from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:
What’s a Psychologist to do: Avoiding Insidious Influences
An insidious influence is any reinforcer source which turns one in the direction of doing things which are useless or harmful or doesn’t turn one in the direction of doing things which are useful. One source is the people who pay the wages of a psychologist. I call this, "Hiring an expert and then telling how to do their jobs." When working for a government agency, I was asked many times to do psychodynamic, one-to-one counselling, presumably because the talk shows, soap operas and movies-of-the-week told laymen that this was what needed doing.
Another deadly influence is laymen who are very willing to listen to you tell them what they think they know. The media are especially dangerous because they will provide a voice to anyone who has something dramatic and heart-rending to report or lie about. In education, rapt attention will be paid if you talk about student deficiencies such as victimhood from social injustice, dyslexia, dyscalculia, broken homes, lack of discipline, the latest funding cut and etc; everything, in sum, except how to teach students better. In correctional rehabilitation, people like to hear about the importance of abuse, the breakdown of society, poverty and discrimination as the basis of criminal behavior. They also listen if you talk about how terrible criminals are and how depth psychotherapy fixes them because it gets to the "real" reasons. In short, you must entertain and/or blame. Start to talk about effective rehabilitation and audience eyes begin to glaze. They will listen to certain things, dispute others and get genuinely nasty about others. Laymen must be ignored. One of the most difficult things about being a psychologist is that everybody is one.
No one who has read this far will be surprised that other psychologists are a particularly malignant source of misdirection, because the majority of psychologists do not have to produce results. Most of the misguided have never been influenced by any DIW aggravations. Psychology conferences are famous for the tedium of their secret language and statistics, but they really are places where people get together and talk at great length and detail about very little. If a particular personality test is popular, there will be many workshops on it but little or nothing on how to change people’s behavior. If something makes the movie-of-the-week, be assured that it will make the psychology-meeting-of-the year. Repressed memories, abuse and multiple personalities have all run their nonsensical course. When someone asks me, after I’ve attended one of these presentations, purely for comedic value, what I thought about it, I reply, "Who cares how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, what’s really important is how many can dance on the point." This usually sends them mumbling away, leaving me in enchanted peace. If you care, four angels can dance on the point of a pin. It has to do with the magical number related to the ethnically sensitive four directions in the full circle of Life (just kidding). I personally do not attend gatherings of psychologists lest I become infected by “consensus disease”. Consensus disease occurs when one believes he knows and can do something important because he agrees with the majority.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies
