Okay, so we go right to the question.
So, Professor, in a recent video, you said that we are now in a narcissistic society, and then you were before in a psychotic society. Is that correct?
That's what I said, yes.
Yeah, so I want us to elaborate on this point.
Yeah, okay.
I think there were two very important socio-cultural trends that converged.
The first one was the secularization of public language. Public language used to be religious. And now it became almost entirely secular. Except in highly specific groups of the population, in highly specific cohorts, the vast majority of humanity engages in secular public speech.
That was the first trend and the second trend was the privatization of public discourse.
Whereas in the past we used to engage collectively in a discourse that was common to everyone. There were commonalities of discourse.
Today, discourse, like everything else, has been democratized. War has been democratized, and we call it terrorism. Everything is democratized. Publishing is democratized. There are no gatekeepers. There's disintermediation.
So what used to be public discourse is now a cacophony of hundreds of millions of private discourses. And what used to be religious public language or public speech became secular.
And this precipitated a transition from a psychotic landscape, mental landscape, to a narcissistic mental landscape. And I will try to explain.
Religion is a glorified and socially accepted form of psychosis. It's an extreme mental illness. And it includes the two most important elements of psychosis.
It includes what we call hyper-fixation. And it includes confusion between internal and external objects.
In psychosis, there is an inability to tell a part where you stop and the world begins. There's a confusion.
When you have a voice inside your head, you tend to believe that it's coming from the outside, that it's external. You externalize the voice. When you have an image in your mind, you perceive it as real. And you perceive it is real, and this is known as hallucinations.
And of course, religion has these two elements.
The incorporation of the world in the individual, that's why people would tell you, God is inside me. You know, God is everywhere. Panpsychism, actually. God is everywhere.
So this is a crucial element of psychosis.
The expansion of the self to become one with the world, a unitary perception of the universe of reality. You are no longer an atom, but you are reality and reality is you. Total reality to the very end of the corners of the universe, 46 billion light years away. It's all one and the same.
And this is of course a psychotic view.
And the second element is the confusion of an internal object, which is God. God is absolutely an internal object. It's a cognition.
The confusion of an internal object, which is God. God is absolutely an internal object. It's a cognition.
The confusion of an internal object with an external object.
We tend to believe that God is out there. Well, of course, God is in here.
So that's why I said that the period of religion, which culminated in the 15th and 16th century before the Enlightenment with the reformation and after the de-Coubertin reformations, these were the last twitches of religion.
So the period of religion was essentially psychotic. It elevated mental illness. Openly, by the way, if you are totally demented and crazy, you became Jesus Christ. As simple as that.
So crazy people became prophets. Crazy people became the harbinger of religion. They promoted religion, they created religion. Religion is the creation of crazy people, exactly like social media, which is the creation of schizoid people, people with schizoid personality disorder, and some narcissism.
So we transition from this approach to reality, which was psychotic, to a privatization of public discourse, atomization, democratization, and the elevation of the individual.
The elevation of the individual started in the Renaissance, of course.
The four critical elements in the Renaissance were the importance of the individual as an organizing principle.
The cult of personality started in the Renaissance, the author, the glorification of autocratic leadership, which is essentially Machiavelli and so and so forth, and the reversion to the classical past. These are the four elements, four pillars of the Renaissance.
And of course, Renaissance was narcissistic. Protestantism coalesced with the Renaissance and created a narcissistic age.
And we transition from psychosis to narcissism.
Narcissism is a new religion with the individual as God.
The individual is the Godhead and the worshiper and the church. Everything is self-contained.
Narcissism is the first distributed religion. There are many nodes. Each individual with this smartphone is a god.
And so it's a distributed, it's a network religion, whereas previous religions were highly centralized, of course narcissism is decentralized and we see it in technology as well, technologies like blockchain, blockchain technologies. These are technologies that decentralize money.
We see it in warfare. The decentralization of war is today called terrorism. We see it everywhere.
We are replacing hierarchies with networks.
And this started in the Renaissance.
And this process leads to the apotheosis, to the deification of the individual.
Indeed, the individual is truly empowered. That's not a hallucination. That's not a delusion. It's true. The individual is truly empowered.
A typical smartphone contains 600 times the computing power of NASA, when they sent a man to the moon.
You are able today to make movies, to publish books, to reach out to the very ends of the globe, to create social movements, to become super famous, and you're able to do all this from your living room with your cat and Netflix in the background.
So we are godlike. Technology has made us godlike.
Narcissism is justified.
And this is what I mean when I say we transition from psychosis to narcissism.
Now I get it. So it's so true.
I mean, it's like the new distribution of illness, I mean of mental health issues. A transition from one type of illness to another.
Yeah.
Because everything is about distribution.
I mean, so if a new distribution is incredible.
Distribution is a proxy for power.
When we talk about power, we are talking essentially about distribution.
About distribution, yeah, of course.
So my second question was about this video that I saw the Narcissism Conspiracy, where you talk about this, the root of contemporary narcissism from Renaissance Protestantism and Enlightenment so you already answer my second question
So my third question is about
You just said that economics is a branch of psychology
And in your video capitalism, ultimate shared fantasy, you explain that capitalism creates mass envy, mass anger.
Could you explain this, please?
I don't think envy and anger are limited to capitalism. I think any economic system would yield envy and anger.
