The Idiocracy Bible: Stupidity for a New Age (Compilation)

The problem is we have let the stupid and the weak take over the world.

The survival of the species depends on going back from these, I mean reversing these pernicious trends.

The humanity is under imminent threat of being overrun by idiots, deluded by imbeciles and submerged by a tidal wave of retardation.

Just have a look at YouTube comments.

We often confuse technology with culture and civilization with progress.

Nazi Germany is proof that such reflexive linkages, they're fallacies, they're wrong.

His Nazi Germany was at the top of the game when it came to technology and considered itself a prime form of civilization.

After all, they are the ones who gave the world Goethe and Kant and Schopenhauer.

And so culture, technology, they are not guarantees against barbarism. Nazi Germany is the proof.

In truth, we have become barbarians with iPhones. We use the latest innovations to play angry birds or whatever it is you're playing nowadays. We watch inane videos on YouTube. We exchange trivialities on Instagram and Facebook.

We have sunk really, really low.

I know because I have a historical perspective, I've spent 60 years or 50 years, or 56 years to be precise, reading history books. We are really at the low point of human history.

Traits are not desirable or undesirable in themselves. They're advantageous, adaptive or detrimental, depending on the context, on the environment.

And so today we have studies that show that women prefer men with low IQ than men with high IQ. There's a preference developing, an adaptive preference, evolutionary adaptive preference, developing for stupid people.

Women are the barometer, the seismograph, of social trends.

They follow the winners, because they have to raise children, they have to take care of social trends. They follow the winners because they have to raise children, they have to take care of a family.

So you want to see where society is going? Have a look at women first. How they act? Not what they say. And women choose low brow stupid men.

In a series of studies, for example, with hundreds of thousands of women, women said that they prefer men with an IQ lower than 120 to men with IQ higher than 145.

These are the results of a study published two years ago.

Why is that? Why women prefer stupider men for the first time in human history?

Because our contemporary world is ruled by the feeble-minded. Dimwits are empowered by technology.

Everything is dumped down to foster mass consumption, to become easily digestible morsels, soundbites.

Women look around and they see that the stupid, the stupid, become presidents of the United States of the Philippines of Brazil and they say to themselves well whatever it takes the stupid are taking over if you can't beat them join them so they begin to develop a preference for the stupid.

In such a world, lower intelligence is a positive adaptation and advantage. Stupidity confers evolutionary advantages on stupid people, and on the spouses of stupid people and the stupid offspring of stupid people.

Women select for stupid men and for beta males, by the way, because the current environment favors these traits.

It is a paradigm shift of mind-blowing, mind-bending proportions for those in possession of a mind, of course.

A study of 9 million young adults over 40 years conducted by Jean Twenge and her colleagues published in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, this study has starkly demonstrated the deterioration from one generation to another.

Youngsters are now focused on money, image and fame, celebrity. They disparage, decried, deride and mock values such as community, volunteerism, environment, and above all expertise and knowledge acquisition.

Don't buy the self-interested slogans of millennials. You know, tolerance and activism and this is sheer nonsense.

The studies are clear. There's a tiny vocal minority that give the wrong impression.

Other surveys have documented a rising level of both narcissism and functional illiteracy.

As if to illustrate the imminence of these dark ages, institutions such as Encyclopedia Britannica announced that they cease to seize the publication of the print edition. After 244 years, the surviving digital editions are far cry from the print equivalent in terms of depth, length and iridition.

So the stupid, the dumb, the trivial, the brain dead, the frivolous are everywhere. Among the working classes, of course, but increasingly you can find them displacing the erstwhile intellectual elites political elites business elites scientific elites they're spawning hordes of mindless politicians, idiot business tycoons, narcissistic media personalities, gullible clergy, vacuous celebrities, illiterate best-selling authors, athletes with far more brawn than brain, repetitious pop singers, less than mediocre bureaucrats, bovine gatekeepers, and even ignorant and semi-literate academics.

And the cacophony of these people drowns the few voices, rare but there, few voices of wisdom, expertise, experience, institutional memory, erudition, scholarship. These voices are drowned out.

There's a problem of discoverability. We can't discover them.

In the mountains and tsunami waves of trash, it's difficult to find the two, three, four, five, six pearls.

The sheer number overwhelms all systems of governance, all mechanisms of decision-making, all retail platforms.

Rather than futilely fight back this tsunami, the well-educated, the erudite, the intelligent, the knowledgeable, they choose to withdraw.

They're out of here. They seclude themselves in self-constructed schizoid ivory towers, drawing the bridges against the proletariat of idiocy.

Imbeciles are a menace to the continued existence not only of our civilization, but also of our species.

We may end up being all homo, no sapiens.

The percentage of stupid people in the general populace may not have changed, are not implying that people are becoming more stupid. Maybe the percentage of stupid people had actually decreased. There are studies that tend to show this.

But in terms of absolute numbers, there are many more stupid heads now than the entire human population only a century ago.

Our numbers are bigger.

Modern medicine makes sure that even the retarded and the plain dimwitted live on to a ripe old age.

And these people vote. These people have a say.

They don't know where their toothpaste is, but they elect a president.

That we are faced with the daunting prospect of idiocracy is the fault of the malignant transformation of the democratic ideal and the recent onslaught of the media, both mainstream traditional media and the new media.

Start with democracy, the stupid people's pernicious answer to meritocracy.

In the not too distant past, not so long ago, there are people with living memory of this.

Stupid, dimwitted people, imbeciles, feeble-minded. They had the right maybe to vote once in a while and express their completely inconsequential opinion, where it mattered least, in the ballot box.

But alas, the inane counterproductive idea of one person, one vote, never mind how pinheaded, unqualified or ignorant that person is, has invaded and permeated.

Hitherto, environments which used to be hierarchical, environments such as government, the workplace, the military, encyclopedias for Christ's sake.

With technology at their disposal, the stupid repeatedly interfere with and disrupt the proper functioning of virtually every system, including systems that crucially depend on mind power, on intellect, on intelligence, on cumulative knowledge and on analysis of raw material, raw data, big data.

Stupid is everywhere. And they don't let anyone work. They don't let anyone function properly. They have a say, they have an opinion. And their opinion matters as much as yours.

Never mind that you are, you know, 200,000 times more educated than they are on the topic. You have your truth, they have their truth. And being stupid, they truly believe that they're equal to you. And they act as though they're equal to you, thereby sabotaging and undermining and destroying everything.

Look around you. It's all falling to pieces and this is a direct outcome of access that we had granted unwisely to people who should have never had access, never had access to speech platforms and to power.

Even the generation and transfer of knowledge have been democratized.

As crowdsourcing yielded enterprises such as Wikipedia, the so-called encyclopedia, that any idiot and teenager can edit, can add to, can delete from, result, vandalism.

Internet search engines rank results not according to the merits, authority, and quality of the content, no, but by the number of votes and who cast these votes, you guessed it, dense people, thick-headed people with skull and nothing in it, who now congregate on social networks.

This widespread and much-loaded vandalism, because there's no other word for it. It's a destruction, the destruction of civilization stone by stone.

This reflects the utter collapse, utter disintegration of the education system.

Because our education system turns out illiterate, self-entitled, magical thinking, nascent and irrational graduates, having annihilated its standards in order to lucratively embrace them as students in the first place.

Money, money talks, education walks.

The stupid, dimly aware of their innate inferiority?

Because they're stupid. They're stupid. They've been told so many times on multiple occasions. So they're dimly aware, they're stupid. There is the Dunning Kruger effect. The stupid don't know they're stupid. They think they're geniuses.

But still, there's something nagging, knowing in the background, telling you, you're not really a genius. So they are aware of their inferiority.

And so they become anti-expertise, anti-education, anti-knowledge, anti-elite, anti-intellectual, anti-excellence.

They seek with destructive envy, with resentiment, to destroy everything that is superior to them. Everything elevated and aesthetic and beautiful and clever and wise.

They seek to reduce everything to their swampish level, to the level of the protoplasm, amoeba-like existences that they lead.

But while in the past, these people remained sequestered, isolated. They were granted no access to any lever of power, to any instrument. And their sentiments remained mere sentiments.

