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1. 00:03 You’re watching a channel on psychology. Inevitably, you’re pretty immune to or used to [ __ ] This is the topic of today’s video, [ __ ] And the question is, what are the differences between [ __ ] lies, delusions, and conspiracy theories?
2. 00:30 Are they all one and the same? Are they synony synonymous? Are they intertwined? Do they interact? Can do they go together inevitably? Or can we have pure [ __ ] also known as clinical psychology or does every liar [ __ ] etc. So today we’re going to explore the intricacies
3. 00:54 and subt subtleties of bullshitting. Before I proceed, I would like to recommend the amazing book by Harry Frankfurt and it is titled Aptly on [ __ ] A prop of [ __ ] My name is Sam Baknin. I’m the author of Malignant Self Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a
4. 01:14 professor of psychology. A few announcements before we proceed. I’m going to be in Vienna the second week of September. Those of you who want to have a face-to-face consultation with me, please write to me. My email address is in the description which is under the
5. 01:33 video. I’m not bullshitting you. Second announcement, I’m going to be in Paris soon if you would like to organize a free seminar or a free lecture in Paris. Free in the sense that I’m not charging a speaker fee. If you want to, please contact me at the same address.
6. 01:50 Similarly, if you want to have a face-to-face consultation in Paris, again, use the same tired, wary email address in the description. And finally, the last announcement for the day. We have two new websites and one new YouTube channel. The YouTube channel is
7. 02:09 not associated with me, not affiliated with me, and it contains video summaries, video shorts, and video clips of my videos. So, it’s a handy way to revisit my videos without having to endure my grating voice, thick accent, bad audio, and the background behind me.
8. 02:31 And there are two websites. One website is dedicated to transcripts, full-fledged, fulllength text transcripts of all my videos, all emphasis all my videos. And similarly, there’s another website dedicated to summaries of all my text summaries of
9. 02:48 all my videos which provide you with a gist of the video without having to endure all the aforementioned predicaments. Okay. On onward Christian and in my case Jewish soldiers into the [ __ ] storm. What is a bullshitter? A bullshitter is someone who is very high on
10. 03:09 machavelianism. Machavelianism is the tendency, the propensity and the ability to manipulate people in a variety of ways. Now, I have a video on this channel dedicated to Makavelianism. You can find the link in the description. The bullshitter uses
11. 03:28 both truths and lies. That is what’s unique to [ __ ] In [ __ ] you find elements of truth, big elements sometimes of truth and a veneer of falsity, facious veneer which kind of emanates from the kernel of truth is intimately connected to it makes sense
12. 03:52 in view of the truth. The bullshitter therefore is a con artist, is a swindler. And the aim, the main aim of the bullshitter is to manipulate you, to change your mind, to modify your behavior, to make you adopt choices and decisions you wouldn’t have otherwise.
13. 04:11 The bullshitter aims to impair your reality testing, to gaslight you, and to embed you in a narrative or a fantasy which is counterfactual, unrealistic. And so bullshitters are highly psychopathic in effect. Even if they don’t know it, if they would never
14. 04:32 acknowledge it, even if they have a self-concept as a good person, a bullshitter is a psychopath. It’s someone who has a goal. And in order to obtain the goal, he mixes expertly concoctions and cocktails of veracities and truths with lies and
15. 04:52 falsities. so as to induce the illusion that the uh outcomes or the results or the consequences of his argument or his narrative are inelectable, inevitable. When you study the bullshitter’s texts and the bullshitter’s narratives, you come across the nuggets of truth, the rocks
16. 05:17 of truth somehow. And you and this is very convincing. And people never vet, never investigate, never research 100% of every claim, of every statement, of every every hypothesis. They never do this. They venture forward forth. They check one statement, two statements, three
17. 05:40 statements. And if they all pan out and if they all prove to be truthful, they tend to trust the rest. They tend to believe the rest. This has something to do with what is known as the B rate fallacy. I will not go into it right now. So this is the bullshitter, a high mac, highly
18. 06:00 machavelian person. Liars are not bullshitters. Whereas bullshitters mix truth and lies in order to obtain some goal, manipulate beh manipulate people, alter people’s behaviors, decisions, choices and so on. The liar abures the truth altogether, gives up on
19. 06:21 the truth, renounces the truth altogether. Liars usually use only lies. The let’s put it this way. The percentage of lies in a pathological liars discourse narrative percentage of lies is much higher than the percentage of lies in a bullshitter’s narrative or a bullshitter’s text.
