The Indoctrination & Utility
of
Loyalty, Jealousy & Competition
in the
Religious, Ethnic & National Mind
I. Introduction: The Relevance of Rivalry in the Age of
Limitation
II. From Hunting & Gathering to the Accumulation of
Agricultural Product
III. Language, Publication & the Vehicles of
Authoritarianism
IV. The Scarcity Principle & the Manipulation of Anxiety
V. Be Part of or Anxiously Not: Group Identification
& Loyalty
VI. The Normalization of Competition & Mutual Opposition
VII. The Normalization of Jealousy & Mutual Antagonism
VIII. The Purposeful Corruption of Idealism
IX. Agricultural Land, Natural Resource & Wealth
Accumulation
X. Commercial Land Development & Wealth Accumulation
XI. The Religious Process: From Spiritual Truth to Defendable
Institution
XII. Modern Religion: The Human Potential Cult & Wealth
Accumulation
XIII. Government as the Institutionalization of Rivalry
XIV. Conclusion: The Costs & Benefits of Rivalry in the
Age of Limitation
I. Introduction: The Relevance of Rivalry in the Age of
Limitation
The notions that rivalry 1) lays at the core of the world's
problems, and 2) is so normal to us that we do not see it as being at that core
struck me in one-two order over the course of several months. I had been
looking into group dynamics (again), this time with respect to how they play
out in the "in" and "out" group schematics of mind control
cults (see #. #., #). I'd come to
understand some time ago that people can be manipulated by concepts they do not
perceive or understand utilized by others who do perceive and understand those
concepts. And moreover by those who are willing to utilize those concepts
cynically, meaning "to achieve dominance and control over others without
regard to ethics or morality."
I had also come to understand (via cult studies) that such
control can be achieved training people to see reality in dualistic, either-or,
all-or-nothing, this-way-or-that, all-good-or-all-evil, all-right-or-all-wrong
polarities. In fact, reality is just whatever it is on a gray scale that may
get very "dark" or "light" at times, but is rarely
"black" or "white." More importantly, reality is what it is
when it is what it is, and not "this" or "that" once and
forever. But if the "authorities" (see #, # and #) can convince those
who have been trained to accept authority -- rather than sensory
perception (what one can see, hear and feel for oneself) -- as the means of
discerning what is from what isn't or what is "right" vs. what is
"wrong," polarization can be made to seem normal.
Authority has its useful place. In a world of limited
resources, some degree of control needs to be in place to prevent chaotic
competition. But blindness to authority's useful purpose vs. its use to blind
the masses to what is (on that scale of grays, for example) in the service of
resource accumulation by a small, informed minority can -- and very evidently
does -- lead to problems. Stalin's, Mussolini's, Hitler's, Mao's, Marcos's,
Khomeini's, Qaddafi's, Hussein's, Kim's and other's use of authoritarian
principles to force the collective mind of the masses into polarized,
dichotomous thinking has led to rather obvious problems.
What struck me almost immediately in my search for data on
rivalry is that it looks like no one has recognized rivalry per se. I
found gobs of relatively trite material on sibling rivalry and sports
rivalries, as well as political and religious rivalries. But utterly nothing
exploring the concept of "competition for the same objective" as a
common, cultural phenomenon. And certainly nothing looking into rivalry as an
organizational principle so deeply embedded in the collective sub-conscious
that it is simply taken for granted. Something so "norm-al" that it's
never examined from outside the common cultural paradigm.
And thus something so normalized in our minds that we
fail to consider its immense relevance to our beliefs and emotions, many of
which influence both very useful and very damaging and dangerous behaviors. If
competition has been normalized in the rest of the world, one's own society
will feel its impact. But if one's own society is merely conditioned,
socialized and normalized to competition (see #) without being aware of it,
will that society be able to see "outside the box" with the problems
competition may induce became become thermonuclear?
II. From Hunting & Gathering to the Accumulation of
Agricultural Product
There was a time, of course, when rivalry made unquestionable
sense. Pre-historic plants competed for space and nutrients from the soil
beneath them. Differing firms of primordial plankton competed for nutrients in
the sea around them. Larger and ever more complex forms of marine life
contested each other for plankton and smaller forms of marine life. Land
animals played rival to each other for whatever flesh and plant life was
available in a range of availability that was limited enough to sustain
life vs. the expense of energy needed to do so.
