 Today we have a smuggler's board. We have a very diverse buffet of issues that we are going to discuss schizotypals Freud the brain Animal empathy do animals have emotions We're going to discuss the infiltration of victim movements by dark triad psychopaths and narcissists and a lot more besides So there's no single topic, but a diversity. I hope you enjoy the ride My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of malignant self-love narcissism revisited and I'm a professor of psychology let's start with schizotypal personality disorder According to the diagnostic and statistical manual these people with schizotypal personality disorder possess and I quote peculiar eccentric or unusual thinking beliefs or mannerisms belief in special powers such as mental telepathy or in superstitions unusual perceptions such as Sensing an absent person's presence or having illusions and if this sounds like you It is because a growing number of people are making these preposterous claims about themselves and about reality Many of them are known as conspiracy theories and many of them become gurus and coaches and self-styled experts And you the brain dead are following them But we all know this by now, don't we? so These unusual cognitive patterns in people with schizotypal personality disorder They can involve counterfactual Grandiosity in other words Grandiosity that does not accord with the facts that doesn't reflect reality that is divorced from reality And this kind of grandiosity can be either narcissistic or it can be paranoid so schizotypal people sometimes come across as grandiose narcissists or vert narcissists and sometimes come across as simply tinfoil head Paranoids and very often it involves something called pseudomania Pseudomania is a manic phase of behavior, but not to the full extent It's like just being restless like attention deficit disorder being unable to sleep but There are no serious disturbances in thinking and in speech At any rate this makes it difficult to types to distinguish the schizotypal from the narcissists from the paranoid or from bipolar patients A schizotypal may consider himself a revolutionary genius possessed of superhuman or supernatural skills He may even think that he is a professor of psychology with 190 IQ Or he may erupt with unbridled insomniac energy as he seeks to implement hair-brained skins or concoct new theories He may become convinced that he's being followed surveyed and about to be assassinated Disorganized thinking disorganized speech are common in these phases as the schizotypal Slides perilously close to schizofrenia. So I hope I answered your question now many people Had been accusing me of victim blaming and victim shaming at this and that how dare I suggest that some victims Actually like their victim would there how dare I say that victims are invested emotionally in their victim would that victim Become an integral dimension and determinant of their identity. This is no no, this is politically incorrect This is shameful even YouTube itself is actually shadow banning or deranking My channel because of what they had informed me is hate speech against empaths and victims Okay Unfortunately everything I say is backed by research. There's been a series of studies recently in the past two years that had That had revealed The fact that Many victims are actually narcissists and psychopaths first of all a While ago Judith Herman and a series of other scholars Judith Herman had Invented the diagnosis of complex trauma or complex post traumatic stress disorder So Judith Herman had suggested that complex post traumatic stress disorder and the victims of CPTSD are Indistinguishable actually from borderline personality disorder She and others are strong advocates of eliminating the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and Replacing it. Yes Exactly with CPTSD So the distinction between people with a personality a severe personality disorder a personality disorder that is now Widely considered to be a form of psychopathy So the distinction between borderline and CPTSD is blurring. It's becoming more and more fuzzy Then there was a study in British Columbia Which had demonstrated that people use victim would as a form of virtue signaling and that people who use victim would in order to signal virtue to show how angelic and perfect they are blameless and and Guiltless and flawless these people are actually narcissists and psychopaths. That's not me. That's a study Then there were there was series of four studies by Gabi and others and they came up with a new psychological construct called the The tendency for interpersonal victim TIV and they said that many people Had adopted victimhood as a form of identity. It's like identity politics and they Leveraged their victim would propagate and perpetuate it and belish it they use it as a form of enchantment and they use victimhood to Define themselves to make sense of what's happening to them and of the world to read other people properly Anticipate their moves predict them etc. etc. So victimhood is very very useful and they refuse to let go of the victimhood. I Have dedicated several videos to these recent studies and today I want to add Yet a new one There's new research and this research provides evidence that narcissism Psychopathy and Machiavellianism These are the maladaptive personality traits known together as the dark triad These are associated with overt displays of virtue and yes, you guessed it victimhood The study suggests that people with dark personalities use these signals of I'm a virtuous victim To deceive other people and to extract resources from other people The study is titled Signaling virtuous victimhood as indicators of dark triad personalities. The authors are Iqin Ok Ok Iqian Qian Brandon strage strage Jack check or something S.T.R.E. J.C.E.K. and Carl Aquino Rakhino and again Signaling virtuous victimhood as indicators of dark triad personalities This has been published in the journal of personality and social psychology I want to quote a bit from the the study the authors say Fortune and human imperfection Assure that at some point in life everyone will experience suffering disadvantage or mistreatment When this happens There will be some who face their burdens