Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. One of the challenges in our modern philosophy lies in the difficulty in acknowledging right or wrong, good or bad. We've blurred the line so much it's almost impossible to clarify this in any absolute way. An artist puts a glass of water on a shelf and calls it an oak tree and defends it's an oak tree because he says it is.
And there's no argument to be used against his declaration because that would be intolerant, oppressive, politically incorrect. Hate speech. Even in extreme cases, the pendulum has swung so far in this liberal direction that you have 50-something gender choices when signing up for a new Facebook account. I'm certainly not advocating the cleaning out of the society of anyone who doesn't agree with the traditional view of things.
But I also can't really see my way to endorsing any opinion whatsoever as the new normal. Now, some will say I'm a dinosaur stuck in the 50s just for expressing that. And that, I suggest, is the problem. Dare we try to approach this in our program today? The censorship of natural today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. We are streaming the world over.
Thousands of downloads later, we're still plugging away here. You who are regular listeners have no doubt noticed the substantial drop-off in our production, though. That's totally due to our intense schedule of work here in Brazil. Our new college, the Keppe and Pacheco Trilogical College, eats up a lot of our time on top of our already hectic work schedule. So maybe that's a way of explaining this.
We do love to hear from you, though. That keeps us motivated. So do drop me a line once in a while. Let me know you're still tuned in. Rich at richjonesvoice.com. So the words natural and normal have become words non grata in our modern and atheistic age, haven't they? Lost in the ocean of relativity that gives every opinion the same weight. Well, except for the point of view that expresses an idea that's unacceptable to the politically correct intellectual and cultural influencers.
Hollywood is woke. Yale is eliminating a famous art class for being too white, male, and Western. A young adult fiction author has canceled his book publication after social media criticism that it wasn't woke enough. You dare not tread on those toes. It's gotten so intense that an author has written a book about how to have impossible conversations, meaning how ideological opponents can reach common ground.
You know, it wasn't that long ago we were embracing controversial debate between two equally matched adversaries as stimulating and necessary. You only have to revisit the fascinating debates between William Buckley and Noam Chomsky back in the 60s to get what I'm talking about. But now you don't toe the line of politically correct liberalism and you're branded an evil alt-righter. Comedians fight with that, of course.
Check out Jerry Seinfeld's views on political correctness. Right-wing pundits do too, but often come across as being so strident and self-righteous the other way as to become entertaining but virtually useless as mediators of this conflict. And as for traditional values, offering an olive branch, you can forget about that too. Those are values elaborated by the oppressor, after all. Worse than useless, offensive to wokeness proponents.
So we'll wade in fearlessly to these stormy waters today, and I hope you'll stay with us long enough to get where we're coming from. And that the view where we're coming from can offer some solve to the open wounds that fester and infect our ability to dialogue, manage, and even reconcile something so necessary in our troubled world. So, the censorship of natural when Thinking with Somebody Else's Head returns in just a moment on the Stop Radio Network.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and welcome to the Stop Radio Network. We broadcast from the International Society of Analytical Trilogy in São Paulo, Brazil. In our programs, Thinking with Somebody Else's Head and healing through consciousness, offer the most relevant conversations around about the state of our world and what we can do to make it better.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: I remember the book Glorification that Dr.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: tuning in. I remember the book Glorification that Dr.
Keppe wrote. I was with him many of the nights or days where he got those inspirations from God, and it was a necessity for him to write what he received. So the book was totally written under inspiration. But it's not only a theological book. It's mostly a scientific book, very therapeutic book, very beautiful by the way. And he used to wake up during the night, two three in the morning, and he said let's go to the top of the mountain.
And we were watching the sky in this dark night with no interference, so you could transcend the sky and see heaven through it. Oh my god, you could adapt the writings that he did with the music of Beethoven, and this would be a trilogy of his writings and the music. It would be heaven.
You're
listening to the most relevant conversations on the planet about how to stop destroying ourselves and the world.
Richard: Welcome back to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. With me is Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco, as always. I was thinking about banalization this morning, Cláudia, actually the last couple of days. The first thing to say about that, I was watching a video that came from Prager University.
I've liked some of their videos in the past. It's a very conservative view of the world. But I think Dennis Prager seems a very sincere fellow. And some friends just sent me a new video from PragerU featuring an atmospheric physicist from MIT explaining how global warming or climate change is not a real occurrence. And how it's, I guess, basically a fabrication of politicians, climate activists, and the media, climate alarmists, as he calls them.
