talking about the neurobiological and mythic bases for the Fundamentalist Mind

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Originally broadcast on November 12, 2008, on the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show.

Transcribed by Carla Gilby, Amanda Moreno and Linda Carraway

     Edited by Jay Farrington 

Kall:  Hello, it's the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, Rob Kall, and it's an interesting week.  In some ways, a let down; some ways, a lot of excitement.  First, I just want to say that we're going to have on tonight Dr. Stephen Larsen, who is the author of The Fundamentalist Mind.  That book got a gold medal as book of the year in the psychology category and I think it's going to be very interesting.  I've known Dr. Larsen for a good number of years, at least ten, maybe fifteen, years.  He's brilliant and I think he's going to bring us some very interesting conversation. 

In the meantime, what is going on in the world?  We found out today that we were victims of “bait and switch.”  Yes, bait and switch.  That's what you call it when you made a deal, you sign a contract, and you go with the deal, and then somebody switches it on you.  That, my friends, is exactly what Hank Paulson did with our seven hundred billion... I'm leaving a space there for my language... SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION (#%!&#) DOLLARS! 

He told us today, “Oh, well, I'm not going to do what I said I was going to do with it, I'm gonna do something else.  I'm gonna do something else.  I'm gonna do things with my bank buddies and we're going to... invest in banks!”  Well, Paulson, the former head of Goldman-Sachs, is basically spreading 700 billion bucks around and there was no rush.  Hey!  Isn't that interesting?  The day that they came out with this demand, this two-page deal that they said they needed the money, they said that it was an urgent, urgent emergency, that the economic world, the universe, was going to cave in.  And you know what?  It didn't. 

It didn't at all.  Instead, what they did, was they pulled an Iraq deal on us.  That's exactly what I said, too.  What they did, was they said, “We are in danger, we are threatened; you, the cowards in Congress, the helpless idiots who all, en mass, like lemmings, run over the cliff anytime we tell you to, we will happily take $700B from you to start, and then whatever else we can steal using the Federal Reserve Bank.”  And... that's what they did. 

And now, we find out today, that there was no rush, that they're just happily, gradually, doling out tens and hundreds of billions of dollars to banks.  The Congress says, “Well, you know, we could lose three million jobs if the auto industry goes under.  Do you think you could throw $25B of that $700B to save three million jobs?”  Well, they gave away $20B of it that's just for bonuses for execs.  So... who knows? 

I think I hear Steve Larsen on.  Are you there Steve? 

Larsen:  Hi there, Rob. 

Kall:  Hey, Steve.  You caught me ranting. 

Larsen:  Ahh!  Very good.  Well, it's a sensible kind of rant. 

Kall:  Yeah.  So.  Steve, I was saying I've known you for ten, fifteen years, at least. 

Larsen:  I'm thinking like that. 

Kall:  Yeah, it's been a long time, and I've known you through the world of biofeedback and mythology; biofeedback basically with your expertise on the brain; and mythology, your work with Joseph Campbell and your story.  You've written a lot about religion over the years, but this is the first... It tended to be more... more metaphysical, would you say? 

Larsen:  That's probably right, Rob.  You've managed to capture both ends of my ADD. 

Kall:  (laughs) Well, welcome to the club! 

Larsen:  If you're ADD and you still have a kind of indefatigable creative drive... People go, “How can you be a mythologist and a psychologist or a neurologist all at the same time?”  I do think, and I believe you share this world, that the cultural creatives are sometimes the people who dip between disciplines and then come up with where the holograph that we're all participating in sort of connects its separate parts. 

Kall:  I think that could be, as interesting and afflicting as it might be.  You know, I used to say that I was afflicted with creativity, and then I figured out I was ADD. 

Larsen:  People who are really creative do use the term affliction, because it is like a daimon that has hold of you and it's where your energy comes from. 

Kall:  You said daimon.  Did you mean demon? 

