 My name is Sam Baknyu and I'm the author of Malignan Sir Flava, Narcissism Revisited. The concept of Uncanny Valley was coined in 1970 by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. Mori suggested that people react to androids or human-like robots in two ways. When these robots or androids differ from real humans in a meaningful and discernible way, when it's easy to tell them apart from human beings, observers, human observers react positively. They are amused. They even form attachments. But the minute these contraptions, the minute these robots or androids come to resemble humans uncannyly, albeit imperfectly, human observers tend to experience repulsion, revulsion and other negative emotions up to and including fear. So real human-like robots, robots who resemble humans too closely for comfort, provoke negative emotions. Indeed, we react the very same way to narcissistic psychopaths. Psychopathic narcissists are near-perfect imitations of humans, but lacking empathy and emotions, they are not exactly there. They are not exactly up to scratch. They are not exactly human. Psychopaths and narcissists strike their interlocutors as being some kind of alien lifeforms or artificial intelligence. In short, psychopathic narcissists are akin to humanoid robots. They are our flesh-and-blood version of androids. When people come across narcissists or psychopaths, the uncanny valley reaction kicks in. People feel revolted, scared, repelled. They can't put their finger on what is it exactly that provokes these negative reactions, but after a few encounters and invariably, they tend to keep their distance and stay away. Why is that? One of the reasons is that narcissists have what I call cold empathy. Contrary to widely held beliefs, narcissists and psychopaths may actually possess empathy. They may even be hyper-empathic, attuned to the minute signals emitted by their victims and endowed with a penetrating X-ray vision. Narcissists and psychopaths tend to abuse their empathic skills by employing these capacities exclusively for personal gain, or the extraction of narcissistic supply, or in the pursuit of some anti-social or sadistic goal, or to extract money or sex for some other benefit. Narcissists and psychopaths regard their ability to empathize as merely another weapon in their arsenal. In a hostile, inhospitable world, they fight everyone with everything they have, and one of the things they have is this ability to penetrate through the chinks in everyone's armor, to spot the vulnerabilities, fracture points, default lines, and to invade. I suggest to label the narcissistic psychopath's version of empathy cold empathy. This is akin to cold emotions felt by psychopaths. The cognitive element of cold empathy is there, but the brain is there, the heart is missing, the emotional correlate is absent. Consequently, cold empathy is barren, detached, sterile, and cerebral. It has an intrusive gaze, but it's devoid of compassion, and there is no feeling of affinity with one's fellow humans. Narcissists and psychopaths empathize, quote-unquote, with anything and everything that gives them narcissistic supply or benefits. So you would find narcissists and psychopaths empathizing with objects, with pets, with, again, with any source of narcissistic supply or material benefit. Sometimes these sources are their nearest and dearest, their so-called friends, their associates, and in this case, they emulate normal behavior. But this is not real empathy. It's a mere projection of the narcissist or psychopath's own insecurities and fears, needs and wishes, fantasies and priorities. This kind of display, demonstrative empathy, usually vanishes. The minute its subject ceases to play a role in the narcissist or psychopath's life, and in his or her psychodynamic processes. In other words, if you are not there to provide narcissistic supply or some other benefit, the narcissist or psychopath is not likely to empathize with you. It's a quick pro quo. I give you empathy, you give me what I need. What is this empathy we keep talking about? Empathy is the ability to put oneself in someone else's shoes. It's the ability for a split second, for a minute, for an hour, for a day, to inhabit someone else's universe, to immigrate across the unspoken, invisible boundary that surrounds each and every one of us. And for that period of time, to adopt, to understand, to assimilate, and to gain insight into the needs, priorities, fears and wishes of someone else. So this ability to put yourself in someone else's shoe is not sympathy, it's not merely compassion. It's almost complete identification. And of course, narcissists and psychopaths are absolutely incapable of doing this in an emotional way. In July 2003 I gave an interview to a Toronto-Canada Daily, the National Post, and they asked a few very interesting questions, I think. The first question was, how important is empathy to proper psychological functioning? And I answered, empathy is more important socially than it is