Category: Psychology

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Leadership Training

Bill’s 21 Irrefutable Rules about Leadership Trainers:

Nobody who is really busy doing real productive work has time to indulge in this kind of narcissism that they call “leadership training”.

Amazingly, the rules of leadership invariably serve the interests of the people who make the rules, and the people who sell leadership training.

Almost all people famous for leadership training never led a single real organization in their lives. All of them lead organizations dedicated to making them rich by selling “leadership” training.

If you really believe you need leadership training, you can’t be helped by leadership training.

You send your staff to take leadership training because you know that none of them will ever hold any authority over you.

There is not a single thing you would learn at a leadership training seminar that would have prevented you from investing in credit default swaps.

If you are selling leadership training to an audience of people who will never be effective leaders because they believe you can improve their leadership skills, you probably know exactly what you are doing– especially when you offer them more of your tapes, books, and CD’s. And they all automatically buy them.

Leadership training is easy because no one can ever really disprove any of the bland observations you make. For that same reason, leadership training is worthless because no one can ever prove it works.

I hear you: you are a weak leader who now believes he is a strong leader because he watched 9 hours of leadership training videos. No, you are not. You are a weak leader who will need to hire a consultant the minute you are confronted with a real problem because you still are not a real leader.

What is leadership? Sounds noble, doesn’t it? What if they called the workshop: “how to boss people around”? Not quite as glamorous, right? But at one level, leadership is all about bossing people around and the trouble with this world is too many people who love to boss people around think they are leaders.

 

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John Maxwell’s Useless and Ephemeral Leadership “Wisdom”

There is only one real irrefutable law of leadership: Anyone who doesn’t already have what it takes to be a good leader will not know what it is they need in order to become a good leader.

And the obvious corollary: anyone who already is a good leader does not need leadership training and would be better off spending this time productively… doing something. Like have a sex change operation if you are a woman, because Maxwell doesn’t ever refer to a good leader as “she” or “her”.

Here it is — in the simplest possible terms: all “leadership training” sounds great in the workshop and works perfectly as long as you don’t let reality intrude. That’s all there is to it. The minute you leave the seminar and immerse yourself into the real world again you will find that your problems are no simpler and the answers are no clearer. And if you had weaknesses as a leader before the seminar, you will have the same weaknesses afterwards. I guarantee that.

However, a considerable number of people make a considerable amount of money trying to persuade middle managers and executives otherwise.

Almost without exception, none of these “leaders” have any real-world accomplishments: they are all preachers, essentially, or what they used to call “snake-oil salesmen”: glib speakers who charm and amuse you and persuade you that you can purchase that glib goodness itself and take it back to your place of employment and do magical things that you could never have done otherwise.

Not only are they unashamed of their lack of real world accomplishments — they sometimes seem to revel in it.

Have any of these geniuses ever actually accomplished anything in the real world? You would think a few would– just for PR value. Just to convince us that someone, somewhere actually used these principles in a real workplace with real problems and actually succeeded because of them. Just to show us that some people care about whether or not people who preach a lot of leadership actually know what they’re doing, in the real world.

Come on– do it! Just to prove– and here’s the most important thing– that the examples given in these workshops and presentations are not simplistic and unrealistic. In other words, nothing like the real problems real leaders will face in a real world.

Not one.

Well…. if you include celebrities like football coaches and Oliver North… But that sort of proves the point, doesn’t it? How wonderful it would be if you could run your company like a football team? Your team accomplishes exactly what your individual players are capable of accomplishing, and you get to credit yourself with some abstraction called “leadership” that miraculously appropriates your players’ talents.

How wonderful if you are a successful athlete– born with a gift– and people will pay to hear you talk about how you invented the gift, nurtured it, developed it, with your hard work and determination. What you have with these people is an attempt to cash in on their celebrity.

Maxwell gives Churchill as an example of a great leader. Why? Because he stood up for democracy and human rights? No. Because he defied the most efficient and powerful military machine in Europe? No. Because he was determined to win. Well, so was Hitler, and so was Custer, and Marc Antony, and Lee.

