Narcissistic Ideas of Progress: Our Dystopian Future (with Ginger Coy)

Victimhood movement is when you claim that you, as an individual, you were deprived of your rights or you're somehow damaged by a collective.

The Black Lives movement, they don't claim that specific individuals have harmed them. They say the police did it. Slave owners did it. Collectives did it.

So victimhood movements are a malignant growth of this conflict between Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Why do populations think that autocracy is the answer?

Because it is a personality cult. An autocracy is a renaissance choice. Machiavelli's prince, Jean Bodin, many others. It's a Renaissance choice.

In the Renaissance, we have the emergence of personality cults. And you can see, for example, that the concept of author, author of an art work emerged in the Renaissance.

Prior to the 13th century, there were sculptures and paintings and almost no one knew who painted them and who sculpted them. It was a collective effort, so to speak. It was usually embedded in cathedrals and so on, which were multi-century efforts. There was no concept of offer and offer.

The concept of offer emerged in the Renaissance, as did the concept of a ruler, an autocratic ruler, and so on so forth, the Borgias, Sforza, it's all emerged in the Renaissance.

So, an autocrat, a dictator, is a Renaissance type.

Of course, the Renaissance drew this, took this from Plato's philosopher kings, which are essentially dictators.

The Romans didn't see anything wrong with dictators. The rulers of Rome, some of the rules of Rome were official dictators. The Senate gave them the title dictator. There's nothing wrong with dictators. According to, you know, even in the Roman Republic, there was nothing wrong with dictators.

And we are still in this battle. We're still in this battle.

So when you say the left, we are largely talking about enlightenment values. When you say the right, you're talking about Renaissance.

Okay, that's a neat framing.

Do you think you have to have a regressed narcissistic populace to hold appeal for autocracy? Is this an indication of how narcissistic we've become in a certain way that we are becoming the narcissist, sort of an affinity with the dictator as a figure?

I think both narcissism and victimhood are inevitable outcomes of this clash between enlightenment and Renaissance, especially the Enlightenment one.

Inevitable outcome, because the Enlightenment set us up for failure.

The main tenet, philosophical tenet of the Enlightenment was that we are rational. Human beings are rational. They're rational agents.

And to this very day, when you study economics, the models in economics, the mathematical models in economics are based on the assumption that people make rational choices.

There's one exception, behavioral economics, where they realize that most people are irrational.

But to this very day, the assumption is that there is such a thing as an average person or a typical person. It's an idealization that allows us to do science. And this person is rational.

But of course, we are not rational. So enlightenment sets us up for failure. We keep failing these standards because we are not rational.

And because we keep failing, we self-reject.

When you feel like a failure constantly, you self-reject.

And to compensate for this self-rejection, you become narcissistic.

Now, your narcissism can be one of two types.

You can be a narcissist as a victim. Victimhood is a form of narcissism.

Or you can be a narcissist such as Donald Trump and in your face narcissists that define anti-social narcissism.

But both types of narcissism are compensatory because the Enlightenment taught us that we should be better than we are. We could be better than we are.

So if we are not better than we are, it's our fault. It's our failure. We are imperfect because we made a choice to be imperfect.

So this is a horrible feeling. And it's a constant feeling. Even today in the debates about racism and so on so forth, you're made to feel bad for your shortcomings.

Because it's as if your shortcomings are choices. You could have been perfect. If you choose to not be perfect, something is wrong with you and possibly you are evil. Somehow it connects, it harks back to religion, maybe you're evil.

So this creates an external locus of control because society, science, they define for you who you should be. You can't decide for yourself who you should be.

There is an ideal man, the famous Renaissance ideal man. The Enlightenment adopted this, but then relocated, the locus shifted to society.

So while the Renaissance said, you could be an ideal man if you work on it, if you acquire skills, if you become an apprentice, not to Donald Trump, then you could become perfect.

What the Enlightenment said is, you could become perfect by participating in social activities with like-minded people who are committed to the same agenda and ideology.

And of course the bridge between Renaissance and the Enlightenment was Protestantism, because Protestantism emphasized the agency of the believer.

In Protestantism, in the original Protestants, Lutheranism, you did not need a church. You were in direct connection with God. You are the main, you were the agent.

And if you were blessed by God, you were successful. You made money.

So the Protestant work ethic is rich people are blessed by God.

So this created a bridge, Protestantism, between the social locus of control and the individual locus of control. You could do both.

Protestantism, therefore, was the first postmodern movement, attempting to reconcile Renaissance values with enlightenment values.

And so this leads to narcissism, because it's inevitable that we're going to fail. We are fallible. We're imperfect creatures.

And so we are likely to be very angry at ourselves, to feel like failures, to castigate, to self-criticized, to reject ourselves, to become self-defeating and self-destructive and so on so forth.

I mentioned Protestantism, and today you could say, yeah, well, but religion doesn't play the same role as it used to.

But that's not true. Postmodernism is an absolutely religious movement. It has scientism, it has consumerism, it has atheism, it has growth, the religion of growth. Everything has to grow. Economies have to grow.

These are religions. These are religions. Postmodernism is absolutely religious.

So you could generalize and say that religion is the bridge between Renaissance values and enlightenment. And that's why religion is making a comeback in many ways.

Because it's the only way to reconcile the two by handing over power, by disempowering yourself.

And so if you are disempowered, God is responsible, you're not, then you know, you're not guilty, you're not a failure. It's a way of, it's a cop-out, it's a way of abdicating.

And yet we are in this place of moral relativism, a signature of post-modernism.

So it seems as though, you know, we're getting to a point where relativism, a signature of postmodernism. So it seems as though, you know, we're getting to a point where narcissism just is that we don't have to moralize necessarily about it.

You know, you just had an excellent essay about real politic after Henry Kissinger's death. And it was, it was fascinating because you're saying dispense with enlightenment values that we should give up on this liberal democracy project.

See what else did I want to say about that.

When you have a counterfactual view of human psychology, and when you reframe history and subject it to an ideology, enlightenment is an ideology, then inevitably it's going to end badly.

Moral relativism is embedded in the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenment is transactional. The minute you are transactional, it means that you can negotiate your morality.

So the Enlightenment says everything is the outcome of a contract. People contract. They create a social contract. They create other types of contracts, scientific contracts, but they contract.

