Episode 109 – Dr. Robert Cloninger, MD, PhD, Genetics & Psychology of Stewardship, Happiness, & Hope
Aaron Perry
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In this important episode, Dr. Robert Cloninger, MD, PhD, discusses the key psychological drivers of personality that distinguish “post materialist cultural creatives” from “traditionalists” and “materialistic and individualistic modernists”. Drawing on substantial data as well as cutting edge genetic research, Dr. Cloninger, one of the most cited scientists in the world (top 0.01%), has identified three key personality traits that elucidate the different personality expressions: self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence. In general, the first two are well developed among traditional corporate and political leaders (cooperativeness too often being limited to an immediate sphere of mutually-beneficial influence, but not necessarily for the greater good). But the third tends to be under-developed among world leaders. It is exactly this, the self-transcendence of creative characters, which “facilitates flexible and resilient adaptation in harmony with other people and nature” (MSM, “What Makes People Healthy, Happy, And Fulfilled In The Face Of Current World Challenges?” p.18 – see PDF link below). Those of us in the regenerative, stewardship, and sustainability movement would do well to understand this framework, and to do what we can to improve in all three categories. When all three are strong, tremendous leadership and positive impact is made possible.
Dr. Cloninger not only walks us through the data, science, and framework in a clear, cogent, and easy-to-understand manner, he also offers insights and suggestions as to how we can each improve our own traits. Thank goodness for neuroplasticity (!) suggests Dr. Cloninger, as he describes why he is hopeful and optimistic about human beings’ potential for growth, change, and psycho-spiritual evolution. Along with the interview, we encourage you to read the short paper, “What Makes People Healthy, Happy, And Fulfilled In The Face Of Current World Challenges?”, which succinctly outlines and explains all of this in a manner accessible to non-technical, non-scientific readers. “Well-being,” writes Cloninger, “depends on functioning with foresight, plasticity, and virtue,” and, he continues, “The development of self-transcendence has a radical transformative impact on self-directedness and cooperativeness. The purposeful striving of self-directedness is transformed into hope and letting go of fighting and worry…” and an “outlook that leads to love, hope, and humility…” (Op. cit. p.21-22).
Dr. C. Robert Cloninger, MD, PhD is Director of the Anthropedia Institute and Professor Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. He was Wallace Renard Professor of Psychiatry, Professor of Genetics, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Director of the Sansone Family Center for Well-Being at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis until July 2019. The Anthropedia Institute is the research and advisory component of the Anthropedia Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to development of human well-being through initiatives in health care and education. He is widely cited and honored for his innovative biopsychosocial research that spans the genetics, neurobiology, development, psychology, brain imaging, and assessment of personality and psychopathology. His personality inventories have been used in more than 6000 peer-reviewed publications around the world and he is one of the most highly cited scientists in the world across all fields (top 0.01 percentile).
He received his B.A. with High Honors and Special Honors in Philosophy, Psychology, and Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin, 1966. He received his M.D. from Washington University in 1970, and Honorary Doctorates from the University of Umea in 1983 (MD in Genetics) and University of Gothenburg in 2012 (PhD in Psychology).
Dr. Cloninger has published ten books and over 600 articles in psychiatry, psychology, and genetics. His recent books include Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being by Oxford University Press, Origins of Altruism and Cooperation by Springer, and Personality and Psychopathology by American Psychiatric Press. Among his many awards, Dr. Cloninger has received the American Psychiatric Association’s Adolf Meyer Award (1993) and Judd Marmor Award (2009), and lifetime achievement awards from the American Society of Addiction Medicine (2000) and the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics (2003). He received the Oskar Pfister Award in 2014 from the American Association of Professional Chaplains and the American Psychiatric Association for his contributions to dialogue between psychiatry, religion, and spirituality. He is a fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and of the National Academy of Medicine in the USA.
RESOURCES
Anthropedia Foundation: https://anthropedia.org
Zwir I, et al. Three genetic-environmental networks for human personality. Mol. Psychiatry, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-019-0579-x (2019).
Cloninger CR, Cloninger KM, Zwir I, Keltigangas-Jarvinen L. The complex genetics and biology of human temperament: a review of traditional concepts in relation to new molecular findings. Trans Psychiatry. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-019-0621-4
Cloninger CR. “What Makes People Healthy, Happy, And Fulfilled In The Face Of Current World Challenges?” Mens Sana Monographs 2013; 11:16-24. (Click following link to download PDF, published with permission of the author).
