 So, for some time I've been drawn to want to know more about narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder, I think for a number of reasons. And also for me there was something in there about this topic and links to social media. And so I decided that I would reach out to the world's foremost leading expert on this, the grandfather of narcissistic research, Professor Sam Vaknen, who very kindly agreed to come on the podcast this week. I went into this thinking that I was going to learn more about a mental health issue. But what I soon, soon began to realise was that this is bigger than that. This is so much bigger than that. This is, to use Sam's word, narcissism is more than just a mental health issue or personality disorder. It's an organising principle of our culture and our society. It's a primal drive. That is where this episode just goes. It pervades parenting, education, media, social media, politics, governments, all of it. Once it begins to sink in, it's pretty huge. In this episode Sam talks in great detail about the dynamics and mechanics of narcissism so you truly understand that. He then goes into discussing the mechanics of social media and the links between social media and narcissism and that is really quite chilling. He then goes on, and this is where it gets big, he then goes on to talk about why narcissism is the one true religion, decentralised, networked religion. He then finishes with two key parts. One is an invitation to leave our requirement for answers and the need to answer things and to revert our attention towards focusing on asking better questions and then the second thing is to consider our own hubris and open up to our own humbleness as a human being. This isn't easy listening but it's necessary listening. You can see during the episode just how it sank in for me and two days later it's still doing the same. It's one of the weightiest podcasts I've done but probably one of the most necessary ones. So enjoy Sam. Hello and welcome back to WA Reel. I'm your host, Bryn Edwards. Today I have the great pleasure of talking to Professor Sam Vaknen. Sam welcome to the show. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. Just for our viewers of this, you are over in Macedonia right now. I'm in North Macedonia, the name has been changed a while back following a 20 year conflict with Greece. So I'm in North Macedonia. So for people who may be unaware, you have extensively studied and talked and explained about narcissistic personality disorder dating back to the 90s with your book Malignant Self Love. You could almost be considered the grandfather of this topic, is that correct? Yes, unfortunately age wise I think you're right if not wisdom wise. One of the questions I always like to ask guests, particularly guests who are such experts in field, is why is this so pertinent to you? Narcissism? Yes. Well, I don't like to dwell on my private life so I'll just mention it in passing. I've been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, I've been diagnosed twice with narcissistic personality disorder and it goes through my thick skull the second line. And then I said, well, you know, I need to look into this. And I tried to look into this and to my dismay, consternation and utter shock, there was almost nothing about the topic. There was Zygmunt Freud who coined the term in 1915 that there were a few studies by Kohut, brilliant genius by Kohut, but within the framework of a bigger concept called self psychology. And then there were snippets of works by Kernberg and others, but essentially nothing and all of it coming from one school in psychology, which frankly has been somewhat discredited and is no longer taught in universities and so on. So I was utterly in a state of shock. And I said, I'll try to represent my inner experiences and outer interpersonal relationships and interactions with people. Social interactions, other, I'll try to describe these. And then I came across the first barrier. There was no language, there was simply no words. Now we know that language words create consciousness, or as my esteemed colleague Jordan Peterson would say, language creates being. And there was no language, there were no words. So I had to invent a whole language. This is the language in use today. About 90% of all the words in use today to describe narcissism were actually invented by me in 1995, not because I'm such a genius, but because there was no way for me to talk otherwise. And that's how it all, that's how it all started. So many people will be aware of narcissists who looks and gazes at his reflection in the mirror and the myth and the story that goes with that. But what is, let's get to the root of it to start off with. What is narcissism? What are some of the mechanics and dynamics around it? As usual, the Greeks have said it all, and we are just kind of rehashing. First notice that in the Greek myth of narcissus, who was a youth in Greece who was condemned, he was cursed to fall in love with his own reflection. There was a goddess who cursed him to fall in love with his own reflection. First of all, it's a curse. It's not a blessing. It's a curse. It's a hindrance. It's a disability. It's a problem. It's an illness. There's no positive word that can be associated with narcissism. It is not, like many narcissists say, an evolutionary advantage, a positive adaptation. It is not like many current scholars suggest a high functioning, a high functioning adaptation to modern civilization and modern society. It's rather the other way around. Individual narcissists have created civilization and society in their own image and rendered it equally dysfunctional, not the other way. So of course, within a dysfunctional society, dysfunction pays. It paid to be a psychopath in Nazi Germany. It was an adaptive strategy. So that's the first thing, the curse, the element of the curse. The second thing in the Greek myth, the guy falls in love with his own reflection. It's a very important distinction. He does not fall in love with himself. Narcissism is not self-love. Narcissism is the love of your own reflection via the medium and the agency of other people. And here's the problem, because you want your reflection to be perfect and brilliant and omnipotent and omniscient and godlike and et cetera, et cetera. You force people, you coerce them, you threaten them, you blackmail them, you manipulate them into providing you with exactly this reflection. And when they deviate from this grandiose, perfect reflection of yourself, you punish them, you abuse them, there's no tolerance, there's zero tolerance in narcissism. The sources of narcissistic supply, the people surrounding the narcissists must provide them with only one kind of reflection which he dictates. It's like the famous joke, if I want your opinion, I'll give it to you. It's about the same thing. If I want my reflection, now here it is. That's the second element in the myth. And the third element in the myth is the youth. Pathological narcissism is a reaction to early childhood abuse and trauma. Now there are many scholars nowadays who would dispute this. They would say it's not true. We can find what we did find in clinical settings. Many people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder who had not gone through, who had not experienced childhood abuse. The problem is with the scholars, not with narcissism. It's like the famous joke with Albert Einstein when they ask him, what happens if the light doesn't obey what you say, what's in your theory? Is it when the light has a problem? So it's the same here. The scholars have a problem. Scholars have a problem because they define abuse too narrowly. They take into account only classical forms of abuse, like physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological and verbal abuse, et cetera. Now these forms of abuse, of course, exist. They're egregious. They're horrible. They should be eradicated and countered and everything, all the slogans. But they're actually a tiny minority of the abuse experienced by children. Children much more often are subjected to the second type of abuse, which had been identified by Karen Hormay in the 40s. And that is when the child is put on a pedestal, idolized, spoiled, pampered. And so the child's boundaries are breached. They are breached and he's not allowed to separate from the parent. He's not allowed to individuate, become an individual. And very often he is forced to parentify. He's forced to actually act as the parent to the parent. And so there's a lot of ambient insistence on. So these are also forms of abuse and many narcissists, most narcissists actually, go through this route. As children, they can do no wrong. As children, they are not disciplined. As children, they are not exposed to reality. As children, they are not able to evolve and grow and develop psychologically. And especially they are not allowed to become autonomous, separate from the parent, individuals. Because the parent is in himself or herself immature and narcissistic. And she wants to merge and fuse with the child forever. She wants to render the child an extension of herself or an elemental construct within her own psyche. So it's intergenerational immaturity, propagated via abuse that masquerades, masquerades as love and caring. That's the most pernicious form, most pernicious form. Because as I listened to you there, what are some of the modern features of modern parenting? You can be everything, you can do it all, put you on a pedestal. We don't, you know, medals for just participating in things like that. Is that all part of this wider definition of abuse that you're talking about? Not only modern parenting, but the modern education system, especially in some countries in the West, I'm alluding to the United States mainly, have taken this form of abuse and ratified it and elevated it and rendered it a principle of action and organizing principle and a hermeneutic principle, principle that imbues life with meaning. So today it's not uncommon for a teacher to tell the children you're all special and if you only put your mind to it, there's nothing you cannot do, magical thinking. Pathological elements in narcissism and pathological elements generally have become the curriculum and the syllabus and the agenda of the modern family and modern education system. Now, if you ask me, which you don't, but I'm going to ask anyhow, if you ask me, why? I'm kidding. I mean, my right sense of humor, it's Blair, it's Jewish, it's British. It's English. I think I should ask you as well, yes. Yeah, I mean, you might as well go take a stroll. I'll ask myself, I'll argue with myself. Come on, keep going, keep going, Sam. So I think in the case of parents, modern parents, there's a lot of shame and guilt because modern parents feel guilty and ashamed. Take for example, divorced parents. There's an intolerable load of shame and guilt for having disrupted the family unit and family environment. They're trying to overcompensate for this. Even parents who are still together, monogamy nowadays is under enormous stress, enormous stress or stresses in multiple. And so there's virtually no functional relationship left. All relationships are subject