practical/hands-on conclusions that not only help us understand our social world, we gain illuminating insights into our personal world.
Depends on the scientific method—a series of standardized steps that objectively examine an idea or physical phenomenon to identify natural forces, laws, mechanisms, or processes by which a phenomenon functions or exists. However, the scientific method is merely busywork unless the scientist is motivated to uncover working conclusions that reflect the real world.
Most importantly, because of the above qualities, implementing both forms of prevention is a science of psychology’s most cherished responsibility. Primary prevention treats the developing mind so no psychological problems exist in the first place.
Secondary prevention treats already existing problems by pinpointing the underlying dynamics (causes and effects), by laying them out for the client to examine. Preventive, therapeutic, and/or management strategies are then applied to significant data that has been gleaned from the client’s past/traumatic experiences. In other words, the client is given a complete therapeutic package that explains the underlying dynamics of the problem, rates the problem in terms of seriousness, describes how he should be feeling if his problem didn’t exist, why he is suffering, what caused his suffering, and what he must now do to feel better. There are no unnecessary listening sessions where therapists passively wait for clients to utter potentially significant clues so they can be labeled and added to a list for therapists to mull over for months or years.
A science of psychology is a sea change in the field of mental health and politics because it finally addresses real problems about real people in real situations with hands-on, more coherent, guess-free explanations in a manual-like form that answers questions the way we want them answered.
Having said that, there will be resistance. Not all people are prepared to face private doubts or fears straight up, or see themselves as others see them. So when people pry, our impulse is to defend or deny, or say it’s none of their business. However, this universal need to conceal our inner world only exists because we’re not privy to some of the fundamentals by which the human mind works. Understanding these fundamentals frees us to share humanity’s common problems in the light of collective understanding.
A primary roadblock to collective understanding is the curious fact that there is no universal agreement as to what the psychological problem is or represents. This is a serious gap in our so-called Information Age that not only leaves us confused and suffering, it makes us vulnerable to people who prey on confusion and suffering.
Collective ignorance or disinterest surrounding our true psychological makeup is this political threat’s cue to freely exploit our psychological dysfunction with its psychological dysfunction, for example, by setting standards for how we’re expected to live, act, and think. In other words, these exploiters meld into our internal suffering worlds with seductive promises born of their internal suffering worlds creating a political world of human predators encouraging their “prey” to protect themselves from invented “evils” like capitalism or The Constitution if they just believe what they would never believe if they were not suffering, or exposed to daily servings of media propaganda.
Their mind-shaping skills are so refined, we don’t know if or when our cognition is being tampered with. Mind-shapers with more diabolical intentions take it up a notch to transform our beliefs, values, and attitudes and even cause cultural shifts that challenge cherished views of religion, morality, patriotism, and what it means to be an American.
These same people strive to give us a new identity, even though it is alien to our better nature, one we previously would have rejected outright before these mind-shapers got to us. Externally imposed transformations going on within our internal world are felt as so real, so empowering, some will fight to defend their mastermind’s superimposed convictions as if their lives depended on it.
So far I have been emphasizing political minds that live to control and minds that live to be controlled. There is a third category of the tyrannical, political mind that complements this dysfunctional duo. These are determined, humorless, highly focused minds that have been preprogrammed by elite, political mind-shapers to wallow in hate to service a political ideology dedicated to subjugating we the people by any means necessary at any cost for as long as it takes. This mob mentality is on a hair-trigger to react to whatever its cognitive handlers want and to get in the face of anyone who dares reject its ideology, or who merely disagrees. Simmering rage drives them to openly ridicule challengers up close with crude, political venom. They speak of tolerance, but tolerate no one who thinks differently. They romanticize “equality” while working for the day when everyone will be equally miserable. They speak of diversity, but openly reject critics, Christians and conservatives. They march against social ills, disrupt gatherings of nonbelievers, resist with extreme prejudice to any perceived insult, create discord, turn to violence, seek social and ethnic divisions, and work for an anti-assimilation culture in what once was America’s “melting pot” while screaming for social justice and against deniers of their “truths.” Fanatical cries of “racist” to every imagined insult ring hollow. They expect us to interpret their words of hate as justifiable in a hateful world.
Above all, they insist on being heard. Facts don’t matter. Whomever is harmed by their antisocial antics doesn’t matter. They simply want what they want—now. Holding signs, wearing body paint and masks, displaying emotion-driven symbols, marching together in heavily financed displays of social activism, and bombarding critics by talking over them with loud, angry arguments are meant to gain attention by shocking us into blindly submitting. They’re on a do-or-die quest to build a new world where injustice, racism, lack of diversity, unfairness, inequality, and old moral values shall forever be forbidden, and forgotten. This juxtaposition of working to build a pro-social future by trashing today’s world with antisocial acts and rhetoric is curiously hypocritical.
But they don’t see their hypocrisy. In their minds, doing whatever is necessary is the only way to transform America into their political Utopia. Nothing now stands in the way of these dreamy-eyed ideologues drunk on power to disrupt and destroy; therefore, they’re confident that nonstop hammering at public sensibilities will someday shut down all resistance. Social disorder sets the stage for creating opportunities to bring down the status quo so their imagined, Utopian world can emerge.
All of the above are antithetical to Mother Nature’s laws. We can’t escape them despite political attempts to replace them with man-made laws. However, for Mother Nature’s laws to play out as designed, we must be in control, notwithstanding the fact that early strivings to bring out our best are not under our control. They’re under the control—if we’re lucky—of psychologically healthy caretakers who protect us from physical and mental assault, and expand opportunities for us to learn, examine, test, and experience new challenges, but, most importantly, they allow us time and provide circumstances for us to organize our mind around moral guidelines that help us judge right from wrong.
Mother Nature designed us around a maturation process that She expects to be nurtured and protected by sensitive caretakers until inborn potential is maximized. Sadly, in most cases, these expectations are ignored, denied, dismissed, or replaced with willy-nilly interpretations of how to control the developing mind, not maximize its potential.
Maximizing human potential according to natural laws lies at the heart of human evolution, and good politics. Absolute control over the many so a few can live in opulence at the expense of the many is not in Mother Nature’s grand plan for human evolution; that’s a formula for human devolution. Nonetheless, human devolution is the unconscious effect/unintended consequence of every tyrannical experiment. Behind well-programmed displays of concern and compassion stands a political tyrant who is in a subliminal war with his people. To win over the collective mind so he remains in control, he declares war on Mother Nature so his future victims willingly reject fact and common sense for eventual political suicide. Bottom line: What Mother Nature gives us at birth is
