TRIGGERnometry - The Personality Disorders Behind Wokeness

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

Josh Slocum is the host of the Disaffected podcast, which examines the role of abuse dynamics in society and politics. Check out Disaffected here: https://www.youtube.com/c/DisaffectedPodcast Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If I come from the left, I used to be woke. I'm not anymore. And I said, oh my God, I have gone right from my childhood home back out into the world. And this is the world we're living in now because the same abusive, exploitative tactics that I know at home, I'm seeing in my friend's circles. I'm seeing in the, you know, the Democratic voters political circles that I'm talking about. And I'm not saying that only people on the left have. a certain psychological disorder. That's not what I'm saying. But I am saying right now, in the Western world, on the left, it looks like it has a really bad case of a cluster B personality disorder. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Boster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is the host of the Disaffected Postcast, Josh Lokem. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure to have you on. We've been trying to make it happen for a long time.

We're delighted we've finally been able to make it work. For anyone who doesn't know who you are you are, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, as you said, I host a weekly podcast called Disaffected. While I say weekly, we do it a television show on Sundays and audio during the week. and it's a show that looks at modern culture and politics through a psychological lens. I am not a mental health professional. I'm not a credential professional.

I don't represent myself as one. But I'm somebody who has personal experience with domestic abuse, family abuse, and mental illness that affected my family's life. 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 is the focus of the show that I'm on, or that I host rather. Well, it's fascinating because I've always said from the moment that we saw some of these ideologies start to play themselves out, someone who's done a lot of personal development stuff and learned psychology at university and all that sort of thing.

It was kind of obvious to me that, excuse me, a lot of the stuff seems to be people projecting their own personal traumas onto the world. Like, I had a bad experience with my dad, therefore all men are evil. Or I had this, therefore all that. Is that the kind of thing that you talk about? Yeah, what we talk about, what I focus on are what are called Cluster B personality disorders and the tactics and abuse dynamic. that attend to those. 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.

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. And it's also something that interestingly, people have said when they watch a show like the one I do, where I talk about my personal background in my family

with people with personality disorders. And I liken them to, I mean, what you can call it woke if you want, you can call it the successor ideology, whatever term it is that you're comfortable with. This cultural moment that we're living in right now, seems to me to be characterized by an excess of clinical levels of narcissism, dysfunctional levels of narcissism, projection of internal rage onto other people.

So yes, it is that sort of thing. And I think it might be helpful to tell people exactly what Cluster B personality disorders are and why talk about them. So 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. Personality disorders, if you want to call them a mental illness, are a somewhat different kind of mental illness. And I'm speaking in rough generalities, there is overlap here. But in general, you can see a person who might suffer from intermittent depression or intermittent anxiety.

And you can think of it as kind of a dark cloud that comes in and may make a couple of weeks or a month in that person's life really tough and might make them a hard company to be around. But it can be treated and it comes and goes. Personality disorders are not like that. They're basically what they say on the tin. They are disorders of personality or character, if you will. They're ingrained, long-term dysfunctional ways of thinking about yourself and thinking about and relating to other people. They don't go away. They're consistent across various parts of your life.

They may not be exactly the same in each situation. But we're talking about fundamental character issues that affect how a person relates to other people. And they're unfortunately really resistant to treatment. So what are the cluster Bs? They are borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder, which is a synonym for sociopathy or psychopathy. These are called the dramatic and erratic personality disorders. So the example that I would give, people want to understand how I conceive of this and where I came from. I am estranged from my mother.

My mother, my best guess for my mother is that she has borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. And the quick way that I give people an insight into this, although I'm in an age now where I'm in middle age, and I know a lot of people aren't going to get my references. So if you don't get these movies, you'll, you know, I'll have to find something. It would be fine. We're middle-aged as well, and our audience is even older. don't worry about that. Okay, I'm still young. Fuck both of you.

I know. I'm 75 years young. If you want to know what kind of childhood I had, if you want to know what kind of person my mother was, this sounds a little flip and it is a little funny and it's okay to laugh at it. But I mean it actually literally. My mother was across between a trailer park version of Joan Crawford and Mommy Dearest and the mother in the horror movie Carrie. That is the kind of personality style that my mother has. That was what our childhood was like growing up.

