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Notes -
Anyone else feel like they are addicted to grand theories of everything? Anytime I get two minutes to myself to sit down and think I can't help but have my mind wander in the direction of psychohistorian style bullshit. Grand theories explaining the arc of history, of wokeness, or of financial booms and busts. Its all so enticing to me, but I'm pretty sure most of it is just a bullshit feeling that my mind spins up.
Me and you both brother. After a lifetime of observation it feels like a unified theory is finally coming together. Things are starting to make sense. My very first lectures in linguistics in undergrad were bafflingly opaque. Unlike hard science we couldn't observe and measure anything physical, (well, phonetics aside). You can't see a noun. We (the humans) had to build up the concepts of syntax, morphology, phonology and so on. What we're describing has always existed but bringing it into conscious awareness and true definition meant seeing way beyond the fact that what goes up must come down.
So much of human behaviour is mystifyingly illogical yet mystifyingly consistent. Like linguistics, you can't see moral righteousness, you can't measure who whom. But we see these concepts in action consistently. We, the animals with the impulses driving this behaviour have had to step back from it, while practicing it, to watch it enough, understand it enough to crystallise it into something as easily digestible as: he is being domineering, they are being bullies, I am being assertive.
There's no Galileo of human behavior to hand these concepts down from on high. We're putting it together ourselves on the fly, right now, in this century. It's very exciting. In hard science they say there's no low hanging fruit left but the social sciences are nowhere near that. Scott, big Yud, they're the backyard scientists of yore. Psychologically we're still in an age where grand discoveries can be made by laymen.
Mainstream psychological understanding is still somewhere near where biology was with Spontaneous Generation theory: a total guess taken as fact for 2000 years.
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