Why Narcissist APPEARS So STUPID (Borderlines and Psychopaths, too, sometimes!)

Summary

The speaker discussed the paradox of high intelligence coexisting with poor life skills among individuals with Cluster B personality disorders, such as narcissism, borderline personality disorder, and psychopathy. They explained that traits like grandiosity, lack of empathy, dissociation, identity disturbance, and external locus of control contribute to repeated mistakes, poor decision-making, and impaired social functioning, leading to what appears as genuine stupidity despite intellectual capacity. Ultimately, these disorders create profound disabilities that hinder practical wisdom, emotional regulation, and effective coping in everyday life.

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  1. 00:00 foreign awareness day and it pleases me no end to see my brainchild accepted into the mainstream millions of people around the world are aware today of narcissists their behavior or misbehavior and the particular form of abuse the likes of which there is none
  2. 00:26 narcissistic abuse I was the first to describe it in the 90s and popularize it over the next 10 years when I have had the only website on narcissism and the only six support groups on narcissism online well into 2004. all hell break Brock lose
  3. 00:48 and people discovered that there’s money in narcissism so now everyone and his dog or cat are experts on narcissistic abuse coaches trainers you you name it I’m glad that I created the cottage industry and have been sustaining so many tens of thousands of people around the globe
  4. 01:11 it’s a gratifying feeling I’ve made a difference but this is not the topic of today’s video said congratulation is always welcome of course no one else will congratulate me so I congratulate myself this is an example of self-supply today is a jealous day I’m jealous I’m full of
  5. 01:33 gel and so we are going to discuss normally stupidity why or why is the narcissist so bloody stupid is he for real now when I say he it of course pertains to she as well the gender pronouns are interchangeable there’s an equal number of women and men diagnosed with
  6. 02:03 narcissistic personality disorder nowadays as opposed to the 70s and 80s when the vast majority of NPD sufferers were men today that’s not the situation women have taken over women have become more narcissistic than men in many ways regrettably so I’m going to use he for literary
  7. 02:28 convenience sake but of course it applies to women as well we’re going to discuss a very strange phenomenon the fact that even highly gifted highly endowed highly intelligent extremely high IQ narcissists are total retards when it comes to life itself and apropod this
  8. 02:54 my name is I’m the author of malignant self-love narcissism Revisited I’m a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern federal University in ustavondon in Russia and I’m entering my 11th year on The Faculty of siops the Commonwealth for international Advanced
  9. 03:14 professional studies in Cambridge the United Kingdom Canada and with a campus in Lagos Nigeria now that you have my academic resume let us proceed to what interests you most and what interests you most is some vaccines here no I’m kidding what interests you most is of course
  10. 03:36 narcissistic abuse and it’s multifarious manifestations let’s start with facts as we usually do there is a disagreement as to whether people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder have an IQ Which is higher than the average or lower than the average
  11. 04:01 Carver in 1977 came up with a former answer bpd’s borderlines are more intelligent than the average population actually he found that the IQ of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder is around 135. a osaketi or something in 1993 found the
  12. 04:28 exact opposite it was a study published by the National Institutes of Health in the United States which is the authority on Mental Health among other things and the study found conclusively that people with borderline personality disorder actually
  13. 04:46 have a much lower IQ than average and that includes their verbal skills in the same debate has been raging for decades over a narcissistic personality disorder psychopathy and so on and so forth but this how much High what is the level of IQ
  14. 05:06 they have and how much IQ they have this may be the wrong question because IQ tests measure types of intelligence that have little to do with life life skills and perspicacity look it up in short you some people are intelligent clever Smart Sharp cunning but also unwise
  15. 05:37 wisdom is not connected to IQ wisdom is not a derivative or an inevitable outcome of a high IQ a high intelligence core Shield perspicacity the ability to kind of predict the future and adopt yourself positively to it also has nothing to do with IQ so the question is wrong
  16. 06:00 the question we should be asking is our narcissists and borderlines and Psychopaths and so on cluster B personalities dark personalities are they wise are they positively abducted to life itself and its challenges is actually exigencies the vicissitudes and ups and
  17. 06:22 downs and cycles of life are these people built to live and to survive and to thrive or is that does the disorder preclude does it preclude all these this is the topic of today’s video a few terminological issues lexical lexical um points pseudo-stopidity
  18. 06:52 is not the same as stupidity so the stupidity is pretending to be stupid acting as if naive but actually behind the scenes being very very sharp and cunning and manipulative and so on this is sudo stupidity stupidity is actually being stupid being inane in defeat and
  19. 07:24 not very adept at coping with life and designing survival strategies and coping techniques so we should distinguish pseudo-stopidity from stupidity as we shall as we will be doing shortly second thing when I say dark personalities these are not people diagnosed with
