Narcissists: If You Can't Beat Them - Join Them? (with Naima Mokhtar, CPTSD Foundation)

You mentioned therapy and some specific type of therapy, but you also mention self-actualization, self-development, changing the narrative, shifting the point of view from victimhood to taking responsibility.

So what kind of tools people by themselves can use to lessen those symptoms or the impact they have in their lives and their decisions?

Well, very little if you have a personality disorder.

But if you are a healthy person or if you have been impacted by complex trauma much later in life, then there are a few tools that you can use by yourself.

Still, I recommend therapy.

There are few tools.

For example, finding your authentic voice, isolating the voices which are not yours, voices that belong to other people, implanted in your mind, and then getting rid of these voices and remaining with the only single voice that represents you.

That's a critical thing, the authentic self.

For example, learning to regulate your impulses and modify your expectations. This is also critical.

There are many things you can do to help yourself.

Getting rid of a victim identity, defining yourself via your victimhood, making sense of the world via your victimhood, and claiming rights that are the outcome of your victim. All these are very bad things. They're pathological and you should get rid of them.

Finally, you should try to separate yourself in, when you interact with mentally ill people, that not only people with personality disorders, for example, people with bipolar disorder, when you interact with mentally ill people, you tend to merge with them, you tend to fuse with them, you tend to become one with them. There's a process of enmeshment with mentally ill people for a variety of reasons.

For example, maybe your maternal instinct is triggered and you want to protect this kind of person. You become protective.

Maybe you feel that you are a savior or a healer or a fixer. You can fix this guy with your love.

You know, it triggers many, many very primitive defenses and behaviors and dynamics. So there's enmeshment, there's merger infusion.

And one of the main things you can do to help yourself is individuation. You need to separate yourself. You need to break apart this very sick bond and to become you.

Now, I have on my YouTube channel, I have a playlist, and it's called narcissistic abuse healing. And I have another playlist titled Life's Wisdom, grandiosely titled Life's Wisdom, and there you can find many, many techniques and hints and tips and advice and so, so forth. So just watch this and try to implement it.

It's a rapid hold on. I'll have a luxury.

But you can start with a simple thing.

You can start with journaling.

Yes.

Simply talk to yourself and talk to yourself in writing so that you can revisit these pages later and see your own progress, or maybe not progress, maybe regression, monitor supervisors that provide some kind of feedback and allow you to calibrate yourself.

Journaling is very simple. Buy a notebook and a pen and start writing every day.

It's not valued enough. Now we tend to post or rant and vent on social media to find validation, external validation, always, more and more.

So there is also okay, by ourselves, we can try and work on ourselves but the pressure of the society is strong, especially we cannot win with social media and the cult of perfection and need to be special.

So how do we counter those external forces as well who are limiting us?

Well, a group of Frenchmen actually were the prophets of this period.

You have Guy DeBoer with the Society of the Spectacle. You have Michel Foucault. You have Althusser, Louis Althusser. These were all Frenchmen. Some of them neo-Marxists. Some of them are not.

And they predicted this age, the age of spectacle, the age of ostentation, the age of pretension, the age of fakery, and the age of atomization.

You have people like Emil Durkheim and so on. None of this is new. It's all been predicted 50 to 100 years ago.

We live in an age that all of us regulate externally via social media. We allow social media to affect our moods, our emotions and our thinking. That is external regulation.

In this sense, we have all become a little borderline, a little borderline and a lot narcissistic.

Society technology, more precisely, has been invented by mentally ill people.

It's important to understand.

Social media has been invented by people who are easily diagnosable as schizoids and narcissists and psychopaths, easily, without any hesitation.

Technology is their extension. It's the way they saw the world, and they imposed it on us.

And so we are in their world now. We are not in our world. We are in their world. We are guests in the space of mental illness that had become modern civilization.

And no, it's not only Western. You can see it in India. You can see it in China. You can see it in Africa. It's global. It's not only Western. You can see it in India, you can see it in China, you can see it in Africa. It's global. It's not only American or UK or France. It's all over.

So we chose mental illness. We chose mental illness because reality has become intolerable and unbearable.

If there is one common denominator to all forms of mental illness without a single exception, it's fantasy.

Mental illness is an escape. Simply an escape.

