Thank you for the friendly overture. I know people who have been strongly
criticized by the PCP bandwagon for making statements one fourth as friendly
to me. I welcome your prelude to friendship and return the invitation with
sincerity. There is so much we can learn from one another.
I do not mean to suggest everyone on this net is part of the "bandwagon." In
the six or seven weeks that I was active on the PCP net, I exchanged postings
with some good people, consolidated some preexisting friendships and made one
or two new friends. But if you hope to join the cult, you better be lying
about potentially being friends with me. Otherwise, you will probably be
shunned by them. There are many worse things in life, however, than being
hated by such people.
The bandwagon lacks the intelligence, education, compassion, good will, and
integrity to engage in honest inquiry. Consequently the potential of true
friendship is beyond them. They do not even believe in the existence of
honesty. To them truth is an adolescent and narcissistic presumption. I have
asked them numerous times "Is it true that there is no truth?" but I get no
response, except some pompous relativistic put down. They apparently never
felt Kelly's aspirations to those humble and incomplete but important truths
to be gained from experimentation and logical analysis, nor the religious
pull of the potential for the complete truth, at the end of time and in the
heart of eternity.
They see nothing wrong with the statement "We always lie, since there is no
truth anyway. Only personal constructions." To them the person is incapable
of participating in the coherence of being and can only gain legitimacy by
either knowing everything (and being God or at least editor of their journal)
or knowing there is not even nothing to know. And knowing no person can know
everything (except he who declares me a cosmically marginal man), they say no
one knows anything and the only one or thing of worth is what they agree to
support through their famous and oh so very special wills to power. Logic,
laws, and the experimental method are mere social conventions to them, to be
distorted and tarnished through the machinations of their second rate little
cult.
I have been involved with construct theory for over 20 years and found much
about its leadership that makes me want to throw up. I attended the
University of Florida, did most of my graduate work and subsequent research
on construct theory, and consequently wasted my career on a good theory that
was bought and sold by a pack of sophists. As I have said before, I would
rather continue being unemployed and shunned than to join the ranks of the
Kelly cult.
You may get the impression that I have nothing positive to say about
construct theory. A review of the archives and my publications and software
may change your impression. But be careful pilgrim. You have signed on to an
unholy land. Those who are good and smart tend to talk poetry and religion
and get diagnosed. Others hide in the background, trying to convince
themselves of how unimportant this net and (by implication) they themselves
really are. Others talk about how good the banquet is, how no one will string
the bow of Odysseus, and how much fun it is to kiss one another's backsides
at conferences and in edited volumns of opinions that they do not even expect
to survive a ten year market. To them, this net is just a way to network for
position in a marketing scheme- a kind of chain letter supported by the
misery of the little people who pay the bills. The victims are their
students, patients, and the few scholars who are competent, honest, and want
to do good research and therapy.
I do not know where our exchanges will go from here. We may be enemies soon.
But from the ground on which I stand now, I wish you well.
Bill Chambers
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