Narcissistic Buffet Answering Your Questions ( Well, Sort Of)

Next thing is fear of the unknown. Negativity, negative emotionality constricts the world and constricts life, limits it, makes it smaller. As it makes it smaller, it's more controllable, more manageable and it's more known.

And this fear of the unknown, if you adopt positive emotionality, then you are adventurous, you're open to new ideas, you are open to conversation and debate, you are open, you're open. To be open is to invite the unknown and the unknown is very frightening.

There's also a fear of commitment, of responsibility. Success is a trap because when you succeed, it implies that you need to be committed and responsible for your success. You need to perpetuate it, you need to maintain it, you need to propagate it, you need to enhance and increase it.

Any rock star will tell you that his biggest liability is the fans because the fans make the map and any successful YouTuber will tell you this. The fans have expectations, they make demands and you have to conform or you lose your popularity. Success or if you build a business and the business is suddenly extremely successful, you're trapped. You're trapped because you have to work in the business 20 hours a day and that's a good case.

So this fear of commitment and responsibility that come with success. So negativity leads to failure and freedom. Negativity is freedom. Negativity on the other hand, provokes frustration, aggression and alloplastic defenses, blaming others.

Okay, now, a pro-ponegativity, one comment about shadow banning. In one of my last videos I said that shadow banning is a conspiracy theory and of course I received another lunch from everyone and his IT dog informing me that shadow banning is very real.

I didn't say that social media don't have algorithms which downgrade the exposure of certain channels, certain personalities and certain messages. Of course they do. They downgrade the visibility and the accessibility of bots, automatic bots, of hate speech, of disinformation for example about the pandemic. So of course there are mechanisms in place to remove people from harm's way. Conspiracy theories are subjected to the same thing. Truth telling is becoming more and more crucial on social media and lack of insanity and inanity and of course violence, aggression, all these are demoted.

So if you want to call it shadow banning, call it shadow banning.

But the normal sense of shadow banning is not this. The normal sense of shadow banning is that social media target politically incorrect people or people with whose political views they disagree, like for example republicans in the United States, conservatives.

And this is utter conspiracy theory. It's utter nonsense.

So no one is shadow banning me.

The reason I have very few views is twofold or maybe threefold.

First of all, I'm high for looting. I use academic terms. I'm inaccessible. Many people don't understand the word I'm saying, though they like to pretend that they do. It's part of grandiosity.

And the second thing, I don't provide solutions. I only analyze problems.

So in a way my message leads nowhere.

Okay, we got the picture.

Now this is very bad. Now what?

I rarely provide solutions, while all others provide solutions.

And finally, I'm a bad content maker. I don't know how to make content. It's not that I don't know how to make content. I know how to make content, but I don't bother.

So my content is shoddy, wise, and I wear the same shirt all the time, which I think is the main reason why the viewership is so low.

Okay, I had the most amazing conversation with an Indian. I don't know if it's an Indian guy or an Indian girl. Their names are very gender challenging. So I have no idea who I was talking to.

But someone wrote to me from India. And he told me that, do you know why I don't watch you? Do you know why I watch other YouTubers, other coaches, other professors? Do you know other public intellectuals? Because they care about me. You don't care about me.

So I asked him, how do you know that he mentioned two names? Or he or she mentioned two names.

So I said, how do you know that they care about you? Did you talk to them? Did you correspond to them? Did they show any specific interest in you? Did they send you money? Did they help you get to get a job? In which way had they demonstrated to you that they care about and not, for example, about your money? Because he bought products and services for both from both channels. And when I say he bought products and services, I'm talking about thousands of dollars in each channel.

So I said, how do you know they care about you and not, for example, about your thousands of dollars that you gave them? How do you know they're not faking? How do you know they're not acting? How do you know they're really empathic just because they say so? Just because they pretend to care? I can pretend to care. I, what you see is what you get with me. I am unvarnished. I have no makeup. Thank God. I am totally truthful. I've always been totally truthful. I'm the first person ever to have admitted that he's a narcissist ever in human history.

So at least with me, you know what you're getting. But with these two, how do you know that they're not faking it and they're not taking you for a ride? How do you know that they don't mock you behind your back and think you're brain dead for giving them your money? They're selling all the time. You know, you can't, I mean, there's their advertisements, there's advertising on their YouTube videos. They promote resorts, they promote books. How do you know they don't want your money?

And then he or she said something very interesting. She said, I don't care if they're faking. I don't care if they're faking because faking takes effort. If they're faking, they are investing in faking. It still means that they care about it. They care enough to fake. They care enough to pretend.

Yes, they want my money. So they care about my money. But this care somewhere, even if the care that I spot, the care that I detect is not about me as an individual. It's about something else. There is still some caring. There's still some concern. There's still some interest in me, in what I can give them, in the interaction.

You he said to me, don't show any care at all. You don't care for me and you don't even care for my money. You hold me, she said to me or he said, you hold me in such contempt that you don't even bother to fake like they do. And there's no difference between you and them, he said. They want money. You want narcissistic supply. But they, for my money, they give me a lot in return, a lot more than you do, because they give me a sense of well-being, they give me solutions. They give me access to a community. What you give me, he said, is humiliation and arguable knowledge that I can find by myself with a search on Google. I don't need you for that.

He said, show me that you care. By the way, I had another comment that said the same. Show me that you care. Show me that you care.

And if you don't care about me, show me that you care about my money because I worked hard to make this money. Show me that you care to provide me with a community. Show me that you care enough about something. I don't exist for you, he said, except maybe as a source of supply. I'm not sure of that either. I'm transparent. When I come to your channel, I feel transparent. I feel that I'm made of air. It's a horrible feeling. You annihilate me.

And he said, well, being, because I said, well, you're self-deceiving because I don't care about you. You care about your money.

He said, well, let me tell you something.

Well-being that is grounded in self-deception is better than misery found in the knowledge that there is nothing you can do and that you're helpless and that you're an idiot.

And this is your message. Your message is you're too stupid to be alive and there's nothing you can do about it and nothing you can do about your life and nothing you can do about your relationship.

What's your main message, he said, no contact. What is no contact?

He's giving up. He's walking away. You're a defeatist.

He said, I don't get well-being from you. Every time I watch one of the videos, I want to cut my wrists.

Your message is so overwhelmingly dark and negative that it drives me to suicidal ideation. And then I go on another channel and yes, it's fake and yes, it's pretension and yes, it's acting and yes, you know what? It's not substantiated by research and most of it is nonsense, but it's our nonsense. It's common nonsense. It makes me feel fuzzy and warm and accepted and wanted. If not wanted for who I am, wanted for what I have, money.

You don't want me. You don't care about me. You don't even care about my money. I don't exist for you. I'm a fleeting figment and you block me and you delete me callously and carelessly as though I were nothing but a YouTube channel.

So this was a fascinating conversation and he taught me that people prefer self-deception to reality.

What I sell is reality and unmitigated reality, unadulterated reality, 100% guarantee, money-back guarantee reality, and people don't want that.

They want to feel good. That's why they drink alcohol. That's why they do drugs. That's why they associate with the wrong people. That's why they have relationships with predators.

They want to feel good and they don't give a fig if the good feeling comes from reality or if it comes from a show, a theatre production.

They don't care if the people in their lives are genuine or if the people in their lives are there because they want something.

Because in their minds, if someone wants something for you, he cares about you. It's a form of caring. You know what? Not caring. It's a form of being seen.

When these coaches and self-styled experts and empaths, whatever, want something from them, want their money, for example, they feel that they are being seen. They are being noticed. They feel that it endows them with real existence.

If I want money from you, suddenly you exist. Suddenly I see you. Suddenly I notice you and suddenly I cater to your needs until I get your money.

As long as you have money, I will continue so there will be a relationship of some sort.

People want connectedness. They want to be alone. I don't give this.

I give you harsh reality and only harsh reality.

Yes, I don't believe every problem has a solution. Yes, I don't believe you can change most of the time.

Yes, I do think that the overwhelming vast majority of you are not the brightest stars in any conceivable galaxy to use a serious British understatement.

We come to it a bit later when we discuss IQ.

