 The Narcissist shared fantasy is compelling, compelling as far as he is concerned, and compelling as far as you are concerned. Today we are going to discuss Connation. Connation is a psychological mechanism behind the Narcissist unwavering conviction that the shared fantasy is not a fantasy, that is real, and that the idealized version of you that he has lodged in his mind is equally veracious, equally real. What makes the Narcissist usually a worldly type, someone with accomplishments in his career, in other realms of life? What renders the Narcissist so unrealistic when it comes to his relationship with intimate partners, with friends and so on and so forth? What renders the shared fantasy so overwhelming, so suppressive of proper judgement of reality testing? This is a psychological mechanism of Connation. But before we go there, I would like to discuss briefly the question of why do you find the shared fantasy compelling? Why can't you extricate yourself from it? Why when you are immersed in it, when you are in the throes of the shared fantasy, when you are inside, you can't see the outside? Why can't you observe the fantasy somehow detached, distanced? Why are you unable to render an objective judgement of the shared fantasy? Why don't you realize it's a fantasy? What happens? What is happening to you when you're exposed to the Narcissist Connation? So this is known as the base-rate fallacy. The base-rate fallacy is very misunderstood. At its foundation, the base-rate fallacy simply states that people are going to prefer their own prejudices, biases and personal experience to facts, to science, to reality. So when people are confronted with hard facts, the base-rate, and these conflicts with their personal experience, they're going to prefer their personal experience, their latest events in their lives, their prejudices, their biases, their discriminatory attitudes, their exposure to influences and so on and so forth. So this is the base-rate fallacy, very simplified, very made colloquial. It's far more complex than this. But at the essence, at the core, this is what it is. Now here's the thing, we tend to believe people. There is an implicit bias in all of us, by the way, to trust that people are telling the truth. Now, I know that many of you are going to rebel against this and say, it's not true. I have critical thinking. I have my thinking cap on. I never trust people. I always judge, I always criticize, I always analyze, and I always come up with my own conclusions. I'm a free thinker and an independent one. Yes, yes, yes. We've heard it all before. There is an implicit bias. Basically, we trust most people most of the time. Now, because this is the case, whenever information we receive from people conflicts with scientific data, with facts, with reality, we're going to trust the information that we receive from other people. We're going to distrust science. We're going to distrust authority and expertise. We're going to distrust reality. We're going to trust our personal exposure to other people's opinions, reviews, and judgments. Because we accept other people as truth tellers, and then we appropriate the information that they give us, and it becomes our information. Their biases become our biases. Their prejudices become our prejudices. Their beliefs and attitudes become our beliefs and attitudes. And whenever they conflict with the facts, with reality, and with data, hard data, we would reject reality. We would reject data. We would reject information, countervailing information. We would stick to what we know best. And what we know best is our personal experience is shaped by events and by other people. That is why we are gullible. That is why anywhere between 90 and 95% of the time, we believe and we trust information that we receive uncritically without bothering to verify, to cross-shake, and to analyze it. That's the fact. Now, because this is the case, the shared fantasy is easy to fall for. You fall for the narcissist, and for his fantasy, because of this implicit bias, the belief that the narcissist, like everyone else, is telling you the truth. That his way of looking at the world, his prejudices, his biases, his convictions, his beliefs, his attitudes are okay. They are voracious. They are truthful. So, you adopt them. You adopt them because you want to please the narcissist, because you want to conform to his worldview, and also because you want to sustain and buttress the way he sees you, which is idealized and flattering and satisfactory. There's a dopamine rush there. So, you adopt the narcissist's world, the narcissist's mind, and then it becomes yours. And because it becomes yours, you deny reality. You reject data and hard facts. You become angry at people. You're infuriated by people who are trying to expose the narcissist to you, who are trying to convince you that you're trapped, that you should exit, that you should go no contact, abandon the narcissist. You defend the narcissist and the shared fantasy and yourself in the shared fantasy. Ferociously, it becomes a cult. Cults are based on this extension of the base rate fallacy. We believe what we are told, then it becomes our conviction we appropriated and then we reject reality and data. So, this is your part in the shared fantasy. What about the narcissist's part? How does the narcissist convince himself that the shared fantasy is real? That his grandiose self-perception and self-image are nothing but the truth. How does the narcissist, who otherwise is very analytical, possibly an accomplished scientist or an intellectual or a teacher or whatever, how does the narcissist fall for such infantile, immature concoctions, narratives, pyracosans? How does this happen? The narcissist uses something known as conation. And apropos narcissists. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Balign & Seflav, Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University, Russia, and currently on the faculty of CIAPS, Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Toronto, Canada, and the inevitable outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria and from Lagos, Nigeria to conation. The narcissist, exactly like you, is addicted to the shared fantasy. He much prefers the shared fantasy to reality. He experiences extremely powerful pseudo-emotions. In a minute I will explain why these are pseudo-emotions and not real emotions, but the narcissist interprets these internal vicissitudes, these tidal waves and forces, this tsunami that threatens to drown him. The narcissist interprets all these as desire, as love, as limerence, as infatuation, or at the very minimum, as lust. The narcissist asks himself, what is happening to me? Why am I so addicted to her presence? Why do I so crave his company? And he says to himself, probably it's because I'm a friend and I love my friend, or I'm in love with my new partner, or I desire her, or I lust for her, etc. These are labels, labels that the narcissist slaps on the internal dynamic within himself that he cannot otherwise interpret. Language breaks down, it has no other words which the narcissist can use, unless of course he's a psychologist. So having idealized you, the narcissist regards you as the best fit for his shared fantasy. You are the pivot of the shared fantasy, you are the axis around which the entire shared fantasy revolves. The narcissist is addicted not to you, but to the shared fantasy which involves you. However, if you were to be taken out of the shared fantasy, out of the equation, everything would fall apart. You are a precondition, a prerequisite for the functioning and the very existence of the shared fantasy, which are the precondition and the prerequisite for the narcissist's document hits which he interprets as happiness and love. This is definitely an addictive cycle, absolutely. So now the narcissist has idealized you, he created a snapshot of you, an internal object that represents you in his mind and has very little to do with you because it's perfect and you're not perfect, no human being is perfect. So this idealized image, the narcissist continues to interact with a snapshot, not with you, he's incapable of perceiving you as an external object and yet the idealized image of you perfectly fits the shared fantasy, upholds it, buttresses it, enhances it, strengthens it. The idealized image of you reflects elements of the shared fantasy and contributes to it by being ideal and perfect. It allows the narcissist to idealize both himself and the fantasy. So you are a perfect fit and the narcissist is motivated to pursue you through the love bombing phase. It's the same as if a producer, a movie producer, set his mind on a specific actor. There's a movie producer, he's about to make a movie and he says, I need this actress, I need this actor, I need Brad Pitt or I need George Clooney, that's the one. And so the movie producer idealizes the actor and begins to pursue the actor, which is indistinguishable from romantic pursuits. There are emotions involved in this kind of pursuit, which are very strong. And so the narcissist does the same, you become an actor or an actress within the theater production known as the shared fantasy. And he's the producer of this theater production, of this fantasy. And so he needs you, you're the perfect fit. The script is there and it is your voice and your visage, your image, your presence that make the shared fantasy come alive, revivify it. So in order to pursue you, in order to be so emotionally invested, affected in the pursuit, in order to persevere, because the narcissist has very short attention span and is not very good at setting long-term goals and pursuing them. In order to do all this, in order to transform himself into a hard-working man on an assignment or a task which he must accomplish. This is the task of co-opting you into the shared fantasy, introducing you into his trap, trapping you and trapping you. So in order to do all this, the narcissist uses something known as conation. So love-bombing and idealization are the cognitive phase of the shared fantasy. What the hell is conation? Conation is the third element in the mind. We have emotion, we have cognition and we have conation. Conation is a fancy word for goal-directed, attitudinal will or volition. It is whatever drives people to act, to accomplish, to strive, to overcome hurdles, to aspire, even if it's against all odds. Whatever drives us is conation. It's a