to friction and dysfunction and so on. And most relationships nowadays last two to three times longer if they survive, two to three times longer than a hundred years ago, which puts them under absolutely torsion and to the breaking point. So children feel this, parents know that children feel this and they're trying to overcompensate. The whole thing is overcompensation. Now the education system caters to the rising tide of narcissism in society, societal collective narcissism. Education system simply, especially the education system in the West where it's utterly commercialized and privatized. Even public education systems in the West are essentially commercialized and privatized. So they respond to the wishes and the needs of the client. Very similar to social media, you know? Everything adapts to the collective mindset and there is no question. Studies by Twinge, studies by Kembo, studies by numerous others. There's no question that our civilization and especially the younger elements in our population are much more narcissistic than let's say in the 1980s. Five times more, actually. Narcissism is the defining psychological moment in the individual and in the collective nowadays. So obviously education system adapted to it. So did politics, so did technology, so did technology, so did show business. We'll get into technology business later, but we'll get into technology and show business and politics later. No, what I'm saying is education is not an exception. Everything adopted. And that's really interesting because one of the questions I wanted to ask you is because it strikes me that even the word narcissism seems to be more prevalent in the modern day vernacular. And I wanted to know whether, so to use our example here in Western Australia, people are more scared of shouts in the ocean because we go looking for them more because we have more drones and we have things to look out for them because they're a threat at the beach. So therefore you become more tuned and more aware. So one of the questions I had for you and you've sort of answered that now is narcissism become more prevalent because we've started to, because you created the lexicon and we can now look for it with a lot more clarity or is it a function or is it a symptom of a slightly, well, not slightly a dysfunctional world unity that we start to live in now? As much as I would love to take credit for these mega, mega social trends, it would aggrandize me and elevate me, make my day. Unfortunately, I cannot. Although the statistics are pretty impressive. In the first nine years of the existence of my website, I've had 120 million unique visitors from 190 territories. Makes me sound like the coronavirus. I've been, it's like the message was out there big time within the first nine years. I mentioned in the first nine years because my website and my support groups were the only ones for nine years. The second one was in 2004. So for these nine, in these nine years, 120 million people visited the website at a time when the internet was in its infancy in its inception. So you can imagine the impact. And yet unfortunately I cannot take credit or debit for what's happening today. The studies are unequivocal. There is an inherent integral innate rise in narcissism, especially among the younger generations. Today adolescence is defined 15 to 25. In this age group, there is an explosion of narcissism. There's an equal explosion of narcissism above the age of 65 in the population group above the age of 65. An explosion of narcissism entitlement and commensurate behaviors, for example, infidelity. And there is the baby boomers are an interesting case because I think with the baby boomers, narcissism was there, but now the fact that we are more sensitive to it renders them more visible as narcissists. But narcissism is really rising among the very young and the very old, these two population groups. There is an interesting fact here. These are exactly the two groups where social media prevail. These are the two groups that provide the growth, the engine of growth in social media up to 25 and over 65. And in these two, narcissism is absolutely supernova. There's no other way to describe it, like five times higher among college students in the United States. So, again, these are just helping me to clarify. Is there almost a level in these behaviors that is healthy and helps us to function? Or is it just, as you said earlier on, a curse, a curse set of behaviors, curse set of beliefs, curse set of personality? Do you understand what I'm asking? Well, narcissism, like everything else in life, is a spectral, of course. Now, the fathers of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychology and psychodynamic theories and object relations theories, this gigantic group of schools of psychology. The fathers of all these suggested that we all have healthy narcissism, that there is a phase of narcissism in infancy. It's called primary narcissism that is indispensable for personal growth and personal development. I will just mention briefly an example or give a taste of why it is indispensable. For the baby, for the toddler, to let go of mommy and explore the world, the baby needs to be grandiose. The baby needs to assess risk incorrectly. The baby needs to feel immune to the consequences of his actions. The baby needs to be impulsive, defiant. In other words, the baby needs to be, not only a narcissist, but I would say a psychopathic narcissist. The first act of separation and individuation with the baby when the toddler leaves mommy's leg and ventures out two meters and then runs back in panic. These two meters are the longest two meters in his life. Never mind how often he travels later. These two meters are the longest because they are the unknown. They are the terra incognita. They are the monster. They are the, you know, and to venture out there, you really need to be grandiose. You need to feel godlike. Yes. So this is an example of our healthy narcissism helps us to explore the world. Right. Similarly, Jung linked intimately, healthy narcissism with a process called introversion. As opposed to Freud, Freud said that introversion is a bad thing, essentially. Jung said, no way, introversion is a very good thing. This way when you introvert, when you look inside, you are able to put together all the disparate elements inside you. And when you put all of them together, when you constellate them, you create the self. He said the self is crucially dependent on introversion. And he proved, he had shown in my view pretty conclusively that without narcissism, introversion would be either lacking or pathological. And therefore the self would never constellate. So that's a second example from another school. The object relations, which is a third school, in object relations, relating to other people is impossible if we didn't first relate to ourselves. Or as we put it colloquially, you can't love others if you don't love yourself. You first have to love yourself in order to love others. You first have to relate to yourself as an object. If you want to relate to others as an object, because you are the laboratory, you are conducting all the dangerous experiments on yourself. What will happen if I love? Will I get hurt? Is it painful? Can I do it? To what extent can I do it? What are my boundaries with myself? So in the initial stage of personal development, there is a state of mind which is very much equivalent to multiple personality, where you are your own object of desire, your own erotic object to use Freudian parlance, your libido, your life force is directed at yourself. And only then when you feel safe, when you discover that everything is okay, nothing really, really bad happened. Only then do you dare venture out and direct some of this energy to others. So even object relations schools, they clearly say that healthy narcissism is a prerequisite. Now of course there are schools that say that narcissism in any shape or form is pathological. I strongly disagree. I think there would be no self-confidence, no self-esteem, no regulation of self-worth, no emotional regulation and no mood regulation without narcissism. And I don't want to transform this into one of my boring lectures. So I'm not going to each one of these, but there are a lot of studies and logical pathways leading from one to the other. In general, internal regulation, or regulation of the internal space environment critically depends on healthy narcissism. And then what happens is, if your narcissism remains infantile, if it remains that narcissism of the six months old, if it remains that narcissism of the two years old, then you're in trouble, then you're a pathological narcissist. Healthy narcissism grows and matures with the adult and becomes what Freud called secondary narcissism. So to wrap it up, in a way, I agree with those I strongly disagree with. They say narcissism is bad. Yeah. Any narcissism is bad. And I say they are right and they are wrong because adult narcissism has nothing whatsoever to do with infantile narcissism. You might as well call it some other name, self-love maybe. It's a totally different phenomenon. So it's the infantile narcissism that turns into the curse. Yes, that's the curse. And other scholars have written about it. There's a famous book called the Peter Pan Syndrome. Peter Pan, you know, people who refuse to grow up. And long before that, there was a whole group of psychologists and they came up with the concept of where are eternals, the eternal adolescent. They all put their head, yesterday I read, is there a booklet, a series of letters about the poet, Percy B. Shelley in Britain. And one of the letters says, there's some problem with this guy, with this poet, you know? He strikes me very much like a boy, you know? It's old. It's old. We all knew about immature childlike people who refuse to grow up. Yes, unhealthy narcissism. Yeah. And I've known people who I've referred to as Peter Pan. Yes, Peter Pan's. They refuse to grow up. Peter Pan explicitly says in the book, I refuse to grow up. I don't want to be another. He says so. It's not like it emanates from the book but it's a clear statement of principle. By the way, The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry book, The Little Prince. The Little Prince is very much the same. He extols the virtues of remaining an eternal child. As he says that otherhood sucks. They have a point coming to think of it. He's probably onto something there. He's probably onto something. So if I was an everyday person listening to this, how do I almost overtly spot or sense a narcissist in my everyday interactions, whether it be in the workplace or within a friend group or something like that? There are numerous red flags and warning signs and so on. I'll start with the basic thing, gut instinct. Yeah. When you're with a narcissist, we have documented in several studies a phenomenon called uncanny valley. You feel uncomfortable and you don't know why. You can't you put your finger in. It's like something has gone awry. Like this person has been misassembled. Something went wrong in the assembly line, you know? It's like an off, some note is off key. Like there's something fake and wrong, but