Narcissism: Unclean Energy (with Michael Shellenberger, November 2022)

Summary

Sam Vaknin discusses the evolution of narcissism from a healthy childhood phase to pathological narcissism in adulthood, which becomes a clinical entity when it remains infantile and extreme. He explains that narcissism has become an organizing principle in society, influencing various social institutions and movements. Vaknin suggests that narcissism and psychopathy are on a spectrum, with malignant narcissism and psychopathy often overlapping. He argues that modern civilization's incentive structure rewards narcissistic and psychopathic traits, leading to their prevalence in certain professions and social movements. Vaknin proposes that instead of fighting narcissism, society should rechannel it towards socially beneficial goals by providing narcissistic supply as a reward for positive actions. He believes that this approach could lead to a redefinition of civilization, as narcissism is an inescapable part of current social fabric and technology.

And thank you so much.

I'm so excited to talk to you.

I've been thinking about it all night.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Kind of you.

And thanks for the plugs in the last few weeks.

Yes, I'm your greatest promoter now.

Would you just-- can you just make sure your screen's a little bit lower?

I want your head a little square.

That's perfect.

Yeah.

It's OK now.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's perfect.

Well, I want to-- I have so many questions for you.

And hopefully, we'll be able to get to them all.

But I just think we need to start with some definition of terms.

I think there's-- for me, there's a lot of confusion.

And so I have a bunch of specific questions.

But I think it's easier for me to just ask them all in one question.

So you can disentangle and unpack what we mean by narcissism.

How is it different from being selfish?

How is it different from having a big ego or being egocentric?

How are all those things different from psychopathy or sociopathy?

What else do I want to disentangle?

Is there a difference between narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder?

Can somebody behave in narcissistic ways but not be a narcissist?

Can I be a narcissist in some interaction but then not really be a narcissist or vice versa?

And then I think as long as we're there-- and take as long as you need to answer this question, because I'm asking so many questions.

Take as long as you need to unpack it.

It sort of gets to this-- I think you had sort of argued that-- and by the way, I haven't read the book yet.

I did order it though.

So I will read the book.

And maybe we can talk again afterwards.

But I'm not going to do that for the business.

But I think you argue that narcissistic personality disorder is a response to stress, similarly to post-traumatic stress disorder, rather than a psychiatric disorder or than a personality disorder.

So I think if you just unpack all of that for me and for others, that would be enormously helpful.

Well, you have a six-month syllabus right there.

Yeah.

Well, I'll do my best.

First of all, narcissism starts off in early childhood.

And then it is healthy.

It's an integral part of the evolution of the self.

And it underlies the regulation of self-esteem and self-confidence later in life, the setting of boundaries, separating from your parents, becoming an individual.

They all rely critically on healthy narcissism, also known as primary narcissism.

But narcissism, like everything else in life, or in psychology at least, evolves, should evolve, should transmute and transform, should shape shift.

And if it doesn't, if it remains infantile well into adulthood, then it becomes secondary narcissism, AKA, pathological narcissism.

Now, pathological narcissism is a clinical entity.

Put differently, it's a diagnosis.

It's a set of traits, behaviors, beliefs, cognitions, or rather cognitive distortions, emotions, or rather suppressed emotions.

And when you put all of these together, you get a syndrome in effect.

And that's pathological narcissism.

And so it's a hyper-complex phenomenon.

It is, on the one hand, a clinical entity, but it had emerged very similar to allegedly the COVID-19 virus.

It had escaped the laboratory.

And now, narcissism is an organizing principle and a hermeneutic principle, an explanatory principle.

We use narcissism to make sense of the world.

We look at show business.

We dissect politics and the business world and academe.

And we say, oh, well, he's a narcissist.

She's a narcissist.

So narcissism helps us to imbue the senseless and the random with patterns and meaning.

And this is an organizing principle.

Narcissism, therefore, is no longer merely a psychopathological clinical phenomenon, but it is part and parcel of the social fabric.

It also underlies many technologies, for example, social media.

So it's not possible to discuss narcissism only in the settings of therapy or clinic or it's all over.

It's ubiquitous.

It had come to define many social interactions, numerous social institutions, social movements, activism, et cetera, et cetera.

It's all over the place.

I would say that narcissism is the color of postmodern life.

On the one hand, and a new religion, a new private distributed networked religion, where everyone is a god and everyone is one's worshipper.

So this is in a nutshell.

