After almost three years in solitary confinement [accumulated from a one-month sentence] at the New Brunswick youth centre 18 year old Ashley Smith has been moved to an adult prison. ibid.
‘Please don’t taser me! I’m scared!’ ibid. Ashley
Ashley would strangle herself often several times a day. ibid.
She was never fully assessed or meaningfully treated. She was never in one place long enough. ibid.
From the time he was out of the womb Chazz Petrella was a boy on the go. But soon that energy was too much for even Chazz to control. Mental illness was something the Petrellas like most families didn’t understand. There were programmes, professionals … nine different agencies had Chazz and his family on their books. The Fifth Estate: Chazz Petrella: The Boy Who Should Have Lived, CBC 2015
Chazz couldn’t seem to focus. When he got frustrated he got aggressive … The drugs kept him awake at night and his behaviour got worse. ibid.
They’d often find him just sitting in a tree. ibid.
At the age of ten Chazz Petrella ended up in an institution … He was the youngest by far and complained the older kids bullied him. ibid.
For some reason those tests never happened. ibid.
He left no note. ibid.
What strange influence does the moon have on the behaviour of man? In Search of s2e5 … Astrology, 1978
January 1974: the full moon moved unusually close to the Earth. Research has found that a strange wave of violent crimes seemed to affect many large cities. Moon madness has long been a persistent myth which scientists are now investigating with computer technology. Can the full moon drive men mad? In Search of s5e6 … Moon Madness, 1980
All human judgment would be removed and replaced instead by a system based on the power of numbers; they gave up on the idea they could understand the human mind and cure it; instead, American psychiatry created a new set of measurable categories that were only based on the surface behaviour of human beings. Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom: Fuck You Buddy, BBC 2007
More than 50% of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder. ibid.
This new system of psychological disorders had been created by a an attack on the arrogance and power of the psychiatric elite in the name of freedom. But what was beginning to emerge from this was a new form of control: the disorders and checklists were becoming a powerful and objective guide to what were the correct and appropriate feelings in an age of individualism and emotion. ibid.
In November 1989 the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Cold War was finally over. A new era of freedom had begun. The shape that freedom was going to take would be defined by the victors – the West, and as this programme has shown, the idea of freedom that had now become dominant in the West was deeply rooted in the suspicion and paranoia of the Cold War. ibid.
Van owner: What if I don’t behave myself?
Tony: We’ll turn you upside down and gut you like a fucking pig. Rise of the Footsoldier IV: Marbella 2019 starring Craig Fairbrass & Terry Stone & Roland Manookian & Josh Myers & Andrew Loveday & Emily Wyatt & Nick Nevern & Conor Benn & Byron Gibson et al, director Julian Gilbey
‘Psychographics focuses more on why someone buys … who your customer is and why they buy.’ The Corbett Report: Psychographics 101, James Corbett online 2017, Infusionsoft’s ‘Introduction to Psychographics’ October 2016
This is not about corporations moulding themselves to better fit your desires, maybe it’s about moulding you to better desire what various companies are selling. ibid.
This nexus of behavioural science and big data and marketing. ibid.
The twentieth century, according to Sigmund Freud, would see man’s capacity for both destruction and technology bring us closer to extinction. As his prophecy came close to reality a new breed of thinker emerged who would try to steer humanity away from disaster. Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words 1/3 Human: All Too Human, BBC 2011
1938: A refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria arrived in the leafy suburbs of Hampstead. Already viewed as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century he had spent decades looking into the secrets of the human mind. His name was Sigmund Freud. ibid.
Freud saw an irrational side to humanity which he was determined to put on the couch. ibid.
Jung had formulated his own ideas: he believed that each of us has an individual destiny which was achieve through a process of individuation. ibid.
Jung believed each of us must face up to our own dark side. ibid.
Another thinker would go on to find wickedness not in the individual but in the very structure of society. Stanley Milgram was born in New York to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe in the ’20s. ... He began to ask unprecedented questions about the human capacity for cruelty. ibid.
[Stanley] Milgram’s results would stun the scientific community. ibid.
‘Ordinary people are easily integrated into malevolent systems.’ ibid. Milgrim
The idea that most of us are capable of performing acts of cruelty simply because someone tells us to forces us to ask key questions about how we structure society. ibid.
In Britain a radical Glaswegian psychoanalyst R D Laing was using television to speak out about his views on the sickness in society. ibid.
Laing was a popular and a persuasive lecturer who insisted doctors should listen to their patients instead of abusing them. He believed much of what we call insane behaviour could be explained by family circumstances and life experiences. ibid.
Across the Atlantic admid the turmoil of the 1960s a group of thinkers came on to the scene who believed that society could be cured and that human behaviour could be improved. One of these was anthropologist Margaret Mead. ibid.
Like Laing, Mead suspected that Western anxieties and problems were caused by the values of our society. ibid.
[Margaret] Mead had been roundly debunked, though some still think her theories have merit. ibid.
Later Spock wrote a book – Baby and Child Care – which changed for ever the way we relate to our children. ibid.
B F Skinner believed he had found an all-embracing antidote to the ills in society. ibid.
Skinner was the most radical practitioner of behaviourism. He believed that each person starts out as a blank slate and is moulded purely by their environment. ibid.
Skinner’s successes were seen as momentous achievements, and his work lives on in every child and employee reward system around the world. ibid.
What Skinner seems to have missed was that humans are not simply blank slates. Each of us is born with innate qualities which affect our behaviour. ibid.
In the latter part of the twentieth century a group of British thinkers emerged who would offer radical new ideas about what makes humans tick. These thinkers would take their cues not from humans but from animals. Enter Desmond Morris who started his career as a zoologist. ibid.
The book that made Morris’s name was The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, and it had a shocking new claim at its heart: much of our normal human behaviour is derived from our animal ancestry. ibid.
Goodall did publish, and some did draw the conclusion that violence in humans and chimps is impossible to avoid. ibid.
Are we slaves to our natural instincts or can we master our behaviour? ibid.
In 1976 Dawkins published one of the most successful science books of all time. The Selfish Gene was a radical updating of evolutionary theory. ibid.
Genes often stand the best chance of survival if rather than fighting it out individuals cooperate and look after each other. ibid.
For Dawkins then humans are not simply selfish individuals who will do whatever it takes to reproduce our genes. ibid.
This is where a century of enquiry into human behaviour fought out on the airwaves has brought us. We are undoubtedly products of our biology, and the potential for human failing will always be there. But that doesn’t mean we’re slaves to our nature. The sophistication of the human brain and the ways in which we live together have given us the power to recognise and master our worst impulses. This after all is what being human is all about. ibid.