Richard Lloyd Jones: It is nurtured in the fevers of fanaticism, fomented in books and newsletters and websites. We can defend it or march out against it. We can propose elegant legal arguments to justify it. But when the jingoism dies down, any rational human being must ask the same question Bobby Kennedy did. What has violence ever accomplished? I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, violence kills us, not the other guy.
This program is based on some extraordinary philosophical proposals put forward by psychoanalyst and social scientist Norberto Keppe. Not completely new ideas, because many of the ideas have been considered by humanity's greatest minds for millennia. But what is new is the nature of synthesis in Keppe's work. He has managed to unite many ideas behind one vast worldview that is comprehensive in its understanding.
So while many have considered the essence of man, like Aquinas, or analyzed the sickness of the socioeconomic structures, like Marx, or investigated the light and dark in the human psyche, like Freud, no one has managed to unite everything into one science that allows us to see where we've gone wrong, personally or socially, as measured against what we truly are in our God-given essence.
Keppe's science of psychosociopathology is fascinating, profound, and enormously vast in its scope. We'll be exploring it in depth at our International Congress on Analytical Trilogy, that's the name of Keppe's science, from July 4th to 6th, 2008, here in Brazil. Anyone who's interested in that will be invited to stay on at our conference spa for a few days to consider the themes of psychosociopathology, perhaps with Dr.
Keppe himself in attendance.
Just write me if you'd like more information about that, rich at richjonesvoice.com. I also want to update you on our brain food community, which we're setting up to give you more education on this science. This idea is morphing somewhat after conversations with Dr. Cláudia Pacheco. We'd like to create a training program to teach the skills of psychosociotherapy. This will involve teleclasses with Dr.
Pacheco and others of us from the International Society of Analytical Trilogy, a newsletter, some question and answer sessions, very specific training to help you develop the understanding of psychosociopathology so you can apply this profound knowledge and the tools therein in your sphere of influence. Again, rich at richjonesvoice.com for more information. A few weeks ago, Gilbert Gambucci explored the roots of racism very effectively on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
So when he came to me with some ideas for tackling violence, I jumped at the chance to look at this pathology through Keppe's eyes. Gilbert joins me today. Well, Gilbert, in Dr. Keppe's marvelous book, Metaphysics I, Liberation of the Being, he has a chapter in there saying every act of external aggression represents a destruction of the perpetrator's own being. Well, we'll get into that, I'm sure, later, but we should begin maybe with this.
Define the being. Gilbert, what is the essence of man? Oh, yes,
Gilbert Gambucci: Richard, this is a secret in life, let's say, the secret to life, because we have to understand what is being? This has been a question for centuries, the study of ontology, the being of the human being. Who are we? What are we exactly? What is the being made of? And there's a confusion here because we also have pathology as human beings.
That is to say, we do things that are against our essence, against our nature. And so there are many wrong ideas floating around in society about what is being, this study of ontology, and very mistaken ideas. Nowadays, we can clarify this study because of Dr. Keppe's work. It's just incredible. It's very fascinating. What
Richard: is it then, Gilbert, if we could define? Because we hear so many times, you know, well, when somebody does something terrible, we say, well, that's just human nature.
And what you're going to suggest, I'm sure, following Keppe's work, is that's not human nature. It's
Gilbert: against human nature. For example, in the Anglo-Saxon world, England, United States, there's an idea of John Locke that the human being is born as a blank slate. That is, he is born with nothing in his being, and you have to educate everything that he's going to be.
But any parent can tell you that their children have personalities immediately. Many times the children, they say things, they come up with things that nobody taught them that. So where does that come from? You know, this shows that the being of the human being, it's already formed. We already have universal concepts inside of us. Gilbert,
Richard: this is somewhat borne out in a recent study at Yale University showing that babies, very young babies, know the difference between right and wrong, between good and bad, immediately from the very beginnings of their lives.
They don't need to be taught it, shown it, to learn it in school. They have it inside them already. Yes, we
Gilbert: develop their personalities, they can develop, but essentially, in a formal way, the universal concepts are inside of us already. There's another very mistaken idea in the society that comes from Descartes, the French thinker, that is to doubt.
You have to doubt everything in order to know it. And this is the basis of modern science today. And, Rich, that's why modern science doesn't understand anything, because you can't doubt something that you know. The being perceives what is the truth. For example, if somebody says something that you never heard before, how do you know that it's true? "The person I did, ah, that's true.
How do you know that?" So what happens is, it's not as Aristotle says, that we acquire knowledge from the senses. It's more like what Plato had to say, Aristotle's mentor, that knowledge comes from intuition. That is to say, our conclusion is that a person recognizes in the exterior world something that is inside himself. We have these universal concepts inside us, so we recognize in the exterior world what is right, what is wrong, what that is exactly.
