Richard Lloyd Jones: It's been the dominant force in the world for the past 70 years. Its impact has been enormous in every area, from economics to culture. But it's not the country it once was. And now, it's even become dangerous to itself and to the rest of us. Where have things gone so wrong in the land of the free and the home of the brave?
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head for the 4th of July, 2007. Let's take a look at the lost values of the United States. First of all, if you've been listening to this podcast regularly, you'll know I base the program on the work of an extraordinary Austrian-Brazilian scientist named Norberto Keppe. Keppe has unveiled the secrets of the human psyche like no one before him, and in the process put his finger on the root cause of our myriad problems on Earth and why we're not resolving them.
For example, everyone knows we should stop polluting, but we don't. Everyone desires peace and happiness, but they continue to be elusive. I used to lament about those very things and shake my head uncomprehendingly at the insane profit motives of transnational corporations and the ludicrous decisions by my political leaders until I became aware of Keppe's discoveries of inversion and envy. Basically, we human beings know what we should do, but we don't do it.
And this is a deep psychological condition that colors all areas of human endeavor. We live in an upside-down world where our values are upside-down too. Keppe's work is unlike anything else you'll find, and it's vital for as many as possible to become aware of it. To that end, I'm giving away copies of one of his books, Liberation of the People, the Pathology of Power.
You can just email me if you'd like a copy of this, rich at richjonesvoice.com. When Keppe was invited to New York City in the mid-80s, he'd already had an outstanding career in Brazil and Austria. His work in psychosomatic medicine was particularly impressive, but he was beginning to consider also the impact of the inversion he was discovering in the human psyche and how that played on the social structures in which we were forced to live.
He began to see a big decay in all aspects of life, particularly in the United States. He wrote and lectured extensively all around the country about that for a number of years, trying to help the American people wake up and reverse the downward spiral he had noticed the country was in. Although the people loved his work, his lectures were overflowing. His analysis appointment book was book-solid from early in the morning until 9 or 10 at night.
The power structure hated his work and commenced an enormous harassment and ideological persecution of his ideas and of Keppe himself. That's why it's been so difficult to encounter anything about him, something this podcast is trying to address, but I can reiterate his work is extremely important here in the 21st century. One of the people who was with Keppe in New York was Gilbert Gambucci, an artist and researcher into Keppe's work, especially into the pathology of power.
And Gilbert shares Keppe's deep affection for the ideals of the United States, which continues unabated in both of them, despite the attacks and persecution they suffered. Gilbert, give us an overview first. Where can we begin in considering the loss of American values? If
Gilbert Gambucci: we look at an overview of American civilization from its beginnings up until today, we can observe something that's happening in the whole of humanity.
Because after all, we're all human and we all have an innate psychological structure that knows automatically how to love, for example. We all know how to do what is good, how to recognize the truth or create what is beautiful. It's innate. We all have this. As humans we also have pathology which opposes these things. We can do what is truthful when we want.
We can do what is genuine either occasionally, most of the time, or never, depending upon the degree of pathology each one of us has. So rich, the problem throughout history has always been how can we control human pathology in order to allow the good, the truth, to flourish, and how can we devise a social structure that would facilitate that. This is where Keppe's science is vital for us because until the development of his work, we didn't even know very clearly what is pathological.
That is, what attitudes, what actions are against our sane human essence. For example, everyone wants liberty, freedom, and we devise political constitutions that try to protect this right to liberty. But liberty to do what? The freedom to exploit one's neighbor by law. The liberty to earn money in ways that jeopardize our fellow man. Without a clear perception of what is pathological, the more cunning, bad individuals find ways how they can vent their evil on society.
And the really clever ones manage to do so while masking themselves as benefactors of humanity. But now, because of Keppian science, it's possible to analyze with accuracy exactly why our society has been undergoing a certain very marked degree of decadence, especially in more recent times. We've lost sight of the altruistic American ideals that our founding fathers founded our nation on. Keppe says
Richard: in Liberation of the People, that book that both of us love so much, looking at the pathology of power, he said this is a great book.
In fact I'm giving away this book for many people around the world for free. It's a great, it's amazing because it's worth gold. Keppe said to me just give away as many as you need because he considers it an important book. He says on page 3, the very beginning of the book, I would say that all of our present day problems can be reduced to one, the way in which social and economic power is being used.
Boy, that's an incisive comment, isn't it?
Gilbert: Look at that, Rich. You know what Thomas Jefferson said in his writing? He was very concerned that the worst thing that exists is the self-seeking egoism of monarchs, clergymen, and the nobles. Of course, these were the powerful people of his day.
Richard: Today we would say the politicians, the lobbyists, the heads of corporations replacing those figures that Jefferson was talking about.