For example, there was a lot of envy in communism. People were very envious of each other.
But the difference is that capitalism elevates envy and greed, elevates negative emotions. Negative emotions in capitalism are an integral part of the ideology. They are considered to be engines of growth. They are considered to be positive things.
The capitalist would tell you it's good to envy. You should envy. Because only by envying others, you can progress.
So there's an identification of the idea of progress with negative effects, with negative emotions, such as envy and anger and so on.
Whereas in communism, for example, which I'm not an adherent of communism, I think it was a massive failure and the theory is counterfactual.
But in communism at least, there was an attempt to discredit envy, to say you shouldn't envy anyone because we are all equal. We should all receive equal resources and equal access and equal opportunities and equal. Everything should be equal. Never mind that in practice, of course, there was a group of people who were more equal than the others, the nomenclatured.
But at least the philosophy, the ideology, was much healthier. The philosophy, not the implementation. Implementation was a mega disaster. But the philosophy was much healthier. No question about it. Mentally speaking.
Capitalism is a narrative. It's a way to allocate resources in scarcity, in a condition of scarcity.
So the basic assumption of capitalism is there isn't enough for all of us. There isn't.
So now how are we going to distribute what there is?
And this is the way to distribute. You reward people who work harder. You reward people who have studied.
So it's an allocative mechanism. It's an algorithm for allocating resources which are considered to be scarce.
However, built into capitalism, there are hidden, or something they're hidden on purpose because if the masses became aware of these assumptions there would be rebellion, there would be social unrest, there will be revolutions.
So capitalism is deceptive, absolutely deceptive.
And some of these deceptions have to do with, for example, the concept of Darwinism.
Capitalism is Darwinian. Survival of the fittest, etc.
Therefore, capitalism is disempathic, not empathic. Capitalism encourages destruction of value, because only destruction of value can lead to new growth.
If you don't destroy the old, you cannot have the new. If you don't have the new, you cannot make profits.
The condition for growth in capitalism is the destruction of the old.
But when you destroy the old, you destroy many millions of people. You destroy their livelihoods. You dislocate them. You disorient them.
The psychological price of destroying the old is huge.
And yet this is built into capitalism.
And that's why capitalism has boom-bust cycles. That's why capitalism always goes through crisis, financial crisis, economic crisis.
In the last 200 years, we have had 76 major crises in capitalism. These are the major ones. There's been another 200 and something minor crises.
It's clear that crisis is a feature, a feature of capitalism, not a bug.
Similarly, capitalism encourages market failures.
Because market failures, market failures, market failure is the Darwinian mechanism of selection. When the market fails, the weak die, the poor die, the unsuccessful, the uneducated die. They die out. It's eugenics. Capitalism is eugenic.
But of course, at the same time, capitalism is a shared fantasy. It disguises its true nature. It comes up with fantastic narratives about get rich quick. You can also become rich. You can also have your dreams come true. Beautiful girls and shiny cars. The American dream, which is definitely only a dream.
You know, this is an integral part of capitalism.
Actually, philosophers like Louis Althusser identified this, and they called it, Althusser called it Interpellation. And Baudrillard called it the Society of the Spectacle and others identified consumerism as a deceptive religion, deceptive secular religion.
I have nothing against capitalism as an allocative algorithm. We are entitled to come up with methods, systems, to divide resources.
Because ultimately, really, our planet is finite. Our planet is, there's an end to our planet as we are discovering.
But capitalism encourages lying, deception, fantasy, capitalism is mentally unhealthy.
Take for example, and with this I will finish the answer, take for example the fact that we, on purpose, ignore the costs of capitalism.
When you look at a financial statement of a company, a commercial company, a financial company, a construction company, any company in capitalism, when you look at a balance sheet, what do you see?
You see computers, you see wages, salaries, you see travel expenses, you see expenses and you see income and you see profit.
But can you see in the balance sheet the cost to the environment?
No.
Can you see in the balance sheet the cost to the happiness of the workers?
No.
Can you see in the balance sheet the deterioration in the health of the workers?
No.
Many, many costs are hidden on purpose, ignored on purpose.
My problem, my beef with capitalism is not the algorithm or mechanism itself.
We can argue with that.
It's also, in my view, a very bad algorithm. But we can argue with that separate.
But my problem with capitalism is founded on deception.
Period.
Capitalism started off as a fantasy, a Protestant fantasy. Not a Jewish fantasy, but a Protestant fantasy actually.
And the fantasy was, if you're successful and rich, you're chosen by God. You're blessed by God himself.
If you want to know who is righteous in the eyes of God, look at the bank account. If they have a big bank account, God loves them.
So there was an identification of the love of God with commercial success.
And it motivated people to cut corners, to cheat, to deceive, because they didn't particularly care about the love of God. They cared about their communities. They wanted their communities to think that they are being loved by God.
It was deception within a deception. It all started with a fantasy and deception.
Now, many of your viewers and some of my viewers are not acquainted with psychology, but fantasy is a pathology. Fantasy is a defense mechanism and it's sick.
One of the most famous forms of fantasy is called narcissism. Narcissism is a fantasy defense.
So capitalism sits well with narcissism and created consumerism as a religion and a dream, created a dream, the American dream, the capitalist dream, created a dream as a substitute for reality.
