Human beings prefabricate culture, morality, religious creeds, laws, and police systems to stop those who go against the common interests for that moment in history. They plan and program community life and the future of their children. Internally, however, the spiritual spark grows ever weaker in the face of the progressive dehumanization of a world which in truth was never human to begin with, but only animal intelligent. The world has glorified science and forgotten human nature.

The center of gravity of a person's psychological awareness is projected more and more toward the external world, progressively abandoning itself to incarnate in the monstrous sons of civilization: consumer products, machines, cinema, and television. Advertising and the press are the two super monsters of our times, tools by which man is skillfully manipulated and converted into a perfect automaton.

He becomes an obedient consumer of certain products, a respectful server of ideologies and systems, which in turn provide small groups with power. If it is true that we live in the era of multitudes, and that their voices have taken over for the authority of kings and princes of the past, it is no less true that history is the conflict of minorities, that is to say, of the leaders who direct the masses.

On this point the words of Professor Ludwig Von Bertalanffy of the University of Alberta are interesting:

Behavior is a response to stimuli coming from the outside ... So far as it is not innate or instinctive, behavior is shaped by outside influences that have met the organism in the past: classical conditioning after Pavlov, instrumental conditioning after Skinner, early childhood experience after Freud, secondary reinforcements after more recent theories.

Hence training, education, and human life in general are essentially responses to outside conditions: beginning in early childhood with toilet training and other manipulations whereby socially acceptable behavior is gratified and undesirable behavior blocked; continuing with education, which is best carried through according to Skinnerian principles of reinforcement of correct responses and by means of teaching machines and ending in adult man in an affluent society which makes everybody happy, conditioning him, in a strictly scientific manner, by the mass media to be a perfect consumer-that is, an automaton properly answering in the ways prescribed by the industrial-military-political establishment.

. . . Man as a machine that can be programmed; all those machines identical to automobiles coming off the assembly line; equilibrium or comfort as the ultimate value; behavior as a business transaction with minimum expense and maximum gain-this is a perfect expression of the philosophy of commercial society. Stimulus-response, input-output, producer-consumer are all the same concepts, only expressed in different terms.

Professor Bertalanffy continues:

I don't care a jot whether and to what extent professors A, B, or C have modified Watson, Hull, and Freud, and have replaced their blunt statements by more qualified and sophisticated circumlocutions. I do care a lot that the spirit still is all-pervading in our society and, even more, seems necessary to keep it going: reducing man to the lower levels of his animal nature, manipulating him into becoming a feebleminded and consumeristic automaton, or a marionette of political power, systematically dulling his brain through a perverse system of education; in short, dehumanizing him ever further by means of a sophisticated psychological technology.

The effects of this manipulation we see everywhere: in the unspeakable vulgarity of popular culture; in the unbearable children and teenagers who do not know their mother tongue when entering college but are glued to the television screen for five hours a day and find no better outlet than drug addiction, premature pregnancies, or delinquency; in a drab society ... in which, through its meaningless rat race, fills thousands of mental hospitals; in politics which has converted Jeffersonian democracy into a manipulated herd of cattle.

. . . Mass persuasion is, of course, one of the oldest human arts, from the sophists of Athens, the rhetoric of Aristotle, and the medieval trivium to Hitler's famous manual. But, so long as it was art, its effects remained capricious and unpredictable, as well as limited in space and time. Rebellion was possible even against the most powerful dictator; as a matter of historical fact, dictators usually came to a bad end. This was basically changed when mass persuasion became scientific, using psychological mechanisms and techniques.

Then its power, because it was not imposed from outside but was internalized, became unlimited and nearly impregnable; aided by mass media whose barrage has no limits in space and is nearly continuous in time. This-besides nuclear weapons-is the great discovery of our age: the power of modeling men into automata 'buying' everything from toothpaste and the Beatles to presidents, atomic war, and self-destruction.

Homo sapiens, alienated by these powerful forces, is simply a puppet who has no other alternative but to live his life and play the role he has been assigned in the drama of creation.

from "The Stellar Man" by John Baines