Newsgroup: it.fan.asimov
Titolo: The Institute of Psychohistory, its journal and its mailing list

 It is unfortunate that Lloyd is so exclusive with the PH list.
I am currently umemployed, and (despite my criticisms of the Institute's
founders) may be interested in working for the Institute of
Psychohistory. I think SDML could be useful in the official science, as
well as for the real reasons of predicting the future. The language is
basically complete, and there are very few bugs in it, so I don't want
to work any more as a programmer, but if there are any interesting
modelling jobs available in any of the branches of the Institute (or
perhaps the HQ in New York) then I'd like to hear of them. I may be
willing to work in any country of the world (preferably in an English or
French speaking country). So if anybody on any of these lists knows of
any such jobs going then please let me know.
Comradely,
Steve.
--
Steve Wallis, a member of South Manchester Socialist Alliance
My socialist web page - 
http://www.stevewallis.org
Also involved in the Coalition Against Sanctions and War on Iraq
(
http://www.stevewallis.org/iraq
)
The start of my autobiography, 'Transition', is now available on the web
at: 
http://www.stevewallis.org/transition.htm

I posted the following message recently to mailinglists at 
yahoogroups.com
 and
topica.com
 concerned with Isaac Asimov and/or psychohistory...
I listened to an old interview with Isaac Asimov on Sunday (which I got
on a CD containing the BBC Foundation radio series from ebay) and in it
the interviewer mentioned that his science of psychohistory was being
used and was called ‘futurology’. I therefore did a google web search
for ‘futurology’ and found that it was just general predicting the
future stuff and not very interesting. I therefore searched for
‘psychohistory’.
The first two pages that came up had boxes to subscribe to psychohistory
mailing lists, at yahoogroups and topica. I therefore subscribed to both
these lists. I also searched both of these sites for other references to
psychohistory and Asimov; hence the set of lists in the header of this
message and my two previous messages on ‘Socialism and Conspiracies’ and
‘Asimov and Conspiracies (Marxism and Psychohistory)’. [Yahoogroups
limits you to subscribing to 10 groups in one day; hence my two previous
messages were sent out in two batches.]
The first google page that came up was for the ‘Institute of
Psychohistory’ which produces a ‘Journal of Psychohistory’. This sounds
very interesting – if anybody has any comments on this journal, good or
bad, then I’d like to hear them; if it sounds good I’ll definitely
subscribe to it. However, its official mailing list
(psychohistory@t...) is utterly dreadful. Despite sending my
messages out over 30 hours ago, they have not appeared. Instead, about
30 messages have been deemed fit to send (often with comments added to
the end) by the moderator, Lloyd deMause – most of these have been
trivia about the threatened war on Iraq and none of them (as far as I
could see) have said anything interesting about modelling the world in
order to predict the future (which is, after all, what psychohistory is
supposed to be about). What’s more, none of the messages contain any
email addresses, so it is impossible to contact the authors of the
messages if they have anything interesting to say, except going via
deMause – or asking the co-moderator Bob Scharf politely. This is in
contrast to every other moderated mailing list I have come across, where
the message header contains the author’s email address. Bob seems very
friendly, and runs what seems a much better unmoderated list discussing
psychohistory from a left-wing perspective (phleft@t...) – Bob has
to approve every addition to this list, but he very promptly added me to
it when I said a little about my reasons for wanting to join it.
Presumably Bob is an influential member of the Institute of
Psychohistory. I urge Bob and any other genuine member of the Institute
who reads this message to try to get deMause removed as moderator of the
official mailing list. If they fail, I urge Bob (since he is probably
the only person apart from deMause with access to the list of email
addresses on the official list) to set up a new rival list with those
people automatically subscribed.
Psychohistory is a very very powerful tool, and the forces of big
business undoubtedly have invested a large amount of effort into trying
to scupper the attempts of the forces of the working class to use it to
change the world. Therefore it is unsurprising that one of their agents
has got himself in a position of tremendous power in the official
psychohistory mailing list and institute.
But we are getting the upper hand. Below the surface, the forces of the
working class have got in a much more favourable position in the two or
so years since I wrote the two previous messages. Forward to a world
socialist revolution!


 deMause?
The Institute website says that deMause's work "is used in most college
courses in psychohistory" so (unless they are lying) they have persuaded
some academic institutions to treat them seriously. Of their nineteen
"branches" around the world (including the one in the USA), five of the
contact names claim to have PhDs and two MDs. Four of their branches
have academic email addresses. So they are "outcasts in the academic
world" to a certain extent but not completely.
I have now come to the conclusion that the "Institute" is a kind of cult
- rather than having research/lecturing groups in universities (which I
had suspected) they invite you to contact them to find out about
meetings. Presumably they have secret meetings for members only as well
as the public meetings that you or I could get invited to. Who knows
what goes on in these secret meetings? I suspect that once they have
recruited people, they use them to help produce models of the world in
order to help big business predict the future. Big business has got to
get its modellers from somewhere and any organisation that uses the word
"psychohistory" to attract people is bound to uncover a fair amount of
potential modellers.
I have just discovered (from their website) that one of deMause's books
is entitled "Foundations of Psychohistory". Obviously he is not an
imbecile and he chose this name deliberately to help attract people who
are Asimov fans - I suspect either to recruit them (if they are
right-wingers) or to mislead them (if they are left-wingers).
They may be purely funded by their members but I doubt it. Big business
has a big vested interest in both of these aims, and I am sure that the
Institute will have been able to find some businessmen/women to help
fund them.
I also suspect that they have chosen the cities to locate themselves
deliberately, for political reasons. The British branch is based in
Liverpool which was the most left-wing city in Britain - indeed it was
the only city in the world to have ever had a council controlled by a
Trotskyist group (the Militant Tendency, which I joined later). Things
have gone horribly pear shaped since, and the left has been smashed -
the council isn't even Labour now (Militant, or the Socialist Party as
it has become, isn't popular any more due to the defeat of the council
and the dreadful mistake of sending out redundancy notices to the entire
workforce - and New Labour isn't either due to the cuts their
councillors have imposed). I don't know how much the Institute has
influenced the victory of big business in that city, but I suspect it
has to some extent...