In reality, capitalism is founded on negative emotions, on hiding the costs, on lying, on deception, on manipulation, and on a devastation of the environment within which it operates via crisis, via environmental costs, externalities like pollution and so on so forth, via severe damage to physical and mental health of others.
It's a psychopathic algorithm. I'm sorry to say. It's psychopathic.
Yeah, I agree.
So you're certainly aware of the Milei phenomenon.
Of the...
of the Milei phenomenon, the president of Argentina, the new president.
And Milei believes in the Austrian School of Economics and won the elections with a very provocative and brilliant narrative against the political caste. He uses and was really brilliant.
And I want to know your thoughts about Milei and about this new phenomenon that is rising all over the world.
It's not Millay only.
So Milley is a reflection of Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is a poor reflection of Putin. Putin and Erdogan and Orban.
It's a global phenomenon. It's the rise of autocratic, conspiracy-minded, mentally ill leaders.
Now, not all mental illness is manifest. Not all mental illness is visible. Not all mental illness is extreme.
Mental illness is very often a low-key phenomenon. Mental illness is like a background noise.
So many people are mentally ill without ending up in a sanatorium. Many people are mentally ill without taking pills, but they're mentally ill all the same.
There has been a pathology, the political process has been pathologized. People with pathologies rise to the top.
And I think there are three reasons for this, which I described in my work in the past. Much plagiarized work, I might add, in the past.
And the three reasons for the rise of these type of leaders is what I call psychopathological resonance, and I will explain each of these reasons in a minute, co-idealization, and legitimized anti-social behavior or even insanity.
So let's start with psychopathological resonance.
When we meet people, even when you date, when you're on dating, when you're with your colleagues, when human beings come across each other, what resonates is their pathologies, not the healthy parts.
The healthy parts actually do not interact. It's the pathologies that interact.
And then, if there is compatibility, sorry?
Wow, I mean wow.
Yes, the reason is simple.
The reason is actually simple.
And I think it's a very clever gimmick of evolution.
Because pathology means diversity. Pathology means not normal.
So if you want to experiment, if you want mutations, if you want evolution to progress, you need actually to explore and experiment the abnormal. You need to try all kinds of things.
You know, today in medicine we believe that cancer is an evolutionary vector. Actually, cancer is a massive experiment of evolution.
Evolution is trying all kinds of mutations all the time. All the time it is mutating.
And some of these mutations kill us and we call it cancer. But other mutations drive us forward.
But by definition mutation is abnormal. In normal conditions you don't have mutations. Of course, ipso facto, I mean mutation means not normal.
I believe our pathologies resonate because evolution is experimenting with psychological mutations. So it is a form of progress, biodiversity.
Anyhow, the fact is that most resonance is pathological.
When you have a pathologized, a sick civilization, for example, when you have a narcissistic civilization, when you have a psychotic civilization, when you have a psychopathic civilization, the pathologies of the population would resonate most powerfully with the pathologies of the leader.
So in the psychotic period, in the psychotic era of human civilization, people resonated with not demented nutcases like Jesus Christ and others, I'm mentioning Jesus Christ, but definitely all their prophets and they're all mental cases.
Today, all of them without exception, would have been in a mental asylum and you would throw away the key. Seriously mentally ill people.
But their pathology, which was essentially psychosis, their psychotic disorders resonated with the population's pathology.
The population was in a psychotic state because they believed in God and other nonsense.
So the psychosis of the population and the psychosis of the prophets resonated and the prophets became venerated and respected and admired and adored.
Then we transitioned to the Age of Enlightenment.
The Age of Enlightenment was actually an age of victimhood because the philosophers of the Enlightenment said that the church was an abuser.
They simply claimed that the church was an abuser and we need to throw away the chains, the chains of irrationality, crazy thinking and we need to liberate. It was about liberation. And that was of course the famous motto in the French Revolution. Liberation.
And during this period, during this 300 years of the Enlightenment, all victimhood movements prospered because the pathology of the population was victim mentality.
So leaders who promoted victimhood, leaders who felt like victims became venerated, admired, looked up to and emulated.
It's enough to mention Adolf Hitler. Who was a victimhood leader.
But I can mention, of course, leaders of the Communist Party. I can mention leaders in China. Everything was victimhood. The organizing principle was victim. The pathology was leading.
Today we know that an entrenched identity as a victim is a mental health pathology.
And today we are at a new stage of civilization, a new phase of civilization, a new pathology.
Because remember, pathology is the engine of growth. Pathology is the engine of evolution.
Not normal state. Normal state is stagnation. Normal state is death.
It is pathology that is the mutation of civilization.
So the new pathology nowadays is psychopathic narcissism.
That's a new pathology of the population, of civilization, of all cultures, of all societies, of all technologies, everything reflects psychopathic narcissism.
So normally the population would resonate with psychopathic narcissists.
And what is the core of psychopathic narcissists? What are the clinical features of psychopathic narcissists?
They are divorced from reality. They live in fantasy and prefer fantasy, actively prefer fantasy. They are manipulative, they're Machiavellian. They are conspiracy minded, they have a psychological trait known as conspiracism. They are disempathetic, etc.
The leader is the mirror and I call it psychopathological resonance.
The second element is co-idealization.
