> Scott Peck was to psychology what Immanuel Kant
> was to Western philosophy.

> had used philosophy, after a blossoming during
> Enlightenment and Romanticism, to affectuate a
> return to the Protestant dogmas that philosophy had
> sought to replace, so did Peck use psychology, after its
> psychoanalitic beginnings in early 20th century and its
> existential humanistic blossoming in 1960s and 1970s,
> to affectuate a return to religious dogmas that
> psychology had struggled to overcome.

>
> The philosophy of Kant - and the psychology of Peck -
> employed a device referred to by Mortimer Adler as
> suicidal epistemologizing and suicidal psychologizing.
> Kant claimed that the imperfection of human perception
> meant that it was only capable of apprehending the
> phenomenal (apparent) instead of the noumenal (the
> true);

> and insignificant ("in the eye"). With these claims he
> trivialized and denigrated both science and art. In
> creating in public mind the suspicion of both empirical
> and intuitive modes of cognition, practiced respectively
> by Enlightenment and Romanticism, he destroyed both
> Enlightenment and Romanticism. In the same manner
> did Peck, through his contributions, place in the public
> mind contempt for and denigration of both reason and
> passion, equating the first with Cartesian logic that was
> inadequate to describe his experience of synchronicities,
> and claiming the second an invalid basis for either
> relationship or meaningful interaction. The result has
> been contempt and invalidation of both reason and
> passion and the destruction, first by philosophy then by
> psychology, of both aspects of humankind.
>
> Both of course are wrong in all aspects. Reason is not
> limited to Cartesian dogmatism, and the intellectual and
> scientific pursuits, in higher physics, anthropology, and
> more advanced psychological studies, have uncovered
> knowledge that entirely exceeds Cartesian dogmatisms
> and its brainchildren - skepticism, behaviorism, logical
> positivism, and similar abominations. Beauty has been
> shown scientifically to exist both in absolute and in
> relative forms.

