And so does our consumer society have a part to play then, do you believe, in encouraging narcissism?

Well, as I’ve just said, I think consumption and the attendant signaling, which is known as advertising and marketing, I think consumption is about narcissism.

First of all, most of the products we consume are utterly unnecessary, obviously. So they must look for some other kind of role. If they are not necessities, what are they?

They must be signals or messages. In other words, most of the products we purchase are forms of communication, coded messages.

And so some of them are what Veblen called positional goods, goods that signify our position, our relative position in society.

And others are about making you feel unique or making you feel special.

And yet others are about making you feel that you belong, that you’re part of some club.

And yet others make you feel that you’re young again.

And yet others make you feel omnipotent because they contain so many functions.

You can do everything with them. There’s nothing you can’t do with them.

And yet others make you feel omniscient. That’s an important function of the smartphone, for example. You are all knowing with the click of a button, you have the entire human knowledge at your fingertips and disposal and so on and so forth.

So yes, I would say that most modern products have little to do with our necessity. They have a little to do with our needs and a lot to do with our self-image and self-perception.

They are about molding our self-image and self-perception to feel unique, omniscient, omnipotent, members of collectives, which are omniscient and omnipotent, narcissistic, not only individually, but also collectively.

And so consumption from about 100 years ago has been transformed from a system of catering to physical needs into a system of catering to psychological needs.

So let’s say up until the 1890s, up until the end of the Industrial Revolution, most products and services were needs, physical needs oriented.

You bought a plow or you bought a dishwasher, you bought a laundry machine or you bought a refrigerator. You bought something you needed and your needs were physical needs. Up until, let’s say, the 1950s, everything you had bought catered to your physical needs, physical needs as an animal who needs to eat and drink, physical needs as someone who needs to travel physically, but they were all physical needs.

Starting in the 1950s, most products and services cater to your psychological needs. Very few of them, indeed vanishingly few of them, cater to your physical needs.

And your psychological needs can be grouped, can be amply described as narcissistic. The overwhelming majority of our psychological needs are in support of our narcissism.

Now, as I said before, there’s healthy narcissism and there’s pathological narcissism. And again, we can make a distinction.

Between the 1950s and the 1980s, most of the products and services had to do or catered to our healthy narcissism. So for example, they were geared to help us to learn and educate ourselves, or they helped us to expand our horizons, or they helped us to acquire skills, which we could use in the workplace, or they helped us, as tourists, to discover new territories and new cultures and new societies, etc.

So I would say that in the history of modern consumption, there are three stages.

From the beginning of the industrial revolution to the 1950s, where most products and services catered to physical needs.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, where most products and services catered to our healthy psychological needs, including our healthy narcissism.

And from the 1980s to this very day, where most products and services catered to our pathological losses, our need to be noticed and our need to be seen and to be observed and to be acknowledged as unique and special and in a pathological way, in a way that implies entitlement, in a way that implies delusion, in a way that implies self-deception, in a way that implies grandiosity, in a way that implies fantasy. All these are pathological adaptations and pathological defense mechanisms.

And the overwhelming vast majority of products and services nowadays cater exactly to these things, fantasy, delusion, self-deception, grandiosity, lack of empathy, separation, atomization, social seclusion, etc.

While you can’t say this about products in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, they also catered to your narcissism. They also made you special and unique and enhanced your skills and capabilities, but they did it in a very healthy way. They were reality-based.

If you want me to give you a kind of litmus test, all products and services until the end of the 1980s were reality based. They acknowledge a reality test.

Today’s products and services take you away from reality, away from social reality, away from physical reality, away from interactions, away from reality.

Because you were talking about how advertising and the products, they make you feel something. They make you feel like you have this, but it’s devoid from reality, I suppose.

Yes. I would say that until the late 1980s, everything was reality-based. The quality of the product and the service and the commercial success of the product or service were based on reality, how effective they are in helping us to manage reality, to manipulate reality, and to extract benefits from reality.

Products and services that came after the dotcom boom and bust, these products and services are not reality-based.

They are actually ways and means to avoid reality, to shun reality, to escape from reality, and to construct alternative realities, virtual realities, augmented realities, avoid social reality, avoid true interaction, avoid coping with real life challenges, avoid acquiring real life skills, etc. We are escaping from reality, and society and all other social institutions are disintegrating.

