The Taproot Podcast - On the Psychology, Shadow, and Projection of Politics with Dr. Peter T Dunlap

Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm Joel Blackstock and I'm here with Peter Dunlap or Peter T. Dunlap as your website says, who is a clinical psychologist also doing research and philosophy in the area of community transformation and spiritual leadership. So you're another Pacifica grad that we found. Did I miss anything or say any of that wrong? Let's see. Well, you used some words to describe me. I don't know that I would use, but I kind of liked them anyhow. And did you- Well, it's okay if other people call you a philosopher, but if you call yourself a philosopher, that's where you kind of walk. That's my rule of thumb.

Starting point is 00:00:51 I do have a degree in philosophy, and I have stuck with the practice of study. So who knows? I think that'll be for other philosophers to decide. It's okay for me to do it, but unless you want to kind of have like a neck beard and some sort of strange you know antiquated antiquated hat and i don't know i would have had a beard david tasey has a quote in one of his books where he's talking about one of the students he's like talking about different archetypes and he was like he was one of those people who uh spoke with a strange accent who he didn't come by honestly and would wear you know red leather and robes and you know when i would

Starting point is 00:01:31 speak in class he would rub his beard and and like sigh deeply and earnestly it's just like you just have this palpable image of this person who's like well i'm a philosopher or a powerful magus or you know whatever is going on on that in that guy's mind that you're in your uh you know philosophy class with and in college i remember those type and i was uh both intimidated and envious at the same time yeah there is something that's kind of enviable about that kind of confidence of just doing yourself i mean not no shade it's just uh no no there was one um, when I was in school, there was like a guy, you know, that always like was trying to return to tradition or whatever. Of course, the traditions were not ones that he came from and he had, you know, like thick, uh, leather pads on his, you know, just looked like he had approximation of, he was dressing like an approximation of what he thought people did at Oxford in the 1700s or something and um he uh it was kind of like a rainy day it's funny something and he was like oh the good English weather and it was like you're from Ohio like you know I'm from Northern California you know um other than that being harder to be any further off the beaten path with what is happening in the world today.

Starting point is 00:02:49 California is kind of its own thing. We are kind of our own thing. Yeah, exactly. Did you call me a Pacifica graduate? Didn't you? Or alumni? Did I say graduate? I'm sorry. I had gone through a lot of times when we're trying to find interesting people, you'll find a certain research institute or something that if somebody is a member, then their work is going to be interesting. So you're trying to find good guests. But the Pacific alums was, I think, how I found you. Or not alums, but faculty was how I found you. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:23 And I started to read about your work. I'm the co-chair of the clinical psychology program at Pacifica. And we have a good time exploring a bunch of stuff. And maybe we'll get into that some just now. Yeah, I'd love to hear about your work. Oh, goodness. Well, my work is as a clinical psychologist where I work a lot with couples and individuals. I help young adults find their calling and I'm really interested in the way in which we've problematically developed our

Starting point is 00:04:01 thinking to the neglect of our feeling and so I do a whole lot of work helping people become rational by Acting to feeling that feeling it We are rationality is dependent on really having access to a normal range of feeling That's one of the makes us able to you know, move around in the world and not bump into things too badly. Yeah, a lot of times when I am working with supervision candidates or doing a consultation group, you've got therapists that somebody says something that, you know, clearly, you know, is the voice of an inner critic or, you know, an oppressive voice in society or something that's

Starting point is 00:04:39 not theirs, but they're doubling down on some position that's unhealthy. And the nature of the more cognitive therapist is to get into a debate club with them. And it's like, no, no, no, that feeling is not coming from their brain. It's coming from their heart. If you just push that into their body and make them sit with that for a few minutes, they're going to realize that they don't believe that. And then it feels icky. You know, if you debate them, then they're even more cut off from their body. They're even more dug in. You'll never get it. You know, just, just take people at face value that they believe what they believe, even when you know that that didn't really healthy or their body, they're even more dug in. You'll never get it. Just take people at face value that they believe what they believe, even when you know that that isn't really healthy or not

Starting point is 00:05:09 what they believe. And if you can push them into the psychosoma, their body will tell them something that you're not going to get to through their ears and their brain. I like that strategy. There's some faith that it's really possible to have in each person and to help their best self come forward with just some kind loving very very direct yeah and so what you're you do the clinical psychology program there um which pacifica is one of the i mean i think one of the last you know deaf psychology you know uh only universities around uh it's an interesting place and then you also have some other work you've done outside of that do you mind talking about any of the works that you do with kind of politics transformation creativity

Starting point is 00:05:52 community well I come from a political family and my my dad was a very committed liberal progressive back in the 60s and 70s I saw your George McGovern button and 60s headband. That was pretty cool. The picture of you in braces. You still got him? Yeah, I think this is a different one than in the picture you're referencing. Okay, yeah. In my junior high school, I started a George McGovern for President Club

Starting point is 00:06:22 and got in a little bit of trouble for it from the principal. He was rather friendly and he knew my family and my dad and he let me off the hook. But he said, you know, because you started the George McGovern for president club, some mother is knocking on my door and she wants to start the John Birch for President Club. And that was a different time back in 72. But since then, I just really see the way we liberals and progressives have really not known how to bend the narrative of our time. And we've had a lot of success, but right now we've had so much failure since really since reagan that since uh his narrative about everybody for themselves has taken over and um we we live in desperate times in need of some larger narrative a year ago president obama asked us

