Secret of Winner Narcissists: Stupidity (with Daria Zukowska, Clinical Psychologist)

And finally, we live in a culture that rewards both narcissism and stupidity, culture that glorifies and glamorizes the traits and the behaviors of narcissists, such as ambition, competition, ruthlessness, callousness, dysempathy, and so so forth.

A culture that also elevates dumbness and stupidity.

Ignorance is considered to be chic. Learning and erudition are for nerds.

And so in this kind of culture, stupid marstices would rise to the top, of course, because they combine both traits, both traits that are perceived as a positive adaptation, not a maladaptation. Culture and civilization, our postmodern environment encourages narcissists to decide. We are gravitating towards a narcissistic psychopathic civilization, in which, of course, narcissists would define our values and assign roles and govern and serve as role models to be emulated and imitated. It's already the case in various spheres. For example, the likes of Andrew Tate in the field of budding masculinity among young men. Similarly, Donald Trump has an appeal among young, uneducated men. And of course, Elon Musk is considered to be a genius, although I repeat, he's probably one of the dumbest people I've ever witnessed. This is the world we live in, counterfactual, fantasy-based, catering to the dumb and to the narcissists, to the narcissists. And so, welcome. And now, finally, listen to what Dahlia and I have to say. I think there are three social trends which converged and gave rise to narcissism as an organizing principle or an ideology of the masses or a religion even. The first trend is what the sociologist Campbell, he said that we have transitioned from a society of dignity to a society of victimhood. So now everyone wants to be a victim. Victimhood pays. Victimhood explains the world. Victimhood makes sense of one's life. Victimhood provides direction. Victimhood imposes obligations on other people and benefits the victim.

So victim would today is the name of the game. This is the first thing. The second thing is the transition from work to entertainment.

When you are embedded in reality, work is the main activity. When you're embedded in reality, work is the main activity. When you're embedded in fantasy, entertainment is the main activity. When you're embedded in reality, education is a major activity. When you're embedded in fantasy, all kinds of nonsense are the main activity. It doesn't have to be education, misinformation, fake news, just pure nonsense. So there is this transition from reality to fantasy, but together with this transition, we also have a transition from realistic activities to fantastic activities. So today, for example, Generation Z, there are many studies, many, many, from Vietnam to United States and so. Generation Z regards work as a bad thing, unnecessary evil. And the main orientation, the main wish, the main dream, is to travel all over the world, to have fun, to play video games six to eight hours a day, these are the statistics, to watch Netflix or something else, it's entertainment. The main emphasis is on entertainment. You work so that you have enough money to entertain yourself.

And that's why we have the gig economy, short-term temporary work, not any investment in career and so on. So work is evil, entertainment is good. Because entertainment became the core feature of modern life, entertainers took over the world. the core feature of modern life. Entertainers took over the world. Donald Trump is an entertainer. Zelensky is an entertainer. Ronald Reagan is an entertainer. They're all entertainers. They're actors.

There is no distinction anymore between entertainment and reality, because entertainment nowadays is reality. However, work is evil, a vicious work is exploitative, work is negative, so there is an attempt to not work as much as possible. Idleness. There's a glorification and ideology of idleness, of laziness, of indolence. This is the second thing. And the last thing I want to mention is the abolition of gatekeeping. In the past, in the past, when you wanted to do anything meaningful, you had other people tell you whether your work was valuable or not. If you wanted to publish a book, you had to go to a publishing house. In the publishing house, there was an editor, sometimes two or three editors. They read your book and they told you, we're sorry, your book is trash. We're not going to publish it. Or your book is great. We're going to publish it.

Similarly, if you wanted to publish analysis in the newspaper, or if you wanted to make a movie, or if you wanted to get elected, to get elected as a politician, whatever you wanted to do that had any impact on other people, you had to go through mediators. There was a process of mediation. There was a process of gatekeeping. There was a key, someone at the gate.

Today, we destroyed all the gatekeepers. And there's a process of disintermediation.

In other words, today you can do whatever you want, never mind the impact on other people, never mind the quality of your work, never mind whether you know what you're talking about or you don't know what you're talking about, nothing.

Even academic publishing is mostly non-peer reviewed. Most academic publishing nowadays is not peer-reviewed, as used to be the case until 20 years ago.

