Richard Lloyd Jones: We've got change in the White House and in the tennis ATP rankings. A change in Madonna's marital status, too, if it comes to that. Not that those last two mean that much. And whether the first is truly meaningful remains to be seen, doesn't it? One thing is clear, though. There's not much change in the economic picture. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we'll continue our series looking at the causes of the economic crisis.
Well, after a historic day at the polls, America has woken up to the same scary reality as before. Jobless rates are up. Stock prices are generally down. Well, you know the story. Some of you much better than me. But what I've been trying to do in this series of podcasts over the past few weeks is investigate some of the reasons for the mess.
And I don't mean in terms of explaining how the subprime mortgage market suddenly went bad. No. But one thing I can help with is getting at the causes of all this. Actually, that's no small feat, is it? And because of the expansive work done on the subject at the Brazilian School of Analytical Trilogy, founded by Dr. Norberto Keppe, we have an opportunity to analyze this in a way that's never been possible before.
Look, one of the hardest things about trying to get a handle on what's really going on is the style of the media. You watch CNN or CBS and you get volumes of information, analysis of the subprime aspect, reporting of the G20 meetings with ex-President Bush. And man, does it feel good to say that. You get opinions and policies and figures and spin, glorious spin.
But it's extremely difficult to pick your way through the information. It's always been like this. In our information age, we're bombarded with information but starving for perspective. You have to know how to understand it. And I don't mean to be able to debate economic policy. The benefits of government stimulus packages over tighter regulations and broader oversight, or vice versa. No, there's got to be an overall view to be had.
And it's exactly here that Norberto Keppe's work does what was before him very hard to do. Because of Keppe's work at mapping the human psyche, he's also been able to apply these findings to the society as a whole, verifying that what the human being did outside, he first did inside himself. That our external social structures are simply the reflection of ways of seeing the world, of philosophies and biases, and often questionable reasoning.
One of Keppe's landmark discoveries is that we are inverted. We act against our nature now, in favor of our inverted values. As one guy on Wall Street put it, Cash flow is more important than your mother. This inversion stems from inside us. I want to start there today because understanding our psyche leads to understanding our society. And that means putting the finger on causes.
So then we can take real steps to change, not just rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on anything we're doing on this podcast. Rich at richjonesvoice.com Sari Koivukangas joins me today. She's a professor at the Keppe and Pacheco Institute, which is currently conducting a great course on psychosociotherapy for people who want to learn how to apply Keppe's psychological findings inside the society, inside their community and schools.
Again, you can get more information on that, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Sari, let's start with inversion. Let's start with looking at this. How do you see this? How does Keppe talk about this? And then we'll go on to how this applies to our economic situation.
Sari Koivukangas: So what we can easily notice in the society is, for example, that dishonesty, war are admired and goodness and progress in the real sense are being despised.
So this is the big inversion that human beings have. And as human beings have created the society, they have also created an inverted society with inverted educational systems, with inverted technology, and so forth. And now, this inverted pathological society sickens the individuals that live in that society.
Richard: It's very interesting, Sadi. I noticed in all this recent discussion about what's happening in the stock market and stuff, Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve, saying he was shocked at the corruption that had happened on Wall Street.
He was a big proponent for many years of deregulation to put less oversight on these economic financial instruments. And he was shocked that there was so much abuse of this. But this is not surprising to us if we think about our society being inverted as you said. That the oftentimes the person the most pathological person can rise to the top in an inverted society almost always.
Robert Hare, a very famous university professor from my country, from Canada, from UBC, has done a psychopathy checklist he's developed for how to determine if someone is a psychopath. It's been followed by many criminal systems throughout the world. And he said that if he didn't have a ready supply of psychopaths in prison to study, he would be able to find many of them within the top echelons of the society of today in law, in politics, in the stock market.
He could find many psychopathic, sociopathic tendencies there. Because of our inversion, we're rewarded, between quotes, for being sort of evil and aggressive. We get rewarded for that in the economic system we have today, don't we?
