Nonconceptual Narcissist's Nonidentity Problem

Today I would like to introduce two concepts, two new concepts, into the discussion of narcissism, non-conceptual mental content and the identity problem.

I would like to adopt these ideas borrowed from philosophy to the study of narcissism in clinical psychology.

Regrettably, the fertilization or cross-fertilization between philosophy and psychology has been severed about 150 years ago when psychology acquired the pretension to be a science. It has become since a pseudoscience, but it has lost the navigational tools that philosophy could have afforded it.

Same process happened in physics, so don't feel too bad about it.

Okay, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a professor of clinical psychology and a physicist as well.

And let's delve right in.

I'm going to use texts from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and I'm going to interject with insights connected to narcissism.

What is non-conceptual mental content?

Quoting from the encyclopedia, the central idea behind the theory of non-conceptual mental content is that some mental states can represent the world even though the bearer of these mental states need not possess the concepts required to specify the contents of these mental states.

So we have a situation where there are mental states. These mental states are representations of the world and are also reactive to the world.

But there is no language. There's not set of concepts that allow the person who experiences these mental states to discuss them, to talk about them, to conceptualize them, to convey them, to communicate them.

Now this is a close cousin of the idea of the unthought known.

The unthought known is a phrase that's coined by Christopher Bollas in the 1980s. Bollas said that there are experiences that in some way are known to the individual but about which individual is unable to even think.

Not only is the individual prevented from discussing these inner experiences, is not even able to think about them.

And yet, these experiences are known to the individual on some more basic, atavistic, primitive level.

The unthought known represents what we call early schemata, what used to be called in the 1930s primitive templates or primitive structures. These are schemata which we use to interpret the object world.

And these schemata are so early, so pre-verbal that they pre-consciously determine subsequent life experiences and expectations so the unthought known is pre-verbal, hitherto unschematetized, early experience.

For example, trauma. They determine one's behavior unconsciously. There's no access to conscious thought.

So this is very similar to non-conceptual mental content indeed. Bollas himself linked this idea of the unthought known to Donald Winnicott's notion of the truest self so we are beginning to see the junction that leads from these ideas to narcissism.

This narcissism can be conceptualized as the unthought known, as non-conceptual mental content.

It's there. It informs the individual. It imbues and permeates the individual.

To some extent, narcissism is the individual, and yet it's very primitive. It's very early. It's not fully schematized. It's not subject to language. It's pre-verbal. It includes traumatic elements.

And consequently, it is the unthought known. It is known, but it's not brought to awareness. It's not subject to language or structure. There's no order there. There's nothing superimposed. There's no concept or conceptual framework that could somehow communicate the experience of narcissism even to narcissist, if to no one else.

So it's a hidden archaeological layer that still, exactly as Freud has suggested, is active.

In systems theory, systems centered therapy, there are the concepts of apprehensive knowing, non-verbal knowing, it's called apprehensive knowing, and comprehensive knowing, what we allow ourselves to formulate in words.

There's a boundary between apprehensive pre-verbal knowing and comprehensive verbal knowing. And it is this boundary that can be traced back to the topological model of Freud, conscious, pre-conscious, unconscious.

Indeed, Gareth Evans, who was the first to suggest the idea of non-conceptual mental content, Gareth Evans identified it explicitly with the unconscious.

Now we will come back to the issue of non-conceptual mental content a bit later.

Allow me to introduce the second idea.

The second idea is the non-identity problem.

I want to read to you again from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but before I do, I want to clarify something.

The non-identity problem in philosophy is usually applied to populations.

Like, what do we, as a population, as a group, as a cohort, how do we behave? What do we do? What are the variety of ways we act in so as to benefit future generations, not yet born people?

So this is the non-identity problem.

And I suggest that we could apply the non-identity problem to narcissism because the narcissist is dissociative, the narcissist is disjointed, the narcissist is discontinuous. There's no immutable fixed, stable core identity there.

We can therefore conceive of the narcissist as a group, a group of past identities, or past pseudo-identities, past self-states, current pseudo-identities and self-states, and future pseudo-identities and self-states.

And the only thing connecting all these three groups is cathexis, investment, emotional investment, other types of investment, and the body maybe. Somatization, bodily manifestation.

