Edward Dutton and the ‘borderline’ women who shaped history

0:00We've learned anything from these past couple of years. My fellow Americans, is that personal medical freedom and liberty are in crisis. America, our love, close brings together the top experts in healthcare-related fields to keep you a beat ahead. We listen to America, our love, close radio on the I-Hart reading network. Hell in the America, our love apps for Apple and Android and Alexa. Don't miss a moment when we're on the Saturday Friday at 5 p.m. Eastern. I'm Dr. Randall Bock here on PAC-MIT's Exploring Abations and give you action when insights into the world of medicine and health. I'm honored today to have the jolly heretic with us. Edward Dutton, he's a professor at the Pology. He's in Finland right now, professing perhaps and also writing and blogging, I guess, as well as blogging. He's the author of the

1:00recently published borderline genius borderline in St. I hope that doesn't qualify or classify either as per say. Tell us what's the genesis of that book? What do you hope you know accomplished with it? What was your inspiration? The book is borderline genius, borderline insane, understanding borderline person, how the disorder and how female borderlines have shaped history. And my inspiration for it was a paper about 30 years ago which looked at the psychopathology of great men. It was by a psychiatrist called Felix Post and what he found was that the most of the sample of I think it was 291 great men were sub clinically psychopsychopological and often things like a class of B. So depression, narcissism, macchi-valonism, psychopathy, but to a sub-clinical

2:05degree seemed to be associated with very high achievement and with being an accepted genius as it were in in various fields and it was very extreme in in the arts for example. And he thought about looking into the females but he decided that there was enough biographical information and various things like this and so he didn't pursue the females. He didn't look at it. He didn't do a female version on female genius and I thought well why not? That would be really interesting. That would be fascinating. Someone should do that. And I thought to myself and I wonder if in so much as I come across various cases of extremely prominent women that had classed of B disorders in the modern day and in particular borderline personality disorder. And also I thought to myself well in terms of just great people, powerful people and you get these groups of women that seem to display class to B traits, the suffragettes for example or female

3:09left wing, woke campaigners, femen, whatever taking their clothes off and covering themselves in fake blood, all of these kinds of groups. I thought I wonder if there's something to this. I wonder if actually these class to be women are highly influential across history. And even if that the in in so much as we would predict that kings, monarchs would be in history when their absolute monarchs would be class to B would be narcissistic or psychopathic. Perhaps these traits would be passed on to their daughters. And so let's look at Britain's absolute monarch queens' regnant. They reflect these kinds of traits. And what I found was that looking into, first of all I looked in detail at the nature of borderline personality disorder, how you can identify it, problems with the concept, all of this sort of thing. So in a sense it's a kind of a practical guide people that might interact with these kinds of women who are both amazing and inspiring and interesting and creative and and all of this sort of thing,

4:11but also can take you to depths of hell and be very anti-social and so on. And then I thought, what are they overrepresented in terms of the great women of history? So I took hold of Charles Murray's book Human Accomplishment. I stated the anglophone people within that. This was people such as Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brompton, Emily Brompton, that scored at least one out of 100 in his accomplishment score or his influence score, Catherine Mansfield, many others. And I found that the majority of them by the modern standard, by the DSM diagnostic criteria, either you have at least five out of nine traits, did appear to have something based on the biographical information. And remember we've got a lot of biographical information about these people. It's much better than a doctor who sees a woman for a number of sessions or whatever. We have a lot of biographical information on these people, which to come to conclusions about them. More than

5:14half of them had the five out of nine diagnostic criteria of borderline personality disorder, would be diagnosed with it in the modern day. And so that was the first finding. And then it was statistically significant and so forth, because if you look at the percentage, it's about 1% or 2% of women that have these traits. Then I looked at the absolute monarch's queen's regment. So this was Queen Jane, Queen Mary, the first Elizabeth I and Mary's Queen of Scots. And I found that in each case, they, to an even greater degree than these creative women, seem to have these borderline traits. It's not like confirmation bias. There were then plenty of women I looked at that with historically significant that didn't have much emphasis. I mean, a bit less than half of these knowledge-grade women were not borderline. In general, they just had things like Emily Dippinson, for example, they just had the Or Jane Austen. They just had things like depression. They had to have them a one of the traits, which is depression. Anyway,

6:16all of these queens, and again, it was significant, had at least five, in fact, often all of these traits. And the most extreme example was Mary Queen of Scots, who was just a stereotypical borderline, according to the literature. And then I looked at there, there are other means of influencing history. One way is being, because of genetic similarity theory, what you will find is that narcissistic men who attain control and for intelligence, tend to attain high status. These are fast light history strategies, kind of men. These are class-of-be men. And they will tend to be attracted to women like this. There is a narcissistic component to borderline personality disorder. It is frequently co-morbid with narcissism. And it is a similar kind of fast light history strategy cluster and way of behaving. And this is highly genetic. And so you find that lots of great men will be narcissists, and they will have borderline mistresses or borderline rives. I look at many

