Universal law #374: Within every profession there are good people and bad.
Take police work for example, some police officers probably try hard to enforce the law fairly and with due respect to all policy and procedure. Others might just do the best they can. They also don’t mind taking an occasional free coffee or 10 minute nap when no one is looking. Still others might pull a full-on, hardcore Rodney King moment and ultimately send their sprawling metropolis into a riotous state of martial law for a week or so.
Oops!
Still, there are some professions where it's hard to see one side or the other. Perhaps the noble profession of clowning comes to mind. It’s actually pretty hard to meet a diabolical clown in real life, although movies assure us that they’re out there.
But wait a minute. The abovementioned infallable law clearly states that every profession has good people and bad, so where are the evil therapists? Well, it turns out that most badasses in psychology turn away from a touchy-feely clinical career and become research psychologists, so that they might better lurk in the dark regions of the human subconscious and find out, on a more collective level, what exactly it is that makes you tick.
Of all the fiendish and malevolent research psychologists, one stands out from the rest for the cruel experiments he performed in his later, more unhinged years. Dr. Harry Harlow studied the effects of isolation on monkeys. While that might not sound very hardcore, keep in mind these were mostly baby monkeys (We all know how people freak out when anything bad happens that’s baby related) and that Dr. Harlow had a unique penchant for driving monkeys completely and utterly mad, toying with them, throwing them away, and then doing it all over again. This made him Dr. Mengele in the eyes of the animal liberation movement.
The actual “pit of despair” refers to a laboratory contraption designed to isolate monkeys and break their small, furry, little wills. You might think that the media or one of his disaffected research students coined the phase. Nope. Dr. Harlow himself enjoyed calling it that. He was just that intense.
So, as you can probably imagine, ever since Dr. Harlow’s infamous experiments, its been pretty fashionable to hate on the guy. Numerous people have claimed that all he did was prove what we already know, that separating a highly social creature from social interaction would break it, that it was common sense. To that I must say: beotch please. Common sense would suggest that if you cut a chicken’s head off it wouldn’t keep running around for a while. Common sense would also suggest that the world is flat, because, well, it just obviously looks flat from down here. Without science and empirical experimentation we never really know anything, and for this reason alone I tip my hat to him. Man did some dirty work so you could get an awesome wikipedia article...
Yet, even more importantly, Dr. Harlow shows that there really is a real life basis for the mad scientist archetype. I mean, sure, he didn’t breed a chimera or create some super-virus or something, but his slightly disturbed ways of crazy experimentation sound like a familiar plot line. In a alternate universe, Dr. Harlow could have easily created an army of killer robots or a death ray. You’re lucky he stuck to monkeys!
Would you rather have had this??
