 My name is Sam Wagnin and the author of Malignan Self-Love and Narcissism Revisited and many other books about personality disorders, finance, economics, philosophy, short fiction, anything that captured my fancy over my very, very, very, very, very, way too long life. I'm also a professor of psychology and a professor of finance in several universities and I'm mentioning that not only because I'm grandiose and vain, which I am, but also because it's relevant to this video, as you will see. Like everything Jewish, this video is divided into two parts. In the first part, there's a personal message from me to you. In this personal message, I will try to clarify the ground rules. Why am I doing what I'm doing and what do I expect from you in return? What will be tolerated and what will not be tolerated and how I'm going to react if you do certain things. The second part of this video deals with a pathology called magical thinking. It's a very critical pathology which underlies narcissism and by implication borderline personality disorder. It even affects psychopaths, histrionics, schizotypo, schizoids and a variety of other mental health disorders. Magical thinking is the foundation of a lot of the phenomena that we see, many cognitive deficits such as grandiosity. It starts in early childhood. So we're going to explore this multifaceted phenomenon in the second half of this video. But first, I would like to start with a personal message that I had promised. And like every good Jewish text, it starts with a guilt feeling. I feel guilty. Mea culpa. I pound my chest in remorse and regret. It's my fault that I did not lay clear ground rules way long ago. It's my fault that I've set you all up for failure. You innocently post comments or react to my videos and suddenly you are trashed, trampled upon. And this is unjust. It's unjust because the ground rules are nowhere to be seen. Well, after this video, that's one excuse you will not be able to use. I am remedying this oversight of mine and admitting culpability, assuming responsibility for my misbehavior, which in itself is breaking news when it comes to a narcissist. Am I rude? Am I abrasive? Am I impatient? You bet. I'm all free. But I do my best to never be gratuitously abusive, abusive without good reason. And I always abuse in order to teach. This is exactly like greater minds such as Jordan Peterson. I believe that punishing, disciplining is an integral part of good education. You see, as far as I'm concerned, you are here to learn. Your students remember the introduction? I'm a professor of psychology. I'm a professor of finance. I taught economics. I taught many topics to countless thousands of students over the decades. I'm a teacher. I'm an educator by grain, by core. So I'm here to teach you and you are here to learn. But like every student everywhere in the world, even in this post-pandemic day and age of remote learning, you should do your homework. You should work hard after each and every video, researching the references, studying the bibliography, doing additional checkups, comparing me to other teachers and other professors to see if I got something wrong, etc. etc. You should work hard. The video is only the beginning, not the end. And don't waste my time. Do not waste my time on questions, the answers to which you can find in multiple videos on my channel. Each and every question you've ever thought about and each and every question you are capable of thinking about is tackled in several of the 600 videos on my channel. Wasting my time is rude. Wasting my time is entitled. Discordious, no courtesy. It's uncivil. It's impolite. I will not waste your time. I'm trying to not waste your time in these videos. I'm trying to elevate you. I'm trying to educate you. I'm trying to better you. I take your time seriously. I take you seriously. I demand the same respect and the same treatment. Wasting my time is grandiose. It's narcissistic. It's entitled. Search my channel before you make a comment demanding my attention. There is no justification to not search my channel. There is no justification to not use Google or Wikipedia or Google Scholar. The only three excuses I accept is if you are amputated or quadriplegic or legally blind. In these three cases, I'd be delighted to help you. In all other cases, take your finger from wherever it is and use it. Put it to good use. Do your homework. Second thing, I weed out and screen out the intellectually challenged. My YouTube channel is a moron-free zone. Ask a truly stupid question and expect to be banned or blocked or at the very least called out on your glaring lack of intelligence or more precisely lack of use of your intelligence. I have zero tolerance for idiots. Zero tolerance. First strike, you're out. Let me give you an example of what I mean when I say idiot or idiocy. I received a direct message the other day. I'm quoting, when you say me and when you say I in your text, are you referring to yourself? That's a question I received. When I use the word I, when I use the word me, when I use the word mine, am I referring to myself? That's the question. Can you believe this? Can you believe such people exist? Doomcoff blocked. And again, do your research. Do your research. Do your research before you comment. Before you direct message me. I do not spoon feed. I am not your mother, thank God. I am not your father, luckily for me. I am not here to spoon feed you. There is no excuse except raging indolence and intellectual laziness to not first Google and then type. First research, then think. I hate lazy people with a passion. So don't try me. Don't push your luck. You're here to learn not to show off, not to brag. I am not interested in your bluster. I am not interested in what you think, in what you believe. Your point of view, your beliefs, your