Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams (archive only)

Narcissism with Vaknin on Instagram (active account)

Histrionic-narcissistic women maintain a stable of men from their past: ex and wannabe lovers now friendzoned and spiderweb-wrapped until they are needed.

When the histrionic goes through a rough patch or a breakup in her primary relationship with an intimate partner, she reaches out to these hapless white knights to rescue her and to afford much needed succor, mostly emotional and rarely also sexual.

Thus reactivated and reanimated, these men serve to restore and boost the histrionic's flagging self-esteem as well as echo and affirm her self-justifying, self-righteous, self-serving, and alloplastic victimhood narratives.

Friendzoning is a cruel manipulative technique. It holds out the false hope of more - sex or a romantic relationship - while extracting from the target an endless stream of benefits.

The histrionic-narcissistic "queen" or "princess" spends time with her courtiers, shares with them intimate details of her dalliances with other men, and consumes their resources, fully aware of the excruciating hurt this causes them. Their pining pain and frustrated yearning constitute her narcissistic supply.

She maintain them in her orbit by throwing them morsels of one night non-penetrative sex and faux romance. This keeps them on their toes and coming back for more, Pavlovian wretches, always on the lookout for the big break when she will finally relent, realize that they could be so much more than mere "brothers", and embark on a full-fledged love affair with them.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jude Law as the Young Pope in this clip at least is not a narcissist, but a psychopath. An avalanche of misinformation online by self-styled "experts" muddied the waters and the differential diagnoses between these two disorders.

Though both types are possessed only of cold empathy, the psychopath is goal-oriented: money, sex, power, social positioning, celebrity. He is relentless, scheming, calculated, ruthless, and callous in his pursuit of his agenda. In contrast, the narcissist wants only one thing: narcissistic supply to buttress the grandiose fantasies that underlie his false self. Psychopaths do not fantasize - they act.

The narcissist is pro-social: he works with others because people are the only sources of narcissistic supply. The psychopath is anti-social: his world is a Darwinian, dog eat dog, zero sum game (he wins, everyone else loses)

Psychopaths do not hesitate to break the law: many of them are career criminals. Narcissists work within social institutions and subvert them, leverage existing laws in their favor, and create networks of affiliated patronage.

Psychopaths like to inflict gratuitous pain and discomfort. They revel in other people's pain and embarrassment, even find these hilarious. Not so narcissists who cause harm off-handedly and only if they have to.

As opposed to most narcissists, psychopaths are either unable or unwilling to control their impulses or to delay gratification. They use their rage to control people and manipulate them into submission.

Psychopaths are far less able to form interpersonal relationships, even the twisted and tragic relationships that are the staple of the narcissist. They are mostly lone wolves.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There are two types of triangulation (using a third party to manage the emotional, intimacy, and transactional aspects of a relationship): breakup and restorative.

Breakup triangulation involves overt and ostentatious cheating with a third party in conjunction with other egregious misbehavior. Its aim is to irrevocably break up with a current partner.

Why triangulate rather than simply terminate? A myriad reasons: revenge, rage, community property, inability to let go (codependency), restoring the cheater's self-esteem, feeling desirable and alive again, obtaining succor and ersatz intimacy, or uncertainty about one's true wishes.

But usually, it is simply the desire to cast one's mate as the villain who ended it all because of he is insanely jealous and not magnanimous or empathic enough to forgive and understand.

Restorative triangulation has the exact opposite goal: to revive the relationship by provoking an emotional response from the jilted partner. Such triangulation involves the mere favorable mention of another person, hints at possible misconduct or compromising circumstances, or, at a maximum, aggressive flirting and non-penetrative sex acts, such as kissing, petting (making out), or hugging.

Triangulation is a last resort and risky strategy. It often escalates counterproductively into sexual assault by the recruited third party or results in an extreme reaction by the offended partner who chooses to discard an unfaithful, disrespectful, narcissistic, and dysempathic counterparty.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Social media gave rise to a new type of Passive Stalker. He (and, of course, it could be a "she") refuses to take "no contact" for an answer.

But, rather than invade his target's personal territory physically, he penetrates her space circumambiently: by haunting her social media accounts, communicating with her friends and family from afar, frequenting places she might patronize, and imitating her life patterns and decisions.

The Passive Stalker is an apparition, a specter, a bothersome rather than ominous presence. He is not an erotomaniac, but a supplicant: biding his time till he gets a second chance. Clearly, his mindset is delusional, but he is never aggressive or predatory. Ultimately, he fades away, having transformed himself from a nuisance to a bad memory.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joker is not a psychopath or a narcissist. He suffers from major depression coupled with a psychotic disorder (aka paranoia-schizophrenia). His psychosis is grandiose and violent in nature, a pretty common comorbidity.

Few mentally ill patients go on murder sprees, but it is not unheard of. Hence the ubiquity and overpopulation of mental health wings in prisons the world over.

How do we know his diagnoses?

1. He is on a regime of multiple medications. Personality disorders are not mental illnesses and are not treated psychopharmacologically. The standard treatment for both mood and psychotic disorders involves potent drugs.

2. Joker is confined to the psychiatric ward of a prison. In the USA, no narcissist or psychopath can claim diminished capacity under the NRGI defense (Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity) which is the only way to get yourself hospitalized rather than incarcerated.

3. Joker has inappropriate affect, one of the signs of schizophrenia: he expresses hyperbolic emotions which are utterly wrong given the circumstances.

His laughter, though, is owing to a neurological disorder (pseudobulbar affect or PBA, often the sad lifelong outcome of brain trauma in childhood of of Bipolar Disorder)

4. Joker suffers from grandiose and violent delusions, including erotomania; referential ideation; disorganized thinking, behavior, and speech; rigid or diminished emotional expression (face like a mask); hallucinations; psychomotor agitation bordering on catatonia; and an impaired reality test (as evidenced in his conversations with his psychiatrist). These are all major signs of schizophrenia or at the very least of schizoaffective and schizotypal personality structures.

5. Like most narcissists and psychopaths, Joker is tormented by persecutory delusions (paranoid ideation). But, unlike in these two personality disorders, he is highly suicidal.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

MAN

Why did you cheat on me with someone so vastly inferior to me? He is ugly, penniless, paranoid, junkie, drunk, unemployed, indolent, and, generally, a beta loser

WOMAN

Because he gave me what you wouldn't, never mind how much I begged you to.

He flooded me with attention, affection, support, succor, and passionate desire. He wanted me in every way. He gave me hours of listening and handholding and the intimacy of inside jokes and of dancing and socializing and doing small inconsequential things together.

He was far superior to you in every way that mattered. He did not abuse me. I lit up his world and his face every time he saw me.

MAN

He wanted you only in one way and solely for one thing and you know it!

He was FAKING all the rest and not very well, if I may add.

WOMAN

True, he was - and, of course I knew it, I am not dumb or gullible.

But, you see, the very fact that he had bothered to fake it, that he had invested so much into making me believe his lies - this very exertion flattered me and proved to me that he cared about having me.

After the years of zero emotions with you, of taking me for granted - even these breadcrumbs of attention and effort and time and lust overwhelmed me with gratitude and elicited in me the wish to reciprocate, to show him in every way how much I appreciate it - and him. So, I did. I gave him all of me, my body first and foremost.

As opposed to you, he toiled hard for it and at the end of every evening, he had earned it, this prize that was me.

And it didn't really matter how much IQ or money he had or how far he got in life or how many of his teeth were missing or whether he looked like a roadkill

The only thing that meant something to me was to glimpse myself through his adoring, desirous eyes, to gauge my reflection and to be able to find myself as lovable and as wanted as you have never made me feel. I did not want him, really, but I wanted him to want me, because it made me come alive, finally.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Conspiracism is the propensity to believe in unproven and unverified oft-repeated conspiracy theories, urban legends, myths, and patent falsehoods, usually involving an evil intent of a cabal to abuse, manipulate, and exploit the unsuspecting masses.

Most people are gullible and believe literally anything and anyone: a well-documented and thoroughly researched phenomenon known as base rate.

They then defend their misconceptions fiercely as they actively align themselves with others and signal their uncritical conformity in like-minded tribes and silos.

Frequent the exposure in these echo chambers to toxic nonsense solidifies the belief in these outlandish and inane narratives, a phenomenon known as "consistency". Social media leverage consistency as grist to their perpetuum mobile rumor and gossip mills.

Other cognitive distortions feed into conspiracism. Consider the proportionality bias: the erroneous conviction that great events are caused by commensurately massive reasons, plots, and dynamic processes. This flies in the face of chaos theory and its butterfly effect: a lone grandiose gunman in Texas can rock the entire world with a single shot.

We also find patterns where there are none (apophenia and pareidolia), connect dots that should remain discrete, and find continuities in the disparate and the unrelated, including other people's actions as related to their imputed motivations (intentionality bias)

Conspiracism is a personality trait. Even after a favorite conspiracy is debunked, there is a counterfactual residue left (continued influence effect). The more you try to argue with a true believer, the more entrenched he becomes in his misinformation and paranoid skepticism (backfire effect)

Conspiracies thrive on ignorance: we don't know what cause autism - enter the anti-vaxxers. There is a smidgen of grandiosity involved as people trust their gut instincts and consider themselves "enlightened", "in the know", superior to the sheeple, and adepts.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When it comes to sexual assault, there are no "safe men". On the contrary, most sexual transgressions are committed by male "friends", "brothers", colleagues, or acquaintances. This is because men misinterpret all female behavior as sexually inviting (sexual overperception bias), respond aggressively to teasing (overt flirting and signalling), use sex to communicate (to comfort, console, protect, commiserate, and hold), and are preoccupied with possessing the woman and competing with other men (often "stealing" her from her boyfriend or husband).

Women, listen up: If a man has ever expressed sexual interest in you, he is never "safe" to be alone with. This is doubly true if his advances had been rebuffed in the past. He would interpret the continued contact following his rejection as a change of heart and mind and would pursue you even more vigorously in order to assuage the humiliating narcissistic injury you had inflicted on him by turning him down.

Women know all that, of course. So, why do they keep exposing themselves to the very same risks? Why do they repeatedly engineer circumstances that are conducive to coercive, non-consensual sex? Because they have a recurrent pipedream: they want to be lusted after, desired, and attended to - but "safely" so, without having to go all the way. They also use other men to triangulate (provoke jealousy in an indifferent partner or break up with him). Innocuous, sexless, flirting is way to restore the woman's sense of femininity and battered self-esteem.

These needs are so overpowering that women sometimes drink senseless and do drugs with total strangers or with casual "friends", ending up raped in dingy hotel rooms or apartments. There is another reason that so very few assaults get reported: women feel that what had happened was their fault, that they had led the guy on, that they owed him the sex. This is the price they have had to pay for his company, attention, and support and for finding them irresistible. The politically incorrect fact is that many women find this deal - unwanted sex for restorative companionship - perfectly worth it. Which is why they keep repeating the pattern: most sexually assaulted women have endured more than one such incident in almost identical situations of their own making.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The antisocial narcissist (same as the psychopath) values his unbridled freedom above all else. He owes nobody anything, no one has any power over him or claim on any of his resources, no one has the right to make any demands of any kind or to expect any kind of behavior or reciprocity from him.

Freedom is closely allied with defiant and contumacious self-sufficiency: he doesn't need a thing from anybody and he depends on nothing and no one. He abhors authority and constraints and is a law unto himself: my way or the highway, the fuck-off factor his greatest pride and joy and the foundation of his inflated False Self.

Women are the antithesis of this mindset: they give a lot but expect to receive in return; they use their sexuality to manipulate; they make demands, challenge, and negotiate. The psychopathic narcissist interprets all their assertive behaviors and any hint of separateness (personal autonomy) as a disrespectful and humiliating frontal attack on his grandiosity, an attempt to subjugate and enslave him, or, conversely, a form of pernicious passive-aggression. He feels cornered and threatened. The result is misogyny: a rabid heartfelt hatred of women.

Over the years, numerous traumatic failed relationships had taught the malignant narcissist that people - and especially women - would either avoid him altogether as a dangerous creep, mock and shun him as a freakish loser, or break up with him punitively after a while (for example: by ostentatiously cheating on him or by plagiarizing his work). This hurtful realization only enhances his "lone wolf" mentality and aversion to all manner of meaningful intercourse with others.

Many psychopathic narcissists finish off their chaotic and shambolic lives as schizoid and paranoid recluses. Like junkies, they may still function seamlessly in their jobs and chosen - usually solitary - professions. But what remains of their existence is ossified and rigidly ritualized.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In the impeachment hearings against Donald J. Trump in the Senate, Alan Dershowitz, the President's counsel defended him thus:

Trump sincerely believed - he expostulated gravely - that his personal interest (to get re-elected as President in 2020 by discrediting his main opponent, no angel himself, admittedly) is in the national interest (summa rerum).

Of course, Hitler said the same. And every other dictator in history: "What is good for me - is good for my country"

What a historical irony that a Jew would raise this argument.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

We hate our contemporary civilization so much that we positively rejoice every time there is an existential threat to the entirety of humanity. Things have gotten so unbearable that we fantasize deliriously about wiping the slate clean and starting afresh, rising from the ashes cleansed by an apocalyptic global calamity, like a pandemic.

Every decade or so, the media, in a desperate attempt to monetize increasingly more reluctant eyeballs, whips up a frenzy about the virus de jour: coronavirus is the latest serving. The flu kills every annual season about 5 times more than all these viruses have decimated combined over the past few decades - and this figure includes Ebola. Only HIV deserves real awe as a globetrotting killer.

And, yet, we panic. But our dread is mixed with breathless Millenarian anticipation for the eschatological end of times. We can't wait to get over with the whole mess we have made of our lives. The grim reaper seems the only way out of the conundrummed morass that we inhabit. We finally decided to go gentle into that night, to the embracing comfort of being nothingness.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What a cruel irony it is that I have developed Cold Therapy - the first ever effective treatment (cure, really) for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) - too late to benefit from it myself.

I am 59 years old, my health is failing. My mental illness had consumed my life - is still devouring it - as surely as the bush fires ravage homes in Australia, leaving only the ashes of Me behind.

WARNING

I will block anyone who gives me the feel good New Age crap about how it is never too late in life. Life has an expiry date beyond which it is all blood and tears and stools and wallowing in your own stench of decomposing physical and mental decrepitude. So back off with your American anodyne platitudes about how every age has its charms. Old age sucks 100%. We lie to ourselves about it in order to survive somehow in the face of our own vanishing dismemberment.

NPD is the slowest invisible cancer - but of the soul and mind. It is spiritual AIDS with nothing to abet it. It is all-pervasive, relentless, and merciless. It starts at age 3. It causes people around the narcissist to hurt and torment him purposefully and profusely as a way of getting back at him for his egregious abuse. It is Inferno and I have been its Dante since 1995. No Beatrice can help me, no god, no healer. I have been doomed by my own progenitor to a life of itinerant, profound, debilitating hurt, unlovable, shunned like a leper, feared and loathed and mocked in equal measures.

It is with impotent rage that I bequeath Cold Therapy to a world I care nothing for or about. Rage at the injustice of healing and aiding millions with my pioneering work since 1995 - except the only person who most deserved my love and my devotion and my succor: Sam.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

By idealizing his sources of secondary narcissistic supply ("intimate partners"), the narcissist actually idealizes himself. If his partner is unique and superior, so is he. Such mate selection is also proof positive of good judgment.

Devaluing the partner is, therefore, a narcissistic injury. The narcissist has to recant and renounce his previous assessment of his partner, thereby acknowledging his fallibility and lack of omniscience: two pillars of his grandiosity.

How does the narcissist reconcile these conflicting needs (to discard and to preserve his inflated False Self)? By shifting the blame, of course: it is his partner who has changed beyond recognition, or had abused his good heart by faking it, or is acting maliciously owing to some ulterior motives and a hidden agenda (she wants his money or has found a lover). The narcissist then reacts with rage and immediately embarks on the "replace" phase: finding a new lifelong adulator-servant-sex toy.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

How long will it take you to recover from a traumatic breakup or from infidelity by your cherished partner? And will you be able to remain friends afterwards or will you go no contact? Will you try again, give each other a second chance at relationship recovery?

Answer these six questions in the Heartbreak and Recovery Scale (HeRS):

1. Did what s/he do come as a shock to you - or was it predictable, the culmination of a visible process?

2. Did s/he humiliate you in the process, especially in public and in front of your peers?

3. Did you react with anger or even rage that just wouldn't go away?

4. Following the events, were you desperate and in the throes of castastophising ("I will never find someone to replace her") or negative automatic thoughts ("I always fail in my relationships")?

5. In the aftermath, did you experience profound sadness (dysphoria) and nothing gave you pleasure (anhedonia)?

6. Finally, in the wake of the dissolution of the bond, did you feel excruciating pain, overwhelming romantic jealousy, or pathological envy?

If you scored 2-3, it is improbable that you will ever be in touch again. A score of 4 prefaces a new phase of mere friendship or companionship between the two of you. A score of 5 or 6 leads to frenzied - though usually doomed - attempts to restore the relationship to its former romantic self.  

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

If she cheated on you once, she is likely to do it again (serial cheating). If he takes actions (not just talk) to triangulate with another person, he will probably end up double-timing with her or with someone else soon thereafter. If you fell victim to infidelity once, it will happen to you again and with multiple partners. Facts.

This is because adultery is the outcome of selecting for wrong mates repeatedly, mismanaging relationships similarly, and mishandling by the cheater of his or her inexorable dysregulated emotions and moods. Straying is a cry for help, a sign of debilitating distress, and the dead canary in the relationship's deepest mine shafts.

Pain aversion leads to self-deception. The injured party often has access to all the relevant information, the bulk of which is provided by the guilt-ridden and shamefaced fornicator. But denial and reframing set in to twist the facts into a palatable, non-injurious tale of innocence, innocuousness, and happenstance. Narcissistic defenses - such as invulnerability and grandiosity - kick in to mask the betrayal.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The narcissist finds it impossible to believe that people act for their own reasons unrelated to him: to satisfy pressing and unmet emotional needs, for example. It challenges his grandiosity to accept that he is not the Prime Mover of the universes of his "nearest and dearest". He interprets every utterance and every action as meant to manipulate or hurt him or as a reaction to something he had said or done.

Grandiosity is a cognitive deficit. It impairs the narcissist's reality test, ability to understand others, and, therefore, his self-efficacy. He is bound to reinterpret and reframe events, information, and people's conduct and choices in ways that flatter him and place him at the epicenter, for instance.

When he is confronted with the truth - that it was not all about him - he is devastated. He becomes enraged, vindictive, or avoidant.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This is also a part of my grandiosity:

My presence (my mind, my sex) is such a blessing and a gift that women should PAY with everything they have - just to have me around. They should expect nothing else from me but the little I am willing to bestow.

They should be eternally grateful for the opportunity to have met me at all - let alone shared my life and my bed. I am a god - and, like every divinity, I expect human sacrifice. They should welcome even my abuse as a token of my attention.

Other men work hard to earn sex, love, and female companionship. They maintain whatever relationships they have in various ways (providing attention, affording succor, gifts, having a good time together, pursuing common interests, drinks, travel, and lovemaking). Even a one night stand requires some investment of time and attentiveness.

I passively await women to be all over me as my effortless birthright. I grant them my time only as an adulated guru.
Women absolutely hate, loathe, and detest me for it: that I do not consider them worthy of any efforts or investment on my part. Their narcissistic injuries, rage, and humiliation are too much to bear.

So, they get back at me the only way they can: by teaming up with other men and by cheating on me ostentatiously. And, giving the slightest opportunity, by abusing and hurting me in the most shocking, cruel, and sadistic ways imaginable. Hell hath no fury like a woman who is taken for granted, as a chattel.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Richard Grannon once told me: "There is nothing you want more than intimacy (with a woman), but it is your kryptonite (the substance from his home planet that, upon contact, renders Superman weak and vulnerable)

The Kryptonite Model of Narcissism explains the pathology in terms of multiple push-pull, approach-avoidance repetition compulsions.

Consider my case (of course): I crave intimacy, but whenever a woman offers it, I reject & abuse her egregiously and so undermine any possibility for an intimate (as distinct from merely functional) long-term relationship. I push my women hard & repeatedly to find other men and cheat on me

I adore sex, just love everything about it. But, inexplicably, I go for periods of 5-15 years (!!!) of utter, unmitigated celibacy, not even flirting.

I value stability, certainty, & safety above all else, but my life hitherto - all 59 years - had been disorientingly chaotic & life-threateningly dangerous every step of the convoluted way. Last time I have held a job was in 1984.

I want to belong somewhere, to rest my truly wearied body. Yet, I haven't met or seen my mother, father, siblings (bar the youngest), any other member of my extended family, & any of my erstwhile friends & business partners in Israel since 1996, the last time I have been to my "homeland". I am an award-winning published author in Hebrew & yet haven't used this language for 23 years, until 2019

I have no roots, no affiliations, allegiances, or attachments to anyone or anywhere or anything

I demand to be respected for my work in economics, psychology, & physics. Yet, I refuse to grow up & face adult chores & responsibilities: I have no driving licence and no children. I have been a multimillionaire several times but insisted to live in rented premises (usually in an annex to my office). I bought my first home (apartment) only 10 years ago.

I pioneered the modern study of narcissism in 1995. Yet, I do not understand what makes me tick. I just know that I have manage to deplete & exasperate even myself. Every single dimension of my personality & existence is unadulterated Kryptonite.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Women initiate the majority of breakups and divorces. When men end relationships, they just walk away. Women tend to be more circumspect: they misbehave with other men, act passive-aggressively, and undermine intimacy in a variety of indirect ways.

To generalize, women tend to rupture the bond only in four cases:

1. Extreme abuse and rejection by the intimate partner

2. Chaotic dysfunction of the dyad leading to unfavorable and inefficacious outcomes;

3. The partner's clinging, abandonment/separation anxiety, and demands for suspension of the woman's personal autonomy within the relationship

4. Some women are terrified of intimacy, are pain averse, and commitmentphobes. When the partner demands a dedicated joint future with increasing closeness, they recoil in horror and act out, sabotaging the budding togetherness.

Dysregulated emotions and approach-avoidance repetition compulsions are prevalent among women traumatized by previous liaisons or with mental health disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder or mood disorders.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In the film "The Irishman" (and in history), Jimmy Hoffa, the powerful boss of the Teamsters Union, disrespected, rebuffed, and challenged on multiple issues and occasions, some of the most lethal figures in the mob.

He must have known it would cost him his life. Why did he make this suicidal choice?

Well, to start with, better dead than a nobody. Just out of a humiliating stint in prison, with his erstwhile world in shambles, his misbehavior buttressed his compensatory grandiose omnipotence (I am untouchable and they are in my debt). A matter of honor and self- respect, as he would have put it.

Such defiance is one of the hallmarks of psychopathy and it subsumes the thrill inherent in life-threatening, adrenaline junkie risk-taking. The drama of it all.

But what about activists who risk their freedom and sometimes lives in authoritarian regimes? Whistleblowers like Assange and Snowden? They are rebellious. But are they in effect sublimated defiant psychopaths who despise rules, institutions, and the authorities? I believe so: they are examples of how even narcissism and anti-social tendencies can be harnessed to good use.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Casual sex with strangers (one night stands, or stranger sex) sometimes devolves into extreme humiliation and even outright infliction of pain. These outlier experiences could fulfill either of several psychological functions:

1. Experimenting with novelty without the risk of being judged and without caring about the sex partner's opinion. The absence of long-term consequences and future reminders (it is, after all, a one time encounter) encourage sexual daring and openness and result in trying out kink and other forms of "deviant or perverted" sex.

2. (Applies to women only) By picking an inferior or lowlife partner and then allowing him to use her body with no constraining rules or boundaries, women self-trash, self-punish, self depreciate, self destruct, and uphold their self-perception as a "bad, unworthy, dumb, defiled slut". Where there is a rejecting and abusive intimate partner in the picture, it is also a way to "devalue his property" by rendering herself a "whore"

3. Restoring one's self-esteem via the other's out of control, bestial desire: the more extreme the sex acts, the more carnally irresistible the violated or raped or humiliated party feels.

4. Sex with unknown and, therefore, potentially dangerous partners is - oddly! - palliative: the fight, freeze, fawn, or fight response required to survive the night distracts from and ameliorates overwhelming and dysregulated negative emotions, such as depression, disappointment, and anger.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

TITS are the elite commando special ops unit of abusers: Too Insane and Terrifying to Stalk.

