How Leader’s Pathologies Resonate with Ours: New Age of Delusions
An Interview with Professor Sam Vaknin: from a Psychotic Past to a Narcissistic Present, and toward a Delusional Future.
What is happening to us? What is wrong with this sick society we are living in? Why are we feeling so lonely, sad, depressed, and desperately seeking attention or salvation? Why are we constantly searching for fantastic heroes?
Why are we stuck in conflicts, wars, and terrorism? Are our leaders mentally ill? Have we all lost our minds?
I delve into Sam Vaknin’s work, searching for some meaning. Professor of Clinical Psychology, a Financial Expert, and a PhD in Physics, and the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited — what I found was a “somewhat disturbing awakening.” I picked this from a comment in this interview published last week on Sam Vaknin’s YouTube channel because I felt the same way.
I found out we desperately search for magical solutions, and we fall into shared fantasies with our political leaders, influencers, and popular “high minds,” confusing fantasy with reality in a sick and almost delusional way.
Wake up, people! We choose to live in their fantasies as a mirror of our dark side. Because they resonate with the pathologies of our age. We are not victims; we need no heroes. Somehow, we deserve the leaders we suffer.
In the following lines, Vaknin digs into our inner space, where there is no savior or tyrant but our “introjects”; internal objects created in our mind that interface with reality. A fantasy, a survival strategy that allow us to function in society without facing our loneliness, our meaninglessness, and our nothingness.
With this interview, I begin my intention of deconstructing narratives in this ‘Human Society Disorder’ publication, and uncover how our perceptions immerse us in many fantastic realities.
AF: Professor, you said that we are now in a Narcissistic Society and that we were before in a psychotic Society. Could you please elaborate?
SV: I think the were two very important sociocultural trends that converged: the first one was “the secularization of public language” –public languages used to be religious– and now it has become almost entirely secular. Except in highly specific groups of the population, the vast majority of humanity engages in secular public speech. The second Trend was the privatization of public discourse –whereas in the past we used to engage collectively in a discourse that was common to everyone (there were commonalities of discourse)– today Discourse (like everything else) has been democratized. War has been democratized and we call it terrorism, everything is democratized. Publishing is democratized. There are no Gatekeepers, there’s disintermediation. So, what used to be public discourse is now a cacophony of hundreds of millions of private discourses, and what used to be religious public language or public speech became secular, and this precipitated a transition from a psychotic mental landscape to a narcissistic mental landscape. And I will try to explain.
Religion is a glorified and socially accepted form of psychosis. It’s an extreme mental illness. And, it includes the two most important elements of psychosis: it includes what we call Hyperreflexibility, and it includes confusion between internal and external objects. In psychosis, there is an inability to tell apart where you stop and the world begins. There’s a confusion. When you have a voice inside your head, you tend to believe that it’s coming from the outside –that it’s external. You externalize the voice. When you have an image in your mind, you perceive it as real, and this is known as hallucination.
SV: And of course, religion has these two elements: the incorporation of the world in the individual –that’s why people would tell you God is inside me, God is everywhere, (Panpsychism, actually). So this is a crucial element of psychosis: the expansion of the self to become one with the world, a unitary perception of the universe, of reality. You are no longer an atom but you are “reality” and “reality is you”. A total reality, to the very end of the corners of the universe, 46 billion light years away, “it’s all one and the same”, and this is, of course, a psychotic view. And, the second element, is the confusion with an internal object which is God –God is absolutely an internal object– it’s a cognition. The confusion of an internal object with an external object. We tend to believe that God is out there, while -of course– God is “in here”. So, that’s why I said that the period of religion –which culminated in the 15th and 16th centuries before The Enlightenment, with the Reformation, and after The Counter-Reformation– was the last Twitches of the religion.
The period of religion was essentially psychotic it elevated mental illness, openly –by the way, if you are totally demented and crazy you became Jesus Christ, as simple as that. So crazy people became prophets, and crazy people became the “harbinger” of religion. They promoted religion. Religion is the creation of crazy people, exactly like social media, which is the creation of schizoid people. People with schizoid personality disorder, and some narcissism. So we transition from this approach to reality which was psychotic, to a privatization of public discourse, automatization, democratization, and the elevation of the individual.
THE RENAISSANCE OF NARCISSISM
SV: The elevation of the individual started in “The Renaissance”, of course. The four critical elements in The Renaissance were: the importance of the individual as an organizing principle, the Cult of Personality (The Author), the glorification of autocratic leadership (which is essentially Machiavellian), and the reversion to the classical past. These are the four pillars of the Renaissance. And, of course, The Renaissance was narcissistic, Protestantism coalesced with the Renaissance and created the Narcissistic Age, and we transitioned from psychosis to narcissism.
Narcissism is a new religion with the individual as God. The individual is the godhead, and the worshipper, and the church. Everything is self-contained. Narcissism is the first distributed religion. There are many nodes, each individual with his smartphone is a God. And so it’s a distributed, it’s a network religion. Whereas previous religions were highly centralized, of course, Narcissism is decentralized.
