 Nothing good can happen on a Monday, except a new YouTube by the inimitable, the one and only one. Thank God for that, Sam Vaknin, Samua. My name is Sam Vaknin, and I'm the author of Malignad Saint-Flaupe, Narcissism Revisited. I'm also a former visiting professor of psychology. Today we are going to discuss morality and its place in psychology and in the relationship between victims and abusers. Is there any place to talk about ethics, about proper conduct, about good and versus evil? Is this about morality, or is this about naked Darwinian power? Is it about the survival of the fittest, or have we, as a society and as individuals, have we transcended this view of reality and entered a more refined space where people are empathic and considerate and sensitive and generally walk? You know my view. I'm not going to disappoint you in this video, but I'm going to introduce you to many, many new concepts and a lot of research, as I always do. Stay with me. And so, I've received a comment by Claudine James on one of my videos and it says, this moral manipulation is alien and crazy-making. Narcissist has deep need to debase others to be able to perch on the moral hilltop, unmarked, or is it cowardice to just say the relationship is over directly, wherein he is the victim, humiliated and rejected again to himself? So this raises quite a few issues and many of them have been tackled in previous videos, but the one new element in this comment is the topic of morality. You see, psychology attempts to stand out from philosophy and from religion and to pose as a rigorous, almost exact and vigorous science. It's derisory, it's funny, it's comic. Psychology will never be a science, at best it's a pseudo-science, but in its attempt to become the new physics of the soul, the new mechanics of the psyche, psychology has rejected morality and value judgments, and there nowhere to be found in psychological theories and practices, which is a huge shame because narcissistic abuse, for example, shatters our belief in a just world, in a just universe. And in this sense, narcissistic abuse is first and foremost a moral calamity. I want to read to you a speech, it was given by Heinrich Himmler, Heinrich, the loyal Heinrich as Hitler called him, has never been known for his morality, but listen to his speech and the amazing and pernicious ways in which he casts himself and the murderous SS, the Tottenkopf, as the moral agents and the Jews perishing in the Holocaust, asphyxiated with Cyclone B gas and then cremated the Jews, the victims are the true moral scourge, they are the true enemies, they are the true perpetrators, the poor, poor, poor SS has to deal with the aftermath of the Jewish evil, listen well how a psychopath, a psychopathic narcissist for that matter, recasts the victims role and himself as the abuser, as the victim. Himmler's speech was given to senior SS officers in Poznan, Poland, October 4th, 1943, and he dealt with the evacuation of the Jews, and here's what Heinrich Himmler had to say. I also want to speak to you here, he said, in complete frankness of a really grave chapter. Among ourselves for once, it shall be said quite openly, not all the same, we will never speak about it in public, just as we did not hesitate on June 30th, 1934, to do our duty as we were ordered to stand comrades who had erred against the wall and shoot them, and we never spoke about it and we never will speak about it, it was a matter of natural tact that is alive in us, thank God, that we never talked about it among ourselves, that we never discussed it, each of us shuddered and yet each of us knew clearly that the next time he would do it again if it were an order and if it were necessary. I'm referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people, this is one of the things that is easily said, the Jewish people are going to be exterminated, that's what every party member says, sure it's our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, it will be done, and then they all come along, the 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew, of course the others a swine, but this one, this Jew, is a first-rate Jew. Of all those who talk like that, not one has seen it happen, not one has had to go through it, most of you men, says Himmler to his SS cohorts, most of you men know what it is like to see 100 corpses side-by-side or 500 or 1,000 to have stood fast through this and accept for cases of human weakness to have stayed decent, that has made us hard. This is an unwritten and never to be written page of glory in our history, for we know how difficult it would be for us if today, after bombing raids and the hardships and deprivations of war, if we were still to have the Jews in every city as secret saboteurs, agitators and inciters, if the Jews were still lodged in the body of the German nation, we would probably by now have reached the stage of 1916-1917. The wealth the Jews possessed, we took from them. I gave a strict order, said Himmler, which has been carried out by SS Uberg Rupenfeher Paul, that this wealth will of course be turned over to Reich in its entirety. We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individuals who have earned will be punished in accordance with the order given by me at the start, threatening that anyone who takes as much as a single mark of this money is a dead man. A number of SS men, they're not very, not very many, committed this offense, and they shall die. There will be no mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people to destroy these people that wanted to destroy