You Outsource Your Mind to Crowdsourced Technologies (with Valentina Poletti)

Wow, that is a really brilliant exposition on the effects of technology, which I believe a lot of them, we have not even thought about these consequences.

And the connection between trying to create a village life inin a city. I had not thought about it. That's really unique. So thank you for that input.

And I remember also watching a video of yours where you talked about how cities are the first form of virtual world. And I thought that was also a really brilliant way of looking at this.

The way we're disconnecting further and further from our natural tendencies, from connection to the natural world, connection to natural needs and tribe relations and so on.

So it seems that we have tried to sort of fix the problem of this disconnection that cities have created, but we have generated yet another problem.

So instead of being able to come back to the natural communion way of human life, we have just created another patch that has led to another consequence.

And I think a much bigger problem.

It's not only another problem, it's a much bigger problem.

If I may just to interject and add another dimension to the conversation.

Cities are symbolic spaces. That's why I call them virtual reality. They're symbolic spaces. Everything is about symbols, the manipulation of symbols, the accumulation of symbols, the exchange of symbols, the replacement of real-life objects with symbols.

We even replace money with symbols. No one has money. People have credit cards or they have digits in the computer at the bank. They think it's money. It's not money, of course.

And similarly, people are beginning to interact remotely. They have long-distance relationships. They have friends on Facebook and so on so forth.

So when we created cities, we disengaged from reality, not only from nature, not only from our nature, but we disengage from reality.

We made a choice to transition from a real space or a natural space to a symbolic space.

Now, social media attempted to reverse this. They attempted actually to transition back, to revert from a symbolic space to a real space.

The idea was that as you interact with people, you get to know them and there's going to be a spillover. You're going to meet them in real life and you're going to develop, you know, even lonely people, schizoid people, going to find friends.

But of course, what has happened is that we ended up converting people into symbols.

While hitherto we converted mostly objects into symbols, living environments into symbols, we symbolized almost everything except people. Now with social media, we are converting people into symbols as well.

And the next stage of course is the Metaverse, where we would be interacting, not even with people, but with the symbols that represent people in the game, with the avatars.

That is completely narcissistic.

This is exactly what happens in the narcissistic.

The narcissist mind is a giant metaverse, where every external person in the narcissist's life, what we call external object in psychology, every human being in the narcissist's life, what we call external object in psychology, every human being in the narcissist life, is converted automatically, instantaneously, into an internal object in the mind of the narcissist.

And that internal object is an avatar. It's a representation of that person in the narcissist mind and therefore very reminiscent of a metaverse.

Thank you so much for this clarification. That was actually exactly what I wanted to go next.

Because I often do that my apology no that's okay that's perfect so we're on the same pace so the virtual reality space I was going to mention that from my observations and experiences it seems that we're transitioning into a narcissistic type of world because virtual reality is essentially a non-reality, which is based on projection. And as you said, that is very similar to the mind, narcissistic mind.

And now we also have the phenomenon of artificial intelligence which is not adding another layer to all of this complexity and all of these mechanisms.

So now so many of the functions that were considered human before, functions that were even daily functions that we performed on a daily basis in a traditional, let's say, society are now being slowly, actually fast, not so slowly replaced by robots and artificial intelligence mechanisms.

So I can see from my own experience how, for example, using Google Maps on a daily basis has sort of led me to forget a little bit of my orientation capabilities and reading, you know, abilities to read maps.

So imagine what will happen as we replace relationships with not only virtual but AI-generated relationships.

So I would like to say have you the floor, take the floor on this because I believe you have a lot of expertise and opinions on this subject as well.

Just a small correction before we proceed.

These symbolic spaces are based on introjection, not on projection, on the conversion of everything outside into an internal object, including people.

So even people are converted into internal object.

When we convert an external object, even if it is a real object, even if it is a belief, even if it is an idea, even if it is an ideology, when we convert these into internal elements, internal components, then we call this process introjection.

Regarding your question, again, I think what has happened is that there was the first, there was a social trend and technology is reactive to it.

The social trend is what we call in psychology contumaciousness. Contumaciousness means the rejection of authority, the hatred of authority.

So there's a hatred of authority, there's a hatred of political authority, there's a hatred of intellectual authority, there's a hatred of learning and expertise and knowledge, there's a hatred because it's a narcissistic defense.

