I think that ideology is a crucial factor here, but he should ask: what's the PURPOSE of psychology? What's its telos?
We understand it to be a promoter of ease and happiness and rationality, but those concepts lose meaning in a world without norms or ethics. Many people now conceptualize happiness as the ability to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it.
Classical thinkers had a concept of 'eudaemonia', which meant the ideal, well-lived life.
I think we need to reestablish a sense of social norms and virtues in psychology, or at least make it more prominent. Virtue is the measurement of a well-lived life, not "happiness."
As a person in recovery I can testify to a paradox: if you spend all your time chasing selfish happiness, you'll end up unhappy. It's much better to try to be decent and kind and strong and USEFUL.
Very true. Having worked in a helping profession for many decades I’ve seen how miserable people end up when they chase happiness. Unfortunately institutional psychiatry encourages this futile pursuit by offering panaceas for every painful emotion, and recommending people avoid “triggers” ie challenges.
Not strange at all given the left’s willingness to sacrifice children’s health and development on the altar of gender identity ideology. Kids and women aren’t designated sacred victim castes. Not unless the kids are labelled “trans kids” but then their reward is to be mutilated and sterilised. What really matters to the left is protecting fetishistic men’s sexual entitlement so Foucault’s transgressions are of very minor importance to them.
How right you are Jenny, not strange at all. I read something that describes leftist ethics as caring universally (disembodied principles) but not actually about real people, i buy the second part, I refute that they care at all, it’s just Daddy issues, No King Day is actually No Daddy Day. Or Daddy hurt me day or Daddy wasn’t there (cos Mummy used the family court against him) day. And yes, they are focused on young people.
That’s interesting, the idea of leftists caring for “the people” but not about any individual human beings. It’s the exact mentality depicted by a party bureaucrat in a Solzhenitsyn novel (I think it was Cancer Ward).
I hadn’t heard of No King day till recently. I’m in Australia. It does sound rather pathological. We have many people (and most of the media) who are histrionic about Trump here too.
The focus of the left on young people seems quite predatory—training them to be foot soldiers in the great postmodern mission of destroying everything, or sexually and developmentally stunting them to justify the behaviours of adult male transvestic fetishists. A speaker at a Let Women Speak event here (something the fetishists’ entitlement activists tried hard to cancel and silence) summed up the situation for many of us when she said “I used to be a leftist…then the left went f—-ing MAD!”. It seems they’ve been mad for a long time and many of us just didn’t notice.
We are noticing now. They are destroying themselves in the public eye and when they are forced to nuance their ideological collusion, then they will attack each other, this has been happening on the left for years, moderates aren’t trusted, the activists are hard line extremists, capable of almost anything, other than debate, compromise and building a better world.
Hannah, I think you’re using “Positivism” for the more broad term, “empiricism.”
Strict positivism (Skinner) rules out all data that is subjective, qualitative, un-measurable.
E.g. any inchoate linguistic or other cognitive structures (Piaget).
Gestalt, psychoanalytic, Thomist, Jungian, and other schools reject strict positivism .
Einstein rejected it when he said “not all that counts, can be counted.”
Today’s leftist structuralist view of gender may be anti-data, but then, they oddly collude with positivism... E.g. they disbelieve in universals (nominalism) by using statistics as a hammer, by questioning any qualitative differences in gender with “overlapping bell-curves”
Yes, it's appropriate to point out the distinction between strict positivism and broader empiricism. I was using “positivism” more colloquially to refer to the scientific, data-driven mindset that once guided psychology. My concern is that psychology has not only drifted away from strict empiricism, but from any external standard of validity, where therapeutic claims now often rest on felt truth, identity claims, or political values rather than replicable evidence or falsifiability. And yes, the irony of today’s ideologues rejecting universals while wielding statistical tools like blunt instruments is exactly the incoherence I was getting at. I hope you enjoed the episode regardless!
that an extreme data-only statistical approach (e.g. overlapping gender bell curves) is a tool of totalitarians
The subjective parts of masculinity that are the most difficult to measure, and the least falsifiable, are the parts in most need of defense. (Aeneas, Winston Churchill, hero attitude stuff)
OK, thanks. My abiding impression now is that everyone has something to sell, data are not neutral, ideologues on side and commercial interests, power, control of the professions etc are all horrible biases swinging the compass needle until any sensible notion of what works, who for, how becomes impossible to discern. Maybe it was always thus, Einstein was arguably selected for greatness from a range of contenders.
Science has been falling apart since the 1980s. 1 in 6 researchers in the UK knows someone who has committed data fraud, according to a BMJ survey.
