516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
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Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today...
to sit down and talk, play really with Michael Malice. And that's always fun. Michael's a, he's a genuine delight to have a conversation with. You never know what direction it's gonna go in. Many directions, all of which have a certain coherence. He's got a great sense of humor and irony and is extremely sharp and unpredictable. So that's ridiculously fun. And he always has something useful to say. So what did we talk about today? Well, we talked about the terrible attractiveness of the kind of virtue signaling that other people make sacrifices for. Motivation for deep evil. Michael has studied totalitarian evil. He was curious about the more mundane forms of pathology. the sorts of things that motivate not only pedophilia, but extreme sadistic pedophilia, let's say. So that always makes for a enjoyable conversation. We talked about Michael shifting views with regards to the marginal, let's say, as a creative anarchist by personality and political inclination.
Michael is prone to presume that the different against the same or the, what would you say, exceptional against the normal is admirable, but he's also come to recognize that the center can be dissolved in a manner that's cataclysmic, and the diverse and the creative can degenerate into the monstrous and dangerous. And so we talked about that technically, psychologically, sociologically. We talked about Camille Pelliat, who's a hero of Michael's, the brilliant female literary critic, unpredictable and sparkling. And Michael's request to me that I broker an invitation, which I could do, I suppose, with some degree of success probability. And we surveyed the landscape closely. Fundamentally, what we did was survey the landscape of counterproductive moralizing and analyzed its effect on psychological and political behavior. And it was great fun. So join us for that. I suppose you think this should be a national holiday. Well, kind of. Don't you? We took down Trudeau. That's the spirit of January 6th. Put her there, man. Right? Thank God.
You know, I watched his resignation speech today. Apparently, the wind blew it away just a couple of minutes before his actual speech, so he had to wing it. And you can tell. And you know what I really found fascinating about it was, and I think it's perfectly in keeping with his essential narcissism, is the first statements he made were about him. He said something like, well, you all know I'm a leader, or I'm a fighter. You all know I'm a fighter, and I don't quit. It's like, well, this isn't about you. I can't believe that, I can't envision saying something like that about myself. Can you imagine going out in front of a national audience and saying, I'm a fighter?
I can't imagine anyone calling you a leader, that's true. Well, yeah, so... No, no, but in all seriousness, to your point, I'm sorry to cut you off, you know better than I do from your work at Shrink, narcissists think their narrative is the reality. They literally believe what they say is true, and when you challenge that, they get enraged because it's an effect you're lying if you contradict what they say. It's self-evident.
Well, there's an interesting corollary to that. Statistical analysis of language, kind of using something approximating early large language models was just factor analysis, but it's analogous, showed that there's no difference between being self-conscious... and being miserable. They're so tightly associated that you can't distinguish them. So the default reality is that if you prioritize yourself, the associated emotion is negative. So narcissists are in a game that just can't possibly be won.
Wait, but isn't it more the case that they can't prioritize their self because there is no self?
Well, the self is a funny thing, Michael. This is something we might as well talk about this. You know, a human being is something that's organized on many levels, right? So if you think about it neurobiologically, for example, I'll give you an example. If you take a cat, a female that works better on female cats, partly because their sexual behavior is a little less complex to organize.
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