Psychology

"We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. ... Such needs have a societal content and function which are determined by external powers over which the individual has no control; the development and satisfaction of these needs is heteronomous. No matter how much such needs may have become the individual's own, reproduced and fortified by the conditions of his existence; no matter how much he identifies himself with them and finds himself in their satisfaction, they continue to be what they were from the beginning—products of a society whose dominant interest demands repression. ... In the last analysis, the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves, but only in the last analysis; that is, if and when they are free to give their own answer. As long as they are kept incapable of being autonomous, as long as they are indoctrinated and manipulated (down to their very instincts), their answer to this question cannot be taken as their own."

"In just the measure that education aims to develop the individual with independence of judgment rather than to indoctrinate him with tradition and custom and official dogma, to that degree it separates him from the mass and is successful insofar as it emancipates his mind from the tyranny of herd opinion."

"The egregious error of adult educators is to define our function solely as one of fostering behavior change and to act as though we believe our principal tasks are to do needs assessment surveys, to communicate ideas and to design exercises to develop specific knowledge, skills or attitudes for prescribed behavior change. Not only does this effort often become indoctrination to engineer consent, but it frequently addresses the wrong reality to begin with. ... We all require the meaning perspectives prescribed by our culture, but we have the potentiality of becoming critically aware of our perspectives and of changing them. By doing so, we move from an uncritical organic relationship to a self-consciously contractual relationship with individuals, institutions and ideologies. This is a crucial developmental task of maturity."

"For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the propaganda system to which we are subjected and in which all too often we serve as unwilling or unwitting instruments."

"Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression."

"We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination."

"How do students come by the opinions they hold, especially those acquired in the course of schooling? They have adopted them on the naked authority of teachers who acted as if they were productive, not cooperative, artists—teachers who indoctrinated them by didactic instruction that was not accompanied by any acts of thinking or discovery on their part.I have used the phrase “naked authority” to signify the authority arrogated to themselves by teachers who expect students to accept what they tell them simply because they occupy the position of teachers. The only legitimate authority is the authority of the reasons relevant or the evidence supporting whatever is to be understood."

"My guess is that you would find that the intellectual elite is the most heavily indoctrinated sector. It's their role as a secular priesthood to really believe the nonsense that they put forth. Other people can repeat it, but it's not that crucial that they really believe it. But for the intellectual elite themselves, it's crucial that they believe it because, after all, they are guardians of the faith. Except for a very rare person who's just an outright liar, it's hard to be a convincing exponent of the faith unless you've internalized it and come to believe it."

"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits."

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders."

"In the last analysis, the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves, but only in the last analysis; that is, if and when they are free to give their own answer. As long as they are kept incapable of being autonomous, as long as they are indoctrinated and manipulated (down to their very instincts), their answer to this question cannot be taken as their own."

"Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few."

"What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain."

"Princes have but their titles for their glories; An outward honour for an inward toil."

"Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside."

"Oh dear Pan and all the other Gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside."

"[Scripture], by which, “as in a glass, we may survey ourselves, and know what manner of persons we are,” (James 1. 23) discovers ourselves to us; pierces into the inmost recesses of the mind; strips off every disguise; lays open the inward part; makes a strict scrutiny into the very soul and spirit; and critically judges of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Heb. iv. 12) It shows us with what exactness and care we are to search and try our spirits, examine ourselves, and watch our ways, and keep our hearts, in order to acquire this important self-science; which it often calls us to do. “Examine yourselves; prove your own selves; know you not yourselves? Let a man examine himself.” (1 Cor. xi. 28)"

"What a wonderful power the machine gives you. But is it going to dominate you? This statement of what the need and want is must come from you, not from the machine, and not from the government that’s teaching you, not even from the clergy. It has to come from one’s own inside. And the minute you let that drop, and take what the dictation of the time is, instead of the dictation of your own eternity, you have capitulated to the devil, and you’re in hell."

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean."

"We would think a man insane who, instead of covering his house with a roof and putting windows in his window frames, goes out in stormy weather, and scolds the wind, the rain, and the clouds. But we all do the same when we scold and blame the evil in other people instead of fighting the evil which exists in us. It is possible to get rid of the evil inside of us, as it is possible to make a roof and windows for our house. This is possible. But it is not possible for us to destroy evil in this world, just as we cannot order the weather to change and the clouds to disappear. If, instead of teaching others, we would educate and improve ourselves, then there would be less evil in this world, and all people would live better lives."

"Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."

"When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities. Jesus moved in a community that allowed the accumulation of private property just as ours does, and the gospel that he preached was not that in such a community it is an advantage for a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear ragged, unwholesome clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a disadvantage for a man to live under healthy, pleasant, and decent conditions. Such a view would have been wrong. ... What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your perfection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.’"

