TRIGGERnometry - The Personality Disorders Behind Wokeness

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00:00:30.960 I come from the left.

00:00:32.820 I used to be woke.

00:00:35.000 I'm not anymore.

00:00:36.660 And I said, oh my God,

00:00:39.060 I have gone right from my childhood home

00:00:41.660 back out into the world.

00:00:42.820 And this is the world we're living in now

00:00:44.460 because the same abusive, exploitative tactics

00:00:47.840 that I know at home,

00:00:49.640 I'm seeing in my friend's circles.

00:00:51.160 i'm seeing in the the you know the democratic voters political circles that i'm talking about

00:00:57.180 and i'm not saying that only people on the left have a certain psychological disorder that's not

00:01:02.960 what i'm saying but i am saying right now in the western world on the left it looks like it has

00:01:10.280 a really bad case of a cluster B personality disorder.

00:01:19.620 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin. And this is a

00:01:25.900 show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today

00:01:32.020 is the host of the Disaffected podcast, Josh Slocum. Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:36.760 Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me.

00:01:38.660 It's a great pleasure to have you on.

00:01:40.140 We've been trying to make it happen for a long time.

00:01:42.320 We're delighted we've finally been able to make it work.

00:01:45.660 For anyone who doesn't know who you are, tell everybody who are you,

00:01:48.960 how are you, where you are, what has been your journey through life

00:01:51.680 that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:01:55.300 Well, as you said, I host a weekly podcast called Disaffected.

00:01:59.060 While I say weekly, we do a television show on Sundays and audio during the week.

00:02:03.500 And it's a show that looks at modern culture and politics through a psychological lens.

00:02:09.140 I am not a mental health professional.

00:02:11.320 I'm not a credentialed professional.

00:02:13.200 I don't represent myself as one.

00:02:14.720 But I'm somebody who has personal experience with domestic abuse, family abuse, and mental illness that affected my family's life.

00:02:24.600 And I've begun to believe that the kinds of distorted dynamics, lack of emotional control, narcissistic exploitation that are common to abusive family backgrounds has been spilling out and infecting our public culture to such a degree that it alarmed me enough that that that is the focus of the show that I'm on or that I host rather.

00:02:48.720 Well, it's fascinating because I've always said from the moment that we saw some of these

00:02:53.340 ideologies start to play themselves out, someone who's done a lot of personal development stuff

00:02:58.400 and learned psychology at university and all that sort of thing, it was kind of obvious

00:03:02.380 to me that, excuse me, a lot of the stuff seems to be people projecting their own personal

00:03:07.660 traumas onto the world.

00:03:09.660 Like, I had a bad experience with my dad, therefore all men are evil, or I had this,

00:03:14.400 therefore all that.

00:03:15.560 Is that the kind of thing that you talk about?

00:03:18.280 Yeah, what we talk about, what I focus on are what are called cluster B personality disorders and the tactics and abuse dynamics that attend to those.

00:03:33.280 So, yeah, it involves a lot of things like projection of your own trauma onto the world, victim signaling in order to get virtue points.

00:03:40.860 I mean, we've all talked about all of this stuff, and it's interesting to me because I think that when you talk about projection, for example, projection is something that all humans do, but it's something that has become, I guess, sort of excessively popular in the Internet age and in the past five to ten years.

00:04:08.040 And it's also something that, interestingly, people have said when they watch a show like

00:04:15.680 the one I do, where I talk about my personal background in my family with people with

00:04:20.940 personality disorders, and I liken them to, I mean, what you can call it woke if you want,

00:04:26.720 you can call it the successor ideology, whatever term it is that you're comfortable with.

00:04:31.880 This cultural moment that we're living in right now seems to me to be characterized

00:04:36.320 by an excess of clinical levels of narcissism, dysfunctional levels of narcissism, projection

00:04:43.300 of internal rage onto other people. So yes, it is that sort of thing. And I think it might be helpful

00:04:51.800 to tell people exactly what cluster B personality disorders are and why talk about them.

00:05:00.160 So when we're talking about mental illness, most people, when you use the term mental illness, most people think of things like severe depression, anxiety, maybe obsessive compulsive disorder, maybe something like schizophrenia where a person is actually literally disconnected from reality.

00:05:18.760 personality disorders, if you want to call them a mental illness, are a somewhat different kind

00:05:24.780 of mental illness. And I'm speaking in rough generalities. There is overlap here. But in

00:05:31.040 general, you can see a person who might suffer from intermittent depression or intermittent

00:05:36.340 anxiety. And you can think of it as kind of a dark cloud that comes in and may make a couple

00:05:42.100 of weeks or a month in that person's life really tough and might make them hard company to be

00:05:46.220 around, but it can be treated and it comes and goes. Personality disorders are not like that.

00:05:51.640 They're basically what they say on the tin. They are disorders of personality or character,

00:05:57.560 if you will. They're ingrained long-term dysfunctional ways of thinking about yourself

00:06:03.440 and thinking about and relating to other people. They don't go away. They're consistent across

00:06:10.060 various parts of your life. They may not be exactly the same in each situation, but we're

00:06:15.300 talking about fundamental character issues that affect how a person relates to other people.

00:06:22.920 And they're unfortunately really resistant to treatment. So what are the cluster Bs?

00:06:29.240 They are borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder,

00:06:35.300 histrionic personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder, which is a synonym for

00:06:41.340 sociopathy or psychopathy. These are called the dramatic and erratic personality disorders.

00:06:49.020 So the example that I would give, people want to understand how I conceive of this and where

00:06:53.820 I came from. I am estranged from my mother. My best guess for my mother is that she has

00:07:05.060 borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. And the quick way that I give people an insight

00:07:10.360 into this. Although I'm in an age now where I'm in middle age and I know a lot of people aren't

00:07:17.000 going to get my references. So if you don't get these movies, you'll, you know, I'll have to find

00:07:20.600 something. We'll be fine. We're middle aged as well. And our audience is even older. Don't worry

00:07:24.160 about that. I'm still young. Fuck both of you. I know. I'm 75 years young.

