Victim-blaming and Moral Injury: Evil?

Nothing good can happen on a Monday, except a new YouTube by the inevitable, the one and only one. Thank God for that, Sam Vaknin. Simoa.

My name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm also a former visiting professor of psychology. Today, we are going to discuss morality and its place in psychology and in the relationship between victims and abusers. Is there any place to talk about ethics, about proper conduct, about good versus evil? Is this about morality? Or is this about naked Darwinian power? Is it about the survival of the fittest? Or have we, as a society and as individuals, have we transcended this view of reality and entered a more refined space where people are empathic and considerate and sensitive and generally woke?

You know my view. I'm not going to disappoint you in this video, but I'm going to introduce you to many, many new concepts and a lot of research, as I always do. Stay with me.

And so, I've received a comment by Claudin James on one of my videos, and it said, it says, "This moral manipulation is alien and crazy. Narcissists have a deep need to debase others to be able to perch on the moral hilltop. Or is it cowardice to just say the relationship is over directly, wherein he is the victim, humiliated and rejected again to himself?"

So, this raises quite a few issues, and many of them have been tackled in previous videos. But the one new element in this comment is the topic of morality. You see, psychology attempts to stand out from philosophy and from religion and to pose as a rigorous, almost exact and vigorous science. It's, it's derisory. It's funny. It's comic. Psychology will never be a science. At best, it's a pseudoscience. But in its attempt to become the new physics of the soul, the new mechanics of the psyche, psychology has rejected morality and value judgments. And they're nowhere to be found in psychological theories and practices, which is a huge shame because narcissistic abuse, for example, shatters our belief in a just world, in a just universe. And in this sense, narcissistic abuse is first and foremost a moral calamity.

I want to read to you a speech. It was given by Heinrich Himmler. Humane, the loyal Heine, as Hitler called him, has never been known for his morality. But listen to his speech and the amazing and pernicious ways in which he casts himself and the murderous SS, the Totenkopf, as the moral agents, and the Jews perishing in the Holocaust, asphyxiated with Zyklon B gas and then cremated. The Jews, the victims, are the true, uh, moral scourge. They are the true enemies. They are the true perpetrators. The poor, poor, poor SS has to deal with the aftermath of the Jewish evil. Listen well how a psychopath, a psychopathic narcissist, for that matter, recasts the victim's role and himself as the abuser as the victim.

Himmler's speech was given to senior SS officers in Posen, Poland, October 4th, 1943, and he dealt with the evacuation of the Jews. And here's what Himmler had to say. "I also want to speak to you here," he said, "in complete frankness, of a really grave chapter among ourselves. For once, it shall be said quite openly. But all the same, we will never speak about it in public. Just, just as we did not hesitate on June 30th, 1934, to do our duty as we were ordered, to stand comrades who had erred against the wall and shoot them, and we never spoke about it, and we never will speak about it. It was a matter of natural tact, uh, that is alive in us. Thank God that we never talked about it among ourselves, that we never discussed it. Each of us shuddered, and yet each of us knew it clearly that the next time he would do it again, if it were an order and if it were necessary. I'm referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of the things that is easily said. The Jewish people are going to be exterminated. That's what every party member says. Sure, it's our program. Elimination of the Jews, extermination, it will be done. And then they all come along, the 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew. Of course, the others are swine, but this one, this Jew is a first-rate Jew. Of all those who talk like that, not one has seen it happen. Not one has had to go through it. Most of you men," says Himmler to his SS cohorts, "most of you men know what it is like to see 100 corpses side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stood fast through this, and except for cases of human weakness, to have stayed decent. That has made us hard. This is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory in our history. For we know how difficult it would be for us if today, after bombing raids and the hardships and deprivations of war, if we were still to have the Jews in every city as secret saboteurs, agitators and inciters. If the Jews were still lodged in the body of the German nation, we would probably by now have reached the stage of 1916, 1917. The wealth the Jews possessed, we took from them. I gave a strict order," said Himmler, "which has been carried out by SS all. That this wealth will, of course, be turned over to in its entirety. We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individuals who have erred will be punished in accordance with the order given by me at the start, threatening that anyone who takes as much as a single mark of this money is a dead man. A number of SS men, they're not very, not very many, committed this offense, and they shall die. There will be no mercy. We had the moral right. We had the duty towards our people to destroy these people that wanted to destroy us. But we do not have the right, we do not have the moral right to enrich ourselves by so much as a fur, a watch, one mark or a cigarette or anything else. We do not want, in the end, because we destroyed a basilisk to be infected by this basilisk and to die. I will never stand by and watch while even a small rotten spot develops or takes hold. Whatever and wherever it may form, we will together burn it away. All in all, however, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our people, and we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, and our character."

