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General News    H2'ed 6/18/14

Interview Transcript: The Corporation Movie/Book Creator Joel Bakan--part 2

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R.K.: Do you think that psychopathy is a trait that is evolutionarily supported?

J.B.: Well, I think self interest is, but I also think that what evolutionary" what evolution reveals is that we need to be enlightened in our self interest and what that means is that we need to actually be capable of transcending our self interest and understanding where our individual interests end and where we need to start thinking about collective institutions that enable us to be the individuals we want to be and that enable us to be fuller and more fulfilled and ultimately happier individuals.

So I don't think you can reduce love for a child to self interest, or romantic love to self interest. We're very complicated beings and there's no question that part of what we are is self interested, and there's no question that we love to consume. I like a good bottle of wine and a nice fitting jacket as well as anybody else. I mean it's not a crime to want to be a consumer, or to be self interested, but it gets back to the point about fundamentalism.

If we see that as our primary characteristic, one that we are to the exclusion of everything else, then we build a society that is fundamentalist because it's based on that notion of who we as human beings, that we're just one thing. Whereas I like to believe both from an evolutionary perspective, or from a spiritual perspective- whichever you choose to take- we are very complicated mixes of self interest, of altruism, of the capacity to love and to sacrifice ourselves for others.

We're all those things. And some of us are genetically predisposed to be a bit more of this and a bit less of that. We're all those things and so the challenge for us as human beings is to create societies that enable us, encourage us, to live those different dimensions of ourselves which are not in any way contradictory but actually reinforcing.

What history shows is that we get into trouble every time we start to think we're just one way whether it's one religious way, or one economic way, or one cultural way, or one racial way, or whatever. But what we see are horrific societies, usually being based on that idea that we're only one thing and that this is prior to that.

And we see functional societies, and I consider the United States with all the difficulties and everything, but the sort of post-war period and I'm not saying it was a panacea, but the United States in general, going back to the constitution, going back to the revolutionary ideals, this was an attempt to create a society that would enable people to be fuller and more multidimensional.

Now the history is checkered for sure and it's not perfect, but this was an attempt, Democracy was an attempt, and a better one than the authoritarian regimes that preceded it, to create a society where people can really engage in this kind of fluidity about what society should be, about the multiplicity and plurality of values that society should embrace, about how that reflects who we are as individuals.

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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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