Transcription
How can we tell the difference between people who are merely self-interested and people who are taking advantage of you? Exploitative people, or exploitive people, depending on the country. So, how can we tell the difference?
Most people are self-interested. That's the way it should be. It's a sign of healthy, uh, psychology. Self-interest reflects a firm foundation of a sense of self-worth, a highly regulated sense, self-esteem, and the self-confidence to go with these two. Self-interest is also a form of self-compassion. A self-interested person takes care of themselves. They pursue their own best interests. They have their well-being in mind. They're agentic. They're self-efficacious. It's a great thing to be self-interested. Actually, it's one of the pillars of self-love.
But there's a thin line, so it seems, between pursuing your self-interest and abusing and exploiting other people, taking advantage of them, leveraging their vulnerabilities, penetrating their defenses, and then manipulating them into a kind of submission. There's a thin line, people say, but actually that is not true. My name is Sam Vaknney, and I'm the author of "Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited." I also a self-interested professor of psychology, and I hope I am not exploiting you too much. Okay.
Shashani, exploitative people, people who exploit others may pretend to respect your boundaries even as they scheme and they plan how to circumvent these boundaries, how to breach your defenses. They, as I said, they are well aware of your vulnerabilities and weaknesses and shortcomings, and they have every intention of leveraging these to obtain something from you. In other words, exploitative people are goal-oriented, and the goal always involves an expense, and it is at your expense. Everyone is self-interested, but only predators are exploitive. Exploitation is a zero-sum game. It is about obtaining goals at the expense of other people because you know there are two ways to obtain goals. You can collaborate with other people. That's a win-win situation. Or you can exploit other people, and that's a win-lose situation. If you win, they lose. If they win, you lose. It's a zero-sum game.
And so this view of the world that it is a jungle out there, a hostile place, and that you need to take advantage of people before they do it to you preemptively. This view is typical of predators. And predators exploit. Predators leverage your assets, leverage your liabilities, I'm sorry, to abscond with your assets. Leverage. Predators want to take everything from you. They are never sated. It's never enough. The only thing that restricts a predator's reach is opportunity. As long as opportunity exists, the predator will definitely pounce on you, act in order to denude you of everything you have or think you have.
Self-interested people never ask you to sacrifice something. Self-interested people take into account your interests, your goals, your wishes, your dreams, as well as theirs. Self-interested people are pro-social. Self-interested people realize that working together can maximize the outcomes. Working together is good for them because if they collaborate with other people, they're bound to end up with a lot more than if they go it alone, alone. And so self-interested people are collaborative, cooperative. They work with you. They're great team players. They combine with other people in order to yield positive, favorable outcomes, to extract them, extract them from the environment. Whereas exploitive people go it alone, alone. Exploitive people regard you as roadkill. Exploitive people objectify you. They consider only what they can take from you. Exploitive people don't believe in synergy. They don't believe that working together can yield better outcomes than going it alone. They think it's a soap story for psies and suckers. They don't think this is real. They think it's a form of social control. They don't believe these narratives. They regard them as counterfactual. And so exploitive people would scan you, would create a map of your penetration vectors, and then would take advantage of you.
And so how to cope with exploitive people is subject for another video. And this video is concerned with spotting them, detecting them. So the first test is that they don't collaborate. They don't work together with others. They work against others. They have a zero-sum game view. Your loss is their gain, and they are hellbent on maximizing their gains at your total ruination and expense. They plan to obliterate you and negate you in order to garner all the benefits they can, they can. It's a little like taking over a company in order to strip it clean of its assets.
Um, and so this is the first distinguishing feature. The second distinguishing feature: they demand sacrifices from you. The third distinguishing feature: they don't respect your boundaries. They keep breaching them. They keep testing you. And sometimes predators use techniques, manipulative Machiavellian techniques which are difficult to tell apart from other types of people who are merely self-interested. For example, mirroring. When people mirror you, they mirror you sometimes in order to flatter you. It could be a manipulative strategy. It could be a form of attempt to modify your behavior somehow in a way which is conducive to securing the goals of the predator or the exploitive person. But mirroring is a behavioral strategy that can signify many things. For example, mirroring is very common among people-pleasers. Mirroring is a way to avoid conflict. So conflict aversion yields mirroring behaviors. It's important to pay less attention to the actual behavior and more attention to the implicit and explicit messaging that go with the behavior. So a people-pleaser, for example, would not expect anything in return. She would give you everything she has just in order to please you. Someone who is conflict-averse would bend backwards to meet your demands. But a predator who is mirroring you is manipulating you. It's Machiavellian. He's going to have a goal, and he's going to state his goal directly or indirectly, implicitly or explicitly sooner or later. The minute behaviors such as mirroring are coupled with stated goals, the minute they go hand-in-hand with demands or with expectations, the minute the mirroring attempts to alter your behavior or to affect your mind somehow, change your opinion or whatever, then we are talking about an exploitive person. Not a benign presence in your life, but someone who is hellbent on taking everything from you, stealing your life, absconding with it, and leaving you behind to rot and to decompose and disintegrate.