Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. With so much tension and confusion in modern day life, it seems appropriate to do our show, which deals so directly with the core issues of human existence. In fact, perhaps any of us who don't feel deeply disturbed by our situation are dangerously alienated or excessively cold-hearted. That would appear to be the case with the power structure that governs our affairs today.
Norberto Keppe, whose Science of Analytical Trilogy underpins our show, considers the way power is being used today to be the biggest problem facing us. We live in a world dominated by the pathology of power, which is even more responsible for our modern crises than our individual problems. Still, we condone this abuse by not learning more about it and by following it. Ignorance is no excuse, and we must become smarter about psychosocial pathology, the purpose of our show today.
Waking up to the cause of crisis, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Join us, make comments, let's get a community going here of like-spirited people. You know, we talk a lot here about the pathology of power because it's not knowledge that most of us possess.
We see really psychotic behavior every day and don't recognize it for what it is. People with no food must cry out in anguish as good business policy sees us destroy excess wheat and eggs to keep the price up. And we line up like sheep to submit ourselves to the humiliation of airport fondling under a sadistic pretext of protecting us from terrorism. There are a million examples, and we look away or close our eyes or even defend this psychosis as necessary because we don't understand the psychology.
We'll delve into explaining all that today. Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco is with us for only a short time today, and the bulk of our show will be with Italian journalist Fabrizio Biliotti, American broadcaster and entrepreneur Susan Berkley, and American businessman Bob Butler. But Cláudia is here first to look at Keppe's scientific growth from studying psychopathology and then expanding out to include an analysis of sociopathology.
This is a fascinating development. Cláudia, how did that process unfold?
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: For seven years, Keppe was studying and focusing only on the effects of the sociopathology in human beings, neuroses, psychoses, and organic illnesses. When he was in Brazil, studying here and researching here and applying his science to his clients, he focused more in inner aspects, aspects that were coming from the inner life of individuals.
So when we moved to New York and we started to work in America, we started to perceive or kept him mostly focused on a huge problem which he started to study and called sociopathology. He started to perceive that if the social or the socioeconomic structure is too sick, it can create not only socioeconomic problems, but severe illnesses like psychosis, neurosis, and that's what we see in America nowadays.
At least 25% of Americans have suffered in some point of their lives some psychotic crisis. And much, much more beyond this percentage are taking some psychotropic drug or some kind of medicine. And
Richard: what happened there then, Cláudia? What was it that he was seeing that was causing all this corruption, all these problems?
Cláudia: Well, it happened, Richard, that because America followed very much some philosophers, some thinkers, some economists like Adam Smith, William of Oaken.
And also this very practical attitude that Americans have seen in action, in doing things, the essence of life and doing anything, like freedom to do whatever they wanted to do. So this kind of schools of thought made a huge disaster in North America. And what Keppe realized is that the structure in American society developed so much sickness and so much inversion that individuals that are born there have very little chance to be balanced and to have a reasonable health.
So he was very much concerned.
Richard: And you and your group started way back in 1984, wasn't it, with a campaign around the U.S. To stop the decay you were seeing there.
Cláudia: Yes, in that nationwide campaign. And right after this campaign to try to stop, to hinder the effects of this decay, Keppe wrote a book about the pathology of powerful. Because we were dealing with powerful people trying to advise, to conscientize politicians that if they didn't follow the true foundations of a healthy society, of what America used to be, that they shift their orientation much more to speculation than before, much more to consumerism than before, and using the freedom in the inverted direction.
And
Richard: we really need to become conscious of this inversion, don't we? I mean, that we use our freedom in a completely wrong way.
Cláudia: Yes. So when Keppe started to advise people there, we made a nationwide campaign. We sent books to all politicians in America, all governors, all House representatives, all senators, all people in charge of the government. We sent books to all of them.
But with no response, they didn't react. So what we realized in that time of the Reaganomics was that they were really believing that that philosophy, the Reaganomics philosophy, would help America to become a powerful nation. And that they would have the freedom to do economically what they wanted to do and they would always succeed. So it was a time of enormous delusions of grandiosity, delusions that casino Wall Street, money making money.
So we were very much worried. We witnessed many, many farms bankrupt, many farmers going bankrupt, many small and medium industries going bankrupt. We saw industry in America finishing. So all the industries went to other countries, China, India sometimes. So we noticed that the orientation in America was that money was the value and not work. And in this sense, American people stopped working.
They were even forced, many of them, to diminish their intensity of work. And not only that, but many of them had to stop.
Richard: Yeah, you know, there's a craze to stop working in North America generally. I don't know, have an easier life, start slowing down is the advice you get as you get older. Stopping working seems to be one of the root problems of the crisis we're seeing now, isn't it?