Now, pathological narcissism includes behaviors which many people find obnoxious or repellent, and behaviors which are abrasive, and behaviors which are abrasive or antisocial or reckless, and behaviors that are dangerous and risky.

The whole monopoly.

Narcissistic personality disorder, and especially a variant of narcissistic personality disorder known as malignant narcissism, is when these behaviors and traits and proclivities and emotions and cognitions are taken to extreme.

So yes, the answer to a part of your question, you could have a narcissistic style.

It was first described by Lynn Sperry and later by Theodore Millon.

You could have a narcissistic style, but you would still not be a narcissist.

It's a question of gradations.

It's a kind of spectrum or dimensional approach to narcissism.

Many people are a-holes, excuse the expression.

And yet they do not qualify for a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder.

Someone with NPD is someone who has only cold empathy.

In other words, he's able to scan and absorb data regarding other people, but he has no emotional reactions or resonance to these data.

It is someone who has severe cognitive distortions, for example, grandiosity.

It's someone who is divorced from reality.

Here's what we call impaired reality testing.

It is someone who is exploitative, envious, externalizing in the sense that he uses aggression to try to manipulate the environment.

Someone whose agency depends on utilizing or abusing other people.

And so pathological narcissism taken to extreme, NPD and then malignant narcissism, is very difficult to distinguish from psychopathy or psychopathy.

And even psychopathy is not a clinical term, actually.

It's not been accepted.

It's been rejected by many DSM committees, by many committees of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

It's a brainchild, essentially, of Harvey Leckie and Robert Hare.

And Robert Hare is the guru of psychopathy.

But I think psychopathy is a valid clinical entity.

I think there is such a thing.

Now, psychopathy to antisocial personality disorder is what malignant narcissist is to narcissistic personality disorder.

And that's when the two diagnoses intermeshed.

It's like a Venn diagram.

There's an area in common.

And that area in common is the psychopathic narcissist.

Psychopathic narcissists tend to rise to the top.

They tend to become chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies.

We found that 5% of them are actually malignant narcissists, psychopathic narcissists, and pure, purebred psychopaths.

That's five times the average in the population.

And these are the ones we were able to interview, actually, Hare and Babiak were able to interview.

Many of them declined to be interviewed.

I suspect the number is much higher.

We find a propensity, we find a prevalence of these disorders in certain professions.

These people gravitate to certain professions.

For example, surgeons, medical surgeons, many of them are psychopaths.

We find the narcissist in show business, of course, in the media.

And lately, in the last two years, there has been a slew, an avalanche actually, of academic studies demonstrating pretty conclusively to my mind that social movements, activism, activist movements, and what I call victimhood, or what you call as well, victimhood movements have been hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths who have become the public face of these movements.

This is academic.

This is not a conspiracy theory, and it doesn't mean that I adhere to your politics, or it's simply we agree on something because it happens to be a fact.

It happens to be a fact.

So there has been an infestation and infiltration of various social institutions, dynamic institutions, such as social activism movements, and static institutions, such as the church or politics.

There has been an infestation of narcissists and psychopaths.

They've taken over because the incentive structure of modern civilization is pro-narcissistic and pro-psychopathic.

Put differently, if you're a narcissist or a psychopath, or a victim whose grandiosity is his victimhood or her victimhood, it pays.

It simply pays.

You are rewarded, there's a reward system in place, of course, constructed by previous narcissists and psychopaths.

It's a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing cycle.

That's in the notion.

I hope I've answered more of those questions.

We find the narcissist in show business, of course, in the media.

And lately, in the last two years, there has been a slew, an avalanche actually, of academic studies demonstrating pretty conclusively tomy mind that social movements, activism, activist movements, and what I call victimhood, or what you call as well, victimhood movements have been hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths who have become the public face of these movements.

This is academic.

This is not a conspiracy theory, and it doesn't mean thatI adhere to your politics, or it's simply we agree onsomething because it happens to be a fact.

It happens to be a fact.

So there has been an infestation and infiltration of various social institutions, dynamic institutions, such as social activism movements, and static institutions, such as the church orpolitics.

There has been an infestation of narcissists and psychopaths.

They've taken over because the incentive structure of modern civilization is pro-narcissistic and pro-psychopathic.

Put differently, if you're a narcissist or a psychopath, or a victim whose grandiosity is his victimhood or her victimhood, it pays.

It simply pays.

You are rewarded, there's a reward system in place, of course, only in mental health and psychology.

I am the father of the field of narcissistic abuse.

