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1. 00:01 Altruism is just a fancy word for sharing. And no, sharing is not always about caring. Sharing can be utilitarian. Sharing could be self-interested. Sharing could even be egotistical. Sharing is a very very smart strategy
2. 00:25 because it allows you to multiply your resources by cooperating and collaborating with other people. You create a pool of available time, energy, money, you name it. Sharing is like extending yourself, like multiplying yourself, like empowering yourself. I
3. 00:52 believe that sharing is the natural state of the universe. Any physicist would tell you that atomic particles share this is known as entanglement in quantum mechanics. Any chemist would tell you that atoms and molecules share this is known as chemical bond. Any biologist will tell
4. 01:21 you that genes share and pull resources in order to translate themselves or manifest themselves in organisms. Sharing is the foundational principle of nature. In nature, everyone shares. Bacteria share, trees share, plants share, um organ, low-level organisms share,
5. 01:47 highlevel organisms share. Sharing is absolutely the dominant features of reality. Dominant dominant feature and principle, the organizing principle of reality. Selfishness, egotism is not the rule. It is actually the ex exception. It is actually abnormal.
6. 02:16 So why why did we develop this illusion not to say delusion that being selfish and being egotistical is the norm. It’s the the rule. It’s a convention and that it is society that somehow forces us or brainwashes us or conditions us to behave differently.
7. 02:39 Altruism, being charitable, being compassionate, being empathy, sharing resources are considered to be something to uh something noticeable, something loadable and commendable, but also perhaps a bit stupid or at the very best inexplicable. That’s that is complete selfdeception.
8. 03:04 That’s not how the world works. Even in psychology, sharing starts as a very early age, two years old, a bit later, and continues throughout life. And people who are selfish, egotistical, entitled, people who exclude other people, exploit other people, abuse
9. 03:27 other people, these people are mentally ill. They they have a pathology in psychology. Sharing is the dominant psychological feature. Sharing is not only the organizing principle of psychological reality of the internal landscape but also the dominant behavior behavioral principle
10. 03:54 the dominant explanatory hermeneutic principle. Sharing imbuss life with purpose, direction, meaning and goals not because of anything anything to do with morality or with ethics or with religious edicts or with the exhortations by gurus and and public in
11. 04:14 intellectuals. Not because of that but because sharing works. Sharing is a positive adaptation. It’s an excellent strategy as any mathematician who knows game theory would tell you. Game theory is about sharing and how sharing yields much better outcomes for everyone
12. 04:33 involved and how when owing for example to paranoia when we don’t share we end up much worse off. There’s no field of human endeavor or human knowledge that gives rise to the maxim that egotism is the rule. No way. sharing is everywhere from as I said the
13. 04:57 submolecular level atomic particle level all the way to societies human societies. So having said that, selfishness involves the inability to perceive the externality and separateness of other people known in psychology or in some schools in psychology as objects.
14. 05:29 You sh to share in order to share you need a sharing partner. You need a recipient of your sharing and someone who would hopefully reciprocate. Sharing is transactional. It’s it’s not um the glamorization and glorification of sharing is wrong
15. 05:53 because sharing is absolutely a form of uh primitive transaction. primitive in the sense that it is a a building block and a cornerstone of all other much more complicated forms of cooperation and collaboration not only in the on the individual level
16. 06:10 but on the collective level species level and so on. So when people do not share there is a problem a psychological problem there’s a pathology involved or a social problem or a cultural problem there’s a problem in any case it’s a pathology on multiple levels and when it
17. 06:32 comes to the psychological arena selfishness egotism the exclusion of others the rejection of others the refusal to share anything with others. A mentality of take her never giver, win, win lose, zero sum game. It’s a jungle out there. Dog eat dog. The world
18. 06:54 is hostile. People are evil. All these are paranoid ideations. They are not grounded in reality. They’re actually counterfactual. Studies show that none of these statements is correct. Not one of them. And so selfishness is a disability. Selfishness is an invalidity. These are
19. 07:14 people crippled because they cannot perceive other people as independent agents, autonomous agents. They cannot perceive other people as external and separate. There’s an absence of representation in there’s an absence of mental representation of other people which
20. 07:35 allows the healthy individual to regard them as potential sharing partners. In pathologies like narcissism and to a much lesser extent psychopathy, people are converted into internal objects. They no longer exist out there. So sharing is precluded because you
21. 07:57 don’t share with internal objects. You share with the external environment. You do don’t share with selfobjects. you share with the real people who gave rise to the self object. When the self object is the alienated, depersonalized, immature representation of another person, when
22. 08:20 the self is unintegrated, unconstillated, then it’s very difficult to share. Every resource is directed inward in a desperate attempt to maintain a homeostasis or equilibrium or to survive somehow. Healthy normal people have moments of soypism. Of course, moments where they
23. 08:44 can’t perceive other people is separate from them. They they moments where the healthy person somehow feels so alone. It’s as if the entire universe has evaporated and reality uh becomes focused on the individual. Healthy people have these moments.
24. 09:02 But narcissists and psychopaths are in a permanent state of solitism. As far as they are concerned, there are not other people out there. The narcissist believes that all other people are figments of his own mind or imagination. They’re pieces of fiction.