Today these people have become the majority. They have an ethos, a code of conduct, a set of values and ideals which reflects their inherent limitations and what limitations these are beyond your wildest imagination.

It is politically incorrect today. It's impolite to claim any advantage and any superiority on any grounds, by the way.

So it's not okay to say retard, even if the person is the reification of retardation. And it's not okay to say that you know something better than other people because they too have a smartphone and access to Wikipedia, so that makes them instant psychologists and medical doctors and professors of physics and everything, because they can scroll and surf and they don't understand a bloody word they are reading, but still they can show you the screen as proof of access to knowledge.

Egalitarianism had become malignant egalitarianism. It's running amok.

Everyone is equal? Are you kidding me?

No one is equal to anyone else in any sense.

I am far superior to you intellectually.

No one is equal to anyone else in any sense. I am far superior to you intellectually, but for the life of me, for the life of me, I can't do carpentry or electrical work or draw or compose.

So there are some of you who are superior to me in these capacities.

Everyone is superior in some way and it's very bad to misallocate skills and they have to fit.

So today everyone is equal. The patient is equal to the medical doctor.

They negotiate. They discuss from a position of equality, medical issues, professors and their students. Students come to me and they are my equals. They have read somewhere something on some website. And so they are my equals now.

Experts are just laymen with degrees and laymen are experts without degrees.

It's very simple. Very simple.

It's a path to hell and to our extinction. It's an extinction event.

And continue with technology in an act of self-preservation, past civilizations.

All civilizations in the past had confined the stupid to certain physical settlements, certain neighborhoods, certain parts of the city, replete with their drinking establishments, stupid entertainments, and stupid sports.

Let the stupid associate with the stupid and do stupid things was the very, very wise thinking.

There, the intellectually challenged could safely torment each other with their vulgarities and rampant uninformed idiocy in those neighborhoods, in those ghettos.

But the advent of radio, television, and most egregiously the Internet, this media, mass media, have changed everything.

Now stupid people have unmitigated access to the kind of technology that allows them to pollute the airwaves to contaminate everyone's life with their non-thoughts, non-thinking and dysfunctional inoperative brain.

So they have access to technology. They can broadcast on the airwaves. They have broadband.

And with their inferior analytic capacity, lowbrow output, trivial observations, monosyllabic exclamations, hair-brained questions, they're all over the place.

There no escape anymore. We are drowning. We are drowning in sludge, nonsensical sludge, hairbrained stupid you know mud. It's quicksand, the quicksand of idiocy.

And so the new media including and above all social media they have transformed stupidity from a mental endemic or mental epidemic to a viral pandemic.

The wise and knowledgeable may broadcast while the stupid merely narrowcast, but the stupid have the upper hand because via Google and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Amazon and YouTube.

They've decimated the print and electronic media and the mainstream media.

There are no newspapers anymore. There are no books anymore. There's nothing anymore.

And the stupider you are, the more followers you have.

Because people can identify with you. They understand what the hell you're saying.

If you are one IQ point above the average, you have lost 95% of the population. No one can understand a word you're saying.

The technological empowerment is the crux of the problem.

There are no barriers to entry, no institutional filters, no erudite and experienced intermediaries and gatekeepers to hold back the tidal wave, the avalanche of doltish, balderdash, the tsunami of nonsense, the flood of misinformation, factoids and conspiracies that corrupt our intellectual space.

Discovery or discoverability, separating the wheat from the chaff, has become mission impossible.

You can't find good things anymore. You have to go through a million cats jumping off roofs and girls peeling bananas to get to Slavo-Zizek. And by that time, you are so exhausted that you don't even understand what he's saying. You've been depleted by the idiots on the way.

Commercial interests inevitably and invariably side with brainless stupid masses, dumb with the dumb because of their superior aggregate purchasing power.

There are so many more stupid than clever that if you're a commercial enterprise, you want to sell to the stupid, not to the clever.

And you want to tell the stupid that they're clever. You want to cater to their grandiosity, to massage their ego, to flatter them. They are stupid enough to believe it even.

Commercial interests inevitably and invariably side with these people.

The privatization of education is one manifestation of this creepingdecaying and decadence. The mindless nature of television programming is another example.

The empty one-liners that comprise most conversations on social networks, this is the culmination. This is how the stupid sound, if you didn't know. They can't put five words together.

Apropos, the late not lamented President of the United States. We are surrounded with clods, harassed by the lame brains, criticized, censored and ordered by simpletons.

Welcome to the new Dark Ages. Welcome to our end.

The virus will not, does not threaten us as a species existentially. The stupid do.

I am back from my trip to Romania. I have been to an amazing fairy tale small city called Turnu Severin. It's a city with a medieval castle completely preserved, Roman ruins, architecture from centuries past, a sunken island under the sea, and numerous other adventurous mysteries.

If you haven't been to Tuno Severin, what are you waiting for? Pack your things and head over there.

Rejuvenated, re-energize, recharge and re-everything. I am back here to offer you yet another controversial nugget. And I even got myself a new mini mug from one of the people there.

We're going to discuss today the two keys to success.

Yes, actually they're only two. If you own these two keys, you're going to end up being Elon Musk or better and definitely richer. So stay tuned. Maybe you could be the next global tycoon.

And these are the two keys.

Success in business and success in general requires equal measures of stupidity and mental health pathologies.

If you have these two things in abundance, you're bound to end up one of the Fortune 1000 richest people on Earth.

But these requisites and requirements apply equally well to politics, science, management, success in general.

Why is that? Why does one need to be stupid and why does one need to be mentally unwell in order to succeed?

The answer in a nutshell is that we are living in a stupid and mentally unwell civilization.

People who are stupid and mentally unwell rise to the top in such cultures and society like so much scum on rolling and rolling waves.

Intellectually inferior folks, the stupid, the inane, the moronic, the idiots, those who cannot analyze, lack analytical skills, the retards, they are more attuned to the needs of a civilization comprised mostly of brain-dead or mentally unwell consumers.

These kind of people, the stupid and the mentally unwell, are able to respond in kind to their constituencies and audiences. They're able to communicate efficaciously with the teaming brain dead or brainless masses.

To cut a long story short, if your neighborhood, your community, your country, the globe, if they are comprised of millions and billions of utterly stupid people, unable to decipher even a simple message, illiterate to the core, if this is your environment, then being a high-strung intellectual, super-intelligent, very knowledgeable, is a negative adaptation. It's going to drag you down.

People are going to be envious of you, and they're going to try to destroy you, the source of frustration. People are going to misunderstand you because they are incapable of comprehension.

You need to be stupid in such an environment. When you are stupid in such an environment, you resonate with your audience or constituency or consumers. When you are mentally unwell and stupid, you reflect and resemble people around you, and they like it. They like to use leaders and successful entrepreneurs and business tycoons and politicians.

People like to regard successful people as blank screens. The implicit message is if he had made it, if he succeeded, so can I. If this idiot is a multi-billionaire, so can I. If this malignant, not very bright pseudo-illiterate narcissists had become the president of the country, definitely so can I.

This implicit message that everyone is capable of everything in an environment which is permissive, promiscuous and non-discriminating.

This is the message of coaches and other assorted con artists, gurus and so on, who keep telling you, you are all geniuses, you're all giants. If you just put your mind to it, there's nothing you cannot do. The law of attraction, the secret, the universe is at your back and call.

When you look at stupid people as role models, when you look at the mentally unwell, as exemplars, you tell yourself in effect, if they had made it, so can I. Nothing stands in my way because I'm at least as good as this and this business tycoon or this and that politician.

Moreover, the stupid are incapable of evaluating risks properly.

The main, the core issue in being intellectually inferior or intellectually challenged is the inability to judge reality properly, the inability to assess risk reward.

Stupid people misperceive risks. They actually underestimate risks, or they don't see risks where they are dangers and perils.

Stupid people plunge ahead with audacity and defiance. The mentally ill behave recklessly, act out, do crazy things. Of course, because they're crazy.

The stupid and the crazy take on the world.

And sometimes this unthinking thrust forward, this ability to ignore obstacles and hindrances and risks and dangers and perils, that's a good thing because it endows successful operators with a first mover advantage. It creates network effects and it corners the market.

In other words, if you're stupid and mentally unwell, you're likely to make seriously bad decisions.