Absolute emotional instability. A parent who turned her children into her caregivers, doing work around the house, being an emotional confidant for her children, telling them secrets, romantic secrets even, that they never should have learned. a series of relationships with men who were physically violent and abusive to her children. My story is not unique. There are a lot of people, sadly, who come from backgrounds like this, but there is a commonality.

This isn't just, well, some people fall into these terrible situations. What's going on here is serious and severe personality disorders, emotional dysregulation, exploitative behavior, even towards your own children. this kind of stuff, well, the way I say it is domestic abuse has gone public. It's gone feral. The sorts of things that I saw in my home growing up that I did not understand are now happening in the wider world and I see them, I see them excessively on what I have been calling the woke left. But unfortunately, it has infected, at least in the United States, the mainstream left. Okay, Josh, hold on a second there. I'm loving what you.

you're saying, I'm completely on board. Can you give me some concrete examples of that, please? Yes. So virtue signaling, we hear that term a lot. Everybody today is a victim. If you want to get attention, if you want to get a story written about you, if you want your tweet to go viral, you have to claim victimhood. Somebody said something to you that was racist. Somebody said something that was transphobic. Somebody did not respect your pronouns. The level of offense that is given to these things is

so excessive. And it seems like culturally, we've been trained to just respond to that. Oh, you know, that's very, very sad. But what do we see? Perfect example from U.S. media this week. New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz, who is somebody

who's written a lot of work for the New York Times that people, I think rightly, have said, you're trying to get people canceled. You're trying to ruin their reputations. They're not living up to woke standards. And yet, a journalist like this will be interviewed by MSNBC and say that the criticism that she got for this gave her post-traumatic stress disorder.

So it's a reversal. Reversals of victim and offender. And we see this a lot. I think you guys see that a lot. You've told you've had guests on your show who've talked about that dynamic. No, yes, we have indeed. The thing that worries me, Josh, is the fact that people can monetize this behavior. And once you can monetize it, it's the ultimate incentive.

Yeah. Well, you can monetize it, right? You can build a personal brand out of being a victim and lots of people have done it. I mean, you know, I think there was an abortive attempt with the Oscars. Jada Pinkett Smith, I think, wanted to be the world's biggest victim for having a disability called alopecia. So. Careful now. I'm losing my hair as well, Josh. I'm going to have to fly over there and slap you.

Isn't that just how it is, though? Men just lose their hair and go bald. But when famous women lose their hair and go bald, they don't just go bald. They have a disability called alopecia. It's an illness. That's part of it. I think we see these double standards here too. Yes, Francis, you can monetize it.

But I think being a victim pays in currency other than cash, too. I think it pays in what you can call narcissistic supply. And that's the term that people use adapted from talk about drug culture. Right. You're getting that feeling of praise. You're getting that high from the attention. And it gives you status. It gives you social status, particularly on the left.

The more of a victim you are, the higher you are in sort of, symbolic hierarchy. So I think it's monetizable, but I think it's also monetizable, if you will, in a social way. And honestly, I think for a lot of people, that social attention may be even more attractive than the money. And it's particularly when you think about narcissism. Now, we're stand-up comedians, and we were involved in an industry stuffed to the brim with narcissists. And what was really fascinating, Josh, is a moment this, you know, this culture, this way of thinking, this ideology, seeked in, you started to see more and more people describe themselves as gender non-binary, pronouns in bio, all of these different things,

fat activists. Now, when I grew up, there was no such thing. But people were legitimately calling themselves fat activists, anti-racist, it just seems as like this kind of toxic relationship between the ideology and the narcissism. And let's be fair, we've all got narcissism later and within us. So it's also kind of, it's corrosive as well because it's encouraging us to behave this way. Absolutely. Narcissism is socially rewarded now. There's always been, it's always been the case. Take, take an industry like Hollywood. Hollywood is full of broken people. This is where children from broken homes, traumatizing homes, inadequate neglectful backgrounds. This is where they go. I'm not saying they do it consciously, but this happens to a lot of

creative people. 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. 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. And I don't think Hollywood is a place that you go to in order to get mentally better. You know, there was a line, there was a really great series on FX a few years ago that looked at the last years of the famous actresses, Joan Crawford and Betty Davis's life. And there was a scene in there where Joan Crawford was in the hospital, you know, huge narcissist.

