Well, okay, great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Sam Vaknin, professor of psychology and economics, I believe.
And you have some very interesting stuff that we're going to talk about today on today's episode of The Fringe on PJMedia.com. And if you are not a subscriber of PJMedia.com, please do sign up because we have a lot of interesting content in exclusive podcasts. And you can use my promo code, it's F-O-X, for a discount if you want to sign up.
And I know that your audience, professor, might not be familiar with PJMedia, so I thought I would throw that out there for them. But I'm really excited to have you here.
So I found you through LinkedIn, you connected with me on LinkedIn, and I started watching your videos. And you write a lot about narcissism and psychopaths, which I find extremely interesting, especially because my research and investigative journalism has led me down this path, where this psychological disorder of borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and other personality disorders have been used incorrectly and viciously against parents in family courts.
I have many, many parents in St. Louis, especially who have been diagnosed with these things, through court appointed therapists who I think are psychopaths. I think they're the psychopaths who have diagnosed these people falsely in a scheme to continue draining their resources, dragging their kids through a court system that just never ever ends.
And so these terms have come up for me. Very recently, I've been studying in depth for the last couple months. What is this narcissistic personality disorder? What are these things and how do they present?
And so your channel has been very interesting to me, because I'm listening to what you have to say. And why don't you, for my audience, give a definition. What is narcissistic personality disorder? And what is a psychopath?
Narcissistic personality disorder is the malignant, extreme form of what we call narcissistic style. Narcissistic style is a phrase coined by Lynne Spitz, who is a scholar of personality and personality disorders. And it is widely used today.
It seems that quite a few people have narcissistic style. They are self-centered. They're a bit less empathic. They are ruthless and callous sometimes. They're reckless. They are goal-oriented, etc. And they're not very good in interpersonal relationships.
But that's the mild version, the benign version. The malignant version is extreme. The narcissist, I'm sorry, does not possess emotional empathy. He has something which I call cold empathy. So he has no access to his own positive emotions and he has no access to other people's emotions.
In this sense, the narcissist is a bit autistic. He's incapable of properly deciphering social cues, sexual cues, and definitely not emotional cues. The person diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, which is a tiny minority of the population as opposed to what may be the impression that YouTube may give.
So people with narcissistic personality disorder are exploitative. They lack empathy. They are self-centered but in a very sick way, in the sense that they are actually divorced from reality. They are coercive. They are addicted to narcissistic supply, which is attention in all its forms. They regulate their internal world, their sense of self-worth, for example. They're regulated with feedback and input from other people. So they're dependent on these other people. They resent this dependence and so they become aggressive. This is a host of very sick dynamics, which put together random narcissistic personality disorder, a very, very serious mental ailment.
Psychopathy is a different thing altogether.
First of all, to start with, there's a debate whether psychopathy or more precisely antisocial personality disorder, whether these are valid mental health constructs, whether they are what we call clinical entities, whether they are real, in other words, because what is a psychopath? A psychopath is someone who essentially espouses the view by or byway of highway. He doesn't adhere to rules, mores, and conventions. He is defiant. He is contumacious. In other words, he hates authority. He is reckless. He is callous. He is ruthless. He is cruel. He is goal-oriented to the exclusion of all others and everything else. So he wouldn't hesitate to trample over people, to step over bodies, and to create these bodies if necessary to obtain the goal.
So is psychopathy a mental illness or is it merely a personality style?
Someone who functions in society in a way in which we deem abhorrent or unacceptable.
In other words, is it a social judgment or is it a clinical entity?
My personal view is that psychopathy is much more what we call a culture-bound syndrome. In other words, in ostensible mental health syndrome that actually doesn't reflect anything real in terms of psychology or even neuroscience, but reflects much more societies and cultures, judgments, mores, expectations, demands, and so on and so forth.
So of course, the various studies linking brain abnormalities to psychopathy, to psychopathic and antisocial behaviors, but we're not quite sure what preceded what. It may be that these behaviors had shaped the brain, not the other way. We didn't have a chance to check these people, to examine them when they were two-year-old.
Right. So this is the picture.
Well, so that's interesting because that brings me to a question that I was watching one of your videos and I think it was an interview. And the topic was that narcissists and psychopaths have taken control of our world.
It appears that way. It appears at least that they are in taking control if they're not already in control. And I think we've seen that very much with what happened with the COVID lockdowns and the misinformation and just so much control.
I call it the age, of course, of control. We're all being controlled by people, experts. And I'm not sure what their motivation is, but I sometimes think that it's to hurt us.
And the question that was asked of you was, well, I believe you had said that the population has become narcissistic and that's what has led to leaders rising to the top who are narcissists and psychopaths.
And my question is, well, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Is it the population that turns first to narcissism or is it that our leaders are narcissists and influence the population? How does that work?
Because I do see it. I see what you're saying. I see that this is happening. I've written about it. I've written about it extensively, but I don't know how we got here because I feel like, yes, our society is very narcissistic. Look at it. It's the selfie generation. You're like six times more likely to be killed by taking a selfie than you are eaten by a shark. That's a problem. If you're falling off high cliffs because you're trying to get a selfie, it's a strange generation. It's a strange thing where I'm the last generation that grew up without smartphones, without cell phones. Generation X, the last ones left who still remember life without all of this. And it has done lots of negative things. So yes, I can see that that has led to a narcissistic style.
But does that turn people into narcissists, clinical narcissists, or are we being influenced at the very top by clinical narcissists?
What do you think?
Clinical narcissism is exceedingly rare. But the answer to your question is pretty unanimous and pretty unambiguous. The population preceded the leaders. We had been documented in our profession. We had been documented the tsunami of narcissism ever since the 80s.
There's a woman, her name is John Twench, and she had been studying this. Campbell had been studying this, many others. They had documented a tidal wave of narcissism starting more or less in the 80s and harking back even to the 60s in some respects.
