So, this is the second part of the two-part series about victims, victimhood, and how victims react as narcissists and psychopaths do.
They become temporary or transient narcissists and psychopaths.
Susan Isaacs wrote in her book, Magic Hour, I thought if I have a good and beautiful wife and nice kids and a comfortable house, I will be at peace. But I've got too much damage and too many needs. Putting a picket fence around me won't make me into a whole person.
And when you look at collective abuse, you see similar collective damage. And this collective damage, exactly like in individual narcissists, provokes narcissistic psychopathic reactions, behaviors, and traits.
In other words, victims who have been damaged for a very long time experience complex PTSD, which renders them effective narcissists and psychopaths.
As I said in the previous video, some victims emulate the misconduct of their abusers, they guilt rape, aggress, confabulate, manipulate, act entitled, and grandiose, and show marked decline in empathy.
And I mentioned the latest riots, and I said black lives do matter, no one is disputing this. There is a systemic discrimination, institutional animus towards black people, racism is rampant, slavery is horrendous, etc. Slavery was a near genocidal process that lasted four centuries and decimated blacks on four continents. And it's justified for whites to feel guilty. There's a collective guilt for all these atrocities.
Whites did to blacks fact, but blacks guilt rape the whites, they manipulate them by leveraging their guilt to obtain desired economic and political outcomes. And there's no question that certain individual whites egregiously misbehave and should be punished for their heinous crimes.
But by rioting destructively and indiscriminately, blacks are punishing all the whites as a collective exactly what the whites did to them.
And so today, what I in this portion, in this portion of the video, I would like to discuss racism.
And perhaps from a controversial or unusual point of view.
So what's new, Vaknin?
No, it's controversial.
Here we go.
Henry Willis Shaw wrote, the trouble with people is not that they don't know, but that they know so much that ain't so.
And so people are flooded with information. There's only that much that we can process. The nuances and fine distinctions between groups of people, most of which most of these groups feel entitled, demand special treatment, and so on.
So it's become too much. Political correctness reflects this weariness and this anxiety of being afraid to hurt someone, even unbeknownst to you by saying the most innocuous things.
Because everyone now belongs to some group or other. Everyone is a one person minority. And everyone has special rights, is unique by virtue of existing. And everyone is entitled and his rights which confer obligations on society to gratify his needs.
So it's a very, very tinderbox. Fractured, fragmented, non society, individual malignant individualism and atomization led to a situation where the only common denominator we all share is our predatory instincts.
Our instincts in trying to extract benefits from others via institutions or directly by rioting, for example. And so we have shortcuts because of the avalanche or tsunami of information, we have stereotypes.
The question is, do stereotypes usefully represent real knowledge? Or do they only reflect counterproductive prejudice, sometimes narcissistic prejudice, because many stereotypes are grandiose. The white man's burden. White man is superior to black people. It's more intelligent. Men are more intelligent than women. Nonsense, by the way.
And many, many stereotypes involve fear and weariness. So for example, today, men, big groups of men in the manosphere, men going their own way, red pillers, black pillers.
Today men have developed this theoreticized structured misogyny, which relies on total misunderstanding of insights from evolutionary psychology and so evolutionary sociology, anthropology.
And so these kind of stereotypes, stereotypes, they're defensive stereotypes. They're like women are perceived as alien lifeforms, very threatening, how to get you, how to exploit you, how to abuse and maneuver you. And women are better at leveraging institutions to support them. And so institutions are compromised as well.
So stereotypes have a tendency to ripple effect. They have a tendency, it's like concentric waves, you drop a stone, stereotypical stone, and then you have waves that would expand.
So if your stereotype has to do with women, instantaneously it will also stereotype institutions. If you believe that blacks are inferior, it reflects on your own superiority. So you become a stereotype. You create a stereotype of yourself as a white man.
Of course, Aryans who stereotyped Jews during the Nazi period, they also stereotype themselves, thereby assuming certain rights and obligations as a race.
And I will dedicate a special video to antisemitism, the most ridiculous stereotype of all.
But stereotypes are there. And the question is, should we discard the baby with the bathwater? Or do they contain a kernel, a core, something of real knowledge? Are they 100% prejudice or a mixture, 60% prejudice, 40% real knowledge?
