It was fascinating and interesting that you just said before.
As you mentioned, is it a good question to tell people that don't be narcissistic?
What do you think? What's bad with narcissistic people? Where does it start to be a problem to be anarcissistic?
There are two major problems with narcissism. First of all, it's a religion, and second thing, it's a zero- sum game.
I'll explain both.
Start with zero- sum game, it's easier to understand.
For the bulk, the overwhelmingly vast majority of our existence as a species, we have collaborated. Teamwork helped us to survive. So we hunted together, we gathered together, then we created agriculture together, and culture is impossible without collaboration, literally impossible. Then we created cities. Cities are the material reification of cooperation and collaboration.
And so on and so forth. And of course, international trade, any human activity is premised on cooperation and collaboration.
Narcissists are incapable of true cooperation and collaboration, because narcissists see the world as a zero- sum game.
Your loss is my game. My loss is your game. If you, if another person wants to win, I have to lose. If I want to win, someone has to pay the price.
That's a zero- sum game. Narcissists see the world as a jungle, where only the fittest survive and don't eat dog.
They cannot conceive of true, they can collaborate for a short period of time to obtain goals. But even this collaboration is with the intention of discarding the collaborators and taking over the fruits of the collaboration.
So we are, for the first time, to best of my knowledge, for the first time in human history, we are at a phase where technology makes people self-sufficient. Technologies have reached the point where we no longer need other people.
Absolutely not. We can survive completely on our own. 50 years ago, you wanted to publish a book, you needed a TV program, you needed a studio, you wanted to broadcast on radio, you needed a, you know, today we can do everything with this smartphone. For example, we have more computing power in a typical smartphone than all of NASA had in the early 1970s. All of NASA, the Space Administration of the United States in your smartphone, we are gods, we have become gods, we are empowered, and we don't need each other anymore.
Collaboration and cooperation are collapsing worldwide. We see it in the workplace, for example, while 50 years ago self-employment was unheard of. Today, actually, in the United States, 60 to 70 million people are self-employed out of a workforce of 140 million, about half.
We see it in the family. About 40% of women in quite a few industrialized countries don't bring children to the world as a choice, as a decision. Marriage has collapsed completely and constitutes less than one- third of relationships, and so on and so forth.
All forms of collaboration and cooperation have vanished, or are vanishing.
And of course, all the institutions that we had constructed premised on collaboration and cooperation, all these institutions are also collapsing. We can't even maintain a relationship with one individual. I'm not talking about families. One individual, one.
We fail at that repeatedly, all the time. We can't anymore. We have become too malignantly individualistic, malignantly selfish, and so on.
And this is the narcissist world. This never leads to good outcomes. Why? Because zero-sum games create a majority of losers and a minority of winners, naturally. That's the natural state of the world.
Wise societies, clever societiesredistribute power and redistribute wealth so that the number of losers is always smaller than the number of winners.
Narcissistic societies do exactly the opposite. They go to the losers and they take even what the losers have.
Sothe winners push the losers to lose more and more and more. That's why we have income inequality of this magnitude never before in human history. The 10,000 richest people in the world, not 10 million, not 100 million, 10,000 richest people in the world have the same amount of money as the rest of humanity. Shocking number. The 100 richest individuals in the United States, 100, not 100,000, 100 richest individuals in the United States have as much money as all the blacks, all the Hispanics and 15 million whites.