Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Narcissism – Quo Vadis? (with Anwesh Satpathy)

1. 00:00 No text all right uh hello welcome everyone it’s an honor today to talk with one of the one’s leading experts on narcissism in fact
2. 00:14 one of the earliest experts in narcissism on the internet professor of psychology
3. 00:20 sam banknet uh professor mcnamee thank you very much for doing this thank you for having me let’s uh revert to sam sam would be much older save a lot of time in the interview right so No text i think that i have a lot to talk about with you because i have read your book and i’ve
4. 00:41 watched your youtube videos and video blogs so there’s a lot of things to talk about
5. 00:47 but uh just to start with basic definitions i think that it’s better if we give the audience an idea what
6. 00:54 exactly it is that we’re talking about so i think the best way to do that is to define
7. 01:00 what narcissism is and how it differs with our narcissistic personality narcissism is a stage in human
8. 01:11 development typically in very early childhood when the child
9. 01:17 separates from the parents from mother and takes on the world the child needs to be a bit grandiose to
10. 01:24 take on the world leave mommy behind you need to be a bit grandiose so narcissism that kind of narcissism is called primary narcissism and it’s very healthy it helps the baby it helps the infant to develop a constellated self and integrate itself it helps the child to
11. 01:42 take on the world explore recognize the existence of other people etc etc so
12. 01:48 it’s a very crucial part of human development however if narcissism in its primitive
13. 01:54 infantile form persists into adulthood then we have secondary narcissism also
14. 02:01 known as pathological narcissism at that stage we could have a narcissistic style
15. 02:10 defined by lin sperry who is a scholar or we could have a malignancy of the narcissistic style which is also known as narcissistic personality disorder
16. 02:21 both the narcissistic style and narcissistic personality disorder share basically the same characteristics it’s
17. 02:28 only a question of degree so there’s a lack of empathy there’s a tendency to exploit other
18. 02:34 people there is envy as a driving motivator there’s the need for narcissistic supply in order in order to
19. 02:40 regulate the sense of self-worth so a need for attention
20. 02:46 there is there are many primitive um childlike
21. 02:52 defense mechanisms such as splitting in other words regarding some regarding the world is all bad or all good regarding
22. 02:58 other people in terms of black and white projection where we attribute where the
23. 03:04 narcissist attributes to other people traits and behaviors that he dislikes in himself the projective identification where the narcissist forces other people to behave in ways which affirm his grandiosity and his expectations of the world basically
24. 03:20 is hostile and dangerous and so on and so forth so narcissist to cut a long story short our two-year-old
25. 03:26 children simply simply put their two-year-old children
26. 03:32 No text so when we talk about narcissism you know what the other personality disorder that comes about the cluster personality disorders and it often happens that you know narcissistic personality disorders and this type most as the other cluster deposit disorders antisocial
27. 03:49 personality disorders borderline perspective disorder so what are the similarities between the
28. 03:56 claustrophobic personality disorders and the differences
29. 04:02 well we are moving towards a totally new reconception of the field and so for
30. 04:08 example the international classification of diseases which is the book that governs mental health outside north america no longer makes these distinctions
31. 04:20 between the book doesn’t make these distinctions between various personality disorders but the book says there’s one personality disorder with various dimensions
32. 04:31 in the diagnostic and statistical manual in its fifth edition published in 2013
33. 04:37 is moving in this direction ultimately we’re gonna have a single personality disorder with various aspects emphasis
34. 04:44 and so on but right now as things stand in north america especially in the united states
35. 04:51 there are ostensibly differences between various personality disorders now all these personality disorders are
36. 04:57 united by certain features uh the dramatic erratic cluster b
37. 05:04 personality disorder all of them have certain features in common for example all of them include grandiosity a cognitive distortion which filters information data from the
38. 05:16 world in a way that accuratizes oneself inflates oneself that is common to psychopaths common common to borderlines etc another thing is is entitlement
39. 05:28 in the psychopath it appears in the form of defiance and impulsivity
40. 05:34 in the in the narcissist it appears in it appears in in the form of exploitativeness uh in the borderline it appears in the form of emotional blackmail um and so on but all of them feel
41. 05:46 entitled they feel entitled to special treatment or they feel entitled to certain things like sex power money
42. 05:54 they feel entitled to the presence of their intimate partner etc etc so we have
43. 06:00 a few a few things in common for example negative affectivity all these disorders the people in these disorders patients or clients in business they feel bad they feel constantly angry
44. 06:12 constantly envious so the overriding emotional landscape is totally negative they are incapable of
45. 06:19 positive emotions with the exception of the borderline the borderline is capable of some emotions and of empathy but even
46. 06:26 the borderline when she is faced with humiliation rejection anticipated abandonment stress even the borderline becomes a secondary psychopath a type of
47. 06:38 psychopath so it’s very fluid the types transition into one another
48. 06:44 all of them go through a process called collapse whereby their defenses their worldview crumbles under pressure from
49. 06:51 the environment under adverse input so when they collapse they suddenly
50. 06:57 transform it’s very common for a covert narcissist to become an overt narcissist or veterinarians to become psychopath borderline to become psychopaths borderline to become narcissistic and so
51. 07:08 we are beginning to think that we have we were splitting hairs there’s no need for all this nitpicking it’s actually
52. 07:15 one thing it’s actually one thing and we are beginning to put everything together in one basket these are people with problems in the organization and functioning of their personality and the way they misperceive the world in reality and others especially
53. 07:33 No text can you define uh what forward and open narcissists are because it’s often
54. 07:39 because cohort often seems like a world class step more easier to recognize because they tend to be in your face you know you can tell that they’re being used but covert narcissists are often
55. 07:51 likely to be depressed you know they’re likely to feel bad and you know often it is the case that they’re diagnosed misdiagnosed with depressed so how
56. 08:02 what is the difference between the two the bleeding edge thinking right now is
57. 08:09 that what we used to call grandiose or overt narcissists are actually psychopaths we made a mistake and we
58. 08:15 thought they were narcissists but they are actually psychopaths that’s the that’s the most most advanced current
59. 08:21 thinking and therefore the only types of pure narcissists unadulterated narcissists
60. 08:28 seem to be the covert narcissists covert narcissists are compensatory their narcissism
61. 08:35 compensates for a deep set lack of inner conviction a deep set sense of inferiority so that they pretend to be superior to cover up for an inferiority complex and
62. 08:48 that is known as compensatory mechanism now the covert narcissist was first described in 1989
63. 08:55 by two scholars qatar and cooper the late cooper he died last year
64. 09:01 and covert narcissist is actually a narcissist who is incapable of obtaining
65. 09:08 narcissistic supply attention directly so he needs to obtain supply via third
66. 09:15 parties or he needs to stew in his corner to sulk to feel bad
67. 09:22 about his inability to obtain supply the inability to obtain supply is the key feature of covert narcissism because
68. 09:29 this creates a panoply of behaviors a cascade of behaviors for example the covert narcissist is likely to be very
69. 09:36 envious very passive aggressive um very um kind of tries to undermine and sabotage
70. 09:47 successful people or so he is likely to be very dangerous
71. 09:53 so this failure in obtaining supply pushes the covert narcissist
72. 09:59 to become more and more subtle more and more surreptitious
73. 10:05 more and more cunning more and more skimming more and more um one could say with a slave mentality like he can’t act in the open so he acts
74. 10:17 underground so but otherwise there is no major psychotic
75. 10:24 psychodynamic difference between overt what we used to call overt and covert they’re both addicted to narcissistic
76. 10:30 supply they both have a grandiose self-perception they’re both exploitative they’re both envious
77. 10:36 they’re both everything they absolutely share the same diagnostic criteria which is exactly why
78. 10:42 in the diagnostic and statistical manual edition 5 they refused to create
79. 10:48 a separate diagnosis for covert narcissism but they just added a single sentence
80. 10:54 alluding to the fact that some narcissists are vulnerable they’re shy they’re fragile
81. 11:01 they’re brittle they are unable to go out there and obtain adulation and admiration
82. 11:08 and so on they’re not in your face they’re not consumatious they’re not defined like a psychopath they are far less impulsive they’re more skimming and long-term planning they’re machiavellian so they’re more machiavellian and so now we have this new construct of dark
83. 11:24 tetrad not dark triad the dark triad was psychopathy narcissism and
84. 11:30 machiavellianism now we have the dark tetrad which is all the aforementioned plus
85. 11:36 covert phenomena covertronomina is covered narcissist and borderline borderlines are actually very very close to covent narcissists in many respects
86. 11:47 so a covert narcissist is a is a narcissist who is collapsed a narcissist who fails at
87. 11:54 obtaining basic needs in self-regulation in a way a dysregulated narcissist which comes perilously close to borderline because the essence of
88. 12:06 borderline personality disorder is emotional dysregulation and failed grandiosity growth stein was a dominant scholar in the field
89. 12:17 grossstein had suggested that borderline is actually failed narcissism
90. 12:23 the child tries to become a narcissist fails to create a false self remains with empathy and emotions and becomes a borderline so this is where everything intersects
91. 12:34 covert narcissism is a form of borderline which is a form of failed narcissism which is a form of
92. 12:40 psychopathy and you’re beginning to see that everything measures very well into this kaleidoscope of dysfunction
93. 12:48 No text so does he convert narcissist narcissistic supply from
94. 12:54 the uh effects and constellations of others or you’re feeling bad and
95. 13:00 that kind of sort of feeling sort of attachment
96. 13:11 you have to increase your voice a bit and be a bit slower because of the connection all right so i was asking does the covert narcissist get narcissistic supply from the
