IT’S A FOOTSHOCK WORLD
If you were allowed one thing you could explain to someone who doesn’t know jack about today’s society, I would pick the footshock experiment.
(… actually, it would be the Federal Reserve System, but let’s not spoil the moment)
Monday, August 10, 2020 I watched Patrick Jordan’s 1.5 hour YouTube entitled “Footshock Experiment: Game Over” (link). I was shocked (heh). It became another significant topic logged into memory, impossible to un-see; another tool for interpretation of world events, called upon from time to time.
Patrick’s coverage differs from mine, and I encourage you to watch it. You can get a brief overview of the experiment at the Wikipedia page “Learned helplessness”. The last section there reads:
Emergence under torture
Studies on learned helplessness served as the basis for developing American torture methods. In CIA interrogation manuals, learned helplessness is characterized as "apathy" which may result from prolonged use of coercive techniques which result in a "debility-dependency-dread" state in the subject, "If the debility-dependency-dread state is unduly prolonged, however, the arrestee may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him."
Isn’t that lovely? This post is about the two faces of “psychology” – the public and the hidden ─ and about reclaiming our humanity from the wreckage.
Subscribing to LIAR$$WORLD is free, hoping that you will pay-subscribe to other Substackers who have more expenses and post more often.
THE 1967 FOOTSHOCK EXPERIMENT OVERSIMPLIFIED:
The “scientists” took several dogs and put them in harnesses (restrained them) and shocked their feet. Merriam-Webster definition #3 of shock is “sudden stimulation of the nerves and convulsive contraction of the muscles caused by the discharge of electricity through the animal body”. Again, lovely.
The narrative keeps mentioning three groups of dogs, but basically group #1 could stop the shock by pressing a lever (with their nose I think … whatever) and group #2 could not stop the shock. Then the dogs were put in a “box” in which half the floor emitted a shock, and the other half did not, separated by a barrier/fence easy to traverse.
The big “reveal” was that the dogs who were able to stop the previous round of shocks jumped over the barrier to the safe side of the fence to escape the torture … I mean, the shock, while the dogs who couldn’t stop the previous round of shocks, simply lay down and suffered passively. Thus, they had “learned helplessness”.
The reason given for this macabre “experiment” (act of cruelty) was to learn if Pavlovian responses are persistent across contexts, or migratable, or transferrable, or some such. Could a sentient being (e.g. dog) be traumatized into a mental state of helpless-paralysis. SPOILER ALERT: all of this shit ends up being about you and me ─ the serfscattlegoy ─ not about dogs or monkeys or mice. Who are THEY interested in rendering helpless? You already know the answer.
Here is the cutesy graphic at Wikipedia depicting the shock box:
(Substack images may enlarge when clicked)
It looks like the dog is wagging its tail and smiling!
I guess THEY don’t want you associating psychological experiments with imagery such as this:
One might suppose that once the foregoing observation was made, that would be the end of the matter. Wrong. Such studies are being done into the present day, many of them in torture chambers fabricated and sold by Maze Engineers of Skokie Illinois. (link)
DESPAIR
Joost Meerloo in his 1956 book Rape of the Mind describes “barbed‑wire disease”, a form of despair found among prisoners of war:
… during the First World War, peculiar mental reactions, mixtures of apathy and rage, could be discerned in prisoners of war as a defensive adjustment against the hardships of prison life, the boredom, the hunger, the lack of privacy, the continual insecurity. The Korean War added to this situation the greater cruelty of the enemy, the prolonged fear of death, malnutrition, diseases, systematic attacks on the prisoner's mind, the lack of sanitation, and the lack of all human dignity.
… the barbed-wire disease begins with the initial apathy and despair of all prisoners. There is passive surrender to fate. In fact, people can die out of such despair; it is as if all resistance was gone. Being anything but aloof and apathetic was even dangerous in a camp where the enemy wanted to debate and argue with you in order to tear down your mental resistance. Consequently, a vicious circle was built up of apathy, not thinking, letting things go ─ a surrender to a complete zombie‑like existence of mechanical dependency on the circumstances. Every sign of anger and alertness could be brutally punished by the enemy; that is why we do not find those sudden attacks of rage that were observed in the earlier prisoner-of-war camps during World Wars I and II.
The Korean War (1950-1953) followed the birth of the US Deep State, marked by the signing of the National Security Act of 1947 by Truman, which act included the establishment of the CIA.
During this controlled conflict, our troops fell under the command of the Under-Secretary of the Security Council of the United Nations, a post always held (under UN charter) by a Soviet Russian general. During the Viet Nam War too!
This is all kabuki theater staged by the international bankers – the trillionaires. You can bet that the US military knew all about the latest psychological tortures popularly attributed to those mean, nasty North Koreans and Chinese (Manchurian Candidate, yeah?)
The point is, our sick agencies of violence (DoD, CIA, etc.) already knew how to induce learned helplessness in humans over a decade before 1967. Yet, the footshock experiment has been repeated a zillion times since the first go‑round. The last section of this post features excerpts (with Arnie comments) from a scholarly paper titled:
Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience
By Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman (July 2016) (link)
Much of it an ordinary person (e.g. Arnie) can understand but some of it is like the following:
Schematic depiction of the proposed model. Serotonin (5-HT) neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) integrate stress-responsive inputs that encode different aspects of a stressor and then activate brain regions that are the proximate mediators of the behavioral effects of uncontrollable stress. Glut=glutamate; vmPFC=ventral medial prefrontal cortex; GABA=gamma aminobutyric acid; 5-HT=serotonin; DRN=dorsal raphe nucleus; habenula=habenula; LC=locus coeruleus; BNST=bed nucleus of the stria terminalis; PAG=periaqueductal gray; amygdala=amygdala; N. Acc.=nucleus accumbens.
Impressive stuff. Way over my head – but this question isn’t: If animals are mentally simpler than humans, and it is known what circumstances cause an animal to “learn helplessness”, why keep doing the experiment? Further, if it is known what circumstances cast a human subject into a state of abject despair, why keep tormenting little furry creatures?
The Michigan Legislature has designed three primary provisions related to cruelty to animals: intentional infliction of pain and suffering, duty to provide care, and anti-animal fighting. The intentional infliction of pain and suffering provision carries the most severe penalties for animal cruelty and a violation is automatically a felony. *MSU Animal Cruelty Laws website (link)
Guess what? As ordinary as I am, I know the answer: THEY are seeking A SWITCH at the neural level … at the biomolecular level.
Neurobiological perspective
Research has shown that increased 5-HT (serotonin) activity in the dorsal raphe nucleus plays a critical role in learned helplessness. Other key brain regions that are involved with the expression of helpless behavior include the basolateral amygdala, central nucleus of the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Activity in medial prefrontal cortex, dorsal hippocampus, septum and hypothalamus has also been observed during states of helplessness. *Wikipedia “Learned Helplessness” page
So, the footshock is the hidden face of psychology, even though we are told about it. Let’s take a look at the public face.
