there are four main "camps" in social science, each with their own distinct approach to addressing issues: psychology, economics, geography/anthropology/sociology ("social science"), and political science. i will begin by summarizing what i believe the fundamental operations of each discipline to be, then discuss determinism/indeterminism and agency at some length (beware! -- some of my ideas are pretty unconventional), and conclude by demonstrating why the disciplines cannot be united and why it is better to leave them separately with their inherent flaws.
psychology: its premise is that an individual person can overcome psychological evidence at any given time (i.e., a psych study might demonstrate a .9 correlation between a person and an environmental context, but that means that 10% of the time a person will do something other than is predicted by the correlation and the reason for them doing so cannot be known), and that one can "manufacture" positive thinking to create a larger body of psychological evidence to support achieving their goals much like people "manufacture" their own luck -- positive thinking is a chain of gene-environment interactions (thus being both internal and external in what it constitutes) that occurs regardless of whether framed as part of the process of free will or having nothing to do with free will at all. however, psych cannot ever establish whether a person's seeming overcoming of psychological evidence is due to free will -- thus an extension of the mind-body problem -- or whether it is due to lack of complete accountability of all evidence involved pertaining to a given situation. psych basically establishes a range as a general guideline, but it also carries the disclaimer that anything is possible. psych ultimately can't decide how human behavior operates.
economics: its premise is based on assumptions of human behavior to create a view of economics with a liberal or conservative slant based on what people's end motives are, but there is still a range within which this can be functional over the short-term. over the long-term, economists don't have any legitimate projections. econ ultimately believes human behavior can be inferred to a certain degree from assumptions necessary for short-term projections and that econ, as the primary motive for human behavior (survival), is reflective of human behavior. so ultimately econ views psych through the lens of econ, but econ does not believe that econ controls psych, because if this were the case, then the system could be blamed for all of the injustice, but keeping econ and psych intertwined mostly relieves econ of this responsibility.
"social science" (geography/anthropology/sociology): its premise is that for large groups of people, their exertion of will, whether free or not, is already accounted for in the evidence of their behavior. so in the end, human behavior is a collective set of psychological evidence interactions, but unlike psych, which attempts to establish a range that covers almost all of people's possible behaviors and views outliers as being negligible for the purposes of psych as a discipline, social science views the range as encompassing 100% of human behaviors. since it is impossible to test these things because the "real world" does not exist in a laboratory environment or even a confined situational setting, social scientists instead study collective psychology indirectly via constructs like language, culture, etc. social science, in denying psych, also rejects the limitations of its range (as i mentioned earlier) and since econ has no long-term projections, social science operates thinking that ultimately anything is possible with human behavior, that there are no inherent genetic restrictions on how humans can interact to maintain a stable, sustainable political economy. as such, they focus instead on things like justice in all of its theoretical implications as the basis of defining society instead of what is the most just within a certain range. they also don't have a set way of getting from point a to point b, so instead they promote doing things they believe that are fair and just within what they are allowed to do in the present system, and ultimately they believe that these things will cause the present unjust system to collapse or that the system will collapse on its own eventually and be replaced by something that is more fair and just. social science ultimately believes that human behavior is malleable to the point that anything within reason (within their own assumptions about the flexibility of human behavior, which are usually very liberal) is possible, it's just a matter of time and resources that prevent change from being spontaneous.