SV: And we see it in technology, as well, as blockchain technologies. These are technologies that decentralize money. We see it in Warfare: the decentralization of war is today called Terrorism. We see it everywhere. We’re replacing hierarchies with networks, and this started in The Renaissance. And this process leads to the apotheosis, to the deification of the individual. Indeed the individual is truly empowered, that’s not a hallucination, that’s not a delusion. It’s true. The individual is truly empowered. A typical smartphone contains 600 times the computing power of NASA when they send a man to the Moon. You are able today to make movies, to publish books, to reach out to the very ends of the globe, to create social movements, to become super famous. And you’re able to do all this from your living room, with your cat and Netflix in the background. So we are Godlike, technology has made us Godlike, narcissism is Justified and this is what I mean when I say we transition from psychosis to narcissism.
AF: I mean it’s like the new distribution of illness, I mean of mental health issues…
SV: A transition from one type of illness to another…
AF: Everything is about distribution, I mean so it’s a new distribution
SV: Distribution is a proxy for power, when we talk about power we’re talking essentially about distribution.
DREAMING IN A PSYCHOPATHIC ALGORITHM
AF: You said that economics is a branch of psychology and in your video “Capitalism: Ultimate Share Fantasy” you explained that capitalism creates Mass Envy and Mass Anger. Could you explain this, please?
SV: I don’t think envy and anger are limited to capitalism, I think any
economic system would yield envy and anger. For example, there was a lot of envy in communism, people were very envious of each other. But the difference is that capitalism elevates envy and greed, elevates negative emotions. Negative emotions in capitalism are an integral part of the ideology. They are considered to be engines of growth, they’re considered to be positive things. The capitalist would tell you “it’s good to envy, you should envy because only by envying others, you can progress”. So, there’s an identification of the idea of progress with negative effects; with negative emotions such as envy and anger. Whereas in communism, for example, –which I am not an adherent of Communism, I think it was a massive failure and the theory is counterfactual– but in communism, at least, there was an attempt to discredit Envy, to say we shouldn’t Envy anyone because we are all equal, we should all receive equal resources, and equal access and equal opportunities. Everything should be equal. Never mind that, in practice of course, there was a group of people who were “more equal” than the others, the nomenclature. But at least the philosophy (the ideology) was much healthier. The philosophy, not the implementation, the implementation was a mega-disaster. But the philosophy was much healthier, no question about mentally speaking.
Capitalism is a narrative, it’s a way to allocate resources in scarcity, in a condition of scarcity. So the basic assumption of capitalism is there isn’t enough for all of us. So, now how are we going to distribute what there is? And this is the way to distribute: you reward people who work harder, you reward people who have studied. So it’s an allocative mechanism, it’s an algorithm for allocating resources that are considered to be scarce. However, built into capitalism, there are hidden assumptions, hidden on purpose, because if the masses became aware of these assumptions there would be Rebellion. There would be social unrest, there would be revolutions.
SV: So Capitalism is deceptive, and some of the deceptions have to do with, for example, the concept of Darwinism. Capitalism is Darwinian: survival of the fittest, therefore capitalism is disempathic (non-empathic).
Capitalism encourages the destruction of value because only the destruction of value can lead to new growth. If you don’t destroy the old you cannot have the new. If you don’t have the new, you cannot make profits. The condition for growth in capitalism is the destruction of the
old. But when you destroy the old you destroy many millions of people, you destroy their livelihoods, you dislocate them, you disorient them. The psychological price of destroying the old is huge and yet this is built into capitalism. And that’s why capitalism has boom-bust Cycles, that’s why capitalism always goes through crises, financial crises, and economic crises. In the last 200 years, we have had 76 major crises in capitalism, these are the major ones, there have been another 200 and something minor crises.
It’s clear that crisis is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. Similarly, capitalism encourages market failures, because market failure is the Darwinian mechanism of selection. When the market fails, the weak die, the poor die, the unsuccessful die, the uneducated die, they die out. It’s Eugenics. Capitalism is eugenic.
SV: At the same time, Capitalism is a shared fantasy, it disguises its true nature, and it comes up with fantastic narratives about getting rich quickly, you can also have your dreams come true, beautiful girls and shiny cars. The American dream which is –definitely– only a dream, this is an integral part of capitalism. Actually, philosophers like Louis Althusser identified this and called it “Interpellation”, Guy Debord called it The Society of the Spectacle, and others identified consumerism as a deceptive religion, a deceptive secular religion. I have nothing against capitalism as an allocative algorithm. We are entitled to come up with methods, systems, to divide resources. Because, ultimately, our planet is finite. There’s an end to our planet.
But capitalism encourages lying, deception, and fantasy: capitalism is mentally unhealthy. Take the fact that we, on purpose, ignore the costs of capitalism, when you look at the financial statement of any company, when you look at the balance sheet, what do you see? You see computers wages salaries, travel expenses, incomes, profit… But can you see in the balance sheet the cost to the environment? No. Can you see the cost to the happiness of the workers? No. Can you see the deterioration in the health of the workers? No.