Cláudia: Well, Keppe understands that richness comes from work, work of quality, work of necessity, and good work, statical, truthful, and good work. So richness comes from this, and money doesn't make any more money. It made, like it artificially made. So it was all a kind of delusional attitude of all those economists, which now we are perceiving the consequences, the drastic consequences. And Keppe tried to avoid this.
We did everything to halt this before. And he said, "if we don't change this philosophy, if we don't go back to the values of work and good work that Americans used to have in the past, that built this nation, all the structure, infrastructure of these nations and everything that America had of beautiful was built with hard work of Americans and also immigrants that went there to work in quality."
And a lot of ethical work was being done in that country.
Richard: Yeah, Cláudia, Dr. Kempis talked a lot about how we're inverted, how we've inverted these economic principles. We've put money and capital above everything else. He's critiqued a lot this inverted idea of making money with money and not basing the economy on production. In his book, Work and Capital, he says, the economy is not a game for people to play at like Monopoly with exciting people.
...peaks and troughs. It's not a fantasy. The economy is part of reality that can only be developed correctly if it returns to its true origin.
Cláudia: Yeah, because, Richard, I think that we are in a provisional, in a first phase of conscientization. Americans now are starting to conscientize that this economic policy, the freedom of market, is not the freedom, the true freedom. Because we are free in economy to work, to do what is good, beautiful and truthful, the good for society, for humanity, and not to feed the envy, the megalomania, the theomania of a few individuals or crazy groups or powerful people that can and do are sometimes really are psychotic.
And so when we are under this impression that a country is in decay only in economy, this is just the first step. Because decay in economy is also a consequence of a decay, a previous decay, psychological decay, in ethics, in education, in attitudes, in costumes, in values, in spirituality, in arts. So a society that enters in a decay, it enters in a decay before the economic decay.
They are in a psychological decay. So the economic decay is just a consequence where people refuse to work, where people think that if they gamble, if they take drugs, if they just have fun in life, if they don't care about the fellow man, if they don't care about ethical principles and spiritual principles. So all this inversion took over America. And this was an enormous sadness for us because we expected that American people would take this new science and bring the benefits not only for themselves, but for all the world, like the Roman Empire did in the past with Christianity.
But what we noticed is that they were not able anymore to understand what was going on. So we tried to advise, and we suffered the consequences that many people know already. We suffered the consequences of this persecution, imprisonment, and persecution. And now Keppe said, okay, so if you don't wake up until 89, it will be too late. Because after 89, it will be impossible to resurrect this kind of like monster that was this speculation bringing or this disease, this disease, economic, financial disease and psychological disease that those upside down economists and thinkers brought to American people.
Yes,
Richard: exactly. And I love this about Keppe's work, Cláudia, because this seems to go to the psychological, even philosophical root cause of all this, rather than just offering a surface explanation. And
Cláudia: when people talk to Keppe, and Keppe is a specialist about American psychopathology and psychosocial pathology, for sure, because he's the one of the persons that love the most that country. This is for sure.
He loved enormously American people in American countries. But when we asked him, OK, Keppe, now what do you think? What is going to happen about this disaster? What is the solution? So he says, go back to work. Now people will have to go back to work and do good and truthful work and work for humanity. And this will not be easy presently anymore as it would be, because making everybody go back to work now, it will be much more complicated.
Because industries are destroyed. Farms are in the hands of a few. All small, medium businesses that were the economic tissue of the nation, now this is almost destroyed. Everybody dependent on a few companies and corporations. So when these corporations go down, everybody goes down. It will be a time of huge conscientization. It's not a matter of having no solution. There is a solution and people should not enter in like a chaos or in panic, but they have to understand that the problem is this.
Thanks
Richard: Cláudia. We need to take a break now.
We're on the Positive World Radio Network. My name is Richard Lloyd Jones and we are back in just a moment. The program is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. We're on the Positive World Radio Network. We're streaming on iTunes, of course, too.
Every time I do that, Bob Butler and Fabrizio Biliotti are joining me here today. Every time I do that, I see how fast I can give that detail. I don't have to take up too much time. So Cláudia Baron-Harposheko is not available today, So I want to sit down with a couple of my very good friends here in Brazil and look at what's going on in the world, particularly through the eyes of what's happening in the media.
And Fabricio Biliotti has been in Brazil a little bit longer than me, 10 years or so. He comes out of a career in music and journalism in Germany and Italy and now is working at our Millennium Language Schools and doing many valuable and good things down here with Dr. Keppe's work in Italian. So welcome, Fabrizio.
Fabrizio Biliotti: Oh, thank you. Welcome to you
Richard: too.