00:07:36.080 If you want to know what kind of childhood I had, if you want to know what kind of person

00:07:40.020 my mother was. This sounds a little flip and it is a little funny and it's okay to laugh at it,

00:07:44.840 but I mean it actually literally. My mother was a cross between a trailer park version of Joan 1.00

00:07:49.960 Crawford in Mommy Dearest and the mother in the horror movie Carrie. That is the kind of

00:07:54.900 personality style that my mother has. That was what our childhood was like growing up. Absolute

00:08:02.900 emotional instability. A parent who turned her children into her caregivers, doing work around

00:08:10.640 the house, being an emotional confidant for her children, telling them secrets, romantic secrets

00:08:17.300 even that they never should have learned. A series of relationships with men who were physically

00:08:24.460 violent and abusive to her children. My story is not unique. There are a lot of people, sadly,

00:08:29.880 who come from backgrounds like this, but there is a commonality. This isn't just, well, some people

00:08:34.600 fall into these terrible situations. What's going on here is serious and severe personality

00:08:42.940 disorders, emotional dysregulation, exploitative behavior, even towards your own children.

00:08:49.560 This kind of stuff, well, the way I say it is domestic abuse has gone public. It's gone feral.

00:08:56.840 The sorts of things that I saw in my home growing up that I did not understand are now happening in the wider world.

00:09:03.340 And I see them. I see them excessively on what I have been calling the woke left.

00:09:10.060 But unfortunately, it has infected, at least in the United States, the mainstream left.

00:09:15.900 The hold on a second there. I'm loving what you're saying. I'm completely on board.

00:09:20.440 Can you give me some concrete examples of that, please?

00:09:22.800 yes so um virtue signaling we hear that term a lot everybody today is a victim if you want to

00:09:32.680 get attention if you want to get a story written about you if you want if you want your truth your

00:09:37.580 tweet to go viral you have to claim victimhood somebody said something to you that was racist

00:09:44.620 somebody said something that was transphobic somebody did not respect your pronouns the level

00:09:49.980 of offense that is given to these things is so excessive. And it seems like culturally,

00:09:56.440 we've been trained to just respond to that. Oh, you know, that's very, very sad. But what do we

00:10:02.080 see? Perfect example from US media this week, New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz, who is somebody

00:10:10.060 who's written a lot of work for the New York Times, that people I think rightly have said,

00:10:16.220 you're trying to get people canceled. You're trying to ruin their reputations. They're not

00:10:19.720 living up to woke standards. And yet a journalist like this will be interviewed by MSNBC and say

00:10:26.120 that the criticism that she got for this gave her post-traumatic stress disorder. So it's a

00:10:33.100 reversal. Reversals of victim and offender. And we see this a lot. I think you guys see that a lot.

00:10:40.100 You've had guests on your show who've talked about that dynamic.

00:10:42.780 no yes we have indeed the thing that worries me josh is the fact that people can monetize

00:10:52.160 this behavior and once you can monetize it it's the ultimate incentive yeah well you can monetize

00:11:00.260 it right you can build a personal brand out of being a victim and lots of people have done it

00:11:04.600 i mean you know i think there was an abortive attempt with the oscars jada pinkett smith i

00:11:10.540 think wanted to be the world's biggest victim for having a disability called alopecia so 0.97

00:11:17.440 careful now i'm losing my hair as well josh i'm gonna have to fly over there and slap you 1.00

00:11:24.640 isn't that just how it is though men just lose their hair and go bald but when famous women 1.00

00:11:31.140 lose their hair and go bald they don't just go bald they have a disability called alopecia it's

00:11:36.500 an illness. That's part of it. I think we see these double standards here too. Yes, Francis,

00:11:43.880 you can monetize it, but I think being a victim pays in currency other than cash too. I think it

00:11:53.000 pays in what you can call narcissistic supply. And that's the term that people use adapted from

00:12:00.220 talk about drug culture, right? You're getting that feeling of praise. You're getting that high

00:12:05.040 from the attention and it gives you status it gives you social status particularly on the left

00:12:11.120 the more of a victim you are the higher you are in in sort of the symbolic hierarchy

00:12:16.300 uh so i think it's monetizable but i think it's also monetizable if you will uh in a social way

00:12:23.860 and and honestly i think for a lot of people that social attention may be even more attractive than

00:12:30.200 the money and it's particularly when you think about narcissism now we were now we're stand-up

00:12:35.820 comedians and we were involved in an industry stuffed to the brim with narcissists and what

00:12:42.500 was really fascinating josh is a moment this you know this culture this way of thinking this

00:12:49.380 ideology seeked in you started to see more and more people describe themselves as gender non-binary

00:12:55.660 pronouns in bio all of these different things fat activists now i never that like when i grew up

00:13:03.960 there was no such thing but people were legitimately calling themselves fat activists

00:13:08.400 anti-racist it just seems as like this kind of toxic relationship between the ideology

00:13:16.100 and the narcissism and let's be fair we've all got narcissism latent within us

00:13:20.980 so it's also kind of it's corrosive as well because it's encouraging us to behave this way

00:13:26.760 absolutely narcissism is socially rewarded now there's always been it's always been the case

00:13:33.400 take take an industry like hollywood hollywood is full of broken people this is where children

00:13:38.380 from broken homes uh traumatizing homes inadequate neglectful backgrounds this is where they go

00:13:44.180 i'm not saying they do it consciously but this happens to a lot of creative people you know

00:13:49.160 They're trying to find a way through art, through self-expression, maybe to make themselves whole again or to get some satisfaction out of that work that feels more meaningful.

00:13:57.720 But unfortunately, when you're in a place like Hollywood, the more outrageously you behave, the more diva-like you behave, the more attention you get.

