Thank you. It's a great honor for me and pleasure to have Professor Beknin as guest today.
Thank you for having me.
It's a very important moment, as we all know. Our topic is very heartbreaking. I wish it did not exist.
The psychoanalysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but this is reality.
So, Professor, should I present you, or would you prefer to say some words about you?
I'm an author of books about personality disorders. I am a former visiting professor at a university in Russia. Currently, I'm on the faculty of CEOPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, which is in Canada, United Kingdom, and Nigeria. But I think our talk should not be about me, but about the situation.
Yes, but it is always important to present you and your work.
I would say that you are a prolific YouTuber. I would say, as far as I know, thousands and thousands and thousands of hours recorded in your channel. It's potential.
I invite everybody to visit and give a welcome to our Portuguese community as well, since I am Portuguese. We are going to have subtitles in Portuguese.
Okay, thank you very much.
I would also like to add that your videos, Professor Beckman, were a major part of these last summer's studies of my own on narcissism. I took the months of summer to study deeply with your work.
For you, for you. I could think of much better ways to spend the summer.
Well, I went to the beach also, but I really wish to thank you publicly for your depth and precious work.
And in nature, nothing is wasted. All is transformed.
So from our own wounding can result or more damage or humans for the betterment of others of all.
So you are a fountain of yours, Professor Sue, all of us.
So blessed be for your work for me.
Call me Sam, but it's much shorter. Thank you.
So as we all know, on the eve of this 17th of October, started this so very tragic events between Hamas and Gaza and Israel.
The attack part on on that very first moment.
There are so there are several layers in such a difficult and heavy not to one time.
We have the obvious religious layer.
And I would introduce the following angle to this team to my question.
I know by the way, what you think about Carl Jung, but nevertheless, I'm going to quote it young.
He said that the problems of psychon or roses often turn out to be religious problems.
He said that he was forced somehow somewhat against his will to examine dogmas so we could treat his patients.
So we came to the conclusion that there were ruling ideas which decide our ethical behavior and have influence in our practical lives.
And these ruling ideas would be archetypes that exist in the structure of the human imagination.
So with this introduction, Sam, I would ask you to offer your thoughts about foundational myths of both religions involved.
Actually, the conflict conflict started off between two atheist groups.
The Zionist movement was anti religious.
One of the main tenets of Zionism, especially political Zionism at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, which was started by assimilated Jews, was to fight off religion and orthodoxy in Judaism as forces of death, a death cult.
So the idea was to get rid of Judaism and to replace it with a new man, a kind of Nietzschean superman, a new Jewish man, in the sense of person. And this new Jewish person would be anti religious.
It's not even atheist. It's anti religious. It would be bonded to the soil. It was a bit like soil and blood in Nazi, you know, later in Nazi propaganda.
All these ideas were roaming. All these ideas were in the air all over Europe. You could find similar ideas in, for example, Russia.
So it started off with atheists or anti religious people on the Jewish side. And on the other side, they were essentially the equivalent of Marxists in the Arab world.
And in the 1930s, between 1936 and 1939, there was an Arab mutiny, a mutiny against the Jews and against the Palestinian Mandate. Which didn't have, didn't have initially any trace of religion in it. But then religion, religious leaders took over. They hitchhiked on the nationalism, on the underlying nationalism. They hijacked the nationalist movements.
In the beginning, it happened with the Arabs, not with the Jews. So you had the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was a religious authority, taking over the Arab mutiny. And on the Jewish side, it took a lot longer. It took until the 1980s. And then the conflict was converted from a clash between two nationalist movements, vine for the same territory. It was converted from this kind of clash to a clash between two religions.
This was owing to the influx of extremist radical religious Jews, mainly from the United States, immigrants to Israel. They started off a settlement movement in the occupied territories in the West Bank, the heartland of Jewish history and religion.
So now we have to, now we have a veneer or an overlay of religion, another layer which is nationalistic layer, and another layer which is essentially economic, because this is a fight over extremely scarce resources.
The size of the state of Israel is New Jersey, like New Jersey in the United States. It's tiny, it's a postage stamp. Absolutely tiny. And because the resources are so scarce, about 40% of the area is actually desert.