25. 09:21 They are the cast of a movie of which he is the director and the producer or some theater production in his mind. They’re all internalized. As far as a narcissist is concerned, there’s no sharing because there’s no one to share with. There’s
26. 09:36 nobody out there. The irony of course is in the case of narcissism, there’s nobody in the narcissist. There’s no it’s an absence masquerading as a presence. Narcissist projects this, externalizes this and believes that they are not other people. When there are no
27. 09:52 other people, when the narcissist is the sole sentient conscious organism in the entire universe, there’s no one to share with and sharing becomes is is not an option. Same to a large extent applies to the psychopath. The psychopath regards other
28. 10:11 people as objects, instruments, tools, means to an end, not as the equivalents, not as equivalents, not as um other organisms with their own psychology and wishes and preferences and dreams and hopes and so on. So these two people, the objectifying, instrumentalizing
29. 10:32 psychopath and the internalizing, introjecting narcissist, they are incapable of perceiving other people. They’re incapable of perceiving the existence, externality and separateness of other people and normally they’re incapable of sharing. So not sharing is a serious pathology.
30. 10:54 I suggest that the only way to conclude that pathological narcissism has been mitigated or amilarated is by observing the narcissist in social settings. There are many claims out there. Even prominent authorities on narcissism claim that narcissism can be
31. 11:13 treated without a shred of evidence because we don’t have we do not have randomized clinical trials uh to support this claim and we do not have longitudinal studies to support this claim, this outlandish claim frankly. And yet there it is possible to
32. 11:34 construct a kind of test which would tell us if pathological narcissism is on the retreat, if it is remitted, if it is somehow mitigated or amilarated because of therapy or because of changes in life circumstances or maybe because of the aging process. And the way to do
33. 11:55 this is to observe the narcissist in social settings. Sharing is a crucial element in the give and take in the exchange in the interactions in interpersonal relationships. If the individual no longer meets the criteria for a diagnosis of narcissistic
34. 12:15 personality disorder, it is safe to assume that the underlying narcissistic pathology is largely gone. Don’t forget that the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder especially in the DSM are mostly relational in relation to other people behavioral.
35. 12:36 So if the narcissist changes his behavior with other people for example if he begins to share and sharing doesn’t have to be selfless but sharing implies the recognition of the existence and separateness and externality of other people. If this happens, then
36. 12:56 most of the diagnostic criteria of narcissistic personality disorder can no longer be met because they are behavioral, because they are relational. And clinically, this person is no longer a narcissist, no longer suffers from narcissistic personality disorder. And
37. 13:12 that’s a powerful indicator that the underlying narcissistic set of pathologies or pathology is receding, is amilarating, is somehow on the retreat, is about to disappear or has disappeared altogether. But this is true only if we were to observe the
38. 13:34 narcissist over an extended period of time, many years. It has to be longitudinal. We have to follow up on the narcissist. Imagine a narcissist who attends therapy and then the therapist declares is no longer a narcissist. He doesn’t meet the criteria for narcissistic personality
39. 13:52 disorder. This is not a serious statement. It is not a serious statement because it’s not longitudinal. You need to follow the narcissist for the next 10 years, maybe 20, maybe 30, in order to ascertain that the change in behavior is not just an attempt to plate and please the
40. 14:13 therapist, is not just a form of manipulation, is not just an act. You need to follow up on this. And the key feature is sharing the behavioral the critical behavioral change is the the narcissist regained ability or emergent ability to share. This is easily observable. Sharing is
41. 14:37 easily observable. Narcissists never share. They only take the never give. If a narcissist suddenly begins to give or engages in more balanced reciprocal transactions, that’s interesting. And if he keeps doing it for the next 20 years, we could
42. 14:55 then safely say that a key feature of narcissistic personality disorder has been reversed or has been eradicated or eliminated. And therefore maybe the underlying narcissistic pathology is has disappeared or has become dominant or inactive or less influential.
43. 15:16 If we don’t follow the narcissist for long periods of time, such a conclusion would be speculative at best and wishful thinking or self-serving at worst. We also have to take into account lifespan impacts. Certain antisocial or dissocial and abrasive behaviors naturally abate
44. 15:37 and remit with age. This is nothing to do with therapy or and so we don’t know exactly why. It’s a debate for another time and I have videos dedicated to it. But even then the question is yes some of the clinical features have disappeared. For example, the narcissist
45. 15:56 is less defined, less reckless, less impulsive, less prone to activities which are antisocial or or asocial, maybe even less criminalized if it’s a malignant narcissist. But that is not proof that narcissistic personality disorder has is gone, that the diagnosis is gone. Negative
46. 16:18 observations absence doesn’t prove anything. So when certain behaviors disappear, it proves nothing. Only when positive behaviors emerge, only when new behaviors appear on the scene, which cannot be reconciled with narcissistic personality disorder,
47. 16:39 only then can we say that there is a fundamental profound foundational change in the individual. and only when we have followed the individual and observed behaviors over 10 20 years. And the key feature the the clinical cornerstone of all this, the thing we
48. 17:00 need to observe most diligently is sharing. In my mind, sharing is just an antonyym. It’s the opposite of narcissism. If narcissism, no sharing. if sharing non-narcissism. End of story. And again, don’t make the mistake of equating sharing with magnanimity or selflessness or
49. 17:29 um some religious um u bent of mind or whatever. Don’t don’t confuse sharing with morality or with ethics because sharing could be and often is selfish utilitarian. If you know what’s good for you, you’re going to share. As I kept saying throughout this video,
50. 17:50 sharing is the smartest conceivable strategy. Smart, intelligent, sharp cookies share. Stupid people hoard. Stupid people withhold. Stupid people avoid. And if they’re not stupid, they’re mentally ill.