Breeding Narcissists

A long, worthwhile, and deeply depressing article on a fundamental change in the principles being taught in our elite law schools opens with an anecdote:

Then, an associate in her late twenties stood up. She said there were lawyers at the firm who were "uncomfortable" with Boies representing disgraced movie maker Harvey Weinstein, and she wanted to know whether Boies would pay them severance so they could quit and focus on applying for jobs at other firms.

The law is a service industry, wherein its participants offer their skills, training, experience, and insight to consumers, aka "clients." It requires those participants to act as expert stand-ins and representatives of those clients, putting their clients' interests at the fore. While it is a reality that, even in service, there remains discretion as to whom one provides services to (with limits... hold that thought), it is nevertheless fundamental to both the nature of the profession and to the very system of law itself that everyone gets their day in court, and everyone gets the advice of counsel. The notion that the representation of an unsavory character is problematic runs against everything that our system stands for.

I know people deeply enmeshed in the Big Law world, and I recall hearing, across recent years, how law school students, rather than pitching their best selves in seeking jobs at the top firms, enter the job market with elevated senses of entitlement, voicing expectations regarding pro bono work and "quality of life" apart from the grind that is the (highly compensated) junior associate career arc.

In a tight labor market, such senses of entitlement and "me" narcissism can be negotiated. However, the anecdote quoted above speaks to a more malevolent corruption of principles, one born of the normalizing of "cancel culture" and the associated dehumanizing of anyone who is not of the woke tribe. Even worse, the young associated wanted to be paid for her virtue signaling.

Young people, especially those attending the elite universities, are increasingly being taught that we are not all equal. Not only are members of certain identity groups to be treated preferentially and members of certain others to be treated disadvantageously, but the very humanity of those members is suppressed in their minds. In the linked article, the sentencing of Montez Terriel Lee, Jr. tells the tale. Lee burned down a pawn shop during the George Floyd riots, killing its owner. Not only did the prosecutor go easy on him, the judge went even easier, and Lee got 10 years instead of the expected 20. The five children of Oscar Stewart, who died in that fire, got handed the "solace" that their father's killer was "engaging in 'the language of the unheard'" and thus could be partially excused for burning their dad to death. When it comes to oppressed groups, perpetrators get more shrift than victims.

The same woke-warriors will, with zero sense of irony, assert that people whom they seek to cancel should not be absolved of responsibility for the words they say.

Truly, if you are invited to speak to a willing audience at Yale, people who don't want to hear your words aren't content with not attending - they have to ensure the willing audience is denied its desire. Yet they or their peers have no problem absolving actual violence or mitigating punishment for such violence if the perpetrator is of a favored identity (even if the victims are also of a favored identity). Or, imposing punishment where none is warranted, if the accused is of a disfavored identity. They'd have thrown Kyle Rittenhouse in jail, as a sacrifice, to voice their displeasure with the concept of armed self-defense, no matter the legitimacy of his defensive use of force, and some are now talking about changing the definition of self-defense to further their 'social justice' aims (justice for theirs, but not for anyone else, of course).

Now, we have young attorneys questioning whether an accused even deserves a defense, if that accused has already been convicted in the court of public opinion (or, eventually, simply of the wrong identities). Worse, it's actually being taught, along with other "don't blame the perpetrator, blame his skin color" forms of discrimination and overt racism.

Boiled down, this is all born of narcissism.

It's a declaration that "I am more important than those around me. My views matter more than the lives of my clients or of the public I serve through my legal expertise. It is proper and just that I sacrifice those I consider unworthy of me so that I can shape society as I wish." Oh, and allow me to reiterate that the young attorney who wanted to quit Boies’ firm to salve her discomfort wanted to be paid for quitting. Don’t like wha the firm is doing? Tender your resignation, full stop. Wanting to be paid for voluntary departure is a cake-and-eat-it-too excess.

It is natural to want to make the world a better place. However, it is wrong to simply throw some people in the trash, just because you don't like what they say or think. And, if you're going into a service profession such as the law, where even the worst of the accused is entitled to a defense, elevating your views above that service is deeply corrosive and an insult to the nation’s core principles.

Would the young woman who'd reject Weinstein as a client allow that a baker should not have to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple? How about a restaurant owner rejecting patrons based on their skin color?

The woke answer is, of course, that different identity classes deserve different protections. That "systemic racism" warrants... nay, demands that some be treated differently. And, of course, that this "systemic racism" is not what you and I know, i.e. disparate treatment under the law based on skin color (see: Jim Crow), but rather a societal bias (ignoring the premise of individual thought and action entirely) that cannot be remedied simply by treating everyone the same.

That there's no end-goal in this world view is not accidental. That it dehumanizes us and reduces the individual to his or her outward markers is deeply ironic. And, that those who most embrace woke are those least affected by its demands is no coincidence. A narcissist is cool with imposing on others, but not on himself. That the originators of all this are academics insulated from the "market forces" of the real world is why it has grown unchecked, and is now metastasizing into broader society.

As many have noted, the Constitution is merely a piece of paper, and the application of its core principles is totally at the mercy of those who live within its words. If we abandon, as Critical Theory demands, the "foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law," what are we left with? A society where a few get to decide the rules by which everyone else lives, and those few having a sociopath's lack of regard for a large segment of the populace.

I was originally going to title this piece "A Nation of Narcissists," but the reality is that we are a more a nation of subjects, with a narcissistic and condescending few exerting their will over not just our nation, but our lives themselves.

Every society that has pursued 'equity' through coercion, whether it be the hard version that is socialistic government or the soft version that is cultural domination, has withered and rotted. The Woke are wrong, theirs is a way of destruction and chaos, and the sooner we stop allowing their bullying to affect us, the sooner we can cure their cancer.

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Peter.