Even erotomaniacs who fall in demented and all-consuming love with TITSers, studiously avoid these abusive fighters once they come to realize how inhumanly psychopathic they are. TITSers scare everyone away sooner or later, even the most hopeless, idealizing, and devoted codependents: remaining in their ambit is life-threateningly agonizing and toxic.

A true blue TITSer sports these traits and behaviors:

To the TITSer, everyone is an object to be exploited, used, and unceremoniously discarded once no longer useful. They are not concerned with the object's whereabouts, life, emotions, thoughts, or wellbeing when it is no longer serviceable.

TITSers invest only a minimal amount of scarce resources - attention, time, sex, money - in others and only in order to maintain their functionality.

TITSers are goal-focused and any abuse or rejection they mete out are instrumental in realizing their aims. They are never gratuitously sadistic.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Does he accuse you of cheating on him all the time? There could be three reasons for his abuse: two of them malignant and one benign.

1. He may be projecting. Actually, he is the one who is cheating or considering to cheat. He assumes that you are in the throes of the same state of mind as he is.

2. He wants to legitimize his adultery or two-timing. If you are cheating - why can't he? And, if you started it, he still maintains the high moral ground, regardless of his peccadillos.

3. He wants to initiate a dialog on opening up the relationship and granting both of you the freedom to be with others, sexually. He just doesn't know how to do it, he feels awkward, he is afraid to hurt you - so he immaturely aggresses.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

People with personality disorders are easily suggestible and so are post-traumatized victims of abuse.

This is because both groups maintain an external locus of control (believe that their lives are largely determined by outside influences and persons)

In an attempt to overturn these alleged mind control and brainwashing, members of both groups often resort to defiant counterdependence: doing the polar opposite of what had been expected of them hitherto, turning from compliance and conformity to rebelliousness, recklessness, and antisocial acts.

Mirror conversion - is when survivors of CPTSD in intimate relationships adopt behaviors which are diametrically opposed to their habitual conduct and fly in the face of their character and what they thought they had known about themselves.

The most common example among women is a shift from sexual faithfulness to the abusive partner grounded in conservative values and mores - to promiscuous, ostentatious, and "sluttish" infidelity, often coupled with substance abuse and other self-destructive acts. Other examples: from empathic to psychopathic and from deep emotional bonding to flat attachment (no connection to any one specific partner and changing partners fast and often).

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The narcissist is a nonentity. There is no one home, just an empty (though inviting) hall of mirrors, reflection upon reflection built to amplify, distort, and focus. The narcissist is merely a carnival attraction.

But this nonexistence is the narcissist's fount of strength: his intimate partners enter his hall of mirrors and fall in love with their own reflections. For many of them, it is the first experience of self-love.

Loving oneself is highly addictive and the narcissist leverages the access to his hall of mirrors - threatens to withhold it - in order to blackmail his partner and manipulate her to do his bidding.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Could God have failed to exist (especially considering His omnipotence)? Could He have been a contingent being rather than a necessary one? Would the World have existed without Him and, more importantly, would it have existed in the same way? For instance: would it have allowed for the existence of human beings?

To say that God is a necessary being means to accept that He exists (with His attributes intact) in every possible world. It is not enough to say that He exists only in our world: this kind of claim will render Him contingent (present in some worlds - possibly in none! - and absent in others)

Does God depend for His existence on other beings, entities, quantities, properties, or on the World as a whole? If He is a dependent entity, is He also a derivative one? If He is dependent and derivative, in which sense is He necessary?

Read the answers here: https://samvak.tripod.com/sciencereligion2.html

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Talks on Psychiatry and Mental Health, San Antonio, August 2020.

I am a member of the Organizing Committees of dozens of international conferences on mental health, neurology, brain studies, psychology, and psychiatry:

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The narcissist has no ego, that Freudian postulated psychological construct that mediates between inner drives and impulses and reality.

Instead, he outsources ego functions: he uses narcissistic supply (attention) from others to regulate critical elements in his inner environment (like his sense of self-worth)

Where there is an ego in healthy people, the narcissist has a monstrous malignant False Self that mediates between him and the world. The False Self is grandiose and godlike and subsumes the functions that Freud assigned to the superego ("conscience" as the outcome of introjection, socialization, and acculturation)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I am the one who taught the world in 1995 that narcissism is untreatable, that no amount of insight can help the narcissist, that narcissists cannot love, attach, or bond in any normal sense of these words, and that the only truly effective coping strategy when you have found yourself marooned with a narcissist is no contact. I invented the very language used today to communicate on this topic, including "narcissistic abuse" and "no contact"

But I am very lonely in my solipsistic, delusional, and sad universe. I crave to be loved and to experience intimacy in all its forms.

So, I harnessed my formidable intellect - all 190 IQ points of it - to write my user's manual. I had hoped to find salvation in self-awareness. I should have trusted my own warning (dated 1997) that this would be a futile effort https://samvak.tripod.com/2.html

I then embarked on a Herculean attempt to invent a new treatment modality for narcissistic disorders of the self, Cold Therapy. I succeeded, but way too late for me: the first practitioners of this technique will be certified only this year. I am 59 years old and my health is failing.

And, in the meantime, I kept traumatizing one woman after another as they had maintained the futile endeavour to transform and heal me with their love, dedication, and commitment. Many women made numerous personal sacrifices just to be with me. I objectified, exploited, and then abused them.

The closer they got to the howling void that is me, the more they panicked: the horror was so great that many of them ended up cheating on me egregiously and ostentatiously just to break the shared nightmarish surrealistic psychotic state of our togetherness, the addictive spell that I have cast on them. Only one of them kept in touch after this harrowing experience. All the others vanished from my life without a trace, like hostages fleeing a death cult.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

My relationship algorithm is very simple

1. I acquire and addict the woman to my presence by offering her my scintillating mind, a fount of knowledge, and inventive kinky sex.

2. I alternate between displays of empathy, succor, and loyalty and savage, soul-devastating abuse (intermittent reinforcement)

3. If the woman becomes adulating, submissive, and obedient, I continue to abuse her with impunity - but also make her my most intimate life partner and trusted confidante

3. If the woman becomes defiant, abusive, demanding, and devaluing, I amplify and vary the modes of abuse to include all forms of rejection and indifference.

4. A defiant, immature, narcissistic, or psychopathic woman would tend to triangulate at this stage: she would misbehave with other men or threaten to do so or choose another man to fulfill some of her needs, emotional and/or physical.

Upon the first hint of triangulation, I push the woman aggressively and relentlessly to develop a full-fledged relationship with the other guy, for one night or for one year, up to her.

5. Her betrayal of me and cheating on me thus accomplished invariably, I abandon the woman and move on to seek an alternative.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sam Vaknin talks to Sahar el-Nadi (@saharelnadi). Her YouTube channel is the leading source of info about narcissism in Arabic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5UAFGbiT0o

It is also available on my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The true pandemic is not the latest variant of Coronavirus: it is sexually transmitted diseases and infections (STD/STI). If you are having sex with anyone above the age of 15, there is a whopping 90% chance that she or he harbors one of the ten major STDs/STIs.

Contrary to a deluge of misinformation online, all these afflictions are transmitted by kissing and oral sex. Even making out, necking, or petting may be enough.

Bookmark this post and give the link to friends, family members and acquaintances. It is important that we spread the word!

Never ever have sex with anyone - even your own spouse - until they get tested and present you with a clean bill of health for at least these:

BLOOD TESTS

Hepatitis A, B, and C

Herpes (HCV) 1 and 2 both igG and igM

Cytomegalovirus (CMV)

Human Immunodeficiency virus (HIV) 1 and 2

Syphilis

Tuberculosis (PCR or IGRA)

SWABS or URINE

Chlamydia trachomatis

Mycoplasma hominis

Trichomonas vaginalis

Neisseria gonorrhoea

Human Papilloma virus (HPV)

Gardnerella

Ureaplasma

Urine microscopy and culture and vaginal swab culture.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

International Conference on Clinical Psychology and Neuroscience to be held in September 17-18, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium.

I am a member of the Organizing Committees of dozens of international conferences on mental health, neurology, brain studies, psychology, and psychiatry

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

We are living in an age of total politics, akin to total war: the entire population is involved via vast networks of corrupt and venal patronage

Switzerland is the only largely apolitical exception: a prosperous, well-governed, Athenian haven in a world of sleazy, bigotted, ignorant, parvenu and fatuous demagogues, more concerned solely with entertaining the brainless masses and with ruthless self-enrichment and self-preservation

Democracy is not the rule of the people. Democracy is government by periodically vetted representatives of the people. Democracy is not tantamount to a continuous expression of the popular will as it pertains to a range of issues. Functioning and fair democracy is representative and not participatory. Participatory "people power" is mob rule (ochlocracy), not democracy.

Alas, while participatory democracy often leads to the elevation to power of demagogues and dictators, representative democracy invariably mutates into oligarchy and plutocracy. It takes a lot of money (“campaign finance”) to get elected and this fact of political survival forces politicians, up for sempiternal re-election, to collude with the rich in a venal quid-pro-quo.

Granted, "people power" is often required in order to establish democracy where it is unprecedented. Revolutions - velvet, rose, and orange - recently introduced democracy in Eastern Europe, for instance. People power - mass street demonstrations - toppled obnoxious dictatorships from Iran to the Philippines and from Peru to Indonesia.

But once the institutions of democracy are in place and more or less functional, the people can and must rest. They should let their chosen delegates do the job they were elected to do. And they must hold their emissaries responsible and accountable in fair and free ballots once every two or four or five years.

Democracy and the rule of law are bulwarks against "the tyranny of the mighty (the privileged elites)". But, they should not yield a "dictatorship of the weak".

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Both having free choice and maintaining meaningful relationships provoke angst (anxiety or dread) in broken, damaged, traumatized, or mentally ill people.

This existential crisis is further exacerbated to unbearable and intolerable levels by a rejecting and abusive partner. The resulting pain leads to decompensation and to reckless, self-destructive and self-trashing acting out. Such people, often on sudden impulse, then team up with rogue, dangerous, psychopathic, and predatory counterparties as instruments of personal doom and self-mutilation for one night or longer.

Egregious misbehavior is irresistible in such circumstances because it fulfills multiple critical psychological roles and needs. Apart from self-debasement and self-punishment, it also provides ersatz empathic intimacy from the new partner and serves as a signalling function: a cry for help, a beacon of distress, intended to elicit a reaction - any reaction! - from the incalcitrant significant other.

Post-traumatized people have zero tolerance for uncertainty. The intimate partner's approach-avoidance and intermittent reinforcement (abuse-love bombing-grooming-hoovering) drive them up the insanity wall.

Misbehaving badly in any way (including ostentatious cheating) is a way of forcing the partner's hand: wake up, forgive me, and love me from now on - or dump me and let me go. It is brinkmanship at its most acute and actually a rational strategy.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Am I rude, abrasive, and impatient? You bet. But I am never gratuitously abusive.

My Instagram is a retard-free zone. Ask a truly stupid question and expect to be banned or at the very least called out on your glaring lack of intelligence. I have zero tolerance for idiots. Example of a DM I got recently: "When you say me and I in your text - are you referring to yourself?" Dummkopf blocked.

Another thing: do your research before you comment or DM me. I don't spoonfeed. There is no excuse - except raging indolence - to not first google. I hate lazy people with a passion, so don't try me.

Finally, you are here to learn - not to show off. I am not interested in what you "think" or "believe". If you are not academically qualified - shut up and be humble. Share the FACTS about your life experience. Share information from reliable, peer reviewed, vetted sources. No conspiracy theories and no inane feel good new wave nonsense.

Generally, you would do well to confine yourself to reading my posts. This is not a community I am running here and you are not now and never will be my pal. Don't get too cosy or familiar with me: we are not on a first name basis and I don't give a fig about you or your life unless you pay me to do so.

You are my follower - so follow me respectfully and be grateful that I am sharing free of charge what I spent decades studying.

And if you didn't get this message or disagree with it - do both of us a favor and unfollow me post-haste.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There are 4 variants of the pandemic of emotional or physical cheating: 1. Ostentatious-malicious (intended to triangulate or hurt the cheater's intimate partner); 2. Deceptive (most common); 3. Functional (pressure valve to alleviate stress, palliate, or meet needs, usually in a "don't ask, don't tell" permissive agreement with the partner); and 4. Open-contractual (as in open relationship or marriage)

Recent studies show that half of all cheaters are happy in their marriages and love their partners. The most common reason for straying given by women was: inequality of burden-sharing (not falling out of love, unmet needs, or boredom – but drudgery!). Two-timing had become a psychopathic (antisocial) impulsive mode of protest and subversion of traditional gender roles. It levels the playing field, fostering unigender and gender vertigo.

Themselves children of divorce, young people are disinclined to separate. Why bother? The next intimate partner is bound to be as bad (or as good) as the current one. Cheating is a narcissistic plan B: have the marital cake and eat the forbidden fruit too. Deception, dysempathy, disintimacy, and blind egotism are now widely perceived as positive and self-efficacious adaptations with beneficial outcomes.

Over the past 300 years, we have revamped our behaviors and values, doubled our life expectancy (which rendered monogamy and a partnership for life impractical), and revolutionized our communications and transportation technologies. Our millennia-old institutions, though, have barely changed to accommodate these tectonic shifts. Anomie, atomization, alienation, irrationality, rampant mental illness, multiple dysfunctionality, mob rule, and rabid narcissism are the costs of this failure to reform.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

To obtain narcissistic supply (attention, sex, power, money), the narcissist has to act, pretend, fake, supplicate, beg, and grovel. He has to groom and motivate potential sources - people he considers immeasurably inferior to him - to part with time and other resources in order provide an uninterrupted flow of fuel to the furnace of his False Self grandiosity.

Such ineluctable and constant kowtowing and dependency are humiliating and amount to a massive, suppurating narcissistic injury. The narcissist feels entitled and firmly considers himself as worthy of special concessionary treatment incommensurate with his real-life circumstances and regardless of any investment or effort he opts to not make.

The pent up resentment and rage he feels at the structural, institutional, lopsided, and cosmic injustice of it all are the main reasons for the narcissist's virulent and rabid abuse. By egregiously mistreating his sources, the narcissist restores a semblance of balance and buttresses his shattered fantastic sense of superiority.

Another function of narcissistic abuse is - counterintuitively - assist in idealizing the intimate partner (and thus both ameliorating the narcissistic wound and enhancing the narcissist's grandiosity, being the mate of someone so special): if the partner survives the purgatory, it proves her mettle and resiliency as well has her dedicated commitment and faithfulness. It renders her unique and inordinately strong, worthy of the narcissist's godlike attributes.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

February 17. Budapest, Hungary. Sam Vaknin lecture: How to Manipulate the Narcissist and Still Survive To Tell About It.

Narcissists and psychopath are better equipped to deal with modern life. The narcissist is adept at manipulating symbols and narratives (starting with his own confabulated False Self). Our technologies encourage poor impulse control.

In a society of spectacle, appearances and simulations are the only forms of reality: TV stars become presidents (from the USA to Ukraine). "Fake it till you make it" became "To fake it IS to make it". Vacuous celebrities are famous for being famous.

Fawning and media hungry academics talk about "productive narcissists" and "high-functioning psychopaths". Narcissists are happy go lucky, they expound and recommend that parents teach their children to be more narcissistic.

What used to be an extreme and obnoxious pathology has now become the de rigeur bon ton, a positive adaptation, and the organizing principle that infuses everything with meaning: from politics to business to dating and sex.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The narcopath bestows his resources (attention, time, money, help, succor, sex) not because of WHO the recipient is but because of WHAT the recipient can provide him with in return for his largesse.

Even acts of charity and altruism are transactional and calculated to maximize returns of one kind (public admiration) or another (control). In return for any investment, however minimal, the narcopath expects at least 2 of the 3Ss: Supply, Sex, Services (the partner as a homemaker, personal assistant, business promoter, or protector). True attachment is, therefore, utterly excluded. Healthy love is person-oriented, not goal-focused; it is a stable emotion, not a fickle one; and it is independent on benefits obtained or aims attained.

The narcopath invests emotionally (cathects) in a succession of "intimate" partners who he grooms: idealizes, devalues, discards, and replaces them - and then, sometimes reidealizes and reacquires them (hoovering). This is the ever itinerant "cathexis lens": WHAT's (not WHO's) in it for me?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A FAILURE is someone who never attains success: he tries hard repeatedly and invariably misses the mark, for a variety of reasons, some of which are beyond his control.

A LOSER is someone who fails to translate his serial successes into long-lasting beneficial outcomes. He fails to leverage accomplishments and triumphs into permanent fixtures in real life. He is not self-efficacious.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Grandiosity is a cognitive deficit founded on a psychological defense mechanism (fantasy). It hopelessly impairs the narcissist's reality test, rendering him delusional and, clinically, mildly psychotic (he confuses inner objects with external ones)

The narcissist is steadfastly and counterfactually convinced that his intimate partner will never let him go because he is such a unique treasure. She will cling to him relentlessly and forever, no matter how diligently he tries to discard her and regardless of how useless and dysfunctional she had become.

So, how to get rid of her if she stops providing 2 out of the 3Ss (supply, sex, services)? By pushing her to cheat on him or otherwise resort to other men. And by drilling into her mind that her unfaithfulness is both preordained and ineluctable - brainwashing and hypnotizing her into the ego-dystonic act. The narcissist often introduces his partner to men and actively pushes her to seek their company and bed them.

The narcissist says to himself, smugly: "Surely, after such a cataclysmic event (egregious misbehavior with another man), she will accept that I have no other choice but to dump her! Plus, she will be so shamefaced and guilt-ridden that she will not dare show her face again. I may continue to keep her around as a service provider or a sexless acolyte but now that she had strayed, I am morally justified to immediately embark on scouting for a full-fledged 3S substitute to cater to my needs"

So, from the inception of every new relationship, the narcissist informs his partner that if she as much as shows interest in another man or flirts with him - let alone do more - he will call off the relationship. The aim of this advance notice is not healthy boundary setting: the narcissist is letting his partner know that there is only one surefire way to extricate herself decisively from his surrealistic world and that is by misbehaving with another man. As his rejection and abuse of his mate proliferate exponentially, he fervently hopes she remembers the way out, her only exit - as well as his.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Only collapsed narcissists, who have hit rock bottom, deign to attend therapy. Even then, they make it impossible to form a therapeutic alliance because they compete with the therapist rather than be guided by him or her.

The narcissist in therapy https://samvak.tripod.com/faq77.html

Watch the full video, titled "Collapsed Narcissist in Therapy" on my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The narcissist is fully aware that he is being gratuitously, cruelly, and, sometimes, sadistically abusive. He fully expects his intimate partner to retaliate: cheat on him, abandon him, or otherwise misbehave. This anticipatory loss-related anxiety is a form of catastrophizing.

To avoid the debilitating hurt involved in being abandoned or cheated on (hurt aversion), the narcissist emotionally detaches from his partner preemptively: he becomes indifferent, tolerant of her misconduct, oblivious, preoccupied (workaholism), and absent.

The narcissist's partner is usually stunned by this sudden act of apathetic vanishing. She escalates her reckless and disrespectful escapades in a desperate attempt to elicit a reaction - any reaction! - from her distant, cold, uncaring, and reluctant narcissist. Triangulation and conspicuous cheating are common strategies. Of course, this just serves to confirm the narcissist's prognostications and worldview: all women are sluts.

The narcissist's anticipation and grandiose omniscience thus vindicated, the pain of having been abused and cheated on by his partner is mitigated and ameliorated, rendered manageable and transient. He feels justified and legitimized now to devalue his erstwhile wayward partner, discard her, and embark on finding her replacement and grooming his next source of secondary supply.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

People with an external locus of control have fuzzy boundaries: they outsource their boundaries, they look to others to determine for them which rules of conduct they should adopt and observe and what constitutes unacceptable misconduct. A man with crisp boundaries would say to himself: "I won't sleep with another woman because I have a girlfriend". A fuzzy-boundaried man would exclaim: "I will sleep with another woman and if my girlfriend objects to it, I won't do it again." Fuzzy boundaries are also ways to gauge the partner's emotional involvement, commitment, and caring.

People with fuzzy boundaries have low tolerance for uncertainty and their predicament is exacerbated when their partner is approach-avoidant or has a dysfunctional attachment style. Their wellbeing depends on the relationship being close-ended (with clear rules), not open-ended (involving guesswork and constant pushing of the envelope of permitted and acceptable behavior)

Narcissists prefer open-ended permissive liaisons because in such dyads their retaliatory or preemptive abusive misconduct is legitimized and justified. The intimate partner's own egregious transgressions are "agreed on" and, thus, rendered less hurtful. Disattachment (flat attachment) is the narcissist's way of managing a relationship with a fractious and defiant mate whose inner landscape is nightmarish and disorganized.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Cathexis Kill Switch is a component of the Cathexis Lens (see an earlier post): to be able to efficaciously redirect his emotional investment (cathexis) from one object ("partner") to the next (reposition the lens), the narcissist first has to turn off all emotions related to the now discarded target.

The Kill Switch feels startlingly real, almost like a physiological event. With breathtaking abruptness, all "love" and interest are gone, all "emotions" evaporate: from 100% to 0 in a millisecond. Literally.

His cathexis energy thus released and at his disposal, the narcissist is free to apply it to grooming and idealizing his next prey (love-bombing).

My Kill Switch is automatically activated when my woman misbehaves with another man in ways that are normally reserved to a couple: spending time alone with him in a hotel room or apartment, intimate physical contact of any kind (including slow dancing), aggressive flirting, or sharing quality time together repeatedly. At that moment, she ceases to be my partner and becomes his.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Men choose a casual sexual partner based on one of three parameters (opportunity, availability, visual cues). Women go through a whopping 39 criteria before they agree to copulate.

This is why women may end up having one night stands even with ugly junkie bum losers: they "saw something in him" (read: he passed some of the 39 tests). Women's sexuality is plastic: a woman will have sex with a man she pities or out of gratitude or because he is intelligent, funny, kind, interesting, attentive, finds her irresistible, pleasant to be around ... the list is 39 items long.

Similarly, the mating (mate selection) algorithm is different between men and women. Men first feel carnally attracted and are then driven to act on their lust. Women's bodies react exactly as men's do: blood flows to all the right places. But they consciously experience arousal only AFTER they have decided to sleep with the man (in other words: after he had been vetted by passing some of the 39 exams)

Different evolutionary paths account for this disparateness: Nature encourages men to be promiscuous and women to think twice. Reproductive strategies reflect the anticipated investment of scarce resources: even in post-modern societies, women are the ones who get stuck with the bill: pregnancy and childrearing.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Paradigm shifts in science and revolutionary leaps in technology are frequently coterminous with political and military upheavals. The dust usually requires three centuries to settle. Such seismic waves and tectonic shifts occurred between the 12th and 14th centuries AD, again starting with the 15th and ending in the 17th century AD, and, most recently, commencing in the 19th century and still very much unfolding.

These quakes portend the emergence of new organizing principles and novel threats. Power shifts from one set of players and agents to another. And the scope and impact of the cataclysm increases until it peaks with the last vestiges of the cycle.

Thus, in the current round (19th-21st centuries AD), polities shifted from Empires to Nation-states and economies from colonialism-mercantilism to capitalism: a new order founded on new systems and principles. Industrialized warfare and networked terrorism emerged as the latest threats. Ochlocracies and democracies supplanted the rule of various elites and crowds of laymen lay siege to the hitherto unchallenged superiority and leadership of experts. Finally, starting in the late 19th century, globalization replaced localization everywhere.

Why this confluence of scientific-technological phase transitions and political-military tumults?

There are three possible explanations:

https://samvak.tripod.com/ghost.html

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The communication of narcissists is either inward-facing (they verbalize their inner dialogs, conversing aloud with themselves with the audience as a mere foil to their stream of consciousness) - or outward-facing (they talk in order to impress their interlocutors, or to evade and obfuscate)

Pay attention to several warning signs:

1. The use of indefinite pronouns and modifiers (like "this" or "someone") without specifying or clarifying any of the other parts of speech, leaving the listener guessing as to what occurred to whom, when, where, and why.