And our good friend Bob Butler is joining us again. Bob is down here for a few months from the Chicago area, and Bob, you'll have a lot of thoughts, I'm sure, on what's going on in the world today. Let's start, gentlemen, with this, what's going on with the news of the world now. Rupert Murdoch's kind of one of his flagship stations in England is in big trouble on two counts now, hacking into people's voicemail to get stories, which is an extraordinary revelation that's come out of England recently, and bribing Scotland Yard for info.
And so initial thoughts on that, Fabrizio. You've been following that story a
Susan Berkley: little bit, I'm sure. And you come out of Italy
Fabrizio: with Bertasconi there, controlling the media everywhere. So initial thoughts on that. What's happening? What's going on, do you think? Well, this is a very complex problem. I think that the situation nowadays, the situation of the media is really serious and in serious danger.
Because for example there is this big link among for example economic power that owns the media and this is a big problem. Because this is not a real guarantee of democracy, not only of information but I would like to say of conscientization, of the function of conscientization that all the media, I mean TV networks or radio I mean, should have, then this is a big problem.
And this situation of Rupert Murdoch shows clearly that the economic power today is controlling the media and that this control also follows and uses methods that are not really, let's say... That are not legitimate, to put it politely, yes. And this puts the democracy in our planet, not only in England, but I mean in Italy too with the situation that we have with our prime minister Berlusconi that owns in practice all the private media, newspapers, magazines and so on, creating a monopoly of this.
Then I think that the most important question now is Is it that the media is really democratic, is it really free? What we read in the newspapers or what we listen on TV, what we watch on TV is the reality, is the truth. And what are the interests, for example, of this big, I mean, economic
Richard: powers? What is yeah in it behind it all.
Susan Berkley has joined us too and I'm glad because we wanted to talk about media today. So we we're we've started without you but but join us here. Join us here please. Bob initial thoughts on what's happening with news of the world and Murdoch and then we'll get to other factors of the media
too. Well for me it's been kind of an awakening you know having lived in the United States all of my life we always kind of felt that the media and the press were truthful.
And surprise, they're not. I remember in the 50s and the 60s, various programs, documentaries, really reporting serious allegations such as the CIA and the creation of LSD. Those things we seldom see anymore. It's like they don't want to investigate. They just leave it alone and this Murdoch situation and though I'm kind of catching up on it because Because of the time here in Brazil, it's astounding to me.
One really asks the question, does democracy truly exist? There doesn't seem to be any truth any longer.
Richard: And you just
can't depend on it. Difficult to find. The story Bob's referring to is an ABC report from the 70s about the introduction of LSD into CIA mind control experiments. Susan, you've been following Rupert Murdoch a little bit. What's your initial view of what's happening
Susan: there?
I mean, it's the tip of the iceberg. I mean, you know, they need to do the same thing in the United States. But the point is not necessarily, I mean, here we have one individual who's shown to be a demon, for example. And this is pretty typical of how we look at things, and we don't address a deeper issue that only Dr.
Keppe, I think, brings in his work about the true pathology of power. So here you've got one individual who's shown to be, you know, sick and unethical and blah, blah, blah, just like we do when we wage war in the United States. We always there's always that one person, the bad actor, you know, the Noriega, the Saddam Hussein, whomever it is. So in this case, OK, now everybody's focusing on on Murdoch, but they're not addressing the larger problem, which is some fundamental problems with the press in general, with the way the media relates to truth.
So I think that there are, you know, usually
Richard: when the media criticizes itself, they talk only about bias. Is the press biased or is it not biased? But they never discuss really who controls the press and how that affects, like Bob was saying, the information that we get that's so necessary to have a healthy democracy. Yeah, one of the things I feel is very strongly about the media is that the various journalists or pundits, whatever, they're involved in taking and defending positions.
But what's the truth? What's the therapeutic value going on underneath all that? If we're just taking and defending a position, you can defend any position you want using your intellect. But what is the fact of human beings? Who are we? Where do we come from? What is the essence that we start from? This is not being discussed.
Susan: There's no objective truth. No.
They never, and it's somewhat against their journalistic nature, they believe that to be fair and balanced, you have to show all sides. Well, there is no all sides to something. It's either right or it's wrong. And the media will always say, well, it's right this way, but on the other hand, well, there is no other hand when it comes to a truth or a lie, when it comes to a right or a wrong.
So this, I think, is a fundamental problem with the press in and of itself. And one of the things that I find so refreshing and so therapeutic about Dr. Keppe's work is that he says, no, this is the truth. And he backs it up. I mean, you know, through arts and through philosophy of the ages and through scientific research. So it's, as we were speaking the other day, Rich, it's a priori versus a posteriori.
So the thing is that you, by intuition and by research, you say, okay, this is a truth, and then you look for science to back up to prove what you know. The press does not operate like this.
