Ours is a culture dominated by two central forces – narcissism and a sense of identity which has become focussed on victimhood.

Exactly when this toxic pairing first emerged is a moot point but, for those who don’t believe that this is now what’s driving people’s behaviour, let me cite just two of a number of recent examples from the world of criminology: Gavin Plumb’s defence at his trial for plotting to kidnap, rape and murder the TV presenter Holly Willoughby; and the case of Linda De Sousa Abreu, a former prison officer at HMP Wandsworth in London, who has pleaded guilty to misconduct in a public office, after a tape emerged of her having sex with a convicted burglar called Linton Weirich inside his cell, all of which was filmed by Weirich’s cellmate.

At Plumb’s trial, which culminated in him being found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, he sought to present himself as the victim rather than a dangerous sexual predator. So, we were asked to ignore his previous attempts to kidnap two air hostesses on trains in separate incidents, falsely imprisoning two 16-year-old girls at a shop and the obvious preparation that went into his attempt to harm Holly, and instead simply accept that everything he was planning was just “fantasy”.

Look at me, he was suggesting, I’m overweight, unfit, have had to give up football and can barely manage to take out the bins – do you really believe I could do this? Indeed, his “look at me” needs were well-served by a number of BBC Radio 5 Live interviews he had given and an appearance on a weight loss documentary. On the radio he stated that “I hate sitting indoors. I hate looking at the same four walls 24/7. I hate being the size I am. I’m pretty much in pain everywhere … I’m scared that … if I get up and do too much, that’s it, I’m done.”

Ah, poor Gavin, we were expected to conclude.

Here it’s also worth observing that, from my work as a criminologist, I am now noting that the defence of “it was just a fantasy” is not only on the increase but also at precisely the same time that it has become glaringly obvious that online behaviour has bled into offline reality.

Plumb used a dark web site called “Abduct Lovers” – which is exactly what he has been convicted of wanting to do with Holly – but other offenders I have worked with used sites that showed graphic images of child sexual abuse which they then recreated within their own offending and, more generally, the mainstreaming of graphic internet pornography has created a dangerous blueprint for men and especially for women that seems to have snaked seamlessly into real life.

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It's helpful to define what is meant by narcissism a little more clearly, especially as this has become one of those terms that has entered into common usage and can be easily misunderstood. Above all, this is not just about having an inflated self-regard but rather, at a clinical level, such an unreasonably high sense of self-worth, that the narcissistic individual has an expectation not just of admiration but also of deserving of special rights and privileges and a corresponding inability to understand, or even care for the feelings of others. What I find is rarely appreciated in all of this is that the narcissist is usually lacking in confidence and is easily upset by the slightest criticism. In that respect the narcissist is child-like.

De Sousa Abreu’s is a case in point and I was surprised by the fact that she took to Instagram prior to her trial late in July to post “her side of the story” which was then widely publicised in the press. In this post De Sousa Abreu blasted “scammers for making cash off her fame” – a reference to fake prison porn tapes that were rushed into circulation, which had, she claimed, been “monetising off my misfortune” – and bemoaned the fact that she thought it was distasteful of “OnlyFans creators impersonating and pretending to be me and re-creating the sad scandal that I am said to be involved in”.

Ah poor Linda, we are supposed to think, although it is worth noting that De Sousa Abreu herself has an OnlyFans site and happily appeared in a Channel 4 series about swingers called Open House: The Great Sex Experiment.

Gavin Plumb

You might legitimately question whether it is possible to extrapolate from these two examples to wider trends in our culture. However, it’s clear to me that Plumb and De Sousa Abreu are but tips of an iceberg that can be glimpsed more broadly in Western society.

Surely we can all see this narcissism and victimhood in the ever-growing list of supposed mental, physical, and psychological problems that are now used by people to both excuse personal responsibility – “it’s not really my fault because of…” – and, by doing so, claim special privilege, and endow a sense of being and identity by those who claim to have these problems or issues and who are only too keen for us to know all about them.

The result is what Professor Keith Hayward has recently described as the creation of an “infantilised world”, where being an adult with adult values such as parenting, emotional self-reliance, responsibility and a strong and functioning work ethic have all but disappeared.

Instead, we now try to stay younger and child-like for longer and have begun to see aging as a process that should be resisted at all costs for as long as humanly possible. Frankly, the antidote to this toxic zeitgeist is quite simple: we all need to grow up.