That's why people like Foucault and like Szasz, Thomas Szasz and others dispute the very existence of mental illness. They say there's no such thing. It's a social construct.

And I'm largely in agreement with them. It is a social construct. It's simply escapism. It's a way to avoid reality.

Reality has become too much.

No one, I don't think, if we were to confront reality, really, with no firewalls, with no deceptions, with no distortions, with no fantasies, we would really go mad.

But I mean, this time really, irrevocably.

Ironically, mental illness is the only thing keeping us sane. Our sanity depends on modicum, a level of mental illness.

You cannot be today sane and functional unless you are partly mentally ill.

Okay, but this mental illness could be channeled or transmuted towards helping the greater good, like creativity, for example.

I think one of the biggest attacks on humankind was crushing creativity in the school system, sexuality and the mobility. Those three are constantly being attacked by the system and by ourselves as well.

Someone you mention often and Raoul Svadmyer very much is Victor Frankl. This unbearable, he said the quote is, life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

So that's what I believe we need to use this insanity that we all have been affected by, to create beauty. And it is sometimes with great artwork or movies or literature or music.

So it is possible there is this beauty in our insanity.

So how can we leverage it to make this world a better place? Is that a very naive question?

All questions are naive because they assume that there are answers. It's a naive assumption.

But Hans Eysenck suggested there is a connection between creativity and psychoticism.

Psychoticism is not psychosis, not the same, but it is a mental health pathology.

So in effect what he said is that creativity is a reflection of some underlying mild, attenuated mental health pathology.

In the overwhelming vast majority of human history, mental illness was considered to be a gift, an asset. All the founders of the great religions were severely mentally ill. All the biblical prophets were clearly mentally ill.

So mental illness until the Enlightenment, until the late 17th century, was considered to be a gift, an endowment by God, a divine. God touched you, and then you became mentally ill, and that established a channel of communication with God. God was the organizing principle, equivalent of today's science.

And only in the last 300 years or 400 years, we came to regard mental illness as an aberration and something bad that needs to be eradicated and exterminated and so on.

And the reason is capitalism, of course. Capitalism requires conformity. Any deviation and divergence are a threat to capitalism.

Think about a production line or a factory. I mean, if you deviate, if we have idiosyncrasy in a factory or in a school, it destroys the production. It destroys the ability to produce.

Like Benjamin said, you know, Walter Benjamin, the age of replication. So in order to replicate, you need identical units, indistinguishable units, you need to commodify and commoditize people.

Yes, we are becoming robots.

We are becoming robots.

We are becoming robots.

Robots, by the way, as you know, is not a modern word. I mean, it's like 100 years old. It's a Czech word, robota, from Czech, robots.

So, yeah, we need to become robots. And our programming needs to be identical in order to maximize outcomes, optimize production, and allow for consumption.

So this is absolutely an artifact of capitalism, the belief that mental illness is a bad thing.

Mental illness is a deviation, another way to look at the world, another way to process information. It's not as efficacious as science if you measure everything in a materialistic way. It's not as science is much better outcomes than psychosis, for example.

But it's simply an alternative. It's not something bad, it's something different.

And it is difference that has become the enemy of modern society.

Because modern society is focused around standardization.

So we mentioned creativity.

Now, if we move to the topic of sexuality, as a healing modality, to recreate bonds between each other, to develop intimacy. That's something that is less and less possible.

I mean, I had a very strange proposal last week by someone I barely know, a man who want a baby. And he said, you seems like you have a good genes.

So I don't want a relationship with you. I just want you to make a baby and give it to me.

So this is the, I mean, so where are we heading?

People don't want any connections or relationship. They just want a product.

That the legacy and being completely disconnected is, is that something we can do to go back to the natural way of connecting with each other, through sexuality perhaps?

Consumption and growth are the two ideas, the twin ideologies of capitalism. Eternal growth, economic growth, and consumption is an organizing principle of modern societies.

But you cannot consume everything without consuming other people as well. They become consumables.

Consumption is a way to look at the world. It's not an act. It's a way to organize the world. It's a hermeneutic principle. It makes sense of the world. It imbues the world with meaning.

When you buy a new iPhone, suddenly your life is meaningful.