thoughts are utterly irrelevant, utterly irrelevant. Keep your cluttered, chaotic, ignorant mind to yourself. If you are not academically qualified, if you do not possess an academic degree, shut up and be humble. Be humble. I know in this age, I know in this period in history, and I know in some countries to be humble is a lost art. Well, I am here to help you to restore it. I am here to help you develop humility. I am not saying that I cannot learn from you. Why do you think I got all my information? Why do you think we, psychologists, get our knowledge from? We study you, we research you, we collaborate with you. Of course, you are the raw material. You are the foundation upon we build our theories. So you are very important. I encourage you to share the facts about your life experience, your observation, share information, about your biography, share your resume, your interpersonal relationship, your experiences. You are all welcome, but do not pretend to be an authority, and do not teach me what is narcissism, and do not teach anyone else who is an authority, what is what. That's why there are professors, and you. You are not professors. You are far from professors. You need to shut up and learn. If you want to share information, share information from reliable, peer-reviewed, vetted academic journals, these are the only acceptable sources on this channel. No conspiracy theories, for morons, no inane good, feel good new wave nonsense. This is not the place. Go elsewhere. Generally, you would do well to confine yourself to reading my posts, watching my videos. I am not running a community here. I don't do community. You are not now, and you will never be. My pals, my buddies, or my friends. I don't do friends. I don't do feel good, let me hold your hand, touchy-feely, new age crap. I am Professor Vaknin to you. Not Sammy, and not Sam. You want to address me, it's Professor Vaknin. I worked very hard to obtain this title. Don't get too cozy or familiar with me. We are not on a first-name basis. And I don't give a fig about you or your life or your loved ones, unless you pay me to care. You need to pay me to care about you. And all the life coaches and the self-styled experts and the other coaches, and I don't know what, who tell you they care about you, they're lying to you, of course. Your brain dead and they want your money. I at least don't pretend. You want me to care for you, you need to pay me and I'm expensive, so probably I'm out of your league anyhow. Don't bother. You're my follower, so follow me. Follow me respectfully and be very grateful that I'm sharing with you, free of charge, what I had spent decades studying. And if you didn't get this message, if you disagree with it, you know, there's a door. Do both of us a favor. And follow me now. And subscribe now. And don't bother to inform the entire universe that you had unsubscribed, because no one cares if you are subscribed or not subscribed. Unsubscribe, post haste and good riddance to you. I don't need people like you here. I prefer to stay with 2,000 people who respect what I have to say and are keen and enthusiastic learners. They want to learn. They want to improve. They want to educate themselves. Their erudition is their happiness. I don't need opinionated, vain, glorious, I don't know, wannabe, self-styled experts. I hope I made the ground rules very clear and I encourage you to adopt this new frame of mind that you are here with humility to learn. That you will do your homework after each and every video, because I give you in the video pointers and markers. I'm telling you what to look for. I'm directing you. Use these innate bibliographies. Use these directions. You don't have to agree with me, of course. You may end up finding other authorities who disagree with me or disagree with the authorities that I agree with. That's legitimate. This is the scientific discourse. That's how science develops out of disagreement and conflict. Science is conflictual and adversarial, exactly like the court system, the legal system. So I'm not telling you that you should agree with it, but if you disagree with me, show me where? Show me the money. Refer me to an article, a paper, an academic journal with a date, with a page number, and tell me why you disagree with me. I am open to proper academic discourse. I am open to learn humbly from your life experiences. I am not open to be your equal, because I'm not. And if you don't like this, go somewhere else. I abhor malignant egalitarianism and I've been fighting it all my life. Everyone is an expert now. Everyone in his dog is an expert, just because you have a smartphone and you can type the word Wikipedia, probably with two spelling mistakes. I am older than the Internet and I remember a world where authority, expertise, knowledge, education, literature mattered. Where people looked up to people with knowledge and education, where they did not contest authority when they recognized one. So I'm all fashioned. Show me. Let's get to today's topic. Today's topic is a magical thinking. I'll propose the first part. Magical thinking is of course a perfectly healthy stage of development in early childhood. It was indirectly described by the great Jean Piaget, the child psychologist in Geneva in 1929. He described a stage of development, which he called the pre-operational phase, where children are developing the capacity to think logically. And when they develop this capacity, they are trying to find, to discover, to explore the universe and to impose on the universe, on their environment, on their parents, on adults, on peers, on circumstances and situations and events. Trying to impose on all these some heuristically discovered rules, some rules that emanate from and are derived from repeated experience. And he called this the pre-operational