Scribal Terror

Child murdered in Atlanta

Ideology stinks. It smells like dead babies.

Imagine yourself free

"The mind that is open to questions is open to dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorize, to salivate when the bell rings." --The Rape of the Mind by A.M. Meerloo

Lessons from Meerloo on Political Conditioning

"Political conditioning should not be confused with training or persuasion or even indoctrination. It is more than that. It is tampering. It is taking possession of both the simplest and the most complicated nervous patterns of man. It is the battle for the possession of the nerve cells. It is coercion and enforced conversion. Instead of conditioning man to an unbiased facing of reality, the seducer conditions him to catchwords, verbal stereotypes, slogans, formulas, symbols. Pavlovian strategy in the totalitarian sense means imprinting prescribed reflexes on a mind that has been broken down. The totalitarian wants first the required response from the nerve cells, then control of the individual, and finally control of the masses." The Rape of the Mind by A.M. Meerloo

When Meerloo talks about "the possession of the nerve cells," he is referring to the principal tenet of Pavlovian conditioning. On a physical ("nerve cell") level, via constant repetition of a bell sound in proximity to the smell of food, dogs learn to salivate to the signal as if they were responding to the actual sensation. They learn to understand the bell as equivalent to the smell of food and their digestive system responds accordingly. 

Constant repetition of politically loaded "catchwords, verbal stereotypes, slogans, formulas, symbols" in the proximity of concepts widely accepted as worthy of praise (tolerance, kindness, charity) or condemnation (oppression, violence, racial prejudice) can condition an unwary public to respond viscerally to the loaded language--the "spin" or slant--as if it were equivalent to the norm it has been associated with.

So, at the very least, take the advice of Dr. Johnson:

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant.* You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, "Sir, I am your most humble servant." You are not his most humble servant. You may say, "These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times." You don't mind the times . . .You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don't think foolishly.'

At the very best, tell Society to take a flying leap.

*cant: "hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature"

 

 

Meerloo on Mind Control

"The only way to strengthen one's defences against an organized attack on the mind and will is to understand better what the enemy is trying to do and to outwit him." From "The Rape of the Mind" by A. M. Meerloo.

 

This is why we study the techniques of persuasion--not just to use it in innocent pursuits but to protect ourselves against it in malevolent ones.

Soft Robots

Like jellyfish but not.

Two Weddings

The first pic is the wedding photo of my great grandparents, Christina Hauser and Herman Kinz. Herman didn't last long after this was taken. The wedding was on June 20, 1887 at St. Francis Seraph Catholic Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Herman died on Nov. 8, 1888, and my grandmother, also named Christina, but generally known as Nellie, was born on April 26, 1888. So she was a posthumous child who grew up with a step-father, Vincent Pelzel, and a large number of younger step-sisters and brothers. The second pic is the wedding photo of Christina and Vincent.

Wired to Conform

Interesting results from an fMRI study of group conformity, from "The Stupidity of Crowds" by Gregory Berns:

 

"First, when individuals conform to a group's opinion, even when the group is wrong, we observe changes in perceptual circuits in the brain, suggesting that groups change the way we see the world. Second, when an individual stands up against the group, we observed strong activation in the amygdala, a structure closely associated with fear. All this tells me that not only are our brains not wired for truly independent thought, but it takes a huge amount of effort to overcome the fear of standing up for one's own beliefs and speaking out."

 

Cognitive Pitfalls

Aaron Beck’s classifications of cognitive distortions:

• Arbitrary inference: “the process of forming an interpretation of a situation, event, or experience when there is no factual evidence to support the conclusion or where the conclusion is contrary to the evidence”

• Selective abstraction: “the process of focusing on a detail taken out of context, ignoring other more salient features of the situation, and conceptualizing the whole experience on the basis of this element”

• Overgeneralization: the process of “drawing a general conclusion about their ability, performance, or worth on the basis of a single incident”

• Magnification and minimization: “errors in evaluation which are so gross as to constitute distortions”

• Inexact labeling: “the affective reaction is proportional to the descriptive labelling of the event rather than to the actual intensity of a traumatic situation”

• Personalization: “the proclivity to relate external events to himself when there is no basis for making such a connection”

Absolutistic, dichotomous thinking: “the tendency to place all experiences in one of two opposite categories; for example, flawless or defective, immaculate or filthy, saint or sinner”

--Whalley on "Unhelpful Thinking Styles"

Salem in Context

An interesting phenomenon in colonial New England:

 

"Throughout the seventeenth century, New England courts refused to convict in witchcraft cases unless there was clear proof of guilt, always elusive when dealing with an invisible offense. Setting aside the trials at Salem (where widespread hysteria overcame temporarily the legal system’s customary commitment to rigor), only a quarter of those New Englanders indicted on charges of witchcraft were convicted." Richard Goodbeer, “How Could They Believe That?: Explaining to Students Why Accusations of Witchcraft Made Good Sense in Seventeenth-century New England.”

 

Prior to the Salem episode, and in areas outside Salem, then, just about everyone believed in witches and believed that the practice of witchcraft was a crime that should be punished through the court system. People involved in the Salem drama did not believe something different than people elsewhere in the colonies believed, and their own views had not changed over time. But a combination of events, characters, and conditions sparked a wave of witchcraft accusations in 1692 that led to the deaths of 20 people on the charges of witchcraft. The governor of Massachusetts quickly shut down the trials, and within a very short time, the residents of Salem recognized (as clearly as we do now) that they had done something terrible. They attributed it to the devil's deceptions, but sociologists today would call it a “moral panic.”

Where Do Moral Panics Come From?

