Richard Lloyd Jones: As a few at the top have been raking in the dough in America, the rest of us have been struggling. Officially low-wage families are increasing in number significantly. While the 100% at the top end is springing for $175 gold-dusted hamburgers at the Wall Street Burger Shop, the rest of us just feel squeezed. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, popping the positive thinking bubble.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Yes, we're coming at this positive thinking thing again. I'm not sure totally why sometimes, but I feel strongly that there is something in our culture of positive thinking that has led us astray. And I think that's been borne out when we just look around at the society we've created. We have children who've been part of the uber-stroked orientation in society, heading into the workforce now, and completely incapable of coping with criticism.
We have up-in-the-clouds investment experts who demanded only positive financial analysis and perspectives, and thereby stayed blind to the dangerously inflated investment instruments that were poised to collapse all around our ears. We have U.S. Fed and Treasury experts being blindsided by the greed and selfishness on Wall Street that they didn't want to see. And I feel strongly that Norberto Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy allows us to understand how all this could happen by putting us in touch with the roots of our human psychopathology that leads to all this.
And that our dogma of positive thinking blocks us from seeing. So I'd like to explore this a little more today with my colleague, Susan Berkley. And just before we get underway, a reminder about our World Psychosocial Forum coming up in Brazil, May 13th to 15th, 2010. Love to have you join us here for that. Be good to let you know more about this intriguing forum.
Rich at richjonesvoice.com is my email, and I'll make sure you're completely up to speed. And one more thing. I've been doing a lot of work with my good friend and Thinking with Somebody Else's Head supporter, Will Lajeunesse, on our Healing Through Consciousness site. This is a site that I've developed for another radio program and podcast I do with Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco.
And on this site, we've included a lot of really interesting articles and audio excerpts for you to understand a little bit more about Norberto Keppe's work. So feel free to check that out.
Let me know what you think too, okay? Rich at RichJonesVoice.com. Now let's try and pop the positive thinking bubble. You know, Susan, this book that you're going to quote from in a minute, Origin of Illness, is one of my favorites.
And I think it's really an amazing book from Dr. Keppe because it talks in really practical, therapeutic, psychological terms about what it means to see problems, the importance of seeing problems. And in our last podcast, we were talking about the negative aspects of positive thinking, which we want to try and cover a bit more today. And I think this book is a really interesting primer for this subject.
So begin there.
Susan Berkley: Well, sure, Rich. You know, a lot of people, this, Keppe brings the answer to the question that a lot of people have, which is, well, if we don't think positively, what is there? What's left? If I look at my problems, how am I going to get out of bed in the morning? So Keppe says in his book, The Origin of Illness, which by the way is translated into English and available through any major bookseller anywhere in the world.
Chapter 10 on page 35, he says that a lack of awareness and envy are practically one and the same, removing the individual from reality. Similarly, consciousness and reality are also the same, acting as a break against envy. So before people tune out and go, what? What the heck are you guys talking about? Let's see if we can give some practical examples so people understand this.
Human beings have a fundamental problem, which you've talked about over and over in these podcasts, Rich, which is that of envy, which, as Keppe defines it, is an unconscious urge to detonate, to destroy all the goodness around us. And it's in ourselves and in the world around us. Personally, I don't think that there's a person listening to this program that would not admit that they have sabotaged themselves in their life.
Everybody can admit that and give lots and lots of examples. Some of those acts of self um sabotage seem are like very flagrant, others are minor, you know, from like locking your keys in the car. And then I'm sure many many people have examples that are that are even worse in their lives. So people can admit that this is a problem in their life and it's often mysterious.
Keppe says it's caused by envy. Then if you look in the world around us, you'll see also that we as a race are destroying our planet. So Keppe's science brings answers to why this happens, Rich. And I think that this fundamental consciousness, this awareness of this problem is key for us to be able to recuperate not just ourselves, but this world, which is so needy right now.
Richard: Keppe's work in this of envy is that actually human beings are not always with good intentions, that there's a part of us that we don't see very well that has a negative intention. We're not always moving in a beautiful direction forward wanting results. We have many more problems than we like to admit. This is not very well understood, is it?
