https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=o3rpK5eB2ic
The other thing that seems to happen, I would say too, is that the social media networks are set up so that casual, derogatory, derisive, narcissistic mocking is not only allowed, but staggeringly prevalent. And encouraged. It’s not, well, that’s it. It attracts attention and is encouraged. Now, we have to talk during our conversation today about the role that narcissism plays in all of this. The mobbing, the derisive online comments, and the transsexual phenomenon itself, as well as this claim that subjective claims to identity trump everything because there is no more signally narcissistic claim than that. I am who I say I am and no one else has a say. It’s like, well really, in a marriage, let’s say, you’re just who you say you are. You don’t have to negotiate your identity with your wife or husband. You never do that with your children. You never do that with your friends. They just go along with whatever game you wanna play, every bloody second of your life, do they? And if they don’t, that makes them evil predators and valid targets for derision and mocking. And worse than that, because as you know perfectly well, this online mobbing behavior that’s driven by thoughtless narcissists not only is psychologically destabilizing because of its vitriolic quality, but also can certainly reach its tendrils into the confines of your job, let’s say. I mean, it’s become impossible for me to work as a psychotherapist. I had to leave my job at the university because it became impossible for me to function in both those domains. And so I would say this narcissism is also encouraged by, it’s encouraged by educational institutions because they take young people in and they say, well, you know, your immature messianic desire to save the world, which could be admirable if channeled properly, should manifest itself in this vehement activism that puts you in position of ultimate moral authority over your seniors, let’s say, instantly. And that’s what you should be doing. And anyone who opposes that is, well, evil and predatory at best. And as a consequence, no punishment is too extreme. And alongside that, that you must choose your identity off a list of dozens and sometimes hundreds, like that require the most intense constant rumination and self-examination. I mean, I was talking to somebody just yesterday who was telling me that a child who’s 12 now, you know, has this check sheet for how do I feel? And this is a really happy child, but you’re meant to be thinking all the time, like, how am I feeling right now? Am I as, you know, on a scale of one to 10, how happy am I? How this am I? How that am I? How the other am I? This is all a terribly bad idea. Well, it’s clearly bad. Look, one of the things I learned when I was treating people who were socially anxious, I had a lot of anxious people in my clinical practice, which is hardly surprising because that’s the kind of suffering that requires people to seek clinical intervention. So socially anxious people, when they go into a new social situation, think obsessively about how others are thinking about them. And so then they become self-conscious, often about bodily issues, but not only that, they might become self-conscious about their lack of conversational ability and the fact that they’re not very interesting and the fact that they’re being evaluated by other people. It’s a litany of obsessive thoughts. And you can, you might say, well, you could train people to stop thinking about themselves, but you can’t stop people from thinking about something by telling them to stop thinking about something. But what you can train people to do is to think more about other people. And so one of the techniques that I used in my practice was, okay, now when you go into a social situation next time, like we’d go through the niceties of introducing yourself and making sure they knew your name and get that ritualized so that it was practiced and expert and therefore not a source of anxiety. But the next thing is your job is to make the other person that you’re talking to as comfortable as possible, to pay as much attention to them. And so we know that the more you think about yourself, this is literally true, there is no difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable. They load on the same statistical axis. And so these kids that are constantly being tormented by 150 identities, so that’s a front, not of freedom, but of utter chaos, and then asked to constantly reflect on their own state of emotional well-being and happiness is the surest route to the kind of misery that’s going to open them up to psychogenic epidemics, let’s say. The clinical data on that are clear. And then you land into that, the idea that you may have been led to believe that because you’re a not very feminine girl or a not very masculine boy, that that means that really you are of the opposite sex. The fact is you’re not, and no one around you is going to think that you are because you don’t look like the opposite sex. And you become even more self-conscious. Like self-consciousness brought you to this point. And now you’re hyper aware that everyone around you doesn’t think of yourself as the way that you’ve just presented yourself. And then you’re watching for misgendering. And you’re actually being told that it’s a really terrible thing to do and that no one would do this unless they really hated you and they wanted you to die. Like they want you to disappear, they want trans people dead, they want them gone. I mean, that’s what people say about me, that I want to cause a genocide of some sort. And I mean, like when did I ever write such a thing? So what that is, is it’s the feeling that you’ve put all of your ability to care about yourself, understand yourself, define yourself onto other people and how they’re looking at you. And they’re not looking at you right, they’re looking at you funny. So you are now out of control. Add to that mix, okay, so we could add a couple of other layers. So kids that are well socialized and popular develop that ability between the age of two and four. And what they undergo this psychological transformation in identity, they go from a two-year-old egocentrism. So the two-year-old can only play a game with him or herself, they can’t play a shared game. And so two-year-olds will play in parallel, but they can’t play a joint game. And that means that their identity, this is so important, their identity is purely subjectively defined and they have temper tantrums if you interfere with that. Okay, now between two and four, most kids extend their identity out into the communal world. And so one of the ways they do that is imagine two little kids between the age of say three and five play in house, a little boy and a little girl. The little boy will ask the little girl, do you want to play house? And she’ll say yes. And so what that means now, they’ve established a joint identity for the time span of their play. And the joint identity is that they’re both engaged in the same epistemological world, in the same conceptual world. And then they negotiate roles. Say, well, I’ll be the daddy and you be the mommy. And they can flip that role, by the way, and sometimes they will because they want to play out the other side, but generally they pick a sex-appropriate role for obvious reasons. And then having established the goal, so let’s pretend about the household, which is a form of thought, they have to jointly establish an identity that’s acceptable to each other. And then they have to do something even more sophisticated, which is they have to conduct themselves in those roles so that the game is fun, so that both people will keep playing, and so that both people want to keep playing with each other. Now it doesn’t take much thought to see that that’s exactly, that’s an analog and a prodroma to what you actually do as an adult when you enter a intimate relationship that’s long-term as you play house in the long run. But so what happens is between the age of two and four, your identity moves from egocentric and subjectively defined to communal and negotiated. And now this idea that we have that your identity is only what you say it is appeals not only to, I suppose, the ideologues that are pushing it, but it also appeals to people who are developmentally stuck, and I mean this in the deepest sense, are stuck at a two-year-old level of psychological development. And I think maybe there’s a couple of reasons for that. You imagine a lot of kids are only kids now, so they’re not socialized by their siblings. A lot of kids have older parents with lots of resources, so they’re sheltered in a way that children never have been. And a lot of kids are exposed to computer screens and TV screens at a very early age, so they don’t have the opportunity to engage in the kind of dramatic play that helps them develop an extended social identity. And so it’s possible on top of all this that we have an epidemic of narcissism that’s being capitalized on by the woke ideologues who are also likely suffering from the same psychopathology. So, I think that’s a good way to look at it. I think that’s a good way to look at it. I think that’s a good way to look at it. I think that’s a good way to look at it. I think that’s a good way to look at it. I think that’s a good way to look at it. I think that’s a good way to look at it. I think that’s a good way to look at it. I think that’s a good way to look at it. 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