Throwing Down the Gauntlet

            Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but it seems to me that a subject that has been around for well over 100 years, that claims to be a science, ought to be able to demonstrate competence in those subjects in which it claims to be expert.   They ought to be able to do something with all that wisdom they’ve been building up.

            And so I challenge psychologists:  You are the self-proclaimed experts on mental diseases.  Take someone with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and cure them.  I dare you.

            You are the self-proclaimed authorities on early childhood development and learning.  The schools have been under your control for quite a few years.  How come the academic statistics keep falling and childhood drug use, suicide, and violence keep rising?  How come that clerk behind the counter at the store can’t give me correct change?

            Don’t tell me about brains.  I didn’t hire you to tell me about brains.  I hired you to cure mental diseases and improve education and otherwise enlighten and uplift modern civilization.  What do I see instead?  A civilization that is in a steep nosedive, constantly plagued by poverty, suffering, war, and man’s inhumanity toward man.  If psychology is really a science of the mind, how come it hasn’t done smething about those things?

            Instead, you are employed to sell breakfast cereal and drugs, to quarantine the mentally ill, to spin the news so people can’t get at the truth.  Maybe it’s time for you to start acting like real scientists.