 Welcome to Super Connected with me, Tim Arnold and my special guests. We invite you to join us in an intimate and honest exploration into the theme of connection. What it means to be connected to each other, what it means to be connected to ourselves and what it means to connect in an ever-changing world. Welcome to Super Connected. Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self-Love Narcissism Revisited and a professor of psychology in the Southern Federal University in Russia and in many other universities. He is a physicist and a philosopher as well, professor of finance and former economic advisor to several governments and multinationals. Sam is joining me from Skopje in North Macedonia and I have invited him to come and share his thoughts on social media and human behaviour. Sam, you are super connected. Hello, how are you? Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. Absolutely, thank you for having me. Just for any listeners who are hearing about you for the first time. I mean I've given a sort of potted biography of what you do but what are you working on mostly at the moment because we've got psychology, finance, you're a philosopher and of course one of the world's leading authors and sources of information about narcissism. What are you working on mostly now? Well, I dropped the economics thing and now I'm concerned mainly with the theory in physics which I've developed in the early 80s and has been taken on by mainstream physicists so that's actually my main concern right now. Then on the sidelines I teach psychology and still pursue my studies of personality disorders. Now expanded, started with narcissism but now it's more into personality disorders which is a whole field. Yes, and we'll talk a lot more about personality disorders because that's part of what led me to finding out about you and all the work that you do and it's fair to say you're a polymath aren't you? Because you've got your fingers in a lot of different pies. Well as I told you yesterday I think we are all forced to be polymaths. We all have two, three careers in a lifetime. We live much longer. We are forced to multitask and so on and so forth and these are excellent definitions of a polymath. Now when I first came across your name I think it was on a Richard Granon documentary. Is that right? Yeah. Might well be. I may have Googled the words social media and toxic. Right, toxic would pertain to me. And up you popped. I've been working on a project for some time which has been my own exploration through music mainly and film about social media about the narcissistic sides of that in terms of wanting to share as much of ourselves with as many people as possible. There were some wonderful things that you said that resonated with me in a way that I'd never heard anybody talk about it before but I listened to you on the documentary. There are two billion people using social media in the world today. Is that right? More. Two billion people use Facebook. Ah, that was specific to Facebook when you said two billion. Yeah, indeed. It's closer to 2.6 billion. Wow. Yeah. And what struck me was that you compared it to use of Facebook to a virus and you sort of talked about it in terms of a virus and what happens. Can you explain that a little bit to me now? Well, the truth is that we use models from epidemiology and virology to describe various social phenomena which incorporate a pronounced dimension of networking. And so in the case of social media, which are by definition networks, the use of such models is instantaneous and automatic. There is no value judgment by comparing social media to various viruses. We are not making any value judgment. We're not saying they're bad or they're good. We're not making the modes of propagation and the modes of evolution of the networks. Yeah. But one thing which might be of interest now in the days of the coronavirus is that the overwhelming vast majority of viruses are self-limiting. In other words, they have an inbuilt mechanism, the nature of which we are not quite acquainted with, but they have an inbuilt mechanism which stops them dead in their tracks, so to speak. They infect a certain population and then they stop. And we think this is in order to self-preserve so that they can have additional healthy hosts in the future. If comparing social media to viral networks is a correct analogy, this would mean that shortly growth of social media would stall and then they will reverse and then they will become much smaller than these networks. And do you think that's likely? Yes, actually I do. I see signs of people signing off Facebook, closing accounts, going off the grid, going offline. I see a counter-revolution in developing in some parts of the world. And I think people are fed up with the toxic emanations from cyberspace in general and social media in particular. So yes, I do see a counter-culture developing. But the part that I was really interested in is just how we communicate with each other. And you and I now are actually communicating with the help of the internet. So it's not a good or bad thing. It's a container. I guess it's the way it's used by some of the companies. Do you think that narcissism is something that... I mean, obviously, narcissists and echo, the beautiful fairy tale, is as old as anything. It's nothing new, the concept of falling in love with the reflection of yourself. But that's right, isn't it? Because some people get it confused that it's falling in love with yourself. It's not, it's a reflection of yourself, isn't it? Narcissists don't have a self and they don't have an ego. So they are not egotists, definitely. And your definition is the correct one. Narcissists fall in love with a reflection. They fall in love with a reflection of a piece of fiction that they had concocted, a script, a narrative that they had concocted early on in early childhood. And then they project this piece of fiction, this narrative, on to others and they feed off the reflections, the reactions, the feedback, the input that they get from others. And so that sounds like social media is a natural habitat for narcissists. But what I wanted to ask you was, is social media brought all the narcissists out to play? Or is it creating narcissists? That are people who didn't have NPD, any kind