Joker’s Era of Narcissistic Collapse (with Ginger Coy)

We're both recording.

Great.

So, hello, again, it's our third time to meet. It's been a little while. Good to see you.

Hello for everybody else. My name is Ginger Coy, and I'm the writer behind Concerning Narcissism on the platform Substack. You can find me at gingercoi.substack.com, where I am both concerned with narcissism and find narcissism concerning. I write about the psychology of politics and culture. And it's my pleasure to be in conversation with the grandfather of narcissism, who coined the phrase narcissistic abuse, none other than Professor Sam Vaknin, whom I often cite in my work.

Sam, would you like to add to your intro?

No, thank you. Thank you for having me. Great.

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So as you know, it's been a grim week here in the United States of America, first five days of the Trump regime return. So, you know, the walls are closing in is how it feels to me for, you know, half the United States who didn't vote for him.

Trump has released the January 6th psychopaths, as you've called them before in the past, and I agree. And America has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord and the WHO, the World Health Organization, amidst a raft of other distressing changes.

So these political arsonists, they've come in and they've effectively shut down everything to do with health already during this avian flu crisis, which has, it definitely won't help drop the price of eggs.

You know, we've got HHS, the Healthand Human Services, Center for Disease Control, the National Institute of Health, the Federal Drug and Administration, FDA, as well as shutting down the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ.

So we're up against, you know, Christian nationalist, neo-Nazi tech plutocrats, namely Elon Musk, the brologarchy, the Russians, and a Supreme Court who is a theocratic crime cult.

And you've said that the United States is in a collapsed narcissistic state resorting to fantasy and self-supply. Can you expand on this?

Yeah, first of all, let's set the record straight. Donald Trump did not win half the votes. He won considerably fewer than half the votes.

However, owing to the antiquated and frankly anti-democratic system in the United States, electoral system, electoral college and so on and so forth, he succeeded to become president.

So Donald Trump is a minority president, and it is the nature and character of this minority that should be of concern and interest to political analysts and others.

However, what's happening in the United States is not exceptional. It's part of a much bigger wave, global wave, which comprises a few strands, anti-incumbency, anti-intellectualism, hatred of authority, contumaciousness, psychopathic defiance, narcissistic navel-gazing and entitlement, the resulting xenophobia, anti-immigration and anti-Semitism and so and so forth.

I always say that anti-Semitism has been the first anti-immigration movement in the world's history because the Jews were the first immigrants, you know, they were expelled from Palestine, they became immigrants, in effect, refugees.

So we are faced with a tumultuous landscape not only in the United States, and actually there's nothing, absolutely nothing exceptional in what's happening in the United States. You can find facsimiles of Donald Trump in Argentina, in Turkey, in Israel, in Russia, in Serbia. It's all over the place.

So what is it that we're facing with?

The one possibility is, of course, to leverage frameworks and theories from political science or from sociology or even from anthropology, trying to understand, trying to make sense of what's happening.

But I'm here to afford another point of view, or at least to introduce another discipline into the fray, and that is the discipline of psychology.

First thing I think to note is that this is not a culture war. Everything that's happening has happened before and has happened before multiple times and therefore is part of the canonical Western civilization.

Adolf Hitler is as much a part of Western civilization as is Jesus Christ. So Donald Trump is as much a part of Western civilization and American history as, for example, Barack Obama, or I would say even that Barack Obama is an outlier in this sense.

So there's nothing new happening here. There's nothing new.

Our shock, our post-traumatic reactions, our befuddlement and discombobulation and so forth, they are not warranted. They're not warranted with any acquaintance, however, fleeting with history.

So what do we have here in psychological terms?

We have a clash between what Freud used to call the principle of reality, or the reality principle, and the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle is reified or embodied in fantasies.

So we have a clash between reality and fantasy. Some people reject reality and opt for fantasy, and some people consider fantasy a very dangerous detour which may lead to extinction, and so they cling to reality, and there's a clash between these two camps.

Donald Trump, of course, let alone Elon Musk, represent fantasy gone berserk, rampant. They are the reification of fantasy, whereas others adhere to reality.

So this is point number one. It's not a cultural war. It's within the same culture.

And this conflict between reality camp and fantasy camp is a great organizing principle when we look at history. It also makes sense of history. It's a hermeneutic principle.

So this is point number one that I wish to make.

The second point I wish to make is that if we apply the paradigm of narcissism or pathological narcissism to what's happening right now, we tend to gain a lot of clarity and to acquire the ability to predict events.

In other words, if we apply this paradigm, we'll be able to predict what's going to happen.

So I'm here to do that if it agrees with you. I'm here to apply the paradigm of narcissism.

And I'll do it initially in a kind of a brief nutshell version, a headline version, and then if you wish, we can go deeper.

In narcissism, in the study of pathological narcissism, we know that there is a state, a state of mind and a state of being known as collapsed narcissism.

It's when the narcissist is unable to harvest or to garner or to elicit reactions from the environment, input, feedback, which would somehow support his or her fantasy.

So narcissists are fantasy creatures. They are 100% fantasy.

Narcissists abhor reality. They reject reality. They repress it and deny it and reframe it and lie about it.

Narcissus and reality, that's anathema. They don't go well together.

So narcissists choose fantasy.

But the fantasy has to be sustained in the face of harsh, intrusive reality. Reality pushes back. Reality always pushes back. There's a lot of information to process, a lot of stimuli, a lot of...

So the narcissist is constantly busy fending off reality with the aid or with the help of collaborators known as sources of narcissistic supply.

These people inform the narcissiststhat his fantasy is not a fantasy, that is real, and that his self-concept or self-image is not fantastic or inflated or delirious or delusional, but actually very true, conforms, is factual, not counterfactual.

When this effort to sustain the fantasy fails for a variety of reasons, the narcissist finds himself in a state of collapse.

Now when the narcissist collapses, he has basically two families of strategies to cope with the collapse, to try to reverse the collapse, and to try to regain the favor of sources of narcissistic supply, so as to reconstitute the fantasy.

So the first family of strategies is known as self-supply, and the second family of strategies is essentially fantasy writ large.

So I'll start with the second family.

The second family of strategies has to do with delusions, and also this becomes delusional and in extreme cases psychotic.

So he severs all relationship with reality, all interactions. He completely withdraws. He becomes clinically what we call schizoid, avoidant, he withdraws, he constricts his life, and so on so forth.

So avoidance strategy.

The second family of strategies is known as self-supply.

Self-supply means, I am so superior to other people. I am so vastly better that I don't need them any, actually. I am my best audience.

I call this process self-audiencing. I'm my best fan. I'm my greatest fan. I'm my best audience, and I'm the most qualified person in the entire universe to decide whether I'm a genius or not, for example.