7:18examples of this Hitler, for example, his two mistresses were both conspicuously, obviously, borderlines. David Lloyd George, various others. Then I looked at women in them, just in the modern day in the arts. So Sylvia Plath, Trudeau Conner, Sarah Kane, who is a British playwright, Princess Diana. So this is the modern day great man, great man's woman borderline. So you have that. And then I looked at the influence of groups of women that have these class to be some extent borderline traits and their influence on history, suffragists, witches, quakers, various groups like that. And then how in the modern times, because of the increasing female influence, they have more influence because they are allowed to express themselves and society is not repressing those traits and forcing them to suppress them and things like that. And so I looked at people such as Virginia Gafrey, the person that was the accuser of Prince Andrew,

8:21and of Renée Nicole Good. That was another example I looked at. That was someone that attacked an ICE agent's car and was crashed into. And then I looked at, does it work the far right? Because there is a relationship between mental illness and physical viewpoint left when people are more mentally ill and average, but it's sort of curvilinear. You also see it on the extreme right. And I found that these women were the evidence of people that were renovated in these kinds of traits on the far right as well. And the difference between what I found and what post found is he found that these men were subclinical, whereas what I found was they actually had the traits. So they were actual borderlines as it were. And I think this makes sense because the nature of women compared to men is that they tend to have, they are more socially conformist. For evolutionally reasons, they're evolved to basically create very intimate groups, small groups of potential alloparerants for their children in polynipolygonous mating systems.

9:22And so because there has to be such high trust, there has to be equality. And so therefore you get this, there isn't much drive to war power or whatever. Whereas men do have that because women essentially select status in these kinds of mating systems. So there has to be something which explains why a woman would become conspicuous rather than keep her head down. And there has to be something as well that would explain why she would be conspicuous and countercultural as well. And what would make sense would be that if the BPD or some other first of E-trick that was behind this. And if you look at the nature of these traits, you can see in particular why they are associated with creativity. And this has been looked at as well in relation to men. So if you have extreme moods, then you want to kind of express them and understand where they're coming from. And this moves you towards artistic accomplishments and things like this. If you are, how identity disturbance, then you have developed a smooth sense of identity that's integrated,

10:24into a smooth identity. And so you kind of adopt different cells. And therefore you can, you can be very adept at exploring different perspectives in a very convincing way. And also the desire to be a novelist or whatever can become an important part of your identity. You have this sense of emptiness which again you want to try to express and understand and our art can be consumed you in that regard, similarly, anger and so on. And so you can see why they get involved particularly in the arts. So yeah, that's the essence of the book. That was very nicely done. I'll play a little bit of a skeptic. There's Gilman, Amnesia. I assume you know, named after Michael Crite, named it after physicist Murray Gilman, who picked up the New York Times and he read something in his own field physics. He's like, oh my god, these guys know nothing what they're talking about. And then he read something about, I don't know, the art, whatever, and they assume they do. And the Gilman Amnesia part is that

11:29you're making this assumption that when they're dealing with your own field of expertise, they know what they're talking about when they're dealing with something else. You see that they don't. When they're dealing with another field, you assume that they do. So I put that up as a little bit of a strong argument for the fact that maybe psychiatry is kind of overstepping its bounds as far as these diagnoses go. We see oftentimes, you know, we see the failures of public health, you know, all through COVID. We see it in various stages. We see kind of this over-psychiatrization, over-medicalization, over-diagnosis across the board. Do we run the risk of kind of post-hoc over-diagnosing people, either from biographing or whatnot? And I'll just give Winelacabia. I mean, I had some psychiatrining myself, a medical doctor, and I saw people, I had a regular primary care storefront, you know, solo medical doctor clinic, and I saw, you know, thousands of patients over dozens of years, well, like 35 years or whatever. And, you know, I had a sensibility about what a borderline person was. I mean, again, mostly entirely women,

12:32and I had a, you know, real sense of when they were in the room about the borderline aspect. I'm not going to get too far into that. We can talk about that per se. But I wonder whether, you know, at a distance, whether, you know, Jane Gray or, you know, Mary, the first, or whenever it can be diagnosed in that same way, whether we're kind of like making kind of a world of interest in that sort of serving for the psychiatry industry and the biography industry and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, this is a very interesting point. I wish I'd make notes, because you've made a number of relevant points. The first one is the nature of the cluster itself. So what seems to be found is that there is a, as you say, there is a sort of stereotypical borderline. There is, there is such a thing as a borderline that has all nine of the traits, clearly. And when you see them or when you meet them, if you're used to such women, then you will know, just intuitively, you'll just know that's the case, I guess, with any kind of typology, you know,

13:33if you're an expert on autism, then you'll just know when someone has, is it all 11 of the criteria and someone is the stereotype? And I think that's true, that is certainly true with borderline. They can be an intuitive dimension. And obviously it's much more difficult to get that without meeting somebody. But then on the other hand, it's not particularly scientific to just judge, judge a person's condition via instinct, but that's true. Secondly, it is also true that the relationship between the nine borderline symptoms is not, in many cases, that's strong. So there is such a thing as a borderline. There is a syndrome that is, let's say, the as proper VPD as it were. And then you get these various people that DDA from it, they only have five of the symptoms or they have some of the symptoms that are not very strongly or whatever. And also, these are not precisely discrete categories. They can merge into other things.