of disorder before? I think it would be, I think it's critical to emphasize that social media were designed with addiction in mind. If you regard addiction as a negative thing, then there is malice or malevolence involved in the design of social networks. This has been confirmed time and again by former engineers of social media such as Facebook and others. Google, even Google as a search engine. And these former engineers and system designers and network designers admitted that addiction and conditioning were in mind when they had constructed the network. So that's not an accident. The design of the networks reflects economic and financial decisions intended to encourage the monetizing of eyeballs and creating stickiness. So that people do not abandon the networks and do not revert to other pursuits such as for example intimate relationships such as community activities such as creative works. So social media compete with everything that's good in us and in our societies. They compete with our families. They compete with our friendships. They compete with our communities. They compete with our creative efforts. And this is by design. It is designed and obviously for a reason of monetization. Would that be fair to say? Yes. The idea was to monetize eyeballs. The longer you remain stuck to the screen and this is called stickiness. The longer you remain stuck, the longer your eyeballs rest on the screen the more they can be monetized by selling advertising. And so they don't want you to look at your girlfriend. They want you to look at the screen. They don't want you to look at your friend. They want you to look at the screen. And they don't want you to write music. They want you to look at the screen. Yeah. I mean based on that what you've just said intimacy itself and deep connections are a kind of enemy of the state of commerce I suppose. Well admittedly social networks catered to a growing tidal wave of tsunami of rising narcissism. We've been documented by scholars the likes of Twinge and Campbell and numerous others. Scholars have demonstrated convincingly that in the last 10 or 15 years there's a rising tidal wave of narcissism especially among the young and when we say the young it's 25 years and younger or even 35 years and younger and so these technologies always follow trends. It's wrong to say that technologies create trends. Are they following technologies following our natural evolution as human beings is that what you're saying? Not natural evolution as human beings that's a biological concept but social evolution. So as societies evolve people react by modifying their psychology and their behavior within societies and then technology caters to these needs. People wanted to work in factories so the train was invented and then people wanted to get away from the city so the car was invented and so on and so forth. It's wrong to put the horse before the cart. Technology simply codifies emergent trends both in individual psychology and in social psychology and so social media codified reified the growing tide of narcissism and if you look at social media you see two aspects which are cardinal to narcissism. First of all the element of reflection. Narcissism the narcissist is not a person he is a collective. The classical narcissist is a person who is not a person he derives his existence he derives his ego functions he derives his inner landscape from myriad gazes of other people. He is around grooming people and then harvesting their reactions and he uses these reactions to create a kaleidoscope which replaces what should have been his self. The narcissist is a hall of mirrors and so social media reflects this they are constructed this way structurally they are social media are halls of mirrors they are kaleidoscopes and you have devices such as like and so on which foster relative positioning and provide instant feedback. Could you describe social media as an alternate reality then? Not an alternative reality in the sense that it is a virtual reality no one confuses social media. I mean in comparing it to something like a psychedelic drug that takes you into... To compare it to something much more shocking let's say that social media is an externalised narcissistic psyche and the externalised mind of a narcissist if you look at social media that's precisely the experience of being a narcissist that's precisely, absolutely precisely how a narcissist functions from the inside so if you want to understand narcissism profoundly and fundamentally all you have to do is look at facebook that's precisely how a narcissist mind works and functions. Yeah and I mean it's frightening to me because of a lot of people I care about on facebook I'm on facebook I've had those moments as many have of trying to oh I'm not going to be on facebook anymore because you get an instinct inside that tells you that there's something unhealthy about it but then I don't think I'm speaking just for myself I think a lot of people who have tried to come off then are presented with a kind of isolation or loneliness that makes them fearful and then they return to social media is that loneliness is that imagined is it not real, are we so far away now from connecting in a very human way that we don't realise that that is something that is some kind of withdrawal that we've got to go through in the same way that one might do when they give up drugs Exactly it's a withdrawal symptom but our societies are anomic and atomised they are what used to be called in Marxist philosophy alienated societies these are societies where individuals function as atoms and each atom has its own solipsistic isolated universe self-sufficient and is not in need of any services or goods actually from the outside today with a typical smartphone you can do absolutely anything that used to have been done 50 years ago by publishing companies by media companies you're a one man a one man economy so you don't really need anyone you need people to grow your food maybe but that's more or less it you don't need anyone This was the big thing that you said that really affected me when I heard you speaking in Richard's documentary was that in some time from now in the future there'll be two different kinds of human beings or I mean there's millions of different types of human beings already