John Maxwell is at his most offensive when he tells you that the only way to cultivate effective leadership in your church is… surprise! By buying more and more John Maxwell books and video tapes. No– wait– even better! By subscribing to his various leadership clubs so that you receive something in the mail every month– along with expensive ongoing subscriptions.

It is a tribute to Maxwell’s charm, I guess, that he can get away with these blatantly self-serving stratagems in front of an audience that has paid to hear him speak! Wow. That is leadership!

It is even more wildly amazing that while telling this audience that leaders can’t be herded like cats because they think for themselves and ask critical questions and think outside the box…. he insists they all need to buy his tapes and books and videos, and they all nod obediently and scribble down the names of the stuff they need to buy from John Maxwell to realize their potential.

The real purpose of all this stuff? To make you feel entitled to your position. To give you the illusion of authority and influence. To convince you that you are really more necessary and more valuable than the people who actually produce products and ideas but don’t know how to suck up to those in authority.

The results from all this “training”? Mission Statements that consist of a platitudinous enunciation of the obvious, and Strategic Plans (a redundancy: a “plan plan”).

And I imagine that most of them probably do. They reach their potential. Just as you will and I will.

John Maxwell does not take questions. Real world issues must not intrude, because they introduce complexity that reveals the utter uselessness of most of his “wisdom”. John Maxwell does not take questions, but he probably could– because this audience does indeed look like sheep.

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Wandering

If you are convinced that you have enemies in the world and that they hate you and that they are coming after you, you will eventually convince the world to hate you and come after you. And indeed, you will have enemies in the world. They will hate you for your paranoia and your defensiveness and the way you always lock your doors and the way you constantly plan revenge for some outrage that has yet to happen. Christ said, turn the other cheek. No wonder they crucified him. He didn’t even do them the comfort of striking back at them. He offered them the quintessential liberality of: they don’t know what they’re doing. I say kiss the other cheek, because that covers just about everyone: they don’t know what they are doing.

We claim that our virtue is offended by some action by some inadequate human being out there, somewhere, but the real offense is that we thought anyone should take our virtues seriously or that anyone would think that we actually believe in them for their own sake. Nothing is more external to the soul than virtue, for it is precisely the only thing protecting your soul from the uncomfortable insinuation of others’ mortalities. We would rather die than have them kill us. We would rather kill than have anybody think we were killers.

If it is a conceit to pretend to be smarter than anyone else, it is an even bigger conceit to believe that intelligence is something to be ashamed of. Who do we prefer to kill: those who refuse to bow to our insights, or those who confront us with undeniable evidence of our inadequacies?

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Donald Miller: Blue Like Disappointed

“Blue Like Jazz” is another one of those books by an evangelical Christian that describes a long, exotic path through an allegedly real and intellectually credible world encountering various challenges to Christian culture that ends up– eureka!–  exactly where it began, in a traditional, evangelical Christian faith. The message is– I am like you. I have the same standards for intellectual and scientific credibility that you thinking people do. I have just as low a threshold of tolerance for bullshit, deceit, distortion, and glibness as you do. And I know that many high-profile evangelists appear to be smarmy corrupt charlatans. And by golly, that don’t mean that what they’re preaching is wrong….

Donald Miller may not be conservative politically, but his discussion of Christianity itself, what belief means, who Jesus was, and how God operates in the world, is alarmingly like Billy Graham’s. In fact, I doubt the two would really find much to disagree about, even if Miller once protested against Bush. I can see “Uncle Billy” smiling indulgently and saying, “shucks, you young folk! Why, I’m glad you’re concerned about global warming. It’s better than having promiscuous sex.”

In fact, it’s quite striking how conventional his faith life is. He goes on and on about how he re-examines some major political or psychological idea and turns it upside down and learns that he is so humble that he was very mistaken when he had previously thought he was not humble enough.

If the issue is that most evangelicals don’t really have the passion to really live out the requirements of their beliefs… he’s scaring me. That is precisely what makes some evangelicals most like Jihadists: the absolute conviction that we are right, because God told us we were right, and nobody else can prove otherwise, and therefore we must take control, for God.