97. 13:23 affection of others like the borderline of people with borderline personality do
98. 13:29 they feel complete and they merge with the other person is that one of these in terms of
99. 13:35 corporate cancer system the vast majority of covert narcissists are simply collapsed narcissists so they
100. 13:41 never obtain supply they are unable even to leverage other people other narcissists for example to
101. 13:47 obtain supply so they’re this collapse narcissist they’re in the corner they’re seething
102. 13:54 they’re furious they’re rachel they’re envious they are passive aggressive they undermine they’re cunning they’re skimming they’re so this is really really bad type i would be far more
103. 14:05 afraid of the covert narcissist than an overt narcissist a small minority of covert narcissists
104. 14:11 which at the time i i coined the phrase inverted narcissist so a small minority
105. 14:17 of covert narcissists the inverted narcissists are able to obtain supply by teaming up with a successful grandiose narcissist so they’re like the moon the moon’s reflected light the it’s the
106. 14:30 light of the sun that is reflected off them they bask in the glory of their intimate partners or business partners etc so they can say i’m a partner of jeff bezos and that is their narcissistic supply
107. 14:43 so inverted narcissists derive narcissistic supply from the success and accomplishment of
108. 14:49 their accomplishments of their partners be it intimate partners or business partners or whatever
109. 14:55 but this is a very small minority the majority of covert messages are compensatory fail i mean collapsed and uh therefore
110. 15:06 essentially incorrigible it’s it would be far more difficult for example to intervene
111. 15:13 theoretic therapeutically with a covert narcissist an overt narcissist or grandiose narcissist because they’re
112. 15:19 totally depleted they have no what we call cathexis they have no emotional reserves imagine going
113. 15:26 through life constantly failing constantly feeling mocked ridiculed and humiliated
114. 15:32 constantly having referential ideation in other words believing that other people are talking about you behind your
115. 15:38 back and scheming against you imagine going through life where everything you ever wanted you
116. 15:44 will never get and you know you will never get because you don’t have the personality to get it imagine looking around you and seeing
117. 15:51 people identical to you narcissists actually succeeding where you fail
118. 15:57 repeatedly you may imagine being besieged with social phobia social anxiety shyness
119. 16:03 imagine feeling that you’re unique and special but no one acknowledging it
120. 16:09 ever on the contrary you’re considered to be you know a nobody a loser imagine going through life like this someone like adolf hitler for example
121. 16:20 probably started off as a covert narcissist because you know he spent all his life
122. 16:26 trying to convince people that he’s special somehow as an artist as a politician and until age 35 at least
123. 16:33 he had been a total unmitigated failure in everything he had ever tried to do for someone like adolf hitler this easily could push him over the edge to psychopathy which of course
124. 16:44 ultimately did so what you seem to be suggesting that No text personality disorders are sort of valuable it’s often the case that narcissists become psychopaths and
125. 16:57 psychopaths you know so our narcissist likely to also engage
126. 17:04 in anti-social activities or are they often has there ever been a case that a
127. 17:10 narcissist has been identified with conduct disorder and later found out that he’s not it it’s not sure i again
128. 17:16 ask you i again ask you to increase your voice and to talk more slowly it’s very difficult to
129. 17:22 understand you over this connection my apologies please increase your voice seriously and talk more slowly thank you so i was i was just talking about uh
130. 17:35 the malleability of narcissists of all of these personality disorders because
131. 17:41 when you describe for instance that the converting narcissists feel that he’s being persecuted now that
132. 17:48 ties in with the schizoid personality disorder of those biscuits and they often
133. 17:54 experience diligence of persecution right so uh you know it’s very difficult for a lay person to make sense of these things and
134. 18:06 you know to sort of find out whether the person has uh narcissism or depression or bodily
135. 18:13 personality disorder and it’s also difficult for
136. 18:20 uh for therapists because it is often the case that they are misdiagnosed so i’m wondering how many of the cases that we have right now are actually
137. 18:33 misdiagnosed and what harm it eventually does to the person and to the people around them first of all laymen should not attempt to diagnose they’re not qualified No text they’re not trained and it would be a serious mistake to attempt to diagnose these diagnoses are
138. 18:49 based on mountains sometimes decades decades long mountains of research and studies and so on and layman
139. 18:58 would be wrong to try to diagnose cancer and the layman would be wrong to try to diagnose personality disorders that’s
140. 19:04 point number one point number two these diagnosis increasingly seem like wrong these differential diagnosis these
141. 19:11 distinctions between at least cluster b personality disorders and not only cluster b
142. 19:17 honestly but i would say all personality disorders these categorical diagnosis diagnosis
143. 19:23 which are based on lists of criteria seem to seem to be a totally wrong
144. 19:29 approach and a very antiquated one the diagnostic and statistical manual edition 4 was published in 1994. edition 3 was published in 1980 that’s 40 years ago
145. 19:41 a lot has happened so we think this diagnosis is uh counterproductive
146. 19:48 to say the least and we are trying to unify everything into a signal diagnosis which essentially means something is wrong
147. 19:54 with this guy now let’s see what mostly is wrong so
148. 20:00 i don’t think it’s very helpful or productive to insist to ascertain
149. 20:06 whether someone is a covert narcissist or a psychopath or depression or
150. 20:12 we realize for example that at the core of all all these personality disorders there’s something called the schizoid schizoid core so we now realize that schizoid or
151. 20:23 schizoidism has a lot to do with these disorders we for example are reconciling of paranoid personality
152. 20:29 disorder as a form of narcissism because the paranoid believes that he is sufficiently important for
153. 20:36 the cia to go after him it’s a form of grandiosity to be paranoid is a form of grandiosity because you you believe yourself to be sufficiently important to be
154. 20:47 the focus in the center of a conspiracy yeah a conspiracy of your neighbors a
155. 20:53 conspiracy of the state doesn’t matter but people are interested in you so even paranoia probably is a form of
156. 20:59 narcissism um so gradually i think what will happen there
157. 21:05 will be a single category of personality disorder and all these questions will will be rendered moot and totally irrelevant we will if you have an intimate partner
158. 21:17 who is problematic as far as you are concerned there are two possibilities either that
159. 21:23 intimate partner has some mental health issue or as often you have a mental health issue what matters is not which one of you is mentally ill
160. 21:34 labeling guilt tripping blame shifting blame assignment these are futile exercises
161. 21:41 what matters is if you’re with an intimate partner and you feel bad either try to fix it or move on it does
162. 21:48 not really matter if your intimate partner has depression cyclotymia dystemia
163. 21:55 schizophrenia who cares who cares about this nonsense you’re feeling bad in your relationship move on you feel embedded in the workplace resign i mean who cares about all this anyhow you can’t take upon yourself to fix
164. 22:07 people or to save people that in itself is pathological and people are very fixated on labels labels matter a lot in medicine
165. 22:19 because in medicine we have objective immutable clinical entities
166. 22:25 tuberculosis is tuberculosis in ghana in china in the in the steps of siberia and in
167. 22:32 montreal tuberculosis is the same everywhere because it’s same everywhere we can administer a course of treatment
168. 22:40 which would work equally well equally well on the moon so but this is not the situation in
169. 22:47 psychology and in psychopathology in clinical psychology abnormal psychology we can’t
170. 22:53 even agree on the name of the discipline it’s this is not a science
171. 22:59 we’re dealing with human beings human beings are very bad raw material because they change all the time and you
172. 23:06 can’t replicate experiments now psychologists like to pretend that they are scientists some of them even
173. 23:12 wear white lab coats and they think it makes them scientists you know and they
174. 23:18 use very sophisticated statistics which makes makes them feel very self-important but psychology is a pseudoscience it will never ever be a science because it is it it studies it studies objects or subjects
175. 23:34 which are constantly ever shifting and ever changing which renders experiments irreplicable and does not allow to generate a sufficient number of hypotheses to be falsified now i’m talking about this with absolute
176. 23:50 certainty because my phd is not in psychology it’s in physics
177. 23:56 and i can tell you there’s a hell of a difference between physics and psychology one is a science the other is literature now you can of course write rigorous literature the greatest
178. 24:08 psychologist ever to have lived was dostoyevsky the second greatest was freud who was not a psychologist but a neurologist so and these people
179. 24:19 were authors of literature literature captures the human soul
180. 24:25 literature captures the essence the attempt to introduce diagnosis was driven by the insurance industry
181. 24:32 not by psychology or any psychologist that i’m aware of this is a totally new development in the
182. 24:38 80s because insurance companies insisted on the ability to remunerate therapists
183. 24:44 in accordance with check boxes these check boxes were imposed on the profession
184. 24:50 no serious professional psychologist or professor of psychology would would tell you that there are
185. 24:56 distinct categorical diagnoses that have nothing to do with each other that’s why most people are
186. 25:02 diagnosed with multiple disorders we never have a case of a patient who is diagnosed with one disorder but usually four or five six even ten is common what does it tell you about the profession that it sucks simply sucks
187. 25:19 if you go to a to a doctor and you have tuberculosis you’re likely to be diagnosed with tuberculosis you may have
188. 25:25 additional phenomena like edema this dead but generally tuberculosis if you go to a therapist or a diagnostician
189. 25:32 you’re likely to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder anesthemia or major depressive disorder
190. 25:39 um i don’t know what else you are likely to come out adhd i mean you’re likely to come out of the session with five diagnosis if you are lucky if you’re lucky
191. 25:51 and with nine different types of medication which is very helpful to certain corporations i am i have a very dim view of my professions very dim view it’s been corrupted by money in insurance