If you know more than I do, then you are superior to me, and you can't be superior to me because I'm God.

It's a narcissistic reaction.

So contumaciousness is an element in psychopathic narcissism. It is an element in what we call reactance, which is a fancy way of saying defiance.

So it started the contumaciousness. We saw it in the 60s, started in the 60s. 1968, the revolutions all over Europe, France, these, that, the 1960s in the United States, the hippies, the shmippies, and all these movements, free love, and you name it.

There was a rejection of authority. It started with a rejection of political authority, all it always does, but it ended up with a rejection of the intellect, intelligence, knowledge, learning, books, hatred, not only rejection, absolute emotional investment in hatred, which is the outcome, inevitable outcome of envy.

And now that we have rejected authority, what could replace it?

The mob, the crowd.

So we have Wikipedia. We have Wikipedia long before artificial intelligence.

What is Wikipedia? Wikipedia is a rejection of experts and authorities. It is the crowd of the mob creating its own encyclopedia.

I mean, the hell with you, the Britannica. The hell with the encyclopedia Britannica. We are much better.

So crowdsourcing is an example of oclocracy, mob rule. It's an example of a rebellion against established intellectual authority.

Artificial intelligence is nothing but crowdsourcing. It's just another name for crowdsourcing.

What artificial intelligence models do, they scan billions of pages, billions of, and they give you the answer.

That is a great description of crowdsourcing.

And that's exactly what Wikipedia does. Only Wikipedia does it with human beings. Human beings scan these billions of pages, then they create an encyclopedia.

Here, a technology is scanning these very same pages, and it creates its own encyclopedia, in effect.

Artificial intelligence is Wikipedia extended by other means. That's all. It's a rebellion against intellectual authority. That's why artificial intelligence lies a lot. Artificial intelligence models hallucinate. They give you wrong answers very often. It's false and it's a lie and it's a scam and a swindle.

When the artificial intelligence companies tell you the accuracy is 99 percent, they are bullshitting you. I would be surprised if it's 30%.

I tested various artificial intelligence models. I asked them 20 factual questions about my life. Factual, fact based. Like where was I born?

I tested them. They failed eight out of ten times. Eight out of ten times, they got the answers wrong.

I was born in Macedonia. I wasn't. I was born in Israel. I happened to be right now in Macedonia. But it was born in Israel. One example, yes.

My sister wrote the book, Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I'm kidding you or not.

So this is artificial intelligence where the illiteracy and the ignorance and the stupidity of the masses is accumulated, structured, shaped and spewed out, garbage in, garbage out.

It's precisely the model of artificial intelligence, and for a very, very long time, it was the working model of the Wikipedia.

Until Wikipedia has been taken over by expert editors, and now it's much closer to a traditional encyclopedia. You can't just do whatever you want. There are strict structures that make sure that you don't vandalize and you don't spread nonsense and misinformation and so.

Wikipedia has become a trustworthy resource because it stopped being a crowdsourcing resource.

Artificial intelligence also involves another trend, the trend of outsourcing.

So not only crowdsourcing, but outsourcing. Outsourcing is when we say, we would like internal psychological processes to be regulated from the outside rather than from the inside.

So, for example, we derive our sense of self-worth and self-esteem and self-confidence from the number of likes and views that we get on social media. That is external regulation. The outside regulates a process that should have been completely internal.

Your self-esteem should not rely on what other people have to say about you. You should know yourself well and your self-esteem is a derivative of this. End of story.

And so we have begun in the last 40 years to outsource something called external regulation.

So our moods, for example, are now very responsive to the outside, much less than to the inside. Our cognitions are shaped by the outside.

We don't do research anymore. We embed ourselves in like-minded thought silos with confirmation bias, and we keep repeating the same mantra over and over and over again ad nauseum.

So this is the second trend outsourcing of internal functions.

We became essentially hollowed out, emptied. We became externally regulated zombies. And this is the second trend.

And when you outsource, you of course transition from an internal locus of control to an external locus of control.

In other words, you begin to believe that your life is determined from the outside, not from the inside.

Because indeed, you have outsourced your mind. You gave authority of your mind to external factors.

And of course, this immediately gives rise to conspiracy theories and paranoid ideation.

You can see that it's a chain. These links are inexorable. They lead to each other naturally and with great inner risen.

