Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Violent Innocence of Narcissist’s Victimhood (Passive-aggression)

1. 00:02 Covert narcissists are anything but assertive. They never externalize aggression.
2. 00:10 They see with bitterness and resentment and envy and they channel their
3. 00:17 aggressive impulses via what is known as negativistic attitudes or passive
4. 00:24 aggression. Now, there are several videos on this channel dedicated to passive aggressiveness and I will post
5. 00:32 one or two of them in the description of this video. And today we are going to discuss the manifestations of passive
6. 00:39 aggression because passive aggression like many other mental phenomena has many guises and disguises, many forms of
7. 00:47 camouflage. Sometimes it doesn’t appear to be any form of aggression but it is.
8. 00:53 You see, covert narcissists are what we call violently innocent.
9. 01:00 Yes, you heard that correctly, violently innocent.
10. 01:06 I think that all narcissists are violently innocent. And when this fact is pointed out to
11. 01:13 them, they claim victimhood. What on earth am I talking about? What
12. 01:19 is violent innocence? My name is Sam Vaknin. I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism
13. 01:26 Revisited, and I’m a professor of psychology. Like many other goodies in psychology,
14. 01:34 the term violent innocence was coined by Christopher Bolas, a psychoanalyst
15. 01:41 American. And he used the phrase to describe
16. 01:47 a refusal. A refusal which is cast in stone. A refus a refusal goes hand
17. 01:54 inhand with obstinacy, oburacy, and fixation. a refusal to do what? A
18. 02:01 refusal to acknowledge the existence of alternative viewpoints.
19. 02:08 He called it a fascist construction. The outcome is to empty the mind of all
20. 02:15 opposition. Violent um innocence started off this way as um kind of construct intended to describe close-mindedness.
21. 02:28 the inability to compl contemplate another person’s point of view and a deficient a deficit in empathy.
22. 02:35 But it has since evolved. Bolas wrote, “Violent innocence is a
23. 02:41 term that posits that a person or an institution can cause significant harm
24. 02:47 while remaining morally ambiguous or seemingly unaware that they are causing
25. 02:53 it. The violent innocent sponsors effective and ideational confusion in
26. 02:59 the other which he then disavows any in knowledge of this being the true
27. 03:05 violation. So there are a few components here. Let’s separate them. The violently
28. 03:12 innocent is a person who refuses to contemplate
29. 03:18 anyone else’s point of view. That’s a person who is sanctimonious,
30. 03:24 self-righteous, self-justifying, always right and so on.
31. 03:32 So this is one element in violent innocent innocence. The other ele element this kind of person is also very
32. 03:40 harmful damages people breaks them
33. 03:46 causes deletterious effects in himself in others and in the environment and all
34. 03:53 this time this kind of person claims the high moral ground at the very minimum
35. 04:00 they say I’m not aware that I’m doing anything wrong I’m not aware that I’m hurting anyone or harming ing anyone.
36. 04:06 That’s all nonsense. And if I am hurt hurting and harming anyone, it’s because I’m oblivious to
37. 04:14 it. It’s not intentional. I don’t mean to do that. On the very contrary, my intentions are noble, and I aim to do
38. 04:22 good, the greater good, and good for others. I am possessed with empathy,
39. 04:28 with love, with kindness, with compassion, with affection. it’s wrong to cast me or castigate me for being
40. 04:37 evil so to speak. So the second element is
41. 04:43 ostentatious morality which is a very prominent element in pro-social and
42. 04:49 communal narcissism. The third element is a lack of self-awareness regarding the impacts, outcomes and consequences of one’s decisions, choices and actions. A fourth element is harmful behavior especially to others but also sometimes to oneself and disavow of any responsibility or
43. 05:12 accountability because of the claim of morality and a lack of self-awareness.
44. 05:18 Put all these togethers together and you have the violently innocent person.
