All Hell Has Broken Loose

 

The cities of the plain

The trans community is all narcissist. Justin Trudeau is a narcissist. Joe Biden is a classic narcissist. Megan Markle is a narcissist. Amber Heard is a narcissist. Jada Pinkett Smith is a narcissist. Was narcissism always so common, and we are just beginning to notice it? Or has something changed?

Something changed. This is one more disaster among so many that we can assign to the social sciences.

Narcissism is, to begin with, an alternative to religious faith: if you turn from God, one obvious alternative is making a god of your own desires. The social sciences from the outset sought to take the place of religion. Its influence on society in general has grown, especially in the past sixty or seventy years. Freud insisted that the goal of life is to satisfy your animal desires. More recently, the social sciences have aggressively advanced the dogma of “self-esteem,” and “unconditional” love in parenting. This is grooming for narcissism. 

But this is not the only, or the worst, thing the social sciences have produced. Here’s a partial list.

1. Mental illness generally. There is a reason that the incidence of mental illness has grown by leaps and bounds in the past sixty or seventy years, on pace with the growing influence of the social sciences. The very concept, of course, of a mental “illness,” comes from the social sciences. Earlier generations would have talked of demonic possession. But was the thing itself, however it was defined, common before the social sciences? Not really. In the ancient world, it seems to have been a problem—witness the demoniacs of the New Testament. But not in Christian Europe. In pre-modern times, Bedlam hospital, Britain’s only facility for the insane, had at most a few hundred occupants. Moreover, mental illness was understood to be curable. But to psychiatry and psychology, it is incurable—all that can be done is to manage it with pills. According to a large study in the Seventies by the WHO, mental illness is still curable in the Third World. It is generally something temporary, like fever. So the true case of mental illness is social science. As to why this is, probably all of “mental illness” is caused by a perceived loss of meaning. That is a direct product of the social sciences stripping God and the spirit from our world view. Social science produces a wholly inadequate understanding of the world, that cannot account for much of human experience. When human experience refuses to conform to the model, “mental illness” is declared. This is probably the worst holocaust in human history, causing the most suffering and death.

2. Racism. There has always been xenophobia, and prejudice, and discrimination over “breeding” and ancestry. But race as such is a scientific construct. It emerges from Darwinism’s view of the human as just another animal, classifiable into physical subgroups the same way horses or pigs are. And Darwinism justifies racism, as the imperative of “survival of the species.” It simply stands to reason in a Darwinian world that our own race is locked in a life and death evolutionary struggle with all other races. It is kill or be killed. People pretend that “social Darwinism” is some perversion of Darwin’s theory. It is not. Darwin himself was a social Darwinist. It was the topic of his second great book, The Descent of Man. Race had no meaning or significance in the Roman Empire, and no meaning in Christianity. While there would remain excuses for discrimination, without the social sciences, race would be removed from the mix. And worst examples of genocide in history have been based on race. The term “genocide” is itself from “genus,” a biological concept equivalent to race. Without the social sciences, we would not think in these terms.

3. Marxism. Marx is often called the father of the social sciences. Marxism is “scientific socialism.” It offered a supposedly scientific explanation of human history. Chalk up the dead of the Holodomir, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields. 

4. Fascism and Nazism. Fascism is a form of Marxism, admixed with social Darwinism. The associated artistic movement was called “Futurism.” Chalk up the dead of the Holocaust.

5. The two world wars, and the Cold War. Both the first and the second war were primarily initiated by Germany on the premise of social Darwinism. The social sciences were especially influential in German culture, home of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. It is the German proclivity for social science that Kipling warns about in 1897 in the poem “Recessional”: “For heathen heart that puts her trust/  In reeking tube and iron shard,/ All valiant dust that builds on dust,/ And guarding, calls not Thee to guard.” Christian morality had no place in this brave new world of scientific objectivity: it was survival of the fittest, meaning in this case the most powerful nation. Chalk up tens of millions more deaths. Had the Cold War gotten hotter, this could in turn be laid at the feet of the Marxist social theory of class warfare.