And Himmler wasn't aware that his speech preceded a concept in psychology known as moral injury. Now, many self-styled experts, of course, misunderstand and misconstrue moral injury. Moral injury is experienced not by victims, but by perpetrators. When a perpetrator behaves in a way that conflicts with his or her values, with his, his or her morality, conscience, etc., etc., we have a moral injury. It's an injury to an individual's moral conscience and values resulting from an act perceived as a moral transgression on the part of themselves. Now, sometimes witnessing such an act can also invoke or provoke moral injury. But in very few cases does the victim suffer moral injury.

Moral injury produces profound feelings of guilt and shame, moral disorientation, societal alienation, a sense of betrayal, a sense of anger. There are psychological, social, cultural, spiritual aspects of moral injury. And in this sense, moral injury is a form of trauma. The US Department of Veterans Affairs uses the concept of moral injury in its literature, and it says the following: "The mental health of military veterans who have witnessed or perpetrated an act in combat that transgressed their deeply held moral beliefs and expectations can result in moral injury."

So, moral injury is almost exclusively reserved for someone who did something really, really wrong, and he knows it. Someone who misbehaved, someone who transgressed, someone who violated the most basic ethical precepts. This kind of person is liable to suffer from moral injury if he is possessed of values, a moral compass, and a conscience to start with.

Moral, moral injury was first described in 1984, and then it was called moral distress. There was a philosopher, his name was Andrew Jenton, and he wrote about, about nursing, and he described ethical dilemmas in nursing, and he said that these ethical dilemmas create, and I quote, "Moral distress arises when one knows the right thing to do, but institutional constraints make it nearly impossible to pursue the right course of action."

The term moral injury was coined by Jonathan Shay. Go down to the description. The description is under the video, not over the video. Go down to the description, and you will find two articles by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay and his colleagues. He focused mostly on military veterans and he interrogated them, asked them about a sense of injustice, leadership malpractice, ethical dilemmas they've encountered, and how they solved them. And he defined moral injury as containing or comprised of three components. He said moral injury is present when one, there has been a betrayal of what is morally right; two, by someone who holds legitimate authority; and three, in a high-stakes situation. He defined moral injury as stemming from the betrayal of what's right in a high-stakes situation by someone who holds power.

Now, today, we don't adhere to this definition. We have enlarged it considerably, and the credit goes to Brit Litz. Again, go to the description, and you will see some of the articles. In 2009, the term moral injury was modified, and Litz and colleagues defined it this way: "Moral injury is perpetrating, perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. It may be deleterious in the long term emotionally, psychologically, behaviorally, spiritually, and socially."

So now the definition is much wider. It doesn't apply only to the military, to law enforcement, to the healthcare industries. Now, anyone and everyone can suffer moral injury. But again, it's limited to perpetrators. Perpetrator guilt, a phenomenon I will discuss in a few minutes, underlies moral injury. If you experience moral injury, it's because you have done something seriously, seriously wrong, in breach of everything that is held dear morally and ethically by everyone, yourself included. Your conscience is torturing you for good reason. Your suffering is purifying and purging and cleansing. It's a baptism by fire and a very healing experience.