 

Where do moral panics come from? Some are bottom-up, but here is an example of a top-down origin, as described in "Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction" by Goode and Ben-Yehuda:

 

Howard Becker (1963: 135-46) argued that the passage of the marijuana laws, and the attendant media and public attention, was a product of the efforts of key moral entrepreneurs, specifically officials in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), who "perceived an area of wrongdoing that properly belonged in their jurisdiction and moved to put it there" (Becker 1963:138). The Bureau's thrust was made up of two prongs. First, FBN officials worked with state legislatures-including drafting model legislation-to facilitate the passage of the state anti-marijuana laws. And second, they provided "facts and figures" to the media which formed the basis for articles in national magazines. Thus, "through the press and other communications media," the Bureau sought to generate "a favorable public attitude toward the proposed" law (Becker 1963: 139). The "national menace" or threat posed by marijuana use did not have an objective reality. The FBN created a crisis where no basis for it existed,and the campaign created a "new class of outsiders-marihuana users."

How a Moral Panic Ends

 

Ann Putnam was one of the witnesses who accused people of witchcraft during the Salem incident in 1692-3. She got people hanged, and she thought she was doing the right thing. Here is the public apology she delivered in 1706, once the moral panic had fizzled out, and the participants were left with nothing but their grief and their guilt:

 

"I desire to be humbled before God for that sad and humbling providence that befell my father's family in the year about '92; that I, then being in my childhood, should, by such a providence of God, be made an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons; and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I justly fear I have been instrumental, with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood; though what was said or done by me against any person I can truly and uprightly say, before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them; but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded by Satan. And particularly, as I was a chief instrument of accusing of Goodwife Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lie in the dust, and to be humbled for it, in that I was a cause, with others, of so sad a calamity to them and their families; for which cause I desire to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence, whose relations were taken away or accused."

Not Dead Yet?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8471219/One-man-dead-wounded-Seattle-CHOP-zone-shooting.html

Seen a Lot of This Lately

Check out this article on dichotomous thinking. 

"If most of your thoughts break down to black or white, good or bad, and all or nothing, then it is possible that you have a strong tendency towards dichotomous thinking."

The European Witchcraft Panic

One example of moral panic was the witchcraft craze in Europe:

 

"On the continent of Europe, roughly between 1 400 and 1650, hundreds of thousands of people-perhaps as many as half a million, up to 85% of whom were women-were judged to have "consorted with the devil" and were put to death. Much of Europe, especially France, Switzerland, and Germany, was in turmoil with suspicion, accusations, trials, and the punishment of supposed evildoers. A kind of fever-a craze or panic---concerning witchcraft and accusations of witchcraft swept over the land. Once an accusation was made, there was little the accused could do to protect herself. Children, women, and "entire families were sent to the stake .... Entire villages were exterminated ....Germany was covered with stakes, where witches were burning alive." Said one inquisitor, "I wish [the witches] had but one body, so that we could bum them all at once, in one fire!" (Ben-Yehuda 1985)

 

I want to come back to a Colonial American version of this, the Salem episode, which I think is even more typical of the idea of moral panic than the European manifestation.

Moral Panics

I've been thinking about this phenomenon a lot, for reasons that I would hope are obvious. But maybe they're only obvious to me. I'll keep coming back to this as the day goes by. See what you think.

At times, substantial numbers of the members of societies are subject to intense feelings of concern about a given threat which a sober assessment of the evidence suggests is either nonexistent or considerably less than would be expected from the concrete harm posed by the threat. Such over-heated periods of intense concern are typically short-lived. In such periods, which sociologists refer to as "moral panics," the agents responsible for the threat-"folk devils"-are stereotyped and classified as deviants.

Goode and Ben-Yehuda, "Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction"

Having Dostoyevskian Thoughts

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Never thought I'd say it

but that whole demonic possession thing is starting to make a lot of sense to me now.

Psalm 159

Deliver me from my enemies, O my God;

Defend me from those who rise up against me.

Deliver me from the workers of iniquity,

And save me from bloodthirsty men.

For look, they lie in wait for my life;

The mighty gather against me,

Not for my transgression nor for my sin, O Lord.

They run and prepare themselves through no fault of mine.

Awake to help me, and behold!

You therefore, O Lord God of hosts, the God of Israel,

Awake to punish all the nations;

Do not be merciful to any wicked transgressors.

Selah

At evening they return,

They growl like a dog,

And go all around the city.

Indeed, they belch with their mouth;

Swords are in their lips;

For they say, “Who hears?”

But You, O Lord, shall laugh at them;

You shall have all the nations in derision.

I will wait for You, O You his Strength;

For God is my defense.

My God of mercy shall come to meet me;

God shall let me see my desire on my enemies.

Do not slay them, lest my people forget;

Scatter them by Your power,

And bring them down,

O Lord our shield.

For the sin of their mouth and the words of their lips,

Let them even be taken in their pride,

And for the cursing and lying which they speak.

 Consume them in wrath, consume them,

That they may not be;

And let them know that God rules in Jacob

To the ends of the earth.

Selah

And at evening they return,

They growl like a dog,

And go all around the city.

They wander up and down for food,

And howl if they are not satisfied.

 But I will sing of Your power;

Yes, I will sing aloud of Your mercy in the morning;

For You have been my defense

And refuge in the day of my trouble.

To You, O my Strength, I will sing praises;

For God is my defense,

My God of mercy.

A bit of unsolicited advice in a time of intellectual ferment. Never engage on any level with someone who is more interested in dominating you than in convincing you. Never negotiate, never concede a point, never look for common ground. Any attention you pay to such a person simply feeds their desire for more and more proof of their own superiority. It's called narcissistic supply. Just turn away. Just break off contact. Don't get sucked in. "Such men are dangerous."

My New Facebook Motto

It's easy to miss, but I like it, so I'm showing it off here. I've had a few problems with people trying to assert dominance, so, yeah.