Engineering of Opinion Towards Soviet-Style Psychiatry--The Artist's Way p.36, 43-49, 51

The following excerpts are taken from a most interesting forum (big on critical thinking to say the least) where I vaguely remembered this topic, then searched, and finally found this most interesting critique of a few aspects of the widely popularized "artist's book". Whether your knee jerks in agreement or grey area wondering, perhaps you'll find "food for thought" in this critique!


excerpts from various posts found here (slightly edited for clarity, here) :
http://anti-politics.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=436&highlight=artists

Seen further down the thread:

"I'm making a warning that _The Artists Way_ (by Julia Cameron) is fooling people, neutralizing our intelligence, creating a confusion, pandering to our emotional weaknesses and exploiting our trust (of established authority), while promoting what all propagandists do--giving us something meaningful while at the same time making war and programming our intelligence in a certain, rigid, fear-stuck way."

Seen further up in the thread:

"The problem with this book... is that a value system is making covert war upon another value system, one which has been warred on systematically for hundreds of years. The author's method fits snugly into the pattern of authoritarian activity, and whether she knows it or not, is manufacturing the consent of some victims to make and perpetuate this war on other victims.

"One group, those labeled "crazyMAKERS", poses a threat to that order, and must be marginalized and made war on, via all the tricks at the disposal of the state--including using "well educated" folks as uncomprehending tools to implement its interests.[1] (Were the "bad" group to somehow get together in meaningful ways and articulate itself instead of only reacting [angrily/powerlessly] in a vacuum as any victim of state-originated attack is supposed to do, that would be *too threatening* [and has to be suppressed via the therapeutic jargon perpetuated uncritically in this book])

"The other group, that which is being helped a little, has been identified as a group that can be "reasoned with", since they hold (or have internalized) the values of the dominating paradigm. The state's architects and strategists don't necessarily "like" this group as fellow human beings (they are, after all, a militatry-centric organization), but this group [of artists, or persons who see themselves in such light] is an important resource, and thus is valuable (and may be allowed to continue to "thrive") for now.

"Notably, those being labeled "crazymakers" are not "making" crazy. They are humanly responding to pain that we mutually find as human beings living in this system. But their way of expression is more willful, and more distrusting of "The Way Things Are". Basically, the "crazymakers" are more something like "crazysurfers" or "crazyfeelers" because they are still angry at what is happening."

[End of excerpts.]

To continue with the above a bit:
...Whereas those being hyped-up to respond to their symptoms of dis-ease within the ideologically correct/therapeutic value system, are Good and Normal, and Appropriate!

Do take a read of the original critique at top and see if you agree in any way. Perhaps this will be something interesting and inspiring to those of us who are learning to question the "corral" of "normal" in the art "ghetto" today? (I'm not exactly optimistic, but thought I'd pass this by anyway)


NOTE to above excerpts:
[1] Check this out on "a good education" which discusses George Orwell's suppressed intro to his famous novel _Animal Farm_:
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20051207.htm
excerpt:
"...Nobody is ordering them to do anything. The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they're being objective. Actually this is a point that Orwell made. You and everybody else has read Animal Farm, I'm sure, but you and everybody else hasn't read the introduction to Animal Farm. There's a good reason for that: because it was suppressed. The introduction was found 30 years later in Orwell's own published papers. The introduction to Animal Farm says look this book is a satire on a totalitarian state but I'm going to talk about England, Free England. In Free England it's not that different. Without state coercion unpopular ideas can be suppressed and are. And then he described how. He didn't go in much details but he said partly it's because the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. But the more important reason, he said, was because of a good education. By the time you've gone through, you know, Oxford and Cambridge and here you could say Harvard and Princeton and so on, and even less fancy places, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things that just wouldn't do to say, and that's what a good deal of education is. So the people who come out of it - and there are many filters, if people go off and try to be too critical there are many ways of discouraging them or eliminating them one way or the other. Some get through, it's not a uniform story. There are plenty of journalists with integrity and honesty. And many of them, some personal friends, will give a much harsher picture of the media than I do, because they have to live with it. But the basic points that Orwell made are fundamentally correct. The more educated you are the more indoctrinated you are. And you believe you are being free and objective, whereas in fact you're just repeating state propaganda."--curiously despised institutional analyst, Noam Chomsky

See also:
http://bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/99/04/01/NOAM_CHOMSKY.html
or search "good education" + Chomsky on your favorite search engine.

NOTES:
"Oppositional Defiant Disorder" is a pseudo-scientific hype game now being implemented in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV" (the psychiatric bible). See this source for a punch in your reality:
http://www.ask.com/web?q=what+page+is+%22oppositional+defiant+disorder%22+on+in+the+DSM%3F&x=50&y=35&qsrc=0&o=0&l=dir

Poo-poo at the likely outcome of seeding children with the notion that their unarticulated rebellion is illness? Perhaps there are grey areas to truly explore, yet if you were a upper-echelon strategist of *engineers of opinion*, would you have your workers in PR making obvious moves?