A Nitwit Moment’s Inadvertent Example Explains Why History Repeats Itself — Justin Bieber’s Narcissistic Comment about the Holocaust’s Anne Frank — Says Something about the Human Condition

© 2013 Peter Free

 

15 April 2013

 

 

When it’s mostly about “me”, we miss the point of other people’s lives and experiences

 

Which essentially means that we are incapable of learning anything meaningful, and History repeats itself.

 

Take, for example, the sometimes shallow 19-year-old singing idol, Justin Bieber, who, the BBC and multiple sources say, left this message at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam:

 

 

Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.

 

Offensive though Bieber’s absurd sense of moral proportion was — to anyone with mind, heart, and historical sense — it serves as a wider illustration of how easily “we” skew our sense of meaning to only those things that affect us directly.

 

Mr. Bieber’s impolitic miscue probably does not mark him as exceptionally obtuse.  Instead, his impulsively recorded thinking at the Anne Frank museum represents the shortcutted way in which most of us think about things gone by, most of the time.

 

Other people’s suffering and the reasons for it are frequently lost in many of our personal summaries of the little we know about the past.  “Anne was a great girl” shuts the door on deeper consideration.

 

 

The moral? — Narcissism taints the human soul in ways that eventually harm other people

 

How else to explain our saddening ability to hurt ourselves and each other, from one generation to the next, over and over again?

 

Indulging our unwitting narcissism, we lose the wider vision, sense of proportion, and ultimately the wisdom, that empathy and imagination might have given us.

 

I doubt that Mr. Bieber was more obtuse at the Anne Frank Museum than most of us are, at least some of the time.