Are We Easily Fooled by Narcissists?

Of course we live in the age of pop psychology where everyone has a diagnosed mental health condition (from stigma to social necessity) and anything even minimally upsetting is described as a “micro-aggression” or a sign of “ageism, sexism, ableism,” add your own ism ad nauseum (nausism?). The ABC (that bastion of unbiased reporting) recently published an entire article on how to commit “Small acts of resistance known as "micro-feminism" [which] can help women feel empowered at work.” These micro-feminist acts include addressing females first in e-mails and holding the door open for men (this must be tough for some feminists who are unable to distinguish men from women). Now, I’ve been known to do both of these things from time to time, simply because being a polite and reasonable person frequently involves holding the door for someone following you regardless of sex, and who, but an obsessed ideologue, really notices the gender order of emails? Does anyone? And if you do, for the love of god, get a more interesting life.

Not that long ago a friend told me that the doctor who recommended her 80 plus year old mother (I’m not sure of her exact age but suffice to say that mum is by all metrics old) might consider getting a walker after her mother fell over and could not get up was exhibiting ageism and, as such, insulting her mother, and, probably, also committing several other micro-aggressions. Now I might argue, and so might the statistics, that hip fractures, primarily if not entirely caused by falls in the elderly, significantly increase morbidity and mortality. An Australian series, in line with data from other countries, indicate that 26% of old people who experience a hip fracture are dead within one year. In this context, a doctor who does NOT recommend a walking aid might be considered either uncaring or incompetent, or possibly both. Biology, it turns out, doesn’t care about your isms. Old people and broken bones are not good matches.

The big latest thing is narcissism. Increasing everywhere we are told, and, although I dislike and disdain overwrought over-emotional headlines, it’s likely true that society is getting more narcissistic. I’m pretty sure that I had a narcissist as a friend for a long time. The friendship was a bit of a roller coaster and I was always left feeling vaguely both disquieted and down-trodden after any interaction. Despite this we remained friends for many years and did lots of trips together, until, one day it all fell apart over unreasonable demands. I actually tried to patch the friendship up; generally I believe it’s hard to have too many good friends, but, the patch up fell apart as well because, as one would expect with a narcissist, everything was my fault and nothing really happened the way it did. There is a certain point you reach in interactions with narcissists when the mask irrevocably falls off and the face behind is anything but pretty.

The most quoted (almost revered) book on narcissism is Christopher Lasch’s book The Culture of Narcissism. I found this a tough read. Written in 1979, it’s more a long and rambling essay, with strikingly few sentence and paragraph breaks, than a book of chapters where each chapter builds on the last. I also struggled part way through (it’s rare for me to NOT finish a book) Anne Manne’s The Life of I: The New Culture of Narcissism. I found Manne’s book too graphically violent and disturbing for bed-time reading and never finished it. The cases she reviewed (coincidentally all or almost all men, perhaps not surprising from an Australian author) seemed to portray people who were more evil than narcissistic. After all, most of us will encounter someone who seems a bit narcissistic in our journey through life but few of us encounter serial rapists and killers. True narcissism is apparently quite rare.

Currently, I’m reading Twenge and Campbell’s book, The Narcissism Epidemic. Twenge, of course, is now well known for her series of books on cultural changes and you might even, cynically, think that her career is built on narcissism (at least research on narcissism). Twenge appears to describe a cultural narcissism probably better described as self-obsession than narcissistic personality disorder which appears to be both rare and dangerous.

We do seem, however, to gravitate towards narcissists, or at least some of us do. I don’t think I’m one of the “some of us” because I am so damned cynical and sceptical, but I could be narcissistic for thinking I’m different. It’s likely true that most narcissists don’t think there is anything wrong with them. Narcissism among the upper classes seems to take the form “see this amazing thing I did for no benefit to myself but all the benefit to others.” Although, when you break the thing down, the doer seems to benefit an awful lot and others, not so much. I always think this when I see prominent political commentators on their favourite soap-box, education, for example. If you’ve been talking about education for 20 years but have not once stepped into your local public school and offered to help teach one child to read, you have achieved far less than you could. Think of it, one day a week, for 20 years teaching one child to read and you would have taught over a thousand people to read. That’s doing the hard yards though, posting on Bluesky is so much easier, plus, you never have to leave the house!

