Together with Jordan Peterson and other scholars, I helped Ginger Coy compile a taxonomy of the psychopathology of walk movements. This taxonomy is easily expandable and applicable to all victimhood movements, walk or not. It is now available on public.substack.com There's a link in the description, but it's a paid blog. It is Michael Schellenberger's and Peter Bogosian's blog. Watch my interview with Ginger Coy in this compilation. So Ginger Coy compiled a walk psychopathology taxonomy chart. It's pretty fascinating. On the left hand side, there is race, climate change and trans issues. And then there are columns. The columns represent a summary of cluster B personality disorders, diagnostic criteria and clinical behavioral features such as attention seeking, demanding excess recognition, entitlement and exaggerated sense that you're owed a great deal, emotional dysregulation, dramatic and erratic excess of empathy for those designated victims, victimhood ideology celebrating the status of being oppressed, impaired reality testing, disinterested in or hostility to evidence, a lack of empathy for those designated oppressors and abusers, and finally splitting seeing things in black and white. So this is a fascinating chart. This, in my view, an erratum there, grandiosity is listed where it should have been entitlement, but otherwise I think it captures the spirit of walk movements and victimhood movements to perfection. Because these movements have been pathologized. They have been infiltrated and hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths. In the description, you will find literature, scholarly literature, regarding what I've just said. It is not hyperbole and it is not just jaded speech. It is reality. And now I'm presenting to you a compilation of new material never seen before on this channel and old videos that I've made about victimhood and walk movements, their psychology and psychopathology.  All right. I am recording. We're both recording. Wonderful. Your, your, your recording session. Well, thank you so much. I'm so excited to talk to you. I've been thinking about it all night. Thank you. Thank you for having me kind of you. And thanks for the plugs in the last few weeks. Yes, I'm your, I'm your greatest promoter now. Would you just, can you just make sure your screen's a little bit lower?  You know, it's okay. Yeah, it's perfect. Well, I want to, I have so many questions for you and hopefully we'll be able to get to them all but I just think we need to start with some definition of terms. I think there's, for me, there's a lot of confusion. And so I have a bunch of specific questions, but I think it's easier for me to just ask them all in one question so you can disentangle and unpack what we mean by narcissism. How is it different from being selfish? How is it different from having a big ego or being egocentric? How are all those things different from psychopathy or sociopathy? What else do I want to disentangle? Is there a difference between narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder? Can somebody behave in narcissistic ways but not be a narcissist? Can I be a narcissist in some interaction but then not really be a narcissist or vice versa? And then I think as long as we're there and take as long as you need to answer this question, because I'm asking so many questions, take as long as you need to unpack it. You know, it sort of gets to this, I think you had sort of argued that, and by the way, I haven't read the book yet, I did order it though, so I will read the book and maybe we can talk again after. Thank you for the business. You know, like, is there, I think you say, you argue that narcissistic personality disorder is a response to stress, similarly to post-traumatic stress disorder, rather than a psychiatric disorder or than a personality disorder. So I think if you can just unpack all of that for me and for others, that would be enormously helpful. Well, you have a six month syllabus right there. Yeah. Well, I'll do my best. First of all, narcissism starts off in early childhood, and then it is healthy. It's an integral part of the evolution of the self, and it underlies the regulation of self-esteem and self-confidence later in life, the setting of boundaries, separating from your parents, becoming an individual. They all rely critically on healthy narcissism, also known as primary narcissism. But narcissism, like everything else in life, or in psychology at least, evolves, should evolve, should, should transmute and transform, should shape shift. And if it doesn't, if it remains infantile well, well into adulthood, then it becomes secondary narcissism, aka pathological narcissism. Now, pathological narcissism is a clinical entity. Put differently, it's a diagnosis. It's a, it's a set of traits, behaviors, beliefs, cognitions or rather cognitive distortions, emotions or rather suppressed emotions. And when you put all of these together, you get a syndrome in effect, and that's pathological narcissism. And so it's a hyper complex, hyper complex phenomenon. It is, on the one hand, a clinical entity, but it had emerged very similar to allegedly the COVID-19 virus. It had escaped the laboratory. And now narcissism is an organizing principle and a hermeneutic principle, an explanatory principle. And narcissism to make sense of the world. We, we look at show business. We, we did dissect politics and business, the business world and academe.  She's a narcissist. Right narcissism helps us to imbue the senseless and the random with patterns and meaning. And this is an organizing principle. Narcissism therefore is no longer merely a psychopathological clinical phenomenon, but it is part and parcel of the social fabric. It also underlies many technologies. For example, of course, social media. So it's not possible to discuss narcissism and only in the settings of therapy or clinic or it's all over. It's everywhere. It's ubiquitous. It's all pervasive. It had become, it had come to define many social interactions, numerous social institutions, social movements, activism, etc, etc. It's all over the place. The concept of narcissism is the color of postmodern life on the one hand, and a new religion, a new private distributed networked religion, where everyone is a God, and everyone is one's worshiper. So this is in a nutshell. Now, pathological narcissism includes behaviors which many people find obnoxious or repellent and behaviors which are abrasive and behaviors which are antisocial or reckless and behaviors that are dangerous and risky. The whole monopoly. Narcissistic personality disorder and especially a variant of narcissistic personality disorder known as malignant narcissism is when these behaviors and traits and predilections and proclivities and emotions and cognitions are taken to extreme. So yes, the answer to a part of your question, you could have a narcissistic style. It was first described by Lin Sperry and later by Theodore Miller. You could have a narcissistic style, but you would still not be a narcissist. It's a question of gradations. There's no kind of spectrum or dimensional approach to narcissism.  Someone with NPD is someone who who has only cold empathy. In other words, he is able to is able to scan and absorb data regarding other people but he has no emotional reactions or resonance to these data. It is someone who is who has severe cognitive distortions for example, grandiosity. He is divorced from reality. Here's what we call impaired reality testing. It is someone who is exploitative, envious, externalizing in the sense that he uses aggression to try to manipulate the environment. Someone whose agency depends on utilizing or abusing other people. Pathological narcissism taken to extreme NPD and then malignant narcissism is very difficult to distinguish from psychopathy. Sociopathy is not a clinical term. It's a medium term. But it's very difficult to distinguish from psychopathy and even psychopathy is not a clinical term actually. It's not been accepted. It's been rejected by many DSM committees, by many committees of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It's a brainchild essentially of Harvey Clickley and Robert Hare. And Robert Hare is the guru of psychopathy. But I think psychopathy is a valid clinical entity. I think there is such a thing. Now, psychopathy to antisocial personality disorder is what malignant narcissist is to narcissistic personality disorder. And that's when the two diagnosis intermesh. It's like a Venn diagram. There's an area in common and that area in common is the psychopathic narcissist. Psychopathic narcissists tend to rise to the top. They tend to become chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies. We found that 5% of them are actually malignant narcissists, psychopathic narcissists and pure, pure-bred psychopaths. That's five times the average in the population. And these are the ones we were able to interview. Actually, here, here and baby, we're able to interview. Many of them declined to be interviewed. I suspect the number is much higher. We find a propensity, we find a prevalence of these disorders in certain professions. These people gravitate to certain professions. For example, surgeons, medical surgeons, many of them are psychopaths. We find the narcissist in show business, of course, in the media. And lately, in the last two years, there has been a slew, an avalanche, actually, of academic studies demonstrating pretty conclusively to my mind that social movements, activism, activist movements and what I call victimhood, or what you call as well, victimhood movements have been hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths who have become the public face of these movements. This is academic. This is not a conspiracy theory. And it doesn't mean that I adhere to your politics or it's simply we agree on something because it happens to be a fact. So there has been an infestation and infiltration of various social institutions, dynamic institutions such as social activism movements and static institutions, such as the church or politics. So there has been an infestation and infestation of narcissists and psychopaths. They've taken over. They've taken over because the incentive structure of modern civilization is pro narcissistic and pro psychopathic.  It simply pays. It's rewarded. There's a reward system in place, of course, constructed by previous narcissists and psychopaths self perpetuating self reinforcing cycle. That's in the nutshell, I hope I've answered. So it's so interesting. And I have so many reactions.  So one of the questions I had was should I start the interview by asking for your qualifications. And I decided not to because we could do that later if we want to but I think what's so interesting to me is that there that when you when I hear you speak and you may have noticed that I've been experimenting by splicing your descriptions of narcissism in with video clips of these climate activists. And when I did it, I was like, I couldn't it just fit so well. It was such a perfect description.  I don't like it doesn't matter because just listening to you.  Yeah, let's just like just forget about kind of the source of it you're describing something so true and you can see how excited I am about it. I have so many questions and I'm really, I mean I'm so excited about that it's actually changed the book that I'm working on, which had been focused on the question of nihilism, and is now becoming much more interested in the question of narcissism. So all right, well, let's just make a general comment, part of the part of the council culture, the walk culture, and part of the self censorship in academia, which borders on Chinese or Soviet, no less seriously no less because you can lose jobs if they dare talk. Yes. Everyone knows it in academia. It's, it's a taboo topic, but everyone knows it, and everyone self censors, seriously self censors, there are topics, for example, which are in my view topics of legitimate that would never, never be discussed. Definitely would never submit a funding request with such a topic you lose your job. So simply, or you will be subjected to harassment and worse even violence on campus. So, part of this, part of this trend, which I regard as an authoritarian trend, no less authoritarian than Donald Trump supporters. So we are besieged by authoritarianism of the left and authoritarianism of the right. Part of this trend is doubting people's credentials. And this is done perniciously, mainly online. I would be happy, happy to provide you with a PDF file after the talk. Yeah, you could, you could review my credentials they're all listed there. I'm editor in chief of six academic journals. I'm, I'm a member of the editorial board of 93 other academic journals. I'm organizing committee of well over 130 international conferences in all in mental health and psychology. I am the father of the field of narcissistic abuse I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse and most of the language in use today, etc, etc, etc. I mean I can go on and on and on. I'm more interested in what I'm saying is no, but I'm mentioning all this because this is a serious threat to free speech and democracy, canceling people. And one of the main methods of consolation is spreading rumors.  Well, I'm, I'm, and when I say that I genuinely, in other words, if you genuinely were super self taught, had had none of those qualifications, everything you still have landed with the power that it lands. I fully agree with you, by the way, and I will tell you, I'll give you a fact, seven out of the 10 most important psychologists in history, never studied psychology and did not have a degree in psychology. The likes of Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Melanie Klein. They never studied psychology. Well, they win a code study psychology later. It was a pediatrician Melanie Klein never studied psychology. Sigmund Freud never studied psychology. And seven out of 10, the developer of the, of dialectical behavioral therapy which is the main treatment modality for borderline personality disorder was actually a borderline patient.  This is nonsense. You don't need an academic degree, and you don't need the, the imprimatur of academe to contribute to any field by the way, not only psychology. Well, and I have to say, so, so I as you might imagine have also been regularly attacked for my lack of credentials. And then what made me feel better is when I started to see that it was happening to people that were much more qualified in formal traditional standards than I was. But so let's unpack that a bit. Is it itself a symptom of a narcissistic culture that people are, is it a symptom of someone's own narcissism that they're challenging the credentials of people they disagree with. It's legitimate to challenge credentials if it's factual. It's of course not legitimate if it's, if it's based on lies and, and obfuscations or lack of research. In this case, it would be what we call devaluation. It's a classic narcissistic strategy of reducing the opponent and thereby aggrandizing yourself, or doubting the opponent's morality, thereby elevating yourself to the high moral ground. Now, there is a major misconception about the concept of grandiosity. They don't want to be the best. They don't want to be the most. It's not true that a narcissist wants to be the richest man on earth, the most powerful person, or whatever. They just want to be unique. They want to be special. So a narcissist grandiosity has a locus. A narcissist grandiosity resides in a claim. And the claim could be, I'm the greatest victim ever. The claim could be I'm the biggest loser.  