192. 26:07 money in pharmaceutical pharmaceutical industry so i’m very wary about all these
193. 26:13 delineations and distinctions which are pretentious to science No text so that’s a very strong statement that you’re making psychology and pseudoscience which i
194. 26:25 think the majority of psychologists will disagree with you of course they will disagree how else
195. 26:31 would they make a living will you would you say that it’s pseudoscience at the level of
196. 26:39 something like biopsy or astrology things like that no
197. 26:45 because it is based on rigorous observations of
198. 26:51 identifiable subjects and because we’re all human and share the same wetware hardware and software the brain well some of us do
199. 27:04 some some of these observations and so on are likely to be universally applicable
200. 27:12 but that doesn’t make a science for example many observations in the bible
201. 27:18 are universally applicable no one would say that the bible is a form of science many observations in good literature such as dostoyevsky are universally applicable
202. 27:29 i mean the characters the protagonists in dostoyevsky’s books they’re universal
203. 27:35 you could point at your friend and say you are like brother karamazov you are like raskolnikov you know and you would
204. 27:42 be 80 right so there is predictive value and descriptive value in psychology but one should never confuse
205. 27:53 descriptive powers or even predictive powers with science
206. 27:59 science is not about predicting things and not about describing things only primitive sciences for example when
207. 28:06 carlos linus started his work in botany he made he made taxonomies of plants
208. 28:14 he just roamed the countryside and he was categorizing and classifying plants no one would say that this is today’s botany similarly you mentioned astrology
209. 28:26 astrology and early astronomy were about creating catalogues up to the 18th century we were creating
210. 28:34 catalogues there is the famous messier catalogue of galaxies so we were we were making catalogues we were making lists there’s a huge difference between making lists and science the main the core proposition of science
211. 28:52 is the ability to produce hypotheses which yield falsifiable predictions this
212. 28:59 psychology can never do ever why because the sun is immutable in the next 5-5 billion years
213. 29:10 you if i conduct a psychological experiment on you the experiment itself changes you
214. 29:19 i’m not talking about conducting the same experiment on you tomorrow tomorrow you’re a new person your
215. 29:26 girlfriend broke up with you you had sex you witnessed a car accident you’re in a fight with your mother you’re a
216. 29:32 different person tomorrow how on earth can i claim with a straight face that an experiment i conduct on you today is the same experiment that i conduct on you tomorrow when you are not the same person tomorrow and how can i claim anything in a
217. 29:48 straight face if the very experiment changes you it’s the uncertainty principle applied to psychology now how can i say with a straight face
218. 30:00 that an experiment that i’m conducting on you is equally valid when i’m conducting it on your friend
219. 30:08 what on earth do you have in common except the brain nothing
220. 30:14 you are not com i cannot commodify you when i could conduct experiments on atoms on planets on stars when i conduct experiments on giraffes
221. 30:26 and baboons even there it’s beginning to be a problem but when i conduct experiments on things
222. 30:32 that can be commodified unitary things that have units that are
223. 30:38 interchangeable fungible units that is science the rest is literature
224. 30:45 literature is fine literature is wonderful literature is insightful literature allows you to understand and
225. 30:52 predict and even touch the essence which science does not allow you to
226. 30:58 so literature is powers of its own and and you know literature is important
227. 31:04 as important to science if not in many respects more important but it’s on science
228. 31:10 and any pretension otherwise is called artistry
229. 31:16 simple so coming back to something you said earlier about No text not having responsibility that it doesn’t matter whose fault it is but
230. 31:28 don’t you think that that conflicts with the idea of personal responsibility which is to say that if
231. 31:35 you are if it’s your fault then you must know that it’s your fault otherwise you’re going to repeat the same mistake again and again and again and you know fine if you break up with one
232. 31:46 narcissist then you’re going to find another narcissist and you’re never going to recognize the fact that it is you who is critical enough to you know be attracted to a narcissist
233. 31:59 i didn’t say that you should not recognize your responsibility accountability and contribution to the situation that’s what i said i said that when you find yourself in a bad situation or a relationship where you feel bad or in a context or environment where you feel bad
234. 32:15 you should just leave you should move on you should not try to diagnose the other party you should not try to fix the
235. 32:21 other party or save the other party these are pathological reactions you should just move on
236. 32:28 you should ask yourself of course how did i select such a person made selection
237. 32:35 and when i had been in the relationship what did i contribute to the dysfunction or the
238. 32:41 how did i make myself feel bad via the agency of the other person these are of course
239. 32:47 important and crucial questions but after you had left
240. 32:53 so the first thing to do is to extricate yourself from environments where which make you
241. 32:59 feel down or bad or dysfunctional or whatever whether your partner
242. 33:05 was a psychopath factor one that type of borderline of this subspecies of masses is very really very interesting theoretically and it’s great fun in a pub
243. 33:16 uh over a pint of beer and so it’s interesting subject matter
244. 33:22 but this is not what you should focus on this is not what you should focus on
245. 33:29 it’s dubious whether we learn lessons it’s a common myth there are many many
246. 33:36 myths for example the myth that we are social animals animals this is a myth there are many numerous myths by the way in psychology psychology is a mythology a form of mythology
247. 33:47 because it’s a form of literature of course and all literature is a form of would agree with that
248. 33:53 yeah kalyan would agree with that yes so not only him i think peterson jordan
249. 34:00 peterson would agree with that so it’s a form of mythology and all literature is an extension of mythology
250. 34:06 because we deal with we deal with archetypes as jung had observed correctly
251. 34:12 in his moments of lucidity which were few and far between but um
252. 34:19 it’s important to simply
253. 34:25 accept that we are prone creatures
254. 34:32 that we are likely very much to repeat the same mistakes again and again and again
255. 34:38 until we die and that there is no learning or personal growth development and evolution beyond a certain point that’s not some buckney that’s sigmund
256. 34:50 freud sigmund freud coined the phrase repetition compulsion to describe this kind of thing so even if you were in a relationship with the narcissist and you study
257. 35:01 everything there is to study about narcissism hopefully not online where there’s 99 nonsense but you were to you want to study everything there is to know about nonsense and now you are perfectly able
258. 35:12 to identify analysis on a first date you are still very likely to end up with
259. 35:18 the narcissist because ending up with the narcissist fulfills important psychological needs caters to important needs allows you to function there’s an
260. 35:29 outsourcing of ego functions and psychological functions to the narcissist
261. 35:35 you had chosen analysis to start with because it had worked for you it was a positive adaptation it’s another myth in psychology that there is such a thing as a negative adaptation
262. 35:47 there is no such thing everything we do and everything we become is a positive adaptation when the child becomes a narcissist it’s because the child is embedded in an
263. 35:59 abusive environment and the narcissism allows the child to survive it’s a positive adaptation when you choose a narcissist as an intimate partner
264. 36:10 it’s a positive adaptation you’re choosing the narcissist for important reasons to help you to regulate for example your internal environment your moods your emotions your effects your cognitions
265. 36:21 borderlines do this borderlines outsource their internal regulation to a
266. 36:27 narcissistic partner codependents do this to some extent so
267. 36:33 everything is a positive adaptation the thing is that positive adaptations like everything else in life have an expiry date they have a shelf life
268. 36:44 and when they expire they taste sour and as you would not eat sour yogurt
269. 36:51 or spoiled food or rotten meat stop
270. 36:57 discard move on but you’re likely to choose the same positive adaptation never mind how educated you are how hyper vigilant you are how how i don’t know what you are you’re very likely to end up the same that’s said said reality so the only thing you can
271. 37:18 do is establish guardrails firewalls and protections
272. 37:24 it to in the face of the eventuality the almost ineluctable eventuality that you’ll end up in the same situation so for example learn lessons about how to manage your finances
273. 37:36 learn lessons how to maintain your social network your friends and family in the face of the
274. 37:42 narcissist demand that you give up on them in other words learn to protect yourself
275. 37:48 that you will end up with a narcissist a second time and a third time in a fourth time in a fifth time is almost for sure
276. 37:54 but learn how to defend yourself once you find yourself again in the same situation with the same kind
277. 38:01 of person now what sort of advice would you give No text for a culture that’s different i’m sorry can you repeat this i’m terribly sorry my hearing is impaired i apologize yes
278. 38:13 what sort of advice will you give in a culture that is conservative you know that believes in some form of arranged
279. 38:21 marriage you know where typhos is kind of looked down upon and you end up you know marrying someone
280. 38:28 who you don’t know and it turns out that he is a narcissist and
281. 38:34 he is abusing you but not in a physical manner so and there are societal barriers for you you know seeking diagnosis and things like that
282. 38:45 what is the person supposed to do in that situation that closed society
283. 38:54 first of all the statistics are unequivocal arranged marriages survive much longer even in permissive societies
284. 39:05 so when you have arranged marriages in sweden they survive much longer than typical swedish romantic based marriages
285. 39:13 and divorce is much easier there and there are no social sanctions if you divorce so i’m not talking about arranged marriages in india or in egypt talk about sweden arrange marriages survive longer
286. 39:26 and the incidence of what we call love much higher in arranged marriages it’s a different type of love it’s not the
287. 39:33 fireworks it’s not romantic it’s about it’s very substantial second fact
288. 39:40 cohabitation increases the divorce rate premarital cohabitation if you live with
289. 39:46 someone before you get married your chances to divorce are three times higher than if you don’t live with that person before you get married these are examples
