America has finally rejected in large measure the decades long experiment of Liberalism in our culture. The failed legacy of Liberalism finally became too much to ignore, rationalize, or deny according to recent surveys. A question that must be posed, however, is whether Liberalism itself was the heart of the beast, or simply the outer layer that became known to the world. Call it an intellectual predisposition, an established academic prejudice, a culture of narcissism, or any number of other names, the fact is that there still beats within the wounded beast of Liberalism a structured humanistic orthodoxy with deep roots in the so-called science of psychology.
The simple, unvarnished truth is that contemporary psychology has become the great Western vehicle for the repudiation of religion and the establishment of the worship-cult of the self. Many books have been published in recent years laying bare the lack of scientific research common to psychology’s founding father, Sigmund Freud. Among theses books are The Myth of Psychotherapy, as well as Freudian Fraud, The Shrinking of America, Psychobable, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Psychological Seduction and other popular titles by qualified authors whose only academic crime has been to follow a trail of evidence that often leads outside the boundaries of the reservation.
In the thousands of university courses on modern psychology, rarely if ever are these critical analyses mentioned. Rather than focusing on honest, scholarly debate, the professors focus on nebulous and elastic concepts such as self-actualization, self-fulfillment, and self-realization. Every failure of human character is then given a name & classified as some sort of personality disorder. Freud even went so far as to label the concept of guilt as a mere personality disorder, relegating the reality of human conscience to the realm of myth.
The focus seems to be on the support and legitimization of the profession, a posture which inherently and aggressively mocks and decries religion as antithetical and entirely incompatible with any degree of intellect or education. Any dissent from psychological orthodoxy is immediately labelled as a flat earth theory in spite of the many thousands of pages presented by highly credentialled dissenters.
A common thread in the work of many self anointed theoreticians such as Jung, Fromm, Maslow, and others has been the concept of human potential, or as it has been distilled in today’s public schools, self esteem. The basic idea of self-esteem in our schools is the reinforcement of self-worth in the minds of children. Tell them often how wonderful they are, make them repeat it as their own persona mantra, and we are told they will come to believe it. Our modern educators theorizing in the shadows of psychology’s founding fathers began giving all students rewards and academic advancement regardless of achievement. Self-esteem was not linked to personal achievement, since this would raise the specter of failure, which of course was “destructive” to the child’s self-image. Race hustlers like Jesse Jackson were quick to jump on the bandwagon, inviting the press to follow them into schools to witness the “I am somebody” choruses. Never mind the fact that none of the many studies on self-esteem has ever shown it to be a catalyst to desirable behaviors. In a recent study, Korean children ranked first in mathematical skills, and American children ranked lowest. American children, however, ranked highest in self-perceived math skills, providing a clear example of the foolishness of a feel-good pop-psychology and the manner I which it distorts accurate self perception.
There is in fact only one thing that can change how we feel about ourselves. In order to truly convince ourselves that we are to be valued, we must produce real and valuable accomplishments! Only these will testify convincingly enough to the only one who really counts in the process of self-evaluation: you! Praise must be genuinely earned in order to be believed. It has to be the result of something worthwhile, not an artificially structured house of cards. Self-esteem is a response, not a reason for being. In this artificial mode, it becomes purely narcissistic, if not a thinly-disguised form of humanistic self-worship. In truth, we only help people by leading them to change, develop and elevate what they are. One road to this noble goal is to help them produce something worthwhile to objectively testify as to their self-worth on their behalf. The other road, the road of an incompetent, over-priced, and self-serving public educational system, is to let them stagnate academically and intellectually, changing only their perception of themselves as benefit accrues only to union supported teachers who operate without the performance standards common in the real world.
A result of this debilitating approach to psychology and public education is the pathetic and widespread attempt to justify the increasing percentage of moral, social, and educational failures in our nation by labeling every failure a victim. Ultimately, there exists in the life of the “victim” no absolute responsibilities, no restraints, and no inhibitions. All morality becomes nothing more than the whimsical finger of human appetite writing in the sand, there to await the next shifting wind of modern psychobable. God at this point has become recreated in the image of man; it is the hollow and unfulfilling religion of Determinism, based pathetically on nothing more than the perpetual, inbred selfishness of the individual.
This kind of influence on our society has been vast. The spiritual self, nurtured in absolute values born of the Judaeo-Christian Ethic, was focused on the development of moral and social values rooted in interpersonal family and community relationships. The goal is both spiritual and noble: to learn to delay gratification and harness the destructive and carnal self will and replace it at the helm with the virtue of selflessness. The example for Christians is found in the highest expression of that principle: Jesus Christ.
The modern self worshiped in schools and at the academic altars of psychology is in contrast concerned primarily with outward traits. As society became influenced by economic pressures and moral permissiveness, the individual became molded more by forces from without. Advances in communication gave rise to effective mass advertising. Now young people identify themselves more by what they wear than by what they believe. Personal identities find expression in outward tattoos and not inward beliefs. Is it any wonder young people today need others to teach them who they are and to convince them of what they are worth? This was at one time the role of family and church. Now that society has reduced the nuclear family to the subnuclear family, the stage is set to reduce it even further to the non-nuclear family where children are molded by government institutions and social criticism and judgement becomes an offense punishable by law. (Just look at Canada and Europe today.) This is the result of a modernism that has lead us away from our churches and to the psychologists’ couches and the psychiatrists prescription pads with their unrelenting emphasis on the morally autonomous and self-determining individual. Sadly, he or she is ultimately left thrashing about in the encroaching quicksand of his self-centered identity and purpose, exclaiming as he slowly sinks, his right to gratify himself at any cost, even standing on the corpses of those beneath him.