political science: its premise is that economics is based on short-term projections that ultimately are sustainable as manifested through political systems; politics itself varies on a daily basis just like economics, but such events are more conducive to media scrutiny than academic understanding -- they are more like "current events" than "political processes". political science differs from social science in that it focuses solely on the political sphere and political manifestations in society, and thus views politics as the means and the ends. on the other hand, social science focuses on social relations and society. when done so with a political slant, social science places emphasis on society over politics, whereas with political science, by trusting economics as the backbone of society, it views politics as a vehicle through which change can be enacted over the limited range provided by economics, and the reasons for enacting change are not reduced to social, but rather political orientations/decisions of groups or individuals, of whom the reasons for their decision-making are not usually attributed to social reasons, but to underlying political philosophy. thus, political science only addresses the social indirectly as it manifests itself through the political, and rather than identify the practical reasons for the social causes as the basis for evaluating politics, it simply uses them for political purposes (manipulating elections, etc.), and when done so academically, filters them through the justification of political philosophy without regards for culture, etc. social science, by placing emphasis on society over politics, thus undermines the set ideas (usually middle-of-the-road) of politics for the long-term, and implicitly for the short-term (or explicitly, depending on the economic philosophy of the social scientist), conventional economics. by dissolving the acceptance of conventional economic thinking and thus the need for formal political systems and processes in their present state, social science believes that everything is political, but that it must be understood through a social lens first before we can conceive how to formally address political systems. as such, the political and social are intertwined, but the focus at each step (beginning, middle, and end) starts with the social as the fundamental basis for understanding, upon which the political is then either extracted or added. in short, social science believes if we address the social with the political always in the back of our minds, then the political will naturally fall into place. political science believes that the political is based on economics, so it doesn't care about the causes of social, but only about the manifestations of the social politically and economically where it can be addressed in those terms. furthermore, social science attempts a more holistic incorporation of political philosophy into every aspect of society (including formal political situations), whereas political science addresses it in a two-faced sort of manner: within the sphere of economics, and thus the general operation of society and culture, it deems political philosophy irrelevant (outside of formal law), but within strict, formal political situations, such as legislation, political philosophy is used as leverage to justify positions that it feigns to be purely justifiable in an abstract, philosophical sense, while the true motives are actually socially-based but are never formally addressed in those terms during the process.
now that i've explained the premises of the four main "camps" of social science, let's move on to the next phase: determinism/indeterminism and free will. before we can know whether or not free will exist, we must know if determinism is true. we'll never know whether things are determinist or not, but ultimately it doesn't really matter, because we'll never have enough evidence to determine what exactly will happen in the future. so there is a paradox here: if we are determinist, then we still have no idea how the future will be even though we believe it ("it" being everything) is destined to be a certain way beyond our control, but if we are indeterminist, then even though we believe everything to not be destined to be a certain way beyond our control, we believe we can control at least some aspects of the future via choice. so in being a determinist, you are saying we cannot control, or determine, the future in any way and we also cannot know its determination, but in being an indeterminist, you are saying we can control, or determine, the future in some way and therefore we can know the determination of what we can control. thus, an indeterminist believes he/she knows more about the way the future will be than an determinist, when one would intuitively think that a determinist would know more and an indeterminist would be completely in the dark about what the future holds. ultimately, in the course of daily living, three things occur regardless of whether one believes in determinism or indeterminism: 1) there is the feeling (whether it is an illusion or not) the we can control certain things to a certain degree and that there are things beyond our control, 2) the things beyond our control are very influential, and 3) the things beyond our control appear to be extremely whimsical (like the stock market) or extremely set in patterns (voter tendencies based on education, etc.). if you look at the plausibility of agency in 1-3, they exist whether or not one is a determinist or indeterminist, and as a result, a certain amount of change will occur, and no one knows what it will be. the only difference is that a lot of political radicals believe that agency is empowering, whereas i believe it is a concept that just exists, and whose ultimate inner workings can never be known because we don't know whether or not things are determinist, and even if it turns out that things are determinist, we still would not have enough evidence to predict things and people would still engage in behavior acting as though they were changing things because this was determinism's route -- channeling destiny through their actions. in short, agency is *just there*. a good analogy would be comparing people who believe agency is empowering to people who believe that we should love the world; the view opposite of this is that just like the world (i.e., "reality") is just out there, agency is just there. so, it is what it is -- a concept that makes sense within a certain framework, but whose purported powers (or at least, whose powers are open to a fair amount of misinterpretation and misuse) outside of this framework are unsubstantiated, i.e., it never tackles determinism or the free will problem head on and it does not establish a range for psychological evidence within which agency can occur (or which agency can occur outside of, in which case the establishment of the range is rendered irrelevant as the "social science" range exists without set boundaries). wikipedia explains the difference between agency and free will:
"Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world. It is normally contrasted to natural forces, which are causes involving only unthinking deterministic processes. In this respect, agency is subtly distinct from the concept of free will, the philosophical doctrine that our choices are not the product of causal chains, but are significantly free or undetermined. Human agency entails the uncontroversial, weaker claim that humans do in fact make decisions and enact them on the world. How humans come to make decisions, by free choice or other processes, is another issue."
