 The survivors of my previous videos today will have known that I described a mechanism. It's called entraining. It's the mechanism by which the narcissist induces a hypnotic trans-like state in his victim or prey or one of the intimate partner or future source of narcissistic supply. This is done in the love-bombing and grooming phases. It starts then, but it continues throughout the relationship. Entraining technically is when an external stimulus like music or warrants speech create a brainwave frequency that is identical to the brainwave frequency of the stimulus creator. So there's someone who creates a stimulus. His brain has certain waves with certain frequencies and via the stimulus he induces an identical brainwave in the recipient. When the narcissist verbally abuses you, when the narcissist talks to you, when the narcissist love-bombs you and grooms you and generally gaslights you or creates an ambience or creates an atmosphere using words or sometimes other means, visual means, even music. When the narcissist bombards you with stimuli, he does this in order to induce in your brain a wave with a frequency and characteristics identical to his. He wants you to mirror his brain. He wants your brain to become an extension of his brain. The landscape of brainwave frequencies in his mind, he wants to replicate in yours. In a way, you become a zombified mirror of the narcissist. It's technically a dissociative state. It's a hypnotic trans-like state. Regrettably, that hadn't been studied so much. I couldn't find a single video online discussing and training this process of inducing identical brainwaves. But I think this is the major technique of the narcissist. Now someone made a comment, a very pertinent comment for a change. What happens when the narcissist does it to his children? Well, that's a serious problem. The brain's neuroplasticity overcomes almost everything. Abuse, trauma, they're all encoded in the brain. They are encoded via proteins, which represent memory, and they are encoded in the way that neurons brain cells connect to each other. This is called neuronal pathways. But the brain is luckily neuroplastic. We can rewire and reprogram the brain to create new pathways and to get rid of many of these memories, either by repressing them or by denying access to them in some other way. So this all can be reverted to original form. And training is not forever. It's a it's not a permanent state. It's a transitional phase. But when it's done to children, I'm not quite sure whether this is totally true. I think the damage done to children is much more permanent than the damage done to adults. First of all, adults have many more defenses. They have experience. They have highly developed cognitive skills. Most adults are emotionally regulated, not dysregulated. But children, people with borderline personality disorder, co-dependence, they will be very, very susceptible, like the virus, you know, susceptible to the virus. They'll be very susceptible, very amenable to modification via entraining. I think the narcissist sometimes homes in on these vulnerabilities. People who are, for example, victims of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, complex trauma, victims of complex trauma are rendered temporarily borderline. They display narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors and traits, and they are indistinguishable from borderline. It is in this window of opportunity, as far as a narcissist is concerned, when the person is most vulnerable, most broken, most damaged, most sad, most destitute and devastated, it is then that the narcissist homes in, zeroes in on your vulnerability and can entrain you most efficaciously. So vulnerable people, from children to victims of complex trauma, from borderline to co-dependent, they're all natural victims of this technique of entraining, but and I, before I proceed, I want again to recommend the book The Brain's Way of Healing, Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity, by Norman Deutsch, DOIDGE. Now, still co-dependence and borderlines are particularly susceptible to narcissists. That's a well-established fact. My good friend, John Lachkar, decades ago, in the 80s, had written the seminal groundbreaking book Borderline Narcissistic Couples, now in its second edition. So, even then, back then people were noticing, clinicians noticed and psychoanalysts, noticed the extremely strong bond between narcissists and co-dependents, narcissists and borderlines. Today, it's known as trauma bonding. Somehow, somewhat erroneously, by the way. But they noticed the bonding. And I think the reason that narcissists bond especially strongly with or co-dependence actually bond especially strongly with narcissists is because they have common ecological roots. The psychogenesis or pathogenesis of narcissism and co-dependency is one and the same. It's the same developmental route. And so it's like both of them have been subjected to the same pathogen, to the same virus, or to the same bacterium, the bacterium of childhood trauma and childhood abuse. There are two possible pathological reactions to childhood abuse and trauma, co-dependency and narcissism. And they both involve fantasy as a defense mechanism. The co-dependent has a pretty realistic assessment of herself, but her view of others is fantastic. Yes, she assesses herself pretty, I mean, she knows herself pretty well. But when she looks at her intimate partner, she idealizes him. That's the process of co-idealization that I mentioned in the previous video. The narcissist is exactly the mirror image. The narcissist's self-image and self-perception are delusional, grandiose, unrealistic. This is exactly where his reality testing fails. The co-dependent has a realistic assessment of herself. The narcissist has unrealistic assessment of himself. The co-dependent has a view of others that is fantastic. But the narcissist's penetrating view of others is blood-curdingly accurate. The narcissist has cold empathy. He sees others exactly as they are. He knows what are the chinks in the armor, how to penetrate, how to intrude, how to manipulate. So they complement each other. She idealizes the narcissist and he sees in her the penetration points that allow him to make