 Post-modernity seems to be characterized by three organizing and explanatory principles. Principle number one, the individual is the source of all rights, and these rights impose commensurate obligations on others. The individual is the basic organizational unit. Many individuals put together can structure and form any arrangement, any contract, social or otherwise amongst them, because the individual is sovereign. The second idea or the second principle, perfection, progress towards perfection. The individual can better himself, perfect himself, make himself superior by wishing hard, by working hard, by studying hard. It is up to the individual to elevate himself, stage by stage, up the ladder of self-actualization and social supremacy. It is all in the hands of the individual, and individuals if they are mentally healthy should aspire to perfect themselves, to become more, nevertheless, to grow, never regress, to always acquire new skills, seek new opportunities, amass and accumulate wealth and accomplishments in short, expand. So this is the second principle, the principle of perfection of the self via progression, via progress. The third principle is suspicion of institutions. Institutions are penumbral, the dark, they are tyrannical, they are averse to individualism. They are the enemies of the individuals, and they need to be resisted and subverted and undermined and modified and ignored. At any rate, there's an enmity, there's a war between the individual and social or other structures and institutions, and this war should be won by the individual. It's up to the individual to win it. Where do these ideas which are so hyper-modern, where do they come from? The surprising answer, they come from the Renaissance, which started something like seven to eight hundred years ago, and they evolved through Lutheranism and Protestantism, and then they clashed with values of the Enlightenment. So we are living in a period which is reactionary and against the Enlightenment values, actually, a period which resembles much more the Renaissance and the early years of Protestantism and later perhaps Calvinism. And this is the topic of today's video, the narcissism conspiracy, when did it start and how did we get here? But before we go there, I would like to introduce you to a series of books, amazing books. It's a series, it's not a single book as you can see, it's written by Dr. Marnie Hill Foderego, I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly, Foderego, Marnie Hill Foderego, and one of the books is a list of thousands of terms and words which have to do with narcissism and narcissistic abuse. Another book is an exercise book, yet another book is a book which in kind of acronym poetry encapsulates and captures all the lessons we have learned about narcissism and narcissistic abuse. I've written the introduction to the first book in the series, there are I think five of them already and another three are to be released, the total number would be eight. It's an amazing series, I've never come across anything similar to this in 30 years of working in this industry, in this field. So have a look, see if it's of any help or interest, I believe it will be, and my thanks go to Marnie Hill Foderego for this very generous gift that she sent me. This is the back of the book, these are the front covers. Okay, let's dive right in, Renaissance, Protestantism, Enlightenment, the battle between conceptions, philosophies and ideologies and how we got caught up in the crossfire and where are we right now, regressing to 15th century and 16th century and 17th century Renaissance Machiavelli's period, hence Machiavellianism. Stay tuned because I'm about to expose the narcissism conspiracy. In the wake of yesterday's video, I was nearly buried alive under an avalanche of fawning, flirtatious and fake gold, sorry, women, needless to say, I banned all of them, then I blocked all of them, and I engage in unspeakable acts of purification and cleansing. And thus, unadulterated, we can move on back to the topic du jour, narcissism, what else? You say you like my giggle, don't you? Okay, Shoshanim and what is left of Shoshanot, my name is Golem, sorry, Sam Baknin and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism, Revisited, no, I'm not the author of Lord of the Rings, regrettably think of the royalties, and I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and a current member of the faculty of CIAPS, Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies all over the globe, most notably in Cambridge, United Kingdom, Toronto, Canada, and outreach campus in the illustrious capital of Nigeria, Lagos. Okay, today's topic is, in my view, fascinating, because we're going to go back in time, I'm going to invite you to time travel with me, to discover the true roots, historical roots of pathological narcissism. Now, we must distinguish very clearly between pathological narcissism as a clinical entity, a mental health problem, or disturbance, or disorder. Pathological narcissism in the clinical sense has been captured and described in ancient writings. You can find it in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, in the Quran, in writings, in Buddhism, literally everywhere. All scriptures, all ancient plays and stories and mythology even, they captured the essence of narcissism. Don't forget that