From: frankred@aifh.ed.ac.uk (Frank Redington)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Re: Tavistock Institute - Brainwashing Center
Date: 31 Aug 92 11:19:31 GMT
Reply-To: frankred@aifh.ed.ac.uk (Frank Redington)
Organization: Dept AI, Edinburgh University, Scotland

In article <1992Aug31.075033.6932@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> aq817@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Steve Crocker) writes:
>
>One of the difficulties in posting material originally written by someone
>else is that it is difficult to respond to criticism of the piece.

fair enough, I`m merely criticising the information 
presented here

>  The 
>  New Left, the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement were all 
>  social-engineering projects.  The Watergate scandals, environmentalism 
>  and the slow and deliberate destruction of American technology were also 
>  preplanned social-engineering projects.  

   on what evidence.

>  Our researches identified this powerful group with certain old 
>  aristocratic families in England, the United States and Canada witch 
>  control, for purposes of social manipulation, the world's $200 billion 
>  drug traffic.

An interesting proposition. Actually most of England's aristocratic 
families are nowadays fairly enfeebled. The U.S. is very different.
The common bloodlines amongst almost all U.S. president up to Reagan,
I believe, are startling - sort of a family business. Drug traffic
for social manipulation ? They'd do a lot better re social manipulation
if they legalised it, but then 200 billions a pretty nice bonus.

During World War II, Tavistock was the 
>  headquarters of the British Army's Psychological Warfare Bureau which, 
>  through the arrangements of the British Special Operations Executive,

believable, probably true

>  also dictated policy to the United States Armed Forces in matters of 
>  psychological warfare.  

dictated ? advised perhaps.

>  Toward the end of the war, Tavistock personnel took over the World 
>  Federation of Mental Health and the Psychological Warfare Division of the 
>  Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in Europe. 

Yeah, big deal. So some people from the Tavistock switched jobs.
Happens all the time.

>  Other important colleagues of Kurt Lewin, including Eric Trist and John 
>  Rawlings Rees of Tavistock, as well as H. V. Dicks, W. R. Bion, and 
>  Richard Crossman, took the personnel from the Strategic Bombing Survey, 
>  the Committee on National Morale and the National Defense Resources 
>  Council, and from this pool founded the Rand Corporation, the Stanford 
>  Research Institute, the Wharton School, the National Training 
>  Laboratories, the National Institute of Mental Health and others.  

O.K., so the Tavistock played a role in starting the careers of
people who then went on to hold influential posts elsewhere

>  The United States government started contracting multimillion-dollar 
>  projects with all these outfits.  Over a period of thirty years, tens of 
>  billions of dollars have been allocated by the federal government to fund 
>  the work of these groups; other tens of billions of dollars found their 
>  way into these institutions from private foundations.  

Evidence for this should be freely available, for those of
you lucky enough to have a F.O.I act.

>  Over the years, these institutions grew and the scope of projects they 
>  contracted grew.  Every aspect of the mental and psychological life of 
>  the American people was profiled, recorded, and stored into computer 
>  memories.

Actually, it is the paucity of machine-readable psychological data
rather than its ubiquitousness that is surprising, especially 
considering the now easy availability of the technology.

>  Close cooperative relations were developed between these think-tanks and 
>  the U.S.A's key polling organizations and the major media.  Gallup Polls, 
>  the Yankelovich-CBS-New York Times polls, the National Opinion Research 
>  Center and others are incessantly conducting psychological profiles of 
>  the entire population, sharing them for evaluation and processing with 
>  the ubiquitous social psychologists.  What the public sees printed in the 
>  newspapers as opinion polls is only an infinitesimal portion of the work 
>  that the pollsters do.  

see above. One of Psychology's problems is the lack of QUALITY data,
not it's incessant availability. The Gallup stuff is well done, for what
it is, but if you want to test any reasonably interesting hypothesis
you usually have to go and get your own, at least if you want to make
sure it's done properly.

>  In the deeper 
>  recesses of the intelligence establishment in Washington, veteran 
>  intelligence officers refer to this awesome group, in   hushed tones and 
>  mysterious language as the "Committee of Three-Hundred". The group prefers 
>  to be called "The Olympians". These are the real power in the land, the
>  deployers of our social engineers and social psychologists.

this is great. do they really do this ?

