 Okay. Hey everyone, this is Alex Kazemi here. I am a 25 year old author, pop artist, cultural commentator and cultural G programmer. And I want to thank the incredibly talented, important and incredible legend and author and thinker Sam Vankin for having me here as a guest on his channel today to express our deep concerns for human culture, the dangers of social media culture, the future of creativity and art, and how this all plays a role with the root source of a morbid, lethal collective narcissism that we are seeing in our culture today. And I believe we will continue to see a progression of throughout the 2020s. It's a true honor to be here with you today, Sam. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I'm pleasure to talk to you. I want to thank you so much for providing this intellectual space for us to talk about the things the mainstream fashion and art media will not allow me to talk about because it makes their young audience feel threatened and uncomfortable. But I think in order to have progress and evolution or culture, we do need to talk about things that are not always politically correct and sanitized by corporations. I agree. I think the monetization of eyeballs has reached the point of censorship. Yeah, it's very dangerous. So I want to start with the hottest topic on everyone's lips, COVID-19. I would think COVID-19 is the ultimate disruption to the global collective narcissism that is associated with the modern world in the 2020s. Because a narc stomping ground, which is the material world, a Malkuth society, which is what we would say in Kabbalah, we are now seeing external supply is now being stripped from everyone. The free will to even exercise the narcissistic hunt is now being alchemized and pushed towards a new reality, the virtual reality, the simulation, the digital world, which would be, you know, hunting on sex apps or dating apps or Instagram, Twitter or whatever one wills in that moment by getting the digital vial of attention and narcissistic supply rather than the physical supply. Talk a little bit about that to me about the alchemical process of what happens when the narcissist can't get his supply in a traditional way like the COVID-19 apocalyptic state. I think we should make a distinction, an age based distinction. Native Digitals, people under the age of 25, who have been studied very extensively by the likes of Twenge and Campbell, they extract narcissistic supply almost exclusively from cyberspace. So Native Digitals will not regard this as disruption on the very contrary. They will regard it as an enhancement of the pathological narcissistic space, because now they have a captive audience, an audience that has no alternatives, but to be online. So many narcissists, especially younger ones, let's say under the age of 35, they are reveling. They're celebrating. This is wonderful for them, because now they can post to Instagram 10 times a day and each of these posts will receive attention. Now they can upload videos and all the videos will have like 40,000 viewers or 400,000 viewers, because no one has anything else to do. I mean, people don't have what to do. They're bored out of their minds and they're online. Online has replaced reality in many respects. I would venture to say that virtual reality is now the outside material physical world. I agree with you. I agree with you. I 100% agree with you. I would say that this gluttonous mentality that they're able to exercise with the excuse of being in quarantine is almost their utopian world. I've been saying this. They have all of this time now to exercise that narcissistic desire for supply on the digital plane, and it's almost no one even questions it. They have permission to do it. Yeah, but I think it's different for older narcissists. Older narcissists are used to extracting supply from flesh and blood bodies, warm bodies to use a vampire metaphor. So narcissists need warm bodies, older narcissists, and they don't have them right now. And it's a major problem for these narcissists. They are frustrated and they're converting frustration to aggression, and they're trying to convert aggression to narcissistic supply. But they have a very limited audience. Now older narcissists, narcissists above the age of 35, they have physical, pathological narcissistic spaces. It could be the neighborhood pub. It could be the church. It could be the workplace. It could be a political party. It could be, but it has to be physical, and they don't know how to efficaciously extract supply from digital platforms, either because they are technophobes or because they are technologically challenged or because it doesn't have the right feel. These are the kind of people who still read books. They need the tactile. You're describing the Generation X archetype of the narcissist is what you're saying. I would say people above the age of 45, above the age of 50. I think these people are in serious difficulty right now. They are tactile. They react in real world shoes. Would you say, is it a coincidence that so much of the modern behavior we see in modern society can be traced back to your research on narcissism, how you've been talking about narcissism for decades. Do you see narcissism as the malady of modern behavior and modern society? I wish I could take the credit for that, but I'm just the last in a very long chain. The first to seriously warn against narcissism as an organizing principle and an explanatory principle of modern life was a guy called Christopher Lash, and he published a book called The Culture of Narcissism. And before Christopher Lash, six years before Christopher Lash has published his seminal tome, there was another guy, a Frenchman called Guy Debord. And Guy Debord in 1968 published a book called The Society of the Spectacle. Yes, that's an amazing book. It's an amazing, difficult to read very, because it's written in a very peculiar manner. But essentially what he said is that appearances are going to replace substance as the principle of existence. And then before him, there was Emile Durkheim. Emile Durkheim, he was a sociologist in Vienna. Durkheim described for the first time what he called anomic societies. These are societies whose principles of organization and institutions crumble, either as a result of an external shock like COVID-19, or as a result of internal dynamics. And then he predicted that two things will happen. Suicide rates will skyrocket, self-mutilation, self-harm, suicide. And on the other hand, narcissism will skyrocket. He didn't call it narcissism. He used other words. So I'm just the last in a very long chain. It seems that narcissism has three functions. On the individual level, it caters to a series of survival needs. We can talk about it later, if you wish. And on the collective societal level, it provides, as I said, an organizing principle. I mean, narcissism today is used to organize people. Yes, I agree with that. To put them together, to motivate them, and to generate institutions. And the second function of narcissism is an explanatory principle, hermeneutic principle. A principle which endows existence with meaning, and endows your being with meaning. That's very powerful because this is the first time in human history, since the invention of religion, where we have a principle that is both hermeneutic, both exegetic, explanatory, and organizing. If you look at religion, for example, look at Islam. Islam is both a religion and a state organizational principle. Islam and Muslims, they are members of something called umah. Umah means the nation. All Muslims, all over the world, are members of umah by virtue of being Muslims. It's the same with the Jews. Judaism is a religion on the one hand, but it's also a nationality. It's also a culture. So religions were both organizing principles, and principles that gave meaning to life. They bring order to chaos. They brought order to chaos, exactly. And the second time this has happened is now, with narcissism. And that's why we bring narcissism to religion. Yes, I agree with you so much on that point. And I think narcissism is a substitute for religion. It's a substitute for spirituality. It's a substitute for love. And I think something I have a huge concern about, which connects to the society of the spectacle that is not talked about in the mainstream media. And as a young artist who has no social media accounts or social media presence, I have obsessively examined my creative peers, and I've noticed that the majority of them have decided to alchemize their creativity to being about the self, whether it's tweets or posting artistic references that