May 22, 2025 • 16 mins
George Noory and author Doug Noll explore his work helping resolve people's interpersonal and ideological conflicts, why people have become more confrontational than they were in the past, and how the Popeye cartoon illustrates a myth of violence always helping the good guy win a showdown.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Man, welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Noory with you,
Doug Noel with us. His book is called De Escalate. Doug,
where would you put road rage in this category?
Speaker 3 (00:14):
I would put road rage in a pretty high highly
escalated state. People with the road rage are really mad
and as we know, can resort to violence if they're
if they lose control.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Can you calm them down in ninety seconds or less?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
You can?
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Although I always I teach my students and my clients
if you're if you're facing incipient violence, run, I mean,
you've got to be skilled in dealing with violence, to
confront situations where there is potential violence. And in the
Prison of Peace Project, for example, when we were training
our students who are incarcerated how to be peacemakers and
(00:54):
medias using these skills, we always told them, if there's
any chance of violence, get out of there. It's not
worth it. But if it's not in sippy advantage, you're
just dealing with somebody who's really angry and upset and
they're screaming, yelling and cussing, then what I teach is
very very effective and will literally calm somebody down in
(01:16):
nine seconds or less.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Do law enforcement officers go through this kind.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Of training, unfortunately. Know.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
I've talked to a lot of law enforcement agencies over
the years, and there's a thing called post Police Officers
Standard Training, and then most of post standards, including California,
de escalation training is at the top of the list,
but they don't teach it. They're much more interested in
teaching how to restrain people, how to protect officers from violence,
(01:49):
than they are in teaching officers how to de escalate
angry situations. And that's unfortunate because we could probably prevent
a lot of use of forest cases on the use
of force cases could probably be solved if officers had
these skills. It's unfortunate, but that's okay. This is a
(02:13):
new idea hasn't been out for a long time, less
than twenty years, and so it just takes time for
it to sink into the people's consciousness on how.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
To do this.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Do these techniques work in arguments as well?
Speaker 3 (02:26):
They work in any situation where there's strong emotions, So
you could have arguments, you could have fights, you could
have yelling and screaming difficult conversations. You could be a
leader in a room, leading in a team meeting, and
somebody says something that's inappropriate or gets angry, and the skill,
the skill works perfectly in those situations. And the beauty
(02:47):
of it, George, is that because our brains are hardwired
to calm down with this technique. That's what the brain
scanning studies show is that it works on any human being.
Any human brain that can that can still process words,
we'll be able to calm down. It's just absolutely amazing
(03:07):
to watch it happen.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
Doug.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
It's my perception that something has happened to human dialogue nowadays. Yes,
in the old days, you could argue with somebody about
just about anything and have a conversation about it. Now
you can't. It's almost like a fight every time. What happened,
(03:29):
that's a great question, George. I think what happened was
that it really started. It started a long time ago,
back in the probably in the seventies and eighties, but
it really really.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
Started steamroll with.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Newt Gingrich and his people in the nineties, where they
started recognizing that the only way they can get votes
is to want either scare people or get people really angry,
and that's what started all and since that time, the
anger and the polarization has been amplified because we have
(04:08):
this thing now called social media that didn't exist twenty
years ago, and social media amplifies and the algorithms all
build and amplify fear and anger and rage because that's
where they get the eyeballs, and the eyeballs are where
the ad dollars are. So you don't see, peace doesn't sell,
(04:33):
it never has and it certainly doesn't sell on social media.
But what does sell anger, rage, polarization, name calling, cussing
people out, you know, being outrageous, because that's where the
eyeballs are. And then you layer onto that the fact
that the our youngest people, especially youngest adults, have been
(04:57):
raised on smartphones with texting, and they've lost the ability
to do exactly what you were talking about, sit down
and have a civil conversation about radically different beliefs or values.
And we've lost that ability because because they learned how
to text, and texting divorces you from the ability to
(05:17):
be able to read body language and listen to people
and slow down and really hear what another person has
to say, so all of this has led to where
we are today, which is this extreme polarization and inability
to listen to each other.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
How much of this is parental responsibility?