us, but we do not have the right, we do not have the moral right to enrich ourselves by so much as a fur, a watch, one mark, or a cigarette, or anything else. We do not want in the end because we destroyed a basilisk to be infected by this basilisk and to die. I will never stand by and watch while even a small rotten spot develops or takes hold. Whatever and wherever it may form, we will together burn it away. All in all, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult of tasks in spirit of love for our people and we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, and our character. Anur Himmler wasn't aware that his speech presaged a concept in psychology known as moral injury. Now, many self-styled experts, of course, misunderstand and misconstrue moral injury. Moral injury is experienced not by victims, but by perpetrators. When a perpetrator behaves in a way that conflicts with his or her values, with his or her morality, conscience, etc., etc., we have a moral injury. It's an injury to individuals, moral conscience and values resulting from an act perceived as a moral transgression on the part of themselves. Now, sometimes witnessing such an act can also invoke or provoke moral injury, but in very few cases does the victim suffer moral injury. Moral injury produces profound feelings of guilt and shame, moral disorientation, societal alienation, a sense of betrayal, a sense of anger. There are psychological, social, cultural, spiritual aspects of moral injury, and in this sense, moral injury is a form of trauma. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs uses the concept of moral injury in its literature and it says the following, the mental health of military veterans who have witnessed or perpetrated an act in combat that transgressed their deeply held moral beliefs and expectations can result in moral injury. So moral injury is almost exclusively reserved for someone who did something really, really wrong and he knows it. Someone who misbehaved, someone who transgressed, someone who violated the most basic ethical concepts. This kind of person is liable to suffer from moral injury if he is possessed of values, moral compass and a conscience to start with. Moral injury was first described in 1984 and then it was called moral distress. There was a philosopher, his name was Andrew Jinton, and he wrote about nursing and he described ethical dilemmas in nursing and he said that these ethical dilemmas create and I quote, moral distress arises when one knows the right thing to do but institutional constraints make it nearly impossible to pursue the right course of action. The term moral injury was coined by Jonathan Shea. Go down to the description, the description is under the video, not over the video. Go down to the description and you will find two articles by psychiatrist Jonathan Shea and his colleagues. He focused mostly on military veterans and he interrogated me, asked them about a sense of injustice, leadership malpractice, ethical dilemmas they've encountered and how they solve them and he defined moral injury as containing or comprised of three components. He said moral injury is present when one, there has been a betrayal of what is morally right, two by someone who holds legitimate authority and three in a high stakes situation. He defined moral injury as stemming from the betrayal of what's right in a high stakes situation by someone who holds power. Now today we don't adhere to this definition, we have enlarged it considerably and the credit goes to Brett Litz, LITZ. Again go to the description and you will see some of the articles. In 2009 the term moral injury was modified and Litz and colleagues defined it this way. Moral injury is perpetrating, perpetrating, failing to prevent or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. It may be deleterious in the long term emotionally, psychologically, behaviorally, spiritually and socially. So now the definition is much wider, it doesn't apply only to the military, to law enforcement, to the healthcare industries. Now anyone and everyone can suffer moral injury but again it's limited to perpetrators. Perpetrator guilt, a phenomenon I will discuss in a few minutes, underlies moral injury. If you experience moral injury is because you have done something seriously, seriously wrong in breach of everything that is held dear morally and ethically by everyone yourself included. Your conscience is torturing you for good reason, your suffering is purifying and purging and cleansing, sub-baptism by fire and a very healing experience. According to Litz the term moral injury has been developed in response to the inadequacy of other mental health diagnosis such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Litz and others said that PTSD doesn't capture the anguish, the self-torture, the torment, the inner disintegration, the knowing feeling of being possessed or bedeviled by voices, powerful introjects that are the equivalent of a harsh inner critic or a sadistic superego but with a correct right justified message. So PTSD focuses on symptoms, moral injury focuses on the reactions to these symptoms in terms of shame, guilt, anger, a sense of betrayal and disgust. When people experience moral injury the first thing is shame, they feel ashamed of themselves because they haven't measured up to their own standards because they have failed first and foremost themselves. I mean the path from PTSD to moral injury is two-way, you could first suffer moral injury which later develops into PTSD. In short, moral injury is a form of