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”

Ecclesiastes 10:8f — Wisdom Contra Foolishness

We remember that Ecclesiastes belongs to what is called “The Wisdom Literature” and so we are not surprised to find these pithy proverbial sayings. The use and work of proverbs was to structure life and to give life boundaries and borders. Proverbs was intended to be generational wisdom that was true for all times and places. There is a remarkably covenantal aspect to proverbs in as much as the minding or taking serious of Proverbs is a way in which we honor our Fathers and Mothers. In the Proverbs we have stored wisdom that was to be used by every generation and we see that it was God’s intent that the covenant generations have a continuity in the fact that all the covenant generations would be guided and structured by heeding the proverbs.

Remember the reason that the Teacher has gone into this comparing and contrasting of the fool and the wise, of folly and wisdom is that he is giving an account of why it is the case that the world is topsy turvy. One reason it is topsy turvy is that the fool and his folly has been embraced.

As we come to Ecclesiastes 10:8-10 I take it to be a description of the way the fool operates. I do so because all of what we find here is a description of failure but it ends in vs. 10 with a contrast of “wisdom brings success.” The fool operates in an unprepared fashion that exemplifies a lack of caution.

Alternately, the Teacher could be emphasizing again as he did in 9:11-12 that God is sovereign over the affairs of men and matters don’t always turn out as we thought they might.

If, what we have in vs. 8-10 is description of the way the fool operates as contrasted with the wise who have success, with the point perhaps being that the wise take proper preparation so as to avoid the fool’s the disasters that arise from a fool’s lack of caution.

— He digs a pit and falls into it
— He breaks through a wall and is bitten by a serpent
— He is hurt by the stones he quarries

then in vs. 11-15 the point is to contrast not only the work of the fool and the wise but their words also. The conclusion of all this is that the fool is good for nothing because they can not accomplish the most mundane of all tasks (they do not even know how to go to the city).

So with that in mind we look at 11-14

If the serpent bites before it is charmed,
there is no advantage to the charmer.

In vs. 11 Maurer translates, “There is no gain to the enchanter” (Margin, “master of the tongue”) from his enchantments, because the serpent bites before he can use them; hence the need of continual caution. Again, in vs. 11, like 8-10 the fool is not someone who takes caution in acting — he is not prepared.

In Ec 10:11 and following verses, the emphasis then switches to caution in speaking and to the issue of finding advantage.

In vs. 12 we are explicitly told that the words of a wise man’s mouth are gracious. We find similar words in Proverbs 10:31-32

The mouth of the righteous brings forth wisdom,
but the perverse tongue will be cut off.
32 The lips of the righteous know what is acceptable,
but the mouth of the wicked, what is perverse.

The wise man speaks in a way that is favorable; kind; benevolent; merciful.

But of course we offer her that these favorable and kind words that the wise man speaks are not words that are intended to be manipulative or full of compromise. They are rather words that need to be spoken at the right time in the right way. Such gracious words, we learn elsewhere from Scripture are like are like apples of gold in a setting of silver.

So the gracious speaking of the wise is a speaking that is able to discern the proper time and place for the proper words, and it is as easy to lack graciousness in words by saying to little as by saying to much.

It is as easy to lack graciousness in words by being to soft as by being to hard.

As such I suppose nothing is more difficult for the wise than to speak graciously. There is always the danger to say to much or to little. There is always the danger of using the wrong tone or choosing the wrong word. There is always the reality that one doesn’t understand the mood of the audience and what they can or cannot hear at any given time. There is always the temptation to be intimidated by man and so swallow the gracious words that might be better spoken. There is always the temptation to be so puffed up that words are spoken that don’t need to be heard.

Very few of the Sons of Adam have the ability to speak words that are gracious and so show themselves wise.

Because of this we have to keep in prayer that God would give us wisdom … to know how to speak.

These words of graciousness from the Wise seeks to eliminate all needless offense and all unwarranted irritation. I say “needless” and “unwarranted” because there will be times when offense and irritation will result from the gracious words of the wise.

Tiny seemingly insignificant realities of words are monumentally important. With gracious words Abigail turned David’s hand away from bloodshed (I Sam. 25:23-33). With gracious words Moses interceded successfully with God in order to turn God’s wrath from the Hebrew children. With gracious words Jesus tongue lashed the enemies of God, and with gracious words St. Paul had startling counsel for those who would empty the Gospel.

The fool, unlike the wise is a flowing fountain of inane speech. It’s doubtful he ever considers what he says or the impact that his words will have.

