Self-fulfilling prophecy: When convinced of a specific outcome, a person may unconsciously alter events to ensure this outcome.

Guess what I learned this week?

Not only is it possible for you to be admitted to university while having the IQ of a brick of cream cheese, it is also possible to earn a doctorate in Chinese philosophy while in a similar state.

Meet, if you would be so kind, Dr. Hirohito*:
Professor of Religious Studies.
Expert in Confucianism.
Pompous Idiot.

*Names have been changed to protect the vacuous.

Read on, if you dare.

Dr. Hirohito is my Introduction to Buddhism professor. She is tiny, in her sixties, and composed entirely of barbed wire and dead puppies.

At first I lived in fear of her. She was nasty and abusive to anyone who made the fatal error of coming to class late (myself included), even after saying on the first day of classes that she did not mind. If you whisper, she berates you. If you rustle your paper, you're being insubordinate. As far as she is concerned, we are far too stupid to even be in her presence. She made this evident during the first week of classes:

"You are taught nothing in high school," she haughtily mused one day. "This is not your fault. Your teachers were lazy. They sleep in class, don't think I don't know what goes on in high school. Most of you can't even read." She holds up the magenta textbook for the course, about 150 pages thick. "Why do you think I gave you this little thing? If I gave you a real textbook, it would take you three years to read it!"

The entire class takes a moment to uncomfortably digest this. I take a moment to remember all the incredibly involved teachers I had in high school, and my bookshelf at home crammed with classic novels.

"I teach this class," she continues after a pause, "at a grade 9 level. If I taught this like a university course, you would fail it." I find this statement odd, as this is a second year course: We all had to pass a minimum of 10 university courses to take this class.

"Now," she continues after she's satisfied that she's adequately insulted us, "who can tell me what a closed system is?"

Someone raises their hand and explains: a closed system is a system of beliefs that explains any criticism by using the system. An example would be how Creationists do not believe in the Theory of Evolution. When presented with fossils of extinct animals, they say God put them there to throw scientists off. Fucking Creationists.

Anyway, Dr. Hirohito continues, apparently impressed that one of us had two brain cells to rub together. "Yes, that's right. You can't argue with people who are involved in closed systems because the arguments will always be absorbed by the system. All religions are closed systems..."

Ok, I think, this makes sense.

"... But so is psychology."

What? What?!

"Think about it: You go to your psychiatrist, and tell him you had a dream. He analyzes it and tells you it means something. The next day you go to him, and tell him you never dreamt at all last night. That means something too. Then you go to him and say you had a dream, but you can't remember it. That also means something. So psychology is a closed system." She smiles, obviously very pleased with herself.

...What the fucking fuck?

I'm not even sure where to begin with this. I suppose we can start with the fact that you do not go to psychiatrist to get your dreams interpreted, nor do you go to a psychologist. You go to a psychoanalyst, a tiny branch of pseudopsychology founded by Sigmund Freud that has no empirical value or scientific merit whatsoever and that 99.9% of psychologists wouldn't even wipe their asses with, let alone recognize as a science. In fact, if you were to call a psychologist a psychoanalyst, I'm pretty sure they would rip out your larynx with their teeth and then rape the hole in your throat. I know this because it took everything in my power not to do it.

Then I suppose we could tackle the fact that she is painting real psychology with the same brush as Freudian analyses, which is nothing like real psychology. Real psychologists study perception, memory, and the functioning of the brain. The only sensible way she could have come to this ineffably moronic opinion of psychology is if she was alive while Freud was doing his shit in Austria in the 1930's.

I briefly consider asking her what Vienna was like before the annex, but ultimately decide against it.

"This culture is ridiculous!" she continues. Actually, she probably started talking some time before this, I just couldn't hear with all the blood rushing past my ears. "Western society is heavily psychologized."

Psycholo-what?

"I love going to Taiwan. You know why? Because people all talk about responsibility" She says the last word slowly, as if it was in some alien tongue none of us had ever heard, "It's amazing. If someone does something bad over there, they are held responsible. Over here, it's 'oh, poor me, I was abused as a child, blah blah blah.' That's bull. There is no evidence that people who were abused as children grow up to be abusers themselves."

...Are you fucking serious?

I will grant that not everyone who is abused as a child becomes an abuser themselves, but not everyone who smokes gets cancer, either. I guess we're all good! Break out the DuMauriers!

"No one takes responsibility in this culture. People say the voices in their heads made them do it! Am I the only one who thinks this is equivocal to saying tiny green men from Mars are commanding you to kill?"

All right, so for those of you keeping score, not only do correlations less than +1.0 not exist, neither does schizophrenia. Amazing conclusions about the validity of psychology coming from someone with a doctorate in FUCKING CHINESE PHILOSOPHY.

"People aren't mentally ill or any of this garbage. They are evil. Plain and simple. Evil and nasty. It's just not politically correct to use these words anymore."

Oh yes, that's extremely scientific: People who do bad things are evil. Absolutely nothing caused this. They are just arbitrarily predisposed to do bad things. This is not biologically or psychologically based whatsoever. Yeah, she's totally right. No psychological disorders in Asia at all. Oh yeah, except Koro: the fear that one's penis will retract into the abdomen, causing death, which, I'm sure you'll agree isn't irrational AT ALL.

"In fact, I teach an entire course on psychology and Buddhism, if you want to take a third year course on the subject."

...

There is no God.

* * *


So, at my university, the person with the worst grasp on even the basic concepts of psychology I have ever encountered is teaching a course on it. I hope for the sake of whoever takes that course that they know nothing about psychology beforehand, otherwise they'll fail.

Oh, and I got a 93% on the first midterm. Guess where I lost my marks? The question on Buddhist psychology. Suppose I should have seen that coming.

I guess everyone did exceptionally well on the first midterm and this clashed with her perception of us as quasi-literate intellectual midgets, so on the second midterm she made exactly one half of the test from material from ONE lecture we had during a snowstorm that roughly three people attended. Unfortunately, I was not one of them. We should be getting it back tomorrow. I doubt I passed.

There's a psychological term for what she did, but I'm sure she wouldn't be interested. Clearly she'd just prefer to be labelled evil.