Desert, and only the rest is somehow, with huge effort, somehow arable, can be used for agriculture.
So there is a confluence of religious, nationalistic and economic fights over scarce resources.
And this is what makes the conflict intractable, because there is no place for compromise. None. Anyone who claims that a compromise can be found in the land of Palestine, between Jews and Arabs, either has no idea what he's talking about, or is gaslighting us.
There is no place for compromise. There are two possible models. One is known as a two-state solution.
The two-state solution is anything between nonsensical and delusional, because the Palestinians are concentrated in two areas. One is known as the Gaza Strip, and one is known as the West Bank.
And to connect these two areas would mean to cut Israel in half, and Israel would never agree to it.
The second option is known as a one-state solution, where both Israelis and Palestinians will live happily ever after.
But there's a problem with a one-state solution. If it is Jewish, it would not be democratic, because the Palestinians are a majority.
So if it maintains a Jewish character, it has to suppress the Palestinians, or treat them as second-class citizens, apartheid in effect.
So a one-state solution can be Jewish, but not democratic. If it is democratic, on the other hand, it can never be Jewish.
And that will never be acceptable.
And they would not accept it. And they will not accept it.
Now, ironically, the model of a one-state, where the Arabs are second-class citizens, is actually a Muslim model. It's in Islam. Islam says that all non-Muslims who live in Muslim countries should be second-class citizens, and they are known as dhimmi, or ahelil dhimam, under the protection of the regime, of course, under the protection of Muslims, not to be abused and pillaged and so on, but still second-class citizens who pay a special tax.
So it is Islam, actually, that provides a model for a one-state solution with the Muslims as second-class citizens.
Why can it be done in the territory that it is today in Palestine, the Gaza Strip?
I'm not quite sure what you ask. Sorry? Why that space of a Palestinian state could not be done in that territory? In Gaza Strip?
Instead of being a prison, being a state?
Gaza Strip is, depending on how you measure it, 47 to 62 kilometers long, and a few kilometers wide.
It is beyond time. It's the size of a city, the size of a metropolis.
And there are between 9 and 10 million Palestinians, even right now, even right now with 2.1 to 2.4 million people in Gaza.
Even now, Gaza is the most densely populated area in the world, much more than Hong Kong.
But it would be a start point.
But the problem is that there are many, many problems.
But how can we, Sam, if we cannot live in a world without religion, at least in the next, I would say, I don't know, generations or years, how can we work with the ideology possession? Because it's a possession, you know.
We are not only in religious terms, with the nationalists, with every time we are possessed by an ideology, we are not human anymore in a sense.
So what could we do about it?
Ideologies are modern inventions. It's a way to reflect underlying mental health issues on the individual level and on the collective level.
For example, we have a rising tide of grandiosity, which started about 200 years ago. It's not new. It started 200 years ago.
We have a rising tide of victimhood. Victimhood is an identity. And religion and ideologies, secular religions like Marxism and Nazism and fascism, secular religion, these are answers to these needs to feel superior in some way, entitled, and a victim, mysteriously together.
You're entitled because you're a victim, and you're superior because you're a victim.
And I know that you spoke about it in other interviews, that the myth, the foundational myths of both Israel and Palestine would be ultimately connected with this victimhood that justifies so much, so many attacks.
Well, you asked me about the founding myths of the conflicting religions there.
The founding myth of Judaism is that the Jews are chosen by God to go on a mission of educating, edifying, and enlightening humanity, thus preventing a repeat of the flood, which was God's punishment to humanity for having strayed way too far from any conceivable morality.
So the Jews are guardians of morality. They are beacons. They are beacons of enlightenment.
And they have this mission and obligation. The Jews don't consider the fact in their eyes that they've been chosen as a kind of gift or endowing them with any superiority.
On the contrary, it's an obligation. This is the founding myth of Judaism.
The founding myth of Islam is persecution, persecution and victimhood.
The Prophet Muhammad had been prosecuted and persecuted multiple times and had to flee multiple cities and had to fight for his life and for the subsistence and survival of his new-found religion and beliefs until he died, actually.
He died fighting.
So the Muslims have a victim mentality and the Jews have what today we would probably call narcissism, if you want to reduce it to mental health categories.