But Miller doesn’t really discuss the content of his faith very much. He talks a lot about going to church or not going to church and tithing or not tithing and how he hangs around with people who cuss and watch “South Park”, leaving one to wonder why he even accepts the idea that he should tithe. It might be a perfectly good idea. It might be an irrelevant relic of a completely different time and place. But he doesn’t explain why, other than to say that God wants him to. How does he know this? Because his friend Rick tells him? How does Rick know? What authority decreed this? Well, of course, probably scripture. But here we get a blank: how does he know what scripture means? Any searching intellect would ask these questions.

Why does Donald Miller’s brain seem to suddenly lose it’s curiosity when it comes to actually discussing the content of faith?

Miller seems to regard an evangelical faith as something hermetic and isolated. You either accept it or you don’t. That appears to me to based on the assumption that the Christian faith is a mysterious but insular little thing that is not affected by your actual behavior. Or is it that your faith is not necessarily indicated by your actual behavior?

10 Real Issues Donald Miller doesn’t deal with
in “Blue Like Jazz”:

1. Is the bible “infallible”? If it is, what does that mean? Should we stone adulteresses?

2. How do you know that a “good” humanist is going to hell, while you’re going to heaven?

3. Is there a hell? How do you know? Where on earth did you find out about it? Who told you? How do you know it’s true? Do you accept everything you are told without question?  (There is no hell: go back to your bible and research the issue.  Even most serious Christian apologists acknowledge that the concept of “hell” came from the Greeks, not from the Old Testament or the gospels.)

4. I’m curious about why you find Bush’s foreign policy something you can question, but not the virgin birth? What is the difference? Both involve tantalizing, ecstatic conceptions and then the pain of passing something impossibly large through a tiny factual reality. We will all require stitches.

5. Does God work miracles today, here and now? Should you pray for specific things you want?

6. At one point, Miller describes how, after his friend Rick persuaded him to start tithing, no matter how much money he was making, he suddenly started making more money.  Oh no– seriously?  Was this God answering prayer? Earthly reward for piety? Coincidence?

 

Donald Miller sees “Romeo and Juliet” with a girl and spoils the effect of the evening by observing that Romeo and Juliet were actually dead at the end of the play.

I think he meant to suggest that he himself was above the kind of sophomoric wisdom of Shakespeare’s play– that true love is magnificent and fulfilling and wonderful. Unfortunately for Miller, that isn’t the real message of the play in the first place, though that is the way most people tend to understand it nowadays. Shakespeare meant to show us that excess, of passion, of will, of impulse, leads to tragedy.

Donald Miller makes it clear that he is disgusted by the sense that Christians are “selling” the gospel, advertising it as a cure-all, fix-all, miracle cure for what ails yah.

But on his website, here is how he describes his newest book:

Every person is constantly seeking redemption (or at least the feeling of it) in his or her life, believing countless gospels that promise to fix the brokenness. Typically their pursuits include the desire for fulfilling relationships, successful careers, satisfying religious systems, status, and escape. Miller reveals how the inability to find redemption leads to chaotic relationships, self-hatred, the accumulation of meaningless material possessions, and a lack of inner peace. Readers will learn to identify in themselves and within others the universal desire for redemption. They will discover that the gospel of Jesus is the only way to find meaning in life and true redemption. Mature believers as well as seekers and new Christians will find themselves identifying with the narrative journey unfolded in the book, which is simply the pursuit of redemption.

Credit card orders accepted.

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The Preposterous “Reign Over Me”

There really is not a single honest moment in this movie, or a single emotion that isn’t the product of manipulation and contrivance..

Did anybody sitting in the theatre for the first five or ten minutes believe, even for a split second, that Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) is going to cheat on his wife? There is no way it’s going to happen in this movie, because this movie is not about what a real person in Alan Johnson’s predicament would have done–it is about what the audience thinks it would have done if it had been Alan Johnson.

In the same way, Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler) is not based on what a crazy man looks like or how he acts. It’s based on what the audience thinks Adam Sandler would act like if he was playing the role of a crazy man. We have Robin Williams syndrome (“The Fisher King”): make your disturbed characters lovably whacky so we can fool ourselves into thinking that we would be understanding and patient and kind if we knew someone like that. For God’s sake, open the door, it’s Adam Sandler– not some genuinely disturbed man who might actually do something disturbing!

