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Forbidden Fruits of the
Tree of Knowledge
Hank Parnell
Most of what is characterized as "human behavior" is as automatic as that of any
animal. Once a set of premises are established, human beings will act upon them
with an often frightful continuation of logic. It was once very fashionable (still is,
in
some unenlightened quarters) to blame the German people for the Nazis, or the
Russian people for the Soviets, or the Chinese or the Cambodians for their
communist atrocities. And yet we now literally know better. The majority of human
beings in any given group, regardless of sex, age, race, religion, culture, etc., will
behave similarly under similar circumstances. This is a thing the Left denies and the
Right pretends to misunderstand. It is called, quaintly but appropriately, "human
nature." Man is fundamentally individual, but he must live in groups to survive, and
hence is said to be "social." Much of an individual's personality seems to derive from
his identification with the various groups of which he is a member. The tendency
toward this is so strong that in other animals we would call it an "instinct." A
documentary about the making of the original Planet of the Apes film reveals that the
cast spontaneously segregated themselves according to the kind of monkey makeup
they were wearing. That is, chimps hung out with chimps, orangutans with
orangutans, and gorillas with gorillas. Even more tellingly, the actors took on the
traits of the distinct ape species as delineated in the film's script �hence the chimps
were quiet and thoughtful, the orangutans were haughty and aloof, and the gorillas
rowdy and boisterous. So pronounced was this effect that actress Kim Hunter, who
played the chimpanzee scientist Dr. Zira, admits she hardly spoke to actor Maurice
Evans, playing the orangutan Dr. Zaius, even though she knew him from previous
productions, because he was "one of them." This sort of thing has been
demonstrated repeatedly by psychologists, among both children and adults. Merely
divide a classroom up arbitrarily, tell one half they're inferior, the other half
they're
superior, and the kids will start to act superior or inferior, as externally-defined.
Recently psychologist Philip Zimbardo returned to familiar territory with a
BBC/Discovery Channel co-production called The Human Zoo, in which a group of
subjects was divided, one group getting red jackets, the other blue. The results, as in
Zimbardo's prison research experiment of 30 years earlier, were not very pretty to
watch; though they were vastly instructive to the honest student of human behavior.
Indeed, so great is the propensity for human beings to behave according to such
wholly arbitrary distinctions that great care must be taken to ensure that there is
some external, third-party panel of "judges" to keep the experimenters themselves
from believing the make- believe circumstances of their own experiments! (In his
infamous prison experiment, for example, Zimbardo himself began to interpret the
behavior of the student "prisoners" and their increasingly sadistic "guards" in terms
of
the prison metaphor he had created. As reported in The Guardian (10-16-01),
Zimbardo said: "It wasn't until much later that I realized how far into my prison role
I
was that I was thinking like a prison superintendent rather than a research
psychologist. [For example] less than 36 hours into the experiment, Prisoner # 8612
began suffering from acute emotional disturbance, disorganized thinking,
uncontrollable crying, and rage. In spite of all of this, we had already come to think
so
much like prison authorities that we thought he was trying to con us �to fool us into
releasing him.") Now imagine this applied to real differences between human beings,
such as race, religion, and culture. Is it any "wonder" people behave as they do in
this regard? In the kind of primitive hunting societies in which man evolved, such a
trait would have an obvious survival value. I leave it to the reader to decide how
much value it has, for survival or anything else, in today's world. I note merely that
it
is still there, hard-wired into our brains by our genes, and hence can't be eradicated
by "conditioning." Indeed, if you "teach" children not to be "intolerant" of blacks,
Hispanics, Moslems, etc., they will invariably become intolerant of those who are
perceived by them as being "intolerant" of these groups. This is why trying to
condition people to "be tolerant" ("sensitivity-training," "diversity education," etc.)