And so we are going there. We are going to the end of the end of a human being, as we used to know it.

Humanity started its self-reflection and self-perception as agent, based on the concept of agency.

You were, for example, a moral agent.

And now, if you're a moral agent, that means you should be punished if you misbehave.

Because you are an agent, you have agency.

But wait a minute, if everything is outsourced and crowdsourced, and maybe whatever it is that you do is not punishable, because you have lost your agency.

And then you have people like Donald Trump who never pay the price for their crimes, you know, because he claims the agency is not his. He's being persecuted. He's being victimized. And of course, this sits well with the age of victimhood.

The famous sociologist Bradley Campbell said that we have transitioned from the age of dignity to the age of victimhood.

What is victimhood? Is when you hand control over yourself to someone else, when you outsource your locus of control, becomes external locus of control.

And I could go on like that forever.

These are processes that are interlinked. They feed on each other. And they affect other issues.

For example, the very idea of truth and originality. Walter Benjamin, of course, was the first to discuss the issue of originality in the age of mechanical copying and so on, so forth.

But I think he didn't go far enough, Walter Benjamin, because had he gone one step further, he would have realized that the concept of originality is inextricably linked to the concept of truth.

Originality is not only about authenticity, it's about truthfulness, about the truth, the very concept of truth.

And what he failed to realize in my view is that the age of mechanical copying would lead us to the erosion of the very concept of truth.

Because if nothing is original and everything is a copy, if nothing is a copy and everything is original, then everything is relative.

And if everything is relative and there's no fixed point, no Archimedean point, then everything is simultaneously false and true, depending on your point of view, your personal history.

In other words, opinion becomes the truth.

Yeah, yeah.

And so it's all interlinked.

And again, I'm not joking when I say that I can continue for a few hours discussing all these, because there are many more trends.

I'm sure of that.

Many additional trends.

But I just wanted to give you a taste of the way I see things.

And I could definitely go a few hours listening to you talk about this topic because I again, like I said, I feel like we really are not going into depth enough and it is a very relevant topic. It's changing our society radically and exponentially fast and we're not really thinking about the consequences.

So I'm glad that at least someone is thinking about the consequences and talking about them with the world.

So thank you so much for having so much insight and so much interesting into really going deep into these kinds of dynamics.

Thanks.

I feel, you know, I feel like as someone who's an expert on narcissism and narcissistic tendencies and behaviors, you probably can see very much more accurately the dangers of these dynamics and how we are encouraging these kinds of behaviors, both at the social level, collective level, but also at the individual pathological level.

So it is, you know, I think it's great that you're doing this as a service to explore these.

Yeah, but we are, you and I are members of an extinct species. We're dinosaurs. We're dying.

Yeah.

We're dying.

And we are dying because no one would listen to us.

And we are also dying because people are incapable of listening to us because they're dumb, they're uneducated, or they choose to not listen.

There is a defense against learning, there's a resistance to learning, and so.

There's anti-intellectualism, hatred of learning and knowledge, and so a rejection of intellectual authority or at the very least scholarly authority and so on so we are fast disappearing, people like us are fast dying.

And I feel a sense of futility having spent my entire life basically learning and studying and reading anddying, and I feel a sense of futility having spent my entire life basically learning and studying and reading and teaching.

And I feel a sense of futility because the world, at least for the next few hundred years, maybe 200.

Things are much faster nowadays than they used to be in the middle ages, so maybe it'll be shorter, it'll be 200 years.

But definitely, definitely many decades.

We're entering a period where people like us are gradually going to become the enemies.

At this stage we are ignored. At this stage people like us are being ignored.

Some of us are getting fired. Some of us are getting criticized. Some of us are getting threatened, mildly, not so mildly.

But there will come a time that people like us will be executed, physically. It's a question of time, not a question of if. That's where we're heading.

Absolutely, yeah.

I feel very despondent, I despair, I have great despair.

And it reminds me of how intellectuals reacted to the rise of fascism and Nazism in the 20s and 30s of the last century in Europe, and how they just gave up.

They stopped talking, not because they were afraid, but they simply saw no meaning in opposing this tsunami that no one can oppose, you know?

And some of them committed suicide, simply committed suicide.

So I don't feel it is my world anymore.

I grew up among books. I adored and admired learned people. These were my role models and heroes.