Thomas Kuhn said science is an outgrowth of culture. Science is downstream to morals. Scientific "truth" without religious structure to guide it, rapidly becomes plural. "information" replaces "truth".
Science without culture or religion, is analogous to psychedelic "spirituality" without any theological creed to guide it.
There is a very simple answer to this. The reason is what Catholics used to call Acedia and Superbia. Vanity and Pride.
I'll present three examples, which I hope are received as the provocation and invitation to thought that they are meant to be.
Example nº1: Universities and superior education.
Very briefly, the massification of universities in the 1960s has caused major damage to every social structure, and to the individual person.
Most people are not interested in truth, freedom, justice or beauty. Abstractions are hard but burning things up in the revolution is a lot of fun.
Instead, most people are interested in technical learning for the purpose of material gain, which I think it's great and I don't criticize. But no one needs universities for that. Also another huge chunk of people are only interested in administrative or clerical work, they have absolutely no curiosity about anything intellectual, and they experience no amazement when considering anything that happens, and they have no scientific or philosophical inclinations, much less any talent for anything technical or artistic. Again, these people do not belong in universities, either.
Last, there are people whose sole aim is to live at the expense of others, passively through the welfare state or other systems of control, or actively by means of fraud, and even violence. Again, these people do not need universities, and will be damaged by universities, the same as the other two. Everyone is worse than they should be.
Universities exist and are big, and toxic and expensive because of the vanity and the pride of politicians, intellectuals, ideologues and social engineers.
Universities should be very small in number and in scope, self-contained. humble, and economically viable, and cater only to the very small number of people of each generation who are truly astonished by reality. Not gonna happen.
Example nº2: The theory of contagious disease.
This is one of the worst ideas in all history of ideas, and it dominates the emotions of people, causing tremendous strife, which everyone prefers to ignore. It's total political depravity with very little fundament in reality. It's also a very controversial, censored and maddening idea. It's the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. Why do we even go into the labyrinth in the first place? Who in his right mind would ever want to be a hero and save a princess?
I don't expect most people to ever understand this problem. I don't have the delusion that most people, especially people who have gone through universities and received their poison, would change their view on any topic in the case that it is shown that there is no evidence to believe whatever it is that they believe, and it's false. Popperian falsification is incompatible with human nature, in my opinion. The best example of modernist psychotic lies can be found in Popper, Lakatos and Kuhn.
And it is only vanity that explains why we accept the lies of power –very useful lies— and it is only pride the reason why we choose to live our lives in the cave that Vanity created for us. We will defend always our cave, no matter how many times reality beats us up and chews our conceited notions. Not gonna change.
Example nº3: Parliaments, democracy and the legal tradition of positive legislation.
This is too long to explain here, so I will just say that it does not work for the purposes these things were invented, which are not legitimate, anyway. The case of legal positivism is clear. It was born to curtail the injustice done by judges in the past, a rigid corset that established the limits of personal action. People were meant to become first statues, then marionettes, then computers and now robots devoid of thinking abilities. But there has never been so much injustice in the Western Nations as today, when Judges are totally algorithmic, and, therefore, political partisans.
Everything in the Justice of these time is a Satanic inversion.
And it is also vanity and pride what keeps alive all this error everywhere. And the corrupt love it so much.
We could stop it any moment we wanted, if we could renounce to our vanity and our pride. Don't expect anything here, either.
Clear and powerful distillation of the ideological capture of Psychology. You are a brilliant speaker, but I am even more demoralised after listening to you - it’s almost as if a century of hard work has been thrown away. Why anybody would subject themselves to some touchy-feely leftist who can’t seriously have any expectation that her “work” will make any difference is beyond me. Troubling and deeply ironic is the fact that some smart folk will opt for therapy instead of medication, to give themselves the best chance. Hannah - have you come across Emil Kierkegaard, he blogs, substacks I believe and has written about the way in which scientific papers are repressed based on the ideology of the publisher, editor, reviewers etc, for example on issues like IQ and heredity.
I think that ideology is a crucial factor here, but he should ask: what's the PURPOSE of psychology? What's its telos?
We understand it to be a promoter of ease and happiness and rationality, but those concepts lose meaning in a world without norms or ethics. Many people now conceptualize happiness as the ability to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it.
Classical thinkers had a concept of 'eudaemonia', which meant the ideal, well-lived life.
I think we need to reestablish a sense of social norms and virtues in psychology, or at least make it more prominent. Virtue is the measurement of a well-lived life, not "happiness."