>  Before you howl "incredible", you ought to review the technical study 
>  that was prepared in May 1974 by the Stanford Research Institute, whose 
>  contents were later used in popularized form in Marilyn Ferguson's book.  
>
>  The study is entitled CHANGING IMAGES OF MAN, Contract Number 
>  URH(489)-2150. Policy Research Report No. 4/4.74, prepared by SRI Center 
>  for the Study of Social Policy, Willis Harman, Director. Dr. Harman later 
>  personally coached Marilyn Ferguson in writing her popularized version, 
>  THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY. The 319-page mimeographed SRI report was 
>  prepared by a team of 14 researchers and supervised by supervisory panel 
>  of 23 controllers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist 
>  B. F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Vickers 
>  of British Intelligence and others.  

I'll get this ASAP

>  A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical 
>  change in the United States.

How do they decide what to do ? A democratic conspiracy ?

loads deleted

>  The brainwashing specialists of the Tavistock network internationally 
>  went to work.  The era of government by "crisis management" had arrived.  
>  Some basic things ought to be said now about the social-engineering 
>  technique of "crisis management". 
>
> KURT LEWIN
>
>  The technique derives from the "topological psychology" doctrine of Dr. 
>  Kurt Lewin, the seminal theoretical influence in the entire field of 
>  social-psychology, the patron-saint of all the Tavistock-related 
>  think-tanks and the man upon whose theories the psychological warfare 
>  battles of World War II were fought.  
>
>  To summarize the matter of Lewin's doctrine in chunks manageable by the 
>  layman: all psychological phenomena occur in a domain defined as 
>  "psychological phase space" or "life space".  This space is composed of 
>  two interdependent "fields", the "environment" and the "self". Life space 
>  is the domain in which human behavior occurs.  Behavior depends on both 
>  environment and self or B = F(E.P.) (Behavior is a function of 
>  Environment and Person.) 

The jargon's a little odd, but yeah, this is the basic interactionist
position. It's just a shame that outside of the lab (and usually inside
the lab) it is very difficult to take account or measure either.

This is accompanied by a tremendous amount of 
>  misplaced emphasis on mathematical/topological interpretations of 
>  psychological relations, none of which makes any contribution to 
>  scientific knowledge, 

if it was any practical use, it would make a massive contribution to
human knowledge

>  but is admirably suited for transforming 
>  psychological problems into computer-programmable problems.  This was 
>  promptly done.  

Aha. I've got a degree in Psychology (does that make me 
one of them?) and am about to receive one in AI. This 
is rubbish. If it's been done, by whom, where are the 
references, and can I ftp it from anywhere ;-)

>  The concept of "controlled environment" arose from the common-sensical 
>  observation that if you have a fixed personality (one susceptible to 
>  being predictably profiled), and if you want to elicit from this 
>  personality a particular type of behavior, then all you have to do is 
>  control the third variable of the equation and thus produce the desired 
>  behavior.  This was the standard social-psychology formula used for years 
>  in every type of situation from labor negotiations to army 
>  counterinsurgency operations, to important diplomatic maneuvers, until 
>  apparently sometime in the 1960's. 

Err, I don't think so. For years social psychologists argued themselves
blue in the face about whether it was the person or the environment
responsible for this or that. Social psychology theories are usually 
consideably more sophisticated than you seem to think, and a lot
more useless in practical situations (except in a statistical sense
of course)

From that point on the greater 
>  emphasis of social-psychology practice and theory was placed on the 
>  problem of using the technique of controlled environment to produce not 
>  the desired B (behavior) but the desired P (personality) in the 
>  equation. 

Did it. No-one ever told me.

loads deleted

loads more deleted

>  Over the course of the last 35 years, an invisible army has been deployed 
>  into place in nearly every corner of the globe.  It is an army of 
>  professionals, buried deep in the universities and think-tanks, whose 
>  names and faces are unfamiliar to most citizens. They are dedicated to 
>  one purpose--TO REDUCE MANKIND, THROUGH THE USE OF ADVANCED TECHNIQUES OF 
>  PSYCHOLOGICAL warfare TO TAME, EASILY CONTROLLED BEASTS.  