Richard: Now, Plato was a little involved in dualism, right? He followed the first religion of Zoroastro, about good and evil existing together inside the human being and in the universe. Dr. Keppe has corrected that in, I think, a very beautiful way. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Gilbert: Yes. It's not that good and evil exist in the nature as two equal forces.
The Creator, as a divine being, He created only what is good, only what is beautiful and truthful. He doesn't create the lie. So what is the lie then? It's as Thomas Aquinas shows us, that evil is just the opposition to the good. So obviously the lie is just an opposition to the truth. So what is ugly is a refusal to do what is natural to us, to make beautiful things.
What we call evil is an opposition to goodness. So what this shows, Rich, is that the being of the human being is something very structured.
It's something that exists. It's not relative. You know, it's something absolute. So, for example, how can we say that, ah, for me, I can't eat rotten beef. But what? You can. For me, rotten beef is okay. I like it. It's good. It's not relative. There are absolutes in the reality.
Richard: And those absolutes, Gilbert, you're suggesting, and I know Norberto Keppe has done a lot of work on this, those absolutes are good things.
They're not like a mixture of clean water and polluted water, for example, in an external sense. They're not a mixture of good thoughts and murderous thoughts. The essence, the true essence of human beings would only be what's good, beautiful, and truthful. Oh, yes, Rich,
Gilbert: you know, if you mix pure water with polluted water, what do you get? You know, you get something that doesn't work.
You can't mix the two.
Many people think that you have to have evil in order to have good. No, evil is the opposition to the good. And so, if we know what is the original nature of being, this awareness of the perfection of our essence, then we can correct the errors that we do. Okay, so what is being? What is being in our original state? It's pure action.
That is the essence of the human being. The action that we do that is good. The action that we take that is beautiful, that is truthful. This is the essence of the human being. This is where all knowledge is stored, as we use the term universal concepts. Now, we have pathology. We have opposition to this. But it's clear when we are doing things that oppose our essence.
So, for example, we have in our society an existence that is not in harmony with our essence, because we put there corruption, deceit, we put there things that are in opposition to our very essence, and so we live in conflict all the time.
Those things are just human nature. Yes, this is because we never understood before what is the pathology of the human being. It's not human nature. Pathology is sickness. It's against human nature. That we do. In fact, it's a little bit complicated, Rich, because we can even be born with certain pathologies nowadays. After generations and generations of, let's say, harmful attitudes, then this affects the DNA of the human being.
So we are born nowadays, for example, with envy. You know, we see it even in the children. But as it is not something that is a part of our human essence, it can be corrected, it can be controlled, because it's something pathological, even if we are born with it.
Richard: I like what you're suggesting now, Gilbert, because it gives us a way to compare things in the world, that we now can compare the results with the essence of things.
So we can actually do a correct analysis of what's happening in the world through this correct dialectics because we have a common starting point now, which is the true essence of man. This takes away this whole Hegelian dialectic, you know, that you have the thesis and antithesis to arrive at a synthesis, this incorrect dialectic. Now we can compare things based on the being, the essence of the human being.
So you and in this podcast are helping us to see a correct way of looking at the world.
Gilbert: You know, Rich, Dr. Keppe, he corrected metaphysics. He completed it and corrected it. We have now this study of ontology, which shows us what is the human being? What is being exactly? So now we can go forward. We don't have to use this false dialectics anymore.
We don't need evil, Rich. We don't need aggression. You know, one time I saw Dr.
Keppe treating a patient in a group situation. And this guy, all the time he's always complaining that he doesn't feel well. Always depressed, always feels bad. But it's constant, this complaint. And I remember Dr. Keppe said to him, "Well, William, if you would like to feel good, why don't you do something good?" And it was kind of funny because it shows what is the essence of the human being.
It's the good action. You know, it's the pure act. If you do what is good, then your being, you are in harmony with yourself. And in fact, you're even in harmony with the divine being. Now, of course, you can oppose that. You can oppose feeling good after doing a good act also. But either we are in harmony with ourselves or we are against ourselves.
Richard: This analysis you're talking about, I remember as well. Because Dr. Kepley says, "well, so what if you don't feel good?"
Do something anyway. I mean, what are you going to wait for? To feel perfect before you go and do something? And everybody has problems. Everybody has difficulties. Everybody has aches and pains in their bodies, especially as they get older. But do anyway. Do something. Because the nature of the human being is this essence of goodness, truth, beauty. Take action. Do something good.
Gilbert: Yeah, Rich. It's a kind of proof of this. For example, when you do something good for another person, why do you feel well? You can oppose feeling well that you did that, but naturally you would feel well. Or the other extreme, for example, after hitting somebody, even if logically you think that you justified yourself in the situation, anyway, the aggressive act is you feel so bad afterwards.
So why? What is that?
