Mmm, this is tasty!
But next time I will try wine.
It's no coincidence that my surname starts with a V.
OK, Terrified Trishanim.
Today we're going to discuss the ecosystem.
No, no, no, not dead boring.
The Narcissus and Psychopaths Ecosystem, where you are the prey. And they are the predators.
Especially those whose name starts with a V.
Yeah, definitely wine next time.
OK, let's delve right in.
I'm proposing a bit of a new concept here, as I do in every video, literally.
And that is the idea that narcissists and psychopaths have adapted their strategies of targeting victims in accordance with the times.
They have evolved, as any species does, in nature, survival of the fittest, natural selection, and all this Darwinian thing.
So growing awareness of narcissism and psychopathy since the 1960s has made it more difficult to prey on victims. Victims became much more aware, much more alert, and much readier to flee the scene.
I was the first to describe Narcissistic Abuse in 1995, and this launched a global movement.
And so now narcissists and psychopaths find it extremely difficult to latch onto hapless victims, targets, and marks. People are savvy to their techniques and manipulative strategies, and people don't give in as easily. They give as good as they get.
Narcissists often pay back involved, and this makes narcissists and psychopaths leery of the consequences.
And so narcissists and psychopaths had to adapt or vanish.
That is the core principle of natural selection, adaptation, and exactly like so many species of bacteria and viruses they have adopted.
They have transitioned from hunting to virtual reality.
Rather than chase and conquer one target at a time in an elaborate and tedious process with no guaranteed outcomes, narcissists and psychopaths have altered the universe.
They have changed the environment. They have geoformed our world. They created a new ambience within which it's much easier to hunt.
Narcissists and psychopaths imposed on the masses, on the collectives, on institutions, on groups of people, on religions, churches, and workplaces.
Narcissists and psychopaths targeted groups of people and collectives rather than individuals, and they did this by changing our civilization.
They have imposed shared fantasies that have redefined our culture and society in narcissistic and psychopathic terms.
They have injected their DNA into the cultural and societal hereditary material of our world.
Our reality has become narcissistic and psychopathic.
By recreating the universe, recreating the world, reinventing reality, reshaping our environment, narcissists and psychopaths have made it much easier for themselves to hunt for prey, subjugate the victim, exploit, abuse, and ultimately discard the remaining husks.
This new ecosystem, invented by narcissists and psychopaths, is binary.
There are only two roles available, predator and prey.
All previous civilizations, cultures, and societies afforded us a multiplicity of roles, but not our postmodern civilization, shaped, as I just said, by narcissists and psychopaths and later on by schizoid men.
In this new ambience, in this new environment, there are only two roles available, predator and prey.
Your choice, you are given the illusion of a choice. You are deluded into believing that having become predator or having been rendered prey was all along your choice, all along your decision. You're in control. You're in the driver's seat. You're empowered, but this is, of course, nonsense.
When you are in a binary world, you have to deny yourself, betray yourself, and sacrifice yourself.
Whichever choice you make, if you choose to become a narcissist and a psychopath, you have to give up your morality, your empathy, your companionship, your compassion, your affection, your helpfulness, your altruism, your charitable-ness, everything about you. You have to give up on yourself. You have to become this alien life-form, a predator.
And if you choose to become prey, of coursethis is self-betrayal, stabbing yourself with a knife at the back. An interesting anatomical position.
It's self-betrayal, it's self-denial. Choosing to become prey is the ultimate, the quintessential act of self-defeat and self-destruction.
Either way, in this new world, in this new habitat and ecosystem, designed, imagined, and created and recreated by narcissists and psychopaths, in this new environment, you are forced to betray yourself. You are forced to deny yourself. You are forced to become what you have never been and never wanted to be.
This process is known as estrangement. And in this sociological realm, it's known as alienation.
So this is imaginary choice. It's not real.
And yet, you find yourself shoehorned and coerced and cajoled into one of these two positions, predator or prey.
Of course, since the vast majority of people would rather be prey than predators, this guarantees an abundance of prey. A multitude of people choose to become prey rather than predators. So many of them do become prey.
But you know, when you are a habitual prey, you're also a victim.
So this binary construction of the psychopathic narcissistic new ecosystem indeed yielded higher numbers of prey, made it easier for narcissists and psychopaths to locate, acquire, and abuse or exploit targets, marks, and victims. It's all true.
On the other hand, it gave rise to victimhood movements, victimhood identity and paranoia.
Ironically, both victimhood and paranoia are forms of grandiosity. They involve entitlement and the misperception that one is of importance, a center of attention and focus.
But victimhood is an identity and paranoia is a survival and coping strategy.
These arose and erupted and became dominant modes of organizing the world and making sense of it because narcissists and psychopaths have created an environment where unless you want to become a predator, you're forced to become prey.
So this is not a conspiracy theory. We increasingly see narcissistic and psychopathic attributes, traits, values incorporated into the daily fabric of our society's cultures and civilizations.
It's not an imagination. It's not a conspiracy theory.
And so more and more people are getting victimized. They become victims. Their victimhood defines them because in this ecosystem, you are defined either as prey or as predator.
This is who you are. This is not what you do. This is not what's being done to you. This is your essence. This is your quiddity. This is who you are.
So victims develop victimhood identity. They define themselves via their victimhood and they become paranoid because they anticipate the next attack by a ruthless predator.
Victimhood and paranoia again created an imbalance between the number of victims and the number of abusers.