So, in essence, it's all fake news, you know, the idea. And okay, we don't need to get into the politics of global warming or even the details of that. But I was thinking that that video creates a kind of a somnolence, people go back to sleep because now, I was really worried about this, oh no, but it's nothing now.
Cláudia: Yeah, everything is normal, climate changes are normal, climate is always changing, nothing to worry about.
Right,
Richard: so there's no way to pursue the conversation about that without being
Cláudia: an alarmist or climate alarmist. You know that there are many economic powerful that are taking advantage from this idea, you know. Yeah, these are the politicians, the economic powerful and some NGO activists. He's right when he says this, that they are taking
Richard: advantage from a problem
Cláudia: to make money now.
But everybody knows that there is something going on on the planet. There are many manifestations, several manifestations that are not usual, are not common. The Earth is demonstrating that it's being hit by a severe disease, a sort of disease. We don't know what kind of disease it is in the planet because the planet is sick. So many, well...
Richard: Unexplainable things. Well, that's what I wanted to come to.
So
Cláudia: if global warming is not the cause, what is the cause? We
Richard: should pursue. Sure. And something's happening. Something's happening. We're
Cláudia: not healthy. We have increased rates of suicide, especially among young people, high rates of depression. We seem to have a school shooting every week in the United States. Psychiatric disorders, panic attacks, anxiety, burnouts, different sorts of neurologic diseases.
Richard: And people try and say, like this guy is saying, it's all totally normal.
There's nothing unusual about that. But I think we can feel, if we're honest, that there's a kind of existential angst in the world. People don't know who they are, where they're going, what's it all about, Elfie, what's going to happen.
Cláudia: Even different choices of sexual behavior, gender
Richard: discussions, this
Cláudia: is a trend that is not natural. You may choose now. You have always had this possibility.
But lately, much more people are refusing their own natural state, sexual state, to pursue happiness through changes. And you know that this pursuit of happiness with such veracity, voracious pursuit of happiness in external and different forms of life, style of life. This is really neurotic, pathological, and... Pathogenic, meaning brings diseases, not only psychological, but viruses because the homeostatic imbalance and the psychoimmune system, which is broken every day more, every day more.
We're breaking down. We're having these burnouts. So all this is a sign, a symptom that there are many wrong things going on in the planet. And as you said, saying this is normal, everybody does, everybody has, being common is not being normal.
Richard: Everybody goes back to sleep. And, you know, there's this whole thing now against conspiracy. I've been reading a
Cláudia: lot of skepticism about conspiracy theorists now.
A woman has written
Richard: a book called American – The Republic of Lies. Anna Merlin has written a book about this, a skeptic, right? And the challenge is that, of course, there's some weird conspiracy theories out there that are very difficult to believe. But there are a lot of questions about what's happening in the world. We can go back to my generation. We can go back to the Kennedy assassination.
We can go back to Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. We can go back to a lot of things. What's really going on? I've just been reading a book about World War II, a very famous raid that the Canadians were involved in in Dieppe, that they're just now uncovering what that was really about. There were 1,000 people lost, 1,000 people, Cláudia, lost their lives in like seven hours there, Canadians.
It was a fiasco. And just now they're uncovering what may have been the reasons for that because they're starting to release some of the hidden documents. And the author of this book says that whenever there's repressed information, there are questions. Questions come up. And so people fill the questions with sometimes crazy theories. But the fact is that people are questioning. We need to understand what's going on in the world.
So when you just dismiss something, oh, there's nothing there, everything's normal, people go back to sleep. It's very serious.
Cláudia: Nobody believes in mainstream media anymore, publications.
Richard: Do you perceive? Well, I sure don't.
Cláudia: Everybody knows that there is a huge lie in the media, mainstream media. They are owned by the economic powerful. Come on. Come on. You must be stupid. And they are making people stupid with cell phones and all this technology.
They are creating stupidity in the planet. So people don't understand anymore. They don't question drugs, technology, and some philosophies, which, as you said, they banalize good and evil, for instance. We are not here speaking about theology in terms of religion, But we are speaking about good and evil, and this is something we can't deny. There is good and evil.
Richard: Well, so we should come back to your questions about gender, because the moment you put your finger in that bee's nest, hornet's nest, you have an enormous reaction from people.