proactive, not a habitual, but pinpointed, punctuated part of motivation. So whenever you spot a target, the target could be to succeed in an exam. The target could be to buy a house, the target could be to get a job, and the target could be to capture someone and introduce her or him into the shared fantasy. Whenever there's a target, whenever there's a goal, whenever there's a purpose and direction, motivation flares up. In these eruptions, which are proactive, not habitual, they are not constant, they are not regular, these flare-ups are known as conation. Now conation is a part of motivation that connects knowledge, affect, drives, desires and instincts with behavior. So this is the glue that holds everything internal together and transforms the internality, the interiority into action. Whatever happens inside you, your drives, your wishes, your desires, your dreams, your instincts, your knowledge, your emotions, your cognitions, all these are put together by conation and then directed outward in order to obtain a goal. So conation is not only the glue, but it's an organizing principle and an explanatory principle. It makes sense of your behavior and imbues it with meaning. As I mentioned, conation is one part of three, there's affect or emotions and there's cognition and it is a component of the mind. The behavioral basis of attitude is often referred to as cognitive component. We'll discuss attitude a bit later. Do not confuse conation with other psychological phenomena. For example, while the narcissist has overdeveloped conation, its conation is overdeveloped because its conation is very obsessive, very compulsive, very sick, very pathological. It overpowers him, it takes over him, it becomes like a cruise missile, it's unstoppable and inexorable. This is a psychopathic element in narcissism, an anti-social component. So what the narcissist has overdeveloped conation and the psychopath, by the way, the same. Narcissists have no attentional control, colloquially known as concentration. Narcissists have no capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what to ignore. They're all over the place, they're scattered brain and endogenous attention or executive attention is lacking in narcissism. I'm talking now about relationships, interpersonal relationships. Narcissists are perfectly capable of attentional control in career, in their careers or in their studies, but they're not capable of it in interpersonal relationships. Attentional control is the individual's ability to concentrate and narcissists can't do that for long. Within interpersonal relationships, that's why narcissists can pay attention to you on a regular basis, a structured basis. They have burst of attention and then they lose all interest in you because they have no attentional control. Similarly, narcissists are not determined and ironically not ambitious. When a narcissist appears to be ambitious, usually it's a psychopathic or malignant narcissist, ambitiousness, especially ruthless ambitiousness, callous ambitiousness is a psychopath's trait. Narcissists are indolent, they're lazy, they're entitled, they don't work hard, they don't study hard. They believe they are entitled to special treatment and to accomplishments in commensurate with any investment in study or work. So they don't have determination, they don't have ambition. Determination is a positive, possibly emotion. Some laymen and scholars say that determination is an emotion. I don't think so, but some do. So determination is a positive aspect, positive feeling that promotes persevering towards a difficult goal in spite of obstacles. It is determination that allows us to overcome and then become. Determination occurs prior to goal attainment and motivates behavior that will help to achieve the goal. And so people consider determination, as I said, an emotion. It's not just a cognitive state, it has an effective correlate, an effective component. And of course the determination crucially depends on coordination. Now, challenge enthusiasm, anticipatory enthusiasm, these are other names for determination. And while determination crucially relies on coordination for its fulfillment, you could have coordination without determination. So you could have a diffuse sense. I want to accomplish this. I want to own this person. I want her to be in my shared fantasy. I want to control her. I want to internalize her. I want to do something. This is coordination, but the determination is missing and the attentional focus or attentional control are missing. So the coordination in the case of narcissism is like a raw force, an undirected, more like an explosion, more like a light bulb rather than a laser light. Steel coordination in narcissism is very powerful, much more powerful than in healthy people, as I've explained before. Now, the narcissist is impelled and compelled by coordination to work in order to construct the shared fantasy and then convert someone into the shared fantasy and introduce her into the confines and the boundaries of this trap known as the shared fantasy. You have to invest effort. You have to work. And narcissists hate to work. They feel entitled. So gradually, narcissists begin to resent the cognitive phase. They become