Psychology is a Science and its Scope is Narrow

Feb 9, 2022 | ,

What psychology fails to understand is that if you want all the privileges of a being a science you also have to shoulder all the responsibilities of it. That includes the admission that while what you prognosticate is based on science it only applies to the subjects experimented upon. The people experimented on are generally middle to high class, from western developed countries, educated, and mostly white. You can’t make generalizations to the population at large based on these experiments just like I can’t say my research on a COVID vaccine applies to an AIDS vaccine.

Platitudes thrown around in a culture steeped in modern psychology like, “by and large social risks and vulnerability will pay off”, “humans basically want to do right by each other”, “sex is pleasurable physical fitness”, “I am happiest when I express my identity to the fullest extent”, “people want to talk to me” sound nice rolling off the tongue. And all these phrases hold true for the demographic psychologists experiment on but far less for those they don’t. It’s like a vaccine that works far worse on variants.

Additionally practices like setting boundaries backfire for the large proportion of the marginalized who are generally in exploitative or abusive situations. In most of the world one must mute their identity just to survive. You can’t be out and proud in Afghanistan or anywhere Pentecostal Christianity has taken power. Also individualism is a luxury of rich countries. In poor ones you are stationed in webs of interdependence and if you were to go it alone you wouldn’t make it very far.

A Couple Things That Feed Depression in the Modern World

Jul 13, 2021 | ,

The fact that you have to perform security. Psychologists and people cutting you off will slap the “insecure” label on you. That’s all well and good but what the insecure label really means is you aren’t performing security. Let’s face it, interactions in modern life are very stratified. There is income, appearance, and power asymmetry and this makes interactions (particular for those at the bottom) fraught. Those of us on the bottom, even though we are generally regarded as little more than part of the furniture, are expected to believe the delusion that, in fact, we are in an egalitarian space and use what little charisma we have to make the room appear this way. Naturally, putting on this act is taxing and depressing for those on the bottom.

The fact that lying to yourself produces negative emotion. One thing that undergirds modern psychology is the idea that there is no absolute truth, everything is just malleable and pliable and the highest good is getting the most performance out of the self the same way with better technology they can squeeze more horsepower out of a car’s engine. A large portion of modern psychology is just you playing cognitive tricks in order to get more of what you want out of life. I even read an article that said you should try to think negative thoughts about eating ice cream when you are eating it so you eat it less. There was no mention of what this deception would do to your psyche. Cognitive reframing is another thing. You are taught by therapists to interpret people’s judgements of you as a negative of them instead of you. You can do this for a while but eventually a good friend who cuts you off is going to expose that yeah, people are rejecting you because of you, not some insecurity in them. Cognitive tricks can help in the short term but in the long run deceiving yourself is just going to net you deeper depression.

On Insecurity

May 5, 2021 | ,

People tend to gaslight you calling you “insecure” when society thinks you’re a piece of shit and you internalize it. What they fail to realize is value merits a quantitative assessment, not a qualitative one. If you are of low value then yeah you are going to feel bad about yourself, that’s telling you your place in society and keeping you from being “too big for your britches”. “Security” is something society expects you to perform. You are doing so to keep others comfortable, not for yourself. In a world where you can be fired, cut off, or divorced for any or no reason there really is no security to be had.

Modern Psychology and Suicide

Feb 5, 2021 | , ,

Modern psychology is framed as the last defense against a suicidal person’s impulses but this is framing it too charitably.

Modern psychology is all about the atomized individual. It is wrong to need people as it is wrong to have people to need you. This weakens social obligations. It’s even considered abuse to threaten suicide because others’ comfort is deemed more important than your existence. Modern psychology revolves around autonomy and personal choice and those two things together play an important role in suicide. We teach people that everyone is responsible for their own feelings but don’t realize the implications of this when there is a suicide.

Expectations of happiness and success are making people closer to the bottom miserable. Modern psychology plays lip service to the idea of contentment but as a driver of culture via advertising and addictive mobile apps it is more than happy to blast late stage capitalism’s version of success and correct being into our faces. The prescient Arcade Fire song Creature Comfort summarized it well, “Born in a diamond mine / It’s all around you, but you can’t touch it”. A lot has been written about this but keep in mind it is business to business psychology, where businesses harness psychology to manipulate the public via advertising and addictive mobile apps, that is producing this. Through all of human history life has been mostly miserable but the difference was people didn’t expect to be happy most of the time. This is a very modern thing. Feeling bad is universal but feeling bad about feeling bad is relatively new.

Psychology doesn’t possess the means to give people the will to live. Psychologists are in above their heads being expected to instill in people the will to live. Often long before the actual suicide people have lost the will to live and they are just going through the motions waiting for an exit. Belief in the afterlife was a powerful deterrent for suicide not just because of threat of hell but because of the fact you would see people who survived your suicide again. Psychology can’t strike from beyond the grave and that puts it at a disadvantage when trying to prevent suicide.