phase, because this phase is not characterized by action. It's characterized by thinking. It's an internal phase. He said that during this phase, children are egocentric. We'll come to it a bit later. Another interesting contribution was made by Bruno Bettelheim. Now Bettelheim, later it was discovered, had lied about his career as a psychologist. He was not a child psychologist, as he had claimed to be. But this does not detract or diminish his accomplishments in analyzing enchantment. He analyzed fairy tales and magical tales. And he showed that the role of fairies, magical creatures, the belief in magic, this role in personal development is indispensable. We use magic and magical thinking, said Bettelheim, to interpret the uninterpretable, to make sense of the senseless, to introduce order into ostensible randomness, and definitely to decipher the roles that adults and peers play in our lives and to develop appropriate behavioral responses and emotional correlates. He thought that magic and fairy tales, and so on, are critical developmental phases. And so while Piaget did not directly address the issue of magical thinking, Bettelheim was the next stage, and he did. Now before we proceed, I as usual will refer you to a few scholars whose work I value in this field. The first one would be Rosin, R-O-Z-I-N. He usually works with another scholar whose name is Nemerov, as it sounds, N-E-M-E-R-O-F-F, Nemerov. And then there is the British scholar Eugene Subotsky, S-U-B-B-O-T-S-K-Y. I don't ask me why all scholars have impossible names. It's possible that they had become scholars because they have impossible names, as a compensatory mechanism. I have no idea. But these are the three that if you want to make a start with understanding magical thinking, they are as good as any. I mean, they're the best. They've studied magical thinking at length for very long time. And so what is magical thinking? Magical thinking is when you say as a child or later as an adult if you have a pathology. That's because magical thinking in adulthood is a prime indicator of some kind of pathology, underlying pathological process. So magical thinking simply says, if I think, it means that I act or it means that I prevent something from happening. If I think, it is. If I think, I create reality. If I think, I affect reality. If I just think, I change reality. Reality is an extension and a figment of my thinking. Reality is inside me and therefore I can manipulate it and alter it and reassemble it and disassemble it and deconstruct it and reconstruct it. Anyway, I see fit because it's all inside my head. It's enough to think, to affect changes in the environment and to obtain favorable results. Now, immediately all of you recognize, of course, nonsensical movements and counts like the law of attraction or the secret or the awakening giant inside. Or if you just put your mind to it, everything is possible. You can accomplish anything. Or of course, rules that if you just follow, very small number of rules, that if you just follow, you will become a totally different person. These are all manifestations and forms, pernicious, pernicious and in some cases, psychopathic and malevolent forms of magical thinking. These are people who use magical thinking to take your money. Simple. They encourage your magical thinking. They encourage you to regress to an infantile state where they are telling you what to do. They are telling you who to be. They become your parental figures and they regress you to childhood and then they can convince you of anything. If you just think about becoming a giant, you become a giant. If you just put your mind to it to be rich, you'll be rich. If you really, really want that gorgeous girl, she will be yours. Pick up artists. And if you follow 12 rules or 5 rules or 7 rules, depending which guru, mystic, yogi and con artist you prefer to follow, your life will be so different that you will have become another person. These are all illusory and delusional forms of thinking and in this sense, if magical thinking is carried to adulthood and if it is taken to extreme, it becomes a delusional disorder. But that is more rare. Very few people deteriorate and degenerate into delusional disorder. Majority of people like, for example, narcissists, borderlines, majority of people with mental health disorders, they have just magical thinking but they don't really, really confuse reality with what they think about reality. They just have the illusion, the deeply held conviction that if they just focus their thinking, concentrate the power of their thinking, they can affect reality. And of course among religious people, you have the bizarre outlandish notion that praying together can affect healing or can affect change in the world. Magical thinking is all over and unscrupulous scammers, liars, cheats and psychopaths are taking advantage of that. Because the vast majority of the population would like to regress to a childhood infantile state. It's very comfortable. You don't have to think. You don't have to think. You don't have to be responsible. You have a parent figure. And so ruthless people, callous people, psychopaths are taking advantage of this. Of course, we have a recently developed tool, a test, psychological test. It's called the Illusory Beliefs Inventory or IBI and we use it to measure magical thinking. The results are staggering and frightening by the way. Magical thinking, for example, is very common in obsessive-compulsive disorders and behaviors, in rumination, in depression. And if you look at magical thinking at the core, at the essence, the quiddity of magical thinking, what do we do when we think magically? We say, if I just want it strongly enough, it will happen. I will get it. Or as a child, I hated that and that died so I killed him. Or my