290. 39:57 of two myths two lies of western civilization out of hundreds
291. 40:04 if not thousands of lives western civilization is founded on lies i would say
292. 40:11 if i had to isolate thousand sentences that are the the predicates of western civilization
293. 40:17 the foundations the pillars of the paradigms of western civilization about 700 of them would be like when i say
294. 40:24 lies counter factual contradicting the facts
295. 40:30 any marital therapist or couple therapists will tell you that it’s good to cohabit
296. 40:36 before you get married and that arranged marriages are very bad these are lies they defy
297. 40:42 the facts if you get trapped in a marriage in an arranged marriage with a narcissist or a
298. 40:48 psychopath in an environment which is traditional patriarchal
299. 40:54 conservative non-permissive where divorce carries stigma
300. 41:00 and there are social sanctions and even legal sanctions and economic functions to to getting divorced then your only choice is of course if you can to relocate either to try to modify your presence in the
301. 41:17 marriage to become emotionally absent perhaps or to relocate but otherwise you’re right it’s a trap
302. 41:24 if these options don’t exist it’s a trap now mind you even in the west when you divorce you pay a very hefty economic cost
303. 41:36 divorced people earn much less than married people the same the same people who used to be
304. 41:42 in marriage earn much less after the divorce there’s a huge economic cost to marriage and
305. 41:49 even though there’s no stigma and allegedly no social cost when we study for example the sexual
306. 41:56 sexual behavior patterns of divorced women we find a huge increase
307. 42:03 in promiscuity and short-term relationships divorced women are much more promiscuous
308. 42:10 and much and have and are much less successful in finding long-term intimate partners
309. 42:17 second marriages the divorce rate in second marriages is seventy percent seven zero
310. 42:23 the divorce rate is in third marriages is well over eighty percent eight zero
311. 42:29 in other words even though theoretically there’s no stigma actually divorced women in the west are
312. 42:36 treated as trash men treat them as trash and even men who marry them
313. 42:42 hastily devotion so it seems
314. 42:48 that the situation is the same everywhere if you were to divorce your abusive husband for example and you’re a woman
315. 42:55 if you’re a woman and divorce your business you pay a huge cost a huge price economically in terms of
316. 43:02 reputation in terms of eligibility in terms of finding the next intimate partnership in terms of ultimate divorce
317. 43:09 in second and third marriages it’s the same in india same in in russia same in the united states same in israel same everywhere but it pertains to women
318. 43:20 there is no such associated cost except economic in the case of men
319. 43:26 men don’t seem to suffer the same consequences so if you are if you’re a man and you
320. 43:32 have an abusive partner you’re much more likely to extricate yourself in other words it’s a gender issue actually not an issue of abuse it’s an issue of gender equality and the morays and standards of society
321. 43:44 which take ages to change you can’t change them overnight with a manifesto
322. 43:50 they take centuries to change you know by the time by the time the gender equality had been
323. 43:57 totally established i believe the problem you have raised will disappear of its own
324. 44:03 and make no mistake don’t think that western women are in much better shape than not i just demonstrate it to you with
325. 44:09 numbers that they’re not they’re actually paying the same price so uh
326. 44:15 does what happens in afternoon and resources personality disorder in psychopaths is
327. 44:21 that they tend to become less aggressive violent as they age like serial killers
328. 44:28 often commit more murders when they’re at 15 to 30 and then it slides down so
329. 44:35 you know the psychopathy doesn’t go away but the expression of it goes away so does that happen with narcissism as well
330. 44:43 does it decrease in any way or its manifestation decrease in any way with age
331. 44:51 it’s a very good question let’s start with borderline actually there is spontaneous healing in borderline all this all the diagnostic criteria disappear and the person can no longer
332. 45:02 be diagnosed with borderline after age 45 81 of borderlines spontaneously heal we don’t know why
333. 45:13 this leads us to believe that it’s a brain disorder we think it could be only biological foundation because nothing else happens it’s the same person same environment same marriage sometimes
334. 45:24 but we can no longer diagnose the person with borderline personalities but interesting thing is the personality disorder disappears but the dysfunctional behaviors that the borderline had developed over decades of sickness these behaviors remain
335. 45:39 so if she if she had developed promiscuity sexual promiscuity she would continue to be sexually promiscuous if she had developed substance abuse she would continue to abuse substances
336. 45:50 only when we try to diagnose her we will not find borderline personality disorder anymore
337. 45:56 and that’s in four-fifth of the cases this enormous spontaneous
338. 46:02 healing event with psychopaths the picture is pretty similar actually
339. 46:09 psychopaths after the age of 40 45 depending on their study in the country
340. 46:16 lose the vast majority of their behaviors so they’re no longer defined
341. 46:22 they’re no longer aggressive or violent they’re no longer consumatious in other words they’ll no longer defy authority
342. 46:28 they become much more conformist they’re no longer impulsive they’re no longer reckless
343. 46:35 they settle down most of them have families jobs etc etc they become
344. 46:41 normal so to speak and this happens with the majority overwhelming majority of psychopaths for
345. 46:47 example the rate of recidivism among psychopathic criminals collapses precipitously after age 45 50. and so
346. 46:58 we again don’t know why and therefore we also assume it’s a brain disorder and this is one of the reasons we are conflating now borderline and psychopathy the patterns are very very
347. 47:09 the patterns the the distribution of the the disorder and its symptoms behaviors and traits
348. 47:16 they’re almost identical in borderline and psychopathy not so in narcissism
349. 47:23 in narcissism we do not see an amelioration actually in some respects we see an exacerbation so the older the narcissist gets for example is likely to become more entitled and way more grandiose
350. 47:40 um this is especially true when he becomes sick no longer can use his body to obtain supply if he’s a somatic narcissist or
351. 47:48 his brain you know is not what it used to be so he will compensate with grandiosity he will make counterfactual claims envy increases so
352. 48:01 narcissists as they grow older become worse you would want to be with a psychopath
353. 48:08 because there’s at least hope and you definitely want to be with the borderline after age 35 40 you want to be with the borderline subject to her dysfunctional behaviors which do not disappear but if her dysfunctional behaviors are throwing objects and breaking things
354. 48:24 it’s lit you can live with that because the disorder itself disappears not so with the narcissist it’s only
355. 48:30 going to get much much worse you’re going to get double the narcissist that you had married so that’s one reason we tend to think that narcissism is not
356. 48:41 brain based but is a construct social construct or something we are not quite sure perhaps
357. 48:48 it’s a secondary disorder in other words it’s an artifact and that’s why the diagnostic and statistical manual committee had seriously considered for two years to remove narcissistic personality
358. 48:59 disorder altogether from the fifth edition the irony is that ultimately they ended
359. 49:05 up with doubling the diagnosis narcissistic personality disorder now has two sets of diagnostic criteria
360. 49:13 in the dsm-5 of them copied entirely from the fourth edition and one of them is what
361. 49:20 they call the alternate model of narcissistic personality disorder page 767 for those of you who are
362. 49:27 interested so uh i think this point was made No text in sixties the seventies by eric fromm who said that medicaid narcissism actually
363. 49:40 becomes was with age but one of the things that i’ve noticed in sort of the pop culture from the cultural side
364. 49:51 of things is that people are increasingly attaching themselves to
365. 49:59 singles artists actors you know it’s not that they like the music or the art per
366. 50:06 se they’re attaching themselves to the person the person becomes a friend you know someone very close and they become obsessed with the person do you
367. 50:18 think that this has narcissistic elements with it
368. 50:27 personality cults are nothing new celebrities are nothing new although we
369. 50:34 tend to think it’s new because of the prevalence and reach of mass media and lately social media what is new is the technologies but not the phenomena
370. 50:46 so in the past personality cults were more prevalent in in politics
371. 50:53 so you had the personality cult of adolf hitler personally cult of stalling of mao you know
372. 50:59 celebrities were pretty common albert einstein was a celebrity um
373. 51:05 you know veteran russell was a celebrity george orwell in the 40s and 50s so
374. 51:11 none of this is new we we tend to live vicariously
375. 51:18 we outsource part of our lives to external figures who do it better than we do it’s like if you want to fix the
376. 51:30 electricity in your home or to fix your plumbing you’re unlikely to try it for yourself i
377. 51:36 assume but you would call a plumber or an electrician if you want to live the glamorous life
378. 51:44 if you want to be creative and you’re incapable of it you can do it through someone vicariously by proxy so celebrities are channeling apparatus
379. 51:56 you channel your energy through them but
380. 52:02 they are you idealize them you’re not interacting with a celebrity but you’re interacting with a manufactured image what get a boat called the spectacle you you’re interacting with a manufactured image and then you add to this manufactured image your projections
381. 52:18 your traits your beliefs and then whenever the celebrity deviates
382. 52:25 from the manufactured image in your head you get very furious and you begin to devalue the celebrity
383. 52:32 and hate the celebrity this is a narcissistic mechanism now this is
384. 52:38 i call it snapshotting the narcissist when he comes across someone
385. 52:44 who is meaningful to the narcissist who is potentially significant like for example a potential intimate partner
386. 52:51 the narcissist takes a snapshot of that person mental snapshot then the narcissist
387. 52:57 internalizes this natural photoshops photoshop’s the snapshot this is a process called idealization and continues to interact only with a snapshot not with the real person
388. 53:10 and when the when the real person deviates diverges from the snapshot in any way the narcissist becomes very furious and devaluing because it threatens the coherence and cohesion of his internal world so it’s the same process with celebrities we snapshot the celebrity we photoshop
389. 53:30 the celebrity we continue to interact with the snapshot in our heads and whenever the celebrity deviates we