Susan: It isn't understood.
And we make a fundamental confusion is which which is we think that seeing a problem is having the problem. And one of the first things that anybody who comes into this work learns that no, that's the start of healing. And in fact if you're starting to see it's because you're doing something good, you're in goodness. Goodness is our natural state and it is the light that allows us to get a real honest view of reality so that we can operate like with a map, with GPS in our lives, you know, like an internal guidance system.
So
Richard: if we think about this idea of positive thinking then, Susan, what's the basis of this?
Susan: The whole movement started in the mid-19th century with Mary Baker Eddy and Christian science, I believe, according to Barbara Ehrenreich, And then developed and grew into the 20th century and became what they called New Thought. And then we had Norman Vincent Peale, who a lot of people remember his name because he died, I think, in the 1970s.
And he was very, he wrote a book, I think, which was called The Power of Positive Thinking. And so we're not saying that it's a bad thing. It's actually a good thing to be positive. We all want to be optimistic, but it has taken on this bizarre, totally out of proportion. It's become this thing that's been completely out of control and has led to a lot of problems in our society, Rich, in our economy, with young people, in business, many, many areas we can discuss.
Richard: I think it was Norman Vincent Peale who said the 20th century illness is the inferiority complex. So he had this idea that our problem is that we're thinking really badly about ourselves. And I see how this is really manifested in economics and politics in North America, Susan, with the election of Ronald Reagan back in the late 70s, where he was elected on a platform of sort of forgetting about the self-recrimination of Vietnam and getting America back to feeling good about itself again.
And by this he meant embarking on a really nefarious economic system based on speculation, based on illusion, based on something that doesn't really exist. And so the roots of this idea of self-recrimination, the bad part of self-recrimination, and it's bad to see your mistakes, you've got to be positive all the time, the negative side of this is very, very strong. It leads us into a total alienation from what's really going on.
Susan: And we see the results. We certainly cannot say that the psychological health of the average person has been improving. The rates of depression and anxiety are higher than ever, aren't they, Rich? And stress-related illness. With all of the psychology and with all of the medication, you would think that there would be some movement toward improvement. It's not. It's gotten worse, except the results that we're getting out of Keppe's Institute, which are consistently positive and no medication is used whatsoever.
So that's why I've been studying this work for 25 years. That's why I align myself with this, because it works.
Richard: And the whole basis of this work is to see the mistakes that you're making, because if we are in our essence good, beautiful and true, then anything that deviates from that is something that we need to see and consider. And the moment we start to consider the problem, to see the problem, to become conscious of what we're doing, we immediately start to return back to the true essence that we have.
So it's very positive, although we're so accustomed to seeing mistakes as a bad thing that we think it's a negative approach. And you guys are going through, as the whole world is, this enormous economic bubble that's bursting. And we can see that this sort of delusional aspect that we can do anything we want. That we're gods, that, you know, we can make as much money as we want without doing anything except having little micro-trades through our computer software systems every time the currency fluctuates .001%, where, you know, all of this kind of stuff is like really contributing to a fantasy economy that we live in.
We're not based on the basics of production anymore, and this is really evident in North America, isn't it? It
Susan: sure is. And you would think that after the big shakeup last year, people would have gotten some sense into them, but they're not. On the way to the studio this morning to record this interview, I just heard on the radio that speculation is even crazier than ever because money is so cheap and that anybody can make money in the stock market.
Now. You see the rate going up and up and up these days, these last weeks. But this problem has led to an issue, a kind of a new disease, which we can call bubblitis, where positive thinking means that subordinates were bringing only good news rather than honest reports to CEOs who have been living in their wealth bubble. And, you know, when you get somebody who is making something like 300 times more than the average worker, these CEOs at the head of these financial institutions, you know, I don't think that we really can conceive of what kind of a wealth bubble these people live in.
And we're living in.
And actually there are banking experts, very few of them, who were warning of something called hedge fund disease. You know, a guy in in Aaron Reich's book named Steve Geisman, who said that it's something so serious, it used to be suffered by kings and dictators who were living in their bubbles. And it's characterized by symptoms of megalomania, narcissism, and extreme egocentrism. If you're worth $500 million, how could you be wrong about anything?
