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
When do they fit us up with ad watching quotameters?
Ones that show if we have watched our quota this week.
Thanks Indigo, was Bernay the one with the girls on the Easter Parade float who, at the reviewings stand where the assembled cameras were, whipped out cigs to demonstrate their modernity? He was fantastic.
And thanks Malisha, no wonder you had a nightmare. The upbringing protocol with no regard to signals from the baby, mentioned earlier hit too close to home for me.
I thought they were just emotionally damaged Scotch-Irish, now maybe they were trying to be modern. Although the first opinions seems strongest.
I think you’re on to something, but I would push the manipulation back further than Skinner, and look specifically at Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud. He invented a lot of what, today, we alternatively call “PR” or “perception management.”
Bernays’ first great stunt was to get women to smoke… and he went on to use PR techniques to engineer a coup that toppled the government of Guatemala.
These techniques are quite scientific and well-developed. The PR guru of today is a man named Mark Penn, who managed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He was a top executive at the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, which helped clean up the image of the Argentine dictatorship, the company that made the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, Exxon after the Valdez oil spill, Union Carbide after the Bhopal chemical disaster, Blackwater after the murder of a number of civilians… in fact, one of the two people killed by the Unabomber was a top executive at this firm.
As to why Americans are so easy to manipulate, part of it is that Americans accept advertising everywhere. The purpose of advertising is to manipulate people’s perceptions of the world. We take it as a sign of progress and abundance that we have so many products to choose from, but each of these products is brought to us by a little lie.
But the techniques work on everybody, and are only becoming more quantitative. Right now, the “cutting edge” is called “neuromarketing” — essentially, watching brain activity through an fMRI while test subjects are exposed to advertising.
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/your-brain-marketing-135355
Manipulation, comes with mind control, usually – and in the case of USA – with and through television and media control, slowly but surely. It goes long back, but most famous was CIA’s program Project MK ULTRA which started the fast exploring of mind and manipulations.
A psychologist Hadley Cantril did a study on the effect of news/ broadcasts and the power of fear injected in humans. Now a well used tool from the government constantly. Hitler lost WW/1 due to the lack of understanding the power of propaganda, but he caught up.
Manipulation is under a big umbrella of strange events of mind control.
OT….
Raff and others who live in Illinios
Any thoughts on the proposed amendment to the IL constitution with regard to pension increases? I want to avoid a Bell,CA scenario but what ARE we going to do about the cliff we face (other than calling for a hit squad on those idiots in Springfield).
Woosty,
Great and appropriate clip!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjqDfpLYuyc
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjqDfpLYuyc&w=560&h=315%5D
Wow, as a result of the terrible image of Skinner’s baby daughter in her temperature-controlled “air crib” environment for two years (I guessd) and my renewed meditation (begun about 20 years ago when I heard of that sociopathic madman and his idiotic bragging) I had a most disturbed and disturbing dream, and just now remembered why it was so hard to wake up this morning. I report somewhere and an infant is “delivered” to me to care for because somehow the infant has no adults. I’m supposed to “deliver” her somewhere else in turn, where she has adults presumably, although none of this is actually known in the dream. She’s very tiny. Everything goes fine. Nothing amiss. At one point, though, after what seems like several days (DAYS!?) of everything being fine, it occurs to me that I should check on whether she needs a diaper change. She doesn’t. But I have no diaper bag, no diapers, and then it occurs to me with an even greater shock, no food for her. In a panic I manage to arrive at a hospital-type place and ask if they can spare a diaper for this baby. The look at the baby — not alarmed — (OK that’s a good sign!) — and give me one hell of a gigantic diaper, big enough for, say, a year-old baby. Can’t fool ME; I’ve HAD a baby. So I figure, “OK, no prob, by the time she uses this one up I can get more that are closer to her size.” But they also seem to have given me a few strange little bottles and a gigantic machine that has nozzles, glass compartments, and complicated doo-jinx but only about an ounce of milk! So I spend the rest of the dream attaching things to other things in an effort to provide this baby with this ounce of milk. She does not seem either hungry or frustrated. (My own kid would’ve brought the house down with his screams by now.) I try to realign the parts of the machine to deliver it back to the hospital intact and suddenly the scene changes and there are adults around, and they are not at all critical of me, and it occurs to me suddenly that I no longer have the baby. Apparently I have already delivered her to them. With some trepidation and embarrassment, I ask, “Was the baby OK?” They say she was fine, everything is in order, and she’s very happy. Then they show me a HUGE, well-fed, complacent, unattractive (somehow, I don’t remember how the baby was or could have been unattractive but I got that impression) year-old baby in a diaper resting in a sort of glass box and expressing no discomfort. Eyes open. But perfectly STILL. It was creepy. And that’s when I must have awakened.