"But it is not only of space in the Church which we ought to be jealous, but also of the interior of the house of God in us, so that it might not become a house of merchandise, or a den of robbers."

"In the present study, we shed a new light on how personality factors predicted obedience and rebellion in a Milgram-like study. ... We hypothesized that personality traits that are consensually desirable in interpersonal relationships, such as Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, could contribute to destructive obedience given the right context. These are two traits that some observers, including Arendt herself, attributed to Adolf Eichmann."

"Personality traits such as Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, which are widely related to positive outcomes such as better mental health ... may also have darker sides in that they can lead to destructive and immoral obedience. ... It may be that a significant share of human suffering stems from personality dispositions that are not necessarily intrinsically antisocial. On the contrary, some traits that often have negative interpersonal consequences, such as low impulse control, may in some extreme circumstances benefit others, such as when someone jumps into a river and risks his life to save a stranger."

"Our results provide new empirical evidence showing that individual differences in Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, political orientation, and social activism matter. Not only “evil” behavior such as destructive obedience may indeed be “banal” in the sense of not relying on extraordinary cruelty of ideological hate, but it also may even be facilitated by dispositions that are consensually desirable elsewhere with family and friends, as Hanna Arendt proposed over 50 years ago. Although our results suggest that adaptive traits in the interpersonal domain may be maladaptive in a context involving destructive authority, they also suggest that some behaviors that may disrupt social functioning, such as political activism, may express and even strengthen individual dispositions that are both useful and essential to the whole society, at least in some critical moments."

"I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."

"Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

"Stanley Milgram carried out the “Eichmann experiment” to determine whether Nazi war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann, whose trial had begun a couple of months earlier in Jerusalem, could have committed the heinous acts of the Holocaust merely because of a misplaced obedience to authority. ... The German philosopher Hanna Arendt, a reporter during the trial of Eichmann, coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe him, seeing behind the architect of the Holocaust a thoroughly normal person. Going further, Arendt also mentioned that Eichmann’s attitude toward his family and friends was “not only normal but most desirable.”"

"Man ... wants to be great, and he sees himself small. He wants to be happy, and he sees himself miserable. He wants to be perfect, and he sees himself full of imperfections. He wants to be the object of love and esteem among men, and he sees that his faults merit only their hatred and contempt. This embarrassment in which he finds himself produces in him the most unrighteous and criminal passion that can be imagined; for he conceives a mortal enmity against that truth which reproves him and which convinces him of his faults. He would annihilate it, but, unable to destroy it in its essence, he destroys it as far as possible in his own knowledge and in that of others; that is to say, he devotes all his attention to hiding his faults both from others and from himself, and he cannot endure either that others should point them out to him, or that they should see them."

"The worst of what is called good society is not only that it offers us the companionship of people who are unable to win either our praise or our affection, but that it does not allow us to be that which we naturally are; it compels us, for the sake of harmony, to shrivel up, or even alter our shape altogether. Intellectual conversation, whether grave or humorous, is only fit for intellectual society; it is downright abhorrent to ordinary people, to please whom it is absolutely necessary to be commonplace and dull. This demands an act of severe self-denial; we have to forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to become like other people. No doubt their company may be set down against our loss in this respect; but the more a man is worth, the more he will find that what he gains does not cover what he loses, and that the balance is on the debit side of the account; for the people with whom he deals are generally bankrupt — that is to say, there is nothing to be got from their society which can compensate either for its boredom, annoyance and disagreeableness, or for the self-denial which it renders necessary."

"If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems, … self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences."

"Following the physical destruction of a people and their material culture, memory is all that is left and is targeted as the last victim. Complete annihilation of a people requires the banishment of recollection and suffocation of remembrance. Falsification, deception and half-truths reduce what was to what might have been or perhaps what was not at all.""

"He does not think there is anything the matter with him because"

"To speak of ideals and their significance as goals to be reached for is to put one's finger on an ever-recurring theme in Chesterton's productive life, the indignant rejection of pessimism in any and all of its forms. This is not to say that he was unaware that there is evil — a great deal of it — in this world. His life was one continuous campaign against the evils he perceived, one of the chief of which was the denial that there is good in the world, the denial that life is basically good."

"Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941–45, also known as the holocaust (Greek: complete burning) or the Shoah (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted."

"Gratitude turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity...it makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow."