Download the PDF paper
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Welcome to the YonEarth Community Podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry. And today,
we’re visiting with Dr. Robert Cloninger. Hey, Robert.
Hey, good to see you here.
Good to see you too. I’m so excited about our conversation today and it’s one that I think
is among the most important we can be having about our reaction and response to some of the great
challenges we’re going through in these times. So I appreciate you taking the time to visit with us,
Dr. Robert Cloninger. Dr. Robert Cloninger is director of the Anthropedia Institute and professor
of meritis at Washington University in St. Louis. He was Wallace rendered professor of psychiatry,
professor of genetics, professor of psychological and brain sciences, and director of the sandstone
family center for well-being at Washington University School of Medicine until July 2019.
The Anthropedia Institute is the research and advisory component of the answer
PDF foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to development of human well-being through
initiatives and health care and education. He is widely cited and honored for his innovative
bio-psychosocial research that spans the genetics, neurobiology, development, psychology,
brain imaging, and assessment of personality and psychopathology. His personality inventories have
been used in more than 6,000 peer-reviewed publications around the world and he is one of the
most highly cited scientists in the world across all fields. In fact, in the top, 1-100th of a percent.
He received his bachelor’s with high honors and special honors in philosophy, psychology,
and anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin and received his MD from Washington
University and an honorary doctorates from the University of New Mea and the University of Gutenberg.
Dr. Cloninger has published 10 books and over 600 articles in psychiatry, psychology, and genetics.
His recent books include Feeling Good, The Science of Well-Being by Oxford University Press,
Origins of Altruism and Cooperation by Springer, and Personality and Psychopathology by American
Psychiatric Press. And these many awards you’ve received, Dr. Cloninger, will include in the
show notes and clearly you’ve been not only well recognized by the global community for your work,
but it’s so interesting to note that of the some 17 million scientists around the world who
have received two or more citations, you’re in the top 200 or something like that around 180,
which is, which is really extraordinary. And I’m so excited about our conversation today because
we’re going to do our best to cover your science, which really is avant-garde cutting-edge science,
and translate it and boil it down to many in our audience who are not necessarily
themselves scientists, let alone neuroscientists or medical professionals. And your research and the
work you’re doing for anthropemia and elsewhere is from my perspective, one of the most important
leading edges of the kind of work, the healing work, and the creative work we have to do in our
world right now, given the extraordinary challenges and crises that we’re now facing. And so I
want to open Robert first by thanking you again and secondly by asking you a very open-ended question
from your perspective with all the research you’re doing, what is the most important insight
you’re helping to make known in the world right now?
You know, we’ve of course as you emphasize in your work, we face many challenges as a species
we’re in essentially the sixth grade extinction and human beings are largely responsible for the
impact on the environment that is causing these problems. And so the fundamental questions
that I’ve been concerned about is to understand whether what it is about our human nature
that may have led us to get to this situation, to create this situation, and more importantly,
understanding who we really are and what it is that’s necessary for us to be healthy and happy
and to be able to live sustainably. What can we do? What is it that allowed us to become so
successful in the first place and what is it that’s going wrong? So from that, what I’ve done
is to try to first develop measures of who are we? How do we describe our personality and the way
we learn and adapt to our life? So that’s why I developed personality inventories and then tried
validate those to show just what it is that makes up a healthy person.
And more recently, once we had established that we had good ways to measure human health and
well-being, the physical, mental, the spiritual and social components of health and what gives
us a satisfaction. Then, well, how did that come to be? And what was it that led to the evolution
of our capacity to be creative, to be pro-social, to look out for our neighbors, to look out for the
environment? And that has been the task I set for myself and it’s really been a fairly long journey
because I started this in the mid-80s, 1980. So it’s been 36 years that I’ve been working on this
set of problems. Yeah, it’s tremendous and obviously in that time, you’ve covered so much
deep and complex scientific research. And we’re going to include a handful of articles
in the show notes that folks can go to if they’re interested in diving deeper.
It includes a relatively recent article of the complex genetics and biology of human temperament,
a review of traditional concepts and relations and new molecular findings. And I want to get to
that in a few minutes. But in preparing for our discussion, I was especially struck by a piece
that you wrote in 2013 called what makes people healthy, happy, and fulfilled in the face
of current world challenges. For in this short eight-page document, you do an extraordinary job
of summarizing and making very clear and easy to understand some critical aspects of ourselves
as individual humans and how that has an impact and influence on our complex social interactions
as well as our impacts on the planet environmentally speaking. And so I wanted to kick it right off
by jumping into this discussion where you’ve identified three key attributes, self-directed
miss, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence as critical to understanding perhaps our own
individual development and then how we might go about fomenting more positive change in our world.
