My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

For all of you who are familiar with self-esteem and self-confidence, please send me messages.

Gullor. Sam Vaknin, we are with you. You are still very hated.

Right. Yesterday I created a conspiracy theory, and a wide concern, bigger than COVID-19. Was I drinking water in yesterday’s Or was it secretly disguised, stealthy, vodka, or gin and tonic? Or God forbid beer, albeit probably not corona beer, because as we all know, it’s infectious and if you drink corona beer, you get sick with COVID-19.

So there’s this debate going on very seriously, whether the drink in my glass was water or something else, and whether I was egregiously lying about it through my teeth.

So in order not to leave anything in doubt, here’s a glass and here’s a bottle of Shanay Syrah. It’s red wine, red wine, not beer, and I’m going to pour some of this red wine into this very big glass, then I’m going to put the bottle aside, I’m going to take a sip.

There you are.

Another conspiracy theory making the rounds is that I actually knew that the virus was coming.

Where’s the proof?

In a series of interviews, documentaries, and videos that I’ve made alone and with others, I consistently compared social media to a self-limiting virus and on at least one occasion I had warned of a pandemic coming.

That much is true.

Probably the real explanation is that I’m a Mossad agent to infiltrate the Western world.

What’s the proof?

My glass yesterday was orange, Donald Trump is orange hair.

What?

You can’t see the connection. No way.

Veteran conspiracy theories like you can’t see the connection.

Let’s get serious, which does happen to me from time to time in this pandemic.

Why so much COVID in a channel ostensibly dedicated to narcissism?

Because I regard COVID-19, the pandemic, as a case study in global narcissism.

Global narcissism gave rise to the very reasons which spawned, like a demon seed, like a demon seed spawned COVID-19 and spawned the virus.

The way we screwed up with the planet, overpopulation, self-centeredness, collapsing community relationships, isolationism, both of countries and of individuals, malignant individualism, malignant egalitarianism, you name it.

There’s a whole cascade of narcissistic effects and behaviors which have led inexorably to this pandemic.

COVID-19 is the case study in global narcissism.

What are the latest news?

Before we go to the latest news, this video is going to be divided into two parts.

I’m a Jew and all Jews divide everything to two parts.

So the first part is news from the pandemic and the second part has to do with God.

I have received, I can’t tell you how many emails and how many messages and direct messages and indirect messages asking me whether the pandemic is a punishment by God, whether it is God retribution for our misconduct and misbehavior, both individually and as a species.

And so I’m going to deal in the second half of this video, I’m going to attempt to deal with an age old question.

If God is so benevolent and so good, how does he allow evil in the world? How does he allow suffering in the world?

But the first part has to do, as I promised, with news from the pandemic.

While you heard it here first, I’ve been saying for quite a few weeks that I think that about 20% of the global population is already infected with the virus.

Yesterday, Dr. Burks in the White House briefing confirmed it. She said that 1.5 million Americans have been tested and 20% of them have tested positive for the virus.

The virus is out there. If this is true, the mortality rate of the virus, the death rate of the virus, not the case fatality rate, remember, case fatality rate is how many people have been hospitalized out of whom, how many people died.

But the mortality rate, the death rate of the virus in the global population, the population out there, the people who don’t bother to go to a doctor, don’t bother to attend clinics, don’t bother to hospitalize themselves.

People with mild symptoms, etc.

So the death rate would be actually one-tenth the death rate of the flu.

If this is true, 20% are infected, COVID-19 is far less deadly than the seasonal, your average seasonal, homemade flu.

As predicted, as I’ve predicted in a series of videos, luckily, YouTube provides a timestamp.

So these are not just empty boasting.

As I had predicted repeatedly, I said three weeks ago that the pandemic will start to abate this week.

Then two weeks ago, I said the pandemic will be over next week.

And I think that’s precisely what’s happening.

Pandemic is abating.

Is it the result of quarantine? Is it the result of self-isolation? Is it the result of social distancing?

Absolutely not.

If you take into account the incubation period of this virus, which ranges anywhere from four days to 27 days, and with an average of 14 days, you will see that the peak of a pandemic, the infection period, infectious period started well before the most recent measures of social isolation and distancing and so on.

I would like to refer you to yet another scholar.

And this video’s guest scholar is Professor Knut Vidovichsky.

I really am not making these names up. And I apologize to all of you for inflicting them upon you.

But he is a great guy and he has fascinating things to say, and he is by far the most qualified voice.

So Knut Vidovichsky, W-I-T-K-O-S-K-I, ski, Knut.

And now I am going to play a game with you.

How many of you have heard of respiratory syncytial virus infection? What?