2. If the narcissist is addressing an audience or you demand the truth and accountability from him, you can safely assume exaggeration, confabulation, reframing, and outright lying on his part. This is done partly also to cover up the narcissist's pervasive dissociation.

3. When the narcissist expostulates on his motivation for doing things, or when he recounts what had happened, he is either wrong, reframing to justify his misbehavior or to restore ego-syntony, or just lying out of self-interest. He tries to sell you on "what makes sense" rather than on the truth. If you keep reiterating the question, he often contradicts himself and comes up with conflicting versions of the same events.

Never trust what the narcissist says. Do not let his gaslighting undermine your trust in your senses, judgment, and common sense. Make sure that only what you see is what you get. Observe the behaviors and reactions of the narcissist and everyone around him for clues as to what had really transpired. Don't let the narcissist club you on the head and don't wake up in his Platonic cave of shadows of an alternative reality.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The passive-aggressive (negativistic or covert) psychopath lacks key features of the classic variant: she maintains impulse control and is never violent.

The covert psychopath plans ahead her egregious, spiteful, raging, vindictive, self-serving, emotionally reregulating, palliative, or restorative antisocial acts. Her behavioral choices are intended to primarily cater to her emotional needs and regulate her self-esteem and self-worth. By the by, as a secondary bonus, she metes out justice as she sees it. Her conduct is selected, premeditated, organized, planned, and well executed. She is self-efficacious.

The stealth of the covert psychopath is such that when she does act, it comes as a shocking bolt out of the blue, a paralyzing and highly traumatic lightning strike, affecting everyone involved. This gives the indelible but utterly erroneous impression of impulsivity where impulse control is actually intact.

The covert psychopath verbally externalizes or sublimates aggression, but is very rarely violent or criminal. She hurts people and humiliates them with malice aforethought, but mostly she is concerned with her selfish cravings. deficiencies, and desires. To her, people are a nuisance and a collateral damage and they are used, exploited, abused, violated, and - their utility over - discarded like so much trash on the way to self-gratification.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Can you decide to not have cancer? Or tuberculosis? Or AIDS? Or even Bipolar Disorder? Of course not. Once you have contracted these conditions, you need intervention of one kind (medication) or another (surgery) to suppress or heal them.

But substance abusers can decide to stop the consumption of alcohol or drugs. And then they abstain for years at a time. Like everything else we do in life - eating, sex, binge watching of TV series - drinking and resorting to illicit drugs affect the body. But not everything that affects the body is a disease in the strict medical sense.

So, why are we being misinformed that alcoholism and other addictions are illnesses when they are manifestly nothing of the kind? Three reasons:

1. Money. Once doctors medicalize a behavior, they begin to collect big time reimbursements from insurance companies. In 63 years, the bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which lists all the mental health diagnoses, has ballooned from 100 pages - to a 1000 pages.

2. Feel good narcissism: my egregious, hurtful, traumatizing misconduct is not my fault: I am sick, poor me, little I can do about it, what a relief!

3. The general tendency to pathologize everything: habits, personality traits, choices, relationships, behavior patterns, social norms, interactions, technology, you name it.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I am defending psychoanalysis in the prestigious conference The Talks on Psychiatry and Mental Health, San Antonio, August 2020.

I am a member of the Organizing Committees of dozens of international conferences on mental health, neurology, brain studies, psychology, and psychiatry
http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mentally ill people cannot be reasoned with or analyzed with any rationality. This is because they are capable of harboring opposing, dissonant, and contradictory cognitions and emotions at the same time (paradoxical thinking and hyperflexibility). Bateson called it the "double bind" and Laing dubbed it the "incompatible knot". Their speech acts and decisions need to be deconstructed, not merely observed.

From the outside, persons with psychiatric or psychological problems appear to be impulsive, erratic, labile, unpredictable, antisocial, dysempathic, dangerous, heartless, mendacious, and egotistical. But the truth is that they are simply meandering along the conflicting paths of their psyche.

This fragmentation of the alienated self and cathecting of (emotionally investing in) internal rather than external objects may have to do with what Giddens called ontological insecurity.

Even in patients with milder syndromes, such as personality disorders, there is a glaring absence of order, continuity, cohesive identity, meaning, emotional stability, reduced anxiety, and consistent positivity (or negativity - the consistency matters, not the valence). Such epic fracturing impedes the evolution of a theory of mind, a worldlife and worldview, and of logic itself.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Grandiosity is a cognitive deficit. Coupled with a lack of emotional empathy, it results in a state of mind akin to an extreme autism disorder. Like autistic people, narcissists misread cues and people.

They may misinterpret being pitied with being loved or being feared or being hated with being popular. When people are repelled by his sordid sexual misconduct, the narcissist believes that they had found him irresistible.

The narcissist is gullible and when flattered and then exploited, he thinks that he is being adulated. He pays attention to what people say, not to what they do (he mislabels actions and trusts words blindly, even when in a paranoid mode). The narcissist filters information via a fantastic prism of self-inflation. Anything that contravenes or challenges his self-perception is either reframed or trashed.

On the rare occasion that the unvarnished truth seeps in, the narcissist reacts with heartbreak: shock, humiliation, anger, desperation, sadness, and pain. Anxious and disoriented he labors furiously to restore homeostasis, if not the compleat status quo ante.

In the wake of such awakening, the narcissist feels that he can no longer trust his grasp of reality and his judgment. And he is right, of course: he can't - and shouldn't. He is delusional. Unlike psychotics, he does not externalize internal objects - but he internalizes external ones which helps hopelessly blend the boundaries between his convoluted inner morass and the world and people out there.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Women willingly enter relationships with - or give their bodies to - evident, clearly visible male scum only because these lowlifes had never ADMITTED publicly to being narcissists, or owned up to it. On the contrary: they make themselves out to be the victims and women are all over them, offering maternal healing and love and sex.

I am being punished because of my HONESTY: I had informed women of WHO and WHAT I am. They know that they may be able to hurt me - but they have no power over me: they have nothing I either need or want. My total aloofness, self-sufficiency, and independence drives women nuts. It threatens and infuriates them.

So, women - documentarists, "friends", collaborators, wannabe lovers - are terrified of me, rage at me, and hate my guts just because they KNOW WHO I AM. And who told them who I am? I DID!

Women see that the men they started dating or fucking are sick and dangerous trash but they keep hoping that they may be wrong about these men. Or they keep deluding themselves that they will control, manipulate, co-opt, "fix" and "heal" these bad boys. They keep convincing themselves that these men are safe, will damage only others. Malignant optimism.

But in my case, women cannot lie to themselves and deceive themselves because I have told them repeatedly that I am a monster who can never be tamed or healed. They know that I will be with them only as long as they function and are useful to me. Not a second longer. I invest in women only a fraction of what I can extract from them. Not an ounce more. Ever. Never. So they set out to annihilate me, often by "in your face" cheating with the aforementioned scum.

Many men are my facsimile, my soulmates. But these men pretend to be empathic, loving, supportive, and caring. And women lap it up, lock, stock, and barrel, to mix my metaphors. It is repulsive to behold.

Lesson: Men! Never out yourselves. Women crave fantasy and deceit. So, tell them what they want to hear, pretend profusely, and they will become your codependent slaves or your one night stand sluts or worse. It works every time. The opposite strategy - of being truthful about who you are - sucks. Male authenticity only renders women rabid, virulent and sadistic enemies.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Greek myths gave us the word Narcissism as well as the very concept of malignant self love (a phrase that I coined in 1999). The Greek distinguished between various types of love and self-love.

Philautia was the love of oneself which is a prerequisite for loving others: "All friendly feelings for others are an extension of man's feeling for himself", said Aristotle.

Philia is the love between friends (more like affection), usually fighting men, the ancient equivalent of today's bromance.

Storge is love for family members.

Eros is love coupled with enduring lust. Not flirtatious infatuation or a crush (especially among the young), which the Greeks called ludus.

Agape is love that leads to action and involves courage, sacrifice, strength.

Narcissism vs. self-love: https://samvak.tripod.com/faq23.html

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Heterosexual Men with sex and gender identities which are full-fledged and fully developed react holistically to the totality of a member of the opposite sex: her bodily attributes to start with, but also her intelligence, sense of humor, vibe, company, life experience, traits, personality, accomplishments and conversation. They are irresistibly attracted to the entire offering: the sex, of course - but the rest as well.

Narcissists and psychopaths effectively fake such immersion in their targets. They emulate the behaviors of the healthy male. They are very convincing and misleading thespians, giving the impression that they are truly "into the woman". But really, in the recesses of their cesspooled and diseased minds, narcopaths abstract a single aspect or dimension of the prey on which they focus. They are goal-oriented and women are just instruments, means to an end (narcissistic supply, sex, money, contacts, and so on). Narcissists and psychopaths reduce other people - women included - to assemblages of functions and transact with them: I will give you my attention, time, and faux affection and you will give me sex, for example.

This one dimensionality of the interaction is at the core of the discard part of the cycle (idealize-devalue-discard-replace): once and if the woman has nothing to offer (for example: she is unattractive or no longer available for sex), the narcissist and psychopath has no further use for her. It is wasteful to invest scarce resources with no return on the investment. The woman's other assets and aspects are irrelevant: they do nothing to further the narcopaths's agenda or to secure his aims.

Real, fully evolved men love and adore women and revel in female company. Narcissists and psychopaths love and adore what women can give to them and revel in female absence: apart from her assigned roles, they consider the woman to be a contemptible underdeveloped nuisance, sometimes even a hate object.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"It was meaningless sex, she (or he) meant nothing to me!" is the stock response of cheating men (and, increasingly, women). I always found this odd reassurance odiously offensive. It only makes matters worse and hurts even more.

To start with it is never true: there is no such animal as "meaningless" sex. Sex - even the casual sort with a virtual stranger - always has some intimate and emotional psychosexual background. There is mutual affection exchanged, gratitude expressed, self-esteem buttressed, pity or protectiveness felt, attraction articulated, smells and tastes enjoyed, support given, exuberance, possessiveness, and, often, hopes and expectations aroused.

But, far more importantly: if he or she really meant nothing to you and the sex was that irrelevant - why risk devastating your significant other for no value? Surely, the happiness and wellbeing of your intimate life partner matter more than an orgasm with a nonentity? Or do they?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lecture in Budapest: "How to Manipulate the Narcissist and Live to Tell about It"

Media kit and press room http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

Cold Therapy 5-days seminar starts in Budapest, Hungary.

Learn about Cold Therapy http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/faq77.html
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Women have been called "The Fairer Sex" for good reason: their beauty inspired and motivated, soothed and aroused, and made the world both a more bearable and hopeful place.

By preserving this pulchritude and enhancing it, a woman cherishes her feminine essence and buttresses her wellbeing: the external and the internal are inextricably intertwined in our gender.

We should all - men and women - seek to maintain and improve this temple, the body: it is a marvel of creation, a sacred deposit, and a message we convey to others.

In beauty salons and clinics throughout the world, day in and day out, workers are dedicated to this mission of feminine aesthetics and resulting happiness.
Using the latest technologies, in depth education and training, as well as leading industry brands, the best among these establishments offer a complete and holistic solution to all your needs in this sphere.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Formed by a sadistic mother, the male narcissist seeks to recreate this nefarious maternal presence in all his future relationships: he coerces his women to become mother figures.

But the narcissist doesn't seek unconditional love from the women in his life, he is not trying to resolve childhood conflicts through them, or to fix their brokenness and ameliorate their pains. He is not intent on saving them.

On the very contrary: he wants to do to women what his mother did to him. He wants to abuse them sadistically and reject them by absenting himself and by withholding in every manner conceivable. When he does have sex with his female partner, it is exceedingly humiliating and excruciatingly painful to her.

Aware of his maltreatment and of his transgressions, the narcissists fully expects his women to hurt him and to abandon him, usually by cheating on him with other men egregiously and conspicuously, incidentally cementing his view that all women are innately sluttish and cruel.

Anticipating this ineluctable punitive backlash renders the narcissist anxious: to avoid the unbearable agony in store, he withdraws coldly and detaches emotionally from his woman. He frequently pushes his women to cheat so as to get it over with and let the other shoe drop.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I seem to attract two types of women: those with the psychological makeup of a psychopathic narcissistic man or women who adhere to and uphold traditional gender roles.

The first kind are ambivalent about me (love-hate), compete with my accomplishments and mini-celebrity, and visit upon me the sins of all their previous abusers combined. They are envious, aggressive, resentful, defiant, and contemptuous. They act impulsively and conspicuously to shock, shame, and humiliate me. Often they disrespect me in public and badmouth me behind my back. Afraid of my retribution and vindictive vengeance, they are paranoid, manipulative, and deceitful. The relationship, such as it is, deteriorates into a zero-sum power play.

The second sort admire my intellect and seek to gratify me in every traditional feminine way by rendering their services and catering to my needs and wishes. My targeted abuse and hurtful rejection are patiently tolerated and smoothed over.

Both these types of women ultimately end up abandoning me or cheating on me with other, kinder, more attentive and desirous men. Drama is inevitable. Either way I end up on my own, time and again.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Narcissists and people with hyperactive narcissistic defenses (such as trauma victims) substitute fantasy, daydreaming, perpetual planning, and analysis for action (action substitution) or perform activities which are irrelevant and tangential to their life and interests (action displacement). When the narcissist cheats on his partner, it is an example of action displacement.

But it raises an interesting question: the narcissist is psychologically self-sufficient, solipsistic, and self-contained. He has no need for intimacy, affection, or succor from anyone at any time. Why cheat at all? Why not just fantasize about it? Is it a form of acting out, more typical of Borderlines and other disorganized personalities (including survivors of CPTSD)? In this and the next three posts, I will explore the answers to these two questions.

Narcissists cheat on their spouses, commit adultery and have extramarital affairs and liaisons for a variety of reasons which reflect disparate psychodynamic processes:

1. In the quest for narcissistic supply, the somatic narcissist resorts to serial sexual conquests.

2. Narcissists are easily bored (they have a low boredom threshold) and they have a low tolerance for boredom. Sexual dalliances alleviate this nagging and frustrating ennui. The quest for novelty, diversions, and thrills – a vacation from his own life - is combined with a journey of self-exploration and discovery that involves “filling in the gaps” in the narcissist’s biography: a missed adolescence, an old flame, a new aspect of his personality.

3. Narcissists maintain an island and focus of stability in their life, but all the other dimensions of their existence are chaotic, unstable, and unpredictable. This "twister" formation serves many emotional needs which I expound upon elsewhere. Thus, a narcissist may be a model employee and pursue a career path over decades even as he cheats on his wife and fritters their savings away.

4. Narcissists feel superior and important and so entitled to be above the law and to engage in behaviors that are frowned upon and considered socially unacceptable in others. They reject and vehemently resent all limitations and conditions placed upon them by their partners. They act on their impulses and desires unencumbered by social conventions and strictures.

5. Marriage, monogamy, and child-bearing and rearing are common activities that characterize the average person. The narcissist feels robbed of his uniqueness by these pursuits and coerced into the relationship and into roles - such as a husband and a father - that reduce him to the lowest of common denominators. This narcissistic injury leads him to rebel and reassert his superiority and specialness by maintaining extramarital affairs.

6. Narcissists are control freaks. Having a relationship implies a give-and-take and a train of compromises which the narcissist acutely interprets to mean a loss of control over his life. To reassert control, the narcissist initiates other relationships in which he dictates the terms of engagement (love affairs)

7. Narcissists are terrified of intimacy. Their behavior is best characterized as an approach-avoidance repetition compulsion. Adultery is an excellent tool in the attempt to retard intimacy and resort to a less threatening mode of interaction.

Narcissists typically claim that they have cheated in order to “put the spark back into the relationship (with the spouse or primary intimate partner.)” Of course, how exactly an act of betrayal and faithlessness can rekindle the ambers of a relationship founded initially on trust and sexual and emotional exclusivity is left conveniently unsaid.

Inevitably, the sexual fantasy life of narcissists and psychopaths reflects their psychodynamic landscape: their fear of intimacy, misogyny, control freakiness, auto-eroticism, latent sadism and masochism, problems of gender identity, and various sexual paraphilias.

Fantasies which reflect a fear of intimacy involve the aggressive or violent objectification of a faceless, nameless, and sometimes sexless person, often in impersonal, alien or foreign settings (example: narratives of rape.) These usually coalesce with misogynistic erotic storylines in which females are humiliated, coerced into hurtful submission, and subjected to violation and degradation by one or many. Where sadism-masochism, homosexuality, or sexual paraphilias such as pedophilia are present, they are injected into the fantasy and colour its composition and progression.

In his fantasies, the narcissist or psychopath is always in unmitigated control of the environment. The assemblages of bodies and limbs which populate his daydreams – his body included - are minutely choreographed to yield maximum titillation. He is like an exhibitionistic and voyeuristic porn director with an endless supply of well-endowed actors either cowed into compliance or craving it

Naturally, the narcissist’s fantasies are devoid of any performance anxiety or of the need to reciprocate in the sex act by pleasing his anonymous and robotic partners.
Such imaginarium invariably leads to acts of self-stimulation, the ultimate manifestations of auto-eroticism. Even when the narcissist incorporates his real-life partner in his fantasies, he is bound to treat her as a mere prop, a body to masturbate with, in, or on, or an object to be “defiled” in acts such as group sex, swinging (wife-swapping), or outright sexual deviance (examples: urophilia, or coprophilia)

This crude and overt denigration serves to render her a “slut”, or a “whore” in his mind, the kind of woman with whom he can have lustful, emotion-free sex. He reserves love, involvement, and intimacy to sexless “madonna”-type, sexually inaccessible or unattainable women, such as his mother

The somatic narcissist’s and psychopath’s sexual promiscuity emerges from underlying problems in gender identity. Many of them are closet bisexuals, cross-dressers, and prone to paraphilias such as pedophilia, fetishism, and sexual sadism or masochism. Some of them try to act out their fantasies and get their partners to assume roles commensurate with their propensities and predilections, however outlandish, illegal, or extreme

A useful test to tell apart healthy sexual fantasies from narcissistic ones is to pose the question: would you be equally satisfied having sex with a sophisticated inflatable robotic doll as with a flesh and blood partner? If the answer is "yes", then, in all likelihood, we are dealing with a narcissist or a psychopath

Yet, these glimpses into the thwarted and the demented rarely go down well with their significant others. The narcissist’s self-exposure often elicits reactions of horror, repulsion, and estrangement. No wonder most narcissists don’t even bother to share their fantasies with their “loved” ones. The cerebral narcissist merely retreats to sexual abstinence punctuated by compulsive, porn-fuelled masturbation. The somatic narcissist compulsively hunts for new feminine prey to sacrifice on the insatiable altar of his False Self.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Trauma victims or people with certain mental health disorders tend to confuse fantasy with reality. They inhabit a twilight zone where strongly felt wishes come true.

This confounding of dreamscape and the world represents a toxic amalgam of magical thinking, entitlement, grandiose delusional omnipotence, dissociation (ontological discontinuity), and psychosis (hyperreflexion, disturbances in the regulation of the Self, and a mixup of internal and external objects). When rejected, such persons react with immediate and powerful decompensation and act out

To an uninformed observer, their reckless and hurtful conduct may appear to be erratic, impulsive, irrational, self-destructive, or even insane. But, in truth, they are flailing and thrashing about in a desperate attempt to regulate overwhelming negative emotions.

Frequently, this takes the form of instantly substituting one fantasy with another of the same variety: rejected by the man of her dreams, a woman would lurch towards a stranger and have an instant fling with him, replete with an ersatz "friendship", faux intimacy and sex. A man who fails to be promoted would sell the company's secrets to its competitor thus restoring his challenged fantastic grandiosity.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

According to Cavenar, Sullivan, and Maltbie ("A Clinical Note on Hysterical Psychosis", American Journal of Psychiatry, June 1979), some narcissistic and histrionic people - mostly women - react with a transient form of psychosis to unwanted sexual advances - but also when their fervent sexual interest is not reciprocated. In the footsteps of Martin (1971), the authors explicitly attribute such decompensation and acting out in some cases to "oral narcissistic" structures in the personality and immature object relations.

I would add to this list women who succeed to bed the men they desire, but are then abandoned or ignored emotionally, contrary to their wishes and fantasies.

The connection between brief, reactive psychotic episodes and symptomatic manifestations of dissociation, including amnesia and even Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), is well established (see the definitive work "Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond" edited by Dell and O'Neil, 2009, Routledge). So, when these women disintegrate under stress or trauma, the transition to dissociative psychosis is abrupt and shocking: it resembles switching from the core personality to an alter in DID. Patients describe it as "brain fog", though they may appear to be perfectly oriented and goal-focused.

On such occasions, behavior changes markedly, becomes disorganized, and then escalates to become aggressive, impulsive, dysempathic, reckless, promiscuous, and antisocial. Amnesia sets in to repress painful and acutely uncomfortable (ego dystonic) memories which, had they remained in conscious awareness, would have provoked extreme shame and guilt. Where amnesia is absent, the woman undergoes depersonalization and derealization: she feels that she were acting as an observer on "auto-pilot". Substance abuse - such as binge drinking or getting stoned - exacerbates all these mental health issues and defenses.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A certain behavior or behavioral pattern can be utterly psychopathic and, at the same time, reactive to abuse, justified, and proportional.

Psychopathic conduct has its hallmarks: it is impulsive (abrupt and shocking), antisocial, aggressive, reckless, and dysempathic. It includes elements of novelty- or thrill-seeking and risk-taking. It is often self-defeating or self-destructive.

But these attributes of psychopathic action do not mean that the psychopath is invariably immoral, that he is always in the wrong: even psychopaths are sometimes egregiously mistreated and have the inherent right to rectify and remedy the injustice or to make sure the maltreatment ceases.

The psychopath is distinguished by HOW he (or increasingly, she) does things - not by considerations of ethics and morality.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Studies have consistently demonstrated that both men and women often - though by no means always! - cheat on their primary partners with far inferior lovers or mistresses: uglier, or older, less intelligent, unattractive, or less accomplished. Why would anyone trade down? When the sexual or emotional affairs are exposed, the cheated spouses are aghast at their unintelligibly poor replacements: they feel humiliated and narcissistically injured.

But, actually, such choices of "safe" stand-ins signal an abiding and deep commitment to the relationship with the deceived significant other.

In a relationship that had become emotionless and sexless, the partners have an irresistible urge to satisfy their needs for affection, succor, and intimacy, sometimes including closeness of the physical sort, when they miss being wanted and desired both as companions and as sexual objects.

But, if the strayers still value the primary relationship for whatever reason or if they still hold hope for it, they would attempt to avoid an alternative liaison with a potentially serious substitute. They want to not form a new, competing, and equipotent attachment. It is easier to give up on an inferior stopgap romantic counterparty. They want to stray - but never lose sight of the safe and secure base of home.

Only when they have given up all expectations within the morbid primary bond, do they seek other partners with superior qualities. Such choice is the tintinnabulating death knell of the old, now irredeemably defunct love.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I am in the throes of reconceptualizing pathological narcissism as a post-traumatic condition or even a role play of sorts. If this be the case, the False Self may be reconceived as a dissociative fragment, the outcome of repeated traumas that had been sliced off and repressed. A kind of godlike alter

This view renders NPD not a personality disorder, but a private case of DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder)

More about the False Self https://samvak.tripod.com/faq48.html

Narcissistic Personality as Multiple Personality https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/NARCISSISTIC-PERSONALITY-DISORDER/mxA7tQxS68U

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

People attract and are attracted to partners who satisfy deep emotional needs and restore the comfort zone. Even abusers and stalkers fulfill these two critical functions for their prey.

The need to be seen, noticed, and attended to is overwhelming even in healthy folks. Stalkers focus on their targets to the exclusion of all and everybody else. Being the aim of such inordinate attention is intoxicating. Some stalkers even take or leave trophies as signals of their omnipresence in their quarry's life and their micromanaged control.

Those who repeatedly pair up with stalkers actually dread loneliness because they maintain an impoverished inner environment: their introjects are sadistic and their internal objects are inaccessible because they are suffused with pain and other negative emotions

In other words: habitual intimate partners of abusers and stalkers cannot sustain an inner dialog with their depleted and wounded selves. The stalker's constant presence restores object constancy and permanence and fills the voided, howling, and all-consuming emptiness at his mate's missing core (first described by Kernberg).