45. 05:25 Of course, violent innocence is common not only as I said in covert narcissism but also in overt narcissism. Um, and in psychopathy where for example
46. 05:36 people gaslight. Gaslighting is to make a series of claims about reality, about oneself and
47. 05:43 about others which are counterfactual. These claims are either fantastic,
48. 05:49 grandiose, and inflated, or they’re simply facious, and to a large extent
49. 05:55 deceptive. Collectively, this is known as gaslighting. And gaslighting is a form of violent innocence, especially when the gaslighting is the outcome of confabulation.
50. 06:06 When there is no premeditation, when there is no intention to gaslight, but the outcome of the confabulation is
51. 06:13 gaslighting. In this particular case of confabulation in narcissism, the
52. 06:19 narcissist claims that the confabulation is real. He attributes to the confabulation veracity and factuality. He rejects any challenge to the
53. 06:31 confabulation. He insists that it’s it’s correct. It reflects reality. He insists that his reality testing is not impaired. It’s intact and perfect and even superior to other people. And so
54. 06:42 the confabulation leads to gaslighting. But all that throughout all this, the
55. 06:48 narcissist feels morally superior and completely unself-aware.
56. 06:54 Whereas in psychopathy, there is awareness of the gaslighting taking place. The gaslighting in psychopathy is
57. 07:00 a machavelian manipulative technique. And all this creates what is known as
58. 07:07 epistemic injury. Because the narcissist is very good at faking reality, at
59. 07:15 imposing fantasy on others, rendering other people willing accompllices, complicit in and colluding
60. 07:23 with him in the creation of the fantasy and so on. Other people who are victims are disbelieved. Victims are not validated, invalidated. victims are challenged.
61. 07:35 People say to victims, “You’re exaggerating. It could have happened. You’re wrong.” And this is known as epistemic injury. At the same time, bystanders and observers experience
62. 07:47 moral injury. What I’m trying to say is that violent innocence is injurious.
63. 07:54 It It’s injurious not only to victims, it’s injurious to society at large. It
64. 08:01 undermines the underpinnings of morality. It imposes a state of delirium, a paracosm, a fantasy on other people.
65. 08:12 It divorces people from reality. It un it it challenges the foundations and
66. 08:18 pillars of what is real and what is not and creates alternative and virtual
67. 08:24 realities and then catapults people into them never to return. So virtual innocence is a very serious process which is um problematic in more than one
68. 08:38 way. Sometimes the virtually innocent
69. 08:45 not only claim moral superiority, not only insist that they are not aware
70. 08:51 of anything wrong or anything bad or anything evil or anything malevolent and malicious that they’re doing. I am not
71. 08:58 aware you’re wrong. My intentions are good. Not only this, but sometimes they
72. 09:05 insist on purity of procedure, adherence to rules and regulations. And this strict robotic
73. 09:17 automated following of rules, following of regulations, following of norms and
74. 09:24 conventions and scripts and mores. This suspension of agency,
75. 09:31 of judgment, of personal autonomy, of independence,
76. 09:37 this auto self-utomatization, self- robotization. This leads to a kind of moral shielding.
77. 09:48 The individual is harming other people, hurting them, damaging them, breaking them apart, ruining their lives. And all
78. 09:55 the time the individual is hiding, hiding behind codes of conduct,
79. 10:01 codicises behind codified morality, behind rules and laws and regulations and norms and conventions written or verbal.
80. 10:12 And throughout the process, the individual says, “I have no choice. This is the law. There’s nothing I can do. I can’t help it. These are the regulations.”