You spoke about this, but I would say one of the most, without connection with this most rampant pandemics of the 20th and 21st century, which is feminarcism.
By the way, I just recently read, I don't remember where, that at least 50% of the current narcissists are already women, so much for our equality rights.
Our Western civilization has added into a very individualistic, as we all know, image, exterior, orientation, split status from feeling function and thinking function, how do you say, real self, from a false self.
Control of others, including control of a body which creates addictions and this excessive rewarding of extroversion, competition, being number one, being the best.
And even though, of course, humanity always faces challenges, but we have our own now.
And this incapacity to see into each other, into intimacy, my intimacy is this split, this division, this war between right and left and religions and dark and night and conscious and unconscious and body and soul.
This grows together with the love of power.
So how can we in a way slow it down, building stronger bridges between these opposites?
I sometimes say that therapy is the religion of the future, because if we do not cook this raw instant with the fire of consciousness, we continue to throw bombs to the others, of course.
So how can we knowing that so many leaders by the even fact that they have to be to get in so powerful positions, they have to have no empathy, they have to manipulate, they have to pray for power.
So those are our traits of narcissists or borderlines or psychopaths.
So how can we do something about it?
I don't think we can. I think the only only transformation possible, if at all, would be once we all collectively hit rock bottom and go through a crucible of fire, aka apocalypse in writings of 2000 years ago.
Apocalypse, by the way, the actual meaning, the lexical meaning of apocalypse is revelation, enlightenment.
Apocalypse is about self-awareness suddenly coming face to face with what truly is.
And this is the core of narcissism.
Narcissism is a fantasy defense. People put a lot of emphasis on narcissistic behaviors, narcissistic traits, as you have just done.
And you gave a great overview of the phenomenology of narcissism.
But these are just the symptoms. These are not the disease.
The disease has to do with our avoidance of reality, having renounced reality.
A fantasy defense that has gone awry and out of control and all consuming because it provides various levels gratification of multiple psychological needs.
So escape from reality to fantasy is the first element.
The second element is solipsism, the inability to recognize the existence of external separate objects, people, their needs, hopes, dreams, priorities, etc.
And of course, such solipsism is the outcome of technological self-sufficiency.
By now we are self-sufficient. We are atomized because we don't need other people.
And here's the breaking news. Being with other people really sucks. Socializing is horrible. Other people are difficult, they're demanding, they're critical, they're injurious, they're disgusting. Sometimes they smell bad. You know, it's not pleasant to be with other people.
Throughout human history, we consented to share space, physical space and mental space with other people because we had no choice.
But now that we are given a choice, technological choice, to be self-sufficient and atomized, we take it, absolutely avoiding other people and pretending that they don't exist externally.
That we are the only ontological entities. We are the only ontology. All the others are epistemology.
And so these are the core engines of massism. Fantasy and renouncing the zoned political, renouncing society, renouncing the construct of society.
Which by the way is a modern construct. It started in my view with Wuson. I don't think there was a concept of society in the Roman Empire. It's a very modern concept, the social contract.
So we don't want that anymore. We don't want other people. We want to pay the price.
So if I were an alien just flying over the earth right now and listening to that, I would think that, okay, they deserve apocalypse because that is really very bad.
But it was not always like that. Maybe in the beginning of the cities centuries ago, when we were closer to nature, and living in a way more, I don't know if more happily, in community.
Of course, the interdependency is always there.
But that is very frightening because we always have to have a hope.
And not everybody is a narcissist yet or even we can be narcissists, but be aware of course, and do something about it.
To help, to build these bridges, to bring some kind of hope and to add more meaning because it's a crisis of meaning as well.
There is hope. I'm looking forward to the apocalypse.
Exactly as in therapy, the narcissist is hopeless until the narcissist hits rock bottom.
Until the narcissist has lost everything. Only then any intervention has any hope with the narcissist.
We need to lose everything. We need to really really endure and encounter an apocalypse.
This is our only hope as a species.
The apocalypse could maybe, the apocalypse doesn't have to be dystopian.
The apocalypse doesn't have to resemble a bad science fiction television series.
The apocalypse, for example, could be a takeover by artificial intelligence.
