 My name is Sam Baknin and I am the author of Malignal Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and A Professor of Psychology. I would like to open the video with a quote from another angry Jew, but know this, that in the last days perilous times will come. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despises of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away, for of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women, loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Now, as Janes and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth. Men of corrupt minds disapproved concerning the faith, but they will progress no further for their folly will be manifest to all as theirs also was. And this was of course Paul the Apostle, and it was his second epistle to Timothy. So, and I thought I was angry, I mean listen to this guy. Paul delineates one of the options we have to cope with the world, to cope with existence. As the existentialists have been saying since the 1940s, existence is a horror show, absolute horror show. It's arbitrary, it's meaningless, it's frightening, it's unpredictable, it's capricious, it's threatening. No one gets out alive. From the moment we are born, we are subject to a death verdict. We are waiting in death row called Earth to be executed by the Green Ripper at the time of his choosing at a place of his choice. I think my Bergman captured it in his movies, and so this angel of death, or the devil, depending which religion you belong to, it symbolizes the finiteness, the fact that we are finite, the fact that we are mortal in the most profound sense of the word, the fact that we have a beginning, and we have an end. And what we do in between matters essentially to no one but ourselves. Now of course you can dispute this last statement, you can say it's not true. What I do matters to my wife, matters to my children, matters to my coworkers, matters to the state. Yes, but that is because we have all agreed. We have all adhered to, signed on, what Jean Jacques was so called the social compact. You see there are three ways to cope with existence. One is psychosis, one is narcissism, and one is what Jordan Peterson erroneously calls nihilism. Nihilism is an ideology with a doctrine, with dogmas, with axioms, so it's the wrong word. What he was trying to say was nothingness. Psychosis, narcissism and nothingness. Psychosis is when we generate internal objects and then pretend that they are external. We invent God, and we pretend that he exists. We invent, we come up, we conjure the nation state, and then we die for it. We adopt beliefs and values, and we defend them in bloodshed and battles. We paint a flag, and then we plant it on a barren island, having sacrificed 70,000 human lives to get there. So psychosis, the best definition of psychosis, is when we confuse internal objects with external objects. When we think that internal objects are actually external. The psychotic hears voices, the psychotic has visions. These are actually internal voices, introjects. These are visions of figments of his mind that he projects through the outside, and then endows with objective ontological existence, separate from himself. He confuses, the psychotic confuses his inner landscape, his mind with reality. It's magical thinking taken to the extreme. It's identity diffusion taken to the extreme because the psychotic's identity incorporates the world and compasses his environment. The psychotic, exactly like a baby, can't tell the distinction between himself and the world. He is infantile in the extreme in this sense. He is unable to reflect upon himself, to set boundaries. His introspection has also become observation, and he thereby objectifies and externalizes himself. So when we have faith in God, when we fight for our country, when we defend our values, when we sacrifice for our beliefs, this is to confuse internal objects, inventions, concoctions, narratives, scripts, fiction with reality, because I have a big surprise for you, there's no such thing as God, or nation state. The flag is nothing but a piece of fabric. Beliefs and values are culture dependent, period dependent, society dependent. Anything that is dependent is not real. Beliefs and values are invented by individuals or collectives. And then everyone treats them as though they have an existence of their own. I'm not disputing the fact that fictitious characters such as God have an inordinate influence on human affairs. Of course they do. Many people, many more people died in the name of God than in the name of anything else. Religion, religion is real. God is real, but God is real in the sense that this construct has effects, discernible effects. And so psychosis is the solution where internal objects, fictitious characters, invented protagonists, belief systems and value systems acquire in our mind an external, extraneous, objective existence and then affect us in return as an effect of us. And this is a good and excellent definition of psychosis. That's one solution. And the vast majority of humanity adhere to this solution. You see, if you were to face existence without any of these solutions, you would go mad. You would go crazy. So to believe in God is to substitute one mental illness, one inevitable, ineluctable mental illness with another, with a delusional disorder. You don't want to face existence the way it is. You don't want to face the world, reality, the universe, the way it is. It's too cold. It's too impersonal. It's too dwarfing. It's a giant narcissistic injury or giant modification. You don't want to face it. So what you do, instead of going crazy, staring into the void, staring into deep space, you go crazy some other