OTHER EXPERIMENTS
September 25, 2022 I chanced upon an Off-Guardian essay “5 Psychological Experiments That Explain the Modern World”, written earlier that month. (link) This is 2 years after the footshock video.
You’ve probably heard of most of these.
1. The Milgram Experiment
Stanley Milgram … 1963 … Yale. Subjects were instructed to monitor other subjects who were to take a memory test and receive an electric shock administered by the first subjects whenever a wrong answer occurred. Further, the first subjects were gradually told to administer increasingly powerful shocks during the course of the experiment. Eventually, the second subjects started screaming in pain. Unknown to the shockers, the shockees were in cahoots with the “scientists”, i.e. no one was really zapped. The claimed finding was that ordinary people become cruel quite easily.
(click to enlarge):
2. The Stanford Prison Experiment
Philip Zimbardo … 1971 … Stanford University. Subjects were asked to role‑play prison guards and prisoners, with the guards being the focus of the study. The claimed purpose of the study was to determine if sadistic behaviors by real US prison guards were innate to the given individual, or a result of the milieu/culture. What happened was the guards became more brutal and vicious in the matter of a week or two, and the “prisoners” became more submissive ─ with the claimed finding that ordinary people become cruel quite easily (sound familiar?)
3. The Asch Experiment
Solomon Asch … 1950s … Swarthmore College. A real subject was partnered with a few fake subjects, and they were all asked questions with obvious answers. At times, the fake subjects would give wrong answers, and the “scientists” tracked how often the real subject changed his correct answer in order to conform to the group. The finding claimed “a significant number” falsified their knowledge.
4. Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger … 1957 … Stanford University. Subjects were asked to perform a very boring/menial task and then asked to tell new subjects who were to do the same task that it was actually quite interesting. Some of the first group were paid $20 to lie and some were paid $1 to lie. The claimed finding was that the $1 group had to “lie to themselves” to internally justify their exaggeration.
5. The Monkey Ladder
“Scientists” … 1960s … Harvard. Five monkeys in a cage with a ladder reaching up to some bananas. A monkey climbs and is punished with a water spray. One monkey is removed and a new one introduced to the cage. The new monkey starts to climb the ladder and is stopped by the others. Successively the monkeys are replaced until they all had never witnessed the punishment but stop attempts to climb ladder. Claimed finding: groups evolve to follow rules mindlessly.
6. Arnie’s Mind Experiment
I know, I said five … bear with me … a short while after reading this stuff, I thought, “What if all this is a big steaming pile of manure?”
This is not an edgy or brilliant question, since so much of the information we are exposed to, especially since World War 2, is ALL CRAP. This is much easier to talk about since the Covid crime: masking, social distancing, fake vaccines, supply chain lies, stolen elections, guys playing girls’ volleyball, free electricity issuing from a fairy godmother’s ass.
MILES MATHIS TO THE RESCUE
February 25, 2023 (5 months later) Miles published a post exposing the Stanford prison guard experiment as a disgusting FRAUD. (link)
Eight days later, a guest writer at Miles’ site did a take‑down of the Milgram experiment. (link)
Great reading if you’re interested.
As I started researching for this post I ran across this article, written in November 2019, about problems with the Milgram event. (link)
The author describes a scholarly paper written by a Gina Perry, written in August of that year. (link) She reexamined the underlying research and writings and discovered that half of the “shockers” knew the exercise was a sham, and most of the shockers who thought it was real refused to keep shocking and/or increasing the severity.
Well, whaddya know? And here, a little old fart hayseed like me could previously only ask himself, “Hmmm. How many times in my life have I met a person who would shock the hell out of another person, causing them to scream in pain, just because some white‑coated egghead asked him to?”
I didn’t mention that the Off-Guardian essay on the 5 tests revealed that the Monkey Ladder experiment NEVER HAPPENED. This isn’t exaggerating, this is flat out LYING, something we’re very familiar with here at LIAR$$WORLD. I guess the people who made it up were quite clever … and assholes.
So that’s three down, what about the Asch Experiment? I call bullshit. I don’t believe it, and why should I? Who knows what they actually did? Just the fact that it’s cited as so significant, and we have to be reminded about it for 70 years, makes it suspect. If someone is stupid enough to give a wrong answer to a simple question when they know the right answer, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. Who cares?
That leaves Festinger’s whoop-de-do “cognitive dissonance”. Wikipedia spends over 9,000 words on this topic – “… is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it.” Could we not use instead such words as confusion, ambiguity, uncertainty, disparity, perplexity, bewilderment? Might the existence of these words indicate that we already knew about such circumstances?
When my brother and I were college-age, he one day invented the term “convergent euphoric reclination” to describe couch-potatoing.
We had great fun with this word string, and it didn’t cost us a dime. How much did the university pay Leon to come up with his brilliant idea, which is probably discussed in the Bible at least thirty times.
Anyway, the implied takeaway from the 5 is that we’re all borderline Nazi torturers, who will leave our brains at the curb to conform to a group of dumbasses, and we aren’t able to process complex information. Got it?
I now call your attention to this article “The 25 Most Influential Psychological Experiments in History”. (link)
One is Ross’ False Consensus Effect Study (1977 … Stanford … sound familiar?) described at Wikipedia as “… a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to "see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common” … assume that their personal qualities, characteristics, beliefs, and actions are relatively widespread through the general population.”
OMG. Genius at work! Whoulda thunk that many people feel that their opinions and ideas are obviously correct and anyone who disagrees is weird?
Another is Selective Attention / Invisible Gorilla Experiment. Subjects were shown a video of a basketball game and tasked with counting the number of ball passes. During this a man in a gorilla suit appear briefly, and it’s later found that many subjects didn’t notice him. OMG – amazing proof that people don’t notice extraneous events when they’re concentrating on a task. Amazing! I bet you Nebuchadnezzar didn’t know this back in 600 BC.
One more. The Visual Cliff Experiment. The white coats “… set out to study depth perception in infants. They wanted to know if depth perception is a learned behavior or if it is something that we are born with.” They set up a platform bordered by a glass section revealing a substantial drop to the floor, and then had mothers try to coax their infants to cross the glass section. “What this study helped demonstrate is that depth perception is likely an inborn train in humans.” Helped demonstrate? Likely? Something that anyone with two brain cells to rub together already knows? These guys could maybe get on the Dumbass Quiz Show!
