Narcissistic Buffet Answering Your Questions ( Well, Sort Of)

Uploaded 9/19/2020, approx. 48 minute read

Summary

Professor Sam Vaknin discusses various topics in this section, including his message of "nothingness," the fear of success, shadow banning, the Hallow Effect, and the controversy surrounding IQ tests. He also talks about the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, which revealed that traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence are much more common than previously thought and linked childhood trauma with health and social problems in adulthood. The study also found that addiction and obesity are solutions, not problems, and that child abuse is the greatest medical issue in the world. The professor emphasizes the importance of protecting children from adverse influences and the critical role of mothers in personal development and growth in the first two years of life.

Next thing is fear of the unknown. Negativity, negative emotionality constricts the world and constricts life, limits it, makes it smaller. As it makes it smaller, it’s more controllable, more manageable and it’s more known.

And this fear of the unknown, if you adopt positive emotionality, then you are adventurous, you’re open to new ideas, you are open to conversation and debate, you are open, you’re open. To be open is to invite the unknown and the unknown is very frightening.

There’s also a fear of commitment, of responsibility. Success is a trap because when you succeed, it implies that you need to be committed and responsible for your success. You need to perpetuate it, you need to maintain it, you need to propagate it, you need to enhance and increase it.

Any rock star will tell you that his biggest liability is the fans because the fans make the map and any successful YouTuber will tell you this. The fans have expectations, they make demands and you have to conform or you lose your popularity. Success or if you build a business and the business is suddenly extremely successful, you’re trapped. You’re trapped because you have to work in the business 20 hours a day and that’s a good case.

So this fear of commitment and responsibility that come with success. So negativity leads to failure and freedom. Negativity is freedom. Negativity on the other hand, provokes frustration, aggression and alloplastic defenses, blaming others.


Okay, now, a pro-ponegativity, one comment about shadow banning. In one of my last videos I said that shadow banning is a conspiracy theory and of course I received another lunch from everyone and his IT dog informing me that shadow banning is very real.

I didn’t say that social media don’t have algorithms which downgrade the exposure of certain channels, certain personalities and certain messages. Of course they do. They downgrade the visibility and the accessibility of bots, automatic bots, of hate speech, of disinformation for example about the pandemic. So of course there are mechanisms in place to remove people from harm’s way. Conspiracy theories are subjected to the same thing. Truth telling is becoming more and more crucial on social media and lack of insanity and inanity and of course violence, aggression, all these are demoted.

So if you want to call it shadow banning, call it shadow banning.

But the normal sense of shadow banning is not this. The normal sense of shadow banning is that social media target politically incorrect people or people with whose political views they disagree, like for example republicans in the United States, conservatives.

And this is utter conspiracy theory. It’s utter nonsense.

So no one is shadow banning me.

The reason I have very few views is twofold or maybe threefold.

First of all, I’m high for looting. I use academic terms. I’m inaccessible. Many people don’t understand the word I’m saying, though they like to pretend that they do. It’s part of grandiosity.

And the second thing, I don’t provide solutions. I only analyze problems.

So in a way my message leads nowhere.

Okay, we got the picture.

Now this is very bad. Now what?

I rarely provide solutions, while all others provide solutions.

And finally, I’m a bad content maker. I don’t know how to make content. It’s not that I don’t know how to make content. I know how to make content, but I don’t bother.

So my content is shoddy, wise, and I wear the same shirt all the time, which I think is the main reason why the viewership is so low.


Okay, I had the most amazing conversation with an Indian. I don’t know if it’s an Indian guy or an Indian girl. Their names are very gender challenging. So I have no idea who I was talking to.

But someone wrote to me from India. And he told me that, do you know why I don’t watch you? Do you know why I watch other YouTubers, other coaches, other professors? Do you know other public intellectuals? Because they care about me. You don’t care about me.

So I asked him, how do you know that he mentioned two names? Or he or she mentioned two names.

So I said, how do you know that they care about you? Did you talk to them? Did you correspond to them? Did they show any specific interest in you? Did they send you money? Did they help you get to get a job? In which way had they demonstrated to you that they care about and not, for example, about your money? Because he bought products and services for both from both channels. And when I say he bought products and services, I’m talking about thousands of dollars in each channel.