According to Litz, the term moral injury has been developed in response to the inadequacy of other mental health diagnoses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Litz and others said that PTSD doesn't capture the anguish, the self-torture, the torment, the inner disintegration, the feeling of being possessed or bedeviled by voices, powerful introjects that are the equivalent of a harsh inner critic or a sadistic superego, but with a correct, right, justified message. So PTSD re-focuses on symptoms. Moral injury focuses on the reactions to these reactions to these symptoms in terms of shame, guilt, anger, a sense of betrayal, and disgust.

When people experience moral injury, the first thing is shame. They feel ashamed of themselves because they haven't measured up to their own standards, because they have failed, first and foremost, themselves. I mean, the path from PTSD to moral injury is two-way. You could first suffer moral injury, which later develops into PTSD. In short, moral injury is a form of self-traumatizing and then self-retraumatizing. The introjects inside you are so powerful and so right that you can't offer any resistance and any meaningful defense, and you essentially internally decompensate. Acting out is just one step removed. Acting out could be in the form of psychosis, all-consuming psychosis, or doing something really, really crazy, really, really criminal, really, really illegal, something that's bound to get you into serious trouble.

Litz focused on the cognitive, behavioral, and emotional aspects of moral injury. And he said that cognitive dissonance occurs after a perceived moral transgression results in a stable internal global attribution of blame, followed by the experience of shame, guilt, anxiety, and withdrawal or avoidance. There's an increased risk of suicide owing to demoralization, self-harming, and self-handicapping behavior. So, according to Litz, the sequence is: cognitive dissonance, no moral transgression, perceived as moral transgression by the individual, then cognitive dissonance, then stable, stable self-attribution of blame, shame, guilt, anxiety, negative affectivity, and the attendant negative moods and negative effects and negative, um, and anxiety. So, this is the next stage: then withdrawal and avoidance, which is a very, very bad sign. It's an extremely bad sign because in the vast majority of cases, it's followed by suicidal ideation, demoralization, severe attempts to self-harm and self-handicap and self-defeat, and ultimately self-destruct.

There are psychological risk factors that predispose individuals to moral injury, and they include neuroticism, being prone to shame. And there are other factors that protect individuals from moral injury. For example, high self-esteem, of course, grandiosity, uh, support, secure people around the individual who forgive the individual and offer, offer the individual a helping hand, a holding hand. And above all, number one is a belief that the world is just. I believe in the just world hypothesis. We'll come to it a bit later in this video.

Now, there's an anthropologist, Tina Molandik, and she integrated insights from psychology, philosophy, theology, social sciences, and so on and so forth. And she offers the most holistic understanding of moral injury. She dwells on ethics, psychology, spiritual, existential dimensions, organizational, political, societal, etc., etc. So, anyone interested to learn more about moral injury, Tina Molandik is your girl.

The research of Molandik showed that unresolved conflicts create potentially morally injurious situations. The unresolved conflicts could be on the political level. For example, disagreements about whether a war is just or not. The Iraq war, um, the Ukraine war. When there's a disagreement as to the ethical dimension of the war, is it a just war? Not only in terms of international law, but in terms of ethics. In this case, soldiers on the ground are fighting a war but do not experience total approval and total support. And so they experience institutional betrayal, and they're looking for reparation. You know, in, in other words, they begin to develop compensatory behaviors. Some of these compensatory behaviors can be entitled and grandiose. In other words, moral injury can provoke narcissistic defenses and even psychopathic behavior. And this is why it's very difficult to tell, um, sometimes people who are actual, real narcissists and psychopaths from people who have become transitional narcissists and psychopaths owing to a single mistake, a single transgression, having done something wrong, having, having erred, having made, having made a faux pas, uh, having misbehaved, and then regretted bitterly, and so on and so forth.

