Selfie sticks should be banned for massaging our self-obsession

More successful societies are cooperative and prosocial. Is new tech driving our inherent narcissistic tendencies beyond a healthy level?

It is just over 100 years since Sigmund Freud's polemical claim that narcissism is not only a normal, but also an ubiquitous, personality trait. "Loving oneself," he argued, is the "libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation". In other words, we have evolved as selfish animals because our self-love is part of our adaptive survival toolkit. The survival of the fittest is also the survival of the self-obsessed, and in the age of modern celebrity, who needs science to evaluate Freud's now not-so-controversial claim?

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