How Psychology Undermined Western Civilization
by Jon Rappoport
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After the
Sandy Hook murders, psychology and psychiatry have taken another
leap forward in expanding their influence throughout society. "More
mental-health services" is the catch-all phrase our leaders
use in "solving" these massacres along with gun
control.
But just as
grabbing guns won't reduce the bulk of gun violence in America,
the vague mental-health dictum won't work, either.
This article
focuses on psychology, which is branch of false knowledge different
from the false knowledge of psychiatry.
A psychiatrist
is a medical doctor who has received special training in diagnosing
and prescribing drugs for "mental disorders," none of
which disorders can be confirmed to exist by any test.
A psychologist
doesn't need to be a medical doctor. With an advanced degree and
a license, he can do therapy with patients and try to resolve "mental
and emotional issues," for which no diagnostic tests exist.
From the beginning
of the history of psychology, it was really a simple trick. Establish
a loose category called "mental problem," pour money and
research into solving it, and enroll patients.
This approach
has become so pervasive that most people can't conceive of an alternative.
A person is acting strange, he has a problem, and a mental-health
practitioner can help him solve it. What else do we need to know?
Well, for starters,
we need to know why the category of "mental problem" is
necessary. Why should we assume it means anything?
Instead, for
example: what about people making an inventory of their own deeply
held convictions, followed by a self-assessment, to see how well
or badly they're living up to those convictions?
Why did that
approach go out the window?
Because it's
based on some sense of responsibility, which is now verboten in
a society where "intervening" and "fulfilling needs"
are paramount.
If a person
can't or won't discover what his most deeply held convictions are,
what hope does he have? What problems can he solve that are going
to make any great difference?
"Let's
see. I'm living a life I don't want, and that life is throwing problems
at me. If I solve the problems, I'll be okay, right?"
Are you kidding?
Academic psychology,
if you read its history, its textbooks, its methods, has nothing
of value or substance to say about a person's most profound personal
convictions. That's not on the radar. It never was. What you get
is sophisticated babble about mental conditions and unresolved issues.
The existence
of these issues and conditions is PROMOTED by psychology. Psychology
is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you assume these conditions actually
exist and if you believe they are real, then you can chew on them
for ten or 15 years and come up with explanations, answers, and
solutions.
Yes, that's
right. The human being is a very adaptable creature. If you can
insert a primary assumption into his mind, where he accepts it as
authentic, he'll begin to cogitate and calculate around it.
Because the
assumption was never his to begin with. He bought it. He went for
it. He took the bait.
Now if you
consider that millions and millions of people are working on this
fake reality, having accepted that they suffer from mental problems,
what do you get?
You get a society
that, more and more, is paralyzed into inaction. You get passivity.
You get an overall depletion of energy and power. You get a victim-club
mentality.
Freud picked
the "Oedipal Complex" out of a hat. The incest fantasy.
He made this the foundation of his breakthrough. He sold it. He
sold it as the underlying trauma and taboo that was always and forever
twisting the minds of every male on Earth. He decided that this
fantasy had to be exorcised with years of specialized therapy.
It was a new
version of old guilt. Forget about the Garden of Eden and eating
forbidden fruit from the tree. The incest wish was the real source
of human guilt.
Psychology,
from Freud forward, quickly became a prison term from which the
inhabitant could be released when the therapist determined basic
problems had been defeated.
Freud's opponents
and detractors argued for their own version of the correct prison
(the basic mental problem). But the whole underlying notion of "a
person captured" needed to come under scrutiny, and of course
that never happened, as long as psychologists and psychiatrists
ruled the roost.
Psychology
became a major force that undermined freedom, the Bill of Rights,
and the Constitution in America. It asserted or implied that no
rights or responsibilities meant anything as long as people were
chained to their own problems and issues. This was an argument from
Inherent Limitation. It was persuasive.
From the perspective
of psychology, only rubes and Neanderthals would claim freedom was
a core fact of existence. The more educated classes would realize
they had to swim through an undersea jungle of their own mental
and emotional restraints, guided by a steady professional hand,
before they could finally emerge and come to experience the meaning
of freedom.
So of course
that journey became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There was one
catch. Most people, after years of therapy, felt no dramatic difference.
This disappointment translated into a deep cynicism about life.
It meant more passivity.
Psychology
has not only promoted the existence of mental problems, it has stated
that these conditions are rock-bottom facts: there is no way to
overcome them, short of talk therapy or psychiatric drugs. Psychology
argues that it is useless to try to "ignore mental conditions."
That won't work. It can't work.
And if the
patient agrees, he can go on to manufacture problems without end.
Whereas, the
truth is, every so-called mental or emotional condition is a signal.