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Gaslighting by narcissists and psychopaths is surreal and disorienting. They lie reflexively, with a straight face, and without missing a beat.

The psychopath's prevarication frequently involves very convincing mimicry of other people's behaviors and affect. This engenders an alternative, almost hallucinatory or nightmarish reality.

Here are two simple rules:

1. The psychopath is never sad - and always mad (at you); and

2. When the psychopath says "I am bad" (is ostensibly repentant), he means to say "I am afraid" (of the consequences of his actions)

As Cleckley wrote in his masterpiece, "The Mask of Sanity", actions and behaviors are the psychopath's only true forms of communication, his language. We should, therefore, pay attention exclusively to what the psychopath does and utterly ignore absolutely everything he says.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When, as an outcome of extreme or repeated trauma, the personality/identity fails to integrate (Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID), some of the resulting fragments (alters or parts) may be possessed of personality or even psychotic disorders. If one of the alters is a psychopath, his antisocial and dysempathic, impulsive m, and reckless conduct creates a set of severe, irreconcilable dissonances (axiological, emotional, deontic and cognitive) with the core personality.

The psychopathic alter (an introject of an abuser, probably) emerges in situations involving unbearable stress and trauma in order to fight back and protect the individual. The core (host) then tries to safeguard its integrity and to avoid shattering ego-dystony (feelings of shame, guilt, fear, and anxiety) by firewalling the psychopathic alter behind dissociative amnesia which sometimes amounts to a fugue state. Consequently, the psychopathic personality (the "badass protector") will have no awareness of the core. Even when conscious of time lost or of blackouts, the psychopathic fragment will erroneously attribute them to substance abuse or other external or medical circumstances.

In the footsteps of Colin Ross's "trauma theory" of the origin of mental health disorders, I suggest that narcissism is a post-traumatic private case of DID and that psychopathy (Antisocial Personality Disorder) is when an alter is walled off from the core to avoid permanent psychosis (though dissociative psychosis may still occur). Another way of looking at it is like a theatre production: an ensemble role play with social inputs. This is reminiscent of the Internal Family System approach. It would explain, for example, why narcissists behave completely differently in prison: they adopt a different role.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

About 1.5% suffer from extreme dissociative conditions, notably DID. Many narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors may actually reflect this lack of inner cohesion and failed integration of identity and self.

Consider triangulation.

When DID sufferers are romantically rejected and abused, their dysregulated negative emotions overwhelm them. They begin to prepare the ground for switching to a protective alter (a psychopathic slut or an antisocial bully, as examples). Such spurned parties then scan for an alternative to the rejecting party (hypervigilant phase): a rescuer-savior type of man or a motherly-salving mother figure.

Having spotted the candidate, the host (core) personality signals its readiness for intimacy, including sex (flirts). Once the signal is reciprocated, the host makes way for the protective alter (part) to emerge.

The inevitable sex act itself usually involves dissociative amnesia as the promiscuity-averse core defends itself from dissonance. The whole episode is sliced off and is denied vehemently

The alter remains out for as long as the triggers that caused the switching are on.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dissociative depersonalization and derealization are common reactions in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), in Dissociative Identity Disorder DID, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder or MPD), and in patients with post-traumatic stress disorders, such as PTSD and CPTSD.

The experience is variously described as being on auto-pilot, sliding into anaesthesia, or reverting to the status of an empathic or sad spectator. It is provoked by intolerable dissonance (for example: when cheating on a partner, having ambivalent sex, breaking the law, or breaching some deeply held mores and values). The patient distances herself from the events, from her pain, and from anticipated abandonment and rejection via the mechanisms of estrangement and alienation: "This is not happening to me, this is just a nightmare, not real". Substance abuse and ambient distractions (such as bar hopping or video games) tend to exacerbate these reactive patterns and the patient often misattributes to alcohol or drugs the behaviors wrought by her alters or the subsequent amnesia.

BPD can be best described as a subspecies of DID: the mood lability and emotional dysregulation are outward manifestations of changes in self-states and switching from host (ANP) to alter (EP). The dissociative trigger in BPD is typically either actual abandonment or the perceived threat of rejection and separation from an intimate partner within an interpersonal relationships which results in unbearable abandonment or separation anxiety.

Indeed, severe dissociation is even now a diagnostic criterion of BPD. When one of the alters is a psychopath, the Borderline patient will be antisocial, impulsive, dysempathic, mendacious (lie about everything all the time), aggressive, and defiant. She will be able to go for long periods without any romantic or sexual liaisons, a lone wolf in her lair - something BPD patients whose alters are not psychopathic cannot ever countenance or do.

It is a myth that people with BPD/DID cannot fully control the behaviors and choices of their alters. They can. This is why the courts reject both BPD and DID as a defense and throw people in prison even when it is proven beyond doubt that an alter committed the felony.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There is a tectonic shift in mate selection preferences among humans. As women become more independent, grandiose, and entitled, they adopt behaviors hitherto associated exclusively with psychopathic men. They also opt for "beta" males (weak, tame, dependent, underaccomplished, less intelligent and less handsome) as sexual and romantic partners.

This is accompanied by a revolution in sexual and behavioral signalling as the semantics and semiotics of types of social conduct are reversed for the first time since the inception of the agricultural revolution and urbanization, thousands of years ago. No wonder feelings of dislocation and disorientation regarding gender roles (gender vertigo) are so high and rampant.

Drinking, smoking, the loud use of profane language, defiance, promiscuity, novelty and thrill seeking, avoidant attachment, impulsiveness, masculine attire and body, little makeup or grooming, overt seductiveness and flirtatiousness, abuse of multiple substances, recklessness, loss of control in public, impetuousness, and frequent changes of partners in interpersonal relationships were considered until the 1960s negative hallmarks of a mentally disturbed or desperate "bad news" woman best avoided.

Today, these very same character traits and behaviors render a woman MORE attractive because they indicate to men her sexual availability, personal autonomy, emancipated mindset, strength, financial wherewithal, absence of demanding neediness or long-term expectations, and fun loving ambience.

In this hookup age of ubiquitous antisocial or asocial narcissism and atomization (schizoid loneliness as a way of life), such women are treasured and courted assiduously by emasculated men, usually for the casual sex and noncommittal non-relationships that have come to typify our dystopian, post-modern, thanatic, materialistic world.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

All the women in my life ended up with other men: they cheated on me, got involved in affairs, or abandoned me altogether. Many of the other men they opted for were far inferior to me in every way: uglier, older, poorer, losers, disabled, mentally ill, criminals, or far less intelligent than me. Most of them abused my women verbally, psychologically, and even physically way worse than I have ever done. A few of them withheld sex or, conversely, sexually assaulted my straying women.

And yet my women manifestly preferred these men to me and maintained long-term relationships with them.

It always puzzled me: Why trade down? And why settle for another, much more egregious abuser? What in ME made the relationships I had offered to my women so intolerable that they had fled screaming to the hills and flung themselves into the hirsute arms of the first man they came across, ANY other man, never mind how dysfunctional, repulsive, and dangerous he was?

The answer to the conundrum was that I made sure to deny my women adamantly and recurrently the things that truly mattered to them. If they sought commitment and children, I gave them only sex and attention. If they thrived on sex and attention, I withheld both, but acted as a good, long-term provider. If what they wished for was certainty and stability, I peregrinated and approach-avoided. If they needed personal space, I intruded. If they craved common memories and companionship, I absented myself. Being a virulent misogynist at heart, I sadistically taunted and punished my women by becoming their dream and then by remaining a mere fantasy, tantalisingly and forever out of reach. So, furious and heartbroken, sad and mad, they dumped me emotionally, sexually and, in all 26 cases but one, also physically.

The other men that usurped my place and absconded with my women have adopted the opposite strategy: they gave my women what they desired most, be it attention, or sex, or succor, or commitment. Having been granted their most fervent wishes, my erstwhile women turned a blind eye to the less savory aspects of the men they selected. They shouldered on.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Narcissists, psychopaths, and Borderlines react with abuse to perceived abuse. But the problem is that their reactive misconduct is based on perceptions and internal dynamics, not on reality, which they cannot be trusted to appraise properly.

People with these personality disorders also possess a low threshold for frustration and poor impulse control.

But the greatest problem is the triple whammy trifecta of cognitive deficits, hypervigilance, and referential ideation. Cluster B patients maintain poor reality testing and paranoid ideation.

Consequently, they misperceive and misinterpret many behaviors as abusive - and react with an arsenal of nuclear weapons to the slightest upset.

So, though many of these perpetrators abuse only when triggered and rarely ignite the chain reaction of maltreatment, their behavioral choices are disproportional and they leverage everything they have, body and intelligence, for instance, to lend their response a bleeding edge.

They may be first provoked (via projective identification, for example) - but then embark upon an unbridled attempt to DESTROY the source of frustration and narcissistic injury (at least mentally, if not always physically). This dynamic is especially evident in couples where one partner is a Borderline and the other one, a Narcissist.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I have become a global hate figure because I remind people how stupid they are: statistically, the overwhelming vast majority of the readers of this post would be inordinately gullible and unintelligent. I also insist to take away people's delusional fairy tales and pet conspiracy theories (starting with all religions through homeopathy and Reiki to New Age trash and meaningless labels such as empaths)

Women especially find my intelligence intimidating. Even before I outed as a psychopathic narcissist, women have been avoiding me, terrified of being exposed as possessed of less than stellar intellect. After all, how does one succeed to not bore to tears someone with 190 IQ and encyclopedic knowledge? How do you keep him interested? Dating me was perceived as a combination job interview and competitive sport: at best exhausting and at worst devastatingly humiliating.

Contrary to the proliferation of self-enriching predatory life coaches and personal trainers and therapists and gurus - I take away false hope, not give it.

There is no giant inside each one of you: most of you are lucky to earn the title midgets. And there are very few things you can do well: you are likelier to fail in most of your attempted endeavors. And life is utterly random and meaningless. And, breaking news, like the tooth fairy, god is a hairy fairy tale for the feeble-minded. The last thing the CIA cares about are your tinfoil heads. The majority of humanity - including your children and their children - die unlamented and soon forgotten. Facts. Face them and move on with your lives, such as they are. And don't forget to despise and hate me for opening your eyes and for telling you the unvarnished truth.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There are three types of promiscuity: frequency, conditional-contextual, and standards.

In Frequency Promiscuity, the quantity of partners and sexual encounters is statistically abnormal - but some criteria and standards are maintained throughout with regards to mate selection, what little time is spent together, minimal emotions (liking the partner, affection, feeling good in his company), and behavioral choices.

In Standards Promiscuity, the numbers of sexual liaisons and disparate partners are not always high but there are no thresholds or benchmarks as to the type of partner chosen or which behaviors are deemed unacceptable: anyone and anything go.

In Conditional Promiscuity, women reward with sex anyone - even a "bad guy" - who is "nice" to them (attentive, protective, and possessive) and finds them irresistibly desirable. It is a meaningless transactional exchange: emotionless sex swapped for worn out pickup lines: better the wrong kind of attention than none.

The first type of promiscuity is not really casual sex: it involves getting to know the prospective sex partner however superficially and cursorily. The second type is compulsive (intended to ameliorate anxiety and depression) and ego dystonic or impulsive (reckless, emotionless, novelty-seeking behavior) and ego syntonic.

Examples:

A heterosexual man who is frequency promiscuous would trawl bars or swipe dating apps to pick up partners for casual sex. But he would be selective as to the physical type of the partner, her psychology, and background. He would also not do drugs or get drunk senseless or visit a brothel. He would spend some time with her, getting to know her better and making up his mind whether he wants to copulate with her or not.

A heterosexual woman who is standards promiscuous will rarely have a one night stand but, when she does, will do it with anyone anywhere at any time. She would also get drunk senseless, do drugs, go to strip clubs, let herself be groped in public or by multiple men, even make herself available to gangbangs, and so on: no standards or inhibitions.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The narcissist faces an unresolvable conundrum: he abuses and rejects his (in)significant other and expects her to accept and embrace him as he is. His rejection and abuse reify his essence, these twin misbehaviors are who he is, his quiddity. If she truly loves him then she must love his rejection and abuse as well: without them, the narcissist is inconceivable, not himself.

In other words: if the narcissist's partner complies with his rejection of her by walking out on him - he perceives her as rejecting and frustrating. Only if she accepts his rejection and coexists with his abuse, does she prove her love for him.

It is a kind of perverted test of allegiance, a trial by fire. Rejecting his abuse and acting on his rejection amount to failure. Sticking around for more is proof positive of worthy devotion.

Regrettably, the test has to be administered frequently in order to rule out any pernicious outside influences or internal dynamics which may lead to an unfortunate change of heart. One can never be too safe with victims or trust them nowadays: Vaknin opened up their eyes in 1995! Talk about traitors to their own kind!

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Narcissist's Psychosexuality: From Fantasy to Deviance and Beyond (all my responses are in ENGLISH) - A new 22 parts SERIES of videos on my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

Be sure to watch The Narcissist's Sexuality Playlist on my channel.

I am talking to: Barbara Gyura@narciszcoach (Narcisz Coach)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Why do abusive narcissists feel rejected by their long-suffering partners who breakup with them? I am trying to recast grandiosity as a cognitive deficit coupled with a variety of psychological defense mechanisms, most notably fantasy.

Consider the following, very common, scenario: the narcissist virulently and aggressively rejects his mate, subjecting her to rabid abuse and the entire spectrum of withholding. When she bolts, he accuses her of having ... rejected and abused him!

Surely, there must be a limit even to the narcissist's delusional prowess? How could his reality test get so out of whack, so impaired?

Interlace grandiosity with entitlement and all is rendered clear: the narcissist feels slighted by his spouse's abandonment! He feels rejected because he considers himself worth fighting for and soldiering on. A unique treasure such as he is merits an endless stream of sacrifices and repeated attempts to win him over! She should have ignored his misbehavior.

That she reacted to it by walking out on him is nothing short of betrayal. The narcissist feels victimized, exploited, discarded, devalued, and humiliated by the ease with which his (in)significant other gave up on him. He fell prey to her abuse, he tells himself - and this, after everything he had done for her! How uncommonly ungrateful on her part.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

YUPTIE is a yuppie with a white trash background. You can find them mainly in the arts, including the performing arts, fashion, on television, and in information technology. Yupties are Young, Urban, Upwardly mobile, Trash.

They are functionally illiterate, are high-income, schizoid loners, and possessed of the manners, habits, and values of the underclass. When they do socialize it is to binge drink, do drugs, dance all night, and end up having casual sex with strangers. They have no families and are highly itinerant and desultory. They are not as materialistic and competitive as their forerunners, the yuppies. Many of them have serious mental health problems such as mood disorders and personality disorders, mostly Borderline and Narcissistic.

Yupties despise learning, experts, the elites, and intellectuals. They are highly paranoid and into conspiracy theories. They congregate in professional conventions but otherwise communicate and collaborate exclusively online. They are both amoral and immoral or even defiantly antisocial. They dress like white trash, neglect their bodies (except to adorn them with prison gang tatoos) and gorge on all manner of medication. They wallow in video games and pointless TV series. They are pathetic wannabe bad boys and gals.

The British historian, Arnold Toynbee, said that when most members of society adopt the behaviors and customs of the ignorant, impoverished, and inert lowest class and when the elites abrogate their responsibility to show the way and to educate - these are the hallmarks of a dying civilization. Yupties are the maggots on and in the corpse of what used to be the West.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I have been arguing to reverse Kernberg's hierarchy: I postulate that the Narcissist is far closer to psychosis (his personality is far less organized) than the Borderline. Only the narcissist's rigid grandiosity is keeping him together and when it is effectively challenged, he decompensates, acts out, and disintegrates.

Grotstein postulated that the Borderline is a failed narcissist: the pathology did not progress (or devolve) into narcissism which is a full-fledged form of binary Dissociative Identity Disorder with two selves (the False and the True)

The Narcissist's solution to this duality of selves is to switch off the dilapidated, atrophied, and dysfunctional True Self and relegate it to the deepest recesses of the mind where it has no influence whatsoever on the narcissist's psychodynamics. Only the False Self is left.

In contrast, the Borderline fails to repress and dissociate the True Self and, consequently, never becomes a narcissist. This "failure" causes the Borderline's two selves to compete for control of her identity and memories.

It is this inner struggle that mimics other dissociative disorders and led scholars such as Masterson, Dell, Putnam, Ross, Ryle and many others to suggest that BPD may merely be another label for the identity diffusion and alteration common in dissociative disorders.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The common wisdom when I was growing up was that as men get older, they have a greater number of potential partners (age hypergamy)

As women age, they have a shrinking pool of possible mates (age hypogamy). This evolutionary asymmetry had always had profound social implications: it affected the structure of our societies as well our institutions and the ways they functioned, both formal (codified mores and norms) and informal.

All this is beginning to change for the first time since the agricultural revolution, thousands of years ago. Women are emancipated sexually and financially and are gradually taking over the reins. They are adopting hitherto exclusively masculine - even defiantly antisocial - behaviors, including ones pertaining to mate choice and selection.

Sex hypogamy is the new normal: women prefer to stay single and childless, wedded to their careers and self-actualization as they sleep only with beta, weak, emasculated men, usually in hookups or short-term "relationships". Our dystopian reality is unigender: it is a world without women, only two types of men with different genitalia.

Sex hypergamy - a preference for accomplished strong alpha males even for casual sex - is out the window. Women want to be on top in every possible way

So, red pillers are right about the 80/20 Paretto principle: 80 percent of women do want to sleep with only 20 percent of all men. But they got the 20 percent wrong: women want to copulate with the 20 percent who are beta males! Women assiduously avoid the intimidating and challenging alpha men whose success and prowess constitute an unbearable narcissistic injury to the competitive, independent female.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The homebound homeless is a person who behaves like a stereotypical homeless even though he has a roof over his head.

The antisocial interpersonal behaviors in cluster B personality disorders usually ameliorate with age, even without treatment. But the outcomes of years of impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, and social dysfunction persist and are exacerbated by the vagaries of old-age.

The personality disordered cannot hold jobs, have little savings, no close or supportive family, few friends. To compensate for mood lability and existential insecurity, they develop dysfunctional behaviors and coping strategies such as drinking, doing drugs, and hoarding. They move from one place to the next, maintaining a schizoid and solitary lifestyle. Their sex lives consist of binge drunken one night stands which involve date rape and sexual assault. Mostly they are celibate and single as everybody has given up on them, their paranoid referential ideation, and their unprovoked aggression.

And so the homebound homeless die the way they had lived: alone, wasted, and exhausted by their own existence. Finally relieved perhaps of their burdens.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Neglect is when one's intimate partner does not care about one's needs, emotions, or wishes and does not mind or interfere with one's behaviors or choices, however self-destructive or harmful or hurtful they may be.

Two forms of neglect are benign indifference (one's partner is available only on explicit demand, "on call") and malignant freedom: "Feel at liberty to do whatever you want with whoever you wish, just don't bother me with the details"

Neglect is not the same as active and overt verbal, sexual, or emotional rejection: pushing you away and asking you to absent yourself in every way.

Neglect also does not involve withholding of sex or of attention when both are asked for openly and clearly.

But it may well be the most pernicious form of abuse because it implies and broadcasts a lack of emotional investment and interest in the partner that obviates her uniqueness and importance as an individual.

Other forms of abuse: https://samvak.tripod.com/abuse.html

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The narcissist is his own worst enemy. In an effort to establish his superiority and sustain his grandiose view of his inflated False Self, the narcissist often self-defeats and self-destructs: berates his boss, cheats on his wife, circumvents the law, and, generally, cuts a clownish pompous self-important figure as he harms his interests and undermines his wellbeing.

This counterproductive state of affairs is further compounded by the narcissist's impaired reality testing and myriad other cognitive, emotional, and empathy deficits.

He has overriding needs to feed his grandiosity (narcissistic supply) and to reinterpret cues - social, sexual, behavioral, and environmental - to buttress it.

The narcissist also lacks access to his positive emotions. Akin to people with extreme autism, he blunders through the world and life, dazed, baffled, and amazed by the vagaries and exigencies of existence and of human relationships and by misfortune, but blaming everyone and everything for his largely self-inflicted plight (external locus of control and alloplastic defenses)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Men born in the height of the Victorian era, in 1870, were my age (59) in 1929. They felt utterly disoriented and dislocated as norms, values, behaviors, and mores shifted kaleidoscopically and dramatically. The world they found themselves in was alien to them: anomic, violent, promiscuous, dissolute, narcissistic and psychopathic. New technologies and the growing involvement of the nanny state in private affairs rendered obsolete millennia-old institutions such as family, community, and even friendship.

Bewildered and dazed, they watched with growing horror as the world descended into collective madness. I sympathize with them: I feel exactly the same. I know where all this is going to end. I was among the first clarion calls, a self-sacrificial canary in the darkening shafts of this existential mine. But I am helpless to effect any change in the suicidal course of events. I am reduced to a mere spectator in this society of spectacle and theatre of the absurd.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Trust in a relationship relies critically on clear enunciated values, agreed upon rules of conduct and stated boundaries with promulgated sanctions if the above are breached. These interpersonal compacts engender stability, predictability, realistic expectations, and self-regulation.

Testing the trust fostered between the parties is a seriously bad idea. One should avoid placing oneself in temptation's way and in potentially compromising circumstances. The parties should not give in to the grandiose and counterfactual assumption that "nothing will happen if I do not allow it to happen. I've got everything firmly under control. It is safe to misbehave up to a certain point"

Why provoke insecurity and uncertainty in your partner by acting in ways and placing yourself in situations which could go awry despite the best intentions and pre-existing commitments? Human behavior is complex and, therefore, rarely predictable and controllable. Stay on the straight and narrow and where there is doubt or even a 1% chance of mishap and mischief - keep away. Think of your partner's peace of mind and of her trust in you and let go of your "freedom" just a little. After all: grandiosity, dysempathy, risk-taking, novelty seeking, reactance, and defiant autonomy are the hallmarks of ... psychopathy!

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Our narcissistic and increasingly more psychopathic civilization legitimizes and rewards psychopaths, both male and female. In women, Antisocial Personality Disorder is strongly associated with both Borderline and Histrionic personalities as well as with childhood abuse and trauma and with dissociative states and disorders.

The structural tectonic shift in gender roles fostered a unigender world where there are only men with two different sets of genitalia. In such an anomic universe borderline psychopathic women florish: their goal-focused manipulativeness, impulsive aggression, emotional dysregulation, and lack of empathy are rendered assets rather than liabilities.

Feminism (suffragism, women's lib) which started off as a laudable human rights movement aimed at leveling the playing field had metastasized into a sexist, hate-filled, utterly narcissistic and delusional power play.

Enslaved by men for millennia, women rose, enraged and fuelled by seething resentment and often misandry. They are now doing to men what men did to them with impunity for so long, giving emasculated and dazed males a taste of their own bitter medicine.

And this internecine mass suicide is only starting as we hurl ourselves off cliffs of intoxicated vanity and fear of the Other.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Conducting my own mini-poll.

If you are in a committed heterosexual relationship with agreed monogamy and sexual exclusivity (like a marriage), which of the following would you consider to be an inappropriate behavior on your part:

1. Meeting once a week EVERY WEEK for evening drinks or a dinner with a friend or colleague of the opposite sex who is single

2. Spending the night in a bar with a friend or colleague of the opposite sex and returning home in the early hours of the morning

3. Sharing drinks with a stranger of the opposite sex who you have just met in a bar or in a restaurant

4. Sleeping over on a couch at the apartment of a friend or a colleague of the opposite sex who is single and living by himself

5. Going on a non-business trip or a vacation with a friend or a colleague of the opposite sex who is single

6. Kissing on the mouth and making out (but no sex) with a friend or a colleague of the opposite sex

7. Giving or receiving oral sex (without penetration) to or from a friend or a colleague of the opposite sex

8. Which of these 7 behaviors would you consider as cheating

Kindly indicate your age in your responses.

Feel free to elaborate on your responses and explain the reasoning behind them as well as discuss the issues among yourselves in the comments.

You can also DM me with your answers and reasons.

Thank you for supporting my research.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The narcissist is a collective, not a person. He has a hive mind: he aggregates input and feedback from other people, filters them via his grandiosity, and recreates his ego on the fly, hundreds of times a day. This hall of mirrors in his head stores the honey and wax of narcissistic supply and ego discrepant information to be reframed.

