Shellenberger and Vaknin DO CONTROVERSY! Don't Miss It!

Shellenberger and Vaknin DO CONTROVERSY! Don’t Miss It!

Summary

no not at all um okay before before we start Michael with your permission I would like to to make two points and I will try to be less verbose than usual the the first point I would like to make has to do with social media you asked me yesterday about social media and I think um one of the reasons social media have been such a success is that they they allow people to engage in what I call existential signaling existential signaling is a fancy way of saying the need to be seen now the need to be seen is a is a survival issue a baby a newborn which is not seen who is not seen

Abuse, Meaning, narcissism, narcissist, Psychology, Reality, Sam Vaknin, Trauma, Vaknin, Vaknin Summaries

June 21, 2025

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00:00 no not at all um okay before before we start Michael with
00:07 your permission I would like to to make two points and I will try to be less
00:13 verbose than usual the the first point I would like to make has to do with social media you asked me
00:19 yesterday about social media and I think um one of the reasons social media have been such a success is that they they
00:27 allow people to engage in what I call existential signaling existential signaling is a fancy way of
00:35 saying the need to be seen now the need to be seen is a is a survival issue a
00:41 baby a newborn which is not seen who is not seen is usually a dead baby in short
00:48 order you need to be seen by your mother or caretaker or caregiver to guarantee
00:54 survival so the need to be seen is very primodial very atistic built into the machinery it's it's hardbaked and in a world with 8.3 billion people
01:05 it's very difficult to be seen it's increasingly more difficult and so I think social media came to the rescue
01:13 and that's a way to be seen the only problem there is that you need to escalate your behavior in order to stand
01:21 out from the crowd so social media drive drive escalation
01:27 escalatory escalatory behaviors and um but behind all this is as I said
01:33 the need to be noticed the need to be seen now when when we were peasants and when we used to inhabit villages
01:41 everyone knew everyone else's business you were seen as a matter of course but in urban settings cities are actually the first virtual reality cities were
01:52 the urban landscape is the first virtual reality divorced from the land divorced
01:58 from the soil and divorced from other people so it's very difficult to be seen in such an environment and that's where
02:04 technology is leveraged and used by people in order to stand out be noticed be seen be cared for be tak be and and
02:13 this creates very bad dynamics among them among them escalation so that
02:19 that's the first thing I wanted to say the second thing I wanted to say is that I made a distinction yesterday between
02:25 right-wing victimhood and leftwing wing victimhood they're both grievance grievance-based
02:33 uh movements obviously the right has different grievances to the left but they're both grievances based movements
02:40 but I think the solution is different and the focus is different as I said as I alluded to yesterday the the left is a
02:48 rumination a rumination movement a rumination kind of uh so they ruminate
02:54 they they rehearse and they redigest and regurgitate grievances
03:01 and they use grievances to establish a set of implicit rights which impose on everyone else corresponding obligations and they do this via rumination whereas
03:12 the right is more actionoriented um the right similarly has a set of
03:18 grievances but the right goes about it by dismantling institutions or building
03:25 new institutions or you know whatever the case may be ironically that's not always been the case when you go back to for example FDR Roosevelt the New Deal
03:37 was a very actionoriented um program you know and technically at
03:43 least he was a Democrat so something has happened to the Democratic um party and
03:50 and the left more generally and I think what has happened is the influence of Europe i think it's what I call the European infection because in the 60s and 70s people
04:02 attempted to adopt action as the solution you had in 1968 8 you had a
04:08 series of revolutions across Europe and they all failed miserably and what has
04:14 happened after that intellectuals took over and the whole thing became a debate society and there was this endless rumination over decades you know mainly French
04:25 intellectuals but not only there was this endless rumination and and
04:31 rehashing and regurgitating and analysis and reanalysis and overthinking and over analyzing and what have you and and it
04:39 led nowhere there were there are no if you if you look at the history of Europe nothing has happened institutionally since the 80s absolutely nothing there's nothing new in Europe i mean except the
04:50 euro maybe but um and so what happened I think is the left in the United States
04:56 got infected got caught caught the European malaise and became became a naval gazing
05:05 um kind of movement naval gazing sphere or space mhm whereas the right is still
05:12 out there is still reality grounded in reality is still it maintains reality testing and so the right is much more actionoriented mind you I disagree with the action this is not an endorsement of
05:24 the right but they are definitely more actionoriented than than the left what the left does is play Lego i mean play
05:33 play the left plays with bricks changing the order of the bricks the color of the bricks and so on so forth but there's no
05:40 new game in town there's no real ironically it is the right
05:46 uh which is revolutionary whereas whereas the left is reactionary
05:52 in many ways that's the irony but okay I don't want to go too deeply into this no I love those I love those observations I um I was going to start on something different but you've you've inspired me
06:03 to uh let's go a little deeper on this question of of history i'm in the middle of a terrific biography of Gerta the uh great German uh novelist and his
06:16 emergence in Germany a sort of a the Germans you know feel like they finally have somebody that's equal to Shakespeare this is uh mid 18th century
06:27 and he is sort of he and his colleagues are all sort of expressing a lot of sentimentality a lot of emotion for the first time it's very exciting and liberatory for the Germans to be so emotional and for those emotions to be
06:43 valued but everybody you know it's just the elite of course the the ordinary folks are just happy to be blacksmiths
06:50 and farmers and and whatnot well now you kind of fast forward you know 300 years
06:56 and now that sentimentality that emotion that you know that constant
07:02 self-expression is the norm and it's and then the even more extreme you know
07:08 expressions are valorized at least in mainstream liberal culture there's conservative culture which continues to
07:15 look down upon that which retains a stoic view of emotional regulation
07:21 whereas it seems like you had that first period but then of course you have the 1960s which is also valorizing a kind of
07:29 you know hyperexpressiveness that there's even like scream therapy you know there's um there's all these stories of eelin in the 1960s this is a
07:40 a sort of a therapeutic location in central California um and now you get to today and it's just there's so much of that that's just
07:52 so mediocre that you have to I'm sort of when I'm reading the Gerta I'm reminded of how beautiful and wonderful that
07:59 emotionalism was and now it's just it's just awful you know and you kind of end up with you know the thing that we find that we spoke with the first time
08:11 which is these you know young people that are throwing soup on the Van Go painting and it's just um there's nothing interesting about it like even
08:22 as a protest it's almost like uh you know there's something quite beautiful about the white and black students in
08:30 the 60s and 50s who sat at the soda counters and had the they had the soda poured on them as a real you know they but they were stoic they were they were
08:41 uh emotionally deeply regulated and disciplined and now you just kind of get this gross
08:48 mediocre uninteresting you know expression i find it very desparing you know I I find it like the quality of the culture I find is just um the quality of pop culture is very low right now um there's just nothing
09:03 there's very few interesting films very few little interesting television movies
09:10 you know um the question I was going to start with had to do with the subjective nature of narcissism um you know because
09:19 it seems like you know when we sort of and I looked I spent some time on the on the DSM versus the ICD descriptions of narcissism because part of what we
09:30 talked about yesterday is we said you know is it really accurate to say that the the kids that throw the soup on the Van Go paintings and the grandiosity of it which is we're
09:44 going to change the entire global energy economy by throwing the soup on the painting you seem to be traum traumatized by this event what's that you seem to be
09:56 traumatized by this yeah well it's such a it's such a picture isn't it it's a it's a such a clear picture and then on
10:02 the other hand you would have somebody like Elon Musk or Donald Trump who say "I'm going to transform global
10:08 communications or I'm going to become a consequential president." You know you could say that those are
10:14 grandiose statements on the other hand when they come true you know on the one hand so I guess the
10:21 question was is it is the difference like are they both equally narcissistic are the kids
10:28 that throw the soup on the Van Go paintings just the same kind of narcissism as Elon Musk and Donald Trump
10:35 or is it different because Donald Trump and Elon Musk have actually realized the
10:41 promises that they made and to what extent does narcissism depend on a subjective judgment or evaluation of
10:49 whether or not the person is equal to their grandiosity and entitlement yeah that's um a superb question actually I have a video where I'm simulating a therapy session with Van Go Vincent Van
11:02 Go wow vincent calls me because we're on a firstname basis of course vincent
11:08 and he says "I'm one of the greatest painters the world has ever seen and I'm going to be much more remembered than Rembrandt and Michelangelo and what have you." And I tell him Vincent listen
11:20 these statements are really you know the strong indicators of a pathology you need help you need medication you're
11:27 very sick individual your reality testing is impaired you're utterly
11:33 delusional and that's Vincent Van Go i mean he was on to something wasn't he he did become
11:40 one of the most prominent painters in in human history so it's a great question where do we draw the line how can we how can we tell if certain claims
11:51 um are realistic or grounded in reality or whether they are divorced from
11:57 reality but before I go there because um I I would like to comment on on
12:03 something completely different like the famous Monty Python sketch and now for something completely different so I'd like to comment on I think we need to make a distinction between um
12:15 pathological narcissism and ostentation the need to be seen this existential
12:21 signaling the need to be noticed that's what I said it leads to es escalatory behaviors it leads to escalation throwing soup on a van go or doing
12:32 something to the monolith or something also with the monolith these actions have a lot to do with the
12:39 need to be noticed with the need to be seen with existential signaling and with another phenomenon virtue signaling
12:47 virtual signaling is actually um a way of fitting in a way of belonging a way
12:53 of of adhering to an inroup and excluding an out group so it's a it's a
13:00 social the social aspect of existential signaling is virtual signaling because virtual signaling is public facing and
13:07 outward oriented whereas existential signaling is about you about yourself the the feeling that you you're not
13:14 about to dissipate into thin air because you are being noticed you are being um
13:20 seen so ostentation is not narcissism all narcissists are ostentatious
13:27 but only a tiny fraction of ostentatious people are narcissists and so this is an important distinction
13:33 second distinction a second thing I'd like to to comment on and forgive me for straying far and wide please but I think
13:42 we may be introducing this way some additional you know aspects or dimensions so the second thing I I would
13:48 like to quote the work of Campbell the famous sociologist who said that we have transitioned from the age of dignity to
13:54 the age of v victimhood m victimhood is now the organizing and explanatory hermeneutic principle by and large on right and left alike
14:05 that's the way we see the world today we are all victims or potential victims and we're in search of abusers
14:13 now the thing is that someone's victim is someone else's abuser that's not my observation that is the observation of one of the most prominent scholars of abuse kartman who came up with the
14:26 Kartman drama triangle kartman said that abusers the role there are three roles there is the abuser there is a victim and there is the rescuer and all three of them
14:38 rotate the abuser sometimes becomes the victim the victim becomes the abuser the rescuer could become either and does
14:45 become either so there's a constant rotation in the roles this is what we're going to through in the world today
14:52 you if you're a victim you need to find an abuser and abusers are in short supply so you're likely to um you're
15:00 likely to cast the other as the abuser you're likely to use othering and
15:06 alterity as a way to find your abuser everyone is searching for everyone in his dog is is a victim i mean that's that's the way it is today so that's the second observation the third observation
15:17 I'd like to make is that you can divide human history basically to three major periods using clinical psychology of
15:24 course the first one is the psychotic period it's the period where people were
15:31 psychotic they believed in the existence of God angels demons and what have you
15:37 this is a great definition and description of psychosis so today if someone comes to a therapist and says I
15:44 I believe there's a demon talking to me constantly and so on so forth he's going to end up in an asylum probably with a
15:50 lot of medication whereas in the past in the distant past this kind of person would have become a prophet or would have established a new religion so this there was this psychotic period then starting with the
