Narcissistic Post-Enlightenment World

The Dark Return to the Renaissance

On December 20, I had the opportunity to interview Prof. Sam Vaknin, my teacher on narcissism, history, and geopolitical affairs. Vaknin provided historical context for the age of narcissism, making a compelling case that this narcissistic era shares a resonance with the Renaissance and that in this post-Enlightenment age, we are reverting and regressing to dark Renaissance values as typified by Machiavelli’s The Prince. It was the Renaissance that gave birth to totalitarianism and the personality cult.

The age of narcissism, in which we find ourselves, finds more common ground with the Renaissance than the Enlightenment. The Renaissance emphasized the role of the (narcissistic) individual, e.g., Renaissance man. The Enlightenment (Modernism) and Postmodernism attempted to simultaneously embrace both individualism (as a throwback to the Renaissance) and collectivism, emphasizing the collective in terms of its institutions and social contract. It would be a crude or binary (splitting) characterization to hold that the Enlightenment is exclusively concerned with the pursuit of the individual, as is often asserted.

Whereas the Enlightenment was an inclusive ideology, the Renaissance was an exclusionary ideology. We are now living in an age of exclusion. Victimhood, a cornerstone of narcissism, is about excluding a group of people who are then labeled abusers.

Narcissism is exclusionary and irreconcilable with the inclusive values of the Enlightenment. Owing to god-like grandiosity, narcissists exclude others from their world because others are not up to their level.

Vaknin asserts, “Narcissism and victimhood are inevitable outcomes of this clash between the Enlightenment and Renaissance, especially the Enlightenment part.” This has to do with having to renegotiate social contracts (gender, genocide, etc.) on an ongoing basis, whereas during the Renaissance there was no negotiation of morality; morality was fixed and eternal.

The Enlightenment envisioned societal progress as linear, whereas the Renaissance conceptualized change as cyclical, recognizing that societal structures are prone to corruption, necessitating their ending.

In this wide-ranging conversation including anticipating world dominion of radical Islam, Vaknin disabused me of the notion that technology, such as quantum computing, could act as a guiding light in these dark times of clashing, unintegrated ideologies. Instead, technology, as a rule with only at best dubious exceptions, follows rather than leads.

Perhaps horrifyingly, technological advancements, which have all the earmarks of social atomization and anomie, are reflections of our deepest psychological and philosophical mindsets and desires.

-GC

Written in the Renaissance’s 16th century, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, gave rise to the term Machiavellianism which is defined as manipulative.

Description:

Enlightenment was a victimhood movement (Church as the abuser).

The counterfactual ideal assumption of rational agents sets us up for failure and self-destructive self-rejection.

External locus of control results in a sense of victimhood (e.g., medicalization of mental illness and ideal of mental health).

Scientism, consumerism, economic growth, and atheism as new religions that regulate human relationships as well.

It is time to give up on the failing liberal democracy project and its attendant ideologies: human rights, sanctity of life, rule of law, civic engagement, international community, and other such infantile inanities.

Liberal democracy is fading everywhere because exactly like Communism it is founded on a counterfactual view of human psychology and a fallacious reframing of human history.

Ideologies are inflexible and self-defeating straightjackets. Adherence to such fantasies ineluctably and inexorably leads to conflict and mayhem.

As the USA’s Founding Fathers knew, universal franchise democracy is a dangerously flawed idea. It empowers the nescient and the dumb, gives rise to demagogues, and elevates ruthless, populist antisocial leaders.

Similarly, the human and civil rights agendas are totalitarian victimhood doctrines that abrogate the inalienable and primordial right for self-defense and the meritocratic allocation of resources, among many other consequent distortions.

We need to get rid of all this delusional Enlightenment baggage and revert to Realpolitik: the consummate use of power, hard and soft, to create and maintain peace and to regulate conflict.

Resources:

Fascism is Political Malignant Narcissism

Is Trump a Proto-fascist?

Transcript:

Coy: Hello, my name is Ginger Coy. I'm the writer behind Concerning Narcissism on the platform Substack. You can find me at gingercoy.substack.com. I write about politics, culture, and proliferating Cluster B psychopathology and how it harms civilization. And this writing effort is largely inspired by the man of the hour and then some, none other than Sam Vaknin.

So Sam, can you introduce yourself? 

Vakin: Thank you. I'm an avid reader of your blog. It's a breath of fresh air, because I think it's as near, as close to objectivity as possible, or neutrality as possible. It's…we're all humans, but… So I'm Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of several books on psychology, international affairs, and so on and so forth. I’m a former professor in some universities and a current professor in other universities. The usual. Let's delve into the topics. I think they are far more interesting than me. 

Coy: Okay. Great. So you probably saw, Sam, that yesterday the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump is disqualified from being on the primary ballot because he engaged in insurrection violating the 14th Amendment.

And of course, Trump has vowed that he will appeal to the Supreme Court and, short of his prohibition from being on the ballot, America is potentially on the precipice of autocracy with the election of Trump, in my estimation, so just some other thoughts: it's Republicans, it's conservatives who are dismissive of the threats that Trump poses to the Constitution. And you would think that they'd want to conserve the Constitution, being conservative. And then also coming from the right is the ultimate, pardon the phrase, Trump card that people seem to employ these days that if you have any criticism of him whatsoever, that you are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome or TDS, a term or phrase that I find tedious because it's condescending that there's no potential there.

You've also mentioned the escalating rhetoric. It's Hitler, the vermin, referring to Hitler and Jews. And then also poison blood, immigrant poisoning of the blood of America. Trump recently quoted Putin that democracy is rotten. The J6 prisoners are now J6 “hostages.”

He pledged to root out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. These are the vermin in our context, “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” and you've mentioned this book before too. And I think it's a great book, Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear. He writes that rationalizing fear away is dangerous.

Many people feel safe with Trump, that he's this bully who can go up against the likes of dictators like Putin. You've talked about how narcissists are apex predators, instinctive— cognitive, and reflexive. So why are people's instincts leading them astray that this narcissist Trump will protect them against dictators and not hurt them personally? What kind of grandiosity, repetition compulsion, what's going on defense mechanism-wise, Sam? 

Vakin: I think the problem is that those of us who would like to believe that these people have gone astray are not quite sure that they have. The world is becoming more and more predatory and psychopathic.

When you look at the leadership ranks all over the world, psychopathic narcissists are in charge. Putin, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, the current president of Argentina, Netanyahu in Israel, and Modi in India. There has been a narcissistic, psychopathic takeover of the elites.

And so it is true, actually, it's pretty realistic to say that we are faced with a world that is being molded and directed and guided by narcissists and psychopaths. And therefore, we may be better off handing over power to a narcissist and a psychopath to cope with them. Takes one to know one, it takes one to defeat one.

That is not entirely irrational. The thing is, the missing piece is, that narcissists and psychopaths always end badly. And when they end badly, everyone else is paying the price. For a while, it might seem as if they are on a winning streak and implementing the right strategies, enhancing the survival value of others, upholding security and safety and so forth, but it's always limited in time.

It may last four years, it may last forty years, at the end of which everything falls apart. Narcissists, ineluctably and invariably, end up being self-destructive and other-destructive. So that's the problem. Had Narcissus been a successful breed and the price was a suspension of personal autonomy, the subversion of freedoms, and so on and so forth, there would have been an argument for this.

There would have been a reasoned argument to say, okay, I'm willing to sacrifice my freedom for the sake of my safety or security. That is the deal that underlies China. That is exactly the transaction. That's a social contract that has given rise to China. Not such a bad outcome at this stage.

But now China has been taken over by a psychopathic narcissist, Xi Jinping. And China is going to pay the price. Its economy is going to collapse, internal strife, civil unrest, it's going to disintegrate at the fringes, and so forth. But China is going to pay the price, not because people have sacrificed their freedoms, China is going to pay the price because there's a narcissist in the position of authority.

So Trump may be the right answer to the likes of Putin and Netanyahu and Modi and Erdogan and may absolutely may be better equipped to deal with them and with Hamas. He may well be. But the problem is he cannot persist in this. He cannot; he is bound to self-sabotage. He is bound to self-defeat and self-destroy. Period. That's one prediction I'm 100% sure of. And we've seen it with the pandemic. So that's the issue. 