Richard: Yeah, this is interesting, Gilbert, because oftentimes we can justify almost anything.
We can use an excuse for almost anything. But it doesn't take away from the feeling bad because we've gone against something that's true inside us. So this idea of Norberto Keppe, that every act of external aggression is a way of attacking your own being first, that's a very interesting area to consider a little deeply with you.
Gilbert: You know, Rich, the aggressive act is against human nature.
It's against our being. Our being doesn't contain the aggression to do aggression. It's like putting a square peg in a round hole. It doesn't go. You can force it, but you're against yourself.
Richard: What are the ramifications of this then, Gilbert, if we're talking about external aggression being an attack against ourselves? We see in the world a lot of aggression, externally oriented. What is this doing to the human being?
What is this doing to us in our society?
Rich, we
Gilbert: don't perceive yet that the aggressor is the one who is being harmed. If the aggressive act was fine to do, there would be no problem. You know, heroism, the concepts that we have of defending our nation, being a hero. But what happens with men who go abroad and kill people? We see how they come back. I remember one guy in the little town where I lived in Pennsylvania.
When he would walk down the street, suddenly he would stop and start putting his feet out, checking for mines, you know, and then he would walk a little further and then start checking for mines. You know, obviously, psychologically, he was damaged by doing the aggressive act. Or another guy, another war veteran, he seemed to be a normal guy, you know, came back after the war, everything seemed to be okay, but one day he held his wife hostage up in the attic of his house with all of his guns and the police had to surround the house and, you know, he just kind of snapped out.
And so what we see is that the aggressive act has serious ramifications on the being of the human being and psychological disturbances for the rest of one's life.
Richard: We're seeing this now with the veterans who are coming back from this Gulf War in Iraq, right? The rates of suicide are skyrocketing much higher than the normal rates. And I saw a documentary years ago, Gilbert, about the various participants in the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
And they were interviewing two or three of these guys who participated, and their lives were just a mess. I mean, really. They were on many different types of antidepressants. They had all sorts of problems in the family. One guy had seen his own child killed right in front of him. He was suicidal all the time. It was a terrible thing. But they interviewed two guys who didn't participate.
Who were part of the platoon, but who didn't enter the thing. And they were having normal lives. Of course, they had seen horrible things, but they had somehow found it in themselves not to participate in this terrible event. And so they hadn't had the remorse, the terrible feelings of guilt that the others had had.
Gilbert: Damage to their being, you know. So this shows, Rich, that we are, in essence, we are transcendental beings.
We are eternal beings. You know, after the body dies off, we don't disappear. It's incredible. We are eternal beings. And so we see that, for example, the aggressive act is not a part of being. It is something extremely against being. And so any kind of aggression, of course, killing someone is a serious aggression. You do receive serious ramifications in your being for any kind of aggressive act.
Even aggressive thoughts, even aggressive words, not
Richard: necessarily physical. Even justified aggression, Gilbert, even in the situation of, like, World War II, which we could analyze that socially in another way, but we could say that these guys who went there were like heroes, you know? Even in that situation?
Gilbert: You know, even good-willed, good-intentioned people, Rich, who are actually honestly defending the country, or if you're in a situation where you need to defend yourself, whether you're going to be killed right now or kill, for example.
Even in this type of situation, the question becomes, "well, if I am killed now, I will be able to do less good in the world before I die naturally, so what should I do?" But even in any aggressive act, you damage yourself.
Richard: I think what's very interesting then to look at is the situation one of my students told me, Gilbert.
His father was a policeman here in Brazil. You know, the situation with drug dealers and crime here can be very, very intense. The student told me his father told him that when a policeman had to shoot somebody in the line of duty and killed the person, he felt terrible for months. But after the second time, he felt less terrible. After the third or fourth, there was no feeling anymore.
It was just part of the job. What is it that's going on there in that situation? "Here, this
Gilbert: is a very serious psychological disturbance when a person inconscientizes the reality of his inner life. We no longer have any contact with our inner life. This is mental illness. This is the definition of mental illness, to lose contact with oneself. The censorship that we do to not see what we are inside.
The first time, as you mentioned, the first time, for example, he felt the result of that in his being."
If we were meant to be able to do aggressive acts, we would have no problem with that. "You can kill and be happy or be aggressive to someone, no problem, but it's not like that. Somebody goes
Richard: into the military, you just give them the gun and give them the manual and the targets to shoot at. The guy's trained already, but they don't do that when you train for the military.
They've got to force the person. They have to torture the person almost. They have to force the person into a situation where they will go against their natural instinct, their natural nature.
Gilbert: You know, to do an aggressive act to an exterior object, first of all, you have to do an enormous aggression in your inner life in order to produce that act. And this aggression is greater than who receives the aggression.
You know, for example, if I strike someone, that someone can get over that easily."