Wow

>  THE TAVISTOCK "MOTHER" 
>
>  The "mother" institution for this network of psychological warriors is 
>  the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations located in London, England. 
>  While the name of the institute is unknown to all but certain members of 
>  this psychological profession and their students, 

yeah, it's real secret. I decided to find out exactly where it 
was. I thought it was in the center, but I suppose that they were
originally at Tavistock square and then moved. Maybe this is just
a sub-branch

It's at 

                 120, Belsize Lane,  
                 London, NW3

                 The telephone number is 071-435-7111

I don't often dial international but I think from the states you
add 44 to the start of the number, and omit the leading 0 ?



>  "Tavistock method" was Brigadier-General John Rawlings Rees, an intimate 
>  of Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and Kurt Lewin who became the clinic's 
>  director in 1932. Rees's contribution to psychology, to put it crudely 
>  but accurately, was that he recognized that the same techniques used in 
>  psychotherapy to cure an individual of his neuroses or psychosis could be 
>  applied to make him sicker.  Rees proposed to deliberately induce 
>  controlled forms of neurosis, or even psychotic behavior.  

I'm on shakier ground here, but this all sounds dodgy. When I'm next 
down in the Smoke, I'll check it out.

>  But it was the war that gave Tavistock its biggest boost.  It is 
>  absolutely no exaggeration to say that Rees, from 1938-42, proceeded to 
>  take over the effective command of the British Army. 

I doubt that

> The military, 
>  according to Rees, was the ideal place to test out his theories.  "The 
>  army and other fighting services form rather unique experimental groups 
>  since they are complete communities and it is possible to arrange 
>  experiments that would be very difficult to do in civilian life."  

yup this is true. You can do lots of things with soldiers that
you can't with volunteers - limits the validity of your results,
but you can't have everything

>  The point is that Tavistock controls the key business schools and related 
>  think tanks around the country (world). The case of Eric Trist is 
>  exemplary.  Trist came to this country from Tavistock in 1960 after first 
>  heading Tavistock's management division and then its human resources 
>  center.  

Howso, all that has been shown is that the Tavistock has been highly
influential. Rees sounds like a bit of a nutter, if what you claim is
true, but I don't see that Lewin or many other people are implicated.
Look at any rapidly developing field of science and you'll see that same
pattern of movements over the last 40 years. Look at the Los Alamos
crew, for example. There are much much better examples of psychological
manipulation about (Stanley Milgram's obedience stuff, for example).

Psychology, psychologists, and (especially) psychistrists have
caused their fair share of harm. But the science is not yet
advanced to the state where the sort of mass manipulation your 
talking about is viable - Do X, and you'll get Y.

Almost all the research you've discussed is useable from either
perspective - as a (fairly unreliable) guide to brainwashing,
or as a warning that it MIGHT work.

>  An NTL brochure describes a course in the Tavistock model of group 
>  dynamics: "This model provides participants with opportunities for 
>  increasing their understanding and awareness of group processes, with 
>  particular emphasis on the covert dynamics which occur in groups with 
>  regard to the issues of authority, leadership and followership.  

This is psycho-speak for a course which will teach you
very little you didn't already know, or couldn't have found out
by reading an undergrad textbook, and some collected readings.

This must be a nice little earner' for whoever runs the course
What do they charge ? $200+

>  "The learning focus is upon groups rather than individual personalities.  
>  This perspective is emphasized in order to facilitate a new understanding 
>  of institutions, organizations and communities.  The focus of the staff 
>  is upon the major problems of group life--those encountered in the 
>  exercise of authority based upon competence, power or both.  It is 
>  assumed that people who understand something about the nature and 
>  exercise of their own authority, as well as that of others, are thereby 
>  equipped to deal more effectively with these issues as encountered in any 
>  work setting."  
>

my proper e-mail address is frankred@cogsci.ed.ac.uk This account
dies on October the 5th.

There are plenty of real bogeymen in the world without picking
on these poor saps. Most TV is shite, and Biased, and I think 
this matters. Maybe the people who think they're pulling the strings
did lift some techniques from communication research. Let's hope
so, because psychology right now is about where physics was before
Newton, especially where mass social manipulation is concerned.

        just my 2 cents worth,
                                  Martin.
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy