 that you have been victimized doesn't make you a victim. That you have been victimized doesn't even make you a survivor. You have gone through an experience and there are many types of experiences. And so, unless the abuse is protracted, long-term, all pervasive, unless the abuse is egregious, you're not a survivor. And you're not a victim. You have someone who has had a bad experience. Victimhood is an identity to define yourself via an event of having been victimized. Or even to define yourself via a relationship in which you have experienced having been victimized. It's not helpful. It retards growth, healing, recovery, prevents you from moving on. Victimhood identity resembles very much narcissism. And in this sense, it's pathological. You will do well to recall your abuse. Never forget. And depending on the severity of the abuse, never forgive. But one thing you should never ever do is adopt the abuse as a defining parameter and dimension of who you are, of your personality. And let the abuse dictate your future because that would be perpetuating the abuse. That's exactly what the abuser wanted to do, wanted to accomplish. You would be handing the abuser a victory, a triumph. You would be keeping the abuser, preserving the abuser in your life. The abuser's voice, the abuser's judgment of you, the abuser's agenda, and the abuser's actions to realize and actualize and materialize this agenda. Don't do this to yourself. Don't become an accessory after the fact with the abuser. Don't become an accomplice. Don't continue to self-abuse, having been abused by someone else. Don't continue to self-victimize, having been victimized by your abuser. Abuse creates victims. But victimhood is not about actually abuse. It's not about specific events. Victimhood is an organizing principle of reality. It imbues your life with a sense, makes sense of life. Gives it meaning, provides you with a purpose and a direction. And in this sense, it constricts your life. It limits it, restricts it. It doesn't allow you to exit this self-imputed image and self-perception as a victim. It defines not only who you are, but what you can and cannot do, what rights you have and what obligations. It becomes a straight jacket, a prison cell. Don't do this to yourself. The best way to move on, to recover and to heal, is to shed this skin, this mantle of victimhood. And to reclaim your autonomy, your personal independence in your agency. The following video compilation deals with the psychology of victimhood. I am a victim mentality. I am a victim stance. Not I have been victimized, but I am a victim. My victimhood defines me. There's a psychology behind that, which we have been discovering in the past three years. And the following videos are going to reveal to you this psychology and refer you to relevant literature. I wish you an edifying time with this video compilation. And I hope that as you emerge at the other end, you will have become not survivors, not victims, but whole and healthy and ready to take on the world and agentic and trusting first and foremost of yourself. Recent studies have demonstrated the prevalence and incidence of grandiose pathological narcissism bordering on psychopathy, as defined by Robert Hare, among social justice activists and other mass movements. One such recent study had been published a few months ago in British Columbia. And there is also a study conducted, actually three studies conducted by Israelis that they had suggested a new personality construct called the tendency for interpersonal victimhood, or TIV. It seems that when mass movements start and when they are concerned with justice, social justice, interpersonal justice, legal justice, financial justice, any form of justice, sooner or later these movements are hijacked, infiltrated, infested with, contaminated by psychopaths and narcissists. And these psychopaths and narcissists tend to rise to the top because they seek attention, they are concerned with narcissistic supply, if they are narcissists, money and power, and sex, if they are psychopaths. These people become the public face of these social movements. They are the outspoken ones. There's a silent majority and the tip of an iceberg minority of psychopaths and narcissists who make it to the mass media, who get interviewed everywhere, who aggrandize themselves and become not only the face of the movement, but the movement. So they tend to consider themselves as ratifications of the principles, ideologies, ideas, strategies, attitudes of the movements which they purportedly and self-imputedly represent. This is a very, very insidious, nefarious, pernicious, dangerous, sick phenomenon, phenomenon. And it had been happening throughout history. The French Revolution was hijacked by the likes of Danton and Robert Speer and others, very, very mentally ill people, psychopaths and narcissists. So the Russian Revolution, the famous October Revolution, had gone through two stages. It was initiated by middle class bourgeoisie, well-balanced people, but then it had been hijacked by total psychopaths like Lenin and Stalin. So social movements have this tendency. Nothing new throughout history. In my own small case in 1995, I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse and for nine years my website has been the only website on narcissism and I maintained, ran and owned the only six support groups for victims of narcissistic abuse. This gradually became a global movement. I launched it over nine years and then I lost control in 2004. And the movement now throughout the world is in the hand of con artists, psychopaths, narcissists, scammers. I mean, it's a cesspool and a cesspit. And covert narcissists pretending to be victims, victims pretending to be experts, experts who know nothing about the condition. Clearly, I had launched inadvertently a mass movement that had been hijacked later by psychopaths and narcissists. Nothing new under the sun. All social justice movements and all justice concern movements go through certain phases. Many of these movements are focused and centered around the concept of victimhood. So they are what I would call victimhood movements. Now, victimhood victims are entitled to justice and they are entitled to pursue justice by any legal means available. They're also very welcome to organize. It's a good thing. It's a healthy thing in society when victims organize to reclaim what's theirs, to reclaim their rights and even to undergo a public healing process. For example, in South Africa, the popular courts that had tried perpetrators in the truth and justice movements. So this is, in itself, it's a healthy phenomenon. The problem is when the movement is again kidnapped and infiltrated by psychopaths and narcissists and changes its character. Now, every social justice movement goes through phases. It starts with legitimate grievances. Victims, people who are deprived, people who are disenfranchised, ignored, people who suffer or pay the price for other people's actions or inaction. People who are the victims, advertent or inadvertent of trends such as globalization and automation and the transition to the service and information economy. There are numerous types of victims. People can be victimized owing to their sexual orientation, to their sex, to their race, to their ethnicity. I mean, we discriminate against each other and we torture each other based on differences. If you are slightly different to me, then you don't belong. You're not in my group, in the in-group, you're an other, you're outside the group. And we tend to redirect aggression, individual aggression and group aggression at others. This is the concept of the other. And so most victims, if not all victims, and most groups of people have legitimate grievances. Now, some of these grievances has to do with specific cases, specific individuals, specific institutions, circumstances. And some of these grievances have to do with the system, systemic bias, systemic discrimination, systemic prejudice. Women had been subjected to a systematic pillage and plunder of their gifts and denial of their rights. So have African Americans. So have the Jews through thousands of years and so on and so forth, homosexuals, of course. Sometimes the system and its dominant ideology targets specific groups of people, denies them their rights, sequesters them, demonizes them, and then punishes them in a variety of ways, not the least of which is the economic way as Fukuyama had observed in a series of brilliant works in the past 20 years. So this economic punishment. So they are legitimate grievances. Victims wake up, they wake up when they compare themselves to others who are not members of their group. They wake up when there is a general tsunami wave of rights and human rights and civil rights, and they want to be included in this tidal wave of rearranging rights and societal rights and obligations. They wake up when things really, really become bad, intolerable, unsupportable, when the victim group hits rock bottom, when blacks are massacred by police, for example, when climate change has led to extreme weather everywhere. This is when we hit rock bottom, when the pandemic is raging all over the globe because of its initial mismanagement by