During the hunter-gatherer era that pre-dated the
development of organized, collective agriculture, man did likewise. But with
the advent of organized agriculture, came the understanding that grain crops
could be stored for later use. Grain could be collected, stored and accumulated.
If the records left by the scribes of Hammurabi in the 18th century BCE, as
well as those of similar times in Egypt, are understood for what they are, one
can see how the accumulation of agricultural product led quite directly to the
mental constructs of possession, competition and rivalry (see #).
Because it became utterly clear as soon as computers could
be used to translate the cuneiform and heiroglyphs left by those scribes that
the first significant forms of written communication were simply this: Lists of
what belonged to whom. "This is mine," is the simple
yet hugely revealing theme of the stone tablets of the ancient world.
And while it seems likely that tribal organization may have
competed for agricultural products, it is clear that the competition between
the city states along the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates Rivers almost 30 centuries
ago grew more than the seeds of the next agricultural crop season. Those seeds
of competition grew into fields of rivalry.
And it was Hammurabi who first (so far as we yet know)
codified that rivalry into laws dictating the conduct of the masses specific to
protecting his wealth from the efforts of others to take it from him.
III. Language, Publication & the Vehicles of
Authoritarianism
The Code of Hammurabi can be read in its currently
translated entirety at
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/hammenu.asp.
Quoting Yale Law School professor C. F. Horne, "[B]y far the most
remarkable of the Hammurabi records is his code of laws, the earliest-known
example of a ruler proclaiming publicly to his people an entire body of laws,
arranged in orderly groups, so that all men might read and know what was
required of them. The code was carved upon a black stone monument, eight feet
high, and clearly intended to be reared in public view. ... The code then
regulates in clear and definite strokes the organization of society. The judge
who blunders in a law case is to be expelled from his judgeship forever, and
heavily fined. The witness who testifies falsely is to be slain. Indeed, all
the heavier crimes are made punishable with death. Even if a man builds a house
badly, and it falls and kills the owner, the builder is to be slain. If the
owner's son was killed, then the builder's son is slain. We can see where the
Hebrews learned their law of "an eye for an eye." These grim
retaliatory punishments take no note of excuses or explanations, but only of
the fact--with one striking exception. An accused person was allowed to cast
himself into "the river," the Euphrates. Apparently the art of
swimming was unknown; for if the current bore him to the shore alive he was
declared innocent, if he drowned he was guilty. So we learn that faith in the
justice of the ruling gods was already firmly, though somewhat childishly,
established in the minds of men. ... Yet even with this earliest set of laws,
as with most things Babylonian, we find ourselves dealing with the end of
things rather than the beginnings. Hammurabi's code was not really the
earliest. The preceding sets of laws have disappeared, but we have found
several traces of them, and Hammurabi's own code clearly implies their
existence. He is but reorganizing a legal system long established."
If rivalry is the underlying organizational principle and
source of a leader's motivation to protect his wealth, authority is the
mechanism. And authoritarianism is the philosophy of that mechanism. Few
have grasped the significance of that concept as deeply as Theodore Adorno (see
#) and Robert Altemeyer (see # and #). Adorno is everlastingly opaque and
difficult to comprehend; Altemeyer is clear as high-grade lens glass, however.
Altemeyer's (and his many followers') primary research into authoritarian
beliefs, values, ideas, principles, codes, doctrines, policies and rules and
how they play out in human behavior have left us with a far more detailed
capacity to understand the mechanisms of social control than the more dramatic
and widely influential writings of Arendt, Asch, Berger & Luckman, Bernays,
Buber, Cialdini, Cooley, Deikman, Domhoff, Durkheim, Ellul, Ewen, Fromm,
Hedges, Henry, Herman & Chomsky, Hoffer, Huxley, Japsers, Klaehn, Kramer
& Alstad, Lakoff, Lifton, Lippman, Machiavelli, Malthus, Marx, Miles,
Milgram, Miller, Mills, Neuman, Phillips, Rousseau, Rokeach, Russell, Schein,
Singer, Skinner, Sproule, Steele, Tuchman, Veblen, Weber, and Woodward &
Denton listed below.