Richard: Yeah. Fabricio, let's talk a little bit about the therapeutic nature of media, what media could be doing. How do you see this? You've been working in media for a long time and now working in Millennium.
The role of media could be what? What could we be doing that's a good question.
Fabrizio: It's not so easy to to answer this but I mean as Susan was uh was saying before I think uh that there is a big difference between information and conscientization. We are living in the in an era in a period of information. Doesn't matter if this information is truth truthful or not.
Doesn't matter if the media are saying the truth or not. Everything is relative and then for example I can have my point of view but your point of view can be the opposite and is also correct. Then there is no more this search for the truth in a deeper sense. Then for in order to understand this we should understand what pathology is and why for example we are living in a world so full of problems.
For example I give you an example. If you open the newspaper today, probably 90% of the news are bad news, negative news about catastrophes or economic crisis, about a lot of things that don't interest to the people today. They are not interesting for the people, for our life, our everyday life. And they reveal a big pathological situation that we are living in our planet.
Now, what is the work of the media today? Give this information, but wanting to transmit, they want to transmit this idea that, for example, this is our reality. The world we are living full of anger, full of wars, full of, I don't know, violence, full of drugs, full of diseases. It doesn't matter what kind of disease we are talking about.
Richard: We have a long list of
Fabrizio: diseases.
Yeah, we can make a long list. This is our reality. And Dr. Keppe says clearly in his books, in his work, that this is not our reality. That reality is truthful, beautiful, and good, then why, for example, the question is why doesn't the media try to bring us to this core that is our essence, the essence of the human beings, the beauty, the truth, and the goodness.
And they only want that. For example, we get used to this idea that our world is full of diseases and bad things, and this is our reality. And then we get used to this, this idea,
Richard: and think that this is the reality,
Fabrizio: and we accept it is the truth. But this is not the truth. Then how can people feel, for example, in front of this kind of news?
This is a desperate. There is no way at all. There is no way. And this is what probably
Richard: is behind that we want to, we made of the pathology a kind of institution, an institution, I don't know how to say, institutionalization of pathology. Yes, exactly. Bob, you had a
Fabrizio: comment, you're percolating
with something I can see. Yes, when I was listening to Fabrizio speak, I remember Dr.
Keppe's work, metrological metaphysics, the Liberation of Being. And your words really struck a chord because Dr. Keppe wrote, there really exists a pact of extinction among the inhabitants of the planet that we have a compulsion for annihilation, annihilation of each other, annihilation of ourselves. And this is pretty scary stuff. Yeah,
Richard: because this, this, uh, suggests that the, this pseudo reality you're talking about, Fabrizio, uh, is, is here for a reason.
Like we, we have chosen, we have selected this. And this, we're not hearing in the media at all. Everything is, uh, analyzed from relative terms, you know, and not from this overview that we have, uh, a perfect world. The world without human beings on it would be a perfect planet, and we're destroying it. And this is, there must be some desire for destruction behind this.
This is never being analyzed except in Dr. Keppe's work. Yes,
Susan: so we don't make the dialectic, which is what, um, you know, Dr. Keppe's work is based on, that there's, um, goodness and the denial of goodness, not good and evil existing as two distinct things. But another thing that I wanted to talk about, for example, is the ownership of the media and how that affects the journalistic content.
People don't realize what they call interlocking directorates. So, you know, of the 10 top media companies, there are several hundred. The people on the board of directors also sit on the boards of directors of hundreds of other companies, including pharmaceutical companies, which are one of the major ones, and companies that produce material for the military-industrial complex. So that's why so many of the stories that you see are oriented around diseases.
And if you open up a newspaper or a magazine, now most of the advertisement is for full-page ads, very expensive full-page ads, is for drugs. The
Richard: poet W.H. Auden said, What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment, which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten and replaced by a new dish. So we'll end on that thought and be back in a moment.
Thinking with Somebody Else's Head is on the Positive World Radio Network. Back in just a moment. We're back. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head is the program we're streaming on the Positive World Radio Network, also available on our website at heat.com.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco is not with us today. She's got some other prior commitments, but Fabrizio Biliotti from Italy, Susan Berkley from New York, and Bob Butler from the Chicago area.
We're discussing what's going on in the world in terms of media. I was reading an article in the op-ed section of the New York Times on Sunday where they were discussing the problem of soldiers returning from war. This is like a monumental problem that's not been talked about very much, so I was appreciative of this article in the newspaper. But I felt something that I've noticed many times when reading about things that are going on in society.
They analyze the situation from the point of view of the soldiers coming back from war as if the war is a natural thing or as if the war is like an expected thing. And so they're analyzing, well, the guys are coming back from war. Of course they're coming back from war. How are we going to help them without discussing, but why are we in this war?