16:02 renaissance and the cult of the individual because the renaissance main feature of the
16:09 renaissance was the cult of the individual starting there we had the age of narcissism
16:15 and it lasted something like 400 500 years probably ended about 20 years ago
16:22 probably with a high-tech bust boom bust you know probably it ended then and I
16:29 believe that we've entered a third era a third third era in human history and that will be the era of the borderline I think we are in a borderline world with
16:40 emotional disregul ulation hyper emotional displays ostentation
16:46 fantasy um uh reliance on authoritarian father figures or mother figures etc these are
16:53 all characteristics of of the borderline and I think we are living in the borderline age now Ger um
17:02 was one of the precursors or or the prophets of later later age romanticism
17:08 in Germany which then spread to the United Kingdom but um at that time it
17:15 was the height of the narcissistic period so a narcissist would not allow himself
17:23 or herself of course narcissist would not allow himself to express emotion
17:29 emotions in a way which could be misinterpreted as vulnerability or weakness mhm a
17:36 narcissist would express emotions in a way which renders the narcissist somehow
17:43 strong unique outstanding um skilled capable and so on so there
17:50 was instrument a period of instrumentalization of emotions for example love became the standard for
17:58 marriage this is a completely revolutionary idea at the time to this very day in most countries in the world
18:05 most marriages are arranged marriages i don't know if you know the statistics but in India 81% of marriages are
18:12 arranged there's no concept of love love is a totally German invention ironically
18:18 so but love was instrumentalized was leveraged it wasn't love for its own
18:24 sake but love led to these erupt relationship eruptions uh one of them
18:31 being an institutions such as monogamous marriage so when we transition to the
18:37 borderline age we transitioned from instrumentalized emotions in in other
18:43 words emotions that lead to action even when Ger wrote uh the book about
18:50 verter the young verter there was the the sorrow of the world and it led
18:57 to suicide mhm there was like an a pandemic of suicide among young people
19:03 who read who who've read the book because the the in that period emotions
19:10 were prescriptive they were prescriptive they they led you to act so if you had for example
19:17 emotions for the Greek revolution like Byron you didn't just sit back and say "I'm going to protest in Colombia University wrapped with a flag of Greece against the evil British." That wasn't
19:30 the idea what you did you picked up your things and you went to Greece to fight
19:38 which is what people did so there was a lot of emotionality about the the Greek conflict which involved the Ottomans and the British and don't ask there was a lot of emotionality involved very
19:49 similar to the Gaza protest nowadays but then it led to action
19:57 and I would say even in 1936 when in Spain you had the sp Spanish
20:04 Spanish you know uh civil war people came up from all all over the world and and joined the the Republican government fighting off the fascists emotions
20:15 always led to action in the narcissistic age and now we're in a borderline age where
20:21 the expression of emotion is its own goal that's the goal the goal is to be
20:28 ostentatiously emotional it's virtue signaling it's existential signaling it's about signaling signaling means no substance all appearances signaling
20:40 means no commitment it's fleeting today Gaza tomorrow B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B Burma you know Russia
20:47 Ukraine whatever as long as you have the capa the the ability to take a selfie an
20:53 emotional selfie of course with tears streaming down your face and what have you and so on so there's a lot of
21:00 ostentation and I call it the borderline age m and now coming to your to your question now that we are a lot older both you and me uh I'll I'll try to
21:11 tackle your question it's again an excellent question having given the example of Vincent Van Gogh in therapy
21:19 we can take a step back and say was his grandiosity justified was his
21:25 grandiosity actually a measure of his intact reality testing Mhm mhm did he
21:33 know something we didn't know were we the ones who were deluded by societal
21:40 and cultural edicts and you know were we the for example
21:46 um did we judge Van Go to be a poor painter because he hasn't sold paintings
21:53 mhm which is a capitalistic criterion right so we were the ones who were deluded we judged him by the amount of money he made when we should have judged him by different criteria and so he was the one grounded in reality when Elon Musk said "I'm going
22:09 to take a man to Mars or all of humanity whatever is left of it to Mars or whatever." When he said "I'm going to
22:16 I'm going to introduce commercial uh space travel um I'm going to do it much more cheaply than NASA you know was he being a megalomaniac was he divorced
22:27 from reality is was his reality testing impaired or did he know something about Elon Musk that we didn't know that we had no access to did he have in other
22:38 words privileged information mhm so the answer to your question is information asymmetry imperfect information the problem with psychology in general
22:49 clinical psychology and so on and all treatment modalities is that we have imperfect information as clinicians as
22:56 practitioners we know a lot less about the patient than the patient knows about herself
23:03 and it is this imperfe imperfection that renders treatment modalities in in
23:10 psychology highly inefficient and also puts in doubt the very concept
23:17 of diagnosis or diagnosing because in physics there is no
23:25 information asymmetry there's no imperfection of information if you if you study neutrons and I study neutrons
23:33 we have the full information available at this moment of course but we have full access to the same set of data the
23:41 we will we may differ in terms of interpretation hypothesizing theorizing and so on but the data is there
23:48 available to both you and me and it is um it is complete as far as the times go
23:55 and and so on whereas in psychology from the get-go the therapist knows very
24:02 little and the patient knows a lot more about the patient not not in general mhm
24:09 so yes it's very difficult to establish an objective test for narcissism only
24:15 time will tell the only objective test is history so when someone makes makes grandio
24:22 megalomaniacal claims and so on so forth you have two options you can diagnose them and say you know these people are
24:29 mentally ill or you can say okay let's wait and see that has to do with claims about skills
24:38 and accomplishments and so on i call them external claims however when an
24:44 individual makes claims about his or her internal world there we do have more or
24:50 less objective criteria so if someone someone were to come and
24:56 tell me I'm a great painter and in a 100 years I would be known as a great painter
25:03 maybe let's wait 100 years and see um but if someone were to come and tell me
25:09 "There are demons whispering in my ear and they're telling me to cut cut off my my ear."
25:16 Well that's a powerful indicator of of a mental illness similarly with a narcissist a narcissist can make
25:22 external claims i'm a genius i'm amazing i'm charismatic i'm this and that i'll
25:28 take men to the moon and then to Mars these are all external claims and we have no way to verify to establish
25:34 veracity the truth value what Aristotle called the truth value we have no way to establish the truth value of such claims
25:41 aristotal said that you the statements about the future have no truth value
25:48 they they can't be proven true or false you have to wait but if someone come
25:55 were to come to me and say I would I'm gonna be a great painter i'm going to be the greatest painter ever and also I
26:02 want to cut off my ear regarding the second statement i can make a relatively objective or at least
26:09 statistical um analysis and say this guy something's wrong with this guy you know he needs treatment he needs help he
26:15 needs medication he needs whatever when it comes to Musk and Trump which are the
26:21 two people foremost on your mind probably when it comes to Trump and Musk we have a set of external statements most of which have come true actually so
26:33 clearly their reality testing is not impaired when it comes to self
26:40 assessment when it comes to self evaluation but that is an artifact of
26:46 the information asymmetry i as a clinician I'm not a clinician but if I were a clinician I know a lot less about Elon Musk than Elon Musk knows about Elon Musk so inevitably his statements
26:59 carry more weight mhm ipso facto however both of them both of them especially
27:06 Elon Musk but also Donald Trump have made a series of statements about their
27:12 state of mind states of mind internal states moods emotions
27:19 um cognitions thousands of such statements all you have to do is read Isaac son's biography of Musk and these
27:28 statements are mostly seriously pathologized i regret to see
27:35 seriously pathologized and people say you envy them and and so on so forth has nothing to do with envy
27:42 i the last person I would envy is Elon Musk he's a miserable person he's a very unhappy person
27:49 but the statements these two people made over the over several decades are indicative of severe mental mental health issues which have nothing to do
28:00 with their capacity yesterday I I explained to you that we make a distinction between what we call episodic procedural and semantic
28:08 so you could acquire skills you could be a highly accomplished person and and so on so forth and at the same time be
28:15 severely mentally ill the man who wrote the first volume of the Oxford English dictionary wrote it out of a mental asylum
28:26 because he tried to kill his lover and don't ask he was seriously mentally deranged so it doesn't mean much there are there's good grounds to assume that
28:38 Ziggman Freud was a very mentally unhealthy person and Jung of course Jung was diagnosed with psychotic disorder with psychosis and spent time in an asylum
28:50 it's part of his biography so this conflation and confusion between accomplishments and and mental state is wrong even mentally ill people can be highly accomplished actually I told you yesterday that people uh scholars like
29:06 Eising psychologists like Ising suggested that mental illness is a precondition for
29:13 creativity and for accomplishments in life that the more mentally ill you are the more likely you are to be creative and even to succeed in life it's not
29:24 this is a myth that mental illness incapacitates you mental illness makes
29:30 you miserable but it doesn't incapacitate you there's a connection to these two things
29:36 and how do we how do we decide whether to give someone treatment number one are they unhappy uh do do they have something called ego destiny are they do they feel bad with themselves
29:47 uncomfortable do they hate themselves do they loathe themselves do they self-deeat and self-destruct what is
29:53 their relationship with themselves that's question number one question number two are they functional in a
29:59 variety of settings not only in a single setting for example they may be great entrepreneurs but they may suck when it
30:06 comes to intimate relationships yeah so are they functional in a variety of setting if the answer to these two questions is yes we do not intervene
30:17 you could have a psychotic person who believes that he is in touch with God through Napoleon you know via Napoleon
30:24 and so on and yet this person is perfectly happy golucky and at the same
30:30 time has a great relationship is functional at work is a multi-millionaire and he loves his children and they love him and so on so forth why would we intervene
30:41 for example I do not think that Donald Trump needs therapy i see no indication that he needs therapy he's totally absolutely elated with who he is mhm and
30:53 he is super accomplished why would we we intervene however Musk requires therapy
30:59 definitely he's an extremely profoundly unhappy person again read it read the biography isaac biography is a bit of a hagiography but it's relatively objective as much as
31:10 he could maintain objectivity and it it's on every page that this man is
31:16 devastatingly unhappy miserable completely i think he would benefit from
31:22 therapy trump wouldn't he would be wasting his money
31:28 c can you say more about when you said that the both men are pathological the statements they've made over years can you describe that a little bit more
31:39 donald Trump may made thousands of statements and I have a series of videos dedicated to to his statements actually
31:46 on on my various YouTube channels i've as I told you also
31:52 started granting interviews to American thinker in in 2016 where I analyzed many of his statements um there there's even a video which is the outcome of analyzing six 600 hours of video of oh
32:05 my gosh Donald Trump yeah so on in that particular video I'm I'm going through the statements and so on but generally speaking uh Donald Trump has a view of interpersonal relationships which is indicative of pretty extreme pathology
32:23 um and that includes problems with intimacy and and the way he sees other
32:29 people and and so on so forth so this is one group of of statements i'm very reluctant to transform this into remote therapy or remote analysis of of uh of of the men because I had
32:42 hoped that we could tackle more broader topics so but one group has to do with
32:48 interpersonal relationships one group has to do with his um view of the world as for example hostile and and so it's it's paranoid ideiation and
32:59 hypervigilance which are very powerful indicators of pathology another group of
33:05 uh has to do with uh conspiracism not only the belief in conspiracy
33:11 specific conspiracy theories which is okay i mean people can believe in conspiracy theories and still be
33:17 mentally healthy but the belief that the whole world is the organizing principle
33:23 of the world is conspiracy so nothing is nothing gets done or nothing happens except through a conspiracy of some kind and that is already a pathology known as
33:34 conspiracism and so on i can go and I not only I can go on but I have gone on i mean there
33:40 are videos those of people who are interested can visit American thinker and search for Vaknin Trump or go on my
33:47 muse Vaknin musings channel and there are analysis there not on my main channel my other channel and so on but