You start to think that you couldn't make anything happen whatsoever.
Richard: Yeah, this is really great what you're talking about here, Susan, because you know, we're seeing that the impact of psychopathology in the affairs, the dealings of human beings is very, very prominent. And Keppe's work is all about this. They've done tests on overconfidence. You know, there've been lots of testing on this since the 80s.
So actually since the 70s, they've been doing testing on people who exhibit overconfidence in their judgments. And it's been observed in many professional fields, including clinical psychologists, physicians, engineers, entrepreneurs, sometimes negotiators, managers and especially investment bankers, that they start to believe that they have this um like this this insight like a god that nobody else has. And you
Susan: know where else it's been perceived in criminals.
And so then we have people like birdie madoff, but he is uh birdie madoff of course who was the biggest scammer in history, you know, did the biggest Ponzi scheme and lost billions and billions of dollars for people who were invested in his schemes. He's in jail now, of course. But so this mentality of this extreme megalomania, you find it in criminals, in jail, and they've done studies And it has spread out into Wall Street and into these investors, these billionaires.
So I think what is really also so worrisome, you know, as a North American, these are the people that we admire. You know, you watch any of the reality TV shows. It's just there's an undercurrent that everybody wants to be. And we say filthy rich. Everybody wants to be like that. This is an example of inversion. I mean, we've gone of Keppe's concept of inversion, which we talk about a lot on these podcasts.
So I think all of us need to really think about this.
Richard: How we give a lot of value to getting something for nothing. How can I get ahead by doing as little as possible, do more with less? How can I take advantage of the situation? I was watching a news report on 60 Minutes recently about the mortgage crisis. The next mortgage crisis that's looming, starting in South Florida, and they were interviewing a guy who used to be a real estate broker, but there's so many apartments and homes on the market now because people are foreclosing because their mortgages are falling apart, that he's decided to set up another business, which is to move people out of their homes.
So he's got a business where he's going in, and when the people vacate the house, he takes the furniture out and sort of stores it on the side of the road. And he's calling his company Vulture Enterprises. We've lost our moral ground in a way, haven't we?
Susan: We have, and you know what's especially worrisome, Rich, is the impact this is having on the workforce and on younger people.
So I'm a business owner and I employ, I have a small business, but we have a recording studio here and we hire teams of freelance audio engineers. These are young people that we're looking for to bring on board, people with recording experience or who enjoy working in the studio. And it's almost impossible for me to find a person to work that has any kind of, I wonder what you call it, like work ethic at all.
They don't show up. You give them any kind of criticism mildly or even, you know, balanced critique. They want to see it. They disappear. Not to mention they don't pass drug and alcohol tests. They they are the most praised generation and I mean I didn't make that term up, but a lot of people are talking about this because people now who are in their 20s and their teens, their 20s in their early 30s, grew up during a time where you never said anything negative to a child.
You shouldn't frustrate a child, you shouldn't remind them of any shortcomings, just positive, build their self-esteem. And you were mentioning earlier about this problem of, you know, extreme megalomania and egocentrism, that this elevated self-esteem can lead to all kinds of problems in life. And I'm seeing it in the young people that I'm trying to hire. When somebody walks in the door now for a position and they're over 40, I go, oh my goodness, fantastic.
This This person, I have hope here that this person could work out.
Richard: It's so incredible, this thing of stroking people too much. This article from the New York Times I was telling you about before our interview, The Most Praised Generation Goes to Work. I think it's the New York Times, by Jeffrey Zaslow. He calls them uber-stroked kids. And this culture of praise is really causing a lot of problems.
Dr. Keppe was saying in our group analysis session last night that the person who thinks he's super capable, has super ability, is usually the person who doesn't do much in life, doesn't accomplish much. It's the person who really thinks I got a lot to learn and I'm not really as good as I could be. This is the person that often accomplishes a lot more, not because they're insecure, but because they're more realistic, they're more linked to reality.