We know that the disproportionate number of criminals in the United States are black. That's a fact, end of story. The vast majority of anti-Western terrorists are Muslim. Terrorists are not Jewish grandmothers. Last time I checked. And most criminals in the United States are not Jewish grandfathers.
So racial profiling is a powerful and justified and accurate tool based on knowledge. It's knowledge and evidence based. It reflects inalienable, indisputable statistics.
Is this a stereotype?
In light of these facts, racial profiling, which is considered to be a subspecies of stereotyping, appears to be rational, actually, ethically justified.
Or if you are a white supremacist, an act of self-defense.
But you can immediately argue that racial profiling is a post hoc ergo-popter hoc fallacy. In other words, does racial profiling cause the very crime and social malaise and ills that it is intended to counter?
In other words, is the reason that most criminals are black, is the reason that they are racially profiled? Does police brutality breed black crime? Or does black crime breed police brutality? Or is there any causal connection? Maybe there isn't.
I mean, there could be a third reason, a third overarching reason, which yields both police brutality and black crime.
But one is hard pressed to see a causal chain between racial profiling and black crime.
Yes, no one is disputing the fact, no one is disputing the fact that there's racism, embedded, reified, wired, hardcore racism in most police departments in the United States.
And that this racism, this racial bias, sometimes unconscious, leads to behaviors which are highly psychopathic and narcissistic, including a lack of impulse control, overt and dangerous aggression, etc.
No one is disputing this.
But this does not cause an effect here. There's not even correlation here.
Stereotypes invariably refer in a generalized manner to often arbitrary groups of people, usually minorities. Stereotypes don't necessarily have to be derogatory or cautionary. I mean, all stereotypes are.
You don't want to be at the receiving end of a stereotype usually. But they don't have to be.
Because for example, take the stereotype of a noble savage and compare it to the stereotype of a wild savage.
So in movies, for example, Indians are overwhelmingly drunk, treacherous, unreliable, and childlike. That's based on Ralph and Natasha Fryar, who wrote a wonderful book called The Only Good Indian, The Hollywood Gospel, published in 1972.
And so in most movies, they're like that. And that's the wild, uncontrolled, impulsive, infantile, ape-like savage.
But there's a group of Westerns, a group of movies, not a small one, especially in the 1950s, where Indians are portrayed as noble, as trustworthy, and as victims. And that's the noble savage, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's noble savage. That's also a stereotype.
And when you say the Jews know how to make money, that's a stereotype, not necessarily a negative one in capitalism. But when you say the Jews control the media and abuse it for their own ends and means, that's a negative stereotype.
So the same minority, the same minority group, can be the recipient of both negative and positive stereotypes. The same goes for blacks.
But let's go back to Native Americans. Both alcoholism among Native Americans, especially those crammed into reservations. So alcoholism among them is indeed more prevalent than among the general population.
Let me put it in a less gentle way. Most Native Americans are dead drunk most of the day.
By the way, statistically same applies to people in Finland. Finnish people are notorious for being drunk most of the day.
And many Russians I've met. The stereotype conveys true, and I would argue useful information, about inebriation among Indians.
But could the other descriptors be equally accurate, that they are treacherous, unreliable, childlike? It is hard to unambiguously define, let alone quantify, these kind of traits.
At which point does self-centeredness become egotism? At which point the pursuit of self-interest becomes treachery?
What precisely constitutes childlike behavior? For example, if you're curious about the world, that's very childlike, but it's wonderful. Some types of research cannot even be attended due to the stifling censorship of political incorrectness.
Endeavoring to answer a simple question like, do blacks in America really possess a lower IQ? And if so, is this deficiency hereditary?
You know, this simple question has landed many an American academic beyond the pale and fired. They lost their jobs.
Today there are numerous questions you cannot ask about blacks, about women, about Jews. I mean, academic freedom has been curtailed to the point that I would venture to say that most studies have become utterly sanitized and impotent.
The two most castigated aspects of stereotypes are their generality, their prejudice.
An academic today is producing actually stereotypes by outlawing certain questions.
In both criticisms of stereotypes, that they are general, too general, and that they are prejudiced, they're biased, both criticism, it is implied that there's a lack of veracity and that stereotypes are not rigorous.
But that's not necessarily true. There's nothing wrong with generalization per se. Science is constructed on obstructions from private case to general rule.
We see a multitude of private cases and we make a general rule.