And the publicist says to her, you know the thing about Hollywood? I don't know if it creates narcissists or attracts people like you. And that's the question. I think it's both. But it's definitely incentivized. But and it's a great point. But the problem is, instead of having, as in John Crawford's times in the 50s and the 60s, you had an industry which created narcissists.

we now have these platforms, which is turning the whole society, a whole society, into one big narcissist. Yeah. Yeah, one big narcissist or one big borderline, as I would say it. You know, I was looking at something this morning. I thought you guys would be interested in because people ask this a lot. Well, how many people actually have a full-on personality disorder, right? And you said, Francis, and you're right, we all have some narcissism in us.

Here's the thing about these traits that we talk about, even if we talk about them in personality disorders or in non-personality disorder people. Almost all of these traits are human traits. They're not personality disorder people traits. We all have a degree of narcissism. Some of it we need. Some of it is healthy. We're talking about excess here.

We all have a degree of self-regard or ability or inability to regulate our emotions. This is normal. But the people that we could look at and say, you have a real pathological level problem, have these so consistently and so extremely, even though many people don't recognize it immediately. There are different kinds of being narcissistic. There are kinds that are very easy to see, and there are types that are more covert. But how many people have them? If you look at the literature, if you go to the psych literature, and you look at the average estimates that come from the professional organization, you'll get something between one to three percent they believe in the general population have a cluster B personality disorder.

I don't believe this for a moment. I suspect all along, even before our modern era, that was probably an underestimate. My guess, and it's just a guess, it's from experience. I'm a decently well-read layman, but again, not a credential professional. 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. One thing I looked at, and I talked about this on a 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. 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? 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. here's what they actually found. For histrionic, excessive over-the-top melodramatic, histrionic personality disorder, 30% of this student surveyed met the criteria. For narcissistic personality disorder, 21% of the students they surveyed fit that category.

That is completely terrified. Well, let me ask you something, Josh, because how much of this is we now have a method for all those people to express themselves, as Francis says in the past. If you were someone like this, you'd go into Hollywood or into stand-up or whatever. 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 side of it, which is how much is social media incentivizing,

rewarding, and therefore generating this sort of behavior in all of us when it's really not very healthy for any person to be using it? Oh, big time. I couldn't quantify it, but it clearly social media is one of the primary ingredients that has made this possible. I don't think it would be possible to this degree if we did not have easy access to brand me on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. And the artificial way that social media has us communicated, strips context because of the medium itself, it's out tone of voice often if you're just typing. You're not sitting in a room where you're reading people back and forth and getting their body language in person. It is set up in such a way that it thrives on big emotions, big emotions in me, big emotions in you. We're all trying to provoke emotional reactions. And even the nicest people, even the most sort of butter wouldn't melt in your mouth people who never lose their temper, bad behavior is encouraged and almost push

by these media and it can make good people act like bad people it can it can make people who are having a bad day have several bad days in a row but it definitely it's kind of like lifeblood for the people who are the hardcore committed narcissistic people i mean there's no better way for them to get supplies so yeah i think that has a huge huge amount to do with it hey constantin do you want better mental health i'm from russia we don't have mental health so how do you deal with mental health. You drink vodka, then go out and wrestle bear. If you live, you feel better.

If you die, you're not real men. What about the bear's feelings? It's Russian bear, it has no feelings. People don't always realize that physical symptoms like headaches, teeth grinding, and even digestive issues can be indicators of stress. And let's not forget about doom scrolling, not sleeping enough, sleeping too much, under eating and overeating. sleeping too much under eating. This is Western disease.

Therapy has really helped me in my life to concentrate and focus. It's really important to have someone impartial who you can talk to about the tricky issues that you're struggling to deal with. Therapy has played a really important role in helping me to deal with my ADHD and become better in all areas of my life. Why is he telling them how weak he is? Drink vodka feel better. Better help is custom. online therapy that offers video, phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist.