governments and so on. These are all cases of hitting rock bottom, and then people organize and they try to reverse history, to reverse the trend. And the thing is, they're often very successful. For example, the civil rights movement in the United States in the 50s and 60s had been quite successful. So the precedent is that if you get your act together as a victim, you're likely to become much less of a victim. It's an incentive. So legitimate grievances often lead to organization. There is a system, an oppressing system, the patriarchy in the case of women, white society in the case of blacks, Nazi Germany in the case of Jews. There's an oppressing system and the victims organize in effect a counterculture. They organize an opposing system and then it becomes the clash of two systems. The problem is that most of these counter systems, most of these victimhood-based systems, they tend to deteriorate very fast to identity politics. And then what we have is a mirror image of the practices of the majority, of the oppressing majority. So you can find today racism among blacks, which is even more virulent, which is even less justified than the racism among whites. Blacks had become the aggressors and the racists as a counterreaction, counter-reformation, if you wish, against the prevailing dominant hierarchy and system. So identity politics is a very powerful tool for these groups because identity creates cohesion, cohesion creates a laser focused action and laser focused action is power. Cohesion is power and you cannot obtain cohesion unless you foster a sense of togetherness, of weakness, of identity. So identity politics also relies on intersectionality and intersectionality is a very fancy name to say that most people are victimized based on more than one parameter. So for example, a black woman, she would be victimized as a black and she would be victimized as a woman. A homosexual Jew would be victimized as homosexual and as a Jew, let alone a transgender Native American and whatever. There are numerous combinations of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, place of birth, origin, level of education, level of socioeconomic attainment and so on. So the old grounds for discrimination and bias, the bias can be explicit, can be an integral part of an overt ideology, for example, anti-immigration, white supremacy. These are overt biases and prejudices, totally non-scientific and nonsensical, but the bias can be implicit bias. The way, for example, medical doctors relate to black patients. In shocking surveys, we find time and again that white medical doctors assume that black people have a different physiology. For example, that they have thicker skin and they experience much less pain. So bias is a poison, it permeates, it pervades the social fabric and the only way to get rid of bias is to get rid of the social fabric. Then movements adopt identity politics and intersectional ideologies, contra-intersectional ideologies in ways that render them subversive. They become, in effect, insurgencies in very extreme cases. They deteriorate into domestic terrorism. But even in the Bolbynine cases, these homegrown grassroots movements, they tend to become very, very aggressive, exclusionary, identity-oriented, a hermetic, schizoid, closed-in, defined, consumacious, an attack on authority. And if you're thinking, well, this list sounds like a psychopath. You're right. This is the list of traits of a psychopath. These identity politics groups, these victimhood-centered groups, tend to become psychopathic as an integral dynamic, not related on particular individuals as members of the group or particular individuals as leaders. The dynamic of the group is psychopathic. They develop collective psychopathy. Very often, victimhood groups also tend to compensate for their sense of innate inferiority and for the humiliation of having been a victim. They tend to compensate with grandiosity. So in the narcissistic abuse movement, today we have empaths. Empaths are angels. They can do nothing wrong. They are wonderful people. They are amazing. They're perfect. They are, in other words, narcissists. So grandiosity and psychopathy tend to evolve naturally as an emergent phenomenon in victimhood-centered social justice movements long before they are hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths. Actually, narcissists and psychopaths gravitate to these movements owing to their increasing narcissistic and psychopathic profile. And so then we have the tendency for victimhood, which is this new construct. We have these studies that show psychopaths and narcissists as active members, not only leaders. And the whole thing deteriorates into demonizing, mudslinging, partisanship, aggression from extreme cases, recently not so extreme and not so rare, even violence. Now, there's a big difference between left-leaning victimhood movements, right-leaning victimhood movements and neutral movements. An example of a neutral movement would be the narcissistic abuse movement, because it incorporates people with leftist views, people with rightist views and so on. It's centered around the injustice done to victims of narcissistic abuse by narcissists and psychopaths. It is undergoing the very same process. It had become more and more grandiose, and it had been taken over by psychopathic and narcissistic con artists and scammers, all these online coaches and experts and so on. But still, it is neutral in the political sense. Left-leaning victimhood-centered movements tend to focus on entitlement and grandiosity. They compensate with grandiosity, entitlement, and they are fantastic in nature. For example, they seek to rewrite history counterfactually, so women are doing this in the feminist movement. They are rewriting the history of the world as though it had been centered around women. When actually women had always been, since the agricultural revolution, marginal in world affairs. Blacks have African-American studies departments where they rewrite history to render blacks the builders of the nation and the greatest contributors to science and literature, which is utter sheer unmitigated counterfactual nonsense. So there is grandiose compensation and a deep sense of entitlement. These are two main features of narcissism because they lead to a lack of empathy. And if you talk to blacks in any setting with any conviction, members of these movements or not, they have become much less empathic. They sound very narcissistic, I must say, and I'm sure I'll get a million comments about this element. So this is the left-leaning movements, entitlement, grandiosity. The right-leaning movements combine two different, two other psychological traits. Conspiracism, which is the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories as organizing and explanatory principles. Conspiracism coupled with grandiosity, for example, white supremacy, coupled with schizoid tendencies that wish to be left alone. Small government, no taxation, no foreign, no adventures in foreign lands. America first. So the right-leaning movements, they tend to be more conspiracy-minded. They tend to be more monkish. They have centered around withdrawal, around avoidance, much less around entitlement. They are afraid of entitlement actually because they translate entitlement to bigger government, more intrusive government. Nanistate, big brother, 1984, or William, things. So their conspiracism actually prevents right-wing movements from becoming fully narcissistic because they deny the element of entitlement. But they have a pronounced lack of empathy, much bigger than in the left victim-hood-centered movements, and they are much more psychopathic. In the sense that they are much less averse to using aggression. They are much more defiant. They are much more conchumacious. They detest authority, clean the swamp, drain the swamp in Washington. So they are more psychopathic. To summarize, the left is narcissistic, entitled and grandiose. It's centered around victim-hood and translates victim-hood into claims on society. They claim rights, they claim money, reparations for slavery, or reparations for the Holocaust. So it's more entitlement-oriented. And what can I get out of it? And the right-wing groups, entitlement groups, are less, they are not exactly victim-hood groups. They are victims of conspiracies, but not victims of society or systemic, because they are mostly white. Right-wing groups are mostly white. They belong to the majority. They are less likely to present themselves as victims. They may be victims of impersonal forces, such as globalization, or the collapse of manufacturing in the United States, or automation, or whatever. But they are more focused on withdrawal, avoidance, and using power where necessary to protect rights. For example, gun rights. In the middle, we have the neutral movements, the social, the justice movements. Social justice movement. They are individual justice movements, like the narcissistic abuse movement. And these movements in the middle, they have the worst of both worlds, actually. They have entitlement, they have grandiosity, but they also have defiance, consumatiousness, and conspiracy-oriented paranoia. This is the picture. What are