00:14:06.720 And I don't think Hollywood is a place that you go to in order to get mentally better.

00:14:12.040 you know um there was a line there was a really great series on fx a few years ago that looked at

00:14:20.740 um the last years of the famous actresses joan crawford and betty davis's life and there was a

00:14:26.240 scene in there where joan crawford was in the hospital you know huge narcissist and the 1.00

00:14:32.920 publicist says to her you know the thing about hollywood i don't know if it creates narcissists 1.00

00:14:38.740 or attracts people like you and and that's the question i i think it's i think it's both uh but

00:14:45.580 it's definitely incentivized but but and it's a great point but the problem is instead of having

00:14:52.060 as in john crawford's times in the 50s and the 60s you had an industry which created narcissists

00:14:58.640 we now have these platforms which is turning the whole society our whole society into into one big

00:15:05.360 narcissist. Yeah, well, yeah, one big narcissist or one big borderline, as I would say. You know,

00:15:15.660 I was looking at something this morning I thought you guys would be interested in because people

00:15:19.880 ask this a lot. Well, how many people actually have a full on personality disorder? Right. And

00:15:25.620 you said, Francis, and you're right, we all have some narcissism in us. Here's the thing about

00:15:29.680 these traits that we talk about, even if we talk about them in personality disorders or in

00:15:34.780 non-personality disordered people. Almost all of these traits are human traits. They're not

00:15:40.880 personality disordered people traits. We all have a degree of narcissism. Some of it we need.

00:15:47.220 Some of it is healthy. We're talking about excess here. We all have a degree of self-regard

00:15:51.680 or ability or inability to regulate our emotions. This is normal. But the people that we could look

00:15:59.060 at and say, you have a real pathological level problem, have these so consistently and so

00:16:05.880 extremely, even though many people don't recognize it immediately, there are different kinds of being

00:16:11.400 narcissistic. There are kinds that are very easy to see, and there are types that are more covert.

00:16:18.440 But how many people have them? If you look at the literature, if you go to the psych literature,

00:16:23.440 and you look at the average estimates that come from the professional organizations,

00:16:26.840 you'll get something between one to three percent they believe in the general population have a

00:16:33.320 cluster B personality disorder. I don't believe this for a moment. I suspect all along, even

00:16:39.280 before our modern era, that was probably an underestimate. My guess, and it's just a guess,

00:16:46.480 it's from experience. I'm a decently well-read layman, but again, not a credentialed professional.

00:16:51.340 I would guess that around 10% of our population right now would fit the full diagnostic criteria for a full disorder and that there are many more of us who have an extra helping of these traits or these traits are being encouraged.

00:17:07.060 One thing I looked at, and I talked about this on the show earlier this year, back in 2013, there was a really interesting article from a couple of clinicians and college professors who were noticing an explosion of narcissism and emotional instability and public temper tantrums among their students.

00:17:28.900 And they said, why does it look to us like every other person who's coming by has borderline personality disorder or histrionic personality disorder?

00:17:38.380 So they decided to do a survey and they looked at 351 students in the survey and they expected to find the one to three percent of them would meet these criteria.

00:17:49.880 Here's what they actually found. For histrionic, you know, excessive, over-the-top, melodramatic, histrionic personality disorder, 30% of the students surveyed met the criteria. For narcissistic personality disorder, 21% of the students they surveyed fit that category.

00:18:07.440 that is completely terrifying well let me ask you something josh because how much of this is

00:18:17.360 we now have a method for all those people to express themselves as francis says in the past

00:18:23.640 if you were someone like this you'd go into hollywood or into stand-up or whatever

00:18:28.740 and now you don't need to do that you've got a phone and you can just do it or there's the other

00:18:34.280 side of it, which is how much is social media incentivizing, rewarding, and therefore generating

00:18:40.900 this sort of behavior in all of us when it's really not very healthy for any person to be

00:18:47.660 using it? Oh, big time. I couldn't quantify it, but clearly social media is one of the

00:18:54.800 primary ingredients that has made this possible. I don't think it would be possible to this degree

00:19:01.560 if we did not have easy access to brand me on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram.

00:19:09.700 And the artificial way that social media has us communicate, it strips context.

00:19:16.180 Because of the medium itself, it strips out tone of voice.

00:19:19.060 Often if you're just typing, you're not sitting in a room where you're reading people back

00:19:23.800 and forth and getting their body language in person.

00:19:26.260 it is set up in such a way that it thrives on big emotions, big emotions in me, big emotions in you.

00:19:35.100 We're all trying to provoke emotional reactions. And even the nicest people, even the most

00:19:40.500 sort of butter-wouldn't-melt-in-your-mouth people who never lose their temper,

00:19:45.680 bad behavior is encouraged and almost pushed by these media. And it can make good people

00:19:50.700 act like bad people it can it can make people who are having a bad day have several bad days in a

00:19:56.320 row but it definitely it's kind of like lifeblood for the people who are the hardcore committed

00:20:02.500 narcissistic people i mean there's no better way for them to get supplies so yeah i think that has

00:20:07.100 a huge huge amount to do with it hey constantin do you want better mental health i'm from russia

00:20:15.180 we don't have mental health so how do you deal with mental health you drink vodka then go out 0.58

00:20:20.620 and wrestle bear. If you live, you feel better. If you die, you're not real man.

00:20:25.660 What about the bear's feelings?

00:20:27.500 It's Russian bear. It has no feelings.

00:20:30.060 People don't always realize that physical symptoms like headaches, teeth grinding,

00:20:34.780 and even digestive issues can be indicators of stress.

00:20:38.380 And let's not forget about doom scrolling. Not sleeping enough.

00:20:41.980 Sleeping too much, under eating and over eating.

00:20:45.660 Sleeping too much, under eating. This is western disease. 0.94

00:20:49.660 Therapy has really helped me in my life to concentrate and focus.

00:20:53.900 It's really important to have someone impartial who you can talk to

00:20:58.140 about the tricky issues that you're struggling to deal with.

