So Lance Lied. So What?
[We must] organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat. -- Willi Münzenberg
Leave it to the practitioners of the modern junk-science substitute for religion (Bring in the grief counselors.) that calls itself “psychology” to attempt to put an acceptable face on the contemptible actions of disgraced bicycle racer, Lance Armstrong:
Though we profess to hate it, lying is common, useful and pretty much universal. It is one of the most durable threads in our social fabric and an important bulwark of our self-esteem. We start lying by the age of 4 and we do it at least several times a day, researchers have found. And we get better with practice.
In short, whatever you think about Lance Armstrong's admission this week that he took performance-enhancing drugs to fuel his illustrious cycling career, the lies he told may be no more persistent or outsized than yours, according to psychologists and others who study deception. They were just more public. And the stakes were bigger.
So begins the article entitled, “Like Lance Armstrong, we are all liars, experts say,” by Melissa Healy in the January 19, 2013, Los Angeles Times.
The psychologists are at it again, trying to live up to the assessment that H.L Mencken made of them many years ago. The following is a complete reprint of an article that I put up on my web site on September 10, 2000:
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Barring sociology (which is yet, of course, scarcely a science at all, but rather a monkeyshine which happens to pay, like play-acting or theology), psychology is the youngest of the sciences, and hence chiefly guesswork, empiricism, hocus-pocus, poppycock. On the one hand, there are still enormous gaps in its data, so that the determination of its simplest principles remains difficult, not to say impossible; and, on the other hand, the very hollowness and nebulosity of it, particularly around the edges, encourages a horde of quacks to invade it, sophisticate it and make nonsense of it. Worse, this state of affairs tends to such confusion of effort and direction that the quack and the honest inquirer are often found in the same man. It is, indeed, a commonplace to encounter a professor who spends his days in the laborious accumulation of psychological statistics, sticking pins into babies and plotting upon a chart the ebb and flow of their yells, and his nights chasing poltergeists and other such celestial fauna over the hurdles of the spiritualist's atelier, or gazing into a crystal in the privacy of his own chamber. The Binet test and the buncombe of mesmerism are alike the children of what we roughly denominate psychology, and perhaps of equal legitimacy. Even so ingenious and competent an investigator as Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud, who has told us a lot that is of the first importance about the materials and machinery of thought, has also told us a lot that is trivial and dubious. The essential doctrines of Freudism, no doubt, come close to the truth, but many of Freud's remoter deductions are far more scandalous than sound, and many of the professed Freudians, both American and European, have grease-paint on their noses and bladders in their hands and are otherwise quite indistinguishable from evangelists and circus clowns. -- H.L. Mencken in "The Genealogy of Etiquette."
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I know, I know, Mencken was writing three quarters of a century ago, and a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. Indeed so. We now know that Mencken greatly over-estimated Freud.
I provided no elaboration on that last point. You can read a bit of that in an article with the unrestrained title of “Sigmund Freud, Anti-Christ Devil,” by Eustace Mullins, a sample of which follows:
Freud’s reputation as the great inventor of an entire new science rests solely on his discovery that he could get his patients to talk about themselves without the use of hypnosis. Nevertheless, much of the mumbojumbo of psychotherapy was invented in order to create a hypnotic atmosphere. Freud’s discovery freed him from the stigma of the charlatans of hypnosis, and put a great distance between him and his discredited predecessors such as [Franz] Mesmer, the father of Mesmerism. Nevertheless, the practice of psychoanalysis depends heavily on creating and maintaining a pseudo-hypnotic atmosphere in the psychiatrist’s office. The patient must be persuaded to relax, to place himself completely in the power of the psychiatrist, and to reveal his innermost self. Thus the pseudoscience of psychotherapy functions only because it is pseudohypnosis. No wonder that Freud is pronounced Fraud!*
Lance Armstrong vs. Bill Clinton
For psychologists to weigh in publicly justifying the miscreant’s behavior in the wake of a scandal involving a prominent public figure has precedents. I have commented upon it on two occasions, involving the same public figure, President Bill Clinton:
Last night the people at ABC's Twenty-Twenty came up with the ultimate fall-back position for our verity-challenged president. They found us a psychiatrist, whose name I can't recall, who assured us that there is not a thing wrong in the world with lying, that we are all taught to lie at an early age, that we all lie about one thing or another almost all the time, and that it serves the very psychologically useful purpose of making us all feel better. People don't like to face unpleasant truths like the fact that, as he strongly implied, life has no meaning at all and we are all going to die, not to mention such smaller unpleasant truths that not many of us are all that virile, attractive, or intelligent.