To prove this, I'm getting an avalanche of comments how hot I am, how sexy I am, and how wonderful my hair is, and how handsome or very handsome I am.

Are the majority of these women legally blind? Are they inebriated, drunk, senseless?

Because if you look at the screen, if you really, really focus, I look like an obese, desiccated lizard after a seriously bad night of binge drinking, and I'm being charitable to myself. I'm one ugly mother who can say I'm hot or sexy or handsome.

Why are you saying this? You're saying this because you are idealizing an authority figure, and this is known as the Hallow Effect.

I want to discuss the Hallow Effect and the celebrity cult in a few words.

The Hallow Effect simply means that once you excel or stand out in one field, people automatically assume that you are an authority in other fields.

Every film star is a political pundit or an expert on the Kabbalah. Every vacuous celebrity is a philosopher, and every philosopher is a vacuous celebrity. Every athlete has solid views about economics.

The cognitive bias known as the Hallow Effect is a crucial pivot of malignant egalitarianism. The Hallow Effect is when we make implicit or explicit assumptions about the skills, talents, erudition, intelligence, experience, circumstances, and prospects of someone because of their looks or accomplishments in unrelated fields.

The internet created a universal Hallow Effect.

Everyone now has access to information, and everyone is empowered to publish and broadcast. Everyone can gang up with like-minded others. Everyone can act.

And so you see professors of psychology talk about issues that have nothing to do with psychology. And you see philosophers talking about economics and economists talking about politics. Everyone now feels like an instant celebrity, a combination of Einstein and Aristoteles, qualified to pass judgments, express opinions, and give advice, omniscient and omnipotent.

In other words, everyone is narcissistic.

In such an environment where everyone is an expert, there are no experts. There are no facts. There's no truth, no benchmarks, yardsticks, or absolutes. Everything is relative.

I have my fact. You have your fact, alternative facts, truthisms. Everything is up for grabs.

Your version of reality is as good as mine. There's nothing I can ever teach you.

The mobs of aggressive, intellectually challenged people, the majority of the denizens of cyberspace, they deter true intellectuals and scholars. True intellectuals and scholars avoid the internet like the plague, I can tell you this, of the 10 foremost experts on narcissism, myself included, excluded, okay? The 10 scholarly academics, all 10 don't have a YouTube channel.

The awning abyss between academe and the community is larger than ever.

Misinformation, disinformation, sheer nonsense, and patent insanity, for example, in conspiracy theories, they have become indistinguishable from true knowledge, discoverability, discovering good things, quality things. That's become a major problem when 3 million books a year are published on Amazon alone, Amazon Kindle.

Everyone, his dog, his cat, his chambermaid, his housekeeper, his neighbor, and his two-year-old kid, they all write books and publish them because they have what to say, you know?

In contradistinction to what I just said, I want to quote a comment that I had received from one of you, and I will make it a habit in each of my videos and try to quote a comment from one of you which I find valuable and insightful, and this is today's comment.

This is M. Griffith. I have no idea what the M stands for.

So, he says, this was such a thought-provoking analysis. Thank you for posting.

The idea that a narcissist could be a child with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, who later develops hyperactivity, makes me wonder whether or not the false self could be a sort of special interest.

Since people with autism spectrum disorder are prone to fixations and often cannot stop thinking about or talking about their special interest, it wouldn't be too far a stretch to consider the narcissist's devotion to building and maintaining the false self as analogous to, say, an autistic child who is devoted to building computers.

He, she says that the false self may be a special interest of an autistic child, because autistic children tend to focus on something, on mathematics, on building computers, on some activity or some discipline, and they become what used to be called the dior savant.

In other words, they become geniuses, but geniuses in a very narrow slice of something.

So, the author is suggesting, the author of his comment is suggesting that perhaps the false self is such a special interest.

Extremely, extremely fascinating idea.

He continues in the comment, special interests are also known to reduce overwhelming anxiety and can make the child feel unreachable, because the child is always in their heads thinking about the special interest.

It sounds suspiciously similar to the false self.

I also have heard that many women with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder can easily be misdiagnosed with borderline personality disorder, because they share similar traits, like alexithymia, black and white thinking, and mood lability.

