Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Ask them about what's important to them, and they'll counter your enthusiasm with a shrug and a mumbled, I don't know. Somewhere between kiddom and adolescence, your child stops asking sweet, inquisitive questions and starts acting like everything you care about and they used to care about is now completely useless. I know, I'm dangerously close to sounding like every other person from the older generation here, lamenting the lost younger generation.
But I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that really, today, something is different with our teenagers. Maybe it's just a matter of degree. I was pretty obsessed with being cool in my teenage years as well. But we have to be open to the possibility that the decay we see in all areas of our planetary experience has spilled over into our young people.
And I don't mean just that difficult teenage time when rebelliousness seems a rite of passage. Of course, there are extraordinary and idealistic young people around, dedicated and talented. But there's a lot of decadence, too. Let's try to understand it better today. The tyranny of cool today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head is on the Stop Radio Network, our 24-7 radio station streaming through iTunes radio stations, and free to your smartphone or tablet through the free TuneIn app.
We have, I think it's safe to say, experience of decay in all areas of Western civil society. Sure, we have more entertainment options than when I was a kid, and we can annoy fellow public transport travelers by doing business before we even get to the office, but sometimes it's hard to see these as enormous cultural advantages.
When you see families out for dinner these days, there's not much family conversation going on. The kids are gaming or chatting, heads buried in phones and tablets. Maybe these kids know better what's going on with their Facebook friends than with their real families. In an extraordinary book he wrote in 2004, Dr. Keppe, shortly after moving to New York at the request of some influential psychoanalysts there, exposed all the decay of Western society.
The decay of the American people and the U.S. Went through it all. The decay of the economy, of industry, in agriculture, in sports, in philosophy, in politics, in education, and ethics and religion, no stones were left unturned. It was not welcomed by the powerful, who personify this exaggerated slogan, my country, right or wrong, under the illusion that speaking about problems is a no-no, that you have to accept corruption to show your love.
Keppe's idea to this day is that real love means helping those you love to see where they're going off the rails.
In his chapter on the decay in youth from this book, Keppe explores the growth of the idea that everything from the past was outmoded and antiquated. That rose up in the youth of the 50s and 60s, and how this attitude, taken to extremes, led the surging baby boomers to despise everything that came before.
Moving away from the virtues and value and work ethic that built the country in the first place. The classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. About five years ago, I sat down with Salma Genzani, one of the lead psychoanalysts at Norberto Keppe's Integral Psychoanalysis Clinic here in São Paulo. When we come back, we'll delve into this youth problem some more with her, the tyranny of cool, when Thinking with Somebody Else's Head returns in just a moment on the stop radio
network.
The sickest people want others to be the way they idealize them. Norberto Keppe disinverting the human being and society.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Any area of endeavor it's very much stopped by this concept of money, the importance of money. This is the biggest inversion in
Richard: society. In the mid-1980s Norberto Keppe wrote an extraordinary book that redefined economics and gave us hope.
And
Sofie Bergqvist: I understand now that this book, Working Capital, is really the solution. It gives people enormous freedom to grow and to do even things more beautiful and better for the community and better for everybody.
Richard: Working Capital is Norberto Keppe's provocative and prophetic view of how the economy has been usurped by the 1% who've tricked the people into a form of slavery. Now we have the means to set ourselves free.
We
Cláudia: are free in economy to work, to do what is good, beautiful, and truthful for humanity, and not to feed the envy, the megalomania, the theomania of a few individuals or powerful people.
Some governments already admit that life on earth will be extinct in a few years. This is not a certainty. The human being does destroy himself and destroy the world in which he lives. This is called inversion, and so far, it is unconscious. But if we wake up now, there is still time to save life on Earth.
Those who ignore this and do nothing to STOP the Destruction of the World are helping to destroy it.
You're listening
to the most relevant conversations on the planet about how to stop destroying ourselves and the world.
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Richard: program is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. We're on the STOP radio network.
My name is Richard Lloyd Jones.
We're broadcasting from São Paulo, Brazil, the headquarters of Norberto Keppe's Society of Integral Psychoanalysis, or Analytical Trilogy. Salma Genzani, one of the lead analysts at Norberto Keppe's Integral Psychoanalysis Clinic here in Brazil, a pretty phenomenal institution, has vast experience with adults, children, and, of course, teenagers. She has a teenager of her own, actually. So she speaks about this from personal experience. Let's find out how she understands the tyranny of cool.
