Richard Lloyd Jones: It's finally official. Global warming is unequivocal, and it's very likely we human beings are the cause. Al Gore's documentary hammers home the same point. The uncertainty is gone. The evidence is crystal clear for most. We have a serious problem looming directly in front of us. But in all the stats and graphs and scientific pronouncements, one thing eludes us. What do we do about it?
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we're going to explore the root causes of our destruction of the world. An update first. We've been sending out Dr. Keppe's Liberation of the People all over the place, from Europe to Asia and, of course, North America. And I've decided to extend the offer, because I think Keppe's work in this book is vitally important in helping the greatest number of people possible to become conscious of the reasons why our human society is so messed up.
Why it's so far from what it could be.
A listener from Norway wrote me recently that after listening to the podcast, he couldn't help wondering what the world could look like. It's impossible to overemphasize what Keppe is doing here, giving us the final understanding of the human psyche, which is where all our problems originate. And providing a thorough philosophical, theological, and scientific underpinning for us to finally begin to get a handle on our true place in the universe and how and why we've strayed so far from it.
So write me, rich at richjonesvoice.com, if you'd like a free copy of Keppe's Liberation of the People, the Pathology of Power. You know, I've been watching An Inconvenient Truth recently, Al Gore's Academy Award-winning documentary, and I continue to be impressed with the way the scientific evidence has been presented in this most excellent documentary. It's extremely well done and scary. And I wanted to add my voice to the discussion because I think one point has not been completely understood, namely the cause of human destruction.
That's something that has been known since the late 70s, but very nefariously kept out of the mainstream discussions around the world. Let's address that now. Cesar Soós is with me today, and I wanted him here because of his intensive study into Keppe's scientific view. Cesar, at the end of Gore's documentary, there is an impressive list of things we can do to help stop global warming.
Why is this list incomplete in your view?
Cesar Soós: First point that I have here, Richard, is that the movie does not address the real cause. Al Gore is very good at pointing the problem itself, but not at giving solutions. Because everybody knows that if you start not to throw any more plastic on the streets or things like this, you will not solve the problem.
The problem is much, much bigger than that. We must address the psychopathology of the human being, the unconscious will the human beings have to destroy things. We had a pact with our social life, with our institutions, and allow them to do that to the planet. And now we have to face this problem and we are desperate, but we caused it. We are the problem, and the solution must be found on us.
Reminds me
Richard: of the old Pogo cartoon from the 50s, maybe. We have seen the enemy, and he is us. I completely agree with you, Cesar, and I think this goes to the heart of our message in this podcast. That we have the society and the environmental situations we have because of our desire to have them, albeit, probably in most cases, an unconscious desire.
Take us a little deeper into this, if you would.
Cesar: Our economic system is designed to provide human beings everything they want. They have the idea that if you have everything you want, then you are rich, then you are fulfilled. But nobody cares about what kind of wanting you have. It's exactly the same as if you take some parents who try to educate their children and give to their children everything the children want.
If you keep doing that, you are growing spoiled children and who knows monsters for society. And our economic system, not dealing with our pathological will, we probably are creating a destructive system.
Richard: Our pathological will, you're talking about here, Cesar, is something that Keppe is almost alone in singling out as an enormous problem. Where Freud saw our unconscious as an instance, as something natural in the human being and full of indecent desires, bad intentions, and animal instincts.
Keppe sees that we have a will that's inverted and turned against what is good, beautiful, and truthful. That means that we have a desire to go against what's good, but we deny consciousness of that. We pretend we're not like that, and so we make ourselves unconscious of it. We inconscientize ourselves, to use Keppe's neologism. How is this inverted will causing us problems, Cesar?
Cesar: You may want many times what is not good for you. For example, Richard, if you have a problem and you do not want to face it, you will search for alienating things. Things that can give you the impression that you solved the problem, but without facing them, taking you out of the consciousness of your problems. Like, for example, going to drugs, going to alcohol, going to alienation in general.
Many movies that don't mean anything to you, that will not help you to do anything of good. So this is a pathological will. And our economic system provides that in abundance. It just cares that you have money to pay. We don't care about what kind of stuff you are looking for.
Richard: It makes no judgments about whether that's right or wrong. Exactly. This lack of ethical concern by the market has its base, of course, in Adam Smith's economic philosophy.
Here's what Keppe writes about that. Adam Smith nourished the human being's megalomania to the utmost degree by fostering the idea that man is good. And therefore, if left to his own devices, he would not only not make mistakes, but he would spontaneously help his fellow man. This is precisely the opposite of what Trilogical Psychopathology shows us. Which is that the tendency of the individual is to exploit and trick his fellow man, and that it's necessary to conscientize him of this if he's to stop.
Indeed, under a system which allows the individual total freedom of action, the human being will automatically enslave his fellow man. Those are very strong words, I know, but the studies of psychopathology are leading us to exactly this place in our understanding of how human beings work. This is a type of megalomania that was identified by the early German psychiatrists as a primary factor in mental sickness.