The apocalypse could be, for example, a total deterioration in reading skills and math skills as is happening right now.
The apocalypse could be overt, pernicious, dark age, religiosity.
The apocalypse could be slow-moving, imperceptible, glacial and pernicious under the radar.
And in a way we are experiencing the beginning of this kind of apocalypse.
But unless we really lose everything we have, I don't see any way back from where we are and things will only get worse in my view.
Because we are offered increasingly more enticing fantasies.
The metaverse, for example. Social media in a way.
Now the first fantasy, the first virtual reality was the city. The city was the first virtual reality. Because we were disconnected from nature and yet we still had food, for example.
So it was easy for us to imagine that the food appears from nowhere. It's inside cities, you have a totally artificial environment that has nothing to do with nature, nothing to do with soil, nothing to do with the seasons.
You have artificial lighting. It's totally artificial reality.
And it is within cities that we discovered self-sufficiency. You could sit at home, surrounded by books or bargements, eat to your heart's content, your slave could go out and bring your food. You didn't even need to meet and see anyone.
And we have the first armies and the first monks and the first antisocial or aisocial people. Starting then, a few thousand years ago.
And so today the problem is that there are 8.2 billion people on this planet. And we all have a need to be seen.
When we are babies, we need to be seen. If we are not seen by mommy, when we are a baby, babies we die. Babies who don't attract attention die.
So the need to attract attention is a survival instinct, survival reflex, sorry. It's a reflex.
It's easy to be noticed, it's easy to be seen, it's easy to be cared for when you're in a village. In a village with 200 other people, 2,000 other people, everyone knows you. Your business is everyone's business. They take care of you if you are sick. They reprimand you if you misbehave. They keep you on the straight and narrow. They provide you with social feedback.
So these smaller units of habitation allowed everyone to be seen.
Now that you're in cities with 10 million people, 20 million people, or in global cities, virtual cities of 2, 3 billion people like the Facebook city, your need to be seen means that you need to escalate your behavior. You need to become radical and extreme. You need to play on negative effects. You need to emphasize negativity.
So the need to be seen is driving each and every one of us, myself included, I'm not exempting myself.
Each and every one of us is driving us to radicalize, to disconnect from others, because it's a zero sum game.
If you're spending time with me, you can't spend time with someone else. I'm getting your attention right now.
So I would do anything to get your attention, but I have to sacrifice others, of course.
But we can go to communities again. We can change that slowly by slowly. People are coming after after pandemic or within pandemic people, many people went to the countryside again.
It could take many, many, many times, but people are increasingly discontacted with their leaders also.
So I believe a revolution is necessary. You call it apocalypse, a revolution of consciousness, of awareness.
I would have agreed with your optimism had I not realized that all this is channeled through victimhood.
People cast themselves as victims, victims of leadership, victims of circumstances, victims of the financial industry, victims of other people, victims of their own upbringing, adverse childhood experiences.
Victimhood is the organizing and the hermeneutic principle, the principle that explains life, that makes sense of life, imbues it with meaning, purpose and direction.
And victimhood, alas, is just another form of narcissism.
So we have transitioned from overt grandiose, in your face, psychopathic narcissism to covert narcissism, also known as victimhood.
Victimhood is covert narcissism, period.
So, yes, people leave their jobs, the great resignation, and they go to nature, but they do so as victims.
People are socially active. There's never been more social activism than today, social justice activism and social, you know, never more than today.
Even among teenagers, even among teenagers, greater environment.
But these are not real. They're fake. They're about obtaining and securing attention. These are covert narcissists. They're virtue signaling. It's all fake. They are. They lack sense and real purpose. Yes.
It includes feminism, includes the current iteration of feminism. It includes definitely me too. It includes the far right. Vocalism. It includes many, many isms.
Yes, it's yes, I agree with you, Sam.
But nevertheless, we can people can go to therapy. Nevertheless, people can.
Many people can reflect, meditate, transform, be more and more aware so that not to be an easy prey of that victimhood, which is a wonderful illusion sometimes.
I'm not quite sure where you derive your optimism from, but it sounds quite delusional and fantastic. I'm sorry.