And while in the 50s, the number one superstar was Albert Einstein. Today, it probably would be some obscure footballer or influencer or Kardashian type.

The world is debased. The world is corrupted in the worst sense of, it's rotten, in the worst sense of the world.

And I see no hope in the near term.

Obviously, because stupid people are taking over, narcissistic people are taking over, obviously the world will implode, and within 200 years there will be massive devastation.

I'm not ruling out a nuclear war. Absolutely not. There will be massive devastation.

And then people like you and me, we will have to rebuild the world. We'll have to rebuild it.

And of course, ultimately, there is hope. If you're willing to wait two, three hundred years, there is hope.

But the next two, three hundred years are going to be absolutely horrible.

A combination of the worst part of the Middle Ages, because there was a part of the Middle Ages, which was not bad, actually, but the worst part, the early Middle Ages, and the worst part of the 20th century.

That's where we're heading, a confluence, a marriage, between the early Middle Ages and the 1920s and 30s in Europe, in the world, not only Europe.

I see that trend definitely, and that's why I sort of, I keep talking, even though maybe it could be deaf ears.

But I have always a little bit of a hope that maybe by planting seeds somewhere, something will survive, you know, some kind of consciousness and self-awareness and willingness to really explore and understand and to do something constructive with life.

You never know. Maybe it will survive. So if nothing else, it makes my life a little bit more worthy of living.

But the other thing I would like to talk with you about, because this is another topic that I am just surprised that it is not talked about more, given the amount of international transactions that we're having today.

And again, international exchanges that are increasing at exponential value and yet are not necessarily integrated with the cultural exchanges.

By living in both Asia and the West, and by living in different countries and continents and cultures, I notice that there are extremely radical differences, both in the cultural norms, let's say, but also under the lens of narcissistic behavior in the way that, for example, narcissistic tendencies and trends and behaviors are encouraged or discouraged in different cultures.

And I have to admit that sometimes it is mind-blowing because I feel like I have to live in two completely opposite realities when I deal with people in the West, in the East, due to the fact that some tendencies that are completely encouraged and seen as heroic, if you will, and a representation of great values in one culture are seen as demonized and criminalized in another culture.

So now I have to figure out a way to integrate all of that.

So please take the floor. Again, I'm sure you have a lot of expertise on the topic, and I would love to hear your opinion and research on it.

First of all, it's important to make a distinction between the hidden text and the occult text or the...

And to revisit works by Althusser and others who've dealt with some of these issues.

Althusser, of course, ended up crazy in a mental asylum, like Nietzsche before him and many others.

I think when you see the world as it is, this is a serious risk.

So there is an overt text and hidden text.

The overt text is the globalized West.

Western values, such as, for example, capitalism, growth, economic growth. Democracy, ironically. You have elections everywhere. You have elections in China also. You have elections in Russia. This is a Western import.

But this is, of course, the overt text. The text that is not deconstructed, the text that is misleading, superficial, and teaches us nothing about the nature of reality. It's a text that is self-referential. It's a text that refers to itself, but never to reality. It has no, you know, connotations, denotations. I'll not go into it right now.

So the overt text is Western values, and I would say even much more so Western lifestyle and Western ideology. Ideologies.

But the overt text is of course irrelevant. What is relevant is the occult or the hidden text.

And the hidden text in each and every cultural sphere is of course dramatically different, but I think can be divided into two major groups.

And there is a lot of work that's been done on this by the likes of Caponi and Roland and Theodore Millon, the late Theodore Millon and others.

And they suggested that you could divide the world basically into collectivist societies and individualistic societies. Where the emphasis is on the individual, and where the emphasis is on the collective.

Now, the Renaissance, when I say Renaissance, I'm talking actually starting in the 12th century, not necessarily, not so much.

But the Renaissance was the cult of the individual.

And because it was the cult of individual, it came out with various manifestations of individualism that we are suffering to this very day.

I regard the Renaissance as one of the most deleterious, detrimental and destructive intellectual movements in human history.

It gave rise, for example, to the personality cult, Niccolo Machiavelli and the Prince. It gave rise to totalitarianism. It gave rise to malignant individualism.

The Renaissance gave rise directly to fascism and Nazism. There's a direct lineage there.

And I will not go into it right now, but we could dedicate a whole, another, maybe talk to it.

So it is the Renaissance that introduced the idea of individualism.