Starting point is 00:07:22 what common story could we tell that would hold us all together and move us to the future? And I think that's the work of depth psychologists is to learn how to tell the stories that would hold us together. Well, historically, you know, that part of the alchemical process of letting go, you know, dissolving something to get to the, that isn't working anymore to get to the true, you know, golden side is not something that isn't working anymore to get to the true golden side is not something that works very well politically, especially in America. I mean, crisis of confidence speech is what thought of as the biggest failure politically. And it's really just Carter being like, hey, I don't know if our mythology works anymore. Maybe it does, but could we all sit and wonder

Starting point is 00:08:00 if we need a new myth? And no, man, we won't. Stop. Stop making me feel stuff. When you sit and wait for a new myth, I think what happens is people get afraid because they don't want to hang out in between stories. And so that's when authoritarianism uh becomes welcomed we we welcome the aggressive uh male dominated type of authoritarianism that um really controls people from the outside and so uh in order to let some new myth arise um we actually have to remember the value of caring for one another and putting each other first. And that comes with a level of sacrifice and duty that none of us quite know how to do well enough right now. And I think that's on all of us. Well, and I think you're saying it causes anxiety to have to wait for the new myth. You're also telling people that, you know,

Starting point is 00:09:06 what they're identified with in the past is not right, you know, which can be a huge opportunity for growth. It's hard to tell that to a patient in a room, you know, you have to creep around that for several sessions and maybe use a metaphor or a story or, you know, in order to make that something that the psyche can tolerate that isn't threatening and overwhelming and re-traumatizing, but it's the person can see it as an opportunity for growth. I don't know how you do that with

Starting point is 00:09:28 8 million people. I barely know how to do that with one person in a therapy room. See, this is where groups become so very important and interesting because there are social change organizations that are working on this every day, all day long. There are hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of really good people working on this from the left and the right. There's an organization called Braver Angels that has chapters around the country that sit people who are left-leaning

Starting point is 00:09:57 and people who are right-leaning down at the same table and help them learn to talk to one another. And I think there's an opportunity for psychotherapists to get more involved such that that storytelling that we do know how to help one person at a time tell becomes more accessible in larger group contexts. I think that's part of the vision, the original vision of psychology by our founders. They really wanted to see psychology become the narrative used, the means used in every institution, whether they be political or religious or humanitarian.

Starting point is 00:10:40 Just by sitting down and talking to one another and finding our shared humanity, it really becomes possible to bridge the differences. But it's going to take something at a more organized level, given the level of polarization that's dominating us now. Well, but what you just said is that you want people wanting to see psychology become kind of the future and outside of somebody that, you know, has a very literal belief in, um, some sort of religious practice or something they'd like to see society centered around. I think most people would agree with you on what that is, where most people would fight is when you start to say what psychology is, because on an individual level, psychology is the class that I had to sit through where they said, all right, you know, it ego, but that's outdated. Jung cognitive, you know, collective unconscious, if you get him at all, and then here's the behaviorists and then here's the cognitive therapy. And it's not that threatening of a concept, but when you get to a society level

Starting point is 00:11:33 and you start talking about psychology, you're talking about who I am and how I think, which is not something that most people want to know, or they would fight kind of with you about how people work and what the nature is, especially when you're of humanity is especially when you're right. And, and so you, you get, you know, you're talking about Reagan and Thatcher coming in and that, that kind of a period of austerity and, um, you know, disbanding community resources to focus more on kind of, you know, national, um, you know, personal freedom and national, um, uh mythology, essentially. But one of the things that did is it pushed psychotherapy incredibly cognitive

Starting point is 00:12:10 in a way that it still has not recovered from. I think you're right. I mean, and for two reasons, I think. I mean, one, it was just appealing to that myth to say what I think is all that I am. There's nothing else to me. I really am the simple. I need to get the line needs to go up. I need to have a bigger army. I need to have a bigger bank account. We are all just what we

Starting point is 00:12:27 do, not what we feel. And so hierarchical thinking, and, you know, that's a very cognitive construct. But then also, you just had an explosion of corporations that kind of started to corporatize academia and healthcare in a way that those entities have not recovered from. And cognitive therapy is very useful. If my insurance company is going to say you've got six sessions to cure PTSD or else you need to just take medicine, cognitive therapy is great there because there's not insight and growth and these bigger things that are harder to turn into a number. I don't know. I'd be interested in what you think. Yeah, well, you're working on several things at once, and let me see if I can help us untangle them. Certainly, cognitive behavioral therapy has its place. There's a process going on over the course of the 20th century that we could describe as the democratization of access to psychotherapy that

Starting point is 00:13:21 was once only available to the rich is now becoming increasingly available to more people. So be it. The bad news is cognitive behavioral therapy really narrows down what it means to be human problematically from what I can tell. Now somebody sitting here from a cognitive behavioral perspective, they and I would have an argument about that, and that's fine. It's good to have open debate about that. Well, some of them, they say they're doing CBT, but when you talk to them

Starting point is 00:13:54 about what they're doing, it becomes very clearly that they've just realized how to use the CBT framework language to turn into relational therapy or to turn into psychodynamic therapy or even more of a Jungian you know self-discovered process when you listen to what they're actually doing in the room it isn't what Beck says to do in the CBT book you know that's what the space therapy is starting to uncover that actual what we're learning from science what we're learning from the research into psychotherapy uh is that that it is two human beings sitting together re-establishing the primary attachment links that make growth and being