I personally think that universal franchise democracy is a seriously flawed and bad idea. And in this, I have good company, the founding fathers of the United States. I think that universal franchise democracy, definitely participatory democracy, always degenerates into ochlocracy, mob ruling, always, there's no exception actually.

Hitler was elected, he was elected in a democracy, one of the most perfect democracies ever created. The Weimar Constitution is the most democratic constitution ever. It's far more comprehensive than the United States Constitution, far better written. It gave rise to Adolf Hitler. Ochlocracy, when you give decision-making power to the people, you end up with demagogues, you end up with autocrats, because people are dumb and they're ignorant.

The overwhelming vast majority of people are essentially illiterate. And even if, when they are literate, they don't possess the necessary intelligence quotient to understand what they're reading. I'm sorry, it's politically incorrect to say, people should not be entrusted with this. Now, the Founding Fathers, and prior to them, in the Age of Enlightenment, they never considered an Athenian book.

Allegedly Athenian because it wasn't true in Athens as well. In Athens, the cradle of democracy, the people who could vote were property owners and men. Not women, not slaves, not employees. Universal franchise. It's a very new invention and a subversion and distortion of all the democratic ideas well into the end of the 19th century.

It's a total invention that is a co-option, and it is closely identified with what I call the Renaissance movements. And with your indulgence, I would like to make a distinction between Renaissance movements and Enlightenment movements. People think that the Enlightenment was a direct continuation, by other means, of the Renaissance.

No, the Enlightenment was a counter-movement, a counter-reformation. The Enlightenment was a retort, a riposte, a rejection of the Renaissance. The Renaissance put men at the center, so it was highly narcissistic. It put men at the center, and consequently, it created totalitarianism. Men of action: Machiavelli's Prince.

Jean Bodin, and others in the Renaissance, believed that the right form of governance is totalitarian, headed by a prince. A prince should make an alliance with a mob. In Renaissance thinking, a prince should make an alliance with a mob and rule this way, subverting and undermining the aristocracy and the church.

That was the political model of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was not a progressive movement, let alone a liberal one. The Renaissance was a throwback to the past. The Renaissance was highly traditionalist, and highly conservative. They wanted to recreate Greece and Rome. They didn't want to go further.

They didn't want to advance. They didn't have a concept of progress, they had a reactionary concept, of forward to the past. In this sense, the Renaissance gave birth to Nazism, to fascism, to communism, to religious fundamentalism. Because the Renaissance was a project of improving humanity by reverting to old values, old works of art, and everything old.

The old was good, the new was bad. In the Renaissance, the new was bad, the old was good. So it's very similar to Adolf Hitler's thinking. Let me read to you a sentence from Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler said “The new age of today is at work on a new human type. Men and women are to be healthier, stronger.”

There is a new feeling of life, a new joy in life. And Roger Griffin wrote this about modernism. Modernism is a drive to formulate a new social order capable of redeeming humanity from the growing chaos and crisis resulting from modernity's devastation of traditional securities. Modernity as distinct from modernism. Modernity by threatening the cohesion of traditional culture, and its capacity to absorb change. Modernity triggers an instinctive, self-defensive reflex to repair modernity by reasserting eternal values and truths that transcend the ephemerality of individual existence. And from this perspective, wrote Griffin in 2007, from this perspective, modernism is a radical reaction against modernity, and this is the Renaissance.

The Enlightenment was an attempt to undo the Renaissance, not a continuation of the Renaissance, because the Enlightenment said, no way, none of this is true. The Enlightenment came up with a concept of personal autonomy, of a social contract, of liberal values. Of universal franchise, unfortunately gradually of the noble savage of so there, and ever since then, ever since the 18th century, we are at war and we are at war right now.

Even with Donald Trump. We're at war between Renaissance philosophies, Viktor Orban, Donald Trump, these kinds of people, Netanyahu, Erdogan, Putin, these kinds of people. In order to progress, we must revert to the past. The past has a solution. The past is the key to our survival. This is Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophy.

And there is this enormous conflict between Renaissance and Enlightenment. This issue has not been resolved since the 15th century. And this is where we are. A thousand years from now, historians are going to look back and they're going to say that the battle between Renaissance values and Enlightenment values lasted a few hundred years, well into the 21st century, and hasn't been resolved yet.

Coy: Where does postmodernism fit into this equation, and how it relates to narcissism?

Vaknin: Postmodernism is an attempt to square the circle. It's an attempt to fuse certain Renaissance values with most of the Enlightenment's values. It puts men at the center in a self-indulgent way. It renders men entitled. By virtue of his or her existence, a man or a woman has rights, and these rights generate commensurate obligations in others.

She doesn't have to do anything. He doesn't have to invest anything. All they have to do is exist, and be born. And in that second, hundreds of rights crystallize. And these rights impose obligations on society and on others. That's a highly Renaissance thing. The Renaissance, for example, was very big on the gifted amateur.

The Renaissance believed that a human being, a single individual, is a kind of kingdom on its own. It's a seat of perfection, a seat of wisdom, everything emanates from the individual. The Enlightenment didn't think so. The Enlightenment said that everything emanates from society, the famous social contract.

So today we're trying to square the circle. We say, okay, everything does emanate from the individual. Individuals have rights, and generate commensurate obligations on the one hand, but on the other hand, individuals should align themselves with collectives in order to act on these rights, to render them actionable.

So it's a kind of trying to square this up. Of course, this delegitimizes collectives because if I am the source of rights and I maintain agency and personal autonomy and self-efficacy and so on, then what is the collective? It's a parasitic structure. The collective benefits from me. I don't benefit from the collective.

The collective is leveraging my rights, my endowments, my gifts, my skills, and the collective prospers and thrives. And I, what do I get out of it? And this is, of course, Marxism. This is exactly what Marx said. Marx said the means of production, the worker, the laborer, the proletariat, they give everything to the collective.

The rich guy with his factory. But what do they get out of it? This attempt to remain somehow Renaissance-minded. The individual is the source of everything. We don't need God, for example. The individual is the source of everything. Authority, autonomy, giftedness. It's all individual. But, individuals need to collaborate and to operate in order to render their rights actionable and to obtain outcomes, to become self-efficacious. This created enormous conflict between individual and collective, and this is where we are right now. The reason we are undermining democracy, the reason we are electing autocrats to power and so on and so forth, and we have been doing it for well over a hundred years now, is because we feel abused and exploited by collectives, and we want to undo these collectives.

We want to destroy them. We want to drain the swamp. This is postmodernity. Failed attempt. To benefit from both worlds, you have to make a choice, either you're Renaissance or you're Enlightenment. You can't be both, ever. And the West, at least, attempts to be both. Pretend it's both. It's not working. It's not working.

Coy: So I've been comparing and contrasting, that we are between worlds, postmodern and modern, or rather, vice versa. And then you're adding into this, the Renaissance. 

Vaknin: Yes, I think it started in the 15th century, not now. What is a victimhood movement? A victimhood movement is when you claim that you, as an individual, you were deprived of your rights or you're somehow damaged by a collective.

The Black Lives Movement doesn't say, they don't claim that specific individuals have harmed them. They say the police did it. Slave owners did it. Collectives did it. Victimhood movements are a malignant growth of this conflict between Renaissance and Enlightenment. 

Coy: Why do populations think that autocracy is the answer?

Vaknin: Because it is a personality card. An autocracy is a Renaissance choice. Machiavelli's Prince, and many others. It's a Renaissance choice. It's a Renaissance. In the Renaissance, we have the emergence of personality cults. And you can see, for example, that the concept of the author of an artwork emerged in the Renaissance.

Prior to the 13th century, there were sculptures and paintings and almost no one knew who painted them and who sculpted them. It was a collective effort, so to speak. It was usually embedded in cathedrals and so on, which were multi-century efforts. There was no concept of an author.

