In this podcast excerpt, the speaker recounts her career beginning in psychology, describing it as increasingly dehumanizing and constrained by materialistic, scientific paradigms. She argues that the true societal crisis stems from institutional and academic forces that shape how individuals relate to the world, limiting both emotional and intellectual understanding. Criticizing materialistic science and academia for demanding definitive answers they lack, she posits that healing must involve an intellectual component—correcting flawed worldviews that affect emotions, relationships, and personal fulfillment. This realization led her to transition to philosophy, which she views as the foundational discipline for education, knowledge, and the restoration of a meaningful, humane worldview.
Chapters
Okay, you can hear me okay, right? Yes. Okay, well, I started my career in psychology actually, and I was very optimistic about being able to help people, and I found out that psychology was very dehumanizing, actually, that we're in an epidemic of dehumanizing the human because of science. So when you talk about healing society, I actually don't think that the problem is the emotions we have or technology or anything like that. The crisis, I think, is that we have a culture that comes from all of the institutions that create our relationship with the world. So academia, for me, tells us how to feel about our relationship to the world. And the crisis is, for me, coming from materialistic science, which wants to be the only one who answers the question and doesn't have any answers to the question. So I think materialistic science and academia right now cancels out the topic cancels it out, you know, says we can't talk about it unless we can give the answers, but we don't have any answers, so what do we do from here? So that for me, you know, the crisis actually comes from institutions, academia, starting with high school and then college. And yeah, that's— I mean, for me, I know that's kind of an unusual way to say it because a lot of people think that to heal it has to be emotional I don't know, for me it also has to be intellectual. You have to have— there's an intellectual crisis and there's an intellectual healing that has to occur when you're allowed to understand the world. And if your understanding is wrong, it filters into everything, your feelings, your happiness, your relationships to people, your goals and careers. I mean, what is the goal or career or the fulfillment that we aim for in our institutional culture. I mean, that shapes how we feel about ourselves, what kind of fulfillment we can get. So I started in psychology, and that's actually how I became a philosopher, because I said that psychology has stopped talking about psychology, and we need to get back to the foundation of education, the foundation of knowledge, the foundation of our understanding, which is where philosophy has its role. That's what philosophy was always for from the beginning of time. So
