Anxiety is attendant upon pain. It's a pain-and-death-oriented society, where the ruling emotion which subsumes all others is anxiety. This is the world we live in, and that's the world we have constructed. And that's a world that more and more, it seems, there's no way out of.
Because our economies are constructed around growth. They are growth-oriented economies.
We don't understand that for the vast majority of human history, there was no concept of economic growth. It's a new invention.
But our economies are growth-oriented, so we have all the time to create more, to work more, to make more money, more and more.
Our relationships are relationships that are, by definition, dysfunctional.
Because we lost the capacity to see each other and to be seen. It looks pretty hopeless.
And here is the said irony and the frightening reality.
There is only one way to survive in such a world.
Emile Durkheim, who was a Jewish sociologist, called such societies, anomic societies. These are societies that don't function anymore.
And he wrote a book, an amazing book, a prophetic book. It's called On Suicide.
And he said, when these societies were ripened, when they would become the norm, the standard, when anomic societies would become the standard, there would be a lot of suicides. There would be a lot of suicide. That would be the sign.
And so, in such societies, there is only one efficient coping strategy. And it's called narcissism.
There is not an accident that narcissism is on the rise, especially among the young, according to studies, for example, by Twenge and Campbell. It's not an accident.
The young intuitively understand that the only way to survive such a toxic concentration camp of an environment is by being a narcissist.
So they're becoming narcissistic.
In July 2016, the academic journal, Neocities, came up with a cover story, a shocking cover story. The cover story, the title was, parents teach your children to be narcissists.
There are all branches in academia. There are many scholars who begin to glorify narcissism, to extol its virtues.
So we have concepts like high functioning narcissists, productive narcissists, even productive psychopaths. This is the work of Kevin Dutton.
So we have today, scholars in universities who say that actually narcissism and psychopathy are positive adaptations. They are the next stage in evolution. They will take the species forward, you know.
It's a dead end in a dead culture, among dead societies.
And we, you can't live in an environment of death without dying yourself. We breathe in death. We eat death. We have sex in a dead way. We are dead. We are a zombified society. Pain, narcissism, these are the tools that are the only tools that are left to somehow cope.
In some way, I think, when I look back at my work and so on, I think to myself, what have I done? What have I done?
Because I'm not sure it's such a good advice to tell people not to be narcissistic or to be less narcissistic and so on.
Narcissism seems to be a positive adaptation. Some people use narcissism to get to the White House. Is it truly a good advice to not be a narcissist and a psychopath?
Yes. Today I'm much lessened. Much lessened.
It is also no accident that recently, we begin to realize that victims of narcissistic abuse adopt psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors and traits as a defense. We call it psychopathic narcissistic overlay. It's an observation I made about 20 years ago. Today it's common.
So today, for example, we know that CPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which is the common reaction of victims of narcissistic abuse, is utterly indistinguishable from borderline personality disorder.
There is emotional nobility, dysregulation and so on. It seems that victims of narcissistic abuse have discovered this truth, that the only way to survive is to join, to become a narcissist.
If you can't beat them, join them. You can't beat the narcissists. They've taken over. Join them.
And victims of abuse do it intuitively. They become more narcissistic and even more psychopathic.
And these are the good news because the world is moving into the next phase, psychopathy. We are going to enter a psychopathic world.
Narcissism is nothing compared to psychopathic.
We see the first glimpses of a psychopathic world. This is what I have to say about your question about Hungary.
It's not Hungary. It's the world. And it's the world because we have nothing to live for, honestly. Nothing to live for.
We are creatures made of dreams. We are human beings, our entities, made of dreams and made of stories.
We have lost our dreams and we don't have any story to tell anymore, any believable story, any story that someone will believe.
With our dreams and without stories, what is left? Dead flesh. Yes, dead flesh. Nothing.
We're dead. We have died. We just don't know.