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1. 00:02 Everyone and his lonely dog or her lonely cat are complaining, griping, breastfeitting, and bemmoning the pandemic of loneliness. The surgeon general in the United States even declared it the equivalent of a national emergency. And yet loneliness or aloneeness
2. 00:28 may actually be the natural state while socializing with other people having to interact with them may be the abnormal state may be a condition that creates a lot of anxiety and depression. should to justify these outrageous statements. I’m going to take you on a
3. 00:51 tour. My name is Sam Vaknin. I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and the very lonely professor of psychology. So, we all have we all have a an innate experience of existence. We all come into being and then experience the state of being throughout life.
4. 01:21 We all have boundaries in the sense that we know where we stop and the world starts and vice versa where the world ceases to exist and we start. So existence boundaries and what is known as the self. The self is just another name for a sense of continuity
5. 01:44 across space and time regardless of mutations in personality, in circumstances, in experiences and in people who come into our lives and then abandon us. Throughout all this, there is a sense of nucleus, a sense of core identity, a sense of something that is immutable,
6. 02:09 something that is always there. I am. This existence, these boundaries, this sense of self, they are just the internalized gaze of other people. It is through the gaze of other people that we become. It is through the gaze of other people that we experience boundaries. It
7. 02:31 is through the gaze of other people that we maintain a sense of self. Self is not other people. Everything that is not other people is the self. Other people, their existence, their observations, their feedback, their input are critical. Without this defining gaze
8. 02:52 when there is no um no way to be seen,
9. 02:59 it’s very difficult to maintain a an identity which is not diffused, which is not disturbed. It’s almost impossible to retain selfhood. And there’s a feeling an of encroaching absence and void and a black hole that is about to consume everything and
10. 03:19 boundaries become porous, fuzzy and dissolvable. Other people’s gaze is what defines us. This defining gaze starts with mother. When the infant sees itself in mother’s eyes, it is then that the infant first realizes that mother is a distinct separate entity. It
11. 03:48 is then that the child emerges from what used to be called the symbiotic phase with mother, one organism with two heads. It is then that the child emerges from this from this merger and fusion and becomes an individual divided from mother. And yet mother’s gaze is a traumatizing
12. 04:11 experience. Let it be clear to be seen is a survival strategy. A child that is not seen, a baby, a newborn that is not seen has a very limited life expectancy. The first things that newborns do, they attract attention to themselves in order to secure food and shelter and changing
13. 04:37 of diapers and other necessities from the adult environment. to be seen is a survival strategy experienced as a psychological need. And yet, as I said, the moment when the child realizes that it is no longer one with mother, that mother is separate, that mother is
14. 05:01 autonomous and agentic and out there external, that is probably the greatest trauma in human life. And this trauma persists lifelong. This trauma accompanies every gaze. The ancient echoes of the maternal trope, the ancient echo echoes of recognizing oneself in the mother’s gaze
15. 05:28 as separate from the mother. These ancient echo e echoes of the trauma reverberate throughout life every time every time we are gazed upon every time we apprehend ourselves through another person’s gaze. Every time we evce our separate separateness, it provokes
16. 05:52 anxiety and existential angst because we realize then that we are essentially all alone that we cannot build bridges to other people. That the intersubjective space, the space between us and other people is a myth. It’s just a story, a bedtime story intended to lull us into
17. 06:15 sleep and to be a self soothing uh fiction. The truth is this gap between us and other people is unbridgegable, is intraversible, cannot be crossed ever. The interubjective space is fragmented, is broken. There’s
18. 06:37 no glue that is holding it together. And so whenever we experience another person’s gaze, thereby emerging and becoming separate and external to that other person. At that point, we also reexperience and revisit the trauma. This is called vividness.
19. 06:59 And when we experience this trauma, it provokes in us anxiety by definition. Therefore, every human contact is anxioenic. Every touch, every interaction, every exchange and interchange and intercourse with another person leads to anxiety because prolonged anxiety use leads to
20. 07:24 depression results in depression. I think anxiety and depression are the attendant effective hues, the attendant effects or the attendant states of mind. embedded in an integral part of of every inter interaction with another human being. And so we are constructed, we are
21. 07:48 machines, we’re devices that minimize anxiety, strive to minimize anxiety. We our machinery, our mental psychological machinery aims to minimize anxiety and to quell and ailerate depression. And so we be we perceive people as triggers of anxiety
22. 08:10 and depression and we wish to avoid them to shun them to isolate ourselves to withdraw and yet we socialize. Why do we socialize? Why do we bring this upon ourselves? Why do we subject ourselves to other people’s gaze thereby triggering in us anxiety?
23. 08:32 Because social socializing with other people is the cost of the gaze. We define ourselves through other people’s gaze. We maintain a sense of continuous existence and being exclusively through other people’s gaze. We establish the boundaries of the self through other
24. 08:54 people’s gaze. And so we need we are addicted to other people’s gaze. We cannot survive without it. And it is experienced as a psychological need as I said. And the cost of these gays, the price we have to pay is socializing with other people.
