Indentured Servitude? I’ll be paying for my student loans for the rest of my life . . . A large portion of my earnings goes to the Wall Street elites that have commoditized and securitized my loans . . . I knew at the time I signed the student loans (again and again) that I would be responsible . . . what I didn’t figure was the cost to my children—JeffVincent, AlterNet

How outlandish is it to say that the spirit of indentured servitude has been revived in the United States? What can young people and their parents do to prevent student loan debt servitude, and what can all of us do to help liberate student loan debtors who are currently doomed to decades of financial misery?

Colonial Indentured Servants and Modern Student Loan Debtors

In colonial America, historians estimate that between one-half and two-thirds of white immigrants arrived as indentured servants. Indentured servants in England were in servitude typically for one year, while indenture in America was typically four to seven years. Today in the United States, student debt is an even longer debt commitment than colonial indentured servitude. The standard Stafford federal loan is, for example, fifteen years, and with waivers and refinancing, it is not uncommon for Americans to be paying off student loans well into middle age.

In “Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture,” Carnegie Mellon University professor Jeffrey Williams concludes, “College student loan debt has revived the spirit of indenture for a sizable proportion of contemporary Americans.” Williams points out that college loan debt, like indentured servitude, “looms over the lives of those so contracted, binding individuals for a significant part of their future work lives.”

Similar to students signing their college loan papers, indentured servants also “freely chose” their servitude. In colonial times, while the elite saw indentured servitude as a freely chosen and fair economic deal, the servants themselves routinely saw it as an exploitative system of labor, a form of time-limited slavery. Like colonial indentured servants who “freely chose” to sign papers agreeing that they would pay off their debt directly in labor, modern student loan debtors “freely choose” to sign papers agreeing to pay off their debt. However, this is a “choice” that the financial elite do not have to make.

Like colonial indentured servitude, the student loan contract is virtually unbreakable. Student loans are enforced by garnishing wages, and, unlike most other forms of debt, student loan debt is almost never forgiven even in personal bankruptcy.

Similar to some indentured servants, some student loan debtors—most famously, Michelle and Barack Obama—do go on to prosper. However, half of those who attend college don’t graduate, and many college graduates do not get high-paying jobs and struggle to make debt payments for much of their adult lives. The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 20, 2010) reported, “Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. . . . The growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all.”

Conversations with Young People about Class and College

Several years ago, I was speaking to a group of high school seniors, and I mentioned that my experience is that the adult world tries to scare young people about so much crap, that the net effect is for young people not to take anything we say seriously. I told them that most mistakes are useful learning experiences, but that there are two things that should concern them because they are very difficult to overcome, and I then moved on to another topic. A sea of hands went up, and several students shouted out demanding that I tell them what the two things were. So I told them: One, it’s difficult to overcome driving drunk and killing somebody; and two, it also tends to drag your life down if you have a kid with someone you can’t stand. These days, however, I’ve had to modify what I say to high school kids.

My recent experience is that, for more people, even more depressing than having a kid with someone you can’t stand is running up a gigantic student loan debt. So, now I talk with young people in groups, individually, and their parents about student loan debt hell

Many young people among the 99%, in my experience, have been socialized NOT to have “class consciousness.” So, we discuss how kids from 1% families can go to expensive colleges without any career plans, party, flunk out, go to another expensive college, and have no student loan debt—and can fall back on either the family business, a trust fund, or a career in politics. While the 1% can afford—without loans—to shell out whatever money is necessary for college, many of the 99% will have a “debt sword” that hangs over their heads for a significant part of their lives.

The 1% and their corporate media have succeeded in making the terms “class consciousness” and “class war” taboo, which is part of the reason why they are winning the class war and enslaving the 99%.

College Decision Making for the 99%

Today, high school students hear repeatedly that they are “losers” if they don’t go to college, and their parents are made to feel like failures if their kids don’t go to college. For the 99%, the truth is that it may make sense to go college, or it may not. College may make sense if you want to earn a living at something that requires a college-level certification. But college may not make sense, especially if you are not motivated for it, or your career desires don’t require a degree and certifications.

Exiting from the modern world-religion view that not attending college is sinful and shameful, let’s look at it soberly. Colleges offer (1) learning, (2) certifications and accreditation, and (3) partying and potential for meeting people.

While learning does take place in college, it is just as easy to gain knowledge outside of college. Most college learning is book learning, and one need not go to college to read books. Moreover, most of us have learned much of what we utilize to make a living and survive through experience, not through coursework.

It is true, however, that without a college degree and specific certifications, one simply will not be hired for certain jobs. While much of what I learned in my formal schooling was worthless or worse than worthless, I needed degrees for credentialing and licensing. The same is true for teachers and other professionals. But there’s little reason not to get that degree as inexpensively as possible.

High school students are intimidated by media, peers, and even some guidance counselors to worry about the so-called prestige of an institution, and parents are guilt-tripped to pay for prestigious institutions. I tell young people and their parents that in more than twenty-five years of private practice, no client has asked me what university I went to before they made an appointment. Furthermore, no publisher or editor has ever asked me where I received my education before they published my books or articles. So if you need to get some certification, shop around for the most inexpensive financial deal.