So I said, how do you know they care about you and not, for example, about your thousands of dollars that you gave them? How do you know they’re not faking? How do you know they’re not acting? How do you know they’re really empathic just because they say so? Just because they pretend to care? I can pretend to care. I, what you see is what you get with me. I am unvarnished. I have no makeup. Thank God. I am totally truthful. I’ve always been totally truthful. I’m the first person ever to have admitted that he’s a narcissist ever in human history.

So at least with me, you know what you’re getting. But with these two, how do you know that they’re not faking it and they’re not taking you for a ride? How do you know that they don’t mock you behind your back and think you’re brain dead for giving them your money? They’re selling all the time. You know, you can’t, I mean, there’s their advertisements, there’s advertising on their YouTube videos. They promote resorts, they promote books. How do you know they don’t want your money?

And then he or she said something very interesting. She said, I don’t care if they’re faking. I don’t care if they’re faking because faking takes effort. If they’re faking, they are investing in faking. It still means that they care about it. They care enough to fake. They care enough to pretend.

Yes, they want my money. So they care about my money. But this care somewhere, even if the care that I spot, the care that I detect is not about me as an individual. It’s about something else. There is still some caring. There’s still some concern. There’s still some interest in me, in what I can give them, in the interaction.

You he said to me, don’t show any care at all. You don’t care for me and you don’t even care for my money. You hold me, she said to me or he said, you hold me in such contempt that you don’t even bother to fake like they do. And there’s no difference between you and them, he said. They want money. You want narcissistic supply. But they, for my money, they give me a lot in return, a lot more than you do, because they give me a sense of well-being, they give me solutions. They give me access to a community. What you give me, he said, is humiliation and arguable knowledge that I can find by myself with a search on Google. I don’t need you for that.

He said, show me that you care. By the way, I had another comment that said the same. Show me that you care. Show me that you care.

And if you don’t care about me, show me that you care about my money because I worked hard to make this money. Show me that you care to provide me with a community. Show me that you care enough about something. I don’t exist for you, he said, except maybe as a source of supply. I’m not sure of that either. I’m transparent. When I come to your channel, I feel transparent. I feel that I’m made of air. It’s a horrible feeling. You annihilate me.

And he said, well, being, because I said, well, you’re self-deceiving because I don’t care about you. You care about your money.

He said, well, let me tell you something.

Well-being that is grounded in self-deception is better than misery found in the knowledge that there is nothing you can do and that you’re helpless and that you’re an idiot.

And this is your message. Your message is you’re too stupid to be alive and there’s nothing you can do about it and nothing you can do about your life and nothing you can do about your relationship.

What’s your main message, he said, no contact. What is no contact?

He’s giving up. He’s walking away. You’re a defeatist.

He said, I don’t get well-being from you. Every time I watch one of the videos, I want to cut my wrists.

Your message is so overwhelmingly dark and negative that it drives me to suicidal ideation. And then I go on another channel and yes, it’s fake and yes, it’s pretension and yes, it’s acting and yes, you know what? It’s not substantiated by research and most of it is nonsense, but it’s our nonsense. It’s common nonsense. It makes me feel fuzzy and warm and accepted and wanted. If not wanted for who I am, wanted for what I have, money.

You don’t want me. You don’t care about me. You don’t even care about my money. I don’t exist for you. I’m a fleeting figment and you block me and you delete me callously and carelessly as though I were nothing but a YouTube channel.

So this was a fascinating conversation and he taught me that people prefer self-deception to reality.

What I sell is reality and unmitigated reality, unadulterated reality, 100% guarantee, money-back guarantee reality, and people don’t want that.

They want to feel good. That’s why they drink alcohol. That’s why they do drugs. That’s why they associate with the wrong people. That’s why they have relationships with predators.

They want to feel good and they don’t give a fig if the good feeling comes from reality or if it comes from a show, a theatre production.

They don’t care if the people in their lives are genuine or if the people in their lives are there because they want something.

Because in their minds, if someone wants something for you, he cares about you. It’s a form of caring. You know what? Not caring. It’s a form of being seen.

When these coaches and self-styled experts and empaths, whatever, want something from them, want their money, for example, they feel that they are being seen. They are being noticed. They feel that it endows them with real existence.

If I want money from you, suddenly you exist. Suddenly I see you. Suddenly I notice you and suddenly I cater to your needs until I get your money.

As long as you have money, I will continue so there will be a relationship of some sort.

People want connectedness. They want to be alone. I don’t give this.

I give you harsh reality and only harsh reality.

Yes, I don’t believe every problem has a solution. Yes, I don’t believe you can change most of the time.