Selma, last time we talked about kids. Right. We focused on mostly the censorship of the parents, how the parents spoil the kids by giving them anything they want. Let's focus on the kids today, particularly the adolescents, because I've noticed a big change since when I was a kid. Here we go. I'm Selma Pick, my father, now, when I was a boy.
But I have noticed that kids today, they
don't seem interested in anything, teenagers especially. When I
Richard: say to my teenage students sometimes, I'll say, hey, did you see that movie, Spider-Man? And they'll say, yeah. I say, what did you think? Yeah, it was okay. And I'll say, well, what about this new one, X-Men? What did you think of that? Yeah, it was okay.
Nothing is like good. Nothing is fantastic. The tyranny
of cool, we could say. How do you see this? How do you analyze this? Yes, I think this is what most worries us today concerning the adolescents. This lack of interest that they have for anything, for life, for the world where they live, for the future, and for true ideals. They are very much worried only with their appearance, how they dress, how the hair looks like, going out with friends where there is a lot of alcohol and drugs and electronic crazy music.
Or they are very much worried, too, with how to get the latest products on electronics and how to have money for these things. And that's what they are linked on. And this is very sad because these things that they look for, they provoke a lot of anxiety, agitation, and they get depressed because these things don't supply the true longings, the true demands of the human beings.
So they never really get to a true accomplishment if they are only focused on this. So,
Richard: before we talk about what the true value in life is, which we've talked about a number of times in this program, what's behind this sort of despising everything in the world? What's behind all that?
Well, for example, this question of inversion is very serious here, right?
Because we see that to be cool nowadays is to be apathetic. This question of not giving value to anything that has value.
You don't listen to experienced people, you stay only on your own selfish needs. And it's very uncool to be happy, to be enthusiastic with life, to like goodness. This is considered to be uncool. So this is a big inversion and it's based on envy. Because then the kids, the adolescents nowadays especially, they don't have gratitude for anything good they have in life.
And if we see our life or their lives, let's say, they have a lot of reasons to be grateful.
Richard: How is this envy? We've talked about envy in this program many times, but I think because the social definition of envy is so different from how we define it here in Analytical Trilogy, how is this envy not to appreciate, not to have gratitude for what you have?
It is exactly this, not willing to see the goodness you have in life. And the adolescents, let's take their example today, they usually have a good life.
They have friends, they have school, they have a house to live, they have parents. They have many good things in life to be grateful to, but they despise. Goodness. They think that this is not cool to be grateful for the things that they have. So they enter in this kind of energetic of really not giving value to life itself.
Richard: How has this happened?
How has this gotten so much worse, at least in my perception, so much worse over the last 20, 30 years? I
think this question in our society that having is much more important than being. It's not born with the adolescence. Our society is like this today, so they learn to look for things that they should have. The clothing, they have to be certain makes, their cars, the house, the neighborhood where they live.
So having consumerism, money, capitalism, all this situation make people despise real values, ethical values, true values, being loyal to your friends, etc.
So there are a few exceptions today, let's say, each time less exceptions. We listen to young people say that they have a motivation for something that's true, like sporting activities or artistic activities or scientific or being a volunteer. So they are not worried or doing something useful with their lives. And this brings a lot of dissatisfaction. And all this is based on envy.
I don't want to see what is good. I don't want to do what is good. This is not cool. This is not fashionable anymore.
Richard: Totally
uncool.
Richard: And so this has been fed by our society, by the
sort of the economic structure. This
Richard: enters into the question of sociopathology, which Keppe has
talked about. Certainly the socioeconomic power has always used human pathology to market its products.
And the adolescents, they have less defenses. They are more naive in this sense.
So they buy. They buy the products that I put to them. And it's very interesting for the powerful machine that directs our planet to have adolescents that don't think. They only want to buy, they are not interested of building anything useful in their lives or in the planet where we live. So they don't contest, they don't argue, and it's okay, they live like this.
They are drugged or they are in the Internet all the time. "That is said to be the drug of our era." Many people already say this. "We don't need cocaine or the others any longer because Internet is enough." They stay
Richard: hours and hours there. I'd like to come back to this question of the Internet because I think this is very important. But first, I'd just like to talk about I was watching a movie with some students, an old James Dean movie in the 1950s, Rebel Without a Cause.