81. 10:23 It’s a bureaucratic copout, obscuring the real world consequences of action or
82. 10:31 inaction. The choice is framed as inelectable, unavoidable, inevitable because that’s
83. 10:38 the way the world is or that’s the way the social contract is or that’s the way
84. 10:44 the law is or that’s the way the rules are or that’s the way regulations dictate or these are the edicts and
85. 10:52 norms and mores and conventions of society and so on so forth. hiding behind, shielding oneself from the consequences, from the adverse and morally dubious and
86. 11:04 duplicitous consequences of one’s actions behind a larger picture, the
87. 11:10 greater good, society, culture, civilization, a period in history, the
88. 11:17 collective. This is violent innocence. And Christopher Bolas was right to to insist that violent innocence is a form
89. 11:30 of denial, an aggressive form of denial. In a recent interview, Huffington Post, the psychologist or therapist Alexandra
90. 11:42 Crommer described this kind of mindset as a sort of willful ignorance. She said
91. 11:51 it means that an institution or a person is maintaining a level of unawareness to
92. 11:57 protect or preserve their belief that they are not harmful and do not cause
93. 12:03 active harm. In other words, there’s a self-concept in the case of the individual or even
94. 12:10 the institution. But we are focused on individuals right now. the covert narcissist and the and sometimes the
95. 12:16 overt narcissist, they have a self-concept of I’m a good person. I’m a good person. And anything that flies in the face of this assertion is negated, visiated,
96. 12:27 counterattacked, deleted, denied, repressed, buried, and it creates
97. 12:33 aggression. This aggression is channeled into morally acceptable. It’s sublimated into morally acceptable forms of repression. And so violent innocence is a cognitive
98. 12:47 mechanism. People defend their self-concept against reality,
99. 12:54 against the fact that they’re harming other people, that their actions are morally inferior or immoral or at the very best amoral. They’re defending
100. 13:06 against this because they have this picture of themselves as pro-social, as communal, as great, as divine, as
101. 13:15 incapable of error, infallible. Uh, Chromemer said in the interview,
102. 13:22 “Violent innocence can be dangerous because it posits that growth is not an ongoing process of gaining conscious
103. 13:31 consciousness and awareness. And this is why violent innocence is very common in narcissism because a narcissist regards himself as the epitome of perfection as
104. 13:43 having attained perfection. There’s no need for perfecting oneself. There’s no need for learning. There’s no need for improving. There’s no need for changing or transforming oneself.
105. 13:55 There’s no need for opening oneself up to other people’s opinions, judgments, and life experiences. when you are
106. 14:01 perfect, when you are godlike, when you’re omniscient, when you’re omnipotent and so why would you why
107. 14:07 would you introduce the possibility of imperfection into your life and mind?
108. 14:13 You would reject any hint that you are in need of edification, of transformation, of improvement, of change. You would reject any of this.
109. 14:26 It’s a harmful dynamic. And in personal in in in in interpersonal relationships with narcissists, you would often hear sentences like, “I didn’t mean to hurt
110. 14:38 you, so you shouldn’t be upset. My intentions were good. This is tough love. I’m doing this for you.” I have a video on this channel which describes
111. 14:50 the myriad hydra ways in which a narcissist self-justifies
112. 14:56 in which a narcissist preserves his self-concept as all good while actually
113. 15:03 splitting other people and rendering them all bad for for pointing the finger
114. 15:09 at him for accusing him for blaming him or for trying to make him aware.
115. 15:15 self-aware. So this is about righteousness.
116. 15:21 This is about self-righteousness. This is about self-justification. This is self aggrandisement. I’m all good. This is about the
117. 15:32 primitive defense mechanism of splitting. Innocent violence is at the
118. 15:38 core of narcissism because essentially the narcissist is not omnipotent,
119. 15:46 is not omnicient. The narcissist is pretty helpless, pretty damaged, pretty
120. 15:52 deficient. And this inferiority, this repository of
121. 15:59 shame that is all consuming and life-threatening is defended against via compensatory pathological narcissism. I’m not ashamed. I’m proud. I’m not
122. 16:11 inferior. I’m superior. I’m not stupid. I’m a genius. Exactly the opposite.
123. 16:17 compensation, a fantasy, confabulation, a paracosm within which the narcissist can be anything but himself.
124. 16:28 Self-denial. When confronted with the suffering that narcissists actively enable or inflict,
125. 16:36 they deny the suffering or they deny the intention or they deny reality or they
126. 16:43 deny the victim and invalidate the victimhood. They they deny. This is their in in in in immediate response.