her idealize him, to force and to coerce her to idealize him. They constitute a symbiotic, a symbiosis. They are a symbiotic relationship, in a way a little parasitical relationship. He knows to push her buttons so that she ends up idealizing him. Pathological narcissism is a form of addiction to narcissistic supply. The narcissist is caught in a kind of conundrum of his own making. On the one hand, he considers himself superior, godlike, above the madding crowd, etc. But on the other hand, to maintain his inflated, grandiose, fantastic sense of self-worn, the narcissist is objectively, humiliatingly dependent on constant input from people, which he considers vastly inferior to him. Imagine if you were, if you're life dependent on people, you detest. And that's the narcissist predicament. His very coherence, his very identity, his cohesion, his core, his kernel, the fact that he can get up in the morning depends crucially, derives, derives crucially from input, on input from people that he holds in contempt. He is contemptuous towards the very foundations and funds and sources of his own existence. He clings to people. He is needy, but he hates them. He resents them. And then he hates himself for his dependence. And this leads to bounds of approach followed by bounds of avoidance. A repetition compulsion. We discussed it many, many times. So here's the narcissist and here's the co-dependent. Both of them were abused in childhood. One developed a solution. The other one developed a mirror solution. Yet they both are branches of the same tree. It is exactly because they are branches of this tree that the narcissist resonates powerfully with the co-dependent and her needs. That's why he has access to her like no one else. That's why he can entrain her and brainwash her and condition her like no one else. Like dependence, people with dependent personality disorder, co-dependence depend on other people for their emotional gratification and for the performance of both inconsequential and crucial daily and psychological ego functions. Co-dependence seek to fuse or merge with significant others. By becoming one with their intimate partners, co-dependence are able to actually love themselves via through loving others. The only way they can love themselves is to see themselves reflected in someone else's eyes. They need someone else's gaze. They need to be seen and in this sense, they're exactly like the narcissist. The narcissist cannot regulate his internal environment. He cannot regulate his emotions properly. He cannot regulate his moods properly. And above all, he cannot regulate his sense of identity, his sense of self-worth properly without input from others. Same with the co-dependent, exactly the same. Same with the borderline. Indeed, there are scholars like Rothstein who suggest that borderlines are failed narcissists. That the child becomes a borderline personality disorder person because the child had failed to become a full-fledged narcissist. So borderline is a form of failed narcissism, according to some scholars. All these people, all three, narcissists, co-dependence, borderlines, they are sides of the same coin. They are not the same. The dynamics, the psychodynamics of co-dependence and psychodynamics of borderline is fundamentally different to the psychodynamics of a narcissist because they possess empathy and they have access to their emotions. The narcissist doesn't. But in terms of their dependence on other people, for the regulation of their inner environment, they are pretty much the same. Co-dependence are needy. They are demanding. They are submissive. They suffer from abandonment anxiety. And to avoid being overwhelmed by it, they cling to others and they act immaturally. These behaviors are intended to elicit protective responses to safeguard the relationship with their companion or mate upon whom they depend. Co-dependence appear to be impervious to abuse. No matter how badly co-dependence are mistreated, they remain committed. In extreme co-dependence, the fusion and merger with the significant other leads to in-house stalking by the co-dependent as she strives to preserve the integrity and cohesion of her personality and the representations of her loved ones within it. So, when there is extreme co-dependence, the boundaries between the co-dependent and her significant other, for example, her narcissist, these boundaries dissolve. The merger is complete. And very often, the co-dependent in such a situation where she had become one organism with the narcissist, she would abuse herself. She would stalk herself and I call it in-house abuse or in-house stalking. She would kind of tell the narcissist, you don't need to do this to me. I'll do it to myself. It's the narcissist outsources his abuse and stalking to this compliant and submissive co-dependent. It kind of, she takes the burden of him. She abuses herself before he abuses her. This is where the co in co-dependence comes to play. By accepting the role of victims, co-dependence seek to control their abuses, to manipulate them. It is a dense macabre in which both members of the diet collaborate, but the only reason they can collaborate at all is because they have a common language, a common dictionary, the language and dictionary of childhood abuse and trauma. They come from the same home. They have been subjected to the same parental mistreatment. They had dead mothers or dead fathers. Emotionally unavailable. Narcissistic, selfish, depressive, sick parents and they had to parentify themselves and they had to parentify their parents. Both of them are lost children in the woods. And so when they find each other, they extend hands and they hold onto each other for dear life. The co-dependence sometimes claims to pity her abuser. She casts herself in the grandiose roles of her abuser's savior and redeemer. The co-dependence of a whelming empathy imprisons the co-dependent in these dysfunctional relationships and she feels guilt, either because she believes that she had driven the abuser to maltreat her or because she contemplates abandoning. It's a loose, loose situation. If she stays in the relationship, she convinces herself via a process called Autoplastic Defense. She convinces herself that she is the reason for