What did you play as a child?
Street football. Was good.
Does the footballer need ego?
Less ego than sense of team, which is the deciding factor.
I ask him, you know why…
As I explain in my books and classes.
Namely…
The egoic eruption in the human psyche: twisted the destiny of our species.
What an egotic eruption?
A sudden swelling of the ego, as I described in The Fall, an earlier book.
what fall
The ancestors lived in a heavenly environment, with an abundance of food and resources: a golden age…
It’s nice to think about it.
But the climate cycle changed and drought and scarcity came: the fall! We still carry its cataclysmic and indelible effects on the human psyche.
What are the effects?
The ego, an enormous ego, an inflamed and overexcited ego… that sprung from the need to compete to survive.
To prevail over the rival?
To prevail, push him aside, steal from him and even kill him: this is how wars appeared.
There were no wars before then?
No. Burials with weapons date back less than 7,000 years: there are none before that.
Did any society get rid of wars?
The Minoans, on the island of Crete: look at their frescoes with octopuses, dolphins, flowers, bulls and dancers, bare-breasted priestesses… No weapons, no war.
Pity about the Santorini cataclysm…
Yes, that volcano on the island of Thera devastated Crete in 1600 BC.
Total, that our species changed.
We became individualistic. Before humanity was empathetic, connected, social.
It seems to me more a wish than a fact.
It also happened in Mesoamerica: the Indians were peaceful until a climatic catastrophe that made them aggressive, as in Eurasia.
No 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 Revolution!
Let’s 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, cabalism, alienation from nature, aggression, violence…
Name me some psychopathic leaders.
Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Victor Orbán, Erdogan, Andrej Duda… Mirrors of pathocracies.
And there are no Spanish politicians?
They explained to me that there was a leader around here who said “I am love”.
And what’s wrong with that?
The pathological leader believes that he is the Good, Nation, Homeland… He only loves himself and seeks to be adored… and one day he will blame others for everything. Hitler said: “Germany does not deserve me”.
Maybe only the psychopath has the courage to take charge.
They are people who feel incomplete and their emptiness must be filled desperately with money, fame, success and power.
At what cost?
They neither feel nor suffer what the other feels or suffers. And we tend to think of the psychopath: we are societies disconnected from empathy, nature, the heart, we are pathocratic societies.
what’s wrong with us
Abdication syndrome, I call it. How comfortable it is to delegate to a leader! Let him decide! You abdicate your responsibility.
And abdicating, abdicating… we give free rein to some famous gurus.
With their dark triad: psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism… And on top of that they are charismatic, cultivators of charm. And they don’t feel guilt, shame or fear.
And that attracts us?
Because they have a self-confidence that many of us admire because we live disconnected.
I’d say we’re sick, Professor.
The only solution involves healing ourselves personally, to reconnect with nature, with your own heart and everyone’s.
Connection, connection, connection.
Mental health is that. Be grateful, have deep relationships and be creative.
Will we remain disconnected or will the connected finally win?
We will reintegrate into our human essence, we will reconnect, we will become empathic again – I am optimistic!