But sometimes bad decisions, which on the face of it appear to be brave but they are actually simply stupid, these decisions give you an advantage in an environment which is comprised of markets, consumers, audiences and constituencies who are even more stupid than you.

So when you operate in a civilization that is essentially intellectually bankrupt, being an idiot is a major advantage. Because you will be the first to go there and this is called a first mover advantage by being the first in the market you can actually shape the market or create it ex nihilo, out of nothing.

You develop, you create something called network effects. People will flock to you even if you offer an inferior service.

Remember, for example, the first versions of Windows, the Windows operating system.

And these network effects will allow you to become effectively a monopoly.

Stupid peopleassess risk wrongly, thereby adopt bad decisions, make bad decisions.

And then sometimes they end up richer, not all of us combined.

Prosperous entrepreneurs often exhibit this lack of regard, disregard and disrespect for risks. They ignore risks completely.

And one of the reasons they do this is because they have impaired reality testing. They have magical thinking.

Many business tycoons and top-level entrepreneurs and top-level politicians and so on, many of them are conspiracy theories, precisely because magical thinking underlies their cognitive processes.

The magical thinking tells you, I'm immune, I'm invulnerable, nothing is ever going to happen to me. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, I will never pay the consequences of my actions. My actions will never have consequences except beneficial ones.

That's magical thinking. The idea that you can impose your will and your thoughts on the environment and it will succumb. It will not fight back.

The perception that the world is a mind game or a power play, and where you only to pretend that you are the greatest and the best, and the most powerful, omnipotent and omniscient, where you're only faking it till you make it, you will succeed.

This involves also a primitive defense mechanism known as splitting, which we will come to in a minute.

These are all pathologies, mental health pathologies, impaired reality testing, magical thinking are infantile. They are supposed to disappear when we become adults.

But I would say that the majority of adults in our current civilization actually are infantile in this sense. They all engage in magical thinking one way or another and very few people have correct reality testing.

Splitting or dichotomous thinking is another mental health pathology very common among successful people.

So hitherto we have described the beneficial effects of being stupid or being intellectually inferior among people in an environment in a civilization, culture and society comprised of stupid people, if you're stupid among stupid, you're bound to succeed. They are likely to understand you and follow you.

Similarly, we have described mental health pathologies, such as an impaired reality testing, magical thinking, inability to assess risks properly, defiance, reactance, contumaciousness, rejection of authority, conspiracyism, all these are common among business tycoons. Think for example Elon Musk.

Another infantile defense mechanism in rampant operation among successful people is splitting. The idea that the world is divided to black and white, hot and cold, with me or against me.

Entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs, successful people in general, shape reality to fit their omnipotent fantasies. They don't gauge reality properly. They don't care about getting it right. They don't care about being in tune with reality. They say the hell with reality. I'm going to make my own reality. I'm going to shape reality in my image. They are godlike.

Of course, it's grandiosity. The dichotomous thinking of such people reduces the world into peers, Pavlovian peers, costs versus rewards. What am I getting out of it? What do I have to invest? Useful versus useless. Is this guy useful to me? Is this guy useless to me? Are you with me or are you against me? Black and white thinking.

This is considered a fallacy in cognitive behavior therapy. We're trying to teach people to get rid of such thinking.

But the vile truth is that stupidity, splitting, mis-perceiving risk, impaired reality testing, magical thinking, conspiracyism, all these, which used to be mental health pathologies, are today in an increasingly narcissistic and psychopathic world, they are all positive adaptations.

They bring to the top the scum. They generate and engender elites of flotsam and jetsam.

People who can hardly read and write. People who have distorted views of reality. People who are addicted to conspiracy theories. People who are plain idiots. People who are grandiose to the verging on psychosis, verging on psychotic disorder, sick people, moronic people, they rise to the top in such societies because they are easily comprehended. People easily understand them.

Success is a mass phenomenon. You need a critical mass to attain success. You need to mobilize networks of people, even when you are all alone in your living room.

And so the ability to resonate with people, to reflect them authentically, to be like them, and therefore liked by them, this ability is indispensable and priceless.

And in today's world, intellectuals, they're not the role models, footballers are. Athletes are role models.

In the 1950s, Albert Einstein was the most sexy role model on earth. Today he's just a man with disheveled hair.

Role models today are narcissistic, psychopathic, grandiose and not very bright, and that is the understatement of the century.

We are all being dragged to the bottom by our elites and our elites are being dragged to the bottom by us.

It's a race to the bottom and it threatens the survival of the species.

We have eradicated intellect. We scorn and mock intellectuals. We hate and despise experts and authorities.

We would rather believe an anonymous YouTuber or our neighbor or our auntie or some soothsayer with a tarot card deck. We would rather believe these people than medical doctors or professors of psychology or scientists or other experts.

It is the death of the age of expertise.

Illiterate, conspiracy-minded, stupid people are the elite of today.

Where they are taking us is anyone's guess, but it can't be a good place.

No matter how stupid you are, even you can't believe that stupid people ought to lead us.

This is an introduction to a rant. The rant follows the introduction.

And I feel the need to say this, because today's topic is stupidity and the stupid.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a ranting professor of psychology.

A few weeks ago, a prestigious media outlet had modified an article I've written about narcissism.

The reason to castigate narcissists, to present them or cast them as predators, is a form of ableism, a discrimination against the disabled.

You see, narcissists are disabled. It's not nice to say not nice things about them, because they are disabled.

Yes, I said, they are disabled, but they are also predators.

For example, we attack viruses. We cast viruses as in a way malignant, dangerous.

This is not a form of speciesism. It's not a form of discriminating against another living species. It's just a fact. Viruses are dangerous. Very often they are deadly.

It's the same with narcissists. They are dangerous. They are predators. The fact that they are disabled has nothing to do with it.

And so this narcissistic virtue signaling, you know, ableism or avoiding ableism is a rank form of stupidity.

And stupidity is taking over the world.

Before we go there, an announcement.

There's a seven days free seminar. I'm giving a seven days free seminar. I'm giving a seven days free seminar in Turnu Severin, Turnu Severin, which is a fairy tale town in Romania.

And so it's September 19th to September 25th there are few seats left I advise you to register if you want to attend now during the seminar I'm going to be in Tornos Severin starting on September 18th and well into September 28th.

During the seminar and the days before and after the seminar, I'm available to give in-person counseling. So if you're interested, contact me. If you want me to reserve a seat in the seminar for you, contact me.

Contact me, in any case, Sam Vaknin, that's my name, one word, small letters, Sam Vaknin at gmail.com. Write to me, I'll reserve a seat for you. And let me know if you're interested in in-person counseling.

Onward to the stupid.

The stupid have always had opinions about everything under the sun. That's been the case in the Middle Ages, that's been the case in the ancient world.

The stupid have been with us forever.

But the stupid were wary. They were careful. They were cautious. They were afraid to express these opinions, lest they be shamed, ridiculed and shunned by their betters.

The stupid kept to themselves. They knew that if they were to venture out and offer their inane opinions or judgments or ideas, they would be put down metaphorically and sometimes physically.

So they were afraid they kept their counsel to themselves.

But this is no longer the case. The damned today are brazen, they are vociferous. They drown out by sheer force of numbers, all the other informed intelligent voices.

The ignorant and the retarded are the overwhelming majority. They trust their own pitiable life experience over science they adhere to magical thinking and they are fierce in the defense of their grandiose, inflated, fantastic self-image.

This is called, by the way, the Dunning Kruger effect. And I have a video dedicated to it.

The stupid don't know that they are stupid. They think they're very clever. Many of them believe themselves to be geniuses.

Narcissism and stupidity are twins.

Technology empowers mediocre failures. Technology renders losers winners in their own eyes. Technology engenders a self-delusion of malignant egalitarianism.

We're all equal to each other in terms of our endowments, intellectual and otherwise.

Access to raw information is not the same as possession of structured knowledge.

But the stupid cannot tell the difference.

A stupid person would say, I'm as knowledgeable as my medical doctor. I know more than my professor or my therapist because I can Google. My opinions, therefore, count as facts.

More and more we hear these claims. Truthism, my facts and your facts.

I've come across an amazing trend in a forum where someone said the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, and another guy answered, that's only your opinion. My opinion is different.