My purpose in listing all these authors is (partly) to
demonstrate that the topic of social control is neither new nor under-examined,
however rarely the precise matter of "authority" as a mechanism of
social control has been put under the microscope. But even Altemeyer failed to
see the use of authoritarian mechanisms like persuasion from some
"pulpit" (be it an article on the op-ed page, an ostensible expert
talking head on CNN, a politician speaking before a rapt audience of
thousand-dollar-a-plate donors, or some un-sourced email that plays to the
recipient's emotional reasoning) to advance the cause of an unmentioned
rivalry.
In his three and half decades of work of "relational
context" as a fundamental component of human interaction, as well as
depression and anxiety, Steven Hayes at the U. of Nevada Reno has developed
extensive research to demonstrate the effects of authority and rivalry (though
he has never mentioned the latter that I know of) on human interaction. For
Hayes -- and his fast-growing army of followers in the exploding
mindfulness-based cognitive therapy movement that is revolutionizing
psychotherapy at this time -- it's all about the language we use to
explain out perceptions. "The words," Hayes reminds his readers again
and again in his many books, "are not the thing itself; they are merely
representations of it." "At best," Hayes says, "they are
relatively accurate descriptions."
But under the influence of deeply and largely unconsciously
held core beliefs, values, ideas, ideals, codes, rules and what have you those verbal representations may be comments,
observations, appraisals, evaluations, assessments, judgments, and other
verbalized "frames" of reality. "It's the corruption of our relational
frames that leads us astray," says Hayes. Hayes is not alone in this
view. The most respected therapists of the late 20th century -- Albert Ellis,
Aaron Beck, Donald Meichenbaum, Martin Seligman, Richard Wessler and Jeffrey
Young among them -- are all in agreement that as the we believe, so we feel; as
we believe and feel, so we appraise; and as we appraise, so we act.
Hayes goes on in several of his books to examine the
behavioristic psychological school's notion of the function of any behavior.
His "functional assessment of behavior" asks the simple question,
"What is the object or purpose of any action?" And beyond that, what
is the objective or purpose of any core belief? With respect to the
utilization of authoritarianism as an organizing principle in society, I am
prepared herein to assert and argue that the purpose of authoritarianism is in
no small part "the development and maintenance of control over an group
for the sake of wealth accumulation and maintenance by selling that group on
the notion of rivalry with another group."
Rivalry is far from the only means of establishing and
maintaining group cohesion, of course. All manner of reward and reinforcement
schematics are in play, including -- most significantly in my view -- the
stipulation of dualistic, dichotomous, polarized relational frames as a means
of interpreting perception in the minds of school children beginning at the age
of about four.
Those who wonder why some parents elect to send their
children to Montessori or Krishnamurti schools may be assisted by understanding
that
1) most public and private educators teach social
organization via common understanding of phenomena for the sake technical
skills acquisition to support cultural competition in the face of rivalry for
resources,
2) that those who determine the nature of most public and
private educational systems are concerned principally with wealth accumulation
vs. rival wealth accumulation,
3) there are other ways to view the purposes of education
even though the one described immediately above serves very worthwhile purposes
considering that nature of many of the rivals, and
4) one of those ways includes the understanding that
relatively -- or even completely -- undisturbed, unfiltered, "pure"
perception of what actually is, is pretty much what one acquires in
advanced degree work, especially in the pure sciences like physics, chemistry,
mathematics, biology, physiology, neuro-biology and -physiology, and the
observation of individual, interpersonal and social group behavior for not
other purpose than to simply determine what is so regardless of the future use
of such knowledge.
IV. The Scarcity Principle & the Manipulation of Anxiety
The "scarcity principle" seems to be attributed to
economist Lionel Robbins who offered it up in a paper in the 1920s. No one had,
however, written an entire book about the matter until Turner & Rojec just
two years ago. Their book never (so far as I know) mentions the concept of
rivalry per se. But it does speak to the "solidarity" that can be
developed in any group with respect to threats to the group's control of
resources and authority thereover.
One hardly need look further than a good basic, high school
history book to find examples of manipulating the beliefs and emotions of the
masses to support authoritarian control imperatives. And if one is really lazy,
look no further than CNN, MSNBC or Fox News. A daily dose of Kim Jong Un will
fix one right up these days. Kim, his father and his grandfather identified
their rivals south of the 38th parallel unmistakably. Moreover, they have quite
cynically -- even viciously one can assert with little effort -- played the
scarcity card with a population of true believers Eric Hoffer, Robert Lifton, Edgar
Schein and Margaret Singer have built careers upon.
