The survivors of my previous videos today will have known that I described a mechanism called entraining. It is the mechanism by which the narcissist induces a hypnotic, trance-like state in his victim, or prey, or one of an intimate partner, or future source of narcissistic supply. This is done in the love-bombing and grooming phases. It starts then, but it continues throughout the relationship.
Entraining, technically, is when an external stimulus, like music or words, create a brainwave frequency that is identical to the brainwave frequency of the stimulus creator.
So, as someone who creates a stimulus, his brain has certain waves with certain frequencies, and via the stimulus, he induces an identical brainwave in the recipient.
When the narcissist verbally abuses you, when the narcissist talks to you, when the narcissist love-bombs you, and grooms you, and generally gaslights you, or creates ambiance, or creates an atmosphere, using words, or sometimes other means, visual means, even music, when the narcissist bombards you with stimuli, he does this in order to induce in your brain a wave with a frequency and characteristics identical to his.
He wants you to mirror his brain. He wants your brain to become an extension of his brain.
The landscape of brainwave frequencies in his mind, he wants to replicate in yours.
In a way, you become a zombified mirror of the narcissist.
It's technically a dissociative state. It's a hypnotic, once-like state.
Regrettably, that hadn't been studied so much. I couldn't find a single video online discussing and training this process of inducing identical brainwaves.
But I think this is the major technique of the narcissist.
Now, someone made a comment, a very pertinent comment, for a change.
What happens when the narcissist does it to his children?
Well, that's a serious problem. The brain's neuroplasticity overcomes almost everything.
Abuse, trauma, they are all encoded in the brain. They are encoded via proteins, which represent memory, and they are encoded in the way that neurons, brain cells, connect to each other. This is called neuronal pathways.
But the brain is luckily neuroplastic. We can rewire and reprogram the brain to create new pathways and to get rid of many of these memories, either by repressing them or by denying access to them in some other way.
So this all can be reverted to original form, and training is not forever. It's not a permanent state. It's a transitional phase.
But when it's done to children, I'm not quite sure whether this is totally true. I think the damage done to children is much more permanent than the damage done to adults.
First of all, adults have many more defenses. They've experienced, they've highly developed cognitive skills. Most adults are emotionally regulated, not dysregulated.
But children, people with borderline personality disorder, co-dependence, they will be very, very susceptible, like the virus, you know, susceptible to the virus. They'll be very susceptible, very amenable to modification via in training.
I think the narcissist sometimes homes in on these vulnerabilities.
People who are, for example, victims of complex post traumatic stress disorder, complex traumavictims are rendered temporarily borderline. They display narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors and traits, and they are indistinguishable from borderline.
It is in this window of opportunity as far as the narcissist is concerned. When the person is most vulnerable, most broken, most damaged, most sad, most destitute and devastated, it is then that the narcissist homes in, zeros in on your vulnerability and can entrain you most efficaciously.
So vulnerable people from children to victims of complex trauma, from borderline to co-dependent, they're all natural victims of this technique of entraining.
But before I proceed, I want again to recommend the book The Brain's Way of Healing, Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity, by Norman Deutsch, D-O-I-D-G-E.
Now, still codependents and borderlines are particularly susceptible to narcissists. That's a well-established fact.
My good friend Joanne LaChark, decades ago, in the 80s, had written the seminal groundbreaking book, Borderline Narcissistic Couples, now in its second edition. So even then, back then, people were noticing, clinicians noticed, and psychoanalysts noticed, the extremely strong bond between narcissists and co-dependence, narcissists and borderlines.
Today, it's known as trauma bonding, somehow, somewhat erroneously, by the way.
But they noticed the bonding. And I think the reason that narcissists bond especially strongly with, or co-dependence actually, bond especially strongly with narcissists, is because they have common ecological roots.
The psychogenesis or pathogenesis of narcissism and co-dependency is one and the same. It's the same developmental root.
And so it's like both of them have been subjected to the same pathogen, to the same virus, or to the same bacterium, the bacterium of childhood trauma and childhood abuse.
There are two possible pathological reactions to childhood abuse and trauma, co-dependency and narcissism. And they both involve fantasy as a defense mechanism.
The co-dependent has a pretty realistic assessment of herself, but her view of others is fantastic. Yes, she assesses herself pretty well. I mean, she knows herself pretty well.
But when she looks at her intimate partner, she idealizes him. That's the process of co-idealization that I mentioned in the previous video.
The narcissist is exactly the mirror image. The narcissist's self-image and self-perception are delusional, grandiose, unrealistic. This is exactly where his reality testing fails.
The co-dependent has a realistic assessment of herself. The narcissist has unrealistic assessment of himself.
The co-dependent has a view of others that is fantastic, but the narcissist's penetrating view of others is blood-curdingly accurate. The narcissist has cold empathy. He sees others exactly as they are. He knows what are the chinks in the armor, how to penetrate, how to intrude, how to manipulate.