Well, it’ll make me summarize those. Okay, I think the key notion for people to get is that
human personality actually involves two domains. One is our temperament, which are simply
our emotional drives, like to look out for danger, which I call harming winds, to be interested in
things that are unusual, new, complex, which I call novelies seeking. And also to be sensitive to
what other people are feeling in action to our behavior, which I call sociability or reward dependence,
because we’re very sensitive to the cues that people give us. These are traits that actually
involve the way we learn from very in response to very simple stimuli. And it’s not a rational
process. These are what create our habits and our attachments and our desires, which are often
irrational. And so, but this is our emotional style. Now, we are different from chimpanzees and our
other ancestors, because although we share temperament, we have evolved to other systems of learning
memory that give us an ability to control our emotions, to regulate them,
intentionally to achieve goals. And a second system for being self-aware and being able to
use our awareness to consider the value that achieving a goal may have for our life and our
satisfaction. And one impact it might have on other people and on the planet in which we live.
And so, what happens in life is for us to learn how to regulate our emotions and our habits and
our attachments and desires to be consistent with goals that are rational. And in addition,
that have a value that’s long term for ourselves and others so that in a sense they’re good.
So, if we make our habits consistent with our goals and our values, then we can have a life that
is both healthy, physically, and happy, emotionally, and also has meaning and purpose.
And so, self-directedness and cooperatives are the two characteristics that mature humans have.
We all have a capacity for these, but not everyone because of their life circumstances or other
things develop it. But if you’re self-directed, that means that you’re
purposeful and resourceful, and you’re also willing to take responsibility to get things done.
If you’re cooperative, you’re tolerant and helpful and empathic, and you’ll at least do things
that are of mutual benefit for yourself and other people. You look for win solutions.
So, that’s our system for intentional self-control. And then there’s a third system that is also
a part of character, and that is this creative self-awareness that I mentioned. And that is also,
that is expressed, it is expressed, we are both self-directed and cooperative, but we add to what
you see with just logical reasoning and analysis. We add to it a sense of compassion and love,
and hope, and faith, when fully developed. And so, the difference between people who are
simply regulating their habits to make money and achieve goals and maybe be famous,
the difference between that self-interested way of living and developing self-awareness of
your relationship to other people and planet, the world in general, is self-transcendence.
So, the difference between being self-interested and self-transcendent is actually critical in current
time. And what I found was that people were only self-directed and cooperative, but not self-transcendent.
Then they would take pretty good care of themselves and those who were close to them.
But they might just ignore the needs of the community as a whole and the planet. And so,
they wouldn’t be concerned about equity, sustainability, and basic principles of fairness.
The people who were self-transcendent, instead of simply self-interested,
were really more characteristic or younger generation who are not satisfied with materialistic values
and executive control. They are more interested, they’re post-materialists,
what are sometimes called culturally creative. They have a creative character in which they have
humanitarian interests, ecological intelligence, social intelligence, and so on, because they want
to try to help us live in harmony with one another and the planet in which we share.
And so, this actually goes back to a very long-standing debate about what is a healthy personality.
And in the West, we’ve tended to think that a healthy personality was just being self-directed
and cooperative. And that does pretty well for most of people’s lives, but by the time you get
it in your 30s and by the time you get it in your 40s and 50s, most people in Western societies
who have that style of living start getting multiple diseases. And they begin to question whether
their values are really satisfying because they thought that if they achieved money and power and
so on, that they would be fulfilled and satisfied. But, you know, look around at the wealthiest
executives and people with a lot of influence and they’re often still very unsatisfied with their
lives and they feel something is missing. And that’s something that’s missing is really this need
for us to do the kinds of things in our life that will awaken us to our connections with one
another in the planet. This feeling, it’s not just wishful thinking or opinion to think that we’re
an integral part of the world and inseparable from one another. It’s actually the truth that
the world operates not less with competition or with symbiosis and we’re connected. And most of us
three-fourths of people actually have these self-transcendent experiences where they feel at least
briefly at times in their life under good conditions connected to one another and they feel
connected to the universe at times. They have moments of joy like that. But it’s very difficult
in modern society to sustain that from day to day. And as a result, we’re manipulated
by, you know, all the signals and social media to grab our attention to looking for likes
or making more money or consuming more or having the newest car and things like that that actually
are leading us to deplete the ecological resources of the Earth to a point that, you know, since
the mid-70s, the Earth has not been able to restore its ecological health. And so we’re gradually
step-by-step degrading the environment that we need. So I ask myself, what can we do
to have people realize that they are not currently, most of us are not living in a court with our
human nature? But because there’s a lot of controversy in science and society about what is
the healthy personality, I had to really look for objective science to see what’s the truth here.
