Psychology, Politics, and Science
Donald
Trump is a sociopath. That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact. It’s been
researched, peer-reviewed, and published by scientist John Gartner, a
psychologist.
Here are some more astonishing facts, published in the scientific magazine Psychology Today: “Liberals are ‘bleeding hearts’ because they empathize so strongly with the sufferings of others… Conservatives see the world as a more threatening place because their brains predispose them to being fearful. They are also predisposed by brain biology to hating complexity and compromise.”
You might not like hearing these things. I sure don’t, but maybe it’s high time that we faced reality. Liberals’ intuitions about us have been confirmed, scientifically.
Or have they? These “findings” sound an awful lot like left-wing wish fulfillment masquerading as science. Just how scientific is psychology?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud was the world’s most famous theorist of “the science of mind.” His most famous theory held that each of us suffers from the original sin of imaginary incest. As children starting about the age of three, we became sexually attracted to our opposite-sex parent (and, correspondingly, we became jealous of our same-sex parent). This unspeakable desire buried deeply within our unconscious, Freud claimed, can cause us to go crazy in adulthood.
Fortunately, Freud devised a way to effect forgiveness. His “talking cure” called psychoanalysis, a regimen of weekly conversations lasting many years, enabled the psychoanalyst to “excavate” our repressed memories, raise them into conscious awareness, and produce catharsis -- release.
Freud showed even more imagination in the telling of his theories. He peppered his abstracts with terms like Oedipus Complex, penis envy, castration complex, anal and phallic stages of psychosexual development, and death drives. Victorian audiences, who normally wouldn’t think twice about psychology, ate it up and Freud became famous.
But was it scientific? In his article “Why Freud was not a Scientist,” Ross Pomeroy writes, “…the primary reason why Freud's ideas are so ubiquitous is that they didn't transcend science; they bypassed them… We now know all of these ideas to be wrong, and frankly, a tad whacko.”
"His approach was not scientific,” adds Harriet Hall in Science-Based Medicine. “He never tested his ideas with experiments that might have falsified his beliefs, and he ignored facts that contradicted his beliefs."
Psychologist Hans Eysenck conceded that Freud was a genius, except “…not of science… but of literary art. His place is not, as he claimed, with Copernicus and Darwin but with Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm…"
By the 1920s, rebellion was afoot. Psychologist John Watson dismissed all this so-called “mind science.” He regarded the mind as a figment of the brain’s imagination: “It has never been seen, touched, smelled, tasted, or moved,” he wrote in the 1920s. “It is a plain assumption, just as unprovable as the old concept of the soul.”
Watson redefined psychology as “the science of behavior.” Behaviorism held that the newborn infant is a tabula rasa, a blank slate sans fear, sans instincts, sans anything that might constitute an innate nature. The script to be written upon this slate is experience. Hence, he who controls experience by shaping the environment can create the person. This led Watson to make one of the most outlandish brags in academic history.
Behaviorists
reasoned that insofar as we are born as blank slates, we enjoy little
innate advantage over animal blank slates. Therefore, researchers should
be able to learn much about us by studying animals. They spent much of
their time experimenting with pigeons and rats. Critics called it “rat
psychology.”
Since Freud and Watson, psychology has advanced little. Today it remains “the science of mind,” and “the science of there-is-no-such-thing-as-mind,” and nobody seems to notice the contradiction. It suffers from “multiple personality disorder,” and this has produced an intellectual vacuum wherein anything goes. Rorschach ink blots, somatotyping, Recovered-Memory Theory, Primal Therapy (scream your cares away), Rebirthing Therapy (experience your own big bang), Attention Deficit Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder -- all esoteric, whacko, and all fitting comfortably within the invisible boundaries of contemporary psychology. There’s even a disorder for when you become fed up with your psychotherapist. That’s called Self-Defeating Personality Disorder.
Meanwhile, no one is paying attention to what ought to be the central purpose of psychology -- understanding human consciousness. Psychologists have become so caught up in esoterica, that they’ve lost sight of their true calling. Ask them to describe the “inner child,” or to talk about ways we can “get in touch with our emotions,” and they can drone on endlessly. But if you ask them What is an emotion? they are struck dumb.