So they compliment each other. She idealizes the narcissist and he sees in her the penetration points that allow him to make her idealize him, to force and to coerce her to idealize him.
They constitute a symbiotic, a symbiosis. They are a symbiotic relationship, in a way a little parasitical relationship.
He knows to push her buttons so that she ends up idealizing him.
Pathological narcissism is a form of addiction to narcissistic supply. The narcissist is caught in a kind of conundrum of his own making.
On the one hand, he considers himself superior, godlike, above the maddened crowd, etc. But on the other hand, to maintain his inflated grandiose and fantastic sense of self-worth, the narcissist is objectively, humiliatingly dependent on constant input from people which he considers vastly inferior to him.
Imagine if your life depended on people you detest. And that's the narcissist's predicament.
His very coherence, his very identity, his cohesion, his core, his kernel, the fact that he can get up in the morning, depends crucially, derives crucially from input, on input, from people that he holds in contempt. He is contemptuous towards the very foundations and founts and sources of his own existence. He clings to people. He is needy, but he hates them. He resents them. And then he hates himself for his dependence.
And this leads to bouts of approach, followed by bouts of avoidance, a repetition compulsion. We discussed it many, many times.
So here's the narcissist and here's the codependent. Both of them were abused in childhood. One developed a solution, the other one developed a mirror solution.
Yet they both are branches of the same tree. It is exactly because they are branches of this tree that the narcissist resonates powerfully with the codependent and her needs. That's why he has access to her like entrain her and brainwash her and condition her like no one else.
Like dependents, people with dependent personality disorder, codependents depend on other people for their emotional gratification and for the performance of both inconsequential and crucial daily and psychological ego functions.
Codependents seek to fuse or merge with significant others by becoming one with their intimate partners. Codependents are able to actually love themselves via through loving others. The only way they can love themselves is they see themselves reflected in someone else's eyes. They need someone else's gaze. They need to be seen.
And in this sense, they're exactly like the narcissist.
The narcissist cannot regulate his internal environment. He cannot regulate his emotions properly. He cannot regulate his moods properly. And above all, he cannot regulate his sense of identity, his sense of self-worth properly without input from others.
Same with the codependent. Exactly the same. Same with the borderline.
Indeed, there are scholars like Rothstein who suggest that borderlines are failed narcissists. That the child becomes a borderline personality disorder person because the child had failed to become a full fledged narcissist. So borderline is a form of failed narcissism, according to some scholars.
All these people, all three narcissists, codependents, borderlines, they are sides of the same coin. They're not the same.
The dynamics, the psychodynamics of codependent and psychodynamics of borderline is fundamentally different to the psychodynamics of a narcissist because they possess empathy and they have access to their emotions. The narcissist doesn't.
But in terms of their dependence on other people for the regulation of their inner environment, they're pretty much the same.
Codependents are needy. They're demanding. They're submissive. They suffer from abandonment anxiety. And to avoid being overwhelmed by it, they cling to others and they act immaturely. These behaviors are intended to elicit protective responses, to safeguard the relationship with their companion or mate upon whom they depend.
Codependents appear to be impervious to abuse. No matter how badly codependents are mistreated, they remain committed.
In extreme codependence, the fusion and merger with a significant other leads to in-house stalking by the codependent as she strives to preserve the integrity and cohesion of her personality and the representations of her loved ones within it.
So when there is extreme codependence, the boundaries between the codependent and her significant other, for example, her narcissist, these boundaries dissolve. The merger is complete.
And very often the codependent in such a situation where she had become one organism with a narcissist, she would abuse herself. She would stalk herself and I call it in-house abuse or in-house stalking. She would kind of tell the narcissist, you don't need to do this to me. I'll do it to you.
The narcissist outsources his abuse and stalking to this compliant and submissive codependent. It kind of, she takes the burden off him. She abuses herself before he abuses her.
This is where the cold codependence comes to play. By accepting the role of victims, codependents seek to control their abuses, to manipulate them.
It is a dance macabre way in which both members of the dyad collaborate, but the only reason they can collaborate at all is because they have a common language, a common dictionary, the language and dictionary of childhood abuse and trauma. They come from the same home. They have been subjected to the same parental mistreatment. They had dead mothers or dead fathers, emotionally unavailable, narcissistic, selfish, depressive, sick parents, and they had to parentify themselves and they had to parentify their parents. Both of them are lost children in the woods.
And so when they find each other, they extend hands and they hold on to each other for their life.
Codependence sometimes claims to pity her abuser. She cast herself in the grandiose roles of her abuser's saviour and redeemer.
The codependence of overwhelming empathy imprisons the codependent in these dysfunctional relationships. And she feels guilt, either because she believes that she had driven the abuser to maltreat her, or because she contemplates abandoning it. It's a loose situation.
If she stays in the relationship, she convinces herself via a process called autoclastic defense. She convinces herself that she is the reason for the abuse. She had provoked him. She had hurt him. She insulted him. She misbehaved.