So if people negotiate a contract, they can negotiate anything, including morality.

Compare this to the Renaissance, and compare this to the offspring of the Renaissance, Romanticism, Nazism, fascism, communism, etc.

In these Renaissance philosophies, there is no negotiation of morality. Morality is fixed. Morality is eternal. Morality can be traced back to ancient Greece and possibly before. Morality is always there and always will be there. There's nothing to discuss, nothing to negotiate. No contract to be made. Contract has been made. If you're a religious fundamentalist, contract has been made by God. If you're a religious fundamentalist, contract has been made by God. If you are not a religious fundamentalist, contract has been made in ancient Greece. But the contract has been made. End of story.

Enlightenment is an open-ended process. Every generation can redefine everything, anything from gender roles to what constitutes a genocide. Everything is open in the Enlightenment.

And that's why we have this counter-reformation or counter-revolutionary forces who are trying to revert to the past, make America great again, the emphasis is on again.

They adopt values like Viktor Orban adopts values from the 19th century. Erdogan had re-adopted Islam. Muslim fundamentalists go back all the way to Muhammad.

And we mock them, we deride them, we say they are primitive.

But what about the Supreme Court justices who interpret the Constitution literally? Aren't they the same like these Muslim fundamentalists?

Of course they are.

So we hand over power to texts, ancient texts, and we read them literally. We don't dare to interpret it.

That's what ISIS does and that's what the Supreme Court does. I see no difference here.

Kissinger was very concerned that radical Islam was going to dominate and take over the world.

It's interesting to me that in America, words like intifada, hijab, burqa, kaffiyeh, jihad, fatwa, Sharia law, they're all part of our vernacular now. And just in recent years, what do you make of that? Do you agree with Islam as ascendant and that it's a threat to our Western values?

I certainly don't want to live under Sharia law, for instance.

Islam stands the best chance of becoming a global ideology.

Exactly because it's not a religion, it's a philosophy. And a philosophy that has a religion as one of its components.

Islam is a way of life. Islam is a culture. Islam is a set of social edicts.

There's no contract there, it's all handed down from Muhammad, the messenger, and so on so forth.

And Islam is a synthesis of values from all other, borrowed from all other Abrahamic religions with very powerful neoplatonic ideas. So it incorporates actually ancient Greece.

And so it has an imperial colonizing aspiration or manifestation or dimension, which renders it very compatible with Rome.

So Islam actually is a compendium of all the conservative traditional Renaissance, if you wish, philosophies. It offers you the perfect, all-encompassing solution of going back to the past.

The idea of progress in the Enlightenment was linear. We go from worse to better, and from better to even better, to the best. It was totally linear.

The idea in Renaissance philosophies is cyclical. We build something, it gets rotten, it becomes dysfunctional, so we destroy it, and we rebuild it according to ancient standards, ancient beliefs, ancient values.

And this has to be done time and again and again because of human nature, which is corruptible.

So the Renaissance is cyclical. The Enlightenment is linear.

And in a world where there's a lot of uncertainty because of technological progress, technological developments, and so on so forth, people tend to be cyclical rather than linear.

The linear goes to the unknown. The cyclical reverts to the known.

And if we were globally, if all of us were to adopt a cyclical mindset, saying, okay, the experiment has failed largely.

How do we know the experiment has failed?

Because we are not happy.

After all, the main tenet of enlightenment was human happiness. In all the writings of all the philosophers from Descartes to Locke and from Locke all the way to Kant, the main thing was happiness, human happiness.

And this has been a mega failure. Absolute, unmitigated, horrendous failure.

The Enlightenment is possibly the worst project in human history. An unmitigated failure.

It led to the atomic bomb. It led to unhappiness, extreme unhappiness. It led to huge rates of mental illness. It's a total disaster, disaster zone.

Sam, what about science, for instance?

What is science?

I know it's a belief.

What did science lead us to?

Antibiotics.

Theoretical science. Theoretical science is irrelevant to us, totally irrelevant to us.

And practical science is actually technology.

You think there was not technology in the Middle Ages? If you think so, you're wrong.

Possehl, for example, taught us that technology in the Middle Ages was superior to technology in the Renaissance.

Technology is not a hallmark of civilization. Barbarians had technology, and we are barbarians with technology.

You're mentioning antibiotics.

It's ironic that the vast majority of antibiotics have been discovered accidentally, starting with penicillin. They were not the outcome of any scientific endeavor or enterprise.

Now, what we're doing today is not science. It's technology.

Energy is good. Everyone is technology. Chabbasa is technology. That's the Israelis.

Okay.

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So speaking of it, so is Israel the cradle of civilization yet again? It's being burned down to the ground in the Middle East. Are we creating a new post-enlightenment civilization?

Yes, I think the Enlightenment project has failed. I think the attempt to reconcile the Enlightenment with the Renaissance values and philosophies has failed. That's what you call post-modernity.

The individual is the source, but embedded in a collective.

This doesn't work. It leads to victimhood narcissism and so on. So that failed.

And so I think we are about to discard the Enlightenment. Pretty completely.

In the geopolitical sphere we are probably going to revert to real politics as it used to be called. Kissinger was a proponent but he was just the latest in a long line. Metternich, many others.

In the philosophical ideological sphere I think we are going to become much more renaissance. We're going to be much more conservative, much more traditionalist. We are going to adhere to personality cults with autocrats. We're going to sacrifice freedoms, liberal and democratic and other. We're going to limit rights and so on and so forth.

I think this process has just started. Roe versus Wade is just a harbinger. I think it's just starting.

And I do think, and I very much regret saying this, don't misunderstand. I do think that the future is Muslim. I'm pretty convinced of this.

Because Islam offers the total solution. A total solution.

Don't forget that Islam between the 9th or even the 7th century and the 15th century, that's 800 years. Islam was the engine of scientific innovation, research and studies. Islam preserved all Greek knowledge. The Muslims translated Aristotelius and many others Plato into Arabic.

Islam was a dominant culture. Islam ruled parts of Europe, definitely all the Middle East, huge parts of Asia and so on so forth. Islam for 800 years did offer an alternative, an alternative to Christianity.

And for a while, Islam prevailed, not Christianity. For a while, until the 15th century, Islam prevailed.

I think we're about to enter a second Muslim age.

