Mind and Difference

What if you are different?

This is my very first post on this forum and I hope I chose the correct section, though this could possibly fall into more than just one category.
Both science, philosophy and culture have often tended to create stereotypes, groups, categories, that tag and explain people, human beings.
In a modern era we live in now, it's almost inevitable to encounter many large forms of generalization: psychology, personality types, basic human rules, etc.
History has often proved that the study of human nature can often be misleading, and I hope I will encounter no resistance in affirming that one culmination of error was eugenics, the discussions around that topic, the conclusions and its contributions to result in Holocaust toward mid 20th century.
I have a notion about the fact that also daily orientation models nowadays are debated due to their flaws. From Sigmund Freud to mental disorders, from the Dalai Lama to neuroscience, every interpretation of human nature still seems to harbor controversies in the different societies of man in the world.
In real life, we have often seen the impact of these. Prejudice, wager therapies and in the worst cases also death.

But my main point is yet to come. From the earliest delving in finding an explanation to human nature, hasn't it always been a bit too pretentious to assume a set of interpretations to be almighty and applicable on anyone?
What if neuroscientific research is only statistical and doesn't apply to my specific brain? What if the perspective of a psychotherapist was completely biased by unreliable information, by scienctific information that may surely change in the next decade? What if you have a totally different upbringing, maybe from an unmodern culture, and have to work within the stereotypes of personality that were set by regulations like DSM-IV (personality/mental disorders)?

I used to have questions like these on the tip of my tongue from the day a friend of mine told me something like "...ALL people are like that!".
We all know well that belief and rethorics are able to shape our reality and our behaviour, and that within a system where everyone believes the same thing... certain rules do work!
In different environments, each society has its merited influence on conclusions and decision-making, which can totally differ from eachother...

Since a few decades, as the world was starting to become flat and knowledge is being mixed, there has been a great rise, apart from the religious multitude, of self-improvement culture.
In my opinion, a culture very likely comparable to tarot fortune-telling, astrology, only a bit more refined, with a more fashionable image, as a cheap counterspell against decadence. Each facet of this self-improvement culture is adapted to the circumstances.
Be it Covey's "7 Habits", EFT, Time Line Therapy, Hypnotherapy, Buzans Learning Strategies, healing cassettes... we can go on listing them for eternity.
To my view, the currently most commercial fruit of this phenomena seems to be Neuro-Linguistic Programming, today known in every corner of the world, with many representants and many applications, especially in the area of business, communication and brainwashing.
People use it wherever I look. All the libraries of my city are filled up with them. And many people seem to be finding useful help in the doctrines of Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the co-founders of NLP.

Oh, how happy I was when I saw the effects it had after I used this "tool" for a while. It even seemed to be more applicable than the previous models in history. One of its main mottos is "the map is not the territory", meaning that it can be applied on any human being! It was full of neuroscientific references. Wonderful!
More than one and a half years later, I have grown out of the zeal I used to have.
The package of NLP also had a set of side-effects on me, including hallucinations, verbal and intellectual decay and physical distress. After having pursued explanations to the damages I started suffering from, most of the master trainers/practitioners, including top main representants, revealed themselves to be very similar to fortune-tellers.
My case was too hard for them, probably because I'm a very different person, with a different metabolism of life. I see no other obvious conclusion.
I stopped seeking their advice when I started being fed up of their lies, their incapacity to respond to or explain my problems, and them continuously offering me more and more expensive methods, products and services to solve the damages they dealt, just like prostitutes.
"Our methods work! If Your mind has negative reactions to its effects, it's your Own responsibility!"
That was more or less the typical dismissal message I was given by those people.

This was just an anecdote from my own life, probably a lesson to learn from. I won't go into details of how much I suffered especially to cry out my experience to the world, since it would derail us from the main question of this topic.
The key message was that even today there are great differences in different minds of different people. And the attempt of using one general structure on the most different person can be lethal.

Immanuel Kant required a categorical imperative. Lifestyles have changed ever since. Maybe the different paths of evolution of the multitude of brains will never lead to an almighty model of human nature...
Maybe also other attempts to explain human nature will fail facing diversity.

But diversity can sometimes be very nice, too.

Helena