self-traumatizing and then self-retraumatizing. The introjects inside you are so powerful and so right that you can't offer any resistance and any meaningful defense and you essentially internally decompensate. Acting out is just one step removed. Acting out could be in the form of psychosis or consuming psychosis or doing something really really crazy, really really criminal, really really illegal, something that's bound to get you into serious trouble. Let's focus on the cognitive, behavioural and emotional aspects of moral injury and it's said that cognitive dissonance occurs after a perceived moral transgression results in a stable internal global attribution of blame followed by the experience of shame, guilt, anxiety and withdrawal or avoidance. There's an increased risk of suicide owing to demoralization, self-harming and self-handicapping behaviour. So according to Leeds, the sequence is cognitive dissonance, no moral transgression, perceived as moral transgression by the individual, then cognitive dissonance, then stable, stable self-attribution of blame, shame, guilt, anxiety, negative affectivity and the attendant negative moods and negative effects and negative and anxiety. So this is the next stage, then withdrawal and avoidance, which is a very very bad sign, it's extremely bad sign because in the vast majority of cases it's followed by suicidal ideation, demoralization, severe attempts to self-arm and self-handicap and self-defeat and ultimately self-destruct. There are psychological risk factors that predispose individuals to moral injury and they include neuroticism, being prone to shame and there are other factors that protect individuals from moral injury, for example high self-esteem, of course, grandiosity, support, succor, people around the individual, forgive the individual and offer the individual a helping hand, a holding hand and above all, number one is a belief that the world is just, a belief in the just world hypothesis. We'll come to it a bit later in this video. Now there's an anthropologist, Tine Molendink and she integrated insights from psychology, philosophy, theology, social sciences and so on so forth and she offers the most holistic understanding of moral injury. She dwells on ethics, psychology, spiritual, existential dimensions, organizational, political, societal, etc, etc. So anyone interested to learn more about moral injury, Tine Molendink is your girl. The research of Molendink showed that unresolved conflicts create potentially morally injurious situations. The unresolved conflicts could be on the political level, for example, disagreements about whether a war is just or not the Iraq war, the Ukraine war, when there's a disagreement as to the ethical dimension of the war, is it a just war not only in terms of international law but in terms of ethics. In this case, soldiers on the ground are fighting a war but do not experience total approval and total support and so they experience institutional betrayal and they're looking for reparation. In other words, they begin to develop compensatory behaviors. Some of these compensatory behaviors can be entitled and grandiose. In other words, moral injury can provoke narcissistic defenses and even psychopathic behavior and this is why it's very difficult to tell. Sometimes people who are actual, echt, real narcissists and psychopaths from people who have become transitional narcissists and psychopaths owing to a single mistake, a single transgression, having done something wrong, having heard, having made a faux pas, having misbehaved and then regretted bitterly and so on and so forth. So the sequence in this case is the individual misbehaves, commits a moral ethical transgression, even a crime, then the individual feels bad about it because it conflicts with the individual's values and conscience and moral compass, individual feels bad, that's a moral injury. Then there is a sense of betrayal if the transgression is embedded in a bigger picture, for example a war, natural disaster, a crash, an accident and so on and so forth. So then there's a sense of betrayal and then there are compensatory behaviors, compensatory mechanisms often involving high narcissism, grandiosity and entitlement. Public condemnation, public exposure of the individual can create the equivalent of modification even in healthy people. But here is something very interesting. If the individual perceives himself to have acted wrongly and then he is made into a hero, he is celebrated, he is fitted, he is subjected to a confetti parade that would create moral injury. So moral injury is any public exposure following a misdeed, following misconduct and the public exposure can be negative but can also be positive. The public eye that big all-seeing eye that used to symbolize God in medieval churches, this eye of the public follows you everywhere and if you know that you have misbehaved, no matter how forcefully and how often you protest to yourself and in public and to others, you know that you have misbehaved, you know how badly you've misbehaved, you know how egregiously you've breached every moral tenet and every ethical person and you know there's no way out of this knowledge and so any attention to you, even positive attention is likely to actually engender and inflame your moral injury. Now if you're embedded in a social network that is supportive and provides sacro and I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinkingly is behind you, that is going to ameliorate the intensity, extent and length, longevity of the moral injury but it's not going to