invariably ends up promoting only another kind of bigotry and intolerance. Another
trait with obvious survival value to a primitive hunting society is obedience to
authority. Zimbardo's research followed in the wake of pioneering studies done by
Stanley Milgram in 1964. The details of Milgram's experiments are fascinating; but
the upshot is that six out of every ten human beings will kill you if told to do so by
a
person they perceive as being in authority over them. They may have a great many
qualms about it, and exhibit a tremendous inner resistance to it �the traumatizing
effects on the participants was the excuse given for declaring such experiments
"unethical" by the psychological community�but six out of ten will still do it, and so
there is really little need to "wonder" about the Nazis or the Soviets any longer. Of
course I believe the main reason such experiments were declared "unethical" is
because scientists themselves were afraid of what they were finding out about
human nature. It throws a monkey wrench into all attempts at "social engineering"
and shows Freudian libido psychology and behavioral rat psychology to be the crocks
they truly are. Milgram's experiments were repeated, the results verified, in various
countries over a period of at least 20 years. Nor did the results vary too widely from
his original findings. Trivial, or truly frightening? You be the judge. One notes,
however, that instancing Milgram's experiments, or Zimbardo's prison experiment,
generally elicits the same kind of nervous unease from people as that exhibited by
those actors who so spontaneously segregated themselves according to the kind of
monkey makeup they were wearing for a film. It's not something people generally
want to �talk about� in other words. A third bit of discouraging news from the study of
human behavior comes as no surprise to some of us. You won't find much about it
on the Web, however; and you have to be something of a devotee of such less- than-
entertaining fare as the Discovery and Learning Channels to know anything about it.
It comes from a professor of psychology at Colgate University named Carrie Keating.
Professor Keating has discovered that, in human males at least (and despite the
caterwauling of feminists, males are decidedly the biologically-dominant sex among
humans), the leaders of any given human group are also invariably the best liars.
They may not, and often don't, have the best ideas, or even the better presentation of
those ideas; what they do have, however, is an ability, often through wholly nonverbal
cues, to be utterly convincing deceivers. Keating has observed this in both children
and adults. The dominant males are the best liars. (I first discovered Keating on a 2-
hour Learning Channel documentary entitled "The Lying Game," broadcast on 11-26-
01.) Keating's simple approach brought a group of students together to work out a
survival scenario following a plane crash. The real purpose was to discover the
leaders, the dominant or influential individuals. Then, each student was tested
individually on his or her ability to lie. They were given two drinks, one pleasant,
another unpleasant, and told to convince the researcher that the unpleasant drink
tasted better than the pleasant one. The videotaped results were shown to a control
group of non-participants who, without fail, identified the most convincing individuals
as the ones who emerged as the group leaders in the plane crash experiment. While
Keating insists that this doesn't mean that leaders are more likely to lie than anyone
else, she does admit that when leaders lie, they are more likely to be believed. Lying,
of course, is an intrinsic human social behavior. One literally cannot have a human
society without a certain amount or degree of prevarication. The power to conceive
is, after all, the power to deceive. We all must say or do things we don't agree with
in
order to interact successfully with other human beings, "go along to get along", as
the saying has it. And of course it helps if one can �believe� the lie. The technical
term
for this is "dissonance"; and the problems that result from holding conflicting beliefs
and attitudes is called "cognitive dissonance", which basically means that at some
level you're aware that you're talking out of both sides of your mouth or, more
commonly, professing to believe one thing while acting in the completely opposite
manner. The capacity for human self-delusion is enormous and only rarely does
such dissonance produce acute psychological distress. In the strictest sense I think
most people believe what they want to believe, that is, whatever reinforces their
sense of self and well-being. We all know, or should, that what is true is often far
less
important, and often even unimportant, compared to what human beings believe is
true. But why are people so willing to believe untruths? Group-identification,
obedience to authority, and the ability of leaders to lie explains only so much. It
seems to me there is a capacity for credulity built into the human brain that makes
the acceptance of lies, even the obvious "Big Lies", psychologically bearable. And of
course, there is. We have all heard stories of innocent people who confess to crimes
after extensive interrogation by the police. Not only do these persons give in and
accept a responsibility that is not legitimately theirs, but they actually appear to
come
to believe the accusation themselves. And then there are of course such phenomena
as "false- memory syndrome" and the epidemic of supposed "child abuse" that has
run rampant in recent years. It is now widely understood that children are incredibly
suggestive. Studies have revealed that simply the suggestion of a scenario can be
picked up by a child, embellished and retold with a wealth of detail. ("Child abuse"
victims testify to such things as orgies in public buildings, "satanic rituals," and
even
abuse conducted in outer space!) Adults suffering from "false memory syndrome" do
the same. Coaxing from authority figures, wishing to identify positively with them, and
the ability of such "authority figures" to lie convincingly points to the reason why
