Soon after leaving Harvard, I began a long struggle to get rid of the most

dysfunctional part of my psychological ignorance. Today, I will describe my long

struggle for elementary wisdom and a brief summary of my ending notions. After

that, I will give examples, many quite vivid and interesting to me, of both

psychology at work and antidotes to psychology-based dysfunction. Then, I will

end by asking and answering some general questions raised by what I have said.

This will be a long talk.

 

When I started law practice, I had respect for the power of genetic evolution

and appreciation of man’s many evolution-based resemblances to less

cognitively-gifted animals and insects. I was aware that man was a “social

animal,” greatly and automatically influenced by behavior he observed in men

around him. I also knew that man lived, like barnyard animals and monkeys, in

limited-size dominance hierarchies, wherein he tended to respect authority and

to like and cooperate with his own hierarchy members while displaying consider-

able distrust and dislike for competing men not in his own hierarchy.

 

But this generalized, evolution-based theory structure was inadequate to enable

me to cope properly with the cognition I encountered. I was soon surrounded by

much extreme irrationality, displayed in patterns and subpatterns. So

surrounded, I could see that I was not going to cope as well as I wished with

life unless I could acquire a better theory-structure on which to hang my

observations and experiences. By then, my craving for more theory had a long

history. Partly, I had always loved theory as an aid in puzzle-solving and as a