‘Psyocracy’

Volume 1: Behavior Modification

‘Psyocracy,’ or ‘psychocracy’ (def.) rule by psychologists or rule by psychology.

The following paper is divided (roughly) into two parts. The first considers the separation of psychology from philosophy in the nineteenth century and the subsequent development of behaviorism out of structuralism and functionalism. It also looks at the shaping influence of associationism, atomism, evolutionary naturalism, logical positivism, pragmatism, and related doctrines on behavioral psychology. The second part gets into the history – and crypto-history – of some of behaviorism’s applications and connexions to business, entertainment, intelligence and military, and social movements. The discussion centers on key individuals (within and outside of behaviorism) such as John B. Watson, Walter Lippmann, Woodrow Wilson, and B. F. Skinner. We hope that both parts will be of interest. But part 1 is denser and concerned more with theoretical abstractions; part 2 is where the more “conspiratorial” angles are visible.

Preface

A movement was born around the turn of the century – in the wake of the “second industrial revolution” which had leveraged advances in chemistry and physics (like electricity and steel production) to create a society of factories and machines, connected, first by telegraphs and trains, and later by automobiles and telephones. Ideologically, it was the offspring of Nietzscheanism^[1] and “Wilsonian liberalism” (on which, see below) – the latter a fusion of “progressivist” social “reformism” and Hamiltonian federalism.

It was funded – via charitable foundations, trusts, and universities – by “robber barons” (or their heirs) like Andrew Carnegie (Carnegie Steel), J. P. Morgan (J. P. Morgan & Company), John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil), and Cornelius Vanderbilt (N. Y. Central & Hudson River Railroad).^[2]

In a wide sense, it included – or intersected with – the advertising and entertainment industries; the intelligence “community”; the military-industrial complex; and political and social sciences.

Call it the “psychocracy” or “psyocracy,” for short. The “American Century” put it on steroids when a Cold-War mandate authorized exotic weapons like “brainwashing” and mind control.

Admittedly, our exploration of this “rule by psychology” will be selective. For example, and due to their overlap with other topics of interest,^[3] we have decided to leave a planned survey of Freudian, Jungian, and other branches of psychology – historically crucial – for the future.

Additionally, although we mention Central-Intelligence-Agency chemist and “spymaster,” Sidney Gottlieb, and his MKUltra program – conducted under the auspices of “the CIA’s Technical Services Division, headed in the 1950s by Willis [A.] Gibbons, a former executive of the US Rubber Company”^[4] – our focus will lie elsewhere. Serious explorations of MKUltra are both important and welcome. But many of them focus upon the CIA’s attempts to perfect techniques of “brainwashing” and to create unwitting, “sleeper-type” assassins (the so-called “Manchurian Candidates”). These experiments often involved the use of drugs like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and sometimes resulted in the loss of life (as with the tragic case of army bacteriologist and bioweapon developer Frank Rudolf Emmanuel Olson). But they could (not unfairly) be summarized as niche military pursuits. On the other hand, the behavioral science we will be investigating has arguably been employed on a much wider scale and has been – to a certain degree – directed against the United States populace more or less as a whole.

There are definitely “overlaps,” or suspected points of intersection, such as the work of “Dr.” Donald Ewen Cameron, whose behaviorist-tinged (and totally unethical) “psychic-driving”^[5] experiments may have informed the broader programs that will occupy us. And we will remind readers that we already touched on some of this in our previous “Twilight Language” study.

Nevertheless, in what follows, we will take a look at the rise of behavioral psychology by probing its connexion to antecedent schools such as functionalism and structuralism, as well as to the intellectual soil of evolutionary naturalism, positivism, pragmatism, and allied philosophies.

In a proposed second volume, we will consider the transition from behaviorism into cognitivism,^[6] and try to excavate some of the origins – those rooted in psychology – of such hot-button topics as “artificial intelligence” and “transhumanism.” So, stay tuned!

Part 1: A Philosophical Introduction

The birth of modern psychology is frequently – if not uncontroversially – dated to the founding of the first laboratory^[7] devoted to “mental” experimentation in 1879 by Wilhelm Wundt.^[8] This is a convenient (if arbitrary) starting point for our discussion. Some philosophical context might be helpful. (Our discussion gets “juicer” as we proceed. To cut to the chase, see “Behaviorism.”)

Immanuel Kant is one of the most original and influential philosophers in history. To get a handle on why, start by noticing that “he is sometimes represented as conducting a sort of refereeing job between the merits and demerits of rationalism and empiricism.”^[9] In a nutshell…

“Empiricism believes that all ideas or concepts derive from experience…[; whereas r]ationalism believes that some ideas or concepts are independent of experience…”.^[10]

The theory of learning and thought that, “for centuries, …has been the engine behind empiricism, from the British Empiricists [such as John Locke and David Hume] through the Behaviorists and modern-day Connectionists[,] …[is called a]ssociationism. …Associationism …connects learning to thought based …[on an] organism’s causal history. …In its …basic form, … pairs of thoughts become associated based on the organism’s past experience.”^[11]

A corollary, often embraced by empiricists, is that the mind at birth is a “blank slate,” or – as this idea was attributed to the 17th-c. English physician and philosopher John Locke, a tabula rasa.^[12]

According to this empiricist tradition, each human mind is initially “empty,” meaning that there are no built-in ideas. Whatever knowledge there is (and this is a source of disagreement even among empiricists) has to get put into the mind via sense experience of the external world.

After its formulation by Locke and Hume, it was carried on in the thought of people such as John Stuart Mill, the logical positivists, Bertrand Russel, Willard Van Orman “W. V. O.” Quine, etc.^[13]

For our purposes, the opposing view – “continental rationalism,” articulated by René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – can be thought of as committed to some form of innatism.^[14]

According to this, “idea[s are] …inborn in the human mind… The doctrine that at least certain ideas (e.g., those of God, infinity, substance) must be innate, because no satisfactory empirical origin of them could be conceived, flourished in the 17th century… The theory took many forms: some held that a newborn child has an explicit awareness of such ideas; others more commonly maintained that innate ideas have some implicit form, either as a tendency or as a dormant capacity for their formulation, which in either case would require favourable experiential conditions for their development.”^[15]

“…[T]he 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant” brokered a new philosophical treaty that “replaced the doctrine of innate ideas with questions about a priori concepts, …characterized in terms not of their origin but of their necessity as conditions of human experience …”.^[16] But…

“…[A] much wider and simpler concern [for Kant] …was …[the] apparent conflict between …the physical sciences …and our fundamental ethical and religious convictions. …[T]he central and simplest form of the conflict was that it seemed to be a … proper presupposition of the physical sciences that everything that happens is determined by antecedent [causes]…”.^[17]

However, if everything is physical, then what place is there for entities like immaterial souls or God? And if every physical event is causally determined, then what place is there for free will?

Kant stated: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith [glaube]”^[18] – here he means all our common beliefs, like that we have free will, minds, etc.

And so, on one popular reading of him, Kant set out to reconcile ethics, metaphysics, and religion with epistemology and physical science. In this – some would say, unsuccessful – project Kant proposed^[19] one a revolutionary distinction: namely, that there is a difference between noumena, “things-in-themselves”^[20] and phenomena, or, “things-as-they-appear.”^[21]

This distinction became the cornerstone of Kant’s “transcendental idealism,” according to which our minds partially determine, and give structure to, our experience of the world. This is to say that we can never know reality independently of our subjective experience of it. The way reality is – apart from our perception of it – will always remain hidden from us.

Phenomena are, first of all, the objects of our experience. Yes, our experience partly depends on what things exist, “out there.” But our experience of phenomena also depends on the way our minds handle those things. In other words, our minds have a given, or innate structure.

Kant argued that experience requires both sensory content, supplied by the world as well as our minds’ built-in structure. Without pre-structured minds, experience would be unstructured and, in effect, incomprehensible to us. On the other hand, without the external world to supply us with content, our minds would be empty – like sorting mechanisms without anything to sort.

As Kant put it: “[P]ercepts without concepts are blind; …concepts without percepts are empty.”^[22]

Kant rejected the idea that “pure reason” was a gateway to all knowledge. Information about the world ultimately arises out of our sensory experience. This was bad news for rationalists. But…

Secondly, phenomena are also the objects of science. But for Kant, space and time are not properties of the mind-independent world.^[23] While our experience is ordered spatiotemporally, to Kant that’s (probably) not the way the external world is – in and of itself.^[24]

In a sense, Kant held that our minds impose structure on the world.^[25] To Kant, science operates within this structured phenomenal realm. Science doesn’t interact with the world-in-itself. It merely studies the world-as-it-appears. This was bad news for empiricists. Here’s the punchline.

If science only studies our experience of “phenomena;” and if phenomena are shaped into experience by our minds; then our question is: Can science study the mind itself?

Kant basically thought that it could not – at least, not in the sense that we think of psychology today, as being an a-posteriori science akin to biology, botany, geology, or whatever.

Kant assumed that the only way to study the mind was through introspection. To him, the only information we could get through introspection was: (1.) the content of experience, which came from the external world (and so wasn’t “about” the mind per se) or (2.) the form of experience, which – okay – was “about the mind,” but which was also knowable a priori.

Moreover, Kant thought he had already unearthed the mind’s structural categories and forms. Even though he acknowledged that this probably didn’t exhaust the workings of the mind, much of the remainder would consist of the unknowable noumena. Or, put it another way: While we can know the world, via the structured experience of phenomena, with our minds, we can’t know any “noumena” – including the noumena of minds. Our minds-in-themselves are unknowable.

Worse still, since we have to use the mind to introspect, we can’t examine conscious experience via a “rationalist” approach without simultaneously modifying the target of our inquiry. And since to Kant, our ideas and thoughts can be neither isolated nor expressed mathematically, we evidently could not approach the mind using conventional empirical methods either.

Still, the fact remains that we are somehow able to structure raw sensory data into an ordered, unified experience. Kant called this our “unity of apperception.” And he saw it as a precondition, not just for intelligible experience (the mind’s inherent structure provides that), but for each of us to think we are a single “self.” At the same time, this unity of apperception is not to be identified with the self. The self is an experiencing subject; the unity of apperception is a formal principle.

This is where the history gets messy. At the decidedly risk of oversimplification, let’s just summarize it this way. After Kant died in 1804, two loosely knit groups coalesced in reaction to his thought. The first group was the Kantians, and the second was the German Idealists. We’ll say merely that they differed over how they understood this unity – over what they supposed was playing the rôle of a “transcendental subject.” What was it that unified consciousness?^[26]

In general, Kantians and Idealists concerned themselves with the internal, subjective world of the mind. They tended to emphasize introspection, reason, and will. They weren’t “anti-science.” They just didn’t see how empirical methods – as they were then known – could study the mind.

Enter Gustav Theodor Fechner. Fechner was Kantian insofar as he accepted the distinction between the “thing-in-itself” (the noumenon) and the thing-as-it-appears (the phenomenon).

But he wasn’t satisfied with this. Trying to overcome the Kantian view that the study of subjective experience was not legitimate science, Fechner founded psychophysics, a science that investigated the relationship between physical stimuli and psychological sensations.^[27]

Despite Kant’s skepticism, Fechner wanted to establish a bona fide empirical science of the mind. Some people thought he was onto something. And the stage was set for psychology.^[28]

Structuralism

The first thinker to pioneer a distinctly psychological science, and therefore one of the men^[29] credited as “fathers” of that discipline, was the German physiologist Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt.

Gustav Fechner had certainly laid the foundations for experimental psychology. But Wundt’s focus was quite different. Fechner had concerned himself with the relationship between physical stimuli and psychological sensations. Wundt was interested in the “structure” of mental states.

Partially under the sway of John Dalton’s atomic theory (circa 1808), Wundt spoke about ascertaining the “atoms” of experience.^[30] His school of “structuralism”^[31] tried to identify and catalog the basic elements of what, in contemporary parlance, is known as consciousness — including “affections” or “affectations” (i.e., feelings), images, and sensations.^[32]

Wundt’s approach also owed a lot to Immanuel Kant. Wundt made reference to Kantian notions of “apperception” and “synthesis” (both of which, recall, related to the unity of inner experience).

After all, part of Kant’s project (see above) had been to classify various proposed, and innate, “categories” of the mind and “forms of intuition,” which (Kant believed) constituted the a priori framework or structure of the human mind. These made possible, and shaped, our experience.

But, just as Fechner had rejected Kant’s skepticism about the possibility of a scientific study of our inner mental experiences (given their private and subjective character), so too did Wundt.

For Wundt, the route to studying consciousness was introspection and (what is now termed) “self-reporting” – albeit from observers who had received some “training” in Wundt’s methods.

For instance, subjects might be exposed to some stimulus and then would tell the experimenter how they felt about it. Or experimenters could reflect on their own private mental states.

It’s worth observing that Wundt believed in free will^[33] and – like Fechner^[34] – believed in a version of “panpsychism,” or “the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world.”^[35] To put it slightly differently, panpsychists may hold that everything – from rocks and grass to insects, dogs, and humans – have some measure of consciousness, however small.

However, the intellectual climate in Europe was rapidly changing.

A naturalistic current, going back to the influential English social-contractarian Thomas Hobbes, was gaining traction. Hobbes’s most influential treatise, Leviathan, conceived of the state as an agreement between a ruler and his subjects. The latter give up some of their individual liberties in exchange for the monarch’s protection of their lives (rescuing them from the “state of nature”).

Hobbes also envisioned science as exploring a material universe by combining the experimental approach of Galileo Galilei^[36] with the mathematical-deductive apparatus of René Descartes.^[37]

Hobbes straddled the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. His metaphysical ideas were not as popular in his own day as were his political ones. Both Hobbesian strands came together in the 19th-c. French mathematician-philosopher Auguste Comte, often called the “father of sociology.”

Comte yearned to organize society on a “scientific basis.” He advocated a view according to which sociological development proceeded through three stages, beginning with superstitious “theology” and advancing to scientific “positivism” via a transitional stage of woolly “metaphysics.”^[38] Thus, Comte was (arguably) both anti-theology and anti-metaphysics.^[39]

Comte heralded what has come to be called “scientism.” This perspective is variously defined, such as “the idea that all forms of intellectual inquiry must conform to the model(s) of science in order to be rational”,^[40] or “that the …sciences …provide the only genuine knowledge of reality.”^[41]

Furthermore, German Idealism was on the decline. And other ideologies, such as the explicitly materialistic communism of Karl Marx, started to take root on the Continent of Europe.^[42]

Alongside this, British naturalist Charles Darwin sent shockwaves through zoology and theology departments alike when he articulated his theory of “descent with modification” (evolution).^[43]

And Darwin’s British “bulldog” Thomas Henry “T. H.” Huxley originated so-called “agnosticism.” Huxley was so nicknamed because of his aggressive promotion of evolutionary theory (e.g., in a widely publicized debate at Oxford in 1860 against Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce).

Also in England, Darwinism converged with Comtism, influencing people such as evolutionary positivist Herbert Spencer, proto-secular-humanist Richard Congreve, utilitarian ethicist John Stuart Mill (the non-theistic “godfather” to Bertrand Russell), and others.

Similar ideas also affected jurisprudence and a “legal positivism” – premised on the rejection of natural law and emphasizing the explanatory and justifying rôle of societal facts – arose from thinkers such as John Austin, Jeremy Bentham, and closer to our time Herbert Lionel Adolphus “H. L. A.” Hart, Jewish-Austrian-born Hans Kelsen (an associate of Vienna-Circle member Otto Neurath),^[44] and Israeli scholar Joseph Raz.

Legal positivists rejected the idea that the law that is grounded in, and has the force of, morality (and for which facts about legality are rooted in objective facts about human nature) and replaced it with the idea that laws are mere “posits” (that is, principles taken to be true and possessing “normative” force, because they have been instituted and authorized by society).^[45]

Mill’s friend and fellow “associationist” Alexander Bain was also influenced by Comte.^[46] In works like The Senses and the Intellect,^[47] and The Emotions and the Will,^[48] Bain advanced his ideas of behavioral dispositions and reflexive “will.” In so doing, he paved the way for a more “scientific” (read scientistic) psychology, and influenced people like William James and Ivan Pavlov.^[49]

And inevitably, these changes – turns toward evolutionary thinking, materialism, and a focus on what is publicly observable – coalesced into a psychological school called “functionalism.”

Functionalism

Functionalism began as a reaction against structuralism (discussed above), and was kickstarted by William James’s The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890.^[50]

Functionalism discounted questions concerning the “structure” of the mind. Atomic-mechanistic views, where the mind was composed of elements in combination – like a machine – gave way (under the inspiration of evolutionary theory) to more “organic” models of thought and reality.^[51]

This was typified by James’s notion of a “stream of consciousness,” according to which our inner, private experience is a continuous and unified flow of feelings, images, and sensations, rather than a bundle of discrete, separate ideas.

A related trend was the development of “phenomenology” by Jewish-Austrian philosopher Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl, who seems to have been influenced by James. Husserlian phenomenology studies the structure and nature of conscious experience – the way reality appears to us. Husserl thought of appearances as “phenomena” in a broadly Kantian sense.

But, crucially, Hussel brought in Franz Brentano’s idea of intentionality, also called “aboutness” – that is (roughly) that our thoughts are always “about,” “directed toward,” or “of” something. And in Husserl’s case, the important distinction became, not between noumena and phenomena, but between noesis (the act of “experiencing”) and noema (the content of the experience).

Like the structuralists, Husserl relied on a form of introspection. But his method was informed by idiosyncratic techniques like epoché (“bracketing”),^[52] whereby the phenomenologist tried to put aside any and all assumptions, preconceived notions, and presuppositions.^[53]

For his part, William James did give some attention to the content of conscious “streams.” But, as its name implies, functionalism was not primarily focused on analyzing subjective experience.

Instead, theorists focused on questions about the “uses” (functions) of mental processes.^[54] The functionalist “sees mental phenomena as activities rather than as states or structures… and attempts to explain the nature of [the] phenomena completely in terms of the uses they fulfill.”^[55]

In this way, evolutionary theory, as it was articulated by naturalist Charles Darwin and his many admirers, provided the impetus for functionalism,^[56] which proposed that mental processes must exist because they have “survival value,” for example, by facilitating environmental adaptation.^[57]

Framed this way, James’s functionalism was closely aligned with his philosophical pragmatism.

One way to approach “pragmatism” is to say it is a theory of meaning that redefines “truth” as what “works.” James himself said that, “[o]n pragmatic principles, we can not (sic) reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it. …[I]f [a] hypothesis …works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, [then] it is true.”^[58]

Bertrand Russell subjected James’s definitions to withering criticism and, in his usual manner, humorously advanced a number of counterexamples. For instance, Russell wrote that “[w]ith James’s definition, it might happen that ‘A exists’ is true although in fact A does not exist.” So, if “…the hypothesis of Santa Claus ‘works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word’,” – say, to make your children happy on the 25th of December – we could say, “therefore[,] ‘Santa Claus exists’ is true, although Santa Claus does not exist.”^[59]

Defining “truth” pragmatically thus stands in stark contrast to (say) a “correspondence” theory, in which a “true proposition” is one that represents the world the way that it is.

Russell drives the point home, asking: Why do we say “there was such a person as [15th-c. Italian explorer Christopher] Columbus”? Surely, the correct answer is “[b]ecause of a certain man of flesh and blood who lived [some 530] years ago…” – not because saying so “works.”^[60]

Russell thus analyzed “James’s doctrine …[as] an attempt to build a superstructure of belief upon a foundation of scepticism… an attempt to ignore all extra-human facts. [Thus, James combines] Berkeleian idealism …with scepticism[,] caus[ing] him to substitute belief in [some object] for [the object itself], and to pretend that this will do just as well. But this is only a form of …subjectivistic madness which [to Russell] is characteristic of most modern philosophy.”^[61]

Still, James did famously endorse (some version of) freedom of the will, for example, in his lecture “The Will to Believe.”^[62] Notwithstanding the provocative title, James is not exactly a proponent of the notion that humans can simply choose to believe whatever they want.^[63]

At the same time, William James exerted a tremendous influence upon later “existentialists,”^[64] many of whom wanted to say that meaning and purpose are the results of choices and actions.

As William Barrett once wrote: “Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to be labeled an Existentialist. Indeed, at this late date, we may very well wonder whether it would not be more accurate to call James an Existentialist than a Pragmatist.”^[65]

One of the hallmarks of 20th-c. Existentialism is an exaltation of the human will that is difficult to classify. In “continental” European thought, this may have a Cartesian quality, whereby behavior of “objects” in the world is wholly determined by antecedent causal factors; whereas, “subjects” in the world – namely, conscious beings like you and me – cannot escape being “free agents.”

When cross-pollinated with the Anglo-“analytic” tradition, Existentialism may take on, or be “cashed out as,” a form of compatibilism (or “soft determinism”). According to this perspective, human behavior is, in fact (i.e., metaphysically), determined. But, psychologically, we may think of ourselves as “free” (or self-determined) so long as our choices align with our desires.

Although functionalism, strictly so-called, is largely passé, it did pave the way for contemporary evolutionary psychology, which has been championed by the likes of “psycholinguist” Steven Arthur Pinker, pal of litigious lawyer Alan Morton Dershowitz.^[66]

Functionalism is a precursor to “behaviorism,” which largely replaced it, not least because some functionalists got onto the defining “mind” as a “set of dispositions” for “adaptive behavior.”^[67]

Behaviorism

Behaviorism concerns itself only with that which is “scientific” – that is, things that are publicly, or, at any rate “unambiguously observable, and preferably measurable,” namely behaviors.^[68]

“Behaviorism …offered …[psychologists and] …theorists of cognitive development a way to be strongly empiricist without appealing to [John] Locke’s [idea of an] inner theater of the mind.”^[69]

In a sense, the rise of behaviorism – and its attendant de-emphasis or disregard of subjective experience – created space for “existentialism” (which emphasizes experience and subjectivity).

Existentialism was deeply influenced by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology (discussed above).

Husserl’s student Martin Heidegger, while he never embraced the label, nevertheless is credited with launching contemporary existentialism which, in thinkers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus (“absurdism”), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, explored individual experience and the “creation of meaning” (or lack thereof) in human choice, perception, and responsibility.^[70]

Ernest Geller described existentialism as “a kind of a priori psychology. It tells us …how you feel and how you think, not by asking you or observing you, but by deducing it from certain general features of your situation – such as …that you’re going to die; …that you have to make moral decisions without having them guaranteed; …that other people are objects to you, but you’re an object to the other people. …These are …[its] premises. From [those], it deduces how you really feel” – absurd, alienated, anxiety-riddled, inauthentic, purposeless, etc.^[71]

So, okay, existentialism latched onto subjectivity. But why should behaviorism give up on it? And why does existentialism abandon a posteriori methodology? Once again, the historical context is instructive. Let’s unpack a bit of it.

In tracing how structuralism gave way to functionalism (see above), we already mentioned Auguste Comte’s “positivism.” Proponents of positivism held “that all true knowledge is scientific” (a belief now called “scientism”). Positivists were dead-set against invoking any “unobservable theoretical entities …in scientific discourse.”^[72]

This anti-theological and anti-“metaphysical” disposition was merged with the arcane and highly specialized mathematical-philosophical doctrine known as “logicism.” According to logicism, the concepts, entities, and laws of mathematics are reducible to, or identical with, those of logic.^[73]

There was a further, important thesis of logicism as well, namely that logic and mathematics are both non-psychological and objective – in the sense of existing and being true independently of human thought. Logic encapsulated rules of sound inference. On this latter point, logicism was expressly opposed to “psychologism,” or the idea that logic and mathematics are psychological – that is, subjective – principles that summarize the way that human thinking happens to work.

To adherents of “logicism,” the rules of logic could not be (or have been) otherwise. They don’t simply describe how we think. They represent how propositions actually fit together (known as entailment relationships). To believers in “psychologism,” logic is not dealing with anything more than what the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume called “habits of the mind.”^[74]

The combination of logicism and positivism was typified in the early thought of the 20th-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. His first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,^[75] profoundly influenced the so-called “Vienna Circle” and led to the creation of logical positivism.^[76]

The previously discussed philosophy of pragmatism and the Vienna Circle’s logical “positivism had a common objective in their attempt to clarify and solve philosophical problems through the analysis” – and redefinition – “of meaning.”^[77] The latter took a much harder line. For example…

The logical positivists asserted that all “metaphysics” was, not just false, but was literally meaningless. To them, the only way a proposition may be meaningful is for it to be “verifiable.”

To many logical positivists, the realm of the meaningless included talk about ethics and religion. It also ranged over “metaphysical” questions such as those about the possible existence of free will, God, minds, or souls.

A few of logical-positivist thinkers, such as Rudolf Carnap, relocated to America during the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism (“Nazism”). Carnap took up residence at the University of Chicago, and his assistant was Carl Gustav “C. G.” Hempel. For his part, Hempel is associated with the doctrine of “logical behaviorism,” or the thesis that propositions seeming to refer to mental concepts can actually be “reduced to,” or translated into, behavioral propositions.

Oxford-University-based “ordinary-language” philosopher Gilbert Ryle further articulated ideas that were incorporated into behaviorism. For instance, Ryle’s 1949 book, The Concept of Mind, disparaged the long-held popular view – going back to René Descartes – that “mind” is an immaterial substance, or a “ghost in the machine [i.e., the body].”^[78]

Psychological behaviorism overlapped with, and drew inspiration from, this logical-behaviorist doctrine. Like members of the Vienna Circle, psychological behaviorists elevated methods of empirical verification and disparaged, eliminated, and rejected talk about unobservable “mental” states. Thus, from its inception, behaviorism was thoroughly naturalistic.