narcissists and psychopaths? Observe these groups, what they see is a goldmine. It's a new pathological narcissistic space. They can thrive in these settings. They can become leaders. They can become media figures. They can obtain narcissistic supply. They can make money. They can have sex with followers and fans. It's fun. It's great. It's a playground. It's a hunt. It's a pub. And so, narcissists and psychopaths flock into these movements. And because of their particular personality structure, narcissists know how to be charming. Narcissists verbalize much better than the average population. Many narcissists and psychopaths are highly intelligent, and all of them are goal-oriented. They are reckless. They are callous. They are disempathic. They are relentless. So they rise to the top. They become the leaders of these movements. And this is how all these movements end. Even hallowed, saintly figures like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, in other ways, gurus like Jordan Peterson and so on, they have pronounced narcissistic elements and traits and so on. When you look, when you listen to the FBI recordings of Martin Luther King, I mean, it's far from impressive. And when you read the autobiography of Gandhi, you come across sections which put your hair on end. I mean, the guy was, you know, near-psychologist. So there's no escaping this. Victims organize, create a counter-culture, a counter-sister. It becomes more and more narcissistic, more and more grandiose, more and more entitled, more and more paranoid. And then it becomes more and more psychopathic as it accumulates aggression, which is directed by an ideology interpolated as Althusser called it. And then it's taken over by narcissists and psychopaths. I hope I made things clear because last time I mentioned only Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movements and the climate change movement with the greater. But now I've mentioned also right-wing movements and neutral movements. It's all over. Whenever people organize to claim justice, they become narcissists and psychopaths. It raises the interesting question whether narcissism and psychopathy are not actually misguided, misdirected attempts by individuals to reclaim justice having been subjected to early childhood trauma. Interesting thought, narcissists and psychopaths as victims of early childhood trauma claiming what's theirs, regaining their rights and establishing some justice using an ideology, a personal ideology which is akin to religion in the case of narcissism that actually aggrandizes, entitles and tramples on other people. Meaningful public discourse of outstanding issues, problematic topics. This discourse is being subverted by victimhood movements, walk movements and exclusionary vindictive identity politics. So dialogue is dead. So censorship and political correctness have taken over. People are afraid to speak up and they are afraid to speak up because self-identified victims, anything from empaths to black lives matter to me too, to the right-wing victimhood movements. Self-identified victims are punitive, they are vindictive, they are vicious and above all they don't hesitate to resort to immoral methods and actions and to make choices and decisions that easily victimize others. Why is that? Here is the dirty secret that no one is going to tell you except the iconoclastic black professor of psychology or former visiting professor to be precise, Sam Vaknin, author of Malignan Self-Lab, narcissism, revisited and the dirty secret is this, the majority of social activists and political activists are mentally ill. Many of them, if not the bulk of them, are dark triad personalities, subclinical narcissists, subclinical psychopaths, Machiavellian. Quite a few of them are sadists as well and qualify for the dark tetrad. Social activism movements, social justice movements, political movements have always been hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths throughout human history. Nazism is a prime example of a victimhood movement hijacked by a psychopath, narcissistic psychopath. So is communism and so to a large extent is capitalism. When we are faced with issues of asymmetry of power, the misuse of potency, discrimination and hurt and pain, when we are faced with these issues, there is a vulnerability, there's a chink in the armor, there's an opening and through that gap, armies, hordes of narcissists and psychopaths rush to take advantage, to leverage, to abuse the situation and the people involved. Victimhood is real. People have been victimized throughout history. I'm a Jew, I should know. Slaves. People have always been victimized. However, victimhood as an identity is a relatively new phenomenon, about 150 to 200 years old. Nationalism in all its forms in the 19th century was founded on victimhood. This is especially true where I am in the Balkans and to some extent in the Middle East. And so victimhood as an identity is a new thing. And now we have a malignant development of this competitive victimhood. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the topic of today's video. Today's video deals with how victims compete with each other for the title of I am the greatest victim ever and my abuser is the most demonic, devil, diabolical, vicious abuser to have ever roamed the earth. Anyone who has visited empath communities know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm going to review three studies. I have reviewed one of these studies in two videos. And so if you go to the description, which is under the video. If you go to the description, I advise you to watch the videos titled, Narcissus, Eternal Victims, Trauma, Psychosis, Splitting the Inner Dialogue. And the other video is Victimhood Movements Hijacked by Narcissist and Psychopaths. In these two videos, I deal with a study, a 2020 study, a study published three years ago by a group of Israeli scholars and researchers. I'm going to deal with this study in this video as well in the third half, in the third part of this video. But first, I'm going to describe and analyze two other studies. And then we will gravitate naturally to the third one. Let's start with a study by E.O.K., yes, I'm kidding you're not, Waichyan, Aquino, and others. This was a study published in July 2020. It is titled, Signalling Virtuous Victimhood, Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities. It was published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And you can find reference, a citation to the literature in the description. It's an amazing and much neglected study. And it's much neglected for good reason. It flies in the face of many claims of victimhood movements and woke movements. And it casts these movements in a very evil and dark light. And they don't like it. These movements are now in control of all the media, both online and offline. Well, all the mainstream media. All the streaming platforms, platforms such as YouTube, LinkedIn, social media, victimhood movements are in control of all these platforms. If you dare to criticize victimhood movements, confront them with facts and studies, disagree with them, they punish you. They punish you viciously, severely, vindictively. They cancel you. They ostracize you. They make other people shun you. They go on smear campaigns. I am now a subject of one such vicious smear campaign. So victimhood movements, small and big, a victimhood movement can be comprised of 10 people, can be comprised of 10 million people. But all of them have one thing in common. They use narcissistic and psychopathic techniques and methods. And they are sadistically punitive, unforgiving and vindictive. Let's go to the study. The study links virtual signaling to dark triad traits. Virtual signaling simply means an insincere, fake, feigned signaling of an underlying virtual, virtuous behavior or a virtuous belief system or value system. Virtual signals are phonies. They are show-offs. They adopt opinions and postures in order to garner praise and sympathy to extract narcissistic supply. In short, they are either narcissistic in the best case or outright narcissists in the worst. They need everyone to see just how good they are, how virtuous they are, how amazingly morally upright they are, how heroic they are and how they fight evil. Being, of course, all good, it's a morality play. Coupled with a splitting defense, I'm all good. You're all bad. I'm protecting the helpless and the weak and I'm going to punish you for your misdeeds. They are self-appointed. No one has elected them to office. No one has told them to take on the assignment of the administration of justice, but they are the equivalent of vigilantes. And they operate within a culture that says that victimhood confers a right. To be a victim is to have a right. And so rights confer obligations and duties on other people. Right? You have a duty towards me. If I possess some kind of right, you have an obligation towards me. Rights and obligations are two sides of the same coin. So victimhood movements are entitled. They are demanding. Victims have discovered that victimhood empowers. Many of them have also discovered the financial benefits of victimhood. They either look recently at the reparations for slavery