20. 06:46 Lies are prepundonderant. They’re very common in the pathological liars, exhortations, statements, claims, and so on. Liars are less interested in manipulating you. Many liars lie for no reason whatsoever, for no good reason at least. Many liars lie uh not necessarily in order to
21. 07:08 obtain something or secure something or change something or modify someone’s behavior or make someone adopt some decisions and choices. Liars lie because they like to gaslight. They like to shape reality to generate an alternative or virtual reality which is not always fantastic
22. 07:29 and to lead you into this reality. And the difference between the bullshitter and and the liar is in their attitude to reality. Whereas the most bullshitters actually believe the their their um stories, their fiction. Most of them believe it. Most of them are committed
23. 07:54 to the alter alternative kaleidoscopic virtual reality that they are spinning and spawning. Liars are not the same. They know the difference between their lies and the truth. Whereas the bullshitter sometimes confuses reality with fantasy. Sometimes confuses
24. 08:17 his narratives with reality. The liar never does this. The liar’s reality testing is intact. He can tell the difference between what is true and what is not. What is real and what is fantastic. In this sense, the liar is way more psychopathic than the bullshitter.
25. 08:38 And again whereas bullshitters are goal oriented and sometimes the goal is passive goal for example to avoid punishment liars are not always goal oriented. One of the things that amaze psychologists, researchers, and scholars is that most people lie or most liars lie for no good
26. 09:04 reason when li when the lies have not been necessary or when the truth is even more compelling than the lies and yet they lie because lying is about power. Lying endows and imbuss the liar with a sense of power, omnipotence, control, mastery. When you lie, you distort reality in a
27. 09:30 way that renders you more powerful than your victims. The information asymmetry between you and your listeners is such that you know that you’re lying. They don’t. And because they don’t, they’re helpless, they’re infilled, they’re weakened, they’re vulnerable, they’re
28. 09:53 susceptible. And this is where it stops with liars. In most cases, not always, but in most cases, the liar just wants to experience this ego trip, this power trip, this uh perception of himself as superior in some way, at least when it comes to information. So liars are not
29. 10:15 only highly psychopathic, they’re highly narcissistic. One could say that liar if if we have to map map these behaviors onto personality disorders, the bullshitter would be um type of psychopath but lowgrade psychopath, maybe secondary psychopath,
30. 10:36 something like that. The liar would be a malignant narcissist. What about people with conspiracy conspiracies? People who who adhere to, believe in and propagate conspiracy theories. Well, first of all, there is um a trait known as conspiracism.
31. 10:55 Conspiracism is the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories and to prefer them to reality or to the truth. People with conspiracism become conspiracy theorists. The conspiracist is very close is a close cousin of the bullshitter because what the
32. 11:13 conspiracist does he en he creates an envelope. He wraps a mound a mountain of erroneous nonsensical or outlandish deductions and claims around a molehill of truth. So at the core of the conspiracy theory, there is a grain of truth, but no more than a grain and it
33. 11:38 is surrounded by a whole beachfront, a whole ocean of nonsense, outlandish claims, inane deductions. So conspiracism is much closer to delusionality, whereas the bullshitter is not delusional. The bullshitter may conflate and confuse elements of reality with
34. 12:01 fantasy, but all in all, the bullshitter is still largely grounded in reality. The liar is always grounded in reality, knows the difference between reality and his lies. The conspiracist is already uh much further on the spectrum towards the delusional pole. He’s delusional.
