Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Meet The Real Jigsaw Horror Psychologists

First of all there is no chance that there could be a fanatic as extreme as the character "John Kramer" known as "The Jigsaw Killer" in the Horror series of seven Saw movies; however surprisingly Stephen Kazmierczak came much closer than I would have expected in real life. Furthermore the psychological research that almost certainly partially inspired this series and many other horror movies or TV shows weren't done by psychologists that are likely to go on killing sprees and never intended any such thing.

The good news is that there is plenty of research to show how violence can be prevented dramatically reducing murders and other violent crime from some of the most credible academic sources; the bad news is that the political establishment, media and other powerful institutions are far more concerned with using psychological research to learn how to control the public than to teach them how to look out for their own best interests.

However intentional or not they did research that was designed to understand how to indoctrinate military recruits in boot camp and learn how to control people psychologically. Intentionally or not these experiments appear to improve boot camp training and hazing practices which helped train cadets to obey orders without question and kill when ordered to. They also increased the likely hood that some of these recruits will kill, when they're not supposed to, especially if they have psychological problems before joining the military.

In order to have a permanent state of war that serves the interests of the political class they need recruits that blindly believe what they're told, since most, if not all wars, are based on lies like the threat of Weapons of mass destruction that Scott Ritter reported didn't exist before the Iraq War; the Gulf of Tonkin incident; and many other propaganda incidents like lies about babies being removed from incubators in the first Iraq war.

This does not, of course, mean that veterans are likely to become murders; however as I pointed out previously in Teach a soldier to kill and he just might a lot more of them do than the vast majority of the public realize. The most common victims of veterans, when they do become violent are often their own family members or other veterans. Some of the people doing the most to recognize this problem are also often family members and other veterans; however they often face peer pressure from those in denial often including those in command.

The official explanation for why they did these experiments was that they were trying to understand how to prevent soldiers from blindly obeying orders like they did during the holocaust; however as I explained previously in Philip Zimbardo, Lucifer Effect, Stanford Prison Experiment and Stanley Milgram Obedience To Authority Experiments could have been done to either teach people why the Nazis and many other armies were full of soldiers that blindly obeyed orders to kill innocent people and how to avoid it; or to teach the military why they obey and ensure that they continue to do so.

These research projects were done with the support of the military, specifically the Office of Naval Research. In the Obedience To Authority they supported the application to the National Science Foundation for a grant, according to Professor Alfred McCoy; and in the Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo acknowledges that the Office of Naval Research provided funding for his grant. In his book, The Lucifer Effect he even describes the similarities with his experiments and military boot camp indoctrination, although he doesn't claim this was his purpose.

If it wasn't the purpose of his experiments why does he think the Office of Naval Research would finance it?

Were they planing to teach their recruits to challenge orders and check to see if they were being sent to war based on lies, which they routinely are?

It makes no sense for the military to fund research that accomplishes the opposite of what they do in boot camp and the similarities with Zimbardo's experiments and boot camp training only further indicates that is the real purpose of these experiments.

Alfred McCoy also reports what he considers compelling evidence that Stanley Milgram and Irving Janis, who taught both Milgram and Zimbardo, may have been working with the CIA in his book a Question of torture. He also indicates that Irving Janis, well known for his Groupthink research may have recommended the Obedience to Authority experiments to Milgram. He doesn't name Philip Zimbardo, who is the only one of the three still alive, as a potential CIA adviser: however as I explained in the previous article about Zimbardo if you substitute him for Janis and Milgram the case for a possible CIA connection gets much stronger, especially after some of the admissions made by Zimbardo in his book The Lucifer Effect.

Stanley Milgram

Philip Zimbardo

Irving Janis

Stanley Milgram's experiments on Obedience to Authority are widely known within the social psychology academic field; however the vast majority of the public knows little about it and when they do hear about it it is usually only limited details without the full implication. Even in the academic world most stories about it don't explain the full motives behind it, as I attempted to explain in the previous post about it.

