It's not just name calling: pop psychology denunciation.
19 February 2019 [link youtube]
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Youtube Automatic Transcription
an original thought came to me while I
was sending an email to my lawyer all right I might as well just tell you what the email of my lawyer was right off the bat you know I noticed went over my divorce documents that the judge very casually insults me in passing makes a judgment on me psychologically in passing in these documents and I vaguely alluded to this you're on YouTube before and I wondered if it was based on at that time looking up YouTube videos about me where does this where has this come from but it says just in passing so casually that yet well you know yeah this guy you know he kind of may have some some problems he seems to lack empathy he may lack the capacity for empathy I have no idea I I was not able to attend court I was not able to be there in person I was not able to talk to the judge I have no idea what ridiculous arguments or evidence my ex-wife's lawyer presented to the court I have no idea but what I just wrote to my own lawyer now was look if somebody says in court if somebody says to the judge that I'm Dyslexic there has to be an empirical test where I can go and get tested and then say to the court no I'm not dyslexic and I can prove it here's the proof okay so the judge has to retract this statement or you can't you can't judge me on the basis of the assumption that i'm dyslexic if somebody says that i'm diabetic in court there must be some tests i can get i go to a hospital go to a doctor go to a specialist they can put me through some series of trials and then give this official verdict to the court no this person is not diabetic how is it that in all of Western culture and Western civilization we've just become resigned to this idea that there are all of these really deeply judgmental psychoanalytic terms circulating whether the term specifically come from the dsm-5 you know whether they come from bio psychiatry psychoanalysis various other schools of psychology doesn't really matter if the purpose of this video treating them all in one category the influence of pop psychology on pop culture when I ask this question to my lawyer what occurs to me is this looking back at you know my lifetime now 40 years old and about the last 200 years in terms of what I did in religious studies within the last 200 years there's really only been one new idea in new religious movements new religious movements this is the polite academic phrase used for cults cult studies this kind of thing when you look at what happened in fringe religious groups in the last 200 years the hocus-pocus hasn't changed since the Dark Ages there's a lot of magic there's a lot of manipulation things like cold reading techniques and some of those things haven't changed in 2,000 years some of them we have on the record going back to ancient India or ancient Greece and Rome you know to give you an example people sit in a waiting room waiting to see the great guru the great master talking about their problems and maybe this waiting room the walls appear to be marble and there are statues purely solid stone hallway but in fact there's a little cubby hole where someone can listen in to their conversation while they're waiting to see the Guru and then when they go in to see the Guru miraculously the Guru seems to be able to read their minds or he interprets some signs importance and he seems to know exactly what the problems are seems know exactly what worries that of their mind and the magic was you had someone listening in to their conversation before they they came in for the interview a lot of those things have been documented going back centuries and centuries and those didn't change the one thing that was really new in religion in the last 200 years was exactly psychoanalysis psychology psychiatry this shared vocabulary and approach to problem solving popular psychology right what I've seen in the transition to the social media era is that the type of bullying interrogation and cross-examination that used to go on only inside psychoanalytic cults I really just mean any kind of cult influenced by pop psychology psychiatry or you name it there are many many examples of this but obviously Scientology is one on a pretty large scale Scientology was really built around a psychoanalytic form of confession the person sits there and holds the magic eReader holds these electronic you know measurement devices and then confesses his or her sins and what they've been thinking about and talks about their repressed feelings towards their brother and their parents these kinds of things again you can actually see YouTube video showing this this is an adaptation of some of the methods and again jargon from psychology and psychiatry and then it's put into a powerfully charged faith-based hierarchical situation where of course the leaders of these cults these new religious movements they want your faith they want your devotion they want your adherence that want your time and they want your money in the end it's about getting people to believe enough to donate money so you can act out the whole pantomime again and groups like Scientology manage to collect quite a lot of money through these types of these types of dialogues so the one thing that's really been new in the last 200 years in religion and again Scientology is not the only example certainly within Buddhism within various forms of Asian religion you got to see the appropriation and ad tation of concept summons directly from Sigmund Freud looks and some for a specific source of that senators from pop psychology in general and of course you'd get