Author: Rob Kall

Rob Kall is host of the Bottom up Radio show, which explores our culture's transition from top down to bottom up, and founder publisher of OpEdnews.com, a left of liberal progressive news and opinion site publishing 500-1000 articles a month. He was honored, as publisher of OpEdNews, by the American whistleblower community, with the Pillar Award, for supporting whistleblowers. He pioneered positive psychology in the mid 1980s, organizing the world's first conference on it, founded and organized Storycon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and application of story, bringing together, for the first time, experts from all the worlds of story, and founded and organized the Winter Brain Meeting, weaving together neurofeedback, consciousness, heart and spirit. "I've come to see myself as working towards empowering and awakening people, first through biofeedback and self regulation training, and more recently, as a progressive publisher, writer of over 2000 articles and host of a radio show exploring a return to our bottom up roots, with the vision that bottom up values offer humanity a kinder, more sustainable future.
Posted on

Top Down Nuclear Masturbatory Fantasies

Reprinted from OpEdNews.com

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D7-syuFRbI]

“Just nuke the bastards.”

That’s the reflexive response millions of people have given for dealing with Iran, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, North Korea. In years past, they said the same for Cuba, North Vietnam and Russia.

It’s Top down nuclear bomb masturbatory fantasy.

I call it masturbatory because it’s about power and potency, or, more accurately, impotence. When it comes to war/violence, nuclear read more

Posted on

Visions of a Positive Future vs Fixing a Pathological Present

Reprinted from OpEdNews.com

It is not enough to resist or fight the system and the problems that exist. It is absolutely inadequate to aim for repairing the symptoms of what is broken. We need big, positive visions which lift our sights higher, towards horizons where there are bright futures, not scotch tape and bubblegum fixes for the pathological system we currently inhabit.

Back in the early eighties, when I was a lonely pioneer in the field that has become Positive Psychology (I called it Positivity back then,) most of the world of psychology focused on pathology. Clinical psychologists asked the questions:
  • What is the diagnosis?
  • What are the pathological symptoms?
  • What is the etiology that has led to the current clinical pathology?
  • What treatments, interventions and drugs are needed to eliminate the symptoms and pathology?
I had a different idea. How much can we help people by, instead of fixing what is broken or pathological, teaching them how to move in positive directions, helping them to develop positive skills. Instead of treating symptoms, we could help them develop habits and behaviors and attitudes that would lift them, regardless of the symptoms, towards greater health, happiness, inner strength and well-being. Of course, there was and is a place for pathology oriented “treatment” of psychological problems, but people back then were not talking about positive ways to lift people towards robust health, as opposed to the mainstream model of helping people to be not ill. I had an overhead transparency that something along the lines– Be Well, not not-sick. Since those early days, starting, for me in 1981, the field of Positive psychology has emerged as a major new idea that has sprouted wings and legs of its own. The International Positive Psychology Summit meeting has over 1000 attendees and hundreds of presentations, and Positive Psychology has become a field unto itself with graduate departments at major universities. Today, I’m prepping for an interview with Henry Giroux, a big picture thinker, and just published an article by Nathan Nahm, who, in his article, concludes, “It is high time that every one in America woke up for the reality we face. Stupid or not, we cannot have a useful prescription to our problem, if we don’t have a correct diagnosis.” Nahm is talking about our economic political situation. Nahm’s remark and Giroux’s big questions in the writings and interviews I’m reading in preparation for our interview, remind me of my quest, earlier in my career, to re-think the way that we help people become and stay psychologically healthy.

And Giroux says, in his book, The Violence of Organized Forgetting,

“It is not enough for people of conscience only read more