Why is that?

Because everyone else is inferior to me, and I hold them in contempt. Who are they to tell me if I'm a genius or not?

I am the only one qualified to judge because I am a genius.

So it's a tautology. It's very circular. I'm the only one person qualified to judge if I'm superior because I'm superior.

And it's a tautology.

And in this sense, it's also a form of avoidance, because it's like a snake eating its tail.

So it's also a form of, it's a circle. It isolates the narcissists from reality.

And then the narcissists reconstructs the fantasy, or comes up with a new fantasy, recruits sources of narcissistic supply, people who would fawn, who would adulate, who would admire the narcissist, who would tell the narcissist that his perception of reality is absolutely correct.

In other words, the narcissist is looking for people who would gaslight him in effect.

And then the fantasy rolls on.

So if we look at Donald Trump, for example, he went through a collapse in 2020.

And then what he did, he self-supplied. He said, you know, I'm the greatest, and I know the election has been stolen. I don't need anyone to tell me that. I know that. I'm the authority and I'm the sole authority.

So he self-supplied. And then he reconstructed the fantasy, a new fantasy, or the same fantasy, actually.

So this is in a nutshell, that's in a nutshell.

We can go deeper if you wish, it's up to you. You're in the driver's seat, like Donald Trump.

I wouldn't put me in the same seat with Donald Trump, thank you.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't either.

Yes, and we could start with him, but how does it apply to the greater population?

I mean, are we collectively in a state of collapse and resorting to fantasy and self-supply to buttress our bruised ego? Those of us who disagree with him? Is that what you're saying?

Yes.

And I'm not making myself to the United States. I think Western civilization is in a state.

Yeah, we're going to get to that. Yeah. For sure.

I think all of Western civilization is a state of collapse.

Because you see identical dynamics in Russia. You see identical dynamics in Israel. You see to some extent identical dynamics in India.

Wherever Western civilization has had an impact or wherever the civilization is Western, essentially, in essence, you see a state of collapse.

Does that imply that we've caught the narcissism from the narcissistic leader?

You know, I've coined this phrase, political narcissistic abuse, which is predicated on the narcissistic abuser, that is the leader, and then infecting the populace like you teach all the time.

So is this a reflection of this state collectively?

No.

Not in my mind.

No, I think the collapse has preceded the emergence of such leaders.

So I think Western civilization has faced a series of challenges and has failed to cope with these challenges.

So we're talking about the two world wars. We're talking about global pandemics, some of which have decimated well over 100 million people. We are talking about the disintegration of institutions, political institutions, social institutions, the family, and so on so forth, gender roles.

Everything fell apart, basically.

Everything fell apart, and there has been convulsive, desperate attempts to cope with this disintegration. And they all failed.

We have had fascism. We have had Nazism. We have had communism. We have had liberalism. We've had capitalism. Nothing is working. Nothing is working.

And this constant failure has led to an increase in the intensity of the collapse, of the sense of collapse.

And so Western civilization has been in a state of object defeat and failure, at least since the death of Queen Victoria, I would say.

And so we're talking about 100 plus years, 120 years at least, and it's not an accident. It's not by accident. It's not a coincidence that Sigmund Freud emerged on the cusp of this collapse.

Because Sigmund Freud is the greatest chronicler of the collapse. He anticipated the collapse. He described it, he captured it, in a literary manner. He was not a great scientist, and it was one hell of a plagiarism.

But he had his hand, he felt the pulse of the times, the zeitgeist. And he realized that things are going to fall apart.

And then Hitler came and things fell apart visibly, but things were falling apart long before Hitler. Everything fell apart.

And then this led to the emergence of leaders who were essentially psychopathic and narcissistic, leaders who claimed not that they know the way forward, but they claimed that they know the way backward.

Yes, to imperialism.

Make America great again.

Yes, this whole expansionist thing that's going on.

But not only family values, expansionism, anti-transgender policies, etc.

So these leaders are not future-oriented. They are past-oriented. They're not even traditionally still conservatives. I wouldn't call them that. They are reactionaries.

I call them retrofuturist because you've got the tech wing.

Yeah, well, the tech wing is also reactionary. Ironically, we can discuss it if you wish.

Oh, go for it.

Yeah. We can discuss it a bit later if you wish. But the tech wing is also reactionary. This is a reactionary movement.

And it's a reactionary movement because there is a widespread perception that the abysmal and dismal present is a reflection of the failure of the future.

There is the belief that reality inexorably leads to the future and that the future is dystopian and dangerous and that our only refuge is going back in time.

Ask John, asked Jordan Peterson. I mean, that's his main message.

We've all become, or many of us became reactionaries, and we yielded reactionary leaders.

They're surfing the wave. They did not create a wave. They're not create a wave.

By the way, this is not the first time in human history, of course.

The most recent example is what happened after the reformation in Europe. When Luther came up with the 95 Theses, and that's by the way apocryphal. It's not a true story.

But when he was supposed to have come with the 95 thesis that he nailed to the church door and so on, when he launched Lutheranism, which later became the Reformation movement, this terrified big parts of the civilized world.

The Reformation movement terrified big parts of the civilized world.

And the Reformation caught on and became a fad and a faction in the barbaric world.

The Reformation was very popular where in Germany, in Northern England, these were the outposts of barbarism. They were barbarians.

The Reformation was not the movement of the civilized world.

Absolutely not.

It was the movement of the barbarians at the gate.

And so there was enormous trauma and shock in the civilized world.

And so this yielded the counter-reformation, which has lasted for about 200 years, and is extremely reminiscent of today.

The counter-reformation basically said, we need to go back big time. We need to go back like a few hundred years. Otherwise, we are doomed.

And so we need to dispense, we need to get rid of everything that we have accumulated since the Renaissance.

Or before, like everything we have accumulated since the 12th century. We need to get rid of all this baggage. And we need to be pure again, like in the 12th century. We need to get rid of all this baggage. And we need to be pure again, like in the 11th century.

So we've had this. And I can name a few other situations in human history where we've had this.

You said before that we're heading back to the Renaissance. Do you still stand by that or are you adding more color right now?

Well, that's the fact of the issue.

The Renaissance brought into play many new principles.

For example, the cult of personality, the primacy of the individual. The individual is an organizing principle. The supremacy of money. Capitalism, proto-capitalism.

So it was a renaissance that has shaped the modern world as we know it today.

And then there was reformation, which has a direct lineage to the Renaissance.

And then there was counter-reformation. Counter-reformation was basically a kind of orthodox or Asian thing, Byzantine thing, more than European.

And today what's happening, I think, is we're having exactly the same clash.