It's another fantasy. It's a kind of fantasy. I'm sorry. I'm thinking with you like in a tennis I'm just saying you sound like someone who is seriously traumatized by the current state of affairs in the world and is retreated into a fantasy defense.
It says I call it malignant optimism, by the way, the fantasy defense that says, well, there's still hope we can still do something. We can still change things and so on.
Of course, that all these possibilities of apocalypse you referred are scary, but I also know that the crucifixion and the resurrection and life is enough of a crucifixion.
As many deaths and rebirths that offers to us, but it's a way out. It's a solution.
I agree with you. We need to be crucified. Absolutely. That's what I'm saying. We need to be crucified.
Nothing short of crucifixion will lead to resurrection. That's precisely what I'm saying. I agree.
But that's not a very optimistic view, is it?
Nobody happened. It happened to me a couple of times in this lifetime. It happened to you. It happens. We have to go through very painful transformations.
There is no crucifixion. Right. And what happened in my life is that I reborn better. I mean, more light and with the well, with with new energy and vitality most of the times, not immediately, but in the process.
But I agree. There's no debate. I think collectively we should go through a collective crucifixion.
I call it the apocalypse. I, crucifixion is acceptable to me. If this is your metaphor, then I comply.
Precipitation. We need to go through crucifixion.
Just to use one that is closer to my first tradition, which is Christian.
But yes, Sam, you spoke about your honest expectations and fears and hopes for this, not only for this conflict, but for what the world is facing now.
Any last thoughts you would like to add to this talk today, Sam, regarding this topic?
You are Israeli, by the way. You are from Israel. Is your family well?
Yeah, as far as I know, I can't get in touch with many of them. Communication is very disruptive in Israel right now. But as far as I know, some of them are well.
So you would like my thoughts about this particular conflict or?
In general, because we have always to look at the world also because these are symptoms of our own world. These are big symptoms of our own world.
What's going on around? Lack of purpose, lack of sense, lack of meaning, lack of hope.
Palestine or Israel, whatever you want to call it, this patch of land has always been the harbinger and the toxin, toxin with the sea, the warning bell of megatrends.
The Roman Empire, about one third of the Roman army was in Judea trying to suppress a rebellion. It took the Roman army four years.
Rome, the empire that stretched from Afghanistan to the United Kingdom, today's United Kingdom, Britain at the time, Rome thought that it's worthwhile to use one third of its army in Judea, which is, as I said, the size of New Jersey, because it is the fault line.
It is the fault line. There are many fault lines in the world, of course.
Tectonic plates of civilization, as Huntington called it, the clash of civilizations.
There are many tectonic plates and many fault lines, but there's none like Palestine. Palestine, none, absolutely none, not Ukraine, not, I mean, forget all this.
Palestine, Biden made a trip to Palestine one week after the conflict started. It took him a few months, more than a year, to visit Ukraine.
Why? Because Palestine is a hundred times more important than Ukraine. Why? Because Palestine is where everything meets.
It's a meeting spot, like in an airport, and where all the tectonic plates clash and all fault lines converge.
For example, the state of Israel is a buffer between the Sunni world, which starts in Gaza, ironically, and the Shia world, which is essentially Iran and so on.
Shia and Sunnah in Islam are two major camps. Sunnah is much bigger than Shia, but still, they're two major camps, fighting over the soul of Islam, the future of Islam, and the direction and interpretation of Islam.
Where do they meet? They don't meet in Iraq. They don't meet in Turkey. They meet in Israel.
If you look at the map, Shia on the north, Sunnah in the south. So, it's one example. Another example.
NATO, Russia, even China, they all converge on this area, the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East.
And in the Middle East, the key, the pivot, is definitely Israel, geographically, if not spiritually, and if not.
So, it is a war by proxy between East and West that has always been fought on the territory of Israel.
Next, religion, Christianity, Judaism, Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, they all converge not in Saudi Arabia. There's nothing meaningful in Saudi Arabia as far as Christians or Jews. But in Israel, there are numerous meaningful sacred sites and so on and so forth.
So, it's also a clash between religions. Above all, it's a clash between civilizations and Weltanshaugen worldviews.
It's a clash between enlightenment and religiosity. Not religion, religiosity. It's a clash between rigid, uncompromising fundamentalism and flexible, moral relativism.