So everyone is doing whatever they want. They publish books, make movies, publish academic articles and so on, without any supervision, without any quality control, without any context, without any real knowledge.

When you put the three together, victimhood, lack of gatekeeping, so that essentially you can do anything you want, and the decline of reality and realistic activities like work and education.

When you put the three together, you get a fantasy space where you can tell yourself, you can create a narrative of yourself that has nothing to do with reality and yet is convincing.

In the past, if I created a narrative of myself that was not convincing, that was counterfactual, other people would laugh at me. The gatekeepers would keep me away from the gate. I would be humbled. I would be made aware that my self-narrative, my self-concept is crazy, is stupid.

But today, I can create any narrative of myself that I want. There is nobody there to tell me or other people that my narrative is fallacious, wrong, stupid, crazy.

So there is no vetting of narratives. All narratives are equal.

Tomorrow I come and say, I am, I don't know, the son of the president. And there's no real media, there's no reality principle like Freud called it.

And when you spoke about that, I've got this feeling that it's about reality testing. No one is right now testing anything. So because it's a fantasy.

So I think this is about narcissism. And when you're trying to test, yeah, you will find that someone can stop your push or like, don't do that because you cannot test when someone is a narcissist, right?

So I've tried once and I was like blocked.

I just, you know, publicly asked one woman like, do you have any degree on psychological field or something that you are treating people? I was blocked and she just sent me a message like, we can speak privately. I said, I don't want to speak privately with you. I'm asking a question that it's for other people and that's it. So, you know, one question, I just want to check reality. And that was it.

It is even worse. In the majority of cases, the answer would be, who cares?

Who cares?

I care.

I still care, right?

Sorry?

I still care.

You care.

Nobody cares.

Nobody cares.

Yeah.

Nobody cares.

Nobody cares if you have a degree or don't have a degree.

People ridicule universities. They mock education. They think education is stupid. They think universities are biased. They think these are political tools. They think there are biased. They think these are political tools. They think there is attack on intelligentsia, attack on the intellect, attack on expertise, on knowledge, onerudition, on education.

These are enemies now. These are targets of narcissists.

Because narcissists are incapable of all this. They are trying to take it down. They're trying to take these things down.

That's why I think you're talking.

Because what does the narcissists do? The narcissist, what is a narcissist? The typical narcissist.

A typical narcissist is someone who created a fictitious narrative, a counterfactual narrative, totally, total fiction, about himself.

This fictitious narrative is known as grandiosity. It is a cognitive distortion, it is not real, it impairs reality testing, but it's a story. The narcissist tells you a story about himself.

And this story is evidently fantastic, completely fantastic. But the narcissist believes in it.

And now if all narcissists together create a common space, they will agree not to challenge each other. They will agree that your narrative is as good as any narrative. It doesn't need to be tested. It doesn't need to conform to reality. It doesn't need, you know, so you have moral relativism and you have truthism.

Truthism means your opinion is as important as any fact.

Did I tell you the story once that in a forum, what happened to me in the forum?

I was in a forum and one guy said, the Battle of Hastings was in 1066. Battle of Hastings is a famous date in the history of United Kingdom. In 1066.

Another guy said, no, it was 1093.

And the guy, the first guy, made a screenshot of the Britannica, the Encyclopedia Britannica, where it says 1066.

And of course it was 1066.

1066.

And the other guy, the second guy said, well, that's your opinion. My opinion, it was 1093.

And this is known as truthism. That means there's not truth anymore. Your opinion is the truth. Your opinion is a fact. End of story. No need to, no ability to check. In Britannica, in Second Opinia, Britannica, you cannot trust them because they're making money, because intellectuals and scientists and so on are corrupt.

That's why people didn't trust medical doctors in COVID. They said that medical doctors were bribed by the pharmaceutical companies.

There is a total collapse of trust in institutions, in expertise, in knowledge, in universities, and in gatekeepers, it's total collapse of trust.

And this is also narcissism, because narcissists, they know they're lying, they know they're faking, they know they are deceitful, so they think everyone is the same way. They think everyone is like them.

So that's why they suspect everyone.

That's why when they're asking, okay, what you're speaking, I can hear but give me the proof, give me the, you know, some data or something.