In historiography, we use phrases like the Romans. What do you mean the Romans? They're like millions.
The ancient Greeks, we refer to them as a group where we say Nazi Germany, communist Russia, revolutionary France, or even the Chinese communist party. These are all forms of group speak. These are all generalization.
We can't have a meaningful discourse without generalization.
In an essay titled Helping Students Understand Stereotyping, and published in the April 2001 issue of Education Digest, countless protests suggest three differences between group generalizations and stereotypes.
He says, group generalizations are flexible. They're permeable to new countervailing knowledge. In other words, there's no confirmation bias.
Ideas, interpretations, and information that challenge or undermine current beliefs are open. Stereotypes are rigid. They're resistant to change, even in the face of compelling new evidence.
Second thing, says Cortes, group generalizations incorporate intra-group, internal group heterogeneity, while stereotypes foster intra-group homogeneity. So intra-group heterogeneity in group generalization, and intra-group between group homogeneity in stereotypes.
Group generalizations embrace diversity. For example, there are many kinds of Jews, tall, short, mean, generous, clever, stupid, black, white, rich, poor, and of course, narcissists.
Stereotypes cast certain individuals as exceptions or deviants. So stereotypes say the whole group is homogenous, but there are exceptions. So someone may say, listen, though you're Jewish, you don't behave as a Jew, you're different.
Or some of my best friends are black. So finally, while generalizations provide more clues about group culture and behavior, stereotypes purport to prefer immutable rules applicable to all the members of the group.
Stereotypes develop easily, rigidify surreptitiously, and operate reflexively, providing simple, comfortable, convenient basis for making personal sense of the world.
In other words, if you have a stereotype of blacks, you would think it applies to all blacks, all black individuals.
The group identity is identical to the individual identity.
And because generalizations require greater attention, content flexibility, and nuance in application, they do not provide a stereotype security blanket of permanent, inviolate, all-encompassing, perfectly reliable group knowledge, end of quote.
It is commonly believed that stereotypes form the core of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, other forms of xenophobia, etc.
So every phobia, every hatred of a group, every group hatred, supposedly the engine and the fuel are stereotypes.
Even when Freud discuss the narcissism of small differences, he said that people hate each other because they are similar, not because they are dissimilar, but even that's a stereotype.
When you say he is like me, it's a stereotype.
Stereotypes go to refrain, determine the content and thrust of prejudices, and propel their advocates to take action against minorities.
There is direct lineage, it is commonly held, between typecasting and lynching.
Like you start by typecasting, you say, I don't know, all blacks are lazy. You end up by hanging them from trees.
There's a direct line there. Almost one would say ineluctability, like you can't help it. It's a slippery slope.
You start by stereotyping, you end up by killing people.
It's like Heinrich Heines said, first you burn books, then you burn people.
It is also claimed that pigeon mooring reduces the quality of life, lowers the expectations and curbs the accomplishments of its victims.
If you stereotype blacks, you could strict their lives, you reduce their opportunities, you limit them in ghettos, mental ghettos.
The glass ceiling and the brass ceiling are pernicious phenomena engendered by stereotypes.
Determinations of women, in this case, the fate of many social policy issues such as affirmative action, immigration, immigration quotas, police profiling, gay service in the military, transgender, all these social issues are determined to a large extent by stereotypes rather than through informed scholarship or opinion.
USA Today magazine reported the findings of a survey of 1,000 girls in grades 3-12 conducted by Harris Interactive for Girls.
Roughly half the 1,000 girls who were studied, half the respondents, thought that boys and girls have the same abilities, but only one third of boys thought the same, so girls were more egalitarian.
A small majority of the girls felt that people think we are only interested in love in romance. Somewhat less than two-thirds of the girls were told not to brag about things they do well and were expected to spend the bulk of their time on housework and taking care of younger children.
So stereotypical thinking had a practical effect on these girls.
Girls who believe that they are as able as boys and they face the same opportunities are way more likely to plan to go to college, studies have shown.
But is it true?
This assumption that boys and girls are the same, identical, equal. Do boys and girls have the same abilities?
Unfortunately, it's a lie. It's nonsense. It's not true.
Boys, for example, are better at spatial orientation and math. Girls are better at emotions, networking, relationships, empathy.