33:54 I've analyzed Trump very I've analyzed Trump much more than I've analyzed Musk because Isaacson did the work for me
34:00 with Musk and um and I but on the other hand I'm telling you he doesn't need any help he doesn't need any therapy there's no call for intervention He's perfectly functional he's happy with who he is he's gone through life you know accomplishing everything he's
34:17 set to accomplish he's grounded in reality when it comes to this aspect of his life he's highly unrealistic highly
34:25 delusional when it comes to other aspects of of life in general and his life in particular but when it comes to
34:33 accomplishing goals is goal oriented is highly um accomplished uh so you're beginning to see the nuances it it's you can't just generalize and say anyone who's grandios
34:45 anyone who's uh dismpathic or whatever is sick and needs needs therapy that's not the way it is you need to you need
34:53 to be fine-tuned you need to be pinpointed you need to it's it's this canvas statements about people you know
35:00 not all narcissists need therapy maybe even a small percentage because narcissists are known to be egoonic
35:08 and you know what among narcissists the percentage of accomplished people is much higher than in the general
35:15 population let alone psychopaths the most accomplished group most accomplished group of people are psychopaths psychopaths are 20 times more represented among chief executive officers than the general population
35:31 that means the general population is one chief executive officer psychopaths have 20 so they're highly accomplished and and so on and if we so we're beginning to talk philosophy now you know the many
35:48 the the good life what is the good life what is the appropriate life we're beginning now to deviate and and
35:54 seamlessly it's a slippery slope because you say "Well narcissists are
36:00 accomplished they're happy psychopaths are accomplished and happy why should we intervene?" And they tell you "Yeah but it's a mental illness and uh they're
36:07 hurting people and we should." But that's not really psychology that's
36:13 philosophy mhm or if you wish uh sociological theory or I don't know what
36:20 what label to give it psychology has to focus on the individual psychology has no place in
36:28 social engineering psychology should not become a coercive social tool the way the left has
36:35 leveraged it the left has leveraged psychology this way yeah i mean let's
36:41 get into that a bit i mean our book is about the left you know and the reason
36:47 that your work became so influential for me is I was trying to I was studying
36:54 climate change um what reduces carbon emissions
37:00 two big things have been nuclear power and natural gas you move from coal to
37:06 natural gas you reduce carbon emissions by half you move to nuclear eliminate them those are the technologies that
37:12 climate activists are most opposed to so there you that's your first clue it has nothing to do with reducing carbon emissions because if it did you wouldn't be attacking the two main ways of
37:24 reducing carbon emissions instead they want to do all sorts of other things they want to just make energy scarce and
37:31 expensive they they make clear they want a Malthusian you know view of society and that's been
37:38 what they pursue for 60 years fast for you know and so you have a and you have a a climate movement that in some ways
37:45 behaves like a conventional social movement with protests and whatever well then you get fast forward to 2022 and we
37:52 start seeing behaviors that I can't explain throwing the soup on the Van Go paintings pouring milk onto the floor they glue their hands to the floor in many ways these appear to be behaviors
38:03 of toddlers of tantrums um they the public hates this the public
38:10 rejects this it makes you know when they stop traffic you can see the drivers sometimes usually a man will get out of
38:16 the car and try to drag the protesters away you can tell it's everything that he can do to not physically
38:24 uh assault the the protesters the public hates this so it's irrational
38:30 through and through from their goals to the strategist tactics your theory says
38:36 "Look this is a kind of narcissism it's a you see the sort of the uh the grandiosity the entitlement the
38:43 emotional disregulation the the wealthiest children in the world claiming that
38:50 they're going to live in an apocalyptic society where there's no there's nothing
38:56 in the IPCC that says that there will be anything close to apocalypse you're talking about reducing GDP a bit more
39:03 from a projected larger GDP it's so your theory is becomes very helpful um at the
39:10 same time we we we know that there's a problem you don't want to diagnose any individual so we say okay fine niche
39:17 says madness is rare in individuals but it's the rule in groups and we start to kind
39:25 of go down the list and we start to see a bunch of different cases on race
39:31 on transgenderism i mean on trans you mean all of them have a kind of
39:37 psychosis sort of a mass psychosis a kind of delusion um in the case of trans it's this idea
39:44 that you can you can become the opposite sex or the opposite gender and even on
39:50 the difference between sex and gender they don't use the same words consistently over time so the language
39:58 starts to you start to feel crazy just trying to understand what's happening
40:04 so I guess my interest in reaching out again was to get your sense of yeah what's happening with these movements um you know you start with some really beautiful moments martin Luther King
40:16 says "My vision is black and white children together." Now he also says
40:22 there's a debt that white people owe to black people and so both things are present in the movement and over time
40:31 the picture of just the black and white children holding hands was the picture that starts to not only go away but actually becomes coded as a racist
40:43 vision because why would you dare imagine that black and white children should be able to hold hands after everything happens the most important thing is the debt and so the the what
40:54 comes to the four out of the beautiful parts of the left is a kind of just for lack of a better
41:03 word it looks like a psychopathology it's characterized by impaired reality testing delusion mass psychosis behaviors consistent with narcissism the
41:16 other picture I love is this picture you may remember during the Black Lives Matter protest there were a bunch of young people demanding that a woman who was at a cafe
41:27 that they demanded that she raise her fists so they basically have these people holding their fists over this woman and she's just and she said later
41:34 that she supported Black Lives Matter but she refused to raise her fist
41:40 those kids that were doing that were behaving like psychopaths um but probably in their day-to-day lives are not psychopaths they're actually probably the opposite they're
41:51 probably very sensitive and very empathic and that's part of the characteristic we see in extreme radical
41:57 movements even terrorist movements are often people that were very very sensitive to the plight of the
42:03 downtrodden so we're trying to So Sam we're trying to make sense of this trans this transformation and when you and the tools of analysis
42:15 uh uh don't work anymore because the behaviors are irrational through and through to the point of being self-destructive that the the public finally says
42:30 we're too we're so afraid of the left we're so terrified
42:36 of the left you know rioting burning genital mutilation of children
42:42 um you know racist hiring practices open border homelessness everywhere you know
42:50 crime that they go and elect Donald Trump i mean Donald Trump's success
42:56 is it's impossible they try to arrest the political candidate they tried to put the political can and and there's
43:02 censorship and so there's a way in which the left the Donald Trump is not
43:08 possible without the left becoming so self-destructive so that's just some context for you to say we look around
43:15 for tools just to make sense of reality and the tools that most explain what's
43:22 happening are psychological tools but then they come with some sense of danger that that we don't that we are we don't
43:29 want to engage in diagnosis we know that there's a moral judgment
43:36 like if I say these behaviors are narcissistic I know I'm making a judgment I'm saying but that's precisely what's wrong with clinical psychology
43:47 the fact that narcissism has transitioned from diagnosis clinical entity to a value judgment precisely
43:55 what's wrong precisely how I ended my previous answer that is not the role of clinical psychology social engineering
44:01 social institutions impact on society and so on that clinical psychology had become relational rather than individual is the big corruption of clinical psychology because it it became politicized in effect right when you exclude groups of
44:19 people you engage in othering alterity and so on when you exclude groups of people by saying you know they're
44:26 harmful they're dangerous they're this they're that what you're engaging in is a is a is is politics by any other name
44:34 that's politics so if you say psychopaths are dangerous they're harmful to people they they are criminals they What does any of this
44:41 have to do with psychology these may be legitimate concerns and legitimate arguments we have to review
44:47 the statistics and see because for every psychopath who is a criminal by the way there are like 10 psychopaths who are
44:53 surgeons and another hundred who are chief executive officers so mind you even this statement in the DSM is
45:00 counterfactual but it has nothing to do with clinical psychology the DSM has been definitely
45:07 weaponized and politicized no question about it the same way that it has happened had happened in Soviet Russia
45:15 and Soviet Union where people were diagnosed by state psychiatrists sent to
45:22 to mental institutions just because they were desenters descent was mental
45:28 illness because you wouldn't descend it's self-destructive wouldn't you that's very Look at Nali wasn't he
45:34 suicidal this Navali you know wouldn't he better on medication or something so
45:42 the minute the minute you weaponize uh the minute you allow psychology to to
45:49 serve as a tool for um social realignment
45:55 um social power as resettling social power asymmetries uh influencing the formation of institutions and the content contents ideology
46:06 that moment you've lost any claim to science that moment you're not even a
46:12 pseudo science anymore you're just a political party the political party of the mentally healthy if you wish
46:18 whatever that may mean even that is debatable as to your
46:24 as to your question uh as I see it wasn't a question actually you made you made a thesis um so as I as I see it um
46:32 I would like to to inject a few a few more with your permission the first thing is something which was first described by Sander Sr in 1989 he
46:46 was psychoanalyst and he came up with a concept of shared fantasy the shared fantasy in in the studies of
46:52 narcissism my contribution I introduced it to the study of narcissism the shed fantasy is
46:59 when the narcissist establishes a narrative and the narrative is is raified usually
47:06 in a physical space so a household a church a pub a classroom classroom a
47:13 political party so there's always a real world manifestation of the sh fantasy but behind it all there's a narrative and the narrative caters to the psychological needs of the narcissist so
47:26 the narrative aggrandizes the narcissist the narrative isolates the narcissist firewalls the narcissist from
47:32 countervailing information and data from reality so the the and so on so this is
47:38 the shared fantasy i think many of the phenomena you describe are shared fantasies simply shared fantasies
47:47 there is a group of of activists or prominent intellectuals and so on so forth they spin a narrative the
47:54 narrative could be factual or counterfactual some elements in the Black Lives Matter movement were pretty
48:00 factual um there is a bias in in the police forces against blacks i don't
48:06 think this um much debatable in my view at least but many of the other elements are not
48:13 factual and the question is not whether they are factual or not factual the question is whether they fit the narrative in other words the exclusionary principle is whether a statement or a proposition fits the narrative not
48:30 whether it corresponds to reality that's a great definition of what Arent called
48:36 totalitarianism so it's a totalitarian approach the shared fantasy is always totalitarian
48:43 and I think all these are shared fantasies perhaps the greatest shared fantasy is the idea of nature
48:50 what is nature i don't think we can define nature or life or consciousness or all these but nature in my view is a
48:58 totally fantastic concept fantasy grounded in fantasy first of all it assumes there is nature and there is humanity as if humanity is
49:09 outside nature it's a cartisian view of observer and observed you know like we are the observers we are not we are a
49:16 disinterested party we are there's humanity and there's nature we observe nature and when we interact with nature
49:23 we are um we we create adverse consequences we are we are a negative
49:29 agent we our interactions with nature are detrimental and deletterious
49:35 but of course it's unmitigated nonsense we're an integral part of nature
49:41 whatever we do is utterly natural this laptop is completely natural completely natural phenomenon so this distinction is fantastic nature is a fantasy complete fantasy there's no
49:55 basis in anything let alone anything scientific so it's a fantasy and then
50:01 this fantasy superimposed on the fantasy there's a narrative and the narrative is we are bad nature is good so there is a splitting defense mechanism
50:12 splitting is an infantile defense where something is all good or someone is all good and something or someone is all bad
50:19 black and white right and wrong but totally right and like totally wrong
50:25 nothing mitigated nothing it's all complete so we call it splitting and it should stop by age two so after H2 you're not supposed to split and if you
50:36 split after H2 something's wrong with you you're a narcissist maybe so environmentalists and so on so forth engage in splitting nature is all good humanity is all bad
50:50 and what we have with nature is an abusive relationship it's the paradigm of abusive
50:56 relationship and the idea and it's exactly the Karpman drama triangle because the