6. The decline of civilization and culture. Education is how civilization and culture is passed on. Education has since the early 20th century, on a German model, been declared a social science. This means our civilization and culture is no longer passed on. It is supplanted in the classrooms with crackpot theories like Marxism, Freudianism, racism, feminism, and Fascism, if this latter not by name. A civilization and culture that is not passed on dies within a few generations, and we are back in the forests of the night.

7. The death of romantic love. Feminism killed all romance, re-imagining interaction between the sexes as being about power. All is either dominance or submission, and the fulfilling of animal desires. There is no room for altruism or beauty. Feminism derives from Darwin; a Marxist analysis traceable through Freidan to Engels; and a heavy dose of Freud.

8. The death of the family. Feminism killed women’s traditional role of nurturing the next generation. Abortion is only the most direct expression of this, an overall devaluing of and contempt for children. A contempt for children seen also in the current promotion of sex change operations on the underaged, and a growing grooming culture in the schools. Children interfere with the Freudian dogma of satisfying animal impulses. If they are not themselves of some utility for sexual gratification, what purpose do they serve? Again, the suffering and death this is causing is incalculable. It is a larger ongoing holocaust than Hitler could have imagined. Moreover, the direction this leads is the gradual extinction of humanity itself.

All this is the Devil’s work. The social sciences are built upon an initial pact with the Devil. The social sciences treat human beings as objects; this “objectivity” is essential to science. Yet human beings are not objects; they are subjects, and morality requires us to see them as such, as ends, not means. All possible horrors follow from this violation of the second most basic moral principle: to love your neighbour as yourself. 

The solution is a religious revival. We can only hope and pray that God is intervening.

And Nothing to Get Hung up On...

I am walking one of my students through her applied linguistics textbook. After giving a history of the modern discipline of language teaching, the survey chapter concludes with this statement:

“The cyclical nature of theories underscores the fact that no single theory or paradigm is right or wrong. It is impossible to refute with finality one perspective with another. Some truth can be found in virtually every critical approach to the study of reality.”

This is a strikingly false statement. It summarizes the fatal problem with social science generally, and how it has poisoned the wider society.

It is impossible to refute any theories?

This is exactly counter to Karl Popper’s definition of science. Science proceeds by refutation: theories are tested by experiment, and falsified.

Would a scientist be content with the statement that the theory of gravity, or of relativity, is neither right nor wrong?  That they are in the end no more accurate a description of reality than geocentrism or the flat earth concept?

The problem is that, in the social sciences, no theories have ever passed this test. Everything gets refuted within about twenty years, and no progress is ever made.

The proper conclusion to be drawn is that the scientific method cannot grasp the human mind. Unfortunately, too many careers, too many institutions, entire industries are based on the fallacy that it can.

Therefore, instead of conceding the error, the field blames reality and the human mind for failing to conform to its demands. And has chosen to dispense with both; or to deny they exist.

So hey, let’s just burn it all down.

New Survey Proves Leftists Are Mentally Ill

A recent study finds a definite correlation between having a diagnosis of mental illness and being politically left-wing. The more left-wing you are, the more likely you are to be mentally ill.

This, of course, can be embraced on the right as evidence that leftist are nuts.

But it is instead a useful illustration of how little we can learn from social science studies. For there are too many possible explanations, and we cannot tell which is true.

It may as well be that the mentally ill are more compassionate, and leftist policies are more compassionate.

It may be that mental illness is inclined to make you poor, and the poor see more benefit in leftist politics.

It may be that mental illness comes with high intelligence, and leftist politics are, on the whole, better ideas than rightist views.

It may be that leftist politics ameliorates or even cures mental illness—attracting the mentally ill to it.

It may be that leftists are more inclined to use psychiatric services and to take psychiatry seriously—and so more likely to have gotten a diagnosis.

The survey relied on self-reporting; it may be that left-wingers are more honest.