so it seems to me that all agency does is assign credit and responsibility among deterministic forces by denoting humans as the channel for change. as such, agency is just an epistemological indicator, as people do not transcend the genes-environment cycle, but they are the only interpreters of it. however, just because people are the only interpreters of change doesn't mean that they should ultimately be held accountable for it -- only a metaphysical break from the genes-environment cycle could be credited with possessing the capacity for enacting change that was not compelled by deterministic forces. so at present, the idea of agency simply "passes the buck" to people, who are a manifestation of gene-environment interactions, without proper justification since people are by no means more empowered to change things than the environment or genes are existing mutually exclusively. regarding the aforementioned four perspectives, only the idea of determinism/indeterminism and the range of psychological evidence (for psychology, the range has defined boundaries, but for "social science", it does not) ultimately are the currencies shared among them, it is just that they are channelled in different manifestations that appear to be incongruent. so, is there a solution? well, first of all, since there is no solution to determinism/indeterminism (i.e., the source of change), in order to bring the four perspectives to a level playing field we would have to reduce their manifestations to the basic idea of determinism/indeterminism. since this is not possible, the next best thing is to establish a psychological evidence range, and at present it is not possible because we cannot know the range for any given situation, and even if we did, it would just be a guideline for psych carries the disclaimer that anything is possible and "social science" would adjust the range to include all possible human behaviors. as such, since the psychological range cannot be established with 100% confidence, then social science is not bound by the range, and we are back to square one wherein each discipline operates by its own system of establishing and gauging the manifestations of determinism/indeterminism through behavior (and underlying causes of visible behavior, such as cognition). considering these ideas, is it still possible to pursue a new, united and universal approach to analyzing human behavior? what would this approach entail? the answer is that it would be impossible to collectively agree on one approach (this is assuming that someone/something had the power to force the disciplines to come to this meeting and that the representatives of the disciplines would be willing to cooperate -- this would amount to a worldwide academic summit of epic proportions never seen before), and because of this, each discipline would claim that its approach is best for its needs, i.e., the ends justify the means. as such, one is left to either accept each discipline's place in academia for what they are (personal opinions aside as to which disciplines are better than others), or one must basically believe that they are all basically worthless or even detrimental. the first is pretty much an educated view, the second one is just indifference and/or ignorance, and the third one is primitivism. with the educated view, even if one vehemently disagrees with one discipline as to how it handles the issue of determinism/indeterminism, if one understands the nature of the determinism/indeterminism issue and the inability to establish a psychological evidence range, thus allowing human behavior to be interpreted through different lenses, from different angles, and with different purposes in mind, then he/she will likely come to the conclusion that it makes sense why that discipline uses that approach and that attempting to force that discipline to change its approach immediately would be both unfeasible and undesirable. in an earlier blog entry ("why philosophy will never move forward until..."), i noted that it would take at least 50 years before some sort of realistic range could begin to be established, and this would be accomplished through cognitive science and computer simulations. however, given the infinite possibilities in the universe, i now realize that this estimate was only applicable to academics who were willing to submit to such an approach as a valid, or the prevailing paradigm of thought, for certainly anyone who opposed the conclusions this paradigm arrived at could easily attack the paradigm for not being all-encompassing and accurate in much the same way that even psych studies at present done in controlled settings do not yield perfect or near-perfect causality that one has come to expect from natural lab sciences. as such, it remains to be seen whether the power of cognitive science and computer science will ultimately be able to simulate things so as to be able to supersede the conventional social science approaches employed at present or whether they will simply be somewhat useful tools, effective enough to stake out their own claim at tackling issues addressed by social science but not being superior so as to displace other disciplines addressing those same issues with their own conventional approaches. one thing i would like to point out about that previous blog entry: i now do not believe that a consensus could be reached by gathering academics of different backgrounds attempting to approximate what the range could be at present because there is too much disagreement within each discipline about that, let alone across disciplines, and any form of agreement among academics of different backgrounds would pretty much amount to middle-of-the-road compromise similar to what is done in actual government and politics, which doesn't mean that what is agreed upon is necessarily the best representation of what is true, just what is convenient for people to believe based on their personal perspectives and agendas, and taken collectively, what best suits everyone politically-speaking. as such, i would rather have disagreement within and across academic disciplines and have the evidence eventually "speak for itself" and uncover what is true than have some sort of forced agreement that is done with political agendas as a primary motive.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