So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to. Trigonometry funds get 10% off their first month at Betahelph.com forward slash trigger, especially if they're not real men. That's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P dot com slash trigger. And what effect is this having on society with the way we interact? interact with each other. What's it doing to the cohesiveness of our relationships? It's destroying them. It's absolutely destroying them. That's the reason why I talk about this on the show. I'm terrified of where our society is going. I believe we are living in a cluster

B world. We are living in a world right now in the West that is running along Cluster B slash abusive household rules. And I want to say, for people, a lot of people say, I've never heard of this kind of thing before. You may not have heard the term, but you know these people and you do know this type of character. You may know it by different names. If you have ever known a couple that had a domestic abuse situation, wife battering or mutual spouse battering, if you know people who've had abusive childhoods, generally speaking, the psychology of the domestic abuser, whether it's physical, emotional, verbal, or all of them, in terms of the abuse, that's cluster B psychology. This is personality disorder stuff going on.

Another term for it is cults. Cult rules are cluster B rules. Authoritarianism, monitoring other people's emotions and decisions and choices to make sure that they line up with yours. This isn't new. And in fact, these kinds of people in these kinds of psychological states, I think, have been written about for thousands of years. The ancients knew who they were. I think they are reflected in our mythology, the vampires, the unquiet dead, the succubus. A lot of these things can be read as allegories for these kinds of exploited people. You will often see narcissistic people, particularly the seductive, maybe sexually, maybe not sexually, but very seductive, and very seductive, charismatic, narcissistic people are often described as emotional vampires.

And it's a really great metaphor because that's what it feels like. Feels like your emotional energy is being sucked out of you and brought into someone else. I'm only six years, five or six years into realizing this, if I'm right about it. Your first question that you always ask and that you ask me, what brought you to be sitting in this seat today. Five or six years ago, I'm not a religious person, but in terms of the effect that it had,

I would describe what happened to me five or six years ago as an awakening. After many, many years of not living around or near my family, I made a very bad decision. I made a foolish decision. I thought that I could love my mother back to health. And I decided to bring her back into my life

put her in a house that I owned that she could afford because she was poor. And I thought, you know, I'll be retirement for my parents. And within two years of doing that, all the screaming, the pathological lying, the exploitation, theft, you name it. All of that stuff began happening at a rapid pace. And I sat there and I looked at myself and I said, what is going on here? I feel like I've gone right back to my childhood. And it became so overwhelming that I had a nervous breakdown.

And I don't say that to be dramatic and I don't want anybody to say, oh my God, I'm so sorry, pity, pity. Worst thing that ever happened, but the best thing that ever happened to me because my mother's pathological behavior was so extreme and so right in my face. And I was in my 40s and I said, something is so severely wrong here. And if I don't put a stop to it right now, it's going to have an effect on my health. And I did have to put a stop to it. I did have to go through a legal battle to separate myself from my mother in our rental situation. And it woke me up. I finally had an answer.

And this is what I would say to people watching or listening. When I learned what personality disorders were, I finally had a way to understand what in my head was, my mother's crazy, but I can't explain it. and I can't explain it to other people. They won't understand. I don't have friends come over to my house because I'm embarrassed of what they'll see if they see my mother behind closed doors. All of a sudden,

it wasn't just this crazy way my mother was. This was a known syndrome. And the worst part, though, was after coming to that realization and saying, I don't want this in my life anymore, I looked around me because I come from the left. I used to be woke. I'm not anymore.

And I said, oh my God, I have gone right from my childhood home back out into the world. And this is the world we're living in now because the same abusive, exploitative tactics that I know at home, I'm seeing in my friend's circles. I'm seeing in the, you know, the Democratic voters political circles that I'm talking about. And I'm not saying that only people on the left have a certain psychological disorder. That's not what I'm saying. But I am saying right now, in the Western world, on the left, it looks like it has a really bad case of a cluster B personality disorder. And Josh, can I ask you something? Because I've been thinking about this a lot.

