#joseph klein

[rwpohl]

die herrin der welt, cinema series 1919

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

How Psychological Manipulation Spread DEI Across America

The ideology behind DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ has roots in the controversial re-education methods of 1970s Racism Awareness Training.

By; Joseph (Jake) Klein

Published: Sep 24, 2024

The following essay is an exclusive excerpt from Joseph (Jake) Klein’s newly released book, Redefining Racism: How Racism Became “Power + Prejudice.” This excerpt is breaking news, shedding light on the National Training Laboratories (NTL) and its deep ties to modern anti-racism education—a revelation that has not yet been noticed by anyone outside a few individuals with pre-release copies. In this section, Klein uncovers how the infamous ideas of Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, trace back to NTL’s controversial training methods, exposing a key third vector that has shaped modern DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs across America.

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A few weeks ago, America’s most famous Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion educator and author of the infamous book White Fragility (which spent over 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and argued that “only whites can be racist” and white people like herself must strive to be “less white,”)—Robin DiAngelo—was revealed to be a plagiarist.

However, DiAngelo’s history of plagiarism is far worse than the recent reporting reveals. I’d know. Today/Earlier this week, I published my book Redefining Racism, an investigation into the origins of DiAngelo’s ideas. While most Reality’s Last Stand readers will know by now the origins of “wokeness” in critical theory and post-modernism, I discovered a key third vector from which DiAngelo’s strain of so-called “anti-racism” stems.

DiAngelo’s ideas are identical to those taught by a group of white-on-white “Racism Awareness Training” educators during the 1970s, most prominently Robert W. Terry, Patricia Bidol, and Judith H. Katz. DiAngelo, without citing them in White Fragility, recycled their ideas that “Racism = Power + Prejudice”—meaning that it’s impossible to be racist against white people within Western society—and that the best a white person can be is an “anti-racist racist,” as all white people are inherently racist by definition.

But to understand who originated these egregiously bad ideas is to know only half the story. The other half requires understanding how such transparent absurdities could successfully skyrocket DiAngelo’s public profile and come to dominate educational institutions and corporations across America. The death of George Floyd in 2020 may have provided the opportunity, but the means were developed decades prior at an organization Terry, Bidol, and Katz were all closely tied to: the National Training Laboratories (today called the NTL Institute).

The origins of the techniques used in modern DEI training can be traced back to the 1940s, with the work of psychologist Kurt Lewin. Lewin, who headed the “psychological warfare center for the Far East” at the Office of Strategic Services (a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency) during WWII, is perhaps best known for his research on “group dynamics.”

Lewin studied how people change and come to accept new values via “re-education.” He believed that new belief systems and values are generally accepted when people feel a sense of belonging after joining a new social group, upon which “previously rejected facts will become accepted as they become ‘facts’ of ‘his group.’” His re-educative change process involved “unfreezing” people’s previously held psychological patterns, moving them to “a new level” of thoughts, feelings, and/or behavior, and then “refreezing” that change. Lewin believed that this sort of re-education could lead to “cultural reconstruction.”

While Lewin did not live to see the first operations of NTL in the summer of 1947, his ideas formed its underlying philosophy and he gave “enthusiastic support” to its creation. NTL was conceived of as “an educational or re-educational or resocialization program directed first toward adult leaders with the goal of helping them become better group leaders and members, sensitive to the dynamic forces in groups and in themselves, and more competent agents of change in their roles and organizations.”

NTL gained prominence due to its development of the “T-Group,” short for “training group” and also known as “encounter groups,” “sensitivity training,” and “human relations training.” T-Groups are a type of “experience-based learning” in which “participants work together in a small group over an extended period, learning through analysis of their own experiences, including feelings, reactions, perceptions, and behavior.”

NTL used T-Groups to run experiments in what they called “action research,” meaning “the scientific study of controlled social change.” NTL understood that in order to create change, “detecting and correcting fallacies in group thinking” was necessary and that “member ideologies” must be integrated into “common group traditions, ideology, and goals.” They knew that creating change in individuals would require getting them to overcome their natural rejection of those labeled as “outside agitators” or “Communists.” The techniques they developed to do so included “making changes aware of the need for change” through “shock” and “guilt,” helping group participants “experience acceptance, support, trust, and confidence in their relations with one another,” and encouraging them to “anticipate their Utopia in the days to come.” These techniques worked, and NTL staff understood their power; one staff member told NTL co-founder Leland Bradford, “you're now in a position where you can form ideology for other people.”

Despite their often radical views, NTL was not a fringe organization. Staff came to NTL’s programs each year from major universities including Harvard, Yale, and UC Berkeley. NTL received a grant from IBM and conducted trainings for Bell Telephone, General Electric, the American Red Cross, the State Department, and the National Security Agency, among other corporations, non-profits, and government agencies. A scholar of NTL’s history wrote that by the late 1960s, “NTL assumed an almost mythical status as an agent of the new order.” By 1974, Bradford estimated “it would be a conservative figure to say that at least twenty to thirty million persons have been touched by group experiences that had some relationship, usually unknown to them, to NTL.”