So you can't say, okay, I'm going to relate to 99% of the universe via consumption, but I'm going to relate to other people via empathy.

You can't make this division. There's no bicameral mind. That's a myth.

If you get used to consume, you're going to consume everything and everyone around you.

So we have become goods. We have become material.

you're going to consume everything and everyone around you.

So we have become goods. We have become material goods, not spiritual goods, material goods. We have become consumables.

You consume your iPhone, you consume television program, and you consume your lover in between, if she is lucky.

So we have begun to objectify each other. We regard each other as consumable objects in the really bad sense of the word.

Because when you objectify, you reduce. It's a reductionist approach.

We have this in science where we reduce things all the time.

And the big holy grail of science is the theory of everything.

And the theory of everything would have a single statement, single equation, a reduction of the whole beauty and richness of the universe into a single equation.

And they think it's the same. Scientists think it's the same thing.

They don't understand how insanely, or totally crazy this is.

It's the same with other people. When you objectify, when you use reductionism, not holism, then you need to eliminate many dimensions. You need to reduce people into a single equation.

And because the most easily accessible equation is sex, because it's the easiest, yes, take off a close or even not, and you have sex. It's the path of least resistance.

So when we are forced to reduce other people in order to consume them, we reduce them to sex. Because that's the immediately available thing.

If I want to reduce you to your intellect, that would take many, many, probably months and years to really interact with your intellect is a lot of work but to have sex with you this we can do in the next few minutes it's easy it's a question of time as well like instant gratification scarce resources and so on so forth.

So people begin to confuse sexuality with sex. They're not the same.

Sexuality is a mode of communication. It's a system of bonding. It's a principle of organization. It makes sense and imbues life with sense and meaning. It creates long-term commitments. It's a project. It's super complex sexuality.

That's why we call it psychosexuality, not sexuality.

But there is sex. Sex is a reflex, arousalal in the mind of the men by the way in the mind of males there's no difference between pornography and actual sex that's one of a recent discoveries 10 years ago the male brain cannot distinguish visuals from three-dimensional objects.

So pornography is totally the same like having real sex.

What about the sensory experience?

Totally.

The brain recreates everything on the fly. It's like artificial reality, augmented reality, and that's it. That's why men are addicted to pornography, and women not so much. Some women are, but vast majority of users are men. Because as far as they're concerned, they're having sex.

Now, we today, we confuse the words sexual with sexy.

Sexy is consumption.

You are sexy. You make my mouth waterarouse me. It's a reflex or an instinct, and I want to consume you. That's because you are sexy.

Sexual is a lot more complex. To be sexual involves fantasy and imagination and intellect and of course looks and smell and so many dimensions it is so multi-layered to be sexual. To be sexual involves archaeology, to be sexy involves two-dimensional cutouts or animated figures, animated dildo and sex dog.

And today when you talk to people, they don't make the difference between sexual and sexy. And that's the core problem, of course.

They perceive each other as sexy, but not as sexual.

And yet, if we move to something a bit darker, like sexual abuse, this is devastating at much higher level.

So how can people recover from this from being degraded, used at the very essence of that being?

What can we say to victim of sexual abuse? How to move on if that is ever possible?

I am not of the opinion that the reactions to sexual abuse are unique. I know this is the bontone. I know this is third wave feminism, so on.

But I don't think it's true.

I think all forms of egregious abuse, all forms of abuse that involve both body and mind, all forms of abuse that involve a power asymmetry, where one side is much more powerful than the other, all forms of such abuse engender exactly the same depth and profundity and intensity of reaction.

So, for example, if you see a parent abusing their child, not sexually, abusing their child, the implications lifelong are catastrophic, and there's no sex involved at all, not sexual abuse.

And if you see someone who has been stalked and harassed at work by her boss, but there's no sex involved, only years of insults and criticism and humiliation, she would develop PTSD. She would develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

The thing with sexual abuse is that it telegraphs. It's like a zip file. It compresses everything.

Whereas in other forms of abuse, you need to continue for a very long time in order to accomplish the same outcomes.

In sexual abuse, you could have a single incident. And with this single incident, there is a power asymmetry, there is breach of boundaries, there is invasion of the body, there's bodily harm, sometimes, not always. There is humiliation, there is disrespect.