this
phenomenon has become so widespread. "Therapists" are now considered such
"authorities" �their testimony regularly locks people up in mental institutions who
have never committed a real crime� that the patient wishes to believe and please
them; and thus they do, by agreeing with the therapist's scenario, true or not. A
woman convinced by her (usually female) therapist that she was raped as a child by
her father has a natural predisposition to believe the therapist, especially if the
woman in question has strong unresolved inner conflicts regarding her male parent,
conflicts that have nothing to do with childhood sexual abuse. Not only is such a
woman demonstrating Milgram's obedience to authority, she is also cementing her
group-identification, since it is usually daughters who accuse fathers, and such an
allegation fits in neatly with feminist theory that all men (even fathers!) are "sexual
predators." Likewise, since the therapist is an "authority figure", we know she is at
least "more believable" when she lies. That is to say, a woman is more likely to
believe a "therapist" who asserts that her father raped her as a child than the
checkout girl at the grocery store. (It should also be said that while psychological
research is necessary and invaluable, the practice of clinical psychology and
psychiatry amounts to little more than ritualized superstition and voodoo
witchdoctory. Most "mental health professionals" are as evil as the hardcore Nazis
and share much the same mentality. And, like the Nazis, they are totally unaware �
or refuse to admit� that they have ever done anything wrong. Thus it is pointless to
expect "physicians" to "heal themselves." Merging psychiatry with law is one of the
greatest "human rights abuses" of the modern age. Of course, it should not have to
be said that pro-liberty psychiatrists and psychologists like Thomas Szasz and
Nathaniel Branden have fought long and hard against such "coercive therapy," but
they remain in a strict minority.) The plain truth is �and I am waiting for some
enterprising researcher to verify this� that when adults are told a lie, even a "big
lie,"
often enough, especially by an "authority figure" (such as a "leader"), eventually most
of them will come to believe it, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the
contrary. And of course when the rest of the group professes a belief in the lie, then
group-identification �and to a certain extent, individual self- preservation, as man is
a "social creature"� steps in to reaffirm it. What Zimbardo calls "deindividuation"
takes hold at this point, defined as "a temporary state of suspended personal
identity." The group then provides all the "identity" the individual needs, and
"cognitive dissonance" ceases to be a problem. And this is why, in my opinion, we
will never really have such a thing as a truly "free society", except perhaps briefly,
in
rare places and times. For one thing, freedom demands too much responsibility from
most human beings as individuals, responsibility that has, for nearly all of human
evolution, been shouldered by the group. It is also why, even though almost everyone
knows that government solutions to any given problem only tend to exacerbate the
problem, not solve it (poverty, crime, drugs, etc., etc., etc.), most people continue
to
support and believe in government intrusions into every aspect of the individual's
social, economic and personal life. It is also why arguments for a free society,
however rational or ostensibly persuasive, continue to fall on deaf ears, and
constitute essentially "preaching to the converted." Only a very small percentage of
human beings are genuinely interested in the truth, much less abstract principles
such as individual liberty. They want to believe that the leader is going to protect
them, that the priest is going to "save their souls," and that their particular group
is
superior to all other groups. Admittedly, that doesn't leave us with much "hope." But
then, there is another example of the "big lie." Most of you were no doubt taught that
in the Greek myth of Pandora's Box hope (which was in the box with all the other
evils) lingered to "comfort" mankind. Actually, the ancient Greeks, who as a people
strove to face reality with the same dogged determination with which modern
Americans seek to avoid it, believed "hope" was the ultimate evil, and it lingered
behind to torment mankind. So the larger question remains. Reality is out there,
demanding to be faced, not avoided. What served our ancestors well in our hunting
past may not serve us at all now. We have come a long way on our big lies. But the
truth, as I believe was once said somewhere, sometime, "will set you free." If so, it
remains to be seen.
Hank Parnell
End<{{{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
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"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe
simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do not
believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do
not believe in anything simply because it is written in Holy Scriptures. Do not
believe in anything merely on the authority of Teachers, elders or wise men.
Believe only after careful observation and analysis, when you find that it
agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all.
Then accept it and live up to it."
The Buddha on Belief, from the Kalama Sutta
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
German Writer (1759-1805)
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It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that
prevents us from living freely and nobly. -Bertrand Russell
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"Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart
information and ideas through any media and regardless
of frontiers."
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
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"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will
teach you to keep your mouth shut."
--- Ernest Hemingway
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