14:38And I think it was point 80% of women that are diagnosed with BPD are diagnosed with something else comorbidly, in particular, vulnerable narcissism is the main one, where there are also others. And so then they've made sort of a typology of different kinds of borderline. And so it might be easier to just talk about plus to B or just talk about the vulnerable dark triad as some people have done because of this relationship. However, when I talk about the people that I looked at, there were plenty of people that were exploring the book, but I looked at that didn't have these kinds of conditions, it just didn't. So I didn't expect necessarily, I thought I might find one of the queens might have these, even what I knew of it, I thought that Mary Queen of Scott, that's what I knew of her, she got gang raped and then married one of her rapists. I mean, this woman,

15:41she, she, because this woman really was unstable, deeply unstable, and Elizabeth the first, deeply unstable. I wasn't so sure about Jane Grey, but then I hadn't really read much about her, and I hadn't read as much about Mary either. So I was surprised actually, by my own bite, I didn't think I would find this with Mary and with Jane, I was surprised. So it's not like I was looking for it, and I just say there were other people that I looked at, like, for example, Catherine and Berlin or Jane Seymour, whatever, just just no evidence that these people have these kinds of tricks, they didn't, they didn't seem to happen by what's reported. So there is, there is a danger of overdiagnosing, but I think that danger of overdiagnosing comes less from, in the modern day, comes less from diagnosing people with something like BPD or Plus2V, generalised disorder or whatever, and more with autism. That's the thing that's being overdiagnosed. And looking back in history in saying this person's autistic, this person's autistic, or even contemporaneously saying this

16:41person's autistic, it's not, it's, they're not, because for it to be a disorder, it has to, has to involve problems functioning, significant problems, functioning in everyday life. And so it's one of the things that was quite interesting actually that I noted in the book is with reference to psychiatry. It shocked me actually as a person that is not a psychiatrist, is just how much debate there is between psychiatrists about this kind of stuff. So a person goes to the doctor and what they expect is for a psychiatrist to have some understand that such that there's to be some agreement, a fundamental agreement among psychiatrists about the way things are. But for example, you get some psychiatrists who argue that borderline personality is essentially the female expression of autism. Literally argue that. And that seems to me to be intuitively weird because autism is kind of male-brained and

17:41involves a lack of social skill and therefore an inability to manipulate people and to have cognitive empathy with them. Whereas BPD seems to involve whether it's photo-culted manipulation, being very good at manipulating people. And persuading, as I say, whether it's hot or cold, but nevertheless, being very good at reading people, indeed reading people before they even consciously know what they thought. And then reacting accordingly, which is why you get this de-idealization of the idealized man very quickly among borderline women. I'm Dr. Randall Bach. We're separating medical evidence from fashionable assumption and asking where psychiatric labels begin to fail. When we return, Edward Dutton will explain why borderline personality occupies the uncertain ground between neurosis and psychosis. You're listening to America out loud pulse. Always a beat ahead. Are you tired of struggling with low energy? We get it. That's why we created organic energy juice. In just one minute, you'll have clean, natural energy all day and never struggle with low energy again. And it tastes amazing. And

18:46there's no toxic chemicals or stimulants that make you crash. You shouldn't have to struggle with low energy and with organic energy juice, you won't. If you're struggling with low energy, then buying organic energy juice is the right decision. With our double your money back guarantee, there is zero risk to try it. Go to chemicalfreebody.com, Ford slash out loud for an exclusive discount. That's chemicalfreebody.com, Ford slash out loud. Are you struggling with thinning hair? Try roots from the wellness company. This doctor formulated non-oily hydrogen gel uses seven powerful peptides and key nutrients to nourish your scalp and support visibly thicker, healthier hair. Visit twc.health.fordslashout loud. Use code out loud for 20% off your first order. That is twc.health.fordslashout loud. Well, it's high time Americans refuse to be pawns in the human chest. Under the name of diversity, politicians divide the people in their quest for power. No diversity, opinion and expression is as American as apple pun.

19:55Now is our time, my fellow Americans, America out loud.News, liberty and justice for all. Welcome back. I'm Dr. Rieba Bak here to test medical claims challenge for moving narratives and offer useful insights into health and human behavior. My guest is anthropologist Edward Dutton, author of orderline genius, orderline insane. Orderline personality disorder takes its name from the border between neurosis and psychosis. What does that distinction mean? They're very very different disorders. Now it's true that you could argue, well, you could be diagnosed with comatently with orderline, with BPD and let's say schizophrenia. And the reason for that is because there are some key traits in common such as psychosis. And you only need to have five or half or a bit over half of the traits in order to be diagnosed. So you can get these things comorbently that seem a bit different for each other because one is clustered ray and one is clustered to be or whatever.

