IS SOCIETY SICK? Part III PRISONER OF THE MIND

Part III

PRISONER OF THE MIND

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007

"Psychological manipulation pervades all areas of society, not only through the use of skills and techniques, but through the conveyance of oppressive behavior to the oppressed themselves, and through the use of psychology as an ideology for the defense of the status quo."

Phil Brown (1973)

There is a reluctance to focus on the question: is society sick?

This is not only a problem for professional thinkers but also for laymen. There is a kind of normalcy to the idea that society is sick and people are sick in society. So what?

The frenetic pace of society, the compulsive waste making, the robbing Peter to pay Paul, the planning for planning sake, the living without consequence, the lifestyle diseases, the looking for miraculous drugs to cure addictions, hey, what's all the fuss about? It's the way it is! But is it? And if so, why is it?

We are told we are a nation of believers in God but that doesn't include going to church. We are told we are a religious and caring nation, but that doesn't include knowing and fraternizing with our neighbors next door.

The religion of the West is imbued with the idea of God and the individual as infinitely precious and irreducibly real for his having an immortal soul. Yet, the history of carnage in the West, and violent crime in the United States, contradicts this perception. Thinking and behaving are worlds apart.

Churches are constructed as houses of worship, but have become increasingly empty of worshipers, as modern society has moved away from religious doctrine to empirical dogma.

In Freudian speak, religion once kept the "lid on the Id," but no longer. The moral highway has no speed limits, no consensus rules of the road, and so crashes have become the symphony of the times. We lost 55,000 Americans in the Viet Nam War. We lose that many every year on American highways as a gauge of this reckless carnage and despair.

The Id is running rampant, as there is no Superego in evidence.

The paradox is that everything is set on the rational while everyone is lost in the wilderness of the irrational. Incest and murder, corruption and malfeasance, and coveting the neighbor's wife and property have become banner headlines. We have lost our way. Even being nice has been replaced by being with it.

The idea of the immortal soul has been superseded by the idea of the individual personality, which is not immortal but all the more precious for not being so. Identity and role relationships have become the new psychology. The irony is that psychology rose out of philosophy and has never found its own identity much less its role. So, rather than create that role, it continues to search for it.

The evidence is demonstrated as psychology develops a new branch every time a perplexing problem surfaces. Currently, we have existential psychology, which rises out of a philosophy that is as obtuse as it is absurd, and humanistic psychology, which attempts to be everything to everybody. The clergy, desperate for survival, grab these new psychologies as if long lost relatives, accepting their dogma, and incorporating them into their sermons as if pure gravitas.

In this new age of the idea of the individual, we measure a person's worth not by his bond, or what he has done, but what he can become. It is the philosophy of "wait until next year."

His worth is a measure of his presence, or how good an actor he is. The more he can shock us to attention the more vivid he is. We see him making his mark as an artist, scientist, businessman or entertainer, not on the strength of his performance, but on future promise. He is phantom we have created chasing shadows, but we don't care as long as he is interesting.

I use the word "phantom" in the Buddhist sense. The Buddhist would read the careerist's resume, curriculum vitae, or biography as the preferred picture in the individual's mind. Picture is not a person, but a touched up portrait removed of blemishes. This makes the individual appear near perfect if unreal, while treating that phantom world as real.

This has created the current mirage in which, seemingly, we all look alike, dress alike, speak alike, think alike, and behave alike as if we have no identity at all, or as if our shadow is real and we are not.

This persistence of memory is buttressed with our programmed conformity. We like to think we are different because we have a given and surname and are told we have an individual self. This fails to refute the fact that we are a society of sleepwalkers addressing each other within this dream of selfhood.

All our ideas of morality and obligation, blame and praise are based on this dream and serve only to strengthen the illusion of its reality.

In this age of manipulation, what Everett Shostrom (1967) calls our obsession with thingness; we delight in playing the fraud on ourselves to disguise our false consciousness. Phil Brown writes:

"Industrial psychologists make factory workers more comfortable, but only in ways to sap their militancy and thus insure corporate profit; fancy lounges and counseling services are traded off for speed ups of the assembly line. Advertising psychologists aid the corporations on the opposite end by brainwashing people into consuming harmful and/or meaningless products. School psychologists push working class children into vocational tracks, while placing middle strata children into academic tracks. Military psychologists polish the machinery of U S imperialism providing adjustment for antiwar GI's. Social psychologists perform research for counter insurgency plans and racial inequality. IQ research by men such as Jensen and Herrstein not only provides the ruling class's answer to black struggles for freedom, but also provides the rational basis for repression since it is scientific."

