Expecting the worst?

Glancing in the daily newspaper. This is the last day of this year. The financial crisis is like a fire that is still out of control. Next year will become a year of economical depression. And economical depression will lead to lots of human depressions. The winners (read: pharmaceutical companies) take it all.
The leading leaders of Israel proclaim that they are not willing to make a short stop of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Checking the TV programs that are going to be sent tomorrow night, the first day of the new year. On one of the channels the movie Day after tomorrow. On another channel the movie The Ice storm. On a third channel the movie Waterworld. All of them catastroph movies.
Anxiety is the name of the day on this New Year’s Eve.
But I have at the same time to state that I feel quite comfortable and confident. I think that 2009 will turn out to be a year of awakenings, leading to some new, fruitful directions.
I do wish you a very good new year!

Time is late…

…in this year of 2008. When time is late I am quite often filled by a mixture of feelings: gratefulness, worries, joy, a sting of sadness. When time is late I know I am a further step to the final end. New Year’s Eve will become a place (our apartment) for fine food, a few very nice friends, serious reflexions and soft discussions about people and the society and the world.
I have a lot to do during 2009. I have to restart my aim to write documentaries about a few important parts of my life, focusing mostly my professional life. I am sad to state that I have not met so many colleagues of mine that have showed up as really good psychologists. Too many of them have turned out to become mainstream psychologists, just following the stream of the individualistic, quick-fix technologies of our time. My kind of psychology is inherited from the science of philosophy, making an art to repeat questions about life, meaning, values and the development of the human minds – and to thoroughly discuss them. I am a believer of the importance of the power of relations over time (meaning long time) and of the networks constructed by the groups we belong to, and the impact of the political and religious ideas that are formed by all those who are fighting for power in our societies. But there are quite few psychologists who openly seem to be interested in discussing issues like that.
Time is late. There is so much to do. And there is not so much time left…

And it once happened…

… that a child was born in a poor Jewish family and as the yearning for a God to be seen and a God to listen to (and not only listen to the rabbis and the prophets) there were suddenly a rumour saying that God had sent his son to the world to ease the minds of the hungry, suffering people and also to take up the fight against some parts of the authorities, and three wise men confirmed that the Son had arrived.
When the Son had reached his thirty years of age he appeared, soon together with twelve disciples, all of them members of the Jewish congregation. And the Son really challenged the rabbis from the temples and by them he was denied as God’s creation.
But the yearning from the people was so very strong that there were new temples, called churches, built to honour him and to honour God and the Holy Spirit.
And around 350 years after the death of the Son the new religion was finally proclaimed as a state religion in the Roman Empire and the new priests declared that the birthday of the Son was the set on December 25.
And this new religion became a long lived faith among millions of people, and during the centuries there were lots of awful clashes, conflicts and dreadful wars between quite a lot of the representatives for the different so called loving and caring religions.
Merry Christmas!

It is impossible to block out envy

When reading or listening about the facts that some people are enormously rich and that some CEO:s receive hundreds of thousands of US dollars as a normal salary you just cannot deny the word envy. Envy is everywhere and it is a strong force in all social environments. Envy could act as a drive for further strength of what you really want to achieve; it works as a sort of mental muscle training; but envy could also bring out a lot of destructive forces, especially within the groups that are to be found in the lowest social classes in the society. The greater economical differences between the social classes the stronger the envy and the more acting-out scenes, many times resulting in heavy criminal activities. This is for sure to think about in this holy time of Christianity. What were the values of Jesus Christ? Are you living his values? Are you supporting the political movements in your society that are most close to those values? Or…?

Experimental societies

If you enjoy computer games there are SIMS and other similar games for you to buy and to play around with. You can build a society of your own, making streets, buildings, people, organizing fire protection department and other rescue services, police forces, schools, hospitals, financial systems, shops, the whole lot. And if you want to play it real, in real time, you can try to become a politician. And if you are energetic and skilled enough you will perhaps end up as a member of the parliament or even in the government. And there the games go on – in real space and real time. Wow! And it is up to you then to decide if you want to play the liberal free-market-for-all way, or if you want to play the socialist, plan-economical way, or if you want to play an anarchist or a syndicalist or a communist or whatever -ist you want to be. It is anyhow a game, a big, fat, funny experimental game. And no game will turn out to become a true paradise, because there is no such thing as a paradise out there. Or in here.
It will be very interesting to see how Mr. Obama will play his game. I do hope that he will play it with some elegant intelligence and with all his power of diplomatic patience. We need a new hero of our time. Just to get us some comfort in this world of weird games going on everywhere.