So let’s find out what is an emotion is. From the Dictionary of Psychology by Professor Arthur S. Reber: “Historically this term has proven utterly refractory to definitional efforts; probably no other term in psychology shares its nondefinability with its frequency of use.” (pg. 246)
How about pleasure? Surely we know what makes fun, fun don’t we? Not according to Reber: “(Pleasure is) an emotional experience that many regard as fundamentally undefinable.” (pg. 576)
Now the most important question of all: Do we possess free will? Can we act as we wish, or are all our actions determined (caused) by forces outside of ourselves? Which is it, Professor Reber?
“Most contemporary social scientists (psychologists, sociologists, et al.)… take a position that can best be described as ‘uncomfortable pragmatism.’ That is, in their day-to-day work they treat their subjects as probabilistically determined, chalk up what they cannot predict accurately to as yet unknown factors of causation… and prefer to think of themselves as actually operating according to their own free choice independently of a crass determinism that diminishes their sense of their own humanity.” (pg. 203)
At last. Mind scientists and never-mind scientists can finally agree on something: Free will for me but not for thee. They regard themselves as being autonomous. They believe they have the freedom to act or think or speak as they choose. But you and me? We are automatons. We have no more power to decide what we shall do than, say, Mars can decide to change its orbit.
Faced with uncertainty about what it is they should be studying, or how to go about studying it, many psychologists have retreated to the comforting halls of academia, where their fellow social scientists study race theory and gender dysphoria, and where “doing science” means coming up with proofs for whatever they already know to be true. Many of those truths turn out to be liberal clichés. A 2015 study found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans eight to one among the ranks of social scientists. Numbers were even worse in a survey of over 300 experimental psychologists: Only four admitted to having voted for Romney.
In an episode of The Bob Newhart Show, Bob, a practicing psychologist, comes to realize that he’s not actually helping any of his patients. He visits the wisest man he knows, his former college professor and mentor Albert, and asks him: “What’s it all about?”
“It’s a crock!” Albert replies.
So the next time you hear a psychologist announce that Trump is a sociopath and that conservatives lack empathy; or that gender is fluid, masculinity is toxic, and gun ownership is a social disease, you must remember this:
It’s all a crock.
Here are some more astonishing facts, published in the scientific magazine Psychology Today: “Liberals are ‘bleeding hearts’ because they empathize so strongly with the sufferings of others… Conservatives see the world as a more threatening place because their brains predispose them to being fearful. They are also predisposed by brain biology to hating complexity and compromise.”
You might not like hearing these things. I sure don’t, but maybe it’s high time that we faced reality. Liberals’ intuitions about us have been confirmed, scientifically.
Or have they? These “findings” sound an awful lot like left-wing wish fulfillment masquerading as science. Just how scientific is psychology?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud was the world’s most famous theorist of “the science of mind.” His most famous theory held that each of us suffers from the original sin of imaginary incest. As children starting about the age of three, we became sexually attracted to our opposite-sex parent (and, correspondingly, we became jealous of our same-sex parent). This unspeakable desire buried deeply within our unconscious, Freud claimed, can cause us to go crazy in adulthood.
Fortunately, Freud devised a way to effect forgiveness. His “talking cure” called psychoanalysis, a regimen of weekly conversations lasting many years, enabled the psychoanalyst to “excavate” our repressed memories, raise them into conscious awareness, and produce catharsis -- release.
Freud showed even more imagination in the telling of his theories. He peppered his abstracts with terms like Oedipus Complex, penis envy, castration complex, anal and phallic stages of psychosexual development, and death drives. Victorian audiences, who normally wouldn’t think twice about psychology, ate it up and Freud became famous.
But was it scientific? In his article “Why Freud was not a Scientist,” Ross Pomeroy writes, “…the primary reason why Freud's ideas are so ubiquitous is that they didn't transcend science; they bypassed them… We now know all of these ideas to be wrong, and frankly, a tad whacko.”
"His approach was not scientific,” adds Harriet Hall in Science-Based Medicine. “He never tested his ideas with experiments that might have falsified his beliefs, and he ignored facts that contradicted his beliefs."
Psychologist Hans Eysenck conceded that Freud was a genius, except “…not of science… but of literary art. His place is not, as he claimed, with Copernicus and Darwin but with Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm…"
By the 1920s, rebellion was afoot. Psychologist John Watson dismissed all this so-called “mind science.” He regarded the mind as a figment of the brain’s imagination: “It has never been seen, touched, smelled, tasted, or moved,” he wrote in the 1920s. “It is a plain assumption, just as unprovable as the old concept of the soul.”
