 My name is Sam Wagnin. I'm the author of Malignan Self-Lab, Narcissism Revisited, and I'm here with my trusted minimalscap, which contains nothing but coffee. Today we are going to discuss about the pandemic as a mass or collective narcissistic injury, because that is precisely what it is. The pandemic left us all headless or chickens, and some of us headless chickens. It is an irony that many of us have the time now to develop self-awareness and self-consciousness. Many of us suddenly find ourselves in a situation where we have to confront our inner demons, where we have to gain insight as to our internal processes, our inner landscape, our fears, our hopes, our preferences, our wishes, our dreams, broken dreams, future dreams. And all this, all this gained insightful self-awareness, all of it is useless, all of it is too late. All of it is too late because the world is never going to be the same. And we are using the frame of reference of BC before Corona. We are trying to apply it to AD after distancing, but the world after the pandemic will have very little to do with the world before the pandemic. And all the promises we make to ourselves, all the vows, all the late blooming understanding, all the mistakes we have made and now have come to realize, to acknowledge and to confess to, this is all very nice and dandy, but all very irrelevant. You see, the pandemic caused a collective narcissistic injury to all of us because we were living in a narcissistic civilization. We have developed inexorably, both men and women, a civilization which was highly narcissistic and highly psychopathic, a civilization where values, or shall I say, lack of values, such as ambition, competitiveness, defiance, hatred of authority, despising the intellect and expertise, promiscuity, lack of impulse control, faking it till you make it, all these became the core values of our civilization. And now suddenly, suddenly, the tiniest organism, almost the tiniest, prions, a tiniere, but the second tiniest organism in the entire universe came here to remind us of a few basic facts, and these basic facts are injurious, they're hurtful, and we are not coping very well with a message. As a species, nature uses the virus to humble us, to remind us how small, insignificant, interdependent we are, to tell us to send us a clear signal that defiance and contumatiousness will be punished. Nature will not tolerate any more our encroachment on the living spaces of other species. Nature is a self-balancing, interlocking set of mechanisms, and we have narcissistically, grandiosely, badly interfered with literally every single one of them, and it is payback time, nature is telling us. And just to make clear who is the boss, nature didn't send us gigantic dragons, nature didn't deploy monsters to consumers, nature sent us something that is not even alive, an RNA package invisible to the naked eye, so tiny, so non-existent literally, an envelope of protein or lipids or whatever, and this invisible enemy, to use Trump's favorite expression, this invisible enemy is tearing us down, is killing us, is putting us in ICU's, is decimating us. Could nature have sent us a more stark reminder of who is in charge? I don't think so. Nature challenged directly our omnipotence, it showed us that there are limits to our growth, economic growth, but also psychological growth. Nature demolished, eradicated our grandiosity in a single stroke, rendered us helpless. This helplessness will remain with us, because this pandemic is the equivalent of a trauma in an individual, and we will all be in a post-traumatic condition. We are all developing post-traumatic stress disorders. Every time you open the television, every time you go online, and you see dead bodies in trucks, refrigerator trucks, you see an endless row of coffins, every time this happens, every time you see someone throbbing in the mouth, lungs collapsing in an ICU, every time you hear about young people dying, children dying, every time this happens, you're traumatized, and these mini-traumas accumulate, and you're developing a post-traumatic condition. No one can maintain omnipotence, the feeling of omnipotence, the sensation of being all-powerful in the face of such constant reminders, how powerless one is, how impotent, in the face of inexorable, impersonal forces that comprise our universe. Our omniscience is also a challenge. The utterly delusional belief that we already know everything, but it's very little to discover. Every century encouraged this delusion. The physicists of the early 20th century believed that there's nothing more to discover, and this was before relativity and quantum mechanics, imagine. Similarly, medicine has developed hubris. Medical doctors have become grandiose, they have become complacent. Medical doctors believe they have the answers to everything, even to questions they've never heard before. And so here comes nature, here comes the virus, here comes this non-organism, to remind, remind us how little we know, how far we are from understanding almost anything about the human body. We are still discovering whole gigantic underlying foundational systems in the brain, in the guts. We are still revamping and revising our view of the body, what we think we know, more or less every two years. We didn't know that most of the neurotransmitter serotonin is produced