So the sequence in this case is, um, the individual misbehaves, commits a moral, ethical transgression, even a crime. Then the individual feels bad about it because it conflicts with the individual's values and conscience and moral compass. Individual feels bad. That's a moral injury. Then there is a sense of betrayal. If, if the transgression is embedded in a bigger picture, for example, a war, natural disaster, a crash, an accident, and so on and so forth. So then there's a sense of betrayal. And then there are compensatory behaviors, compensatory mechanisms, often involving high narcissism, grandiosity, and entitlement.

Public condemnation, public exposure of the individual can create the equivalent of mortification, even in healthy people. But here is something very interesting. If the individual perceives himself to have acted wrongly, and then he is made into a hero, he is celebrated, he is feted, he's subjected to a confetti parade, that would create moral injury. So moral injury is any public exposure following a misdeed, following misconduct. And the public exposure can be negative, but can also be positive. The public eye, that big all-seeing eye that used to symbolize God in medieval churches. This eye of the public follows you everywhere. And if you know that you have misbehaved, no matter how forcefully and how often you protest to yourself and in public and to others, you know that you have misbehaved. You know how badly you've misbehaved. You know how egregiously you breached every moral tenet and every ethical person. And you know there's no way out of this knowledge. And so any attention to you, even positive attention, is likely to actually engender and inflame your moral injury.

Now, if you are embedded in a social network that is supportive and provides secure and unthinking, unthinkingly is behind you, that is going to ameliorate the intensity, extent, and length, longevity of the moral injury, but it's not going to prevent it. And if it continues into the process of narcissism, of moral injury, it's going to exacerbate. So, in a way, moral injury is the opposite of narcissistic injury, but ironically, it is experienced the same. It's a kind of mortification, and so the reactions are very much the same. There's a lot of soul-searching, a lot of self-tormenting, a lot of tears and, and gnashing of teeth, and an attempt to flee yourself, to, to kind of put a stop to it, to throw, throw on the kill switch, no pun intended. So, uh, any distortion of the original experience by the public is perceived as enhancing, amplifying, magnifying the moral injury because it brings to light, it highlights the injustice, the unjust way in which the individual had comported himself or herself.

In 2019, researchers found out that there's a list of events that distress civilians at a level consistent with moral injury, including a car accident or experiencing sexual assault, uh, provoked sexual assault in many ways, and, and so on and so forth. But not everyone reacts the same way. The preconditions that I've mentioned must exist for a moral injury to manifest. Moral injury explains a plethora of, of, um, behaviors, including, for example, resignation, leaving your job. That's work by Ludma and so on and so forth. I encourage you to go into the literature. It's pretty fascinating. And definitely, there is a very strong connection between moral injury and complex post-traumatic stress disorder, CPTSD, especially with the element of complex post-traumatic stress disorder known as self-organization, disturbances in self-organization. Moral injury is not so much linked, not so much, uh, linked to other aspects of CPTSD, but, um, it is deeply linked to emotional dysregulation, interpersonal difficulties, a negative self-concept, a, a sense of worthlessness or failure, guilt, and shame. In short, moral injury triggers the bad object. So, it renders CPTSD much worse, or even creates, brings on CPTSD.

Now, I mentioned earlier that one of the defenses against moral injury is the just world hypothesis. Now, we have some, there's something called primal world beliefs, or in short, primals. Primal world beliefs in psychology are basic beliefs that humans hold about the general character of the world. Clinically speaking, primal world beliefs are part of what is known as the internal working model. Okay, Jeremy Clifton and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania coined this phrase, primals, or primal world beliefs, between 2014 and 2019. And they did a lot of, of amazing, amazing work, and so on and so forth. And they, they isolated 26 primal world beliefs that people hold, that they hold. And these are preconditions for existence, not only for happiness or contentment, but for functioning. You can't function well if you don't hold some of these beliefs. And they include the beliefs that the world is safe, enticing, alive, that the world, in short, is a good place, is good, is just, um, and not dangerous. Of course, the opposite of this is that the world is capricious, arbitrary, hostile, dangerous, and, and so on and so forth.

