Psychology/Psychiatry

This piece introduces my 10-part series on economic sanity and alternative economic systems.  Never mind that I am not an economist. Instead, please appreciate that I am not an economist.
Neither is Daniel Kahneman an economist, and he won the Nobel Prize for economics. He is a psychologist like me, but a very different psychologist in at least two respects. Firstly, his specialty is cognitive psychology, mine is organizational psychology. Secondly, I will never win a Nobel Prize.

In a world defined by social atomization, bureaucratization, and ant-like regimentation along institutionally sanctioned channels that exist but to uphold hierarchies of power, it is practically a moral obligation for anyone who wants to be fully human to break out of his bubble and, if possible, experience the world as “the other” does. In particular, as those without a voice do.

Western culture is clearly obsessed with rules, guilt, submissiveness and punishment.
By now it is clear that the West is the least free society on Earth. In North America and Europe, almost everyone is under constant scrutiny: people are spied on, observed, their personal information is being continually extracted, and the surveillance cameras are used indiscriminately.
Life is synchronized and managed. There are hardly any surprises.

While conflict theories and resolution processes advanced dramatically during the second half of the 20th century, particularly thanks to the important work of several key scholars such as Professor Johan Galtung significant gaps remain in the conflict literature on how to deal with particular conflict configurations. Notably, these include the following four.

Overwhelmed by anxiety and image insecurity a friend’s 20-year-old daughter recently quit her university course and withdrew to her bedroom where she took to self-harming. Company and environments in which she felt emotionally secure became harder to find, until she stopped venturing out at all together.
‘Alice’ is one of a growing number of people, young and old, but disproportionately under 30 years of age, who feel unable to meet the expectations and challenges of contemporary life — whether real or imagined.

Quebec medical tribunal will decide if psychiatrist-for-hire Louis Morissette was allowed to provide a hatchet job based on hearsay
The review committee of the medical tribunal of Quebec will decide within 90 days whether or not anyone anywhere, such as a political party or institution or individual in any province or state, can hire a Quebec expert psychiatrist to render a medical opinion about an opponent without interviewing or even informing the individual.

The existent, the body, disappears.  We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks….Nobodies and no Necessity – for Necessity is the condition of the existent.  It is what makes reality real.
— John Berger, “Steps Toward a Small Theory of the Visible”.
The real body.  To be real, it must be bodily; and to be a body is to be eaten.  The humiliation in incarnation; to become bread.  To be eaten: to be consumed by sorrow, sickness, and death.

In the groundbreaking work, Humanity: The World Before Religion, War, and Inequality, author Barry Brown has provided definitive evidence of humankind’s natural tendency to be peaceful, cooperative, and egalitarian. Brown’s work is the first ever to document the history of humankind before and after the advent of warfare.

Anyone reading the scientific literature (or the progressive news outlets that truthfully report this literature) knows that homo sapiens is on the fast track to extinction, most likely some time between 2025 and 2040.

Cognitive dissonance in Psychology
The psychological tension that occurs when one holds mutually exclusive beliefs or attitudes and that often motivates people to modify their thoughts or behaviors in order to reduce the tension.
Anxiety that results from simultaneously holding contradictory or incompatible attitudes, beliefs, or the like, as when one likes a person but disapproves of one of his or her habits.
Motivated Ignorance in Politics