BACK TO THE NASTY
This is from the ACLU’s website (link):
The ACLU filed a lawsuit against James Elmer Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, two psychologists contracted by the CIA to design, implement, and oversee the agency’s post-9/11 torture program. The suit, filed in October 2015 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, was on behalf of three of the program’s victims. All three were kidnapped by the CIA and tortured and experimented upon according to Mitchell and Jessen’s protocols. One of the men died as a result of his torture. The other two continue to suffer the effects of the physical and psychological torture inflicted on them. In August 2017, after the judge rejected attempts to dismiss the case and a trial was imminent, the psychologists agreed to a settlement — a first for a case involving CIA torture.
I didn’t see any promotional articles in Psychology Today or Newsweek Magazine about how these two men developed highly effective torture protocols to torment supposed “terrorists” at a secret facility beyond the reach of humanitarian laws, did you? (By the way, you paid for the “settlement”).
Fiji, a nation that has traditionally cherished the fuller figure, has been struck by an outbreak of eating disorders since the arrival of television in 1995, a study has shown.
Anne Becker, an anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, has studied Fijian eating habits since 1988. In 1998 - 38 months after the [first ever television] station went on air, Ms. Becker conducted a survey of teenage girls and found that 74% of them felt they were "too big or fat".
Ms. Becker said there had been a sharp rise in indicators of disordered eating, such as induced vomiting. She said 15% of the girls reported they had vomited to control weight.
*BBC 20 May 1999
I didn’t see any promotional articles in Psychology Today or Newsweek Magazine about how clever psychologists developed powerful persuasion techniques to disrupt little girls’ normal lives and development, causing them to obsess about being as thin as a Barbie doll, did you?
You already know that the military gets the cutting-edge technology first; then it trickles down to the taxpayer … maybe. THEY pretend to go to the moon and all we get is Tang orange drink ─ which is just a bunch of chemicals ─ and a mylar blanket in case you have a car crash in the winter.
You already know about Madison Avenue:
“You can learn much more about human nature on Madison Avenue than you will from experts on human nature, because on Madison Avenue one stands or falls by the sales. Professors in their ivory towers can say anything because there's no penalty attached. Go to where there is a penalty attached and there you will find wisdom.” *Idries Shah, in Psychology Today magazine, circa 1970
There are two psychologies. The silly crap we are bid to admire and obsess about, and the stuff that actually makes an impact.
Freudianism was a bunch of sick Talmudic filth designed mentally cripple the serfscattlegoy, while Bernay’s work was state-of-the-art understanding of some of the fundamental workings of the human mind, in order to keep the masses working hard, toeing the line, and buying a bunch of $HIT from the cabal’s corporations.
NUDGING
Nudging draws on insights from psychology, primarily the work of Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, and Amos Tversky. These two Israeli psychologists pioneered the study of mental shortcuts that humans rely on to make decisions, known as heuristics.
<>
In 2010, the U.K. Prime Minister set up the Behavioral Insights Team within the government’s Cabinet Office; the team was spun off as a private company in 2014 and now has offices around the world. Globally, there are now more than 200 teams, or nudge units, that specialize in applying behavioral science to everyday life.
<>
Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging … the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs … Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.
<>
Few may realise that the Nudge Unit has offices in the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France and Singapore … the role the Nudge Unit has played during the Covid era … Over the last two years (Ed. 2020, 2021), governments, in the United Kingdom and beyond, used subliminal methods to secretly manipulate the public … Essentially these psychologists and behavioural scientists suggested that people would need to be frightened to follow the lockdown rules … “It’s absolutely wrong for us to be paying our taxation towards activities to shape our behaviour when we’re not aware that it happens. I think we need public inquiries in countries where they have behavioural science units.”
*Attributions: various
MK-ULTRA
This is a huge topic, and we don’t have time to say much about it. Wikipedia devotes about 5500 words and 124 reference links. I found this article by Unz Magazine whilst researching and it gives a good overview of some of the key players. (link)
Sidney Gottlieb was the “Dr. Fauci” of the affair, i.e. he directed the (taxpayers’) monies and liaised with the feds and the cabal at high levels. An accomplished chemist, he was dubbed “America’s Official Poisoner” by Counterpunch Magazine. Here are some of those substances:
Dr. John Gittinger was key in that he developed sophisticated psychological tests which facilitated finding the right subjects for various applications. These tests are an example of “real psychology”, and much about them is still secreted from the serfscattlegoy.
Dr. Louis Jolyon (Jolly) West – I quote the Unz piece: “He was an expert on cults, coercive persuasion (“brainwashing”), alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, and terrorism ─ not in preventing these but in causing them. His “Violence Project” is famous.” Jolly indeed.
Dr. Harold Wolff was tasked with developing interrogation torture techniques. Although working at Cornell University, he stipulated “Where any of the studies involve potential harm of the subject, we expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of the necessary experiments.”
George Estabrooks was a “psychologist” and expert on hypnosis, and an expert on (creating) Multiple Personality Disorder, who observed that “the condition is created by severe trauma – so severe in fact that the traumatic episode cannot be integrated into the experiences of the core personality”. So, a monster versed in unspeakable torture techniques, most effectively applied to children.
Dr. Karl Pribram was an expert on mind control, who stated, “I certainly could educate a child by putting an electrode in the lateral hypothalamus and then selecting the situations at which I stimulate it. In this was I can grossly change his behavior.” Don’t think his boasting about raping children’s minds is speculative.
Dr. Jose Delgado is famous for inserting electrodes into brains, especially for when he wired a mature bull, causing him to halt mid-charge against a toreador. Unz again: “he had at his disposal an unlimited number of helpless subjects provided him by the CIA from orphanages, prisons, mental institutions and other sources.”
Dr. John Cunningham Lilly is the most widely known player featured. He invented the isolation tank (float tank – you can do it for $50-100 an hour) and is infamous for wanting to strap dolphins with explosives for military use. Born to wealth, he is probably from The Families and had numerous roles at junctures of the mind-bending projects of the black‑fund agencies, e.g. LSD and woo‑woo gurus.
Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, known as Scotland’s Mengele, operated mostly in Canada. I quote Unz: “Dr. Cameron began MKULTRA Subproject 68, experiments that were designed to first “de-pattern” individuals, erasing their minds and memories – reducing them to the mental level of an infant – and then to “rebuild” their personality in a manner of his choosing. These experiments constituted a human catastrophe that permanently and totally stripped many hundreds of Canadian people of their identities.” He served briefly as president of the American Psychiatric Association, and also four other similar organizations!
“I am no longer a psychiatrist. I renounce it because I believe cruelty is at the core of the profession (and) I believe that there is something inherent in the profession that tends to bring out any cruelty lurking within. I have long wondered why this profession -- which ought to be so compassionate -- has, it seems to me, turned its back humanity.” *Facets of a Diamond: Reflections of a Healer by Dr. John Diamond (2007 book)
ANTHROPOLOGISTS
Psychologists of groups, right? Fair game for this post …
I point you to this Wikipedia page (link) “Human Terrain System”. This is a military term which arose during the Iraq and Afghanistan criminal invasions by Uncle Sam (uncomfortably – you and me). The term itself is a prime example of “the objectification of the other” (WW1 the Hun; WW2 Jerrys and Japs; Viet Nam gooks; not to mention the hundreds of racial slurs we’ve heard during our lives).