You never heard of it? You ignorance.

Respiratory syncytial virus infection or also known as RSV is, as the name implies, a respiratory syndrome.

It affects breathing. It actually stops it.

There’s the CDC, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and they have statistics.

Last year, this utterly unheard of disease, utterly, many medical doctors haven’t heard of it.

So last year, this disease caused 177,000 hospitalizations, 177,000 people were hospitalized, of which 14,000 people had died in the United States alone, almost as many as COVID-19.

I don’t remember any panic over RSV. I don’t remember quarantine, social isolation, social distancing.

And yes, before you ask, it’s infectious.

Actually, it’s more infectious than COVID-19.

Another bit of interesting news, and it’s interesting only because it agrees with me, of course.

So another bit of interesting news, the National Academy of Sciences in the United States came out and said that cloth masks are probably inefficient, probably inefficacious.

The jury is out there, but there were strong hints.

I mean, the National Academy of Sciences would never conflict with the medical establishment directly. They’re all in it, they’re all sharing the same cake, and no one speaks where one eats.

So they’re saying it very gently and subtly, that cloth masks suck, and they do nothing.

The WHO, the World Health Organization, and numerous governments, including minor governments like the government of the United Kingdom, they say that masks don’t work.

Cloth masks, surgical masks, no mask works.

So both of them are against masks. I’m against masks as well, and I’m against masks because I know the literature, and I took trouble to survey it, to read it actually, to download it and read it, actually.

I have passwords and usernames for all the major databases in the world, and I was able to read the literature.

Masks are not protective, end of story. They don’t protect.

What they do, they give you a false sense of safety.

Now that’s good in itself.

I would say that masks are anxiolytic. They reduce anxiety.

Are they wrong with it?

We need that too.

Apropos anxiety and other mental health issues, I think one of the biggest problems would be that people will have to return because of economic hardship. Many people will have to return to live with their parents and reunite with their exes.

Divorce people.

We go back together.

People who detest their parents, can’t stand their parents, and ran away will have to return tail between the legs.

This economy is going to force merge and force reunite and force fuse people who should never ever be together.

In psychological terms, this will create at least three effects.

It will force people to reenact, to live through unresolved old conflicts. It will revive unresolved old conflicts. It will create something called compromised closure.

Closure that is not real. People would cheat themselves that they have obtained closure just in order to coexist, to survive with their exes and parents.

So this is not real closure, it’s self-deception.

And finally, of course, it will create massive amounts of triggering.

I foresee another pandemic coming, and that’s a pandemic of mental health disorders, and I’m by far not the only one who foresees this.

Breakups and divorces will skyrocket, and mental health issues will swarm us in a tsunami wave the likes of which we have never ever seen before.

Society today is much more fragile than it had been in the 1930s and 40s. It’s even much more fragile than it had been in the 1960s with the Vietnam War.

Society today cannot withstand these shockwaves because it’s atomized, it’s anomic, and it’s highly dysfunctional.

And one last bit of possibly good news.

Antibody tests are out there, contrary to what I’ve said yesterday.

Here I admit a rare, rare mistake, pounce on it, don’t let it go, post comments how I made a mistake.

So I made a mistake, there are antibody tests, they are not available to the white public, the tests are still being tested, they’re still being clinically trialed, but these trials are going on both in the United States, for example, in Dayton, Ohio, and in Europe, for example, in Germany.

Very shortly, very shortly, we will have antibody tests, workable antibody tests.

There’s a different issue altogether, whether they can be mass manufactured, manufactured to size.

There needs to be millions of them. There need to be billions of them to have any meaning whatsoever.

As promised, let’s go to the issue of God, evil, and the pandemic.

There’s no question that the pandemic is evil, evil in the sense that it causes, it engenders bad outcomes.

Now it’s not evil in the sense that it’s premeditated. No one sat there and invented the pandemic. No, it’s not a bio weapon, it’s not connected to any technology.

Let’s get rid of all this nonsensical, feeble-minded, idiotic, not to use harsher words, conspiracy theories.

But it’s bad, definitely it’s not good.

Why does God allow things like pandemics, the death of young children, the Holocaust, genocides, why does God allow for these things to happen if God is totally good?

I would like to read to you a few quotes and I would like then to deal with this issue.

This issue has a name, it’s called Theodicy.

It’s ages old and there have been debates about this since time immemorial, literally since the moment we invented God, since the moment we have invented this father-like figure, this patron, this person who is full of benevolence and so on, since that moment we started to ask the question, then how is evil possible?

And I’d like to read to you a few quotes.