As a person in recovery I can testify to a paradox: if you spend all your time chasing selfish happiness, you'll end up unhappy. It's much better to try to be decent and kind and strong and USEFUL.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/rule-1-you-are-responsible
Very true. Having worked in a helping profession for many decades I’ve seen how miserable people end up when they chase happiness. Unfortunately institutional psychiatry encourages this futile pursuit by offering panaceas for every painful emotion, and recommending people avoid “triggers” ie challenges.
Foucault has been accused of multiple, repeated sexual abuse and rape of children as young as 8 in Tunisia. Strange that he hasn’t been cancelled by the leftists. Reference: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/16/reckoning-with-foucaults-sexual-abuse-of-boys-in-tunisia
Not strange at all given the left’s willingness to sacrifice children’s health and development on the altar of gender identity ideology. Kids and women aren’t designated sacred victim castes. Not unless the kids are labelled “trans kids” but then their reward is to be mutilated and sterilised. What really matters to the left is protecting fetishistic men’s sexual entitlement so Foucault’s transgressions are of very minor importance to them.
How right you are Jenny, not strange at all. I read something that describes leftist ethics as caring universally (disembodied principles) but not actually about real people, i buy the second part, I refute that they care at all, it’s just Daddy issues, No King Day is actually No Daddy Day. Or Daddy hurt me day or Daddy wasn’t there (cos Mummy used the family court against him) day. And yes, they are focused on young people.
That’s interesting, the idea of leftists caring for “the people” but not about any individual human beings. It’s the exact mentality depicted by a party bureaucrat in a Solzhenitsyn novel (I think it was Cancer Ward).
I hadn’t heard of No King day till recently. I’m in Australia. It does sound rather pathological. We have many people (and most of the media) who are histrionic about Trump here too.
The focus of the left on young people seems quite predatory—training them to be foot soldiers in the great postmodern mission of destroying everything, or sexually and developmentally stunting them to justify the behaviours of adult male transvestic fetishists. A speaker at a Let Women Speak event here (something the fetishists’ entitlement activists tried hard to cancel and silence) summed up the situation for many of us when she said “I used to be a leftist…then the left went f—-ing MAD!”. It seems they’ve been mad for a long time and many of us just didn’t notice.
We are noticing now. They are destroying themselves in the public eye and when they are forced to nuance their ideological collusion, then they will attack each other, this has been happening on the left for years, moderates aren’t trusted, the activists are hard line extremists, capable of almost anything, other than debate, compromise and building a better world.
Very true. They’re basically anarchist toddlers with severe personality disorders.
Ha! Nailed it. Most of them probably smell bad too.
Do you happen to have a transcript of the episode? It sounds interesting, but I take material in much better off the page…
https://hannahspier.substack.com/p/how-psychology-became-an-engine-for?r=1rqrel
Most of it is in here, it’s paywalled but you can do a free trial 😊
Very interesting and informative episode! I enjoyed it a lot!
Hannah, I think you’re using “Positivism” for the more broad term, “empiricism.”
Strict positivism (Skinner) rules out all data that is subjective, qualitative, un-measurable.
E.g. any inchoate linguistic or other cognitive structures (Piaget).
Gestalt, psychoanalytic, Thomist, Jungian, and other schools reject strict positivism .
Einstein rejected it when he said “not all that counts, can be counted.”
Today’s leftist structuralist view of gender may be anti-data, but then, they oddly collude with positivism... E.g. they disbelieve in universals (nominalism) by using statistics as a hammer, by questioning any qualitative differences in gender with “overlapping bell-curves”
Yes, it's appropriate to point out the distinction between strict positivism and broader empiricism. I was using “positivism” more colloquially to refer to the scientific, data-driven mindset that once guided psychology. My concern is that psychology has not only drifted away from strict empiricism, but from any external standard of validity, where therapeutic claims now often rest on felt truth, identity claims, or political values rather than replicable evidence or falsifiability. And yes, the irony of today’s ideologues rejecting universals while wielding statistical tools like blunt instruments is exactly the incoherence I was getting at. I hope you enjoed the episode regardless!
I was introduced to you recently. I enjoy your content a lot. I’m a psychiatrist in Honolulu.
https://beyondmentalhealth.com/is-the-color-purple-an-illusion/
Tom, I am not being doltish here, please translate - what was your point?
that an extreme data-only statistical approach (e.g. overlapping gender bell curves) is a tool of totalitarians
The subjective parts of masculinity that are the most difficult to measure, and the least falsifiable, are the parts in most need of defense. (Aeneas, Winston Churchill, hero attitude stuff)
OK, thanks. My abiding impression now is that everyone has something to sell, data are not neutral, ideologues on side and commercial interests, power, control of the professions etc are all horrible biases swinging the compass needle until any sensible notion of what works, who for, how becomes impossible to discern. Maybe it was always thus, Einstein was arguably selected for greatness from a range of contenders.