parents are divorcing because of me. So it's a confusion of internal and external. Everyone has internal objects. Internal objects, constructs, voices of important people like parents, peers, role models, teachers. Internalized voices, they're called introjects. Other forms of internalized objects. Your narcissist, you remember, takes a snapshot of you. That's an internalization, kind of avatar. So he internalizes you. Everyone has internal objects. But when you confuse your internal objects with external objects, your internal events with external events, your internal processes, for example cognition, thoughts, emotions, moods. If you confuse these with the outside, with reality, with the environment, then you have an impaired reality testing. Then something's wrong with you. I've heard people say, every time I'm sad, every time I'm depressed, it's raining. I'm kidding you're not. Their mood affects the weather, the local weather, the local microclimate. People are serious about this. I've heard people say, I can take away evil and bad just by waving my hand in a specific way. I've heard people say, if we link hands across the planet and we all think the same thought, the energy of the thought will change the world. I've heard people say a lot of unmitigated, trashy nonsense based on magical thinking. I've heard people say, there is a God. And if I pray to him, he will micromanage my life. He will make me rich. He will cure my child. He will restore my family. It's also a form of magical thinking. There's nothing wrong with magical thinking before the age of nine. Most children up to the age of nine engage in one level or another of magical thinking. Although starting at age six, children are beginning to doubt magic. They are beginning to get integrated with reality. They realize that magical thinking is not working. It's dysfunctional. It's wrong. They develop better theories, better coping strategies. But after age nine, if you still believe in these things, something is seriously wrong with you. And yes, am I saying that something is seriously wrong with religious people? Yes, I am. Of course I am. Something is seriously wrong with them. And another Jew said it long before me. His name was Zygmunt Freud. He said that religion is a mental illness. And there was another Jew, Marx. He said that religion is opium for the masses. They were all right because Jews are always right. And that also is magical thinking, of course. So the person with magical thinking, he has a defective theory of mind. Now what is a theory of mind? A theory of mind is a theory that we construct about how other people think. What makes other people tick? How other people operate? How their minds are working? So we construct this theory of mind. It is based on empathy, including emotional empathy. But it can be based on cold empathy, reflexive and cognitive component. Psychopaths have wonderful, very, very well-boned and operational theories of mind. That's why psychopaths are very good con artists. They know how your mind works. And they subvert it and they co-opt it in their favor. So you don't need emotional empathy to construct a very, very effective, efficacious theory of mind. Cold empathy is enough. But some kind of empathy. You need some kind of empathy. And you need what is called the intersubjectivity agreement or intersubjectivity contract. It's the belief that what you call pain is the same as what another person calls pain. So just let me see if the volume is okay. Yeah. What you call pain is, your pain is another person's pain. What you call love is another person's love. So there's an assumption that because we're all human, human, we all share the same inner experience, the same introspective experience of emotions, moods, effects and so on. That is, of course, no one can prove this. We don't have access to anyone else's mind. So it's a kind of commonly accepted fallacious probably agreement which allows us somehow to survive as a species, as a cooperative species, as a social species. But people with magical thinking, they have a defective theory of mind. And it was Piaget who put his finger on it. He put his finger on many things, by the way. And he said that children go through the pre-operational phase and they have egocentricity. What he meant when he said egocentricity is that children at a dead stage, which is around four years old and so on, children at a dead stage assume that everyone else is exactly like them. They don't recognize differences, distinctions, idiosyncrasies, nuances, subtleties, no way. As far as children in the pre-operational phase of development, everyone is a clone. Every single person on Earth is a clone of one ideal type or some, you know. So it's like they see the world as multiplicity, as a mirror, a gigantic mirror, where every person is reflected in every other person to perfection. They have a defective theory of mind. When you grow up and your theory of mind is functional and healthy, you realize that other people are different to you. They're not the same. You begin to notice the differences and the distinctions and the special quirks and the foibles and the preferences and the wishes and the priorities. In other words, you begin to notice that other people are separate, autonomous agents and entities that they have personal agency, that they're independent of you, that they're not you. But someone with magical thinking would regard other people, external objects as internal. He would regard other people as figments, elements of his own mind. He would remain stuck in Piaget's egocentric phase. He would regard all other people as mirror reflections of himself. He would live in a gigantic, endless effectively hall of mirrors with an infinite regression of images. So someone like that, for example, a narcissist, would