Submitted by: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
The two major themes that run through most of my guest blogs here are the idea that we are being manipulated by a Corporate Oligarchy, whose aim is to re-establish Feudalism in an American format. The second theme is my belief that their method of control is perpetrating this revision of America through manipulation of the National myths to which we have all been exposed. They have worked hard and somewhat successfully to take the myths and turn them into memes. One myth that I’ve recently written about is the “American Dream” that all of us have an equal chance of fulfilling all our aspirations based on our innate abilities and hard work alone. One meme that has been developed from this is that our Elite 1% are entrepreneurial heroes, who are the only “job creators” worth mentioning. The truth is that most of the 1% inherited their wealth, like the Koch Brothers or Donald Trump, while many others were born in privileged settings and rose in the world through their contacts with others from the same background.
Gene Howington, a friend and another guest blogger, has approached the same territory with his four part series of discussions of propaganda methodology. Gene and I are running on parallel tracks getting at the same thing and interestingly both of us set out on our parallel paths independent of discussion with the other. Gene and I have both touched on the mechanisms that are being used and in Gene’s case eve the science of the manipulation, but I think both of us have missed the specific science that has been adopted by corporations and used to perform this attempt to control. Today I came across an article at Alternet.org http://www.alternet.org/ that flashed the proverbial light bulb in my brain. When I read it my thought was, of course……. .Why haven’t I as someone trained in mental health seen this connection before? I will present extensive quotes from the article and then link it. I think it is important enough that everyone who visits here should read this article through.
“The corporatization of society requires a population that accepts control by authorities, and so when psychologists and psychiatrists began providing techniques that could control people, the corporatocracy embraced mental health professionals. In psychologist B.F. Skinner’s best-selling book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), he argued that freedom and dignity are illusions that hinder the science of behavior modification, which he claimed could create a better-organized and happier society.”
“During the height of Skinner’s fame in the 1970s, it was obvious to anti-authoritarians such as Noam Chomsky (“The Case Against B.F. Skinner”) and Lewis Mumord that Skinner’s worldview—a society ruled by benevolent control freaks—was antithetical to democracy. In Skinner’s novel Walden Two (1948), his behaviorist hero states, “We do not take history seriously,” to which Lewis Mumford retorted, “And no wonder: if man knew no history, the Skinners would govern the world, as Skinner himself has modestly proposed in his behaviorist utopia.” As a psychology student during that era, I remember being embarrassed by the silence of most psychologists about the political ramifications of Skinner and behavior modification.”
This article is titled: “Why Are Americans So Easy to Manipulate and Control?” and it is written by Bruce E. Levine . After some explanation of the methodology used to manipulate us, Mr. Levine goes on to provide the background of the Psychologist who most influenced B.F. Skinner and surprisingly, or perhaps not, this man gave up his profession to become an Executive with the famous J.Walter Thompson advertising Agency in the 1940’s.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Walter_Thompson_Company
“[B.F.]Skinner was heavily influenced by the book Behaviorism (1924) by John B. Watson. Watson achieved some fame in the early 1900s by advocating a mechanical, rigid, affectionless manner in child rearing. He confidently asserted that he could take any healthy infant, and given complete control of the infant’s world, train him for any profession. When Watson was in his early 40s, he quit university life and began a new career in advertising at J. Walter Thompson.
Behaviorism and consumerism, two ideologies that achieved tremendous power in the 20th century, are cut from the same cloth. The shopper, the student, the worker, and the voter are all seen by consumerism and behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable objects.”
How exactly do we get from B.F.Skinner’s psychological theories to an anti-democratic manipulation?
“For Skinner, all behavior is externally controlled, and we don’t truly have freedom and choice. Behaviorists see freedom, choice, and intrinsic motivations as illusory, or what Skinner called “phantoms.” Back in the 1970s, Noam Chomsky exposed Skinner’s unscientific view of science, specifically Skinner’s view that science should be prohibited from examining internal states and intrinsic forces.
In democracy, citizens are free to think for themselves and explore, and are motivated by very real—not phantom—intrinsic forces, including curiosity and a desire for justice, community, and solidarity. What is also scary about behaviorists is that their external controls can destroy intrinsic forces of our humanity that are necessary for a democratic society.”
The “conditioning” of many Americans, the fruit of which we’re now seeing starts with our children:
“Behavior modification can also destroy our intrinsic desire for compassion, which is necessary for a democratic society. Kohn offers several studies showing “children whose parents believe in using rewards to motivate them are less cooperative and generous [children] than their peers.” Children of mothers who relied on tangible rewards were less likely than other children to care and share at home.
How, in a democratic society, do children become ethical and caring adults? They need a history of being cared about, taken seriously, and respected, which they can model and reciprocate. Today, the mental health profession has gone beyond behavioral technologies of control. It now diagnoses noncompliant toddlers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and pediatric bipolar disorder and attempts to control them with heavily sedating drugs. While Big Pharma directly profits from drug prescribing, the entire corporatocracy benefits from the mental health profession’s legitimization of conditioning and controlling.”