390. 53:37 get very furious and devaluing of the celebrity which explains why celebrities don’t last that long
391. 53:43 because they always deviate of course celebrities are human beings they have independent lives they change they make
392. 53:49 decisions they want to experiment with a new style of music look at the reaction when an artist tries a new type of music people get furious
393. 54:00 absolutely furious because he freezes to remain static he refuses to remain as natural and so we live vicariously [Music] through this but this is a classic
394. 54:12 classic human behavior the ancient greeks lived vicariously via the olympian gods
395. 54:20 jung correctly identified archetypes archetypes are actually these external
396. 54:26 visuals or images or organizing principles through which we live vicariously it seems that we outsource
397. 54:34 a big part of our internal world and project it onto the environment now the narcissist does this the narcissist uses other people to regulate his sense of self-worth
398. 54:46 and other ego functions reality testing but the difference between a narcissist
399. 54:52 and a normal person is that a normal person would take input from the environment and from other
400. 54:58 people and would subject it to a internal structure which is coherent
401. 55:06 and cohesive and congruent and so on the narcissist would take input from the external environment
402. 55:12 and would make this input the internal world so it’s like the gnosticism has no
403. 55:19 container a normal person has a container you give him wine he puts the wine in the container the narcissist uses the bottle of wine is the container
404. 55:30 it’s empty in other words the narcissist is empty there’s a empty schizoid core and the narcissist mind is a kaleidoscope it’s a hive mind
405. 55:41 it’s like shimmerings and glimmerings and shards and broken pieces
406. 55:47 from other people’s minds the narcissist is like a reflection of his human environment at any given
407. 55:53 moment and he’s kaleidoscopic he’s shifting we call this phenomena clinically identity disturbance
408. 56:00 narcissism borderlines have no fixed core identity but it’s ever shifting
409. 56:06 in accordance to environmental input feedback cues and so on No text feel a sense of emptiness inside in borderlines yes in borderlines
410. 56:18 borderlands have this psychopath service narcissists don’t have a sense of emptiness because
411. 56:24 nurses is mistake confused external and internal
412. 56:30 exactly like the psychotic the psychotic thinks that his internal objects are actually external so if the psychotic has a voice in his head he believes this voice is coming from
413. 56:41 the outside not from his head not from his mind this the narcissist is exactly the opposite the mirror image of a psychotic the narcissist sees external objects
414. 56:52 like external people and thinks that they are actually internal so the narcissist confuses internal and
415. 56:59 external the psychotic confuses internal and external but in two different ways totally different ways kernberg otto was one of the three fathers of the profession of personality disorders kemberg suggested that borderlines and
416. 57:15 narcissists are actually pseudopsychotics that’s why he called it borderline it’s on the border between neurosis and
417. 57:21 psychosis he said that they’re sick they’re actually schizophrenic it’s just a mild form
418. 57:28 mild form of schizophrenia and so narcissus
419. 57:34 when he when the nazis sees you and thinks that you could become for example an intimate partner or something
420. 57:40 then he would immediately confuse it and think be confused and think that you are in his mind
421. 57:46 not that you’re real he would internalize you interject you that’s a the clinical term is introduction he would
422. 57:53 interject it the psychotic would see an image of a man in his mind
423. 57:59 and would think that it’s outside so that’s the only difference but this is a psychotic reaction it’s known as hyper reflection so it’s a psychotic mechanism
424. 58:11 and so because of that it’s very very difficult for narcissists to have reality testing they’re totally divorced from reality they live utterly inside their minds
425. 58:23 even their grandiosity cuts them off reality they need other people
426. 58:29 they need other people to tell them what is real and what is not it’s very bad for the narcissist it’s
427. 58:36 very frightening lonely place schizoid do you think we are fostering a culture
428. 58:45 of narcissism because in the last few years we have seen the rise of openly grandeur you know seemingly narcissistic individuals like trump being elected you know they keep talking
429. 58:58 about how good they are and how great the things are when in fact it’s the opposite so
430. 59:06 we seem to be rewarding uh narcissists and making more avenues for them making
431. 59:13 more socially acceptable avenues for them which eventually creates a feedback
432. 59:19 loop and it and shows that more and more past narcissists join this sort of pool so do you think that’s happening twenge and others have documented a
433. 59:30 massive rise in narcissism among young people there is no question that some
434. 59:37 elements of narcissism like grandiosity like entitlement
435. 59:45 no question that these elements are on the rise and they are fostered and enhanced by technology i think these elements had created technology i think technology was created to cater to these needs not the other way it didn’t create the needs but
436. 60:02 you just create it was made to cater to the knees but there is no question about this
437. 60:08 the only question is if you take the elements and you add them together do you get
438. 60:14 pathological nurses and the answer to my mind is no
439. 60:20 what you get you do get a rise in what lynn spirit calls narcissistic style
440. 60:27 so we are relating to our environment especially a human environment other people we are increasingly relating to them via narcissistic paradigms narcissistic
441. 60:38 organizing principles narcissistic assumptions narcissistic interpretatory
442. 60:44 interpretative principles so when we filter the world when we try to make sense and imbue things with meaning when we like to organize our lives we
443. 60:55 will try to interact and collaborate with others we are very likely to resort to and make use of
444. 61:03 narcissism as a kind of philosophy or ideology or even i would say religion
445. 61:12 so narcissism becomes the zeitgeist
446. 61:18 if you wish the spirit of the times but it doesn’t make it pathological
447. 61:24 and so technically it’s not that we we’re seeing a rise in narcissistic personality disorder malignant narcissism and so on but what we are seeing is that people find
448. 61:35 elements of narcissism very self-efficacious very useful
449. 61:41 and enhancement to their agency in other words it pays to have a narcissistic style
450. 61:47 you are likely to secure better outcomes it’s a positive adaptation so of course people gravitate towards narcissism for example if you don’t promote yourself you’re dead
451. 61:58 no notice you you know if you are not a bit pushy and aggressive
452. 62:05 you’re finished if you if you are not entitled you’re unlikely to get what you need
453. 62:12 if you are not grandiose you’re not you’re nothing today the only two options are loser or
454. 62:18 grandiose i mean that’s it ask donald trump and if you are all these things you’re
455. 62:24 likely to become president of united states so it pays simply that it pays in july 2016 the magazine new scientist
456. 62:35 in the united kingdom came up with a cover story the cover story title of a cover story was parents teach
457. 62:42 your children to be narcissists fact so
458. 62:49 but we should not confuse narcissism as a philosophy or ideology organizing principle or
459. 62:55 meaning meaning imbuing stratagem or paradigm
460. 63:01 with narcissistic style and with narcissistic pathology these are totally three different issues completely the world is not more pathologized
461. 63:12 when it comes to narcissism but the world is a lot more narcissistic and increasingly a lot more psychopathic especially among women women are becoming increasingly more
462. 63:23 psychopathic than narcissistic which is of course taboo and you’re not supposed to say it it’s politically
463. 63:29 incorrect and had i worked in the west i would have lost my job but the fact is
464. 63:36 supported by studies women are becoming much more narcissistic and so on it’s there’s a clinical term for it
465. 63:42 it’s called the stalled stalled revolution women for example describe themselves
466. 63:48 increasingly more using masculine aggressive terms psychopathic terms narcissistic terms it’s probably a backlash against millennia of enslavement and mistreatment no question about it
467. 64:04 but it’s still a very very disconcerting phenomenon and it leads to an estrangement between
468. 64:10 the genders to a collapse in sexual scripts and romantic scripts to inability to date dating is down 60 percent in since 1998
469. 64:23 inability to have sex there’s a decline in in sexual activity among young people massive decline in some in some countries not sexual activity at all
470. 64:34 uh a majority of interactions now are via social media so there’s no face-to-face interactions
471. 64:40 and in the year 2016 we conducted studies and was the first year in human history
472. 64:46 where women and men women especially did not have any contact
473. 64:52 of a majority of women had no contact of any kind with the opposite sex
474. 64:58 major i repeat this it’s my problem since 2016 to this very day
475. 65:04 a majority of women do not have any contact that includes sex or casual sex anything
476. 65:10 with the opposite sex in the west at least these are frightening
477. 65:16 facts absolutely terrifying facts we are breaking apart as a society
478. 65:23 our institutions are dying in the core core organizing units family gender
479. 65:32 even i would say human interaction and not working anymore for us the problem is not that all the
480. 65:38 institutions die that is sometimes a welcome process the problem is that all the institutions
481. 65:44 had died and we utterly failed to come up with substitutes
482. 65:50 so okay no gender no male no female accepted we don’t have to organize
483. 65:57 ourselves by gender but what’s the alternative none okay no family no marriage we don’t have to organize ourselves in families and marriages
484. 66:09 but what’s the alternative to this none the problem is not that we are dismantling the old it’s perfectly okay the problem is we came with nothing new
485. 66:21 so the alternative now is a void social black hole human i mean
486. 66:27 the species is facing deep space nothing just nothing this has never happened before in human history ever
487. 66:39 it’s a very frightening thing and i don’t know how we’re going to survive this and we forget the pandemic it’s a joke i don’t know how we’re going to survive this how much of it do you think has to do
488. 66:50 with the rise of social media because strange has i’m sorry again slow and
489. 66:57 much higher how how much of this do you think has to do with the
490. 67:03 rise of social media because friends research shows that
491. 67:09 since the rise of social media there is a direct accordingly between
492. 67:15 the rise of social media and the rise of the levels of depression between
493. 67:21 especially with girls so as hate has written jonathan in fact