So it is like a compressed file of other forms of abuse. Compressed in time, compressed in space, compressed in meaning.

I think sexual abuse is a crisis of meaning. Not so much a bodily thing, not even a psychological thing. It's a crisis of meaning.

Suddenly you cannot make sense of the world. The world becomes senseless, meaningless, crazy, dystopian, and you feel trapped in some kind of nightmarish scenario that you cannot extricate yourself from, and this nightmarish scenario is immediately introjected, immediately internalized.

So when the sexual abuse or rape is far over, you're still carrying it with you for many years to come.

So this is the potency of sexual abuse.

But the same techniques that are used to treat trauma are very efficacious with sexual abuse.

Regrettably, the fields are segregated.

So when we treat sexual abuse, very few people, clinicians who treat sexual abuse, use trauma therapies. And very few traumatologists, very few people who are experts in trauma therapies actually treat people with sexual abuse. So there is a segregation.

Same way there's a segregation in the treatment of personality disorders and child psychology. These are two fields. Child psychologists never treat personality disorders. And personality disorder clinicians never use methods from child psychology.

It's a big shame.

But if we were to treat victims of sexual abuse with trauma-related therapies, especially mind-body therapies, the outcome should be excellent.

Because it's the same. When you are the victim of a natural disaster, what happens? Or when you are at war, a soldier, or when you suddenly witness a horrible accident, people decapitated them, what is it that traumatizes you?

Nothing happened to you. What is it that traumatizes?

The fact that you can no longer make sense of the world. The world becomes unpredictable, dangerous. You feel that nothing you have known before makes any sense anymore and can guide you anymore. All your scripts are broken. You are not only helpless and hopeless, but you have no meaning. It's like there's no one and nothing that can safeguard you. It's a breakdown in a sense of personal safety.

But in a very profound sense, like if this can happen, it can happen again. And because this has happened in a way which makes no sense and had no antecedence and it's totally serendipitous, it can happen again. The randomness of it.

I think even in sexual abuse, the randomness of it.

I think even in sexual abuse it's the randomness.

Majority of rapes and sexual abuse cases involve acquaintances, spouses, good friends. Majority, depending on the class of sexual abuse, between 70 and 90%.

So suddenly you can't trust a friend anymore. You can't trust your spouse anymore. You can't trust your lover anymore. You can't trust your neighbor anymore. You can't trust your lover anymore. You can trust your neighbor anymore. You can trust.

It is a breakdown of trust.

And this is the core issue, I think, not the fact that a penis penetrated a vagina. Okay. It's not okay. And it's violent and it's this and it's that. There's power symmetry. Okay. I understand all that. And of course it's very unpleasant and horrible and everything.

But I don't think that's the reason for the trauma.

I think the trauma is because after it's all over, you're lost. All your guidelines are gone.

Can we move on?

Thank you for that.

You mentioned a third grade feminism.

Third wave, not third grade.

Thank you.

Yes, your view on the new feminism, also the rise of psychopathy among women, this war between genders. Can you touch upon that a bit, please?

I like your phrase third grade feminism because third grade means torture. Given the third degree, it's torture. Who lies that?

What is happening in our society between men and women?

Well, there's been a schism, there's been a break or between first and second wave feminism and third and fourth wave feminism. And this break created a crisis in classical gender roles, masculinity and femininity.

And of course we should distinguish gender, which is a performative social construct, from sex, which is biologically determined.

Even non-binary sex, even indeterminate sex, is biologically determined. Even homosexuality is biologically determined. Sex is biological. End of story.

That it could be very varied, that we could have dozens of types of sex sexuality. It's okay because biology is varied. Biology is a great inventor, a great creator.

And we were blind simply to other alternatives, male, female. There are other alternatives, of course. There have always been other alternatives. We were just blind to them for social reasons.

But we should distinguish sex from gender. Gender is socially determined and it's performative. Gender is about signaling. It's a form of signaling. And it includes massive elements of virtual signaling and relative position within society. The creation on the fly of hierarchies, power plays and mind games from time to time.

So gender is a way that society organizes itself in order to maximize production of some things. For example, production of children.

So what happened is gender roles broke down.

And by the way, they broke down long before feminism. Feminism started 150 years ago, suffragettes. It was 150 years ago, not so long ago.