The first impact the fool’s words is upon himself. He swallows himself up. The idea of “swallow up” here means “to destroy.” A fool is his own worse enemy and his words the weapons by which he lays himself low.

We have our own proverbs down this line. When someone says something unfitting we will say,

“He just shot himself in the foot.”

Our words, as everyone here knows, can bring be our undoing.

The Teacher informs us that when it comes to the fool his words are from beginning to end are idiotic. Vs. 13 may be giving us the idea of how the fool’s speech goes from bad to worse. He starts with words of foolishness and ends with raving madness.

We should interject here that the fact that we are a culture characterized by raving madness is seen in theories of literature that teach that there is no such thing as authorial intent in literature or that authorial intent if it does exist is inaccessible. This is the raving madness of fools because it cuts off the gracious words of the wise of generations gone by from this generation of fools. This is raving madness because it disallows any stable meaning in any of our literature and disallows fixity in law and ethics. This is raving madness because the fool seldom desire to apply the same standard of unreachable authorial intent to what he writes when he writes that we cannot reach authorial intent.

Of course all of this is ultimately contrasted with God’s own Word … our Lord Christ. Our Lord Christ is God’s wisdom to us. By God’s word the heavens were formed and the earth made. By God’s word all things consist. Because God’s Word … our Lord Christ is Wisdom … St. Paul can say all wisdom and treasure of knowledge is hid in that Word who is Christ.

So, as we consider all this … the words of the wise vs. the words of fools, we needs be reminded again that the only hope we have for gracious words is anchored in the reality that we are anchored in the Lord Christ who is wisdom from God. We have no hope of ever being enabled to use the gracious words of wisdom unless we find ourselves buried and risen with Christ. We have no hope of being sanctified in Wisdom so that our words become increasingly gracious as the years go by unless we are seated in the heavenlies with the Lord Christ. Would we avoid being fools with all their rash words and raving madness we would be a people who find ourselves nestled in Him who is God’s eternal Word of Wisdom.

In vs. 14 the Teacher presses on with the fool and his words

14 A fool multiplies words,
though no man knows what is to be,
and who can tell him what will be after him?

We have a proverb that parallels this idea somewhat in our own culture that says

“It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

Another one we have that parallels this somewhat is,

“Silent waters run deep.”

According to the Teacher the fool is someone who always has something to say.

Now, this is not a admonition against people who are wordy. One can be wordy without being a fool. However it is a admonition against banal wordiness. Wordiness that has no meaning and intends to go nowhere.

When 14b is read in conjunction with 14a the idea seems to be that the fool is one who has an opinion on everything including those things that cannot be known. No man can know what is to be but a fool will tell you what is to be. No man can tell you what will happen in the long future and yet the fool, with his multitude of words, will tell you.

Charles Bridge offers an interesting insight into the fools words here,

“But to judge the waters flowing from a fools fountain; listen to Baal’s worshipers on Mt. Carmel as they cry out to their god incessantly, listen to Rabshakeh’s proud boasting about how Assyria was going to crush Israel during the time of Hezekiah or listen to the fretting murmurings of the people of God when they complained against God leading them out of Egypt.”

The Fool has the ability to always say just the wrong thing at just the right time.

Another matter we might speak of here is the fact that because the fool is so prolix he often immerses himself in contradiction. The fool has a mind that is as crooked as his words are and so he is full of contradiction. James hints at the idea that the fool is double-minded and so his words are full of contradictions that belie his double-mindedness. So, if you want to locate a fool, listen for contradiction in his plethora of words.

application — out of the abundance of the heart a man speaks

For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. 35 The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. 36 I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, 37 for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”

In vs. 16-20 the Teacher ends with what I believe to be are words of application.

He has given us wise and fool in work and words. Now he locates the fool.

The people have a fool for King who is a child.

This is suggested by another Proverb from the book by that name,

Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child (Prov. 22:15).

And the fact that foolishness is being spoken of here is confirmed in vs. 16b by describing a ruling class that is partying when it should be governing.

Foolishness of the governing elite is also seen in these verses when they speak of laziness, idleness, and the idea that money is a solution apart from Wisdom.

Governments run by such men cause everyone to suffer from their injustices, for they will use their powers to
extract from people what they would not otherwise be willing to give. Taxes can become an intolerable burden when
sinners are in command and lead a nation as fools that think money answers everything. Certainly from this description we can see that we are a people governed by fools. Our entitlement programs are maxed out while a President spends 100 million dollars to go to Africa.

vs. 17 gives us the contrast to fools who govern.