Now what we are seeing now are the convulsions of the old order, the Ancien regime, as the French call it. We are seeing the convulsions of the old order, the Judeo-Christian order, fighting back, trying to survive somehow in the face of the twin onslaught of Renaissance philosophies and Islam.

This is a twin onslaught.

What Islam fails to understand yet but shortly, is that it can merge safely with Renaissance philosophies. And when it does, it will dominate the world. Nothing will stand in its way.

And to remind you, Renaissance philosophies is a totalitarian personality cult, gifted amateurs, narcissistic. And so narcissism is a renaissance phenomenon, it's an innocence phenomenon, not an enlightenment phenomenon.

The enlightenment was anti-narcissistic.

Victimhood is a renaissance phenomenon because the Renaissance was a victimhood movement. The church was the abuser and the oppressor. The aristocracy was the abuser and the oppressor.

The Renaissance was a victim movement. The Enlightenment wasn't. The Enlightenment empowered people.

Enlightenment said, you're great, you're wonderful. Nothing can stand in your way if you just agree to collaborate.

So the Enlightenment was very optimistic, very upbeat. That's why the Enlightenment believed that guarantee happens.

The Renaissance was dark.

Machiavelli is the ultimate Renaissance man.

Renaissance was dark. Renaissance was Stalinesque, Kafkaesque. Renaissance believed that there are dark powers like the church and the aristocracy, are trying to undermine the order, enslave people, slaughter and do worse things.

So the renaissance was, and today we are going back there.

Conspiracy theories are not enlightenment. They are renaissance.

So narcissism.

Sorry?

No, go ahead.

All these modern phenomena are a renaissance phenomenon.

Now, Islam is just beginning to co-opt and to collaborate with some of these phenomena. Conspiracy theories, for example. Islam is co-opting conspiracy theory and so on.

And Israel is on the forefront of the Judeo-Christian bulwark and it's a siege. We under siege. The West doesn't realize it. We under siege from without and we are under siege from within.

We are under siege because mobs, mobs, oclocracies, empowered by technology, dumb, ignorant, vicious mobs are now leveraging technology to take over. Oclocracy, not democracy. It's nothing resembling democracy.

The founding fathers would have died a second time at the witness Donald Trump and the 40 million who constitute his base.

So this is oclocracy. Mob rule. It's much more similar to, let's say, Nazi Germany than to anything in the history of the United States.

So there is an enemy from within. There is a Trojan horse. There's a fifth column in the West.

That's why Trump is praising Putin. That's why Erdogan and Putin and Victor Orban from Hungary, who is supposedly a European Union country, and Slovakia recently, that's why all these people and Xi Jinping, they're all forming alliances across countries, across civilizations.

Huntington was wrong. It's not a clash of civilization. It's a clash of ideologies that cross, cut across civilization.

You could have the prime minister of a European Union country, the dictator of a Muslim country, and the murderous thug that rules Russia and the dictator of China all collaborating. European Union, Russia, China and Turkey, all collaborating and Netanyahu, all collaborating.

Why?

Because it's not a clash of civilization. It's a clash of alternative models and of governance and human happiness.

The Renaissance told you, you could be happy as a narcissist. You could be happy as a victim. As a narcissist, I'm sorry. You could be happy as a subject of a prince personality cult you could be happy.

And the enlightenment told you you could be happy if you regard yourself as a collaborator, a cooperator with other people.

And the Enlightenment failed because it posed too high a bar. People couldn't reach the Enlightenment. Couldn't reach the standard.

It may account for why our institutions are failing as well, because they're collectives.

So do you think the elites are inflicting Trump upon us? Is this payback or punishment for the terror that elites may feel about the role of the Internet?

I think the elites are quaking in their boots. This is definitely a time of revolution. This is a pre-revolutionary time. There's no question that it will end in revolution of some kind.

Revolutions nowadays are not so much gory and bloody as they are legal. The law is co-opted by revolutions to suppress certain groups and obtain certain outcomes.

But the elites are quaking, yeah, because the disaffection and disenchantment and anger, rage of the masses has reached a boiling point and oclocracy is already upon us.

There's one rule in oclocracy. The previous elites pay the price. Oclocracies are anti-elitist.

The Renaissance tried to teach autocrats like Machiavelli's prince, the Renaissance tried to teach them don't go against the mob, collaborate with the mob, be swept by the mob to power. And Hitler did this.

But how many people can do that? Not many.

Trump is doing this. It takes a certain ability to resonate, a certain ability to be so empty, so blank that you could become the mob in this sense.

Donald Trump is an emptiness, is an absence. So Hitler was the same. So they were able to resonate with the mob. They were able to shape with the mob. They were able to shape-shift and become the mob.

And I think that's where we're going to, an oclocracy, and the elites will pay a huge price, a huge price, legally, at least, financially maybe, if not worse.

Yeah, you've talked about the French Revolution in the past.

Can you address the affinity between the solipsism of narcissism and the technological age that we're living through or in?

And there's a certain resonance there.

It's a technology very rarely drives social change. Maybe the telegraph, maybe the car, these were technologies that drove social change.

I can't say that social media, I think most technologies reflect social change. They kind of surf the wave of social change.

And so our current technologies are solipsistic because people have chosen to be atomized.

People have rejected the Enlightenment and the core feature of the Enlightenment is the social contract. Working with others towards common goals, tolerating others somehow and so on.

People don't want this anymore because they are self-sufficient.

People don't want to go back to work after the pandemic. They want to work from home. They don't want to see their home. They don't want to see their colleagues.

So people want to be alone. People want to be atomized. People want to be with their cats and Netflix, not in disorder.

And that's it. So we have a wave of atomization. We have this choice.

Loneliness is not a pandemic. Loneliness is not bad or horrible, as the surgeon general is trying to convince us. Loneliness is a choice.

And when you talk to lonely people, most of them are actually very happy, very content with their loneliness. And they are terrified of the idea of introducing someone else into their lives, the upheaval and the need to compromise and the friction and the conflict. They don't want this. Who needs this?

Sorry. I mean, I have everything I need right here, including sex. Who needs this?

So this atomization is reflected in the technology. Technology renders us more and more and more sufficient.

So to allow us to atomize at will, to avoid social contact, it will, and this of course flies in the face of the Enlightenment and is exactly the ideal, it's exactly the ideal of the Renaissance.