This was what we identified with teenagers for many, many years. Was to rebel against the status quo, to sort of fight for an ideal, to try to be different in some way from the values that they saw in their parents. Of course, a lot of this was based on envy, too, trying to overturn good things. But in some cases, there was an attempt to try to fight against the hypocrisy that they saw in society.
This is almost totally gone now. Do you have any ideas why we've lost that sense of trying to fight for an ideal?
And I think there is a huge work that has been done with our world. So the kids that are born 10, 15 years ago, maybe even 20, they are different from the kids we were in our youth. So I believe that the drugs counted a lot of this.
The CIA introduced the drugs in the 60s, and that was really something.
And that revolution that was at the time. Also, they were too much linked still with sensorial life. So they thought through sensorial values they could achieve something. So in my understanding, they had a mix of true values, but still they couldn't see that the true ones would be psychological, artistic, disinverted. There was a lot of inverted ideas that were not conscientized at that time.
So it was easy to introduce the drugs, the sensorialist, the importance of sex in this. And this deviated a lot the ideals of the time. And as time goes by, the new generations, this is only increasing. And we see a very difficult situation nowadays with kids.
Richard: You know, Dr. Keppe has been talking a lot recently about, I would characterize it this way, is the difference between a sensorial, sort of materialistic life, and a more psychological, spiritual life.
And I think this is a very important thing for teenagers to understand. What is a psychological, spiritual life? What would that be? Maybe you could
talk a bit about that. Yes. We see that not only adolescents, but we are all very much linked to the world outside. This having or worried what we are going to eat today or tomorrow, what you are going to do for the weekend or the vacations or the university.
It's all exterior life that matters. And we are very much disconnected with our inner self, inner lives. What we really feel, what we really think about things, the intentions that we have, we almost don't know them. And it's fundamental, this coming back to one's inner life. And the adolescents still, they are more pure people in this sense because they are not so much masked.
It still is easier for them to access their inner lives.
They see how the world is, they are linked to the external, to the appearances, but if we do a work with them, the response is much quicker than the response with adults.
Richard: Yeah, adults are more stubborn, right?
Right. So when they find out that they have inside what they need to be really happy, that they don't need to dress the way the system tells them to dress or their friends, they don't have to do what the others do in order to be cool, that they can have their own personality and develop their own goods, they start to be born again.
And this is very beautiful to see. You
Richard: know, in this James Dean movie, it was interesting that he got into trouble because he was challenged by some other guys to not be a chicken yet to drive, you know. And so he did a very stupid thing and a guy got killed because he didn't have any contact with himself.
He thought that he had to look good for others. And this is a big mistake that we've made for centuries.
Yes, this question of relativism. What is good for me might not be good for you. This is a big mistake. Because we have all the same essence, which is true, good, and beautiful. So what is good for me is good for all the others.
So I will be original, be authentic, the most I can act and feel and act according to my essence. To what is really original in me, by nature, by essence.
Richard: And this is where the real self-confidence comes from, too.
Right, yeah.
Richard: Well, now maybe the inevitable question arises, what to do about this? Keppe's perspective is, we have to first accept consciousness of our decay.
If we don't, we'll never move to change, because we won't think anything is wrong. And herein lies a fundamental thought.
As long as we continue to believe we live in the best of times, we'll never look at what our modern world has lost. Not pessimism, but realistic, and the first step towards change. That's our program for this time. The program is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, Happy to be streaming to you through the Stop Radio Network.
Bye-bye for now.
True illness is the attempt to create what was never meant to exist. Norberto Cappi. Disinverting the human being and society.
Cláudia: Since the beginning of all civilizations, they had always manifested an enormous interest and knowledge about the spiritual life and spiritual beings.
Richard: It's a world of ancient wisdom that modern science has eliminated.
Cláudia: The arising philosophy of positivism preferred to base science on material happenings.
So, only what you can see and touch and feel is real.
Richard: Now, spirituality is being put back into science.
Cláudia: Imagine what would happen if people start considering this as a real thing. Not only as a religious thing, but also a real scientific thing. Imagine what would happen.
Hi, my name is Thorne, and I love listening to the Stop Radio Network. It helps me to start off my day in a really good mode.
Richard: The most relevant conversations in the world today are
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