but you said that you could quite clearly categorise them into those that have followed the social media path into this schizoid isolation and those who have not is that right if I got that right Yes I think you have generally you get things right by the way here's a narcissistic supply for you Thank you You got this one right I think there will be anywhere between 2 to 3 billion people who will not who will fail to win themselves off here they will have become so addicted and so conditioned How many? I think between 2 and 3 billion nearly one third of the world because we're going to be 9 billion in 2050 Nearly one third of the world will be on the grid and nearly two thirds of the world will be off the grid but if you talk only about the adult population it's going to be 50-50 so that's a matrix that's a matrix type model of reality there will be 3 billion people living in virtual reality with virtual interactions and artificial types of connections and another half of the population which would constitute a kind of massive counter culture which will be living off the grid and demonstrably so it will be kind of an act of protest and I think these two irreconcilable lifestyles will ultimately clash Yes I mean it's a kind of terrifying thought to picture what you're saying and I know you say it scientifically speaking and with great research The people who are on the grid on the grid I mean online people who use the internet as the main gateway to the world they consume news via Facebook 46% of them consume news via Facebook they surf they are on social media they use WhatsApp etc etc so these kind of people people who live mostly online these people dedicate much more time to cyberspace than they do to their own children if they have children at all people today spend an average of almost 5 hours a day 5 hours a day compared to 3 hours of television out of the equation and they spend an average of 1.5 hours a day with their children How does it make you feel Sam? How does it actually really make you feel? I don't feel I don't feel either way as I told you I'm not quite sure that the previous model had worked perfectly I mean we did end up with two world wars and genocides and so on we made a hash of it I'm not quite sure because we had a model a very clear set of institutions which were developed mostly during the agricultural revolution and these institutions have survived despite massive technological upheavals this mismatch this discrepancy between technology in other words human capability and the institutions which were supposed to contain channel and amplify these capabilities this discrepancy was detrimental to the human species perhaps it is time to develop new institutions and perhaps these institutions will be highly individualized to the point that every individual will have become his or her own institution and that's sort of happening a lot at the moment isn't it without becoming their own institutions well people have the capacity today to publish a book they have the capacity to broadcast they have the capacity to communicate subversively they have the capacity to flash mob they have the capacity to topple regimes which they have done profusely all over the world with the help of social media so this is the age of the individual I mean I know it doesn't look this way particularly the age of the individual and of course we have malignancies everything in you every phenomenon in human history and human sociology and human anthropology has a malignant equivalent and of course the malignant equivalent of individualism is rampant or malignant individualism also known as narcissism do you think it's comparable to I don't know 1930s Germany in terms of very young people who would have been growing up then and going into Hitler youth without knowing the rights or the wrongs about it that's how they grew up that there are young people very young I mean children you know pre-teens growing up into a world where it's normal to not have privacy to share so much of what you do and sometimes some of those children I think are lucky to have parents who regulate their use of social media but there are many who do not and there's so many young people broadcasting and commoditizing themselves before the age of 13 in some cases online do you think it's similar do you know the comparison I'm trying to make is that young kids are just growing up and they don't know any different well digital natives of course don't know any different and they regard the world as normal I mean the new normal is to them normal however I do see three very worrying developments first of all there's a fascist backlash against individualism so we have movements which strongly resemble authoritarian collectivist movements in human history can you name a few such as Donald Trump is a glaring example but you have to you have numerous such tin pot dictators in the making or in the breaking and so these are but these people reify they embody a social backlash a backlash of the digitally disenfranchised a backlash of the uneducated a backlash of the left out and the cast out and so on so I see this as a problem of individualism growing a battle between our magadan actually between individualism and fascism in any other name I think we're entering a period of massive mega conflicts the likes of which we haven't seen since maybe the industrial revolution and perhaps the agricultural revolution I do like to ask my guests about their favourite music and when I asked you if you could just choose one song oh Superman by Laurie Anderson tell me about your connection to the song why did you choose that song sir I chose the song because of some of the industrial mechanical technological sounds in it it reminds me of the third axis of conflict I mean we have discussed two axes of conflict the rise of fascism against individualism can I just ask you can I just ask you a quick sorry before sorry to interrupt but are you a fan of Anderson in general okay okay yeah no it's just nice to know yeah please camera carry on so we discussed two axes of conflict one was fascism against individualism and one was the rise of men against women and I think the third axis would be the rise of corporate interests against the individual so I think there are two forces arrayed against