I hope my quotations have given you enough of a taste of this article to cause you to follow this link and read it in its’ entirety, with the various backup evidence it offers. It will take perhaps 5 minutes of your time, but I think that time will be well worth it to you. http://www.alternet.org/why-are-americans-so-easy-manipulate-and-control?page=0%2C2&paging=off
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Mike S, thank you, very important piece of work. I read the article, and remembered that a friend of mine went to college (one of the Seven Sisters Schools) with Skinner’s daughter. She was not psychotic or anything else weird. My friend, who became a physician, said, “She was nothing remarkable. No friends. No enemies.” And I thought, “a happy society.”
Intellectual articles and books and disturbing movies notwithstanding, we are going there, I believe we are irremediably and inexorably going there. I have only one descendant and he will not be having children (his choice, which his partners have all gone along with so far) so I comfort myself in the belief that I won’t actually be here to see it materialize.
So, throw down already! ….
In 1964, as an elective in a Sociology course at Roanoke College, I worked as a volunteer at a local VA hospital where patients were heavily drugged with Thorazine, Stellazine etc. They seemed always to be in a Zombie-like state.
In ’68-71, as a Special Education teacher, most of my students were
taking Ritalin and other drugs.
My point is that what you are saying in your Post is not new.
20/20, John Quinones
“Questioning an Authority Figure”
“A man claiming to be a bounty hunter asks shoppers at a market for a favor.”
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=7160770
“The corporatization of society requires a population that accepts control by authorities… – AlterNet article
‘Compliance,’ A Low Budget Indie, Might Be The Most Disturbing Movie Ever Made
Posted: 08/15/2012 1:28 pm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/15/compliance-movie-film_n_1779123.html
“Compliance,” … is not a Holocaust drama or a gory war film or a Lars Von Trier genital mutilation-fest. It is a psychological thriller grounded in an almost documentary level of reality and will probably hold up as one of the most well-paced, brilliantly acted films of the year.
It was also, without a doubt, the most uncomfortable film experience of my life. Certainly it makes one question what constitutes a “great” film; though I don’t really wish the experience of viewing “Compliance” on anybody, I also haven’t stopped thinking about it.
Further compounding the psychologically disturbing nature of “Compliance” is the fact that it is based almost entirely on true events.
According to the film, in the decade leading up to 2004, more than 70 cases were reported of a man, pretending to be a police officer or some other authority figure, who called a fast-food restaurant and requested strip searches of employees. Each incident shared a similar pattern: The purported officer claimed to need help to solve a case, which required a manager to remove a female employee’s clothing and, in some cases, perform sexual acts on her.
The film is based on one such event, which occurred at a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Ky., in 2004. In Zobel’s version, Dreama Walker stars as Becky, a blond, teenage employee of “Chickwich,” a fictional fast-food restaurant in Ohio, and Ann Dowd stars — in an epically nuanced, Oscar-worthy performance — as her well-meaning manager, Sandra.
Early in the film, Sandra receives a call from a man claiming to be a local police officer named “Officer Daniels,” who explains that Becky has been accused of stealing from a customer. Officer Daniels then instructs Sandra to remove Becky’s clothes, her belongings, to help him “find the money,” and then — well, it just gets worse from there.
The most unsettling part of “Compliance” (or rather, one of about a million unsettling parts — really the whole movie is one long, unsettling part) is that, from an outsider’s perspective, the whole escalation could have easily been avoided. As an audience member, one knows very early on that the caller isn’t really a cop, so why doesn’t this manager know? Why does she go along with it? Why does young Becky not resist?
At the panel following the screening, psychologist Stanton Peele suggested anyone might do the same thing in a similar situation. Though when the audience was pressed — “How many people in this room think they would have gone along with this scenario if they were present?” Peele asked — no one raised their hands.
“Nobody in this room would have fallen for it? Really?” Peele pressed. “Well, that’s such a wonderful thing.”
Then some of the audience members became vocal. A woman in the back suggested that any “intelligent” person would know right away that the caller wasn’t real, and obviously no cop would request this type of thing from a woman over the phone in a public place. Another man suggested it was a matter of “IQ,” and that anyone with a “high IQ” wouldn’t fall for it.
“These people were working at a fast-food store!” the man explained.
Someone else, however, who said he was also “highly educated,” admitted that he wouldn’t have asked if the man was a real police officer. “If you truly believed there was a threat of consequence, you would have done it,” he said. “A police officer is calling, saying you might lose your job, you might be held accountable if you don’t do these things, you might follow through.”
“This man didn’t call banks and law firms, he called places of vulnerability,” one audience member said.
Psychology Today editor-at-large Hara Estroff suggested that the events in the film paralleled those of the famous experiments done by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s, in which he asked various subjects to deliver intense shocks to people in other rooms who wrongly answered a series of questions. The shocks increased with each incorrect answer.
Milgram had surveyed professors and students before carrying out the experiments, and all had told him they would never do such a thing; yet, when the actual experiments were carried out, 65 percent followed through until the end, administering the final 450-volt shock to the unseen victims.
