Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form, page 13
The U.S. government denies Commander Narut’s claims, but Watson claims that he was able to obtain some outside corroboration from an individual who stated that Commander Narut had ordered violent films from him, and Narut’s tale was subsequently published in the London Times. (307)
So what does all this have to do with Ronald McDonald and Big Bird and the holes in your kid’s brain? Very simple….
Compulsory schooling, as with military entrainment, was born on the battlefield. In 1806 Prussia’s army was defeated by Napoleon at the battle of Jena. Prussia believed that their defeat was caused by soldiers thinking for themselves in the midst of combat. Far too many soldiers were refusing to fire their weapons. The Prussian government wanted to know how to prevent such pesky inconveniences like “free will” in future generations, so they approached the brilliant psychologist Wilhelm Wundt of the University of Leipzig and asked him for advice. Wundt, the true father of experimental psychology, suggested they abolish voluntary schooling. Wundt recognized that the best way to control a population was to begin with the children.
Fragmentation was the order of the day.
Wundt began by dividing traditional school subjects up into sub-sets. He shattered them into divisions,—not unlike military divisions—precise regiments of lifeless facts marching through the children’s porous little minds six hours a day, five days a week: History, English, Mathematics, Biology, Physical Education, etc. It was very important that no connections be made among these disparate subjects. Each was to stand alone, islands of isolated facts with no ties to the future or the past. The best way to ensure this fragmentation was to create specialties . Each instructor would be licensed to teach a specific subject, nothing more. If they tried to overstep their bounds they would be severely punished, ostracized from the academic world. 1
The origins of “licensing” and academic “degrees” grew out of this authoritarian structure. The Ph.D. itself, based on the ideas of Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis , was created by Prussia in the early 1800s. The concept of “licensing” was later expanded upon by Andrew Carnegie in the 1890s. The purpose, according to John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down , was to “tie the entire economy to schooling and hence to place the minds of all the children [in the hands] of a few social engineers” (Gatto Interview 15).
These social engineers, led by Wundt, knew that fragmentation was the key. Once they had divided the subjects, they then set about dividing the children by segregating them according to age groups. As Gatto has pointed out, this kind of segregation exists nowhere else, certainly not in the adult world. In what office setting do you find all the fifty-five-year-olds working in one room? Before compulsory schooling, in the era of the one-room schoolhouse, the older children were encouraged to teach the younger children. This system is known to work much better than ordering children to sit back passively and accept like a drone what their “superior” tells them.
Or like a soldier on the battlefield.
Just as a drill sergeant enjoys rattling a broomstick inside a garbage can at four in the morning in order to torture his recruits, the school system has a similar—though far more systematic—instrument of control.
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells—
–Edgar Allan Poe, “The Bells”
Bells are the most basic tool of Pavlovian conditioning. As any Freshman psychology student is well aware, Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist known for his breakthrough work with the conditioned reflex. This work consisted of ringing a bell prior to feeding his dogs; he did this regularly over an extended period of time. Eventually the dogs would salivate upon hearing the bell, even when there was no food around.
In the vast laboratory known as public education, however, the experimental subjects—children in this case rather than dogs—are conditioned not to do something as trivial as salivate. No, the goal is far more sinister.
Let John Gatto, “New York State Teacher of the Year” for 1991, tell you in his own words:
I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It’s heartwarming when they do that; it impresses everyone, even me. When I’m at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class nor in any class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.
Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and the future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference. (Gatto, Dumbing Us Down 6)
There is an historical precedent for the use of bells as a Pavlovian conditioner. Bear with me as we launch into another extended quote, this one from none other than Dr. Timothy Leary, whose research into psychedelics as a behavior modification tool was supported and funded by Dr. Henry Murray, chairman of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard and the head of the CIA’s Psychology Department. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, Murray was also the man who oversaw the mind-control experiments performed from the years 1958 to 1962 on a young student-volunteer at Harvard named Theodore Kaczynski, whom the FBI would later dub “the Unabomber” (Cockburn). To be fair, it’s quite possible Leary’s intentions were honorable, but at this late date I’m afraid it’s clear that the motives of his financial backers were far from benevolent. Either way, Leary’s knowledge of the history of behavioral control is extensive, which makes the following insight that much more impressive….
Over a thousand years ago [there existed] an organization of light-wizards that controlled and programmed minds from Istanbul, Constantinople, and Greece, through Southern Europe and Northern Europe, all the way up to the British Isles. We’re talking, of course, about the hyperdelic, cyberdelic, shamanic brain-fuckers centered in the Vatican. Those guys knew how to program minds.