00:21:01.340 Therapy has played a really important role in helping me to deal with my ADHD

00:21:06.380 and become better in all areas of my life.

00:21:09.580 Why is he telling them how weak he is?

00:21:11.980 Drink vodka, feel better.

00:21:14.380 BetterHelp is customised online therapy that offers video, phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist.

00:21:22.260 So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to.

00:21:26.360 Trigonometry funds get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com forward slash trigger, especially if they're not real men.

00:21:33.720 That's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P dot com slash trigger.

00:21:40.880 and what effect is this having on society with the way we interact with each other

00:21:46.760 what's it doing to the cohesiveness of our relationships it's destroying them it's

00:21:53.160 absolutely destroying them that's the reason why i talk about this on the show i'm terrified

00:21:59.480 of where our society is going i believe we are living in a cluster b world we are living in a

00:22:06.200 world right now in the West that is running along cluster B slash abusive household rules.

00:22:13.660 And I want to say for people, a lot of people say, I've never heard of this kind of thing before.

00:22:20.140 You may not have heard the term, but you know these people and you do know this type of character.

00:22:25.860 You may know it by different names. If you have ever known a couple that had a domestic abuse

00:22:33.860 situation, wife battering or mutual spouse battering, if you know people who've had abusive

00:22:39.880 childhoods. Generally speaking, the psychology of the domestic abuser, whether it's physical,

00:22:46.700 emotional, verbal, or all of them in terms of the abuse, that's cluster B psychology. This

00:22:52.320 is personality disorder stuff going on. Another term for it is cults. Cult rules are cluster B

00:23:00.120 rules. Authoritarianism, monitoring other people's emotions and decisions and choices to make sure

00:23:07.220 that they line up with yours. This isn't new. And in fact, these kinds of people in these kinds of

00:23:14.600 psychological states, I think, have been written about for thousands of years. The ancients knew

00:23:20.000 who they were. I think they are reflected in our mythology. The vampires, the unquiet dead,

00:23:26.160 the succubus. A lot of these things can be read as allegories for these kinds of

00:23:30.900 exploitative people. You will often see narcissistic people, particularly

00:23:36.520 the seductive, maybe sexually, maybe not sexually, but very seductive and charismatic

00:23:42.820 narcissistic people are often described as emotional vampires. And it's a really great

00:23:47.740 metaphor because that's what it feels like. It feels like your emotional energy is being

00:23:52.720 sucked out of you and brought into someone else.

00:24:01.260 I'm only six years, five or six years into realizing this, if I'm right about it.

00:24:12.020 Your first question that you always ask and that you ask me, what brought you to be sitting

00:24:18.160 in this seat today. Five or six years ago, I'm not a religious person, but in terms of

00:24:27.660 the effect that it had, I would describe what happened to me five or six years ago as an

00:24:32.960 awakening. After many, many years of not living around or near my family, I made a very bad

00:24:41.480 decision. I made a foolish decision. I thought that I could love my mother back to health, 0.98

00:24:45.940 and I decided to bring her back into my life, put her in a house that I owned that she could 1.00

00:24:52.700 afford because she was poor. And I thought, I'll be retirement for my parents. And within two years

00:24:58.880 of doing that, all the screaming, the pathological lying, the exploitation, theft, you name it,

00:25:09.500 all of that stuff began happening at a rapid pace. And I sat there and I looked at myself and I said,

00:25:14.080 what is going on here? I feel like I've gone right back to my childhood. And it became so

00:25:19.200 overwhelming that I had a nervous breakdown. And I don't say that to be dramatic. And I don't want

00:25:26.080 anybody to say, oh my God, I'm so sorry, pity, pity. Worst thing that ever happened, but the

00:25:29.960 best thing that ever happened to me because my mother's pathological behavior was so extreme 1.00

00:25:35.580 and so right in my face. And I was in my 40s and I said, something is so severely wrong here. And

00:25:41.420 if I don't put a stop to it right now, it's going to have an effect on my health. And

00:25:47.500 I did have to put a stop to it. I did have to go through a legal battle to separate myself

00:25:54.400 from my mother and our rental situation. And it woke me up. I finally had an answer.

00:26:02.480 And this is what I would say to people watching or listening.

00:26:04.600 when i learned what personality disorders were i finally had a way to understand

00:26:12.440 what in my head was my mother's crazy but i can't explain it and i can't explain it to other people

00:26:19.060 they won't understand i don't have friends come over to my house because i'm embarrassed of

00:26:23.860 what they'll see if they see my mother behind closed doors all of a sudden it wasn't just

00:26:28.460 this crazy way my mother was. This was a known syndrome. And the worst part, though, was after

00:26:36.980 coming to that realization and saying, I don't want this in my life anymore. I looked around me

00:26:41.640 because I come from the left. I used to be woke. I'm not anymore. And I said, oh, my God,

00:26:50.200 I have gone right from my childhood home back out into the world. And this is the world we're

00:26:54.860 living in now, because the same abusive, exploitative tactics that I know at home,

00:27:00.740 I'm seeing in my friend's circles. I'm seeing in the Democratic voters' political circles that I'm

00:27:07.800 talking about. And I'm not saying that only people on the left have a certain psychological

00:27:12.960 disorder. That's not what I'm saying. But I am saying right now, in the Western world,

00:27:18.420 on the left, it looks like it has a really bad case of a cluster B personality disorder.

00:27:24.860 so and and josh can i ask you something because i've been thinking about this a lot and maybe

00:27:30.360 this isn't a particularly interesting avenue but it just it makes me curious you mentioned you

00:27:35.040 being on woke and on the left and i know that one of the things that i've identified as someone

00:27:40.760 who's got left-wing views and right-wing views there is a tendency for people on the left to

00:27:46.800 feel like uh they have to be on that side of politics because they experience themselves

00:27:53.140 as being somewhat vulnerable.