Larsen:  No, daimon is the term that Socrates uses, the Greek inflection is d-a-i-m-o-n, and it's not the same inflection as a Christian demon, or a Babylonian demon, for that matter.  It's kind of an older idea that we all plug into spiritual, sort of phantom, rulers, or originators, that are both our creative genius and perhaps our downfall at times. 

Kall:  Yes, that's it.  And you're manifesting the deep wells of wisdom that you bring to any conversation here.  So, I introduced, before you were on the phone, your book, The Fundamentalist Mind, the subtitle is How Polarized Thinking Imperils Us All.  I mentioned how it's an award winner, it won a gold medal in Psychology, the Book of the Year.  So tell us a little about it.  What's this about?  Why would people read this? 

Larsen:  I suppose I went into a reactive mode after the events of 9-11.  I'm a New Yorker, and I live about 90 miles from the city, but I have an office in New York, as well, and I went to college in New York, at Columbia, and I lived in The Village, in the East Village, and in the Soho District.  I love that place.  It's really amazing.  And I was down there just shortly after the event and I saw people doing something I'd never seen before, which was, in all the parks around New York City, making little shrines and praying and meditating and weeping together.  It made a profound impression on me.  Joseph Campbell had long passed away, but I thought, “Oh, my God, he should see this,” and realized that, in a way, it's a consequence of fundamentalism, on both sides. 

Kall:  Both sides, yeah, really.  So tell me some more.  What is the fundamentalist mind? 

Larsen: Well, the fundamentalist mind… one of the unique things I bring to this book is this ability to sort of span paradigms.  So, I say that fundamentalism is not restricted to religious fundamentalism alone, although religious fundamentalism -- because religion is so powerful a psychological force in people’s life -- the religious fundamentalism manages to kind of climb to the top of the list of human inspirations, madnesses and delusions at the same time.  It can be wonderful; that’s where we plug into the trans-rational, the metaphysical, and those of us who are in the mental health field know also how prone to delusion the human mind is.  So, people can get very stuck in their mythological kinds of thinking.   

So, after this event that happened it was really religious fundamentalism, but I went…no, the division and the tectonic plates that we’re all sitting on is much deeper than that.  It’s the division between materialism and the metaphysical kind of perspective.  It’s the difference between old, traditional, orthodox ways of thinking and whole families and dynasties and communities that have talked to each other in this language forever and that’s why they all get along – they all understand each other, because they all speak the same language.   

So, they’re all starting to war with each other.  These tectonic plates that are moving are larger than anything we’ve seen in recent history.  It’s not just the Catholics versus the Protestants, or the Hindus versus the Buddhists, or the, you know, really fundamentalist Islamic against the more liberal Islamics.  It’s a deeper thing than that.  The fundamental quest is: is there a meaning in life?  Is the universe alive or is it dead?  Are there trans-rational channels of communication that we can plug into, whether you go from Karl Jung’s archetypes to the sublimest insights of modern philosophers and intuitives.  Where do we touch the mind of the universe?  It’s a very, very dangerous, perilous territory – that’s why I say the perilous thing – because, when people get into this zone, their thinking easily becomes polarized. 

Kall:  Tell me more about the danger. 

Larsen: Well, the danger starts with probably Zaroastrianism, but it’s possible that dualism is even more ancient than that.  Through Zaroastrianism, it goes into Judaism and then it goes into Gnosticism and Manichaeism and Christianity and later on into Mithraism and it just comes down through the ages, and it’s this idea that you can really label good and evil.  I mean, what a balmy idea.  And, you know, use those emotionally loaded words as if everybody understood what the hell you were talking about. 

Kall: Now, you start your book off by talking about the “phantom rulers of humanity.”  What is that about? 

Larsen: There’s a great poetic line… I drew that from one of Joseph Campbell’s favorite poets, Robinson Jeffers.  And the poem is right in front of me, so I think I’ll read it to you a little bit, and then I’ll sort of say what I just read. 