It may be that psychiatrists have simply wrongly diagnosed certain political opinions or tendencies as “mentally ill,” making those who hold the opinions, by definition, mentally ill.

It may be that being mentally ill makes you left wing, but this is unrelated to the reason that most people are left wing. Nazis like highways; but most people who like highways do not like them because they are Nazis.

It may be that being left-wing is more socially acceptable, and people who are mentally ill are afraid to stand out. So they will say they are left-wing.

It may, conversely, be that being left wing makes you mentally ill because people reject you for your left-wing opinions—not because the opinions themselves are wrong. 

Shall I go on?

Just about any social science survey can be used to prove opposite hypotheses; the human soul is too complex to be understood in such simple terms.

A Rant on Irreproducible Science

From Sarah Hoyt.

Narcissism Is Good for You. Not.

Narcissus showing his emotional flexibility.

A new study announces that narcissism can be the key to happiness.

This is not an entirely new claim. Alice Miller asserts the same.

It is nonsense.

Look at the original story of Narcissus; it gives the full diagnosis and prognosis. So does much of the rest of the literary tradition. Narcissus dies of grief, then suffers eternally in the underworld.

The legend of Tantalus is also an analysis of narcissism. His fate is proverbially bad.

Tantalus in the underworld.

So is every Greek tragedy; what the classical Greeks called hubris, we call narcissism.

The new study says that narcissism makes one resilient and able to overcome challenges. This is the opposite what is shown in literature: Narcissus is unable to overcome the simplest emotional blow. He cannot even turn his head away from his reflection, stand up, and go and get something to eat. He dies rather than suffer it.

Where is this false claim of happy narcissism coming from?

It is easy to see how any researcher who wanted to could come up with such results. Simply ask the narcissist.

“Are you emotionally resilient?”

Of course; the narcissist will insist that they are perfect. Of course they are emotionally resilient, if this is a good thing.

“Are you unhappy?”

This sounds like a bad thing. So no, of course, they are not unhappy. They will, if pressed, quickly admit to being abused and cruelly mistreated by any or all their intimates, or by the world itself, but if you frame it in such a way that it seems to reflect on them, no, they are not unhappy. Their life is wonderful.

You can get a narcissist to say anything, so long as they think it reflects well on them; and deny anything, so long as they think it makes them look bad.

More broadly, this survey illustrates a fatal problem with the social sciences. They are no more than a cargo cult based on the prestige of physical science. Among extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, they are about the craziest mass delusion ever; and they have persisted for over a hundred years. Because human beings are so complex—as complex as any human observer—they cannot be reliably objectively observed. It is therefore always possible to produce studies coming to any given conclusion.

Just recently, I had to cut a chapter out of a book. I had come across a number of studies showing that a vegetarian and fish-based diet, without red meat, reduced the risk of depression. Looked definitive.

Right then, a new study came out showing that eating red meat was important in preventing depression.

Because the social sciences do not work, what happens is that everyone manipulates studies to make whatever point they want to make. It becomes entirely politics, and dangerously misleading. I expect the “red meat prevents depression” study had a lot to do with politics. But then, perhaps the original vegetarian claims did too.

The most interesting study in the social sciences is this one, which has been repeated at least three times: fifty percent of all study results in the social sciences cannot be repeated.

That means any claim you read in the social sciences is about as useful for decision-making as flipping a coin.

Among narcissists, there is, of course, an inevitable desire to make narcissism appear to be a good thing. And so we are unable, through the social sciences, to ever get a good fix on narcissism.

The researcher for the current study makes his political agenda plain enough:

"This work promotes diversity and inclusiveness of people and ideas by advocating that dark traits, such as narcissism, should not be seen as either good or bad, but as products of evolution and expressions of human nature that may be beneficial or harmful depending on the context.” 

"This move forward may help to reduce the marginalisation of individuals that score higher than average on the dark traits.”

Fortunately, we have the literary corpus. 

Read it.

