The Standard Review

The Consequences of Counting Sheep

Knowledge may be power but in this information age, the race for such power is as corruptible as any other and bullies involved in this competition are just as likely to describe degradation as the way to encourage toughness. I often see examples on the Internet where those who are seen as highly suggestible or who lack sophistication or savvy are defined as cattle or sheep.

On the playground, this is similar to calling someone a sissy or highlighting someone's weakness in an attempt to show how someone else is strong or tough by contrast. Of course, this is encouraged in the classroom as a way to coerce people to comply with standard evaluations. This is why psychology became so heavily influenced by the philosophy of behaviorism and why compulsory education focuses more of encouraging the standards of behavior than anything else.

The name of this blog is The Standard Review. What I have attempted to describe is the way that cultural standards influence public policy and how unrealistic expectations can negatively influence our relationship with individuals as well as with our community. Almost every post here is tagged "social Darwinism." Herbert Spencer helped to make this particular cultural standard so popular. This is how Wikipedia explains Herbert Spencer's contribution to the theory described as social Darwinism:

"For many, the name of Herbert Spencer would be virtually synonymous with Social Darwinism, a social theory that applies the law of the survival of the fittest to society; humanitarian impulses had to be resisted as nothing should be allowed to interfere with nature's laws, including the social struggle for existence. Spencer desired the elimination of the unfit through their failure to reproduce, rather than state intervention to secure their physical annihilation.[26]

Spencer's association with Social Darwinism might have its origin in a specific interpretation of his support for competition. Whereas in biology the competition of various organisms can result in the death of a species or organism, the kind of competition Spencer advocated is closer to the one used by economists, where competing individuals or firms improve the well being of the rest of society. Spencer viewed private charity positively so long as it did not encourage the procreation of the unworthy, as he believed in voluntary association and informal care as opposed to using government machinery.[27]"

Spencer suggested that exclusionary and harsh standards would make the valued class stronger, but aside from how the less privileged are treated by it; I don't believe it strengthens anyone at all. Cultural standards can be used to discourage murder, rape, and other abusive acts, but they can also be used to define someone who isn't as skilled or capable as less worthy of respect and dignity. As someone diagnosed with autism who has been punished by the educational/training/rehabilitation/disability system for nearly a half-century, I see the values encouraged by the system to be mainly exclusionary and abusive in that way.

As much as people work towards creating better supports for people with mental illness and intellectual disability, they should also recognize that most people due to class status and disenfranchisement are simply just classified by the system as crazy and stupid and there's hardly a distinction between the two. It's convenient to claim that someone is inferior in the department of sanity or intellectuality due to moral reasons (for example, someone is described as willfully ignorant and/or choosing to be lazy), but it must be understood that the system which is supposedly providing them support uses those same moral standards which are based on nothing more than propaganda as an excuse to treat them as a subhuman species. Although this is deceptively advertised as support, it provides nothing but more unnecessary obstacles for those who are diagnosed.

The encouragement of overcoming is in no way separate from the fear which creates pity in terms of the treatment in this part of the population. The standard is not set so that no one will be left behind as it is advertised to be. Instead, it is set so that competition can be glorified and the abuse of those who are determined losers will appear justified.

It's important to recognize that anything and everything which criticizes someone classified as mentally ill, intellectually inferior, autistic, or with any variation or vernacular, can and will be used to further degrade everyone with such a diagnosis. Most everything we do is criticized and most anything that anyone of us does which society frowns upon is used to degrade the rest of us as well.

As an autistic, I wonder how anyone can believe that encouraging any type of cultural skill standards (standard of so-called appropriate or normal behavior, standard of communication, standard of so-called appropriate or normal response, etc.) can be seen as anything other than a way to encourage fear and degradation for what autistics do, which causes us so much harm.

Maybe people aren't smart or skilled in traditional ways, and maybe we go along and are naïvely accepting in a way that the savvy and sophisticated (otherwise known as the sane and smart) part of the population describes in the same way they describe the ways of cattle or sheep. However, it doesn't help anyone to show how others are less valuable based on their lack of ability. Furthermore, as I said earlier, lack of skill, naivete, and/or lack of emotional or mental stability is described as a lack of morality by the system which defines what skills are valued and which ones aren't.

It's important for everyone to use the skills which they have to perform their best weather that fits within traditional boundaries or whether the expression is completely unique. Doing your best is self-supporting as well as encouraging the strength of others. When instead, someone else must be degraded in order for others to appear better, the standard of degradation and unreasonable expectations is reinforced at the expense of everyone becoming weaker and everyone's contribution becoming less valuable.