Leonardo da Vinci, for example, never socialized. He was a loner. He worked alone. He even decrypted his writings using mirror, like mirror images and I don't know what. He did not want people to read his notebooks, ever. He was a total loner.

And when you read the prince, Machiavelli's prince, it's a loner. He describes a loner and so on.

So mobs are composed of loners. That's the irony.

Democracy, real democracy, requires collaboration, teamwork, common goals, the pursuit over decades or centuries or generations of some vision.

Mobs are comprised 100% of loners. These loners come together to elect another loner. And then they go back.

That's why we have the concept of flesh mob. It's ephemeral. It's not a constant structure. It's not a permanent structure. It shapeshifts.

So technology just empowers us to do what we want to do, which is to never, ever, ever have to suffer or tolerate another human being, if possible. This is what the world we live.

Yeah, most people think of social media as being narcissistic with selfies and whatnot.

So leaving aside social media for a moment, I mean, kind of the flip side of what you just argued, do you think the advances in technology will help to offset the worst of the uptick of narcissism in the sense that we can have an AI merger with quantum computing, for instance, that's more supercharged and would inform the philosophical underpinnings of our world.

This is, your question reflects the fallacy.

Yeah.

The technology shapes human consciousness and social trends.

With extremely few exceptions in human history, the invention of the wheel, I'm not even sure about that. Maybe the telegraph, maybe the car.

With extremely few exceptions, technology follows, never leads.

So AI will be shaped to uphold and support and buttress and enhance and amplify narcissism and solitude and so on.

The users will shape the technology, not the other way around.

And the users right now want to be exclusionary, not inclusive.

That's another difference between linear progress.

Linear progress is inclusive. In order to realize goals and so on so forth, you have to include other people.

The Enlightenment is an inclusive ideology. The Renaissance is an exclusionary ideology.

Look at all the daughters of the Renaissance. Religious fundamentalism excludes infidels, heretics. Nazism excludes the Jews, etc.

Communism excludes the bourgeoisie. These are exclusionary movements.

And we are now living in an age of exclusion.

It's a great way to describe victimhood. Victimhood is about excluding a group of people who are then labeled abusers.

But it's an exclusionary thing.

Narcissism is totally exclusionary. I am Godlike. I am superior. I am invisible, I'm this and that, and you are inferior, you're excluded for my world because you're not up to my level.

These are all exclusionary things.

Therefore, they cannot be reconciled with enlightenment.

And these exclusionary things will continue to dictate technology in the future.

They will dictate quantum computing. They will dictate the parameters and specifications of artificial intelligence, of the multiverse, and so on so forth.

The technologies are derivative. They are not important at all.

The constant focus on technology is a distraction, is an attempt to divert attention from the real problems.

And the real problems are human relationships and the absolute absence of human happiness.

These are the real problems.

This discontent civilization and its discontents. This is the real problem and we are not tackling it because we are diverted by entertainment or by technology or by, you know, these are, who cares about technology.

Focus on what we do with technology, why we invented this technology, why we are going that way technologically, focus on our choices and our state of mind on our future.

And so this we are not doing and I think maybe we are not doing this because we are too afraid to look ourselves in the mirror, too afraid to confront the truth and reality.

Right now, we live in a world of totalitarian victimhood, entitlement movements. Everything is totalitarian, victimhood, entitlement movement. Everything, the Republican Party. I mean, you name it.

Everyone defines himself or herself as a victim. Consequently, she or he is entitled, and it leads to narcissism and totalitarianis totalitarian by definition. The narcissist is a dictator. Even in the realm of his own family, it's a cult and he's the cult leader.

So when you render victimhood and narcissismthe organizing principle of your life and your civilization, you're bound to end up with totalitarianism and autocracy, not with democracy.

Democracy requires the recognition that everyone is equal to everybody else, which narcissism would never countenance or accept. Never.

And this entitled victimhood, which leads to narcissism and totalitarianism, it undermines very important principles of civilization and organization.

For example, meritocracy. It undermines meritocracy. It undermines the right to self-defense. It undermines critical, atavistic, primitive values that have been with us like forever.

We're drifting away.

Yeah.

Sorry?

Free speech.

We're drifting away from our humanity.

What constitutes humanity is a set of beliefs and values and behaviors and traits and so on. And we are drifting away from them because we are narcissistic, because we're entitled, and because we are victims.

And so we demonize so- called abusers, we exclude, not collaborate, and so the rejection of the Enlightenment, when I suggested in my article to finally give up the ghost and admit that the Enlightenment project has failed and resort to Realpolitik in international affairs and to limited democracy, elite democracy, rather than universal franchise, is because if we don't, we will end up in Trump land.

And I hope not in Hitler land, not in the Fourth Reich.

I hope. I'm not sure at all.

Not in the Fourth Reich, I hope. I'm not sure at all the leader of the Fourth Reich will be Mussolini, of course. I am not sure that this is an outlandish proposition.

The only defense against this scenario, the only defense is to somehow accept that victimhood and narcissism are the enemies and fight them back.

And fight them back not by electing a narcissist to be a leader because we feel victimized and he accepts and acknowledges our victim.

That's not the way to fight back.

But I don't think we have an incentive to do this because victimhood pays. And narcissism pays. These are positive adaptations.

If you're a victim, you get money, you get attention, you get adulation, you get pity, you get victimhood pays emotionally, it pays psychologically, it pays financially, it pays legally.

I'm sorry, but the Me Too movement is a victim movement. Many women became rich on the back of the Me Too movement. Not nice to say to a woman, but it's a fact. It's a self-enrichment movement. It's a narcissistic movement.

Environmentalism, of course, is a self-enrichment narcissistic movement.

Completely.

Scientism, it is worse.

So, if I were to go to Donald Trump, so hello, Don, you know, I'm an expert on narcissism, and you are a malignant narcissist. I can treat you. I can help you. Not treat you. I can help you.

Why do you think I need help? I'm a multi-billionaire. I'm the former president of the United States. I'm a future president of the United States. Why do you think I need help?

He doesn't.

We have created an incentive structure. We disincentivize any alternative to narcissism and victimhood.

Any alternative to the individual as God. Society is God in the Enlightenment. The individual is God in the Ganesas.

And the bridge between the two is religion.

And the only religion I see that can somehow emerge from all this mess is Islam.