Social Science

The South Sea Bubble

Why are so many so devoted to the social sciences—even though after a couple of hundred years of effort, that stake has never panned out? They have never built any solid body of knowledge about society or human life. As the mathematician and nuclear physicist Stanlislaw Ulam noted scornfully long ago, every result they have ever produced is either trivial, or not true.

Freud and Marx dominate popular culture and the academy. Even though both have been long ago positively disproven in any scientific terms. Yet everyone seems to simply ignore this, and carry on. The same could be equally said of lesser figures: Margaret Meade, Noam Chomsky, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, “learning styles,” “left brain-right brain.” Karl Popper, our reigning cultural authority on what is and is not science, compared it all to astrology. But nobody will let the false theories go.

It deserves a section right after St. Vitus's Dance and tupilmania in “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Except that this irrational faith in social science would need a section bigger than the entire remainder of the volume. We have gone elaborately crazy nuts. Mad King Ludwig had nothing on us.

So what is driving this?

I think the answer is not that hard to find. People grasp at social science as a substitute for religion. Religion is the discipline that previously covered the same subject matter: man's soul, man's inner being, man's relationship with his fellow man.

And social science appeals because it strips out all moral considerations. Leaving people feeling free from moral constraints.

How could anything be any clearer than that this is the base of Freud's appeal? Sex in the street!

Marx, in turn, gives license for envy and for scapegoating. Take what you want from others! If you have less, it's the oppressive system! You deserve what you want!

This is usually the tacit appeal of every new theory in the social sciences: it gives license for some traditional vice. Beyond freedom and dignity!

This is not going good places. I think it fair to say, from an objective consideration of history, that social science has brought us the awful mass murders and monstrous wars of the 20th century. All of them. Not to mention the growing epidemic of mental illness worldwide.

Time to wake up and move on.

Math Is Hard

Here's a problem with the social sciences; one of many. They are called "soft sciences": meaning they can only suggest statistical probabilities, not hard facts or "laws."

But this means they require some fairly sophisticated mathematics: statistics is not simple.

And the folks who go into the social sciences are usually not very math-minded.

This alone, with all the best intentions, can make many of the field's findings dubious.

"Education" has sadly, tragically, defined itself as a social science. In order to qualify, you must these days take social science courses at a supposedly postgraduate level. Yet a solid grounding in statistics is apparently not involved. Indeed, from my own experience, the slightest understanding of statistics--and that is about my own level, the slightest understanding--would tell you that almost none of the research in the field of education is statistically valid.

Although I am far from a math whiz, I know how to bell-curve marks. But I never learned this in any education courses. I learned it from a colleague who studied postgraduate math. And, frankly, I have never yet met a teacher outside of math and the hard sciences who knew how to do this--something that seems like a basic teaching skill. In fact, I have more than once encountered incomprehension, including from supervisors, at the proposition that you could give a test for, say, fifteen marks, and nevertheless use it to assign a mark out of twenty.

Welcome to the social sciences. If you can do math, you go into the hard sciences. If you can write, you go into the humanities. If you can do neither, you become a social scientist.

But the funding is good.

Most Science Now Isn't

Social scientist at work.

Science began as a theological exercise. It is based on the assumption that there is a designer of the universe. Without an invisible legislator, we would not be able to find “laws” of nature. Mathematics would not work, nor would logic. We would simply have chaos.

This being so, science began as a way to understand God's nature, and his intentions. Ask Francis Bacon.

No,  not that Francis Bacon

There is a reason, after all, why empirical science arose in Christian Europe, not elsewhere. Unlike most other religions, Christianity holds that the material world is real and made by God. To Buddhism or Hinduism, for example, it is simply “illusion.” To Gnosticism and many pagan philosophies, it is the creation of the devil. The success of science proves the Christian assumption, and disproves the Buddhist or shamanist idea that the material world is “chaos.”

This is also why, popular romanticism and Disney's Pocahontas to the contrary, it is only in the Christian world that you see a real concern for “ecology” or “environmentalism.”

