Psychopathology of "I am a Victim" Mentality (NEW Intro+Compilation)

That you have been victimized doesn't make you a victim. That you have been victimized doesn't even make you a survivor.

You have gone through an experience, and there are many types of experiences.

And so unless the abuse is protracted, long-term, all pervasive, unless the abuse is egregious, you're not a survivor, and you're not a victim.

You have someone who has had a bad experience.

Victimhood is an identity to define yourself via an event of having been victimized, or even to define yourself via a relationship in which you have experienced having been victimized.

It is not helpful. It retards growth, healing, recovery, prevents you from moving on.

Victimhood identity resembles very much narcissism, and in this sense, it's pathological.

You would do well to recall your abuse, never forget, and depending on the severity of the abuse, never forgive.

But one thing you should never ever do is adopt the abuse as a defining parameter and dimension of who you are, of your personality, and let the abuse dictate your future, because that would be perpetuating the abuse.

That's exactly what the abuser wanted to do, wanted to accomplish. You would be handing the abuser a victory, a triumph. You would be keeping the abuser, preserving the abuser in your life, the abuser's voice, the abuser's judgment of you, the abuser's agenda, and the abuser's actions to realize and actualize and materialize this agenda.

Don't do this to yourself. Don't become an accessory after the fact with the abuser. Don't become an accomplice. Don't continue to self-abuse, having been abused by someone else. Don't continue to self-victimize, victimized, having been victimized by your abuser.

Abuse creates victims, but victimhood is not about actually abuse. It's not about specific events.

Victimhood is an organizing principle of reality. It imbues your life with a sense, makes sense of life, gives it meaning, provides you with a purpose and a direction, and in this sense, it constricts your life. It limits it, restricts it. It doesn't allow you to exit this self-imputed image and self-perception as a victim. It defines not only who you are, but what you can and cannot do, what rights you have and what obligations.

It becomes a straitjacket, a prison cell. Don't do this to yourself.

The best way to move on, to recover and to heal, is to shed this skin, this mantle of victimhood. And to reclaim your autonomy, your personal independence in your agency.

The following video compilation deals with the psychology of victimhood.

I am a victim mentality. I am a victim stance. Not I have been victimized, but I am a victim. My victimhood defines me.

There is a psychology behind it, which we have been discovering in the past three years.

And the following videos, I am going to reveal to you this psychology and refer you to relevant literature.

I wish you an edifying time with this video compilation. And I hope that as you emerge at the other end, you will have become not survivors, not victims, but whole and healthy and ready to take on the world and are authentic and trusting first and foremost of yourself.

Recent studies have demonstrated the prevalence and incidence of grandiose pathological narcissism bordering on psychopathy, as defined by Robert Hare, among social justice activists and other mass movements.

One such recent study had been published a few months ago in British Columbia.

And there is also a study conducted, actually three studies conducted by Israelis. And they had suggested a new personality construct called the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, or TIV.

It seems that when mass movements start and when they are concerned with justice, social justice, interpersonal justice, legal justice, financial justice, any form of justice, sooner or later these movements are hijacked, infiltrated, infested with, contaminated by psychopaths and narcissists.

And these psychopaths and narcissists tend to rise to the top because they seek attention.

They are concerned with narcissistic supply.

If they are narcissists, money and power and sex, if they are psychopaths, these people become the public face of these social movements.

They are the outspoken ones.

There's a silent majority and the tip of an iceberg minority of psychopaths and narcissists who make it to the mass media, who get interviewed everywhere, who aggrandize themselves and become not only the face of the movement, but the movement.

So they tend to consider themselves as ramifications of the principles, ideologies, ideas, strategems, attitudes of the movements which they purportedly and self-imputedly represent.

This is a very, very insidious, nefarious, pernicious, dangerous, sick phenomenon.

And it had been happening throughout history.

The French Revolution was hijacked by the likes of Danton and Robert Spear and others, very, very mentally ill people, psychopaths and narcissists.

So the Russian Revolution, the famous October Revolution, had gone through two stages.

It was initiated by middle class bourgeoisie, well-balanced people, but then it had been hijacked by total psychopaths like Lenin and Stalin.

So social movements have this tendency.

It's nothing new throughout history.

In my own small case in 1995, I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse.

And for nine years, my website has been the only website on narcissism.

And I maintained, ran and owned the only six support groups for victims of narcissistic abuse.

This gradually became a global movement. I launched it over nine years and then I lost control in 2004.

And the movement now throughout the world is in the hand of con artists, psychopaths, narcissists, scammers.

I mean, it's a cesspool and a cesspit, covert narcissists pretending to be victims, victims pretending to be experts, experts who know nothing about the condition.

Clearly, I had launched inadvertently a mass movement that had been hijacked later by psychopaths and narcissists.

Nothing new under the sun.

Now, all social justice movements and all justice concern movements go through certain phases.

Many of these movements are focused and centered around the concept of victimhood.

So they are what I would call victimhood movements.

Now, victimhood victims are entitled to justice and they are entitled to pursue justice by any legal means available there.

Also very welcome to organize. It's a good thing. It's a healthy thing in society when victims organize to reclaim what's theirs, to reclaim their rights and even to undergo a public healing process.

For example, in South Africa, the popular courts that had tried perpetrators in the truth and justice movements.

So this is in itself is a healthy phenomenon.

The problem is when the movement is again kidnapped and infiltrated by psychopaths and narcissists and changes its character.

Now, every social justice movement goes through phases.

It starts with legitimate grievances.

Victims, people who are deprived, people who are disenfranchised, ignored, people who suffer or pay the price for other people's actions or inaction, people who are the victims, inadvertent or inadvertent of trends such as globalization, automation and the transition to the service and information economy.

There are numerous types of victims. People can be victimized owing to their sexual orientation, to their sex, to their race, to their ethnicity.

I mean, we discriminate against each other and we torture each other based on differences.

If you're slightly different to me, then you don't belong. You're not in my group, in the in group, you're an other, you're outside the group.

And we tend to direct, redirect aggression, individual aggression and group aggression at others.

This is the concept of the other.

And so most victims, if not all victims, and most groups of people have legitimate grievances.

Now, some of these grievances has to do with specific cases, specific individuals, specific institutions, circumstances.

And some of these grievances havewith the system, systemic bias, systemic discrimination, systemic prejudice.

Women had been subjected to a systematic pillage and plunder of their gifts and denial of their rights.

So have African Americans, so have the Jews through thousands of years and so on and so forth. Homosexuals, of course.

So sometimes the system and its dominant ideology targets specific groups of people, denies them their rights, sequesters them, demonizes them and then punishes them in a variety of ways.

Not the list of which is the economic way, as Fukuyama had observed in a series of brilliant works in the past 20 years.

So this economic punishment.

So they are legitimate grievances.

Victims wake up, they wake up when they compare themselves to others who are not members of their group. They wake up when there is a general tsunami wave of rights and human rights and civil rights, and they want to be included in this tidal wave of rearranging rights and of societal rights and obligations. They wake up when things really, really become bad, intolerable, unsupportable, when the victim group hits rock bottom, when blacks are massacred by police, for example, when climate change has led to extreme weather everywhere.

This is when we hit rock bottom, when the pandemic is raging all over the globe because of its initial mismanagement by governments and so on.

These are all cases of hitting rock bottom and then people organize and they try to reverse history, to reverse the trend.