you can't put your finger in it. Because the narcissists are adept at putting on a facade of perfection. So this is the first thing, your gut instinct. You feel something's wrong. You feel something's fake. You feel this confiture. Probably you're in the presence of a narcissist or a psychopath. Second thing, narcissists would relapse and remit remission to childlike infantile, not childlike infantile states. They would act the adult for six hours and then there would be a pause or a break in the meeting and you'll be witnessing a spoiled child. So they have these flashes of spoiled brat, spoiled brat flashes. The third thing is cognitive deficits. They're gonna make the most inane nonsensical statements which would stun you and shock you. I'm not talking about conspiracy theories. For example, conspiracy theories are inane statements but they're inane statements founded on some rationalities of logic, some progression, some cause and effect. I mean, narcissists would make utterly, at least in Wanderland, inane statements. And the reason is they lack empathy. They can't gauge the environment and other people and they have cognitive deficits. They filter everything to uphold and buttress their grandiosity and whether it doesn't fit, they rejig it sort of. So these are the three I would say that maybe a fourth and I'll let you go. The fourth is, narcissists mistreat people gratuitously. They abuse gratuitously. So they would abuse the waiter. They would abuse the cabbie. They would abuse the maid. They would abuse, I mean, they would just abuse for the fun of it. And there would be no rhyme or reason to the abuse. It's not like they're gold-oriented, like the psychopath. But they would just abuse and then they would forget about it and they would also be very much at a loss. What had they done wrong? I mean, they would then rationalize and justify everything and so on. So if you see someone mistreating, especially service people, mistreating them for no good reason, it's an excellent mark of narcissism. And so service people aside, you mentioned that this concept of narcissists apply. Obviously, the supply has to come from someone else because they're not giving it to themselves. That's the question. Did narcissists spend much time by themselves? Well, let's correct a few misapprehensions here. Narcissist supply was a term coined in the 1930s by a psychoanalyst. I took it, I appropriated it in good narcissistic fashion. I appropriated it and imbued it with utterly new content. So today's narcissistic supply is my work, but the initial I owe the credit to this guy. So, and the second amendment, narcissists are capable of providing themselves with supply. Of course they are. They have whole routines, inner dialogues, inner monologues and so on and so forth ready made to supply themselves. So for example, memories, they recall the moments of glory and victory and triumph or they would construct situations which would aggrandize them all by themselves and so on. Actually, narcissists spend a lot of time alone. They have a pronounced schizoid streak and the reason they spend a lot of time alone is because they're trying to avoid narcissistic injuries and even worse phase of narcissistic injury called narcissistic modification. Narcissistic modification can be life-threatening. It's a very dangerous situation where all the narcissists defenses crumble and he's skinless and he's triggered and traumatized to such an extreme extent that he can become psychotic, lose it, or he can even take his own life or so it's very, very, so to avoid the triggers that might bring on narcissistic injury and modification, narcissists very often withdraw from life, from society, from sources of supply and sort of gather force and they use this time to construct a new scheme and new strategy for obtaining narcissistic supply. So they may go into hibernation as an economist and emerge from hibernation as a philosopher. They think, oh, now I can get supply as a philosopher. So, I mean, they help with economics. So they also use these periods to scout for alternative sources of supply, groom these sources of supply via love-bombing and other techniques and bring these sources of supply into their lives. The sources of supply are people, simply people. And sources of supply have several critical functions, the most critical of which is what I call secondary narcissistic supply. Secondary narcissistic supply is very simple. The source of supply has to memorize. It's like an external hard disk, external memory. She has to memorize all the moments of glory, victory and triumph of the narcissist and recount these moments to him when he is down on supply. So her main role is to regulate the flow of supply. When he is down, she floods him with supply. When he is up, he doesn't need her. And when he's up, he tends to ignore the source of supply. He neglects her, he abandons her. But then he runs short, he runs low, he runs deficient on supply and suddenly she's in love with his life. And her role then is to remind him how great he is, how omnipotent, how niche, how he beat his, so he regularly supplies. Is there any particular characteristics of the people that they draw from? No, that's another myth online. Unfortunately online, something like 90% of the information is misinformation. And that includes information preferred by people with academic degrees who discovered that they are experts on narcissism because there's a lot of money. I am very, very, very, very aggravated by the onslaught of charlatans, crooks, con artists, including ones with very, very high academic degrees, no integrity. And many of these people have published nothing in the field of narcissism, never studied narcissism, never researched narcissism, never were involved with narcissism. And yet from one morning to the next, they had become leading experts on narcissism and they spew out inordinate amounts of nonsense, misleading nonsense. So... This is a phrase that gets banded around a lot nowadays. What? Nonsense? Just a phrase. Yes, there's money in it. It's a cottage industry, there's money in it. So it attracts unscrupulous people, so-styled coaches, victims become coaches, dogs become victims, become coaches. And academics who suddenly realise they can make a lot of money by lying and pretending to be experts. It's a very... Tell me further about coaches because it strikes me that there's an absolute proliferation of people who want to help. And whilst on one level, you know, we all want to help our fellow citizens and neighbours and brothers and sisters, et cetera, et cetera. It's turning into a bigger and bigger industry and there's something about it to go back to your first warning sign. There's something about it for me personally that just feels a bit awkward. One cannot and should not, of course, generalise. There are authentic people out there. But unfortunately, and no one knows the sin as well as I do in one way, if you wish, I had created the sin. So I would say with full responsibility that nine out of ten, nine out of ten, are out for the money. And of this, perhaps half have no idea what they're talking about. And this is pretty unique to the sin of narcissism. If, for example, you compare the sin of borderline personality disorder, there's a lot more substance and a lot more scholarship. And it's a lot better founded. And these people refer to literature a lot more often. So you have giant forums of people with borderline personality disorder, the families and so forth with a million members, for example. On Reddit, the forum on Reddit is about a million members and so on. And these people, I go through the threads and I'm not welcome there because my view of borderline is very deep. So it's not that they are my friends, so to speak. I'm absolutely not welcome. And yet I appreciate them because they often quote articles and I mean, they're serious. In narcissism, you find people with doctors, with PhDs making stupid, stupid videos like the dark glare in the narcissist's eye or how the narcissist's eyes become metallic when he hates you or say these seven words and demolish the narcissist or how to take revenge. These are people with PhDs. Shame on them. Shame on these people because they are a disgrace to the profession. The absolute charlatans, dilatans and con artists, I have no other way to describe this. Most of them never read a single paper or book on narcissism. They conflate and confuse terms. They use failed narcissists instead of collapsed narcissists, for example, many of them, which is a prime indicator that you had never read anything about narcissism. It's really bad. It's accessible out there. And it's accessible out there for one reason. When you study borderline, you're studying a mental health phenomenon. It's limited to this, the illness and its effect on the sick on the patient and on the patient's human environment. His family, his workplace, et cetera. That's borderline. Bipolar, the same. Schizophrenia, the same. Narcissism is not only a mental health issue. It's an organizing principle of society and culture. It imbues our existence with sense and meaning. It serves to interpret political moves so people characterize Donald Trump as a narcissist. And that explains a lot of his behavior and decisions. We are no longer talking about mental illness, therefore, we're talking about a political tool. Bloomberg, when he became a political candidate, hired a self-styled expert on narcissism to understand Donald Trump. I was approached by the Biden campaign to become their advisor, for example. So narcissism has permeated other areas which have nothing to do with mental health and which are very lucrative. For example, there are people who advise Hollywood on narcissistic characters in movies. There are people who advise political parties on their opponents and adversaries. There are people who participate in designing or redesigning the education system to reduce narcissism. Narcissism is everywhere. Narcissism is an organizing principle of society and culture and modern civilization. And it is an explanatory principle. It makes life meaningful and full of sense. And that's why it's contaminated and adulterated. The money, it corrupted everyone in this because you open a channel, a YouTube channel, to help victims. And before you know it, you're inundated with offers to give lectures and seminars to groups which are not victims, whose members are not victims. But for example, political operatives or education professionals or health care professionals. I participate in numerous international conferences which have nothing to do with narcissism or even psychology. But they want to hear my view about narcissism because it affects their profession. This is the issue. No one invites an expert on borderline personality disorder to advise the Democratic Party in the United States. No one. This will never happen. And such a contract could easily be half a million to a million dollars. It's a lot of money here, sloshing around. Money corrects. Wow. The all-pervasiveness into the culture that you've just demonstrated with that answer is... It's almost chilling. It is chilling because it brings into the game people who not only have