494. 67:29 one of the reasons is that girls express their aggression in a non-physical manner
495. 67:36 so you know they would if they want to make you feel bad they would rather escape you from the group
496. 67:43 and you know they will send mean things about you and social media extrapolates that it ensures that you know it’s very easy to
497. 67:54 make someone feel bad about themselves because you just post a picture of a party that you went to and they were not
498. 68:01 invited and you know done so do you think that social media has extrapolated the problem that you talked about especially in regards to depression
499. 68:13 and narcissism i don’t know much about how whether it has increased psychopathy and causes declared
500. 68:25 social media is a is a vehicle and a raiification of social trends
501. 68:31 so yes it’s an amplifier of course it’s all technology is an amplifier television had a profound
502. 68:37 impact on the car had a profound impact on for example physical distribution created the suburbs all technology has profound impacts and social media is not an exception
503. 68:49 the only thing that is different social media
504. 68:55 and to the best of my ability had never happened before perhaps with the exception of the
505. 69:01 concentration camp the only it’s the only technology
506. 69:07 which had been invented with pernicious insidious and malevolent goals in mind i think there were only two such technologies the concentration camp and
507. 69:19 social media i’m not aware of any other technology which had been invented with malice in mind i’m not aware i may be wrong there may be others but i’m not aware
508. 69:30 of any others social media had been invented by a group of engineers and essentially schizoid young men men not women
509. 69:42 schizoid socially inapt many of them autistic and so on so
510. 69:48 people with highly specific mental health issues and they had colluded with engineers
511. 69:55 to create platforms which masqueraded
512. 70:01 as communication venues or communication channels but actually had to do with fostering addiction and operant conditioning
513. 70:13 through a variety of means relative positioning comparing yourself to others social exclusion encouraging aggressive speech by limiting the number of characters and other methods rewarding
514. 70:30 aggression lies by promoting them until recently when they had no choice
515. 70:36 and they were forced by legislators and others to do something about it now everything i’m saying is not my
516. 70:43 conspiracy-minded mind because i hate conspiracy theories i dedicated a long
517. 70:49 long stretch of my career to fighting conspiracy theories this is not a conspiracy theory these are actually testimonies
518. 70:55 by the engineers of google facebook and others which are widely available online and you can go and listen to these blood curdling and spine chilling testimonies
519. 71:07 social media platforms were constructed with the express intent of making you feel bad
520. 71:14 so that you will resort to them and revert to them time and again in order to try to
521. 71:20 make yourself feel good they became a monopoly
522. 71:27 of regulation of your moods so they regulated your moods and emotions through a variety of inbuilt hardwired
523. 71:38 software features which are utterly visible they’re not a secret and they involve well-known elements of psychology and psychologists were involved in developing these platforms
524. 71:51 they involve operant conditioning they involve addictive behaviors they involve relative positioning these are well documented mechanisms to drive you to do what the platforms want you to do and what they want you to do is to stay online on the platform
525. 72:08 for as long as they as you can so that they can monetize your eyeballs
526. 72:14 so that they can convert your experience into advertising dollars
527. 72:20 now here’s the problem to accomplish this goal [Music] they need you
528. 72:26 not only to feel bad but they need you to come to the conclusion
529. 72:32 that the only way to reverse this feeling is by staying on the platform one number two they need to eliminate the rest of your
530. 72:44 life any minute you spend with your girlfriend is a minute you’re not spending on facebook any hour you play with your children
531. 72:55 is an hour of revenue lost to twitter
532. 73:01 they have a vested interest to destroy eradicate eliminate
533. 73:07 the rest of your life your intimate relationships your friendships your family your community
534. 73:14 your other interests your studies they want all this gun
535. 73:20 because every minute that you dedicate to anything or anyone else
536. 73:26 is a net loss to social media platforms so of course they’re not social
537. 73:32 they’re a social media platforms they disconnect you from people they
538. 73:39 don’t connect you to people they give you the illusion of connecting you to people because your interactions with other
539. 73:45 people on social media platforms is mediated via aggression
540. 73:52 via competition via comparison via depression via anxiety indeed studies by keith campbell jean twenge and many others
541. 74:04 had shown conclusively that the more you use social media the higher your depression and anxiety are of depression and anxiety among social
542. 74:16 media users between 1998 and 2008 went up five times 500 percent and 300 respectively so social media is an engine of mental
543. 74:33 illness in this sense it is
544. 74:39 a sick malevolent bordering on criminal and probably criminal
545. 74:45 enterprise akin and comparable to the best of my knowledge only to the
546. 74:52 concentration camps because only the concentration camps or industrial complexes intended to foster negative outcomes i’m not aware of any other technology
547. 75:04 the steam engine the telegraph the telephone they were all invented to help people they’re all invented with the
548. 75:10 best intentions in mind not so social media
549. 75:16 but uh doesn’t this depend on how an individual uses it for instance uh
550. 75:24 someone’s back and people were dying due to lack of oxygen to social media to
551. 75:30 ask the politicians leaders for help and because it was public on twitter a lot of them got oxygen and
552. 75:38 instant health people banded together for you know social activism so
553. 75:45 isn’t it like it depends on how you use it if you use it for questions
554. 75:56 doesn’t it depend how i use morphine yes of course it depends how you use morphine but morphine is a drug
555. 76:03 class one drug you use it to go to jail of course it depends how you use it but the the platform is structured to let it use it only in one way
556. 76:14 the minute you’re exposed to morphine you become addicted the minute you’re exposed to the platform you become addicted and
557. 76:20 conditioned that less than zero two percent of users that’s the number by the way that less than zero point two percent of users had at one point or other leverage
558. 76:32 the platform for communication purposes for good for good causes and is very impressive what about the
559. 76:40 other 98 9.8 when you’re exposed to these platforms they condition your brain
560. 76:46 through likes through comparisons through exposure to fake news
561. 76:52 through exposure to manipulative tactics and techniques in built into the software
562. 76:58 the software is built like this so of course if you are a careful user
563. 77:04 of heroin you know you are unlikely to get addicted but how many people are careful with
564. 77:10 herring not many if any you can’t help it
565. 77:16 the platform is structured to addict your conditioning you don’t have any credible defenses and
566. 77:23 no one has studied what happened to these activists after the activism was over
567. 77:30 did they remain on the platform what did they do once the cause was gone or finished
568. 77:37 didn’t they become addicted as well somehow to the exposure
569. 77:43 to the fame to the celebrity didn’t they begin to compare themselves to other activists
570. 77:49 trying to out-compete them it creates an escalation in aggression escalation in speech acts escalation in
571. 77:56 behavior because to get noticed you need to escalate and when you look at these platforms you see extreme behaviors on multiple accounts
572. 78:08 why because otherwise they will not be noticed so they need to ask and escalate
573. 78:14 these platforms are not these platforms are not good they’re evil
574. 78:20 they’re simply evil now of course everything can has has dual use knives guns and yet we regulate guns
575. 78:31 no one regulates these platforms because everyone is terrified of them look what they did to someone like donald trump
576. 78:37 he’s a president of the united states not my favorite mind you a raging narcissist
577. 78:43 an a-hole in addition but they have the power to shut
578. 78:49 shut up and censor the president of the united states what chance any politician has against
579. 78:55 them or any regulatory agency everyone is terrified of them they have become monopolies well over 60 percent
580. 79:02 of all news is disseminated through facebook not cnn not the new york times facebook controls sixty percent that’s
581. 79:13 six zero percent of all the news in the world and no one dares to break them up
582. 79:20 when oil companies at the beginning of the 20th century reached a level of control of 10 to 20
583. 79:28 percent of the market they were broken up antitrust anti-cartel regulations
584. 79:35 no one dares to do this to facebook today no one dares simply facebook google should be broken to many multiple pieces no question about it
585. 79:47 but who’s going to do that so what sort of circumstance would you propose because i think it’s
586. 79:58 not pragmatic to tell people to just stop using social media because that’s not going to work everyone has a smartphone in their hands everyone has access to instant twitter facebook and
587. 80:11 whatsapp so at a time like this what is the solution
588. 80:19 do you think that we need to change the solution solution is regulation but i don’t see the political will for example i would limit social media usage to two hours a day
589. 80:31 there’s a clock the clock stops you even if you want to i would limit
590. 80:38 friends to people you know you really know and you will have to prove that you know them
591. 80:45 for them to become your friends i would limit of course certain types of speech
592. 80:51 like fake news lies conspiracy theories of some kind etc etc
593. 80:57 which now is beginning hesitantly beginning to to be the case there are ways of course there are ways i would limit of course age i would never expose anyone under the
594. 81:08 age of shall we say 16 or 18. i mean people under a certain age are not allowed to engage in sex or buy
595. 81:14 drinks or buy guns vote visa social media are much more potent than guns drink so i would limit limited by age
596. 81:26 now
597. 81:32 yes yes yes federal regulations in the united states strategic relations absolutely the internet had reached a stage where
598. 81:38 it has to be strictly regulated it’s a medium like the radio like television like everything else all media are regulated all media are regulated not about not regarding content of course that is censorship i’m absolutely against this
599. 81:55 but about regarding distribution dissemination exposure public public profile of course everyone is
600. 82:01 regulated movies are regulated you have the rating yes and g r
601. 82:08 x everything is regulated the biggest media
602. 82:14 are not the biggest media are not the smallest media are television is radio radio what
