Which of these definitions fit me and my intensions? I'm playfully mischievous, not a deceptive scoundrel. I'm somewhat solitary, but not vicious, nor am I destructive and unpredictable. However, the advent of the internet and the "blogosphere" do enable me to operate outside of controls. My "operations" are not to defraud; they fall more in line with the idea of removing diseased or abnormal plants.

The "controls" I refer to are the mainstream publications (e.g., journals) in psychology and related fields. These venues are not interested in the same topics as myself. As is their right, they publish articles that fit their particular philosophies and promote a particular agenda. Typically, it is a strongly leftist, socialist agenda.

Journals or other periodicals that have properly high standards for research-based articles are better, but are nevertheless deeply enmeshed with politics. This is because a vast majority of psychological research is funded by "public" money, meaning, by the forced removal of private citizens' property via taxation. So, although editors may claim that their review and selection of which research will be published is independent of political concerns, they are dropping the context of who decides what kind of research gets funded in the first place.

Furthermore, editors and reviewers are themselves researchers and, likely, beneficiaries of the government-run research process. One does not get to be an editor of a top journal without being a prominent researcher. And one doesn't become a prominent researcher (in psychology anyway) without being awarded multi-million dollar research grants--grants offered by the government.

This is to take nothing away from the quality of research such people produce. Very interesting research has been produced that has been funded by taxpayer money. Nor is it to claim that all such people are socialists, just because they benefit from a socialist system. Instead, it is to point out that such people will not openly advocate for a completely privatized market, either for the country as a whole, in the particular realm of health care, or especially the world of research. They may not believe in socialism, but they believe in a paycheck and, presumably, the work they do. Therefore, why should they advocate for a different system that brings with it the "instability" of a private and free market? After all, they didn't create the system and they, as individuals, cannot really change it.

While there is some truth to the idea that they didn't create the system and that what they can do as individuals may be limited, these ideas ultimately become rationalizations. The dirty secret is that such persons know that in a free market they can't compete.

This is due in part to the fact that psychology, as a science, has not impressed the majority of the populace. Intellectually, if there is a single name and set of ideas that is widely associated with psychology, it is Freud and his sexually-focused theories of human behavior. Thus, psychology, in the minds of many, is focused on perversions and insanity. Neither of these subjects is inspiring.

Culturally, to the extent psychology is implicitly or explicitly included in movies, literature, and so forth, it is again focused on the irrational, the perverse, the worst representatives of humanity. (I note that there are individual works that are very interesting and good, such as Caleb Carr's The Alienist, but as a trend in the wider world of art, the morbid, even the disgustingly perverse, is the norm and primary focus. Further, such "studies" in pathology often present either no moral judgment of the immoral characters or even try to elicit compassion for such creatures.)

Thus, the public at large, while having a potential interest psychology and an increasing acceptance of the importance of psychological issues and factors in their own lives, nevertheless are not desirous of wallowing in the muck that psychology seems to be offering. The sad part is that so many outstanding aspects of what psychology has accomplished get overshadowed or never heard about. Psychological researchers cannot count on the public to voluntarily contribute money to their work, as the public doesn't see it's value.

However, psychologists, especially academic researchers, are poor at getting good ideas out to the public. Marketing is not part of their training and, more fundamentally, they think it's vulgar. These are the leftist or left-leaning pseudo-socialist types that condemn anything related to profit or markets as cheap, banal "materialism." Few of them actually live the materially-limited lifestyles they preach everyone else should live, but that just demonstrates their hypocrisy.

The problem goes much deeper: psychologists are, largely, anti-intellectual. That may seem paradoxical given that psychology is a very intellectual field, it takes as part of its subject matter the contents of consciousness (i.e., ideas, concepts, premises), and requires a lot of thought and experience to do well. Being a psychologist requires intelligence.

However, I mean that many psychologists, in terms of their own personal philosophy, don't believe that reality is absolute or that one can objectively know and understand it. They don't believe in reason or the ability to understand things. Everything, to them, is a "construct," i.e., an essentially meaningless, never-to-be-validated view that, at best, a bunch of people agree upon. It's a collective opinion that may have some small, practical, and narrow application, but doesn't correspond to reality.

Academic psychology is dominated by a subjectivist, relativist, anti-mind philosophy, be it in the form of constructivism, social constructionism, post-modernism, multiculturalism, or whatever Frankenstein-like “worldviews” have been created in the past few years. Psychologists are better than most people at coming up with rationalizations for irrational ideas and behaviors. And all these variations on the anti-reality, anti-mind, and anti-man core of academic philosophy in psychology are just that.

But they are also attempts to destroy the concepts (and reality) of knowledge and values as such. After all, if either there is no objective reality or our minds aren't capable of knowing it, on what basis can we make any judgments? How can we say that one thing is better than another? Who can claim that Nazi Germany is worse than America? Who can say that living in a modern house is superior to living in a mud hut? Who dares to claim that the life of a human being is better than that of an earthworm?

In the great garden of ideas, it is precisely subjectivism and relativism that are the diseased and abnormal plants. I see it as my job to, in roguish fashion, separate and remove these diseases from the healthy and beautiful flowers of reason and objectivity.

As one who knows that reality is an objective absolute; that reason is our means of knowing it; that one should pursue his own rational self-interests and achieve happiness in life; that the only rational relationship among men is voluntary, mutual consent to mutal gain; that it is not the job of government to finance anything other than means of protecting individual rights (e.g., police, courts of law), I also know that these ideas will never be accepted into the primary venues of psychological literature (and I don't have the right to force them in). Therefore, I have to act as a rogue, to go outside that system and stake a claim there. I'm glad technology--a product of man's rational capacity and effort--has made it possible.