Does that make me happy? Extremely not. I speak Arabic. Who's watching this? Speak a lot of ill arabiya. I speak the Arabic of the Quran. I read the Quran and the Hadith in the original, I know what I'm talking about.

Islam is a wonderful, truly wonderfulphilosophy.

It's a philosophy of submission and social organization and so on.

But it is open to interpretation. Open to interpretation, the trend is it to interpretation. Open to interpretation that renders it very dangerous.

So it doesn't make me happy, but on the other hand, I don't see an alternative.

Christianity is already compromised heavily by the Enlightenment project that has failed, and Christianity consequently is about to fail. It's failing.

Judaism has never been grand.

And we have Buddhism, of course, in Asia.

But Islam is making inroads. I think that's the shape of the world to come.

Autocracies, dictatorships everywhere, entitled narcissistic individuals, victimhood as an organizing principle which leads to violence and aggression.

And Islam is the main religion of the world. The world religion. That's what I see.

Okay, that sounds pretty bleak. Though I'm with you, I can see it.

So you've asserted that, okay, so just devil's advocate for a moment, maybe something a little brighter here, you asserted that we might not be smart enough to understand how narcissism is not as bad or as evil as we want to think it is.

I mean, to engage in this kind of thinking would be splitting black and white thinking, which would be narcissistic and adding to the problem, essentially, if you consider it still a problem.

But I really enjoyed your lecture the other day, your video on considering this, you know, is it evil or not?

So maybe, you know, you've mentioned in a separate video like narcissism functions like a virus does, that we don't like it, but maybe it has evolutionary advantage or purpose that we're not, again, not smart enough to understand exactly.

And you've said that we should intentionally expose ourselves to some level of narcissism to inoculate us from the worst of it.

So, you know, again, I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish about a state of play when it comes to narcissism.

But lately I've been thinking about how to make peace with narcissists and narcissism and this era that we're living in that is narcissistic, because otherwise it's to demonize the narcissist and engage in splitting.

So can you walk me through that a little bit more?

I don't demonize anything. I don't demonize narcissism. I don't demonize anything.

I don't demonize narcissism. I don't demonize dictatorships. I try not to demonize anything.

I am a utilitarian.

I engage in calculating. It's a calculus of the greater good and what leads to it.

Utilitarians are immoral, not im-moral. They are a-moral. They contemplate murder as a public good. You could murder someone. You could murder an individual if it saves a hundred, for example.

In utilitarian theory, philosophical theory, it's permissible to kill someone if you were to save 10 people.

So they don't impose any value judgments on anything.

And this is how I am a utilitarian.

Narcissism is an energy. Like every energy, it can kill or it can power things. Electricity can kill you and can power you in this interview.

So it depends.

It's not narcissism in itself. It's the use we make of narcissism.

Today we make use of narcissism in order to subjugate other people, to suppress them, to elevate ourselves, to cater to our needs, to promote our interests, and so on. So it's, let's say, a selfish variant of narcissism.

And if you're about to stop me and ask, is there any other? Of course, there are other variants of narcissism. There is even something known as the prosocial or communal narcissism.

So narcissism is an energy. We need to accept that the future world, when I say future, it's like 10 years, not the future world is going to be narcissistic, entitled, victimhood oriented, probably Muslim as I said, but that's the future world.

There's nothing to be done about it we've entered a reenactment of the Renaissance the Enlightenment project is dead. We all political will rule in the geopolitical affairs and not in self-sufficient solipsistic narcissism. We will rule when it comes to interpersonal relationships.

When it comes to politics, mobs will be recruited by autocrats and dictators, the way Hitler recruited his mobs to accomplish outcomes.

That's the world we're going to live in. And we need to accept this.

And I've been saying the same about climate change. Climate change is going to happen. Period. There is nothing we can do about it. End of story.

Rather than spend all these billions of dollars on nonsense, maybe we should begin to adapt to climate change. It's not going away. It's not going to go away.

Same with narcissism.

So we need to begin to regard narcissism as a feature of life, part of the structure, and see how we can channel it, redirect it, to obtain outcomes which could be, perhaps, accepted by a majority of us.

Not try to repress narcissists, demonize narcissists, attack narcissists, fight off. They're going to win. They are winning.

Change is happening it's nothing we can do about it. It's delusional.

So we need to learn how to live with them.

If you want the metaphor, narcissists are aliens with superior technology, superior psychological technology. You better learn how to coexist with these aliens because they have superior technology or they will exterminate you.

So this is what we need to do.

It's easy to manipulate a narcissist to become prosocial and communal if the incentive structure is right, exposure, celebrity, fame, adulation, and so. The carrots, it's easy to do this.

If you confront them if you are argumentative and critical and so on you provoke the worst of them the worst in them and they are going to become subversive and destructive.

Instead you need to co-opt their grandiosity and their entitlement their lack of empathy you need to co-opt it and use it for the greater good.

This should be a project akin to the enlightenment, the third project. Let's call it the third project, we to the Enlightenment.

The third project.

Let's call it the third project.

We had the first project, the Renaissance. It led to Nazism and fascism. Not good.

We had the second project, the Enlightenment. It led to the atomic bomb. It led to smartphones, which I'm not sure is a good thing. It led to all kinds of things. Not good. We failed there too.

Maybe it's time for a third project, harnessing narcissistic energy.

A third project which could bridge the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, socially harnessing individual energy. This individual energy is narcissism.

That we instead are demonizing this group of people is stupid, so destructive, counterproductive.

Because narcissists happen to be very creative. They're driven. They're ambitious. They're entrepreneurial. Elon Musk.

They drive. If you want to talk about progress if you want to talk about progress you want to talk about inventions if you want to talk about technology but it's all driven by narcissists are in show business in the media in science and it's all narcissism is a huge engine.

And what we're trying to do, we're trying to dismantle it rather than put it to good use.

And that could be the third project after the failure of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

I believe you quoted Theodore Millon. failure of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

I believe you quoted Theodore Millon the other day, talking about the spectrum of narcissistic personality, narcissistic style all the way to NPD. And his postulation that we're all a little bit narcissistic anyway.

So to your point of embracing it, it is what it is?

Yeah, it was actually Len Sperry, Milan was quoting him.

Yeah, the first from style. We have narcissistic style versus narcissistic disorder. The narcissistic style is much more common than the disorder.