603. 82:20 the hell is listening to radio but it’s regulated who’s watching movies anymore i mean in cinemas but they’re
604. 82:27 regulated social media and by extension the internet
605. 82:33 must be immediately rigorously forcefully regulated and quite a few people should go to jail
606. 82:40 absolutely not with regards to content of course only with regards to the platforms and
607. 82:47 the profiles of the public exposed to these platforms end of story you want to see you want to
608. 82:53 watch a triple x movie no problem if you’re above the age of 18. you want to watch social media no problem if you’re above the age of 16. under 16
609. 83:04 zuckerberg goes to jail simple
610. 83:11 so well that you know i intend to leave libertarians generally against any sort of state regulation because that always you know doesn’t work like what we’re seeing in
611. 83:22 afghanistan so i you know i would
612. 83:28 i don’t think i would agree with you there i think that it is a problem i don’t have solution i don’t see uh regulation as a solution because
613. 83:40 internet because of its sort of open unregulated nature people have been allowed to expose states uh the crimes that states commit
614. 83:51 you know the united states the quickly links uh snowden all these things like that and when you regulate you will not expect these things you will not expect people to you know you should never regulate content you should never regulate content and a lot of what
615. 84:07 you just said was utter nonsense everything you wear everything in your ear everything behind you is regulated the earphones in your ear are regulated by six different layers of
616. 84:19 regulation the clothes you’re wearing are regulated the books behind you are regulated the shelf everything in your environment right now is heavily regulated
617. 84:32 you would not have survived a single day without regulation you would be electrocuted by your earphones
618. 84:38 so regulation is critical i agree with you though that content should never be regulated if snowden obtains documents they should be absolutely free anywhere
619. 84:50 so i’m against regulation of content but i am for regulation of technology
620. 84:56 had no one regulated the earphones in your ear you would have been electrocuted
621. 85:02 simple you are using a smartphone right now or laptop i’m not sure
622. 85:08 they include 2 000 forms of regulation known as ce regulations everything around you is a product of heavy
623. 85:19 heavy micro grained regulation regulation is good
624. 85:26 as long as it is not abused and of course you’re right that everything can be abused but there is no
625. 85:32 form of abuse bigger than lack of regulation look at wall street wall street was not regulated and you see the outcomes
626. 85:43 the biggest form of abuse is a lack of regulation the second biggest is regulation we are humans we don’t have
627. 85:49 perfect solutions you’re right everything can be abused everything is abused
628. 85:55 but when i have to choose between lack of regulation and regulation i will choose regulation any day i want the
629. 86:01 banks to be regulated i want my foot to be regulated i want my medicines to be regulated i want your earphones to be regulated because i don’t want you to die before the end of the interview at least
630. 86:12 i want your laptop to be regulated your smartphone everything about you the shelf everything has to be regulated i want the platforms on the internet everything must be regulated except one thing free speech i think donald trump is an abomination but
631. 86:32 it was not okay to shut him up that is content censorship
632. 86:38 i’m all against it absolutely all i guess but
633. 86:44 otherwise for example to force the platforms um
634. 86:50 to for example not exposing to over stimulation or conditioning by limiting
635. 86:56 the number of hours totally has not to do with content or forcing the platforms to allow you to accept his friends only
636. 87:07 real friends it’s a it’s an ideology it’s a policy thing it’s nothing to do with content
637. 87:14 these friends and you can exchange anything you want pornography included who cares go ahead no one will interfere with your choices of content and speech of course which is sacred
638. 87:26 but i want everything to be regulated absolutely i i moan and regret and lament the fact
639. 87:34 that there are some parts who are still not regulated the relation is the only thing standing between us an utter
640. 87:41 anarchy exploited by evil corporate minds and by criminals
641. 87:48 it’s as simple as that and if you are wondering yes social media is a combination of both even corporate minds
642. 87:56 who are bordering on the criminal in my view at least how much of it do you think has to do with consumerism in general
643. 88:07 because i watched a recent video of yours i think it was uploaded yesterday
644. 88:13 on uh how agriculture led to the decline of uh western civilization you know
645. 88:20 corrosive values being a part of the western civilization and uh because i read a lot of evidence
646. 88:31 history is that before agriculture societies where hunter-gatherer societies
647. 88:38 generally had very low levels of violence in a violence
648. 88:46 in asian countries which is extremely low but after
649. 88:52 agriculture started in the idea of private property developed and communal settings stopped and violence in those societies first agricultural societies did not
650. 89:04 difference uh rose up by the rate of you know the regular values that we have in something
651. 89:10 like congo or vietnam all of these communist wrong nations
652. 89:18 so do you think that there is something in technology which is inherently
653. 89:25 anti-human which is inherently corrosive and destructive
654. 89:34 it’s a much more complex question than it sounds because technology is any attempt to rearrange the environment so that it
655. 89:45 yields better outcome essentially when you move a branch or when a chimpanzee takes a branch and
656. 89:51 uses it to pluck honey or something i mean that’s technology
657. 89:57 psychology is common among animals it’s not a human thing
658. 90:04 i think the problem with human technology is that it’s closely allied or aligned
659. 90:13 with values which cater to the needs of a small elite
660. 90:20 so for example property consumerism i mean everything you’ve
661. 90:26 mentioned entertainment entertainment religion
662. 90:32 all these things are actually inventions of the elite elites throughout history and they were intended to manipulate the masses to work in tandem to collaborate in order to generate wealth which is then asymmetrically distributed most of it
663. 90:49 vast majority of it goes to the elites in a tiny proportion remains to maintain the masses
664. 90:55 or to give them the illusion of progress getting richer getting better or whatever the american dream
665. 91:02 so technology had been co-opted by the elites and then
666. 91:08 quoted in a series of ideologies that the masses had swallowed lock stock
667. 91:15 and barrel [Music] and that is i think the the problem that is the source of the problem not not technology by itself but the ideological the ideology within
668. 91:27 within which technology is embedded that ideology has been single for 10 000
669. 91:33 years it’s the same ideology for 10 000 years a tiny percentage of a population
670. 91:39 must control and own the vast majority of resources now how to accomplish this well religion religion is not working anymore science
671. 91:50 science is not working anymore social media social media is not working anymore oil oil is all i whatever it
672. 91:57 takes whatever it takes nationalism of course monarchy feudalism communism
673. 92:08 i mean all these were inventions of elites and so
674. 92:14 technology has been co-opted now elites are very clever so very often they give the impression of democratization so for example in the 16th century
675. 92:26 there was democratization of religion it was known as protestantism
676. 92:32 but of course it was an illusion same with technology social media is the illusion that technology is democratized but of course it’s nonsense because social media is controlled by three people so
677. 92:48 the illusion of democracy or democratizing the ideology like religion is not democratized science is
678. 92:54 democratized education is democratized technology is democratized so you feel you’re in control you feel
679. 93:00 it’s it’s for you you are in charge but of course it’s utter nonsense because when you follow the money
680. 93:06 it’s always the elites it’s always the elise we are stupid enough to buy into their
681. 93:13 ideologies from time to time we get fed up and there’s the french revolution and we cut
682. 93:19 off a few heads on the russian revolution and we put a few people in gulags but that never lasts ultimately the elites just changed things
683. 93:30 so there was the communist elite and later on there was napoleon after the french revolution so the the core question i think is not
684. 93:41 consumerism or religion or technology or because these are the shifting kind
685. 93:47 faces of the chimera of elite control now the elite don’t misunderstand me is
686. 93:53 not a conspiracy it’s not a group of identifiable people who sit together secretly in some place and plan the elites are groups of people who have common interests because they have common interests all over the world they act in similar ways
687. 94:04 but they’re not coordinated and the core question is is there in principle
688. 94:11 any recourse against the elites or as jordan peterson suggests elites are a normal part of nature there will always be an elite
689. 94:22 the top lobster actually jordan peterson’s message is very reactionary
690. 94:28 because what he’s suggesting is hierarchy is normal and the elites are there forever and
691. 94:35 just get used to it live with it that’s it move on nothing to see here and this is the core question he touched upon the core question and he and others
692. 94:46 pikati for example they touched upon a core question can the elite in principle have recourse again can they must masses in principle have recourse against the
693. 94:57 elites and if they can is there an alternative
694. 95:03 to hierarchy peterson says no pkt says yes
695. 95:10 there’s a disagreement is there an alternative to hierarchy some people say we can reorganize everything as a
696. 95:16 network a distributed network yeah but who will be the network network administrator so internet came close at some stage
697. 95:27 to being a distributed network with no center there is a religion like that islam islam is a distributed network with no center it has no center
698. 95:38 catholicism is the center islam has no center so islam is a totally distributed
699. 95:44 religion network religion same with the internet it’s a network technology
700. 95:51 but you see what’s happening even these network technologies they’re immediately co-opted and hijacked by the
701. 95:57 elites so it’s a war it’s a war and we just don’t
702. 96:03 realize it because we are collaborating with elites by adopting their technologies their ideologies their beliefs their norms the
703. 96:11 conventions we are collaborating with and the question is can we eradicate the elites and what are we going to replace
704. 96:17 them with new elites bad idea if elite is built into human history
705. 96:24 then no point to change the elites however if we can manage without elites for example in a distributed network totally everyone is equipped nodes