I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse in most of the language in use today, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, I can go on and on and on.

I can go on and on andon.

And one of the main methods for consolation is spreading rumors and counterfactual and fake news in effect, fake information.

Well, and when I say that I genuinely, in other words, if you genuinely were super self-taught and had none of those qualifications, everything you said would still have landed with the power that it lands.

I fully agree with you by the way.

And I will tell you, I'll give you a fact.

Seven out of the 10 most important psychologists in history never studied psychology and did not have a degree in psychology.

That would include the likes of Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Melanie Klein.

They never studied psychology.

Well, Winnicott studied psychology later.

He was a pediatrician.

Melanie Klein never studied psychology.

Sigmund Freud never studied psychology.

And seven out of 10, the developer of dialectical behavioral therapy, which is the main treatment modality for borderline personality disorder, was actually a borderline patient.

She was mentally ill in an asylum.

This is nonsense.

You don't need an academic degree and you don't need the imprimatur of academe to contribute to any field, by the way, not only psychology.

Well, and I have to say, so I, as you might imagine, have also been regularly attacked for my lack of credentials.

And then what made me feel better is when I started to see that it was happening to people that were much more qualified in formal traditional standards than I was.

But so let's unpack that a bit.

Is it itself a symptom of a narcissistic culture that people are, is it a symptom of someone's own narcissism that they're challenging the credentials of people they disagree with?-

It's legitimate to challenge credentials if it's factual.

It's of course not legitimate if it's based on lies and obfuscations or lack of research.

And yes, in this case, it would be what we call devaluation.

It's a classic narcissistic strategy of reducing the opponent and thereby aggrandizing yourself or doubting the opponent's morality, thereby elevating yourself to the high moral ground.

Now, there is a major misconception about the concept of grandiosity.

Narcissists don't want to be the best.

They don't want to be the most.

It's not true that the narcissist wants to be the richest man on earth, the most powerful person or whatever.

Narcissists just want to be unique.

They want to be special.

So a narcissist's grandiosity has a locus and narcissist's grandiosity resides in a claim.

And the claim could be, I'm the greatest victim ever.

The claim could be, I'm the biggest loser.

No one is a bigger loser than I am.

The claim could be, my failure is so spectacular that it's the biggest failure in the history of the United States.

My bankruptcy was the greatest.

You don't understand this.

This is narcissism.

This is grandiosity.

So similarly, when you devalue your opponent by doubting his credentials counterfactually, against the facts, what you're doing actually is you elevate yourself to the high moral ground and reduce him essentially as a person, as a human being.

That's definitely a narcissistic strategy, but it could be also the opposite.

A narcissist could be very proud of being a con man's con man.

An activist, activist, a loser's loser.

You know, just the uniqueness matters.

The locus is utterly irrelevant and this is why narcissists shape shift all the time.

They start off as communists and then they become Joseph Gables.

====become Joseph Gables.

Wow. They start off as communists and they become Mussolini. It doesn't matter what you do, you have no beliefs, you have no affiliations, no allegiance, no loyalty to anything. The only thing is to maintain your delusional self-perception as unique. It is uniqueness that matters, not supremacy.

That's a major misconception of narcissism.

And is that the same difference then between narcissists and psychopaths?

The main differences between narcissists and psychopaths are the following.

Narcissists depend on other people in order to regulate internal processes.

For example, their sense of self-worth critically relies on what is called narcissistic supply.

So they need the attention of other people, the approbation, the affirmation of other people, or they need to be feared and hated by other people.

As long as they are attended to, as long as there is attention involved, they can regulate their moods, their emotions, negative emotions, and their sense of self-worth.

So they are actually dependent, they are co-dependent in many ways.

Psychopaths are not.

Psychopaths couldn't care less about other people.

They regard other people as objects, stepping stones.

They have a goal, they're goal-oriented.

Narcissists have no goals.

Their only goal is supply.

A narcissist is an actor today, a politician tomorrow, and a martyr the third day, whatever it takes to obtain supply, the narcissist is there.

Whatever claim needs to be made, however contradictory is made.

I mean, it's just about supply.

It's an addiction.

The narcissist is an addict, he's addicted to supply, to attention.

The psychopath is called calculated, skimming, Machiavellian, and goal-oriented.

Now, mind you, many psychopaths are primitive, so they also tend to be ruthless and reckless.

They don't regard well, or they don't analyze well the consequences of their own actions.

They have a very limited horizon, and therefore they become criminals.