Gilbert: You know, one of our amazing founding fathers was Thomas Paine, and he was also very concerned that it's necessary to reduce authority, that is, the accumulation of power, to a minimum so as not to impede the liberty of others. So these guys had the idea that an accumulation of power impedes the liberty of the people. And they knew what they were talking about because they suffered the despotism of the King of England at that time.
In
Richard: fact, they wanted to create a constitution to try to be something for the people, not for the powerful.
Gilbert: Yes, exactly. Paine also was concerned that it's necessary to prevent a dominating class of any type from perpetually remaining in power. Of course, in his day, this was the noble class. But what class of people today, of powerful people, are perpetually there? What kind of families are there from generation to generation?
You know, today we suffer from an economic power.
Richard: This is very clear, Gilbert, because guys go from government to public corporations to private corporations, back to government. Paul Wolfowitz was the Assistant Secretary of Defense. Then he became president of the World Bank. Now he's going to be replaced. There he'll go to some corporation, sit on some as a board of directors in some big corporation.
These guys have influence not just in the public eye but behind the scenes. This is extraordinary too. Yes,
Gilbert: they never go away, they're always there. This is a perpetual class of of powerful people who remain there all the time. You know americans have a tendency to laugh at english people because they support their royal family. You know this is a perpetual royal family.
Generation after generation, Americans think that's just ridiculous, you know. But we have a perpetual class of people in our society who are much more dangerous than the royal family of England. This economic power, this little group of people who hide behind their secret sect societies and have their multinational corporations, that dominate our society.
Richard: And how do they dominate, Gilbert? Because these are not, well, sometimes the Rockefellers are like you see them as elected official senators and governors and things, but how are they dominating?
Because it's not in a direct way in terms of running the governmental policy directly. Where are they? Where's their field of influence today?
Gilbert: You know, if we look at something that Alexander Hamilton said, he shows us that it's a constant fight to avoid the predominance of imbalanced individuals. So these people who wield lots of power, they are not nice people. They're not there for our benefit.
They are imbalanced individuals. Our founding fathers were very aware of that because they suffered openly. Deputism of monarchs. Nowadays, the economically powerful people, they hide themselves. And they dominate from behind the scenes. In this sense, they're real cowards, but they're really vicious people. As in Montesquieu, Richard, what did he say? That absolute power corrupts.
Richard: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Yes.
Gilbert: And so we have just a slightly different view of that. That people who want power are already imbalanced people. And then when they get the power, they vent their pathology on the society. And then we see how sick they are.
Richard: Yeah, because they have a lot of freedom. If you're in power, you don't have the same restraints that a guy working at Walmart has, for example.
So when somebody's in power, their pathology, as you call it, comes out in much clearer ways. They can exercise their pathology much more.
Gilbert: Yes, exactly, Rich. As Thomas Paine warned us, it's necessary to impede the excessively greedy from exploiting the gullibility of the masses. They go there to do that and you know there's something psychological behind this. It's not just that they want to take all of the wealth of a nation to themselves, which they do, but behind that there's a very sick attitude of extreme envy.
They want to attack the civilization, they want to attack the happiness of the people, they want to attack our desire to pursue happiness, to have liberty, the right to life. Yeah, I
Richard: think this application you're making now of Dr. Keppe's psychological findings is really interesting, that envy is not just some term in a psychological treatise somewhere. It's an actual application in our social life, in our private lives, in our social lives.
And you
Gilbert: know, Rich, one of the means they have of attacking society is that they've taken control of the major medias. They've bought them literally and so they use the media to their interests and their interests are not in our interests. And it's incredible even thomas jefferson in his time he perceived something in relation to this. He said that schools and the public media must be free, that is not controlled by any interest other than their proposed function, in order to avoid the corruption and decadence of a nation.
So they perceived at that time that the media must be free. Otherwise, if ill-intentioned people control the media, then we, the people, we will gradually enter more and more into a decadence, into corruption, into the type of pathology that they have.
Richard: I think it's five or six companies now, Gilbert, that control the majority of media in the United States, both print and electronic media and also the film industry.
Gilbert: You know, our late president, John Kennedy, was very worried about this, Rich. And he was working on legislation to bring back the Federal Reserve banks into the hands of the government because U.S. Federal Reserve and the international banking system are privately owned. And this is one of the things he was making legislation on, correcting this situation. The finances of the United States government are in the hands of these international bankers.
Richard: Yeah, sure, because the government borrows money from a private bank.
Gilbert: I mean, this is absurd. The government should be controlling the money supply itself, not through a private bank. That's ridiculous. It's just one of the ways in which this, what we call economic power, dominates the American government. And, you know, people don't like to see this. In fact, there's a psychological phenomenon here, Rich, because people like to attack the, how is it called, the messenger of the bad news.