way. You go crazy by believing in something you had invented a few thousand years ago or by believing in something you had invented four days ago. Love, a relationship, another person, friendship. A new country, patriotism, the flag, the anthem, your football club. These are all, of course. Fiction. These are all narratives. These are all movies. But they are better than the alternatives, than the alternative, many people think. You see, if you are feeble-minded, if you are of weak character and personality, if you are anxious, if you are phobic, if you are average, if you don't have the tools to cope with the fact that you are nothing and you live in a nothing universe that doesn't care a fig about you, then of course psychosis is your solution. Because the overwhelming vast majority of humanity are exactly the categories that are just described. They invariably and inevitably choose psychosis as the solution. And when I say psychosis doesn't have to be a belief in God, doesn't have to be a religion. It could be a secular religion, communism, capitalism. It could be a belief system, including Jordan Peterson's belief system. It could be an ideology. It could be anything. It could be any, any thing, any system, any intellectual endeavor, any piece of fiction that acquires in your mind counterfactually a separate objective ontological existence and ends up affecting your life, your decisions, your choices, your moods, your emotions and your interpersonal relationships. This is an utterly psychotic solution. Another group of people choose the second solution. The second solution is narcissism. Psychosis is to say, maybe I alone am meaningless, but when I integrate into something bigger than myself I acquire meaning via this belonging, via this integration. When I become a part of God, I acquire God's meaning, God's purpose, God's plan, God's goal. I become an agent of God by believing in God, by having faith. When I become a part of the nation state, I'm a citizen of that state. The state endows me with significance and meaning. So psychosis is about conflating and confusing your inner world, your inner landscape, your psychodynamics with an outside entity which is bigger than yourself which in which you can be subsumed, which can consume you, which can assimilate you, with which you can merge and fuse. Psychosis is a codependent solution. The second group of people are narcissists. They choose a narcissistic solution. They say the source and the font of meaning is me. I determine what is meaningful. I am the meaning. I am the significance. I am the source of everything that makes sense. I am the sense. It's a kind of Cartesian approach. I think, therefore I am. I am, it's the only certainty. I can't be certain about anything else, except the fact that it is I who is thinking. It's the only certainty in the universe. Because it's the only certainty in the universe and any meaning and significance has to rely on certainty. You cannot derive meaning and significance for something that is shifting, kaleidoscoping, or meaningless in itself. You cannot derive meaning and significance from the uncertain. And if the only certainty is that you exist, then you are the meaning. You are the significance. The entire universe is meaningless without you. You endow it with meaning by virtue of your existence. And this is narcissism. One could even say that narcissism is therefore a variant of existentialism. Kierkegaard tried to merge the two. He tried to create a psychotic narcissism. He tried to merge narcissism with religion, with faith. He said that transcending believing in God is the ultimate act of narcissism. It didn't work too well. Not for him personally, and not for anyone after him. Saita was closer to the mar, another existentialist. There's a whole school of existentialist psychology, which leverage and make use of these insights. But narcissism is the second source. So remember, psychosis, what I invent gives meaning. What I invent, I invent. It becomes separate from me, distinct from me, an entity by itself, and per se. And therefore it endows me with meaning. Narcissism, I don't need to externalize any internal object. I am the object. I am the source of meaning. So narcissism is like inventing something and then assimilating it, not externalizing it. The narcissist therefore is the abode, is the temple, is the shrine of God himself. Where the average person would invent God, then project God, then externalize God, then objectify God, then make God into a distinct separate entity from which that average person, the creator actually, can derive meaning and significance. The narcissist stops short of this process of projecting and externalizing. He invents God, of course, it's called the form self. But then he becomes God. He merges with God. He becomes God. The narcissist is his own God, of course. And narcissism is a private religion. I dealt with this way of looking at narcissism in other videos. So this is the second solution. And the third solution is only for the strong-minded, not for the faint of heart. You need to be really, really, really, really strong to accept that you are nothing. The universe is meaningless. The world is insignificant. It started nowhere and is going no place. There's no goal, no plan, no cause and no effect. There's only nothingness. To accept that you are nothing within nothingness requires inordinate resources of strength and resilience. And only extremely few individuals have reached this state of enlightenment. Because to accept this nothingness is to become enlightened. Some people mistakenly say that it means to suppress the ego. No. Narcissists have no ego. You want to suppress the ego, you become a narcissist. Narcissists