The Western civilization has chosen the Renaissance and has taken it, reductio and absurdum, has taken it to its reductive, absurd limits, with Nazism in my view. Nazism was a direct descendant of the Renaissance.

And then there was a backlash, there was a counter-reformation.

And we are in the throes of counter-reformation, ironically led by Protestants this time, because they have become the establishment.

So, yes, I think we live in a Renaissance world and I think many elements, many principles, integrated into Western civilization in the Renaissance are irreversible, for example, personality cult, or the role of the individual.

But I think much more importantly, there is a backlash that is extremely reminiscent of the counter-reformation, which is anti-science, anti-intellect, anti-dviance, anti-difference against the other-ing. There's an othering process. Altarity. And so on.

So we have this backlash. And it's a replay. It's a replay of the 16th and 17th century in Europe.

Only taking place, you know, all over the world this time, because there's second wave of globalization.

So picking up on your thread a moment ago, do you want to speak now to how you think even the tech aspect is reactionary?

Technology is often misidentified with science. It's not science. And it has surprisingly little to do with science.

Science is a value system. And in this sense, it's a religion.

Whereas technology is empirical, pragmatic, and is not driven by values. It's not axiological. There's no overriding value system that somehow limits technology. We see it today with artificial intelligence, where technology is unbridled.

And in this sense, it's the exact opposite of science. Science is a methodology which is strict and driven by values. For example, the belief that finding the truth is very important. Or the pursuit of the truth is very important.

So that's a value, of course. Or the belief that basically you could falsify things. If you study things in depth, you could falsify them, which is essentially a tenet of faith. So it can't be proven in any way. So it's very religious-like.

Technology is unbridled.

Now, this is the first mistake.

And the second, because we see science is progressive.

There is this illusion, the science always is a form of inexorable self-eternal progress cannot be stopped and when we identify technology with it when we say technology is an offshoot of science, or even a part of science, or even technology is the supreme form of science, the purest science, we then impute to technology the idea of progress.

But it's wrong. Technology is anti-science, and therefore it's anti-progress.

That's point number one.

Point number two.

Technology, of course, is a tool, instrument, an amalgam of tools and instrument. At the service of an agenda, there's always an agenda, always to kill your enemies, that's nuclear atomic weapons, nuclear weapons, to cure disease, that's MRNA technology, to establish colonies on Mars, in other words, neo-colonialism. That's also, you know.

So there's not technology divorced from an agenda.

Of course, there's a huge difference between an agenda and values. You could have agendas without having any values attached to them. And you could have values with no agenda, not translated into an agenda.

So science is values driven and values centered, whereas technology is agenda driven and agenda centered.

And so the agendas of technology, modern technology, are reactionary.

You could see it in the idea of colonialism. You could see it in the idea of oclocracy, the rule of the mob or the rule of the masses. You could see it in anti-democratic instincts. You can see... Oclocracy, the rule of the mob or the rule of the masses. You could see it in anti-democratic instincts. You can see it in manipulativeness or psychopathic manipulativeness, Machiavellianism.

There are in technology, the agendas of technology, almost without a single exception, are highly reactionary. That's why I keep saying that technology is a reactionary force, not a progressive force. Science is progressive.

And that would square with the anti-vax sentiment and the anti-science taking a foothold.

To Petrus, your argument there.

You see that all major technologists, the people who are driving technology, they're anti-science. Elon Musk hates science, his anti-science, criticize science all the time.

If you're against truth, you're into fantasy.

If you're against reality, you're into fantasy.

I think truth is the fantasy of science.

But if you're against reality, if you're against reality, of course, you're into fantasy.

And if you are into fantasy, then you are anti-science and anti-intellect.

And there's no reconciling this.

And then if you are anti-science and anti-intellect, you're anti-progress.

And if you're anti-progress, you're reactionary.

End of story. QED.

And modern technology is reactionary, whereas technology in the 19th century, in the industrial revolution was progressive, not reactionary.

We have a very bad confluence here. Very bad confluence.

So global mental illness, collective mental illness, because it's a mental illness, it's narcissism, pathological, coupled with huge power asymmetries, for example, income inequality, for example, technological inequality and so on, that are exploited and leveraged by people who essentially hate reality, and hark back into a fantasy that is highly reactionary.

And imaginary, may I add.

I don't know what it means, great America. I don't know what it means great America. I don't know when has America been great.

Again, that's a fantasy.

It's very very sick and very very dangerous confluence and maybe this sets our period apart from previous periods.

Because in the 16th and 17th century, you had the reactionary leaders, you had the mass psychosis. You had narcissism and entitlement because Protestants, for example, said that if you are rich, it means you are chosen by God, you know, and so on.

So you had all these elements, but you did not have the super powerful reactionary technology, and you did not have the level of income inequality that we have today.

So there are added features today that render this period unique in human history, like never before.

You know Sam, every time you sort of predict the future, and I might think it's too outlandish for words, it always comes true every single time.

I was looking at some of your work for at least four years ago. You were talking about the onset of feudalism. And here we are techno feudalism, unbridled capitalism deluxe.

And then you were talking at the end of your video called mate selection under siege about what we can anticipate in the future.

And some of the characteristics you mentioned were pretty dystopian.

I wondered if you could flesh it out right now, but sort of atomized that the future will look like parabonding will be, and dyads will be obsolete, virtually sexless, except as a transaction, isolated, tech-empowered, no societies, instead residential units, no communities, cities at its administrative entities, solitude as an organizing principle.

And with the conclusion, you're saying, welcome to the world of narcissism, the solipsism that you talk about.

Just as an aside, I came up with the concept of neo-feudalism 20 years ago, actually. But it's true that on YouTube I have videos and lectures which date back five or six years ago the techno feudalism is another thing that Vagov, that's another guy came up with the idea of techno feudalism and it's a combination of actually what I'm saying.

I mean, feudalism is reactionary. It's going back to the past.

And he said that this is, technology is actually a form of feudalism.

And so he's saying the same. He's saying the technology is reactionary.

Coming back to mate selection and so on.

I think as usual, we need to take a bird's eye view.

Many, many of the concepts we use intuitively and as a matter of course are very new.

For example, the idea of society. It's a very, very new idea. You can't find it in writings in the 18th century, or the 17th century, let's say. You can't.

The first time society was mentioned as an organizing principle was at the end of the 18th century.

So it's a very new idea.

And so when you come up with new ideas and they have hermeneutic power, they have explanatory power, then you tend to believe that they reflect reality. You tend to believe that they reflect reality you tend to believe that they have also ontological power.

So if the idea of society, the concept of society helps me to make sense of my life, to make sense of my interactions with other people, to make sense of institutions and structures and hyperstructures and so on, then probably society exists. It is so powerful in explaining the world that probably it reflects something that really exists.