But the narcissist is not a single entity. It's not a single individual. It's a group. It's a group of wannabe people, self-identities, broken fragments and shards, kaleidoscopic.

And so the non-identity problem applies perfectly to narcissism because there's a question, the actions and decisions and choices that the narcissist undertakes right now at the present. How do they affect future identities or future pseudo identities of the narcissist? The decisions, choices and actions made by the current dominant ruling surf state, how do they, how would they affect future surf states?

So this is exactly the non-identity problem.

Allow me to read to you from the text in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The non-identity problem raises questions regarding both the moral obligations that agents have in respect of possible future people, people that is, who do not yet but may exist at some future time, and how those obligations, to the extent that we have them, are most credibly explained.

It today remains among the most challenging problems in all of population ethics.

It is plausible to think that we are often obligated to make future people, at least some of them, better off, rather than leaving them as they might otherwise be or making them worse off.

But on reflection, it seems that any change that we contemplate in respect of any conduct that we plan to engage in, prior to a given person's being conceived, even a change that would on its face seem to represent a clear improvement for that future person.

All this will often fail to make that person better off and often instead serve only to bring another person, a better off person, but still a non-identical person, into existence in place of the one we are contemplating.

Similarly, when the narcissist considers or contemplates the well-being of his future selves, future self-states, future pseudo-.

The narcissist assumes that the progression from current present self to future self is inexorable. It is deterministic. It's algorithmic.

But that is of course not true.

The narcissist is malleable, is reactive to external stresses, stressors, pressures, tensions, anxieties, for example, the narcissist is highly reactive to the fluctuations in the availability of narcissistic supply and to the quality of narcissistic supply that he receives. The narcissist is super reactive to states of collapse or mortification or narcissistic injury.

So the narcissist assumption, God-like assumption, that he can somehow act today in order to make his future self better off is wrong.

Exactly is our assumptions that if we tackle climate change, we're going to make specific individual better individuals better off in the future this assumption is of course wrong.

Why is it wrong?

I continue to read to you from the text.

The phenomenon Gregory Kafka called the precariousness of existence, we all just barely missed, never coming into existence at all.

Any of your forebears, well-meaning changes in conduct, may well have resulted in the coming into existence of a better off trial, which is not you.

But for you, the result of any such change very probably would have been your never having existed at all.

In other words, that we come into existence is a total accident.

One day later, another partner changing in circumstances, the slightest alteration and transformation would bring to the world another person, not you.

Your existence is an accident, actually an improbable accident, taking everything into account.

And so there's no way you can plan on the determinate, ascertained existence of someone.

Because we come into the world in a form of lottery, in a form of casino. We come into the world abhazardly and accidentally.

And so actions that we take today to render the lives of future beings better off, these actions are problematic because we cannot be sure that these future beings will even exist.

Same with the narcissist.

His current existence, his present, does not portend or predict or prognosticate future self-states.

So the narcissist is unable to cater meaningfully and deliberately to his ongoing welfare and well-being.

Because the narcissist cannot be sure which self-state will take over tomorrow.

And how different that self-state would be from the current self-state, the self-state that is contemplating the future self-state.

The variance in the self-states and pseudo identities and ego states, call them what you will, the variance between them is so enormous.

The disjointedness, the disconnect, the dissociative gaps are so abysmal that it is debatable whether the narcissist is a single entity across space and time and whether we are not talking perhaps about a colony or a hive.

It's debatable.

Now coming back to the text.

The psychological explanation of non-conceptual mental content in explaining the behavior of non-linguistic and pre-linguistic creatures, cognitive ethologists and developmental psychologists often appeal to representational states.

Spelke, for example, attempts to explain the development of the ability to perceptually organize the visual array into unitary persisting objects he explains this by appealing to an infant's capacity to form a representation of the visual surface layer layout and the presence of mechanisms are following basic principles or kind of a theory of the world.

These principles are principles of cohesion, boundedness, rigidity and no action at a distance.

And yet this is exactly the narcissistic deficiency. The narcissist, having failed to separate, an individual has also failed to develop a proper representation of the outside world.

Narcissists does not recognize the separateness and externality of other people.

In many ways, the narcissist is psychotically hyper-reflexive, co-extant and coterminous with the world around him.