The borderline does this very often. This guilt trip, self-induced guilt trips, this shame, all engulfing, all encompassing, all consuming shame. It's very typical of borderlines, especially after a borderline does misbehave.
The codependence is the same.
And this is one option.
The second option is to abandon the narcissists, to fight for their life, to escape, to go no contact.
But this also induces in her guilt and shame.
Codependency is a complex multifaceted and multidimensional defense against the codependence fears and needs.
There are five categories of codependence stemming from their respective etiologies.
There's codependency that aims to fend off anxieties related to abandonment. These codependents are very similar to borderlines. They are clingy, smothering, and prone to panic. They are plagued with ideas of reference, referential ideation, and they display self-negating submissiveness.
Their main concern is to prevent their victims, friends, spouses, family members from deserting them or from attaining true autonomy and independence. These codependents merge with their loved ones and experience any sign of abandonment, actual, threatened, anticipated, imaginary, as a form of self-annihilation or even amputation. These codependents are also usually borderlines.
There's a comorbidity there.
The second type of codependency is a codependency that is here to cope with the codependence fear of losing control.
By feigning helplessness and neediness, such codependents coerce their environment into ceaselessly catering to their needs, wishes, and requirements.
These codependents are labile drama queens. Their life is a kaleidoscope of instability and chaos. They refuse to grow up. They force their nearest and dearest to treat them as emotional or physical invalids. They deploy their self-imputed deficiencies and disabilities as weapons. They weaponize them.
I would call this the narcissistic or codependent. Both these types of codependents use emotional blackmail and, when necessary, threats to secure the presence and the blind obedience and compliance of their suppliers.
When there is vicarious codependents, they live through others. They sacrifice themselves in order to glory in the accomplishments of their chosen targets. They subsist on reflected light, on secondhand applause, and on derivative achievements. They have no personal history, having suspended their lives, wishes, preferences, and dreams in favor of another.
So this is the taxonomy of codependents.
As you see, codependency is often comorbid with borderline and with other forms of personality disorders. You can't really make a total distinction. The line is blurred and fuzzy.
I know that many codependents deny that they have any narcissistic traits, that they have any borderline traits, but it's a very indefensible position.
Take for example the codependent or borderline narcissist. Like you have a psychopathic narcissist, you have a borderline narcissist, and even a codependent narcissist. These kind of narcissists oscillate between periods of clinging and other codependent behavior patterns, which they misinterpret as intimacy, and periods, eras of aloofness, detachment, and emotion and neglect and abandonment, which they regard as legitimate and the only possible manifestations of personal autonomy and space.
So there is this approach avoidance, repetition, compulsion.
Codependent or borderline narcissist tend to form with their intimate partner a shared fantasy, a shared psychosis for Liaddou.
These are all the outcomes of their overwhelming and all pervasive abandonment anxiety. They either smother the partner in an attempt to forestall abandonment, or they preemptively abandon she, thus avoiding her and maintaining an illusion of control over the situation. I'm the one who walked out. I dumped her, not the other way around.
The codependent deploys strategies, this kind of codependent deploys strategies such as merger, becoming one with her intimate partner while renouncing all personal autonomy and independence of both of them up to a point of shared psychosis.
There is something called coextensivity, the ventriloquist defense, insisting the department mind reads her and acts in ways that reflect her inner psychological states and moods. This kind of codependent will say, you're so insensitive, can't you see that I am sad? Or couldn't you have guessed what I wanted? She's looking for telepathy. Her partner should be dummy and she is the ventriloquist.
And the shifting boundaries using behavioral unpredictability and ambient uncertainty to induce paralyzing dependence in the partner.
And finally, there's a form, another form of dependence that is so subtle, that it eluded detection until very, very recently. And it's known as counter dependency.
Counter dependence reject and despise, despise authority. They are contumacious. They often clash with authority figures like parents, bosses, the law, the state, their sense of self worth.
We see many of these, by the way, in the pandemic, their sense of self worth and their very self identity are premised on and derived from, in other words, dependent on these acts of braggadaccio, bravura and defiance. They are personal autonomy militants.
Counter dependence are fiercely uncompromisingly independent, very often foolishly so. They are controlling, they are self centered and they are aggressive. Many of them are antisocial, and they use projective identification. They force people to behave in ways that buttress and affirm the counter dependence view of the world and his expectations.
These behavior patterns are often the result of a deep seated fear of intimacy. In an intimate relationship, the counter dependent feels enslaved and snared and captive.
Counter dependence are locked into approach avoidance repetition compulsion cycles.
The hesitant approach is approached by is followed by avoidance of commitment. They are lone wolves and bad team players, but they are also co dependence.
So you see codependency is a very complex phenomenon. But even in the little that I've, you know, in the survey of the terrain, you already saw many, many things in common between narcissists or dependents, borderlines. They are all members of the same family, their first cousins if not brothers.