And those findings have been considerably expanded in Keppe's work. What's the basis of Keppe's understanding here, Cesar?
Cesar: Man wants to control nature and not be controlled by it. You can summarize all the human problem in this. You want to dominate the universe. You want to dominate nature. You want to dominate biology, you want to dominate matter, you see, and by thinking like this, you have exactly the same attitude of the sickest individuals closed in mental institutions.
We present the same kind of pathology, but in different levels. There are many scientists, politicians, and very high-positioned individuals in power who think they can control our lives, who think they have control over the future. When a big problem like the environmental problem shows up, like today, they keep thinking, no, no, in the future when this problem is more critical, in the future we will have conditions to solve it.
We will find technologies, I'm sure we'll do it. So this is what we are doing, not only in terms of environment, but also in terms of food. We are manipulating genetically many vegetables, and we don't know what will be the consequences of that.
Richard: You know, a few weeks ago, Cesar and I sat down to talk about the nature of reality. What is reality?
What is our natural condition? Because I felt from the very beginning of my time here in Brazil, about five and a half years ago, that there's something basically wrong in man's approach to life. That we're inverted from reality, even that we're against it. Of course, these are ideas that we're exploring a lot in this podcast, but Cesar and I never finish that discussion, but I'm hoping we can soon, because I think the conversation about what reality is, in fact, is very interesting and important.
For now, Cesar, we can say something maybe about our view of reality and how it differs from what so much of science tries to tell us today. Give us an example of some who misinterpret reality a bit.
Cesar: For example, Richard, quantum physicists, they have an enormous difficulty to understand what we say, our criticisms against quantum physics, because of this, because they do not understand about psychopathology.
When you create a theory, you put in the theory not only the vision, the deep thoughts you have. But you put your pathology and a theory that says that you create your reality, of course, puts you in a pedestal like if you were a god. And it's not like that. We are submitted to universal laws and we must do and act according to the universal laws if we are to be happy.
Richard: So maybe this is striking close to the root of the problem, Cesar. Submission to the universal laws. Submission to being what we are. What we were created to be. Not what we want to be in our megalomaniac view of ourselves. Define this a bit more for us if you could.
Cesar: In the case of economy, we do not want to reduce the CO2 emission because this would cause enormous implications in our economic system.
Because we created the system. But we don't think the same way in terms of nature. Because we didn't create nature. So we put pesticides on the corn to prevent the insect to eat from the corn but we are destroying a much bigger system a much greater system inclusively that we live and we depend on it but why Richard? Because we are not the creators of this big system we are just creators of this economic and fragile system we live in.
This is a very clear example of how theomanic we are. We will do everything possible to save our creations, our Frankensteins, but not to save the creation itself. It seems that, psychologically speaking, we have the same problem as Adam and Eve, because we reject reality. We reject the paradise. And this is what we call theomania. We want to be gods. We have the psychological attitude of wanting to oppose reality.
That's why Dr. Keppe says that our unconscious actions go against ourselves, because our unconscious actions go against what is real, what is natural, what is the paradise. Now,
Richard: before you start thinking, well, wait a minute, Richard, if we're against reality, what hope do we have? Let me just inject a note of optimism here, okay? If we begin to see this root cause of our problems, if we begin to pay attention to see our inverted desires, our inverted wants, we can really, for the first time, begin to address the root cause of our human destruction.
When we address the roots of our pathological attitudes, we find that what is underneath our destruction is a basis of goodness, truth, and beauty that's always been there in us. But has been left aside, has been ignored by our inverted mania to focus on secondary things.
Because underneath our great human inversion and sickness is great health, great sanity. We know what's right, what's just, what's fair in social, political, economic structures, but we need to see the pathological part that is against this good, true, and beautiful essence that we have inside. I thought a comment from Dr. Cláudia Pacheco, the founder of the STOP the Destruction of the World Association, would provide a provocative and maybe instructive end to our podcast today.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: When Keppe speaks about what is good and bad, he places that bad or evil is the absence of goodness. So what exists is all good, beautiful, and truthful by itself. What exists by itself. Imagination of man the value we add the fantastic importance we add to things. This is fantasy. This is pathological. And I understand that the prophets and Jesus and the huge wise men that humanity knew in the past like Buddha like Gandhi they placed a value in what is really valuable.
But we are deceived by our own fantasies and the fantasies that is like this structural pseudo power in the world. When we understand the power that we give to presidents, to first ministers, to judges, this is a power we give them or we vote for sometimes for laws that are totally against ourselves. What is the value of this other than a pathological, false, pseudo-value?
If all of this falls down, what will be left? The true and real value and power, which is the real power, the power of nature, the power of God, the power of true values. And this you don't buy with money.
Richard: No, you don't. And so in the end, we have an even more challenging job to do than recycling and stopping our carbon gas emissions, although we certainly do need to do that.
We have to look deep inside the human soul and change much about how we see reality. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