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Well, that's a great question. I think I'm going to
say it's a lot. There's a lot of responsibility here
you can lay on parents. But also I have to
say that parents are ignorant. They only know what they know.
So for example, how many times, and for anybody in
(05:58):
the artists audience listening to this, think about when you
were growing up, when you got hurt, you skin your knee,
you're outside running around, you fall down, you skin your knee,
you start to cry, and you're only two or three
years old.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
And what are you told.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
You're told if you're if you're a little boy, say
man up, don't cry, rub dirt in, it doesn't hurt.
If you're a little girl, you said, put on your
big girl panties, don't be a drama queen. These statements
are emotionally invalidating, and what they teach children is that
emotions are bad, emotions are evil, emotions are wrong, and
(06:33):
to feel emotion is to be less than human. And
parents do this because it was what they were taught
by their parents. But more importantly, the reason that human
beings engage in this sort of behavior is because they're
trying to soothe their own unconscious anxiety around another person's upset.
(06:54):
So when you see a little child who's crying and
you don't know how to manage your own emotions your brain,
and it's going to become anxious, and you will do
anything you can to get rid.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Of that anxiety. So what do you do.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
You tell the kid to stop crying, stop feeling that way,
so that I can feel better about myself.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
See, I would have a mother who God lovers. She's
going to be ninety six next week.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
Doug for her.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
She would pick me up, take me home, patch me up,
give me a little kiss on the knee that was
Ralph scraped up, and send me on my way.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Good for you, and good for her. You know, we're
probably about the same age. My mom passed away the
last fall at ninety six.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Now, It's okay.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
She had a great life and you know it was
an amazing process. So and good for you and good
for her. But I don't think that is always the
most common experience and I don't think it's the most
common experience that people have today. I talked to parents
all the time about this, and they're a standard to
learn that the most powerful thing they can do for
their children is listen to their emotions.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Listen to a.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Child's emotions and reflect those emotions. So when a child
is happy, say you're really happy, or when they're really sad,
you say you're really sad, or are you really upset?
Or you're hurt, or you're scared or you're frightened. Just
telling children what they're feeling helps the emotional processes in
their brain develop, so they develop some emotional maturity as
(08:17):
they grow. And when you emotionally invalidate a child by
saying don't cry, don't be a drama queen, oh you'll
give over, don't make am out and out of emoihill,
you are literally shutting down the emotional development.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
Of that child.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
And so I think part of the problem we have
today is so many people have been invalidated that they
are not emotionally connected to themselves, and so when they
get into an emotionally intense situation, they get triggered and
then get highly reactive because they don't have any other
skills to help them work through the emotional moment. And
(08:53):
my goal in life is to change all that.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Of course, as somebody with a mediator experience, how would
you handle situations between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Hamas?
What would you do.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
Well? I think that.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Those are extraordinarily complex problems. And I'm not sure that
in those situations who we're dealing with, uh, we're dealing
with conflicts that are being driven by overtly strong emotions.
I think it's much more complex. For Putin, for example,
his the driver that he wants, he wants a new
(09:31):
he wants a neutered neutral benign Ukraine that has is
not being armed, is basically a buffer between the West
and the Russian border, and he wants any any He
wants to make sure that Russia is protected from an
invasion from the West through Ukraine. So he is he
(09:54):
has no interest in being de escalated. And I would
say that if you were a prutent advisor and Putin
did displayed anger, displayed upset, that maybe de escalating him
and calming him down so that you could have a
more clarifying conversation, do some more problem solving, might be useful.
(10:18):
But I don't think that in the grand scheme of
things being able de escalating a conflict like the Russian
Ukrainian situation is going to be that the concept that
I teach, which is interpersonal de escalation, is going to
be effective. Same thing we were talking earlier, and I
heard the report about Israel thinking about bombing Iran and
(10:40):
Iran sitting, I was thinking that the United States is weak,
and I mean, these are all perceptions that are totally wrong,
but I don't think they're amenable to unless there's interpersonal
emotion that's involved. The kind of stuff that I teach
is much more granular and micro and may or may
not be of assistant but probably not.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Using your techniques for de escalate and elusive peace. Could
we really have peace with Russia? Could we really have
peace with China?