The very concept of authorship, the Oteo and the author, these are Renaissance inventions.

Prior to that, art was basically a collective endeavor, a collective effort.

You don't know the names of the artists in ancient Egypt? Not one of them.

So this is a new individualism is a renaissance day.

And then you have societies which luckily for them were not affected by the Renaissance because they were too far away, like Japan and China and so forth, and they're collectivist societies.

Narcissism exists in both individualistic societies and collective societies, because it is part of human nature.

However, it manifests, it expresses differently.

Whereas in individualistic society, the individual would take credit, would boast, would brag, would make claims about accomplishments, which are counterfactual, would lie, everything would revert to the locus would be the individual.

So the individual, an individual athlete may say, I trained a lot, I worked very hard, and I accomplished this. An individualisticNobel Prizewould say, you know, I spent all my life studying this chemical reaction and then I succeeded. Suddenly with inspiration, I succeeded to this and to do that and so on.

In collectivist societies, you would have the same narcissists. But a collectivist athlete would say, I want to thank my coach and the support of my team members, without which I would have never accomplished this.

And a collectivist Nobel Prize winner would say, in our laboratory, which is one of the best in Japan, we succeeded to break this enigma which other laboratories all over the world failed to do.

These are both narcissistic, grandiose expressions, but they relate to the collective.

A worker in a corporation in Japan, a salaryman, as they call it, you know, in Japan, would be proud to belong to that company. He would derive his sense of grandiosity from the fact that he belongs to that company. It is part of this collective, whereas a chief executive officer of a similar competing company in the United States, would make it all about him. He was the visionary. He came up with new ideas. He implemented new procedures. He and he and he, even very often nonsense. He didn't do anything.

So, narcissism is all over the world. There is not a nook or cranny or angle that is free of narcissism. Not such thing. Arab societies, Asian societies, African society, Western society, they all have narcissists.

But there are legitimate and non-legitimate ways of expressing narcissism.

And so each society structures speech, structures what informs the individual, which what is legitimate speech and what is not legitimate speech, and sometimes even penalizes non-legitimate speeches, we have seen, for example, during the COVID pandemic.

So you pay a very high price if you use non-legitimate speech. If you belong to a white supremacist militia in the United States and you're proud of it, you're very likely to end up in prison. So even if you're a collectivist by nature and your grandiosity is the outcome of belonging to the group, you may end up in prison for this. If you're a neo-Nazi, for example, in Germany.

And similarly, if you are too individualistic in Japan, you are likely to attract very negative attention, which could end very badly for you. And there were a few actors in Japan who were put in prison because they were too individualistic in many ways.

And so there are cues of sexual assault and other things and so.

So there are permissible speech acts in every society, and that's the only difference.

Nothing substantial, nothing fundamental and nothing clinical is different. It's the same narcissism.

Just the way you talk about it depends, you know, is responsive to your culture.

Yeah, exactly. The way I see it is that it's almost like when you have a flow of water and you close the flow in one spot, so the water flows in the other spot.

So in a similar way, whatever the society permits, whatever it encourages and it allows, that's where you're going to see those traits coming out.

So in my personal experience, and it could also be due to the, and then we could even explore the topic on how technology, on Eastern and Western, how differently it is being applied and it's influencing culture because that's another book that could be written on.

But the way I see it's being expressed here, for example, in Asian cultures a lot more is what most people would define as covert kinds of narcissistic expressions, as opposed to the more overt ones that are more encouraged and promoted and accepted in Western cultures.

So I'm seeing much more of the, as you said, for example, with the example of Japan, if a person were to brag too much about their own accomplishment here, they would be immediately seen as shameful by the society. So it is not encouraged at all to do these kinds to promote these kinds of behaviors which are instead encouraged in western societies but at the same time when a person self sacrifices to great degrees even to the detriment of everybody else around them and themselves.

But that is because it is a very collective value, self-sacrifice and selflessness and just giving, giving, giving, working for society because that is considered such a high value in this society. There is a lot of these narcissistic tendencies of doing all of that so in order to get the attention, to get the approval, to get the adulation and so on and so.

I would like to, I know that you haven't been using clinical language in what you've just said. You've been using colloquial language, which is okay.

Yes, yes.

But I would like to comment because some of these words have clinical meaning. And if I don't correct the record, it could be.