Besides learning and credentialing, colleges do offer a certain kind of socializing and partying that one does not get via independent study. However, is the typical college partying worth the price tag? How expansive is the typical socializing that goes on at colleges compared with many other ways of mixing it up with the world that are far less expensive?

I have worked with many extremely intelligent young people who simply don’t like school. They can be shamed into going to college, or they can be exposed to a math that, from my experience, will very much interest them. Specifically, help them add up the money that will be spent on college. Add that to four years’ lost income from not working. What’s the total? $150,000? $200,000? More? Then consider financial resources—specifically, how much debt will likely accrue? How much money per month will that debt will cost? How long will that debt persist? If their parents were going to contribute some money toward their schooling, what could their children do with it instead of going to college? Use it to start up a business? Buy a home that is free and clear?

For the $100,000 price tag of four years of tuition plus room and board for the University of Cincinnati or Ohio State University (both public universities), one can buy two homes free and clear in a safe neighborhood where I live in Cincinnati, then live in one, rent out the other, and sit on them until the real estate market improves. I know intelligent, industrious, and hardworking young non-academics who passed on college and student loan debt, and are now in their thirties and own their own homes, have money in savings, have successful businesses and are enjoying life, and whose major pain is sorrow for some of their student debtor friends.

Working with teenagers, young adults, and their parents, I have discovered that the corporate media has given many of them a distorted sense of life with regard to risk. Specifically, many of them have been socialized to believe that the least risky path is the most prestigious college that one is admitted to. While young people have been socialized to be terrified of not having a college education or not receiving a degree from a prestigious institution, they have not been told about the risk of carrying huge debt.

The Political Battle: Liberation for Debt Slaves

Class consciousness is the starting point in both the prevention of and the liberation from debt slavery.

The 36 million Americans carrying federal student loan debt, the millions of others with private student loan debt, their parents who have co-signed on this debt, and other families who have been in this sinking boat or will soon be in that boat are an extremely large class. This group is actually a larger one than many other groups in American history that have won civil and economic justice for themselves through political struggle.

Some in desperation have urged for voluntary default on student loans. However, Occupy Student Debt views this campaign as ill-conceived, “We strongly advise anyone with student loan debt NOT to participate in this form of protest, especially given that the law, as currently written, allows lenders and collectors to profit from defaults.”

What have other victimized groups—from African-Americans to Latin-Americans to gay Americans—in U.S. history done that has worked to gain social and economic justice? For one thing, they have made it clear to politicians that they will not vote for any politician who does not take actions to correct their victimization. So to begin with, members of this large group of student loan debtors and their families should show up at all candidate forums—including Obama’s—and assault politicians with questions:

Do you think it is fair that gambling debt can be discharged in bankruptcy, but not the student loan debt of a working class person who tried to get a college education and couldn’t find a decent-paying job?

Why is it that public universities are not free or low cost in the United States when they are in many nations in the world?

Why is it that politicians don’t worry about the “moral hazard” of bailing out large banks and insurance companies, but are concerned about debt forgiveness for student loan debtors when such forgiveness would be a “stimulus package” for the U.S. economy?

Beyond confronting the politician clowns in the circus, pressure needs to be applied directly to the circus owners who have orchestrated current bankruptcy laws and who have a stake in higher tuition in public universities. In “Meet 5 Big Lenders Profiting from the $1 Trillion Student Debt Bubble” (November 28, 2011), AlterNet’s Sarah Jaffe documents how Sallie Mae (originally called the Student Loan Marketing Association, the largest student lender in the United States, created in 1972 as a government-sponsored enterprise but fully privatized in 2004), along with Wells Fargo, Discover, NelNet, and JPMorgan Chase have ripped off students and their families. These giant corporations care only about are their stock prices; and student loan debtors and their families can threaten stock prices by creating nasty publicity, by bringing pressure on institutional investors to divest, and utilize other ways that compel concessions.

Over the last twenty years, the financial-industrial complex’s lackey politicians have altered bankruptcy laws so as to make it almost impossible for student loan debtors to declare bankruptcy, but these laws can be changed again to make student loan debt as easy to discharge in bankruptcy as is gambling debt. Also, if giant banks today can “buy money” from the Federal Reserve for almost nothing, then student loan interest rates should also approach 0 percent. Moreover, U.S. public universities were once free or extremely low cost, and that can be the case again, especially if the U.S. government stops spending trillions of dollars on wars that the majority of Americans oppose.

Part of class consciousness means recognizing the size of one’s class and thus its political power. Class consciousness also means becoming angry by victimization and using that anger to energize organizing. In much of the world today, as I detail in Get Up, Stand Up, the 99% can get a B.A. and even an advanced degree without accruing any debt, as tuition and fees in public universities in many nations are either free or extremely low. That can be true again in United States if the 1% had reason to recalculate that they better once again throw the 99% a bone or two to keep us from demanding real power. Today, the 1% is emboldened and unafraid to completely piss on the 99%.