Not a real Indian. Trust us: it's a cartoon.

Unfortunately, over the last few centuries, we have mostly forgotten this, and come to raise “Science” itself to the status of religion. From being a useful tool, we have made it a cosmology. Whereas Philosophy used to be the “queen of sciences” (which is why the highest degree is still, even in a scientific field, “Doctor of Philosophy”) now Physics is more often cited. The social sciences are the worst example of this new “scientism,” and perhaps the fount and origin of most of the problem. They contradict some of the basic assumptions of science, but let's leave that point aside for now. For now, let's just note that social scientists almost inevitably put themselves in direct competition with religion: seeking to explain without it what religion is meant to explain, seeking to fill the human needs that clergy used to fill. Chesterton once described Freudian analysis as “confession without absolution.” That's about right. Marx and Freud, the two great founders of the social sciences, were open opponents of religion. There is good reason for this: religion was their direct competitor. It still is. 

Is that a cigar, or are you just glad to see me?

Both have also been comprehensively debunked as science. Nevertheless, their mooncalf, “social science,” lives and grows. Feminism, postmodernism, “progressivism” not only continue to dominate, but seem to grow annually in their influence, even though they are based ultimately on Marx and Freud, and this philosophical underpinning has long ago been disproven.

Unfortunately, trying to elevate science to a religion is not just destructive of religion. It is destructive to human life. Humans are reduced to the status of physical objects. It is also destructive, ultimately, to science. We are now seeing this raven wing home to roost.

"He goes on Sunday to the church." We used to care.

Let's leave aside the point that any sort of social science presupposes radical human inequality: the scientific observer must be seen as having a consciousness at an entirely different level from the observed, or else you have an insurmountable observer paradox. Even if that were not so, from science by itself one cannot derive any moral code, or any sense of the value of anything. It has, of course, been tried: Nazism sought to derive morality from Darwin and the principle of survival of the fittest. This did not look to most of us, in the end, like morality. Freud's morality was more or less the same: survival of the individual, and survival of the species. But in practice, it was only sexual license, and another kind of mass murder, abortion, inevitably followed. Marxism tried to derive morality from material progress and a need to be on “the right side of history,” even though it held that history was going there anyway. Besides failing in practice, and leading to moral abominations as awful as those of Fascism and Freud, this was always philosophically incoherent.

So far, so bad for humanity. But also for science. Science itself (like more or less any human activity) cannot work unless you can count on its practitioners being themselves moral. Yes, you can police them, but then who polices the police? Who polices the police of the police? You can have peer review, you can expect results be reproducible, but in the end, someone somewhere is only on their honour to do this honesty. Yet science itself provides no moral code, and no reason to be moral. This was fine so long as we could count on scientists to also have a religious foundation. Now that we have dispensed with religion to the extent that we have, ancient chaos returns.

The Stripped Gears of Social Science

Photographed in an antique shop window. Is it live, or Memorex?

There are only two kinds of discoveries in the social sciences: those that do no more than confirm common sense, and those that are wrong. The latter is more common.

This study is probably correct. It suggests that bullies have high self esteem than the average person and are less likely than others to experience depression. So much, indeed, is common sense. Unfortunately, it goes directly against everything social science have been telling us for a generation or two. For at least that long, we have been told that bullies and abusers act as they do because they were themselves abused in the past, and because they have low self-esteem.

Teaching and parenting practice has, of course, been altered, sometimes forcibly altered, to reflect this for that same two generations, always sparing the rod in hopes of more perfectly spoiling the child. Everything a child does is now awesome. Nothing a child does can be punished in any meaningful way.

No surprise if we now have a much bigger problem with bullying in schools. We of a certainty also have it in the wider world of work, in society, in marriages, in life in general.

And we paid large sums to get screwed in this way.

What's worse, we've been told for about the same time to work on our and our children's “emotional intelligence.” Sounds good, put in that way, but it really means learning to falsify your own true feelings while manipulating those of others. In other words, training to be a proper psychopath.