Part 2: The Major Players

John B. Watson

John Broadus Watson,^[79] is the Johns-Hopkins-University theorist usually called the “father of behaviorism.”^[80] A biographer describes Watson’s childhood as one characterized by delinquency; he was twice arrested for fighting and for “discharging firearms”.^[81]

Of course, Watson came from a hardscrabble world where “the indigent, the unskilled, and the desperate” might only manage to survive by laboring in “[t]he mills” – which were “new factories [that] replaced old forms of peonage and chattel”.^[82] Meanwhile, the lives of “factory managers and overseers” were a cut above the rest and they became “…the emerg[ing] …middle class”.^[83]

In this environment, colleges and universities were essentially geared toward “train[ing] a new professional class to serve the diverse needs of an increasingly urban-industrial community.”^[84]

Bear in mind that many of what we think today of as prestigious universities were established as thinly veiled recruitment centers and academies for particular sectors of the economy (and the individuals who dominated them). For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was founded by geologist William Barton Rogers in 1861 (and funded by a federal “land grant”). One of its specialties was preparing geologists to locate coal, oil, and mineral deposits for mining operations. Similarly, industrialist Amasa “Leland” Stanford established the university that bears his name in order to train civil, mechanical, electrical, and metallurgical engineers – all essential for building trains, laying tracks, and connecting U.S. cities with them.

The rationale for Leland Stanford’s investment was simple. If coal and railroad concerns – which were often joined at the hip – had to pay to train employees themselves, then operating costs would become astronomical. It was much more cost effective to endow some educational and research institutions, use political influence to secure ongoing federal funding, and then simply hire graduates once they had acquired their lucrative skill sets.

Thus, unless one resigns him- or herself to laboring in a factory, the available career paths for average “Joes” are: (1) learning to manage other laborers or (2) assisting industry. Probably vaguely groping toward one of these two outcomes, Watson eventually received a master’s degree at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. There, he had been taught by one Gordon B. Moore, a disciple of John Dewey with only a “limited …background in psychology” who evidently formulated his own, idiosyncratic “physiological psychology.”^[85]

Whatever that actually came down to evidently didn’t matter much, as Watson later reflected that this early period “failed to ‘mean anything’ in terms of his education.”^[86]

By this point: “Watson had come to realize that his only hope for advancement lay in further professional training.”^[87] Thus he undertook a letter-writing campaign to try to secure his path.

According to the story, after being refused entry into Princeton (after having appealed to James Mark Baldwin), Watson wrote a personal letter to the University of Chicago’s President William Rainey Harper asking, not only for admission, but also for a free ride (or payment deferral).^[88] His wish was apparently granted after he somehow convinced Furman University President Andrew P. Montague to write him a letter of recommendation.^[89]

Of course, the University of Chicago was established with funding from Standard Oil founder, John Davison Rockefeller, Sr.

Watson received his PhD. in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1903 after studying with several notables, including functionalist standard-bearer James Rowland Angell;^[90] John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher; neurologist-physiologist Henry Herbert Donaldson, breeder of the Wistar albino laboratory rat;^[91] and animal behaviorist and biologist Jacques Loeb.

The “Loeb” surname will come into play, shortly, when we discuss the Kuhn, Loeb, & Co. banking operation. Although we cannot say for sure whether Jacques Loeb was a relation.

Jacques Loeb did, however, once work for “the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York” – later Rockefeller University.^[92]

Donaldson had done studies on “sensory deprivation” – now said to be widely employed in various forms of “enhanced interrogation” (torture) – by studying Ms. Laura Dewey Lynn Bridgman, a blind and deaf woman who was an earlier version of Helen Adams Keller.^[93]

Wilhelm Jerusalem, who translated Dewey’s works into German, also wrote about Bridgman, who had been educated at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, founded by “Boston Brahmin” – and ex-opium smuggler – Thomas Handasyd Perkins.

Combining these various influences, and likely under no small obligation to his patrons at the University of Chicago, Watson professed – in his so-called “Behaviorist Manifesto”^[94] – to reimagine psychology, not as a study of the “mind” or of consciousness, but of behavior and “environments.” As we will further explore in a moment, this was probably music to the ears of big-business interests, especially at the dawn of what engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor called “scientific management.”^[95] Possibly, Watson was something of an academic mercenary.

Watson’s behaviorism was premised upon a “classical-conditioning” model^[96] of stimulus and response that had been developed by Ivan Petrovich Pavlov during experiments – including with his famous “Pavlovian dogs” – primarily during the Bolshevik and Stalinist eras of communism.^[97]

“After the fall of the Tsarist regime in 1917, the Bolsheviks identified Pavlov as the main authority in physiology… [T]hey [were the first to support] him unconditionally.”^[98] Later, when he “…search[ed] for a thinker …who …[would] act as the great transformer of human nature, [Joseph] Stalin rediscovered the figure of Ivan Pavlov… In [Pavlov’s] theory on conditioned reflexes, Stalin found a formula to place human nature in an environment controlled by the State. Pavlov’s ‘stimulus-reaction’ theory enabled [Stalin] to see people as simple automatons.

“This …led to a Pavlovian revolution in the Soviet behavioural sciences… [and] became the basis of the ‘Soviet man’: the human being …whose behaviour, …may be fully understood by knowing the laws of conditioning and controlled by applying this knowledge.”^[99]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Watson “was a reductive materialist who rejected spirituality and tried to explain everything in terms of physical mechanisms, framed by stimulus-response reflexes.”^[100] Gustav Bergmann, an early member of the Vienna Circle who later decamped for the United States (along with Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Peter Frank, and Kurt Gödel) evidently saw Watson’s behaviorism as an extension of logical positivism and its U.S. variant, logical empiricism. (Logical positivism had been transplanted from Austria to the United Kingdom via Sir Alfred Jules “A. J.” Ayer, who worked for Britain’s MI6 intelligence during World War II.^[101])

Bergmann praised Watson, saying that the latter’s “contribution was not,” in the first place, Watson’s own, personal “materialism or metaphysical behaviorism – i.e., [his endorsement of] the thesis, which [to Bergmann] is merely silly, that there are no minds – but, rather, his [enforcement of] methodological behaviorism.”^[102]

Thus, Watson’s methodology required that behaviorists act as-if their subjects had no minds (i.e., adopt materialism as a methodology) – regardless of what they personally believed.

So, technically, a “methodological behaviorist” need not be committed to atheism, naturalism, physicalism, etc. “Methodological behaviorism makes no commitment either way about the existence of the mental.”^[103] Metaphysical or “[p]hilosophical behaviorism does make such a commitment: mental states are identified with overt bodily movements, or tendencies to certain movements, given certain stimulus inputs. …Mental terms are given operational definitions (definitions of something solely in terms of what can be empirically tested or measured…) …,”^[104] as we will discuss further (albeit briefly) when we mention Percy W. Bridgman.^[105]

To say, for example, that John Doe “feels a pain” or “is in pain,” is simply to say that John will say and do certain things (like grimace, recoil, or shout “ow!”) under particular conditions (such as being slapped by his wife when his extramarital affair is discovered or getting bitten trying to scare his research subject with a rat).

Even though “[n]ot many [serious thinkers] paid attention [to Watson] in 1913 and for several years thereafter[,] …as 1920 approached, behaviorism was taking hold [in the academy], partly because authoritative people like future Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell and Harvard neorealist …[and William James’s pupil] Ralph Barton Perry generally supported Watson’s program.”^[106]

Importantly, Perry advocated for “defensive” or “militant democracy,” a view whereby proponents sought to “limit certain rights and freedoms [of people] in a democratic society in order to protect the existence of the state, its democratic character and institutions, minority rights, or other aspects of the democratic system.”^[107]

In a few moments, we will say much more about the “democratic character” Perry had in mind.

Discussing Watsonian behaviorism in a joint paper revealingly titled “The Cult of Empiricism…”, philosopher Stephen Edelston Toulmin and psychologist David E. Leary are explicit:

“[T]he practical [i.e., pragmatic] character of the American temperament [during the era], blending …with the progressivist movement…, provided a context within which American psychologists were called upon, and willingly offered, to apply their new-found methods to the solution of real-life problems. …[I]t is clear that Watson’s promise of an ‘objective’ science of psychology that would lead (in short order) to the prediction and control of behavior was precisely what the reformers, politicians, and businessmen-trustees wanted to hear… The fit between perceived social needs and the goals of applied, and particularly behavioristic, psychology was fortunate [sic], to say the least.”^[108]

Thus, there was a related societal trend that is vital to appreciating the rise of psychological behaviorism. Before we tackle it, let’s talk about the twenty-eighth U.S. president whose rôle in establishing (or at least ratifying) the psychocracy/psyocracy seems to have been decisive. We can say nothing definitive; but we’ll gesture at (what we consider to be) several suggestive lines.

Woodrow Wilson

Thomas “Woodrow” Wilson was President of the United States from 1913 to 1921.

Previously (1902-1910), Wilson served as the president of Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton is one of the nation’s original eight “Ivy League” schools.

Princeton served as the academic home of Charles William Bray, II. Bray was an experimental psychologist who started in the psychology department beginning in 1928 and, by the end of 1945, had risen to full professorship.^[109] Possibly, this was due to his close association, during World War Two, with one Walter Samuel Hunter. (See “The Second World War,” below.)

Princeton would also later figure into the story of the “analysis” of radio propaganda (on which, see infra.) and its press was the publisher of works such as Harold D. Lasswell’s Propaganda, Communication, and Public Opinion: A Comprehensive Reference Guide.^[110]

In 1910, Wilson ran for New Jersey governor. So-called “dean of public relations,” Pendleton Dudley was paid – by persons unknown – to aggressively promote Wilson’s campaign.

Even near the end of his life, Dudley refused to divulge the name of Wilson’s patron. He stated:

“As to the Woodrow Wilson incident, let me say first that this was a highly confidential matter involving very delicate personal considerations and to identify a pioneer public reactions practitioner with a rather devious development… would be… damaging to our profession.”^[111]

For his part, Dudley went on (circa 1956) to chair the Foundations for Public Relations Research and Education, now the Institute for Public Relations.

It was also around this stage of his political career that the shadowy “Colonel” Edward Mandell House came into the picture – eventually to be engaged as Wilson’s campaign manager.^[112]

House came from money and out of the state of Texas.^[113] It was likely (at least partially) on House’s advice that Wilson authorized General John “Black Jack” Pershing to undertake the “neutralizing” or “punitive expedition” against the Mexican revolutionary known as “Pancho Villa,”^[114] ostensibly in retaliation for his March 9, 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico.

The book Filming Pancho: How Hollywood Shaped the Mexican Revolution,^[115] explains how Wilsonian propagandists (“public-relations” men) carefully curated – and even stage-managed – the American public’s news about the goings on immediately south of the border.^[116]

“On January 3, 1914, Pancho Villa became Hollywood’s first Mexican superstar. In signing an exclusive movie contract, Villa agreed to keep other film companies from his battlefield, to fight in daylight wherever possible, and to reconstruct battles if the footage needed reshooting.”^[117]

Who would join General Pershing on the border in Colonel House’s home state of Texas to assist the “…expeditionary army hunting …Pancho Villa”?^[118] Later-to-be Office of Strategic Services head honcho, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, “The Spymaster Who Created …Modern American Espionage.”^[119] But, speaking of “espionage” …

It was also under Wilson’s watch that the Espionage Act of 1917 was passed and signed into law, essentially criminalizing any actions – or exercises of speech – that undermined war aims.

Some suggest that House’s utopian novel (for more on which genre, see below), Philip Dru: Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935,^[120] served as a “blueprint” for his advice to Wilson during the latter’s presidency.^[121] Secretary of the Interior, Franklin Knight Lane, seemed to remark that many policies advocated in House’s book “…[come] about slowly,” under the Wilson administration, “even woman suffrage.”^[122]

In the novel, Philip Dru is represented as speaking fondly of “Socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx”.^[123] Commenting on Philip Dru, Administrator, which was published in 1912, Kennedy intellectual Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr. (born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger) wrote: “At one point Dru muses about Russia and wonders when her deliverance will comes. …As the book ends, Dru has resigned his dictatorship, learned ‘Slavic,’ and sailed with his …girl friend from San Francisco to an unknown destination, presumably to start the Russian revolution.”^[124]

It seems noteworthy that Wilson was president when Romanov Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate between March 8-16, 1917. Little more than half a year later, October 24-25, 1917, the former Russian Empire was fatefully transformed into the communist Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. In July of 1918, Nicholas and his entire family were murdered. By 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or “USSR”) was born out of a treaty joining Belarus, Russia, Transcaucasia (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia), and the Ukraine into a “Soviet Union.”

It is also important to gesture toward the long-standing allegations that this Soviet Union was made possible due to funding (and other assistance) from financiers inside Britain, Germany, and the United States.^[125] The ex-tsarist military officer and “White Russian” émigré Arsène de Goulévitch, claimed that Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as “Leon Trotsky” had spoken “of a large loan granted in 1907 by a financier belonging to the British Liberal Party” – ostensibly referring either to Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild or his son, Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild.^[126]

According to Edgar Sisson, an American stationed in “Petrograd” (later Leningrad and now Saint Petersburg) and the U.S.-Russian liaison from Wilson’s Creel Committee (the Committee on Public Information), an informant within the ranks of the Communist revolutionaries had turned over evidence of collusion between the Bolsheviks and Western bankers. Among those named were Alexander Lvovich Parvus^[127] and Max Moritz Warburg,^[128] who had also supposedly financed Trotsky and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias “V. I. Lenin.”

But, stateside, fingers were pointed at Jacob Henry Schiff and Paul Moritz Warburg, both bankers at Kuhn, Loeb and Co., the American arm of the German-based M. M. Warburg & Co. Paul Warburg became the second vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and was the brother of Felix Moritz Warbug and Max Warburg, who lived on the European continent until they were displaced – and decamped for New York City – following the political rise of Adolf Hitler.

British parliamentarian Archibald Henry Maule Ramsay wrote that, between the revolutionary years of 1905 to 1917, “Jacob Schiff, of Kuhn Loeb and Co.” had “granted …subsidies …to the Nihilists” for the purpose of establishing a “terrorist organization” that would “[cover] Russia with its emissaries” and topple the tsar.^[129]

Numerous writers have reproduced the following quotation: “…[I]t is estimated by Jacob’s grandson, John Schiff, a prominent member of New York society, that the old man sank about $20,000,000 for the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.”^[130]

Though, researcher George “G.” Edward Griffin has supposed that Schiff – and others within the same banking circles – “heavily financed all factions of the revolutionary movement to be sure of gaining influence with whatever group should come out on top.”^[131]

A host of contemporary reporters has parrotted the line taken by diplomat and historian George Frost Kennan – one of six Establishment “insiders” termed the “Wise Men” – who deemed the documents “forgeries” in an article published by the University of Chicago Press.^[132]

Several facts remain unaccounted on this blithe dismissal. Most glaring, as even Establishment historian Naomi Wiener Cohen admits, Kennan and Schiff had previously worked together to distribute Russian-revolutionary propaganda.

“The Russo-Japanese War [1904-1905, had] allied Schiff with George Kennan in a venture to spread revolutionary propaganda among Russian prisoners of war held by Japan. The operation was a carefully guarded secret, and not until the Russian Revolution of March 1917 was it publicly disclosed by Kennan. He then told how he had secured Japanese permission to visit the camps and how the prisoners had asked him for something to read. Arranging for the Friends of Russian Freedom to ship over a ton of revolutionary material, he secured Schiff’s financial backing. As Kennan told it, fifty thousand officers and men returned to Russia ardent revolutionists. There they became fifty thousand ‘seeds of liberty’ in one hundred regiments that contributed to the overthrow of the czar. …[T]he Russo-Japanese War changed power configurations on the international scene, …[and] it generate[d] new strategies for Schiff to employ in his private war for Jewish liberation.”^[133]

Additionally, as Bertie Charles Forbes related, Jacob Schiff referred to “[t]he Russian revolution [of Mar., 1917] …[as] possibly the most important event in Jewish history since the race was brought out of slavery…”.^[134] So, Schiff was certainly an “interested observer.”^[135]

Moreover, Schiff was certainly no stranger to funding socio-political initiatives when they suited him, even when local laws or populations were opposed – as when, in the U.S., he paid to divert Jewish immigrants from New York City and reroute and settle them in Galveston, Texas.^[136]

Furthermore, Schiff lurks behind the scenes for the creation of the “Fed.” Recall first that Louis Thomas McFadden, a 19th-20th-century Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, had alleged that “Wilson was under the guidance and control of the most ferocious usurers in New York through their hireling, [Col. Edward M.] House.”^[137]

Is it merely coincidental that several of the pillars of the Establishment^[138] were erected during Wilson’s tenure? For example, the 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution (which created the federal income tax) was ratified in 1913 and followed swiftly by the Underwood Tariff Act (a.k.a. the Revenue Act of 1913). The Federal Reserve Act (signed by Wilson on December 23, 1913) created the Federal Reserve System, the first central banking system in this country since Andrew Jackson vetoed the recharter of the Second Bank of the U.S. (1816-1836).^[139]

According to G. Edward Griffin, Wilson was handpicked by the coterie of bankers who devised the Federal Reserve at a secret meeting off the coast of Georgia, held from November 20-30, 1910, including: Republican Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich (Rhode Island) and his private secretary Arthur Shelton; Assistant Treasury Secretary Abram “A.” Piatt Andrew, Jr.; J. P. Morgan-banker Henry Pomeroy Davison, Sr.; National City Bank’s Frank Arthur Vanderlip, Sr.; and – Jacob Schiff’s associate and friend – Kuhn, Loeb & Co.’s Paul Moritz Warburg.^[140]

Indeed, Paul Warburg and Jacob Schiff were related by marriage. Schiff married Therese Loeb and the two had a daughter, Frieda, who married Felix Warburg. Paul Warburg married Nina J. Loeb, Therese’s sister. In any event…

According to William T. “Bill” Still, Senator Aldrich had put his name on a proposal (the Aldrich Bill) to create a central bank earlier in 1910, but it failed to pass.^[141] Still says that the bill which ultimately did pass as the Federal Reserve Act three years later – the Glass-Owen Bill – was merely the Aldrich Plan under a different name. To hear Still tell it, the press and public really only expected “money-trust” mischief from Republican sponsors like Aldrich. So, the scheme was to submit the bankers’ blueprint via Democrats, including bill sponsors, Representative Carter Glass and Senator Robert Latham Owen, Jr., and the signer, President Wilson. Recall that Wilson had originally been endorsed by populist William Jennings Bryan.^[142]

This manipulative strategy, if it really was the plan, is indicative of a means-justify-the-ends sort of mindset behind some of these groundbreaking – and epoch-making – political promotions.

Besides the fact that National City had a seat at the Jekyll Island Club, it was also an early, heavy employer of public-relations “interpretive” bulletins on which it spent “$250,000 a year”.^[143]

But the supposed “great success,” and “the first modern government propaganda operation, [was put into place] …under the …Wilson Administration. [Recall that] …Wilson was elected President in 1916 …in the middle of World War I… on the platform ‘Peace Without Victory.’

“…The population was extremely pacifistic and saw no reason to become involved in a European war. [But t]he Wilson administration was actually committed to war and had to do something about it. They established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission [sic], which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world.

“…Among those who participated actively and enthusiastically in Wilson’s war were the progressive intellectuals, people of the John Dewey circle [including Laura ‘Jane’ Addams, William Edward Burghardt ‘W. E. B.’ Du Bois, Sidney Hook, Walter Lippmann, and Abraham Johannes ‘A. J.’ Muste], who took great pride, as you can see from their own writings at the time, in having shown that what they called the ‘more intelligent members of the community,’ namely, themselves, were able to drive a reluctant population into a war by terrifying them and eliciting jingoist fanaticism.

“That was a major achievement, and it led to a further achievement. …Right at that time and after the war the same techniques were used to whip up a hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, which succeeded pretty much in destroying unions and eliminating such dangerous problems as freedom of the press and freedom of political thought. There was very strong support from the media, from the business establishment…”.^[144]

The Committee on Public Information was nicknamed the “Creel Committee” after its chairman and nominal head, George Edward Creel (with connexions to both William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer). Ultimately, it reported to President Wilson (and Col. House?) and was partially overseen by Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Secretary of War Newton Diehl Baker, Jr., and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. Creel directed numerous propagandists, including Edward Louis Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew who later worked with the CIA and the United Fruit Company when the former overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954), Carl Robert Byoir (who later ran ad campaigns and PR for The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, or “A&P”), and Charles Edward Merriam (founder of the Rockefeller-funded Social Science Research Council).

It is noteworthy that the previously named Edgar Sisson was also an adjunct of the Creel Committee, which collected and published the Sisson Documents. This association is perhaps the strongest argument that can be mustered in favor of skepticism about the documents’ veracity. As one academic over-confidently puts it: “[T]he American government distributed fabricated documents supplied by anti-Communist revolutionaries to make false claims about a German-Bolshevik conspiracy. The …Sisson Documents strengthened a narrative the Wilson administration created that the Bolsheviks were German stooges who, with German support and direction, took Russia out of the war and promoted unrest in the United States.”^[145]

Of course, the propagandistic use of the documents is one thing (and doubtlessly it is true). But the documents’ genuineness is a separate matter. Effective propaganda nearly always builds on a foundation of truth. And the fact that Wilson’s Creel Committee seems to have publicized the Sisson Documents for instrumental-utilitarian reasons, does nothing to address the other facts that suggest Schiff’s (et al.) interest and involvement in fomenting revolution inside of Russia.^[146]

Nevertheless, either the Sisson Documents are good evidence that the Bolsheviks were partly financed by Western bankers (like Schiff) with connexions to the Warburgs, or they are good evidence for the effectiveness of propaganda for controlling the public mind – or both.

As the Rockefeller-funded Council on Foreign Relations, reflecting on the World-War-One period, once bragged: “[B]y the expensive process of trial and error, we succeeded, before the Armistice came, in developing a workable system of price-fixing and of excess profits taxation; we devised means of increasing the labor supply and of diverting it to essential industries; we formulated and made effective a national labor policy; we built up the most efficient engine of war propaganda which the world had ever seen.”^[147] (N.B. Later CIA Director Allen Welsh Dulles was listed as the “chairman” of the CFR’s “committee on research”.^[148])

It is also interesting to consider the fact that, according to 19th-20th-century American-Jewish businessman and Catholic convert Benjamin Harrison Freedman, Wilson was being blackmailed around the same time frame – and, probably, beyond.

According to Freedman, the blackmailer was socialite Mary Hulbert Peck, with whom Wilson had allegedly had an affair in 1906, while still at Princeton. In Freedman’s tale, the intermediary for the hush-money payouts – totalling some $40,000, “worth $1,421,328.89 today”^[149] – was New York attorney Samuel Untermyer.^[150]

On the other hand, if the true mastermind had actually been Untermyer, using the affair as leverage (or even, in a more exotic scenario, employing Peck as a “honey trap”), then the true goal of the blackmail may have been to exert political influence over Wilson.

On this wavelength, we may recall that Wilson was president when the Balfour Declaration was made, November 2, 1917, and addressed to Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild. That document, issued under the full authority of “His Majesty” George V’s government, essentially committed Great Britain to the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, which was then still under the control of the Ottoman empire.^[151]

In response to the Balfour Declaration, the 1920 World Zionist Congress, held in London, established the “United Israel Appeal,”^[152] with Samuel Untermyer as its first president.^[153]

The previously mentioned banker Jacob Schiff stated: “It has come to me, …while thinking over events [related to the Russian revolution] of recent weeks... that the Jewish people should at last have a home land of their own. I do not mean by that that there should be a Jewish nation. I am not a believer in a Jewish nation built on all kinds of isms, with egoism as the first, and agnosticism and atheism among the others. But I am a believer in the Jewish people and in the mission of the Jew, and I believe that somewhere there should be a great reservoir of Jewish learning in which Jewish culture might be furthered and developed… And naturally that land would be Palestine. If that ever develops – and the present war may bring the development of this ideal nearer – it will not be accomplished in a day or a year, and in the meantime it is our duty to keep the flame of Judaism burning brightly.”^[154]

When Chaim Weizmann, the future first president of Israel, came to America in 1920, the head of the Jewish delegation that received him was Louis Dembitz Brandeis who just so happens to have been the first Jewish supreme court justice – nominated by Wilson January 28, 1916.^[155]

At the same time, Justice Brandeis “was also very influential in promoting the virtues of scientific management in its early period of development… [H]e was …a proponent of the importance of the role of efficient business practices…”.^[156]

One commentator writes: “[C]ontemporary behaviorism is rooted …deeply in the prosaic soil of rationalized factory production and in the empirical imaginations of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Frank [Bunker] and Lillian [Evelyn] Gilbreth [née Moller], and [George] Elton Mayo than it is in psychological or scientific theory.