His experiments involve strapping a volunteer to a chair while another volunteer gives him simple questions and is told to administer shocks if he gets them wrong. He doesn't know it but the volunteer strapped to the chair is only faking it and they claim the purpose is to see if he will follow orders without question and how much pressure it will take to get him to obey assuming he's willing. The subject faking the shocks acts as if he's in real pain.

The so-called Stanford Prison experiment also studies obedience to authority in a mock prison environment where both the "guards" and "prisoners" are actually paid college students volunteering to participate in an experiment. As I explained in the previous article about it none of the participants are actual criminals that went through the court system nor have they gone through normal training as guards, which should raise major doubts about whether the alleged reason for the experiment is real. The similarities with boot camp and financing by the Office of Naval Research along with other reasons explained in the previous article about it indicate that it is far more likely that this research was done for other reasons including boot camp training efforts and other indoctrination methods which wouldn't be considered ethical.

The Saw horror movie involves a psychopath that kidnaps people drugs them and straps them down in a chair similar to the ones used in the Obedience to Authority experiments, and adds a lot of dramatic and far fetched features made for horrifying and entertaining purposes. When they wake up they're often told they must participate in a game and given instructions to follow. Whether they obey or not there's usually horrible implications like another person might also be strapped to a chair and they have to choose to either put a body part where it will be stabbed or the other person would be shot and killed. Supposedly if they allow themselves to be maimed the person speaking through the speaker or a puppet named Billy will agree to let them go although it only leads from one horror to another.

It's not hard to see similarities and recognize that this was almost certainly at least partially inspired by the original Obedience to Authority experiments. Philip Greven among many other more sincere researchers reviewed the Obedience to Authority experiments when he wrote Spare the Child as part of his research to explain how corporal punishment leads to escalating violence including murder and domestic violence among other things. He also reported on how it also leads to blind obedience to authority. He cited the experiment as a possible lost opportunity, since they could have researched the child rearing techniques of the people that blindly obeyed authorities to see if they were more likely to have been raised in abusive homes that also used corporal punishment.

His research along with research from other academics like Alice Miller, Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Alice Miller, and James Garbarino explains how early child abuse and corporal punishment leads to many problems later in life and contributes to higher murder rates among abused children that don't address these problems before they grow up, although they're much less likely if they do address them. This assumption is confirmed by lower murder rates where there is less use of corporal punishment and lower rates since child rearing experts like Benjamin Spock advised parents on how to raise children without strict disciplinary methods. Children raised in this manner developed more critical thinking skills and are more likely to question authority and less likely to be violent as adults.

Early child abuse often also leads to hazing and more acceptance of it. Hazing in boot camp does the opposite escalating early abuse and teaching blind obedience to authority. Both early child abuse, including corporal punishment and hazing are clearly contributing causes to violence later in life since they tech people to blindly obey authorities and to deal with their problems through violence. This isn't something military psychologists research to improve solidarity, as they often claim, or at least not in a manner that encourages reasonable relationships. It is done to teach lower class-men or cadets to submit to the authority of upper class-men commanding officers or to go along with the group, even when the group is doing something wrong like fighting one war after another based on lies.

Hazing scandals periodically make it into the news briefly including the recent story about 20 Marines Facing Possible Punishment Over Hazing At Parris Island 09/15/2016 which contributed to the suicide or suspicious death of a cadet who was hazed beyond what they normally consider allowable. This hazing included putting him into an industrial clothes drier and accusing him of being a terrorist, because he was a Muslim. This is just one of many scandals over the decades about military hazing; however they rarely go into the full history of past incidents or report on how they research hazing or indoctrination tactics.

If they respond as they have in the past they'll blame it on a small group of people that went over the line and punish them. Perhaps they'll be more careful about extreme hazing tactics at least until the press cools down again, or at least try to do a better job preventing the media from reporting on it again. However it's highly unlikely that they'll try to minimize bigotry as effectively as possible; since this is often how they convince cadets to fight more vigorously. During the Vietnam war they taught them to hate "Gooks" now they teach them to hate Muslims and they've often tolerated white supremacism because the most bigoted people are raised in the most authoritarian manner.

There is little or no chance that they'll report on the research that has been done in the past to develop these techniques, and how they're used to teach cadets to blindly follow orders even when they're based on lies.