Stupidity is on the rise. And it is on the rise for two reasons.

Number one, a reverse Flynn effect. A reverse Flynn effect.

There has been a precipitous decline in average IQ scores in the past four decades.

Yes, contrary to online nonsense, there's been a decline in IQ, not a rise in IQ.

The Flynn effect has been effectively reversed in the 1980s, and the decline is massive.

In some countries, for example, Norway and other countries, the decline equals something like 10%.

The second reason why stupidity is on the rise is that inanity is tolerated. Stupidity is legitimized.

We tolerate the dumb and we encourage indolence, entitlement, nicheignorance.

We say, you know, everyone is entitled to have their own lifestyle, their own choices.

We tolerate every personality. We accept any way of life.

This is malignant tolerance. Malignant tolerance is anything goes and everything goes.

No boundaries, no values, no beliefs, no guiding principles. Nothing. Anything goes. That's malignant tolerance.

And so we tend to tolerate and legitimize stupidity.

And there's a very big corpus body of knowledge in psychology, sociology, anthropology and similar sciences, which concludes definitively that when we tolerate and legitimize a behavior or trait, the incidence and prevalence of these behaviors and traits tend to skyrocket.

Societal legitimacy, peer tolerance, encourage specific behaviors. They provide what we call positive reinforcements.

And so, malignant tolerance, which accepts stupidity as a legitimate lifestyle choice, so to speak, and encourages behaviors such as indolence, entitlement, ignorance, of course leads to a tsunami of stupidity.

Now the way I see it, stupidity is a form of assault.

What is assault? What is rape?

Rape is the invasion of your body without consent, any part of your body. Could be your genitalia, but could also be your brain.

Second-hand smoke is respiratory rape because someone forces smoke into your body. Ambient noise pollution is auditory rape. The great unwashed is olfactory rape. Unwanted touch, invasion of private space are tactile rape. Not fully consensual sexis rape, pure and simple. All forms of abuse constitute emotional rape.

And in my view, stupidity is a rape. It's an intellectual rape.

Someone forces his idiocy, his cretinism, his moronic views into my brain without my consent and permission. He is raping me intellectually.

Rape should be criminalized in all its forms. Rape should be penalized in all its forms. The perpetrators should be relegated to penal colonies, virtual or otherwise.

Otherwise? Otherwise.

Because if we don't, we may end up in Idiocracy. Watch this movie. It's important of the future. It's a dystopian view which is fast becoming reality.

And so now, on to the rant, as promised.

Yes, this has been only the introduction. Poor you.

Stupidity, and especially profound stupidity, have become positive evolutionary adaptations.

The stupid evaluate risks less well, so they are willing to take on the world without fear of the consequences of their actions. That makes them better entrepreneurs, better businessmen, better politicians.

The stupid get a chance to have sex which is much higher than the clever. That's a fact established in numerous studies.

So their reproductive success is much higher.

The stupid are everywhere. The stupid and the profoundly stupid constitute the vast majority of humanity.

So they band up together, theyteam up, they collaborate with each other, and they obtain outcomes, favorable outcomes.

To be stupid is to be more self-efficacious.

And so we are heading into the age of stupidity, idiocracy. And the age of stupid, the clever will become an endangered species, an extinct variant of humanity.

Stupid people will bring stupid people into the world, will breed and inter interbreed and stupidity will become a characteristic of humanity.

Intelligence and intellect will be outsourced technologically into our devices. The only smart things in our lives will be the smartphone.

I, of course, am terrified by the veracity of these claims. I wish I could say that this is tongue-in-cheek.

It is not.

Humanity is under an imminent danger, an imminent threat of being overrun by idiots, deluded by imbeciles, and this risk is growing by the day. And so we are submerged by a tidal wave of retardation.

We often confuse technology with culture and civilization with progress. Nazi Germany is proof that such reflexive linkages are spurious.

In Nazi Germany, technology was at the apex, and yet they were barbarians and stupid to boot.

In truth, we have become barbarians with iPads and iPhones. We use the latest innovations to play angry birds or whatever it is that we play nowadays and to watch inane videos on YouTube and to exchange trivialities on Facebook.

Traits are not desirable or undesirable in themselves.

Traits, qualities, properties, characteristics of the organism, the phenotype, the genotype, the psychology of the organism. These are advantageous, adaptive, or they are detrimental depending on the environment.

That's all. The environment determines which traits will survive and which will not. Traits that afford you reproductive success, traits and qualities and skills and talents that allow you to have children, make sure that you will propagate your genes. These survive.

And in today's world, if you're intelligent, your chances of reproducing are much lower.

Women prefer men with an IQ lower than 120 to men with an IQ higher than 145.

Now these are the results of a study published several years ago.

It seems that women increasingly prefer stupid men.

Why is that?

Because our contemporary world, the world we live in, is ruled by stupid people. It's governed by the feeble-minded. Dimwits are empowered by technology and everything is dumbed down to foster mass consumption.

Education is a misnomer. Higher education institutions teach how to have fun, how to go on hookups, basically, and how to game the system to obtain a degree, which is pretty much useless in later life. And of course, how to make student debt.

This is the world we live in.

And women select for beta males, as the manosphere calls them, women select for inferior men, because in the current environment, better traits are preferable to alpha traits. In the current environment, what used to be inferiority is an evolutionary advantage, a positive adaptation.

Stupidity is a case in point.

It is a paradigm shift of mind bending proportions for those of us in possession of a mind.

A study of one million young adults, over 40 years, conducted by Jean Twenge and her colleagues, and published in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, this study rocked me, shocked me. It has starkly demonstrated the deterioration from one generation to another.

Youngsters today, according to this study, are focused on money, image and fame, and they disparage values such as community, volunteerism, the environment, and knowledge acquisition.

Ostentatious social activism is a form of virtue signaling.

These youngers are socially active, demand justice in mass protest on camera. They're posing, they're faking, they're out to garner likes and attention.

Other surveys have documented a rising level of illiteracy in the younger generations. Many of them are unable to read a label on a bottle or a medicine.

As if to illustrate the imminence of these new dark ages, the Encyclopedia Britannica and others, Newsweek and so on, announced that they will cease publication of their print editions.

The Cyclopedia Britannica has survived for 244 years. But it did not survive the tsunami of idiocy and stupidity and intellectually challenged readers, so to speak.

The survival editions of the Britannica are a far cry from the print equivalent in terms of depth, length, and irreducible.

The stupid, the trivial, the frivolous, they are everywhere.

Among the working classes, of course, but increasingly you can find these displacing the erstwhile elites, spawning hordes of mindless politicians, idiot business tycoons, everyone knows who I have in mind, narcissistic media personalities, gullible clergy, vacuous celebrities, illiterate best-selling authors, athletes with far more brawn than brain, repetitious pop singers, less than mediocre bureaucrats, bovine gatekeepers, and even ignorant and semi-literate academics.

And the cacophony of these constituencies of intellectually challenged people, their cacophony drowns the few voices of wisdom expertise and, and the sheer number of the stupid overwhelms all systems of governance and all mechanisms of decision-making.

Rather than fight back this tsunami, which is futile, the well-educated, the erudite and the intelligent choose to withdraw. They avoid the world. They seclude themselves in self-constructed schizoid ivy towers and they draw all the bridges.

Imbeciles, cretins and morons are a menace to the continued existence not only of our civilization but also of our species. We may end up being all homo, no sapiens.

The percentage of stupid people in the general population actually is increasing. There's been a drop of seven points in global IQ since the 1950s.

In terms of absolute numbers, there are more stupid people now than the entire human population only a century ago.

Modern medicine makes sure that the intellectually challenged, the plain dimwitted live on to a ripe old age and reproduce.

That we are faced with the daunting prospect of idiocracy is the fault of the malignant transformation of the democratic ideal and the recent onslaught of the media, both old and new.

Let's take democracy. Let's start with democracy. The stupid people's pernicious answer to meritocracy.

In the not too distant past, dim-witted people had the right to vote once in a while and thus expressed their completely inconsequential opinion, where it mattered least in the ballot box.

There was a way to contain stupid people, to sell them on a delusion of power.