“It was on the shop floor that ‘scientific’ behavior control was first instituted on a large scale (and where it remains endemic); and it was in the work of Taylor, the father of ‘scientific management’ and among the apostles of ‘human engineering’ who followed him,^[157] that the attitudes and ideology of self-conscious behaviorism were first articulated.”^[158]

Thus, there is a tangled knot of nascent behaviorism, Big-Business money trusts, scientific management, and – yes – Zionism all converging during the administration of Woodrow Wilson. No wonder it was he who once fretfully wrote:

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. …[T]here is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”^[159]

That’s the kind of thing Sigmund Freud might have called “uncanny.”^[160]

Finally, as the story goes: “The first step words a One World Government, the …[League of Nations,] was set up after WWI [January 10, 1920] by …Woodrow Wilson at the behest of the British-influenced Round Table and a cadre of U.S. aristocrats who called themselves the Inquiry.”^[161] Wilson had a massive stroke on October 2, 1919, while cheerleading for the League.

As we have mentioned in several places, such as our “1968,” his second wife, Edith Wilson (née Galt) has occasionally been called the “first woman president” on account her assumption of unspecified powers and prerogatives after her husband’s incapacitation. The extent of Edith’s influence is still a mystery. Edith was assisted in hiding President Wilson’s true condition from everyone by the possibly intelligence-connected naval rear admiral and physician, Cary Travers Grayson. On Wilson’s passing and subsequent alleged ghost sightings, see “Haunted D.C.”

Wilsonian Liberals & the First World War

More or less simultaneous with the publication of Watson’s Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It in 1913, was Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s ascendancy to the presidency in the 1912 election.

A key feature of that contest was the splitting of the opposition into the old Republicans – who nominated incumbent president, future Supreme Court chief justice, and former Skull and Bones fraternity member William Howard Taft – and the Progressives – party of Theodore Roosevelt.

Supporters of Wilson called themselves “liberals.” In the literature, they’re sometimes also termed “Wilsonian Idealists.” Many of these individuals were partial to “progressivism,” which fused a Madisonian taste for federalism (with its associated strong central government) with domestic interventionism in the name of “social reform.”

William James’s successor and fellow pragmatist-instrumentalist, John Dewey, prescribed that these reformist policies forgo dogmatism and aim, through experience and experimentation, to solve practical social problems. In fact, Dewey explicitly linked all this with behaviorism.

He wrote that: “instrumentalism means a behaviorist theory of thinking and knowing. It means that knowing is literally something which we do; …and that active experimentation is essential to verification.”^[162] While Dewey perhaps only intended to emphasize that knowledge is a human activity and not merely a passive reception of information, other thinkers in this “Deweyite,” progressive-liberal mold took things further.

One commentator summarized the received view. “[Walter] Lippmann argued for an intellectual elite that would apply scientific management to democracy, in order to tame it. His philosophy was a blend of [Wilsonian] liberalism and elitism.”^[163]

Noam Chomsky summarized what problems these Wilsonians had in mind.

“By World War I, business leaders and elite intellectuals recognized that the population had won so many rights that they could not be controlled by force, so it would be necessary to turn to control of attitudes and opinions. Those are the years when the huge public relations industry emerged…^[164] The industry was devoted to what …the leading public intellectual of the twentieth century …Walter Lippmann approvingly called ‘a new art in the practice of democracy,’ [or] the ‘manufacture of consent’ – [also called] the ‘engineering of consent’ [by] …his contemporary Edward Bernays… Both Lippmann and Bernays took part in Wilson’s state propaganda organization, the Committee on Public Information… [I]t was hoped [that their new techniques], would ensure that the ‘intelligent minorities’ would rule, undisturbed by ‘the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd,’ [namely,] the general public, [those] ‘ignorant and meddlesome outsiders’ whose [proper] ‘function’ is to be ‘spectators,’ not ‘participants.’”^[165]

Meanwhile, the “P. R.” industry’s major promoters held that “[t]he ‘greatest’ service public relations could perform …was to do for a business ‘what [American former-baseball-player- turned-Christian-evangelist William Ashley] Billy Sunday has done for religion’ – publicize its policies in ‘the language of the man who rides in the trolley car and goes to ball games…’”^[166]

Consequently, “behaviorism was very popular among the managerial classes… [I]t gave them a moral right to control and dominate people. If people have …no intrinsic nature, then there is no moral barrier to control or manipulation of them – in their own interest, of course. …[W]e can control and manage and organize them using the latest behavioral techniques, and they’ll all be better off.^[167] …[B]ehaviorism gave the perfect intellectual justification for it; …And the parts of the society that need that, they still believe it… more than ever.

“So, instead of talking only about academics, …go to the big institutions, like, say, the public relations industry. Now we’ve gone [up] several orders of magnitude …in power and significance. They were based from the beginning on the same idea… that it is necessary to control the public mind. …With the extension of the [voting] franchise, with the bringing in of working people and others into the public arena, you can no longer ensure that the wealthy and the capable and the enlightened, …will run everything. So therefore it is necessary to use the techniques of propaganda. And right after the First World War this was very prominent because of the enormous success of Anglo-American propaganda during the war, which had real success in affecting people’s views, extremely so, and they were aware of it.”^[168]

As Edward Bernays put it: “The important thing …is regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers. …[C]learly it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically. In the active proselytizing minorities in whom selfish interests and public interests coincide lie the progress and development of America. Only through the active energy of the intelligent few can the public at large become aware of and act upon new ideas.”^[169]

The Second World War

Under the above-discussed definition, “liberal” economic planners developed a version of state capitalism. Rather than production decisions being made Soviet-style by “central-planning” bureaucrats,^[170] by World War Two, these were arguably made in corporate boardrooms.

Remember that, once John B. Watson had tired of academia – or vice versa – he himself turned to the corporate world and developed advertising campaigns for the firm of J. Walter Thompson (JWT). In that capacity, he rose to executive level and, along the way, supposedly popularized the habit of workers taking a “coffee break” to increase sales for Maxwell House.

University of Pennsylvania psychologist James McKeen Cattell, who had been one a several Americans to study under Wilhelm Wundt, founded the Psychological Corporation in 1921. His short-lived company specialized in creating educational and psychological assessment tools.^[171]

Four-term Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal measures barely affected [the Great Depression] …in the 1930s …; but World War Two overcame it. World War Two was a grand success economically; there was a kind of semi-command economy, directed by corporate executives who flocked to Washington to run it… It was confidently predicted … that the US would go right back into depression after the war; therefore something had to be done… Fortune and Business Week reported that high-tech industry cannot survive in a ‘pure, competitive, unsubsidised, free-enterprise economy’ …and ‘the government is their only possible saviour.’ The only question [was] how. …They understood that social spending could serve to stimulate and sustain the economy, but they much preferred, and quickly hit upon, an alternative; …the Pentagon, Department of Energy, NASA, the Atomic Energy Commission, [namely,] the whole Pentagon system.”^[172]

In a word, the cover story for the initial wave of economic planning was “defense” – foreign and domestic. “It is easy to sell; you just make people cower in terror, and then they will pay for it.”^[173]

This basic framework goes a long way to understanding the intersection of big business and the intelligence apparatus. For example, Charles Douglas “C. D.” Jackson, who during the Second World War was part of the psychological-warfare division of the Office of War Information (OWI) and thereafter went to work for general (and later president) Dwight D. Eisenhower. Jackson ended up as an executive and publisher for Life and Time magazines, selling the U.S. populace on the necessity of the “Cold War” – and its related military spending.^[174]

Another major player to come out of the OWI was later famed Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS) company executive William Samuel Paley.

“During World War II Paley …[was] supervisor of the Office of War Information (OWI) in the Mediterranean theater, and later …[became] chief of radio in the OWI’s Psychological Warfare Division (1944-45), of which he finally became [overall] deputy chief.”^[175] In any event…

Psychological behaviorism was a made-to-order for this latest, “psych-war” version of John Dewey’s “instrumentalist” social-management program.^[176] This is not merely our inference.

“By 1942, the federal government was the largest single employer of psychologists in the country… [And a] single government agency… called the Office of Scientific Research and Development… and …directed by Vannevar Bush… coordinated all scientific research…”.^[177]

History has actually provided us with a few individual case studies. The first is the shadowy Walter Samuel Hunter. An early convert to a broadly Watsonian viewpoint, Hunter began cheerleading for behaviorism and haranguing its critics.^[178]

One biographical sketch refers to “Hunter …[as] a liberal member of the behaviorist group in psychology,” where the meaning of “liberal” – in the period – has been explained, above.^[179]

Hunter’s intersection with state “security” is evident in the same place, where we read that, on the eve of U.S. involvement in World War Two, he was “chairman of the applied psychology panel of the National Defense Research Committee [under Vannevar Bush]… [Hunter] was recognized by President Truman, who awarded him the Medal for Merit in 1948. Hunter was active as a member of several other military advisory groups during and after World War II.”^[180]

Hunter’s Wikipedia article says, cryptically: “Little has been publicly documented as to exactly what Hunter did during World War II.”^[181]

The case of behaviorist Frank Nicholas Stanton, PhD., while still short on important detail, is nevertheless quite telling – since he happened to be a long-time president (1946-1971) of CBS.

In an article published in 2008 in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, historian Michael J. Socolow refers to Stanton as “The Behaviorist in the Boardroom” and says of him that he adopted a “methodological approach” and was an expert in “audience measurement.”^[182]

By his own admission, Stanton’s views were shaped by “voracious” reading of “experimental psychology”, and he “was most impressed with the behaviorists – especially… Watson.”^[183]

According to a biographical snippet appearing on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Stanton “[graduated] from Ohio State …with a Ph.D. in psychology in 1935, [and] his studies brought him to the attention of CBS …[executive] William S[samuel]. Paley who was interested in his work in audience research” which paved the way for “…Nielsen Media Research.”^[184]

Starting in 1937, Stanton co-managed the Rockefeller-Foundation Radio Research Project.^[185]

Working closely with Stanton was another psychologist, Albert “Hadley” Cantril, Jr.,^[186] who, during World War II, worked under Nelson Rockefeller in the Office for Inter-American Affairs. Known as the “Rockefeller Office,” it had been established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt July 30, 1941,^[187] for what were (in effect) pro-business intelligence operations.^[188] Interestingly, Nelson Rockefeller was authorized to form and run his own “intell” network before the creation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).^[189]

Around the same time, Hadley Cantril published his study titled The Psychology of Social Movements.^[190] Prior to this, Cantril had been president of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), which was located in New York City^[191] and had been financed by department-store magnate Edward Albert Filene (otherwise known as the “father of U.S. credit unions”).^[192]

Another “Radio-Project” propagandist was Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, who also happened to be a literal Austrian transplant from the logical-positivist Vienna Circle.

Among other things, Stanton and his fellow propagandists Cantril and Lazarsfeld, along with Princeton University, loomed like shadows behind famed film director George Orson Welles’s infamous radio interpretation of The War of the Worlds, originally written by Herbert George “H. G.” Wells.^[193] Orson’s version was broadcast as a Halloween-themed live performance from his “Mercury Theatre on the Air” repertory group on October 30, 1938 by – who else? – CBS Radio.

The radio play is notorious for having caused – to one degree or other – “The Martian Invasion Panic.”^[194] Here’s the way sociologist Robert Emerson Bartholomew describes it.

“Shortly after 8 p.m. on October 30, 1938, many Americans became anxious or panic-stricken after listening to a live, one-hour radio play depicting a fictitious Martian landing at the Wilmuth farm in …Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Those living in the immediate vicinity of the bogus invasion appeared to have been the most frightened, but the broadcast could be heard in all regions of the continental United States, and no location was immune. The play included references to real places, buildings, highways, and streets. The broadcast also contained prestigious speakers, convincing sound effects, and realistic special bulletins. …The incident remains arguably the most widely known delusion in U.S. history, and perhaps even in world history.”^[195]

After the end of World War Two, President Harry S. Truman gave the State Department control of the OWI and the radio-propaganda outfit known as Voice of America.^[196] Of course, going into the administration of former General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the department of state would be controlled by John Foster Dulles, older brother of CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles.

Within a decade, some of the militarized propaganda-“sykewar” apparatus seems to have been shuffled into “private-sector” companies such as Simulmatics Corporation.^[197]

Transitional Thinkers

In between behaviorist majordomos Watson and Skinner, there were several notable people.

Firstly, there was atheist physicist Percy Williams Bridgman.^[198] He published his The Logic of Modern Physics^[199] and founded what is called “operationalism,” a perspective that held that the meaning of a scientific concept is nothing other than the measurement procedure (“operation”) used to observe whatever the phenomenon in question is.^[200]

Sometimes classified as “[a philosophical] theory of knowledge…, [it is in many ways] comparable to [John] Dewey’s instrumentalism [pragmatism] in the belief that the meaning of a concept is ‘synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.’”^[201]

This was carried further by Stanley Smith Stevens. “In 1935, …Stevens …argued that all psychological concepts need to be strictly defined in terms of public and repeatable operations. If the study of mind and behavior is …rigorous science, [then words like]… ‘experience,’ ‘consciousness,’ and ‘sensation’ …have to …[be] ‘operationally defined.’”^[202]

So, for example, while “hysteria” or “melancholia” may be unquantifiable states of mind, anxiety and depression may be “operationally” (read: scientifically) defined as a threshold or value on a Beck Inventory or Hamilton scale, a measurement of a subject’s heart rate, or an observation about his or her engagement or withdrawal from a particular social situation. And so on.

According to psychologist Sigmund Koch, who actually helped moved his discipline “from … [one] dominated by behaviorism …to a multivalenced set of inquiries into human mentality and functioning,”^[203] “[w]ithin a few years after the appearance of [Stevens’s] papers, … ‘virtually everyone in psychology […] was some kind of operationist. …’”^[204]

A second transitional figure was American linguist Leonard Bloomfield. Bloomfield, influenced by John B. Watson, embraced a behaviorist perspective about language. He thought of speech and writing as learned behaviors, and characterized linguistic meaning as “function of stimulus and response”.^[205]

Bloomfield placed his experimental focus upon observable linguistic phenomena – such as studying graphemes (atoms of written language), morphemes (atoms of linguistic meaning), phonemes (atoms of sound in speech utterances), and syntax (the rules for arranging all the various linguistic “atoms” into words, phrases, sentences, etc.).

Bloomfield subordinated semantics (or the study of linguistic meaning) to syntax. And he railed against the perennial behaviorist bogeyman of “mentalism.”^[206]

This term – “mentalism” – has to be handled carefully. In a pre-behaviorism context, it would have most naturally applied to psychoanalysts, like Sigmund Freud and the neo-Freudians,^[207] Carl Jung and the Jungian “depth psychologists,”^[208] Jacques Lacan and his Lacanians,^[209] and various lesser lights and spinoff movements.^[210]

In general terms, “mentalism” designates “[t]he doctrine that mental states and processes exist independently of their manifestations in behavior and can explain behavior.”^[211] So defined, Chomsky’s post-behavioral, “cognitive revolution” could be classified as a species of mentalism.

In the history of philosophy, “mentalism” is sometimes used as a synonym for “subjective idealism,” a “theory of perception that maintains that what can be known is limited to a person’s ideas; therefore, the ideas of a particular perceiver constitute [his or her] reality.”^[212]

Further complicating the picture, in popular culture, “mentalism” is associated with a certain type of entertainment or performance art that combines – or appears to combine – various “occult” practices and miscellaneous “psychic” phenomena such as clairvoyance, divination, hypnosis, mediumship, mind reading, precognition, psychokinesis, spiritism, telepathy, etc. along with memory feats, mind control, and stage-magic tricks.^[213] Of late, this is due in no small part to the effect of mass media, such as CBS’s crime-drama television series (2008-2015), The Mentalist.

Thirdly, we will mention materialistic behaviorist Clark Leonard Hull. Hull harkened back to the logicist strand of logical positivism with his Mathematico-Deductive Theory of Rote Learning.^[214] In such works as Principles of Behavior: An Introduction to Behavior Theory,^[215] Hull expressed his view that all non-reflexive behavior could be explained by observable stimuli and responses.

At the same time, Hull’s “drive theory” was apparently inspired by Sigmund Freud, the uncle of seminal propagandist Edward Bernays. Additionally, Hull also supposedly constructed his own “punch-card” computing machine, anticipating computationalism.

A fourth transitional figure was 20th-c. American semiotician Charles William Morris.^[216] Morris is especially interesting for our purposes since he sought to combine several of the movements we have discussed (behaviorism, logical positivism, and pragmatism) in his theory of signs.^[217]

In our view, the creation of the field of semiotics forms part of the crucial background for getting a grasp on Twilight Language. Therefore, we intend to explore it further in the future, planned second part of our “Twilight Language” study. However, regrettably, we lack the space to say more about it at the present time. But, we will tack on one more thing to this miscellanea.

If psychology grew out of philosophy – as did numerous other branches of science – it is also worth mentioning the trend, sometimes called “meta-epistemological skepticism,” to reduce epistemology (or the exploration of how and what we know) to “a branch of psychology and neurophysiology. Instead of focusing on the normative question of what justifies our beliefs, naturalized epistemology simply describes how people do, in fact, form their beliefs. The task of naturalized epistemology is to describe causal factors and processes in scientific, natural terms as to how people’s beliefs are normally – in the statistical sense of …usually – formed.”^[218]

Although coming during or after Skinner, key players here include Willard Van Orman “W. V. O.” Quine^[219] and Richard McKay Rorty. Rorty advanced “epistemological behaviorism,”^[220] on which “belief” and “knowledge” are reckoned behaviorally and “observationally.”

For example, on Rorty’s analysis, what it is to “know” some proposition about psychology – call it p – might boil down to being able to get an “A” grade when tested on it in your Psychology 101 class. To know something about mathematics would be (nothing other than) to display the ability to solve a particular problem. To know a language is to achieve fluency. And so on.

B. F. Skinner

“After Watson, [Burrhus Frederic] B. F. Skinner emerged as the face of behaviorism.”^[221]

Understood metaphysically, as opposed to “methodologically” or “pragmatically,” both “classical” Watonsian and Skinnerian Behaviorism are forms of philosophical determinism (“environmental determinism”). That is, Watson and Skinner rejected the idea of human free will. This ought to surprise no one, as both stand in a tradition going back at least to materialist Thomas Hobbes.

Roughly, “determinism” is the idea that all events in the world – including my writing this text and your reading it – are the law-governed and predictable results of chains of preceding causes.^[222]

Although obviously indebted to his predecessor, Skinner’s behaviorism differed enough from Watson’s for some commentators to refer to it as neo-behaviorism.^[223]

Although a full account lies well beyond our present scope, it is worth registering a few of the theoretical differences with “classical conditioning.” “[Skinner] worked with operant conditioning, as opposed to Pavlovian conditioning on which Watson’s version of behaviorism often relied.”^[224]

“Operant conditioning” was considered to be the practical next step; behaviorists factor in the impact of consequent stimuli to determine the likelihood of a given response being repeated.^[225]

To Skinner, “operant” behavior is not an organism’s automatic response to a stimulus. Rather, it is “voluntarily” behavior that an organism has learned from environmental consequences.^[226]

Operant behaviors are those by which someone acts upon the environment; the environment “responds” with consequences that strengthen or weaken the behavior. In other words, these outcomes function like feedback loops, raising or lowering the probability that various operant behaviors will be repeated. This interplay between the organism or person and the environment is called “operant conditioning,” and the influence of evolutionary theory is unmistakable.

Evolution – through survival-oriented adaptations – has shaped organisms’ antecedent or latent behavioral dispositions. This is to say that evolution provides an array of behavioral possibilities, and then the organism’s environment punishes or rewards choices that are made.

In the “behavioral sciences” (e.g., Applied Behavior Analysis), an “underlying… philosophical assumption”^[227] – and a takeoff on Darwinian natural selection^[228] – is that behaviors leading to “positive consequences” (say by increasing the odds of reproduction or survival) are more likely to be repeated than ones leading to “negative consequences” – a doctrine called “selectionism.”

And, of course, the operant-conditioning framework “does not concern itself with inner states, which Skinner calls mentalism [q.v., supra] and which he regards as unscientific, but rather with the creation of an environment that systematically provides the proper reinforcement.”^[229]

How original or philosophically defensible all this is is debatable. “Operant behavior, though defined by Skinner as behavior ‘controlled by its consequences’ is in practice little different from what had previously been termed ‘instrumental learning’ and what most people would call habit. Any well-trained ‘operant’ is in effect a habit.”^[230]

Indeed, one author goes so far as to say: “There is little that Skinner has been able to do with his rats or with those famous pigeons he taught to play ping-pong that [19th-c. American circus owner Phineas Taylor] P. T. Barnum didn’t know a century before.”^[231]

For our purposes, the crucial bit is the prospect that the behaviorist may intervene decisively in the conditioning process.^[232] On this score, “[w]hat Skinner did do was to make the [conditioning] process” – entertainment-oriented and undisciplined in the hands of Barnum and Bailey – into something “self-conscious, measurable, and systematic; he broke it down into the smallest and most discrete ‘behaviors’ – made them subject to measurement and quantification – and moved it out of the laboratory [or the ‘Big-Top’ circus tent] and into the clinic and classroom.”

Or, as we have been pointing out, into the repertoires of advertising agents, intelligence operatives, political-campaign managers, psychological-warfare specialists, and sundry other professions premised upon the manipulation of human behavior or “public opinion.”

Admittedly, and notwithstanding Frank Stanton (discussed under the subheading “The Second World War”), Noam Chomsky has acknowledged that many “Establishment”-linked interests – from business to intelligence – didn’t “…didn’t [necessarily] read Watson or Skinner.”^[233]

But other “insiders” did seem to carefully study the behaviorists. Take, for example, philosopher Abraham Kaplan, who authored The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science^[234] and wrote Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry with Harold Dwight Lasswell.^[235]

Kaplan’s own thinking was influenced by many of the same people we have touched on already, not least being pragmatists like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.^[236]

But Kaplan is most noteworthy for his close association with the RAND Corporation, which we mentioned in our article and video “1968.” Created as “Project RAND” in 1946 by Franklin R. Collbohm of the Douglas Aircraft Company along with American generals Henry H. “Hap” Arnold and Curtis Emerson LeMay, it became a “non-profit” institution in 1948.

One Charles Wolf, Jr., a long-time “economic advisor” to RAND,^[237] even wrote the foreword to Kaplan’s book, which is still in print.^[238] For his part, Wolf was also an architect of propaganda and psychological warfare conducted in Latin America under the army-intelligence operation codenamed “Project Camelot” (1964-1965) otherwise known as the study of Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential.^[239]

Some behavioral – and other – psychologists apparently received funding from the Central Intelligence Agency’s MKUltra “front” organization, the “Human Ecology Fund.”^[240] Otherwise known as the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, it was based out of Cornell University^[241] and run by one Harold George Wolff.^[242]

“In 1928, Wolff travelled to Europe, working with two Nobel Prize winners—Otto Loewi [who had discovered the first neurotransmitter] in Austria and, a few years later, Ivan Pavlov in Russia.”^[243]

By Wolff’s own admission, part of his CIA-dictated mandate was to “develop new techniques of offensive/defensive intelligence use” and to test “[p]otentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures)... to ascertain the fundamental effect upon human brain function and ...mood.”^[244]

Along with colleague, and Human Ecology Fund vice president Lawrence Hinkle, Wolff helped to establish the effectiveness of inducing or utilizing such psychological tortures as "isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger" for purposes such as interrogation.^[245]

According to a document collected by John Marks, in 1949, “the CIA’s Morse Allen” sought to create “‘security validation teams” …that would combine the use drugs, hypnosis and the polygraph to perform a variety of intelligence functions, including the screening of Agency personnel and informants, the interrogation of suspected enemy agents, the processing of any ‘loyalty cases’ that might arise, and the possible use of ‘operational hypnosis.’”^[246]

In the ensuing years, techniques incorporating Wolff’s discoveries have been used in various detention and “extraordinary rendition” centers all over the world.^[247]

Moreover, “[d]octors like Wolff were funded by the CIA via organisations like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and through dummy institutes set up by the agency.”^[248]

One of the most notorious of the MKUltra doctors was American psychiatrist Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, who we mentioned in our video “10 Occultists Who Were Accused of Being Spies.”

Jolly West’s entanglements are too numerous to list exhaustively.^[249] But it’s a matter of public record that he conducted animal experiments with LSD.^[250] And West was one of the psychiatric doctors called in to “evaluate” Jacob Rubenstein – a.k.a. “Jack Leon Ruby” – the man who shot alleged-JFK-assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (alias “Alek J. Hidell”).^[251] Finally, “Dr. Jolly” was consulted – ostensibly as a “brainwashing expert” – during the robbery trial (in 1976) of the kidnapped heiress Patricia Campbell “Patty” Hearst.^[252] (See also “Manson Family,” below.)

But, could Ottterman’s reference to other “doctors like Wolff” also have included B. F. Skinner?

After all, “[t]he [CIA’s] Human Ecology Fund provided funds to B. F. Skinner” for several purposes, such as “to write an autobiographical essay for his Festschrift…^[253] Human Ecology funds also supported Skinner’s work for the Symposium on the Application of Operant Conditioning at the 1964 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association…”.^[254]

And “Skinner… received a $5,000 Human Ecology grant to pay the costs of a secretary and supplies for the research that led to his book, Freedom and Dignity.”^[255]

Indeed, according to Schrag: “In the acknowledgments for [his expanded and revised] Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner credits NIMH for support in preparation of the book; he had, in fact, received more than $280,000 from the federal government.”^[256]

Utopianism or Dystopianism?