SV: Many costs are hidden on purpose, and ignored on purpose. My problem with capitalism is not the algorithm or mechanism itself. We can argue that it’s also, in my view, a very bad algorithm. My problem with capitalism it’s founded on Deception. Capitalism started as a fantasy, a Protestant fantasy, not a Jewish fantasy, and the fantasy was if you’re successful and Rich you are chosen by God, you are blessed by God himself. If you want to know who is righteous in the eyes of God look at the bank account, if they have a big bank account, God loves them. There was an identification of the love of God with commercial success, and it motivated people to cut Corners, to cheat, to deceive, because they didn’t particularly care about the love of God. They cared about their communities, they wanted their communities to think that they were being loved by God. It all started with fantasy and deception, and in psychology, fantasy is a pathology, fantasy is a defense mechanism and it’s sick. One of the most famous forms of fantasy is called narcissism. Narcissism is a Fantasy defense, so capitalism sits well with narcissism and created consumerism as a religion and a dream.
Capitalism Dream, The American Dream, creates the dream as a substitute for reality. In reality, capitalism is founded on negative emotions, on hiding the costs, on lying, on Deception, on manipulation, and on the devastation of the environment within which it operates via crisis, via environmental costs externalities like pollution and severe damage to the physical and mental health of others. It’s a psychopathic algorithm. I’m sorry to say it’s Psychopathic.
AF: You are certainly aware of the Milei phenomenon. Milei believes in the Austrian School of Economics and won the elections with a very provocative and brilliant narrative against “the political caste.” I want to know your thoughts about Milei, and this new phenomenon that is rising all over the world.
SV: It’s not Milei only, Milei is a poor reflection of Donald Trump, and
Donald Trump is a poor reflection of Putin, Putin, and Erdogan, it’s a global phenomenon. It's the rise of autocratic conspiracy-minded mentally ill leaders. Not all mental illness is manifest, not all mental illness is visible. Not all mental illness is extreme. Mental illness is very often a lowkey phenomenon, mental illness is like background noise. So many people are mentally ill, without ending up in a sanatorium, and many people are mentally ill without taking pills. They’re mentally ill all the same, the political process is being pathologized. People with pathologies rise to the top, and I think there are three reasons for this, which I described in my work in the past, much plagiarized work. The three reasons for the rise of these types of leaders are what I call psychopathological resonance, Co-idealization, and legitimized Antisocial Behavior, or even insanity.
OUR SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
SV: So let’s start with psychopathological resonance. When we meet people, even when we’re dating, when we’re with our colleagues,
when human beings come across each other, what resonates is their pathologies, not the healthy Parts. The healthy parts do not interact, it’s the pathologist that interacts, and the reason is simple. I think it’s a very clever gimmick of evolution because pathology means “diversity”, pathology means “not normal”. So, if you want to experiment, if you want mutations, if you want evolution to progress; you need actually to explore and experiment with “the abnormal”. You need to try all kinds of things.
SV: Today in medicine we believe that cancer is an evolutionary vector, actually, cancer is a “massive experimentation of evolution”. Evolution is trying all kinds of mutations, all the time, it is mutating and some of these mutations kill us, and we call it cancer. Other mutations drive us forward, but by definition, “mutation” is abnormal, in normal conditions, you don’t have mutations, of course, “ipso facto”, mutation means not normal.
I believe our pathologies resonate because evolution is experimenting with psychological mutations, so it is a form of progress, of biodiversity. Anyhow the fact is that most resonance is pathological. When you have a pathological, sick civilization, for example when you have a narcissistic civilization, when you have a psychotic civilization, when you have a psychopathic civilization the pathologies of the population would resonate most powerfully with the pathologies of the leader.
SV: So, in the psychotic period in The Psychotic era of human civilization, people resonated with nut demented cases, like Jesus Christ, and others. I’m mentioning Jesus Christ, but all the prophets, all mental cases. today all of them without exception, would have been in a mental Asylum, and you would throw away the key. Seriously mentally ill people, but their pathology which was essentially psychosis, their psychotic disorders resonated with the population’s pathology. The population was in a psychotic state because they believed in God and other nonsense. So the psychosis of the population and the psychosis of the prophets resonated and the prophets became venerated and respected, admired, and adored.
SV: Then we transition to the Age of Enlightenment the Age of Enlightenment, that was an age of victimhood. The philosophers of the Enlightenment said that the church was an abuser, they simply claimed that the Church was an abuser, and we need to throw away the chains of irrationality and crazy thinking. We need to liberate, it was about Liberation, and that was, of course, the famous motto in the French Revolution: Liberation.
During this period, during the 300 years of the Enlightenment, all victimhood movements prospered because the pathology of the population was victim-mentality, so leaders who promoted victimhood, leaders who felt like victims became venerated, admired, looked up to, and emulated.
OUR PATHOLOGY AS AN ENGINE OF GROWTH
SV: It’s enough to mention Adolf Hitler, who was a victimhood leader, but I can mention of course leaders of the Communist Party, and I can mention leaders of China. Everything was victimhood, the organizing principle was victimhood, the pathology was “victim”. Today we know that an entrenched identity as a victim is a mental health pathology. And today we are at a new stage of civilization, a new phase of civilization. This is a new pathology because remember, pathology is the engine of growth, pathology is the engine of evolution, not the normal State.