127. 16:51 Narcissists deny. Period. And there’s a refusal to see one’s own
128. 16:57 contributions, one’s own responsibility and to be held accountable for this. Ironically, by minimizing one’s contribution
129. 17:08 and oneself, the narcissist is actually saying, “I am not omnipotent. I am not
130. 17:14 responsible for this.” So violent innocence creates a dissonance. On the one hand, if you are all powerful, if you’re all knowing, if you
131. 17:25 are godlike, then you’re responsible for the suffering of other people because you are the source of everything. You’re the found you’re the mover and shaker.
132. 17:37 If on the other hand you’re not responsible for what’s happening to people then for their suffering for
133. 17:44 their pain for the for any harm then you are not all powerful and you are not all
134. 17:51 knowing and this is the dissonance which is embedded in violent innocence.
135. 17:59 Even the combination sounds like an oxymoron. When you insist as a as a
136. 18:05 measure of defense, defensively, when you insist defensively, I’m a moral person. I’m a good person.
137. 18:12 I’m I’m a noble person. And there’s nothing I can do.
138. 18:18 Nothing I can do because that’s the law. Nothing I can do because that’s reality. Nothing I can do because I’m I I don’t
139. 18:24 have the resources. there’s nothing I can do because I’m super moral or super righteous, super sanctimonious or whatever. When the minute you say the sentence there’s nothing I can do, you
140. 18:37 disown your agency. When you say this harm, this suffering,
141. 18:44 they’re inevitable. I can only witness but nothing more. And often I deny that
142. 18:50 this is suffering. I deny that this is harm. When you are saying this, you are saying I am helpless.
143. 18:57 I’m puny and pucilanimous. I have no agency. I have no power. The harm is
144. 19:03 inevitable because I am I’m minimizing myself. I’m
145. 19:09 a nobody. There are greater forces and greater people at play.
146. 19:17 So this requires vanity. Uh the opposite of vanity. This requires modesty.
147. 19:23 This requires to humble oneself to eat humble pie and narcissists are very bad at that. So
148. 19:30 this creates a dissonance. On the one hand when the narcissist hurts other people, when the narcissist harms other
149. 19:36 people, when the narcissist damages other people, he wants to say it’s not my fault.
150. 19:42 But it’s not my fault. When you say it’s not my fault, it means also it’s not in
151. 19:48 your power. and then it minimizes you. And if
152. 19:54 narcissism is about anything, it’s about maximizing oneself. So there’s a dissonance there. There’s a clash.
153. 20:00 There’s a conflict. And the innocence yields the dissonance involved. Yields
154. 20:08 aggression yields the violence. Alexander Chromemer in the aforementioned Huffington Post interview said, “People institutions might insist on their own innocence.
155. 20:20 despite being given information that their decisions or inaction cause harm
156. 20:26 due to a desire to protect or preserve their view of self. Receiving feedback
157. 20:32 and a request for change is hard, but it is necessary. If you cling to the story,
158. 20:39 if you cling to your grandio, fantastic, counterfactual, unreal self-image as all
159. 20:46 good, and at the same time you claim to be helpless,
160. 20:52 you sidestep accountability and responsibility. Obviously, you shield yourself morally. You preserve the self-concept, but there’s a cost. And the cost is sacrificing your p your self-perception as godlike
161. 21:09 as omniscient and omnipotent. So on the one hand you’re defending the self-concept by removing yourself from
162. 21:16 the sin of a crime and on the other hand you are undermining the self-concept
163. 21:23 because you render yourself childlike or helpless or hopeless or or incapacitated
164. 21:30 in some way. And so this internal dissonance, this internal
165. 21:36 conflict leads to rising anxiety because all dissonance leads to anxiety and a
166. 21:42 lot of aggression promises. For some people being made aware of hurt caused
167. 21:48 requires them to take active remedial steps. Many institutions and people have
168. 21:54 a hard time with this insight due to the fact that many view mistakes as permanent in some inst permanent in some
169. 22:02 instances the people or institutions do believe that they’re actually innocent and have not caused any harm despite contrary feedback. Chroma says correctly that healthy adaptive people and institutions view feedback view education view awareness
170. 22:20 as constants like change change is constant. It’s all part of the ongoing process of personal development and growth. It’s not a threat to identity except in the case of
171. 22:33 narcissism where the identity is fixated, rigid, oified and any challenge to it, however
172. 22:42 remote, however implied, however subtle, however nuanced,
173. 22:48 is catastrophized. And the narcissist react with reacts with rage. And if rage doesn’t helps,
174. 22:56 then passive aggression. And if this doesn’t help then there is a borderline
175. 23:02 state with emotion dysregulation and and suicidal ideiation ultimately. But violent innocent is only one aspect of passive aggression.
