Duty Vs. Self-Enhancement in the American Psyche

The ten-thousand-watt smile that captivated me as a 10 year old immigrant

Source: Wikimedia Commons, Mayor Raymond L. Flynn records, Collection #0246.001, City of Boston Archives, Boston

In the frenetic pace of the modern political news cycle, we are rarely able to take a moment for self-reflection and insight on our shared journey. The passing of President Jimmy Carter offers this pause for all citizens and politicians, who are leaders, vessels for, and drivers of cultural energies and targets of hope, idealization, contempt, and projection from the masses.

American presidents serve an outsized role in the American psyche. As a 1.8-generation immigrant to the American South from South India at less than 2 years old and the son of a single mother, I looked up to President Carter as a father figure. This smiling, friendly, intelligent, charismatic man was elected president when I was 9 years old. Soon after, he inspired me to write him a letter outlining my ideas for saving energy. (My “bright” idea was to add a tiny solar panel to light bulbs to capture unneeded light... OK, so I was no energy prodigy!)

Many details of President Carter’s long life are well known. Born and raised in modest, even bare-bones, material conditions in 1920s rural Georgia. Graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. Submarine officer for several years before the untimely passing of his father made him choose between taking over his family farm and what looked to be a promising career in the military. He chose the farm and applied his intellect to turning the farm around and making it a success.

Ten years later, he began his political career in the Georgia Senate. He was elected president in 1976 after serving as Georgia’s governor, but he may be one of the few U.S. presidents who will ever be able to say that the high points of his life came after the presidency. In those 44 years, he performed monumental service for world health, peace, diplomacy, and human and political rights, to name a few. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. (Though he may well have deserved the award in 1979, alongside Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel, for brokering the Camp David Accords of 1978.)

I was recently charmed and thrilled to relive his deft wit, intellectual chops, and charming personality in interviews with David Letterman and Stephen Colbert. He never lost his trademark ten-thousand-watt smile, which actually reminded me of my own mother’s ten-thousand-watt smile. They were both leaders in the International League of Revolutionary Smiles, of which I’m now a card-carrying member. (Don’t we all have little panels that transform the radiance of smiles into life energy? This is a truly solar energy, and probably the reason that the Spanish word for smile is “sonrisa.”)

I was also reminded of a classic 1940s Erik Erikson paper in which he theorized about the collective psyche of a submarine crew, with each shipmate’s ego contained and adjusted to perform a specific duty, subordinating individuality to the needs of the boat and mission. This is a very Confucian concept in my mind, but perhaps lacking the benevolence from superiors and colleagues proscribed by Confucius. For example, later papers and research (and accounts on the Submarine Reddit) point out mental health problems associated with submarines and other military service. The suicide rate for veterans (34.7 per 100,000 in 2022) is nearly 2.5 times the rate for all U.S. adults (14.7 per 100,000). Improving care for service members and veterans would go a long way to making duty and service more manageable and even rewarding.

In any event, it seems young Jimmy Carter took his call to duty and service very seriously, from submarines to farming to politics to humanitarian work. He might, of course, have said that his “nuclear power” was his Christian faith, which expressed itself in deep compassion, shared humanity, a sense of responsibility to others, and radical love.

Narcissism tends to promote self-enhancement over humility and self-effacement. All U.S. presidents are said to be more narcissistic than average, and President Carter was no different. At number 20 in a survey of historians done before President Obama, he ranked right in the middle of the pack. I don’t think one could argue that Carter did not utilize self-enhancement in order to rise in prominence or gain attention. But self-enhancement didn’t seem to be a strategy or end in itself with President Carter.

The pressures for self-enhancement, as opposed to duty and service, have only grown in the era of social media. Social media have been implicated in a dramatic rise in narcissism in the 2000s, described by psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell in their 2010 book The Narcissism Epidemic.

The beauty of being human is that we have the capacity to choose and cultivate our personality characteristics, and we are influenced by others’ choices and preferences. We can choose whether and how to self-enhance, self-efface, be humble, be arrogant, attend to duty and service, or serve ourselves and our faction. In maturity, we can choose how we are influenced by others. We can, in maturity, choose from whom we seek guidance. We certainly have a choice in whether or how we reward the strategies of others engaged in their own journeys of identity and meaning.

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Of course, we can have an ongoing debate about how much choice and free will we have, given familial and cultural pressures and given the possibility of being exposed to what cult and mind control expert Steve Hassan calls destructive or undue influence. (See figure.)

Source: Courtesy of Steven Hassan, Freedom of Mind

We can always give ourselves the time and space to self-reflect and gather insight as we traverse our shared journey with people who might inspire, horrify, or exasperate us. People do get reactions out of us. As I wrote in my book Facebuddha: Transcendence in the Age of Social Networks, “We are who happens to us and what we make of the happening.”

The American experience is quite an education in personality and psychology, ambition, leadership, community, diversity, and danger. We were lucky to have President Carter as a leader in our American experience. I, for one, would have been happy to serve on his ship.

Who knows? Maybe it still sails, serves, and smiles into the sunset, and towards a new day.

© 2024 Ravi Chandra, M.D., D.F.A.P.A.