prevent it and if it continues into the process of moral injury, it's going to exacerbate. So in a way moral injury is the opposite of narcissistic injury but ironically it is experienced as the same, it's a kind of modification and so the reactions are very much the same. There's a lot of soul searching, a lot of self-tomenting, a lot of tears and gnashing of teeth and an attempt to flee yourself, to kind of put a stop to it, to throw on the kill switch, no pun intended. So any distortion of the original experience by the public is perceived as enhancing, amplifying, magnifying the moral injury because it brings to light, it highlights the injustice, the unjust way in which the individual had comported himself or herself. In 2019 researchers found out that there's a list of events that distress civilians at a level consistent with moral injury including a car accident or experiencing sexual assault, provoked sexual assault in many ways and so on and so forth but not everyone reacts the same way. The preconditions that I've mentioned must exist for a moral injury to manifest. Moral injury explains a panoply of behaviors including for example resignation, living a job that's worked by Ludmila Graslova and so on and so forth. I encourage you to go into the literature it's pretty fascinating and definitely there is a very strong connection between moral injury and complex post-traumatic stress disorder, CPTSD, especially with the element of complex post-traumatic stress disorder known as self-organization, disturbances in self-organization. Moral injury is not so much linked, not so much linked to other aspects of CPTSD but it is deeply linked to emotional dysregulation, interpersonal difficulties, negative self-concepts, a sense of worthlessness or failure, guilt and shame. In short moral injury triggers the bad object so it renders CPTSD much worse or even creates brings on CPTSD. Now I mentioned earlier that one of the defenses against moral injury is the just world hypothesis. Now we have some there's something called primal world beliefs or in short primals. Primal world beliefs in psychology are basic beliefs that humans hold about the general character of the world. Clinically speaking primal world beliefs are part of what is known as the internal working model. Okay. Jeremy Clifton and his colleagues in the University of Pennsylvania coined this phrase primals or primal world beliefs between 2014 and 2019 and they did a lot of amazing work and so and so forth and they isolated 26 primal world beliefs that people you hold that they hold and these are preconditions for existence not only for happiness or contentment but for functioning. You can't function well if you don't hold some of these beliefs and they include the belief beliefs that the world is safe enticing alive that the world in short is a good place is good is just and not dangerous. Of course the opposite of this is that the world is capricious arbitrary hostile dangerous and and so on so forth the just world belief is the belief that there is karma the world is a karmic place outcomes are typically earned and deserved and each primal is modeled as a kind of variable in operation within this just world. Now what is the just world hypothesis and how does it constitute a defense against moral injury there's a book called everything happens for a reason don't ask but it encapsulates this disbelief and there are all these sentences you know you got what was coming to you what goes around comes around chickens come home to roost everything happens for a reason and you reap what you saw you know these sentences they are all about the just world hypothesis or more precisely more accurately the just world fallacy it's a cognitive bias it assumes that the world is organized in a way that justice is inbuilt it's a hardwired feature it's smitted out to people people get what they deserve their actions will have morally fair and fitting consequences actors and agents will get paid handsomely for their good deeds and even more handsomely for their bad deeds nothing will go unpunished and nothing will go unrewarded assumptions that noble actions eventually will be rewarded and evil actions will be punished that's a part of this hypothesis now it's a tendency to attribute consequences or to expect consequences to a universal force in a way so it's it's kind of a proxy to a belief in god it's a supreme power that restores a moral balance or universal connection between the nature of actions and their results of course this is completely it's completely illogical and irrational I mean think consider for example the following question who decides what is good and what is evil any action is good in certain contexts and evil in other contexts I can give you like a million examples so forget all this it's not a very rigorous philosophically rigorous notion or concept but it implies the implies the existence of a cosmic justice destiny divine providence there's dessert stability order karma it's a kind of rationalizing suffering on the grounds that sufferers deserve it now many many social psychologists studied the just world hypothesis and number one among them is melvin learner melvin learner started his work in the 1960s and he's definitely the grandfather the father and the mother of the field he studied beliefs about justice and he inquired into negative societal and social interactions he was actually he was trying to understand experiments by stanley milgram stanley milgram studied obedience uh learner wanted to answer the question how come regimes political