And maybe this isn't particularly interesting avenue. But it just makes me curious. You mentioned you being awoken on the left. And I know that one of the things that I've identified as someone who's got left-wing views and right-wing views, there is a tendency for people on the left to feel like they have to be on that side of politics because they experience themselves as being somewhat vulnerable. And so they want a quote-unquote fair society because they know that in a fair society maybe their opportunities and status will be elevated above what it might have been

in a more meritocratic society, which is where the right might lean to. And by the way, this isn't a pro-right or anti-left thing. I'm just, it's one of the things I've observed. We're also, you know, particularly with the Ukraine situation now, starting to see quite a lot of pathologies on the right. But in terms of that, talk to us about what was it that you drew you to being woke? I'm just curious. This won't be the same for everybody.

But this is how it was for me. I think, I think leftist politics naturally pre-selecting. for people who conceive of themselves as victims or as people on whom forces act, right? People who are victims of systems. Our family was poor. For a long time, single mother household, my mother, I never even met my father. My brother and sister come from a different marriage. There was physical battering and violence in the home.

um poverty and a from a from the time i was a very young child and again this is this is i mean i'm telling you my story but this is the story of millions of people this there's nothing unique about my family in terms of the screwed up families um i was i was made in basically i was made into my mother's surrogate husband emotionally um a caretaker for the younger children um a girlfriend, sort of, if you will, to talk to about all the terrible things men had done to her. I mean, when I was a kid, I used to comfort my mother when she was afraid of getting slapped around by my stepfather, while I was afraid as well. This kind of role reversal. You see reversal in all of this.

And I'm gay. And I was unable to face when I was a teenager the reality of the psychiatric derangement in my mother. It was too much for me to face. I interpreted my emotional instability as a teenager, and I had a lot of it. And my depression, I had a couple of suicide attempts at around 12 years old. I interpreted all of this as I'm gay and everybody hates gay people and I'm getting beat up at school. So this is why I'm depressed. And that was part of it.

But really, it was because I came from an absolutely deranged household. and I learned to see myself as a victim, as a minority. I'm a gay man, gay people are oppressed. I come from a low socioeconomic background. America hates struggling single mothers, and they're not generous enough with welfare or food stamp benefits. And I just took on these leftist politics that my mother had, and I made them my own.

Now, I'm not saying there's no way to be a liberal that isn't more considered than how I got there. There are ways to do that. But I see a whole bunch of this. One of the common characteristics I see in people today who, Hugh very left, is they either see themselves as having been victims of structural racism, structural misogyny, structural anti-poverty, and or they see the people that they associate with as victims.

It's always an outside force. It's never that you didn't make good choices. And it's interesting. It's really interesting because, as I mentioned, I think on the right, there is something similar but different happening where, I mean, I think the three of us would agree that we've all been lied to for some time by mainstream media and the establishment has been pushing particular narratives. But it's getting to a point now where it feels like a lot of people feel like it's

becoming an identity almost. Like we've been lied to and now we've discovered this thing that answers all our questions. Have you noticed that or am I imagining that? Are you saying, I'm trying to figure out, are you saying that there's just as much of a danger on the right of adopting a new identity that says, well, they all lie to us so they're always wrong now. Is it, did I parse that right? And we're victims. We are victims. We are victims of this great conspiracy, whatever that is.

There's this sort of very simplistic explanation. to explain things that have been happening, just like structural racism or homophobia. There is an element of truth. Gay people have been badly treated in the past. Black people have been badly treated. But the explanation is overly simplistic and emotionally dysregulated.

It's like, yes, you were not told the truth about Brexit and Trump and COVID to some extent and blah, blah, blah. That does not mean that when mainstream media says it's going to rain today, it's definitely going to be sunny and there's not going to be a single... Do you see what I'm saying?

I do, yeah. And I think that is a danger, and it is something that people are falling into. There are conspiracies, you know, it bothers me. I hate the tone of it, like you see, you even see the word conspiracy theory printed and you hear it in this voice. Conspiracy theory, right? Drives me nuts because conspiracies are real and positing that a conspiracy happened is not a sign of, oh, he's kooky, right?