I have a book ─ Weaponizing Anthropology by David Price (the 2011 book and Price were associated with Counterpunch Magazine) decrying the involvement of anthropologists in war. He was a founding member of the 2007 group “Network of Concerned Anthropologists” who wrote a pledge (link), which hundreds of anthropologists signed, renouncing the military prostitution of their knowledge base and skill set. The pledge expresses revulsion at the term “human terrain”.
Here is an example of two anthropologists who were not disturbed by such activities:
Last December (Ed. 2006), the U.S. Army and Marine Corps published a new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24). In policy circles, the Manual became an artifact of hope, signifying the move away from the crude logic of "shock and awe" toward calculations that rifle-toting soldiers can win the hearts and minds of occupied Iraq through a new appreciation of cultural nuance.
… “If I could sum up the book in just a few words, it would be: "Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill." (Ed. John Nagl – fascist asshole – appearing on The Daily Show, proving that it is controlled by the cabal and is not “hip” by any means).
… Last year, the anthropologist Roberto González determined that anthropologists Montgomery McFate and David Kilcullen authored sections of the Manual and contributed to new Iraq counterinsurgency programs, relying on embedded military ethnographers in "Human Terrain System" teams, using anthropologists to assist troops making judgments in the field, employing cultural knowledge as a weapon of "pacification." Drs. McFate and Kilcullen have become media darlings (Ed. Demonstrating that the media is controlled by fascist assholes).
… Human Terrain anthropologists use ethnographic knowledge to advise and inform troops in the field while traveling with armed escorts and are, in some instances, themselves armed and wearing uniforms, yet McFate maintains that these anthropologists are in compliance with basic anthropological ethical standards, mandating that participants in research projects participate under conditions of voluntary informed consent.
… The most egregious known instance of the military's recycling of an anthropological text occurred in 1962, when the U.S. Department of Commerce secretly, and without authorization or permission from the author, translated into English from French the anthropologist Georges Condominas' ethnographic account of Montagnard village life in the central highlands of Vietnam, Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt. The Green Berets weaponized the document in the field. The military's uses for this ethnographic knowledge were obvious, as assassination campaigns tried to hone their skills and learn to target village leaders. For years, neither publisher nor author knew this work had been stolen, translated, and reprinted for militarized ends.
In 1971, Condominas described his anger at this abuse of his humanistic work, saying: "How can one accept, without trembling with rage, that this work, in which I wanted to describe in their human plenitude these men who have so much to teach us about life, should be offered to the technicians of death -- of their death! ...You will understand my indignation when I tell you that I learned about the 'pirating' [of my book] only a few years after having the proof that Srae, whose marriage I described in Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt, had been tortured by a sergeant of the Special Forces in the camp of Phii Ko.'"
(The foregoing by David Price at Counterpunch Magazine, October 2007) (link)
A FORBIDDEN TOPIC
For some time, I have felt that a lot of “psychology” is the manifestation of the psychopaths’ struggle to understand the Natural Man. What mother needs some bearded professor to explain why mothers love their children? What mother needs Benjamin Spock telling her how to nurture and protect her precious child?
Dr. Spock died with a net worth of $19 million, was a 10th cousin of William H. Macy ─ meaning he was from The Families (link) ─ started a lobbying group in 1956 to establish fluoridation of the nation’s water (which makes everyone sick and damages children’s IQs) and was touted as a left‑wing pacifist in the Viet Nam era (Hogwash! Controlled opposition ─ and therefore a fascist asshole). See how it works? Compassionate child expert is against war …
I call your attention to the 2007 book Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism by Andrew M. Lobaczewski. It is about the psychological characteristics of the psychopaths – a topic much easier to read about than two decades ago. Here is a good introduction to the realm by Dr. Yoho, the wonderful man who spurred me to create this blog (link).
Lobaczewski lived behind the Iron Curtain and was the compiler of a body of information being developed by real psychologists and some other intellects to characterize and analyze and warn normal citizens about the predations of the psychopaths. Many of them attain positions of power in government, and one of the discoveries was that they have a knack for recognizing each other and then adding these other freaks to their network.
Here is an excerpt from an interview with colleagues of Lobaczewski which called my attention to this vital topic in 2010 (link):
While the title of the book may seem hermetic, it must be understood in the context of the great difficulty Andrej had in getting his work published at all. The first two manuscripts were lost, as he describes in his preface. One was burned minutes before the arrival of the police in a raid on his home, and the second was sent to the Vatican via an intermediary, never to be seen again. The third version, the one published by Red Pill Press, was written while Andrzej was living in the US during the Reagan years. Zbigniew Brzeszinki had offered to help him find a publisher, but after several months, it became clear that he was at best doing nothing and at worst actively working to ensure it never got published. So, the manuscript sat in a drawer for over twenty years. It was written for a professional audience and the title was chosen in that context. This is also the reason that the text itself is very dense, and the title accurately reflects that it was not written for the layperson. It was written for professionals and in an academic style reflecting his background.
Clearly, THEY don’t like being revealed and discussed! Zbigniew is a world‑class psychopath and a creature of psychopath‑king David Rockefeller. Photos of either one give you a clue as to where the reptilian rumors come from!
… because psychopaths are conscious of being different. They see normal people as inferiors - "others" - to be used and discarded when they are no longer needed. But like a predator among its prey, psychopaths must disguise themselves to evade detection. If they made their motives known, others would be horrified.
* Harrison Koehli (link)
TINFOIL HAT
Early December 2019 a “scholarly” paper was published, “Looking under the tinfoil hat: Clarifying the personological and psychopathological correlates of conspiracy beliefs”. (link)
Like, wow. Someone’s finally going to figure out why I’m such a nutbag! Merciful heavens!
Abstract
Objective: We sought to replicate and extend provisional research on the personological correlates of conspiracy beliefs by examining their associations with abnormal- and normal-range personality domain-level traits and, for the first time, lower-order personality facets; we also examined internalizing symptoms.
Method: The study comprised four samples of community and student participants (Ntotal = 1,927), and examined the cross-sectional relations between self-reported conspiratorial ideation and measures of (a) the six-factor model of general personality, (b) intellectual humility (IH), (c) traits relevant to certain personality disorder features (narcissism, psychopathy, disinhibition), and (d) internalizing symptoms (depression, anxiety, anger).
Results: Agreeableness and conscientiousness were significant, albeit modest, negative correlates of conspiracy beliefs, although other general personality dimensions tended to manifest negligible associations. Significant associations between lower order personality facets and conspiracy beliefs, not evident at the domain level, emerged. Indices of IH were significant negative correlates. Conspiracy beliefs were also associated with a range of personality disorder features and internalizing symptoms.