But of course there's not such thing as society. These concepts are concepts. They are ways, they are language elements. They don't reflect anything real.

And so we are adaptive as a species. We're an adaptive species.

Now the constraints and the challenges of the environment and the stimuli from the environment are such that as a society or a collective, they are no longer needed as organizing principles, as organizations, or as institutions. So long they needed.

I mean, 200 years from now, when sociologists would look back, there would be a standard that we had the delusion that societies are necessary.

The normal state of humanity is isolation. We have never had big units.

In the inception of humanity, when humanity began, we had tiny units, small units, five, six, seven people roaming the earth, gathering roots and hunting small animals. And that has been the case up until 10,000 years ago.

The last 10,000 years are an aberration. They are not the norm.

We are not zoon political. We are not social animals. Absolutely not. It's complete nonsense.

We are solitary. We are loners. We collaborate, but so do, you know, other species. We collaborate. We are goal-oriented. It's all true and so on but we are solitary animals.

And what is even more important, as distinct from all other species, we prefer to live in symbolic spaces. We have a preference for symbolic spaces.

So we would die for a flag, or we would die for an ID, like a nation state, which is just an ID.

When we are faced with a choice, you could live in reality or you could live in a fantasy which is essentially a symbolic space, where would you choose?

The overwhelming vast majority of us would choose the fantasy because we are creatures made of dreams. We are made of dreams. We are symbolic creatures.

We always start with reality, and then we devolve or evolve into fantasy.

And I'll give you an example. Money.

Initially money was a physical thing. You had shells and you had coins and you had notes and you had...

So we started with reality. We started with tangibles.

But then hurriedly, we invented the banking system and fiat currency and reserve fractions and so on.

And now, almost 99% of our money, it's just symbols in computers. It's digits in computers. It doesn't exist physically.

And where we have come up with a meta language of money, that's cryptocurrencies, crypto assets, we are withdrawing.

So we're becoming more and more abstract, more and more symbolic.

So we are a species that likes to live atomized, isolated. We are loners by nature.

And we are loners by nature because when you are forced to be with other people, you are forced to confront reality. Other people are the messengers of reality.

So, you can't live with another person. You can't have a relationship of any kind whatsoever with another human being and not be forced into reality.

And we don't want that. We're symbolic creatures.

So when we're alone, we can live in fantasy, we can process symbols. We can thrive in the abstract landscapes internally and externally.

And so what's happening now, we are reverting to a more natural state. We have had 10,000 unusual crazy years that do not represent the nature of humanity.

And that's why this 10,000 year-long experiment has failed. This experiment has failed.

The experiment with civilization, with cities, the urban experiment, with society, with family, this experiment has failed because it ran contra to human nature.

There is not human nature. Family is not human nature. Having children is not human nature. Living in cities is absolutely not human nature. Forcing to, being forced to interact with other people, even minimally, is not human nature.

That's why after COVID, no one wanted to go back to the office, to a physical office. That's not human nature.

And so we tried for 10,000 years to coerce, to shoehorn human nature, to mold it somehow, because we were arrogant.

There was this intellectual arrogance that we can somehow modify human nature, control it, reinvent it, or we can't, ultimately we're animals.

And so we're just going back to how we should always have been atomized, all by ourselves, living in a fantasy, immersed in symbols, engaging with reality only when absolutely necessary.

That's who we truly are.

What does that look like, a rural environment where we could be apart from one another?

It doesn't have to be rural, because you could have a city with 200 million people and be out completely alone. The spatial division is not very important because that's a figment of reality. And reality is not relevant and not important.

So today you're in your apartment and your apartment could be tiny, but you're self-sufficient basically. All your entertainment needs, food is delivered, laundry, there's a laundry shaft or whatever, you're self-sufficient.

And what modern technology is doing, that's why I call it reactionary. Modern technology is pushing us back to a pre-societal stage.

The irony is that the most asocial thing ever is social media. These technologies are pushing us to the state of being that preceded the formation of societies and cities and so on. Families.

That's why the family is falling apart, dying.

Dying.

Well, this regressive quality, it's scary. It feels like we're sliding back in time.

I wouldn't use words like, although I have used, but I don't think back and forward and so on, these are value-laden words. I think we are aligning more with our nature.

And that could be very scary.

I'm not saying, you know, for people like me and you, I mean, I'm twice your age, but still for people like us, we have grown in within societies. We are used to these organizing principles.

And when they are gone or when they evaporate and dissipate we feel you know disoriented and we feel dystopian.

But children born now or in the next hundred years they would be shocked to learn that people have had physical sex they would be totally disgusted by the idea that you had to work in an office where you had to share toilets.

And they would find the concept of society to be very reminiscent of an ant colony or a bee colony. And very, very anti-human, very anti-human idea.

And indeed, there's a great argument to be made that our mental illnesses, our dysfunction, and so on, were brought on by these unnatural organizing principles.

The city, for example. I think the city is a breeding ground for mental illness, crime, and so on and so forth. And I'm not the first to say this, of course.

But I think on a larger scale, the fact that we were coerced and pushed to live with each other, to work with each other, to have sex with each other, to create families with each other, and so on, so forth, we were expected to do that. We were penalized when we refused to do that. We were coerced to conform.

I think this was an anti-human experiment, absolutely anti-human.

So you see, it's not completely, in my view at least, not completely black and white.

Because we are guilty of splitting when we say, you know, Donald Trump is all black and we're also guilty of splitting. It's not completely black and white.

The source of attraction of people like Donald Trump and worse, they're worse, believe it or not.

The source of attraction of these people is that they have a message which appeals to human nature.

They're saying, you know, you have been forced to act unnaturally, to think unnaturally, and we're going now to allow you to be you.

What is the message of Donald Trump? He says, the big betrayal, you know? He says, all this bullshit with woke and transgender and so on and so forth, bullshit is his word, not mine, with woke and transgender and so on so forth, this is artificial, this is fake, they were brainwashing you. And now I'm liberating you.

It's a message of liberation. It's a kind of liberation theology, you know, it's a message of liberation. I'm a message of liberation. I'm freeing you from these ideologies and I'm freeing you not only from the ideology of transgender or woke or but I'm freeing you from the need to conform.

It's a rebellion of essence.

So it's like giving license to people to dispense with institutions, with societies, with families.

Ultimately, people like Donald Trump and others, and this is only beginning, mind you, it's not going to end. This is the next 200, 300 years. This is a mega trend. It's a huge historical trend.

At the end of this trend, ironically, we're going to live in a, we're going to have a situation where there would be no families anymore.

So the irony is that these people claim to be pro-family and family values and this and that, but their libertarianism, their anarchy, their anarchic principle, their liberation theology, lead to the point where people will say, well, if I'm free to choose, if everything is relative, if, you know, then I choose to not have family, a family.