20:56That I was very surprised by that by that that you get people that are that seems to me that the reason why there was a particular pay for I found that sees a relationship between autism and BPD in women only is because these women are borderlines who identify as artists and autism autism because if you're autistic they can victim signal which is one of the things that that borderlines narcissists, because it's narcissistic component of it, will do. And they can feel special and important and they can bond with people over it and they can get people to sympathize with them and do things for them. But it's not socially unacceptable. Whereas if you admit that you're a narcissist or a psychopath or a borderline then that's seed as a negative and it's not very good for yourself a steam. So you can see why you get this and that was what the study that I looked at about it had this small number of women that have born one personality or whatever it was and half of them met the diagnostic criteria for autism

21:59but that's because they've been asked about it, they've been personally asked about it and of course they're stretching the definitions of things. So I think that's more of a problem than overdrive those in BPD. In fact my understanding is that BPD is underdived those in women and autism is overdived. I would just kind of query about the etymology of borderline. I have a sense that it really came about as it's kind of the borderline between certain diagnoses. They couldn't really place it under the schizophrenia category and whatnot. I mean we can talk about why that has come to be because borderline is kind of funny. It's kind of like frankly you pray. I think you pray literally means borderlands because it was like- What was this guy? Was it stunned? Was that his name Adolf Stern and it was the difference that it was on the border between neurosis and psychosis and it's very it's also on the border in some ways but it's interesting the way that it works. They're they're sensitive, they're highly anxious and whatever and full of all these negative feelings

23:04and so in order to deal with that they don't like ambiguity and in that sense it's a bit like autism perhaps. They want they want structure. They want things to be clear. They want things to be black and white and so they what they will do is they will they they they they cut object constancy is a problem. There can't be any nuance and so a person at any given time is either brilliant or appalling. They split. They idealize. They will in particular have a favorite person. They will idealize this person. He's their savior and he's wonderful and they're almost like enmeshed with him psychologically so that he's part of them and they're part of him and he gives their life meaning and all this kind of thing and that's the idealization phase but then of course the slightest thing and the disappoints them which it inevitably will. A because we always will get disappointed by people and B because they have this tendency to be a bit narcissistic and so therefore you can easily insult them and knock in the narcissistic supply and make them feel hurt and then they will see you with evil and make you make them feel bad and so then they split and

24:07then the person is evil and awful and so forth and but they do that even in relation to themselves so they're since they're either in a narcissistic phase in which they think they are wonderful and amazing or brilliant or they are in a phase of collapse of emptiness and in extreme cases of the terrible stress they can become dealing with dissociate so they they will they will dissociate from reality they will you know day dreaming is obviously the basic example of this they will enter it from world psychologically and they can enter what's called paranoid so online psychosis or online skits of freedom but psychosis anyway where the whole world is evil and against them and over and and there's a real serious problem and and and then this kind of makes people go away and leave them alone and then they will leave the psychosis so it's on the border between neurosis which I suppose is kind of that that you're unhappy and you're worried in your anxious and you understand why you are and you you have a realistic understanding of what's why you are unable to deal actively with these problems so that you don't worry about them

25:12and psychosis where you're completely irrational and you come up with some paranoid understanding of what's going on and they oscillate between the two in a sense so that's why he put it on the border. So let me let's establish that we've established with borderline as to a certain extent then what does it mean what does it mean for us I mean the essence of your book that I was you know kind of shocked and surprised by was kind of the pervasiveness in upper echelons and you you obviously bring up the cluster be aspects and we could delineate what was often unskilled listener but a lot of you know what might happen for society to be caring about borderline is you know the trappings that that accrue to the the wife of the guy a and or b whether we have feminized society so that women are kind of getting to these physicians on their own and or we are idolizing that or becoming that you know there's kind of the social contagion aspect which happens more amongst women to begin with and I you know we've

26:14seen you know a lot of things you mentioned like you know people you know women gluing their hands to pavement or the Mona Lisa or whatever you know all this kind of like you know wild you know demonstrative behaviors seem to be have taken up by the collective and and so the sub question would be you know are we wrongly seeing ourselves as individuals when really we are just a herd kind of species that has become atomized so the first part you make about the wives what there is a difference I suppose between the basically that in a way one could argue that the borderline take is the extreme fast life history strategist woman or to some extent no that's not quite right but she she is a relative fast life history strategist woman and she takes traits which are there in all women and pushes them to an extreme so the basic dynamic between men and women man wants to

27:16have sex sexual relations whatever the woman therefore she has something to risk from the sexual encounter she wants some resources from the man in return he says okay I get to control your sexuality through patriots that's that's the basic exchange and with these with these so therefore you get a situation where women sexually select for status because in a faster constructive ecology it's the man that is of high status that clearly has the good genes and they want the good genes to pass on to the offspring and the man because he has nothing to lose from the encounter at all he sexually selects all youth and beauty and what you find is that men will swap men will exchange fast life history strategy men can be persuasive to exchange mental stability or looks which will it for beauty which will imply and there's a study I look at in the book which seems to find this is the case there might actually be some weak relationship between mental instability and beauty in women and so these these women can be it's a weak