But this was before the advent and invention of modern technologies.

Today, I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that the majority of population have a narcissistic style. I don't think it would be exaggerated to say this.

Rather than fight the inevitable, let's surf the wave. It's a wave, it's energy, it's huge energy. Nothing mobilizes a human being more than ultimate recognition and adoration and adulation. Nothing.

Even the healthiest, most balanced and normal person wants to be recognized for his accomplishments, wants to be applauded by his peers and colleagues, wants to be promoted, having accomplished things at work. These are all narcissistic defenses.

People don't realize narcissism is healthy. There is healthy narcissism, and we all have narcissistic defenses, and everyone needs narcissistic supply, not only narcissists.

The misinformation online distorts thinking about narcissism because these facts are not recognized so I think it's time to admit the facts, which is always the most difficult phase.

Most difficult phase is to admit the facts. It's time to admit the facts.

Number one, democracy sucks. Universal franchise democracy sucks. It's not a good organization or governance principle. It needs to be dispensed with and we need to think of alternatives.

Number two, narcissism is bad only if you do not harness it and channel it and redirect it. It could be a force for good if you do.

Number three, victimhood should be fought tooth and nail. We should no longer suffer or tolerate any victimhood statements, victimhood self-aggrandizement. Victimhood movements have been hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths.

There should be a counter-culture movement fighting off victims and victims. Reparations for slavery, go away. What the hell is this nonsense for example.

And we should be able to say this openly and without fear and I'm referring to Akadim and so on.

So I think if we follow these three principles, we'll be okay. If you acknowledge the facts, and then fearlessly, you're trying to come up with solutions, usually survival is guaranteed.

However, if we don't, we are on the verge of a cataclysm, the likes of which I am very hard pressed to remember in history, perhaps with the exception of the fifth century, Rome. I'm very hard pressed to think of an equivalent in history as to the moment we are standing in right now.

You see, people say, oh, there have been much worse periods in history.

I disagree. This is by far the worst period in history.

What do I mean?

In the 14th century, you had the black death, the plague. One third of population of Europe died. Horrible. No question. It was a bad period.

But everything else was intact. People were dying, true. But they had families. They had the church. They had the belief in God. They had the aristocracy. They had the feudal system. Wages went up because of scarcity of labor. Everything remained intact.

Today, what do we have? We have no families. We have no God. We have no communities. We have no society. We have nothing. We are alone. We are drifting alone molecules.

And so if you compare the 14th century to the 21st century, I would rather live in the 14th century. With all the certainties and securities that existed then, there was a safety net, psychological institutional safety net for people who were suffering.

Today you're on your own. You're on your own. If you suffer, for example, if you're depressed or anxious, you're finished. You're on your own. You can be, someone will give you a pill. It's not a solution.

So the 21st century is even worse than the 20th century.

In the 1930s, there was Hitler. Later there was Holocaust. World War II. 50 million people died in Europe. Horrible. I'm not denying this, but people had everything else. They had their friends, they had their families, they had the church, they had the state, everything was intact.

Today people don't have friends.

In 1980, a typical person in the United States had 10.1 friends, best friends. Today the number is 0.9. 40 years later, 10 friends versus one friend, maybe.

41%, 42% according to the latest Pew Center research. 42% of people haven't had any contact with a friend in the week preceding the questionnaire. None whatsoever.

63% of men and 34% of women have resigned themselves to a life of a lifelong, to lifelong singlehood. The vast majority of them haven't had sex in the previous year. They don't want any contact with the other.

So it's bad.

This atomization, this disintegration of social safetyness, of society at large, of institutions, there has never been something like this in human history. Never, ever. Not even the fall of Rome in 476. Not even then. Nothing remotely to what's happening to them.

We're adrift. Adrift. It's the worst, by far the worst period in human history.

And we refuse to wake up.

We instead, we say we are victims.

That's it. They're victims. That's it. We're entitled.

Rather than wake up and say, OK, let's take stock of what exists, what there is, and somehow adapt to it.

We are refusing to adopt.

Okay, as we're prognosticating for the future here, but I just want to get back to brass tacks and circle back to a question I asked you earlier about, you know, because again, Trump is imminent here and what to do on a practical level.

So, you know, what kind of defense mechanisms are at play for people who refuse to acknowledge that Trump is a narcissist?

I see minimization, denial, partnerization. I mean, I'm hearing people want to diagnose him with oppositional defiant disorder, I guess, psychopathy, ADD, ADHD, anything but narcissism.

Trump is triggering in people primitive, infantile defense mechanisms.

So he triggers in people fantasy defense, provides them with a fantasy. Or alternative reality, alternative facts, yeah?

Or at the same time, for example, he triggers in them splitting. We are all good. Everyone else is all bad. Vermin or whatever.

So what he does, he regresses his base, psychologically speaking, he regresses his base to infancy.

Infants do this. Infants split. Infants regress to fantasy zone.

He infantilizes his base.

The problem with this is that it's a very alluring proposition.

Everyone wants to be a baby again. Everyone wants to have a second go-in childhood, the second chance, second childhood. Everyone wants to go back to the womb, where it was safe and stable.

And Trump is offering this.

What is he saying in effect is you don't need to be responsible or accountable or make choices or I'm there. I am a paternal figure or parental figure. I'm there and you can be children now. All your lives you have had to be adults. You've had to work hard. And you failed. As adults, you fail. You don't have a job. You're uneducated. That's his base.

So you failed as adults. Here I'm giving you an opportunity to not be adults anymore, to be babies, my babies. Yes, as babies, you can call everybody's bad, evil. As babies, you can live in fantasy. As babies, you can project. You're actually weak. Your failures, you're losers. But you can call everyone else weak and failure and loser.

So he legitimizes infantilization of his base.

And that's an irresistible proposition.

People fear most freedom.

What people fear most is freedom. They need to choose.

Sam Vaknin, it's Jean-Paul Sartre. People are terrified. Kierkegaard, the existentialists. They taught us that angst, the existential anxiety is because we have to make choices all the time. We are responsible, we are accountable. We have to pay the consequences for our actions and our decisions.

We don't want to do that. It's terrifying because we don't know if our choices and decisions are right. Maybe we're making the wrong choices. Maybe our decisions are wrong. And then we will have to pay a horrible price.

So it's very tempting to not have to make decisions. Someone else will make the decision and then if he's wrong he will pay the price.

