German psychologist Kurt Lewin immigrated to the United States after Hitler seized power in 1933. Lewin became director of the Center for Group Dynamics at MIT and founded the first National Training Laboratory in Bethel, Maine in 1947. Lewin’s National Training Laboratory studied behavioral science and group dynamics and applied its findings to “change” American schools, companies, and culture.

Lewin and his comrades had a soft-spot for Marx and (in the aftermath of WW2) a desire to make sure that a Fascist government like Nazi Germany could not happen in the United States. They theorized that Hiter’s rise to power was a reflection of Germans’ “irrational” beliefs in the importance of strong father figures and thus set out to make the next generation of Americans “less authoritarian” and “more democratic.” Read up on the Frankfurt School if you’re curious about this type of History.

Warren Bennis, a colleague of Kurt Lewin’s at MIT and founder of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, published a compendium of essays about the change process in 1951. Entitled Human Relations in Curriculum Change, this manual gives the “recipe” for making American students less individualistic and authoritarian (read: masculine) and more “democratic” (socialist).

These change strategies have been used to extensively alter American culture. Indeed, the head of Illinois public education, Vernon L. Nickell, notes in the Forward that this manual was “received with enthusiasm and is being used extensively by the faculties of many schools.” (2)

The Change Process

"Lecture and propaganda do not suffice to bring about the necessary change." – Kurt Lewin in "Basis Conceptions About Human Motivation”

This quote is important. When people think of “brainwashing,” they usually assume it would only exist on the curriculum level. In other words, you’d get the teachers to teach the government’s side of the story and give kids homework assignments that glorify U.S. achievements. As Lewin notes in his essay about human motivation, however, this approach is too simple to fully sink in.

After all, Lewin and his colleagues weren’t after surface-level changes. In “Principles of Re-Education,” he writes that the “re-educative process” is meant to alter "the individual in three ways. It changes his cognitive structure, the way he sees the physical and social worlds, including all his facts, concepts, beliefs, and expectations. It modifies his valences and values…And it affects motor action, involving the degree of the individuals control of his physical and social movements.” (4) This stuff goes deep.

So how do you do it?

1) Use “Force Field Analysis” to map all the forces in a social system that are “for” and “against” a proposed change. A force can be any thing - a Right-leaning faculty member, a traditional belief held by parents in the community, a physical aspect of the school building that encourages less ‘democracy’ (for example, a separate lunch room for upperclassmen.) Once you have a map of the different forces in the system, begin "planning steps to increase supporting forces and to reduce resisting forces.”

2) Group pressure is the strongest nonviolent force you can use to change an individual. If the Group believes something, people will disregard their personal morals and values in order to fit in. The Group setting (the “herd mind”) thus forms the basis for re-education. Lewin writes, “The individual's behavioral norms, values, and perceptions are shaped as he participates in the related activities of group life and…he offers the least resistance to change...when the group itself shifts its support to new relationships within and between social systems.”

American education is all about the Group. Students are divided into groups based on age and rotate around classrooms for small-group study all day. The student social system is run by cliques (groups), and after-school sports emphasize the team (group) above all else. Perhaps this state of affairs seems “normal,” but consider that for 150 years American education was “anti-group.” Students weren’t divided by age or social standing and actually assumed responsibility for educating their younger peers in the classroom. Sports (children’s games) were not associated with the town’s center of academic learning and education was done on the local level, so in a meta-sense it wasn’t subsumed into the “national Group” like we see today.

3) Human needs form a hierarchy. To steer human behavior towards a predetermined goal, you must offer the prospect of helping individuals better fulfill an inherent need. Indeed, the manual notes that “Individuals have certain basic psychological and biological needs, and their purposive behavior is aimed at the satisfaction of these needs. But their satisfaction is possible only through participation in group life by means of roles associated with positions in various social systems.”

This is something I noticed in High School. I changed schools after 9th grade and thus was an outsider in 10th grade. During this time I was completely ignored by the girls in my grade - they wouldn’t even speak to me due to my low status. Once I eventually gained acceptance amongst the high-value guys, however, my role in the sexual marketplace changed almost over night (even though I still looked the exact same). At this new level of popularity - a new “role” I was playing - I had access to information that I was previously denied. Friends would let me know “so and so girl was asking about you; I put in a good word.” Once or twice before a school dance a buddy came up and let me know: “Yo, that girl’s friend just told me she wants to hook up with you tonight. Go dance with her, man!” Now, I put in work to increase my status, but a perk of this new role of “moderately popular guy” was increased ability to receive sexual gratification.

Needs-fulfillment is laced throughout the education system. For example, one of the most basic human needs is resources (shelter, food, electricity, etc.) To get these materials you need to get a job. To get a job you need to do well in school and get good grades (regardless of what the curriculum teaches). Sustained protest against the curriculum thus directly inhibits your ability to acquire resources, putting your very survival in danger. This type of behavior gets you excommunicated from the Group, and you’ll be forced into the role of “outsider” or “enemy.” I’m not trying to push for some utopian system where there’s no money or status, by the way. I’m just explaining how the system works, and why critiquing it can be so difficult. If you go along, you get sex, resources, and connections (i.e. get your needs met). If you don’t, you get none of those things and are an outsider. Which do you think most people are going to choose?