So they're agents of progressivism, they just don't realize.

Oh, they're espousing eugenics too.

You know, what is this going to look like, Brave New World, where you have just incubators, no one has sex and connects in that fashion any longer.

It's part of the ethos of infinite growth.

Allow me to elaborate a bit.

There is this assumption that we need to grow all the time.

Economically, definitely. There's the ethos or myth of growth in economics.

An economy, a national economy, has to grow all the time.

So every year, we measure. Did GDP grow? Did industrial production grow? Did we constantly measure?

That's not capitalism, of course. Capitalism was corrupted by the growth ideology, or by the growth tenet.

But this idea that we should grow all the time has infiltrated everything. It even infiltrated the question of population policies and so.

You're asking, will we have incubators? How about the world where there are no children anymore whatsoever at all?

Not incubate.

Everyone will live forever.

They're about long-termism as well.

They're not forever. There will be a mortization. The population will dwindle from 20 billion when this will start to, let's say, one billion.

Who said we have to be 8 billion people or 80 or where's the magic number? Why do we have to multiply and grow all the time? Why not dwindle and even maybe fade away gently into the night?

Yeah, by shuttering these health agencies, it does seem like eugenics. Like it's going to be Darwinian who survives all of us.

Yeah, that's one way of accomplishing this.

But another way of accomplishing this is getting rid of institutions such as a family. Motherhood. Motherhood is a new invention, of course, totally new. Childhood is a new invention.

I think I told you in one of our previous talks, I gave you the example of Louisa May Alcott. She wrote a book and the book is called Little Women, not little girls or little children. There was no concept of child. The concept of child is about 150 years old. It's new.

So, you know, maybe for some industrial purposes, military purposes and so on, there will be factories that will produce children. We will be producing children that will produce smartphones on demand.

But we will not be producing them gratuitously or unnecessarily because children are a burden. Children are a burden and, you know, they're not a pleasant experience.

Studies have shown, have demonstrated conclusively in the past 60 years that childless people are dramatically happier than parents.

Yeah. We included.

So I'm on purpose being a bit provocative because I want us to challenge all these hidden assumptions and concepts that appear to be eternal but they're two years, 200 years old.

Well that's why I enjoyed speaking with you and learning from you Sam because you always seem to invert the status quo thinking and give us a lot to think about and it's not just provocative for the sake of being provocative either.

I think that earlier, what you say usually comes true, no matter how outlandish it seems.

Well, because I don't predict, I retrodect, I look at history.

I think these people are arrogant. People like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, I don't think. I know. They're arrogant. They're arrogant and they say, we control the flow of history. We make history.

But no one makes history. I think the only two people in history who made history were Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. These are the only two people in history who harnessed history and redirected it. And Adolf Hitler is debatable.

So no one controls history. I think the likes of Elon Musk and Donald Trump and others, Viktor Orban and Putin, all these people, I think what they're surfing the wave of the reactionary wave, away from what came to be perceived as dystopia, liberalism, capitalism and even democracy came to be perceived by many, many people as dystopian or at the very least as inefficacious like in the case of democracy but definitely dystopian.

So they're surfing the wave of, away from dystopia.

What they don't realize, they're leading us to a new, brave new world.

And this brave new world is revolutionary. It's not conservative. It's not traditional. It's not religious, definitely. It's super revolutionary. It's not conservative. It's not traditional. It's not religious, definitely. It's super revolutionary.

They are agents of progressivism likenever before. They just don't realize it.

They call it accelerationism.

Yes, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are going to destroy the family once and for all, much more than any woke movement has ever done.

You know, they are going to create amalgams of industry and technology and intellectual pursuits that are going actually to drive us away from each other.

And so they're going to atomize society. They're going to accomplish what intellectuals, the most progressive, crazily progressive, Kropotkin, and I don't know what, wanted. They're going to accomplish this.

These are the people who are going to, these are the agents. They are going to do this.

And they don't understand this. They think they are leading us back to an era with sanctity of the family, community, society. They are leading exactly away from all these.

Exactly. Nation states, they will be the big destroyers of the nation state. There will not be a single nation state left standing, starting with the United States. Not one.

They're so obsessed with tax-free zones, so network states, special economic zones, everything to get away from everything to do with nation states.

And the nation, as you've talked about before, with one of our talks, it's identity driven. And we have such a diaspora at this point. There's no unity. No one even wants, or hungers for unity the same way that they once did.

Nation state is a compact. It's a consensus. It's a set of symbols and ideas incorporated into what appears to be a cohesive or coherent framework. So it's nothing. A nation state is nothing. It's just an idea.

When you saw dissent, which is what Donald Trump is best at doing, when you saw dissent, when you are dismantling the nation state.

There is no non-dissenting nation state.

He drives wedges everywhere. You're right.

They're dismantling the nation state.

Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Taylor Greene, yeah.

Yeah, the greatest intellectual in the modern conservative movement. She said, we need to divorcehalf of this country and another half and we need to divorce.

She intuitively, because she's a primitive moral, she intuitively grasped the crux of what's happening, the gist of what's happening.

Yes, exactly. There's a divorce happening.

All in- In the government in California and Texas, one of 60, get away.

It's not only divorce in this limited sense, divorce, you know, like a slow motion civil war. It's not only divorce in this limited sense.

It's a divorce, it's a valuedivorce in values, divorce in lifestyles, divorce in what's permissible and what's not, divorce in political institutions, divorce in individual institutions. Everything is falling apart. She understood that.

But she didn't go one step further, owing to intellectual limitations, I assume. She didn't go one step further.

Who has wrought this divorce? Who has made it possible? Who has made it even discussable?

Her own movement. Of course, that the left has pushed people to behave in ways which were unnatural, I fully agree. And I'm a great critic of the work movements and victimhood movements and great.

Me too.

So the left has also pushed people to this divorce, so both left and right, but the right is also responsible.

That's what she doesn't grasp. It is the right in charge now, and the right is pushing for the demise of the nation-state, and the death of the family, and the destruction of society, which were values espoused by the most liberal and progressive thinkers in the 1930s and 40s and 50s.

That's an amazing joke. Donald Trump is a natural extension of Bertrand Russell, although he probably never heard of him. Or Aldous Huxley.

So they just don't understand that because they're illiterate. Most of them are illiterate.

Exactly.

He traffics in pseudo realities.

I mean, this is postmodernism, this is wokeism, this is moral relativism, and they don't even understand these are the waters in which they move.

So I want to ask you about another video that you put out.

You said that we shouldn't put certain classes of narcissists like Donald Trump, like Elon Musk, on a pedestal, that garden variety non-wealthy narcissists were quick to deride and dismiss and, but otherwise we venerate and elevate these other ones. Can you speak more than that?