is the only group of people, only class of people without an ego. And indeed, if you look at many Indian so-called gurus and mystics and not to mention con artists, you can see the narcissists in them. They are narcissistic. The minute you suppress only the ego, you become narcissistic. You do not, suppressing the ego is not enough. You need to suppress the world and yourself in it. You need to not be. Nothingness is a solution of suspending and then eradicating your being, your existence. It's anti-existentialism. It's not nihilism as Peterson repeatedly, mistakenly keeps calling it. It's nothingness. It's much closer, I would say, to Nirvana. If you want to borrow from Eastern mysticism or Eastern religions, it's a much closer state to Nirvana or Avidya. These Eastern states where you actually disappear, vanish. Can one experience existence in this process of disappearing? When one disappears, can one then reappear in some other form? Of course not. This is a weak solution and this is the solution, for example, of religious people. They disappear and then they reappear integrated into a supreme power. When you go to 12 steps, treatment for alcoholics and others, in the 12 steps program, the first step is to accept that there is a higher power, a supreme power, suspend yourself. But suspend yourself and accept the authority of a higher power. That's not what I'm talking about. That's a copout. That's a copout. It's a narcissistic copout. Because if you are limited, you're finite, you're mortal, but the minute you become a part of God, you're infinite. You're infinite, you're omnipotent, you're omniscient. It's utterly narcissistic and in this sense most religions are utterly grandiose and narcissistic. Of course, God is everywhere. God is inside you. You are part of God and other such unmitigated nonsense. Nothingness is the solution of the strong. Nothingness is not about destruction because destruction is an act of being. It's an existential act. To destroy is the mirror image of putting together. To put together and to destroy are the same actions. What does it matter if the brick is this way or this way? I'm not talking about destruction. I'm not talking about nihilism. I'm not talking about anarchism. I'm talking about not being. To accept this not being is a contradiction in terms. Because who will do the accepting? Who does the accepting? If I'm telling you accept that you are nothing in a nothing meaningless, pointless, arbitrary, capricious, nothingness, which you call universe. The very demand is outlandish, contradictory, because I'm asking you to accept. I'm assuming that there's a you. So only the very, very strong and the very, very resilient and the very, very enlightened in the truest sense of the word can accept that they are not even in the position to accept nothingness. But I'll be shocked if there are more than 36 people like that in the world. According to Jewish mysticism, there are 36 people like this in the world. And I'll be shocked if there's, I'll be shocked if a 37th is found. Hell, I'll be shocked if there are 36 people. It's very, very difficult. Narcissism, the second solution. So to summarize the psychosis where we externalize an internal object and begin to believe in it as though it exists outside us. There's narcissism, which says I am the source of all meaning. So I am the meaning. And there is vanishing or disappearance or nothingness, nothingness. And that is a solution only for people who are strong and enlightened and resilient and developed, developed enough to accept that they are not in the position to make any decision whatsoever, including the decision to accept nothingness. That they are being decided, that they are not decision makers, that they are not the source of decisions, but the recipients of decisions. This is a totally passive role, not fatalistic, passive, but passivity that is elevated to a form of nothingness. Maybe I'll dedicate a video to it one day. And my focus is, of course, narcissism has always been. And here's the thing with narcissists. Peterson and others, Peterson follows the footsteps of Dostoevsky and others. When they discussed suffering or angst in existentialist terms, it's angst. Peterson uses the religiously loaded suffering again in the footsteps of Dostoevsky. And so the narcissist is special in this sense. There's a narcissist experiences epiphany and apotheosis without suffering. The narcissist never suffers. You could say, wait a minute, what do you mean never suffers? There's narcissistic injury, there's modification, that's not suffering. Injuries are not suffering. You could have an amputated soldier who is the happiest man on earth because he helped win the battle. You can have a mother who has sacrificed her child for the nation and she's the proudest woman on earth. You could have, in other words, injuries, wounds, bleeding, psychological bleeding or physical bleeding. This is not suffering. It's not the same. Suffering is something much more profound. Suffering is not external. Suffering is not something that happens to you. Suffering is not your reaction to something that happens to you. You could be mortified as a narcissist. You could be wounded and injured as a narcissist. That's why narcissists are hyper-vigilant. They are constantly wounded and injured. But that's not suffering. Narcissists never suffers because to suffer you must be human. Suffering, and there I agree with Peter so completely, is a human. Not only a human trait, but defines us as humans, makes us human. And suffering is not possible without empathy and without emotions. Suffering is the ineluctable, derivative, emergent, epiphenomenal of emotions coupled with empathy. If you don't