Can we not say that academics who refuse to even consider, much less accept, the existence of evidence that would force them to alter their paradigm, in whatever field, are effectively having negative hallucinations? That they are NOT seeing what objectively is there? Does not mainstream psychology posit all hallucinations as symptomatic of mental illness?
What safeguards are in place to vet the sanity of those who go into journalism? If their goal is to see and report what is in front of them, but they suffer both from negative and positive hallucinations, how can they do this job? What prevents intellectually gifted but emotionally grotesque human beings from going into the one field which, more than any other, creates our sense of shared reality? Nothing.
Imagine on the other end a psychiatry which actually DID do a thorough job both of ensuring that all prospective therapists went through careful training which included abreaction, and the perinatal matrices? What if they graduated, consistently and universally, as actually decent, humble, attentive, warm human beings? A new priesthood might bring on a new social order.
Should we call it dreaming to see something which should be there but is not? Is it dreaming to see how the world could live in peace and harmony and happiness? I don’t think so. I think it is those NOT capable of this that are dreaming. They are engaging in negative hallucinations in which they do not see the possibilities which are objectively there.
I can find fault with virtually all of our political and social order. To be sure, we do many things right. We have crafted peace over very wide areas. Through free trade and free markets, we have brought global prosperity unlike anything ever seen in human history.
But culturally we are losing precious resources, like the capacity for moral judgement, and the effective use of principle in both thought and behavior. Both of these underlie, clearly and beyond any possibility of dispute, the on-going failures we see in generalizing wealth and well-being, and in generating and sustaining shared senses of meaning and purpose, hope and joy, privilege and pleasure.