It's displacement of the cost of life. It's opting out of life, in a way, rejecting life. They're saying, I'd rather be in a fantastic space, paracosm.

And so it's not possible to overcome Trump.

Because in a world that is so terrible, and I just spent the last few minutes telling you that this is the worst century ever in human history, in a world that is so terrible, fantasy is an appealing solution, appealing alternative. It would be very difficult to defeat Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is not reality-based. He is fantasy-based.

Fantasies are all-encompassing, comforting. It's a form of self-soothing.

Trump is like food. You consume Trump all the time.

By the way, not only his supporters, his antagonists, his enemies consume Trump all the time.

Look at PBS. PBS has more coverage of Trump than anyone else, period. Biden is like one-tenth of Trump in terms of coverage, because Trump triggers them somehow, attracts their attention, seduces them, tempt them.

In short, what I'm trying to say is that Trump is having a love affair with his base, because the love affair is exactly this.

Love is a pathology, a fantasy defense.

And how do you come between two lovers?

How do you come between two lovers? If you try to talk to a lover and say listen the person your love is horrible she's evil she's ugly she will never listen to you.

Yes, if you were imagine a couple, absolutely Romeo and Juliet, here we are.

Do you think Trump represents like a liminal figure that are we dwelling in this narcissistic era and then we're going to move into a different era that you've been teasing out?

Is he a gateway drug to something else? Or is it we going to be in this state for some time?

Trump is not alone. I don't know why you single out Trump.

Well, I wanted to talk about Trudeau too, because per comments from our last...

Yes, there are dozens, not only Trudeau and not only Trump. There are dozens of similar leaders all over the world.

The ones you just mentioned Orban, yeah.

Yes, it's a leadership style. It's not Trump. It's a Trump just conforms to the leadership style that is now the dominant leadership style, which is narcissistic autocratic.

So I don't think, yes, he is going to pave the way to a Hitler type. He's going to pave the way to a psychopath.

Narcissus usually pave the way to psychopath.

So ultimately, the world is going to be ruled by psychopaths.

But I think that's a bit further down the road, and it crucially depends on some developments.

So I'm not quite sure about that prediction.

Depends, for example, whether someone is going to come up with an ideology that offers coexistence between morality and narcissism, or between goal orientation of the collective and narcissism.

Nazism as an engine of the collective.

Then people may settle down to a more benign version.

But if they remain stuck with narcissistic leaders, and these narcissistic leaders are going to distract, as I told you, it's inevitable. They're all going to do that.

Then at some point, people are going to revert to narcissistic, to psychopaths. Escalate. People are going to escalate. You're going to say okay then we need someone who is an animal someone who is immoral someone who is crazy not Trump was saying I'm crazy you know don't play with me I'm crazy don't test me enough so he could be a harbinger of psychopathy to come.

And on the other hand, if an alternative will rise which will incorporate narcissism, and channel it.

So I don't know yet. I'm not optimistic. I think we're heading towards the psychopathic age. I'm not optimistic in this sense.

Sam, we're going on an hour and a half now. Is there anything else you would like to say in closing?

Well, it all sounds very, very pessimistic.

But I think what we fail to grasp is a process of habituation.

Someone born this year would regard autocracy, even dictatorship, narcissism, victimhood, a ruling religion, perhaps Islam, he would regard this as normal. She wouldn't think there's something odd or bad about it. It's life.

We have the vantage point. I much more than you. We have the vantage point of the age of history. I can compare the 1960s to so.

But someone born today would just feel great in the new environment. Habituated.

Why did communism fail?

Because people were comparing communism to capitalism.

But had all the world been communists, had the entire world been USSR, USSR would have lasted forever.

People in the USSR were comparing themselves to the United States they listened to rock music they saw smuggled movies they wanted consumer goods and the USSR was unable to provide so it fell apart but imagine that the entire world part globe was under the control of Brezhnev for the USR leadership the Politburo. The US would have never think it's a comparison that drives change envy basically that drives change.

Someone born into a world of narcissistic, psychopathic dictators with no concept of human rights, of civil rights, with entitlement based on victimhood, and empowered by technology, fueled by technology. This kind of young boy or younger wouldn't see anythingamiss, they wouldn't feel the need to change.

Exactly as digital natives nowadays can perceive a world without laptops and smartphone. They just can't. And they don't understand how people interacted without social media. It's odd.

Today, the vast majority of social interactions are digital. People don't meet face-to-face at all.

So it's cause for optimism. What we regard as intolerable and hard, difficult as own, would be matter of course and matter of fact and people won't feel bad. Won't feel bad at all? They will find different venues, other venues for happiness.

So we know, we would know that there are alternatives.

But you know, in 1984, something that people fail to mention and all the critics of this masterpiece in 1984 there are only two people who are unhappy Winston and his girlfriend, Julia. Only two.

In the entire book, it's never mentioned that someone else is unhappy. Only this two.

He has someone collaborating with, but that's it. Only this two.

And when he's interrogated and so on so forth, O'Brien, I think the name of the interrogator. He's trying to kind of persuade him that happiness is an arbitrary choice.

He says two and two or five. All you have to do is to say two and two a five and you'll be happy and we'll let you go.

And then what he does, he sacrifices his girlfriend. He says, go to her, go to Julia. She is the subversive. She's the dissident.

But the book is like, I think, 400 pages or something, and it's not mentioned even once that someone is unhappy.

It's a lesson to learn.

An astute observation, Sam.

I do have one more question for you, because you've mentioned that China isn't quite the threat that we might be making it out to be the sentiment here in America.

There's a lot about cultural Marxism to do with wokeism and this indoctrination of our education system along March through the institutions.

Should America regard China as a threat?

America regarded the U.S.S.R. as a threat, and then America regarded Japan as a threat. I'm old enough to remember.

Now America regards China as a threat.

America is in need of threats. America is always on the lookout for an external enemy because this is the only engine of cohesion in a country that is made up of 187 ethnicities, four recognized races and so.

The United States is not a homogeneous nation state. It's an abstract concept, it's an idea, refined somehow. And the glue that holds everything together very often is an external enemy. So you demonize external enemies, you exaggerate their importance and so on.

Now, China is a formidable competitor in commercial markets, which is good for you.

If you know what's good for you, it's good for you, because it drives you to innovation and so forth.