Erasmus would see the folly in all this, but these people are dead serious and they are playing with people's minds. Time (December 31, 1973) sees this as a new definition of corruption where money may not be involved but the way people are perceived and treated is.

There is an up and down war that constantly goes on in the social and behavioral sciences. Experimental psychologists who play with mice all day pride themselves on their rigorous research designs. They put down sociologists because they have less precise methodologies, and have been known to speculate about their findings. Both psychologists and sociologists put down anthropologists because they seldom use statistical analysis in their value-laden case studies. Political scientists, historians and geographers are even held in less repute.

Should anyone take a side road into philosophical speculation, he is likely never to be invited back. He has committed the cardinal sin of becoming an interdisciplinarian, venturing outside the sacred walls of his discipline and contaminating himself with culture. Ernest Becker took this plunge in "The Birth and Death of Meaning" (1971) never again to be considered comfortable by his colleagues.

George Bernard Shaw was fond to remind us that the virtues we hold dear to our hearts have a price tag on them. Shaw asked an elegant lady of society if she would go to bed with him for 20,000 British pounds. She replied, "But of course, silly, who wouldn't?" Then Shaw parried, "Would you go to bed with me for five pounds?" Indignantly, the lady said, "I most certainly wouldn't," then added, "what kind of a woman do you think I am?" To which Shaw rejoined, "We already know that, now don't we? We're just trying to determine your price range."

The games scholars play is not unlike the game we all play. Scholars lie. Scholars cheat. Scholars play the con. Now, is this a humanistic fact or a self-righteous fiction?

We know we lie and cheat and play the con on ourselves as well as others, but we are not scholars so we are excused for being human. We expect scholars like our priests to be above reproach, but they are not; indeed, neither are the religious. We are all prisoners of our society's mind, and that mind not only condones lying and cheating and playing the con, but also continuously invents new imaginative ways to exercise the propensity.

Scholars cheat because many are involved in research that they know beforehand is pointless, valueless and meaningless, and like hundreds of studies done before. So, why do these scholars write for grants to attempt research the character of which is inconsistent with their personal and professional code of ethics?

Scholars cheat for the same reasons that we do. They cheat to keep the wolf from the door. They cheap because the academic freedom they purport to enjoy does not in fact exist. They operate in a managed environment of compromise and trade offs: from "publish or perish" to the seductive possibility of tenure. This is not unlike the larger environment that embraces us all.

And like us, the majority of the academic community is docile, timid, tentative, yielding, unimaginative, protective, security conscious, afraid, mechanistic and unoriginal. It is the mindset that permeates our society, so why shouldn't it penetrate the ivory towers of academia?

Academics are also petty because they are powerless; slaves to the norm and obsessively driven to replicate these norms, while giving off the impression to the contrary. They are not only non-thinkers like most of us they are non-leaders as well. They are our mirror image, and not protectors of the lamp of Diogenes that we fantasize.

Where they differ with most of us is that they can cover their deceptions in a sea of words, or hide their illusions in an ocean of statistics, which fortifies the academic "I" from the societal "we" intended to be served. The greater the separation of academia from the wider community the more pronounced the conflict between them. If one community is sick can the other community be well?

This cognitive dissonance is buried in what Leon Festinger (1957) described as cognitive consistency. We change things around, whatever we experience, to fit with what we perceive to be true no matter how outrageous the discrepancy. We are motivated to achieve consistency between our attitudes and behavior. When it does not exist, our minds make the adjustment to make it so.

When someone says we have a twisted brain, they are not talking out of church. We all do. Unbeknownst to us, our brains -- vain, emotional, immoral, deluded, pigheaded, secretive, weak-willed, and bigoted -- push and pull, twist and warp our perceptions of reality.

The scholar prides himself in his objectivity, his value-free conscience, his integrity, and open mindedness. He sees himself as a high priest pursuing research above the banality and carnality of society. He cannot accept academia being a reflection and pawn of society, and so he denies it emotionally and intellectually, hard evidence be damned! He cannot accept it; therefore, it does not exist.

Consequently, the behavioral scientist in particular and the social scientist in general has equated proliferation with profundity and methodology with meaning. He can describe society's dilemma in impressive terms, but has failed to move society one iota closer to resolution of its conflicts. He has had little success in explaining why we lie, cheat, and steal from ourselves, much less make us less so inclined. He can define populations but not divine behavior. He is an artist of methodology and paradigms attempting to be scientist. He represents a discipline in search of a philosophy.

Fifty (50) percent of the world's psychologists and seventy-five (75) percent of the world's sociologists work in the United States. They were given the body of America as patient in the 1960s to study. What single contribution did their collective genius produce?