Sari: Right. And because the society is made of inconscientized individuals, it acts very unconsciously. So the only way out of this situation is through conscientization. And that is what Dr.
Kepes' work of Analytical Trilogy is all about. So
Richard: in his psychoanalysis of society, he talks about three phases of human development. What are they? How do you see those?
Sari: So you are speaking about the discoveries of a Hungarian psychoanalyst, Ferenczi, who studied the development of human beings. And he divided the development of children into the oral, anal, and genital phases. For example, if you have babies in the family or your friends have babies, you may have noticed that babies up to two years of age, they experience their life through the mouth.
So what do they do? They eat, they scream, they suck, they use the soother.
Richard: They put everything they can, everything they can find, they put in their mouth.
Sari: Exactly, exactly. They take the earth and put it in their mouth. Everything. So that's why it's called the oral phase. And the babies, of course, they are very dependent on adults. Then after the oral phase comes the anal phase.
And this is the most difficult phase of children. They become aggressive. They attack their siblings. They bite. And it's very hard for the parents. And why is it called the anal phase? Because at that time the children they start to control their bowel functioning and they find it very very interesting say. So they go to the toilet and they wave bye to their excrement.
Again imagine the parents when they came to notice this they would get frantic. But for children this is normal and this is what they valorize and you can easily see it in them. After the anal phase comes the genital phase of children more or less at the age of four to six. So the children they discover their sexuality they start asking questions mommy why are the boys different from the girls start playing
Richard: doctor right.
And if
Sari: the parents are very censoring they will think this is terrible but it's a normal phase of development. And they also are very narcissistic self-centered but they start to like you know worry about their clothes that the colors match they want to use mops the lipstick and things like that and this is also part of child's development. Okay so
Richard: you're talking about how the these are the normal phases of development as we've discovered them but why are we talking about them?
Probably because something happens to us we get locked into these phases.
Sari: Exactly because at the age more or less of seven the children should reach their level of maturity, start using the reason, they go to school at that age. So, supposedly, they should leave their egocentric world and turn more towards the world.
Richard: The bigger world outside them, in other words, yes.
Sari: Right, right.
But do you know many very mature people?
Richard: No, unfortunately.
Sari: Yes. And what would be a mature individual? They would be more interested in the wide, invisible, limitless world of accomplishment, spirituality, but we don't see that very much, right? So what happens is that most people get stuck in these sensorial phases of development, oral, anal, and genital phases, and do not act in a mature way in our society, in the individual lives.
So this correlation is very interesting because an oral adult is dependent just like the baby. The life goes around the mouth so the person wants only to eat too much or drink too much they use drugs or alcohol they speak too much. This face is more typical for women and
Richard: this would mean too in a in a sense of you said about reliance right that they're totally reliant on things.
So this kind of person would stay reliant on their parents or maybe reliant on government reliant on on a on a boss so there'd be this tendency to be dependent
Sari: right. They have lots of difficulties to progress in life they seem to be more childish more
Richard: in more useless than. And not so much dangerous because they're not really worried about other people.
They're just worried about protecting themselves, right?
Sari: Because the really dangerous individuals in this society belong to the anal phase.
Richard: People who get stuck in this phase of between two and four years old that you're talking about. So
Sari: how does that show up in our society? Because these are adults that are in the anal phase, like the child. So they get pleasure from their aggressiveness.
They like attacking the others and they valorize power they want to control over the other people. The child's bowel function control and excrement are now power and money and it's more typical for men although we find many women also in this phase typically bankers politicians the people in the economic power. And they are characterized by paranoia, avarice and unfortunately it is exactly these individuals they want power today.
Richard: Yeah, because of course the oral people stuck in that phase they're not thinking about, they're just trying to protect themselves so they might even see an aggressive paranoid person as somebody who will protect them, right? Right. And I remember reading something very recently that very often in election campaigns, the person who's the most paranoid has the biggest support from the populace. This has not happened in this particular election in the United States.