It's a clash between West in terms of civilization, Western civilization and Eastern civilization.
And it's a clash between past orientation and future orientation.
Now, this is where the war between all these axes is going to take place, or is taking place there.
And this is why the conflict there cannot be solved via political negotiations.
The mistake, I think, of the West and everyone else, they've been trying to tackle the political dimension as if this were the conflict between the two constituents of Belgium.
It's not the same. The solution there needs to go much, much deeper and needs to involve philosophers.
I'm kidding you're not. In the negotiations, we need philosophers. We need psychologists. We need theologians. We need a whole university there to tackle the conflict.
And yet, who are we sending? Secretaries of state and all kinds of third-rate diplomas.
That is a hope and it is not delusion as far as I know.
And that's what I also meant when I talked about a revolution.
And the three religions that are patriarchal, I mean, in terms of their substitute to the goddess, the mother goddess, to a father god, Islam and Judaism and Christianity, maybe they should recover the highest value to go to the table of negotiations as well, because there has to be a highest value, which is life, above everything and everything and all.
I hope we can remember this life is the highest value.
And for future orientation, as I thought, I heard you before, our young generation has to be really inciting to their own future, because if now the United Nations and the UN and the United States, they are throwing millions to help in the world.
Why didn't they give those millions in peace? They actually did. The Palestinians received 40 billion, billion, not million, dollars between 1994 and 2020.
But corrupt elites in the Palestinian people stole all this money. This is 40 billion.
By the way, 30 billion out of the 40 billion were given by non-Muslims. So they tried. They tried to solve the problem with money. They tried to solve the problem with diplomacy.
The problem there is not economic mostly, is not even nationalistic mostly. The problem there is a clash of worldviews, a clash of psychology, a clash of theology.
It's a philosophical battle. It's a battle of philosophies. And it can be solved only by philosophers in the Platonians, philosophy kings.
I agree with you, Sam. I was living one and a half years in Africa. I traveled to several countries in Africa. And I would say I saw pretty much the same injections of millions to those countries.
And people are starving. And I would say countries with immense resources, much more than in Europe.
You mentioned life as the ultimate value. Something malignant has happened to religions. They have become death cults.
For example, Judaism, in its transformation into nationality and a culture, not only a religion, Judaism is elevating and glorifying suicide.
Do you know that every Jewish soldier has to go, has to visit Masada? It's a place where Jewish fighters committed suicide, collective suicide. They killed their families and then they killed themselves. Every soldier has to go there and take an oath.
Why there? We have so many other sites that they could have visited, but they are taken there because of the suicide pact.
Judaism glorifies death in many ways. And of course Islam glorifies death, the concept of Shahada, the concept of the Shahid, the martyr who gives his life for the greater good.
Religions became death cults because the world has shifted its emphasis from human beings to material objects. A material object doesn't have to be a car or a smartphone. A country, a physical country, is a material object.
If you're willing to die for a river, for a mountain, for a hill, you're a materialist.
It doesn't matter if this is cloaked in nationalism. You're a materialist. You're fighting for something material.
When we transitioned from spiritualism, which lasted well into the 16th century, when we transitioned from spiritualism to materialism, which I blame Protestantism for, at that minute religions became death cults because when you are emotionally invested in physical objects, you venerate death. Physical objects can never be a mind. You venerate death.
We use forced labor and child labor to produce smartphones. That means we value smartphones more than workers in China who produce them. We kill people for oil. So we definitely have a preference for material goods over human beings.
The thing is that we lie to ourselves. We say, "Yeah, material goods is my laptop and my smartphone and my television and my refrigerator. That's material goods." No! Material goods is the territory of your country. That's also material.
The thing is that the fact is, the truth is, that nothing physical is worth dying for. Period. Nothing physical is more important than human life. Nothing. Not a country, not a device, not the economy. Nothing is worth dying for.
Not an ideology as well. Yes, along these, I would say, modern centuries, we grow on fearing also paradoxically.
The more life lost is sacred, meaning, I would say. We also fear death. These are death cults in a way, yes, because they are killing us.
In a way, we are also much more afraid of death than when we were connected to the seasons in another way, because we knew that after winter, spring would come again, maybe in another form. It would be, I would say, a different flow of affairs inside of us.