51:03 environmentalists are the rescuers remember in the triangle you have abuser humanity not all humanity uh capitalist industrialists uh
51:15 consumers white rich males and so on there's a lot of intersectionality yeah
51:22 okay so there are the predators the abusers there's nature who is the hless
51:29 sleeping beauty the virgin the damsel in distress and there is a rescuer the rescuer are the environmentalists but remember what Karman said that every
51:41 abuser becomes a victim every victim becomes an abuser and every rescuer ends up being either the roles are fluid we constantly psycho so it's natural for the environmentalists who cast themselves as rescuers natural for them to become
51:57 abusers according to Kman's theory mhm and that's exactly what's happening in a
52:03 shared fantasy the roles are fluid very often for example the narcissist would have a shared fantasy with an
52:09 intimate partner in due time the intimate partner would
52:15 adopt abusive behaviors that is a fact in all shared fantasies
52:21 with narcissists the intimate partner ends up being highly narcissistic and psychopathic highly abusive highly
52:28 aggressive this effect well established so that's exactly what happens here so I
52:35 would like to introduce the concept of shared fantasy the Kman drama triangle i think that would be very useful um um to elucidate i have one more thing to add
52:46 with your permission can you remember can you remember your Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah i'm older than you so if I don't
52:53 talk I will forget the the next thing I would like to introduce the last thing I' I'd like to introduce i have many
52:59 more things to say but okay let's stick to this um is um
53:05 scientism or pseudocience so what happens in all these situations you mention you mentioned transgender you mentioned this there is a kernel there is an element of science
53:18 that is then leveraged exaggerated beyond recognition so you start with
53:25 gender dysphoria which is as rare as unicorns more or less it's a very rare phenomenon you start with gender dysphoria and then you
53:37 generalize it you apply it indiscriminately you politicize it you leverage it as a
53:45 victimood movement you So there is ultimately buried somewhere there there
53:51 is the the pearl under the princess you know with the mattresses there is something similarly with
53:58 environmentalism there are some scientific facts regarding greenhouse gases and climate
54:06 change and so on but then these few scientific facts are taken out of context politicized leveraged uh photoshopped you know and it's beyond
54:20 recognition so this is a form of on the one hand scientism the religion of science the
54:27 the unbridled mis misconception of science because science is about doubt
54:34 science is about science is about getting things wrong not right in science we are happy when we get things wrong we are very suspicious and very
54:45 uncomfortable when we think we got something right so today in physics for example everyone is very uncomfortable with quantum mechanics and with re relativity theory theories why because
54:58 they work and we unhappy with this we know that this is not the truth science
55:04 is asytoic it's an approximation to the truth so when you take something like
55:10 gender dysphoria and leverage and generalize it you're not engaging in science you're engaging
55:16 in scientism the admiration of a fake fake perception
55:22 of science of a wrong perception of science it's as if science has all the answers when actually science is
55:28 exclusively about asking the right questions this is scientism and on the other hand
55:35 there is pseudocience there's pseudocience so they take these things they take them out of context and
55:43 they get them wrong they simply get them wrong by the way part of my biography which uh I I believe you're not acquainted with I've spent about 10 years studying climate change i've
55:54 written numerous articles on the topic and so on and at some point I was even inducted into CEFACT i don't know if you
56:00 know the Oh sure yeah i was inducted as a member of the scientific advisory committee and and so on so I had some and I worked with the economist on the the magazine i worked on climate change i I a bit acquainted to some extent with
56:15 the with climate change science and so on as it were as it was about 10 years ago
56:22 so I I was privy to all these dynamics especially psychological dynamics among these people and I make a clear
56:28 distinction between the scientists and the political activists or the activists clear distinction
56:36 most of the scientists I came across are okay they're modest they're humble they are inquisitive they're open to doubt
56:44 and to and they falsify their own findings and they they admit admit to errors and mistakes they're okay most of them there there are few megalomaniacs but most of them are okay whereas among
56:56 the activists definitely are right there is a pathology there at play but there are these elements on top of it the the
57:03 scientism and the fantasy the shared fantasy and the Kman drama triangle and the victimhood narrative and so on here
57:11 the victim is the planet this is a victimhood movement with a with an object as a victim the planet and so they are the rescuer they they're
57:22 the rescuers they're the saviors we have this dynamic in abusive relationships where you have this guy you know this
57:28 guy who always finds women in distress in distressed marriages and saves them and rescues them from the abusive husband you know we have this dynamic it's the same here as I see
57:42 in terms of the the this is very helpful Sam um and inspiring a few more questions i mean in terms of sort of
57:48 shared fantasies um I'm curious whether you view that as
57:55 um always a negative because I think you would say the people that created the
58:01 United States of America uh and next year we'll celebrate the 250th anniversary of that story and the
58:09 story went you know that all humans are endowed
58:15 by their creator and they said you know you can decide for yourself who that creator is you can say God or nature it
58:21 doesn't matter they're just saying all humans are endowed with inalienable
58:28 rights say natural rights um that entitle them
58:35 to citizenship and voting and property and all these other things to a
58:41 particular form of governance and society and life um well I mean
58:48 obviously that's not true in the sense that you go back to the ancients
58:54 you know or most of human history and you have slavery and you have huge numbers of people who clearly don't have
59:01 those rights now they would say well those rights are being deprived they had them but they were being deprived
59:08 by oppressive people but there is a bit of a it seems like in that you could say that's a fantasy or it's a delusion to think that all humans are endowed with this it's a story there's even a kind of
59:21 confusion between the is ought distinction they're really saying all humans should be treated as though they
59:29 have these natural inalienable rights but they say no no no they the language is that they have these inular rights but it's a shared I I guess my my question is would you call that a shared fantasy no what would you call that what's the difference so fantasy is purely something
59:50 definitely not a fantasy and it's a great example
59:58 actually all good visions are counterfactual all visions that stand a chance are
60:04 counterfactual if you have a factual vision you're an engineer not a visionary engineers have factual visions for example the engineers who built the Suez
60:15 canal the engineers who built Apollo the they had factual visions but these are
60:23 blueprints these are engineering blueprints you know u when you have a counterfactual vision
60:31 only then do you possess transformative power and a chance to change something
60:37 very often you fail so many transformative visions or counterfactual visions remain counterfactual but they still induce change i I am
60:48 hardpressed to think of a counterfactual vision that did not induce change the change may have sputtered or the change may have been minimal or the change may have reversed itself and there were reactionary forces at play and you name it or the change may led to awitz
61:05 i mean there was there are counterfactual visions that are very
61:11 dangerous and so on but they always lead to change i think this is the test a fantasy is static and self-preserving a fantasy is opposed to change a fantasy
61:24 has a narrative it's a take it or leave it it's this is the way it is it's
61:30 usually self agrandizing and so on but whatever the narrative may be it does not is not open-ended
61:38 you want to talk about a fantasy religion is a fantasy that's a fantasy because it fulfills all
61:45 these criteria rel there is a canonical set of texts
61:51 they are open to interpretation and so on but the rules of interpretation are rigid
61:57 there there is no allowance for thinking outside the box or this is frowned upon
62:04 in in times past you could have been burnt at the stake or whatever you know so it's a highly rigid system of thinking and rigid systems of thinking are
62:16 usually fantastic not always but usually fantastic many visions start off as visions and
62:24 end up as fantasies a prime example is communism
62:31 communism started off as a vision and ended up as a fantasy that's why it
62:37 collapsed the second test for a fantasy so the first test is rigidity
62:43 the opposite of change hatred and rejection of change warning against change regarding change as um as deliterious as undermining as dangerous
62:54 as hateful as and change is the enemy and and and so on and so forth and you
63:01 could say that even in in morality plays good versus evil medieval morality plays
63:07 or earlier were actually the active agents are satanic
63:13 it was the serpent in the garden of Eden who init who acted who initiated change
63:21 when God placed Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden God expected an inertial system that would never change he warned Adam and Eve against change
63:32 god himself warned them against change it was the serpent who introduced change
63:39 into the equation so change was equated with the devil with a with a song and it
63:45 was the devil who rebelled against God he was he was an archangel he rebelled
63:51 against God and he's a fallen angel the um the devil was a revolutionary
63:59 he tried to revolutionize the institutions he tried to drain the swamp as far as he you know he thought God was
64:06 doing a bad job and that God was being inegitarian
64:12 that God was being totalitarian and authoritarian and a dictator and so on there was a rebellion there there was a
64:18 revolution so change is associated in fantasy with negativity change is always negative in fantasy that's the first test and the
64:29 second test fantasy always fails i cannot think of a single case where fantasy has succeeded it always fails for the simple reason that fantasy is
64:40 the opposite of reality is divorced from reality it's not grounded in reality rejects reality so you can't operate in
64:48 reality that's your platform that's your framework you can't operate in reality by by negating it and pretending that it
64:56 doesn't exist or rejecting it because then you will fail reality will impose cost on on being on being immersed in a
65:05 fantasy and these are the two tests by these tests the founding fathers were
65:11 not engaged in fantasy at all they aspired to change they they in integrated change into into the system the system was about change by the way it was a victimhood movement if you read the the the founding documents they are
65:28 full of grievances against the crown in Britain and against this and against that it's a victimhood movement but they
65:35 aspire to change and one could say that it was a major success all in all
65:42 if it had it been a fantasy you would not have been celebrating 250 years anniversary trust me exactly like the USSR the USSR has they've transitioned from vision to fantasy it was that was the
65:58 end of the USSR why because they kept lying to themselves about production figures about you know was a fantasy they rejected reality
66:12 i'm done i know it's shocking but I'm done no it's it's interesting i mean um it
66:18 sounds like the distinction for you between vision and fantasy is that the vision is grounded in some reality it's grounded in a greater
66:30 sense of reality in terms of nature no I I I I see that I have miscommunicated
66:36 not always no the vision complete can be completely counterfactual but the main goal of the vision is to
66:42 induce change whereas the main goal of the fantasy was to preserve is to preserve power structures or to pre to
66:51 preserve some some institution some order fantasy is about preservation
66:58 vision is about transformation both of them can be counterfactual both of them can be divorced from reality but
67:06 when you induce change and the vision is translated into reality that's when it becomes grounded and it loses its visionary power it becomes an agenda or a platform political platform or whatever this is the transitional phase where the Soviet
67:23 Union has failed they had a vision the vision was counterfactual because that's not the way economies work the economic part of it was completely
67:34 infantile you know it was counterfactual but the vision was based on inducing
67:40 change changing the power a symmetry between in the feudal system that Russia
67:46 um was in the industrial societies and so on but then what happened in the USSR
67:53 owing mainly to Stalin who was mentally ill severely mentally ill person there
67:59 was a transition from vision to fantasy stalin placed a premium
68:06 on uh preserving on on lies there was a premium on lying
68:13 there he incentivized people to lie the whole system became
68:19 floating in space totally divorced from reality and so on it became a fantasy and then it proceeded to burge and so on
68:26 and finally it collapsed when Gobbachev tried to introduce some elements of reality the fantasy couldn't withstand
68:32 it the change was rejected there was a military coup and so on so forth he lost his position and there was the end of it
68:39 and Putin reinstated actually the the fantasy russia now is totally fantasy based i should know i've lived there for five years right now and and it's totally
68:51 fantasy based it has no leg to stand on it will collapse i know it sounds bizarre right now but fantasies always end badly
69:02 no exception in human history ask Adolf Hitler h
69:08 I mean it's interesting because I mean it still sounds like let me let