Narcissism is a form of constitutive panpsychism or composite subjectivity: even inanimate objects, collectives, institutions, and abstract ideas and concepts play a role in the constant formation and mutation of the narcissist's reflexive psyche. His ego functions are all outsourced, so he imbues everything and everyone with a "soul". Social media are the technological reification of this inexorable process of grooming and harvesting.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Borderline and Histrionic personality disorders may be manifestations in females of secondary type psychopathy (as measured by Factor 2 of the PCL-R test). In other words: Borderline and Histrionic women may actually be psychopaths. A growing body of recent studies supports this startling conclusion. Survivors of CPTSD also manifest psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors (overlay)

Intimate partners won't not surprised: impulsivity, defiant grandiosity, antisocial and interpersonal aggression, manipulativeness, dysregulated negative emotionality, lack of object constancy (object impermanence), attachment dysfunctions, hostility, splitting (dichotomous thinking), high levels of distress, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse are all typical of and common among secondary psychopaths - and among Borderlines. These women also defy gender roles and behavioral norms (act masculine). But the Borderline adds a twist to this cocktail: dissociation. Whenever stress levels and inner dissonance become intolerable, she hands over control to her inner psychopath, depersonalizes, derealizes, or develops amnesia.

When the Borderline's life partner is another proud member of the Cluster B tribe (another Borderline or Psychopath, or a Narcissist), he reacts with equal measures of abuse to her frequent misconduct. The relationship ineluctably devolves into a vicious power play and warping cruel mind games, exacerbating traumatic mental health outcomes for everyone involved.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When healthier people come across narcissists, they are often struck by their rigid immaturity and childlike vibe. There is a clearly infantile entity where an adult (or a person) should have been.

At the same time, the narcissist makes them feel infuriatingly inferior by establishing his or her grandiose delusional superiority: intellectual, pecuniary, biographical, or otherwise.

This discrepancy creates a jarring dissonance: children are not supposed to make us feel inferior! And we are not supposed to feel aggressive, envious, and competitive towards kids! On the contrary: we should find them endearing and protect them! Narcissists are like aliens as they were depicted in old sci-fi movies: of slight build with giant (babylike) eggheads. And inaccessibly foreign.

Less grandiose narcissists (and goal-oriented psychopaths) try to redress this offensive, dissonant, and incongruent power asymmetry by pretending to need and desire the other party. Narcissistic and psychopathic men tell women how charming, intelligent, and irresistible they are and how much they yearn for their company and sex. They let men know that they find them shrewd and reliable and knowledgeable and would like to hang out with them.

But some narcissists are too full of themselves to play this game. They are utterly self-sufficient and solipsistically self-contained. They are superior and are not ashamed to communicate it. Nor do they intend to ameliorate the impact of this natural imbalance. They care little what people (the lesser specimens) think about them (for example: that they are unattractive or asexual or gullible) or what they do to them in retribution. This apparent invulnerability only frustrates their interlocutors even further and renders them more aggressive, devaluing, and vindictive - a vicious circle of hurtful escalation. 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Latest by the authoritative science journal New Scientist: COVID-19 (Coronavirus) kills 0.7-1% of those infected. 99% fully recover. 7000 people died, the majority of whom were above age 50 and with pre-existing conditions (such as heart disease, obesity, smoking-related complications, or diabetes). The flu decimated 30,000 people in the US alone during the same period. The measures adopted by governments, communities, and individuals the world over are far more dangerous and detrimental than this or any other virus can ever be.

This mass delusion, psychosis, hysteria, or panic is a first. The only comparable reaction to a pandemic happened in the 14th century with the bubonic plague (Black Death). The Spanish flu killed 50-100,000,000 worldwide. AIDS infected 45,000,000 and millions perished. Swine flu infected 61 million in the USA alone - and killed 600,000 globally. SARS (2002-4) had a case fatality rate 10 times higher than COVID-19. There was no hint of panic or hysterical self-isolation. So, what gives? Why now?

The answer is an effluent confluence of:

1. Ignorance

Functional illiteracy is at an all time high and the education system had crumbled.

2. Social media

Fake news, rank nonsense, and conspiracy theories are the only pseudo-intellectual diet of most people.

3. Distrust of authority

People distrust the government, experts, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, labs, universities, politicians, and the media. Instead, they rely on uninformed word of mouth, charlatans, and con-artists whose trashy wares are purveyed on YouTube and other such online unmitigated garbage dumps. For example: washing hands is good - most masks INCREASE the risk of contracting the virus!

4. Narcissism

Infatuation with one's self leads to extreme risk aversion and inordinate measures of pampering, self-medication, and self-protection. People consider their cosmically significant and unprecedently unique and treasured lives to be worthy of the utmost efforts at preservation.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Black Death – an epidemic of bubonic plague in the 14th century – decimated between one third and one half of Europe’s population, yet it was the best thing to have happened to Mankind in many centuries. The depleted number of survivors shared in the vast fortunes of the deceased, laying the foundation for modern, entrepreneurial capitalism; the added physical spaces and vacancies made available via the devastation of numerous households spurred urban renewal and magisterial architecture on an unprecedented scale; the crumbling authority of the Church and its minions led to reformist religious stirrings and the emergence of the Renaissance in arts and sciences; labourers and women saw their standing in society much improved as the scarcity of workforce rendered them much sought-after commodities.

Seven centuries later, an “inflation of humans” led to an ineluctable devaluation and may have erased at least the latter of these achievements: wage growth. Wages have stagnated in direct correlation with the explosion in global population. The social fabric itself has been rent by the mounting pressure of an annual net growth in population which exceeds the citizenry of Germany: interpersonal relationships, social organizational units, tolerant co-existence, peaceful multiculturalism and diversity have all crumbled worldwide.

The "Black Death" - an epidemic of bubonic plague which ravaged both Europe and the Mediterranean in 1347-1351- killed one quarter to one third of the population - c. 25 million people. This is the equivalent of 250 million today. It took 150 years for the population to recover its pre-epidemic levels.

Scholars believe that the plague emanated from the Middle East through southern Russia, between the Black and the Caspian seas.

Contemporaries did not use the term "Black Death". They called it the "Pestilence" or the "Great Mortality". They regarded it as divine punishment of humanity's sins.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This pandemic is emerging as the solution for all the ills of modern society. People are so fed up, so alienated and broken, so atomized and lonely, so frightened and disgusted by how things turned out to be that they hope the Coronavirus will do to humanity what Trump did to Washington: dry the swamp by decimating an excess billion or two and by reminding everyone of what really matters in life. This emissary of the Grim Reaper will restore solidarity, family, friendship, community, and harmony as we all mobilize to eradicate it. It will bring out the best in us.

This nihilistic state of mind results in the most counterintuitive phenomenon: people violently castigate anyone who tries to restore calm and good sense. They mob, humiliate, slander, and threaten those who do not subscribe to apocalypse. They gang on psychologists and medical doctors and politicians who attempt to offset the rampant irrationality and the panic which have swept across large swathes of humanity.

The Coronavirus is their last utopia, their only hope and they resent any endeavour to take it away from them. The virus is death and death is peace and thus the end to their travails and troubles without and within. They just want to withdraw into their toilet papered fortresses and await an ineluctable deliverance. And woe unto you if you try to bring them back into this valley of tears. They have had enough.

Previous Corona viruses had two waves.

This wave will last until June 2020.

Next one will start in October and November 2020 and will last until the summer of 2021. This second onslaught may well start in China once more.

Then COVID19 will be gone forever.

It has to do with the dynamics of the Corona family: reservoirs, herd immunity, self-limitation. Epidemiology and virology.

Viruses are amazing! They are not really life forms - more like weaponized packages or missiles with payloads of RNA. And prions - deformed highly infectious non-destructible proteins - are not even that!

So, between June and November 2020 expect to see no new infections. And the virus will completely vanish after July 2021.

But the disruptive psychological effects of this health crisis and the strain on interpersonal relationships, exacerbated by the measures taken by governments all over the world and the forthcoming global recession - outcomes like clinical depression and anxiety - will be felt long after the virus is gone.

But possibly the greatest effect will be on the increasingly more atomized social fabric: alienated and paranoid, people will henceforth avoid each other, having realized that they can leverage cyberspace to become totally self-sufficient. Many will be rendered hybrid narcissistic schizoids (grandiose lone wolves)

AIDS did this to sex in the 1980s and 1990s: people have adopted prophylactic celibacy and went online to consume porn, date, and socialize. Sex has never recovered. What remained of human interaction is next.

COVID19 (a coronavirus) failed to propagate and create a viable human reservoir. The pandemic will be over within days: the number of new cases will collapse precipitously.

To survive and thrive, especially with the change in weather, the virus needs to mutate and presto so. There are already 2 strains out there (S and L), which is an impressive feat for an upstart zoonotic (animal-to-human) virus. A future mutation can be far more virulent than the relatively harmless variant we are faced with now. This is exactly what happened with the Spanish Flu in 1918-20 when 50-100,000,000 died worldwide.

Most viruses "hibernate" (go latent or dormant and then resurface). But COVID19 - like MERS and even its close relative, SARS - did not secure the requisite number of hosts to implement this strategy.

Finally: how about teaming up with a bacterium? A germ-virus hybrid would be invincible as the couple leverages the skill sets of a life form coupled with a payload.

In the meantime, with our impatience, ignorance, risk aversion, and sheer panic, we have ruined our economies and rent our social fabric. Many will die as the outcomes of these lamentable policies unfold inexorably. The virus is the least of our troubles now: we have seen the enemy - and it is WE.

The COVID19 pandemic is receding worldwide, except in Italy whose population is inordinately old: 23% are above the age of 65.

Italy has 650 Coronavirus fatalities per day. It is the only country with such numbers. The rest of the world COMBINED has another 600 fatalities per day. Germany's case fatality rate is 0.2% - Italy's 7%. Italy is an outlier: the entire country should be quarantined for a long while.

But there are other countries with such a demographic profile: Japan for example. Yet, the Coronavirus is eradicated there. This is because Italy has always had crumbling institutions (including healthcare) and a national character that can charitably be described only as Collective Borderline Personality Disorder: grandiose, defiant, contumacious, reckless, dramatic, entitled, and labile.

Italy also has a vested interest in amplifying and exaggerating what is undoubtedly a serious health crisis. Italy's economy has been in freefall for years now and the Coronavirus will come handy in securing massive dollops of international aid.

Consider, for example the 4500 Coronavirus deaths over 2 MONTHS. Italy has 1800 deaths of natural causes EVERY DAY. Why should its system be overwhelmed by an addition of 4500 to 640,000 annual deaths?

So, we can learn nothing from Italy: it is a special case, where all these emergency measures and more are justified.

Moreover:

Why not implement the same measures against the flu every year? Why only against Coronavirus? The flu and its complications IS killing 650,000 a year worldwide, after all!

This pandemic will be followed by a massive, global, but short recession that will last 2 quarters. The global economy will then rebound very strongly and enjoy a period of prosperity.

This reversal of fortunes will be brought on by unprecedented targeted fiscal expansion packages coupled with extreme monetary quantitative easing in a zero interest rate environment worldwide.

As people seize the day with unbridled credit-fueled hedonism, a consumption tsunami will deplete private savings to their lowest levels ever. This is exactly what happened in Europe after the Black Death and in the USA in the Roaring 1920s gilded age, following World War I and the Spanish Flu.

Three other ineluctable outcomes:

1. A baby boom ("Corona Babies"); 2. A. explosive rise in divorces as people emerge from an enforced sharing of living quarters with no longer so intimate partners in already unstable and dysfunctional relationships.

3. A sharp rise in the incidence of reactive mental health problems such as mood and anxiety disorders as well as a marked deterioration in the condition of anyhow fragile, broken, and damaged individuals (example, people with Borderline Personality Disorder and survivors of CPTSD).

Here is a winner of the Nobel Prize and the world's number 1 biological modeler confirming to the Los Angeles Times what I have been saying for a week now on my YouTube channel:

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-22/coronavirus-outbreak-nobel-laureate

The WHO issued a warning that the COVID-19 pandemic is "accelerating" when in effect it is decelerating and over its peak, including even in Italy and the USA. And its trajectory has little to do with social distancing.

How to explain such inaptitude?

Epidemiologists are very poor mathematicians but too grandiose to seek help. The WHO doesn't employ even ONE mathematician!

Consequently, their predictions are driven more by anecdotal optics and panic than by any crunching (analysis) of the numbers in highly complex mathematical models

Remember: the infections we are diagnosing today occurred (were transmitted) A FEW DAYS AGO! It is like star light: it takes time for light to traverse the distance, so we never see the present - we can only see the past (rearview mirror). Like a tsunami wave, the pandemic will crest in the next 10 days as a result of OLD infections - but NEW infections will decline precipitously.

How ironic it is to watch the empty shelves in supermarkets across the USA, so reminiscent of the bereft grocery stores in the USSR and its centrally planned and locally mismanaged economy. The USA used to mock the Russians for their incompetence. Karma is, indeed, a bitch.

We are entering the final few weeks of the pandemic. Most epidemiological models clearly show that the virus failed to establish a viable reservoir for future infections and is, therefore, self-limiting.

Nonsense! - you scream in unison - Can't you see that the number of infections and deaths are increasing?

Of course I can. But it is not accelerating. The growth is stable, not exponential (mathematical progression, not exponential). Much more importantly: currently diagnosed cases reflect infections acquired up to a month ago! The incubation period of this virus is up to 10 times longer than we have ever encountered. So, what we are confronted with now is the PAST, not the present: like starlight which takes years to reach us.

How reliable are the truly good prognostic models we have? The answer is very: they had predict surprisingly well the caseload, fatality rates, and timing of abatement in all past pandemics.

The coming two to three weeks will be vertiginous and terrifying. One million will be infected and about 100,000 will die. But we are nearing the end. Survive and you will thrive.

Here is how people entertained themselves in Italy in a previous pandemic almost 700 years ago (The Black Death aka The Plague aka The Pestilence): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron

Pasolini made a film in 1971, loosely based on The Decameron:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron_(1971_film)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Romantic Distancing is when people who used to have a full-fledged relationship remain in the confines of a dyad and share living and business quarters as functional roommates or business partners, but are emotionally and/or sexually avoidant and absent. They keep on keeping on owing to inertia or habit, community property, common children, peer pressure, social expectations, low self-esteem, economic, legal, or other dependence, pessimism regarding the dating pool out there, sometimes good sex, and any other reasons they can think of.

But many of these disgruntled spouses or partners seek sex, intimacy, and love elsewhere. And a small minority do so openly, ostentatiously, often with their official primary partner present and observing as the flirt with another person evolves into much more.

Why flaunt the extra-dyadic affair so cruelly and egregiously?

There are three successive phases in such radical misbehavior:

I. Triangulation: attempting to rekindle the relationship by provoking jealousy. A cry for help, really: a signaling of distress and dysphoria.

If this fails and the partner couldn't care less there is ...

II. Rage and a wish to hurt the partner's feeling by defiant in-your-face, overt, dysempathic, and disrespectful cheating that he is forced to witness.

III. Gradually, being unfaithful becomes a way to self-soothe and cater to emotional and sexual needs not met by the primary partner. There is little effort to conceal the succession of new lovers because the cheater no longer bothers about his or her partner's emotions and whether s/he is hurt or not. Emotional absence and utter indifference as well as unrelenting and driven selfishness had replaced love, friendship, or even common courtesy. The rationalization is: "He (or she) doesn't care or mind, so why bother to hide it?"

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Why do we often believe and trust narcissists and borderlines when they tell us what had happened? Why do we fall for their lies?

Because they are not lies. Psychopaths prevaricate to secure goals. Narcissists and borderlines rarely do: more commonly they confabulate.
Confabulation is a desperate attempt to bridge dissociative memory gaps ("lost time" or "blackouts") by extrapolating from past experience and creatively generating a fiction, a narrative as to what probably and plausibly might have happened in the missing hours or days.

Confabulating is intended to both restore identity continuity and cohesion and to hide the missing segments in the narcissist's or borderline's personal histories.

Confabulations - effectively false recall - are irresistibly convincing and alluringly reassuring because: 1. The narcissist or borderline honestly and firmly believe them to be true; 2. They have the power of memories and therefore appear to be objective and authentic; 3. They are always very likely, plausible, and even highly probable - so easy to accept by all parties.

In many cases, there is a fourth reason: the confabulation allows everyone involved to negate and efficaciously ignore a painful reality or an uncomfortable alternative scenario or set of facts. We all - including the confabulator - want to believe the confabulation because it affords us comfort, succor, and a peace of mind.

Narcissists and borderlines dissociate and confabulate ceaselessly. It is easy to be drawn into their counterfactual alt reality, the twilight zone of their inventive probabilities, the psychotic realm of their discontinuous existence. Confirmation bias does the rest: having committed ourselves to the narcissist's or borderline's version of events, we filter out and suppress all countervailing information and contradictory or challenging facts and possibilities.

More: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/journal75.html

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Narcissists regard sex with a healthy intimate partner as a narcissistic injury to which they react with narcissistic rage and other forms of externalized or mutated aggression.

Healthy sexual relations require give and take, a reciprocity that negates the narcissist's entitlement to special treatment: his needs - and only his needs - should be catered to. The partner is there to service them. He masturbates with the partner's body and often also humiliates or even hurts her sexually. She is his sex doll, sex slave, or sex pet.

Moreover: the narcissist perceives sex as a competition against prior entrants, replete with vigorous performance criteria. In his mind, his partner is the referee and her orgasms the sexometer. This engenders in him performance anxiety and resentment for being dissected, compared, and judged at all: his grandiose omnipotence is challenged and he is rendered hypervigilant.

The narcissist's sex is largely auto-erotic: he makes love to himself via the reflecting agency of his partner. More evolved forms of intercourse involving authentic collaboration towards mutual gratification elude him and infuriate him as they reveal his incompetence and impotent emotional illiteracy.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

How ironic it is to watch the empty shelves in supermarkets across the USA, so reminiscent of the bereft grocery stores in the USSR and its centrally planned and locally mismanaged economy. The USA used to mock the Russians for their incompetence. Karma is, indeed, a bitch.

External supply and demand shocks foster supply chain disruptions coupled with hoarding. This double whammy amplifies scarcity.

This is how the perennial textbook "Economics", authored by Nobel prizewinner Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, defines the dismal science: "Economics is the study of how societies use scarce resources to produce valuable commodities and distribute them among different people." The classical concept of scarcity - unlimited wants vs. limited resources - is lacking.

Anticipating much-feared scarcity encourages hoarding which engenders the very evil it was meant to fend off. Ideas and knowledge - inputs as important as land and water - are not subject to scarcity, as work done by Nobel laureate Robert Solow and, more importantly, by Paul Romer, an economist from the University of California at Berkeley, clearly demonstrates. Additionally, it is useful to distinguish natural from synthetic resources.

The scarcity of most natural resources (a type of "external scarcity") is only theoretical at present. Granted, many resources are unevenly distributed and badly managed. But this is man-made ("internal") scarcity and can be undone by Man. It is truer to assume, for practical purposes, that most natural resources - when not egregiously abused and when freely priced - are infinite rather than scarce. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins discovered that primitive peoples he has studied had no concept of "scarcity" - only of "satiety". He called them the first "affluent societies"

More: https://samvak.tripod.com/scarcity.html

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Politicians all over the world are abusing the pandemic to become effective DICTATORS.

Take Hungary, for example.

This 10,000,000 strong country has had only 130 cases of COVID-19. About 5-11 of these cases are critical (depends on how you define the word), and only 6 deaths hitherto.

I repeat: SIX DEATHS. In 3 months. In an EU country of 10 million people.

Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister, announced that all the hospitals are full and collapsing, closed the borders of this EU country, and assumed the powers of a dictator in all but name.

The largely state-infested media whip up a frenzy of hysteria and panic to implement unresisted a xenophobic agenda that Orban has been unsuccessfully trying to impose for years now. In the process, the institutions of the state and of civil society are all but humbled, cowed, or eradicated.

And Orban is a random choice. Dozens of political leaders all over the world are acting even more egregiously to usurp power. I doubt if this pernicious process is either temporary or reversible.

The pandemic is completely over - except in Italy. This pandemic scare is transforming into an Italian epidemic. The number of new deaths - outside Italy - is DOWN 90%. People are hysterical, so they do not pay attention to the DATA.

Still: do not underestimate the risk. It is the second time in history that Italy is serving as a reservoir of a deadly agent.

In the 14th century, the Black Death (the Plague) spread from Italy to the rest of Europe (1347-8). It decimated between one third and one half of Europe's population. The very term "quarantine" was first used when Venice prohibited the entry of ships carrying sick people into its port for a period of 40 days.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

People with dramatic or erratic (cluster B) personality disorders are manipulative and often tell you what you want and need to hear most. They shapeshift, chameleon-like, and, for a while, BECOME you. They profess to share the same values and outlook on life. They even imitate and reflect your most typical gestures.

Self-love in this hall of mirrors is the most intoxicating and addictive form of infatuation. The relief of having found your carbon copy soulmate and long lost twin is irresistible and overwhelming.

It is during this window of vulnerability that the narcissist, psychopath, borderline, or histrionic strike: abuse you, torture you, steal from you, humiliate, deceive, betray, cheat, badmouth and smear, or dump you.

Usually, all the above.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Instances of casual sex will explode after the pandemic is over. But too much casual sex can impair your ability to associate sex with intimacy: if you do it with strangers often enough, your own partner is rendered just another stranger, a statistic. One night stands become the norm and how you think about sex. Habits mold our neuroplastic brain. Meaningful relationships become impossible in a world of meaningless, physical, often drunk sex: you bond to your mate in every way, except sexually. People under age 35 - the generations of hookups and dating apps - are already experiencing this self-inflicted disability whenever they try to have a more significant liaison.

Here are some psychosexual rules to follow to mitigate this risk:

1. Never spend too much time with your casual sex partner before you hit the sack. Time shared engenders attachment and intimacy and transforms what should have been a harmless one-off experience into a more meaningful variant, replete with budding emotions (such as affection or even gratitude). Confronted with these mixed signals, our brains react by linking casual sex to intimacy. Henceforth, you will pursue intimacy only in bars and via occasional romps. Bad idea.

2. Exclude certain sex acts and reserve them only for your loved ones. Don't do absolutely everything with everyone, promiscuously or indiscriminately. Refuse to realize all the sexual fantasies of your casual sex partner. Maintain an island of uniqueness and exclusivity: your body should be used to tell your intimate partner how special he or she is to you. If there is nothing you haven't done before with total strangers or acquaintances - in which way can you make your mate feel chosen and unprecedented in your sex life?

3. Don't have too many one night encounters too often. Don't sever the neural pathways that connect sex to deep and abidingly profound intimacy. Do not overuse your sexuality off-handedly, transforming it into just another bodily function, a mere exchange of excretions, a form of masturbating with other people's genitalia. Do not debase sex to the point that you will think nothing of cheating on your partner or doing it when drunk, wasted, or stoned senseless. Respect yourself and be mindful of the trust issues (and real-life hurt and dangers) that a totally carefree, anarchic attitude to sex can create.

Casual sex can be fun once in a while and can restore one's sense of wellbeing and self-esteem. If it conforms to one's values and upbringing, it is ego-syntonic and not disruptive. There is nothing wrong with it inherently. But like everything else in life, overuse can be detrimental to your psychological health and to your ability to nurture a future connection with that other special person. You can overdose on casual sex. Recent statistics show that young men have 6 and young women a little over 4 such encounters a year. Women are catching up to men. This is way too much. It is toxic.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Life can never be meaningful without meaningful interpersonal relationships, especially with intimate partners or significant others, including friends. Narcissists, psychopaths, histrionics, and borderlines are incapable of having such profound connections, each disorder for its own psychodynamic reasons.

Consequently, even in the best of times and when they are goal-focused, the lives of these people are aimless, diffuse, derealized, depersonalizes, confabulated, and dissociative. They meander and wander and stumble through their lives as if they were on a stage set, sempiternal, disinterested, and mildly curious observers of the comings and goings.

Often they end up hurting and traumatizing others more by their absence than by their presence. Lacking object constancy, their "nearest and dearest" are out of mind when they are out of sight. Splitting helps them to justify egregiously immoral, antisocial, harmful, and hurtful misconduct: if your partner or friend is suddenly all bad, intentionally frustrating, persecutory, and evil - surely whatever you do to him or her is in self-defense.

