 If narcissists are delusional, if they are disconnected and divorced from reality, how come so many of them are successful, way more successful than normal people, pillars of the community, role models to be followed? How come? Can you succeed in reality without actually comprehending it and perceiving it correctly? Is this the lesson? Not necessarily. Stay with me on this video when I propose to you an explanation. But first things first, if you want to apprehend and comprehend relationships with narcissists and psychopaths profoundly and thoroughly, all you have to do is read the book Alice in Wonderland, my favorite book of all time, bar none. Here's an excerpt from the book. Did you say pig or fig, said the cat? I said pig, replied Alice, and I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly. You make me quite giddy. All right, all right, said the cat. At this time, it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail and ending with a grin, which remained some time after the rest of the cat had gone. Well, said Alice to herself. I've often seen a cat without a grin, thought Alice, but a grin without a cat. It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life. The value and discard, yeah? Okay. On to another field of human endeavor, quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, there's something called the quantum chaishire cat. It's a quantum phenomenon. It suggests that the physical attributes and the physical properties of an elementary particle can take a different trajectory from the particle itself. This sounds deranged, but it is not more demented, not more crazy than the rest of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the physical theory that describes Alice in Wonderland and relationships with narcissists and psychopaths. So the quantum chaishire cat simply says that you can measure the existence of a particle in one location or one pathway, and you can measure the properties of that particle, for example, the spin of the particle in a totally different location. It's as if the properties, the attributes, the qualities, the traits of the particle have nothing to do with the particle they have a life of their own. And this is why it's called the quantum chaishire cat. Now this phenomenon has been first proposed by my mentor, Yakel R. Ronald, one of the greatest minds in modern physics. In classical physics, there's no such thing. In classical physics, the physical properties of an object, including an elementary particle, these physical properties cannot be detached from the object associated with them. So for example, if you have a magnet and you move it around, the magnetic moment of the magnet follows the magnet. When you move the magnet around, there's no situation where the magnet is in one place in your bedroom and the magnetic moment is in your kitchen. No such thing. But in quantum mechanics, this is possible. I will not go into the details right now, how is it possible and why is it possible and so on and so forth. Suffice it to say that it is the outcome of something known as weak measurement. Weak measurement is a problem not only in quantum mechanics, but also in psychology. Because it raises the question, to what extent can we gain information about a subject? To what extent can we study a subject? To what extent can we subject someone or something to an experiment or a test without changing it for good? And this is a major problem in psychology, because the raw material of psychology is human beings and human beings are very changeable, especially when they are subjected to testing and examination and study. Okay, we put that aside. Remember the story of the Cheshire cat? The cat vanished and left behind. It's green. I suggest that there is something which I would call narcissism, Cheshire effect. There are cat narcissists versus green narcissists. Now green, G-R-I-N, like smile, yeah? Cat narcissists versus green narcissists. Similarly, there are cat psychopaths versus green psychopaths. The cat variety, the cat narcissists and psychopaths, they focus on rewards, benefits, goals and outcomes in the outside world. They are public facing. They are outwardly oriented. So a cat psychopath would be interested in money, in power, in sex, in sex, in access, in contacts, in accomplishments, in fame, in celebrity. A cat psychopath and a cat narcissist would be focused on changing the world somehow, making a mark, transforming their environment, leaving a legacy. So they will be focused on the outside. A green narcissist, a green psychopath, green G-R-I-N, a green narcissist or a green psychopath. They emphasize how these same rewards and same outcomes and same goals make them feel. So they are inwardly directed. They are not outwardly directed. They are not after money. They are after the way money makes them feel. They are not after sex, but they are after the arousal and the excitation and the emotions during sex. So they are not focused on external outcomes, on changing the environment, on acting in and upon the environment, on obtaining outcomes favorable, usually, from the environment. They are not focused on self-efficacy, but they are focused on how these things make them feel, how these things change their inner world, affect their cognitions and their emotions. So this is a very important distinction. You can see two psychopaths. Both of them are in pursuit of money. Both of them are greedy. Both of them are avaricious. Both of them are ruthless and relentless and callous in pursuit of money and more money and even more money. And in the process, they hurt people. They damage people. They trample on everyone. They are heartless, cruel. They have no conscience, of course. They have no