pathological narcissism, the word narcissism, comes from the myth of narcissus. So, there's nothing new really. We haven't discovered anything new, believe it or not, when it comes to the clinical dimensions aspects of narcissism. However, narcissism is an organizing principle. Narcissism is the way we organize our lives, the way we form and then run institutions, the way we function in larger society, among ourselves in interpersonal relationships, and even more importantly, within ourselves, our perception of the self, and how we love ourselves, how we reject ourselves, so an organizing principle. Narcissism is an explanatory, hermeneutic, exegetic principle, principle that makes sense of our reality, imbues our lives with meaning, and renders the world an environment which we can cope in and function in and somehow survive. Narcissism is an organizing principle. Narcissism is an explanatory principle. This is something relatively new, but not as new as you think. If you go back to Sigmund Freud in 1914, 1915, that's not traveling back in time sufficiently to discover the roots of narcissism, because narcissism as a way to organize human society and institutions and make sense of human existence, this kind of narcissism started in the Renaissance, well over possibly 800 years ago. The Renaissance was, of course, a pan-European movement. Anywhere started more or less at the end of the 12th century and ended more or less at the end of the 17th century when it gave place and gave room to the Enlightenment. And within this period of anywhere between 300 and 500 years, depending on the location, pathological narcissism became a very crucial pivotal tenet, something that gave rise to a series of philosophies and ideologies that came to characterize the existence of their Renaissance men. And this is the topic of today's video. How did narcissism emerge from the Renaissance, from Protestantism and from the Enlightenment? How did these movements, hundreds of years old, how did they push us inexorably to postmodernism, the point we are in today, steeped, immersed in and drowning in, if you wish, narcissism? They are to blame. We are just the byproducts of these historical movements and developments. So stay tuned and we will take this tour of the historical landscape which gave rise to pathological narcissism. Just let me find the text because I seem to have lost it. I don't know why. Here it is. Here it is. Okay. So before we proceed, in a video I posted a few days ago, I analyzed the phenomenon of switching and I analyzed switching in borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder but not in dissociative identity disorder. So first of all, I'm going to dedicate a video to switching in DID in what used to be called multiple personality disorder. Also, in the video that I posted, I forgot to mention hyperactivity. When switching occurs, there's a phase of hyperactivity followed by a phase of hypoactivity. So talkativity, hyperverbalizing and hyperreflexivity, pseudo-psychosis and hyperactivity are followed by a period of subdued, slow-motion, hesitant reactivity. Also, borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder are prone to switching, owing to splitting and self-splitting defenses. I explained this in the video. But what is important to understand and something I've omitted to my great shame and disgrace, what is important to understand is that the self-splitting in the switching process, the previous self-state, the original self-state, is perceived as all bad while the new self-state is perceived as all good. So the transition from one self-state to another involves the splitting of these self-states, the devaluation of the prior previous self-state, the idealization of the next oncoming self-state. Self-splitting. Okay, I apologize for these omissions in the video. I hope I have made up for it somehow. There's a link in the description to the video. The video is titled Signs of Switching in Narcissism and Borderlines. Now you can watch it, perhaps, in a new light. And now let's proceed to the Renaissance. Renaissance thinkers were concerned with the improvement of the individual. The emphasis was on the individual. They believed that if you were to somehow better the individual, somehow transform the individual and render the individual more functional, more clever, more educated, more anything, this would have an aggregate effect on human society. In other words, the Renaissance, contrary to the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment thinkers, like Giacoso and others, they placed an emphasis on the social contract. The Renaissance believed in a grassroots effect, kind of crowdsourcing. The Renaissance thinkers believed that you should work or focus or concentrate on the individual, and that if you were to improve a sufficient number of individuals, there would be an emergent phenomenon. Society at large would change and become also better. And how do we improve the individual? By reverting to classic Greek and Roman works and values. So the Renaissance was a reactionary, retro movement, a movement that wanted to revive ancient Greek and Roman, especially Republican Roman values, works of art, literature, sculptures, paintings, you name it. Anything Greek and anything Roman was involved in fashion. The Renaissance comprised a series of grassroots