Here's another instance of this academic game at work. Some time ago, a prominent paper came to the conclusion that there was never any significant discrimination against the Irish in America, and few if any “No Irish Need Apply” signs or ads. The Irish had simply imagined the whole thing. Now, a high school student—a high school student—has managed to disprove the claim comprehensively, simply with a bit of web searching.

A bit of web searching.

How, you might ask, is this possible? How can an academic paper become so widely accepted while making such extremely improbable claims, and on the basis of so little evidence?

It is really quite simple. Academia is set up to make this happen. Imagine if the original paper by the reputable history professor with the Yale Ph. D. had researched the record thoroughly and discovered that, yes, as everyone had always assumed to be true, discrimination against the Irish in America was widespread in past generations, and there were a good number of signs denying them employment. Would there then be a publishable paper, simply confirming what everybody already knew? Probably not. But if you can put out a paper that seems to show that what everybody thought was wrong—then you get it published, get tenure, get a lot of attention. You have discovered something!

All that really prevents this is the sheer honesty of individual academics. Unfortunately, morality has become unfashionable in such circles. Indeed, academics as a group, as a class, have a vested interest in promoting this kind of behaviour, rather than censuring or preventing it. If a field as a whole seems to produce no new discoveries, can produce nothing the general public doesn't already know, it is hard to justify its very existence. Why take a Ph.D. in it, if you learn nothing? Why pay someone to teach it, if he has nothing to teach? Thus, it becomes important for any field to consistently violate common sense. This is probably, on the whole, not a good thing.

Yes, there is the risk that someone will try to reproduce your results and find them wrong; as happened here. But the same problem applies: merely repeating and confirming someone else's study is not generally publishable. So others rarely do it. The high school student's paper made waves because the original paper, arguing that the Irish had not been discriminated against, had become so widespread among academics to have become, itself, a new received wisdom. At this point, “revisionism” begins to pay dividends. And the cycle begins again.

Just as a clock that has stopped dead will still be accurate about twice a day, so all these crazy ideas emerging from the academy probably get disproven eventually. However, what we are witnessing is not a quest for truth or knowledge, and alarmingly little get added year by year to the store of human knowledge. In the meantime, a great deal of damage gets done.

It is worst in the social sciences, because they are based on incoherent premises—primarily, an insurmountable observer paradox. But the same also applies in the humanities and in the hard sciences. The difference is that the social sciences emit nothing but this static; humanities and hard sciences do also sometimes produce valid results.

Even so, anyone who has lived long enough and made some effort over their lives to follow medical advice will surely have noticed the pattern. Sugar will kill you. It will make you fat. You must take artificial sweeteners. No, wait, artificial sweeteners will kill you and make you fat; you must take sugar. No, they are quite safe; sugar is bad and will make you fat. You must get more sunlight for vitamin D. You must stay out of the sun or get skin cancer. You must get more sunlight for vitamin D. You fools! Why have you not been listening to us experts? Cholesterol is bad for your heart; cholesterol is good for you. Eggs are healthy; eggs are unhealthy; eggs are healthy. Aspirin is dangerous; safer to take acetaminophen. Acetaminophen is dangerous; safer to take aspirin. Statistics at least tell us medicine does make some progress; technology proves that hard sciences make some progress; but there is obviously still a huge amount of static involved.

This is one reason why I love the Catholic Church. Of all human institutions with intellectual pretensions, it seems uniquely immune from this disease. All other human “knowledge” seems built on sand; it alone is built on rock.

Social Scientists Discover Water Runs Downhill!

From the Depasrtment of the Painfully Obvious: social conformists are weak on morality.

This is close to self-evident. If you listen to your conscience, you will often be at odds with those around you. If you always go along weith those around you, you will often be at odds with your conscience.

This points up one fuundamental flaw with social science: it thinks being "normal" is the goal of life.

The New Schizophrenia

A schizophrenic concept of house decoration.