Acceptance and Murder

Recently, the mainstream media has once again depicted murders of disabled people in a completely irresponsible way. Both George Hodgins, an autistic man, and Daniel Corby an autistic boy, were killed within the past month. Rather than only suggest how unfair the decision of those who ended their lives was similarly to the way other murders are reported; the focus was instead on how these people’s burdensome disability must have contributed to their killer's choice.

It is wrongly assumed too often that our culture is sophisticated enough to demonize the disability without doing the same to the person with the disability similar to the way some describe hating the sin but loving the sinner. Despite each individual’s spirit, we as a culture cannot safely assume that the way we depict particular disabilities will not encourage abuse and even murder. For we who are targeted in this way, the correlation between the two is obvious.

Despite the popular impression of how our justice system operates, people with disability and inconvenient cultural diversity aren't treated very differently than criminals. In fact, there continues to be many opportunities to the people with the power and inclination to do so, to criminalize the ways the people of these categories are different.

Convenience is the most valued commodity for many people, and therefore, it is often also the most exploited. Unless the category of people you are defined as fitting is seen to help create more power (or at least the illusion of more power) for the most powerful people; those people are probably working to create laws that will encourage the belief that you are a burden on society.

The categories encourage a place, and a duty for every individual based mainly on how they are seen to add value or the lack of it to the collective. The leaders of industry have the power and opportunity to set these laws which determine your place and therefore, your supposed value. Having a disability means that your ability is completely inconvenient for them. It means that you are seen as needing care and therefore, the care giver (and similarly, the rest of society) will be seen as deserving sympathy for having to tolerate you.

One example of how cultural exclusion was made legal in early America is the way that physician Samuel A. Cartwright defined the desire of a slave to be free as the psychiatric disorder called drapetomania. Black slaves were defined by law as only partially human, and it was claimed that their skin color indicated less sensitivity to pain. This, of course, made their physical punishment appear less cruel so it could then be applied more severely.

The harmful ways the reputation of the medical establishment lent credibility to the descriptions of slaves in order to protect the financial interest of plantation owners is similar to how people with disabilities are cruelly defined by the main-stream media in order to only promote the value of care givers rather than those described as their burdens.

Today slavery in America is mainly only described in terms of our history. However, although the ways that utilitarian attitudes are encouraged may appear more subtle now to most, we still have some extreme ways of discriminating and punishing inconvenient people that our mainstream media refuses to accept responsibility for. Our industry leaders demand that the media continue spreading propaganda, which shows people whom the leaders find inconvenient to have no value at all.

Despite the promises of finding causes and cures for autism, there is little proof. The fear of having to deal with the burden of the autistic person encourages people to treat autistics in the worst possible ways. The spread of lies about our lack of empathy, contributing to financial burdens, and divorce of our parents is what has truly reached epidemic proportion.

The people who can’t understand and appreciate people’s value beyond the strict utilitarian view that industrialists encourage through the mainstream media shouldn’t be involved in promoting societal values. I hope that everyone who does appreciate people's value and can avoid these unfair judgements will work to end the harmful lies being told.

Ability isn't more important than happiness. Besides, emotional stability is an essential foundation to learning. Therefore, nothing is more important than how disability is viewed. If someone's value isn't understood; it's the result of an oversight. To view it otherwise ensures that we as a culture soon won't have enough compassion (which is our greatest resource) for our species to continue.

Disclaimer :I give my permission for this post to be reprinted in order to raise awareness of this issue.

What They Don't Say About Us

The most important thing I've learned from newspapers, television, and the Internet is that only a few people are being discussed. Most are thereby defined by this discussion as insignificant. Of course, the standard for a persons significance is constantly changing because the people which have the distinction of being important need to maintain the illusion by exclusive means.

In the discussion regarding diagnosis such as autism, I believe that nothing is more important than finding more ways to include the voices of people who have been disenfranchised. As I see the leadership in the United States has recently voted to launch more powerful weapons in the war against the poor, I'm reminded that nothing defines the economic poverty more than disenfranchisement, and a behavioral diagnosis is similar to a box that allows others to place you on a shelf where you can be more easily criticized and ignored.