Starting point is 00:14:33 open to learning possible and it's all based on relationship now what does that imply out there in the political um i i think what it implies is some need to go very slowly and not imagine that we're going to suddenly get people that are extremely different from us to the table. I don't think we need to create one big tent that everybody's comfortable in. I think that we need to rebuild things a little more slowly than that. And each one of us will do that differently. You're doing it in the way by holding these podcasts. I do it by working with people on the political left who really are the ones holding my community together. They're the ones out there finding candidates to run for the city council and

Starting point is 00:15:25 raising money and putting up yard signs. And so I like to sit down with them and find out how they're doing, what level of distress they're experiencing. Are they lonely? What would happen if they got attention from each other and not only held meetings that were based on who's going to put the yard signs up next week, but really paid attention to each other in a creative and more psychologically focused manner. And in that way, psychology is not just psychotherapy. Whether you go behavioral or cognitive development or emotion focused or psychodynamic all of those are psychology but psychology is much bigger than psychotherapy it's much bigger yeah it has to do with how we treat one another and that we can learn to apply psychology in our social change organizations to make them more of a

Starting point is 00:16:23 home to make them a place where people can go to experience belonging and connection and to have that from the center of activity that enables us to strengthen our social change organizations and bring about more accelerated change, specifically around climate change. I think that is the primary crisis that's driving all of the other horrors of our time. And I think one of the ironies with climate change is that we evolved to understand fairly simple systems. I mean, some of the smartest people can understand kind of maybe five layers of cause and effect in a complex system. Most people see one or two, you know, I felt bad when

Starting point is 00:17:03 I was in that store. Well, you got a phone call that was bad. Now I'm just going to go ahead and associate that whole thing with feeling not good. You know, we don't, we don't really want to interrogate those systems and pick them apart. It just, it was evolutionarily beneficial for us to not have, I mean, we weren't supposed to be supercomputers modeling incredibly complicated, you know, global phenomenon, or just kind of supposed to be like, red berry tastes good. Green berry makes you die. Don't do that. And now we're sitting with something that is so infinitely complicated, by the time everybody can readily apparently see the problem, it maybe is too late. Well, it is too late. Now, we don't know how bad it'll get. We don't know how far the environment will deteriorate. We don't know what level of social organization we will maintain. Let's cross our fingers and hope we

Starting point is 00:17:54 really do have a chance. But what you're saying is really important. And we don't need suddenly people to handle much greater complexity. We need a story that holds all people together. We need a story that holds people together, regardless of how much complexity they are comfortable with. A good story that's true. The story has to be true. It can't go around blaming other people for things they didn't do. So if history feels good, Peter, what are you trying to tell me here?

Starting point is 00:18:27 Well, we want a story that creates space for everybody to belong. But I'm good and they're bad. So you're kind of making me feel not special. You know, it's okay if you really need to blame people.

Starting point is 00:18:41 I'll say, you know, you must be really mad tell me more. I think good storytelling does that. People used to sit around the campfire or in their village centers, and they used to dance and sing in their churches. They would listen to the minister, and they would all have a place where they had a deep experience that they belonged to that group, and it would be filled with feeling. And that's something that we can recreate through the right type of community leadership that has upstanding in psychological awareness. That's why I was wondering what you'd think of those Adam Curtis movies. I don't know if you got a chance to look at him.

Starting point is 00:19:41 But I mean, what I've seen in my lifetime and i mean i don't go back to the 70s you know i'm born in 87 but what i've seen is and it kind of switches i mean the left and the right go through a period of um you know kind of being more uh populous but there's what in america what i've been forced to pick between in every election is a group of people that's telling a story that is compelling and interesting, but also a lie that isn't helpful and a misdiagnosis of the problem, you know, usually scapegoating a group of people. And then you have another party that is refusing to tell any story at all. Like they're telling me to go to a website and memorize facts, or this is just right, or you should do it and it's like

Starting point is 00:20:32 please stop like and can i mean that's what you want to sit these people down and be like look the thing they teach you the first day of law school is that it doesn't matter what's true what is relevant is can you tell a story that the jury it makes sense to them and so you know when i'm in college and and there all this, the beginning of, you know, you start to hook, you know, old, basically old people into email for the first time and Obama's getting to be president and there's these interesting, you know, artifacts coming out of that. But it's like, you know, when I'm sitting there and I'm, you know, 89 and I, you know, the rural electrification act brought a light to my house or whatever. And somebody'm, you know, 89 and I, you know, the Royal Electrification Act brought a light to my house or whatever. And somebody says, well, Obama is a Muslim hologram.

Starting point is 00:21:09 That's a compelling story to me. OK, we need another one, too. I don't think I'm not interested in upsetting people. If that's the story someone needs to believe, then God bless them. Really, truly. We only need to tell a story that brings a few people closer together. It won't take many. We need to tell a story. I think that's it. It's going to be a patchwork, like a quilt. It's going to be a community of small communities, not a giant community. Yes. It's not a big tent. We don't need a big tent. We're never going to get a big tent.