not regard other people as capable of self-efficacious, autonomous action. A narcissist is shocked when other people behave in ways that he had not predicted, anticipated and wanted. He resents. He becomes furious when his spouse shows an independent mind, disagrees with him, criticizes him, walks away or cheats on him. It doesn't sit well with this theory of mind where there's a single global, universal, earth-long, hive mind of which he is a part and also the mind. The narcissist, everyone is included in him and he permeates everyone. It's a bit of a mystical, actually the narcissist is a mystic in a way. This is a mystical perception, the multiplication and reflection of everyone in everyone. But it's a defective theory of mind because it's untrue. It's unrealistic. And it encourages magical thinking because if everyone is a part of you, then you can manipulate them inside you and it will have immediate effects in the outside. If you manipulate someone inside your head, they must conform. And if they don't conform, if they don't follow the puppeteering inside your head, then they diverge from their representation in your head as a narcissist. You have a snapshot, you have an internalized image or representation of that person as a narcissist in your head and then you manipulate that puppet, that marionette and the real person refuses to comply. This creates conflict, dissonance, diversion and you resent this, you're angry. It causes narcissistic rage, narcissistic injury or even modification. So narcissists are an example of such people with magical thinking, with the defective theory of mind. But people with magical thinking also have a defective theory of the world. For example, they don't understand causation very well, cause and effect. They don't get it. If everything is inside the mind, if you control everything magically, if everything is inside you and you are inside everything, if you are everything and everything and everyone is you, then nothing can affect anything. If you are everything, then there's nothing outside you. Therefore, nothing can affect you and therefore you can affect nothing. There's no causation, no cause and effect. Benedict Spinoza discussed the issue, can God have a will? Can God want anything? And he said, and many others after him, augmented this argument. God cannot want anything because the word want means to miss, you don't have it. If I want a glass of water, it's because I don't have the water inside me. I don't have it inside me, I need to do this and then I'll have some water inside me. I missed the water, I lacked it, it was not inside me. This caused me to act in a magic, in a world of magical thinking. There's no need to act outside, it's enough to act inside, because everything is inside. And of course, it creates a normal confusion regarding cause and effect. For example, effects are very often confused with causes, causes are confused with effects. It's a mess, the very arrow of time is reversed very often. And this leads to phenomena which are misidentified as gaslighting. Very often the narcissist would argue with you as to what came before what, what caused what, what made what happen. And you think he's doing this because he's a liar or because he's trying to manipulate you, because he's trying to make you think that you're crazy, gaslight you. No, he really doesn't get it. In his muddled mind, there's magical thinking. For example, if he thought that you should do something, you had already done it. And he's angry at you that you had done it, or that you hadn't done it. And you hadn't done anything, but in his mind you had. And his mind is what matters. It's the only arbiter of truth and fact. And this form of infantile thinking, infantile misperception, magical thinking, which as I said, can escalate up to delusional disorder. This form of infantile thinking is actually grandiosity. Because if you are everything, if everything includes is in your head, if you control everything, if you can manipulate, if you can make things happen just by thinking about them, then your godlike is this not grandiosity, it's the mother of all grandiosities. That's why I'm dead set, dead set, against all these coaches that tell you that you can do anything. This is a giant inside you, that all you need to do is think. All you need to do is decide. All you need to do is adopt a set of rules. And that's the end all and be all. That's it. They are leveraging your sickness, your infantile grandiosity. They are making you godlike in your own minds. They are introducing you into a whole of mirrors where you see yourself in an idealized form. And this is irresistible. You fall in love with your godlike rendition. Who doesn't want to be a god? Everyone wants to be god. And here they come and tell you no problem. You want to be a god just by my book? Follow my rules. Buy this DVD. You will be a god. And who can resist this? They are love-bombing you. They are grooming you. They are targeting you. They are idealizing you. And you are the victims of narcissistic abuse. With all these scammers, qualities, psychopaths, alleged coaches and self-styled experts. You are being abused. And this infantile grandiosity goes hand in hand with what we call auto-plastic defenses. Because first of all, what is auto-plastic defense? Auto-plastic defense is when you blame yourself. When you feel responsible for everything that happens. When everything is in your head. When your thinking creates the world. When the world is an outcome of your word, exactly like God. Because at first there was the word logos. Read your Bible. Only God creates the world with a word. And now you are God-like because you don't even have to say the word. It's enough just to think about it. And the universe will accommodate you. It will change itself to suit your