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Every person can correct the medieval-looking image of man instilled in him by his upbringing in order to learn to think on the basis of a scientific view of man, to understand his life better and to live it better.
The above-mentioned quotation, which is attributed to the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) is commonplace in diplomacy. If one examines relevant political decisions under this aspect, one’s eyes open. As a fellow human being, however, one feels co-responsible for the fate of people, because as a rule one has allowed a minority to live at the expense of the majority without doing anything.
Yet the world is so rich that all people without exception could live in prosperity.
But this is not allowed to happen. Injustice would not have to be; no one would be short-changed in life. Hunger and hardship would not arise either.
But the rulers and their proxy politicians have planned not to allow the natural-scientific image of man to arise, so that people do not learn to think and understand their lives better as well as live better.
Anthropological premises of human nature
Human image and worldview are of great importance to individuals, whether they are aware of them or not. The conception of man includes views about the nature of man, about his living conditions and development, about his position in nature, in the cosmos and in society. Every theory about man depends on anthropological premises of his culture, on the concept of human nature and thus also on the worldview.
From a scientific point of view, the concept of human nature implies the complete absence of genetically determined aggressive drives. This results in the ability of human beings and the necessity to live and organise themselves in a peaceful society without violence and war.
A second assumption results from man’s biological existence: Man has no pre-defined instincts; at birth he has only a few reflexes.
It follows that the intellectual faculties, the emotional reactions, the subjective apprehension of the environment, the mental conceptions of the external world and the personality of man are acquired through socialisation. “Socialisation” as a lifelong learning process of integration or adaptation of the growing human being into the surrounding society and culture. People can and must learn everything. This learning requires a relationship with at least one fellow human being (1).
Work, Love and Community as the Three Great Tasks of Life
Human life as a whole has the character of a task. At every moment of our existence we are confronted with tasks that we have to overcome. The three great tasks of life that inevitably urge us to confront are work, love and community. One can only agree with this view of the individual psychologist Alfred Adler.
The necessity of work stems from the fact that people can only sustain themselves if they engage in productive activity. In this way they contribute to the general welfare, which secures the existence of the human race.
The requirement of love is given by the fact that nature has provided for bisexuality and thus created the task of connecting with a love partner.
Work and love are also community issues. They arise from the fact that man is a social creature and that all his life problems have a social character. From this it can be deduced that a healthy way of life requires above all a sense of community, a bond with one’s fellow human beings. This is expressed not only in the willingness to work and love, but also in the sympathy for questions of the larger context, questions of city and country, people and humanity (2).
The main principles of the concept of man, including socio-biological, educational and cultural dimensions.
The first dimension is the socio-biological one. It is: Man is a social living being. In this respect, the survival and development of the human species depend on mutual aid (Kropotkin) and interpersonal relationships. Finally, man is a child of his culture, which in turn creates culture.
The second, educational dimension says: Man is dependent on his upbringing. This means that character, behaviour and intellectual abilities are not innate, but develop within the framework of interpersonal relationships and the socio-cultural milieu.
The third, cultural dimension says: Man is a being of culture and dependent on it. This means that man creates his image of man; his world view influences his view of man, his view of education and his interpersonal relationships (3).
As a scientific educator and psychologist, I am particularly concerned about the pre-psychological and medieval-looking image of man that still exists today – because it is intentional – and which refuses to give way to a contemporary scientific image of man. The human being is not enlightened by this.
People are supposed to believe in an aggression instinct so that they separate themselves from their love and children and go to war to kill and be killed.
In Arno Plack’s 1973 book “The Myth of the Aggression Instinct”, the scientist Dr. sc. at. August Kaiser in the chapter “Aggressiveness as an anthropological system”:
“The view that man has a natural, innate tendency to harm his fellow man runs like a red thread through the millennia of human cultural history. The moral rules of all religions contain commandments in the sense of “Thou shalt not kill!”, whereby the natural inclination to evil is explicitly accepted as a human trait. Today, however, the appeal to theological views no longer counts for much. Giving in to the need for scientific explanations, one now prefers to speak of an innate ‘instinct of aggression’ rather than of original sin.