28:23really I'm stressed weak but it would imply that might be the case and so what you are finding with these women is they are fast life history strategist what they want is the man who is high status because he's high status he has good genes they get the genes and they get and they and their offspring has good genes but these women are also a fear of abandonment they see the world of dangerous unstable place and so to some extent they also want someone who will who will look after them they want resources it's the basic it's the basic stereotypical manosphere enemy that is the kind of woman that the borderline would would seem to be the way they stereotyp negatively women it's not all in the other line at all but it's borderline that particularly like that and therefore you find that borderlines there's a few little clinical cases on this they don't tend to have many female friends because having female friends involves a stable ecology where there's a polygamous mating system and you need other women to look after your kids and there's stability and all this

29:25kind of thing so that's what but they're not evolved to stable they're evolved to unstable and in unstable everyone's out for themselves and what you want is the high status man so of course then they will tend to have male friends because they want to get the best man they can get out of their little group of male orbiters there's evidence that borderlines will tend to particularly interested in much older men why because you've age is clearly a proxy status that's why women are sexually selected as such is the age but then they will just do it to an extreme degree and you'll also expect particularly interested in the man's status because that's a proxy of good genes and so therefore what you would find is that they will mate poach and this brings me back to the difference as it were between the first wife and the second wife between you know there's the kind of wife that sees the potential in a man and is prepared to take that risk and maybe he'll be successful and maybe he won't but she sees the potential and she finds this attractive and she

30:26marries and when he's not yet particularly successful that he might be and there's the kind of woman that is attracted to a man because he's successful because he has resources clearly so the mate poach and that's much more what the borderlines modus operende would be they are fast like a few judges women they are relatively low in agreeableness so therefore they're relatively ruthless and so forth and they but but importantly they are high neuroticism and this makes them both needy you know mentally unstable in that way but also exciting and creative and original and for a fast like history strategy man those kinds of traits are attractive because if you are a fast like history strategies then you will you will be attracted to other fast like history strategies because it means you pass on more of your genes and also it's the environment to which you are evolved and what we find from the research by Felix post and others is that um

31:26socio-economic status is associated with intelligence and pro-social personality what's known as general factor of personality i agreeableness, high-conjentiousness, kind of low neuroticism and relatively high extraversion this is this is what predicts socio-economic status but very high socio-economic status are you being right at the top being that the real mover and shaker the genius type as it were that's different that's associated with very high intelligence combined with moderately anti-social traits such the intelligence is sufficient to outweigh and compensate for the negative side of these anti-social traits and thus if you are low in agreeable as you will question things and so you will come up with original ideas if you are low in congeniousness you will not be rolled down so you'll think out of the box currently in my ideas if you're hiding your vorticism you will be processing information all the time and considering things and ruminating and so you'll come up with original ideas and also you'll have a desire to

32:26make sense of the chaotic world and um you know these kinds of things and so you get and also you'll and if you're not able to you'll be cut pro you'll be prepared to to make the move be Machiavellian and thus get very very far and so these kinds of very high status men who seem to get right to the top and then you can expect them to have to marry uh eventually are people that are genetically relatively similar to themselves so that's what what the book finds sociologically and it's interesting actually that you get these online psychotherapists that are a man for example and say I'm going to give you coaching about how to deal with your narcissist abuse you're a lovely kind woman and you've got and you've been preyed upon by this narcissistic man all termsively a woman oh you're a lovely kind man you've been preyed upon by this borderline personality woman and let me help you but that's not actually what the data is saying it may be that a certain kind of clinical

33:27psychopath will notice a kind person and take advantage of them that that may be the case but with regard to narcissists and borderlines what is what you find is that they are attracted to each other because they're both narcissistic and they're and they're probably genetically reasonably similar and so of course they're going to be attracted to each other and the narcissist gets out of it the the worship phase the phase you know the idealization phase that's where he likes that he gets narcissistic supply she gets out of it the reassurance and and she gets out of it as well probably a narcissistic supply but also the reassurance and the being with a high salus man the being with a craft and the emotional closeness the intensity and all the things that she wants but eventually he will de-idealize her he will I'm sorry she will de-idealize him and so what they intend to end up with is men that have voidant personality anti-social personality anxious

34:28so people that have depression certain clustered peace symptoms certain clustered sea symptoms the anxiety whatever and but they will just take the the the the trauma form abusive relationship but that's the kind of people they tend to end up with it's kind of like narcissistic aspect obviously you can see it in acting it is the you know entire pornography industry say the same thing you know this kind of you know this same kind of there's got to be women in there who you know are looking for father figures one way or another and they're maybe profiting by their beauty and whatnot but have we in a sense created these silos where these traits are selected and then admired and then we as a society are following the trail of you know people who haven't figured their own lives out and then just are outwardly projecting their narcissistic you know prevails and pursuits yes I think that probably there are there are two we're probably seeing a situation now where there are more narcissist or lines whatever class to be type people then

