THE AGE OF EGOISM

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2330, 17 September 1921, Page 4

THE AGE OF EGOISM

Arc wo living in nil age oi' egoism f If a writer in a contemporary is not romancing, we undoubtedly are. lie asserts that nothing interests or concerns us but ourselves. Not ourselves collectively as a nation or a people, but ourselves individually as rather complicated and exclusively important persons. If we are to take the greater percentage of characters in modern fiction as representing the kind of men and women that are pre-eminent to-day, the type that abounds and prevails, we are a world absorbed, dominated, obsessed by self. It is our master and our slave. It pre-oeeupies us from the cradle to the grave. We meditate it, probe it, study it, analyse it, journalise it, sing songs to it, brood over it. We diagnose our destiny, however trivial; anatomise our personality, however shallow and vain; chart and check our temperament, our moods, and our tendencies, -aggrandising them into a portentous paramountcy. We project ourselves on the printed page, posture to the painter, use the sculptor as a showman and exhibitor. We are adepts at every trick and artifice for attracting attention and concentrating it on ourselves. Our dress, manners, idiosyncrasies, cults, immodesties, cynicisms, and all llie paraphernalia of a calculated revolt, arc assumed with one end in view—to exploit our personality, to feed the voracious appetite of a diabetic egoism. We crave to be noticed, to be listened to. We are avaricious of attention. By all the means at our command we strive to impose ourselves on others. We become dictatorial, hectoring; we threaten and gesticulate. If that will not do we are audacious, vulgar, truculent, noisy. We have none other gods than our Self. We are calculating]y and systematically selfish; selfabsorbed, self-centred, self-inter-ested.