no idea what they're talking about, but they are, in many respects, psychopaths. Even if they are not psychopaths clinically, they behave antisocial and psychopathically because to start with, they know they don't know anything. I have correspondence with one of the leading luminaries of narcissism on life. Correspondence, writing, in writing. Telling me, because we used to be friends. And it's not Richard Grant before anyone begins to speculate. Richard is actually one of the good guys. Richard does a lot of research before he says anything. It's someone else. And I have a letter from this guy telling me I have no idea of narcissism. I never heard of narcissism. But there's a lot of money in it. Tomorrow I'm going to open a YouTube channel and declare myself an expert on narcissism. It's an academic. I have a letter. I mean, I am not speculating. So it's really bad out there. It attracts, or even normal people become psychopathic because they become color-oriented. They become antisocial. They lie. They cheat. They con. It's tempting. It's seductive. Not only the money, but the power because if you have a channel with 300,000 or 500,000, suddenly you are someone. You're a celebrity. You're, I mean, if you read Jordan Peterson's book, Peterson's book, there is about four pages if I counted correctly. Detailing in intricate minutia, how he rose to stardom on the internet. Quora, it gives numbers. On this and this date on YouTube, I had 18 million views. On this and this date, 7,000 people upvoted my Quora post. On this, this man is aggrandized and elevated and inflated by his newfound celebrity, having been an obscure middle of the road or even low end of the road. Academic who contributed very, very next to nothing to his field. Although he made a few contributions. I'm quoting him, by the way. I'm quoting him in my, but he was not, you know, he was not Zygmunt Freud. He was, you know, one of the middle character. But suddenly YouTube made him a celebrity. It's difficult to resist. Difficult to resist. I also have tens of millions of views on my channel. And I'm a narcissist. I should have been the guy who is doing this. I should have, I should have been the one telling the victims, yes, you are victims and your abuser is horrible. I should have been the one compromising the truth, my truth, in order to become popular. I never did this. I'm now in the midst of a campaign attacking an unsensical new word, empath. And empaths are a very, very big, vociferous, vicious group of people. You don't take on the empaths unless you are truly committed to the truth. I am committed. What was he like? He described what are empaths, just so we're clear. Empaths are self-styled, self-aggrandizing. Self-declared victims of narcissistic abuse. And they claimed that they had fallen victim to narcissistic abuse because they are wonderful, kind, inordinately nice and empathic people, but inordinately is the keyword. Yes. It's not like saying, listen, I was a nice guy and a kind guy and I was taking advantage of it. That's okay, it happens often. Of course, narcissistic abuse is founded on exploitation and abuse and spotting your vulnerabilities and homing in the chinks on your armor and all this is okay. They're not saying this. They're saying we are unusually and exceptionally and inordinately and amazingly nice and kind. That's why, and they don't realize, they have such zero self-awareness. They don't realize this is a grandiose narcissistic statement. When you use the words amazingly, exceptionally inordinately, you are a grandiose narcissist. These people in all likelihood are covert narcissists who have been out narcissized by overt narcissists. They definitely behave like covert narcissists. If you go to their forums, they are vicious. They're sniping. They're passive-aggressive. They are aggressive. They are horrible people. I'm sorry to say this, as a collective, absolutely horrible people. And so I'm on a crusade against these people because, you know, empaths. Of course, needless to say that empathy is not a word we use in academia, has no clinical meaning. It's a totally nonsensical word because every single individual on the planet has empathy. Even narcissists and psychopaths have empathy, which was recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition 5, the latest edition. The only difference is the narcissist's empathy, the psychopath's empathy, don't have an emotional resonance element. The narcissist looks at you. He analyzes you. He spots your vulnerabilities and weaknesses and frailties and shortcomings and insecurities. And then he leverages them to obtain supply. The psychopath does the same and he leverages this new found information the results of this scan, MRI, mental MRI scan. Psychopath uses this to secure goals like sex, money, take your money, take your wife, take something. So there is a goal already. But stop to think for a second. Is it possible for me to con you, to cheat you, to deceive you, to abuse you if I have zero empathy? Of course not. I need empathy to understand you. I need a modicum of empathy to realize what makes you tick, to reverse engineer you, to take over you, to body snatch you, to brainwash you. I need empathy. What happens is this. The narcissist and the psychopath have as much empathy as any empath. Perhaps even more, mind you. But it stops there. They scan you, they gather the information and it has zero emotional reasons. If a psychopath sees you crying on screen, he sees you crying. He will tell himself, he will say to himself, this guy is crying, so therefore he is sad. Now that is called cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy, analytical empathy. Cold, I call it cold empathy. This guy is crying, he said. So normal person, a healthy person would say, this guy is crying, he said, it makes me sad. I want him to not cry. I want him to stop crying. I will tell him everything will be okay, cool it. I know how you feel. You make me feel sad, please stop. That's a healthy person. A psychopath would say, great, this guy is crying, he's vulnerable, he's weak. Now what can I take from him? So, or if you want a vulgar example, a psychopath would pick up a woman and go with her to a bar, get her drunk. And then he wouldn't say, oh, she's drunk and I shouldn't take advantage of her or something. But he would say, great, she's drunk. She must be disinhibited. I can now have sex with her. It's goal oriented. That's the only difference, but empathy is there. Everyone has empathy. That's why the term empathy is idiotic, nonsensical, empty, clinically meaningless. So, thoroughly deep dived into narcissism and going right back to start, you were saying that the first component of the original story is about the reflection and falling in love with the reflection. I now understand why social media in and of itself can be such a breeding ground for this because it doesn't take a Carl Jung or a Sigmund Freud to work out that what I put online is what I want people to like, click, share. I think I saw a video of yours where you mentioned the number of selfies. I mean, selfies only just recently become a world, but the number of selfies that are posed is something like 60, 70, 80%. And in that act in and of itself, I'm going to take a picture of myself and then put that out of there. It's now like a lot of pennies are dropping for me. I've always cognitively got this. I guess I'm now sort of feeling it is that social media is a real breeding ground for this. And it's, let me ask a question. Is it specifically designed for this or has it become a byproduct or is it in and of itself? That's probably a rabbit hole. Richard Brennan and I made a documentary called Plugged In and it garnered millions of views. It touched a raw nerve. And in that documentary based on research beforehand, I made the statement that social media were designed to obtain all these nefarious and pernicious manipulative outcomes. This is supported by numerous testimonies by engineers who were involved in the design of Facebook and the design of Google, including chief engineers. The engineers will set the strategic goals in the design templates. So chief engineer of Google, there's a testimony online. You can go and watch chief engineer of Facebook, ex former, I'm sorry, former chief engineer, of Facebook openly says, we designed it to condition people, to get them addicted and so on. But you see, when you're not sure about something, follow the money and follow your common sense. Follow your common sense. Social media make money by keeping you glued to the screen. They monetize your eyeballs. This is how they make money. They don't charge you anything. It's they monetize your eyeballs. They need your eyeballs to remain stuck on the screen. So this implies two things. Number one, they will have designed their platforms to keep your eyeballs glued to the screen, stands to reason. You don't need to be a genius analyst or have insider information. It stands to reason. Number two, everything else outside the screen is the mortal enemy of the social media. So your wife is the mortal enemy of the social media. Your children are the mortal adversary of Facebook. Facebook hates your wife and hates your children and hates your friends and detests your community. Facebook does not want you to do anything else except gaze at the screen as advertisers scroll their wares in front of you. And if you break these gaze for a minute because your daughter came to hug you, Facebook hates your daughter because she just took away from Facebook half a dollar. Yeah, she took money from Zuckerberg's pocket, your daughter, when you hug her. So they will try to discourage you from being social. That's the irony in social media. I know. It's not social media. It's not a social media. These are media intended to encourage you to become solipsistic, autistic, schizoid, avoidant, socially shy, because their business model depends on isolating you. Where else do we find this kind of approach with narcissists and psychopaths? Narcissists and psychopaths groom their victims by socially isolating them. They remove the social safety nets that victims have. They cut off the victims' access to her family. They then alienate the victim from her friends. They isolate her and isolate her until she becomes 100 million percent dependent on a single source of sustenance and feedback, the narcissist. Grooming is another name for isolation. Social media are grooming you. They are teaching you. They are conditioning you to self-isolate. We have all been self-isolating long before the virus. Indeed, in that interview, I say something very chilling. It's public record. I say something very chilling. I say, social media are like viruses. And the best thing that can happen to them is if a real virus were to come along. I'm saying this on the interview. Yeah, yeah. It's prophetic almost. I'm not giving myself compliments, but it tends to reason. Who made money during this pandemic? Guess, social media. Digital platforms like Amazon. Who are also dependent on your attention. These are attention merchants. And they are converting you into an attention whore. Now they're doing this using a series of extremely sophisticated, and I have no