What did you play as a child?
To street football. It was good.
Does the footballer need an ego?
Less ego than sense of team, which is decisive.
I’m asking you, you know why…
From what I explain in my books and classes.
Namely…
The egotic eruption in the human psyche: it twisted the destiny of our species.
What egotic eruption?
A sudden inflammation of the ego, as I described in The Fall, my previous book.
What fall?
Our ancestors lived in a paradisiacal environmental environment, with an abundance of food: a golden age…
It’s nice to think about it.
But the climate cycle changed and drought and food shortages ensued: the fall! We carry its cataclysmic and indelible effects on the human psyche.
What effects are they?
The ego, a huge ego, an inflamed and overexcited ego… that arose from the need to compete to survive.
To prevail over the rival?
Impose, separate him, steal from him…, and even kill him, and thus wars arise.
Weren’t there wars before then?
No. The burials with weapons are from less than 7,000 years ago. Not before.
Has any society escaped war?
The Minoans, on the island of Crete: look at their frescoes with octopuses, dolphins, flowers, bulls and dancers, priestesses with bare breasts… There are no weapons, there is no war.
Too bad about the Santorini cataclysm…
Yes, that volcano on the island of Thera devastated Crete in 1600 BC.
In short, our species changed.
We became individualists. Before, humanity was empathetic, connected, social.
It seems to me to be your wish.
Also in Mesoamerica the Indians were peaceful until a climatic catastrophe that made them aggressive, as in Eurasia.
Any other exceptions?
The Iroquois Indians in North America.
Because?
Its democratic social system inspired the founding fathers of the United States, its Constitution and its American Revolution… which influenced the French one!
Let us rejoice in democracy, then.
But today our democracies have become pathocracies.
What is a pathocracy?
The psychopathy of our political and business leaders is warping our democracies into pathocracies.
What psychopathy?
Narcissism, greed for power and money, caudillismo, distancing from nature, aggressiveness, violence…
Name me psychopathic leaders.
Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Erdogan, Andrezj Duda… Mirrors of pathocracies.
And there are no Spaniards?
They have told me that there has been a leader here who says “I am love.”
And what’s wrong with that?
The pathological leader does not doubt that he is the Good, the Nation, the Homeland… He only loves himself and seeks to be adored by others… whom he will blame for an entire day. Hitler ended by saying: “Germany does not deserve me.”
Perhaps only the psychopath has the courage to take charge.
They are people who feel incomplete and their emptiness has to be desperately filled with money, fame, success and power.
At the expense of whatever?
They neither feel nor suffer what the other feels or suffers. And we tend to elevate the psychopath: we are societies disconnected from empathy, from nature, from the heart, we are pathocratic societies.
What the hell is wrong with us?
Abdication syndrome, I call it. How comfortable it is to delegate to a leader to decide! You abdicate your responsibility.
And by abdicating, abdicating… we give way to some crazy gurus.
With their dark triad: psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism… And on top of that they are charismatic, cultivators of charm. And they feel no guilt, shame or fear.
And that attracts us?
Of course, because they have a self-confidence that many people admire because we lack it and live disconnected.
I would say we are sick, professor.
The only solution is to heal ourselves personally, to reconnect with nature, with your heart and everyone’s.
Connection, connection, connection.
Mental health is that. Be grateful, maintain deep relationships and be creative.
Will we continue to be disconnected or will those connected finally win?
We will reintegrate into our human essence, we will reconnect, we will become empathetic again: I am an optimist!