This is from Robinson Jeffers “Roan Stallion,” this little stanza: 

The fires threw up figures and symbols, meanwhile

Racial myth swarmed and dissolved in it

The phantom rulers of humanity

That without being are yet more real than what they are born of

And without shape

Shape, that which makes them

The nerves and the flesh go by, shadow like

The limbs, the lives, shadow like

These shadows remain

These shadows to whom temples

To whom churches

To whom labors and wars visioned themes are dedicated 

I mean, a poet can say in a few sentences like that what it takes philosophers a much longer time to say.   

The phantom rulers are the archetypal patterns, the mythological patterns, the supernatural susceptibilities to which our species has been vulnerable ever since “The Iliad,” for example.  I mean, here you have these Greeks fighting out there on the plains of Ilium, and overhead the gods and the goddesses are fighting it out, and they are doing their divine squabbles, and they’re putting people into devilishly fierce trances and making them blood thirsty and making them cunning and giving them creative ideas like the Trojan horse and all that stuff and inflaming Achilles wrath, and you know…I mean, so, it’s been going on a long time, you know, in the Old Testament, the children of Israel were wandering around the deserts of the near east and as often as not kind of… they were a rather fierce band of very smart nomads, and when they came upon settled communities, they maybe got along, maybe didn’t get along, and they didn't like the religions, which were mostly goddess-centered religions.  So they kind of tended to be iconoclastic, they broke the idols of the old guys.   

Then they substituted a sky god, for which you mostly can't make images. They really didn’t like the idea of graven images.  But then, I think you have to say, "Well, what about the Cherubim and the Seraphim that sat at the entrance to the Holy of Holies," or "What was that stuff in the Ark of the Covenant?" and "Why is the Inner Sanctum of the temple holier than the Outer Sanctum?" So, whether people despise other people’s graven images of the sacred, or whatever, we all seem to be susceptible to it. In modern terms, what you have is that people venerate the Bible as if it were the effigy of a god.

Kall:  It’s easier to get a hold of the sky, I guess. Your next chapter is

‘The Neurobiology of Belief’ and this is where you kind of tie the pieces

together of the previous chapter, ‘The Phantom Rulers.’ 

Larsen:  Yes, I do.  This is a thing, Rob, I’ve been working on my other earlier book, The Healing Power of Neurofeedback, which, by the way, I understand, is the best-selling neurofeedback book possibly because… 

Kall: Congratulations! 

Larsen: ….Thank you. It has so many interesting stories in it.  At least there was on Amazon a while ago. It’s really inspired a lot of people to do neurofeedback and to look for non-chemical ways of healing what are called mental-emotional-neurological disorders.  

Kall:  Well, I’m a firm believer in neurofeedback, of course. I don’t speak about it much on this show, because that’s not what this show focuses on, but I’ve been very involved in it and it’s definitely -- if there’s an area of your life where your brain’s involved and there’s something going on like attention deficit or depression or what are some of the others on the list, Steve?  Where feedback helps?  Head injury, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? 

Larsen: Oh, yeah.  All the affective disorders: depression, bipolar, manic-y things sometimes, but also one of the things in which the lens, the type of neurofeedback that I do has been exemplary is with head injury—TBI (traumatic brain injury)-- and PTSD. I haven’t seen the equal and I practice many other kinds of biofeedback, as well as traditional neurofeedback, before I got into this stuff and it’s pretty amazing.  We’re starting to work now with the Northeast Center for Special Care, which is really a wonderful center here in New York State for…. 

Kall:  All right, but here's where I have to get back to not digressing and stop being ADD. We’re talking about the neurobiology of belief. You got into the brain from your work with neurofeedback but how does that tie into belief and into fundamentalism? 

Larsen:  The brain seems to be set up for belief and we find some kind of metaphysical orientation as far back as the shamans, and that’s into prehistory because people weren’t writing down what the shamans did; all we have is a few kind of magical paraphernalia and drums and dolls and inscriptions on cave walls to tell us about that.  But shamanism is one of the earliest places that people are into the supernatural. 

Then you come down through history and you find when you get the hunters and the planters, as Campbell said, the planters tend to have systematic mythologies and then almost immediately, getting back to the theme we were on before, you have Zoroastrianism and then dualism and Judaism, good, evil, god, devil. 