movement or at the Jews taking billions of dollars from Germany only six years after the end of the Holocaust. Victimhood pays exactly like crime and very often victimhood is indistinguishable from crime. And so victims have monopolized the public discourse of a dialogue because they have a right to speak up and you don't have a right to respond. You don't have a right to respond because you are all bad. You are evil. You are the abuser or the descendant of the abuser or somehow connected to the abuser or you could have been the abuser by virtue of your skin color or your education or the place you were born in. You are tarred with a wide brush as an abuser, as a perpetrator and for that moment on you should keep silent and if you dare to speak up you are continuing to perpetuate and perpetrate the abuse and you should be punished for that either in the public sphere, in the public arena or even criminally and legally. So victimhood movements have co-opted the levels of power. Victimhood movement have now merged and fused with power structures. They have become the system. It's a system of victimhood and having thus been empowered victims are abusing their power rampantly. Look at the MeToo movement for example and so it's a very sick world we live in because victims social activists, not victims social activists and political activists are mostly mentally ill. Many of them are narcissists and psychopaths. The insane took over the asylum. Narcissists and psychopaths pretend to be moral, ethical, upright, honest, benevolent but deep inside they're just narcissists and psychopaths and now they're using the levers of power to subjugate and penalize everyone who dares to confront them to challenge them, to undermine them or to suggest an alternative. Online pile-ons are an example of this. Social media platforms have been compromised by these victimhood movements gun narcissistic, victimhood movements and identity politics gun psychopathic. They took over social media on the left on the right they took over talk radio the media now is at the disposal and the mercy of these people and these are seriously Machiavellian one could even say evil people this new research that I've just referred to is I'm gonna quote looks at the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue and so it's a very interesting study because it's not a single study it's a series of studies, it's multiple studies that the authors conducted on exactly this subject and what is the conclusion? Psychopathic, manipulative and narcissistic people are more frequent signalers of virtuous victimhood they are competitive victims dark triad personality traits lead to characteristics like self-promotion emotional callousness, duplicity tendency to take advantage of others explain the authors and treated as a composite the dark triad traits were significant predictors of virtuous victim signaling I can't tell you how terrifying these few words are what it means is that as we have been transitioning from the age of dignity to the age of victimhood and I'm now quoting the famous sociologist Campbell as we have transitioned into the age of victimhood narcissists and psychopaths took advantage of this transition compromised the new power structures pretended to be victims and many of them do believe that they are victims because narcissists have alloplastic defenses and an external locus of control in other words they blame other people for their defeats and failures and misfortune and mishaps so it's easy for a narcissist to say I'm a real victim, I'm really a victim you are wrong about that and yet these movements are now infested with narcissists and psychopaths and this holds true say the authors even when controlling for factors that may make people vulnerable to being mistreated or disadvantaged in society for example demographic and socio-economic characteristics as well as the importance they place on being virtuous individuals as part of their self-concept the authors point out that virtue signalling is defined as the conspicuous expression of moral values done primarily with the intent of enhancing one's standing within a social group victim signalling may be used as a social influence tactic that can motivate recipients of the signal to voluntarily transfer resources to the signaler this is absolutely shocking victimhood is the organizing principle of today's society victimhood is the explanatory principle of today's world it imbues the world with meaning makes sense of reality victimhood is the new religion together with narcissism and narcissists consider themselves as victims narcissism is a victimhood movement and so we are at the mercy of narcissists and psychopaths masquerading as moral virtuous victims co-dependence people-pleasers healers rescuers saviors many of them are online as coaches self-styled experts you name it this is a dangerous situation and there's an emerging literature on what is called competitive victimhood and it deals with the prevalence of victim signalling by various social groups there is evidence that victim signalling carries some benefits it's a functionality it's a resource extraction strategy this is a war for money for power for fame and celebrity today the more victimized you are the more of a victim you are the more your identity is that of a victim the more public exposure you gain the more likely are you to have access to the media and the more money you are likely to make and that is why on YouTube there is a group of unscrupulous immoral individuals with and without academic degrees who make a living out of perpetuating victimhood because there's a lot of money in it victimhood has become a cottage industry victim signalling justifies victim groups seeking retribution against alleged abusers and oppressors this is true on the collective level and it's true on the individual level victims feel totally entitled to behave immorally and even criminally in the pursuit of what they call justice what kind of justice the justice they decide on they are the law retribution takes the form of demanding compensation through some kind of resource transfer from non-victims to alleged victims so claiming victim status can facilitate resource transfer by conferring moral immunity on the claimant and the complainant it's an interesting kind of transactional landscape all you have to do is claim victimhood of some kind ageism ableism sexism racism antisemitism anyism goes you just identify your slot and claim your prize moral immunity shields the alleged victim from criticism about the means they might choose to satisfy their demands if you identify as a victim you are beyond reproach anything you do is morally justified in the pursuit of restoring justice and balance your justice and your balance you can act criminally you can act immorally you can act unethically and it's all okay because you are doing these things as a victim victimhood identity victimhood stunts is therefore a shield a protection a defense against the repercussions and consequences of your own actions not on the narcissists and psychopaths find victimhood irresistible victim status can morally justify the use of deceit intimidation bullying criminal conspiracies violence verbal and otherwise against alleged abuses perpetrators and oppressors in the pursuit of accomplishing their goals victims are entitled to behaving any way they choose they are above and beyond the law they are the law this is lynching we're in an era of all pervasive massive lynching lynching of men by women in the wake of the Me Too movement lynching of whites by colored people lynching of oppressors alleged oppressors descendants of oppressors could have been oppressors by wannabe victims fake victims narcissists and psychopaths claiming a victim status can lead observers to hold a person less blame worthy to excuse transgressions victims appropriate private property inflict pain on other people normally this would have been condemned or rebuked but not when you're a victim when you're a victim you're above reproach above rebuke above repudiation and above condemnation claiming victim status elevates the claimants psychological standing there is a subjective sense of legitimacy entitlement and the right to speak up in the public arena in the commons the victim has a monopoly on the right kind of speech and any other speech is castigated and chastised as evil and dark and backward and reactionary and wrong it's a small step from this to criminalizing speech and we are not far from that a lot of speech is already being criminalized the self-sustaining the political correctness there is absolute fear I can tell you that from personal experience absolute fear a person who has the psychological standing can reject or ignore any objections by non-victims to the unreasonable of the demands of the victims so if you're a victim you don't have to listen to the other party to the other side you automatically you're automatically in the right your justice is on your side God is with us God is with us do you know whose slogan this was? the SS God is with us was carved on the knives of the SS God is with us in contrast to victim signalers people who do not publicly disclose their misfortune or disadvantage