Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [71]
A May 2007 Pentagon report by the inspector general’s office acknowledged that psychologists oversaw the adaptation of the military’s Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape (SERE) program for use against prisoners. SERE was first designed to replicate torture techniques and help U.S. troops resist Chinese and Soviets interrogators. But, in the hands of army and intelligence psychologists, SERE has been reverse-engineered to break prisoners held in American interrogation centers. The sleep deprivation, lengthy stress positions, complete sensory deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, and forced nudity are systematically employed to reduce prisoners to a state of utter helplessness. Many become catatonic. The psychologists monitor the steady deterioration of the prisoner and advise interrogators how to employ techniques to complete the psychological disintegration.
Psychologists, in and out of the government, have learned how to manipulate social behavior. The promotion of collective harmony, under the guise of achieving happiness, is simply another carefully designed mechanism for conformity. Positive psychology is about banishing criticism and molding a group into a weak and malleable unit that will take orders. Personal values, those nurtured by an independent conscience, are gently condemned as antagonistic to harmony and happiness. Those who refuse under group pressure to become harmonious are deemed a drag on the corporate body and, if they cannot be reformed, expunged. Those who are willing to surrender their individuality are granted small rewards doled out by the corporate structure. They can feel, at least until they lose their jobs, that they belong to an important and powerful collective. They can adopt a corporate identity. They feel protected. The greatest fear becomes the fear of disrupting the system, of becoming an impediment to the harmony of the corporate collective. The quest for harmony, which these psychologists understand, lures people into a state of psychological somnambulism.
Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader argues that most oppressive systems of power, including classical Western colonialism and proponents of globalization, all use the idea of social harmony as a control mechanism. There is a vast difference, Nader points out, between social harmony and harmony ideology, between positivity and being genuinely positive. Nader sees harmony ideology as a concerted assault on democracy. The drive for harmony, Nader argues, always lends itself to covert censorship and self-censorship. The tyranny of harmony, when pushed to the extreme, leads to a life of fantasy that shuts out reality. Nader sees the ideology of harmony as one that has slowly dominated and corrupted the wider culture.
Positive psychology is only the latest incarnation of this assault on community and individualism. A related ideology was lauded by Business Week in the early 1980s as the “New Industrial Relations.”16 It was touted as a new form of human management. It was also said to be “nicer” than the earlier “scientific management” and social engineering innovations of Henry Ford or Frederick Taylor.17
Roberto González, an anthropologist at San Jose State University, spent nine months in 1989 and 1990 as a student engineer at General Motors. He later wrote “Brave New Workplace: Cooperation, Control, and the New Industrial Relations,” a study on corporate work teams and “quality circles.” The goal of such programs, González found, “was to end the adversarial relationship between management and labor through ‘self-managed’ work teams, and in so doing improve the efficiency and psychological ‘health’ of those involved.” He notes that these workplace reform programs have gone by several names, including “the team approach,” “employee participation,” “workplace democracy,” “human capitalism,” and “quality