So what if the priapic razorback lies almost every time he opens his mouth, implied the good doctor. It beats having us feel bad about the man we voted for because that would make us feel bad about ourselves, which is practically the worst thing that can ever happen in the value system of today's psychology profession.
At this very minute there is a trial going on across the river from me in Maryland in which former U.S. Senatorial aspirant, Ruthann Aron, stands accused of arranging to have a hit man kill her husband and his lawyer. She doesn't deny making the arrangements because she was caught in the act. The "hit man" was an agent of the state. But her lawyers have found members of the psychiatry profession to testify that she was so badly wounded psychologically from having been abused as a child that she is not responsible for her actions. Never mind that if the hit man had been the real McCoy, and good at his work, Dr. Aron and his lawyer would have ended up quite dead and Ruthann would have gone on playing the grieving widow and the upstanding member of the community. No psychiatrists would ever have been likely to have been needed to regale us with tales of Ruthann's childhood trauma.
Similarly, it was not difficult to find psychiatric "experts" to tell us why the Menendez brothers were driven by their scarring upbringing to shotgun their parents to death as they sat watching TV and eating ice cream, and then to make up a cock and bull story about how they discovered the bodies.
We have also been treated recently to the spectacle of the "suicidologist" Dr. Alan L. Berman, in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, telling us for Kenneth Starr that "to a 100 percent degree of MEDICAL certainty, Vince Foster committed suicide." That conclusion, in turn, was based to a large degree upon recent psychiatric literature that concludes that "perfectionist types," presumably like Foster, are inclined to do themselves in. One of those so concluding is Yale professor Sidney Blatt.
By this time everyone has probably already heard the three reasons why lawyers are being used to replace laboratory rats:
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1. They are more plentiful. |
As you reflect on the examples I have given of modern psychiatrists at work and the following, which concludes part 3 of my four-part series, "America's Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster," you might think of substituting "psychiatrists" for "lawyers" in the joke, especially with respect to that third qualification.
Actually, it's probably even worse than circular reasoning because Dr. Berman seems to have made a bit of a leap to make a warped Felix Ungar type out of a man who simply exhibited high standards. The likely circular reasoning is explained by a letter that I sent to the student newspaper of Yale University on February 8, 1996, with an information copy to the psychologist whose work is the subject of the letter. It was not printed, but I did get a response from the psychologist who simply thanked me for the information. I reproduce the letter to the editor here almost in its entirety. As you read it, bear in mind as well the opening quote from Edward Zehr. It is not just the propagandistic press that concerns him, but the "decay of our basic institutions."
I might also note that while this long essay began with comparisons between current developments in the United States and those in France a century ago, comparisons to our late lamented cold war superpower rival can hardly be avoided.
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Dear Editor: I trust that the final failure and collapse of that great experiment in large-scale planning called the Soviet Union will not lead to the rapid withering away of academic programs in Sovietology. There is much to be learned about human folly and treachery from the largest and longest such experiment in history. Take, for instance, the systematic corruption of that nation's institutions and professions, as all independent and objective standards were sacrificed for the perpetuation of the power of the state. Outstanding examples of such corruption were in the professions of journalism and psychiatry. We now know that to be a correspondent for Pravda or Izvestia was to be a member of the KGB, and we have all heard the tales of brave Soviet dissidents condemned to psychiatric hospitals and plied with mind-altering drugs because, after all, anyone who would challenge the state "must be crazy." These things come to mind because I have just finished reading the innocuously-titled article "The Destructiveness of Perfectionism, Implications for the Treatment of Depression" in the December, 1995, issue of the American Psychologist by Professor Sidney J. Blatt of the Yale University Department of Psychology. Ostensibly an examination of the motivation behind the recent suicide deaths of three prominent and successful men, it turns out to be something quite different upon closer examination. One of the three men, you see, and the one enjoying the prominent lead place in the article, was Vincent W. Foster, Jr., Deputy White House Counsel. Psychoanalysis, itself, is not without its serious detractors, but when it is done long distance and post mortem, the reason for skepticism is increased. When the analyst relies almost completely upon secondary sources for his information about the subject's mental state, the validity of the inquiry results becomes all the more questionable. When those secondary sources are only newspapers, and the newspapers are only The New York Times and The Washington Post, then the whole exercise is little better than a sick joke. Do I exaggerate? Let's look at the facts. Professor Blatt deduces much about Foster's thought processes from the text of one of the few primary sources he presumably thinks he has, the fingerprintless, torn-up note which mysteriously materialized in Foster's