Starting point is 00:21:51 What we need is to bring enough people from the near right together with enough people from the near left, together with enough far lefties with medium lefties, wherever the breach is within the left, oppressives and liberals, whatever the breach is between the moderates, whatever, there's a current breach inside the Republican party. That's profound. It's just profound, the breach within the Republican party. And a part of me could say, you know, go ahead, you guys fight it out. I'm going to sit in the sidelines. But I really think that would be a mistake on my part. That breach within the Republican Party is a breach inside me. And there's some intense emotional pull toward the deepest form of closing boundaries around small groups because of how scared and angry those people are and that should

Starting point is 00:22:46 be respected and considered well i think they're scared and angry on you know kind of the liberal middle left too it's just they're scared and angry of a different thing i agree i mean i think the appeal of i mean i don't really think one i don't know i mean i think the appeal of like fox news is that like you know your cultural star is not waning it's not that like your your aging and your perspective is less relevant it's not that the world has changed since you were 13 it's just that the world is bad everyone's bad and you're good so just get really angry about this and this becomes this kind of addictive thing whereas it seems like cnn what they're saying is like oh look you know you don't need to change anything you don't need to change anything. You don't need to do anything different, you know, other than maybe vote.

Starting point is 00:23:27 But like this, just know that you're correct. You have the right opinion. You're looking down on the right people. And while you're looking down on the right people, you're on the right side of history and you're not going to be embarrassed and you're not going to look foolish. And that's kind of the itch that that scratches. So we know that systems close boundaries using stories. And we know that hate feels good. And the purpose of hate is to close boundaries around identity groups. We know all of that.

Starting point is 00:23:54 So those of us that are trying to create something post-ideological, that's where psychology comes in. Psychology is something that takes place in the clinic or the posh private practice office uh that's a psychology but psychology also applies where those where any narrowing of the truth can be addressed and my my focus is i want to address the narrowing of the truth that takes place within the political left. That's where I have placed the lever to move the world. I want the political left to have more tolerance for the truth. And we... That would be nice.

Starting point is 00:24:35 We on the left are not that good at the truth. We're not that good at science. We make all sorts of silly claims about how we're the ones that are devoted to science. And we're only really interested in the science we can cherry pick right off the low hanging fruit that already aligns with the ways we think. And what we need is a triple down commitment to a full range of science. And it will be very humbling because of the reasons you're listing around the way we tell ourselves stories that are arrogant where does that aversion to science not it's not even aversion it's like this ambivalent relationship that the kind of moderate you know middle left seems to have a

Starting point is 00:25:18 science now where it's like i mean they had a like i don't know if it was a campaign or something there's a bumper sticker where everybody had this i effing love science things and you follow their linkedin or their facebook profile just a little bit and when they're done posting about harry potter and and star wars they're yelling at somebody who posted a research study because it doesn't agree with their worldview well we live in really troubled times and so so it's so tempting to find fault. I love science. It does not mean I watched Neil deGrasse Tyson one time. I just don't know what that means.

Starting point is 00:25:57 I know. I know. But here's the thing. What you said earlier about levels of complexity really applies here. That when I am having a bad day, I'm going to be not as open to all of the complexities of what's true around me. One of them is going to get under my skin and I'm going to want to snap at my neighbor. or I'm going to drive too fast on the freeway and be pissed at somebody cutting me off, or I'm going to be a little bored by one of my clients instead of kind, patient, and empathic and direct. So I have real bad days and mostly I have pretty good days. And on the good days, then I don't get surprised by how hard it is to stay open to the full complexities of what's going on around us.

Starting point is 00:26:56 Someone like Rachel Maddow, who I assume still does television broadcasting, though I stopped watching her years ago. I haven't had a cable ever, so I'm watching her years ago. She has... I haven't had a cable ever, so I'm not really sure what the lineup looks like now. They seem to get canceled every other year now, so you got to refresh it. Whether it be her or a dozen others, there's just a way of cherry-picking the facts

Starting point is 00:27:19 and coming up with pretty pat arguments and then displaying contempt for anybody that doesn't go along with that storyline and i don't think people should indulge in contempt right now it's way too risky what but i mean serious question that's a little bit go ahead i'm sorry there's a delay i didn't mean to interrupt you at all. Please finish. Oh, that's okay. All I was saying was we need more humility. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:50 And there's nothing harder. Well, there's two questions that I've got there. One is a little bit more theoretical and then one's a little bit more practical. One, are you familiar with John Beebe, the Beebe model of the MBTI? John was on my dissertation committee. And I published a review of his book. And at first I didn't really get the MBI, the Myers-Briggs.

Starting point is 00:28:17 And I was kind of polite to John because of how much he had helped me. And then he caught on that I was only being polite. He nudged me and he said, well, Peter, you know, it's about consciousness. And I go, oh, because he knew I was interested in consciousness. So I started reading closely and studying and I started catching on. It's, it works. It's an excellent system for understanding why I lean this way and you lean that way, how we're different. Well, the BB model of the MBTI specifically tells you that you can use that individual psychology that is studying the inside of you to see how you're going to project that externally. And I think that because you can turn individual psychology or group psychology into a cosmology, basically,

Starting point is 00:29:05 that seems very useful for being able to understand society. Because like, for example, in the BB model, like I'm, you know, kind of a EI split, you know, I can split between EI and FJ, but every time I've ever taken it, you know, very strong NFJ, INFJ, ENFJ, you know, split, but 100% of my points are in intuition you know I'm just very bad at doing anything that's kind of detail oriented or or a rote memorization hierarchical I'll try and figure out how it works and you know whatever so it's like that gets me in trouble but that's what happens is you know I want to sit with a gray area of everything and look at these sides and whatever but my shadow type is going to be the