The narcissist perceives himself as the world. He perceives everyone around him as mere mental images, internal objects and introjects in the infinite space of his mind, this mind that is the universe.

So the narcissist is unable to represent the external word appropriately, recognizing the external world's externality to start with, separateness, cohesion, boundedness, rigidity.

And the narcissists consequently is subject to magical thinking, including actions at a distance, including conspiracism.

Narcissists develop paranoid ideation, for example, because they are irrational.

So Spelker's paradigm or Spelker's model does not apply to narcissists because they never traverse that stage in childhood thatallows them to represent the world appropriately within themselves and consequently they never transition from non-conceptual pre-verbal stage the unthought known if you wish to the conceptual verbal, where language is used as a bridge between internal and external, but also as a form of demarcation between inner and outer. Language is the first boundary. Spellker says that these capacities to conceptualize the world, perceive the world appropriately, these capacities, explain the infant's rudimentary physical reasoning, underlying, for example, the infant's ability to track the motion of particular objects and exhibit certain expectancy responses regarding the persistence of objects behind occlusions. This is known in psychology as object constancy or object permanence. Narcissists are not possessed of object constancy precisely because they cannot perceive objects as permanent as constant as extant the existence of other objects human objects included the existence is in doubt. The narcissist is a constant skeptic about the existence of anything and everything and anyone around him. In this sense, the narcissist is a solipsist in this particular sense. The Encyclopedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, continues. Research suggests that an explanation of the infant's behavior should appeal to the way the infant is perceptually aware of the world as segmented into objects that exhibits certain predictable regularities.

According to Spellke, the content of those representations appealed to in explaining the infant's responses in tasks as those mentioned above, this is conceptual content. The manifest behavior reflects the infant's incipient object concept and its capacity, the infant's capacity, to utilize this concept in a primitive form of physical reasoning. In other ways, to develop a theory about how the world works. Another theory about relationships, the internal working model. And a third theory about the minds of other people, mentalization, theory of mind.

These theories, these models, modeling the world, modeling yourself in the world, modeling other people with yourself, all these models don't exist in narcissists. The narcissist doesn't have working models of the world, doesn't have a working model of relationships and other people, and above all, of course, doesn't have a working model of himself and the minds of other people.

He doesn't have a working model of relationships and other people, and above all, of course, doesn't have a working model of himself and the minds of other people. He doesn't have all these, because he never, never, ever transitions from the pre-verbal non-conceptual phase to the verbal conceptual one. And he never transitions because he was not allowed to become a part of reality. He was not allowed to interact with reality, the friction, the feedback, the pushback of reality, which informs the child about his or her boundaries, which creates the self, which allows the child to understand that I stop here, the world begins. The world stops here and I begin.

This externality, this separateness, the narcissist as a child, has never been allowed to go through these formative experiences. And so in the narcissist's mind there are no models. There's no organizing principle. There are no theories or structures, nothing. There's just a jumble, a hodgepunch of internal objects, a cacophony of interactions, conflicts, pushbacks, vitriol, praise, adulation.

Inside the mind of the narcissist, there is an ongoing polylogue between thousands, hundreds, dozens of introjects, internal voices, internal objects, call them as you wish. This cacophony drowns out any attempt to create a self, to constellate it, to integrate it, any attempt at integration. For integration, we need profound silence. At some point there is a profound silence within which we become. We are born out of these silencebers this is Jung's idea of introversion is connected to narcissism and so when we introvert when we withdraw into ourselves for a split second for a minute for a day whatever however long it takes we shut the world off and we have this silence and within this silence we grow into this silence and we become, having become, we open up to the world.

But now we realize our separateness, we realize the externality of the world.

We develop willy-nilly, however unwillingly, involuntarily, and with fear, with dread, with angst.

We develop theories about these separateness, theories about the world, about other people, about us, about relationships.

Equipped with this library of theories, we then take on life itself.

Narcissism is a rejection of life, but not a rejection of life because of some innate malice or even because of some innate deficiency.

It's a rejection of life because how could you take on life if you were denied the most basic tools and instruments?

If your toolkit is empty, if you're a blank slate instrumentally and functionally speaking, operationally, the executive part is missing.

And so the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy continues to discuss Spelke's work.

Spelke did his work in the late 80s and early 90s.

