is that understanding how systems shape humans both as individuals and as a society is not de-humanising, it’s possibly the most humanising something can be.
Yes but no. It’s dangerous territory, promising both great rewards yet also containing fatal traps: The problem is reducing our own understanding and with that perception of the world to our intellectual understanding. To paint a caricature: When you start to measure mouth angles to figure out whether someone’s happy instead of relying on your mirror neurons (“subjective interpretation”, cry the Skinnerites). Psychology itself is a very good example here, they legitimately did have to make studies to prove that mood and posture are connected because there were just too many sceptics around with their heads up in their theories, disconnected from their own humanity, their perception of reality having become limited to those theories, not unwilling but unable to see things that don’t come with a p value. And that’s within psychology itself have a good guess how it’s in other disciplines. Not really that relevant in say mathematics, but in economics? As said: Fatal.
Evolution already gave us tools to understand the world. Sure, it also enabled us with rationality, the capacity for science, but to deny that natural understanding is just as bad as shutting off our rationality, it alienates ourselves from our own nature with contains both, in both cases we’re incomplete. And for the record: It also provided us with the capacity to mistake social conditioning for actual intuition.
And yes this all is very much the crisis of the millennium but OTOH you shouldn’t worry too much evolution already seems to have accounted for it: Skinnerites tend to be unfuckable. That’s because they’re alienated from their own nature, and that makes you ugly.
To be human is to be shaped entirely by your environment and your reactions to it simultaneously, and mass psychology is how we come to have anything remotely psychological to be.
There’s variance in human psychology that makes individual either more or less prone to move with the flock, or look at it critically, it’s a necessary condition for societies to be even half-way functional: With only pure flock swimmers we’d be blindly following each other down cliffs, with only pure critics we’d not be a social species in the first place. And a society made of solely flock swimmers would not develop a critical understanding of psychology in the first place. And when I say “variance” here I very much mean nature, not nurture, nurture in this instance only comes into play if the nature happens to be ambivalent.