MISCmedia by Clark Humphrey » Blog Archive PSYCHOLOGY IN REAL LIFE, IN THREE PARTS

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PSYCHOLOGY IN REAL LIFE, IN THREE PARTS

May 9th, 2013 by Clark Humphrey

Exhibit A: Web cartoonist Allie Brosh offers a poignant, funny, unflinching, harrowing account of her bout with severe depression.
Exhibit B: Psychology Today’s got a cover story called “Confessions of a Sociopath.” She’s cool-headed, icy-blooded, and immune to others’ emotions. Of course, she’s a former trial lawyer. (And a Mormon.)
Exhibit C: Harvard historian Naill Ferguson recently gay-bashed the late UK economist John Maynard Keynes. Ferguson alleged that Keynes, as a childless hedonist (he’d actually been married to a woman who couldn’t conceive), didn’t give a darn about society’s long-term future. Ferguson essentially compared Keynes’s advocacy of government stimulus programs instead of “austerity economics” to a fiddling grasshopper sneering at hard-working ants. As Canadian cultural historianÂ Jeet Heer explains at the American Prospect, this dichotomy has been at the heart of both economic and moralistic arguments since the days of the Greeks.