176. 23:13 Violent innocent is uh the claim of moral superiority.
177. 23:19 It’s uh it’s like saying I ostentatiously conform to social mores
178. 23:27 and expectations and demands and conventions and norms. I ostens ostentatiously conform to them and my
179. 23:34 conformity is the cornerstone and the guarantee of my superior morality. This self-righteousness is a form of passive
180. 23:45 aggression of course because it allows such people to to sabotage
181. 23:51 to hinder to obstruct the lives and goals and dreams and hopes and wishes
182. 23:58 and agency and autonomy of other people. They use they leverage this
183. 24:05 self-righteousness and sanctimoniousness as a as a weapon. They weaponize against
184. 24:12 other people. They they’re always um they’re busy bodies in many ways.
185. 24:18 They’re nosy. They they they criticize other people. Cajol
186. 24:24 cajol them. They they expose them. They they attack them. They and all the time
187. 24:30 there’s a feeling of elation because they equate this with power. But
188. 24:36 again, this is only one form of passive aggression. There are many others. For example, procrastination.
189. 24:44 Passive aggression is sabotage. When you sabotage other people, you sabotage their happiness, their joy. You sabotage
190. 24:50 their lives, their goals and plans, their their their cognitions, their
191. 24:57 emotions, their dreams and hopes and fantasies, their expectation. You sabotage. You constantly sabotage.
192. 25:04 That’s what you do. This is passive aggression. And one way to do that is to procrastinate, to postpone everything to the last minute. And then of course to either not get it done or get it done
193. 25:17 wrongly or get it done in an inferior way thereby undermining
194. 25:23 the undermining the the path to accomplishments of other people. So procrastination is a form of passive aggression. last minute delays, uh doing
195. 25:34 everything uh too late, disruptions, interruptions. And so the passive aggressive aggressive person would disrupt you, interrupt you,
196. 25:47 interfere, intervene, invade your space, your time. U you’re busy and they will
197. 25:54 just insist on having your attention and so on so forth. And then when you decline or when you erupt with with
198. 26:01 anger, they would guilt trip you. They would blame you for this. You see, the
199. 26:08 passive aggression goes hand inhand with a sense of victimhood. Generally, it’s about victimhood. Narcissists constantly feel victimized. They constantly feel that they’re victims because their aggression and their passive aggression are rejected by
200. 26:25 other people. And they don’t see their aggression and passive aggression as forms of aggression. They refrain the aggression. They rewrite history.
201. 26:37 They’re innocently violent and they emphasize the innocence, not the violence. So when you reject them, when
202. 26:44 you decline, when you refuse to collaborate or to collude, when you push them away, when you shun them, when you
203. 26:51 avoid them, when you withdraw, when you protect yourself, um they they claim victimhood. They call
204. 26:59 you the abuser. Neglect and irresponsibility that are all
205. 27:05 pervasive and systemic. These are forms of passive aggression. Not doing things on time, not doing
206. 27:13 things at all. Um, ignoring important information,
207. 27:19 um, acting in ways which are suboptimal, uh, declining to assume responsibility
208. 27:26 for one’s actions and choices and decisions. All these forms of passive aggression. And when taken to extreme,
209. 27:34 it’s it’s indoor indolence or laziness. Not the kind of indolence and laziness
210. 27:40 which are the outcome of a philosophy of life like big big Leovski but indolence and laziness which are intended to prevent other people from accomplishing
211. 27:51 to prevent other people from having a full life a happy life. Laziness and
212. 27:57 indolence which stand in the way of processes. laziness and indolence that
213. 28:03 undermine um undermine trajectories and paths um
214. 28:10 goals, dreams, hopes, wishes, plans. So, indolence is the extreme form of neglect and irresponsibility.