It's very interesting what's happened there, how there's been a sort of a transformation, almost an attempt to move into something more mature now. And this is very, very beautiful to see. But generally speaking, we give a lot of value to these arrogant, aggressive, paranoid people thinking that they are going to protect us in some way. So in this sense, the population generally has become dependent on the power, right?
Sari: So this is what we call a social pact. So the people, they have the same intention as their leaders.
Richard: So these anal adults, these would be people who are like the bullies of our society. And
Sari: when they grow up, they like to attack the others and they use the society to do this.
Richard: And it's so interesting, Sadi, that we're considering now the justification of things like torture.
We're still considering the possibility that torturing people, that taking away their rights, that holding people in prison with no charges, that these are things that we can actually do and justify. That's a very anal adult phase, isn't it?
Sari: Which will no longer exist in the mature phase. And the third phase in adults is the genital adult. It's the narcissistic and self-centered individuals.
They valorize overly sex and dating. They are extremely vain and they love the looks. In this group you can find the noble of the past. And many of the artists that we know. They usually have a good sense of aesthetics. But the accomplishment is quite weak. But these individuals are not dangerous for the society. This would
Richard: be like plastic surgery would be part of that, right?
The desire to look beautiful all the time The incredible people who are addicted to fitness Exactly Even the anorexic phase maybe You know, they're so concerned about the image that these incredibly skinny supermodels that we see.
Sari: Right. Well, Richard, it's important to point out here that there is, of course, nothing wrong with food, money or sex. They are actually a normal part of human life.
The problem lies in the fact that we have both things of secondary nature into the primary place. And now the sensorial life of food, drugs, money, power, sexual fantasies, pleasure and alienation dominates love, reason, aesthetics and psychic life and this inversion is enough to take the world into the total destruction. If you see the television for example, all the ads are about food, money, power, sex or the tv programs as well.
So this way we are ignoring the real world of love art spirituality accomplishment science philosophy and in the mature world the psychic life would dominate over the sensorial life. And what is interesting to mention is that the mature individual, the person that makes more use of his psychic life, also enjoys truly the sensorial life. He enjoys healthy alimentation, better sex life. He's using his money in a better way for him and the society.
This
Richard: inversion is so clear sadi and the the disinversion that's necessary as you're speaking we can say wow imagine a society where people are actually thinking about using their money to better society. Now we have so much of this idea that I have to get the money for me. I'm only interested in me and my life. And if I have a good life, that's all that counts.
This is rampant throughout the North American civilization. Look out for yourself. Just get the money that you need. You're completely free to do that. And so we see all sorts of sayings now that are the very, I think, symptomatic of this anal phase is, you know, nice guys finish last. You've got to swim with the sharks. It's a jungle out there, creating this idea that you need power and aggression.
And if you're going to play hardball with the big boys, you've got to be tough. You've got to leave your nice qualities. You've got to leave your ethics. You've got to leave your kindness. All of that has to be left at home. You know, otherwise you'll get nowhere.
Sari: So isn't it exactly these inverted philosophies of life that are taking the societies to collapse?
Richard: Totally. And what I most appreciate about Obama's campaign in this election that just finished is that he never stooped to that kind of politics. It's incredible to watch because normally in a political campaign, often the leaders of various parties, they start out with the best of intentions. I'm not going to play dirty politics. I'm not going to do this sort of dirty tricks stuff.
I'm going to try and stay clean of that. But as the election campaign goes on and it gets dirtier and dirtier, tougher and tougher, eventually what happens is even the guy who wants to stay clean says, well, there's no way I'm going to win that way. They don't give faith or value to goodness and truth and beauty. And so they start to do this muckraking stuff and to start to make attacks on their opponent.
Obama never did that. It's like he gave value somehow to goodness and truth and beauty. So here we see the opportunity to have a more mature development. And I'm totally convinced that Obama was able to do this because of all the work that Norberto Keppe's Analytical Trilogy has done before. Because Keppe was in America in the early 1980s, writing books about this, analyzing this.
Even in this book, Psychoanalysis of Society, in 1976, he was starting the process of discussing these issues for us to become a mature people. So by resonance, Obama is benefiting from this resonance that Norberto Keppe has established many years ago.