empathy. Both of them, but they are different. They are different because one of them is really interested in money. They are after money. They want money. They love money. They affect money. They are emotionally invested in money. Money is an external thing, something out there in the environment. The other psychopath, who is indistinguishable behaviorally from the first psychopath, the second psychopath, couldn't care less about money. The reason he is pursuing money, the reason he is attempting to hoard money, to increase the amount of money he has, is because money makes him feel secure or loved. So it is not money that interests him. It is the way money makes him feel, the way money affects his emotions and cognitions, his sense of safety, his stability of his life and so on and so forth. So this is an important distinction between the ket narcissist or psychopath and the green narcissist or psychopath. The green narcissist and psychopath lives in fantasy. The green psychopath, the green narcissist, they are invested in their internal world. This is much more true for the narcissist, because the number of green psychopaths is extremely small and they are usually malignant narcissists. They are usually psychopathic narcissists. Most psychopaths, the vast majority of psychopaths are interested in external outcomes. Most of them are ket people. Most narcissists are green narcissists. They are not ket narcissists. The vast majority of narcissists are not interested in the external world because they are unable to perceive other people as external objects and because they have an impaired reality testing. They're unable to grasp reality appropriately. So most psychopaths are ket people and most narcissists are green people. Green people are focused on the inside. They are focused on their internal landscape and environment, on internal objects, on what goes on through their minds. Green people are divorced from reality. They reject reality. They falsify reality by reframing it. They distort their cognition in order to misapprehend reality, for example, by being grandiose. So green people live in fantasy. Ket people live in reality and this leads us to the answer to the question that opened this video when we were all much younger. I opened the video by asking, how come narcissists who are delusional, who live in fantasy, who are divorced from reality, how come they are so successful? They are successful precisely because they are delusional, precisely because they are embedded in fantasy, precisely because they are disconnected from reality. This is the secret source. This is the reason for their success. Why is that, you ask, scratching your collective head? Let's go back a bit. The modern economy, definitely in the last 100 years, but more so after 1990, the modern economy is about the manipulation of symbols within fantastic spaces. I'm going to repeat this because it's hard to wrap your head around. When I give you the word economy, it conjures up agriculture, industry, manufacturing, goods, food. It conjures up, when I say economy, this word is associated with tangibles, but this is no longer true. The vast majority of economies in the world, actually there's no exception, all the economies in the world today, produce mostly intangible, not real things, symbolic things. So modern economies are concerned with the manipulation of symbols within fantastic spaces. Consider, for example, money. What is money? It is a symbol, and money flows through the banking system, which is a fantastic space. Similarly, you're watching this video on and off, of course, through a computer screen. What is a computer? It's a physical object that manipulates symbols in a fantastic space. The computer is programmed, the computer is coded, and the computer programs, the software, the apps, they're all symbolic. They're all about symbols. And it's a great definition of the modern economy, my view. Anything from video games to entertainment to finance. These are all giant industries that rely 100% on the manipulation of symbols in fantastic spaces. None of them produces anything tangible anymore. We watch movies on screens. They are streams of digits. No one buys DVDs anymore. So no one goes to the cinema, very few people. The tangible part of the economy is shrinking to the point of vanishing. Even tourism, for example, tourism is make-believe. It's make-believe, vacations. It's a symbolic break from reality, from life. It's an escape from reality. Everything is essentially reducible to symbols. And the more digital and electronic the economy becomes, the more symbolic it becomes. The more concerned it is with the manipulation of symbols in fantastic spaces. Here are the facts. 2% of the population in industrialized nations, 2% work in agriculture. Your entire food chain, all the food you eat is manufactured by 2% of the population. Another 15% are stuck in factories and manufacturing. And that's because they don't have a choice. They're not educated enough or whatever, or clever enough. So a total of 17%, 17% in industrialized nations, produce everything you see, which is tangible. All goods, all foods, all comestibles, everything, 17%. What do the other 83% do? What are they doing? Well, something between 4% to 6% or 10% are unemployed, but the other 75% are busy. They're very busy. They're busy at what? Services. 