Victims whose identity is their victimhood are unlikely to become or less likely to become victims again.
And paranoid people are likely to recoil from any contact. They're likely to isolate themselves, to become avoidant and to withdraw, to have a constricted life. They're again far less likely to be victimized.
Ironically, the transition from individual hunting or hunting of individuals to the re-engineering of the ecosystem, the reinvention of the environment, which initially yielded an abundance of victims again created a situation where paranoid victims are avoiding predators.
The prey is now avoiding predators because the prey is scared, because the prey is paranoid, because the prey is angry, because the prey realizes its state of victimhood.
So now again we're back to square one. There is an imbalance between predators and prey. The number of prey is declining.
But at the same time, this created another form of imbalance.
Now that numerous people, everyone and his dog and his mother-in-law, they are victims, everyone defines themselves as victims one way or another, victims are now in search of abusers.
There are so many victims out there that there aren't enough predators and abusers to go around.
Every victim needs an abuser. Every victim defines herself or himself in contradistinction to an abuser.
This is known as negative identity formation.
I am a victim because I am not a victimizer. I am a prey because I will never be a predator.
My identity depends crucially and exclusively on the identity of my abuser.
So there is an identity entanglement between victims and abusers, and a victim without an abuser is not a victim or no longer a victim.
Victims need abusers as much as predators need prey.
And so victims are now in search of abusers.
Victims now label everyone as an abuser or a victimizer or a bad person or an evil person.
Victims now are redefining abuse in order to lower the bar of which behavior constitutes misconduct, maltreatment and mistreatment.
So the sequence is fascinating.
Since the 1960s, narcissists and psychopaths were hunting for individual victims.
Then victims became aware well into the 1990s, and the number of victims has declined because of this growing awareness, because victims learned to avoid predators and abusers.
So predators were stuck without prey.
So what they've done, narcissists and psychopaths, they have redesigned our civilization so that our civilization created the binary role, predator and prey.
And now you have to make a choice. Do you want to become a predator? Do you want to become prey?
Both cases you had to deny yourself.
The vast majority of people chose to become prey. They did not want to become predators.
But the prey are victims.
So this gave rise to victimhood movements and to paranoid conspiracy theories.
And again, because people affiliated themselves with victimhood identity politics and became more and more paranoid about the environment and about other people, this again reduced the number of victims and again created the conundrum for predators because the number of prey has again declined.
At the same time, it caused victims to look for abusers because you can't be a victim without an abuser.
So people started looking for abusers and victimizers, and people started to mislabel other people as abusers, victimizers, narcissists, psychopaths, and what have you.
Everyone became a potential abuser. Everyone became a victimizer.
Victims have redefined what constitutes abuse and what constitutes mistreatment and what constitutes victimization. They've redefined it.
And they set the bar so low that literally every speech act, every sentence, every word, every behavior is now considered abusive by one group or another.
Victimization has become so prevalent, so ubiquitous, so spread that now whatever you do, whatever you say, you will be declared an abuser by some group.
And there are thousands of such groups.
And so, willingly, inevitably, you will find yourself at some point cast or described as a predator, as an abuser, as a victimizer by someone, by some group of people.
And so this is the situation right now.
The new ecosystem created by narcissists and psychopaths rewards and incentivizes narcissistic and psychopathic traits and behaviors.
If you're a narcissist, it pays. If you're a psychopath, you rise to the top.
The new ecosystem promotes narcissistic behaviors, narcissistic traits, and narcissistic values.
This is known as axiological shift. There's a shift in values.
So narcissistic values, psychopathic values have now become normative, not only normative, but socially condoned.
And so ambition, ruthlessness, callousness, defiance, contumaciousness, rejection of authority, Machiavellianism, manipulativeness, atomization, self-sufficiency, all these are now being glamorized and glorified.
And of course, they've been injected into the axiological system, injected into our value system by narcissists and psychopaths.
So now we have an ecosystem, a civilization, cultures and societies that are utterly narcissistic and psychopathic.
They're conducive to narcissism and psychopathy, induce them in people, educate people to become narcissists and psychopaths, rewards them.
The system rewards them when they do become narcissists and psychopaths. They're incentives to become narcissists or psychopaths.
And so many more people have become narcissists and psychopaths or narcissistic and psychopathic.
And at the same time, the vast majority of people, the multitude of humanity are prey, they're victims.
And so they have organized themselves in victimhood movements in search of abusers because there's no victim without an abuser, a corresponding abuser.
And so now they label everyone an abuser or a victimizer.
And this creates the equivalent of the Karpman drama triangle, where every victim can and will find herself an abuser in someone else's eyes. And every abuser can and will find himself abused and victimized by someone.
So there's role shifting and shape shifting among victims and abusers. And everyone takes on the mantle of predator and prey at different times in different circumstances and in reaction or interaction with other people or different people.
It's all very fluid now. It's in flux.
The ecosystem that narcissists and psychopaths have created has elevated them to the top. They did rise to the top and afforded them an abundant supply of victims or targets or marks.
So it did work. It was a great idea to reshape civilization in the image of the narcissist, the narcissistic God in the image of the psychopathic divinity. That was a great idea.
However, it backfired in some ways because victims organized themselves because now victims are empowered. They have power and they can label abusers. They can label people as abusers and victimizers and offenders. They can even put them in prison. They can punish them severely.
In many ways, narcissists and psychopaths have been too clever by half and definitely too clever, too smart for their own good.