Sooner or later, research animals will be replaced by humans, and scientists will become the social engineers of the human psyche.
— Hub Zwart, Professor of Philosophy
Behaviourism provided the social engineers with a pseudoscientific arsenal. Behaviourism came into vogue in the USA through the experiments of John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. In a paper examining the parallels between Marxism and Behaviourism, Dr. Stephen P. Forster149 wrote:
In both Marxism and behaviorism man’s role becomes that of interpreter of the forces that shape him. This is accomplished by analyzing the disposition and dynamics of material forces. For Skinner: ‘The task of a scientific analysis is to explain how the behavior of a person as a physical system is related to conditions under which this individual lives.’150 For Marx: ‘The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.’151 152
Foster described Skinnerian Behaviourism as ‘a behavioural technology’ with a political purpose, that of ‘control’:
This view, however, has a significant political implication. Scientific understanding provides the possibility of prediction and control and thus leads to a technology of human affairs. This technology in Marxist terms is a revolutionary activity, in Skinnerian terms a behavioral technology. The scientific objective detachment of Marx and Skinner is linked to social-political commitment. Indeed, the social goals are the ultimate justifications for both systems.153
Skinner was an advocate of Behaviourism as a means of ‘control’ to prevent ‘the catastrophe toward which the world seems to be inexorably moving’.154 It has a familiar ring for today. Skinner was a recipient of CIA funding.155 Foster describes Skinner’s aims for Behaviourism, which can be seen as the aims of ‘social control’ and ‘social engineering’ advocated by Charles Merriam:
Skinner’s ultimate purpose in this respect is to formulate all human problems into technological problems. Then man can establish a process of identifying causal relations of human behavior to antisocial and destructive activities and a technique of adjusting those causes to obtain an extinction of the unwanted behavior. The domain of human affairs which has been traditionally considered ethical is thus transformed into a strict scientific one and thus man, in effect, delivers himself without obstacle to his own scrutiny, which is capable of identifying and eliminating his own imperfections.156
What Foster ascribes to Behaviourism is the doctrine that came into eminence in the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, the ‘perfectibility of man’, the doctrine of Rousseau, of the Jacobin Revolution, of the Perfectibilists (as the Order of the Illuminati were also called), of liberalism, Marxism, and the modernist social doctrines that aim to replace traditional ethics, morality and religion with social engineering. Foster shows the parallels between Marxism and Behaviourism in this quest for perfection through social change:
Skinner’s proposed transformation of morality into technology is very much analogous to Marx’s vision of the withering away of the state once the productive capacities of society have been transformed. Implicit in both views is the idea that the greatest human goods will be realized when man acknowledges his being acted upon and shaped by the material world and also acknowledges that by rearranging material conditions (for Marx, the termination of commodity production, for Skinner, a more consistent system of distributing pleasure and pain) a better world will come into existence.157
Foster stated that in both Marxism and Behaviourism, ‘there is the assumption that the quality of human social experience will be significantly improved because social institutions will be based on the recognition and satisfaction of genuine human needs and these institutions will be more knowledgeably and efficiently administered’.158 What these ‘human needs’ are is determined by the social scientists in research that is financed by the oligarchy.
Skinner was introduced to Behaviourism via its primary salesman, John B. Watson, who had a double career as vice-president of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York City.159 Watson’s lectures at Columbia University in 1913, ‘Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It’, were published as the Behaviorist Manifesto. Applying Behaviourism to advertising, Watson stated that three basic emotions, ‘fear, rage and love’ can be utilised to sell a product to the consumer, by appealing to a ‘deep psychological or habit need’. For example to sell Johnson & Johnson baby powder, fear of infection was the message ‘to scare young parents’.160
While Watson was applying Behaviourism to capitalist marketing, he also lectured on Behaviourism to the New School for Social Research, and supervised research on infants, funded by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund.161
Watson’s dictum that there are no inherited human traits remains a pervasive dogma that separates the social sciences from genetics. Hence, although Behaviourism might not seem to retain the domination of psychology it once had in the USA, this dogma remains the basis of the social sciences, and of social policy throughout the West and further afield. Watson wrote in his seminal book, Behaviorism, that ‘there is no real evidence for the inheritance of traits’. A baby born from a long line of crooks, thieves, murderers and prostitutes, raised in another environment ‘would have a favorable outcome’.162 He added:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.163
Here we have the same type of dogma used to justify the mass terror of the Jacobin state and then the Bolshevik state, and the ‘soft dictatorship’ of contemporary Western societies, where states are guided by the principles of Behviourism in assuming that all social problems can be eliminated by social engineering. This is also the underlying doctrine that one can recreate individuals at will, according to the production and marketing requirements of international capital. It accords with Critical Theory, with its doctrine that there are no ‘primary ties’ that should not be eliminated to reconstruct the individual.
Behaviourism was pioneered in Russia by the physiologist Dr. Ivan Pavlov. Despite his misgivings about Bolshevism, when the Bolsheviks assumed control, Pavlov was treated as part of a privileged class. Pavlov sought to induce conditioned reflexes in dogs by a system of signals and rewards. Zwart describes Pavlov’s laboratory as ‘a pathogenic environment, a totalitarian regime that cared for its animals but exploited their bodies as production factors …’164 That is to say, it was a Communist state in microcosm. Despite the intentions of Pavlov himself, his research was seen to reflect
the philosophy and zeitgeist of a particular political ideology (an ideological universe even), namely communism as a twentieth-century creed … The conditioned reflex provides a powerful tool for social engineering. Sooner or later, research animals will be replaced by humans, and scientists will become the social engineers of the human psyche.