You have this tendency coming down to split the world into pairs of opposites.  It’s very easy.  It makes sense.  People who aren’t very thoughtful can get behind it.  But that’s people who haven’t read about paradoxicality and the fact that this is a multilevel, post-quantum universe that we live in. 

Kall:  Tell me more about the neurobiology of belief. 

Larsen:  Well, you have ascending pathways in the central nervous system and the impulses, the afferents, can get steered either to the amygdala which is a fight-or-flight kind of system, very emotionally intense.  Then, if you’re in a quiet, tranquil state, like you can get into from doing breathing, as in meditation or HRV-type of stuff like Heart Math, you ascend through the thalamus and you go right into the cortical ascending pathways and you can kind of make sense of what you are encountering. When you’re loaded with the hysterical emotion of the limbic system, your thinking polarizes very easily into the black and white and further on…. 

Kall:  Whoa, whoa, Steve. Dr. Larsen, now, my friend, you are talking language that most listeners don’t understand. See, you’ve mentioned a couple of different parts of the brain.  Put it in a little plainer English, OK? 

Larsen:  The thing I was going to get to is just naming the organs of the brain. The brain is split into two hemispheres.  The splitting is throughout; it’s there in the two branches of the autonomic nervous system and it’s there in the two hemispheres of the brain that are connected by a slender bridge called  the corpus callosum and the information doesn’t always get from the left to the right. And we think the right hemisphere is just wonderful, because it’s creative, and  imagistic, and kind of ADD, and it’s not linear, and systematic, and verbal, and calculating like the left hemisphere is supposed to be.  But actually, the right hemisphere is also a natural pessimist as Richard Davidson’s work has shown, and if it’s activated, people can get a very black view of the world.  So I think this is what happens in certain variations of fundamentalist Christianity. The world is a contest between god and the devil and if you’re not with us, in the same way that we are and say the same things that we say, then you’re in the hands of the devil. And oh, you don’t want that because in the Middle Ages they use to summon these horrible scenarios of eternal torture and then Judgment Day. Rob, I have a whole chapter on Judgment Day mythologies, really, and the whole millenialist Armageddon kind of scenario.  That’s a very, very dangerous thing, to think the end of the world is coming.  That’s what Joseph Campbell called “ the great non-event”. 

Kall:  Well, but there are sure enough tens of millions of people who base their lives on expecting to not die a normal death; to be raptured away or to find the messiah.  

Larsen:  Yeah.  This whole idea of 'The Rapture' actually is a kind of an artifact of, I think, of 19th Century, about 1840's, Darbyite thinking, in which he really... people were inflamed, in the mid-1800's, with the idea of the 'Second Coming of Christ,' in England and in America.  You look at the cults that arose in America, the Jehovah's Witnesses, they were expecting the end of the world; the Seventh Day Adventists, they were waiting for that seventh day; the Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that's all about apocalyptic thinking; and the end of the world is coming, so, by God, you'd better shape up or you're going to be in a lake of fire, or eternal damnation, or you... 

Kall:  And not only that, but it doesn't matter what you... whether you take care of the world or not.  It doesn't matter whether you act responsibly and leave it better than you got it from your parents. 

Larsen:  Yeah, that's a little scary.  In other words, that leads... that one mythical belief leads to social irresponsibility and ecological irresponsibility. 

Kall:  Yes, it does.  So, the brain lateralization, the right and left brain, when people succumb to right brain dominance, which tends to be negative and depressive, they find themselves more receptive to this kind of negative, end-of-the-world, evil-is-in-the-world, simplistic thinking and maybe they drop down into their lower parts of their brain, their mammalian or reptilian brain.  Is that the kind of thing that happens? 

Larsen:  Well, you know, as Joseph Campbell used to say, and he wasn't a neurologist or neuro-psychologist or anything, but he was pretty hippy, said, "Look, mythology is the software, neurology is the hardware, and if you put bad software into the hardware, it's going to kind of mess it up." 