very frustrated by the need to invest, to commit and to be present just in order to accomplish a goal. So when the narcissist sees you, he idealizes you. He then internalizes the idealized image of you, the snapshot. And then it's as if just by virtue of having love-bombed you and having idealized you, you owe him allegiance and affiliation. The narcissist regards love-bombing and idealization as huge gifts. And now you are in his debt. You owe him. You should reciprocate. You should reciprocate by becoming a figment and an element and a component of his shared fantasy. Narcissists resent the very angry when they realize that they have to continue to flirt with you, to court you, to show interest in you, to take you out, to cater to your needs, to listen to you, to take into account your wishes and dreams and priorities and preferences, to somehow accommodate themselves to your independence and agency. They hate all this. They hate all this vehemently. They're frustrated and this resentment and frustration and lead to aggression, narcissistic abuse. And then the stage is set for your devaluation. Connation therefore has a double function in the narcissist's shared fantasy. Number one, to motivate the narcissist, to develop goals and the attitudes that lead to goal attainment. So Connation drives the narcissist to somehow co-opt you, subvert you and introduce you into the shared fantasy. Connation is energy. Think of it as energy, mental energy. In this sense, Connation is closely affiliated with Catexes. It may be the precondition for Catexes, will or volition, volitional precondition. So this is the first function, to give the narcissist enough energy to build the shared fantasy and introduce you into it. The second function of Connation is to bring about the devaluation phase. Remember, the sole function of the shared fantasy is to convert you into a maternal figure, a mother, a new mother, and then separate from you and become an individual. Re-enact the early childhood conflicts of the narcissist. So Connation is built into the shared fantasy as a feature, not a bug. And Connation drives the narcissist to frustration, to aggression, to resentment and to hatred of you. You force him to work hard. You force him to invest in you. You force him to commit. You make him do things he would rather not do. That includes sex, by the way. So he's angry at you. Connation drives him, but it drives him to devaluation and to narcissistic abuse. That's the second role of Connation. Connation, the phase of Connation or the activity of Connation within the shared fantasy is characterized by volition, self-activation toward the goal. The initial goal is compromising you, introducing you into the shared fantasy, rendering you symbiotic appendix or extension of the narcissist, coalescing you with the internal object, co-opting and coercing you to conform to your avatar in the snapshot in the narcissist's mind. So these are all goals initially. That's the first class of goals, group of goals, which Connation caters to the cognitive phase. And then the next goal is narcissistic abuse and devaluation because that's a precondition for separation. So Connation is the engine behind love-bombing and idealization and also behind narcissistic abuse and devaluation. This is what confuses the victims, no end. Because it's the same energy just transformed from extremely positive, ideal, out of this world fantasy, Disneyland into a nightmare, hellish, hellish scape, hellscape, you know? And it's the same energy. So the victims are very confused. The transition seems to be surrealistic, insane, doesn't have any rhyme or reason or logic to it. And the energy seems to be the same. The narcissist pursues you, idealizes you, love-bombs you with the same vehemence that he abuses you and hates you and rejects you and resents you and discards you and devalues. Same energy, same intensity, same presence of mind, same goal orientation, same everything. And that's extremely confusing because Connation is the common foundation and yet the manifestations of this common foundation are diametrically opposed. Now there's a theory known as basis plural of attitudes, of basis or attitude. The type of information from which an attitude is derived is known as a base of attitude. Traditionally, scholars have distinguished between three bases, three types, three categories of bases. There was the affective base or affective bases and that's emotions, feelings, even moods that are associated with the object of the attitude, the attitude object. And then there was the cognitive basis, beliefs about evaluative attitudes associated with the attitude object. And then there was a behavioral basis, responses, past behaviors, future intentions associated with the attitude object. So these are the components of attitude. It's a tripartite model of attitudes. It's a theory of attitude structure that proposes that an attitude is based on or consists of affective, cognitive and behavioral components. The affective component refers to feelings associated with the attitude object, the cognitive component to beliefs and thoughts associated with the attributes of the attitude object and with the attitude object. And the behavioral