modernist movements that put together constituted a reaction to elitist, hermetic and scholastic medieval modernity with its modest technological advances. So the Renaissance was evolutionary in character, but revolutionary in goals. The idea was to displace erstwhile elites, especially the church, to displace them and endow the individual with agency, personal autonomy and power to empower the individual at the expense of the church. The church of course was the predominant institution. The church did everything. The church had schools and universities. The church had churches. The church simply catered to all the needs, psychological and physical of the individual. And the Renaissance was very courageous in attacking head on this total institution, this multi-tentacled construct or structure, which has evolved over 1500 years. It was a war. The Renaissance was a belligerent, combative warlike. Today they would have been called probably freedom fighters or terrorists by the church. The medieval strain of modernity was perceived by Renaissance contemporaries to have been nascient, ignorant, dark, middle ages. Though whether the Renaissance indeed improved upon the high and late middle ages is disputed and was disputed by the likes of Johann Wiesinger, Charles Haskins and James Franklin. Those of you who would like to read further, these are the names. The Renaissance idea of progress was therefore not linear, but cyclical. Mankind's hard-earned accomplishments are easily squandered and they have to be regained repeatedly throughout history. History is a cycle. We accomplish things, then we squander them, we destroy them, we self-destruct and then we have to start from zero and we have to rediscover our previous accomplishments. Indeed, the literacy rate, an important indicator of progress, had fluctuated throughout the period from the 15th to the 18th centuries. In stark contrast to medieval men, the Renaissance men was a narcissistic, albeit gifted and multi-talented, amateur. Amateur in pursuit of worldly fame and rewards. A throwback to earlier times, ancient Greece, republican Rome, when everyone was an amateur. There were no professions, well, no professions to speak of at the time, anyone could do anything. Philosophers became doctors, barbers became doctors, doctors became philosophers. I mean, there was no, there was high fluidity, high interprofessional fluidity and not much specification and expertise. So, the Renaissance wanted to revive this and we have the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and so on and so forth, Michelangelo, who did a little of everything. The Renaissance man is a polymath. He's polyglot and polymath. He's all over the place. He knows a little, a little about many things, rather than a lot about a single topic. So, this was the Renaissance man and the Renaissance was both reactionary and modernist, looking forward by looking back, committed to a utopian new human type by regressing and by harking back to the ideal humanity of the past. There's a lot of narcissism here, as you begin to see, because the constituent unit is the individual and the individual has the power to explore the world and gain knowledge by becoming a gifted amateur. And so, the individualism power, he doesn't need the church. There's a process of disintermediation. There's no need for the mediation or brokerage of the church. This led pretty directly to the development of Lutheranism and Protestantism a bit later, but there was disintermediation here. As the individual was empowered, the church was disempowered, was weakened, of course. One came at the expense of the other. It was a zero sum game. In the 20th century, romanticism, a 19th century malignant mutation of Renaissance humanism and its emphasis on the individual, provoked the counter movements of fascism, communism and Nazism. But contrary to the observations of Jacob Buchhardt in his masterpiece, otherwise masterpiece, the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, there were two editions 1860, 1878, but contrary to his observations in this masterpiece, it was the Renaissance that gave birth to the aesthetics of totalitarianism, to the personality cult, to the obsession with men of action, to the cultivation of verbal propaganda and indoctrination, rhetoric as means of influencing both the masses, both the masses and decision makers, and to the pernicious idea of human perfectibility. This all emanate from the Renaissance, so ironically individualism and totalitarianism are both Renaissance ideas, but they're easy to reconcile because totalitarianism is founded on an individual, an individual at the center of a personality cult, a narcissistic psychopathic individual who becomes the men of action, the leader. So the Renaissance put together individualism and totalitarianism by emphasizing the prince in Machiavelli's terms, the prince, the men, the strong men who is an unflinching leader in the face of adversity, men who engages in realpolitik and doesn't succumb to the feebleness and weakness of ideologies or philosophies or theories or the human heart or empathy. Many Renaissance thinkers considered the state, the structure of the state, to be similar to a constantly belabored, massive work of art, whose affairs are best managed by a prince, not by God. And I refer you to writings by Machiavelli, but