So, I know that your time is almost... No, don't worry about my time. It's good that you said they're killing us, because we think that the people in Gaza are in danger. The people in the negative desert about in Gaza are in danger. Maybe the Israelis are in danger. We don't realize. We are being assassinated every day. Every day, each and every one of us is being assassinated through, for example, air pollution, through global warming. This is a mass assassination thing. It's a death cult in the sense that it offers human sacrifice to a god or a divinity, which is material.
That's all. And we are all being sacrificed, not only the people of Gaza. Their death is much more visible and much faster, but we are all dying.
Absolutely, son. And that responsible, responsibleizes us much more. And you mentioned earlier that maybe I was kind of traumatized.
Yes, I know. This is a one and a half year in Africa, seeing so many people growing in rage, growing in fear, in violence, growing in being in hunger, women being violated, others. Maybe I am traumatized because it's very traumatized by the unfairness of it all. I was economic advisor to President Momo. President Momo was the general who took over Sierra Leone and started the civil war there. I was there those two years when the civil war started. Under General Momo, I was his advisor. I have seen things there. I've lived in Africa for four years. I know Africa well. Western Africa. Well, so I have seen these things, of course, but I've also lived in East Europe during the transition from communism. I lived in Russia for six years. I have seen humanity at its worst. And I've seen the tidal wave of narcissism and entitlement and grandiosity and victimhood. I've seen it all coming. I've been warning against it for three decades now. And maybe crucifixion is not such a bad thing after all. If resurrection is guaranteed in three years or three decades, three days or three decades, maybe.
Sam, I have a granddaughter. She's Maya. She's five years old and I have to do my best to honor her.
And when I say her, I would say all children because when you have children and grandchildren, all of the others become ours.
So this from from here today, what I feel when I leave, you know, it's more responsibility, much more responsibility. I've seen yes to a crucifixion to my in my circumstances, what needs to to to go, you know, doing in my circumstances, whatever I can, what is possible to me each day.
That is what I bring to me with me. And this is exactly why people are atomized. That is why they broke apart from each other. They lost faith in the ability to have any influence on larger processes. They say, I'm going to take care of myself. I'm going to take care of my immediate family. I'm going to make a difference in my life. But I don't believe in my capacity to have any effect outside my life or beyond my life. I'm not criticizing you. I think I think if every atom behaves properly, then the molecule would be OK.
Yes, because I take care of my own what I mean needs to die. Yes. My rage, my bad rage, not my good rage and and and and all my wounding what have to be transformed.
That's what I think, because I am responsible for that so that maybe I can do something better with the others.
And I know that we influence a lot each other. I believe so. You influence so many people. We people that are listening to us, people that are in our people that come to my consultations, my sessions, my consultations, my we influence people, of course.
I think we were exposed to three models.
The first model was collectivism. The second model was individualism. And the third model was communitarians, communities.
And we tried communities. And then because of the numbers, because we are too many, then we transitioned to collectivism.
And collectivism was a really seriously bad idea. Communism was collectivist. Mao's China was collectivist.
I mean, hundreds of millions of people literally died because of collective.
So we said, oh, forget collectivism. We're going to become individuals. We're going to act as atoms. We're not going to interact with each other. We're not going to have common agendas. We're going to do.
And then but this is not the solution, of course. Collectivism is not a solution.
Malignant individualism is not a solution. Communities are the solution.
I'm speaking about individuation, which is much different than individuation. That is the process.
And I would ask you to to speak forward that what you have just told, please bring to the table of negotiations, philosophers, psychoanalysts, psychologists, people from the academia, bring them. That is, I would say, an important key.
And it is important right here, right now in this very moment.
Sam, whenever you come to Portugal, please let me know, because I would love to meet you in person.
And I want to thank you very much for this wonderful interview.
We have many food for thought and to to feel within my own heart, in my own meditations and reflections.
And I would like to also end with with my prayers because I believe in good thoughts and good intentions and and and in the prayers for everybody.
And in this moment, especially for those who need most that empathy that I would say love.
It's it's important. It's very, very, very important.
So thank you. Many blessings to you as well.