(c) Copyright 1999: Graham L. Strachan
Brock Chisolm, former Director of the (United Nations) World Health Organization, is quoted as saying, “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.” [GWB quote of the day, 7/7/1999]. ‘Remove from the minds of men’? Doesn’t that sound like mental conditioning? How does that square with the Alexander Downer/Tim Fischer version of globalism as ‘freer markets’? It doesn’t, does it?
Some years ago another hero of the globalist-Left, B.F.Skinner, in his book ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’, mounted a concerted attack on what he termed ‘autonomous man’. What was ‘autonomous man’? Autonomous man was an independently thinking and acting, morally responsible, individual human being. Skinner, who formed his ideas by training pigeons to peck different buttons in the laboratory in order to get food, spent a whole book arguing that the human mind does not exist. Just what he thought he was using to develop his argument never seems to have occurred to him, but such is the standard of modern scholarship, at least in the so-called social ‘sciences’. According to Professor Skinner (p. 196) science must abolish autonomous man if it is to “prevent the abolition of the human species....To man qua man (man as a human being) we readily say good riddance.” Skinner advocated the mass mental conditioning of human beings by an ‘elite’ group of behavioural scientists. ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ became a standard text in teachers’ training colleges.
Why would socialists be so hostile to individualism, to ‘autonomous man’? Even their opposition to the traditional family can be traced to its capacity to build independence of character and spirit, and to foster ‘politically incorrect’ ideas. National patriotism too is a uniquely individual emotion: the love of a country regarded as ‘home’ in defence of which men have been prepared to die in wars not of their own making. Even the globalist hostility to ‘religious dogmas’ can be sheeted home to the Christian teaching that man was created as an individual by God in His own image, with individual rights inalienable at the hands of worldly governments, including the right to commune directly with the Creator without the interposition of a human intermediary in the form of a priest or pope. Such ideas are anathema to those hell bent on people control.
But what is it about the independently thinking individual that socialists hate most? Ayn Rand identified it as the ability to reason [see Ayn Rand, ‘For the New Intellectual’ (1960), pp. 10-57, esp. p. 44]. Why would socialists hate the ability to reason so much? Because they can’t do it! And what they can’t do, or otherwise control, they will destroy. They are driven by envy, and that is the nature of envy: the hatred of the good for being the good. The fact is, the independent thinking individual has always posed, throughout history, the greatest obstacle to attempts to collectivise human beings and now, in the latest version of this oft-repeated human saga, the greatest obstacle to global collectivisation at the hands of the social science elite is again the independent thinking individual with a sense of dignity and self-worth. But let’s go back to the beginning.
When modern man first appeared on the earth about 45,000 years ago he was living in small tribal groups, surviving by hunting and gathering, and using primitive stone tools and weapons. Obliged to follow his food sources about, he was unable to form permanent settlements. Tribal society was socialist, the individual was regarded as a tribal ‘resource’, everybody was required to work, all labour was linked to tribal survival, and the proceeds of hunting and gathering were pooled and shared according to tribal custom. Professor Friedrich Hayek describes this as everybody having a ‘visible common purpose ’ [F.A. Hayek, ‘Law Legislation and Liberty’, Vol.II (1976), p.134].
Around 8000 BC in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), certain tribes to turned from hunting and gathering to cultivating crops and domesticating animals which enabled them to settle into permanent farming villages. Settled argiculture brought about productivity increases which allowed parasitic elites to form whose members did nothing but rule over the productive masses, tax them, and squander the spoils on wars, monuments to themselves, and leisure, including sexual depravity. So what’s new? By 3,500 BC, the first civilisation, Sumer, had developed in southern Mesopotamia.
Somewhere between 45,000 BC and 3,500 BC man developed language, and in a book called ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’, American psychologist Dr. Julian Jaynes of Princeton University argued that since language is essential not only for communication but also for reasoned thought, man, prior to the development of language, must have operated in another mental state, a kind of semi-conscious mode he called the ‘bicameral’ or two-chambered (of the brain) mode. The person operating in bicameral mode would not be fully conscious in the sense of being a self-aware reasoning individual, but would still be capable of performing most tasks necessary for survival in a group or tribe, in much the same way as people automatically do up buttons without actually thinking about it. Tribal man, in other words, had a tribal mind which was not fully conscious in the modern sense.