Now and then insulting comments to my blog

It happens that a few, who has read my blog, write and send insulting and rude comments. They are never signed with any name and they are also giving false mail addresses, which makes it impossible for me to reach them directly. By its contents I can see that the writers are from Thailand and I do also understand that they in one way or another are involved in THAI pilot recruitment. I always delete the worst of those rude comments, because they apparently want to spread lies about me as a person and as a professional psychologist.
I have no idea on what grounds these people are so upset and sound so angry, and I have no idea why they are directing their rage to me. I do welcome any serious comments and any serious inputs for discussion, but I will not let my blog site become a sort of grafitti board for people who just want do to harm by being agressively insulting. I will delete that kind of comments. But, as I just said, I do welcome all serious comments, which does not mean that I expect people to always agree with my points of view, and I welcome all those who dare to step up providing me with correct e-mail addresses, making it possible for me to write to them directly.

I am a psychologist, not a businessman

Are you a journalist or a businessman? This questions is angrily yelled by the actor Al Pacino in the movie Insider. He is playing the role of a reporter, employed by the American TV network CBS. Al Pacino has found out that one of the very big tobacco factories has sacked a scientist who discovered that the president and all vice presidents of the company lied about the dangers of smoking tobacco. According to the scientist all tobacco smoking works like a heavy drug, making lots of people to become dependent drug addicts. The tobacco factories mixed even some chemicals in the tobacco to enlarge the dependency effect. When CBS planned to make a story about this the TV network company was threatened by the tobacco factory. The factory was going to sue the CBS Company on millions of US Dollars if they were to make an official story based upon what the sacked scientist had told them. And the directors at CBS became scared and stopped the program. Al Pacino, in his role character, went mad. And he yelled: are you a journalist or a businessman?
I am a psychologist. Based upon what I have done so far in my professional career I regard myself being a rather good psychologist. But I am a lousy businessman. As a matter of fact – even though I am running my own, small consultant company together with my colleague and wife, I am not especially interested in making business, escalating a profit of my own. I have the idea that a skilled psychologist and a skilled businessman are from two different planets. They are mostly not sharing the same basic values of how to interact with other people and how to create a better world for all of us.
No, I didn´t say that I am right and the other is wrong. We are just different.

Why do you celebrate Christmas – and New Year?

December – Christmas month. People rushing around trying to find all those Xmas gifts that anyhow will be forgotten in a few weeks forward.
I once asked a youngster if she knew why we celebrated Christmas? She went silent for a while, thinking, and then came the answer: To make Santa Claus happy!
But most people are of course aware of the legends of the birth of Jesus Christ, even though there is a certain debate going on about what date Jesus was born. December 25 is perhaps just a wish because it coincides with one of the darkest periods in the Western world and with the old date when we celebrated the return of the light from the sun. But anyhow, Christmas is just as fun as any other of the happy-go-lucky-festivitas, where we enjoy drinking alcoholic drinks and eat fat food together with our relatives and friends. And singing songs about the newborn Jewish child, belonging to the Jewish group of people. Interesting!
But wait a minute! Why do you then celebrate the New Year on the evening of December 31? What do you really celebrate?
No, it cannot be the birth of Joseph’s, the carpenter, and Maria’s son. He was supposed to be born on December 25. So, what is it then to celebrate on December 31?
Try to figure it out, speak to your partner or to your friends about this question – and send me a comment of what you came up to. It vill be interesting!

When are you out of control?

The correct answer is – always, at all times, nights and days. Most “operations” in your mental and in your physiological total body system are handled by the autonomous system. It is run by some millions of your brain cells without you being aware of it. And when things go wrong somewhere inside your body you have no idea of what is happening. You are out of control. You are considerably much, much more complicated than an advanced computer. And I can tell you that when my computer seems to go mad I have not a clue of what it is doing. And there is a certain risk that when I go mad I am not even aware of that I am going out of my mind.
That is why it is such an exciting challenge to try to understand as much as possible about us human beings, and this is one of my main driving forces behind my continuous strivings to act as a psychologist.