Conclusions: Our results suggest that the nonclinical individual prone to conspiratorial ideation is somewhat likely to display a complex mixture of traits including distress, immodesty, impulsivity, and negative affect. Future research should investigate potential multiplicative relations among personological variables in predicting conspiracy beliefs.
KEYWORDS conspiracy beliefs, conspiratorial ideation, internalizing, personality, personality disorders
Please note: Any time a “scientific” paper, or something from WAPO or NYT isn’t behind a paywall, THEY want you to read it ─ important BS.
So, published December 2019. The Covid $camdemic was declared 11 May 2020. Got it? We had four months to learn about crazy‑ass conspiracy loons in order to focus more efficiently on the cabal’s version of events.
From the first paragraph:
Conspiratorial ideation is pervasive, perhaps universal…
Because most everything except knitting clubs and farts are subject to conspiratorial manipulation!
Nevertheless, people are not all equally susceptible to conspiracy theories.
Yeah, a lot of people are dumbasses!
Still, there are few contemporary accounts of the links between personality and conspiracy beliefs.
Because until now no one had paid the right idiot to do it.
The large-scale, although not wholesale (Goreis & Voracek, 2019), neglect of the potential personological correlates of conspiratorial ideation may stem in part from two longstanding notions that are contradictory: namely, that such beliefs are (a) inherently psychopathological, and therefore, fall outside of the normal-range personality domain or, alternatively, (b) are “too normal” and apply almost equally to everyone, thereby rendering investigations of individual difference correlates essentially moot.
… did I mention that the neglect was due to no $$$?
Here are the emotions they claim to have tested/measured:
Here’s an example the analytical jargon which keeps the funding flowing:
Here’s what all this work produced:
Conclusion
In conclusion, our findings paint a multifaceted, albeit still hazy, portrait of the modal conspiracy-prone individual. A mixture of narcissism and undue intellectual certainty, on the one hand, conjoined with poor impulse control, angst, interpersonal alienation, and reduced inquisitiveness, on the other hand, may provide a personological recipe for a tendency to impetuously latch on to spurious but confidently held causal narratives that account for one’s distress and resentment. To the persons fitting this portrait, positing a world populated by malevolent actors hatching secret plots may be comforting, as it may afford at least a partial explanation for their otherwise inexplicable negative emotions. From the standpoint of cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1962), it may be psychologically easier to invoke an external attribution, in this case, a conspiratorial worldview, to account for one’s dissatisfaction than to posit an internal attribution. Such individuals may not see a compelling reason to double-check their intuitions because they are certain that they are correct. At the same time, given the relatively modest or weak effect sizes we have reported, the picture we offer here is best regarded as a fuzzy sketch, ideally one to be fleshed out in future research.
In other words, whoever commissioned this shit didn’t pay enough $$$ to get the right LIARS to get the job done, once and for all. After all, we need an accurate test that will hold up in a court of law, so we can lock away nosey citizens and get on with the rapine of civilization.
(Notice they shoehorned in the deliciously scientific term “cognitive dissonance”).
MASS-FORMATION PSYCHOSIS
January 2022: Robert Malone is interviewed by Joe Rogan, and it goes viral.
Malone had a following before his “Joe Rogan Experience” interview that was released Dec. 31 (2021) — but that show introduced him to an even wider audience. On it, he promoted an unfounded theory called “mass-formation psychosis,” telling Rogan that a “third of the population [is] basically being hypnotized” into believing what the mainstream media and Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert and chief medical adviser to President Biden, report on the vaccines. *Washington Post 1-24-22
I and many others proceeded to read about Professor Mattias Desmet, a Belgian egghead, and his theory about why people were wearing masks and not going to church. I was a bit skeptical, but hey, it was all new territory – a world gone mad.
Then I read Dr. Peter Breggin’s dismantling of Desmet’s tortured logic and was comforted in my doubt. It’s a brilliant 7,000-word essay which accuses Desmet of one of the cabal’s favorite MO’s – blame the victim. (link)
So, another shrink for hire, ready to tell us how we need “experts” to explain why your Cheerios get soggy if you don’t eat them quickly enough.
It turns out that people were wearing masks because they were REQUIRED, and they were not going to church because it was FORBIDDEN.
EMOTIONS
Perhaps the word “personological” in the tinfoil title caught your attention. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia page about Henry Murry, the originator of this concept (link):
Personology was a holistic approach that studied the person at many levels of complexity all at the same time by an interdisciplinary team of investigators … According to Murray's ideas, an individual's personality develops dynamically as each person responds to complex elements in her or his specific environment.
OMG! Hold the phone! We need another genius alert!
Who on earth could have realized that a person’s personality develops over time because the world is complex! (Notice that, in the spirit of full employment, we now need a whole team to figure this stuff out).
Recall the emotions list from the tinfoil paper. Developing this post made me wonder what are considered the basic emotions ─ analogous to the basic tongue tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami). One model that’s quite prominent features six (Paul Ekman, 1972 … click to enlarge):
Fair enough. Whatever. No one asked my opinion. But …
Is this not reductionism? Remember that Dr. John Gittinger was highly valued for his personality tests, which cast individuals into pigeonholes, with an eye toward exploiting them. I find this obsession with categorization troublesome. These tests are jealously guarded by insiders and not really discussed with the hoi polloi.
God’s system ─ our glorious universe ─ is a vibrant cacophony of wonder and surprise and differentiation. Satan’s wannabe‑system is one of gray regimentation. The cabal want orderly drones meekly filling their coffers to overflowing.
Here’s a list I gathered by searching for all emotions, ending up with 271:
Maybe we should leave the emotions to poets and painters, not to white coats ─ who can be and have been hired for murder and mayhem. Memo to category‑obsessed psychologists: Don’t tell me what I am. Don’t tell me who I am. Just fuck off and die.
TWO MORE LAME-ASSES
Game theory is mostly a bunch of sick garbage generated by the psychopaths in their struggle to understand Natural Life in a civil society. A premier example of this blindness is applying game theory to the human behavior called altruism.
Erez Yoeli is a research scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the director of MIT’s Applied Cooperation Team (ACT), and a lecturer at Harvard’s department of economics. His research focuses on altruism: understanding how it works and how to promote it. Yoeli collaborates with governments, nonprofits, and companies to apply the lessons of this research towards addressing real-world challenges. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Moshe Hoffman is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, a research fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a lecturer at Harvard’s department of economics. His research focuses on using game theory, models of learning and evolution, and experimental methods to decipher the motives that shape our social behavior, preferences, and ideologies. He lives in Lubeck, Germany.
Hoffman co-wrote a paper titled “An evolutionary explanation for ineffective altruism” and they both took part in an interview titled “Altruism may not seem to make sense until you dig deep”.