And the thing is, they're often very successful. For example, the civil rights movement in the United States in the 50s and 60s had been quite successful.

So the precedent is that if you get your act together as a victim, you're likely to become much less of a victim. It's an incentive.

So legitimate grievances often lead to organization.

There is a system, an oppressing system, the patriarchy in the case of women, white society in the case of blacks, Nazi Germany in the case of Jews. There's an oppressing system and the victims organize, in effect, a counter culture. They organize an opposing system and then it becomes the clash of two systems.

The problem is that most of these counter systems, most of these victimhood based systems, they tend to deteriorate very fast to identity politics.

And then what we have is a mirror image of the practices of the majority, of the oppressing majority.

So you can find today racism among blacks, which is even more virulent, which is even less justified than the racism among whites.

Black had become the aggressors and the racists as a counter reaction, counter reformation, if you wish, against the prevailing dominant hierarchy and system.

So identity politics is a very powerful tool for these groups because identity creates cohesion. Cohesion creates a laser focused action and laser focused action is power. Cohesion is power and you cannot obtain cohesion unless you foster a sense of togetherness, of weeness, of identity.

And so identity politics also relies on intersectionality. And intersectionality is a very fancy name to say that most people are victimized based on more than one parameter.

So for example, a black woman, she would be victimized as a black and she would be victimized as a woman. A homosexual Jew would be victimized as a homosexual and as a Jew, let alone a transgender Native American, whatever.

There are numerous combinations of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, place of birth, origin, level of education, level of socioeconomic attainment and so on. They all grounds for discrimination and bias. The bias can be explicit, can be an integral part of an overt ideology, for example, anti-immigration, white supremacy. These are overt biases and prejudices, totally non-scientific and nonsensical.

But the bias can be implicit bias, the way, for example, medical doctors relate to black patients. In shocking surveys we find time and again that white medical doctors assume that black people have a different physiology, for example, that they have thicker skin and they experience much less pain.

So bias is a poison, it permeates, it pervades the social fabric and the only way to get rid of bias is to get rid of the social fabric.

Then movements adopt identity politics and intersectional ideologies, contra intersectional ideologies in ways that render them subversive.

They become in effect insurgencies in very extreme cases. They deteriorate into domestic terrorism.

But even in the more benign cases, these homegrown grassroots movements, they tend to become very, very aggressive, exclusionary, identity oriented, a hermetic, schizoid, closed in, defiant, contumacious, an attack on authority.

And if you're thinking, well, this list sounds like a psychopath, you're right. This is the list of traits of a psychopath.

These identity politics groups, these victimhood centered groups tend to become psychopathic as an integral dynamic not related on particular individuals as members of the group or particular individuals as leaders.

The dynamic of a group is psychopathic. They develop collective psychopathy.

Very often victimhood groups also tend to compensate for their sense of innate inferiority and for the humiliation of having been a victim. They tend to compensate with grandiosity.

So in the narcissistic abuse movement today we have empaths. empaths are angels. They can do nothing wrong. They are wonderful people. They are amazing. They're perfect.

In other words, narcissists.

So, grandiosity and psychopathy tend to evolve naturally as an emergent phenomenon in victimhood centered social justice movements long before they are hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths.

Actually, narcissists and psychopaths gravitate to these movements owing to their increasing narcissistic and psychopathic profile.

And so then we have the tendency for victimhood, which is this new construct.

We have these studies that show psychopaths and narcissists as active members, not only leaders.

And the whole thing deteriorates into demonizing, mudslinging, partisanship, aggression on extreme cases, recently not so extreme and not so rare, even violence.

Now, there's a big difference between left-leaning victimhood movements, right-leaning victimhood movements and neutral movements.

An example of a neutral movement would be the narcissistic abuse movement because it incorporates people with leftist views, people with rightist views and so on. It's centered around the injustice done to victims of narcissistic abuse by narcissists and psychopaths. It is undergoing the very same process. It had become more and more grandiose and it had been taken over by psychopathic and narcissistic con-artists and scammers, all these online coaches and experts and so on.

But still, it is neutral in the political sense.

Left-leaning victimhood-centered movements tend to focus on entitlement and grandiosity. They compensate with grandiosity, entitlement, and they are fantastic in nature.

For example, they seek to rewrite history counterfactually. So women are doing this in the feminist movement. They are rewriting the history of the world as though it had been centered around women, when actually women had always been, since the agricultural revolution, marginal in world affairs.

Blacks have African-American studies departments where they rewrite history to render blacks the builders of the nation and the greatest contributors to science and literature, which is utter sheer unmitigated counterfactual nonsense.

So there is grandiose compensation and a deep sense of entitlement. These are two main features of narcissism because they lead to a lack of empathy.

And if you talk to blacks in any setting with any conviction, members of these movements or not, they have become much less empathic. They sound very narcissistic, I must say. And I'm sure I'll get a million comments about this element.

So this is the left-leaning movement. Entitlement, grandiosity.

The right-leaning movements combine two different, two other psychological traits.

Conspiracism, which is the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, is organizing and explanatory principles.

Conspiracism coupled with grandiosity, for example, white supremacy, coupled with schizoid tendencies, the wish to be left alone.

Small government, no taxation, no foreign, no adventures in foreign lands. America first.

So the right-leaning movements, they tend to be more conspiracy minded. They tend to be more monkish, more with they have centered around withdrawal, around avoidance, much less around entitlement.

They're afraid of entitlement, actually, because they translate entitlement to bigger government, more intrusive government.

They state that big, big brother, 1984 or William things. So their conspiracism actually prevents right-wing movements from becoming fully narcissistic because they deny the element of entitlement.

But they have a pronounced lack of empathy, much bigger than in the left victimhood center movements. And they are much more psychopathic in the sense that they are much less averse to using aggression. They are much more defiant. They are much more contumacious.

The detest authority clean the swamp, drain the swamp in Washington. So they are more psychopathic.

To summarize, the left is narcissistic entitled in grandiose. It's centered around victimhood and translates victimhood into claims on society. They claim rights. They claim money, reparations for slavery or reparations for the Holocaust. So it's more entitlement oriented.

And what can I get out of it?

And the right wing groups, entitlement groups are less. They're not exactly victimhood groups. They are victims of conspiracies, but not victims of society or systemic, because they are mostly white. Right wing groups are mostly white. They belong to the majority. They are less likely to present themselves as victims. They may be victims of impersonal forces such as globalization or the collapse of manufacturing in the United States or automation or whatever.

But they are more focused on withdrawal, avoidance and using power where necessary to protect rights. For example, gun rights. In the middle, we have the social movements, the justice movements.

They're not social justice movement. They are individual justice movements like the narcissistic abuse movement.

And these movements in the middle, they have the worst of both worlds, actually. They have entitlement. They have grandiosity, but they also have defiance, contumaciousness and conspiracy, conspiracy oriented paranoia.

This is the picture. When narcissists and psychopaths observe these groups, what they see is a goldmine. It's a new pathological narcissistic space.

They can thrive in these settings. They can become leaders. They can become media figures. They can obtain narcissistic supply. They can make money. They can have sex with followers and fans. It's fun. It's great. It's a playground. It's a hunt. It's a pub.

And so narcissists and psychopaths flock into these movements. And because of their particular personality structure, narcissists know how to be charming. Narcissists verbalize much better than the average population.