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Well, I guess it depends on how you define peace,
pieces of word that has a lot of different meanings.
Can we can we have a peace with Russia, peace
in the sense that there isn't war like what's going
on with Ukraini right now? Yes, but the only way
that in my opinion, people like Putin only respond to aggressive,
(11:40):
aggressive behavior and The worst thing we can do is
not arm Ukraine. If we want to stop Putin and
get him out of Ukraine, Ukraine has to be armed
to be able to defend itself. Putin will respond to that.
He responds to strength, he doesn't respond to weakness. With
respect to China, this is a problem that goes back
(12:01):
for thousands of years. The Chinese for centuries have always
felt inferior to the West. Partly that's due to colonialism
and the way the West treated Asia or centuries and
it so it always has felt that it's the step
sister in global affairs and has always tried to assert
(12:23):
itself to be to gain dominance. It doesn't want military dominance,
it wants economic and cultural and social dominance. So that's
a completely different problem than the Putin you know, Russian
Ukrainian problem. Can you have peace with these countries, Yes,
you can, but it's it's always dynamic. It's going to
change from year to year to year, it's going to
(12:45):
change from decade to decade, and there's no one answer
that's going to say, oh, we're going to have peace
in the world's it's it's going to be a constant
challenge for diplomats and for political operators to keep everything
in balance, in some sort of balance, so that we
don't have violence breaking out in the sense of war,
(13:07):
for example, invading Taiwan or in the Russia's case, invading Thailan,
Ukraine or Poland or the Baltic States. So that's the challenge,
and I don't frankly, I just don't think that our
politicians the days quite understand that it's a dynamic balance
where you never have peace. It's always something changing all
(13:29):
the time.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Somebody like Hitler, doug what was wrong with the guy?
Speaker 4 (13:32):
What did he want?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
He was a demagogue and he came to power when
the West crushed Germany after World War One, crushed Germany economically.
He was a demagogue who was able to convince people
that the Teutonic image of the White Area nation was.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
The right of the German people.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
And then he escaped go to the course the Jews, and
that led to the led to the Holocaust. And what
he wanted was an Aryan, an Aryan nation dominating the world.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Was he insane in your opinion?
Speaker 4 (14:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
I don't know how you would define insane. I would
say that he was a probably a meglomaniac. Yeah, obviously.
But and here's a guy who also believed that violence
was was was the path to redemption. There's a really
interesting theory called the myth of redemptive violence. And I'll
(14:36):
just give you a quick example and it kind of
explains a lot of this stuff. So you remember when
you were a kid, we're about the same age when
pop By the Sailor. Remember Popeye the Sailor and olive
oil and an olive oil. Okay, so let me tell
you there you go. So remember the plot situation. Popeye's
walking down the street with olive oil and they're just
happy as a clam and all of a sudden, Bluto
shows up and he absconds with olive oil, which is
(14:59):
really it was really sort of a it was a rape,
but not quite that obvious on children's cartoons in the
nineteen fifties. And olive oil is taken away, screaming and yelling,
Popeye comes chasing after Blueto. He gets the snot beat
out of him by Bluto. And then when he's an extremists,
this magical spinach pops out from his arms and he
(15:21):
ingests the spinach and he gets this superpower, and then
he kicks the snut out of Blueto rescues Olive Oil
and they walk off happily ever after into the sunset.
And that is the myth of redemptive boness. If you
remember all the old Bruce Willis movies, a diary movies
exactly the same storyline.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
What the idea is is that.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
When we are confronted with violence, we meet violence with
even more bonets because we get a certain satisfaction out
of beating up the good guy, even though we leave
just massive destruction.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
In our wake.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
And so with Popeye, so one, how come Olive Oil
is such a victim? How comes she can't defend herself
against this guy every single week when he comes into
her presence? And why does Popeye wait to have a
snot kicked out of him before he eats the spinish?
Why doesn't when he see Blue that eat the spinish
and tell Blue to go take a walk?
Speaker 4 (16:13):
And what do we do with Blue? Though?
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Why can't we get this guy into therapy or something.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Made a great cartoon?
Speaker 3 (16:19):
That's why exactly because it's the plot the myth of
redempti violence, the idea that when there's redemptive violence, the
good guy comes in and beats up the bad guy.