component relates to past behaviors, future intentions and so on and so forth, all having to do with the attitude object. This is of course when there's a breakdown in narcissism because the affective component is missing. There's a cognitive component and behavioral component. And in lieu of the affective component, there's a cognitive component. So whereas in healthy people, we have a combination of affect, cognition and behavior. In the narcissists, we have a combination of cognition, cognition and behavior. Affect, cognition and behavior in healthy people, cognition, cognition and behavior in narcissists. And this of course is what drives the narcissists to be obsessed with the shared fantasy, its formation and the exact partner, the right partner, the perfect partner for the shared fantasy, which is you, idealized and not bond. And then the synchronization, the same energy drives the narcissists to resent you because you keep frustrating him. You keep frustrating him by making demands or by being independent or just by being there unable to somehow resolve his internal conflicts, helpless in the face of the enormity of the narcissistic debacle. So whatever the case may be, he's driven to abuse and to devaluation, which also rely on cognition. Now in healthy people, emotions are both regulated and regulatory. Emotions regulate us. So for example, if I love someone, no matter how angry and frustrated I am with that person, I would still not abuse them because I love them. Love therefore, which is an emotion, complex emotion, compound emotion, love regulates and controls my behavior, serves as an inhibitory factor, inhibits my behavior. So because I love, I'm not going to attack you because I love, I'm not going to abuse you because I love, I'm not going to be aggressive because I love you. Narcissists don't have emotions. So this regulatory element is missing and their cognition is distorted and compromised by their grandiosity and entitlement. So they don't have the two core regulatory mechanisms, emotional regulation and cognitive regulation. And so they become dysregulated. Narcissistic abuse is a form of acting out. It's dysregulation. It's not emotional dysregulation because unlike borderlines, narcissists are incapable of positive emotions. So it's not exactly emotional dysregulation. I would call it systemic dysregulation. Everything is dysregulated. Everything is shaking and quaking. It's like living on top of a fault line, active fault line with constant tremors, earthquakes, tumblers and twisters. That's how it feels when you're with the narcissist because his totality is dysregulated. And everything that could have stood at the bridge, everything that could have helped him to control himself, to regulate himself and so on, is missing, simply missing. Cognition is a dysregulatory force. Cognition encourages, fosters and genders dysregulation because it is only when you are out of equilibrium, out of balance that you pursue a goal. When you want something, it's because you miss something. When you want to eat, it's because you're hungry. When you want to drink, it's because you're thirsty. When you want to have sex, it's because you don't have sex. So, volition will is about not having something and feeling bad about it. About wanting in English also means missing something, deficiency. So, wanting is about not having something and wanting it. And so, Cognition is built to dysregulate you. It causes you to lose equilibrium, to lose balance, to lose stability, to lose internal regulation. It causes you to move your static, your content and suddenly or not, Cognition forces you to move forward, to pursue goals, to invest, to commit, to act, to work, to study, to do things. Cognition is disequilibrium, out of balance in a positive way. The analysis is, Cognition is not controlled or not aligned with emotions and cognitions. So, it's out of control. It's insane. It's disregulated to the maximum, which causes, of course, aggression, frustration, and finally, devaluation and discord. Edward Boring, yeah, I'm kidding you not, his name was Boring. Edwin Boring, I'm sorry. Edwin Boring published a book in 1929 titled Experimental Psychology. And in this book, he referred to another psychologist by the name of James Ward, W-A-R-D. It was James Ward who first introduced the tripartite model of emotion, cognition and Cognition. And George Stout expanded this model and created something called a doctrine. George Stout's famous doctrine. Stout divided the mind into cognition, desire, which is another name for Cognition, and feeling. But actually, they were all preceded by another guy, Immanuel Kant, a famous schizoid. One of the greatest philosophers in history, despite his name, Kant, don't hold it against him. And he suggested, I think he was the first to describe Cognition actually. Anyhow, so Cognition was a philosophical concept long before psychology has ever appeared on the scene. For a very long time, by the way, psychology was a branch of philosophy. So in the philosophy of mind, Cognition refers to the ability to apply intellectual energy to a task in order to achieve the completion of the task or to reach some kind of solution. And in the philosophy of mind, Cognition and motivation are pretty indistinguishable. The ability to focus and to maintain persistent effort is Cognition, and it is driven by motivation. It's very unclear in the philosophy of mind. It seems to be basically the same concept. Now, there's been a very famous study by Reitman and Wilson, and there's a list of literature in the description of the video. Reitman and Wilson are neuro-psychologists, and they looked at the performance of specific tasks which were required, as they put it, required some cognitive ability. They published a study in the year 2000, and they reached an amazing conclusion which I fully concur with. Cognition, which has been a neglected dimension of behavior in neuropsychological assessment, may be the missing link between cognitive ability and prediction of performance capabilities in everyday life. Cognition, therefore, as far as they're concerned, is the bridge between cognition and action. Cognition and behavior, cognition and performance, the bridge connecting all these, is Cognition. It's a very, very fundamental force within the mind. In the case of the narcissist, like everything else, Cognition has gone awry, is out of control, is dysregulated. And this is all linked to what is known as doxastic attitudes, doxastic attitudes. Doxastic attitudes, epistemic attitudes. Epistemic epistemology is a branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge. How do we know things? What constitutes knowledge? What relationships we have with knowledge? And so on and so forth. So doxastic attitudes are attitudes towards propositions, towards statements, towards beliefs, towards information. The most commonly known doxastic attitude is indeed belief, holding something to be true. The narcissist has a doxastic attitude of belief towards the shared fantasy. In other words, the narcissist holds a shared fantasy as true. Similarly, the narcissist has a doxastic attitude of belief towards his confabulations. He holds his confabulations to be true. He also holds his promises to be true, so narcissists never future fake, they never gaslight. Psychopaths do this. Narcissists believe all these things to be true. They have a doxastic background, a doxastic attitude to everything involved with their lives, with their self-perception and self-image, and with their shared fantasy. They don't regard any of these to be a lie, a confabulation, an invention, perhaps manipulation. They don't see it that way. They absolutely don't see any of this. They believe that they are God-like, a perfect entity. They believe that the shared fantasy is not a fantasy, but is actually the only reality. They believe that other people are wrong, they're right. They believe that the idealized image of you is you or should be you, and you should aspire to become this idealized image. And if you don't, you're frustrating the narcissist on purpose, you're being aggressive, and so on. The narcissist believes the veracity, the truthfulness of everything in his life, including totally confabulated, concocted, invented and imaginary passages in his life, autobiographical passages, which are intended to bridge extreme, really severe dissociation, memory gaps. So belief is a doxastic attitude, which is very common in narcissism. Holding something to be false is known as a doxastic attitude of disbelief. And then you can also suspend judgment with holding belief or disbelief, with holding ascent to a proposition, without judging it to be true or to be false. Now what happens with doxastic, the doxastic attitude of belief in narcissism is that it is infectious because of the base rate fallacy. Because you assume owing to your personal experience or biases that you have absorbed or whatever, because you believe implicitly that most people are truth tellers, you believe the narcissism. His doxastic attitude of belief in himself, in the shared fantasy, in his totally imaginary autobiography, this infects you. They're contagious. And you develop doxastic attitudes of belief in all these things. You become a prisoner, a hostage of the narcissist combination of enormous self-confidence and conviction coupled with the shared fantasies ability to deceive because it resembles reality very much. And it caters to your deepest needs. They need to be loved unconditionally. They need to have a better future. They need to believe in the goodness of people and of structure and order and justice in the universe and so on. By the way, studies have shown that the more determined, more vociferous you are, more vocal, more determined, more insistent you are on something, the more people believe you. Just because you are, just because of the emotional investment. People unconsciously identify emotional investment, vehemence, vociferousness, ferocity, they identify this with veracity, with truth. That's why demagogues are so successful because they're very vocal, they're very clear, they're very determined, they're very energetic, very emotional, so they're very convincing. Doxastic attitudes in many ways resemble what we know, what we call propositional attitudes. But they're not. You should distinguish these two. When we use terms like belief or judgment or opinions or opinion, these are all