have both, there's no way on earth you could suffer. You could experience negative emotionality. And narcissists have negative and borderlines, have negative emotionality. They get angry. They become envious. And when they're angry, when they rage, when they're envious, when the borderline anticipates rejection or abandonment, when the narcissist is humiliated and insulted, I mean, when all this happens, lighted, when all this happens, yes, there is a sense of discontinuity and incompleteness. It's a challenge to grandiosity. That's not suffering. That's not suffering. Even losing a child is not suffering. It's a loss. Suffering is, suffering is the experience of emotions coupled with empathy. Suffering is the introspective label for experiencing empathy and emotions. Because if you have empathy, you're flooded with pain. The minute you have empathy, you have a sensor. You have a gateway. You have a portal to other people's pain. And you're invariably and inevitably flooded. Of course, you have defenses against such an avalanche of pain. Everyone does. Of course, you screen out the endless screams and the tremendous agony and the hurt. Of course, you don't absorb all the information that the environment provides you with. Maybe 5%. Similarly, you don't absorb all the pain in your environment. Maybe 5%. But it's still empathy is a gateway and a portal to pain. Other people's pain. But this pain would be meaningless. Would have no meaning without emotions. What the pain does, it provokes in you, evokes in you, triggers. That's why we use the word trigger. Triggers, emotions. One could even argue as many have that our emotions, that emotions are another name for reaction, for empathic reactions. In other words, that all our emotions are merely empathic reactions. That when we integrate into this intersubjective web of pain is when we experience emotions. And this experience of the network of pain is what we call emotions. Love is an attempt to counter this pain. But there would be no love without this pain. I mean, if you want to counter something, you first have to experience it. So love is the desperate attempt to counter this pain, the pain of loneliness, for example. Hatred, anything, it all has to do with empathy and pain. The narcissist have called empathy, which is cognitive and reflexive empathy, a bit animalistic, I would say. Tigers, lions have called empathy, who would not be shocked to discover that viruses have called empathy with the cells that they invade. Called empathy is not to do with emotional empathy. They don't have empathy. They don't experience other people's pain. They don't resonate with the network. In Eastern religions there's something called Indra's net. It's a goddess and she had a net. So if you pick up one bead of this net, all the beads coalesce and merge and are raised together. You can't pick up a single bead in the net without affecting all the other beads. The narcissist and the psychopath are not in this net. At best they are observers, but they are not beads in this net. Therefore they are not subject to the ripple effects of other people's existence. They don't experience existence. The only way healthy people experience existence is via others. Why do you think people go crazy in social distancing, in self-isolation and in solitary confinement in prisons? Because gradually, if we are isolated totally from other people in deprivation tanks, for example, we feel that we cease to exist. Our very existence is a kaleidoscope of reflections. We all have in this sense a hive mind. The only difference between a narcissist and a healthy person is that a healthy person has a core which integrates these inputs into the sensation of existence, into the experience of existence. The narcissist doesn't have this core. He remains shattered like shards of glass, like a hole of mirrors. So narcissists and psychopaths don't exist. And if you don't exist, of course you don't suffer. And if you don't exist and you don't suffer, in which sense are you human? It is small wonder, therefore. It's no wonder that narcissists don't regard themselves as human. They regard themselves as God, as gods. What is God? What is faith? What is religion? It's a fairy tale in the best sense of the word. There was a scholar by the name of Bruno Bettelheim. Bruno Bettelheim later, it was later discovered that he was not a psychologist, as he claimed to have been, and he plagiarized some of his work and unsavory character. And by the way, if you look at the history of psychology, many of the main contributors to psychology have never studied psychology. Simon Freud was a neurologist. Winnicott was a pediatrician. Margaret Mahler was not a psychologist until much later in her life. So Bettelheim was belonged to this august company. He was not a psychologist, although he lied in the book and claimed to have been a child psychologist. But it does not detract from the amazing importance of this book, the enchantment. It's about the enchantment of fairy tales. Bettelheim suggested that fairy tales are ways for children to cope with existence. Children cope with problems like abandonment, anxiety, radical conflict, rivalries with siblings and peers. They cope with this via stories. If they are not exposed to fairy tales, they invent fairy tales of their own. Ask any child. They constantly tell them some stories. It's a self-soothing mechanism, storytelling. If they don't have real friends, they invent imaginary friends. And the stories that children are exposed to in fairy tales, or the stories that they invent, they are very violent. They are brutal. They are ugly. The emotions are usually negative. Fear. Death. But that's the good thing about fairy tales. Fairy