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1. 00:01 how can we tell the difference between people who are merely self-interested and people who are taking advantage of you exploitative people or exploitive people depending on the country so how can we tell the difference most people are self-interested that's the way it
2. 00:18 should be it's a sign of healthy uh psychology self-interest reflects a firm foundation of a sense of self-worth a highly regulated sense self-esteem and the self-confidence to go with these two self-interest is also a form of self-compassion a self-interested person
3. 00:38 takes care of themselves they pursue their own best interests they have their well-being in mind they're agentic they're self-efficacious it's a great thing to be self-interested actually it's one of the pillars of self-love but there's a thin line so it
4. 00:56 seems between pursuing your self-interest and abusing and exploiting other people taking advantage of them leveraging their vulnerabilities penetrating their defenses and then manipulating them into a kind of submission there's a thin line people
5. 01:16 say but actually that is not true my name is Sam Vaknney and I'm the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited i also a self-interested professor of psychology and I hope I am not exploiting you too much okay shashani exploitative people people who exploit
6. 01:41 others may pretend to respect your boundaries even as they scheme and they plan how to circumvent these boundaries how to breach your defenses they as I said they are well aware of your vulnerabilities and weaknesses and shortcomings and they have every
7. 02:04 intention of leveraging these to obtain something from you in other words exploitative people are goal oriented and the goal always involves an expense and it is at your expense everyone is self-interested but only predators are exploitive exploitation is a zero sum
8. 02:29 game it is about obtaining goals at the expense of other people because you know there are two ways to obtain goals you can collaborate with with other people that's a win-win situation or you can exploit other people and that's a win-lose situation
9. 02:46 if you win they lose if they win you lose it's a zero sum game and so this view of the world that it is a jungle out there a hostile place and that you need to take advantage of people before they do it to you preemptively this view is typical of predators and predators exploit
10. 03:09 predators leverage your assets leverage your liabilities I'm sorry to abscond with your assets leverage predators want to take everything from you they are never sated it's never enough the only thing that restricts a predator's reach is opportunity as long
11. 03:33 as opportunity exists the predator will definitely pounce on you act in order to denude you of everything you have or think you have self-interested people never ask you to sacrifice something self-interested people take into account your your interests your goals your wishes your
12. 03:57 dreams as well as theirs self-interested people are pro-social self-interested people realize that working together can maximize the outcomes working together is good for them because if they collaborate with other people they're bound to end up with a lot more than if
13. 04:17 they go it alone alone and so self-interested people are collaborative cooperative they work with you they they're great team players they combine with other people in order to yield positive favorable outcomes to extract them extract them from the
14. 04:38 environment whereas exploitive people go it alone alone exploitive people regard you as roadkill exploitive people people objectify you they consider only what they can take from you exploitive people don't believe the in synergy they don't believe that working together can yield
15. 05:00 better outcomes than than going it alone they think it's a soap story for psies and suckers they don't think this is real they think it's a form of social control they don't believe these narratives they regard them as counterfactual and so exploitive people
16. 05:21 would scan you would create a map of your of of the penetration vectors and then would take advantage of you and so how to cope with with exploitive people is subject for another video and this video is concerned with spotting them detecting them so the
17. 05:50 first test is that they don't collaborate they don't work together with others they work against others they have a zero sum game view your loss is their gain and they are hellbent on maximizing their gains at your total ruination and expense they plan to
18. 06:11 obliterate you and negate you in order to garner all the benefits they can they can it's a little like taking over a company in order to strip it clean of its assets um and so this is the first distinguishing feature the second distinguishing
19. 06:31 feature they demand sacrifices from you the third distinguishing feature they don't respect your boundaries they keep breaching them they keep testing you and sometimes predators use techniques manipulative machavelian techniques which are difficult to tell apart from other types
20. 06:54 of people who are merely self-interested for example mirroring when people mirror you they mirror you sometimes in order to flatter you it could be a manipulative strategy it could be a form of of attempt to modify your behavior somehow in a way which is
21. 07:13 conducive to securing the goals of the predator or the exploitive person but mirroring is a behavioral strategy that can signify many things for example mirroring is very common among people pleasers mirroring is is a way to avoid conflict so conflict aversion yields mirroring
22. 07:34 behaviors it's important to pay less attention to the actual behavior and more attention to the implicit and explicit messaging that go with the behavior so a people pleaser for example would not expect anything in return she would give you everything she
23. 07:59 has just in order to please you someone who is conflict averse would bend bend backwards to to meet your demands but a predator who is mirroring you is manipulating you it's machavelian he's going to have a goal and he's going to state his goal directly or indirectly implicitly or
24. 08:24 explicitly sooner or later the minute behaviors such as mirroring are coupled with stated goals the minute they are they go hand inhand with demands or with expectations the minute the mirroring is attemp attempts to alter your behavior or to affect your mind somehow change
25. 08:45 your opinion or whatever then we are talking about an exploitive person not a benign presence in your life but someone who is hellbent on taking everything from you stealing your life absconding with it and let it leaving you behind to rot and to decompose and disintegrate