But here's the real zinger: The same thing has been done in
an almost identical fashion right here in the land of plenty by another Korean
named Sun Myung Moon. One might be tempted to assert, "It's a Korean
thing," but believe me, it's not. It's a cult thing. Lifton's eight
identifying aspects of cult operations include the following:
1. Control of at least the mental, if not physical
environment.
2. Manipulation of the members with contrived spiritual
experiences.
3. Establishing impossible-to-meet standards of thought and
behavior.
4. Confessing one's "bad" thoughts (and behaviors)
to another.
5. Belief in the absolute, "scientifically proven"
truth of the leader's claims.
6. Loading the language to force those who use it
into yes or no, all-or-nothing termination of further consideration.
7. Demand that group dogma is true regardless of personal
experience.
8. Believing that the cult members have a right to exist,
but rivals (meaning everyone outside the cult) do not.
In practice, cults almost invariably work through a cycle of
evolution that leads to rivalry with everyone outside the door, outside the
compound, outside the church, outside the meeting room, outside the belief
system. Karl Marx saw the rival to be anchored in the awful excesses of the
banking system and the blinded bourgeoisie who propped up corporate capitalism
on their laboring shoulders. (Sure; there were all sorts of excesses. But you
and I enjoy running water and electricity in our homes because of it, not to
mention the freedom to drive our little bodies where ever we wish to go on a
moment's notice.) David Miscavige sees the rivals to be everyone who has
anything to say about Scientology that questions what he has to say about it,
regardless of all the interviews with the "church's" angry
ex-members. Likewise Donald Adams and the other guardians of the
"theocratic organization" (their words; not mine) of the Governing
Body of Jehovah's Witnesses in Brooklyn, New York.
It may or may not be entirely fair to heap the last two in
with Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin, but while rivalry has rankled them all,
rivalry has also served a hugely useful purpose for them all. For as Eric
Hoffer observed four decades ago, very little serves to keep the true believers
truly believing more effectively than fear of prospect of having the culture
upon which they believe they depend threatened by the very evil they have built
very high walls to defend against. Musselini pointed at the communists. Hitler
pointed at the Jews. Stalin pointed at the fascists. And it worked.
One might even say that one's rival is often just about the
best friend a dictator can have.
V. Be Part of or Anxiously Not: Group Identification
& Loyalty
The average person's information processing is largely
limited to what Jean Piaget first called concrete operational processing (see
#) and lawyers call "stipulating" the possibilities (usually in terms
of "one thing" or "another." Piaget believed these to be a
natural developmental stage in humans that most people never grown beyond. But
I will suggest that such limitation would not be the case if children were
permitted to explore the universe and determine for themselves how things work
by and for themselves.
Rather -- as Jean Jacques Rousseau saw and reported in his
late 18th century book, Emile: A Treatise on Education -- children are
commonly trained from about the age of four onward to see things as they instructed
to see them. Which is to say in absolute, is-or-isn't, all-or-nothing,
this-not-that, concrete conceptual terms (meaning "in verbal
explanations" using words) that eliminate any possibilities in between a
pair of dualistic, dichotomous polarities. And in case you missed it before:
"The words," Hayes reminds his readers again and again in his many
books, "are not the thing itself; they are merely representations of
it." "At best," Hayes says, "they are relatively accurate
descriptions."
But at worst, they are gross, verbal misrepresentations
of a reality small children can see but cannot yet articulate. And it does
appear that there those who prefer the circumstances to remain such.
Rousseau (and others) argued that such
"concretism" ultimately destroys children's innate ability to generalize
from the specific and specify from the general in favor of mandated
referral to a limited set of stipulated possibilities. Moreover, the stipulated
possibilities are represented in words or images rather than by the thing
itself. Milton Rokeach was all over this in his mid-20th century book, The Open and Closed Mind:
Investigations into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems. The issue is further discussed by
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman in their book,
The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge,
only five years after Rokeach's book was published.
There was an initially hazy, but
increasingly clearer notion that intrigued me as I plowed through a lengthy
course of "higher" education in human behavior: That the "spectral" or
"continual" ranges of possible realities I had been trained not
to be able to see from the age of four to seventeen were now being revealed to
me by professors who expected me to be able to see what my mind had previously
been conditioned to deny.