  20. 07:44 narcissism these are not people diagnosed with psychopathy and so on and so forth in the dark trials the dark Triad contains three elements subclinical psychopathy psychopathy that cannot be diagnosed subclinical narcissism narcissism that cannot be diagnosed in machiavellianism
  21. 08:06 the ability to manipulate your human environment in order to secure favorable outcomes of a form of self-efficacy that comes at the expense of other people by exploiting them or coercing them or gaslighting them or brainwashing them or in training them so this is these are
  22. 08:30 terminological issues remember reclaim if you have to okay so let’s proceed why why do we find some narcissists some borderlines and some psychopath actually the majority of them why do we find them a bit stupid why do they make why do they commit so many mistakes
  23. 08:59 why they are they error prone why do they rarely get anything right anything from relationships to to the workplace why do they misread other people so egregiously almost to the level of autism spectrum disorder what’s wrong with these people what’s wrong with cluster B people
  24. 09:26 the cluster B personality disorder are either pseudo stupid or stupid for example covert narcissists are pseudo stupid they pretend to be stupid because they know that by acting stupid people around them will put their guard down that will give them an opportunity to
  25. 09:48 penetrate the defenses of other people and manipulate them and obtain the desirable results so this is pseudo pseudo stupidity people with people who are covert narcissists they are also pseudo pseudo-humble they display pseudo humility they pretend to be modest
  26. 10:08 they declared they described themselves as hapless victims they’re never to blame for anything they’re never guilty of anything they’ve never done anything wrong they are just continuously being victimized and preyed upon and and their codependent actually the
  27. 10:29 and so on so this is a form of pseudo stupidity it’s to put yourself down to underestimate Your Capacity to rid other people to manipulate other people to interact with other people to claim that somehow you are disabled and that’s why you keep falling prey to predators
  28. 10:49 it’s a form of pseudosupidity it’s typical of covert narcissists the overt narcissist the grandiose narcissism and the borderline and the psychopath they’re simply stupid they’re not pseudo stupid they’re really really actually stupid and in this video today I will explain
  29. 11:07 to you why I’ll give you the reasons and there are so many of them so many reasons so many causes so many etiologies and what we call echopathology there’s such a background of Dynamics which are not helpful not conducive to wisdom that it is what is shocking is
  30. 11:32 that these people survive at all I mean they are so profoundly moronic because they can’t help it that’s the way they they’re built start with grandiosity grandiosity is a severe cognitive distortion it impairs the reality testing of those affected it also undermines and sabotages
  31. 12:00 self-efficacy now those are very many big words Ten Dollar Words my favorites let me try to break them down to you grandiosity is the belief that your inflated self-image is actually real it’s not fake your fourth self is not false other people may be getting it wrong but
  32. 12:25 you know for sure that you are unique unprecedented amazing perfect brilliant and so on and so forth it would take other people time to discover all these things that’s because they’re more stupid than you you are superior in every conceivable way intellectually bodily whatever so
  33. 12:50 grandiosity is a filter that distorts information from reality incoming information feedback input they’re all distorted they’re all they’re all refrain grandiosity falsifies reality and so in the absence of a firm grasp on reality of course you can’t act wisely
  34. 13:16 the second thing is grandiosity hampers obstructs self-efficacy in order to operate efficaciously efficiently in the environment with other people [Music] um you need to be able to read people appropriately you need to be able to resonate with people in short you need
  35. 13:40 to have empathy the lack of empathy common to all cluster B personality disorders and in the case of Borderlands it’s not a lack but it’s substantial reduction in empathy that’s the most recent that’s the most recent research most recent studies we have it even made
  36. 14:01 it into the DSM-5 so the deficiencies in empathy which in the case of the psychopath lead to to Absolute absence of any kind of empathy except called empathy called empathy is cognitive empathy and reflexive so the absence of emotional empathy warm empathy the ability to resonate
  37. 14:24 emotionally with another person when this is missing you can’t you can’t decipher other people properly you can’t understand other people and obviously you can’t manage yourself properly and efficiently with other people and so this undermines Your Capacity to obtain goals
  38. 14:47 to realize your potential to actualize your potential to self-actualize to collaborate with other people towards obtaining big goals bigger goals to work in a team to survive in the workplace to have an ongoing relationship which which is you know Savory and and a happy one
  39. 15:09 in short it limits you grandiosity and a lack of empathy limit you to the point that you are stupid they alienate people and they narrow your opportunities and subject you to recurrent diversity repetition compulsion is the the direct outcome of this
  40. 15:34 narcissists Psychopaths and borderline keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again no matter how often they get penalized no matter how high the cost they keep repeating it and they keep repeating these mistakes because they keep disastrously
