Quotes on Social Engineering Achieved via Television, Government Schools, and Pharmacology

Man’s conquest of [human nature] means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, (London: HarperCollins, 1999) p. 46

…[T]he man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.

Ibid, -Lewis, p. 37

If the system succeeds in imposing sufficient control over human behavior to assure its own survival, a new watershed in human history will have been passed. …industrial-technological society will be able to pass those limits [of human nature] by modifying human beings, whether by psychological methods or biological methods or both. In the future, social systems will not be adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human beings will be adjusted to suit the needs of the system.

-Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society & Its Future, (Filiquarian Publishing) pp. 68-69

…[N]ew technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology… [S]uppose a… treatment is discovered that, without undesirable side-effects, will greatly reduce the psychological stress from which so many people suffer in our society. If large numbers of people choose to undergo the treatment, then the general level of stress in society will be reduced, so that it will be possible for the system to increase the stress-producing pressures… Something like this seems to have happened already… [M]ass entertainment is a means of escape and stress-reduction on which most of us have become dependent.

-Kaczynski, p. 71

Our society tends to regard as a “sickness” any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system, and this is plausible because when an individual doesn’t fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a “cure” for a “sickness” and therefore as good.

-Kaczynski, pp. 70-71

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction?… Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

-Kaczynski, p. 65

Now let us consider another kind of drug — still undiscovered, but probably just around the corner — a drug capable of making people happy in situations where they would normally feel miserable. Such a drug would be a blessing, but a blessing fraught with grave political dangers. By making a harmless chemical euphoric freely available, a dictator could reconcile an entire population to a state of affairs to which self-respecting human beings ought not to be reconciled…

-Aldous Huxley, cited in Jim Keith, Mind Control, World Control, (Kempton: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1997) p. 95

There will be in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing… a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies.

-Huxley, cited in Keith, p. 95

The twenty-first century… will be the era of the World Controllers… The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship education will really work — with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

-Huxley, cited in Keith, pp. 95-96

[Education] is becoming a scientific technique for controlling the child’s development.

-Kaczynski, p. 66

What if there is no “problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right?… Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

[In 1934,] Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years… Cubberley… had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: “Our schools are … factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned…. And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”

[Schools are] laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.

We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults.

-John Taylor Gatto, “Against School”

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?

-Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the godfather of consumerism

Two institutions at present control our children’s lives – television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, non-stopping abstraction. In centuries past the time of a child and adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to become a whole man or woman.

-John Taylor Gatto, “Why Schools Don’t Educate”