Watson redefined psychology as “the science of behavior.” Behaviorism held that the newborn infant is a tabula rasa, a blank slate sans fear, sans instincts, sans anything that might constitute an innate nature. The script to be written upon this slate is experience. Hence, he who controls experience by shaping the environment can create the person. This led Watson to make one of the most outlandish brags in academic history.
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specialized world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select -- a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief, and yes, even a beggar-man, and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”Watson was generous with advice for other parents: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap,” he cautioned. “If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night.” Watson himself was a terrible parent, according to his granddaughter actress Mariette Hartley.
Behaviorists
reasoned that insofar as we are born as blank slates, we enjoy little
innate advantage over animal blank slates. Therefore, researchers should
be able to learn much about us by studying animals. They spent much of
their time experimenting with pigeons and rats. Critics called it “rat
psychology.”Since Freud and Watson, psychology has advanced little. Today it remains “the science of mind,” and “the science of there-is-no-such-thing-as-mind,” and nobody seems to notice the contradiction. It suffers from “multiple personality disorder,” and this has produced an intellectual vacuum wherein anything goes. Rorschach ink blots, somatotyping, Recovered-Memory Theory, Primal Therapy (scream your cares away), Rebirthing Therapy (experience your own big bang), Attention Deficit Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder -- all esoteric, whacko, and all fitting comfortably within the invisible boundaries of contemporary psychology. There’s even a disorder for when you become fed up with your psychotherapist. That’s called Self-Defeating Personality Disorder.
Meanwhile, no one is paying attention to what ought to be the central purpose of psychology -- understanding human consciousness. Psychologists have become so caught up in esoterica, that they’ve lost sight of their true calling. Ask them to describe the “inner child,” or to talk about ways we can “get in touch with our emotions,” and they can drone on endlessly. But if you ask them What is an emotion? they are struck dumb.
So let’s find out what is an emotion is. From the Dictionary of Psychology by Professor Arthur S. Reber: “Historically this term has proven utterly refractory to definitional efforts; probably no other term in psychology shares its nondefinability with its frequency of use.” (pg. 246)
How about pleasure? Surely we know what makes fun, fun don’t we? Not according to Reber: “(Pleasure is) an emotional experience that many regard as fundamentally undefinable.” (pg. 576)
Now the most important question of all: Do we possess free will? Can we act as we wish, or are all our actions determined (caused) by forces outside of ourselves? Which is it, Professor Reber?
“Most contemporary social scientists (psychologists, sociologists, et al.)… take a position that can best be described as ‘uncomfortable pragmatism.’ That is, in their day-to-day work they treat their subjects as probabilistically determined, chalk up what they cannot predict accurately to as yet unknown factors of causation… and prefer to think of themselves as actually operating according to their own free choice independently of a crass determinism that diminishes their sense of their own humanity.” (pg. 203)
At last. Mind scientists and never-mind scientists can finally agree on something: Free will for me but not for thee. They regard themselves as being autonomous. They believe they have the freedom to act or think or speak as they choose. But you and me? We are automatons. We have no more power to decide what we shall do than, say, Mars can decide to change its orbit.
Faced with uncertainty about what it is they should be studying, or how to go about studying it, many psychologists have retreated to the comforting halls of academia, where their fellow social scientists study race theory and gender dysphoria, and where “doing science” means coming up with proofs for whatever they already know to be true. Many of those truths turn out to be liberal clichés. A 2015 study found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans eight to one among the ranks of social scientists. Numbers were even worse in a survey of over 300 experimental psychologists: Only four admitted to having voted for Romney.
In an episode of The Bob Newhart Show, Bob, a practicing psychologist, comes to realize that he’s not actually helping any of his patients. He visits the wisest man he knows, his former college professor and mentor Albert, and asks him: “What’s it all about?”
“It’s a crock!” Albert replies.
So the next time you hear a psychologist announce that Trump is a sociopath and that conservatives lack empathy; or that gender is fluid, masculinity is toxic, and gun ownership is a social disease, you must remember this:
It’s all a crock.
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