35:34was the case a couple of hundred years ago and there's two reasons for that firstly as I discussed when I was last on your show we have undergone a collapse in half Darwinian selection pressure from 50% child mortality down to 1% this means this huge build-out of mutation away from the direction of what we were selecting for and what that fitness factor was that we seemed to have been selecting for was basically conservatism i.e. group orientation, religiosity i.e. group orientation, pro social personality i.e. group orientation, mental health i.e. group orientation and physical health that was the sort of the fitness factor that we were selecting for. So you would if there is a collapse in half Darwinian selection pressures and what you would expect to see is a movement a build-up of people that are the opposite of that i.e. that are individualists that are selfish that are mentally unstable that are individually oriented that are fast light history strategies essentially i.e. people that are class to be those four-line narcissist

36:37that these kinds of people that are living more of them for genetic reasons alone and indeed there is a number of studies that have found that people that have for example BPD are elevated in many physical conditions and there's also some minor physical abnormal malities that they're more likely to have as well and that people can judge just from looking at a face that a person has a BPD greater than child's level so that's that implies minor physical abnormal malities or something because that's the first thing i'm dr. Randall Bach we've examined borderline personality disorder in private relationships and among unusually successful men and women when we return Edward Dutton will consider how modern culture can turn emotional instability into identity, performance, and influence you're listening to america ala pulse always a beat ahead you wouldn't go a day without brushing your teeth or washing your hands what about washing your nose i mean your nose does filter the air you breathe air loaded with bacteria viruses and irritants make nasal hygiene part of your routine with clear no messy bottles to fill no drowning sensation clear as a natural drug-free

37:42sailing with the added benefit of zyletol which blocks bacterial and viral adhesion available in stores and online at clear.com that is x al e ar dot com in a world of rising prices you can still grow abundance i'm dug heavens author of the national bestseller the sprout book sprouts grow in three to five days without soil sunshine or fertilizer on your kitchen countertop for under a dollar serving take control of your food and your future visit the sprouting company dot com slash out loud and use the code out loud for an exclusive offer grow food not fear welcome back i'm dr randal bak here to examine the medical theories beneath public behavior and test them against lived experience my guest is Edward dutton known online as the jolly heretic we now turn from individual psychology to a culture in which social media can reward emotional display and make private disorder publicly influential the second thing then is the other nature

38:43of the culture changes it shifts over into a more individually oriented culture that is concerned with the quality and heart of evidence intelligent people are doctors and socially signaling competitive to singular and then you just have this idea that you should be allowed to express yourself that you shouldn't discipline children that you shouldn't upset people that you should let people be themselves all of these kinds of things which mean that at the environmental level if you have a narcissistic whatever kind of trades then you won't suppress them in a way that you used to have to use to have them you had to force yourself to suppress them that you did but now you don't and so with these with you you'll get these very histrionic kind of women and it's almost looked up to it's almost it's almost it's almost admired that they behave like that and then when they behave like that like that woman that's broke down screaming when don't Trump was it was an orgerated president for example the first time and the ITV went up and asked what's wrong rather than what they should have thought they would have done 100 years earlier

39:46which just dismissed her as a hysteric and and you know try and get a hospitalised but no she's allowed to express herself and then this changes the nature of the culture such that behavior like that becomes more acceptable women are very socially conformist and so forth so they imitate that behavior and so therefore even women the art particularly plus the might in order to get ahead and see that's nothing you get this desire to see genuine I'm so genuine I'm so genuine I'm so I'm so fervent in my belief that I can't control myself and that creates an arms race of sort of histrionic behavior and drags into that that kind of racket of behavior even women that are innately that high in it but are just socially conformist and so and so therefore it kind of spread throughout society and then the fact once you get the um mental illness becoming increasingly acceptable rather it's a balance if you go back to the 1980s even recently as that

40:50mental illness was shameful it was to poo and you didn't talk about it in public and now it's almost a badge of identity and honor and proof that you're a genuine and indeed important person to be mentally ill and the fact that someone like Felix Post or even myself has demonstrated that mental illness is associated with creativity it means you're interesting it means you're important it means you're someone it means you could be something one day and so therefore people that aren't even necessarily that kind plus to be traits might persuade themselves they are or might just deliberately feign such behaviors in order to seem important so yes at the at the environmental level as well at the general level that we're seeing this increase and also simply the nature of narcissism the basic kind of idea historically is it a spoiled child because it's a spoiled child

41:52that's given no boundaries and is not taught how to feel with negative things that eventually turns into a narcissist and increasingly that's how children are raised as we looked at last when I was on your programme and we talked about my work work with genetics the schools where there's an anti-strict no bullying policy where there's no physical education or sports in case kids can't cope with losing where parents aren't allowed to bring birth to the invitations to school because the kid might get left out etc and so they're not being taught the coping skills to deal with bad things happening to them with the result that as adults they have tantrums which is which is BPD type of behavior but with border lines that the way that they will one of the one of the key markers is lack of emotional control that they will swing between between being perfectly present and normal and being incredibly aggressive and nasty and emotionally overwhelmed and so forth and in a certain kind of society that that is so unacceptable that you have to force