In his unsurpassed masterpiece, "The Mask of Sanity", Cleckley suggests that meaningful relationships "influence to consistent, purposive behavior". Studies - like Lisa Wade's - are demonstrating that the young have elevated meaninglessness to an item of faith: it is bad taste to attach to your sex partner and dating is down 50%, replaced by hookups. Problem is: meaninglessness is malignant and metastasizes to all other areas of life, including marriage (or partnership) and parenthood. It is a psychopathic fixture and goes hand in hand with "pseudologica fantastica" (pathological lying), as Dan Ariely had convincingly demonstrated.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The WHO announced that COVID-19 is growing exponentially. That is nothing short of a lie - or mindblowing innumeracy. If 1 person got infected (patient zero) and then passed it on to 2 others and they each infected two others, after 120 days there would have been 536,870,912 infected folks. Taking travel restrictions into account as well as social distancing, the number drops to 90,000,000. What we have instead are 500,000 affected. This is proof of a mathematical (linear) progression - not an exponential (geometric) one.

The WHO makes even more egregious assumptions: that the Growth Factor is 2-3 (every person infects 3 others) and the doubling time is 2-3 days, not 4. Adopting these outlandish assumptions, we would have had to import Martians and to infect them, too as we ran out of eligible humans.

There are many models in epidemiology: population simulations mainly. But the really advanced ones were ironically developed for Wall Street by quants: people like me who are both physicists and mathematicians. These models make use of bleeding edge math: chaos theory, catastrophe theory, fractals, SPDEs, lie algebras, and neural networks. No medical doctor or WHO staffer would even recognize the terms, let alone be adept at making use of these astoundingly accurate tools. I studied medicine: the math in medical school is college level at best.

What these instruments tell us is that the pandemic is largely over. What we are witnessing now is the tsunami crest of past infections, owing to the inordinately long incubation period of this particular variant of SARS. We are looking at the rearview mirror or at distant star light.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Abusers control their victims by rendering their lives meaningless and inconsequential. The prey adopts the abuser's point of view: "You are nothing without me, unworthy trash, bad, sad, and mad". This kind of perpetual rejection and hurt often renders the abuser's judgment a self-fulfilling prophecy: CPTSD survivors are typically indistinguishable from patients with Borderline Personality Disorder in their impulsivity, recklessness, promiscuity, substance abuse, mood lability, and emotional dysregulation.

Exposed to the abuser's grinding and relentless devaluation, his "intimate" partners and (in)significant others resort to vengeful and demonstrative self-trashing intended to hurt the perpetrator by debasing his "property" often in humiliating public displays of infidelity and drunkenness or by committing antisocial, even criminal, acts.

With these self-destructive actions, the victim is protesting: "You say that my life is meaningless? I am going to make myself meaningful to you via your pain, by harming you, and by traumatizing and provoking you!"

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Another 2-3 weeks and the pandemic will be over. And then we will start facing the REAL problems.

First, how do we know who carries the virus and who doesn't? Even people who had recovered from COVID19 may harbor a viral load. Many are asymptomatic and presymptomatic. Children and animals are perfect vectors of transmission and reservoirs. We have no idea if the virus is endemic (like flu) or will mutate into oblivion (like SARS and MERS). We don't even know if it is susceptible to ambient temperature and humidity (seasonal). A vaccine will be available in 2 years as a minimum. Anticipate a chilling effect on sex, social gatherings, parenthood, schooling, workplaces, public transport, tourism, and all other forms of human contact.

The economy will recover in 2 quarters due to packages of unprecedented fiscal stimuli and reckless monetary expansion. But human societies and relationships will never be the same. The real pandemic will involve soaring post-traumatic mental health problems coupled with paranoid and agoraphobic self isolation and anomic atomization. Technology and climate change (for example: rising sea levels) will exacerbate all these trends until we either disintegrate into the zombie apocalypse - or, in a backlash, reboot our civilization to render it less narcissistic and less psychopathic. It is an opportunity to make our choice: as a species, we are running out of time.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Narcissists and Borderlines compensate with hypervigilance, paranoid and persecutory ideation, and hypermnesia for their all-pervasive dissociation and identity diffusion.

People with these disorders "lose time" (have biographical memory gaps), but recall to perfection and in the minutest details every slight, offense, transgression, threat, and challenge, real or imagined. They bear and hoard treasured grudges. The narcissist is attempting to avoid narcissistically injurious attacks on his grandiosity and the borderline is trying to anticipate and preempt abandonment and rejection, on the one hand, or engulfment and enmeshment, on the other hand.

It is possible that the discontinuities in memory and personal biographical data are the outcomes of such inordinate investment in fight or fight responses. When we focus on an outside menace, we tend to dissociate: this is the case even when we watch horror movies!

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

We don't need any additional humans: at 8 billion, we have reached the planet's maximum capacity to sustain us. Birth rates have declined precipitously across the world, with contraceptives and abortion as means of birth control. The majority now marry very late or not at all. Procreation is dead as we transition to the age of solitary recreation.

Most of our social institutions were rendered obsolete by this tectonic shift. There is no further need for marriage, monogamy, sexual exclusivity, family, parenting, love, intimacy, long-term relationships, and non-casual, emotionally meaningful sex.

Gender roles have been effectively abolished as men and women act and think exactly the same way, disparate genitalia notwithstanding.

Since we don't need to procreate, there is no reason to cohabit, bond, or form attachments. Technology rendered us utterly self-sufficient. Casual sex is an ample solution, soon to be replaced by humanoid sex dolls and holographic porn. The very concept of society is antiquated: it was meant to provide a safe environment for raising children and for the transfer of wealth to future generations. The individual is now the only viable organizing principle. Hence the all-drowning tsunami of grandiosity and dysempathic egotism that is sweeping across the globe indiscriminately.

Indeed, language itself has to adapt. There is no future without children: only an everlasting carpe diem hedonistic present. No wonder mindfulness is all the rage.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

My newest video is about social isolation and distancing with the narcissist: https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

Social isolation with the narcissist is a hostage situation: intermittent reinforcement leads to trauma bonding and the Stockholm Syndrome.

The pandemic challenges the narcissist's grandiosity. The narcissist displaces his need for control onto his spouse or intimate partner.

It is difficult to obtain scarce narcissistic supply in a pandemic, so the narcissist reverts to his partner and when she frustrates his insatiable appetite, he becomes aggressive: sexually demanding or withholding, physically violent, verbally and psychologically abusive, gives her the silent treatment and even threatens her. "Background Noise" is the only technique that works in these circumstances.

Abuse and abusive relationships with narcissists and psychopaths

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/abuse.html

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/abusefamily.html

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I regard sex by women and men as fundamentally different experiences. "Penetration" is an aggressive male chauvinistic word that refers to the woman as a territory to be probed, invaded, and conquered. Men are as much engulfed and "digested" by women as they pierce them.

With the single exception of rape, the woman has to invite her sex partner in, welcome him warmly, bathe him in her unique libation, and guard his liquid manhood in herself. She is a host, he is a guest in her shrine.

Even in casual sex, the woman gives access to her essence, from the inside. Even a one night stand implies a modicum of intimacy, closeness, naked vulnerability, and total trust between the woman and her sex partner. At least as much friendly confidence as between a hostess and her guest who she invites to the most shielded private recesses of her home.

This is why cheating by his female intimate partner is such a disproportionately devastating blow to the cheated heterosexual man from which he never fully recovers. Women are far less impacted by the sexual-physical aspects of their partner's infidelity precisely because the anatomy is different: when a woman gives consent it is more pronounced, explicit, proactive, significant, and, well ... deeper.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

COVID-19 is shaping up to be a war of the quarantined but defiant young against the doomed old who egotistically are absconding with their youth.

In scenes not seen since the Black Death, protean, self-assembling, flash mob teenage gangs break curfew and maraud the streets, damaging property, coughing and spitting in the faces of passersby, and spreading saliva and secretions on surfaces.

Travel and movement restrictions, voluntary and mandatory, are likely to remain in place after the pandemic over, in 2-3 weeks. This abnormal state will engender inter-generational tensions and conflicts akin to the post World War I and Vietnam eras. But these ineluctable fissures will be amplified to the social breaking point by technologies such as social media. Expect a plethora of Manson families this time around: the age of the Clockwork Orange is dawning.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

More and more financially emancipated women mimic psychopathic men, adopting both their misbehaviors and their traits. A curious gender inversion seems to be occurring: men are assuming hitherto feminine roles and reactive patterns.

For example: judging by numerous reports from the crowded clinics of couple therapists, men are now more sex averse ("frigid") than women (they compensate with porn), they are more romantic, and are more likely to be infatuated and to suggest to transition to a committed relationship after a bout of casual sex (women overwhelmingly decline such overtures for further contact after one night stands). Many men are stay at home dads as women become primary breadwinners.

Women are catching up to men in the frequency of cheating on their intimate partners and the number of one night stands, especially when these involve drinking or other forms of substance abuse.

In many places, more women than men frequent singles bars and dives and women are surging on dating apps where three quarters of them admit to scouting for anonymous sex partners or infidelity accomplices. Women sue for 73% of all divorces.

The floodgates are wide open: in a unigender world, gender roles are fluid and often inverted. Gender vertigo ensued followed by male avoidance in a misogynistic manosphere (MGTOW, red-pillers, incels)

This is part and parcel of a bigger trend: the ascent of aloneness. More and more people of both genders - since 2016 in the West, at least, the majority - choose to live alone: they find their own exclusive company irresistible. Technology rendered us utterly self-sufficient, so why be bothered with the quirks, moods, emotions, and expectations of others? Procreation, marriage, and family are phased out. Sex is gradually displaced by porn and occasional casual masturbation with other people's bodies. When it comes to relationships, the prize is just not worth the price.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Today I came across the first truly worrying news in this entire pandemic: a newborn baby died in the USA of COVID-19. If this baby had no underlying conditions (comorbidities), it is a seriously scary development because it implies that the virus is mutating in vivo and possibly recombining with a flu virus. Similar feats have been "achieved" in labs in the USA (2011) and elsewhere. Several impeccably healthy adults in the 50s had also died, suggesting that perhaps a new strain is at work.

Newborns have only the bare rudiments of an immune system. SARS Cov-2 (the COVID-19 culprit) is essentially an autoimmune virus: it provokes the immune system - even if it is already depleted - into an overdrive known as hyperinflammation.

Certain types of immune cells - like cytokines - end up attacking the body's own tissues and, in elderly and immunocompromised patients, they cause death (cytokine storm). The reason younger folks have higher survival rates in this pandemic is because their immune system is still under construction.

For the virus to have decimated a healthy newborn, it must have mutated or merged with another nasty. Bad news all around: equipped with the formidable arsenal of even the common flu, we stand no chance. A Spanish flu like pandemic will ensue. In 1918-20 about 50-100,000,000 died. This time, the toll in human lives will be closer to a billion. Why? Because in our narcissistic panic, we universally quarantined and self-isolated and thus failed to develop the only true protection against the propagation of this virus: herd immunity.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The pandemic is over in Italy and the UK. Another 10 days and it will level off. It is still going strong in Spain and the USA, but even there, it will last 3-4 weeks at most. Its petering out has nothing to do with quarantines and social distancing and everything to do with the typical dynamics of a self-limiting virus of the SARS family. As usual, we have been fighting the last war and shooting ourselves in both feet simultaneously.

Ironically, we have been ready for this virus. All our institutions have crumbled in the past two decades: family, neighborhood, community. We all became schizoid loners whose sole human contact is the occasional impersonal encounter of casual sex. The only social left in our lives were social media, our only friends were strangers on Facebook, and dating survived only in apps. Social distancing was a fact of life: the virus stood no chance of propagating anyhow.

This pandemic also exposed other structural weaknesses in what was left of our civilization: our narcissistic preoccupation with our bodies, extreme risk aversion, inter-generational lack of solidarity or even conflict, distrust of authorities, media, and experts, our malignant, technology empowered self-sufficiency. Income inequality will skyrocket with big businesses as the only survivors of this cataclysm and entrepreneurs, small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and the self-employed going out of business.

We were already crumbling: the virus just shined a bright and transient light on our incremental demise as a cooperative, intelligent species.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

If anyone is to blame for the mass panic that swept across the globe, it is the medical profession. It failed us beyond words in providing a measured, reasoned, proportional, and analytical response to this health crisis.

Yesterday, the White House's coordinator, Dr. Birx suggested in a public statement that 200,000 people might die in the USA (based on the flimsiest of evidence and on undisclosed mathematical models not available for peer review and scrutiny). Dr. Fauci of NIAID is not far behind in his coast to coast alarmism.

The world renowned epidemiologist Lipsitch published an academic paper (with others of equal stature) suggesting, with a straight face, that social distancing was a successful measure in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. To remind you: 100,000,000 died on that unhappy occasion. Isn't such a slaughter more indicative of the dismal failure and dangerous nature of quarantines and universal isolation - rather than its alleged and untried efficacy?

Other leading luminaries, or rather self-aggrandizing panic merchants - like Osterholm, the self-imputed "virus doctor" - are making the talk show rounds, strutting their stuff: they are some of the very same people who erred egregiously by predicting 1,400,000 dead in both the SARS (2002-3) and the Ebola pandemics and the need for 500,000,000 vaccines immediately, or else.

So, what is going on? Fear of failure and its attendant humiliation ("not on my watch"), better safe than sorry, the intoxicating novel experience of the limelight and mini-celebrity, and terror of the devastating consequences of litigation run amok.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There are 8 strains of SARS Cov-2 (the COVID-19 virus). Is it going to mutate and kill us all? Exceedingly unlikely. HIV (the AIDS virus) has been around since 1931 and has mutated only in 1971. Even so, it infected 75,000,000 and killed 32,000,000 people. Like SARS Cov-2, HIV is a zoonotic virus (zoonosis: transmitted from animals to humans). Such viruses account for 60% of all human illnesses and 75% of new emerging infections.

To study mutations in genetic epidemiology, we sequence genomes and construct phylogenetic trees.

SARS Cov-2 is a very big RNA virus: with 30,000 nucleotides, it is twice as big as the flu agent. But it mutates only twice a month (flu: once or twice a week). Flu circulates among pigs and birds which serve as in vivo labs for mutations.

SARS Cov-2 has two secret weapons: 1. Spikes which allow it to latch onto the ACE2 protein receptor throughout the respiratory system, upper and lower; and 2. Furins: binding proteins that pierce into the patient's tissue like sharpened knives(anthrax has the same lovely feature)

Ironically, vaccines and medicines exert selective pressure on viruses: they mutate to offer resistance and only the strongest survive the onslaught. Antibiotic resistance has already rendered one third of our antibiotics useless.

The fear is that SARS Cov-2 will undergo an antigenic shift and combine with another virus, far more virulent and transmissible, also allowing it to cloak itself invisible to the immunological system.

Antigenic drift (its current state) is actually likely to reduce its effectiveness (as it did to SARS and MERS). Big viruses are less likely to undergo drift and more like to recombine with other pathogens.

Still, the good news is: immunity acquired is likely to last for years as the virus changes only minimally. This is why universal quarantine and social distancing are huge mistakes: they prevent the emergence of herd immunity. Measures targetted only vulnerable populations would have forestalled much of the tragedy now unfolding.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The narcissist has 3 essential demands from his partner and companion, 3 Ss: Sex, Supply, Services. If she provides any 2 of these 3, he is pacified and ignores her: she is a captive and he is indifferent to her emotions, needs, and wishes. He takes her silent, acquiescing presence in his life for granted: an inert, lifeless, and objectified or even mummified fixture. The narcissist acts similarly towards a frustrating partner who provides only 1 or none of the 3 Ss: by withdrawing and disinvesting, absenting himself and cutting off all meaningful communication.

In both cases, the narcissist reacts with extreme abuse and rejection to any attempt to invade or control his personal space or time. To attract his attention and gain access to him, the partner needs to escalate, dramatize, render unpredictable, and exaggerate her behaviors.

Many partners react to this apathetic negation of their being by self-trashing (for example: by drinking to oblivion and having unprotected sex with a lowlife stranger, falling into bad company, self-harming with drugs or otherwise, or by engaging in other reckless and self-destructive behaviors)

The aim of these maneuvers is to communicate distress: "By ignoring and rejecting me, you are hurting me so much that I want to destroy myself. I hope the pain I am causing you now will be sufficiently potent to pierce the veil, to make you care about me, to penetrate your formidable firewall and stupor. I am also furious at myself for having trusted you, for having been so naive and gullible to fall for your manipulation. I deserve to be punished for this lapse in judgment."

Usually, only the threat of abandonment or actual loss can convey this harrowing and heartbreaking message. Overt, ostentatious, purposeful and weaponized cheating is the sole way open to the partner to get through to the neglectful and oblivious other.

Ironically, this escalated cry for help is rarely restorative and often irrevocably terminal and destructive: it dooms the relationship. Half measures like triangulation are useless: all out egregious in your face infidelity is the only efficacious wake up call. But it is a last hurrah.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Scholars like Cleckley and Karpman have noted 80 years ago that misandry and misogyny coupled with a profound and abiding fear of intimacy result in psychopathic (antisocial) behaviors in adulthood.

Such people form "intimate" relationships that are anything but: they are impersonal, dysempathic, transient, objectified, emotionless, noncommittal, defiant, defensive, entitled, and founded on destructive envious competition, deceit, contumacious counterdependency, and self-defeating recklessness. The parties are loth to share or to disclose vulnerabilities in such adversarial settings.

It is small wonder that as our civilization becomes more and more narcissistic, both men and women adopt and emulate grandiose psychopathic males as role models, gurus, and guiding lights.

But in a feat of reverse mental engineering, this paradigm change also entails a surge in inter-gender conflict and hatred: both misogyny and misandry are off the charts. The genders get together either to have casual, meaningless sex - or to tear each other down triumphantly and abusively, also via rejection, withholding, and hurtful extreme misconduct and betrayals.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Vaccination is about advertently causing an artificial controlled pandemic in order to generate herd immunity. Once a sufficient number of people are immune, the virus finds it difficult to propagate and even those who are not immune (free riders) are safe.

As long as the virus is successful, it is under no selective pressure to mutate and evolve. So, the best strategy is to rapidly obtain herd immunity: if we do it gradually, we force the virus to alter and improve its arsenal to get to as many people as it can before it is too late for it to replicate.

Presumably, a warmer or more humid weather should have a restraining effect on the pandemic. Spring and summer present an opportunity to allow the populations which are less vulnerable to get infected.

There are dozens of countries which implemented quarantine and social distancing measures only very recently. These are the countries with moderate to high infection rates per million population - but by far the lowest death rates: China, Israel, Russia, Sweden, North Macedonia, USA, UK, Brazil, and most of Africa, Latin America and Asia, refugee camps everywhere. Luckily for humanity, quarantines and social distancing are luxuries that the only the self-indulgent and navel gazing West can afford.

Coronavirus conferred immunity typically lasts from a few months to a few years: reinfection is unlikely, though possible. Viral clearance is universal: there are no measurable viral load or shedding two weeks after full recovery (defined as two negative swabs). Fast serological tests are coming onstream and should guarantee that recovering patients and asymptomatic folks are safe to interact with. One needs to be in very close physical proximity with an infected symptomatic (aerosolizing) patient for at least 30 minutes to get infected.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There are three types of attention: 1. Synoptic: making connections between events and facts so as to create an emergent logical and explanatory narrative (connecting the dots); 2. Targeted: maintaining a laser focus on a few data to the exclusion of all else; 3. Inclusive: paying equal attention to people, happenings, and information without committing to a single theory or filter (no confirmation bias).

The narcissist is an obsessive-compulsive junkie: he is addicted to narcissistic supply and seeks it out relentlessly. He, therefore, manifests the second type of attention-giving. Only when he can leverage the other two variants to secure supply, does he express them, too.

Even when the narcissist is hyper-analytical and extremely intelligent, he is blinded by his urge to garner attention. He often remains oblivious to most amazing, bothersome, or shocking occurrences and information around him even when it is relevant to his safety or wellbeing. Like the autistic patient, the narcissist fails to read even the most blatant cues: sexual, social, body language, or communicative.

The narcissist is utterly disinterested in other people, in memories, places, nature, emotions, or in daily life. He instantly dissociates (appears to be bored or distracted) when confronted with these: he goes through a "synoptic failure". His perception is impressionistic and linear (random lists with no organizing principle or the connective tissue of a storyline) - not analytic (what the data possibly mean). This environmental obliviousness is reinforced by his need to buttress his grandiosity via reframing or ignoring hurtful info (a cognitive deficit which leads to an impaired reality test). The narcissist also refrains from actions whose outcomes are uncertain and may expose his weaknesses, vulnerabilities, nescience, or impotence. So, he ignores all info that may necessitate such reactions.

Of course, a constitutional failure to appreciate other people's actions and intentions renders the narcissist gullible, even naive: he is always shocked by what transpires around him and by the fact that his deeds and words have untoward consequences.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Watch any video on COVID-19 by Prof. John Ioannides of Stanford University. Detox yourselves!

The unwarranted panic was engendered by narcissistic doctors and leveraged by psychopathic politicians to grab power.

Misinformation is deliberately spread by unscrupulous doctors and increasingly more tyrannical authorities. Examples: the case fatality rate of SARS Cov-2 is the same as the flu virus, not higher - and asymptomatic carriers of the virus are not infectious.

As the pandemic proceeds apace, at least in the hysterical media, hospitals are becoming major vectors of transmission.

Shockingly, not a single randomized, double blind trial with a control group had been conducted on any population anywhere in the world: a reflexive first step in any pandemic when the authorities wish to reduce panic rather than fan and leverage it for tyrannical power grabs.

Doubts are also rising regarding the cause of death in many cases, especially with the elderly, the immunocompromised, and those with pre-existing conditions: was the virus just present in their bodies - or did it actually cause their demise?

And how many of the symptoms are psychogenic somatization (psychosomatic)? Shortness of breath and chest pains are symptoms of both anxiety disorders and respiratory distress in all patients with any of the zoonotic Coronaviruses!

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Women are newly emancipated slaves: mistreated as chattel property by men since the agricultural and urban revolutions thousands of years ago, they have rebelled and prevailed. But a collective psychology shaped over millennia cannot be undone or modified within a few decades: society and its agents - parents foremost - had brainwashed girls and inculcated in them rigid, stereotypical gender roles, replete with coping and survival strategies in a male-dominated world.

Women were conditioned to make use of the surreptitious weapons of the weak: to manipulate; undermine passive-aggressively; feign weakness, clinging, and codependent neediness; and extort economic benefits, often by triangulating or by getting pregnant.

Having acquired civil rights and economic prowess, women lacked a credible behavioral-social model to introject and follow. Instead, they started to emulate and imitate male caricatures which comprise pronounced psychopathic features: dysempathic machoism, promiscuity, defiant reactance, recklessness, infidelity, antisocial conduct, and substance abuse. In a way, women are pathetically trying to be more men than men.

Such abrupt discarding of traditional gender roles in a unigender universe has led to gender vertigo, gender alienation, gender dysphoria, misogyny, misandry, and a tsunami of auto-eroticism (masturbation with porn, incest, and homosexuality, for instance). A decline in births to below the replacement rate and the collapse if inter-gender communication and institutions (family, marriage) and behaviors (dating, meaningless sex) followed ineluctably.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The psychopathic female (and to a lesser extent, narcissists of both genders) creates a crazymaking space, a vortex into which she sucks, in ever-increasing concentric circles, everyone around her. She abuses relationally: smears, cheats with your best friends or colleagues or with the spouses of such, manipulates by flirting or by begging for pity and sympathy (casting men in rescuer roles). She charms and beguiles, always the long-sought soulmate, a perfect resonance and fit, the other, long-lost half. Her sex is a fantasy in flesh. Demure and shy or extroverted and histrionic, she somehow introduces even the most reluctant into her chaos, without and within.

The role of the crazymaking space is to provide an optimal environment for the expression of the psychopath's grandiosity and sadism as well as for the attainment of her goals (power in all its forms). It is a theatre set, a stage upon which she enacts her antisocial amorality plays with everyone in her life as props. Without remorse or empathy, she mercilessly and relentlessly metes out just deserts: rewards and punishments. She acts mechanically, fearlessly, impulsively, and with determination, like an inexorable automaton, a force of nature.

