(RNS) How many narcissists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. He holds the bulb while the world revolves around him.

Naughty narcissist Jesse James has humiliated his wife (and our collective darling) Sandra Bullock with his wandering ways. This after she won the Oscar for Best Actress, and the same week she told Barbara Walters that her work got better because she could be both fearful and braver knowing she had her husband to go home to.

Just days after her crowning achievement, she learned her husband was carrying on a tawdry sexual affair with Michelle “Bombshell” McGee, a grotesquely tattooed woman who claims she slept with James for 11 months, providing intimate details and saved text messages as evidence.

Remember, this is the guy Bullock stood by and supported as they fought for, and won, custody for his children from his second marriage to a slightly less heavily tattooed porn star.

“The vast majority of the allegations reported are untrue and unfounded,” James said in his apology to Bullock. “Beyond that, I will not dignify these private matters with any further public comment. This has caused my wife and kids pain and embarrassment beyond comprehension and I am extremely saddened to have brought this on them.”

Somehow his dignity and sadness seem peripheral to this story.

But these kind of lame apologies pour forth like saliva from a Bassett hound off the lips of wayward rogues like Tiger Woods, John Edwards, Mark Sanford, Ted Haggard, Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Swaggart and dozens of others caught in adulterous relationships.

In a sign of just how jaded we’ve become, some commentators spun the Bullock-James saga as a lucky break for Tiger Woods because Woods’ own marital problems rotated off the front pages of the tabloids. It might be the best PR strategy Tiger could have implemented before his return to the Masters.

It’s so good to know we live in a society that has its priorities in order.

Behind all these stories is some version of narcissism, the inordinate fascination with oneself, excessive self-love or vanity. “As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism,” the late social historian Daniel Boorstin observed.”We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.”

In such a culture, celebrity counts more than character, and looking out for No. 1 is assumed to be normal human practice, especially if you can get away with it.

For a few generations now, America has been sucked into a self-improvement craze with enough self-help books and gurus to satisfy an ever-increasing demand for selves who need improving. I recently heard a scholar express concern for the younger generation because “all of their cultural role models are narcissists.”

We are now seeing the result of our folly: a nation of narcissists. I once heard a woman recall a date with a man who was explaining that he wasn’t taken seriously at company meetings: “I’m too good-looking,” he told her. “As soon as I walk in the door, everyone stares at me and assumes I’m too good-looking to be smart. The worst part is, I’m usually the smartest person in the room.”

Breaking a marriage vow always involves some level of excessive self-love, and sexual infidelity is symptomatic of our national illness.

Before we rush to gather and cast stones, let me hasten to add that every human is guilty of self-love at one point or another in life. Some people just have the misfortune of putting it on display for the entire world to see.

According to the oldest story in the Bible, the original sin in the Garden of Eden was not eating forbidden fruit; it was worshipping the human self in place of the creator. As Fyodor Dostoevsky said, “Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.”

We come forth from the womb as worshipping creatures, and we will worship something. If the object of our affection is something other than God, we are guilty of idolatry. If we become our own idol, we are nothing more than narcissists.

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)