The concept of author emerged in the Renaissance, as did the concept of a ruler, an autocratic ruler, and so on and so forth. It all emerged in the Renaissance. And so an autocratic dictator is a Renaissance type. The Renaissance drew on this and took this from Plato's philosopher kings, who were essentially dictators. The Romans didn't see anything wrong with dictators. The rulers of Rome, some of the rulers of Rome, were official dictators. The Senate gave them the title dictator. There's nothing wrong with dictators. According to, even in the Roman Republic, there was nothing wrong with dictators.

And we are still in this battle. When we used to say the left, we were largely talking about Enlightenment values. When you say the right, you're talking about the Renaissance. That's good framing.

Coy: Do you think you have to have a regressed, narcissistic populace to hold appeal for autocracy? Is this an indication of how narcissistic we've become in a certain way? That we are becoming the narcissist in sort of an affinity with the dictator as a figure in America? 

Vaknin: I think both narcissism and victimhood are inevitable outcomes of this clash between the Enlightenment and Renaissance, especially the Enlightenment part.

Inevitable outcome, because the Enlightenment set us up for failure. The main tenet, philosophical tenet of the Enlightenment, was that we are rational. Human beings are rational. They're rational agents. And to this very day, when you study economics, the models in economics, the mathematical models in economics, are based on the assumption that people make rational choices.

There's one exception, behavioral economics where they realize that most people are irrational. But to this very day, the assumption is that there is such a thing as an average person or a typical person. It's an idealization that allows us to do science. And this person is rational. But of course, we are not rational.

So the Enlightenment sets us up for failure. We keep failing these standards because we are not rational. And because we keep failing, we self-reject. When you feel like a failure constantly, you self-reject. And to compensate for this self-rejection, you become narcissistic. Now, your narcissism can be one of two types.

You can be a narcissist as a victim. Victimhood is a form of narcissism. Or you can be a narcissist such as Donald Trump, an in-your-face narcissist, a defiant, antisocial narcissist. But both types of narcissism are compensatory because the Enlightenment taught us that we should be better than we are. We could be better than we are.

So if we are not better than we are, it's our fault. It's our failure. We are imperfect because we made a choice to be imperfect. And so this is a horrible feeling, and it's a constant feeling. Even today in the debates about racism and so on and so forth. You're made to feel bad for your shortcomings because it's as if your shortcomings are choices.

You could have been perfect if you choose to not be perfect. Something is wrong with you and possibly you're evil. Somehow it connects, it harks back to religion. Maybe you're evil. This creates an external locus of control because society and science define for you who you should be. You can't decide for yourself who you should be.

There is an ideal man, the famous Renaissance ideal man. The Enlightenment adopted this but then relocated, the locus shifted to society. So while the Renaissance said you could be an ideal man if you work on it, if you acquire skills, if you become an apprentice– not to Donald Trump– then you could become perfect.

What the Enlightenment said is you could become perfect by participating in social activities with like-minded people who are committed to the same agenda and ideology. The bridge between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was Protestantism because Protestantism emphasized the agency of the believer.

You in Protestantism, in the original Protestantism, you did not need a church. You were in direct connection with God. You were the main…you were the agent. And if you were blessed by God, you were successful. You made money. So the Protestant work ethic is rich people are blessed by God. So this created a bridge.

This created a bridge, Protestantism, between the social locus of control and the individual locus of control. You could do both. Protestantism, therefore, was the first postmodern movement attempting to reconcile Renaissance values with Enlightenment values. And so this leads to Nazism because it's inevitable that we're going to fail.

We are fallible. We're imperfect creatures. And so we are likely to be very angry at ourselves, to feel like failures, to castigate, to self-criticize, to reject ourselves, to become self-defeating and self-destructive, and so forth. I mentioned Protestantism, and today you could say, yeah, but religion doesn't play the same role as it used to, but that's not true.

Postmodernism is an absolutely religious movement. It has scientism, it has consumerism, it has atheism, it has growth, the religion of growth. Everything has to grow, economies have to grow, human beings have to grow. These are religions. Postmodernism is absolutely religious. So you could generalize and say that religion is the bridge between Renaissance values and Enlightenment.

And that's why religion is making a comeback. In many ways, because it's the only way to reconcile the two, by handing over power, by disempowering yourself. And so if you are disempowered, God is responsible, you are not. Then, you're not guilty. You're not a failure. It's a way of.. it's a cop-out. It's a way of abdicating.

Coy: And yet, we are in this place of moral relativism, a signature of postmodernism. So it seems as though we're getting to a point where narcissism just is, that we don't have to necessarily moralize about it. You just had an excellent essay about Realpolitik after Henry Kissinger's death.

And it was fascinating because you're saying dispense with enlightenment values, that we should give up on this liberal democracy project. 

Vaknin: When you have a counterfactual view of human psychology, when you reframe history, and subject it to an ideology—Enlightenment is an ideology—then inevitably it's going to end badly. Moral relativism is embedded in the Enlightenment. Because the Enlightenment is transactional.

The minute you are transactional, it means that you can negotiate your morality. So the Enlightenment says everything is the outcome of a contract. People contract. They create a social contract, they create other types of contracts, scientific contracts and so on, but they contract. So if people negotiate and contract, they can negotiate anything, including morality.

Compare this to the Renaissance and compare this to the offspring of the Renaissance romanticism, nazism, fascism, communism, etc. In these Renaissance philosophies, there is no negotiation of morality. Morality is fixed. Morality is eternal. Morality can be traced back to ancient Greece and possibly before.

Morality is always there and always will be there. There's nothing to discuss, nothing to negotiate. No contract is to be made. The contract has been made. If you're a religious fundamentalist, the contract has been made by God. If you are not a religious fundamentalist, a contract has been made in ancient Greece. But the contract has been made. End of story.

The Enlightenment is an open-ended process. Every generation can redefine everything, anything from gender roles to what constitutes a genocide. Everything is open in the Enlightenment, and that's why we have these counter-reformational, counter-revolutionary forces who are trying to revert to the past “Make America Great Again.” The emphasis is on again, they adopt values like Viktor Orban adopts values from the 19th century. Erdogan adopted Islam. Muslim fundamentalists go back all the way to Muhammad and we mock them.

We deride them. We say they are primitive. But what about the Supreme Court justices, who interpret the Constitution literally? Aren't they the same as these Muslim fundamentalists? Of course, they are. So we give, we hand over power to texts, ancient texts. And we read them literally, we don't dare to interpret them.

That's what ISIS does, and that's what the Supreme Court does. I see no difference here. 

Coy: Kissinger was very concerned that radical Islam was going to dominate and take over the world. It's interesting to me that in America words like intifada, hijab, burqa, keffiyeh, jihad, fatwa, and Sharia law, are all part of our vernacular now. And just in recent years– what do you make of that?

Do you agree that Islam is ascendant and that it's a threat to our Western values? I certainly don't want to live under Sharia law, for instance. 

Vaknin: Islam stands the best chance of becoming a global ideology, exactly because it's not a religion.

It's a philosophy and a philosophy that has religion as one of its components. Islam is a way of life. Islam is a culture, Islam is a set of social edicts, and there's no contract there, it's all handed down from Muhammad, the messenger, and so on and so forth. Islam is a synthesis of values from all others, borrowed from all other Abrahamic religions, with very powerful Neo-Platonic ideas, so it incorporates actually ancient Greece, and it has imperial, an imperial colonizing aspiration of manifestation or dimension which renders it very compatible with Rome. So Islam actually is a compendium of all the conservative traditional Renaissance, if you wish, philosophies. It offers you the perfect, all-encompassing solution of going back to the past. 

The idea of progress in the Enlightenment was linear. We go from worse to better, and from better to even better, to the best. It was totally linear. The idea in Renaissance philosophies is cyclical. We build something, it gets rotten, it becomes dysfunctional, so we destroy it, and we rebuild it according to ancient standards, ancient beliefs, ancient values, and this has to be done time and again because of human nature, which is corruptible.

So the Renaissance is cyclical, the Enlightenment is linear, and in a world where there's a lot of uncertainty because of technological progress, technological developments, and so forth, people tend to be cyclical rather than linear. The linear goes to the unknown. The cyclical reverts to the known, and if you were globally, if all of us were to adopt a cyclical mindset saying, okay, the experiment has failed largely, how do we know the experiment has failed?