they believe makes them special or different or unique. Everything is for the purpose of their ego or anything that doesn't require a level of empathy for something outside their own experience and a level of disassociation. So, you know, building a fictional character and writing fiction and films traditionally requires a level of curiosity, empathy, and going into a world beyond your own. I find that with the young artists today, they want to immerse themselves in their own world, whether it's their Twitter feed, their Instagram feed, their TikTok videos, their podcasts. It's a hyper-reality of them, and they're only getting positive feedback. And they are never the enemy, and they're essentially painters pasting pasties of their lives, and they cannot do anything wrong. It's just all cupcakes and flowers. Would you say the brain's hyper-focus on this self-aggrandizing behavior is dangerous for the evolution of creativity in oneself? It's not always self-aggrandizing. If the artist is a narcissist or has narcissistic tendencies, it's self-aggrandizing. But many artists are not actually narcissistic or narcissists. It's an attempt to be noticed. It's an attempt to be seen. As babies, we need to be seen. If we are not seen by mommy, we die. It's a survival instinct. And in a world with 8 billion people, it's very difficult to be seen. So people have this need to be seen. And so that's one reason. The second reason is we used to have institutions, social institutions, which guaranteed that we are seen. We had a family. And of course, every member of the family saw us, noticed us. We were living in a village. And of course, everyone in the village knew everyone's business. We had communities. And today, there's nothing. There are no institutions left, at least not functioning ones. So we are left to our own devices. Today, the underlying organizing principle of society is the individual. Even in countries like China, it is the individual now. All institutions that gave the individual meaning that let the individual know that he or she is an individual in the sense that it is distinct. It is special, not unique. Unique is narcissism, but special. All these institutions are gone. And so we are forced to self-cater. We are forced to become self-sufficient. Because no one will do it for us. In the past, when I was growing up, as old as some of the dinosaurs, so when I was growing up, I had a family. My mother, my father, my siblings, they gave me the feeling that I'm special. I had a neighborhood. I had friends. To date, there's absolutely nothing. The majority of people totally isolated, literally, physically isolated. The only friends they have are Facebook non-friends. It's a disaster. Society has been atomized completely, and it's alienation in the Marxist sense. Well, this is what makes sense to me. What you just said is that there's this burning desire to belong and have an identity or your place in the world. And the way that they're creating avatars or RPG characters of themselves is a kind of way for them to feel, to get that desire to be seen and that survival instinct to be seen. And I guess if they're creatives, that's their way to do it is through their public invention of themselves and through their art. And I find a lot of modern young artists today are very preoccupied with image and aesthetic rather than creating something intentional, substantial, or provocative. There's this preoccupation with achieving the feeling of how something looks and making sure it looks cool rather than creating something that is challenging or emotional. Does this rumination and obsession with treating life like a vogue fashion shoe come from constantly engaging with the emphasis on aesthetics on social media in their brain and the over-not normalized concern right now of how to look and how to perform? Well, if all you want is to be seen, then of course you will emphasize visuals. Generally, if you look at human history, we have spent 99.95% of the existence of the species with visuals and images. When you go to the Altamira cave in Spain or, I mean, what you see, people painted on the cave walls, they didn't write. Text is a very new invention. Text originated in Phoenicia about 4,000 years ago. It's a very new invention. And so what happened is there was a short interlude of text, and then we reverted to form. We reverted to our roots, and our roots are in visuals and images. And if you want to be seen, obviously you will emphasize aesthetics rather than content. Content is intimately associated with text. The rise of the alphabet, the rise of text, was associated with the rise of, for example, Greek philosophy. And with the rise of religions. Because Judaism originated 4,000 years ago. So all content systems, all meaningful systems, all semiotic systems, they are constructed around text. And images don't carry real content. Images carry messages about themselves. Images are self-referential. Text is always other referential. Images are self-referential. And of course in the world of self-reference and narcissism, images rule. Today, 70% of all searches online originates with YouTube, not with Google. Yeah. This is so interesting to me. So it's almost like this innate human desire to be seen has now cross-contaminated with the way our visual minds work. And now we're seeing in real time this visual language, this visual world being created where we're communicating ourselves through fragments of images and references. And we're saying, you know, this Madonna picture from 1995 is how I feel. You know, people are talking in references. Yes. I think we are regressing precisely. If you look at the development of a typical human being, images until a very late age, don't use language. They react to visuals and images, and they are very associative. And they have libraries of networked interconnectedness. But these libraries are self-referential, they're self-contained. And so also the world of imagery that we are creating is ever-enriched. I mean, we are adding images all the time. But all these images are intimately interconnected. And if they don't have a reference to previous images, they're meaningless. And so artists today are very derivative, very derivative, much more preoccupied with imitation and emulation. Because in the absence of these backward references, no one will understand what they're trying to say. This is an enormous regression. Wow, you just hit a huge one. This is an infantile state they're in, in culture. They're regressing as creatives. And like you said, we can even lead it back to being a baby in the way the brain is working. And of course, if you look at the metaphor of screens, consider screens for a minute, bear with me. We started with a huge screen. And 2,000 people congregated around the screen. They ate popcorn. They made out. They talked. They laughed. They smoked. This screen is a cinema. Then we made a smaller screen. We created a smaller screen. And now only 20 people could eat popcorn. And I don't know what, make out or whatever. And that's the television. And then the screen grew smaller and smaller and smaller. Until today, the prevalent screen is a one-man screen. You can't truthfully share your smartphone with anyone else. The experience of your smartphone is only yours. It's idiosyncratic. You are programming your smartphone from the second you wake up. You're programming. You choose what to see, which news to read, what apps to open and what apps to close. You have become a programmer. Programming prior to that was a collective experience. And screens allow sharing. Today, screens isolate you, atomize you, and force you to be self-sufficient. And they cut you off from empathy a lot, too. Because, like you said, you're being programmed in your own individual world all the time. You're not really thinking of outside perspectives. A metaphor I have for social media is that it's like eavesdropping on this huge dinner table conversation, along with looking at 25 TVs stocked on another, trying to grasp or process the amount of information that is happening all at once. I think this is ultimately a problem for the young artist and the young person who needs a kind of stillness in the world to find some peace and a voice. Would you agree? I think this ambient noise is white noise in the sense that it carries no information. There's no signal-to-noise ratio because there's no signal. It's not possible to generate a signal in a noise that is utterly random. And social media, by definition, they are utterly random. Even if you select your friends, even if your friends are selected, what they generate is utterly