wishes, to realize your dreams. You are bigger than God. Who is God? Nothing. God had to talk. You don't have to talk even. You just have to think and buy of course the relevant book. So this is grandiosity but it's coupled with auto-plastic defenses. Because if you are the world. If thinking is doing. If thinking is being. If thinking is preventing something from happening. If thinking has an effect on the universe, on the outside world. Then you are to blame if anything goes wrong. You are responsible. You are guilty. This is called auto-plastic defenses. And here's the thing. Auto-plastic defenses are the main hallmark. The main feature of neurosis. Magical thinking leads inexorably to neurosis. As the person with magical thinking brushes against reality. As reality keeps frustrating this kind of person. As reality keeps contradicting and challenging his grandiosity. His magical thinking. His magical beliefs. His superstitions. His prejudices. His biases. And his deficits. Cognitive and emotional. And other. As reality intrudes with its countervailing cruel information. This kind of person develops very, very deep guilt and shame. And guilt and shame put together. If they coalesce. And gets ossified and fossilized. They become neurosis. Now magical thinking is comorbid. Appears in a variety of mental health disorders. I mentioned a few of them are cystic personality disorder. All the line I'll discuss that in a minute. It also appears with OCD. Obsessive compulsive disorder. Obsessive compulsive disorder is adopting rituals. Repetitive rituals. In order to reassert control over reality. So if I wash my hands 10 times. My mother will not die. If I walk in a highly specific way. Bad things will not happen to my family. Or I will succeed in the test. If I don't know. If I whistle a certain song. At exactly the same hour every day. Then I'll become rich. So OCD. Obsessive compulsive disorder. Is attempting to use ritual. Ritualized behaviors. To counteract. Suppress. Mitigate. Ameliorate and reduce. Intrusive thoughts. Which have to do with reality. Intrusive thoughts are always about reality. If I don't do this. My mother will die. If I don't do this. My family will be in bad shape. If I don't do this I remain poor. The recent studies revealed that Magical thinking is not correlated. Not connected. To worry. Or to anxiety. Which is very surprising. When scholars embarked on this effort. To study the issue. They were convinced that Magical thinking will be intimately linked. To worry and to anxiety. But it's not. And if you stop to think about it for a second. You will say yeah right. Of course it's not. Of course it's not because it's magical. Magic gives you infinite power. And if you have infinite power. What do you have to worry about? What do you have to be anxious about? Anxiety and worry are correlated with intolerance of uncertainty. They are correlated with unattainable perfectionism. They are correlated with situations you cannot control. Uncertain situations. Situations of failure and defeat. But if you are a magician. With Magical thinking. What is that to worry about? What is it to be anxious about? That is precisely the source of good feeling. That. Adherence of cults. And all these modern coaches. Self-styled philosophers and psychologists. And self-styled experts and public intellectuals. All of them are cult leaders. These are all cults. If you don't believe me. Try to argue with a follower of Sadguru. Or try to argue with a fan of Jordan Peterson. See what you get. These are cults. Try to argue with someone who believes in the idiotic QAnon. See what you get. These are all cults. With varying degrees of intelligence. The adherents of QAnon are at the lower rung of the ladder of intellect. Obviously. And the followers of Jordan Peterson are higher up. But they are all cults. So of course in cults. The main function of a cult is to reduce anxiety. To reduce worry. By introducing rigid rules. Which if you follow you are guaranteed to acquire magical powers. Influence of the world. Now, magical thinking manifests differently in different situations. And I'm going to review four of them. Narcissists, Borderline, Psychopath and the conspiracy theorists. Narcissists believe in action at a distance. They believe they do something or they think something or they want something or they believe something and it will have an impact way way beyond their immediate circle or environment or so they believe in action at a distance. They also believe that they are omnipresent. Their omniscience and omnipotence. The fact that they are all powerful and all knowing makes them Godlike and exactly like God. They are everywhere. And that's why Narcissists pursue celebrity. That's why they pursue fame. Because to be a celebrity or to be famous is to be everywhere via the media. So if you have 15 million followers on Instagram, you are present simultaneously on 15 million screens. That's omnipresence. The Borderline personality disorder. She has I'm saying she because majority are women she has object in constancy. She out of sight, out of mind. She doesn't, she's not with you. You can be the person she loves most in the world. The minute she walks out the door you don't exist. You cease to exist. Many Borderlines would deny this. They would say it's not true. When I love someone, I'm all into him. I can't forget him. If I'm with him, if I'm not with him. Even worse, when I'm not with him I don't love him even much more. But object constancy is not about thinking. It's about the innate all pervasive ubiquitous knowledge body knowledge, body memory of the existence of the other exactly like baby and mother. And Borderlines don't have this. They may remember you on a cognitive level as a kind of fading memory. Sepia photograph is a kind of presence that is