The normal state is stagnation, normal state is death. It is “pathology” that is the mutation of civilization so the new pathology nowadays is psychopathic narcissism. That is a new pathology of the population of the civilization, of all cultures of all societies, of all Technologies, everything reflects Psychopathic narcissism. So normally, the population would resonate with Psychopathic narcissists. And what is the core of Psychopathic narcissists? What are the clinical features of Psychopathic? They’re divorced from reality, they live in fantasy and prefer Fantasy actively, they’re manipulative, they’re Machiavellian, they’re conspiracy-minded, they have psychological traits known as “conspiracism”, and they are disempathic. The leader is the mirror and I call it psychopathological resonance.
OUR FOLIE A DEUX, OUR LOVE FEST
SV: The second element is Co-idealization. The leader idealizes the
population and the population in return idealizes the leader. It’s a mutual admiration Society, it’s a Love Fest. The leader is saying you are such a
special kind of person you’re amazing, you’re unprecedented, and because you are like that, because you are a chosen people, it makes me special. Because only a very special person can lead you. You are so special that the very fact that I’m Your Leader makes me special and vice versa. I am so unique, so endowed so gifted. I am the Messenger of history (Hitler). I am the Messenger of inexorable economic forces (communism). I am,
therefore, the fabric of reality so my uniqueness is going to be projected on
you. Because you have such a unique leader who makes you a unique person. Because you have such an amazing, fascinating, incredible leader that makes you chosen, and special as a nation, as a people, as a group, as a collective. It’s a two-way street two-way street: the people idealize the
leader, the leader idealizes the people, and vice versa, and again it’s
a vicious or virtuous cycle, depending on which way you look: so, co-idealization.
THEY ARE THE TRUTH
Finally, the leader legitimizes the pathology of the age. So a prophet of God during The Psychotic Age tells the people: “You are right to believe in God, God does exist you’re not crazy. God does exist, I personally spoke to him. So the leaders during the psychotic age, the makers of religion, the people who invented religion, these utterly mentally ill people, the likes of which have never existed, these mentally ill people legitimize the pathology of the population. The population said: “we believe in God but we are not so sure.” In the Bible, for example, many times people say “We are not so sure about the existence of God, we’re going to “worship the golden cuff”, we’re going to forget God, or “we’re going to worship all kinds of Idols because we don’t we are not sure that God exists”. And then the prophets, Moses for example, come and say: “Are you nuts? Of course, God exists! I spoke to him personally the other day!”
The leader legitimizes the pathology of the people, the leader tells the people: “You’re not crazy you are normal. Everyone else is crazy, you are healthy, and everyone else is sick. Why? Because I think like you. The fact that I think like you proves to you that what you’re thinking is right. I am the source of legitimacy. I’m the source of authenticity. I am the source of veracity. I am the truth.”
SV: Indeed the New Testament opens with words: “At the beginning there was the word” (logos). “ I am the truth”. So Milei, or Donald Trump, or Erdogan, they’re saying the same things we are thinking. They’re verbalizing our thinking, so it must be true. Then it reduces the anxiety of the people. People feel calmer, they feel more safe, more stable, and more secure. If you are a racist and you believe that black people are inferior you may have some doubts, maybe a bit anxious about this ideology. Because you look to the left, and you see pretty educated and accomplished blacks, and it challenges your perception. But then a leader comes who says: “Yes, blacks are inferior biologically”, and you feel legitimized and Justified, and your anxiety is reduced.
Now there’s a tradeoff: the leader tells you: “If you want me to reduce your anxieties you need to give me control over your life, over your thoughts, over your opinions, over your judgments, and in short over your reality. I need as a leader to monopolize your reality so that I have the power to reduce your anxiety. So that I have the power to calm you down pacify you and grant you Inner Peace.
SV: So reality in The Psychotic Age was God, reality in The Enlightenment was abusers everywhere, of all kinds, in reality, today is power and money, and Godlike a Godlike existence, and it’s being legitimized increasingly, so Milei is not the engine of this, he’s just a symptom, he’s just a derivative and a late by the way there are like 20, 30 other leaders who preceded him.
OUR INSANE ZEITGEIST
AF: You said, (quote) “We have survived a generation of such leaders, men of action, the cult leader. It seems that we are facing a second wave of personality cult leaders. I don’t know if we are going to survive the second wave.” (unquote). And in your book “Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited,” you wrote that narcissistic leaders can connect with the unconscious collective.
SV: Yes, Collective, yes I just mentioned the psychopathological resonance that’s what I meant. Collective, yes I just mentioned the psychopathological resonance that’s what I meant. The leader legitimizes your dark side, he legitimizes your dark side, and he tells you your dark side is perfectly acceptable, perfectly okay. Actually, you should be proud of your dark side you should promote it. This is the psychopathological resonance I’m not a great fan of Jung’s Collective Unconscious, I think it’s metaphysical nonsense.