the abuse. She had provoked him. She had hurt him. She insulted him. She misbehaved. The borderline does this very often. This guilt trip, self-induced guilt trips. This shame, all engulfing, all encompassing, all consuming shame. It's very typical of borderlines. Especially after a borderline does misbehaving. The co-dependence is the same. And this is one option. The second option is to abandon the narcissists, to fight for their life, to escape, to go no contact, but this also induces in her guilt and shame. Co-dependence is a complex, multifaceted and multi-dimensional defense against the co-dependence fears and needs. There are five categories of co-dependence, stemming from their respective etiologies. There's co-dependency that aims to fend off anxieties related to abandonment. These co-dependence are very similar to borderlines. They are clingy, smothering and prone to panic. They are plagued with ideas of reference, referential ideation. And they display self-negating submissiveness. Their main concern is to prevent their victims, friends, spouses, family members, from deserting them or from attaining true autonomy and independence. These co-dependence merge with their loved ones and experience any sign of abandonment, actual, threatened, anticipated, imaginary, as a form of self-annihilation or even amputation. At least co-dependence are also usually borderlines. There's a co-mobility there. A second type of co-dependency is a co-dependency that is here to cope with the co-dependence fear of losing control. By feigning helplessness and neediness, such co-dependence coerce their environment into ceaselessly catering to their needs, wishes and requirements. These co-dependence are labile drama queens. Their life is a kaleidoscope of instability and chaos. They refuse to grow up. They force their nearest and dearest to treat them as emotional or physical envelopes. They deploy their self-imputed deficiencies and disabilities as weapons. They weaponize them. Both these types, and this I would call this the narcissistic or co-dependent. Both these types of co-dependence use emotional blackmail and, when necessary, threats to secure the presence and the blind obedience and compliance of their suppliers. Then there is vicarious co-dependence. They live through others. They sacrifice themselves in order to glory in the accomplishments of their chosen targets. They subsist on reflected light, on second-hand applause, and on derivative achievements. They have no personal history, having suspended their life's wishes, preferences and dreams in favor of others. So this is the taxonomy of co-dependence. And as you see, co-dependency is often comorbid with borderline and with other forms of personality disorders. You can't really make a total distinction. The line is blurred and fuzzy. Now I know that many co-dependents deny that they have any narcissistic traits, that they have any borderline traits, but it's a very indefensible position. Take for example the co-dependent or borderline narcissists. Like you have a psychopathic narcissist, you have a borderline narcissist and even a co-dependent narcissist. This kind of narcissists oscillate between periods of clinging and other co-dependent behavior patterns, which they misinterpret as intimacy. And periods, eras of aloofness, detachment and emotional neglect and abandonment, which they regard as legitimate and the only possible manifestations of personal autonomy and space. So there is this approach avoidance, repetition compulsion. Co-dependent or borderline narcissists tend to form with their intimate partner a shared fantasy, a shared psychosis for Liadon. These are all the outcomes of their overwhelming and all pervasive abandonment anxiety. They either smother their partner in an attempt to forestall abandonment or they preemptively abandon ship, thus avoiding hurt and maintaining an illusion of control over the situation. I'm the one who walked out, I dumped her, not the other way around. The co-dependent deploys strategies, this kind of co-dependent, the close strategies such as merger, becoming one with her intimate partner while renouncing all personal autonomy and independence of both of them, up to a point of shared psychosis. There is something called co-extensivity, the ventriloquist defense insisting that the partner mind reads her and acts in ways that reflect her inner psychological states and moods. This kind of co-dependent will say, you're so insensitive, can't you see that I am sad? Or couldn't you have guessed what I wanted? She's looking for telepathy. Her partner should be dummy and she is the ventriloquist. And there's shifting boundaries using behavioral unpredictability and ambient uncertainty to induce paralyzing dependence in the partner. And finally there's another form of dependence that is so subtle that it eluded detection until very recently and it's known as counter-dependency. Counter-dependence rejects and despises authority. They are consummations. They often clash with authority figures like parents, bosses, the law, the state. Their sense of self-worth, we see many of these by the way in the pandemic, their sense of self-worth and their very self-identity are premised on and derived from, in other words dependent on these acts of braggadaccio, bravura and defiance. They are personal autonomy militants. Counter-dependence are fiercely uncompromisingly independent, very often foolishly so. They are controlling, they are self-centered and they are aggressive. Many of them are antisocial and they use projective identification. They force people to behave in ways that buttress and affirm the counter-dependence view of the world and his expectations. These behaviour patterns are often the result of a deep-seated fear of intimacy. In an intimate relationship the counter-dependent feels enslaved and snared and captive. Counter-dependence are locked into approach avoidance repetition compulsion cycles. The hesitant approach is followed by avoidance of commitment. They are lone wolves and bad team players but they are also co-dependence. So you see co-dependency is a very complex phenomenon but even in the little that I've you know in the survey of the terrain you already saw many many things in common between