Check out a modern photography exhibition and you’ll often find disturbing pictures of conflict and misery, along with the usual justifications of “Hey man, that’s the reality!”
We all remember those generation defining images of the naked girl running down a dirt road in Vietnam, the young student defying the tanks in Tiananmen Square, the vulture stalking the child in the Sudan. And it’s easy, in the face of those stark scenes, to think that this does indeed show reality.
I’m not so sure about that. If we look around us, we can certainly see enough disgrace and horror to make that argument that life is suffering.
But a humble psychoanalyst and social scientist in Brazil is forcing us to re-think all that. “Evil,” states Norberto Keppe, “is just the destruction of good, not the natural state.”
And that profound truth, although hinted at throughout history, has never been entrenched as a core pillar of any scientific philosophy. Until now.
What a Normal Life Should Be, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.