But, it is true that the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, contains pathologies normally, and these pathologies permeate, infiltrate, and invade the minds of people who are living during this period of History. We are, according to object relation schools in psychology, we are relational creatures, our mind is the direct outcome of all the relationships we’ve had with other people, starting with “mother”. But throughout life, we are shaped by our relationships, our identities the total of our relationships.
SV: And there were even psychologists or psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan who suggested that the unconscious itself is the compendium of the voices of other people. So he went so far as to say that we don’t exist except as the nexus between multiple people. We are just a reflection of networks of relationships between people. So of course the spirit of the Age “The Zeitgeist” is communicated via these networks. We are influenced by “the ethos”, the narratives, the stories, the legends, and the fables of our time. And if these are pathologized, for example, in Nazi Germany, if these are pathologized, we would be pathologized. Even if we started totally mentally healthy we would end up being pathologized.
SV: And then as we become more and more pathologized this creates anxiety. Because initially there is a healthy part; the pathology starts as a minority. So the pathology is small and the healthy part is big, but then the pathology becomes bigger and bigger, and this creates dissonance. It creates conflict between the healthy part and the increasingly larger sick
part. The sick part that is influenced by the environment, and so there is a
conflict between them, and this conflict creates anxiety. And then the leader comes to you and says: “you shouldn’t feel this conflict, your healthy side is sick, your sick side is healthy, so you should pay attention to your sick side you should cultivate it, you should nurture it, you should listen to it you should follow it, you should believe in it. The dark side is the only source of light, your healthy side was mistaken, evidently mistaken because is non-conformist”.
Society is sick, so if you are healthy in a sick Society you are sick. There is no such thing as objective psychopathology, it is all context-dependent. Take for example “depression”, if you live in a nice apartment and you have income and you have a boyfriend or a dog or both, then you should be happy you should not be depressed, and if you’re depressed we say that there is a pathological process happening you should not be depressed. In other words, you should be treated because something’s wrong with you. But if you live in “Auschwitz” and you are not depressed something is wrong with you.
SV: So depression is normal in “Auschwitz” but it is abnormal in Buenos Aires. There is no such thing as “mental illness” that is an objective entity like something scientific, it depends on the context and depends on the environment. If you live in a narcissistic society and you are not a narcissist, something is wrong with you. If you live in a psychopathic society and you’re not a psychopath you’re likely to be penalized, it’s self-punitive, and it’s self-destructive not to be a psychopath in a psychopathic Society. If you live in Nazi German and you help the Jews, you’re not a psychopath you help the Jews… you’re crazy! this is destructive! You want to die! what is this? it’s suicide!
So, your mental health absolutely should reflect and correspond to the pathologies of the age, and it is the leader who is the intermediary, the leader channels the pathologies of the age. The leader communicates to you the pathology of the age. That’s the conduit. that’s the communication pathway. You are informed about the pathologies of the age through the leader.
OUR POWER COLLECTIVE
SV: And then you conform, you change, you become a member of the SS, you were a lawyer, or an accountant, or a teacher, but then Hitler communicated to you that you should kill Jews in Auschwitz. So, Hitler communicated to you the pathology of the age, and you adopted yourself. And once you have adopted yourself, once you started to kill Jews, in Nazi Germany, “you felt good”. It felt good.
Conforming to society feels good, conforming to pathologies feels good, it reduces anxiety, it restores inner peace, it energizes. The force of the collective, the magnetic field of the collective energizes. But going against the grain, against the tide, against Society, against the leader creates enormous anxiety. The leader is the reification of the age, and reification of the Zeitgeist, and going against the Leader creates enormous anxiety, even if there will be no consequences.
SV: Let’s say you’re very rich and you don’t care, and you are very powerful and you can go against the leader; but it creates axiological dissonance, it creates a dissonance of values, of beliefs you are an outlier, you are abnormal, you are outcast, you are freak. To not be a psychopath in Nazi Germany was to be a freak, to not be narcissistic in Milei’s Argentina is to be a freak, and to not be a psychopathic narcissist in today’s United States is to be a freak. It is the leader who defines who is a freak, and who should sleep well at night, and feel happy when they get up in the morning. This is the leaders’ power. Because he is the reification of pathology, and the channeling medium of pathology, but which pathology? The pathology of the civilization, of the culture of society, and of the Age. Leaders are seismographs, they pick up the earthquakes in the Zeitgeist. They are attuned, and this is this is why they become leaders. We don’t. They do. They’re much more attuned.
LIVING LIKE ANTS
AF: They have like a cognitive empathy, I heard in one of your videos… not emotional empathy but cognitive they can understand…
Yes, cold empathy which is a combination of cognitive empathy and reflexive empathy, but no emotional empathy. Cold empathy gives you the ability to create a map, to scan people, or to scan groups of people. And create a map of their fears, their wishes, their dreams, their fantasies, and then resonate with this. Hitler was great with this, and Donald Trump is great with this. These people resonate, they create a “High mind”. They convert a mass of individuals into a colony. Like an ant colony or a bee colony, with a single mind.
