Political Psychologism

Psychology is definable as a science of the mind and behavior, especially the mind and behavior of humans.

Psychologism is the explanation of everything humans do through psychology--a tendency that, given what psychology covers but also does not cover, may be considered misuse and abuse of psychology, a form of misuse and abuse of which we have long seen much in the political realm.

Those who incline to psychologism in this way, faced with any sort of discontent, relentlessly change the issue from objective reality to some inner trouble of the person who points out anything troubling in their conditions, or those of society at large. Those taking this tack tell those who lack food and shelter that they aren't really suffering from the fact that they are starving and homeless, rather their troubles are psychological--that they only feel deprived because others have more. They tell the poor who feel that the system isn't working for them and taking an interest in political figures challenging the status quo that they aren't suffering from material hardships and desirous for their redress, but that they are the mental wreckage of modern life, desirous of relief from the burdens of their individuality via flight into a Mass Movement in which that individuality will be dissolved, a flight not to but from freedom . . .

Such maneuvers, as one recent analyst of the political scene had it, "dissolv[e] conflicts of power, interest, and ideas in a bath of psychological analysis," and in so doing dismiss and discredit any questioning of the world, any protest, any dissent, and pretty misanthropically too, pathologizing as they do anything and everything humans do, think, feel in the manner of a Medieval theologian seeing sin and evil in everything, and reducing their subject to a pathetic, rather ugly, mass of neuroses--which is why people of a certain ideological background love it so much, and have worked so hard to promulgate it among the credulous, especially those among them who reflexively mistake what is merely counterintuitive and obscure for what is profound and true.