Pub Night?

An excerpt from a draft for my next special article.

Friday night in the pub

A couple of beers and every one has an opinion,,,

Your mates speak with conviction and authority. They have read something somewhere. It’s fun.

But some of the laugher is hollow because the real world outside is depressing. Denial is easier after a few drinks.

That is a “pattern”. A social pattern in our society.

Denial…..

Laughter drowns out the screams in far away places. .

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. The Second Coming. WB Yeats.

A lack of conviction attracts the passionate intensity of the worst.

You can see that in the media – but mainstream and, sadly, alternative, which sadly mediate public opinion.

You see that in the pub, too. Occasionally, the conversation gets serious.

Drunken Harry (PhD) insists that Ukraine is winning the war and Putin is a psychopath referring to an article in WaPo.

Go to WaPo, yes, he repeats the canard that Ukraine is winning and quotes an article in the NYT by an Oxford professor. . As for Putin, he mentions the opinion of a prominent psychologist. As though that meant something.

Ah, academic circles. Circle jerks.

This pattern is something that we learn in high school along with so many other fallacies --“argument from authority” or argumentum ad verecundiam.

We may be aware of such fallacies, but they keep our bubbles inflated. And they are great for beer night.

The Pattern and Psychology

The pattern can be seen in the field of psychology which is considered one of the social “sciences”, along with anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science – but it is more of an industry.

Americans spend 282 billion a year in this area, according to Columbia Business School—which is 1.7% of the country's annual consumption and roughly the cost of a major economic recession!

That is a lot of money for a lot of hot air, to keep you floating with the winds.

Although the term “psychology” goes right back to the Greeks and Romans, the field of “psychology” did not exist until the Industrial Revolution. Educational systems curated facts and information and taught appropriate opinions. But how about feelings? Thought generates feelings and vice versa. More was needed.

Dr. Freud is famous of course, but the “father of experimental psychology” was Wilhelm Wundt " who established the first experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1879, offering the “science” of the mind establishing academic credibility.

So today, we have a huge industry of experts, medical and “scientific” with PhDs telling us how to feel and think and act .They constitute a kind of super regulatory agency.

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has a disorder for everyone – for almost every behavior—except some they categorized previously – such as homosexuality, bisexuality, gender identity disorder and the like, masturbation oral sex, anal sex and anything not leading to coitus which are no considered “normal”.

So much for “science”. Psychology is not about that – it’s about cultural values – aligning them and regulating them wokeishly.

Now, of course, everyone is indoctrinated in the basics of psychology in high school and the first two years of college. We learn words like “sociopath” and “psychopath”, “narcissist”, “autistic’, and so on, not that we really know what they mean.

Education therefore supports the constantly evolving tyranny known as “Normalcy”, which ironically includes things once “abnormal” which are now OK as long as these people conform to “normal” middle class values.

Gay, lesbian, and queer people are of course “normal “ so long as they are “monogamous”, “date” like “straight” people, get married and have children and invite their friends to LGBTQ events.

Of course, large orgies next door are NOT OK… Not because you reject the identity o the participants but because of the noise and people fucking on the lawn upsetting your poodle.

People with “disorders” such as ADHD or bipolar or whatever or almost OK== as long as they are “normalizable” with drug therapy.

The rest? Well, that’s what we have prisons for – which are a useful source of slave labor.

Psychologists in need of treatment

Frontiers of Psychology is a noted Psychology & Sociology journal.

It published an article by one Yusuf Çifci – who is not a psychologist or sociologist but a political scientist. Here’s part of it.

Hitler, Putin, and Trump grew up in similar families. When these three leaders are compared on the axis of familial causes of narcissism, it is seen that all three leaders were traumatized, experienced frustrations in their childhood that were not appropriate for their age, and grew up with an over-authoritarian father figure in addition to a mother who approached them with compassion. The fact that Hitler and Putin grew up as replacement children and were physically violated by their fathers, whereas Trump was placed in a boarding and disciplined military school at a precisely narcissistic developmental stage, triggered these three leaders to become narcissistic political leaders.