In a way, culturally conditioned as we are to regard all women as weak and ineffectual, well-meaning and maternal, the female psychopath is far more nefarious, pernicious, subterranean, and dangerous than her male brother. She is subtle, passive-aggressive, and surreptitious. She stealthily undermines the foundations rather than overtly bombard the citadel. The male psychopath's thespian capacity is hampered by his narcissism: he feels humiliated by the very need to pretend and act, manipulate and supplicate. Not so the female of the species.

Before you know it, your life and health are gone, your mind is traumatized beyond repair, exposed as you were to the soft pulchritude of almost alien Evil reified.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I can accept and tolerate - and have countenanced in dozens of intimate and work relationships - cheating, betrayal, and abuse when they do and did not involve attempts to deceive me, cover up misbehavior, or misrepresent facts and events.

When you lie to me, you are challenging my grandiosity: in my mind, I am omniscient (all-knowing). To prevaricate implies that you think that I am stupid and gullible enough to believe your nonsense: your feeble and futile confabulations constitute a narcissistic injury. I am driven into rage and vindictiveness by such manifest dishonesty. I immediately absent myself from the relationship, one way or another.

Perhaps this has to do with the fact that I am delusional and my reality testing is shot: I know how easy it is to pull the wool over my eyes. I am so focused on securing narcissistic supply that I screen out even the most blatant reminders of the traitorous misconduct of significant others. It sometimes takes me months to realize what had happened: that I had been conned, stabbed in the back repeatedly, or subjected to egregious ostentatious infidelity which I actually witnessed! Triangulation is hopeless in my case because I never notice it!

Less typically, I never lie. This has nothing to do with my non-existent morality and everything to do with my grandiosity.

Lying requires a sustained effort: first to come up with a plausible false narrative (external consistency) and then to recall it and retell it (internal consistency). I am so vastly superior to everybody else that I deem no one worthy of such exertions. I also enjoy sadistically inflicting pain on others with my brutal honesty. It is a great and wounding fun to be always truthful - and a lot less taxing than lying.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The histrionic narcissist disastrously misjudges the nature, depth, extent, and longevity of his intimate relationships, as well as the motivations and expectations involved: he overperceives the former, underperceives the latter.

He idealizes his partner, but it comes with a steep price tag: the narcissist is unforgiving. He monitors errors, weakness, and failures like a hawk, eager to capture his mate in flagrante. He is not supportive, not there when most needed because he regards self-insufficiency as deplorable meekness and actionable inadequacy. The narcissist capitalizes gleefully and sadistically on any misstep to erode his companion's self-esteem and undermine her self-confidence. Using unrelenting intermittent reinforcement, he becomes the sole regulator and arbiter of her self-worth.

The narcissist pushes his (in)significant other to the limit, but never beyond it - unless and until he wants to discard her owing to her unacceptable demands on his time, money, or liberty. He is finely tuned in his abuse and subtly calibrated as long as his partner is of any use and provides at least 2 of the 3 essential Ss: Sex, Supply, Services.

The personality pathologies of the narcissist's partner resonate with his. A mentally compromised individual lacks boundaries and opens her core to an idealized white knight in shining armor: a rescuer, savior, and healer. Only to find out to her utter devastation that the gift has been a Trojan Horse all along.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Identity diffusion or disturbance is an aspect of Borderline Personality Disorder: shifting - often diametrically opposed - values, opinions, beliefs, plans, preferences, wishes, commitments, and priorities.

I maintain that both the narcissist and the Borderline possess a rich fantasy life that impinges on the cohesion and temporal consistency of their core identity: if you can be anybody at all - you are nobody in particular.

The narcissist's fantastic grandiosity relates exclusively to himself but he idealizes and devalues others. So does the borderline, whose delusions revolve solely around others.
Out of touch with her inner objects, the Borderline is frequently overwhelmed by her emotions. She feels as if she is drowning in a sudden tsunami (dysregulation). Most Borderlines learn to bury their emotions under an avalanche of facts, actions, and events.

Instead of FEELING - they ACT. They keep busy in order to keep the thoughts - the inner noise - away.

The Borderline tackles her threateningly immersive "flayed skin" environment in two ways:

1. She suppresses her emotions and goes numb, avoidant, or withdraws altogether; or

2. She acts out: go wild, reckless, unpredictable, promiscuous, and defiant.

As the Borderline gets older, she grows calmer and settled. But then she feels "dead" because she designs her life - her job, for example - to accomplish exactly that: zero titillation and no potentially triggering stimuli.

Years of chaos and waste render the Borderline terrified of her savage dark side. She constricts her existence and impoverishes it in order to keeps in the straight and narrow.

The Borderline's intimate partners abandon ship because they feel that she is not there, there is nobody home, just an emptiness. Coupled with the Borderline's unending drama and egregious hurtful acts, it takes an extreme codependent to survive such a relationship.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

We base our perceptions and understanding of others on intersubjectivity and empathy – mentalism, a theory of mind, placing ourselves in other people's shoes. But it is a speculative system founded almost entirely on trust: it is based on honest reporting by others of their inner (mental) states and on the correlations of these self-reports to observable actions and behaviors. Dishonest self-reporting leads to discrepancies with observables which engender disorientation and induce our dysfunctional responses.

People with Cluster B (dramatic or erratic) personality disorders consistently mislead and misrepresent their psychological self-states, emotions, and cognitions. This prevarication has to do with identity diffusion or disturbance; dissociative amnesia; confabulation; and manipulative lying and gaslighting.

Consequently, there is no point in trying to grasp, analyze, comprehend, retrodict, or predict these personalities. They do not possess a stable core. They are either subjected to and at the mercy of the labile and dysregulated whims of their moods or emotions - or no longer with us, steeped in delusions of grandeur within fantastic landscapes (pseudo-psychotic impaired reality testing) - or lying through their teeth.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Participating in a Webinar organized by The Talks: The Psychology of COVID-19 - Implications for mass and individual psychology and health.

May 16, 2020, 10:00 AM CST

https://www.thetalks.com/webinar/impact_psychology_health

Watch my videos on COVID-19 here: https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The process of idealizing a potential or an actual source of narcissistic supply ("intimate partner") is coupled with the Hall of Mirrors Effect.

When the narcissist's mate perceives her reflection in his carnival attraction, it does not amount to the creation of another self.

The narcissist idealizes his source of secondary supply ("intimate partner") and then grants her access to his Hall of Mirrors, where she beholds this idealized image of herself.

This allows her to experience unconditional self-love (possibly for the first time in her life). It is akin to re-parenting. In the first two years of life, parents idealize and reflect the child via unconditional love.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There is a marked decrease in dating (-50%) and relational sex and a pronounced increase in the frequency of casual stranger sex. Recently, I posted two lengthy videos about promiscuity and casual sex. I left three issues to be explored in a future feature:

1. The proliferation of sublimatory channels.

Sexual energy (a manifestation of the libido, the life force) can be converted and directed into other, socially conformist, venues, like artistic creativity or politics.

Modern technologies have empowered us and granted us access to so many new or hitherto inaccessible activities that sex had been pushed to the bottom of the list. Simply, we are too busy to copulate and sex has to compete with other equipotent distractions and diversions.

2. The male brain perceives pornography as the real thing. The female brain similarly reacts to erotic and chic lit. This renders sex with a flesh and blood partner a poor, logistically fraught substitute best avoided except as a last resort.

3. As both men and women became way more narcissistic or even psychopathic and as the numbers of broken and damaged victims and survivors of abuse proliferated, the pool of eligible acceptable partners shrank dramatically. People are more demanding, self-centred, dysempathic, grandiose, defiant, impulsive, incapable of attachment and bonding, leery of intimacy, and less prone to compromise.

The effort and performance required today in establishing and maintaining a viable longish-term dyad far outweigh and outstrip anything expected in the past. Breakups, divorces, and infidelity are stratospherically high - so, why bother? The prize is no longer worth the price and it is all for one night, anyhow.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When forced into true intimacy and a firm demand for reciprocity, some narcissists experience erectile dysfunction (ED) or premature ejaculation.

Such non-virile malfunctions are the discernible outcomes of their performance anxiety and the challenge to their grandiosity engendered by an equal partner in an egalitarian state: between the sheets, we are all the same.

The narcissist expects women to be awed, inspired, entertained, and be irresistibly attracted by his impersonal performance in other settings (such as the workplace). This is vicarious courtship, wooing by proxy, a non-romantic shortcut in lieu of true attentiveness to his partner.

Spending time with a woman and investing persistence, intimacy, and succor in a budding relationship bore the narcissist to tears because he has to feign interest in another person, essentially a prop and a mute witness to his grandeur - and no one can conceivably be as interesting as he is. She must never be allowed to steal the limelight from him.

Narcissistic sex is becoming the prevalent form of mating in our contemporary dystopia of casual, anonynous, animalistic romps. Even when technically accomplished, it is either mechanical-clinical-perfunctory - or pyrotechnic and competitive. It is a spectacular decoupling of sex from any emotion and of courtship from copulation. It is a form of ritualized rape or at best mutual masturbation and involves only power and self-gratification.

As gender roles are gone and everyone emulate and imitate psychopaths and narcissists, unisex and unigender are fast becoming the twin scourges of the wasteland that our interpersonal relationships had become.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In apps such as TikTok and Instagram, youngsters are sharing with each other relationship advice the gist of which is: if you desire someone, you should play on their insecurities and gaslight them. Pure and simple.

These messages teach not only approach-avoidance as a conditioning technique but they also advise the young to fake emotions - never have genuine ones - and to separate sex from emotions.

According to recent studies (by Lisa Wade and others), among people under 25 the ONLY kind of sex is casual and emotionless (one night stands). Among people between 25-35 casual, meaningless, and largely anonymous sex is the dominant, main type of sex.

The young are so used to separate sex from love and intimacy that they are not having almost any sex with intimate partners!!! Sexlessness in committed relationship is the norm. Instead, they pick up strangers in bars or acquaintances and friends and they cheat: infidelity is at an all time high and the majority of people under 35 - both men and women - now cheat serially.

Actually, interpersonal relationships among the young are open in anything but name: the members of the couple let each other sleep with others occasionally (DADT- Don't Ask, Don't Tell)

I call it the "Intimacy Cloud": young men and women are sexually and emotionally intimate with multiple people all the time, even when they are married or in an otherwise supposedly monogamous dyad. They have emotional affairs and sleep with classmates, former lovers, besties, old flames, colleagues, and so on.

Approach-avoidance and triangulation - insecurity and jealousy - are the main relationship management tools among the young. But to make use of such instrument efficaciously, they must remain aloof and calculated: they cannot allow themselves to really love or desire anyone. Flat affect is de rigeur as are narcissistic and psychopathic traits and behaviors.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

As I was growing up, my mother had informed me - in sadistic words & life-threatening deeds - that I am unlovable, no one will ever love me.

It took me the rest of a long life to realize that she was wrong: I am inordinately lovable.

People feel affectionate towards me instantly & women get infatuated & care about me profoundly even at a distance, let alone face to face. They are bewitched by my mind & by my ability to understand their essence the way no one had ever done before.

When I - rarely - put my mind to it, I am superintelligent, irresistibly charming, hypersexed, insightful, & stimulating to be with. I have had the most incredible life. Some women also bond with the delightful, curious but deeply wounded child inside me.

Yet, not one person perseveres, no one sticks around: men won't collaborate with me after a while. Women are the worst: my life has been one extended & egregious torture by furious, frustrated, envious, & heartbroken females.

At first, they try their hardest to share a life with me. But invariably, all my intimate partners end up cheating on me openly (in my presence or they make sure to share the tiniest details afterwards) - or dumping me unceremoniously in favor of another man. There hadn't been a single exception in 26 serious relationships!

So, my mother must have had a typo: I am lovable, but not livable.

I treat people as functions, props, or objects. I extract from them the 3 Ss: sex, supply, services. I expect them to leave me in unhindered peace when they are not engaged in the performance of their duties. If they attempt to make demands on my time, attention, or resources, I become cruelly abusive, lash out & all but demolish them almost demonically. I am otherwise utterly self-sufficient, engaged in an addictive intercourse with by far the most intelligent and exciting person I know: me.

Other people I perceive as ineluctable nuisances, maintenance chores, background white noise. They are there to entertain me, serve me, and cater to my needs. And like The Help downstairs or a utility service provider, their presence should never be felt as they unobtrusively glide, ghostlike, in and out of my life.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Women are terrified of me. Literally. Even women who know me well and whose lives I have transformed for the better. Not long ago, a student I had agreed to meet appeared hours late, accompanied by her best girlfriend and ... a police detective for protection. I am kidding you not.

When I ask women why they are so mortified, they answer: "You are a psychopath and a narcissist, you are dangerous". How dangerous and in which ways remains vague, even to them. There is just a general feeling of acute menace in the air, entirely engendered by their fervid and ill-informed imagination.

But the very same women freely pick up complete strangers in bars, get drunk or high senseless, and end up alone in hotel rooms and apartments with these men. They trust them fully.

Many of these casual dates are seasoned predators. They could well be psychopaths and narcissists. Why are women NOT afraid of these unknown men - but paralyzingly scared of me?

Moreover, many women recoil in undisguised horror at my presence and then date, bed, and have intimate committed relationships with men they KNOW are abusers, criminals, junkies, or alcoholics. These men are not strangers to these women! They have a reputation for being violent, reckless, and antisocial that these women are fully cognizant of. Yet, they still invariably prefer these men to me.

I have been a student of irrational behavior for decades now. But this puzzle stumps me. These women are not choosing better men than I am. On the contrary: they are opting for far more abusive or dangerous men and usually also far inferior in most ways. And yet, they avoid me like the plague. Go figure.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Both Picasso and Einstein would have been considered abusers nowadays. With such a reputation, women would have shunned them, regardless of their genius or celebrity status. See Harvey Weinstein.

It wasn't always like that. In my youth, geniuses were allowed to mistreat other people, including and especially their intimate partners and nearest and dearest. The genius's infidelity, outbursts, moodiness, and absences were the price one paid for the once in a lifetime privilege of sharing a life with a luminary. It was both expected and accepted.

Today, physical appearance and a kind personality (real or feigned) are the two parameters that determine attraction. A towering intellect, an overabundance of talents, skills, and expertise are major turn offs and their bearers are derided, hated, suspected, and shunned. In these uncertain times, there is safety in mediocrity, similarity, and predictability. The irrational is comforting, the stupid congregate, the losers afford each other succor. Alpha winners are hunted, penalized, or avoided altogether, by both genders.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I am always 1000% upfront with my women: I provide them with a roadmap as to what they could and should expect. Few men, if any, are as explicit, as honest, and as self-disclosing as me at the beginning of a relationship.

But women REFUSE to believe me. They refuse to believe that such a heartless, robotic, emotionless being can have a human form AND they grandiosely expect to be the sole and first exception or to "fix" me.

In all critical aspects, I am not human, more like an artificial intelligence.

The problem I have is that I am trying to mate with another species, not my own: humans.

Women are terrorized and horrified by me not only because I am a psychopath. Many women can live with that.

No. They run away screaming to the waiting arms of the first man available because they find out that I am a reptile or a computer simulation or a robot with a brain who is about 10 times more potent than an average one (fact: I have 190 IQ). It is like being trapped in a futuristic sci-fi yarn with an alien life form, albeit carbon-based.

PS

Just to set the record straight: my work on narcissism actually has little to do with introspection.

I have a database of 1736 DIAGNOSED narcissists who responded to a 687 questions long questionnaire. It is by far the biggest in the world.

Long gone are the days that my work emanated from self-observation.

BUT

Women MISCONSTRUE my work as autobiographical. They wrongly apply to me everything they hear and read about narcissism, 99% of which is copied from my original work in 1995-9.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Pick-up artists (PUA) are communities of men, guided by self-imputed "experts" who purport to have found the exact sequences of buttons to push to get a woman to succumb and offer access to her body.

They fail to see the irony: like homebroken and trained puppies they jump through hoops held high by females and adhere religiously to a script written entirely by the fairer sex: "You want to sleep with me? You have to go through these motions and act clownishly for hours"

I have even less respect for self-disparaging and self-loathing incels who whine constantly and pathetically about being shunned by women and how they have a god-given right to sex, by force if need be (black pillers). Some of these misfits even undergo extensive cosmetic surgeries to fix their "facial deformities", a form if body dysmorphic insanity known as lookmaxing.

Red pillers are more benign: they claim only to have seen the light and the true nature of women as rapacious and psychopathic entities who leverage the institutions of society to their unbridled and dysempathic benefit.

The logical extension of this alleged power asymmetry is to avoid all committed relationships (casual sex is fine): enter MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way)

There is no question that traditional gender roles are dead and that sex has become merely a physical function, no longer associated with intimacy. Both men and women feel disoriented and overlooked in this maelstrom of gender vertigo.

It is also true that women are empowered and, having been only recently emancipated, are imitating the traits and behaviors of antisocial men. It is a veritably post-apocalyptic age for relationships and dating.

But the solution is not avoidance or manipulation. We need a new social contract between the bearers of disparate genitalia. And we need with our heads rather than with our nether organs.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When I post well researched video commentary on my YouTube channel, get numerous comments about my hair, my shirt, the nature of the drinks in my transparent glass.

This is a manifestation of Parkinson's law of triviality: people dedicate more time and heated energy to things they know well from personal experience than to deep and demanding topics that necessitate learning and critical thinking.

Everyone knows a lot about hair and shirts and water - but how many understand the intricacies of viral propagation?

This is a very disturbing truth. It means that most folks can be easily manipulated by juxtaposing a marginal but familiar topic with a crucial, life-altering one.

Most interlocutors or voters or decision-makers will pay attention and dedicate resources to the former - but largely gloss over the latter.

YouTube is deleting my videos on COVID-19. None of my videos contains any conspiracy theory and all the information is thoroughly researched.

But I dared disagree with the dogma of universal social distancing (as do many mainstream medical experts) and that is sufficient basis nowadays for heavy-handed, authoritarian censorship.

Youtube - a monopolistic utility! - could have added a disclaimer to flag videos it deems inaccurate, misleading, or dangerous. Instead, it chose the reprehensible path of the most unsavory regimes in human history: to muzzle dissent and digitally execute its bearers.

This may be the most lasting damage of this pandemic: the reversal of human and civil liberties hard-won over centuries. YouTube's egregious misbehavior is exactly what gives birth to conspiracy theories.

All my videos are still available here - spread this link: https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings

YouTube is falsifying the number of views on my video. Last night, between 10:53 and 03:57, the number of views remained at 7000, even as the likes exploded to more than 1000. i checked every 20 minutes. I fell asleep at 04:18, so not sure what happened afterwards. This morning, at 10:57 AM, the counter was on 9,360 views. In a typical night, all my new videos get at least 8,000 additional views. No doubt: YouTube is manipulating the statistics.

Go to my channel to see that videos with 1000+ likes typically have 20,000+ views: https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

Videos that are not widely watched do not get recommended and so are forgotten.

Similarly, YouTube deleted ONLY my COVID-19 videos with the HIGHEST view count, starting with the highest even though I have said the very same things in other, less popular videos.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

How to tell apart a one night stand with a stranger from a first date that ends with sex?

1. Casual sex is focused on the act and takes place after a brief chance encounter in a bar, pub, restaurant, club, dating app or site, a party.

Dating is more involved and time consuming: it requires coordination, spending time together, getting to know each other, and engaging in other activities, such as attending an event, dancing, or socializing.

2. Partners to a one night stand are selected mostly based on their looks or physical attractiveness, often fuelled by alcohol ("beer goggles"). Personality matters only in date sex. In casual sex people end up in bed because they turn each other on. In dating, they end up having sex because they fascinate or like each other or for some other emotional or transactional reason ("owing" the other, for example).

3. One night stands may result in one more encounter, but rarely lead to a relationship. Dating sex morphs into more much more often.

4. Casual sex evokes instant diffuse, weak, consistent, body-focused, and stable emotionality: gratification relaxation, comfort, a general "feel good" fuzzy factor. There is no psychological intimacy, just the physical kind.

Emotions and intimacy in dating start low. They are hesitant and diffuse in the first few minutes. They coalesce, focus, become clearer, and intensify with hours spent together to the point of communicating positive feelings - anything from gratitude to affinity to infatuation - via sex.

5. One night stands with strangers are unambiguous: the acquaintance with the partner is so brief, cursory, superficial, and forgettable that it borders on anonymity.

Date sex comes after getting to know the partner substantively over hours of talking and interacting with him or her in various settings and sometimes with other people. The acquaintance is much deeper and consequently the sex is less perfunctory or emotionless.

6. Finally, in casual sex, the transition from hanging out together to full-fledged sex is abrupt and transactional: the parties waste little time on banter and are focused on the gratification.

In dating, courting and signalling precede the sexual act, which is a culmination of fondness and intimacy, however minimal.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When intimate partners cheat on each other, they ease their conscience and allay their guilt and shame via a "deceitful confession": coming clean about certain facts and circumstances while altering, minimizing, or denying outright the more egregious misconduct, the core of the transgression.

The aim is utterly selfish: to unburden the offender but without hurting his significant other with exclamation like "what s/he doesn't know won't hurt her/him" or "what happened there, stayed there, it was totally meaningless and I will never see this person again"

Examples of deceitful confessions:

I just (danced with him, kissed her), but it stopped there, I got hold of myself, nothing else happened

We got drunk, so we slept overnight in a hotel room, that's all.

I spent the night at his apartment, but he is an old friend, like a brother to me.

I stumbled and fell all over her, so we started talking and we have common friends. I am meeting her to have a quick bite.

Deceitful confessions make matters worse. They only amplify the emotional damage made to the intimate partner and the wreckage in the relationship.

Why engage in acts that are evidently massively injurious to someone you claim to care about and love - if these misdeeds are so meaningless to you and so casual that they can be glossed over so effortlessly? If the sex with another person was so forgettable, why not forget about it to start with?

But of course in an age of ubiquitous narcissism and psychopathy, self-gratification trumps impulse control and one's needs, however trivial, invariably take precedence over another's wellbeing, however profound.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Rashomon Effect is named after a Kurosawa 1950 film in which multiple witnesses to a rape provide diametrically opposed descriptions as to the sequence of events.

The Rashomon effect is the reason we get obsessed with and fixated on traumas, we ruminate ceaselessly and have intrusive thoughts, revisiting the pain and hurt time and again, with no end in sight, picking at scabs and wounds. In a desperate attempt to make sense of the traumatizing person or behavior or period, to gain emotional relief and liberating insight, the victim keeps revisiting the scene, deconstructing, reframing, and reconstructing it, rendering it in the process a kaleidoscope of mutually exclusive and conflicting narratives.

Abusers rarely provide closure and are deceitful, seeking to further the harm they had already caused by sowing uncertainty with counterfactual statements and lies. They gaslight and manipulate and drive the injured party deeper into the "what if or if only" rabbit hole of self-doubt, guilt, and shame, thereby regaining control over her and ascertaining outcomes beneficial to themselves.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I get a high-like rush from rejecting the sexual advances of women or from teasing them to the point of agonizing distraction. Shocking women this way is so potent that I prefer it to actual sex: the gratification I get from frustrating women, wounding them to the quick, disempowering them, and hurtfully undermining their self-esteem is more than orgasmic.

Richard von Kraft-Ebbing was the first to suggest (in his seminal tome, "Psychopathia Sexualis", published in 1886) that sadism amounts to deviant sexuality. There is sado-masochism as a sexual practice, of course.

In actual sex, I am mostly a sadist, though I avoid any physical injury to my female partner, I just force her to perform humiliating acts, thus objectifying her maximally.

But sadism can also be a form of sublimated (socially acceptable, diverted and channeled) psychosexuality. Devastating women by rejecting them is both sadistic and erotic and, on the surface at least, conforms to social behavioral conventions and mores.

According to the recent mega study "A Billion Wicked Thoughts", women cannot resist men who find them irresistible and treat them with affection - regardless of any other quality in the man or lack thereof. A man can be an ugly junkie loser dimwit and still bed a woman if he treats her as a princess and perseveres in passionate courtship. I make sure to deny women precisely these elements and then observe their disintegration, decompensation, and acting out with unmitigated sex-like pleasure.

