Pop psychology has a habit of taking ideas from psychology and science and transforming them into half-truths – ideas that can be simplistic and misleading.

Some examples are examined below.

Ego

Sigmund Freud defines the ego as a psychological entity that seeks to mediate between the id (the impulsive, child-like entity) and the real world. For example, the id may want sex or food NOW but the ego’s adult role attempts to rein in inappropriate behaviour. Whilst the field of psychology does not use Freud’s model, it does provide some useful concepts.

This is substantially different from pop psychology that considers the ego as the attachment to the judgements of the personality. Some consider that the personality is something that should be “dissolved” which is impossible.

There is a difference between making a judgement and having a preference. Having a preference for a red or black coat is not making a judgement about the coat. This can change from the time the front door closes and the car door opens.

Also, an observation is not a judgement. Observing that being slim is healthier than being overweight is not a judgement.

Intuition

Intuition is another term that is frequently used in pop psychology without a clear definition. Mainstream psychology’s definition is somewhat nebulous as well. Carl Jung defines intuition as “the unconscious recognition of previous patterns”. A similar, poetical definition from Zen Buddhism is “Knowledge that has come inside”.

A farmer may know that rain is on the way without being able to articulate why.

Intuition is more that just doing what “feels right”. “Feeling right” can be based on familiarity, social consensus or a compelling story that could be recent or recalled from decades ago. Stories have a tendency to become more entrenched and less reliable as time elapses.

Professor Joel Pearson and researchers Galang Lufityanto and Chris Donkin research intuition at The Future Minds lab of University of NSW. They define intuition as:

Subjects were instructed to decide whether random dot motion on a computer screen was left-to-right or right-to-left. At the same time, an emotional image was presented to one eye. The direction of the motion was 100% correlated with a positive or negative emotional impact. The participants clicked a button to record if they recognised a positive and emotional experience.

There were 36 positive emotional images and 36 negative emotional images. Examples include guns, snakes, pets and babies.

Even though the images were below the threshold of conscious awareness, there was still a very high correlation with the ability to be aware of the emotional response. Results were validated by measuring stress related skin conductance results.

The outcomes was the the brain uses these images that are unconsciously perceived to help decide the direction of the dots.

Pearson has written the Intuition Field Guide.

What is Evil?

The Stoics

The concept of evil occupies much complex debate in psychology. Does evil really exist?

I think that the concept that evil does NOT exist arose with Zeno of Citium (334-262 BCE) who founded the Stoic school of philosophy. This Zeno was active two hundred years after the death of Socrates.

This is not the Zeno of Elea (495-430 BCE) of the Zeno Paradox fame. Zeno of Elea was before the Socrates period. The Stoics, who included Cato the Younger, Seneca the Younger, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, believed in a deterministic world.

As the Stoic Chrysippus ² (279 – 206 BCE) wrote,

The Stoics and all those that follow with similar deterministic views get into a philosophical tangle attempting to reconcile a supreme, ineffable deity with the problem of suffering. Since such a deity is also aware of the future then it follows that the future is predetermined.

Stoics are mentioned in the bible. The Gospel of Truth is one of the Gnostic texts that was found at Nag Hammadi. This text equates evil to ‘what is bad’ such as physical pain, sickness, suffering, misfortune, harm, fear, confusion and grief as well as the anticipation of death and destruction.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had no doubt that evil existed. He had brutal first-hand experience regarding evil. He wrote:

Marcus Aurelius – Meditations

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 – 180) was the Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and a Stoic philosopher around the time that the Empire was at its peak. He was the fifth ruler of 5 emperors that later became known as the Five Good Emperors. This was a time of relative peace and stability lasting from 27 BC to 180 AD. There were not very many great Roman Emperors.

Marcus Aurelius is one of the great all-time rulers and his private diary of meditiations was never intended to be published.

Marcus writes:

Here we have this extraordinary ruler telling himself that it is OK that he will never write as well as Plato – but keep writing anyway.

The persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire appears to have increased during his reign but his involvement is unlikely. There is no record of early Christians in the 2nd century calling him a persecutor. Tertullian called Marcus a “protector of Christians“.

Tertullian (c. 155 AD – c. 220 AD) was a prolific author who denounced Christian writings that he deemed heretical and violently suppressed non-orthodox versions of Christianity. His version of Christianity became the accepted orthodox version and Tertullian can be considered as “the founder of Western theology“.

The Bible

The bible’s deterministic world cannot be reconciled with the notion of free will which is also a foundation of Christian belief. Our fall from grace resulted from Adam and Eve choosing to disobey the lord.

If the world is deterministic and always perfect then how can Judas be judged for simply performing his allocated task of turning Jesus over to the authorities.

