You do people a disservice to reduce their passion to early childhood
experiences. I am not saying that what we learn as a child can not be useful
after we are adults.I learned a lot of very good things about truth and honor
as a child. I also grew up in the Mississippi Delta as a white liberal and
learned things about people who believe deep down in side that they are
essentially superior to others. They were the elite and the black folks and
white trash were just "niggers". This made an impression on my childhood
conscience and led to the testing a many hypotheses that were not welcomed by
the evil elements of the delta. My questions were not considered polite. I
should be congratulated for my childhood decency, not reduced to it as a mere
neurosis.
Much of what I see going on in PCP circles resembles the evil I saw in
Mississippi but it is a lot more disquised. I do not think incompetent PCP
psychologists are literally lynching people, although the eyes of my dying
daughter in the heat of poverty suggested otherwise. Like many of my
Mississippi aquaintances, the bandwagon hides behind a veneer of manners and
ostensible good will. Parts of the English culture encourage this superficial
"Genteel" approach. The best and the worst of the southern aristocrats
aspired to the culture of the British aristocracy. Many academicians do the
same thing now. They think the degrees they bought have made them special.
They want to appear to be cultivated but wish not to take the responsibility
of leadership and knowledge. This shows a disrespect for the good things that
the British and Southern aristocrats did. Kipling said that the arts and
sciences made empires, not empires the arts and sciences. Pampered and less
than gifted recipients of the privileges of empire confuse superficial
fluidity with the arts and sciences with the soul that generated them. With
respect to the Kelly cult, the bandwagon prefers to act like pretty rich
girls who demand their intellectual superiors should feel honored by their
superficial manners.
Gary, it may seem hard for you to understand this but I have friends and
family who love me and who I love. I do not make enemies of eveyone. As an
adult I invested a great amount of my life in personal construct theory.
After many years of being abused for dispassionate research, I came onto the
net with a mission. I want to blow the whistle on the Kelly cult. When I am
through on this little PCP net, I am going to take my message concerning PCP
to other psychology newsgroups. My arguments against the Kelly cult have only
been strengthened by the PCP net response to me. They have responded from the
purview of guilty spoiled little girls, not as scholars.
I do not care if you or the other pampered folks on the net like me or not. I
do care that each time I describe myself as a personal construct psychologist
that I feel embarrassed, largely because of the behavior of the bandwagon in
recent years. A number of people rode Kelly's coat-tails to some very cushy
positions in life. They used construct theory and then they abandoned it to
the cult. I am doing their dirty work. Its ok, I am a man, not a pampered
little junior high school girl. I can handle your collective hatred.
There is very little left of my career that the cult can destroy. It
apparently can not even imagine that I might have loving friends and family
and in any case, could not get more than a laugh out of them- should they
attempt to alienate them from me.
And now you and a few other poorly educated people make stabs at my
personality. Well don't throw me in the briar patch! I do have a PhD in
personality psychology and I didn't buy it by kissing Franz Epting's butt,
nor any of the other teachers I had for 11 years as a college student. I also
have access to a lot information about me that you do not know. I find your
patronization slightly cute but mostly just a symptom of the sophistical
nature of much of what passes now for education. These things happen to
cultures in decay. I am glad that I spent my youth studying good books
instead of being inducted into superficial manners that would portray me as
the intellectual or literary equal of wiser people. I trust books more than I
rust what you refer to as an "oral tradition." Many oral teachers are
corrupt. Books hide less easily behind superficial manners.
Much of what you say seems to be summarized as follows: "Each person creates
his own life by the language he uses. Say nice things and your life will be
nice." This is only partly true. Life is real. Words can help somethings but
not others. There is tragedy and there is goodness and evil, whether or not
it is considered polite to discuss them or not. We may make the most of what
we are given in life, but we are only partly responsible for what happens to
us.
I am not an unintelligent man. I could have sold my soul and become one of
the Kelly cult. I have not and will not. It is presumptuous of you to judge
me on a PCP net, without being familiar with the issues of PCP. You don't
know what is and has been going on. If you do not want to be dismissed with
words like "flake", why don't you try to learn something about construct
psychology while on the PCP net? Wouldn't that be more interesting than just
being cute with the other pampered girls?
Eumaeus
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