Alas, the inane idea of one person, one vote, has invaded and permeated, hitherto hierarchical environments such as government, the workplace, and the military.

And I'm saying this is a crazy idea because never mind how pin-headed, brain dead, unqualified or ignorant someone is, he has a vote like I do, same vote that I do. He has the same power in the ballot box like me. Or you? If you are a professor with four doctorates, you have the same power like a semi-retarded with a motorcycle or something. You know what I mean?

This is unbelievably idiotic, this malignant egalitarianism.

People should not have the equal right to vote. People should not have equal rights period, because people are not equal.

With technology at their disposal, the stupids repeatedly interfere with and disrupt the proper functioning of virtually every system, every institution, every process.

Even the generation and transfer of knowledge have been democratized as crowdsourcing yielded enterprises such as Wikipedia, the so-called encyclopedia that anyone can edit, add to delete from and generally vandalize.

Internet search engines rank results not according to the quality of the content, the merits and authority of the author. No. They rank the results by the number of votes, by the number of views, by the number of likes.

And these votes, and these views, and these likes come from, they are cast by, you guessed it, mostly dense people. Mostly stupid people who now congregate on social networks.

The stupid determine your search results.

This widespread and much loaded vandalism of human knowledge and even human information, the information is the raw material for knowledge. There's vandalism going on which reflects the utter collapse and disintegration of the education system.

Our education system turns out illiterate, nascent and irrational graduates, having annihilated these standards in order to lucratively embrace them as students in the first place.

And so we have honorary doctorates. Taylor Swift is the new PhD.

The stupid dimly aware of their innate inferiority. The stupid are anti-elitist, anti-intellectual, anti-excellence, anti-expertise. They hate intellectually superior people. They detest geniuses. They want to bring everything down to their level.

But while in the past, these remained only sentiments, todaythey have become an ethos, a code of conduct, a set of values and ideals embodied or reified in the woke movements, for example, in political correctness.

It is politically incorrect and impolitic and impolite to claim any advantage, any superiority. And if you do claim any difference, it's as a victim. Victimhood has taken over.

Because stupid people are victims, most of the time as they should be. As they should be, natural selection aims to get rid of stupid people and so they are victimized.

Egalitarianism is running amok. Everyone is equal. The doctor, the medical doctor and his patient. They're negotiating. They're talking as equals. They're not equals.

Professors and their students. The students dictate to the professor what to teach and how to teach. Experts and laymen, the layman says, it's only your opinion.

Expertise is just another opinion, equal to anyone else's.

This is beyond sick. This is dangerous. This is counterfactual, of course.

People are not equal. If I am the expert, you shut up and learn. End of story. I'm not interested in your opinion. I would, of course, be interested in your opinion if you acquire an education equal to mine, but not a minute before.

And even then, if I'm more clever than you, if I have a higher IQ, you should still shut up and listen to me and learn from me, because you are not my equal.

In an act of self-preservation, past civilizations had confined the stupid to certain settlements, replete with their drinking establishments, entertainments, and sports arenas. The stupid congregated there away from the mainstream and lacking any and every influence. There, the intellectually challenged, could safely torment each other with their vulgarities and rampant, uninformed idiocy.

In these settlements, establishments, enclaves, prison islands, call them whatever you wish. We sequestered the stupid, we isolated their toxic impact.

But the advent of the radio, television, and most egregiously the internet, these technologies have changed all that.

Now, stupid people have unmitigated access to the commons. They control the kind of technology that allows them to pollute the airwaves and the broadband and our screens with their inferior analytic capacity.

Low brow output, trivial observations, monosyllabic exclamations and harebrained queries.

And so the new media have transformed stupidity from a mental endemic or pandemic to a viral pandemic.

The wise and the knowledgeable may broadcast while the stupid merely narrow cast.

But the stupid have the upper hand because they have Google. They have Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Amazon, YouTube. These are decimating traditional print and electronic media.

And as I say, I would like to repeat this. Stupidity used to be an endemic situation, an epidemic limited to specific locations. Now it's a global viral pandemic.

And now the stupid are empowered with technologies that allow them to transition from narrow casting to broadcasting.

Technological empowerment is the crux of the problem. There are no barriers to entry, no gatekeepers, no institutional filters, no erudite and experienced intermediaries or moderators to hold back the avalanche of doltish blather, the tsunami of nonsense, the flood of misinformation, fakes and conspiracies that corrupt our intellectual space.

There's a problem of discovery separating the wheat from the chaff. It's a mission impossible. You can't tell apart the pearls from the trash they're buried in.

Millions of books, so-called books, are published by Amazon every year. 99.999 and I don't know how many nines of them should have never been published. Or in the best tradition should be burned.

Because they make it impossible to find the 100 truly good qualitative books that are published simultaneously.

Commercial interests inevitably and invariably side with the brainless masses. Because the brainless masses have a much bigger aggregate purchasing power.

The privatization of education is one manifestation of this creeping decadence.

The mindless nature of television programming is another example.

Videogates.

The empty one-liners that comprise most conversations on social networks are the culmination of this.

We are surrounded with clods, harassed by the lame brain, criticized censored and ordered by simpletons.

This may be the new Dark Ages, but we have hit a new low because the original Dark Ages were still controlled by intellectual elites of the Church. The elite of the church for example, educated clergymen.

These new dark ages are controlled by the peasants. The peasants have revolted. The sewer had exploded and we are all floating in you know what.

Today is narcissistic abuse awareness day and it pleases me no end to see my brain child accepted into the mainstream.

Millions of people around the world are aware today of narcissists, their behavior or misbehavior and the particular form of abuse the likes of which there is none, narcissistic abuse.

I was the first to describe it in the 90s and popularize it over the next 10 years when I have had the only website on narcissism and the only six support groups on narcissism online well into 2004.

And then all hell broke loose and people discovered that there's money in narcissism.

So now everyone and his dog or cat are experts on narcissistic abuse, coaches, trainers, you name it.

I'm glad that I created a cottage industry and have been sustaining so many tens of thousands of people around the globe. It's a gratifying feeling. I've made a difference.

But this is not the topic of today's video. Self-congratulation is always welcome, of course. No one else will congratulate me. So I congratulate myself.

This is an example of self-supply.

Today is a jealous day. I'm jealous. I'm full of gel.

And so we are going to discuss, finally, stupidity.

Why or why is the narcissist so bloody stupid? Is he for real?

Now when I say he, it of course pertains to she as well. Gender pronouns are interchangeable.

There's an equal number of women and men diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder nowadays as opposed to the 70s and 80s when the vast majority of NPD sufferers were men.

Today that's not the situation. Women have taken over. Women have become more narcissistic than men in many ways, regrettably.

So I'm going to use he for literary convenience sake, but of course it applies to women as well.

We're going to discuss a very strange phenomenon. The fact that even highly gifted, highly endowed, highly intelligent, extremely high IQ narcissists, are total retards when it comes to life itself.

And apropos this, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University, in Rostovandon, in Russia, and I'm entering my 11th year on the Faculty of SIAPS, the Centre for International Advanced Professional Studies, in Cambridge, the United Kingdom, Canada, and with a campus in Lagos, Nigeria.

Now that you have my academic resume, let us proceed to what interests you most.

And what interests you most is Sam Vaknin is here. No, I'm kidding. What interests you most is of course narcissistic abuse and its multifarious manifestations.

Let's start with facts as we usually do.

There is a disagreement as to whether people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder have an IQ which is higher than the average or lower than the average.

Carver in 1977 came up with a former answer. BPDs, borderlines, are more intelligent than the average population.

Actually, he found that the IQ of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder is around 135.

Svirski or Sacketti or something in 1993 found the exact opposite. It was a study published by the National Institutes of Health in the United States, which is the authority on mental health, among other things.

And the study found conclusively that people with borderline personality disorder actually have a much lower IQ than average, and that includes their verbal skills.

And the same debate has been raging for decades over narcissistic personality disorder, psychopathy and so on and so forth.

But this how much high what is the level of IQ they have and how much IQ there is may be the wrong question because IQ tests measure types of intelligence that have little to do with life, life skills and perspicacity. Look it up.

In short, some people are intelligent, clever, smart, sharp, cunning, but also unwise.

