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Is there a term, or a study, or an article you can recommend, for this variety of narcissistic behavior I've noticed recently: the narcissism of pretending that you would be completely incapable of doing something. An illustrative example:
We're all familiar with the tough-guy fantasist narcissism of men who believe that they would have been great on D-Day or at Gettysburg, guys who are cocksure they would have been heroes given the opportunity. We've all rolled our eyes at men who are certain they would have been extraordinarily brave, with no proof.
Lately, I've been rolling my eyes at men who claim they would have been extraordinarily cowardly. Men who say "Man I would have been useless in the civil war, pissed myself and run away LOLOLOL" or "I probably wouldn't have made it off the boat on D-Day."
Because they probably would have been average. If they were drafted by the government, they probably wouldn't have had the immense courage necessary to run away. If they went to boot camp, they would have been pushed through it like everyone else, gotten stronger and learned to do what they were told. In battle, they probably would have followed orders and done what they were trained to do, at a bang average level. Maybe not great, but they would have been within a standard deviation of average.
There's something about this kind of extravagant self-deprecation that annoys me, gets under my skin. It dehumanizes the actual men who did (and continue to do) these kinds of things. It's a cheap effort to claim to be extraordinary, with no effort or evidence.
A lot of men today (including myself) can credibly say they wouldn't have been allowed in or made it through boot camp.
The 40s version of themselves obviously was more likely to have done so have but that version doesn't exist so why center them in any discussion? If I ask what you'd do on the Titanic it's not interesting to swap in a median English male of the time is it?
Finland has a conscription, with a possibility to obtain a deferment, a release or a possibility to do a civilian alternative. The last stat I managed to find was that, in 2016, 72 % of men who had turned thirty at the end of that year had completed military service. In 2008 that was still over 80 %. So at least a large amount of Finnish men are provably capable of going through a boot camp, and probably at least some share of those who chose a civilian alternative would have also been capable of doing it if push came to shove.
You might say they’re overwhelmingly sisu-fied.
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