in silence treating it as a private matter They must work out for themselves and there will be others say the authors who make a public spectacle of their sufferings Label themselves as victims and demand compensation for their pain one way or another The latter response is what interests us So the studies are huge by psychological standards. They included almost 3600 participants and The authors examined how signals of virtue and signals of victimhood are related to dark triad traits and deceptive behaviors before we proceed we no longer use the Construct of dark triad We increasingly are using a construct known as the dark tetrad and the dark tetrad is The three components of the dark triad Machiavellianism narcissism and psychopathy coupled with borderline or covert narcissism so The vulnerable versions and this is the dark tetrad at any rate this study had focused on the dark triad so the researchers first thing they found is that Perceiving someone as a virtuous victim made people more likely to try to help the victim Indicating that if you use signals of virtue and signals of victimhood It's a great strategy to gain resources from other people If you want to take something from someone if you want to get something from someone You can pretend to be a victim or you can signal your virtue and you are likely to get it and that includes even extreme things like sex So in the study there are examples. So participants were more willing to help a victim Participants were more willing to help a victim of a random act of violence Who was described as being short while volunteering at the charity even When this was not verified So if you if you came and said well, I've just been shot It's a random act of violence and this happened to me while I had been volunteering at a charity event And then there's another guy who says I've been shot It's a random act of violence and this happened to me as I was walking past a grocery store or a strip club People would prefer the victim the person who had been shot while volunteering in a charity event So in subsequent studies They established that it was a positive relationship between dark triad rates and emitting signals of victimhood and virtue If you participate in a charity event Then of course you're virtuous and if you were shot while you were participating at the charity event You're both virtuous and you're a victim and these forces people coerces them in a way Manipulate them into giving you help and the help could be substantial They could even become self-sacrificial in trying to help you Among the three dark triad traits Machiavellianism which is a willingness to be manipulative an urge to be deceitful Tendency proclivity to be deceitful Machiavellianism was the strongest predictor of virtue virtuous victim signaling I want to repeat this because this is mind-boggling and shocking and It supports everything I've been saying for almost 20 years If you are a victim and you signal your victim you make a spectacle of yourself You share your victimhood everywhere and you do this while claiming to be a virtuous blameless guiltless helpless hapless Victim you've done nothing to deserve the victim would you have contributed nothing to your predicament or situation? you are an angel You're an angel and your abuser is a demon the devil some morality play is the ancient Splitting defense mechanism. He is all bad. You are all good If you're doing this if this is the way you behave and the vast majority of empaths online This is precisely their message Well, if you're doing this according to this study, you're very likely a psychopath. I Mean, I've been charitable. I was saying I have been saying in my last few videos that empaths are actually covert narcissists Wrong, they're psychopaths. It's even much worse in other words people with high level of Machiavellianism According to the study were more likely to report that they have often been That they have often pointed out how I'm how I'm not able to pursue my goals and dreams because of external factors In other words, they had an external locus of control people with Machiavellianism position themselves postured as victims in the sense That someone external or something external usually someone but it could be an institution or could be victimized by But the state by the FBI, but you know, you name it anyone and everyone and everything can victimize it, but Generally, it's another human being so they position themselves as As people whose lives have been disrupted interrupted thwarted and stunted by other people But actually they're Machiavellian psychopaths or narcissists so Some of them were saying many of them said in the studies I Don't feel accepted in the society because of my identity Remind you of something. Yes black lives matter me too And of course right wing Militias and conspiracy theories all these victimhood movements essentially are founded on dark triad traits and It's offline and it's online in for example the empath movement all these people They really had convinced themselves that they are victims and they had moments of victimhood in their past I am not invalidating the experience of victimhood, but it is what you do with your victimhood That matters and if you are if you have narcissistic traits psychopathic traits borderline traits Then you're very likely to Embrace your victimhood Leverage it love it hug it cuddle it go to sleep with it and wake up with it Let's call it victimhood fleas like narcissistic fleas victimhood fleas and you're likely to Convert yourself into a victim in the sense that victimhood is likely to become your primary identity The organizing principle of your life and the thing that gives your life rhyme and reason direction and purpose and goal Victimhood helps you make sense of your life and the world around you and other people and so Sentences like I don't feel accepted in the society because of my identity. I Am not able to pursue my goals and dreams because of external factors Sentences like People like me are underrepresented in the media and in leadership and in business These are all sentences from the from the studies from the study that I had mentioned and these people also report Virtue signaling more often so they buy products in a way to