Okay. So not everyone is annoyed with the idea that Alan Johnson hangs out with Charlie for hours and hours and, apparently, cannot imagine that it might be wise to phone his wife and let her know where he is. But then you couldn’t have the phony scene of the conflict with this wife.

Or that Dr. Oakhurst is an amazing psychiatrist who not only looks like a 19-year-old Playboy bunny, but must be the only psychiatrist in New York who doesn’t require patients to make an appointment, and who accepts referrals from dentists. Not only that, she is willing to drop everything on a moment’s notice so she can hang around with her patients during her off hours, and accompany them to court, but this remarkable PHD doesn’t seem capable of describing to a judge her qualifications.

Nor do I think the writers had the slightest clue about how the actual process of committing a patient to a psychiatric ward works.

The secondary characters in this movie are almost all mild stereo-types or one-dimensional cut-outs whose sole purpose is to validate your own saintly feelings about how understanding you are about Charlie’s mental illness. Alan Johnson’s wife– come on!– is the physically perfect wife of the actor, Will Smith: Jada Pinkett. Seriously. And Johnson’s crisis is that– get this– she doesn’t understand him. He feels constricted in his marriage. What’s so unbelievable about that?

Liv Tyler as a psychiatrist? This is one of the most astute casting choices since they made Meg Ryan a brain surgeon in “City of Angels”. You just look at Liv Tyler and think– yeah, she reminds me a lot of some psychiatrists I know.

Then you have the tiresome problem of creating dramatic tension by having Charlie resist being treated by the aforementioned saintly psychiatrist when, in real life, nobody seriously believes anyone could or should be treated if they don’t want to. In real life, Dr. Oakhurst says, ” You don’t want to talk to me? Fine. Good bye. Call me back when you do.” The movie makes a clumsy, awkward concession to reality by having Charlie say, “are we done yet” and Oakhurst replies, “if you want the session to be over, it is”, but after showing this three times, you realize that the movie is cheating. Either there is productive time in each session before Charlie wants to go, or the sessions are ridiculous. If there is productive time, then the dramatic tension is gone.

These scenes really consist of Charlie running away in the school yard yelling and giggling, “don’t chase me, don’t chase me”.  It is a lot of peoples’ dearest fantasy: to be able to behave like an asshole while beautiful people chase after us begging to let us be rude to them some more.

The only teasingly bright moment in the film is when Alan Johnson realizes that the reason Charlie likes hanging around with him is because he is the only one who doesn’t remind Charlie about his loss. Then Johnson immediately sets out to make Charlie acknowledge his loss, thus draining the potential for dramatic interest in that thread.

Bottom line: yes, this film is exploitive. By choosing to contrive a story rather than explore the reality of grief and loss, it attempts to cash in without paying it’s dues.

Sandler can act– check out “Punch Drunk Love”.  But not in “Reign Over Me” .

I’ve heard some people rave about Sandler’s acting in this film. With all due respect, I have no idea of what those people think good acting consists of. Sandler speaks louder and softer and louder again and softer again… and weeps. He doesn’t invent anything out of this character, doesn’t develop a rhythm or texture to him… every time he flew into a rage he conveyed, convincingly, what it would be like to see Adam Sandler imitate someone imitating a rage. There isn’t a moment in his performance that feels like it came from any particular insight into Charlie Fineman’s condition– it all feels external to me.

There are movies that do do a better job of dramatizing emotional disturbances than this one: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, for example. Mike Leigh’s “Naked”.

There are even more films that are equally bad or worse: “Prince of Tides”.

Films (good and bad) designed to make you feel good about your encounter with emotional (or mental) disturbance:

“What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”,
“I am Sam”,
“Beautiful Mind” (supposedly a true story: they left out all of the disagreeable characteristics of John Nash, including his first marriage, and his divorce).
“Prince of Tides”,
“The Departed” (the same bullshit trope about a psychiatrist begging the adorable patient to accept treatment while the patient resists).

 

Get off my case.