philosophy of psychology, its socio-political ramifications, and why knowledge/power prevents the realization of a utopian society
i woke up this morning and for some reason started thinking about when i spent a summer in england and hung out a couple times with these physics/computer geeks. they had some side interests besides math and science -- downloading tons of american media and projecting it onto a screen so as to have their own home movie theater, learning asian languages, studying religion, and smoking a ton of weed (they even had a poster on the wall that read something like, "i love the skunk!"). it was pretty apparent that they didn't have a formidable background in social science, but one night we were talking about philosophy or psychology, which lead to one of them uttering something along the lines of, "...which is why i think it's pointless to study psychology." i think i replied back by saying how psychology was now taking the path of a natural science instead of how they were probably perceiving it as something like psychoanalysis or possibly behaviorism. i don't think my response registered, and the conversation stopped briefly before switching topics. anyway, i was reading about a course on "philosophy of psychology" the other day, and perhaps that triggered something in me to do some of my own philosophizing about the topic. to start things off, i broke psychology down into having three major conceptual problems -- two from the first person perspective and one from the third person perspective.
first problem with psychology from the subject's perspective: the "depth" problem sort of like ryle's regress (i think that i think that i think...ad infinitum). you need motivation to think about something, but in trying to think (subscript 1) about your motivation to think (subscript 2), you have to have motivation to think (subscript 1) about your motivation to think (subscript 2). so ultimately, you have this endless chain of motivation until you reach a point where you can't explain where the source of your motivation to think (subscript n) comes from.
second problem with psychology from the subject's perspective: the "breadth" problem. your typical psychological terms attempting to qualitatively assess cognitive activity that can't be described as conventional "thinking" -- e.g., things having to do with feeling and emotion (fear, pain, anger, joy, etc.) -- are intertwined with thinking. but once you essentialize and make them abstract, two things occur: 1) there are no longer continuous shades of grey as things are categorized and thus things are assumed to exist as discrete entities, 2) the subject becomes self-aware so as to recognize his/her psychology, thus changing the nature of his/her psychology. so, for example, instead of being angry and feeling the anger from "within", he/she recognizes the feeling of anger and essentializes/categorizes it and views it from "without". the combination of #1 and #2 result in #3, which is that turning psychology into a science inherently changes the nature of the psychology it is studying -- thus by establishing a formal epistemology, the metaphysics are altered.
problem with psychology from the observer's perspective: the "external" problem. controlling/"helping" a person's psychology from outside to avoid a person studying his/her own psychology and running into the depth and breadth problems presents a new set of problems. for one, in theory the subject is at the mercy of another person, so there is a reversal of power in the roles between the two people. furthermore, this "other person" needs another person (it could be the other person in the subject-observer relationship with roles maintained but switching the people, or it could be a third person) to control his/her own psychology. so, it makes people responsible for other people's psychology but not for their own. thus, the depth problem is "outsourced" from one person to another, so floating around amongst people is the unsolved problem of motivation. (this is still all external psych in theory.) however, abdicating oneself of responsibility for thinking and allowing another person to attempt to control one's behavior does not necessarily mean that one stops having his/her own motivation, so problems associated with that continue as well. so instead of confining the depth problem to each individual, it is multiplied by having the personal depth problem continue for each person in addition to burdening each person with at least one other person's depth problem. also, the initial power reversal turns into a power struggle as a person's own motivations and another person's attempts to control that person's psychology lead to conflict. (the past three sentences have described external psych in practice.) in both theory and in practice, external psych avoids the trap of the "breadth" problem, although thinking about another person's psychology via behavior obviously also impacts the observer's own psychology, but not really more so than any other sort of academic training (this being an attempt to "quantify" the impact of different kinds of academic training -- studying psychology via behaviorism does qualitatively impact the observer's psychology in a unique way, but just because it is unique as a form of psychology does not mean that it suffers from all of the same problems of studying psychology from a subject's perspective, which is why it avoids the trap of the "breadth" problem).