communicate their positive moral characteristics Their charity giving their altruism is ostentatious and conspicuous. It's a show It's a theater production. It's not real. There's no empathy behind it and This relationship between victimhood Virtue signaling and dark triads a shocking relationship this relationship held even after accounting for demographic and socio-economic characteristics So people with darker personalities people who were more narcissistic more psychopathic Mama Kevillian were more likely to claim victimhood status regardless of Their actual status in society in other words They claimed victimhood status even when they were not victims at all and even when they were actually the abuses Participants who reported engaging in more virtuous victim signaling scored Also scored higher on other measures They tended to be more willing to purchase counterfeit goods. They were more likely to cheat There were coin flip games and other games and they were cheating. They're much more likely to be deceitful. I Repeat this because it flies in the face of all the nonsense propagated online people who claim to be victims People who render their victimhood as spectacle People whose identity is that of a victim They are actually much more likely to engage in Antisocial even criminal activities and they are far more likely to cheat and to deceive others. This is not The first time this is being Demonstrated in Gabba's studies JBAY Published in October last year the same finding in Dana Realees studies the same finding Beware of people who claim to be to be victims. They're as likely to be narcissists or psychobas Participants who reported engaging in More virtuous Victim signaling were more likely to exaggerate perceived mistreatment by a colleague in order to gain an advantage over the colleague An association that was mediated by dark triad traits. In other words Victims very often exaggerate their victimhood in order to extract benefits either from society from others But above all from their abuser or tormentor from the other party Now I wouldn't go as far as saying that all victims are like that. Of course, that would be untrue That would be vastly untrue to be to caricature the the fact that there is real victimhood out there, but Some victims those with narcissistic traits Psychopathic traits borderline traits this type of victims. They would tend to lie To cheat and to deceive about their victimhood simply They would invent stories that had never happened. They would describe being exit incidents that had never happened They would exaggerate the misbehavior of the abuser and they would do all this to take him to the cleaners To destroy him. It's a form of vengeance And to extract material or other benefits from it a form of blackmail and extortion. I Will read another section from the from the study Together the authors say together our studies present convincing evidence that the virtuous victimhood signal Is an effective mechanism for persuading other people to part With their resources in a way that benefits the person who is doing the signaling and that people who tend to engage in a moral Social manipulation to achieve their goals are more likely to emit these signals of victimhood The researchers themselves as I do strongly caution against Interpreting these findings are suggesting that everyone who claims to be a victim has a has maladaptive personality traits such as Machiavellianism. No one is saying this. I am not saying this I'm just saying when you come across a group of victims whose victimhood is their identity Who exaggerate and exalt in their victimhood who love their victim or emotionally invested in their victimhood? Victims who have victimhood competitions victims who Who render themselves all good? Refuse to acknowledge any personal responsibility or contribution to their predicament and condition in circumstances Decisions they have made choices. They've undertaken This kind of victims are extremely likely to be narcissists Possibly psychopaths and they are definitely Machiavellian. They're manipulative These are dangerous people covert narcissists psychopaths So and and essentially con artists who pretend to be victims Now many of these victims convince themselves that they're victims because it's good for business and You should be very beware of these communities because they these victims are actually extremely defined and aggressive people Defined and aggressive. They can retard your healing They can retard your healing by forcing you to conform and to remain a victim for the rest of your life and They can punish you or penalize you if you express any opinion That is independent and autonomous and critical and questioning. These are very violent neighborhoods The authors conclude by saying our conclusion is simply that victim signals are effective tools of social influence and maximally effective when deployed with signals of virtue We also provide evidence Supporting our proposition that for some people these signals can be deployed as a duplicitous tactic To acquire personal benefits. They would otherwise not receive very sobering view of victimhood on top of several such Major studies in the past two years. We are beginning to reconceive of victimhood as a manipulative tactic a Manipulative technique. You see there's a big difference between saying I am a victim and Saying I had been victimized a world of difference on to another victim Zygmunt Freud and I'm saying that he's a victim because Zygmunt Freud and the theory of psychoanalysis and then psychoanalytic theories should derivatives of Zygmunt Freud anything from Adler to Jung and so they're today considered to be Shambolic scams We don't teach them in a university because they are not substantiated by experiments and studies and The scholarship is dubious their speculative They're based on anecdotes on introspection God forbid and so we don't teach them We don't teach them because we think these pioneers of psychology were actually not psychologists in the sense that we perceive The discipline today. We think they were possibly literary figures like Dostoevsky or Maybe even kind of con artist, you know, Jung was under verge He was having sex with his with his patients. He was into UFOs and the occult