Many narcissists and psychopaths are highly intelligent and all of them are goal oriented. They are reckless. They are callous. They are the sympathetic. They are relentless. So they rise to the top. They become the leaders of these movements.

And this is how all these movements end.

Even hallowed saintly figures like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, in other ways, gurus like Jordan Peterson and so on. They have pronounced narcissistic elements and traits and so on.

When you look, when you listen to the FBI recordings of Martin Luther King, I mean, it's far from impressive. And when you read the autobiography of Gandhi, you come across sections which put your hair on end.

I mean, the guy was, you know, near-cycled.

So there's no escaping this.

Victims organize, create a counterculture, a counter-system. It becomes more and more narcissistic, more and more brandyons, more and more entitled, more and more paranoid.

And then it becomes more and more psychopathic as it accumulates aggression, which is directed by an ideology, interpolated as Althusser called it.

And then it's taken over by narcissists and psychopaths.

I hope I made things clear because last time I mentioned only Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements and the climate change movement with the greater.

But now I've mentioned also right-wing movements and neutral movements. It's all over.

Whenever people organize to claim justice, they become narcissists and psychopaths.

It raises the interesting question whether narcissism and psychopathy are not actually misguided, misdirected attempts by individuals to reclaim justice having been subjected to early childhood trauma.

Interesting thought, narcissists and psychopaths are victims of early childhood trauma claiming what's theirs, regaining their rights and establishing some justice using an ideology, a personal ideology, which is akin to religion in the case of narcissism, that actually aggrandizes, entitles and tramples on other people.

Meaningful public discourse of outstanding issues, problematic topics. This discourse is being subverted by victimhood movements, work movements and exclusionary vindictive identity politics.

So dialogue is dead. So censorship and political correctness have taken over. People are afraid to speak up and they are afraid to speak up because self-identified victims, anything from empaths to Black Lives Matter to #MeToo to the right-wing victimhood movements, self-identified victims are punitive. They are vindictive. They are vicious. And above all, they don't hesitate to resort to immoral methods and actions and to make choices and decisions that easily victimize others.

Why is that?

Here is the dirty secret that no one is going to tell you except the iconoclastic Black professor of psychology or former visiting professor, to be precise, Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited and the dirty secret is this.

The majority of social activists and political activists are mentally ill. Many of them, if not the bulk of them, are dark triad personalities, subclinical narcissists, subclinical psychopaths, Machiavellian.

Quite a few of them are sadists as well and qualify for the dark tetrad.

Social activism movements, social justice movements, political movements have always been hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths throughout human history.

Narcissism is a prime example of a victimhood movement hijacked by a psychopath, narcissistic psychopath.

So is communism and so to a large extent is capitalism.

When we are faced with issues of asymmetry of power, the misuse of potency, discrimination and hurt and pain, when we are faced with these issues, there is a vulnerability. There is a chink in the armor. There is an opening. And through that gap, through that gap, armies, hordes of narcissists and psychopaths rush to take advantage, to leverage, to abuse the situation and the people involved.

Victimhood is real. People have been victimized throughout history. I'm a Jew, I should know, slaves. People have always been victimized.

However, victimhood is an identity, is a relatively new phenomenon, about 150 to 200 years old.

Nationalism in all its forms in the 19th century was founded on victimhood. This is especially true where I am in the Balkans and to some extent in the Middle East.

And so victimhood as an identity is a new thing.

And now we have a malignant development of this competitive victimhood.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is a topic of today's video.

Today's video deals with how victims compete with each other for the title of I am the greatest victim ever.

And my abuser is the most demonic, devil, diabolical, vicious abuser to have ever roamed the earth.

Anyone who has visited empath communities know exactly what I'm talking about.

I'm going to review three studies.

I have reviewed one of these studies in two videos.

And so if you go to the description, which is under the video, if you go to the description, I advise you to watch the videos titled Narcissist, Eternal Victims, Trauma, Psychosis, Splitting the Inner Dialogue.

And the other video is victimhood movements hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths.

In these two videos, I deal with a study, a 2020 study, a study published three years ago by a group of Israeli scholars and researchers.

I'm going to deal with this study in this video as well in the third part of this video.

But first, I'm going to describe and analyze two other studies.

And then we will gravitate naturally to the third one.

Let's start by with a study by EOK.

Yes, I'm kidding you're not.

Vaknin, Aquino and others. This was a study published in July 2020. It is titled Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Traits.

It was published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

And you can find references citation to the literature in the description.

It's an amazing and much neglected study and it's much neglected for good reason.

It flies in the face of many claims of victimhood movements and woke movements.

And it casts these movements in a very evil and dark light. And they don't like it.

These movements are now in control of all the media, both online and offline.

Well, all the mainstream media, all the streaming platforms, platforms such as YouTube, LinkedIn, social media, victimhood movements are in control of all these platforms.

If you dare to criticize victimhood movements, confront them with facts and studies, disagree with them, they punish you. They punish you viciously, severely, vindictively. They cancel you. They ostracize you. They make other people shun you. They go on smear campaigns.

I'm now a subject of one such vicious smear campaign.

So victimhood movements, small and big, a victimhood movement can be comprised of 10 people, can be composed of 10 million people.

But all of them have one thing in common. They use narcissistic and psychopathic techniques and methods and they are sadistically punitive, unforgiving and vindictive.

Let's go to the study.

The study links virtue signaling to dark triad traits.

Virtue signaling simply means an insincere, fake, feigned signaling of an underlying virtue, virtuous behavior or a virtuous belief system or value system.

Virtue signalers are phonies. They are show-offs. They adopt opinions and postures in order to garner praise and sympathy to extract narcissistic supply.

In short, they are either narcissistic in the best case or outright narcissist in the worst.

They need everyone to see just how good they are, how virtuous they are, how amazingly morally upright they are, how heroic they are and how they fight evil.

Being, of course, all good. It's a morality play coupled with a splitting defense. I'm all good. You're all bad. I'm protecting the helpless and the weak and I'm going to punish you for your misdeeds.

They are self-appointed. No one has elected them to office. No one has told them to take on the assignment of the administration of justice, but they are the equivalent of vigilantes.

And they operate within a culture that says that victimhood confers a right. To be a victim is to have a right.

And so rights confer obligations and duties on other people. If I have a right, you have a duty towards me. If I possess some kind of right, you have an obligation towards me.

Rights and obligations are two sides of the same coin.

So victimhood movements are entitled. They are demanding. Victims have discovered that victimhood empowers.

Many of them have also discovered the financial benefits of victimhood. They have not looked recently at the reparations for slavery movement or at the Jews taking billions of dollars from Germany only six years after the end of the Holocaust.

Victimhood pays exactly like crime. And very often victimhood is indistinguishable from crime.

And so victims have monopolized the public discourse and the global dialogue because they have a right to speak up and you don't have a right to respond.

You don't have a right to respond because you are all bad. You are evil. You are the abuser or the descendant of the abuser or somehow connected to the abuser.

Or you could have been the abuser by virtue of your skin color or your education or the place you were born in. You are tarred with a white brush as an abuser, as a perpetrator.

And from that moment on, you should keep silent. And if you dare to speak up, you are continuing to perpetuate and perpetrate the abuse. And you should be punished for that either in the public sphere, in the public arena or even criminally and legally.

So victimhood movements have co-opted the levels of power. Victimhood movement has now merged and fused with power structures. They have become the system. It's a system of victimhood.