briefcase some days after it was searched and thought to be empty. He is able to invest such confidence in the authenticity of the note because his twin bibles failed to carry the October 25, 1995, Reuters dispatch reporting that three certified handwriting experts, one of whom is renowned literary document authenticator, Reginald Alton of Oxford University, had, independently and unanimously, with extensive supporting explanation, pronounced the note a mediocre forgery. Scholars like to invoke the authority of the best source available, and, to date, these are it. Therefore, the best conclusion a reputable scholar can draw about the sentiments expressed in the torn-up note is that they represent what someone, who we may presume to be Foster's murderer, wants us to think Foster was thinking, not a very good basis for Foster's psychoanalysis. Citing a New York Times opinion column, which is really no better than a tertiary source, Blatt tells us that Foster "did not seem to be his usual self, (his)...mood seemed low, (he)...spent weekends in bed with the shades drawn...recently lost 15 pounds, and...sent out signals of pessimism that alarmed close friends and colleagues." Virtually every word of that statement
evaporates upon close examination. Had Blatt done the responsible thing and
at least consulted the writings of Foster-case investigator Christopher Ruddy
of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, he would have discovered that, at
the time of his physical examination on December 31, 1992, Foster weighed 194
pounds and that his body when autopsied on July 21, 1993, weighed 197 pounds
after having lost blood and dried out in the sun for some hours. This fact
was originally discovered by independent investigator Hugh Sprunt using
Senate Banking Committee hearing documents. Those documents, which include
the testimony of all of Foster's close associates, turn up no one whose
observations about Foster's behavior fit, even loosely, Blatt's quote. They
all say he seemed his normal self to them. Furthermore, White House
spokesperson, Dee Dee Myers, says in the Washington Times of July 30,
1993, that the story about Foster working in the bed on weekends with the
blinds drawn is not true, and no corroboration for it turns up in the record. Perhaps Professor Blatt deserves the benefit of the doubt and did not realize just how contrived is the press case upon which he depends so completely. However, that requires imputing to him a degree of credulity that ill becomes a serious scholar. Is it not almost as easy to believe that what he has produced is not really a work of scholarship, but of propaganda? Sincerely, David Martin |
In the case of this most recent report of the misleadingly-named Office of the Independent Counsel, as with the newspapers that reported on it, it is certainly a good deal easier to believe.
ABC News and the psychology profession are continuing their all-out assault upon the Ten Commandments and national standards of decency and honor in the country. Before, it was a middle-aged, male, father-like psychiatrist on 20-20 telling us that lying is okay because it is commonplace and because the alternative would often make us feel bad. This time the interview, an exceptionally long one on ABC's Sunday Evening News, right at the dinner hour of God's special day for most Christians, was of the still rather youngish and exceptionally self-assured female "director emeritus" of the Kinsey Institute. Her message—though she would never use these words for it—is that adultery, cheating, tom-catting, marital infidelity, serial womanizing and the like by married men is also okay because it is commonplace. It is especially commonplace historically among American presidents and the sort of people who have that type of ambition, so that makes it especially okay for them to do it. Also mitigating any disapproval that should accrue to them for their wayward ways is the fact that power is attractive to women, so that the leaders' increased opportunity to indulge their sexual appetites makes their willingness to do so, regardless of the social strictures that apply to the rest of us, all the more understandable and forgivable.
In sum, the message being conveyed could not have been clearer, "Even if every allegation about Bill Clinton's womanizing that you have heard is true, what's the big deal?" That essential message was not challenged by her female interviewer. Rather, she played "straight man," as it were, appearing only to challenge the exculpating assertions by interjecting, "But this is the president who should set an example and be held to a higher standard, shouldn't he?" giving the smug psychologist the opportunity to explain that, no, such lusty, larger-than-life leader types really ought to be held to a lower standard in the sexual realm. That was also the between-the-lines message to be gleaned from Primary Colors, the book, and probably from the movie as well. One could almost believe that it would be wrong for such men to deprive American womankind of their favors. "Let's be realistic and adults about this," said the Kinseyite in so many words.
Now I am among the first to say that there is something essentially phony about the current media frenzy surrounding the latest revelations about Bill's sex life. This is the same press that will not tell us about much more serious crimes connected to the Clinton administration, the Waco Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombing, the murder of Vincent Foster, the cover-up of the real causes of the downing of TWA 800, the ongoing complicity of the CIA in drug smuggling, etc. One must wonder why they should consider these sexual matters so important by comparison. Be that as it may, that certainly does not mean that the sex-related charges related to Bill Clinton are of no consequence. Let us take a critical look at what the Kinseyite psychologist, with her ABC megaphone, was telling us.