  41. 15:52 misreading their environment and other people it is the great definition of stupidity now these people cluster B personalities they lack impulse control they’re defined they’re consummations they reject Authority and they decompensate under stress their defenses
  42. 16:14 crumble and they act in a inanely crazy making they do Insane things and these drawbacks guarantee frustration or worse again acting in a self-defeating self-handicapping self-destructive manner is a form of extreme extreme ingrained profound stupidity next thing next mechanism
  43. 16:47 in most of these disorders there’s extreme dissociation especially in borderline personality disorder but also in in narcissism there is dissociation because these people are dissociative they’re very bad at learning from past experiences they never learned the
  44. 17:04 lesson not because they aren’t able to do rivalism but because they keep forgetting the facts and the details or they keep rewriting history to conform to their grandiose fantastic inflated self-image and so there’s no learning these people never learn
  45. 17:25 and they and again it leads to repetition compulsion covering the same ground the same swampish quicksand ground their previous actions Adam Brett their next actions their obstinacy what appears to be options is actually panic these people are in panic
  46. 17:52 because they know that they don’t know they have no they have no database of life experience that they can draw on safely they are not sure of Their Own of their own experiences they are not sure whether their memories are true or some kind of fictional concoction
  47. 18:19 it’s a nightmarish existence they go through life second guessing themselves confabulating in order to bridge memory gaps it’s it’s terrifying it’s like having a very very short-term memory without any long-term memory a goldfish memory akosakov syndrome memory
  48. 18:45 it’s pretty frightening but it also leads to what strikes observers as extreme stupidity I mean for Christ’s sake you’ve done the same thing a few years ago why why do you keep why did you do it again why do you keep repeating your mistakes and your your
  49. 19:05 misbehavior and your misdees and your misconduct and why do you keep finding yourself in the throes of um conundrums and and Scandals and in mess in in worse threats and why do you keep driving yourself into situations which represent risk and danger and adversity
  50. 19:28 doing precisely replicating actions that you’ve done before it’s a form of stupidity these people are also entitled they think they’re entitled to special treatment without any commensurate accomplishments in their manic like in bipolar you know they’re manic so they never plan
  51. 19:49 thoroughly they’re sloppy they execute with no attention to detail so everything goes awry everything goes wrong everything looks shoddy and con artistic in a way and so they appear to be incapable of the Perfection that they attribute to themselves or even much less
  52. 20:14 they appear to be a kind of poor imitation of the real thing and distracts people is truly stupid because with the minimal investment of resources they could have accomplished so much more they could have done they could have achieved they could have grunted themselves the
  53. 20:39 access that they so seek um to higher paying jobs to better looking people to more accomplished professionals to institutions and so on they deny themselves they deny themselves all these opportunities by refusing to invest to commit this is not laziness
  54. 21:04 it transcends laziness it’s some kind of resignation it’s like saying well if the world doesn’t realize how deserving I am how entitled I am even without any effort on my part then something’s wrong with the world I’m not gonna I’m not gonna justify the
  55. 21:25 world’s ignorance omniscience and stupidity how come they don’t realize that I’m the world’s leading genius or the most drop dead gorgeous woman or the most amazing scholar or how come they don’t realize this they should have and I should have to
  56. 21:43 put no effort into communicating this to them or justifying it or underlying it is founding it or anything I don’t need to work hard this is so self-evident that I’m superior and perfect and Brilliant and Godlike and amazing and omnipotent and omniscient it should come
  57. 22:03 as a self-evident truth like in the Constitution of the United States you know this is of course extremely stupid at the heart of all this is the fact that these people are immature they’re the mental equivalence of children and this renders them naive and gullible
  58. 22:25 they’re very open to manipulation to this extortion they are they’re prone to to being victimized by con artists and swindlers because they trust themselves to never fall prey to a predator it’s part of their grandiosity but there’s another reason
  59. 22:46 over the years over the Decades of their life lives these people have learned to leverage the appearance of infantile haplessness and helplessness this infantile helplessness is a signal what they’re saying is please don’t hurt me I’m just a baby please don’t hurt me
  60. 23:11 please don’t hurt me I’m a simple tone please don’t hurt me I’m naive and gullible it is the kind of mimicry I refer you to my video the video that I’ve made about mimicry stupidity in this case is a kind of mimicry they’re pretending to be a lot less than
  61. 23:33 they are a lot less dangerous a lot less evil a lot less manipulative a lot less Machiavellian a lot less narcissistic a lot less grandiose a lot less worldly and so on so forth they pretend to be terrified they pretend to be hopeless they pretend to be amiable they pretend to be
  62. 23:58 naive they and so they pretend all these things in order to fend off potential threats and predators it’s a Machiavellian tooling effect it’s a manipulative strategy yeah now most of people with cluster B personality disorders especially people