42:54yourself not to do it and hell yourself not to do it but if you're told it's okay to express yourself be yourself and and and that it is wrong for someone to criticise you for these emotions that they're not your fault it's a it's a problem that you have but it's not your fault it's not your fault then of course they can have free reign to behave like that in public places and have these public breakdowns and indeed it's a performative public breakdowns and parts as well because it's it's tried when Trump was elected for example he had these women uploading themselves screaming onto onto onto YouTube or whatever it was basically displaying a lack of emotional control performative lack of emotional control the idea is that this is what genuine looks like this is me genuine because I might be doing this so strong against this idea rather than the idea you've got absolutely no business getting emotionally overall because people disagree with you just say what it's about a more than half population have disagreed with you and it's therefore

43:56they're turned to have government and you might win next time and therefore you shouldn't have emotions about it at all really and it should be unacceptable that you do and so that's this this yeah that's that's the one of the environmental elements on which they've become more influential and then once they become more influential once we once we take them seriously take the borderline seriously and then and not think to yourself actually it's very likely she's lying because that's what borderlines will tend to do in order to manipulate in order because they fear of abandonment because they want to bond with people and thus have a close relationship with them where they will be looked after whatever they will tend to lie to lie so the research indicates that was it between is it between 20 30 and 70 percent of borderlines claims we've had an abusive childhood but that's when you ask them about it and when people actually do clinical practice and look into this then they'll talk to their sisters or whatever family therapy and they that's not what happened at all or it's a complete exaggeration of what happened but of course if you say to a man

44:57you've been sexually abused you're coming across as genuine and incredibly honest if you don't know him very well that's how you that's how you're seeing so that's nice that's positive you'll be creating a strong bond with him by sharing very personal information so that works to get this man on sign and then to get him to look after you and to be your special person that will guide you through life and be be essentially your emotional container to regulate your emotions for you because you can't that's kind of what they're looking for for someone to do and of course to meet at the interesting is a sexual and so you can you can see why they would lie about that and in my book I look at that I say well that's one of the markers there are the criteria there are the the diagnostic criteria for the lives I read out earlier but there's other things that are very common among such as claiming they've been sexually abused such as eating disorders, homebures, gender dysphoria is not common but it's it's people with it that are women are often borderlines of body modification, massacism there are 100% more likely than controls to be

46:00sexual massacists because it's the sort of they're fast like history strategists and so the only way you can know that the man is truly dogman is if he can dominate you and therefore that's arousing and a certain kind of massacism involving hells and he knows me so much that he'll punish me and and sort of a relief in in that sense they're more like to be bisexual they're more likely as I said to have these abuse fantasy so yeah and whereas we used to say you know don't don't say it's attention seeking behavior which is encouraged by the society the internet particularly you could argue helps people like that to become prominent social media because what's interesting emotions interesting they have strong emotions some kind of conversion some kind of story arc like the prodigal son that's interesting and these people tend to have an identity diffusion where they will have dramatic shifts in identity so you know that's interesting having been abused

47:05or whatever not vulnerable to signaling that's interesting or you can you can become an easily very easily I suggest if you're a poor lion just right it doesn't look hard but how does how does borderline personality play out in you know Saudi Arabia is there such a thing are we really I think I think the pressure of having to be you know open and and individual I suspect that there is such a thing so one of the parts of my book I look at is living the refused witchcraft and what you fought an execution for witchcraft and again we're meant to believe oh this is just random and bad luck whatever it was these were deeply anti social women these were socio sexual women these were women who would would move from one extreme of behavior to another and this was noted at the time that would go around cursing people that would seem to kind of enter different cells and be different people at different points that would talk about

48:08rape fantasies where they were raped by the devil in the form of a black man for example things like this and they really believed these things and this seems to me consistent to a significant degree with borderline personality disorder with psychosis with diffusion of self with anger problems with with mood swings with the emotional regulation problems with you know with the all of these traits that are associated with with with with BDD so you got women like that and those and those women would often they'd be accused of adultery or things like this and so there's probably people like that in Saudi Arabia and they probably get themselves into trouble and end up being accused of adultery and things like this and end up being killed that's that's the kind of that there would be women like that you know I would think so yeah because there were when we in the west were a society that was rather like that that was a highly religious and repressive society

49:10so then we have one that's the opposite and you know you've separately expounded upon the Lindsay Clancy case we have kind of this performative aspect it mixed in with a little bit of Mimesis and social detergent amongst women we have a huge divide and we made you know kind of like impossible and and irretrievable conditions for you know guidance about how we are to be civil how we are to be civil well not not kill our kids for instance you know it gives it gives if you start saying that we don't have free will and on the one hand you can say that's a reasonable thing to do certain people can have emotions but are so extreme that it impinges their free will so their French had this concept of private passion for example or that you can say that that you can have a mental condition that is so extreme that you don't have free will you don't