And so what they're finding in these corporations now, Where did I read it? Lands End and Bank of America are hiring consultants to teach managers how to complement employees using email prize packages and public displays of appreciation because of this desire from this generation that's been uber-stroked coming up who can't accept any criticism. Uh scooter store inc, which is a power wheelchair and scooter firm in texas, has a staff celebrations assistant whose job it is to throw confetti, susan, 25 pounds a week at employees.
Susan: I'm not surprised at all, it's I mean it's just a joke, it's a total joke. Uh and and so anybody so what happens now is business owners and people don't know how to manage, I mean and you have I have to learn that. I had to learn what qualities to look for in people. You can't overpraise people. You have to be balanced in your criticism and all of that.
And I think that if this country is going to recover, if we're going to grow, we have to take a serious, serious look at how we've been led astray by pop psychology in this. There's Martin Seligman, who was the president of the American Psychological Association, actually has something which he calls the positive psychology. He started this whole area called positive psychology, and he publishes the Journal of Happiness, which studies the linking of optimism and happiness to every desirable outcome, including health and career success.
And he says that happiness derives from six virtues, wisdom and knowledge, courage, love, humanity, justice, temperance, spirituality and transcendence, and you should make every effort to be positive and happy because the consequences include poor health and lower achievement. So it's like this again, psychology isn't furnishing except for Keppe's work the solutions for people who want to live a better life. In
Richard: fact what's happening susan is these young people who are coming up in this kind of environment, they're they're what they're finding in studies that are being done is that these young adults are more self-centered.
They're much more narcissistic than before. The average college student In 2006 was 30% more narcissistic than the average student in 1982. So what we find happening here is that this narcissism, this self-centeredness, this human psychopathology is taking over in our society in a very, very unhealthy way. And unless we start to address that, we're going to lead ourselves even further and further down this road of delirium and what would you call it, bubblitis that we're into.
And so we really seriously need to address the fact that the human being is has problems and needs to begin to see those problems. And,
Susan: you know, I want to, the intent of positive thinking is a good one, but kind of misses the mark a little bit, Rich, because what we really need to focus on is that we can't permit unethical thoughts stemming from envy and projection to overtake our mind, you know?
And why is that? The reason is because they're not aesthetic and they lead to disease as a result. So, when we say aesthetics, what do we mean? Well, Dr. Keppe defines aesthetics as inner equilibrium. So, if we allow, if we become conscious, for example, that we have a hateful thought or an angry thought towards someone, and we nurture that thought, and we don't attempt to figure out why we have that thought, but we just let it run rampant and free, we suffer.
And interestingly enough, as Dr. Keppe has discovered, the reason that we suffer is because those thoughts are not part of our nature and they actually do violence to it because our essence is harmonic. We have a harmonic basis. We have an aesthetic, well-balanced basis deep inside ourselves. Of course, as human beings, we're far from that. So when the positive thinkers come and they say you know cut the norman vincent peel for example cut out all negative thoughts in a sense he's right but he needs to take it further which is to find out why we have those thoughts in the first place because certainly they will cause us harm.
But it's like fighting um a never-ending battle to just like just kind of stamp them out and stamp them out and stamp them out. It's like trying to get rid of ants, you know. If you have an infestation of ants, you stamp out a few of them, or they're going to keep coming and keep coming until we really, really find the source of them.
And we need to understand the difference between a negative thought and an unethical thought, Rich. And I
Richard: was thinking as you're speaking, Susan, that Dr. Keppe has talked about this a lot, that our purpose is not to change people, but to conscientize other people. That's his purpose in analysis. So when we're dealing with this thing of negative thoughts, our sort of objective is not to override the negative thought.
We need to control that and not just express it willy-nilly, but it's to really see how we are. If I'm having a lot of negative thoughts of jealousy, of anger, of frustration, of impatience, I need to pay attention to that. I can't just sort of gloss over that and say that I don't have that anymore. It's really important to go into this a little bit, to feel those feelings and really see how I am.
I am a jealous person. I need to perceive that. And that's not very comfortable for us. So that's why we're trying to gloss over it so quickly. We're trying to leapfrog over it and get back to the good feelings. And this misses the point that we need to see how we are, not just jump over it and try to change it so quickly.