doubt that they had been advised by unscrupulous psychologists. No doubt that some of my fraternity had collaborated with them in designing this. And they are using essentially several, I mean, several tools, but I will focus on one because time is short. I don't want to monopolize. So, and it's called relative position. Relative positioning is when you keep comparing yourself to others, this provokes pathological envy, provokes anxiety, provokes depression if you're failing. Anxiety and depression create a loop. You're trying to reduce and ameliorate your anxiety and depression. And the social media, social medium come and says, listen guy, you're depressed, you're anxious, all you have to do, all you have to do is put another post, make another video, you know? Then you get 2,000 likes, then you will not be depressed and anxious. But here's the problem with social media, the self-defeat, the self-destructive element in self-detonating element in social media. They constructed the platform to be a relative positioning platform and to create operant conditioning, not addiction. It's a big mistake. People are confusing the two. Addictions you can break. Addictions you can break. Any smoker will tell you this. Any alcoholic will tell you this. Addictions you can break. Operant conditioning you cannot break. Any dog will tell you that. At least the dogs that participated in Pavlov's experiments. You cannot break operant conditioning. So they condition you and they condition you to self-medicate, self-medicate with a platform to reduce the very anxiety and depression that they are inducing in you. And they are inducing it in you by creating endless comparisons with others in a variety of ways, numerous ways, dozens of ways. Now here's the problem and here's the self-detonating self-destructive element. You are comparing yourself, not only to other people, but to your previous self. Let me explain. Yesterday you made a post. You received 200 likes. Today you are making a post. You received 100 likes. You feel bad. You're half the person. Sorry, you're half the person. This is relative positioning with your previous selves, not only with other people. Had you been the only user on the platform, you would still be anxious and depressed. Had you been the single user on the platform? Because you would be compelled to compare yourself to your previous performance. So this is not only operant conditioning. This is self, this is improvised explosive device, you cannot escape the negative mental health consequences. Because even if the platform tomorrow, even if they were to become virtuous and remove all the comparison or relative positioning tools, like likes, even if they were to humanize the platform and convert it really to a social interaction tool, which is very easy to do. There were social media before social media, for example, IRC, IRC or MIRC. And of course there were less support groups. I mean, there were many other forms of social media before social media. And they had nothing to do with relative positioning. They were really about communication. It's very easy, extremely easy, to take Facebook and convert it into the gigantic dialogue platform in the universe. Yeah, a force for good. If they were to do this tomorrow, it's too late. Because you are already comparing yourself to yourself. They have conditioned you to compare yourself to yourself. And this has permeated and penetrated the real world. As we no longer make a distinction between the virtual and the digital and the real, cyberspace is the only space. So now in the real world, we are doing exactly the same. We are conditioned to never be happy. Now there's one mental health condition that has this feature. It's called narcissism. In narcissism, the narcissist is never happy because his expectations of himself, not of others, of himself are so inflated, so fantastic, so unrealistic, so grandiose, so perfectionist that he can never make it. He is never happy because he never approves of himself and he never approves of himself and of his accomplishments because his expectations are fantastic. Social media is converting all of us to narcissism, teaching us to develop self expectations which can never be satisfied. Today you have 200 likes, tomorrow you need 300. It's like drugs, exactly the same mechanism of drugs. Tomorrow you need 300. If you don't get 300, you're depressed and anxious and compelled to self-medicate and reduce the anxiety by posting another post and that post gets 50 likes and the situation becomes much worse. There has been an absolute supernova of depression and anxiety disorders among people under the age of 25 and among people above the age of 65. These are the two groups who have been using social media and scholars like Twenge Campbell and others, Wade, they studied the question whether there is any other factor that can explain this explosion in depression and anxiety and they found none, only one, screen time, screen time and within screen time, the main component was social media. Social media and screen exposure to screens make us all mentally ill by fostering the equivalent of narcissism and by enhancing, exploding rates of depression and anxiety. Now imagine what's happening in this pandemic. People are cut off reality, cut off the familiar, cut off their habits and cut off all the support networks. They're heavily dependent on social media which are constructed to induce, not to reduce, to induce depression and anxiety. You can imagine, in a study about six weeks ago, 34%, 34% of the other population of the United States were found to have developed new depressive and anxiety disorders, new, one third of population. Of course, the longer this lasts and the more we are dependent on social media, by the end, all of us will be depressed and anxious. These are machines for creating depression and anxiety and narcissism. I heard that. Yeah. That's me being open and honest about letting that sink in. I mean, I just, the thought of that is chilling in the fact that we're not- It's chilling, it was blood curing, absolutely blood curing. Killing is a world I've used several times now here and the fact that it's just trickling in and trickling in and trickling in and trickling in. And you know, I'm 45. I like to, I probably foolishly or not, like to pride myself on the fact that, Facebook didn't turn up until I was in my life till 30. So I still can see the difference between a friend on Facebook and what a real friend actually is. For those younger than me. And now listening to you, you know, for those younger than me who are swimming in the pool, swimming in the pool where it's already there when they turn up into life. And also, yeah, those older than me who may be less critical thinking and more, you know, why would this be a bad thing? I bow down to authority. You can see how it is just scary. And I'm just taking a moment as this all sinks in if I'm going to be on this subject. It's a, it's a problem because people are comparing social media to knives or guns. They say everything can be abused. You don't have a knife, you can cut bread or you can kill someone. You have a gun, you have a gun. You can kill, you can kill for food or you can kill. So they're saying everything is dual use. Everything is an evil side and a good side. It's not the case with social media. It's a wrong comparison. Social media were designed to be evil only. They were not designed to have dual use to be good and to be evil so that you can make a choice. I'm going to use it only in a good way. Like I'm going to use the knife only to cut bread. I will never use it to kill someone. It's a choice. With every object, there is an implicit choice of use and abuse, not with social media. Social media has taken away the, have taken away the choice from you. By the way, when you use social media, you see how little choice you have. They dictate to you everything. You cannot customize anything. It's all dictated, it's authoritarianism. If you talk about political culture, it's a dictatorship, absolute dictatorship. Including now rampant censorship. It's totally authoritarian framework. Ask yourself, the generations that have grown on social media and are used to being dictated to, you will communicate only this way. You are allowed to do only this. You are not allowed to do this. You are not allowed to use these words. You are not allowed to pose, I mean, a generation that grew up, how can they sustain democracy? How can they sustain, what concept of choice do they have? There's a big brother in California and he tells them what to think, what to say, what to do. As long as they confine themselves to cats and cakes, it's okay. But the minute they try to exercise critical thinking express opinions and so on, they're in trouble. Their accounts could be deleted. It's a massive punishment in today's world if your account is deleted. I've had my Instagram account deleted. I've had my page on Donald Trump deleted. A page which contained only works by scholars on Donald Trump academics. I didn't post conspiracy theory or any such nonsense. I'm dead set against these things. And yet the page was deleted. My YouTube videos have been taken down including utterly innocent YouTube videos on virology, epidemiology and so on. I have medical education. So in addition to everything I have medical education I'm qualified to make these videos, huh? Yeah. I mean, it's a, so you grew up to obey. It's a thought police. This is 1984. To your world. It's thought police. Book has got a different, yeah. It's all there. It's just, I think even with the censorship the thing that scares me as well is that the more with the censorship and the lack of ability to express yourself whether it's the good parts or the bad parts or whatever, the fact that we start we potentially would start to identify with this perfect reflection of ourself and try to aspire to that all the time means that we detract from actually what it means to be human which means there's good days and there's shit days. And that as somebody who found his life got like this during the end of the 30s and into the 40s in what I referred to as a midlife realignment. That was coming to terms with my shadow and I found myself reading a lot of Carl Jung and appreciating that I'd spent all my life individuating myself by saying I am this, but not that. I'm this, but not that. And then all of a sudden all those knots which had been shoved down decided that they wanted to come up and they wanted some air time. And they were all the bits I didn't really like about myself as I reached the peak of my individual, you know, what I refer to as the peak of my individual power, the latter 30s. And I feel like that's as far as you can sort of go before the shadow comes in. And there's just no space for that in this. Your whole attention is focused on a perfect reflection and then anything that starts to question the narrative is censored. So you can't explore, you can't delve into yourself. You don't even acknowledge some of the darker. They're dark because the light's not shown on them. They're not dark because they're bad. And so we're going to end up. I mean, I remember what I was like at the age of sort of 37, 38 as this blew