Because we are not happy. After all, the main tenet of Enlightenment was human happiness. In all the writings of all the philosophers from Descartes to Locke, and from Locke all the way to Kant, the main thing was happiness, human happiness. And this has been a mega failure. Absolute, unmitigated, horrendous failure.

The Enlightenment is possibly the worst project in human history. An unmitigated failure. It led to the atomic bomb. It led to unhappiness. Extreme unhappiness. It led to huge rates of mental illness. It's a total disaster. Disaster zone. 

Coy: Sam, what about science, for instance? 

Vaknin: What is science? I know, it's a belief. What did science lead us to? 

Coy: Antibiotics. 

Vaknin: Theoretical science. 

Coy: Vaccines. 

Vaknin: Theoretical science is irrelevant to us. Totally irrelevant to us. And practical science is actually technology. You think there was no technology in the Middle Ages? If you think so, you're wrong. Technology in the Middle Ages was superior to technology in the Renaissance.

Technology is not a hallmark of civilization. Barbarians had technology, and we are barbarians with technology. You're mentioning antibiotics. It's ironic that the vast majority of antibiotics have been discovered accidentally, starting with penicillin. They were not the outcome of any scientific endeavor or enterprise.

Now what we're doing today is not science. It's technology. Technology is good. Everyone has technology. Hamas has technology. That's the Israelis. 

Coy: Okay, so speaking of, is Israel the cradle of civilization yet again? It's (the region) is being burned down to the ground in the Middle East. Are we creating a new post-Enlightenment civilization?

Vaknin: Yes, I think the Enlightenment project has failed. I think the attempt to reconcile the Enlightenment with Renaissance values and philosophies has failed. That's what you call postmodernity. The individual is the source, but embedded in a collective. This doesn't work. It leads to victimhood and narcissism, and so on.

So that failed. And so I think we are about to discard the Enlightenment, pretty completely. In the geopolitical sphere, we are probably going to revert to Realpolitik, as it used to be called. Kissinger was a proponent, but he was just the latest in a long line. Many others in the philosophical ideological sphere.

I think we are going to become much more Renaissance. We are going to be much more conservative, much more traditionalist. We are going to adhere to personality cults with autocrats. We're going to sacrifice freedoms, liberal and democratic, and others. We're going to limit rights, and so on and so forth. I think this process has just started.

Roe vs. Wade is just a harbinger. I think it's just starting. And I do think, and I very much regret saying this, don't misunderstand. I do think that the future is Muslim. I'm pretty convinced of this. Because Islam offers the total solution. A total solution. 

Don't forget that Islam, between the 9th or even the 7th century and the 4th and the 15th century. That's 800 years. Islam was the engine of scientific innovation, research, and studies. Islam preserved Greek, all Greek knowledge. The Muslims translated Aristotle's and many others, Plato into Arabic. Islam was a dominant culture, Islam ruled parts of Europe, definitely all the Middle East, huge parts of Asia and so on and so forth.

Islam for 800 years did offer an alternative to Christianity and for awhile Islam prevailed, not Christianity, for awhile, until the 15th century, Islam prevailed. I think we're about to enter a second Muslim age. Now what we're seeing now are the convulsions of the old order, the Ancien Régime, as the French call it, we are saying the convulsions of the old order, the Judeo Christian order, fighting back, trying to survive somehow, in the face of the twin onslaught of Renaissance philosophies and Islam.

This is a twin onslaught. What Islam fails to understand yet, but will shortly, is that it can merge safely with Renaissance philosophies. And when it does, it will dominate the world. Nothing will stand in its way. And to remind you, Renaissance philosophies are totalitarian, personality cult, gifted amateurs, narcissistic, and so on.

Narcissism is a Renaissance phenomenon. I mentioned the rise of the author. It's a Renaissance phenomenon, not an Enlightenment phenomenon. The Enlightenment was anti-narcissistic. Victimhood is a Renaissance phenomenon, because the Renaissance was a victimhood movement. The church was the abuser and the oppressor. The aristocracy was the abuser and the oppressor. The Renaissance was a victimhood movement. The Enlightenment wasn't. The Enlightenment empowered people. Enlightenment said, you're great, you're wonderful. Nothing can stand in your way if you just agree to collaborate. So the Enlightenment was very optimistic, very upbeat.

That's why the Enlightenment believed that it could guarantee happiness. The Renaissance was dark. Machiavelli is the ultimate Renaissance man. Renaissance was dark. Renaissance was Stalin. 

Stalin believed that there were dark powers, like the church and the aristocracy who were trying to undermine the order, enslave people, slaughter, and do worse things. So the Renaissance was and today we are going back there. Conspiracy theories are not Enlightenment, they are Renaissance. 

All these modern phenomena are Renaissance phenomena. Now, Islam is just beginning to co-opt and to collaborate with some of these phenomena, conspiracy theories, for example. Islam is co-opting conspiracy theories, and so on. And Israel is on the forefront of the Judeo-Christian bulwark, and it's a siege.

We're under siege. The West doesn't realize it. We're under siege from without, and we're under siege from within. We are under siege because mobs, or ochlocracies, are empowered by technology. Dumb, ignorant, vicious mobs are now leveraging technology to take over ochlocracy, not democracy. It's nothing resembling democracy.

The Founding Fathers would've died a second time had they witnessed Donald Trump and the forty million who constitute his base. So this is an ochlocracy mob. It's much more similar. It's much similar, much more similar to let's say, Nazi Germany. To anything in the history of the United States. So there is an enemy from within.

There is a Trojan horse. There's a fifth column in the West. That's why Trump is praising Putin. That's why Erdogan and Putin and Viktor Orban from Hungary, which is supposedly a European Union country in Slovakia recently. This is, that's why all these people in Xi Jinping, they're all forming alliances across countries, across civilizations. 

Huntington was wrong. It's not a clash of civilizations. It's a clash of ideologies that cross-cut across civilization. You could have the prime minister of a European Union country, the dictator of a Muslim country, the murderous thug that rules Russia, and the dictator of China, all collaborating.

European Union, Russia, China, and Turkey, all collaborating, and Netanyahu, all collaborating. Why? Because it's not a clash of civilizations. It's a clash of alternative models of governance and human happiness. The Renaissance told you, you could be happy as a narcissist. You could be happy as the subject of a prince personality cult. You could be happy. And the Enlightenment told you that you could be happy if you regard yourself as a collaborator, a cooperator with other people. And the Enlightenment failed because it posed too high a bar.

People couldn't reach the Enlightenment, couldn't reach the standard. 

Coy: It may account for why our institutions are failing as well, because they're collectives. 

Do you think the elites are inflicting Trump upon us? Is this payback or punishment for the terror that elites may feel about the role of the Internet?

Vaknin: I think the elites are quaking in their boots. This is definitely a time of revolution. This is a pre-revolutionary time. There's no question that it will end in revolution of some kind. Revolutions nowadays are not so much gory and bloody as they are legal. The law is co-opted by revolutions to suppress certain groups and obtain certain outcomes.

But the elites are quaking because the disaffection and disenchantment and anger, rage of the masses has reached a boiling point and ochlocracy is already upon us. There's one rule in ochlocracy: the previous elites pay the price. Ochlocracies are anti-elitist. 

The Renaissance tried to teach autocrats like Machiavelli's prince. The Renaissance tried to teach them not to go against the mob. Collaborate with the mob. Be swept by the mob to power. And Hitler did this. But how many people can do that? Not many. Trump is doing this. It takes a certain ability to resonate, a certain ability to be so empty, so blank, that you could become the mob.

In this sense, Donald Trump is an emptiness, he's an absence. Hitler was the same. So they were able to resonate with the mob, they were able to shapeshift and become the mob. And I think that's where we're going, to an ochlocracy, and if so, the elites will pay a huge price, a huge price, legally at least, financially maybe, if not worse.

Coy: Yeah, you've talked about the French Revolution in the past. 

Can you address the affinity between the solipsism of narcissism and the technological age that we're living through, or in? There's a certain resonance there.