tales legitimize our deepest and darkest corners of the soul, and religion does the same. The narcissist's religion is not an exception. The narcissist's religion is also a fairy tale, which is a very dark fairy tale. Very pathologized, full of negative emotionality and so on. But the difference between the narcissist and the average run-of-the-mill believer, worshipper, parishioner, adherent to classic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, The difference is that the narcissist is simultaneously God and the worshipper. He is the deity. He is the divinity. And he worships himself in the form of the false self. He doesn't make a clear distinction between himself and the false self. He believes that he is the false self. And he is missionary. He tries to convince others to worship the false self. It's like Christianity in the 19th century in Africa, trying to convert everyone, or in Asia, trying to convert everyone to Christianity. Same with the narcissist, trying to convert everyone, to believe in him. Believe in him because he is God. God is everything the narcissist ever wanted to be, ever wants to be. God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, admired, much discussed. Here we are discussing him. Or inspiring. God is the narcissist's wet dream, his ultimate grandiose fantasy. But God comes handy in other ways as well. Before I proceed, a little reorientation. I said that when we are faced with the impersonality, the vast distances of deep space, the lack of meaning, the meaninglessness of existence, there are three solutions. The psychotic solution, narcissistic solution, and the nothingness solution. The narcissist chooses the narcissistic solution, but he makes use of the two other solutions. He creates an internal object called the false self and then believes in it, identifying himself with it, merging with it, becoming a part of it. And also he creates nothingness, as we will see shortly. The narcissist, to remind you, alternately idealizes and devalues figures of authority. He is contumacious on the one hand, and he is imitative on the other. In other words, he tries to imitate figures of authority that he admires, but then he devalues them and becomes very defined, anti-socially defined. In the idealization phase, the narcissist strives to emulate his role models. He admires them, imitates them, often ludicrously. He defends them. These figures cannot go wrong, can never be wrong. The narcissist regards these role models as bigger than life, infallible, perfect, whole, brilliant. But as the narcissist is unrealistic and inflated expectations are inevitably frustrated, he begins to devalue his former idols. He discovers that the idols are fit of clay. They are the God that failed. Now these idols are human. To the narcissist, human is a derogator, they are small, they are fragile, they are error-prone, they are pusillanimous, they are mean, they are dumb, they are mediocre, suddenly. The narcissist goes through the same cycle in his relationship with God, because God to the narcissist is the quintessential authority figure. There are many people, average people, normal people, healthy people, whose relationship with God is very primitive and infantile. To them, God is the missing parent, the missing father figure or the missing mother figure. So it's a very, very regressive way of relating to this internal construct, God. The narcissist is even worse, because as far as this is concerned, God is a kind of authority, like the state or the police. And he goes through a cycle of idealization and devaluation with God as well. Often, even when disillusionment and iconoclastic despair have set in, the narcissist continues to pretend to love God. And to follow God. He loves, he simply lies to everyone. The narcissist maintains this deception, because his continued proximity to God confers on him authority or access to people. So any one of you have come across priests, preachers, leaders of the congregation, evangelists, cultists, Bible thumping, politicians, intellectuals, and I will not mention names, and all of them derive authority from their allegedly privileged relationship with God. They claim to have this relationship with God, and you believe them. And what is the source of the authority? I mean, how do you know they're not lying? Because they said so. The base rate fallacy. Base rate fallacy is a discovery, recent discovery in behavioral psychology, that people tend to believe 95% of what they are told uncritically, and they don't bother to check. And then they are found in bed with a prostitute, you know, and whole health breaks loose. Religious authority allows the narcissist to indulge his sadistic urges and to exercise his misogynism freely and openly. Such a narcissist is likely to taunt and to torment his followers, hack to and chastise them, humiliate and berate them, abuse them spiritually or even sexually. The narcissist whose source of authority is religious is looking for obedient and unquestioning slaves upon whom he can exercise his capricious and wicked mastery. The narcissist transforms even the most innocuous and pure religious sentiments and impulses into a cultish ritual and a virulent hierarchy. Narcissist prays on the gullible, his flock become his hostages. Religious authority also secures the narcissistic supply. His core religionists, members of the congregation, his parish, his constituency, his audience, they are transformed into loyal and stable sources of narcissistic supply. They obey his commands, they eat his admonitions, they follow his creed, they admire his personality, they applaud his personal traits, satisfy his needs, sometimes even his carnal desires. They revere him, they