I think we feel unsafe. We feel unsafe.

There are too many changes happening simultaneously. And there's no guide.

You know, throughout human history, there's always been a guide. Like you had the Bible. The Bible was a guide, you know. Or later in the 19th and 20th century, or 18th century, there was the Enlightenment, so you had the big minds that were guiding you.

We don't have a guide nowadays. We don't have guides, or at least not guides that are universally accepted so we are adrift and we're terrified and state of uncertainty indeterminacy and so on we dysregulate ourselves our fear and so on disregulate us we are self-dis regulating rather than self-regulating and so on, disregulate us. We are self-disregulating rather than self-regulating.

And so the natural inclination is to regress. When you're in such a state, you regress. You become an infant. You become a baby. Helpless, terrified, lost.

And then, then of course you're looking for a parental figure. A strong man or a strong woman. Margaret Thatcher was a strong woman, let it be clear, you know.

A strong man or a strong woman, who would absolve you and keep you safe. Absolve you of your mistakes, wrong decisions, bad choices.

They absolve you because they take over the executive functions. They render you helpless, but a benevolent kind of helplessness.

Now you don't have to make decisions. You don't have to make choice. We're going to make them for you. So you're not responsible. You will not be held accountable. There will be no consequences.

So that's, you know, one thing.

And the second thing is you're safe. You're safe because we know what we're doing.

I mean, look at me. I'm a billionaire several times over. I have a huge experience in business all over the world. I meet leaders.

So the message is, I'm vastly superior to you.

The message of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and so on ironically is, I am so vastly superior to you, surrender yourself.

Because you can never have my experience. You can never know what I know. You can never succeed the way I have. I am vastly superior. So just give it up. Give it up and give it to me. And I'll take care of you.

In return for this surrender, I guarantee your freedom, some basics, life basics, and maybe income. I mean, Elon Musk is talking about, you know, base income or secure income and so on.

And this is the message. This is the message and it's a message that is embraced by the masses.

When you are lost, when you're terrified, what do you do?

For example, you have various ailments, physical ailments, and you're lost, you're terrified, what do you do? You seek an authority. This authority is called a medical doctor. You go to a medical doctor.

It's the same. You're lost in your life.

So you seek someone, you hand your life over to, to outsource your life to.

And this is the situation now.

They make people feel safe and absolved.

It's very religious, you know, absolution. It's the same message of religion. I'm absolving you and you're safe.

So what would you say to anyone who doubts that Trump is a narcissist or even that his psychopathology is as dangerous as it is?

I don't believe anyone does this, honestly. I think that it is a positive adaptation.

I think they believe, people believe that Trump's narcissism, Musk's insanity, evident insanity, I mean the men is insane, raving, stark, mad. No question about you. Doctor Strangelove, totally crazy guy.

People say the world is so abnormal. The world is so hostile and crazy and unpredictable and so on, that we need crazy people.

Suddenly, insanity becomes a positive adaptation. Suddenly, narcissism becomes an advantage.

Who would you rather cope with the likes of, let's say, Putin? Or with the likes of Jong Il or whatever. Who would you rather deal with them?

A normal, healthy, stable person, or a nutcase like Donald Trump, who is unpredictable, dangerous, terrifies his own adversaries, and so on.

You feel much more safe with a Donald Trump.

So it's not something to do with Donald Trump or Elon Musk or others like them. It's a belief about the world. It's a Veltanschao. It's a view of the world.

Today people believe that the world is crazy and the only way to cope is by anointing and appointing crazy people as your representatives and emissaries they will protect you because they're equally crazy.

It's like imagine that you're in a school and you're constantly being bullied. So you would team up with another bully. Maybe you will have sex with that bully so that bully would protect you.

This happens a lot of these coalitions.

Yeah, I've gotten some pushback recently that maybe narcissism isn't that which fells us or fell society so much as greed.

Greed is one facet. It's a behavioral facet.

It's a behavioral facet.

But narcissism includes thousands of elements like greed.

So it has much stronger explanatory power, organizing power. It helps us to understand the world much more than greed alone.

Yeah, because you could say selfishness, right? I mean, it's just components. I think they all fit underneath the umbrella, the canopy.

Yeah, I mean, if you say greed is a problem, I'll counter and I would say no, envy is a problem.

And there's no end to this because everyone will come up with their own.

But when you say narcissism, you have captured all of them. You have captured envy and greed and selfishness and callousness and disempathy.

So narcissism is an umbrella term for all these antisocial dysfunctional behaviors and traits. And so we'd rather use narcissism than specify, you know, make specific lists of...

So I want to get into psychological defense mechanisms in terms of psychological warfare, things like Robert J. Lifton's thought reform or psyops or seditious terrorism. I'd like your commentary on what we're facing in autocratic societies and how best to sort of gird our loins, if you will, and protect ourselves.

Autocratic societies or authoritarian societies are based on the identification. There's a clinical, psychological process known as identification.

They're based on the identification of people, individuals, with a leader, with a central figure of authority.

The identification is the most crucial because it fulfills, it caters to dozens of emotional, dozens of psychological needs.

So for example, when you identify with such a leader, you feel safe. On the other hand, when you identify with such a leader, you feel hopeful.

Because honestly, if someone like Elon Musk made it, so can I, and so can you.

When you identify with such a leader, you feel absolved of responsibility and accountability. So there's a sense of relief. Or in clinical terms, it's anxiolytic. It reduces anxiety.

And so on.

So identifying with the leader is very crucial. And it goes both way. The leader identifies with the leader is very crucial, and it goes both way. The leader identifies with the flock of the masses and so forth.

And so it becomes a hive mind. It becomes a single mind.

There is a process of entrainment, a process of synchronizing brain waves, possibly literally, between the leader and the lead.

And from that moment on, there is an overwhelming need to conform.

The need to conform is not felt as dissonant, whereas in liberalism and progressivism, or whatever you want to call it, the need to conform very frequently feels as coercion. It feels dissonant. It feels that you are forced to do something against your beliefs or your wishes or background or whatever.

That's not the case with authoritarianism, where the need to conform feels good, egosyntonic.

Because when you conform to a group, you acquire the properties of the group.

So for example, you are empowered, become much more powerful. You also attribute to the group, this is known as in-group and out-group dynamics. You also attribute to the group superiority or supremacy, which reflects on you, a process known as co-idealization.

So, group dynamics in progressivism or liberalism or democracy or so on are dramatically different, totally divorced, from group dynamics in autocratic authoritarian and totalitarian societies.

In liberalism, democracy and so forth, group dynamics are essentially exclusionary, ironically. They exclude the individual in many ways.

