Re: All you need to run the world is...a bell!

There's hope: love and laughter! 
Hey Bader, don't get me wrong: I ain't talking about the "hope" they
give to the homeless, but I mean *real hope for all*.

No wonder some little animals need the lion...

"Man is an automaton who can be caused to act as one wills! This is
the ideal of capitalism [and totalitarianism]!"

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 system starts with verbal conditioning and training by
combining the required stereotypes with negative or positive stimuli:
pain, or reward. In the P.O.W. camps in Korea where there was
individual and mass brainwashing, the negative and positive
conditioning stimuli were usually hunger and food. The moment the
soldier conformed to the party line his food ration was improved: say
yes, and I'll give you a piece of candy!

The whole gamut of negative stimuli, as we saw them in the Schwable
case, consists of physical pressure, moral pressure, fatigue, hunger,
boring repetition, confusion by seemingly logical syllogisms. Many
victims of totalitarianism have told me in interviews that the most
upsetting experience they faced in the concentration camps was the
feeling of loss of logic, the state of confusion into which they had
been brought the state in which nothing had any validity. They had
arrived at the Pavlovian state of inhibition, which psychiatrists call
mental disintegration or depersonalization. It seemed as if they had
unlearned all their former responses and had not yet adopted new ones.
But in reality they simply did not know what was what.

The Pavlovian theory translated into a political method, as a way of
leveling the mind (the Nazis called it "Gleichschaltung") is the stock
in trade of totalitarian countries. Some psychiatric points are of
interest because we see that Pavlovian training can be used
successfully only when special mental conditions prevail. In order to
tame people into the desired pattern, victims must be brought to a
point where they have lost their alert consciousness and mental
awareness. Freedom of discussion and free intellectual exchange hinder
conditioning. Feelings of terror, feelings of fear and hopelessness,
of being alone, of standing with one's back to the wall, must be
instilled.

The treatment of American prisoners of war in the Korean P.O.W. camps
followed just such a pattern. They were compelled to listen to
lectures and other forms of daily word barrage. The very fact that
they did not understand the lectures and were bored by the long
sessions inhibited their democratic training, and conditioned them to
swallow passively the bitter doctrinal diet, for the prisoners were
subjectd not only to a political training program, but also to an
involuntary taming program. To some degree the Communist propaganda
lectures were directed toward retraining the prisoners' minds. This
training our soldiers could reject, but the endless repetitions and
the constant sloganizing, together with the physical hardships and
deprivations the prisoners suffered, caused an UNCONSCIOUS TAMING and
conditioning, against which only previously built up inner strength
and awareness could help.

There is still another reason why our soldiers were sometimes trapped
by the Communist conditioning. Experiments with animals and
experiences with human beings have taught us that threat, tension, and
anxiety, in general, may accelerate the establishment of conditioned
responses, particularly when those responses tend to diminish fear and
panic (Spence and Farber). The emergency of prison camp life and
mental torture provide ideal circumstances for such conditioning. The
responses can develop even when the victim is completely unaware that
he is being influenced. Thus, many of our soldiers developed automatic
responses of which they remained completely unconscious (Segal). But
this is only one side of the coin, for experience has also shown that
people who know what to expect under conditions of mental pressure can
develop a so called perceptual defense, which protects them from being
influenced. This means that the more familiar people are with the
concepts of thought control and menticide, the more they understand
the nature of the propaganda barrage directed against them, the more
inner resistance they can put up, even though inevitably some of the
inquisitor's suggestions will leak through the barrier of conscious
mental defense.

Our understanding of the conditioning process leads us also to an
understanding of some of the paradoxical reactions found among victims
of concentration camps and other prisoners. Often those with a rigid,
simple belief were better able to withstand the continual barrage
against their minds than were the flexible, sophisticated ones, full
of doubt and inner conflicts. The simple man with deep rooted, freely
absorbed religious faith could exert a much greater inner resistance
than could the complex, questioning intellectualist. The refined
intellectual is much more handicapped by the internal pros and cons.

In totalitarian countries, where belief in Pavlovian strategy has
assumed grotesque proportions, the self thinking, subjective man has
disappeared. There is an utter rejection of any attempt at persuasion
or discussion. Individual self expression is taboo. Private affection
is taboo.

Peaceful exchange of free thoughts in free conversation will disturb
the conditioned reflexes and is therefore taboo. No longer are there
any brains, only conditioned patterns and educated muscles. In such a
taming system neurotic compulsion is looked upon as a positive asset
instead of something pathological. The mental automaton becomes the
ideal of education.

Yet the Soviet theoreticians themselves are often unaware of this, and
many of them do not realize the dire consequences of subjecting man to
a completely mechanistic conditioning. They themselves are often just
as frightened as we are by the picture of the perfectly functioning
human robot. This is what one of their psychologists says: "The entire
reactionary nature of this approach to man is completely clear. *Man
is an automaton who can be caused to act as one wills! This is the
ideal of capitalism!* Behold the dream of capitalism the world over a
working class without consciousness, which cannot think for itself,
whose actions can be trained according to the whim of the exploiter!
This is the reason why it is in America, the bulwark of present day
capitalism, that the theory of man as a robot has been so vigorously
developed and so stubbornly held to."' (Bauer)

However there's hope...love and laughter!

'Even in laboratory animals we have found that affective goal
directedness can spoil the Pavlovian experiment. When, during a bell
food training session, the dog's beloved master entered the room, the
animal lost all its previous conditioning and began to bark excitedly.
Here is a simple example of an age old truth: *love and laughter break
through all rigid conditioning*. The rigid automaton cannot exist
without spontaneous self expression. Apparently, the fact that the
dog's spontaneous affection for his master could ruin all the
mechanical calculations and manipulations never occurred to Pavlov's
totalitarian students.'

http://www.ninehundred.net/control/mc-ch2.html

http://webspawner.com/users/donquijote
__________________
"My struggle is not against the puppet, but against the puppeteer"