random. And whenever we increase randomness, I'm a physicist, whenever we increase randomness, we lose signal. We know that. So now we've reached the apex of randomness, total randomness, and of course, zero signal. Yeah. Well, I would say also with a lot of modern artists today, there's a lot of self-professed projects of grandiosity on social media that are not actually real. It's very bizarre. I have a modern saying called, is your art real or where is your art? Because people are constantly talking about these projects that they're creating on their social media pages, but the art isn't real or doesn't have a real release date. It's a figment of an extension of their virtual self and avatar, but they post about it and they get congratulations over things that aren't real. I see that as a kind of sickness and delusion. Is that connected to narcissism? How does that work? What is going on there, Sam? Again, some artists are narcissistic and narcissism is a motivation. It's not a modus operandi. It's a motivation. So we need to ask the question, why are they doing this? Some of them are narcissists and of course, they're doing it because they want to garner narcissistic supply, attention. But many of them are doing it not because they are narcissists. Many of them are not narcissists. Many of them are nice people. Not narcissists, have empathy, have emotions and so on. Many of them are doing these things because I think they have transitioned in their minds to a kind of an autistic space where they correspond and interact with themselves. And this is, by the way, a superb definition of psychosis. Psychosis or psychotic disorder is when you confuse your internal objects with external objects. When you have voices in your head, it's normal. Everyone has voices in their heads. It's called introjects. But when you make a mistake and you think that this voice is external, talking to you from the corner of the room, you need medication. Exactly. I literally have, I've felt this way about the way people use Twitter and they're talking to themselves. I find this to be a kind of psychosis. Yeah, no, no. And I'm happy that you said that because that's so needed to be said right now, Sam, because a lot of people, because it's so normalized that behavior, people don't see it as psychosis, but to hear that from an academic like you is really great. I find that creating art, as you know, since you've written so many incredible books and are an incredible writer, is that it requires a level of discipline and focus and delayed gratification and sometimes pain and suffering and it requires beating the resistance and self-doubt within. I find that a lot of very creative artists today are using social media and using technology addiction and the internet and YouTube and pornography and Instagram and TikTok pinches as a means of pain management to not go through that excruciating process of self-discipline and focus to create their great works of art. And Robert Green in his book, Mastery, talks about this a little bit about the modern artist's greatest modality will always be choosing self-involvement over mastering your craft, sharpening your tools, or whatever it is that you want to manifest in this world and how self-involvement is ultimately a distraction of artists. In the bigger picture, do you agree that a lot of people are using social media as a drug to regulate their emotions? Well, first of all, I beg to differ with Green. I've read this book and it is a masterpiece. But I beg to differ with him because self-involvement motivated very big artists, very great artists in literature, for example. Marcel Proust is by far the most self-involved artist ever. No, I agree with that, yeah. So self-involvement in itself is not a problem. The problem is craftsmanship. Today, we have extended the definition of art to the breaking point. Yes. Today we have a problem of discoverability. We can't discover true art in the mountains of unprocessed raw material, of trash, of... When we have converted everything into art, we have converted art into nothing. Exactly, exactly. And this started not now, I regret to say. This started at the end of the 19th century. When the relativization of art, art was made relative, and relativization of other things, like morality, never mind. But relativization of art led to its disappearances as a distinct, rigorous set of criteria and procedures. And today, you don't need criteria. Anything goes. You don't implement procedures. And there is the issue of immediacy and lack of delayed gratification, as you just noticed. You want to see the end result now. So the first step is also always the last step. And there's nothing in between. It's an art of void. Today, we don't have art. We have voids, simply voids. It's a vortex of nothingness. And it's very interesting to hear how that progressed. And what you just said. I must compliment you on your maturity, by the way. You're 25. Oh, thank you so much. It's pretty amazing. Oh, thank you. I never give compliments, by the way. Oh, thank you. I will compliment you forever. This is something that actually transitions into what I wanted to talk to you about. So Camille Paglia always talks about how she was obsessed with her image and manipulating the media. And now she was an architect of her public narrative using the resources of the tabloids, press appearances, any airtime to cultivate a message that is ultimately calculated and planned, whether it is to target an ex or someone who hurt her, but she used the media in a very passive aggressive way to televised crypto messages. The famous image in 1992 of her in front of the Taj Mahal portray loneliness and to vie for sympathy from the viewer in retrospect was prescient of a behavior that we would see be displayed in the human condition. Before social media, like in the late 1990s, there was this, that one MTV Olympian arena where there was a separation between us, the audience, and the stars. People didn't have access to having a public image unless you were in the media. You were a celebrity. You were elite. Today you have a public narrative, but you did nothing to earn it. Now that you see that these young people today have the tools to be micro celebrities, they are a part of the media. They are the media and they can be passive aggressive. They can send crypto images and accentuate tragedy and drama. And there seems to be a kind of addiction to self mythologizing and pathos and using the fragments of your life to build a false self, a false fantasy character along with falling in love with the false self on your screen. Do you trace this grandiose desire back to the collective narcissistic wounding? I think it would be more beneficial to discuss the confusion that reigns nowadays. Yes. The overriding state of mind today is confusion. If I had to characterize the last 50 years, I would say I would call this period in history the era of confusion. So it pertains to your question as well. We confuse action with message. The action becomes the message. You don't need to have a message. If you act, that is your message. And that's why celebrities are known for being famous. They are known for acting. And so crafting a message in itself is the message. So the message could be hollow, could be null, a null hypothesis, could be nothing. But the very fact that you have taken the effort and had documented the effort to create this message, which ultimately came to nothing, that is the message. So confusing action and message. The second confusion is between reality and the representations of reality. And of course we have hybrids like reality TV. And we have a reality TV star in White House. And we have a comedian as president of Ukraine because for 10 years he had portrayed the president of Ukraine on television. So we confuse reality and its representations which is exactly what Gidebel predicted. And finally we confuse inner states with the representations of these inner states. We have come to a point where empathy broke down is no longer a useful tool. Empathy is always very good when there is authenticity. But when the emphasis shifts from authenticity to representation, empathy can be very misleading. So people stopped using empathy because they can't trust what they see anymore. They can't trust the signifiers. In semiotic terms, they can't trust the denoted and connotated are one and the same, are linked somehow. So in other words we can simplify what I'm saying. If I see a woman crying, she can be crying for either of two reasons. Either because she's sad or because it's a show. It's a performance. And this is what we can't distinguish anymore. And that's why people are so jaded. And this is why people won't even care to give anyone sympathy and this is why reality has become so confusing because we don't know when people are performing for narcissistic supply using their lives as a form of alchemy to get something off somebody. Performance art. Pardon? Performance art. Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, no. We live in the time. Well, this is interesting because we live in the time of the obsession with controlling the public avatar and the virtual version of yourself. And let's maybe say think of how much pop culture has changed. In 1991 when Madonna's Truth or Dare documentary came out, it was vilified as narcissistic and she was demonized as a paraphernalia and exhibitionistic. Or even the prose of like Brad Easton Ellis' American Psycho and the character Patrick Bateman who clearly has some kind of MPD psychopathy, very much disturbed people. But you fast forward to 2020's Modern Society and you see this emotional exhibitionism of posting your Prozac pills, your mental illness, this display of trauma, of gluttony, of glamour, of heightened self, or even the creative process is demanding validation, approval, look at me. And you can tell it's what Gabramate would call the hungry ghost is that it's insatiable. So would you say what happens to a culture when all of this is normalized, when we're encouraged to engineer self mythologies and pathos and the narcissistic person is usually incredible at spinning things to be more exaggerating and creating alternative facts and huge images of things. What happens when that's our normal and we don't even question it? I think as I said we should go a way back to see the roots of all this. There was Marshall McLuhan and he said the medium is the message. The medium became the message. And so media representations became reality and so there's reality TV. And so celebrities became famous for acting to be famous. Action substituted for message. It was a chain reaction. And now here's the problem. If action is the message you need to escalate and radicalize your action to be noticed. Simply to be noticed you need to radicalize. Anything goes. Sexual exploits, mental illness assassinating your parents on camera. I don't know what will come next. You know? It's like Luca Magnota. I'm sorry? It's like Luca Magnota the serial killer that you talked about. I think I wonder if you have this. I'm sorry I was about to say one more thing and I'll let you proceed. And I think a great representation of this is the movie Joker. Joker embodies all this. Absolutely embodies all this. The narcissism but Joker is not entirely a narcissist. If you compare Joker to American Psycho you see the evolution of this creed if you wish. Yes. Because Joker is a compound a kaleidoscopic picture partly a narcissist partly a psychotic partly a social influencer partly a leader of a new social movement partly a rebel partly a clown partly a messenger or a prophet it's a kaleidoscope of modern that's why Joker in my view is one of the 10 best films ever. It's an amazing social document. Amazing. Forget the movie. It's a social document. It will be remembered forever. It's a stunning movie. And you're saying it emulates a kind of modern archetype that we can connect to all different types of people that we see today. He has a high mind. He doesn't have a self. He has a high mind. He is all of us. He's our ultimate mirror. Yes. He is not a human being. He is a set of frequencies and resonances. And he changes accordingly by the way. There's no core. There's no core identity. He changes all the time. He changes professions. He changes lovers. He changes behaviors. He changes aspirations. He changes his mother. All the time he changes. So he's fluid. He's influx. He's like the terminator. You know this metal in the terminator. And this is the and compare him for example to American cycle. American cycle, whatever you say about the character, it's a horrible character of course. It's a sadistic killer. But whatever you say about him he had a core. He was clear cut. In a way. He was because he was clear cut. There were no questions about him. No hesitations. No misunderstandings. The message was loud and clear. You couldn't. You could not mistake it for anything. Had you tried to and he was consistent and persistent from the first frame to the credits. Not so Joker. Joker is very disorienting as a figure. Why? Because we are disoriented. Yes. Yes. That's very true about Patrick Bateman is that his character is so polarizing to so many young serial killers and people who are just interested and obsessed with him in general for whatever reason is because he does have that kind of sense of self. That people can see themselves as oh wow, Patrick Bateman kind of does know his place in the world whereas Joker is disorientated and confused and everywhere. Patrick Bateman is certainty. Some people say a horrible certainty over the most benign uncertainty. Patrick Bateman is a horrible certainty. Yeah, no for sure. Joker is a horrible uncertainty. The whole movie, the entire movie is about uncertainty. Don't forget the guy in the middle of the movie becomes unemployed. All the traumas of modern life are there. Economic traumas, psychological traumas intergenerational traumas psychosis, narcissism mental illness, everything is there. All the traumas. It's the reality. It's unapologetic about it. It's showing you as a cinematic film what's happening in our world and putting it in our faces. And if you look at it, it's largely divided into two parts. There are two movies in Joker. The first movie in Joker is about social ills. So you see a gang of young children beating him up. You see him losing his job. You see him being mocked in the subway carriage. It's about social ills. And then there's a second movie about the disintegration of the personality under these stresses and pressures. Stresses and pressures of daily life mind you. He's not traveling to Mars to be a part of a new colony. He's in his own city. This is daily life. We all have these experiences. I was mad. I lost my job once. We've all gone through these experiences. But the movie is warning us that the resilience of modern personalities to these accruing stresses is at a breaking point. We will all end up being Joker. Don't forget that in the last scene of the movie, everyone is Joker. Literally, they wear a clown mask. I see that happening. Do you see the way that people use social... I wonder if you've had this thought in the last 10 years. Do you think people use social media as a way of people acting out their unconscious traumas? That it's a kind of acting out behavior? I think social media affords you a false sense of safety. First of all, you can have anonymous handles and it can be anonymous. But even if you're not anonymous, does this feeling that it's not real has real life consequences without paying real life prices? You can act on the world without paying the price of acting on the world. In this sense, social media are like protective sanctuaries where you can go and you can be self-efficacious. You can have an impact on the world but without paying the commensurate cost of being self-efficacious. This is so interesting because you're going back to the Faustian deal and Madonna has a song referencing the British author Boulard called Drowned World Substitute for Love off of a Hurray of Light album and it's about sacrificing the true self for the false self and the sacrifice that comes with success and yet discovering that materialism, consumerism and reaching out of yourself for fame and fortune and external supply to provide you happiness is ultimately an empty pursuit and doesn't really achieve any true fulfillment. I was wondering, would you say the pursuit and chase for fame in a traumatized person is a substitute for love? Well, if you can't get love from an individual, you might as well get love from the masses as Adolf Hitler taught us. If you can't get love from an individual you might as well get love from money as other people taught us. I mean money is a love substitute adulation is a love substitute. We have numerous love substitutes because we cannot find love anymore. There's no love to be found. End of story. No, no for sure and I think that innate human desire for love is being shown everywhere and something I find what you alluded to earlier to be of extreme concern is that there's multiple versions of reality existing on the internet in which you can lose yourself too if you are young and unconscious. Whether you're a young boy and you identify