in the intestines. We didn't know that ten years ago. We didn't know five years ago that there's an underlying sewage or canalization or lavatory connecting the brain to the spine. We didn't know that there was a superstructure upon which the brain relies and is founded, a superstructure which is the equivalent of the internet network. We didn't know this five years ago and yet we pretend to know everything. We give people medicines like antidepressants based on transitory and temporary discoveries that are overturned every single year. Here's the virus. There's a science of urology and epidemiology and it goes back one over a hundred years. Had you spoken to an epidemiologist or a virologist? Only six months ago they would have told you we know more or less 90% of what we need to know. Now they know that they don't know 90% of what needs to be known. We have a long way to go before we can say that we know something. We need to be a lot more socratic. We need to accept that the only thing we know for sure is that we don't know. We need to be far less grandiose. We are vulnerable. We are all fallible. We all die. Sometimes we die long before we are supposed to die. Sometimes we get things right very often, most often, most frequently. We get them wrong. We are not infallible. And yet we all believe ourselves to be immortal. We behave and we react to this pandemic as though we have a right to live. As though it's an obligation of nature because we have a right. Nature is an corresponding obligation to keep us alive. Who said that? Who said that? Life is an inexorable process of dying. Of course, it's a life sentence. We all behave as though if we only apply the rules of reason and rationality, we are bound to find answers to all the questions. And yet we have to accept, even in my field in psychology and in previous fields I've been an economist, I've been a physicist, I've been a philosopher, we have to accept that some questions have no answers and that some problems have no solutions. We have to be humble. We have to realize how fragile we are, how ephemeral, how transient. We are dust. The Bible is right about this at least. We are dust. Package dust. Pre-package dust. But dust all the same when we are living on a speck of dust in the furthest corners of a speck of a galaxy. It's a big galaxy but it's still on the suburbs. We're not very central, we've never been. And even what we did construct over the centuries, our social institutions, look at them. Look how we botched our own history. Look at the family. Look at our communities. Look at our governments. Look at our elites. And on the other hand, look at the people. The amount of stupidity, ignorance, retarded conspiracy theories. Look at us. It's a shameful, disgraceful spectacle. So, we're justified to be anxious. Anxiety is a thought and depression, a totally healthy reaction. Someone who is not depressed, anyone who is not depressed and is not anxious right now needs treatment. Somebody's wrong with him or her. Because you know what? I look into the future and I see nothing. We all know that our economies will recover for some of us. But for the vast majority, they will never recover. Our institutions definitely will never recover. Is this the end of history to use Fukuyama's terminology? Of course not. We are resilient species. We'll continue to exist. We will construct new institutions. We'll survive somehow. We'll survive somehow. But from now on, we are all the victims of abuse. Our parents, nature, and if you wish, God, if you're inclined to such fantasies, they've abused us. There is this lingering feeling that we are not really liked, that the universe had rejected us, that we did something so wrong, so vile, so contemptible, that we are no longer accepted, that we are unwanted guests. We have failed. We have failed. That is the knowing. This is what's knowing at our souls. We realized that we had failed individually, collectively. Ask the young. Ask them what world we are living in. What's our legacy? Anywhere from climate change to this pandemic, we made it happen and we are bequithing this to the next generations. Already, their wages are lower than our wages. Already, many of them continue to live with their parents, can't afford rent, can't afford education. The level of literacy has never been higher. The planet is polluted beyond redemption. Locust swarmed the earth. It's Biblical, what we have done. Biblical, possibly the Bible, was kind of automatic writing. Our unconscious scripting the future based on our deficiencies. Is it too late to reverse? Well, largely yes. Remember what I said earlier, not every problem has a solution. We screwed up, but we need to focus on areas where we can make a difference. There are such areas, possibly the environment, possibly medicine, possibly psychology. There are some areas, some parts of the arts, cinema maybe. We need to focus on these areas and regain our strength via accomplishment, via doing the right things for a change. But what are we doing instead? Trade wars, rearmament, ballistic missiles. Yes, in the midst of this pandemic, that's what we're doing. Finding with each other, quarreling, cutting off budgets to the WHO, doing other things. Who did what to whom, which laboratory released which virus, if at all. We cut together our act together, even faced with extinction.