But I don't, a lot of things that many people think are conspiracies, I don't think are conspiracies. I think they are predictable ways that patterns interact with each other and have certain outcomes. So, you know, there are people on the right might say, well, it's all a conspiracy to do X, Y, and Z. Or this is all a conspiracy to do exactly to maneuver our children into this. I don't know that there are as many conscious mechanical conspiracies as there are attractive ideas that serve certain interests and that preferentially attract the kind of people who consciously or unconsciously will exploit those dynamics for their own social or monetary profit. So I think a lot of things tend to go together, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there's a puppet master pulling particular strings. Well, that's exactly what I mean, Josh, because that's kind of the point is that while, of course, bad things happen in the world and sometimes bad things are done by other people, quite often they're done because of, you know, how appealing an idea is and the idea might be very wrong. Or they might happen through the development of certain social trends that aren't.

But the point that I was getting at is I think just like the structural explanation is a very overly simplistic way of, talking about things or misrepresenting things. So this idea that there's one group of people, a small group of people who are sort of in charge of things. It's quite an old theme as well. It's been around for a very long time in the past too. Yes. This is a good illustration of black and white thinking, either or thinking. This is a problem for all of us right now. And it's really tempting, especially when we're scared. And I'm scared. I am scared of where our society is going. It's really tempting to fall into yes or no answers in black and white thinking. Rather, I think we need to go for discernment and judgment. And do you notice, do you notice that one of the

tenants of being a nice, decent person on the left is don't judge. Don't be so judgmental. You do you. I'm not saying it's a consistent. conspiracy, but this is conscious, this is conscious and it is serving a purpose. We have been told that to be nice people, to be decent and ethical people, requires us to suspend our judgment. The word judge has taken on a negative connotation, the same way the word discrimination has. It's almost impossible to use the word discriminate in its original meaning because people believe discriminate equals bad. Same thing with judge. Well, that sounds judgmental. Sometimes judgmentalism is required, but discernment is always required. Is it really all the way yes? Is it really all the way no?

Or is it something else? Yeah. Black and white thinking, by the way, is very typical of the borderline personality thinking style. And a way to think of that is when people ask, What's the easy way to understand borderline personality disorder? Think of the dynamic. I hate you. Don't leave me. You're terrible. You're not giving me what I want.

You're not living up to my expectations. Then the next day, oh my God, oh my God, you're the best in the world. Don't ever leave me. I can't live without you. Oh, I didn't mean it, et cetera, et cetera. This, you know, overvaluing people or ideas and then drastically undervaluing them and vacillating between these extremes is typical of borderline personality.

but it's also more and more typical of the way we're approaching our political conversations, and it is dangerous. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Because if you do, then EasyDNS is a company for you. Easy DNS is the perfect domain name registrar provider and web host for you. They have a track record of standing up for their clients, whether it be cancelled culture, de-platform attacks or overzealous government agencies. He knows about that. So will you in a second? EasyDNS have rock solid network infrastructure and

fantastic customer support. They're in your corner no matter what the world throws at you unless it's your ex-girlfriend, in which case you're on your own. You know about that. Move your domains and websites over to EasyDNS right now. All you've got to do is go to easydns.com forward slash triggered. That's easydns.com forward slash triggered. Use our promo code, which is also triggered, and get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, Access of Easy, which tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. The worrying thing, Josh, for us is we've touched on cults, is how deeply attractive cults are from the outside, particularly in a world that we live in

that is becoming more and more atomized, families are breaking up, they're smaller. We're We have that deep need to belong to be part of a tribe. And so doesn't that make us more susceptible to cults? 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 Mooney's and the Harrikschristis, right? Yeah. 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. I think the leadership is distributed in the social media age. I think all the elements of cult thinking, which are also Cluster B slash authoritarian slash abusive parent thinking, all of those things are are present we don't need to have one single charismatic leader but yes when people are scared they want to cleave to a tribe it's it happens to me i used to be a liberal a leftist i'm not anymore but i won't say i'm a conservative because there are emotional things that attach to these words and expectations that come along with them and i know it's clunkier

but I wish people would say to each other, okay, I'm not going to ask you if you're a liberal or conservative. I'm going to ask you what you think about this particular issue and this particular issue and this particular issue. Because I have views that some people would consider too left-leaning for their tastes. And I have a lot of views these days that are far too right-leaning for the people that I used to hang around with.