There's a certain feeling of satisfaction the week.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
At Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight
at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to
coastam dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Man, welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Noory with you,
Doug Noel with us. His book is called De Escalate. Doug,
where would you put road rage in this category?
Speaker 3 (00:14):
I would put road rage in a pretty high highly
escalated state. People with the road rage are really mad
and as we know, can resort to violence if they're
if they lose control.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Can you calm them down in ninety seconds or less?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
You can?
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Although I always I teach my students and my clients
if you're if you're facing incipient violence, run, I mean,
you've got to be skilled in dealing with violence, to
confront situations where there is potential violence. And in the
Prison of Peace Project, for example, when we were training
our students who are incarcerated how to be peacemakers and
(00:54):
medias using these skills, we always told them, if there's
any chance of violence, get out of there. It's not
worth it. But if it's not in sippy advantage, you're
just dealing with somebody who's really angry and upset and
they're screaming, yelling and cussing, then what I teach is
very very effective and will literally calm somebody down in
(01:16):
nine seconds or less.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Do law enforcement officers go through this kind.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Of training, unfortunately. Know.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
I've talked to a lot of law enforcement agencies over
the years, and there's a thing called post Police Officers
Standard Training, and then most of post standards, including California,
de escalation training is at the top of the list,
but they don't teach it. They're much more interested in
teaching how to restrain people, how to protect officers from violence,
(01:49):
than they are in teaching officers how to de escalate
angry situations. And that's unfortunate because we could probably prevent
a lot of use of forest cases on the use
of force cases could probably be solved if officers had
these skills. It's unfortunate, but that's okay. This is a
(02:13):
new idea hasn't been out for a long time, less
than twenty years, and so it just takes time for
it to sink into the people's consciousness on how.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
To do this.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Do these techniques work in arguments as well?
Speaker 3 (02:26):
They work in any situation where there's strong emotions, So
you could have arguments, you could have fights, you could
have yelling and screaming difficult conversations. You could be a
leader in a room, leading in a team meeting, and
somebody says something that's inappropriate or gets angry, and the skill,
the skill works perfectly in those situations. And the beauty
(02:47):
of it, George, is that because our brains are hardwired
to calm down with this technique. That's what the brain
scanning studies show is that it works on any human being.
Any human brain that can that can still process words,
we'll be able to calm down. It's just absolutely amazing
(03:07):
to watch it happen.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
Doug.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
It's my perception that something has happened to human dialogue nowadays. Yes,
in the old days, you could argue with somebody about
just about anything and have a conversation about it. Now
you can't. It's almost like a fight every time. What happened,
(03:29):
that's a great question, George. I think what happened was
that it really started. It started a long time ago,
back in the probably in the seventies and eighties, but
it really really.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
Started steamroll with.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Newt Gingrich and his people in the nineties, where they
started recognizing that the only way they can get votes
is to want either scare people or get people really angry,
and that's what started all and since that time, the
anger and the polarization has been amplified because we have
(04:08):
this thing now called social media that didn't exist twenty
years ago, and social media amplifies and the algorithms all
build and amplify fear and anger and rage because that's
where they get the eyeballs, and the eyeballs are where
the ad dollars are. So you don't see, peace doesn't sell,
(04:33):
it never has and it certainly doesn't sell on social media.
But what does sell anger, rage, polarization, name calling, cussing
people out, you know, being outrageous, because that's where the
eyeballs are. And then you layer onto that the fact
that the our youngest people, especially youngest adults, have been
(04:57):
raised on smartphones with texting, and they've lost the ability
to do exactly what you were talking about, sit down
and have a civil conversation about radically different beliefs or values.
And we've lost that ability because because they learned how
to text, and texting divorces you from the ability to
(05:17):
be able to read body language and listen to people
and slow down and really hear what another person has
to say, so all of this has led to where
we are today, which is this extreme polarization and inability
to listen to each other.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
How much of this is parental responsibility?
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Well, that's a great question. I think I'm going to
say it's a lot. There's a lot of responsibility here
you can lay on parents. But also I have to
say that parents are ignorant. They only know what they know.