Some people seem upset when I point out to them that it is a kind of phoniness that Alan Johnson doesn’t cheat on his wife in this movie.  The fact that a lot of fans of the film resent my view on this tells me that I’m right.

Why, really, are they upset? Because they think I mean he should cheat on his wife in the movie.  No, I don’t care what he does in the movie as long as it’s believable.  As long as, given the reality constructed by the film, it is something that tells us something about the character in the film, not the audience.

Let me illustrate what I mean:  you could make a movie (like “Forrest Gump”) about a soldier who engages in numerous battles and sees numerous atrocities and rescues his friends and saves a baby from a wild dingo and never actually fires his weapon at anybody, to allow your audience the illusion that someone could serve “honorably” in Viet Nam by pretending that they didn’t go there to actually kill anybody, drop bombs, or even fire their weapons.  It caters to human vanity, to allow the viewer to enjoy two contradictory ideas simultaneously:  that serving in the military is  patriotic and honorable; that soldiers don’t kill anybody or blow anything up.

The film-makers want to titillate the viewer with the possibility that Johnson would cheat, while providing the cheap moral comfort of the idea that he didn’t, so you don’t have to feel bad about liking him.

The Alan Johnsons of real life, given the circumstances offered in the movie, do cheat. But we prefer our fairy tales. [added April 2008]

It should tell you a lot about this movie that Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt were both considered for the role of Charlie Fineman. Come on— do you really think anyone serious about dramatizing an emotional breakdown would consider Cruise or Pitt for the role?  Okay– maybe Pitt.

Nobody here is interested in someone who can really act or can be convincing as an emotionally disturbed man, like, say, Christian Bale or Heath Ledger. What the producers wanted is someone the audience would love, because otherwise they would understand immediately how preposterous the storyline is. If you are not rooting for Adam Sandler (or Pitt or Cruise) because he is a charismatic star, you would never believe the behaviour of the psychiatrist, or the judge, or the cops, or even Alan Johnson, or Johnson’s kids, or his wife. That’s because what you are really watching is a projection of your own self-image: you feel like you are a good person who feels compassion for disturbed individuals, because you feel affection for Sandler.

Although… maybe you don’t..

It also tells you something that the music that Charlie listens to obsessively is Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, and The Who, rather than, say Tom Waits, or Dylan, or Leonard Cohen, or someone genuinely edgy. It tells you that someone is playing it safe– Springsteen, for example, is critically respectable, but not as original or interesting as Tom Waits. So the movie is not cheap, tacky Hollywood, but Binder doesn’t quite really want to do anything quite really daring.

One of Binder’s previous films, “The Upside of Anger”, featured an ending that was so ridiculously preposterous, it completely destroyed all of the dramatic tension built up by what was, until then, a fairly satisfactory narrative. Here, he doesn’t even get that far, the ending is almost equally preposterous and unsatisfying.

Spoiler: in “The Upside of Anger”, a woman’s husband disappears one day. She assumes he left her for his secretary and becomes bitter and disillusioned. She takes up a relationship with washed-up baseball star Kevin Costner; they have a crisis or two, save the family and…then they find her husband’s body in a pit behind the house. You realize that one day the man disappeared, and she never took the slightest steps to find out what happened to him. She just assumed he ran out on her. Without any possessions, of course. Without any evident planning or foresight. And she never called the police, and they never conducted even the most rudimentary investigation which would have revealed that his disappearance almost certainly was not planned or premeditated, and so on and so on…

And you are asked to believe that when he didn’t return to the house one day, it never occurred to his wife to take any action whatsoever to find out what happened to him. Binder didn’t think audiences would have too much trouble with this…

 

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Paul Bernado’s Mom

Marilyn put on more and more weight. She became grotesquely obese. Signs of severe depression were very noticeable. She stopped taking care of the home and the children and withdrew into her own world in the basement of the house. (From the Criminal Library Website, the entry on Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, a paragraph on Paul Bernardo’s parents, his mother, Marilyn.)

Spare a thought or two for Paul Bernardo’s mom.

