Richard Lloyd Jones: It's been justified and rationalized for centuries, and the arguments to support it vary from scientific to downright insane. Although universally condemned, subtle forms of it still crop up in all modern societies. Skin color, sex, what you put on your head or cover your face with are still fair game for prejudice. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the roots of racism.
First of all, thanks to all of you for your notes to me about the program. It's always gratifying to hear from you, so don't hesitate to write me if you've got any comments, questions, or even suggestions for the show. Rich at richjonesvoice.com. And please pass along the suggestion to like-minded friends and family to check out Thinking with Somebody Else's Head as well.
The bigger community we create together, the more Norberto Keppe's profound but insufficiently recognized work will get out to more people. And this can only be a good thing. Well, we can look back at images from recent history, a short 50 years ago actually, and be staggered at the images of black people sitting at the back of the bus. Duke Ellington got so disgusted with not being able to stay at the hotel where he was playing, or even go in the front door, that he bought a Pullman rail car for his band to travel around in.
That way, he said, we travel just like the president. Billie Holiday's harrowing song about lynchings, Strange Fruit, which her generation witnessed with regularity, makes us shake our heads in shock and even dry our eyes in sorrow to this day. Because slavery, lynchings, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, these are so obviously wrong and have always been, to any person with even the most tenuous link to the true human essence.
Surely, there can be no debate about that anymore, except by someone so separated from human spirituality and love as to be certifiably insane. And yet, it continues, and not just in subtle forms, either, like being refused a job, as the horrible images and reports rising out of Rwanda and Bosnia showed us. How can this be possible? Well, I'm reminded of St. Augustine, who confessed after deep soul-searching that there was no difference in intention between the worst criminal and himself.
He only managed to control it where the other did not. What is it inside us in regards to racism that we don't understand well enough yet? That's the essence of Norberto Keppe's work and the subject of our radio program today. Gilbert Gambucci, an American musician and researcher joins me again. Gilbert, where do you want to step out from in this vast and important subject?
Gilbert Gambucci: So as a research scientist for Noberto Chepi for 20 some years, I can say that when he was a young man, he studied initially psychoanalysis in Vienna, which is the center of psychoanalysis in the world until today. And he studied with people who studied with the creator of psychoanalysis with Freud. And there's something interesting there. Because at the end of Freud's life, he began noticing that in the mental institutions, that the sickest people, the people who had the, let's say, the greatest degree of mental illness, were exactly the people who were the most envious of other people.
So he began to make this correlation between mental illness and envy. He himself, at the end of his life, he was not working with his sexual theories. He was working with envy. Now, let me
Richard: ask you a question about this here, because I'm sure you're going to make this connection between envy and why the problem of racism has never been solved. But before we come to that, let's describe envy.
What envy is, because
Gilbert: Keppe's language is completely different from what we normally see in society. We have a more scientific view about what is envy, because there's a confusion. Many times in the school, the students ask us, well, teacher, isn't there a good envy? Because they might admire somebody. They want this that the other has. And this is not envy. This can be even admiration, which is actually good if you want to emulate another person, what he has or what he does.
But envy wants to destroy the good that another has. And in fact, the person himself doesn't even want it. It's just a destructive attitude. And at the basis of envy, you can see that envy doesn't accept the being of the other person.
Richard: Let me use a couple of examples to describe this. Keppe talks about this a lot when kids are locked into this anal sadistic phase where one boy watches another boy playing with a toy and he walks over and takes away that kid's toy.
Not because he wants to play with it himself, but because he wants to destroy the enjoyment the other kid is having. Yes,
Gilbert: Rich, so under the racism social plane, what happens is we've been trying to deal with this socially and have made a certain degree of progress. In 1863, there was the Emancipation Proclamation during the time of President Abraham Lincoln, you know, freeing the slaves.
But immediately afterwards, there was what was called lynching. You know, a very sick thing began to take place where the Afro-Americans were suffering, being killed. And 100 years later, during the presidency of Kennedy, Martin Luther King organized an interracial protest march on Washington in relation to racial segregation to commemorate the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. And so it was a demonstration of 250,000 people, blacks and whites, and King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech.
And so what happens is that we can see that just dealing with it on a social level doesn't solve the
Richard: problem. Why has the problem never been solved? In all the centuries, this problem of racism has never been really addressed at the level that I know you want to address it today. What's going on here?
Gilbert: Because until today, we haven't perceived it as mental illness, because envy is the etiology of pathology.
It's at the root of mental illness. And so when a person doesn't accept the being of another, that's envy. And what happens is that we put envy into our work. Because nowadays we're all born with envy. All of us have it. And so there are some horrifying things that become legislation. For example, the House of Burghers statute. The Three-Fifths Compromise. These are laws dealing with how to treat slavery at the time.
So we can see that man's pathology. He puts it in what he does. We have a mix. Now, the question is this. If all of us are born with envy, if all of us have this, then, Rich, what's the difference between you and I and a person who's in the mental institution, for example?
Richard: This is a good question, and sometimes I wonder this myself.
