The way of controlling the human mind

People like Dewey were known as pragmatists for good reason. They were interested in the truth about the human psyche only insofar as that truth produced results. Like the physical sciences, which were not so much a means of understanding nature as they were a means of controlling it, the new science of psychology, as conceived by John Dewey, would be a way of controlling the human mind. Dewey was one of the architects of twentieth-century liberalism, and one of the goals of liberalism was social control.

Liberalism, in this respect, was both arsonist and fire department. Science was the solvent which was to dissolve all of the old bonds associated with morals, religion and tradition, and once that dissolution had been accomplished and the culture was on the verge of social chaos as a result, science, specifically the new science of psychology, would provide the culture’s mandarins a way of controlling the unruly masses along new, more “rational” lines, which also, by the way, would benefit the controllers both politically and financially. Psychology, according to Dewey, was to become the scientific arm of democratic reform, and the public school was to be the institution wherein the democratic science found its application to life.1 Dewey was, of course, reacting to the waves of immigration which were sweeping over America’s shores from southern and eastern Europe at the time. Dewey saw the schools as the main instrument of socialization, an instrument which would produce a homogenized American citizen, purged of ethnic and familial affiliation, who identified with progressive, national goals as articulated by the masters of public opinion in a mass-media age. Schools would be “managed on a psychological basis as great factories are run on the basis of chemical and physical science.” The schools would create Americans as Dewey defined them, which is to say, people who believed in science but shared a skepticism about the institutions created by the founding fathers. This skepticism would find its way into the writings of fellow liberals like Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and the rest of those who found their apotheosis with the founding of the New Republic and the coming of Woodrow Wilson’s war.

E. Michael Jones
Libido Dominandi