the repackaging of some elements of traditional Buddhism but you also just get complete innovation and direct imitation I would also say the creation of transcendental meditation as a product marketed to white Americans this is another another examples there are many what I see now in the era of social media is that this same style of interrogation cross-examination and judgment is not happening in a confessional booth is not happening in the privacy of a cult leader talking to a cult member or that this kind of this kind of hierarchical arrangement that so many new New Berlin troops had it's become a popular sport on the Internet where I mean they're the most vocal minority here on the internet it's not everybody it's not a huge part of our population but it's a minority of our culture that casts a really long shadow and you see people on anonymous message boards like reddit who just spent hours and hours of their day reading about other people's psychological problems or their complaints about their lives and casting judgment and casting aspersions this may sometimes be in the in the form of giving advice people who come here on YouTube and through YouTube comments or responses on Facebook even which is less anonymous and I mean in a strange sense I feel like this trickles up to a judge in a court of law who feels no shame in just casually and him passing suggesting I mean not only with no diagnosis with no no evidence no one of this nothing was considered without talking to me once though meeting me without any statement from any psychiatrist wrote it really with no relevant evidence of any kind again unless this judge check out my youtube channel or something and didn't want to admit what what her sources were that a judge would so casually cast this type of damning aspersion on someone to say that they feel no empathy and and then for there to be no way for that to be falsified these mysterious you know mental conditions that people take such delight in accusing one another of having being a narcissist being a sociopath having no empathy you know if it can't be falsified if there's no way I can clear my name in the same sense that I can clear my name of the allegation that I have diabetes that I can clear my name of the allegation that I have dyslexia because I can go and get a test that proves either I'm dyslexic or I'm not or I'm a little bit dyslexic or I'm a lot dyslexic if there is no test if there are no verifiable criteria how is this different from Catholics in a small village in the dark ages weighing up one another's souls how is this different in principle I really mean this from what went on in the Salem witch trials when people would interpret a sign such as the fact that a young woman was alone in a barn when a single large black fly was lazily dancing in the sunlight well they would try to interpret this as indicating you know the evils in her soul the witchcraft it's a real example if you read testimony from Salem witch trials they're often interpreting very symbolic and very peculiar things I read an account of a murder in a in a small town in northern Laos where I was doing research was interested in history and culture where it came down to an interpretation of someone's dream someone had a dream that someone else was was a which basically was somehow connected to black magic demons dark forces or something um my problem here ultimately is not with the ontological claim that narcissism is real or that empathy exists as something that can be scientifically tested and proven to have a certain absence it's not really what I'm questioning what I'm questioning is the mentality of an audience and an audience that I see on social media all around the world an audience that has been trained to delight in really playing the role of the Spanish Inquisition but unlike the Spanish Inquisition from what I see it really seems like the Inquisition never ends the goal posts keep moving if people can't prove that I'm a narcissist or if they can't prove that I lack empathy then they're gonna try to prove that I don't speak Chinese well tough they're gonna try to prove that I was lying about the job I had in in China you know this this is an inquisition and I don't feel I'm especially marked out for that I really don't I don't think I've received the worst of it I don't I think there were a lot of people who are who are the targets of this to a much greater extent for whatever reason they're more appealing targets so they're more porous or what-have-you [Music] most people want to re-examine the legacy of the last 200 years in the development of bio psychiatry obviously in terms of the negative impacts on the patient's you know people who are now living with brain damage due to electroshock therapy due to bio psychiatric drug treatments neuroleptics antipsychotics antidepressants drugs that are now absolutely proven to cause brain damage to very serious negative side effects through your life and the benefits are not proven or in some cases have been proven to be nil which is to say no better than placebo okay that's one impact of the last 200 years of that cultural and pseudo scientific development and of course I've already mentioned there's this kind of focused specific peculiar influence that popular psychology had on the development of groups like Scientology new religious movements and cults what I'm most afraid of is the impact on the other 90% of us who don't fall into either one of those categories because it seems to me that that has become the stretching rack that has become the inquisitors tool that people have come to regard as their Sunday night entertainment to be applied to anyone they can get their hands on and with certainly no purpose in mind of in any way helping the person on the other end who is thus in a sense being analyzed