The just world belief is the belief that there is karma. The world is a karmic place. Outcomes are typically earned and deserved. And each primal is modeled as a kind of variable in operation within this just world. Now, what is the just world hypothesis, and how does it constitute a defense against moral injury? There's a book called Everything Happens for a Reason. Don't ask. But it encapsulates this belief. And there are all these sentences, you know, you got what was coming to you. What goes around comes around. Chickens come home to roost. Everything happens for a reason. And you reap what you sow. You know these sentences, they are all about the just world hypothesis, or more precisely, more accurately, the just world fallacy. It's a cognitive bias. It assumes that the world is organized in a way that justice is inbuilt. It's a hardwired feature. It's meted out to people. People get what they deserve. Their actions will have morally fair and fitting consequences. Actors and agents will get paid handsomely for their good deeds, and even more handsomely for their bad deeds. Nothing will go unpunished, and nothing will go unrewarded. The assumption that noble actions eventually will be rewarded, and evil actions will be punished. That's a part of this hypothesis.

Now, it's a tendency to attribute consequences or to expect consequences to a universal force in a way. So, it's, it's kind of a proxy to a belief in God. It's a supreme power that restores a moral balance or universal connection between the nature of actions and their results. Of course, this is completely, um, it's completely illogical and irrational. I mean, think, consider, for example, the following question: Who decides what is good and what is evil? Any action is good in certain contexts and evil in other contexts. I can give you like a million examples. So, forget all this. It's not a very rigorous, philosophically rigorous notion or concept, but it implies the implies the existence of a cosmic justice, destiny, divine providence. There's dessert, stability, order, karma. Um, it's a kind of rationalizing suffering on the grounds that sufferers deserve it.

Now, many, many social psychologists studied the just world hypothesis, and number one among them is Melvin Lerner. Melvin Lerner started his work in the 1960s, and he is definitely the grandfather, the father, and the mother of the field. He studied beliefs about justice and he inquired into negative societal and social interactions. He was actually, he was trying to understand experiments by Stanley Milgram. Stanley Milgram studied obedience. Lerner wanted to answer the question: How come regimes, political regimes that cause cruelty and suffering continue to maintain popular support? How do people come to accept social norms and social laws and mores that produce misery and hurt? It's, it flies in the face of logic, I mean, and basic assumptions about human nature. How does this happen? So Lerner, um, came up with an answer. He said, because we tend to blame victims for their suffering. That's why we don't think the victims don't deserve what they're getting. We believe victims deserve to suffer. And so then the regime which inflicts suffering on victims becomes an instrument of God, uh, an agent of order and structure and justice, a positive thing. Such a regime is perceived as a positive thing.

Going back to Heinrich Himmler, he said to his, he said to his subordinates, the SS officers present, he said to them, "You're good people because you're punishing the deserving. The Jews are our enemy. They want to destroy us, and you're punishing them. That makes you good people."

So, Lerner theorized that there was a prevalent belief in a just world in which actions and conditions have predictable, appropriate consequences. And the actions and conditions are associated closely with specific behaviors or attributes. So, consequently, this means that society determines the norms of society, the values of society, the ideologies that rule society, govern society, they determine, first and foremost, what is right and what is wrong. They determine what is just and what is unjust, what is appropriate, what is inappropriate. And then they tell you how to behave. Allport called it interpolation. Society tells you how to behave and what traits and attributes of yourself you should emphasize. They're positive, and others are negative. You should suppress them or repress them.

Lerner said that believing in a just world is a functional thing. It maintains the idea that one can influence the world in a predictable way. All you have to do is be good. All you have to do is work hard. All you have to do is conform, and then nothing bad will happen to you. It's a kind of contract with the world regarding the consequences of your choices, decisions, and behaviors. If I follow you, what you're saying to the world, what you're saying to society, what you're saying to your, to your government, what you're saying to other people, what you're saying to your spouse and to your children, and to your bosses, and to your neighbors, and what you're saying to your church, what you're saying is, if I agree to follow your prescriptions, behavioral prescriptions, if I agree to suppress my antisocial and asocial traits, would you then guarantee that I will never be punished? And the answer resoundingly is a counterfactual yes, counterfactual, because this is nonsense. There's no such contract in reality. No one guarantees anything to anyone ever. Bad things happen to good people. There's a book by that name. But people pretend. They lie to themselves. And so they plan for the future, and they engage in effective goal-driven behavior.

I, those of you who want to delve deeper, there's a kind of a booklet or monograph or whatever you want to call it, published in 1980 by Lerner. The belief in a just world: A Fundamental Delusion, that says everything there is to say. The belief in a just world, said Lerner, is not about the world, it's about the believers. The believers want to feel good. The belief in a just world maintains the believer's well-being. People are confronted daily with evidence the world is not just. Many people suffer for no apparent cause, like the Holocaust victims. And yet, we continue to lie to ourselves. And we use strategies to eliminate information that threatens this belief, rational or irrational strategies. We, for example, we accept the reality of some injustice. We say, well, mostly the world is just. Of course, there are mistakes, glitches, and bugs in the software, and sometimes the world is not just. Or we say, wherever we seek injustice, we fight back. We're going to prevent injustice or reverse injustice or provide restitution. Or, or, or you say, this is the best I can do. I'm limited, and so on and so forth. These are all, or you deny the injustice, or you withdraw from the world, or you reinterpret or reframe the event. These are all defenses against the fact that the world is actually not just. You need to fit your experience of an unjust world, eminently unjust, overwhelmingly unjust world, you need to fit it into your expectation of a just, karmic world. You reinterpret the outcome, the cause, the character of everything, and that includes the victims.

And here we come to the crucial point: to justify injustice in the world. The easiest method is to blame the victims, to shift the blame to the victims. If you cast the victims as the bad guys, then anything and everything that's happening to them, all their suffering is justified. It's actually proof that the world is just. If you observe the injustice and suffering of an innocent person, one major way is to rearrange the cognition of an event to interpret this victim as deserving of his suffering. Observers blame victims for their suffering. They try to find behaviors, a history, some mistakes they've made, their characteristics. Anti-Semitism is built entirely on this edifice. So these are negative social phenomena which are intended to resolve cognitive dissonances via derogating, devaluing, and degrading the victim.

Another effect of this kind of thinking is that individuals experience less personal vulnerability because they do not believe they've done anything to deserve or to cause negative outcomes. And this is a self-serving bias, which is very, very, very thinly separated from narcissism. In short, if you believe in a just world and you believe that you are a good person, you are one step removed from becoming a narcissist. One step removed. So all these whining, self-styled victims, um, healers, rescuers, saviors. "I'm always wronged. I'm, I always fall victim. I've never done anything bad to anyone. And look what's happening to me. I never get along with a specific group of people." You name it: women, minorities, Jews, whatever. All these people are actually deep in the throes of malignant narcissism. They just camouflage, pretend to be the prey when they've actually long ago become the predators. Watch my previous video about mimicry.

Just world beliefs. They are forms of what we call causal attribution. In victim blaming, the causes of victimization are attributed to the individual rather than to the perpetrator or to the situation. So if you're victimized, it's because you attract abusers. You're a narcissist magnet. You are passive. You're just there, and bad things happen to you all the time. It's a form of superstition, delusional superstition. And so the consequences of belief in a just world may be related to or explained in terms of causal attribution. You had it coming. You're a victim because you deserve to be a victim because you have a victim mentality. You have victim behavior, and you attract abusers because you're not sufficiently careful, or you're too provocative, or you yourself, you're an abuser just pretending to be a victim, etc., etc., etc.