Starting point is 00:29:45 opposite of that so when i'm in crisis you know like when i'm starting the clinic and i'm working 17 hours a day and you know stuff's going wrong at home and stuff's going wrong at work and i just don't have any more bandwidth then i become extremely black and white and extremely you know judging you know thinking that and it's the opposite of my personality, but I think societies function the same way, you know? I mean, there's a reason that you have kind of a right hierarchical snapback at the end of every kind of, um, you know, introspective, you know, point in history, you know, the eighties come after the seventies for a reason, I think. I think that's right. And here's a way to open it up historically and

Starting point is 00:30:26 measure it in terms of hundreds of years. We have the enlightenment that differentiates thinking and sensory experience, and that leads to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Maybe that's a blessing, maybe it's a horror, depending on who you ask and when, certainly it's both. But then what ends up happening is people become so lopsided with thinking and sensing that they lose the moral bearing of feeling and they don't object to colonialism or raping peoples or killing native peoples. When Napoleon goes into Egypt in 1798, I think, and he gets a bunch of prisoners, the prisoners have dark skin and they're Egyptians. And normally what he'd do is he would repatriate prisoners if they were Austrian and white, but instead he mows them down, he butchers them. And so this is a underdeveloped moral function that is haunting us moderns.

Starting point is 00:31:37 And so us in depth psychology are trying to do something about that one person at a time in the clinic. And we have 30 years now into emotion-focused therapy and relational therapy and really using feeling in a creative and powerful way. And in that way, we're working for the whole Western civilization trying to rebalance its lopsided intellect. Now, as soon as you get into the political world, the left becomes utterly blind and indulges in that thinking analysis that you described earlier as going to facts and not telling stories. And so one of the things I do is I really try to help people on the political left reuse the therapy they've been in for their

Starting point is 00:32:26 private lives and bring that into their public way of engaging with one another so that we reconstitute feeling as a higher form of intelligence that we use socially. Now, that's something that we need to do to rebalance the typological imbalance that's been taking place for hundreds of years and it's possible to do an adept psychologist can lead the way well and i mean the second part of that practical question when you're talking about the news is like you know in a system can a system that is pretending to be objective because they put the two people that disagree about this thing and the root on either side of the screen and they fight, even though, well, actually there's these other truths all over here and you just pick these two people that

Starting point is 00:33:18 have one difference to pretend that the truth is on, you know, two inches to the left or right of the middle. But like when you have that system and you're you're taking and and every corporation has a because you know we used to say you work for the people if you're on the news the government pays for the news hour and you're not able to go pick a side and work for a corporation you have to be objective if you say something that's a lie you get in trouble and then reagan chips away at those because he kind of wants to tell some stories about iran contra and stuff and then clinton completely says you know you can a lie, you get in trouble. And then Reagan chips away at those because he kind of wants to tell some stories about Iran-Contra and stuff. And then Clinton completely says, you know, you can

Starting point is 00:33:49 actually own the news station, just go ahead and buy it. So, you know, you've got preparations that there's this whole cycle and you have the same general who's the four-star general in the military who now is sitting on the board of the Lockheed Martin company or, you know, whatever military contractor that goes on the news to say, well, they won't let us. We need to cut loose. We need these bigger bombs. Look at this product. Look what it can do basically to do advertising for a government contractor. And that's, I mean, there's a million different examples of that, but you have this kind of feedback loop of these companies that own an interest in each other, pretending that they're a news company

Starting point is 00:34:23 when they're really not. I mean, is there a way to do what you're saying at all under that system? I mean, is the answer just to turn it off and have a conversation with your church or your school or your employees instead of listening to this stuff? I like that idea. The scale that corporations now dominate, the way that the media and government and corporate, private, for-profit corporations, the way those three things are fused together is disastrous. It can't change its mission. I guess what I'm getting at is it cannot change its mission away from profit. You can make a really good point to it. you can have really good people in the organization you can you can basically like they're gonna expand within the limits of what you let them do within regulation but they they can't i mean i was remember as a kid there was like um i think it was nike but

Starting point is 00:35:18 there was like some big protest that happened on the lawn of the ceo about how they were making all of these um you know shoes for 10 cents an hour and child labor whatever of the CEO about how they're making all of these, you know, shoes for 10 cents an hour and child labor or whatever. And the CEO came out to the protesters and he was like, I agree with you. I don't want to do this. But if I do what you're saying, they'll fire me and they'll put another person there. I'm irrelevant. I'm a cog in this process.

Starting point is 00:35:38 What you need to do is make it illegal. Because if you don't make it illegal, the next guy will just come in here and do it. And if I do the right thing, I'll get fired. In order to make it illegal, there are hundreds of people working every day, maybe thousands, on what it takes to have ethical corporate organizations. And those people make slight improvements. I think we're living at a time where we've lost more ground than we've gained ground, but those things are hard to measure, and I would turn to the experts who are working on this, such as John Harrington, who has worked on ethical corporate investing with investments,

Starting point is 00:36:25 and I would ask him, are we making any headway? In the meantime, what I'm interested in is being able to bring about the political leadership who could really create the pressure on those larger institutional forms to make them more empathic toward all of humanity because corporations should really serve the human species and the ecosystem to make them just, sustainable, such that human beings get enough food to eat, that they have education, that they have a place in society where they belong, where there is ethical work for them to do. And these progressive values of mine are in the descent right now way too much. I'm going to assert my ideological values

Starting point is 00:37:22 and help the political left win more elections by getting the heck out of its head and into its heart and learning how to lead with feeling and story so we learn how to create enough cohesiveness on the left to win enough elections to get the political right to sit back down at the table to negotiate democracy's future rather than continuing to tear democracy apart. If we don't learn how to tell good, true stories, if we don't know- Or just stories at all. I haven't seen a story from the Democratic Party for a long time. I mean, but I think there is a tension between people who see themselves as kind of responsible or moderate or the adults in the room on the left and the people who can tell a story.