If the indoctrination methods being used by the military are going to be exposed it will almost certainly have to be done with a lot of grassroots pressure exposing them. However intentionally or not some of them are being openly reported on a semi-regular basis by veterans themselves in their own memoirs including Chris Kyle author of "American Sniper," who brags about hazing and bullying in his book. There are some obvious biases in the following excerpts, including some that were confirmed in a libel lawsuit; however if he admits to bullying and hazing, and brags about it then it and can't even keep some of his lies credible clearly indicates that he isn't as heroic as the media portrays him.

.... We were speeding along for awhile and all of a sudden I heard, "One-two-three-four I declare a van war."

The next thing I knew, I was pummeled. "Van war" meant it was open season on the new guys. I came out of that one with bruised ribs and a black eye, maybe two. I must have gotten my lip busted a dozen times during hazing.

I should say that van wars are separate from bar fights, another SEAL staple. SEALs are pretty notorious for getting into bar scrapes, and I was no exception. I've been arrested more than once through the years, though as a general rule the charges were either never filed or quickly dismissed.

Why do SEALs fight so much?

I haven't made a scientific study of it, but I think a lot is owed to pent up aggression. We're trained to go out and kill people. And then, at the same time, we're also being taught to think of ourselves as invincible hard-asses. That's a pretty potent combination. (Cris Kyle "American Sniper" p.61)

By then I'd figured out what had happened. When I met with Runaway a short time later, I practically strangled him — I probably would have, if it hadn't been for the officer there.

(Cris Kyle "American Sniper" p.173)

I was Ryan's safety officer, making sure he didn't get too busted up. He had a head guard and everyone wore boxing gloves, but the hazing can get kind of and the safety officer is there to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand.

Ryan wasn’t satisfied with three rounds. He wanted more. I think he thought if he fought long enough, he’d beat them all.

Not that he lasted too much longer. I had warned him that I was his safety and whatever he did, he was not to hit me. In the confusion of his head being bounced off the platoon’s gloves, he swung and hit me.

I did what I had to do. (Cris Kyle "American Sniper" p.246)

We went back over to our side of the bar and had a few more drinks. In the meantime, Scruff started running his mouth about the war and everything and anything he could connect to it. President Bush was an asshole. We were only over there because Bush wanted to show up his father. We were doing the wrong thing, killing men and women and children and murdering.

And on and on. Scruff said he hates America and that’s why he moved to Baja California. 9/11 was a conspiracy.

And on and on some more.

The guys were getting upset. Finally, I went over and tried to get him to cool it.

“We’re all here in mourning,” I told him. “Can you just cool it? Keep it down.”

“You deserve to lose a few,” he told me.

Then he bowed up as if to belt me one.

I was uncharacteristically level-headed at that moment.

“Look,” I told him, “why don’t we just step away from each other and go on our way?”

Scruff bowed up again. This time he swung.

Being level-headed and calm can last only so long. I laid him out.

Tables flew. Stuff happened. Scruff Face ended up on the floor.

I left.

Quickly.

I have no way of knowing for sure, but rumor has it he showed up at the BUD/S graduation with a black eye. (Cris Kyle "American Sniper" p.354-6) PDF online copy

Chris Kyle is far from the only veteran that writes about bar fights and admits that they get in a lot of them, and that they often don't result in charges. Michael J. Walsh a Vietnam SEAL also does so and writes about how they terrified a bunch of camp fire girls during training and some of his own bar fights, also admitting that they often don't file charges.

His explanation about the existence of a "safety officer" who is there to make sure things don't get out of hand is an indication that this has been institutionalized and the people doing the training or hazing are clearly being advised on how to do it and how to make sure things don't go to far, or at least they're supposed to do that. His description is typical of methods used to teach the new guys to follow orders and deal with their problems through violence, and throughout his book that is what he does. He even adopted the motto, "despite what your momma told you violence does solve problems" when he started his own company after leaving the service; however this motto doesn't seem to have worked out that well, since he was one of the many veterans killed by other veterans in shootings that have happened since the wars.