A quote from one of them: “What we are saying is that humans evolved a psychology to play these games … They have tastes and beliefs, ideologies, intuitions, that help them do that. Sometimes those games are about reputation, sometimes they are about signaling things, sometimes they are about group identity and persuasion, sometimes they are about other things.”
Notice he says “they” and not “we”. (Actually, I approve, because psychopaths shouldn’t say “we” when discussing Natural Persons!)
Altruism is one of the most sacred behaviors in the universe. Everyone (who’s not a psychopath) knows the thrill of the magnanimous gesture, the helping hand. For Pete’s sake, there’s even a YouTube of a duck feeding pond fish – that’s how broadly the sentiment is written into the heart of life (link). If you don’t know what a bodhisattva is, please take a moment to find out.
We all know the heartfelt passage 1 Corinthians 13. Some bibles repeat the word love, and some use charity, but the Ferrar Fenton (link) uses “friendship”, a choice I prefer.
This blows all white coat “why humans (insert behavior here)” right out of the water.
Of course, there are many compassionate folk trained in psychology. But the cabal controls what gets promoted, what gets used, and what gets secreted or suppressed; and the taxpayer usually picks up the tab. Witness their latest gambit: encouraging tweenagers to chop off their body parts just because they’re occasionally confused. Lord have mercy upon us!
FOOTSHOCK AGAIN
What emotions does a chipmunk possess? Kinda silly, yes? Let’s try anyway … I would venture contentment or agitation. Surprise, sure. But what links him to a human? FEAR.
What ties together this entire post? FEAR. What is the cabal’s favorite state of existence for the serscattlegoy? FEAR.
The footshock has been a 50-year saga of fear after fear, and the concomitant mental exhaustion. The footshockers want to learn about human behavior by tormenting mice, but mice don’t experience joy and sadness. Ah, but they experience FEAR!
Animals don’t get shocked in the natural world. Heck, humans didn’t get shocked until circa 1800 AD. These lab animals getting shocked are as mystified as you would be if some alien force levitated your body, for minutes or hours, completely beyond your control.
I think I would “learn helplessness” rather quickly under these conditions.
Yet, there is an important lack of equivalency here. Shooting from the hip, as a layperson, I’d say the inertia/paralysis induced in the animals is a rudimentary “strategy” to conserve energy. That’s what wounded animals do – they rest – they don’t have urgent care clinics. But they don’t lie there thinking, “How am I going to pay the mortgage next month …”
Human despair is vastly more complex, and what the white coats don’t account for is the supernatural element, because psychopaths are spiritually vacant.
Notice the difference between the following two definitions of despair – the first is today’s Merriam-Webster and the second is the 1828 Webster:
The entry from nearly 200 years ago agrees with the modern, but it includes an added dimension – the transcendent. The bible quote reads “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair”. Yes, despair is still “utter”, but there is a way to hold off, a way to defy the pragmatic.
When I graduated from high school, the ceremony included this song from Man of La Mancha, still playing on Broadway at the time:
At the time I considered it slightly corny (because teenagers are insane) but now that I’ve witnessed how difficult life can be, I am deeply moved by these words.
The cabal know how to create despair in man, woman, and child. THEY increase the psychic burdens upon us with each passing year. THEY have now locked us in our homes like base criminals. THEY have poisoned us with fluoride for 70 years now – known to cripple the part of the brain which governs the resistance to dominance. BUT THEY’RE STILL NOT HAPPY.
THEIR malevolence is bottomless. And that’s why the footshock experiment goes on.
Congratulations if you've gotten this far. I've made my point. If you’re still interested, this final section is 3,000 words long, but it saves you from reading the 15,000-word paper celebrating the 50th anniversary of the learned helplessness study. Plus, the original paper didn't have my smart aleck comments or cool pictures. Either way, God bless!
Feel free to write to me: arnie1815@proton.me
Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience
By Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman (July 2016) (link)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4920136/
EXCERPTS WITH COMMENTS BY ARNIE:
I’m not going to explain this thoroughly because 1. I don’t know how 2. You wouldn’t have time to read it anyway 3. My point is quite simple and “scientific” papers are routinely complex, or at least complex sounding.
You may disagree with me, but I implore you, read things with your own mind. Toss it around. Flip it backwards. Chew on it. Make your own convictions. Declare your personhood ─ your spiritual sovereignty.
Abstract
Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned helplessness is now very well-charted biologically and the original theory got it backwards. Passivity in response to shock is not learned. It is the default, unlearned response to prolonged aversive events and it is mediated by the serotonergic activity of the dorsal raphe nucleus, which in turn inhibits escape. This passivity can be overcome by learning control, with the activity of the medial prefrontal cortex, which subserves the detection of control leading to the automatic inhibition of the dorsal raphe nucleus. So, animals learn that they can control aversive events, but the passive failure to learn to escape is an unlearned reaction to prolonged aversive stimulation. In addition, alterations of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex-dorsal raphe pathway can come to subserve the expectation of control. We speculate that default passivity and the compensating detection and expectation of control may have substantial implications for how to treat depression.
(Excerpts from the foregoing):
“… the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events …”
<> This is the first sentence, and it makes no sense. How can succumbing to an uncontrollable event be marked as failure?
“… theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses ─ that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape …”
<> Learning that nothing you do matters undermines your efforts to escape the situation … Brilliant! Genius‑level shit! Where’s my yellow sign?
“ … The mechanism of learned helplessness is now very well-charted biologically … “
<> Well, after torturing animals (and humans) for 50 years and millions of dollars, one would hope you’ve learned something – preferably, that you are sick bastards, and you should pray for redemption.
“ … the original theory got it backwards. Passivity in response to shock is not learned. It is the default, unlearned response to prolonged aversive events … “
<> An animal “gives up” after being brutalized in such a manner that its efforts to escape are futile, and your big insight is whether this is “learned” or “default”. What does that even mean? Who gives a flying #$@&?%-? I notice you can’t even speak what you do, using “prolonged aversive events” instead of torture.
“ … mediated by the serotonergic activity of the dorsal raphe nucleus … activity of the medial prefrontal cortex … alterations of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex-dorsal raphe pathway … ”
<> Ka-ching! Well said, Dr. Maniac. This is the kind of language that keeps the dollars flowing. As long as you know big words and are trying to make sentient beings miserable, there’s a prestigious place for you in the cabal’s universities.
Spoiler Alert: In the section following, I will assert that the super-technical part of this ongoing experimentation is to find neural and biochemical techniques for inducing misery – a reverse engineering of the sensory manifestation of torment, so that it can be accomplished on the cheap and at mass scales.