From the beginning, NTL was aware that its programs “created various degrees of stress for some individuals and we needed either a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist present.” Psychiatric staff brought into NTL, while very friendly to the organization, reported that “some casualties are probably inevitable.” Those “casualties” ranged between participants leaving T-Groups with “emotional disturbances,” participants with previous psychiatric histories undergoing “psychotic episodes and become[ing] seriously ill,” and at least one suicide. A study by the American Psychiatric Association found that 9.4%—a “conservative estimate”—of 170 subjects who completed NTL’s programs could be counted as casualties, meaning they “became more psychologically distressed” for an enduring period of at least eight months after their group experience.

While the casualties from NTL’s T-Groups were bad enough, the casualties from other groups who adopted and further developed their methods tended to be much worse. For example, Synanon, an organization that was originally founded as a rehabilitation program for drug addicts but developed into a particularly brutal cult. Synanon members were forced to shave their heads, and some members were forced to have vasectomies, abortions, and divorces. Despite Synanon owning hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weapons and participating in multiple attempted murders, Synanon successfully maintained ties with major corporations such as IBM and Heinz until the 1980s when the cult was finally shut down by the IRS for tax evasion.

The problems with T-Groups and “sensitivity training” didn’t go unnoticed; they became a focus of political controversy. In congressional testimony, the T-Groups were compared to Communist struggle sessions and accused of “trying to homogenize… members” by making “approval… more important to [members] than truth.” Due to this public notoriety, the terms “T-Groups” and “sensitivity training” have become less common over time, but their methods have continued nonetheless.

The links between DiAngelo and NTL’s techniques are not marginal. Judith Katz, whose work DiAngelo’s White Fragility most heavily copies from, was a member of NTL’s board of directors. Patricia Bidol, who Katz took her ideas from, was the “dean and facilitator for NTL’s Human Interaction Labs.” Robert Terry, who Bidol based her work on, underwent a series of NTL group sessions and ran his own trainings in partnership with an NTL staffer.

While “Racism Awareness Training” as developed by Terry, Bidol, and Katz—and currently taught by DiAngelo and her ilk under the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—may not have gone quite as far off the rails as Synanon, they’re both sibling children of NTL’s methods. Like Synanon, which claimed to be one thing but indoctrinated its participants into something much worse, DiAngelo’s style of DEI claims to be “anti-racist” but has indoctrinated its participants into something entirely different.

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For more on the National Training Laboratories and the history of Racism Awareness Training, read Joseph (Jake) Klein’s book Redefining Racism: How Racism Became “Power + Prejudice,” available now.

[mybisexualwife]

[figureskatingcostumes]

Joseph Klein competing in the Junior short program at the 2021 US Championships.

(Source: figureskatersonline.com)

[figureskatingfanblog]

The US Virtual Challenge Skate was live yesterday, with some promising Juniors and Seniors. Joseph Klein and Isabeau Levito won the Junior competitions and Lucas Brossard and Alina Broillo won the Novice competitions.

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WHAT I’M CURRENTLY WORKING ON:

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[gettothedancing]

Op-eds by a terrorist and a dictator apparently met the New York Times’ standards for publication, but not an op-ed by a conservative United States senator.

Joseph Klein

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

It’s Time To Stop Being Kind To People

Pathological kindness has become one of the greatest threats to civilization

By: Joseph (Jake) Klein

Published: Nov 15, 2023

From top-to-bottom, society has conditioned us to think kindness is an unmitigated good. The golden rule to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is one of the most remembered lines of Jesus, but the lesson is near ubiquitous across both the world’s religions and secular moral philosophy. To be kind is one of the first lessons we teach our children. Our greatest works of fiction have focused on the heroism of kindness. Even our advertising frequently uses the morality of kindness to ingratiate us to brands.

But far from an unmitigated good, kindness has a dark side. The once virtuous cell of kindness has metastasized into a cancer. The evolution of kindness, manifested in the unparalleled cooperative ability of mankind, enabled the development of civilization.

In contemporary times, however, pathological kindness has become one of the greatest threats to bring about its destruction.

In the beginning, kindness was not a luxury, but a need. To escape the poverty and starvation inherent to the state of nature, humanity had no choice but to learn to be kind to each other in order to successfully cooperate and produce what they needed to survive. As the great economist Ludwig von Mises explained, “[w]e may call consciousness of kind, sense of community, or sense of belonging together the acknowledgment of the fact that all other human beings are potential collaborators in the struggle for survival because they are capable of recognizing the mutual benefits of cooperation, while the animals lack this faculty.”

“However,” Mises continues, kindness was not developed as a virtue purely in the abstract. “we must not forget that the primary facts that bring about such consciousness or such a sense are the two mentioned above. In a hypothetical world in which the division of labor would not increase productivity, there would not be any society. There would not be any sentiments of benevolence and good will.”