Do girls face the same opportunities as boys? It would be perplexing if they did, taking into account physiological, cognitive, emotional and reproductive disparities, not to mention historical and cultural handicaps.
It all boils down to this politically incorrect statement. Girls are not boys.
And I have shocking news for all of you. Girls will never be boys. Luckily for boys.
And still there's a long stretch from girls are not boys to girls are inferior to boys.
I didn't say girls are inferior to boys. I said girls are not boys.
I personally actually think that women in today's environment are far better equipped, far better adopted than men. I think women are the future.
I think there's a transition of mastery, transition of husbandry, transition of control from men to women.
In this sense, I'm a feminazi, if you wish.
So it's not that I, but I would never, never say that girls are boys or exactly like boys, identical to boys, same like boys.
It's nonsensical, nonsensical, sentence, anti-scientific.
Girls are not inferior to boys. And of course, girls should not be discriminated against, should not be confined.
So much separates stereotypes and generalizations from discriminatory practice.
Discrimination prevails against races, genders, religions, people with alternative lifestyles, sexual preferences, ethnic groups, poor, rich, professionals, any other conceivable group. Discrimination is one group's way of protecting its turf, its prerogatives, its privileges, its access to resources against other encroaching groups.
And discrimination has little to do with stereotypes and a lot to do with societal and economic power matrices.
It's true that most races typecast blacks, Indians, Jews, Latinos, Hispanics, but typecasting in itself does not amount to racism, nor does it inevitably lead to racism or discriminatory conduct.
In a multi-annual study titled Economic Insecurity, Prejudicial Stereotypes and Public Opinion on Immigration Policy, this study was published by the Political Science Quarterly. And the authors, Peter Burns and James Gimple, substantiated the hypothesis that economic self-interest and symbolic prejudice have often been treated as rival explanations for attitudes, one of a wide variety of issues, but it is plausible that they are complementary on an issue such as immigration.
This would be the case if prejudice were caused, at least partly, by economic insecurity.
In other words, put simply, the poorer society is, or the greater the number of poor people in society, the more social friction and tension and unrest there is, you know, need to be a genius to get that.
I mean, social collapse and disintegration and social inequality led directly to all the major revolutions in human history, from the French Revolution to Adolf Hitler.
A long list of scholarly papers demonstrate how racism, especially among the dispossessed, dislocated and low-skilled people, racism surges during times of economic hardship or social transition.
You can safely expect a tsunami of racism following this pandemic.
Often there is racism, anti-Semitism. Often there is a confluence of long-established racial and ethnic stereotypes with a growing sense of economic insecurity and social dislocation.
Social identity theory tells us that stereotypical prejudice is a form of compensatory narcissism.
The acts of berating, demeaning, denigrating and debasing other people, these acts serve to enhance the perpetrator's self-esteem, to regulate their labile sense of self-worth.
It is stereotyping as a vicarious pride by proxy.
I can't be proud of myself as I am, so I'm proud of myself by comparison.
I may be a poor hillbilly redneck, but I'm still superior to the most superior black.
So I'm proud. I'm now grandiose.
Belonging to a self-styled, self-imputed elite group bestows superiority on all its members.
Not surprisingly, education has some positive influence on racist attitudes and political ideology, and the lack of education is a sure predictor of racism.
Having been entangled sometimes unjustly with bigotry and intolerance, the merits of stereotypes have often been overlooked, and yes, stereotypes have merits otherwise they would not have existed.
In an age of information overload, nutshell stereotypes encapsulate information compactly and efficiently, and thus stereotypes possess an undeniable survival value.
Admittedly, many stereotypes are self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling prophecies.
A young black man confronted by a white supremacist may well respond violently.
I would, and Hispanic, unable to find a job, may end up in a street gang.
So stereotypes are one thing, but discrimination guarantees behaviors which conform to stereotypes.
But this recursiveness does not detract from the usefulness of stereotypes as reality tests.
Stereotypes enhance a reality testing. They are serviceable prognosticators. They're good predictions.
Why?
Because blacks do commit crimes over and above their proportion in the general population. Blacks are also more sick with COVID-19. Pleasant facts, but true. And they're more sick with COVID-19 because institutionally they're discriminated against. Their healthcare system is crumbling, etc.
Doctors tend to mistreat black patients, or actually undertreat them.
But these stereotypes are true.