00:27:55.100 And so they want a quote-unquote fair society

00:27:57.860 because they know that in a fair society,

00:28:00.280 maybe their opportunities and status

00:28:02.380 will be elevated above what it might have been

00:28:05.080 in a more meritocratic society,

00:28:07.080 which is where the right might lean to.

00:28:09.620 And by the way, this isn't a pro-right or anti-left thing.

00:28:12.880 It's one of the things I've observed.

00:28:14.640 We're also, particularly with the Ukraine situation now,

00:28:17.320 starting to see quite a lot of pathologies on the right.

00:28:20.080 But in terms of that, talk to us about

00:28:22.000 What was it that drew you to being woke?

00:28:25.520 I'm just curious.

00:28:30.160 This won't be the same for everybody,

00:28:33.400 but this is how it was for me.

00:28:38.320 I think leftist politics

00:28:42.400 naturally pre-selects for people

00:28:46.180 who conceive of themselves as victims

00:28:48.480 or as people on whom forces act, right?

00:28:53.220 People who are victims of systems.

00:28:56.020 Our family was poor,

00:28:58.860 grew up for a long time,

00:29:00.900 single mother household, my mother. 0.99

00:29:02.900 I never even met my father.

00:29:06.480 My brother and sister come from a different marriage.

00:29:10.380 There was physical battering and violence in the home,

00:29:15.760 poverty.

00:29:16.840 and a, from a, from the time I was a very young child. And again, this is, this is, I mean,

00:29:26.540 I'm telling you my story, but this is the story of millions of people. This, there's nothing

00:29:30.140 unique about my family in terms of the screwed up families. Um, I was, I was made in, basically I 0.50

00:29:37.520 was made into my mother's surrogate husband emotionally. Um, a caretaker for the younger

00:29:43.660 children, a girlfriend, sort of, if you will, to talk to about all the terrible things men had

00:29:51.360 done to her. I mean, when I was a kid, I used to comfort my mother when she was afraid of getting

00:29:55.580 slapped around by my stepfather, while I was afraid as well. This kind of role reversal,

00:30:00.880 you see reversal in all of this. And I'm gay. And I was unable to face when I was a teenager,

00:30:10.580 the reality of the psychiatric derangement in my mother it was too much for me to face

00:30:15.880 I interpreted my emotional instability as a teenager and I had a lot of it and

00:30:21.560 my depression I had a couple of suicide attempts at around 12 years old I interpreted all of this

00:30:28.460 as I'm gay and everybody hates gay people and I'm getting beat up at school so this is why I'm

00:30:34.140 depressed. And that was part of it. But really, it was because I came from an absolutely deranged 0.94

00:30:40.840 household. And I learned to see myself as a victim, as a minority. I'm a gay man. Gay people

00:30:48.760 are oppressed. I come from a low socioeconomic background. America hates struggling single 0.96

00:30:54.140 mothers, and they're not generous enough with welfare or food stamp benefits. And I just took 0.73

00:30:59.600 on these leftist politics that my mother had, and I made them my own. Now, I'm not saying there's

00:31:04.740 no way to be a liberal that isn't more considered than how I got there. There are ways to do that,

00:31:11.320 but I see a whole bunch of this. One of the common characteristics I see in people today

00:31:17.860 who hew very left is they either see themselves as having been victims of structural racism,

00:31:27.500 structural misogyny uh structural anti-poverty and or they see the people that they associate

00:31:35.080 with as victims it's always an outside force it's never that you didn't make good choices

00:31:40.800 that's how i do it it's it's really interesting because as i mentioned i think uh on the right

00:31:49.160 there is something similar but different happening where uh i mean if i think with the three of us

00:31:56.000 would agree that we've all been lied to for some time by mainstream media and the establishment

00:32:01.280 has been pushing particular narratives but it's getting to a point now where it feels like a lot

00:32:05.480 of people feel like uh it's becoming an identity almost like we've been lied to and now we've

00:32:11.740 discovered this thing that answers all our questions have you noticed that or is it am i

00:32:15.920 imagining that are you saying uh are you i'm trying to figure out are you saying that there's

00:32:23.780 just as much of a danger on the right of adopting a new identity that says, well, they all lied to

00:32:29.200 us, so they're always wrong now. And we're victims. We are victims. We're victims of this

00:32:35.120 great conspiracy, whatever that is. There's this sort of very simplistic explanation to explain

00:32:40.360 things that have been happening, just like structural racism or homophobia. There is an

00:32:45.180 element of truth. Gay people have been badly treated in the past. Black people have been

00:32:48.920 badly treated. But the explanation is overly simplistic and emotionally dysregulated. It's 0.95

00:32:54.760 like, yes, you were not told the truth about Brexit and Trump and COVID to some extent and

00:32:59.280 blah, blah, blah. That does not mean that when mainstream media says it's going to rain today,

00:33:04.580 it's definitely going to be sunny and there's not going to be a single... Do you see what I'm saying?

00:33:09.740 I do. Yeah. And I think that is a danger and it is something that people are falling into.