There's a big defense of the right to have an abortion, the right to decide what your gender is going to be and what your sex is going to be.
Cláudia: But if you want to defend the other side, then you are penalized. There are laws that forbid you to be on the other side of this kind of thinking.
Richard: Isn't that interesting?
Cláudia: So, for instance, you cannot speak about Jews, black women, homosexuals.
Muslims. Muslims. Muslims, but you are free to speak against white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon,
Richard: Anglo, or
Cláudia: whatever, heterosexual people. You are totally free to speak against, for instance, Christian beliefs. No problem whatsoever. You can crucify men that are heterosexual, but don't speak about any other areas. Why do they do this? Why do they do this?
Richard: That's the question I was going to ask you.
What's going on there? What is the... Why this... Yeah, there's a TV series now which speaks very badly about Jesus, and it's on Netflix. I was just thinking. So
Cláudia: if you are for Christ, you are all the absolutely negative categories. You are to be exterminated.
Richard: Yeah. If you want to make a series like that
Cláudia: about Muhammad, I'm not proposing
Richard: that people do that, of course.
Cláudia: If you use a swastika
Richard: or something, my God, you go to jail. Yeah. So there's a big sort of censorship about what you can talk about.
Cláudia: What is natural? Yeah. What is natural is censored nowadays. What is natural is censored nowadays.
Richard: Wow. So gender is something that you are talking about in terms of as a natural. Gender is different from sex. I think we have to say that, right?
There are sort of gender identifications. Maybe people don't feel masculine in that way that you're supposed to. But male and female, come on. That's a, I don't know what the percentage of the people who are born like hermaphrodite with both sexual organs, it's a pretty small percentage. But most of us are born one way or the other. So if I want to change that, what we're trying to do.
Or
Cláudia: if you want to consider this as a pathology to be treated, you cannot anymore.
Richard: You can't. No, that's what I was going to come to. If I have an idea against what my natural biological state is, then that's something I need to think about. It can't be. But they want to make freedom for any kind of thought in any kind of area you want to go.
And we know entering into the area of the will, freedom of the will, that is a really dangerous area for the human being to enter.
Cláudia: Yeah. And I want to mention here something. That lately women entered in this very, very dangerous path, thinking that now it's the time for women to do whatever they want and to have their freedom. And freedom to do the wrong that they saw men doing in the past.
So what is happening is a very big imbalance for families, for people, for... If you want to speak about family, this is an old-fashioned thing. Nobody accepts anymore. What is a family? Well, come on, family, family.
Richard: Traditional family.
Cláudia: Yeah. So these are things...
Richard: How 1950s of you.
Cláudia: Yes, yes, yes. But as a psychoanalyst, I've seen so many people being hurt and suffering because of this misunderstanding of how can a person really achieve satisfaction in life.
Richard: So because the traditional relationship has value? Is this what you're talking about here?
Cláudia: A traditional relationship requires a minimum of loyalty, fidelity, patience, tolerance, love, dedication, sacrifice, sometimes even sacrifice. You need to sacrifice many things if you want to put a relationship, like a family relationship, a husband, a wife, or a lasting relationship, you need to sacrifice.
Richard: Then let me just talk about it this way, Cláudia, because this is a controversial issue.
Freedom of the will. Dr. Campbell has written a book called Libertação da Vontade in Portuguese. And when I first came here, when I was translating that, I thought it was liberation of the will. But it's not. It's liberation from the will. If we liberate our will, if we let our will go free to do whatever we want, we create a lot of problems.
This is the
Cláudia: scientific part people need to understand. Mostly because we have deliriums. We fantasize things. You see so many people destroying their lives because at some point they started to fantasize some possibility as a reality. I'll give you an example. This happens very often with couples where women get married and for some reason they think they are going to be treated as princesses, and they are, and they are in in the way their husbands could do that they were.
But they have some sort of imagination about being married, so they get married, and after some time, they start to become dissatisfied. Because life, real life, is not the same as they imagined. And how many people and how many things were involved in that situation, in that marriage. Even more when they have kids. So, new kids, they're going to suffer all those influences, negative influences.
Well, so they get married and they start thinking the husbands they have do not fit their ideal. So they want to change their husbands to something they don't even know what could be. And fights start. And men do the best they can most of the time. Most of the time. How do you call the opposite of feminism?
Richard: Masculinism, I guess. I don't even know if there
Cláudia: is something like this.