The most critical problem I see with this exclusion is that when people begin to advocate against it, they tend to set up a similar standard. This becomes even worse when the methods of exclusion are copied from those who are described as opponents of their goal. Political agendas often become more important than the people the agenda's leaders claim they are aiming to help.

So much of our culture influences the belief that success is always earned.The way this is taught tends not to include the details of how our standards of success are based on commercial branding.Too often the belief leads to the humiliation and distrust of people who fall below the standard. Most are even ignored altogether as a result. Unfortunately, the standard is rarely explored and criticized, and therefore, many myths are maintained and used as weapons.

This makes learning how to encourage each other very difficult. We tend to imagine a commercial price tag on every human attribute and expression and rank each other accordingly. Many expressions which could be accepted and even celebrated as eccentricities are instead judged as substandard. This encourages recovery and overcoming of too many aspects of the human experience. It even happens to such a degree that it can lead to us forgetting how to enjoy life and appreciate each other.

Our guidebook of standards is like a product catalog that ranks our worth similarly to the way price tags are used. We then can't appreciate each other appropriately and because the value is seen in such a narrow context, our communication is very limited. Therefore, since we tend not to trust what we don't understand, we become unnecessarily defensive rather than empathetic and compassionate.

The cultural divide many of us experience is very real. It's important to recognize how these divisions occur so that realistic solutions can be found. To avoid acknowledging this often encourages simply another political agenda that widens the gap even further and excludes those who are in the biggest need of inclusion. The problem with identity politics isn't identity, it's the politics.

Human communication always includes labeling and ranking. Although the writers of the DSM and the industry that supports them cannot be trusted to do what is in the best interest of the people who are diagnosed based on their suggestion, I can't think of any system of labeling and ranking, which deserves unreserved and unregulated loyalty and trust. We can, however, use any label far beyond the intentions of those who have formed standards, which create harm.

Too often, people who are caught by the predominant labeling and ranking systems get ranked as insignificant and are therefore ignored by people with an anti-labeling political agenda. This is very unfortunate as well as unnecessary. Advocates can instead use what others meant for harm (or what became harm due to negligence) to empower an otherwise disenfranchised (and unrepresented) group.

Being involved in a society that is so driven by consumerism and bombarded with commercial images has a way of teaching us as individuals that we are also products. What is implied indirectly is that our cultural standard for significance defines most people as less valuable than the food and water we consume. If we as a culture don't begin to recognize the standard and the subtle ways it's taught, we can't begin to combat it.

Viewing things in a different way shouldn't lead to being excluded from discussions. In order to have a more inclusive society, we need to encourage more people to express themselves in diverse ways and thoughtfully consider a broader set of options. In this way, we can begin to introduce new ideas and show less interest in standards, which are designed to empower only an elite few. What these few would like to hide about the rest of us is important to understand, and we are important to everyone's future.

Activists Compromising Everything

 

Every time activists in the U.S. have sought to reform the mental health/developmental disabilities/ mental retardation/etc. system, their efforts (which always became compromises) ultimately strengthened the system and made it more difficult to stop.

Dorothea Dix came along when a change was obviously needed and set a president for how reform was to take place. Mainly, this reformation put the determination of rights for those mainly affected by the system in the hands of political opportunists.

 The response to the public recognition of the abuses in places like Willowbrook included the creation the Protection and Advocacy agency which protected the system from being independently investigated.

In the same way, that sterilization was originally sold as a right, forceable institutionalization law are sold as the way to ensure that those who were in the most need of care could be assured adequate support.

Today it's obvious to those who are treated the worst by this system that it was never designed for their benefit but is instead an unfair weapon in the class war for allowing the judicial system to incarcerate misfits and promote the careers of politicians.

There is no mystery in why such low standards are used to evaluate science regarding autism or why the pharmaceutical companies have  started a new propaganda campaign to promote their new products due to the ritalin campaign getting old.

Of course the behaviorists are getting away with more abuse than ever (including murder) and the solution is described as impossible due to the severity of the behavior problems. The abuse is being exposed mainly by those who are advocating more formal integration of standard behaviorism in schools by using laws that claim that children will be safer.

A class war is determined by hierarchy. The people at the bottom of the ladder know very well how the system works and are listened to the least. If you don't yet see that compromise is not an option it's mainly because you aren't at the bottom yet. However, if you review the history of the system and analyze how quickly the system is expanding to include you, you'll understand that either you or someone very close to you soon will be.