The leader idealizes the population, and the population in return idealize the leader. It's a mutual admiration society. It's a love face.
The leader is saying you are such a special kind of people. You're amazing. You're unprecedented.
And because you are like that, because you are chosen people, it makes me special. Because only a very special person can lead you. You are so special that the very fact that I'm your leader makes me special and vice versa.
I am so unique, so endowed, so gifted. I am the unique, so endowed, so gifted. I am the messenger of history, Hitler. I am the messenger of inexorable economic forces, communism, etc. I am, therefore, the fabric of reality.
So my uniqueness is going to be projected on you because you have such a unique leader that makes you a unique people. Because you have such an amazing, fascinating, incredible leader that makes you chosen and special as a nation, as a people, as a group, as a collective.
So it's a two-way street. Two-way street.
The people idealize the leader, the leader idealizes the people, and vice versa, and again, and it's a vicious or virtuous cycle, depending which way you look at it.
So, co-idealization.
And finally, the leader legitimizes the pathology of the age.
So a prophet, a prophet of God during the psychotic age tells the people, you are right to believe in God. God does exist. You're not crazy, you're not nutcases. God does exist. I spoke to him personally. I personally spoke to him.
So the leader during the psychotic age, the makers of religion, the people who invented religion, these utterly mentally ill people, the likes of which have never existed, these mentally ill people legitimized the pathology of the population.
The population said, we believe in God, but we're not so sure.
You see in the Bible, for example, many times, the population, the people say, we are not so sure about the existence of God.
We're going to worship the golden calf. We're going to forget God. We're going to worship the golden calf. We're going to forget God. We're going to worship the golden cult. We're going to worship all kinds of idols because we are not really sure that God exists.
And then the prophet, Moses, for example, prophet comes and says, are you nuts? Of course God exists. I spoke to him personally the other day.
So the leader legitimizes the pathology of the people. The leader tells the people you're not crazy, you are normal. Everyone else is crazy. You are healthy. Everyone else is crazy. You are healthy. Everyone else is sick.
Why? Because I think like you. The fact that I think like you proves to you that what you are thinking is right.
I am the source of legitimacy. I'm the source of authenticity. I am the source of veracity, of truthfulness. I am the truth.
Indeed, the New Testament opens with the words. At the beginning there was the word, Logos. I am the truth.
So, the people say, Millet, or Donald Trump, or Victor Orban, or Erdogan, or Netanyahu, or, you know, they're saying the same things we are thinking. They're verbalizing our thinking.
So it must be true. It must be true.
And then it reduces anxiety. It reduces the anxiety of the people.
People feel calmer. They feel more safe, more stable, more secure.
If you are a racist and you believe that black people are inferior, you may have some doubts. You may be a bit anxious about this ideology because you look to the left and you see pretty educated and accomplished blacks and it challenges your perception.
But then a leader comes who says, yes, blacks are inferior biologically and you feel legitimized and justified, and your anxiety is reduced.
Now there's a trade-off.
The leader tells you, if you want me to reduce your anxieties, you need to give me control over your life, over your thoughts, over your opinions, over your judgments, and in short, over your reality.
I need as a leader to monopolize your reality so that I have the power to reduce your anxiety, so that I have the power to calm you down and to pacify you and to grant you inner peace.
So, reality in the psychotic age was God. Reality in the Enlightenment was abusers everywhere, of all kinds. And reality today is power and money and a godlike existence. And it's being legitimized increasingly.
So Milley is not the engine of this. He's just a symptom. It's just a derivative.
And a latecomer, by the way. There are like 20, 30 other leaders who preceded him.
Taking a commercial break.
Wow.
What happened?
Millie catastrophe.
Yeah.
So you are saying?
I stopped, I finished everything I have to say. It was very very well time.
Yeah, so you were just talking about my next question, because I read your book and said a quote, not in this book, but not in the book, but just in a video, we have survived a generation of such leaders, men of action, the cult leader, seems that we are facing a second wave of personality cult leaders, and I don't know if we are going to survive the second wave, unquote.
So, you know, Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited.
You wrote that narcissistic leaders can connect, that's what you were saying, with the unconscious collective.
Yes, I just mentioned the psychopathological resonance. That's what I meant.
Yeah, that's what I meant. I mean that the leader can connect with the, it's like the we, the co-dependency, people who vote, they have this same, this narcissistic trait, but they are like unconscious. Is that correct?
I mean, it's the same that in Argentina we want to be like relayed, but we could not.
It's like you were saying about the people who are racist and they cannot say it because it's not good to say that.
So if there is a person who can connect with my unconscious if I'm very narcissist and I want to manipulate every person. So he can do what I can't. That's what leaders do.
Yes, he can do what you can't, but he also legitimizes your dark side. He legitimizes your dark side.
He tells you your dark side is perfectly acceptable, perfectly okay.
Actually, you should be proud of your dark side. You should promote it. You should make it your only side, etc., etc.
So this is the psychopathological resonance.
I'm not a great fan of Jung's collective unconscious thing. I think it's metaphysical nonsense.
But it is true that the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, contains pathologies normally. And these pathologies permeate, infiltrate, invade the minds of people who are living during this period of history.
We are, according to object relations schools in psychology, we are relational creatures. Our mind is the direct outcome of all the relations with relationships we've had with other people, starting with mother.