Vaknin: Technology very rarely drives social change, maybe the telegraph, maybe the car. These were technologies that drove social change. I can't say that about social media. I think most technologies reflect social change. They surf the wave of social change. And our current technologies are solipsistic because people have chosen to be atomized.

People have rejected the Enlightenment, and the core feature of the Enlightenment is the social contract, working with others towards common goals, tolerating others somehow, and so on. People don't want this anymore because they're self-sufficient. 

People don't want to go back to work after the pandemic. They want to work from home. They don't want to see their colleagues. They don't want to… people want to be alone. People want to be atomized. People want to be with their cats and Netflix, not in this order. And that's it. So we have a wave of atomization. We have this choice. 

Loneliness is not a pandemic. Loneliness is not bad or horrible, as the Surgeon General is trying to convince us. Loneliness is a choice, and when you talk to lonely people, most of them are actually very happy, very content with their loneliness, and they are terrified of the idea of introducing someone else into their lives: the upheaval, and the need to compromise, and the friction, and the conflict, they don't want this.

Who needs this shit? Sorry. I have everything I need right here. Including sex. Yeah. Who needs this? So this atomization is reflected in the technology. Technology renders us more and more self-sufficient so that to allow us to atomize at will, to avoid social conduct. It will, and this of course, flies in the face of the Enlightenment and is exactly the ideal.

It's exactly the ideal of the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, never socialized. He was a loner. He worked alone. He even decrypted his writings using mirror images. I don't know what. He did not want people to read his notebooks, ever. He was a total loner. 

And when you read The Prince, Machiavelli's Prince, it's a loner. He describes a loner. So mobs are composed of loners. That's the irony. Democracy, real democracy, requires collaboration, teamwork, common goals, and the pursuit over decades or centuries or generations of some vision. Mobs are comprised 100% of loners. These loners come together to elect another loner and then they go back.

That's why we have the concept of flash mobs. It's ephemeral. It's not a constant structure. It's not a permanent structure. It shapeshifts, so technology just empowers us to do what we want to do, which is to never ever have to suffer or tolerate another human being, if possible.

This is what the world will lead to. 

Coy: Most people think of social media as being narcissistic with selfies and whatnot. So leaving aside social media for a moment, the flip side of what you just argued. Do you think the advances in technology will help to offset the worst of the uptick of narcissism in the sense that we can have an AI merger with quantum computing, for instance, that's more supercharged and would inform the philosophical underpinnings of our world?

Vaknin: Your question reflects the fallacy. The technology shapes human consciousness and social trends, with extremely few exceptions in human history. The invention of the wheel, I'm not even sure about that. Maybe the telegraph, maybe the car, with extremely few exceptions. Technology follows, never leads.

So AI will be shaped to uphold and support and buttress and enhance and amplify narcissism and solitude and so on. The users will shape the technology, not the other way around. And the users right now want to be exclusionary, not inclusive. That's another difference between linear progress. Linear progress is inclusive.

In order to realize goals and so on and so forth, you have to include other people. The Enlightenment has been an inclusive ideology. The Renaissance is an exclusionary ideology. Look at all the daughters of the Renaissance. Religious fundamentalism excludes infidels and heretics.

Nazism excludes the Jews, etc, etc. Communism excludes the bourgeoisie. These are exclusionary movements. And we are now living in an age of exclusion. It's a great way to describe victimhood. Victimhood is about excluding a group of people who are then labeled abusers. But it's an exclusionary thing.

Narcissism is totally exclusionary. I am godlike. I am superior. I am invisible. I'm this and that. And you are inferior. You're excluded from my world because you're not up to my level. These are all exclusionary things. Therefore they cannot be reconciled with Enlightenment, and these exclusionary things will continue to dictate technology in the future.

They will dictate quantum computing. They will dictate the parameters and specifications of artificial intelligence, of the multiverse, and so on and so forth. These technologies are derivative. They are not important at all. The focus, the constant focus on technology is a distraction and an attempt to divert attention from the real problem.

And the real problems are human relationships and the absolute absence of human happiness. These are the real problems. This discontent civilization and its discontents, this is the real problem and we are not tackling it because we're diverted by entertainment or by technology or by, these are, who cares about technology?

Focus on what we do with technology, why we invented this technology, why we are going that way technologically. Focus on our choices and our state of mind, on our future and so on. And this we are not doing and I think maybe we're not doing this because we're too afraid to look ourselves in the mirror. Too afraid to confront the truth and reality. Right now, we live in a world of totalitarian victimhood entitlement movements. Everything is a totalitarian, victimhood entitlement movement. Everything. The Republican Party. The…you name it. Everyone defines himself or herself as a victim.

Consequently, she or he is entitled, and it leads to narcissism and totalitarianism. Narcissism is totalitarian by definition. The narcissist is a dictator, even in his own, in the realm of his own family. It's a cult, and he's the cult leader. So when you render victimhood, narcissism, the organizing principle of your life and your civilization, you're bound to end up with totalitarianism and autocracy, not with democracy.

Democracy requires the recognition that everyone is equal to everyone, everybody else, which a narcissist would never countenance or accept, never. And this entitled victimhood, which leads to narcissism and totalitarianism, undermines very important principles of civilization and organization, for example, meritocracy.

It undermines meritocracy. It undermines the right to self-defense. It undermines critical, atavistic, primitive values that have been with us forever. Or even free speech. We are drifting away from our humanity. What constitutes humanity is a set of beliefs and values and behaviors and traits and so on.

And we are drifting away from them because we are narcissistic, because we're entitled, and because we are victims. And so we demonize so-called abusers. We exclude, not collaborate, and so on. The rejection of the Enlightenment, when I suggested in my article to finally give up the ghost and admit that the Enlightenment project has failed and resort to Realpolitik in international affairs and to limited democracy, elite democracy, rather than universal franchise, is because if we don't, we will end up in Trump-land, and I hope not in Hitler-land, not in the Fourth Reich, I hope, I'm not sure at all. The leader of the Fourth Reich will be Muslim, of course. I am not sure that this is an outlandish proposition.

The only defense against this scenario, the only defense, is to somehow accept that victimhood and narcissism are the enemies and fight them back and fight them back not by electing a narcissist to be a leader because we feel victimized and he accepts and acknowledges our victimhood. That's not the way to fight back. But I don't think we have an incentive to do this because victimhood pays and narcissism pays.

These are positive adaptations. If you're a victim, you get money, you get attention, you get adulation, you get pity. Victimhood pays emotionally, it pays psychologically, it pays financially, it pays legally. I'm sorry, but the MeToo movement is a victimhood movement. Many women became rich on the back of the MeToo movement.

Not nice to say to a woman, but it's a fact. It's a self-enrichment movement, it's a narcissistic movement. Environmentalism, of course, is a self-enrichment, narcissistic movement. Completely. Scientism, it is worse. 

If I were to go to Donald Trump, and say, “Hello Donald, you know, I'm an expert on narcissism and you are a malignant narcissist. I can treat you. I can help you. Not treat you, I can help you.” He'd say, “Why do you think I need help? I'm a multi-billionaire, I'm the former president of the United States, I'm the future president of the United States. Why do you think I need help?” He doesn't. We've created an incentive structure.

We disincentivize any alternative to narcissism and victimhood, any alternative to the individual as God.

Society is God in the Enlightenment. The individual is God in the Renaissance. And the bridge between the two is religion. And the only religion I see that can somehow emerge from all this mess is Islam. Does that make me happy? Extremely not. I speak Arabic. I speak the Arabic of the Qur'an. I read the Qur'an in the Qadith in the original. I know what I'm talking about. Islam is a wonderful, truly wonderful philosophy. It's a philosophy of submission and social organization so forth. But it is open to interpretation that renders it very dangerous.

So it doesn't make me happy. But on the other hand, I don't see an alternative. Christianity is already compromised heavily by the Enlightenment project that has failed and Christianity consequently is about to fail. It's failing. Judaism has never been {indecipherable, perhaps relevant?}. And we have Buddhism, of course, in Asia, but Islam is making inroads.

I think that's the shape of the world to come. Autocracies, dictatorships everywhere. Entitled, narcissistic individuals. Victimhood is an organizing principle, which leads to violence and aggression. And Islam is the main religion of the world. That's what I see.