So the prevalence and incidence of narcissism in cohorts, in populations, had exploded. There's no other words. There was a big bang of narcissism.
And of course, now there are two possibilities.
Either perfectly innocuous and innocent leaders shape themselves to be narcissists and psychopaths in order to win the vote. In other words, they're acting as narcissists and psychopaths because this will carry favor with the electorate.
That's one possibility.
That is so scary. Yeah.
That's one possibility.
I have to be a psychopath and a narcissist to get elected. So I'll be one or I'll act as one. That's one possibility.
We don't know because we don't have direct access to these leaders to test them and so on.
The other possibilities, of course, and it is the more likely possibility, honestly, is that narcissists and psychopaths rise to the top in narcissistic and psychopathic societies because they better reflect the electorate. Narcissists are blank screens.
People project onto leaders and narcissistic leaders and psychopathic leaders. People project onto them their own foibles, their own traits. People want to see themselves in their leaders.
So this is likely, it's selective pressure. It's likely to create negative selection of narcissists and psychopaths as leaders. And this is likely what had happened.
Now, of course, it's a vicious cycle.
What's the cure? How does the population cure itself of narcissistic tendencies that leads to this disaster?
Because I think we can all agree this is a disaster.
What's going on all around us, a total disaster.
So what do we do? How do we recover? Is it possible or do we just have to, does it have to all fall apart?
Well, let's start with the premise. We inevitably judge something to be a disaster from our vantage point, which is heavily dependent on the year we were born, for example, on our education, acculturation, socialization processes, and so on and so forth.
So we are individuals in some respects and integrated and embedded in social and cultural and time fabric, period fabric. We can't extricate ourselves from that. No one is objective.
What to you is an unmitigated disaster to the young people of today is the normal. What to you is the new normal to them is the normal.
And they complain about lack of economic opportunities and climate change and so on and so forth.
But for example, they strongly reject any attempt to insinuate or to say that their way of interacting personally with other people, their social interactions are somehow pathological.
All young people would reject this claim. They would say, for example, and this has been documented in numerous studies, for example, by Lisa Wade. They would say, for example, that it is abnormal to have sex in intimate relationships, that actually sex should be only reserved for hookups and one night stands.
We have documented cases of young people saying, I'm not having sex with my boyfriend. I love him. I would never do something like this with him.
For the young, as far as the young are concerned, their sexual scripts, in other words, their sexual style, their behavioral patterns, their interpersonal relationships, or actually lack their own, their lack of intimacy, all these are perceived by them to be utterly normal.
And if you try to tell them anything, if you try to tell them that's not normal, actually, they will tell you, okay, boomer. They're not open to listen. They're not open to listen.
For them it's utterly normal. They don't see anything catastrophic or disastrous in this.
They want sex. They outsource. They go to a club or they pick up someone. They have sex for the night.
And many of them, by the way, don't see a problem to have what I call the intimacy cloud. In other words, to have multiple sexual relationships surrounding a single intimate relationship. They don't see any problem with that.
They carry with them exes and previous one-night stands and so on. And so, for example, the acceptance among the young of extra, extra couple sex, the acceptance is almost universal. They accept extra couple sex. They don't see what's wrong with it in principle.
And these are mores. These are relative things. This is not written in stone. It's not part of the, you know, so you and I can think that, for example, cheating is a bad thing, you know, but the young would think that cheating is a legitimate way of acquiring variety in sex.
Finding excitement or whatever.
Having fun or something, yeah. Yeah.
And you are not right and I'm not right. And they're not right. No one is right. There's no right. It's just the way things are.
So I would tend to dispute the claim that we are heading towards a catastrophe. However, we are heading towards a world which in our terms, in the terms of your generation and mine, I mean, much older than you, but our generations, in terms of our generations, this would be a dystopian world. A horror show.
Yeah, a horror show.
Well, the lack of socialization.
But the residents of the horror show, I mean, feel at home.
The lack, yeah, the residents of the horror show definitely feel at home. The lack of socialization though, I mean, I see it in my own teenager. She doesn't like it. She hates it.
And I think, and also I think this, all this fantasy of the eighties, which is coming out in television shows and fashion. And this is nostalgia for the 1980s.
My own children feel it. And maybe that's because their parents tell them stories about what it was like to be a kid in the eighties, which was so much different than it was for them. They got helicopter parents. They got, and we didn't. And for some reason, we're so consumed with fear that nobody lets their kids out to play anymore. Like I was the only one in my neighborhood who would let my children out to play by themselves. And then I felt I couldn't do it because no one else would.
So then they weren't safe because they weren't in a group. They were just by themselves. And when we were kids, you could send them, we would all be out in this roving group of 12, 13, 15 kids, right? For sun up to sun down. We were, that's when nobody knew where we were, house to house to house to house. When I had my children, I thought that's how it was going to be. And it wasn't. Everyone locked their children inside. And if you were the one that wanted the kids to go on a bike ride to the library, you were the weird one. If you weren't accompanying them and hovering over them, and so I think my children, especially my oldest, she feels that because I was always very frustrated by it. And I always wanted her to have some freedom and I could never give it to her because no one else would, would, would play.
So I think there are some children maybe, I mean mine, and I know my niece also, she's very disappointed that boys don't talk to her. They only text her. They will not talk to her in person.
So meeting people is very hard and she doesn't want to communicate over text message.
There are some kids who are really struggling with this, but they're stuck. They're stuck in the horror show, like you said, because their generation is in this agreement that they're going to do this. And this is how they socialize.
And the ones who don't want to are left out on the edges, feeling like something is horrifically wrong. And I think they're right.
But like you said, the majority of them, if they're going to agree to this, this is just how we're going to do it now, I guess.
Well, social media and pornography are twins, the twins. Both of them capitalize on fallacies and cognitive deficits and biases that had been discovered in the 70s, 80s and 90s by psychologists.
Social media platforms and pornography, the pornography industry, they use psychologists. They use them. They hire their services to design these offerings, these services to be addictive and to leverage psychological shortcomings.
