The drive of modern society could be described as the promotion of expertise. Back in the mid- twentieth century, the phrase “the best experts say...” had the effect of putting the listener on the defensive. Would you accept what was told you, despite its counter-intuitiveness, or would you (in effect) question the way society hung together? Would you have the recklessness, or courage, to risk being “anti-social” if you disagreed?

There were lots of common-sensical people who wrestled with this variant of sidewalk superintendancy, often in silence. Speaking up would get one branded as potentially “stupid,” as so many of the advances in modern physics (whose clothes were borrowed all through the century after World War 1 ended) were just as counterintuitive as the “long term plan” being presented.

The people who found it easy to be categorized as ‘stupid’ were the ones who had an easy time of it during this period. Thanks to universal suffrage, combined with the lack of any obligation to justify one’s vote through written argument in the ballot box, the person who was easygoing about being insulted by “pinheads” could simply vote the other way and justify their choice through the workhorse word “arrogant.”

(I suspect that a vote-justification measure was brought up by the expert faction, as a “reform against ballot-box abuse,” and one such plan reached the ears of Robert A. Heinlien. So he concocted this version: in order to win the right to vote, you had to factor a quadratic equation in your head correctly, otherwise it was “Better luck next election!”. His insertion of a test-passing twelve-year-old girl into his modest proposal was a pretty clear giveaway of where his tongue was.)

Those that had to walk the hard road were men and women whose I.Q.s were sufficiently high to be seriously stung by the “stupid” smear. Robert Welch was one of these; he ended up in Crank Land. So was Lyndon LaRouche: he went from econometrician to ‘nut-case’. I’m sure these two stand as proxy for a lot of high-I.Q. conservatives who faced a culture of smearing and fell down as a result.

So there’s no need to explain why McCarthyism won a lot of adherents among conservative intellectuals sick of seeing mediocre works praised as “great,” and of reading in college tracts that were little more than jargonized Democratic Party propaganda in book length that were praised as ‘serious scholarship’ by the professor class. The smearing of McCarthy as “stupid” must have produced a great belly laugh, before or after the rejoinder: “Takes one to find one, bloke!” The price of fomenting real anti-intellectualism must have seemed low when compared with the benefits.

The age of the “experts” is basically gone now, thanks in large part to successful mockery based upon examination of their track records. We no longer live in modern society by this criterion (as well as others); the social environment is now post-modern, with the expert replaced by the head doctor.

This is going to continue because of the advances made in neuroscience. As the brain becomes less and less of a mystery, people in the United States are going to naturally listen to those who were up on the field ‘way back when few people cared. This began to have political consequences as far back as the 1960s, as anyone who studied the 1964 campaign knows, but the level of psychologizing was rudimentary at the time; a lot of the up-to-the-second concepts used back then have been found to have no biological basis whatever. The Freudians behind it were thrown into the “expert” bin successfully.

I should pause and note that, for the person of more modest I.Q., the 1964 Fact smear- campaign-disguised-as-science could be easily countered with: “those shrinks are half-crazy themselves, anyway. Why else would they have gone in there?” Strangely, the type who also had a ready dismissal handy was the investment professional. He or she could say, with truth: “’Psychologically unfit for the Presidency’? Hell: do you know how many of those head doctors are psychologically unfit to pick a stock?” Followed by verifiable data.

Given the popularity of psychology, though, the above Fact incident is little more than an encrusted bloody shirt. The field has advanced in too many ways, largely to the cost of that same orthodox Freudianism. Even our side has dabbled in it; I’ve brought up Clinton myself in passing.

So it seems a low-risk prediction that psychologizing of political figures and other public figures will not only become a permanent part of the landscape, but will grow. In order to prepare for this new way, we need to have a handle on the unconscious biases of therapists, which will make their way into political biases.

Here’s my contribution to this pin-down, based upon my own experiences and observations:

1. Psychologists and psychiatrists are very much scientists, who see their mission in life to bring advancement to the masses through the use of good science. This is their primal attitude, and it’s consistent with the expert bias above. This means that you cannot tell a psychologist or psychiatrist that they’re wrong in relation to something in their specialty unless you’re their peer in terms of educational accomplishment – with the possible exception of a patient on the couch objecting to a diagnosis of themselves.
2. There is a kind of gap between neuroscience and psychoanalysis because the findings of the former have not yet completely penetrated into the practice of the latter. But this is impossible to use unless you know your neuroscience cold – and the consensus of the neuroscience profession is on your side flatly.
3. As far as biases from the clinic are concerned: a lot of the crap a therapist faces consists of a patient wrapping themselves in the mantle of whatever “big bully” the patient believes will intimidate the psychologist or psychiatrist into stopping their probings. (Such a maneuver was tried by Oliver Sacks’ patient in the movie Awakenings: watch for when Sacks himself snaps.) This means: if you snoot a therapist, they will peg you as “resistant” - automatically. Their clinical experience is utterly consistent with this pegging.
4. This implies that political psychology contains an element of dormant demagogy. An example of this which might be coming our way would be pegging a man or woman of the higher sort as “schizothymic.”
5. Another professional limitation is the therapist’s habit of characterizing the oddball or eccentric as potentially sick. Once again, a functioning therapist would find it very difficult to break out of this lens, as such a judgement is continually reinforced by their work.

All of the above implies that the professional therapist, when in politics, is a kind of Tory, the kind that seeks normalization through elimination of “ignorance” (vagueness). As long as psychology is both popular and prestigious in the minds of people, the political effects will be a reinforcement of the current crack-down on deviancy.

Of whatever sort seems threatening to society.