50:10really understand right and wrong you don't understand what you're doing because your perception of reality is so totally more by the mental condition so that's a good thing perhaps you could argue because it's not people's fault but then on the other hand that can be taken to an extreme by manipulative people who are able to fame having convincingly if they are high in psychopathic traits and so forth a certain condition in order that they can get away with crime and they can convince people but that's that's the case and then you get people like these borderlines these women I assume they are these women that can't pay in favor of Lindsey Clancy they wear pink and they have a natural colored hair and they're screaming and shouting and whatever it's class to be histrionic sort of behavior and it's as if they kind of feel that they have emotions that they can't control and they identify with her they think I could have that could have been me I get so emotionally overwhelmed with these extreme emotions that I can't control myself I don't know what to do and I could do something awful and surely that can't be my fault because

51:11I'm also a bit narcissistic and so therefore I can't blame myself it has to be before something else and therefore if they're not prepared to accept that then I could be the one up on trial for things that I do and I'm most fearful and therefore I'm like her and therefore for the good of my empowerment this person that I need power because the world is frightening and I'm not power over it this person that's like me has to be looked up to so that I can be carelessly be all looked up to myself or whatever that's kind of where their minds work and but I as far as I can see in the Lindsey Clancy case she was been diagnosed with bipolar 2 there was a doctor that actually diagnosed her with bipolar 2 which is I understand it is that you have you have a depressive phase but only a hypomanic phase not particularly high phase but some did moderately high phase and it crosses over with borderline personality we have suicidal behavior and suicidal ideation which you research suicidal methods before she was even the problem when this happened we have severe depression and anxiety we have problems regulating emotion we have

52:16something like self harm we have the impulsive behavior of mixing her medicine things like this it seems to me that there and if she's to be believed you have psychosis so if she's to be believed so there's a case if no more than that for arguing that she may be a borderline that's but with regard to the the psychosis I've been amazed talking to psychiatrists the degree of disagreement so I have one psychiatrist who I respect and who's quite faced who said to me as far as he's concerned obviously this is the case of postpartum psychosis it's amazing that it's even come to trial but this is a person that's faced and has harsh social attitudes and then and then another that said quite the opposite and this is basically just mid-tier probably the husband wasn't giving this narcissist the attention she felt she deserved so she thought she'd take vengeance on him by killing his children and then killing herself so she

53:17could have a sense of eternal power over him interestingly there is no evidence that there's no evidence that she had psychosis before the event or after the event it just it just suddenly manifested at that convenient point which makes one rather suspicious and as I understand it she killed the boy Dawson first and she'd written on a blog how much he's the most difficult human being I've ever encountered she said so she didn't like this boy and I understand I did this is wrong my understanding is that she murdered him and then put him in the husband's office and he was the husband's favorite and the things like this whereas the others were in the cell and this didn't come out in the trial this is what has been in the newspaper at the time so that makes me think that this is a malicious act this is this is this is this is this is this is so whatever reason in her

54:18mind a husband wasn't looking after her properly or wasn't it wasn't admiring her as much as she wanted and so she took utter vengeance on him and planned it out in a lot of detail utter vengeance out just to destroy him basically like Medea yeah I'm kind of with that so what's the reception of your book so far and what do you hope to achieve through it and what's the message that people should heed well the reception I've looked has been positive from the people that have read it and they feel that it particularly the practical level men that have dealt with women that are borderlines they felt that it's very helpful out to to the suck spotting the signs and therefore knowing where to go from from from from there and well I think it's it's it's an interesting what do you want out of life do you do you do you want excitement and fun and intellectual exploration and creativity or do you want rigid or do you want stability and reasonable

55:22or something whatever or do you want somewhere between the two the borderline has many positives as I said some of the greatest most intelligent most creative amazingly within history have been borderlines has created amazing things and that's why that that's why these kinds of traits have stayed in the population both into the relation to male geniuses and female geniuses but you wouldn't necessarily want to live with such people there there is no female unicorn you have to make trade-offs and that trade-off is always going to be between exciting and fascinating and amazing and inspiring and actually you know reliable and loyal and and and and and that sort of thing there will be no female unicorn but the four wanders forearm so it gives you the information that you need to identify and be these people to just how to deal with these people and how to get the best out of them as it were and also it just it just demonstrates in a clear way the influence of these kinds of women on history which a lot of people are unaware of which is part of their brilliance really their genius that you you know realize just how influential they are

56:25a lot of thanks so much how people can find you hitherto and yarn how would you recommend my youtube challenge to jolly heretic where I last show Monday's to to pm new york my sub stack is the jolly heretic where you can if you like you can support them to the cost of a kind of their month right but in person to use the logs videos we find things uh by all my books are on amazon uh and and they might follow them on twitter app jolly heretic thanks so much very much appreciate your time with us let's talk again bye bye that's all for today remember every myth as a solution and every truth has the power to transform your health minus an america outlawed pulse rating every Friday at five p.m. Eastern on demand wherever you get your podcasts secure stay informed and we'll see you next week america outlawed pulse pause