But the truth is that the vast majority of psychopaths are not criminals.

That is a beef, that is a problem that the profession has with Robert Herr's work.

Robert Herr's work is the father of psychopathy, yes?

Robert Herr's work is based exclusively on his experience as a prison psychologist.

So he had a very non-representative sample.

The majority of psychopaths are not criminals.

They are very, very flexible and transient when it comes to social functioning.

They become pillars of the community.

They rise to the top.

They manage, they're activists, they are in the limelight.

They rule.

So psychopaths rule.

Narcissists also rule, but psychopaths rule over them.

The hierarchy is psychopaths, narcissists, the rest of us.

Wow.

So when someone is both a narcissist and a psychopath, how do the differences get resolved?

We distinguish between primary and secondary disorders in comorbidities.

Comorbidity means that you're diagnosed with two mental health issues simultaneously.

Comorbidities are very common, and there are strong indications that our classification of mental illnesses must be wrong somehow.

But leave that aside, in the case of comorbidity of psychopaths and narcissists, the dominant disorder is narcissism.

The psychopathy, the psychopathic side is at the service of the narcissistic side.

So the narcissist needs to obtain supply.

He will use psychopathic methods to attain the goal.

The goal would become supply, and he would act psychopathically, anti-socially to obtain the goal.

So for example, he would not hesitate to break the law, or he would not hesitate to abuse and exploit people egregiously.

He would not hesitate to steal from people, to deceive people, and so on and so forth, but with the aim of obtaining supply.

While a typical psychopath would do it for sex or money or power, a narcissistic psychopath would do it for the sake of obtaining attention.

Now, altruistic charitable behaviors can easily become narcissized, can easily be put at the service of buttressing grandiosity.

So it's like ostentatious altruism.

Watch me charity.

The kind of social activism that is intended to promote attention rather than to accomplish goals.

These are all prime indicators of the infiltration of narcissism into all these operations.

So we tend to conflate morality with these mental health issues.

We say, for example, the narcissist cannot be moral.

That is absolutely not true.

If the locus of grandiosity of the narcissist is in his religiosity or morality, then this kind of narcissist would be strictly moral, harshly religious, and that would be his grandiosity.

Similarly, a psychopath definitely can be moral if morality would help in securing the goal.

So he could be, for example, extremely moral in order to have sex.

Or he could be very moral because he makes money.

He's a fundamentalist evangelist and he makes a lot of money.

He's very moral, but he pays.

So yes, morality is not the hallmark of mentally healthy people.

Morality is a cognitive dimension.

And like everything else, it can be put to ill use.

One of the, so there's so much there to unpack, but one of the things that was struck by in making this video of the climate activists was how many of them said, "I don't wanna be here.

"I'm here because it's my duty to be here, but it's actually, I'm suffering to be here right now.

"In fact, I'm angry that climate change is making me be here right now.

And they cry and their faces turn into child faces.

You know, I actually found their photo.

They get, they, I don't know if you call that regression, if that's still a word you use, but they look like children when they say it.

It's unfair that I have to be here doing these things.

What is that?-

Depends, personally, I wouldn't blanket doubt everyone.

I think each case needs to be studied separately.

And we need a preponderance of evidence to reach a conclusion regarding mental health or mental illness.

So I wouldn't, I would be very reluctant to blanket case the whole group.

However, if there is a repeated, if there's repeated behavior of ostentatious virtual signaling, what you describe is called virtual signaling, as you well know, because I think you mentioned it in some of your writings.

So if there is ostentatious virtual signaling and exclusively in public settings, almost never in private, then you could safely assume that it's a manifestation of grandiosity, or at least in the service of grandiosity, intended to garner narcissistic supply, attention.

So what matters are the ostentatiousness, the public setting, because if this is done privately, it may be authentic, the public setting and the virtual signaling.

In other words, when it's done among peers and like-minded people, the echo chamber thing.

So this is common, not only on the left and not only among climate change activists.

It's typical, it's on the alt right.

I mean, all social movements, all social movements attract these kind of people, who are conspicuously moral and self-sacrificial.

This is a Messiah complex.

A good Messiah gets crucified.

I mean, if you don't get crucified, you don't qualify.

So there is this martyrdom of self-sacrificial stance.

And it's very typical, not only in public setting, but also in private settings.

For example, many mothers or even parents, black male children, by telling them, I've sacrificed so much for you.

You know, I didn't want to be here, but here I am for you, et cetera, et cetera, you owe me.

