Mature people use their fire to warm the house rather than burn it down, refrain from assaulting flight attendants, help old ladies cross the street, pack a sandwich for the long road trip, and can take a joke.
Our current cultural climate trends in the opposite direction. Instead of constructive sublimation, we celebrate raw destructive aggression; instead of suppressing dark emotions, we revel in them; instead of preparing for the future, we’re busy destroying it; instead of laughing at ourselves and our shared humanity, we either laugh at the weak or foreswear humor altogether.
In America today, the delicate and complex machinery of democracy is placed in infantile hands. You don’t need a child’s imagination to foresee trouble ahead.
Noam Shpancer, Ph.D.
November 13, 2021
Psychological Immaturity Threatens Our Democracy
Democracy requires psychological maturity, which appears to be in short supply.
[The article does a good job of describing the problem from the viewpoint of a psychologist. I wish he had some suggestions for a solution.—Joe]
Well, for a start, we could imprison overwhelming majority of psychologists. You know, all the ones pushing speed on boys for being, well, boys. And the ones pushing homosexuality on children. And encouraging boys to call themselves girls, and vice versa.
It’s the 90% that give the rest a bad name.
For some time I’ve thought that leftism/socialism is based in emotional and intellectual immaturity.
The older I get, the more certain I am that the words ‘social’ and ‘science’ should not be used in the same sentence.
I’d go farther. The word social has some meaning, but I no longer know what the word science means. Today it seems that ‘science’ is mostly data mining, misuse of statistics, cherry picking, and wishful thinking. In addition, take a look at any of the professional journals and the resulting news articles. We publish so many papers per year that no one has even the time to read let alone peer review. And adding to that is that the papers are often contradictory. Coffee is good, coffee is bad.
If you need other examples don’t overlook the new sciences that are build upon a house of cards and even deny reality such as gender studies and its Journal of Gender Studies.
You know what science is. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, even if there’s an ocean of bathwater and one tiny baby hidden somewhere in it.
I know. The scientific method works and will continue to work, but science as promoted by our elites has become a new god and cannot be questioned.
I guess that not much has changed in human nature down through the ages. Each generation thinks that they are more modern than previous generations.
So it is still necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff.
They say science, but they really mean magic. It’s all just smoke and mirrors to fool the gullible and make us do what we’re told and has been for centuries.
The Science is Settled! Are YOU denying The Science?
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards for they are subtle and quick to anger.
Different words, same meaning.
Brannick, just remember this simple rule: a discipline whose name contains the word “science” is never a science. (The same, only more so, applies to any discipline containing the word “studies”.)
Greta Thornberg anyone? If Al Gore and John Kerry aren’t moronic enough to get you to no longer believe your 8th. grade biology teacher.
Let’s try and spoiled, mentally challenged brat?
Moronic and infantile is the only way left to them.
Let’s face it, you’re not going to use reason and logic to convince people that communism works. (While standing in front of a mountain of human skulls.)
That crap only works on the educationally inbred, and emotionally charged.
It’s one of the reasons life needs to be kind of hard on everyone. Shared stress will breed humor. And humor will breed comradery. And comradery is what one needs to build society.
We were getting there in the 70’s and 80’s. Joking about race and our stereotypes was building a stronger sense of country. Can’t have that, can we?
He sort of had me until he upheld democracy as the standard. It would be tragic if we were founded on the notion that the tyranny of the majority, being the highest imaginable standard of virtue, were to replace the tyranny of false god-kings or dictators, being unable to understand or even to conceive of no other ideal but those.
Wait; are we unable now, to imagine anything but tyranny of majority as a replacement for tyranny of an earthly king or a clique? Maybe so. And if so, then who are the immature, underdeveloped ones, and who should we properly blame for the fall of our once constitutional, former republic?
And again and again, we should be careful not to dismiss the enemy as being infantile, silly or stupid. They rule the world after all, and we support them and obey their dictates whether we approve of them or not. They obviously have some intelligence and some organizational and long-term planning abilities, even if those abilities are not oriented in the direction we prefer.
Until we stop being dismissive of both our enemy and the solitary means to our salvation, we’ll have no means or basis whatsoever of acting appropriately.
The Jews in Europe had the same problem of dismissiveness regarding the up and coming Nazi Party (and about their long awaited messiah). What does our champion psychologist say about that, about the deadly affliction of normalcy bias (including the doctrine of preference for routine and tradition over discernment) among whole societies?
If we are pointing out the fact that discernment is the enemy of the powers that be, then I agree. All cheaters, liars, and keepers of secrets need a veil under which to operate. They are the ones who keep us in the dark. But that doesn’t mean that they themselves don’t have any discernment. Some of them have to be quite perceptive and clever in fact.
And so we keep pointing to the character, intelligence and knowledge of one side or the other, when mostly what we should be looking at is allegiance. There are two sets of standards in the world, and each of us is allied either with one or the other.
A democracy will ALWAYS devolve into chaos and destruction. Because a democracy always pits 51% of a group against 49%…. No democracy in history has ever survived. That is why America was intended to be a Constitutional Republic. Sadly we weren’t able to keep the republic and it quickly mutated and devolved into a democracy. Now it’s nothing but an oligarchic kleptocracy.
Evil existed before psychology was invented. Let’s not excuse evil with sketchy psychological theories.
Psychology was invented to excuse evil. It now embraces and extolls the so-called virtues of evil.