260722: New Psychotools?
Alright, so the whole big history of culture is one endless referendum on “Do we try something new, or don’t we?” And there are no easy answers or general solutions, so what's left?
We can start by describing the picture differently. People want things. They want things socially: what they desire is affected by, and affects in turn, others’ desires. Moreover, their desires add up to emergent changes in the trajectory of the social world. "Longing on a large scale is what makes history." [DeLillo, Underworld]
In this account, our best hope is to help people want better things. That is, we can give them tools for thinking about what they want more clearly: for dialectically reconciling their conflicting desires, and for thinking through the indirect or secondary consequences of achieving their desires. A Pros & Cons list is a psychotool, invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1772, in a personal letter to Joseph Priestley. Hop forward a half-century and Darwin is using it to debate whether to propose to Emma Wedgwood.
Another form of psychotool that could be developed, to help people with their desiring, is the creation of new concepts and metaphors. For a century now, Western civilization has been hung up on depth metaphors of psychology, as introduced by Freud and Freudian thinkers. This metaphor implicitly encourages etiological approaches to problem-solving: Individuals are encouraged to go deep into their unconscious, and back in time to their childhood, to diagnose the root causes of their present makeup. Adler's teleological approach, on the other hand, proposes a radically different framing: Individuals are encouraged to look forward, to the future, and ask what functions and purposes their behaviors might be providing. This can open up entirely new and productive vectors of thought, much as "extrospection" may complement and support attempts at introspection. By locating and challenging these background assumptions—these framing metaphors which guide our search for solutions—we create new frontiers and paradigms for further psychotools.
Perhaps the primary contribution of the Enlightenment was the introduction of a set of psychtechnologies, which we can loosely refer to as scientific reasoning. Scientific reasoning is well suited to studying Nature, to engineering materials, to building bridges. However, Enlightenment psychotools remain a poor choice within domains of the inexact sciences, where reflexivity and anti-inductivity rule, and where the subtle dynamics of ongoing interpersonal communication (non-verbal, connotative, tonal, facial, etc) are far "thicker" than any of our abilities to measure, track, and represent.