also by his contemporary, Jean Baudel, or even Leonardo Bouni. So there was an authoritarian cast of mind, and this authoritarian cast of mind did not prevent the vast majority of Renaissance philosophers from vociferously and incongruously upholding the republican ideal and the individual's public duty to take part in the political life of the collective. It was as if they thought that a narcissistic, psychopathic, strong men of action leader can somehow be juxtaposed or superimposed on a republican body politic, which is comprised of light of individuals, empowered individuals. Empowered individuals would resonate well with the men of action, who is an individual, is also an individual. But the contradiction between authoritarianism and republicanism was only apparent, as I said. Renaissance tyrants relied on the support of the urban populace and an emerging civil service to counterbalance a fractious and perfidious aristocracy and the waning influence of the church. It was a war between the emerging individual and previous institutions, whose aim was to create faceless, anonymous masses. And so two ideologies clashed here, and the compromise was an individual who would create institutions that would convert groups of individuals into masses. Later came to be known as oculocracy. And this led to the emergence in the 20th century of oculocracies, polities based on mob, mob rule, the rule of the crowd led by bureaucracy with an anti-clerical, anti-elitist populist, fear or duche or secretary general on top. The colonialist ideas of Leibnzau and white supremacy, forms of racist geopolitical narcissism, these ideas also have their roots in the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a seriously bad period, ideologically speaking. It gave rise to everything that's dark and bad in today's world. And it is very ironic that we consider the Renaissance to have been an improvement upon the Middle Ages, because it was anything but exploratory sea voyages gave rise to more virulent forms of nascent nationalism and to mercantilism, the economic exploitation of native lands, and later on imperialism and colonialism, with a few notable exceptions. These were perceived by contemporaries in the Renaissance to be progressive developments, you know, the white men's burden. Now, Renaissance led in my view inexorably to Protestantism. Protestantism basically, at least the primitive, the prototype of Protestantism, Lutheranism, Martin Luther's church, relied basically on two things, disintermediation, getting rid of the church as an intermediary between the individual and God. No need, the individual can directly interact with God, if necessary, maybe in a congregation that assembles ad hoc in some location, but the location is not important. The congregation is not important, the individual is. So this is one thing. And the second pillar of Protestantism and Lutheranism was that you could be chosen by God. It is God's decision, mind you, in a way you are pretty predestined. There's very little you can do to change your destiny, not only in Calvinism, but also in the original writings and teaching of Luther, the father of Protestantism. So very little you could do. Of course, you have to behave, you have to follow the commandments, you have to observe religious edicts and so on, but God chooses you, you're chosen. How do you know that you're chosen? How does anyone know that someone is chosen? He's blessed. How is he blessed? He is rich. Protestantism equated wealth, riches, career accomplishments with the blessing of God. And in doing so, it gave rise to modern capitalism. The proto-capitalism preceded Protestantism by 200 years, but modern capitalism is absolutely Protestant. You know the famous Protestant work, ethic, Weber, others. So this is the succession. The Renaissance came and what Renaissance thinkers and scholars suggested was that the church was corrupt, aristocracy was even more so, and there was a need to elevate the individual, to venerate the individual, to empower the individual, to allow the individual to form institutions, new institutions, which would displace the church and the aristocracy. And these institutions, the head of these institutions, would be an individual. This would be a man of action. Today we would call him a dictator or tyrant, but at that time it was perceived as a prince, the remote descendant of Plato's philosopher kings. So it was all around the individual. Even mass movements, even mobs, even crowds were led by identifiable individuals. And so this was the Renaissance. Then came Protestantism. And Protestantism, through its various manifestations and transmutations, Protestantism said, yes, the individual is at the core of the religious experience as well. While the Renaissance emphasized earthly pursuits, governance, money making, commerce, science, these were the emphasis, and the activities of Renaissance thinkers and scholars. Protestantism suggested to apply the same, the very same principle, to religion. So okay, the organizing unit in religion, the base unit, would be the individual, not the church. We're getting rid of the church. The church does nothing but corrupt, steal, and is utterly unnecessary. So first of all we translate the Bible into the vernacular, to common spoken language, German in this case, and later English, so that people don't have