  63. 24:17 with water like personality disorders suffer from an identity disturbance because they have memory gaps and severe dissociation they are unable to form a stable core identity and so they fluctuate between various identities on the fly in response in reaction to
  64. 24:38 environmental pressures and stresses and stretchors so because there’s no core identity there’s identity disturbance these people are unable to maintain continuity and coherence they depend on other people for external regulation over sense of self-worth in
  65. 24:57 the case of narcissism or external regulation of emotions and moods in the case of borderline and so When You observe them from the outside they appear to be fickle unstable stupidly disloyal to themselves or even without service they it’s as if they are suggestible
  66. 25:28 the latest fad the latest fashion the latest statement the latest question turn them around 180 degrees they don’t have a stable center of gravity they are catastrophically influenced by every bit of information from the environment and every push and pull of other people
  67. 25:54 we call this suggestibility it’s very common in histrionic personality disorder and this extreme dependency on external input makes them look really really stupid additionally these people have alloplastic defenses they tend to blame other people or the
  68. 26:18 environment oh god of the universe or the world or reality what have you on natural disasters or whatever they tend to blame the outside for their own misjudgments miscalculations defeats and failures and you know when you do it all the time it appears that you’re covering up for
  69. 26:42 something covering up for your own inadequacy worthlessness inanity lack of good judgment and ultimately stupidity generally with alloplastic defenses comes a paralyzing external locus of control it’s as if people will cluster B personality disorders say
  70. 27:10 Our Fate is determined from the outside there’s nothing we can do about it but this creates behaviors which are erroneously identified with stupidity for example indecisiveness reticence reluctance avoidance withdrawal these are all behaviors of avoiding the
  71. 27:33 world because the world is perceived essentially as hostile and malevolent and in control of their lives and this indecisiveness or avoidance they appear to be they appear to involve you know a lack of intelligence simply a lack of intelligence I mentioned dark personalities
  72. 27:56 that personalities may be Machiavellian but they are so embedded in fantasy all these personalities are fantasy defenses they’re so paranoid this paranoia is a form of grandiosity it puts you at the center of attention malign attention malevolent attention but still attention
  73. 28:15 so this personality is a fantastic they’re in fantasy much more than in reality they’re paranoid everyone is a persecutory object everyone is a potential enemy or a real one they are into conspiracy theories Global or personal and they are firewalls they’re separated
  74. 28:37 by rigid defenses so put all of this together and people immediately spot them immediately see through them if if they are willing as many people are not willing to see through these through these defenses and behaviors and so on that’s not the topic of today’s video
  75. 29:01 but if you are willing the The Narcissist the psychopath the borderline on the first meeting in the first five minutes present you with a visit card and on this visit card is a complete list of all their problems and all the their dysfunctions uh and so they’re not very good at
  76. 29:25 deceiving people or manipulating them unless the victims want to be deceived unless the victims derive some benefit from being manipulated and this is why these personalities Resort ultimately and pretty fast to end training brainwashing and coercion that’s why they deteriorate
  77. 29:49 into coercive Acts almost invariably and finally cluster B personality is a post-traumatic they are compensatory they’re broken they’re false at the core of each and every one of them there’s a bad object a series of interjects series of voices
  78. 30:08 which are harsh and critical and even sadistic they have internal enemies many of their internal objects are the secretary the and so this constant Battle Zone this constant Civil War leads them to abuse substances and develop addictions all in all these people are a sorry sight
  79. 30:34 and intelligent as they may be their absolute unmitigated idiots inadequate failures losers their reification of a life rejected potential wasted and total misapprehension and miscomprehension of life the world and others they are these people narcissists
  80. 31:10 borderline Psychopaths they’re invalids they’re extremely disabled people and their disability disability reaches the point where it far outweighs any IQ they may have the ability to solve mathematical equations is very nice but how often do you need it in real life
  81. 31:32 the capacity to synthesize insights from various disciplines is astounding but how often do you do that in a lifetime and how do you cope with your wife lovers children co-workers bosses the authorities the law how do you survive life itself if you don’t know the first thing
  82. 31:56 about being human
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Summary

The speaker discussed the paradox of high intelligence coexisting with poor life skills among individuals with Cluster B personality disorders, such as narcissism, borderline personality disorder, and psychopathy. They explained that traits like grandiosity, lack of empathy, dissociation, identity disturbance, and external locus of control contribute to repeated mistakes, poor decision-making, and impaired social functioning, leading to what appears as genuine stupidity despite intellectual capacity. Ultimately, these disorders create profound disabilities that hinder practical wisdom, emotional regulation, and effective coping in everyday life.

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