Dunking Autistics

 
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Though the ideas from early American Putirtan culture are hundreds of years old, some of that type of thinking can be found in today's culture as well with regard to how disability is viewed and more specifically how autistics are treated.

The authority during the Salem witch trials was practically in a state of paranoid frenzy due to the fear of having their authority challenged. They were not only concerned with punishing the accused but wanted no trace of them if the accusation proved false. This would prevent the potential for them being charged with falsely arresting people or with abusing their authority.

 It says here:

"Dunking is a form of torture and punishment that was applied to scolds and supposed witches.

In a trial by ordeal, supposed witches were immersed into a vat of water or pond, and taken out after some time, thus and given the opportunity to confess. This process was usually repeated until the victim drowned or gave up and confessed, leading to them being executed in another way, usually hanging or, more rarely, burning. Also, if they had their hands/feet tied, they would be left under water. If they floated they were guilty of witchcraft, if they sank they were innocent but would have usually drowned anyway."

 
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After the notorious Salem witch trials:

"Reversals of attainder and compensation to the survivors and their families

Title page of A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft by John Hale (Boston, 1702)The first hint that public call for justice was not over happened in 1695, when Thomas Maule, a noted Quaker, publicly criticized the handling of the trials by the Puritan leaders in Chapter 29 of his book Truth Held Forth and Maintained, expanding on Increase Mather by stating, "it were better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one person be put to death for a witch, which is not a Witch".[67] For publishing this book, Maule was imprisoned twelve months before he was tried and found not guilty."

 

Although, today's courts are often described as favoring the presumption of innocence, factors such as economic status, race, and the presumption of ability and competency heavily influence the outcome of a court trial (being viewed as less competent encourages a guilty verdict). Even social skills and how likeable someone is cannot be ruled out as being influential.

With the overwhelming influence of modern technology and the opportunities that present for networking, communication on the Internet largely impacts cultural views as well as how people vote on public policy. Furthermore, the fear encouraged by eugenist in the past century has greatly influenced our cultural bias against disability. This bias is even more pronounced with a disability relating to competency and mental stability. All this combined with the fear-mongering recently from autism advocacy groups such as Autism Speaks, causes autistics to receive a lot of negative attention.

Similar to the ways supposed witches were presumed guilty of crimes and sentenced without an opportunity to defend themselves, autistics who assert themselves on the internet regarding public policy which affects them are often treated with no respect and little if any opportunity to express themselves.

With that in mind I've written some ideas/questions regarding cultural views about disability and more specifically how this influences the experience of autistics that advocate their rights on the Internet. Here are the questions:

 

 

How often has the person living with someone who has a disability ( a parent, caretaker, etc.) had more opportunities to voice their view about the disability than the person most directly affected?

How often have non-disabled people been justified in harming a disabled person due to the public's empathy of what is seen as the able person's burden? How often is this done in relation to the frequency of the disabled person having the way they were being abused, understood and validated?

How often are the expressions of frustration from the abused disabled person accepted in a public discussion? How often is it ignored? In contrast how often does the person living with someone with a disability (parent, caretaker, etc.) express frustration for their perceived burden and have that be accepted and validated? What crimes against the disabled has this acceptance led to?

Based on what is known about something, in particular, that can be called autism (that which can be cured/removed/fixed), how often are people with conditions with a similar amount of information known about that solution (or the lack thereof) asked if they want that condition cured?

How often does a discussion that involves issues that are most relevant to a particular group of people include having them provided the least opportunity to express their views and have that view be respected? How much more often does that happen when this is related to a disability?  What about with a developmental disability? How about in relation to autism?

How much is understood about the lives of adult autistics when they were children? How much effort goes into learning about that and how much is simply presumed? How do convenient presumptions affect communication? What does making convenient presumptions reflect  about the person making them when someone they live with has a communication disorder? How much better could they (the person with the disorder) communicate with the people in their lives if those people weren't making convenient presumptions?

What role does shame play in someone's emotional development? What about academic development? How much is being done to ensure that autistics will not need to be ashamed in the future no matter how competent they are perceived? What are children learning about the importance of competency and will they feel proud when they arrive at the standard cultural expectations (or the ones of their family) or will they always be ashamed of what they haven't achieved and try to degrade others in order to achieve that sense of pride? Who is ultimately served by this striving to achieve?

What do the money and time spent on the gambling everything on the fix or cure in relation to what is spent on encouraging self-esteem and empowerment reflect about the value others place on these people? What does the money and time spent on the gamble to fix them in relation to what's spent on education and vocational training reflect? What about nationally? globally? community efforts? individual households?