It's possible. Especially if the person is well-balanced. Maybe nothing can happen with him. But the one who is the aggressor suffers a distortion in his being. And so, Rich, you know, on a national level, for example, we've been talking on an individual level, but on a national level, the phenomenon is the same. A country, for example, who declares war on another country, they will suffer the consequences of the aggression because it is not a part of being.
So, for example, if you're a nation that wars, you will notice with inside the nation more and more aggressivity going on in social terms. So you can't make war without the consequences of suffering psychological damages within the people of the
Richard: country. And you can have even like an economic aggression, like the aggression carries out into all aspects of the social life, right?
Into the relationships, into the ways we react together, into the ways we handle problems in the traffic, into the economic systems that we create. This aggression internally is reflected through the social situations that we live in. Yes, a
Gilbert: warring nation, whether you like it or not, it stimulates aggression. So that's why we have a growing delinquency in the United States. And delinquency is a form of mental illness, Rich.
You know, there are some types of mental illnesses where the person just attacks themselves. Delinquency attacks the society, but it's something that is against being. It's a mental illness. One
Richard: of my students was telling me last night that her boss told her recently that "she was too nice. She wasn't going to get anywhere in her company unless she developed this more aggressive, more domineering style."
And that certainly is perpetrated in our society. What do you have to say about that, Gilbert? What's the psychological thing that's underlying that attitude that's very prevalent in our society? There is this
Gilbert: idea that exists that there are benefits from being aggressive. Maybe you can grab some money in that way or put somebody down and take their position in that way, but it's the aggressor who suffers.
And in his being, he suffers the consequences of that eternally. It's very, very difficult to repair that
Richard: afterwards. What can we say then about leaders who force, put young people, young men and women in situations where they have to go against their essence? What can we say about the leaders that permit this to happen, Gilbert?
Gilbert: Yes, we must become more careful about how we are manipulated by people who have their own interests in mind in positions of power.
People are thought to think that by being aggressive with another nation, this is patriotic. But really, is there any greater form of terrorism than to wage war? Whoever wages war, they are the terrorists of humanity. And who suffers the most? Those who
Richard: wage the war. Could this be why we're seeing so many difficulties in the country that is waging the war at the moment?
So many problems, economically, socially, with suicide, with rates of depression. Could this be a reason for this, Gilbert? Of
Gilbert: course, Rich. Even obvious examples like what happened at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and many different types of aggressions like this. The United States is a warring nation. And so we are suffering the consequences of that. And it's much more serious than what people think.
This is not patriotism. This is a destruction.
A very destructive attitude that is going on. And it incites a certain paranoia. So we have a tendency to think. That our problem is coming from outside. From another country or another person. But it's not. We are the ones who wage the war, and for very dubious reasons. So we've got to consider this more seriously. We have to stop with this in order to repair ourselves as a nation.
Richard: Gilbert, what do you have to say about, this is probably a tough question to answer, but if somebody does attack you, what do you do in that situation? It's an easy thing to talk about turning the other cheek and all those things, but really, in that situation, how can we handle this to be psychologically balanced? What
Gilbert: was it that Gandhi said? Very illuminated person.
Something was going on in his country, and he said, "for this cause, I am prepared to die, but for no cause am I prepared to kill."
And so what we've got to do in a situation of being attacked is to find how justice can be done to the situation. And, you know, usually, Rich, justice requires much more courage than to react in a violent way. We have to have the courage to do as Gandhi shows us, as Martin Luther King shows us. You cannot use violence. We have to use courage and intelligence.
You
Richard: and I watched very recently the film Bobby, about Bobby Kennedy, and the whole last scene of that movie, the last few scenes of that movie, is set against his speech on the meaningless menace of violence, and he said that "any act of violence within a country harms us all." And that really struck me as something pertinent to what you're saying now, Gilbert.
It harms us all because it's against what the human being really is.
Gilbert: You know, recently, Rich, there are so many films bombarding us with war films showing how war is romantic, the heroism of being a soldier and all of these things.
And war just brings devastation to a nation. It sets a nation back at least 50 years. And if you're a nation who is in constant war, you just go backwards. You don't develop. And so we've got to find out who is it who decides that we go to war? And why do we follow those decisions? And I would like to suggest that it is not a president.
It's an economic power who hides behind a political structure, who decides these things. So we've got to begin to perceive this and have the courage and the intelligence to begin to deal with it in reality and stop simply doing as they think we should do. I agree completely with Mahatma Gandhi. I agree completely with Martin Luther King that violence is not the answer in any form at all.
Because the violent act is against ourselves.
Richard: Gilbert Keppe says it this way, "the very idea of aggression, to say nothing of the act, causes immense damage to life because it's against life."
We'd do very well to take that to heart. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Talk to you next week.