This war is totally, all of these wars that we've seen recently are totally out of reality. They're totally manufactured wars to fulfill another intention behind them, which I think we should talk about. But first, let's focus on this, guys. We're in the war now, so now we have to deal with it. But wait a minute. Why are we in the war? This is never being discussed or very seldom being discussed in our media today.
Where can we go with this? What observations can you make about this so we can begin to explore this a little bit deeper? Fabricio. Well, I
Fabrizio: think that we should use the science of psychosocial pathology that Dr. Keppe developed in these years, many years. And this is like an individual. Think about, for example, an individual. Many individuals, they think that, for example, they are not guilty.
When they do something and something goes wrong, it's because of the others. Then the husband accuses the wife because she, uh, she's not good for him, or vice versa, the husband, the wife accusing the husband, they're not good enough. They're good enough. Yeah, and if I am dissatisfied in my life is because of external factors. Now let's think that this individual pathology, this neurosis, can be also social, a social pathology, like Dr.
Capi says, that it can be that, for example, a society, a population of a country starts, starts to think that all of their problems come from outside, like for example is the situation of United States, uh, with the terrorism. Yeah. Then United States are thinking, OK, the problem are the terrorists. The terrorists are our enemy and so on. And we are not guilty.
We are not responsible if our economy, for example, is falling down because we are defending ourselves from some kind of... External enemy. External enemy. Then we have to make a war. It's important to defend ourselves. But wait a minute. Why, for example, now is this war necessary? What are these enemies? I'm not defending the terrorists. This is not the point. Of course not.
Richard: This is obvious.
But what is important is to see that, for example, through the science of psychopathology, it's possible to see that, in general, people, individuals, as well as societies, project the consciousness of these problems that they have internally outside.
Fabrizio: Then, for example, what we are seeing, for example, in the case of the United States, and also of Europe, not only of the United States, but a big economic crisis.
Enormous. Enormous crisis. And it's like nobody wants to be conscious of the reasons, of the causes of this big crisis. Then there is a war. But what for? What are these terrorists? We don't know. We don't know exactly. The media made a kind of brainwashing, making us believe that, for example, there are enemies and the righteous people are on one side and on the other side there are only bandits.
And I think sometimes when I read all this news I'm getting crazy because they don't really explain what's going on. No, not at all.
Susan: I mean, so I'm here in Brazil, as is Bob. We have a big economic crisis, the budget crisis going on in the United States with the risk of the United States for the first time ever defaulting on its loans.
I mean, this would be, you know, disastrous. Monumental. Monumental. And so I went to look online in the New York Times. It was like almost nothing on this story. The Rupert Murdoch story led, and this other was sort of like in the background. And I was thinking, you know, you speak about Fabrizio, about the paranoia. Looking back, you know, as a child, I grew up during the Cold War era, as did Bob, and we used to have what were called duck and cover drills.
As little kids, in the case of an atomic war, of a nuclear bomb explosion, we were told you should go out in the hallway and cover your head. Or if you were in a picnic, you should just take the picnic blanket and put it over your head and you'd be safe from an atomic explosion. So from the time we were little kids in the United States, this was drilled into us that there was always an enemy, the Red Scare, some sort of.
So we grew up in a very paranoid nation. And so this is way going back over 50 years. Why? Like you're saying, why is this that way?
And unfortunately, too, the actions, if you believe, the actions of a few people known as terrorists, what's happened is the press has expanded it to really encompass a religion. So now every person who is a Muslim or of a certain sect, they're considered by many, many Americans, many Europeans, as people to be cautious of, so that they're treated with disrespect when they go to an airport.
They're looked at with contempt in the eyes of Americans. As I travel, you can see people feeling uneasy, uneasy when someone who appears to be a Muslim, because right away, because of the way the press has handled everything, they assume that this is a terrorist and they forget that this is a human being. Yeah,
Richard: this is such an incredible point because, you know, if we look at these reports about the people who are coming back damaged from war, the reason that's given is because they're not being welcomed back into the society well enough.
And not that going to war is in itself an attack against the essential nature of a human being. So if I go to war and see and do terrible things, I am damaging my own inner structure. And it's never being questioned now that this war, sending people to war is a very, very serious thing. You're damaging a generation of people psychologically and spiritually.
This is not just a, a small thing. This is something enormous. And we can't, there's no way we can integrate people back into the society intelligently when we're putting them against their essence like that. This is not being discussed at all,
Fabrizio: and this is a big inversion, Richard. You know why? Because, for example, we think that we can destroy and then we can rebuild something better.