I do the same to men and get the same high out of it, but, being heterosexual, with men it is merely a power trip: my ability to deny their most fervid wishes and humiliate them in the processes buttresses my grandiose omnipotence.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Conditional love is offered only when the love object takes certain actions or attains certain performance criteria. In contradistinction, pernicious or toxic love sends a mixed signal: "Only I love you because you are not lovable and you are better off dead"

Conditioned love connects love to certain acts and minimum accomplishments. Toxic love links love to pain, hurt, and self-eradication.

People exposed to intermittent love in early childhood bribe other people to secure their caring and succor. They become people-pleasers, codependents, histrionics, or narcissists. People who grew up with dual signaling (I love you - you are unlovable - kill yourself) end up being internalizing borderlines, schizoids, schizotypals, or externalizing psychopaths.

All these intimacy-challenged, intimacy-anorectic types have rejection sensitivity coupled with zero latency: no matter how emotionally invested they are in another person, the minute they anticipate or perceive rejection, they catastrophize and instantly switch off any emotions they may have had. They do not mourn or grieve and they immediately transition to a new love interest or friend, in some cases within minutes from the breakup.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Acquired - as opposed to congenital - aphantasia is the gradually developing inability to conjure up mental imagery in the mind's eye. Aphantasic people can think or conceive of an object - but never imagine it.

Narcissists are like that when it comes to other people. They have empathy aphantasia: they can analyze and understand others but never visualize them as multi-dimensional fellow humans. They have only cold (reflexive and cognitive) empathy but not the emotional resonance that normally goes with it.

So, narcissists fail to construct a mentalist theory of mind (a theory about how other minds operate). They are not privy to the intersubjective agreement: the unspoken correspondence between sentient human consciousnesses. They are like extraterrestrial observers who crashed on our planet, dazed and bemused by the native variety of intelligence.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The father of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, coined the term "anomie" to describe the atomization and normative decoherence of societies owing to unsustainable population growth. In anomic states, misbehaviors such as suicide and crime proliferate.

He neglected to mention that mentally disordered people thrive in chaos: their internal upheaval perfectly chimes in with and is optimally adapted to the external mayhem.

In eras of apocalypse, one frequently finds psychopaths gleefully contemplating the ruination of institutions and contributing to the demise of their own civilization. In decline and fall, antisocial individuals are defiantly euphoric, eerily content, and counterintuitively purposeful. No dissonance there - just resonance.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Psychopathic narcissism is a constant state of tension, a tug of war, between ferocious self-sufficiency and devout personal autonomy (lone wolf) on the one hand - and prostrate addiction to narcissistic supply and dependence on the people who provide it (sources), on the other hand.

Even the most rabid antisocial and the most grandiose fool end up succumbing to social pressures and pairing up to secure any 2 of the 3Ss: sex, supply, and services.

Often, the malignant narcissist strikes a compromise: to keep these unfortunate partners in his life, he turns a blind eye and allows them to engage in casual sex with others and to have love affairs (DADT - Don't Ask, Don't Tell). This way, he also maintains his leeway to act in any way he sees fit and prevents the partner from making demands and becoming a burden and a nuisance.

As long as 2 of the 3Ss are forthcoming, the partner is encouraged to outsource her emotional and physical-sexual needs.

The psychopathic narcissist is never romantically jealous but he reacts badly to cheating that may or does lead to abandonment. Grooming a new source of supply is an onerous and uncertain task and losing such a fount of mental sustenance is akin to losing a job or your neighborhood trustworthy pusher.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Many of you have been so wounded in the past that you do not trust yourself to make the right decisions anymore.

You let these bad advisors: anxiety, wariness, and even fear dictate your choices and decisions and constrict your life.

In modern society, we are narcissistically obsessed with avoiding hurt, pain, and death altogether or at least postponing them indefinitely.

But pain and death are the only two things, apart from love, that give life any meaning. They are the greatest teachers, the engines of personal growth and development.

Even depression is not such a bad thing. It is like trash collection: it is how we process inner debris.

We should not seek these negative emotions and experiences out - but we should welcome them with an open mind and, much more crucially, an open heart.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sexual inflation is when women offer unconditional sex with no strings attached. Such behavioral choice leads to a precipitous decline in committed relationships and a commensurate rise in casual sex.

Throughout the history of our species women traded access to their bodies as vessels of both sexual gratification and childbearing (pregnancy). Men provided, in return, proteins: as nutritional supplements (game meat they had hunted for), as sperm, and packaged in muscles. They guarded their women and children (really enslaved chattel) from incursions by other men.

Typically, men euphemistically relabelled this possessiveness "protection" and the whole unsavory arrangement "marriage". But nowadays as sex is freely and instantly available, men have little incentive to commit. Women are no longer dependent on men for any of the traditional functions.

The foundation of the inter-gender compact have crumbled, gender roles became fluid and fused (unigender), and this frustration led to aggression (radical feminism and the manosphere). Gender vertigo ensued: men and women are exceedingly wary of each other and repeated hurt and abuse perpetrated by both parties is driving most people to opt for an atomized, solitary, self-sufficient existence as a lifestyle choice.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The codependent and Borderline believe that, in an intimate relationship, both members of the couple need to CHANGE in order to become ONE, to fuse and merge into a single interdependent psychodynamic entity, a polychephalic bicellular organism.

But in a HEALTHY relationship, both parties REMAIN AS THEY ARE. They accept each other as two distinct, separate, and different people.

They bring into the relationship experiences and others from the outside. They do not feel threatened by personal autonomy: theirs and their partner's. On the contrary, they embrace it. Instead of abandonment anxiety they experience the anticipated joy of a functional togetherness. They do not chain and constrict each other but liberate one another.

True love is about letting go - as any good enough mother knows.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Two cognitive deficits conspire to entrap the gullible narcissist and render him prey to psychopathic women: his grandiosity and the Madonna-whore complex.

The narcissist divides all women to Madonnas (sexless homemakers like his mother) - and whores (promiscuous psychopaths or borderlines). When he comes across the latter subspecies of woman, he idealizes her as a homemaker and Ignores all the copious info that he possesses regarding each and every single one of her true attributes: defiance, aggression, dysempathy, promiscuity, substance abuse, a history of cheating, and more.

He counterfactually idealizes his chosen life partner as a SAFE HOMEMAKER - not as an IRRESISTIBLE SLUT.

He then convinces himself grandiosely that women - both Madonnas and whores - are smitten with him even when in reality they regard him as at best mere entertainment or useful at times, are very reluctant to meet him and to sleep with him, and are not attracted to or infatuated with him as a man.

Thus deluded, he falls victim to callous, cruel, perfidious, hostile, or goal-oriented women with cluster B personality disorders who traumatize him and take him to the cleaners.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Timetable for the pandemic: next 18 months. My predictions:

Restrictions worldwide - lockdowns and social distancing - will be lifted almost fully by June, but NOT as applied to international travel except on official business or commerce - and only by invitation and with a certificate (clean bill of health, COVID-19 free tested)

In October 2020 - March 2021, there will be a second very deadly wave of COVID-19. All restrictions will be reimposed globally.

We will begin to use Remdesivir (a medication that I recommended in my vid weeks ago). It will cure COVID-19, so restrictions will be again lifted. Vaccines will fail clinical trials repeatedly and will come on stream only in 2022.

Full international travel will be restored on June 2021.

My COVID-19 videos are available here: https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This pandemic renders all of us helpless, orphaned toddlers. The parental template is shattered: no one is there to answer our questions or tell us what to do. Experts and institutions alike display the same abysmal ignorance and are subjected to the same indignities as we are. We are forced to parent or reparent ourselves.

In this anomic environment, experienced schizoid loners, cyber nerds, digital natives, and adults who had been parentified in a dysfunctional childhood - are all advantaged. Digital socializing suits them and they thrive increasingly the more impersonal life becomes.

The mass and social media expose us to harrowing images and the outcome is a tsunami of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). Narcissists and psychopaths are best equipped to cope with such exigencies. Other mental health disorders - depression, paranoia, hypochondriasis (factitious), and anxiety - will become the new normal. Many people will shelter in place and socially distance for the rest of their natural lives as most Europeans did after the Black Death.

But, as relationships - starting with long distance ones (LDR) - disintegrate, an avalanche of bereaved and lonely hearts with descend upon dating apps and venues for casual sex pickups. Narcopaths will be there, lurking with open arms. The aftermath of COVID-19 will afford these miscreant predators a field day of vulnerable prey as the Spanish Flu did in its wake, in the 1920s.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I have been warning against an African famine of Biblical proportions in my COVID-19 vids (https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings). The main culprit: locusts. Or rather the disastrously misguided policy of social distancing which prevented farmers from spraying with insecticides the breeding grounds of this pest.

Now, swarms of 500 BILLION insects each (20-200 times larger than 70 years ago) have descended on East Africa, decimating all vegetation and crops. The UN's WFP (World Food Programme) is predicting 300,000 deaths A DAY, as 265 MILLION people starve. Black lives clearly DON'T matter.

Locusts are grasshoppers. The desert variety has been known to cover with a thick writhing carpet 20% of the surface of the Earth, in over 60 countries on 3 continents. About a tenth of Mankind perished in each and every one of these onslaughts. The size of each swarm is up to 460 square miles in size. It consumes about 200,000 TONNES of plants PER DAY. Swarms fly thousands of kilometers. In 1954 such a cloud from Africa coated Great Britain.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

WHO 2014 recommendations in case of influenza and Coronavirus pandemics:

NOT TO LIMIT TRAVEL, not to quarantine or social distance.

This is also the orthodoxy view in epidemiology, what they teach in medical schools all over the world.

Why did WHO mysteriously reverse its position 3 months AFTER the discovery of this virus, one of hundreds in the Coronaviruses family? What NEW information led to this controversial volte face?

https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/92/12/14-135590/en/

On March 14, I posted my first video dedicated to the COVID-19 pandemic. In it, I said that the disease’s actual death rate is between 0.7-1% of all cases (5-10 times the typical flu and 2-3 times in a bad flu season)

At that time, the WHO was talking about 2-3.5%. Ironically, Dr. Fauci himself had suggested a rate of 0.1% (identical to the flu) in an academic paper published on March 26 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The next day, he went on Comedy Central and announced that he believed that the actual death rate is 1%

A massive testing campaign study in Germany came up with 0.22%. Now, this smaller, but still significant study in New York yielded a death rate of 0.5-0.78%. The case fatality rate is much higher, of course, at 3-6%, depending on the country. About 20% of all resolved cases have died. These figures render COVID-19 far more deadly than the flu - but also a trifle less contagious.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There are fundamental differences between a shared psychosis (shared psychotic disorder) and a shared fantasy. Both involve at least two members.

Akin to a cult, in a shared psychosis there is an inducer or primary "leader" and an induced or secondary member. The inducer constructs the canonical and codified narrative and the codex of rules of conduct, including a list of transgressions and punishments. The induced members abide by these constructs and adhere to them. Banishment is typically the penalty for the most egregious violations of the compact.

The shared psychosis inculcates and promotes a paranoid theory of everything and an idiosyncratic lingo. It pertains to the group, its dynamics, its immediate environment (its external enemies), and making sense of the world at large.

A shared fantasy is a collaborative surrealistic narrative which involves two or more equipotent participants in a dream state. It comes replete with imaginary goals and emergent roles for everyone involved (usually, two people in a dyad). It refers strictly to the members, the attributes of their emotions (such as their identity or intensity), the inner dynamics, their utopian or dystopian future, and unrealistic plans to make it happen or to forestall it.

Many love affairs and certain types of sexual practices (BDSM, sadistic sex) amount to shared fantasies which incorporate attempt to recreate unresolved early childhood conflicts with parental figures and also to avoid true intimacy and realistic life goals.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Self-analysis, rumination, and intrusive thoughts (or obsession, in extreme cases) are often erroneously conflated.

Two simple tests to distinguish between them would be:

1. Am I focused on finding solutions (self-analysis) or on revisiting and re-examining problems and debacles from different angles which can have no bearing on my reality now or in the future (rumination)? If the answer is "neither" and you cannot switch off your cognitions, then you are dealing with intrusive thoughts.

2. Are the lessons I am trying to derive relevant to my life anymore (self-analysis) or am I engaged in a theoretical, retrospective, inapplicable exercise (rumination)? If your recurrent unpleasant and unwanted thoughts have nothing to do with learning or with behavior modification, they are obsessive or intrusive ones.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Albert Einstein wrote this quote. He represented the holistic school in physics. Holism has been battling reductionism in all human affairs: are we merely the sum of our parts?

Consider even sex. A partner's bodily organs - genitalia, a mouth - can be deployed for pleasure as mere masturbatory aides. Or they can stand for the delectable and irresistible entirety of a loved one. Identical mechanical experiences gain two radically disparate meanings, depending on whether the state of mind is reductionist (casual romp with a stranger) or holistic (love making with a significant other). One can even transition between the two states with the same person as the relationship deepens.

Or dinner. With a work colleague, the shallow focus would be on a sliver of life (professional, gossip, or a one night stand). This is reductionism. A romantic date would involve so much more! Holism in action: deeper resonant emotions, compounded expectations, values and beliefs, long-term goals. The entire person, in all his or her dimensions.

Or a conversation. Language or speech can be used to convey little and only factually - or to touch the soul. Reductionism, holism.

Modern science and medicine are utterly reductionist, concerned with fleeting moribund leaves in a dense and infinite forest. Missing and ignoring the big picture in favour of minutiae has been leading our species astray for centuries now, at least since Descartes.

The absence of polymaths and Renaissance men is a symptom of a malaise of intellectual sterility. The synergy afforded by true interdisciplinarity had become a lost art. Aesthetics and fecundity are sacrificed at the altar or efficacy and recursivity.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Palindromic speech is any kind of statement about facts or inner mental state that intentionally (often) or inadvertently (rare) creates confusion and disorientation in the listener. Gaslighting and lying are examples of crass and malicious palindromic speech acts. Confabulation and "word salad" (illogical, incoherent discourse) are benign variants intended to bridge dissociative gaps in memory or to buttress grandiosity.

Palindromic speech makes use of various semantic devices:

Referential shift (when the words refer to one thing while appearing to be referencing another);

Double entendre (word or phrase open to two, sometimes mutually exclusive interpretations or meanings);

Contextual drift (subtly altering the context of the conversation and thereby the message or the reality testing);

Manipulative speech (goal oriented utterances intended to impress or to accomplish aims, not to communicate);

Misattribution (proffering the wrong connections or links between alleged or ostensible motivations and intentions and actual actions, thus deflecting blame, for example or casting one's actions in the best possible light);

Circumstantial mitigation (an external locus of control and victim stance: events conspire to yield the misconduct, abrogating personal responsibility, a passive voice); and

Logical fallacies (such as post hoc ergo propter hoc - if B followed A it means that A caused B, correlation is causation, reference to authority, ad hominem attacks, and so on)

Palindromic speech is efficacious because of the base rate cognitive bias (people automatically fully believe 95% of what they are told, sight unseen) and because it mitigates the ineluctable hurt associated with truth-telling. It colludes with psychological defense mechanisms such as denial and with behaviors such as reframing and avoidance. It has powerful psychodynamic allies, in other words.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Yesterday I watched a cliché-spewing, self-styled mystic yogi" guru (a grandiose, half educated Hindu Indian, naturally) inform a professor of medicine in the ivy league Yale University that the West knows nothing about the human body.

The sage professor nodded his enthusiastic assent as he nearly kissed the hand of this derisible fake. It is a common sight: Westerners seeking wisdom & enlightenment in the East from men (never women), many of whom are cunning self-enriching con artists.

This mindless obsequiousness disregards the fact that Eastern "philosophies" are largely a hodgepodge of incomprehensible rank nonsense & that the only visible outcomes of the alleged perspicacity & sagacity of these Indians yogis are the dirt poor, disease infested, trash heaps that they call homes. I am not impressed. Asians are right to choose Western values & knowledge over anything their homegrown "spiritual" scammers have to offer.

The West sports its own crop of psychopathic narcissists who purvey inane messages to the desperate, ignorant, gullible, paranoid, & utterly disoriented masses.

Apparently, there is s giant lurking, waiting to be awakened in every one of us (delusional grandiosity), we can accomplish anything we put our mind to, and we can attract good fortune (read: money and beautiful girls) if we only want it real bad (infantile magical thinking) and the world is a lot more sinister than it seems (persecutory ideation). In the meantime, the callous fraudsters who brainwash millions of idiots and wannabes with promises of instant success or occult info ("If I made it, so can you and I will tell you all you need to know") are laughing all the way to the bank.

Increasingly more grandiose, people are injured and humiliated by and shun the truly intelligent, expert, knowledgeable, and insightful. They opt for ersatz fake gold.

It is not surprising that the latter - the Western trickster "coaches" and conspiracy theorists - often quote the former (the Indian phonies) . They are specimen of the same family of lethal intellectual viruses in human form.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Narcissistic and Borderline (secondary psychopathic) people triangulate often as a relationship management strategy. But their triangulation is unusual: they openly flirt with others in the presence of their primary partners and then, in many cases, ostentatiously proceed to full-fledged substance abuse and infidelity as their horrified, petrified, and agonized mates are left to ponder the wreckage.

They then sadistically proceed to describe to their spouses their sexual exploits and other misconduct in excruciating details as a form of coming clean, maintaining openness and honesty, and expressing remorse, repentance, and shame, or expiating guilt.

But why go into details? And then why lie about many of these data? Why assume the risk of a breakup? And why settle on such a course of action to start with?

Intended to get a rise out of the partner, triangulation helps to raise the "market value" of the straying mate in an invisible auction among other potentials. But totally accurate info would lead to a dissolution of the bond and to other adverse outcomes. Hence the prevarications and confabulations: I was drunk, I can't remember, he raped me, we only hugged or danced or kissed, or ... he fell asleep, we only had drinks together and he returned to his hotel and so on.

The Cluster B partner feels compelled to triangulate in this total, conspicuous, and extreme manner because she anticipates abandonment and feels that she has nothing left to lose, having already tried every other method and failed. At best, the romantic jealousy and hurt caused by the indiscretion may motivate her rejecting and abusive companion to reclaim her. At worst, it will just speed up the inevitable.

Borderline and Histrionic women are secondary psychopaths. They are defiant and competitive. They convert every relationship into a power play and bear long-term grudges as they seek to settle sexual and romantic scores, old and new, both with their partners and with third parties (sometimes even with casual strangers) who had injured or challenged them somehow.

This irresistible competitive urge, the permanent power play, the need to prevail over her mate or over others, the drive to "restore justice" and thereby her self-esteem, and/or the compulsion to consummate a flirtatious and seductive hunt or a chase successfully often result in cheating on the primary intimate partner.

But the Borderline or Histrionic does not perceive her misconduct - however egregious and extreme - as cheating. "I needed to get it out of my system, it had nothing to do with you and I have no intention to hug/slow dance/kiss/make out/sleep with him again now that I proved to myself that he desires me sexually. I am no longer attracted to him. In future, I will meet him just for coffees and chats, nothing more even if he asks for it. Whatever happened there between us, stays there", she protests indignantly to her shattered significant other.

Or: "You made me do it: you rejected me, abandoned me, you communicate with other women, and you withheld sex when I wanted it. So, you had it coming. But why make such a big deal out of it? It was meaningless sex with a nobody! I don't even think about him anymore until you remind me! You are so jealous and insecure! It sucks!"

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The pandemic amounts to a ginormous transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich: asset prices remain stable even as the rich get to keep the wages and benefits that they would have normally paid out to their poorer compatriots. Most tax revenues and government stimulus funds end up with big corporations and the already affluent. Income inequality - already unprecedented - will skyrocket.

Rich people have an “inflationary mindset”: they prefer to spend their capital, but owing to the amounts involved, are forced to hold on to the bulk of it, tied down in assets, both tangible and financial. They wish to consume (inflationary effect or "personal inflation"), but end up saving (deflationary outcome.) Poorer folks have a deflationary state of mind: they would like to hold on to their money, but are forced to spend most of it, or even all of it (not to mention avail themselves of additional credits and loans.) They wish to save (deflationary effect), but end up consuming (inflationary outcome.) Thus, all economic players in the marketplace wind up acting irrationally: against their innermost as well as expressed wishes and preferences. This gulf between the desires and actions of all economic agents is the main source of instability and uncertainty in the capitalist system, based as it is on wealth transfer from the many to the few and its accumulation in the hands of the latter.

What are the effects of these discrepancies in the perception of money between the rich and the rest of us? How is this psychological gap – indeed: this abyss – manifested in economic expectations and in one’s grasp of one’s purchasing power (based on streams of future income)? How does the price signal react to income inequality?

The larger the disparities between rich and poor, the greater the share of national wealth held by the rich, the more deflationary the economy. Rich people consume only a tiny portion of their wealth. The rest is tucked away in the vaults of financial institutions, in real-estate, or in art. Their money is effectively taken out of circulation and its velocity drops precipitously (demonetization).

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The contemporary dating scene is fragmented and baffling. But recent studies help to make sense of it.

Men and women who are in pursuit of casual sex (one to two night stands) find it in bars or parties (60%), pubs, restaurants, resorts, and clubs (another 20%), and dating apps and sites (the remaining 20%). About 30% of users of technology are looking for meaningless, emotionless romps or accomplices to adultery. Many first dates end in sex, but it is not considered casual because it incorporates intimacy and rudimentary emotions.

In the middle tier, men and women have self-limiting (the median is 6 months) love affairs (as playmates, fuck buddies, friends with benefits). They find partners on dating sites and apps but, more frequently, via social media and at work.

Finally, many singles (bachelors, separated, divorced) are looking for life companions within a committed relationship. Friends and family introduce them to potentials, or they join activities, venues, and institutions with like minded people.

Oddly, people keep looking for the wrong kinds of partners in the wrong types of places and this mismatch is the main reason for protracted dating and relationship failures. If you go to a bar to look for the love of your life or to church to pick up a one night stander, you are bound to be bitterly disappointed.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The genomes (genetic sequences) of the SARS Cov-2 virus are available publicly. The earliest - from China - dates to January 21 and the latest was releases on April 24 on GenBank and SRA - the Sequence Read Archive.

The initiated can use online tools to analyze the variations between these sequences. Such discrepancies represent the cumulative outcomes of antigenic drift: random copying (replication) errors (aka mutations) as well as of recombinations, including antigenic shifts (borrowing RNA or DNA segments from other viruses, bacteria, or host cells). There is some potentially bad news.

Under severe selective pressures (the virus could not find hosts to infect, owing to social distancing), the virus may have now undergone a series of antigenic shifts, had mutated, and had combined with at least 2 other viruses, including HIV (in its envelope) as well as possibly 1 bacterium (in its RNA)

Luckily, there is no trace or signature of the highly transmissible (infectious, contagious) influenza virus. But this isolate is so removed from the original L and S strains that it qualifies to be considered a SARS Cov-3, IMHO.

From now on, the previous strain may decline, but the new strain - an ominous Swiss Knife - will be capable of attacking children aged 1-6 and young adults 25-40. In fact, these age groups may come to predominate the case fatalities.

The virus will no longer focus exclusively on the respiratory system and instead cause extreme sepsis (toxic shock syndrome) coupled with inflammatory processes culminating in heart failure.

The new virus will also attack the kidneys, gastrointestinal tract, liver, connective tissues (skin, joints), and the brain. It will mimic syndromes like Kawasaki and Guillaume Barre, and rheumatoid arthritis.

The good news is that Coronaviruses are self-limiting. The pandemics caused by them suddenly stop even without any countermeasures. But, even so, we better find the right antiviral by autumn.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

People cannot maintain two personality styles: one cold, impersonal, efficacious, and rigidly boundaried (for strangers) and the other warm, empathic, and inviting (for friends, family, or romantic interests)

Most people DECEIVE themselves into believing that there is no problem to make this separation, to put on these alternating masks or personas (Goffman, Jung) - but, in reality, no one can sustain such a charade for long.

If you try to maintain a duality of coterminous dichotomous personality styles, one of these facades would begin to feel like disingenuous acting and faking. It would create ego-dystony: a sensation of all-pervasive awkwardness, discomfort, and unease in multiple settings.

In time, this constant need to switch between the modes engenders anxiety and the only way to reduce it is to eliminate one of the two styles and become a unitary personality with a single outward facing behavioral and emotional interface.

Back to Page 6

Proceed to Page 8