by Mary Leary Gorman

The Behaviorism, which co-opted earthling psychology after World War I, was a dramatic and partisan rejection of the previous generation of wide-guage thinkers who founded Scientific Psychology in the later years of the eighteenth century.  A rejection of men like Wundt, Fechner and Tichener who defined the subject matter of psychology -- the rigorous study of the relationship between inner and outer geography, between consciousness and external stimulus-behavior.

Before World War I, psychologists operated in respectful collaboration with "subjects."  The basic laboratory technique was "Introspective training" -- teaching people how to attend to, calibrate and describe the workings of their own body-brain.  This charming laboratory by-product of 19th century Romantic Individualism was fiercely rejected by the Behaviorists who moved in after World War I and sternly defined psychology in terms of objective stimulus-response -- scornfully banishing to the shadowy realm of subjectivity any internal, personal reaction of the subject.*

And Oh boy, what a new toy for power-hungry hive-managers!  Psychology!  Conditioning!  Mind control!  From the first, Behaviorism was seen as the special province of the manipulators, the secret services, the bureaucrats, the espionage boys, the spies, the "dirty trick" operatives.

During World War II, the elite of American psychology worked with the Office of Special Services (OSS).  (The OSS was, after the war, reorganized as the CIA).  From their center near Washington, D.C., OSS psychologists developed the science of Personality Assessment.  Candidates for espionage and "dirty trick" operations were not only administered batteries of tests but were assessed in complex, contrived, simulated psychodramatic situations.  The classic example of OSS assessment involved the fake graduation party, which was played out as follows:

After several days of harassing assessment experiments (in which apparent co-equal colleagues and fellow candidates were actually planted psychologists, slyly playing disturbing and confusing roles) the candidates were invited to a party with staff members in which alcoholic drinks were served.  The celebration party was, of course, part of the assessment.  The candidates' reaction to the fake comradery was part of the selection process.

Easy-going trustful souls, given to cocktail fun, were transferred out to the Office of War Information.  Distrustful, cagey, paranoid types were immediately screened-in as part of the Intelligence (sic) elite; in :Pynchon's words, "... the New Chaps with their little green antennas out for the usable emanations of power, versed in American politics (knowing the difference between the New Dealers of OWI and the eastern and moneyed Republicans behind OSS), keeping brain-dossiers on latencies, weaknesses, tea-taking habits, errogenous zones of all, all who might someday be useful."

From these war-time roots grew the Post-war Psychology of Selection and Adjustment.

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* Before 1914 psychologists were Protestant scholars and gentlemen who, in contrast to the academic bureaucrats of today, would never stoop to deceive or manipulate subjects.  The ethos of the time is nicely illustrated by the comment of Henry Lewis Stimson, Secretary of War, 1911-1913 and again, believe it or not, 1940-1945, who tried to block the emergence of OSS-CIA elements by saying, "Gentlemen, never open other people's mail."

WINTER 1977
TUCSON LECTURE
"TO LIVE EAST OF DENVER IS TO FAIL THE INTELLIGENCE TEST"

The truth of the Occidental Ascendance becomes comically clear when we move down and back East across the Atlantic Ocean.  The Greenwich time zones are in centuries.  If Boston is two hundred years before Los Angeles (no accident that the current Neurological Capital of the planet has been given the high-altitude title "City of the Angels"), then surely we see that London is four hundred years back and down.

What, in truth, can we expect from England?  Elizabethan Style?  Repetitious tradition?  Culture?  Only in the sense of a class structure -- which penalizes new genetic intelligence in favor of inherited privilege.  Parent-child inheritance of bureaucratic advantage always drives the superior-futique genes into migration.  This is not a political complaint, but a neuro-genetic I.D. test.  The genetically active, whether descended from the sperm-ova of prince or pauper (every gene-pool contains its princes and paupers), always migrate West.  Those who rely on power remain in the Eastern capital.

If England is a comic opera what can we say about France?  Paris is a museum of dusty Louis XIV granduer.  And what, in relevant charity for the past, can be said about the lessons that an intelligent terrestrial primate can learn today in Lisbon?  Madrid?  Rome?  Athens?  Cairo?  Beirut?  Jerusalem?

There is this to be said for N.A.T.O. nations.  They are the most Western, i.e., the freest and smartest gene-pools of the Old Continent.  Examine a map of the Euro-Asian land mass.  Color in blue those countries which are democratic, which respect human rights, which out-law torture, which allow any cultural or individual experimentation.  You will see that the blue countries cluster nervously at the Western borders of the huge, Euro-Asian hemisphere.  Notice as you go East you find more government restrictions, more centralization, more contempt for the individual, more commitment to tradition and familial-dictatorship.

To live in the East is to fail a genetic intelligence test.  This winter I traveled from San Diego to Buffalo and told the shivering natives, "Buffalo is an intelligence test you have failed.  So you have to stay here and repeat Buffalo 1A."  (Laughter)  Can there possibly be one intelligent person left in North Ireland?  Uganda?  (Laughter)  Any Ugandan with more than eight billion neurons surely has swum a river or climbed a mountain to flee from that jungle of primitive barbarism.

And what can we say to those Americans who, via genetic back-spin, look East for something to do?  The time has come to learn how to read the Occidental Altimeter.  When you move East you crash-land in the past.  Consider our liberal Potomac executives and congressional busybodies who continually ignore the wisdom of Washington's farewell advice not to meddle in the affairs of the Old World.  Poor President Carter sends a senile envoy, Averell Harriman, to Cyprus to settle the quarrel between the Turks and the Greeks -- forgetting that Mid-Brain Mediterraneans have been fighting each other about mammalian territorial borders for 5,000 years!  And here comes Secretary of State Vance attempting to mediate border disputes between the Palestinians and the Hebrews!  How about that for a genetic laugh!  And Nixon tilts in favor of Pakistan!  And Kissinger intervenes Lon Nol in Cambodian politics thus assuming the karma for two million dead and creating the ultimate insectoid state-postwar Cambodia.  Foreign policy is the game of mad monsters playing chess blindfolded with mammalian-gene-pools as pawns.  Foreign policy is totally foreign to the American Myth.  That's why accented Europeans like Kissinger and Brzezinski are selected to be Secretaries of State.  It's a European game several centuries old. 

Here's your American Ecological Foreign Policy.  The folks of the Old World inhabit pre-civilized, barbarian gene-pools.  Europeans and Africans and Asians are our own animal origins still obsessed with territorial conflict.  This is not said in disinterest.  By all means send food and veterinary medicines to the Old World.  By all means send the old gene-pools invitations that freedom, change, mobility and Intelligence Increase awaits in the West.  But to meddle in European-African-Asian politics is an attempt to reconcile the ancient quarrel between rabbits and foxes.  Shall Free Americans take sides in back yard competition between the red ants and the black ants of South Africa, or the ferocious-fanatics of the Middle East?  Interestingly enough, the national, tribal folk of Africa say they just want to be left alone and have no loyal commitments to Soviet or Pentagon politicians.  By all means let them alone.