But for example, imagine that we, I have an accident and I lose my arm. Will be, the question is, will be my life exactly as the life I had before or better? Then, the same thing happens when you make a war. This is exactly the same thing. That country will be, won't be, no, I mean, won't be the same thing that before it is destroyed at an essential
Richard: level.
Then
Susan: what will come after this won't be the same thing. No, of course. You being Italian, you know what happened in Europe during the Second World War and all of the priceless artistic artifacts that were irreplaceable. Same thing in Iraq.
Richard: In Baghdad, the Museum of
Susan: History. May I add one more thing also about the media bias as well? They say when they look at themselves that we're wired to care about anything that even remotely threatens us, so emphasizing bad news is good business.
But again, it's beyond that. It's much beyond that.
Richard: Yeah, because if we, you know, in, in psycho, psychotherapeutic terms, we say you see the real intention through the results. So what are the results of a war? And let's look at this in terms psychologically. What are the results of these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq recently, and this other one in Libya, which is not really a war, but it looks like a war.
What are the results of this? One, we have an increase. Well, let's look at it together. We have an increase in paranoia, right, within the people in the United States, increase in paranoia. When there's an increase in paranoia, in fear, what can we do? What can you do behind the scenes when people are afraid?
Susan: Yeah, manipulate them more.
Richard: Some way. You can start taking away rights.
Oh,
Susan: not to mention the Patriot Act in the United States. I mean, this is inconscionable that there aren't riots on the street about
Richard: this. Yeah, exactly. It's totally shocking. People accept this level
Susan: of taking away rights because
Richard: there's an external danger. So that's an intention. What happens to the people who go to the war? When they come back, they're damaged. It creates a damage in the psyche, as we saw after Vietnam.
It creates a damage inside the psyche of people. This is an intention. When that happens, then there's destruction that happens. So there's a destructive intention behind these things. What happens to the economy? You start investing all of this money in war, and the economy gets ballooned up like a huge hot air balloon with nothing in it. And when that collapses, you have destruction of ordinary people's lives.
Do you want to say something, Bob? There's many more things we can add to this. But
it's really true. You know, if you look at the stock market, for example, for the last year, the last time I checked, it was up like 14 percent for the year. And yet unemployment, 9 percent. If we do away with all the statistics in the games that they play, the actual number is around 16 percent.
Cities like Detroit, which once was a beautiful city, totally deteriorated, dilapidated, worse than the slums, as we've said before in your show, than some of the favelas of San Paolo. The bottom line is this is a distraction to distract the people from reality, from truth. And so what can we do? Where can people find good information? Richard, Susan, and
Richard: Fabrizio. On our programs, right?
And who's being blamed for these problems? This is another very interesting thing, because if you start to, I was reading Thomas Friedman in the New York Times on Sunday, and he was talking about the baby boomers are to blame. The people are to blame for this economic crisis in Greece and expanding out to Portugal and Spain and the United States. That the people are to blame, and not the power structure, not the real people responsible.
Susan: Yes, and I think it was Friedman, I'm not sure. Somebody in one of the Times opinion pieces said that the reason that we have the health care crisis right now is that old people don't want to die a natural death. The old and very, very sick want to extend their lives unnaturally through cancer, medications, experimental drugs for Alzheimer's and cancer. And in the end, it's not having any effect, and it's costing us billions and billions of dollars, and they should just die with dignity.
It's
Richard: ridiculous blaming it on old people, too. People are always blamed for problems that are created by the power structure. And so Keppe's work on the pathology of power is inequivocal. It's like it's totally, it doesn't have any, it's not a mamby-pamby at all. It says very clearly our situation is the worst today, particularly because of the way power is being used, not the people.
We have our pathology. We don't see things. We're not reacting. We're not storming the bastions for the French Revolution. We're not doing those kinds of things. But the real problem is happening in the corridors of power today.
Fabrizio: I think that, for example, there is this big pathology of powers we are talking about now. And I'd like to say in the sense that the problem is that today we are dominated by a very, very small group of powerfuls.
And we think that, for example, and the people in general think that, for example, these people are the most balanced people. This is why they are the power. They're
Richard: there because they're the good people. Because they are good people. Fabricio, hold your thought. I have to take a break. I want to come back to this because the pathology of power is one of the most essential elements of Dr.
Kempi's work that's not been understood and needs to be studied more. So we'll do that when we come back. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Positive World Radio Network. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. We're back in just a moment. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones on the Positive World Radio Network. I'm sorry to have cut you off, Fabricio, because the pathology of power is essential.
So continue with your thought. You were talking about how we believe somehow that the people get to a position of power because they've demonstrated the most sanity, the most balance, the most emotional equilibrium. But this is not true, is it?