So for example, covert. The word covert has a clinical meaning. It means a narcissist who is unable to obtain narcissistic supply, unable to garner attention, and therefore becomes bitter, seething with envy and passive aggressive. We call it a collapsed narcissist.

So I wouldn't use the word covert in, for example, when we describe collective or collectivist narcissism.

So in a collectivist societies, an overt narcissist, not a covert narcissist, would brag and boast as much as Donald Trump does, but he would brag and boast about the collective, about belonging to the collective, or being an integral part of the collective, or enjoying what the collective has to offer.

So it's still grandiose overt narcissists. Just there are permissible speech acts and non-permissible, socially unacceptable, and frowned upon speech acts.

So I wouldn't use the word covert. It's a bit misleading.

What you describe at the very end of what you've said is known as pro-social narcissism. There is a variant of narcissists who is communal. It's a narcissist whose grandiosity is about how altruistic is, how charitable, how compassionate, how amazingly caring, how flawless, how righteous, how so this kind of narcissist does good deeds, but then brags about it. His good deeds are ostentatious. They are visible, public. Everything is done in public. There's no private sphere.

And so we call this kind of narcissists pro-social narcissists. For example, probably Mother Theresa is an example. And maybe Greta Thunberg is an example.

So these are people who are essentially highly narcissistic, and they externalize, they create a facade or a look how pro-social I am, not anti-social, exactly the opposite. Look how beneficial and benevolent I am and magnanimous and amazing and moral and ethical.

I would even say the locus of the superiority is in the morality. I am more moral than you. It's competitive morality.

And sometimes there is competitive victimhood. I'm much bigger victim than you are. My abuser is much worse than your abuser. You know, I've been ho-hounded by the CIA much more than you did.

So there is a seamless integration with paranoid ideation as well.

So paranoia, victimhood, prosocial, ostentatiousprosocial and communal narcissism, they very often go in hand in hand.

And then you see a pro-social narcissist who says, I'm a very moral person, I've never done anything wrong, I'm righteous, and so on, and because I'm like that, everyone is attacking me, everyone is hounding me, everyone is, you know, and I'm a victim.

So you have a smooth transition from a pro-social claim, narcissistic claim, to victimhood to paranoia. Smooth, to integration.

So all these are nuances of pathological narcissism that unfortunately get lost online.

People make a huge mess between psychopathy and narcissism.

Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I'm sure I also sometimes confuse the terms.

And yes, it's a communal narcissism. That's the more accurate term to describe these tendencies that I observed very intensely in Asian cultures and not as much in Western cultures.

And it's really amazing sometimes how extreme one of these tendencies will go in a culture where it is so accepted and promoted and valued.

So to the extent of incredible levels of self-sacrifice, incredible levels of victims and so on and so forth, because it is part of the value system of the culture.

And so that's how the narcissistic traits can come out hidden as goodness and being a good part of society and so on and so forth.

So thank you so much for the correction and the clarification.

And so we probably don't have that much time left. I don't want to steal too much of your time. Although I could really talk about this for hours.

Don't worry about my time, but the attention span of viewers are likely to dwindle dramatically.

We might lose them eventually.

So, is there, okay, so I will leave the last minutes to you for if you have anything you would like to add.

No, I much prefer to be led. I'm a very submissive type.

As you may have noticed.

So, all right so even though we can really honestly have another entire conversation on this but would you like to touch upon the subject of how technology is impacting eastern cultures versus western cultures because that is another topic that I'd be very relevant in the way that we are shaping society today and the world.

One common misconception is that technology creates or generates or engenders social trends.

I am not aware of any technology ever in human history that has created a social trend, not even the printing press.

And I can go into details what I mean and so on, but to generalize, I'm not aware of such a...

I am aware, however, of numerous social trends that gave rise to technologies.

And so when you ask the question how is technology leveraged, accepted, integrated, and assimilated in various cultures, what technology would do is to amplify these cultures.

Amplify.

Now, one could argue that quantity becomes quality. And if you amplify something sufficiently, you create something new.

That is an interesting argument.

For example, you have narcissism, and then social media come, and they amplify the narcissism. The narcissism was there. Nothing new. But having been amplified, maybe we are faced with something relatively novel, a kind of narcissism that has never happened before.

So this argument has its place, of course.

I think in Western societies, technologies amplify narcissism and, to a logic sense, psychopathy.