69:15 me take a look at the g let's look at the trans issue for a second um you know there's part of the history comes from you know exaggerating the prevalence of
69:27 gender dysphoria and then mistreating it um you know and but the discourse is so confused Sam they say uh someone will
69:38 come in and they say I feel like I'm a girl or I feel like I'm a boy you know the opposite sex and they say yeah you
69:44 have a gender identity that's different from your sex and this gender identity exists it has it exists somewhere maybe
69:53 in the brain but there's an existence to it so we're going to realign the sex of the body or the sex traits of the body
70:01 with that gender gender identity so you you look like you're you're a 15year-old girl but you've got a male gender
70:07 identity we're going to change your body so that you look like a male and we're going to align your body with your
70:13 gender identity then it goes to horribly wrong we were leaked we were leaked the
70:19 internal files of this thing called WPath the World Professional Association of Transgender Health we were given the
70:25 internal files and one of the most fascinating parts of it was um people come back to their
70:32 doctors and they go "I've made a terrible mistake i wasn't actually a boy i was just
70:39 confused and depressed and I'm autistic." Or vice versa and the response from the
70:47 clinicians is to say um well that's okay because you're on a
70:54 gender journey so now you're going to be maybe you won't be male or female at all maybe
71:00 you'll be both male or female it's shocking how flexible they were they had
71:06 this fantasy but they weren't trying to enforce it as soon as they said they said "You have a
71:12 gender identity as a male." And then they say "I really was wrong about that." They say "That's okay you can be
71:18 whatever you want to be." Does that does that contradict your view of the fantasy is trying to impose a kind of rigidity in other words they weren't trying to
71:29 they could have said um you're a terrible person because you
71:35 are actually still a boy but now you're just confused they were very flexible because of course then they got to use
71:42 more of their medical tools they could say "Well we'll just do a little bit more testosterone a little bit more um
71:48 estrogen." We're shocked when we look at these cases how flexible people are
71:55 about the fantasy you can say a similar story on race you know as soon as you particularly the black conservatives black critics of black lives matter so on the one hand
72:06 they say it's your lived experience that matters but then a black person says "Oh I came out of the ghetto and I made a
72:12 better life for myself by not being a victim and not engaged in this grievance and not engaged in in racism and I'm
72:19 better for and they say you're a they just say you're a a sellout you know to the to the true black cause." So it's sort of incredible levels of flexibility and I'm sure we would find the same thing with how the communists interpreted marks they would
72:36 just choose the marks that they wanted i don't think it denotes flexibility or it denotes rigidity the fantasy the fantasy
72:43 as I said is a narrative the nar narratives is replete with a code codex
72:51 so the narrative includes a series of dos and don'ts shoulds and uh things
72:57 that are frowned upon and things that are commendable or even required and so on
73:03 and the rigid rigidity is in the codex so um the fantasy seeks to preserve the narrative
73:14 the the vision is always open because if the vision is not open it becomes a fantasy and it's no no chance to succeed
73:22 you could think of you could see the whole thing as a Darwinian um selection you know kind of survival
73:30 of the fittest a vision that would that becomes a fantasy dies out where whereas a vision that is open to input from reality is is very flexible adaptive
73:41 changes here and there and so on so forth there's a chance to survive whereas the vision of the United States
73:47 has in my opinion until recently never become a fantasy
73:53 because people in the United States are very pragmatic and practical and they you know they go with the flow and they
73:59 fake it till they make it and all these ethos of capitalist entrepreneur and
74:05 entrepreneur capitalism entrepreneurship and market economy and so on so forth division in in uh in Russia degenerated into a fantasy and and lost out so in
74:17 the in the Darwinian selection USSR died out and America survived
74:23 um fantasies preserve the narrative the core the core protective mechanism
74:31 and task of the fantasy is to preserve the story line and the behavioral edicts
74:39 or tenets that emerge from the story so if the story for example is um gender
74:46 and ironically the transgender story is a very um traditionalist
74:54 conservative reactionary story ironically because what what does the
75:00 transgender movement say they say there should be a conformity between sex and gender
75:08 which is essentially a highly conservative statement it's a Victorian statement right and they say where there's no conformity we should use medical means to induce this conformity
75:20 so where someone for example has one set of genitalia but feels like the opposite gender we should operate on this kind of person or medicate this kind of person to make the gender and the sex match
75:34 which mind you is a super conservative highly Victorian traditionalist approach
75:40 to sec to sexuality that's the huge irony of transgender they're trying to homogenize people they're not trying
75:47 they're not for diversity they're the exact opposite of diversity they say if
75:53 you are dysphoric about your gender we're going to we're going to attack your body we're going to change your
75:59 body because we don't allow heterogenity we don't allow it heterogenity everyone
76:06 must be homogeneous that's an amazing aspect of transgender that is totally been completely ignored
76:14 it's there's exactly the opposite perception of transgender that it is a revolutionary thing and a a progressive
76:21 thing and while in in effect they're highly highly totalitarian highly it's
76:27 it's a horrible thing not because of the actual medical procedures but it's a horrible thing because of the philosophy
76:33 the philosophy is we do not allow discrepancies we do not allow
76:39 variability we do not allow you know uh diversity we don't allow where there is
76:46 a gap opening we're going to close it by all means if possible though so but then
76:53 Sam how do you then explain how they how the medical how the transmed providers
77:01 respond to these dransitioners in other words the girl comes back she's she's
77:07 Yeah you know and she goes "I made a terrible mistake i removed my breasts you know I I did genital surgery i've
77:15 been taking testosterone but I'm wrong i was wrong i'm actually I was a girl the whole time and the medical providers go "That's great you're on a gender journey
77:28 so now we just need to You can just add new breasts." It's true they won't You won't be able
77:34 to nurse a baby with them and we'll change whatever we change down there and yeah we'll move you from testosterone to estrogen and it's true your voice will stay low and grally
77:46 but you're on a journey and it's okay how do you explain like that's not that they're just um they're very flexible they're not
77:58 flexibility it's not flexibility is rigidity that's what I'm saying transgenderism
78:04 masquerades as flexibility while essentially it's rigidly victorian
78:12 they transgend then how do you explain that but then how does that exp why are why are they willing to say okay
78:20 now you were a you were we you we aligned we made you a boy you were a boy for five years and now you want to be a girl again because again that is because again the discrepancy might must not be
78:32 allowed to stand no discrepender the gender identity then but then the
78:40 whole concept that there's some fixed gender identity is not something that they actually believed no that that's a prevailing view that's a mainstream view in academ
78:51 uh the belief is that gender as distinct from sex gender is a performative social
78:57 construct and therefore is in flux in principle is in flux there there's quite a lot of
79:03 supporting evidence of this um there are societies where a person can choose gender for example in northern Albania a woman can choose to become a man subject to specific circumstances like if there
79:15 are no males in the family so she can choose to become a man from that second from the moment she announces of to be a
79:21 man it's an announcement public announcement i'm a man from that moment that woman is allowed to sit in a cafe smoke with her with her peers male peers
79:32 which in northern Albania is considered to be a no no for a woman
79:38 and so on so forth there other cases that demonstrate that gender is a performative social construct and
79:44 therefore in flux the rigidity of the transgender narrative is whenever
79:50 there's a gap opening between self gender self-perception
79:56 and sexual equipment we are going to close this gap mhm whether this gap is this way and and you and this gap can open um several
80:08 times during a lifetime like when you're 14 you feel like a girl 19 you feel like a boy theoretically at age 36 you can feel like a girl again and and we'll continue to operate on you we continue to operate on you as often and as long as needed just in order to avoid gender
80:25 dysphoria to avoid this discrepancy they're terrified of the discrepancy
80:32 right they're terrified of this that's interesting oh now Sam let's now let's take the the lived experience example so
80:40 you hear um white people can never understand black people because black
80:46 people have this um uh lived experience and uh as um and they're you know uh
80:55 burdened even genetically they say with trauma and then you get a black conservative or they could be a black liberal but they sort of say um well my lived
81:06 experience leads me to think that I'm not a victim victim and that in fact it's harmful to imagine that you're a victim and that in fact you're victimizing people you black lives
81:17 matter or NAACP or whoever it might be and then they say okay forget what we
81:23 said about lived experience um uh you're a traitor to the cause you're
81:29 just a sellout um how do you explain
81:35 uh um doesn't that demonstrate a significant ificant amount of flexibility no where's the flexibility here this is religious rigidity
81:46 you're a heretic if you don't adhere to the lived experience or lived life narrative
81:54 you are a heretic that's why they say you ain't black right that's what they say you're not black heretic right so
82:01 you should be burned at the stake proverbial stake hopefully you should be burned at the stake there's a rigidity
82:07 for you these are religions these are pseudo religions or secular religions these are victimhood religions sex I
82:16 mean cults they're cults by definition and this whole argument of lived
82:22 experience or is of course uh beyond ridiculous
82:28 there is a a field in there is subdiscipline in philosophy uh and it's known as interubjectivity studies there isn't a question here for example
82:40 how do I know that you're a human being i don't the answer is I don't
82:47 i have to rely on your self-reporting and I have to make certain assumptions
82:53 which are highly speculative in nature that because you blink your eyes and you move your head in a specific way and so
82:59 on so forth and I do the same from time to time it stands to reason that you're
83:06 a human being it's highly speculative so we have no valid objective way to
83:14 prove that another thing another entity is human and what
83:22 we do instead we impose a speculative framework a spec a theory we theorize we
83:29 hypothesize actually we create a hypothesis about each other whenever we come across each other that's problem
83:35 number one problem number two I can never ever access your mind and you can never ever access my mind so how do we cope with this language we self-report
83:49 body language facial micro expressions and expressions i mean we we gather cues
83:55 a lot of cues big part of which is self-reporting by the other person self-reporting by the and we put them together and again we create a theory it's called a theory of mind again we
84:07 create a theory about about the fact that the other person has a mind at all
84:14 even then we have no reliable access to another person's mind and that has
84:20 nothing to do with skin color that's the idiocy of all this it's nothing to do with skin color it's
84:27 perfectly applicable between the two of us and as far as I see we are not that black so
84:34 in principle every everybody everyone's lived experience is idiosyncratic inaccessible non-communicable
84:46 in other words the only correct frame of reference philosophically is soypism
84:53 to imply that by observing other people's experiences
85:00 we can make valid deductions s about their state of mind their psychology
85:06 their is completely erroneous it's actually the first thing
85:12 we teach in clinical psychology do not rely on your observations not you are likely you're as likely to be wrong as you are to be right so and
85:24 rely instead on what self-reports we we actually don't it's an interesting thing we don't rely on self-reports because a patient could lie or whatever we ask ourselves why did
85:37 the patient choose these specific words so a patient would come and say my mother abused me i'm not going to say oh
85:45 I believe you your mother abused you now let's build on this let's take this as the hypothetic as a basis for treatment
85:52 i'm going to ask myself why did you choose to tell me this and why did you choose the word abuse m and why did he
86:00 choose to focus on his mother and so on so I I'm asking why not what it is that bad because nothing that
86:08 comes out of you has any validity scientific validity of course and if I were to observe you for the next 10 years I would I would not learn much about you i may learn a lot about your habits about your preferences eyeglass preferences which are interesting and
86:27 but I may I probably won't learn much about you so lived experience is complete
86:34 unmmitigated nonsense and there are fields in philosophy and psychology that but the woman that says I was abused and you say you want to know why she asked why she said that how do you I mean that
86:45 seems like a very difficult question as well to figure out why she told you that she was abused no it's a basic it's more
86:52 of a statistical approach like if a woman keeps mentioning abuse abuse abuse abuse I know almost for fact that she
