I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn't change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.
Interpretation
Psychotherapy could help leaders understand their own issues, preventing harm to others.
George Monbiot suggests that political leaders often impose their personal traumas and issues on society, negatively impacting their governance. He advocates for psychotherapy as a qualification for national office, believing it could help candidates become more self-aware and less likely to project their own problems onto the population, fostering more empathetic leadership.
In practice
This quote could be used in a political speech advocating for mental health awareness in leadership.
The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.
A cat has a reputation to protect. If it had a halo, it would be worn cocked to one side.
Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.
When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing, then the supreme state will come to you uninvited and unexpected.
There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.
Now then, Pooh," said Christopher Robin, "where's your boat?" "I ought to say," explained Pooh as they walked down to the shore of the island, "that it isn't just an ordinary sort of boat. Sometimes it's a Boat, and sometimes it's more of an Accident. It all depends." "Depends on what?" "On whether I'm on the top of it or underneath it.
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
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