Here’s a great article by Mark Twight about the latest in Everest climbing which is where the worlds faux-climbers go to live out their narcissistic dreams. It’s a shame that young climbers are so disconnected from the great history of alpinism that they do not recognise even some of the best and boldest climbers who ever lived. Perhaps it’s cultural narcissism; the inability to grasp that people who are old now did things that were as hard if not harder than anything today’s young climbers are punching out. It’s a loss of history that only those who’ve been around long enough to witness history made seem to appreciate.

Avoiding the Rain

It’s a month since I’ve been in the sea kayak and it sure feels it. The wave buoy is at 2 metres with a 12 second period but it must be mostly southerly as my home bay is calm, one of the easier days to launch and stay dry. There’s no one else about which is no surprise as it is cold and grey although there is no wind. Still, the sea surface is messy after the storms of the last couple of days.

I’m by myself and the kayak feels wobbly, the paddle awkward and my pace very, very slow. I cut across the bay to look at the latest “eco-resort.” There are plans - aren’t there always - to build a hotel, villas, restaurants, bars, and “put Batemans Bay on the five star tourism map.” Right now, there are a series of “glamping tents” built on very low lying land that is sure to be inundated the next time an East Coast Low coincides with a high tide, which could be later this week. All the big news announcements are from three years ago and there is bugger all going on now so who knows what has happened to putting the Bay on the tourist map. Most of the locals would probably rather stay off that map.

These developments are so bizarre given the government is always bleating about sea level rise and climate change. The land there is all sand with a height above sea level of a metre or less and, it’s very prone to erosion by big tides and storms. In April this year, a storm event saw homes further to the west and on higher ground flooded by sea water. At my home bay, which is significantly higher, waves wash into the car park at high tide during storms, and the one house that is a metre or so above high tide is wrapped in sea weed after a storm event. It’s obvious to anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex that these developments should not be approved and the cost of remediation and relocation will be paid by future generations. Realistically, however, that is business as usual in Australia where we’ll never pay for today something we can push off until tomorrow. Fuck the future as we say here, or don’t but we would if we were being honest.

The tide has turned so it is slow plugging my way northwest up to the big bridge over the Clyde River and I paddle under all the little jetties on the way past. The tourist boat, that plies up and down the Clyde River daily is nearly empty but it runs every day regardless of numbers. West of the bridge, I cross back to the north side as the current will be less. There’s an oyster shop on this side of the river, a quirky little place that also sells coffee and is never super busy but always has some patrons. Further east, the next restaurant is temporarily closed, but the caravan park further east has a surprising number of patrons for this time of year. There’s a gaggle of kayakers in plastic boats at Cullendulla, but I pass by Square Head and paddle south back to my launch site. Frustratingly, I’m three kilometres short of 20 kilometres when I get back so I have to head back out again and south this time to make the magic number. I get back to the house just as the rain starts.

Don't Be Like George or Riding in the Rain

Years ago, one of Canada’s leading mountain guides was at the hospital I worked at giving a talk at Grand Rounds. Grand Rounds are a great tradition in big teaching hospitals and are generally open to medical doctors and other allied health staff. George’s talk was about rescues in Kananaskis Country and the thing I remember most clearly is that technical rescues (involving climbers from alpinists to rock climbers) comprised under 5% of the rescues conducted in any given year. This was very validating to a rock and mountain climber like myself and I strutted out after the talk feeling pretty self-righteous. Most rescues were for things that an alpinist would consider kind of nit-picky – like twisted ankles or getting wet in a rain storm – small ailments that you might feel a tad embarrassed calling the rescue services for. Not that this holds true in 2025, when a hang-nail is a good reason to call for a rescue.

My one an only rescue off Bugaboo Spire 

after Doug got his leg stuck in a crack at over 3,000 metres

The other thing I remember, which was kind of an off the cuff remark, was that coming into the busy rescue season, George had been out putting in big days in the mountains to get in shape, and, as he got older, he lamented how much harder this got every year. Every summer, I think, “stay in shape for the winter climbing season, don’t be like George;” and every year winter rolls around and I realise that, like George, I’m out of shape again.

Under all that mud my legs are actually blue

So, I’m back on the home wall – with a home wall you would think I could stay in shape – and bouldering locally when it’s not raining. I’ve also got a short term goal to ride (on the analog bike) 1000 metres of elevation gain on my local trails. The most elevation I’ve ridden so far is about 800 metres and my legs were shaking like jello on one of those vibrating fat buster machines from the 1980’s. It was too wet today to climb so I went out on the bike and came home in pissing rain after the light rain intensified into a torrential downpour. And here’s a hot tip for analog riders who dread the uphill grind after the downhill run: ride when it is pissing with rain and about 5 degrees Celsius. You’ll discover that the hills are the only thing that keeps your half frozen corpse-body alive.