Michael Hoffman has somewhere suggested that, historically, a core ideological difference has tended to separate political activists and theorists into two, broad and warring factions. But this is not, as one might suppose, a difference between “conservatives” and “liberals,” “Democrats” and “Republicans,” or even “capitalists” and “communists.” Rather, in Hoffman’s estimation, it is an even more fundamental distinction between those who believe that it is possible for human beings to create a perfect society on earth (utopians) and those who deny this (dystopians).

These conflicting visions have frequently been sketched in literary works from, on the “utopian” wavelength, 15th-16th-c. English humanist Thomas More’s Utopia (1516); 16th-17th-c. Italian hermeticist Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602);^[257] 16th-17th-c. English statesman Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626); 19th-c. British politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril, the Power of the Coming Race (1871);^[258] 19th-c. British socialist and textilist William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890); 19th-c. American “nationalist”-socialist Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); 20th-c. British-American screenwriter James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933); and 20th-c. British novelist Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962); to, on the opposing end of the spectrum, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932); 20th-c. British journalist George Orwell’s^[259] 1984 (1949); 20th-c. Austro-Hungarian-born author Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940); 20th-c. British composer Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962); 20th-c. American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle (1962); and 20th-21st-c. American writer Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008).^[260] Other authors and titles could be named.

But, among the utopian hopefuls stands B. F. Skinner, with his novel Walden Two (1948).

Without getting bogged down with Skinner’s specific proposals, suffice it to say this. He thought the individuals inside “Walden Two” would be content and refrain from quarreling because their day-to-day lives and interactions were carefully designed and managed by behavior engineers.

As a practical matter, society is divisible into those people who are controllers and those who are controlled – even if, on pain of contradiction or special pleading, no such distinction exists at the level of metaphysics. This is to say that, on Skinnerian principles, every single individual, regardless of his or her place in the societal hierarchy, is conditioned by their environment.

Thus, Skinner’s view is characterizable paternalism, that is, the view that “authorities” are justified in dictating the obligations and restricting the liberties of those who are subordinate – all in their “best interests,” of course – just as parents would limit the freedom of their children.

In this way, and despite the subtleties of his brand of (“radical”) behaviorism, Skinner stands in the tradition of Walter Lippmann who, as we discussed previously, thought that the “masses” (a term originating, it appears, in Karl Marx’s rhetoric) were suited only to be spectators. It was left to intellectual “élites” – like him, naturally – to determine policies, manage the “democracy,” and “manufacture consent” by intentionally (and propagandistically) shaping public opinion.

Skinner’s template for this program may have differed from Lippmann’s in its finer points, but the broad societal vision is cut from the same cloth. “Skinner is the only major figure in the history of behaviorism to offer a socio-political world view based on his commitment to behaviorism.”^[261]

“Take this statement by …B. F. Skinner. ‘My image in some places is of a monster of some kind who wants to pull a string and manipulate people. Nothing could be further from the truth. People are manipulated; I just want them to be manipulated more effectively.’”^[262]

“Skinner declared, in 1971, that ‘the outlines of a technology [to shape the entire culture] are already clear’.”^[263] This sounds awfully close to comments made by Aldous Huxley in a 1962 speech he gave to an audience at the University of California – Berkeley, which we referenced in our previous “Twilight Language” study. Huxley stated that humans are on the brink of a “final” or “ultimate revolution,” in which hidden actors have the power to “act directly on the mind / body of [their] fellows. …[W]e are … developing …techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy …to get people actually to love their servitude.”^[264]

Relatedly, the Spanish-born 20th-century behavioral neurophysiologist, José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado, who experimented with electrical brain stimulation and electrode implantation, once stated: “Just as we have developed city planning, …we should propose mental planning …to formulate theories and practical means for directing the evolution of man.”^[265]

Circa 1973-1974, as Skinner was entering into retirement, there was talk – emanating from predictable quarters – of marshalling federal money for the creation of a “Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence.” Reports indicated that the initial impetus for this “Violence Center” came from then-director of the University of California, Los Angeles’s (UCLA) Neuropsychiatric Institute (and chair of its psychiatry department) – who else? – Louis Jolyon West.^[266]

Part of West’s vision for the Violence Center was to establish “a research facility” in a recently decommissioned – as well as “isolated but convenient” – “Nike missile base… located in the Santa Monica Mountains” for the purpose of “carr[ying] out …experimental …programs for the alteration of undesirable behavior.”^[267]

Then came various, damning disclosures related to the break-in at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. by various CIA-connected agents,^[268] as well as the subsequent cover-up by President Richard M. Nixon. Whatever popular support there had or might have been for such a behavior-modification dissolved into nothing. At that point, California’s then-governor, and later president, Ronald Wilson Reagan had his Health and Welfare Secretary, Earl Winfrey Brian, Jr., bemoan the Violence-Center proposal’s “callous disregard for public safety” and the whole business was supposedly scrapped.

Meanwhile, under “pressure from civil-liberties organizations” and groups like the Black Panther Party, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, or “LEAA announced that it had banned the use of its funds ‘for psychosurgery, medical research, behavior modification^[269] – including aversion therapy – and chemotherapy.’’’^[270]

In the midst of all this, who pops up to defend behavior modification? B. F. Skinner.

Skinner’s defense – ultimately, unsuccessful – of a vast and probable CIA-instigated operation to perfect behavioral manipulation is quite striking.

“A number of prominent psychologists, Skinner among them, challenged …[these backtracking] announcement[s]... Skinner [held] that the behavior of prisoners is always modified by …prison environment[s], [so] …it might as well be done right[,] …[adding that] the [LEAA’s] …mandate … was to support and encourage changes in behavior.”^[271]

Skinner, who once “agreed” with that he was barely short of the best thing to ever happen to psychology,^[272] “…measure[d] …[the] effectiveness [of his interventions based on] the absence of resistance and counter-control: ideally, …[his] technique[s would] …be so elegant …that the manipulated will not suspect, let alone object, that someone or something is trying to shape their behavior; …Skinner …[was] certain that the moment [for this level of control was] at hand.”^[273]

Clearly, Skinner had his “mind” on more than pigeons and rodents.^[274] Though, in fairness, we acknowledge that mind-control-history researcher John Marks thought that the early Skinnerian focus on “reward[ing] …rats scurrying through mazes” might have been a little beside the point for Central-Intelligence-Agency project managers who were more interested in “drugs…, hypnosis, …and …genetic differences…”.^[275]

In fact, to hear Marks tell it, part of the point of channeling funds through “the CIA’s Human Ecology Society [was to help] liberate the behavioral sciences from the world of rats and cheese. With a push from the Agency …, the field opened up. …Eventually, a reputable behavioral scientist could be doing almost anything… The CIA’s money undoubtedly changed the academic world to some degree, though no one can say how much.”^[276]

It is worth remembering that Clark L. Hull (discussed in “Transitional Thinkers,” above) took cognizance of hypnotism in his version of “neo-behaviorism.”

Ultimately, whether or not Skinner himself was implicated in the CIA’s chicanery, it is both easy and tempting to suppose that at least some Skinnerians were. For example, while it is far from conclusive, it is certainly suggestive that Peter B. Dews (editor of Skinner’s aforementioned Festschrift) was a “principal founder of the discipline of behavioral pharmacology”^[277] – a métier combining two of the “Company’s” (i.e., the CIA’s) psychology-related enthusiasms.

Or, consider Israeli-American psychologist Perry London, whose theoretical interests ranged over behaviorism and hypnosis,^[278] the latter also being a specialty of William Joseph Bryan,^[279] possible CIA handler of Robert Francis Kennedy’s (RFK’s) alleged assassin Sirhan Sirhan.^[280]

For more of the context, and on a more likely culprit, see our previous “1968” presentation.

Of course, as we also reported in that place, William Joseph Bryan – a relation of three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan – is credited with hearing the “confession” (under hypnosis) of Albert Henry DeSalvo to being the “Boston Strangler.”^[281]

Recall that, by “1963, having sampled everything from palm reading to subliminal perception, [chemist and spymaster Sidney] Sid Gottlieb and his colleagues satisfied themselves that they had overlooked no area of knowledge – however esoteric – that might be promising for CIA operations”^[282] – including assassinations, interrogations, and mind control under the ægis of Gottlieb’s projects codenamed “Artichoke” and “MKUltra.”^[283]

Writing in 1969, the aforementioned Perry London declared: “means are being found, in all the crafts and sciences of man, society and life, that will soon make possible [the] precise control over much of people’s individual actions, thoughts, emotions, moods, and wills…”. Citing Skinner favorably, Perry added that “some people may be surprised at the extent to which it is now possible to manipulate people systematically.”^[284]

Incidentally, if R. C. Winkler is to be believed, more than a few psychologists themselves might be numbered among Perry’s “people [who] may be surprised at the extent” of the arguably rampant behavioral modification.

“Psychology students are taught …that psychology is a science. …[They are] encourage[d] …to think of …[themselves] as developing a body of knowledge that is objective, value-free, stable and separate from, if not just a little above, the tainted world around us. ...The result is a strong belief amongst psychologists that if the methods one uses are reliable and the results replicable, then one's activities are value-free. …[I]t is argued that psychology …[is] …not tainted …[insofar as] it …[is] methodologically pure. …There is little awareness that psychology may use reliable methods yet not be value-free.

“An understanding that psychology and social science are not value-free and are not divorced from the basic assumptions of society is essential to the understanding of psychology… [P]sychology is shaped by social beliefs and institutions… Psychology and social science are tied into the prevailing culture through the assumptions in the theories ....use[d], through institutional constraints on …activities, and through the information …[that is] gather[ed or] …not gather[ed]. …

“The societal world views and values built into …psychology …become increasingly apparent as …[psychology’s] ability to control human behavior …increases …using techniques developed in basic research …and as social issues force themselves on the university.”^[285]

Recent Behaviorist Trends

A concerted effort was made to combine anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology – along behaviorist lines – through the founding in 1954 of Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the behavioral Sciences, with funding from the Ford Foundation.

It was initially headed by University of Chicago-trained educational-assessment specialist Ralph Winfred Tyler. Presumably, the “evaluation” of students is as important a pastime for the school system^[286] as the “polling” of audiences is for major media companies.^[287]

The late contrarian and sleuth David McGowan tied the advent of the “serial-killer” phenomenon to the birth, in 1972, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioral Science Unit. Pursuant to the arrival of “applied behavior analysis” (circa 1968),^[288] the FBI changed the BSU’s name to the Behavioral Analysis Unit in 1985.^[289]

As Michael Hoffman opined, in his article “The Mirror World of Columbine”: “The best and brightest kids will not take New World Order bureaucratic regulation. …[Children] are …herded like assembly-line automatons. The elite among them intuitively revolt. …Unfortunately, disaffected youth today turn toward the Hegelian fake alternative: System-certified ‘rebels,’ the System’s manufactured image of Hitler, System-distributed videos and films – most of which have implanted behavior cues for these elite kids to emulate and create the kind of mayhem, murder and suicide the System needs to build its police state.”^[290]

The previously discussed, and Rockefeller-connected University of Chicago also produced political and social scientists such as Harold Dwight Lasswell and Charles Edward Merriam, Jr., the latter also founder of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) which has been lavishly funded by a veritable who’s who of well-heeled “nonprofits,” such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation.^[291]

Lasswell and Merriam’s intellectual progeny include political scientist Herbert Alexander Simon – also schooled by Gottlob Frege’s pupil and Vienna-Circle logical positivist Rudolf Carnap.

Simon was influenced by the “cognitive revolution” in psychology and helped usher in our era of “artificial intelligence” along with another of his teachers, Nicolas Rashevsky. Among Simon’s “contributions” are those in “decision theory,” some of which he published as Administrative Behavior: a Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization.^[292]

Some of these insights, propelled by cognitivism, have also been incorporated into “behavioral economics.”^[293] This burgeoning field includes such names as Israeli “mathematical psychologist” Amos Nathan Tversky and Israeli-American decision theorist Daniel Kahneman, whose opinions were considered to be valuable by the members of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum.^[294]

Also on the contemporary scene, applied behavior analysis has been behind the creation of “token economies.” In brief, these are behavior-management systems that use incentive “reinforcers” (the tokens) that may be used like a form of money. Importantly, “allowable” goods and services available for exchange or purchase must be carefully limited to further reinforcers.

So, if you want a target to stop smoking, you might encourage (or force) the use of tokens that may not be used to buy cigarettes, but could be used to buy gum instead. If you want a child to better apply him- or herself in school, you could award tokens for study sessions or grades that may be “cashed in” for weekend video-game time.^[295] Etc.^[296]

For obvious reasons, token-economy applications have been restricted to places – such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and schools – that are “closed” or rigidly controlled systems.

But, with the rise of the surveillance state, the entire globe is becoming what the sometimes interesting renegade broadcaster Alex Jones has referred to as a “Prison Planet.”

The use of tokens is not entirely novel. Especially during the 18th and 19th centuries, various companies – from logging and mining concerns to manufacturing and textiles – paid their employees “scrip,” currency often only redeemable in the town’s company-owned store.

In a sense, tokens in token economies are like scrip. But whereas scrip was often the result of a proprietor’s venality, psychologist-created tokens expressly aim to alter or control behavior.

On this wavelength, consider comments from American billionaire Laurence Douglas Fink, CEO of the investment firm BlackRock. In 2017, Fink said he would use his massive financial clout to “force behaviors” about social-activist goals like “diversity, equity, inclusion,” environmentalism, “gender and race,” and other such controversial so-called “progressive” aims.

“While sitting alongside former AmEx CEO Kenneth I. Chenault, …Fink revealed[:] …’Behaviors are gonna have to change and this is one thing we’re asking companies. You have to force behaviors, and at BlackRock we are forcing behaviors.’ …[The] BlackRock CEO admitted[:] ‘If You Don’t Force Behaviors… You’re Going to Be Impacted’.”^[297]

Of course, Larry Fink and BlackRock evidently also endorse – and appear to be working toward – the adoption and widespread use of blockchain technologies and other “tokenized assets,” including behavior-programmable “central bank digital currencies,” (CBDCs), “stablecoins,” and other mystifying “digital” forms of money.

Has the groundwork on “token economies” laid by behaviorists paved the way for this new form of techno-tyranny?

Critiques of Behaviorism

As stated, Radical behaviorism is deterministic in a philosophical sense. If all behavior, including private feelings and thoughts,^[298] is caused by an (admittedly complex) interaction between the environment and an organism, then it looks like there is no such thing as “free will” in anything like the senses advanced by “agency theorists,” indeterminists, or (philosophical) libertarians.

Perforce, and for consistency, Skinner must have believed (or professed) that his career path and, indeed, his embrace of behaviorism were themselves the results of his prior conditioning.

Therefore, it seems to me that radical behaviorism is susceptible to Alvin Plantinga’s so-called “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.”^[299] In a nutshell, Plantinga argues that if evolution is gears entirely physical beings toward survival, and if naturalism is true (that is, if “there is no such person as God or anything like God”),^[300] then our brains, cognitive faculties, and reasoning abilities are all aimed at survival (and reproduction, etc.) If so, then our beliefs – which are the products of our physical brains, cognitive faculties, and reasoning abilities – may have adaptive value. But, Plantinga thinks, it is not at all obvious that beliefs must be true in order to have adaptive value. If it is even possible for false beliefs to have adaptive value, then it would be irrational to think that any of our beliefs are true.

In other words, it would be irrational to believe that our brains, cognitive faculties, and reasoning abilities can be relied upon to discover truth. Consequently, it would be irrational to hold that any beliefs are “true” if they have been formed by the naturalistic-evolutionary processes. But since if naturalistic evolution is itself true, then all of our beliefs have been formed by these processes; if naturalistic evolution is true, then all our beliefs are suspect – including our beliefs in evolution, naturalism, and – by extension – radical behaviorism.

Additionally, behaviorism’s aversion to introspection has seemed to many observers to be both unwarranted and plain unlivable. Rather than deliver this point in the form of an argument, consider, instead, the following common psychology joke.

“Q: What does one behaviorist say to another when they meet on the street?

“A: You’re fine. How am I?”^[301]

The point is, it is one thing to ignore inner awareness and private mental states in abstraction. But trying to do so in daily life is virtually impossible.

Preëminently: “The behaviorist program was… dealt a major setback when Noam Chomsky, in his review^[302] …of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior…,^[303] argued successfully that no purely behaviorist account of language-learning is possible.

“Chomsky’s alternative, a theory of Universal Grammar, which owes some of its inspiration to Plato and Descartes, has made the idea of innate language structures, and perhaps other cognitive structures as well, seem a viable alternative to a more purely empiricist conception of cognitive development.”^[304]

Specifically, “…Chomsky argued for the necessity for postulating innate ideas to explain the amazing speed and facility with which children typically acquire natural languages.”^[305]

A ‘Manson-Family’ Connexion

Another important behaviorist was Edward Chase Tolman. Originally, he had studied under Hugo Munsterburg at Harvard.

Tolman’s gestalt-informed “purposive behaviorism” is sometimes cited as an example of a behavioral theory that was merely methodological.^[306] That is to say, allegedly, Tolman was prepared to accept a non-mechanistic account of (phenomena such as) learning. If true, this would imply that Tolman’s approach to behaviorism was not as “radical” as B. F. Skinner’s.

On the other hand, according to former Georgia State University philosophy Professor George Graham, “Tolman …[once] wrote that ‘everything important in psychology …can be investigated in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determiners of rat behavior at a choice point in a maze’.”^[307] So, regardless of the “exception” that Tolman – along with Edwin R. Guthrie and Clark L. Hull – took to what “Skinner …said about …references to innerness,” this difference by no means deflated the former’s enthusiasm for behaviorism.

And this is crucial because Tolman taught at the University of California – Berkeley where, except for a wartime stint with the pervasive Office of Strategic Services (OSS), behavioral psychologist Robert Choate Tryon spent most of his academic life.

In fact, however, OSS chieftain William “Wild Bill” Donovan evidently put Tryon in charge of his organization’s Psychology Division and, among other things, tasked him to “to analyze and interpret… information… [about] potential enemies”.^[308]

That the behaviorist-trained, OSS-psych-war head Tryon was a fixture at Berkeley is intriguing.

At some point, David E. Smith seems to have received part of his training at U. C. Berkeley.^[309] David, along with one Roger C. Smith was affiliated with the Haight-Ashbury “Free Clinic.”^[310]

Among the clinic’s visitors? One Charles Milles Manson, allegedly born “No-Name Maddox.”

According to Ed Sanders, even before the crimes that made them infamous, “[t]he officials of the Haight-Ashbury Clinic certainly had …heard of …[Manson’s girls, known as the Witches of Mendocino] since Manson’s former parole officer, Roger Smith... had left the parole scene in January of 1968 …[to establish] a drug counseling treatment program associated with the Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic. …[And] Dr. David Smith^[311] …[was] the medical director…

“Dr. David Smith of Haight-Ashbury Medical clinic …said that Mrs. [Inez] Folger worked at the clinic both prior to and subsequent to the [Manson-family-connected Labianca and Tate] murders.”^[312] The claim was that this was “volunteer work”, and seems also to have included attempts to secure funding for the clinic “from [places like] the Merrill Trust …and …the Bothin Foundation”^[313] as well by throwing “several parties to raise money”.^[314] Sanders reports: “The Manson Family bopped in and out of the H-A Medical Clinic in 1968…”.^[315]

Of course, Inez’s daughter was Abigail Folger who was murdered along with Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, and Sharon Tate on August 8, 1969. Sharon Tate’s husband, film director Roman Polanski (who had recently finished Rosemary’s Baby), was allegedly in London shooting The Day of the Dolphin when his wife was killed.

We incorporated Rosemary’s Baby into several past presentations, including “January 6.”

Additionally, several prominent “rock-and-roll” acts – including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin – were said to have performed concerts for the benefit of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic at the behest of Korean War army veteran and show promoter “Bill Graham” (born Wulf Wolodi Grajonca).^[316]

But who else was roaming around the “Haight” but the previously mentioned MKUltra head shrinker extraordinaire, Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West.

“…[O]n Frederick Street, …[West] set up …a ‘laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad’ …in June 1967, at the dawn of the summer of love. He installed six graduate students in the ‘pad,’ telling them to ‘dress like hippies’ and ‘lure’ itinerant kids into the apartment. …

“This wouldn’t have been the agency’s first ‘disguised laboratory’ in San Francisco. A few years earlier, the evocatively titled Operation Midnight Climax had seen CIA operatives open at least three Bay Area safe houses disguised as upscale bordellos, kitted out with one-way mirrors and kinky photographs. A spy [and ex-OSS operative] named George Hunter White …hired prostitutes to entice prospective johns to the homes, where the men were served cocktails laced with acid. The goal was to see if LSD, paired with sex, could be used to coax sensitive information from the men. …

“At the Haight-Ashbury pad, though, West’s motives were vague. No one seemed to have a firm grasp of the project’s purpose — not even those involved in it. …One …Stanford psychology grad student who lived at the pad that summer… fumed… ‘What the hell is Jolly doing, it is like a zoo …Is he studying us or them? …I feel like no one is being honest and straight and the whole thing is a gigantic put on. … What is he trying to prove? He is interested in drugs, that is clear. What else?”^[317]

In 1974, during its coverage of the bizarre Patricia Campbell Hearst kidnapping case, the New York Times reported that Donald David “Cinque” DeFreeze – the founder of the culprit terrorist “Symbionese Liberation Army” – had just come out of confinement at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. In his article titled “Experts Feel Miss Hearst May Have Undergone Brainwashing,” columnist Jon Nordieimer wrote: “Vacaville …[is] one of the premier prison facilities in the United States where varying forms of behavior modification were conducted…”.^[318]

A related anecdote pertains to Charles Manson (for even more on whom, see further below).

Since that case is of perennial interest, I will present David McGowan’s entire summary, with the relevant particular embedded – with boldfacing – in the middle.

“When the Manson case came to trial, there were the usual strange occurrences that seem to plague serial killer trials. The lead defense attorney, Ronald [William] Hughes, had just passed the bar and had yet to try a single case. He was, needless to say, a rather odd choice to spearhead the defense of one of the most vigorously prosecuted and high-profile murder cases of all time. Hughes soon went missing, and later turned up dead on the very day that death sentences were returned by the jury. Family member John Philip ‘Zero’ Haught, not charged with playing a role in the murders, also turned up dead, allegedly after playing a game of Russian Roulette. Another member of the Family [Dianne K. Lake] was whisked away to Patton State Hospital, which was reportedly deeply immersed in overt behavior modification experiments in the 1970s.^[319]

“Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the trial was that the defense team rested their case without bothering to actually present one. Courtroom viewers were stunned when not a single witness was called to rebut the prosecution’s case, thereby virtually guaranteeing a win for [Los Angeles County District Attorney Vincent] Bugliosi and the state. Also of note is that then-President Richard Nixon declared Manson guilty on national television, nearly causing a mistrial, but ultimately greatly aiding the prosecution’s efforts. When it was all over, Judge Oder pronounced death sentences for Charlie, Patricia Krenwinkle, Susan Atkins, and Leslie VanHouten.”^[320]

Concluding Remarks

We have surveyed psychology by following several important trajectories, starting with the formative movement called “structuralism,” proceeding into “functionalism,” and concluding by sketching several varieties of “behaviorism.”

The first movement is crucial because it marked psychology’s separation from philosophy and its recognition as an independent science.

We treated functionalism as having paved the way for behaviorism. Functionalism could be thought of as the transition between structuralism and behaviorism, in a manner analogous to how some thinkers have treated deism and a way station between theism and atheism.^[321]

Behaviorism piggybacked off of functionalism’s turn away from the ontology of “mentalism.” However, even “function” turned out to be too “metaphysical”-sounding for hardcore empiricists.

And, behaviorism, which professed to deal only with “observables” and promised effective practical interventions based on understanding and manipulating stimulus-response triggers, became the dominant psychological perspective for decades, rising to prominence between the 1920s and 1960s. Behaviorism was embraced by numerous advertisers, intelligence officers, policy makers, and public-relations outfits of all stripes.

Gustav Le Bon talked about influencing the “popular mind.” Carl Gustav Jung developed notions about a “collective consciousness.” These ideas were ultimately leveraged into the blossoming fields of “public relations” and “propaganda,” as devised by people like Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays.

The so-called “Wilsonian Liberal” Walter Lippmann provided the moral cover by arguing that the real world is “too big, too complex” and our experience of it “too fleeting” for anyone to grasp it. John Q. Citizen, especially, is simply out of his depth trying to apprehend even the basics of modern economics, politics, and allied disciplines. Nevertheless, everyone behaves as if – or believes that – they have a comprehensive picture of the world. Individual pictures are anemic and incomplete at best – total misrepresentations at worst. Lippmann calls these subjective constructions “pseudo-environments.”

Perhaps this is a reason why, a little later, when Swiss-born psychologist Jean William Fritz Piaget pioneered “constructivism” in developmental psychology,^[322] he received funding from Establishment quarters that have a deep-seated interest in steering history and society.^[323]

But, to someone like Lippmann, the question for would-be policymakers and stage managers is: Do you allow average people to construct their own idiosyncratic pseudo-environments?

And the resounding answer was: No! The reason? Because they won’t have access to good information and because they don’t share the intellectual’s philosophical commitments.

So, instead, corporate managers, the intelligence community, and media “experts” use their specialized talents and tools to create socio-cultural “stereotypes” that guide the public. Of particular interest to Lippmann was the process by which the “masses” would be induced to allow themselves to be governed.