individualism one is fascism which is the state power the nanny state the intrusive state the authoritarian state on the other hand on the other hand also commercial interests multinationals who prey on our digital data and are as intrusive as a state and very often much more so and as authoritarian as a state and very often much much more so anyone has read anyone who has read the agreements which Google forces you digitally sign before use their services would understand what I'm saying very few people do read them including me I'm guilty of not reading I'm not mentally well so I read them I'm not sure if I'm not mentally well because I've read them but still well it's a good job you did read them because you can tell us about them well they are they are a dictatorship manifesto all of them all ULAS all of them are dictatorial, authoritarian intrusive, confiscatory manifestos the likes of which I think few dictatorships would have dared to issue forth I won't mention by name but there are some tech companies that I've worked for in the past that have very similar ULAS and yes it is it's quite alarming what they tell you you can and can't do Yes and so I think we have two actually manifestations of fascism we have corporate fascism the first time in human history and we have state fascism which is the old variant 100 years old variant and in terms of music which is the most important part of my life for the last 25 years listening to music, making music, writing music and interacting with other people in a very intimate way musically, creatively it's it's existence now the realm of the internet and social media is to me feels very secondary I'm just interested what you felt about that because I might have got it wrong I think some people just say that I'm a bit old fashioned but I keep noticing that it's really hard to share any sounds without showing somebody something they can look at nobody's being inspired to shut their eyes and I think a lot comes from shutting your eyes isn't it because it's a bit like when we go to sleep and you know dreams as you'll know because of your experience as a psychologist as well I mean dreaming is such an important part of what we are as human beings in many different ways and it all happens when our eyes are closed we live in an age of regression and one of the regression multiple regressions in terms of human the history of mankind history of humankind so one of the major regressions is we started off with visuals human art human culture all over the world from Altamira to you name it it was all based on visuals you had cave paintings cave texts and then about 5000 years ago with the Phoenicians and then the Egyptians we transitioned to text there were ideograms and other forms of text but essentially we transitioned from images to text and then there was a period of about 4000 years in which text reigned supreme we were text based cultures and societies in medieval monasteries people preserved text this is the great period of the libraries exactly a great period of libraries and then Gutenberg and the printing press newspapers and newspapers and you know all forms and manifestations of text and textual graphics and everything had to do with text and I think what happened in the past 20 years is again one of the an amazing revolution we are regressing back to the Altamira cave we have a digital cave akin to plateaus where visual shadows play on the walls so we have abandoned text in favor of images and visuals and similarly because music is a form of notation ultimately it's a form of mathematics harmony everything it's essentially a form of text I know it sounds very bizarre what I'm saying no it's all let's put it this way music is much closer to text than to images so music is being abandoned in favor of images everything that is not image and not visual is abandoned as a scientist and somebody that isn't just guessing entirely from their imagination like I do all the time you obviously must make some predictions of what you think may happen in terms of the way people are communicating on social media now and the way music and art will be used in the future what thoughts do you have about it because it sounds like some of the older ways are returning and again I think it's quite important to say there's no judgment on whether it's better or worse it just seems like a lot of the ancient ways that we would have approached life are coming back sometimes there was another old codger by the name of Hegel Hegel proposed the trilateral model of human development development of human societies and ideologies and so on and that's the model of entethesis and synthesis and I think similar trends are happening even if in music for example jazz is an example of a synthesis between the author based model these are the solos in jazz and the group collaboration model so jazz is a pretty recent phenomenon relatively speaking and it embodies a synthesis between the two rival models I think in music I'm giving this as an example because you're a musician and I think similar things are going to happen with regards to human communication and human interaction we are entering an age of augmented reality that is the ability of computerized digital information to be projected onto our reality so that we wear special glasses or maybe contact lenses in the future and we see instead of looking at a screen we see the info or the entertainment or whatever in the air superimposed on real buildings and on real people so I think we are going to synthesize everything ultimately we're going to go to a bar and as we go to the bar we're going to get information from Wikipedia if it still survives about all the important historical buildings on the way and then we're going to meet our friend and we're going to see biographical information about our friend which he had allowed us to see and then we're going to have a drink with that friend and we're going to see hanging in the air a description of the drink it's constituents and ingredients and so on and so forth it's all going to be seamless in the near future it's all going to intermesh and interlace and we are gradually the distinction between real reality virtual reality and augmented reality these distinctions are going to blur they're going to look very artificial I mean