“ … may have substantial implications for how to treat depression … “
<> The requisite “someday cure cancer” teaser. Yeah, your 50 years of torture have really paid off. Here’s testimony:
Main body:
In the early 1960s, Richard Solomon and his students at the University of Pennsylvania wanted to know how prior Pavlovian fear conditioning would influence later instrumental learning. To find out they restrained dogs in a hammock and the dogs got 64 mild-moderate electric shocks to their back paws, each shock heralded by a tone. Twenty-four hours later the dogs were placed in a shuttlebox and were supposed to learn to escape shock by jumping a short barrier between the two chambers. The two-factor theory of avoidance learning predicted that turning on the fear-inducing tone in the shuttlebox would generate fear and accelerate jumping. But to the experimenters' annoyance, they could not test this because the dogs often failed to escape altogether in the shuttlebox and passively waited the shock out.
<> The experimenters are annoyed because their torture of the animals didn’t cause the behavior they speculated it would. One paragraph into this paper and we know we’re dealing with assholes.
We must mention that running dog experiments was a harrowing experience for both of us. We are both dog lovers and as soon as we could we stopped experimenting with dogs and used rats, mice, and people in helplessness experiments, with exactly the same pattern of results.
<> Awwww – dog lovers! They were so happy when they could stop torturing dogs and torment people instead. I’m sorry I called them assholes.
To summarize briefly, a wide range of other behavioral changes followed INESC (Ed: the inescapable group) including reduced aggression, reduced social dominance, reduced food and water intake, exaggerated attention to external cues, reduced preference for sweet tastes, potentiated fear conditioning, slowed fear extinction, neophobia, anxious behavior on measures such as juvenile social exploration, potentiated opioid reward, exaggerated stereotypy to stimulants, and others. Importantly, none of these occurred if the shocks were escapable.
<> So, after being tortured, the animals displayed withdrawal, loss of appetite, nervousness, and so on. Wow! Cutting edge insights. Whoulda thunk it? Sidenote: the Sackler family were especially interested in the increased welcoming of opioid relief.
The early 1970s witnessed the first research directed at understanding the neural basis of these phenomena. Of course, these investigations could use only the neuroscience tools then available …
<> Patience, Grasshopper, you’ll soon have many more ways to slice and dice the brain and nervous system.
… by the mid-1980s, there were nascent neurochemical views, but their detailed mechanism(s) of operation were necessarily murky given the tools that were then available …
From this point on, we each went off to do other things. Seligman began to study humans exclusively.
<> C’mon, guys, admit it! You were never really worried that some rat in some lab was depressed, right? Only humans can pay good money to be sick.
The human work went in three directions. (Ed. The first was fully analogous to the footshock procedure) … subjective unsystematic reports occasionally revealed that people from the inescapable group said that “nothing worked so why try?”
<> Isn’t that the definition of helpless? – “nothing worked”. Geez, can I get paid to do this shit? And notice the “subjective unsystematic reports”. Brings to mind the more recent subjective unreliable reports that Ivermectin can significantly ameliorate the effects of Covid.
The second direction … claimed that inescapability itself was not sufficient to produce anything more than momentary helplessness. Rather, the explanations that subjects made of the causes of their helplessness predicted the time course and the extent of helplessness. Subjects who attributed their helplessness to permanent causes (e.g., these problems will always be unsolvable) would show long-term helplessness in that situation. In contrast subjects who attributed their helplessness to temporary causes (e.g., only verbal puzzles are unsolvable) would not show helplessness later in that situation. Subjects who attributed their helplessness to pervasive factors (e.g., most problems are unsolvable) would show passivity across situations, whereas subjects who attributed helplessness to local factors (e.g., this problem is unsolvable) would only show helplessness in the original situation.
<> People are different. Situations are different. Outcomes are different. I’m no gold‑plated university professor, but I’m pretty sure we already knew this … like, about a thousand years ago.
The third endeavor that Seligman pursued was the possibility that learned helplessness was a laboratory model of clinical depression … diagnosed by the presence of at least 5 of the following 9 symptoms: sad mood, loss of interest, weight loss, sleep problems, psychomotor problems, fatigue, worthlessness, indecisiveness or poor concentration, thoughts of suicide …
Learned helplessness in the laboratory – combining the animal and human experimental results – produced eight of the nine symptoms, with the only exception being suicide …
<> This probably isn’t helpful, but why don’t we just say that sometimes you feel good and sometimes you feel lousy? The reasons are multitudinous. Also, I’m pretty sure mice don’t commit suicide … but I wish you would.
Not only did inescapable shock and noise produce the symptoms of depression, but the converse occurred as well: Depressed people, who had not received inescapable events, behaved in the laboratory as if they had—showing passivity in the shuttlebox and giving up on cognitive problems …
<> Well, yeah, they already feel like crap – you don’t have to bother tormenting them.
(Ed. After 2000 Seligman started working on positive concepts in psychology and wrote several books with titles such as “Learned Optimism” and “Authentic Happiness” and “Flourish”. Kudos, Marty! Better late than never!)
Here are the mechanisms that were assumed by the original theory:
First: DETECT: Animals DETECT the dimension of controllability and uncontrollability. (This was also called the dimension of contingency and non-contingency).
Second: EXPECT. Animals that DETECT uncontrollability EXPECT shock or other events to be once again uncontrollable in new situations and this undermines trying to escape in new situations.
<> Wilson Van Dusen in his book, The Presence of Other Worlds, states that Emanuel Swedenborg distilled human activity down to two functions: “understanding and willing”. I express this as “cognition and volition”. That pretty much sums human activity. Swedenborg died in 1772, and he probably cadged the idea from some ancient Greek, so I’m thinkin’ this ain’t so new.
We state inclusion/exclusion criteria for any adequate neural learned helplessness study at the outset. A study must meet two criteria. First, control over the stressor must be manipulated to determine whether any neural change measured is indeed a consequence of the uncontrollability/controllability of the event. Otherwise, the measured change could be a simple consequence of the stressor per se.
<> Heavens to Betsy! We wouldn’t want to confuse learned helplessness with ordinary stress. We might lose our funding!
Second, the initial stressor must occur in an environment very different from the test environment since one of the hallmarks of learned helplessness is trans-situationality.
… For example, there are a large number of reports under the label “biological mechanisms of learned helplessness” that have delivered inescapable gridshocks while the subjects are constrained to one side of a shuttlebox, and then escape learning is tested in that very same shuttlebox. Poor test shuttlebox escape learning could be mediated by fear conditioning to the shuttlebox environment, since freezing is a prominent fear response.
<> Now, listen up folks ─ we can’t have the torture victim just be afraid of the torture box. We need the victim afraid of EVERYTHING. (To keep this sounding scientific, we made up the term “trans‑situationality”). Also, freezing in fear is old news. Bo-o-o-ring. We’re interested in perpetual helplessness. Chronic helplessness. Any bozo with a torture box can cause freezing.
It is, of course, difficult to know where to start in a search for the circuitry that mediates learned helplessness.