regimes that cause cruelty and suffering continue to maintain popular support how do people come to accept social norms and social laws and more is that produce misery and hurt it's it flies in the face of logic I mean and basic assumptions about human nature how does this happen so learner um came up with an answer he said because we tend to blame victims for their suffering that's why we don't think the victims don't deserve what they're getting we believe victims deserve to suffer and so then the regime which inflicts suffering on victims becomes an instrument of god uh an agent of order and structure and justice a positive thing such a regime is perceived as a positive thing going back to Henry Himmler he said to his he said to his subordinates the ss officers present he said to them you're good people because you're punishing the deserving the jews are our enemy they want to destroy us and you're punishing them that makes you good people and so learner theorized there was a prevalent belief in a just world in which actions and conditions are predictable appropriate consequences and the actions and conditions are associated closely with specific behaviors or attributes so it's so this means that society determines the norms of society the values of society the ideologies that rule society govern society they determine first and foremost what is right and what is wrong they determine what is just what is unjust what is appropriate that was inappropriate and then they tell you how to behave out was a calling calling interpolation society tells you how to behave and what traits and attributes of yourself you should emphasize they're positive and others are negative you should suppress them or repress them learner said that believing in a just world is a functional thing it maintains the idea that one can influence the world in a predictable way all you have to do is be good all you have to do is work hard all you have to do is conform and then nothing bad will happen to you it's a kind of contract with the world regarding the consequences of your choices decisions and behaviors if I follow you what you're saying to the world what you're saying to society what you're saying to your to your government what you're saying to other people what you're saying to your spouse and to your children and to your bosses and to your neighbors and what you say your church what you're saying is if I agree to follow your prescriptions behavioral prescriptions if I agree to suppress my antisocial and asocial traits would you then guarantee that I will never be punished and the answer resoundingly is a counterfactual yes counterfactual because this is nonsense there's no such contract in reality no one guarantees anything to anyone ever bad things happen to good people there's a book by that name but people pretend they lie to themselves and so they plan for the future and they engage in effective goal driven behavior I those of you who want to delve deeper there's a kind of a booklet or monograph or whatever you want to call it published in 1980 by learner the belief in a just world a fundamental delusion that says everything there is to say the belief in a just world said learner is not about the world is about the believers the believers want to feel good the belief in a just world maintains the believers well-being people are confronted daily with evidence the world is not just many people suffer for no apparent cause as the Holocaust victims and yet we continue to lie to ourselves and we use strategies to eliminate information that threatens disbelief rational or irrational strategies we for example we accept the reality of some injustice we say well mostly the world is just of course there are mistakes glitches and bugs in the software and sometimes the world is not just or we say wherever we seek injustice we fight back we're going to prevent injustice or reverse injustice or provide restitution or or or you say this is the best I can do I'm limited and so on so these are all or you deny the injustice or you withdraw from the world or you reinterpret or refrain the event these are all defenses against the fact that the world is actually not just you need to fit your experience of an unjust world eminently unjust overwhelmingly unjust world you need to fit it into your expectation of a just karmic world you reinterpret the outcome the cause the character of everything and that includes the victims and here we come to the crucial point to justify injustice in the world the easiest method is to blame the victims to shift the blame to the victims if you cast the victims that is the bad guys then anything and everything that's happening to them all their suffering is justified it's actually proof that the world is just if you observe the injustice the suffering of an innocent person one major way is to rearrange the cognition of an event to interpret this victim as deserving of his suffering observers blame victims for their suffering they try to find behaviors a history some mistakes they've made their characteristics antisemitism is built entirely on this edifice so these are negative social phenomena which are intended to resolve cognitive dissonances via derogating devaluing and degrading the victim another effect of this kind of thinking is that individuals experience less personal vulnerability because they do not believe they've done anything to deserve or to cause negative outcomes and this is a self-serving bias which is very very very thinly separated from narcissism in short if you believe in a just world and you believe