They developed a new lexicon and new expressions such as "fail safe," and "one man one vote," and "Medicare," "Megadeath," and "lifestyle," and "black humor," and "elephant jokes," and "God is dead" (Nietzsche style), and "non-books."

They also came up with "soul," and "open housing," and "Marshall McLuhan," and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf," and "Thalidomide," and "cross-busing," and "cluster development," and "white backlash," and "multiversity," and "super star," and "Super Bowl."

They had no trouble mentioning in the same breath "White Paper," and "Black Power," and "New Math," and "Sit-ins," and "de facto segregation," and "ad hoc committees," and "Black studies," and of course, war.

James Reston wrote: "No nation ever fought such a vicious war (Viet Nam) in the midst of such sacrifice by some of its people and so little sacrifice by the rest."

Of course scholars were too busy to note the import of these words, as they were congratulating themselves with the panache of James V. McConnell, who proclaimed:

"I believe that the day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with drugs, hypnosis and astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain absolute control over an individual's behavior."

McConnell is not alone. Behaviorists, without affirmation, have for the past four decades held the heady belief that people can be molded by simply deciding how they should be molded and then manipulating their behavior to that criteria, as if man were a laboratory mouse.

Scholars have been given the exalting role of society's thinkers, a role the rest of society relinquishes with a sigh of relief.

Scholarship, or the product scholars produce, is accepted unequivocally as the blueprint of wisdom and master plan of good sense. Little note is taken of the lack of originality, spark of wisdom, or pinch of sense.

Society accepts their prescriptions as the remedies it is looking for, even if their formulae later prove to be killers. Fortunately, most of their prescriptions have the innocuous consistency of placebos. Still, the danger exists because they are trusted without qualification, making society vulnerable to their hubris and excess.

Scholars have the comfort of hieroglyphic speak in that laymen fail to have access to their technical shorthand. One need only spend an hour in a university library perusing the journals of scholars to see how much this is so. They insulate themselves from the vernacular hiding their frustration in a glib rhetorical style accompanied by grids and graphs, schematics and statistics that conveniently bury the definition of the problem in the blur. The non-scholar reader expects to be so impressed by this obfuscation that he takes solace that better minds than his are so employed. This is obvious in social and behavioral research, but is equally true in the hard sciences as well.

Once advanced training in a discipline earns an MA, MS, or Ph.D., the holder has a license to play his con on society as a bona fide scholar with credentials the equivalent to credibility. It matters little if his frame of reference, his problem design, his creative verve, and the legitimacy of his research is without merit. As long as hieroglyphic speak resonates with his interlocutors, he is journal bound to take up space in some university library masquerading as profundity.

Ivan Illich in "Deschooling Society" (1970) saw education a farce with a societal revolution fragmenting the bond of trust between scholars and laymen. He recommended nothing less than radical surgery:

"In a school society, we have come to rely more and more on the professional judgment of the educators on the effect of their own work in order to decide whom we can or cannot trust; we go to the doctor, lawyer, or psychologist because we trust that anybody with the required amount of specialized educational treatment by other colleagues deserves our confidence. In a deschooled society, professionals could no longer claim the trust of their clients on the basis of their curricular pedigree, or ensure their standing by simply referring their clients to other professionals who approved of their schooling."

Instead of placing trust in scholars and professionals, it would be prudent, according to Illich, to place that same trust in the judgment of the client himself. This would mean, of course, turning society completely upside-down, and inside-out.

Imagine judging thought on the basis of the thinking and not on the basis of the pedigree of the thinker. It would put the onus on each of us to involve ourselves in the process of making judgments, and not leave that confidence up to an outsider. Perish the thought, we would have to do our own thinking. We could no longer take comfort in being prisoners of the mind. We could no longer skip thinking to the shorthand of stereotypical answers to all our problems: that is, seeing farmers as "rednecks" and blacks as "lazy," and Jews "as all rich," and men "as strong" and women "as weak."

Bias would perish from our vocabulary. Gone would be the luxury of generalizing about the motivation of the youth culture, or the disposition of old age, as we would base all on our direct experience and consideration. We would have to know our own mind to cease to be prisoners of everyone else's.

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19. Phil Brown (editor), Radical Psychology, Colophon Books, Harper & Row, New York, 1973.
20. "Corruption in the U.S.: Do they all do it?" Time Magazine, December 31, 1973.
21. Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man, Free Press, New York, 1971.
22. Everett L. Shostrom, Man, the Manipulator, Abingdon Press, New York, 1967.
23. Ibid, Brown.
24. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford University Press, 1957.
25. James Reston, The New York Times, February 17, 1968.
26. James V. McConnell, Time Magazine, April 2, 1973.
27. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Harper & Row, New York, 1970.