But throughout life, we are shaped by our relationships, our identities, the sum total of our relationships.
And there were even psychologists or psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan. Jacques Lacan suggested that the unconscious itself is the compendium of the voices of other people.
So he went so far as to say, he went to so far as to say that we don't exist, except as the nexus between multiple people. We are just a reflection of networks of relationships between people.
So of course, the spirit of the age, the Zeitgeist, is communicated via these networks. We are influenced by the ethos, the narratives, the stories, the legends, the fables of our time.
And if these are pathologized, for example in Nazi Germany, if these are pathologized, we would be pathologized.
Even if we start off totally mentally healthy, we would end up being pathologized.
And then as we become more and more pathologized, this creates anxiety because initially there is a healthy part. The pathology starts as a minority.
So the pathology is small, the healthy part is big.
But then the pathology becomes bigger and bigger and bigger and this creates dissonance. It creates conflict between the healthy part and the increasingly larger sick part, the sick part that is influenced by the environment.
And so there is a conflict between them. This conflict creates anxiety.
And then the leader comes to you and says, you shouldn't feel this conflict. Your healthy side is sick. Your sick side is healthy.
So you should pay attention to your sick side. You should cultivate it. You should nurture it. You should listen to it, you should follow it, you should believe in it.
The dark side is the only source of light. Your healthy side was mistaken, evidently mistaken, because it's nonconformist. Society is sick. So if you are healthy in a sick society, you are sick.
There is no such thing as objective psychopathology. It is all context dependent.
Take, for example, depression. If you live in a nice apartment and you have income and you have a boyfriend or a dog or both, then you should be happy, you should not be depressed.
And if you're depressed, we say that there is a pathological process happening. You should not be depressed.
In other words, you should be treated because something is wrong with you if you're depressed.
But if you live in Auschwitz and you are not depressed, something is wrong with you.
So depression is normal in Auschwitz. It is abnormal in Buenos Aires, but it is normal in Auschwitz.
Maybe, I'm not sure, but it is normal in Auschwitz.
In other words, there is no such thing as mental illness that is objective entity like something scientific. It depends on the context, depends on the environment.
If you live in a narcissistic society and you are not a narcissist, something is wrong with you.
If you live in a psychopathic society and you're not a psychopath, you're likely to be penalized.
It's self-punitive. It's self-destructive to not be a psychopath in a psychopathic society.
If you live in Nazi Germany, and you help the Jews, you're not a psychopath, you help the Jews, you're crazy, this is self-destructive, you want to die. What is this? It's suicide.
So, your mental health absolutely should reflect and correspond to the pathologies of the age.
And it is the leader, the leader is the intermediary. The leader is the channel. The leader channels the pathologies of the age. The leader communicates to you, the pathologies of the age.
That's the conduit. That's the communication pathway.
You are informed about the pathologies of the age through the leader.
And then you conform, you change, you become a member of the SS. You were a lawyer or an accountant or a teacher.
But then Hitler communicated to you that you should kill Jews in Auschwitz. So Hitler communicated to you the pathology of the age and you adopted yourself.
And once you have adopted yourself, once you started to kill Jews in Auschwitz, in Nazi Germany, you felt good. It felt good.
Conforming to society feels good. Conforming to pathology feels good. It reduces anxiety. It restores inner peace. It energizes.
The force of the collective, the magnetic field of the collective energizes.
Going against the grain, against the tide, against society, against the leader. The leader is the reification of the age, reification of the zeitgeist.
Going against the leader creates an enormous anxiety, enormous anxiety, even if there will be no consequences.
Let's say you are very rich and you don't care and you are very powerful, and you can go against the living.
But it creates axiological dissonance. It creates a dissonance of values, of beliefs.
You are an outlier, you are abnormal, you are outcast, you are a freak.
To not be a psychopath in Nazi Germany was to be a freak. To not be narcissistic in Millaise Argentina is to be a freak. And to not be a psychopathic narcissist in today's United States is to be a freak.
It is the leader who defines who is a freak and who should sleep well at night and feel happy when they get up in the morning.
This is the leader's power because he is the reification of pathology and the channeling medium of pathology.
But which pathology? Pathology of the civilization, of culture, society and of the age.
Leaders are seismographs, they pick up the earthquakes in the zeitgeist. They are attuned.
And this is why they become leaders. We don't, they do. They are much more attuned.
They have like a cognitive empathy.
I heard in one of your videos. Not emotional empathy, but cognitive, theycan understand.
If they are not, yes, they call them. Which is a combination of cognitive empathy and reflexive empathy, but no emotionally.
Cold empathy gives you the ability to create a map, to scan people or to scan groups of people, not only people, and create a map oftheir fears, their wishes, their dreams, their fantasies, and then to resonate with this.
Hitler was great. Donald Trump is great. He's great at this.
These people resonate. They create a hive mind. They convert a mass of individuals into a colony, like an ant colony or a bee colony with a single mind.
Now we have a name for this in neuroscience. We did not have a name for this until 10 years ago.
But 10 years ago we discovered an interesting phenomenon in neuroscience. We discovered that people who play in a band, in a musical band, in a rock band, for example, rock group, the brainwaves of these people synchronized to the point that we cannot tell the difference between them. All of them have identical brainwaves when they play music.