We have a name for this in Neuroscience we did not have a name for this until 10 years ago. But 10 years ago we discovered an interesting phenomenon in Neuroscience: we discovered that in people who play in a band, in a musical band, in a rock band, for example: the brain waves of these people synchronized to the point that we cannot tell the difference between them. All of them have identical brain waves when they play music. This process is known as “Brain wave entrainment”, and in my work, I extended this concept, I extended this idea, and I suggested that language is indistinguishable from music, it’s a form of music. It is sound, it is processed sound, it has structure, it has an order, it has repetition. It is exactly like music.
So, I think when people are exposed to political speech, their brains are “entrainment”. When you’re exposed to verbal abuse your brain “entrains” with the abuser. I believe “entraining” is a crucial concept in explaining mass movements; and personality Cults. In relationships, I think it’s super crucial, I think brains, actually, do synchronize, not as a metaphor, the waves synchronize.
AF: Yeah like when a rock star in a stadium, and he said “oh, oh…” and the whole stadium starts to repeat the same…
SV: yes, this a High Mind, it’s like a colony.
AF: So, I had something in my mind since a long time ago, it’s about the unconscious Collective, I know that you don’t like this term, but I always observe the behavior from crowds, and it makes me feel uncomfortable and unsafe… emotions + collectives, together, looks
dangerous. So I mean, emotions are personal, not collective. I feel when a leader uses emotional symbols it could be very effective but very dangerous. What are your thoughts about this? I think we should use ethics instead of morals when we are talking about or facing Collective, organizations, or movements.
SV: I’m not quite sure I understand the question you’re asking about the use of emotions?
OUR HIGH MIND LEADERS
AF: Yeah, in yeah I think that when leaders use emotion emotions like a flag like you know like “patriotism”, like that kind of emotion is very dangerous because crows can do crazy things together, as hooligans do.
SV: Yes, first of all, there is a collective mind, as I said, a “high mind”
like the mind of a colony of bees. So there is a collective mind in
Cults, we have a cult mind, it’s a non-documented phenomenon. So yes,
individuals when they’re a group, when they are in a coherent and cohesive Collective, they suspend their individual existence. Many cognitive functions are suspended. Everything is replaced by the instructions, or emanations, or projections of the leader. The leader’s mind, actually, becomes the “collective mind” or the “high mind”. And then the question is: is the leader dangerous? Because, if the leader is ethical, Nelson Mandela, for example, then the same mechanism can bring very positive results.
In mobs, in crowds, there is a suspension of reality testing; “no access to reality”. Suspension of judgment, suspension of opinion, and a replacement of all these by the mind of the leader. The mind of the leader expands outwards and consumes the crowd. But if the leader is ethical and moral, a good person, and a positive person, this could have wonderful outcomes. Of course, if the leader is paranoid, vicious hateful, this could have horrible outcomes: the Gulag or Auschwitz, or whatever.
SV: So the emphasis on the crowd is wrong, the emphasis should be on the leader. It is the pathology of the leader that resonates with the pathologies of the crowd and becomes one, the leader becomes one with the crowd, but it is the mind of the leader that prevails, not the minds of the individuals in the crowd.
OUR NOISY DECISIONS
So, The use of emotions is necessitated because, during the Enlightenment, many philosophers came up with the absolutely nonsensical counterfactual idea, that people are rational. We see, for example, in economics, we have the “rational agent” that’s like the typical individual who makes rational economic decisions, and of course, it’s total nonsense. Economics is a branch of psychology, and as we know, today, people are not rational. There is a field in economics known as “behavioral economics”. It was founded by a Nobel Prize winner, and we know today that people are not rational. All these constructs of a rational agent that makes economic decisions, the way a computer would make them, is totally nonsensical. Same in politics, and the same in relationships, we are not rational.
80-90% of our decisions are dictated by emotions, or by noise it’s a recent discovery. There’s a a great book by Daniel Kahneman called “Noise”, the Nobel Prize winner in economics, was, actually, not an economist, he was a psychologist. Daniel Kahneman was not an economist, he was a psychologist. He won the Nobel Prize in economics because he introduced psychology to them.
So when we make decisions these decisions are based on emotions, and if not emotions they’re based on some noise, on some disturbance, on some mess; they’re chaotic decisions. We almost never make decisions based on analysis, or rationality, or other cognitive processes (structured cognitive processes). So it would be meaningless for a political leader to reason with you, to analyze things, to talk to you rationally. It would have zero resonance and impact, and it would not (or rarely) touch or trigger your pathology. So yes, leaders know this, and they use emotions. Not only in politics, they use emotions in business, and of course in interpersonal relationships. It’s extremely rare to base decisions on cognitions.
When you meet someone and you ask yourself: “could this guy be my husband?”, you rarely analyze the situation in a totally logical way, unless you’re a psychopath. And if you’re a psychopath, you are goal-oriented, and you are going to ask: “How much money this guy has in the bank?” That’s rational. The only group of people who, actually, are rational most of the time, are Psychopaths.
OUR REAL FANTASIES
AF: It seems that Milei’s option was necessary to stop populism in Argentina. I lived here for the last 12 years, we experienced a very sick shared fantasy with Cristina Kirchner. Milei’s narrative was the only one able to defeat populism. Isn’t this the way dialectics work? Why are we so radical in this post-modern society where the middle ground seems ineffective?
