The “Man Is An Animal” Theory (Part-2)

Along with the increased turbulence, the twentieth century saw the rise of another view of man. From this came many repercussions in the way man looks at and treats himself and his fellows. And from this grew the most fundamental challenge> facing man as he beagan the twenty-first century.

The thing that most separates man from any life form is his ability to understand and reason. And perhaps the thing he has most universally tried to understand is himself. How is it that, despite being able to act rationally, man could also act so irrationally? Philosophers, religious leaders, scientists and scholars – the greatest minds among men-have wrestled with this riddle, but never arrived at a satisfactory explanation.

Many great thinkers in history believed that life consisted of both the material and immaterial, that the mind was separate from matter. This idea is called “dualism.” Other people throughout history, known as “materialists,” believed that everything is made of matter.

In nineteenth-century Europe, the Industrial Revolution caused many changes in Western culture and materialistic theories became dominant in man’s thinking.

And it is in this view that we find the source of what troubles man and casts the longest shadows over his happiness and, indeed, his very survival.

One of the first of these materialistic theories in modern times came from British naturalist Charles Darwin who spent several years on a scientific expedition studying plants and animals in many parts of the world. In 1858, he wrote Origin of species, a book which explained a theory of evolution to show how life froms had gradually developed from common ancestors. His ideas were bitterly constested by religious scholars because they seemed to provide evidence for those who wished to deny the existence of a Creator or creative force in the universe. Naturally, this upset many other people who believed man was not merely a hairless ape.

Still, Darwin’s ideas gained general acceptance and created the groundwork for another theory to take root.

It came from a German, a Professor Wilhelm wundt of Leipzin University, In 1879, Wundt advanced the theory that man could be totally understood by studying material things only. Wundt had been trained in physiology, the study of physical structure and function in living things. Through his training, he arrived at the notion that investigating the soul or spirit was a waste of time because a man could be studied in the same way that a frog or a rat is studied. His teachings refuted the dualist idea thast mind and matter were different. From this it was only a short hop to the conclusion that man was just another animal who had merely evolved to a higher level of intelligence than all the others. It was simply a matter of brain cells, the therooy went.

In spite of the fact that Wundt never really proved any of his ideas, the school of experimental psychology was born.

The word psychology means “study of the soul,” from the Greek word “psyche,” meaning “the soul.” But today, psycholgists proclaim that there is no soul and istead study  human and animal behavior. This makes as much sense as a baker claiming there is no such thing as bread. The original definition of  psycholofy died with the unproven idea that an individual’s actions were simplu a response to stimuli perceived by the organism and were not related to any nonmaterial part of a person. According the Wundt, there was no nonmaterial part of man, no mind, no soul.

Ultimately, then, man was no more than a higher order animal. And if aperson could be convinced of this, his ideas of personal responsibility could be changed.

The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had definite militaristic ambitions at the time, and Wundt’s ideas laid the foundation for seventy years of attempts to solve Germany’s problems through warfare. After all, went the thinking, if a dog can be trained to salivate, a man can be trained to fight. It merely required that he become conditioned to different ideas about the value ofhman life and the makeup of those in the enemy camp.

Experimental psysiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov.

After returning to hos country, Pavlov formulated his principles of mental conditioning, best known for his demonstration that a dog will salivate when a bell rings, if he was earlier fed to the accompaniment of a ringing bell. From this grew the idea that men could be conditioned like dogs.

Pavlov’s work in the field of conditioning led to the attempted brainwashing of individuals and entire populaces. Avidly utilized by both Lenin and Stalin for political ends in the then USSR, it helped spread communist rule over almost the world.

IT is no wonder that these new psychological theories, this wholly materialistic view of man, found great favor with governments during this restless period of revolutionary social thought: the control of populations was much on their cooective mins. If man could truly be understood in purely physiological terms, then one could control or solve the problems of man on purely physical basis, much like moving a recalcitrant cow by prodding it with a stick.

This was the “new” view of man and life.

All is material. Man and all lif rose spontaneously from a sea of ammonia. The theory was not new, however. It had appeared thousands of years earlier in Egyptian mythology and was repeated in kGreece by the philosopher Thales who believed that everything had wate as its essence. Nevertheless, as man advanced into the twentieth century the traditional concepts of Soul and Spirit went the way of the horse-drawn cart and buggy whip.

Materialism quickly ascended to supremacy un many fields which had traditionally heldnomaterial views of man, society and life. Socilogy, philosophy, psychology, politics, education and biology, among others, began to reflect the materialist’s view of the world. And soon, the effect of their theories began to be felt throughout society.

This is not to say it was all bad. Applying the principles of materialism to material things brought about remarkable increases in our scientific knowledge about the earth and the universe. It has given man a host of tangible improvements in his way of life.

The grave error, however, has been to apply these same materialistic principles to man himself. This is, in fact, the something, the basic source of the troubles in our modern era.

The materialist view provided man with numerous false solutions to his problems. Man was placed in the confounding position of being materially rich, but spiritually and morally poor.

The Results

Broad application of Wundt’s man is an animal” theory had disastrous and widespread consequences. And nowhere is this heritage more apparent than in the field of psychiatry.

Nineteenth-century psychiatry, with its long history   of mistreatment of the insane, leaped onto the coattails of Europe and America. Thus, in short order, the psychiatrist expanded his sphere of influenc from insane asylums to the halls of political power and other institutions. Now, however, he carried with him not only the creed of materialism, but he attitudes of his heritage: that the insane needed to be controlled through any necessary means of force and duress. Applied to populations at large, these attitudes have had disastrous consequences for society.