However, gender broke down 150 to 200 years before that.

If you read novels by Honoré de Balzac, and even to some extent Jane Austen, you begin to see the breakdown of gender roles.

And the reason gender roles broke down is that men have become scarce. There were fewer and fewer men because they were killing themselves in wars, mainly. Men have become scarce.

Well over 20 million men died in the First World War and something like 30 million men died in the Second World War and this was within 30 years on a single continent.

The fact is there were no men. And not only did they become scarce, but they became in innamorato and dangerously self-destructive.

Whereas men were engaged in a project of construction and productivity until the beginning of the 19th century.

Starting in the 19th century, men engaged in destruction.

The main project of masculinity was destruction, to destroy each other, other nations, other collectives, other groups to invent new weapons, ever more powerful weapons and potent weapons. It was all focused on destruction.

Sorry for cutting you. But can we connect this destruction drive for destruction to the rise of narcissism? Is that the same?

I think it's probably the other way around when you feel threatened, you become narcissistic.

So I think this drive to destruction gave rise to narcissism, not the other way around.

But women gave up on men. That's simple as that. They just gave up on men.

And they began to wish to become self-sufficient and independent rather than dependent. And it became an agenda and then it became a political agenda.

And it was nothing wrong with it. I think women were doing the right thing. Men were out of their minds and they still are.

Women are right to disengage before they are dragged into the abyss with men. They were right to do that.

And now, nowadays women are more educated than men. That's a fact.

Under age 25, women make more money than men. Forty-two percent of women are lifelong singles, so they don't need men. A sizable proportion of women conceive without a man, IVF technologies and so on, about 10% of women, conceived without a man, and even much more sizable proportion, don't want children at all, remain childless.

There's been a divorce. We divorced. Women divorced men.

Men's reaction was twofold.

Initially, men reacted as men do testosterone. They became aggressive. Aggressive, oppressive, it didn't work.

It didn't work because men were no longer equipped to cope with life and to be productive. They lost this.

And so only women remain in the game.

When men realized this, when they realized that aggression would lead them nowhere and that they were losing the hegemony, the control, the mastery that they used to have in the last 5,000 years at least, when they realized this, they transitioned from aggression to submission.

And today what men are doing, they're trying to become women, not women, but they're trying to become more feminized men, while women have chosen to become men.

There are studies by Lisa Wade and many others that show that women today identify as men used to in the 1950s. They use the same adjectives, ambitious, driven, ruthless, callous, and so when they describe themselves.

So women today are men. Women today are the men of the 1950s. Same.

And men are lost. Aggression failed. Submission drives women away because who wants to be with submissive people?

And so the end result is what I call the unigender. There's a single gender. They are men with vaginas and men with penises. They are single gender, and it's increasingly more women defined, female defined.

Nothing wrong with that.

There have been periods in history where women were in control, or at least geographical locations where women were in control. There's no reason to assume that women will do much worse than men in managing the affairs of humanity.

So nothing's wrong with it, but men are lost. They're angry. They are.

And so this divorce is looking more and more permanent rather than, and I think there's a gender war, and the emergence of unigender is not helping because now both parties are competing on exactly the same playing field.

In the past, women were in charge of home and men was in charge of work. So they didn't compete for territory. The demarcation was clear.

But now they're on the same field. It's the same territory. And men are losing.

Absolutely. I mean, anyone who doesn't see this is not with us.

Men are absolutely losing.

And of course there's convulsions, you know, the cancellation of Roe versus Wade in the United States and women suppressed in Afghanistan. In Russia, domestic abuse is being decriminalized.

Yes, there are men are fighting back there's a backlash, that's the war but women are going to win this war because men have succumbed, men have accepted the unigender is a tolerable or acceptable solution, especially the younger generation, let's see.

Millennials, Gen Z and Alphas, they accept the unigender as a tolerable solution. They no longer would define themselves as men and women. They would find us. I work with these, with the young people.

They find it a bit antiquated, a bit old-fashioned.

They don't define them. They define them such as person. I'm a person.

So what kind of person I am? Male and female are no longer identity determinants.

Where will this all end? I don't know.

You see, there is this myth that the planet is overpopulated. It is overpopulated by old people like me.