now that i've completed the three problems with two different psychology approaches, it's time to analyze what i consider to be the three main approaches to psychology: "no psych", "self psych", and "external psych" (the first two problems dealt with self psych, and the "external" problem dealt with external psych; no psych was not previously addressed). no psych is simply a person who lacks real introspection and any formal training in psychology. no psych ultimately assumes a person to be responsible for actions that he/she cannot be held accountable for because he/she does not have any way of "double-checking" his/her own psychology. thus, no psych also lends itself to a person trying to exert power over others for his/her own benefit (this is an assumption that i believe is self-evident and will be explained later). self psych is ultimately pointless (it can't find ultimate source of motivation) and self-defeating (by attempting to empower a person to examine his/her own psychology, the person's psychology as an object of study becomes inherently changed, so a person hasn't gained anything from examining his/her own psychology but has just altered it (and likely made it more complicated) -- whether or not this alteration is beneficial to a person is highly debatable. in theory, external psych's goal is to make a person dependent, as they are under the control of another person, so a person can't be responsible for his/her actions. it also outsources problems of no psych and self psych to others, thus passing around the problem (and likely making it more complicated) instead of addressing it or admitting that it cannot be addressed. also, by "outsourcing" the power to another person, this person must outsource his/her power over his/her own psychology to another person, which when all is said and done makes people responsible for and have power over other people but not responsible for and have power over themselves under the assumption that other people know what is best for a person. however, in practice, people keep their own personal motivations, which leads to conflict between that person and the person who is attempting to control that person's behavior. ultimately, our society seems to be built on the basis that an acceptable compromise is reached when external psych occurs in practice (not external psych in theory).
the problem with communism, utopian socialism, and anarchism is that they assume two seemingly incompatible premises to be true in order to work: that a person knows what is best for himself/herself and that other people know what is best for this person, the first being an approach of "no psych" and the later being an approach of "external psych" (in theory). when external psych is used in practice (instead of in theory; it can't be implemented as it is in theory because it is exactly just that -- in theory), it also covers no psych (the subject retains his/her own motivations, etc.), but it is obvious based on history that the kind of compromise resulting from external psych in practice is not deemed acceptable to supporters of the aforementioned ideologies for the operation of society. so, we are left with "self psych", at least in a broad sense. what kind of a society would need to exist in order for this to occur? well, for one, a certain baseline of human needs and wants would have to be assumed to be produced by society without anyone needing to do the "dirty work" (this is a practical assumption based on inference, it is not an established fact of "self psych"). at present, this is not possible, but it is conceivable that in the future, technology could reach a point where grunt work could be virtually eliminated and the management of the machines doing the grunt work would be so minimal as to be virtually voluntary and a naturally occurring act in a communally-based society. second, this society would have to be extremely educated (this is from a practical perspective), and one that placed value on knowledge and on breadth and depth of experience without being dependent on extravagant expenses (without abundant material wealth, one is forced to use his/her mind to understand and appreciate things, and this comes with a certain amount of introspection which would be at least a broad form of "self psych"). third, one would have to assume that this love of knowledge and experience would completely negate tendencies for power imbalances beyond those deemed acceptable by the utopian society to exist. given the amount of corruptness in academia (trust me, i have familial connections in academia and people are always trying to steal grant money, and that's by no means the only form of attempted theft), let alone the "real world", how could one ever hope for a society in which no corruption occurred?