Pavlovian psychology … is a style of research driven by interest. It is interested in developing effective, evidence-based tools for manipulation and exploitation. Ideally, society as a whole becomes structured as Pavlov’s laboratory (i.e. Pavlov’s laboratory as a small-scale, anticipatory model of an ideal state, a window into the communist future).165
Zwart states of Lenin’s interest:
… After speaking with Pavlov, Lenin proclaimed his desire to re-educate the Russian people as an animal trainer would. In October 1919, Lenin allegedly paid a secret visit to Pavlov’s laboratory to find out how the work on conditional reflexes might help communism to control human behaviour. The ultimate aim of communism was to improve human beings and to transform human nature. Although Pavlov was critical of communism, he was patronized by the Bolshevik regime. Lenin spoke of Pavlov’s work as hugely significant for the revolution and Trotsky saw the production of a new, improved version of humankind as the great task of communism, using current humanity as raw material, or as a semi-manufactured product.166
As will be seen below when discussing eugenics and population control, Trotsky described the creation of the ‘new Soviet man’ by using Nietzsche’s term Übermensch, which if used by anyone else would be greeted with wails about ‘Nazism’ by today’s intersectional, transsexual Trotskyites. Trotsky was also interested in applying Freudian psychoanalysis to Marxism, placing him along the same path as the Critical Theorists:
In 1923, Trotsky wrote to Pavlov arguing that, whereas Freudians assumed an artistic stance towards human existence, Pavlov opted for an experimental, physiological approach, so that his reflex doctrine might provide a physiological substructure to Freudian theories. Despite its literary tendencies, he argued, psychoanalysis could be encompassed as a special case of doctrine of conditioned reflexes. Later, however, Pavlovian psychology became the official doctrine and in 1949 it was formally declared that Pavlov had demolished ‘the Freudian houses of cards’. On January 24, 1921, a formal Decree was published on Pavlov’s research indicating that, in view of Pavlov’s outstanding scientific services, which were of tremendous importance to the working people of the world, a special committee was established to guarantee the best conditions for research. While ‘the academician Pavlov’s laboratory’ would be furnished with every possible facility, Pavlov and his wife would receive a special food ration, equal in caloricity to two normal academic rations. …167
Particularly interesting is that Zwart alludes to the analogous character of the USSR and capitalist USA in that both aimed to reconstruct humanity according to economic factors, and as seen above in regard to the USA, both used behaviourism as a method of social engineering with,
… the Soviet Union as decidedly science-based, relying on physics, dialectical materialism and social engineering. A similar wave of social engineering and human resources management could be discerned in capitalism as well, however, notably in the form of Taylorism,168 Fordism169 and other instances of Americanism. While Pavlovian knowledge could provide scientific input for communism, Pavlov’s work could be regarded as the realisation or condensation of an ideology of social engineering …170
Ethologist Konrad Lorenz contended that the universal acceptance of Behaviourism was achieved because it offered a method to circumvent the difficulties of instinct and the unconscious. The social engineer could affirm that every individual is born ‘as a completely blank page and that all he thinks, feels, believes and knows is the result of his “conditioning”’.171 If that is the case, he can be re-conditioned. Liberals saw it as a ‘liberating and democratic principle’. If everyone was born tabula rasa, then, raised under ideal and equal conditions, humanity could be reshaped according to an ideal.
Lorenz pointed out that the rulers and policy makers in the USA, China and the USSR were unanimous in their insistence on the conditionality of human behaviour. Lorenz described the behaviourist doctrine as ‘pseudodemocratic’, ‘inhuman’ and ‘satanic’, as it enables the ‘dehumanization’ and ‘manipulation’ of mankind. This is the crux of the matter:
It is equally important to the capitalist mass producer as to the Soviet functionary to condition people into uniform, unresisting subjects, not very different from those described by Aldous Huxley in his terrifying novel Brave New World.172
Lorenz warns that if a doctrine based on ‘a lie’ about human behaviour is universally accepted, then the effects will be ‘disastrous’. This doctrine, Lorenz contends, is responsible for much of the ‘moral and cultural collapse that threatens the Western world’.173 Lorenz saw the methods used by ‘various “establishments”’ — whether capitalist or Communist — to recondition people into their own preconceptions of the ideal, as ‘substantially the same throughout the world’. ‘We, ostensibly free, Western civilized people are no longer conscious of the extent to which we are being manipulated by the commercial decisions of the mass producers’. While crafts disappear in the mass (global) consumer society, we are increasingly conditioned to consume according to the production requirements of mass manufacturers, and are not aware of our manipulation.174 Science itself has been conditioned to what is fashionable. Environmental conditioning is the fashion within science as it is within politics.
However, Lorenz states that this fallacious science does not cause the West’s ‘cultural diseases’, but is the product of them.175 That is to say, the position of the social engineers is enabled by a pre-existing weakness in the social organism. If the social organism had not succumbed to age and disease in the first instant, it would have the stamina to resist and repel the social pathologies that are able to enter. The rise of the oligarchy, for example, occurs during the late epoch of a civilisation, as explained by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West,176 and Brooks Adams in The Law of Civilization and Decay.177 The cultural diseases of the West are the cause of the dehumanising impact of modern science, and not the effect.178 If the West had not succumbed to social decay, it would have the vigour to resist.