And so to remind you, the infant has an incipient object concept and there's a capacity to utilize this concept in a primitive form of physical reasoning.

However, it says the Encyclopedia, if one has an account of what it is to possess a concept that makes it inappropriate to attribute mastery of the corresponding concept to the creature whose behavior is being explained, then the appeal to representation in the explanation of its behavior is also motivation for the notion of non-conceptual representational content.

It's a very important observation.

If we are faced with an account of the position of a concept, in this particular account, this particular concept, this particular methodology of applying the concept, this particular user manual, fails.

It's inappropriate. Inappropriate in the sense that it does not explain your behavior.

We want to believe that your ability to conceptualize and then knowing how to use the concept, how to leverage it, apply it, implement it, and so on, so forth, would yield explanatory power, would become a kind of hermeneutic tool.

But sometimes we see people, infants usually, whose behavior cannot be explained via the attribution of some content or some methodology about how to use this content.

And so then we need to discuss not the concept because the concept fails if we try to use the concept and the methodology to explain the behavior of the infant or the individual, we fail.

So we realize the concept and the use of the concept, the inappropriate tools to explain the individual.

And then we need to use representations, representations of the world would explain the behavior, would come up with motivation.

But representations of the world are non-conceptual content, non-conceptual representation and content.

Now that's again a very important thing.

Sometimes concepts and the use of concepts is not enough to explain human behavior.

Sometimes we need to believe that there are representations of the world within states of mind and that these representations are pre or non-conceptual.

In the case of the narcissist, there is no combination of these two modes, there's no confluence.

Whereas normal people have conceptual and non-conceptual conceptual frameworks and representational non-conceptual framework, the narcissist does not have these frameworks.

He doesn't have a conceptual frame, obviously, because he has never reached this stage of personal development as a child.

But his representations of the world are also faulty.

They exist, but they're wrong. They're inappropriate.

Another way of saying it is that the narcissist's reality testing is wrong, impaired, which I've been saying in like 256 videos either two.

The ability of the narcissist to perceive reality correctly, and thereafter to act in it and on it, sense of self-efficacy, this is impaired, this is damage, because the mechanism for generating representations, the representational mechanism, and the mechanism for generating concepts, the conceptual mechanism, they're both broken beyond repair.

The narcissist is left rudderless in the sea of life with no navigational tools, no ores, no crew, you know, like after the bounty, the rebellion on the bounty. So then he drifts, he simply drifts, currents, ups and downs, he waxes and wanes, cycles, none of it makes sense, none of it is meaningful. It is a very nihilistic internal environment.

Of course, a narcissist extrapolates this nihilism and projects it onto the external environment, attributes nihilism to humanity at large, to specific individuals, and believes that nihilism is the organizing principle, and the hermeneutic, exegetic, planetary, interpretative principle makes sense of reality of the universe and of life.

So the Encyclopedia explains, one such understanding stresses the relation between possessing concepts and being able to justify certain canonical judgments involving that concept.

Going on to argue that providing justifications is a paradigmatically linguistic activity, a matter of identifying and articulating the reasons for a given classification inference of judgment.

This is McDowell's work in the 1990s.

If this is the case, then non-linguistic and pre-linguistic creatures, which is a narcissist, will not be able to possess concepts. And those representations we attribute to them in explaining their behavior will have to be non-conceptual.

However, there is a variety of possible responses to this argument.

It might be objected, for example, that possessing a given concept simply requires being able to make de facto justified judgments involving that concept, rather than being able to justify judgments involving these concepts.

So there's a difference between de facto justified judgments or the justification of judgments, which assumes truthfulness, a truth value.

In other words, sometimes we don't know the truth about reality, and we are not sure that the concepts we apply to it are valid. There's a problem with validation, but we still make assumptions. We still make judgments. We de facto judge.

Because, for example, they work.

Again, the narcissist is a heuristic machine.

What the narcissist does is trial and error.

He keeps on testing people around him, situations, circumstances, environments, social structures, institutions.

The narcissism is a constant litmus test mode.

And the reason the narcissist is constantly teasing information out of the environment by abusing it, by being aggressive, externalizing aggression. The reason the narcissist is doing this, because it doesn't have an internal framework to make sense of the world. It doesn't have the playbook. it doesn't have the theory, it doesn't have the encyclopedia, the internalized compendium of knowledge about reality, about life, about other people, and above all about himself.