80% of modern economies are services. And the vast majority of services have to do with the manipulation of symbols in fantastic spaces. Actually, symbols in fantastic spaces is nothing new. Consider, for example, the city, the idea of the city. A city is a virtual reality. It's the city doesn't grow its own food. Most cities don't manufacture the goods they consume. Cities are fantastic spaces, imaginary places. Cities are virtual realities. They're not real. They're not connected to the soil. They don't produce anything. They only consume. So this is a kind of metaverse, kind of multiplayer game. But cities have been invented something like 10,000 years ago. So there's nothing new about fantastic spaces. We are used to living. Orbanization has culminated in the 20th century. And now something like 60 to 80% of our population, depending on the country, live in the fantastic space known as the city. The cityscape is a dreamscape. Okay, I hope I got the point through. We don't manufacture or produce anything physical. The vast majority of us deal with symbols. And symbols are manipulated in spaces which, by definition, are not real. They're fantastic. You can manipulate symbols as an accountant. You can manipulate symbols if you are a banker. You manipulate symbols as a coder, computer programmer. We all manipulate symbols. Symbols are about fantasy. Symbols are about externalizing your mind in a way that is communicable to other people and can even be traded with them. You know what? Even when you buy a new apartment, you're buying a fantasy space because the apartment, the physical apartment, was preceded by the idea of this apartment in the architect's mind. What started the apartment, what put the apartment together was the manipulation of symbols within the fantastic space of the mind of the architect and the engineers. Everything is about symbols. Everything. And so we all inhabit fantastic spaces. We are residents in dreamscapes. And in such environments, the narcissist has an amazing natural competitive edge and advantage because narcissists are the masterminds of fantasy. Narcissists are the ultimate, the go-to authority on manipulating symbols. The narcissist has been manipulating symbols and creating fantastic space since early childhood in order to avoid the reality of trauma and abuse, instrumentalizing and parentifying physical or verbal abuse or whatever it was in order to evade reality, in order to somehow survive in an environment which threatened the life or at least the mental integrity of the child. This kind of child who later becomes a narcissist in adulthood, this kind of child learns to fantasize. The fantasy defense of the narcissist is everything the narcissist has. Narcissism, pathological narcissism is a fantasy defense, period. So having created a world in which we manipulate symbols in fantastic spaces, we have actually created the conditions for the flourishing, the thriving and the dominance of the master experts in fantasy, the narcissist. The narcissist throughout his life from an early, early age as a child had invented an imaginary friend which later became a godlike figure. This is known as the false self and then the narcissist spends the rest of his life interacting symbolically with internal objects, one of them is the false self. The narcissist converts everyone around him into symbols, into introjects, into disembodied voices, into internal objects and then the narcissist embeds these objects, internal objects, embeds them in a space of fantasy and then he continues to interact with these internal objects within the fantasy. This is the narcissist's internal world and yet this is a great description of our civilization. Our civilization is constructed and founded on the conversion of people and objects into symbols, into civilizations, internal objects and then the manipulation of these symbols in order to yield favorable or socially accepted outcomes. Civilization, modern civilization is the exact replica, extension and reflection of the narcissist's mind. Modern civilization is a giant narcissistic mind and so of course narcissists find it very appealing and very easy to cope with. Narcissists function well in cultures and societies and periods in history where fantasy has been preferred to reality, where people and objects were converted to symbols or regarded as symbols. So narcissists flourish in ideological spaces such as Nazism, Communism, Fascism because these ideologies are fantasies, they are totally divorced from reality and these ideologies objectify people, convert them into symbolic objects and then these ideologies use people the way an accountant would use numbers or a banker would play with deposits. They not only dehumanize people but they move them around and manipulate them and kill them as if they were not people at all. They don't see the human dimension, they lack empathy. So narcissists thrive inside such ideologies. Wherever there's fantasy, narcissists are on top and that includes for example the information technology sector where increasingly more so engineers and business people and entrepreneurs are creating fantastic spaces. Social media are fantastic spaces, definitely the incoming multiverse is by definition a space of fantasy. So narcissists thrive in the information technology sector. In finance, narcissism is very dominant and prevalent in finance because finance is not about the real world. Finance is about manipulating and playing with symbols within spaces of fantasy whose only limitation is the imagination and perhaps some rules of capital adequacy. That's all. Narcissists gravitate towards fantastic spaces and when the entire world, when all our society, the totality of our society, all our civilization become one huge fantasy, who's going to be on top? Narcissists, the green people, not the cat people necessarily, the green people. But cat people team up with green people because cat people realize that green people are master minds, master experts in operating within fantastic spaces. So a cat person would create an alliance with a