to answer this question, let's revisit the second point and compare it to the third. notice that i put in parentheses how "extremely educated" was from a "practical perspective". this was because i was leading up to using academia as an example and had things in mind such as that, for example, in the 04 election, the more educated a person was, the more likely they were to vote for kerry. so, being educated helps eliminate the real blatant stupidity and can help most people to come to agreement to a point (even though there are still some outliers on both ends of the political spectrum). however, when one examines intellectual and academic issues more closely -- past the basic issues of things like, "is it better to vote for kerry?" -- one finds that there is actually extreme disagreement on most things across the spectrum of all intellectuals and academics, although it might be more like a bell curve than an even distribution (assuming that these academics and intellectuals are actually well-informed all-around, and most are not outside their area of expertise). now, here is where the idea that knowledge and power are connected (although i'm not going as far as some people by reducing one to the other, i am simply acknowledging that there is a strong relationship between the two) backfires on itself. when one views the disagreement to be within the boundaries of healthy academic discourse and that objective knowledge still prevails by and large and the areas of intersubjectivity are rather negligible, then even a wide range of opinions can be accommodated within a socio-political system that is rather inflexible for the individual outside of the arena of engagement and discourse. the problem here is that the idea of objective knowledge really only exists in academia as a standard that peers hold each other to for their work, not in the "real world", and even in academia it doesn't flourish per se as there is opposition from postmodernists, leftists, "x studies" people, etc., and a certain degree of corruption even among those who are in favor of objective knowledge which ends up tainting the objectivity of knowledge. now, i stated earlier that, "one would have to assume that love of knowledge…would completely negate tendencies for power imbalances." the problem is that in the "real world", no matter how smart and educated the people are, their lifestyles are not governed by knowledge the way that their profession is supposed to be conducted -- the line between knowing and being becomes much more blurred outside of academia. thus, their knowledge is not simply for the love of knowledge or that which is used exclusively in the domain in which it is used professionally, but gets intertwined with their own personal beliefs, especially those with political ramifications (political being both formal and informal), and as such, knowledge affects their power relations. the wide range of knowledge and possible disagreements, when supported by power proportionately, would not result in a stable, utopian socio-political system, but in fact would be just the opposite -- beyond the basic human needs and rights requirements, there would be quite a lot of instability and conflict among the differing factions (although since the instability deals with things that are "superfluous" in the grand scheme of things, one might be tempted to consider the society as stable at heart despite its continuous flux, but for the sake of my argument, let's still retain the idea of instability). the result of this does not mean that there would be capitalism per se, particularly as we know it, but what it does mean is that beyond a basic level of established human needs and rights, there would be a degree of inequality and general fighting (not necessarily violence, but other forms of spiteful, contentious competition) that would be beyond those desired by communists and socialists, and an amount of instability that would be undesirable by utopian standards. so, one can conclude that "self psych" usually leads to enough of a collective understanding that allows for the addressing/elimination of society's most treacherous ills, but not enough for the achievement/fulfillment of a utopian society. why is this so? well, there is no concrete answer, but from what human behavior has displayed over the centuries (revisiting my earlier assumption that no psych lends itself to a person trying to exert power over others for his/her own benefit) is that people intuitively and instinctually crave power once their survival needs have been fulfilled, and the greatest of intellectual understanding (self psych replacing the various mixes of no psych/external psych over the course of human civilization) can only temper this to a certain degree. so ultimately, it is really just an inherent human tendency due to our innate biological functioning that we like to think we can rise above it using our consciousness, but which, for better or worse, we largely succumb to it even in the most intellectually, and hence consciousness-based constructed society.
first problem with psychology from the subject's perspective: the "depth" problem sort of like ryle's regress (i think that i think that i think...ad infinitum). you need motivation to think about something, but in trying to think (subscript 1) about your motivation to think (subscript 2), you have to have motivation to think (subscript 1) about your motivation to think (subscript 2). so ultimately, you have this endless chain of motivation until you reach a point where you can't explain where the source of your motivation to think (subscript n) comes from.
second problem with psychology from the subject's perspective: the "breadth" problem. your typical psychological terms attempting to qualitatively assess cognitive activity that can't be described as conventional "thinking" -- e.g., things having to do with feeling and emotion (fear, pain, anger, joy, etc.) -- are intertwined with thinking. but once you essentialize and make them abstract, two things occur: 1) there are no longer continuous shades of grey as things are categorized and thus things are assumed to exist as discrete entities, 2) the subject becomes self-aware so as to recognize his/her psychology, thus changing the nature of his/her psychology. so, for example, instead of being angry and feeling the anger from "within", he/she recognizes the feeling of anger and essentializes/categorizes it and views it from "without". the combination of #1 and #2 result in #3, which is that turning psychology into a science inherently changes the nature of the psychology it is studying -- thus by establishing a formal epistemology, the metaphysics are altered.