present and is not present. And so object in constancy is a form of magic because to make things disappear is as magical as making them appear. Now another magical feature of Borderline is dissociation. To dissociate a memory to forget actively to forget is to undo to rewind the world. If you don't remember something or someone it had never existed. It's a form of rewriting reality reinventing it, undoing it, rewinding it. And the final element in Borderline which has to do with magical thinking is disinhibited lack of impulse control. The Borderline acts as though there are no consequences to her actions. She can do anything and reality in the world will not make her pay for it. There will be more consequences to her actions. It's like living in an eternal present, like eliminating the future. This is of course magical thinking because the future does exist. And every action has reaction in consequences. Similar problems exist with the psychopath and that's why we increasingly begin to reconceive a Borderline which is a form of secondary psychopathy. The psychopath feels omnipotent, feels in control via intimidation and has disinhibited lack of impulse control exactly like the Borderline and all these are forms of magical thinking. For example, the psychopath believes that his reputation is such that it will deter people and this reputation is like a cloud a magical cloud that surrounds him like a cloak of invisibility. Similarly he believes himself to be omnipotent so he will embark on behaviors which are essentially reckless, dangerous, risky because he will feel utterly immune to the consequences of his misdeeds of his daring their due activities and that's of course magical thinking because it's not true. And finally the mind of the conspiracy theories the person who believes in conspiracy theories first of all I want you to know there is such a trait in psychology it's called conspiracism conspiracism look it up Google Conspiracism is the quality of believing in conspiracy theories it's a propensity to believe in unproven and unverified oft-repeated conspiracy theories urban legends myths, fake news and potent falsehoods Conspiracism is predicated on the assumption that there are sinister things afoot but these sinister things these actors with evil intent a cabal out to abuse and manipulate and exploit the unsuspecting masses these illuminates or whatever there's this assumption that these people these these sinister undercurrents you know they are evil so evil is critical to the activation of the trait of conspiracism and it usually involves the belief that groups of people are evil most people are gullible most people believe literally anything and anyone immediately this is a well-documented thoroughly researched phenomenon and it is known as the base rate just google base rate 95% people believe in 95% of what they are told immediately uncritically without verifying without checking anywhere nothing they immediately believe 95% of what they are told this is the base rate that I don't know many times so of course they believe conspiracy theories of course they believe nonsense reptilians 5G I don't know what are the crap they believe in they believe in because believing is the natural normal average reaction and but then they believe in magical thinking kicks in grandiosity kicks in narcissistic defenses geeky they believe in something and that they have to defend their misconceptions and they have to defend it defend them fiercely because if they let go of their misconceptions if they admit to having been mistaken this is narcissistic injury challenges challenges their grandiose self-conception their inflated ego they and they defend their misconceptions by creating cults they align themselves with others they signal uncritical conformity in like-minded tribes silos subject to confirmation bias they reject all information which contradicts or might contradict or challenge their beliefs and they are rabid they are violent they are aggressive they are disempathic in short they become psychopathic narcissists frequently the exposure in these echo chambers to toxic nonsense solidifies the belief in these outlandish and inane narratives and this phenomenon is known as consistency the more you're exposed the more you're exposed to nonsense the more you believe in it ask Hitler and Gebels they they invented this idea and social media leverage this psychological propensity for consistency they leverage it by repeating and repeating and repeating and it is of course an element in classic techniques of brainwashing conspiracy theories brainwash their adherents coaches brainwash their followers public intellectuals who claim to have come up with a system for life brainwash their followers, fans, adherents it's a brainwashing technique sometimes it's done accidentally sometimes it's done intentionally once the money kicks in they realize how much money they can make believe me it's totally intentional and they social media leverage this base rate and consistency the gallability they leverage it as a grist to the perpetual mobility rumor and gossip and fake news conspiracism feeds off other cognitive distortions it is really a very bad psychological traits because it brings into confluence narcissism magical thinking base rate fallacy, consistency fallacy I mean it's to utterly deform to apologize the mind so other cognitive distortions feed into conspiracism consider for example proportionality bias the erroneous conviction that great events are caused by commensurately massive reasons plots dynamic processes sinister cabals it's a fallacy of course very big events can be caused by a virus which is a very small organism big events do not need to have big reasons or plots or processes or cabals actually I doubt very much that cabals exist and this