The individual feels that it has to go through a process, it has to evolve somehow.

There is implied criticism of the individual.

When you try to conform to liberal, democratic, progressive values, it means you are somehow deficient, somehow defective. Something is wrong with you. You need to evolve this implied criticism here. It's demeaning and denigrating in many ways.

And this is when people talk to you about racism, they imply that maybe you have, maybe you harbor implicit racism. Maybe you're not as, you know, white as evolved as you think you are.

So these values and these systems and so on, they come with implied criticism.

Whereas the authoritarian, autocratic, totalitarian group dynamics, they imply that you are chosen, that you're unique, that you are a participant in the making of history, that you are powerful.

And that's why you have today this, you know, awakened the giant within and all this, you know, because authoritarian group dynamics involves magical thinking.

You finally, you suddenly have the power of a magician or a wizard. Your mere presence and participation contributes to the power of the group, the supremacy of the group, and determines the direction of the group somehow.

So you feel that you are, while in individual, in progressivism and liberalism, you are, it's a confrontational, adversarial system. It's like you're learning about racism to discover that you have been a hidden racist or latent racist all your life and maybe even homophobic to boot.

So you need to forcibly consciously change yourself.

Why do you need to change yourself?

Because as you are, you're inadequate. Something's wrong with you.

And this is the great irony. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk and so on, they talk about libertarianism, the value of the individual.

But actually, progressivism and liberalism force you to make individual choices, to confront their message as an individual.

You don't have the comfort of belonging to a group. You don't.

The woke movements and the victimhood movements are fascistic movements. They're not liberal movements. They're not progressivist movements. They are fascistic movements in every sense of the word.

So they are authoritarian, they are totalitarian movements.

And so the same with the people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the conservative movement and so on. They are victimhood movements to start with. And they don't allow you to be an individual. They take away your individuality. They subsume you. They assimilate you within the group.

Now why would you do that? Because it feels really good. They are feel good movements.

Liberalism and progressivism is about making you feel bad about who you are. And these movements are about making you feel good about who you are in other words the difference between reality and fantasy.

So I don't think you know I think people like you and I are wasting our time completely that's why I stopped writing.

Because we are faced with dynamics, which include narcissism, grandiosity and so on so forth, that cannot be stopped. There's no way to stop them. They are again inexorable. They cannot be stopped. They cannot be altered because they are in a way predestined. They're built into. They're structural. They're hardwired and baked into what it is to be human, the essence of humanity, liquidity, quiddity of being human.

I think in certain periods in history, you just need to stand back.

All the voices that rallied against Adolf Hitler between, let's say, 1923 and 1933, when he became councillor all these voices and there were many voices, intellectuals and so what good did they do nothing it was a waste of time complete waste of time.

I think this is not defeatism. It's simply knowing when to conserve your power and what works and what doesn't work. Right now.

Sam, I've definitely been inspired by you to be that much more fatalistic that what will be will be.

On the other hand, we're talking about an epidemic pandemic of narcissism and where you draw the line is when they hurt you.

So yeah, and in terms of writing, it's, you know, am I an activist journalist over here or simply illuminating what's happening? And walking a line at times.

Eachto his own, of course. But I'm not quite sure what's the benefit of writing right now. Even self-benefit.

Like, what am I doing? Am I documenting my thoughts? That's pretty grandiose. What am I doing? Am I documenting my thoughts? That's pretty grandiose, you know?

What would I be doing if I were to write yet another article against Elon Musk and Donald Trump? Or make another video against them? Or even throwing light on... Or alerting people.

What would I be doing? I would be fighting against the current the current of history cannot be reversed not by Donald Trump not by Elon Musk definitely not by me or by you this this is stronger than any single one of us, any single individual, never mind how many hundreds of billions of dollars and how many tens of millions of followers they have, they're deluding themselves into thinking that they're exempt from the laws of history.

History takes its course. We can definitely discern patterns in history that are repeating themselves and they reflect of course the fact that all human beings share the same nature.

This nature is decipherable, that's what we have psychology for, and therefore allows us to predict and so on.

But for example, that we will never go back or that we will not go back in the foreseeable future to a societal principle of organization, I'm quite convinced.

In other words, that societies are dead and families are dead. I'm absolutely convinced. We will never go back to that. We will never have societies anymore families.

I think the next stage is the nation states. I think they will disintegrate.

But you've talked about his name is Emil Durkheim or something, anomic states. And how it can lead to suicidality.

So this transition is not going to be for the faint of heart.

And what you just said in terms of the fatalism of history is inexorably going to unfold the way it's going to unfold.

You know, my next question was, you know, what could we do to push back against plutocracy, you know, instruments such as defanging dark money or antitrust crackdowns or targeting lobbyists or boycotting.

But, you know, maybe this just ends up being a revolution at some point, literally, or some sort of revolt, a war against the powers that be.

Yeah. History is spastic. It works through spasms. So at some point this whole thing will become untenable. People will rebel and envy will play a big role and so on so forth. Yeah. And there will be a revolution. And, you know, people will be crucified or worse and a new.

But these are superficial, these are superficial tidings.

Changing power from one group to another, from one elite to another, from the changing changes in power are the scum on the waves of history.

Underneath it all, they're much, much hugeer, much bigger trends and so.

I mentioned one of them, which is atomization. And I mentioned that the last 10,000 years have been an aberration.

Now we're talking 10,000 years. We're not talking whether Donald Trump will go away and then Elon Musk will become president.

Oh, he cannot. Sorry.

And you know, we're not even talking about whether conservatives lose power in United Kingdom and liberals take over, vice versa. We're not talking about labor. We're not talking about any of this.

These are yesterday's news. This is utterly not interesting.

What is interesting is to observe these giant movements in human affairs, which take as a minimum hundreds of years, as a minimum, for example, the culmination of the Renaissance is nowadays, right now, started with Adolf Hitler and now.

So these last hundred years is a culmination of the Renaissance. And then we're beginning to see the initial, the buds, the budding over counter-reformation, a reactionary force.

Now, that's interesting. I don't care if it's Trump, not Trump, Putin. They're all, you know, they're all old men, they will die soon. None of it is interesting.

But these giant changes, they are interesting, asking yourself, how would humanity look 100 years from now and realizing that people would see each other once a year, maybe.

For example, I mean, that's interesting. And what role will technology play in?

Suddenly understanding the technology will actually push us to be atomized and separate from each other and will render apart the fabric of what we used to call society, realizing suddenly that children will be such a rarity, they, you know, they will provoke mass attention in the street when you see.

These are the interesting things.

Politics is a reflection of all this. Technology is even a reflection of all this.

It's on these trends that I try to focus in my work.