Starting point is 00:38:08 I mean, there's almost a mistrust of somebody who can intuitively read the room and connect with a group of people from, you know, the central what the Democratic Party is, which goes back to the 60s. I mean, it goes back to Vietnam and the Chicago 7 and a lot of those guys. I mean, I'm not trying to say that they, I'm not picking anybody, this is a psychology point about their campaign, it's not a political one, I'm not really publicly forward with my politics, but I mean, Obama basically used a lot of kind of empty things without committing to specific stuff, you know, but then when I watched Clinton's campaign, like, she would get up and there was no story, it was like she would negotiate with herself, she'd be like, well, somebody said we should do this, but also that's too far.

Starting point is 00:38:47 So what if whatever? And it's like, this is a campaign rally. And a lot of what you were told was, well, go to the website and read the data on the page about the proposed bill, which is not a narrative. It's not a story at all. I agree. I agree. And I'm working to do something about that. I'll be teaching a class next Friday to graduate students of depth psychology, and the story I'll be telling is of the history of humanity

Starting point is 00:39:14 and the way we have evolved successfully and our failures of evolution, Western civilization's successes and its failures, and how that leads us to this moment. And what are the opportunities of this moment? And the fact that we have the left, whether it be Obama or Biden or the Clintons or Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or dozens of dozens of other people who are successfully holding our democracy together, but they are problematically one-sided in terms of their intellect and they don't quite know how to embody the feeling level

Starting point is 00:39:58 and the intuition level to create the stories really does create a place at the table for the depth psychologist to step forward and into the role of helping. Now, Arianna Huffington in 2010 said, enough analysis. We need more to hear from more of the political pundit Carl Jung. Now, if that wasn't somebody pulling a chair out for us at the seat of cultural leadership, I don't know what was. The dilemma is I'm part of the international Jungian community, and as much as there are a few dozen of us trying to step into that seat, we don't quite know how to come out of our psychological story enough to get those people, the politicos,

Starting point is 00:40:47 to show up at our conferences. We depth psychologists are really ready to do therapy with the world, but the world has not shown up for its first session. And that's on us psychologists for not getting out into social change organizations and talking to the politicos doing the trench work where they are. That's on us. Well, I mean, and kind of what I was asking about that failure to tell a story and, you know, just some of the like examples I've seen of that is like, don't you think that there is an inferiority complex beneath living in your head that much, that there's a fear of being, well, I won't look serious or I won't look smart or I won't look presidential. Like if I show any intuition, if I show any authenticity, if I even say what I believe in a way that isn't, you know, put the word salad, then I'm going to get in trouble.

Starting point is 00:41:43 Let's do something about that. So back about 25 years ago, I did. Do you think that maybe that's wrong? I mean, what I'm asking about is a generation that's kind of older than me. I mean, you know, it's like, you know, those, do you see that trend, especially in the kind of liberal left, of, well, I have to. There's a reason for it. and we can do something about it. So let's do something about it. 25 years ago, I did some research and I got a bunch of folks that are activists and leaders from the political left and I sat them down and we talked about it.

Starting point is 00:42:19 And one of the things that came out is this prejudice against feeling. And one woman who was on the city council at the time spoke in the research circle about the way that she had been attacked at a public meeting and she had to go in the back room to cry because she couldn't dare show feeling in public. Well, I learned that 25 years ago and since then I've been helping community leaders and psychotherapists to reflect on that reality and to begin the work of doing something about it through training. We can train ourselves up. There are tens of thousands of good therapists around the country maybe a hundred thousand maybe a million i don't know and all of them could help community leaders develop their emotional intelligence and learn how to use it in public i call that the development of a very simple public emotional intelligence and once the left catches on to this, they will win more elections. And there are some politicos who are starting to do this more, but it's really hard.

Starting point is 00:43:35 People who are more right-identified identify with different values than those of us who are left-leaning. And the values they identify with are solid, important, good values. And those of us that are more liberal, the values we emphasize are different. And we serve a purpose and people on the right serve a purpose. And in a healthy democracy, the tension between the right and the left leads to good things. Now, our polarization has deteriorated the democratic process to the point where we are at risk for losing our democracy. And those of us on the left, I think we need to stop putting the right down in our overly simplified manner. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:44:36 And those of us on the left really do, as you've said, need to learn how to tell effective stories that really are motivating and moving. And there are some people on the left who are better at that than others. Well, and I think that Freud called it the narcissism of petty differences. But what you have a ton on the left is people fighting about semantics, about language, about aesthetics. And I don't like people fighting about aesthetics at all. I mean, there was just an eight-year period where people were yelling like, well, I think the president should have bad manners. I think the president should have good manners. And I was like, I care about how many people are starving. I care about how much healthcare exists. I care about what our planet looks like. I care about how much money is going to this and not that. You know, I don't really care if he's reading Emily Post or not. That was just me. I really like how you put that.