Like a lot of other veterans he feels as if many if not all problems should be solved with violence including when he declined to strangle "runaway" after he didn't back him up. No doubt many veterans will consider this justified since they count on each other to cover their backs; and this would be justified, to a point, at least if it weren't for the fact that they were fighting a war that was based on lies, and anyone paying enough attention to the news would have known that Scott Ritter, Mohamed ElBaradei and others exposed this before the media ratcheted up the lies by Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and many others.

When it was exposed after the war that it was based on lies and the propaganda was no longer credible even to those that still relied on traditional media many of them still stood by their actions and didn't express the same outrage for the politicians that got them into war based on lies and were responsible for the deaths of many of their fellow soldiers.

They were trained to obey orders and believe what they were told.

On several occasions Chris Kyle, and other veterans who also wrote their memoirs, said that it wasn't their job to get involved in politics. That is for other people to handle.

Isn't that what the Obedience to Authority experiments were supposed to learn how to prevent? Judging by the rhetoric that Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram came up with to justify their experiments it should have been. Instead of defending our country they turned Iraq into a terrorist stronghold which is being used to inspire terrorist attacks against eh United States accomplishing the opposite of what it was intended to; and if Kyle had thought things through he would have realized this and might have blamed the politicians who betrayed him.

Instead he blamed the celebrity he refers to as Scruff Face and other people that acknowledge the problems with the war. They really shouldn't have been there and there was an enormous amount of "Collateral Damage" to Iraq civilians but Kyle admits that he never cared about them, and that he was only fighting them to prevent them from coming over here and terrorizing us which they weren't doing but others did in retaliation for the bombing of civilians.

His description seems biased like he was portraying himself in an unbelievably positive light and that Scruff was the obnoxious one and deserved to be hit, but anyone familiar with the war might recognize that he was at least partly right since the war was based on lies. This was blatant bragging about how he thought it was appropriate to punch people out because they disagree with him, although if Scruff really did throw the first punch then it might be justified but then it wouldn't have been necessary for him to leave "quickly," since it would have been self defense.

Of course the celebrity eventually turned out to be Jesse Ventura, and he won a libel lawsuit which was filed before Kyle's death but not finalized until afterwards. The jury clearly found that it was false but Kyle still seems to imply that this is appropriate behavior for settling arguments when someone points out that the war they fought was based on lies.

This is not an isolated case; there must have been thousands of such discussions around the country and many more that never happened because many veterans knew that if they discussed it that it could turn into an argument.

There's little or no discussion about how likely it is that this problem could be a major contributing factor to the high number of veteran suicides, shootings, including many where veterans are killed by each other or cops when they go on shooting sprees.

Does it take a genius to realize that if there was discussion without intimidation about this that it would indicate that there is a clear connection?

Does it take a genius to realize that when minority veterans are trained to fight wars to defend our country and return to find that their country isn't defending their own communities from corporate fraud or other social problems that it might be a contributing cause when a couple of them use their military training against the police that are oppressing them that they need to make some changes and stop antagonizing this problem?

In the Saw movies John Kramer claimed he didn't condone murder and despised murderers; this was obviously not even intended to be taken seriously, and everyone was supposed to think of him as an obvious hypocrite. Is it that much more hypocritical when we fight one war after another based on lies? If not it is often only because large groups of people support our side even when it is wrong. Sometimes the excuses to justify it are sophisticated sometimes not.

As I reported previously in Anti-violence social experiments could be part of a slippery slope the Obedience to Authority and Stanford Prison Experiments weren't the only experiments the government and psychology world were involved in that led to unintended consequences. According to Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber; Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice By Kevin Cullen, Shelley Murphy and CIA Shrinks & LSD by Jeffrey St. Clair - Alexander Cockburn Ted Kaczynski, Whitey Bulger, Stanley Faulder, and who knows how many other people were experimented on by psychologists working for the CIA as part of the MKULTRA mind control experiments. These were far less successful when it came to learning how to indoctrinate people but the consequences appear to be far more serious, since all three of them turned out to be murders and two of them were among the most notorious mass murderers.

