This morning’s (4/6/10) 700 Club reported on bullying, a growing avocation for some students in public schools. The target here was a 10-year old, thin little boy who didn’t appear to have much physical stamina. Not long ago Dr. Phil had a program about the same thing, except in his case it was girls of high school age. Apparently two teens, separately and independent of each other, committed suicide as a consequence of being bullied.
While I am not in the habit of watching Dr. Phil, I am in the habit of watching the 700 Club, which can start your day with an upbeat story along with a prayer, rather than the dreary news of the world. which is a downer. From years past I remember people in my life who would stop at church on their way to work, but few churches are left which are open at that hour, and certainly not in my town.
The TV hosts speculated about the bullying and what drives these kids to be so mean. My mind flitted back to a speech I ran across in 1953, and published in my monthly bulletin for the California Chapter of the now defunct Minute Women, USA, Inc. The speech was the product of a Canadian psychiatrist, G. Brock Chisholm. Until I laid it out in my bulletin, apparently the only people who knew what this miserable individual said had been those present in 1945, chief of whom was Abe Fortas who became very controversial on his own several years later, but then he lauded Chisholm, saying that “he not only pleads for mature men and women, but the nature of his plea discloses that he himself is that extraordinary creature: a man of maturity.”
At the time I was a very new Christian and not too learned, and I’m sorry but what this guy’s speech disclosed to me, was a man who at the very least was an atheist, very likely a Marxist and wicked to boot. So I was shocked, especially since his weird concepts were greeted with pleasure by his audience which included the equally strange Henry Wallace, who ran for President on the “Progressive Party,” and they all ate up this man’s speech on the “reestablishment of peacetime society,” in which Chisholm outlined the responsibility of psychiatry as well as education to remodel mankind.
Man’s revolt against Christian civilization had been going on long before this, but his speech was, in my estimation, the catalyst for the promotion of every kind of shameful wickedness, particularly in the schools and became the catalyst for me then to decide never to allow either of my two, a son and a daughter, to attend public schools. And for the most part they never did.
I didn’t then have even a fleeting thought about tearing them all down, but I certainly have since!
So many of Europe’s wars from medieval times onward were really family quarrels, and even right up to WWI, when all those “royal” relatives disagreed, but what had that to do with the citizens of the United States, whose Founders said keep out of European affairs?
Chisholm dispensed a lot of b.s. on the ailments of mankind which cause the creation of wars, and then he said:”For a cause we must seek some consistent thread running through the weave of all civilizations we have known preventing the development of all or almost all the people to a state of true maturity.” Your definition of maturity and mine might be somewhat different from Chisholm’s. (He was revered by all the leftwingers of his era) Then he asked the question:
“What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? It must be a force which discourages the ability to see and acknowledge patent facts, which prevent the rational use of intelligence, which teaches or encourages the ability to dissociate and to believe contrary to and in spite of clear evidence, which produces inferiority, guilt and fear, which makes controlling other people’s personal behavior emotionally necessary, which encourages prejudice and the inability to see, understand and sympathize with other people’s points of view. Is there any force so potent and so pervasive that it can do all these things in all civilizations?”
Chisholm answered his own question, naming this force, the cause of all these “immaturities’” As he saw it: “There is—just one. 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, the poison long ago described and warned against as the ‘fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.’”
Chisholm wasn’t finished, however, with his condemnation. He said, “We have been very slow to rediscover this truth and to recognize the unnecessary and artificially imposed inferiority, guilt and fear, commonly known as sin, under which we have almost all labored and which produces so much of the social maladjustment and unhappiness in this world. For many generations we have bowed our necks to the yoke of the conviction of sin. 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 and others with a vested interest in controlling us. ‘Thou shalt become as gods, knowing good and evil,’ good and evil with which to keep children under control, with which to impose local and familial and national loyalties and with which to blind children to their glorious intellectual heritage.”
Chisholm’s condemnation of the knowledge of good and evil continued for many more paragraphs, aimed entirely at Biblical concepts of right and wrong. He called for the “reinterpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy……The suggestion that we should stop teaching children moralities and right and wrongs and instead protect their original intellectual integrity has of course to be met by an outcry of heretic or iconoclast, such as was raised against Galileo for finding another planet, and against those who claimed the world was round (and didn’t that first appear in the Bible?)….etc., etc., ad nauseum.
He finally got to the meat of his subject which is why I am bringing it up here, “The pretense is made, as it has been made in relation to the finding of any extension of truth, that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness and social chaos. The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and many other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely. Most of the patients they have treated successfully have done the same and yet they show no signs of social or personal degeneration, no lack of social responsibility, no tendency toward social anarchy…(oh yeah?)….Freedom from moralities means freedom to observe, to think and behave sensibly, ..free from outmoded types of loyalties (That couldn’t be the reason our prisons are overflowing with people without concepts of right and wrong? …They learned it in school?)
“If the race is to be freed from the crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility…..we have perhaps fifteen or even twenty years….to change the dearest certainties of enough of the human race, …to root out and destroy the oldest and most flourishing parasitical growth in the world, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ….the sciences of living, should be made available to all the people by being taught to all children in primary and secondary schools…..only so, I think, can we help our children to carry their responsibilities as world citizens…..psychiatry must now decide what is to be the immediate future of the human race. No one else can. And this is the prime responsibility of psychiatry.”
Now what has all that to do with bullying? There are, of course, even worse things going on in the public schools which have become dens of iniquity, just as I visualized when I first read Chisholm’s speech back in 1953. That was about the time that sex education was introduced as well, because its promoters said the parents wouldn’t do it. In Massachusetts every degenerate vice is now being taught (Mass Resistance.com) where the Cradle of Liberty has been traded for the Cradle of License. The things going on there may well be occurring more secretly in many other states as well.
What other result was possible with the removal of all concepts of right and wrong— based on the Ten Commandments? It was there in the Garden the human conscience was born, the ability to recognize the difference between right and wrong. Now we have the concept “If it feels good, do it.”
Way back about 1848 when the system of public schools was first being promoted, Dr. Charles Hodge predicted it would become the “greatest engine for the propagation of nihilism the world has ever seen.” And so it has become.
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