The omission of the real significant information in the starry-eyed, happy dappy description that Skinner’s daughter, as an adult, gave of her “air-crib” and her happy childhood left something out. When that baby was in that controlled environment, she was comfortable. But she was neither living, nor learning to live, in an environment that was not similarly controlled. The first two years of life let us learn (a) how to regulate our body temperature; (b) how to deal with and respond to hunger and other physiological cues; and, most important, (c) how to call forth the attention we need from the adults caring for us. The idea that “since you give them what they need, they do not need to ask for more or other” is a criminal idea, leading me (by a different route but once again) to the “life interest.”
The little Skinner baby was not deprived of her liberty (in that dependent state she had none) or of her property (ditto) but she completely lost her life interest in learning to squawk when she needed something or, without an expressible need, had something to squawk about.
I must say that having reread about the Skinner thing AND about the wacko calling the fast food places, both in a single day, put me in a condition from which I think I have to recover!
I’m a recovering “knower.” Perhaps I should learn to drink. 😈
Behaviorism represents a cynical view of human nature but unfortunately, when applied to a population that can be kept in perpetual fear, also an accurate one. In short, when our brains believe we are in crisis mode, they don’t take time for higher level thinking but instead merely react to a stimulus without first reflecting and responding. Thus, as Naomi Klein laid out in the Shock Doctrine, when the population is shocked, they will fearfully surrender hard-won liberties in favor of security, not taking the time to consider Franklin’s admonition that one who bargains liberty for security deserves neither.
What I find fascinating/fearful is to go back Lakoff’s descriptions of the way the right pushed for and achieved radical reductions of civil liberties during the Bush years and then realize that every issue he warned about has been embraced by the Obama administration. While Lakoff warned that the real battleground was in the brains of citizens, the fact that Obama surrendered these battles (either through the pressures of corporately-funded candidates or political expediency) means almost all of will be conditioned to believe in endless war, an end to social safety nets, and that civil liberties are a quaint, pre-9/11 luxury we can no longer afford.
When the population is constantly afraid, and when the one who promised Hope (and had the power to reframe) instead adopts the same fear-based frames of his neocon predecessors, the battle is almost over. Thus, our nation will continue to go bankrupt, supposedly to win the hearts and minds of the people whose nations we conquer (while actually creating more enemies) while while domestic budgets and civil liberties are slashed simply because the battle over framing has been won in the monds of voters.
Because we’re constantly kept in fear, and the voices of reason have been drowned out, we will remain controllable, and ultimately controlled.
“And no wonder: if man knew no history, the Skinners would govern the world, as Skinner himself has modestly proposed in his behaviorist utopia.”
I am suspicious that these practices engendered some social diseases:
(The Peak of Sanityquoting Barry Levinson, The Age of Insanity). Children are being raised in the midst of an epidemic of lies, which will infect them unless they somehow experience awareness.
MikeS, Interesting piece, thanks. In our culture not only do corporations employ psychological techniques, they employ some of the most creative people in the world to advertise their wares. I always mute commercials as I know many folks do. It’s interesting to watch their counterpunch, making their tv ads an explosion of visual @ the outset of the ad. The Madison Ave. folks are mofo’s!
“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.”
Well said.
“Malisha
1, October 13, 2012 at 10:18 pm
Dredd, whose NOSE is that?”
——————————
Clever.
Whose prick and testicles was my question?
The old woman versus the young one, in the perception picture.
