Right at the beginning of the program, I said that something happening in a far-flung place, you're fooling yourself if you think, oh, it doesn't affect me here, I'm fine. It reverberates around the planet in many different ways. It could be amongst your colleagues or your friends or yourself or your, you know, in a thousand different ways.
Joining me now as somebody, as you watch or listen to this show, you know, is a very prized guest of mine and I always, I don't underestimate how lucky we are to have him contribute.
Sam Vaknin joins me now. Sam, as a psychologist with a brilliant world view, as someone who's, you know, as Jewish yourself, but I love the way that you look at the world through your eyes.
And I think I just touched upon, you know, and I've touched upon it throughout the program.
This whole thing about, that's just the news, it's got nothing to do with me. And forgetting it impacts very, very deeply for many people. And in all sorts of ways for the rest of us and I did that one of the things that I wanted to do throughout today show why I'm so glad that we've got you is to just alert people to that so they don't blunder into it.
Talk me through for let's start with Jewish people as well, you know, and the way people think they're just one lot of people who all believe the same thing. I mean, you know, and this is, you know, and the us and them thing.
But, you know, also it's the Jewish New Year as well. And there's a whole lot of feelings going on at the moment, isn't there?
Yes, Shanat Tovah, Rosh Hashanah, which means in Hebrew a happy new year.
The Jewish people is accustomed to ups and downs and persecution and exile and warfare. Jews have been warriors throughout the ages actually, well into the time of Jesus Christ. And then they've been exiled by the Romans and they became immigrants.
The first anti-immigrant movement in the world is anti-Semitism, because Jews have become immigrants in dozens of countries and territories and they have been rejected by the host or the would-be hosts.
And so they have learned to assimilate the outside point of view. And they reacted to it in a variety of ways.
They tried to assimilate. They tried to isolate themselves. They became avoidant. They tried to have a state of their own, normalize themselves. So they didn't become normal. They would be accepted. It's all about being accepted. The Jews yearn for acceptance.
And yet it keeps eluding them and so in Israel which is a fascinating experiment in its own right in Israel the population reacted, the Jewish population reacted in two ways denial and fantasy.
Denial means that the Israelis pretended, lied to themselves, that the occupation is something they can manage and handle, would not corrupt them, would not undermine the very foundations of the Jewish state as a just and democratic state.
So there's been a lot of denial going on there.
And another part of the nation engaged in fantasy, the fantasy that, you know, at the flick of a button, there could be peace and coexistence, and everyone would be smiling and happy and so on so forth, ignoring 140 years of strife, mutual massacres, and worse.
October 7th was a wake-up call for both sides of the equation, for the denialists and for the fantasies.
The fantasies have learned that there is an accumulation of rage, resentment on the Palestinian side. Much of it justified, I must say.
And the denials have learned the limitations of power as a tool for managing one's affairs and one's relationships and guaranteeing one's future.
What has been taken away from the Israeli nation on October 7th was a sense of safety. Now no one feels safe, not Palestinians, not Israelis, not Lebanese, not I think even Iranians.
And you're right that if anyone is deluding himself that this is a limited regional skirmish, then, you know, that's entirely untrue. This would easily spill over into horrendous scenarios, which, you know.
And so it's a trauma. It's a trauma to everyone involved.
And the thing is this, our predecessors have been exposed to news about traumatic events, but in a lifetime, you would have been exposed to two, three such news.
And today, since the age of television, we are inundated with traumatic and traumatizing images, inundated. We're easily exposed daily to hundreds of images and bits of information, which would have utterly destabilized and traumatized our ancestors, and that's daily.
So we reacted in one of two ways.
We become desensitized. There's compassion fatigue. We no longer care. We convert the whole thing into a kind of video game.
And the other type of reaction is we become activists and we try to make the world a better place.
And then we come across our own limitations and the very fact that power resides in the hands of the very few elites, oligarchs, politicians and so on so forth.
That's actually the simple folk, simple men and women. There's very little you can do and that in itself is traumatizing.
One of the things that Thahir Starma said, he wrote a piece in the Times and he made the point of there's a very real risk and I think it's probably already happened because we talked about discrimination in the workplace going up for Jewish and Muslim people, etc.
Is that people use whatever trauma is happening. They feel it's their time to shine, to be anti, to be, you know, finally I can hate in the open if I couch it in the right language and that brings anything happening anywhere in the world to our very doorsteps doesn't it because it can be our colleague the person up the, the person in the next town, who decides to enact, you know, I'm free to be hateful and you represent the people I want to be hateful towards.
What traumatic events, even far away traumatic events, the very exposure to traumatic images, traumatic imagery, traumatic sounds, traumatic traumatizing interviews and so on.
What trauma does, even vicariously, even by proxy, even remotely, what trauma does, it takes away your belief in the essential goodness of people, and it takes away your belief in the essential goodness of people and it takes away your belief that the world is a just structured and orderly place not a hostile and indifferent one.
So then you sit back and those are unconscious processes and you say well people are not essentially good, they're essentially evil. And the world is an unsafe place, unpredictable, capricious, arbitrary, dangerous, full of risks, lurking in the woods.
And so if you combine these two beliefs that people are malevolent, evil, conspiring, self-interested, narcissistic, perhaps, psychopathic maybe, and that the world is a place of peril and menace. If you combine these two, this triggers in you the survival instinct.
You want to fight back.
And so now the next question is, who is the enemy? You need to identify an enemy to restore your sense of safety, to restore some semblance of order and structure and justice into a universe that has been challenged by those traumatizing events.
So you seek, you seek, you are looking for an abuser, an enemy, a foe.
And then anyone would do. Anyone would do.
Your neighbor might become an enemy. A co-religionist might become an enemy. Anyone would do.
And then at that stage, you externalize aggression. You try to eliminate the perceived source of threat.
What I'm trying to say is that trauma triggers a chain reaction, which is highly predictable, has been described in literature time and again, is ineluctable.
In other words, there's no alternative. The chain reaction is one and only. And it leaves inexorably from exposure to trauma to traumatizing others.
What we do, we project the trauma. We have been traumatized, so we want to traumatize others.
By traumatizing others, we regain control and mastery over a life that seemed for a while to be random and terrified and so.
So hatred, envy and rage, they're ways of asserting or reasserting control over an environment that is perceived to be out of control.
It's a sad note to end on, but Sam, you know, I hope people listen, have listened to what you've said and recognize that within themselves because the one thing we do have some control about is what we do with our feelings and not as Sam so brilliantly said that we don't take our trauma and visit it upon somebody else instead of dealing it with it ourselves.
That's Sam Vaknin there, as I said very, I love having him on the show.
That's it for today.
Let me say a quick thank you to Ila Lonesse, Carla Batesis, Jack Thubbin, Faith Eden, Cammy Lamont Brown.
Because next up is Mark Sagan's the wonderful Saturday, Sunday night. I've got my days right with Mark Sagan's.
Mark, got to come a minute to tell me what's coming up.
I'm sorry I've eaten into the hand, David. But, you know, it's an conversation.
No, no, don't worry about that. Should any further things happen, of course, in the Middle East, we'll be bringing you the very latest news on all of the...