and astrology He was psychotic for five years. So not of it. He doesn't cut a very impressive figure And so in many many universities around especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, but not only the Every we have discarded the baby with the bathtub and the bathtub with the building Everything got out the window and so Freud had been victimized in my view. Now, there's a new There's a new book published About the correspondence between recent discoveries in neuroscience and Freud's Models models of consciousness and and the psyche Freud himself Was a neurologist not a psychologist. He was a scientist His initial studies had to do with the nervous system He described hysteria, for example in term in terms of nerve impulses and Activity in in the brain So he started off as a scientist and what he wanted to do he wanted to Scientify psychology. He wanted to render it convert it into a science and And it's very ironic that this most scientific of psychologists had been discarded by his very own profession because Freud was a proto neuroscientist and so I Would like to review a bit what's what's happening Nowadays because there is a kind of There is a kind of revival of interest in Freud Because recent discoveries in neuroscience Seem to indicate that he got many things right many things straight and that is models or be it abstract symbolic There's no question that there is no such thing as an ego. You can't capture it in a flat or a lab You can't experiment on it So we don't we don't presume that these these are objective entities out there But as symbols as notation kind of formal notation like symbols in mathematics They do seem to capture reality because more and more Neuroscience is discovering that Freud had actually been right which would render him one of the greatest geniuses of the human spirit in all of all times There's a new book By Mark Psalms s o l m s the book is titled the hidden spring Journey to the source of consciousness the hidden spring journey to the source of consciousness Mark Psalms s o l m s ww notum and Company is four hundred and something pages each one of them Amazing if you are into neuroscience and Freud and so on so forth Let's start. Let's go back in time in October 1895 Sigmund Freud had written a letter He sent the letter to his colleague. He's confident. I doubt if Freud ever had friends. He had disciples colleagues, I Don't recall that he had friends of any kind, but okay as close to a friend as possible His name was Wilhelm fleece if I f l i e s s. Sorry, so He wrote to this guy and he said he said after an industrious night The barriers lifted the veils dropped and everything became transparent from the details of the neurosis To the determinants of consciousness And so Freud on that specific night had thought reached a conclusion that he had deciphered the human psyche and He made He started to write down his discoveries and the title In his handwriting was project for a scientific psychology Freud's project started off as an attempted science by the way a pretension And hubris and grandiosity That we still carry with us as his spiritual descendants to this very day Psychologists want very much to be scientists never mind the psychology can never ever be a science in principle At any rate he started off with this very very scientific looking thing and the first manuscript including manuscripts includes equations and mathematical symbols and and sketches and nervous system branching and synapses and axons and so on and he wanted to reduce Reduce the psyche reduce the human soul into an energetic apparatus into a machine He said it's like a battery a battery that builds up excitation and then Discharges us it and this discharge of excitation is what we call relief And the discharge goes through the coils of the nervous system Gradually Freud began to realize that such a reductionist model is not going to work It's not going to capture the vast majority of human experiences introspective or observed and so He's he gravitated more and more towards language From science with its mathematical obstructions to language Which led him much later to talk therapy talk therapy is not Freud's invention But he was the first to popularize and so modern brain research has gone back full circle Because modern brain research neuroscience is trying to do what Freud had tried to do in 1895 and had failed dismally so the idea that Psychology can be reduced to the brain That it is essentially the science of the brain, but it's a primitive way of describing the brain It's like psychology when it grows up when it matures is going to be Neuroscience and of course mark solmes the author of the book Is a neuro psychologist and he has quite a resume of cognitive scientific research And he surprisingly reaches a conclusion that Freud's theories had anticipated some of the key findings in Modern brain research It's a shocking read the book So you say keep saying I mean when I when I read the book I have seen saying to myself This Freud was something else I mean at when Freud Had embarked on his work The at the very tail end of the 19th century no one knew anything about the brain close to anything and Freud Had rich conclusions that have taken 150 years to substantiate 130 years to substantiate He was way ahead of his time. He was like a prophet a biblical prophet And neuroscience is uh, actually neuroscience begin to look like a A primitive version of Freud Because neuroscience is focused on the cerebral cortex The outer layers, you know in the crown of the brain And so neuroscience is concerned with what we call higher order cognition That's contemplation rationality deliberation this kind of of types of thinking which is essentially analytical thing And everyone is into this the cerebral cortex one way or another. Yes other parts are studied also But when you talk about cognition and emotions and so There's an amygdala. There's Cortex and that's essentially that that's that And what about desires? What about deeper emotions? What about pressures? What about pleasures? What about stressors? I mean Neuroscience is not up to it yet Maybe one day, but right now it's not up to it and Freud was Freud anticipated future neuroscience not only current neuroscience