We have a process called atomization, where everyone sits at home, isolated with a series of screens of varying sizes, and interacts essentially with other people who are doing exactly the same.

The size of screens can tell you the whole story.

If you go back to the 1950s, the dominant screen was huge, and about 2,000 people could congregate in front of that screen and share a common experience. That screen was the cinema in the 1950s.

Then fast forward 20 years or 30 years actually, you had a much smaller screen, and only 20, 30 people could congregate in front of that screen and have a common experience. That screen was a television.

Then fast forward another 20 years, and even much smaller screen, and only two, three people could share the experience of that screen, and that was the personal computer.

Then the screens kept shrinking and shrinking and shrinking until today’s screen allows only one person to interact with it. It’s a one-person interaction, and that would be the smartphone or your watch, your smartwatch.

Screens tell the whole story. Screens are a metaphor to what’s happening to us.

At the very beginning of screens in the 1950s, or even 1930s, we wanted to have communal experiences shared with thousands of other people.

Today, we don’t want other people.

Think of the way that you hold your smartphone. You hold the smartphone in front of your face. The smartphone isolates you from your environment. It’s kind of a firewall. The smartphone was designed to separate you from reality, to separate you from other people.

There could have been any number of design choices in designing the typical smartphone, but from the very beginning, smartphones were built, designed, and constructed to separate you from life, to provide you with an alternative to life.

Modern consumption and modern consumer goods are about isolating you and rendering you a hostage, in effect, a prisoner. They are total ecosystems.

All previous consumer goods up to the 1980s were not total ecosystems, in the sense that you could not interact only with a single product and need nothing else.

You could not, for example, interact with your refrigerator only, or with your laundry machine only, or even with your personal computer only, or with your television only. You had to go out to reality. You had to talk to other people. You had to use other devices. You had to have a network, both social and electronic, in order to survive.

But today’s devices, today’s consumer goods, are self-contained, self-sustaining, self-sufficient, and they isolate you, because they provide you with a total solution. And they could safely be called total consumer goods or total devices, and they provide a total ecosystem.

By the way, you see it in the way that these devices are designed.

Because, for example, you cannot use an Apple device if you go outside the Apple ecosystem. You must remain hostage and prisoner to Apple’s offerings. Apple’s App Store, everything is Apple. Everything is branded Apple. Look at Facebook, for example. Facebook does not allow Google to crawl its database. There are no Facebook results on Google, because Facebook keeps its content behind a firewall so that Google has no access to it.

What happens is modern consumer devices fractured our world, broke it apart, so that if you interact on Facebook, you are the hostage of Facebook. You are Facebook’s prisoner. If you interact with Apple, you’re Apple’s prisoner.

Apple, they don’t want you to go outside the walls of the ecosystem, which is exact opposite philosophy to the philosophy of the network which prevailed in the 80s and beginning of the 90s, exact opposite philosophy.

And you can see the same happening with countries, countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia. They isolate their consumers behind the firewalls. They don’t allow their consumers free access to, for example, information, or even to consumer goods.

So we are seeing a fracture and an atomization of life, of social life, of society as a whole, of institutions. And this has direct linkage to modern technologies and the consumer goods that they produce.

So consumerism is not only about narcissism in the individual level, it’s about the emerging, very disturbing trend of collective narcissism, exactly the trend that brings to power people like Donald Trump or Bolsonaro in Brazil or Duterte in the Philippines.

We are beginning to see a confluence of consumerism with politics, technology with politics.

Donald Trump is a technological president, exactly like Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler used consumer goods and technologies which were the cutting edge technologies in his spirit. He used movie theaters, he used the microphone, he used the airplane, he used the radio, and he was the first to use television. So Adolf Hitler was a highly technological leader in a narcissistic psychopathic age using consumer goods in a way that fractured and broke society apart. And people like Donald Trump are doing the same.

So consumer goods dictate not only how we as individuals interact with the world, but how collectives interact with the world via institutions such as politics. It’s an extremely, extremely dangerous and worrying trend.