This process is known as entraining.
And in my work, I extended this concept, I extended this idea, and I suggested that language is indistinguishable from music. It's a form of music. It is sound. It is processed sound. It has structure, it has order, it has repetition, it's exactly like music.
And so I think when people are exposed to a political speech, their brains entrain.
When you're exposed to verbal abuse, your brain entrains with the abuser.
I believe entraining is a crucial concept in explaining mass movements.
I think it's super crucial.
I think brains are in explaining mass movements, personality counts, relationships.
I think it's super crucial. I think brains actually do synchronize, not as a metaphor, actually synchronize.
No, no, yeah.
The waves.
Yeah, you want a rock star is in a stadium and he said, oh, and now all the stadium starts to save the same, synchronized, and we are like incredible.
Yes, so this is a hive mind. It's like a colony.
So I have something in my mind a long time ago. It's like it's about the unconscious collective. I know that you don't like this term, but I always observe the behavior from crowds and it makes me feel like uncomfortable and unsafe.
Emotions plus collective together looks dangerous for me.
So I mean emotions are personal, not collective.
I feel emotions. I mean, when a leader uses emotional symbols, it could be very effective, but very dangerous.
So, what are your thoughts about this?
Because I think we should use ethics instead of moral when we are talking about or facing collective organizations or movement.
I'm not quite sure I understand the question.
You're asking about the use of emotions in collective organizations?
Yeah, I think that when leaders use emotions, emotions like a flag, like, you know, like patriotism, I don't know how to say that, like this kind of emotion is like very dangerous because crowds can do crazy things together like hooligans.
First of all there is a collective mind as I said a hive mind like the mind of a colony of bees so there is a collective mind, as I said, a hive mind, like the mind of a colony of bees.
So there is a collective mind.
In cults, we have a cult mind. It's a non-documented phenomenon.
So yes, individuals, when they are in a group, when they're in a coherent and cohesive collective, they suspend their individual existence. Many, many cognitive functions are suspended and so on. And everything is replaced by the instructions or emanations or projections of the leader.
The leader's mind actually becomes the collective mind or the hive mind.
And then the question is, is the leader dangerous?
Because if the leader is ethical, Nelson Mandela, for example, then the same mechanism can bring very positive result.
In mobs, in crowds, there is a suspension of reality testing, no access to reality, suspension of judgment, suspension of opinion, and a replacement of all these by the mind of the leader.
Mind of the leader expands outwards and consumes the crowd.
But if the leader is ethical and moral and a good person and a positive person and so on so forth, this could have wonderful outcomes. Of course if the leader is paranoid, vicious, hateful, this could have horrible outcome. The Gulag or Auschwitz or whatever.
So the emphasis on the crowd is wrong. The emphasis should be on the leader.
It is the pathology of the leader that resonates with the pathologies of the crowd and becomes one.
The leader becomes one with the crowd.
But it is the mind of the leader that prevails, not the minds of the individuals in the crowd.
So the use of emotions is necessitated because during the Enlightenment, many philosophers came up with the absolutely nonsensical, counterfactual idea that people are rational.
So we see, for example, in economics, we have the rational agent.
That's like the typical individual who makes rational economic decisions.
And of course, it's total nonsense. Economics is a branch of psychology.
And as we know today, people are not rational. Not rational.
There is a field in economics known as behavioral economics. It was founded by a few Nobel Prize winners.
And weknow today that people are not rational and all these construct of a rational agent that makes economic decisions, the way a computer would make them, is totally nonsensical.
Same in politics. Same in relationships. We are not rational. 90% of our decisions are dictated by emotions or by noise.
It's a recent discovery. There's a great book by Kahneman called Noise, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who was actually not an economist, it was a psychologist.
Daniel Kahneman, he's not an economist, he's a psychologist. He won the Nobel Prize in economics because they introduced psychology into them.
When we make decisions, these decisions are based on emotions, and if not emotions, they are based on some noise, on some disturbance, on some mess. They're chaotic, chaotic decisions.
We almost never ever make decisions based on analysis or rationality or other cognitive processes, structured cognitive process, almost never.
So it would be meaningless for a political leader to reason with you, to analyze things, to talk to you rationally, it would have zero resonance and impact. And it would rarely touch or trigger your pathology.
So leaders know this and they use emotions. They use emotions not only in politics, they use emotions in business. And of course, in interpersonal relationships, it's extremely rare to base decisions on cognitions.
When you meet someone and you ask yourself, could this guy be my husband, you rarely analyze the situation in totally logical rational way, unless you're a psychopath.
And if you're a psychopath, you are goal oriented and you are going to ask how much money this guy has in the bank.
That is rational.
The only group of people who actually are rational most of the time are psychopaths.
It seems like that Milei's option was like necessary to stop populism in Argentina.
And I live in, I live for, I am Uruguay, I'm from Uruguay and I live here for 12 years. And we experienced a very thick shared fantasy with Cristina Kirchner as well.
And Milei's narrative was the only one that was able to defeat populism.
Isn't this the way that dialectics work? Where are we so radical in this post-modern society, where the middle ground is ineffective?
You just ask this question, because it's like we need to be passionate, emotional to just move something, no?
The Hegelian construct, the Hegelian construct of synthesis and, you know, the three stages of Hegelian dialectic.