87:02 preoccupied with this with this issue that is a safe assumption a safe thing to say mhm but it is very unsafe to observe her even in her natural
87:13 environment even her personal history autobiographical memory and so on first of all as we all know memory is extremely unreliable starting with the studies of Elizabeth Loftus and later we
87:26 now know that memory is the most probably the most unreliable thing there is because we reconstruct memories all
87:32 the time collective memory is the same mhm narratives change all the time the
87:38 black narrative of the 1960s is not the same as it is now and the black narrative of the 1860s was not the same as it or definitely not the same as it is now right and so on so forth so if
87:51 there is such a thing as black narrative also these generalizations like if you have a specific skin color you have an
87:57 identical experience to all people with the same skin color is of course invalid exactly like white people don't have the
88:05 same experience if we are both white I doubt dramatically whether we have we
88:11 have we have a lot in common you know because I grew up in Israel i was a
88:17 member of a minority in Israel i was abused by the collective i mean I
88:23 drastically dramatically different experiences to you and we both white white what's what's the fact what's your skin color has anything to do with anything um no it's outrageous i'm perplexed no
88:35 so I want to go back to this issue of the distinction between the fantasy and the v your distinction between this
88:42 between the vision and the fantasy so cuz the the um and what the difference is um and whether the difference can be
88:51 whether the difference can be understood internally to the visions or whether they have it has to be understood by the
88:59 consequences we have another vision the other vision says um there's these things called
89:05 nations um everybody knows that they're arbitrary they don't even follow
89:11 geography that well i mean sometimes they do you know like the one between the United States and Mexico kind of
89:17 does but the one between the United States and Canada it even goes through lakes you know so we know they're
89:24 arbitrary but we say um um uh we need that to be able to have a community and
89:32 we but we also say all humans have inalienable rights so you get to a situation where you say all humans have inalienable rights but we're only going to treat we're only going to apply that
89:44 to people inside these imaginary boundaries and the left had basically
89:50 been fine with that in fact you saw the left was in favor of reduced migration
89:57 for a very long time because it un it depressed uh workingclass wages and the left was on the side of the working class and then over the last you know 10 years or so both in Europe and the United States the left said "No it's um wrong
90:13 it's immoral to enforce these national boundaries because every human
90:21 has these inalienable rights um isn't what's going Let's say and if you object
90:27 to the mass migration let's just So you know isn't isn't what's going on there a
90:33 problem not of fantasy versus vision but just the wrong
90:40 fantasy no I don't think um first of all as to your first question a vision calls for
90:48 change a fantasy calls for conservation and preservation h a narcissist would
90:54 not for example establish a shared fantasy with his intimate partner and would tell her I want you to change me
91:01 or I want us to change something an artist would establish a relationship with her in a shared fantasy so that she
91:08 can affirm and confirm to him repeatedly that he is exactly the way he sees himself immutably
91:16 so fantasies are immutable whereas visions always have a call for action the call for action could be founded on counterfactual pillars
91:27 pillars could be founded on delusions on imagination on you name it but there's
91:34 always a dynamic aspect whereas fantasies are always static m that's the
91:40 first thing what you have described is a third thing altogether not fantasy and
91:46 not vision is these are narratives stories we are we are we are creature human
91:53 beings are made of stories people die for stories you know you have a piece of fabric with a stupid painting on it people die for it it's called the flag you know people die
92:07 um for totally fictional narratives like the nation state and so we are we are we
92:13 are we react very powerfully to stories Frankle it's not some name it's Victor
92:19 Frankle Victor Frankle said that what keeps us alive is meaning and that meaning is mediated via stories you know
92:26 Bethleheim Bruno Bethleheim when he analyzed fairy tales enchantment through fairy tales he there was there's a big part dedicated to the power of stories so these are narratives
92:38 Now a narrative could be inclusionary um Marxism was an inclusionary narrative
92:45 or a narrative could be exclusionary only Americans
92:51 there's no rules that says that narratives have to be one way or the other and um you could start with an inclusionary narrative that becomes very fast exclusionary so for example Marxism started off as inclusionary narrative as far as the
93:09 polit Yes inclusionary narrative mhm but then communism became exclusionary in in
93:16 many ways so um a nation state America the United States I I'm sorry if
93:23 I'm offensive is not a nation state by the 19th century definition of a nation
93:30 state by the work of Genan and similar similar scholars at the time
93:36 um is not a nation state because nation states in the 19th century were perceived as homogeneous racially and ethnically homogeneous and even if you were not homogeneous you
93:48 were supposed to expel the minorities or somehow suppress them and so on and there were huge huge transfers of population between Bulgaria and Turkey and Turkey and Greece and you know Czech
94:00 Republic and Germany and people were transferring populations in order to homogenize the state the nation state
94:07 and by this definition the United States and most industrial countries nowadays are not nation states what are they
94:15 they're narratives raified narratives that's what they are and narratives
94:21 these kind of narratives are about affiliation about belonging
94:27 so there these are in-group narratives and immediately when the narrative is an
94:33 in-roup narrative it is also a negative narrative there's an outgroup we call this process in
94:40 psychology negative identity formation when you grow up you can say "I'm going to be like my father." That is positive identity formation or you can say "I am never ever going to be like my father."
94:52 That's negative identity formation the narrative of what used to be nation states now they are not nation states
94:59 because they're mongrels they're hybrids they're multicultural multithnic societies and it's a bloody mess so they
95:07 are no nation states anymore so what replaced the nation state the the the nation state is a narrative and the narrative is uh built on positive
95:19 identity formation all Americans are entrepreneurial the social mobility American dream by the way to totally
95:26 counterfactual upward social mobility in the United States is the lowest in the industrial
95:32 world and so you have positive aspects but you also have negative aspects americans are
95:39 not immigrants and immigrants are not Americans especially if they come illegally they're undocumented that's
95:46 perfectly legitimate it's a legitimate narrative actually all narrative narratives are both inclusionary inroup
95:53 and exclusionary outgroup all narratives have positive identity formation and negative identity formation there's
96:00 nothing special about it and these narratives have nothing to do with vision they're not visions and they're not fantasies they're just a an agreement what Jeanjacuso called the
96:12 social contract they're just a contract an agreement between a group of people to belong like forming a club or you
96:20 know you belong it's about belonging in the in the case of um I want to on
96:27 this issue also the distinction between a victimhood narrative and a non-victimhood narrative um is what
96:35 happened in the United States your view because of course the declaration of independence is this long complaint against the king exactly is very
96:43 complainy yeah um but then after that they say so we're going to start a country that everybody has these inalienable rights you know excluding obviously what was happening in in the
96:55 south with slavery but the idea was we're all going to have these inalienable rights and then we moved beyond it and we did not have a story of the United States um in a victimhood narrative um um is that sort of and now I guess um I guess so I have a lot of
97:12 questions about it but in your view is that sort of the most crucial one of the most crucial parts of it is to not have
97:19 a victimhood narrative and are there other nations that I mean do all na do
97:25 any nations have victimhood narratives um and and and what and then I guess the other question is sort of how do you get
97:31 people out of them nations and other people out of the victimhood narratives um because it seems like yeah if the
97:39 what's exciting about for me I'm what I'm this conversation is you can start with a victimhood narrative but then you
97:46 can also get out of it as the United States showed absolutely actually
97:52 uh some visions are are founded on victimhood vision so
97:59 the incentive to change is to not be a victim anymore like they start with a victimhood narrative they say okay now we have a vision how to not be a victim zionism is
98:11 an example zionism was a victimhood narrative po we all across this that but
98:17 we will never again so it's a victimhood narrative that gave rise to a vision a transformative vision vision is always about change so a
98:29 transformative vision which is Zionism it became the state of Israel and uh it became a narrative state of Israel is a narrative because people
98:41 came from 140 countries i'm I'm a Safari DJU trust me I had nothing whatsoever to do with Ashkanazi Jews zero common denominator and yet we
98:52 all became Israelis we all served in the same army and and so forth this was the overpowering narrative of belonging so
99:01 affiliation narrative started with victimhood narrative became a vision and led to an affiliation narrative
99:09 this is a progression similarly Germany Germany had a victimhood narrative
99:17 the victimhood was versail the versail agreement after first world war so there's a victimhood narrative you know
99:23 we were victimized with this with that poor we there was a vision the vision was Nazism the vision doesn't have to be positive of course the vision was Nazism it was a
99:34 revolutionary movement for change the vision gave rise to an affiliation
99:40 narrative the super race and Arian you know they said there was affiliation narrative affiliation narrative had an
99:47 inclusionary aspect and an exclusionary aspect that led to the Holocaust
99:53 and then it became a fantasy at some point the war went wrong and at that
100:01 point Hitler transitioned to a fantasy the minute Germany at that point probably 1942
100:09 when Hitler transitioned to fantasy Germany was Nazi Germany was doomed when Nazi Germany collapsed
100:16 the modern Germany especially West Germany modern Germany abstained from a
100:22 victimhood narrative did not have a victimhood narrative and yet did have a vision the vision that led ultimately to
100:29 the European Union so they did have a vision this time a positive vision which led to an affiliative narrative affiliation narrative which started off
100:41 as west Germans so unification of Germany and then was expanded to the
100:48 European Union like now the affiliation now in the eyes of Germans mostly is we
100:54 are Europeans like there's a new affiliation narrative Europeans and again the affiliation narrative of
101:02 being Europeans had an inclusionary aspect we are Europeans and the definition of European
101:10 is very fluid by the way they're talking about Canada and Australia and Israel and don't ask so we have this fluid we
101:17 are Europeans affiliation narrative But there was an exclusionary aspect immigrants
101:23 and that gave rise to the right to the to right-wing movements in in in Europe
101:30 ironically the exclusionary aspect of the affiliation narrative so this sequence is very common victimhood vision affiliation narrative and then
101:41 excluding someone negative formation positive formation negative by excluding someone this is a classical sequence
101:48 characterizes most of human history now in the case of Germany yeah Germany
101:54 there's this very strong narrative that Germany uh was the oppressor
102:02 that the Germans are all still guilty from what they did and it's and and when
102:10 you you know there's a lot of evidence that that's been driving the energy vendy the big transition to
102:17 renewables they say it they say it openly they say this will redeem Germany to the world and the same thing with the
102:24 mass migration we're going to let in a million migrants because that will redeem us to the world and it seems um
102:31 also pathological um you could see it as being I mean obviously they people that defend it see
102:38 it as being generous and and whatnot but the pathological part appears to be this
102:44 irrational view that the people alive today need to do things based on what Germans different Germans not because of course
102:57 the you know the children and the grandchildren it's not only Germans there is There is if you wish a reverse victimhood narrative like we are the abusers yes it's not Germany only it's all the former colonial powers it's not
103:14 limited United States United Kingdom slavery the you get these singular evil events
103:21 slavery indigenous genocide now the interesting thing of course is that they these um let's just take the United
103:28 States to just disentangle it from Germany which is a more complicated case these narratives show up
103:34 not right after slavery not right after indigenous genocide but long past
103:42 um they started showing up in the 1960s you know really from the 1960s all the
103:48 way through this last we call it the woke reign of terror um the last 12 years um why in your view does do these
104:00 narratives I Yeah it's I'm sorry what did you say it's oppressor narratives it's a reverse victimhood it's like
104:07 reverse victimhood narrative victim or oppressor yeah why do they show up when they show up and not earlier when there's actually a much stronger memory the people are still alive who did the
104:20 genocide and the slavery europe notice the dates it's a 1960s and no this is not what I'm saying is not speculation you can trace the
