Reprinted from READERS DIEGEST, April 1980

The Co-Option of Psychology by Counter-Intelligence
by George Milman

George Milman was genetically selected to become one of the first Mythic Permanent Adolescents.

His career of continual change was facilitated by his being born and raised on the Sunset Strip -- the launch end of the Genetic Runway!  Growing up in the ecological niche for the Self-Actualized Caste, he quickly learned how to make reality movies and to arrange life-sets as playgrounds.

Milman's first step was to secure his terrestrial affairs by studying law.  He then indulged his taste for Japanese cuisine by starting the prototype Hiro Sushi Bar.  In addition to satisfying his gustatory circuits his restaurant concept spread throughout the world and became the largest and most profitable food-dispensing firm in history.  In addition to earning enormous profits, Milman's restaurants raised the aesthetic level of the terminal species and contributed to the Hedonic Revolution.

Milman's next move was, inevitably, the manufacture of toys.  He was the first entrepreneur to understand the importance of Neurological Toys in activating the futique circuits of young children.  Thus a new generation (1980 forward) whose intelligence was stimulated at early age by Milman Marvels grew up using toys and games to activate, stage-by-stage sequential circuits of their nervous systems.  During the formative mutational years of the new post-human species it was said that any device which turned on the senses, stimulated the mind, opened up new neural skills, increased scientific understanding bore the trade mark:  Milman Marvel!

The fact that American psychology after 1946 was an offspring of Military Psychology is neither alarming nor unexpected.  Throughout human history the Military Caste has introduced each new technology -- mechanical, medical, social, and even bureaucratic.

The military serves hive-terrestrials as the pioneer avant garde.  The military caste, i.e., the warrior insects, are genetically wired to act as paranoid sense-organs for the body-social.  Most intelligence structures were originated by their military who function as suspicious antennae for their societies.  They were charged with the responsibility for finding out what's happening over there in the next hive; for sniffing out what the territorial rivals are doing.  And protecting the hive.

As Pynchon pointed out in Gravity's Rainbow, wars (however cruel and pointless they may seem to liberals) were necessary competitions to stimulate technological advances.  Inter-hive conflicts are evolutionary devices to make Earthlings move faster, see farther, communicate better, transport, organize and heal themselves more effectively.*

After the new technology has been tested and proved by the warrior caste, it is then co-opted by the other techno-castes who convert the new energy into hive use.  The order in which castes take over a new energy is fixed:  political power caste, engineer commercial caste, moral domesticator caste.  In advanced societies which have met these security satisfaction challenges, the technology is then co-opted by post-hive individual castes:  artist caste, neurologician caste, neurogeneticist caste.

The history of pre-flight civilization was this cycle of technological evolution.  Each caste is robot-wired to use the New Technology and harness it to the specialized caste function.

Pynchon outlines how this new technology (psychology) was initiated during wartime by the requirements of the military and how mind-control techniques have been taken over by the managerial, technician-intellectual and social-moral castes.

Gravity's Rainbow, of course, was a powerful signal from the Artistic Caste (change agents).  The book was a brilliant attempt to use psychological knowledge to free individuals from the limiting past.

Without understanding all the implications, the Military during World War II, mobilized enormous national resources to create new technologies.  These included air-transportation, electronic communication, nuclear energy, production of labor-saving gadgets, and psychological assessment of personality.  All of these breakthroughs were produced by the patriotic emergency.  Uncle Sam, the national self-indulgent consumer, wanted!  And he got!  Gimme 50,000 bombers!  And the hive gladly produced!  Gimme a radar system that will detect metal miles-high-in-the-sky.  He got it!  Sam said, Gimme ships and planes so I can ship ten million lusty young warriors in two years to the five continents.  And he got it!

The neurogenetic implications are staggering.  The American gene-pool sprayed sperm from 20 million testicles around the globe -- the fastest, largest genetic experiment in planet history.  The so-called "war effort: performing the genetic function of mixing up sperm-egg exchanges in addition to the cultural interactions, i.e., the new imprint models imposed on youthful nervous systems of both the invaders and the invaded.  When American G.I.'s rode into German towns astride sleek-powerful military machines an irreversible impression was made upon the impressionable German minds.

In the context of this all-out hive-war solidarity it was considered an honor for physicists like Einstein and Fermi to make bombs, and for psychologists like B.F. Skinner and Harry Murray to offer their services to do secret work for the OSS-CIA.  (Skinner is not keen to have us recall that he spent his war years in clandestine research training pigeons to guide unmanned bombers to hit targets such as enemy cities, filled presumably with unarmed men and women.)

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* For an extended discussion of the genetic meaning of war in species evolution, please refer to Neuropolitics:  The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis, Peace Press, Culver City, CA, 1977.

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