Sari: So the conscientization of these pathological aspects in the individual and in the society are fundamental so that we can reach the mature face.
Richard: And what would that be, do you think? Well, let's see first if we can see some cultures that have some of these phases, some societies, because we've talked about this in individuals. What about countries that have this anal, oral, genital orientation? How do you see that?
Sari: Well, we could see that our... Presence society is very anal, and that's not difficult to see at all.
Very obvious, isn't it? If we speak particularly about the American society, it's maybe the clearest example of the anal society. The Brazilian society already has more of a mix, like the oral part of certain dependency. You have the genital phase. Yeah,
Richard: very narcissistic. The bikinis on the beach. Or the almost no bikinis on the
Sari: beach. Not that I
Richard: want everybody to start coming down to the beaches.
But it's really something when you come from North America. To go to a Brazilian beach, let me tell you. And
Sari: of course the most primitive societies. Most dependent societies are in the oral phase. As we could say of many of the African societies. For
Richard: example. We see this very much in Brazil very dependent the
Sari: oral society they are most concerned in satisfying the needs for food and they have lots of difficulties in developing their society.
So if
Richard: there's no food in those societies, if people are starving, this is the way the powerful keep the society in this oral phase. People are struggling to survive, just to eat, just to. We see this in Brazil, we see this in many countries in Africa. Of
Sari: course, really the societies where you have like partial or total misery, they could be considered oral societies.
Speaking about the anal society, there you find this kind of expressions you were saying, and time is money. The laws are set to benefit the owners of the goods. The property is more valorized than human life. And there is the idea that economic gain justifies all the means. If it makes profit, then it's good. And also people in these societies they feel they need to arm themselves to defend their goods and their things and Dr.
Kepes says in the psychoanalysis of the society on page 162. We are going at full speed to the height of the age of madness, the anal saddest phase of humanity, when all the violence is allowed, stimulated and clarified, whereas love is despised and denied.
Richard: Wow, that's a beautiful statement. We
Sari: can see this in many, many examples. We have the electric chair, guillotine, concentration camps, dictatorships, Stalin, Franco, CIA, and many other more modern examples, as you said, like the torturing.
Richard: Sure. Saddam Hussein, these kind of crazy Pol Pot in Cambodia. We have many examples of this in South America. Of course, he's really malicious. There's Mao Zedong. He's really malicious people who've killed often millions. I mean, Mao Zedong, he destroyed a whole generation of teachers and artists in his culture. The cultural revolution to eliminate all of the culture, all of the art, all of the beauty.
Look at the envy, the aggression, the anal sadistic aspect of this terrible thing.
Sari: Right. So people do not seem to perceive that today's face of humanity is the worst of all. Richard, I was talking the other day to a student that came to our school, and he's a Catholic priest. And he was mentioning about the crimes and injustices that the church did during the Middle Ages.
And he was very censored because he's a priest and he was saying, well, this was horrible things. He
Richard: felt terrible about this, I'm sure.
Sari: Right. But then I was talking to him and trying to show to him that, well, of course it was something not acceptable, but we should see that at that time they would put one person to the fire, and today's leaders put like whole nations into fire.
Richard: Look at the 20th century. War after war after war. Millions of people died in fire, literally.
Sari: So, this time that we are living and we have been living is the first time of humanity.
Richard: Because, you know, Sadi, we have the feeling that we're evolving in our society, you know, that we're getting better, we're improving. And, you know, we're not we're not hanging people in the public square like they did in the 1600s, but drawing and quartering them in the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
We have this idea that this is advancement, but we are still. We're still hanging them in many, many ways. And whenever you have the execution of a serial killer in the United States, you have people outside the prison having a barbecue, having a party. And there's no difference in
Sari: our emotional response. We've hidden it away a little bit more. It's now a little more humane in how we, quote unquote, in how we execute people.