Life is tough. You fall in love with a guy but he’s uneducated so your father forbids you to marry him. You marry some other guy and he cheats on you and beats you. You have an affair with the guy you first fell in love with and have an illegitimate child you name “Paul”. You put on more and more weight and eventually you find yourself living in the basement of your own house, indifferent to everything, wallowing in your own grotesque prison of flesh and disappointment.

You son grows up to be a psychopathic killer and notorious for some of the most shocking crimes in the history of this province. Nice life.

It is for Paul Bernardo’s mom that the tv sings it’s siren song of comforting anesthesia. The one thing I’m sure she has down there, in her basement, is a tv. And all the illusions of life that make everything glamorous and good chunnel into her basement through the cable and make things seem right and true and good.

From the same website (crime library):

Paul used Amway techniques in many facets of his life, not only in sales and business but also in personal relationships.

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I Forget Why I’m Depressed

If this is safe and effective, it’s one of the few tools we’d have in the case of a mass disaster,” Marmar said. “What are you going to do if there’s a dirty bomb? You’ll have widespread panic. Do you want these poor people to be haunted by this searing memory. Charles R. Marmar of the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, quoted in Washington Post, October 19, 2004

There are reputable experts in the field of psychology who believe that a broken heart is much like a broken leg. If you wonder what they’re getting at, it’s this: would you let someone leave your hospital with an untreated broken leg? Of course not. So why would you allow someone to leave your hospital with a broken heart?

Of course, it is not like that in real life. Psychologists can only wish! It’s more like, if you went to the hospital with a broken leg would the hospital allow you to leave without treating your arm?

This is not really about “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, however. It’s more about trauma. It’s about rape and assault and fires and bombs. What if you could give people a drug — propranolol– that would remove the “traumatic” part of the memories? It would allow people to remember horrible events without the emotional weight?

This idea is so strange to me that I wonder why anybody at all thinks this is a good idea.

On the other hand, what’s so great about anguish?

I wonder if we wouldn’t be as compelled to try to do something to improve our lives if we were able to quickly take some drugs to fix our feelings about any particular problem. Would we even be as upset with terminal illnesses and diseases? Why not just take a pill?

This is just one more peg upon which I hang my theories about drugs and a ‘drug-free’ America. The idea that we are against drugs becomes more and more fanciful everyday. We’re not against drugs. We’re against freelance drugs.

We love drugs. We wouldn’t do without them.

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Happiness

Suppose you were unhappy. Suppose you had a doctor’s appointment for your annual check-up and while you were sitting there half-naked on an examining table, you said, “I just feel kind of down lately.”

I’m feeling kind of blue lately.

Life just seems to suck lately.

I’m not very happy.

We can’t have that, can we? We can’t have people going around not being happy. It cannot be allowed or accepted. It is not normal. It is untenable. It is unsustainable.

We cannot say, “Yeah? Life does suck sometimes.” No, we cannot.

We say that little qualifier– “sometimes” because we can’t bear to say, “life sucks”.

Life sucks, and then you die.

So if you aren’t happy, we will prescribe you a drug. Why? Because that is best solution to the problem of life? No.

To make life good, we would have to find someone to love you, make you rich, make you safe and healthy, and make our cities livable.

That would be too hard to do. So we will zoloft you. We will prozac or paxil you instead.

There really is no clearer indication of just how pagan our society has become. It doesn’t matter what you think is going to happen after this life is over. None of us, Christian or non-Christian, is going to accept a life in this world that is not happy.

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Dr. Sell – Are You Mad?

Not even mental health experts agree on this. The American Psychiatric Association, which supported the government, argued that mental illness is a physical disease that should be treated like any other. “The brain is an organ just like the liver is an organ and the heart is an organ,” said Dr. Renee Leslie Binder, a psychiatrist who advised the association on its court brief. “If someone has an infection, you don’t tell them to breathe deeply. You give them antibiotics to fight the infection. When someone has a brain disease, the main form of treatment is medication.” New York Times, June 21, 2003

Rather mechanistic view of the brain, don’t you think? All of your behaviours, your personality, your fantasies, your desires, your hopes and dreams– are all the result of chemical processes and physical properties. The brain is not really different from your liver or your heart. If this is true, somewhere in the distant future, we will be able to fix your brain.

How will you know if your brain needs fixing?

You don’t want your brain “fixed”?

Well, that is the issue, isn’t it. Who gets to decide? Who decides if your brain needs to be fixed?

Dr. Charles Thomas Sell was charged with Medicaid fraud five years ago. When he appeared at trial, he cursed, spat, and screamed, according to the New York Times. He was deemed “emotionally disturbed” by the judge and incarcerated in a hospital. Not fit to stand trial, mentally.

The government– the prosecution– asked the courts to allow it to force Dr. Sell to take medications for his illness. They believed that the medications would make him sane. They wanted to help Dr. Sell. After curing him, they could put him on trial and then imprison him for his crimes.

Of course, if Dr. Sell needs medications to make him sane, it raises the possibility that he was not sane when he committed his crimes. Is the prosecution willing to argue that he is sane enough to stand trail because we have cured the insanity that caused him to commit crimes? I somehow doubt it.

Is this a little like the police charging someone with a murder committed with a high-powered rifle. After discovering that he couldn’t shoot straight, they decide to send him out for fire-arms training before they put him on trial? Or an impotent man charged with rape. Can they require him to take Viagra before going on trial?

A similar case was ruled on in Ontario in June 2003. A 47-year-old gentleman named Scott Starson, who is regarded as something as whiz in physics, had asked for the right to refuse to take medication which, he claimed, prevented him from working on his physics. Starson wrote a paper on physics in 1991, with the collaboration of a Stanford physics professor. However, his doctors and his mother felt that he should be ordered to take medication for his mental illness. Starson believes that the medications his doctors want to forcibly inject him with slow down his brain. He says that that would be “worse than death”.

Here’s the clincher. At a hearing, Starson’s doctors admitted that none of the medications had helped him in the past, and that they could not be sure that any of the medications would help him in the future. Not only can we try to force you to let us mess with your mind, but we can even do experiments on it.

The courts in Ontario ruled otherwise. Mr. Starson, it ruled, has a right to think for himself.

What if we had a doctor of society who said that our society was sick? We engage in a mad pursuit of dubious gratifications. We exploit poor people and oppress the powerless. We sell tools of murder and destruction. We destroy the environment.

What we need is for a doctor of society to decide that our society is no longer capable of making rational decisions and, therefore, it should be fixed. All Third World Debt is forgiven, and we will move to a 30-hour work week, with six weeks guaranteed vacation every year. How do you like that? This doctor goes to court and asks a judge to give him the power to fix society.

So who gets to decide?

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“Recovered” Memories

Feldman-Summers, S., & Pope, K. S. (1994). The experience of “forgetting” childhood abuse: A national survey of psychologists. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62, 636-639.

Abstract: “A national sample of psychologists were asked whether they had been abused as children and, if so, whether they had ever forgotten some or all of the abuse. Almost a quarter of the sample (23.9%) reported childhood abuse, and of those, approximately 40% reported a period of forgetting some or all of the abuse. The major findings were that (a) both sexual and nonsexual abuse were subject to periods of forgetting; (b) the most frequently reported factor related to recall was being in therapy; (c) approximately one half of those who reported forgetting also reported corroboration of the abuse; and (d) reported forgetting was not related to gender or age of the respondent but was related to severity of the abuse.”

This passes for scientific research? It is taken from http://www.jimhopper.com/memory/#bc, a website dedicated to “proving” that memories of traumatic childhood experiences can be recovered.

If you believe that there is scientific evidence in support of “recovered” memories, you ought to read this paragraph very carefully. This is what is passed off as “scientific” proof. A poll of psychologists asking them if they had been abused as children and then if they had repressed the memories of it and then if they felt it was corroborated.

In other words, can you “remember” being abused as a child, and did you lose the memory of it. In other words:

Do you have faith in God above?
If the bible tells you so.