And having thus been empowered, victims are abusing their power, rampantly.

Look at the Me Too movement, for example.

And so it's a very sick world we live in because victims, social activists, not victims, social activists and political activists are mostly mentally ill.

Many of the monosties and psychopaths, they're insane, took over the asylum. Gnosties and psychopaths pretend to be moral, ethical, upright, honest, benevolent.

But deep inside, they're just narcissists and psychopaths. And now they're using the levers of power to subjugate and penalize everyone who dares to confront them, to challenge them, to undermine them or to suggest an alternative. Online pile-ons are an example of this.

Social media platforms have been compromised by these victimhood movements, gun narcissistic, victimhood movements and identity politics, gun psychopathic. They took over social media on the left. On the right, they took over talk radio. The media now is at the disposal and the mercy of these people.

And these are seriously Machiavellian, one could even say evil people.

This new research that I've just referred to, I'm going to quote, looks at the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue.

And so it's a very interesting study because it's not a single study, it's a series of studies, it's multiple studies that the authors conducted on exactly this subject.

And what is the conclusion?

Psychopathic, manipulative and narcissistic people are more frequent signalers of virtuous victimhood. They are competitive victims.

Dark triad personality traits lead to characteristics like self-promotion, emotional callousness, duplicity, tendency to take advantage of others, explain the authors and treated as a composite, as a composite. The dark triad traits were significant predictors of virtuous victim signaling.

I can't tell you how terrifying these few words are. What it means is that as we have been transitioning from the age of dignity to the age of victimhood, and I'm now quoting the famous sociologist Campbell, as we have transitioned into the age of victimhood, narcissists and psychopaths took advantage of this transition, compromised the new power structures, pretended to be victims. And many of them do believe that they are victims because narcissists have other plastic defenses and an external locus of control.

In other words, they blame other people for their defeats and failures and misfortune and mishaps.

So it's easy for a narcissist to say, I'm a real victim, I'm really a victim, you're wrong about that.

And yet these movements are now infested with narcissists and psychopaths.

And this holds true, say the authors, even when controlling for factors that may make people vulnerable to being mistreated or disadvantage in society, for example, demographic and socio economic characteristics, as well as the importance they place on being virtuous individuals as part of their self-concept.

The authors point out that virtue signaling is defined as the conspicuous expression of moral values done primarily with the intent of enhancing one's standing within a social group.

Victim signaling may be used as a social influence tactic that can motivate recipients of the signal to voluntarily transfer resources to the signaler.

This is absolutely shocking.

Victimhood is the organizing principle of today's society. Victimhood is the explanatory principle of today's world. It imbues the world with meaning and makes sense of reality.

Victimhood is the new religion together with narcissism and narcissists consider themselves as victims. Narcissism is a victimhood movement.

And so we are at the mercy of narcissists and psychopaths masquerading as moral, virtuous victims, codependents, people pleasers, healers, rescuers, saviors, many of them are online as coaches, self-styled experts, you name it.

This is a dangerous situation and there's an emerging literature on what is called competitive victimhood and it deals with the prevalence of victim signaling by various social groups.

There is evidence that victim signaling carries some benefits. It's a functionality. It's a resource extraction strategy.

This is a war for money, for power, for fame and celebrity.

Today, the more victimized you are, the more of a victim you are. The more your identity is that of a victim, the more public exposure you gain. The more likely are you to have access to the media and the more money you are likely to make.

And that is why on YouTube there is a group of unscrupulous, immoral individuals with and without academic degrees who make a living out of perpetuating victimhood.

Because there's a lot of money in it.

Victimhood has become a cottage industry.

Victim signaling justifies victim groups seeking retribution against alleged abusers and oppressors.

This is true on the collective level and it's true on the individual level.

Victims feel totally entitled to behaving morally and even criminally in the pursuit of what they call justice.

What kind of justice? The justice they decide on. They are the law. Retribution takes the form of demanding compensation through some kind of resource transfer from non-victims to alleged victims.

So claiming victim status can facilitate resource transfer by conferring moral immunity on the claimant and the complainant. It's an interesting kind of transactional landscape.

All you have to do is claim victimhood of some kind. Ageism, ableism, sexism, racism, antisemitism.

Anyism goes. You just identify your slot and claim your prize.

Moral immunity shields the alleged victim from criticism about the means they might choose to satisfy their demands.

The minute you identify as a victim, you are beyond reproach. Anything you do is morally justified in the pursuit of restoring justice and balance.

Your justice and your balance. You can act criminally. You can act immorally. You can act unethically.

And it's all okay because you are doing these things as a victim.

Victimhood identity, your victimhood stance, is therefore a shield, a protection, a defense against the repercussions and consequences of your own actions.

No wonder narcissists and psychopaths find victimhood irresistible.

Victim status can morally justify the use of deceit, intimidation, bullying, criminal conspiracies, violence, verbal and otherwise against alleged abusers, perpetrators and oppressors.

In the pursuit of accomplishing their goals, victims are entitled to behave in any way they choose. They are above and beyond the law. They are the law.

This is lynching. We're in an era of all pervasive, massive lynching.

Lynching of men by women in the wake of the MeToo movement.

Lynching of whites by colored people.

Lynching of oppressors, alleged oppressors, descendants of oppressors, could have been oppressors by one of the victims, fake victims.

And above all, narcissists and psychopaths claiming a victim status can lead observers to hold a person less blameworthy, to excuse transgressions.

Victims appropriate private property, inflict pain on other people. Normally, this would have been condemned or rebuked, but not when you are a victim.

When you are a victim, you are above reproach, above rebuke, above repudiation and above condemnation.

Claiming victim status elevates the claimant's psychological standing.

There is a subjective sense of legitimacy, entitlement and the rightpsychological standing. There is a subjective sense of legitimacy, entitlement and the right to speak up in the public arena and in the commons.

The victim has a monopoly on the right kind of speech, and any other speech is castigated and chastised as evil and dark and backward and reactionary and wrong.

It's a small step from this to criminalizing speech. And we are not far from that.

A lot of speech is already being criminalized. There is self-censorship, there is political correctness. There is absolute fear to speak up. I can tell you that from personal experience.

Absolute fear.

A person who has the psychological standing can reject or ignore any objections by non-victims to the unreasonables of the demands of the victims.

So if you are a victim, you don't have to listen to the other party, to the other side. You automatically have, you automatically in the right, your justice is on your side. God is with us. God is with us.

Do you know whose slogan this was? The SS. God is with us.

In contrast to victim signalers, people who do not publicly disclose their misfortune or disadvantage are less likely to benefit or to reap rewards. Retributive compensation has become the only form of compensation. Moral immunity and morality plays, have become the only forms of morality.

Deflection of blame has become the only way to blame. Guilt has been expunged.

Victims never feel guilt. Whatever they may do, and many of them do horrible things, they never feel guilty.

The effectiveness of victim signaling is a resource transfer strategy.

Follows the basic principles of what we call signaling theory.

Let me tell you a bit about signaling theory.

Signaling theory says that the transmission of information from one individual, the sender, to another individual, the receiver, can influence the behavior of the receiver.

Signals refer to any physical or behavioral trait of the sender. Signals are used by senders to alter the behaviors of receivers to their own advantage.

I want to quote a few sentences from this amazing series of studies.

A series of studies that has been suppressed, actively, implicitly, possibly and explicitly, because the discoveries of these studies are politically incorrect. And so these studies are censored.