215. 28:21 Generally, passive aggressiveness assumes either of two forms.
216. 28:27 Performative obnoxiousness and performative submissiveness.
217. 28:33 Before I go into that, I want to explain the difference between performative and ostentatious.
218. 28:39 Both performative behaviors and ostentatious behaviors are visible. Obviously, they can be witnessed. They
219. 28:47 are intended for public consumption. They’re public facing. But performative behaviors are dictated
220. 28:54 by society. They involve social scripts. Whereas ostentatious behaviors are
221. 29:02 idiosyncratic. They’re individualistic. They depend on the on the particular individual. So when you are
222. 29:09 performatively obnoxious, it means you’re obnoxious the way society expects you to be obnoxious, the
223. 29:17 way society imagines obnoxiousness, the stereotype of being obnoxious, then you
224. 29:23 are performatively obnoxious. When you’re ostentatiously obnoxious, it’s just because you are truly obnoxious and
225. 29:30 you are even unaware that you’re obnoxious. you are you are you feel um hurt you feel in pain when other people tell you that you’re obnoxious you reject it you say it’s not true so this
226. 29:42 is ostentatious obnoxiousness whereas performative obnoxiousness is goal oriented it’s a form of signaling
227. 29:50 it’s a form of coercive behavior modification the obnoxious obnoxiousness
228. 29:56 is intended to coersse people into modifying their behaviors or their perceptions or their cognitions and so
229. 30:02 So performative obnoxiousness is a form of signaling. It’s coercive and it is
230. 30:08 about modifying other people and it’s a form of branding. You’re known as an
231. 30:14 obnoxious person. Your reputation precedes you and people are wary of you. People not only avoid and shun you, but they obey you. It it secures outcomes.
232. 30:26 But performative obnoxiousness as well as ostentatious obnoxiousness, it’s a form of passive aggression. The
233. 30:33 obnoxious person is not violent, definitely not physically, and often is not violent verbally. The obnoxiousness has more to do with contempt,
234. 30:45 more to do with disregarding other people, uh, lack of empathy,
235. 30:51 uh, than with any manifestations or transformations of aggression. And so it’s a form of passive aggression. The alternative is performative submissiveness,
236. 31:03 obsiciousness, the pretension to conformity, going along with the flow.
237. 31:10 Um pretend, but it’s all pretend. It’s all fake. It’s all
238. 31:17 under the surface. There is anger and rage and sthing resentment and envy and
239. 31:25 plans to damage other people. Premeditation, malice, I would say. So
240. 31:32 performative submissiveness is a veneer. It’s a facade.
241. 31:39 And sometimes narcissists use performative submissiveness in a mavelian manner. For example, if you
242. 31:46 threaten the narcissist with exposure or with a law or with I don’t know, the
243. 31:53 narcissist may pretend that he is afraid, may act in ways which communicate fear.
244. 32:00 Look at me, I’m terrified and so on so forth. All the time playing with your mind, manipulating your behavior.
245. 32:09 And so this is an example of performative submissiveness. And again, it’s a form of passive aggression.
246. 32:17 Nothing in psychology has a single face. It all shapeshifts,
247. 32:23 metamorphosis. It’s all all mental phenomena. All psychological processes
248. 32:30 are multifaceted. And depending on the on the environment and on internal dynamics, they can wear
249. 32:38 guises, disguises and masks which are very very misleading and very very
250. 32:44 surprising. For example, violent innocence coupled with victimhood.