Is it really just the people who are self-interested that are the natural human? And this other is kind
of a fantasy for humanists and to people who are very spiritually or religiously oriented.
And what I discovered here, and I think they’re not surprised you, but it surprised a lot of my
colleagues. We set out to identify all the genes for human personality. We found that there are
about a thousand of them, and they interact with each other in very complex ways. And it turns out
that what distinguishes us from chimpanzees and even from the endotholes is this capacity for
self-transcendence. That’s what gave us the creativity and the ability to appreciate our need to
work effectively in cooperative communities. And that’s what let us be able to displace all the
other hominids, the early humans on earth. Because if you work in social groups, you look out for
your children, your grandchildren, and even strangers in your community, it turns out that that’s
a very powerful force. And our capacity for being inventive and creative rather than just, you know,
being selfish and looking for using our power to do things that will serve us, we can have a vision
and imagination of the future that’s healthy for us. And it turns out that that
set that character, that creative character who’s self-directed in cooperative and self-transcendence
has much more energy is physically more resilient to injury and aging and all sorts of toxicity
that, you know, abounds in the world today and that we’re happier and we’re
able to be much more adaptive and innovative when faced with the kinds of challenges.
And it turns out that, you know, despite all the things that we’re doing, wrong now that are
decreasing the sustainability of the environment which we live, it turns out that we actually evolved,
became human, but modern humans with creativity and the sense of community and an imagination for
how to get along with each other. That happened in response to climatic changes that were
threatening our very survival. That was that started about three or four hundred thousand years ago.
And the system for temperament and social agreement, that goes back 40 million years. The
capacity for logical analysis and just being self-directed and, you know, making good tools and so on,
that goes back about two million years. But the capacity to be creative in communal and
self-transcendent goes back only a hundred thousand years. And it’s within that time that we
actually became dominant on the earth. But in the last two or three hundred years, as we moved
into our industrial society, we lost track of the very thing that made us so successful.
And we became very concerned with our power and domination over the earth until we realized
it is not an inexhaustible resource. And we lost a lot of our sense of need for social equity.
And I need to use creativity. So I’m sorry, you got me going on a lot of important issues,
but I hope I answered the question in context. Very, very much so and is appreciated and makes sense.
I have a follow on question, which is we can clearly trace some of the roots of our current
psychospiritual and social challenges back to the dawn of what we call civilization. A lot of
work’s been done in the area of eco psychology and elsewhere to do so. And I don’t think it’s,
by any means, a stretch to say, in the 20th century in particular, there has been this
hyper acceleration of this ultra-individualism. Sort of the Gordon Gecko greed is good. The
Ein Rand cult of individualism called positive objectivism in stories like Atlas Shrugged,
which is one of the most red books ever. And we’ve basically made of us grown up in and only
really experienced, especially in the west, especially in the United States. A culture that is so
infused with and permeated with an ethos stemming from a super underdeveloped self-transcendence
in the leadership. It strikes me that this is a really important thing for us to understand.
And I’m also curious if you could expand on the observation you make in the paper that many,
if not most, of the corporate leaders over the last several decades and political leaders and
others who are really making the major decisions in the world up to this point, generally have
underdeveloped self-transcendence attributes. And can you tell us a bit about the science,
how you go about realizing that kind of thing? And then also what you think that means in terms of
strategies and approaches, we might be taking going forward to help remedy that fact.
Well, there are several very important questions. There are several parts of this. First,
the fact is that the current sort of business philosophy that emphasizes profit without a sense
of social responsibility and that thinks, like Hayek said, that social justice is just an illusion
and it’s a fiction, is simply not consistent with our human nature. It’s simply not true because
we can show that what made us homo sapiens wise and virtuous is the recognition of our connectedness,
not our separateness. So if you have an attitude that you’re separate, you’re going to be defensive
and competitive and it tends to lead to insatiable desire for power and money and so on.