Whitey Bulger

Ted Kaczynski

Stanley Faulder

These experiments were more common than most people realize, although they're rarely reported in the traditional press. However the government has admitted to participating in at least some of these experiments; and they still try to portray discussion of them as fringe conspiracy theories. Since they report on them so rarely some fringe conspiracy theorists have added exaggerations to them so there might be some justifications for some of the dismissals but if researchers sort through the details it is clear that there is a lot of truth to them.

However it is far more common for the routine boot camp training to teach violent behavior that often escalates to further violence sine it goes on at a much larger scale. Steven Kazmierczak, who went on a spree killing five people before committing suicide, is one of the most extreme cases and apparently he was fascinated by the Saw horror movies and may also have been impacted by early childhood abuse that was escalated with boot camp hazing and he also was a student studying sociology. He began boot camp in the Army but was discharged early for not disclosing his previous mental illness. The news reports don't claim there was any problem in boot camp but if they didn't discover it before he began, and there wasn't a problem it may be unlikely that they would have double checked and discovered it. He also got a job as a corrections officer even though he had psychological problems.

Most of the public aren't that familiar with the research into the Obedience to Authority experiments or the Stanford Prison Experiments; however as a sociology student Kazmierczak was almost certainly much more familiar with them, since they're among the basics often taught in either sociology or psychology. It is hard to imagine that he didn't see a similarity with these experiments and the Saw horror movies, especially since he was so obsessed with the movies. Many other sociology students might not want to sit through mindless horror, but someone obsessed with them would. Since there are also many people in the academic world in denial about how early abuse could lead to blind obedience he may also had an even more distorted view of it as well.

According to a report in 2010 Steven Kazmierczak wanted to punish Illinois university. 03/22/2010 As Philip Greven and other researchers into the use of corporal Punishment have exposed those who suffer from extreme child abuse or corporal punishment often feel the need to punish those they feel have abused them in the same manner that they have been punished or often in a more extreme manner. Many of these abused children often seek out employment in the military of as law enforcement officers, including either security guards or correctional officers, although rehabilitation efforts have been replaced by increased punishment methods thanks to the get tough on crime propaganda. There is a significant amount of evidence to indicate that children raised in this authoritarian manner often want to stop being the one being held accountable through disciplinarian methods and become the authority figure holding others accountable, as part of a role reversal.

There are many more veterans who went through military training and turned violent after returning from service including some who never saw combat and others like Michael McLendon who also never made it through boot camp in both the Marines and the police academy. There are also a surprising number of police officers, security guards, and correctional officers who also went on shooting sprees. In some cases there is evidence to indicate that hazing or bullying in the military field directly contributed to their violent behavior as I reported previously in Media Downplaying Two Police Killing Sprees Ignoring Solutions Eulalio “Leo” Tordil a homeland security police officer and army veteran was obsessed with military style training forcing his wife and children to go through push ups; and Steven D. Bellino an Army veteran, and FBI agent who rejoined the military with the air force was shamed while going through boot camp for the third time before he went on his shooting spree. And there have been many more veteran and police shootings.

As David Couper indicated in Hazing and Bullying in the Police Academy there are still a lot of military academies that use similar indoctrination tactics to the ones used in the military and these are probably also developed with help from the research done by Milgram and Zimbardo. Fortunately he has demonstrated a more effective way to train police without teaching them to be abusive; unfortunately most academies aren't adopting less authoritarian methods.

This means that until these training tactics are changed many police will also be taught to blindly obey orders and deal with problems through violence. If large corporations are destroying the environment, conducting enormous amounts of white collar crime that indirectly contributes to crime, suppresses wages by relying on abusive sweatshop labor and many other things the police don't protect us from them; instead they blindly obey orders to arrest protesters even when the politicians don't even do a good job pretending to address their legitimate complaints, unintentionally becoming accomplices to what would be considered crimes in a sincere democracy.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman author of The “Myth” of our Returning Veterans and Violent Crime attempts to dismiss this problem with selective statistics and an attempt to blame at least part of the problem with violence on violent media. He cites a claim from NPR that over a hundred veterans have come home an committed murder and makes the false assumption that these are all the veterans that have committed murder. If he had done further research he would have realized that this figure originally came from the New York Times and that it claims that it is far from a complete listing of the murders by veterans since their method of search was limited.

