THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONING OF AMERICANS
PART 1

By
Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
October 29, 2012
NewsWithViews.com

(Note:
Perhaps the most troubling thing about the attack on our Ambassador
in Benghazi, Libya weeks ago is that Obama administration defenders
are saying we have to wait until investigations are completed to know
what went wrong, and Republicans are NOT responding that sends a green
light to terrorists to attack us today, tomorrow, etc., around the world
because we are so stupid or incompetent that it takes us weeks to figure
out what went wrong!)

In
the past, I have mentioned that Edward Bernays in PROPAGANDA
(1928) said: "Those who manipulate the organized habits and opinions
of the masses constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling
power of the country....The technical means have been invented and developed
by which opinion may be regimented." And in THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE
ON SOCIETY (1951), Bertrand Russell wrote: "Although this
science of mass psychology will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly
confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to
know how its convictions are generated."

In
1966, Dr. James McConnell, a professor of psychology at the University
of Michigan, stated: "I teach a course called The Psychology of
Influence, and I begin it by stating categorically that the time has
come when, if you give me any normal human being and a couple of weeks,...I
can change his behavior from what it is not to whatever you want it
to be, if it's physically possible....I can turn him from a Christian
into a communist and vice versa....Look, we can do these things. We
can control behavior."

Five
years later, Milton Rokeach in "Persuasion That Persists"
(PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, September 1971) proclaimed: "Suppose
you could take a group of people, give them a twenty-minute pencil-and-paper
task, talk to them for ten to twenty minutes afterward, and thereby
produce long-range changes in core values and personal behavior in a
significant portion of this group. For openers, it would of course have
major implications for education, government, propaganda, and therapy....My
colleagues and I in the last five years achieved the kinds of results
suggested in the first paragraph of this article....It now seems to
be within man's power to alter experimentally another person's basic
values, and to control the direction of the change."

How
did the psychological conditioning of Americans toward this end occur?
In SCIENCE OF COERCION: COMMUNICATION RESEARCH AND PSYCHOLOGICAL
WARFARE 1945-1960 (1994), Christopher Simpson referred to "the
engineering of consent of targeted populations at home and abroad....Various
leaders in the social sciences engaged one another in tacit alliances
to promote their particular interpretations of society....They regarded
mass communication as a tool for social management and as a weapon in
social conflict....Key academic journals of the day...concentrated on
how modern technology could be used by elites to manage social change,
extract political concessions, or win purchasing decisions from targeted
audiences....This orientation reduced the extraordinarily complex, inherently
communal process of communication to simple models based on the dynamics
of transmission of persuasive---and, in the final analysis, coercive---messages."

Sometimes,
the messages have been subliminal, as Robert Bornstein in "Subliminal
Techniques as Propaganda Tools" (JOURNAL OF THE MIND AND BEHAVIOR,
Summer 1989) indicated that subliminal methods might be successfully
used to deliver propaganda messages, because "the undetectable
ability of subliminal stimuli may diminish their resistability relative
to other persuasion techniques." In case one is skeptical as to
whether subliminal techniques work, refer to a study by G. J. W. Smith,
D. P. Spence, and G. S. Klein ("Subliminal Effects of Verbal Stimuli,"
JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, pages 167-176),
which was described by them as follows: "A static, expessionaless
portrait of a man was flashed on a screen by Smith, Spence and Klein.
They requested their subjects to note how the expression of the picture
changed.

They
intermittently flashed the word 'angry'on the screen, at exposures so
brief that the subjects were consciously completely unaware of having
seen the word. They tended, however, to see the face as becoming more
angry. When the word 'happy' was flashed on the screen in similar fashion,
the viewers tended to see the face as becoming more happy. Thus they
were clearly influenced by stimuli which registered at a subliminal
level, stimuli of which the individual was not, and could not, be aware."

Two
years before the article by Smith, Spence and Klein, BATTLE FOR
THE MIND: THE MECHANICS OF INDOCTRINATION, BRAINWASHIING, AND THOUGHT
CONTROL by psychiatrist William Sargant was published, in which
he indicated that if certain "underlying psychological principles
are once understood, it should be possible to get at the person, converting
and maintaining him in his new belief by a whole variety of imposed
stresses that end by altering his brain function." Sargant further
explained that the human brain "is particularly sensitive to rhythmic
stimulation by percussion and bright lights....Belief can be implanted
in people after brain function has been sufficiently disturbed by...induced
fear, anger or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances,
the most common one is temporarily impaired judgment and heightened
suggestibility."

© 2012 Dennis Cuddy - All Rights
Reserved

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