And go to the description and make sure you read these studies. Show your support for truth.

Here are a few sentences from these studies.

A perceived victim signal can lead others to transfer resources to a victim, but that the motivation to do so is amplified when the victim signal is paired with a virtual signal.

People high in the dark triad traits emit the dual signal more frequently. A positive correlation between the dark triad scores and the frequency of emitting the virtual, virtuous victim signal has been found.

Evidence of how these signals can predict a person's willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors has been spotted.

Frequent virtuous victim signalers are more willing to purchase counterfeit products and judge counterfeiters as less immoral compared with less frequent signalers.

A pattern that was also observed when using participants dark triad scores instead of the signaling score.

Frequent virtuous victim signalers were more likely to cheat and to lie in order to earn an extra monetary reward in a coin flip game.

That a dimension referred to as a moral manipulation was the most reliable predictor of virtuous victim signaling.

Frequent virtuous victim signalers were more likely to make inflated claims to justify receiving restitution for an alleged and ambiguous non-violation in an organizational context.

The authors make clear we do not refute the claim that there are individuals who emit the virtuous victim signal because they experience legitimate harm and also conduct themselves in decent and laudable ways.

But the infiltration of narcissists and psychopaths has contaminated the signal. The signal is now partly noise, narcissistic noise, psychopathic noise.

Virtuous signaling, morality plays, casting yourself as a victim today is a suspect activity because narcissists and psychopaths are doing all these things in order to punish people, subjugate people, extract resources from people, manipulate people, cheat people and deceive people, and all this by claiming to be victims.

I proceed to another study by Weizmel, Mannheimer, Schoenhauf, Zlothnick, Dver and others. It is titled ADHD and Political Participation, an observational study.

Again, you can find a link in the description. The conclusions of the study.

Overall, say the authors, we find evidence that individuals with ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, individuals with ADHD display a unique pattern of political activity, including greater participation and less tolerance of others' views, but not necessarily showing greater active interest in politics.

Our findings add to a growing body of literature that examines the impact of ADHD on different types of everyday behaviors.

This is the anodyne camouflaging abstract. The study itself is nothing short of absolutely shocking.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a serious problem in childhood and recently we are discovering that it's a problem in adulthood as well.

This study shows, demonstrates that people with ADHD are more likely than the average individual to participate in politics and even deeply so.

They are very committed and invested in politics.

And this is pretty, pretty counterintuitive and surprising because people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder cannot pay attention to anything at length. They cannot focus on a task for any period of time. They are sometimes hyperactive to the point of mania. They act without prior contemplation of the consequences of their actions. So they have poor impulse control and they are unable to analyze, synthesize and go deep into any topic or issue.

And yet these people who can hardly put two and two together, they go into politics. They define politics.

You will soon hear the numbers.

A sizable minority of politicians, political activists, social activists suffer from severe ADHD. So they are incapable of learning anything in depth, analyzing it rigorously and reaching any decisions about the future that would make any sense.

And yet these are the people who define the agenda and dictate the way you live.

The condition is chronic ADHD, is debilitating. It leads to other issues that impact daily life, individual relationships, interpersonal relationships, work life. They are all disrupted.

And these are the people who engage in politics regardless of their age, sex, race, education, political orientation and the levels of therapy that they are receiving regardless of all this.

So the authors, a group of Israeli scholars, I don't know why Israel is so concerned with victimhood, possibly because the Jews have invented victimhood as identity politics.

So the authors studied 1,369 participants and that's a moderate size study, not small, not big, a moderate size study. About 15% of these people suffered from pronounced ADHD.

And then they asked these people about their political participation in activism.

They measured political participation in activism in a variety of ways over the course of a year.

So this was a serious study, a longitudinal study.

They measured activism online, offline, via proxy, by proxy, directly and so on and so forth.

And then they compared the data with the level of news consumption of the participants and whether they were active in political parties, participated in politics on social media, had political opinions and shared them and so on and so forth.

And they discovered the following.

Overall, say the authors, individuals who screen positive for ADHD report at higher levels of political participation than individuals who screen negative, both digitally and in traditional ways.

That in itself should already give you a pause.

People with attention deficit disorder tended to express political opinions on social media, but did not consume news. These people were not exposed to the news and yet they had very clear and rigorous and strong and irreversible political opinions and stance.

Strikes you as narcissism. Right you are. This is grandiosity. These people were grandiose.

The study noted that they didn't bother to read news, analysis, listen to news, watch news, compare with other people. They just made up their mind.

So the famous saying, I've made up my mind. Don't confuse me with the facts. Or if I want your opinion, I'll give it to you.

These are arrogant people. Arrogant people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who are also grandiose in our probability, highly narcissistic, although this was not in the study. That is my interpretation.

And so these people had zero or very close to zero input and yet felt that they are sufficiently authoritative and knowledgeable to dictate to other people how to behave politically and socially.

In this sense, say the authors, our results align with previous work defines that individuals who suffer from other health conditions in daily lives tend to participate more regularly in political activity, such as contacting a politician or signing a petition.

Sick people, especially mentally ill people are the ones who are active in politics.

We're beginning to see the full picture.

And among these sick people, grandiosity is rampant, psychopathy, narcissism, ignorance, because you have attention deficit.

These are the people who define your futures and control you via the levers of power, institutions and mechanization.

The studies authors noted that ADHD sufferers expose themselves only to same minded thinkers. So they get embedded in what we call echo chambers or silos, cognitive or thought silos.

And so they go to social media, they find like minded people, they team up with them, and then they don't bother to, they don't feel the need to read, to listen, to watch, to analyze, because everyone around them keeps telling them they're right.

They are less tolerant than other people. ADHD sufferers, according to the study, were less tolerant of other political views.

This wasn't due to attempts to fight democracy, but it had to do with their attentiveness issues.

They couldn't, they didn't have the patience to listen to other people, so they became very aggressive because they felt frustrated.

Overall, say the authors, we find evidence that individuals with ADHD display a unique pattern of political activity, including greater participation and less tolerance of others views, but not necessarily showing greater active interest in politics.

And now we come to the seminal study, a very, very important study published three years ago.

It was published in Personality and Individual Differences.

I remind you at the beginning of this video, I referred you to two other videos I've made in which I analyzed these studies.

But I'm going to review them yet again.

Studies are titled The Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, TIV, the Personality Construct and its Consequences, was authored by Gohav Gabbai, Boaz Amhiri and others.

The researchers coined the phrase tendency for interpersonal victimhood.

This is an ongoing, they describe it as an ongoing feeling that the self is a victim, which is generalized across many kinds of relationships.

Here is the abstract of the study.

The authors said in the present studies, by the way, these were four studies in the present research, we introduce a conceptualization of the tendency for interpersonal victimhood, which we defined as an enduring feeling that the self is victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships.

Then, in a comprehensive set of eight studies, I'm sorry, not four, but eight, in a comprehensive set of eight studies, we develop a measure for this novel personality trait, TIV, and we examine its correlates, as well as its affective, cognitive and behavioral consequences.

In part one, two studies, we established the construct of TIV with its four dimensions.

Number one, need for recognition, narcissism, moral elitism, grandiosity, lack of empathy, again, narcissism and psychopathy, and rumination, obsession, compulsion, in a way.

So these four traits, dimensions of personality, are typical of professional lifelong victims, people who define themselves as victims whose identity is an identity of victimhood.

