Delaware’s program was such a blatantly Orwellian operation that the entire thing was abandoned two days after FIRE went public — but it had already been operating for at least a year. And one year of reeducation at an American university is one year too many.
While I wouldn't want to discount the impact of indoctrination in education, it is just as important to watch what corporate America is imposing on its employees. "Diversity" is being imposed (NYT) on the employees in the workplace at a much accelerated rate:
For the last five years, Wachovia Bank, N.A., has required all of its leaders, from the manager level on up, to take a three-day course focusing on the philosophy behind the company’s seven-year-old diversity initiative. “The course sets up a learning environment, essentially an orientation to diversity,” explained Reginald Davis, chief executive of the Atlantic banking group (New Jersey, New York and Connecticut) of Wachovia Bank, N.A. “We cover the terminology that we need to communicate the concept of diversity and then zero in on the experiences of people who have been affected or influenced by diversity in some way. It is an experiential learning process, with exercises in which people speak about their differences. They learn to express themselves about their own identity group and then how to interact with others.”
When plain-speaking was the norm, we called it brainwashing.
Dr. Smith has a post today describing the suicide rate among white men, and offers advice to help them. Another way to help them might be to stop preaching that being a white man is inherently evil, and requiring that they attend courses intent on making them accept their evilness. Perhaps convincing them that they're evil, and then being surprised when they accept it and act on it, is counterproductive.
Brainwashing Techniques (HowStuffWorks.com, How Brainwashing Works):
In the late 1950s, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton studied former prisoners of Korean War and Chinese war camps. He determined that they'd undergone a multistep process that began with attacks on the prisoner's sense of self and ended with what appeared to be a change in beliefs. Lifton ultimately defined a set of steps involved in the brainwashing cases he studied:
- Assault on identity
- Guilt
- Self-betrayal
- Breaking point
- Leniency
- Compulsion to confess
- Channeling of guilt
- Releasing of guilt
- Progress and harmony
- Final confession and rebirth
From Lifton on Thought Reform:
Loaded languageNew words and language are created to explain the new and profound meanings that have been discovered. Existing words are also hijacked and given new and different meaning.
This is particularly effective due to the way we think a lot though language. The consequence of this is that the person who controls the meaning of words also controls how people think. In this way, black-and-white thinking is embedded in the language, such that wrong-doers are framed as terrible and evil, whilst those who do right (as defined by the group) are perfect and marvellous.
The meaning of words are kept hidden both from the outside world, giving a sense of exclusivity. The meaning of special words may also be revealed in careful illuminatory rituals, where people who are being elevated within the order are given the power of understanding this new language.
The importance of the group is elevated over the importance of the individual in all ways. Along with this comes the importance of the the group's ideas and rules over personal beliefs and values.
Doctrine over personPast experiences, beliefs and values can all thus be cast as being invalid if they conflict with group rules. In fact this conflict can be used as a reason for confession of sins. Likewise, the beliefs, values and words of those outside the group are equally invalid.
Hence we have new terms such as team building and project teams, which are destructive to the self, and the ideals of Western society... imposed through diversity training, as a condition of employment.
John Leo (City Journal, Orwell Lives, February 4, 2008):
Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, calls this establishment pressure “liberal monism.” She means that those who talk the most about diversity and pluralism are often the most willing to mandate that all private and religious institutions conform to one ideological framework. Liberals, she says, are eradicating the differences needed to make tolerance a viable practice. In order to enhance diversity, it is necessary to suppress it.
[Emphasis mine.]
"The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienable right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes."
- Carl Friedrich Bahrdt
It isn't simply the language that is under attack through indoctrination. It is the ideals of Western society and the very concept of the right of individual thought, judgments, and actions.
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