Wisdom is not connected to IQ. Wisdom is not a derivative or an inevitable outcome of a high IQ, a high intelligence quotient.

Perspicacity, the ability to kind of predict the future and adapt yourself positively to it also has nothing to do with IQ.

So the question is wrong.

The question we should be asking is, are narcissists and borderlines and psychopaths and so on, cluster B personalities, dark personalities, are they wise? Are they positively abducted to life itself and its challenges, its exigencies, the vicissitudes and ups and downs and cycles of life? Are these people built to live and to survive and to thrive? Or does the disorder preclude all these?

This is the topic of today's video.

A few terminological issues, lexical points.

Pseudo-stupidity is not the same as stupidity. Pseudo-stupidity is pretending to be stupid, acting as if naive, but actually behind the scenes being very, very sharp and cunning and manipulative and so. This is pseudo-stupidity.

Stupidity is actually being stupid, being inane and effete and not very adept at coping with life and designing survival strategies and coping techniques.

So we should distinguish pseudo-stupidity from stupidity as we shall, as we will be doing shortly.

Second thing, when I say dark personalities, these are not people diagnosed with narcissism, these are not people diagnosed with psychopathy and so on and so forth.

In the dark triad, the dark triad contains three elements, subclinical psychopathy, psychopathy that cannot be diagnosed. Subclinical narcissism, narcissism that cannot be diagnosed, Machiavellianism, the ability to manipulate your human environment in order to secure favorable outcomes, a form of self-efficacy that comes at the expense of other people by exploiting them or coercing them or gaslighting them or brainwashing them or entraining them.

So these are terminological issues. Remember and replay if you have to.

Okay, so let's proceed.

Why do we find some narcissists, some borderlines, some psychopaths, actually the majority of them, why do we find them a bit stupid? Why do they commit so many mistakes? Why are they error prone? Why do they rarely get anything right, anything from relationships to the workplace? Why do they misread other people so egregiously, almost to the level of autism spectrum disorder?

What's wrong with these people? What's wrong with cluster B people?

Cluster B personality disorder are either pseudo stupid or stupid.

For example, covert narcissists are pseudo stupid. They pretend to be stupid because they know that by acting stupid, people around them will put their guard down and will give them an opportunity to penetrate the defenses of other people and manipulate them and obtain the desirable results.

So this is pseudo-stupidity.

People who are covert narcissists, they are also pseudo humble. They display pseudo humility. They pretend to be modest. They declare, they describe themselves as hapless victims. They're never to blame for anything. They're never guilty of anything. They've never done anything wrong. They are just continuously being victimized and preyed upon. And they are codependent actually.

This is a form of pseudo stupidity. It's to put yourself down, to underestimate your capacity to read other people, to manipulate other people, to interact with other people, to claim that somehow you are disabled. And that's why you keep falling prey to predators.

It's a form of pseudo-stupidity, it's typical of covert narcissists.

The overt narcissists, the grandiose narcissists, and the borderline and the psychopath, they're simply stupid. They're not pseudo-stupid. They're really, really actually stupid.

And in this video today, I will explain to you why. I'll give you the reasons.

And there are so many of them, so many reasons, so many causes, so many etiologies, what we call ethiopathology, there is such a background of dynamics which are not helpful, not conducive to wisdom, that it is, what is shocking is, that these people survive at all.

I mean, they are so profoundly moronic because they can't help it. That's the way they're built.

Start with grandiosity.

Grandiosity is a severe cognitive distortion. It impairs the reality testing of those affected. It also undermines and sabotages self-efficacy.

Now those are very many big words, $10 words. My favorites. And let me try to break them down to you.

Grandiosity is the belief that your inflated self-image is actually real. It's not fake. Your false self is not false.

Other people may be getting it wrong, but you know for sure that you are unique, unprecedented, amazing, perfect, brilliant, and so on and so forth.

It would take other people time to discover all these things. That's because they're more stupid than you. You are superior in every conceivable way, intellectually, bodily, whatever.

So, grandiosity is a filter that distorts information from reality, incoming information, feedback, input. They're all distorted. They're all reframed.

Grandiosity falsifies reality. And so in the absence of a firm grasp on reality, of course you can't act wisely.

The second thing is grandiosity hampers, obstructs, self-efficacy.

In order to operate efficaciously, efficiently, in the environment, with other people, you need to be able to read people appropriately. You need to be able to read people appropriately you need to be able to resonate with people in short you need to have empathy.

The lack of empathy common to all cluster B personality disorders and in the case of border borderlines, it's not a lack, but it's substantial reduction in empathy. That's the most recent research, most recent studies we have. It even made it into the DSM-5.

So the deficiencies in empathy, which in the case of the psychopath lead to absolute absence of any kind of empathy except cold empathy. Cold empathy is cognitive empathy and reflexive empathy.

So the absence of emotional empathy, warm empathy, the ability to resonate emotionally with another person, when this is missing, you can't, you can't decipher other people properly. You can't understand other people. And obviously you can't manage yourself properly and efficiently with other people.

And so this undermines your capacity to obtain goals, to realize your potential, to actualize your potential, to self-actualize, to collaborate with other people towards obtaining big goals, bigger goals, to work in a team, to survive in a workplace, to have an ongoing relationship which is, you know, savory and a happy one, in short, it limits you.

Grandiosity and a lack of empathy limit you to the point that you are stupid. They alienate people and they narrow your opportunities and subject you to recurrent adversity.

Repetition compulsion is the direct outcome of this.

Narcissists, psychopaths and borderlines keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again. No matter how often they get penalized, no matter how high the cost, they keep repeating it.

And they keep repeating these mistakes because they keep disastrously misreading their environment and other people.

It is a great definition of stupidity.

Now, these people, Cluster B, personalities, they lack impulse control.

They are defiant. They're contumacious. They reject authority.

And they decompensate under stress. Their defenses crumble.

And they act in inanely, crazy making. They do insane things.

And these drawbacks guarantee frustration or worse.

Again, acting in a self-defeating, self-handicapping, self-destructive manner is a form of extreme, extreme ingrained, profound stupidity.

Next thing. Next mechanism.

In most of these disorders, there's extreme dissociation, especially in borderline personality disorder, but also in narcissism. There is dissociation.

Because these people are dissociated, they're very bad at learning from past experiences. They never learn the lesson.

Not because they are unable to derive a lesson, but because they keep forgetting the facts and the details. Or they keep rewriting history to conform to their grandiose, fantastic, inflated self-image.

And so there's no learning. These people never learn.

And again it leads to repetition compulsion covering the same ground, the same swampish quicksand ground, their previous actions adambrate their next actions.

Their obstinacy, what appears to be obstinacy, is actually panic.

These people are in panic because they know that they don't know.

They have no database of life experience that they can draw on safely.

They are not sure of their own experiences. They are not sure whether their memories are true or some kind of fictional concoction.

It's a nightmarish existence. They go through life second guessing themselves, confabulating in order to bridge memory gaps.

It's terrifying. It's like having a very, very short-term memory without any long-term memory. A goldfish memory. A Korsakoff syndrome memory. It's pretty frightening.

But it also leads to what strikes observers as extreme stupidity.

I mean for Christ's sake you've done the same thing a few years ago why do you keep why did you do it again why do you keep repeating your mistakes and your your misbehavior and your misdeeds and your misconduct. Why do you keep finding yourself in the throes of conundrums and scandals and mess and worse threats? Why do you keep driving yourself into situations which represent risk and danger and adversity doing precisely replicating actions that you've done before?

It's a form of stupidity.

These people are also entitled. They think they're entitled to special treatment without any commensurate accomplishments.

And they're manic, like in bipolar, you know, they're manic.

So they never plan thoroughly. They're sloppy. They execute with no attention to detail.

So everything goes awry, everything goes wrong, everything looks shoddy and con-artistic in a way.

And so they appear to be incapable of the perfection that they attribute to themselves, or even much less. They appear to be a kind of poor imitation of the real thing.

And this strikes people as truly stupid because with a minimal investment of resources, they could have accomplished so much more they could have done they could have achieved they could have granted themselves the access that they so seek to higher paying jobs to better looking people to more accomplished professionals to institutions.

And so they deny themselves they denied themselves all these opportunities by refusing to invest to commit.