was sending an email to my lawyer all right I might as well just tell you what the email of my lawyer was right off the bat you know I noticed went over my divorce documents that the judge very casually insults me in passing makes a judgment on me psychologically in passing in these documents and I vaguely alluded to this you're on YouTube before and I wondered if it was based on at that time looking up YouTube videos about me where does this where has this come from but it says just in passing so casually that yet well you know yeah this guy you know he kind of may have some some problems he seems to lack empathy he may lack the capacity for empathy I have no idea I I was not able to attend court I was not able to be there in person I was not able to talk to the judge I have no idea what ridiculous arguments or evidence my ex-wife's lawyer presented to the court I have no idea but what I just wrote to my own lawyer now was look if somebody says in court if somebody says to the judge that I'm Dyslexic there has to be an empirical test where I can go and get tested and then say to the court no I'm not dyslexic and I can prove it here's the proof okay so the judge has to retract this statement or you can't you can't judge me on the basis of the assumption that i'm dyslexic if somebody says that i'm diabetic in court there must be some tests i can get i go to a hospital go to a doctor go to a specialist they can put me through some series of trials and then give this official verdict to the court no this person is not diabetic how is it that in all of Western culture and Western civilization we've just become resigned to this idea that there are all of these really deeply judgmental psychoanalytic terms circulating whether the term specifically come from the dsm-5 you know whether they come from bio psychiatry psychoanalysis various other schools of psychology doesn't really matter if the purpose of this video treating them all in one category the influence of pop psychology on pop culture when I ask this question to my lawyer what occurs to me is this looking back at you know my lifetime now 40 years old and about the last 200 years in terms of what I did in religious studies within the last 200 years there's really only been one new idea in new religious movements new religious movements this is the polite academic phrase used for cults cult studies this kind of thing when you look at what happened in fringe religious groups in the last 200 years the hocus-pocus hasn't changed since the Dark Ages there's a lot of magic there's a lot of manipulation things like cold reading techniques and some of those things haven't changed in 2,000 years some of them we have on the record going back to ancient India or ancient Greece and Rome you know to give you an example people sit in a waiting room waiting to see the great guru the great master talking about their problems and maybe this waiting room the walls appear to be marble and there are statues purely solid stone hallway but in fact there's a little cubby hole where someone can listen in to their conversation while they're waiting to see the Guru and then when they go in to see the Guru miraculously the Guru seems to be able to read their minds or he interprets some signs importance and he seems to know exactly what the problems are seems know exactly what worries that of their mind and the magic was you had someone listening in to their conversation before they they came in for the interview a lot of those things have been documented going back centuries and centuries and those didn't change the one thing that was really new in religion in the last 200 years was exactly psychoanalysis psychology psychiatry this shared vocabulary and approach to problem solving popular psychology right what I've seen in the transition to the social media era is that the type of bullying interrogation and cross-examination that used to go on only inside psychoanalytic cults I really just mean any kind of cult influenced by pop psychology psychiatry or you name it there are many many examples of this but obviously Scientology is one on a pretty large scale Scientology was really built around a psychoanalytic form of confession the person sits there and holds the magic eReader holds these electronic you know measurement devices and then confesses his or her sins and what they've been thinking about and talks about their repressed feelings towards their brother and their parents these kinds of things again you can actually see YouTube video showing this this is an adaptation of some of the methods and again jargon from psychology and psychiatry and then it's put into a powerfully charged faith-based hierarchical situation where of course the leaders of these cults these new religious movements they want your faith they want your devotion they want your adherence that want your time and they want your money in the end it's about getting people to believe enough to donate money so you can act out the whole pantomime again and groups like Scientology manage to collect quite a lot of money through these types of these types of dialogues so the one thing that's really been new in the last 200 years in religion and again Scientology is not the only example certainly within Buddhism within various forms of Asian religion you got to see the appropriation and ad tation of concept summons directly from Sigmund Freud looks and some for a specific source of that senators from pop psychology in general and of course you'd get the repackaging of some elements of traditional Buddhism but you also just get complete innovation and direct