The social sciences suck. I was watching Democracy Now this morning and saw a news blurb that the American Psychological Association has been linked in some way to U.S. torture practices. Some leaked memos implicate the American Psychological Association in collusion with waterboarding an forms of torture. I guess if we see the social sciences– psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and so on –as benevolent paradigms of study and practice, sciences designed to help people and cure them of mental illness, then I suppose we’d all be shocked and bewildered that prestigious institutions of those sciences are dabbling in torture.

But the social sciences are NOT benevolent paradigms designed to help people. Consider: when cops and courts impose social norms on you, you’re a criminal. When priests and rabbis impose social norms on you, they call you a sinner. When SHRINKS impose social norms on you, they call you “mentally ill.” The shrinkhood is a tool of the established order, and a powerful one. When cops put a label on you, you can still get past that because you’ve done your time and people change. When priests and rabbis label you that’s just some superstitious hokum. But when the thought-police shrinkhood labels you, you’re NUTS. The social sciences have the illusion of being “scientific” and “objective” when they brand you for life. But their criteria for branding you is far from scientific.

Keep in mind, unwed pregnant girls used to be “diagnosed” with a “mental illness.” Until very recently, the shrinkhood’s diagnostic manual considered homosexuality a mental illness. In other words, in the history of the shrinkhood, the social sciences have been used in a way to malign and socially alienate segments of the population, to apply a kind of pressure in order to get those segments to alter their behavior and conform to the social norms of the majority. Shrinks are mind cops. Deviate from the “norms” and you’re a nut. The shrinkhood is a subtle kind of coercion that in ways seems even more legitimate than priests and cops.

So, given the mind-cop character of the shrinkhood, should we be surprised that the American Psychological Association is dabbling in torture? Some context here: it’s been decades since the Central Intelligence Agency developed its KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual and its Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual [that’s part 1, here’s a link to part 2]. Look those up online [we did it for you]. Disturbing. They should be called, “HOW TO TORTURE PEOPLE.”

What the C.I.A. did, it developed the perfect program for torturing people, for completely disassembling a human personality. I won’t quote them too extensively. For a more thorough treatment of these manuals, check out, “Another Open Letter to the Delusional Mental Health Worker,” soon to be posted at seanswain.org. What the C.I.A. manuals present is, in their own words, the “simple torture situation.” They describe what conditions most quickly break the wills of human beings… Which means the C.I.A. had to have done experiments… Some tht succeeded… Some that failed… In order to map the limits of tolerance to psychological pain. What do you think the professions were of those conducting such experiments to develop the science of torture?

Exactly.

The C.I.A. employed a veritable army of shrinks to subject human beings to a variety of regimens of deprivation. A veritable army. And the program went on for years and years, decade after decade, as your government developed a playbook for destroying our minds most efficiently. So given this history, this long partnership between fascist war criminals and the professionals of the social sciences, should we be all that surprised that Dick Cheney’s shadow government has an information-sharing deal with the American Psychological Association?

These are the same shrinks who created the torture program in the first place… The same shrinkhood that socially exiles you if you don’t toe the line of their prescribed norms… The same shrinkhood that pushes prozac and ritalin at all of us and creates diagnoses such as “attention deficit disorder”– which means you’re crazy if your teacher is boring –so we can all experience better living through chemistry… And if that doesn’t work, there’s always waterboarding, brought to you by the American Psychological Association.

If your enemy colonizes your world, you can resist. If your enemy colonizes your mind, you don’t know to resist.

For Ihsan, this is Ohio Governor-in-Exile Elect Sean Swain from Ohio’s supermax facility. If you’re listening, you ARE the resistance…