And with your permission, I'll give two examples.
The male brain, the male brain is unable to distinguish a two dimensional image on screen from a real woman. That's a fact. Men react identically. In other words, when we map the brain of a male, all the areas in the brain lit up, they fill up with blood, etc., the same way identically, if he's watching a naked woman on screen or if he's watching a naked woman or interacting with her in reality, there is no difference whatsoever.
This is the source of the addictive power of pornography, because the brain of the man tells him this is a real woman and you're having real sex. So pornography capitalizes on this anatomical neuropsychological fact.
Social media capitalizes on other things, on, for example, what we call relative positioning, on dopamine bursts every time you get a like.
Pornography and social media are neuropsychological addiction devices. That's their main aim to get you addicted, to condition you. And they're doing a great job.
They're doing a hell of a job.
Yeah, they're doing a great job.
And the thing that bothers me about both of those things that you just brought up, and I completely agree with you, is that we have an entire group of people saying, on one hand, alcohol addictions are so terrible, drug addictions are so terrible and life destroying, and we must have rehab, and we must have all these things for alcohol and drugs.
But they refuse, and I mean refuse, to say that pornography is addictive, that it is, I mean, there's a small group, you know, people saying sex addiction is real, pornography addiction is harmful.
But those people get so much pushback by what I would call the establishment and the pornography industry that pays for a lot of these studies to say that, oh, it's not harmful to you, and it isn't doing bad things to your relationships, which is all a bunch of hogwash, because it does impair relationships, I've seen it happen in my own, you know, family life, I've seen it happen.
It is a, and friends of mine, my God, it's everywhere. And to deny, when on one hand, oh, cocaine is so addictive, and you need to go to rehab, and it's, oh, we'll support you and come around you. But there's this whole, like, I don't know, industry to convince you that pornography is not a problem, that pornography will not addict you, and that social media too, that social media is good, that social media is connecting us, that it's bringing us together.
And I don't think that that's true, because ever since social media has been introduced, I think this population has become more and more divided. I've seen, you know, friends and family members cut you off, people you've known since you were little, just decide one day that your views are so, you know, abhorrent to them that they can't speak to you anymore, because of your political views or whatever.
America didn't used to be this way. I don't remember, we used to, you know, I've always been a conservative person, my parents are Republicans, conservatives, and, but all through my life, I had Democrat friends, we would, we would argue, we would laugh, we would talk, we would, and then we would go have a beer together, we would no, no one would ever get to the point where it was, I can't speak to her because she has the wrong views.
Now, you can't even tell people what you think you can't, because if you do, or if they find out, they will shun you like an amish shunning.
I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's incredible. I've never, I've never done that, but I've had it done to me. I've had it done to me.
We're like, I feel like I can be very open with people. I don't care what you are. And I don't care what you think. I'll have whatever conversation you want to have.
Because I think on, under all, we're all people. We all bleed the same.
So why can't, and I don't want to talk in an echo chamber. I certainly don't want to just hang out with people who agree with me. That's not fun in any way. And that's not, it's not intellectually stimulating. And so I don't, but yet I think social media is to blame for this.
What do you think?
I think we should follow the Roman dictum, Quay Bono, who benefits. Think about Facebook.
Facebook generates revenue when you watch advertising. So if you watch your daughter, instead of watching the screen, Zuckerberg loses money. It's extremely simple. He has every incentive to disconnect you from your daughter, to detach you, to make sure that you have no alternative to Facebook.
Because any alternative to Facebook, a good neighbor, your husband, your spouse, your children, your girlfriends, your high school friends, any alternative to Facebook takes away money from his pocket and he doesn't like it.
No businessman does. So he makes sure to get you addicted and he conditions you to abrogate and destroy all and every other connection you have to any alternative to Facebook.
In other words, in other words, he isolates you. It's a policy. It's not an unforeseen byproduct.
It's by design.
It's by design. Absolutely.
We have testimonies. We have testimonies by the engineers who had designed Facebook. They said this.
And yet, why are there no tribunals? Why are these people not on trial?
Let me answer your question.
So this is a social media. It's the pornography. I'm not quite sure what you're referring to, but there is a wide consensus that pornography is addictive.
Scholars, very important scholars like DiBardo and Lisa Wade and others, not only pornography is addictive, but pornography shapes almost exclusively the sexual scripts and sexual style of young people.
They import directly what they see on pornography and they try to implement it in their sex life. And what they see on pornography is the objectification of the female body and its reduction to body parts and violence.
Simply the overwhelming vast majority of sex in pornography is one way or another violent. And that's what they see.
For example, we have a stunning statistic. Ever since young people started to watch pornography, the incidence of anal sex had increased over the incidence of vaginal sex.
Now youngsters most of the time have anal sex, not vaginal sex. And this they took directly from pornography.
In the United States, though, we have these people, these crazy people running around claiming to be sex educators who are trying to even teach pornography in our schools to elementary students.
There was a woman in New York City, a so-called educator who was showing little children videos. I'm talking kindergartners videos on how to masturbate.
These people wanted to, and she was also teaching a pornography literature class, literacy, sorry, literacy class in pornography, as if our children need literacy in pornography.
So when you say there's studies that say it's harmful, those studies are not being taken seriously in the United States. They are not being taken seriously by the psychopaths in charge of our kids.
We have psychopaths in charge of our kids in public schools, teaching them that pornography is education, is good for them. That's what we have.
And we're parents are going, oh my God, stop this. This is grooming. It's sexual abuse. It's setting them up for pain and bad relationships and no one's listening to us. No one's listening to us, professor.
So it's like, what do we do?
These people are psychopaths.
Well, I don't think we should conflate sex education with what you had been describing.
Sex education is good and it should start in kindergarten.
So I don't see anything wrong with it.
However, of course, legitimizing pornography in any way, shape or form, as a form of literature or whatever.
Pornography is not a form of cinema. It's not an artistic endeavor.