And it turns out that that just never satisfies. And then the fact is that what makes us work
to be physically, mentally and socially, healthy is to really identify as a part of something
larger than our individual self. And that’s what self-transcendence means is that you’re willing
to make sacrifices for others and to work for harmony rather than competition because you really
feel you’re part of one whole. And that’s the reality. I mean, if you think about it, we never,
we don’t live in a vacuum. We are not really separate. We have so many bacteria in our microbiome
that are really a part of us. We’re in symbiosis with them. We have to share the air that each of us
breathes the land, the planet. And so we’re all a part of this larger whole. And we have to be
stewards of that. Now, what’s remarkable is that there’s so many things going on now that are
leading us to not use the self-awareness that will fully capable of. So, you know, having
the notification signals on your iPhone that constantly grabbing your attention actually keeps
you responding by habit. It’s an addiction. And when you get controlled by that, then you can’t
enjoy silence. You can’t be aware effectively of being a participant in a larger whole. So,
we need to spend more time with our iPhones off. You know, in nature walks or gardening or in true
dialogue with someone where you’re looking at each other’s eyes and you’re thinking about what’s
he feeling? Why is he thinking that? Why does he think differently than me? I mean, because we are
each born with different talents, strengths and weaknesses. Nobody’s perfect. But together,
if we work cooperatively, we create a very resilient community and planet.
And so it’s getting to let ourselves have the experience so we can judge for ourselves what’s
healthy and satisfying for me. Not someone telling me how to live my life. We need freedom. We need
flexibility. We don’t need to be controlled. But we’re actually letting ourselves be controlled
by powerful and clever forces to get us to consume, to be distracted, to be in a state of fear,
and to measure status in terms of things that are not actually very satisfied.
And so just to be aware of that gives you, inoculate you against a lot of the things that keep us,
you know, in our rat race or slaves to money. And I think that’s the important thing. Now,
there’s really good news, though, because remember our basic nature, what does make us
satisfied is to be self-transformed. And even if most people haven’t cultivated it,
they have that within them. And it is possible. And it’s very important to realize, then,
that ultimately, step by step, the generations are making changes. All parents realize that
teenagers are very difficult often, because they have their own mind about what to value,
and there are types of music and so on. But adolescence has a very interesting
utility for the whole population of humanity, because the teenagers stop and reflect on
what are the parents doing wrong? And they change a little, hopefully, in the right direction.
All the parents’ generation isn’t necessarily going to agree with them. But what’s happening is that
we have, roughly speaking, there are three groups of personalities. The people who are
dominated by their habit system and their desires, we call those, in terms of values,
traditional, because they tend to be easily manipulated by fear, and by people who promise to
give them what they want. But they give up a lot of their capacity for self-regulation and
freedom to people who they’ll just more or less bluntly follow. There’s another group of people
that I think are dominant in terms of executive positions and business, but now they’ll
say business principles have permeated all of our social institutions. And things are generally
driven by individual profit, and we’ve forgotten that when we gave corporations the rights of a person,
initially, they were also expected to have the duties of a person. But somehow somebody
forgot about that, and it’s not being enforced. And so you get this notion that a corporation only
has responsibility to its investors, and not to the community that’s allowed it to operate.
And so we have a lot of anti-social personalities that are, that would be the diagnosis of most
businesses these days. Now, you know, there are good ones too that are just concerned about people
and community responsibilities. But unfortunately, the neoliberal values that don’t respect the reality
of social justice that don’t respect the need for sustainability and the way we care for our
communities and our planet or not, we’re not recognizing those responsibilities very effectively.
Let me just make sure I’ve got this clearly as I’m taking notes here. So you’ve identified there
are three types of people. The first, you can call traditionalists. The second, the tends to be
dominant at the apex of various organizations right now. What is the title here? The individual
materialists are sometimes, they’ve been called world value studies, the moderns, or the materialists.
And then those people are the ones who are self-directed and cooperate to the extent of working
for mutual benefit, but are not self-transparent. And they tend to be very hyper individualistic and
competitive and so on. And they’re fairly, they’re fairly healthy until they start accumulating
multiple chronic diseases and social dissatisfaction and so on. The third group are post-materialists,
are cultural creatives, the people who have well-developed self-directedness,
cooperatives, and self-transcendence. If you’re only self-transcendent, you tend to be and you’re
not self-directed, you tend to be living in a fantasy world. And you have to combine facing the
reality of life. You have to have realistic goals and to be able to get along with people and
analyze things, factually not just live in dreams and wishes, but you also have to have an
imagination that allows you to realize that we are part of something that we subjectively feel,
that may not be able to tangibly and objectively prove to accept it. We can only encourage people
to have the experiences that let them realize what makes them healthy and happy for themselves.