Now you say dystopian, utopian. I don't know if it's dystopian, it's different. It's different.

I grew up in a family. Families are already half dead, and they will be fully dead, 50 years from now. There will not be families anymore.

So is this a dystopian development? I have no idea. It's another way of organizing life, you know.

I mean, why not have an autocracy if people are narcissistic anyway? It goes hand and glove. It comes to the territory. Lends itself.

Narcissism is shape-shifting. It can manifest in a variety of ways. I think, for example, some forms of democracy are highly narcissistic, definitely the woke movements and the victimhood movements were all highly narcissistic.

So narcissism doesn't have, is an equal opportunity abuser, doesn't have any preference for specific political types of organization.

The personality cult is a Renaissance thing, not a narcissistic thing.

Narcissism can be collective, for example, in Japan, there's collective narcissism. In China, there's collective narcissism.

So in Japan, a narcissist would say, I work for Toyota. And that would be his source of grandiosity, that he is a member of this elevated supreme collective.

So narcissism is like water. It will go where there's a hole.

So I don't think authoritarianism necessarily reflects narcissism.

Not necessarily.

And I don't think democracy necessarily reflects proper values or good values, or the good good life as Aristotle called it.

I don't think so.

I think both can be leveraged by narcissism and often have been leveraged by narcissism and by narcissists.

So I don't have this value judgment of things, and I don't particularly care to use the words good, bad, dystopian, because these are value judgments.

I see where things are going. I try to see where things are going, and I describe how the world is going to look in my view at least.

And that's the end of it as far as I'm concerned. I don't judge it.

I can say that Donald Trump is a narcissist and I've been warning against Donald Trump, not only because he's a bad person and he is a bad person.

Not because of that. Not because he's a bad person. It is a bad person. Not because of that. Not because he's a bad person.

It was not moral judgment. It's because narcissists always end badly. Narcissists always destroy everything for themselves and for others. He's a danger. I don't care if he's a good man, bad man. He's a danger.

So I was warning people against Donald Trump, not because I'm, and by the way, I was warning people against Barack Obama.

Not because Donald Trump is bad or good, but because there hasn't been a single case, none in clinical literature, in human history, not one case, where narcissists ended up building something, creating a legacy, improving things, not one.

This, the Elon Musk, Donald Trump presidency, is going to end cataclysmically. I don't have a beginning of a doubt about this, cataclysmically.

And because, unfortunately, the United States is going to impact the world, my bank account included.

Yeah, I think crypto is a threat if the world's reserve currency goes bye-bye. I think if the United States were to collapse or something horrible is where to happen and so on, the global banking system is likely to shake and break, you know.

So this guy is threatening me.

Donald Trump is threatening me, my livelihood, my well-being, my future, my...

Totally with you on that front.

It's nothing to do with whether it's a good guy or a bad guy.

I don't do morality.

I think it's just easy for people to go from dangerous to equals bad.

But I understand it's worthwhile to parse these concepts.

No, to some extent I thought that certain figures in the Democratic Party were equally dangerous.

I think that the Walk movement and the victimhood movements and all this, and even to some extent DEI and so on, I think these were serious miscalculations and in this sense extremely dangerous because they have led to Donald Trump.

Yes.

You said that the election in the United States came down between the woke ideology essentially and Trump, an authoritarian.

You use your own words, of course.

Between ideological tyranny and personality cult, yes.

Yes.

You have to choose ideological tyranny or personality cult and people chose personality cult.

But this is a choice created by the Democratic Party and by universities and so. So, you know...

Try to marginalize and make that friend, that's sort of the radical left, it's one wing of the left, but people saw it as all-encompassing.

Well, it was forceful. It was vociferous. And it ultimately pushed the Democratic Party to the left all the time.

I mean, Bill Clinton would have been considered far right in today's Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders, compared Bill Clinton to Bernie Sanders.

So these people were dangerous people in my book. They're as dangerous as Donald Trump.

I just care to survive.

What I want to do is survive.

Is it too much to ask?

Me too.

That's my number one.

What I want.

And I think these people are pushing us to a cataclysm, an apocalypse. It doesn't have to be nuclear weapons. There are many other types of apocalypse. They're pushing us to an apocalypse.

All narcissists end badly. Their marriages collapse. Their children don't talk to them, they go bankrupt, they steal and kill.

All narcissism is highly inefficacious. It leads to very bad outcomes.

And these bad outcomes to oneself and to everyone around oneself is what I'm worried about.

You've also written about how the United States isn't a postmodern autocracy. You know, basically that it's going to be Russia style that will have elections, but they'll be fake, essentially.

I mean, we're already technically in an anocracy. And people say, oh, we're losing our democracy.

Well, we've been losing it for some time steadily.

But I thought your observations were on point about, you know, the trappings of democracy.

I think a better comparison now that some time has passed, I think a better comparison would be Nazi Germany rather than Russia.

In Russia, Russia was actually controlled by an elite, used to be known as nomenclature, the elite, the communist elite, which was a tiny percentage of a population, and most of them were intellectuals, actually. That includes Joseph Stalin, who was an intellectual.

So Russia is a bad example, I think. A better example is Nazi Germany, because the United States is devolving into an oclocracy, mob rule, which is exactly what's happening with Donald Trump and his followers and so on, reminiscent, highly reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and his followers.

So I think it's about to become a mob rule, an oclocracy.

And always at the head of an oclocracy, there's a plutocracy.

Adolf Hitler, his closest associates, I'm not talking about his subordinates, but his supporters were industrialists, rich industrialists. He always appeared in public with Krupp and Thyssen, which were the Elon Musk of their time.

So it's very reminiscent of Nazi Germany. I'm not going to say, I'm not saying it's going to end the same.

There will be an apocalypse, I'm just not sure of the nature of it. I don't think it's going to be a second Holocaust or something. History never repeats itself.

But it's going to end as badly as it did with Adolf Hitler. As badly.

Because there is a recreation and replication of the dynamics of Nazi Germany in, let's say, the early 1930s. That's how I see.

Well, go ahead.

No, I said, I think we should give our viewers the rest.

Yeah, I think so, too.

So I was going to wrap. But thank you for this thought-provoking discussion on all things geopolitics and how it interfaces with psychology and what we can glean from psychology to inform our worldview. And I feel comforted, you know, strangely from this conversation.

I don't know if that was your intention or not, but thank you for your time.

And for those of you who want to subscribe, follow me on Substack. Again, it's gingerquoy.substack.com, or you can look under my publication name concerning narcissism.

I'm an ardent reader and follower. Yeah, great stuff. Your writing is amazing. You should publish a book. Thank you, Sam. All your support and encouragement, I really do. Means a lot. Take care. All right. Take care. Thank you.