problem with psychology from the observer's perspective: the "external" problem. controlling/"helping" a person's psychology from outside to avoid a person studying his/her own psychology and running into the depth and breadth problems presents a new set of problems. for one, in theory the subject is at the mercy of another person, so there is a reversal of power in the roles between the two people. furthermore, this "other person" needs another person (it could be the other person in the subject-observer relationship with roles maintained but switching the people, or it could be a third person) to control his/her own psychology. so, it makes people responsible for other people's psychology but not for their own. thus, the depth problem is "outsourced" from one person to another, so floating around amongst people is the unsolved problem of motivation. (this is still all external psych in theory.) however, abdicating oneself of responsibility for thinking and allowing another person to attempt to control one's behavior does not necessarily mean that one stops having his/her own motivation, so problems associated with that continue as well. so instead of confining the depth problem to each individual, it is multiplied by having the personal depth problem continue for each person in addition to burdening each person with at least one other person's depth problem. also, the initial power reversal turns into a power struggle as a person's own motivations and another person's attempts to control that person's psychology lead to conflict. (the past three sentences have described external psych in practice.) in both theory and in practice, external psych avoids the trap of the "breadth" problem, although thinking about another person's psychology via behavior obviously also impacts the observer's own psychology, but not really more so than any other sort of academic training (this being an attempt to "quantify" the impact of different kinds of academic training -- studying psychology via behaviorism does qualitatively impact the observer's psychology in a unique way, but just because it is unique as a form of psychology does not mean that it suffers from all of the same problems of studying psychology from a subject's perspective, which is why it avoids the trap of the "breadth" problem).
now that i've completed the three problems with two different psychology approaches, it's time to analyze what i consider to be the three main approaches to psychology: "no psych", "self psych", and "external psych" (the first two problems dealt with self psych, and the "external" problem dealt with external psych; no psych was not previously addressed). no psych is simply a person who lacks real introspection and any formal training in psychology. no psych ultimately assumes a person to be responsible for actions that he/she cannot be held accountable for because he/she does not have any way of "double-checking" his/her own psychology. thus, no psych also lends itself to a person trying to exert power over others for his/her own benefit (this is an assumption that i believe is self-evident and will be explained later). self psych is ultimately pointless (it can't find ultimate source of motivation) and self-defeating (by attempting to empower a person to examine his/her own psychology, the person's psychology as an object of study becomes inherently changed, so a person hasn't gained anything from examining his/her own psychology but has just altered it (and likely made it more complicated) -- whether or not this alteration is beneficial to a person is highly debatable. in theory, external psych's goal is to make a person dependent, as they are under the control of another person, so a person can't be responsible for his/her actions. it also outsources problems of no psych and self psych to others, thus passing around the problem (and likely making it more complicated) instead of addressing it or admitting that it cannot be addressed. also, by "outsourcing" the power to another person, this person must outsource his/her power over his/her own psychology to another person, which when all is said and done makes people responsible for and have power over other people but not responsible for and have power over themselves under the assumption that other people know what is best for a person. however, in practice, people keep their own personal motivations, which leads to conflict between that person and the person who is attempting to control that person's behavior. ultimately, our society seems to be built on the basis that an acceptable compromise is reached when external psych occurs in practice (not external psych in theory).
the problem with communism, utopian socialism, and anarchism is that they assume two seemingly incompatible premises to be true in order to work: that a person knows what is best for himself/herself and that other people know what is best for this person, the first being an approach of "no psych" and the later being an approach of "external psych" (in theory). when external psych is used in practice (instead of in theory; it can't be implemented as it is in theory because it is exactly just that -- in theory), it also covers no psych (the subject retains his/her own motivations, etc.), but it is obvious based on history that the kind of compromise resulting from external psych in practice is not deemed acceptable to supporters of the aforementioned ideologies for the operation of society. so, we are left with "self psych", at least in a broad sense. what kind of a society would need to exist in order for this to occur? well, for one, a certain baseline of human needs and wants would have to be assumed to be produced by society without anyone needing to do the "dirty work" (this is a practical assumption based on inference, it is not an established fact of "self psych"). at present, this is not possible, but it is conceivable that in the future, technology could reach a point where grunt work could be virtually eliminated and the management of the machines doing the grunt work would be so minimal as to be virtually voluntary and a naturally occurring act in a communally-based society. second, this society would have to be extremely educated (this is from a practical perspective), and one that placed value on knowledge and on breadth and depth of experience without being dependent on extravagant expenses (without abundant material wealth, one is forced to use his/her mind to understand and appreciate things, and this comes with a certain amount of introspection which would be at least a broad form of "self psych"). third, one would have to assume that this love of knowledge and experience would completely negate tendencies for power imbalances beyond those deemed acceptable by the utopian society to exist. given the amount of corruptness in academia (trust me, i have familial connections in academia and people are always trying to steal grant money, and that's by no means the only form of attempted theft), let alone the "real world", how could one ever hope for a society in which no corruption occurred?
