Attitudes Toward Self

 I have recently heard a whole spate of words about the term 'narcissism', and it's being actively bandied about in political circles to suggest that it's the root of all evils. A leader who is 'narcissistic' is apparently given a series of traits which are supposed to completely determine her or his behavior, such as an inordinate greed for personal gain, at the expense of others. In demonizing and pathologizing narcissism, however, we ourselves become the victims of our own act of labeling, by imputing so much power to a particular set of personality traits. By attributing all the evils in the world to one sole personality trait, we make the same mistake of over-inflating the sense of self that was considered evil in the first place.
   It seems safe to say that the ills of the world can't really be reduced to a single set of personality traits. To do so is to ignore the conditions around a person that often ignite or suppress these same qualities. Sometimes a particular tendency can create a harmonious result in one context, but a completely disastrous one in another. Is anybody prepared to take the complexity of our social situations and passions, and reduce them to isolated brain mechanisms that are responsible for one personality? I know that a few psychologists might be trying to map the mind in this way, but not everyone takes this view. But there does seem to be something comforting in the idea that the bad things in the world come from a tendency which can be isolated and even potentially reversed, much as we would any illness.
   The best cure for narcissism is not to think of it as narcissism at all. If I stop getting drawn into the idea that there are separate selves vying for resources and attention, my mind expands, and it stops blaming or condemning particular people. I also stop generalizing. A person may behave 'selfishly' in one instance (again, a very value-loaded, derogatory term), only to be relieved of a certain burden or worry later and thus be more open to letting go of their worries and preoccupations. This probably happens all the time in the course of a lifetime. Labeling a person only stigmatizes that person, and makes it harder for them to see that there are an infinite number of routes that anyone at any given time can take. And I think the world would do a whole lot of good to start having more tolerance for the many flavors of being that are existing in the same time and space, both within and outside of us. Sometimes it is agreeable and sometimes withdrawn; sometimes happy and sometimes depressed; sometimes adventurous and sometimes cautious. Can we ever take this wonderful complexity and reduce it to some dysfunction of the mind?