Gilbert: Because if you go to a mental institution, you will find that the sickest people there are extremely envious of others. So the difference is that you and I, we still have some sense of ethics. Now, we don't allow our envy to dominate our lives. You know, we have it, and when we notice it, we control it. Now, some people, they don't control it.
When the envy comes up toward another person, they don't use their sense of ethics. They don't want to perceive that they need to control this. They give vent to it, and then this is a
Richard: problem. This is strange, Gilbert, or interesting, maybe, I should say, because the idea that people have about racism is that racism is because I think the person's inferior.
Not that I have envy of him, but that I think he's an inferior person. In some cases, it's been said that the person doesn't have a soul, which allows me to justify making him a slave or dominating him in some way, exploiting him completely. No,
Gilbert: we're only envious of superior people, superior things. Now, just to give one example, Nat King Cole, the great singer, he was loved throughout the world.
He was a hard worker and a very talented person, beautiful voice. But one time he suffered a persecution. On his front lawn, there was burned into his front lawn some derogatory words about him. And apparently this never, the grass never grew out. And Nat was very, he was very injured by this. And so here's a man, I think he was living in Beverly Hills at the time, very successful Afro-American, internationally loved.
So why would people persecute him in this way? Can you perceive the envy involved? It's a sick mentality. So when this type of thing arises, the envious ones, they need to be treated as a sickness. You know, people who give full vent to this need to be hospitalized and treated for the mental illness that it is in reality.
Richard: Gilbert, we have some listeners from the former Yugoslavia who would almost certainly want us to address ethnic cleansing, which was a particularly horrible aspect of that and many modern.
Civil Wars. And here we can see more evidence, I think, of this envy and even censorship that Keppe talks a lot about, that you've been talking a lot about in this podcast. What's going on when one group wants to cleanse, in quotes, its environment of the presence of the other group? Well, in Keppe's work, we can find an explanation for this. The attempt to eliminate the consciousness that the other group brings.
Just as Hitler, who was part Jew, was trying to cleanse whatever he didn't like about that inside him by projecting it out to the greater Jewish community. So Serbs and Croatians, Tutsis and Hutus, etc., are trying to rid themselves of something inside that they don't see inside themselves, but see instead reflected in the outside world, in the other group. As Keppe says in his wonderful book, Universe of the Spirits, he says, the human being in general doesn't condemn the evil the other person does, but the consciousness that it brings him.
This is the essential difference between our psychoanalytical process and that of other schools of psychology. We try to do everything we can to help the person conscientize how his attitude is similar to all the evil tendencies exhibited by humanity as a whole. While the laws of society have been set up to stifle any perception whatsoever of any evil that arises from the individual and society, end of quote.
So we want to see the problem outside and not inside ourselves. And if we can begin to see what's going on inside, we have much less of this projective attitude towards others. And this is directly linked with envy, isn't
Gilbert: it? Inside of each one of us, it's this question of envy. And in fact, Saint Basilico, he was an Italian theologian from the Middle Ages, the 4th century, at the beginning of the Christian church.
He affirmed that envy was the original sin. And it's very interesting how later now the serious psychoanalysts are working with this. They're perceiving that it's the, what we say, the etiology, the root of human pathology. You know, it's at the basis. And we can notice that racism, it stems directly from envy of another person. Okay, so this comes from each one of us.
We have to deal with this in our inner life. Because what is society, after all? It's a structure that comes from many individuals. And so, if the individuals, for example, are corrupt, then the social structure will be corrupt. It's exactly like this. If the individuals are envious, then there are going to be laws that are envious, and a structure, a segregation, and all of this.
So it comes from each one of us. Now, each one of us has envy, so the question becomes how to identify our own envy so that we can control it, so that we can live in peace and with tolerance with one another. From
Richard: Keppe's book, The Origin of Illness, where he explores envy, censorship, and projection at length. He says this, which relates very much, Gilbert, to what we're saying.
He said, it's interesting how we generally reject the good we receive, giving any shabby excuse we can find to demean it. Now think about this in terms of the black and white problem in America, which exists in other countries too, but we see it prominently there. America was trying to create what? Was trying to create a pluralistic society for the first time on earth, where everybody had the same rights, the same opportunities.
But this is a really, really, really, really, really good thing for all of humanity. Why would we accept this good thing if we're full of envy? So we can see maybe that this is the rejection of something really good and then creating any shabby excuse we can to demean it. Oh, well, these black people are less than me, or we need to have slavery installed because we can make more money with that.
Nobody is equal. Everywhere in life we have differences between strong and weak. All these crazy excuses to hide the fact that we're rejecting something that was really good, really beautiful. Yes,
Gilbert: Rich, the French thinker, Rochefoucauld, he affirmed that it's more difficult to accept success, to accept goodness, happiness, than to accept evil. It's more difficult. And you can notice this. And so, for example, Rich, what is the type of American, for example, American music that is typically American?
Richard: Jazz music, blues music.