Plus, DBT, dialectic behavior therapy, is known to help people with autism spectrum disorder as well. DBT is the choice treatment for borderline.

Now to the great Albert Camus controversy.

I've learned my lesson. Every time I kid, every time I make a joke from now on, I'm gonna say, just kidding, because many of you don't get my right sense of humor, my dry, desiccated sense of humor. And it's not okay that I'm not making clear when I'm joking and when I'm talking about facts.

So Albert Camus, of course, was not a Jew. He was a Catholic, and a lot of his writings have to do with atheism, a struggle with religion as a Catholic.

Well, on one side, a Catholic. And so he was not a Jew, although he was a great friend of the Jews.

During the Holocaust, he literally endangered himself, trying to help the Jews. He was an editor, and he published all kinds of opinion pieces and articles. I mean, he's considered by Jews a friend of the Jewish people.

Another Jew, Albert Einstein, a real Jew this time, I'm not kidding. Another Jew, Albert Einstein, he had many, many, many, many, very similar to Winston Churchill. He had many aphorisms. He had many sharp, witty, wittyisms, mini break.

So he said, only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe. And it's the first time that I wholeheartedly agree with Donald Trump, the President of the United States. He made for a change, shockingly, an intelligent statement that is based on evidence, makes a lot of sense.

He said, I'm quoting, we are all on the fast track to developing herd mentality, not herd immunity. That's for returns, herd mentality. The man is a genius. He finally assimilated all the knowledge, everything I've been trying to say for decades, herd mentality.

Yes. And just to prove that Trump is always right, especially in this case, when I posted the video where the Hungarian translation was taken out, I left only the English, I mean, actually Dokas did it, but we left only the English parts.

Many people seriously suggested that the people behind me are not translators. They are my colleagues, other professors, and I'm suppressing their speech because they disagree with me.

And there's been a brouhaha, how vicious and wicked I am, that I'm not allowing the people behind me to speak. Every time they try to speak, I cut them off. And how I mistreat the poor people, and even there was a parody, a video parody explaining that the person behind me is a professor from another university and I'm not allowing him to speak because I'm monopolizing the four hours.

And some of it was dead serious. People really believed it.

Einstein was right. Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity.

But as opposed to him, I'm quite sure about human stupidity. It is infinite.

And having dispensed with my sadism for the day, I want to talk about sadistic supply versus narcissistic supply.

I've received a few questions about it.

Sadistic supply can't go well with narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply is when you cultivate someone, when you groom someone, by a loved one being, in other ways, to provide you with adulation, admiration, affirmation, applause, to confirm and to buttress and to affirm, to support your grandiose view yourself, as brilliant, as perfect, as handsome, whatever.

So this is narcissistic supply.

Obviously, you can't get very far if you mistreat someone. If you mistreat someone, they're likely to provide you with negative narcissistic supply. They're likely to criticize you, disagree with you, humiliate you in public, mortify you, injure you narcissistically, etc. It's a bad strategy, bad strategy to torture, taunt, torment and frustrate the people who you want to convert into sources of narcissistic supply.

But there is sadistic supply. A tiny minority of narcissists are sadistic narcissists, and they value sadistic supply over and above narcissistic supply.

They derive their sense of omnipotence, sense of power, their sense of omniscience. They derive their grandiosity, in short, from humiliating, rejecting, abandoning, torturing, tormenting, taunting, frustrating, and titillating and teasing other people. It is by hurting other people that they feel elevated and superior.

And this is sadistic supply. It's usually not bodily. It's psychological and mental.

So this kind of narcissist would always prefer to hurt someone and to humiliate someone than to obtain a tangible narcissistic supply.

I always give the example that a sadistic somatic narcissist would prefer to reject a woman who is offering him sex because it gives him a sense of power rather than actually have sex with them. It's dead bad. It overcomes even the sex drive.

The most gorgeous woman, drop dead gorgeous, can come to a sadistic somatic narcissist or a sadistic cerebral narcissist and offer him, in uncertain, in non-uncertain terms, offer him to have sex that night right now. And he would derive enormous joy and elation from humiliatingly and publicly rejecting. And he would give up the sex for that sadistic supply is a higher quality grade herring than narcissistic supply.

