Reductive Psychology
I took the subway after a whole day of work. It was already 7 PM, but the heat of the severe summer of Buenos Aires didn't dismiss the daylight yet. The subway was full. The people felt bothered by the closeness of their neighbors, sources of heat. We did our best to fight against our irrepressible wishes to shout, to push everybody else far from our reach. He didn't. The heat, the pressure in the office, the air feeling like soup (we were the noodles), some argue with his wife on the phone that afternoon, they all made him to explode and shout to the woman beside him: "Move out! You're bothering me!" The woman, a pregnant standing young woman, was obligated to shout back: "You are bothering me, you, @#&$**+@." Several others, with no formal invitation, were moved by the environment to fight, so they did it shouting, complaining about the heat, and blaming the Subway Company because of the lack of oxygen that made them feel in such a bad mood.Those people were healthy. They were responding to their environment in the proper way. They were reacting to (I don't want to use the word) their stimuli in the normal way that any human being would. If they didn't, they would get home with this anguish in
Reductive psychology can be described as the branch of psychology that deals with the model stimulus-response to answer the questions of psychology. The model is simple: if we have a stimulus, we will have a response, which will be measurable and understandable-and predictable. Under this light, a man becomes a machine responding in the same way to the same stimuli. If you want to make a doctor, Watson said, you need to expose a young fellow to the right stimuli, and he'll become so. If you want to make someone shout to someone else, put him in a crowded subway in a Buenos Aires' hot summer afternoon, and there you are! When you are self-betraying, you begin to blame the other person of the things he/she didn't do or did to justify your behavior. Now, this position is in a deep error if view from a gospel perspective. The Salvation Plan implies free agency. Free agency is the cornerstone of the whole probation time we have on Earth. If we didn't have it, we would be obedient, but also stupid. If we didn't have the opportunity to choose, we would have been good, but the earth time would have been worthless. The problem can involve others. And this is another danger of self-betrayal. If I'm in a self-betrayal process and blame my wife because of something I did, she has 2 alternatives: a) try to understand my problem and avoid the crash; and b) self-betray and provoke a collusion. When two people engage in a collusion, each one is self-betraying, and making the other to become the monster. Each one is blaming the other and not taking responsibility for their own mistakes. In the end, the fight ends up being 2 kids arguing stubbornly and getting nowhere. The problem is that in the process each can stab the other really hard with hurting words, and these wounds normally are built to last.
Some common words found in the essay are:
Subway Company, Salvation Plan, Response Note, Heaven Page, Buenos Aires', James Watson, Heavenly Father, Graphically Scientific, Voyages Gulliver, Buenos Aires, free agency, reductive psychology, self-betrayal process, scientific method, self-betrayal process blame, scientific tools, agency responsibility, truth can't, satan's plan, spiritual truths, human behavior,
Approximate Word count = 2184
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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