Cognitive Psychology:
Cognitive psychology is the stereotypical Dr. Sigmund Freud psychology of psychiatrists telling patients to lie down on couches and talk about their mothers. From what I hear from psychologists, the basic idea of cognitive psychology that Dr. Freud came up with was a good one, but most of his so-called “discoveries” in the field were crap.
Cognitive psychology revolves around asking people questions about what they think and feel, asking them about their personal history and cultural background, and drawing connections among those things that point to subconscious reasons people have for their feelings.
A lot of ordinary people try to do this, and I think most people aren’t very good at it. People who aren’t trained as psychologists can figure out enough about people to make this work with people they know, or at least, share some sort of common background with, but if people try to do this with anyone whose background is too far removed from their own, it’s really easy to f*ck up by making assumptions based on things that are true for you but aren’t true for the other person.
I ran into no end of this in flight school and with my former roommate the New Age game show host. At flight school, my instructors would talk to me to try to figure out why I couldn’t learn what they were trying to teach me better than I was. They all came from culturally conservative middle-class backgrounds, where people took it for granted that you’re supposed to follow the rules more or less, think inside the box, follow business professionalism etiquette, and make money. They could understand that other people didn’t live this way, but their own values had become such fundamental parts of their brains that other ideas were foreign concepts to them; the instructors couldn’t truly accept that other people’s ways of life were equally valid to their own. In my own cultural background, you follow rules that work and ignore rules that don’t, you only think inside boxes that are big enough to encompass all the ideas that need to be thought about, you be yourself, and you pursue a meaningful life. My instructors took it for granted that their values were fundamental and should be obvious to any intelligent adult, and if I ever asked why they felt that way about things, in order to try to get them to see that their way of doing things wasn’t the only way—or even a very good way, when dealing with people from different backgrounds—they’d always say things like, “Because that’s how the world is and you just have to get used to it.” As a result, their attempts at using amateur cognitive psychology on me were counterproductive, because they interpreted the things I said according to their own limited perspectives on the world, and reached conclusions that were completely misguided.
My roommate the New-Age game show host came from a middle class background too, but it was the pseudo-liberal emotionally dysfunctional kind, where people assume that college educations, high paying jobs, middle class values, and two weeks of paid vacation time per year will solve all the world’s problems. Basically, my roommate was a middle class whore. Not in the sexual sense, but in the sense that she’d sold her soul for middle class values, without even realizing it—because it was her cultural background, and she’d been taught to make strong emotional attachments to a certain set of values that only work well under certain circumstances and are completely inappropriate in most others, thereby trapping her in a pretty small existential box. (It’s nothing personal; I meet a lot of people like that.) We had the same goals in life, but she was approaching them from a direction that left her very ill equipped to reach them. She knew that her own background didn’t work, but she assumed it must be somewhere close, so she could fix it by keeping it mostly intact but making some adjustments to it. She was basically trying to figure out everything in these books, but she was trying to apply it to the lifestyle she’d learned growing up, where middle class values were more important than people actually giving a f*ck about their own families. As a result, if she ever figures out everything in these books, it’ll probably take the rest of her life, because first she has to fully fathom that her own culture is founded on the faulty assumption that wealthy White farmers were inherently better than anyone else in the world, that the lifestyle of White economic imperialists is completely environmentally unsustainable, that with it it’s also completely socially, politically, culturally, and economically unsustainable, and that the Native Americans she was learning from, outspoken opponents of White imperialism though they may seem to be, couldn’t grant her magical powers to overcome these fundamental laws of physics.
As a result of her fundamentally warped perception of life, she would interpret everything I said the wrong way. She wouldn’t interpret it in direct relation to the way she grew up, because at least she could understand that I came from a background that was different from hers and hers had some obvious problems with it, but she would still interpret what I said fairly closely to the way she grew up, because she didn’t fully realize just how differently it could be interpreted. For instance, if she asked me, “Why do you talk so negatively?” and I said, “I don’t talk negatively, I just live one second away from certain death when I’m flying,” and she asked, “Why do you want to do that?” and I said, “Because America is under attack, which means it’s time for men to do whatever it takes to help keep it safe,” she would interpret that to mean that I’d been emotionally brainwashed into believing that by politicians or military recruiters or Hollywood action movies or dumb rednecks or somebody, without realizing (or caring, or fully comprehending, even if she did realize) that what I meant was that I was doing my part to fulfill my evolutionary role in my community, as opposed to shrugging my shoulders and saying, “It’s not my problem, so why should I give up my two weeks of paid vacation time per year to do anything about it?” which is what pretty much everybody from her cultural background seemed to be saying. So as a result, my evolutionary cultural values ended up being yet another resource she and everyone else from her pseudo-liberal emotionally dysfunctional middle class whore cultural background had to exploit. There I was, volunteering to risk my life to keep her and her family safe, and all that meant to her was that I was “doing my macho thing” and as a result (though I doubt she even saw the connection) her brother or cousin or nephew or whoever stood that much less chance of getting drafted to go risk his own life. And she was convinced that the way I talk and the fact that I was willing to risk my life to earn a paycheck meant I had a bunch of unresolved emotional issues that weren’t her responsibility to deal with.
I must say, it’s ironic that since then I’ve made some friends in the Native Youth Movement, a Native American political activist movement who believe that rather than cashing in on the emotional dysfunctions of middle class White people like her Native Americans were doing, it’s their duty as able bodied members of their tribes—lo and behold—to do whatever it takes to keep their people safe.