The tribal mind would have had no sense of self, of being an individual separate and distinct from the collective. The tribal individual would learn their behaviour from other members of the group, and in novel situations would call upon hallucinated instructions arising in the right temporal lobe of the brain, which were interpreted as instructions from the ‘gods’, much like a schizophrenic hearing voices. Jaynes presented evidence that man operated in this mode even into the fairly advanced stages of early civilisation.
As civilisation advanced, however, and agricultural production and trade expanded, the number of new situations the bicameral had to cope with daily increased and the bicameral mode was no longer viable. It began to break down and a new way of thinking evolved. This used the imagination to develop an internal map of the outside world, enabling an individual to reason through various alternative ideas or courses of action and to decide on the most appropriate. The learned action and automatic thought of the bicameral tribal mode was replaced by the self-willed action and independent thought which is now described as consciouness.
The important point Jaynes made was this: the transition to full consciousness was volitional, not automatic. The individual had to choose to adopt the new mode of thinking, and had to make a conscious effort to continue to think that way. Failing that, through mental laziness, by allowing others (‘authorities’) to do their thinking for them, people could readily lapse back into bicameral mode. The thing which initially encouraged people to exercise their consciousness was competition. Survival was still a problem then, and the fully conscious individual had a distinct competitive advantage over the person lingering in bicameral mode. Because of this competitive advantage consciousness won out over bicameralism. Until recently that is, but more on that in a moment.
With the rise of permanent settlement and the collapse of the bicameral mind, tribal society gave way to an individualist social order in which people were free to pursue their own goals in their own way, bound only by common rules of conduct (morals). The new order was based on production and exchange. A concept of private ownership developed, and the nuclear family replaced the tribe, or extended family, as the principle social unit. This new social order was to persist for the next 10,000 years. Socialists call it the ‘bourgeois capitalist’ system, because it is based on private ownership of property. Professor Hayek calls it a ‘Great Society’, and Professor Karl Popper an ‘Open Society’ [see Karl Popper, ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’ (5th. Edition revised, 1966)]. It was a society in which each individual was free to use their knowledge for their own, not tribal, purposes.
Not everybody welcomed the new social order. Some people wanted to lapse back into bicameral mode and avoid self-responsibility, longing for a return to the warm fuzzy feeling of being protected or taken care of within the tribal environment. Others, particularly the parasitic ruling classes, saw advantages in the greater degree of social control afforded by the tribal organisation. As Ayn Rand pointed out, there is only one means of survival available to those who live parasitically off the efforts of others: to control those who produce.
As a result, as Karl Popper describes it, “....this civilisation has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth...the transition from the tribal or ‘closed society’....to the ‘open society’ which sets free the critical powers of man.” He refers to the rise of ‘reactionary movements’ throughout history which have tried, and still do, to overthrow civilisation and return to tribalism. Totalitarianism, according to Popper, belongs to a tradition that is just as old, or just as young as civilisation itself [Karl Popper, ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, Volume 1, Introduction]. Professor F.A.Hayek also identified Socialism and its variants, Communism and Fascism/Nazism as attempts to re-impose tribal values and a tribal organisation on large modern societies [see F.A. Hayek, ‘Law, Legislation and Liberty’ (1972-9), esp.Vol.II, p.133 et.seq.].
Globalism is merely the latest version of these reactionary movements, this time striving to create one big global tribe, or ‘global village’, an attempt to recreate paleolithic tribal society on a global scale.
What about the so-called big brave capitalists? How does big business fit into this picture? Martin Page, in his book “The Company Savage” (1972) drew the parallel between the modern corporation and the tribe, which he defined as “a group of people who superstitiously believe that, together, they add up to more than the sum of their individual beings.” From this superstition springs another notion found in almost all tribal societies: that the tribe itself is a living force in its own right, which exists independently of the people who make it up. In Africa, says Page, tribesmen call this force the ‘Tribal Spirit’, in Britain it is called the ‘Company Spirit’. This pagan belief is even recognised in corporate law as the fictional persona, the corporate personality. It is also the basis of the idea of the organic ‘corporate state’.
Antony Jay, author of the book, ‘Corporation Man’ (1972), also recognised the similarity between the tribe and the modern corporation and even sought to apply the dynamics of tribal behavior to corporations in a bid to have them function more effectively. Professor Hayek also attributed the recent revival in tribalist thinking to the fact that more and more people were obliged to work in larger and larger organisations, both public and private.