with the incel community or a young girl who is being inducted into the cult of beauty bloggers. The internet and social media operates a lot like Scientology. It's a way to be uniformative and straight laced and mimic the behaviors of others. It's a way to have a place to belong and have a space for your lack of identity. It's a way to not be challenged. It's a way to exist in your own reality with your own gods, your own rules, your own news, your own values, your own school of thought. And modern society is almost always the enemy and there's a term that historians of fascism call obsession with the plot. That means that you are creating an irrational enemy all the time which I find to be the root source of both the liberal and republican parties is a lot of chaos and narcissistic political leaders. But would you say their followers are also narcissistic? Well, if they are, they are vicariously narcissistic. They would be what I call inverted narcissists. They bask in the reflected glow of the primary narcissists. So supporters of Donald Trump they would be this kind of inverted narcissists. He's the sun and they're the moon. The light is reflected light. It doesn't emanate from themselves. But I think there is collective narcissism I was among the first to point it out. Narcissism of collectives of all groups. There is such a thing. And of course it motivates a lot of the political discourse and mind you artistic and cultural discourse and so on so forth. But I think we are shifting regrettably from narcissism to psychopathy actually. Narcissism shortly will be passed because it's no longer efficient in our environment. Narcissism took over let's say 20 or 30 years ago. Narcissism had shaped the world. But they had shaped the world to be without empathy, without true emotions with facsimiles of everything etc etc. And what the narcissists did not realize is that in such a world it is the psychopath that has a competitive edge and a natural advantage in the natural selection game that is now ensuing psychopaths will win. You see there is a chain of being. Narcissists eat regular people for breakfast. Psychopaths eat narcissists for breakfast. Wow. So it's like we are evolving now. If we evolved as humans. Devolving. So we are devolving. So we hit the pokemon phase of being narcissists and now we are going to the next level of becoming psychopaths collectively. Yes, I think so. I think we can see this by the way in vulnerable groups. As we all know from social history, vulnerable groups and minorities they create habits that are later adopted by the elites. So for example sun tanning. Sun tanning was very common among farm workers because they were exposed to the sun. But today sun tanning is associated with the elite. Free sex or liberated sex emancipated sex was very common among the lower working classes. And then it was adopted by the aristocracy and today free sex or liberated sex is a hallmark of the liberal progressive decadent elites. So the elite always copies, emulates and imitates the so-called lower classes, lower socioeconomic strata. And we have of course the famous novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lady Chatterley's Lover is exactly about this. It's about how working classes affect the aristocracy and so on. Now why am I saying all this? Because I think what's happening there's a groundswell of psychopathy among certain minorities and I would identify only one and that is women. I think women having been emancipated and liberated don't know what to do with these newfound freedoms and with these newfound powers and with this newfound access and so on and so forth. The field has not been leveled not by a far, not by a long short, but it is being leveled and shortly in historical terms, in 70 years 100 years, women and men will be totally equal. But women have been enslaved for 10,000 years and so they are newly emancipated slaves, exactly like after the Civil War but black have been enslaved for 300 years. Women have been enslaved for well over 10,000 years and so they have the mentality of a slave the collective mentality, inter-generationally transmitted mentality of a slave but with powers of a master this is always an extremely bad combination and what we are seeing is that women all over the world are emulating and imitating the behaviors of psychopathic men not of men in general not of nice men but of psychopathic men because it's a hostile it's a hostile root source of injustice from what they've gone through for 10,000 years and in feeling that pain now that there is this visibility this cultural change there is a lot of pent-up anger and rage. And this anger and rage and aggression and frustration and hatred frankly because they have been wrong and it's valid I would say it's valid it's justified and everything and we know from other social units, for example the family if a child is being abused and tortured some children are very likely to become psychopaths and all children would try to somehow emulate the abuser they can become narcissists they can become psychopaths or they can become codependent and try to merge with the abuser but there's always children who grew up in abusive families with abusive, narcissistic selfish, aggressive, violent parents they always try to somehow become the parent oh yeah, that's very true and I think that's their way of unconsciously trying to deal with the trauma is by mimicking it mimicking what has happened to them by regaining control because if you become the abuser you will never be abused again exactly it's a safety mechanism it's a magical thinking if I become my abuser he will not abuse me because he is me it's a kind of magical thinking it's a distortion it's cognitive bias and distortion yes but magical thinking is cognitively wrong but it means that today there are many recently emancipated groups and I'm talking about LGBT community I'm talking about women even about blacks who's emancipation is still ongoing I'm talking about many many groups I think they are continually adopting more and more psychopathic behaviors that's why I believe and ultimately we know from social history that the elites imitate and emulate minority groups and so it will transfer to the elites so I foresee very shortly in historical terms a totally psychopathic civilization oh yeah, no we're seeing it happening in real time and that is such a beautiful prescient prediction of what is about to happen on the topic of women I wanted to talk a bit about pornography and how porn is a lot of young men in women's sexual education and the new generation just mimics what they learn as porn and I know a lot of young men who have told me they struggle with the Madonna whore complex from growing up with pornography and this idea of a curvaceous, busty pornographic woman and then the sanitized woman who is waif or fairy-like or ethereal is that also connected to narcissism in young men is that taught? I feel like men have also lost the respect for the divine femme and the goddess and we seem to be disconnected from the goddess archetype and lost respect for femininity and I don't know if that's connected to what you're saying about the freedom of the slavery that women have faced and how we're seeing everything cross-contaminated right now there's even a term called simp that if you appreciate women you are weaker or inadequate for it so it's from the manuscript this is a term that's used among in-cells and red-pillars and migtails and this kind of thing the manuscript is absolutely poisonous phenomenon absolutely very dangerous anyhow coming back to your question pornography is an extension of a much larger philosophical trend and that is a trend of reductionism until the 18th century the prevailing the predominant trend in thinking about anything in thinking about sex in thinking about society in thinking about God in thinking generally was holistic if you look at physics for example Newton connected planets to each other the thinking was holistic network what happened in the 18th century with the cart is that we suddenly separated ourselves from nature we became observers there was nature and us there was God and us the world broke down the cart broke the world down split it schism and so from that moment on there was a new philosophical dogma known as reductionism it's prevalent in psychology it's prevalent in medicine where no one is a human being but someone is a heart or a lung it's so reductionism what is pornography pornography is the visual embodiment or reification of the principle of reductionism because the emphasis in pornography is on body parts literally by