narcissists, co-dependence, borderlines. They are all members of the same family, their first cousins if not brothers. And that's why when they come across each other there is this feeling of a twin flame, a soulmate, a previous incarnation. There's this enormous echoing resonance that they can't feel, they can't have with any other type of person. And the reason is that the narcissist is a victim of early childhood trauma and abuse. Narcissism is a post-traumatic condition. So is borderline, so is the co-dependent. These are all traumatized people who had chosen different solutions or failed to adopt certain solutions. And yet they immediately recognize each other and they immediately share the most important thing in life, a common ancestry, a common origin. Their roots are one and the same. I want to make a few, I want now to answer a few of your of the issues you've raised or questions you've sent me and so on so forth as is usually my habit. I'm aggregating several questions at once. Toxic masculinities, the examples of which are men going their own way, in-sales, red pillars, all kinds of pillars, toxic masculinities exist. There's no point in denying them and no point in cloaking them in some form of activism, men's rights and other such nonsense. These are misogynistic, hate-filled, aggressive, defiant, antisocial, virulent movements which regrettably are recruiting more and more online and offline. And there's no point in denying this phenomena. All you have to do is go to one of these forums and sit back and lurk and read for half an hour. You don't need more than half an hour. It's very toxic, it's poisonous, it's a miasma. These are very, very sick people there. Very sick. The overwhelming vast majority of them are narcissists, frustrated narcissists, failed narcissists in the sense that they're border lines and collapse narcissists in the sense that they're gorm-oriented but counter-cognition. They're failures and losers, catalog story short. They're failures and losers with women because they're failures and losers in life, generally. And that has rendered them toxic. The poison, the poison of anger, of frustration, of aggression, of repeated slides and humiliations, these poisons, poison bubbles, sieves, festers and ferments inside them until it renders them unrecognizable. This is toxic masculinity. But make no mistake about it. There is the female equivalent of all this. It's toxic femininity. There are movements in feminism and outside feminism which are utterly toxic. They are misandrists. Misundry is men hating, exactly like misogyny is woman hating. There are many men haters. They are equally frustrated. Most of them are borderline. Very, very pathologized and sick women. And they too, they too transform their negative emotionality into an ideology. The irony is the latter wants to become and emulate the former. Toxic feminists, toxic women, when they grow up in their wet dreams, they want to become toxic men. Toxic women emulate, imitate toxic men, psychopathic men. They want, they think that to be a man, to be virile, to be masculine, to control the world, because men control the world. There's patriarchy, chauvinism, this, that. They think the only way in this man's world is to become a man, and not only a man, but an extreme caricatured version of a man, psychopathic man. So yes, I agree. I agree even with members of the monosphere who had written to me claiming that I neglected the toxic femininity part. And they are right in this sense. There is toxic femininity. A few other questions I have received. Many married women behave like virtual singles. I call them virtual singles. They are more single than an attached single. A single woman in a committed relationship, she behaves less single than a married woman who had effectively exited her marriage and is behaving like a single. For example, virtual singles are very promiscuous. Married virtual singles are women who had given up on the shared fantasy, had given up on the marriage for a variety of reasons, usually because their needs are unmet. And these needs are not necessarily connected to abuse or to misbehavior by their partner. For example, maybe they are risk takers and novelty seekers. They need novelty. They need diversity. They need to taste every dish on the menu. So a marriage by definition is the wrong framework. They need to go outside the marriage. So whatever the needs may be, they're not met within the marriage. And so these married women find themselves trapped in an arrangement which doesn't fit, doesn't suit, and does not reflect their psychological makeup. And so they wander out, they exit the shared fantasy in the marriage. They become virtual singles, virtual because they are still technically married, but they behave as singles for all intents and purposes. Here's the problem. Both men and women nowadays, both genders, want to eat the cake and keep it. They want to have the cake, but want to eat it. The men want to have free, uncommitted, no strings attached sex. Fair enough. But at the same time, they expect women to be faithful to them and loyal. On the one hand, they're hunting, they become predatory. Most men today and women are predatory. Predation is the foundation of dating nowadays. You date each other as two predators. So most men hunt for loose, promiscuous, easy women. And then when they get these women, they're shocked that these women are not faithful, that they're not loyal, that they're not exclusive, sexually exclusive. They come across women who are entitled secondary psychopaths out for diversion or borderline. These are the kind of women who would collaborate in. Or they come across women whose ethos, whose perception of sex is very relaxed. And having sex is nothing more than having lunch together. And so then they're shocked that these women perpetuate these attitudes and behaviors with other men. Women, on the other hand, offer themselves free, no strings attached, the hookup culture. And then they're shocked that men refuse to commit, refuse to invest, refuse to create families, refuse to get married. That's the situation today. Two thirds of men refuse to get married. And women are shocked. Why do men refuse to get married? Well, men refuse to get married because