I'm an equal, another topic, same general area of sadism, but another topic. I'm an equal opportunity abuser. Sorry. I'm an equal opportunity truth teller.

So I piss off everyone. I piss off empaths. I piss off red pillers. And lately, I piss off my colleagues and brethren, professors of psychology.

It is when I don't piss off anyone, when I piss off no one, that I become exceedingly anxious, concerned, and worried.

Pissing off people is my way of reducing and regulating my anxiety.

So, to me, anxiolytics and anti-anxiety medications. Let me make a statement before I proceed.

A first year, first semester, student of physics knows more statistics than any tenured psychology professor.

Physicists who specialize in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, quantum physics, physicists like me, these are my specialties.

These are my specialties. We know a thousand times more statistics than any psychology professor.

So when I received a litany of messages and emails from psychology professors all over the world, from Denmark to Australia, informing me that I don't understand statistics, I found it a bit ill-researched, shall we say.

My expertise, as I said, is statistical mechanics and quantum physics.

In these fields, you need to master statistics from A to Z, a thousand times more than any professor of psychology.

So, of course, all these professors who had written to me about IQ, mysteriously, all of them are making a living from researching and from marketing IQ tests.

Nassim Taleb is not one of my favorite intellectuals. He had written the famous book, The Black Swan, and he's a very bright person, but he's not my favorite intellectual.

We're not going into detail right now.

A while ago, he published a diatribe against psychology professors, and it's titled, IQ is largely a pseudocytific swindle.

I couldn't agree more. It's a diatribe because it includes insults and slides and personal attacks, and I don't like this writing style. I do it on YouTube, but I never do it in writing.

So, it's not my thing.

But within this diatribe, he says that professors of psychology are probability challenged, and I could not have put it better.

Let me make one thing absolutely clear.

As a true expert on statistics and a professor of psychology, IQ scores, I repeat, are artificially adjusted to fit into a normal distribution using statistical methods.

I casually mentioned in the previous video standardization, normalization, measurement errors, inference, z-test, which is also used on SAT scores, by the way, reliability, validity, and a host of other concepts.

It was not meant to be a lesson in statistical analysis, of course.

So, all these nonsensical emails that I've received, they were based on nothing because I didn't make a statistical statement. I made a sweeping statement. I did not go into details.

For example, I didn't make a distinction between the variable and the mean of distribution, etc. Still, it is a fact, unpleasant fact, politically incorrect fact, but still a fact.

The scores of IQ tests, all IQ tests, no exception, from Stanford Binet to the latest, are tweaked. Tweaked as in toyed with, reassembled, readjusted.

It's a charitable way of saying faked based on assumptions of normals.

They, the scores are adjusted to fit an assumption about how reality should be, how they should be distributed.

And a YouTube video to the general population, to laymen, is hardly the place to conduct this argument, but I do encourage you to do two things.

I encourage you to read the aforementioned essay by Taleb, where there is a statistical appendix for those of you in the know, the initiated. And I encourage you to watch Taleb's videos, YouTube videos, about IQ. I also encourage you to go to scholar.google.com and type any number of search strings, type IQ controversy, type IQ statistics, type IQ statistical errors, and then drown in thousands of academic articles, replete with a sea of statistical arguments, which will show you that IQ tests are not to put too fine a point on it, utter nonsense, and bolder dash.

Among scholars in the profession, the whole field of IQ is a very bad reputation, bordering on nonsense, or even the whiff of a scam. That's how we, professor of psychology, from other branches of psychology, relate to IQ tests.

Psychometrics in general is a very problematic area, but within psychometrics, IQ tests really, really take the prize. They are like the equivalent of a dive, you know, a single dive with a bad reputation.

The audacity and vanity of academics in fake wannabe science disciplines like psychology and the humanities, this audacity and vanity no bounds for the record.

The math used in IQ tests is a child's play compared to physics and the play of a not very bright child.

IQ changes just to answer a few other questions. IQ changes with age, it changes with exercise, physical exercise, it changes with time, it also changes with time in whole populations.