That's why when they come across each other, there is this feeling of a twin flame, a soulmate, a previous incarnation. There is this enormous echoing resonance that they can't feel, they can't have with any other type of person.
And the reason is that the narcissist is a victim of early childhood trauma and abuse. Narcissism is a post traumatic condition.
So is borderline. So is the codependent. These are all traumatized people who had chosen different solutions or failed to adopt certain solutions.
And yet they immediately recognize each other and they immediately share the most important thing in life, a common ancestry, a common origin. Their roots are one and the same.
I want now to answer a few of your, of the issues you've raised or questions you've sent me and so on and so forth as is usually my habit.
I'm aggregating several questions at once.
Toxic masculinities, the examples of which are men going their own way in cells, red pill bubbles, all kinds of pillows, toxic masculinities exist. There's no point in denying them and no point in cloaking them in some form of activism, men's rights and other such nonsense.
These are misogynistic, hate-filled, aggressive, defiant, antisocial, virulent movements, which regrettably are recruiting more and more online and offline.
And there's no point in denying this phenomenon. All you have to do is go to one of these forums and sit back and lurk and read for half an hour. You don't need more than half an hour. It's very toxic. It's poisonous. It's a miasma. These are very, very sick people there. Very sick.
The overwhelming vast majority of the narcissists, frustrated narcissists, failed narcissists in the sense that they're borderlines and collapse narcissists, in the sense that they're goal-oriented but counter-confidentially. They're failures and losers.
Cut a long story short. They're failures and losers with women because they're failures and losers in life, generally.
And that has rendered them toxic. The poison of anger, of frustration, of aggression, of repeated slights and humiliations, these poisoned bubbles sieves festers and ferments inside them until it renders them unrecognizable. This is toxic masculinity.
But make no mistake about it. There is the female equivalent of all this. It's toxic femininity.
There are movements in feminism and outside feminism, which are utterly toxic. They are misandrist. Misandry is men hating, exactly like misogyny is women hating. There are many men haters. They're equally frustrated. Most of them are borderline. Very, very pathologized and sick women.
And they too, they too transform their negative emotionality into an ideology. The irony is the latter wants to become and emulate a former.
Toxic feminists, toxic women, when they grow up in their wet dreams, they want to become toxic men. Toxic women emulate, imitate, toxic men, psychopathic men. They think that to be a man, to be virile, to be masculine, to control the world, because men control the world. There's patriarchy, chauvinism, this, that. They think the only way in this man's world is to become a man and not only a man, but an extreme caricature version of a man, psychopathic men.
So yes, I agree. I agree even with members of the Manosphere who had written to me claiming that I neglected the toxic femininity part. And they are right in this sense.
There is toxic femininity.
A few other questions I've received.
Merits, many married women behave like virtual singles. I call them virtual singles. They are more single than an attached single. A single woman in a committed relationship, she behaves less single than a married woman who had effectively exited her marriage and is behaving like a single. They, for example, virtual singles are very promiscuous. Married virtual singles are women who had given up on the shared fantasy, had given up on the marriage for a variety of reasons, usually because their needs are unmet and these needs aren't necessarily connected to abuse or to misbehavior by their partner. For example, maybe they are risk takers and novelty seekers. They need novelty. They need diversity. They need to taste every dish on the menu.
So a marriage, by definition, is the wrong framework. They need to go outside the marriage. So whatever the needs may be, they're not met within the marriage.
And so these married women find themselves trapped in an arrangement which doesn't fit, doesn't suit, and does not reflect their psychological makeup. So they wander out, they exit the shared fantasy in the marriage, they become virtual singles. Virtual because they are still technically married. But they behave as singles for all intents and purposes.
Here's the problem. Both men and women nowadays, both genders, want to eat the cake and keep it. They want to have the cake, but they want to eat it.
The men want to have free, uncommitted, no strings attached, sex. Fair enough. But at the same time, they expect women to be faithful to them and loyal.
On the one hand, they're hunting, they become predatory. Most men today and women are predatory. Predation is the foundation of dating nowadays. You date each other as two predators. So most men hunt for loose, promiscuous, easy women.
And then when they get these women, they're shocked that these women are not faithful, that they're not loyal, that they're not exclusive, they're sexually exclusive. They come across women who are entitled secondary psychopaths out for diversion or borderline. This is the kind of women who would collaborate. Or they come across women whose ethos, whose perception of sex is very relaxed. And sex for them, having sex is nothing more than having lunch together.
And so then they're shocked that these women perpetuate these attitudes and behaviors with other men.
Women, on the other hand, offer themselves free, no strings attached, the hookup culture. And then they're shocked that men refuse to commit, refuse to invest, refuse to create families, refuse to get married.
That's the situation today. Two-thirds of men refuse to get married. And women are shocked.
Why do men refuse to get married?
Well, men refuse to get married because you are giving them for free. What in the past was intimately connected with a legal arrangement of some kind, including marriage. Today you give the goods for free. Of course no one pays. Of course no one pays for that in any way or shape or form. That's one thing.