that you are a good person you are one step removed from becoming a narcissist one step removed so all these whining self-styled victims um healers rescuers saviors i'm always wronged i'm i always full victim i've never done anything bad to anyone and look what's happening to me um i never get along with a specific group of people you name it women minorities jews whatever all these people are actually deep in the throes of malignant narcissism they just camouflage pretend to be the prey when they've actually long ago become the predators watch my previous video about mimicry just world beliefs there are forms of what we call causal attribution in victim blaming the causes of victimization are attributed to the individual rather than to the perpetrator or to the situation so if you're victimized is because you attract abuses you're a narcissist magnet you're passive you're just there and bad things happen to you all the time it's a form of superstition delusional superstition so the consequences will believe in a just world may be related to or explain in terms of causal attribution you had it coming you're a victim because you deserve to be a victim because you have a victim mentality you have victim behavior and you attract abusers because you are not sufficiently careful or you're too provocative or you yourself you're an abuser just pretending to be a victim etc etc etc now there have been many philosophical and psychological attempts in philosophy and psychology to rationalize victim blaming enshrine it and institutionalize consider for example veridical judgment veridical judgment it's a suggestion that derogation effects are based on accurate judgments of the victim's character in other words if you think the victim has done something wrong or something to deserve his ease of her suffering it's because you're right they did or they are it's beyond shocking that there is such a school in psychology but veridical judgment go go and look it up for yourself um learner countered by saying that people are derogated denigrated debased attack chastised criticism when they actually suffer individuals who agreed to undergo suffering but did not go undergo suffering were viewed positively so it's not about the victim it's about the situation and then there is another theory called guilt reduction guilt reduction is we humiliate the victims we blame the victims we criticize the victims because we want to reduce our own feelings of guilt observers the guilt reduction theory says that observers feel responsible or guilty for a victim's suffering if they themselves are involved in the situation or in an experiment for example in order to reduce the guilt they devalue the victim there isn't adequate evidence to support this appealing idea even observers who were not implicated in experiments and had no reason to feel guilty still were blaming and denigrating and jubilating victims and there's another theory called discomfort reduction it says that we blame victims as a way to alleviate discomfort after we view suffering either primary motivation is not to restore a belief in a just world but to reduce discomfort caused by empathizing with the victims blaming victims is not intended to suppress helping activity but intended to suppress empathizing with the victim because empathizing is really really uncomfortable these people assist the victims they help them but they don't empathize with them according to Irvin Staube devaluing the victim leads to lesser compensation if restoring belief in a just world was a primary motive instead there's virtually no difference between compensation amounts whether the compensation proceeds or follows devaluation so here we come to psychopathy psychopathy is a lack of just world maintaining strategies there are no emotions and there's no empathy so there's no discomfort there's no need to blame the victim things that just are there's no emotional reaction to the horrors and the suffering of other people you just note them in passing as you would note for example the weather uh it's a complicated a complicated topic we blame and derogate victims this is well established in in many many uh studies i refer you to studies by zik ruby and leticia and peplau and and and many others and even victims of violence illness poverty they are all somehow blamed for what's happening for their suffering the existence of a just world hypothesis coupled with a very high self-esteem is actually narcissism narcissism is a defense narcissism as a defense against moral injury this narcissism assumes that nothing in principle is immoral victims deserve what's happening to them they deserve the suffering they deserve what's coming to them so we see two pathways here two trajectories number one a person starts off as as a moral person ethical person with a conscience and then he does something really bad and he feels he feels guilt experiences shame ego distony so there's moral injury and then to defend against the moral injury such a person is likely to become highly narcissistic and even psychopathic on the other end of the spectrum a narcissist and a psychopath they would almost never or very rarely experience moral injury they may experience something which i call self efficacy injury injury because they have failed so it's equivalent of modification or narcissistic injury but never moral injury self efficacy injury is a very interesting concept which i will elaborate upon in a future video what happened when these very people these very people are victimized the people who kept saying the victims deserve it