Note: Nothing encourages injustice more than the false claim that justice is being served.

Intelligence Required

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People receiving accommodation and accessibility pursuant to policy changes regarding disability does not negate that the intention of the original policy design was meant to provide a convenience for what gets described as the "general public" more so than for aid to those who receive the label. This is especially true for disabilities that refer to intellect and behavior.

The increase in the number of people labeled is in direct proportion to an increasingly exclusive and bigoted society as well as an increase in population. It doesn't seem productive to me to protest the labeling except for the purpose of opposing the harmful treatment. Usually though, such objections are more geared toward the ideal of encouraging people to overcome weakness.  Unfortunately, the language associated with overcoming is often used more to promote the derogatory stereotypes than it is anyone's empowerment.

There is not much of a dividing line in regard to cultural understanding between intellectual deficit and mental instability. The judicial system has greatly influenced these beliefs. The majority of people are hurt by these assertions and are either institutionalized or completely ignored and denied any type of aid as a result.

Since the broader awareness and understanding of deficits are not creating better accommodation and accessibility for the majority of people(and often the bigotry encouraged from broader awareness causes the opposite response) the goal of  promoting the more positive cultural perspectives is essential to inclusion and acceptance. It's irresponsible to attempt policy changes without the preservation of dignity for the person labeled with the deficit being the top priority.

The current cultural understanding of behavior in the U.S. as it relates to intellect, mental stability, and character was greatly influenced by the Eugenics movement and more specifically by the efforts of the American psychologist Henry H. Goddard.

 
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 "Henry Herbert Goddard (August 14, 1866 – June 18, 1957) was a prominent American psychologist and eugenicist in the early 20th century. He is known especially for his 1912 work The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, which he himself came to regard as deeply flawed, and for being the first to translate the Binet intelligence test into English in 1908 and distributing an estimated 22,000 copies of the translated test across the United States; he also introduced the term "moron" into the field.

He was the leading advocate for the use of intelligence testing in societal institutions including hospitals, schools, the legal system and the military. He played a major role in the emerging field of clinical psychology, in 1911 helped to write the first U.S. law requiring that blind, deaf and mentally retarded children be provided special education within public school systems, and in 1914 became the first American psychologist to testify in court that subnormal intelligence should limit the criminal responsibility of defendants."

 

However later,

 

"By the late 1920s, Goddard had reversed many of his early opinions, declaring in multiple public forums that he had been gravely mistaken in many of his most famous conclusions (Zenderland, 1998, pp. 324-326). He had begun to question the validity of the tests that were used to detect morons, and he stated emphatically that his former belief that morons could not be educated satisfactorily was wrong. In addition, he frequently voiced his new opinion that feeble-minded people should be allowed to have children, if they choose to do so. He asserted in a 1927 article for Scientific Monthly that the concept of segregation colonies had been a bad idea (Zenderland, 1998, pp. 324-326).

However, Die Familie Kallikak was printed in Germany in 1914 and reprinted in 1933 shortly after the Nazis came to power. Goddard never intended for his book to be connected with Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust. In 1938 and 1939, he tried unsuccessfully to use his influence to help the daughter of a Jewish colleague escape from Austria (Zenderland, 1998, pp. 333-335). Subsequently, a psychology text by Columbia University psychologist Henry Garrett (1961) provided a brief, and rather embellished, overview of the Kallikak study to bolster his eugenicist arguments. Although these interpretations stood at odds with Goddard's opinions later in his life, these and related events have helped to paint the rather negative picture many people still hold of Goddard and his work."

I think it's very important to understand that the most prevalent views regarding these issues are anything but liberating.

Bigoted views result from people's dependence on convenience, their unwillingness to explore the history of language, and the constant submission to shame-based behavior, which encourages us to seek ways of belittling rather than empowering each and rather than staying focused on doing our individual best.

There are people who are so removed from the majority of people and have therefore become completely indifferent to common struggle that they intend to relieve hardship (their own hardship, but it's conveniently described as ours) by eliminating part of the population. Too often people continue to echo the language which was designed by them as well as encourage their agenda without paying much attention to how the attitude continues with a snow-ball effect.

The way we use language regarding intelligence and mental stability is very important and oppression would never survive if the people behind oppressive agendas were unable to depend on the ways we encourage language subtly that support their efforts. If we were more careful to watch the way we contribute to our own demise, their efforts would not be nearly so successful.