Time to Confess my Psyns

Jan 3, 2021 |

I confess that I have psynned in thought, word, and deed. I confess that I have said and done things that modern psychology deems “unhealthy”.

I confess that I have not lived life as an atomized individual and have been less productive, less successful, and less whole due to this. I do independent projects when there is an audience for them. I exercise when someone pushes me to go with them. I am productive when I have structure (which I rarely do because I’m on the bottom and most people won’t touch me with a ten foot pole). I have committed the unpardonable psyn because I’m codependant and would lose everything if I lost my mother.

I confess that I possess low but accurate self-esteem. I reserve the right to feel whatever I want about myself as psychology’s mantra is “you do you”. I do not believe I have innate worth because as someone who people have deemed OK to treat like shit I don’t experience it. Trying to get me to build self-esteem is like outfitting a submarine with a screen door because as a man my value as a human being comes from what I contribute to society (and society affirms this is true by the way it treats men like me who lose).

I confess I don’t give people the benefit of the doubt but I’m going to keep doing it because they have lost my trust. I get it that you want me to assume people are good even when they have proven time and time again that they are otherwise. I know you want people to feel that they’re basically good and that the confabulations they’re spewing in therapy have a basis in reality because you make a living largely based on telling people what they what they want to hear.

I confess most of my thoughts are negative and that makes you uncomfortable. Speaking truth to power is rarely sunshine and rainbows though. My experiences are commensurate with my thoughts. If I have good experiences I’ll have good thoughts. If not, I won’t. Efforts to try to get me concoct confabulations about my past to get me to feel better about myself are not going to work because one prick of truth can pop that reality distortion bubble so I’d rather not build of a bulwark of bullshit that is going to splatter in my face when I need it most.

I confess I am beyond help because I can’t use your SSRI anti depressants. Because I’m bipolar I can’t be on the only medication that helps mitigate the stress of depression and helps one to be more atomized. Just like the social dynamic is different when you are sober while others are drinking, the dynamic of therapy isn’t the same without SSRI’s which help one put into practice the religion of modern psychology.

Ratchet

Oct 14, 2020 | ,

Things in modern life works like a ratchet. It only turns one way. I volunteer and get next to nothing for it, not a scrap of social capital to be accepted and included with people who could lift me from my sorry state. Then due to my disability I take from the government for healthcare and dole without reciprocating a smidgen. People on the right wanted to remedy this by the Medicaid work requirement where people would have to work for their healthcare.

When things only turn one way you miss the reciprocity that built up social bonds in the past. Granted modern psychology doesn’t like reciprocity arrangements very much, if one is performing something virtuous and is hoping for something in return that is somehow pathological even though it was a thing that undergirded society for millennia.

Dismiss

Oct 2, 2020 |

One of the must gut-wrenching things modern psychology does is dismiss that which it pathologizes.

For example, let’s say you’re lonely and you miss someone so bad it is occupying your mind too much. Modern psychology posits that you are failing to live up to their ideal of an atomized individual. Since you are already in a pathological state according to them the specific neediness you experience is dismissed.

Modern Psychology’s Most Powerful Side

Aug 15, 2020 |

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.

Peak Happiness

Aug 14, 2020 | ,

A lot of life is a trade off. A lot of it is a zero sum game between you and others’ happiness. People would agree that ideally we’d want peak happiness. But in order to achieve that we would have to efficiently balance the trade off between what makes us happy verses what makes the group happy. An example below is from economics called a Laffer Curve which basically wants to figure out how to optimize governmental revenue given various tax rates (as too high taxes will strangle economic growth and too low taxes will bankrupt the treasury). In the case below we are modifying it for happiness. If everybody’s too altruistic it will produce an unhappy society because everyone will be putting others first and not attending to their needs. However, if everyone is maximizing for their personal happiness (which we are more toward now) then there comes a point similar to tragedy of the commons where the gains in personal happiness come at the expense of the group’s collective happiness.

For example if a group of friends is going out to a restaurant but one of the people is taking too much time and making everyone else late. Or people blasting music without caring about how their neighbors feel. Yes your selfish action makes you happier in the short term but your happiness is diminished by the selfish actions of those around you.

I posit that in the 60’s we had a better balance of personal happiness verses collective happiness and that’s why that decade is remembered so fondly. People were altruistic to an extent but they were also about finding themselves. Now the pendulum has swung way to the individual happiness end. Selfishness has become normalized and the few forces pushing against it are weak. But people are more unhappy because dealing with the fallout of others’ selfishness is more of a drag on people’s happiness than the happiness they receive from putting them self first.

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