The solution to class exploitation and abuse is always the same. Get conscious, get angry, get energized, and get organized. Then strategically threaten the wealth and control of the 1% so they are forced to make concession. Expect a counterattack from the 1%, and counter it with even greater pressure for more economic justice.

Indentured Servitude? I’ll be paying for my student loans for the rest of my life . . . A large portion of my earnings goes to the Wall Street elites that have commoditized and securitized my loans . . . I knew at the time I signed the student loans (again and again) that I would be responsible . . . what I didn’t figure was the cost to my children—JeffVincent, AlterNet

How outlandish is it to say that the spirit of indentured servitude has been revived in the United States? What can young people and their parents do to prevent student loan debt servitude, and what can all of us do to help liberate student loan debtors who are currently doomed to decades of financial misery?

Colonial Indentured Servants and Modern Student Loan Debtors

In colonial America, historians estimate that between one-half and two-thirds of white immigrants arrived as indentured servants. Indentured servants in England were in servitude typically for one year, while indenture in America was typically four to seven years. Today in the United States, student debt is an even longer debt commitment than colonial indentured servitude. The standard Stafford federal loan is, for example, fifteen years, and with waivers and refinancing, it is not uncommon for Americans to be paying off student loans well into middle age.

In “Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture,” Carnegie Mellon University professor Jeffrey Williams concludes, “College student loan debt has revived the spirit of indenture for a sizable proportion of contemporary Americans.” Williams points out that college loan debt, like indentured servitude, “looms over the lives of those so contracted, binding individuals for a significant part of their future work lives.”

Similar to students signing their college loan papers, indentured servants also “freely chose” their servitude. In colonial times, while the elite saw indentured servitude as a freely chosen and fair economic deal, the servants themselves routinely saw it as an exploitative system of labor, a form of time-limited slavery. Like colonial indentured servants who “freely chose” to sign papers agreeing that they would pay off their debt directly in labor, modern student loan debtors “freely choose” to sign papers agreeing to pay off their debt. However, this is a “choice” that the financial elite do not have to make.

Like colonial indentured servitude, the student loan contract is virtually unbreakable. Student loans are enforced by garnishing wages, and, unlike most other forms of debt, student loan debt is almost never forgiven even in personal bankruptcy.

Similar to some indentured servants, some student loan debtors—most famously, Michelle and Barack Obama—do go on to prosper. However, half of those who attend college don’t graduate, and many college graduates do not get high-paying jobs and struggle to make debt payments for much of their adult lives. The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 20, 2010) reported, “Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. . . . The growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all.”

Conversations with Young People about Class and College

Several years ago, I was speaking to a group of high school seniors, and I mentioned that my experience is that the adult world tries to scare young people about so much crap, that the net effect is for young people not to take anything we say seriously. I told them that most mistakes are useful learning experiences, but that there are two things that should concern them because they are very difficult to overcome, and I then moved on to another topic. A sea of hands went up, and several students shouted out demanding that I tell them what the two things were. So I told them: One, it’s difficult to overcome driving drunk and killing somebody; and two, it also tends to drag your life down if you have a kid with someone you can’t stand. These days, however, I’ve had to modify what I say to high school kids.

My recent experience is that, for more people, even more depressing than having a kid with someone you can’t stand is running up a gigantic student loan debt. So, now I talk with young people in groups, individually, and their parents about student loan debt hell

Many young people among the 99%, in my experience, have been socialized NOT to have “class consciousness.” So, we discuss how kids from 1% families can go to expensive colleges without any career plans, party, flunk out, go to another expensive college, and have no student loan debt—and can fall back on either the family business, a trust fund, or a career in politics. While the 1% can afford—without loans—to shell out whatever money is necessary for college, many of the 99% will have a “debt sword” that hangs over their heads for a significant part of their lives.

The 1% and their corporate media have succeeded in making the terms “class consciousness” and “class war” taboo, which is part of the reason why they are winning the class war and enslaving the 99%.

College Decision Making for the 99%

Today, high school students hear repeatedly that they are “losers” if they don’t go to college, and their parents are made to feel like failures if their kids don’t go to college. For the 99%, the truth is that it may make sense to go college, or it may not. College may make sense if you want to earn a living at something that requires a college-level certification. But college may not make sense, especially if you are not motivated for it, or your career desires don’t require a degree and certifications.

Exiting from the modern world-religion view that not attending college is sinful and shameful, let’s look at it soberly. Colleges offer (1) learning, (2) certifications and accreditation, and (3) partying and potential for meeting people.

While learning does take place in college, it is just as easy to gain knowledge outside of college. Most college learning is book learning, and one need not go to college to read books. Moreover, most of us have learned much of what we utilize to make a living and survive through experience, not through coursework.

It is true, however, that without a college degree and specific certifications, one simply will not be hired for certain jobs. While much of what I learned in my formal schooling was worthless or worse than worthless, I needed degrees for credentialing and licensing. The same is true for teachers and other professionals. But there’s little reason not to get that degree as inexpensively as possible.