And like many people, when I changed my mind politically over the past five years, I lost nearly all of my friends. Nearly all of my leftist friends. And I don't think we talk about this enough because I went through the same thing. I lost a lot of friends. I know you did.

And... You still got me. He said that in the most sinister manner possible. But I don't think we talk enough about how deeply distressing that is because when you're part of a group or a cult or a way of being and you suddenly leave it,

It's like a death in a way. I know that sounds very dramatic, but it is, it's a death of an old way of living. Absolutely. It's a social death. I don't remember who said it recently, but it's a brilliant formulation.

Somebody like in somebody called cancel culture, social murder. And that's what it is. Reputation, destruction, and being cast out. This is shunning. This isn't new. Nothing we're doing right now is,

you know, ooh, it's 2022. We just figured this. No, no, no. 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 that, you know, I'm a victim now. I lost all my friend. Well, I certainly felt victimized in the moment. That's a natural emotion. But it's demoralizing. It can make people depressed. It can make them suicidally depressed. It's vicious. Yeah. It hurts.

It does. And the other thing about it, Josh, is we talk about emotional dysregulation, or I call it emotional incontinence, where people just don't know how to control their emotions. Our mutual friend Helen Dale likes that phrase, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it was one that's going around. And I just find that our reaction as a society

to a lot of things that I consider fairly trivial or minor is now, oh, you've got a different opinion? You think the tax system should work differently? You don't believe that this thing that you are now all, you know, you didn't post a black square on Instagram, then you have to be socially murdered as you put it, right? And again, I don't consider this a victimhood thing for me

because I know it's unpleasant to lose friends and, you know, I've obviously gone through it as well. But on the other hand, I went an interred with my eyes open. I knew that this is a society we live in. And that's the cost of doing what you believe to be doing. I'm okay with that. But it just, as an observer of it, it seems very, very disproportionate to the so-called crime.

And where does that come from? Cluster B. Maybe he's born with it. Maybe it's close to be. Well, it, where does that come from? It does come, that is a very typical, you can think of it as emotional inflation, right? Taking something moderately or minorly distressing and inflating it. This is very, very typical of the histrionic personality style, the bored.

line personality style. But it's become normalized. We have normalized, we have normalized personality disorder style relations. We actively applaud and affirm them. This whole sort of, you know, well, I'm going to say my piece no matter what anybody has to say because I'm a woman of color or I'm a trans person of disability or I'm this or I'm that.

And the more melodramatic and the more you declaim and the, the more strident your tone of voice, the more you get, you go, girl, you go. You know, it's, I mean, I talked about this on an episode of my show earlier this week. A headline in one of the New York newspapers talking about Jada Pinkett Smith's struggles with alopecia and alopecia awareness advocates. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding? Struggle. an alopecia awareness.

Everything that is, frankly, not very interesting or doesn't need to be put on a pedestal, is elevated to this fever pitch of emotion. It's not real. It's not helping. Well, it's definitely not helping. So, Josh, obviously we're focusing on negative things here, which is not unusual for us,

because we're sort of looking at the culture and trying to say maybe we're going in the wrong direction on some things. But what can be done about this? I know for myself, for example, I do my very best not to ever act like a victim. Not because there aren't situations in which people mistreat me or whatever, but I just don't think it's helpful to me and to my well-being to consider myself that way. But me doing that doesn't seem to be changing the culture, sadly. It's not having that kind of impact.

So what do we do as individuals and as a society to try and overcome these? Because look, let's be honest, right, Josh? Social media isn't going away. It's not going to disappear. That's right. It's not. So all this talk about, oh, social media is so bad for us. I agree.

