Prof. Sam Vaknin on Censorship
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/08/03
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited as well as many other books and ebooks about topics in psychology, relationships, philosophy, economics, international affairs, and award-winning short fiction. He is former Visiting Professor of Psychology, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia and Professor of Finance and Psychology in CIAPS (Commonwealth for International Advanced and Professional Studies). He was the Editor-in-Chief of Global Politician and served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, eBookWeb, and Bellaonline, and as a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent. He was the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101. His YouTube channels garnered 60,000,000 views and 305,000 subscribers. Visit Sam’s Web site: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What defines censorship, or, more properly, characterizes censorship?
Prof. Sam Vaknin: Censorship is any suppression of speech that is motivated by an ideology or by the perception of risk avoidance. It is intended to prevent challenges to the interests of an existing establishment or system or to safeguard secrets and national security interests.
Jacobsen: What have been the methods — and as two common placeholder spheres of influence concepts — of censorship in Eastern cultures and in Western cultures?
Vaknin: Censorship in authoritarian regimes, most of which are indeed in the east or global south, is overt and institutionalized. The red lines are promulgated publicly and punishments for transgressions are enshrined in criminal law.
In the West, censorship is far more pernicious: it is stealthy, self-imposed, and adheres to standards of political correctness that reflect the interests and concerns of the identity politics of vocal victimhood groups.
Worst of all: the very existence of censorship is denied in the West as public intellectuals, the mainstream media, and societal and legal institutions uphold the counterfactual myth of “free speech”.
Censorship reflects the breakdown of trust in society and the need to use violence, both verbal and physical, to prevent the utter disintegration of the social fabric and the institutions that preserve the privileges of the elites.
Jacobsen: How have those forms of censorship evolved into the present?
Vaknin: The sociologists Bradley Keith Campbell and Jason Manning posited that have transitioned from the age of dignity and reputation to the age of victimhood. This is not just about identity politics: as multiple studies have demonstrated in the past 3 years, victimhood is a profitable proposition and a way to reallocate scarce economic resources coercively.
Additionally, we are in the throes of more than one century of unprecedented existential risks (from nuclear weapons and world wars to climate change and invasive surveillance).
The confluence of these two toxic trends has rendered speech a dangerous luxury. Speech acts are deemed subversive, offensive, or malicious, even life-threatening, both on the collective and on the individual level.
Jacobsen: What have been the forms of censorship most tragic to intellectual progress and scientific discovery?
Vaknin: By far, political correctness. It has stifled legitimate scientific inquiry, stymied public discourse, and penalized free thinkers of all stripes. It is comparable only to the Inquisition or to MCCarthyism.
Jacobsen: What have been the common forms of censorship against you?
Vaknin: Ironically, my sister, Sima Gil-Vaknin, served as the Chief Censor of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), so I know a thing or two about the inner workings and the psychological underpinning of censorship.
Over the decades of my intellectual efforts, I have been subjected to every form of censorship in more than 10 countries. My videos are shadowbanned (deranked) on YouTube. My articles have been deemed “hateful speech” and deleted from various platforms, including, most recently LinkedIn. I have been sued multiply and have received graphic death threats more times than I can count.
Jacobsen: Why are these tactics used against public personalities?
Vaknin: Naming and shaming. Cancelling. Mobbing. Violence (Salman Rushdie, Jamal Kahshoggi, to mention but two). Verbal abuse. Smear campaigns. All tried and true methods originally perfected by narcissists and psychopaths.
Jacobsen: Is censorship targeted against misunderstood or ill-understood individuals on the extreme ends of intelligence and creativity, i.e., geniuses, more often than cognitively average people if taking a per capita rate into account?
Vaknin: I wouldn’t say that. On the contrary: censorship targets the masses, the media, your average student or teacher, small to medium size businesses. In short: censorship targets constituencies whose vested interests in the current power structure are not great and who, therefore, are more open to evolutionary and even revolutionary ideas.
Jacobsen: What are ways for geniuses to protect themselves from the onslaughts of idiots? Leonardo Da Vinci devised some apparent techniques to keep certain aspects of his productions hidden in plain sight from sufficiently unintelligent people, as an example.
Vaknin: This is by far the most serious problem: the inexorable rise of the idiocracy.
Why would women prefer men with an IQ lower than 120 to men with an IQ higher than 145? These are the results of a study published last year.
The answer is simple:
Our contemporary world is ruled by the feebleminded, dimwits are empowered by technology, and everything is dumbed down to foster mass consumption.
In such a world, lower intelligence is a positive adaptation which confers evolutionary advantages on its bearers – and on their spouses and offspring.
Women select for beta males because the current environment favors beta traits over alpha traits.
It is a paradigm shift of mind-bending proportions (for those in possession of a mind).