idolize him. He becomes a mini god, a substitute god in the Catholic Church, literally a substitute to God. And so being part of a bigger thing, people think that a narcissist can never believe in God because that would mean recognizing a higher power, a supreme being. That's not true. Being part of something bigger is very gratifying narcissistically. It's narcissistic supply. To be a particle of God being immersed in God's grandeur, experiencing God's power and blessings firsthand, however delusionally, communing with God or claiming to communing in God. These are all sources of an ending narcissistic supply. The narcissist becomes God by observing God's commandments, following God's instructions, loving God, obeying God, succumbing to God, merging with God, communicating with God. The bigger the number of interactions he has with God, the more God-like he becomes, God's best friend, their buddies, their besties. Defying God is a way of interacting with God. And even defying God is very gratifying, as far as grandiosity goes. Because it's one thing to defy the schoolmaster or the police, and it's another thing to defy God. The bigger the narcissist's enemy, the more substantial the narcissist's enemy, the more grandiosely important the narcissist feels. Remember, paranoia is a form of narcissism. The bigger your enemy, the more important you are. Like everything else in the narcissist's life, the narcissist mutates God into a kind of inverted narcissist. God becomes the narcissist's dominant source of supply. The narcissist forms a kind of personal relationship with this overwhelming, overpowering entity, in order to overwhelm and overpower other people. Narcissism becomes God vicarious, God by proxy. His relationship with God is the guarantee that he is God-like, or Godly. Narcissism idealizes God, and then devalues God, and abuses God. And this is the classic narcissistic pattern he did it to you, he's going to do it to God. Even God himself cannot escape the narcissist. The thing is that narcissism, of course, is prone to magical thinking. He regards himself in terms of being chosen, or being destined for greatness. He believes that he has a direct line to God, even perversely, that God is serving him in certain junctions and conjunctions of his life through divine intervention. Micro-management. God has nothing else to do but to supervise your life, to interfere with your decisions and choices, to take care of you, to protect you. Many, many, many, many people have this maintained, this hold, these crazy beliefs. These grandiose beliefs, these narcissistic beliefs, that they have a privileged lifeline to God, that God takes special interest in them, particularly and individually and personally. The narcissist believes that his life is of such momentous importance that it is micromanaged by God. Narcissist likes to play God to his human environment. So, narcissism and religion go well together, institutionalized religion. Because religion allows the narcissist to feel unique by virtue of belonging to the church, or to the synagogue, or to the mosque. And this is a more private case of a more general phenomenon. The narcissist likes to belong to groups or to frameworks of allegiance. He derives easy and constantly available narcissistic supply from institutions, from frameworks, from constructs and inventions, like the nation, like the church, like a charity. Within these institutions and from the members of these institutions, he is certain to garner attention, to gain adulation, to be castigated, to be praised, to be noticed. The narcissist's false self is bound to be reflected by his colleagues, co-members, co-religionists, fellows, citizens, compatriots. And this is no mean feat. It cannot be guaranteed in other circumstances. The narcissist's best bet for narcissistic supply is belonging. That's why you find many narcissists in the most radical movements, white supremacy, radical feminism, meek towers. They are infested with narcissists because narcissists derive supply from the very fact that they belong to these groups. They leverage the collective power of the group. They annex it, they appropriate it. They feel this collective power is their power. And hence the narcissist's fanatic and proud emphasis of his membership. If the narcissist is a military man, he shows off his impressive array of medals, his impeccably pressed uniform, the status symbols of his rank. If he's a clergyman, he's overly devout, he's orthodox, he places great emphasis on the proper conduct of rites, rituals, ceremonies. He is a traditionalist to the last cell of his body. The narcissist develops a reverse benign form of paranoia. He feels constantly watched over by senior members of his group or frame of reference, the subject of permanent, avuncular criticism, the center of attention. If the narcissist is a religious man, he calls it divine providence. And this self-centered perception also caters to the narcissist's streak of grandiosity, proving that he is indeed worthy of such incessant and detailed attention, supervision and intervention. And from this mental junction, the way short to entertaining the delusion that God or the equivalent institutional authority is an active participant in the narcissist's life in which constant intervention by God is a key feature. God is subsumed in a larger picture, the picture of the narcissist's destiny, mission and cosmically significant life. God serves this cosmic plan by making it possible. Indirectly therefore, God is perceived by the narcissist to be at the narcissist's service. God is the narcissist's servant, butler. Moreover, in a process of holographic appropriation, the narcissist views himself as a microcosm