Narcissism
Love of the self. The person is entranced by his own mental ability and moral standing, to the point of being unable to hear any contrary view. Self-love is noted for its fidelity:
The sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my Heart.
William Shakespeare, Sonnets, 1609.N24
Narcissism is the inevitable product of a society which has become so banal that there is all too little, apart from the self, left to love. This is fatal to argument because the person who loves himself has to love his own opinion, and is even defined by it; a change of opinion would suggest that there had been a change in the person himself, so that the person the narcissist formerly loved no longer exists, leaving him or her with nothing to love at all. In these circumstances, the argument that the opinion is wrong, and that the matter is more complex than it seems, has no chance of being heard or of getting anywhere. In a banal society, thought is dead.N25
Related entries:
Carnival, Dirty Hands, Internal Evidence.
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An antidote to this being epistemological humility
Indeed. Although interestingly, the entry on Humility is one that I reflect on often, with its reminder of the rarely-acknowledged dangers of humility as an aim in itself (which I recognise well from my own upbringing and life).