SV: The Hegelian construct of synthesis, the three stages of Hegelian dialectic have no foundation in reality. People don’t work this way, social movements don’t work this way, and even science doesn’t work this way. And I’m a physicist, we don’t work this way. No one does, no one that I’m aware of, in any field of human activity, or thought. This dialectic is flawed. It’s nonhuman, it may apply perfectly to artificial intelligence or robots, but it’s not human.
When we are confronted with a shared fantasy which is the thesis in Hegel’s work, when we’re confronted with the “Share Fantasy”. We try to exit the Fantasy by proposing another “Shared Fantasy”; the only way outside a fantasy is into another fantasy. So what actually happens in
human affairs is that we transition between fantasies from one fantasy to another, and then to another, and some of these fantasies could be
synthetic, some of them could borrow elements from the “thetical fantasy” and the “antithetical fantasy”, and then combine them in a “synthetical fantasy”. Yes that much could be true. But it’s all non-analytical it’s synthetic, nonanalytical.
So, people interface with reality through the mediation of other people, and to accept this, to say to yourself: “ I’m going to work inside reality and I’m going to work on reality through someone else, through a political leader, through a scientist… I’m always going to accept the mediation and the brokerage of another person”. Is fantasy, of course, this is a great definition of “Shared fantasy”. So, science is a shared fantasy, politics is a shared, and these are all shared fantasies. We used to have a shared fantasy about some God in the sky, but we got rid of that Share fantasy, I mean most of us got rid of the Share fantasy, but we have others… now God is in the Presidential Palace, or now God is in a laboratory in MIT or now God is in Silicon Valley. It’s the same Share fantasy, we are incapable of interacting with reality directly, without the mediation of “a fantasy” because who we are psycho-biologically starts with the fact that we never interact with reality. We interact with sensory inputs.
OUR SOLIPSISTIC SELF
SV: Reality provides stimulus reality, provides information reality, provides cues. We take them into our brains and our brain processes them, and what we experience is not reality but is the outcome of the processing that took place in the brain. We, actually, experience only ourselves never anything, or anyone else, only ourselves.
We are utterly solipsistic. Solipsism is the only true Philosophy, for the very simple reason that we can never gain access to another person’s mind, so we’re isolated, and now we have two choices: the existential Choice, you know, the “Kierkegaard choice” of saying you know, I’m alone, I’m alone, I’m shaping my life, my choices would have infinite consequences for me, and that is terrifying, that is “Angst”. How many people are capable of “angst”? Very few, and the rest of humanity what they do, they replace “The Angst” with fantasy, they solve the “existential angst problem” with fantasy. They pretend that it’s reality, they light on themselves, the self-deceive that is reality.
But the very fact is that when I take this glass and drink this water, I’m never in touch with the glass or with the water. I’m in touch with the way my brain has processed the glass and processed the water, and that’s where it starts. I can never be in touch with reality, I have no idea if you are real and there is no rigorous scientific way to prove that you’re real. There’s no philosophic method that I can use to prove that you’re real, none. I have no access to your mind I have to rely on what you’re telling me. I have to rely on your self-reporting. Maybe you’re a psychopath, maybe you’re a liar, maybe you’re a robot, maybe you’re an alien.
There is no method to decide what you are so in order to talk to you, on this Zoom, I engage in a fantasy that you are real. It’s a fantasy, total fantasy. Whatever you cannot prove with a scientific method, is a fantasy and I cannot prove with a scientific method that you are human, or even that you exist. I cannot. That’s why artificial intelligence is so deceptive. That’s why people can’t tell the difference between artificially generated images and real ones, between artificially generated characters and real ones, because the very concept of reality is fuzzy it’s bullshit. There’s no such thing, and so, in politics, in science, in religion, everywhere the organizing principle of reality is fantasy that’s the irony.
And you’ve just replaced Kirchner’s fantasy with Milei’s fantasy, and ultimately, there will come a third party, or leader, and he will make a synthesis of Kichner and Milei and you will say: “Wow, what a revolution, we are finally embedded in reality. It’s also nonsense, It’s also fantastic.
OUR REAL CHOICE
AF: But you said that we need to revert to reality. You said (quote) “We invented the meaning and we become the meaning, and in the process, we sacrifice everything around us, everything is a perspective, everything needs a language, a story, and narrative”. You said that. How can we live without symbols? Is this your “Nothingness Philosophy? Because my son is 12 and when he was six he confused video games with reality, so how can we be in reality now?
SV: We are still confusing we’re still confusing video games with reality. The president of the United States is a reality was a “reality TV guy”, Schwarzenegger was governor of California. We are still confused, Ronald Reagan was President of the United States… we are still confusing television with reality, absolutely, as adults.
I think you need to make a distinction would be helpful for you to make a distinction between fantasy, language, and delusion. When I say we should go back to reality I mean we should get rid of delusions. There is no way to get rid of fantasies. The only way we interact with reality is through fantasy, it’s an organizing principle. It’s an explanatory principle. We are incapable of direct contact with reality, so we must go through Fantasies.
