Life has always seemed a little complicated to most of us. We just try to muddle through and hope we don't get caught in the machinery, like Charlie Chaplin does in "Modern Times". But there are always people who try to figure out the basic rules of the world around them. For example, in the animated world on the right, you could start by studying the behavior of marbles in motion. This is, in fact, where Newton started. We call such people scientists.
Three hundred years after the Enlightenment, the idea of a science of human nature is still new to some people. But in those days, it was practically all anybody ever talked about. If there were underlying laws that explained physical phenomena, what laws explained human behavior? Time after time, attempts to agree on the foundations of such a science have collapsed under heated debates about terminology, or this camp's refusal to accept that camp's discoveries.
During the last two centuries too much of social science has degenerated into politically fashionable interpretations of skewed statistics. How often do we hear that psychologists can tell you anything you want to know about the effect of dinner bells on dogs, that psychiatry is used to suppress dissent, or that psychoanalysts are still vacationing in Disneyland? Even New Age psychotherapists avoid educating their patients when hand-holding and the sale of inter-class validation — remember medieval indulgences? — can get the bills paid about as well.
Many observers of this state of affairs have suggested that we need theoreticians with more backbone, who aren't afraid to say what they really think. We take pride in offering the ideas of Paul Rosenfels as a candidate for what may in the future come to be regarded as the foundation of a true science of human nature. According to Paul Rosenfels, another cause is "homophobia". The love tendencies are inevitably attracted by that which is psychologically masculine, which usually confuses the masculine image the thinker has of himself. This creates a problem of secret homosexual feeling in yielding individuals. Embarrassment over this emotional tendency is the outstanding cause of the psychological dishonesty which has slowed the development of the science of human nature.
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When Paul said that psychology's biggest hurdle was homophobia, he didn't mean that scientists didn't like gay people. He meant that they were unable to fully investigate their own psyches for fear of the homosexuality they might find. For a science of man (the species) must start with the scientist's examination of himself before he can ever be objective about other people. And because even gay scientists continue to cling to an artificially impersonal model of objectivity, their view of human nature remains lacking in real human content. According to in (1943), psychoanalysis is a disease whose symptoms psychoanalysis tries to cure, a psychologist is a person trained to cure the obscure, and psychology is the science which tells us what everybody knows in language that nobody understands.