the way there's a book a wonderful book about pornography called a billion wicked thoughts I don't know if you had the chance to read it hang up and run it's the best study ever of pornography there are no opinions expressed it's just raw material and you can draw your own conclusions but the raw material is study what they have done they called one billion google searches and based on these google searches they drew a profile of the typical porn user stunning stunning study anyhow what they have discovered is that the overwhelming majority of porn users focus on specific body parts it's kind of fetishes specific body parts and none of them literally none of them pays attention to the totality so I can admit from someone who grew up watching porn that's what I did exactly that's how my mind state was I was focusing on one body part that's one element so pornography is the extension of reductionism into sexual imagery second thing pornography is about role playing it's about pretension it's fake it's make-belief world and it is a permissible world exactly like social media I said social media is a sphere is an ambience where you can act upon the world without paying for the consequences absolutely same with pornography you act upon the world without paying consequences because pornography has real life effects I mean you ejaculate it has effects it's a real world phenomenon yet you don't pay any cost in today's world porn hub is free so you don't pay any cost and so it's another manifestation or exemplification of this separation between reality because it's real and the costs of reality we have all become free riders free riders within a huge commons we benefit we benefit but we refuse to pay the price pornography is like that the third thing that pornography does it simplifies in an age of dumb and dumber in an age of stupidity as a reason to be proud I mean people are proud of their stupidity they are no nothings they show it off they show it off absolutely they brag about it so they hate experts they deride academic authority they mock intellectuals they argue with authorities on topics they argue as though they are I mean I call it malignant egalitarianism everyone is an expert because everyone has access to Wikipedia you know and so in such a world pornography fulfills a role because it allows you to actually interact with archetypes archetypes of women, archetypes of men and archetypes of sexual activity and to experience the entire gamut in other words to become an expert is that dangerous pornography is an absolute unmitigated time bomb according to studies by Twenge and Campbell in the last 10 years dating dating activity among teenagers hormone laden teenagers dating declined by 56% because modern dating is a clusterfuck of dysfunctional attachment styles and you see how these young people are getting in their codependent cosmic entanglements with people in which they are idealizing the person as their soulmate and really operating off of a child's view of romance in tandem with being in that pornographic world you know what happens to people who don't become conscious of their broken attachment styles and codependency you're the optimistic type some people live these cycles to the grave you still talk about attachments and so on recent studies by Lisa Wade for example uncover shocking truth the bottom today is to not get attached teenagers people under the age of 25 who responded to very detailed questionnaires said that the worst transgression against etiquette is to get attached after sex the majority of these young men and women your age said that if they find an intimate partner they will try to not have sex with the intimate partner because sex is meaningless isn't that very avoidant it's not avoidant are you listening what I'm saying sex is meaningless oh no no see I can't relate to that sex has a lot of meaning to me of course there's a lot of meaning by the way there's a lot of meaning period not only to you it is denial of course sex is meaningless but it's denial when you have hook ups when you have one night stands when you have casual sex you lie to yourself but you lie to yourself in conformity with cultural mores the culture today is such you are mocked, ridiculed and derided if you connect sex to intimacy or if you connect sex to emotions something's wrong with you yes no and I've experienced this and I've seen people who treat people this way that you know if you see sex with intimacy you're broken sex is meaningless you need to treat it like an athletic act exactly and so this has this leads to two things first of all objectification of the other you must debate with other people's bodies people become animated dildos and animated sex dolls and the second thing is what I call the intimacy cloud intimacy you see in the past when you got married you had to forego all other people of the same sex if you got married to a man you were a woman you got married to a man you forego your male friends I don't mean you forego in the sense you were not in contact but you forego them as potentials intimate potentials and so on today in a typical relationship between young people each young person carries with him or with her a cloud of intimate people the husband or the wife or the boyfriend are just one of many one of many equally intimate equally sexualized people so a woman age 25 is likely to say I love my husband if she got married just got married I love my boyfriend we're having sex and so on but I also love Jeff who used to be my lover my best friend like a brother to me and I also love I don't know what and then she will see nothing wrong in spending the night at Jack's and nothing wrong absolutely this is like the polyamory it's polyamory and I call it intimacy cloud it's absolutely polyamory but see this is very dangerous because now what you're talking about the reductionism and the commodification of the self think of that plus being encouraged turn yourself into a sellable sex object and archetype and trope to be purchased approved dating app it's dating apps are just a human meat market and if you think of the modern narcissist and if we've transcended past that as you said swipe left swipe right and a dehumanizing discarding approach to sex and romance in our world is very hollow and very vapid I find dating apps to be even more dangerous and that but before I comment on dating apps I want to say that you see use the term polyamory which is which is technically correct but there's no love there it's polyamory is when you have several intimate partners of equal standing is it not supply the intimacy cloud is simply never giving up on anyone you have ever been intimate with or can be intimate with never giving up never paying the price because when you get married or when you have a boyfriend you have a price to pay and that price is called exclusivity people refuse again again refuse to pay the price they want to have real world consequences they want to get married or the one to have children or they want to have a boyfriend but they refuse to pay the price of exclusivity now dating apps the problem with dating apps is one as you said commodification and objectification of potential sexual partners but I think there's something even more pernicious and much more dangerous dating apps don't come out in the open and admit who they are what they are dating apps don't say listen guys this is a database of possible facts you know that's all it is they don't say this they present themselves as a love bazaar a market where you can find love attachment connection relationships it's a lie of course it's deceptive it's deceptive and it's dangerous for the people who are too stupid to critically think exactly it's deceptive that's the problem dating apps without exception are totally deceptive studies have shown that one quarter of people who go on dating apps are looking for casual sex yet another quarter are looking to have fun and entertainment which is casual sex all sex 7-9% are looking to cheat on their partners etc etc well over 3 quarters of people who go on dating apps have no inclination or intention in the universe to have a relationship they are looking for casual sex and I think it's disgusting to me that these corporations would even brand these things as dating apps why not be honest with the people and just say this is a sex app I call them sex apps this is what they are I want to talk about something controversial that you've brought up in your work before but right now we have a very free space so I want to talk about this in ancient Greece bisexuality was very normal and my generation seems