This is known as the Flynn effect. And most IQ tests have been debunked and exposed as lacking internal and external validity in rigor. And this includes the IQ tests used by Mensa, the self-glorifying narcissistic organization of high IQ people.

So why do I keep bragging about my 190 IQ?

Because with a face like mine, you have to hold on to any asset you have.

Okay. Why do you hate mothers so much? Why do you keep blaming mothers? What about fathers? What about peers? What about teachers? What about Donald Trump? What about my neighbor?

All right, all right. I don't blame mothers.

It's just that mothers play a super critical role in personal development and growth in the first two years especially. A bit less later, the formative years are between zero and six months and six years.

And the first two years, the mother is absolutely, totally critical.

And then the father enters, then peers, role models like teachers, even people on television, social media.

But the first two years are the exclusive and monopolized domain of the primary object. The primary object is usually a mother.

But if the mother is absent, it could be a grandmother. Doesn't matter. Whoever raised the child, usually mothers raise children.

So I keep talking about mothers.

And this critical role also implies critical responsibilities.

And when things go awry and can be traced to this period, the early formative years, up to separation and individuation and including, then the mother is held responsible.

Today, I want to talk about the biggest study in history that kind of illuminated some of these issues.

And I'm quoting from the masterpiece, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk.

Bessel van der Kolk is, by the way, a medical doctor, not a psychologist, and one of the greatest trauma experts in the world.

So you see, another case where non-psychologists actually contributed greatly to psychology only recently.

So Bessel van der Kolk in his book describes the ACE study.

ACE study is the adverse childhood experiences study. It's the biggest of its kind ever. More than 50,000 patients responded to an evaluation of childhood trauma.

The ACEs, the scores were from zero to 10. And the results linked childhood trauma with health, social problems, adult social problems.

And it brought to light many, many issues.

The study was conducted between 1995 and 1997. And it would be an excellent idea to do it all over again.

Because how to put it gently, things might have changed with the introduction of social media, and internet, other technologies, and with the disintegration of gender roles in society.

But still, there are a few things we can learn from this study.

So it was conducted between 95 and 97 by the CDC. Yes, that's CDC. CDC that is dealing with the pandemic, the Center for Disease Control, and Kaiser Permanente.

And it was co-chaired or co-navigated by Robert Ander and Vincent Feliti, both of the medical doctors, by the way. They were the co-principal investigators.

And it started with a very interesting story.

In 1985, Feliti was Chief of Kaiser Permanente's Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego. And he also, on the side, he was running an obesity clinic.

One day, he was sitting in his obesity clinic, and a 28-year-old nurse, nurse's aide, showed up in his office. And so she complained of obesity. She said, everything bad in my life is because I'm obese and fat. And so, you know, men are not interested in me, and my girlfriends are avoiding me, and also there are physical problems with that.

So she said, this is my one and only problem. If I get rid of my obesity, I believe my life will be transformed beyond recognition.

So over the next one year, almost, 51 weeks, her weight dropped from 408 pounds to 132 pounds. I wish only. Wonderful.

So Feliti was very kind of gratified, major success story, and so on. And a few months later, he met her again. And she went back all the way. She went back all the way within a few months, which is biologically almost impossible. It's supernatural.

She must have spent every minute of every hour of every day of these few months just gorging on food, consuming and eating and wallowing in and swimming and, I mean, ice creams, I don't know what, just eating and eating and eating high-calorie foods to regain all this weight.

And when he asked her, what had happened? What did you give up all these hard-won accomplishments?

She said that when she went down, she became very attractive. Her body was svelte and, you know, and so there was a male co-worker, and he started to flirt with her. And then he suggested that they have sex. The minute he suggested they have sex, she went home and started to eat and didn't exit.

It was like social distancing, quarantine, self-isolation. She didn't exit for months. She stuffed herself. She ate when, I mean, she was a sleepwalker. When she slept, sleepwalked. When she sleepwalked, she ate. She ate when she went to the toilet.

She was in panic. She wanted to regain her whole body because she was threatened with sex.

And so Feliti invited her to his office, and then he discovered, gradually, that she had an incest history, a long, convoluted and horrible incest history with her grandfather. And she was terrified of sex.