Coy: That sounds pretty bleak, though I'm with you. I can see it. So you've asserted that …devil's advocate for a moment, maybe something a little brighter here. You asserted that we might not be smart enough to understand how narcissism is not as bad or as evil as we want to think it is.

To engage in this kind of thinking would be splitting black and white thinking, which would be narcissistic and adding to the problem, essentially, if you consider it as still a problem. I really enjoyed your lecture the other day, your video on this topic and considering this, is it evil or not?

So maybe, you've mentioned in a separate video, that narcissism functions like a virus. That said, maybe it has an evolutionary advantage or purpose that we're not smart enough to understand exactly. And you've said that we should intentionally expose ourselves to some level of narcissism to inoculate us from the worst of it.

I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish about the state of play when it comes to narcissism, but lately I've been thinking about how to make peace with narcissists and narcissism and this era that we're living in that is narcissistic because otherwise, it's to demonize the narcissist and engage in splitting.

So can you walk me through that a little bit more?

Vaknin: I don't demonize anything. I don't demonize narcissism. I don't demonize dictatorships. I don't demonize. I try not to demonize anything. I am a utilitarian. I engage in calculating. It's a calculus of the greater good and what leads to it.

Utilitarians are amoral, not immoral. Utilitarians are amoral. They contemplate murder as a public good. You could murder someone, you could murder an individual if it saves a hundred, for example. In utilitarian theory, philosophical theory, it's permissible to kill someone if you were to save ten people.

So they don't have any, they don't impose any value judgments on anything, and in this sense I'm utilitarian. Narcissism is an energy, and like every energy it can kill or it can power things. Electricity can kill you and can power you in this interview. So it depends, it's not narcissism in itself, it's the use we make of narcissism.

Today, we make use of narcissism in order to subjugate other people, to suppress them, to elevate ourselves, cater to our needs, to promote our self-interest, and so on. So it's, let's say, a selfish variant of Narcissism. And if you're about to stop me and ask me, is there any other? Of course, there are other variants of narcissism.

There is even something known as pro-social or communal narcissism. So narcissism is an energy. We need to accept it. That is the future world, and when I say future it's ten years, not a hundred. The future world is going to be narcissistic, entitled, victimhood-oriented, probably Muslim as I said. But, that's the future world.

There's nothing to be done about it. We have entered a reenactment of the Renaissance. The Enlightenment Project is dead. Realpolitik will rule in geopolitical affairs and self-sufficient solipsistic narcissism will rule when it comes to interpersonal relationships. When it comes to politics, mobs will be recruited by autocrats and dictators, the way Hitler recruited his mobs to accomplish outcomes.

That's the world we're going to live in and we need to accept this and I've been saying the same about climate change. Climate change is going to happen. Period. There is nothing we can do about it. End of story. Rather than spend all these billions of dollars on nonsense, maybe we should begin to adapt to climate change.

It's not going away. It's not going to go away. Same with narcissism. So we need to begin to regard narcissism as a feature of life, part of the structure, and see how we can channel it, redirect it to obtain outcomes that could be, perhaps, accepted by a majority of us— not try to repress narcissists, demonize narcissists, attack narcissists, or fight off narcissists.

They're going to win. They are winning. Climate change is happening. There's nothing we can do about it. It's delusional. So we need to learn how to live with them. If you want a metaphor, narcissists are aliens with superior technology, superior psychological technology. You better learn how to coexist with these aliens because they have superior technology or they will exterminate you.

So this is what we need to do. It's easy to manipulate a narcissist to become pro-social and communal if the incentive structure is right. Exposure, celebrity, fame, adulation, and so on. They're children. It's easy to do this. If you confront them, if you are argumentative and critical, and so on, you provoke the worst of them, the worst in them, and they are going to become subversive and destructive and instead, you need to co-opt their grandiosity and their entitlement, their lack of empathy, you need to co-opt it and use it for the greater good. This should be a project akin to the Enlightenment. The third project. Let's call it the third project. We had the first project, the Renaissance. It led to Nazism and Fascism. Not good. We had the second project, the Enlightenment. It led to the atomic bomb. It led to smartphones, which I'm not sure is a good thing. It led to all kinds of things. Not good. We failed there too. 

Maybe it's time for a third project, harnessing narcissistic energy, a third project, that could bridge the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Socially harnessing individual energy. This individual energy is narcissism. That we instead are demonizing this group of people is stupid, self-destructive, and counterproductive, because narcissists happen to be very creative.

They're driven, they're ambitious, they're entrepreneurial, Elon Musk, they are, they drive, if you want to talk about progress, if you want to talk about inventions, if you want to talk about technology, it's all driven by narcissism. Narcissists are in show business, in the media, in science; it's all narcissism.

Narcissism is a huge engine and what we're trying to do, we're trying to dismantle it rather than put it to good use. And that could be the third project after the failure of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Coy: I believe you quoted Theodore Millon the other day, talking about the spectrum of narcissism, narcissistic personality, narcissistic style, all the way to NPD and his postulation that we're all a little bit narcissistic anyway. So to your point of embracing it, it is what it is. 

Vaknin: Yeah, it was actually Lynn Sperry. Millon was quoting him. We have narcissistic style versus narcissistic disorder. The narcissistic style is much more common than the disorder. But this was before the advent and invention of modern technologies. Today, I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that the majority of the population has a narcissistic style.

I don't think it would be exaggerated to say this. Rather than fight the inevitable, let's surf the wave. It's a wave. It's energy. It's huge energy. Nothing mobilizes a human being more than ultimate recognition and adoration and adulation. Nothing. Even the healthiest, most balanced and normal person wants to be recognized for his accomplishment, wants to be applauded by his peers and colleagues, and wants to be promoted, having accomplished things at work.

These are all narcissistic defenses. People don't realize narcissism is healthy. There is healthy narcissism. And we all have narcissistic defenses, and everyone needs narcissistic supply, not only narcissists. The misinformation online distorts thinking about narcissism, because these facts are not recognized.

I think it's time to admit the facts, which is always the most difficult phase. The most difficult phase is to admit the facts. It's time to admit the facts. Democracy sucks. Universal franchise democracy sucks. It's not a good organization or governance principle. It needs to be dispensed with, and we need to think of alternatives.

Number two, narcissism is bad only if you do not harness it and channel it and redirect it. It could be a force for good if you do. Number three, victimhood should be fought tooth and nail. We should no longer suffer or tolerate any victimhood statements, victimhood self-aggrandizement. Victimhood movements have been hijacked by Nazis and psychopaths.

There should be a counterculture movement fighting off victims and victims. Reparations for slavery? Go away! What the hell is this nonsense, for example, yes, and we should be, and we should be able to say this openly and without fear, and I'm referring to academia, and so on. So I think if we follow these three principles, we'll be okay if you accept, if you acknowledge the facts.

And then, fearlessly, you're trying to come up with solutions, usually survival is guaranteed. However, if we don't, we are on the verge of a cataclysm, the likes of which I am very hard-pressed to remember in history. Perhaps with the exception of the 5th century, Rome. I'm very hard-pressed to think of an equivalent in history as to the moment we are standing in right now. People say, oh, there have been much worse periods in history. I disagree.

This is by far the worst period in history. The 14th century, you had the Black Death, the Plague. One third of the population of Europe died. Horrible. No question. It was a bad period. But everything else was intact. People were dying, true, but they had families, they had the church, they had the belief in God, they had the aristocracy, they had the feudal system.

Wages went up because of scarcity of labor. Everything remained intact. Today, what do we have? We have no families. We have no God. We have no communities. We have no society. We have nothing. We are alone. We are drifting alone, molecules. And if you compare the 14th century to the 21st century, I would rather live in the 14th century, with all the certainties and securities that existed then. There was a safety net, psychological institutional safety net, for people who were suffering. Today you're on your own. You're on your own. If you suffer, for example, if you're depressed or anxious, you're finished. You're on your own. Someone will give you a pill. It's not a solution.