706. 96:35 maybe it’s worth to have a global revolution and to get rid of the elites by force is necessary
707. 96:42 that’s the open question do you think that there is any political
708. 96:48 will for you know getting rid of their leads because jordan peterson is right now the world’s
709. 96:55 most influential intellectual and his message isn’t saying you know the status quo is their
710. 97:01 leads are fine and get on with your life so at a moment when people are enamored
711. 97:08 by this spectacle of uh democracy and meritocracy and you
712. 97:16 know they deserve where they are
713. 97:30 politics is compromised politics is an invention of the elites and of course there’s no meritocracy
714. 97:37 it’s a total myth social mobility in the united states is the lowest
715. 97:43 among the 39 industrialized nations fact you’re born poor you will die poor
716. 97:49 you will die poorer actually statistically speaking there’s no social mobility they point out the two three individuals who made it but of course the overwhelming vast
717. 98:00 majority have inherited their wealth so social mobility is nonsense there’s no meritocracy that’s also nonsense it’s all nonsense invented by the elites politics is nonsense democracy is
718. 98:12 nonsense it’s all nonsense poisonous toxic nonsense invented by the elites
719. 98:18 and if there is any hope to get rid of the elites is by giving up on all these
720. 98:26 principles organizational principles institutions and so on exiting and creating a grassroots movement
721. 98:33 but i’m still hesitant to say that this would be a recommended
722. 98:40 course of action precisely because we hadn’t settled on an answer whether an elite less society is possible even biologically jordan peterson’s message is pernicious and toxic because not only does he say that an elite is indispensable a normal natural
723. 99:02 but he says that you can join the elite he perpetuates the myth of social mobility he says if you follow my 12 rules you will be much more self-efficacious
724. 99:13 you will get the beautiful girl you will have the american dream essentially that’s his message he’s an agent of the elites masquerading as a populist tribune
725. 99:26 the worst conceivable traitor as an intellectual
726. 99:32 not so slav slavojiijit for example is an authentic intellectual
727. 99:38 so but still i can’t say that i disagree with
728. 99:45 jordan peterson because i don’t have sufficient data to support an elite less society we never had one
729. 99:52 unless we go back to hunter-gatherer societies when we inspect primitive tribes
730. 99:58 primitive so-called primitives tribes in the amazon and other places i’ve lived in africa for three years
731. 100:04 so i met many tribal leaders and so on there are small scale societies with no elites i can tell you this and they’re very efficient and they survive and so but
732. 100:15 they’re small so what we we don’t have an answer whether large scale
733. 100:21 communities large-scale groups of people can survive without elites we know that leaders
734. 100:28 emerge naturally we know that but elite is not about leadership
735. 100:34 elite is about entrenched interests using force using violence
736. 100:40 leadership is another thing entirely actually in rome in republican rome
737. 100:46 leaders came they led the roman people and they went back to being farmers
738. 100:53 they did not become members of any elite because there was no elite only imperial rome had elite
739. 101:00 republican rome had no elite ancient greece had no elite until alcibiades
740. 101:06 maybe switzerland has no elite today in switzerland there’s no elite no political class
741. 101:18 it’s not true to say that there is there are no examples of societies without elites but they’re very small in numbers
742. 101:25 so we don’t know we don’t we’re not sure we can extrapolate it to big numbers we’re not sure whether when you have big
743. 101:31 numbers there are no emergent phenomena for example the formation of elite
744. 101:37 but elite is when people hijack interest and property
745. 101:43 and entrench them via violence using violence police is violence
746. 101:50 army is violence institutionalized violence
747. 101:56 well the state’s definition you know is the monopoly of violence
748. 102:02 but i think i’ve been thinking about the relationship between religion and
749. 102:08 narcissism because exactly i think we should make this the last question because yeah yeah yeah
750. 102:14 people people will not survive this however interesting you are in me you and me are they will not survive this
751. 102:20 yeah so i’ve been thinking about the relationship in religion and narcissism and you wrote i think it was in your book um jesus christ
752. 102:31 being an example or the religious games that’s not the historical question might be different
753. 102:37 being an example of a narcissist and what we see in india often are these are you know around the world these god men or these gurus were popping up and
754. 102:50 you know they always end up in jail almost always because of sexual abuse education that’s sometimes corruption but likely sensory patients must
755. 103:01 fit popularly so and they tend to exploit their followers
756. 103:07 but they tend to be charismatic they tend to you know have a sort of uh they tend to make others believe that they’re the most important person in the world their grandiose they tend to be
757. 103:18 god incarnate and so so i’m thinking
758. 103:24 if there is a connection between region in general and narcissism are religious who is
759. 103:32 likely to be just narcissists who have got his socially acceptable way of expressing
760. 103:38 themselves well modern modern so-called mystics so-called gurus public
761. 103:44 intellectuals mind you um and so on obviously are raging
762. 103:50 narcissists who are taking advantage of the gullibility and frankly stupidity of the vast majority of people
763. 103:56 the overwhelming vast majority of people are on the wrong side of iq and it’s easy to
764. 104:02 take advantage of them they also have psychological needs that are uncatered to by modern society
765. 104:10 so these raging narcissists many of them psychopaths are taking advantage of all of all these people would believe anything people believe that reptilians came to earth and became queen elizabeth people believe that the earth is flat
766. 104:22 one third of young people actually believe that the earth is flat i don’t know if you realize this shocking statistic
767. 104:29 um people believe in people believe that there’s an alien here she has her own youtube channel and you know she teaches them alien wisdom and people would believe i came to believe that people
768. 104:40 would believe anything so everything is okay and these narcissists
769. 104:46 and psychopaths are making are doing brisk business and they’re very happy all the way to the bank or to prison whichever comes first
770. 104:53 earlier religious leaders were embedded in a different context
771. 105:01 where today we say personality disorders at that time they called it demon possession the language was different the source of knowledge was different god was the source of knowledge it was absolutely possible to communicate with god it was not considered psychosis
772. 105:19 as we would consider it today so i think it’s a question of language
773. 105:25 and a question of social norms the earlier prophets and messengers and whatever you
774. 105:31 want to call them today would have qualified as mentally ill
775. 105:37 but the very concept of mental illness has changed forms it’s new it’s new it’s a 17th century construct i mean there was no mental illness before
776. 105:49 at least not in the modern sense melancholy was first described by burton in in 17th century so
777. 105:57 there was no mental illness it was absolutely possible to communicate with a whole range of supernatural entities such as angels
778. 106:03 demons god what have you and so they used the vernacular these prophets used the vernacular the language of their time
779. 106:15 and they communicated what they believed to be deep truths about reality and about people and and so on and so forth
780. 106:21 it is wrong to judge these people by modern standards and modern criteria
781. 106:27 it would be wrong as foucault michelle had observed the very concept of mental illness of pathology is a coercive state
782. 106:39 it can be used for coercive state tactics soviet russia that placed people in
783. 106:45 gulags and prisons and diagnosed them as mentally ill dissidents dissidents and activists activists when we’re diagnosed mentally ill
784. 106:56 same in germany nazi germany so we need to tread very carefully because
785. 107:02 mental illness includes a very thick dollop of judgment opinion context dependent and culture bound
786. 107:14 morays and conventions which have nothing to do with any alleged clinical entity
787. 107:20 what today would be called psychosis at the time was called communing with goals what today would be called schizoid
788. 107:26 personality disorder was going to the desert for 40 days i mean
789. 107:32 we could we can pathologize anything and everything so i
790. 107:38 believe that the earlier religious leaders were more authentic to use jean-paul
791. 107:44 sartre’s words were more authentic were closer to themselves were not manipulative
792. 107:50 narcissists and psychopaths in the classic sense but the modern crop the modern cropper criminals criminals masquerading as holy men mystics yogis
793. 108:03 public intellectuals coaches these are all criminals
794. 108:09 the psychopaths and that people fall for them is a sign of the sickness of the times
795. 108:16 we are living in very very sick times very pathologized times
796. 108:22 i hope we emerge increasingly with every day i’m less sure maybe it has to do with my age
797. 108:28 i’m not sure where every day that we stand at a chance to emerge from this my asthma
798. 108:36 signs are ominous on almost every front and i don’t maybe it’s my age but i don’t think
799. 108:43 i think i’m sufficiently capable of objective or attempt to use objective thinking the signs are bad simply bad objectively speak
800. 108:57 whether we emerge with a new model of organization new ways of surviving it’s a distinct
801. 109:04 possibility we’ve done it before many times whether we perish it’s also a distinct possibility we’re on the cusp
802. 109:15 we’re on the cusp these are in this sense you see religion these are the end days
803. 109:22 now don’t forget that narcissism is a form of religion it’s the worship of oneself
804. 109:30 what the child does the child creates a god a divinity called the false self
805. 109:37 and then the child sacrifices his true self to the false self it’s human sacrifice
806. 109:44 it’s a form of primitive one person religion and now we have a million a billion gods
807. 109:52 all of them false cells all of them with human sacrifice and it might well be that the religion of the future would be narcissism actually might well be
808. 110:04 for the next interview maybe well on that realistic if not hopefully not
809. 110:12 i think i i enjoyed talking with you i learned a lot and it’s it was fascinating to hear to speak as it always is it’s fact loved your books as well
810. 110:28 and i cannot thank you enough for doing this thank you for having me i appreciate it i apologize for my hearing
811. 110:34 and with your permission i will upload it to my channel this is okay with you obviously of course
812. 110:41 okay thank you very much and have a nice day try to