From: target@batstar.net

To: psysr-disc@yahoogroups.com

Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 08:19:44 -0700

Subject: Re: further on "dire future of population collapse"

 

Gec:

Thank you for acknowledging my remarks. I appreciate your choice of engagement in that regard.

You wrote

I agree that it is uncomfortable psychology to think about population collapse, but "bad" psychology?

You employ a certain version of "protest talk" which is activist material. How is it psychological?

PsySR wants to build cultures of peace with social justice. That is a standard for this list, I'd say.

You have introduced a topic that is longstanding, for which there are many histories of engagement in the frame of PsySR's intention. In my case, I worked closely with the U.S.-China People's Friendship Ass'n, an organization that in the 70s had many similarities to PsySR. Their target was normalization of relations with the PRC, and the year when that was achieved, the Pres. of USCPFA was the widow of WEB DuBois. Their internal discussions were about overcoming the anticommunist culture of that era, so they did many things that helped "build a culture of peace."

China implemented then and now a policy of "one family, one child." That's a radical response to the concern you address, from 35 years back, in fact. However some of the collateral issues regarding the social dynamics of a "culture of peace" were not properly engaged; the current concern over Tibet and the Dalai being one such area.

"Good psychology" involves engaging what makes things change - it's a matter of social responsibility.

I am not sure what you mean by "tokenism" or that I routinely use the rhetoric of a clinical client. I do function pretty well in my job, my family, and my community. I probably am not very much like a clinical patient.

I take this to be a comment that you consider that you are speaking from "lived experience" with the mental health system (in the U.S., or I gather, more likely abroad). The "other" of your argumentation however is generic, and specifically it does not engage the prevailing "resistances" of conventional psychology to "building cultures of peace with justice."

Yet, as the polemic "Torture after Dark" indicates, the "strategic helplessness of the APA" is at issue here, so that falling into the "learned helplessness" of "complaint behavior" is .. bad psychology, in my view.

I have also studied most of Descarte's writings. Vico I have not read. I would like to but probably won't because of other priorities on my time. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has an entry on Vico, and I [here] paste in a quote that tries to summarize his book "The New Science"

Thank you for quoting Vico.

It is difficult to see how Vico's writings on overpopulation can be useful in understanding the collapse of our population dependent on petroleum oil for its food and social order.

You might look at John Shotter on the matter of the interpretation and relevance of Vico. What is key is that our "social science" is pre-scientific, so that the dominant issue is what moves us closer to (an eventual) true science is highly relevant. In the "first wave" of the client/survivor movement, such as with MPLF Boston and NAPA in California, the prevailing clinical patterns of "torture denial" were taken up, deliberately (my source is Leonard Frank, the co-founder of NAPA). Mere protest w/o thoughtful "othering" does not engage the needed social change; it's "tea party talk," not an approach which takes on the crisis of overpopulation and the like in any effective manner.

In Shotter's terms, it's not "socially accountable."

Contrast that with PsySR today, where the previous apologetics for "dog torture" have now been transformed into a broad advocacy against "learned helplessness" in the dynamics of the APA itself.

Maybe concepts from clinical psychology have some explanatory power: Thinking about population collapse certainly provokes anxiety, which induces neurotic defense mechanisms like intellectualization, reaction formation, denial, repression, etc. The topic touches an emotional button, that is for sure.

That is uncritical "ego psychology" and reflects the philosophy of "attitude management" (e.g. Bandura's social learning theory). As with Seligman, a psychology of uncritical compliance followed by manipulative over-reaction does not speak for social justice. [You may say "denial of resistances" is bad, but that would be a projective interpretation of my remarks.] Good psychology would speak to the sensus communis of Vico and it would engage the process of change of social institutions. It would not mainly be a reductive coping strategy for "nightmares" like population collapse.

That's my view.

 

Andrew Phelps