> the root of the best marriages I've ever seen - marriages
> that produced wholesome families, meaningful and
> lasting love between partners, beautiful and intelligent
> and accomplished children, and are still going strong 50
> or 60 years down the road. In taking the stances that
> they did, Kant and Peck thus became destructive of
> both the intellectual and the passionate aspects of man -
> and destructive of all the greatness and progress and
> richness of life that these two aspects have produced.
> And in pursuit of their dogmas, was created a character
> that is essentially necrophilic (death-seeking) and
> seeks to destroy, in its relations, policies, thoughts and
> activities, all that creates and affirms and adds to life.
>
> In both cases, a pursuit that produced great
> improvement for many and at multiple levels was
> effectively destroyed by being used against its own
> foundations. With Kant, philosophy had destroyed itself -
> both Enlightenment philosophy that made possible
> Western science and Western democracy, and
> Romantic philosophy that made possible the world's
> greatest literature, cultural blossoming and richest
> interpersonal experience and relations - by claiming the
> mechanism for both to be imperfect or trivial. With
> Peck, so did psychology, in both its analytical and its
> humanistic aspect - by trivializing and denigrating the
> aspects of human being to which it spoke and which
> it worked to describe. And the pursuits that have given
> the Western world its greatest accomplishments -
> democracy, science, innovation, freedom, great
> literature and art, understanding of nature, civil and
> human rights, meaningful and beautiful relationships
> between men and women, and humanistic life-affirming
> values that went to a great length to make most of both
> accomplishment and experience - were subverted by
> the pursuit that had conceptualized them being used to
> destroy its own foundations. And in both cases, the
> result was an imposition, against a flourishing of life
> through affirmation of passion and intellect, of orders
> and character that were fundamentally anti-life.
>
> The Victorianism that followed Kant, like the three
> decades that followed Peck, were contemptuous of both
> intellect and passion - contemptuous as such of the life-
> enhancing and life-affirming aspects of humanity. It is a
> mentality that by its own nature can only lend to
> systemic violence, oppression, and war against both
> feeling and intellect, which lead directly to abusive,
> controlling and systematically destructive mental,
> emotional and relational habits in people who are a part
> of that mentality. But furthermore still it leads to destruction
> of all that thought and feeling make possible: science,
> democracy, freedom, ingenuity, innovaton, human rights,
> beauty, compassion, art, love, vitality, and every meaningful
> form of improvement in people's lives. This, of course, has
> been the essential character of both the Victorian era and its
> more contemporary equivalent. And just as Kant and Peck
> came to believe that the source of evil was hubris - which
> their followers use to damn both reason and passon and
> people who affirmed, cultivated and benefited from both -
> so has the far greater hubris of their own mentality made
> apparent itself in its values and its effects.
>
> In both cases, just as Kant used philosophy, and Peck
> used psychology, to destroy the ages of reason and
> passion, so have the concepts they brought in to
> replace them convicted the orders that they had
> ushered in. The Protestant morals that were used and
> then hideously misused to sustain the dark night of
> Victorianism were in the end employed themselves to
> convict as morally damnable an order that consigned
> the bulk of the people in it to colonization, child labor,
> brutality, squalor, suffocating formalism, hysterical
> prudery, internecine warfare, disconnection from life
> both within and without, and brutal, cruel, degrading,
> unforgiving existence. Likewise the concept of
> responsibility that was used and then hideously
> misused for the last three decades is now making
> apparent the irresponsibility of suffocating innovation in
> energy sector to keep alive the stranglehold of oil
> cartels, giving taxpayer subsidies to beef industry that
> takes 10 times as much biomass to produce a burger
> than the vegetable industry to produce an equivalent
> amount of grain, consuming 4,000 calories a day and
> driving SUVs while millions are dying because of
> disastrous climatic events caused by ecosystemic
> destruction and accumulation of CO2 emissions in the
> atmosphere, destroying with no thought for the future or
> for what made them possible the natural treasures that
> man cannot conceivably recreate, and ladening the
> future generations with trillions of dollars in debt, amid
> collapsing family incomes, in order to pay for an
> economic stimulus that never came. By applying at the
> collective level the characteristic that is demanded of
> the individual, is seen the corruption of the arrangement
> itself. Victorian moralism was rightfully used to show
> the moral wrongness of the Victorian order; and the
> more modern-day responsibility is likewise making
> apparent the irresponsibility of the present one.
>
> And just as personality psychology has been used and
> hideously misused in the period following Peck to target
> people who thought or felt differently from the social or
> communal entities of place and time, whatever the
> character of these entities or their intent or the actual
> substance of their beliefs and behaviors, so has it been
> used by others, rightly or wrongly, to describe business,
> politics, religion, psychology, media, and even the
> Western civilization, as possessing a psychopathic and
> predatory character. The same concept is now used by
> me to describe any communal or social entity that seeks
> unlimited power over the minds, beliefs, personalities
> and lives of the people within it - and then seeks to
> impose itself on others.
>
> To believe that an unofficial organ of power, that unlike
> official organs of power in a constitutional democracy is
> not subject to check and balance and official
> accountability, is somehow less prone to corruption and
> wrong and abuses of power than official organs of
> power, is ridiculous. Such an entity becomes law,
> reality and sanity unto itself and therefore is capable of
> the worst forms of corruption and systemic crime. And
> in countries where the power of official organs is
> checked and balanced and made to accord with
> constitution and bill of rights, but for some or another
> reason the power of unofficial organs is not subjected to
> similar scrutiny and is thus used to commit most
> horrendous abuses and most illegal abominations
> against the people within them and without them, these
> entities not only can be seen as unconstitutional, but in
> fact should be seen themselves as possessing the
> worst of these disorders.
>
> The sociopathic character that does not recognize law,
> is the character of the community or the social network
> that becomes law unto itself and thus not only
> perpetuates and then covers up systemic crime while
> totally controlling the people within it, but also
> commands of people inside of them unconditional
> loyalty regardless of scale of their crimes against
> people both inside and without. And it is these
> entities, not the people they demonize, that are the true
> danger not only to democracy, but to humankind as it
>

> foreseeable future. The crimes and coverups of small
> towns, gangs, old-boy networks, cults, Islamists,
> Jehovah's Witnesses, paramilitary organizations, and
> corrupt networks and operations in medicine, law,
> police, courts, psychiatry, and politics, are a far graver
> threat to rule of law than are the works of any number of
> axe murderers - and they affect people's lives to a far
> greater extent.
>
> The same can be likewise ...
>
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