Important People

 

In order to create and/or maintain a closed society the people in command must control the information AND the entertainment. The messages that get regularly reinforced will teach people to believe that there are limited resources which more important than many of the people who use them. In other words, that some people are worth more dead than alive.

One group need to believe that they are entitled and therefore become active in their community and in politics so that what they see as their rights will be preserved.  The other group needs to be shamed into believing they are unworthy and taught shame-based behavior. This confirms the beliefs of the first group and keeps the second fighting among each other rather than uniting and working for change.

If exclusion was just the result of flaws in the system, the plans for change would be practical and possible and more of them would be implemented. Until more people who aren't being favored are allowed to make unique contributions to society  so that they believe they are worthy of inclusion and the rewards that follow, they won't honor and respect any of their so-called provisions. Even worse, they won't feel that way about themselves or anyone else.

Smart Enough to Avoid Punishment

 

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In an ideal society, a label that indicated an intelligence deficit would be beneficial. It could be used to provide either accommodations or more realistic and focused expectations. However, the way these labels have been used by the compulsory school system in the United States has taught us to relate this to a value system that can be quite harmful.
 

 The method used for making this judgment is severely limited in both accuracy and practicality. The American justice system depends on such arbitrary evaluations to provide more latitude within law enforcement, which leads to agents having more unlimited control. If this system's leadership were challenged more so that they were required to explain the reasoning behind punishments for the population labeled (either by formal diagnosis or socially acceptable insult) as stupid, crazy, and immoral/lacking in character development, this would ultimately encourage everyone to take more responsibility. It's difficult for people to understand a responsibility and the benefits for accepting it when their leaders aren't willing to.

Thinking skills typically have much less to do with brainpower and formal training than the advertising for academia would lead people to believe. The tests to evaluate aptitude and academic progress provides advantages for a small number of people. The rest is shown  to instead be inferior and taught to be compliant.

The problems faced by business owners during the industrial revolution were met by them claiming that unnatural and inappropriate breeding was a threat to necessary progress and the future of the human race. These claims were used to justify their scientific proposals for population control, which continues to play a dominant role in politics and the judicial system.

Francis Galton called the science eugenics.

"Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in a book, Inquiries into human faculty and its development.[13] He believed that a scheme of 'marks' for family merit should be defined, and early marriage between families of high rank be encouraged by provision of monetary incentives."

Here is some of what has been said by respected people who have influenced the public perceptions of this supposed problem.

This is one example:

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind...
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
[1.1] Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell

 
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And here are others:

"It does not, however, seem impossible that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place among men. Whether intellect could be communicated may be a matter of doubt: but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity are in a degree transmissible... As the human race could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable, that an attention to breed should ever become general."
- Thomas R. Malthus. An Essay on Population. 1798

 AND

"In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it."
- Jacques Cousteau,  1991 UNESCO courier

And here: 

Margaret Sanger, the Founder of Planned Parenthood, advocated eugenics, describing it as a way to eliminate "human waste" from society.

"Everywhere we see poverty and large families going hand in hand. Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by Church and State to produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased or feeble-minded; many become criminals. The burden of supporting these unwanted types has to be bourne by the healthy elements of the nation. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born."

 

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And here:

 
In support of the eugenics movement, (Theodore) Roosevelt wrote that

"it is obvious that if in the future racial qualities are to be improved, the improving must be wrought mainly by favoring the fecundity [fertility] of the worthy types... At present, we do just the reverse. There is no check to the fecundity of those who are subnormal..."

 
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And here:

John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) a major figure in the eugenics movement founded the American Medical Missionary Board (but soon changed its name to the Race Betterment Foundation). Kellogg himself was an important and respected figure who authored numerous medical and eugenics treatises in order to lobby for policy of "national eugenics." Kellogg, who launched the breakfast cereals industry by introducing granola to the American public as a health food.

The corporate experiment established by Americans (known as the United States) has traditionally attempted to divide and conquer the unwanted public. One method for achieving this is by encouraging confusion over the meaning of personal responsibility. Rather than encourage each other and work together to challenge unfair elitist domination,  society is instead obsessed with following the traditions of unreasonable standards for critical evaluations.