flies in the face of chaos theory and its butterfly effect a lone grandiose gunman in Texas can rock the entire world with a single shot or two we also find patterns where there are no patterns we tend to look at totally random sets of data totally random events totally accidental confluences and conflations and we tend to see patterns there where there are none when you look at clouds you see horses and you see the apocalypse and you see towers but of course there's nothing there there are only clouds but you do see and when you look at stars you create the small bear and the big bear and the archer but they're not there and yet you see them so we see patterns we see structures we see images we see figures where there are none and these phenomena in psychology are known as apophina and pareidolia and they are part of magical thinking that should never be connected should remain discreet we find continuities in the disparate and the unrelated in the incidental and we look at other people's actions and we relate these actions to imputed motivations but these motivations need not be true they're speculative and very very often totally irrational unreasonable and probably wrong but there's no intentionality bias when we tend to ascribe intentions to people and these intentions are simply wrong conspiracism is a personality trait predicated on magical thinking even after a favorite conspiracy is debunked there is a counterfactual residue left continued influence effect it's gone so even when for example in the 16th century in the 18th century there was a conspiracy theory it was called witches there was a conspiracy theory that there are witches the witches affect the world and witches conspire with satan sexually sometimes in order to corrupt young people it was a conspiracy theory and it's gone it's gone it's debunked everyone considers witch hunts to be witch hunts wrong and yet there's a residue there's a residue left and it's called the continued influence effect there are still practicing witches there's a proliferation of literature about witchcraft there's something left conspiracy theories are like COVID-19 they live behind polluted, dirty ugly, stupid degenerative symptoms the more you try to argue with a true believer the more entrenched he becomes in his misinformation and paranoid skepticism and this is known in psychology as the backfire effect conspiracies thrive not only on magical thinking but on ignorance and in order to believe in magical thinking you need to be ignorant for example if you know physics immediately a lot of magical thinking is rendered inoperative you can't believe in magical thinking and no physics you can't believe in the tsunami of nonsense on COVID-19 and no medicine so conspiracies thrive on a combination of malignant over magical thinking and ignorance but ignorance is a precondition for magical thinking we don't know certain things but that we don't know certain things doesn't mean that they have to be only in a specific thing so for example we don't know what causes autism we are still speculating we know that autism spectrum disorders have correlates in the brain biological correlates, genetic correlates we know to foretell if a child will have autism by now but we don't know what causes it but if we don't know what causes autism it doesn't mean the anti-vaxxers are right if we don't know what causes autism it does not mean that vaccines cause autism it means we don't know end of story the people who postulated the vaccine theory as a cause of autism they were taken seriously I can show you any number of studies at the beginning science took them seriously and studied the issue but then it came to the conclusion that it's nonsense no way the anti-vaxxers don't want to hear about it because being an anti-vaxxer has nothing to do with vaccines and nothing to do with autism it has to do with personal identity it means you belong it means you are a cult member it means that you make sense of the world it imbues your life with meaning and direction and goal and quite a lot of people make money out of it there is more than a smidgen of grandiosity involved as people trust their gut instincts and consider themselves superior enlightened in the know all the others are ignorant, they are sheeple but the conspiracy theories has access to knowledge to privilege information arcane information is an adept how a loser the traries of an obscure country no one heard of had come across knowledge that most of the scientists in the world never heard of is an open question and the profile of most conspiracy theories theorists is not complementary these are people who are collapse narcissists losers, uneducated ignorant if they were to subject themselves to an IQ test I don't think they would have liked to see the results so magical thinking has many many pernicious manifestations and outcomes on the societal level not only in the individual level it starts in childhood but as we had developed a civilization when most people refused to grow up men refused to become men so do women we refuse to grow up simply because we refuse to grow up we drag from our childhood all the dysfunctional seek wrong elements magical thinking splitting object inconsistency, narcissism they all are childhood elements our refusal to grow up is going to ruin our civilization and if we are not careful it's going to destroy our species but then children like to destroy they like to quote Jordan Peterson to bite they like to ruin things so when you tell someone this will be the end of the species or this will be the end of civilization he welcomes it these people with magical thinking they welcome this devastation and destruction this creative destruction something new will come out of it something bigger of which of course there will be an inevitable part