The claim, the claim could be my failure is so spectacular that it's the biggest failure in the history of the United States. And bankruptcy was the greatest, you know, well, understand this is narcissism. This is grandiosity. So similarly, when you devalue your opponent by doubting his credentials counterfactually against the facts. What you're doing actually is you elevate yourself to the high moral ground and and reduce him essentially as a as a as a person as a human being. That's definitely a narcissistic strategy, but it could be also the opposite. A narcissist could be very proud of being a con man's con man.  You know, just the uniqueness matters. The locus is utterly irrelevant. And that's why narcissists shape shift all the time. They start off as communists, and then they become Joseph Gables. Wow. They start off as communists and they become Mussolini. Right. It doesn't matter what you do what you have no beliefs you have no affiliations no allegiance loyalty to anything. The only thing is to maintain your delusional self perception is unique. It is uniqueness that matters, not supremacy. That's a major misconception. And is that the same difference then between narcissists and psychopaths. The main differences between narcissists and psychopaths are the following. And narcissists depend on other people in order to regulate internal processes. For example, their sense of self worth critically relies on what is called narcissistic supply. So they need the attention of other people be the approbation the affirmation of other people. They need to be feared and hated by other people. As long as they are attended to as long as there is attention involved, they can regulate their moods, their emotions, negative emotions, and their sense of self worth. So they are deep. They're actually dependent. They are co dependent in many ways. Psychopaths alone. Psychopaths couldn't care less about other people. They regard other people as objects stepping stones. They have a goal, they're goal oriented narcissists have no goals. Their only goal is supply. A narcissist is is an actor today, the politician tomorrow, and a martyr the third day, whatever it takes to obtain supply. The narcissist is there, whatever claim needs to be made, however contradictory is made. I mean, it's just about supply. It's, it's an addiction. The narcissist is an addict is addicted to supply to attention. The psychopath is called calculated scheming Machiavellian and goal oriented. My mind you site many psychopaths are primitive. So they also tend to be ruthless and reckless. They don't regard well, or they don't analyze well the consequences of their own actions. They have a very limited horizon, and therefore they become criminals. But the truth is that the vast majority of psychopaths are not criminals. That is, that is the beef that is a problem that the profession has with Robert here is work. Robert has work. He's the father of psychopathies. Robert has work is based exclusively on his experience as a prison psychologist. So he had a very non representative sample. The majority of psychopaths are not criminals. They are, they are very, very flexible and transigent when it comes to social functioning. They become pillars of the community. They rise to the top. They manage their activists. They are in the limelight. They, they rule. So psychopaths rule. Narcissists also rule, but psychopaths rule over them. The hierarchy is psychopaths, narcissists, the rest of us. Wow. So when, when someone is both a narcissist and a psychopath, how do the differences get resolved? We distinguish between primary and secondary disorders in co-morbidities. And that you, you're diagnosed with two mental health issues simultaneously. Comorbidities are very common. And there are strong indication that our classification of mental illnesses must be wrong somehow. But leave that aside. In the case of comorbidity of psychopaths and narcissists, the dominant disorder is narcissism. The, the psychopathic side is at the service of the narcissistic side. So the narcissist needs to obtain supply. He will use psychopathic methods to attain the goal. The goal would become supply and who would act psychopathically, anti socially to obtain the goal. He would not hesitate to break the law, or he would not hesitate to abuse and exploit people egregiously. He would not hesitate to steal from people to deceive people and so on and so forth, but with the aim of obtain obtaining supply. While a typical psychopath would do it for sex or money or power. And narcissists would do a narcissistic psychopath would do it for the sake of obtaining attention. So altruistic charitable behaviors can easily become narcissized can easily be be put at the service of buttressing grandiosity. So it's like ostentatious altruism. Watch me charity. The kind of social activism that is intended to promote attention, rather than to accomplish goals. These are all prime indicators of the infiltration of narcissism into all these operations. So we tend to conflict morality with with these mental health issues. So narcissists cannot be moral. That is absolutely not true. If the locus of grandiosity of the narcissist is in his religiosity or morality, then this kind of narcissists would be strictly moral, harshly religious, and that would be his grandiosity. Similarly, a psychopath definitely can be more if morality would help in in securing the goal. For example, extremely moral in order to to have sex, or he could be very moral because he makes money is a fundamentalist evangelist and he makes a lot of money is very moral, but it pays. So, yes, morality is not is not the hallmark of mentally healthy people. It is a cognitive dimension. And like everything else, it can be put to ill use. One of the, I'm so there's so much there to unpack but one of the things I was struck by in making this video of the climate activists was how many of them said, I don't want to be here. I'm here because my it's my duty to be here but in fact, but it's actually I'm, I'm suffering to be here right now.  And they can do that in their faces turn into child faces.  It's unfair that I have to be here, doing these things. What is that depends. So I wouldn't blanket doubt everyone. I think each case need to be studied needs to be studied separately and we need a preponderance of evidence to reach a conclusion regarding mental health or mental illness. So I wouldn't, I would be very reluctant to blanket case the whole, the whole group. However, if there is a repeated, if there's repeated behavior of ostentatious virtual signaling. As you will know because I think you mentioned it in some of your writings. So if there is ostentatious virtual signaling and exclusively in public settings, almost never in private. Then you could safely assume that it's a manifestation of of grandiosity. This is in the service in the service of grandiosity intended to garner narcissistic supply attention. So what matters are the ostentatiousness, the public setting, because if this is done privately is mean, maybe authentic, the public setting, and the virtue signaling in other words when it's done among peers and like minded people, the echo chamber thing. This is common, not only on the left and not only among climate change activists, it's, it's typical is on the alt right and I mean, all social movements. All social movements attract these kind of people who, you know, who conspicuously are conspicuously moral and self sacrificial. This is a messiah complex at a good messiah get gets crucified. You don't qualify. So there is this martyrdom or self sacrificial stunts. And it's very typical, not only in public settings, but also in private settings, for example, many mothers, or even parents, black male children by telling them, I've sacrificed so much for you. You know, I didn't want to be but here I am for you, etc, etc, you owe me. In other words, the phenomenon you've just described is part of a larger phenomenon known as entitlement entitlement requires on the one hand virtue signaling because if you're not virtuous, you should not be entitled you're not entitled. The entitlement requires virtue signaling on the one hand, and the assumption that there are rights and commensurate obligations. Like, if you're entitled, you have rights and these rights creating others obligations. So this is part of part and parcel of ethics. I'm a philosopher and all my other sins. It's part and parcel of ethics. And in ethics, we know that there is a rights and obligations calculus. This ostentatious virtue signaling is a way of telling wider society, you owe me. You owe me because I'm sacrificing. I have a right to your time, resources, attention. I don't know what else I have a right. And because I have this right, you have an obligation because every right creates an obligation. And so, and I have this right because I am virtuous and you're not. This is implicit devaluation. Every form of virtue signaling involves devaluation. Because if I'm virtuous means you're not. Because if we were both equally virtuous, why would I need to signal it to you. Like, for example, we both breathe, we breathe oxygen, and not signaling to you that I'm breathing oxygen, we would be idiotic. But if I think I'm more virtuous than you, I would signal to you that I'm virtuous. So there isn't implicit devaluative or devaluating message in virtue signaling. We are the climate change activists. We are virtuous, because we're trying to save the planet and we're trying to save you despite yourself. And because we are sacrificing our time and God knows what else, this creates a right. And these rights right imposes on you an obligation. And this is the sequence of virtue signaling. And of course it is grandiose. Professor, one, you know, one change. Please call me Sam. Sam, one change, one change very quickly in the climate change movement which I've been a part of for 25 years, more than 25 years. One huge change that's occurred very quickly is, you know, 10 years ago, and maybe even less than that. Nobody said, I'm here because my future is at risk. It was, I'm worried about future generations. So there's temporal and then there were spatial I'm worried about Africans. Now it's I'm now they still have the they still do the other they still do the they still do those things but then they go, I'm here. Because I won't have a future me. You know upper middle class British citizen, who is going to be absolutely fine. What is that about is that is that an evidence of rising narcissism is it a particular form of it. I just said that virtue signaling creates a calculus of rights and obligations. But you can. It's much less effective to claim rights on behalf of third parties. Even when you go, even when you go to court, the court tells you you have no standing. You can sue on behalf of someone else. That guy should come and so that girl should come and so you can sue on their behalf. You don't have standing. So, if you personalize it and you say it's affecting me. It's affecting my future saying my life. Your the strength of your argument is much more profound, because it's like it's about me. This is narcissistic. It's not but it's narcissistic in the sense that everything has been atomized. The social fabric has been torn a Sunday, not only with regards to climate activism. Politics is polarized I mean, we're falling apart in the sense that we are drifting apart we are we're atomized this process is called atomization. And so this reflects atomization. The minute you optimize, it means that there is no solidarity and there are no common denominators. When you look at, for example, it at the institution of family or the institution of marriage or the institution of intergender relations, or even the institution of gender roles. You see that everything that become fluid and negotiable. Because everything now is fluid and negotiable even sex, fluid sex, fluid gender, everything is is negotiable and fluid. It means that everyone, each one to his own, we are all atomized. And today we don't have what used to be called social screens.  If you have to date someone today, you have to negotiate from scratch. There is no script that dictates to you how to behave but you have to negotiate every aspect of the date. When you're going to go what you're going to drink how much you're going to drink, what are you going to do afterwards are you going to have sex or not. What kind of sex you're going to have etc etc etc. It looks a lot like a corporate merger and acquisition or take over. So, so, of course, we have all devolved, and it's devolution, it's not an evolution, we've all devolved into self interested narratives, and, and self directed ethical calculus. While in the past ethics, even schools of ethics such as utilitarianism which were very, very, in a way, immoral schools of ethics were always about the other. But as we became less and less tolerant of the other, and as the other had receded from our field of view to the point of vanishing, as we have created a world of solipsism, where it's us, Netflix and the cat, more or less, if we're lucky. Well, in such a world, of course, then there would be what we call pronoun density, pronoun density is a measure of narcissism in speech in speech acts. How many times do you use the words the words I my myself and mine. So, the pronoun density first pronoun density had excluded in the last 2030 years. And that's only one example. Everything is embedded in, in these huge, long social trends. In 1960, 60, there was a French philosopher and sociologist, Gidebot, and Gidebot wrote a book called The Society of the Spectacle. And then later there was another guy, Louis Althusser, who was a neo-Marxist, post-Marxist philosopher. And Louis Althusser said that society is that we are interpolated, we are kind of brainwashed and made to act via advertising and corporate messaging and so on and so forth. When you put the two together, you see that the world of business had imposed on us a spectacle and rendering all of us Shakespearean actors. We are, we don't live anymore. There's no life anymore. There's only an act. A role-playing. We all play roles. And because we all play roles, we are interpolated. In other words, we are treated as objects. For example, our eyeballs are monetized. That's a creepy metaphor. Monetizing eyeballs, you know, it's a horror, Belalukusi horror movie. So the interpolation of the corporate world, it started in the 50s and the 60s with consumerism and so on, and late-stage capitalism, which is pretty malignant, rendered all of us objects. And from the moment we became, from the moment we were made into objects, we became, first of all, passive recipients. And the second thing is we were unable to discern or to interact with others. It made it extremely difficult for us to interact with others. In other words, we prefer to interact with the overall script, with the narrative, than with each other, which would explain the rise in activism movements and social movements and so on. Activists, socially active, social movements, they're not about people. They're about narratives. They are close cousins of ideologies, in the worst sense of the word. And we live in a death cult. It's a death cult, because we value objects over people. We value objects, even the planet is an object. And we treat the planet in nature as if it were an object, subject to manipulation, subject to fixing, subject to alteration, subject to modification, totally passive out there, waiting for us to act. It's an objectification of this hyper-complex system in which we are seamlessly integrated. It's the Cartian view of Cartesian view of us versus the world, observer versus reality. And it's very sick. Forget narcissism for a minute. It's even much worse than narcissism, because it's a total loss of touch with reality, total loss. When you start to treat other people as objects, when you fit into a narrative, when you regard, when you objectify everything, including your own planet and so on, this is an excellent description of the matrix. That's the matrix. The matrix is a narrative reified in machinery. That's the matrix. The