And so Sons starts with a brain stem The brain stem the primitive reptilian not David Ike reptilian really part It's in it's in the stem not in the cortex Where consciousness arises Um, as he says it is the hidden wellspring of the mind the source of its essence It if you shift your view anatomically you shift your view Psychologically if you focus on the cerebral cortex Cortex you you get a picture of human psychology Which which emphasizes High level cognition and the detriment of everything else that is human But if you start with the brain stem Where emotions are pleasures are Desires are it's very reminiscent of Freud's concept of the id And so some's right the neurological sources of effect in consciousness Are at a minimum deeply entangled with one another it follows that feelings pervade conscious experience so songs wants to move past the model of mind that that Like is separate from our base feelings It's like we don't feel comfortable with the fact that we're animals We're primitive We're very basic We're binary machines in a way We don't like that. We don't like to consider ourselves the missing link chimpanzees So we we invented this concept of mind and mind is uniquely human because it includes introspection It includes all kinds of capacities and and abilities that Separate us from animals and we're very invested emotionally in this grandiose superiority self-perception And so this Bias this prejudice had directed confined channeled structured our neuroscience neuroscience is actually a massive Propaganda campaign to prove that we are unique Exceptionalism in science. It's like Neuroscientists are trying to prove that humans are not animals or not only animals So mindless drives They're the basis of more sophisticated forms of conscious thinking and we refuse to admit it mental life perception memory revolution Is not cool reason as Shakespeare had put it It's much more than that and much less than that and neuroscientists are terrified of of admitting it in effect Freud laid the groundwork for this Freudian psychoanalysis Started off with the most primitive animalistic urges and Freud himself Had posited claimed that it is culture Not anything in the human mind Not anything in the brain culture outside other people social structures mores memory institutional memory He said that culture interacts With the with the human mind, which is very animalistic and basic And constrains it via the ego Now Jung just took it a step further Jung created the collective unconscious So it was not only current day culture, but like the totality of the experience of the human species But even with Jung there is this conflict There is this clash between our basic nature, which is essentially vestial essentially primitive pre-bordial and our institutions Including historical institutions current institutions cultures And so which somehow Constrain and channel and sublimate and transform this raw energy inside us so in his In his early work songs Was focused on sleep and dreams exactly like Freud Dreams were an unlikely path to proving Freud right because Freud took dreams and and Had converted them into a language of symbols, which was essentially a form of literature and researchers Associated dreams with REM sleep Mindless state there's no mind in dreams Neuroscientists used to say when you dream you're mindless and of course Freud said exactly the opposite He said you're mindful to the maximum when you dream It is when you're conscious when you don't dream That you filter out the vast majority of highly relevant information And that's why dreaming and sleep are crucial according to Freud And today the scientific consensus is And i'm quoting another scholar Neuroscientist ellen hobson The primary motivating force for dreaming is not psychological but physiological Dreams according to this model are like neural indigestion or cleansing with spinal fluid cleansing of the brain so all the meanings that Meaningfulness that Freud had attributed to dreams There were nonsense Neuroscientists said until recently as Freud said the dream is an expression of the unconscious unconscious wish and unconscious content So the dream's explicit imagery the manifest content Is hiding Rifle desires and passions and urges and drives the latent content Latent content is buried underneath and then sub and then converted into a language of symbols Psalms actually reaches the conclusion that Freud's version of dreaming Freud's idea of dreaming conception of dreaming is much closer to the truth than contemporary neuroscience Psalms discovered that patients with damage To the part of the brain that generates re m sleep Actually still dream It's wrong to say That re m sleep is a precondition for dreaming. It's not People who cannot In experience re m dream Sleep can still dream re m is rapid eye movement So re m sleep has some connection to dreams The psyches reward system maybe wanting system Is also connected. So some parts of the hardware are connected to dreams But It's not a precondition You can dream without these parts being activated and this is This is revolutionary The means that Freud was right Dreaming has to do with wishes It has to do with Much more complex processes that involve multiple Areas of the brain not a single center or a single function or a single observed behavior Or activation or multi-unit activation. It's wrong Dreaming in other words Is an extensive Multi-unit activity Multi-part activity is you could easily say actually The dreaming is the activity of the top totality of the brain Almost all parts of the brain participate Including the famous reward Pathways and and so And this is much closer to Freud's view than to anything modern neurosciences to say Dreams are also symbolic They're puzzling They're like imagining They're like detective stories Dreams are manifestations of suppressed wishes was Freud's initial position And Songs tend to agree Songs isolated the parts of the brain where wishes originate Is expressed and then pursued And these parts it seems are intimately connected or activated at least When people dream So Songs is coming up with a model of the brain That is like Freud's sensitive to the the psyche's efforts To balance competing needs and pressures. It's a homeostatic