Cross-Country Riding

Coming around a switchback on the new Burnaaga trail on the bikes today, we passed a couple of blokes pulled over staring at their screens. Strava, of course, not that these guys were Stravaassholes, just blokes checking their statistics. These blokes were riding from the top of Wandera Mountain back to Mogo after being shuttled to the top, and, apparently, had ridden a greater distance than that advertised on TrailForks. Doug and I were riding the two way section which, if you also ride Sandy Pinch FT to the top of the old Snake track is about 26 kilometres and 500 metres of elevation gain.

Since I’ve joined the growing cohort of people with a tracking watch (a Garmin or Polar, or some other brand), I have all those statistics – distance, elevation gain, time – available simply by glancing at my wrist. But I really try not to. Years ago, when a Suunto altimeter watch was the greatest wrist worn device you could get, I had one ski buddy (just one) with an altimeter watch and during the course of a backcountry ski day Dave would give us a run-down on our statistics. It was interesting, at the end of the day, to see our total elevation gain (which I never quite trusted as it was always so much more than the map indicated – although a standard Canadian topographic map can hide a lot of smaller ups and downs in a 40 metre contour interval), but I never really wanted to know our statistics during the course of climbing a mountain. If we weren’t at the top, we were not there yet, and if we wanted to summit we had to keep going, data from the watch notwithstanding.

I think that is a good way to be. Set your goal and just keep going until you get there. Don’t worry too much about the details. If you keep going, those details will take care of themselves and it’s way too easy to let your brain convince your body to stop despite the fact that you have no good reason to stop.

Palerang Trig

It’s funny the places you find tracks. Palerang trig is one of those funny places. There are other higher trigs and even named “mountains” in the area. Lowden trig, for example is 1346 metres high and nearby Mount Major has a 1330 metre contour. I had an idea that we might find a faint foot pad on the north ridge of Palerang but, in the end, we found a decent marked and flagged trail.

There is now a small cairn where the foot-pad leaves Palerang FT. This is pretty much where you would head up the ridge if you were using common sense to walk up. If you are somewhat careful, you should be able to follow the track all the way to the trig, although in a couple of places large trunks have fallen across the pad, and it is faint and vague in other spots.

At the top there is a giant pile of rocks and the trig. The rocks make a handy lunch spot. The view is somewhat obscured by trees but you can see down to Mulloon Creek valley, out to Lake George and around the nearby hills.

We had been hoping to continue along Mulloon FT to a small camping area and then the next day walk further west to the Black Range FT and some granite bouldering but the road was way too rough for our van and there was a tree across the road near Little Bombay Creek. Driving back out we chatted with the bloke driving the grader and he said he would drive the grader up and pull it off although his mandate was not to grade that far. A pleasant walk if you are in the area.

Mount Jagungal

 “Several sexy campsites…” With a review like that and four stars as well, who could be criticised for wanting to hike up Mount Jagungal? It’s from AllTrails, of course, although I was curious who had given the walk one star. When I scrolled through, I found the single one star review but, frustratingly, there was no comment, no description, no explanation of why this walk, that 71 out of 73 reviewers had rated at least four stars garnered such a dismal rank. I mean, how does a walk get one star, it has to be pretty terrible. Did the rater get bitten by a death adder? Attacked by a rabid fox? Trampled by a male brumby after a mare in heat? Not find a single sexy campsite? It boggles the mind. I’ve had some pretty awful trips over the years, including one where we lost our entire food drop and skied for four days through heavy rain and snow to escape with no food and I still would have given that trip more than one star.

I’ve had Jagungal on my list for years. For many years in a row I had a plan to ski up the mountain over a four day trip from Guthega, but, for those many years, the snow-pack had been so miserly and myself such a snow snob - coming from big mountains and deep snow-packs in the Canadian mountains - that I could never garner the enthusiasm to drive six hours to carry my skis across a lot of flat country side.

A bike and hike is the very best way ascend the mountain unless the idea of a loop walk predominantly on fire trails appeals. The country you pass through is very pretty however, so a two day walk would also be worth more than one star, at least by my rating system.