25. 09:16 The huge revolution in the past 20 years is the invention of the of the artificial gaze, a nonhuman gaze, a machine gaze as embedded in social media and in artificial intelligence. It’s a giant revolution in the sense that now we can derive we can derive a perception a
26. 09:42 self-perception of existence. We can we can maintain an
27. 09:50 a cohesive coherent self personal continuity boundaries between us and the world. We can maintain all these functions using machines. We don’t do we no longer need human beings in this sense. The artificial gaze is cost free costless cost free
28. 10:13 is we no longer have to pay the price of socializing with other people having to tolerate them having to uh somehow accept them having to bear the burden of friction with other people. We no longer have to pay this this price because now we have a perfectly usable and feasible
29. 10:33 gaze which comes at us from screens. Social media I mentioned artificial intelligence is also constructed on the gaze and this of course leads to narcissistic solypism. We are now giving the opportunity given the opportunity to retain our ability to persevere as a
30. 11:00 continuous entity by using machine generated a machine generated gaze that allows us to disengage from the rest of humanity. And so we become soises we become narcissist. Narcissistic solypism is a combination of fantasy and the introjection of other
31. 11:23 people. Fantasy is a rejection of reality, the rejection of life actually. And instead of interacting with other people in a classical way face to face you know uh we what we do we convert them into into symbolic representations simulacra and
32. 11:45 we interact with these simulations with these internal objects put together fantasy in introjection what you get is pathological narcissism and this is only the beginning the next stage when AI artificial intelligence takes over is we’re going to transition to a skitsoid
33. 12:03 avoidant phase. We’re going to develop an auto gaze, a self gaze kind of self supply and then we are not we won’t even need any external gaze not even machine generated. We’ll be we will be able to internalize the machinery of gazing at this stage in the development of
34. 12:27 these technologies. Um the thrust of these technologies is very clear. For example, intimacy challenges the business model of social media and artificial intelligence. If you interact with other people, with your children, with your spouse, with
35. 12:49 your girlfriend, with your church, the more time you spend with other people, the less time you spend on social media or artificial intelligence. These technologies monetize your attention, monetize your eyeballs. They need you to be glued to the screen. They
36. 13:10 are sticky technologies. And if you spend this time with other people, this is a time not spent on these uh platforms and which reduces their advertising income. So they are built, they’re constructed to destroy intimacy. Number two, these technologies provide
37. 13:33 self-sufficiency as a main commodity. Shortly, we’re going to have the metaverse. And the metaverse will be an all-inclusive totalitarian universe. You will never have to exit the metaverse. You could do everything through the metaverse. Consult a lawyer, go to work,
38. 13:50 have sex, order a pizza. You would never have to exit your home and the universe, the artificial virtual universe that is a metaverse. So the these technologies are predicated and premised on self-sufficiency. What does it mean to be self-sufficient? Means you don’t need
39. 14:10 other people. Means you can obtain the gaze without paying the price. Means you can avoid and withdraw. Avoid other people. Withdraw from society, from humanity, from life itself, from reality and still be able to maintain a sense of coherent, cohesive, continuous identity.
40. 14:32 The next element is that even when you do interact with other people virtually, for example, on social media, the parameters of social of socializing, the parameters of interacting with other people are totally controlled by you. You could, for example, block other
41. 14:51 people. You could ban other people. So, um, socializing is no longer perceived as a give and take. It’s no longer perceived as syn as a synergy. It’s no longer perceived as a collaboration or a corporation where the other party is unpredictable to some extent. The other
42. 15:11 party has inputs and feedbacks with feedbacks which sometimes don’t accord with and don’t conform to your own beliefs and values. That’s in a normal situation in a non-technological environment. But technology allows you to control the process of interacting
43. 15:29 with such with other people to such an extent that actually you end up talking to yourself within a one-man eco chamber, a silo. And finally, technology associates negative effects with profits. The more negative the emotions, the more profitable the platform. platforms that
44. 15:55 are built around fear and anger and envy are the most successful. So negative effects are at the core of so both social media and artificial intelligence. negative effects are conducive to a schizoid avoidant withdrawing withdrawal state because when you have
45. 16:19 ne when you maintain negative a effects when you’re immersed in negative emotions negative thinking hatred envy fear you know anger when you’re when you’re drowning in all these in these sensations and feelings avoiding other people aloneeness
46. 16:40 feels like a great idea. It’s egoonous. You feel comfortable to be alone and you feel uncomfortable to to be with other people. These other people trigger in you negative effects which are uncomfortable. Whereas if you’re away from other people, isolating yourself
47. 17:00 totally withdrawing and avoiding constricting your life, the likelihood of negative effects is much reduced. You can rail against the world. You can rant and ramble and what have you. But the consequences are highly high minimized. So these four
48. 17:20 aspects or dimensions of technology in confluence encourage you to avoid other people, encourage you to become skittle, avoidant, encourage you to actually cater to your own psychological needs by yourself with the help of technology while not paying the cost of having to
49. 17:41 suffer them. You can now lead your life completely uh insulated from the vagaries and v vicissitudes and exigencies of human relations, interpersonal relations, relationships are now perceived as um undesirable and the alternative is very very irresistible, attractive
50. 18:08 and the alternative is of course to be swallowed to become the ghost in the machine. That’s what we all we are all going to become. The ghosts in a machine. Akin similar to the imagery in the Matrix.