are less likely to benefit or to reap rewards retributive compensation has become the only form of compensation moral immunity and morality plays have become the only forms of morality deflection of blame has become the only way to blame guilt has been expunged victims never feel guilt whatever they may do and many of them do horrible things they never feel guilty the effectiveness of victim signaling is a resource transfer strategy follows the basic principles of what we call signaling theory let me tell you a bit about signaling theory signaling theory says that the transmission of information from one individual the sender to another individual the receiver can influence the behavior of the receiver signals refer to any physical behavioral trait of the sender signals are used by senders to alter the behaviors of receivers to their own advantage I want to quote a few sentences from this amazing series of studies a series of studies that has been suppressed actively implicitly, possibly and explicitly because the discoveries of these studies are politically incorrect and so these studies are censored and go to the description and make sure you read these studies show your support for truth here are a few sentences from these studies a perceived victim signal can lead others to transfer resources to a victim but that the motivation to do so is amplified when the victim signal is paired with a virtual signal people high in the dark triad traits emit the dual signal more frequently a positive correlation between the dark triad scores and the frequency of emitting the virtual virtual victim signal has been found evidence of how these signals can predict a person's willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors has been spotted frequent virtuous victim signalers are more willing to purchase counterfeit products and judge counterfeiters as less immoral compared with less frequent signalers a pattern that was also observed when using participants dark triad scores instead of the signaling score frequent virtuous victim signalers were more likely to cheat and to lie in order to earn an extra monetary reward in a coin flip game the dimension referred to as a moral manipulation was the most reliable predictor of virtuous victim signal frequent virtuous victim signalers were more likely to make inflated claims to justify receiving restitution for an alleged and ambiguous harm violation in an organizational context the authors make clear we do not refute the claim that there are individuals who emit the virtuous victim signal because they experience legitimate harm and also conduct themselves in decent and laudable ways but the infiltration of narcissists and psychopaths that's these are my words the infiltration the invasion of narcissists and psychopaths has contaminated the signal the signal is now partly noise narcissistic noise psychopathic noise virtuous signaling morality plays casting yourself as a victim today is a suspect activity because narcissists and psychopaths are doing all these things in order to punish people subjugate people extract resources from people manipulate people cheat people and deceive people and all this by claiming to be victims I proceed to another study by Weismel Manor Kaplan, Schenhove Slotnik, Dvier and others it is titled ADHD and political participation an observational study again you can find the link in the description the conclusions of the study overall say the authors we find evidence that individuals with ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder individuals with ADHD display a unique pattern of political activity including greater participation and less tolerance of others views but not necessarily showing greater activity active interest in politics our findings add to a growing body of literature that examines the impact of ADHD on different types of everyday behaviors this is the anodyne camouflaging abstract the study itself is nothing short of absolutely shocking attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a serious problem in childhood and recently we are discovering that it's a problem in adulthood as well this study shows demonstrates that people with ADHD are more likely than the average individual to participate in politics and even deeply so they're very committed and invested in politics and this is pretty pretty counter intuitive and surprising because people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder cannot pay attention to anything at length they cannot focus on a task for any period of time they are sometimes hyperactive to the point of mania they act without prior contemplation of the consequences of their actions so they have poor impulse control and they're unable to analyze synthesize and go deep into any topic or issue and yet these people who can hardly put two and two together they go into politics they define politics you will soon hear the numbers a sizable minority of politicians political activists social activists suffer from severe ADHD so they're incapable of learning anything in depth analyzing it rigorously and reaching any decisions about the future that would make any sense and yet these are the people who define the agenda and dictate the way you live condition is chronic ADHD is debilitating it leads to other issues that impact daily life individual relationships interpersonal relationships work life they're all disrupted and these are the people who engage in politics regardless of their age, sex race, education political orientation and the levels of therapy they're receiving regardless of all this so the authors a group of Israeli scholars I don't know why Israelis are so concerned with victimhood possibly because the Jews have invented victimhood as identity politics so the authors studied 1,369 participants and that's a moderate size study not small, not big a moderate size study about 15% of these people suffered from denounced ADHD and then they asked these people about their political participation in activism they measured political participation in activism in a variety of ways over the course of a year so this was a serious study a longitudinal study they measured activism online, offline via proxy by proxy, directly and so on so forth and then they compared the data with the level of news consumption of the participants and whether they were active in political parties participated in politics on social media had political opinions and shared them and so on and so forth and they discovered the following overall say the authors individuals who screened positive for ADHD reported higher levels of political participation than individuals who screened negative both digitally and in traditional ways that in itself is already should already give you a pause people with attention deficit disorder tended to express political opinion opinions on social media but did not consume news news these people were not exposed to the news and yet they had very clear and rigorous and strong and irreversible political opinions and stance strikes you as narcissism right you are this is grandiosity these people were grandiose the study noted that they didn't bother to read news analysis listen to news watch news compare with other people they just made up their mind so the famous saying I've made up my mind don't confuse me with the facts or if I want your opinion I will give it to you these arrogant people arrogant people with deficit hyperactivity disorder who are also grandiose and highly narcissistic although this was not in the study that is my interpretation and so these people had zero or very close to zero input and yet felt that they are sufficiently authoritative and knowledgeable to dictate to other people how to behave politically and socially in this sense say the authors our results align with previous work that finds that individuals who suffer from other health conditions in daily lives tend to participate more regularly in political activity such as contacting a politician or signing a petition sick people especially mentally ill people are the ones who are active in politics and are beginning to see the full picture and among these sick people grandiosity is rampant psychopathy narcissism ignorance because you have attention deficit these are the people who define your futures and control you via the levers of power institutions and mechanization the study's authors noted that ADHD suffers expose themselves only to same minded thinkers so they get embedded in what we call echo chambers or silos cognitive or thought silos and so they go to social media they find like minded people they team up with them and then they don't bother to they don't feel the need to read to listen to watch, to analyze because everyone around them keeps telling them they are right they are less tolerant than other people ADHD sufferers according to the study were less tolerant of other political views this wasn't due to attempts to fight democracy but it had to do with their attentiveness issues they couldn't they didn't have the patience to listen to other people and so they became very aggressive because they felt frustrated overall say the authors we find evidence that individuals with ADHD display a unique pattern