you are given them for free. What in the past was intimately connected with a legal arrangement of some kind, including marriage. Today you give the goods for free. Of course, no one pays for that in any way or shape or form. That's one thing. And second thing, you're promiscuous. You're entitled. You're predatory. You're psychopathic. You're not faithful. You're unfaithful. Why would a man invest in a woman, in their future, in a family? Why would a man create community property with a woman? Why would a man commit to a woman and to their future together if he cannot be sure 100% of sexual exclusivity? And can a man be sure of sexual exclusivity nowadays? No way. The statistics are unequivocal. Women cheat as much as men nowadays. This is a tectonic shift. And both women and men, over the life of a relationship, about 60% of them cheat. And these are the people who admit to it. You're virtually guaranteed that if you team up with a woman, she will end up being unfaithful. Guaranteed. Why invest in her? Why commit to her? Why get married? One of the main reasons in the past to get married was sexual availability, sexual accessibility, sexual regularity. And the second reason was wealth distribution, transferring wealth from one generation to another. But what if your children are not your own? You're transferring wealth to someone else's children, to another man's children. You can't be sure nowadays. There's no reason, no rational reason, to get married. Absolutely no. And you want to have sex? All you have to do is walk 200 meters to the nearest bar as much sex as you want. You know what? If you are seriously indolent and lazy, swipe left. Sex is around the corner. Sex is on your screen. And so women are promiscuous. There's no other word to describe it. All women nowadays are promiscuous. Women typically have like nine relationships, 10 relationships by the age of 30. These are the relationships, not counting one night stands. They're promiscuous. And 73% of all divorces are initiated by women, at which point they abscond with half the community property and the children. That's by far the worst conceivable business proposition ever, or to paraphrase the famous Donald Trump. The worst deal ever. There is no rational reason nowadays to get married because women terminate marriages, take all your property. You can't be sure the children are yours. Women are not faithful anymore. They're promiscuous. And you know what? Women brought this on themselves. They have created this new world. This is toxic femininity. They had created a swamp in which they are finding themselves. And of course, men reacted. Men reacted to this by becoming toxic. Men resented having lost hegemony, resented the demise of the patriarchy. Men hated the fact that the slaves are emancipated, that their women are no longer property. People hate change. Men and women. Change is hated, especially if the change detracts, takes away from your power, and especially if this power used to be absolute. So men are resentful. They hate women for what they have done. And so there's toxic masculinity. And today it's intergender war. The world is uni gender. You have a single gender with different genitalia. And both genders are escalating on the way to total psychopathy. And both of them are becoming more and more toxic, radicalized, escalated, separated, and divided. And even in movements which are essentially laudable, like the Me Too, you have sizable fringes of sickness, mental sickness, aggression, authoritarianism, the bad kind of define, psychopathic defiance. These movements are pathologized to the core already. This breakdown, it's called gender vertigo. This breakdown of communication between genders, this breakdown of gender as a defining role and an organizing principle and an explanatory principle. This is part of a much larger failure. Our species has failed. Our species has failed. Now it's absolutely clear. If you measure success by how many specimens of a species there are, we are a major success. There's 8 billion of us. No other species had multiplied to this extent and occupied every ecosystem and every niche on earth. No one. We are underwater. We're in space. We're in deserts. We're in jungles. We're in beaches. We are repairing on rivers. I mean, we're everywhere. And there's many of us. And we're multiplying. Forget the pandemic. Pandemic doesn't touch one week's production of new humans. We're multiplying. So if you measure it by quantity, we're a success. If you measure it by longevity, we're a success. We live longer than our forefathers, than our ancestors. But these are not the right measures of success. How long do you live and how many of us are there that is this success? No. Success is cooperation. Success is happiness. Success is the quality of life. Success is connectedness. And in all these, we have failed so miserably, like never, ever before in human history, recorded or not recorded. We are 80 crux and the nexus of absolute unmitigated failure as a collaborative social species. I encourage you to read words by Emil Dorchheim, Christopher Lash, Dorchheim, by the way, not Dorchheim, but Dorchheim, D-U-D-U, R-K-H-E-I-M, very clever Jew. Jew, really. Emil Dorchheim wrote about anomic society, suicide and so on. Very fascinating work. More than 100 years old, as fresh as yesterday's newspaper. Christopher Lash, who in the 70s wrote about rising tidal wave of narcissism in society. Eric From, I'll deal with him in a minute, sociologist, social psychologist. But before I come to Eric From, I want to mention Sapolsky. Sapolsky is a biologist, brilliant biologist, who had studied social primates, social primates and social leaps. And his expertise was baboons. He had studied baboons for at least two decades. And he has published many books and so on. And he reached, after decades of career, observing all kinds of primates, including humans. He reached a conclusion that the really only important thing is social connectedness. He discarded the view that the best predictor or prognosticator of survival is how high you are in the dominance hierarchy. That's Jordan Peterson's view, the famous lobster analogy. Sapolsky says this is nonsense. How high you are, whether you are alpha male, whether you are