Kindness became a virtue precisely because it’s productive. But, in a world of abundance, kindness instead now often eats away at the resources of society. In a prosperous, advanced society where individuals have moved up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, expressions of kindness towards those who cannot or will not help themselves has been able to develop as a dominant virtue.

Kindness towards those who cannot help themselves is indeed a virtue; anyone of us could fall into this situation through no fault of our own. But kindness towards those who will not help themselves, who seek to leech off of us rather than contribute to society’s progress, is where virtue slips into vice. Most dangerously, those who are successful at taking advantage of society’s kindness rarely admit they will not help themselves, but wear the mask of those who cannot.

When a scammer takes advantage of your kindness to profit at your expense, we all know they’re the bad guy. But when someone claims victimhood and takes advantage of you by passing laws and regulations, we’re supposed to call that the justice of democracy.

This is the politics of Leftism, from the Jacobins through classical Marxism and now wearing its more fashionable woke regalia. A class group or cultural group (including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) flips morality on its head by claiming itself as oppressed—those who cannot help themselves—and appeals to the vice of kindness to gain legal advantages over other groups and redistribute resources towards itself.

To be clear, not everyone on the Left is a manipulative leech. Numerically most will be manipulated hosts. But their manipulators fit a personality type known as the dark tetrad: narcissism, psychopathy, machiavellianism, and sadism. Amongst other traits, dark tetrad types tend to present with a sense of entitlement and a victim mentality. Studies have demonstrated a strong link between the dark tetrad personality and politically correct authoritarian behavior, which includes a belief in censorship of words and ideas deemed offensive by the authoritarian, that those who utter these words and ideas should be punished for it, and a belief that alleged perpetrators of crimes against a victim group should be treated as guilty before proving their innocence.

Distinguished evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins brilliantly explains in the video below how evolution leads to the existence of such dark tetrad behavior. A world full of kind people is evolutionarily unstable as it creates an incentive to take advantage of the productive ability of the kind masses. But if those who live by leeching off of others become dominant in society then it’s just as evolutionarily unstable, as society collapses from its inability to produce. A society mostly full of kind people, but with a few leeches, can last for the long run.

In an era where victimhood culture is becoming dominant, we are moving into unstable space. It wouldn’t be the first time such an unstable arrangement had the opportunity to destroy a civilization—just look at the Soviet Union. While dark tetrad personalities only constitute about 7% of the international population, in the contemporary West the leech’s activism appears to have led to a far larger percentage of their hosts accepting their destructive ideas. These hosts are overrepresented amongst the world’s upper classes given that being higher on Maslow’s Hierarchy provides more of an opportunity to extend pathological kindness. Rob Henderson has famously labeled this phenomenon “luxury beliefs.”

So what do we do about this problem? You read it already: it’s time to stop being kind to people. Not everyone, obviously, kindness is usually a virtue and should be extended to everyone who wishes to cooperate to build our shared society in peace and productivity, and should also extend to the many well-intentioned hosts of bad ideas who know not what they do.

But when it comes to the leeches, it’s time to cease acting as if it’s a moral virtue to extend endless kindness to those who seek to gain at your expense. Feeding their victimhood and entitlement is what provides an incentive for them to continue; like training an animal, when the rewards cease the behavior will follow.

As the French economist Frédéric Bastiat put it, “[w]hen, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.”

Yes, many already express hostility and disgust towards the woke and mock them online (and sometimes in person), but how many speak of it with clarity as a moral virtue to do so? To make the leech’s hosts stop feeding them, they must understand that their overextended kindness is a moral evil.

At least one woman understood this: Ayn Rand. Rand spoke of the “virtue of selfishness,” pioneering clickbait tactics with an intentionally provocative phrase designed to grab people and force them to think, but that when explained becomes more agreeable than at first glance. “Selfishness” to Rand did not mean gaining at another’s expense, as the leeches (or “parasites," in her words) do, but acting in one’s long-term rational self-interest. That includes being kind to those who work cooperatively with us to make the world a better place, which is most people most of the time. But to be virtuously selfish, in Rand’s view, one must oppose altruism: self-sacrifice for another’s gain.

Unkindness towards those who deserve it needn’t and shouldn’t be a permanent attitude. Those willing to stop using victimhood as a weapon should be met with forgiveness. Perhaps they should even be treated with disproportionate kindness to encourage others to also give up their maladaptive beliefs. We want to reward people who stop their pathological behavior and join the cooperative harmony of human civilization. But until then, we must be brave. We must be willing to be seen as black sheep in order to fix society’s broken morality.

Don’t be kind to those who seek your destruction, and know and say loudly that you are right not to do it.

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It's not a kindness to help people avoid living in reality. It's not kindness to lie in order to deprive grown adults of the opportunity to live in the real world.

We don't lie to the religious any more. We don't pretend to pray with them because they'd be offended otherwise. We don't say that their faith is reason enough to believe an obvious lie.

Stop letting people manipulate you into lying for their benefit.