And then they assessed the internal consistency, consistency, stability, etc.

In part two, again, two studies, we examine TIV's convergent and discriminant validities using several personality dimensions and the role of attachment styles as conceptual antecedents.

They discovered that insecure attachment goes hand in hand with being a victim.

In part three, again, two studies, we explore the cognitive and behavioral consequences of TIV. Specifically, we examine the relationships between TIV, negative attribution, and recall biases, and the desire for revenge.

Professional victims, empaths, are vindictive, they're vengeful. Because they consider themselves morally superior, because they lack empathy, because they're vicious, because they are psychopathic and narcissistic, they pursue the alleged abuser or perpetrator or oppressor to the end, viciously, maliciously, vindictively, and vengefully.

This is not Sambakhni. These are the studies.

So, TIV, study number four, has shown that, demonstrated conclusively, the TIV, the tendency for interpersonal victimhood, is intimately linked with behavioral revenge.

Participants high in TIV also reported experiencing more intense negative emotions and a higher entitlement to immoral criminal behavior.

Mediation analysis offered insight. The revenge process in the mind of the perpetual professional victim, the vindictiveness of the "I am a victim" identity, is a process. It's something that unfolds all the time. It's a background process.

The authors say the higher participants' TIV, the more they experience negative emotions felt entitled to behaving morally.

However, only the experience of negative emotions predicted behavioral revenge.

Gabbai and her colleagues express a view. They say that their studies indicate that the tendency for interpersonal victimhood is a stable personality trait that is linked to particular behavioral, cognitive and emotional characteristics.

They say, and I'm quoting, "It is deeply rooted in the relations with primary caregivers, these tendency affects how individuals feel, think and behave in what they perceive as hurtful situations throughout their lives."

Now, there's an article that later on analyzed the studies. It's titled "Latterly arising from Gabbai, etc., the tendency for interpersonal victimhood." And it reminds us that there is a precedent for tendency for interpersonal victimhood. Thirty years prior, in the 1990s, there was something which was known as "befallen injustice," "sensitivity to befallen injustice," SBI. It was developed by Schmidt and others and his colleagues. It was later renamed "Justice Sensitivity from a Victim's Perspective" or "JS Victim."

In 2005, Schmidt published an article about JS victim, justice sensitivity from a victim's perspective and nicknamed it "victim sensitivity" together with Golvitz in 2013.

So it's not a new idea. The Israeli authors misrepresent tendency for interpersonal victimhood as a new concept or a new idea. It's not. It's absolutely not.

"TIV and victim sensitivity are one and the same. Gabbai conceptualized TIV in a way with four indicators, the four indicators that also define justice sensitivity.

Frequency of observed injustice, emotional intensity and mental intrusiveness of observed injustice, motivation to restore justice, etc.

There's a great analysis by Baumeister and Schmidt in 2016.

In a way, the Israeli authors hijacked, and I don't want to use a stronger word, hijacked Schmidt's work. And I'm all against this because this is being done to me day in and day out here.

You see, I'm adopting a victim stance.

And so bear in mind the tendency for interpersonal victimhood is the same as victim sensitivity.

And if you want to delve deeper into this, I would advise you to look for anything written or authored by Schmidt.

And so this is the picture. This is the picture. And it's an unsavory picture.

We have transitioned from age, the age of dignity and reputation, the age of upright morality, the age of social cohesion, the age of clear scripts, social, sexual and otherwise. We have transitioned from all this to a world where everyone competes for being a victim.

Why?

Because victimhood pays.

Victimhood became a cottage industry and has been invaded by mentally ill people. Narcissists, psychopaths, sadists, attention deficit grandiose people.

These movements, which started off as legitimate social justice movements, have been hijacked and altered beyond recognition.

The mid-two movement of today has nothing to do with a mid-two movement of five or six years ago. Nothing. It is rapacious. It is vicious. It is unjust. It is psychopathic, totally compromised.

Same to a large extent with Black Lives Matter. Of course, feminism, the third and fourth waves, are unrecognizable variants of the first and second wave.

No first and second wave feminists would agree to identify yourself with anyone who claims to be a feminist today.

Feminism is a power grab, a crass commercial enterprise run by utterly psychopathic and narcissistic figures.

This is the world we live in. Victimhood is leveraged. The world is misused. Guild tripping, blame shifting.

When you identify other people as oppressors or abusers or perpetrators, you give yourself license to behave as one. When you cast other people as criminals, you then feel totally justified in behaving as a criminal or behaving criminally.

It's as if the minute you cast yourself as a victim, morality flies out the window and you are entitled to do anything and everything you wish to your heart's content.

This is sick. This is dangerous. This must stop. We must speak up. All of us must speak up against this phenomenon.

But we are too terrified. We are afraid of losing tenure and our jobs, being shunned and cancelled, being prosecuted criminally.

It's gone that far.

And so as victims, erstwhile victims, attain positions of power, they bring their victimhood with them into the power structures, compromise the power structures and the institutions and render them long arms of psychopathic and narcissistic victimhood.

It is an untenable situation that is ripping apart the social fabric, generating gender wars, all out wars actually, between various interest groups, each one of whom, each one of which is claiming to be a victimhood movement.

Identity politics is now conflated totally with victimhood. This is bad. This is what gave rise to Nazism. Identity politics conflated with victimhood.

If we don't want a repeat of the 1930s, we must stop right here and right now on the collective level and on the individual level.

We must fight back against victimhood.

Okay, Ishvan Panim. I'm going to try something new. I'm going to proceed each and every long video with a bullet points summary.

You can watch the summary. It's usually between five to ten minutes and ignore the rest of the video. It will break my heart, but hey, I'm a narcissist. I deserve it. Here's your chance to break a narcissist's heart.

Okay, Shoshanim.

So now the bullet points summary and innovation on this channel followed by the longer presentation, deeper with examples and so on and so forth.

You can skip the second part because the first part captures all the information in the second part with without the examples.

Narcissists always claim to be victims and they do so convincingly because they're charming. They're attractive. They have they have thespian skills in order to act. They're convincing. They have cold empathy. They can scan you, which buttons to push the manipulative, etc.

And so their claims to victimhood sound very true and very, very plausible.

They persuade people that they are victims.

Codependents and people pleasers use two techniques to manipulate other people.

One technique is known as control from the bottom. I'm helpless without you. I need you. This is a form of manipulation and it's control from the bottom, control through submissiveness.

And the second technique used by codependents and people pleasers is victimhood. I'm a victim. I'm entitled to special treatment, special consideration and your constant sensitivity and vigilance to not hurt me again.

So but narcissists use these techniques as well. It's virtually it's very difficult to tell apart narcissists from real victims, narcissists from codependents and narcissists from people pleasers.

Many narcissists claim to have been victims of narcissistic abuse, to have been discarded, cruelly, to have been devalued unjustly. These claims are made both by real victims and by narcissists who hijack the narrative, mimic the victims and essentially snatch the whole scene.

So how to tell which is which, which is the real victim and which is the narcissist?

Number one, splitting.

Narcissists exactly like borderlines.

Split. Splitting is an infantile defense mechanism which says I'm all good. Everyone else is all bad.

It's also known as dichotomous thinking. There's nothing wrong with me. I have done nothing wrong. I am a kind, empathic, nice, loving, caring person, compassionate, helpful, attentive.