Pornography is a product, a crass product, whose main thrust is to get you addicted because it leverages neurological mechanisms in the brain.
So it's a direct intervention in the brain. Pornography is a direct intervention in the brain and it's manipulation to create addiction.
So it's a drug, simply a drug in other words, a visual drug.
Well, we have people pushing it.
I disagree with you that kindergartners need sex education.
I had three children myself and I believe in answering questions when they're asked.
And my children never asked any questions until, oh, seven, eight years old.
And I think parents are the best people to give their children the information they want to give them at the right time.
And I don't think that there's any reason for five year olds to be given videos on masturbation.
That's ridiculous. It's absurd to me.
I disagree. I think vast majority of parents are not qualified, able or willing to provide sex education.
I think children ask questions when it's way too late, when they had already been exposed to peers and to pornography and only then they asked questions.
So by that time it's too late.
And I do think because vast majority of children masturbate, starting at age two, I think masturbation is an integral part of childhood and should not be regarded with any particular horror.
No, I mean, that's true. I mean, as far as the human behavior part of it is true.
I just don't think strangers in schools should be talking to little children, because to me that's like a grooming behavior.
It might be a good idea to educate the parents, yes.
Yeah, maybe it's better to talk to parents about it and let parents talk to their own kids.
I mean, even the most evangelical, one of the most evangelical churches in America, you know, I remember I think it was Franklin Graham. Maybe I could be wrong about that.
But no, it was Focus on the Family, which is a very evangelical fundamentalist type of organization.
I remember reading a newsletter through that, which even acknowledged that yes, masturbation in children is perfectly normal. And it happens.
This is a thing.
So it's not even because people like to blame Christians in Christianity for being anti-sex education. But that's really not true. It's not.
Yes, there are some sex that are like that, no doubt. But the vast majority of I would say Americans are pretty open to understanding what biology is, right? What human behavior is. I don't think there's any like, I just think that American parents get upset about other people coming in and trying to give their children what we would consider morality.
Because sexual behaviors come with morality, right? And parents want to be able to teach their kids their own morality and not a secularized morality that is coming from an outside source that you might think is immoral or somehow damaging to your child.
And I think every parent has a right.
Any sexual behavior with another person has a moral dimension. Any sexual behavior with one's own body, I fail to see how this could have a moral dimension.
No, and I would agree with that.
But I think that a stranger stepping in to give your child their advice about what they're doing with their body is not OK either.
That could inconvenience many parents.
But then these parents should step in, educate themselves and educate their children.
And I guess I have faith that parents, I think that each parent has a right to parent their children the way they see fit without interference.
We are wrong about this. Sex education is very lacking in the United States and the main culprits are the parents.
Parents refuse to talk to their children. They're shy, they're embarrassed, and so on and so forth. So children are left exposed to peers who are ill-informed and to pornography.
So parents are...
And that is dangerous.
That is dangerous. That is dangerous.
And I encourage parents all the time that they should absolutely take control of that situation because pornography is so prolific.
This brings me to a controversial issue that I saw one of your videos that I have to bring up because I so disagree and I wanted to tell you about it.
I didn't disagree with the video. It was about victimhood and it was about...
You were discussing victim blaming. I get charged with victim blaming all the time. I wrote a book called Believe Evidence. It was called Believe Women but Women was Scratched Out and Evidence was written on the top because I thought the Me Too movement was so dangerous to due process.
And in America, we have... You're innocent unless proven guilty and people coming forward 30 years after the fact to say, this person sexually assaulted me and there's no physical evidence and there's no witnesses and anything else.
Well, it's too bad. That's too bad. You don't get a conviction on that at this point.
So I saw a lot of problems with the Me Too movement and I wrote a book about all the times that I could find documented throughout history where women lied, specifically, to put men in prison, get them murdered, actually have terrible consequences happen to them.
I started in the Bible and I move all the way through to documented historical cases and I got a lot of pushback from that because especially in one section of the book, I talk about how to protect your own kids from becoming victims.
And one of the things that I said is exactly what you said in that video, which is you may not get raped because you are wearing something that was inappropriate, but you are also not protecting yourself.
You have a duty to protect yourself. And I teach my kids that all the time.
Of course, anyone who rapes you should be put in jail forever and I think they should get the death penalty.
But there are things that victims need to take responsibility for.
So I agree with you like a thousand percent on that and then I'll back that all day long.
But something you said in that video really bothered me and it was that you cited a study about children who were not negatively affected by incest. And I believe that that is the same study that is used by pedophiles and abusers in our psychopathic system, in our judicial system to give children to abusers. And I've seen it happen where they accuse the protective parent of parental alienation and they give the child to the guy who's been raping them and the children are suffering.
And I'm telling you, Sam, they are suffering big time. I've seen the medical records. They are having nervous vomiting incontinence all the way through the age of 10, 11, 12 in a bill like incredible panic and fear.
I don't think that we can say that children are not affected negatively by sexual abuse.
Do you want to clarify that?
Can you clarify that for me? I'm sorry. I know. Can you clarify that for me? Because I don't think that's what you meant to say.
And that's not what I said, actually. I cited a study by the famous pediatrician and later psychoanalyst Winnicott. And this study had been suppressed and so on. But Winnicott found out that children are traumatized by incest, mostly because of the reactions of society. They see that daddy is arrested, everyone is shocked, etc.
So this creates a trauma.
However, we live in a specific society. We can't pretend that we are living on the moon. We are not living on the moon. We are living in a society which adjudicates which judges incest to be wrong and shocking. So it doesn't really matter why the child is traumatized. The fact is that there is no way for the child to not be traumatized. The child will be traumatized.
Whether the direct source of the trauma is the actual sex act or the direct source of the trauma is the reactions to the sex act, I think is a moot point, an irrelevant point.
Because the child is embedded in a specific society in which incest is frowned upon and is criminal and so on. And so when the child is subjected to incest, he is also subjected to all the social reactions to incest, which partly bring about the trauma.