And even if I will send this, the person is answering to me, this is not true, this is fake.

And I'm like, okay, so it's okay, it's your choice also and it's mine.

But this thing that you mention about, this gatekeepers, that they were, the people, they showing what is reality exactly and what it's not where is value and where it's not that's why sometimes it was a group not one person but a group to you know make some conclusion this is I think the main thing that we are struggle, that because the society is so narcissistic, we cannot do reality testing because you've got, you have to have healthy ego that has this function and narcissists doesn't have that.

So everything, what you said, it is absolutely amazing. Thank you for that because I think it's connecting everything what you said before with what we are struggling right now.

So yeah, thank you for that.

I think we can conclude by saying that narcissists are shaping the world in their image.

The narcissist is, for example, the narcissists is fake, so he believes that everyone is fake, so he's creating a fake world.

The narcissist is aggressive, so everyone is aggressive, it's aggression.

The narcissist shapes the communal space, the common space, to reflect himself. It's an extension of himself.

Narcissists always regard other people and environment as extension. They have only internal objects. They regard everyone as extension.

So if I'm fake, everyone is fake. And if everyone is fake, I have to suspect everyone. I cannot believe anyone. I cannot believe the Britannica. I cannot believe the university. I cannot believe professors. I cannot believe anyone. I cannot believe the Britannica. I cannot believe the university. I cannot believe professors. I cannot believe scientists. I cannot believe medical doctors.

Because if I'm faking it, they're faking it also.

They're also fake.

And all these so-called science and so-called knowledge and this is also bullshit. This is all for money. This is all corrupt.

So they are undermining the foundations of reality because they can thrive only in fantasy. Only in fantasy.

Absolutely.

Thank you for that. That's, I think, showing a lot what is going on on the surf.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you and take care.

So hello everyone and hello Professor Sam Vaknin.

Hello, it's good to see you.

Thank you, Darya. Good to see you again.

So Professor Sam Vaknin, the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism, Revisited, an amazing book that I highly recommended to.

And the owner of Minnie. Don't forget.

I do apologize.

And the owner of Minnie. Yes.

****REDACTED

You should apologize to Minnie, not to me.

Sorry, Minnie.

So I would love to speak with you about, I think, one really interesting topic.

Why some narcissists are so successful while others are complete failures and losers some. Why is that?

Because there are various different types of narcissists.

You have regular narcissists, overt, grandiosenarcissists. You have covert narcs. You have prosocial, communal narcissists. And you have malignant, psychopathic narcissists.

So we cannot generalize and use the word narcissists. Depends which variant you are, like COVID, you know, which variant you are.

So, for example, some narcissists are charismatic. They project an image of self-confidence. They give the impression that they know where they are going. They have a plan.

And so people follow them and they become leaders. The charismatic narcissist is typically an overt, grandiose narcissist.

But a much more successful variant is the psychopathic narcissist.

The psychopathic narcissist is goal-oriented.

In other words, the psychopathic narcissist indeed has a plan and implements the plan and is capable of pursuing his goals and accomplishing them.

So the psychopathic part in malignant narcissism renders the narcissists successful because he is focused on goals and is able to attain the goals.

Similarly, the pro-social or communal narcissists is a kind of narcissists that is able to construct coalitions. He is able to work in a team. He has the team building capacity.

The majority of narcissists cannot work with other people. They regard other people as stupid, inferior. They hold other people in contempt. They're very obnoxious, they're abrasive, they're rude, they're arrogant.

So most narcissists, the majority of narcissists, cannot work with other people successfully, even when they try.

After a while, they create conflict in the workplace and there's a mess.

The pro-social communal narcissists is able to put on a mask of friendliness, empathy, morality, ethics, communality.

And so people gravitate towards this kind of narcissists. They believe in him, they trust him, they follow him, not necessarily as a leader, but at least as a colleague.

So he's able to put teams together and to accomplish again, to accomplish goals.

And finally, we have to mention the, so this is in a nutshell, yes.

Covert narcissists, for example, are unable to accomplish goals. Covert narcissism is a compensatory reaction to constant failure. The covert narcissists constantly fails. He is in a state known as collapsed narcissism.