It alerts a person that he is heading the ship away from its destination.
He's experiencing a crisis that has everything to do with the question:
WHAT IS MY COURSE IN LIFE?
Finding an
answer to that question makes all the difference.
I know somebody
is going to write me about how nutrition can solve mental problems.
Somebody is going to write and tell me how vaccines, medical drugs,
chemtrails, GMOs, dyes and colors in food, etc., create mental problems.
I've written
about these factors for years. Understand, however, that, in these
cases, what the person is really suffering from is a severe nutritional
deficit, or from the toxic overload of the vaccines, drugs, GMOs.
To say it's a mental problem is to misname what is really going
on. In the same way, saying a person has an irresistible itch when
what he really has is poison ivy is a diversion from the main event.
Psychology
says: "Here is the mind. It contains conditions and issues.
We can resolve them."
That's false.
That's the illusion. The mind doesn't CONTAIN CONDITIONS or issues.
The conditions-hoax
is perfectly paralleled by the disorder-hoax of psychiatry. These
are, at the very best, metaphors. At their worst, they're intentional
ruses.
Here are ACTUAL
rock-bottom conditions: freedom, independence, deep and profound
desire, the power and energy to fulfill those desires, a sense of
what is right and wrong, the wish to see others succeed brilliantly,
community, expressing self, creative power, action in the world.
These are the
elements of a philosophy, not psychology. These are elements of
life abundant.
These are loci
of decision for every conscious person.
And, as it
turns out, psychology came late to the party. For millennia, humans
have been engaging in philosophy and the exploration of spiritual
dimensions.
The assumption
of "gross limitation caused by internal problems" is a
very recent concoction.
The assumption
is simply the result of propaganda bought and sold.
When we delete
such nonsense, we can discover the kind of personal truth that rings
the bell clearly, if we are up to the task.
The rise of
psychology was in part fueled by the notion that science could resolve
human problems. But humans aren't machines; they aren't closed systems;
they aren't planets moving in fixed orbits. The analogy doesn't
work. It fails miserably.
Exploring instead,
for example, what the ancient alchemists were really up to, and
the original teachers of Tibet who employed the techniques of itinerant
adepts from India, gives us a startling perspective on the UNLIMITED
human being.
These teachers
weren't, in any meaningful sense, psychologists. They were philosophers
of action. They were adventurers and explorers. They didn't sit
in offices dealing with the latest symptoms of people suffering
from the malaise of a brainwashed society.
They knew there
was a Matrix; they knew it was a heavy blanket of illusion; they
knew it both corralled the individual and the community; and they
knew it could be dispelled. It was their mission to make that happen,
and they didn't stint.
Theirs was
a heraldic enterprise. It surpassed, by light years, stirring sand
in a childish playpen of therapy.
That heraldic
thread of adventure never dies. It can be stifled at times, but
it remains alive under the surface.
Liberating
the creative force in a person is the key. Not through some external
and removed and remote process. The process involves everything
you've got.
It goes down
to the center of the Earth and out to the stars, and beyond. When
so engaged, the mind cooperates and collaborates with the adventurer.
It moves through so-called mental problems like a rocket burning
up old paper.
One summer
in the 1980s, when I was just starting out as a reporter, I scored
a few front-page stories for LA Weekly, because other writers were
out of town. I managed to squeeze in one of the weirder features
the Weekly had published up to that time: off-the-record interviews
with therapists detailing their private fantasies all of
which turned out to be intensely anti-social.
I later learned
the "therapy community in town" didn't appreciate my approach.
Similarly,
I expect some psychologists will rankle at this one. But the point
is, all these fantasies, of both patient and therapist are outcomes
of the creative force in action nothing less or more
and they should be seen that way.
Instead of
assigning fantasy A to mental condition A and fantasy B to condition
B, why not just throw all the insanity overboard and acknowledge,
finally, that what underlies fantasia is the beginning and end of
the answer to what's bothering people and troubling them and driving
them into despair and deep boredom:
Imagination
and the creative force are tigers waiting to be let out of their
cages so they can invent astonishing Futures.
This would
be a truly modern psychology and a thoroughly contemporary reflection
of what we all know.
From our deepest
wellsprings, we:
INVENT;
IMAGINE;
CREATE;
IMPROVISE;
BUILD;
WORK TO MAKE
WHAT WE IMAGINE INTO FACT IN THE WORLD.
Exploring the
meaning and action of THIS is a worthy undertaking, and it would
happily supersede what has absurdly been called psychology.
February
1, 2013
Jon
Rappoport runs No More
Fake News. The author of an explosive collection, The
Matrix Revealed, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional
seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer
Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years,
writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch,
LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other
newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe.
Copyright
© 2013 Jon
Rappoport
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