or equilibrium model So pleasure and pain Guide our interactions with the world And The world is uncertain. We miss a lot of information. It's information incomplete informationally incomplete And it is pleasure and pain That signals they are the signals that kind of direct our behavior Precisely as Freud had said it's precisely what Freud said Freud wrote a thing which has not been understood Inevitably reappears like an unlaid ghost Ghost it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken And this is what's happening to his theory Repression Is now well documented in neuroscience. The unconscious has been proven beyond doubt And now dreaming and dreams wish and wish fulfillment Suppressed wishes all this is emerging Um desire fantasy All this is emerging not only These are emerging not only as artifacts of mental life But as actually situated in specific locations In the brain Neuroscience is converging with psychoanalysis. Never mind how low Neuroscientists are to admit it So ironically Freud had abandoned this scientific project And now neuroscience is returning to Freud's work as a scientific project Highly recommended book the hidden spring a journey to the source of consciousness by mark saunders s o l m s w w norton and company I want to move on to another topic. That is the topic of empathy People kept keep asking me his empathy a human Merely a human manifestation a human phenomenon In other words, do animals have empathy? And what's connection between empathy and emotions? And can we develop empathy? Can we acquire it? Can we learn it? Later in life, let's call it late onset empathy I think it's very instructive and very interesting to deep dive into the question of whether animals have emotions and then Do animals have empathy? And then of course What's the connection between emotions and empathy in the animal kingdom? And there's a very simple reason for this. We are animals Of course people on youtube are animals, but all humans are animals even people who don't use youtube are essentially animals So we know that people Have emotions towards animals. They have pets They love animals. They anthropomorphize animals. In other words, they attribute to animals to their pets, for example Human qualities human behaviors human expressions human manifestations and human motivations and human internal processes They humanize Their animals, of course most animals if they could speak probably would have resented this because they're not human They're animals a giraffe has essential giraffes. She doesn't want to consider to be considered a very tall blonde so that humans anthropomorphic eyes Animals is a problem Both for the animal and for the human because we get it wrong We attribute to animals the kind of love and empathy that humans have But is empathy a uniform a uniform quantity like there's only one kind of empathy Is it possible that there is human empathy dog empathy cat empathy? Well, forget cat empathy Cats have no empathy our mouse empathy. I mean, is it is it possible that each animal Has its own kind of empathy shaped By its mental apparatus by its brain by its emotions by its experiences By its of course genetic template dna. Is it possible? I think it's far more safe to assume this Than to assume that animals and humans have the same kind of empathy In other words, it's a safe assumption that there is animal empathy as distinct from human empathy And it's a safe assumption that there are animal emotions as distinct from human emotions In fact in ethology. Ethology is the science of human behavior animal behavior So in ethology The current consensus is that animals do have empathy and definitely they have emotions such as grief fear And even complex emotions, which we used to think were primarily associated with human beings Animals are very emotional actually Pythagoras who was an ancient philosopher and mathematician And greek No one is perfect lived in 490 bc Pythagoras said that animals I quote possess the full range of human emotions Pythagoras lived a long time ago Things have changed now we have science And so charles Darwin wrote I'm quoting there's no fundamental difference between men and the higher mammals in the mental facilities current research bleeding edge cutting edge research Definitely had proven pretty conclusively that your animals display behavior That can be explained best most parsimoniously by assuming that Animals have emotions I mentioned grief, but also fear joy happiness shame Rage compassion even respect There is a famous Conservationist animal rights activists and professor of ethology and so his name is dr. Mark Bekhoff be ko ff Mark Bekhoff And he he stated at the time non-human animals are amazing beings Daily we we are learning more and more about their fascinating cognitive abilities emotional capacities and moral lives We know that fish are conscious and sentient rats mice and chickens display empathy And feel not only their own pain, but also that of other individuals presumably individual chickens so It's widely accepted now that animals have emotions They have emotions humans were not right. We're not wrong. I'm sorry when they had attributed emotions to animals. They may have been wrong By attributing human emotions to animals, but animals have some kind of emotions Because we can observe their behaviors and the best explanation is that they have emotions. But what about consciousness? Consciousness, what about interpersonal relatedness? Our connection to other people we know now And it's been a maximum psychology for several decades that our self And the perception of self the self perception of self our introspective capacity Crucially relies on our interactions with other people. In other words, we are not individuals. We're not atoms Our very being Our very separateness our very process of individuation depend crucially on interacting with other people and This way emerges consciousness Consciousness may be described as a hive mind So we are all fragments and shards A kaleidoscopic collection collage and assemblage of other people And in this sense humanity is like an ant colony. It has a single mind Fractured and fragmented among numerous individuals Well, if this is the case, is it the same with animals? I've mentioned