Yes, I do think that the overwhelming vast majority of you are not the brightest stars in any conceivable galaxy to use a serious British understatement.

We come to it a bit later when we discuss IQ.

To prove this, I’m getting an avalanche of comments how hot I am, how sexy I am, and how wonderful my hair is, and how handsome or very handsome I am.

Are the majority of these women legally blind? Are they inebriated, drunk, senseless?

Because if you look at the screen, if you really, really focus, I look like an obese, desiccated lizard after a seriously bad night of binge drinking, and I’m being charitable to myself. I’m one ugly mother who can say I’m hot or sexy or handsome.

Why are you saying this? You’re saying this because you are idealizing an authority figure, and this is known as the Hallow Effect.

I want to discuss the Hallow Effect and the celebrity cult in a few words.

The Hallow Effect simply means that once you excel or stand out in one field, people automatically assume that you are an authority in other fields.

Every film star is a political pundit or an expert on the Kabbalah. Every vacuous celebrity is a philosopher, and every philosopher is a vacuous celebrity. Every athlete has solid views about economics.

The cognitive bias known as the Hallow Effect is a crucial pivot of malignant egalitarianism. The Hallow Effect is when we make implicit or explicit assumptions about the skills, talents, erudition, intelligence, experience, circumstances, and prospects of someone because of their looks or accomplishments in unrelated fields.

The internet created a universal Hallow Effect.

Everyone now has access to information, and everyone is empowered to publish and broadcast. Everyone can gang up with like-minded others. Everyone can act.

And so you see professors of psychology talk about issues that have nothing to do with psychology. And you see philosophers talking about economics and economists talking about politics. Everyone now feels like an instant celebrity, a combination of Einstein and Aristoteles, qualified to pass judgments, express opinions, and give advice, omniscient and omnipotent.

In other words, everyone is narcissistic.

In such an environment where everyone is an expert, there are no experts. There are no facts. There’s no truth, no benchmarks, yardsticks, or absolutes. Everything is relative.

I have my fact. You have your fact, alternative facts, truthisms. Everything is up for grabs.

Your version of reality is as good as mine. There’s nothing I can ever teach you.

The mobs of aggressive, intellectually challenged people, the majority of the denizens of cyberspace, they deter true intellectuals and scholars. True intellectuals and scholars avoid the internet like the plague, I can tell you this, of the 10 foremost experts on narcissism, myself included, excluded, okay? The 10 scholarly academics, all 10 don’t have a YouTube channel.

The awning abyss between academe and the community is larger than ever.

Misinformation, disinformation, sheer nonsense, and patent insanity, for example, in conspiracy theories, they have become indistinguishable from true knowledge, discoverability, discovering good things, quality things. That’s become a major problem when 3 million books a year are published on Amazon alone, Amazon Kindle.

Everyone, his dog, his cat, his chambermaid, his housekeeper, his neighbor, and his two-year-old kid, they all write books and publish them because they have what to say, you know?

In contradistinction to what I just said, I want to quote a comment that I had received from one of you, and I will make it a habit in each of my videos and try to quote a comment from one of you which I find valuable and insightful, and this is today’s comment.

This is M. Griffith. I have no idea what the M stands for.

So, he says, this was such a thought-provoking analysis. Thank you for posting.

The idea that a narcissist could be a child with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, who later develops hyperactivity, makes me wonder whether or not the false self could be a sort of special interest.

Since people with autism spectrum disorder are prone to fixations and often cannot stop thinking about or talking about their special interest, it wouldn’t be too far a stretch to consider the narcissist’s devotion to building and maintaining the false self as analogous to, say, an autistic child who is devoted to building computers.

He, she says that the false self may be a special interest of an autistic child, because autistic children tend to focus on something, on mathematics, on building computers, on some activity or some discipline, and they become what used to be called the dior savant.

In other words, they become geniuses, but geniuses in a very narrow slice of something.

So, the author is suggesting, the author of his comment is suggesting that perhaps the false self is such a special interest.

Extremely, extremely fascinating idea.

He continues in the comment, special interests are also known to reduce overwhelming anxiety and can make the child feel unreachable, because the child is always in their heads thinking about the special interest.

It sounds suspiciously similar to the false self.

I also have heard that many women with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder can easily be misdiagnosed with borderline personality disorder, because they share similar traits, like alexithymia, black and white thinking, and mood lability.

Plus, DBT, dialectic behavior therapy, is known to help people with autism spectrum disorder as well. DBT is the choice treatment for borderline.