Though stereotypical in the extreme, it's a useful fact to know and act upon.
Racial profiling reflects this fact, however unpleasant.
Stereotypes are like fables. They are often constructed around middle-class morality. They are prescriptive. They split the world into the irredeemably bad. Other blacks, Jews, Hispanics, women, gay, transgender, and the flawlessly good, we, the purveyors of the stereotype.
While expressly unrealistic, the stereotype teaches what not to be, how not to behave.
So if you say Native Americans are drunk, the implication is you should not be drunk. If you say blacks commit crimes and are lazy, the implication is you should not commit crimes and it's not going to be lazy.
It's a morality play. It's a form of moralizing.
A byproduct of this primitive rendition is, of course, segregation.
A large body of scholarship shows that proximity and familiarity, hold on to your seats.
Proximity and familiarity, exactly as Sigmund Freud had predicted, actually polarize rather than ameliorate into ethnic and interracial tensions.
Do you remember Spike Lee's movie? Movies where the friction between whites, Italians, for example, than blacks, leads to massive volcanic eruptions of social pressure cookers?
Stereotypes minimize friction and violence.
How? By keeping minorities and the majority apart.
Segregation works, venting and wanting, substitute for vandalizing and worse.
Of course, in time, as erstwhile minorities are gradually assimilated and new ones emerge, conflict is averted. So segregation is a temporary measure. It should never be a long-term fixed policy. It should never become apartheid.
But in times of stress and friction, economic dislocation, segregation is not a bad idea.
Moreover, though they frequently reflect underlying deleterious emotions such as rage or envy or hatred.
Not all stereotypes are negative, as I said. Blacks are supposed to have superior musical and athletic skills. It's a stereotype. It's not negative.
Jews are thought to be brainier in science, shrewder in business. These are two complements, stereotypical complements. Hispanics uphold family values and ethnic cohesion as do Italians. Gay is sensitive and compassionate.
Stereotype, any gay would tell you.
And negative stereotypes are attached even to positive social roles. Athletes, for example, are dumb and violent. Soldiers inflexible and programmed like robots. These are stereotypes.
Stereotypes are selective filters. Supporting data is worded and information to the contrary is ignored.
And this phenomenon is known as confirmation bias. There's a silo of like-minded people, echo chamber.
One way to shape stereotypes into effective coping strategies is to bombard their devotees with exceptions, contexts and alternative reasoning.
So, for example, blacks are good athletes because sports is one of a few egalitarian career paths open to blacks.
The only way out of the ghetto is to become LeBron James. Becoming an NBA player is the only way out. Jews historically excluded from all professions. I mean, for the majority of the last 2000 years, Jews were not allowed to do anything but to lend money. They were not allowed to be farmers. They were not allowed to study universities and so on.
So, when the universities did open, Jews crowded into science and business and specialized. If gays are indeed more sensitive or caring than the average, perhaps it's because they have been repressed and persecuted for so long.
Athletes are not prone to violence. Violent athletes simply end up on TV more often.
And soldiers have to act reflexively and robotically to survive in battle. It's an automatic function. It's not driving.
There's nothing wrong with stereotypes if they are embedded in reality, if they promote the understanding of social and historical processes.
Western, multi-ethnic, pluralistic civilization celebrates diversity and the uniqueness and distinctiveness of its components. We are not trying to homogenize like in Mao's China. On the contrary, we want people to be different.
And stereotypes merely acknowledge this variety in diversity.
The US Today magazine reported in January a survey of 800 adults conducted by social psychology professors Amanda Dickman of Purdue University and Alice Iglie of Northwestern University. These two ladies found that, far from being rigid and biased, stereotypes regarding the personality traits of men and women have changed dramatically to accurately reflect evolving gender roles.
Dickman noted that, I'm quoting, women are perceived as having become much more assertive, independent and competitive over these.
Our respondents, whether they were old enough to have witnessed it or not, recognized the role change that occurred when women began working outside the home in large numbers and the necessity of adopting characteristics that equip them to be breadwinners.
So stereotypes evolve. We evolve. Stereotypes are part of us.
They're not external alien entities. They're the way we think about groups of people. And we always group people. As long as we regard people in groups, two member groups, two million member groups, two hundred million member groups, as long as we think in groups, our group, others groups, there will be stereotypes.
And it's a good thing.