ants or bees Is it the same in higher order animals? And what why do we experience our consciousness as separate and distinct in other words? Why do we experience ourselves as individuals? Not as part of some mass that is homogenized and faceless and impersonal, but we stand apart In our own eyes at least How do we reconcile this myth self perpetuating myth That we are alone that we are we that we are not other people Even as we say that our selfhood depends crucially on interacting with other people on object relations So there is a behaviorist approach to studying animals and The behaviors say that we are making a mistake by assigning human emotions to animals The behaviors say you don't need emotions It's enough to to have a stimulus response theory If you know that stimulus a creates response b you don't need to introduce emotion c in the middle, but It's manifestly untrue. It's manifestly untrue in humans, of course Although the behaviorists did their best bf skinner and others did their best To extrapolate from rats and mice to humans to say that humans also don't have emotions or cognitions It's all false. It's all misinterpretation Humans too are stimulus response machines rank nonsense Rank nonsense. I have no idea how skinner came to be known as a genius The guy was intellectually challenged so It's nonsense in humans and it increasingly seems that it's nonsense in in animals Animals experience emotions. There are advanced technologies. We observe Animals in natural habitats. We put them through functional magnetic resonance imaging. We have a lot. We have a huge body of knowledge and information We've seen animals having what appear to be emotional reactions to triggering events These reactions are not instinctual because they deviate from instinct. We know we have a full map of the instincts of every animal And when the animal behaves in ways which are utterly unpredictable and context dependent Situation situational we know that the animal is deviating from instinct. Why? How if it doesn't have any internal process which we can safely label as emotion? And so animal researchers Are asking themselves increasingly what line separates Humans from animals What separate what sets us apart If we perceive the world Emotionally and animals perceive the world emotionally in which sense are we non-animal and in which sense animals are not human And there's a huge debate scientists agree that emotions Are very crucial in human beings Also, there's an issue of consciousness sentience. There's an issue of introspection which most animals Have a very primitive form of if at all So is it a question of degree maybe Maybe we are like animal version 2.0 The most the more advanced upgrade Is it a question of quantity only? Or is it a question of quality? Do we have some things that animals Don't have even a hint of a shade of an inkling of they don't have a trace of It's uniquely human It's a problem because Um We fail to find such thing There is not a single thing that humans do That animals don't do Animals do it more primitively more basically more badly Less efficiently less often, but they do it language. Yes toolmaking. Yes emotions. Yes Self-awareness. Yes introspection to some extent. Yes, it's all there Even our sexual habits and practices Fully exist in the human king in the animal kingdom Animals do everything humans do in bed and outside bed So It's increasingly begins to look like The line separating humans From animals is a quantitative line Not a qualitative line and emotions play a pivotal role in the well-being of humans and probably Emotions are the engine and driver of evolution It seems that Emotions guarantee our survival and affect our daily lives so as to optimize or maximize our chances to survive and input differently emotions of the glue That binds us together also socially via A manifestation of emotions, which we call empathy And here we come to the question. Do animals have empathy? Empathy could be safely described As an agglomerate or conglomerate of emotions complex Integral emotion which involves other or triggers or calls upon other emotions The ability to understand other people to share Their cognitions and their emotions to guess Properly appropriately correctly their state of mind Their emotions their motivations. This is crucial We display empathy not only towards other people We display empathy towards animals as well Sometimes we display empathy towards a situation A nation A collective There was a lot of empathy in the wake of 9-11 Towards the American people Sometimes we display empathy towards an institution For example, many of us are very sad that the family is falling apart So do animals do the same? I can't tell you I can't I can't give you an unqualified yes But it's a pretty qualified yes It seems that in social species In animals that associate in social groups Animal is prevalent There's a Dr. James C. Harris At Johns Hopkins University And he said that Empathy is an evolutionary mechanism to maintain social cohesion So animals rely On the group for survival And they must be very sensitive To other members of the group what they're feeling Sometimes the other members of the group are human beings Diane Fossey Headed with gorillas I mean Primates had reacted to human observers with empathy The idea of empathy in animals Is a new way of looking at animals Because our feelings towards animals May actually be reciprocated by these animals As any dog owner would tell you It's possible that Animals truly care About members of their own species In a way that we can somehow Relate to however remotely So in primates In dogs In mice In elephants We had observed empathy most definitely We had observed elephants Morn The death Of a conservationist A person, a human being We had observed dogs Comfort humans In the aftermath of trauma We had observed rats Look out for their friends We had observed animals Having feelings and having empathy There's an environmental writer His name is Carl Safino And he gave an interview to National Geographic And he said Watching animals my whole life I've always been struck I've always been touched By their bonds And been impressed occasionally Frightened by their emotions Anyone who works closely with animals Will tell you