And secondly, you're promiscuous. You're entitled. You're predatory. You're psychopathic. You're not faithful. You're unfaithful. Why would a man invest in a woman, in their future, in a family? Why would a man create community property with a woman? Why would a man commit to a woman and to their future together if he cannot be sure 100% of sexual exclusivity? And can a man be sure of sexual exclusivity nowadays? No way. The statistics are unequivocal. Women cheat as much as men nowadays. This is a tectonic shift.
And both women and men, over the life of a relationship, about 60% of them cheat. And these are the people who admit to it. You're virtually guaranteed that if you team up with a woman, she will end up being unfaithful. Guaranteed.
Why invest in her? Why commit to her? Why get married?
The only reason in the past to get married, I mean one of the main reasons in the past to get married was sexual availability, sexual accessibility, sexual regularity. And the second reason was wealth distribution. Transferring wealth from one generation to another.
But what if your children are not your own? You're transferring wealth to someone else's children, to another man's children. You can't be sure nowadays. There's no reason, no rational reason to get married. Absolutely not.
And you want to have sex, all you have to do is walk 200 meters to the nearest bar. As much sex as you want. You know what? If you are seriously indolent and lazy, swipe left. Sex is around the corner. Sex is on your screen.
And so women are promiscuous. There's no other word to describe it. All women nowadays are promiscuous. Women typically have like nine relationships, ten relationships by the age of 30. These are the relationships.
Not counting one-night stands and everything. They're promiscuous.
And 73% of all divorces are initiated by women. At which point they abscond with half the community property and the children. That's by far the worst conceivable business proposition ever. Or to paraphrase the famous Donald Trump, the worst deal ever. There is no rational reason nowadays to get married because women terminate marriages, take all your property. You can't be sure the children are yours. Women are not faithful anymore. They're promiscuous. And you know what? Women brought this on themselves. They have created this new one. This is toxic femininity. They had created the swamp in which they are finding themselves.
And of course, men reacted to this by becoming toxic. Men resented having lost hegemony. Resented the demise of the patriarchy. Men hated the fact that the slaves are emancipated. That their women are no longer a chateau or property. People hate change. Men and women. Change is hated. Especially if the change detracts, takes away from your power. And especially if this power used to be absolute.
So men are resentful. They hate women for what they have done.
And so there's toxic masculinity. And today it's inter-gender war. The world is unigender. You have a single gender with different genitalia. And both genders are escalating on the way to total psychopathy. And both of them are becoming more and more toxic, radicalized, escalated, separated and divided.
And even in movements which are essentially laudable, like the Me2, you have sizable fringes of sickness, mental sickness, aggression, authoritarianism, the bad kind of defiance, psychopathic defiance. These movements are pathologized to the core already. This breakdown, it's called gender vertigo. This breakdown of communication between genders, this breakdown of gender, is a defining role and an organizing principle and an explanatory principle. This is part of a much larger failure. Our species has failed. Our species has failed.
Now it's absolutely clear. If you measure success by how many specimens of a species there are, we are a major success. There's 8 billion of us. No other species had multiplied to this extent and occupied every ecosystem and every niche on Earth. No one. We are underwater, we are in space, we are in deserts, we are in jungles, we are in beaches, we are riparian, on rivers, I mean, we are everywhere. And there's many of us. And we are multiplying, forget the pandemic. Pandemic doesn't touch one week's production of new humans. We are multiplying.
So if you measure it by quantity, we are a success. If you measure it by longevity, we are a success. We live longer than our forefathers, than our ancestors.
But there's a lot of the right measures of success. How long do you live and how many of us are there? Is this success? No. Success is cooperation. Success is happiness. Success is the quality of life. Success is connectedness.
And in all this, we have failed so miserably, like never, ever before in human history, recorded or not recorded.
We are at the crux and the nexus of absolute unmitigated failure as a collaborative social species.
I encourage you to read words by Emil Durkheim, Christopher Lash. Durkheim, by the way, not Dorkheim, but Durkheim. D-U-D-U-R-K-H-E-I-M. Very clever Jew. Jew, really.
Emil Durkheim wrote about anomic society, suicide and so on. Very fascinating work. More than a hundred years old. As fresh as yesterday's newspaper.
Christopher Lash, who in the seventies wrote about rising tidal wave of narcissism in society. Eric Fromm. I'll deal with him in a minute.
Sociologist, social psychologist.
But before I come to Eric Fromm, I want to mention Sapolsky.
Sapolsky is a biologist, brilliant biologist, who had studied social primates, social primates and social apes. And his expertise was baboons. He had studied baboons for at least two decades.
And he has published many books and so on. And he reached after decades of career, observing all kinds of primates, including humans. He reached a conclusion that theonly important thing is social connectedness.