So the 21st century is even worse than the 20th century. In the 1930s, there was Hitler, later there was the Holocaust, World War II, 50 million people died in Europe. Horrible. I'm not denying this, but people have had everything else. They had their friends, they had their families, they had the church, they had the state, everything was intact.

Today people don't have friends. In 1980, A typical person in the United States had 10.1 friends, best friends. Today the number is 0.9. 40 years later, 10 friends versus 1 friend, maybe. 41%, 42% according to the latest Pew Center research. 42% of people haven't had any contact with a friend in the week preceding the questionnaire. None, whatsoever. 

63% of men and 34% of women have resigned themselves to a life of lifelong singlehood. The vast majority of them haven't had sex in the previous year. They don't want any contact with each other. It's bad. This atomization, this disintegration of social safety nets, of society at large, of institutions, there has never been something like this in human history.

Never. Ever. Not even the fall of Rome in 476. Not even then. Nothing remotely similar to what's happening today. We're adrift. Adrift. It's the worst, by far the worst period in human history. And we refuse to wake up. Instead, we say we are victims. That's it. We're victims. That's it. We're entitled. Rather than wake up and say, okay, let's take stock of what exists, what there is, and somehow adapt to it. We're refusing to adapt. 

Coy: Okay, as we're prognosticating the future here, I want to get back to brass tacks and circle back to a question I asked you earlier about because again, Trump is imminent here and what to do on a practical level? What kind of defense mechanisms are at play for people who refuse to acknowledge that Trump is a narcissist? I see minimization, denial, compartmentalization. I'm hearing people want to diagnose him with oppositional defiant disorder (psychopathy), ADD, ADHD, anything but narcissism.

Vaknin: Trump is triggering primitive infantile defense mechanisms. So he triggers in people a fantasy defense, which provides them with a fantasy, or alternative reality, alternative facts, yeah? Or, at the same time, for example, he triggers in them splitting. We are all good, everyone else is all bad, vermin, or whatever.

So what he does, he regresses his base, psychologically speaking. He regresses his base to infancy. Infants do this. Infants split. Infants regress to fantasy and so on. He infantilizes his base. The problem with this is that it's a very alluring proposition. Everyone wants to be a baby again.

Everyone wants to have a second go at childhood, a second chance, second childhood. Everyone wants to go back to the womb where it was safe and stable. And Trump is offering this. What is he saying in effect is you don't need to be responsible or accountable or make choices at all. I'm there. I'm a paternal figure, a parental figure.

I'm there and you can be children now. All your lives, you've had to be adults. You've had to work hard and you failed. As adults, you fail. You don't have a job, you're uneducated. That's his base, yeah? That's all. So you failed as adults. Here I'm giving you an opportunity to not be adults anymore, to be babies, my babies.

Yes, as babies, you can call everybody else bad, evil. As babies, you can live in fantasy. As babies, you can project. You're actually weak. You're failures, you're losers, but you can call everyone else weak and failure and loser. So he legitimizes infantilization of his base. And that's an irresistible proposition.

People fear the most freedom. What people fear most is freedom, the need to choose. That’s not Sam Vaknin. It's Jean Paul Sartre. People are terrified. Kierkegaard. There's existentialists. They taught us that angst, the existential anxiety, is because we have to make choices all the time. We are responsible. We are accountable.

We have to pay the consequences for our actions and our decisions. We don't want to do that, it's terrifying, because we don't know if our choices and decisions are right. Maybe we're making the wrong choices, maybe our decisions are wrong, and then we will have to pay a horrible price. It's very tempting to not have to make decisions.

Someone else will make the decisions for us, and then if he's wrong, he will pay the price. It's displacement of the cost of life. It's opting out of life, in a way, rejecting life, and saying, I'd rather be in a fantastic space, a paracosm. And so it's not possible to overcome, because in a world that is so terrible, and I just spent the last few minutes telling you that this is the worst century ever in human history. In a world that is so terrible, fantasy is an appealing solution, an appealing alternative. It would be very difficult to defeat Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not reality based, he is fantasy based, and fantasies are all encompassing, comforting, it's a form of self soothing. Trump is like food, you consume Trump all the time.

By the way, not only his supporters, his antagonists, his enemies consume Trump all the time. Look at PBS. PBS has more coverage of Trump than anyone else. Period. Biden is like one tenth of Trump, in terms of coverage, because Trump triggers them somehow, attracts their attention, seduces them, tempts them. In short, what I'm trying to say is that Trump is having a love affair with his base, because the love affair is exactly this.

Love is a pathology, a fantasy difference. And how do you come between a love, between two lovers? How do you come between two lovers? If you try to talk to a lover and say, listen, the person you love is horrible. She's evil, she's ugly. He will never listen to you. Yes. If you were true, imagine a couple.

Coy: Absolutely. Romeo and Juliet. Here we are. 

Do you think Trump represents a liminal figure… that we are dwelling in this narcissistic era and then we're going to move into a different era that you've been teasing out? Is he a gateway drug to something else? Or are we going to be in this state for some time?

Vaknin: Trump is not alone. I don't know why you single out Trump. 

Coy: I wanted to talk about Trudeau too, per comments from our last conversation.

Vaknin: Yes, there are dozens, not only Trudeau, not only Trump. There are dozens of similar leaders all over the world. 

Coy: The ones you just mentioned, Orban, yeah. 

Vaknin: Yes, it's a leadership style. It's not Trump. Trump just conforms to the leadership style that is not the dominant leadership style, which is narcissistic autocrat. I don't think, yes, he is going to pave the way to a Hitler type. It's going to pave the way to a psychopath. Narcissists usually pave the way to psychopaths. Ultimately, the world is going to be ruled by psychopaths.

But I think that's a bit further down the road, and it crucially depends on some developments. I'm not quite sure about that prediction. Depends, for example, whether someone is going to come up with an ideology that offers coexistence between morality and narcissism. Or between goal orientation of the collective and narcissism.

Narcissism is an engine of the collective. Then people may settle down to a more benign version. But if they remain stuck with narcissistic leaders, and these narcissistic leaders are going to self-destruct, as I told you, it's inevitable. They're all going to do that. Then at some point, people are going to revert to narcissism, to psychopathy. Escalate. People are going to escalate. They're going to say, okay, then we need someone who is an animal, someone who is immoral, someone who is crazy, now Trump was saying, I'm crazy, don't play with me, I'm crazy, don't test me, I'm nuts. It could be a harbinger of psychopathy to come.

And on the other hand, if an alternative will arise which will incorporate narcissism and channel it. I don't know yet. I'm not optimistic. I think we're heading towards a psychopathic age. I'm not optimistic in this sense. 

Coy: Sam, we're going on an hour and a half now. Is there anything else you would like to say in closing?

Vaknin: It all sounds very pessimistic, but I think what we fail to grasp is a process of habituation. Someone born this year would regard autocracy, even dictatorship, narcissism, victimhood, a ruling religion, perhaps Islam, he would regard this as normal. She wouldn't think there's something odd or bad about it.

It's life. We have the vantage point, I much more than you, we have the vantage point of the age of history. I can compare the 1960s to, but someone born today would just feel great in the new environment. It's habituated. Why did communism fail? Because people were comparing communism to capitalism.

But had all the world been communist, had the entire world been the USSR, it would have lasted forever. People in the USSR were comparing themselves to the United States. They listened to rock music. They saw smuggled movies. They wanted consumer goods, and the USSR was unable to provide this, so it fell apart.

But imagine that the entire world, the entire globe, was under the control of Brezhnev or the USSR leadership, the Politburo Bureau, the USSR would have never failed. It's the comparison that drives change– envy, basically, that drives change. Someone born into a world of narcissistic, psychopathic dictators with no concept of human rights or civil rights with entitlement based on victimhood and empowered by technology, fueled by technology. This kind of young boy or young girl wouldn't see anything amiss. They wouldn't feel the need to change. Exactly as digital natives nowadays can't perceive a world without laptops and smartphones. They just can't.

And they don't understand how people interacted without social media. It's odd. Today, the vast majority of social interactions are digital. People don't meet face to face at all. It's a cause, it's cause for optimism. What we regard as intolerable and hard, difficult and so on, would be matter of course and matter of fact, and people won't feel bad, won't feel bad at all. 