In the social sciences, it is certain that whatever was taught as true thirty years ago is now taught as error. This demonstrates that the social sciences have produced no useful knowledge; any more than a dog chasing his tail has produced a useful meal. We can be sure that whatever we “know” now will be known to be false within the next thirty years.

So with psychiatry/psychology; as illustrated by a recent article in the Wilson Quarterly. In 1960, all the learned doctors knew schizophrenia was caused by your mother being cold and distant. In 1990, this suggestion was horribly unjust to parents. Schizophrenia was caused by genetics, nothing else. Best thing for them was to send them back to their families, if possible. Today, it again comes mainly from childhood adversity: “being beaten, bullied, or sexually abused.” But now the father is to be blamed. More politically correct that way. Too bad for all those schizophrenics hustled back into the bosom of their loving family.

Inmate in a lunatic asylum, circa 1854.

This might be funny if it were not human lives we are playing with. Lacking any real knowledge, it seems to me that psychiatry and psychology, along with all the social sciences, do more harm than good. This is because, in order to justify their existence, they are more or less obliged to violate common sense; and common sense almost always knows better than they do. They should not be the basis of any recognized professions, and should not receive one penny of public money. That's the very least we should do; perhaps it would be better if they were banned outright. They are, as the late, lamented, Thomas Szasz put it, in the same field as astrology and witchcraft.

Thanks to the biochemical-genetic model most popular in the nineties, the article points out, schizophrenics were treated over the last thirty years with the drug Clorazil. Besides not working, in most cases, and severely limiting quality of life with its fierce side effects, it killed them in large numbers, by inducing diabetes. Oh well—back to the drawing board. How about a revival of good old-fashioned lobotomies with an ice pick?

Wain's cats, supposedly showing the progress of his schizophrenia. I like the bottom left best.

Recent studies show, the article goes on, that “schizophrenia has a more benign course and outcome in the developing world.” Which is to say, to put it plainly, you are more likely to recover from schizophrenia if you avoid seeing a psychiatrist. That is the most obvious difference here: the developing world cannot afford as many psychiatrists and psychiatric visits. As noted previously in this space, most mental illness is understood in most cultures as temporary; bring in psychiatry, and suddenly everything is incurable.

The worst thing that psychiatry does is to try to muscle out and replace religion and religious explanations. For what, after all, is this “psyche,” the thing both “psychiatry” and “psychology,” as their names assert, seeks to understand and to treat? It is the soul. What is the real soul therapy, and the real soul knowledge? Religion. By contrast, psychology and psychiatry are thoroughly materialist. Their fundamental premise is that the soul can be prodded with a scalpel. That is, roughly, as sensible as debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But, by muscling in, they are likely to distract the patient from religious explanations and religious treatments for his spiritual suffering.

Goya, sketch of a lunatic.

Keeping him in distress indefinitely.

A case in point, in the article: the Hearing Voices movement, a patient self-help group, has come up with an interesting technique for those who think they are, as the saying goes, “hearing voices.” They treat the voices “as if they were people,” negotiate with them, and ask them to stop.

It turns out that they do.

Psychiatry of course never thought of this, because for psychiatry the voices were “hallucinations” and they certainly did not want to encourage the delusion. Why are the voices hallucinations? Because psychiatry, being thoroughly materialistic, holds that spiritual beings—psyches—do not exist. Before psychiatry, or without psychiatry, people would most naturally have understood the voices as spiritual entities, angels or demons. What would have been simpler than to try to talk to them? It's called prayer. And it would have worked; they could have moved on.

"Admiral" Ashihara, virtually famous Japanese schizophrenic.

Although psychiatry would immediately label you “insane” for saying or thinking so, as a matter of proper philosophy, proper reason, it is perfectly plausible and sensible, in fact, to assume these voices are the voices of real spiritual entities. It is without any kind of philosophical justification that psychiatry and psychology are completely materialistic; it is a matter of faith, or dogma. In fact, it is contrary to human experience and to most of the best of philosophy. In fact, it is quite possible that the dissonance between this materialist view, so common in the modern “developed” world, and the spiritual reality of much human experience that produces “mental illness” as we know it in the first place. In other words, “mental illness” may be an artifact of the materialist world view. Psychiatry and psychology then act as the gate-keepers, the holy inquisition, seeking to prevent those with sufficient insight from going beyond the accepted dogma.