The right hemisphere, if it's tutored, let's say, in creative thinking, optimal performance, the human potential idea, the thing's a beautiful performer.  It helps us dance, act, play the piano beautifully, many things, be expressive in our lives.  But if it's fed a constant hash of stuff about 'the end of the world is coming, it's coming right now, you better be prepared, and you're a bag of sin,' this whole idea, 'so you're condemned and it's only by Christ's sacrifice for you that you all have a chance and let me tell you about because I'm the one who knows.' 

Thank kind of thinking, that Conversionist thinking, was rife in the 1800's, and it's scarcely less rife now.  If you listen to the televangelists and stuff like that, they really do scare people.  Jerry Falwell was fond of saying, "I don't need an undertaker, I'm waiting for the uppertaker."  He was expecting The Rapture to happen in his own lifetime and he said that kind of stuff publicly. 

It seems to me, once a guy has said things like that in public and then he really does need the undertaker, as was revealed by Jerry's death a couple of years ago, God bless him, he really needed the undertaker, but he got lots of people whipped into a frenzy of expectation that the end of the world was coming in their lifetime.  Ronald Reagan evidently believed, and he spent time with Falwell and Robertson, believed that the end of the world was coming.  And, so, well, maybe it is, but if you start thinking that way, you're going to behave really, really strangely and impractically. 

Kall:  Your next chapter is "Authority, Ritual and Dissociation?" 

Larsen:  Yeah, isn't that cool? 

Kall:  How does dissociation fit into all this? 

Larsen:  Well, the three things, authority, ritual, and dissociation....  

The brain, the primate brain, is geared to alpha males in the primate societies and so our attention is always directed upward. 

Ritual is very, very efficacious psychologically with animals, all animals are ritualists, they know how to dance, the facial expression, the mask, the types of cries.  With human beings, religionists have monopolized this.  When you walk in a sacred space and you take off your hat, and maybe your shoes if you're a Buddhist, and you walk into this silent, vast cathedral or shrine or mosque, and you bend down and you touch your forehead to the floor, or fold your hands and pray, and you smell the incense, man, you've been through ritu... you've been ritualized and you're in a different state of consciousness already. 

The dissociation part comes along... it's really pretty sinister, because I think what really happens, and I'm sort of with Julian Jaynes, the Princeton psychologist philosopher, who said that we can be vulnerable to the right hemisphere, the voices of the gods talk to us, so we have this view of the end of the world, and then we have these beautiful verses of the Bible to quote while things are happening, and it's.... People can very easily, "Ah, yes, the end of the world is coming" and "Take us to your bosom, Father" and you're saying the prayers or you're saying your rosary, and you're doing the things.... It's like a resignation about the fact that now we're in the realm of the timeless, the ultimate, the eternal, and everybody's psyche... boy, are we vulnerable to that stuff. 

Kall:  We don't have much time.  I just need to give a station ID.  This is Rob Kall, the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, 1360 AM, WNJC.  I'm here with my guest, Dr. Stephen Larsen, author of The Fundamentalist Mind:  How Polarized Thinking Imperils Us All. 

The end of your book is about 'natural religion.'  What's that all about? 

Larsen:  That's bottom up if I ever heard it, Rob.  I like the title of your show, Bottom Up, because I think that... well, it has to be a two-way street; it always has to be a dialogue, and.... 

That's what's happening with this latest election, by the way. My daughter lives in Williamsburg (Virginia) and she was just sitting around, people hugging each other in the streets, and weeping, and really, really hoping for something brand new.  Now, these are people who also want an end of the old regime, they want an end of the last eight years.  No wonder people want paradise; you long for heaven after hell, right? (laughs) 

Kall:  (laughs) Yeah, really.  I've been saying that we've all gone through post-traumatic stress, living under the cloud of the Bush administration. 