Nowadays, I am able to see quite
clearly that most of those professors did not grasp the concept I just
outlined. Nor did they understand that they, themselves, had had their innate
capacities to see and understand the full ranges of possible realities de-programmed
and over-written with socially useful concepts like productivity, competition,
consumption, rivalry and patriotism. Nor that they were later re-programmed to
begin to be able to use a rigorously stipulated, rule-bound, scientific method
to be able to regain a verbally defined and thereby limited version of
the innate observational skills that had been trained out of them.
VI. The Normalization of Competition & Mutual Opposition
If one steps back from the concretism that results from the
normalization of dualistic, dichotomous, polarized appraisal, interpretation,
evaluation, assessment, analysis, consideration, attribution of meaning,
judgment and conclusion stipulated by socially inculcated core beliefs,
values, ideas, ideals, assumptions, presumptions, convictions, prejudices and
attitudes... one can quite easily see that everyone filters their
sensory experience thusly. There are very few people who simply look to see
what is at any moment in time.
Most people are schooled in large groups where the group
dynamics of credence, social proof and groupthink are installed as norms in
young people who as yet have no conscious, conceptual frame of reference to
turn to to question or take issue with such schooling. Cognitive scientist Noam
Chomsky asserted from his research in the 1960s that at least 98% of the
general population regularly speaks, writes and/or acts on the basis of
unconscious, unquestioned, unexamined core beliefs. (He is not alone. See also
Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, Donald Meichenbaum, Martin Selgiman, Richard Wessler,
and Jeffrey Young in the references hereto. Or just think of Wayne Dyer and his
"erroneous zones.")
It is beyond question of any sort for most cognitive
psychotherapists (the majority of people in practice at this time) that the
single greatest cause of depression, anxiety, mania, substance abuse,
over-eating, workaholism, post-traumatic stress disorder and what have you is
not stress. It's what one makes of stress because on one's unconscious core
beliefs, values, ideas, ideals, assumptions, presumptions, convictions,
prejudices and attitudes... and how they determine one's appraisal,
interpretation, evaluation, assessment, analysis, consideration, attribution of
meaning, judgment and conclusion in the face of any new sensory experience.
Thus, if one has been schooled to believe in productivity, competition, consumption, rivalry and
patriotism, one is likely to see the world through those filters. And not be
able to do much other behave in response to what he sees in any fashion other
than those filtrations because he does not even know the filters are there.
One can argue cases for and
against rivalry as a "natural" phenomenon among small children. But
most mental health professionals who work with small children will tell you
that they can very easily see the cause-and-effect relationships between
rivalrous attitudes in parents and rivalrous behavior in small children. The
parents of narcissistic, self-obsessed and unusually "competitive"
children tend to be so themselves. Children imitate what they see in those who
are most significant to them (see Brazelton et al, Mahler et al, and
Winnicott).
And then they go to school. Where
they will learn to compete for recognition and esteem on the playing field, as
well as in the classroom. And woe (truly) to the child who does not compete
well with his -- and now her -- rivals.
It's 2013 now, and the
socialization of female children to "go along to get along" that was
the cultural norm when I was child in the mid-20th century is rapidly being
displaced with a new socialization. A new socialization fueled in large part by
the political empowerment of "feministic" ideals built on a platform
of understandable, but nevertheless reactive, resentment towards male chauvinism
and millennia of female subjugation. Make no mistake here; I have plenty of
empathy for this. But I also see the potential for affects other than those
well-intended, and one of them is the unconscious embedding of rivalry as a
core belief in both sexes now that an increasing number of males -- for
one reason or another -- are "slacking," and no longer so
"naturally" competitive and rivalrous.
05-13-2013: I've decided to put this on the back burner for the time being. Too much other "real" work going on, and how many people will ever dig into material like this, anyway?
VII. The Normalization of Jealousy & Mutual Antagonism
VIII. The Purposeful Corruption of Idealism
IX. Agricultural Land, Natural Resource & Wealth
Accumulation
X. Commercial Land Development & Wealth Accumulation
XI. The Religious Process: From Spiritual Truth to
Defendable Institution
XII. Modern Religion: The Human Potential Cult & Wealth
Accumulation
XIII. Government as the Institutionalization of Rivalry
XIV. Conclusion: The Costs & Benefits of Rivalry in the
Age of Limitation
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____________________
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____________________________
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______________________________
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____________________
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Jeffrey Young: ________________________
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Thank you. Labels: brainwashing, common cult-ure, competition, manipulation, rivalry, thought control