Now, the writers of this hoax are dimly aware of the issue here, so they ask how many of these psychologists who remember that they didn’t remember they were sexually abused “recovered” their memories in therapy? And how many now claim that they can corroborate the abuse? This article doesn’t detail the nature of “corroboration”, but we can imagine. Well, we can, but we shouldn’t, I suppose. By “corroboration”, they could mean… well, what could they mean? Other than some kind of confirmation from a non-witness– since the abuse is almost never witnessed– or by someone else who was also abused by the same person, which is not corroboration by any definition of the word. (In fact, in how many cases did they hear the alleged corroboration first, and perhaps were moved to “remember” that they too were victims?)

There is no record of anyone producing any kind of physical evidence in support of the recovered memories. There is a lot of evidence of “recovered” memories that were demonstrably false. There is a lot of evidence that the human mind is exceptionally creative when it comes to memory, combining them or altering them in amazing ways.  There is lots of evidence that human memory is subject to suggestion and manipulation.

Partisans would argue that it’s because of the nature of the crime– there never is physical evidence. There are just these long-suppressed memories.

The fact that 56% of these people “recovered” their memories in therapy, of course, is highly suspect. First of all, we’re dealing with psychologists here. These are people who already have faith, presumably, in psychology, and the various beliefs, structures, and assumptions common to the practice of psychology. A keystone of Freud’s theories is “repression”: memories of traumatic events are buried somewhere in our psyche but can be “recovered” through psychoanalysis.  Memories are like a tape recording: once found, they are an accurate record of what happened.  More recent research shows that this is patently false.

In other words, that there is such a thing as an unconscious, and a location for things that are repressed, and such a thing as repression. Maybe they all read “Sybil”, which, for a time, was the bible of hack psychology.

It’s like asking people if they believe in angels. You have to choose only people who also believe in the bible. If they say yes, you proceed to ask them if they have ever met one. I’ll bet 25% of that group have, in one form or another. An angel, for example, saved me from a serious car accident by waking me up when I was falling asleep on the freeway. That may sound strange to you, but a lot of people out there believe that such things really happen.

So a lot of psychologists, in therapy– with a psychologist, presumably– are led to “recover” memories of abuse which, apparently, they had repressed. So how do they know these memories are valid?

The study looks at corroboration, which consists of:

  • people who knew about the abuse confirmed it
  • someone else reported abuse by the same perpetrator (if you know someone who was robbed, does that mean that the robber probably robbed you as well?)
  • The abusers acknowledged some or all of the abuse. (I’d like to hear that conversation.)

None of this is really scientific by any stretch of the imagination. You just have to have a lot of questions about a person who “knew” about the abuse confirming it. How did they know? What did they really know? What kind of conversation led to this disclosure?

On to another facet:

Just as technology evolves, social consciousness and hence the definition of academic freedom is evolving. And this is coming about as people, particularly members of less powerful groups, speak. Dr. Jill Vickers, a Professor at Carlton, for example, recently “urged CAUT to come to grips with and to understand how the principles of academic freedom and institutional authority, ideas that legitimize the university, can also be used to perpetuate the status quo and sustain those who are more powerful and privileged – in most cases white males” (Riseborough, 1993). Along similar lines, UNESCO is currently reviewing an international proposal regarding academic freedom (International Conference of University Teachers’ Organizations, 1993). The text of this proposal makes it clear that there can be no academic freedom without social responsibility.

by Connie M. Kristiansen, Carleton University, Newsletter of the Section on Women and Psychology, Vol 20, No 2, page 7-16.

Read that chilling line again: “There can be no academic freedom without social responsibility”. Sound like an old communist plot? It’s a feminist plot, however, aimed at those would deny that memories can be repressed and then “recovered”.  Who believe that there is such a thing as a false allegation.

It’s idiotic, to be blunt. Free inquiry should be suppressed in the name of a greater social good, which is, to be able to expose the institutionalized oppression of women that is so pervasive and encompassing that women are justified in suppressing freedom of speech in order to fight it.

If I have to explain why that’s a bad idea, I’d have to admit that our society is hopelessly ignorant about the fundamental basis of freedom, democracy, and human rights. It probably is.

And if radical feminists are so stupid as to believe that this very weapon, the suppression of free and open discussion and deliberation, is not sure to be turned and used against them in the future, as it has been in the past, then they are greater fools than even I imagined.