But now I’m going to step further because we actually know from large-scale population studies
working in multiple countries with different environments and different cultures,
that all human beings, in order to be optimally healthy and happy,
to be able to create a sustainable world, have to cultivate all three of these character traits.
And so the good news is that the post-materialists are actually increasing in the number.
And the values of the younger generation are near a majority in many places where they’re not
oppressive regimes like China and so on. And so one of the things that’s going on is a cultural war
now that on the surface is primarily between materialists and people who are more emotionally
reactive and traditionalists. And yet the post-materialists have been fairly quiet for a long time.
They just sort of went their way quietly. But now we’re seeing a lot more social activism.
And that is not fully appreciated except in epidemiologic studies because that’s the younger group
who are just getting, who have been disillusioned with politics and social activism,
but now are starting to speak more. And so I think that I have hope for the future because the
materialists of many of them are a bit scared. They want to limit voting and so on.
And that’s the big consideration
that you try to control values by not letting the values be expressed.
But in fact, near a majority of people now have the kinds of values that lead to more humanitarianism,
more concern for ecological issues and sustainability. That’s the direction of the future.
If we’re the surround. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so beautiful and exciting. And I’m going to take that
opportunity quickly, Dr. to remind our audience. This is the YonEarth Community podcast.
And I’m your host, Aaron William Perry. Today we’re visiting with Dr. Robert Klonenger,
who is a leading global thinker and scientist and influencer on this important conversion of
genetics, psychology, well-being, health, and social evolution. And I want to give a quick shout out
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your health and wellness practices at home. And also, of course, want to mention that you can find
more information about Dr. Klonenger’s work at answerofpedia. That’s answerofpedia.org.
We’ll include that link as well as a link to palmhealth.com in our show notes, along with links to
a few of his key articles. And that I’m going to take as a segue, Robert, into one of the things,
you know, we’re a part of it, the YonEarth community that has me extraordinarily excited and
full of gratitude, really, to be a part of this emerging movement, which is happening globally.
And this is the movement around fair trade, around regenerative economics and business practices,
around sustainable and triple bottom line business practices. We’ve got emerging third-party
certifications, such as the regenerative organic certification, the B-Corp, or benefits corporation
designation, and many others. And folks like Dr. Bronner’s, Adagonia, and others are really
helping lead the way in a global transformation of what we’re doing in our business lives and
in our work in economics, which we’re all participating in. And I’m really curious to hear from
you with all the research and insight you’ve got at your fingertips. Are you being increasingly
invited and called into corporate conversations as folks are responding to this emergent trend?
And clearly, there’s very exciting things happening in business at all scales, as folks are seeing
this massive transformation getting underway. Is this already something that you’re able to help
accelerate and define? Is it something maybe that is still kind of gestating and getting underway
for you and your colleagues? Well, first of all, it’s wonderful to see these excellent examples
of corporations and groups that really recognize the need to use our basic human potential
and to operate in a way that actually is consistent with our human nature,
rather than just being profit driven. And I think that is a great example. And I’ve tried,
I’ve focused primarily in the healthcare field, which is extremely dysfunctional,
and consulted with insurance companies, health insurance companies, but also that brings me
in contact with a number of executives. And so we’ve tried to interest those people in our
well-being training programs at Antipedia. And we have programs where people can take this online
and go through systematically a lot of the principles so that they can communicate with one another
and express that in their work. So yes, we’re doing that, but the need is tremendous.
And in health, for example, we have almost 60% of physicians describe themselves as burned out,
demoralized, and feel that they wouldn’t want their children to follow in their footsteps
in as healthcare providers. And this is because very often, we had brought in business
managers to try to reduce healthcare costs, but they only shifted those costs to their own
salaries and to buildings and so on, but not to the patients or the providers themselves.
And this has had a very unfortunate effect that there’s very little attention to the
communication between the doctors and their patients now are the need for continuity of care.
Everything’s becoming very procedural and algorithmic without that human touch.
And so I’ve done a lot of work in person-centered medicine to try to
do the things that we’re doing at Palm Health in St. Louis. And to work with the World Medical
Association to try to lead people to be aware of the need not just to make doctors more resilient
to the stressful conditions in which they’re working, but to try to change the basic values
of how our priorities aren’t held. A lot of forces against that because there’s so much
much profit to be made in healthcare. And that’s the problem that we have is that there is a lot
of greed and that the cost of that greed and self-interest is something that we can’t sustain.
And so I think there are a lot of smart people who are waking up to realize that, you know,
this is actually not even for my own individual benefit anymore. This is not working for me.