35. 12:23 What do I mean when I say delusional? Let’s revert to the American Psychological Association’s dictionary defines which defines delusion this way. An often highly personal ID or belief system not endorsed by one’s culture or subculture. For example, religion is highly
36. 12:44 delusional but it is endorsed by society. So an a personal idea or a belief system which are not endorsed by the prevailing mores and conventions and norms of society, culture and civilization and this belief system or highly personal idea is maintained with
37. 13:02 conviction in spite of irrationality in spite of evidence to the contrary. Delusions may be transient and fragmentaryary or highly systematized and elaborate. And in delusional disorders, though most of delusions fall between these two extremes, in
38. 13:22 delusional disorder, the delusion is entrench entrenched. It serves as a life narrative, an organizing principle, an explanatory interpretative principle that makes sense of reality and of one’s existence. Common types of delusions, says the
39. 13:39 dictionary, include delusional jealousy, delusions of being controlled, delusions of grandeur, delusions of persecution, delusions of reference, nihilistic delusions, and somatic delusions. Data suggests that delusions are not primarily logical errors, but are
40. 13:58 derived from emotional material. They have come to represent one of the most important factors in systems for diagnostic classification. Some researchers believe that delusions may be the most important symptom of schizophrenia and I would add schizotipal disorder and
41. 14:15 schizopeffective disorders. Okay. So here we have a kind of spectrum a gradation. It starts with a liar. Actually the liar is at the very end of the spectrum. The liar is well grounded in reality. The liar knows what he is saying and what he’s doing is wrong.
42. 14:35 It’s not true. And yet he says it. Why? In majority of cases because it’s a power play. The liar wants to feel superior by virtue of having access to information. Information that others don’t. He knows that he’s lying. Others don’t. At the middle middle of the spectrum, we
43. 14:56 have the bullshitter. The butcher is a liar, but a liar who is already compromised as far as reality testing. A liar who is able to convince himself that his lies are true. a liar who embeds in his lies huge chunks of truthfulness huge chunks of reality
44. 15:19 and thereby rendering his [ __ ] believable, acceptable, even r apparently rational and logical. So that’s the middle of the spectrum. Further to the left or the right depending on your political uh inclination, there is the conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theorist is
45. 15:39 someone who is already pseudo delusional because he believes in the conspiracy theory against all odds and against all evidence and against reality itself. What the conspiracy theorist does, he handpicks, he selects various data, he puts them together in a way which gives
46. 16:01 rise to a story, to a script, to a narrative which is essentially nonsensical, erroneous, outlandish, delusional. He exaggerates data to the point that they lose all veracity or similarity or affinity with the truth. And because the delusional person
47. 16:22 because the sorry the conspiracy theories believes in his own conspiracy theories there is an element of delusionality and this leads to the very end of the spectrum with delusional people. Delusional people are mentally ill because they’re completely divorced from
48. 16:39 reality. They renounce it. They reject it. They ignore it. They suppress it. They bury it. and they live completely in a separate universe. Little princes on islands floating around the the cosmos and they’re no longer with us. Why don’t we regard religion as a
49. 17:01 delusional disorder? Because it’s widely spread and widely accepted and we believe that it’s not politically correct. you say to pathize huge swaths, huge chunks, huge groups of people and the population. But in reality, clinically speaking, people who believe in utter unmitigated
50. 17:23 nonsense like God and angels and so on are mentally ill. They suffer from a delusional disorder. End of story. religion, all the narratives adhering to religion, supreme beings, superior powers, angels, demons, you name it, all this nonsense, God and and and other
51. 17:42 inanities. These are all artifacts of an extreme, highly sick delusional disorder. And you could see the outcomes throughout human history. So that’s it. From [ __ ] to delusion, courtesy Harry Frankfurt and his book on [ __ ] Signing off, your master bullshitter, Sam Baknney.