Completely lacking was any discussion of concrete specifics, though the subject was indisputably Bill Clinton. The deductive approach that dominates modern social science was very much in evidence. Once the general principle was established to the satisfaction of the speaker—thence presumably the audience—that sexual license among leaders is the American and the historical norm, looking at the dirty details became unnecessary. I saw the method on display at its worst in my profession, economics, with regard to the national debate on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Economists went on record overwhelmingly favoring it because they favor the principle of free trade. Not only do most of them know nothing about Mexico or the history of U.S.-Mexico relations, they don't even think it necessary to know anything about that to render a judgment on this public policy issue. What is worse, I would venture to say that most of those economists weighing in on the NAFTA didn't know very much about the actual details of the NAFTA itself, or even thought it necessary to know them.
When we look at the details of Bill Clinton and sex what we see immediately in every case is gross abuse of power, personal corruption shading over into corruption of the office, itself. Should we really think that such a thing is okay? Let's take some of those we know about and proceed upon the Kinseyite-conceded premise that the allegations are true:
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Kathleen Willey: A volunteer worker makes a personal plea to Clinton for a full-time paying job because she and her husband have fallen upon desperate financial straits. He uses the occasion to fondle her sexually, conveying the message that the granting of the employment favor will be contingent upon Willey's reciprocation with sexual favors. He knows that she is a married woman (assuming that he does not, at that point, know something that she doesn't) and, of course, that he too, is married, in a manner of speaking. Should we Americans really treat such behavior as acceptable in our president, or anyone in a similar position of authority? Is this how one gets on a research team at Kinsey? |
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Monica Lewinsky: A 21-year-old intern worms her way (unfortunate image) into the good graces of the president by performing oral sex on him repeatedly in his study over a period of several years. She is made a full-time White House employee and then gets a well-paying job at the Pentagon, continuing to pay visits to the White House, ostensibly to service the president. Coincident with her impending testimony in the lawsuit of Paula Jones, she is offered good jobs at the United Nations and then at Revlon. All positions except the one on her knees are apparently beyond her qualifications. Imagine that what we have here is a corporate CEO and a summer intern. Should the board of directors tolerate such behavior? What if it were an authority figure like a school principal and a student teacher? What would our Kinseyite have the school board do, I wonder? What if she had children at the school? Or let's take some other examples of someone abusing his power to obtain sex: A teacher with a pupil? A lawyer with a client? A judge with someone accused of a crime? A judge with a lawyer who represents clients before him? A doctor with a patient? A psychiatrist with a patient? Is the putative behavior of Bill Clinton really much different from any of these examples? |
It gets worse.
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Gennifer Flowers: What is alleged is a 12-year affair with Governor Clinton. Clinton also gave a state job to Ms. Flowers that a black, female state employee was in line to get. Ms. Flowers lived in the Quapaw Towers apartments in Little Rock. A neighbor, a lawyer by the name of Gary Johnson, had a security camera that captured Governor Clinton coming and going from the Flowers apartment. He made the mistake of mentioning his possession of such a tape at a Little Rock bar, and was soon set upon in his apartment by a couple of burly men and beaten within an inch of his life and his tape was taken. I suppose our Kinseyite would argue that the real problem in this case is the social disapproval that in our still unenlightened country accompanies such sexual behavior, which necessitates such extreme concealment reactions. But now who's being the realist? Lying and concealment are integral to illicit sexual behavior. Society disapproves, and spouses, reacting typically in a more natural and human way than Hillary Clinton has done publicly, also disapprove, sometimes quite violently. One who engages habitually in illicit sexual behavior must always live in fear of its exposure and of the consequences of its exposure. He must compromise himself to some degree with anyone in a position to reveal his carryings on. Those in such a position are often already on the shady side of the law and the public interest, as are those who would be inclined to use such knowledge to their advantage. So even if one doesn't regard illicit sexual activity as corrupt behavior in itself, he nevertheless must concede that it very easily leads to corrupt behavior. Especially in the case of Bill Clinton, personal and political corruption would already seem to make up a seamless web. |