How’d they do it? Well, first of all, they developed the notion of a bell. If you were a peasant in Constantinople or Romania or France or wherever, the loudest sound you ever heard in your life was that bell five times a day. And where was that bell? On top of the church steeple. And the only sound you ever heard louder and stronger than that was lightning, and you know who’s in charge of the lightning bolts. (Leary Lecture)
What Leary neglects to mention is the fact that the center for behavior modification shifted in the early 1800s from the Vatican to the arena of public education, which is why Dr. Henry Murray was a chairman at Harvard and not the Vatican. If a researcher like Leary had existed a thousand years ago he would have been forced to solicit funds from the Pope rather than the CIA.
A few weeks ago I was having an argument with a friend. I maintained that I had learned absolutely nothing worthwhile from high school. My friend countered with a non sequitur, insisting that kids need to graduate from high school in order to get a good job. Despite being a patently false comment (employers tend not to care about your grades in high school or college), it did inspire me to ask the following question: Since when did education devolve into a glorified trade school? It wasn’t that way in Plato’s day, nor was it that way before Wilhelm Wundt and the implementation of compulsory schooling.
Only while researching this article a couple of days ago did I come across the answer. During a brilliant 1994 interview conducted by Jim Martin, the publisher of Flatland magazine, John Taylor Gatto lays out the following information: Between the years 1807 and 1819 a stream of American dignitaries travelled to Prussia to consult with Dr. Wundt. They were so impressed by his work that they immediately began advocating his system of behavioral control for American education. The sons of the American elite were shipped overseas to study at Wundt’s feet, and by 1900 all the Ph.D.s in the U.S. were being trained in Prussia. Between 1880 and 1910 the American successors to Wundt became the heads of the Psychological Departments at all the major universities. Henry Murray was no doubt among them. Wundt’s main protégé, James McKeen Cattel, trained 322 Ph.D.s who in turn set up the new discipline of educational psychology; this discipline quickly grew in influence with the help of the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. (Ultimately, Wundtian experimental psychology gave rise to infamous behavioral scientists such as James B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, whose work was used for the specific purpose of raising the firing rate in the U.S. military and training assassins to kill more effectively.)
The next step came… when Andrew Carnegie [realized] that capitalism—free enterprise—was stone cold dead in the United States. […] That men like himself, Mr. Morgan, and Mr. Rockefeller now owned everything. They owned the government. Competition was impossible unless they allowed it. Which, human nature being what it is, was a problematical thing.
Carnegie said that this was a very dangerous situation, because eventually young people [would] become aware of this and form clandestine organizations to work against it. [...] Carnegie proposed that men of wealth re-establish a synthetic free enterprise system (since the real one was no longer possible) based on cradle-to-grave schooling. The people who advanced most successfully in the schooling that was available to everyone would be given licenses to lead profitable lives [...]. [Y]ou need to look at what occurred in the two decades following Carnegie’s original proposal (1890-1910). You’re talking about the realization of Carnegie’s design. These licenses, which now extend to bus drivers and all sorts of unlikely people who never had to be licensed, are then tied to forms of schooling. So they’ve reserved that part of the work market. Through the cooperation of the government, many of the government positions have very precise schooling requirements. You can in fact control all of the economy by tying jobs to schooling, and therefore you have a motivation for people to learn what you want them to learn. (Gatto Interview 14)
Control.
Today, as the twentieth century collides with the twenty-first, a single bell atop a church steeple would no longer be effective as an instrument of control. The population is too large, too spread-out. The instrument of fragmentation has become more sophisticated. The church bell has morphed into Hollywood. Why waste valuable time and money surreptitiously planting electrodes in people’s brains when you can sell them television sets instead? The CIA’s MK-Ultra program has long been obsolete, which explains the recent explosion of books and movies and magazine articles and even comic books concerning the subject. As Marshall McLuhan liked to say, quoting James Joyce, “pastimes are past times” (McLuhan 99). Anything that’s popular is twenty to thirty years out of date.
Thought control has morphed into mind control, mind control into soul control. No implants required. Just sit back and relax. Take a toke, dude, and trip out on those pointillist dots on your TV screen. Go with the flow. Accept the fragmentation.
How is it possible to develop a logical train of thought with a bell clattering in your head every forty-five minutes, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s classic science fiction story “Harrison Bergeron”? Or, for that matter, every seven minutes if you’re a hardcore television addict? You must recognize the fact that a commercial interruption carries with it as much of a fragmentary effect as any church bell in the Middle Ages.
All is not lost, however. Wundt was right; the best way to control a population is to begin with the children. But the opposite is true, as well. What was once fragmented can be made whole again. The primary reason kids hate school is obvious: They know, at least subconsciously, that they’re being lied to. If you begin respecting them, teaching them real history, they’ll want to learn. But that would require a radical alteration, a veritable paradigm shift, in the present system. It would first require the decertification of teaching and the destabilization of institutional schools.
“Oh, no!” cries the voice from the audience, “but how will Little Johnny learn to read and write?!”