A study of nine million young adults over 40 years (conducted by Jean Twenge and her colleagues and published in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) has starkly demonstrated the deterioration from one generation to another. Youngsters are now focused on money, image, and fame and disparage values such as community, volunteerism, the environment, and knowledge acquisition. Other surveys have documented a rising level of illiteracy. As if to illustrate the imminence of these new Dark Ages, the Encyclopedia Britannica announced that it will cease the publication of its print edition after 244 years. Its surviving digital editions are a far cry from the print equivalent in terms of depth, length, and erudition.
The Stupid, the Trivial, and the Frivolous are everywhere: among the working classes, of course, but increasingly you can find them displacing the erstwhile elites, spawning hordes of mindless politicians, idiot business tycoons, narcissistic media personalities, gullible clergy, vacuous celebrities, illiterate bestselling authors, athletes with far more brawn than brain, repetitious pop singers, less than mediocre bureaucrats, bovine gatekeepers, and even ignorant and semi-literate academics. Their cacophony drowns the few voices of wisdom, expertise, and experience and their sheer number overwhelms all systems of governance and all mechanisms of decision-making. Rather than futilely fight back this tsunami, the well-educated, the erudite, and the intelligent choose to withdraw and seclude themselves in self-constructed, schizoid ivory towers, all bridges drawn.
Imbeciles are a menace to the continued existence not only of our civilization, but also of our species. We may end up being all Homo, no sapiens.
The percentage of stupid people in the general populace may not have changed. It may even have decreased. But in terms of absolute numbers, there are more Stupid heads now than the entire human population only a century ago. Modern medicine makes sure that the retarded and plain dim-witted live on to a ripe old age. That we are faced with the daunting prospect of idiocracy is the fault of the malignant transformation of the democratic ideal and the recent onslaught of the media, both old and new.
Start with democracy, the Stupid People’s pernicious answer to meritocracy:
In the not-too-distant past dim-witted people had the right to vote once in a while and thus express their completely inconsequential opinion where it mattered least: in the ballot box. Alas, the inane idea of “one person (never mind how pinheaded, unqualified, or ignorant), one vote” has invaded and permeated hitherto hierarchical environments such as government, the workplace, and the military. With technology at their disposal, The Stupid repeatedly interfere with and disrupt the proper functioning of virtually every system.
Even the generation and transfer of knowledge have been “democratized” as crowdsourcing yielded enterprises such as Wikipedia, the “encyclopedia” that anyone can edit, add to, and delete from. Internet search engines rank results not according to the merits and authority of the content, but by the number of votes cast by … you guessed it: mostly dense people (who now congregate on social networks). This widespread and much-lauded vandalism reflects the utter collapse and disintegration of the education system which turns out illiterate, nescient, and irrational graduates having annihilated its standards in order to lucratively embrace them as students in the first place.
The Stupid, dimly aware of their innate inferiority, are anti-elitist, anti-intellectual, and anti-excellence. But, while in the past these remained mere sentiments, today they have become an ethos, a code of conduct, a set of values and ideals. It is politically incorrect and impolite to claim any advantage and superiority. Egalitarianism is running amok. Everyone is equal: doctors and their patients; professors and their students; experts and laymen alike.
Continue with technology:
In an act of self-preservation, past civilizations had confined The Stupid to certain settlements, replete with their drinking establishments, entertainments, and sports arenas. There the “intellectually-challenged” could safely torment each other with their vulgarities and rampant, uninformed idiocy. The advent of radio, television, and, most egregiously, the Internet has changed all that: now stupid people have unmitigated access to the kind of technology that allows them to pollute the airwaves and the broadband with their inferior analytic capacity, low-brow output, trivial observations, monosyllabic exclamations, and harebrained queries. Thus, the New Media have transformed stupidity from a mental endemic to a viral pandemic. The wise and knowledgeable may broadcast while the Stupid merely narrowcast – but the Stupid have the upper hand, what with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Amazon, and YouTube decimating the traditional print and electronic media.
This technological empowerment is the crux of the problem: there are no barriers to entry, no institutional filters, and no erudite and experienced intermediaries to hold back the avalanche of doltish balderdash, the tsunami of nonsense, and the flood of misinformation, factoids, and conspiracies that corrupt our intellectual space. “Discovery”: separating the wheat from the chaff has become mission impossible. Commercial interests inevitably and invariably side with the brainless masses because of their superior aggregate purchasing power. The privatization of education is one manifestation of this creeping decadence. The mindless nature of television programming is another. The empty one-liners that comprise most “conversations” on social networks are its culmination. We are surrounded with clods, harassed by the lame-brained, criticized, censored, and ordered by simpletons. Welcome to the New Dark Ages.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Sam.
Vaknin: Thank you for having me, Scott. I appreciate your unwavering support.
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