They will find different venues, other venues, for habits. So we know, we would know that there are alternatives, but you know in 1984 something that people fail to mention in all the critiques of this masterpiece. In 1984, there were only two people who were unhappy, Winston and his girlfriend, Julia. Only two. In the entire book, it's never mentioned that someone else is unhappy, only these two. He has someone collaborating with him, but that's it, only these two. And when he's interrogated, and so on and so forth, Brian, I think the name of the interrogator. 

Coy: Yes, O'Brien. 

Vaknin: O'Brien is trying to persuade him that happiness, it's an arbitrary choice. It says two and two are five. All you have to do is to say two and two are five and you will be happy. They will let you go. And then what he does, he sacrifices his girlfriend. He says, go to her, go to Julia. She is the subversive. She is the dissident. But the book is, I think, 400 pages or something. And it's not mentioned even once that someone is unhappy. It's a lesson to learn. 

Coy:  Astute observation, Sam. 

I do have one more question for you, because you've mentioned that China isn't quite the threat that we might be making it out to be. The sentiment here in America, there's a lot about cultural Marxism to do with wokeism and this indoctrination of our education system through the long march through the institutions. Should America regard China as a threat? 

Vaknin: America regarded the USSR as a threat, and then America regarded Japan as a threat. I'm old enough to remember, and now America regards China as a threat. America is in need of threats.

America is always on the lookout for an external enemy, because this is the only engine of cohesion in a country that is made up of 187 ethnicities, four recognized races and so on. Your, the United States is not a homogenous nation state. It's an abstract concept. It's an idea, ratified somehow.

And the glue that holds everything together very often is an external enemy. So you demonize external enemies, you exaggerate their importance, and so on. Now, China is a formidable competitor in commercial markets, which is good for you. If you know what's good for you, it's good for you.

Because it drives you to innovation so forth. But China is prestige, digitation, sleight of hand. China is a magician's trick. It is built on mountains of credit, which are then allocated to non-productive sectors and so on. China will come crashing down big time soon. The way Japan did. 

But rest assured, the United States will find another enemy. In United States history, the United States is the country that has engaged in warfare more than any other country in the world in human history, and that includes Nazi Germany. There has not been a year in United States history that it hasn't gone to war with someone.

You're a very belligerent collective, aggressive and violent, which is why the United States is widely perceived as a much bigger threat worldwide than China or even Russia. So that's my answer, I'm afraid. 

Coy:  Any last thoughts on the war in the Middle East?

Hamas has nothing to do with the Palestinian cause. Hamas is an extension of Iran and its interests in the region. That's why the Houthis, Yemenite Houthis have joined in, and militias in Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Hezbollah have joined in. Hezbollah has nothing to do with the Palestinians. Hezbollah is Shia, and Palestinians are Sunni, and so on.

This is a war between Iran and Israel, fought via proxies, exactly like Ukraine. Ukraine is a war between the United States, the West and Russia, fought via proxies. The proxies are Ukraine. So this is a war between Iran and Israel over regional dominance. Who will dominate the region? Israel was on its way to strike peace accords with very crucial players like Saudi Arabia and this, I think alarmed Iran very much. Hamas is not relevant. Hezbollah is not relevant. The Houthis are not relevant. All these are not relevant. Ultimately, the war has to, the ultimate stage of the war has to be between Israel and Iran. I'm not sure which form it'll take. It'll be a military confrontation, but I'm not sure which form it would take.

Ultimately, these two are going to lock horns when all the proxies are pushed out of the way. This is the real war. And that's why the United States got itself involved with carriers, because it's an Iranian threat. They're using the Palestinians and the Shia Muslims, they're using others, but it's an Iranian threat.

And Iran now has teamed up with Russia, teamed up with China. Iran has joined BRICS, (economic) and so Iran is becoming part of the resistance axis against the West. So this is also a war between the West and the emerging East. 

I think the West is going to win because I think China is a paper tiger. We've seen that Russia is a paper tiger. They cannot defeat poor Ukraine even. China is an even bigger paper tiger in my view. It's going to come crashing down big time soon. So I think the West is going to win by default. Ultimately, but in the meantime, there could be very nasty episodes with Iran. I don't rule out a nuclear confrontation.

It's going to be bad before it gets better.

Coy: What if Trump becomes our dictator and he joins the Axis of Evil and leaves NATO for Iran, China and Russia? 

Vaknin: I don't think even if he does that, I don't think Trump is going to abandon Israel.

Even if he does abandon NATO, I don't think he's going to abandon Israel. And of course Iran is an arch enemy of Donald Trump. He has made it his arch enemy. And Israel is the long arm of the United States in the region, fighting off Iran's proxies at this stage, and Iran later. So I don't think there's any risk to Iran.

Ukraine will pay a heavy price should this happen. It's the worst thing that could happen to Ukraine, a heavy price, and then I think, Realpolitik, we would need to accept that regional powers have regional spheres of interest. And we would need to stay out of each other's way to avoid new Vietnams all the time.

And this is an invention of an American president, the Monroe Doctrine. Monroe was the American president, who said that South America is an American sphere of influence. And they would not, America would not allow any colonial power to interfere. We need to accept that Russia has its sphere of influence, which includes Ukraine, always did, historically, 100%.

We need to accept China has its sphere of influence. We need to accept Israel is a regional power and has its sphere of influence. So does Iran. We would need to learn to coexist rather than coerce. It's very humiliating to the United States because it has developed this concept of exceptionalism and the policeman of the world.

It would be a stand-down. It would be very humiliating for the United States. But it's a healthy humiliation. It leads to mental health. Right now the United States is not acting as a mentally healthy person. Not globally and not domestically. I think there's a lot of healing to be done. And then this is the world.

Kissinger saw it. And that's why Kissinger was an extremely effective Secretary of State, ultimately. Because he saw it; he accepted it. There are bullies and thugs and strong people, strong guys everywhere. You don't go around picking fights with everyone, you just accept. This neighborhood belongs to this gang, that's it.

That's Realpolitik. Not might is right. On the very contrary, I think. Don't use might to enforce rights and let people solve their own problems. Don't attempt to be…it's patronizing, it's condescending, just let them solve their own problems. If they are really unhappy with Putin, believe me, Putin will go.

And if they are unhappy with the theocratic regime in Iran, it will go. There hasn't been a single regime, not one, that survived popular discontent, unrest, and hatred. Not one. Not ever in history. So this self-appointed or self-imputed righteous, we know best, and we are the policemen of the world. It's not helpful to the United States. Trillions were wasted in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. For what?

Coy: I like your positive sentiment that the West will prevail, ultimately. 

Vaknin: I think this particular military confrontation, yeah. Because the other parties are paper tigers. They're making tiger noises, but they're not real tigers, not yet. You need a tradition of capitalism to become a real tiger. China doesn't have this.

China is imitating capitalism, emulating. It doesn't have it. It doesn't really know the nuts and bolts, the transmission mechanisms. You need a sense, you need a feeling for capitalism. Capitalism has been going on in the West since the 13th century. And later on, with the customs unions. Capitalism is a long process.

Proto-capitalism lasted almost 400 years. China wants to emulate all this in 50 years. You can have the facade, the Potemkin village of capitalism. You can have banks and real estate and shopping malls. That's not capitalism. Capitalism is a state of mind and China doesn't have this state of mind.

No way. That's why China's capitalism will fail big time and it will crash horrendously with an impact on the global economy. So China is not yet a real adversary to the United States. Most of its GDP is fictitious, totally fictitious. It's not yet. In 100 years, 200 years, 300 years, maybe, because it did used to rule the world.

China did used to be the superpower, much longer than the United States. Yeah, but not now. Another few centuries, maybe. Not now. 

Coy: Sam, thank you for this thought-provoking discussion: geopolitical affairs, narcissism, and technology, etc. 

If you all have enjoyed this conversation, please do subscribe at gingercoy.substack.com. Look forward to seeing you there. And thank you all for listening. 

Vaknin: Thank you for having me. Thank you, Ginger. And happy holidays. 

Coy: You as well. Bye, Sam!