So because the covert narcissist constantly fails, he compensates by becoming passive aggressive, envious, and so on, and never accomplishes his or her goal.

So covert narcissists are always losers.

Oh, okay.

Majority of narcissists are also losers. Ultimately, they self-destruct. Ultimately, everything they build goes down the drain. Ultimately, they lose all their friends, all their family, all their relationships. They remain alone. And so on. So majority of narcissists are failures.

But as I said, there are these variants, these small percentages, small fractions of narcissists who are successful.

I think the last thing we need to take into account is the culture.

The culture, the social mores, social norms, civilization and values.

So in a society that is essentially narcissistic, a society that values accomplishments, achievements, ambition, a society that teaches you to be competitive, a society that underestimates empathy and regardsemotionsas weaknesses. In this kind of society, of course the narcissist would thrive and succeed.

Each society rewards members of the society that uphold and reified, that embody the values.

So if you have a society that values intelligence, then intellectuals would be the elite. Intellectuals would be successful. If you have a society that values money, rich people would be successful.

And if you have a society, like today's society, which is an idiocracy, it's a society ruled by and for very stupid people, dumb people.

In this kind of society, dumb people would be revered and elevated and admired and so on.

We have examples of people like Elon Musk, who is one of the stupidest, dumbest people I ever came across. And yet he's considered a genius.

Because in a dumb society, society where the stupid took over, the more stupid you are, the more successful you are.

Don't forget that stupid people are unable to gauge risk. They don't evaluate risk appropriately.

So stupid people take risks that other people who are more intelligent would never take. So their chances to succeed are much higher.

And yet the majority of stupid people are actually narcissists.

Narcissists are incapable of learning because they believe they know everything. Narcissists are incapable of evaluating other people appropriately because they don't do emotions, they don't do empathy.

So when we say stupid person, we can also say narcissists in majority of cases.

And so in this culture and civilization that we have now, the more stupid you are, the more risks you take, the more successful you become.

And we have the likes of Elon Musk or Donald Trump, Victor Orban in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia. These are seriously stupid people. And yet they are universally considered gods.

Why?

Because they embody, they reifying the values of our society. And our society elevates ignorance, elevates stupidity.

Today, if you're intellectual, if you're a scientist, if you're educated, if you're intelligent, then society rejects you. People, the vast majority of the masses, they hate intelligent people. They hate intellectuals.

And so the narcissists fit in because narcissists never really study. They never invest seriously in their work. They improvise. They fake. They pretend. They lie. They deceive. And they're stupid because they're incapable of learning.

And this is the perfect profile of the idols of this age. And that's why today narcissists are very successful.

Thank you for that.

And when I'm observing like many other people, you know, social media or just the word outside, it's difficult to seriously watch this.

What is going on and what values and what are people, what people creating right now, what videos or materials, you know, there is sometimes no values and stilla lot of people follow that.

So thank you for that because I think it's really important. It's not only between, you know, couplesa family members, but it's just going, you know, far much, yeah, far much away.

So, yeah, I would like to make a comment. Narcissism is concerned with two things. Image, impression management, appearances, not substance, not what is real, but what appears to be real. Imitation, simulation, mimicry, that's one component of narcissism. And the second component of narcissism is narcissistic supply. Being able to convert people into sources of admiration, adulation, follow ship. We want people to follow you, to subscribe to you too.

So, narcissism is about these two components.

So anyone who would place emphasis on appearances and would maximize the number of followers or fans or voters or essentially would succeed in such a society. It's a narcissistic society. It's a narcissistic society. It's a narcissists succeed because they emphasize these two things. Anyone on the other hand who emphasizes education, expertise, authority, intellectual authority, the intellect and real knowledge, substance, and doesn't care much about how many people follow or how many people like or this kind of person is going to be a failure in our society. Because our society rewards and values, narcissists.

Today I could definitely say that narcissists took over. I think it's too late. I think narcissists took over. They're in charge. They're in charge of everything. They're in charge of politics. They're in charge of the economy. They're in charge of show business. They're in charge of entertainment. They're in charge of social media. Narcissists have taken over. And there is no going back. There's no going back. And so the question would become in the future, how come healthy normal people succeed? Not how come narcissists succeed, but how come healthy people succeed?