The King belongs where he is and the princes of the realm have discernment.

We end this morning where the Teacher gives counsel. Despite the fact that people may be ruled by fools they would be wise to avoid cursing the King or the Rich who despite being fools could make their lives hell.

Vos Channels Dabney

“Nationalism, within proper limits, has the divine sanction; an imperialism that would, in the interest of one people, obliterate all lines of distinction is everywhere condemned as contrary to the divine will. Later prophecy raises its voice against the attempt at world-power, and that not only, as is sometimes assumed, because it threatens Israel, but for the far more principal reason, that the whole idea is pagan and immoral.

Now it is through maintaining the national diversities, as these express themselves in the difference of language, and are in turn upheld by this difference, that God prevents realization of the attempted scheme… [In this] was a positive intent that concerned the natural life of humanity. Under the providence of God each race or nation has a positive purpose to serve, fulfillment of which depends on relative seclusion from others.”

Geerhardus Vos
Biblical Theology, p. 60 in the old Eerdman’s edition (1948, re-set in 1975)

Announcing IronRhetoric.Org

R2K for Dummies Podcast

I have now entered the realm of Podcasts. The new host site for the podcasts will be

Iron Rhetoric

My first podcast is on Radical Two Kingdom Theology. My podcast comes in the context of a freshly released paper that deals with the core theology of R2K.

A Booklet on Merit in the Doctrine of Republication

This paper, which deals with Mosaic Covenant Republication theory, is the foundation upon which R2K rests. If the covenant republication theory can be shown to be specious then the whole R2K project fails. This paper, written by three OPC ministers, reveals that the whole covenant republication theory is indeed specious.

The curtain is beginning to fall on the whole Klineian Escondido Westminster Ca. R2K project. It is dying the death of a thousand qualifications. It will not survive long among thinking people now that it is being examined closely in more and more quarters. Doubtless it will live on in the lacunae and backwaters of Reformed micro institutions much like one can still find a champion for Amyraldianism here or there.

Let us pray that the Federal Vision comes to the same end.

The Attack On Distinctions Is An Attack On The King

The West could have and would have never been the West if it had not influenced, informed, and shaped by the categories of Biblical Christianity. Today the West is in a war for its soul because there is a different Worldview that is animating it and that Worldview is at direct warfare with Biblical Christianity. Over the centuries, and especially since the “Enlightenment” the West has been attacked by sundry non Christian Worldviews but with the rise of Cultural Marxism all those previous anti-Christian worldviews have found their nadir and most potent expression. I would even say that with Cultural Marxism one has arrived at the full blossomed fruit of all the Christ hating worldviews that have been spawned since the Enlightenment. It has the emotionalism of Transcendentalism – Romanticism. The Egalitarian impulse of abolitionism. The viciousness of Jacobinism. The sense of inevitable progress of Social Darwinism. The confidence of inevitable victory of Marxism – Communism and the cocksure certainty of Unitarian Deism. Cultural Marxism is the grand inheritor of all the “virtues” of all the Christ hating worldviews that have gone before and by inheriting all those “virtues” it is poised to finally do what each failed to do in their turn, and that is the final destruction of that Biblical Christianity that made the West the West.

Cultural Marxism is of course, like all the worldviews that went before it, an ideology, but it is more than an ideology. Unlike the ideologies that went before Cultural Marxism understood that there was a direct correlation between cultural Institutions and conquering the West. As such, the cultural Marxist have, by design, attacked the cultural Institutions of the West in a “long march through the Institutions.” This long march through the institutions was designed to overthrow the influence of Biblical Christianity in every cultural nook and cranny of the West. So, from Theodor Adorno’s “Authoritarian Personality” which overthrew the idea of the Christian family, to Lord Keynes who overthrow the Biblical idea that debt was bad, thus overthrowing the foundation of Biblical Economics, to Magnus Hirshfield and Alfred Kinsey who glorified sexual perversion, to Franz Boas who advanced the idea of cultural relativism denying that cultures could be inferior or superior according to a Transcendent standard, to Sigmund Freud who anchored the meaning of reality (or such meaning as could be had) in the subconscious and unconscious of the individual, to the Social Darwinism of Frank Lester Ward who argued that man’s evolution and progress could be directed by man himself to the Educational theories of John Dewey and to a host of other examples what Cultural Marxism has done is to overthrow the West by overthrowing the Biblical presuppositions upon with the cultural institutions of the West were based. Now it is true that some of the names mentioned in this paragraph predated the rising of the Frankfurt School in Germany, from which Cultural Marxism arose, but all of the names mentioned above with their respective ideas were put in the toolbox of Culture Marxism unto the destruction of the West.