And so it is telling that it took schizophrenics themselves, bucking the medical establishment, to come up with the “Hearing Voices” treatment. This suggests that those experiencing “mental illness” have better insights as to its nature and their needs than do the doctors supposedly “treating” them. But, of course, the doctors will not listen to their patients, other than to “diagnose” a problem. After all, they are “mad,” aren't they? Their thinking is disordered.

Your brain on schizophrenia: terminally silly illustration of exactly where the angels dance.

Psychiatry is full of such double binds. If you sink and drown, you are not a witch. If you float, you are a witch, and must be burned at the stake.

Sisyphus and the Humanities

One thing that really started to drive me crazy about study in the humanities and social sciences back in grad school was how it all seemed to be ruled by nothing but fashion. In the hard sciences, Einstein may have made significant improvements on Newton, but Newton still has a lot to say. So, for that matter, does Euclid. But in the humanities and social sciences, most things from about thirty years ago is held to be unspeakably wrong on every count, let alone anything from a hundred years ago. Behaviourism is now beyond the pale; it absolutely ruled psychology when I went through. In 1990 everything was hereditary; now nothing is. Just as nothing was hereditary in 1960. I discovered on line an old teacher's manual put out by the Christian Brothers. Their first principle was that the teacher must never leave his special position at the head of the classroom; that would be to break the sense of his authority. Today, staying at the head of the classroom (a “sage on the stage”) is considered the cardinal sin. 

Sisyphus pushing the Humanities faculty uphill.

What this necessarily means is that everything we pretend to know in the humanities and social sciences is nonsense. We can be just as sure that, thirty years from now, all the “correct” procedures of today will be considered totally wrong and harmful. No knowledge is being built, year upon year and generation upon generation. It is all a huge waste of time, money, energy, and human lives. I cannot believe this does not drive others to distraction as it does me. Life is supposed to be a quest for truth.

But there is, I discovered, a solution. There is a tradition of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences that really does seem to have a firm foundation and to be building useful and growing insights year by year and generation by generation. It is called the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Insights that go back over millennia, as far back as the time of Abraham, remain essentially valid, but are still being built upon and further refined and revealed today. With no suspicious gaps, like the so-called “Dark Ages,” in the record, either.

It is in fact, an edifice of knowledge even more solid and longstanding than that of science itself.

This is an important reason why I am a Catholic.

Sociopathy and the Social Sciences

David P. Goldman wrote of Barack Obama, in the Asia Times, “He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.”

This statement says more than may at first be apparent, and about the social sciences, not about Obama. Never mind Obama. If it is wrong to view the population of the United States at an emotional distance, it is equally wrong to view a primitive tribe at an emotional distance, for they are equally human. Nor are anthropologists the only ones who do this: it is equally true of sociologists, psychologists, and anyone else who seeks to reduce the study of humans to a “science”—in a nutshell, the social sciences.

If the attitude and talents of the social scientist are those of the sociopath, then, to call a spade a spade, social scientists are sociopaths. Anyone who looks at other humans beings as legitimate objects of objective, scientific, dispassionate study, is viewing all other human beings as objects.

This is hardly something that should be acceptable in a moral society, much less something lauded, respected, and government funded.

And it is hardly surprising, given this basic bent, that the social sciences in the academy end up in general opposition to the common people and their aims. Their interests are antithetical by the nature of their endeavour.

And here’s another cheery thought: given that the social sciences have completely taken over the field of education, your own children spend five hours every day, give or take, quite possibly in the hands of such sociopaths. Not all teachers, of course, are sociopaths; but when they are, this is not an anomaly. This is exactly what the system is built to produce.