High school students are intimidated by media, peers, and even some guidance counselors to worry about the so-called prestige of an institution, and parents are guilt-tripped to pay for prestigious institutions. I tell young people and their parents that in more than twenty-five years of private practice, no client has asked me what university I went to before they made an appointment. Furthermore, no publisher or editor has ever asked me where I received my education before they published my books or articles. So if you need to get some certification, shop around for the most inexpensive financial deal.

Besides learning and credentialing, colleges do offer a certain kind of socializing and partying that one does not get via independent study. However, is the typical college partying worth the price tag? How expansive is the typical socializing that goes on at colleges compared with many other ways of mixing it up with the world that are far less expensive?

I have worked with many extremely intelligent young people who simply don’t like school. They can be shamed into going to college, or they can be exposed to a math that, from my experience, will very much interest them. Specifically, help them add up the money that will be spent on college. Add that to four years’ lost income from not working. What’s the total? $150,000? $200,000? More? Then consider financial resources—specifically, how much debt will likely accrue? How much money per month will that debt will cost? How long will that debt persist? If their parents were going to contribute some money toward their schooling, what could their children do with it instead of going to college? Use it to start up a business? Buy a home that is free and clear?

For the $100,000 price tag of four years of tuition plus room and board for the University of Cincinnati or Ohio State University (both public universities), one can buy two homes free and clear in a safe neighborhood where I live in Cincinnati, then live in one, rent out the other, and sit on them until the real estate market improves. I know intelligent, industrious, and hardworking young non-academics who passed on college and student loan debt, and are now in their thirties and own their own homes, have money in savings, have successful businesses and are enjoying life, and whose major pain is sorrow for some of their student debtor friends.

Working with teenagers, young adults, and their parents, I have discovered that the corporate media has given many of them a distorted sense of life with regard to risk. Specifically, many of them have been socialized to believe that the least risky path is the most prestigious college that one is admitted to. While young people have been socialized to be terrified of not having a college education or not receiving a degree from a prestigious institution, they have not been told about the risk of carrying huge debt.

The Political Battle: Liberation for Debt Slaves

Class consciousness is the starting point in both the prevention of and the liberation from debt slavery.

The 36 million Americans carrying federal student loan debt, the millions of others with private student loan debt, their parents who have co-signed on this debt, and other families who have been in this sinking boat or will soon be in that boat are an extremely large class. This group is actually a larger one than many other groups in American history that have won civil and economic justice for themselves through political struggle.

Some in desperation have urged for voluntary default on student loans. However, Occupy Student Debt views this campaign as ill-conceived, “We strongly advise anyone with student loan debt NOT to participate in this form of protest, especially given that the law, as currently written, allows lenders and collectors to profit from defaults.”

What have other victimized groups—from African-Americans to Latin-Americans to gay Americans—in U.S. history done that has worked to gain social and economic justice? For one thing, they have made it clear to politicians that they will not vote for any politician who does not take actions to correct their victimization. So to begin with, members of this large group of student loan debtors and their families should show up at all candidate forums—including Obama’s—and assault politicians with questions:

Do you think it is fair that gambling debt can be discharged in bankruptcy, but not the student loan debt of a working class person who tried to get a college education and couldn’t find a decent-paying job?

Why is it that public universities are not free or low cost in the United States when they are in many nations in the world?

Why is it that politicians don’t worry about the “moral hazard” of bailing out large banks and insurance companies, but are concerned about debt forgiveness for student loan debtors when such forgiveness would be a “stimulus package” for the U.S. economy?

Beyond confronting the politician clowns in the circus, pressure needs to be applied directly to the circus owners who have orchestrated current bankruptcy laws and who have a stake in higher tuition in public universities. In “Meet 5 Big Lenders Profiting from the $1 Trillion Student Debt Bubble” (November 28, 2011), AlterNet’s Sarah Jaffe documents how Sallie Mae (originally called the Student Loan Marketing Association, the largest student lender in the United States, created in 1972 as a government-sponsored enterprise but fully privatized in 2004), along with Wells Fargo, Discover, NelNet, and JPMorgan Chase have ripped off students and their families. These giant corporations care only about are their stock prices; and student loan debtors and their families can threaten stock prices by creating nasty publicity, by bringing pressure on institutional investors to divest, and utilize other ways that compel concessions.

Over the last twenty years, the financial-industrial complex’s lackey politicians have altered bankruptcy laws so as to make it almost impossible for student loan debtors to declare bankruptcy, but these laws can be changed again to make student loan debt as easy to discharge in bankruptcy as is gambling debt. Also, if giant banks today can “buy money” from the Federal Reserve for almost nothing, then student loan interest rates should also approach 0 percent. Moreover, U.S. public universities were once free or extremely low cost, and that can be the case again, especially if the U.S. government stops spending trillions of dollars on wars that the majority of Americans oppose.