movie, yes? It's a narrative. It's a story. Reified in machinery, built into machinery, embedded in machinery. And everyone in the matrix is isolated, so lipstick, but experiencing a delusion of connectivity, a delusion of life. The matrix is a death cult, of course. Everyone there is dead. They just don't like it. It was very far from this. Social activism in all its form in the 60s was benevolent, because it was about the other. There were big arguments about narrative, even in the civil rights movement. There were numerous strands and threads. There was a lot of argument, so it was a very fertile intellectual ground and so on. This is not the shape of social activism today. Social activism today is ideological, authoritarian, narcissistic, sick to the core, not concerned with people, but concerned with objects. That's a death cult. Sim, and by the way, do you have a hard stop at the top of the hour? Can we keep going a little bit longer? No problem. Excellent. My audience is used to being inflicted with wonderful things. I have more time too. I want to, sometimes in these conversations, we wait until the end to get to a positive story or a positive vision or a vision of health. But I want to do it a little bit earlier because I want to, I think it provides a nice contrast and you start to go there with the 60s. I loved what you said about redirecting pathological narcissism into a healthy narcissism in a story of overcoming victimhood, overcoming oppression. So I want to spend some time there. And let's get specific. You know, we are in Britain, so you may know I believe climate change is real. I don't think it's a catastrophe, but I do think it's something we should do something about. I think it's important for people to have clean, cheap, reliable energy. And so, and I'm friends with, I have friends in Britain. And Britain is experiencing the worst of an energy crisis, part of it created by, not entirely, but part of it created by people that are opposed to cheap and reliable clean energy, even nuclear and natural gas. So what would, what is a positive, if you say we want cheap abundant natural gas and nuclear for Britain for the people to lift up out of poverty or climate change for all these positive reasons. How can you go about positive healthy altruism, including a social movement without succumbing to pathological narcissism or psychopathy what would you how would you describe. And I think a little bit of a vision for what that positive public engagement would look like and part of the reason I ask is I think that I think there's sometimes people here will hear this critique that you're making which is super persuasive and I agree with 100%. And I think a lot of people hear it and they go. Well, and they were they lapse into a kind of libertarianism. That's why you shouldn't engage in altruism. That's why governments shouldn't try to help people you end up with a kind of and Rand. Nobody should help anybody because that's always pathological. I don't hear you saying that, but I think it'd be great if you could articulate more with the same level of depth and robustness and complexity that you do on the unhealthy pathological side, the healthy side of public and social engagement. And that is the dinosaurs. So, 20 years of my life I spend as economic advisor to governments, working hand in hand with institutions such as the IMF or bank, FC, and others. My latest assignment was economic advisor to the government of North Macedonia where I'm residing right now. And right to that I worked with the Czech Republic in the Czech Republic, even Nigeria and so on. So I know economics, at least development economics quite well, and there is no narrative more counterfactual than libertarianism. The market is a method of allocating resources left to its own devices. It produces failures. It's actually very far from efficient because people are irrational. The conception of the market is a perfect allocating mechanism is founded on the assumption that people are rational agents. They're not. Today we have behavioral economics, where we demonstrate quite clear and people won Nobel prizes, this kind of man and others. Where we have, where economists demonstrated quite conclusively that people make choices based on emotions, a limited time horizon, wrong assumptions, fake news and you need it. So markets can never be sufficient. We need the intervention of the state in this case. Is the nation state the best, the best counterbalance to market failures? I'm not quite sure. I think there are the possible models, but in the absence of such implemented models, we need the nation state to intervene, of course, and that includes social welfare and so on. Soft-hearted, touchy-feely, tree-hugging person invented social welfare, his name was Bismarck. So I think, you know, we can take it for granted that it is needed. That's as far as libertarianism and similar approaches of laissez-faire, laissez-passez, and I know this nonsense has been debunked in the 18th century. It had a revival with touchy-rism and re-ignite economics, but re-ignomics and look where it led. So that's just to debunk one of the alternatives or ostensible alternatives. Here is my dilemma. The ideal model of social activism is probably the 60s, probably. Social activism had started to emerge in the late 18th century with the likes of Jean-Jacques Oussot and, to some extent, Voltaire in France, others in Britain and Germany and so on so forth, even Goethe contributed to the emergence of social activism. But it first deteriorated into dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, and bloodbaths. I don't need to remind you of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution for this matter. So this form of activism was wrong because it was based on exactly on total equality or actually egalitarianism. There's a huge difference between equality, egalitarianism, and equity, and people tend to confuse the three. Egalitarianism is the assumption that everyone is equal in endowments, not only in opportunities. That's a massive mistake, of course. It comes counterfactually. It leads to horrors. The 1960s, maybe because I was born in the 1960s, so maybe I have a bias there, but I think it was the optimal mix of true altruism, really wanting to work for the benefit of the greater good for a collective, but not losing your individualism. There was a free exchange of ideas and so on. There were many debates in feminism at the time. There was second and first wave of feminism, second wave of feminism was in the 1960s. The civil rights movement was in the 1960s. The ecological movement as it was called at the time, later environmentalism, started in the 1960s. 1960s gave sexual revolution, which in my view is a social activism movement, started in the 1960s. Well, many good things came out of the 1960s because people were concerned about each other, not about themselves, and because they did not objectify anything. They still, it was still a human movement. I think we need to go back there, but the obstacle that I see and why I'm probably a lot less optimistic than you. The obstacle that I see is the fact that there is a general obsession with being seen, a general obsession with attention. Attention had become commodity, commoditized. It's a commodity. It is also, it also underlines the bottom lines of all the major corporations in the world, at least in technology. So, attention, attention today is the way that you define or regulate your self esteem. Your relative positioning compared to other people, your progress in life, your ambitions, your career milestones, your integration into social structures. You have much more via social media, for example, than face to face, and so on and so forth. In other words, narcissism is baked into technological tools and emergent social institutions, so inextricably that I fail to see how we can reverse this. So I think we need to succumb. We need to succumb to climate change, in my view. We need to stop this.  It's not going to work. No one is committed to it. I mean, forget the cop. It's the cops are copouts. Cop 27 is cop out 27. Nothing is happening there. Nothing will ever happen. So, we need to succumb to climate change and begin to design our lives. Anything from architecture, coastal architecture to hitting, I don't know, we need to design everything to take into account the inevitability of climate change. Similarly, narcissism is ineluctable. We need to design everything. Social activism included climate change activism included to take into account narcissism. So narcissism revolves around one cognitive distortion, a misperception of reality known as grandiosity. We need to reach channel grandiosity we need to social engineer grandiosity. If you come to people and say, you should work anonymously and humbly to further the interest of other people to do good to be altruistic and charitable. You need to do F of not use the short version. You need to come to people and say, if you do ABC, you're going to be great. I'm going to make you great again. I'm alluding to Trump. So, but you need to define the goals and the agendas in a way that is socially beneficial, viable, sustainable. So to everyone involved, and of course to the template that we subsist on which happens to be the planet. So, I give an example in my interview with Atlantico.  He would become his local her locals of grandiosity. She would go around bragging about being the greatest victim ever.  And that's what she's going to do, overcome her victim. We need to motivate people to be great, unique, special and noticed via socially beneficial agendas and platforms. We need to reach out, like in spiritualism, we need to reach out this ghost of narcissism. It can be done, of course, can be done. There are political movements which are which subsist of narcissism, literally built on us, founded on us. You may disagree or agree with the political aims and, you know, but they still they go to where they, I mean they realize their goals and agendas via narcissism. And I think Brexit is an excellent example. And so it is possible to harness, to harness narcissism is a form of natural energy. The narcissist is obsessed with narcissistic supply and, and concentrates all his energy on obtaining supply. It's a huge source of power equal I bet to nuclear nuclear power. And we need to somehow leverage it. We need to be wise about it, not to castigate it and chastise it. It's too late for this. Hey, it's too late. Nazism is here. Climate change is here. Wake up. There is a confluence, a pernicious confluence of denial and displacement. These are the modern, modern coping strategies and coping mechanisms. We first deny, and then we displace. So take for example climate change. We deny that it is irreversible. And then we displace, and we say, okay, if we invest in renewable energy, we're going to solve the problem. There's no displacement because you direct your energies into something which is manageable in order to avoid something that is not manageable. You have a fight with your boss. You can't tell him that he's an A-hole.  That's displacement. You can't deal with climate change. It's too strong. It's too systemic. It's here to stay. And it's ever growing. You can't cope with it. You can't manage this. So you build a wind farm because now there's a guy, his name was Parkinson's, and there's Parkinson's law. Parkinson's said that if a committee is faced with two decisions, one is to construct a nuclear plant, and the other is to construct a bicycle shed, they will dedicate 10 minutes to the nuclear plant and 10 hours to the bicycle shed.  Same with climate change. Same, exactly the same. We focus on things that we can manage, the bicycle sheds, because we can't cope with climate change. This is called displacement, but it also involves denial. Same with all other forms of social activism that I'm aware of. The relationships between men and women are millennia old. What am I talking about? Millions of years old. By denying that biological realities and psycho-biological realities, we're not going to make anything go away. We're only going to get things worse. So what are we focusing on? Consent. How to define consent. Consent is something we can cope with, something we can discuss. We have talking heads. They make themselves look important and intelligent by discussing it, or for the better. And so everyone is focusing on these kind of issues, you know, consent, first day, second day, this, that. That's not the issue, of course. The issue is the abrogation and breakdown of inter-gender relationship, the gender wars, the wars of a single gender, uni-gender, where men are women, and men are men, and women are men. Now, I'm not saying it's good, I'm not saying it's bad, but it should not be denied and ignored and reframed and displaced, which is exactly what we're doing. Definitely feminism is doing. This is the way we cope with modernity, or postmodernity. We deny and displace, we create a spectacle, a stage show, and then we pretend that this theater plays reality. It's not going to lead us anywhere. I think we can, if we harness and channel the narcissism of social activists, we can accomplish. We can accomplish many of the goals we want to accomplish. Sam, this is so fascinating, and I want to come back to this part where you just went. But let me, let's, I want to take for a minute, go back to the 60s. There's this really interesting one. I'm sorry you were disrupted, the connection is bad. Oh, I said I want to go back to the 60s for a minute. Sure. 1964, the United States passes the Civil Rights Act. And it's really, it's much more comprehensive than really people had imagined it included women. I created girl sports, you know, it's this incredible achievement. I think it may feel very proud within one year. However, the President of the United States at the urging of the civil rights leaders says, we're not done. How could we be done? You know, we've been had we've had race oppression for 400 years. We owe a debt to African Americans. And so we created this thing we call affirmative action.  Did that, that then very quickly, here we are 1965 that very quickly you go from that to the late 60s and you get, you get what we call today identity movements you get victim based movements. You get the weathermen, which is, I mean, I'll leave it to you to figure out how to describe it. Domestic terrorism. You know it. Yeah. And like, when I did some research on it for my last book, I was surprised to learn that they were all doing cocaine. They were the, there was an alliance between the white rich kids and black and African American activists who were involved in the cocaine trade. They had to go to the bank in part to buy cocaine to sell not only blacks you had the same by your knees army for a little bit with the first and so. Yeah, yeah, so you had this narcissistic.  