4) The next one may be surprising, but explains the extent to which we’ve been fooled. "Much stress is laid on the creation, as part of the re-educative process, of an atmosphere of freedom and spontaneity. Voluntary attendance, informality of meetings, freedom of expression in voicing grievances, emotional security, and avoidance of pressure, all include this element.” Brainwashing cannot be done at the barrel of a gun. People resist the use of overt violence and coercion in first world countries. For this reason, the authors’ of this manual frequently note that people should feel “free” during the change process, and should imagine they are consciously choosing to adjust their beliefs and values themselves.

Freedom, informality of meetings, encouragement to express grievances - are these not the things that people experience in college? Indeed, partying, social justice warriors, and never having class on Fridays are three things I’ll always remember about university life. In reality, this liberal atmosphere is designed to soften people up and give them the space to consider alternative (anti-traditional) modes of thought. Within the artificial constraints of campus life, you can “experiment” with all sorts of lifestyle decisions that simply aren’t possible in the “real world.” While most people get over keg stands and having sex with strangers, an underlying liberal attitude and skepticism of objective truth remains.

5) Create dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. Alice Miel writes, "Much more promising in most cases than philosophizing as a way of securing initial interest in deliberate social change is capitalizing upon dissatisfaction. Men do not change their social arrangements so long as they are perfectly satisfied with them.” Again, we see this all the time on college campuses and amongst liberals. Once people are “fired up” about social issues like police brutality, income inequality, racism, etc., they become receptive to a new way of doing things. The change agent can then capitalize on this willingness to change by introducing ideas that subtly advance his agenda.

This fits into the larger tactic of problem-reaction-solution, where one deliberately creates a problem and then stands ready to offer the solution as shit hits the fan. Before draconian Drug War laws could be passed, crack cocaine was first introduced into the ghetto by elements of the federal government. A media barrage then followed which warned middle-class Americans that the crack epidemic was getting out of control and represented a national security threat. Michelle Alexander shows in her book “The New Jim Crow” that support for stricter drug laws went from nonexistent to off the charts in just a couple years, and people were then clamoring for laws that would give the government unprecedented power to search and imprison people, and also create an extremely lucrative private-prison industry.

6) Not included in this manual, but at the very basis of the change process is Kurt Lewin’s Theory of Regression. Lewin writes, "Change in organization can be derived from the overlapping between play and barrier behavior. To be governed by two strong goals is equivalent to the existence of two conflicting controlling heads within the organism. This should lead to a decrease in degree of hierarchical organization. Also, a certain disorganization should result from the fact that the cognitive-motor system loses to some degree its character of a good medium because of these conflicting heads.”

This is brilliant. The “barrier” Lewin refers to is the archetype of the Father. The father, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, is understood to represent restraint/objectivity/morality/sobriety, etc. Fathers are the ones who prevent kids from eating entire bags of candy. Obviously, many Fathers are not perfect, but again they subconsciously represent a “barrier” between the child/teenager and the lusts (pleasures) of this world. The Father has also been conceptualized as the “guilty conscience” elsewhere in psychoanalytic literature.

To introduce a teenager into a controlled environment (i.e. the college campus) where dopamine liberation (“play behavior”) is normative (drinking, drugs, casual sex, etc.) creates tension in the individual. Peer pressure (the Group) works to negate the Father’s voice and individuals are “liberated” from traditional notions of morality. Now, I’m not pushing for a return to Victorian era social mores or anything like that. There’s nothing wrong with drinking and having sex in moderation. The point here is a more of a philosophical one. Although it seems totally “free” from a humanistic perspective, the liberal environment actually turns us against Fathers and what they represent. This decreases people’s ability to perceive objective reality and, as Lewin says, leads to a decrease in hierarchical functioning and people get very confused.

Conclusion

America started with an emphasis on the nuclear family, traditional gender roles, and local governance. To “change” this system into an Empire, or an Oligarchy, or a socialist system managed by an elite - whatever you want to call our current system - the Father’s authority has to be negated. The old school definition of a Father is a sovereign man - a person who is a King over his land and family. While we now consider “Father as king” an oppressive concept, it’s actually just the opposite. This set up creates many Kings, checking the power of the centralized government and preventing a Satlin or Napoleon from asserting himself as Father of the whole nation.

Any ways, to change this traditional paradigm you need to get kids out of the household, so their values can be changed. You put them in centrally planned schools and emphasize Group work at every step of the way. Groups bond over what they have in common - their baser desires - so this already softens up the individual and makes him forget he is a “King.” You then manipulate the environment, setting up paths towards needs-satisfaction that serve your agenda and thus encourage people to follow along. At the end of this process people are “changed.” They’re no longer connected to objective truth and thus have tolerance for Blue Pill ideas like big government or breaking down gender roles that they would’ve considered insane prior to the change process.

More on my blog: http://legendary-peace.com/

SOURCES:

(1) http://www.ntl.org/

(2) http://channelingreality.com/Niwa/Documents/Social_Engineering/1951_HRCC_Benne_122710.pdf, forward

(3) Ibid, preface

(4) Ibid, 19