The first practical case study was getting the isolationist U.S. public behind World War One. And it was considered to have been a “coup” for the propagandists.

This is, by the way, the “manufacture of consent” that Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann picked up on and wrote about.

So, right there, you have the use of print and visual media for thought-control purposes. And Behaviorism – as articulated by John B. Watson – was appealing to the would-be control class.

But things took an even darker turn when the Office of Strategic Services was authorized to weaponize behavioral (and other forms of) psychology during World War Two.

These fledgling efforts became the bedrock upon which the succeeding Central Intelligence Agency would build its various, top-secret brainwashing-and-mind-control projects, including Artichoke, Bluebird, and MKUltra.

Looking Ahead

Ultimately, at least within academy psychology departments, behaviorism too was supplanted – this time, by cognitivism.

And, although that story will have to occupy us next time, in brief, cognitive psychology takes stock of “high-level” “processes” – like attention (think ADHD), memory (including problems like dementia), decision-making (and decision theory), grief-processing, etc. – that behaviorism seems unable to handle adequately.

Behaviorism is still relevant, especially (though not exclusively) in child psychology (e.g., in managing “Autism spectrum” disorders),^[324] as well as in assisting Alzheimer’s caretakers with day-to-day challenges and, for that matter, helping anyone struggling with “negative behaviors” such as anxiety, substance abuse, etc.

It is perhaps not unfair to say that, if behaviorism has morally unobjectionable applications, these lie largely in treating individuals who are cognitively impaired, or addressing non-rational or irrational habits of persons with “normal” cognitive function.

In other words, we would suggest a general principle along the following lines. If persons have the ability to function on a rational level, then therapists have a moral obligation to deal with them on that level. Divergences must be mutually agreed upon.

Child psychology – and child rearing – is also of interest and almost certainly of great importance. We can only gesture to some points of interest.

For one thing, Luther “L.” Emmett Holt, author of the first widely read child-care manual (The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses, 1894), received numerous grants from Rockefeller-associated institutes. Indeed, he seems to have been the Rockfeller family’s private pediatrician at some point.^[325]

The next such manual (Psychological Care of Infant and Child, 1928) was penned by behaviorist John B. Watson (on whom, see above.) Watson’s manual was of dubious worth, not least because all four of his own children (by two different women) reportedly had “suicidal ideation” (with one actually committing suicide) associated with their childhoods and upbringing.

Nevertheless, Waton’s guidebook was not supplanted until the publication of a book by – Yale University graduate, and Scroll-and-Key inductee – Benjamin McLane Spock. Better known as “Dr. Spock,” he published Baby and Child Care in 1946. Two decades after its printing and wide circulation, and “…after Dr. Spock had spoken out passionately against the Vietnam War, …journalist Stewart Alsop… [suggested that] many older Americans believed that the era of social unrest that began in the 60’s had its roots in children who were ‘Spocked when they should have been spanked.’”^[326]

Former Washington-Post reporter Carl Milton Bernstein wrote: “There are perhaps a dozen well known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as ‘known assets’ and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various subjects. Three of the most widely read columnists who maintained such ties with the Agency are C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times, Joseph Alsop, and the late Stewart Alsop, whose column appeared in the New York Herald‑Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek.”^[327] Oh, by the way…

While at Yale, Spock was said to have been friends and Olympic-rowing partners (gold medaling in Paris, 1924) with later Citigroup “investment-bank” chieftain James Stillman Rockefeller.

Of course, another area that we have yet to explore is “humanistic psychology,” which also does appear to have intelligence connexions (in people such as Carl Ransom Rogers) and seems to have been an input source for what today is termed “transhumanism.”

Also in the vicinity is computational psychology, which sees the human mind – and its relationship to the brain and nervous system – as relevantly modeled on computer programs – and the underlying hardware on which they run.

Computationalism is also connected to the emergence of artificial intelligence, or “A. I.”^[328]

So, if you would be interested in seeing us pursue these research leads by way of a proposed “Volume 2,” kindly consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber or by sharing our original links with your social network.

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^[1] E.g., Walter “Lippmann …reject[ed] the possibility of a truly unified society, …[and] also …that there is any privileged epistemology, be it Science or otherwise, that can provide human beings with an independent guide to the conduct of human affairs. Thus his thinking reflected the relativity of knowledge claimed by [Friedrich] Nietzsche, the irrationality of consciousness proposed by [Sigmund] Freud, and the instability of even ‘scientific knowledge’ implied in the work of [Albert] Einstein.” Carl R. Bybee, “Walter Lippmann & John Dewey,” Media, Public Opinion & Governance, lecture notes, module 10, unit 56, Mass Comm., Univ. of Leicester, 1997, <https://www.infoamerica.org/teoria_articulos/lippmann_dewey.htm>.

^[2] Although we will not be discussing the Vanderbilts in this piece, they do form part of the background for understanding the rise of the Bush political dynasty. Additionally, Andrew Dickson White, co-founder (with Western Union owner Ezra Cornell) of Cornell Univ. was a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones fraternity within just a few years of Chauncy M. Depew, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s attorney. White was the co-author, with John William Draper, of History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874). One Gen. William Henry Draper, Jr. would later help to establish the Population Crisis Committee, liaise between the U.S. government and United Nations’s Population Commission, and assist the Planned Parenthood Fed.

# Chauncey M. Depew (S&B 1856): general counsel for the Vanderbilt railroads, he helped the

Harriman family to enter into high society.

^[3] E.g., synchronicity and “Twilight Language,” the latter being the subject of a recent presentation.

^[4] Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, “The CIA’s House of Horrors: The Abominable Dr. Gottlieb,” CounterPunch, Nov. 17, 2017, <https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/17/the-cias-house-of-horrors-the-abominable-dr-gottlieb/>.

^[5] Cameron worked with neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield and out of the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill Univ. in Montreal, Canada. Certainly, there are lines of investigation worth pursuing, such as Cameron’s receipt of funding from the well-nigh all-pervasive Rockefeller Foundation. But we can’t do it all. So, if there is sufficient interest, we will have to probe these corners in a future presentation.

^[6] The most important name in launching the “cognitive revolution” is that of Noam Chomsky. But others figured in the transition, including Albert Bandura and David M. Clark.

^[7] It was a “little room of equipment” on the campus of the university at Leipzig, in Saxony, Germany. Alan Kim, “Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt,” Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman, eds., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2022, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/wilhelm-wundt/>.

^[8] “Psychology,” arguably goes back to the ancients. “Psyche” is the Greek word for soul. “Psychology, [so considered] as a part of philosophy, had [by the 19th c.] already several times changed the way it defined its object: as ‘soul’, ‘mental substance’, ‘mind’, etc. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many regarded psychology to be the account of …‘inner experience’, distinct from the natural scientific accounts of external, sensible reality.” Kim, loc. cit.

^[9] “Immanuel Kant's Philosophy – Bryan Magee & Geoffrey Warnock (1987),” Philosophy Overdose (YouTube channel), uploaded Aug. 23, 2023; orig. Bryan Magee and Jill Dawson, “Geoffrey Warnock on Kant,” The Great Philosophers, BBC, #8, 1987, <

>.

^[10] Milton D. Hunnex, Chronological and Thematic Charts of Philosophies and Philosophers, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Academie Books; Zondervan, 1986, p. 3.

^[11] Eric Mandelbaum, “Associationist Theories of Thought,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman, eds., winter 2022, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/associationist-thought/>. Associationism, in Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1738), “was put forward as a theory of mental processes. Associationists’ … answer the question of how many mental processes there are by positing only a single mental process: the ability to associate ideas.” Ibid. This is an application of the “Occam’s Razor” principle, named for the 13th-14th-c. Franciscan nominalist, William of Ockham.

^[12] Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. II, chapt. I, §2, 1689. Aristotle (De Anima, “On the Soul,” iii, 4) compared the mind to a blank tablet (pinakidion) written on by the scribe of experience (grammateion). Aristotle was not an empiricist in the modern sense. To Aristotle the “active nous,” associated with his godlike “unmoved mover,” was a quasi-divine component of the human intellect. Stoicism’s reputed founder, Zeno of Citium, “suggested …the soul is imprinted by the senses …the same way as a signet ring imprints its shape in soft wax. At birth[, it] …is …like a blank sheet of paper …ready to receive writing; all our cognitive experience is drawn either directly or indirectly from sense experience, that is, empirically.” Scott Rubarth, “Stoic Philosophy of Mind,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <https://iep.utm.edu/stoicmind/>. Additionally, similar viewpoints were discussed or espoused Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, Kitāb al-Nafs, “Book of the Soul,” chapt. II, §2 and chapt. V, §5; cf. Kitāb al-Shifā, “Book of Healing”) and St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiæ, part I, ques. 84, art. 3, sc. & ff).

^[13] Obviously, many more names could be added. But this is just a rough sketch.

^[14] A.k.a. “Nativism.” A tangent line, which we will not pursue here is the possible connexion between John Calvin’s concept of an innate “divine sense” (sensus deitatis or sensus divinitatis), and Descartes’s “divine signature,” such that our capacity for grasping “clear and distinct” ideas (including “God exists”) is an indication – or even a “proof” – of His existence. The former has been developed by philosopher Alvin Carl Plantinga into a claim (referred to as “Reformed epistemology”) that belief in the existence of God can be “properly basic” in the manner of the Cartesian foundationalist. Both the Calvinist sensus and the Cartesian signatura designate natural capacities to recognize or perceive God.

^[15] “Innate Idea,” Encyclopædia Britannica, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/innate-idea>.

^[16] “Innate Idea,” Encyclopædia Britannica, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/innate-idea>.

^[17] “Immanuel Kant's Philosophy – Bryan Magee & Geoffrey Warnock (1987),” loc. cit.

^[18] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965, p. 29.

^[19] In Immanuel Kant, Critik a der reinen Vernunft (“Critique of Pure Reason”), Riga (Latvia): Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1781.

^[20] Dinge an sich.

^[21] Erscheinungen, lit. “apparitions.”

^[22] Quoted by Hunnex, loc. cit.

^[23] Rather, they are (what he called) “fundamental” or “pure” forms of our intuition.

^[24] Kant thought that Euclidean geometry and Newtonian science rooted in our intuitions of space and time. Kant also specified twelve other ways – his “categories” – in which experience is structured by the mind, arranged in four classes. These were 1. Quantity (Unity; Plurality; and Totality); 2. Quality (Reality; Negation; and Limitation); 3. Relation (Inherence and Subsistence; Causality and Dependence; and Community and Interaction); and 4. Modality (Possibility and Impossibility; Existence and Non-existence; and Necessity and Contingency).

^[25] Alvin Plantinga has referred to this strand of Kant’s thought as “creative anti-realism.”

^[26] The details of these disagreements, while interesting, would be too much of a digression, here. The various proposals are equal parts abstract, complex, and opaque. If interested, see the overview: “Early Kantianism: 1790–1835,” <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Kantianism/Psychological-Neo-Kantianism>.

^[27] See his Elements of Psychophysics, 1860.

^[28] Additionally, when Hermann Cohen launched the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism (ca. 1870), he referred to Fechner’s work on the stimulus-sensation relationship. Marco Giovanelli, “The Sensation and the Stimulus: Psychophysics and the Prehistory of the Marburg School,” Perspectives on Science, vol. 25, no. 3, May-Jun. 2017, pp. 287-323; <https://doi.org/10.1162/POSC_a_00244>.

^[29] Others who contributed include Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Heinrich Weber.

^[30] Besides “atomism” (“elementalism”), the view that complex ideas or things are constructed from simple building blocks, other “-isms” in play are: “sensationalism,” or the notion that all human knowledge comes from sensory experiences (either classifiable as “impressions,” i.e., direct, vivid experiences; or “ideas,” i.e., less vivid copies or echoes of those original impressions) and the related concept of “associationism,” which holds that thoughts are relations of impressions and ideas. These latter owe to David Hume.

^[31] In one of those curious trends that the likes of G. W. F. Hegel or Friedrich Nietzsche would have chalked up to the outworkings of the Zeitgeist (“spirit of the age”), Wundt developed structural psychology alongside Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics. Wundt and Titchener were investigating atoms of conscious experience; Saussure was looking at the atoms of language (“signs”). Saussure influenced many people, including Russian structural linguist Roman Osipovich Jakobson. In turn, a wide-reaching school of “French structuralism” was born that involved such people as literary theorist and semiotician Roland Gérard Barthes, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Jean Piaget, the investigator of cognitive development mentioned earlier, is also sometimes associated with “structuralism,” insofar as his views about developmental psychology appealed to the idea of age-related, organized “stages.” He believed that all humans progress through the same stages, in the same order, but not necessarily at the same speed. However, in light of the discussion as it’s been developed so far, we will point out that “Piaget …was not a nativist (a believer in innate ideas) or an empiricist. …[H]is view was that cognitive structures naturally change in the course of being used, and both the organism and the environment are involved in this process of change.” Robert L. Campbell, “Jean Piaget's Genetic Epistemology: Appreciation and Critique,” lectures, Institute of Objectivist Studies Summer Seminar, Charlottesville, Va., Jul. 7-8, 1997, posted and rev. Mar. 27, 2006, <https://campber.people.clemson.edu/piaget.html>. There is something of an idea of “stages” in the physical theory of quantum mechanics (QM). E.g., QM may describe properties, like angular momentum and energy, as “quantized,” i.e., they are only observed (measured) to exist in discrete steps – contrasting with classical mechanics where properties may have any value along a continuum.

^[32] Wundt’s pupil, Edward Bradford “E. B.” Titchener popularized the theory and coined the term “structuralism.” He also thought that art was importantly connected to empathy, a view he seems to have from the Schopenhauerian-Nietzschean perspective where it is an “escape from the clutches of …irrational cosmic will,” see Hunnex, op. cit., p. 31.

^[33] Wundt wanted to say that deterministic physical causality governed the physiological processes inside the brain, while also holding that conscious processes (such as volitional acts) were physiologically indeterministic – even if they obeyed their own “parallel” internal, mental rules of causation. Cf. “Determinism,” <https://psychology.jrank.org/pages/179/Determinism.html>.

^[34] Kim calls Fechner’s brand a “arcane panpsychic monism.” Loc. cit.

^[35] Philip Goff, William Seager, and Sean Allen-Hermanson, “Panpsychism,” Edward N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2022, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/panpsychism/>.

^[36] Sometimes called his “method of reconstruction.”

^[37] Hobbes even claimed to think of God in materialistic terms, as the ultimate cause of motion. Hobbes’s concept harkened back to Aristotle’s “Prime” or “Unmoved Mover” (otherwise known as the Aristotelian “first cause”) and elicited (not wholly unjustifiable) allegations of atheism. Periodically, Christian thinkers have – for one reason or other – expressed partiality to materialism, as when (influenced by Stoicism) 2nd-3rd-c. Carthaginian Church Father Tertullian defined of God and the soul semi-materialistically (and held the “traducian” view that children’s souls were created during the act of sexual intercourse), or when Univ. of Notre Dame professor Peter van Inwagen endorses a “Christian Materialism” on which human persons are entirely physical.

^[38] It is sometimes said that Comte derived some of his ideas from the 18th-19th-c. French socio-economic theorist Henri de Saint-Simon, for whom he worked as a secretary. Saint-Simon lost the sight in one of his eyes following a botched attempted suicide in 1823, and he died two years later disappointed that his views about political reform hadn’t taken root. Evidently, Saint-Simon viewed science and technological innovation as vital to societal development. And that seems to have informed Comtean positivism.

^[39] Arguably, Comte would have considered psychology to be a branch of philosophy rather than science.

^[40] Merrill Ring, “Science as the Conceptual Foundation of Human Thought: Two Cases of Scientism,” dept. weblog, Cal. State Univ., Fullerton, Nov. 17, 2022, <https://philosophy.fullerton.edu/faculty/merrill_ring/scientism.aspx>.

^[41] J. P. Moreland, “What Is Scientism?” Crossway, Sept. 24, 2018, <https://www.crossway.org/articles/what-is-scientism/>. Actually, Moreland’s definition summarized the view of people who would restrict this “genuine knowledge” to “…the hard sciences—like chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy…,” ibid.

^[42] According to Marx’s “historical materialism,”economics (which revolves around “modes of production”) is society’s all-important “base” on which everything else rests – including the arts, law, politics, religion, etc. (society’s “superstructure”). But, societies aren’t static. Societal development – the Hegelian historical “dialectic” – occurs because of class struggle between an élite who control the means of production (“bourgeoisie”) and the workers (“proletariat”). In classical Marxism, the ensuing struggle leads inexorably to revolution, which results in changes to the economic base. Marx thought that history had – or would – progress through six basic stages: “primitive communism,” ancient slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, then restored communism (or the ideal, “classless” society).

^[43] See Darwin, On the Origin of Species, London: John Murray, 1859. Zoology dates back to Aristotle. But, in a more contemporary sense, let’s say it traces to Konrad von Gesner, Historia Animalium (“The History of Animals,” 1551). Modern botany is also in the vicinity, and goes back at least to Carl Linnaeus, Species Plantarum (“Plant Species,” 1753).

^[44] Kelsen was criticized by National-Socialist theorist Carl Schmitt.

^[45] Ius naturale (“natural law,” in the sense of a factually grounded legal system) vs. lex posita (“posited law,” in the sense of measures enacted by a governing body).

^[46] On “associationism,” see note #32.

^[47] London: John William Parker, 1855.

^[48] London: J. W. Parker & Son, 1859.

^[49] Bain also founded, in 1876, the journal Mind. Russian physiologist and Nobel laureate I. P. Pavlov is commonly said to have thought of our brains as akin to telephone “switchboards.”

^[50] New York: Henry Holt & Co. German psychology crossed into the United States via such people as James McKeen Cattell, Gottfried William Leonhard Fritschel, Granville Stanley Hall, Charles Hubbard Judd, Hugo Münsterberg, and Harry Kirke Wolfe. The thought of William James had been introduced to Germany via the translations of Austrian-Jewish philosopher Wilhelm Jerusalem.

^[51] This comes through, e.g., in the work of French thinker Henri Bergson. His ideas of durée (“duration,” in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1889), élan vital (“vital force,” in Creative Evolution, 1907), and intuition (Introduction à la Métaphysique, “An Introduction to Metaphysics,” 1903) challenged the prevalent mechanistic view and reintroduced continuous, subjective experience.

^[52] Other factors shaped Husserlian introspection, such as “eidetic” or “imaginative variation,” in which you think of something – say, a triangle – and then picture different ways that it could be (such as having bigger or smaller angles, longer or shorter sides, etc.) without affecting the triangle’s “essence.”

^[53] Husserl owes a great deal to Descartes, whose “method of doubt” was a key component of the latter’s system. However, whereas Cartesian doubt aimed to clear the way for building a solid foundation for knowledge (epistemological “foundationalism”), Husserlian bracketing was a way to study consciousness.

^[54] The word “process” also ties in the thought of Alfred North “A. N.” Whitehead, fountainhead of so-called “process philosophy” and co-author, with Bertrand Russel, of the Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), an attempt to reduce mathematics to logic.

^[55] J.S.B., “Functionalism,” p. 250.

^[56] 20th-c. Hungarian psychologist Egon Brunswik proposed, in his “Perception and the World of Objects” (Wahrnehmung und Gegenstandswelt, 1934), a “probabilistic” version of functionalism. Recall that there was much interest in probabilistic ideas following the inception of Quantum Mechanics (around the turn of the century) when Max Planck reported on “black-body radiation” and coined the word “quanta.” Quantum Theory was fleshed out with contributions from Max Born (who applied statistics to the analysis of wave functions), Niels Bohr (who produced a “quantized” atomic model), Albert Einstein (who studied the “photoelectric effect”), Werner Heisenberg (who gave us “matrix mechanics” and the vexing “uncertainty principle”), and Erwin Schrödinger (who, following Louis de Broglie, articulated the mathematics behind the quantum-wave model). Presumably, this vaguely inspired Brunswik to regard a subject’s environment – which he felt was as important as the subject him- or herself – as “an uncertain, probabilistic one.” “Egon Brunswik,” Wikipedia, Apr. 6, 2025, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egon_Brunswik>.

^[57] Darwinism, properly so-called, soon gave way to the “Modern Synthesis” (a.k.a. “Neo-Darwinism), a combination of the thesis of common descent with a modified conception of “natural selection” that took on board Gregor Mendel’s discoveries about genetics and heredity. By now, evolutionary studies have been broadened still further – to encompass epigenetics, “multi-level” selection, “punctuated equilibrium,” and other abstractions – to create what is referred to as an “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.”

^[58] William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907, pp. 273 and 299. Of course, James’s second sentence, unedited, reads: “On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.” Ibid., p. 299.

^[59] Bertrand Russell, History Of Western Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1946, p. 772.

^[60] Russell, op. cit., p. 772.

^[61] Russell, op. cit., pp. 772-773.

^[62] Originally delivered to the philosophical clubs of Brown Univ. and Yale (Apr.-May, 1896) and publ. in The New World: A Quarterly Review of Religion, Ethics, and Theology, vol. 5, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1896, pp. 327-347; archived at: <https://books.google.com/books?id=6OAWAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA327>.

^[63] The fancy name for this would be “doxastic voluntarism.” There are complications, as there usually are. But the basic question is whether people have voluntary control over what they believe (doxa, “opinion”).

^[64] As did others, including Arthur Schopenhauer (see The World as Will and Representation, 1819).

^[65] William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, New York: Anchor Books, 1962, p. 18. Gary Lachman has proposed that another “non-continental” existentialist was British writer Colin Wilson.

^[66] It’d be a fallacious argumentum ad hominem to dismiss evolutionary psychology merely because of the moral failings of a proponent. Still, we note that Dershowitz solicited Pinker’s “interpretation” of 18 U.S.C. § 2242, on the illicit enticement of minors. Pinker said the law’s plain sense pertained to “luring” done only via the internet. Dershowitz used this to get a “non-prosecution agreement” (plea deal) in 2008 from Rene Alexander Acosta, then-Florida attorney general (A.G.), and later labor secretary for Donald Trump. William Pelham “Bill” Barr was Trump’s federal A.G. when Epstein died under suspicious circumstances in jail at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. Barr’s father, Donald, had ties to Epstein going back to the 1970s. The elder Donald had written a sci-fi “novel” titled Space Relations (Surrey, U.K.: Charterhouse, 1973), about galactic oligarchs who sexually enslave people – including children.

^[67] Esp. William James; see Hunnex, loc. cit., chart 15.

^[68] Ian Melville Logan Hunter, “Behaviourism,” Alan Bullock and Oliver Stallybrass, The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought, New York: Harper & Row Publ., 1977, p. 57.

^[69] Gareth Matthews and Amy Mullin, “The Philosophy of Childhood,” Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman, eds., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2023, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/childhood/>.

^[70] Eugene Tovio Gendlin was in the orbit of “contemporary phenomenology,” according to Hunnex, op. cit., chart #14, as was Pierre Thévenaz, What Is Phenomenology? And Other Essays, James M. Edie, ed., Charles Courtney, transl., Chicago: Quadrangle, 1962. Gendlin was an associate of the CIA-connected humanist-psychologist, Carl Rogers.

^[71] Ernest Gellner, “Philosophy: The Social Context,” interviewed by Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas, BBC, 1978; online as “The Social Context of Philosophy – Ernest Gellner & Bryan Magee (1977),” Philosophy Overdose (YouTube), posted Apr. 9, 2022; <

>.

^[72] Anthony Quinton, “Positivism,” op. cit., p. 488. Quinton adds: “Positivism is a scientifically oriented form of empiricism.” Ibid.

^[73] Foundational work was done by Giuseppe Peano. But the founders of logicism were the Germans Richard Dedekind and Gottlob Frege. The work crossed over to the British Isles and was advanced by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, who actually attempted – ultimately unsuccessfully – to carry out the proposed reduction in their monumental, 3-volume Principia Mathematica (Cambridge & London: Cambridge Univ. Press & Royal Society, 1910, 1912, and 1913).

^[74] To Hume, much of human thinking (e.g., our tendency to organize events according to cause and effect or to reason via induction) bottoms out in “habits of the mind” (cf. Treatise on Human Nature, book I, part III, §VI). It was also popular on certain subjective interpretations of Kantianism that picked up on the idea that our minds are innately organized into a priori categories that shape the way we experience and interpret the world. Thinkers who articulated some version of psychologism included the logician Christoph von Sigwart, Neo-Kantians Theodor Elsenhans, Benno Erdmann, and Theodor Lipps as well as psychologists (meaning the relevant branch of science) Gustave Le Bon, Gerardus Heymans, and the previously discussed Wilhelm Wundt.

^[75] The English-language edition was published: London: Kegan Paul, 1922. In German, 1921.

^[76] Important Vienna Circle members incl. Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath.

^[77] Roland Posner, “Charles Morris and the Behavioral Foundations of Semiotics,” in Martin Krampen, Klaus Oehler, Roland Posner, Thomas A. Sebeok, and Thure von Uexkuell, eds., Classics of Semiotics, Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, series eds., Topics in Contemporary Semiotics, New York and London: Plenum Press; Plenum Publ., 1987, p. 25; archived online at <https://archive.org/details/classicsofsemiot0000unse/page/24/>.

^[78] Oxford and London: Oxford Univ. Press and Hutchinson’s Univ. Library.