Where do you see that trend heading to in the next 20 years?

Well, first of all, I encourage you to have a look at the interview I made with Richard Grannon, because it’s very, very detailed and so on.

First of all, I think for the first time, for the first time ever, as we talk about Adolf Hitler, we are talking about a phenomenon which was largely European, started in Germany and infected the rest of Europe. But that’s where it ended more or less.

But the first time I think we are talking about a global pandemic, a truly global phenomenon. And that’s why I’m comparing social media and modern consumer goods to viruses, essentially. Because exactly like epidemiology, we have vectors of transmission, and we have spreading memes and so on, which imitate, very effectively, the behavior of viruses.

So as I see, I think, exactly like viruses are self-limiting, I think the technology and current consumer goods are self-limiting. There will be a point where people will simply draw back in horror and recoil.

But it will be too late for many of us, because social media, modern consumer goods, they are constructed to be addictive. They’re constructed to condition us. As I said, they render us hostages and prisoners, not only physically, but also psychologically. So there’s a lot of addiction and conditioning going on.

A lot of the planned obsolescence, which is a typical feature of most consumer goods, a lot of the planned obsolescence has to do with the attempt to condition us to buy new versions, new updates, new generations of the same devices and the same goods and the same services.

So there will remain a group of people addicted to all these paraphernalia, to social media, to consumer goods, etc.

And there will be a rebellion against a counter-revolution, a counter-trend where people will try to free themselves of the shackles of modern consumerism. And we’re beginning to see, of course, the buds of this revolution.

So I think what it will do is it will fracture humanity to two camps, the camp of people who find consumption gratifying because it caters to their narcissistic needs. And these people will continue to be addicted and conditioned by innovation, by technology, by new consumer goods, etc. And 1 billion, 2 billion people will be like that. They will continue their existence as it is now, forever consuming, forever working hard in order to consume, forever using consumer goods as symbols, as positional goods, forever bragging, forever showing off, forever delineating or demarcating the uniqueness via consumer goods, via social media and so on.

And there will be the rest of humanity which will break free.

I believe in that because all viruses are self-limiting in the sense that at some point they stop propagating. Had viruses not stopped propagating, we would all be dead by now.

So I believe that consumer goods are the kinds of viruses which, and I believe the trend is about to stop. And then humanity will fracture. And we will have these two camps. That’s how I see things.

The other camp, the rebellious camp, I think will consume a lot less. Will consume differently, or should we say in a balanced way. Will consume not narcissistically, in a healthy way.

And I think this will have tremendous destabilizing repercussions. It’s the entire mass production system, our entire modern economy, all modern economies, West and East, are built and founded on the assumption of ever increasing consumption. If we pull the rug under the feet of multinationals, manufacturers, service providers, we are going to collapse the modern economy.

And I think the rug is about to be pulled. I think this revolutionary movement that I’m talking about, people who are going to renounce social media, people who are going to consume less, people who are going to move to the countryside, people who are going to consume wisely, people who are going to give up goods and services which are not necessities, people who are going to revert to retro lifestyles.

I think this movement is on the rise, and I think it’s going to become actually dominant. A counterculture, a subculture or counterculture of non-consumed consumerism. I believe the revolution is happening.

But here’s the irony. We can’t afford to not consume. Should we stop consuming even marginally, the entire edifice of modern economies will crumble. And then, of course, we will have provoked enormous social unrest everywhere and possibly global wars.

So this is the dilemma. On the one hand, our consumption patterns today are sick, addictive, conditioned, narcissistic, atomizing, destructive. The way we consume is destroying us, destroying us as individuals, destroying us as societies, destroying us as collectives, destroying and ruining and devastating our institutions, starting with the family and ending with the state.

Raising to power, demagogues, narcissistic and psychopathic leaders are a great risk to peace in our future. Our consumption leads us into a blind alley of self-annihilation.

But we can’t afford to stop consuming. Because if we stop consuming, we will have removed the foundations of modern economies. And then the global economy will collapse. And then we will have such social unrest which will most probably lead to global warfare and again to our self-destruction.

It’s a no-win situation. If we continue to consume, we will annihilate, self-annihilate.

If we stop consuming, we will self-annihilate.