Yeah, thank you for that. And don't forget about our field, psychology. I can tell how many covered or not even, but narcissists are in a psychotherapy school or as a psychologist, many, many of them. And that was my second question. Narcissists, they are delusional. They cannot disconnect like, you know, from the reality. They cannot test reality properly. And still, they are more successful, they're all this healthy, normal people. Because, like you said, right? Why is that if they cannot, you know, test?

Because our civilization is based on fantasy, not on reality. Our current contemporary postmodern civilization is founded on the rejection of reality, the renouncing reality and the adoption and embrace of fantasy. Now there are no bigger experts in the world in fantasy than narcissists. They're the biggest experts in fantasy. So in a civilization that makes fantasy its foundation, of course, narcissists would rise to the top because they are much more adept at constructing fantasies, introducing you into the fantasy, getting you addicted to the fantasy, and giving you rewards within the fantasy, positive reinforcements via the fantasy. Everything we recently invent or construct, for example, social media or new technologies like the Metaverse and so on. All these technologies are fantasy-based. They're all fantasy-based. They all take you away from reality. If you are using Facebook and if you are using Instagram, then you have less time for reality. You have less time for your loved ones. You have less time for your family. You have less time for your friends.

The owners of social media, for example, the corporations that own social media, they don't want you to be in reality. They want to take you away from reality because every minute you spend in reality is a minute you don't spend on Facebook. And every minute you don't spend on Facebook is a dollar less for Zuckerberg. So of course Zuckerberg would have an incentive for you to be single, not have any intimate relationship, not be in touch with reality, and embedded in fantasy. He would have incentive to make this happen. And these technologies are not only fantasy based, but they empower the most negative effects. They empower envy. They encourage anger. They, above all, support stupidity.

The more stupid you are, the more likely you are to appeal to other stupid people. And the majority of people are dumb. That's a fact.

Actually, over the last 40 years, there's been a drop of 10 points in global IQ.

So, majority of people are becoming dumber and dumber.

Because IQ is like a muscle. It's like a muscle. You have to use it.

We are using it less and less, the intellect.

So we're becoming dumber and dumber.

The more dumb you are, the more appeal you have, the more you attract other dumb people. So it's a vicious circle.

It's a vicious circle because dumb people feed other dumb people, dumb information, and this dumb information makes the dumb people even more dumb, and they then gravitate towards even more dumb influences and so on.

The circle of dumbness, circle of stupidity, is unending and self-reinforcing.

And as I said, I keep saying stupidity and our conversations about narcissism.

So you could say, why do you keep mentioning stupidity? We are supposed to discuss narcissism.

Because narcissism is a form of stupidity. It's what I call pseudo-stupidity.

Narcissism is a form of stupidity.

The narcissist is divorced from reality, unable to understand other people, unable to learn, believes that counterfactually, delusionally, that he knows everything.

Narcissists are stupid, and stupid people are highly narcissistic.

It's a compensatory mechanism for stupidity.

So that's why I keep discussing stupidity.

Stupidity, I would say, is the symptom of narcissism. It's like temperature in the flu, when you have flu. It's the temperature, the fever. It's the fever.

So stupidity is the fever. The disease is narcissism.

And we have no way in my view to reverse this because there are two social processes that encourage narcissism and by implication stupidity.

The one is democracy, I'm sorry to say, and the other is technology.

The dumb people use democracy and use technology, abuse democracy and abuse technology, to impose their vastly inferior capacity on other people.

And to punish anyone who is intellectual, who is expert, who is knowledgeable, who is educated, and so on, we have entered a kind of dark ages again.

Thank you for this answer because I think it's explaining a lot and I have to admit. I'm scared when I'm observing this seriously because narcissism is a positive adaptation right now and this is really scary.

Yes.

That's exactly right.

Narcissism is not a maladaptation. It's actually a positive adaptation in today's society. It's very true.

So what could you tell to, let's say, healthy enough people how to cope with that? What can we do? Can we do something?

Narcissism is a great imitator, the greatest mimicry.

Narcissism is actually a form of simulation.

So narcissists imitate. So they imitate really empathic people. They imitate really prosocial and communal people, and they become pro-social communal narcissists.

