Abstract

This paper examines a largely unrecognized mental disorder that is essentially a disability of values. It is their daily contact with this pathology that leads many university liberal arts faculty to demoralization. The deeply rooted disparity between the world of the traditional liberal arts scholar and today’s college students is not simply a gulf across which communication is difficult, but rather involves a pathological impairment in the majority of students that stems from an exclusionary focus on work, money, and the acquisition of things. It is argued that this state of mind constitutes a self-disabling mental illness, which for a society becomes pathological ideology, and for the individual takes the form of clinical narcissism.