Hence we have such beliefs as:

References to evil occur throughout both the Old and New Testament.

Alice Through the Looking Glass

In Through the Looking Glass, Alice meets Humpty Dumpty sitting on his wall.

It is not known why Lewis Carroll included this in his 1872 book but presumably it was in response to some contemporary issue.

Definition of EVIL

If we use a word, we all must be clear what is meant and the same goes for EVIL.

We cannot begin to even discus whether evil exists or not unless it is clear what we are talking about.

Lets keep it simple. Below is my definition of evil.

We can also state that evil exists when The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Preamble is violated.

Many choose to suffer enormously instead of betraying their conscience or their fellow beings in an effort to ensure that the inalienable rights of others are not being violated.

Common Popular Myths

Logic and Reason is Bad – Feelings are Good

Marianne Williamson claims that Rene Descartes treated the body as a machine – push a lever and it will result in a predetermined outcome. It is obvious that Williamson has never read any of Descartes’s works or attempted to understand the world that he lived in.

He received information in the form of dreams – dreams that changed the course of history. He opposed the concept of bleeding for treating illness some 150 years before the rest of Europe. According to Descartes, “bleeding shortens the days”.

Descartes proposed that the most effective treatment for disease was bed-rest and vegetable broth. He was a vegan and rarely drank alcohol – something that the rest of the world still has not woken up to 400 years later.

Rosicrucians (Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross) arose in the early 17th century in Germany. It was a secret society which wanted to transform all aspects of society – science, mathematics, art, religion and politics through the exploration of esoteric knowledge. This was a time of bitter and bloody wars, primarily driven by divisions in between Catholic and Protestant religions.

It is not known if Descartes was a member but he was certainly in contact with members of the Rosicrucians and was influenced by them.

A coded notebook was discovered after Descartes death. It was decoded by the brilliant German mathematician, Gottfried Liebniz. His coded notebook contains alchemy symbols and astrological symbols. Descartes desired to combine ancient Greek geometry with mathematics. It is clear that Descartes had discovered the relationship between the vertices, edges and faces of the Platonic regular solids which was later rediscovered by Leonard Euler – that is, the number of faces plus the number of vertices equals the number of edges plus two. Descartes later found this formula worked for any polyhedra – not just the five regular Platonic solids.

Descartes believed this discovery was very significant – far beyond the simple geometrical relationship. Why did Descartes think this esoteric knowledge to be kept secret? One reason is that Johannes Kepler linked these regular solids with Copernicus’s cosmology of placing the sun at the centre of creation. Revealing his discovery, would have roused the attention of the Catholic Inquisition – a fate worth avoiding.

The time of Galileo and Descartes is an alien world – full of malevolent spirits, virulent illnesses such as bubonic plague that resulted from divine displeasure and the masses were at the mercy of a bitter European climate and warring rulers. Religious fervent resulted in bloody religious wars and the church exploited the fears of population to control their subjects. A world where, if you swore at a neighbour and something bad happened to them, you could be in big, big trouble.

All that Galileo, Descartes and others advocated was an examination of existing beliefs to verify if it really was true.

Additional Reading

The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason

“All is Well” because “Everything Works Out For the Best”

The Theogony (Birth of the Gods) is a poem by Hesiod, a Greek poet from the time of Homer. It was written in BCE 730–700 and describes the origins of the Greek gods.

According to Hesiod, “at first Chaos came to be“. He described Chaos as either “the gaping void above the Earth created when Earth and Sky are separated from their primordial unity” or “the gaping space below the Earth on which Earth rests“.

From this void, the primordial entities were formed: Gaia (Earth, the ancestral mother of all life), Tartarus (the underworld abyss, a place of judgement), Eros (the masculine primordial deity of love and desire), Erebus (Darkness, the primordial force of darkness and evil) and Nyx (Night, the feminine primordial force of the night).

Some Chinese creation myths involve creation arising from chaos. In the beginning was QI, the universal life force that is differentiated into yang and yin, the masculine and the feminine, day and night, light and dark, order and chaos.

The earliest references to the yin-yang symbol occur in the I Ching which was written in 700 CE as part of the Taos philosophy.

Throughout human civilisation, the yang has been predominant with order being imposed by men through war, political structures and physical power.

Allan Watts claims that:

Watts’s followers will smile knowingly – only those very special, very advanced souls can see the perfection in the apparent chaos, turmoil, tyranny, brutality and anarchy of our everyday world.

It is obvious from the atrocities of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and Auschwitz (“where humans were reduced to a whisper from a chimney“) ⁸, to the “banality of everyday evil” ⁹ that harmony and order are rare conditions.

The reality is that we are not comfortable with the idea that life is random, unpredictable, chaotic and at times incredibly harsh and brutal.