out. And I wonder whether, you know, some of it was from being in a boys' boarding school. But, you know, whilst it was untidy, it was the most healthy and cathartic part of my life. And it was, it helped me to be in touch with being human. Now, if I extrapolate my experience of one, which I embodied and just put some of those elements out there, there's going to be a lot of bundled up and screwed up people. The way this continues. You know, I hear your part about the operant conditioning of narcissism. To me, there's also this innate lack of humanness in it. This was called, this is called, this is called inauthenticity or in existentialist philosophy. It's called bed faith. It's when you present to the world the version of yourself, which is very little to do with yourself or which incorporates only highly selective or selected and specific elements, which misrepresent you as a totality, an integrative totality. In other words, cut a long story short. When you're lying, it's simple. Pure and simple. When you lie to the world, because omission is lying as much as commission. You don't have to actively say something by not saying something. You're lying, you're equally lying. Fallacious, we are forced into fallacious existence. You know what it reminds me? You know, musicians, they have their own style. And then the musician wants to experiment with a new style. And his fans are all over him. They want him dead. They feel betrayed. You know, what's wrong with you? You are metal, hard rock. You are this. You come to classical music. You see, see? I mean, you went into classical music, you're a traitor. It's the same here. We are all, we've all been rendered mini celebrities. Mini celebrities. Someone like me would have never had hundreds of thousands of people following him. And would have never had 120 million people reading his work. Never. End of story. Never mind how brilliant I am. Of course I'm brilliant, but I'm kidding. But never. So it, it, it deformed. It deformed my psychology. Yeah. Somewhere there had I been less assured of myself. You know what, perhaps less narcissistic, less grandiose. I believe this attention would have molded me. Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo, you know, the famous French 19th century author. He wrote a book, he wrote a famous book called the Hunchback of Notre Dame. And in the book there's a chapter. And the chapter is called Compo a Chicosi. Compo a Chicosi. Compo a Chicosi were vagabonds, vagabonds. Perhaps Gypsies, Roma, no one knows. But they were vagabonds. And they were kidnapping children, babies. Sorry, they were kidnapping newborn babies. And they were putting them in bottles. And the babies grew inside the bottles. And then when they were, when they were old enough, they broke the bottle. But the baby, the child was already shaped in the form of the bottle. And they were known as Compo a Chicosi, child stealers, child thieves. Yeah. We are all in these bottles now. We're all growing inside these bottles. And even if one day we break the bottle, it's too late. We're deformed. Everyone is now a mini-celebrity. So they are afraid to experiment, afraid to be truthful, inauthentic, in bad faith, fallacious, liars, pretentious. And they have transformed all of us into con artists. Simply, this is the definition of con artists. It's someone who uses and abuses your confidence to sell you something, including his self-image. Yeah, we're all con artists. And that certainly fits in with, you know, the plethora of celebrity, or no, reality TV shows that we have, which started with Big Brother. Now in Australia, we have Married at First Sight and Bachelor and all this shite, if I don't mind saying. Yeah, I don't mind you saying. I'll just point you in, all the way at the end of it. So, what is it going to take for us to reconcile this? I mean, yeah, I mean, where's the trajectory at what? You know, I'd like to have faith in the human spirit picking in at some point, but if it's conditioned into its operant behaviors, where do you see this going, Sam? I think at some stage, people will rebel. And I think what will happen, humanity will fracture into two tribes, incompatible tribes and non-communicating tribes. Yeah, one would be people who have been conditioned and are being conditioned and willingly submit themselves to the conditioning of social media because of the instant celebrity, because of the dopamine rushes. This is biochemical to use this element because of heightened anxiety and the only way to reduce it on the accessible way social media and so on. So there will be people, there'll be a tribe of people using social media residing in cyberspace, totally digitized virtual people. Let's call them this way. Virtual people in all but carbon, they would have a carbon presence, but the carbon presence would be just a container and one should never confuse a container with a content of course. Content would be digital. These people will have been digitized. They will also have sex with digitized sex dolls. I mean, they will absolutely convert everything to virtual and digital. And already we see very worrying trends. Dating among the young has declined by 56%. Sex among the young has declined by well over three quarters. Yeah. These are the most basic interactions among young people and they are of no interest to them anymore. They prefer to play video games or be online social media and so on and so forth. About half of all communication today between people who are proximate, they sit next to each other. Half of all communication is via smartphone. So you would see two girls sitting next to each other and texting or using... I can talk about where the people are. Using WhatsApp. So with these people who would become residents of virtual reality, virtual TV, virtual space. And then there would be those of us who would rebel, not necessarily our age group. I mean, I'm older than you, but not necessarily this age group. But I think it'll be age independent. I think there'll be many young people who rebel, many old people who rebel, old-fashioned people, people with memory, pre-digital memory, like you, like me. But there will be a rebellion. I've no very little doubt about this. There'll be a rebellion. The outcome of this rebellion would be to go real. So there will be people who will go real and people who will go digital or unreal or go artificial or go virtual. So go real, go virtual. And this would be two incompatible, non-communicating tribes. And humanity will fracture in the most profound sense of the word. Now, the last time this happened was a few thousand years ago with religion. Religion did this. What is religion? Religion is virtual reality. It's a space. It's a space to which you migrate, heaven, hell, you migrate into this space. And you live in that space. You interact with God. Your behavior is dictated and directed by this virtual sphere. Religion was the precursor of cyberspace and that is exactly the enormous force of cyberspace. Cyberspace is a new secular religion. And it is coupled with yet another religion known as narcissism. Narcissism is a true religion in the classic sense of the word, not secular, true. And if you give me time, I'll explain why. And if you don't want to, then I will not. Yeah, no, actually I'd like to know the difference. Okay, so to understand why narcissism is the new religion which will overtake by storm, Christianity, Islam and Judaism and Buddhism combined. This will be by far the prevalent religion in 50 years, the religion. And it will be a religion. Cyberspace is a religious space. Similar to, for example, the religious space in the minds of people in the Middle Ages. People in the Middle Ages believed that their earthly existence, their existence of earth, their corporeal existence, their physical existence is meaningless. They believe the important life starts in the afterlife. They placed emphasis on the afterlife. So all people in the Middle Ages in Christianity and not only in Christianity, all people in the Middle Ages, they did not inhabit reality. They inhabited virtual reality. They didn't call it Facebook, they called it heaven. They didn't call it Zuckerberg, they called it God. Both of them were Jewish, so it's okay. They, I mean, they, but it was virtual reality. It was cyberspace. And they all waited, bided, bided their time on earth to get to the real game. And the real game was the afterlife. That's where the action was. You were sentenced to spend 40 years here in the shithole, but the real thing started after you died, you had died. And that's why they invested in ordinate efforts here on earth to secure their place in the religious cyberspace of heaven and hell, intelligences, the concept of sin, building cathedrals over hundreds of years, over centuries. These were projects intended to secure the foundations, if you wish, the technological foundations of afterlife. The cyberspace of that time was called afterlife. So cyberspace of today, virtual reality of today is what afterlife used to be in the Middle Ages. But narcissism is not the equivalent of heaven and hell. It's the equivalent of Christianity. It's a new religion, absolutely. Which makes me, I guess, Moses. Okay, so I'm kidding. Definitely not Jesus. I want to live long, but Moses. Seriously, I will try to explain why. Bear with me. What is narcissism? What happens to the narcissistic individual at a very early phase, an early childhood, the child experiences abuse and trauma. The child says, I can't take it anymore. It hurts. I'm in pain. I'm going to invent an imaginary friend. And this imaginary friend will protect me, will firewall me. It will be a decoy. All the pain and the abuse will go to that imaginary friend, not to me. And that imaginary friend will be everything that I'm not. I'm small, he's big. I don't know many things, he knows everything. I am powerless, he is all powerful. My mommy tells me I'm bad, he's perfect, et cetera. He's everything I'm not. Now, make a list. All powerful, all knowing, what is this? God. The child invents a private religion. Wow. He invents God. He discovers God, the false self. This imaginary friend that protects the child is God. The main function of God was always to protect humanity. People invented God to protect them because they were small and powerless and ignorant and frightened and abused by the elements and abused by others. And they wanted an imaginary friend to protect them and they invented God as does the child. The child invents the false self as God and then it's a private religion with one worshiper and one God. The God is the false self. The worshiper is the child. As the narcissist grows, his religion, his private religion becomes missionary. He's trying to recruit you to his religion. He's trying to force you to tell him that his false self is not false, that it's real. In other words, he's trying to convert you like the missionaries did in Africa. He's trying to convert you to a believer in his false self. He wants him to tell you, yes, you are a genius. Yes, you are handsome. Yes, you are brilliant. Yes, you are perfect. Your false self is not false. It's a true God. It's a God of life. It gives you accurate information about yourself and