HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Nov. 17, 2004 Who has had the most influence on our modern culture? The philosophies we absorb from TV and popular novels, and the beliefs we get from our schooling, have been strongly influenced by just a few intellectual leaders. For example, our laws and morals have certainly been liberalized by the influence of Alfred Kinsey, drastically changing what is now legally acceptable. This even extends into the popular music that now has deep effects on young people. He managed to keep secret that he was an extreme (and I do mean extreme!) masochist, pedophile, and not someone who was likely to be an objective scientist when studying other people. The trouble is, several of these intellectual leaders, who were supposedly teaching us facts derived from their scientific studies, were really just clever liars. They wanted to prove something, usually to make excuses for their own craziness, and they ignored any data that didn't fit into their conclusions. In some cases they simply made up the data that did fit. They got away with it because the news media and our college professors wanted to believe the new conclusions, so they told us it was all valid science (or economics, psychology, etc.), and we should all "get with it" and accept these modern ways of seeing the world. Some scholarly books have now been published, which expose previously-accepted intellectual leaders as being nothing but frauds who completely falsified their conclusions. The quickest way to get a summary of these iconoclastic books is to skim through their short Customer Reviews in amazon.com. Being a retired university professor, I can't resist listing a selection of such summaries in outline form, as follows. (1.) Sigmund Freud --- (A.) Search amazon for "torrey freud," then click on Torrey's title, "Freudian Fraud..." and look at the second Customer Review. It's shocking to see how such a complete liar and cheat could have such enormous influence on Broadway plays, doctors, and our whole society. (B.) Search amazon for "dolnick madness," then click on Dolnick's title, "Madness On The Couch..." and see the second Customer Review. (2.) Alfred Kinsey --- (A.) Search for "james h. jones" and click on "Alfred C. Kinsey..." and especially the sixth Customer Review. You will be reminded of the broad influence of Kinsey, and also how he tightly selected the interviewees to eliminate any that did not have a "liberal" attitude toward sex. Kinsey managed to hide (until recently) the fact that many of his interviewees were prisoners and prostitutes. He also hid the terrible injuries that he survived, from his own masochism. (B.) Search for "judith reisman," then click on her title, "Kinsey Crimes..." and see especially the fifth Customer Review. (3.) Margaret Mead --- (A.) Search for "mead sex" and click on "Sex and Temperment..." Then read the short Customer Review, which tells how later anthropological studies did not confirm any of her important conclusions. One of her main points was that women are dominant, not men, in some primitive ("natural") cultures. However, the truth is that there is not a single primitive culture in the world where women are dominant. In the Encyclopedia Britannica, if you look up any of the tribes that she studied, there is no mention of female dominance. Also, Mead claimed that adultery was openly accepted among some South Sea Island tribes. Later studies reported that it is punished by death in those same tribes. Mead was bisexual and had an afair with her professor, Ruth Benedict, but she managed to hide that until Benedict's daughter later published the fact. This was at Columbia University, from which the hippie movement of Kerouac and Ginsberg emerged in the 1950s. (I was a Columbia student then, and I became a hippie myself. However, I soon realized that it only made you poor and dependent on parents and Government welfare, so I quit that lifestyle and went to work. ) The hippies had great influence on our present youth culture, in many, many ways. (B.) Search for "caton samoa" and read the Customer Review of Hiram Caton's book, "The Samoa Reader." (2.) Karl Marx --- Rather than one or two books, just note that Russia has given up on Communism. Although a few of Marx's ideas were pretty good, such as our Social Security backed up by Government bonds, most countries are becoming less and less socialist. The policies of Mao caused 30 million deaths in China, according to books such as "Hungry Ghosts," by Jasper Becker, reviewed and summarized in the N.Y. Times Book Review, February 16, 1997. (Search amazon for "becker hungry" and read any review there.) China has now become more capitalist in the coastal cities, but Vietnam has not. China is therefore "outsourcing" some of its lowest-cost labor to Vietnam, which "remains one of the poorest countries in the world," according to the N.Y. Times, September 30, 2004, page W1. Should we listen to our own intellectuals who espouse Marxist philosophy? ------------ About the author: Dan Shanefield is a retired engineering prof, who worked at Bell Labs and then at Rutgers University. He wrote the book "Industrial Electronics for Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians". Visit his website or email Dan Shanefield: shanefield@ieee.org Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