00:33:14.840 there are conspiracies you know what it bothers me i i hate the tone of but like you see you even

00:33:21.400 see the word conspiracy theory printed and you hear it in this voice conspiracy theory right

00:33:27.160 drives me nuts because conspiracies are real and positing that a conspiracy happened is not a sign

00:33:34.040 of oh he's kooky right but i don't a lot of things that many people think are conspiracies

00:33:41.140 I don't think are conspiracies. I think they are predictable ways that patterns interact with each

00:33:48.260 other and have certain outcomes. So, you know, there are people on the right might say, well,

00:33:55.800 it's all conspiracy to do X, Y, and Z, or this is all a conspiracy to do exactly, to maneuver our

00:34:02.800 children into this. I don't know that there are as many conscious mechanical conspiracies as there

00:34:09.980 are attractive ideas that serve certain interests and that preferentially attract the kind of

00:34:17.840 people who consciously or unconsciously will exploit those dynamics for their own social

00:34:23.940 or monetary profit. So I think a lot of things tend to go together, but it doesn't necessarily

00:34:29.400 mean that there's a puppet master pulling particular strings. Well, that's exactly what

00:34:33.800 i mean josh because that's that's kind of the point is that while of course bad things happen

00:34:39.940 in the world and sometimes bad things are done by other people so quite often they're done because

00:34:45.220 of you know how how appealing an idea is and the idea might be very wrong or they might happen

00:34:51.920 through the development of certain social trends that aren't but the point that i was getting at

00:34:57.400 is i think just like the structural explanation is a very overly simplistic way of talking about

00:35:03.280 things or misrepresenting things. So this idea that there's one group of people, a small group

00:35:09.560 of people who are sort of in charge of things, it's quite an old theme as well. It's been around

00:35:14.580 for a very long time in the past too. Yes. This is a good illustration of black and white thinking, 0.97

00:35:23.660 either or thinking. This is a problem for all of us right now. And it's really tempting,

00:35:28.280 especially when we're scared. And I'm scared. I am scared of where our society is going.

00:35:34.760 It's really tempting to fall into yes or no answers in black and white thinking.

00:35:39.420 Rather, I think we need to go for discernment and judgment. And do you notice that one of the

00:35:46.840 tenets of being a nice, decent person on the left is don't judge? Don't be so judgmental.

00:35:54.700 You do you.

00:35:56.560 I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, but this is conscious and it is serving a purpose.

00:36:02.800 We have been told that to be nice people, to be decent and ethical people, requires us to suspend our judgment.

00:36:10.160 The word judge has taken on a negative connotation the same way the word discrimination has.

00:36:16.520 It's almost impossible to use the word discriminate in its original meaning because people believe discriminate equals that.

00:36:24.700 Same thing with judge.

00:36:26.600 Well, that sounds judgmental.

00:36:28.800 Sometimes judgmentalism is required, but discernment is always required.

00:36:34.200 Is it really all the way yes?

00:36:35.640 Is it really all the way no?

00:36:37.360 Or is it something else?

00:36:38.480 um yeah black and white thinking by the way is very typical of the borderline personality

00:36:46.320 thinking style and a way to think of that is when people ask what's what's the easy way to

00:36:54.780 understand borderline personality disorder think of the dynamic i hate you don't leave me you know

00:37:01.460 you're terrible you're not giving me what i want you're not living up to my expectations then the

00:37:05.880 next day. Oh my God. Oh my God. You're the best in the world. Don't ever leave me. I can't live 0.53

00:37:09.860 without you. Oh, I didn't mean it, et cetera, et cetera. This, you know, overvaluing people or

00:37:15.740 ideas and then drastically undervaluing them and vacillating between these extremes is typical of

00:37:22.180 borderline personality thinking, but it's also more and more typical of the way we're approaching

00:37:26.760 our political conversations. And it is dangerous. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a

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00:38:34.320 The worrying thing, Josh, for us is we've touched on cults, is how deeply attractive cults are from the outside,

00:38:42.700 particularly in a world that we live in that is becoming more and more atomized.

00:38:46.600 Families are breaking up. They're smaller.

00:38:48.940 We have that deep need to belong, to be part of a tribe.

00:38:53.160 And so doesn't that make us more susceptible to cults?

00:38:57.080 Sure. I mean, and what is a cult other than, you know, we like to, I mean, given my age, when I think of cults, I think of things like the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas, right?

00:39:09.600 Nobody, you know, younger millennials and younger were probably like, I have no idea what that is. But we have this, we've defined cults as a small religious type group that has one really weird and zany charismatic leader. I think we need to update our definition of cults. I don't think we need a charismatic leader anymore.

00:39:33.260 I think the leadership is distributed in the social media age. I think all the elements of

00:39:39.380 cult thinking, which are also cluster B slash authoritarian slash abusive parent thinking,

00:39:46.540 all of those things are present. We don't need to have one single charismatic leader.

00:39:52.980 But yes, when people are scared, they want to cleave to a tribe. It happens to me. I used to

00:39:59.160 be a liberal, a leftist. I'm not anymore. But I won't say I'm a conservative. Because there are

00:40:07.420 emotional things that attach to these words and expectations that come along with them.

00:40:14.120 And I know it's clunkier, but I wish people would say to each other, okay, I'm not going to ask you

00:40:17.860 if you're a liberal or conservative. I'm going to ask you what you think about this particular issue

00:40:22.280 and this particular issue and this particular issue. Because I have views that some people

00:40:27.620 would consider too left-leaning for their tastes uh and i have a lot of views these days that are

00:40:32.760 far too right-leaning um for for the people that i used to hang around with um and like like many

00:40:39.740 people um when i changed my mind politically over the past five years i lost nearly all of my friends

00:40:46.240 nearly all of my leftist friends and and i i don't think we talk about this enough

00:40:51.860 because i went through the same thing i lost a lot of friends i know you did

00:40:55.060 and you've still got me yeah yeah he said that in the most sinister manner possible

00:41:02.800 but i don't think we talk enough about how deeply distressing that is because

00:41:08.100 when you're part of a group or a cult or a way of being and you suddenly leave it

00:41:13.500 it's like a death in a way i know that sounds very dramatic but it is it's a death of the

00:41:19.280 of an old way of living. Absolutely. It's a social death. I don't remember who said it

00:41:25.600 recently, but it's a brilliant formulation. Somebody called cancel culture social murder.

00:41:33.720 And that's what it is. Reputation destruction and being cast out. This is shunning. This isn't new.

00:41:40.360 Nothing we're doing right now is, you know, oh, it's 2022. We just figured this. No, no, no.

