Academic freedom is bullshit: thoughts build on one another, like bricks and mortar, like stacked dominos, and if you want to keep your cathedral standing you can’t have people shoving them. What they call academic freedom really only applies to people who aren’t original enough to think past the premise of the lectures. I got kicked out of the Psychology PhD program at Princeton for unorthodox ideas – there’s honor in that kind of failure. Who else in the 21st century has the guts to be a heretic?
Don’t call me a drunk, I don’t care how many this is: you’ll understand when I explain it to you.
Psychology is all neurotransmitters and fMRI scans these days, but it … you’re cute, by the way … but it shares the same fundamental error that Freud did, back when we thought women were hysterical for a reason. Do you want to know what it is? You do. I’m telling you, this will all make sense. Someday, you’ll look back at this moment, and … put your phone down … I’m going to lay out some truth.
The error, this is it, is that once you peel away enough layers, you reach the truth: get past the repressions of the super ego, Freud said, and what you have left is the truth: understand how the neurotransmitters transmit along the axiel mylon sheath and what you’ll get is an honest impulse. Same/same – you see? Go deep enough, and you reach that holy grail of truth, the explanation.
But that’s a lie, in fact, it’s the lie … here, let me get you another one. You see? I told you I’m making sense. It’s the big lie: underneath all our explanations is just lies. There isn’t a truth. There’s nothing resembling a truth. The only relevant question in the mind is: what lies are you telling yourself? The rest is all coloring between the lines.
We are all mythology.
I’m going to call you Mandy. Is it okay if I call you Mandy? I’ve always wanted to meet a Mandy, and I think this is a good time to start.
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St. John Campbell is a pseudonym
Read more stories by St. John Campbell
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