Hitler, Putin and Trump grew up in completely dissimilar families in different cultures, on different continents. Their fathers were very, very different – ad their mothers too! A High School student could have written a better essay – but Frontiers of Psychology published it anyway. As is common with pseudo academic articles it has a long bibliography of references, mostly irrelevant to its main argument.

The term “physical violation” usually means sexual abuse. And it is only after wading through a long explanation of “narcissism” cribbed from various sources that we get to what was really meant.

We know that Hitler was an abused child, that his father physically abused Hitler Daily (Dörner and Güss, 2011), and that Hitler’s father beat Hitler with a belt made of hippopotamus skin (Gruen, 2022). As a result of his traumatization, Hitler had “chronic narcissistic rage” (Dreijmanis, 2005).

It is possible to argue similar theses for Putin as for Hitler. Putin tells how his father beat him with a belt when he was a preschooler (Volkan, 2020)

The only trouble with this is that , in the past just about every kid up until the 1960s endured such corporal punishment at home and in schools, including beatings with belts and canes. My father went to a Boys School in which the kids were beaten every day, just to instill “discipline”.

According to this theory we should have generations of malignant narcissists!

How about your Mom and Dad who were probably also strapped at one time or another.

Similarly, in previous generations, child mortality was high.

Replacement Child Syndrome occurs when a child is seen as a substitute for another, something most common in smaller, upperly mobile nuclear families but is fairly rare.

Putin had two brothers. One died in infancy. The other died of diphtheria at age 2. Putin was born 10 years later. He was not a substitute for either of his brothers – he was a “miracle” – so was called the “miracle baby”.

Yes, his mother loved him. So did his Dad. And he loved them back.

Planted Evidence

The idea is based on writings by a Turkish psychoanalyst named Volkan, applying Freudian concepts., without apparently too much knowledge of Putin’s childhood.

This is a good example of transposing today’s values and concepts to another time and to “prove” existing biases.

Just start with “Putin is a malignant psychologically, just like Hitler and Trump”. Then look for circumstantial evidence.

Police do this kind of thing all the time. “A black guy did it”. So they look for the easiest to find black suspect and evidence. If necessary they plant it.

Unfortunately, the psychology of this is also a pathology of academic inquiry.

We can claim the same theses for Trump as for Hitler and Putin. “Trump often suggests violence in his rallies and in his tweets, and while there are constraining factors both inside and outside of the rallies themselves, the potential for violence is plain” (Goethals, 2021, p. 242).

Although there is no indication that Trump’s father physically abused him, we know that he was put in a boarding school during his adolescence.

This would not pass muster in a court of law – but it is damning it the court of public opinion presided over by the Media.

This article has been then republished by the more mainstream PsyPost—which feeds a lot of other publications.

Since PsyPost launched in 2010, our reporting has been mentioned by AskMen.com, Big Think, Bustle, Complex, Cosmopolitan, Daily Dot, Elite Daily, Headline & Global News, International Business Times, Inverse, Medical Daily, Mic.com, New York Daily News, New York Magazine, Popular Science, RedOrbit, Refinery29, ScienceAlert, Teen Vogue, The Daily Caller, The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, The Frisky, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The New York Post, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, Vice News, Uproxx, and many other reputable publications.

It contributes to the narrative, reinforced by hundreds, if not thousands of similar stories. This kind of thing is viral .

Blame those whose lack of conviction is hidden by passionate intensity.

Addendum

This may sound like I think all psychologists and psychiatrists are somehow fake. Not at all. There are many in these professions who genuinely want to help others — and are good at it! They care!

But this kind of profession is as much art as it is science, in fact more so. Properly done, it can make a huge difference. What I object to is the abuse of the profession of political purposes or simple exploitation.

More Zen Cats. Yin and Yang

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Might be some typos in this post. It’s really late here in Japan. Apologies in advance.