When a city or society is confronted with riots resulting in violence, destruction and death of it’s citizens, its not surprising when law-abiding citizens ask, “how could this happen?” or “why are people so violent?” or “what is wrong with the youth of today?”
All sorts of explanations, justifications and unusual solutions are advanced, but they rarely provide the answers or uncover the root causes of the problems.
To gain a broader understanding, we must look at a quite different long-term factor that has been an insidious cause of deteriorating social and family standards and conditions.
In the 1940s, psychiatry’s leaders proclaimed their intention to infiltrate the field of education and the law and bring about the “re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong.” G. Brock Chisholm and British psychiatrist John Rawlings Rees, co-founders of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), bluntly told their peers at the time:
“If the race is to be freed from the crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”
Governments were eager to implement new ideas and ideologies of the “new psychology” as society recovered from the devastation of war.
The attempt to undermine morals and consequently the deterioration of society and the family unit can be traced back to the influence of psychiatry in these different fields.
In its formative years, WFMH conferences were held in London in 1940 and 1945 where the leaders eagerly laid out their goals and objectives. Rees proclaimed:
“We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper
development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine.”Dr. John Rawlings Rees, “Strategic Planning for Mental Health”, June 18, 1940
Canadian Psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, President of the WFMH in 1945 proclaimed:
“The re-interpretation and eventually (sic) eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith… are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy. The fact is, that most psychiatrists and
psychologists and other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely.”Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, 1945
A year later Chisholm wrote again about the eradication of right and wrong conduct,
“…the pretense is made, as it has been made in relation to the finding of any extension of truth, that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness and social chaos. The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respected people have escaped from moral chains and are able to think freely.”
Dr. G. Brock Chisholm in: Psychiatry: Journal of Biology and Pathology of Interpersonal Relations 9, no. 1, February 1946
These were not empty statements at the time but the verbalization of a long-term goal and strategy that laid the foundation for educational and social modalities that have since become deeply rooted in our society and which directly affect us today. Undermining traditional concepts of morals and the eradication of ‘right and wrong’ have gradually and deviously found their way into our educational and social system over the last 60 years.
The eradication of right and wrong and breakdown of family life
“The family is now one of the major obstacles to improved mental health, and hence should be weakened, if possible, so as to free individuals and especially children from the coercion of family life.” International Congress on Mental Health, London, 1948
“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas…”
G. Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist and co-founder of the World Federation of Mental Health
“Few legislators who passed these mental health laws realized that (Brock) Chisholm and his associates defined mental illness as a sense of loyalty to a particular nation, a sense of loyalty to a moral code, and strict adherence to concepts of right and wrong. Chisholm has been obsessed for years with the idea that instilling concepts of right and wrong, love of country and morality in children by their parents is the paramount evil.”John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason, Chapter IX, Mental Health
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished … The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are ‘obstructive’ and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective … It is for the future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”Bertrand Russell quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of philosophy & psychology who influenced Hegel and others – Prussian University in Berlin, 1810
“Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know – it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.”
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) sponsored report: The Role of Schools in Mental Health
“The educational system should be a sieve, through which all the children of a country are passed. It is highly desirable that no child escape inspection.”
Paul Popenoe, Behavioral Eugenist and co-author: “Sterilization for Human Betterment”
“Despite rapid progress in the right direction, the program of the average elementary school has been primarily devoted to teaching the fundamental subjects, the three R’s, and closely related disciplines… Artificial exercises, like drills on phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements, are used to a wasteful degree. Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically of little value. Nearly every subject is enlarged unwisely to satisfy the academic ideal of thoroughness… Elimination of the unessential by scientific study, then, is one step in improving the curriculum.”
Edward Lee Thorndike, pioneer of “animal psychology”
“…a student attains ‘higher order thinking’ when he no longer believes in right or wrong“. “A large
part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student’s fixed beliefs. …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.”
Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and educational theorist, in “Major Categories in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives”, p. 185, 1956
“Men are built, not born…. Give me the baby, and I’ll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood…. I’ll make it a thief, a gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless…”
John B. Watson, psychologist, founder of “Behaviorism”
To obtain a far greater and more in depth study into psychiatry’s influence on society, read CCHR booklets and watch videos on Justice, Racism, Religion, Children.
Professor Thomas Szasz Quotes on Restoring Free Will & Personal Responsibility
“We have to restore the idea of responsibility, which is corrupted and confused by psychiatry, by the idea that something happened to you when you were a child and therefore you are not responsible thirty years later.”
“Modern psychiatry dehumanizes man by denying …the existence, or even the possibility, of personal; responsibility of man as a moral agent… (the psychiatric mandate) is precisely to obscure, and indeed deny, the ethical dilemmas of life, and to transform these into medicalized and technicalized problems susceptible to ‘professional solutions.’”
“Psychiatrists and other behavioral scientists continue to pour out an uninterrupted stream of articles and books allegedly demonstrating that man has no free will. By debunking free will and responsibility, professionals in the mental health discipline seek to legitimize themselves as bona fide scientists; at the same time, they also try to endear themselves to the politicians and the public by promising to control crime, which they call excessive violence….”
“The materialistic interpretation of nature, as the term implies, entails viewing all signs as the manifestations of physiochemical processes, such as human beings observe when they look at nature. Joy and sadness, fear and elation, anger, greed—all human aspirations and passions—are thus interpreted as the manifestations of unintentional, amoral, biochemical processes. In such a world, nothing is willed; everything happens.”
“Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance.”
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