The belief that force can monitor thinking, personality and behavior, laid the foundation for two world wars-the most destructive in mankind’s history. Psychiatrists I nGermany developed the pseudoscience of eugenice, with its ideas of “racial purity.” “Super races,” they claimed, could be bred to umprove racial characteristics in the same way that farmers breed horses to get bigger, stronger animals. From this idiocy came Hitler’s political ideology that the race could be improved by cleaning it of inferior stock. And thus resulted the wholesale slaughter of entire populations during the Nazi Holocaust. The German people wee duped into believing their problems stemmed from the presence of genetically inferior races within its population. Their “solution” is forever imprinted upon human history.

The genocidal activity in the former Yogoslavia, euphemistically termed “ethnic cleansing,” is but a continuation of this brutal mind-set. In the late 1980, a psychiatrist traveled widely throughout the region and strirred up Serbian nationalism, Inflamiing long-buried ethnic hatreds. Another psychiatrist, a pupil of the first, became a Serbian political and military leader and it is his troops that initiated the bitter warfare which erupted in 1990 and conducted the campaign of terror to rid the area of “inferior” Muslims. It was psychiaatrists who stirred up the hatreds that are so horrifying the world.

If this strikes one as outrageous, it is!

Nevertheless, it is true. The facts speak for themselves. The materialist idea that some  peoples are genetically inferior to others and need to be wiped out for the greater good of mankind is a lunacy created and perpetuated to this day by psychiatry.

And what of mental illness, the area psychiatry officially claimed expertise in?
Materialism decrees that any personality problem is physical in nature.  thus psychiatry treats it with physical means: drugs to tranquilize or shock the system; electricity to convulse the person out of his current patterns of behavior; and, make unacceptable behavior; and, operations to incapacitate the nervous system and make unacceptable behavior impossible. Today’s extensive use of psychotropic drugs is simply an extension of this philosophy. After all, if a living being has no soul, it does not really matter what one does to it.

Psychiatry has had almost half a century in which to gauge the success of this approach. And govermments the world over have poured money onto its ciffersm based upon its promises of a new world with a docile populace.he success of this grand experiment would easily provable by improvements in apparent mental disorders, emotional problems and a general bettering of the quality of life. Instead we have exactly the opposite-a drastic deterioration in all the above.

Psychiatry has consistently invented more and mental illnesses during the last fifty years, and the pharmaceutical industry has been quick to jump on the gravy train by inventing the chemical “cures.” The effects of these drugs create yet more categories of mental illness profiting everyone but the patient.

In the mid01800s, 1 in 1,000  individuals in the us was deemed mentally ill; today, psychiatrists claim that 20 percent of the population is in need of psychiatric treatment.

It is not just mental illness, however, all societal problems which existed before the rise  of materialism have drastically worsened through the use of materialistic solutions. And, in particular, it is easily provable by statistics that any segment of society in which psychiatry has dabbled has considerably deteriorated.

The statistics of violent crime and us government funding of psychiatry are disturbingly parallel. According to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) figures, the violent crime rate increased 560 percent between 1960 and 1991 ! And crimes against property tripled, Meanwhile, psychiatric funding increased from $254 million in 1960 to $17.4 billion in 1990, an increase of 6,750 percent. It the solution to give them more tax money? That would be like feeding the wolf in the chicken coop.

Psychiatric methods in our prisons have resulted in an 80 percent rate of repeat offenders.   the rehabilitation of criminals is no longer even discussed as a possibility.

And ever since psychiatry began to meddle in matters between men and women, counseling them, filling popular magazines with their “solutions,” and influencing the messages put forth by our gullible philosophers and artists, interpersonal relationships have, to pit it kindly, become more strained than at any earlier time. It divource rates continue to increase during the next twenty-five years as musch as they did in the last, divorces wil outnumber marriages in the United States.

Morally, mankind has often skated on thin ice, but it could be argued that the ice has never been as it is today. In virtually every arena of life-from business to politics to out youn-morals ideas. Of everything is material, who can say what is moral or immoral? Who can truly pin responsibility anywhere? Psychiatry? No field In the humanities or sciences in more ethically bankrupt than psychiatry, which encourages licentiousness as therapy in many cases, avidly chases the dollar without providing any caluable product in return, and heavily attacks the entire concept of morality-right and wrong. Many aspects of society have suffered fro it. Psychiatrists have the stated goal of redefining the concepts of right and wrong to suit the arrogant-beyond-belief attitude they are the ones best sunited to shape mankind’s balues and his future. And this from people who have the highest suicide rate of any profession.

In our educational systems, Wundtian-based psychological and psychiatric theories have left a legacy of spiraling illiteracy, With the broad introduction of psuchiatric mental health programs into the US school system in 1963, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores declined nationwide for sixteen strainght years and then leveled off in a much lower range. While  illiteracy has always been with us, it has generally been because of lack of schooling. These figures have worsened in spite of the availability of schooling for everyone.

All of these trends yield a clear conclusion: materialistic solutions applied t human problem do not work. without massive publice funding, the methods of nineteenth-century psychology and psychiatry would quickly go the way of that horse-drawn cart and pass from view. In fact, if funding for unworkable psychiatric solutions was simply cut off, this alone would improve the general state of mental health throughout society.

the trends are clear to those who are willing to look. It would not be an exaggeration to project,

after another century of materialistic influence, a slave society on Earth  where a small class of technocrats rules a drugged, illiterate and violent populace-a virtual planetary bedlam.

By 10minutegyan