It's an imitation. It's not really. It's a way to obtain supply by pretending that you are ethical, you're moral, you're empathic, you're loving, you're compassionate, you're altruistic, you're charitable. It's all a game, it's a play, it's acting.

Same with team building. The narcissist builds a team or has followers or has fans, but that's not real. Then it's a simulation of teamwork because ultimately the narcissist is the only one who decides and the narcissist punishes anyone who dares to disagree with him.

You can have a look at Donald Trump, for example, yes?

So similarly, charisma or image, the narcissist doesn't have real charisma or real image.

That is why we say in clinical psychology, we say that narcissists and psychopaths have superficial charm. It's not real charm, it's superficial, it's imitative, it's imitation.

So the narcissist acts charming and has charisma because he pretends that he is self-confident. He knows where he's going. He's going to lead you to a better place and so on so forth.

This is the key to surviving this world and confronting narcissists, the fact that they are imitators.

Because they are imitators, deep inside, narcissists know that they are impostors. They know that they are faking. They know it.

Even the most, I'm great, I'm amazing, I'm a genius, I'm a narcissist. Deep inside, he knows he's faking. He knows it's not true.

And this is the weapon. This is the weapon against narcissists to expose them, to simply expose them, to confront them and to expose them.

Once you confront and expose a narcissist, there is a process called narcissistic mortification.

And then the narcissist avoids you, completely avoids you, because narcissistic mortification causes extreme emotional dysregulation and suicidal ideation.

In other words, narcissistic mortification reduces the narcissist to a borderline state.

So this is very terrifying and painful and the narcissist avoids the source of narcissistic mortification.

All you have to do is confront the narcissist and prove that the narcissist expertise is fake, the narcissist's accomplishments are fake, so on, so forth.

And if you do that, you're likely to get rid of the narcissists. If you do that as an individual, you get rid of the narcissist individually. If you do it as a community or a collective or a group, you get rid of the narcissist as a collective or a community or a group.

But that's the only way to get rid of the narcissists.

Now you should expose, it's not enough to expose the narcissist generally. You should find out what is important to that narcissist. What is the locus of grandiosity?

So for example, if you have a narcissist who says that he is a genius, and you exposed that this narcissist, I don't know, committed a crime, that's not relevant. This will not create narcissistic mortification.

If the narcissist claims that he's a genius, you have to prove that he's stupid. If the narcissist claims that he's knowledgeable, you have to prove that he's ignorant. If the narcissist claims that he has many sexual conquests, he's super attractive, drop dead gorgeous, unbelievably irresistible, you have to prove that he's actually not having sex and being rejected all the time.

You have to focus on the locus of grandiosity.

If the narcissist says I'm altruistic and charitable, I'm a good person, I'm empathic and so on, you have to prove that he's actually evil, exploitative, and hurt many people.

You have to focus on the locus.

The mistake with Donald Trump, for example, is that they tried to expose him where it didn't matter to him. He couldn't care less. They said that he sexually assaulted women and that he falsified his books and he doesn't care. For him to falsify books and not to pay tax means you're clever, you're smart. For him to sexually assault women means you're dominant, your man, your macho.

So all these exposures added narcissistic supply, didn't take it away.

But Donald Trump thinks he's a genius exactly like Elon Musk. If someone were to expose that he's actually an idiot, exactly like Elon Musk who is also an idiot, if someone were to expose this, this would devastate them, this would demolish them, this would mortify them, and shockingly, they would withdraw from the public scene. You will never hear from them again.

However, no one is doing this.

No one is doing this partly, I think, because most other people are equally ignorant and uneducated and dumb and so on. There's no one there to do itknow.

Yeah, understandable. Thank you for that.

My last question was so what is the different how it works for overt and covert npd but you already answered this on the beginning.

Covert narcissists believe that they ought to be successful. They believe themselves to be special. And they think they should have been successful.

So they have alloplastic defenses. They say, I'm not successful because my boss envies me. Or because I'm surrounded by evil people. Or because society is structured wrongly. Or because I'm not appreciated enough in the workplace or because some institutions are after me.

So covert narcissism is often coupled a lot with paranoia, with paranoid ideation, and the covert narcissist becomes angry and bitter and passive aggressive and hateful and envious.