Therefore, I think the question should not be even discussed. I think it's a bit of a stupid question, honestly.
Because no question that incest causes trauma, which part of the incest causes trauma, the actual penetration or the reaction to the penetration or I don't know what, this very interesting maybe academically or intellectually, but it should have zero implications when it comes to public policy and criminal justice.
As far as public policy, people are using and I have specific examples of a guardian ad litem in St. Louis, I have her on tape, using this argument that the child was not actually traumatized by the trauma that happened to her, but that it was mom's reaction to the trauma and she literally said, did he stick his finger up her butt? I don't know. You don't know. He says he didn't. She says he did, but basically you just have to get over it and move on. And if you can't move on, we're going to keep giving this child to this man, even though with the nervous vomiting, this is the one with the nervous vomiting and the incontinence and the horrific problems that she's having, it's your fault because you can't move on. And I feel like that is so damaging to these kids because our justice system is not doing its job because they're allowing people like that to use that argument to say, well, it's not the abuse. It wasn't the thing that happened to her that's the problem. It's mom's overreaction.
And in that case, dad was never arrested. Nothing ever really happened. This poor kid just can't get any help because everyone wants to say mom's crazy. Mom's making most of this up.
As I just said, it doesn't matter what creates a trauma. The fact is that incest leads to trauma. End of story. Incest leads to trauma in a variety of pathways.
One of them is a direct sexual experience. Another is the betrayal of an authority figure or role model. And the third pathway is the reactions of people around the child, including of course the mother and the mother's mother and the uncles and the society at large and the teachers and the social workers and the police and the courts.
This is a harrowing traumatizing experience.
Well, I agree with you. That's true.
Why subject the child to this to start with?
So incest is wrong, period, because it subjects the child through all this train of events and circumstances.
And our system just does not handle it. They just do not. They just, you're right. They re-traumatize them over and over again. And it just gets worse and compounds and gets worse and worse.
But no one seems to have any answer to it. There's just no good.
And I think that what you just said about the betrayal of the adults around them, that might be the worst part because they go to someone for help, like they've been told. You know, we tell our little ones all the time, if someone does something to you, you tell, and then we will help you. And then the child does that and they get, no one believes them, but that the adults in church don't believe them. They get put through all these horrific tests and interviews and it goes on over and over and over. And there's fighting and yeah, that's probably one of the, that it's double trauma on top.
So I agree with you. Yes, that's true. That's, that's very true. I just don't know. I get very upset about it because I see these kids and I see the trauma and our system has no, has no plan to help these kids at all.
Anyway.
I liked, you had it. I don't remember which video it was, but I've been listening to a lot of your videos and one of them was about experts. And I took it that you don't seem to have a very positive view of experts. And I, me either, at least especially recently with all the experts we've been inundated with, with all their expert opinions. I thought maybe you could talk about the expert syndrome, if, if that's what it is, but what is it about experts that bothers us so much?
I have a very high view of experts. I have a very low view or dim view of people who pretend to be experts when they're not.
Regrettably, we have yet to come with an algorithm to tell us which is which. So for example, online, there are many so-called experts on narcissism and they spew nonsense, inordinate amounts of nonsense, which is consumed by millions of people. Some of these nonsense is very detrimental, very wrong, very damaging. And people get stuck in victim board for years or they misinterpret what had happened to them and they reframe and so on.
Regrettably, some of these self-styled experts have a doctor, doctor in front of their name. They are doctor of this and thisor at least they claim to be. I don't know. In one case, at least I found it's fake, but they claim to be doctors. So academic degree doesn't guarantee expertise, doesn't guarantee expertise. And vast majority of people don't know how to check credentials.
For example, it's very critical to ask, did you publish anything in this field? Having had claiming that you're an expert in this field, have you published anything in this field?
And you'd be shocked to discover that the vast majority of self-styled experts on narcissism hadn't published anything on narcissism ever, anywhere. Publishing is very important because you go through what is called peer review. Others challenge you, others of your caliber challenge you. And so you're forced to learn and amend, correct.
Another question is, of course, what qualifies you to be an expert? Did you study this topic? And if so, for how long? And with whom? Who was your teacher?
There are questions you should ask to establish expertise.
Regrettably, anyone in his talk today in today's permissive environment claim to be experts. And many of them are taken to be experts because no one knows how to vet experts. And that's where the danger lies. The fake experts.
And you're right, 99% are fake. Not fake in the sense they don't have a degree. They have an academic degree. But the area in which they claim expertise is not their area of expertise.
Yeah, it's hard to tell, right? It's hard to tell.
Even, you know, you mentioned COVID. I am strongly averse to the conspiracy theories regarding COVID. Strongly averse.
But it is true that many of the people who make policy and people who claim present themselves as experts online and offline and so on, they're actually not experts in this field. I will not go into names.
But if I take the five most prominent experts on COVID, not one of them, not one of themhas experienced in respiratory diseases. Not one of them has experienced in coronaviruses.
I mean, this is shocking that someone whose expertise is actually sexually transmitted diseases had become the public voice for COVID. This COVID has nothing to do with sexually transmitted diseases. Absolutely nothing.
And before you ask anything, yes, I have a medical education. So even people who are highly credentialed, had accomplished a lot in their own field, they often gravitate to another field.
And there is something called the heisenberg effect. If you're an expert in field A, and you gravitate to field B about which you know nothing, the fact that you're an expert on field A makes you an expert on field B in the eyes of the ignorant public.
So you see physicists talking about God. What qualifies them to talk about God had they studied theology in the Jesuit order, you study 13 years theology before they allow you to say anything about religion. That's a Jesuit order, yes, where education is highly prized.
So, and yet, physicists don't hesitate to talk about God as though they are experts, you know, and biologists as well.
Similarly, by the way, religious people, I mean, preachers and I don't know what don't hesitate to declare themselves experts in on evolution or physics, when they're not. These are charlatans, charlatans with or without academic degrees.