In your previous talk with Atlantico, I think you said something that was like you need at that moment there needed to be somebody to really push back. On the victim on the trend and to really affirm. No, no. We have leveled the playing field. We're, we shall overcome is enough. You know, stop it. Let's stick with we overcome. None of this victimhood identity movements. I'm assuming you still believe that because you just gave that interview recently, and it seems though. How does that fit into. It seems like there's both. It seems like I guess I'm trying if I have to simplify if I hear you correctly you're saying that those of us that want to be engaged in healthy political engagement. We need to do two things on the negative side you need to push back against the victim. There's narcissistic psychopath psychopathology. And on the positive side you need to redirect it. You're being cut off because the connection is bad I'm sorry. Oh no it's okay. I'm just saying there's a positive. I heard all the rest of the positive. Yeah, yeah so it seems like if I'm understanding you correctly. I think it's really interesting. Because it does I think there's sometimes we will go, I think on the one hand people are just negative towards the victim movements. And I think on the other side people that are more conflict diverse, want to just be positive and redirect for I'll give you an example I'm friendly with a psychologist in the United States named Jonathan height. You may know his work, moral psychology. There's a movement. There's just a big 60 minutes television program on this question of, how do you, how do you change social media. You know to make it so it's not so anger driven. It's not so fear driven it's not so negative emotions. And I'm very sympathetic to that argument. On the other hand as I was why as I was listening to it I also thought you know this could be a way to allow greater censorship, you know one's opponents. But nonetheless it seems like they're sort of on the one hand. I see Jonathan height is trying to address this, this question to, which is how do you both challenge and stop the really bad victim movements but also redirect and I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that it seems like there's some complexity there. It's a challenge. Victim movements, victim movements go awry when they are appropriated by the elites and become integrated into existing power structures, including profit motivated power structures in other words the corporate environment. When there's when when victim movements or rather social activism movements get compromised by aligning themselves or or affiliating themselves with vested establishment interests. Then things go right. That's point number one point number two, when victim would begins to be monetized that leads to commodification of suffering. Suffering becomes a commodity. And one thing we know about commodities I used to be a commodity trader when I was very young in my 20s. One thing we know about commodities. Of course you were. I did everything I really never did. So one thing we know about commodities. It's a paradigm of economic growth. Yeah, you produce more and more and more. The minute you monetize suffering. You have a vested interest you have an inbuilt incentive. Not to decrease suffering, but to perpetuate it. To increase, at least to perpetuate. That's your currency. That's your currency. That's what you're selling that's your product. Yes, think of it as a product. I mean the minute money enters the game. You're done. That's it. I mean victim would becomes permanent fixture, because that's your product line. You're going to produce victims and suffering. So you're going to, for example, you're going to cast. An ever growing circle of people and institutions as victimizers as abusers.  You're going to recast human interactions. In terms of victimizer victim, you're going to reframe everything in terms of victim. So you have the minute you get integrated with the elites, the minute you get you begin to monetize suffering, the minute you become part of the bottom line. You're in a production line of suffering and victim and that's irreversible and you can ever, never extricate yourself. Too many interests are involved, including political interests. Johnson, Lyndon Johnson Johnson in 1964 was not the same Lyndon Johnson of 65 and not the same Lyndon Johnson of 1968. I urge you to read the famous biography of Lyndon Johnson, three volumes, wonderful. It was not the same man. In 1965, he has already been compromised. Now I'm a Jew. I'm a Jew. And the Jewish elites in the 60s made a strategic decision to latch onto the bandwagon wagon of the black civil rights movement. Suddenly Jewish activists proliferated in all civil rights parades and and voter registration and I mean you name it. That was a strategic decision by Jews, because Jews are the quintessential eternal victims. That is not an antisemitic statement. That's a fact. Victimhood is the defining determinant of Jewish identity. I know because I grew up in Israel and I've been a Jew all my life. It's a defining determinant of Jewish identity. We define ourselves by our martyrhood, by our undeniable victimhood. I'm not a Holocaust denier and I'm not a climate change denier.  If you are real, Holocaust did happen. We have been victimized as Jews. But Jews are the, as I said, the quintessence and the epitome of victimhood and the benefits that victimhood confers. I'm sorry to say that sounds very antisemitic, but it's very true. There's a Holocaust industry. There's a Holocaust industry for decades now. On an individual level, collective level, state level. And so the institutionalization of victimhood movement, their integration into elite narratives, their penetration of Akadem, their monetization spells the doom and the end of their agenda, ironically. It is when they triumph that they lose the battle. Because when victimhood becomes mainstream, it becomes permanent. And that's, I think, was the huge failure of these victimhood movements in the 1960s. They allowed themselves to be compromised by the establishment, by the mainstream, by the elites, by money, ultimately. And by attention, media attention. Martin Luther King wasn't averse to media attention. Shall I put it gently? And he was a showman, a great showman. And so was he a narcissist between you and me and the books behind you. Yes, of course he was. He is an example of how these movements are hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths. So, this process, is it inexorable? It is inexorable. Victimhood movements garner attention. Attention attracts psychopaths and narcissists. Is it the end of the story? No, it could be the beginning of the story. We just need to reframe everything. We need to offer the narcissist what he wants narcissistic supply by doing the right thing. Do the right thing and it will get supplied. What do you want? You want power, sex, money, you get all of this. Just do the right thing. So, society and institutions have the power to dictate the reward and incentive system. And thereby control individual and collective behavior. We've been doing it for millennia. It's called the criminal law. Had there not been a criminal code, we would all be criminals. All, according to Dan Ariely and others, all of us would be criminals. But we have a criminal code. The criminal code channels our energies in socially acceptable ways. Zygmunt Freud called it sublimation. We need to sublimate narcissism and psychopathy. Do we need to fight narcissism and psychopathy? No, it's too late. It's a waste of time and energy. The Jewish example is so interesting because of course you also have the state of Israel, which I, as you know, I'm an environmentalist and so when I look around the world for desalination technologies farming in the desert, it's just nobody does it better. Israeli technological ingenuity.  And so the story is not, so Israel is not a, Israel is not Haiti. Or it's not some basket case, which is sort of like, well, we are all victims. Give us foreign aid. No, I mean, Israel actually produces things. I mean, it's a story of overcoming. It's a story of success. Israel has been constructed almost entirely on reparations from Germany, following the Holocaust and three to five billion dollars annually from the United States. For 40 years almost. Okay. That's an infusion of $200 billion, which is the equivalent today of 350 billion. That would prevent most locations from becoming Haiti. There's also a debate regarding the environmental impacts of desalination projects in Israel, because they dump the salt back into the ocean. They're raising the salinity level of the sea actually, but let's not go into details. There is no debate even among Jews that that Jews are very victim oriented victim would orient that we define our identity via victim. The typical textbook history textbook in Israel in high school is simply a list of programs and Holocaust and genocide and blood libel and what have you. That's our, our haggadah in Passover, the famous book that we read every Passover is about how we were slaves and, you know, and so on. And it's not unique to the Jews, the Germans are the same, the Serbs are the same, the Russians are the same I've lived in all these countries. But it's the same. But Sam the difference is that Jews win some significant larger percentage of Nobel prizes. Jews are outperforming. So so with victim narrative Jews outperform gentiles. It's pretty significantly. So is that intellectually intellectually I mean you can even kind of go. Okay, so Israel gets a lot of aid but it provides the provides a national security service. Oh, I'm not I'm not disputing that at all and it was not the thrust of argument what I was trying to say is that the fact that Jews collaborated with the civil rights woman starting the mid 60s was a way of creating identity politics, integrating the civil rights movement into the mainstream, because the Jews constituted the intellectual elite of the time, and still do to a large extent. So it was like an intellectual imprimatur. It's like, it was like saying civil rights movement is intellectually rigorous. In other words, it's moral. It's right. It's ethical. We are the people of the Bible. And it's not joking. I mean we're the chosen people in this sense. We're the, we the keepers of the flame of the flame of ethics and what's right and what's wrong and so on and so forth. And so the, I give it as an example of collaboration but of course I can, I can talk about for example the integration of the civil rights movement with sports associations in the United States, how sports leverage the civil rights movement. There was a confluence of the civil rights movements with multiple institutions and establishments it went mainstream. It started to monetize suffering. The minute you monetize suffering, suffering never ends, because it becomes product. That's what I said it's a death cult. It's a death cult is objectifying people, they become, they become merely production units for suffering. There is no incentive to end all suffering. Imagine for example if medicine were to end all disease. What would happen to the doctors. People don't realize that there is a perverse incentive structure in many of the helping professions in many of the altruistic movements and charitable movements. There is a perverse incentive structure.  Why would you do that. You're human after all. I mean, even with a lab coat. This is the dynamic I read about in my last book which is the homelessness industrial complex perpetuating addiction, mental illness and homelessness. And I'm awaiting your book. Yeah, no, I'm going to send. But okay, Sam let's come back to this issue of of a healthy culture. I've I'm one of the countries I'm obsessed with is the Netherlands. Talk about a country that does not have a victim narrative. One of the famous one of the most famous books ever written on the Netherlands is called embarrassment of riches about how when the Dutch grew rich because of course the Dutch grew rich before anybody else. It was like embarrassing to them. They don't have a victim narrative. They have a narrative well it's starting to come. It's starting to show up. But we've been giving we can we come up with so many examples of pathology when you come up with examples of healthy culture healthy movements, healthy individuals spend some more time there with me. Of what you come up with because I think there's so much pathology, we can point to what else comes to mind for you like who do you when you look around and you go, that's a model for healthy behavior healthy engagement and collective or individual as an as a nation or as a culture what what comes to mind for you. I've traveled all over the world. I've lived in 13 countries or 14 actually, and I've worked in 51. So I have an unusually vast exposure to societies and cultures anything from South Korea to Nigeria to Russia to I mean you name it. I've worked in all these places. So I really have a panoramic overview of synoptic overview of humanity in effect, not because I'm so special but because I traveled a lot and lived many places. And so, there are, first of all, Campbell the sociologist suggested that we are transitioning from the age of dignity to the age of victimhood. It's not my say I mean Atlantico misattributed to me I think it was, it wasn't my saying was his thing. And he's right. It's a it's, as I said it's an organizing principle. It's a it's a hermeneutic it explains the world makes sense of the world. So you find victimhood movements in India, you find victimhood moments in Israel of course you find victimhood mood in the Arab world or the Arab world is founded on victim. So all post colonial societies in Africa, a victimhood based in the United States, the whites are victims the blacks are victims and if any color in between is also a victim native Americans I mean everything is basically an overriding way to make sense of your life and your world and what's happening to you and why you couldn't make it as, as you think you should, you deserve, because everyone deserves to be multi billionaire and most beautiful girls and become president of the United States of course.  Something is wrong with society. So, because something is wrong with society it owes you. I came across very few exceptions. For example, Denmark is an exception. Netherlands used to be an exception, no longer in the last 10 years. They have a victimhood stance with regards to immigrants and so on. They have immigrants and are victimizing the Dutch. Unfortunately, so they, they are veering right wing, I mean, far right wing, they're very into the right. But Denmark is still an extremely healthy society in my view. Strangely Finland, the Finnish people, they drink a lot this rampant alcoholism. I don't know, I don't know if it because of the alcohol, I don't know why, but they're pretty healthy. Their attitude is pretty healthy, but Denmark is more healthy. So, I would say Denmark. I'm hard pressed to come, to come up with other examples but I think New Zealand to some extent with New Zealand is isolated. But maybe because owing to its isolation, it had remained healthy and touched by all these, you know, corrupt, corrupting influences or decadent influence or whatever you want to call them. So, even maybe New Zealand, maybe Denmark. Some parts of Germany. What about Japan?  What makes you say that?   Sexual relations or sexual behaviors in Japan are deeply disturbed. I mean, astoundingly and worry. Everyone would agree, every sexologist, every psychology, Japanese first and foremost, they would agree that there's something seriously wrong in between men and women. And generally with regards to sexuality and gender in Japan. Japan is a collective society. But in the best sense of the word, where the collective is totalitarian, not only authoritarian, intrusive and stifling and stunting, we call this psychological process constriction. The collective constricts the life of individuals. Individuals consequently are unable to separate an individual, they don't become full fledged individuals, they define their identity via collectives, but again in a bad sense, sacrificial sense. So they would tend to sacrifice their lives and interests and so on, in favor of collective, some of them imagined collectives and so on. This was much worse has been used to be much worse in the 30s and 40s, of course, but it's still very much dominant and very much prevalent. I lived in South Korea. So I had, I spent a lot of time in these countries, Japan and everywhere, Hong Kong, and so, so Japan struck me as a very, very sick society, very sick, especially the young, I mean people under age 35 or 40. But mind you, the prevalence and incidence of mental illness among the young is, is much higher than among older generations.  