of political activity including greater participation and less tolerance of others views but not necessarily showing greater active interest in politics and now we come to the seminal study a very very important study published three years ago it was published in personality and individual differences I remind you at the beginning of this video I referred you to two other videos I've made in which I analyzed these studies but I'm going to review them yet again the studies are titled the tendency for interpersonal victimhood TIV the personality construct was authored by Boaz Amiri and others the researchers coined the phrase tendency for interpersonal victimhood this is an ongoing they describe it as an ongoing feeling that the self is a victim which is generalized across many kinds of relationships here is the abstract of the study the authors said in the present studies by the way these were four studies in the present research we introduce a conceptualization of the tendency for interpersonal victimhood which we defined as an enduring feeling that the self is victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships then in a comprehensive set of eight studies I'm sorry not four but eight in a comprehensive set of eight studies we develop a measure for this in the psychology trade TIV and we examine its correlates as well as its affective cognitive and behavioral consequences in part one two studies we establish the construct of TIV with its four dimensions number one need for recognition narcissism moral elitism grandiosity pain narcissism and psychopathy and rumination obsession compulsion in a way so these four traits dimensions of personality are typical of professional life long victims people who define themselves as victims whose identity is an identity of victimhood and then they assessed the internal consistency stability etc in part two again two studies we examine TIV's convergent and discriminant validities using several personality dimensions and the role of attachment styles as conceptual antecedents they discovered that insecure attachment goes hand in hand with being a victim in part three again two studies we explore the cognitive and behavioral consequences of TIV specifically we examine the relationships between TIV negative attribution and recall biases the desire for revenge professional victims empaths of indicative they are vengeful because they consider themselves morally superior because they lack empathy because they are vicious because they are psychopathic and narcissistic they pursue the alleged abuser or perpetrator or oppressor to the end viciously maliciously vindictively and vengefully this is not some acne these are the studies so TIV study number four has shown that demonstrated conclusively the TIV, the tendency for interpersonal victimhood is intimately linked with behavioral revenge participants high in TIV also reported experiencing more intense negative emotions and a higher entitlement to immoral criminal behavior mediation analysis offered insight the revenge process in the mind of the perpetual professional victim the vindictiveness of the I am a victim identity is a process it's something that unfolds all the time it's a background process the authors say the higher participants TIV the more they experience negative emotions felt entitled to behavior morally however only the experience of negative emotions predicted behavioral revenge Gabbai and her colleagues express a view they say that their studies indicate that the tendency for interpersonal victimhood is a stable personality trait that is linked to particular behavioral cognitive and emotional characteristics they say and I'm quoting it is deeply rooted in the relations with primary caregivers these tend parents this tendency affects how individuals think and behave in what they perceive as hurtful situations throughout their lives now there's an article there's an article that later on analyzed the studies titled letters arising from Gabbai etc etc the tendency for interpersonal victimhood and it reminds us that there is a precedent for tendency for interpersonal victimhood 30 years prior in the 1990s there was something which was known as befallen injustice sensitivity to befallen injustice SBI it was developed by Schmidt and others and his colleagues it was later renamed justice sensitivity from a victim's perspective or JS victim in 2005 Schmidt published an article about JS victim justice sensitivity from a victim's perspective and nicknamed it victim sensitivity in 2013 so it's not a new idea the Israeli authors misrepresent tendency for interpersonal victimhood as a new concept or a new idea it's not it's absolutely not TIV and victim sensitivity are one and the same Gabbai conceptualized TIV in a way with four indicators the four indicators that also define justice sensitivity frequency of observed injustice emotional intensity and mental intrusiveness of observed injustice motivation to restore justice etc etc there's a great analysis by Baumert and Schmidt in 2016 in a way the Israeli authors hijacked Schmidt's work and I'm all against this because this is being done to me day in and day out here you see I'm adopting a victim stance and so bear in mind the tendency for interpersonal victimhood is the same as victim sensitivity and if you want to delve deeper into this I would advise you to look for anything written or authored by Schmidt and so this is the picture this is the picture and it's an unsavory picture we have transitioned from age the age of dignity and reputation the age of upright morality the age of social cohesion the age of clear scripts social, sexual and otherwise we have transitioned from all this to a world where everyone competes for being a victim because victimhood pays victimhood became a cottage industry and has been invaded by mentally ill people narcissists, psychopaths sadists attention deficit grandiose people these movements which started off as legitimate social justice movements have been hijacked and altered beyond recognition the mid to movement of today has nothing to do with a mid to movement of five or six years ago nothing it is rapacious it is vicious it is unjust it is psychopathic totally compromised same to a large extent with black lives matter of course feminism the third and fourth waves are unrecognizable variants no first and second wave feminists would agree to identify yourself with anyone who claims to be a feminist today feminism is a power grab a cross commercial enterprise run by utterly psychopathic and narcissistic figures this is the world we live in victimhood is leveraged the world is misused guilt tripping blame shifting when you identify other people as oppressors or abusers or perpetrators you give yourself license to behave as one when you cast other people as criminals you then feel totally justified in behaving as a criminal or behaving criminally it is as if the minute you cast yourself as a victim morality flies out the window and you are entitled to do anything and everything you wish to your heart's content this is sick this is dangerous this must stop we must speak up all of us must speak up against this phenomenon but we are too terrified we are afraid of losing tenure and our jobs being shunned and cancelled being prosecuted criminally it's gone that far and so as victims erstwhile victims attain positions of power they bring their victimhood with them into the power structures compromise the power structures and the institutions and render them long arms of psychopathic and narcissistic victimhood it is an untenable situation that is ripping apart the social fabric generating gender wars all out wars actually between various interest groups each one of whom each one of which is claiming to be a victimhood movement identity politics is now conflated totally with victimhood this is bad this is what gave rise to Nazism I repeat this is what gave rise to Nazism identity politics conflated with victimhood if we don't want a repeat of the 1930s we must stop right here and right now on the collective level and on the individual level we must fight back against victimhood ok, I am panicking I am going to try something new I am going to proceed each and every long video with a bullet points summary you can watch the summary it's usually between 5 to 10 minutes and ignore the rest of the video it will break my heart but hey I am a narcissist I deserve it here is your chance to break a narcissist's heart ok Shoshanim so now the bullet points summary an innovation on this channel followed by the longer presentation deeper with examples and so on and so forth you can skip the second part because the first part captures all the information in the second part without the examples narcissists always claim to be victims and they do so convincingly because they are charming they are attractive they have thespian skills they know how to act they are convincing they have cold empathy they can scan you which buttons to push the manipulative etc etc and so their claims to victimhood sound very true and very very plausible they persuade people that they are victims co-dependence and people pleases use two techniques to manipulate other people one technique is known