Left brain / right brain personality

The left-brain / right-brain personality myth is an enduring belief that contrasts logical thinking and the analytical with the creative and intuitive.

Left–right asymmetries of brain are common. Other animals such as monkeys, whales, birds, frogs, mice show strong asymmetrical behaviour.

The two hemispheres of the human brain function differently. Whilst the left brain is dominant for language and the right hemisphere is involved more strongly in emotional processing for most people.

Split-brain surgery was initially developed in the 1940s as a treatment for seizures.

Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga performed split-brain experiments in the 1960s. As a last resort treatment for epileptic patients, the corpus callosum, the bundle of fibers connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain were severed. The two hemispheres acted independently.

Both the left and right lobes process visual information but the left hemisphere processes information from the right visual field, and the right hemisphere processes information from the left. That same pattern is seen for other functions too with the left frontal lobe controlling the right side of the body.

In 95% of right-handed people, language is processed predominantly in the left hemisphere. For the other 5%, language processing seems to be distributed bilaterally between the hemispheres. In left-handers, the left-hemisphere performance dominance in language processing is reduced to around 75%, while language is processed bilaterally in 14% and a weak right-hemisphere predominance is found in the remaining 11%. Approximately 10% of the world’s population are left handed.

It is certainly true that some people tend to be stronger in analytical types of thinking with others are stronger in creative thinking. However, creative thinkers can be very analytical.

Albert Einstein is frequently cited as an intuitive thinker (which is true). He took some 8 years of intensely detailed work to transform his initial intuitive ideas of general relativity into a mathematical framework.

Albert Einstein’s elegant equation is much more complicated than it appears. It expands to a set of ten connected nonlinear partial differential equations.

Many quotes regarding imagination and intuition purported to be said by Einstein are simply not true.

There is no reason to suggest that logic and creativity are associated with the predominance of one hemisphere over the other. ^{10 11 12}

As Galileo Galilei wrote in a letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany 400 years ago.

Beliefs and Ideology

Popular beliefs are often manifested by ideology. Eveything that does not confirm to those opinions are ignored, minimised or discriminated against.

There is often a lack of awareness of the origins of such beliefs and it is easy for us to beome blind or unaware of alternative possibilites – credible or otherwise.

This effect is even given a name – the Dunning-Kruger Effect or DK-Effect. ¹⁴

The psychologist, Professor David Dunning and Justin Kruger describes the Dunning–Kruger effect:

Marcus Tullius Cicero, the famous Roman orator, lawyer, politician and writer was born 3 January 106 BC in Arpino, Italy. He was executed on 7 December 43 BC, Formia in Italy. He was executed, at the age of 63, because of the conflict between Mark Antony and Octavian. Cicero had his neck severed by Mark Antony’s men.

Additional reading

Belief Versus Truth

Other Popular Myths

Tornadoes, Seagulls and the Butterfly Effect
The Secret Life of Water and Masaru Emoto
Sugar Causes Cancer
Sugar Causes Diabetes
Sugar Causes Heart Disease
Eggs Cure Diabetes

Last updated on Tuesday 22 October 2024 at 19:05 by administrators

1. Lufityanto, G., Donkin, C., & Pearson, J. (2016). Measuring intuition: Nonconscious emotional information boosts decision accuracy and confidence. Psychological Science, 27(5), 622–634.
2. pronounced kris-sip-bus
3. Grayling, A. C. (2020) The History of Philosophy. Penguin UK.
4. Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations: A New Translation. Translated by Gregory Hays. Random House Publishing Group, 2009. 
5. From Pippa Passes by Robert Browning. It was published in 1841.
6. Aczel, A. D. (2005) Descartes’ Secret Notebook. New York: Broadway Books.
7. Alan Watts from Philosophy and Society Lectures.
8. Keneally, T. (2008) Searching For Schindler. Penguin Books.
9. Arendt, H. (2006) Eichmann in Jerusalam: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Classics.
10. Allen, D. K.-A. (2019). The Myth of Left- vs Right-Brain Learning. International Journal of Innovation, 5(1), 12.
11. Grimshaw, G. M. & Wilson, M. S. (2013) A sinister plot? Facts, beliefs, and stereotypes about the left-handed personality. Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition. 18 (2), 135–151.
12. Jarrett, C. (2012) Why the Left-Brain Right-Brain Myth Will Probably Never Die | Psychology Today [online]. Available from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-myths/201206/why-the-left-brain-right-brain-myth-will-probably-never-die (Accessed 29 June 2017).
13. Galileo Galilei – Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615)
14. Dunning, D. (2011) ‘The Dunning–Kruger Effect’, in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Elsevier. pp. 247–296.