That they are convinced beyond doubt That animals display And contain many emotions And feelings Empathy included Some of it is anthropomorphic But not everything Animal behaviour Admittedly Is not inherent proof Of their inner experience But we can say the same about human beings All I have When I look at you All I have is what you say about yourself And your behaviour I can't enter your mind I have no access to your mind I don't know if what you're telling me is true Maybe you're trying to manipulate me All I can do is observe you And based on my observations I can construct a model Of what's going on inside your mind Same with animals Maybe I'm anthropomorphising you Maybe you're an alien from Mars Or somewhere And you're just your body snatched And you're not really human Maybe you're an android Produced by some obscure company in China No one has heard of And you're the first android unleashed upon us As long as you self report As a human being In a way that is recognisable to me I'm going to judge you To be human I will deem I will deem you to have humanity And same with animals Animals are conscious beings And they experience varying degrees Of emotional responses How do we know that? Because we observe them We see how they behave And they self report Non-verbally In many ways But The evidence already Is pretty conclusive I'm going to finish by Reading to an excerpt From a book And this excerpt is about True alpha males What is an alpha male? I've delegated the whole video To the issue of what is an alpha male And this is just an annex Or appendix which supports my views The book is The cast C-A-S-T-E Cast the origins of our discontents By Elizabeth Isabel Wilkerson So I would like to read to you an excerpt from the book The social hierarchy And vocabulary of wolves And canines Runs throughout our culture Alpha male Underdog, lone wolf Pack mentality In part due to our observations of the dogs We may have owned And to the seeming parallels between ourselves And this companion species Of social animals Car and day canine specialists Have sought to correct the distortions Of the term alpha male The king of the world chess Bitter of popular imagination This Image of alpha male has worked its way Into our psyches But it's wrong True alphas Says Wilkerson True alphas Are fearless protectors Against outside incursions But they rarely have to assert themselves Within the pack Rarely have to act with aggression Bark orders Or use physical means of control We treat dogs like children But as pack animals They respond to the cues of an alpha In a pack structure A human alpha Should never have to raise her voice Dogs don't understand that If you're having to raise your voice To get a dog's attention A dog will not see you as the leader You have already lost A true alpha does not behave like that And doesn't have to If a so-called alpha Resorts to that They are signaling that they are not in control At all anymore True alpha Command authority Through their calm oversight Of those who depend upon them They establish their rank Early in life And communicate through ancient signals Their inner strength And stewardship Asserting their power Only when necessary An alpha Generally eats first Decides when and who will eat afterward Inspires trust Inspires trust Through firm shepherding For the safety and well-being Of the entire pack An alpha is not necessarily the biggest Not necessarily the fastest But usually the innately Self-assured one Who can chastise a pack member With a mere look Or a low voice A true alpha Wills quiet power Judiciously apportioned You know that you're not seeing a true alpha? Or put another way You have encountered an insecure alpha If he or she must yell Scream, bully, or attack Those beneath them Into submission That individual Does not have the loyalty and trust of the pack And endangers the entire group Through his or her insecurities Through his or her Show fear and lack of courage We all are misconceptions About alpha behavior To studies of large groupings Of wolves placed into captivity And forced to fight for dominance Or to cower into submission In nature Wolf packs are more likely To consist of extended family systems Packs of between 5 and 15 wolves Led by an alpha male And an alpha female Whom the pack trusts And has risen to trust For the survival of them all The main characteristic of an alpha male wolf Is quiet confidence Quiet self-assurance Richard McIntyre A researcher of wolf behavior At Yellowstone National Park Told the ecologist Carl Safina You know what's best for your pack As an alpha male You lead by example You're very comfortable with it You have a calming effect The other members of the pack The various beta and gamma wolves Can thus go about their tasks With greater reassurance In the wisdom of the alpha At the bottom of the hierarchy Is the omega, the underdog The lowest ranking wolf Rising from natural personality traits In relation to others In the pack The omega generally eats lost He serves as a kind of court jester Who acts as an escape valve Often picked on By other wolves He bears the brunt of the tensions They face in the wild Where they are subject to attack From predators or from rival packs And during lean times In the hunt for prey The omega acts as a kind of social glue Allowing frustrations To be vented without actual Acts of war Wrote a wolf conservationist The omega is so critical To pack structure That when a pack loses its omega It enters into a long period of Morning Where the entire pack Stops hunting And just lays around looking miserable As if there were no longer Reason to go on The loss of the omega Can threaten social cohesion And put the entire pack at risk Depending on the composition of the pack An omega might not be easily replaced The new omega would mean A demotion For one of the lower to mid-level pack members Either way The pack is destabilized After all These roles are not artificially assigned Based upon what an individual wolf looks like As with certain other species But they emerge As a consequence of internal personality traits That surface naturally In the forming of a pack Humans could learn a lot From canines Isabel Wilkerson Cast the origins Of our discontents Random house Published last year Great book