about the environment. It's a survival tool and mechanism. Believe in it, worship it. In the initial stages of narcissism, in the initial stages of narcissism, there's also human sacrifice. So already you're seeing the elements of religion. You're seeing a God-like entity. You're seeing missionary activity. It's all hallmarks of religion. And now I'll come to the next one, human sacrifice. At the initial stage, when the child invents the private religion and his new God, he makes a human sacrifice. But it's a child. He has no access to any other person except himself. So that's the human sacrifice he's offering. He sacrifices himself, the child with this new God. And he sacrifices what we call the true self. That's why the narcissist has no true self. He has no true self because early on, he had sacrificed it to this new God, to this new insatiable, voracious God. And he's left empty, non-existence. Narcissism is not a disease of too much existence. Narcissism is a disease of absence. The narcissist is a void. It's an absence. It's a whole of mirrors. It's an empty corridor with howling winds. It's deep space. There's nobody there. The self that used to be there has long been sacrificed to an unforgiving God, the false self. And now we wrap it up in the social level. On the social level, as more of us become narcissistic via technological means, otherwise education system, that parenting, as more of us become narcissistic, more of us have private religions. More of us have false gods, false selves. More of us make human sacrifices. More of us try to convert each other. Narcissism is a post-modern religion because it's distributed. It's a network religion. It's a religion with multiple gods, multiple worshipers, multiple temples, multiple shrines, multiple human sacrifices, where every god is someone else's worshiper and every worshiper is someone else's god. It's a network concept. That's because that's the metaphor. That's the metaphor we live in today. We borrowed the technological metaphor into our religion. And if you look at other religions, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, they all borrowed, they all borrowed the prevailing technological metaphor of the day. If you read the Bible, I mean the Old Testament, it's full of references to cutting edge technology of the period, plowshares. Agricultural technology is all over the book. God compares himself very often to a farmer. Worshippers of God compare themselves to plants, to seeds, to the prevailing, the dominant metaphor of Judaism is an agricultural metaphor. The dominant metaphor of Islam is the technology or technologies that facilitated nomad existence in the desert. Technology is another name for religion. Simple. We see it in social media. I'll give you a discount on therapy. I'm gonna be digesting and processing that for days. But yeah, I was following it and I just... I'm flattered. Thank you. You may proceed. Thank you, Sam. I pride myself in being able to think about things and see patterns and try to draw analogies, but that's another level that you've just gone to. Well, I've had 25 years. I had a four on you. I had 25 years of funds. No, but as I sit and listen to it, it puts it into a great, great, great context. It's because all things human, all things human are the same. We keep repeating the same things. It's different disguises. We're deceived by the costumes and the uniforms. But underneath the costumes and the uniforms, there's human bodies, human minds, and they have not changed in the last 10,000 years. They haven't changed in 100,000 years. Perhaps in a million years. We're all the same animal. Same animal. We're smarter but the same at the same time. So, what are some of the simple things we can do to keep it real other than switch the fucking screen off? Go out, date, pick up chicks. This would be a good start. You're picking up stuff. What are the conversations with people? You know, there are two conflicting kind of schools. There's the Jordan Peterson School, which says we have strayed. We simply strayed. All we need to do is go back, go back to tradition, go back to conservative values, go back to what the ancients had taught us, go back to the family, go back to structural social units, go back to monogamy, go back to traditional gender roles. Peterson is a reactionary in a good sense. Not reactionary in the bad sense. He's not advocating genocide, but he's a reactionary, a social reactionary. So that's one school of thought. And of course, Peterson is not alone in this. And not the first. So there's this school of thought. And there is a school of thought which I would call fatalism. And Jordan Peterson wrongly calls nihilism. And that's the school of thought. It says that social trends. Are there for a reason. Technologies. Ray fine. Trades and cognitions and emotions. In other words, technologies don't bring these about. They just leverage and reflect. Other much deeper, more profound processes in human populations. Religions. Another name for technologies. Religion is a social technology. So religions are also reflective. And this is true. The problem is not in social media and whether we turn off the screen or not. Screens can be useful. We have in this conversation. That's not the problem. Problem in other words is not to discard the technologies or to discard the technologies and religions. Because the only thing that will happen if you tomorrow discard the technologies and religions, we're going to invent new technologies and new religions. The need is there. The need is there. The template of human cognitions and motions and so on fears, anxieties. It's there. Something has happened to us. Not to the manifestations of us. That's where I strongly differ with Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson is a doctor who treats the symptoms. That's very nice. Of course, reduce the temperature. This is that inflammation. It's not the problem. He's describing the malaise. He says, well, we need to control this malaise. We need to reverse it. We need to. But wait a minute. How did the malaise, why the malaise came about? Yeah. Why did we choose to undermine traditional gender roles? It's bad to undermine. We can argue. It's bad. It's good. If I'm left, leftist, I would say it's very good. If I'm a feminist, of course I would say it's very good. Traditional gender roles were slavery. And if I'm Jordan Peterson, I would say it's very bad. We are, we don't know what we're doing. We are reverse. We are engineering. We are, we are destroying our future. Okay. That's legitimate. A legitimate debate. But that's not the main debate. Nor is it frankly a very important debate. The only debate that matters is why did we choose this course of action, this path? Why, for example, didn't gender roles become much more entrenched, much stronger, much more delineated and democking? Why? In times of uncertainty and anxiety and crisis, actually we tend to freeze. That's initial response. Why didn't we freeze? Why instead of freezing, we exploded everything, decomposed everything, ruined everything. What was this self-destructive? What, where this self-destruction is coming from? And is it self-destruction? Or perhaps it's not. These are the critical issues that no one deals with. Peterson included. No one is dealing with these questions. You know what it reminds me? When you go to therapy. A client comes to me and she begins to say, this and this happened. I don't give a fig about what she's saying. A fig. Because what she's saying has been filtered over many days. It's a narrative. It has very little to do with what really happened. It's fictitious in large part. It's, honestly, it's not journalism. You cannot really rely on what she's saying. That's her subjective version of the events, having been fitted through many emotional layers and history, her prejudices, her biases. So what she says is absolutely not relevant. There is a relevant question. Why does she choose this version of the events? Yes. What is her motivation to choose this narrative? And not any of another 90 possible narratives, which incorporate the various impacts. Why did she choose this narrative? This is a question facing humanity. Why did we choose this narrative? Not how do we reverse this narrative, which is Jordan Peterson's message. How do we reverse the narrative? Not what are the elements of this narrative, which is Slavo Žižek. These are secondary to my mind-boring questions. And not really important. Why did we choose this narrative? And in my work in narcissism, I am trying very hard to answer this question because I think narcissism has a lot to do with it. I think narcissism embodies somehow, directly or indirectly, the answer to the question. Why did we choose this narrative? You see, narcissism is not an intellectual analytical construct. It's not just a mental wordplay. It's not a game. It's a primordial psychological drive force. So we are going down really deep. If the answer is narcissism, we are not being flippant. Or, ah, the world is narcissistic. Everyone is more narcissistic. This is a very weighty statement. As I've just demonstrated, narcissism is a religion. And religions are by far the most profound manifestations of the human spirit and psyche. Much more than science. Science is nothing. Technology is nothing. And it's new. Science and technology are new. If they are only 300 years old, you know, religion is the name of the game. So, narcissism is a religion. Do you understand what I'm saying? It's a new religion. Narcissism is a foundational psychological force at the basis of most mental illness and most mental health. This is what we should focus. That's why I'm focusing on narcissism. Not because I have nothing better to do. In my other head, some are physicists and some are doctors. I think narcissism is the core. It's the key. And it's the answer we're looking for. If you're asking me, do I have the answer? No, of course I don't have the answer. But I have the question. I think I have the question. The question is, what is narcissism? Why we chose narcissism? Why narcissism took over? How to deal with narcissism? That's the core question. How to deal with narcissism? How to deal with narcissism? How to deal with narcissism? Everything will settle into place. Women will be women. Men will be men. Societies will function. Love will flourish. Dating will resume. Sex will become functional. Solve this. This is the virus. This is the virus. The COVID-19 virus affects the brain multiple effects. Don't treat the effects as we are doing today. Today we are treating the symptoms. Don't treat the effects. Kill the bloody virus. Suddenly everything will be okay. The brain, the liver, the kidney, everything will fall into place in one fell swoop. Focus there. I was delighted to read when I read the Peterson's book for a second time. I was delighted to notice how many times I read it. It is true. This is it. This is where we should go. This is where we should focus. But not in the coach, self-styled expert, YouTube environment. Philosophers should focus on this. Psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists. I want to know how narcissism manifested in primitive societies. Not one study. Not