^[79] Watson’s research assistant was undergraduate psychology student Rosalie Alberta Rayner. “Under …[the] premise [that infant emotional responses were ‘built up’ through conditioning], Watson and Rayner embarked on the now infamous ‘Little Albert’ experiments …They placed a white rat next to 11-month-old ‘Albert B’ while loudly striking a metal rod out of sight of the child. Even though he had previously been attracted to the rat, he soon displayed fear whenever it approached.” Eventually, Watson and Rayner had an extramarital affair that resulted in the former’s eventual divorce from his first wife, Mary Ickes,. “Rayner and Watson had two sons, William in 1921 and James in 1924, whom they raised according to behaviorist principles. …Her sons both attempted suicide later in life, William successfully. According to James: ‘ …the principles for which Dad stood as a behaviorist eroded both Bill’s and my ability to deal effectively with human emotion…and it tended to undermine self-esteem in later life, ultimately contributing to Bill’s death and to my own crisis.’” Corinne Smirle, “Rosalie Rayner,” Psychology’s Feminist Voices, 2013, <https://feministvoices.com/rosalie-rayner/>; <https://web.archive.org/web/20131228022742/https://feministvoices.com/rosalie-rayner/>. According to Wikipedia, Watson’s first marriage also resulted in two children, “…also named John and Mary Ickes Watson, the latter of whom attempted suicide later in life.” “John B. Watson,” Sept. 22, 2024, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson>. Mary Ickes, also known as “Polly” was the mother of minor film star Mary Loretta “Mariette” Hartley.

^[80] But, we emphasize – yet again – that Watson didn’t arise in a vacuum. He was assisted or presaged by Alexander Bain, William Benjamin Carpenter (ideomotor effect), “J. E.” De Camp, Knight Dunlap, Clark Leonard Hull, Mary Cover Jones, Adolf Meyer, Sergius Morgulis, Curt Paul Richter, “C. F.” Sams, Herbert Spencer “H. S.” Jennings, William Isaac Thomas (who also worked on “symbolic interactionism” theory – which also involved Charles Horton Cooley and pragmatists John Dewey and George Herbert Mead), and Edward Lee Thorndike. Harvey A. Carr was also in Watson’s circle; though Carr was evidently more of an old-school functionalist. Watson was criticized by aforementioned pragmatist George Herbert Mead.

^[81] Kerry W. Buckley, Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism, New York: Guilford Press, 1989, pp. 6 & 7.

^[82] Ibid., pp. 6 & 7.

^[83] Ibid.

^[84] Ibid., p. 11.

^[85] Ibid., pp. 11-12.

^[86] Ibid., p. 12.

^[87] Ibid., p. 14.

^[88] Ibid., p. 15.

^[89] Ibid. Which Montague may have done as a bet in order to raise his institution’s prestige.

^[90] Psychology: An Introductory Study of the Structure and Functions of Human Consciousness, 1904.

^[91] Watson probably used this sort of rat in his infamous “Little Albert” experiments. (See further on.)

^[92] Samuel Aaron Miller, “Loeb, Jacques,” Encyclopædia Judaica, vol. 11, Jerusalem: Keter Publ. House, 1972, p. 438.

^[93] See Donaldson’s The Growth of the Brain (1895).

^[94] John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review, vol. 20, 1913, pp. 158-177; archived at <https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/views.htm>. It’s worth noting that the German Albert Paul “A. P.” Weiss was evidently also developing behavioral models along similar lines.

^[95] Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, New York: Harper & Bros., 1911. N.B. The Univ. of Chicago also nurtured accountant James Oscar McKinsey, founder of the now-powerhouse “consulting firm” McKinsey & Co.

^[96] Watson stressed the importance of gradualism and “reinforcement” – a concept anticipated by Edward Lee Thorndike the “law of effect” – and, in this way, differed from some other theorists, such as Edwin Ray Guthrie, who believed in “one-trial learning” and non-reinforcement. Robert M. Yerkes named Guthrie as the head of the “Psychological Warfare Services Advisory Committee” during World War Two. Yerkes, “Plan for a History of Psychological Services in the War,” Donald G. Marquis, ed., Psychology and the War, <https://betshy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/98f1d-psychology-and-the-war-robert-yerkes.pdf>.

^[97] “Utopian socialism,” typified by Comte’s employer-teacher, Henri de Saint-Simon (Saint-Simonianism), Charles Fourier (Fourierism), Étienne Cabet, said to have coined the term communisme (Cabetism), and Robert Owen (Owenism). (Occasionally, Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, “Rétif,” is credited with coining the word “communism.” Regardless, Rétif seems to have invented “pornographer” – and been one too.) In any case, it’s interesting that B.F. Skinner's book Walden Two (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publ. Co., 1948) is frequently described as “utopian.” It inspired Kathleen “Kat” Kinkade (et al.) to co-found a commune called “Twin Oaks” in Virginia as a “behaviorist utopia.” See Damon Randolph Bach, “The Rise and Fall of the American Counterculture: A History of the Hippies and Other Cultural Dissidents,” dissertation, Texas A&M Univ., Dec. 2013, p. 207, <https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/51a90542-7fe8-4687-8158-cb666e98329d/content>.

^[98] A. García-Molina and J. Peña-Casanova, “Stalin’s Interventionism in Soviet Physiology: The Pavlovian Session,” Neurosciences and History, vol. 10, no. 2, 2022, pp. 92-100, <https://nah.sen.es/vmfiles/vol10/NAHV10N2202292_100EN.pdf>.

^[99] Ibid.; citing D. Joravsky, “The construction of the Stalinist Psyche,” S. Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, London: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978. p. 105-128.

^[100] Gregg Henriques, “Wilber and Watson Made the Same Mistake: Both Ken Wilber and John Watson Erroneously Yoked Behaviorism to Materialism,” Unified Theory of Knowledge (weblog), Nov. 11, 2023, <https://medium.com/unified-theory-of-knowledge/wilber-and-watson-made-the-same-mistake-930d7dead54b>.

^[101] Richard Norton-Taylor, “Graham Greene, Arthur Ransome and Somerset Maugham all spied for Britain, admits MI6,” Guardian (U.K.), Sept. 21, 2010, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/21/mi6-first-authorised-history>.

^[102] Bruno Angelo Strapasson and Saulo de Freitas Araujo, “Methodological Behaviorism: Historical Origins of a Problematic Concept (1923-1973),” Perspectives on Behavior Science (Assoc. for Behavior Analysis Intl.), vol. 43, no. 2, Apr. 22, 2020, pp. 415-429; <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7316941/>.

^[103] J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 2nd ed., Downer’s Grover: IVP Academic; InterVarsity Press, 2017, p. 233.

^[104] Ibid.

^[105] The psychologist Karl Spencer Lashley appears to have been metaphysical behaviorist-materialist. Lashley differed from Watson mainly in that the former took on board perspectives gleaned from biology and neurobiology, as opposed to the latter who concentrated much more narrowly on environments. An important philosopher in the vicinity is Wilfrid Stalker Sellars. Usually classified as along the functionalist spectrum, Sellars interacted with behaviorism, German idealism, logical positivism, and pragmatism, incorporating elements into his own outlook of “critical realism.”

^[106] Malone, loc. cit.

^[107] “Defensive Democracy,” Wikipedia, Apr. 19, 2025, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy>.

^[108] Stephen Toulmin and David E. Leary, “The Cult of Empiricism in Psychology, and Beyond,” Sigmund Koch and David E. Leary, eds., In A Century of Psychology as Science, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985, pp. 598-599; <https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=psychology-faculty-publications>.

^[109] G. Wever, “Charles W. Bray II (1904–1982),” obit. American Psychologist, vol. 40, no. 2, 1985, p. 233; <https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092195> and <https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-12380-001>.

^[110] With Ralph Droz Casey and Bruce Lannes Smith, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946.

^[111] Scott M. Cutlip, The Unseen Power: Public Relations, a History, Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., Publ., 1994, p. 99; <https://archive.org/details/unseenpowerpubli0000cutl/page/98/>.

^[112] Also in the vicinity were Maurice Lyons and William F. McCombs, both Democratic-party fixers who Wilson eventually placed onto the Creel Committee.

^[113] His father, Thomas William House, Sr. was said to have been one of the richest men in Texas at the time (along with Paul Bremond, Cornelius Ennis, William J. Hutchins, and William Marsh Rice). See Marilyn McAdams Sibley, The Port of Houston: A History, Austin, Tex.:: Univ. of Texas Press, 1962, p. 75; <https://books.google.com/books?id=fhHgDQAAQBAJ>.

^[114] Born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula.

^[115] Margarita de Orellana, Verso, London, 2009.

^[116] De Orellana discusses the application to Mexico of the word “barbarous,” first by John Kenneth Turner in Miriam Leslie’s newly created American Magazine (“Barbarous Mexico,” 1909) – to which Walter Lippmann and Frederick Winslow Taylor were contributors – and then in book form (Barbarous Mexico, 1911). As novelist Thomas Kennerly “Tom” Wolfe, Jr. once pointed out, “‘stereotype’ is a word originally used by typesetters to describe a word or phrase repeated so often that they created a special plate for it.” Dorothy McInnis Scura, Conversations With Tom Wolfe, Jackson, Miss.: Univ. Press of Miss., 1990, p. 263. It was Lippmann who, in his book Public Opinion (1922), first used “stereotype” in its modern, psychological sense – as a predominating and simple image that people associate with a particular social group. See Lippmann, Public Opinion, New Brunswick, N.J. and London: Transaction Publ., 1998, part III, pp. 79-158; <https://monoskop.org/images/b/bf/Lippman_Walter_Public_Opinion.pdf>. Turner was an associate in Los Angeles of one “Job Harriman.” But it’s not clear if this person – described by Wikipedia as “an American minister who later became an agnostic and a socialist” associate of Eugene Debs – was any relation to the family of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman.

^[117] Ibid., back matter. To our way of thinking, these factoids make all the more interesting the mysterious disappearance – and presumed death – of iconoclastic journalist Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce (best known for his The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906) in Mexico in the midst of the Mexican Revolution right around the time de Orellana says Pancho Villa was dealing with Hollywood.

^[118] Douglas Waller, Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, New York: Free Press; Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 18; <https://books.google.com/books?id=QsLlM1lzsZEC>.

^[119] Ibid. Biographer Waller also says that these orders “reached Donovan… [by] state department cable …toward the end of June, 1916, while he was in Berlin. Five months earlier the Rockefeller Foundation had commissioned him to be one of its representatives in Europe convincing two belligerents, Great Britain and Germany, to allow the foundation’s War Relief Commission to ship $1 million worth of food and clothing into famine-plagued Belgium, Serbia, and Poland.” Ibid. Inexplicably, Waller does not raise the question of whether “spymaster” Donovan was performing some sort of intelligence or reconnaissance work, writing merely: “…Donovan, who had grown increasingly interested in news stories he read about the European War, jumped at the chance to tour the continent and its battlefields, and, perhaps, scout future overseas clients for his law firm.” Ibid.

^[120] New York: Benjamin W. Huebsch, 1912.

^[121] Billie Barnes Jensen, “Philip Dru, the Blueprint of a Presidential Adviser,” American Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 1971, p. 49; <https://www.jstor.org/stable/40640972>. John Kenneth Turner’s California associate Job Harriman was also said to have been a “socialist utopian”.

^[122] Franklin K. Lane, The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1922, p. 297; <https://books.google.com/books?id=8mwoAAAAYAAJ>. This strand – women’s suffrage – shows up in some of the earliest examples of utopian literature, such as St. Thomas More’s Utopia. For more on that, see further on.

^[123] Loc. cit., chapt. vi; online in an unpaginated, electronic version, here: <https://ia801706.us.archive.org/32/items/philip-dru-administrator/Philip%20Dru%20Administrator.pdf>.

^[124] Arthur M. Schlesigner, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order 1919-1933, Boston and New York: Mariner Books; Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003 [orig. 1957], p. 493, n. 4.

^[125] Some funding came from, or was funneled through, Germany. George Katkov, “German Foreign Office Documents on Financial Support to the Bolsheviks in 1917,” International Affairs, Royal Inst. of Intl. Affairs), vol. 32, no. 2, Apr. 1956, pp. 181-189; <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2625787>.

^[126] Arsène de Goulévitch, Czarism and Revolution, N. J. Couriss, transl., Hawthorne, Cal.: Omni Publ., 1962, p. 224; <https://ia902905.us.archive.org/29/items/a.-goulevitch-czarism-and-revolution/A.Goulevitch%20-%20Czarism%20and%20revolution.pdf>.

Omni Publications, 1962

^[127] Born Israel Lazarevich Gelfand or Helphand.

^[128] The cache of evidence, called the “Sisson Documents,” reads in part: “…got in touch with the Imperial Bank of Germany through the bankers, D. Rubenstein, Max Warburg, and Parvus.” According to Doc. #57. “Parvus is an agent at Copenhagen (see ‘New Europe,’ January 31, 1918, pp. 94-95). …The office of the banking house M. Warburg has opened in accordance with telegram from president of Rhenish-Westphalian Syndicate an account for the undertaking of Comrade Trotsky.” Doc. #64; cited by William N. Grimstad, The Six Million Reconsidered, Torrence, Cal.: Noontide Press, 1979, p. 128.

^[129] Captain Archibald H. Maule Ramsay, The Nameless War, London: Britons Publ. Society, 1952; citing François Coty, Figaro, Feb. 20, 1932; online as Ramsay, The Nameless War, N.p.: AAARGH, p. 29; <https://ia903409.us.archive.org/9/items/the-nameless-war-captain-archibald-maule-ramsay/The%20Nameless%20War%20-%20Captain%20Archibald%20Maule%20Ramsay.pdf>.

^[130] The most reputable, academically speaking, was probably John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, New York: Anchor; Random House, 1992, p. 936; citing New York Journal-American, Feb. 3, 1939. Cf., e.g., Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Dilling, The Plot Against Christianity, Lincoln, Neb.: Elizabeth Dilling Foundation, 1964 [orig. 1953], p. 125; citing Cholly Knickerbocker, Journal-American (Hearst Press, New York), and giving the date as Feb. 3, 1949; <https://archive.org/details/plotagainstchris00dill/>. Emil Ludwig seems to echo this. See July ’14, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929, p. 295; <https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/july1400emil/july1400emil.pdf>.

^[131] Griffin, The Creature From Jekyll Island, Westlake Village, Cal.: American Media, 1994, p. 284.

^[132] George F. Kennan, “The Sisson Documents,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 28, no. 2, Jun. 1956, pp. 130-154; <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1872537>. The other “wise men” were Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, W. Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, and John McCloy.

^[133] Naomi Wiener Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership, Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis Univ. Press, 1999, p. 137; <https://archive.org/details/jacobhschiffstud0000cohe/page/136/>.

^[134] Bertie Charles “B. C.” Forbes, Men Who are Making America, New York: B. C. Forbes Publ. Co., 1922, pp. 334 and 335; archived online at <https://books.google.com/books?id=40EEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA334>.

^[135] For a fuller account of these matters, see “Communism, Jewish Origins of,” and “Schiff, Jacob,” in Kit Marlowe, Jr. and Jack Eckstein, AntiZion, updated, 2016.

^[136] “Schiff, Jacob Henry,” Encyclopedia of Jewish Knowledge, New York: Behrman’s Jewish Book House, 1934, <https://archive.org/stream/encyclopediaofje00unse/encyclopediaofje00unse_djvu.txt>. This episode is variously called the “Galveston Experiment” or “Galveston Plan.” Cf. “Galveston Movement,” Wikipedia, Apr. 20, 2024, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galveston_Movement>.

^[137] Louis T. McFadden, “Louis McFadden on the Federal Reserve,” Congressional Record, Jun. 10, 1932, pp. 12595-12603, <http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=McFadden1932>; cited by Arthur Goldwag, The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right, New York: Vintage, 2012, p. 134.

^[138] Here, we capitalize “Establishment and intend it as a rough synonym for phrases like the “Blob,” the “Cryptocracy,” or the “Deep State,” on which bewildering array of terminology, see: Edward “E.” Digby Baltzell, Jr.; Benjamin J. “Ben” Rhodes (a deputy national security advisor to Barack Obama’s); contrarian historian Michael A. Hoffman II (

https://revisionisthistory.org

); and Michael “Mike” Lofgren (former aide to Ohio republican congressman and later governor John Richard Kasich, Jr.).

^[139] Of course, “…Chicago attorney Sigmund [G.] Livingston founded [the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith] ADL in 1913,” <https://www.adl.org/who-we-are/our-mission>. Sigmund is said to have been born in Germany. So, call it a “sync” that John D. Rockefeller’s dad, William Avery Rockefeller, Sr. (also known as “Devil Bill”) had been some sort of bigamist and “snake-oil salesman who, to his other family, was “Doctor William Levingston” (according to “William Rockefeller Sr.,” Wikipedia, Mar. 7, 2025, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rockefeller_Sr.>) or “Dr. William Livingston” (according to “Father of Rockefeller Believed to Be Dead,” New York Times, May 13, 1906, <https://www.nytimes.com/1906/05/13/archives/father-of-rockefeller-believed-to-be-dead-is-said-to-have-spent.html>). “The ADL solicited the aid of U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson and others to denounce [famed automaker Henry] Ford’s antisemitism. Under mounting pressure from the ADL and other groups, Ford closed The Dearborn Independent [in 1927] and issued an apology in 1929.” Cynthia Golembeski, “Anti-Defamation League,” Encyclopædia Britannica, Apr. 23, 2025, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anti-Defamation-League>.

^[140] Griffin, The Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, Appleton, Wis.; Westlake Village, Cal.: American Opinion; American Media, 1994. The Federal Reserve History website says: “An additional member of the First Name Club was Benjamin Strong[, Jr.], vice president of the Bankers Trust Company and the future founding chief executive officer (then called governor, now called president) of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. …Vanderlip recalls him attending, but no other account indicates Strong’s presence. …Bertie Charles (B.C.) Forbes – the founder of Forbes magazine and the journalist who first revealed the meetings in an article in 1916 – …concluded Strong did not attend… [Strong’s] ideas were certainly present at the meeting even if he was not there in person.” “The Meeting at Jekyll Island: November 20, 1910–November 30, 1910,” <https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/jekyll-island-conference>.

^[141] William T. Still and Patrick S. J. Carmack, The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America, VHS, Piedmont, Okla., Rolling Bay, Wash.: Money Masters Video; Royalty Production Co.; Still Productions, 1996.

^[142] As we touched on in “10 Milestones in Election Fraud,” Bourbon Democrat Grover Cleveland lost face with grassroots Democrats after the 1894 Pullman Strike ended with workers being killed.

^[143] Eric Frederick Goldman, Two-way Street: The Emergence of the Public Relations Counsel, Bellman Publ. Co., 1948, p. 10; <https://books.google.com/books?id=ev8hAAAAMAAJ>. National City’s outlay would be in the ballpark of $8,075,732.32 today. CPI Inflation Calculator, <https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1913?amount=250000>. Other businesses who came in on “P.R.’s” ground floor were: American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), Bethlehem Steel, and United Fruit.

^[144] Chomsky, Selections: Excerpted from Media Control, 2002, <https://chomsky.info/mediacontrol01/>.

^[145] John Maxwell Hamilton and Christina Georgacopoulos, “The Sisson Documents and Their ‘Distinguished Place’ in the History of Disinformation,” Intelligence and National Security, vol 36, no. 6, pp. 881-897, Jul. 7, 2021, <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02684527.2021.1946953>.

^[146] Other commentators worth considering are British intelligence officer (MI6) Sir Paul Henry Dukes, author of Red Dusk and the Morrow: Adventures and Investigations in Red Russia (London: Williams and Norgate, 1922) and Robert Archibald Wilton, a London Times correspondent who wrote Russia’s Agony (London: Edward Arnold, 1918) and The Last Days of the Romanovs (1920).

^[147] Harold James Tobin and Percy Wells Bidwell, Mobilizing Civilian America, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1940, p. 4; <https://ia800601.us.archive.org/29/items/ldpd_11345811_000/ldpd_11345811_000.pdf>.

^[148] Ibid., front matter.

^[149] CPI Inflation Calculator, <https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1906?amount=40000>.

^[150] As it happens, Ellen Louise Wilson (née Axson) died in 1914, supposedly of “Bright’s Disease” (which is a kidney-inflammation ailment). A Google AI summary states that this sort of inflammation may be caused by a range of things, such as “toxins, infections, or autoimmune diseases”. One wonders whether the first Mrs. Wilson had possibly been poisoned. Within a year (1915), Woodrow Wilson was remarried to Edith Bolling Galt.

^[151] “Balfour Declaration 1917,” <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/balfour.asp>. The end of Ottoman control in Palestine was foreseen by the Western powers during World War I. In anticipation of victory, Britain and France brokered a secret deal – the Sykes-Picot Agreement – dividing Ottoman territories, including Palestine, between them. Britain thus negotiated for Palestine, occupied it beginning in late 1917, and defeated the Ottomans decisively in 1918 (at the Battle of Megiddo, Sept. 19-25). Within two years, so-called – and still British-controlled – “Mandatory Palestine” was created (Jul. 1, 1920) to govern in lieu of British army occupation. The League of Nations “confirmed” this arrangement in 1922 (Jul. 24).

^[152] Keren Hayesod, or the “Foundation Fund.” It was later eclipsed by the United Jewish Appeal.

^[153] Chaim Weizmann, “Brandeis and Weizmann: Interesting Chapter in American Zionist History,” The Jewish News (Detroit, Mich.), p. 24; archived at <https://digital.bentley.umich.edu/djnews/djn.1949.03.25.001/24>.

^[154] Forbes, op. cit., pp. 334-335. Cf. Schiff’s statement, read by Herbert Parsons (president of the Friends of Russian Freedom), “Pacifists Pester Till Mayor Calls Them Traitors,” New York Times, Mar. 24, 1917, <http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9E05E4DB143AE433A25757C2A9659C946696D6CF>.

^[155] Brandeis was the enemy of financier John Pierpont “J. P.” Morgan, Sr. Brandeis opposed, on the grounds that it was monopolistic, Morgan’s attempt to merge several New England railroads.

^[156] David Savino , “Louis D. Brandeis and His Role Promoting Scientific Management as a Progressive Movement,” Journal of Management History, Jan. 9, 2009, n.p., <https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/17511340910921772/>.

^[157] Other names in “scientific management,” include: Harvard’s supposedly “anti-capitalist” mathematician Carl Georg Lange Barth (who worked with Bethlehem Steel); engineer Morris Llewellyn Cooke (Rural Electrification Administration) who married into the family of Standard Oil shareholder Daniel Bushnell (marrying Eleanor Bushnell Davis); Harrington Emerson (Interstate Commerce Commission and Sante Fe Railroad); engineer Horace King Hathaway (Link-Belt Company); Marxist mechanical engineer Henry Laurence Gantt (Joseph Bancroft & Sons Company; Midvale Steel; and Williams & Wilkins.); Marxist mechanical engineer Walter Nicholas Polakov (consultant for U.S.-navy supplier Emergency Fleet Corporation); and engineer Sanford Eleazer Thompson (consultant for two-time U.S. Secretary of War, Henry Lewis Stimson). As to how and why several leftist-communist types should be assisting “capitalists” increase worker “efficiency,” Noam Chomsky writes: “The similarity between [Wilsonian progressivism] and Leninist ideology is very striking. According to Leninist[s] …, the radical intelligentsia …will be the vanguard who will lead the stupid and ignorant masses on to, you know, communist utopia, because they’re too stupid to work it out by themselves. And in fact there’s been a very easy transition over these years between one and the other position. …And I think the reason for the ease is partly because they’re sort of the same position. So you can be either a Marxist-Leninist commissar, or you can be somebody celebrating the magnificence of State capitalism, and you can serve those guys. It’s more or less the same position. You pick one or the other depending on your estimate of where power is, and that can change.” Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” William Greene, transcr., lecture, Univ. of Wisconsin – Madison, Mar. 15, 1989, <https://chomsky.info/19890315/>.

^[158] “Although [B. F.] Skinner quite properly names Pavlov, the Russian psychologist, and Edward L. Thorndike, one of the American pioneers of intelligence testing, as two of his principal intellectual forebears…” Schrag, op. cit., p. 14

^[159] Woodrow Wilson, “The New Freedom,” 1913; archived at <https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-new-freedom/>.

^[160] Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 1919; online at <https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf>.

^[161] Devon Jackson, Conspiranoia, New York: Plume; Penguin, 2000, p. 71.

^[162] John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1916, pp. 331 and 332; archived at <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/40794/pg40794.txt>. Dewey notes that Aristotle’s foundational logical text was titled the Organon (ca. 330 B.C.), meaning “instrument” or “tool,” ibid., pp. 332-333. And he refers obliquely to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), or “New Instrument,” in which the “Baconian method” of induction is laid out. Ibid.

^[163] Bybee, loc. cit. “Dewey… did not see Science as standing outside of and above human existence… The problems of democracy were …bureaucratization and impersonalization of industrial life, …the power of economic forces to secure their interests in government either directly through compulsion or threat, or indirectly through the manipulation of public opinion. The cure …was a more participatory form of democracy.” Ibid. For a counterpoint, from someone who thinks Lippmann has been mischaracterized, see Michael Schudson, “The public, the media and the limits of democracy: Re-examining the Lippmann-Dewey ‘debate’,” ABC Australia, Jun. 19, 2019, <https://www.abc.net.au/religion/public-media-and-limits-of-democracy-the-lippmann-dewey-debate/11228168>.