<> CIRCUITRY. I repeat – CIRCUITRY (!!!!!!!!!!!!) They finally admit it. They want to flip a switch!
By the mid-1990s there was quite a bit known about the neural circuitry that regulates fight/flight and fear/anxiety, and so this information could be used.
<> So, their tech-y wet dream has come true … um, I mean autonomic nocturnal emission.
The most proximate mediator of fight/flight seemed to be the dorsal periaqueductal gray (dPAG), while the extended amygdala (bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, BNST, together with the amygdala proper) mediated fear/anxiety.
<> I don’t give a hang whether this is true or not. This is reductionism, a sophomoric method of interpreting reality which has never produced any profound understanding of anything. Mayhem and suffering, sure – but understanding? No. Check it out at Wikipedia and read about Vaucanson’s Automatic Duck, another hoax and LIE. (link)
The work above indicates that dorsal raphe nucleus 5-HT neurons are selectively activated if the shock is inescapable, and that this activation is necessary and sufficient to produce passivity and anxiety. But the key question is why the dorsal raphe nucleus responds only if the shock is inescapable. The most obvious option is that the dorsal raphe nucleus DETECTS the uncontrollability of the shock. To do so the dorsal raphe nucleus would have to extract the conditional probability of the shock offset given that the wheel turn or some other escape response occurs, and the conditional probability of the shock offset occurring in the absence of those responses, and compare these two probabilities. When the probabilities are equal the shock is uncontrollable. However, to do this, the dorsal raphe nucleus would require inputs informing it whether the motor responses have occurred and whether the shock is present or not, but the dorsal raphe nucleus does not receive these types of somatomotor and somatosensory inputs.
<> Fuck the dorsal raphe nucleus! The DRN is not the boss of me! These people are insane. They make it sound like that little alien in the robot’s head in Men in Black:
We believe that the neural explanations strongly inform the psychological explanations … On the other hand, the neural work would likely never have been done without the original behavioral work and psychological theorizing … but then translation back to psychological concepts also seems useful.
<> In 399 B.C. Socrates said, “It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking.” I guess in all of the excitement of the intervening years we forgot his words and had to reinvent the mind-body relationship all over again – with funding, of course.
A second theoretical advance came from the neural circuitry: We know that the part of the brain that DETECTs control is a circuit formed by the prelimbic area of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the dorsal medial striatum. When this system was inactivated so that control/lack of control information could not be detected and subjects were exposed to escapable shock or inescapable shock, the rats reacted to the shock as if it were inescapable – both in terms of passivity/anxiety and of neurochemistry. The data showed that all the animals, regardless of whether they had an escape response that they learned perfectly, acted later as if the stressor had been inescapable. That is, if the control detecting circuit was taken offline, all animals acted as if the shock was inescapable whether the animal actually was able to escape the shock or not. This suggests that if the DETECT control circuit is absent the animal invariably reverts to the default of helplessness following exposure to any prolonged stressor.
<> The boldened words are all you need. I repeat: They want to flip a switch!
For example, ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions eliminated the ability of behavioral control to blunt the passivity and fear caused by inescapable shock, but these lesions did not even reduce the passivity and fear blunting impact of safety signals (Christianson, Benison, et al., 2008). Instead, safety signals had their impact via the insular cortex and insular cortex lesions eliminated the protective effects of safety signals.
<> Now you’re talking lobotomy-type-shit. As usual, with scientific cruelty, we are trained to think, “Oh, they don’t do that anymore. We’re more civilized and enlightened now”.
When we first found that dogs given inescapable shock later failed to learn to escape in a shuttlebox, but that dogs given exactly equated escapable shock later escaped normally, the ideas that we developed were shaped by thinking of what might be most adaptive for dogs, rats and people.
<> It’s nice to be included in such esteemed company!
Unresolved Issues
At the level of basic neural circuits, there are several important unresolved issues.
… However genetic/molecular tools are now available that allow these gold standard experiments …
<> Katie bar the door! These lunatics aren’t done yet and they’ve got new gizmos to play havoc with. Keep in mind that “gold standard” means “adhering to the cabal’s wishes” because that is who owns all the gold.
Given our caution about the multifarious functions and structures of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, it has not escaped our notice that one such function is prospection, the representation of possible futures (Seligman et al., 2013). In their review of prospection research Gilbert and Wilson (2007) conclude “An extensive body shows that prefeeling depends critically on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and that people with damage to this area find it difficult to predict the hedonic consequences of future events”
<> We’re almost done! Prospection means anticipation but sounds more like something complicated that needs more funding. Prefeeling reminds me of George Carlin wondering what “preboarding the airplane” meant. Hedonic means pleasurable or pleasant (more funding again). I thought that racetrack touts were the only people who could predict future events. Maybe we could do a gold standard study …
In conclusion … We are mindful that in the theory of explanatory style, “hope” consists largely in the habit of expecting that future bad events will not be permanent, global, and uncontrollable, rather they will be temporary, local and controllable … Such expectations are likely the best natural defense against helplessness …
<> Not to brag, but I learned that when I was five years old, playing my 78 RPM recording of the 1902 Swedish children’s fable “The Little Engine That Could”. Of course, who cares what a five-year-old thinks?
THAT’S IT! Thank you so much for stopping by! God bless you in all your studies and collaborations with other Truth-seekers in these troubled times.
You can write to me at arnie1815@proton.me
This is a great write up.
"Freudianism was a bunch of sick Talmudic filth designed mentally cripple the serfscattlegoy”
Oh man…..after 50 years I agree. But it took me that long to figure it out.
I heartily have the most utter disrespect for white coats with psychiatrists on the apex of my list of people I would throw out the earth-ship to ligthen the cargo….if you know what I mean.
The foot experiment video of Patrick Jordan is excellent.
Some of the experiments I was not aware of….yes all lies. Experiment that never occurred. Because everybody is conditioned to “RESPECT” authority. A good exercise is to begin to disrespect these figure and look at them like meth dealers at street corners. They are a bunch of psychopaths who friends with the other psychopaths, head of states, or so called leaders…..
Author and I seem to have grown up in the same era the way he writes.
Over the years, and much reading, I always figured maybe I'm just mentally stronger(?) than many of these subjects. After all, scientists never lie, they follow the evidence.
Covid changed all this. I witnessed in real time, lying, and more lying, and then the playground actions of adults(!) to humiliate and marginalize dissenters and even questioners by force, if necessary.
This excellent article, which must have taken an enormous amount of energy from the author, further validates my observations of life that I am rather normal; I just give things more thought than the average person who blows "to and fro" as stated in James 1.
Thanks for an incredibly long, well-thought out article which, once again proves, Mom was right: Follow the Golden Rule and repudiate Evil as taught in the Bible.
I will never look at the Man of La Mancha the same!
The "Impossible Dream" is what makes humanity.
Thank you for the insights.