So for example, how many times, and for anybody in
(05:58):
the artists audience listening to this, think about when you
were growing up, when you got hurt, you skin your knee,
you're outside running around, you fall down, you skin your knee,
you start to cry, and you're only two or three
years old.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
And what are you told.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
You're told if you're if you're a little boy, say
man up, don't cry, rub dirt in, it doesn't hurt.
If you're a little girl, you said, put on your
big girl panties, don't be a drama queen. These statements
are emotionally invalidating, and what they teach children is that
emotions are bad, emotions are evil, emotions are wrong, and
(06:33):
to feel emotion is to be less than human. And
parents do this because it was what they were taught
by their parents. But more importantly, the reason that human
beings engage in this sort of behavior is because they're
trying to soothe their own unconscious anxiety around another person's upset.
(06:54):
So when you see a little child who's crying and
you don't know how to manage your own emotions your brain,
and it's going to become anxious, and you will do
anything you can to get rid.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Of that anxiety. So what do you do.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
You tell the kid to stop crying, stop feeling that way,
so that I can feel better about myself.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
See, I would have a mother who God lovers. She's
going to be ninety six next week.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
Doug for her.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
She would pick me up, take me home, patch me up,
give me a little kiss on the knee that was
Ralph scraped up, and send me on my way.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Good for you, and good for her. You know, we're
probably about the same age. My mom passed away the
last fall at ninety six.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Now, It's okay.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
She had a great life and you know it was
an amazing process. So and good for you and good
for her. But I don't think that is always the
most common experience and I don't think it's the most
common experience that people have today. I talked to parents
all the time about this, and they're a standard to
learn that the most powerful thing they can do for
their children is listen to their emotions.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Listen to a.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Child's emotions and reflect those emotions. So when a child
is happy, say you're really happy, or when they're really sad,
you say you're really sad, or are you really upset?
Or you're hurt, or you're scared or you're frightened. Just
telling children what they're feeling helps the emotional processes in
their brain develop, so they develop some emotional maturity as
(08:17):
they grow. And when you emotionally invalidate a child by
saying don't cry, don't be a drama queen, oh you'll
give over, don't make am out and out of emoihill,
you are literally shutting down the emotional development.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
Of that child.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
And so I think part of the problem we have
today is so many people have been invalidated that they
are not emotionally connected to themselves, and so when they
get into an emotionally intense situation, they get triggered and
then get highly reactive because they don't have any other
skills to help them work through the emotional moment. And
(08:53):
my goal in life is to change all that.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Of course, as somebody with a mediator experience, how would
you handle situations between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Hamas?
What would you do.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
Well? I think that.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Those are extraordinarily complex problems. And I'm not sure that
in those situations who we're dealing with, uh, we're dealing
with conflicts that are being driven by overtly strong emotions.
I think it's much more complex. For Putin, for example,
his the driver that he wants, he wants a new
(09:31):
he wants a neutered neutral benign Ukraine that has is
not being armed, is basically a buffer between the West
and the Russian border, and he wants any any He
wants to make sure that Russia is protected from an
invasion from the West through Ukraine. So he is he
(09:54):
has no interest in being de escalated. And I would
say that if you were a prutent advisor and Putin
did displayed anger, displayed upset, that maybe de escalating him
and calming him down so that you could have a
more clarifying conversation, do some more problem solving, might be useful.
(10:18):
But I don't think that in the grand scheme of
things being able de escalating a conflict like the Russian
Ukrainian situation is going to be that the concept that
I teach, which is interpersonal de escalation, is going to
be effective. Same thing we were talking earlier, and I
heard the report about Israel thinking about bombing Iran and
(10:40):
Iran sitting, I was thinking that the United States is weak,
and I mean, these are all perceptions that are totally wrong,
but I don't think they're amenable to unless there's interpersonal
emotion that's involved. The kind of stuff that I teach
is much more granular and micro and may or may
not be of assistant but probably not.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Using your techniques for de escalate and elusive peace. Could
we really have peace with Russia? Could we really have
peace with China?
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Well, I guess it depends on how you define peace,
pieces of word that has a lot of different meanings.