Agreed.
Science has been falling apart since the 1980s. 1 in 6 researchers in the UK knows someone who has committed data fraud, according to a BMJ survey.
Thomas Kuhn said science is an outgrowth of culture. Science is downstream to morals. Scientific "truth" without religious structure to guide it, rapidly becomes plural. "information" replaces "truth".
Science without culture or religion, is analogous to psychedelic "spirituality" without any theological creed to guide it.
Thank you, this was great. I agree wholeheartedly. Upgraded, looking forward to listening to more of your content :)
Why bad ideas never die.
There is a very simple answer to this. The reason is what Catholics used to call Acedia and Superbia. Vanity and Pride.
I'll present three examples, which I hope are received as the provocation and invitation to thought that they are meant to be.
Example nº1: Universities and superior education.
Very briefly, the massification of universities in the 1960s has caused major damage to every social structure, and to the individual person.
Most people are not interested in truth, freedom, justice or beauty. Abstractions are hard but burning things up in the revolution is a lot of fun.
Instead, most people are interested in technical learning for the purpose of material gain, which I think it's great and I don't criticize. But no one needs universities for that. Also another huge chunk of people are only interested in administrative or clerical work, they have absolutely no curiosity about anything intellectual, and they experience no amazement when considering anything that happens, and they have no scientific or philosophical inclinations, much less any talent for anything technical or artistic. Again, these people do not belong in universities, either.
Last, there are people whose sole aim is to live at the expense of others, passively through the welfare state or other systems of control, or actively by means of fraud, and even violence. Again, these people do not need universities, and will be damaged by universities, the same as the other two. Everyone is worse than they should be.
Universities exist and are big, and toxic and expensive because of the vanity and the pride of politicians, intellectuals, ideologues and social engineers.
Universities should be very small in number and in scope, self-contained. humble, and economically viable, and cater only to the very small number of people of each generation who are truly astonished by reality. Not gonna happen.
Example nº2: The theory of contagious disease.
This is one of the worst ideas in all history of ideas, and it dominates the emotions of people, causing tremendous strife, which everyone prefers to ignore. It's total political depravity with very little fundament in reality. It's also a very controversial, censored and maddening idea. It's the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. Why do we even go into the labyrinth in the first place? Who in his right mind would ever want to be a hero and save a princess?
I don't expect most people to ever understand this problem. I don't have the delusion that most people, especially people who have gone through universities and received their poison, would change their view on any topic in the case that it is shown that there is no evidence to believe whatever it is that they believe, and it's false. Popperian falsification is incompatible with human nature, in my opinion. The best example of modernist psychotic lies can be found in Popper, Lakatos and Kuhn.
And it is only vanity that explains why we accept the lies of power –very useful lies— and it is only pride the reason why we choose to live our lives in the cave that Vanity created for us. We will defend always our cave, no matter how many times reality beats us up and chews our conceited notions. Not gonna change.
Example nº3: Parliaments, democracy and the legal tradition of positive legislation.
This is too long to explain here, so I will just say that it does not work for the purposes these things were invented, which are not legitimate, anyway. The case of legal positivism is clear. It was born to curtail the injustice done by judges in the past, a rigid corset that established the limits of personal action. People were meant to become first statues, then marionettes, then computers and now robots devoid of thinking abilities. But there has never been so much injustice in the Western Nations as today, when Judges are totally algorithmic, and, therefore, political partisans.
Everything in the Justice of these time is a Satanic inversion.
And it is also vanity and pride what keeps alive all this error everywhere. And the corrupt love it so much.
We could stop it any moment we wanted, if we could renounce to our vanity and our pride. Don't expect anything here, either.
————
Things will get worse before they get even worse.
Trust in God only. Everything else is useless.
Excellent podcast, what a breath of fresh air in a therapy world that has gone mad….
Clear and powerful distillation of the ideological capture of Psychology. You are a brilliant speaker, but I am even more demoralised after listening to you - it’s almost as if a century of hard work has been thrown away. Why anybody would subject themselves to some touchy-feely leftist who can’t seriously have any expectation that her “work” will make any difference is beyond me. Troubling and deeply ironic is the fact that some smart folk will opt for therapy instead of medication, to give themselves the best chance. Hannah - have you come across Emil Kierkegaard, he blogs, substacks I believe and has written about the way in which scientific papers are repressed based on the ideology of the publisher, editor, reviewers etc, for example on issues like IQ and heredity.