The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations: Ch 9 How individuals and groups react to blending fact with fiction by Dr. John Coleman

How individuals and groups react to blending fact with fiction

CHAPTER 9

Cantril's conclusion was that the public reacted exactly as his profiling research experiments had led him to believe it would. That Sunday night October 30, 1938 was to become a landmark date in his files and a date signifying a vast paradigm shift for ever in the way that "news" would henceforth, be presented. Slightly more than seven decades later, the world is still being fed a diet of news mingled with fiction, - fiction that in so many instances is terrifying. The Western world has undergone drastic changes unwillingly forced upon it, that it has become a world so vastly different from what it was on that October night in 1938, as to be "another planet." We shall return to this vital subject later in this work.
Following the Second World War, Cantril became totally involved with the head guru at Tavistock, its founder, John Rawlings Reese and his World Tensions Project at the United Nations' UNESCO.
Profiles on how individuals and groups reacted to international tensions were formulated on the basis of skillfully blending fact with terrifying fiction in preparation for a campaign to launch "World citizens," (of a One World Government Socialist-Communist dictatorship) that began to be employed to weaken national boundaries, language and culture and to discredit pride of nation and sovereignty of nation-states, in preparation for the coming of the Socialist New World Order-One World Government, that President Woodrow Wilson said America would make safe for "democracy."
Those fresh-faced young American boys from Arkansas and North Carolina were sent marching off to Europe believing they were "fighting for their country," never knowing that the "democracy" Wilson sent them to "make safe for the world" was a Socialist-International Communist One World Government dictatorship.

Journal of Humanistic Psychology

John Rawlings Reese was the publisher of Tavistock's magazine Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Their joint thinking mentality is seen in the 1955 monograph, "Toward a Humanistic Psychology, " an as a progression of Cantril's support for the Tavistock-trained Gordon Airport's perception of the "personality." As he expressed it in the 1947 book, Understanding Man's Social Behavior, in a chapter on "Causality." Cantril's methodology was based on the conception that "the particular environment in which growth takes place gives the particular individual a particular direction for growth."
Cantril's endeavors are good examples of the breakdown of boundaries between supposedly neutral opinion taking and social-engineering opinion making;
Tavistock's commitment to forcing major shifts in personality and behavior in all sectors of targeted population groups such as we have sought to describe.
Cantril appointed a board of directors to assist in the work, among who were:

• Warren Bennis, a follower of Tavistock director Eric Trist.
• Marilyn Ferguson, allegedly the author of The Aquarian Conspiracy;
• Jean Houston, head of the Institute for Brain Research, member of the Club of Rome and author of Mind Games.
• Aldous Huxley, who supervised the MK-Ultra LSD program that ran for 20 years.
• Willis Harman, a Stanford University director and mentor of "The Changing Images of Man" later disguised as "The Aquarian Conspiracy" passed off as the work of Marilyn Ferguson.
• Michael Murphy, head of the Esalen Institute, established by Huxley and others as the Center for "sensitivity training" and drug experiments.
• James F.T. Bugenthal, an initiator of cult-creation projects at Esalen.
• Abraham Maslow, the leading exponent of the irrationalist "think force" and founder of AHP in 1957.
• Carl Rogers, Maslow's co-worker at the AHP in 1957.

AHP's reigning ideology was exemplified by a book review in a 1966 issue of its journal, The Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

Maslow's book, The Psychology of Science

Reviewing Maslow's book, The Psychology of Science, Willis Harman, a year before his 1967-69 Stanford Research study, welcomed the "challenge to science" from "extrasensory perception, psycho kinesis, mysticism, and consciousness-expanding drugs" (particularly LSD and Mesacalin.) He lauded Maslow's "new science" since it would bring to the fore "hypnosis, creativity, parapsychology, and psychedelic experience," and shift scientific concern away from the "outside" world to studying "inner space."
This was Cantril's original "particular personality" thinking brought to its logical conclusion. To Cantril goes the "glory and honor" of forcing a vast paradigm shift on the way the Western world thinks and behaves.
Certainly Oswald Spengler would have had no trouble in identifying it as one of the causes of the downfall of the West he had predicted in 1936.

Making Changes in the "Cognitive and Behavioral Structure"

Whatever the particular coloration of ideology that accompanied the scientists of the polling institutions after World War II, the invariant notion of social engineering trough "sampling methods" and "opinion research" could be found in Cartwright's paper Some Principles of Mass Persuasion prepared for the Division of Program Surveys of the Department of Agriculture.
The paper was subtitled, "Selected Findings of Research on the Sale of United States War Bonds," but as Cartwright makes clear, the war-related aspect of the survey was just a pretext for conducting an analysis on the principles of how perception can be modified to suit whatever ends the controller might have in mind.
One would be puzzled as to what the sale of war bonds had to do with agriculture, but that was part of Cartwright's methodology. It was the Bernays-Lippmann-Cantril-Cartwright hypothesis synthesized and concentrated in a World War II setting. The article was featured in Tavistock's journal, Human Relations which ought to immediately brought the reader to attention.
"Among the many technological advances of the past century that have produced changes in social organization," Cartwright began,

"the development of the mass media of communication promises to be the most far reaching. This heightened interdependence of people means that the possibilities of mobilizing mass social action have been greatly increased. It is conceivable that one persuasive person could, through the use of mass media, bend the world's population to his will."

We do not believe that Cartwright had Jesus Christ in mind when he made that statement.
Under a subheading, "Creating a Particular Cognitive Structure," Cartwright continues:
Principle One:

"It is considered a truism by virtually all psychologists that a person's behavior is guided by his perception of the world in which he lives.... It follows from this formulation that one way to change a person's behavior is to modify his cognitive structure. The modification of cognitive structure in individuals by means of the mass media has several prerequisites. These may be stated in the form of principles."

Interspersing his account with examples from the application of his study to the World War Two war-bonds sale drive, Cartwright then elaborated the principles: "The 'message' (i.e., information, facts, etc.), must reach the sense organs of the persons who are to be influenced... Total stimulus situations are selected or rejected on the basis of an impression of their general characteristics," etc. A second set of principles investigated more deeply the methods of altering "cognitive structure."
Principle Two:

"Having reached the sense organs, 'message' must be accepted as part of the person's cognitive structure." Cartwright noted in this section that "any effort to change behavior through a modification of this cognitive structure must overcome the forces tending to maintain the present structure.
Only when a given cognitive structure seems to the person to be unsatisfactory for his adjustment is he likely readily to receive influences designed to change that structure."

Under "Creating a Particular Motivational Structure," Cartwright analyzed further "the social inductions the governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in Washington into turmoil for a protracted period."

Polling comes of age

CHAPTER 10