^[164] This included people such as: Ivy Ledbetter Lee, hired by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to repair Standard Oil’s after the “Ludlow Massacre” (Ludlow, Colorado, Apr. 20, 1914).

^[165] Noam Chomsky, “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours,” Boston Review, Sept. / Oct. 2009, <https://chomsky.info/200909__/>. N.B. This was the era during which the highly decorated United States Marine Corps officer Smedley Darlington Butler was active. In his 1935 book, War Is a Racket (New York: Round Table Press), Butler explained his view that the military was being used to advance the interests of U.S. business.

^[166] Goldman, loc. cit.

^[167] “Somehow ‘we,’ the controllers, are immune from this human condition of infinite malleability, however. ‘We’ have a nature and ‘we’ understand what’s good, that’s kind of like a hidden premise. But for the rest of the slobs out there, they’re just passive objects…,” ibid.

^[168] Noam Chomsky, “On Humanism and Morality,” interviewed by Tor Wennerberg, Nov. 1998; publ. in Montreal Serai, vol. 13, no. 3, Autumn 2000; archived online at <https://chomsky.info/199811__-2/>.

^[169] Bernays, Propaganda, chapt. 3, 1928; archived at <http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html>.

^[170] I.e., the “State Planning Committee,” or Gosplan.

^[171] Its materials were first subsumed into Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1970), which (at an unknown date) spun them off into Harcourt Assessment. This latter was then acquired by Reed Elsevier (2001), and (in 2008) became part of London-headquartered Pearson Education.

^[172] Noam Chomsky, “Power in The Global Arena,” Amiel Lecture, London, May 1998, <https://chomsky.info/199805__-2/>; citing Frank Kofsky, Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993 and Chomsky, Turning the Tide, Boston: South End Press, 1985 and Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, New York: Hill and Wang, 1992, p. 49. Here’s an example: “Take IBM. … IBM relied on the taxpayer for its wealth. …[I]t learned to shift from punch cards to modern computers. It learned it at Pentagon-funded labs… Finally in the early sixties the firm was able to produce its own fast computers but they were too expensive for businesses, so the United States stepped in to purchase them. …[P]rocurement by the state is a major device of taxpayer subsidy. …[D]ecades later, IBM was finally able to make profits in the market and it was also able to spin off wildly successful enterprises like Microsoft and others which also benefited amply from public subsidy.” Noam Chomsky, “The State-Corporate Complex: A Threat to Freedom and Survival,” lecture, Univ. of Toronto, Apr. 7, 2011, Yvonne Bond, transcription, <https://chomsky.info/20110407-2/>.

^[173] Ibid. Elsewhere, Chomsky explains that this “welfare-warfare” model (to borrow the phraseology of Hillsdale College’s Kevin Slack) was dominant between “roughly 1950 until the early 1970s,” when the “Bretton Woods restrictions on finance were dismantled, finance was freed, speculation boomed, huge amounts of capital started going into speculation against currencies and other paper manipulations, and the entire economy became financialized.” Noam Chomsky, “Chomsky: Understanding the Crisis – Markets, the State and Hypocrisy, interviewed by Sameer Dossani, Foreign Policy In Focus, Feb. 10, 2009, <https://chomsky.info/20090210/>.

^[174] As we reported in one of our presentations on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jackson – acting as an agent for Time-Life – reportedly purchased Abraham Zapruder’s original film taken in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and promptly saw to it that it was stashed in a vault. Jackson also came in on the ground floor of the Bilderberg Group, which figures in countless contemporary conspiracy shenanigans and was established in 1954 by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

^[175] “William S. Paley,” Encyclopedia Britannica, <https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-S-Paley>.

^[176] Here, “instrumentalism” is essentially synonymous with both “experimentalism” and “pragmatism.”

^[177] “Project Camelot,” Wikipedia, Mar. 31, 2025, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Camelot>; citing Carol Cina, “Social Science for Whom? A Structural History of Social Psychology,” dissertation, State Univ. of New York at Stony Brook, 1981, pp. 186-187; citing “Britt, 1942, p. 255.” At the level of synchronicity, behaviorist Richard A. Winett was educated at Stony Brook Univ. and went on to teach at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State (“Virginia Tech”) which, on Apr. 16, 2007, was the site of a shooting “spree” – blamed on undergraduate Seung-Hui Cho, who is said to have committed suicide after he killed 32 people and wounded 17.

^[178] See W. S. Hunter, “An Open Letter to the Anti-Behaviorists,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 19, 1922, pp. 307-308; citing Psych Bulletin, vol. 19, no. 9; archived online at <https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?journal=Journal%20of%20Philosophy&title=An%20open%20letter%20to%20the%20anti-behaviorists&author=WS%20Hunter&volume=19&publication_year=1922&pages=307-308&doi=10.2307/2939675&>. He seems to have had a personality similar to that of Navy intell. astronomer, and “ufology” critic, Donald Howard Menzel.

^[179] Lorrin A. Riggs, “Hunter, Walter S.,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, <https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/hunter-walter-s>.

^[180] Riggs, loc. cit.

^[181] “Walter Samuel Hunter,” Apr. 27, 2023, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Samuel_Hunter>; citing H. Schlosberg, “Walter S. Hunter: Pioneer Objectivist in Psychology,” Science, vol. 120, no. 3116, Sept. 17, 1954, pp. 441-442; <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13195670/>.

^[182] Michael J. Socolow, “The Behaviorist in the Boardroom: The Research of Frank Stanton, Ph.D.,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 52, no. 4, Dec. 2008, pp. 526ff; archived online at Gale Academic OneFile (pay wall), link.gale.com/apps/doc/A192586867/AONE?u=anon~6f727e5&sid=googleScholar&xid=90f3e42d.

^[183] Dan Bjork, “Rise of Frank Stanton to CBS,” Review of History and Political Science, vol. 2, no. 2, Jun. 2014, pp. 245-266, <https://rhps.thebrpi.org/journals/rhps/Vol_2_No_2_June_2014/12.pdf>.

^[184] “Frank Stanton: Biography,” <https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1460243/bio/>. The snippet concludes with the SynchroMystically intriguing factoid that: “It was his [Stanton’s] influence on the entire style of CBS that led to his proudest achievement, construction of the new CBS corporate headquarters, ‘Black Rock’, at 51 West 52nd Street in New York.” Ibid.

^[185] J. Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion, Cambridge (U.K.) & New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, pp. 63 and 220; <https://archive.org/details/propagandademocr0000spro/page/64/>. The Rockefellers (esp. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller and Rockefeller Foundations) also funded the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which was founded in 1923. We got into this in our symbol-odyssey video titled “Omicron.”

^[186] In biographical sketches, Cantril is unfailingly described as an propaganda expert or a “public-opinion” analyst, or both. If you’re wondering what “school” of psychology he represented or subscribed to, it may be summarized as “social psychology” of a broadly functionalist (though materialist) bent.

^[187] Via executive order #8840; see “EO 8840,” Federal Register, <https://www.federalregister.gov/executive-order/8840>.

^[188] Paul Kramer, “Nelson Rockefeller and British Security Coordination,” Journal of Contemporary History, The Second World War: Part 1, vol. 16, no. 1, Jan. 1981, p. 73; <https://www.jstor.org/stable/260617>. Kramer gives its date of creation – under the name “Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics” – as August 16, 1940, noting that this was “well over a year before Pearl Harbour [sic],” ibid. He also says that James Vincent Forrestal, then assistant to FDR and later navy secretary, did the leg work of setting up the Rockefeller Office. Forrestal died May 22, 1949 (supposedly having committed suicide by jumping from the 16th floor of his room at the Bethesda Naval Hospital) – having receiving unspecified “care” for depression from Navy psychiatrist George N. Raines.

^[189] An Office of Coordinator of Strategic Information was created June 25, 1941, and William J. Donovan was named Coordinator of Information on July 11, 1941 But the Office of Strategic Services wasn’t technically established until June 13, 1942 along with the Office of War Information (OWI). If you’re interested in the complicated timeline, see Greg Bradsher, “The Creation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),” Text Message (weblog), Aug. 24, 2021, <https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2021/08/24/the-creation-of-the-office-of-strategic-services-oss/>. Leonard William Doob was another OWI-alumnus and propaganda expert (cf. Propaganda: Their Psychology and Techniques, 1935; Propaganda and Public Opinion, 1949; The Strategies of Psychological Warfare, 1949; etc.). He taught psychology at Yale Univ. His Wikipedia article, comparing him to Robert King Merton (born Meyer Robert Schkolnick) and Jacques Ellul, asserts that he was not an advocate. “Leonard W. Doob,” Sept. 14, 2024, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_W._Doob>.

^[190] Hadley Cantril, The Psychology of Social Movements, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1941.

^[191] See “Institute for Propaganda Analysis Records: 1937-1968, 1947-1951 [bulk 1937-1941],” New York Public Library: Archives & Manuscripts, <https://archives.nypl.org/mss/1513>.

^[192] Evidently, the IPA had been the brainchild of Harvard mineralogist Kirtley Fletcher Mather, scion of the old Puritan Mather family that included Increase Mather and his son Cotton Mather, both active in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the time of the infamous “Salem Witch Trials.” Kirtley also assisted Clarence Seward Darrow against William Jennings Bryan during the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in 1925.

^[193] The source material was adapted for Welles by screenwriter Howard E. Koch.

^[194] The actual level of “panic” is the subject of no small amount of continuing controversy.

^[195] Robert E. Bartholomew, Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001, p. 217.

^[196] Allan Needell, Science, Cold War and the American State, Abingdon: Routledge; New York: Taylor & Francis, 2000, p. 156; <https://books.google.com/books?id=mMDSO8Ci42cC&pg=PA156>.

^[197] Established in 1959, and on which, see Jill Lepore, “How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future,” New Yorker, Jul. 27, 2020, <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/how-the-simulmatics-corporation-invented-the-future>.

^[198] I’ll leave you to reflect on the SynchroMystical significance of a name like “bridge-man.”

^[199] New York: Macmillan, 1927.

^[200] HasokChang, “Operationalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2021, Edward N. Zalta, ed., <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/operationalism/>. Bridgman committed suicide in 1961 due to a long battle with metastatic cancer.

^[201] Hunnex, op. cit., p. 14.

^[202] Sander Verhaegh, “Psychological Operationisms at Harvard: Skinner, Boring, and Stevens,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Dec. 10, 2020, <https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22071> and <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jhbs.22071>.

^[203] M. B. Franklin, “The Artist Speaks. Sigmund Koch on Aesthetics and Creative Work,” American Psychologist, vol. 56, no. 5, May 2001, pp. 445-452, <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11355368/>.

^[204] Verhaegh, loc. cit.

^[205] According to the summary by Hunnex, op. cit., p. 6. Also in the vicinity was Charles Kay Ogden’s “contextualized behaviorism,” which drew from Watson’s stimulus-response psychology. In The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1923), co-authored with Ivor Armstrong “I. A.” Richards, meaning is a triple-relation of “symbol (i.e., [a word] or expression), … thoughts (or interpretation), and …referent (or that [which is] referred to). …We get from words to things indirectly, by way of thought.” Ibid. Ogden advanced a proposal for a “Basic English” (based on his analysis of the language patterns, what he called “distributionalism”) that gained some traction after World War Two, presumably because it was hoped that a common language would unite the peoples of earth. One is reminded of Ludwik Lejzer “L. L.” Zamenhof’s pre-World-War-One constructed language of “Esperanto,” or Robert Anton Wilson’s “E-Prime,” a version of English without the verb “to be.” I. A. Richards was instrumental in the development of “New Criticism,” a forerunner of postmodern literary criticism according to which it is an interpretive error to factor-in the intention of a text’s author (the so-called “intentional fallacy”) or the audience’s reaction (the “affective fallacy”). C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards lived during the rise, and reflect some of the sensibilities, of logical positivism. Jason Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2021. pp. 13-14.

^[206] In this case, evidently, we’re talking about the “mentalist linguistics” of people such as Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and – to a lesser extent – “cultural anthropologist” Franz Boas.

^[207] Such as Alfred Adler, Franz Gabriel Alexander, Erik Erikson, Anna Freud, Erich Seligmann Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Heinz Hartmann, Karen Horney, Abram Kardiner, Melanie Klein, Harald Schultz-Hencke, Herbert Stack “Harry” Sullivan, Clara Mabel Thompson.

^[208] Like Cary Baynes, Marie Louise von Franz, Rosemary Gordon, Robert Alex Johnson, Emma Jung, and James Hollis, and Jean Shinoda-Bolen, and Thomas Moore.

^[209] Including Jacques-Alain Miller, Alain Badiou, Cornelius Castoriadis, Joan K. Copjec, Jesuit priest Michel de Certeau, Muriel Drazien, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Antoinette Grugnardi Fouque, Pierre “Félix” Guattari, Serge Liebschutz Leclaire, Dominique-Octave and Maud Mannoni, Jean Oury, François Perrier, and Slavoj Žižek.

^[210] Notables might be Karl Abraham, Michael Balint, Helene Rosenbach Deutsch, Julia Kristeva, Jean Laplanche, David A. Rapaport, Jacqueline Rose, and Donald Woods Winnicott.

^[211] Aaron Sloman, “Mentalism,” in Bullock and Stallybrass, eds., op. cit., p. 383.

^[212] Stanley M. Honer, Thomas C. Hunt, and Dennis L. Ockholm, Invitation to Philosophy: Issues and Options, 8th ed., Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publ., 1999, p. 243. In its extreme form, subjective idealism manifests as “solipsism, …[t]he view that only I (that is, the solipsist) exist, that other persons and objects have no independent existence of their own but exist solely as creations of my consciousness…,” ibid.

^[213] Practitioners include “Ali Nomad” (Alexander James McIvor-Tyndall), Banachek (Steven Shaw), Derren Brown, Joseph Dunninger, Anna Eva Fay (Ann Eliza Heathman), Uri Geller, Erik Jan Hanussen, “Kreskin” (George Joseph Kresge, Jr.), Oz the “Mentalist” Pearlman, and innumerable others.

^[214] New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1940.

^[215] New York: Appleton-Century, 1943.

^[216] Not to be confused with contemporary Prof. Edward K. Morris in the University of Kansas’s Applied Behavioral Science department.

^[217] Posner, loc. cit. To Morris, “[a]ll three movements rejected [Kant's] ‘a priori synthetic judgments’ as a source of knowledge, and for that reason each movement considered itself ‘scientific’ … According to them, what makes knowledge different from empirical data, was to be found… in the structure of the language employed (logical positivism), …in the function-dependent substitution of signs for objects (behaviorist empiricism), and …in the social conventions of communication (pragmatism), and these were differences that could be empirically investigated in their own right…”. Ibid. “Semiotics,” or the interpretation and study of symbols in the modern sense, can be traced to logician Charles Sanders “C. S.” Peirce (in the analytic tradition) and Ferdinand de Saussure (in the Continental tradition), which latter used the word “semiology.” Morris’s innovations created the subdisciplines of “‘pragmatics,’ ‘semantics,’ and ‘syntactics.’” Ibid.

^[218] Moreland and Craig, op. cit., p. 81.

^[219] W. V. O. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, chapt. 3, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969, pp. 69-90; <https://joelvelasco.net/teaching/3330/Quine-Epistemology-Naturalized.pdf>. Quine held that linguistic “meaning is a function of the conditions under which [a sentence] is uttered”, Hunnex, op. cit., p. 6.

^[220] See R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979.

^[221] Bernard C. Beins, “History of Psychology: John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Behaviorism,” Choice, <https://ala-choice.libguides.com/c.php?g=1420077&p=10527229>.

^[222] The examples given about what we would colloquially call our “free choices” are somewhat frivolous. But since behaviorism generally treats all human “behavior” as deterministic, even more “meaningful” and weightier choices – such as whether to become a Board Certification Behavior Analyst or sit around pinching the heads off house flies; whether to go to church on Sunday or go to a bordello instead; or whether to profess the Nicene Creed or the Humanist Manifestos (I, II, or III) – are equally treated as the determined outcomes of prior causes (both environmental or genetic, what have you). As Reformed Presbyterian logician Gordon Haddon Clark once put it: “Theology does not require brains; it requires a mind or spirit…”. This is because commitments (in religions such as Christianity) to “traditional” doctrines such as God’s final judgment, justice, right and wrong, etc. require some concept of freedom of the will that is robust enough to explain why a “sinner” ought to be punished for behaving badly while a “saint” should be rewarded – not to mention an immaterial or non-physical, enduring “soul” or “spirit” capable of inhabiting apparently otherworldly realms such as “heaven” or “hell.” All to say: These questions have worldview importance. See Clark, Behaviorism and Christianity, Jefferson, Md.: Trinity Foundation, 1982, back matter. Clark had been trained by, and later criticized, Edgar Arthur Singer, Jr., another Deweyite pragmatist working in the tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.

^[223] John C. Malone, “Did John B. Watson Really ‘Found’ Behaviorism?” Behavior Analysis, Mar. 15, 2014, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 1-12; <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4883453/>.

^[224] Beins, loc. cit.; emphasis supplied. Skinner taught at Harvard Univ. (1958-1974, and emeritus prof. until his death in 1990). Possibly, apropos of nothing, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Project MKUltra supposedly ran from 1953 to 1973. And Skinner’s tenure had a few years of overlap with Henry Murray, whose Harvard teaching career spanned from 1927 to 1962. – Except… During World War II, Murrary worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where (possibly among other things, and along with Ernst Kris and Bertram D. Lewin) he contributed to Walter C. Langer’s Analysis of the Personality of Adolph [sic] Hitler, under orders from Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan. During his last three years at Harvard (1959-1962), Murray supervised Timothy Francis Leary’s psychedelic experiments (LSD and psilocybin) and conducted “stress” experiments on some twenty-two unwitting undergraduates – among whom was then-17-year-old mathematics major and future “Unabomber,” Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski.

^[225] As opposed to merely considering antecedent stimulus in the “classical” stimulus-response sequence. Schematized, Skinner’s model is “stimulus-response-stimulus,” “antecedent-behavior-consequence,” or “stimulus-response-reinforcement,” Theresa M. Yakich, email, Apr. 16, 2025.

^[226] All that Skinner seems to have meant by “voluntary” was “not reflexive.” Operant behaviors are “voluntary,” in that sense. Some “behaviors” – such as pupil dilation – are reflexive. When stimuli precipitate an involuntary response, this is called “respondent behavior.” But, importantly, for Skinner, all behaviors are either operant or respondent . There is no tertium quid or via media.

^[227] “BCBA Test Content Outline (6th ed.),” Behavior Analyst Certification Board, 2022, update Sept. 2024, <https://www.bacb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/BCBA-6th-Edition-Test-Content-Outline-240903-a.pdf>.

^[228] In an appendix to our recent “Twilight Language” analysis, we sketched the successive replacement of Charles Darwin’s original theory of biological “(common) descent with modification” (Darwinism) by a “modern synthesis” taking stock of Mendelian inheritance and population genetics (Neo-Darwinism) and, more recently, by an even broader “extended evolutionary synthesis” that includes insights from a variety of other fields and areas of study including embryology, “epigenetics,” and transgenerational inheritance.

^[229] Schrag, op. cit., p. 13.

^[230] J. E. R. Staddon and D. T. Cerutti, “Operant Conditioning,” Annual Review of Psychology, Jun. 2002, vol. 10, no. 54, pp. 115-144; <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1473025/>.

^[231] Schrag, op. cit., p. 13.

^[232] A full account of this lies beyond our present scope, but would have to mention “aversive” and “reinforcing” stimuli, “extinction,” negative and positive “reinforcement,” “punishment,” “shaping,” applications of David Premack’s “Premack principle,” otherwise known as “grandma’s rule,” etc. Still, as Schrag reminds: “The principle of Skinnerian operant conditioning is simple enough. At its core is the systematic reinforcement—the rewarding—of behavior that the shaper regards as desirable, and the ‘extinction,’ through the withdrawal of the reinforcers that might have sustained it, of undesirable behavior.” Ibid.

^[233] Chomsky, “On Humanism and Morality,” loc. cit.

^[234] Oxford (U.K.) and San Francisco: Chandler Publ. Co., 1964.

^[235] New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1950. Lasswell was influenced by the mechanistic worldview and social-contract theory of Thomas Hobbes – as was international-relations “realist” Hans Morgenthau.

^[236] Kaplan’s Wikipedia article mentions that he “was named one of the top ten teachers in the United States in 1966 by Time magazine.” Sept. 18, 2024, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Kaplan>. Of course, Charles Douglas “C. D.” Jackson was a Princeton graduate, an OWI psychological-warfare expert, a former aide and speechwriter for Dwight D. Eisenhower, an early Bilderberg member, and as it happens a publisher for Life magazine. As we have reported several times, Jackson evidently purchased the famous film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination from Abraham Zapruder – and saw to it that it was kept in a Time-Life vault for nearly a decade.

^[237] See “Charles Wolf, Jr. — Publications,” <https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/w/wolf_jr_charles.html>. Wolf was also affiliated with the Hoover Institution (founded by Herbert Hoover at Stanford Univ.), the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, and UCLA. He was associated with various mutual-fund-style investments such as Capital Income Builder and Capital World Growth and Income. And, along with Pentagon-Papers authors Leslie Howard “Les” Gelb and Morton H. Halperin, Wolf was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Wolf’s obituary in the N. Y. Times represents him as having had an antagonistic relationship with Pentagon-Papers “leaker” Daniel Ellsberg, who is said to have smuggled the document out of RAND sometime before 1970 (when he allegedly left that institution) and later released it to the New York Times. Sam Roberts, “Charles Wolf Jr., Who Clashed With Pentagon Papers Leaker, Dies at 92,” obit., New York Times, Nov. 10, 2016, <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/us/charles-wolf-jr-died-pentagon-papers.html>.

^[238] Abingdon (U.K.): Routledge; New York: Taylor & Francis, 2009; 2017.

^[239] According to an obituary of Colonel Norman Dane Vaughan, participant with naval officer Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr. in the exploration of the South Pole: “After heading search and rescue for the North Atlantic division of the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations, Vaughan was back in uniform during the Korean War, this time working in psychological warfare at the Pentagon.” Myrna Oliver, “Norman Dane Vaughan, 100; Went to South Pole With Byrd,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 26, 2005, <https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-26-me-vaughan26-story.html>.

^[240] According to John Marks, it was closed down in 1965. Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, New York: Times Books, 1978, p. 163.

^[241] At one time, the areligious contrarian psychologist Frederick C. Thorne was also connected with Cornell. See T. S. Krawiec, “Obituary: Frederick C. Thorne (1909-1978),” American Psychologist, vol. 34, no. 8, 1979, p. 715; <https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-09578-002>.

^[242] Human Ecology had ties to other research institutions, such as – via Edgar Henry Schein – the Massachusetts Inst. of Technology’s Sloan School of Management (“MIT Sloan”); or – through Vienna, Austria-born Martin Theodore Orne – the Univ. of Pennsylvania. Like “Jolly West, Orne participated in the trial of Patricia “Patty” Hearst (as well as in the trial of Kenneth Alessio Bianchi who, along with Angelo Anthony Buono, Jr., was one of the “Hillside Stranglers”). It seems also that MIT received CIA monies through the Geschickter Fund (as did Georgetown and Stanford Univs.). “Humanistic psychologist” Carl Ransom Rogers was on the board of the Human Ecology Fund. See Stephen P. Demanchick and Howard Kirschenbaum, “Carl Rogers and the CIA,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 48, no. 1, Sept. 19, 2007, pp. 6–31, <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022167807303005>.

^[243] Rebecca Akkermans, “Harold G. Wolff,” historical profile, The Lancet, vol. 14, no. 10, Oct. 2015, pp. 982-983, <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(15)00184-2/fulltext>.

^[244] Michael Otterman, American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond, London & Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pluto Press, 2007 [Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne Univ. Press, 2007], p. 25.

^[245] Ibid., p. 86.

^[246] “U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Interrogation Research Section to Chief, Security Branch, “Establishing of Security Validation Teams,” Classification unknown, September 27, 1949, 2 pp,” National Security Archive, John Marks Collection, box #1, George Washington Univ., archived online at <https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32716-document-01-us-central-intelligence-agency-interrogation-research-section-chief>. Hypnotists with known or suspected ties to intelligence (CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation, or otherwise), include William Joseph Bryan (discussed elsewhere, herein), Milton Hyland Erickson (who was some sort of intelligence operative during World War II and who later became an associate CIA-grant recipient Margaret Mead), and George Hoben Estabrooks, on whom, see McGowan, Programmed to Kill, op. Cit., passim. Dr. “Jolly” also supposedly used hypnosis: “Louis Jolyon West seems to have used chemicals and hypnosis liberally in his medical practice, possibly leading to the death of a child and the execution of an innocent man.” See Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring, “Inside the Archive of an LSD Researcher With Ties to the CIA’s MKUltra Mind Control Project,” The Intercept, Nov. 24 2019, <https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/cia-mkultra-louis-jolyon-west/>.

^[247] Ibid., passim.

^[248] Ibid., p. 25.