And
Susan: you know, the point here also, Rich, is that one of the main causes of diseases is a lack of ethics. And people don't think about this. They think that disease comes from bacteria. It comes from, you know, outside sources. But really, the psychosomatic medicine that's being developed down in Brazil at Dr. Kepes Institute shows that perhaps the primary source of disease is a lack of ethics.
And meaning that if we're not good, if we're not honest, if in the sense of trying to see how we really are and do right, if we want to avoid work, if we want to avoid loving and caring for other people, we will suffer. We will become ill. It's a fact of life. Why? Not because we're being punished in some way, but because it goes against our structure, which is good, beautiful, truthful, harmonic.
And so when we act against that, it's like we're we're doing violence to ourselves, and the body will react with stress, and stress, of course, leads to disease. So the positive thinkers, in a way, are kind of on the right track, but they don't go deep enough. They don't discern a difference between what's positive and what's ethical. As
Richard: Dr. Keppe has said in his metaphysics, that action is the basis of wisdom, not thinking.
And ethics is linked to action. We take action, and then we get wisdom, then we understand. It's not based on our thinking, it's based on what we do. And ethics is very much based on what we do. So what you're talking about now has a really important metaphysical point to make, that we are what we do. And so acting ethically, this is what brings us the wisdom, this is what brings us the health, the equilibrium that you're talking about.
It's very important.
Susan: And it's very exciting to think that we can actually heal ourselves through good action. That good action can actually heal damage in our inner life, heal a flawed ethical structure, which we all have in our society these days, by the way. Nobody escapes from that. But good action and the correct use of our will to do good has a healing benefit.
And that's what's so exciting. So it's not merely thinking positive, but it's thinking ethically and acting accordingly. And that is, I think, very, very exciting for the medicine of the future.
Richard: And let's deal with this fact too, Susan. We have this idea that looking at this horrible feeling that I have, this horrible jealousy or whatever is going on inside, it's such a horrible thing to see that, you know, who wants to go there?
And it's very important for us all to realize that Dr. Keppe is saying that consciousness, We are consciousness. Consciousness is always good. Even consciousness of evil is good. So good action includes being conscious of the bad things that we're thinking or the bad feelings that we're having. This is a positive. This is a good action for us to do this, not a negative thing at all.
Susan: So action isn't just like we Americans think to go out and do something. Action is also an inner attitude, Rich, like you're saying, an attitude of trying to become more and more aware in a deeper way of how out of alignment we are with goodness, truth, and beauty. And if we're feeling uncomfortable, it's a sign that our thoughts are based on something incorrect, such as envy or projection, because good thinking always brings good feelings.
Even if we are, like you say, conscientizing a serious mistake.
Richard: We've all had that feeling when we conscientize something that we did wrong and we really admit it. We have a big relief. We feel this big relief. There is something. And we feel when other people do this, too. If we feel somebody is like holding a secret, something they're not saying, when they finally come out and say it, it's like a relief in the air.
And so the consciousness, consciousness is always our friend, never our enemy. It's never attacking us. It's always good. Even to see, even to have consciousness of things that are wrong. This is very, very positive for us and very necessary.
Susan: And we might feel when we do this, and trust me, we don't do this enough or a lot. When we do this sincerely and with our hearts, we're humbled and we feel like two feet tall.
And that goes against a lot of what we're taught these days, you know, about self-esteem and things like that. But in a sense, like you say, the end result is always great relief, relaxation of stress. Humility, I think, always brings health. Keppe says in The Origin of Illness that our unwillingness to accept seeing our own problems is a way of preserving the pleasure of envy, even though this attitude causes us great harm.
Sanity does not result from consciousness, but rather consciousness is sanity. Just as only a person with good eyesight can see imperfections, illness is not a consequence of alienation, but a denial of the desire to see.
Richard: I'm reminded of Keppe's work that what's wrong increases in strength if it's not admitted. We do great damage to ourselves by not wanting to see, especially to see our mistakes.
Much good stuff here in Keppe's work. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Talk to you next time.