He discarded the view that the best predictor or prognosticator of survival is how high you are in the dominance hierarchy. That's Jordan Peterson's view, the famous lobster analogy.
Sapolsky says this is nonsense. How high you are, whether you're alpha male, whether you're a number one lobster, that doesn't determine your quality of life, your chances for survival and your chances to procreate by the way.
He said that the main determinant was the networks, the social networking, the social support networks that you had as an individual in your tribe, in your herd, in your flock. It's much more important than rank. And also it's closely correlated to reduce stress because stress determines many things in primates and apes, especially primates.
Stress has deleterious effects on the body, on the mind, and social connectedness reduces stress.
Sapolsky said that we have too much leisure, too much leisure time, and we don't know what to do with it. So we torture each other simply. That's our fun activity.
All you have to do is go online, trolling, attacks, flames. I mean, people externalize aggression.
Social media were built around this principle of externalizing aggression.
So he said that we have too much leisure time as well.
But if you're socially connected, the stress created by too much leisure time is substantially modified and reduced.
Happiness, he said, is not connected to material goods. It's connected to having social support, to having a meaningful life with a goal or a belief, a faith of some kind, to having structure, to having predictability, attribution, control over threats and challenges.
And these are, of course, the elements we see in various coping strategies, functional but also dysfunctional, religion, for example, and addictive behaviors, addictions. They both provide all these, but I and many others think that they are highly dysfunctional.
Religion involves delusions and addictions involve serious damage to mind and body.
But putting these two aside, if you are able to create supportive social networks of support and love and empathy and in government and kindness, if you imbue your life with meaning going forward, if you're structured, this is far more important than how rich you are, how famous you are, and what is your position among the other lobsters.
I will read from Eric Fromm. He wrote one of the most important books of the 20th century, Escape from Freedom. He published, I think, the first edition in 1941, a year before Clackley published his seminal book on psychopaths, The Mask of Sanity. These were the years of miracles.
Eric Fromm says, there is only one possible productive solution for the relationship of individualized men with the world. His active solidarity with all men, and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties, but as a free and independent individual.
However, if the economic, social and political conditions do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality, in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time, people have lost those ties, which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. Freedom then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction.
Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to men and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if such a relationship deprives the individual of his freedom.
He said, freedom by itself is a bad thing. It's a burden because it creates uncertainty.
When you're free, you have no certainty, you have no security, you have to choose.
And so, and Kierkegaard, observation, that the need to choose in itself creates anxiety, angst.
And so freedom to choose, free will, the possibility to exercise free will, these potentials are frightening.
And so many, many times people say, I don't want freedom, take away my freedom. I don't want responsibility for the consequences of my actions. I don't want to decide on my actions. I want to be submissive. I want to be a slave. Slave mentality. Slaves are free, perhaps. Slaves are the most free people because they are free of the burden of choice, the need to decide and the responsibility that come with it.
And this is from his message. And he says, the only way to ameliorate the terrifying aspects of freedom is if there is active solidarity with other men and there is kind of involvement in activity, love and work, and this way to unite yourself with the world, you become one with the world.
And so the world is not so threatening anymore. It's another message. I mean, it's another way of, it's the same message like supposed to. Where you are in the world, who is under you? Are you alpha male? How many people you control? How many lives you determine? That's a stupid game. Simply a stupid game. Important is, are you happy? You could be a multi-millionaire. You can be a president. You can be anything, a rock star. Are you happy? Are you happy? And now these people have discovered there's much more happiness in nothingness than in somethingness. And that's my, that's been my message for a very long time now, made a few videos about choose nothingness, not in the sense that choose to become nothing, not in the sense of choose to abrogate your responsibilities, not in the sense of choose to disappear, give up on the world.
No. Choose nothingness in the sense that you emphasize being in existence, that your focus is internal, never external, that you don't derive any important internal functions from the outside.
Not your self-esteem, not your self-confidence, not your sense of self-worth, nothing become a self-contained, self-sufficient unit, not in the bad sense, like I don't need you, but in the good sense, in the good sense that I fulfill all my needs.
Now how can I help you? That's nothingness. Nothingness is not that you withdraw from the world. It's that you let the world withdraw from
you. Eric Fromm postulated that there are eight basic needs. Transcendence. He said that humans come to the world and no one asks them if they want to come to the world or not without consent, you know.
And so when they come to the world that they find themselves in the world and they never gave consent to be in the world, they feel pissed off.
He didn't ask me if I want to be born, he just brought me to the world.
And so he said that destruction, destroying people or creating people, creativity and destruction are two ways of somehow coping with this sudden appearance in the world, which is non-consensual.
Malignant aggression, killing, gratuitous killing, not for survival, or creating something and then caring for it. All these actions are somehow trying to cope with presence in the world and transcend it.
He said the second need is rootedness. Rootedness is the need to establish roots, to feel at home somewhere, with someone at some time.
Productivity depends crucially on rootedness. Growth, personal growth depends on rootedness.