of his group, of his affiliation, of his frame of reference and allegiance. The narcissist is likely to say, for example, that he is the army, that he is the nation, that he is the people, the struggle, history or part of God. When the narcissist reaches positions of leadership, it's very common. Louis XIV said, let us know the state, I am the state. Adolf Hitler said that he is history, and not to mention Trump, Trump is America, obviously. As opposed to healthier people, the narcissist believes that he both represents and ratifies and bodies his class, his people, his race, history, God, his art, anything else. He feels a part of. The narcissist is not only a part of something, but that something is a part of him. If he is a part of God, God is a part of him. It's a reciprocal relationship of co-ownership, merger and fusion, total coterminous relationship. This is why individual narcissists feel completely comfortable to assume roles usually reserved to groups of people or to some transcendental divine or other authority. And this kind of inflation, when the narcissist's grandiosity is inflated outwards, like in a car. So when this inflation happens, when this enlargement happens, it sits well with the narcissist's all-pervasive feelings of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience. In playing God, for instance, the narcissist is completely convinced that he is merely being himself. The narcissist does not hesitate to put other people's lives or fortunes at risk. He preserves his sense of infallibility in the face of mistakes and misjudgments. And he does this by distorting the facts, by evoking, mitigating or attenuating circumstances, by repressing memories or simply lying or confabulating. And so this is the narcissist's solution where meaning is derived via inflation, by subsuming the world, by consuming the world, by appropriating the world, by rendering the world a mere atom inside the narcissist. The narcissist says, I am the source of meaning. I am the logos. I am the light. I am the creator. Because I'm divine. It's meaningless to ask what's the meaning of my life. My life is the meaning. It's meaningless to ask what's the significance of me, because I am significance embodied and reified. I am, therefore, the world. I think, therefore, reality. In the overall design of things, small setbacks and defeats met a little, says the narcissist. The narcissist is wanted by the feeling that he is possessed of a mission, of a destiny, that is part of fate, of history, inexorable processes. He is convinced that his uniqueness is of some purpose, purposeful, that he is meant to lead or to chart new ways, to innovate, to revolutionize, to organize, to reform, to set precedents, to create from scratch, whatever. Every act of the narcissist is perceived by the narcissist to be significant. Every utterance of momentous consequence. Every thought of a revolutionary caliber. The narcissist feels part of a grand design, a world plan and the frame of affiliation, the group of which he is supposedly a member and a part. It must be commensurately grand. The proportions and the properties of a group must resonate with the narcissist's proportions and properties, because the group is him. He is the group. He is the meaning. He is the significance. The characteristics of the group must justify his characteristics. Its ideology must conform to his preconceived opinions and prejudices. There must not be light between the narcissist and groups that he belongs to or his beliefs or any construct that he externalizes. So if he believes in God, there must not be light between him and God. God must conform to the narcissist or cease to exist. It is here that the narcissist may transition from the second solution. You remember psychosis, narcissism, nothingness? Here, if the narcissist feels a discrepancy, a grating injury, he is hyper-vigilant. He feels that he is disrespected, slighted or misunderstood or discriminated against or passive-aggressively sabotaged, undermined. It is then that the narcissist chooses nothingness as a solution. And ironically, the narcissist is best equipped for enlightenment. If the aim of enlightenment is not being, not the suspension of being, because suspension implies an agent. Suspension implies a will, volition, an actor. Not the suspension of being and not the destruction of being, because destruction is a mirror image of construction. I'm not talking about this. Not being. Suddenly not being. The narcissist is perfectly positioned to do this. Ironically, it's the narcissist who is closest to enlightenment, much more than the average person. Average person is wedded to reality. Average person is invested in reality. Average person derives meaning from reality. The context of reality is a hermeneutic framework, is an interpretative framework, gives imbues life with a direction and a goal. Average people find it very difficult to totally divorce reality. The narcissist has nothing to do with reality. The narcissist's only reality is the narcissist. And as you can turn off the light switch and immerse yourself in total unmitigated darkness, and as you can enter a deprivation tank and float in water for two months, the narcissist can turn himself off. The narcissist can turn the only reality he knows off, because he is the only reality. He has no emotions. He has no bridges to other people. He has no empathy. And all external objects, he internalizes. He internalizes even people. Intimate partners, children, spouses, lovers, coworkers, bosses, authority figures. He internalizes God. God resides in him, not in the good sense. In the bad sense, God resides in him because he minimizes God. He minimizes God. Then he takes God