He met her, by the way, again, 12 years later. He met her again, and she had bariatric surgery, and she lost 96 pounds. By the minute she lost 96 pounds and men started to be attracted to her, she became suicidal.

She had five psychiatric commitments, hospitalizations, and she had three courses of electroshock to control her suicidal ideation.

And Feliti understood from that early on, like more than a decade before the ACE study, he understood that obesity may actually be a solution.

You remember how we started the video? Negativity is a solution. Obesity is a solution because it protects her from sex. It isolates her. It prevents courting and flirting. If you mistake someone's solution for a problem to be eliminated, the treatment will fail.

And this is precisely the reason that addiction programs and rehab fail. A huge proportion between 60 and 80% of alcoholics revert to alcoholism after treatment in rehab within the first year.

Why? Because addiction is not a problem. It's a solution.

Actually, I personally am propounding and promulgating a new theory of addiction, where I claim that addiction is actually the normal state, the baseline state. But forget that. Forget me and my work.

Generally, addiction is a solution, not a problem. Obesity is a solution, not a problem.

So this started him on a process which ultimately led to the adverse childhood experiences study. As I said, it's one of the largest investigations of childhood abuse and neglect.

And the CDC says that the study dealt with household challenges and later life health and well-being.

The original ACE study was conducted at Kaiser Permanente, over 17,000 health maintenance organization members from Southern California receiving physical exams, completed confidential surveys in the first stage regarding their childhood experiences and current health status, behaviors, etc.

So to develop the study took more than a year. Both Feliti and Anda, they spent more than a year.

And they developed a set of 10 questions. They wanted it to be quick and to the point. They developed 10 questions which covered categories of adverse childhood experiences. So that included physical abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, family dysfunction, divorced parents, mentally ill parents, addicted parents, parents in prison, etc.

And the study revealed that traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence, first of all, are much more common than we thought.

You see, the overwhelming vast majority of study participants, they were white, middle-class, middle-aged, well-educated, and financially secure with medical insurance because that's how they were filtered.

The questionnaire was administered by the medical insurance. So these were rich kids, yappies in today's terms.

And yet of this group, which ostensibly and theoretically is immune to dysfunctional, disruptive homes, even in this group, one third of the respondents were free of adverse childhood experiences. And two thirds of this amazingly white privileged group, two thirds reported adverse childhood experiences. Each adverse experience was one point. The score was one point.

So you could have a score of zero to 10. And of the two thirds who reported an adverse experience, 87% scored two or higher. One in six had an ACE score of four or higher, which is seriously higher.

Felicity and his team, they found that adverse experiences are interrelated, though they usually study separate. So abuse is never like a M.O. method of operation or M.A., method of abuse.

Abuse is multifarious. Look the word up. Multifarious and shape-shifting and everything.

So the same abuser is likely to abuse psychologically, but then on rare occasion also physically and maybe given the right circumstances sexually.

And this creates a cascade, accumulation, later damage. As ACE scores rise, rose, chronic depression, for example, rose dramatically.

People with an ACE score of four had 66% of people with a score of four. Sorry, let me rephrase. 66% of women with a score of four in the ACE study and 35% of men had depression. And only 12% of people with ACE score zero.

So women with an ACE score of four, with women who had four adverse childhood experiences or more or higher, these women had a rate of depression, which was five times the average. And men had a rate of depression three times the average.

The likelihood of being on antidepressant medication or prescription painkillers also rose with the same proportion.

The same study, by the way, as an aside, is a curiosity. People with high ACE scores react much better to antidepressants than people without adverse childhood experiences. That's why we are very wrong to prescribe antidepressants the way we do.

Anyone comes to you with a depression? Yeah, yeah, here's an antidote. You need to, because people don't react similarly to antidepressants. If they had a really terrible abusive childhood, they react much better.

And the vast majority of people did not have a really terrible childhood. So they don't react as well to antidepressants.

Anyhow, study participants were asked, have you ever considered yourself to be an alcoholic? And people with an ACE score of four were seven times more likely to be alcoholic than adults with a score of zero.