And so we want to help them to cultivate their human potential and to realize what would work
and to realize that that actually is more satisfying. Really, basically, I think people want to
be healthy and happy and good, but they may not know how to do it or how to change the environment
when it’s their working. And it’s so great that at Anthropedia, you and your colleagues have developed
a suite of resources for folks that can come in and engage as individuals. I see that you’ve got
a lot of resources for nonprofit organizations doing a variety of work in the world. And I’m
thinking of many of my own cultural creative friends and folks engage in this regenerative and
healing work. And I’m so excited to share with them what you’re doing and what Anthropedia is
offering. I was wondering if you could just kind of walk us through just basically what it would
look like for us when and as we engage with Anthropedia. And as we go through the curriculum and
resources that you guys have developed. Okay. Well, let me explain it a little bit by giving
you a sense of my own journey and the steps where we made mistakes and had to correct them in
order to be able to do something affecting. Initially, I developed videos with Anthropedia in
order to I could give to my patients as an adjunct so that they got essentially more intense
access to resources to promote their health rather than just thinking about I’m a psychiatrist.
So rather than just treating illness, depression, anxiety and so on and other serious illnesses,
I wanted to help them work on their health and their happiness. And health and well-being
are not just the absence of disease. You can be physically well and not really be very healthy
and happy socially, emotionally and so on. So we added the DVDs that gave things that we’ve
discovered that they loved it, but somehow they couldn’t translate it in their daily life.
And so we had to start training coaches to work with them one-on-one, personally,
to help them understand what it meant to translate these ideas that sounded desirable,
but no one seemed to be able to just implement it on a day-to-day basis in a sustainable way.
And so we developed the training program for coaches. And that’s a big part of what the
Anthropedia Foundation does is it trains coaches who can help other people.
And we’ve trained a large number of well-being coaches and they’re certified. We also began
then to offer it to people who didn’t necessarily want to be coaches themselves,
but to learn enough so that they can implement it in their business or their personal life
just for their own well-being. And so many people take these courses now. And so we’ve put everything
into online modules in addition to the opportunity to get person-to-person coaching because we had
to do that during the pandemic. We think it’s better if you can be face-to-face with someone
because you feel more of that human connection, but at the same time we can scale up more
and have broader, larger scale impact by doing it online too. And we have centers in the U.S.
St. Louis New York, Sweden, France, Italy. And so we’re spreading, but we can scale up a lot more
quickly by doing things online. So we’ve discovered that you can’t just tell someone that this is
what you should do and how you should live your life. People really have to discover for themselves
in freedom what it is that worked for me with the resources I have, with the constraints I have.
And so this is very personalized and everybody’s passed a little bit different than we respect that.
And so we give people the opportunity to have experiences, they try out for themselves what works.
We also realize that we have to help them with the kinds of stresses of modern life,
with dealing with anxiety, with dealing with toxic work environments,
with pollution in the world around them, community around them, with all those sort of people who
are content for the moment with acting in ways that are unsustainable in the long term.
And so we provide spas, we call spas with a 21st century, that provide a lot of mind-body
services that are just fun, but actually are health promoted. You know, we have things where
people are doing physical exercise that stimulate both their strong or weak muscles and float tanks,
but other things that help with detoxification, relaxation, meditation,
eye hand coordination that stimulate neuroplasticity, because to change your habits you have to
be willing not just to accept that some of your habits are bad, but to be able to change them.
And so we put together things that address the body, the mind and the soul simultaneously,
because if you don’t have a sense of what you value, what’s good, what’s virtuous,
and you don’t have the capacity for change, you’ll never be able to change your habits.
The only way you’re going to be healthy is that you can make your habits
be in accord with your goals and your values. And it’s got to be realistic, it’s got to be able to
add up at the end of the day and be feasible, but it’s also got to fill your heart and soul.
And that’s the kind of environment. So we also, people will come into our centers and they
spend an afternoon or a day or a week and learn to do this, and then they can bring that back and
find what is our community to do similar things.
Yes, it’s absolutely wonderful. And I’ve had an opportunity to experience just a little bit of
this visiting St. Louis and in full disclosure, it’s actually a list. We finally met just a few
weeks ago before recording this at my daughter Oshas University graduation ceremony, and she’s been
on the podcast. And of course, she and my son Hunter have worked at Palm Health, which you’re
part of. And the endora. Help create, I’m sorry. And the endora, which is the spa.
