Cut the Cocoon
One of the things God really hates is Twitter. He hates it because it’s ugly and nasty. What do you expect the true voices of the marginalized to sound like, puppies and rainbows? The whole thrust of Judeo-Christian religion involved telling those on the bottom the lie that God was close to those on the margins mainly so they would shut up and not fight for their rights. The truth is anything you say about those on the margins is unfalsifiable because people with no voice say that runs counter to those in power’s narrative will be shut down quickly. That doesn’t happen on Twitter! You can shout those on the margins down but you can’t shut them up.
Another reason God hates Twitter is more nuanced. According to the Bible the secret things of a person’s heart were meant to be judged by God, not people. Twitter short circuits this with campaigns like #metoo and #blacklivesmatter. It’s as if people’s sins were resting in a cocoon until judgement and humankind via Twitter cut the cocoon instead of letting the sins emerge and take flight in the seat of judgement.
Dismiss
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.
Trump Will Win This One
I have spent the last sixteen years in Wisconsin and Michigan, two states that are in play this election. I agree with Michael Moore, I think Trump is going to win this one. You don’t get that feeling if you just pay attention to the media and Twitter but those of us on the ground feel it. A dairy farmer friend back in Wisconsin confessed this to me as did a nurse here in Michigan who follows politics pretty closely.
At issue here is hope is gone here for most of us here in flyover country, certainly those of us (which are many) who aren’t winning at late stage capitalism. Hamilton and Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP are both rap but they neatly describe the disparate realities of those of us on one side or the other. The Hamilton people already have hope and a future and they are doing well enough so they naturally want government to go back to being a smoothly functioning appliance one doesn’t have to think about. Eminem people don’t fucking have anything to lose, they just want to throw sand in the engine at this point. Looking at the newspaper help wanted ads and seeing three janitor jobs. Some of these people lit up for Bernie but not so much for Biden. Biden just means going back to feeding the big banks so late stage capitalism’s cogs operate smoothly.
Trump’s policies do negatively impact these people (like the Medicaid work requirement) but these people vote with their hearts not their heads. They are hurting and wounded people act alarmingly like wounded animals not using their faculties of logic. These people don’t want to vote the way people who don’t give a shit about them vote. They are resentful of elite urban liberals who have pulled away from them and (incidentally) packed the $180 a seat Hamilton showing when it finally came to Grand Rapids this year.
Trump tempts even me, a moderately intelligent educated Bernie supporter who almost believes in God. My vocation has been gutted by outsourcing and so when Trump fired the Tennessee Valley Authority chair over outsourcing some tech jobs I had this feeling, despite all the bad he has done, that he was on my side. And that’s all that matters for these voters. And there are a lot of them.
Modern Psychology’s Most Powerful Side
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
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.
No Goodness, No Hope
It seems that society has shifted where you used to have to give an answer for the hope that was in you (1 Peter 3:15) where now it’s expected of you that you give an answer for the hope you don’t have. For me there is a real good reason for this because I have a visible physical disability which makes my every interaction with the world an incursion.
Yes they have gotten rid of those ugly laws of the early 20th century but don’t think things have improved much as people would like you to believe My whole life I have been rejected for jobs because of my disability and it’s gotten worse in the past three years. In fact one recruiter even blatantly said I need to somehow make people comfortable with my physical disability (as, as I already understood at the time, it was an incursion on the abled world). A subsequent interview I brought up my visual impairment about three quarters of the way through the interview and they were like, “we thought you couldn’t see”. At least they were honest.
I’m grateful for the Black Lives Matter chant, “no justice, no peace”, but I’d like to add to that, “no goodness, no hope”. I have found no goodness in the vocational world so am under no obligation to hope. People in power strongly dislike the fact that a lot of us are hopeless because hopelessness by definition means that something in the environment has to change in order to restore hope. Asking for goodness in the wasteland of late stage capitalism is just too much of an ask.
To take it further modern psychology’s imperative to hope makes even less sense than Christianity’s. With Christianity you ideally have a supportive community around you and (if you have the capacity to believe it) a good thing coming in the afterlife. Modern psychology (which is the primary driver of late stage capitalism) gives an imperative to hope without giving an imperative to virtue. People need to pay into the system via virtue to be able to withdraw from it in the form of hope. Goodness is what germinates hope, when there isn’t goodness people still want to be seen as good so they still give you the imperative to hope and trust. But this just does more harm than good as you are just immobilized by the blowback of shitty people.
Helping professionals generally have empathy but they can’t put them selves in the shoes of the average businessman who will be much more judgmental than them when it comes time to give jobs. Because if this they mistakenly believe you have more hope than you actually do.
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