Statistics are hard to sort through since they often have many contributing causes; however by doing such a bad job checking his own facts that should raise major doubts about his credibility. If he had done abetter job sorting through the statistics, even in a more subtly biased manner, he could have made a convincing case that veterans are no more likely to commit murder than non veterans, although I suspect he would have still had to ignore some inconvenient facts. However by claiming that

As I explained in States with high murder rates have larger veteran populations there was a government report on the prison population in 2004 which indicated the rates of incarceration were lower among veterans than they were among non-veterans. However, this is largely due to racial problems and incarcerating a large volume of non-violent drug offenders, especially from abandoned inner cities. The same report found that the veterans were more likely to be incarcerated for violent crimes, including murder, than the non-veterans. Also this showed that about 4% of these veterans were from the Afghanistan and Iraq war, which they implied was a small percentage; however this was only a year or so after the war and inmates in federal or state prison are in jail for serious crimes which they much have committed either while still in the military or very shortly after leaving.

A closer look confirmed that when sorting through the details veterans were more inclined to be involved in violent crime than non-veterans and several other studies have indicated that both veterans and police have higher rates of domestic violence in their families than civilians. Dave Philipps author of "Lethal Warriors" and Casualties of War, Part I: The hell of war comes home 04/14/2014 came to similar conclusions by studying veterans in Colorado Springs and comparing them with civilians from the same demographic groups.

However Stephen Kazmierczak is one of many examples that implies there's probably some truth to Grossman's claim that violent media is at least partly responsible for his shooting spree. He was clearly obsessed with the Saw movie posing with a puppet of Billy and having it tattooed on his arm; and there are statistical studies indicating that viewing violent media contributes to violent crime. However these studies don't try to claim that violent media is the sole contributing cause, and it is unlikely that it is even the leading cause; since murders have been declining for decades while violence in the media has been increasing. Other studies, some of which Ive cited in past articles, including Philip Greven's work, indicate that early child abuse is a more important factor. This is confirmed by decking murder rates as child rearing tactic have been improving with the help of researchers like Benjamin Spock and many others that followed him. The declining murder rates also follow a larger correlation with declining veteran rates since the Vietnam war when we have had fewer men in the military.

In the case of Stephen Kazmierczak and others they had multiple risk factors including early emotional problems which may have involved early child abuse followed up with hazing in boot camp and an obsession with violent media along with taking Antidepressant drugs, some of which have correlated with higher murder rates.

There are of course other contributing causes to violence that aren't getting adequate attention by the media and in some case the psychological research that is most prominent when making policy decisions is influenced by ideologies of the well connected, including poverty, lack of education, income inequality and abandoned inner cities where children have little or no access to good education or economic opportunities. This includes Charlotte North Carolina, which is currently at least the fifth or sixth city experiencing riots as a result of police shootings killing African Americans.

But the leading politicians are being advised by researchers into psychological manipulation of voters to convince them to vote against their own best interests like Frank Luntz The media also relies on psychological researchers to manipulate the public to buy stuff that they don't need and even though this isn't a leading cause of violence researchers like Juliet Schor author of Born to Buy Susan Linn Consuming Kids and Roy F Fox author of Harvesting Minds have shown that it is almost certainly a contributing cause confirmed by shootings over sneakers that have been hyped up by deceptive ads to convince kids they're worth over two hundred dollars; and they also reported on the so called "Girls Intelligence Agency" which encourages children to try to push brands prompted by advertisers on their friends which researchers have clearly indicated could lead to arguments of petty things.

And of course deceptive advertising leads poor or middle class people to pay more for things than their worth or encourage them to buy things they don't need which increases poverty. Susan Linn has also expressed outrage over the watered down American Psychological Assocaition ethical rules that too place in 2005 which she indicated took her by surprise; she doesn't name Philip Zimbardo by name but he was president of the APA when this decision was made in 2002 so it happened under his watch.