And yet I'm constantly being taken advantage of, abused and used because people out there are bad. I am all good. They, whoever they may be, are all bad. This is splitting.

Splitting defense is used only by narcissists and borderlines. Real victims do not split.

Even people pleasers and co-dependence do not split. Splitting is a prime red alert, prime warning sign that you're dealing with a narcissist.

Listen to what the narcissist says and ask yourself, is he constantly presenting himself as essentially all good while everyone else is taking advantage of him, harming him, hurting him, etc.

So this is fleeting.

Number two, non-discrimination.

The narcissist would blame whole populations. He would say, for example, all my girlfriends betrayed me and hurt me and abused me and cheated on me. All my spouses, all my business partners have victimized me, stolen from me, took advantage of me, etc.

So the narcissist would generalize. He would generalize to populations.

Generalization is a fallacy, is a kind of mental health issue. And it is dealt with in cognitive behavior therapy.

So narcissists generalize. Narcissists wouldn't say, well, this girlfriend was really bad, but this girlfriend was great. Narcissists would say, my girlfriends, as if they all belong to a club or a political party together, you know, my girlfriends did this to me, my business partners did this to me.

He would generalize about groups of people and he would then go on to place himself as the victim of these people.

Only narcissists do that.

Victims are much more nuanced.

Number three, self-pity.

Narcissists and especially covert narcissists pity themselves and they pity themselves visibly, publicly, ostentatiously, conspicuously. It's a currency. Their self-pity is a manipulative ploy to pull at your heartstrings.

And so the self-pity and the ostentation that goes with the self-pity, they are coupled with goal orientation.

Narcissists want something from you. If he is on YouTube, he wants your views and the advertising money. Otherwise, he wants to become a celebrity. He wants to have sex with you. He wants to take money from you.

He would pose as a victim, a helpless, hapless, innocent, totally innocent victim, just to get you to do what he wants. It's manipulative.

Remember, a true victim, a real victim, would never wallow in self-pity, in public at least. He would never do this. And he would never, ever couple self-pity with some goal. He would never go on YouTube and pity himself.

Next, alloplastic defenses and an external locus of control.

A narcissist would blame others for all the misfortune in his life, all his failures, all his defeats and all the bad turns. It's never his fault. He is never in the wrong.

There's an external locus of control. He is just there, a passive, inert object, the recipient of other people's malice and mental illness. He is a victim by virtue of existing. There's no responsibility or blame. He never assumes responsibility or blame. It is a defense against shame and guilt, which in the narcissist's case, a life-threatening.

But still, it's there.

So if you watch someone online or you talk to someone and they keep saying, "This was not my fault. I have been a victim. I'm not responsible. I've been abused. I've been taken advantage of. I've been discarded cruelly. I have been shamed. I have been, you know, I contributed nothing to my predicament. I am perfect. I am an angel.

I, well, that's a narcissist. Many of them are called empaths.

Next is denial of misconduct or proportionality of response.

The narcissist would do the most horrible things. He would steal your work. He would sleep with your wife or girlfriend. He would forge documents. He would lie to your face. He would do, he would go behind your back. He would backstab you. He would bat-mouth you. He would do the most incredibly immoral and in many cases illegal things.

And yet he would deny them in the face of hard evidence. He would still deny this, his misbehavior or misconduct. He would try to reframe it, perhaps, as justifiable because he is on a moral crusade or God knows what. He would invent a narrative that would convert the misconduct into proper conduct, moral conduct, laudable and commendable conduct, etc.

But it would still be misconduct, of course.

A narcissist would also contest the proportionality of the response. A narcissist may say, "Yeah, well, you know, I have done it. I have done this, but I think the response was out of proportion. I didn't deserve this. I've been victimised. It's wrong what the other party did to me. I have wronged the other party in maybe it's debatable. I don't think so, but maybe, but in any case, the other party's reaction was out of bounds and totally insane and unjustified and I've been discriminated against and I've been maltreated and it's horrible what's been done to me.

Totally ignoring, neglecting and denying what had triggered this cascade of events. The original sin, the primal sin, the narcissist's misconduct on his behavior.

The narcissist engages in grandiose ostentatious morality. He's a hero. He's a rescuer. He's a savior. He's a healer. He's a fixer. Whatever he does, even if it's patently, immoral and possibly criminal and illegal, whatever he may do, whatever he does, it's all in the name of ethics and morality and And he is selfless. He's not doing any of this for himself, God forbid. It's not about revenge. It's not about some lowly instinct or drive. No way, no serene. He is prosocial. He is communal.

Anyone who comes with these BS stories is a narcissist.

A narcissist would also try to explain his misconduct and his misbehaviour in terms of, "I have been baited. I have been tempted. I have been entrapped. I have been seduced. I have been coerced. I have been brainwashed and entrained. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't recognize myself. I broke my own principles and boundaries.

Someone made me do it. He made me do it. The victimizer, the abuser made me do it. Anyone who resorts to these idiotic excuses is a narcissist.

Next, the narcissist never apologizes, never assumes responsibility, never acknowledges guilt, never tries to make amends, never agrees to discuss even the outstanding issues, never provides closure.

Real victims do.

And finally, automatism. The narcissist is an autopilot. He never reflects on his behavior. He never analyzes it. He never synthesizes his lessons. He is not introspective. He is incapable of seeing himself. He sees only others and only in a way which is self-justifying and conducive to ego-syntony.

The narcissist engages in automatism because automatism, being an autopilot, prevents him from introspection, allows him to not engage in any soul-searching.

So narcissists would react automatically. They have stock phrases. They have regular sentences. They have habitual words and behaviors and they would go through them as if they were robots, badly programmed robots.

Many of you know such people. They are online, as self-styled experts, as coaches, as victims, as empaths, they are offline, as your colleagues, as your friends, as your girlfriends or boyfriends or spouses or intimate partners or they are all over.

I've just given you the tools to tell apart narcissists from real victims.

Real victims occupy reality. They are alert and aware of nuances. They have dignity. They seek resolution and real solutions. They accept responsibility for their contributions to their own predicament. They learn lessons. They modify their behaviors. They grow. They evolve. They learn.

Perhaps the best sign that someone is a narcissist is that the same thing keeps happening to him time and again.

It's as if the narcissist has learned nothing from previous replays, identical replays of the same cloned events.

A narcissist who goes online and says, "I have had three girlfriends and they all did this to me."

Well, it means you are incapable of learning. You are incapable of growth. You are incapable of evolution and personal development.

And this is typical only of narcissists, never of real victims.

Remember this and apply this from now on to all your interactions with everyone around you.

And now to the more detailed presentation, replete with examples.

Here is something to boggle your mind.

Every narcissist overt, covert, dead or alive, claim to have been a victim or at the very least to have been victimised, discriminated against, trained, set up, treated unjustly, abrasively, harshly.

Every narcissist says this, no exception.

How on earth can we tell the difference between narcissists posing as victims and real victims?

Now, mind you, here's the problem.

Narcissists truly and honestly perceive themselves as victims.

They're not acting, they're not lying, they're not gaslighting, they're not faking.

They truly, honestly, profoundly, deeply, irrevocably, and you know that I can continue for another half an hour, firmly believe their own confabulation, their own narrative, their own fantasy, their own storyline in which they are the hapless victims of malevolent, malicious, dark, malign, evil forces out there.

So how can you tell the difference?

I'm going to teach you a few ways.

