Narcissism and Frontiers

There are 1001 hero cults. For many boys, day to day life in childhood is spent soaking in hero cults of sports, comic books, and TV. For some, training begins for a chance to shine forth in the light of natural justice and achieve victory and be a hero, at least on a small scale.

There's almost nothing sweeter than the thrill of winning against a field of competitiors who all prepared and worked hard to try to win. This feeling is experienced by proxy by sports fans. Day-to-day real world life, though, is almost entirely devoid of such opportunities to compete and win, and often times naked competition in the human world is very destructive. People who participate in sports as adults often transform the competitive elements of their sport into mechanisms for self-improvement as the realities of life and age set-in.

If a true understanding is really achieved by creating a mind that's a reflection of nature, then the narcissist or egotist's understanding of the world is very distorted, and the egotist is, rather ironically, very easy to dupe and exploit.

Simply creating a venue for someone to be "special" and give them an award of a cheap medal will motivate hundreds, or maybe thousands of people to strive even at the risk of their own life. (See Napoleon's quote) 

A frontier provides a "natural" test of men, although the "struggle" for life on the frontier is probably framed in a hero cult delusion, too.