And there's a difference between, you know, people, anyone who can have an opinion about anything, and someone who's looked at as an expert. There's a huge difference.
And I think what I my biggest problem with the COVID thing was that from the very beginning, I was like, Yeah, okay, gonna do what these experts tell me to do, because they know what they're talking about, right? I have to trust that, because I'm not a virologist. And I don't have that background.
And so, yep, 15 days to slow the spread. Yep, 30 days to slow. I'll do that. I'll do. And eventually, when people keep changing their story, and the thing that, you know, no one is agreeing, and it's first no masks, then masks, then it just keeps changing.
Well, maybe goggles, and maybe wear masks during sex, but you can still have hookups, you can.
This got to the point where I just my brain went, I can't trust any of these people, I don't believe any of you anymore.
And I and now I'm at the point where I somebody tells me they're an expert, and they put them up on a stage and tell me this is the person to listen to. And I think, hell no, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna try to ignore everything and listen to my own brain.
They did not have the humility and the integrity to say it's a new virus. And we don't know anything about it. Right, which would have been the honest thing to do.
Yes, it would have.
And by the way, this statement is almost equally valid today. Almost right.
Well, I found out when I had to take my daughter to the hospital, while she was COVID positive, she had an attack of appendicitis and had to have her appendix removed at the same time. And while I was in she wasn't really struggling with any COVID problems, she was perfectly fine. She was 10.
And it was like a cold for her.
But we went into the hospital. And I asked, because I was nervous, my whole house had COVID. And I was the only one caring for them. And I was nervous about it, because we had gotten no information really. And I asked, who's the doctor in charge here who, who knows about COVID, who, you know, who's your team, and I want to talk to them, because I'm facing now a complication with this appendicitis and whatever. And I got at least the honest answer there, which was no one, there's no one.
And when I asked all my questions about, well, what can this do? And is this related? They all?
Yeah, we don't know.
No one had any clue.
And so that's what led me to believe, boy, these people on TV, they are not telling the truth, because the people in the hospitals who are the ones dealing with it, don't know.
So how can the people on TV know anything when they're not the ones in the hospitals, and the doctors in the hospitals are saying, we have no clue. And that that really, it just really bothers me, because the whole, you know, it's like a show, you're putting on a show for the public. And the show is a lie. And the lie is very damaging. It's damaging to, you know, to trust to public trust, which I think is very important to have. It's important that your people trust you. And I think we're that goes right back to our narcissists in charge, our psychopaths in charge, because I don't think they care about that. I think it's all about how it looks. And what they can get away with.
I think there was a lot of a lot of arrogance and then gloriousness and and hotiness and grandiosity involved.
Yes. I think these people are not used to saying I don't know, because in their own fields, they know everything. I mean, and so they're not using not just to say I simply don't know, I'm sorry, I mean, give me some time and study this would take me six months, I'll come back to you. I just don't know right now.
I mean, well, I know from other diseases that you have to do this and this, if you wish to. I mean, it's up to you. Do it. Don't do it. But give me some time. I don't have the answers, you know, which would have been the would have been the honest answer.
That would have been great.
And they didn't and they didn't. And this is a corruption of the public intellectual and the corruption of the expert.
There's been a process of corrupting the expert of the public intellectual because the rewards, if you claim to be an expert or you become a public intellectual, the rewards are enormous.
Someone like Jordan Peterson made hundreds of millions of dollars or more by claiming to be a world leading psychologist. No one has heard of him. I never heard of him until I saw his book and I'm in the field 26 years, you know, but he made a hundred million dollars because he claimed to be a world leading psychologist.
Someone else might claim to be an expert on Covid and will tell you what to do when actually he spent all his life studying a single virus or two, actually, two viruses which have nothing whatsoever to do with Covid or the family of viruses that underlie Covid or nothing, absolutely nothing.
But, you know, his face is plastered on television all day long and all night long and he put his face on donuts. The rewards are too big today. There's a lot of money, a lot of fame, a lot of celebrity, a lot of the rewards had become too compelling.
So there are very few people who are that strong, sufficiently strong to resist the rewards and there is a mass process of corruption of academia. There's a lot of money sloshing around. So even priorities are skewed. It is extremely arguable whether vaccination was the right way to go.
Extremely arguable. You see the results now. They're not good.
They're trying to lie to us and tell us that they're good, though.
I just saw today on Twitter. They're good, globally. In some isolated locations, they're good, temporarily. Until the next variant.
So wouldn't it have been much better to put these 80 billion dollars into finding a medicine, a medication?
Yes.
Well, now they're finding that they were wrong about all of the, you know, keeping ivermectin from people.
And in India, there's a big deal about that now.
I'm not going into specific medications, but wouldn't it have been better to invest in medicating people, giving them a single pill so that they can recover, not go to hospital, rather than this utterly delusional enterprise of vaccinating 8 billion people. It's a delusional enterprise, utterly delusional. And vaccines expire. Vaccines expire in 12 months. Everyone will need a booster when 90 percent of the global population hadn't received a first shot.
Oh, God. And they're going to force us to people who don't want to take it. They're going to force us through force.
And I'm opposed to every anything done through force. And I feel that once you start forcing people against their will to give up bodily autonomy or whatever it is, through force, this is tyranny. And I don't care what it is. It doesn't matter that it's vaccination or it could be anything. It could be force. You to bake the cake. I don't want to bake your cake. If I want to bake the cake, I'll bake the cake. If I don't, I won't. If I want to take the shot, I'll take it.
There's an ethical moral difference between baking a cake and vaccination because, presumably, getting vaccinated protects other people while baking a cake doesn't protect other people.
So there is a question of your responsibility to other people. And then it becomes the critical question becomes the vaccine itself. It's efficacy and so if it does protect other people, I personally think that you have a moral obligation to take it because you have no right to impinge on the life of other people. It's immoral.
