The Follies Of Contemporary Psychology

I have had any number of interactions, in any number of ways, with any number of people involved in psychology.

I discovered that their task is to get people to feel good about their place on the Titanic as it is about to sink.

Where do I start. Let's start with the biggest pile of crock. Self-esteem. Rewarding self-esteem does not make better people; it makes worse people. If you have high standards for yourself, you will find it harder to feel good about yourself than if you have low standards for yourself. The person with lower standards will have a higher self-esteem; the person with higher standards will be a better person.

Another bit of idiocy. “Positive thinking.” Navel-gazing. Stupidity. Delusion. “Positive thinking” does not begin to solve anything at all. All it does is blind you to what is going on all around you. I have seen blind optimism lead people into hideous situations and all sorts of stupid, ignorant deeds. You fail to anticipate problems, and you do foolish things. Then you think that the reason that you are failing is some kind of unconscious negativity. It is not. It is the stupidity of your approach. You think that thinking critically is the same thing as thinking negatively. So then you fail to check for what could go wrong, and you run into all kinds of unexpected problems.

Personal responsibility – well there is a room for that, but it's not what is needed at this time. We have polar ice caps melting. We have men and women killing one another. If people are encouraged to focus only on their personal lives, these problems do not get solved. Focusing on such things would get you labeled as not taking personal responsibility or as being negative or grandiose. However that kind of focus is what is sorely needed now. Whereas if people are only focusing on their personal lives, nobody is going to pay any attention to these things, and our Titanic will sink.

What else. Supposedly ego is the root of all problems. It is not. Anything human can work for good or for ill. That is as much the case with ego as it is the case with the mind or the heart. Yes, the heart can err, and I have seen that in many situations. That the mind can both do good things and bad things, everyone knows. As for the ego, for an alternative view we have Ayn Rand, that the ego is the fountainhead of all progress. I take neither side in this battle. I neither extol nor demonize ego. I see it as capable of going in any given direction, for good, for ill or for a mix.

Oh and, you can never be angry and you can never say anything negative. More stupidity. When the nuclear reactor in Japan blew up, the Japanese politicians used that kind of thinking to not tell people what had taken place. They thought that that was enlightenment on their part. It was not enlightenment. It was lying. If you believe that you get what you send out, you will not say the things that need to be said. This will create a climate of suffocating insincerity. That will not lead to anything like enlightenment. It will lead to deception and insincerity all across the board.

Then there is the idea that you create your reality with your thinking. Yeah right. Your thinking did not create the Sun. Your thinking did not create America. Your thinking can influence your life in all sorts of directions. That does not mean that it has created your reality.

Am I being negative in saying on this? I sure hope so. These people are totally full of shit. Their solutions are absolutely wrong, in some cases precisely wrong. Self-esteem does not better humanity, it worsens it. Positive thinking does not make you successful, it makes you blind. And claiming that focusing on anything other than one's personal life is being grandiose or not being responsible prevents people from paying attention to the very real problems with which we are faced now.

What is being pushed as “mental health” is absolutely no such thing. It is a delusion. And it is time that more people wake up from these and related delusions and get to work solving the real problems of the world.