Injection drug use also increased exponentially. People with an ACE score of six, the likelihood of intravenous drug use injection was 4,600 percent greater.

So if you had a score of zero, if you had a score of six, six experiences and higher, you were 46 times more likely to use drugs than someone who had a score of zero.

Women in the study were asked about rape. They were more likely to be raped. The prevalence of rape was five percent if you had a score of zero. It was 33 percent if you had a score of four.

So girls who witness domestic violence from growing up at a much higher risk of ending up in violent relationships themselves. Boys who witness domestic violence will abuse their own partners seven times more.

Like if you witness domestic violence in your household, you're seven times more likely to use domestic violence in your own marriage or your own relationship.

More than 12 percent of study participants have seen their mothers being beaten and battered.

And the list of high-risk behaviors predicted by ACE score includes smoking, obesity, unintended pregnancies, multiple sexual partners, sexually transmitted diseases, you name it, it can all be traced back, can all be traced back to adverse childhood experiences and consequences.

Those with a score of six or above, they had a 15 percent or greater chance than those with a score of zero of suffering from 10 leading causes of death, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, ischemic heart disease and liver disease. They were twice as likely to suffer from cancer. Cancer, four times as likely to have emphysema.

The stress on the body, possibly, led to all these medical, purely biological, physiological, medical consequences.

So each adaptation, each adaptive behavior like smoking, drinking, drugs, obesity, these are habits. And these are habits we developed to cope with stress, to reduce anxiety and long-term health risks. Long-term health risks are perceived as short-term benefits. That's the problem. The problem is that they are alcoholic and the drug users, the junkies, they in the short-term, they feel good. It's in the long-term that they pay the price.

When you talk to addicts, they keep telling you that their drug of choice, their substance, is very beneficial. They say it allows me to function, allows me to function, allows me to be creative. If I give it up, I will not be creative, I will be productive, I will not function or fall apart.

They regard their addiction as a solution, not as a problem.

Generally, by the way, we don't have a very far horizon, a very long horizon. Look at climate change. We don't do anything about climate change. Forget all the idiotic, international agreements that are unenforceable, they are just expressions of intent. We actually don't do anything about climate change.

And the reason? It's not our problem. It's a far away problem. It's down the road. We kick the can, we pass the back.

The same with addicts. They say, right now I feel great. Why do I have to work?

Robert Ander presented the results of the ACE study. And he said that child abuse is the greatest medical issue in the world. He thinks the overall cost of child abuse exceeds by far, by huge factors, the overall cost of cancer and heart disease. He thinks if you eradicate child abuse, you reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half of an hour.

Alcoholism by two thirds, suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three quarters.

And it would have a dramatic effect on workplace performance and decrease the need for incarceration and prisons.

Why I'm mentioning all this?

Because a lot of childhood adverse experiences had to do with mother in early years and with the father in later years.

The clear demarcation, clear watershed, up to age two more or less, two maybe three, mother is critical. After that, mother and father are equal in their influence on the child's forming mind, integrating and constellating self and identity.

But up to age two and three, the mother beyond question is by far the greatest and sometimes exclusive influence on a host of supercritical functions, what Freud called ego functions.

The label doesn't matter. Reality testing, individuation, separation, objects relating to other people, empathy, I mean, you name it, it's all mother, made in mother.

And so I am not against mothers, perhaps with the exception of mind. I'm not against mothers. I'm not for mothers. I don't know what the term mothers mean in any case. I'm against any adverse influence on the child, because I used to be one. Trust me, what I've been exposed to defies description. And I will not expose you to it.

So I really, really, really feel strongly for children who are in abusive and dysfunctional households. And I do make the distinction and the separation between the role of the mother, the role of the father, the role of other caregivers who might be present and ameliorate the situation, reduce the effects of abuse and so forth.

A loving grandmother or grandfather, and later exposure to teachers and role models and peers also modulates everything.

No question about all this. The foundation is the mothers.

Sorry, there I am. I, exactly like Donald Trump, abhor political correctness. And anyone attacking this fact is trying to be politically correct at the cost not only of the truth, but the cost of numerous hundreds of millions of children throughout the world.