00:41:45.200 This is ancient human behavior. This is the Salem witch trials. This is the Inquisition. It goes back even further than that. When people are shunned and ejected from a community, their moral status is taken away from them. Their sense of identity in some way is taken away from them. It's our responsibility to rebuild these things ourselves. I'm not suggesting, you know, I'm a victim now. I lost all my friends.

00:42:08.220 Well, I certainly felt victimized in the moment.

00:42:10.140 That's a natural emotion.

00:42:12.540 But it's demoralizing.

00:42:16.980 It can make people depressed.

00:42:18.800 It can make them suicidally depressed.

00:42:21.700 It's vicious.

00:42:23.020 Yeah, it hurts.

00:42:25.400 It does.

00:42:26.640 And the other thing about it, Josh,

00:42:28.300 is we talk about emotional dysregulation,

00:42:31.100 or I call it emotional incontinence,

00:42:32.980 where people just don't know how to control their emotions.

00:42:36.760 Our mutual friend Helen Dale likes that phrase too.

00:42:39.940 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:42:40.720 I think it was one that's going around.

00:42:42.480 And I just find that our reaction as a society

00:42:47.240 to a lot of things that I consider fairly trivial or minor

00:42:50.280 is now, oh, oh, you've got a different opinion.

00:42:54.300 You think the tax system should work differently.

00:42:56.860 You don't believe that this thing that you are now all,

00:42:59.680 you know, you didn't post a black square on Instagram. 0.98

00:43:02.140 Then you have to be socially murdered, 0.99

00:43:04.880 as you put it, right?

00:43:06.280 And again, I don't consider this a victimhood thing for me

00:43:10.080 because I know it's unpleasant to lose friends

00:43:12.040 and, you know, I've obviously gone through it as well.

00:43:13.720 But on the other hand, I went into it with my eyes open.

00:43:17.040 I knew that this is a society we live in

00:43:19.000 and that's the cost of doing what you believe to be doing.

00:43:22.640 I'm okay with that.

00:43:24.380 But it just, as an observer of it,

00:43:27.160 it seems very, very disproportionate to the so-called crime.

00:43:32.960 And where does that come from?

00:43:35.940 Cluster B. Maybe he's born with it. Maybe it's Cluster B.

00:43:49.580 Well, where does that come from? It does come, that is a very typical, you can think of it as

00:43:57.640 emotional inflation, right? Taking something moderately or minorly distressing and inflating

00:44:04.520 it. This is very, very typical of the histrionic personality style, the borderline personality

00:44:09.840 style. But it's become normalized. We have normalized personality disorder style relations.

00:44:19.900 We actively applaud and affirm them. This whole sort of, well, I'm going to say my piece no matter

00:44:27.720 what anybody has to say because I'm a woman of color or I'm a trans person of disability

00:44:33.160 or I'm this or I'm that and the more melodramatic and the more you declaim and the

00:44:38.560 the more strident your tone of voice the more you get you go girl you go you know it's I mean I

00:44:46.560 talked about this on an episode of my show earlier this week a headline in one of the New York

00:44:51.500 newspapers talking about Jada Pinkett Smith's struggles with alopecia and alopecia awareness

00:44:58.700 advocates are you kidding me are you kidding struggle alopecia awareness everything that is

00:45:11.120 frankly not very interesting or doesn't need uh to be put on a pedestal is elevated to this

00:45:18.540 fever pitch of emotion um it's not real and it's not that's well it's definitely not helping so

00:45:26.220 Josh, obviously we're focusing on negative things here, which is not unusual for us because we're

00:45:32.340 sort of looking at the culture and trying to say maybe we're going in the wrong direction on some

00:45:37.720 things. But what can be done about this? I know for myself, for example, I do my very best not

00:45:44.120 to ever act like a victim. Not because there aren't situations in which people mistreat me or

00:45:49.140 whatever, but I just don't think it's helpful to me and to my well-being to consider myself that

00:45:54.540 way but me doing that doesn't seem to be changing the culture sadly it's not having that kind of

00:46:00.320 impact so what do we do as individuals and as a society to try and overcome these because look

00:46:06.700 let's be honest right josh social media isn't going away it's not it's not going to disappear

00:46:10.960 it's not so all this talk about oh social media is so bad for us i agree but that talking about 0.53

00:46:18.220 it's not going to do shit right so we're going to have to do something what can we do

00:46:24.540 So what we're doing right now, what the three of us are doing right now, and I'm glad you asked this because I wanted to say it, but I didn't want to say it in the beginning because I didn't want to sound like I was buttering you up so that you'd be nice to me during the interview.

00:46:36.540 But I mean this quite seriously. Your show has been a very important component in my political maturation over the past couple of years.

00:46:47.040 When I was a lefty, I would not listen to conservative viewpoints.

00:46:53.020 I had a very stereotyped view of anybody who had political views that were to the right of mind.

00:46:57.800 I engaged in a lot of black and white thinking myself.

00:47:01.360 I have some of these traits that I talk about.

00:47:04.040 There are few children who come from homes like I do who will not have some of these emotional dysregulation problems.

00:47:10.060 I think they're better today.

00:47:12.300 But I understand them, and I'm not wholly outside that world myself.

00:47:15.900 I just basically assumed that people who were on the right were morally deficient.

00:47:22.180 I mean, it's absurd and it's embarrassing to say it, but that is how I acted in the world.

00:47:26.840 And when I heard, I don't remember the first episode I heard of your show.

00:47:33.480 It might even have been Carrie Smith of Unsafe Space, or it might have been before then. 0.99

00:47:38.540 But you have such a variety of people on your, you have medical experts, you have researchers,

00:47:43.860 you have historians, you have people across the political spectrum. And the commonality with all

00:47:49.140 of them is that they're unafraid of stating what they believe to be true and expounding on it in

00:47:54.660 an interesting way. I have listened to more people with more political points of view that I scoffed

00:48:00.480 at before because of your show than probably any other single sorts of media consumption. So I'm

00:48:07.640 very grateful that you guys are out there. I mean, it's interesting too, but it's actually been

00:48:12.720 educational for me. So I think that we need to do, you need to do what you're doing. I hope that what

00:48:18.640 I'm doing with disaffected will be helpful to people. I want it to be helpful in two ways.