Can we can we have a peace with Russia, peace
in the sense that there isn't war like what's going
on with Ukraini right now? Yes, but the only way
that in my opinion, people like Putin only respond to aggressive,
(11:40):
aggressive behavior and The worst thing we can do is
not arm Ukraine. If we want to stop Putin and
get him out of Ukraine, Ukraine has to be armed
to be able to defend itself. Putin will respond to that.
He responds to strength, he doesn't respond to weakness. With
respect to China, this is a problem that goes back
(12:01):
for thousands of years. The Chinese for centuries have always
felt inferior to the West. Partly that's due to colonialism
and the way the West treated Asia or centuries and
it so it always has felt that it's the step
sister in global affairs and has always tried to assert
(12:23):
itself to be to gain dominance. It doesn't want military dominance,
it wants economic and cultural and social dominance. So that's
a completely different problem than the Putin you know, Russian
Ukrainian problem. Can you have peace with these countries, Yes,
you can, but it's it's always dynamic. It's going to
change from year to year to year, it's going to
(12:45):
change from decade to decade, and there's no one answer
that's going to say, oh, we're going to have peace
in the world's it's it's going to be a constant
challenge for diplomats and for political operators to keep everything
in balance, in some sort of balance, so that we
don't have violence breaking out in the sense of war,
(13:07):
for example, invading Taiwan or in the Russia's case, invading Thailan,
Ukraine or Poland or the Baltic States. So that's the challenge,
and I don't frankly, I just don't think that our
politicians the days quite understand that it's a dynamic balance
where you never have peace. It's always something changing all
(13:29):
the time.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Somebody like Hitler, doug what was wrong with the guy?
Speaker 4 (13:32):
What did he want?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
He was a demagogue and he came to power when
the West crushed Germany after World War One, crushed Germany economically.
He was a demagogue who was able to convince people
that the Teutonic image of the White Area nation was.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
The right of the German people.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
And then he escaped go to the course the Jews, and
that led to the led to the Holocaust. And what
he wanted was an Aryan, an Aryan nation dominating the world.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Was he insane in your opinion?
Speaker 4 (14:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
I don't know how you would define insane. I would
say that he was a probably a meglomaniac. Yeah, obviously.
But and here's a guy who also believed that violence
was was was the path to redemption. There's a really
interesting theory called the myth of redemptive violence. And I'll
(14:36):
just give you a quick example and it kind of
explains a lot of this stuff. So you remember when
you were a kid, we're about the same age when
pop By the Sailor. Remember Popeye the Sailor and olive
oil and an olive oil. Okay, so let me tell
you there you go. So remember the plot situation. Popeye's
walking down the street with olive oil and they're just
happy as a clam and all of a sudden, Bluto
shows up and he absconds with olive oil, which is
(14:59):
really it was really sort of a it was a rape,
but not quite that obvious on children's cartoons in the
nineteen fifties. And olive oil is taken away, screaming and yelling,
Popeye comes chasing after Blueto. He gets the snot beat
out of him by Bluto. And then when he's an extremists,
this magical spinach pops out from his arms and he
(15:21):
ingests the spinach and he gets this superpower, and then
he kicks the snut out of Blueto rescues Olive Oil
and they walk off happily ever after into the sunset.
And that is the myth of redemptive boness. If you
remember all the old Bruce Willis movies, a diary movies
exactly the same storyline.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
What the idea is is that.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
When we are confronted with violence, we meet violence with
even more bonets because we get a certain satisfaction out
of beating up the good guy, even though we leave
just massive destruction.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
In our wake.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
And so with Popeye, so one, how come Olive Oil
is such a victim? How comes she can't defend herself
against this guy every single week when he comes into
her presence? And why does Popeye wait to have a
snot kicked out of him before he eats the spinish?
Why doesn't when he see Blue that eat the spinish
and tell Blue to go take a walk?
Speaker 4 (16:13):
And what do we do with Blue? Though?
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Why can't we get this guy into therapy or something.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Made a great cartoon?
Speaker 3 (16:19):
That's why exactly because it's the plot the myth of
redempti violence, the idea that when there's redemptive violence, the
good guy comes in and beats up the bad guy.
There's a certain feeling of satisfaction the week.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
At Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight
at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to
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The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
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