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Psychology and Evil
As a trained industrial/organizational psychologist eons ago I studied the subject of evil only casually and ignorantly. I realized after studying and writing extensively about organizations, especially corporations and government bureaucracy in America, that together they are a motherlode of evil in character and behavior. In this article I explain my belated insight. When I […]
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Why I Don’t Rely on Hope
“Where do you find hope?” “How do you sustain hope?” Those are probably the most common questions in response to more than three decades of writing and lecturing about today’s multiple cascading social and ecological crises. For years I struggled with how to answer, wanting to be honest but sensitive to the anxiety that typically […]
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Cognitive Warfare, Targeting your Subconscious
Cognitive warfare is no longer science fiction. Cognitive warfare is a fact of the modern age and everyone, whether civilian or military, is a potential target. Cognitive attacks are aimed at exploiting emotions rooted in our subconscious, bypassing our rational conscious mind. This is achieved by exploiting biases, fallacies, emotions and automatisms, but also through […]
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Criminality in the White House: The Rise of the Political Psychopath

When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal. — Richard Nixon Many years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?” The answer, then and now, remains the same: None. There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians. Nor is there much of […]
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Yankee Micro Social Psychology Part II

Summary of Part I In Part I of my article, I described how initially the field of social psychology had deep roots in the socio-cultural traditions of Wundt, Royce, Baldwin, Cooley, Thomas and Mead. But by the beginning of World War I a shift towards individualism can be seen in the work first of the […]
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Yankee Micro Social Psychology Part I

Orientation Developing a Marxist social psychology is a very important aspect of explaining what is going on within the individual in relation to society as well as what is going on in small group interactions between themselves. What we find when we examine social psychology in Yankeedom is what you might suspect, and that is […]
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Crowds, Masses and Movements

Orientation Why study crowds, masses and movements? It is tempting to imagine that as socialists we must know a great deal about crowds, masses, and in medieval thought individual meant inseparable, that is indivisible. People were defined as individuals by reference to the groups of which they were members. Group membership defined their very identity […]
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2,315 Charter Schools Failed And Closed In 11 Years

Although they have been around for more than 30 years, and although they are frequently touted as being superior to public schools, the U.S Department of Education reports that between 2010-11 and 2021-22, an 11-year period, 2,315 charter schools failed and closed in the U.S. That is a huge number of school closures in a […]
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Coming to Terms with a Lifetime of Trauma While in Prison
I am a Black man in prison, and I want to talk about trauma. I want us all to be able to talk about trauma. I’m here because when I was a teenager and young man, I made many bad life choices involving drugs and violence. Living with the consequences of my actions is not […]
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Collectivist, Individualist and Communist Selves Part II

Summary of Part I In Part I of my article, we began by distinguishing the social self from two forms of identity that are often confused with it: temperament and personality. The focus of part one is to show how very social (or even socialist) was the work of social psychologist George Herbert Mead. We […]