I hope you can join us for Sunday’s Book Salon with one of my favorite progressives, Thom Hartmann. We’ll be discussing his new book, Threshold – The Crisis of Western Culture.

I love Thom Hartmann’s radio show, the thinking persons’ talk radio. I never miss Brunch with Bernie Fridays, if I can help it. For several years, Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, our only true elected (and re-elected) Socialist , has been joining Thom on the show for an hour to talk about politics and take listeners’ calls.

I must confess, though, that I often turn the radio off when he has a guest from the Ayn Rand Institute or the NRA or a few other conservative point-of-view guests. I think he is far too polite about some of their "ideas" and I need to keep my blood pressure under strict control these days. Still, he is respected on both sides of the aisle for his willingness to air both sides of a debate.

Here are a couple of my favorite takes from Threshold:

In Chapter 5, Free Market Fools, he asks the question on many of our lips since the bankster bailouts – Why do CEOs make all that money? Here’s his answer, deduced while wearing his psychotherapist’s hat.

"But what part of being a CEO could be so difficult – so impossible for mere mortals – that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the US capable of performing it?
I my humble opinion, it’s the sociopath part. CEO’s of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their community and decent people. But the CEO’s of the worlds largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings. Only about 1-3% of us are sociopaths – people who don’t have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1-3% of sociopaths there’s probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction there’s an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.
Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences."

That seems about right to me! What do you think?

Chapter 10 Caral, Peru: A Thousand Years of Peace

Here Thom talks about an ancient indigenous city, recently discovered by a Peruvian archeologist, Dr. Ruth Shady, and her team, which thrived for 1,000 years without any signs of war that they can detect. What they have determined is that they were a cooperative society that traded with the other tribes around them to get items their society lacked, in good faith.

Archeologists think it was a matriarchal or at least egalitarian society, based on artifacts unearthed (unsanded,really)at the site. The city has two, distinct areas – a rectangular grouping of rectangular buildings they think was the administrative center, dominated by the males. The other is a more rounded, artistic center complete with an acoustically perfect amphitheater where they unearthed musical instruments made of bone and stone. They think this was the original heart of the city, begun and nurtured by the women.

"The city had huge plazas, giant pyramids, elaborate homes and the remains of art, music and a complex culture. The citizens of this city lived in peace for more than 1,000 years before climate change covered their city over and they abandoned it."

Think about that for a minute – a complex culture with art and music and no war, for a thousand years.

Please join us Sunday at 2 pm Pacific for a discussion with this amazing man about his amazing book. I’ll see you in the comments.