Rootedness is another word for self, safe base. The security of a mother, good enough mother.
Rootedness starts with a mother. If a mother is dead, emotionally unavailable, narcissistic, depressive, absent, you can't have rootedness. You don't have a safe base. You have nowhere to go back to.
And so some people who has had a good childhood, a healthy childhood, they grow. They grow, they separate, they individualize, and they tackle the world on their own terms.
Others become fixated. They're afraid to move beyond the security and safety of mother or mother substitute. That's a proposed shared fantasy.
The third need is a sense of identity. We all need an identity, and identity can be a bad thing. We can acquire an identity by opposition to others. You know, we hate someone and that's our identity. We can conform to a group and suspend our individual existence, engage in group fake, or do things we would never do on our own just because the group sanctions it and gives us a blessing.
So conformity is a sick way of acquiring identity and the productive way is individuality. Of course, there's a middle ground, collective, the collective.
One can acquire certain identity elements by belonging.
The problem starts when all of the identities determined via group affiliation. That's where it becomes sick.
The fourth need is frame of orientation.
Understanding, creating a theory of the world, a theory of one's place in the world, a theory of other people, creating theories that work about what's happening to us. Excitation and stimulation is another need.
To be active, to strive, to be goal-oriented. Not to be totally passive, not to be totally responsive. Unity, a sense of oneness between one person and another person, one person in nature, one person in the world.
Some people say one person in God. Unity with something. You need to exit yourself. You need to belong to something bigger than yourself. It could be simply your intimate partner. It doesn't matter. But you need this. If you remain confined to yourself solipsistically as a schizoid, that's a pathology. It's a pathology because it leads to severe dysregulation.
We need input from the outside feedback to calibrate and regulate.
Finally, effectiveness, or as we call it today, self-efficacy. It's the need to be accomplished or at least to feel accomplished, to derive from a reluctant environment outcomes which are beneficial to us, which are productive, which further our interests, which secure our survival.
Okay, this was from...
Someone asked me, why do I constantly attack neuroscientists and geneticists as grandiose?
Well, there's a very surprising reason to it because they're grandiose.
Neuroscientists and geneticists, these are very young scientists. They are absolutely just starting. They're the inception of their sciences.
And I'm not even sure these are sciences yet. They barely have a hammer and they see a nail everywhere. Everything is a nail because they got themselves a hammer.
And not only they got themselves a hammer, but they claim it's not a hammer. They claim it's something much more sophisticated.
These are very primitive branches of science at their beginning and what they don't know dwarfs what they do know.
I will give you one example. I gave many in my other videos. I'll give you yet another example.
The science news published the following. A mother's mouse's gut microbes help wire her pup's brain according to new study.
The new results point to the influence of specific microbes and the small molecules that they produce called metabolites. Metabolites from the microbiome of the mother, in other words metabolites produced in the intestines of the mother.
In the intestines there are bacteria. The bacteria secrete or create tiny molecules called metabolites.
So metabolites from the microbiome of the mother, from the gut flora of the mother, can influence the developing brain of the fetus, says Catherine Nagler, an immunologist at the University of Chicago.
The metabolites do this by reaching a developing pup's brain where they affect the growth of axons, the thread-like signal transmitters of nerve cells.
Let me get this straight. In the intestines of mother mouse, there are bacteria known collectively as microbiomes. They produce molecules called metabolites, about which we didn't know until recently. And these metabolites modify the brain of the fetus.
Yet again we come across proof that a lot of what we had considered either to be brain functions actually is happening in the intestines. Serotonin is produced mostly in the intestines, not in the brain. So we don't know.
And to claim that we know, to find the gambling gene, aggression gene, narcissism gene, dopamine pathway, these are the ramblings of immature, infantile pseudo-scientists who want to become instant celebrities in the mass media.
Serious scientists would never do this because they know how much they don't know.
I will end by demonstrating to you how everything we know today about co-dependence, of narcissists, about psychopaths had been known long ago. We didn't use the same words, but the essence had been known very, very long time ago.
I'm going to read to you excerpts from two literary works.
The first one is American Notes for General Circulation. Charles Dickens had visited the United States and survived to tell about it in 1842. That was his first visit. He visited the States a few times. The first time was in 1842 and he came utterly shocked. He came back to the United Kingdom where slavery had been illegal for a while. He came back utterly shocked. Not utterly shocked by slavery, but utterly shocked by the justifications for slavery.
And here I want to read to you a pretty lengthy excerpt. And in this lengthy excerpt, you see how the inimitable Charles Dickens characterizes co-dependence and then psychopaths and then narcissists.
Brilliant.
Okay. So he's discussing people's attitudes to slavery.
He says, the first are those more moderate and rational owners of human cattle who have come into the possession of them as so many coins in their trading capital, but to admit the frightful nature of the institution in the abstract and perceive the dangers of society with which it is fraught, dangers which however distant they may be, or however tardy they're coming on, are as certain to fall upon its guilty head as is the day of judgment.