the digital natives of 2050 won't understand this conversation at all gosh yes I mean all of those realities would have come under what Arnold Mindell would consensus reality what do you think about alternate realities what do you think about dreaming and social dreaming which is it's something I've learnt about quite recently but oddly was also discovered in 1982 which I know that's an important year for you too isn't it it's the year that I wrote my doctorate in physics yeah do you know about social dreaming yeah what are your thoughts about that I mean I'm fascinated because you've got such a strong scientific kind of view on so much ever since a chap by the name of Descartes in the 17th century we've had this misguided belief that there is reality and there is us like we are observers we are spectators and we we document what we see and what we there was a split in the world he created a schism he broke the world apart he created the duality of the world and us he did admit that the only certainty is that one exists one cannot be certain about reality but he still made this distinction he still broke the world into two big pieces and of course this was very artificial and very wrong we do not perceive reality we perceive internal processes in our brains we are inward looking we are introspective we sample the world by the way a very low betrayed sample which would not pass with any music studio in the world so we sample the world and then we take this bits of info and we insert them we apply models in the brain, mathematical complex models that we have in our brains and we create reality as we think it should be now so we live inside our minds in any case these distinctions between real objective reality and subjective reality and alternative reality and dreaming in the individual and social dreaming and all these distinctions are a misunderstanding of how our brain operates the solution or the answer to your question lies in an obscure field called neuroscience we are beginning to understand the brain and our senses in ways which have defied us for millennia and what we are discovering is nothing less than astounding there is no world the ancient eastern mystics were right there is no world there are just ever shifting kaleidoscopic models of the world which are triggered by external stimuli these external stimuli are of course by definition outside us but the models are where we live we inhabit the models not the world of the stimuli now if we can generate and create stimuli in other ways the other models in our brain will be activated and they are equally valid models it's very important to understand people keep asking the utterly idiotic question is the world a simulation who cares a simulation is reality a simulation has to take place somewhere and consume some resources it has to be in some hardware or if not in some hardware it has to be in some brain it has to have an existence as long as it has an existence its validity as a construct is equal to what today we erroneously call reality and of course whatever the reality is we have to learn to survive in it right yeah the models we have in our brain are survival friendly they are not accidental models and Darwin was right about this these models were created very carefully crafted very carefully over millions of years to aid and abet our survival and to allow us to convey our genes forward in time tokens just before we finish I almost asked you about everything I want to ask you I could listen to you for hours thank you that makes two of us very kind obviously the climate change situation that has gripped all of us probably over the last 20 years but certainly in the last few years is that something you feel where the planet without the human beings on it has its own voice is it trying to say something to us well there's of course the popular Gaia theory yeah I just wondered what you thought about that well we are a part of the planet a very important part of the planet and in this sense we are an organ of the planet and we operate on behalf of the planet we never ever operate the planet whatever happens on the planet is the planet so climate change is an effect we are having on the planet cows have a similar effect on the planet by the way we are having an effect on the planet there is no question about this just before we finish I almost asked you about everything I want to ask you about but I could listen to you for hours thank you that makes two of us very kind it's the obviously the climate change situation that has gripped all of us probably over the last 20 years but certainly in the last few years is that something you feel where the planet without the human beings on it has its own voice is it trying to say something to us that is of course the popular Gaia theory yeah I just wondered what you thought about that well we are a part of the planet a very important part of the planet and in this sense we are an organ of the planet and we operate on behalf of the planet we never ever operate against the planet whatever happens on the planet is the planets so climate change is an effect we are having on the planet cows have a similar effect on the planet by the way we are having an effect on the planet there is no question about this anyone who denies climate change is Donald Trump which is not a compliment in my book but the metaphysics of climate change the philosophy and ideology which were spawned by this indisputable scientific fact they are wrong climate change is a natural phenomenon because we are a part of nature this is the cart this is the cartesian mistake of saying there is us and there is nature no we are part of nature but I really could talk for so much longer but we have only got an hour on the show I have one last question and it is the same question I ask everybody on this show and that is what is the most important connection in your life Sam connection you mean human connection no it can be any books book hands down books yeah I love books I love the smell I love the texture I talk about books the way most men talk about women I make love to them oh well that sounds like a very harmless and healthy relationship look for the books thank you so much thank you for having me and I look forward to talking to you again soon so do I take care bye