Psych Hist Paper #2

“…they call this the "Ownership Society," but what it really means is that you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck, you're on your own. No health care? The market will fix it. You're on your own. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don't have boots. You are on your own.
Sen. Barack Obama
Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, 2008 National Democratic Convention.

Who own us? Is a question tangled up with the idea of freedom. Yet, freedom is one of those concepts that we all think that we understand but in reality have no idea what it is or how to achieve it. If we consider that most of the human race been owned by some else at all times, one must wonder if we are any different than our forefathers in not been free.
Through the history of the human race there seems to be some kind of ownership. Someone always owns someone else. No one ever reads Proudhon, ownership is a crime. The Egyptians owned the Jews, the feudal lord owned peasant, god owns the religious and the lending companies own the students. The examples are interminable. But in the past that ownership allowed for the greatness of human kind. Without the slaves in Greece could the philosophers dwell in their idyllic ideas? Or could the roman emperors build an empire without owning slaves?
Now-a-days there is a whole system to keep you from achieving true freedom. Our parents tell us what to do, the church tells us what to believe, and the educational systems tell us what to learn. And there are no real alternatives. At least no practical and pragmatic ones, as graduate students we must summit, we must surrender our freedom to Feyerabend watchdogs of the profession. Maybe Dave Chappelle was right when he said, “I’m the first freeman in my family, I didn’t went to college”. Sadly we are not Thoreau or Birce…
As the recipients of a great legacy of ownership we are perpetuating the system that has enslaved us. The profession needs slaves. We, as psychologist, are just one more of the many mechanisms used to perpetuate the ownership. With a DSM in one hand and theories on the other we would tag and limit the capacity of people. We are going to do unto others as it was done unto us. Besides, the resentment that we feel toward the free, when we had to relinquish our freedom, is too much to bear. We are a new form of Kapos, the slaves that help enslave the rest…

Psych Hist Paper #1

I have been plugged to my computer watching the Democratic National Convention all week long. Watching history been made as the U.S. Democratic Party elected Barack Obama as their candidate for the U.S. presidency. As I browsed thru the news services the headline from CNN "Obama nomination makes history" caught my attention. What makes this a historic moment? Who and what determines that? The fact that an African American has been chosen as a candidate for president?

Rhetorical questions that were answered at our previous class. Still the question begs to be ask, am I witnessing history? For when we evaluate the whole situation there are a series of salient facts on specific dates. For starters Barack Obama is of African descent, second for the first time an African American has been nominated for presidential candidate by one of the main political parties of the U.S. Those are facts beyond discussion. Now the way that historians, political analyst or the lay people construct what this means and its possible implications is what can be debated.

But my point is that there are a series of facts and dates that need to be there for us. When we go "back" and review "history" we cannot do it out of a whim for there are a series of dangers that could lead us to bias. We can accuse the compilers of history of bias (for whatever reason), but aren't we incurring in the same sin when out of a whim we want to revise history? Nothing more than revisionists approach.

This relativistic and subjective manner on which a revisionist movement rest is a dangerous one. In the sense that if we deconstruct history to small self serving histories with what are we going to end up? With a miss-match collection of biased unreliable opinions. And everybody is not entitled to an opinion, what we are entitled is to a well informed, researched and though thru opinion of the facts and dates that occur.

There is a material reality that does exist without our interpretation or interference. When it rains, it rains. Even if you called it a meteorological event or an increase in the humidity in the soil, that fact is that it rains, no matter what a suggestive revisionist analysis said.

There needs to have a base line from where we can move on. There is a need for a series of facts and dates from where we can move on and decide what history is. What is the history that we want, the history that makes us feel complete and content (for bias toward ourselves is something that will always influence us). In the end history is nothing more than what we choose to remember.