green person. The green person would manipulate symbols within an environment and the cat person would benefit from it, would somehow enjoy the rewards and outcomes of such activity. Cat and green people teams of cat and green people are very common in politics, in show business, in finance, very very common. You could see the two cups on patrol. You can see one cat person who is interested in bottom line, the bottom line, outcomes, goals, results, products and so on and next to him there's a green person. Someone who sees the big picture can imagine as a vision, can manipulate symbols within a space of fantasy, can engender the fantasy and then impose it on reality. And these teams are unbeatable and that's why we are being taken over by narcissists and psychopaths. They have an advantage. Healthy people, normal people, are embedded in reality but reality is vanishingly small. 17% remember that's reality. 83% is dreamscape, imagination, power cousins, virtual, not real. And there narcissists and psychopaths have the edge and the advantage. So in the modern economy, in the modern world, narcissism is a positive adaptation. Anyone who is grounded in reality is seriously challenged, seriously effed I would say. If you're grounded in reality, you're doomed. You're doomed to failure, to defeat. You will never make it. Reality is a bad qualification. So narcissism is a positive adaptation. In July 2016, the famous scientific magazine, New Scientist, they had an edition with a cover story and the title was, Parents Teach Your Children to Be Narcissists. Of course it was kind of tongue in cheek but they were right. The world is built to cater to the special advantages, structural superiority of narcissism and increasingly to psychopathy. We are divorcing reality. Think about, consider technology. Until 1990, for 50,000 years, that's 50,000 years, until 1990, technology was about extending the body and extending the mind. 50,000 years, as old as me, extending the body and extending the mind. All the tools we invented, all the instruments, everything was about expanding the reach of your body, your arms, your legs, expanding the remit and the ambit of your mind, enhancing it somehow, its faculties, its capacities. Technology was all about empowering the human being, empowering mind and body. But that ended in 1990. You cannot think of a single technological invention, a single advance since 1990 that has to do with extension of body or mind. In 1990, a tectonic shift has happened. All technologies nowadays are concerned with escaping reality, evading reality. Not about enhancing the human body, not about empowering the human mind, but about evading and escaping reality. Reality is the next frontier. Giant tech companies, such as Facebook, Meta, Google, Alpha, these giant tech companies are going to monopolize reality and they are going to convert reality into fantasy into multiverse and a variety of other ways and then they are going to own reality. They are going to provide you with your reality testing. All technologies today are about subverting reality, extending the mind into an alternative virtual reality, taking your mind away from reality and soon also your body. In virtual reality, you have to wear goggles and haptic suit. Your body is going to become part of the game, fully incorporated into the fantasy. No one wants to be in reality. Reality sucks. Who are the greatest experts on falsifying reality, evading reality, fantasy, deception, gaslighting? Who are the greatest experts on all this? Who have mastered these techniques? Almost, I would say, from birth. Psychopaths and narcissists, they are. And if you look at modern culture, nine out of ten prominent figures are narcissists or at least narcissistic. Nine out of ten intellectuals, nine out of ten artists, nine out of ten filmmakers, the whole world, your entire world is constructed by narcissists, four narcissists, and by psychopaths, four narcissists, and they're beginning to team up, the cat person and the green person. So gradually, we all have to adopt because narcissists and psychopaths have constructed for us a narcissistic psychopathic fantasy known as Western civilization, post-modern society. And we all have to adopt. And so we're becoming more and more narcissistic, more and more psychopathic. There's a tidal wave of narcissism and psychopathy, diagnosable, non-diagnosable everywhere, even among women. Until 1980, women were constituted, 25% of people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. Today, the figure is 50%. I believe women are going to be the majorities in a women dominated world. We would have to rewire our brains, rewrite our books. We would have to accept that narcissism and psychopathy are adaptive. They work. It pays to be a narcissist or a psychopath. It brings you to the White House, for example, or to the Grammy and Emmy charts or wherever it is that you want to go to a billionaire's mansion. You have to be a narcissist to get there because otherwise, you will never make it. Within a fantasy space, you will find yourself competing with narcissists and psychopaths who've done nothing else in life except fantasize. Since early childhood, you don't send a chance if you don't adopt their way of looking at the world, their Weltanschauung, the worldview. If you don't become a narcissist, behaviorally at least, if not by inner conviction, you're doomed to the second tier of society. There's a new feudalism coming. You have to choose. Are you the master of the manner? Are you the feudal lord? Or are you the vassal and the servant and the agricultural worker? New times are upon us, and they are stamped with the mind of the narcissist and the psychopath working together.