Starting point is 00:45:19 Well, I think it's an inevitable process if you take away all the levers of power and you say, okay, well, it's too far to do this because that alienates this part of the Big Ten Democratic Party. Well, it's too far to do that because that's not reasonable anymore. We have corporate control. It's not the 70s. So there's no there's no power that you have. What's left other than the way things look and the way they sound, you know, because as there's less and less things that we're allowed to expect the president to do or the party to do, then there's less and less. Political correctness is what is killing the left. of small differences is a result of not having a shared story that catalyzes our movement toward engaging the political right in a way that brings everybody back to the table to

Starting point is 00:46:16 negotiate our shared future. We need a story that is about the human species' shared future on earth that accounts for where we will be in seven generations. The fact that species are dying off, the fact that glaciers are falling into the ocean, the fact that some of our children aren't going to have children because they don't think it's ethical to bring children into the world right now. We got to have a story that accounts for all of that. I happen to think the origin of that story needs to be on the political left going post-ideological and really expanding its psychological range to stop demonizing, to withdraw its projections, and to go hear a more potent center on the left. But that's because that's where I

Starting point is 00:47:06 want to do my work. I'm sure there's equally important work to do on the right. Well, and some of, I mean, it's not, I'm not trying to punch left or right. I mean, what I'm saying, I think, more broadly is related to that is that I think that change begins at the local level. And then if you have healthier local communities and you begin to faster have a network of those communities, and we try and change all this stuff from the top down, like whoever's in charge of the whole system or the president's going to come in and change it. And they do have some power,

Starting point is 00:47:37 but I think that if you're going to make real progress in the direction that you're talking about, to do that without a community of just, you know, somebody online posting about it without any friends, without a church, without a secular organization, without, you know, a work community, without any kind of local community is something that just doesn't work. And we have forgotten that as we've become more digital, really. I agree with you. One of the things that is happening in my community, two friends of mine, John Crowley and Lou, I always have a hard time with his last name, and so now I'm embarrassed, but anyhow, Lou and John hold something called Petaluma Conversations at the local library.

Starting point is 00:48:26 And they show up with a handful of lay trainers. And they put a political issue on a card and set that card on a table. And then people from the community show up. They've been doing this for years. And they pick which issue, which table they want to sit at. And at each table, there's a trainer. And they take turns talking. And when one person talks for two or three minutes,

Starting point is 00:48:55 the next person reflects what they heard before they say their piece. It's profound. The inner telephone game. Yeah, well. It's profound. The inter-telephone game. Yeah, well, it's profound. So I don't get to stand up and say my opinions until I've demonstrated that I listened really closely to the last person who spoke. That's pretty brilliant.

Starting point is 00:49:22 It's brilliant. It truly is. Lou is also helping the local, he helped start the local Braver Angels organization chapter, and they bring red and blue citizens together and step them through highly psychologically disciplined practices of how to listen and how to communicate across the red-blue difference. And bless his heart for doing that. I don't think I have the stomach for that. And John is also part of an organization called Petaluma Tomorrow. No, Petaluma, Cool Petaluma, that got a million-dollar grant to help Petaluma lower its carbon footprint.

Starting point is 00:50:08 And they're going neighborhood by neighborhood and training volunteers in every neighborhood as to how to talk to their neighbor about what practices will lower each neighborhood's carbon footprint. And they're using neither John nor Lou are psychotherapists. Lou's a trained mediator and John's background is in computer engineering. And they have trained themselves in reflective listening practices and they're bringing those into their social change organizations. If there is a future, this is one of the ways it will unfold. Through those of us with psychological training, getting more active in our communities and helping our communities develop the tolerance, the patience and the humility that they need to work out these differences. And it is possible and it is happening right and there there was a a guy um who used to do in like the early 2000s all of this uh like i'm blanking on the name because he was he was a um like an activist and kind of a political artist but he he would uh go to these communities these small towns and talk about like climate

Starting point is 00:51:22 change and nuclear weapons and the amount of uh risk the amount of money. And, you know, he would kind of get shouted down. And so then he quit doing it and he would go back to the same towns and he thought the people would kind of recognize him and they didn't. And he would do a different project and be like, okay, look, you, this town has $4 million that it just gets, you know, this county, what do you do with it? Every year you get $4 million and they're like, Oh, build a school. We'll do this, whatever. And he would come back and be like, okay, that's great. But you already spent it. You can't build a school every year. What are you going to do with the $4 million next year? And they're like, well, I mean, we could do roads and he's like, okay, that's infrastructure. So that's gone too. You've

Starting point is 00:51:57 already done it. You don't need to do that for another 20 years. What do you do with the $4 million? And then they would start being like, what is this money coming from? And he's like, well, you know, we have the nuclear capacity to blow up the world 30 times. But even if we need to, we really just need to blow it up once. So like if you just got rid of the ability to blow up the world, you know, 29 X redundant times, you know, you just have all this extra money. So anyway, what would you spend it with? And then they get angry and they're like, what? Why do we do?