imitation I would also say the creation of transcendental meditation as a product marketed to white Americans this is another another examples there are many what I see now in the era of social media is that this same style of interrogation cross-examination and judgment is not happening in a confessional booth is not happening in the privacy of a cult leader talking to a cult member or that this kind of this kind of hierarchical arrangement that so many new New Berlin troops had it's become a popular sport on the Internet where I mean they're the most vocal minority here on the internet it's not everybody it's not a huge part of our population but it's a minority of our culture that casts a really long shadow and you see people on anonymous message boards like reddit who just spent hours and hours of their day reading about other people's psychological problems or their complaints about their lives and casting judgment and casting aspersions this may sometimes be in the in the form of giving advice people who come here on YouTube and through YouTube comments or responses on Facebook even which is less anonymous and I mean in a strange sense I feel like this trickles up to a judge in a court of law who feels no shame in just casually and him passing suggesting I mean not only with no diagnosis with no no evidence no one of this nothing was considered without talking to me once though meeting me without any statement from any psychiatrist wrote it really with no relevant evidence of any kind again unless this judge check out my youtube channel or something and didn't want to admit what what her sources were that a judge would so casually cast this type of damning aspersion on someone to say that they feel no empathy and and then for there to be no way for that to be falsified these mysterious you know mental conditions that people take such delight in accusing one another of having being a narcissist being a sociopath having no empathy you know if it can't be falsified if there's no way I can clear my name in the same sense that I can clear my name of the allegation that I have diabetes that I can clear my name of the allegation that I have dyslexia because I can go and get a test that proves either I'm dyslexic or I'm not or I'm a little bit dyslexic or I'm a lot dyslexic if there is no test if there are no verifiable criteria how is this different from Catholics in a small village in the dark ages weighing up one another's souls how is this different in principle I really mean this from what went on in the Salem witch trials when people would interpret a sign such as the fact that a young woman was alone in a barn when a single large black fly was lazily dancing in the sunlight well they would try to interpret this as indicating you know the evils in her soul the witchcraft it's a real example if you read testimony from Salem witch trials they're often interpreting very symbolic and very peculiar things I read an account of a murder in a in a small town in northern Laos where I was doing research was interested in history and culture where it came down to an interpretation of someone's dream someone had a dream that someone else was was a which basically was somehow connected to black magic demons dark forces or something um my problem here ultimately is not with the ontological claim that narcissism is real or that empathy exists as something that can be scientifically tested and proven to have a certain absence it's not really what I'm questioning what I'm questioning is the mentality of an audience and an audience that I see on social media all around the world an audience that has been trained to delight in really playing the role of the Spanish Inquisition but unlike the Spanish Inquisition from what I see it really seems like the Inquisition never ends the goal posts keep moving if people can't prove that I'm a narcissist or if they can't prove that I lack empathy then they're gonna try to prove that I don't speak Chinese well tough they're gonna try to prove that I was lying about the job I had in in China you know this this is an inquisition and I don't feel I'm especially marked out for that I really don't I don't think I've received the worst of it I don't I think there were a lot of people who are who are the targets of this to a much greater extent for whatever reason they're more appealing targets so they're more porous or what-have-you [Music] most people want to re-examine the legacy of the last 200 years in the development of bio psychiatry obviously in terms of the negative impacts on the patient's you know people who are now living with brain damage due to electroshock therapy due to bio psychiatric drug treatments neuroleptics antipsychotics antidepressants drugs that are now absolutely proven to cause brain damage to very serious negative side effects through your life and the benefits are not proven or in some cases have been proven to be nil which is to say no better than placebo okay that's one impact of the last 200 years of that cultural and pseudo scientific development and of course I've already mentioned there's this kind of focused specific peculiar influence that popular psychology had on the development of groups like Scientology new religious movements and cults what I'm most afraid of is the impact on the other 90% of us who don't fall into either one of those categories because it seems to me that that has become the stretching rack that has become the inquisitors tool that people have come to regard as their Sunday night entertainment to be applied to anyone they can get their hands on and with certainly no purpose in mind of in any way helping the person on the other end who is thus in a sense being analyzed