to be extremely bisexual very sexually fluid and more than ever with men and men and in ancient Greek mythology Hercules had many twin male lovers and there was this concept of erestes and drominos and say alpha male narcissistic type is ultimately a baseline heterosexual man but he still uses gay men as sexual objects or as narcissistic supply have you in your studies seen any cross-contamination between bisexuality and bisexuality or is it connected? well I wouldn't describe bisexuality as contamination cross-contamination I mean cross-fertilization cross-fertilization I just want to make clear there's no derogatory we are not associating this with any sexual presence I think what's happening in the modern world as opposed to Greece the homosexual sex first of all was limited usually did not include penetration but it was also an integral part of a power structure so sex is a language sex is a mode of communication you can say many things with sex you can say I'm grateful to you with sex you can say I pity you with sex you can say I love you with sex and you can also say master you have taught me so much thank you with sex you can also recognize the master's authority with sex you can recognize a military commander's authority or in prison you can recognize the chief honcho with sex so in prison for example totally heterosexual men engaging anal intercourse but as a way to establish power matrices power hierarchies inside the prison so homosexual or homosexual sex like heterosexual sex has many many types of messages embedded and it's very critical to look at the context moreover it's not possible to have any meaningful exchange between people any people of any type without a very powerful undercurrent and that's of course the social of words like bromance yeah an erotic sexual undercurrent is present among male friends among female friends among males and female friends there's always sex in the air whether it is converted into actual action or not is another issue but it's always in the air and so in permissive environments such as ancient Greece it was simply translated but it did not indicate homosexual tendencies by the way no no no of course not it didn't mean that you were a homosexual that's the difference it was a way of communicating something it was usually a student and a master in academies in proper academic institutions and it was a way of communicating or it was in the army we have documented we have in the Odyssey so in the army Alexander the Great we have documented homosexuality documented as a means of communication and creating cohesion unit cohesion in the army and so it's important to understand it's a language the second thing I would like to mention is I don't think there is sexual fluidity I think it's a I think people very often confuse sex and gender I think what has happened in the Victorian age people conflated sex and gender and it is still very difficult for us to get rid of this yes yes absolutely absolutely I think all people without a single exception even the most straight laced Christian fundamentalist people are omnisexual all people I think what is happening now and by the way it's documented I mean in studies for example most men have at least one homosexual experience in teenage years I think everyone is omnisexual everyone is capable of sleeping with everyone given the right circumstances the right type of communication and the right ambience and incentives but what I think has happened the Victorians created gender roles which were so strict and rigid that certain behaviors were immediately outlawed outcast and considered taboo now what is happening we are creating a unigender world unigender we don't have any clear distinctions the boundaries between genders are totally blurred and we have a single gender with two types of genitalia I think that's where we are going and then also what is so interesting about that is that the people who will create these new terms and these new gender names as a way to also demand rights and also ask for acceptance based off of that template and I find that to also be so fascinating and what you just said also you kind of described about the teenager in the male in his adolescence so if we think of today like an 18 year old boy downloads a gay sex app like Grinder and wants to hook up with a man just to receive oral sex or something like that and he comes out of the experience and he doesn't label himself as bisexual he doesn't label himself as gay I think that happens more than we think I think it's a great pity that we use labels I think exactly as we are creating a unigender space where everyone is of the same gender and the gender is human being I think we should create a unisex world a unigender and unisex on Friday you may wish to sleep with a man on Saturday with a woman and on Tuesday with both Is that more true to our animalistic baseline our carnality our truth are you asking if we look at nature no not nature just in general from your studies to have that opinion do you see that as as a valid thought no I think what happened is we have unified the genders so now we have one gender everyone would agree that essentially men are sometimes behaving like women women are behaving like men so we have unigender but and we have unified the sex so we have unisex actually but what happened is people realize that they can they can conflate this process with political power and political power also means money monetary incentives and political incentives contaminated the process the pure process the beautiful process of sexual opening opening up sexually so if you if people now self define as transgender or as gay they can do so individually and that would not benefit them at all but if they participate in a political movement it would benefit them a lot they could attain political power they can make a lot of money it's clout it's currency it's like it's like what we see with male celebrities they're always gay baiting so that they can be in the gay media and they can get and I said a lot of beautiful things about how intimacy and a relationship requires a sense of ritualistic sacrifice which means monogamy and connecting and how a lot of our true spirituality is in these decisions and sacrifices and in our 2020's culture of surveillance as we've talked about there's a splitting in dialectic between the online and offline self the private and public self these public sanitized Instagram accounts where they exhibit their public relationships and show off in Bragg and then these private Instagram accounts when they still demand an audience still demand attention, displaying imperfections drug use, scandal, chaos drama of their own invention and their own pathos and self mythology what happens when we lose a sacrilegious approach to life when our most private moments become monetized and are exploited our most secret private experiences and what then becomes sacred what becomes valuable is that a part of the modern confusion is losing that sense of I found something and it's special and it's valuable and it's sacred and I want to keep it private I see everything can be converted into narcissistic supply Yeah, well here if we adopt a historical perspective we see that humanity has always pendulated, has always reached between a private mode and a public mode in let's say during biblical times there was no concept of privacy privacy is a modern invention a modern sort of development so people were people's private lives what we call today private lives were enacted in public it was a public spectacle neighbors felt totally justified to interfere with other people's with their neighbors' lives people were raising children in villages not in families so the vast majority of the history of humanity there was no privacy there was only a public sphere privacy arose when we again privacy arose more or less in the Victorian era or maximum in the 18th century when we suddenly began to segregate into individual dwelling units the creation of the apartment or the creation of the house and of course this is the basic structural unit in cities urbanization as urbanization speeded up in matchboxes as they were put in matchboxes suddenly the physical walls were internalized as a metaphor and the concept of privacy arose before that everything was in the open literally in the open physically in the open psychologically in the open socially there was only public sphere but if you're putting a small matchbox together with your husband and six children you become a unit and you become defensive the minute you are surrounded with walls you become defensive try it out by the way