These are kind of tests to tell apart a real victim from a narcissist who believes himself to be a victim.

Of course, when I say he, it's a she, when I say him, it's a her, etc., etc.

Half of all narcissists nowadays are women. Women's lib. Equality is upon us.

And for those of you who are lucky enough, fortunate enough, do not know who I am. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love and Narcissism Revisited. I am a former visiting professor of psychology and a current member of the faculty of CIAPS.

So let's delve right into the quagmire and swamp of victimhood.

Narcissists always claim to be victims and they're very convincing. They're very convincing. They're charming, they're outgoing, they put on a facade of compassion and affection and empathy and so on.

And you buy into their stories. Many of them pose as co-dependence, as victims of narcissistic abuse, as victims of generalized abuse, as post-traumatic people in the throes of post trauma. Many of them go online and kind of merchandise their victimhood. Many of them compete.

So there's a phenomenon of competitive victimhood. And many of them are so convincing that this has become their identity, their badge of honor. They are the perennial, well-known, famous victims.

And that's how they're judged. Even though a substantial minority, perhaps even a majority of them, are actually narcissists and especially covert narcissists. But not only.

How to tell which is which.

Here are a few tests.

Number one, splitting. A narcissist would engage in splitting, which is a primitive infantile defense mechanism.

Splitting says, "I'm all good. They are all bad. I've never done anything wrong. I've been wronged all my life.

Having introspected, having interrogated myself, having so searched, I discovered that I'm blemishless. I'm flawless. I am 100% on the high moral ground. There's nothing wrong with me. And I've never done anything wrong to anyone.

This all or nothing, black or white, all good, all bad, all angels, all demons, this kind of thinking is known as splitting or dichotomous thinking. And it is typical only of narcissists.

Real victims don't have this.

So many, many, many of the so-called empaths of coaches who pretend to be co-dependence and victims of self-styled experts who claim to have been victims of narcissistic abuse.

Many of these people are actually narcissists because they engage ostentatiously, conspicuously, visibly and publicly in massive acts of splitting.

Only narcissists split.

Remember that victims never do.

Victim, rape victims have a much more nuanced perception of reality. They are much more attuned to the gray zone, to the gray area between the black and the white, to the fact that people are not all bad and never all good, that life is a complicated proposition, that things happen even to the best of people.

So, real victims have a much more realistic grasp of the process that had led to their victimization. As I said, much more nuanced, not so with narcissists.

Second test, non-discrimination. Non-discrimination is simply every girlfriend I've ever had has betrayed me, abused me, destroyed me, abandoned me, cheated on me, killed me and my dog. Every girlfriend, there has never been a single exception. All of them, no exception, have done this to poor me.

And by the way, the element of self-pity is an awarding sign. If you spot self-pity, that's a narcissist.

Victims have dignity. Victims don't pity themselves. They're angry sometimes, but self-pity is a hallmark of a narcissist, especially a covert narcissist.

Covert narcissists don't engage in self-pity, but covert do.

So, there is this self-pitying tone, you know? All my girlfriends were horrible to me. All my spouses, all my business partners, they victimized me, they discarded me, they treated me harshly. I was so good to them. I gave them everything. I gave them love. I gave them money. I gave them sex. I gave them this. They just keep victimizing me. Everyone keeps victimizing me. Poor me. Please, I'm so in need of compassion and empathy and so on and so forth.

It's a manipulative technique, a narcissistic manipulative technique.

Beware, if you see anyone whose narrative, whose story is that everyone in his life has victimized him, everyone, and that he has done nothing to deserve this and he self-pities and shares this self-pity with you.

But in accepting where there are certain positive outcomes, certain goals. So, for example, a narcissist would share his story with you because it gets him views on YouTube. Or he would share this story with you because it would make him some money. Or he would share this story of victimization and self-pity with you because it would get him laid. He would get him to have sex.

So narcissists, exactly like psychopaths, in this sense, are goal-oriented. Non-discrimination goes hand in hand with goal orientation.

You see something like that? Be very, very, very suspicious. Do not give the benefit of the doubt. It's 99.9% a narcissist.

Next, alloplastic defenses. It's everybody's fault, never mind. None of this is my fault. Everything that has ever happened to me is not my fault. I'm a poor victim. I'm a poor codependent. I am a lamb. I didn't see it coming. I am so innocent and pure of heart. I'm so giving and so caring and so amazing and so loving and so this and so compassionate and so empathic and so warm-blooded and so I don't know what.

And you see what they're doing to me? You see none of it is my fault. I'm not responsible. I contributed nothing to my repeated predicament. Nothing.

This is called alloplastic defense. Alloplastic defense is when you keep blaming others all the time. Even when you have misbehaved egregiously, even when your misconduct screams to high heaven, it's still never, ever your fault.

You want to figure out if someone is a real victim or a narcissist? Listen to him. If he never, ever says, "I'm sorry. I did something wrong." It was partly my fault. I contributed to it somehow. I accept responsibility, accountability. I am learning to recognize myself and my involvement in all this.

If he never says, "I'm sorry." That's a narcissist. If he never says, "It's partly my fault." That's a narcissist. If he never accepts responsibility or his contributions to whatever has happened, that's a narcissist.

Real victims go through thorough, functional, healing, self-soul searching. They recognize their contributions and their involvement, the wrong choices they've made, the bad decisions, and they vow to themselves to never repeat.

But the narcissist? No way. He just happened to be there in the wrong time and the wrong place. At the wrong place, that's all. None of it is ever his fault. None of it.

Yeah, well, he did, you know, he did misbehave here and there. He did steal. He did, you know, forge. He did do all kinds of things which happened to be anything between immoral and illegal.

But so what? He did not deserve to be victimized. His own bad behavior is never acknowledged and he never expresses remorse or regret ever. That's a great sign of a narcissist.

Real victims never do, never behave this way. Never.

And the last thing I would say, although there are quite a few others, but the last thing is automatism.

The narcissist has at his disposal, ready-made phrases, responses, answers, whole texts, and so on.

So whenever the narcissist is confronted with a situation, he goes on, he goes on automatic pilot, autopilot. So whenever something bad happens to the narcissist, automatically he says, I've been a victim, I've been victimized, I'm codependent, I'm helpless, I'm traumatized, I'm, you know, it's not my fault.

And that's it. It's automatic.

He never bothers to go deep. He never bothers to really think. He never bothers to introspect. He never bothers to analyze. He never bothers to synthesize. He never bothers to truly consult others. He doesn't really consult others. He goes through the motions very often, but in order to self justify, and he blocks out any information that contradicts his self justifying, alloplastic narratives.

It's never my fault. I'm always the victim. I'm codependent and I'm traumatized. I'm helpless. I am, and therefore I am prayed, I fall prey to malicious malevolent predators out there.

They are all bad. I am all good. So I have nothing to apologize for. None of my behaviors has been wrong. I've never done anything wrong, ever.

And that's me, that's anosicist. Period.

Come across someone like that. That's anosicist.

And never mind how eloquent he is, how charming he is, how attractive he is, how well versed he is in the lore of victimhood. That's anosicist.

Simply anosicist. Peel your eyes. Pierce and penetrate the facade. Have a really look at the person and ask yourself, is this human being on the screen or next to me or my workplace or my family, is this person real or is it an act? Is this person a victim or is it anosicist claiming to be a victim?

And I've just provided you with four tools to answer this question. So make good use of them.

Good use of them.