gat

health. But what was mental health? What did a fully sane man or woman look like? Out of this
conference in the U.K. two psychiatrists, J.R. Rees and G. Brock Chisholm, leveraged a profitable
new organization for themselves—the World Federation for Mental Health. It claimed expertise in
preventative measures and pinpointed the training of children as the proper point of attack:
The training of children is making a thousand neurotics for every one
psychiatrists can hope to help with psychotherapy.
Chisholm knew what caused the problem in childhood; he knew how to fix it, too:
The only lowest common denominator of all civilizations and the only
psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality, the
concept of right and wrong.
Shakespeare and the Vikings had been right; there’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Morality was the problem. With WWII behind us and everything adrift, a perfect opportunity to
rebuild social life in school and elsewhere—on a new amoral, scientific logic—was presenting
itself:
We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents,
our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our
newspapers....The results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority,
neurosis and inability to enjoy living.... If the race is to be freed from its
crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original
responsibility.
Old Norse pragmatism, the philosophy most likely to succeed among upper-crust thinkers in the
northeastern United States, was reasserting itself as global psychiatry.
The next advance in pedagogy was the initiative of a newly formed governmental body, the
National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). In 1950, it arranged the White House Conference
on Education to warn that a psychological time-bomb was ticking inside the schools. An epidemic
of mental insufficiency was said to be loose among Americans, imperiling the advances that
industry and the arts had given America. Barbarians were already through the gates and among
us!
13 The story of the BSTEP document and the Delphi Technique, two elements in this initiative, is told in Beverly
Eakman’s Educating for the New World Order, by a former Department of Justice employee. The book offers an
accessible, if somewhat breathless, passage into the shadow world of intrigue and corporate shenanigans behind
the scenes of schooling. Also worth a look (and better edited) is Eakman’s Cloning of the American Mind. Whatever
you think of her research, Miss Eakman turns over some rocks you will find useful.
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