00:48:24.020 I want people to make the connection to understand that there is a way of understanding

00:48:30.400 and predicting the behavior in this woke culture. If you understand these dynamics,

00:48:35.320 I also hope that it will make people feel that they are not crazy.

00:48:40.440 I have had countless emails and messages from people saying, it sounds like you're narrating my childhood life or it sounds like you're narrating my marriage or what happened to me in my woke group when I was ejected.

00:48:54.240 But I didn't know there was a name for it and I didn't know there was a way to understand it.

00:48:58.880 And I'm not trying to big myself up because I didn't understand this until six years ago either.

00:49:03.520 I think we have to keep doing these things. I confess that I don't have a better answer for you other than talk about it and have conversations with people who want to change it. I don't know how to fix it, and I suspect – well, I think I'm realistic, but a lot of people call me cynical.

00:49:23.560 um from personal experience and from observation in the world i think it's usually true that a

00:49:32.180 problem has to get so acute and so unbearably painful that we have no choice but to stand up

00:49:39.140 and confront it and walk down a different road um regardless of your efforts my efforts the 0.93

00:49:46.380 efforts of other people in this kind of conversation shit may have to fall apart a little bit more 0.85

00:49:51.840 time will tell and josh on a micro level what do you say to those people who are watching or 0.99

00:49:58.860 listening to this and thinking holy shit my partner friend blah blah blah is a cluster b 0.98

00:50:04.600 personality what do they do um talk to talk to other people who are in your situation 0.99

00:50:14.500 Talk to other people who have abusive family structures. Read, read, consume, educate yourself about that. See, I hate educate yourself. We can't even say normal things anymore.

00:50:31.840 Sure. When my sister made a phone call to me that changed my life six years ago when the crisis with

00:50:43.360 my mother was coming up, I had every excuse in the world. I thought, maybe she has Alzheimer's.

00:50:48.840 Maybe she's taken a fall. Maybe she has dementia. Why is she acting this way?

00:50:52.800 Well, I was trying to avoid the fact that she'd acted this way my entire life, and I didn't want

00:50:56.680 to admit it. My sister called me up and said, Josh, I think I understand what's going on here.

00:51:04.260 I think you need to read about this. I think our mother is a narcissist, and I think she has a

00:51:08.140 cluster B personality disorder. So I went and I read the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic,

00:51:14.300 Survivors Forums. I just read and read and read. And the more I read both the clinical literature

00:51:19.800 and the lay survivor literature, it was instantly clear to me. As much of a set piece as this

00:51:26.600 sounds like it's true. Within three days, an entire lifetime of baffling emotional

00:51:36.560 dysregulation, abuse, and lying slotted itself into understandable categories. It was like

00:51:41.960 watching a mechanical machine sorting parts, chink, chink, chink, chink, chink. All of a sudden, 1.00

00:51:47.460 I had clarity. That can happen for you too. Read about this, learn about it, talk to other people,

00:51:55.680 watch my show, send us an email. The knowledge of this, just the knowledge alone that you are

00:52:04.980 not crazy to have noticed this and you are not the terrible person who has it coming the way

00:52:13.580 the person abusing you says or implies is worth so much. That's a great note to leave it, Josh.

00:52:21.360 So we're going to ask you a couple of questions from our supporters for our supporters on Locals Only.

00:52:26.800 But before we do that, we always have one final question, as you know, which is what is the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

00:52:33.360 I can see you've got one ready to go. You're you're you're pumped and good.

00:52:37.460 Well, I mean, I am, you know, I do actually listen to your show every week.

00:52:41.660 So I gave this some I gave this some serious thought.

00:52:44.520 And I think what I'd have to say is what we're not talking about enough is how rotten and disgusting sweet potatoes are now.

00:52:55.760 Maybe this isn't a problem in Britain, but I'll tell you, boys, over here in the United States, people are trying to sneak sweet potatoes into your stuff all the time.

00:53:03.400 And I've had enough of it.

00:53:05.420 So, you know, people who watch my show know that I'm sort of on a one man campaign to get rid of the fibrous, nasty devil's tuber that is sweet potatoes.

00:53:14.520 but I would like to raise awareness

00:53:16.460 of the problem of sweet potatoes.

00:53:18.720 Fantastic.

00:53:19.420 Well, controversial to the bitter end.

00:53:22.240 It's been Josh Locombe.

00:53:23.220 Thank you so much for coming on

00:53:24.440 of the Disaffected podcast.

00:53:26.560 We're going to do a couple of questions

00:53:27.940 for our local supporters,

00:53:29.140 but thank you for being here, Josh.

00:53:30.780 Where can people follow you online?

00:53:32.500 Tell everybody where to go.

00:53:34.860 Yep, we are on YouTube

00:53:36.540 with our channel Disaffected.

00:53:38.620 We're on all the major audio

00:53:40.300 and video streaming platforms,

00:53:42.160 Disaffected podcast.

00:53:42.980 If you want show announcements on Twitter,

00:53:45.480 at Disaffected P, Disaffected, the letter P.

00:53:49.100 Thank you, guys.

00:53:50.480 Fantastic. It's been a pleasure.

00:53:51.900 Thank you guys for watching and listening.

00:53:53.840 We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one,

00:53:57.000 or our show.

00:53:57.920 All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.

00:54:00.040 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go,

00:54:03.120 it's also available as a podcast.

00:54:05.080 Take care and see you soon, guys.

00:54:08.900 A lot of the professional mental health on offer

00:54:11.420 is literally validating actual delusion

00:54:15.140 and disordered behavior and thinking

00:54:18.680 and calling it beautiful and authentic.

TRIGGERnometry - June 02, 2022

The Personality Disorders Behind Wokeness

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