Fabrizio: This is not true. And the big problem is that, for example, nowadays, these powerful groups are dominating everything. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that is not under control of these groups.
And, uh, what, but what people think about it's that they admire this kind of people, and they, as I was saying before, people in general think, okay, if they have the power, uh, is because they are more balanced, because they deserve somehow this, but this position. But in reality, through studies of the psychopathology and the pathology of power that Dr. Keppe did during all these years, we can see that, for example, these groups are the, uh, the, the sickest group dominating our planet, and that they reduced our reality only to numbers.
Everything is numbers, not nothing but numbers. And it doesn't matter, for example, as we were talking about before in the other part, for example, if we send young people to die and to kill in wars, it doesn't matter. If we, for example, waste all these energies that could be used, for example, to... And money. And money, exactly, to help our society to live in a better.
Then what are we talking about? But all this pathology is not analyzed because of a big inversion that we can reach the good through the evil. We can make a war because through this war we will have a better situation. But when we analyze all of this, for example, we can see that this is pathology. And this pathology is not analyzed today.
For example, this is the function of the media. Yes.
Richard: Yeah. And when we see the situation of damage that we do, you know, I was watching the last World Cup where Germany was playing, remember, and Germany was having some success. And they were saying, many of the reporters were saying, it looks like Germany is finally leaving behind the vestiges of World War II, the horror that happened there.
Well, this is 60, 70, you know, war sets us back generations. It's not something that brings development. People use this excuse all the time. It's not something because it's against the nature of the human being. This is why people are coming back destroyed from war, because they're doing things against their essential nature, not because they're not being accepted back into the society well or because we haven't put up monuments to them.
Because this is a damage, this damages the human being's psyche.
Fabrizio: Richard, I'd like to say something, because you were talking about Germany. And nobody remembers that, for example, Germany before the two world wars was really powerful in all senses, in all fields. Let's think about the philosophy, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and so on. Science, Freud, Jung, Einstein in the field of physics and so on, and music, for example, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and so on.
And also economically was, let's say, growing and growing and growing. And it's very interesting that, for example, these two world wars, they came and destroyed what?
Richard: Not the capacity of Germany to produce also this part, but especially the scientific development, philosophical development, and so on. This was the real aim of the two wars. To destroy this. To destroy all those things that can bring some consciousness for the people.
Yes, because if the people are deprived of these things you're talking about, we become basically slaves working for the banking financial system. Which is what they want.
Fabrizio: And this is the same, I think, is happening in the United States. Because the United States was a real great country, producing and growing and growing, and was a model in this sense. In every area.
Richard: In every area.
Fabrizio: Then what happened with this country? What's going on now, for example? Then there is something wrong happening that is linked probably to something that we don't really understand. And I'd like to say very clearly to these economic powers that are ruling and dominating not only the United States, but all the countries all over the world, then this is the problem.
And there is a reason why, for example, the United States are today in this situation. Yeah. Noam
Richard: Chomsky said, I don't know how recently, but at one point in his very extensive career, he said, the U.S. Is unusual. Among industrial democracies, in the rigidity of the system of ideological control, indoctrination we might say, exercised through the mass media, unique, it doesn't happen so much in other countries.
You guys, Bob and Susan, you're living in this once great country that we all looked up to. How do you feel as you see it being taken apart in this way?
It's not a good feeling. I guess you could say the values, the virtues that were instilled in me as a young boy by my parents, they're gone. You see recklessness, lawlessness on the streets.
You see people whose standard of living continues to decrease. You hear news reports that say everything seems to be improving. You get another report that says unemployment is growing. Use of drugs is increasing. The use of drugs. I mean, we've talked about that. The use of painkillers leading to robberies in drugstores. The killing of innocent people. That incident we spoke about in New York not too long ago.
So 50% or more of Americans on two or more pharmaceuticals. This isn't the sign of a healthy environment. This is the sign of people with symptoms and seem to be getting sicker.
Susan: Obesity, of course. And as Bob was saying, the addiction to prescription medication, not to mention non-prescription medication. I mean, these things would have been
Richard: unheard of 25 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago.
And Dr. Keppe wrote a book called The Decay of the American People and of the United States. When he talked about the decay in all of these areas, as you were talking about with Germany, Fabrizio, the same things happened in the United States, in North America generally. We see a decay of not just of education, but of things like values, of things like our religion, our psychological perspective.
Yeah,
Susan: he wrote that book in 1984, I believe, when he had recently moved to the United States, traveled extensively in the country in order to help the country. And Dr. Keppe, being a visionary and acutely perceptive, was able to see things that most people couldn't at the time. And had we listened, much of what we are seeing right now, if you read that book now, it seems prophetic, would have been averted.