one. I couldn't find one. Are you kidding me? Narcissism must have been crucial to survival, especially in primitive societies. And yet, not one. Narcissism underlies sexual identity and sexual differentiation. Underlies gender roles and gender acculturation. It underlies many. It is the core of identity. And because it is the core of identity, it is the filter of memory. Memory is identity. Take away your memories. You have Alzheimer tomorrow. Take away your memories. You have no identity. So memory and identity. But wait a minute. Narcissism is the main filter of memories. So it's our identity. It's social media. Narcissism. You name it. Narcissism. People are sensing this. Politics. Narcissism. Show business. The common folk feel that Narcissism is much more than Narcissism. They feel it in their bones. That's why this gigantic online movement started. Not because of some acne. I invented the language, maybe. But really, I didn't have much to do with the movement. There are many bigger, much bigger movers and shakers there. It's a global social movement. I think it's the biggest social movement online. Because I've checked the forums and so on. Today, Narcissism is the main keyword and buzzword. Every movie, every TV series, every book I read. It's all over the place. People feel that there is something there which might sort out their lives. Might make final sense and meaning of it all. The last time they felt like this was 2,000 years ago. Or maybe 1,500 years ago. With religion. They felt that the concept of God, the organizing principle of God can make sense of their lives. Can sort out their lives and can bring them to a good place. Ironically, the study of Narcissism should not be the study of apathology. But the study of a solution. I'm not saying that Narcissism is a solution. I'm not saying that if you study Narcissism, you will find what's wrong. If you find what's wrong, you will find the cure. It's a very simple sequence. You don't need to be a genius for this. That's phenomenal. Is that with me? I am. This is Bryn's processing face. Oh. Well, you have a brain. I have a brain that makes do with us. Yes. And I have an MRI to prove it. I have an MRI image to prove it. Yes. I have my brain scan. I have proof that I have brain. The biggest thing that's coming up. Why do you think they invented the MRI? It was a strong suspicion that many people don't have brains. Indeed. The biggest thing that comes up for me at the moment is wanting to join you on the journey of trying to work out why we choose this narrative. Why are we choosing that? And to have the clarity of the question is just even in and of itself really look kind of I've just got this big It's important to phrase to formulate the right question. People focus too much on answers. It's important to formulate the questions. You see Western society, Western civilization is results oriented solution oriented. It's a fix it, fix it culture. Every disease must have a cure. Why? Every problem must have an answer. 12 rules in your life is changed. Awaken the giants. Think and the universe will arrange itself. It's all goal oriented, psychopathic psychopathic civilization. It's goal oriented. But all previous civilizations all previous civilizations they were never concerned with the answers. They did not even pretend to be to think they didn't presume to be able to discern the answers. They were very, very focused the agenda, the main agenda was formulating the right questions. So someone like Socrates Socrates was not concerned with the answers. He was concerned with the questions. So was Plato and these are the fathers but go a bit further the count. The count was not concerned with answers was concerned with questions. He actually said no answers were possible because the only certainty is that I exist. You go you go to Kant. Kant didn't pretend to have answers. He claimed that he's able to decipher the structure but then he used the structure to present questions. So did Newton by the way one of my doctors is physics. So the big fish, the great physicists, they didn't provide answers. They provided the right questions. How did Einstein formulate his theory of relativity? It opens with a question. He says what would happen if a light wave you know he didn't say listen guys now light is traveling this speed and if you do this it will be humility. We no longer have humility even if you look at public intellectuals I mentioned Peterson and Gijek I didn't mean to single them out. They are part of a subculture of public intellectuals. They are not humble. They are arrogant. They are grandiose and this is a betrayal of the concept of public intellectual. The public intellectual should not tell you what to do. Should not be prescriptive. These are the 12 rules. These are the 10 rules. These are the 7 principles. That's not okay. The main role of a public intellectual is to provoke you to think for yourself and to hope that with crowdsourcing of all these answers from a million or 2 million people and some wisdom will emerge. Some wisdom will emerge. I must admit that in the middle ages public intellectuals were a lot more honest and integral. Perhaps because they humble themselves in front of God they didn't usurp God they didn't stand in for God they were forced they were forced to be humble. Even the narcissists were forced to be humble. That was the bottom. There's God and there's you to humble. I must say in the middle ages the discourse is very futile. It's futile because you deal with imaginary entities like angels and all that but utility aside the discourse was more honest and led to much better results in my view. The Renaissance the Renaissance and modern science and so on the Enlightenment later they didn't come from nowhere. They came from the Christian tradition and the Christian tradition came from the scholasticism of the Jews in the Talmud and that was influenced by Neoplatonism in Egypt and Neoplatonism was influenced by the father and mother and I think we think Socrates Socrates and Aristoteles these two giants and these two giants were focused on framing the right questions questions to pose to other people and questions to pose to nature Aristoteles. That's the end of the story and that's how modern science operates real scientists not the ones on television chubris and nonsense not talking about these scientists the real scientists those who toil in laboratories anonymously they're humble they're humble and they focus on the questions they focus on formulating the right questions they know nature will answer ask the right question people will answer focus on the right questions don't think you have the answers focus on the questions people will answer focus on asking nature the right questions nature will answer everything all of existence is resonance but you can't obtain the right frequency if you strike the false note and grandiosity is a false note because grandiosity encompasses the question and the answer and here's a rule a rule of the universe the question is never where the answer is never if anyone tells you I have the question and the answer they're lying they're con artists there are people who formulate the questions and people who pose answers there are experiments where we pose a question and there are the answers and the answers are never never together with the questions so we lost this humility we lost this humility and our public intellectuals are not making it better our politicians are not making it better all our role models so you see in the 1950s the most desirable men there were even then there were opinion polls about desirable men in the 1940s and 50s the most 30s 40s and 50s the most desirable men on earth was Albert Einstein the Apollo of physicists he was the most desirable men on earth Marilyn Monroe wanted a child with him and she married Arthur Miller they were the desirable men they were the heart throbs and the drop dead gorgeous today who do we have reality TV stars footballers athletes singers all of them put together 100 IQ if I'm optimistic we have deteriorated it's the very last question sure the answer is no no very last question statistically it's 50% I'm right it's not a close question so very last question we'll keep it quick it's a hypothetical one I always enjoy asking my guests this question it's a hypothetical question but I always enjoy if you could take so I'd like you to bear in mind you're a very clever person I'd like you to just go with the question rather than pull it to pieces if you could upload a short piece of nuggets into the collective consciousness so everyone just gets it what would it be I think this the last one that we have lost humility we have lost a sense of proportionality and until we regain it things will get worse and worse and worse what's the virus is the virus not a manifestation of hubris in the way we treat nature we are not humble in front of nature if you are a religious person which I'm not humble in front of God we have converted God into our agent and our servant he micromanages our lives we ask him to do this and to do that and to even our prayers became grandiose and lack humility if you go to the United States evangelicals and so on they have a personal relationship with God one on one and they can summon him summon him mind you talk to him and definitely they make demands and they expecting to micromanage their puny meaningless lives and if he doesn't they are pissed off that's religion where humility should be the founding principle the pillar what can you expect in science in politics and show business and so on you have scientists in my field scientists making claims about the brain making claims about genes which are atrociously grandiose which are atrociously grandiose we know nothing about the brain nothing not a thing until ten years ago these these self-styled geniuses didn't even know that the main neurotransmitter in the brain is produced in the intestines not in the brain until ten years ago and until seven years ago they didn't know that the brain lies upon two hyper structures one hyper structure which filters spinal fluid and another hyper structure which facilitates communication they were studying the brain for 100 years they didn't know they didn't know the foundations of the brain they know nothing and yet yes of course we know to give people antidepressants which regulated the secretion and reabsorption of a substance called serotonin and they started giving people these pills 40 years ago and only ten years ago they discovered that most of the serotonin is not produced in the brain at all yes in the intestines this is the extent of hubris and antidepressants made a tremendous damage to sexual lives of people to mood dysregulation they were not a beneficial thing so one sentence be humble humble yourself Sam it's been an absolute honour and pleasure to listen to you today thank you good interlocutor patient one thank you obviously if anybody wants to hear and find out more they can go to your YouTube channel and find you there yes I have a YouTube channel and on Amazon my books etc today it's very easy no need to give links just google my name is Sam Wacken thank you very much thank you it's been a pleasure really