The ‘Dictionary of the Undoing’ of Apathy and Narcissism

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The world is on fire, literally, yet most of us are thumbing away at our phones, posting meaningless complaints on Facebook. You have your say. You vent. So, what? The fires keep burning, the floor beneath us is giving way and—status update—the roof might fall on our heads.

That’s one of the messages in John Freeman’s Dictionary of the Undoing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The essayist and poet calls his alphabetically-arranged jeremiad a “lexicon of engagement.” “Engagement” sounds like a call to political action, and his Dictionary serves that purpose at one level. On a higher plane, Freeman argues that we need to wake up and engage with reality—you know, that big place that exists somewhere beyond our screens.

Freeman isn’t the only smart person to see through Mark Zuckerberg’s false utopia of connectivity, but his critique is among the sharpest: “Long before it normalized a reality TV sociopathic present, social media normalized narcissism,” he writes in the entry under “I.” He points out that the iPhone allows us to simultaneously be our own make-believe celebrity and paparazzi. The dopamine feed of “likes” and “friends” has changed us for the worse. Social network addicts are “applying the tones of digital social life—glibness and a crystalized cult of personality worship born out of celebrity culture—to politics and world events.”

The brutal reality is that your “friends” don’t really care about you or your status updates; they’re not really friends and the whole dull, time-consuming business promotes apathy as the world keeps burning. Elsewhere, Freeman writes that too much information without context also causes disengagement. “Our apathy has turned the struggle into entertainment. Our apathy has made empathy a consumable experience.” And those fires keep burning.

Part of Freeman’s project is to rescue language—reclaim it from the vandals who degrade it and twitter it away—and to remind ourselves of its power. Words can be sparks in the darkness and kindled into a cleansing fire.