Marty Jay Levitt, a former Union busting consultant, also helped explain how Union Busting adds to corrupt bureaucracy and incites crime using psychological manipulation techniques. You don't even have to understand them to realize that there is a problem if you realize that a portion of the money people pay for their goods at stores like Walmart or when buying energy produced with coal is used to manipulate workers so they settle for less money instead of providing improved products or services. And the added social costs from higher crime or poverty is subsidized by taxpayers so rich people can get higher profits.

Philip Zimbardo didn't explain that his research into hazing methods and obedience to authority could also help union busting companies teach corporations how to teach blind obedience so they can get more for less but he did report on incidents where someone that understood this called up many fast food restaurants, falsely told them they were a police officer and asked them about their employees. After getting a name from management they said they suspected them of stealing and instructed management to detain them. Many recognized this as a prank but some complied and even strip searched them. This inspired a Law and Order episode co-staring Robin Williams who did the same thing claiming to be "Detective Milgram." This is one of the many shows inspired by the Obedience to Authority experiments; however they did little to explain the full implications and detective Munch even acted as an expert on it and blamed the people following orders without going into details about the purpose of the research.

Philip Zimbardo didn't even consider the possibility that the reason fast food workers and management were so willing to blindly obey orders from a stranger on the phone falsely claiming to be a cop might be that large corporations have been studying his work when they develop their union busting methods and train their employees to blindly obey orders. Nor does he suggest that there should be far more disclosure than there is so the public can learn how to stand up to military and corporate manipulation tactics.

But why all this trouble to manipulate the public?

Is it solely power for the sake of power? or greed?

Many skeptics could easily ridicule this and claim it is all just a fringe conspiracy theory; however there is an enormous amount of evidence to indicate that a lot of this is clearly true, although most people, including many pseudo-skeptics, don't take the time to sort through these details. Also an enormous amount of these sources are from credible academics and in many cases the researchers like Philip Greven, Alice Miller, Dorothy Otnow Lewis, James Garbarino that explain the leading causes of violence get little or no air time by the traditional media; and those that use it for entertainment purposes or to promote get tough on crime policies that have been proven not to work, are on TV nonstop repeating their appeals to emotion like the most effective propaganda.

The same goes for those that expose wars based on lies, advertising scams, union busting methods fraudulent business practices like insurance scams and many other things. Those with corporate interests get enormous coverage; however those that expose their scams can't get any air time from the six corporations controlling over ninety percent of the media. These six corporations are controlled by a small fraction of 1% of the population; and they're helped by the most deceptive psychologists.

The psychologists don't go on killing sprees but they promote policies that make them more likely as a result of their ideologies that enable the rich to get richer without carrying out basic functions for the poorest people in abandoned sacrifice zones like Charlotte North Carolina which is inevitably exploding and this can be expected to continue happening unless the root causes of crime can be exposed and stopped.

Fortunately as I explained in a series of posts about the contributing causes of violence and ended with Politicians increase crime; Grass roots efforts reduce crime; Politicians steal the credit some communities have learned to look for other source3s for their news and have implemented policies that reduce crime despite the opposition from the political class that is constantly recommending policies to enrich their campaign contributors instead of benefiting the public by reducing crime and addressing other social problem. However far more needs to be done and if it isn't then the problems in Charlotte, Milwaukee, Ferguson, Baltimore could spread else where instead of reducing crime like Richmond California and other part of the country where voters do a better job researching and holding politicians accountable.

Chris Hedges observed that many of the professions that are supposedly looking out for the best interests of society are apparently using their advance education to look out for their own best interests and the best interests of those with the most political power at the expense of the vast majority of the public.

Clearly this includes psychologists that do more to study how to manipulate the public than look out for their best interests.

The relatively small number of veterans or cops mentioned so far are only a small fraction of the ones that have gone on shooting sprees in this country and are almost certainly related to boot camp indoctrination developed by authoritarian psychologists. Even the following additional examples of the most well known shooting sprees are also only a small fraction. They're followed by additional sources on this subject including some my past related articles.