So he needs to extract information constantly from everything and everyone around him in order to feel momentarily safe somehow but of course none of these activities is falsifiable.

In other words, he can never test the very act of testing. He can never subject his own tests to testing.

For example, he can never know that his tests are the correct tests.

Because he doesn't know whether the test he is using are the right ones, the appropriate ones, he can of course never rely on their outcomes and results. It's a total state of indeterminacy, uncertainty, inconstancy, it's fearful, its dread, fright, its angst. Narcissism is just another name for angst, in my view.

The encyclopedia mentions another objection.

It might be objected that the ability to justify judgments involving some concept is not necessarily linguistic, since it is possible to identify the justification for a judgment without engaging in communication.

And this is what the narcissist attempts to do, non-verbally, because he is stuck in a pre-verbal state, non-verbally, he engages in a constant act of self-justification, which is non-communicable, not linguistic, and that's what I call a private language.

That's my big disagreement with Ludwig Wittgenstein. We'll put it aside for a minute.

Narcissism is a private language and a private religion, but it's a private language. And it is a language that is self-referential, self-justified.

The statements in this language, the theorems in this language do not require external validation. They are internally consistent.

And this internal consistency is erroneously presumed to apply to the world. External consistency, consistency, compatibility between what one believes and the world is assumed to emerge from the internal consistency of the inner narrative.

So now says, here is what I believe, here is what I think, here are my judgments. And because they all fit together, they must be true. They must apply with validity to the external world, which is of course a fallacy, easily provable fallacy.

However, the argument from the need to provide psychological explanations of the behavior of non-human animals and human infants to the existence of non-conceptual content does not stand or fall with the thesis that concepts are necessarily linguistic.

It has been argued that there is a distinction between two different types of thinking.

Many students of the type of cognition engaged in by animals and infants view this cognition as being domain specific and modular in important respects, best understood in terms of bodies of knowledge, closely focused on particular aspects of the natural and social worlds.

These are the models that I described earlier. These models are bodies of knowledge, encoded, structured within a paradigm and within a theory-like template, but there are still bodies of knowledge.

An example of such domain specificity is found in the perceptual module. Spelke suggests is responsible for the segmentation of the visual array into objects according to certain basic physical principles. Carey and Spelke and Spelke himself elaborated on this.

These domain-specific modules are thought to have evolved separately and for specific purposes and are not integrated with each other (Hirschfeld and Gelman).

Indeed, this is the pre-verbal infantile phase that the narcissist is stuck in.

He has these domain-specific modules. They are not integrated because they're pre-verbal.

Language is the glue that holds the entire internal space together. Language makes sense of the interactions between constructs internally.

And so in the absence of language, or if you're stuck in a pre-verbal stage, before language has been formed, you're stuck there emotionally, you're stuck there, developmentally, what used to be called arrested development or stunted development.

If you're stuck there, if you're an infant for the rest of your life you don't have the benefit of using language you don't have this gift you are doomed to wander the wasteland of disjointed, disconnected modules of alleged knowledge, because narcissists have other deficiencies.

For example, impaired reality testing. So the knowledge they acquire or they believe they are acquiring is wrong.

Anyhow, these modules of knowledge, erroneous as the knowledge might be, these modules of knowledge are not interconnected, there's no synergy.

They don't yield any internal cohesion or coherence, also known as identity. They don't give rise to identity.

This is why the narcissist has enormous difficulty to remember things. That's why he's dissociating.

The borderline is dissociative, owing to trauma and stress and anxiety and so on, tension. It is very fragile.

The narcissist is dissociative structurally. It's nothing to do with the borderlines etiology or little to do with the borderlines of geology.

The narcissist primary trauma caused him to dissociate not necessarily from the environment, from the world, from mother, for example.

He didn't only dissociate from external objects, but he dissociated from himself and much more profoundly and fundamentally.

He dissociated from his own ability to not dissociate.

He gave up, so to speak, internally. He gave up on his self.

He gave up on the integrative and constellation processes that give rise to core identity, to the self, to the ego, whatever you want to call. He gave up on himself, to cut a long story short, and that's why narcissism is a prolonged grief disorder.