But that, again, leads to the question of the efficacy of the vaccine, the real efficacy of the vaccine in the long term, etc., again we don't have sufficient information. We don't know, for example, if vaccines prevent transmission. We don't. We think they do. But we don't know for sure. So if they don't affect transmission by getting vaccinated, you're not protecting anyone.
I agree with you with the data. I agree with you with the data. But I'm much more libertarian about what people want to put in their own bodies. I think we have enough of a population that likes vaccines and wants vaccines that we can leave the small population alone that doesn't and not make a big deal about their choice, because I think that forcing people is very wrong.
Had it been equally distributed, it's true. But in some states, there are big minorities and even majorities of people who refuse to take vaccines. So had there been a total equal distribution all over the states, you're right. Then 70% take the vaccine, 30% don't take the vaccine. It's okay.
We're over 70% in New York.
Yeah, well, New York is okay.
But you go to Missouri, you go to, I mean, you're in trouble.
Mississippi, you're in trouble. There you're in trouble, because majorities don't want to take vaccine.
And then there is an ethical question. Because if you can prove that the vaccine protects other people's lives, you have a moral obligation to do it.
But the thing is, we are not at that point yet. Because we don't know. We don't have this information.
Yeah. Do you have any questions for me before we head out of here?
Well, I heard you mentioned parental alienation.
So, sure.
If you could expand on this.
Yeah. So part of my investigation of family court system in Missouri, particularly speaking of Missouri, there's a lot of problems in Missouri, by the way. Missouri is a problematic place.
The specific problem with parental alienation that has occurred there is that it's being used as a weapon of abusers to continue abusing the ex-spouse and also the children. And a lot of them are domestic abusers. So I have actual police records, even some convictions, of these people who have done child abuse and have done spousal abuse. And yet the court system and these guardians and litem are continuing to allow these people, including one guy who's serving seven years for child sodomy. And I've got him on tape. And he admitted it. He's guilty. Trying to reunite these people with their children that they abused under the auspices of the other parent is engaging in parental alienation for trying to keep them away from the abuser.
And this is very disturbing to me because the theory of parental alienation, while the behaviors, I acknowledge the behaviors, I would acknowledge that some people use that as a weapon to hurt their ex-spouse.
I absolutely acknowledge that. I think that it's also being used as a psychological disorder to harm and to help abusers. And abusers are using it and they know this. Lawyers know that it's like the game plan. And this is what they do. And I think that's very immoral. It's harmful to the children. And I'm seeing it all over the place.
And this goes into the psychologists. And one who's, you want to talk about an expert who's not an expert. We have a psychologist in Missouri, who's a geriatric psychologist. And yet he is in charge of custody evaluations for children. And he has no experience. He has no training in child abuse, in none, zero. He has no training in how to identify an abuser. He has no training.
And what he is doing is misdiagnosing people, mothers with mostly mothers in his case. I have other psychologists who misdiagnose fathers.
But in this case, it's mostly mothers with narcissistic personality disorder to give their kids to an abuser. An actual recorded abuser.
And this is a guy who I don't know if he's getting kickbacks. I don't know how this is working or why. But he's doing it consistently. I have like 16 women. And KMOV in Missouri actually did a nine-minute segment on TV about these women who were diagnosed falsely using the MMPI, by the way, and accusing them of parental alienation and giving their children to abusers.
So I have this problem with this parental alienation thing going around. Because to me, it seems like a scam.
MMPI cannot be used to diagnose personality disorders.
Interesting. Because that's what they're using it for.
Cannot be used to diagnose personality disorders. Each personality disorder has its own set of tests specific to the personality disorder.
But we never, ever use MMPI for this.
This is good information.
This is one thing.
And the second thing, there is no such thing as parental alienation syndrome.
Syndrome is a very well-defined thing in clinical psychology. It's a set of traits, behaviors, effects, emotions, and cognitions, which go together coherently all the time and lead to behavioral outcomes, and etc, etc.
Parental alienation is not a syndrome. There are parents who turn their children against the other parents. That happens, of course. But it's not a syndrome. It's a behavior. It's a choice. I don't want to call it, but syndrome is not.
So it's total nonsense.
They're using it as abuse. They call it abuse.
And in fact, I have someone on record saying, a guardian in light, I'm saying that parental alienation abuse is worse than any kind of physical abuse. And I mean, that includes beating with a hammer. It includes any kind of physical abuse you could think of.
This woman thinks that manipulation is worse abuse than any of those things. And because it's scarred, it's not okay to turn. It's not okay, but to conflate it with breaking bones.
And I mean, it's just, yeah, it's a bit on the wild side.
Well, and also it kind of correlates to your victim video, because in dealing with the victims that I've been dealing with, you know, I do find it difficult, because I've never been a victim of these types of things.
And so I try to be empathetic. I do find it difficult sometimes, though, where I want to grab the person and shake them. And I want to say, how has this happened to you twice? How have you been in this situation? Have you considered that you have done something, that something you have not seen, something you have not?
And I have asked every person, and they never want to talk about it. I've asked every person, well, a few of them do, every person, what were the red flags? Where did you go? Like, when you were in this relationship, and you must have seen red flags. I was in a relationship that was headed towards abuse, I saw the red flags, I got out, I ran.
And so I want to know, like, what caused you to see those red flags, and then ignore those red flags until you were 10 years down the line, and three kids into it, and now you're suffering because of it.
And I'm not trying to blame the victim. I want to know, how do we stop other people from being in this situation? And no one wants to really acknowledge this.
And I think it's because they don't want to take that responsibility on themselves. And I'm not saying it to be like, oh, you're a bad person, and you're stupid, or you're, it's just that maybe your insight could help other people to not be here.
Again, there are strong incentives to demonize the other party. It's called splitting. It's a splitting defense mechanism. I'm all good, he's all bad. You know, I'm angelic, I'm blameless, blamishless, faultless. I didn't do anything wrong, I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He took advantage of me, I was unable to resist, and I was a magnet, etc.