number one lobster, that doesn't determine your quality of life, your chances for survival, and your chances to procreate, by the way. He said that the main determinant was the networks, the social networking, the social support networks that you had as an individual in your tribe, in your herd, in your flock. It's much more important than rank. And also it's closely correlated to reduce stress and to, because stress determines many things in primates and apes, especially primates. Stress has deleterious effects on the body, on the mind, and social connectedness reduces stress. Sapolsky said that we have too much leisure, too much leisure time, and we don't know what to do with it. So we torture each other, simply. That's our fun activity. All you have to do is go online trolling, attacks, flames, I mean people externalize aggression. Social media were built around this principle of externalizing aggression. So he said that we have too much leisure time as well, but if you're socially connected, the stress created by too much leisure time is substantially modified and reduced. Happiness, he said, is not connected to material goods. It's connected to having social support, to having a meaningful life with a goal or a belief, a faith of some kind, to having structure, to having predictability, attribution, control over threats and challenges. And these are, of course, the elements we see in various coping strategies, functional, but also dysfunctional, religion, for example, and addictive behaviors, addictions. They both provide all these, but I and many others think that they are highly dysfunctional, as religion involves delusions and addictions involve serious damage to mind and body. But putting these two aside, if you are able to create supportive social networks of succor and love and empathy and engulfment and kindness, if you imbue your life with meaning going forward, first structure, this is far more important than how rich you are, how famous you are, and what is your position among the other lobsters. I will read from Eric Fromm. He wrote one of the most important books of the 20th century, Escape from Freedom. He published, I think, the first edition in 1941, a year before Cleckley published his seminal book on psychopaths, The Mask of Sanity. These were the years of miracles. Eric Fromm says, there is only one possible productive solution for the relationship of individualized men with the world, his active solidarity with all men, and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties, but as a free and independent individual. However, if the economic, social and political conditions do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. Freedom then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission of some kind of relationship to men and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if such a relationship deprives the individual of his freedom. He said, freedom by itself is a bad thing, it's a burden because it creates uncertainty. When you are free, you have no certainty, you have no security, you have to choose that sardis and Kierkegaard observation that the need to choose in itself creates anxiety, angst, and so freedom to choose, free will, the possibility to exercise free will, these potentials are frightening. And so many, many times people say, I don't want freedom, take away my freedom, I don't want responsibility for the consequences of my actions, I don't want to decide on my actions, I want to be submissive, I want to be a slave, slave mentality, slaves are free perhaps, slaves are the most free people because they are free of the burden of choice, the need to decide and the responsibility that come with it. And this is from this message and this is the only way to ameliorate the terrifying aspects of freedom is if there is active solidarity with other men and there is kind of involvement in activity, love and work, and this way to unite yourself with the world, you become one with the world and so the world is not so threatening anymore. It's another way of, it's the same message like supposed to, where you are in the world, who is under you, are you alpha male, how many people you control, how many lives you determine, that's a, that's a stupid game, simply a stupid game. Important is, are you happy? You could be a multi-millionaire, you could be a president, you could be anything, a rock star, are you happy? Are you happy? And what these people have discovered, there's much more happiness in nothingness than in somethingness and that's my, that's been my message for a very long time, I've made a few videos about, choose nothingness, not in the sense that choose to become nothing, not in the sense of choose to abrogate your responsibilities, not in the sense of choose to disappear, give up on the world, no, choose nothingness in the sense that you emphasize being in existence, that your focus is internal, never external, that you don't derive any important internal functions from the outside, not your self-esteem, not your self-confidence, not your sense of self-worth, nothing become a self-contained, self-sufficient unit, not in the bad sense, like I don't need you, but in the good sense, in the good sense that I fulfill all my needs, now how can I help you? That's nothingness, nothingness is not that you withdraw from the world, is that you let the world withdraw from you, Eric Fromm postulated that there are eight basic needs, transcendence, he said that humans come to the world and no one asks them if they want to come to the world or not without consent, you know, and so when they come to the world that they find themselves in the world and they never give consent to be in the world, they feel, you know, pissed off, you didn't ask me if I want to be born, just brought me to the world and so he said that destruction, destroying people or creating people, creativity and destruction are two ways of somehow coping with this sudden appearance in the world which is non-concentral, malignant aggression, killing, gratuitous killing, not for survival, or creating something and then caring for it, all these actions are somehow trying to cope with presence in the world and transcend it, he said that the second need is rootedness, rootedness