The first quote is by a chap called Anisius Manlius Severinus Boethius. He lived between 480 and 524, that means about 1,500 years ago, and he was a Roman philosopher and statesman. And he wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy, which is still absolutely valid. Absolutely valid. It reads like a self-help book written by a life coach, a modern life coach.

I am shocked that Boethius, albeit dead, does not have a YouTube channel. So that’s what he wrote. There is nothing that an omnipotent God, all powerful God, could not do.

No.

Then he says no.

It’s like today we say not. And then he says, well, in this case, if an omnipotent God can do anything, can God do evil?

No.

God cannot do evil.

So that means that evil is nothing, since that is what he cannot do, who can do anything.

In other words, what he’s saying is this.

If God can do anything, and he cannot do evil, then evil is nothing.

Well, that’s a fine example of sophistry and scholasticism.

Another chap by the name of Quentin Smith wrote an interesting book called The Anthropic Coincidences, Evil and the Disconfirmation of Theism.

And he wrote, an implication of intelligent design may be that the designer is benevolent, and as such, the constants and structures of the universe are life-friendly.

However, such intelligent designers may conceivably be malevolent.

It doesn’t have to be benevolent.

How do we know that God is malevolent?

Maybe he is malevolent, like the Gnostics said.

It is reasonable to conclude that God does not exist, since God is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good, and thereby would not permit any gratuitous natural evil.

But since gratuitous natural evils are precisely what we would expect if a malevolent spirit created the universe, if any spirit created the universe, it must be benevolent, not benevolent.

And that is essentially the Gnostic argument.

Both of the Gnostics said that there are two gods, the one who created Earth, the one who made creation, created the universe, is Demiurge.

It’s kind of a demi-god, and he is malevolent.

Lucretius said essentially the same in Latin.

Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist, very photogenic, very handsome, traces the roots of evil to organized religion and to faith itself.

The belief in a god has spawned all manner of wickedness and malice throughout history, says Dawkins, correctly.

But religion is merely a private case of a much larger phenomenon.

Men’s quest for meaning, the search for an organizing exegetic, explanatory, hermeneutic, overriding, all-encompassing and all-pervasive principle.

The yearning for sense and justice amidst apparent randomness and chaos.

We all have this, and some of us find the answer in God.

Indeed, secular religions, known as ideologies, have proven to be even more lethal and pernicious than the epiphanic variety.

Nazism, communism, and fascism have wreaked more mayhem and generated more death than any divinely-inspired counterpart.

So did nationalism, and to a large extent, so did liberal democracy.

We’ll go into it some other time.

This still leaves the perplexing question of evil and its convoluted relationships with all manners and modalities of faith.

Whether you’re an atheist, which I’m not. Whether you’re agnostic, which I am. Whether you’re a fervid believer, which I despise.

The questions of why evil exists, what purpose evil serves, and how are evil and justice intertwined, these questions torment all of us on a daily basis.

I’m asking myself the same question that a Christian fundamentalist would ask, or even a Muslim militant.

Let’s start with the logical problem of evil.

God is omniscient. He knows everything. He is omnipotent. He’s all-powerful. And he’s good.

We don’t discuss here the more limited versions of a divine designer or a divine creator.

We go the whole nine yards. There’s a God, and this God can do anything, knows everything, and he’s good.

Why, therefore, won’t such a God eliminate evil?

If he’s all-powerful, why does it destroy evil?

If he cannot destroy evil, if he cannot do so, then he is not all-powerful or he is not all-knowing. And if he will not do so, if he refuses to do so, then surely he is not good.

Epicurus is said to have been the first to offer this simplistic formulation of the logical a priori, a priori or deductive problem of evil.

And later, there was another guy called David Hume in the 18th century, and he expounded on it in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published in 1779.

Evil is a value judgment. A plainly human culture bound depends on the culture, period-specific construct.

And Thomas Aquinas called evil en svecionis, the subjective perception of relationships between objects and persons, or persons and objects, or, for example, the pandemic.

Some religions, Hinduism, Christian science, some religions shrug off evil as an illusion, the outcome of our intellectual limitations and our mortality.

As St. Augustine explained in his seminal The City of God in the 5th century, what to us appears heinous and atrocious may merely be an integral part of a long-term divine plan whose aim is to preponderate good.

So evil leads to good, results in good.

By the way, something I can attest to from my extremely limited personal experience.

Everything I thought even led only to good.

Leibniz postulated in his Theodicy in 1710 that evil, moral evil, physical evil, metaphysical evil, is an inevitable part of the best logically possible world, a cosmos of plenitude, and the greatest possible number of what he called compatible perfections.

Okay, you saved, hold your horses.