Whereas in Eastern societies, I think technologies amplify cohesion and compliance.

I don't want to say obedience, I don't want to say slavishness, I don't want to say submissiveness, although in some countries definitely that's the case.

But shall we say conformity?

So technologies there would encourage conformity, because they homogenize. These technologies homogenize huge numbers of people.

Again, there is one thing I keep saying and people hold me to task for it. I keep saying that modern technologies are totally reactionary. And they're reactionary because they lead us back to the past. They lead us to the village.

And they lead us, for example, to homogenization.

Initially, there were television networks. And these television networks captured 70, 80, 60% of the audience every single night. In many countries, 100% in every single night. Even in the United States, there were three television networks, and between them, they captured close to 80% or 90% of the audience. So there was essentially homogeneity.

And then what happens?

Cable television came. Cable television fragmented the audience. It fractured the audience.

Okay?

And then social media recreated the homogeneity of the public. Again recreated it. That's why that's another example of a reactionary trend, going back to the past.

So today you have identical experiences. It's true that you are exposed to different posts and different images and different reels and different views, but you are within the same platform, it's the same platform. It's like watching NBC or ABC. It's true that on NBC you could see a basketball game, you could see a soap opera, you could see the news, and it's true, internally, the content shapeshifts and so on. But you are in hock and you are inside a single platform.

And the algorithm of a platform homogenizes. It's an algorithm that homogenizes, regrettably, leveraging what we call negative effects like envy, anger, fear. And this creates even more homogeneity.

So when you take social media and other technologies, by the way, you mentioned artificial intelligence, multiplayer games, which is a fascinating topic. Multiplayer games are complete solipsistic, self-contained, self-enclosed spaces, alternative realities. You can definitely go into the game and never exit because you can buy things, you can trade things, you can get married, you can work, you can...

And the metaverse is the idea to expand multiplayer games and to include your workplace or your grocery store or your pizza parlor or whatever.

So when you take these technologies and you superimpose them on Eastern society, let's call them Eastern or the South, Southern and Eastern societies, which are essentially collectivist societies.

The homogeneity built into these encourages conformity, encourages obedience, encourages, you know, so in the East.

When you take the very same technologies and you superimpose them on the West, what you get is homogeneous individualism.

Everyone thinks they're special. Everyone thinks they're unique, but they're special and unique in the same way.

In predetermined ways, the algorithm limits you 100%. It's a single thoroughfare.

It reminds me of Chaucer. Chaucer and the pilgrims. There are many types of pilgrims. There's this and there's that. And they disagree and they hate each other and they fight and so on.

But they're all walking the same road. The same, and this is a Trocerian scene.

Western individualism is the ultimate form of conformity. This is what Western people fail completely to understand.

Their rebelliousness, their defiance, their individualism, their consummations, their contumaciousness, they're in your face, they're unspecial, I mean, I'm unique, you know, this is all channeled and predetermined.

It reminds me that when you work with certain softwares, they give you a choice of templates. Then you choose a template, it's like choosing a template and saying, you see how unique I am? I chose this template.

Yeah, but the template is predetermined. This is the mother of all conformity, you know? You can't create your own template. You have to choose one of the templates.

And yesterday I wrote something I said that actually let me get it let me get it right okay I wrote something which kind of captures what we're talking about. Hold it for a second. Be patient.

And here's what I wrote. If the cage is sufficiently large, it creates the illusion of freedom.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

When the enclosure is adequately provisioned, it is misperceived as home. That's what I wrote yesterday.

And so we have individualistic conformity and collectivist conformity, the same way we have individualistic narcissism and collectivist narcissism.

It's the same thing. It masquerades differently, it appears, expresses, manifests differently.

It reminds me that in biology, you have genes. You have a gene. And the same gene fulfills several functions very often, depending on combination with other genes and so.

But the environment sometimes determines whether a specific gene is expressed or not. This is known as epigenetic expression.

So the environment is, and it's the same here, you have conformity. And the environment tells you how to express your conformity and you think you're being an individual.

So in Japan, the environment tells you, if you want to express your conformity, you have to do it through the collective. And by belonging to the collective, you would feel special and unique and so.

And in the United States, they tell you, if you want to express your conformity, you have to do it through by being an individual and claiming individuality, but you can claim individuality only in these prescribed ways, which is a total oxymoron, total contradiction in terms.