This is not laziness it transcends laziness. It's some kind of resignation.

It's like saying well if the world doesn't realize how deserving I am, how entitled I am, even without any effort on my part, then something's wrong with the world.

I'm not going to justify the world's ignorance and niches and stupidity.

How come they don't realize that I'm the world's leading genius or the most drop-dead gorgeous woman or the most amazing scholar? Or how come they don't realize this? They should have, and I should have to put no effort into communicating this to them or justifying it or underlying it or founding it or anything I don't need to work hard.

This is so self-evident that I'm superior and perfect and brilliant and godlike and amazing and omnipotent and omniscient. It should come as a self-evident truth like in the Constitution of the United States.

This is of course extremely stupid. At the heart of the United States you know this is of course extremely stupid.

At the heart of all this is the fact that these people are immature they are the mental equivalence of children and this renders them naive and gullible they're very open to manipulation, to this extortion, they're prone to being victimized by con artists and swindlers because they trust themselves to never fall prey to a predator it's part of their grandiosity.

But there's another reason.

Over the years, over the decades of their lives, these people have learned to leverage the appearance of infantile haplessness and helplessness.

This infantile helplessness is a signal.

What they're saying is, please don't hurt me, I'm just a baby. Please don't hurt me. Please don't hurt me. I'm a simpleton. Please don't hurt me. I'm naive and gullible.

It is a kind of mimicry. I refer you to my video, the video that I've made about mimicry.

Stupidity in this case is a kind of mimicry.

They're pretending to be a lot less than they are, a lot less dangerous, a lot less evil, a lot less manipulative, a lot less Machiavellian, a lot less narcissistic, a lot less grandiose, a lot less worldly, and so and so forth.

They pretend to be terrified. They pretend to be hopeless. they pretend to be terrified they pretend to be hopeless they pretend to be amiable they pretend to be naive and so they pretend all these things in order to fend off potential threats and predators.

It's a Machiavellian tool in effect. It's a manipulative strategy.

Now most of people with cluster B personality disorders, especially people with borderline personality disorders, suffer from an identity disturbance.

Because they have memory gaps and severe dissociation, they are unable to form a stable core identity and so they fluctuate between various identities on the fly in response, in reaction to environmental pressures and stresses and stressors.

So because there's no core identity, there's identity disturbance, these people are unable to maintain continuity and coherence.

They depend on other people for external regulation of a sense of self-worth in the case of narcissism or external regulation of emotions and moods in the case of borderline.

And so when you observe them from the outside, they appear to be fickle unstable, stupidly disloyal to themselves or even without selves. It's as if they are suggestible the latest fad, the latest fashion, the latest statement, the latest question. Turn them around 180 degrees.

They don't have a stable center of gravity. They are catastrophically influenced by every bit of information from the environment and every push and pull of other people.

We call this suggestibility. It's very common in histrionic personality.

And this extreme dependency on external input makes them look really, really stupid.

Additionally, these people have alloplastic defenses.

They tend to blame other people, or the environment, or the universe or the world or reality what have you or natural disasters or whatever they tend to blame the outside for their own misjudgments miscalculations defeats and failures.

And you know when you do it all the time it appears that you're covering up for something covering up for your own inadequacy worthlessness inanity lack of good judgment, and ultimately stupidity.

Generally, with alloplastic defenses comes a paralyzing external locus of control.

It's as if people with cluster B personality disorders say, our fate is determined from the outside. There's nothing we can do about it.

But this creates behaviors which are erroneously identified with stupidity.

For example, indecisiveness, reticence, reluctance, avoidance, withdrawal. These are all behaviors of avoiding the world because the world is perceived essentially as hostile and malevolent and in control of their lives.

And this indecisiveness or avoidance they appear to involve a lack of intelligence, simply a lack of intelligence.

I mentioned dark personalities. Dark personalities may be Machiavellian, but they are so embedded in fantasy.

All these personalities have fantasy defenses. They're so paranoid.

This paranoia is a form of grandiosity. It puts you at the center of attention, malign attention, malevolent attention, but still attention.

So these personalities are fantastic, they're in fantasy much more than in reality. They're paranoid, everyone is a persecutory object, everyone is a potential enemy or a real one. They are into conspiracy theories, global or, and they are firewalled, they're separated by rigid defenses.

So put all of these together and people immediately spot them, immediately see through them if they are willing, as many people are not willing to see through these defenses and behaviors and so on.

That's not the topic of today's video.

But if you are willing, the narcissist, the psychopath, the borderline, on the first meeting in the first five minutes present you with a visit card and on this visit card is a complete list of all their problems and all their dysfunction and so they're not very good at deceiving people or manipulating them unless the victims want to be deceived, unless the victims derive some benefit from being manipulated.

And this is why these personalities resort ultimately and pretty fast to entraining, brainwashing, and coercion. That's why they deteriorate into coercive acts, almost invariably.

And finally, Cluster B personalities are post-traumatic. They are compensatory. They're broken. They're false.

At the core of each and every one of them, there's a bad object. A series of introjects, series of voices which are harsh and critical and even sadistic. They have internal enemies. Many of their internal objects are a secretary.

And so this constant battle zone, this constant civil war leads them to abuse substances and develop addictions.

All in all, these people are a sorry sight and intelligent as they may be, their absolute unmitigated idiots, inadequate, failures, losers, their reification of a life rejected, a potential wasted, and a total misapprehension and miscomprehension of life, the world, and others.

They are these people, narcissists, borderline, psychopaths, they're invalids. They're extremely disabled people.

And their disability reaches the point where it far outweighs any IQ they may have.

The ability to solve mathematical equations is very nice. But how often do you need it in real life?

The capacity to synthesize insights from various disciplines is astounding. But how often do you do that in a lifetime?

And how do you cope with your wife, lovers, children, co-workers, bosses, the authorities, the law? How do you survive life itself if you don't know the first thing about being human?

Yesterday I recorded the latest talk with the clinical psychologist, Darya Zhukovka. And we focused on the similarities between stupidity and narcissism.

That is not to say that all stupid people are narcissists, or that stupidity is a form of narcissistic personality disorder, but stupidity has many clinical features common with narcissism.

For example, stupid people are grandiose, stupid people are entitled, and stupid people engage profusely in magical thinking.

If I only put my mind to it, everything is possible, and the universe will arrange itself according to my wishes.

We live in an environment of truthism. Opinions are as good as facts, and facts are merely opinions.

We live in an environment of malignant egalitarianism. Anyone who has access to a smartphone and by extension to Wikipedia is as qualified, as educated, as much of an expert and as much of an authority as anyone who has dedicated his entire life to any given field. Everyone is equal, malignant egalitarianism.

The grandiosity that I mentioned has to do with the fact that stupid people are usually too stupid to realize how stupid they are. This is called the Dunning Kruger effect.

And the emotional life, the emotional landscape of stupid people, is comprised of equal measures, envy and hate, admiration.

And so they envy and they hate their superiors, intellectual superiors. They hate intelligent people. They deride and decry the educated. They detest knowledge, erudition and expertise. They put down, malign and attack, medical doctors, physicists, you name it. Psychologists, of course.

Envy and hate are the outcomes of real inferiority versus real superiority.

At the same time, stupid people admire other stupid people. The more stupid the idol, the more followers he or she has. Extremely stupid people are also extremely popular among the stupid masses. Dumb follow the dumbest.

And so they admire and they follow these people because stupid people hope to emulate the extremely stupid.

It's as if they say to themselves, there's hope for me yet if X, Y, Z has made it, even I can make it.

They can't say this to themselves when they're confronted with an intelligent person, a public intellectual, a scientist, an expert, a medical doctor. They can't. They can't lie to themselves. There's no extent of self-deception, not even Dunning Kruger.

But when they are confronted with really, really stupid people, the likes of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin and, you know, seriously stupid people, they admire them, they follow them, they idealize them, they aggrandize them.

They say Elon Musk is a genius and so is Donald Trump and so on so forth.

Because they are like Elon Musk. They resemble Donald Trump. And if these two idiots made it, so can they.

Finally, stupid people are empowered by a series of social trends that unfortunately have converged recently.

I mentioned a few of them in the talk with Daria. And I hint to other, as to other, another two of them.

