06 February 2007

Psychology is real and inconvenient

People are always wanting to think that I am advocating some particular psychological attitudes in a way that is applicable to the population in general, and hence to themselves if they go away from here or never come in the first place. The few websites that have links to mine mostly contain expositions of my psychological ideas which make them sound as if they are supportive of hippyish dropout psychology.

Matters are not helped, either, by the fact that both religions, and modern collectivist ideology (the new world religion), instil in people the idea that psychological events are either good or bad, and that their psychology is something for which they are responsible and should be able to alter to taste, so that they are bad if they fail to make it conform to what is socially regarded as good.

So people are very likely to have a lurking fear that they are intrinsically evil or worthless, associated with a fear of self-assertion and autonomy, since anything of that kind led to their being slapped down in infancy, and even throughout their ‘educational’ years. But so long as they don’t try to break away from the social guidelines — which in practice are tolerant of dropping out in the approved manner, as well as of having a salaried and highly-taxed ‘career’ in the approved manner — they can kid themselves that they are not minding about anything and need never confront their real problems.

Well, as a matter of fact, it is exceedingly difficult to change one’s psychological position; when I had psychological problems everyone was keen on telling me that they did not exist. I had to keep telling myself that psychology was real. It did not work in what might appear to be the rational way, or the way that would have been convenient for oneself.

But eventually, after a lot of failed attempts to make something work, and especially after proving to myself very thoroughly that the methods proposed by counsellors etc. did not work (not that I went near such people, but the recommended attitudes are ubiquitous in the modern world), I gradually acquired some degrees of freedom and found that it was possible to make some choices and re-direct certain things.

There was no way, at this stage, that I could have foreseen the extraordinary higher level outcome.