to rely on priests in order to read the Word of God. And then individuals constitute the church. There's a church of the individual and they are in direct contact with God. And finally, some individuals are blessed by God, they're chosen, and we know that they're blessed and chosen by virtue of their standing in society, and especially by virtue of their possessions, how much money they have, how much wealth, how much real estate, and how accomplished they are in their career. This was a revolution, because whereas the Renaissance merged individualism with the institutions of the state, giving rise to totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Protestantism merged individualism with the institution of religion, thereby giving rise to individualized, distributed religion. These are precisely the two hallmarks, the two pivots of pathological narcissism, modern-day current pathological narcissism. It is a distributed private religion. The narcissist worships a divinity or a deity, also known as the false self. It's a private religion which involves human sacrifice. The narcissist sacrifices himself, his true self, and then he sacrifices his intimate partners, his friends, and so on. So there is a close affinity between the axioms and philosophical principles underlying Protestantism and the way pathological narcissism is structured as a private religion. Similarly, there is a close affinity between the principles of the Renaissance, the gifted amateur, the men of action, the prince, narcissistic, narcissism, grandiosity, a key feature of modern, post-modern pathological narcissism. If you put the Renaissance and Protestantism together, you get narcissism, pathological narcissism, period. At some point, about the late 17th, early 18th century, there was a kind of counter-reaction that was known as the Enlightenment. But the Enlightenment only made things worse, only exacerbated the situation. Although in principle, the Enlightenment emphasized society over the individual. The Enlightenment emphasized the greater good, the public good in principle. So it constituted an opposition to the principles of the Renaissance. And even I would say to Protestantism, and that's why the Enlightenment divorced itself from religion, became anti-religious, anti-clerical. So the Enlightenment had to distance itself from Protestantism and from the Renaissance because it began to consider the world in terms of much larger structures known as societies. But even so, the Enlightenment thinkers and scholars committed a grave mistake which only exacerbated and permitted, allowed, the rise of narcissism. In the Enlightenment, there is a counterfactual assumption. An ideal, which is not real, is defined by the facts. It's not evidence-based. And that is the ideal of the rational agent. The Enlightenment introduced into all kinds of disciplines, including, for example, economics and so on, the rational agent. It's a person, an individual, who makes decisions which are 100% and all the time rational. They are never biased, they're never prejudiced, they're never superstitious, they're never conspiracy minded, they're never stupid. They're always rational. That is, of course, not the case. People are irrational. They're never, almost never, rational. They're always irrational. And so the Enlightenment presented an ideal, to use Freud's terms, an ego ideal, which sets us up for failure. We constantly fail at being rational and we feel bad about it and we self-reject and we self-destruct because we keep failing. The Enlightenment created a situation where none of us would measure up to its standards. We would all be defeated, time and again. That's a bad feeling. And ultimately, we internalize these defeats and failures and begin to feel like losers. And as losers, we self-reject and sometimes self-destruct. There was a first element that the Enlightenment introduced and coupled with the narcissism of the Renaissance and of Protestantism, the Enlightenment transformed narcissism into a destructive force. In the Enlightenment, there is an external locus of control because the operating unit is society, the collective. The individual is driven here and there, is like flotsam and jetsam, is like a cork on stormy water. The individual is moved along by the forces of history, of his culture, of his period and of his society. He is a passive, to a large extent, a passive kind of vector. He is not an agent. The Enlightenment denied the individual, the agency, personal autonomy and independence that were afforded by Protestantism and the Renaissance because the Enlightenment embedded the individual in a much bigger picture, in much larger forces, for example the force of history. And so there was this external locus of control and of course it gave rise to a sense of victimhood. I'm a victim. If my life is determined by economic forces which are impersonal and huge and no one can control, then I'm a victim of these forces. And this led of course to what today we call victimhood movements. But victimhood movements are nothing new. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and most notably the American Revolution were victimhood movements. If you read the founding documents of the American Republic, they are all lists of grievances. It was a victimhood movement, par excellence. So, this sense of victimhood stayed with us and has come to define us. And it is a legacy of the Enlightenment, actually. Scientism, consumerism, economic growth and even atheism emerged as new religions that regulate human relationships in lieu of older religions and ideologies. So we are caught in a crossroad between the Renaissance and Protestantism and the Enlightenment and liberal democracy. Both of them are not good psychologically speaking. The Renaissance and Protestantism end up imposing on us totalitarian authoritarian structures and denying our freedom of action in the name of our individuality. And the Enlightenment demands of us too much expects us to be inhuman. We keep failing. And when there's a confluence of these forces, what emerges is a compensatory defense. We keep failing with the Enlightenment, so we claim to be infallible. We never fail. We never make mistakes. We're always right. We find ourselves under the control of some personality cult or some totalitarian authoritarian structures and we rebel. And then we feel like victims and they're victimhood movements and then these victimhood movements become narcissistic and psychopathic and it all emanates from these three enormous forces, enormous historical movements. Now I've given an interview to Ginger Roy. There's a link in the description where I'll expound a lot more of these themes and topics. And in this interview, I make a few points. I suggest that the project of liberal democracy has failed and I think it should be somehow replaced. It's an ideology and exactly like communism and other ideologies. It's based on a counterfactual view of human psychology, fallacious reframing of human history. Ideologies are inflexible. They are self-defeating straight jackets and when we adhere to such fantasies, because ideology is just another name for fantasy. It's a rejection of reality. It's an attempt to reshape reality in ways which are untenable. So when we adhere to these fantasies, we ineluctably and inexorably end up in conflict and mayhem. I also deal in the interview with the issue of democracy and I explain that as the founding fathers of the United States knew well, universal franchise democracy. Anyone and everyone and his dog can vote is a dangerously flawed idea. It empowers the nation, the ignorant, the dumb. It gives rise to demagogues, elevates ruthless populist, antisocial leaders and so on. It's a bad idea, simply. And similarly, the human rights and civil rights agendas are totalitarian victimhood doctrines that abrogate the inalienable and primordial right for self-defense and the meritocratic allocation of resources, among many other distortions. So we need to get rid of all these delusional baggage of renaissance, of protestantism and of the Enlightenment. And we need to revert to reality, including your own politics, but not only. The reality and narcissism cannot go together. Narcissism is a fantasy defense. If you're embedded in reality, if you're grounded, you will never ever be a narcissist. And if you're a narcissist, you are never ever in reality. So we need to revert to reality. It's easy to say because we have been brainwashed over the past seven, eight hundred years by a succession of movements that emphasize the individual and then emphasize society and give rise to all kinds of mental health pathologies on a mass scale, mass psychogenic illnesses. And the only way to solve this is not by treating one individual at a time in psychotherapy. The only way to solve this is to substantially reform or even get treated completely of social current social structures and institutions and replace them with others that do not reflect the values of the renaissance and protestantism and the unrealistic expectations of the Enlightenment. It can be done, actually. Such a manifesto can easily be composed. The question is the political will because narcissism is very enticing. It's addictive. It caters to deep-set psychological needs. And there's narcissism everywhere. There's narcissism in the renaissance, in protestantism, and narcissism is a compensation for the accusatory finger of the Enlightenment. So, it's not easy to ask people to get rid of their narcissism. Reality hurts and bruises. And people might say, uncomfortable, cocooned and scorned in my fantasy. Why should I give it up? Well, you should give it up because otherwise you will end up with another Hitler. Hitler was a direct, direct spiritual descendant of the renaissance and, to some extent, protestantism and the Enlightenment, believe it or not. He will end up with this kind of people. If you, and you know, we have survived a generation of such leaders and it seems that we are facing a second wave of such men-of-action personality cult leaders. I don't know if we're going to survive the second wave. I have my grave doubts because social cohesion previously has been much higher and many institutions, for example, the church, were still respected. Today we have no institutions. We have no social cohesion. We have nothing. We have no defenses against this second wave of insanity. Climate change may only be a symptom of this. We may be heading to an extinction event, a serious existential risk, and perhaps it's time to rethink where we stand and how did we come here? The path, the road that led here, which is paved with the renaissance, protestantism and Enlightenment stones.