In other words, the phenomenon you've just described is part of a larger phenomenon known as entitlement.

Entitlement requires, on the one hand, virtue signaling, because if you're not virtuous, you should not be entitled, you're not entitled.

So entitlement requires virtue signaling, on the one hand, and the assumption that there are rights and commensurate obligations.

Like, if you're entitled, you have rights, and these rights create in others obligations.

So this is part and parcel of ethics.

I'm a philosopher among my other scenes.

It's part and parcel of ethics, and in ethics, we know that there is a rights and obligations calculus.

And this ostentatious virtue signaling is a way of telling wider society, you owe me.

You owe me because I'm sacrificing.

I have a right to your time, resources, attention.

I don't know what else.

I have a right, and because I have this right, you have an obligation, because every right creates an obligation.

And so, and I have this right, because I am virtuous and you're not.

This is implicit devaluation.

Every form of virtue signaling involves devaluation.

Because if I'm virtuous, it means you're not.

Because if we were both equally virtuous, why would I need to signal it to you?

Like, for example, we both breathe.

We breathe oxygen and not signaling to you that I'm breathing oxygen, who would be theotic.

But if I think I'm more virtuous than you, I would signal to you that I'm virtuous.

So there is an implicit devaluated or devaluating message in virtue signaling.

We are the climate change activists.

We are virtuous because we are trying to save the planet and we're trying to save you despite yourself.

And because we are sacrificing our time and God knows what else, this creates a right.

And this right imposes on you an obligation.

And this is the sequence of virtue signaling.

And of course, it's grandiose.

Professor, one change very quickly in the climate change movement, which I've been a part of for 25 years, more than 25 years.

One huge change that's occurred very quickly is, 10 years ago, and maybe even less than that, nobody said, I'm here because my future is at risk.

It was, I'm worried about future generations.

So there's temporal and then there was spatial.

I'm worried about Africans.

Now they still do the other, they still do those things, but then they go, I'm here because I won't have a future, me, upper middle class British citizen who is gonna be absolutely fine.

What is that about?

Is that an evidence of rising narcissism?

Is it a particular form of it?

I just said that virtue signaling creates a calculus of rights and obligations, but it's much less effective to claim rights on behalf of third parties.

Even when you go to court, the court tells you, you have no standing.

You can't sue on behalf of someone else.

That guy should come and sue, that girl should come and sue.

You can sue on their behalf.

You don't have standing.

So if you personalize it and you say it's affecting me, it's affecting my future, it's affecting my life, the strength of your argument is much more profound because it's about me.

And of course this is narcissistic, but it's narcissistic in the sense that everything has been atomized.

The social fabric has been torn asunder not only with regards to climate activism, politics is polarized.

I mean, we are falling apart in the sense that we are drifting apart.

We are atomized.

This process is called atomization.

And so this reflects atomization.

The minute you atomize, it means that there is no solidarity and there are no common denominators.

When you look at, for example, at the institution of family or the institution of marriage or the institution of intergender relations, or even the institution of gender roles, you see that everything had become fluid and negotiable.

And because everything now is fluid and negotiable, even sex, fluid sex, fluid gender, everything is negotiable and fluid.

It means that each one to his own, we are all atomized.

And today we don't have what used to be called social screens.

We don't even have what used to be called sexual screens.

So if you date someone today, you have to negotiate from scratch.

There is no script that dictates to you how to behave, but you have to negotiate every aspect of the date.

Where you're gonna go, what you're gonna drink, how much you're gonna drink, what are you going to do afterwards?

Are you gonna have sex or not?

What kind of sex you're gonna have, etc, etc.

It looks a lot like a corporate merger and acquisition or takeover, sometimes hostile takeover.

So, of course we have all devolved and it's a devolution.

It's not an evolution.

We've all devolved into self-interested narratives and self-directed ethical calculus.

While in the past ethics, even schools of ethics, such as utilitarianism, which were very, very, in a way immoral, schools of ethics were always about the other.

But as we became less and less tolerant of the other, and as the other had receded from our field of view to the point of vanishing, as we have created a world of solipsism, where it's us, Netflix and the cat, more or less, if we're lucky.

Well, in such a world, of course, then there would be what we call pronoun density.

Pronoun density is a measure of narcissism in speech, in speech acts.

How many times do you use the words, I, my, myself and mine?

So, the pronoun density, first pronoun density had exploded in the last 20, 30 years.

And that's really one example.

Everything is embedded in these huge, long social trends.