They have no foundation in reality. People don't work this way.
Social movements not work this way. Even science doesn't work this way.
And I'm a physicist. We don't work this way. No one does that I'm aware of in any field of human activity or thought.
This dialectic is flawed. It's non-human. It may apply perfectly to artificial intelligence or robots, but it's not human.
When we are confronted with a shared fantasy which is the thesis in Hegel's work when we're confronted with the shared fantasy we try to exit the shared fantasy by proposing another shared fantasy.
The only way outside a fantasy is into another fantasy.
So what actually happens in human affairs is that we transition between fantasies from one fantasy to another and then to another.
And some of these fantasies could be synthetic. Some of them could be synthetic. They could borrow elements from the antithetical fantasy and the antithetical fantasy and then combine them in a synthetical fantasy.
Yes, that much could be true.
But it's all non-analytical. It's synthetic. It's not analytical.
So people interface with reality through the mediation of other people.
And to accept this, to say to yourself, I'm going to work inside reality and I'm going to work on reality through someone else, through a political leader, through a scientist, throughout, I'm always going to accept the mediation and the brokerage of another person is fantasy, of course.
This is a great definition of fantasy. Shared fantasy.
So science is a shared fantasy. Politics is a shared fantasy. These are all shared fantasies.
We used to have a shared fantasy about some God in the sky. We got rid of that shared fantasy. I mean, most of us got rid of these shared fantasy, but we have others.
Now God is in the presidential palace. Or now God is in a laboratory in MIT. Or now God is in Silicon Valley.
It's the same shared fantasy.
We are incapable of interacting with reality directly without the mediation of a fantasy because of who we are psychologically.
Start with the fact that we never interact with reality. We interact with sensory input.
Reality provides stimuli, reality provides information, reality provides cues, we take them into our brain and our brain processes them.
And what we experience is not reality, but what we experience is the outcomes of the processing that took place in the brain.
We actually experience only ourselves, never anything or anyone else. Only ourselves. We are utterly solipsistic.
Solipsism is the only true philosophy for the very simple reason that we can never gain access to another person's mind.
So we're isolated.
And now we have two choices, the existential choice, Sartre, Kierkegaard, existential choice, so saying, you know, I'm alone, I'm alone, I'm shaping my life, my choices would have infinite consequences for me, and that is terrifying. That is angst.
How many people are capable of angst? Very few.
And the rest of humanity, what they do, they replace the angst with fantasy. They solve the existential angst problem with fantasy.
They pretend that it's reality. They lie to themselves. The same to say that it's reality.
But the fact is that when I take this glass and drink this water, I'm never in touch with the glass or with the water.
I'm in touch with the way my brain has processed the glass and processed the water.
And that's where it starts.
I can never be in touch with reality.
I have no idea if you are real.
And there is no rigorous scientific way to prove that you are real.
None. There's no philosophical method that I can use to prove that you're real. None.
I have no access to your mind. I have to rely on what you're telling me. I have to rely on your self-reporting. Maybe you're a psychopath, maybe you're a liar, maybe you're a robot, maybe you're an alien.
There is no method to decide what you are.
So, in order to talk to you on this Zoom, I engage in a fantasy that you are real. It's a fantasy, total fantasy.
Whatever you cannot prove with a scientific method is a fantasy.
And I cannot prove with a scientific method that you are human or that you even, or even that you exist.
I cannot.
That's why artificial intelligence is so deceptive. That's why people counter the difference between artificially generated images and real ones, between artificially generated characters and great ones.
Because the very concept of reality is fuzzy, it's bullshit. There's no such thing.
And so in politics, in science, in religion, everywhere, the organizing principle of reality is fantasy.
That's the irony.
And you've just replaced Kernberg's fantasy with Millon's fantasy.
And ultimately there will come a third party or leader and he will make a synthesis of Kirchner and Millay.
And you will say, wow, what a revolution we are finally embedded in reality.
It's also nonsense. It's also fantastic.
You said that we need to revert to reality.
And you said we invented the meaning and we become the meaning.
And in the process, we sacrifice everything around us.
Everything is a perspective, everything needs a language, a story, a narrative.
You said that.
How can we live without him? Is this your nothingness philosophy?
Because my son, he's 12, and when he was six, he confused video games with reality.
So how can we be in reality now?
We're still confusing video games with reality.
The President of the United States is a reality was a reality TV guy. Schwarzenegger was governor of California.
We are still confusing television with reality.
Absolutely. As adults.
I think you need to make a distinction, would be helpful for you to make a distinction between fantasy, language, and delusion.
When I say we should go back to reality, I mean we should get rid of delusions.
There is no way to get rid of fantasies.
The only way we interact with reality through fantasy, it's an organizing principle, it's an explanatory principle.
We are incapable of direct contact with reality, so we must go through fantasy.
However, there is a very, very important distinction between fantasy and delusion.
Fantasies are self-consistent and other consistent, self-consistent in the sense that all the elements in the fantasy do not contradict each other.
And fantasies are other consistent in the sense that the information that comes from the outside does not contradict the fantasy.
So the fantasy needs to be consistent.
Delusions are inconsistent. They are never consistent.
When you have a delusion, it's because you are denying and ignoring information that is inconsistent with the delusion.