try it out put yourself in a room you will see how defensive you are someone will open the door you will feel inconvenienced for no reason whatsoever I felt that before I felt that feeling of being jarred or shocked it will be perceived as an invasion yes privacy is the result of an increased urbanization and its structural organizing unit which was the apartment so it reflects social realities rather than individual needs or psychological needs actually the truth be told we feel psychologically our well-being is much increased the less private we are the less of a private sphere we have the better off we feel that's disturbing to me I know because I understood from your question that you value privacy a lot but the facts are the more we belong the better we feel the more we are accepted the more people we can share with the more things we share the more that's the secret the more success of social media the less private we are the better off we are psychologically speaking and also by the way medically our health increased that's why for example married people live longer than singles if you think about marriage marriage is a sacrifice of privacy it's an intrusion the family unit is the first it's an audio scene of sacrificing privacy the family unit and then you go further you have other units and each unit bites into your privacy cake until nothing much is left but this is how we organize we are social we are zoned political we are social animals because we have in nature species where the animal is very individualistic and doesn't flock or herd but we are not like that no no and I think that's so interesting to think about is that exploitation of the self and the privacy is really coming from a place to have a social environment to belong and they'll take whatever it takes to do that I feel like as a society just one comment is the distinction between sacrificing privacy and monetizing privacy yeah our privacy is being monetized now that is an intrusion that reduces well being what if you invite that monetization that's what disturbs well you don't really ever invite this monetization it's all very obscure and behind the scenes it's not transparent I mean Russia interfered in the elections in the United States until a year after it's not technology is not transparent it's very obfuscating so you don't really know what do you know what types of information are gathered only about you I don't think you do neither do I so there is this unease that we are being commodified or prepackaged or something that's monetizing privacy it's really a bad process but sharing giving up previously for sharing and for belonging that's actually considered a positive that's very interesting for me and I think that I love how you said that these things that are outside of us are the internal metaphors our behaviors the way we use visual language is very much coming from our internal environment and how we're trying to externalize something so as we're kind of wrapping up I wanted to kind of talk to you about as we've painted the dark psychopathic narcissistic climate in our world what is the solution how do we get out of this how do we escape is this a survival of the fittest situation as virtual reality is taking over the world do we need to challenge the pilot narcissistic behavior how do we de-program we've had a short beautiful Halcyon Halcyon interlude a paradise but paradise is lost we've had 4,000 years in terms of the human species human species is a million years old we've had 4,000 years where we have developed content invented the alphabets wrote beautiful poems discovered foundational principles of science cross fertilized discovered the globe traveled all around had adventures and wars and love we've had this 4,000 years it's over and it's over not because of COVID-19 it's over because we are going back to our roots we are regressing we're going back to our beginnings so we're so deep in the future the future is behind us we are we are returning to a visual culture we are returning to the public sphere we are returning to might is right we are returning to unbridled conflict with nature and spirituality we are simply returning the rise of the occult and so-called esoteric pseudosciences it's another sign that we are returning it's another sign that we are returning we have given up on enlightenment we have given up on science we have given up on expertise we are now giving up on medicine we are gradually shedding shedding all these layers which are very new layers enlightenment started 300 years ago you know and we are again very religious it's a new development a whole swath of Europe which used to be under communist rule and where people were rank atheists they are all very religious now so religion is having a comeback the individual is having a comeback 10,000 years ago we were organized in very small units we didn't have nation states I think nation states are about to disappear it's like it's like you have this incredible new DVD player where you can rewind at the speed of light and we are rewinding there's no power or force on earth that can stop this process why are we rewinding? you can ask why are we rewinding? why are we doing this to ourselves? because we failed we failed to leverage these 4,000 years to secure a better future we don't trust ourselves anymore we fucked up Sam are you saying we've transcended past the collapse of western civilization? I don't think there's anything like western civilization anymore there is the canon there are the famous books and the famous discoveries but they are frozen they are fossilized no one relates to them who's the last person to have read Dostoevsky? it's dead it's dead in the water there's no western civilization there's show business there's fame, there's celebrity there's performance art there's living in a reality TV show and I think I'm really grateful it's fragmented it's not a collective effort it's not a collective effort it's everyone to himself it's the jungle out there now it's everyone to himself and with social distancing this metaphor of everyone to himself has acquired a real life quality oh of course and it's ultimately if there is anyone in power who is controlling all of this let's just say if we were in a fantasy world and that was happening they would want us to be at home in virtual reality focusing on ourselves and becoming more and more disconnected and isolated this is their utopian world as much as it is for the narcissist I've spent all my adult life fighting conspiracy theories I think they are for weaklings people minded and scammers but I will say this the elites the financial elite, the political elite and I used to advise these people for 30 years of my life I used to be advisor to governments, advisor to very rich people billionaires and so on I know these worlds intimately I used to be an intelligence officer I know these worlds very intimately I will say this in an uncoordinated manner not via conspiracy theory but via shared values they want to make everyone a slave that part is true but they don't conspire to do this they just simply have the same values and so each one of the members of the elite in his own way and with his own capacity and these capacities are enormous each one of the members of the elite I think there are about 10,000 people like that they make sure that we are less and less powerful they disempower us and they reduce us to mindless and thinking slaves and they do this not because they are evil and not because they are conspiratorial and not because of any of the nonsense of conspiracy theories they do this because it's in their self-interest and because that's what they do it's more practical it's kind of what you're saying is that world domination of the elites and brainwash all of this it's just kind of their practical nature I compare them to viruses can you blame a virus that is killing you that's what viruses do that's what elites do throughout history by the way the elites enslave the masses simple absolutely and I think I want to thank you so much for your incredible conversation I think the people who find this conversation I really hope it helps them and brings some intellectual camaraderie for the people who are like us out there who are thinking about these things I think it's really important for anyone who listened to this conversation you can also email me fanmail at alexkasemi.com maybe Sam will put it in the description to tell us what you thought of the episode and if it brought any type of change to your thinking that would be really helpful thank you for having me and for the intelligent questions thank you