104:32 intellectual provenence and the pedigree of all these ideas and so many of these
104:38 people actually studied in Europe in Paris and so on in the 1960s there was a redefinition realignment moral realignment it was the end of the colonial period
104:50 there was the emergence of postcolonial studies there was institutionalized guilt and
104:57 redemption and atonement via you know variety of com compensation schemes and
105:03 the Germans gave money to the Jews the reparations so it was not limited only to colonialism but to all the vile and evil actions of the white race let's
105:16 summarize it you know so whites everywhere starting in Europe adopted
105:22 the view that they have misbehaved or the misconduct was so
105:28 egregious that they need to somehow um as the Germans put it put it um good they need
105:38 to good means to make it good again in German make it good again redeem yeah
105:46 redeem but restore It's more like restore make it good again you know and that was not only you know Germany had it with the Jews and and and so on the
105:57 everyone had it with someone like everyone was all people were all over Africa and it was all the ferment the
106:04 ferment of the 60s ferment of the 60s the influence of these of this emanated from Europe there was there was epicenter of all but
106:16 spread throughout the world I mean you had people in Africa you had people in the Middle East you had people who were heavily influenced by these by these intellectual intellectuals and intellectual thinking in so it's not not
106:30 an accident that it happened in the 1960s of all decades why not in the 1990s well in the 1940s right 1960s
106:37 because that's when the whole world entered this phase you had in 1968 you
106:43 had revolutions attempted revolutions student protests in well over 23
106:50 countries from Canada to to France from Germany to United Kingdom from you know Yeah so there was I mean what's so striking is that it happens in the because the United States of course after World War II were the heroes i mean we just we saved
107:06 the world from fascism and there was a period of that certainly through the 50s but yeah you certainly get into the 60s and it's suddenly the United States is just this evil and you forgot everything that happened in World War II it's just um the United States became evil a bit
107:24 later um the United was cast as the villain mainly in the 70s and 80s not
107:31 exactly in the 60s actually not from the you don't think the Vietnam war cast the United States as started that process so
107:39 it took a few years for the you know for mental picture to change in the in the late60s you still find for example um
107:46 French students saying that the twin revolutions they called it the French revolution was influenced by the
107:53 American revolution so like you know the good influence of America radiating all over the world starting in the 18th century you still had these voices in the late60s
108:04 but then of course um by 1970 you know the trend reversed and America
108:12 became the villain and then you had Vietnam you had Pinocha in in Chile you had Iran the Ku Iran you had so people started to say it's a new colonial
108:24 Um Sam I'm curious your view of of where things are headed now you know um it's
108:30 so um the the mood in the United States it's just it couldn't be more different
108:36 i've never lived through a period where I can look back six months or really more like a year ago and go "Wow the the
108:45 media used to in just a year ago the media decided that Joe Biden couldn't be president or
108:53 he couldn't run for reelection he had to step down the media decided that um you know the the the media really ran the United States." Well now here we are six you know 12 months later the two most powerful people in the United
109:09 States and the people that we've been talking a lot about for good reason are Donald Trump and Elon Musk um Donald
109:16 Trump I think inarguably more powerful just because he's the president and when
109:22 there's a disagreement Trump wins but um Musk is incredibly powerful um
109:28 the left has not there are not protests on climate change there are not protests
109:34 defending DEI there are not protests on transgenderism
109:40 there's not protests demanding open borders it's incredible you know the when the Democrats when when Trump went
109:46 to Congress to address Congress I think it was February the Democrats held up
109:52 little signs none of them were climate trans open
109:58 borders race i mean the four biggest things you would say really the three biggest race
110:04 climate trans with the borders sort of done sodto voce but they weren't the democrats are not defending their
110:12 program they're sort of now they're burning Teslas and and but then Elon's
110:18 gone and the left is um it's hard to even know what the left is now you don't think it's a shock reaction delayed well
110:29 I mean so the question is do we think the left will go back to those issues i'm very skeptical because the part of
110:36 it is that there's just no pol the politics are terrible you know transgenderism is opposed 71% of the
110:43 public opposes trans medicine 78% opposes trans people in sports climate
110:51 change you know we had the energy crisis which is when we were first in touch that was 2022
110:57 um and now Greta Tunberg is is on Palestine and as you said she'll be on something else right and and so um
111:04 climate's kind of gone i mean you know they've they shut down the main climate
111:10 change study that they do in the United States and there was hardly any protests it's incredible so I am curious your
111:17 view i don't think they're going to go back to that i am curious your view because I think it's sort of um it's a
111:24 little bit like it is like somebody was living in a fantasy and then suddenly came back to
111:30 reality they crashed the same way the USSR crashed fantasies crash end of story they're not
111:38 sustainable and they alienate most people when you wake up from fantasy you're all alone exactly like the
111:44 narcissist narcissist wakes up at the end of his life he's all alone abandoned you know
111:50 so I think there there are few um if you want my input I think there are few there are few things to first of all
112:03 the democrats lost their major constituencies and they lost the major constituencies
112:10 because um they declared a culture war what they failed to understand that there was no alignment between economic interests and cultural values in other
112:23 words the working class uh is highly conservative i not all of it but most of them are highly traditional highly conservative highly you know and if if you fight for
112:36 the economic interest of the working class you cannot afford to be progressive or walk because that's not
112:44 what the working class is so the minute they adopted the walk
112:50 movements and so on as as a hobby horse they have lost their con constituencies in this culture war they've lost And then they became the party of the
113:02 elite which is there have been such reversals actually in the past in American history even uh if you look at
113:09 the Republican party uh antibbellum before the civil war and so on there have been such transitions it's not it's not uncommon it's it happened in American history so now they're the
113:19 party of the educated classes and the the elites and the and and so on so forth maybe not the billionaires but all
113:27 educ in terms of education the educated class and the question is um
113:34 what can they come up with next that would mobilize and energize both these
113:41 mutually exclusive constituencies this educated people hold the working class in contempt i mean you know it's between us don't
113:52 tell anyone they hold the working classes in contempt they they make it they make it plain to see yeah and the
113:58 working classes to be frank uh regard the educa educated people as out of
114:04 touch and derisively you know so there's not no love lost between these two constituencies how can you establish a party on this hybrid hybrid ground I don't think it's possible i therefore
114:17 think the relevant question is the life expectancy of the Democratic party not what what will be the next hobby horse or I don't see a way for the Democratic
114:30 Party to survive i think that's precisely the reason that they're demonizing Donald Trump
114:37 and trying to unite everyone around the defense of democracy
114:43 there's only one major problem with this democracy failed to work for the
114:50 majority of the electorate in the United States and not only in the United States democracy as a political system gave
114:56 rise to intellectual oligarchy um elitism
115:03 and uh it failed as a political system um
115:09 at least the type of democracy we're having right now has failed as a political system
115:16 and so the defense of democracy is an off-putting message most people are disenchanted with
115:22 democracy including intellectuals such as myself i think democracy is a horrendous idea in this sense I'm an
115:30 adherent of Joseet the guy who wrote uh the famous book
115:36 revolt of the masses i think democracy is a bad idea and I think we need to come up with an
115:42 alternative political arrangement or or way to make decisions and so on but
115:48 simpler people less educated more less pretentious than me they simply feel that democracy didn't work for them didn't do the job you know so the defense of democracy cannot be a
115:59 rallying cry will not recreate reinvent on the fly the democratic party and even
116:05 I would say it's a mistake i mean they can gather around them disgruntled intellectuals and these kind
116:12 of people virtue signalers um covert narcissists and you know this kind of they can create a new victimhood movement the democracy can be cast as the victim and then there's rescuer savior which is a democratic party but that's a sliver
116:29 sliver of the American people well and also the problem is is that the under democracy the public repudiated the Democratic party
116:40 yes the Democrats The Democrats tried to incarcerate their main political opponent they engaged in mass censorship
116:48 i'll tell you um another thing I wanted to ask about Sam um is this revolt of Just to finish my answer oh yeah sorry no no no no not your fault um you know
116:59 uh what I'm trying to say is that I think we should focus less on what will be the next narrative of the democratic party what next cause of the democrat what the next type of activism
117:11 and I think we are faced with a distinct possibility of the total disintegration of this big tent of of the democratic
117:18 party it has never been cohesive never been coherent is a grievance-based movement victimhood based I
117:26 don't think it's it survival value right now i don't think it's contributing anything and u I don't
117:33 think it's defense of democracy sounds credible or worthwhile honestly so I think it's going to dissipate and disintegrate that's my prediction and then these are dangerous waters because
117:46 never mind how virtuous you are when you are faced with the potential for total power very few people can stand withstand this temptation even the pope
117:57 you can't stand this temptation when you it's a vacuum as opportunity nature
118:03 abhores vacuum there's an opportunity I mean then America I think the real crisis in America is the imminent death of the democratic party not the imminent
118:14 death of democracy once the democratic party is out of the picture as a meaningful force
118:20 then you would be faced with a one party system and then I don't Maybe not Donald Trump
118:26 but someone else it's very tempting this vacuum very dangerous
118:34 um I want to um last question then I'll let you go Sam um I'm curious your view of of the reaction from men you know young men you may know that the
118:46 generation Z uh voted disproportionately for Trump mainly the men yeah main more
118:53 of the men than women but the women did actually increase um as well um but the men are clearly and the young my son is
119:00 26 um the men are just
119:06 have had it you know and I'm curious your view of masculinity and manliness
119:13 and the the ways in which um yeah it was just been denied these fundamental sex differences we've discovered there's
119:24 a Harvard psychologist named Joyce Benninsson who's written a book called Warriors and Warriors and the research
119:31 on the psych the the the psych the psychology of sex differences is
119:37 incredible and yet we've not been allowed to talk about it um I wonder if you've thought about sort of how you know manliness and masculinity have been sort of repressed and demonized um at the same time you know when we
119:53 interviewed Joyce you know she was her career was she was you know uh
119:59 ostracized she's very liberal but you know ostracized and I asked her I was like um
120:05 do they is it that people say is it that your colleagues would say that there's no differences between women and men or
120:12 that the or that women are are good and men are bad and she said they said both both things were going on and now we see this revolt of men i wonder how you see this uh the sort of his the really the
120:27 repression of masculinity manliness since the 60s and this new revolt of of men it is an indisputable fact that uh whatever has happened until the 1950s
120:39 was a men men's doing there were very very few pe women who were involved usually indirectly you know not very the women were not very
120:50 influential so whatever has happened until 1950s was men's doing during the first two world wars the
120:57 first two because there will be other others I assume but during the two world wars women got a chance to experience
121:04 the male existence and they discovered that it was a slate slight of hand it was kind of wizard of oz that there was nothing much to it they
121:15 worked in factories they manufactured weaponry and munitions and they they said you know it's not such a big deal
121:22 men were making too much of it this experience this exposure to the men's world
121:29 caused women essentially to become defiant to adopt many psychopathic
121:35 features m um another thing that has happened is that
121:41 women began to describe themselves in stereotypical male masculine terms these
121:47 are studies by Liisa Wade and others in between in 1980 there was a study
121:54 that asked women to describe themselves using nine adjectives and they chose eight stereotypically feminine
122:01 adjectives like empathy caring loving compassionate and this that fast forward to 2020 women again were exposed to the same questionnaire and they were asked to describe themselves using nine adjectives and they chose eight
122:16 masculine adjectives wow ambitious competitive ruthless callous and so on