Yeah, and the end the end the agora, right? And of course, their mother, my ex, Amanda,
works at Palm and has been engaged with anthropidious work for many years. I’ve been hearing about
this for quite some time. Now, funny enough, your son, Dr. Kevin Kloninger, and Dr. Lauren
Munsch del Faro, and I were all in a couple of classes together in undergraduate school here at
the University of Colorado and Boulder a couple of few decades ago. And so it’s, it’s lovely to
me just to think about the sort of evolving ecosystem here among some of these very personal and
family relationships and how it came to be that you were sitting next to me when we were eating
lunch a few weeks ago. We got to talking to say, God, by golly, let’s, let’s have a podcast
conversation on all of this. And it leads me to think about, you know, some of the serendipity
that can occur in our lives and end up having, you know, really significant impact in our lives
over time. And I’m just wondering a two part question. When you’re thinking about how do those
who are already well on the road of a cultural creative development as an individual,
how do, how do they, how do we accelerate that work? And secondly, when we’re looking at folks
who have often resources and power and influence who maybe haven’t yet developed as much of the
self-transcendence attribute, how do we help those folks as well, A, become aware, B,
motivated, and C, you know, on the road? And in their sorts of some of the question,
how do we scale and accelerate these trends that you’re already seeing, you’re already identifying
in our world, generally, knowing that given many of these very near term systemic complex
challenges that we’re facing, we need to, you know, mobilize as many of us as we possibly can
with that heart-centric love-centric compassion-centric values and ethics-centric way of being
and working how doctor, how do we do that? Well, I think first of all, for your own health,
you do have to be able to identify friends and like-minded people in order to be able to
help them. So we have to first help those who are like-minded to work together as we’re doing here.
But in addition, we have to not make the mistake of lacking compassion and respect for people who
have different values and don’t demonize people who are currently maybe living in a way that
we might think is unhealthy because eventually smart people realize that that’s not working.
And if we maintain respectful dialogue with them and try to practice being tolerant
and being ready to help them when they have trouble, they’ll often see that, you know,
there’s something special there that they would like to share in. So keeping the communication
bridges open to be really there to help everyone and not just, you know, your friends and people
who are like-minded because we really all do have talents and abilities that would work much better
if we helped one another. And some people just haven’t seen that yet, but if we stay around
and respectful and they see that we’re ready to be helpful without demonizing them and
vilifying them, then I think that this can speed up because the natural evolution is that, you know,
a paradigm doesn’t just shift overnight because you’ve got the evidence for it. It tends that
generations change slowly. And so we have to really look out in particular for our younger generations
because it’s easier for them to change. And we can help them to have hope, to be active
and to be ready to be the change that needs to take place. And I am concerned that there’s
enormous stress on little generation and generation zero right now and they need a lot of help and
support. And so people who recognize this need for social justice, for sustainability, for
love, hope, and faith in all of our actions will have a sense of unity, but that unity while
it should look out certainly for those people who are culturally creative, but also for all the
younger generation and to remain available and accessible in as respectful as possible of everyone,
even if you think that they’re wrong. You know, I mean, a little bit like the question that was asked
of Gandhi that, you know, he said he would always do what’s right in his bullet and his opinion,
but he knew sometimes he was wrong. And so that made him very tolerant of the people that he opposed.
And so what happened in South Africa and in India is that many people who found him initially as
their his his opponent came to respect him because he was so fair and so tolerant, always driven
to be non-cooperative with what he didn’t agree with, but still loving all human and wanting to
help all of humanity. I think he’s a wonderful example. Beautiful. The beautiful. Well, Dr.
Kloninger, thank you so much for taking the time to visit with us today. And before we sign off,
I just I just want to give you the open-ended floor. If there’s anything else you’d like to
say or mention before we conclude this discussion, please by all means.
Well, I think thank you for that. I think what’s most important for us is to not be discouraged
when we so see so many people doing things that are not good for themselves or others.
But remember, you have to have respect because we all do make mistakes. And if we can maintain
friendly, respectful dialogue, and we remember our basic nature is good. And we don’t let ourselves
give in to fear and violence. And we maintain a sense of unity and community. Then I think that
things will work out well. Thank you. Thank you. The YonEarth Community Stewardship and Sustainability
podcast series is hosted by Aaron William Perry, author, thought leader, and executive consultant.
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Well done. This is so wonderful to hear this described cogently and based on such long study and contemplation. Thank you Professor Cloninger for your work and Aaron Perry for this really interesting interview. Well done
Thank you for your kind remarks John!