We need 300 to 500 million children. Because if we don't have these children, the pension schemes will collapse, there will be social unrest, we are bloody mess. And there will be no one to take care of old people like me when I need it.

We have a deficit of about 300 million children, maybe 500 million, there's a debate.

And the charm, the magnetism between the genders, gender roles, they have positive aspects they were abused by men. Gender roles were abused by men but they had the positive aspects I mentioned, charm and magnetism and attraction and the beautiful intricate game so subtle and so enigmatic and the discovery of each other as a woman and a man. There was beauty in it.

We have taken away the narrative. We are no longer living in a story. We are living in solipsistic, atomized fantasies, which involve Netflix, of course, and a cat, in the majority of cases.

Even men are beginning to adopt cats, which is a very worrying sign.

Yes, I actually look here. I am an old school as well I was born in the 80s and yes it was a bit caricatural stereotype like girls like Barbies and boys play with G.I. Joes but it was so simple at the same time.

And it generated sexual attraction. We cannot deny this. The differences. The differences generated attraction.

It's very difficult to be attracted to someone who essentially is you.

Same, yeah.

Is you?

Well, unless you are narcissistic, which would explain narcissism, the rise of narcissism.

Aha.

You develop a tiny bit before we finish on that.

So the unigender phenomena could explain as well the rise of narcissism?

Yes, because the species must continue to exist. Evolution and nature don't care about our social plays and social contracts.

And if the situation is that we are all of the same gender, then narcissism is a great way to be attracted to other people because we are essentially being attracted to ourselves which would explain the rise in homosexuality, the substantial rise, it's not only coming out of coming out, it's not only coming up, it's a real rise in homosexuality, especially among women, by the way.

And that's because we are more and more attracted to ourselves.

And we are attracted to ourselves either directly.

Autoerotism is the number one sexual activity, by the way.

Yes, you mentioned autoerotization.

Autoerotism.

So we're either attracted to ourselves or we attracted to someone who is so reminiscent of ourselves that we could easily get confused and say, it's my reflection.

Narcissism, I think, is the species way of trying to perpetuate the species.

It's evolution's solution to allow us to continue to have sex and continue to have children somehow.

Because if we were not auto-erotic, if we were not attracted to ourselves, all sex would have ceased already because the differences between men and women are increasingly more difficult to tell.

Females and males, sorry. The difference between females and males are increasingly more difficult to tell. And the differences are being erased, intentionally erased. It's a policy.

And so what's left?

How would I be attracted to someone like me if I'm not a narcissist, if I'm not auto-erotic?

I think it's a great solution for survival of the species.

Okay.

But it's not really working if we have a deficiency.

You're being cut off.

Baby natality.

Would you repeat you were cut off?

So, thank you. You said narcissism might be a solution to reproduce the species, but at the same time there is a paradox because there is not enough babies. We don't make any babies anymore. So how do we reconcile the two?

Auto-erotism is a problematic solution because in the majority of cases, you would prefer yourself as a sexual object, which explains masturbation and the rise in sex toys and sex dolls and, you know.

But that's the only possible solution when you erase all gender differences. And when you allow people to transition from one sex to another, when there's sex fluidity, it's the only solution.

Otherwise there would be zero attraction. At least like that, 20, 30% would end up having sex and children.

But if you didn't have homoerotism, then this too would be lost.

Or homoerotism is a stress reaction.

For example, it's very, very common in prisons, in military barracks, where people are under enormous stress and enormous anxiety and so on, people, they become auto-erotic.

When you have sex in prison with another prisoner, who is a man who looks like you, you're having sex with yourself. You're masturbating with someone else's body. So it's a stress reaction, absolutely, it's an anxiety reaction.

Today, sex is an anxiety reaction.

You ask people, we ask people, in studies, how they experience sex, they experience it as not a very pleasant thing. It's full of performance anxieties and fears of sexual assault.

There is an orgasm gap where the overwhelming vast majority of women do not orgasm, and the overwhelming vast majority of men don't know how to orgasm them are totally undrilled in sex.

There is a collapse in sexual scripts, in social scripts.

So even sex has become an anxiety-inducing activity rather than anxiolytic.

Yes, it's supposed to be.

It's supposed to be.

And the most beautiful way to connect and bond with each other and beauty and intimacy.