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Sally Miller Perdue: The major problem in this case, as well, is not so much the sexual behavior but in the extreme, criminal measures taken to conceal it, though Ms. Perdue's liaisons with Governor Clinton were among many facilitated by Arkansas state troopers in the employ of the governor. According to Ms. Perdue her affair with Clinton was of a few months duration in 1983. During the 1992 presidential campaign she was approached by a Democratic Party functionary who told her that a well-paying federal job would be waiting for her if she would keep her mouth shut about her relations with Clinton, but that if she would not, something unfortunate might happen to "those pretty little legs" that take her on her regular jogging excursions. She did talk to a TV station that suppressed her story. Soon she received death threats and she lost her job as a result, she believes, of outside pressure. So if abusing one's power to obtain illicit sex is bad, abusing one's power to conceal illicit sex is oftentimes worse. Except for a necrophliac it is self-defeating to kill someone from whom one desires sexual pleasure; not so the killing of someone from whom it has already been obtained and whose subsequent eternal silence is deemed desirable. Furthermore, it is the desire, and often the necessity, to conceal that makes one vulnerable to blackmail, not just by domestic low-lifes, but by political opponents and foreign powers as well. So what is at issue here is not harmless, boys-will-be-boys playing around as the Kinseyite would have us believe, but ugly, disgusting old-fashioned abuse of power. And before we leave that subject, is it not almost as bad an abuse of power for ABC News to use its own "bully pulpit" of the airwaves to attempt to degrade national standards of morality and to defend indefensible behavior in our leaders by putting the unchallenged views of such a shameless wrecker of traditional virtue as this before the American public? And is this not just one more example, as with the teaming up of the mainstream media and such stalwarts as Dr. Sidney Blatt and Dr. Alan L. Berman in the creation of the false Vince Foster depression story, of the utter Soviet-like corruption of our press and of our psychology profession? |
Concrete Facts Versus Theoretical Fiction
The pitiful defense by psychologists of Lance Armstrong’s cheating and lying crumbles just as fast when one examines the actual facts of the case. Listen here to former cycling teammate Frankie Andreu and his wife Betsy talk about the lives that his lies ruined. And here is a representative excerpt from a Sports Illustrated interview of his former bike mechanic, Mike Anderson:
SI: You're one of a number of people who were telling the truth and who Armstrong tried either to intimidate or ruin. There has been speculation as to whether he'll address that with Oprah.
Anderson: And doing it! Not trying, but doing it. He certainly ruined me, and [Greg] LeMond, and Frankie [Andreu], and Emma [O’Reilly]. Professionally. Financially. He did a really good job of polarizing the cycling fans in the U.S. against Greg. He ruined Greg's bike company. He told me he was going to do it when I worked for him! It's a cautionary tale, I think, of what happens when people get too much power.
SI: A lot of media figures are now piling on Lance, but when you were in the newspapers after Lance sued you, that certainly wasn't the case.
Anderson: It really sheds some light on what people in your profession and what readers and the public view as journalistic integrity. So many journalists took the party line. The Sally Jenkinses of the world, the list goes on and on and on. How many just let it go? That was one of the hardest things to deal with. No journalists bothered to contact me [for my side of the story], they just reported. The local paper never bothered to contact me or my lawyers, they just spouted what came from Bill Stapleton. [Lance's team] took a page from Karl Rove's book on how to deal with detractors. That made my life very uncomfortable in a place like Austin.
This excerpt from the Sports Illustrated interview of Lemond’s wife, Kathy, informs us further about the fruit of behavior that the psychologists would have us believe is acceptable and commonplace:
SI: What about apologizing to Greg?
LeMond: If I don't hear something tonight, I'm going to be really upset. I spoke with Oprah's people and I would hope that they would ask that, because Lance did terrible damage to Greg's reputation. He is owed an apology. The things he's said, 'Greg's an alcoholic, Greg's a drunk.' I had a reporter tell me one time, the guy called me and asked if Greg's a heroin addict. ...I want him to address what he's done to Greg. He didn't have any problem saying the horrible things to the whole entire world.
SI: It's thought that Greg's brand with Trek would have been worth tens of millions if Armstrong had not pushed to have Trek drop Greg.
LeMond: Do you know what a loss that was for us? We lost our income. We lost our company. Greg lost his reputation.
SI: Do you think Greg will eventually take Armstrong's call?
LeMond: Why would he want to? I mean, if Lance will actually say to him, 'Yes, I hacked your e-mails. Yes, I had someone following you. Yes, we taped you.' He has hounded us and harassed us.
SI: USADA head Travis Tygart recently talked on television about getting death threats. Did you get hate mail when Greg spoke out?
