UNDERMINING THE EDUCATED CLASSES WITH PSYCHOLOGY
by Jon Rappoport
author of THE MATRIX REVEALED
April 19, 2012
“…the methods that are used by law enforcement to gain confessions are based upon extremely powerful psychological techniques that have been known to social scientists for decades. These same methods have been used by marketers and conmen alike for centuries to convince regular people to do their will. That fact that these same techniques can be applied by law enforcement to get people, who often times should clearly have known better, to give statements that result in lengthy imprisonment, or even execution, is a testament to the power of such techniques!” — Eric Mings, PhD of interrogationpsychology.com.
For many new readers who are coming to my work for the first time, part of my approach is to analyze systems that operate as mind control.
These systems aren’t called mind control. They work by shrinking down the vision of what a human being can be. They reduce, limit, restrict—sometimes in the name of “good science.”
Such systems are often thought of as “realistic.” They appeal to the educated classes because they are taught in colleges, and because they can be studied extensively.
During one of my interviews with retired propaganda master Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), he stopped and said, “Look, you really want to understand what psychology is all about? It has two main uses now. Profiling a potential enemy, and concocting successful advertising. In both cases, it looks for the lowest common denominator. Is that what you want therapy in an office to deliver to a patient? A lowest common denominator?”
With the onset of Freudian psychoanalysis, intellectuals in the West began to perceive a new way of looking at the human being: as a bundle of INTERIOR problems, which needed to be resolved through a deep understanding of primary traumas sustained in childhood.
These problems were touted as UNAVOIDABLE. There was no way to work around them, except through therapy.
This sort of propaganda was undertaken by newly minted “mental-health professionals,” who were busy creating journals and conferences and faculty positions, in order to cement their status in society.
Essentially, their sales pitch was: we’re indispensable; we are the only people who can restore true sanity.
As psychology spread its wings, the restoration of sanity, which from the beginning was a fatally flawed jumble of nonsense, took on a different hue. It morphed into: making people normal.
This was an easier goal to comprehend, and it fed into the fears of those who wanted to be accepted in a world that was becoming increasingly conventional and conformist.
Of course, normalcy could never be adequately defined, but people had a sense of what it meant. That was good enough. Getting along with others was part of it. Feeling comfortable in a group was part of it. Sharing similar ideas and feelings was part of it. Being a member of a team was part of it. Learning to live with limitations was part of it.
All these factors helped extend the growing political concept of Collectivism, a system in which the so-called needs of the many are placed light-years ahead of the needs of the individual.
Psychological therapy was now viewed as a process through which a patient could learn to adapt and adjust—and moreover, such adjustment was deemed “recovery from neurosis.”
In other words, it wasn’t just superficial socialization. It was the attainment of inner equilibrium, a victory in which “what a human really is” was achieved.
This was the new propaganda.
Well, what else would you expect? Psychologists couldn’t simply say, “We’re training you to fit in.” They had to dress it up.
The bottom line here—and it is a very significant one—is that great individual achievement was taken off the stage.
It was replaced by an average life. Furthermore, psychologists made it their business to point out that great heroes often suffer from mental disorders.
The overall effect on civilization, as psychology was integrated into the language and the every-day consciousness of citizens, was enormous.
GREAT INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT was downplayed. It was no longer a widely accepted goal. Its day had passed.
“Do you want to ‘distort your psychology’ in order to attain some sort of illusory greatness, or do you want to be happy?”
Many, many people, in all times and places, are on the lookout for ways to accept stripped-down lowered expectations; psychology provided that in spades. Normalcy was now a “theory of the mind.”
And here is where the placebo effect enters in. Humans, when pressed, when they feel their present situation is intolerable, will look to any hope for relief. If it is offered by a psychologist, a patient will INVENT A ROLE FOR HIMSELF in which he truly does want to be “normal” above all else. In this role, he will find, in therapy, exactly what he needs to confirm that, yes, he has these interior problems that can be worked out and resolved through the language and the concepts of psychological therapy.
The good patient.
The good patient reconstructs his past to fit the basic notions of therapy.
And it works, like any placebo does—for a little while. Then the construct fractures; and the outcome splits open like a badly designed coat.
Psychology, as it turns out, is merely a sub-category of theater, played out on the basis of not knowing it is theater.
The sacrifice is: great individual achievement.
And the rest is history, which we are living through now.
The answer is to restore what has been sacrificed.
And when you start down that road, you inevitably meet up with your own imagination, and you can’t deny it. If you’re honest, you realize you’re a great deal more than you thought you were. Therefore, you can’t fall back on foolish little prescriptions. You can’t play the same old games. You can’t use a system to make yourself blind.