as control from the bottom I am helpless without you I need you this is a form of manipulation and its control from the bottom control through submissiveness and the second technique used by co-dependence and people pleases is victimhood entitled to special treatment special consideration and your constant sensitivity and vigilance to not hurt me again so but narcissists use these techniques as well its virtually its very difficult to tell apart narcissists from real victims narcissists and narcissists from people pleases many narcissists claim to have been victims of narcissistic abuse to have been discarded cruelly to have been devalued unjustly these claims are made both by real victims and by narcissists who hijack the narrative mimic the victims and essentially snatch the whole scene so how to tell which is which which is the real victim and which is the narcissist number one splitting narcissists exactly like borderlines split splitting is an infantile defense mechanism which says I am all good everyone else is all bad its also known as dichotomous thinking there is nothing wrong with me I have done nothing wrong I am a kind empathic nice loving caring person compassionate helpful attentive and yet I am constantly being taken advantage of abused and used because people out there are bad I am all good wherever they may be this is splitting splitting defense is used only by narcissists and borderlines real victims do not split even people pleasers and co-dependence do not split splitting is a prime prime red alert prime warning sign that you are dealing with the narcissist listen to what the narcissist says and ask yourself is he constantly presenting himself as essentially all good while everyone else is taking advantage of him harming him hurting him etc so this is splitting number two non-discrimination the narcissist would blame whole populations he would say for example all my girlfriends betrayed me and hurt me and abused me and cheated on me all my spouses all my business partners have victimized me stolen from me took advantage of me etc so the narcissist would generalize he would generalize to populations generalization is a fallacy is a kind of mental health issue and it is dealt with in cognitive behavior therapy so narcissists generalize and narcissists wouldn't say well this girlfriend was really bad but this girlfriend was great and narcissists would say my girlfriends as if they all belong to a club or a political party together my girlfriends did this to me my business partners did this to me he would generalize about groups of people and he would then go on to place himself as the victim of these people only narcissists do that victims are much more nuanced number three self-pity narcissists and especially covert narcissists pity themselves and they pity themselves visibly publicly ostentatiously conspicuously it's a currency their self-pity is a manipulative ploy to pull at your heartstrings and so the self-pity and the ostentation that goes with the self-pity they are coupled with goal orientation the narcissist wants something from you if he is on YouTube he wants your views and the advertising money otherwise he wants to become a celebrity he wants to have sex with you he wants to take money from you he would pose as a victim a helpless hapless innocent totally innocent victim just to get you to do what he wants it's manipulative remember a true victim a real victim would never wallow in self-pity in public at least would never do this and he would never ever couple self-pity with some goal he would never go on YouTube and pity himself next alloplastic defenses and an external locus of control a narcissist would blame others for all the misfortune in his life all his failures all his defeats and all the bad turns it's never his fault he is never in the wrong there's an external locus of control he is just there a passive inert object the recipient of other people's malice and mental illness he is a victim by virtue of existing there's no responsibility or blame he never assumes responsibility or blame it is a defense against shame and guilt which in the narcissist case is frustrating but still it's there so if you watch someone online or you talk to someone and they keep saying this was not my fault I have been a victim I am not responsible I have been abused I have been taken advantage of I have been discarded cruelly I have been ashamed I contributed nothing to my predicament I am perfect I am an angel well that's a narcissist many of them are called empaths next is denial of misconduct or proportionality of response the narcissist would do the most horrible things he would steal your work he would sleep with your wife or girlfriend he would forge documents he would lie to your face he would do he would go behind your back he would backstab you he would bat mouth you he would do the most incredibly immoral and in many cases illegal things and yet he would deny them in the face of hard evidence he would still deny this his misbehavior or misconducting would be terrible because he is on a moral crusade he would invent a narrative that would convert the misconduct into proper conduct lawdable and commendable conduct but it would still be misconduct of course a narcissist would also contest the proportionality of the response a narcissist may say well I have done it I have done this but I think the response was out of all proportion I didn't deserve this I've been victimized it's wrong what the other party did to me I have wronged the other party in maybe it's debatable I don't think so but maybe but in any case the other party's reaction was out of bounds and totally insane and unjustified and I've been discriminated against and I've been maltreated and it's horrible what's been done to me totally ignoring neglecting and denying what had triggered this cascade of events the original sin the primal sin the narcissist misconduct or misbehavior the narcissist engages in grandiose ostentatious morality he is a hero he is a rescuer he is a savior he is a healer he is a fixer whatever he does even if it's patently immoral and possibly criminal and illegal whatever he may do whatever he does it's all in the name of ethics and morality and religion and the greater good I don't think any of this for himself God forbid it's not about revenge it's not about some lowly instinctive drive no way, no serri he is pro-social he is communal anyone who comes with these BS stories is a narcissist a narcissist would also try to explain his misconduct and misbehavior in terms of I have been baited I have been tempted I have been entrapped I have been seduced I have been coerced I have been brainwashed and entrained I didn't know what I was doing I didn't recognize myself I broke my own principles and boundaries he made me someone made me do it he made me do it the victimizer, the abuser made me do it this anyone who resorts to these idiotic excuses is a narcissist next the narcissist never apologizes never assumes responsibility never acknowledges guilt never tries to make amends never agrees to discuss even the outstanding issues never provides closure real victims do and finally automatism the narcissist is an autopilot he never reflects on his behavior he never analyzes it he never synthesizes his lessons he is not introspective he is incapable of seeing himself he sees only others and only in a way which is self-justifying and conducive to egocintinity the narcissist engages in automatism because automatism being an autopilot prevents him prevents him from introspection allows him to not engage in any soul searching so narcissists would react automatically they have stock phrases they have regular sentences they have habitual words and behaviors and they would go through them as if they were robots badly programmed robots many of you know such people they are online as self-styled experts as coaches as victims as empaths they are offline as your colleagues as your girlfriends or boyfriends or spouses or intimate partners they are all over I've just given you the tools to tell apart narcissists from real victims real victims occupy reality they are alert and aware of nuances they have dignity they seek resolution and real solutions they accept responsibility for their contributions to their own predicament they learn lessons they modify their behaviors they grow they evolve they learn perhaps the best sign that someone is a narcissist is that the same thing keeps happening to him time and again is as if the narcissist has learned nothing from previous replays identical replays of the same cloned events a narcissist who goes online and says I have had three girlfriends and they all did this to me well it means you are incapable of learning you are incapable of growth you are incapable of evolution and personal development and this is typical only only of narcissists never of real victims remember this and apply this to all your interactions with everyone around you and now to the more detailed presentation replete with examples here is something to boggle your mind every narcissist overt covert dead or alive claim to have been a victim or at the very least to have been victimized discriminated against framed set up treated