In this video, State Controlled Consciousness, John Taylor Gatto explains how compulsory schooling is used to provide an expanded military that protects the rules which are decided by the state. The United States adopted this tool of government from Prussia, which encourages us to believe that there is little or no value to an individual human or their creative process. Since the rules can be taught by motivating people to avoid punishment, the rules don't get challenged and the elite who possessed the power is allowed to preserve it.

When the government control becomes an unregulated obsession for an elite few, the remaining public is following standards that they instinctively know lacks the sound judgment. At this point, they can either choose to revolutionize the system, or they can instead become apathetic and frustrated from being unable to trust their neighbors or even themselves and their own judgment.

The advances in technology are now accelerating dramatically pursuant to the insatiable appetite of consumers. This appetite was encouraged so that the market could be deceptively described as the answer to the world's problems. This provided industry leaders with more power and ultimately more authority. Most all scientific discoveries are encouraged and glorified based on the establishment of the same misplaced faith in an unregulated market. This creates advantages for a few people and is used as the justification for excluding the majority for being invalid.

An appetite for technical accuracy has been established in accordance with the encouragement of the myth that we can decide the accuracy of information based on the same rigorous scientific evaluations. Due to the lack of ethical regulations that would encourage us to evaluate ideas, we are accepting commercial brands of truth and hyper critically micro managing each other in a depressingly hopeless and fatal way.

Psychology is a brand of processing ideas. It is promoted in order to encourage the validity in scholastic pursuits. The academic industry advertises that those who achieve their awards are superior in  ability, judgment, and character. The science of human behavior(as it's described) is mainly used as a political tool for controlling the public. It's used more as a method for controlling thoughts and behaviors than  for understanding them. It enslaves consumers by outwitting them rather than teaching productive ways for evaluating and using information.

A society that was truly concerned with justice and human rights would not be allowing the continuing abuse of people based on a punitive justice system deceptively defined as the mental health industry. In such a society, the abuses associated with Applied behavioral analysis (ABA)  (originally researched to determine methods of manipulating prisoners of war) would have been enough to warrant an appropriate investigation. Instead, the harmful traditions of the public school system (which have gotten worse since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was established) continue so that radical change is not seen as necessary. The leadership along with their past misdeeds continues to go unchallenged while voters continue to be taught that most all political compromise is necessary.

Since the state agencies defined as Protection and Advocacy have become practically as ineffective as those that serve vocational rehabilitation needs, the concerned parents of schoolchildren who are being abused are deceptively provided with a substitute solution. Rather than look at how the nature of Applied Behavioral Analysis will likely be implemented in an abusive way, the bureaucratic leaders look for ways to justify and protect their reputation. Instead of admitting their mistakes and making the radical changes which are needed, they instead direct the public's attention to teachers being inadequately trained in the proper use of this supposed "discipline".

A newer and better type of ABA described as Statewide Positive Behavioral Support has been substituted for the important regulation that is needed for teachers abusing authority. The goal of the school system (despite the way typically presented) is to reestablish behavior standards as the focus of compulsory education for most students so that federal laws are easier to enforce.

A society that was truly concerned with justice and human rights for everyone would be able to look at the origins and traditions of the public school system and find better ways to help more students become prepared for adulthood. This would include of course addressing the problems presented by intelligence quotient (I.Q.) test, which were based on eugenic goals and finding more appropriate means of evaluating students.

However, in order to avoid accepting this responsibility, the lack of student achievement was used to explain the need for more exclusive standardized test, which was sold by legislation called No Child Left Behind. (Of course this achieves the opposite goal from the one that the name suggests.)

 

Apathy and hyper criticism is two sides of the same coin. Both encourage an attitude that impedes progress and promotes dependence and oppression. Commercial advertisement provides a constant source of frustration and dissatisfaction by teaching people to evaluate their worth in relation to the type of people they can never become who own things that they can never afford.

"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"~ Audre Lorde

Blaming each other only weakens us so that we are vulnerable to deception. The majority of people are not empowered by standard evaluations, and, unless we challenge those standards we will never recognize and trust the value in our neighbors and in ourselves and we will destroy ourselves in the process.

Personal responsibility should not divide and weaken us so that we can be manipulated by fear and doubt. People don't need to be convinced of the rewards which come from the achievement of truly worthwhile goals. When people believe in themselves and their own ability, they find ways to do things and naturally avoid the punishment which comes from either failure or cheating.

 The value in ourselves which we need to recognize in order to be more successful becomes more apparent when we are willing to accept the same in others. This kind of experience is what will sustain humanity and ultimately the human race.