Indio007,
Agreed, dood.
I found a new way of stating it: We accepted the state of slavehood. Ther were economic factors, not humans to be considered. Similarly we as freedmen were also barely more than economic factors.
We did not abstain and condemn slavery following the emancipation proclamation. We accept the premise that origin defines value, character, etc.
As long as we have this mindset, we are a setup for receiving slave conditions and eventual status. We fight
to keep somenone below us, but not those who would make us slaves. We never achieved freedman or full citizenship status after the years of indenture leading to the great depression. We were freed temporarily then but without payment for food to sustain us.
Our strength is numbers, our strength is being united.
Otherwise we are chaff blowing in the wind. Literally, not poetically.
Mike,
Excellent tie in, but does Max mind you reading my mind considering how filthy it can be? But seriously, I’ll have more to say later. I’m having a computer issue that’s taking away from doing anything productive this weekend. (I’m in down time burning some utility CD’s right now, but I’ll be back to it soon.)
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710–.htm
I came upon this link in some fashion, through Idealist, Mike Spindell, and or comments, to an article by Mike back in January. I found it here on Professor Turleys website.
I know many of you have read it, I read it first yesterday. Noam Chomsky is a fine example of an independent thinker. His essay seems very relevant to this discussion.
Important issue, great comments. The problem is as complex as its dissection. Far too often parenting is wanting and children are being ‘fed’ a diet of television, movies, music and video games which not only degrade and desensitize but applaud selfishness and glamorize dishonest behavior.
To provide an environment that allows freedom of choice but neglects discussion of resulting consequence does disservice to all. It is abuse of the system.
Lone Alfares
Darren the breakwaters are kept intact by the Supreme Court, our elected representative Congress, and the executive powers of our President.
Ultimately one person one vote, allows the People to design and emplace the Interpreters of Law, Creators of Law, and Direction of Law.
Corporations are people. Money is free speech. These two rulings are taking root, and their roots in time will destroy, our constitution Of the People, For the People, By the People.
The destruction has started, Frank Luntz and Rove are Skinner spawn, and they will multiply fast. The Uber Rich love to throw crackers at fellows like these and watch them fatten.
Mike Spindell points out,
“One meme that has been developed from this is that our Elite 1% are entrepreneurial heroes, who are the only “job creators” worth mentioning.”
Luntz and Rove create these circus acts for the 99%ers to be dazzled by.
The 0.1%ers love to watch their pet Nazguls hypnotize the populace.
The breakwater around Mordor is being built higher than the breakwater protecting our Constitution.
Anybody got a fancy gold ring ?
ID707 and Anon Posted,
Thank you ID for linking “The Authoritarians” and thank you AP for detailing the Milgram experiments, they both dovetail beautifully with the point I’m trying to make.
Mike, thank you much for the link. I read the article and shared / liked it on Facebook and elsewhere. All you other commenters — please share it on whatever forums you subscribe to.
Thank you Mike for another good article for our discourse.
I suppose one afterthought I have from this would be there can be islands of reason available to individuals or families amidst the sea of decline in society here. That is, we as individuals can choose to live otherwise and not subject ourselves to the traps of this kind of mindset.
An example would be as simple as this. If a parents of a family decide the influence of commercialism, bad citizenship and poor examples for children are too frequent via television they can choose to simply turn off the TV or watch only some programming. And while the rest of the children in the neighborhood become spoiled, overweight, and lazy, our family’s children can instead have the opportunity to not be a part of this and presumably do better in life.
If the decay or corporatizing is happening it has really two concerns of someone who chooses not to be a part of it. First, whether or not the person is afforded the ability to choose whether or not to be a part of it such as market choices or keeping corporate interests from politics, the law or the judiciary. The second concern is whether this island of free choice to live otherwise is not surrounded by a sea so tempestuous, the tumult inundates the island and wipes out the inhabitants.
So I suppose succinctly, the line in the sand we must never allow to be crossed would be to put breakwaters to protect the islands of liberty, and never allow the storm of corporatization to grow too wild.
Dredd, whose NOSE is that?