The comedian and actor John Cleese has an interesting take on extremism, arguing that what some people see as extremism in those they perceive as enemies can often be used to justify their own equally extremist reactions to it. “You can be as nasty as you like and feel your behaviour is morally justified”. 

In other words, extremism begets extremism – it’s just that our own certainty that we are right and ‘they’ are wrong risks blinding us to the fact our own behaviour is no less extreme.

Extremist ideology of whatever nature blooms in closed networks of ideological echo chambers (like internet chatrooms, s...

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Andy Warhol once predicted that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Well, the future is now, and unfortunately – for all of us – that prophecy has now, to some extent, become a reality of regurgitated and unfiltered narcissism in which everyone has an opinion and we’re all entitled to it.  

Humans aren’t designed to be in contact with this many humans and we certainly aren’t designed to be exposed to all of their thoughts, all of the time.   

Self-help consumerism has exploded.   And like an unceasing episode of projectile vomiting...

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History is littered with people whose behaviour has been so outrageously self-serving that they have become poster boys and girls for narcissism and you really don’t have to search too hard or too far back to find them.

Adolf Hitler is perhaps the most obvious and dangerous example from the last century, but the most recent ex-President of the United States of America is a more contemporary example who deserves to share the same sentence.

In between there are plenty more celebrities, both minor and major, whose public behaviour and verbal outpourings can easily be described as being narcissistic.

From Joan Crawford’s emotionall...

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