And the sad thing is, because of this paranoid nature that Fabrizio was talking about, people thought that his criticism was they didn't understand that it was meant to help. That people don't understand about that awareness even of something bad is good. Dr. Keppe's always talking about that because we are good at
Richard: our base. We're not evil. We're good at our base. And so we have to see how we stray from our baseline health in order to reconstruct something.
Reconstruct ourselves, reconstruct our nation. But I want to go somewhere here with this that may be difficult to follow. I don't know. But the idea that there's an intention behind this, I think, is something that's not considered very often. And only in Dr. Keppe's work have I seen this, that behind all of this, the results we're seeing that you're describing very well, behind those results, there's a prior intention.
And this is not well understood in the media. If the media could understand this, we could analyze the situation much more healthily in a much more healthy way. So we're not understanding the intention that's behind of these economically powerful you were talking about before, Fabrizio.
Susan: And as Bob was saying in that piece that he read from Dr. Keppe earlier, it's like the powerful do our intention.
So every human being apparently has an unconscious desire to detonate their lives. This is everybody's psychopathology. We, as the people and workers, we're even more well-balanced than the powerful. So it's like we choose the leaders that will accomplish that desire in us. That's how I understand it. And we allow these things to happen because our intention, like you say, Rich, is this.
Richard: Yeah, and boy, this is tough
Susan: to sort of swallow, isn't it? That we have an intention to destroy. It's not conscientized. It's something that we're not aware of. And without this awareness,
Fabrizio: we cannot analyze anything. We analyze things at face value, and you can't do that in the psychological terms. And this is very interesting what Susan was talking about, because I was thinking now, for example, when a problem appears, we think that everything is lost.
And we know through the psychopathology of Dr. Capet that it's exactly the contrary. When a problem appears, we have the chance to deal with. Then, when we are conscious of the situation, because a problem appears, and we have to analyze what's going on, what's behind this problem. Then, we were talking about USA or Europe, it doesn't matter. In our private life, it doesn't matter what's the situation.
But when a problem appears, this is a chance we have to conscientize and to correct, let's say, to do something. Yeah. And this is, for example, a big there is a big difference, for example, between a problem and the consciousness to be aware of that problem. So Fabrizio hiding the problem is the problem. Exactly. This is this is this is the common idea.
If I don't perceive the problem, there is no problem. Then, for example, let's take the United States. Okay, if I don't see the economic problems or this decay of Europe, too, because Europe is exactly in the same situation, then if I don't see the problem, there are no problems. If I don't see the corruption, there is no corruption. And not that we know through the psychopathology that even if the problem doesn't appear, it can be or it could be that there is something wrong.
And how can we see this? Through the results. If we live in a world full of wars, full of problems, etc., there is something wrong. We as the media, journalists, or people who work in this field, we should help to bring these principles, to apply these principles to the media, as we are doing now.
Richard: This is the role of the people who are
Fabrizio: listening.
I hope there are some journalists and people listening, because this is their job, and this is not to be afraid, for example, to see that there are problems and that we should see the causes that are behind. Then, for example, what are the media doing now? Oh, they are just giving information, information, and the default, and this, and that, the crisis, and the war, and so on.
With no context. But no context. Why is it happening? But the result is very clear. Human beings and probably these people who are ruling the world, And also, we, the people, have
Richard: this intention. Please understand, this is not the natural course of history. This is the idea we have, that history goes up and down, and we go through these natural courses, and we're on the way to an evolution.
No, we are destroying ourselves.
Susan: Something that was beautiful. A beautiful country, a beautiful society. We are destroying it.
Richard: I really hope that this message can be heard, because this is essential for us to hear. Hiding the problem is the problem and the role of journalists, the role of all of us is to really try to understand this better. And this is where Norberto Keppe's work is so valuable and I can't stress it enough.
This book Liberation of the People, another book that you published and and translated Susan, the origin of illness, the
Susan: book you're quoting from Bob, Trilogical Metaphysics, the Liberation of Being, these are all books that are available in English and available on our websites at healing through consciousness.com. And so I really want to encourage you to understand what's going on, really, and to spread this news for people.
Let people know about this program. Let people know about our sites. Send an email. I mean, we have also a reading group on Tuesday night where we're there live discussing these issues. We welcome your participation. It's free. So if you're interested, tell Rich.
Richard: Joneshealing at gmail.com. Believe me, we would love to hear from you. Thanks, you guys. That was great. We're filling in for Cláudia Pacheco.
It's always a challenge. But it was a very interesting discussion, and I hope it leads people who are listening to some further action in terms of understanding what's really going on behind the scenes.
Susan: Thank you for the work you do.
Richard: Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we're on the Positive World Radio Network, and we are back next week. Thanks a lot.