Globalists are socialists and therefore collectivists, in other words, tribalists. They view society not as many individuals, but as various tribes, pressure groups, or ‘human resources’ whose interests are necessarily in conflict. They readily accept concepts such as inherited tribal guilt, guilt for past wrongs allegedly committed by people of the same tribe or race. It is therefore meaningful for them to apologise for the alleged crimes of their tribal ancestors, and to try to persuade others to do likewise. They are obsessed with issues of race, culture and group ‘rights’, while they ignore and set about abolishing individual rights.
The more disturbing aspect of global tribalism lies in the adoption of policies which are having the effect of causing the masses to revert to bicameral or tribal mode. Globalists are committed to mass people conditioning along the lines advocated by B.F. Skinner, and in a society supplied with an abundance of material goods, in which information is carefully controlled by the mass media, and in which independent thought is discouraged from an early age by an education system which rewards conformity, it is possible to achieve that. Masses of people, through the encouragement of mental laziness and reliance on ‘authorities’, can be lulled back into bicameral mode. Once there they can be induced to believe almost anything provided it comes from an accepted authority figure or source, such as political ‘leaders’, professors of this or that, newspapers with coloured pictures, teachers in the classroom, the lyrics of pop music, or the TV.
People can be persuaded to reject their morality and to adopt values actually threatening to themselves and their society. They can be induced to believe the butchery of defenceless civilians by NATO is a ‘humanitarian action’, that war-making is ‘peacekeeping’, and that it is wrong to judge people who do such things because moral rules are merely an outmoded form of social control, a conspiracy by naughty people from the old individualist order. Faced with ideas seemingly too difficult to grapple with, bicamerals will reject them out of hand as ‘conspiracy theories’ or ‘just another person’s opinion’, and move on to easier things, like sport or gossip.
Large numbers of people in Western society now fit this description. In Australia it tends to be dismissed as political apathy. But the disturbing thing is that the self-styled elitists who now monopolise the institutions of governance.... global governance, and what’s left of national governance....are themselves exhibiting signs of bicameralism, increasingly inhabiting an imaginary world of their own making, and making statements which bear no relation to reality or to logical consistency.
That bicameralism should infect the institutions of governance is not surprising. According to Martin Page, tribalists gain from the tribe a sense of identity that they mostly cannot provide from within themselves. Expulsion from the tribe can lead to breakdown, even death, through the loss of this. It follows that the prospect of expulsion can motivate members to accept unquestioningly the beliefs and values of the group, no matter how bizarre they might be, gaining authentication for those beliefs from the fact that significant numbers of influential people subscribe to them.
Politicians, bureaucrats and academics operating in bicameral mode can believe that the world is warming up even though it isn’t, an economy can be ‘healthy’ even though it is over a quarter of a trillion dollars in debt, that globalisation can be ‘good for Australia’ even though it requires the surrender of the nation state, that increasing monopoly in economics is leading to ‘increased competition’, that banning unpopular views is consistent with free speech, that discriminating against discrimination prevents discrimination, that giving preferential treatment in the allocation of state benefits or employment to some groups at the expense of others promotes ‘equality’, and that a conspiracy between government and opposition to exclude parties like One Nation from the political process is consistent with ‘democracy’. They can also be persuaded that the sexual mollestation of children is not paedophilia but ‘cross-generational sex’, that every child has a ‘right’ to a relationship with a ‘loving paedophile’, and that the merging of semen with faeces in an anus has equal legitimacy to its deposition in a vagina.
Ultimately, fed the right sort of bunkum, bicamerals in government, the bureaucracies, academia and the media can come to inhabit an upside-down world which has no relation to reality, in which the unreal becomes the real and vice versa, in which good becomes bad, lies become truth, ugliness becomes beauty, morality is dismissed as a social control conspiracy, in which evil becomes good, crime goes unpunished while innocence is condemned, perversion is normal, self-defence is a crime against the attacker, real assets can be bought with imaginary money, and tyranny is freedom (from the ‘tyranny’ of too much freedom). It’s the world of Rousseau in which men must be forced to be ‘free’, or of George Orwell in which ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, and 2 and 2 make 5’. Get used to it. That’s the new world order.
Globalisation Discussion Forum