Part of class consciousness means recognizing the size of one’s class and thus its political power. Class consciousness also means becoming angry by victimization and using that anger to energize organizing. In much of the world today, as I detail in Get Up, Stand Up, the 99% can get a B.A. and even an advanced degree without accruing any debt, as tuition and fees in public universities in many nations are either free or extremely low. That can be true again in United States if the 1% had reason to recalculate that they better once again throw the 99% a bone or two to keep us from demanding real power. Today, the 1% is emboldened and unafraid to completely piss on the 99%.

The solution to class exploitation and abuse is always the same. Get conscious, get angry, get energized, and get organized. Then strategically threaten the wealth and control of the 1% so they are forced to make concession. Expect a counterattack from the 1%, and counter it with even greater pressure for more economic justice.

The majority of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals “go along to get along” and maintain a status quo that includes drug company corruption, pseudoscientific research, and a “standard of care” that is routinely damaging and occasionally kills young children. If that sounds hyperbolic, then you probably have not heard of Rebecca Riley, and how the highest levels of psychiatry described her treatment as “appropriate and within responsible professional standards.”

When Rebecca Riley was 28 months old, based primarily on the complaints of her mother that she was “hyper” and had difficulty sleeping, psychiatrist Kayoko Kifuji, at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, diagnosed Rebecca with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kifuji prescribed clonidine, a hypertensive drug with significant sedating properties, a drug that Kifuji also prescribed to Rebecca’s older sister and brother. The goal of the Riley parents—obvious to many in their community and later to juries—was to attain psychiatric diagnoses for their children that would qualify them for disability payments and to sedate their children making them easy to manage.

By the time Rebecca was three year old, again based mainly on parental complaints, Kifuji had given Rebecca an additional diagnosis of bipolar disorder and prescribed two additional heavily sedating drugs, the antipsychotic Seroquel and the anticonvulsant Depakote.

At the age of four, Rebecca was dead.

At the time of her death, Rebecca had a life-threatening amount of clonidine—enough to kill her—in her body, according to the former director of the Massachusetts toxicology lab and the medical director of a regional poison control center. The medical examiner who performed the autopsy concluded that Rebecca died from intoxication of clonidine, Depakote, and two over-the-counter cold and cough medicines that led to heart failure, lungs filled with bloody fluid, coma, and then death. Rebecca’s abusive parents went to prison for their over-drugging contribution to their daughter’s death.

Kifuji’s fate? The psychiatric establishment rallied around Kifuji, enabling her to return to Tufts Medical Center practicing child psychiatry without any restrictions, penalties, or supervision. After Rebecca’s death, Kifuji’s treatment was defended by Tufts-New England Medical Center, whose spokesperson told “60 Minutes” in 2009: “The care we provided was appropriate and within responsible professional standards.”

Apparently, psychiatric care that is considered appropriate and within responsible professional standards includes: diagnoses of ADHD for a 2 year old and bipolar disorder for a 3 year old when the symptoms of those disorders are normal behaviors for those ages; prescribing three heavily sedating drugs that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for child psychiatric treatment; ignoring the warnings from a school nurse about over dosages for Rebecca; and making diagnoses based almost entirely on the reports of Rebecca’s mother, who herself was diagnosed with mental illness and heavily medicated to the point of falling asleep in Kifuji’s office.

Long before the Rebecca Riley tragedy hit the headlines, I was embarrassed by the mental health profession for 7 major reasons:

1. Corruption by Big Pharma

How did it become within responsible professional standards for 2 year olds to get an ADHD diagnosis, for 3 year olds to get a bipolar diagnosis, and for toddlers to be prescribed multiple heavily sedating drugs? The short answer is drug company corruption of the mental health profession.

Congressional hearings in 2008 revealed that psychiatry’s “thought leaders” and major institutions are on the take from drug companies.

On June 8, 2008, the New York Times reported about psychiatrist Joseph Biederman: “A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007.” Due in large part to Biederman’s influence, the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003. Pediatrician and author Lawrence Diller notes about Biederman, “He single-handedly put pediatric bipolar disorder on the map.” In addition to his popularization of bipolar disorder for children, Biederman is one of the most significant forces behind the expanding numbers diagnosed with ADHD; and Congressional investigators also discovered that Biederman conducted studies of Eli Lilly’s ADHD drug Strattera that were funded by National Institute of Health at the same time he was receiving money from Lilly.

Not only does the drug industry have influential psychiatrists such as Biederman in their pocket, virtually every major mental health institution is financially interconnected with Big Pharma. Congressional hearings also exposed the American Psychiatric Association (APA), psychiatry’s premier professional organization, as being on the take from drug companies. In 2006, the drug industry accounted for about 30 percent of the APA’s $62.5 million in financing. Most relevant here, the APA is the publisher of the psychiatric diagnostic bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and thus the APA is the institution responsible for creating mental illnesses and disorders.

2. Invalid Illnesses and Disorders

Psychiatry’s first DSM (1952) and its DSM-II (1968) listed homosexuality as a mental illness, and only because of a fierce political fight waged in the 1970s by gay activists did the APA abolish homosexuality as an illness and eliminate it from their DSM-III (1980). Gay activists’ fight was not only a victory for themselves but a service for everyone else, as it made public the important scientific problem of psychiatric disorder invalidity. Specifically, are psychiatric disorders scientifically valid illnesses, or are they simply behaviors that create discomfort for some authorities at a given moment in time?