A key component in the toolbox of Cultural Marxism is its doctrine of Egalitarianism. Cultural Marxism, with its core doctrine of Egalitarianism, is a frontal attack on God’s Law and in how the West has been structured. The Ten Commandments are inoperative in a world where Egalitarianism is at the fore because Egalitarianism denies the very distinctions that God’s law regulates. If one denies those distinctions one denies the very concept of God’s law. Egalitarianism denies all distinctions while God’s law labels and creates the distinctions He demands.

Cultural Marxism with its Egalitarianism destroys the distinction between God and all other gods. God said,

“You shall have no other gods [b]before Me.”

But Cultural Marxism, wearing its officially religious garb, as it has crept into the Church, denies the distinction between the God of the Bible and all other gods. When putatively Chrristian men argue that there are any other ways of salvation besides Christ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_YkeKhA8BUw

they are denying the distinction between the God of the Bible and all other gods. If other gods can provide other ways to the same salvation then the teaching is that all gods are the same. All the gods lead to the final harmony of God.

This idea of denying the distinction of God vis-a-vis all other gods is seen also in R2K as they insist that in the public square all the gods must be given equal playing time. No god is to be before any other god. There must be a egalitarianism among the gods. This is the whole idea behind public square pluralism. There is a whiff of egalitarianism in R2K theology in their reasoning concerning the lack of God’s primacy in the public square.

Cultural Marxism, with its egalitarianism, also destroys the Creator creature distinction. God has said,

“You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.”

Here there is a clear distinction that is being posited between the Creator and the creature. The Creator is of such a transcendent character and nature that the creature is to worship Him in a proscribed and distinct way. The Creator is of such a transcendent character and nature that even His name must not be sullied. Cultural Marxism, with its egalitarianism insist that the Creator creature distinction is a myth and so all law legislating man’s approach to god are irrelevant. Cultural Marxist Egalitarianism is an attack on distinctions and an attack on distinctions is an attack on both God and God’s law.

Though we will get to this in more detail later, it should be said even here, that Egalitarianism both begins and ends with an attack on the Creator creature distinction. All of the distinctions that the Cultural Marxists attack in the second table of the Law have as their goal forever finally destroying the the Creator creature distinction. If man as man is bereft of all the God given distinctions that makes him distinct from other men then there is hardly room for a God who insists that He is God distinct from the creature. In Cultural Marxism all colors must bleed into one. Even the colors that would color man as distinct from God.

In God’s fourth words He establishes distinctions among the days,

“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.”

The Egalitarianism of Cultural Marxism destroys the Cultic Holy Day by suggesting that all days are the same, thus eliminating the distinction that gives Christian meaning to all the days. With the destruction of the Christian cultic holy day, all other days, which are non cultic holy days, lose their meaning. Interestingly enough it is also the case that with the elimination of distinctions between days of work and days of rest what one inevitably finds in cultural Marxism is a culture where there is no rhythm of work and rest. Instead what you find are cultures of sloth or cultures where the tyrant’s motto is “Arbeit macht frei” (Labor makes you free).

In my next post I will go on and look at egalitarianism in terms of the second table of God’s Law. However, we are already seeing that Cultural Marxism with its attack on distinctions is an attack on the authority of God’s legislating law word. On a more macro scale egalitarianism is an attack on all of God’s creative work of distinguishing. Whether we consider how God in His creation ordained distinctions between earth and sky, sun and moon, land and water, man and animal, male and female, what we continuously see is a God who is at war with a worldview that has as its defining center-piece the obliteration of distinctions. Even in the fall we see the first foray of the Cultural Marxist and egalitarianism as the serpent attacked the distinction between God’s legislating law word and Eve’s own legislating fiat law word. From Satan’s first assault on the throne — an assault that found him defying the distinction between himself and God — and an assault that found Satan insisting that “I will arise to the most high” what we find in Satan’s plan is the destruction of all God ordained distinctions. Egalitarianism is nothing less than Satan’s work to un-make God’s creation, God’s law-word, and God Himself.

And the fact that the visible Church is blind and dumb to this frontal assault is more then enough reason to be done with those visible Churches who are trying to baptize this abomination.