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How Could It Happen?
A letter from Robert Ornstein
President, Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge
October 9, 2001
Dear Friends,
Our deepest condolences go out to all who have suffered
a loss of family, friends or colleagues in the tragic events of September
11.
As you know, a main focus of ISHK’s work since our founding
in 1969 has been to disseminate information and insights from psychology
and other disciplines about who we are and how our minds work, so
that we may be more conscious in shaping the future. Today, as our
nation bands together in responding to terrorism, getting this kind
of information and insight into the wider culture is more important
than ever.
Towards this end, we’ve set up a page on our website to direct
attention to some important, useful books: Focus
on 9/11
We are all shocked by the images and unfolding story of carnage. We
ask ourselves, in utter disbelief, what goes on in the minds of people
who can commit such horrific acts in the name of a religious or political
cause? We want to understand - and we need to do so because we are
all so easily influenced by our surroundings, particularly at times
of stress.
Ultimately, eradicating terrorism and the climate supporting it will
take more than military action or intelligence operations. It will
require all of us taking individual and collective responsibility
for understanding more about our human nature and the differences
in cultures throughout our world.
To help us move in this direction, we would like to encourage you
to read - or reread - three important books. Battle for the Mind
and The Manipulated Mind are perhaps the best, most readable
accounts of modern research into how the human mind gets changed.
The third book, New World New Mind, looks at what we can
and must do to get beyond the biological and cultural conditioning
that keeps us in a state of crisis.
In Battle
for The Mind: A Psychology of Conversion and Brain-Washing, How Evangelists,
Psychiatrists, Politicians and Medicine Men Can Change Your Beliefs
and Behavior, physician/psychologist William Sargant asked
how ordinary people can suddenly change long-standing reasonable beliefs,
drop their ordinary perspectives of common sense, and become open
to ways of thought quite foreign to their previous lives. He examined
a number of such situations including brainwashing in POW camps, religious
conversion and political indoctrination. He found a common pattern:
First, people were subjected to intense trauma. The trauma continued
until people behaved in ways very different from what was usual for
them. Their personalities showed signs of breaking down. New ways
of thinking, applied intentionally or by accident, could then be easily
accepted. He shows us how “conversion,” far from an obscure
phenomena affecting only deviants, is by the very nature of how the
mind works a process that under the right conditions no human being
can resist.
In The Manipulated
Mind: Brainwashing, Conditioning and Indoctrination, Denise
Winn, former editor of the British edition of Psychology Today,
reviews a range of research in this area, including the classic study
by Stanley Milgram, in which a majority of ordinary American citizens
who participated in the study blindly obeyed an authority figure in
administering what they believed were painful, even lethal shocks
to a stranger. Ms. Winn shows how the process of “involuntary”
mind change is not a special subversive technique but the clever manipulation
of influences in all of our lives which prevents us from being as
self-directed as we think.
The third book, New
World New Mind, which I co-authored with environmental biologist
Paul Ehrlich, examines how the human mental system, which evolved
to its present state millions of years ago, leaves us “hard-wired”
for responses not always appropriate in the modern world: Fight or
flight. Aggression. Gross generalization. Seeing everything in black
and white. Seeing only sudden dramatic change and not the gradual
changes that, for the first time in history, could destroy the planet’s
life-support systems in less than a century.
“In our opinion, events will continue to be out of control until
people realize how selectively the environment impresses the human
mind and how our comprehension is determined by the biological and
cultural history of humanity. We can get out of this situation, but
only if we get ourselves on a course of human development and progress
much faster than biological evolution - a course of conscious evolution.
We wrote this book in an effort to help decision makers, educators,
physicians, businessmen, and concerned citizens change their ‘minds’
- not in the conventional sense, but rather to change the way they
make decisions.” (from NEW WORLD NEW MIND)
These are the kinds of ideas that urgently need to be read, discussed
and understood - in our book clubs, online, at the dinner table with
friends and family, and in our social studies classes. We’ve
set up a web page where you can get these books at a low cost:
http://www.ishkbooks.com/focus1
These books may also be available from your local library or bookseller.
The scientific evidence of the past four decades illuminates many
aspects of the nature of both the human mind and the human predicament,
and points the way to the changes needed. With the right kind of information
and understanding, and in the spirit of learning, we can help create
the future we want for ourselves and for our children.
Sincerely,
Robert Ornstein
President, Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge
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