We had a 40 minute drive to get to Round Mountain trail-head so we started a bit later than previous days but were still away relatively early. The ground was frosty and the trail headed uphill straight away which my old body found uncomfortable. I need a reasonable warm-up these days before pumping my heart rate up to 150. After the first hill, the FT descends down to a ford on a manky bridge made of rusty corrugated metal; a hill I knew I would have to push on the way back.

After that, however, the FT is a delight, rolling along the Toolong Range across open plains with lovely views and hills which are mostly easy to ride. A few kilometres from Derschkos Hut, we met a couple of blokes hiking who warned us about a rambunctious fox breaking into packs and shared the delightful news that there was a track up the mountain. Doug and I had assumed we would be bush-bashing, so this was great news. We passed Derschkos Hut and turned onto Grey Mare FT and, shortly after Grey Mare FT plunged down into and back out of a steep creek gully, we found the trail.

We stashed the bikes in the bush and proceeded to follow the track up a short drainage through some head high scrub to gain a ridge that runs SSW from the top of Mount Jagungal. Once on the ridge, the incline laid back, the scrub cleared and it was a pleasant walk up alpine country to the top. The gently rolling high plains that spread south to the Main Range were pretty and would be nice to walk or ski across some time. The ride out was half an hour quicker than the way in but I did have to push up that first hill.

Mount Tabletop

Riding the bicycles out of Three Mile Dam Campground early on a frosty morning, the only other camper up and about gives us a thumbs up. We ride up the paved road to Selwyn Snow Resort and slip off onto Selwyn FT which climbs 50 metres up to the ridge where the lifts run during the winter ski season. In the big fires of 2020 the resort burnt completely with an extensive rebuild completed in 2023, but the resort only managed to open for a short period in 2024 because it was too difficult to maintain snow coverage with warm temperatures and lack of natural snow.

Ostensibly, Australia is committed to net zero and obsessed with meeting climate targets, and yet, the Blyton Group spent $30 million rebuilding a “snow” resort that cannot survive without artificial snow-making. This large expenditure was made possible by a sweet deal by the NSW State Government who granted a new 40 year lease and facilitated planning permissions necessary for the rebuild. Snow making, of course, uses huge amounts of power and water. Exactly how much power and water is required to maintain snow at the resort is not available in the public domain – quelle surprise! How this meshes with Australia being a climate leader is unclear, and, in essence, any individual with a normally developed level of scepticism will find the entire enterprise suspect.

If you value the natural environment, and particularly Australia’s precious and limited alpine area, you might find the plans for Selwyn Resort just a little bit disturbing. Quoting from the website:

The creation of a brand-new ‘Winter Wonderland’, the first of its kind in Australia, will see the introduction of a range of exciting new snow play products in the coming years including a tubing carousel, skating rink with bumper cars, kids snowmobiles and a miniature enchanted village.

The commonality among all these planned features are, of course, their artificial nature and lack of actual physical activity required to participate. In fact, this dystopian future sounds more like a Disneyland comes to the alpine experience than it does a real authentic experience where people connect with their environment and use their bodies in a healthy way. This is increasingly the style and practice in Australia – the worlds greatest nanny state where the health and safety bureaucrats have the backing of the increasingly timid bed-wetter population – nature and adventure either off-limits completely (see the Arapilies climbing bans) or tamed to become an experience that encompasses no adventure or challenge whatsoever. There is a small and nascent movement against the over-engineering of the outdoor environment but the broader societal influences towards increasing government reliance are broadly outstripping this counter-culture movement. Australia, unfortunately, exists under the tyranny of the “do-gooders.” As C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

But, it’s May and there is no snow at Selwyn, and only a dusting of frost. From the 1600 metre high point on the ridge, Selwyn FT heads south, undulating along a gentle ridge of burnt snowgums, falling down to Nine Mile Creek, then climbing again to pass along the eastern and southern flank of Tabletop Mountain. It’s lovely riding, and a bicycle a fantastic way to travel this country. After 2.5 hours we are at the base of Tabletop Mountain and the broad flat summit a mere 20 minute walk up grassy slopes. To the southwest, at 2062 metres is Mount Jagungal. Not a particularly high mountain, but, from this angle, almost looking like a real mountain not merely a rounded hill.

Leaving the van early in the morning, we had forgotten lunch and our snack bags feel very light. We split half an energy bar and a few nuts, and then walk back down to the bicycles for the ride out. Bicycle travel is even better on the way back and we are back at Three Mile Dam in time for lunch.