However, there is a very important distinction between fantasy and delusion. Fantasies are self-consistent and other-consistent. Self-consistent in the sense that all the elements in the fantasy do not contradict each other. And, fantasies are other-consistent in the sense that the information that comes from the outside does not contradict the fantasy. So the fantasy needs to be consistent. Delusions are inconsistent they are never consistent. When you have a delusion it’s because you are denying and ignoring information that is inconsistent with the delusion. When you have a fantasy all the information internally and externally generated, is consistent with a fantasy. If it is not then it’s not a fantasy, it’s a delusion. And I’m against delusions because delusions are not self-efficacious. Delusions don’t allow us to function and to thrive and survive, while fantasies… without fantasies, we cannot survive. Fantasies are critical survival strategies, so this is the first distinction.
The Second distinction: is language. And here I blame another Jew, Wittgenstein, who made the famous claim about “private languages” and he said that private languages are meaningless, and I think exactly the opposite.
I think the only possible languages are private. Public languages are desperate attempts to communicate between private languages, and we can never prove that public languages are true. They don’t have a truth value. I have my own private language… yes I have my own private world, my own mind, my own thinking, I perceive the color red in a specific way. I’m sad, I’m happy, I’m thirsty, I’m hungry. I have my private language and so do you. In order to communicate to you how I perceive the color red, I need to use a public language. But, neither you nor I can prove that what I’m saying is true.
When I tell you this is how I perceive the color red, or this is how I feel love or this is how I feel when I drink wine, I cannot prove to you and you cannot prove to me that what I’ve said has validity, has a truth value. Because I may be lying and you cannot prove that I’m lying. So public languages are, shockingly as it may sound, meaningless. They are meaningless, they’re just statements. We call them in logic “undecidable”. These are statements that cannot be decided. Similar to the statement God
exists… Can you prove it? Can you disprove it? What’s the meaning of this idiotic sentence? So, I am exactly opposed to Wittgenstein, I think the only languages with a truth value are private languages, because I know when I talk to myself inside my head I know it’s true unless I’m psychotic. I mean from normal I know it’s true. So we should not confuse language with fantasy and delusion. When we say language we usually mean public language, and of course, public language includes words, but also science, semiotics, signs, symbols, behaviors; these are all signaling mechanisms, and they are all languages. And language can give rise to Fantasy and language can give rise to delusion. Language could give rise to mental health, it can give rise to mental illness. It can give rise to anything and everything because public language has no truth value.
When I say public language has no truth value, it means that public language cannot say anything with certainty about reality. If I say public language is not truth value means it’s useless, I cannot trust it when it comes to reality. That’s why delusions also rely on public language. So we should not confuse all these issues when I say we should go back to reality I mean two things basically: to accept our inability to communicate, the fact that the inter-subjective space will always be meaningless, or at least contingent, and therefore, if we seek the truth, and if we want to get as close as possible to reality, we should rely only on our private language –ignore public language– and we should accept, however, reluctantly the role of fantasy. This is what I mean.
OUR TRUE REALITY
AF: OK… you mean private language is the dialogue you have with yourself, and that’s when you can be like ego-syntonic?
If you go back to reality, if you accept that the private language is the only truthful language. Because the only person you can trust is yourself. The only person who knows if your self-reporting is true or not is you. I can never know. Only you know, so only you are the source of truth. I can never be the source of Truth for you, you are the only source of Truth. And also you understand and accept the only source of Truth is inside your head, everything outside your head has no truth value. Therefore you need fantasy because you cannot say anything you cannot say anything with certainty about reality out there. Do you understand?
AF: Okay I get, it so we have to accept fantasies… I am a fantasy with this guy that I like and he’s a narcissist, and he will do bad things… but I am in a fantasy and that’s my fantasy.
No, your fantasy is much more fundamental. You’re in a fantasy that you are sitting in a room, you’re in a fantasy that you have a laptop because you have no access to reality. You have only access to the processes in your brain, and so you deceive yourself: you say: “The processes in my brain are
reality”, but they are a reality, but they are not the reality of the room. They are not the reality of the laptop, they are the reality of your brain. So your
fantasy starts from the moment you open your eyes in the morning, and convince yourself that you have eyeglasses. There is a process in your brain that informs you that you have eyeglasses, but your knowledge is limited to this process. You have no access to your glasses, you have access
to the way your brain processes what you think is eyeglasses. So that’s why
fantasy starts. But at least you know that the process in your brain is true; does exist. And this is of course René Descartes “Cogito ergo sum” that’s what he meant, actually, I think, therefore I exist.
AF: You mean we have to accept fantasies, otherwise we will live in a delusional way.
Exactly, these are the choices we have fantasy or delusion, true. And the greatest delusion is that you’re not living in fantasy. The greatest delusion is to say I am living in reality, I’m not living in fantasy. That’s the greatest.
AF: Professor, thank you so much for this. I saw so many videos
and I will continue because I am worried about our future and I think we must understand this to not continue following in this shared fantasies with our leaders.
I think you’re right to be worried because I think we have transitioned from shared fantasies to delusions we are entering a delusional age, yeah the worry is Justified.
