Let's face it: academic psychologists are boring. They apparently have very little to say to us ordinary folk. "Psyche" means "mind" or "soul" or "identity", and "ology" means "logic", but if go to a university to understand the logic of your soul they'll perform their favorite bait-and-switch. Instead of learning about your soul, you'll learn about how their souls have studied the souls of their experimental "subjects". Or worse, you'll just have to memorize lots of irrelevant trivia about the history of psychology's failure to help anybody the way it was supposed to.

When psychology becomes the study of psychology, you might as well be playing tennis without a net. The doctrines you're taught are not held to any standard of truth. Your degree is guaranteed to be worthless — except to the next generation of academic victims, who will enjoy the privilege of paying huge sums of money to learn what you don't actually know but can prattle on about for hours, weeks or years. Fortunately, smart Americans, all the way from Hollywood screenwriters down to NPR comedians, seem to know all to well what frauds these folks are.

So let's forget about these pretenders. In fact, let's forget about the word "psychology" for the moment. Let's ask a better question. What's the most important thing we need to understand in order to have a fulfilling life? Well, you could say "the world". But you could also say "me". In fact, in some sense, these are the same things.

Phenomenologists tell us that all our apprehensions are seen in perspective. Everything we think about is conceived from a point of view. So we think about "the universe we live in", or "Newton's century", or "my cat". In that sense, you could say that so-called worlds are merely projections, or theories, of observers only and do not attain objectivity.

Okay, so how can you attain a better understanding of yourself? If psychology hasn't benefitted the world very much — we still have as much as before anybody even invented the word — then obviously politics, economics, and sociology are more important, more central, both to understanding who you are and to dealing with the world's problems, right?

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At a superficial level there is truth to this, but that's only because psychology as a discipline has failed miserably. It's also true that taking snake oil is better than eating dirt, after all. But although psychologists have yet to tackle the "big issues" in any effective way, and many of them have degenerated into a cabal of "psychocosmetologists", consider this: The greatest crimes of history have been committed by often well-intentioned men who were simply mistaken about human nature. Although they are now demonized as mad men and fanatics — which simply means we don't have to try to understand what they were really like — to those around them they were heroes and saints. In their world, they heroically acted on what they knew to be true with great vigor and determination. They thought that men could be changed through force — forced labor, forced migration, forced brainwashining — and force is exactly what they applied. And most of them didn't live long enough to find out that what they knew to be true simply wasn't true at all.

If you were suddenly made dictator of the world, and there was no "dictator school" that you could attend so you could become really good at it, this would be a pretty easy mistake for you to make. And for a very simple reason: parents do this to their children. They "raise" their children to think and behave in whatever manner the community demands. This is why people in various parts of the world think differently and behave differently. But one of the most significant discoveries of the last few hundred years is that conditioning a child to adapt to a particular culture is different from how a species evolves to adapt to a particular environment. Conditioning has to be achieved within 10 or 20 years. Evolution's time scale is hundreds or thousands of years. In fact, evolution slowly — very slowly — created large brains precisely so that individuals could enjoy childhoods long enough to endure and embrace this conditioning.

Lamarck thought it obvious that giraffes evolved long necks by stretching them throughout a liftime. Their babies naturally had long necks like their parents because babies always look like their parents, right? It took Mendel to help us realize how erroneous, and even dangerous, this assumption was. Offspring don't automatically show the acquired characteristics of their parents. Biological evolution, it turns out, more or less ignores the history of nations. The genes that define a species vary randomly from generation to generation. Those varieties that do well in the long run, survive; the others don't. Over thousands of years the species can change, but at any point in time, the species has a nature that can't be changed by circumstance. And this nature determines what any individual can know and can do. Dictators who try to speed up evolution fail because you can't train cats to be dogs. People always live their lives better than you think they are.

So the most important question you need to answer before you can get a life is: just what is this human nature, anyway? What part of me is flexible enough to educate and train, and what part is just given, to be used with wisdom and strength? Understanding human nature is what psychology was supposed to have been about but never became. In fact, what we really need is something much bolder than what psychology has become. We need a science of human nature.

Most people think the world consists of tables and chairs and people. And that these things are just what they seem to be, no more and no less. But what we have slowly grasped in the last 100,000 years is that the world is so much more than what our senses bring us. Most of it, to thoughtful people at least, is hidden to the naked eye. To find its core, to make sense of what little is apparent, we need to collect evidence of things not seen.

This kind of faith sounds like a strange idea to some, but it's no stranger than the desire sixteenth-century people had for a science of physics. Nobody much talked about it in those terms, perhaps, but once Isaac Newton actually laid its foundations, they got the picture.

To hypothesize hidden realities that cause what we experience is not a game for the light-hearted. It's just too easy for most of us to adopt without question the silly fairy tales our parents tell us. Lots of fairy tales are harmless, after all, like Santa Claus. I believe in Santa Claus. Every winter I watch all the new Santa Claus movies. But we need to become much smarter about figuring out which fairy tales are okay and which fairy tales are not okay.

And even plausible ideas, like epicycles and phlogiston, often just don't pan out. History is littered with credible hypotheses that turned out to be useless in the long run. Too many people just can't seem to learn even the rules of the science game and, instead, try to squeeze round observations into square fairy tales. And many of these, like the great dictators of yore, don't live long enough to see how foolish they've been. "Intelligent design" is only the latest in a long littany of silly symphonies that goes all the way back to creation.

Of course, you're not likely to cause major catastrophes just by being mistaken about human nature. All that will happen is that you'll pick the wrong boyfriends, support the wrong wars, and waste your life being no more ignorant or ineffectual than anyone else. In a few short years they will lower your body back into the earth, and, a generation later, no one will remember your name. No harm done.

But the amazing thing is that, despite these daunting difficulties, many people in the last three hundred years have labored devotedly on this incredibly important project: laying the foundations for a science of human nature. Most of them, through sheer exhaustion, fell silent and their efforts were lost. And, in the twentieth century, only one attempt proved worthy of further study.