In 1968, there was a French philosopher and sociologist, Guillebore.

And Guillebore wrote a book called "The Society of the Spectacle." And then later there was another guy, Louis Althusser, who was a neo-Marxist, post-Marxist philosopher.

And Louis Althusser said that society, that we are interpolated, we are kind of brainwashed and made to act, via advertising and corporate messaging and so on and so forth.

And when you put the two together, you see that the world of business had imposed on us a spectacle and rendering all of us Shakespearean actors.

We don't live anymore, there's no life anymore.

There's only an act.

A role play, we all play roles.

And because we all play roles, we are interpolated.

In other words, we are treated as objects.

For example, our eyeballs are monetized.

That's a tricky metaphor, monetizing eyeballs.

It's a horror, a Bela Lugosi horror movie.

So the interpolation of the corporate world, it started in the '50s and the '60s with consumerism and so on, and late stage capitalism, which is pretty malignant, rendered all of us objects.

And from the moment we became, from the moment we were made into objects, we became first of all passive recipients.

And the second thing is we were unable to discern or to interact with others.

It made it extremely difficult for us to interact with others.

In other words, we prefer to interact with the overall script with a narrative than with each other, which would explain the rise in activism movements and social movements and so on.

Because activists, socially active, social movements and so on, they're not about people, they're about narratives.

They are close cousins of ideologies in the worst sense of the word.

And we live in a death cult.

It's a death cult because we value objects over people.

We value object, even the planet is an object.

I mean, we treat the planet and nature as if it were an object, subject to manipulation, subject to fixing, subject to alteration, subject to modification, totally passive out there, waiting for us to act.

It's an objectification of this hyper complex system in which we're seamlessly integrated.

It's a Descartian view of, Cartesian view of, you know, us versus the world, observer versus reality.

It's very sick, forget narcissism for a minute.

It's even much worse than narcissism because it's a total loss of touch with reality, total loss.

When you start to treat other people as objects, when you fit into a narrative, when you regard, when you objectify everything, including your own planet and so on, this is an excellent description of the matrix.

That's the matrix.

The matrix is a narrative reified in machinery.

That's amatrix, the matrix, the moment, yes?

It's a narrative, it's a story, reified in machinery, built into machinery, embedded in machinery.

And everyone in the matrix is isolated, solipsistic, but experiencing a delusion of connectivity, a delusion of life.

The matrix is a death count, of course.

Everyone there is dead, they just don't know it.

We are not very far from this.

Social activism in all its form in the '60s was benevolent because it was about the other.

There were big arguments about narrative, even in the civil rights movement.

There were numerous strands and threads.

There was a lot of argument.

So it was a very fertile intellectual ground and so on.

This is not the shape of social activism today.

Social activism today is ideological, authoritarian, narcissistic, sick to the core, not concerned with people, but concerned with objects.

That's a death count.

Sim, and by the way, do you have a hard stop at the top of the hour?

Can we keep going a little bit longer?

My audience is used to being inflicted with one of our things.

I have more time too.

I want to, sometimes in these conversations, we wait until the end to get to a positive story or a positive vision or a vision of health, but I wanna do it a little bit earlier because I wanna, I think it provides a nice contrast.

And you started to go there with the '60s.

I loved what you said about redirecting pathological narcissism into a healthy narcissism in a story of overcoming victimhood, overcoming oppression.

So I wanna spend some time there.

And let's get specific.

We're in Britain, so you may know, I believe climate change is real.

I don't think it's a catastrophe, but I do think it's something we should do something about.

I think it's important for people to have clean, cheap, reliable energy.

And so, and I'm friends with, I have friends in Britain and Britain is experiencing the worst of an energy crisis, part of it created by, not entirely, but part of it created by people that are opposed to cheap and reliable clean energy, even nuclear and natural gas.

What would, what is a positive, if you say we want cheap, abundant natural gas and nuclear for Britain, for the people to lift up out of poverty, for climate change, for all these positive reasons, how can you go about positive, healthy altruism, including a social movement, without succumbing to pathological narcissism or psychopathy?

What would you, how would you describe, can you paint a little bit of a vision for what that positive public engagement would look like?

And part of the reason I ask is I think that, I think there's sometimes people here, will hear this critique that you're making, which is super persuasive and I agree with 100%.

And I think a lot of people hear it and they go, well, and they lapse into a kind of libertarianism.

You know, that's why you shouldn't engage in altruism.

That's why governments shouldn't try to help people.