This ‘aggression instinct’ is now generally taken for granted, except by experts. Every newspaper reader or television viewer knows the names of SIEGMUND FREUD and KONRAD LORENZ, who thought they had proved the aggression instinct hypothesis through their work. A large number of students have adopted their statements without critically examining them and without contributing new arguments. Has the evidence for this hypothesis really been produced? Or does human aggressiveness have other causes? The answer to these questions has a fateful character for humanity.” (4)
It is violent upbringing that triggers aggression in the child. These are instilled. Man would not be able to kill his fellow man; that does not correspond to his human nature.
The pre-psychological conception of man assumes that people want to go to war. But this is a fraud, a swindle, a great nonsense. No man leaves his love, no man leaves his wife and children to go to war, to kill others and to get himself killed. That is what almost all young people say in confidential conversation.
The theorists of the aggression instinct do not understand man. In reality, people want to live quietly and in peace in their house, yard and garden. All of a sudden they are supposed to have an aggression instinct and want to go to war against the other people. Let us have the courage and patience to revise our opinion. The psychology faculty of the universities unfortunately teaches a lot of nonsense in ideological and political terms.
The contributions in the aforementioned book “The Myth of the Aggression Instinct” come from representatives of various sciences, all of which are confronted with the problem of aggression. On the back of the book it says:
“Thus it is shown from several sides that the self-evidence with which today, following Konrad Lorenz, an innate aggression instinct is spoken of, is by no means justified.” (5)
People are supposed to learn to follow and become afraid of fellow human beings through authoritarian education, so that they do not associate, cooperate and live together with them.
Not only proven scientific experts, but also enlightened educators have known for a long time that the authoritarian, violent education from the time before the great world wars caused a lot of damage, although parents and educators did not want this. Young people were supposed to learn to follow so that as adults they would believe in authority, obey its orders and go to war (see Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss).
Education in our culture is still built on being afraid of people. The way educators treat the child creates emotional reactions in him that turn against the human being. The young person is afraid of fellow human beings. When he then grows up, he is not able to cooperate and live together. He cannot arrange life well for himself.
Even a spoiling and pampering upbringing does not change this. The aforementioned natural scientist and psychologist August Kaiser writes on this:
“An authoritarian upbringing is not exhausted in the use of psychological force, but includes a number of more subtle methods by which the child is subdued. A hidden form of coercion is pampering. By showering the child with ‘love’ and taking away all effort and difficulties, the child is deprived of its possibilities for free decision-making and discussion, and is kept dependent and independent. The child’s character is thereby corrupted. Strictness enforces submission by force, whereas pampering buys it. Both are found side by side in traditional education.” (6)
Added to this is the coercion of the educators. The child fails when it is forced. That is in its nature. It then feels uneasy and can no longer learn. Without fear and coercion, it likes to learn. But this unfortunate way of education is not abandoned even in school.
Actually, school is the appropriate tool to form the child’s total personality, Alfred Adler believes:
“That the school must be regarded as the basis of the whole education of the people, there is no doubt about it. The task of the school is: how do we develop people who will continue to work independently in life, who will regard all requirements of a necessary nature not as a foreign matter, but also as their business, in order to participate in them.” (7)
If students of psychology do not learn anything sensible at university, no psychologists will be trained who want to and can help people.
The fact is that because of inadequate training in universities, psychologists are not being trained to take up people’s cause. The author has experienced this himself. However, he was lucky enough to be able to turn to depth psychology as well as psychotherapy after his psychology studies.
Since human beings do not tolerate inequality, hierarchical structures, the
The attitude of a genuine psychologist or psychotherapist should be based on absolute equality and non-violence. Because there are only gradual differences between a therapist and a patient, “help-seekers” should find a suitable “interlocutor” who values and follows the fundamental equality in the therapist-patient relationship. In order to be able to reach or “touch” his counterpart – also in feeling – the psychotherapist must also be able to refrain from an academic-elitist use of language and speak the respective language of his counterpart.
People should not come to their senses and learn to think, because otherwise they will say goodbye to the mystical view and no longer accept the injustices in the world speechlessly.
The mystical conception as an antithesis to the scientific view had already occupied the thoughts of the philosophers, the New Hegelians and the libertarian socialists. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 to 1872) had shown that every religion is anthropomorphic, that is, that man projects already existing views onto the religious plane, so that, for example, the authoritarian father becomes the almighty God in heaven. Karl Marx (1818 to 1883) had also analysed the function of religion for society (“the opium of the people”) and, with the introduction of the materialist conception of history, placed man down from heaven and onto earth.