Larsen:  And many people who are smart enough, if you travel around the world and meet intelligent people of all countries, they're so sympathetic for America right now, they go, "Oh, my God, how did you get yourself into that one?"  I think many of them are cheering and going, "Oh, you're about to redeem yourselves."  Well, it's a scary moment and everybody's heart is thumping a little hard in their chest here, but I think we have a....  I think America is made up of idealistic and practical people and the way that this last election turned out showed that all those people that have been peace marching and emailing and moveon.com (http://www.moveon.org) and the thousand-one little points of light or trickling rivulets or whatever you want to call it, have really formed together and made a kind of a stream of 'things have gotta change, we're in danger of becoming the scourge of the world, a Baby Huey out of control, and everybody's frightened of this not-so-smart Baby Huey,' with good reason.  So, you find out that American presidents, for example, Ronald Reagan, was really a rather firm believer, he spent a lot of time with Falwell and Robertson, rather firm believer that the end of the world might just happen in our time. 

Now, here's the sinister part of it:  God might kind of a little bit sort of detached or lazy, He might just need a little help.  So, we visualize the Star Wars initiative as being the only thing on a grand enough scale to bring about Armageddon; you know, the great battle on the plains of Megiddo that everybody keeps visualizing, where the... 

Kall:  Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second now.  We went from natural religion, where you talk about moving towards the synthesis and some hope for our wayward species, towards Megiddo and Armageddon.  Let's move back towards the natural religion side of this. (laughs) 

Larsen:  What's the matter, you don't like Megiddo? (laughs)  I don't like it, either. 

Kall:  (laughs) Hey, last week, we finished that chapter on apocalyptic thinking and moved into a more hopeful mode.  So... natural religion.  What is natural religion? 

Larsen:  Well, people said, "Oh, you should call it spirituality."  I said, "No, that's tripe."  I want to call it natural religion because I believe there is a natural religion, the Native Americans had it when we came among them and they were innately respectful for the natural world, for the environment.  That didn't mean that they were primitive polytheists, they also had the idea of Wakan Tonka, the great sublime God Above All; there was also a sky god, Tarhuyiawahku, for the Iroquoian's.  Back in those days, they had a chance in America, if anybody bothered to read the books that were being printed by the hundreds and thousands, people could have read New England Transcendentalism, or read the works of Swedenborg, and realized there is a kind of a religion in which Biblical Christianity is not alien to the natural world, but the natural world is a metaphor of the spiritual world. 

At the same time, people who weren't bothering to read were in these revival tents all over America preaching the end of the world to scare everybody's pants off so they'd reform themselves.  It's there's quite a dichotomy there in about the 1840's in America. 

Kall:  We've got to wrap.  How would you like to finish up talking about your book?  Do you have a web site that you want to talk about? 

Larsen:  Well, yes.  We have symbolicstudies.org (http://symbolicstudies.org/site/), which is the wonderful not-for-profit creature that my wife Robin has designed.  Then we have also stonemountaincenter.com (http://www.stonemountaincenter.com/), which is my therapy center for neurofeedback and psychotherapy and basically holistic health.  We have wonderful people that are joining us there now.  And I encourage people to get The Fundamentalist Mind or look me up on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Stephen%20Larsen&page=1), there are a few books you can buy cheap on Amazon. 

Kall:  You have some amazing additional books that you've done that I've enjoyed over the years.  What are a couple of the names of them? 

Larsen:  My first book, published by Harper & Row, 1975, was The Shaman's Doorway: Opening Imagination to Power and Myth , and then there was The Mythic Imagination:  The Quest for Meaning Through Personal Mythology, which was 1990, and then....  Or actually, I should say, with my wife Robin, the Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision, a big master work of Swedenborg's life and works, then I did a book on Swedenborg's spiritual psychology, and then the Joseph Campbell biography, A Fire in the Mind, that we published in 1991. 

And then we kind of heaved a sigh of relief for a while, then in 2000, we published The Fashioning of Angels: Partnership As Spiritual Practice... 

Kall:  Yeah, I really liked that one. 

Larsen:  Well, thank you. 

Kall:  Steve, we've gotta get going.  Thank you so much.  It's Doctor Stephen Larsen, The Fundamentalist Mind:  How Polarized Thinking Imperils Us All.  Get that part of your brain going that takes you more towards natural religion.

Authors Bio:

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

more detailed bio:

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, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

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