hostage. He kidnaps and hijacks God. And he forms a trauma bond with God. There's trauma bonding between the narcissist and God. It's a Stockholm syndrome. God becomes a prisoner in the narcissist's penitentiary. And so the narcissist holds the keys. If he decides to stage a daring escape from reality and leave God behind, it's not a problem for him. This is the irony that perhaps it is true narcissism that we can finally reach enlightenment. Maybe we're all collectively going through this, transitioning from psychosis to narcissism and maybe from narcissism. We want to be malignantly optimistic. One day we will transition to enlightenment. And so as long as a narcissist is in reality and as long as he belongs to a group, he still insists that the group must magnify, magnify him, echo him, amplify his life, his views, his knowledge, his personal history. And this intertwining, this inter- and meshing of individual and collective is what makes a narcissist the most devout, most loyal of all the members of him, or sometimes the leader of him. The narcissist is always the most fanatical, most extreme, most radical, most dangerous adherent of the group. Its take is never merely the preservation of the group, but his very own survival. As with other narcissistic supply sources, once the group is no longer instrumental, the narcissist loses all interest in it, devalues the group and ignores it. In extreme cases, narcissists might even wish to destroy the group as a punishment or revenge for its incompetence in securing his emotional needs. Hitler gave orders from the banker to destroy Germany. Albert Speer ignored him, luckily for Germany. Narcissists switch between groups and ideologies with ease as they switch between partners, spouses, value systems, jobs. In this respect, narcissists are narcissists first and members of their groups only in the second place. If the narcissist had adopted God as his source of supply, the narcissist comes first. His belief, his faith, God himself, comes second in the best case. And so this is where we are right now. We are right now in a crossroads between these three solutions. Some of us choose psychosis. That includes religious people. Some of us choose narcissism, a growing number. We choose narcissism. And some of us, extremely few, extremely strong, extremely resilient, and they have my unmitigated and bridal admiration. They choose nothingness. To choose nothingness is not to ignore the truth. It is to embrace it. It is to accept it. It is to not fight it. The surrender is the ultimate act of assertion, self-assertion, and perhaps even rebellion. It is through surrender that one emerges victorious from this existence that otherwise defeats us all. Simply defeats us all. Now, many people come up with sets of rules, commandments, values, value systems, and they try to convince you that these are. If you follow these, you will be happy. Any delusion can make you happy. You believe in the fairy tale of God, it will make you happy. You believe in love. You believe your partner loves you, it will make you happy. The problem with replacing one delusion, one mental illness with another, the problem of replacing one totally arbitrary, meaningless set of values with another, the problem of exchanging one set of rules which has no internal or external validity with another set of rules which has an equal lack of validity. The problem with all these exchanges and interchanges and trades is that they lead from one meaninglessness to another, from one disillusionment to another, from one disappointment to another. Delusions have expiry dates, that's the problem. Ask any cult member that will tell you, you could survive in a cult for 20 years and be the happiest of people. One day, one day, you have to live. When you live, you have to face reality, you have to face the world. You have to face the speck of dust that you are. You have to face your finiteness, your mortality, your meaninglessness, and the meaninglessness of your life, and the meaninglessness and insignificance of everyone else in your life. And you have to accept that you have no access to other people's minds, that we can't touch each other, cannot, that empathy and emotions are utterly arbitrary agreements, and they are arbitrary because it's a nature of reality. Reality is arbitrary and capricious and unpredictable. There are no rules, not even the laws of nature, which are specific in many ways. So, to accept this, to embrace this, you need amazing resources of strength. This for me is the ultimate test of being human. Can we survive even if and when we stop deceiving ourselves, we stop lying to ourselves and to others, can we then survive? As long as you lie to yourself, as long as you adopt, I don't know, 12 rules, 10 commandments, 16 values, that flag, this nation, that church, these are all lies and delusions. And of course, you know, you're free, we all go, we all watch movies, we also lie to ourselves, we know it's not real. It's not real, that's a problem. It's not real. In one day, you will be forced to wake up and it might be too late. Perhaps we will all benefit from choosing the third option, nothingness. There's nothingness for sure, counters narcissism, and nothingness in its own strange way, counters psychosis. Nothingness eradicates mental illness, because to be mentally ill, you must exist. Someone must be mentally ill. And if your separate existence, if your hubris, hubris and mistaken belief that there is a solution, that is a way, there are rules. If you get rid of all this baggage, perhaps this is liberation. Perhaps this is true liberation. When you don't have anyone to set free, maybe that is the very quintessence and quiddity of total freedom.