Estroff quoted Milgram: “Ordinary people simply doing their jobs without any particular hostility can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”
Indeed, Peele suggested, the recent Sandusky trial is a perfect example of this.
“The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children Sandusky victimized,” he said. “They never demonstrated through actions or words any concern for the safety and well-being of Sandusky’s victims until after he was arrested.”
Regardless of whether or not “Compliance” is a film likely to draw widespread interest — it also divided audiences when it screened at Sundance this year — one can’t deny the questions it raises.
The soft-spoken Zobel seemed to appreciate the intense reactions elicited by his film, and to look forward to seeing how the rest of the world would respond. Though he said he originally had no idea what he was getting into when he began working on the film, he said the stories of these prank calls had immediately “riveted” him.
“They’re sensationalist news that you read about, and then the next day it’s not there anymore,” he said. “I’d immediately had such an adverse reaction to it, where I said, ‘There’s no way I would be that guy.’ But I had to ask myself, ‘Am I being honest, that I’ve never been in my life been in a situation where an authority figure has asked me to do something I disagreed with, but I’ve gone along with it because I didn’t feel I had the agency to say no?'”
It would appear that the Catholic Church was so far ahead of Skinner that he could have studied the teachings of the church as it clawed its way from a group of followers of a peaceful carpenter to the power hungry behemoth it became after it became the state religion of Rome to its current iteration as the patriarchal, power hungry, misogynist, scandal ridden bureaucracy it is.
Interesting perception….
Sorry. I’m fixated on “tangible” reward, Raf, and asked that we ignore the racial problem. Mike, is my fixation hopelessly off base here?
Eeyore,
Whatever she perceives as rewarding and for her, getting the black man out of the White House as she has been instructed to believe is reward enough.
“a Corporate Oligarchy, whose aim is to re-establish Feudalism in an American format.”
Already there dood.
They are working on slavery now, with an exception. They want no duty to take care of the slave AT ALL.
The 14th amendment didn’t guarantee equality by bringing slaves up. It brought freemen down to slavery thus making all equal. The USA brought all into care creating a “status” of jurisdictional SUBJECT… whatever that means.
Slartibart,
You have found the link now I hope? If not, it is in the last line of the blog.
MikeS wrote before about another component.
How some need authorities to steer them. The RWA’s, Right Wing Authoritarians. Folks who have chosen a source as their guiding light and who accept and defend to death (?) the guidance given.
“Obama is a communist” “What is that?” “Study it out”.
Reading it will take more than 5 minutes.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
——————-
But that is OT for the moment. Back to behaviourism and populace control, including the death of democracy.
The expertise of the Republican side in packaging their message is obviously better than the Dem side.
MikeS, I assume like GeneH, believes that both sides have the same ultimate purpose, since money steers them both.
Read the article and then come back. Best so.
So in summary, what is the score. Are we consumers? Did you suspect that you and your kids are steered?
Why do you envy Siegel? And feel that Trump is a star? Just joking (?).
Give Chomsky a chew.
Lastly, how do we counteract this? I mean with starting with ourselves. Reading and study is so hard.
Watching sports is more fun, or house furnishing programs, or playing with your grandchildren.
Slartibart,
Think of the woman who recently called Obama a communist. She is not rich, nor are the millions of other Americans like her who will vote just as the Kock brothers want. What is her tangible reward? (For now, let’s ignore the racial component.)
Slartibart
I agree they seem to respond to an authoritarian mindset, but the article talks about tangible rewards. What are those? (The cigarette story sticks in my head but the Koch brothers offer me nothing.)
And what is the “tangible” reward that conservatisim offers? They want to eliminate the rewards: healthcare, social security, access to higher education, etc.
Eeyore,
I dunno… you get to hate all sorts of people? And when you’re rich your taxes will be low? Maybe a nice statue of Ayn Rand? I’m sure there’s something…
Mike,
Although I don’t agree with your premise that they want to take us back to feudalism, there are some very interesting ideas here. I don’t have much time right now so perhaps I read too fast, but I don’t get a clear idea of how our voting preferences are “controlled” and how this works in our religious choices. And can you offer some ideas as to why the right seems so much more “controlled” than the left?
Eeyore,
I would guess that the right’s tendency towards an authoritarian mindset is likely what results in the greater “control” you suggest.
Great article and observations. Thanks
Behavior modification takes many forms, but they all rely on one thing – isolation of the target. In a big country such as ours, it’s difficult to isolate people without controlling all of the centers where belief systems are first formed. If you’re going to tell a lie and repeat it until it is accepted as the truth (brainwashing), you can’t have people exposed to the truth. So education, science, the media and even religion are particularly important. One of the ways of undermining people psychologically is to take away values that they live by. As a result, we have seen a degradation in this country’s moral values through the intentional destruction of the family system. It’s all part of what you call the manipulation of America.
Mike,
FYI, your link to Altnet.org goes to the front page—not the article you reference.
(needless to say, another great article… 😉 )