He kills himself. He sacrifices the true self we are coming back now to Christopher Bollas. He sacrifices the true self and what is left, what was substituted for this the true self is the false self and the false self is pre-verbal. It's the unthought known. It's an imminence. It's a process of multiple processes that somehow can never exit, can never emerge, can never communicate, can never interact, the self-isolating, self-limiting, self-containing, and self-sufficient.

The self-sufficiency is just another name for the narcissist's grandiosity.

Now, the encyclopedia continues.

In contrast, many philosophers have suggested the type of conceptual thought engaged in by language users is essentially domain general, systematic and productive.

I agree with this approach. And I think that is exactly the lacuna, the lack, the deficiency at the heart of pathological narcissism. This inability to be domain general, to be systematic, to be productive.

Narcissism is the opposite of productivity. It's not that narcissism is always destructive, but it's never ever constructive. Never mind the appearance of creativity. It's misleading. It's misguided. There's nothing really there, it's hollow, it's shallow, it's superficial.

Concept possesses, says the encyclopedia, can generate an indefinite number of new thoughts from the concepts they possess, and their thoughts obey what Gareth Evans has termed the generality constraint.

Here's what Evans had to say. We cannot avoid thinking of a thought about an individual object X to the effect that it is F as the exercise of two separable capacities. One being the capacity to think of X, which could be equally exercised in thoughts about X, to the effect that it is G or H or whatever. Doesn't have to be F.

And the other being the conception of what it is to be F, which could be equally exercised in thoughts about other individuals, to the effect that they are F.

If the generality constraint is taken to be an essential characteristic of conceptual thought, Evans, Peacock, Heck, all these thinkers.

So if the generality constraint is an essential characteristic of conceptual thought, then it seems to follow that many, if not all, non-linguistic creatures, animals, infants, narcissists, are not capable of engaging in conceptual thought.

For illustration, we can look at infant's object perception.

Though the infant is capable of representing its environment in a particular way that explains its expectations regarding object motion and object persistence, the fact that such representations are domain-specific suggests that this characteristic of conceptual thought is violated.

In particular, the domain specificity of this type of cognition makes it the case that capacities operative in constructing object representations are not ones that can be engaged generally in context falling beyond the domain of operation of the module.

You see how limited and restricted is the repertory and the reach of pre-verbal creatures such as infants, animals and narcissists.

Thus, says the Encyclopedia, we have a violation of the generality constraint with respect to these representations.

This suggests that the kinds of capacities that are involved in the infant's representation of the environment are not conceptual.

So if they are correctly described as representing the world at all, their representations must be non-conceptual.

And so, Beck, B.E.C. in 2012 discussed analog magnitude representations. I will not go into it. It's a fascinating topic, but it's way too deep even for this video.

The Encyclopedia continues.

Of course, the plausibility of this way of motivating the notion of non-conceptual content is a hostage to fortune in two important senses, one empirical and one philosophical.

The argument rests upon an empirical claim about the appropriate way to explain the behavior of non-linguistic and pre-linguistic creatures, and in particular upon the assumption that it will not turn out to be possible to explain such behavior in non-psychological terms.

I beg to disagree with this. I think psychological terms are the only way to try to access the minds, however primordial, however basic or primitive, we want to access someone else's mind, or at least describe it, capture it somehow, we are limited to the language of psychology.

Psychology is not a science, but it's great literature, and literature is the conduit into the human mind.

So I disagree with this argument.

Again, the encyclopedia, but the argument also depends upon the thesis that the domain of behavior explicable in psychological terms extends further than the domain of concept possession and this in turn depends upon a substantive philosophical account of what it is to possess a concept if for example possessing the concept of an F simply requires being able to discriminate Fs from the rest of the perceptual environment and or to act on them in a suitable manner, then it is hard to see how any evidence that animals and young infants represent the world will not also be evidence that they represent the world conceptually.

I will not go into this debate. I disagree with his arguments completely.

But for the sake of completeness and transparency, I wanted to give you access to the counter arguments.

Anyhow, I applied in this video two new concepts, two concepts new to psychology, from philosophy.

And I wanted, as well as trying to throw light on the phenomenon of narcissism, using these two tools, conceptual tools, I also wanted to demonstrate how philosophy can fertilize psychology and raise it to a whole different new level.

I hope I've succeeded, conceptually at least.