This is the co-dependence.
The second, and now he's describing psychopaths.
The second group consists of all those owners, breeders, users, buyers, and sellers of slaves who will until the bloody chapter has a bloody end, will own, breed, use, buy and sell slaves at all hazards, who doggedly denied the horrors of the system in the teeth of such a mass of evidence as never was brought to bear on any other subject and to which the experience of every day contributes its immense amount.
These are people who would at this or any other moment gladly involve America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its soul and an object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery and to weep and work and torture slaves, unquestioned by any human authority and unassailed by any human power. These are people who when they speak of freedom, they mean the freedom to oppress their kind, to be savaged, murdered as a cruel, and of whom every man on his ground in the republican America is a more exacting and a sterner and a less responsible despot than the caliph Harun al-Rashid in his angry robe or scarlet.
The third group, and not the least numerous or influential, is composed of all that delicate gentility which cannot bear a superior, cannot brook an equal, of that class whose republicanism means I will not tolerate a man above me, and of those below none must approach too near, whose pride in a land where voluntary servitude is shunned as a disgrace, must be ministered to by slaves, and whose inalienable rights can only have their growth in negro wrongs.
Is it the interest of any man to steal, to gain, to waste his health and mental faculties by drunkenness? Is it the interest of any man to lie, to forswear himself, to indulge hatred, to seek desperate revenge, or to murder? No. All these are roads to ruin.
And why, then, do men tread these roads?
Because such inclinations are among the vicious qualities of mankind.
Blot out, dear friends of slavery from the catalogue of human passions, prove our lust, cruelty, and the abuse of irresponsible power of all earthly temptations, the most difficult to be resisted.
And when you have done so, and not before, we will inquire whether it be the interest of a master to lash and maim the slaves, over whose lives and limbs he has an absolute control.
Wonderful, beautiful description of the three types of, essentially, personality disorders.
And now here's a description of a narcissist. A description of a narcissist from the book, The Sixth Great Power, a history of one of the greatest of all banking families, the House of Bearings, 1762, 1929.
There's a description of a narcissistic woman for a change. That other bearing peer, the Second Lord Ashburton, was equally remote from the bank.
Thomas Carlyle thought he found little pleasure in his new glory. He's immensely rich, but having no children.
Carlyle says, describes this Second Lord Ashburton, he's immensely rich, but having no children, and for himself no silly vanity, I believe does not in the least rejoice in such a lot.
Poor fellow, he looked miserably ill the day I called on him. One could not but ask oneself, thinking of his income of 60,000 pounds a year.
Alas, what is the use of it?
So this is how Carlyle describes a very rich man who is not a narcissist. He's not a narcissist, and he's unhappy because money can't make him happy.
Vanity, he has no vanity. He has no grandiosity.
Carlyle continues.
I'm talking a text from the 19th century.
Carlyle continues.
His gloom was possibly induced by his wife, Harriet, who knew only too well what was the use of 60,000 pounds a year. One observer called her perhaps the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day. She was intelligent, quick-witted, with just enough education to pass for a blue stocking, and enough vivacity to pass for a wit. She was anxious to shine in the high aesthetic line, and turn the ground, the place where they lived, into a menagerie where literary lions like Carlyle and Thackeray grazed among politicians and assault grandees. So she associated only with high society. Her main defects were arrogance and a propensity for conversational bullying.
So marked this as to verge on sadism.
Let me read this again.
This encapsulates and captures the essence of sadistic narcissism.
Let me read this to you again. That's a woman. Her main defects were arrogance and a propensity for conversational bullying. So marked as to verge on sadism.
I don't mind being knocked down, complete one of her victims, but I can't stand being danced upon after I'm knocked down. Anything to do with a bank seemed to her tedious and common.
When the wife of a new bearing partner, Mrs. Russell Sturgis, asked to be introduced to her at a party, she replied, in a dawdling tone, that she must decline as she had already been introduced to two ladies of the firm.
But she made sure that her guests enjoyed the best.
What impressed an American visitor, Mrs. Lawrence, when she visited the grounds, was not so much the resident physician, the groom of the chambers, a buckler, an under-buckler, the spectacular silver, and the turkeys stuffed with truffles. What impressed Mrs. Lawrence, the American visitor, was the fact that at breakfast, the boiled eggs were marked with a day of the month in which they were laid.
The author is Philip Ziegler, and the title is The Sixth Great Power, a history of one of the greatest of all banking families, the House of Bearings. Highly recommended, because this woman, Harriet, is a great description of a narcissistic woman, which is rare.
Whenever we discuss narcissists, we tend to masculinize them. We tend to discuss male narcissists.
But of course, 50% of all narcissists are probably female. It used to be 25%, but in the past 30 years, it became half and half. Now, the genders are equally represented among narcissists, and women are catching up very fast on psychopathy as well.
Congratulations. We are on the way to a good place, no doubt.