The vast, overwhelming, silent, ignorant majority of the "good people" of the USofA don't realize it--they've been trained since birth to ignore it, they are almost all in total ignorance of it--but they are the uninformed, naive, involuntary, test/experimental subjects in the biggest, most complex, most far-reaching, "Stimulus/Response", Behavior Modification (see, e.g., BF Skinner and/or Pavlov) research project in the history of the world. And the most spectacularly successful one, too.
As a result, Murkins are the most effectively and thoroughly "brain-washed" population, across ALL classes, in the world--outside mebbe North Korea. How ELSE explain the eternal, mindless, pro-forma repetitions of the Pledge in every classroom every day? The hacktacular, increasingly competitive performances of the National Anthem at commercial, privately sponsored athletic events? Support the TROOPS! Must I go on?
It's called "The American Dream."
The "lab" equipment? Simple. The "Average Murkin" living-room, and the glowing, blue, sub-visible flicker of the greatest hypnotist of ALL TIME: Television and its progeny (ALL subsequent screen-driven technologies). You don't have to tell 'em what to think. If you can 1) direct what they think about and 2) supply the ways/words in which they think about it, the conclusions are pretty much foregone. How many screens are you attached to? Where do you get your instructions?
You thought the Milgram/Zimbardo experiments were bad? They illustrated how even "good" people, given unlimited power and no accountability, would go massively far into sadism when given the authority of prison guards and the proper orders. They had only limited subjects and situations.
In the larger context, under the PATRIOT ACT and its scions, the Owners are turning the whole country into a population of prisoners and prison guards, with no accountability and almost limitless power. You can call down a SWAT Team on your neighbor just about anytime you want to: claim there's 1) drugs or 2) terrorists or 3) kiddie porn, and ALL Constitutional protections evaporate.
There are psychologists are on the advisory panels of virtually ALL prisons, and quite prominently at the detention center for Central Asian prisoners at Guantanamo. The guy in charge of that process is the same guy who "invented" so-called "learned helplessness," a truly skeevy, wretched piece of shit named Dr. Martin Seligman, who has made a TON of money from it. "Learned helplessness" basically departs from Bateson's observations about the "double bind," and teaches practitioners how to CREATE the fucking things. (Seligman's work illustrates perfectly to me one of Michel Foucault's most controversial, contrarian adages: that the "telos" of the "human sciences" is not therapy or repair, but coercion and control; but I digress).
"Learned helplessness" is a misnomer, in any case, because it places the onus for the behavior on the subject, not on the experimenter who fucking TEACHES it. Originally, the fuckstick Seligman experimented on dogs. I want to experiment--vivisection, perhaps--on his skeevy ass and leave the carcass for the jackals.
(Confession: The ONLY "D" Dr. Woody EVER got in college was in an intro psych course in which the project was to conduct a behavioristic experiment, which I refused to do and in which I declined to take ANY part...)
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