And of course, I'm not the first one to say this. Sartre, of course, discussed the issue of authenticity and how authenticity is extremely close to impossible, especially in Western society.

He gave the example of the waiter, the waiter in a cafe. The waiter comes in, changes his clothes and becomes a waiter, and so on and so forth.

So I'm not the first to suggest this, but it is relevant to your question. It's the same phenomenon masquerading differently, but it's the same.

Don't think that there is any fundamental difference between Japan and Texas. None. It's just that in Japan, the same phenomena are expressed one way and in Texas, definitely, a very different way, but it's the same phenomenon.

Brilliant, brilliant answer. And this really helps to sort of wrap everything around.

And aren't the things that we're least aware ofthe ones that control us the most?

So it is almost an oxymoron that because we believe we're so free, that is what actually ends up making us so enslaved.

So, yeah, nothing hides better than in place sight.

Well, thank you so much for this very insightful and very interesting and fun conversation.

And again, I could really talk more about these kinds of topics.

So if you want to come back anytime.

No, it's up to you.

I told you I'd like to be led.

It's up to you.

I'd be happy to talk to you. If that's what you're saying.

Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of these kinds of questions that we could go into. So we can definitely.

So thank you so much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

Would I would like to share also, obviously I will put your information under the video that I published. Would you like to share anything about how people can reach you? What kind of books about...

Just Google Sam Vaknin. I have a YouTube channel and I have a million website. I've been one of the first on the internet. I'm all over the place. So just type Sam Vaknin and you'll get everything you need.

Okay.

Any final words? Anything you would like to say to the people who are willing enough to listen all the way to the end of this conversation?

Disengage.

The reality right now is manifestly and totally toxic. I cannot see a single redeeming feature in reality nowadays. For your own sanity and for your own survival, perhaps atomization is not such a bad thing and avoiding contact with people.

There is a debate whether we are truly zoon politicon, we are truly social animals. I doubt, I have my doubts. I think we are not social animals. I think the concept of the idea of society is very new and a bit counterfactual. It's very new, definitely. The first time anyone discussed society was in the late 18th century.

Exactly like childhood is a very new concept, it's 150 years old.

So the idea of society is very new.

And every new idea creates an ideology, and every ideology interpolates you, like Althusser said. Every ideology forces you to behave in highly specific ways and to think in highly specific ways.

Don't.

It seems that this attempt to create an organizing principle and a hermeneutic principle, explanatory principle, in the form of society, this idea of society, has failed.

Has failed.

Early enlightenment figures, including, of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, they hinted that it might fail. Even the great believers in society, like Adam Smith and Hobbes, even they had their doubts.

I think we have reached a breaking point where the concept of society, the idea, the organizing principle, has failed completely. We need now to protect ourselves from others. Others represent a threat. All others. Your nearest and dearest and closest are no exception.

And the only way to protect yourself is to create an inner world that is rich enough and supportive enough so that you can somehow survive in the only virtual reality which is healthy, and that is your mind. Your mind is a virtual reality, of course.

So don't look outward for solution. Don't look for, for example, for a virtual reality out there provided by Zuckerberg.

But look inwards. You have everything you need, everything it takes. You have all the resources from the moment you're born. We come fully equipped.

And so if the environment and so called society and so on, the world has failed you, you feel free to withdraw and to avoid and to wait, to wait it out.

I know this is an exceedingly unpopular message and might be even construed as mentally unhealthy message, because we have, for example, schizoid personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder.

But these disorders are value judgments. To say that someone is avoidant and to pathologize it is because avoiding is perceived to be not good, not okay. That's not a clinical entity. That's a value, judgment.

So feel free to be schizoid and avoidant. Because the alternative is increasingly more dangerous and threatening.

That's my message, and that's what I do in my personal life.

Well, thank you for this very, very valuable final words.

And yeah, I have to say I resonate a lot with your message.

And anyways, fortunately, I never get tired of still trying you know trying my best to do whatever is possible up until the day that I am out of here so hopefully something good will come out of it thank you so much again for this conversation I'm very honored to have had you here and to have this wonderful, insightful.

Thank you for having me.

I appreciate. Thank you for suffering. My long answers.

It's okay. It's quite pleasurable.

Okay, so I'm going to stop the recording now.