they had it coming suddenly they're victimized there was a study by dr ronnie yanov bulman and it found that victims often blame their own behavior but not their own characteristics for their victim victimization uh blaming one's behavior is a way of reasserting control if if you say i i became a victim because i made a mistake then you made it happen it's the same way a narcissist copes with modification he says i made it happen when you say i made it happen my behavior caused my victimization then you are in charge you are the boss you're in control dimensions of just world beliefs include a belief in an unjust world a belief in imminent justice a belief in ultimate justice the hope for justice and the belief in one's ability to reduce injustice the belief in an unjust world simply means a recognition of the existence of injustice but then all the others are there to render the observer to render the individual in charge in control in short these are not statistic defenses okay um sometimes people have different beliefs in the personal and the public domain so they say i believe in a just world for myself personal just world but i don't believe in a just world in general others for others and these beliefs are uh are on the line separating from mental health and mental illness but i will not go into it right now that's a lot a lot to go into okay a belief in a just world in general is good it's necessary for mental health it's associated with greater life satisfaction well-being and less depressive effect the problem starts when a belief in a just world conflicts with behavior which is unjust abusive criminal in short when a belief in a just world leads to victim blaming or and and or to narcissistic behaviors or psychopathic behaviors then we transition from mental health to mental illness like everything else a belief in a just world can can be abused is often abused by narcissists and and psychopaths and and so in itself a belief in a just world is a coping strategy a resource it buffers stress associated with daily life it reduces the trauma in traumatic events it's a positive illusion positive adaptation you could even say it's a form of defense mechanism a cognitive bias that protects you similar to grandiosity which is a cognitive distortion that protects the narcissist from narcissistic injury but it often devolves degenerates into victim blaming and into entitled narcissism and into psychopathic behaviors and that's where the problem starts okay another point it has to do with the belief in a just world is the internal locus of control when you believe in a just world there is a greater acceptance and less dissatisfaction with negative events in one's life and that helps you maintain an internal locus of control this relationship holds only for beliefs in a just world for oneself belief in a just world for others is related to all kinds of social phenomena some of which are negative for example victim blaming that I mentioned before okay I mentioned perpetrator moral injury it's also known as perpetrator trauma or perpetration participation induced traumatic stress pits it occurs when symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are caused by an act or acts which are considered morally reprehensible it's very similar to moral injury but it usually involves transgressions which produce more profound shame because they are more extreme now trauma that is the outcome of misbehavior trauma that is the outcome of criminal behavior trauma that is the outcome of extreme misconduct is mentioned in the dsm5 it says when it defines ptsd it says that there are causal factors for military personnel being a perpetrator witnessing atrocities or killing the enemy so there is a recognition that people carry out acts which conflict with their essence so extremely that they develop trauma consequently and moral injury is like narcissistic injury and moral trauma is like modification let's see moral injury and moral especially moral trauma produce a monopoly of traumatic symptoms intrusive imagery dreams flashbacks unwanted thoughts explosive anger concentration and memory problems and sleep problems hypervigilance feeling of alienation a sense of disintegration and alcohol and cocaine use disorders alcohol and cocaine are by far the two substances most used in in these cases and dreams are affected the contents of dreams this results in cycles of violence domestic violence street crimes emotional numbing detachment apathetic behavior substance abuse i mentioned and so on and so forth all this mess is a part of a branch of psychology known as moral psychology it's a field of study in philosophy and in psychology and it uses initially it was used to describe moral development but today it refers more broadly to topics at the intersection of ethics psychology and philosophy of mind some of the main topics in moral psychology are moral judgment moral reasoning moral sensitivity moral responsibility moral motivation moral identity moral action moral development moral diversity moral character especially virtue ethics altruism psychological egoism moral luck moral forecasting moral emotions affective forecasting moral disagreement and so and so forth it's a thriving area and i'm going to dedicate in the future several videos to to the cognitive mainly to the cognitive aspects of moral psychology so i hope you understood where victim victim blaming is coming from and how ironically it's connected to morality and moral injury and the attempts to compensate for moral injury but becoming an able narcissistic recyclable