But forget sex. The young have much higher depression rates and rates of anxiety disorders. Suicide rates among the young are going up and so on so forth. The young are in a huge predicament. Now we have something called displacement in psychology, it's a defense mechanism. So when you try to explain yourself why your, why your life is going south, nothing is, nothing works and you're not getting anywhere, you can afford an apartment. You still live with your parents, you're 35 years old, one third of people under age 35 live with their parents in the industrialized world. 40% of people under age 25 live with their parents. The number was 3% in the Great Depression. So something really bad is happening. When you try to explain to yourself or to account for, for this inadequacy, for this systemic failure as a young man or a young woman, you know, you would, you would tend to have what we call alloplastic defenses, you would tend to blame others. So you blame student debt, but you would also blame climate change. And you would blame the government and you would blame others, your peers. So there is this tendency to shift the blame or shift the responsibility, abrogate actually personal responsibility. I think the climate change movement has been hijacked by this disgruntled youth. These youngsters are unmitigated failures in every dimension that I can think of. Compare them to their equivalents in the Great Depression or during Second World War, you name it. I mean, it's really, I mean, I give lectures and these young people come to me and say, you don't know what you're talking about. Do you know what the price of an apartment in San Francisco is? Yes, I know what the price of an apartment in Frisco is. Do you know what your grandfather had to go through in the Great Depression? Do you know what your great grandfather had to go through in the Second World War?  And so it's a question of being spoiled or entitled or not sure what, but they externalize this aggression. And so I think the climate change movement has been hijacked actually. By this failed youth, by this failed generation. The climate change movement today is a failed generation movement. This generation has hijacked the climate change movement, which is legitimate. There is climate change, it's constant and it's horrible and the environmental impacts will be cataclysmic and we have to prepare for it. I'm not denying climate change, but the way it is now with Greta and all her peers, there's nothing to do with climate change. This is displacement. Sam, I have to tell you a story. I went and read all of the New York Times media coverage of heatwaves for the last century. The worst heatwaves in the United States were in the 30s. So in the middle of the Great Depression, the New York Times wrote about heatwaves, but the way they wrote about them, like people are like dying, like on the streets and the apartment. Yeah, the dust ball. Yeah, yeah. So the way the New York Times was writing about it though, in the middle of the Great Depression was, well, this is strange because everything has been getting better. Whereas now when the New York Times writes about heatwaves, we're far fewer people die. I mean far fewer people die. It's the end of the world. It's a sign of the apocalypse. Now the other issue you're describing is, now I may use the wrong psychological jargon, but it's external locus of control, right? So 100 years ago, if you fail, you say, well, I've got to work harder. And that's on me. And then 100 years later, it's, I have no power. I can't afford, I can't, and it's all, and it's, I'm a victim of my circumstances. My parents didn't raise me right. I have student debt, climate change, historical racism, oppression. Yeah, precisely what I'm saying. Yeah, that's the age of. So you're right that alloplastic defenses, alloplastic defenses when you tend to blame others. Circumstances, institutions and so on for your predicament. Yeah, also for your failures and defeats, self-inflicted, however they may be. Yeah, that's alloplastic defenses go hand in hand with an external locus of control. You believe that your life is determined from the outside, not from the inside. This and this whole thing is a form of displacement. And there's something you cannot cope with because you are too, I don't know, indolent or, or I don't know what to do something, then you would tend to displace it. You would tend to say, well, the cause is out there, not in me, but out there. It's nothing I can do, sort of to me. So, so that's, that's, I mean, that is scary. That seems like the end of civilization. I hope it's the end of civilization. I think we, I think we, the civilization we've created is dysfunctional, problematic, and not conducive to happiness, which I think is the ultimate test.  Our civilization is not conducive to contentment, it's conducive to conflict, and dissonance, and aggression, and it's not good, it's not working. I absolutely hope it's the demise of this civilization, as it is now. It involves malignant capitalism, not original capitalism, which was 13th century, 15th century capitalism was was a great way to create wealth and distribute it. But the malignant ideological forms of capitalism have failed us. The current civilization involves narcissism, and the focus of commoditization of suffering and attention, and then the linkage of suffering with attention. The only way to garner attention is to suffer in public ostentatiously. So this is bad. Current civilization is a death cult, it places emphasis on objects, rather than people. It's a civilization of the inanimate, not the animate. Current civilization is adversarial, founded on conflict rather than on collaboration. For example, like in hunter-gatherer societies, where collaboration and cooperation was preeminent. So current civilization is seriously flawed. So I sure hope it spends its demise. Of course, we're going to go through a tectonic phase, where all of us and our descendants is only going to suffer horribly. This is the price of transition, and I hope it's dying. I hope these are the death threats of civilization. Absolutely. Now, climate change has nothing to do with civilization. Climate change is a geophysical phenomenon. It's been brought on by human activity to a large extent, but not only. And so we have to accept it. It's not the first time the planet heats. We've had the Dantean anomaly. I don't know if you know about this phenomenon. The Dantean anomaly that was five or six years with famines and I don't know what, because the planet heated, overheated. I mean, it has happened numerous times before. The Ice Age was a result of climate change. And I don't think that climate change is a threat to civilization.  Those are three pillars of our civilization. They're all being undermined. Yes, undermined or non-existent. What's that? It's undermined or even rendered non-existent. It's, it's, the enlightenment is dead. The enlightenment, 18th century enlightenment, European enlightenment, was founded on the principles that you have mentioned. Democracy was supposed to be a ratification or a reflection of meritocracy. But it had become a clock-racy, mobile. Similarly, meritocracy was supposed to be founded on education. But education having been privatized and monetized has now has nothing to do with meritocracy. Education was supposed to lead to informed citizenship, therefore, proper decision making, political and otherwise. But of course, education today is ideological, mostly. So it doesn't lead to good citizenship. It leads to partisanship. It leads to division. It's adversarial, exactly like a court of law. And so on and so forth. You see the chain of, chain of, none of this is working. So we, there are two options. We can tackle each unit separately and try to, this is nonsense. It all needs to go. There needs to be an enormous conflagration. And then we can reveal. I'm sorry, but I'm, I am not an incrementalist. I'm not. But Sam, well, okay, now we're, now we're finally getting to some, maybe potential some disagreement. I think we need to affirm the pillars of Western civilization. And, and how do we make the case for Western civilization? Would you rather live like the Chinese or the Russians, which are totalitarian societies oppressive, or would you rather live in the United States of America? People aren't trying to get into China and Russia. There's not a, there's a border crisis on the southern border of the United States. There's a border crisis in Europe. Why? Because people would rather live in Western civilization. And so the case needs to be made to the people inside Western civilization that that requires cheap energy, law and order and meritocracy. And so, so let me argue with you and say, we do not need to be apocalyptic about this. We just need, it's a cyclical phenomenon. We simply need to affirm the pillars of Western civilization. And we need to push back against the coddled, entitled narcissistic culture and say, if you don't want, if you don't, if you think this is oppressive, please go and live in China where you can live under a social credit system. Have you been monitoring the Republican Party in the United States? I think, I think the majority of voters, Republican voters definitely would utterly reject what you adjusted. They would reject, I think, I think they would reject many democratic talents. They would reject definitely what they consider to be liberalism or progressivism and so on so forth. I think, I think many voters in the West, industrial societies in the West, are opting to become China. They opt, they don't want to live in China. They definitely don't want to live in Russia, which is a failed experiment. But they want to live in a China-like thing, like a strong leader, a central authority, and prosperity guaranteed by excluding others, which is what China is doing. There's no immigration to China, by the way. There's no immigration into China. Not because people don't want to go into China. I think if China were to open up, many people from Africa would go into China. Maybe from Afghanistan would go into China. I mean, there's no question about it. But you can't, you can't go into China. You can't immigrate. They don't allow this. So, I think many, many voters in the United States and in the United Kingdom, I know the United Kingdom well, many voters in these places are opting for a Chinese model, definitely. With, for example, Donald Trump as Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping standing. So, I am not quite sure about the commitment of people in the West to enlightenment. So, what I said, enlightenment is dying. I'm not sure about their commitment. I think if Trump tomorrow, or someone like Trump, never mind, were to kind of introduce an authoritarian regime with intermittent elections, or no elections, I'm not sure how many would, would rise up to the challenge with their Second Amendment weapons. I'm not quite sure. I think many would simply accept it and go along. And if they have prosperity guaranteed and so on, just the Chinese traded prosperity for freedom. There was a trade off. Now if Xi Jinping cannot deliver prosperity, there'll be a mess. I agree. But I think the predominant model nowadays is not American anymore. It's more Chinese. I have witnessed first and at least 10 countries transitioning from democracy to authoritarian rule. And that includes this country that I mean right now. You may be right. You may be right. I hope obviously obviously I hope you're wrong and will would like to try to try to prove you wrong in the real world. There has been an enormous debate in the United States around efforts by the federal government to regulate social media companies to restrict misinformation, which is being overly defined to include factual information. We've seen a pushback mostly from the right in defense of not allowing that to occur but now we've seen a very important left-wing publication in the United States called the Intercept, writing a big piece about leaked documents attempts by the Department of Homeland Security to regulate speech. So we there is a pushback from liberals and conservatives on state regulation of speech. Immigration, you know, there's definitely anti-immigrant sentiment here, but also we've just let in millions of people. You know, I mean, so like de facto, there's no comparison to Europe. I mean, we let in so many more immigrants, you know, and my neighbors, I'm in Berkeley in California, my neighbors all have signs in five languages saying immigrants welcome here. And there's a cynical read to it, which is that they want them for their to work as gardeners and house cleaners and maids. But I think that, so I, well, anyway, we can, it's some of its speculative, but I guess the question I would put to you would be, if I if I if I support the same fact and that is saying let's rechannel narcissism towards something positive rather than the same fact and that says we should wait for the we should allow the apocalypse to proceed. It's the same. I believe that rechanneling and reframing actually the clinical term would be reframing reframing narcissism. I believe is the apocalypse. Okay, I believe, I believe that when once we have reframed narcissism, the rechanneling of energy would be so dramatic and so tectonic if you wish, that everything will crumble. The institutions will crumble and new technologies will crumble and you name it and then values beliefs. It will be a total redefinition of the human space and civilization. We will have a civilization founded on narcissism. Perhaps I haven't been too clear and that's my fault, definitely. I'm suggesting to transition from a civilization founded on virtue, fewer than virtue, mind you, and dignity to a civilization founded on narcissism by skipping the victimhood entering phase. I'm suggesting to transition to a narcissistic civilization, simply because I believe that narcissism is ineluctable, not because I support it. I think the genie is out of the bottle. For example, with social media, you can't take this back. There's three billion people there. They're vying for attention. They're hunting for likes and followers. This is their main preoccupation. You can't believe how much energy and time people invest in this.  It's mind-boggling. I'm part of it. I participate in it. I have many Twitter followers. You contribute value. I mean, these are people who feel bananas or something. It's a struggle. Let's get a little more specific in our closing minutes because I will let you go. I have another podcast at the top of the hour, so we have another 10 minutes. And give us some more, Sam, in terms of what that looks like. What does it specifically mean? Because I think I'm really fascinated. Say more about what that looks like. Because obviously you're clearly saying, if I'm hearing you right, that we have to use these tools. Have to use these social media tools as much as toxic as they are. We have an expression from environmentalism of the antidote is near the poison. Or the, you know, the poison is, medicine is a poison. Poison is a medicine. Talk me through that more.  