Starting point is 00:52:18 We could have four million dollars. Like and then the people were like yelling at him you know i think that kind of appeal to community and the direct effect of this stuff which is why i think when you start saying you know values disconnected from the material that's where they're dangerous you know something like that is making such a direct connection you know to the heartstrings and not the and not the you know our ego values well i like the idea i like the idea of um you know appealing to the pocketbook obviously but also just um having communities reflect on what their needs are and uh seeing that the way we currently are organized and the values that were currently

Starting point is 00:53:00 organized by our hangovers from a past time so whether it's psychotherapy you had to help somebody just have insights about how their childhood affects their current life and their current relationships or if you help a community do the same these things are possible and it can free up energy or it can free up money or both well and you're having somebody immediately participate in a better vision of how the world could be better without telling them that, you know, and which seems condescending or there's reaction to it. Here, they're just envisioning, what if I had $4 million?

Starting point is 00:53:35 What does that look like for my kids? What does that look like for the road? What does that look like for whatever? Whereas, you know, because they're feeling it. And I think one of the places where you get the most pushback left and right is if you just say hey what if the other side's not that terrible um what if what if the other side's solution like is is not that terrible it's just that neither one is really that great what if we could just slightly believe in a better possible world such a negative reaction to that they're like why are you letting the democrats off the hook why are you letting the republicans off the cook you must secretly be working for them, or you must not know this list of terrible facts I found on Facebook. And it's like, no, I'm just saying maybe there's a slightly

Starting point is 00:54:11 better way to do things. And we have Americans have an immediate angry, negative reaction to that. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I don't think that's true enough to follow. Some people do react that way. So your statement is true, but it's also a caricature. And I find as a caricature, it goes too far. Because it's also true that I find when I talk to people that if I'm patient, and I don't have to be patient that long, but when I'm patient, people are willing to de-escalate conversations. People are willing to talk more about where they're coming from emotionally. And that gives me a great deal of hope that people want to find the best in each other when they are attended to effectively. And so what I do is I train community leaders and budding therapists,

Starting point is 00:55:06 how to use the psychotherapy skills that work so well to create healing from psychopathological suffering, but also work to create the type of relationships we need in our communities. And I have a great deal of faith in that, that when people are listened to, they stop pointing fingers at others. Well, and I'm not, you know, I'm not saying that I have no faith or respect for humanity. I mean, a lot of what I'm talking about is an increasingly large, you know, maybe it's a minority, but it's increasingly getting larger group of very politically reactive Americans that are very emotional and very upset and I but those people are going to be incredibly important if you're gonna build the project you're talking about and so kind of what I'm thinking about is how do you reach them you know um

Starting point is 00:55:58 well I'll tell you I think I know when there's polarization you want to tell everybody within arms reach only the people that are within your arms reach don't try to tell don't try to imagine a single story for everybody but those people you can reach whether it's this podcast, in your neighborhood, in your clinic, or wherever, those people you can reach out to, help them see that it's normal to polarize. It's normal to close boundaries when you're distressed. And help them shift the conversation to talk in a new way about their own distress. Well, I think one of the ways, go ahead. Work, it works.

Starting point is 00:56:54 Well, I mean, the way that I've found to do that, which I mean, I guess is going to be people that are, you know, my age and younger is by being a little bit um having a little bit of a sense of humor maybe being a slightly self-deprecating about my politics other people's politics kind of the silliness of that which is sort of what i'm trying to do and and sitting with that people withdraw the projection you know they withdraw the projection of the shadow over here and the grandiose wonderful savior daddy mommy over here and and so i'm not you know and i i think some of that especially when you're dealing with younger generations i mean i'm not trying to make fun of it what anybody thinks or make them feel bad just saying like i

Starting point is 00:57:35 know we get really upset and turn blue in the face and yell and we cry about it and whatever it's kind of stupid like can we just have a little bit of a sense of humor you know that the have some humor about how we think in order to feel a little bit less important? Joel, I'm with you. And I'm curious about how we wind this conversation up. What would, because at this point, I need to go have some breakfast. Sure, no. We really, really appreciate your time.

Starting point is 00:58:01 It's been fascinating talking to you. And anything that you kind of want to close on or promote, I'll definitely throw in the show notes of the show. And we just, I don't know, it's really neat to kind of have two different sets of language or two different ideological lenses and see how those come together. So I always appreciate conversations like this one. Well, I think just in closing, I think the work is to learn how to use the psychological perspective or a psychological attitude

Starting point is 00:58:31 in a more expansive way to really be able to account for the social and the political, but not to do it solely in the name of critiquing the failures of any ideology. Those of us that have psychological and political training are responsible for articulating a means to an end. We're responsible for identifying the social and political problems and the mental health issues linked to them that are currently haunting us and doing more than criticize. we're actually responsible for developing a remedy. For you know, a shared practice that can take place in the clinic or the private practice office or the classroom or the city council chamber or the dining room table or in the national news media, or between nations.

Starting point is 00:59:25 We're responsible for articulating a story that is able to be told readily and somewhat easily in all of those places about our shared humanity. And about now is the time to bring ourselves back together through sacrifice and some experience of shared duty and humility for the sake of what's happening in the world, for the sake of pulling ourselves back from the brink to give us a little breathing room and to buy us some time so that we can really see the extent to which there are solutions to our problem. And they begin with the right, right effective psychological story that is about all of us and all working together yeah well thank you so much for your time peter that's beautiful Thank you. Thanks for watching!

The Taproot Podcast - On the Psychology, Shadow, and Projection of Politics with Dr. Peter T Dunlap

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