Now, there have been many philosophical and psychological attempts in philosophy and psychology to rationalize victim blaming, enshrine it, and institutionalize it. Consider, for example, veridical judgment. Veridical judgment. It's a suggestion that derogation effects are based on accurate judgments of the victim's character. In other words, if you think the victim has done something wrong or something to deserve his, his or her suffering, it's because you're right. They did, or they are. Um, it's beyond shocking that there is such a school in psychology, but veridical judgment. Go and look it up for yourself. Um, Lerner countered by saying that people are derogated, denigrated, debased, attacked, chastised, criticized when they actually suffer. Individuals who agreed to undergo suffering but did not undergo suffering were viewed positively. So it's not about the victim, it's about the situation.

And then there is another theory called guilt reduction. Guilt reduction is we humiliate the victims, we blame the victims, we criticize the victims, um, because we want to reduce our own feelings of guilt. Observers' guilt reduction theory says that observers feel responsible or guilty for a victim's suffering if they themselves are involved in the situation or in an experiment, for example. In order to reduce the guilt, they devalue the victim. There isn't adequate evidence to support this appealing idea. Um, even observers who were not implicated in experiments and had no reason to feel guilty still were blaming and denigrating and humiliating victims.

And there's another theory called discomfort reduction. It says that we blame victims as a way to alleviate discomfort after we view suffering. The primary motivation is not to restore a belief in a just world, but to reduce discomfort caused by empathizing with the victims. Blaming victims is not intended to suppress helping activity, but intended to suppress empathizing with the victim because empathizing is really, really uncomfortable. These people assist the victims. They help them, but they don't empathize with them.

According to Irvin Staub, devaluing the victim leads to lesser compensation. If restoring belief in a just world was a primary motive, instead, there's virtually no difference between compensation amounts whether the compensation precedes or follows devaluation.

So here we come to psychopathy. Psychopathy is a lack of just world-maintaining strategies. There are no emotions there, and there's no empathy. So there's no discomfort. There's no need to blame the victim. Things just are. There's no emotional reaction to the horrors and the suffering of other people. You just note them in passing, as you would note, for example, the weather. Uh, it's a complicated, complicated topic. We blame and derogate victims. This is well-established in, in many, many, uh, studies. I refer you to studies by Zick and Leticia and Peplau and, and, and many others. And, um, even victims of violence, illness, poverty, they are all somehow blamed for what's happening, for their suffering.

The existence of a just world hypothesis coupled with a very high self-esteem is actually narcissism. Narcissism is a defense. Narcissism is a defense against moral injury. This narcissism assumes that nothing in principle is immoral. Victims deserve what's happening to them. They deserve the suffering. They deserve what's coming to them. So we see two pathways here, two trajectories. Number one, a person starts off as a moral person, ethical person with a conscience, and then he does something really bad, and he feels, feels guilt, experiences shame, ego dystony. So there's moral injury, and then to defend against the moral injury, such a person is likely to become highly narcissistic and even psychopathic. On the other end of the spectrum, a narcissist and a psychopath, they would almost never or very rarely experience moral injury. They may experience something which I call self-efficacy injury. Injury because they have failed. So it's the equivalent of mortification or narcissistic injury, but never moral injury. Self-efficacy injury is a very interesting concept, which I will elaborate upon in a future video.

What happens when these very people, these very people are victimized? The people who kept saying, "The victims deserve it, they had it coming," suddenly they're victimized. There was a study by Dr. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, and it found that victims often blame their own behavior, but not their own characteristics, for their victimization. Blaming one's behavior is a way of reasserting control. If, if you say, "I became a victim because I made a mistake," then you made it happen. It's the same way a narcissist copes with mortification. He says, "I made it happen." When you say, "I made it happen. My behavior caused my victimization," then you were in charge. You were the boss. You're in control.