The younger generations are deficient when it comes to human interactions, intimacy skills, the ability to maintain relationships and the connection between bodily functions, for example, sex and emotions. This is not an old man talk. This is not a baby boomer talk. This is substantiated by numerous studies. Fact number one, fact number two, narcissism is on the rise. It has quintupled among college students according to Twenge and Campbell. Point number three, narcissism is energy, similar to nuclear energy. Point number four, this and any energy can be channeled. Point number five, there is a wide consensus as to what would constitute a socially acceptable agenda. We all, for example, think that we should be happy. No one says the aim of society and the individual is to be unhappy. I have yet to come across someone who says this. But point number six, we disagree as to the means and methods and ways to obtain happiness. Point number seven, when people receive narcissistic supply, they're happy. It's a fact. Put all these points together. And you emerge with a ready made off the shelf solution, which guarantees the attainment of socially acceptable goals, social coherence, social cohesion, or at least social functioning. On the one hand, as a collaborative species on the one hand, and on the other hand guarantees personal contentment, forget happiness content. What is the solution? This solution is to institutionalize narcissism. Not to fight it anymore. It's a lost cause. It's hopeless. We need to institutionalize it via specific technologies, institutions, and career paths. How do we institutionalize? I'm sorry, I'm being telegraphed. That was great. How do we institutionalize narcissism? We provide doses, dosages of narcissistic supply at every turn. We engineer systems, institutions, interactions, relationships. We re-engineer everything to produce a single product, narcissistic supply. This product should displace previous products such as victimhood. Today, the main commodity in the world, the main currency, the main coinage is suffering and victimhood. If you're not a victim, you manufacture victimhood. You force people to victimize you. It's called projective identification. It's like suicide by cop, you know? Projective identification. We create a new currency, narcissistic supply, and we displace previous currencies such as victimhood. Why do, why should we do this? Because narcissistic supply is more innocuous. It's also individual. It doesn't have society-wide impacts. It's not poisonous. It's not pernicious. It doesn't create rights and obligations, calculus. It doesn't impose on other people. You sit at home and you receive supply. It's not a form of entitlement. It's a passive consumption act. So we re-engineer everything to produce supply. If you do A, you get attention. If you do B, you don't get attention. Positive and negative reinforcement, very primitive, very animal-like, very effective, of lovean. Social media are doing this. How do I know it's going to work? How am I sure? How can I be so sure it's going to work? Because that's the core of social media. It's precisely what they're doing. If you do A, you get a thousand likes. If you do B, we're going to shadow ban you or derank you, and no one will ever see you. No, people don't do B. Is it a form of censorship? Of course it is. Everything is. If you're a liberal, progressive person, there are many things you cannot say. There is no ideology or set of beliefs that does not suppress speech. It's a myth. There is no such thing as free speech.   That's a shame.  End of story. So of course, in the new narcissistic paradigm, in the new narcissistic model and chart flow, there will be many things which will be many speech acts which will be suppressed. It's nothing special. It's nothing unique. And at least I know that there is no energy stronger than narcissistic supply. People will do anything for narcissistic supply. If you don't believe me, go on Tik Tok. Oh, no, I believe. But the question is how do you, I mean, is this a matter of we need to get Elon Musk on the phone and tell him how to change the algorithms at Twitter? Elon Musk is a master of narcissistic supply. He doesn't need any lessons from me. But he's the head of, he's the CEO of, he owns Twitter now. I know, he owns Twitter.  I have no doubt that he will engineer Twitter this way. Elon Musk, in my view, is not the brightest star in the galaxy. There's a British understatement on the one hand. Elon Musk is an animal of narcissistic supply. He's a trimordial force of supply. So I'm sure he will redesign and re-engineer Twitter to be an engine of supply. But generally social media are engines of supply. We can look to them for modeling. If I'm hearing you right though, you're saying that the incentives need to shift from victimhood to supply. What's that? The supply. An overcoming victimhood would garner the most supply. Right. Like if you overcome victimhood, you get the most supply. There will be a chart, kind of a flow chart of how much supply you get. There'll be a tariff of supply. Yeah. But we need to redesign everything in terms of attention. We need to make attention to coinage. By the way, institutionalized coinage. For example, we are on the verge or on the brink of introducing the metaverse. The metaverse needs to be constructed with the coinage of attention at its core. So that if you're active in the metaverse in certain ways, you get way more attention than if you're active in other ways. Similarly, in politics, if you act in certain ways, you get way more attention to do. Mainstream media covered Donald Trump lot. That's a perverse incentive system. Right. It's a perverse incentive system is getting exactly what he wants. Attention. They're paying him with attention for misbehavior. While they actually should have ignored him, had the mainstream media ignored Donald Trump. That would have been his most severe punishment. But the media made the media incentives were similar. They wanted the revenues and the journalists for themselves getting. The shift I'm talking about is a shifting in values. It's a social agenda, which requires social engineering. I mean, 50 years ago, it would have been inconceivable to mention sex or pregnancy on CBS. For example, today it's not. It's a shift. If we decide on a global agenda, and we promote it one day, it will become true. And then they, Donald Trump will not get any coverage for any of its shenanigans. So are you, so you're saying, are you excited? I guess I'm trying to, are you saying that Twitter needs to change its algorithms? Or are you saying we need to change the culture? Or are you saying both? Because of social media, which are technologies, of course they need to reward socially beneficial behaviors more than socially anti-social behaviors. But no, I'm talking about a society-wide culture-wide change where we say, okay, people need attention. They need to be seen. They need to be noticed. This is the currency of the realm. That's it. That's the coinage. We need to accept this. This is what it's all about.   They don't want to work. They don't want to study. They don't want anything. They want attention. We're going to pay them with attention. But we're going to do it in a wise and clever way, a smart way. Right. We're going to pay them with attention if they do the right thing. And we're going to withhold attention if they don't do the right thing. Right. For example, Donald Trump. So we need a social media, let's just, if we were starting from scratch, you would start a social media platform that rewarded people for telling stories of overcoming adversity. And you would punish them for telling stories of wallowing in victimhood. For example, but I would also reward free and bridal speech. So I would reward, I would reward to some extent controversy and controversial ideas and so on. But I would, I would eliminate, I've tried to eliminate via this incentive system, censorship and so in this sense, I agree with Elon Musk. I don't agree with him on a lot, but in this, in this sense, I agree with him. So, yeah, we need to, we need to, of course, we need to reach a consensus as to what constitutes socially beneficial outcomes. And once we have this list, this list of socially beneficial outcomes, we need to incentivize these outcomes via attention, via narcissistic supply. Listen, once before we did succeed to reach a global consensus on this. It was called the 10 Commandments. 10 Commandments was a social consensus on what constitutes, you know, and then everyone adhered to it basically. We need to reach the 10 Commandments of, but we need to accept that people are narcissistic. And we need to reward them with attention because they don't care about anything else. Yeah, it does want attention. Sam, I feel like the conversation has just started.  Would you talk to me again? If you reward me with attention, I will, of course. I have, I have a lot of attention. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Yes. I think it's really important conversation. I can't stress how important it is. I'm excited to get the video out and to get reactions from people, but I know I have more questions, particularly on this positive, on this positive project, which I do think is essential for a positive human future. So, Sam, thank you so much. Thank you for your work. I spent the last few days getting to know it. Thank you. Appreciate you, sir. We'll be in touch again soon. I'll be in touch again. Thank you kindly. Thank you. Okay. Bye bye. Okay. I believe I'm recording. Finally. Hello, everyone. My name is Ginger Koy and I'm the writer behind concerning narcissism on sub stack. It's an honor to be sitting with you today, Sam. As you're such an influential thinker in my lifetime. And I deeply respect you. For our viewers, I created concerning narcissism on sub stack as an homage to your work, Sam, because you've helped me understand the chaos that is narcissistic abuse of which I have suffered mightily in my lifetime. It gives me great pleasure to introduce my viewers to Professor Vakni today if you don't know him already as a foremost expert in narcissism and all things cluster B. And I've been listening to Professor Vakni on his YouTube channel for years now and I've realized profound insights about narcissism and in life in general. So Sam, I'm going to ask that you introduce yourself please. And I'm the author of Malignance of Love narcissism revisited, which was the first book ever to describe narcissistic abuse. I also coined the phrase narcissistic abuse and the overwhelming majority of the language in use today. And then proceeded to serve as a visiting professor in psychology in two or three universities and now I'm on the faculty of CIPS Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies in Toronto, Canada, Cambridge United Kingdom and outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria. I'm legally obligated to repeat this phrase so my apology. I wanted to start off right off the bat. So concerning narcissism's most viewed piece is my most recent piece about victim hood ideology and it's called victim hood movements hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths. Where did victim hood come from what is the historical background of this movement. Amazingly very few people are asking this question. They take victim hood for granted the same way you take oxygen. I assume for granted. But victim hood is a very, very interesting development in human history. Initially, there was fatalism or determinism, which has accepted things as they were. But no one regarded himself or herself as a victim. I mean things just happened. And history, or God, or both were inexorable and non-negotiable. And that was it. Life was a take it or leave it proposition. No one felt victimized. And so first we should make a distinction between sacrifice and victim hood because they're often conflated and confused. There are spiritual traditions centered around sacrifice, the most famous of which is obviously Christianity. Where, you know, Jesus chose to sacrifice himself. And so sacrifice entails two elements. One being chosen somehow. There's an element of choice, usually choice by God. But not necessarily. Being chosen by an ideology, by God, by non-individual collectivist forces and so on. So there's an element of choice. And the second element in sacrifice is a kind of apotheosis. In other words, becoming one with God or becoming closer to God. Or enjoying the benefit of God's proximity or God's grace in the case of a religious tradition. Similarly, merging with the state or enjoying the benefits of the state or sacrificing one's self in order to uphold the state. So in sacrifice traditions, there's an element of choice. An element of somehow merging or fusing or getting enmeshed with a bigger whole. With a bigger entity than yourself. So we have examples, the Catholic martyrs. Yes, multirology in Catholicism. In Protestantism, you're chosen by God and the proof that you're chosen by God is that you're successful and rich. So that's proof of that's the Protestant work ethic. That's the proof that God has chosen you. And so on and so forth. These are all sacrifice traditions. They have nothing to do with victim. Jesus was never a victim. The Catholic martyrs were never victims. The Shahid, the suicide bomber in Islamic tradition is never a victim. These are not victims. They have made choices. This is all voluntary. Victimhood is a Jewish tradition. And actually it's an exclusively Jewish tradition. There is no other spiritual tradition in the world which upholds victimhood as a central tenant. It's a Jewish tradition. Recall Jewish history. Slavery in Egypt. The Jews were victims in Egypt. Exile, the Roman exile. The Jews were the victims of Roman aggression. Of course, recently, or more recently, the Holocaust, where the Jews were victims of Nazi Germany. Victimhood defines the worldview, the Weltanschauung of the Jewish people throughout their history. Actually the first act of Abraham was to sacrifice or to attempt to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to render his son a victim in effect. So victimhood is a Jewish thing and victimhood is very distinct, is not the same as sacrifice. Sacrifice entails being chosen and a greater entity to which you get submerged or subsumed once you have sacrificed yourself. Victimhood involves entitlement. That means victims have rights and because victims have rights, other people have commensurate obligations. There's a rights obligation calculus in victimhood, which does not exist in sacrifice. Jesus didn't say, listen guys, I'm going to sacrifice myself and that gives me a lot of rights and that endows you or puts upon you obligations towards me. No one is saying this in the sacrificial traditions, but in victimhood traditions, absolutely yes. I've been a victim of the Holocaust, you owe me money. I've been a victim of the Roman exile, you owe me a state. I've been a victim, I've been a slave in Egypt. I have a right to conquer someone else's land. Rights and obligations and I know what I'm saying is very controversial. May I remind the viewers that I'm a Jew. So dispense with the anti-Semitic tropes and tribe. So entitlement and the second element in victimhood is over generation of grievances. Victimhood, victimhood generates grievances. It's a grievance generation machine machinery. And of course we have a perfect example in the founding documents of the United States of America. The founding documents of the USA is actually these documents are lists of grievances against the British King and the British realm. So it's not, it started with the Jews and with the Jewish traditions and so on and so forth. But then people discovered around the 18th century with the French Revolution and the American Revolution. People discovered that victimhood pays that grievances, grievances generate obligations in other people which you can capitalize on, monetize, benefit from and profit from. Victimhood was discovered as a capitalist invention. It was a form of manufacturing. It became the equivalent of a factory. Only this factory created grievances and brought in income based on the grievances or territory based on the grievances. And so this led of course much later to anti-colonialist movements. Anti-colonialist movements are Western grievance victimhood narratives. They are not African narratives. They are not Asian narratives. They are Western narratives. Anti-colonialism started in the West, not in Africa. Actually started in the 19th century in the United Kingdom. Abolition started in the 19th century in the United Kingdom. So anti-colonialism, anti-slavery, all these, anti-mercantilism, which are victimhood movements based on grievances of the