While psychiatry lost homosexuality as a mental illness in the 1980 DSM-III, the APA found other groups that it could pathologize, groups who could not mobilize and resist, most notably children, who are now routinely given psychiatric diagnoses for behaviors that many of us view as normal behaviors for their ages.

Psychiatry sees it as within responsible professional standards to diagnose 3 year olds such as Rebecca Riley with bipolar disorder, the symptoms of which include: irritable and rapidly changing moods; severe temper tantrums; defiance of authority; agitation and distractibility; sleeping too little or too much; poor judgment; impulsivity; and grandiose beliefs.

Psychiatry also sees it as within responsible professional standards for Rebecca Riley to have been diagnosed at 28 months old with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the symptoms of which are inattention (easily distracted and bored, difficulty organizing and completing tasks, losing things, not seeming to listen, not following instructions); hyperactivity (fidgeting, talking nonstop, having trouble sitting still, difficulty with quiet tasks), and impulsivity (impatience, blurting out inappropriate comments, interrupting conversations).

Today, children and teens are also diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), the symptoms of which include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” and “often argues with adults.” The standard for a medical disorder should not be whether or not an individual causes friction.

3. Scientifically Unreliable Diagnoses

Even if you believe that bipolar disorder for three year olds, ADHD for 2 year olds, ODD for teenagers, and all the other DSM diagnoses are valid disorders, there is still the scientific issue of diagnostic unreliability—the lack of diagnostic agreement among professionals examining the same person.

A generation ago, psychiatry admitted that their diagnoses were unreliable, and they agreed that this was a major scientific problem. So in 1980, in an attempt to eliminate this embarrassment, they created the DSM-III with concrete behavioral checklists and formal decision making rules, but they failed to correct the problem. Psychiatric diagnoses remain unreliable, but now psychiatry no longer talks about the unreliability problem.

If a measurement is a reliable one, then clinicians trained with it should be in high agreement on the diagnosis. A major 1992 study, conducted at six sites with 600 prospective patients, was done to examine the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses. Experienced mental health professionals were given extensive training in how to make accurate DSM diagnoses. Because of the extensive training, one would expect that diagnostic agreement would be much higher than in typical clinical settings. Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk summarize the study in Making Us Crazy (1997):

What this study demonstrated was that even when experienced clinicians with special training and supervision are asked to use DSM and make a diagnosis, they frequently disagree, even though the standards for defining agreement are very generous. . . . [For example,] if one of the two therapists made a diagnosis of Schizoid Personality Disorder and the other therapist selected Avoidant Personality Disorder, the therapists were judged to be in complete agreement of the diagnosis because they both found a personality disorder—even though they disagreed completely on which one! So even with this liberal definition of agreement, reliability using DSM is not very good.

Kutchins and Kirk conclude: “Mental health clinicians independently interviewing the same person in the community are as likely to agree as disagree that the person has a mental disorder and are as likely to agree as disagree on which of the over 300 DSM disorders is present.”

4. Biochemical Imbalance Mumbo Jumbo

Just as nothing was more important in selling the Iraq war in 2003 than the Bush administration’s certainty that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), nothing has been more important in selling psychiatric drugs than psychiatry’s certainty of biochemical brain imbalances as the cause for mental illnesses.

Prior to psychiatry’s proclamation that depression was caused by too little of the neurotransmitter serotonin, few Americans were taking antidepressants. But by declaring that depression was caused by a serotonin imbalance analogous to diabetes and an insulin imbalance, depressed Americans became far more receptive to serotonin-enhancing drugs such as the “selective-serotonin-reuptake inhibitors” (SSRIs) Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft.

SSRIs can make some depressed people feel better; however, alcohol makes some shy people less shy, but that’s not enough evidence to say that shyness is caused by an alcohol imbalance. The truth is—and scientists have known this for quite some time—that serotonin levels are not associated with depression.

Researchers have used a variety of methods to test the serotonin imbalance theory of depression, including comparing serotonin metabolites in depressed and nondepressed people, and depleting serotonin levels through a variety of means and then observing whether this resulted in depression. Elliot Valenstein, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, reviewed the research in his book Blaming the Brain (1998) and reported that it is just as likely for people with normal serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormal serotonin levels, and that it is just as likely for people with abnormally high serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormally low serotonin levels. Valenstein concluded, “Furthermore, there is no convincing evidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency.”

In 2002, the New York Times reported: “Researchers knew that antidepressants seemed to raise the brain’s levels of messenger chemicals called neurotransmitters, so they theorized that depression must result from a deficiency of these chemicals. Yet a multitude of studies failed to prove this precept.” Yet even now, many psychiatrists and other mental health professionals continue to promulgate the serotonin imbalance theory of depression, and polls show that the majority of Americans continue to believe it.