I’m glad you asked me that, ma’am.
You’re living under a false assumption if you think the school system teaches reading and writing. As Gatto has pointed out:
…the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things, it really isn’t very hard. Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for “basic skills” practice is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of children for twelve years…. (Gatto, Dumbing Us Down 13-14).
This same point—the relative ease with which children can learn given the right set and setting—was proven over seventy years ago by A.S. Neill, creator of an experimental live-in school called Summerhill. Influenced by the psychoanalytic work of Wilhelm Reich, Neill decided to create a school geared toward helping the “rejects” of the British school system. In the words of investigative journalist Jon Rappoport:
Neill operated on the idea that if you allowed students and faculty to participate, by vote, in the running of their own school, they would be more real, more alive.
And then if you gave students, with no tricks, the license never to come to classes until they were ready to learn, they would live out their childhood fantasies to the hilt. A child might play in the fields and the mud with his companions until he was fifteen—every day—and then finally school would begin to interest him. At that point he would come to class to stay…. At that juncture, twelve years of education might be telescoped into two or three years, without stinting. The classrooms at Summerhill were not remarkable.
There was no effort made to “interest” the child in a subject through special aids. Neill forbade this. He saw that when a child wanted to learn, the teaching became easy, and when he didn’t the introduction of seduction was a cruel thing. (Rappoport 229)
A.S. Neill proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that kids learn much more efficiently when you leave them alone. Forget this “concept mapping” (otherwise known as “brainstorming” or “webbing”) nonsense so prevalent in education today. That’s the big thing in high schools now: forcing complete strangers to bounce ideas off each other until the “gestalt” inevitably reduces the very worst of these ideas into a form acceptable to the status quo. Teachers claim it encourages cooperation, but in reality it just instills conformity. Its sole purpose is to merge our children into a single hive mind consisting of brainless organic robotoids who drink alike, eat alike, sleep alike, and think alike. A regiment of tiny toy soldiers marching into oblivion to the same dissonant tune.
The purpose of school is not to teach.
If you don’t believe me, study an average Scan-Tron sheet—or as I like to refer to them, “Scam-Trons.” In case you’re not aware, a Scan-Tron is a rectangular blue-and-white slip of paper that consists of a series of multiple choice questions, each question having four possible answers. For each question the student is expected to fill in one of the available bubbles with a No. 2 lead pencil. When the student is finished, the teacher feeds these little slips into a machine that reads the answers with a laser. With such back-breaking work, one wonders why teachers aren’t paid more.
(Anecdotal Interlude: In high school I knew a guy named Bill who would coat the edge of the sheet with Vaseline. Somehow the Vaseline had a kind of mirror-like effect and would screw up the laser, causing the machine to interpret all of his answers as correct. Eventually he grew more clever and dabbed the Vaseline on only some of the answers, so the results would be more believable. Word to the unwise.)
The Scam-Tron is one of the most basic examples of behavioral programming one can find in the school system. Its intent is to instill in the student the idea that there exists only a limited number of answers for any given question—a closed universe of possibilities. I have a close friend who works as a teacher in Seattle, WA. She tells me, and I know this is true from my own experiences at Torrance High in the late 1980s, that all the kids prefer taking the multiple choice Scan-Trons. This is, statistically speaking, crazy. It should be obvious that an open-ended, subjective, non-linear written test in which you have to actually think of your own answer provides you with a much better chance of receiving a good grade. But this doesn’t matter to the majority of high school students because they’ve simply forgotten how to think.
My teacher-friend in Seattle recently wrote a question for her students in which she asked them to do nothing more than give their opinion . Anything at all, written even semi-coherently, would have earned them at least a passing grade. Many of the students chose to leave the question blank. When she asked them why they had done this, they replied matter-of-factly that they couldn’t think of their own opinion.
Fragmentation.
This is where neuro-linguistic programming comes into the picture. NLP was created by Jim Grinder and Richard Bandler in the 1970s, though the basic techniques are related to the work performed from the 1940s to the 1980s by the psychologist Dr. Milton W. Erickson under the close supervision of the CIA (Bowart Chp. 4, p. 6). Essentially, NLP is the art of mastering the “language of the unconscious” to influence not only yourself but others as well. A baseball player might want to use it to improve his batting average—“creative visualization” could be used for this purpose—while a CIA agent might want to use it to coax vital information from a reluctant source. In the latter case, our hypothetical agent would try to “mirror and match” the source’s physiology—sit the way he sits, gesture the way he gestures, breathe the way he breathes. In this way he could win the source’s confidence within a surprisingly short period of time. But NLP doesn’t rely only on gestures and body language; it also relies a great deal on words—words written or spoken with such precise tonality and timing that they slip into the subconscious as embedded commands.