^[249] West “treated” Thomas “Lance” Rentzel, a sports professional in the National Football League (NFL) who had evidently received traumatic head injuries during his career and was also an “exhibitionist” sex addict who had some curious associations with Playboy tycoon Hugh Marston Hefner. The New York Times reported that “Rentzel wrote [a] book at the suggestion of his doctor.” Pete Axthelm, “When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow,” N.Y. Times, Jan. 7, 1973, p. 28, archived at <https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/07/archives/when-all-the-laughter-died-in-sorrow.html>. The book – Lance Rentzel, When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow, New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972; <https://archive.org/details/whenalllaughterd0000unse_x4c3/> – it includes “An Epilogue” (pp. 269ff) penned by Louis Jolyon West, who cryptically wrote that he made periodic “reports on his progress to several public and private agencies”, pp. 272-273. But, the whole context is a bit more disturbing. West wrote: “It is most unusual for a psychiatrist to permit his relationship with a patient to become public knowledge. However, there are many unusual things about the case of Lance Rentzel. For example, he and I are required to make periodic reports on his progress to several public and private agencies. Moreover, the decision to publish this book (the writing of which I encouraged as part of the psychotherapeutic process) was made independently by him, after much deliberation. …It is also irregular for a psychiatrist to treat someone with whom he has had some previous relationship. Although Lance didn’t know it when he was referred to me, I was acquainted with his father during the years when we both lived in Oklahoma (where I was a member of the university’s medical faculty). I already knew a great deal about his family and about his personal history before he first came to see me at the UCLA Medical School last summer. …Lance Rentzel was marked as a gifted child intellectually and musically before he finished second grade. Soon afterward it became evident that he was also an extraordinary physical specimen. …There was more to the Rentzel legend. For example, I was present at his last high school football game… When Coach Tommy Prothro asked me to see Lance Rentzel in consultation, after he was traded to the Los Angeles Rams, I was glad to be of help. However, it was not my intention to treat him myself; I expected to send him for psychotherapy to someone else. But the function of trust is crucial in effective psychotherapy. Lance insisted that he wanted to work with me, and in the end I agreed. Treatment has been somewhat unorthodox (just as is the writing of this epilogue!) but, so far, it could be called reasonably successful.” Ibid., pp. 272-273 and 275-276.

^[250] Louis Jolyon West, Chester M. Pierce, and Warren D. Thomas, “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: Its Effects on a Male Asiatic Elephant,” Science, vol. 138, no. 3545, Dec. 7, 1962, pp. 1100-1103, <https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.138.3545.1100>.

^[251] On Jolly West’s association with Jack Ruby, see “Coast Psychiatrist Hired to Treat Ruby,” New York Times, Apr. 29, 1964, p. 83, <https://www.nytimes.com/1964/04/29/archives/coast-psychiatrist-hired-to-treat-ruby.html.> On Oswald’s alias, see “An Oswald Alias Seen as Anagram; The Name of ‘Alek J. Hidell’ Linked to Jekyll and Hyde,” New York Times, Nov. 1, 1964, p. 50, <https://www.nytimes.com/1964/11/01/archives/an-oswald-alias-seen-as-anagram-the-name-of-alek-j-hidell-linked-to.html>.

^[252] See Louis Jolyon West, “Psychiatrist Pleads for Patty Hearst’s Release,” Register-Guard (Eugene, Ore.), Dec. 29, 1978, p. 9a, <https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=xBRWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=B-IDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3278%2C8989203>.

^[253] P. B. Dews, ed., Festschrift for B. F. Skinner ("Behaviorism: The Science of the Individual"), New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970.

^[254] David H. Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology, Durham and London: Duke Univ. Press, 2016, p. 384, n. 16.

^[255] John Marks, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control, New York: New York Times Books; Quadrangle, 1979, p. 160.

^[256] Loc. cit., p. 259.

^[257] Inspired by Plato’s Republic and Laws.

^[258] Which we touched on in our two-part investigation of “Nazi Occultism.”

^[259] Born Eric Arthur Blair.

^[260] Harder to classify precisely are works such as François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1564); Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726); Samuel Butler’s satirical Erewhon (1872); Herbert George “H. G.” Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and A Modern Utopia (1905); Ernst Jünger’s Heliopolis (1949); William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954); Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957)

^[261] George Graham, “Behaviorism,” Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, eds., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2023, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/behaviorism/>.

^[262] Ibid., p. 214; citing Peter Schrag, Mind Control, New York: Pantheon, 1978, p. 10.

^[263] Schrag, op. cit., p. 12.

^[264] Aldous Huxley, “The Ultimate Revolution,” speech, Univ. of Cal. – Berkeley, 1962, online at <

>, esp. 0:03:08ff; excerpt online at <

>. Cf. <https://antioligarch.wordpress.com/aldous-huxley-the-ultimate-revolution-mar-20-1962-berkeley/> & <https://antioligarch.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/aldous-huxley-the-ultimate-revolution-mar-20-1962-berkeley.pdf>.

^[265] Schrag, op. cit., p. 176.

^[266] Who held those positions from 1969 to 1989. West “was an expert on cults, coercive persuasion ("brainwashing"), alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, and terrorism.” “West (Louis Jolyon) papers,” # LSC.0590, Online Archive of California, <https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c84j0hcd/admin/>.

^[267] Al Huebner and Terry Kupers, “Violence Center: Psychotechnology for Repression,” Science for the People, vol. 6, no. 3, May 1974, p. 19; <https://archive.scienceforthepeople.org/vol-6/v6n3/violence-center/> and <https://science-for-the-people.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SftPv6n3s.pdf>.

^[268] Such as Everette “E.” Howard Hunt, Jr. and James Walter McCord, Jr.

^[269] The term was evidently popularized, if not coined, by Edward Lee Thorndike. See E. L. Thorndike, “Provisional Laws of Acquired Behavior or Learning,” Animal Intelligence: Experimental Studies, New York: Macmillan Co., 1911, passim.

^[270] Peter Schrag, Mind Control, London & Boston: Marion Boyars, 1978, p. 8.

^[271] Ibid.

^[272] Berkeley Rice, “Skinner Agrees That He Is the Most Important Influence in Psychology,” New York Times Magazine, Mar. 17, 1968; cited by London, op. cit., p. 227. This from the guy who is often said to have once boasted: “Give me a child, and I’ll shape him into anything.” Skinner’s quote (while arguably in line with his character) is possibly apocryphal. However, it does appear to be close to a documentable statement made by Watson. “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years. Please note that when this experiment is made I am to be allowed to specify the way the children are to be brought up and the type of world they have to live in.” John B. Watson, Behaviorism, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co., [1924?], p. 82; archived at <https://archive.org/details/behaviorism032636mbp/page/n93/>. In the front matter, Watson dedicated his book to “Stanley Resor” (which, according to Wikipedia is pronounced /REE-zor/) saying that it was he “Whose unfailing interest in both industry and science has given me the opportunity to write this book.” This was Stanley Burnet Resor (1879-1962), who headed J. Walter Thompson (JWT) advertising agency to which Watson turned for employment when he left the academy (Johns Hopkins Univ.) after his affair with graduate student / research assistant Rosalie Rayner became public knowledge while he was still married to Mary Ickes Watson. The elder Resor’s son Stanley Rogers Resor (born Stanley Burnet Resor, Jr.), a graduate of Yale Univ. (and a member of Scroll and Key) and Yale Law School, was an associate of Leslie Lynch King, Jr. (better known as Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr.), Robert “Sargent” Shriver, Jr. (father of Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger’s now ex-wife Maria Shriver), and Trilateral-Commission connected former Carter-administration secretary of state Cyrus Roberts Vance. The younger Resor was secretary of the army under LBJ and Nixon and married Jane Pillsbury, heiress of the Pillsbury family.

^[273] Schrag, op. cit., p. 8.

^[274] Of course, Skinner took a dim view of the idea of any such thing as an immaterial “mind” and thought of human beings merely as physical, biological-genetic organisms, reacting to their conditioning, their environments, and their actions. Talk of “autonomy,” “free will,” or an “inner man” was delusional, illusory, or – at the least, and what’s even worse – unscientific.

^[275] Marks, cit. cit., p. 162.

^[276] Marks, cit. cit., pp. 162-163.

^[277] James E. Barrett, “Peter B. Dews (1922–2012),” The Behavior Analyst (now Perspectives on Behavior Science), vol. 36, no. 1, 2013, pp. 179-182; <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3640885/>. A collection of writings published in honor of a scholar.

^[278] See Leslie M. Cooper and Perry London, “Sex and Hypnotic Susceptibility in Children,” International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, vol. 14, no. 1, 1966, pp. 55-60; <https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1966-04860-001> and David Rosenhan and Perry London, “Hypnosis: Expectation, Susceptibility, and Performance,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 66, no. 1, 1963, pp. 77-81; <https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-05238-001>. We cannot say whether London’s first title is indicative of an interest in “sexology.” This frequently took on (what some people today might call) a pro-LGBT activist flavor and would bring in the likes of Hanoverian lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs; Sigmund Freud’s disciples Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich; Ashkenazi-Jewish writer Magnus Hirschfeld; Prussian physician Ernst Otto Burchard; Weimar publisher Karl Schultz; Scottish eugenicist Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes; British eugenicist Henry “Havelock” Ellis; American criminologist and “progressive” Katharine Bement Davis; American biologist Alfred Charles Kinsey* (who founded the Institute for Sex Research with funding from the ubiquitous Rockefeller Foundation); New-Zealand-born “gender” theorist and behavioral psychologist John William Money; Jewish-American folklorist Gershon Legman; Jewish-Canadian inventor Kurt Freund; and more recently, American gynecologist William Howell Masters and his one-time wife, Virginia E. Johnson (born Mary Virginia Eshelman, who performed as a musician under the name “Virginia Gibson”); as well as Jewish-American sociologist, Jean-Piaget student, and self-proclaimed “sex therapist” Karola Ruth Westheimer (née Siegel, a.k.a. “Dr. Ruth”). A notable exception to the activist strain of sexology was German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing who published a manual of psychosexual disorders titled Psychopathia Sexualis: Eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (“Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study,” Stuttgart, 1886). Eugenicist and psychologist Robert Mearns Yerkes was friends with John B. Watson. It is held against Applied Behavior Analysis founder Ole Ivar Løvaas that he experimented with “gay-conversion” behavioral therapies. Finally, American-British pharmaceutical magnate Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome supposedly collected “sexological” texts as part of his London-based Wellcome Collection. * Kinsey may have become acquainted with some of the German-language sex studies when he became a pupil of Harvard entomologist William Morton Wheeler. Alan Mathison Turing, an openly gay computer scientist who committed suicide in 1954, exerted influence over the development of computational psychology. It’s worth noting that the so-called “Turing Test” is really a cluster “of behavioural tests for the presence of mind, or thought, or intelligence in putatively minded entities.” Graham Oppy and David Dowe, “The Turing Test,” Edward N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2021, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/turing-test/>. “The phrase ‘The Turing Test’ is most properly used to refer to a proposal made by [Alan Mathison] Turing (1950) as a way of dealing with the question whether machines can think. According to Turing, the question whether machines can think is itself ‘too meaningless’ to deserve discussion (442).” Ibid.; citing A. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, vol. 59, no. 236, 1950, pp. 433-60. Chomsky somewhere humorously likened the question of whether machines can think to the question: Do submarines “swim”? And to Chomsky, the “answer” is a matter of arbitrary definition. “If you want to consider what they do swimming, then they swim.” If not, then not.

^[279] Investigator Shane O’Sullivan says this: “Sex and religion were his [William Joseph Bryan’s] twin obsessions. He was an ordained priest in a fire-and-brimstone sect called the Old Roman Catholic Church and was a frequent guest preacher at fundamentalist churches in Southern California.” Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, New York and London: Sterling Publ.; Union Square Press, 2008, p. 399. According to writer John S. Craig: “At the time of the assassination [David] Ferrie was a forty-five year old New Orleans resident who was acquainted with some of the most notorious names linked to the assassination: Lee Oswald, Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, Jack Ruby, and Carlos Marcello. …He was …at one time a senior pilot with Eastern Airlines until he was fired for homosexual activity on the job. He was also a hypnotist, a serious researcher of the origins of cancer, amateur psychologist, and a victim of a strange disease, alopecia, which made all of his body void of hair. …Ferrie was also a bishop of the Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America.” “The Mystery of David Ferrie,” Fair Play Magazine, Jul. 1995, <http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/05th_Issue/ferrie.html>; <https://web.archive.org/web/20010725025552/http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/05th_Issue/ferrie.html>. For more see Peter Levenda, Sinister Forces — The Nine: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft, book 1, Walterville, Ore.: Trine Day, 2011 and Cathy Fox, “David Ferrie U.S. Child Trafficking and Abuse Network 1960/1,” Foxblog, Nov. 28, 2019, <https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/david-ferrie-us-child-trafficking-and-abuse-network-1960-1/>.

^[280] William Turner and John G. Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup, New York: Carroll & Graf Publ., 2006 (orig. New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 227-228.

^[281] Cynthia King, “William Bryan: From Dorsey to DeSalvo,” Miami Herald, Feb. 15, 1970, p. 7-BR (p. 113); <https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-miami-herald-dr-william-joseph-bryan/114443942/>.

^[282] Marks, op. cit., p. 163.

^[283] For an overview, from the preceding Project Bluebird to the ordered destruction of MKUltra records by then-Director of Central Intelligence Richard McGarrah “Dick” Helms, see “National Security Archive Publishes Key Records on Infamous MKULTRA Program…,” George Washington Univ., <https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2024-12-23/cia-behavior-control-experiments-focus-new-scholarly>. One name associated with George Washington Univ. was E. Lakin Phillips, who served as a “manpower specialist with the Department of the Army,” for thirty years (1947-1977). See “Psychologist E. L. Phillips Dies at 78,” obit., Washington Post, Mar. 17, 1994, <https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1994/03/17/psychologist-el-phillips-dies-at-78/120c46cf-c39f-4baf-bbc8-054782143b5c/>.

^[284] Perry London, Behavior Control, New York: Harper & Row, 1969, p. 4. Cf. Schrag, op. cit., p. 10.

^[285] “Psychology as a Social Problem: How Value-Free Is ‘Objective Psychology’?” Australian Psychologist, vol. 8, no. 2, Jul. 1973, 120; <https://aps.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00050067308255626>.

^[286] See also “World War Two,” above – especially the footnote following mention of “The Psychological Corporation.”

^[287] Some “biggies” include: Arthur Charles Nielsen, Sr. (Nielsen Ratings, est. 1923), Princeton-University-educated psychologist Archibald Maddock Crossley (Crossley's Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting, established in 1930, evidently relied on to time Orson Welles’s “The War of the Worlds” broadcast, but defunct by the late 1940s) who helped found the American Association for Public Opinion Research (as well as the Market Research Council and the National Council on Public Polls); Claude E. Hooper (C. E. Hooper Company, founded in 1934 and bought by Nielson in 1950); George Horace Gallup (Gallup, Inc., established in 1935 out of the advertising agency Young and Rubicam); Louis Harris (Louis Harris and Associates, Inc., later the “Harris Poll,” first established in 1947, and then bought by the investment firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, it was finally acquired by Nielson) whose operation may have been employed by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan; Elmo Burns Roper, Jr. (Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, established in 1947 at Cornell University); Joseph Newton Pew and John Howard Pew (Pew Charitable Trusts, founded in 1948, eventually belched out the “think tank” Pew Research Center) founder and president, respectively, of Sun Oil Co. (Sunoco) – Joseph Newton Pew, Jr. was an anti-New-Deal Republican fixer and oil lobbyist; Jim Seiler (American Research Bureau, founded in 1949, later renamed Arbitron, and eventually purchased by Nielson); and numerous others added more recently.

^[288] Applied Behavior Analysis, or “ABA,” an offshoot of Skinnerian – that is, “Radical” – Skinnerian Behaviorism, sometimes also called “Behavior Analysis.” The latter provides the scientific-theoretical basis (including operant and respondent conditioning) for the former, which is its applied branch – with aims revolving around behavior-modification. Although others (like Turkish psychologist Peter Harzem) are in the vicinity, ABA’s origins are said to lie with Norwegian-American psychologist Ole Ivar Løvaas, who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Psychology (roughly, 1961-1994). The previously discussed Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West was also at UCLA for some of the same time (1969-1989). But West was the chair of the Department of Psychiatry and also the director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute.

^[289] Programmed to Kill, New York: iUniverse, 2004, passim., but for the express point, see esp. p. 163. McGowan also connected the CIA’s Phoenix Project, which ran from 1968 to 1972 under later DCI William Colby. Here is another deep “rabbit hole,” as the “Phoenix” program reportedly connects multiple people (including Thomas Clines, Oliver North, Richard Secord, Theodore Shackley, & John Singlaub) to what Leroy “Fletcher” Prouty described in The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the U.S. and the World, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Prouty inspired “X” in JFK (Oliver Stone, dir., Warner Bros., 1991). Cf. “Lt. Col. Oliver North, a key figure in [Iran-Contra],” UPI (archive), Jan. 3, 1987, <https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/01/03/Lt-Col-Oliver-North-a-key-figure-in-the/5640536648400/>.

^[290] Hoffman, 1999, <https://www.revisionisthistory.org/columbine.html>.

^[291] See “Social Science Research Council Records,” <https://dimes.rockarch.org/collections/iNo7dbyWw2GwSwKsC3nDj3>.

^[292] New York: Macmillan, 1946.

^[293] Elise Frølich Furrebøe and Ingunn Sandaker, “Contributions of Behavior Analysis to Behavioral Economics,” Behavior Analyst, vol. 40, no. 2, May 15, 2017, pp. 315-327; <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6701237/>.

^[294] Kate Whiting, “What we learned about effective decision making from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman,” World Economic Forum, Mar. 28, 2024, <https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/03/what-we-learned-from-nobel-winner-daniel-kahneman/>.

^[295] The CIA is also heavily involved in the “entertainment industry.” One example is the connexion between ex-DCI William Colby and the videogame manufacturer Activision – supposedly merely to provide color commentary for its “spy games.” See “Activision Spy Games,” Reuters via the New York Times, Jan. 6, 1994, <https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/06/business/activision-spy-games.html>.

^[296] Behaviorists who have contributed to the relevant research are too numerous to list exhaustively, but include Nathan H. Azrin, Teodoro “Ted” Ayllon, and Jack Michael. See J. Michael, “The Psychiatric Nurse as Behavioral Engineer,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Oct. 1959, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 323-334, <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/instance/1403907/pdf/jeabehav00203-0061.pdf> and T. Ayllon and N. Azrin, The Token Economy: A Motivational System for Therapy and Rehabilitation, Norwalk, Ct.: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968.

^[297] Aubrie Spady, “BlackRock CEO Slammed for ‘Force Behaviors’ Comment After 2017 Interview Re-emerges About DEI,” FOX Business, Jun. 5, 2023, <https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/blackrock-ceo-slammed-force-behaviors-dei-initiatives>. BlackRock “owns shares in …Amazon, Apple, MasterCard, Johnson & Johnson, Walmart and Walt Disney Co..” Ibid.

^[298] Skinner did try to account for what he called “covert behaviors,” i.e., private feelings and thoughts – a realm ignored by Watson, who focused only on what was publicly observable. But Skinner believed that the same principles of reinforcement and conditioning applied to all behavior, whether covert or overt. The Skinnerian system, often called “radical,” held that variable control encompassed every aspect of human behavior. This belief drove Skinner’s pupil Ogden R. Lindsley to create what is now widely regarded as the first human operant laboratory, the Behavior Research Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. Ogden focused on developing what he termed “behavior therapies” for schizophrenia. Research has since been expanded to encompass a Mood and Behavior Laboratory as well as a Behavioral Psychopharmacology Research Laboratory. See Ogden R. Lindsley, “Studies in Behavior Therapy and Behavior Research Therapy: June 1953-1965,” chapt. 6, in William O’Donohue and Deborah Henderson, eds., A History of the Behavioral Therapies: Founder’s Personal Histories, Oakland, Cal.: New Harbinger Publ., 2001, pp. 125-154; <https://archive.org/details/historyofbehavio0000unse/page/124/>. Additionally, Skinner’s notions about “verbal behavior” were partly inherited from Leonard Bloomfield (see “Transitional Thinkers,” above). See B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957. Chomsky elsewhere notes that we have no understanding of what thought is, and that our primary evidence comes from introspection, which is heavily bound up with language. Historically, this led people like Wilhelm von Humboldt to conclude that thought and language were identical. This perspective seems to have points of contact with the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and may be considered a precursor to Skinner (although neither thinker seems to have been directly influenced by von Humboldt).

^[299] See Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, Oxford (U.K.) and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993, esp. chapt. 12.

^[300] “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. Alvin Plantinga, Templeton Prize 2017,” Templeton Prize (YouTube channel), Apr. 25, 2017, <

>.

^[301] Larry Hauser, “Behaviorism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <https://iep.utm.edu/behaviorism/>; citing Paul Ziff, “About Behaviourism,” Analysis, vol. 18, 1958, pp. 132-136.

^[302] Noam Chomsky, “Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Language, vol. 35, 1959, pp. 26-58.

^[303] Loc. cit.

^[304] Matthews and Mullin, loc. cit.

^[305] “Innate Idea,” Encyclopædia Britannica, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/innate-idea>.

^[306] Gestalt was developed in opposition to Structuralism (discussed above) by Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka, and Max Wertheimer.

^[307] Graham, loc. cit.; citing E. C. Tolman, “The Determiners of Behavior at a Choice Point,” Psychological Review, vol. 45, 1938, p. 34.

^[308] “Project Camelot,” loc. cit.; citing Cina, op. cit., p. 195.

^[309] “About the David E. Smith MD Family Foundation,” <https://www.drdave.org/about/>.

^[310] See Roger C. Smith, “The World of the Haight-Ashbury Speed Freak,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, vol. 2, no. 2, publ. online Aug. 2, 2012 (orig. Spring 1969), pp. 77-83; <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02791072.1969.10524418>.

^[311] Of unknown relation to Roger.

^[312] Ed Sanders, The Family, updated and rev. ed., Boston: Da Capo Press; Perseus Books Group, 2002, pp. 39 and 462.

^[313] The Bothin Foundation evidently goes back to Henry E. Bothin, a steel magnate and real-estate developer in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. He owned huge parcels of land along with route of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, which line had been the result of numerous mergers, but traced back to people such as Cyrus K. Holliday (Santa Fe Railroad) and Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker (of the Southern Pacific). Bothin died in 1923 and his estate was partially funneled into a charitable organization – the Bothin Foundation – which supported a tuberculosis sanitarium and, beginning in the late 1940s to early 1950s, the Henry E. Bothin Youth Camp ("Camp Bothin"), favored by the Girl Scouts. The Merrill Trust seems to have been formed after the death of investment banker Charles Edward Merrill who, along with Edmund Calvert Lynch, founded Merrill Lynch in 1915.

^[314] Ibid., pp. 461 and 462.

^[315] Ibid., p. 462.

^[316] For more on the general historical context, see David McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream, London: Headpress, 2014.

^[317] O’Neill and Piepenbring, loc. cit. According to Dr. Gordon Deckert, the whole thing was bankrolled by a CIA front called the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc. Ibid.

^[318] Jon Nordieimer, “Experts Feel Miss Hearst May Have Undergone Brainwashing,” New York Times, May 28, 1974, p. 30; <https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/28/archives/experts-feel-miss-hearst-may-have-undergone-brainwashing-possible.html>.

^[319] More recently, Patton State Hospital has been “home” to ex-pornography “star” and accused sex predator Ronald Jeremy Hyatt, better known as “Ron Jeremy.” Evidently, Jeremy ran in some of the same circles as “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” Joseph Michael “Joe” Arpaio; former prostitute and “madam,” Heidi Lynne Fleiss; late Nevada-brothel owner Dennis Leroy Hof; and Republican anti-tax activist Grover Glenn Norquist.

^[320] Programmed to Kill, op. cit., p. 143.

^[321] See James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, 3rd ed, Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1997.

^[322] “Constructivism” is a theory of human learning – also associated with George Alexander Kelly – that emphasizes our creative activity in building knowledge rather than merely receiving it, passively. And “developmental psychology” is often said to have roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John B. Watson. Rousseau evidently to the “myth of the noble savages,” according to which children are born “good” and are corrupted by society. On the literary scene, Jerome David “J. D.” Salinger’s character Holden Caulfield – in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) – in pining for the innocence of youth, seems to have believed a similar notion.

^[323] In 1955, Piaget established his International Center for Genetic Epistemology with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. “Genetic epistemology attempts to explain knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, on the basis of its history, its sociogenesis, and especially the psychological origins of the notions and operations upon which it is based.” Jonathan Y. Tsou, “Genetic Epistemology and Piaget’s Philosophy of Science: Piaget vs. Kuhn on Scientific Progress,” Theory & Psychology (Sage Publ.), vol. 16, no. 2, p. 204 <https://philpapers.org/archive/TSOGEA.pdf>. Additionally, Piaget’s education-oriented Rousseau Institute was supposedly bankrolled by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial.

^[324] See researchers such as M. K. DeMyer, J. N. Hingtgen and R. K. Jackson, “Infantile Autism Reviewed: A Decade of Research,” Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol. 7, no. 3, 1981, pp. 388-451; <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6116276/>.

^[325] Howard Markel, “How to Be the Perfect Parent (And Drown Yourself in Guilt),” New York Times,

Jun. 17, 2003, <https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/17/health/how-to-be-the-perfect-parent-and-drown-yourself-in-guilt.html>.

^[326] Ibid.

^[327] Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up,” Rolling Stone, Oct. 20, 1977; online at <https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-stone-10-20-1977>.

^[328] Cf. “cybernetic” specialist and semiotician Gregory Bateson.