But talking about it ain't going to do shit. It's not going to do shit, right? So we're going to have to do something. What can we do? 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, 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. But I mean this quite seriously. Your show has been a very important component in my political maturation over the past couple of years. When I was a lefty, I would not listen to conservative viewpoints. I had a very stereotyped view of anybody

who had political views that were to the right of mine. I engaged in a lot of black and white thinking myself. I have some of these traits that I talk about. There are few children who come from homes like I do who will not have some of these emotional dysregulation problems. I think they're better today. But I understand them and I'm not wholly outside that world myself. I just basically assumed that people who were on the right

were morally deficient. I mean, it's absurd and it's embarrassing to say it, but that is how I acted in the world. And when I heard, I don't remember the first, episode I heard of your show. It might even have been Carrie Smith of unsafe space, or it might have been before then. But you have such a variety of people on your, you have medical experts, you have researchers, you have historians, you have people across the political spectrum. And the commonality with all of them is that they're unafraid of stating what they believe to be

true and expounding on it in an interesting way. I have listened to more people with more political points of view that I scoffed at before because of your show than probably any other single sorts of media consumption. So I'm very grateful that you guys are out there. I mean, it's interesting too, but it's actually been educational for me. So I think that we need to do, you need to do what you're doing. I hope that what I'm doing with Disaffected will be helpful to people. I want it to be helpful in two ways. I want people to make the connection, to understand that there is a way of understanding and predicting the behavior in this woke culture if you understand these dynamics. I also hope that it will make people feel that they are not crazy. 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, but I didn't know there was a name for it and I didn't know there was a way to understand it. And I'm not trying to big myself up because I didn't understand this until six years ago either. 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. From personal experience and from observation in the world, I think it's usually true that a problem has to get so acute and so unbearably painful that we have no choice but to stand up and confront it and walk down a different road. Regardless of your efforts, my efforts, the efforts of other people in this kind of conversation, shit may have to fall apart a little bit more. time will tell. And Josh, on a micro level, what do you say to those people who are watching or listening to this and thinking, holy shit, my partner, friend, blah, blah, blah,

is a cluster B personality. What do they do? Talk to other people who are in your situation. Talk to other people who have abusive family structures. Read. consume, educate yourself about that. See, I hate educate yourself. We can't even say normal things anymore. When my sister made a phone call to me that changed my life six years ago when the crisis with my mother was coming up. I had every excuse in the world. I thought maybe she has

Alzheimer's. Maybe she's taken a fall. Maybe she has dementia. Why is she acting this way? Well, I was trying to avoid the fact that she'd acted this way my entire life and I didn't want to admit it. My sister called me up and said, Josh, I think I understand what's going on here. I think you need to read about this. I think our mother is a narcissist and I think she has a Cluster B personality disorder. So I went and I read the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, Survivor's forums. I just read and read and read and the more I read both the clinical literature and the lay survivor literature, it was instantly clear to me. And as much of a set piece as this sounds like, it's true.

Within three days, an entire lifetime of baffling emotional dysregulation, abuse, and lying, slotted itself into understandable categories. It was like watching a mechanical machine sorting parts. Chink, chink, chink, chink, chink. All of a sudden, I had clarity. That can happen for you, too. read about this, learn about it, talk to other people, watch my show, send us an email. The knowledge of this, just the knowledge alone that you are not crazy to have noticed this

and you are not the terrible person who has it coming, the way the person of using you says or implies, is worth so much. it's a great note to leave it josh so we're going to ask you a couple of questions from our supporters for our supporters on locals only 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 i can see you've got one ready to go you're you're you're pumped and good well i mean i am you know i do actually listen to your show every week so i gave this some i gave this some serious thought 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, 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, and I've had enough of it. 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 Devils Tuber that is sweet potatoes. But I would like to raise. awareness of the problem of sweet potatoes. Fantastic. Well, controversial to the bitter end. It's been Josh Lercom. Thank you so much for coming on of the Disaffected Podcast. We're going to do a couple of questions for our local supporters, but thank you for being here.

Josh, where can people follow you online? Tell everybody where to go. Yep, we are on YouTube with our channel Disaffected. We're on all the major audio and video streaming platforms, Disaffected Podcast. You want show announcements on Twitter at disaffected P, disaffected the letter P. Thank you guys. Fantastic. It's been a pleasure. Thank you guys for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one, or also all of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go,

it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. A lot of the professional mental health on offer is literally validating actual delusion and disordered behavior and thinking and calling it beautiful and authentic.