doxastic attitudes. So doxastic attitudes can also refer to states sufficiently similar to beliefs, such as psychological certainty, credibility or credence and so on and so forth. The narcissist makes use of coordination of doxastic belief to end of the base rate fallacy to trap you, to lure you into the shared fantasy and then it's very difficult to extricate yourself. It's like buyer's remorse. You have led yourself into the situation. To extricate yourself, you must admit that you've committed a colossal mistake that your judgment of others and of the world has is terrifyingly wrong, cannot be relied on. You don't trust yourself anymore, you're unreliable, perhaps you're stupid, perhaps you're crazy. This is implicit gaslighting. You're gaslighting yourself. Doxastic volunteerism is a philosophical view that people choose their own beliefs. This is why I use the phrase buyer's remorse. You choose to believe the narcissist. This is voluntary. You have a certain amount of control over what you believe. You choose whether or not to believe something. Numerous studies have shown this. This is the orthodoxy, this common knowledge in psychology. Beliefs are not just formed somehow out of thin air. They reflect choices and decisions and selections, including mate selection and the beliefs you have about your mate. And this philosophical view of doxastic volunteerism is derived from a branch of logic known as doxastic logic. And we're not going into it right now. This is not a lecture about philosophy. Doxastic volunteerism claims that each human agent is the author of their own beliefs. And it creates an ethics of belief. Because you author your beliefs, because you are the writer, you are the creator of your own beliefs. You do bear responsibility. You do have a contribution. All this nonsense online, that there was nothing you could do about it, that you're not responsible, that you've contributed nothing. You would just happen to be there. You were a magnet. It was an accident, a force of nature. You're totally exempt from any person of responsibility and accountability. That's nonsense. It's counterfactual. That's not how beliefs form. Beliefs lead to connation, to drive, to accomplish goals, and to human interactions and interactions. Interpersonal relationships. Beliefs underlie everything. And philosophers distinguish two types of doxastic volunteerism. Direct doxastic volunteerism and indirect doxastic volunteerism. The direct version is when the person has control over some of their beliefs. Changes can change beliefs, for example. And indirect doxastic volunteerism is when you have unintended control. You can control intermediate actions. And so through these intermediate actions, you can control some of your beliefs, but not all of them. So doing research, evaluating evidence. These are forms of actions that lead to indirect voluntary control. Because they can modify some beliefs, but not all. Now direct voluntary control refers to acts which are such that if a person chooses to perform them, they happen immediately. So you have direct voluntary control over whether you contemplate the shared fantasy, and the narcissists, and his life, and his claims, and his promises. You have direct voluntary control over this. If you decline to do this, if you ignore, if you deny, if you repress, it's your fault, 100% your fault, not the narcissists. Similarly, you have indirect voluntary control. Acts which are such that although a person lacks direct voluntary control over them, they can cause this to happen if they choose to perform some other intermediate actions. In other words, indirect voluntary control is when you act in ways that empower you later to act directly. You go in a roundabout manner. You empower yourself indirectly. So now this of course leads to the distinction between direct doxastic voluntarism, which claims that people have direct voluntary control over at least some of their beliefs, and indirect doxastic voluntarism, which supposes that people have indirect voluntary control over some of their beliefs by conducting intermediate steps such as research. So the narcissists' connation drives both of you into the shared fantasy. It then leads to narcissistic abuse and devaluation. But you contribute to all this. You contribute to all this because you need the shared fantasy as badly as the narcissist does. That's why it's called shared. You share in all this. It takes two to tango. You have equal contribution. Equal contribution. I'm sorry. It's very unpopular to say this. And so you need to sit back, revise and review everything you thought about yourself, about the narcissists, about your relationship, about your hopes, about your dreams, common plans and so on and so forth, and ask yourself, to what extent has my need, to what extent had my need to believe the base-rate policy and my need to evade reality? To what extent these have contributed to my relationship with the narcissists? The narcissists, few narcissists, put a gun to your head. They present you with an option. They present you with a script, the scenario, with a narrative, with a piece of fiction. That you choose to become a protagonist in the narcissist literature is entirely your choice.