5. Pseudoscientific Drug Effectiveness Research

There are multiple tricks that psychiatric drug manufacturers and their researcher psychiatrists and psychologists use to make their drugs look more effective than they really are. For example, one of the most common depression measurements used by researchers paid by drug companies is the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD). In the HRSD, researchers rate subjects, and the higher the point total, the more one is deemed to be suffering from depression. On the HRSD, there are three separate items about insomnia (early, middle, and late) and one can receive up to six points for difficulty either falling or remaining asleep; however, there is only one suicide item, in which one is awarded only two points for wishing to be dead. The HRSD is heavily loaded with items that are most affected by drugs, and it is therefore especially damning for antidepressants that even with such measurement dice-loading, these drugs routinely fail to outperform placebos—even dice-loaded placebos.

Proper drug research requires that neither subject nor experimenter knows who is getting the drug and who is getting the placebo (a true double-blind control). Drug company antidepressant researchers use inactive placebos such as sugar pills (which don’t create side effects). Independent research on inactive placebos show that many subjects in antidepressant and other studies can guess if they are getting the actual drug or not, which changes their expectations and subverts the double-blind control. In order to make it more difficult to guess correctly, an active placebo (which creates side effects) should be used. In 2000, a Psychiatric Times article concluded: “In fact, when antidepressants are compared with active placebos, there appear to be no differences in clinical effectiveness.”

Dice-loading depression measurements and placebos are just two of many techniques that drug company researchers use to make antidepressants look more effective than they really are, but even with such dice loading, antidepressants have not fared well, at least when one examines all the studies.

Drug companies try to ensure that those studies showing antidepressants to be no more effective than placebos are not published; however, all studies must be submitted to the FDA. So independent researcher Irving Kirsch and his research team at the University of Connecticut used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to all data, and analyzed forty-seven studies that had been sponsored by drug companies on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Celexa, and Serzone. Kirsch discovered that in the majority of the trials, the antidepressant failed to outperform a sugar pill placebo (and in the trials where the antidepressant did outperform the placebo, the advantage was slight).

6. Psychotropic Drug Hypocrisy

Chemists consider psychiatric prescription drugs and illegal mood-altering drugs all to be psychotropic or psychoactive drugs. Cocaine and ADHD drugs such as Adderall and other amphetamines affect the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine; and antidepressants used in combination also affect the same neurotransmitters. Not only are prescription psychotropics and illegal psychotropics chemically similar, they are used by people for similar reasons, including taking the edge off their discomfort so as to function. The hypocrisy surrounding illegal and prescription psychotropic drugs is harmful to society in at least two ways.

At one level, because people are being misinformed about the realities of prescription psychotropic drugs, they are more likely to gulp them down and to give them to their children. This has helped create a tragic phenomenon detailed by investigative reporter Robert Whitaker in his book Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010): psychiatric drug use turning mild and episodic conditions into severe and chronic ones that have helped create a huge increase of Americans with severe mental illness, especially among children.

At a second level, this psychiatric-illegal psychotropic drug hypocrisy allows for unfair criminalizing and incarceration of people using illegal psychotropics.

7. Diversion from Societal, Cultural, and Political Sources of Misery

When we hear the words disorder, disease, or illness, we think of an individual in need of treatment, not of a troubled society in need of transformation. Mental illness expansionism diverts us from examining a dehumanizing society.

In addition to pathologizing normal behavior, the mental health profession also diverts us from examining a society that creates the ingredients—helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, and isolation—that cause emotional difficulties. We are diverted from the reality that many emotional problems are natural human reactions to loss in our society of autonomy and community. Thus, the mental health profession not only has financial value for drug companies but it has political value for those at the top of societal hierarchies who want to retain the status quo.

Today, a handful of dissident mental health professionals do challenge and resist their profession’s dehumanizing standard practicies. I know several of these dissidents, and they are the only psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health professionals that I have any respect for.

The majority of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals “go along to get along” and maintain a status quo that includes drug company corruption, pseudoscientific research, and a “standard of care” that is routinely damaging and occasionally kills young children. If that sounds hyperbolic, then you probably have not heard of Rebecca Riley, and how the highest levels of psychiatry described her treatment as “appropriate and within responsible professional standards.”

When Rebecca Riley was 28 months old, based primarily on the complaints of her mother that she was “hyper” and had difficulty sleeping, psychiatrist Kayoko Kifuji, at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, diagnosed Rebecca with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kifuji prescribed clonidine, a hypertensive drug with significant sedating properties, a drug that Kifuji also prescribed to Rebecca’s older sister and brother. The goal of the Riley parents—obvious to many in their community and later to juries—was to attain psychiatric diagnoses for their children that would qualify them for disability payments and to sedate their children making them easy to manage.

By the time Rebecca was three year old, again based mainly on parental complaints, Kifuji had given Rebecca an additional diagnosis of bipolar disorder and prescribed two additional heavily sedating drugs, the antipsychotic Seroquel and the anticonvulsant Depakote.

At the age of four, Rebecca was dead.