is the need to establish roots, to feel at home somewhere, with someone, at some time, productivity and depends crucially on rootedness, growth, personal growth depends on rootedness, rootedness is another word for self, safe base, the security of a mother, good enough mother, rootedness starts with a mother, if a mother is dead, emotionally unavailable, narcissistic, depressive, absent, you can't have rootedness, you don't have a safe base, you have nowhere to go back to and so some people who has had a good childhood, a healthy childhood, they grow, they grow, they separate, they individuate and they tackle the world on their own terms, others become fixated, they are afraid to move beyond the security and safety of mother or mother substitute, that's a proposed shared fantasy, the third need is a sense of identity, we all need an identity and identity can be a bad thing, we can acquire an identity by opposition to others, we hate someone and that's our identity, we can conform to a group and suspend our individual existence, engage in groupthink or do things we would never do on our own just because the group sanctions it and gives us a blessing, so conformity is a sick way of acquiring identity and the productive way is individuality, of course there's a middle ground, collective, the collective, one can acquire certain identity elements by belonging, the problem starts when all of the identity is determined via group affiliation, that's where it becomes sick, the fourth need is frame of orientation, understanding, creating a theory of the world, a theory of one's place in the world, the theory of other people, creating theories that work about what's happening to us, excitation and stimulation is another need, to be active, to strive, to be goal oriented, not to be totally passive, not to be totally responsive, unity, a sense of oneness between one person and another person, one person in nature, one person in the world, some people say one person in God, unity with something, you need to exit yourself, you need to belong to something bigger than yourself, it could be simply your intimate partner, it doesn't matter, but you need this, if you remain confined to yourself solipsistically as a schizoid that's a pathology, it's a pathology because it leads to severe dysregulation, we need input from the outside feedback to calibrate and regulate, and finally effectiveness or as we call it today, self-efficacy, it's the need to be accomplished or at least to feel accomplished, to derive from a reluctant environment outcomes which are beneficial to us, which are productive, which further our interests, which secure our survival, okay this was from someone asked me why do I constantly attack neuroscientists and geneticists as grandiose, well that's a very surprising reason to it because they are grandiose, neuroscientists and geneticists, they are, these are very young sciences, they are absolutely just starting, they are the inception of their science sciences and I'm not even sure these are sciences yet, they barely have a hammer and they see a nail everywhere, everything is a nail because they got themselves a hammer and not only they got themselves a hammer but they claim it's not a hammer, they claim it's something much more sophisticated, these are very primitive branches of science at their beginning and what they don't know dwarfs what they do know, I will give you one example, I gave many in my other videos, we'll give you yet another example, the science news published the following, a mother's mouse's gut microbes help wire her pup's brain according to new study, the new results point to the influence of specific microbes and the small molecules that they produce called metabolites, metabolites from the microbiome of the mother, in other words metabolites produced in the intestines of the mother, in the intestines there are bacteria, the bacteria secret or create tiny molecules called metabolites, okay, so metabolites from the microbiome of the mother, from the gut flora of the mother can influence the developing brain of the fetus says Catherine Nagler an immunologist at the University of Chicago, the metabolites do this by reaching a developing pup's brain where they affect the growth of axons, the thread like signal transmitters of nerve cells, let me get this straight, in the intestines of mother mouse there are bacteria known collectively as microbiomes, they produce molecules called metabolites about which we didn't originally and these metabolites modify the brain of the fetus yet again we come across proof that a lot of what we had considered either to be brain functions actually is happening in the intestines, serotonin, serotonin is produced mostly in the intestines not in the brain, so we don't know and to claim that we know to find the gambling gene, aggression gene, narcissism gene, dopamine pathway, these are the ramblings of immature infantile pseudo scientists who want to become instant celebrities in the mass media, serious scientists would never do this because they know how much they don't know, I will end by demonstrating to you how everything we know today about codependence of narcissists about psychopaths had been known long ago, we didn't use the same words but the essence had been known very very long time ago, I'm going to read to you excerpts from two literary works, the first one is American Notes for General Circulation, Charles Dickens had visited the United States and survived to tell about it in 1842 that was his first visit, he visited the States a few times, the first time was in 1842 and he came utterly shocked, he came back to the United Kingdom where slavery had been illegal for a while, he came back utterly shocked, not utterly shocked by slavery but utterly shocked by the justifications for slavery and here I want to read to you a pretty lengthy excerpt and in this lengthy excerpt you see how the inimitable Charles Dickens characterizes codependence and then psychopaths and then narcissists, brilliant, okay so he's discussing people's attitudes to slavery, he says the first are those more moderate and rational owners of human cattle who have come into the possession of them as so many coins in their trading capital but who admit the frightful