Reality Takes Precedence!

I'm back after another hiatus of hibernation. "What kind of intense hibernation prevents blogging? I blog and I don't believe in pants," you might say. To be honest, I wanted to quit, but then lastnight I read this beautiful swoosh of anti-graduate school fervor from Timothy Leary:

We're all caught in this social addictive process. You young people know that it's not working out the way it could. You know you're hooked ...

All right, where do we go? What can we do? I have two answers to those questions. The first is: drop out! Go out where you are closer to reality, to direct experience. Go out to where things are really happening. Go out to the frontier. Go out to those focal points where important issues are being played out. Why don't you pick out the most important problem in the world, as you see it, and go exactly to the center of the place where it's happening, where it is being studied and worked on? Someone has to be there, in the center. Why not you?

Now, there's a risk to this. The first risk is that you'll lose your foothold on the ladder that you've been climbing. You'll lose your social connection.

Undergraduates come to me very often and say, "I want to go on to graduate school in psychology. Where should I go?" And I always ask them the question, "Why do you want to study psychology?" And as I listen to them, usually one of two answers develops. Answer number one is, "I want to become a psychologist. I want to play the psychology game. I want to be a professor, and I want to get tenure, and maybe if I'm really ambitious, I might get to be president of the APA." Well, that's fair enough, and for someone who has that ambition I can give them advice about the strategic universities to go to, like go to Michigan or Yale but don't go to XYZ.

Some students, though, will say, "I want to study psychology because I want to study human nature" or "I want to find out what's what." To do some good. And then I tell them, well, forget about graduate school. What kind of good do you want to do? Do you want to help the mentally ill? Then get yourself committed to a mental hospital. Stay there for a year or two; you'll learn more about mental illness in that two years our profession has learned in a hundred years. If you want to learn about delinquincy and reducing crime, go down to the tough section, learn the crime game, learn how to make a man-to-man contact with tough guys, learn from them why they are crooks and criminals. Spend a year in prison, not as a psychologist, but maybe as a guard, or cleaning up the garbage, and you'll learn more than you ever learn in a criminology textbook. That is how it goes. There is no problem that can't be best solved and best worked out at this stage of ignorance by getting right to the reality. -Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (1965).