 

Obsolete

In the past half-century, technological advances have become an increasingly dominant aspect of the global economy. As technological manufacturers have taught us it is impractical to repair our networking devices, we have adopted the belief that humans are composite of efficient or defective independent parts, and that we can be evaluated accordingly as valid or invalid.

Now that the majority of people are serving the enterprise known as science, in one way or another, the corporations which dominate this field have become a political force that works together with government to control as many aspects of our behavior as possible.

We are taught the central nervous system which is most active within the space between our ears is an end unto itself, and that we must submit to the scholastic theories of psychologist and psychiatrist so that our thought processes will be adjusted properly. We've learned to hyper-critically micro manage each other and quickly devalue any diverse expression that deviates from what the current leadership has determined to be the norm.

Medical models are dependent on behavioral treatments that propose to chemically alter the brain structure. These are researched by using the least valued public as expendable products (human lab rats) so that valued workers are more easily manipulated, and the elite are provided with more comforts.

In addition, many among the labeled community aren't exposed to the way that all these specific labels of a learning disability, developmental disorder, psychiatric condition, or psychobiological disorder practically vanishes for most people who are among the class which is least valued once they are institutionalized. In such environments the abuses of control are justified either by the person in care being considered unable to control their actions or unwilling to submit to authority.

Most of what we are taught are cures to the incorrect configuration of our brains or the maladjusted way we respond to our environment doesn't exist in any other way than how close our expressions come to a standard that was set to glorify the characteristics which are most comfortable to the people in positions of leadership. All sorts of atrocities are committed and justified by the claim that it is done in the name of science, progress, and the common good.

The most outrageous and harmful treatments and attempted cures are justified through the sophisticated fear-based advertising campaigns that describe cases of severity. The biggest deception of these campaigns is the exploitation of severe problems. While people with the most severe cases are shown as the reason for more research into cures and treatments, they are not the ones who benefit from scientific discovery.

Instead, in addition to the exploitation, they typically get described as beyond repair, aberrant and unwilling, too old, or that the main problem is due to poor character.

The way severe neurological disorders may contribute to a violent response has never been advertised in order to provide a better understanding or treatment for the people who have them. Instead, in a very few cases it gets accepted in the judicial system as an excuse (which then gets little if any attention or aid) and the belief that these disorders are associated with violence mainly provides justification for incarceration and harmful treatments based on the presumption of guilt for the undesirable and inconvenient public.

If our attitudes about people don't change so that we accept more diverse expressions as valid and important the sophistication of our technology and scientific research will go to provide worse treatment and even more widespread abuse. This is the current trend despite claims that science is leading us away from our barbaric ways.

The design for the cure attitude exhibited in the way it's advertised was never meant to provide more people with aid or understanding and eliminating competition certainly won't make the already accepted any stronger. Unless we focus on acceptance first and gear scientific research toward helping people whom we are already willing to accept as valid regardless, the result will be more expressions, which are shown to be inappropriate and more people who are thereby defined as obsolete.

Controlling Theories for Psychological Treatment

 
 http://www.xtcian.com/LucyPsychiatricBooth.jpg

It may be best for industries that the public believes that all sophistication of science and scholarly views are beneficial but this broken-until-fixed-by-the-psych-industry is and always has been quite harmful to the majority of the public.

There are as many successful ways for people with disorders that involve thinking (psychological, psychiatric, learning disability, and developmental disorder)  to live as there are individuals that have them. (This includes both the diagnosed and the would-be-diagnosed).

Unfortunately, the few ways that are advertised most and encouraged by most people as successful/appropriate have the best market value (including what is most funded by government aid as tools for the judicial system) and therefore,  prevent most people from getting any aid all. The ones discouraged and excluded are of course the ones that need acceptance and accommodation the most. The excluded group is subjected to bullying and fewer opportunities for relationships and jobs pursuant to the mainstream attitudes that result.

The system that created these disorders was designed to be oppressive rather than empowering. As more people are diagnosed the cure factor becomes an even more powerful weapon and appeals to more people who become even more afraid of becoming disenfranchised. This creates even more division for people who are already excluded by other social factors.

The Internet is a networking tool that is mainly used to narrow the view of what is and isn't acceptable and prevent as many expressions of diversity as possible. The corporations will be blamed for our ruthless abandonment and harsh treatment of people who are inconvenient and uncomfortable but only because they are seen as profiting the most from it. It could never occur without our help.