And in so doing, what that is, is they don't want consciousness of the problem. So they attack the person who brings up the problem. And the psychological phenomenon behind that is that the person wants the problem to continue. Doesn't want to see, doesn't want to deal with the problem. And Thomas Jefferson put it very eloquently, this phenomenon. He said, if you expect a nation to be ignorant and free, you expect what never was and never will be.
And so this question of our lost ideals, losing the ideals of these great men in place of economically powerful people, it's something that we have to deal
Richard: with. Gilbert, I want to try and take this away from just the powerful for a minute. Let's see if you can comment on this a little bit, because I think one of the real losses of American ideals that I've seen, I'm a Canadian, but I saw that it changed.
And maybe that movie Wall Street epitomized that, where Gordon Gekko said in that movie, greed is good. As long as I can put gas in my car, I don't want to know about those problems. This sense of me, me, me, the narcissism, the selfishness, which began maybe in the late 70s, early 80s, there seemed to me something was lost there in the spirit of the American people.
Do you have any thoughts about that?
Gilbert: You know, Rich, there are two distinct lines of thinking within American civilization. One is this altruistic philosophy of life that comes since the founding fathers, since the beginning, and perhaps Kennedy summed it up very well when he said ask not what your country can do for you but ask what you can do for your country.
And so you find many people who do this kind of work in benefit of the others. You know they do a service because they want to service you well and as a result you earn your keep that way. Then there's another line of thinking that is based just in getting money. This comes from, especially since the implementation of Adam Smith's ideas, where essentially it places all value in that which generates money.
And so you'll find the one line of altruistic philosophy of life. For example, we have people like Abraham Lincoln. We have people like Thomas Jefferson. John Kennedy, Martin Luther King These people who are very concerned about the public welfare On the other hand, we have a line of people who are just concerned about themselves How much can they extract from the society?
These are people who want to take everything they can. And in the process, destroy the civilization. And so we have these two lines of thinking going on within American society at the same time. The religious people call it the wheat and the chaff growing together. But you know Rich what I would like to ask you as a Canadian, because Canada is very linked to the United States but you guys are a little bit different, you know which do you think dominates today.
Richard: Well this is obvious that this I really started to notice this with the ascendance of Reagan as president who followed Friedman's economic ideas, supply side economics. We give benefits to the people who have the money. And I noticed a big difference in the American spirit because we had a prime minister in Canada who was very linked to Reagan at the time, Mulroney.
There was this trio of Thatcher in England, Mulroney in Canada, and Reagan in the United States. And they created this enormous pressure on making money, privatizing everything, everything being driven by this, exactly this spirit you were talking about or this anti-spirit maybe, everything for me. Where are the kennedys and the martin luther kings, where are the values of these people in the United States today.
We don't hear them. We can see it in a kind of a counterculture movement of michael moore's who are like really screaming out against the system but they don't have the solutions that Keppe has in terms of understanding the pathology of human beings. They're just kind of of muckrakers, you know, they want to like protest against the current way of thinking. And this is very good.
They're very helpful in that way, but they don't understand how to resolve this problem. Keppe's science helps us to, gives us some solutions.
Gilbert: This is a vital point, Rich. You know, there's a concept, actually, it's a type of people that are called the sleeping tiger. And these are people from the 60s, essentially, who were very anti-establishment. I thought it was just in the United States. But as I've lived in Europe for many years, I've noticed that it was a phenomenon that was taking place in Europe as well. Where people were very dissatisfied with what was going on in the society.
It was becoming more and more dominated by the economically powerful people, especially after the assassination of Kennedy. Then it just became an open door for them to take control of everything they possibly could. But what happened was these anti-establishment people didn't have a solution. And so what happened to these people? They became what we call the sleeping tiger. They're asleep. And so the question is, Rich, can this sleeping tiger be awakened?
Or has it died in his sleep? You know, we don't see this idealistic philosophy of life anymore in the United States. Just with some individuals, it's very rare. And, you know, did Martin Luther King Jr., did he exist? What was that? Or did he not? You know, he said there can be no great social gain without individual pain. Is there anybody who's willing to pay a price to improve?
Our situation, to take this bull by the horns and take a look at it, see what we can do. So do we want to compact ourselves with the ideal of king and our founding fathers and work for the benefit of humanity? Or do we want to make a compact with the economically powerful and just receive the drug money that they put into our country and live a materialistic life, decadent and without spiritual value?
Which do we choose?
Richard: It's an obvious choice, isn't it? And Keppe's Analytical Trilogy can help us change everything. We'll be discussing all this at our World Forum here in Brazil next March 2008. Hope you can join us. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