But China is prestidigitation, it's light of hand. China is a magician's trick. It is built on mountains of credit, which are then allocated to non-productive sectors and so.

China will come crashing down big time soon.

The way Japan did.

The way Japan did.

But rest assured, the United States will find another.

The United States is history. The United States is the country that is engaged in warfare more than any other country in the world, in human history, and that includes Nazi Germany. There has not been a year in the United States history that it hasn't gone to war with some.

You're a very belligerent collective, aggressive and violence, which is why the United States is widely perceived as a much bigger threat worldwide than China or even Russia.

So that's my answer, I'm afraid.

Any last thoughts on the war in the Middle East?

Hamas has nothing to do with the Palestinian cause, of course. Hamas is an extension of Iran and its interests in the region. That's why the Houthis, Yemenite Houthis, have joined in. And militias in Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Hezbollah have joined in. Hezbollah has nothing to do with the Palestinians. Hezbollah is Shia and Palestinians are Sunni and so.

This is a war between Iran and Israel, fought via proxies, exactly like Ukraine. Ukraine is a war between the West and Russia, fought via proxies. The proxy is Ukraine.

So this is a war between Iran and Israel over regional dominance. Who will dominate the region?

Israel was on its way to strike peace accords with very crucial players like Saudi Arabia. And this, I think, alarmed Iran very much.

So Hamas is not relevant, Hezbollah is not relevant. The Houthis are not relevant. All these are not relevant.

Ultimately, the ultimate stage of the war has to be between Israel and Iran. I'm not sure which form it will take this. It will be a military confrontation, but I'm not sure which form it will be.

Ultimately, these two are going to lock horns when all the proxies are pushed out of the way. This is the real war and that's why the united states got itself involved with carriers and because it's an Iranian threat. They're using the Palestinians and the Shia Muslims are using others. But it's an Iranian thing.

And Iran now has teamed up with Russia, steamed up with China. Iran has joined BRICS, economic. And so Iran is becoming part of the resistance axis against the West.

So this is also a war between West and the emerging East.

I think the West is going to win because I think China is a paper target.

We've seen that Russia is a paper tiger. They cannot defeat for Ukraine even.

China is a paper, even bigger paper tiger, in my view. It's going to come crashing big time soon.

So I think the West is going to win by default, ultimately.

But in the meantime, there could be very nasty episodes with Iran. I don't rule out a nuclear confrontation. It's going to be bad before it gets better.

What if Trump becomes our dictator and he joins the axis of evil and leaves NATO with Iran, China and Russia?

I don't think, even if he does that, I don't think Trump is going to abandon Israel. Even if he does abandon NATO, I don't think he's going to abandon Israel.

And of course Iran is an arch enemy of Donald Trump. He has made it its arch enemy.

And Israel is the long arm of the United States in the region, fighting off Iran's proxies at this stage, and Iran later.

So I don't think there's any risk to Iran.

Ukraine will pay a heavy price, should this happen. It's the worst thing that could happen to Ukraine. A heavy price.

And then I think real politics. We would need to accept that regional powers have regional spheres of interest and we would need to stay out of each other's way to avoid new Vietnams all the time.

And this is an invention of an American president, the Monroe doctrine. Monroe of an American president, the Monroe doctrine. Monroe was the American president, said that South America is an American sphere of influence. And America would not allow any colonial power to interfere.

We need to accept that Russia has its sphere of influence, which includes Ukraine. Always did, historically. 100%. We need to accept China has its sphere of influence. We need to accept Israel is a regional power and has its sphere of influence. So does Iran.

We would need to learn to coexist rather than coerce.

It's very humiliating to the United States because it has developed this concept of exceptionalism and the policemen of the world.

So it would be a stand down. We're very humiliating the United States.

But it's healthy humiliation. It leads to mental health. Right now the United States is not acting as a mentally healthy person.

But not globally and not domestically. I think there's a lot of healing to be done.

And this is the world Kissinger saw it and that's why Kissinger was an extremely effective Secretary of State ultimately.

Because he saw it, he accepted it.

They're strong, they're bullies and thugs and strong people, strong guys everywhere.

You don't go around picking fights with everyone you just accept this neighborhood belongs to this gang that's it that's real political not might is right on the very contrary I think don't use might to enforce right and let people solve their own problems.

It's patronizing, it's condescending. Just let them solve their own problems.

If they are really unhappy with Putin, believe me, Putin will go. And if they are unhappy with the theocratic regime in Iran, it will go.

There hasn't been a single regime, not one, that survived popular discontent, unrest and hatred. Not one. Not ever in history.

So this self-appointed or self-imputed, righteous, we know best and we are the policemen of the world and it's not helpful to the United States.

I mean, trillions were wasted in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

For what?

Well, I like your positive sentiment that the West will prevail ultimately.

I think in this particular military confrontation, yeah.

It will happen.

Because the other parties are paper tigers. They're making tiger noises, but they're not real tigers, not yet.

You need a tradition of capitalism to become a real tiger. China doesn't have this. China is imitating capitalism, emulating. It doesn't have it. It doesn't really know the nuts and bolts, the transmission mechanisms.

You need a sense, you need a feeling for capitalism. Capitalism has been going on in the West since the 13th century. And later on, with the Solverine, customs unions, so capitalism is a long process. Proto-capitalism lasted almost 400 years.

And China wants to emulate all this in 50 years.

You can have the facade, the Potemkin village of capitalism. You can have banks and real estate and shopping malls. That's not capitalism.

Capitalism is a state of mind. And China doesn't have this state of mind. No way.

That's why China's capitalism will fail big time and it will crash horrendously with an impact on the global economy.

But China is not yet a real adversary to the United States.

Most of its GDP is fictitious, totally fictitious.

So it's not yet in 100 years, 200 years, 300 years, maybe, because he did used to rule the world. China did used to be the super common, much longer than the United States.

So, yeah, but not now.

Another few centuries maybe.

Not now.

Thank you, Sam, for this thought-provoking discussion, geopolitical affairs, narcissism and technology, etc. If you all have enjoyed this conversation, please do subscribe at gingercoi.substack.com. Look forward to seeing you there, and thank you all for listening.

Thank you for having me. Thank you, Ginger. And happy, happy holidays. Happy New Year. Thank you. You as well.

Bye, Sam.