So how it has been so degraded and hijacked and commercialized?

Well, I think we touched on all the reasons and all the points, but the end result is indeed this, that today when you go on a date, you are not happy, you are not relaxed. It's not a release. It's not something to look forward to you. You're bloody anxious. You're worried. You're worried for a variety of reasons.

Narcissistic reasons. Do I look good? Am I impressive? It's impression management. It's a display, it's performative, it's a performance.

But you also worry because the other party may be crazy, maybe crazy. The other party may be abusive. The other party may be aggressive. Actually, the chances are pretty high.

So the whole process of dating has become a minefield.

And the consequence, according to Pew Center, is that about half of all adults have no contact, sexual contact, with anyone in the year, in a proceeding, sorry, they have their lifelong singles, let's put it this way, the lifelong singles. Half of all adults didn't have sex in the preceding year but they're lifelong singles. They're committed to singlehood. Being alone is perceived to be a very rational choice nowadays because the cost of human interaction has become utterly unacceptable and disproportionate. The benefits versus the cost, cost is disproportionate.

And so everyone, you know, and that's why technology allows you to become more self-sufficient. Technology caters to your needs.

What is your need? To be self-sufficient. Technology caters to your needs.

What is your need? To be self-sufficient. To be independent. To minimize interactions with other people. To limit them, to channel them, maybe to avoid them altogether.

So technology comes to the rescue.

And there you are.

And we all live in tiny cubicles, in warehouses known as buildings, tiny cubicles. And we consume Netflix and we play with our cats.

And this is where it seems things are going.

There is a big debate nowadays in evolutionary sociology. There's a big debate whether Aristotle was wrong, and we are not zoon politikon. We are not a social animal. Maybe we are an asocial animal, anti-social animal.

Maybe the period where we socialized, we were forced to socialize in the virtual reality known as cities, maybe that period was an aberration.

Because the overwhelming majority, because the rest of history we were in caves, we lived in caves or small groups.

So Hobbes was right when he said man is a wolf for man. It's possible that we mistook, we misunderstood the nature of men, men as a, you know, mankind.

It's possible that we actually are solitary animals that were forced to collaborate, were forced to work together or act togetherbecause we were confined in virtual spaces known as cities.

There was the famous experiment with ratswhen they confined them in, you know, the famous experiment where the rats became aggressive.

And so this would explain crime, for example.

Would explain crime?

Crime is a pathology.

We're going round, and I think that's a perfect conclusion for this amazing discussion with you.

Thank you.

We started the conversation by pointing out the schizoid core of those personality dysfunctional way of behaving.

So it might not be a disorder at all, it might be ouradaptation.

Yeah. Some scholar thinks that these are positive adaptations.

And there are scholars who glorify and glamorize psychopathy and narcissism. They say that's the next stage in evolution.

I believe we cannot, I mean, if it's rising, we cannot do without and we have to find a way to live together and to leverage the many qualities that instead of using them to destroy and manipulate and hurt, could be channeled for the greater good.

If you can't beat them, join them?

Exactly, exactly. That's part of my saying.

If you cannot beat your enemy, turn him into your friend.

And that's why I admire you so much because this is basically the way I see you.

So you manage to channel your own narcissism to help people around.

And when I describe you, I like to call you Dexter, I hope I hope you're not going to get offended that's a serial killer, a serial killer series 10 years or 15 years old now, the serial killer that he cannot do anything about his compulsion so he decided to hunt serial killers.

And I see you at the Dexter psychology. And I admire so much your work and the way you help us all to grow and be better.

Just one thing. Don't idealize people like me. I'm not doing this to help people.

It's a fun. It's a side effect.

That's not my motivation.

And that's fine. That's fine. I mean, I can give you all the supply one as long as you, it can help more, more.

I mean, there's no problem of being on the top.

You've learned to manipulate a narcissist.

Benefit of this conversation.

I wouldn't dare. I wouldn't dare.

But yeah, we need to find a way to live with each other and make each other happy the best we can.

So yeah, thank you. Thank you, thank you for that.

Thank you for having me. It was an interesting conversation. Thank you. Very challenging.

Well, that's a very good compliment. Thank you.

Thank you.

Oh, good.

Oh, bye.