122:24 in my work and I've done a lot of work on gender and we could have a whole conversation by the way on gender issues
122:30 i'd love to yeah that sounds great it's difficult to find an intelligent interlocative so there was a compliment
122:37 by the way thank you in my work and again it's very extensive um I I propose the the idea of uni
122:49 gender i think what we having emerging is a uni-ender world where we have women
122:55 with vaginas and women men with vaginas and men with penises everyone is actually masculine it's exactly the opposite of of the prevailing perception that everyone is feminine or feminized or or that men
123:11 were forced to feminize and women what is happening is actually everyone is becoming a man
123:18 and here men are faced with a with a choice if women had become men
123:24 then a man can become a man by exaggerating masculinity and this is known as toxic masculinity or a man can give up
123:37 because women are winning these are the statistics 60% of university graduates
123:44 are women and no it's not only in the humanities
123:50 it's already about 35% in STEM science technology etc already 35%
123:57 under the age of 25 women make more money than men
124:03 across most countries that we know of i mean China Egypt Russia these are global studies
124:09 women are taking over one-third of all households have a woman as a main provider as a primary provider
124:17 the vast majority of uh children under a certain age majority not vast majority of children under a certain age grow in single parent households and the parent is in
124:29 the vast majority of cases a woman a mother
124:35 professions that used to be exclusive male domains are now completely dominated by women starting with nurses
124:43 nursing was a male profession teachers teaching was a male profession
124:52 judges and attorneys and prosecutors the legal professions judges are still
124:58 there's still a majority of men in the higher levels but when you go down there's a majority of women prosecutors
125:04 majority women will and so on so women have taken over
125:10 there's a the real revolution is that the future is a matriarchy not a patriarchy
125:18 and men are falling behind they they and so some of them are becoming very aggressive very violent very toxic very
125:27 they reactionary they're trying to reverse the clock they there's misconral
125:33 of traditionalism and conservatism and and they I I would call them male supremacists mhm but the overwhelming majority just gave up we know for
125:45 example that among men uh the
125:52 uh the main preoccupation is playing video games mhm uh we uh and that's not
125:58 the case with women it's only men so men nowadays play between depending on the
126:04 country 6 to 8 hours a day video game
126:10 that's escapism of course we know that uh depending on the country 40 to 60% of
126:18 people under the age of 35 continue to cohabit with their parents they live with their parents mhm but this is a very misleading statistics because
126:29 strangely majority of them are men not women we know that milestones and parameters of adulthood
126:40 are deteriorating and declining all over frequency of sex number of sexual partners driving drinking firearms these were hallmarks of masculinity
126:52 they all of them completely collapsed so for example most men in the United
126:58 States postpone as much as they can getting a driving license mhm the you
127:05 the use of alcohol the consumption of alcohol among men especially among the young has declined precipitously and not
127:12 because of health reasons mhm so this myth that young men drink and it's wrong it's counterfactual and of course we know that the frequency of sex is all but collapsed my generation has had much
127:25 more sex than Gen Z and a bigger number of sexual partners
127:31 there is an indication of avoiding life we we have a clinical term for this it's called constriction we have strong indications of constriction avoidance introversion running away withdrawing
127:43 only among men it's a dysfunctional reaction usually indicative of a threat
127:51 it is called the freeze response m there's a freeze response men are perceiving women as a growing threat so on the face of it you see you know
128:02 Row versus Wade and and women in Afghanistan and women in Russia where domestic violence has been decriminalized and so on so forth and we see this backlash this reactionary
128:13 backlash by men and we say it's over feminism is over we're going back to the
128:19 50s 1950s nothing can be further from the truth these are just dying convulsions
128:26 of uh gender men who have failed and are failing to
128:32 reassert themselves and above all to redefine themselves and to find a new identity men can't accept can't make
128:41 sense of a world where women are
128:47 may end up dominating they they there's no paradigm there that has prepared them for that and in addition to that all the institutions collapsed
128:58 parental the parents as authority figures society the church the family I
129:05 mean it's all collapsed so there are no guidelines there are no what we call in clinical literature there no scripts
129:11 sexual scripts social script there no guidelines and so YouTube became the the great
129:17 educator sex education is mostly from YouTube and peers according to studies and of course you have figures like
129:23 Andrew Tate and so on who who are father figures substitute father figures and so on so the institutional collapse
129:31 affected men disproportionately because institutional collapse favors women mhm
129:38 why because these institutions were male oriented they were built by males constructed by males in favor of males
129:44 and so on so when the institutions collapse females women benefit disproportionately and mightily whereas men suffer and the great irony
129:56 of course is that what we call feminism starting with the first wave basic rights voting and so on these were granted to women by men i mean there were suetsettes and all these no one paid attention they were they were clowns in the circus the real
130:13 reforms were carried almost 100% by men and for 100 years including the
130:19 contraception and you name it these are all gifts given by men to women
130:25 and women are trying to user the place of men i'm sorry to say that they have declared war it's a gender war women have declared war women have
130:37 become misandress they're men haters where we complain about misogynism and
130:43 so on i've never heard more virulent speech than among women when it comes to men so there's a war here mhm and men didn't didn't wake up to this yet i think they they're playing dead
131:00 part of the problem big part of the problem they they don't know how to be a man no one told them no one instructed them no one was No one knows how to be a man anymore mhm what what does it mean
131:11 to be a man to be dominant in bed on a one night stand or to give flowers maybe or or I what is it to be a man and there's no guidelines no nothing it's mess it's very fluid but women women
131:24 know what it is to be a woman to be a woman is to be girl boss to be a woman
131:31 is to be the new man right there's a clear definition on what it is to be a woman nowadays and what is not allowed
131:39 when you're a woman you will not be submissive you will not be you know but there's no equally clear definition what
131:46 it is to be a man and women uh some women objectify themselves as a
131:55 manipulative ploy so that there's the ranch culture yeah the ranch culture is kind of u
132:03 objectifying yourself rendering yourself a sex object as a woman but the idea is not to cater to the
132:10 whims and needs of men or to conform to their stereotypes no although this may be the outcome the idea is to manipulate
132:17 them you're talking about Only Fans only fans and and sugar daddies and you know
132:24 there's a whole culture giant culture enormous culture i mean it would exceed your wildest beliefs and expectations of leveraging men's
132:35 stupidity gullibility vulnerability and so on to make money and to benefit
132:44 mainly monetarily but not only legally of course and so on so the paradigm has reversed the abuse party nowadays are men
132:56 in my view i am not denying at all that men had abused women egregiously over many many
133:03 dec centuries and maybe millennia not denying this at all but right now the pendulum has tilted and I I think women are abusing men and
133:14 I'm uniquely positioned to as an observer because I'm in the abuse
133:20 abusive relationship space for 30 years and with all due undue modesty I have
133:29 contributed mightily to the field a lot of the language in use today is mine i invented it so I don't feel I don't feel
133:35 that to be careful and I don't feel inferior in in this when I say this
133:41 definitely women today are abusing men at a rate that easily competes with anything men have ever done to them
133:48 before easily I have What do you What do you Go ahead
133:54 no I'm just curious i have ideas I have ideas on how to over But what I
134:00 Yes please i'm sorry no no i was just saying what's the what's the tell us the dream so what I would like to suggest is
134:06 a third conversation if you're not averse to it yeah yeah i'd love that dedicated only to this gender masculinity femininity i have a lot to say about and I've said a lot but I think it's a fascinating topic and again
134:17 I think some people getting a few things wrong i didn't have time now to mention them but I think some things people are getting wrong i want also to put it in a historical a very long historical
134:29 context mhm because there is a historical context here and even a religious intellectual context here
134:36 which is very often neglected in all this literature because most of the literature and I've read all of it and I
134:42 had to but most of the literature is very like operational like coming in one
134:48 night stands and what men do to women what women do to men is like kind of you know I don't I can't recall off the top of my mind a book for example who
134:59 analyzed the int intellectual traditions that have led to the to the state of things as as it is today mhm i can't not
135:07 a single book that I I can remember that I read Simon de Bvoir I mean you name it I read all of them I mean all of them I
135:14 read everything but I didn't find an indepth study of the intellectual traditions that led to this and of
135:20 course these are extensions of processes that have lasted sometimes for millennia
135:26 you know this a culmination of something it's the tip of an iceberg and I find it
135:33 fascinating when you when you draw this line when you show the the progression the inevitability of it all i I find it fascinating and if men don't wake up
135:44 we're going to find ourselves in the position that women found themselves in after the agricultural revolution mhm
135:52 because it was the agricultural re revolution that was the inflection point and we're going to find ourselves in the same situation and the oppression and
136:03 suppression doesn't have to be overt or explicit as you know i mean all these
136:10 walk movements and so on this oppression by other means subtle right right surreptitious ambient atmospheric mhm the indirect social control the abuse is
136:23 is hidden it's like what used to be called covert and overtext deconstruct you to deconstruct the abuse it's and this is where we're going i mean no one no one will put men in uh you know in
136:35 prison in in gulags or or prevent men from going to work i'm not talking about this kind of oppression
136:41 but the narrative itself can be oppressive the the ethos can be oppressive and I think that's where
136:47 we're headed and it's also the it's and because it's so invisible to people it's all the more powerful yes the lack the
136:55 we call it the the hidden text the hidden text is a lot more powerful and that's why we have disciplines like
137:02 deconstruction and so where we try to see the hidden text never mind that it's been abused by the left but okay but
137:08 still it it's a it's I think it's a correct observation that every text has
137:14 a kind of hidden text underneath it definitely ironically in the writings of the left there's a lot of hidden text ironically the right tends to be a lot more explicit mhm again I am uh a liberal let it be clear i'm not an
137:31 advocate of the right but the right is much more honest much more direct much
137:37 more explicit what you see is usually what you get usually mhm whereas in the left there are layers upon layers and
137:43 the archaeology of the text um and feminism started off as neutral
137:51 but ended up definitely as an extension of this pericious variant of the left yes
137:58 insidious actually that's a correct word insidious version so feminism unfortunately is utterly politically
138:05 compromised and contaminated definitely the third and fourth wave
138:12 well Sam always a pleasure yes i take it you're going to go on vacation no no no vacation i'm preparing now for a
138:18 three-day seminar in Scopia that I'm giving and then immediately after that I'm participating in a documentary
138:25 German radio television they're making documentary about my work and so on and so I I need to prepare for this but if you want to have a third conversation we don't need to release these
138:36 conversations all of them at once you know you can right keep them in reserve for for a rainy rainy day but if you
138:43 want to have a a a third conversation this week is actually great because I've vacated my I've emptied my calendar and
138:50 I'm like yeah that sounds great let's do feminism i mean let's do yeah let's do feminism and and gender
138:57 that sounds lovely gender sex and so yeah must Yeah great okay to you initiative is yours let's Yeah let's arrange over email yeah okay thank
139:08 you very much thanks Sam always appreciate you my pleasure bye-bye bye

Summary Link:

https://vakninsummaries.com/ (Full summaries of Sam Vaknin’s videos)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html (My work in psychology: Media Kit and Press Room)

Bonus Consultations with Sam Vaknin or Lidija Rangelovska (or both) http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/ctcounsel.html

http://www.youtube.com/samvaknin (Narcissists, Psychopaths, Abuse)

http://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings (World in Conflict and Transition)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com (Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/cv.html (Biography and Resume)

Summary

Abuse, Meaning, narcissism, narcissist, Psychology, Reality, Sam Vaknin, Trauma, Vaknin, Vaknin Summaries

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