And so all these situations prevent, doesn't allow the covert narcissist to succeed. He is unable to work with other people because he's constantly envious of them. He is unable to pursue a goal because he has sabotages all the time. He believes himself to be superior when actually he is constantly proven to be inferior.

So the covert narcissist is never accomplished.

But unfortunately most other narcissists, especially as I mentioned, the malignant narcissists, prosocial, and so on, they are increasingly more and more and more successful.

To the point that in academia today, in academia today, in universities and so on, we have quite a few scholars, quite a few academics, who are glorifying narcissism. They're saying narcissism is an evolutionary adaptation. It's a good, positive evolutionary step forward. Narcissists are great leaders, they're great thinkers, they're risk takers, they're this, they're high-functioning narcissists.

And there is a whole literature and a whole industry of glorifying and glamorizing narcissists and psychopaths even, psychopaths as well.

And these academics believed that narcissism and psychopathy came about because evolution required it. It's a positive, it's a next step in evolutionary adaptation and ladder.

And so this gives a lot of fuel, a lot of ammunition to narcissists who are proud for being narcissists, then psychopaths who are proud for being psychopaths.

And we have a whole pride movement, pride movement of psychopaths, pride movements, or Nazi. It's becoming something to be proud of, to boast, to brag about it. You see people competing, I'm more psychopath than you. No, I'm more psychopath to you, you know, and so on so forth.

The values are changing. The values are simply changing.

And people like me are much older than you, but people like me and perhaps you, you were brought similarly. So people like us find it very difficult, very difficult because our values are perceived to be counterfactual, non-productive, stupid even, and so on.

Anything from reading books to honesty, to pursuing knowledge, to having real expertise, to all these are considered to be stupid. You're stupid if you do all these things.

In the current civilization, these perquisites do that. You fake it till you make it. You get rich quick. You know, if you just think about it, it will happen. The law of attraction, the secret, magical thinking.

There's a pathologizing of the value system. The whole value system is founded on mental health pathology.

True, the values are changing and I can tell how many these kind of topics I see, magical thinking, you just have to think and you will have everything what you want and you just have to seriously be focused on that, on the goal, money or whatever it is.

And yeah, it's difficult to watch this series.

Yeah. Reality became very, very difficult.

Reality is harsh. Reality is unbearable. It's intolerable.

So people escape from reality. People avoid it.

And if you're intelligent, you can escape to books, you can escape to history, you can escapeart and culture.

If you're intelligent, what do you do if you're not intelligent?

Then you escape to other non-intelligent people. You all go to the pub and have a beer, you know.

In history, intelligent people and non-intelligent people always were segregated. They were always separated.

In the 13th century, there was a big uprising in the town of Cambridge, against Cambridge University.

It was called the town versus gown.

The simple people who were uneducated attacked the professors and the students and killed many of them. And the professors and the students ran away and established Oxford.

It's nothing new. The stupid hate the educated, the stupid hate the intelligence. There's nothing new about this.

In every revolution in human history, intellectuals were assassinated. In the Russian Revolution, millions of intellectuals were assassinated and murdered, doctors, you know, you name it.

Always there is a cycle of the masses destroying the intellectual elites. Always. Always it's the masses versus the elite.

And we live now in a period where the masses took over.

They took over. Masses don't know how to manage things. They don't know how to accomplish results.

It will end very badly.

And when it ends badly, the masses retreat and the intellectuals take over to rebuild everything from zero.

And again, the masses takeover.

This is the cycle of human history.

Thank you for that. It's difficult to hear all of these answers and, yeah, to be and live in this kind of society right now, because we can observe seriously the changes that's happening. So thank you for this.

Think of it this way.

Narcissism is the ideology of the less educated, less intelligent, less accomplished, because narcissism gives them fantasy.

It is the new ideology, it is the new religion of the masses.

The masses have adopted narcissism because it gives them a way out of reality.

And reality is humiliating. Reality is difficult, and narcissism is the solution.

And I think this is a good point to stop and thank you so much for this knowledge. And lots of things that you said. It will be good to be with it and just to process.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not going to like this interview, I can tell you.

I love it.

So, thank you.

And thank you and thank you everyone and Merry Christmas to everyone.

Yes. Merry Christmas. Thank you. Thank you.