unjustly abrasively harshly every narcissist says this no exception how on earth can we tell the difference between narcissists posing as victims and real victims now mind you narcissists truly and honestly perceive themselves as victims they are not acting they are not lying they are not gaslighting they are not faking they truly honestly profoundly deeply irrevocably and you know that I can continue for another half an hour firmly believe their own confabulation their own narrative their own fantasy their own storyline in which they are the hapless victims of malevolent malicious dark malign evil forces out there so how can you tell the difference I'm going to teach you a few ways these are kind of tests a real victim from a narcissist who believes himself to be a victim when I say he when I say him it's a her etc etc half of all narcissists nowadays are women women's live equality is upon us and for those of you who are lucky enough fortunate enough to not know who I am I'm Saint Vaknin I'm the author of malignant self-love and narcissism revisited I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and a current member of the faculty of see ups so let's delve right into the quagmire and swamp of victimhood narcissists always claim to be victims and they're very convincing they're charming they're outgoing they put on a facade of compassion and affection and empathy and so on and you buy into their stories many of them pose as codependence as victims of narcissistic abuse as victims of generalized abuse as post traumatic people in the throes of post trauma many of them go online and kind of merchandise their victimhood many of them compete there's a phenomenon of competitive victimhood and many of them are so convincing that this has become their identity their badge of honor they are the perennial well-known famous victims and that's how they're judged even though a substantial minority perhaps even a majority of them are actually narcissists and especially covert narcissists but not only how to tell which is which here are a few tests number one, splitting a narcissist would engage in splitting which is a primitive infantile defense mechanism splitting says I'm all good they are all bad I've never done anything wrong I've been wronged all my life I having introspected having interrogated myself having soul-searched I discovered that I am blemishless I'm flawless I am 100% on the high moral ground wrong with me and I've never done anything wrong to anyone this all or nothing black or white all good all bad all angels all demons this kind of thinking is known as splitting or dichotomous thinking and it is typical only of narcissists real victims don't have this so many many many of the so called empaths coaches who pretend to be co-dependence and victims of self-styled experts who claim to have been victims of narcissistic abuse many of these people are actually narcissists because they engage ostentatiously conspicuously, visibly and publicly in massive acts of splitting only narcissists split, remember that victims never do real victims have a much more nuanced perception of reality they are much more attuned to the grey zone to the grey area between the black and the white to the fact that people are not all bad and never all good that life is a complicated proposition that things happen even to the best of people so real victims have a much more realistic grasp of the process that had led to their victimization as I said much more nuanced not so with narcissists second test non-discrimination non-discrimination is simply every girlfriend I've ever had has betrayed me abused me destroyed me abandoned me cheated on me killed me and my dog every girlfriend there has never been a single exception all of them, no exception have done this to poor me and by the way the element of self pity is an a warning sign if you spot self pity that's a narcissist victims have dignity victims don't pity themselves they are angry sometimes but self pity is a hallmark of a narcissist especially a covert narcissist overt narcissists don't engage in self pity but coverts do so there is this self-pitying tone you know all my girlfriends were horrible to me all my spouses all my business partners they victimize me they discarded me they treated me harshly they I was so good to them I give them everything I give them love I give them money I give them sex I give them this and they just keep victimizing me everyone keeps victimizing me poor me please I'm so in need of compassion and empathy and so on and so forth it's a manipulative technique a narcissistic manipulative technique beware if you see anyone whose narrative whose story is that everyone in his life has victimizing everyone and that he has done nothing to deserve this and he self pities and shares the self pity with you but in a setting where there are certain positive outcomes there are certain goals so for example the narcissist would share his story with you because it gets him views on youtube or he would share this story with you because it would make him some money or he would share the story of of victimization and self pity with you because it would get him laid he would get him to have sex so narcissists exactly like psychopaths in this sense are goal oriented non-discrimination goes hand in hand with goal orientation you see something like that be very very very suspicious do not give the benefit of the doubt it's 99.9% a narcissist next alloplastic defenses it's everybody's else fault never mine none of this is my fault everything that has ever happened to me is not my fault I am a poor victim I am a poor codependent I am a lamb I didn't see it coming I am so innocent and pure of heart I am so giving and so caring and so amazing and so loving and so decent and so compassionate and so empathic and so warm blooded and so I don't know what and you see what they are doing to me you see none of it is my fault I am not responsible I contributed nothing to my repeated predicament nothing this is called alloplastic defense alloplastic defense is when you keep blaming others all the time even when you have misbehaved egregiously even when your misconduct screams to high heaven it's still never ever your fault you want to figure out if someone is a real victim or a narcissist listen to him if he never ever says I'm sorry I did something wrong it was partly my fault I contributed to it somehow I accept responsibility accountability I am learning to recognize myself and my involvement in all this if he never says I'm sorry that's a narcissist if he never says it's partly my fault that's a narcissist if he never accepts responsibility or his contributions to whatever has happened that's a narcissist real victims go through thorough functional healing soul searching they recognize their contributions and their involvement the wrong choices they've made the bad decisions and they vow to themselves to never repeat but the narcissist no way it just happened to be there in the wrong time in the wrong place in the wrong place that's all none of it is ever his fault none of it yeah well he did he did misbehave here and there he did still he did you know forge he did do all kinds of things which happened to be anything between immoral and illegal but so what he did not deserve to be victimized his own bad behavior is never acknowledged and he never expresses remorse or regret ever that's a great sign of a narcissist real victims never do never behave this way and the last thing I would say although there are quite a few other tests but the last thing is automatism the the narcissist has at his disposal ready made phrases responses whole texts and so on whenever the narcissist is confronted with a situation he goes on automatic pilot so whenever something bad happens to the narcissist automatically he says I've been a victim I've been victimized I'm codependent I'm helpless I'm traumatized I'm you know it's not my fault I'm and that's it it's automatic he never bothers to go deep he never bothers to really think he never bothers to introspect he never bothers to analyze he never bothers to synthesize he never bothers to truly consult others he doesn't really consult others he goes through the motions very often but in order to self justify and he blocks out any information that contradicts his self-justifying alloplastic narratives it's never my fault I'm always the victim I'm codependent I'm traumatized I'm helpless I'm and therefore I fall prey to malicious malevolent predators out there they are all bad so I have nothing to apologize for none of my behaviors has been wrong I've never done anything wrong and that's me that's a narcissist come across someone like that that's a narcissist and never mind how eloquent he is how charming he is how attractive he is how well versed he is in the lore of victimhood that's a narcissist peel your eyes pierce and penetrate the facade have a real look at the person and ask yourself is this human being on the screen or next to me or to my workplace or my family is this person real or is it an act is this person a victim or is it a narcissist claiming to be a victim and I've just provided you with four tools to answer this question so make good use of them