The Frankfurt School Meets Brave New World
Like the fog, Brave New world continues to creep in on little cat feet. I was unexpectedly enveloped in a bank of it while reading, of all things, the Science Times supplement in the June 2 New York Times. The piece, titled "Study Suggests Sleeping One's Way Past Bias", begins, "It may be possible to reduce biases regarding race and gender while a person sleeps. . . "These "biases" are actually the recognition of facts. The two facts which are to be removed from people's brains while they sleep are, in this case, the fact that men and women are different and the fact that both races and ethnic groups within races, taken as wholes, have different characteristics. Thesa facts are, of course, Politically IncorrectTM.The short Times piece goes on to describe the techniques of psychological conditioning that appear effective in obliterating these facts.
Research had shown that biases could be reduced with a technique called counterstereotype training. . .Study participants were shown images . . . of women and African-American men. When participants were shown images of women alongside scientific words, and African-American men alongside pleasant words, they were asked to press a button labeled "Correct" (i.e., Politically Correct). A sound followed.
Then, while study participants napped, the sounds were played back to them, and after their naps the hapless saps so bombarded “showed a reduction in bias," i.e., a loss of ability to grasp reality.This wonderful discovery comes straight out of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where humans were reduced to mechanisms through a combination of genetic and psychological conditioning. The conditioning techniques are sufficiently effective that very few people escaped them. They were also all-pervasive.But someone else was on to psychological conditioning in the 1930s, when Huxley wrote his book. Who? None other than the men of the Frankfurt School, those bright folks who gave us cultural Marxism, aka Political Correctness and multiculturalism. Realizing that their Marxist ideology had little future if it depended on reasoned argument, they decided that psychological conditioning would be their weapon of choice. Their disciples now practice endless conditioning techniques on us all, through the schools and universities, through the video screen media, and, it seems, through "scientific" experiments reported in the New York Times. Directors of North Korean prison camps, take note.The cultural Marxists believe their ideology can, with enough conditioning behind it, overcome reality. It will not any more than other ideologies did. But the attempt has already done vast damage to Western societies, leaving them unmoored, forgetful of who they are and unable, on the moral level of war, to defend themselves. When reality returns, it will do so with a crash.But what is repellant about the Times story is not just the ideological claptrap being shoved into the study's subjects' brains. What repels us, or should, is the whole idea of conditioning itself.Conditioning is fundamentally dehumanizing. Man was created to be a reasoning creature. Reason may be the ability that makes men most like God. Conditioning cuts reason out of the loop. Someone who has been sucessfully conditioned cannot reason about the content of his conditioning. His own mind prevents him. A powerful feeling of doing something wrong, something bad, rises if he begins to question what has been planted in his head--in the case of the experiment reported here, even while he slept.We see again why conservatism is the negation of all ideologies, and with them the hideous methods adopted for their inculcation. Conservatives know that truth is attained only through a combination of faith and reason. We believe that schooling and culture should teach people how to reason, how to reach valid judgments based on facts. It should not surprise us that all ideologies suppress facts and forbid reason at least on certain matters. It should surprise us that the New York Times welcomes another step toward Brave New World. 