to answer this question, let's revisit the second point and compare it to the third. notice that i put in parentheses how "extremely educated" was from a "practical perspective". this was because i was leading up to using academia as an example and had things in mind such as that, for example, in the 04 election, the more educated a person was, the more likely they were to vote for kerry. so, being educated helps eliminate the real blatant stupidity and can help most people to come to agreement to a point (even though there are still some outliers on both ends of the political spectrum). however, when one examines intellectual and academic issues more closely -- past the basic issues of things like, "is it better to vote for kerry?" -- one finds that there is actually extreme disagreement on most things across the spectrum of all intellectuals and academics, although it might be more like a bell curve than an even distribution (assuming that these academics and intellectuals are actually well-informed all-around, and most are not outside their area of expertise). now, here is where the idea that knowledge and power are connected (although i'm not going as far as some people by reducing one to the other, i am simply acknowledging that there is a strong relationship between the two) backfires on itself. when one views the disagreement to be within the boundaries of healthy academic discourse and that objective knowledge still prevails by and large and the areas of intersubjectivity are rather negligible, then even a wide range of opinions can be accommodated within a socio-political system that is rather inflexible for the individual outside of the arena of engagement and discourse. the problem here is that the idea of objective knowledge really only exists in academia as a standard that peers hold each other to for their work, not in the "real world", and even in academia it doesn't flourish per se as there is opposition from postmodernists, leftists, "x studies" people, etc., and a certain degree of corruption even among those who are in favor of objective knowledge which ends up tainting the objectivity of knowledge. now, i stated earlier that, "one would have to assume that love of knowledge…would completely negate tendencies for power imbalances." the problem is that in the "real world", no matter how smart and educated the people are, their lifestyles are not governed by knowledge the way that their profession is supposed to be conducted -- the line between knowing and being becomes much more blurred outside of academia. thus, their knowledge is not simply for the love of knowledge or that which is used exclusively in the domain in which it is used professionally, but gets intertwined with their own personal beliefs, especially those with political ramifications (political being both formal and informal), and as such, knowledge affects their power relations. the wide range of knowledge and possible disagreements, when supported by power proportionately, would not result in a stable, utopian socio-political system, but in fact would be just the opposite -- beyond the basic human needs and rights requirements, there would be quite a lot of instability and conflict among the differing factions (although since the instability deals with things that are "superfluous" in the grand scheme of things, one might be tempted to consider the society as stable at heart despite its continuous flux, but for the sake of my argument, let's still retain the idea of instability). the result of this does not mean that there would be capitalism per se, particularly as we know it, but what it does mean is that beyond a basic level of established human needs and rights, there would be a degree of inequality and general fighting (not necessarily violence, but other forms of spiteful, contentious competition) that would be beyond those desired by communists and socialists, and an amount of instability that would be undesirable by utopian standards. so, one can conclude that "self psych" usually leads to enough of a collective understanding that allows for the addressing/elimination of society's most treacherous ills, but not enough for the achievement/fulfillment of a utopian society. why is this so? well, there is no concrete answer, but from what human behavior has displayed over the centuries (revisiting my earlier assumption that no psych lends itself to a person trying to exert power over others for his/her own benefit) is that people intuitively and instinctually crave power once their survival needs have been fulfilled, and the greatest of intellectual understanding (self psych replacing the various mixes of no psych/external psych over the course of human civilization) can only temper this to a certain degree. so ultimately, it is really just an inherent human tendency due to our innate biological functioning that we like to think we can rise above it using our consciousness, but which, for better or worse, we largely succumb to it even in the most intellectually, and hence consciousness-based constructed society.
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