So, and it's very comforting to think that you have no personal responsibility, and therefore will never be held accountable for anything that had happened, that you had no contribution to what had happened. It's very comforting.
It's like, you know, I can go on with my life, it's probably not going to happen to me again, because I just came across one bad apple, one bad guy. It's not going to ever happen to me again.
And that's it. I didn't do anything wrong. I don't need to look into myself, I don't need to.
Victimhood pays. It pays sometimes monetarily. It will make a lot of money from victimhood movements and from being victims. It also pays, above all, emotionally. It's very rewarding to be a victim. It's a good place to be in.
You feel morally upright, superior. It's actually a grandiose defense. And that's why today in recent studies, we are beginning to conflate people whose identity is that of a victim. We are discovering that people who had rendered victimhood an integral part of their identity are actually dark triad personalities. They are narcissists, psychopaths, Machiavellians. I'm beginning to discover, for example, that many victimhood movements, you mentioned me too, many victimhood movements had been penetrated and hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths.
This has been recent studies in British Columbia, other places. We had discovered that there is a personality construct called TIV and that interpersonal victimhood. There's a personality construct called TIV where people are prone to define themselves via their victimhood and they seek victimhood so as to kind of buttress their sense of grandiosity, actually. It's a narcissistic defense.
So we're discovering unsavory things about the fringes of victimhood and victims.
I've seen it. I've seen it.
Because if you dare to say this, you're ostracized. YouTube is shadow banning my videos. I bet they are.
I was going to ask you if you had blowback for that victimhood video.
I'm no longer recommended.
They're doing it to me too though.
You can't find it on search terms.
There is this pernicious political correctness and so on which stifles academics as well. We are terrified. We are afraid to speak our mind. Absolutely. And there is self-censorship, extreme self-censorship by all these walk movements and so on, by all these victimhood movements.
And so today you can't ask questions such as what is the contribution of a victim to a repeated victimhood if it's a pattern? Was slavery all bad? Maybe the answer is yes, slavery was all bad.
But I want to have the liberty to ask the question. And if I can't ask this question, I'm a slave.
Yep. Absolutely.
Absolutely. That completely, it just describes what we're living in. And I find it to be, like I said, it's tyrannical. When you have to hide your beliefs, when you have to self-censor, when you have to do that, I just think we're on the downswing. We're not going anywhere good.
And it's upsetting to me. But I've enjoyed your videos very much. And I enjoyed your perspective very much. And I thought that the talk that you gave in front of the students, I'm not sure where you were, but it was a class of some sort. And you were speaking about the nature of reality too. It was very, very, very interesting to me.
And I would encourage people to find Professor Sam Vaknin's YouTube page. And I'll link it here especially. And I think what I will do is I'll link it in the show description. And I'll make sure that I link his video on victims and victimhood because I found that to be extremely interesting.
As a person who deals with victims on a regular basis, I found that to be very, very helpful. And I get frustrated sometimes dealing with victims.
How do you tell victims how to not become a professional victim? How do you tell them to, how do they get out of it?
What do they have to do?
Social mobility obtaining favorable outcomes today depends on identity politics as a victim.
Even people who don't consider themselves to be victims are actually victimizing themselves.
And I want to give you an example.
Today we teach in all the universities in the West, at least, that women should be sexually liberated and emancipated. That they should take charge of their sex lives and that they should become the new men. You know, they should be gung ho and they should initiate. They should do the flirting. They should court. They should etc.
So women empowerment.
Here's the problem. When women adhere to these feminist messages and when there is pride in being a slut, and believe it or not, there is such a movement. Oh, I know.
I know it. I've written about it.
It's a problem.
This woman are adopting male stereotypes. A slut is a male stereotype of a woman. A liberated woman, a truly liberated one. Not a slut.
So actually these women, they don't think they're victims. They think they're emancipated and empowered and liberated, but they are the ultimate victims.
They had internalized the male chauvinistic stereotypical view of women.
Yeah. And now they're trying to conform to it. They're trying to become a men's slut. Victimhood identity politics is the pathway to everywhere, including the White House, including the White House, to everywhere, to positions in academia, to budget allocations in Congress, to the White House, to the judiciary.
I mean, you name it, you need to be some kind of victim of someone.
Now, this leaves a decreasing pool of abusers, because if everyone is, everyone's victim, I mean, who's the abuser?
And so we're beginning to see intersectional victimhood and intersectional abuse.
So now there are abusers who abuse intersectionally, because we ran out of abusers, you know?
Oh my God.
So now you have a victim who is, for example, a lesbian, Black woman. So she suffers intersectional victimhood as a lesbian, as a Black person, and as a woman. But she is victimized by a white supremacist male, etc. So he's an intersectional abuser, because he abuses her as a male, he abuses her as a white person, he abuses her as a supremacist.
I mean, so we are now beginning to see intersectionality of the abuse victim dynamics. And this is the big next wave in academia, I bet you 101. That's the big next wave, intersectional abuse. It's utterly sick.
The dynamic is utterly sick, because victimhood is a state of paralysis. It's stasis, it's death. It's a form of death.
Victimhood means that you do not control your life. You have an external locus of control. Someone else determines your life, the abuser. Someone else determines your identity. If your identity is that of a victim, you have no identity. It's determined by the abuser.
And so you, and it creates some plastic defenses. In other words, you always blame everything on the outside. There's no personal responsibility or accountability.
And so you feel that you can behave any way, any which way you want. And everything is justified because you're a victim, who are you? You've been traumatized. You can't help yourself. You're a victim. It leads to help this path.
And I see everyone flocking.
And everyone is flocking. You're absolutely right. Professor Sam Vaknin, and thank you so much for sitting with me today. I really appreciate it. Hopefully, maybe we can do it again sometime. I would love that because I'm sure I will have more questions for you as I get deeper into your channel. And I hope that you enjoyed it today. Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me. Stay well. Thank you. You too.