Gilbert: That the whole world loves. And where does that come from? It comes from the black community directly. Do you perceive the envy that is involved in the question of racism? The
Richard: goodness of the people is being rejected, not the perceived insuperiority, but the superiority is
Gilbert: being rejected. You know, for example, you can pretend that another person or race is inferior to you, but for example, in the days of plantation slavery, after the Emancipation Proclamation and many of these plantation owners lost their slaves, what happened?
They went out of business. They were no longer wealthy men. They no longer had the wonderful lifestyle that they had. So who was superior here, actually? Who did the work? Who was able to make
Richard: the plantations go? So here we see an inversion in the society, Gilbert, that's very interesting to talk about, is that we give value to the person who has the money, not to the person who does the work.
And this is true in big corporations, too. What would a big corporation be without all the little people who earn 300 times less than the top executives of the company? What would the company be without them?
Gilbert: Yes, Rich, they're always passing us the idea that we need them. But they need us. Otherwise, nothing would happen. You know, it's not the capital that commands.
It's the work that commands. First there's work, then there's capital. But they're all the time trying to pass the opposite idea to us, that the capital is important, the money, that they are important. But they without we working are nothing, absolutely nothing. And we working without them, we don't need them. We working would generate our own capital. So it's they who are inferior, they need us.
And the slaves were envied by the slave owners because of their ability to work, because of their ability to produce. Yes, and the slave owners were useless in this sense. They didn't know how to work. They're very cunning, they know how to connive, they know how to exploit, but to produce they don't know how to do it. So they take people of value to work for them.
It's the same in capitalism today, it's the same thing. They look for people of value to make them wealthy, to give them a good life, and then they envy us and attack us at the same time. You can notice this from the psychological standpoint, this happens in practice.
And you know, Martin Luther King, he gave us a very good advice. He said, now look, be careful because black superiority is as dangerous as white superiority. And he was a brilliant man. So if you analyze this, what is he saying? Look, don't fall into the same type of envy of another race. Now don't cultivate this envy of another race or another person, you have to do the opposite.
You have to hold that back. You know, you have to consciously hold that back and act in a sane manner, not in an insane manner. Envy is insane. Envy is mental illness. We know this now. So we have to control that.
Richard: In Canada, we have a big problem between, I don't know how big a problem it is now, I've been out of the country for six years, but certainly it's been a problem over many years, between the French Canadians and the English-speaking Canadians.
And I feel somewhat similar in this regard, that the French culture brings to Canada fantastic things. There is a real artistic, creative impulse that comes from French Canada that is, I think, envied by the English Canadians. Now, there's lots of problems. There have been lots of political difficulties. I'm not saying it's as simple as that. But there is beauty within the French Canadian culture in Canada.
There's tremendous stability organization from the English side of Canada, and these two sides cannot live together, or they have great difficulties to live together. And it's very much a part of this rejection of what's good in the other person, not what's bad. But all the polemic that happens is around what's bad, how we've been treated badly. But I'm thinking now that maybe it's more the rejection of what's good.
Yes,
Gilbert: because rich French civilization was the apogee of culture in recent times. And so they went there in Canada, so they are suffering a certain envy.
Richard: Very interesting. Keppe says here, he said, Psychoanalysts have a very difficult time because they must deal with the enmity of their patients, of their colleagues in other medical professions who treat patients organically with medication, and of society itself, which justifies its feelings of envy any way it can.
So we have an enormous justification of slavery, of ethnic cleansing, of the final solution. In Germany, we have tremendous justifications of those things to hide the envy behind them. Is there any more that you can
Gilbert: say about this? Rich, you know, we've gone as far as we can socially on the subject. You know, there have been great men who have really addressed the question, put things into law, such as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Gandhi.
All kinds of people have addressed this. Now what we are lacking is awareness of the psychological aspect. Which is the the source of where racism comes from. And so now we have this science that can identify this, so now finally we can get to the root of the problem. There's just one point here, rich, that I would like to try to clarify, and that is our society. It's not exactly only a conglomerate of many individuals. Normally it would be that, but also we have an aspect that aggravates the society.
It's the pathology of power. You know, the sickest individuals get into positions of power. Not necessarily the politicians, but this economic power who control the politicians. And many times they are one and the same thing, but they aggravate the society. So in fact, our social structure is actually sicker than we are individually. So we have to deal with that. And they inflame the question of racism, you know, because divide and conquer.
So they want us to, they actually inflame the envy that a person can have toward another, and they want to keep us fighting with each other so that we don't perceive what is the real fight, that we are being controlled, we are conquered by a hidden powerful group. We call them the economically powerful. They are our problem.
So they keep us fighting against each other, black and white and oriental, so that we don't perceive what is the real problem. So now what I find really hopeful, Rich, in practical terms, is that with Keppe's work, we have consciousness of this. We know that amongst the people, we are not enemies with each other. We know who the enemy is now. So now we have the means to get to the promised land, this place that everyone is after, but we haven't reached it yet.
We've got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop, and I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you.
But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.
Richard: Oh, the truth can still give you goosebumps, can't it? A big contrast, too, between the ideas of Norberto Keppe, the words of Martin Luther King, and what passes for policy with our leaders today. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Talk to you next week.