LeMond: It's absolutely terrifying. The fans, you get letters that say, ya know, 'you better not be riding your bike by yourself on the road.' It's scary.
And how about Armstrong’s one-time masseuse, Emma O’Reilly, as told by London’s Mirror?
But on Valentine's Day in 2004 - when the 1998 Tour winner Marco Pantani, 34, died from heart failure after a drug overdose - Emma decided to speak out.
"It wasn't about Lance," she said. "When Marco died that was the catalyst for me. I didn't want to see anyone else die. I got involved with the book LA Confidential and told my story."
Just after the book was published later that year and during a Press conference to launch the new Discovery cycling team, Lance launched an attack that Emma will never forget.
She said: "I was sweeping the floor at home when he called me a prostitute and an alcoholic. I remember the Sky news headline.
"I just stood there shocked and angry. I then called my boyfriend Mike and told him to turn on the TV. He was horrified his girlfriend had just been called a drunk and a slapper in front of the world's media."
Lance then issued a legal claim against Emma and a Sunday newspaper for £1million.
She said: "I thought Lance was going to ruin me. Take everything I had away from me big-time. My house, my business."
Now let us return to the professional lying enablers in the psychology profession, as relayed to us by the journalist Healy in the Los Angeles Times:
People who are highly creative appear to have the vision and the flexibility of mind to find justifications for their deceptions, and quickly, [Duke University professor Daniel] Ariely said. For Armstrong, whose racing style suggests he was creative and flexible in taking advantage of openings to victory, those same qualities might have allowed him freer rein not only in concocting deceptions, but in justifying them to himself.
Imagine how much the Andreuses or the LeMonds or Mike Anderson or Emma O’Reilly might admire that creativity and flexibility at this point. I can just hear the good Israeli-American Professor Ariely extolling Bernie Madoff’s or Jon Corzine’s talents in similar fashion, while interviews of their victims would be similarly revealing.
Now listen to Professor Robert Feldman, dean of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and a leading psychologist on lying:
It's not easy to lie. Psychologists and neuroscientists have found that — initially, at least — deceit requires mental exertion for most of us. The effort to reconcile a lie with the truth — or with our notions of ourselves as good people — takes up so much brainpower that as we do it, we may actually forget to perform such effortless acts as blinking.
To sustain a lie over years, and against mounting evidence of its untruth, liars large and small must "develop an infrastructure around it," Feldman said — a litany of justifications that makes it possible to cling to deception and convince ourselves that we are good people in spite of it.
"But as time goes on, it gets easier," Feldman said.
“And it can be richly rewarding and therefore well worth the effort,” you can almost hear him say. Hollywood screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay for Exodus after getting off the Hollywood blacklist, is one, like Armstrong, who seems to have put in the required mental exertion to lie convincingly and profitably. He wrote in a letter to his son, “The important thing about a lie is not that it be interesting, fanciful, graceful, or even pleasant, but that it be believed … Let the lie be delivered full-face, eye to eye, and without scratching of the scalp. Let it be blunt and forthright and so simple that you can repeat it in detail and under oath ten years hence.”
Conspiracy to Corrupt
What’s with these psychologists, the Feldmans, the Blatts, the Bermans, the Arielys, the nine psychologists and psychiatrists that Ruthann Aron was able to marshal in her defense? Here’s where our opening quote from Willi Münzenberg comes in. It is taken from an article by Timothy Matthews entitled “The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to Corrupt” What he describes is a concerted movement to undermine what used to be called “Christendom,” which we now might call more broadly Western civilization. It began after World War I in Frankfurt, Germany, as a form of Marxist revisionism that focused more directly upon the cultural rather than upon the economic foundation of society. The concept of “political correctness” is part of the movement. Within the larger category of political correctness is the method of teaching known as “values clarification.”
The underlying philosophy of Values Clarification holds that for teachers to promote virtues such as honesty, justice or chastity constitutes indoctrination of children and ‘violates’ their moral freedom. It is urged that children should be free to choose their own values; the teacher must merely ‘facilitate’ and must avoid all moralizing or criticizing.
In such a world, clearly despicable behavior—cheating and lying—such as engaged in by Lance Armstrong and Bill Clinton is not to be condemned. To condemn it is to impose your old-fashioned, culturally determined notions of right and wrong on others. Such is the utterly reprehensible New Moral Order that these psychologists seem to be trying to create for us.
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*For more on the father of modern psychoanalysis see Henry Makow’s “Freud’s Part in Our Satanic Possession.”
David Martin
February 7, 2013
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