When you have a fantasy, all the information, internally generated information and externally generated, all this information is consistent with a fantasy.
If it is not, then it's not a fantasy. It's a delusion.
And I'm against delusion. With delusions are not self-efficacious.
Delusions don't allow us to function and to thrive and to survive.
While fantasies, without fantasies, we cannot survive. Fantasies are critical survival strategies.
So this is the first distinction.
Second distinction, language.
And here I blame another Jew, Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein made the famous claim that about private languages.
And he said that private languages are meaningless and so on.
I think actually exactly the opposite.
I think the only possible languages are private.
Public languages are desperate attempts to communicate between private languages, and we can never prove that public languages are true. They don't have a truth value.
I have my own private language, yes. I have my own private world, my own mind, my own thinking.
I perceive the color red in a specific way. I'm sad, I'm happy, I'm thirsty, I'm hungry.
By the way, I am hungry.
So I have my private language and so do you.
In order to communicate to you how I perceive the color red, I need to use a public language.
But neither you, nor I, can prove that what I'm saying is true.
When I tell you, this is how I perceive the color red, or this is how I feel love, or this is how I feel when I drink wine, I cannot prove to you, and you cannot prove to me that what I've said has validity, has a truth value, because I may be lying, and you cannot prove that I'm lying.
So, public languages are, shockingly as it may sound, meaningless. They are meaningless.
They're just statements. We call them in logic undecidables.
These are statements that cannot be decided.
Similar to the statement, God exists. Can you prove it? Can you disprove it? What's the meaning of this idiotic sentence?
So, I am exactly opposed to Wittgenstein. I think the only languages with the truth value are private languages because I know when I talk to myself inside my head, I know it's true. Unless I'm psychotic, I mean, I'm normal. I know it's true.
So we should not confuse language with fantasy and delusion. Language, when we say language, we usually mean public language.
And of course, public language includes words, but also signs, semiotics, signs, symbols, behavior. These are all signaling mechanisms, they're all languages.
And language can give rise to fantasy, and language can give rise to delusion. Language can give rise to mental health, it can give rise to mental illness. It can give rise to anything and everything because language, public language, has no truth value.
When I say public language has no truth value, it means that public language cannot say anything with certainty about reality. If I say public language is not true value, it's useless. I cannot trust it when it comes to reality.
That's why delusions also rely on public language.
So we should not confuse all these issues.
When I say we should go back to reality, I mean two things basically to accept our inability to communicate, fundamental essential inability to communicate, and the fact that the intersubjective space will always be meaningless or at least contingent.
And therefore, if we seek the truth and if we want to get as close as possible to reality, we should rely only on our private language, ignore public language, we should rely only on our private language, ignore public language. We should rely only on our private language, and we should accept, however reluctantly, the role of fantasy.
This is what I mean.
Private language is the dialogue you have with yourself?
Yes.
And that's why you can be egosyntonic?
If you go back to reality, if you accept that your private language is the only truthful language.
Because the only person you can trust is yourself. The only person who knows if your self-reporting is true or not is you. I can never know. Only you know.
So only you are the source of truth. I can never be the source of truth for you. You are the only source of truth.
And also you understand and you accept the only source of truth is inside your head. Everything outside your head has no truth value.
And therefore, you need fantasy. You need fantasy because you cannot say anything. You cannot say anything with certainty about reality out there.
You understand?
Okay, I get it.
So we have, yeah, we have to, I have to say, okay, I have to accept fantasies. I am in a fantasy with this guy that I like and he's a narcissist and he will do bad things. But I am in a fantasy and that's my fantasy.
No, your fantasy is much more fundamental. You're in a fantasy that you're sitting in a room. You're in a fantasy that you are sitting in a room.
You're in a fantasy that you have a laptop.
Yeah, yeah.
Because you have no access to reality. You have only access to the processes in your brain.
And so you deceive yourself. You say the processes in my brain are reality, but they are not the reality of the room. They are not the reality of the laptop. They are the reality of your brain.
So your fantasy starts from the moment you open your eyes in the morning and convince yourself that you have eyeglasses. There is a process in your brain that informs you that you have eyeglasses, but yourknowledge is limited to this process. You have no access to your eyeglasses. You have access to the way your knowledge is limited to this process. You have no access to your eyeglasses. You have access to the way your brain processes what you think is eyeglasses. So that's where fantasy starts. But at least you know that the process in your brain is true, does exist. And this is, of course, René DeKal. Kogito, ergosum. That's what it meant, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what he meant, actually.
I think therefore I think then I exist. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, I mean, if we have to accept fantasies, otherwise we will live like in a delusional.
Exactly. These are the choices we have. Fantasy or delusion? True. And the greatest delusion is that you are not living in fantasy. The greatest delusion is to say I am living in reality. I'm not living in fantasy. That's the greatest. So, Professor, I'm not believing in fantasy. That's the greatest.
So, Professor, I'm so, thank you so much for this. Yes, this is, this was very, I saw so many videos, I will continue because you are, I was was I am worried about the our future and I think we must understand this to not continue following in this share fantasies with this kind of leaders and I think you're right I think I think you're right to be worried because I think we have transitioned from shared fantasies to delusions we are entering a delusion of age. Yeah.
The worry is justified.
Yeah. So thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. A pleasure. Take care. Bye.