Even today, there are serious, enlightened scientists and other contemporaries who ask themselves what effect a religious education has on mental health, on the ability to think adequately and to relate to others, on the development of a sense of community and on the later development of neuroses. Since the pre-psychological image of man is consciously maintained, that is why man persists in believing.
There are contemporaries who are of the opinion
- that children who have mystical ideas forced upon them at a young age do not develop a sense of community,
- that irrational speculation serves as a method of explaining things and events to those brought up in the mystical conception,
- that speculation develops into a more or less conscious “organ of interpretation” of man, constantly at work in the unconscious,
- that the development of the individual and of humanity can be promoted more effectively by prophylaxis than in adults in psychotherapy, and
- that a rational education without any supernatural agency is the way to a healthy development and a dignified existence of man and society (8).
We humans have not yet detached ourselves from the Middle Ages. Rejecting mysticism is very difficult for many; people are not supposed to come to their senses. They are embedded in faith – and this is not the only way to sustain today’s economy.
Today people believe because that is artificially maintained. People can read and would turn away and no longer believe. But that is instilled in them. What they learn in school is determined by the church. The curricula for this institution are mainly created by the church. State and Church are united and work hand in hand.
Many thousands of years ago, people invented gods – and still believe in them today. Psychology tries to recognise the nature of man and his essence and learns that mysticism still dominates it.
Only when people correct their image of man, acquired in education and instilled by the state, do they have an instrument in their hands to learn to think and to better understand and shape their own lives.
Psychology is the tool that enables people to adequately assess themselves, the political situation and the necessary measures to change society and culture. Without psychological knowledge of the nature of man, everything peters out just as it does without historical knowledge and in-depth cultural criticism.
A person can change completely in his way of thinking, in his world view, in his world of thought. He is afraid that it is a sin not to believe. But when he starts to read the history of the church, the history of the other side, of the doubters who rebelled and he gets insight into natural science, then he has different thoughts, a different view of life.
Psychology and psychotherapy is not an easy thing. It requires a lot of courage from the individual, trust in the interlocutor and patience; feelings and attitudes do not change from one day to the next and the psychotherapeutic conversation is not a chat. Prejudices have to be replaced by knowledge. Overall, we have a very hard time seeing and feeling the facts, the reality naturally. How is that still possible in the 21st century? Since everything resists psychology and its findings, it is difficult to communicate them. Perhaps one has to wait for a few more generations.
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Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is an elementary school teacher (Rector), educationalist (Dr. paed.) and psychologist (Dipl.-Psych.). After university training, traineeship and university studies, he became a scientific teacher in adult education. In this capacity he was head of training at BAYER AG/Leverkusen, co-founder and head of an independent school model trial in Cologne, in-service trainer of Bavarian guidance counsellors and school psychologists at the Academy for Teacher Training and Personnel Management in Dillingen/Donau and head of the Central State School Guidance Office in Munich.
As a retiree, he worked as a psychotherapist in private practice and was rapporteur at a public hearing on juvenile delinquency in the European Parliament in Brussels. His books deal with the topics: Possibilities of applying individual psychology in schools (Understanding and helping; How is Ingo? Or: How to become a fellow human being? – Foreword: Peter Handke), psychological consequences of “entertainment violence” (Game over!; I’m not playing that game!), psychological manifesto of common sense (Don’t hand over power to anyone!). In all his publications, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education as well as an education for public spirit and peace. For his services to Serbia, he was awarded the Republic Prize “Captain Misa Anastasijevic” by the Universities of Belgrade and Novi Sad in 2021.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(1) Ansbacher, H. L. and Ansbacher, R. R. (eds.). (1982). Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology. A systematic presentation of his teachings in excerpts from his writings, Munich.
(2) Op. cit.
(3) Op. cit.
(4) Plack, Arno (ed.). (1973). The myth of the aggression instinct. Munich, p. 43
(5) A. op. cit.
(6) op. cit., p. 63
(7) Adler, A. (1914). Individual psychology in schools. Frankfurt / Main, p. 25f.
(8) For example: Gassmann, M., Gleich, W., Greuter, D., Hug, H., Palmer, U. (1979). Social psychology. Zurich
Featured image: Franklin D. Roosevelt (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)