nature of the institution in the abstract and perceive the dangers of society with which it is fraught, dangers which however distant they may be or however tardy they're coming on are as certain to fall upon its guilty head as is the day of judgments, this is the codependence, the second and now he's describing psychopaths, the second group consists of all those owners, breeders, users, buyers and sellers of slaves who will until the bloody chapter has a bloody end will own, breed, use, buy and sell slaves at all hazards who doggedly deny the horrors of the system in the teeth of such a mass of evidence as never was brought to bear on any other subject and to which the experience of every day contributes its immense amount, these are people who would at this or any other moment gladly involve America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its soul and an object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery and to whip and work and torture slaves, unquestioned by any human authority and unassailed by any human power, these are people who when they speak of freedom, they mean the freedom to oppress their kind, to be savage, merciless and cruel and of whom every man on his ground in a republican America is a more exacting and a sterner and a less responsible despot than the Caliph Harunal Rashid in his angry robe of scarlet, the perfect description of psychopaths and now he comes to the Nazis, the third group and not the least numerous or influential is composed of all that delicate gentility which cannot bear a superior, cannot brook an equal of that class whose republicanism means I will not tolerate a man above me and of those below none must approach too near, whose pride in the land where voluntary servitude is shunned as a disgrace must be ministered to by slaves and whose inalienable rights can only have their growth in negro wrongs. Is it the interest of any man to steal, to gain, to waste his health and mental faculties by drunkenness? Is it the interest of any man to lie, to forswear himself, to indulge hatred, to seek desperate revenge or to murder? No, all these are roads to ruin and why then do men tread these roads? Because such inclinations are among the vicious qualities of mankind. Blot out your friends of slavery from the catalogue of human passions, brutal lust, cruelty and the abuse of irresponsible power of all earthly temptations the most difficult to be resisted and when you have done so and not before we will inquire whether it be the interest of a master to lash and maim the slaves over whose lives and limbs he has an absolute control. Wonderful, beautiful description of the three types of essentially personality disorders and now here's a description of a narcissist. A description of a narcissist from the book The Sixth Great Power, a history of one of the greatest of all banking families, the House of Bearings, 1762-1929. There's a description of a narcissistic woman for a change. That other bearing tear, the second lord Ashburton, was equally remote from the bank. Thomas Carlisle thought he found little pleasure in his new glory. He is immensely rich but having no children, Carlisle says, describes this second lord Ashburton. He says he's immensely rich but having no children and for himself no silly vanity, I believe does not in the least rejoice in such a lot. Poor fellow, he looked miserably ill the day I called on him. One could not but ask oneself thinking of his income of 60,000 pounds a year. Alas, what is the use of it? So this is how Carlisle describes a very rich man who is not a narcissist. He's not a narcissist and he's unhappy because money can't make him happy. Vanity, he has no vanity, he has no grandiosity. Carlisle continues. We're talking a text from the 19th century. Carlisle continues. His gloom was possibly induced by his wife, Harriet, who knew only too well what was the use of 60,000 pounds a year. One observer called her, perhaps the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day. She was intelligent, quick-witted, with just enough education to pass for a blue stalking and enough vivacity to pass for a wit. She was anxious to shine in the high aesthetic line and turned the ground, the place where they lived, into a menagerie where literary lions like Carlisle and Thackeray grazed among politicians and assorted grandees. So she associated only with high society. Her main defects were arrogance and a propensity for conversational bullying so marked this as to verge on sadism. Let me read this again. This encapsulates and captures the essence of sadistic narcissism. Let me read this to you again. That's a woman. Her main defects were arrogance and a propensity for conversational bullying so marked as to verge on sadism. I don't mind being knocked down, complained one of her victims, but I can't stand being danced upon after a knockdown. Anything to do with the bank seemed to her tedious and common when the wife of a new bearing partner, Mrs. Russell Sturges, asked to be introduced to her at the party. She replied in a dawdling tone that she must decline as she had already been introduced to two ladies of the firm. But she made sure that her guests enjoyed the best. What impressed an American visitor, Mrs. Lawrence, when she visited the grunge, was not so much the resident physician, the groom of the chambers, a butler and underbuffler, the spectacular silver, and the turkeys stuffed with truffles. What impressed Mrs. Lawrence, the American visitor, was the fact that at breakfast, the boiled eggs were marked with a day of the month in which they were laid. The author is Philip Ziegler. The title is The Sixth Great Power, a history of one of the greatest of all banking families, the House of Bearings. Highly recommended because this woman, Harriet, is a great description of a narcissistic woman, which is rare. Whenever we discuss narcissists, we tend to masculinize them. We tend to discuss male narcissists. But of course, 50% of all narcissists are probably female. Used to be 25%. But in the past 30 years, it became half enough. Now the genders are equally represented among narcissists. And women are catching up very fast on psychopathy as well. Congratulations! We are on the way to a good place, no doubt.