"δουλείαν δὲ ποίαν κακίστην νομίζεις εἶναι; ἐγὼ μέν, ἔφη, τὴν παρὰ τοῖς κακίστοις δεσπόταις. τὴν κακίστην ἄρα δουλείαν οἱ ἀκρατεῖς δουλεύουσιν;"

"σοφίαν δὲ τὸ μέγιστον ἀγαθὸν οὐ δοκεῖ σοι ἀπείργουσα τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἡ ἀκρασία εἰς τοὐναντίον αὐτοὺς ἐμβάλλειν; ἢ οὐ δοκεῖ σοι προσέχειν τε τοῖς ὠφελοῦσι καὶ καταμανθάνειν αὐτὰ κωλύειν, ἀφέλκουσα ἐπὶ τὰ ἡδέα, καὶ πολλάκις αἰσθανομένους τῶν ἀγαθῶν τε καὶ τῶν κακῶν ἐκπλήξασα ποιεῖν τὸ χεῖρον ἀντὶ τοῦ βελτίονος αἱρεῖσθαι;"

"Has it ever occurred to you, Euthydemus, ... that though pleasure is the one and only goal to which incontinence is thought to lead men, she herself cannot bring them to it, whereas nothing produces pleasure so surely as self-control?”“How so?”"Incontinence will not let them endure hunger or thirst or desire or lack of sleep, which are the sole causes of pleasure in eating and drinking and sexual indulgence, and in resting and sleeping, after a time of waiting and resistance until the moment comes when these will give the greatest possible satisfaction; and thus she prevents them from experiencing any pleasure worthy to be mentioned in the most elementary and recurrent forms of enjoyment. But self-control alone causes them to endure the sufferings I have named, and therefore she alone causes them to experience any pleasure worth mentioning in such enjoyments."

"Οὐαὶ ὑμῖν, γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι ὑποκριταί, ὅτι καθαρίζετε τὸ ἔξωθεν τοῦ ποτηρίου καὶ τῆς παροψίδος, ἔσωθεν δὲ γέμουσιν ἐξ ἁρπαγῆς καὶ ἀκρασίας."

"ἔτι ὁ τῷ πεπεῖσθαι πράττων καὶ διώκων τὰ ἡδέα καὶ προαιρούμενος βελτίων ἂν δόξειεν τοῦ μὴ διὰ λογισμὸν ἀλλὰ δι᾽ ἀκρασίαν: εὐιατότερος γὰρ διὰ τὸ μεταπεισθῆναι ἄν."

"εἴπερ γὰρ ἔστιν ἐφ᾽ ἑνὸς ἀκρασία, ἔστι καὶ ἐπὶ πόλεως."

"Everyone who achieves strives for totality, and the value of his achievement lies in that totality—that is, in the fact that the whole, undivided nature of a human being should be expressed in his achievement. But when determined by our society, as we see it today, achievement does not express a totality; it is completely fragmented and derivative. It is not uncommon for the community to be the site where a joint and covert struggle is waged against higher ambitions and more personal goals. ... A more profoundly organic individual development is obscured. The socially relevant achievement of the average person serves in the vast majority of cases to repress the original and nonderivative, inner aspirations of the human being."

"Three years ago you were a kid. You didn't have a single feeling worth having—cocky and shallow. Like most kids. Then you got picked up by the scruff of your neck and dumped into life. You actually did things you didn't want to do, because they were right. You learned how to feel other people's pain—and finally the Lord faced you with pain of your own. Someday you're gonna stop cringing in front of it. you'll pick it up and carry it with you, and you'll be a man for the rest of your life; with a hurt hid inside you—but it'll make your joy all the richer."

"When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is." Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics."

"Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question."

"A child is protected by the limit of feebleness against emotions which are too complex. He sees the fact, and little else beside. The difficulty of being satisfied by half-ideas does not exist for him. It is not until later that experience comes, with its brief, to conduct the lawsuit of life. Then he confronts groups of facts which have crossed his path; the understanding, cultivated and enlarged, draws comparisons; the memories of youth reappear under the passions, like the traces of a palimpsest under the erasure; these memories form the bases of logic, and that which was a vision in the child's brain becomes a syllogism in the man's."

"We confound loss of naiveté (a developmental change) with loss of innocence (a spiritual failing). While each person is fated to lose naiveté, no person loses innocence by developmental necessity. Each person loses innocence by his or her own hand."

"Who is there that has never, more or less consciously, noticed that our whole education is calculated to produce feelings in us, i.e. impart them to us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out? If we hear the name of God, we are to feel veneration; if we hear that of the prince’s majesty, it is to be received with reverence, deference, submission; if we hear that of morality, we are to think that we hear something inviolable; if we hear of the Evil One or evil ones, we are to shudder; etc. The intention is directed to these feelings, and he who e. g. should hear with pleasure the deeds of the “bad “ would have to be “taught what’s what” with the rod of discipline. Thus stuffed with imparted feelings, we appear before the bar of majority and are “pronounced of age.” Our equipment consists of “elevating feelings, lofty thoughts, inspiring maxims, eternal principles,” etc. The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age."