I'm not that kind of thing. But I see in most of the cases where people get married and then after a while they break apart, that women are 90% those who take the lead, the initiative to break apart.
Richard: They get unsatisfied. So they are more delirious.
Cláudia: They are more in fantasy than man, in relationships. It's a pity because so many couples could be friends, a long life, long lasting.
And relationships that are lasting relationships, they have some sort of richnesses that cannot be achieved in one, two years or three years. They are really, it's like a treasure that you, it's like saving, savings of good experiences. You have a big savings of good experiences together. And this is precious. This is treasure. And very few couples have this
Richard: nowadays. The women say, my first wife, I sound a bit like Richard Burton when I say that, right?
How many wives have you had? But my first wife said that. She said that there was something, she needed more, that there was something, she felt that there was something, you could see that what she wanted was like more adventure or more, I don't know, the practicality of being together was too boring somehow. So then she started
Cláudia: going out with a guy who was an alcoholic and eat her.
And then a new fantasy, a new fantasy lasted for, I'm
Richard: sure could last, how much, how long could it last? Short
Cláudia: time. And then another one and another one, and then when they get old, they are alone, they are lonely, poor creatures, most of them with Alzheimer, trying to forget the failures, the
Richard: fracassos. The weaknesses, the failures.
Cláudia: Failures that they had in the past, the unhappinesses.
So they create Alzheimer's to forget. And many, many women now, they end up their lives with this dementia precocious, which is a form of forgetting. They can't stand, they can't bear their sad memories, what they did with their lives. So this is not relative. You cannot say this is normal. It's not normal. It's common.
Richard: It's not normal. And the women and many people have been very fooled by this idea that we have to be free to do what we want.
That's sort of the underlying thing
Cláudia: in all of these things you're talking about, coming out of the closet or changing your sex or your gender. So the theomania, Richard, the mania of being godlike, these narcissistic thoughts, people don't have the slightest idea who they are. And these women start thinking, men can do this, but women do this more often. I deserve more.
I deserve more, so I'm the best. And this, Keppe calls, projective identification, which is we put our negative qualities, our pathologies, in the other. And the qualities of the other person I see all in myself. So the other one is just rubbish and I'm the best.
Richard: So what am I doing that I'm wasting my life with such a loser?
Cláudia: That's how women think most of the time and they are deceived by their illusions and delusions of grandeur.
And this has the influence of the devil too, so demons are around here taking pleasure, taking fun, getting fun in destroying loving relationships. You not perfect
Richard: relationships, loving relationships,
Cláudia: because there is not such a thing like perfect relationships of perfect people, but you know. Now, giving a message, you that are on the other side, listening to this conversation, you must be identifying with what we are saying, because nobody in the planet doesn't suffer from this projective identification.
And if we don't realize this, we screw up incredible good things and good people. And then we lose them, and then the next step and the other step are always an attempt to cover up what we did wrong in the past that we do not admit. I was watching the movie, a documentary about Rita Hayworth.
Richard: Rita Hayworth. Hayworth.
Cláudia: Rita Hayworth.
Richard: Not so easy for a Portuguese.
Rita
Cláudia: Hayworth. So her story was very much like this. She was always in this projective identification. Right. And always she was the best and she was deserving more and better and the choices she did were always one after the other.
Richard: Lesser and lesser. Lesser
Cláudia: and lesser. Starts at the top. She went to Alzheimer's in the end of her life. She ended up with Alzheimer's and drinking and very unhappy.
This is not normal. This is not what we are meant to be. This is not we are born to live. No, this is common, but this is not normal.
Richard: You know what struck me as I was listening again to Cláudia's professional take on relationships? This tendency we all have to screw up our relationships by seeing the cause of our problems outside. After all, who hasn't felt, this person I'm with is holding me back.
That's a trap. Maybe the biggest relationship trap we can fall into. All because we don't know ourselves well enough. Projective Identification. Norberto Keppe speaks about that in his revelatory book, Origin of Illness, available in our bookstore at protonpublishinghouse.com. That's all our time for this week. We'll talk to you next time on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Stop Radio Network.
Richard: Tuesday in New York, and Gwen's headache is now five days old. Wednesday in London, and Ronald's left the hospital for the streets again. It's Thursday in Mogadishu, and angry students are protesting against corruption. Whether the illness is physical, psychological, or social, Norberto Keppe's The Origin of Illness is a book that gets to the bottom of it and offers a solution.