colonized, are actually Western exports to the colonies. That's the irony. So we have the next phase in victimhood movements, which is anti-colonialism. And then gradually we replaced traditions, spiritual traditions and religions with secular religions, such as Nazism, communism and nationalism. These are all grievance based victimhood movements. Nazism was founded on the belief that the German people have been victimized by the Versailles Treaty. And therefore are fully entitled, they have a right to Lebensraum, to conquer territory within Europe and to enslave people who are inferior. So Nazism is a victimhood movement. And communism is a victimhood movement, of course. The proletariat is victimized, abused and manipulated by capitalists, fat cats and robber barons. And so the proletariat has a right to rebel and via the revolution to decimate literally very often the capitalist. And of course, many national movements are victimhood movements. To this very day, look what's happening in Azerbaijan. These are victimhood movements. And so this is how, this is the historical background of victimhood. It started with the Jews and via their influential writings, for example, the Bible. It spread and it became a global phenomenon. Displacing sacrifice traditions, actually. Because today the biggest religion in the world is victimhood, not Christianity, not Islam, not Judaism, not Buddhism. The biggest religion in my view today is victimhood and its ally or its flipside narcissism. Because victimhood entails narcissism. With your permission, I will mention a few more points. I'm sorry, the answer is a bit long. I hope I'm laying the foundation for the dialogue because then we can expand upon some of these points. Modern victimhood borrowed heavily from historical victimhood. So we have entitlement and we have all these elements, grievances. They all exist in modern victimhood. But modern victimhood added to the mix, added narcissism to the mix. And now we have narcissistic victimhood, which is the modern form of victimhood because everything is narcissized, not only victimhood. Politics, show business, social media, everything is imbued with narcissism. So victimhood became an organizing or hermeneutic principle. Today we explain gender relations via victimhood. We explain sexual interactions, sexual scripts between men and women via victimhood. Politics, geopolitics. Even environmentalism is a victimhood movement. Here the victim is the planet. The planet is the victim. Of course, animal rights, you will be very hard pressed to find a nook and cranny in corner in human activity and existence. Nowadays, that is not infused and immersed in victimhood. It is the organizing principle. The principle that makes sense and imbues our lives, makes sense of the world and imbues our lives with meaning. So it's an explanatory hermeneutic principle. And these are historical, while traditional victimhood movements were historical. Modern victimhood movements are historical. A historical, I'm sorry. I'm used to lecturing in French as well. So A historical, in the sense that they don't care about historical accuracy. And they think it is perfectly legitimate to reframe history and create narratives that cater to the claims and grievances of the victimhood movement, even if they are not 100% in accordance with reality, even if they are counterfactual. We see this, for example, in the recasting of the history of slavery. Which is very far from accurate, and I'm putting it very gently and charitably. Next is malignant egalitarians. Malignant egalitarianism is the idiotic claim, and I'm being again charitable, that everyone is equal to everyone in every way. Everyone is equal to everyone in every way. So everyone is an expert on everything. There's no hierarchy of expertise or learning or knowledge. Everyone has the same rights, I agree. Everyone is entitled to everything similarly and so on. But wait a minute. If everyone is the same as everyone else, everyone is automatically a victim. Because reality never treats everyone identically. You are not likely to be dealt the same hand as everyone else. So this gives rise to universal victimhood. The minute everyone is equal to everyone, everyone is discriminated against, everyone experiences injustice, everyone has a grievance. Because if I am equal to the president of the United States and I don't have a limousine, something's wrong with it. I'm a victim. Finally, there's the most worrisome phenomenon in my eyes and the one I'm possibly the best qualified to discuss in the context of this dialogue. And that is the coalescence of mental illness with victimhood. Now I'm relying on dozens of studies, all of them recent, all of them in the last two, three years. I will mention a few names, Kean and Aquino, Weismel Manor and Kaplan, Gaby and Hameiri, Golvitsa and others. These studies have demonstrated conclusively that psychobas, narcissists, people with other mental health disorders such as ADHD, have taken over victimhood movements such as Me Too, Black Lives Matter and movements on the right of course, not only on the left. They've taken grievance-based movements and taken over and they are leveraging these movements and abusing these movements. And they've infiltrated these movements and these movements are utterly compromised. This is an exceedingly dangerous phenomenon. I see it online. I am actually the father of a major victimhood movement, victims of narcissistic abuse. I created a single-handedly, first 10 years was only me. I created this movement which today numbers tens of millions of people and I don't think I'm exaggerating. And I see within this victimhood movement this trend where narcissists and psychopaths have taken over, hijacked this movement.  So it's really bad out there. And we can discuss later if you wish, the modern manifestations of victimhood. That's, in a nutshell, the historical background. Well, it sounds as though we're trapped amongst a bunch of narcissists or at least those on the spectrum of narcissistic traits, because then you're saying they're making a distinction that these movements are ultimately hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths. Yet it sounds as though we're all in the midst of victimhood ideology and therefore narcissistic already. So it just gets heightened to your point, it seems. Well, we're all, we're all human to varying degrees. We're all human. And so we react to human incentives. Start with the fact that victimhood pays. It pays to be a victim. People are making money off victimhood. They monetize victim in a variety of ways on YouTube off YouTube with social welfare schemes with welfare states. It's all based on victimhood. People, some people ended up having a country owing to victimhood claims and grievances. The United States, Israel, Israel, these are victimhood based countries. These are, these are proofs positive that victimhood pays. The second thing is deceptive signaling. Deceptive signaling is the ability to signal victim, deceptively, when you're not a victim. In order to motivate other people, to indulge you, to share with you their resources, to behave in ways which are conducive to your goals, to secure beneficial outcomes, to render you more self-efficacious. When you say I'm a victim, it's, it's a kind of manipulative tactic because you can modify other people's behaviors. And there are, as I said, expectations as a victim, you have rights and other people have commensurate obligations. There's also the issue of competitive victimhood. You compete with other victims. I'm much more of a victim than you are. There's a hierarchy of victims. My abuser was much worse than your abuser.  We have this. We have this visibly, especially online. If you put the three together, victimhood pays, deceptive signaling, and competitive victimhood, you realize it's a capitalist endeavor. And I'm not deprecating capitalism. What I mean to say, it's a money spinning proposition. It's a scam. It's simply a scam. Now, am I disputing the fact that there are victims? Of course not. Victims exist. There are many victims. Real ones.   They feel helpless. They're depressed. They're anxious. They're dysfunctional. And the last thing they want to do is interact with other people. They isolate themselves. They become schizoid. This is all well documented in the literature. This is what real victims look like. They don't go on camera. They don't advertise themselves. They don't open YouTube channels with millions of followers and make something like a million dollars a month. They don't do this. These are not real victims. These are fake victims. Can I generalize and say that the overwhelming majority of these people are fake victims? Yes, I think I can, actually. I know it's a controversial view, but I think Greta and all these millions of teenagers just found a way to enjoy 15 minutes of fame, to signal virtue, virtue signaling to their peers, and to generate awesome material for Instagram and TikTok. I think these were the main motivations, not the welfare of the planet, honestly. Do you want to get into more of the modern manifestations that you were alluding to earlier that you said you could get into? Victim hood movements? You started right, Greta. We can try to profile modern victim hood movements. First of all, classical traditional victim hood movements usually did three things, fulfill three functions. They decried specific transgressions. They tried to reverse the victim hood state. So they were not invested in remaining a victim. They were invested in reversing the victim hood and eliminating it, actually, while modern victim hood movements are invested in remaining and perpetuating the state of victim hood, because it pays emotionally a process called catechesis, and it pays financially, and it makes you famous and a celebrity, and then you can have a lot of sex. And I know this sounds crass and vulgar, but this is human reality. Humans are animals, ultimately. And so classical victim hood, traditional victim hood, decried the phenomenon, decried the transgressions, tried to reverse them, and therefore traditional victim hood movements were remedial. They tried to remediate. They tried to heal. They tried to cure. And we had traditional victim hood movements among individuals, so individuals kind of try to remedy individual transgressions and we had them on the collective level fights, real fights against bias discrimination and oppression. So some anti-colonial movements, not all by any means, but some anti-colonial movements were blessed and very good victim hood movements. I think the civil rights movement, by and large, ignoring the malignant manifestations such as Malcolm X and I don't know what, but by and large, the civil rights movement was okay, was an okay victim hood movement. Because the core message of the civil rights movement is, we don't want to be victims anymore. We want to change the system so that we are never victims anymore. This is not the message of modern victim hood movements, not at all. So modern victim hood movements are exclusionary. There is an exclusive membership in a club. And this exclusive membership elevates you. It's a kind of sick apotheosis. It renders you got like, at the very least renders you unique, especially in some way. So it's a badge of honor to be a victim.  You're becoming invested in your identity. And there is a disincentive to reverse your victim hood status. If you are a housewife from Indiana, and I know I'm being as politically incorrect as I can.   And you're the center of attention. And you are beginning to make $1,000 or $2,000 a month off YouTube. And everyone caters to your needs, walks on eggshells, cossets, cossets you and pampers you. And suddenly you are, that's a new experience. It's narcissistic supply. It's wonderful. It's mini celebrity. I mean, just the week before you've been a housewife in Indiana and now everyone in Bangladesh and Nepal and the Philippines, kind of you. It's irresistible. It's irresistible even for healthy people, as far as healthy people are concerned. It's irresistible. We call it acquired situation of narcissism. You can become a narcissist. It's late onset narcissism. If you become a rock star, there's been studies of rock stars who didn't, who were not narcissists. But once they've become rock stars, they became narcissists. They were diagnosable. We say that they transitioned from subclinical narcissism to clinical narcissism. They were diagnosable. So this is called acquired situation of narcissism. So this is exclusionary identity politics based on uniqueness, specialness. And now you have an incentive to multiply your uniqueness. As you say, I'm unique as a woman. Wow. What an amazing experience. But wait a minute. Is there anything else I can leverage here? Yes, I'm also black. I'm also black. I am not only a woman. I'm not only victimized as a woman. I'm victimized also as a black person.  Double whammy in traditional victimhood movements. Double yummy in modern victimhood movements. And this is known as intersectionality of this. It's amplifying exponentially the benefits and the perks and the outcomes of each victimhood movement by combining them, simply combining them, multitasking. And of course, all these movements are grandiose. They're entitled. And one of the really, really bad things about modern victimhood movements, they dehumanize the other. We didn't have this. We didn't have this in traditional victimhood movements. The Jews never dehumanize the Romans. Never. Actually, they've learned from the Romans. The greatest historian of the Jews is Josephus Flavius, who studied in Rome and spent most of his life in Rome. And we did not demonize the Greeks because they, you know, victimize us or the Romans because of it. The first time we victimized anyone, we demonize, I'm sorry, we don't demonize the Romans or the Greeks. The first time we demonize anyone was the Nazis. It was the first time. And it kind of proves my point that modern victimhood movements demonize. The Jewish people never demonized anyone with a single exception, a man in Persia, the only exception. We never demonized anyone else who victimized us as a people until the modern era when we victimized the Nazis. When we demonize, what's wrong with me, when we demonize the Nazis. So demonizing the other is again an element. There is also conspiracy, the element of conspiracy. Victimhood is not only perceived as an accident of history or a manifestation and expression of power asymmetries or inexorable historical processes or, you know, there's no now is definitely and always the outcome of some mega conspiracy. So in feminist gender studies, there is the patriarchy. I'm a man. I never heard of a patriarchy. I never voted for the patriarchy. Of course, similar minded people would end up doing similar things and thinking similar thoughts. That's very different to a conspiracy. And yet we have conspiracy in all victims in all modern victimhood movements. And this is known in psychology as conspiracism. Conspiracism is a clinical pathological element of personality. So there's a lot of conspiracy. There's also on the right you have Marxism. It's not I'm not limiting myself to the left. It's all over the place. It's left right to name it. Cultural Marxism, patriarchy. This, that, you know, it's all conspiracies. And the last thing I would mention is that modern victimhood movements are concerned with materialistic individual goals. While classical traditional victimhood movements were concerned with collective goals like let's get us a country. Let's reverse a historical wrong. Or let's preserve our tradition. So these were collective goals. Modern victimhood movements are concerned with individual goals. Let's get more money. Reparations suddenly, slavery reparations 150 years later. Let's get more money. Let's have more sex. Let's become more famous. These are all individual