My description of the basis of modern psychology should make it obvious I am talking about a system of mind control. It (psychology) is somewhat subtle, because it quietly rejects the larger context in which an individual could operate on his own.
Instead, it substitutes notions like “compensation,” “acting out,” “personal drama.” In and of themselves, these labels might, in some situations, be vaguely interesting. But when wedded to the prospect of CURING a person of their negative impact, the stage is set for a reduction of energy, creative power, and space. Why? Because the terms of the problem have been placed on a smaller platform and the dimension of the solution has also been prefabricated to fit that platform.
Psychotherapy is to the creative life as a kitchen melodrama is to high adventure.
Think about it. If you were consciously setting out to corral and capture a significant segment of the educated population, without arousing their suspicion, you could succeed grandly if you educated them about the purported composition of their struggles—by naming the elements holding them back from progress, by claiming that these elements are, indeed, real, by choosing elements that actually shrink the field of operation, by essentially defining what a life consists of…and then stepping in and saying you can make that life better. It’s like redefining three-dimensional chess as checkers and then sorting out winning checkers strategies.
“You see, the large and great life is a delusion based on neurotic fantasy. The smaller life is real. And we can help you with that.”
Of course, this is unspoken. But it’s there. And it is sold.
“We’re going to take a life that could be A,B,C,D, and miniaturize it down to lower-case a,b,c,d. We’re going to carry out this miniaturization process so skillfully and so insistently that, eventually, the person forgets there even is an A,B,C,D. Then we have him. Then we can rearrange those a,b,c,d deck chairs and he’ll believe we’re helping him. That’s how we win.”
That’s the shell game. That’s the operant conditioning. That’s how it works.
Here are a few more comments from Ellis Medavoy on the subject:
“At some point, as I was doing medical propaganda, I came across a few operatives who were using their contacts to promote psychology as an essential part of society. It took me a little while to see what their game was.
“They were working for what I call the Collectivist Elite, the men who are trying to make a world of obedient androids, satisfied androids. Well, that’s mind control. These operatives, doing their propaganda, feeding stories to the press, were pushing a general idea of psychology.
“Their version of psychology, when you boil it down, is: we’re all living in a park. It’s a good park. We can all be happy if we stay there and work together and cooperate. But part of this cooperation means we all admit we’re deficient. We need a fix, a cure. We can get that cure if we realize that every impulse we have toward being a self-sufficient individual is really a symptom, and the symptom needs to be wiped out.
“The idea that an individual has tremendous power is another symptom that really needs to be cured.”
Once you get a person to accept the myth that his most pressing desire is to be “normal,” you can perform many manipulations. You can play on his need to be part of the group, the team. You can use veiled threats of exile from the group. You can pretend your manipulations are really only an effort to bring him into the “community.” You can pretend you’re just trying to help him be what he wants to be. You can promise him acceptance. It all hinges on this operation designed to “shrink him down” so he views Normal as his highest and most proper ambition.
And what can he offer in his defense? How can he fight you off? What can he use as a standard, against which he can compare Normal?
If you mention INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM, POWER, IMAGINATION as that standard, he’s in the dark. He doesn’t know what you’re talking about. He’s entered into a state of amnesia about those qualities.
And in that state of amnesia, he’ll admit to having committed offenses. He’ll confess to crimes he never even contemplated.
As documented by Dr. Peter Breggin in his classic work, Toxic Psychiatry, about 35 years ago a bridge was built between the profession of psychologist (and psychiatrist) and the pharmaceutical industry.
Since psychology was already sinking into a morass of behavior-control (my analysis), why not take the next step and simply say all these “symptoms” were really brain imbalances and deficits?
Forget science. By the way, there are no chemical or biological tests to support a diagnosis of ANY so-called mental disorder. But the “science” of “brain imbalances and deficits” could be sold. It could be marketed.
The pharmaceutical industry could save a languishing and increasingly unpopular profession (psychologist/psychiatrist), by buying expensive ads in journals, funding conferences, awarding grants, bankrolling graduate studies.
Talk therapy would be replaced by the prescription pad. The drug companies would develop and market the chemicals. The “therapists” would handle the diagnoses and write the scripts.
And so that marriage was made.
Which takes us all the way from Freud (and his early Pavlovian counterparts) to the present Century of the Brain and Its Control.
To many people, that doesn’t look so bad at all. It looks good, because they have forgotten the potential power, freedom, and imagination at the core of Self.
They have stopped exploring how far and how high that power, freedom, and imagination can go. Such a journey means nothing to them.
Jon Rappoport
The author of an explosive new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.