Democracy. One vote for one person. One vote per one person is a seriously bad idea because it doesn't take into accountthe quality of the voter, the background of the voter, how much skin the voter has in the game.

Democracy, participatory democracy, democracy of one-on-one is a seriously flawed idea and leads to mob rule, oclocracies of authoritarianism and ultimately lethal, deadly totalitarianism.

Adolf Hitler was popularly elected in fair and free elections in Germany, several times actually.

And the second development has to do with fantasy-based technologies, technologies that encourage people to believe that they are geniuses in a fantasy world, and at the same time create opportunities for mass followership, for mass admiration, for mass adulation and mass aggrandizement of exceedingly stupid people.

These technologies have supplanted, have replaced the technologies that were subject to gatekeeping.

Technologies in the past were not made readily available to the masses. There were people whose role, whose job was to prevent access to specific technologies such as book publishing or the news media.

Today, gatekeeping has vanished, all but vanished, and disintermediation has taken place, and everyone carries in his or her pocket an entire publishing and news industry and empire in the form of a smartphone.

The empowerment of the stupid led to the elevation of the super stupid, the super dumb, and to the formation of what could easily be described as an idiocracy.

And as to the rest, listen to my talk with Dalia.

The key question that Darya and I discussed is how come certain narcissists are winners, pillars of the community, very successful and accomplished people, while the vast majority of narcissists are actually losers, they're self-destructive, they end badly in interpersonal relationships, in business, in any endeavor they undertake.

How come this disparity between camps of narcissists, the winners versus the losers?

I mentioned to Dalia that there are various types of narcissists.

There is the malignant narcissist, the combination of psychopaths, narcissists and sadists. The malignant narcissist is goal-oriented.

Because this kind of narcissist is goal-oriented, typically he or she is often accomplished.

Other narcissists known as pro-social and communal narcissists are actually narcissists who are capable of collaborating with other people. They're capable of building teams, they're capable of motivating people, to contribute to a common goal. They're leaders, natural-born leaders, or at the very least, natural-born participants in the social interplay.

They pretend, of course, they fake empathy, they fake compassion, they fake considerateness, they fake everything, but they fake and simulate very efficaciously, sometimes completely unaware of their own faking.

Pro-social communal narcissists are grandiose, exactly like all other narcissists, but the locus of their grandiosity is different.

They're very proud of being hyper-moral, incredibly just and ethical, amazingly charitable and altruistic.

And of course they elevate, they leverage all these in order to gather around them.

Acolytes, followers, fans, various kinds of gurus, coaches, online and offline are actually pro-social communal narcissists and they sometimes create cults, at other times create political movements, but they're very good at assembling people into a coherent mass, a coherent collective, and then marching forward, like so many Christian soldiers.

So, typically, many narcissists have charisma. They cultivate their image, they manage impressions, the charisma is fake and simulated, of course, this is what is called in clinical psychology superficial charm, but still there it is, the initial impression is very favorable and people get hooked and addicted to the narcissist's personality.

I mentioned at the beginning of this video that there are correlates between stupidity and narcissists and narcissists never learn, they never learn because they believe that they already know everything and they never learn because learning implies some kind of deficiency or lack and they are of course perfect, perfect beings don't need to learn, they don't have a learning curve.

So stupidity and narcissism are first cousins, if you wish, and stupid people are less risk averse than healthy, normal, intelligent people.

Stupid people evaluate risk, appraise risk wrongly. They misperceive risk, and consequently they assume risks, they take on risks much more than other people. Stupid people are risk takers.

And because risk sometimes pays, stupid people sometimes become multi-billionaires or presidents of countries or you name it.

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 narcissists would rise to the top, of course, because they combine both traits, both traits that are perceived as positive, 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.

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 victimhood 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 fantasy, entertainment 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, 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 is 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 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.

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, vicious, work is exploitative, work is negative.

So there is an attempt to not work as much as possible, idleness, there's a glorification, an 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, 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 real, 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 you know 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, yeah, like blocked. I just, you know, publicly asked one woman like do you have any degree on psychological field or something that you're 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 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, but who cares?

Nobody cares.

Yeah.

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 is attack on intelligentsia, attack on the intellect, attack on expertise, on knowledge, on erudition, on education. These are enemies now. These are targets of narcissists because narcissists are incapable of all this. They are trying to take it. They're trying to take these things down.

Because what does the narcissists do?

What is a narcissist? The typical narcissist is someone who created a fictitious narrative, a counterfactual narrative, 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 testedIt doesn't need to conform to reality.

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 of 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 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 again in Britannica, in Cyclone, 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, 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 their deceithood 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 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, so it's okay. It's your choice also and it's mine.

But this thing that you mention about this gatekeepers, that they was the people, they show 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 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 dysfunction and narcissists doesn't have that so everything what you said it's absolutely amazing thank you for that because I think it's connecting everything what you said it's 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.

For example, the narcissist is fake so he believes that everyone is fake so he's creating a fake world. The narcissist is aggressive so everyone is aggressive. The narcissist shapes this 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 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, 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. Thank you.

So hello everyone and hello Professor Sam Vaknin.

Hello, it's good to see you. Thank you, Daria.

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. Don't forget. I do apologize.

****REDACTED

Sorry, Minnie.

Yes.

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?

Why is that?

Because there are various different types of narcissists.

You have regular narcissists, overt, grandiosenarcissists. You have covert narcissists. You have pro-social, communalnarcissists. 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 narcissist successful because he is focused on goals and he is able to attain the goals.

Similarly the pro-social or communal narcissist, it's a kind of narcissist 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 narcissist is able to put on a mask of friendliness, empathy, morality, ethics, communality and so people gravitate towards this kind of narcissist.

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 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 narcissist 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, then 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 regards emotions as 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 people, a 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 scientists, 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 narcissist fits in because narcissists never really study, never invest seriously in their work, they improvise, they fake, they pretend, they lie, they deceive, and they're stupid because they are incapable of learning.

And this is the perfect profile of the idols of this age.

And that's why today in last cities are very successful.

Thank you for that.

And when I'm observing like many other people, the social media or just the world outside, it's difficult to seriously watch this, what is going on and what values and what are people creating right now, what videos or materials, you know, there is sometimes no values and still a lot of people follow that.

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

So, yeah, I think it's...

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, so narcissists succeed becausethey 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 how many people hate 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, 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 from the reality, they cannot test reality properly and still they are more successful than these healthy normal people.

Because like you said, right, why is that?

And still, they are more successful, they're all these healthy, normal people.

Because like you said, right, why is that if they cannot, you know,

Because our civilization is based on fantasy, not on reality.

Our current contemporary postmodern civilization is founded on the rejection of reality, the renouncing of 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, 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 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. You use it or lose 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, delusional, 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.

And thank you for this answer because I think it's explaining a lot and I have to admitI'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 with that what can we do can we do something about this dynamic this you know social thing?

Narcissists are great at imitation. Mimicry, narcissism is actually a form of simulation.

So narcissists imitate.

So they imitate really empathic people. They imitate really pro-social 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, your 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 his followers or as fans or has 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 does 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, 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, narcissistic mortification, and then the narcissist avoids you, completely avoid you, because this is 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, and 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 narcissist.

Now, you should expose, it's not enough to expose the narcissists 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 many, most other people are equally, you know, ignorant and uneducated and dumb and so on.

So there's no one there to do it.

Yeah, understandable thank you for that.

My last question was so what is the different how it works for overt and covert NPD about you already answered this on the beginning so yeah, because many people are, yeah.

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. This is 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 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 universities and so on, we have quite a few scholars, quite a few academics who are glorifying narcissism.

They are 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 believe 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 of narcissists.

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 psychopaths than you, you know, and so and so forth.

The values are changing. The values are simply changing.

And 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, it's perceived as only idiots 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 of this 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 go, money or whatever it is and yeah, it's difficult to watch this series.

It's a fantasy.

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 escape to art 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 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 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 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 take over. 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. Lots of things that you said. It will be good to be with it and just to process.

Yeah. Gonna like this interview I can tell you but I love it.

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

Yes. Thank you.

Thank you.

And Merry Christmas to everyone.

Yes, Merry Christmas. Thank you so much. Thank you.