On balance for the average person modern psychology does more harm than good. This is because the facets of modern psychology that do harm are free and pervasive while the ones that help are expensive. This makes the poor disadvantaged in a way that not many people are talking about.

A lot of cliches that are floating around are just knee jerk reactions telling us we shouldn’t cognate according to the way we’ve been fed. For example advertisers spend two grand per American on keeping culture pervasive and cementing capitalist definition of worth. And then you get these psychologists saying stuff like “don’t compare yourself to others” and “you have innate worth”. These are nice things to say but if you are reinforcing certain ideas through incredibly powerful means and then turning around and saying they’re false your actions speak louder than your words. And worse, some people will actually believe those words and then go into a world where they are immobilized by the blowback of them being patently false.

One doesn’t have to look far to see that more and more of the world is designed around nefarious use of psychology. For example, mobile apps designed to keep people addicted. The incessant overreach of capitalism that has happened in the past forty years has been spearheaded by psychology. The younger generations are rightfully critical of capitalism but don’t see the hidden hand of psychology in it because psychology’s ultimate trick is brainwashing you into thinking you’re thinking for yourself when you’re really thinking for them.

The other issue is people taking psychological tools into their own hands. Almost all tools can also be used as weapons, that is just how the world is set up. One of the obvious ways people use psychology as a weapon is gaslighting, when they assume the role of a therapist and manipulate the other party into thinking they’re crazy. Empathy is another tool one can use for ill. For example putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and realizing they have no future so you cut them off.