But the idea is still the same. And the need for revenge, this feeling is still the same. And the way we are also repressing and hanging the being of the people by using systems to oppress them. The focus in the economic issues that are completely secondary for human life and the development of society.
Richard: Very nice. Cláudia Pacheco said in one of our programs that we do a terrible thing when we force people to work for survival.
So it's not the purpose of work. The motivation to do something good comes from the essence of the human being, which is goodness, truth, beauty, pure action. Not survival, not just to get money.
Sari: So, Richard, could you give an example of a genital society?
Richard: I was just thinking about the Brazilian beaches when you were saying that. But I also would think about maybe Louis XIV in France, this really building a huge palace at Versailles to
Sari: show the world, this kind of showing everybody how good, how beautiful we are.
Maybe this would be one example I could think of just off the top of my head. Right, exactly. But this is right. The noble, although in the past it was only a little group of people that would enjoy this kind of benefits.
Richard: And many times they brought beautiful development to society in spite of themselves because they built beautiful opera houses and museums.
And these beautiful structures we see all through Europe are built by these narcissistic genital phase nobles, right?
Sari: Yeah, so Dr. Kepes says that this is the difference between a pleasant and unpleasant sick individual. So they valorize leisure, which means that they put the feeling in the first place. And we can notice that the genital phase societies, they are more relaxed and less strict.
As you were speaking about the Brazilian society, it's less censured as well in that sense. In these societies, you start to see miniskirts, bikinis. Many of them have concerted the monarchy. For example, in Sweden.
Richard: Canada, in a way.
Sari: Canada, in a way, you're right. And they do not seek for wars because the anal societies, they want to make war. And I think that the hope of the world with the American elections is that the American society will control themselves better in these unconscious intentions of destruction and making the war.
This is the hope of the world. The genital faces, they valorize ours, as you were saying, the noble France, Italy, average, this face. Now imagine the mature face.
Richard: Ah, this would be beautiful to imagine.
Sari: Let's think about this. Where aesthetics is everywhere. And I think it's the most important thing to talk about, is the mature society. But at the same time, it's the most difficult, because it has never existed.
It would be, according to Dr. Koeppe's studies, a society without rigid institutions, because the institutions we have today, they're more based on censorship, which means avoiding consciousness. So we have the prisons to avoid the consciousness of the criminality that everybody has inside of them. We have the electrical chair to avoid consciousness. We have the mental hospitals where we try to hide the people that show this equilibrium and think that this way we are free.
So as in the individual the unconscious part dominates the person in the society the unconscious things are what dominate the society as well. In the mature phase there is the predominance of feeling and it's truly theological the middle ages were not really theological. And Dr. K.P. Even uses theopsychic.
Richard: Theopsychic, what a word that is.
Sari: When we would return to the psychological life through which we can have the true contact with God.
And in this society, the people abandon the fantasy They have about churches, philosophies, and institutions. And leaders. And about leaders too. Exactly. And I think this is happening already. We see that the spirituality is increasing, but more in the sense of internal aspects. So the mature society returns to the inner self to work. Not any kind of work, but work of originality and variety.
So other characteristics of the mature society would be things like conscious, innocence, affection, and finally, the true freedom people have been looking for millennia. Millennia.
Richard: For centuries. Because we would then be linked much more to this true theological part of ourselves, which would be the true spirituality inside and the true spirituality reflected outside in the churches, the institutions where we worship as well.
But it would be based on a true feeling, not being dependent on the church, but participating in the theological, spiritual development of our society.
Sari: And this might sound difficult to do. We consider the society today, but on the other hand ourselves, the human structure aspires all this. And in his latest book, the divine kingdom, on page five, Dr Keppe says we must not forget that our essential structure is formed in accordance with the paradise in which we lived.
Therefore it will be much easier than we think to rebuild this marvelous past that is engraved and functioning in all our DNA, which is constantly working towards its return. Some
Richard: philosophers have talked about knowledge and wisdom already existing inside the human being. Keppe agrees. Our problem lies in our refusal to act on this inner wisdom. And if we change that aspect, we will change society.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Talk to you next time.