psychologically. The absence of empathy, for instance in the narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders, predisposes people to exploit and abuse others. Empathy is the bedrock of our sense of morality. Arguably, aggressive behavior is as inhibited by empathy as it is by anticipated punishment. But the existence of empathy in a person is also a sign of self-awareness, of a healthy identity, of a well-regulated sense of self-worth, of personal boundaries, and of self-love in the positive sense. Its absence denotes emotional and cognitive immaturity, an inability to love, to truly relate to others, to respect their boundaries and to accept their needs, feelings, hopes, fears, choices and preferences as autonomous entities. And how is empathy developed? Ask the post. Well, it may be innate. Even toddlers seem to empathize with the pain or happiness of others, such as their caregivers, mother-father. Empathy increases as the child forms a self-concept, an identity. The more aware the infant is of his or her emotional states, the more he or she explores his limitations and capabilities. And the more he does that, the more prone he is to projecting this newfound knowledge on to others. By attributing to people around him his newly gained insights about himself, the child develops a moral sense and inhibits his anti-social impulses. The development of empathy is therefore a part of the process of socialization, of becoming social being. But as the American psychologist Carl Rogers taught us, empathy is also learned and inculcated. We are coached to feel guilt and pain when we inflict suffering on another person. Empathy is an attempt to avoid our own self-imposed agony by projecting it onto another. Question, is there an increasing dearth of empathy in society today? Well, my answer is that social institutions that reified, propagated and administered empathy, have imploded. The nuclear family, the closely-need extended clan, the village, the neighborhood, the church, have all unraveled. Society is atomized and anomic. The resulting alienation fostered a wave of anti-social behavior, both criminal and socially acceptable. Survival value of empathy is on the decline. It is far wiser to be cunning, to cut corners, to deceive, to abuse than to be empathic. Far more profitable, definitely. Empathy has largely dropped from the contemporary curriculum of socialization. It's no longer on the menu. In a desperate attempt to cope with these inexorable processes, behaviors predicated on a lack of empathy have been pathologized and medicalized. The central phase that narcissistic or anti-social conduct is today both normative and rational. No amount of diagnosis, treatment and medication can hide or reverse this fact. Ours is a cultural malaise which permeates every single cell and strand of the social fabric. And is there any empirical evidence that we can point to of a decline in empathy? There's a problem with that. Empathy cannot be measured directly, but only through proxies such as criminality, terrorism, violence, anti-social behavior, related mental health disorders, abuse, and on the positive side, charity, altruism. It is extremely difficult to separate the effects of deterrence from the effects of empathy. If I don't batter my wife, I don't torture animals or I don't steal from the indigent, is it because I'm empathetic, I have empathy with them, or is it because I don't want to go to jail? Who can tell? Who can separate these motivations? Rising litigiousness, zero tolerance, skyrocketing rates of incarceration, as well as the aging of the population, have sliced intimate partner violence and other forms of crime across the United States in the last decades, so crime is down. But this benevolent decline has nothing to do with increasing empathy. The statistics are open to interpretation, but it would be safe to say that the last century has been the most violent and least empathetic in human history. Wars and terrorism are on the rise. Charity giving is on the way, measured in the percentage of national wealth. Welfare policies are being abolished. Darwinian models of capitalism are spreading. In the last two decades, mental health disorders were added to the diagnostic and statistical manual whose hallmark is a lack of empathy. So now we have mental health problems whose core involves a lack of empathy. The violence is reflected in our popular culture as well. Movies, video games, books, media itself. So empathy, supposedly a spontaneous reaction to the plight of our fellow human beings, is now channeled through self-interested and bloated non-governmental organization or multilateral office. The vibrant world of private empathy has been replaced by faceless state largesse. PT, Mercy and the elation of giving have all become tax deductible. And it is a sorry site indeed. A sorry site because the world has become a psychopathic narcissist world. It is his world now. It is his age, his epoch, his era. Welcome to the narcissistic psychopaths period.