goals. Traditional modern victimhood movements rarely discuss collective goals. Even when you have a movement like me too, which supposedly deals with collective goals, the goals of women. This is reduced to individual stories. You don't find an overarching manifesto of me too. Or an agenda of me too. There's no such thing. There's no scriptures. They're not scriptures. In Marxism, you have the Marxist manifesto, communist manifesto. In Judaism, you have the Python. You don't have this in me too. You don't have this in Black Lives Matter. You don't have this in modern victimhood movements because they are just an agglomeration of individuals, each one of these individuals pursuing individual goals and collaborating ad hoc to obtain these goals. This is what renders these movements narcissistic and psychopathic. So do you think that this clamoring for collectivism as I see it through cultural Marxism is really a misguided effort to mitigate against the atomization of living in the age of narcissism, a sort of we versus me ethos. Is there any relation? I mean, it used to be that we emphasize the individual, but now it seems to have mutated into a corrupted form of recognizing autonomy all the way on the spectrum to full blown narcissism. You mentioned earlier communism being on the right. I'm not sure if you've misspoke. I think of it is on the left. Right, right. Even though this is debatable, whether narcissism was right. Yeah, because I've heard that. Yeah, Nazism is still to the left, but it's just right of communism is how I've heard it. Yeah, it's debatable because Nazism was an eclectic moment. It didn't have a core ideological core. It was whatever worked, you know. Because if you see the, the, the full name of the Nazi party has something for everyone. National, socialistic, Deutsches, Arbiter, Partei, something for everyone. So I wouldn't classify it either as right wing or left wing, but yeah. I think the left progressively sort of, so to speak liberal left or whatever you want to call it whatever epithets is a cup of tea. I think the left pretends to be collective. The same way the right pretends to be individualistic. I think both of them are actually goal oriented. Very materialistic, very short term, very clear. And they want more and more of the same goals. Like if you get $100 not enough you want another $100. So it's a never ending quest. And there is, this is the incentive to perpetuate victimhood. So I don't think the left is collectivist and the right is individualistic. I think all of them are infested with narcissists and psychopaths. And when I say narcissists, I don't mean people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. I mean people with narcissistic style or narcissistic tendencies or traits or behaviors. And this I would say characterizes a big proportion of a population. Yeah. So, all of them are infested with narcissists and psychopaths who discovered El Dorado simply. Now whatever it takes, if having a collective call for action works like in environmentalism, then let's do it. If you're referring to individual needs and individual grievances and individual hopes of getting whatever benefits, then let's do it. Whatever works. This expediency is also typical of modern victimhood movements. They are flexible to the point of non-existing, not existing in ideological terms. They go with the flow. They don't have a core. They don't have a spine. They migrate to the path of least resistance. Whatever works, whatever gets things done, whatever, you know, let's do it. And there's no loyalty and no adherence to any real ideological commitment or even idealistic commitment. Maybe ideology is not a good thing, but to have ideas is a good thing. No one has any ideas. These are impoverished, intellectually impoverished movements. All of them. So I'm going to pause for a moment and put myself in the shoes of someone who's new to you, listening to you, and right out the gate. It'd be easy to dismiss what you're saying is hyperbolic or cynical, jaded, what have you. But maybe if you were to put a finer point on it, what are the repercussions of these victimhood movements being hijacked by psychopaths and narcissists? I mean, how does it manifest? You've talked about a psychopathic collective, for instance. What does that look like on the ground? First of all, let me be clear and give credit where it's due. I am definitely not the first to say this. There's a famous sociologist, Campbell, and he said that we have transitioned from the age of dignity to the age of victimhood. And I fully agree with him. There are numerous studies substantiating every single statement I've made, however, hyperbolic and jaded. I did bother to mention 27 studies about 10 minutes ago, because I knew this was coming. By now, there's a body of evidence that is decisive in my view, that victimhood movements have been hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths. Now, if we take this to be the truth, or even partial truth, because one narcissist is the bad apple in the barrel, one narcissist, a single narcissist can corrupt the whole body. Ask Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was a single psychopath in a system, a political system. He didn't even win the majority in elections. He was just a prime minister in a minority government. He had five ministers and there were another 20-something, which did not belong to his party. But Stalin was saying, we have examples in history that he takes a single narcissist or a single psychopath to subvert the system and convert it into narcissism and psychopathy. So it seems that narcissists and psychopaths act as catalysts. They catalyze a process of increasing narcissism and increasing psychopathy, and that's what I meant when I used the phrase narcissistic collectives and psychopathic collectives. These are collectives who have been infected or infested with narcissists and psychopaths, and they don't have to be the majority. They have to be strategically placed, that's all, and have to be good interlocutors, demagogues, speech makers, and so on and so forth. I, as you may have noticed during this conversation, have no allegiance to the left or to the right. If I had to give an example of what I've just said, Donald Trump. Donald Trump is such an example. The man has corrupted the political system of the entire United States. All of it is corrupted now, beyond recognition. And he did this in fewer than five years, and definitely a single individual. So, yeah, it's dangerous to introduce narcissists and psychopaths into your environment, because they take over the same way a virus does. And so if these victimhood movements are infested with narcissists and psychopaths, and we are not talking about single individuals, according to the studies, we are talking 30, 40% of leadership positions. Then we are doomed. And we are doomed, I think, for two reasons. Victimhood movements have infiltrated politics. And I'm not talking only about the left. The Tea Party movement occupy Wall Street. I'm not limiting, I'm not the leftist, I'm a rightist, I'm an observer. And politics is increasingly more victimhood based, increasingly more. It's much more visible on the left, because the right claims that it wants a small state or a small, you know, but the right is still a victimhood movement. So, right and left, these are victimhood movements that they've taken over the political machinery. That's point number one. Point number two. In the sense of the world today, we imbue our lives with meaning exclusively via victimhood. It became the exclusive principle. The first question we ask is, who's suffering? Who is suffering? Who has been hurt? How should we remedy? What things can we do to ameliorate someone's, you know, damage? And we take for granted that someone is a victim somewhere at some time, and we need to do something about it. We have a commensurate obligation, and he has rights, or she has rights. So, we can no longer think straight. We are not thinking straight anymore. Everything is now viewed via the prism of victimhood. We are, in clinical terms, trapped in a fantasy of victimhood. We are no longer in reality. We are fantasizing. We are delusional. We are clinically psychotic, in a psychotic state. Now, the psychosis in this particular case relies on the narrative of victimhood. But it doesn't make it less diverse from reality. And why does this bother me or worry me? Because survival is predicated on what Freud called the reality principle. Reality testing is critical to proper functioning in changing environments to derive beneficial outcomes. This is known as efficacy. You cannot be efficacious in your environment. You cannot extract benefits and outcomes that are helpful to you from your environment, human or not human, if you are delusional. You cannot do this. If we as a species have become psychotic and delusional, our days are numbered. It's as simple as this. Now, you would say, yeah, but don't worry. We have science. There are enclaves. There are enclaves where victimhood has not penetrated. That is not true. I'm sorry to say. I happen to be a physicist. That is not true. Even science has been infected with victim. You don't believe me? Read ecological literature or environmental literature. It is phrased as a political manifesto, not as a study. You don't believe me? Read the recent diatribes about plagiarism and lack of funding. And science is utterly immersed in victimhood culture, utterly. Everyone is a victim of something. They are not enough funds or there are no recognition or we are not putting the right emphasis. We should emphasize the planet, not civilization or I don't know why. And it's not limited to ecology and environmentalism. I see victimhood in physics. It's bad because it distorts our ability to view reality as it is, which is a precondition for survival. Except now we have something called postmodernism, which is introduced woke-ism. Like you, I don't share a fidelity to either the left or the right. So I'm looking at the delusionality of the left extrapolated out to a place of narcissism as it presents. This frightens me more than the right, because as you've said, the right at its worst tends towards antisocial or psychopathic manifestations. But at least psychopaths are in reality, whereas the delusionality of narcissism on the left and as it's presenting through the fringes, which has become more and more metastasized. So would you say that characterization? Something else bothers me in the dichotomy between left and right. Both of them are delusional, both of them are conspiracy minded. Both of them are victimhood movements, both left and right victimhood movements. Both of them are grievance based. There's not much distinction when it comes to the artificial observable characteristics, the superficial ones, the superficial characteristics, like the structural, when you observe them from the outside. But there's one major difference between left and right. The left is systematically oppressive. The right is individualistic. So the right is likely to be much more violent and much more psychopathic than the left. But the left, or at least in democracies, but the left, even in democracies, would leverage and deploy systems, whole systems to oppress the individual. And if there's any resistance would become even more violent than the right. So it is the systematization of victimhood that on the left that bothers me. What you call walk movements, self-censorship in academia, people lose their tenure and worse. Some people go to prison. It's not a joke. There is a systemic oppression of free speech, of reality and evidence-based studies. There is the council culture. There are the walk movements. This is violence. The left is violent. And the right is violent. But the right is violent, individual by individual. So it's not a serious threat, honestly speaking. Ask the guys who are now going to prison for January 6. So the right is incapable of orchestrating, even when it is in power, because of the libertarian tendencies of the right and the individualistic strain of ideology. The right is incapable of orchestrating collective oppression, systematized oppression. We have never seen a right-wing regime which was very good in the long term with systematic oppression. We have seen, you know, brutes and thugs in juntas in Latin America. We have seen the Nazi regime and so on and so forth. Nazi regime, I'm not sure it's a right-wing phenomenon.  Never had this. This is what bothers me, what terrifies me about the left. It's the left. I mean, we look at Congress and we look at the House and say, okay, the right is so many presidents and so many majorities. That's nonsense. That's not what the game is taking place. That is not what the game is taking place. Politics has been sidelined and not only in the United States, in Europe as well. Politics is no longer a relevant game. Business is and the public sphere, the masses. We are in an era of oculocracy, oculocracy, mob rule. The mobs rule through social media. The mobs rule through mass victimhood movements. Politicians are no longer relevant. They are totally solipsistic and autistic if they think they have any impact on anything, you know. So this is the wrong way to look. But when you look at reality outside the belt in Washington or outside Brussels and European Union, you begin to realize how horrifying the scene is. Where on the one hand, you have militias, essentially militias of right wing, you know, victims, self-styled victims, victims of the state, victims of the police victims, self-styled victims. So right wing militias. When I say militia, I mean five guys, ten guys, 200 guys, this kind of thing. But they're ready to be violent. And on the other hand, you have absolutely systematic state-sponsored left-wing oppression. Absolutely. Even in the United Kingdom, which is supposedly at the hands of the conservatives. That's that's what's the feeling of betrayal because the left is always presented itself as so open-minded and egalitarian and not, and yet they frame things in oppressor versus oppressed. So it's like they def protest too much. They're obsessed. Actually, I beg to differ. Okay. And it's good to have disagreements. Yeah. I beg to differ. I don't think the left has ever made these claims. If we look historically at writings in the 90th century, which is the origins of the left. So you have Marxism, but even more powerfully you have socialism. Marxism was a fringe phenomenon until the 1920s. The major movements were socialism, socialist movements. And so when you look at socialist writings, definitely Marxist. They're not talking about we're going to end up oppression. They're talking about we want to oppress. We have been oppressed either to now we want to oppress. Marx is very open about it. It says we need to take back the means of production. We need to destroy private property. The left is about victimhood in the sense that the left wants to render victims the oppressors. Like let's give you a taste of your own medicine. You capitalist pigs, you know, that's the left. Now it is couched in very beautiful. Because the left is great at speaking and talking. So it's couched in all kinds of, but when you go to the hardcore, the hardcore is about a redistribution of power. A redistribution of power as simple as that. It's a power oriented movement. It's about power. And so how do you take power with power? It's a war. It's a very conflictual movement, the left. The left is about war. That's the irony because they cast the right as violent and conflict oriented. And actually the right is conflict averse. Even rightist militias, they just want to be left alone. They don't want to fight. They want to be left alone. But the left is combative. I think that's the irony that I'm getting at here. Yeah, trying, you're helping me to elucidate and zero in on. You know, you're talking about e