Dimensions of just world beliefs include a belief in an unjust world, a belief in imminent justice, a belief in ultimate justice, the hope for justice, and the belief in one's ability to reduce injustice. The belief in an unjust world simply means a recognition of the existence of injustice. But then all the others are there to render the observer, to render the individual in charge, in control. In short, these are narcissistic defenses. Okay. Um, sometimes people have different beliefs in the personal and the public domain. So to say, I believe in a just world for myself, personal just world, but I don't believe in a just world in general, others, for others. And these beliefs are, um, are on the line separating from mental health and mental illness, but I will not go into it right now. That's a lot, a lot to go into. Okay.

A belief in a just world in general is good. It's necessary for mental health. It's associated with greater life satisfaction, well-being, and less depressive affect. The problem starts when a belief in a just world conflicts with behavior which is unjust, abusive, criminal. In short, when a belief in a just world leads to victim blaming, or and/or to narcissistic behaviors or psychopathic behaviors, then we transition from mental health to mental illness. Like everything else, a belief in a just world can be abused, is often abused by narcissists and, and psychopaths and, and so on. In itself, a belief in a just world is a coping strategy, a resource. It buffers stress associated with daily life. It reduces the trauma in traumatic events. It's a positive illusion, positive adaptation. You could even say it's a form of defense mechanism, a cognitive bias that protects you, similar to grandiosity, which is a cognitive distortion that protects the narcissist from narcissistic injury. But it often devolves, degenerates into victim blaming and into entitled narcissism and into psychopathic behaviors. And that's where the problem, uh, starts. Okay.

Another point which has to do with the belief in a just world is internal locus of control. When you believe in a just world, there is a greater acceptance and less dissatisfaction with negative events in one's life. And that helps you maintain an internal locus of control. This relationship holds only for beliefs in a just world for oneself. Belief in a just world for others is related to all kinds of social phenomena, some of which are negative. For example, victim blaming that I mentioned before. Okay.

I mentioned perpetrator moral injury. It's also known as perpetrator trauma or perpetration-participation-induced traumatic stress, PPITS. It occurs when symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are caused by an act or acts which are considered morally reprehensible. It's very similar to moral injury, but it usually involves transgressions which produce more profound shame because they are more, um, extreme. Now, trauma that is the outcome of misbehavior, trauma that is the outcome of criminal behavior, trauma that is the outcome of mis extreme misconduct is mentioned in the DSM-5. It says, when, when it defines PTSD, it says that there are causal factors for military personnel being a perpetrator, witnessing atrocities, or killing the enemy. So there is a recognition that people carry out acts which conflict with their essence so extremely that they develop trauma consequently.

And moral injury is like narcissistic injury, and moral trauma is like mortification. Let's say, um, moral injury and moral, especially moral trauma, produce a monopoly of traumatic, um, symptoms: intrusive imagery, dreams, flashbacks, unwanted thoughts, explosive anger, concentration and memory problems, and sleep problems, hypervigilance, a feeling of alienation, um, a sense of disintegration, and, and alcohol and cocaine use disorders. Alcohol and cocaine are by far the two substances most used in these cases. And dreams are affected, the contents of, of dreams. This results in cycles of violence, um, domestic violence, street crimes, emotional numbing, detachment, apathetic behavior, substance abuse, I mentioned, and so on and so forth.

All this mess is a part of a branch of psychology known as moral psychology. It's a field of study in philosophy and in psychology, and it uses, initially, it was used to describe moral development. But today, it refers more broadly to topics at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Some of the main topics in moral psychology are moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral sensitivity, moral responsibility, moral motivation, moral identity, moral action, moral development, moral diversity, moral character, especially virtue ethics, altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, moral forecasting, moral emotions, affective forecasting, moral disagreement, and so on and so forth. It's a thriving area, and I'm going to dedicate in the future several videos to, to the cognitive, mainly to the cognitive aspects of, um, of moral, uh, psychology. So, I hope you understood where victim blaming is coming from, and how, ironically, it's connected to morality and moral injury, and the attempts to compensate for moral injury by becoming an a-hole narcissist or a psychopath.