At the time of her death, Rebecca had a life-threatening amount of clonidine—enough to kill her—in her body, according to the former director of the Massachusetts toxicology lab and the medical director of a regional poison control center. The medical examiner who performed the autopsy concluded that Rebecca died from intoxication of clonidine, Depakote, and two over-the-counter cold and cough medicines that led to heart failure, lungs filled with bloody fluid, coma, and then death. Rebecca’s abusive parents went to prison for their over-drugging contribution to their daughter’s death.

Kifuji’s fate? The psychiatric establishment rallied around Kifuji, enabling her to return to Tufts Medical Center practicing child psychiatry without any restrictions, penalties, or supervision. After Rebecca’s death, Kifuji’s treatment was defended by Tufts-New England Medical Center, whose spokesperson told “60 Minutes” in 2009: “The care we provided was appropriate and within responsible professional standards.”

Apparently, psychiatric care that is considered appropriate and within responsible professional standards includes: diagnoses of ADHD for a 2 year old and bipolar disorder for a 3 year old when the symptoms of those disorders are normal behaviors for those ages; prescribing three heavily sedating drugs that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for child psychiatric treatment; ignoring the warnings from a school nurse about over dosages for Rebecca; and making diagnoses based almost entirely on the reports of Rebecca’s mother, who herself was diagnosed with mental illness and heavily medicated to the point of falling asleep in Kifuji’s office.

Long before the Rebecca Riley tragedy hit the headlines, I was embarrassed by the mental health profession for 7 major reasons:

1. Corruption by Big Pharma

How did it become within responsible professional standards for 2 year olds to get an ADHD diagnosis, for 3 year olds to get a bipolar diagnosis, and for toddlers to be prescribed multiple heavily sedating drugs? The short answer is drug company corruption of the mental health profession.

Congressional hearings in 2008 revealed that psychiatry’s “thought leaders” and major institutions are on the take from drug companies.

On June 8, 2008, the New York Times reported about psychiatrist Joseph Biederman: “A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007.” Due in large part to Biederman’s influence, the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003. Pediatrician and author Lawrence Diller notes about Biederman, “He single-handedly put pediatric bipolar disorder on the map.” In addition to his popularization of bipolar disorder for children, Biederman is one of the most significant forces behind the expanding numbers diagnosed with ADHD; and Congressional investigators also discovered that Biederman conducted studies of Eli Lilly’s ADHD drug Strattera that were funded by National Institute of Health at the same time he was receiving money from Lilly.

Not only does the drug industry have influential psychiatrists such as Biederman in their pocket, virtually every major mental health institution is financially interconnected with Big Pharma. Congressional hearings also exposed the American Psychiatric Association (APA), psychiatry’s premier professional organization, as being on the take from drug companies. In 2006, the drug industry accounted for about 30 percent of the APA’s $62.5 million in financing. Most relevant here, the APA is the publisher of the psychiatric diagnostic bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and thus the APA is the institution responsible for creating mental illnesses and disorders.

2. Invalid Illnesses and Disorders

Psychiatry’s first DSM (1952) and its DSM-II (1968) listed homosexuality as a mental illness, and only because of a fierce political fight waged in the 1970s by gay activists did the APA abolish homosexuality as an illness and eliminate it from their DSM-III (1980). Gay activists’ fight was not only a victory for themselves but a service for everyone else, as it made public the important scientific problem of psychiatric disorder invalidity. Specifically, are psychiatric disorders scientifically valid illnesses, or are they simply behaviors that create discomfort for some authorities at a given moment in time?

While psychiatry lost homosexuality as a mental illness in the 1980 DSM-III, the APA found other groups that it could pathologize, groups who could not mobilize and resist, most notably children, who are now routinely given psychiatric diagnoses for behaviors that many of us view as normal behaviors for their ages.

Psychiatry sees it as within responsible professional standards to diagnose 3 year olds such as Rebecca Riley with bipolar disorder, the symptoms of which include: irritable and rapidly changing moods; severe temper tantrums; defiance of authority; agitation and distractibility; sleeping too little or too much; poor judgment; impulsivity; and grandiose beliefs.

Psychiatry also sees it as within responsible professional standards for Rebecca Riley to have been diagnosed at 28 months old with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the symptoms of which are inattention (easily distracted and bored, difficulty organizing and completing tasks, losing things, not seeming to listen, not following instructions); hyperactivity (fidgeting, talking nonstop, having trouble sitting still, difficulty with quiet tasks), and impulsivity (impatience, blurting out inappropriate comments, interrupting conversations).

Today, children and teens are also diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), the symptoms of which include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” and “often argues with adults.” The standard for a medical disorder should not be whether or not an individual causes friction.

3. Scientifically Unreliable Diagnoses

Even if you believe that bipolar disorder for three year olds, ADHD for 2 year olds, ODD for teenagers, and all the other DSM diagnoses are valid disorders, there is still the scientific issue of diagnostic unreliability—the lack of diagnostic agreement among professionals examining the same person.

A generation ago, psychiatry admitted that their diagnoses were unreliable, and they agreed that this was a major scientific problem. So in 1980, in an attempt to eliminate this embarrassment, they created the DSM-III with concrete behavioral checklists and formal decision making rules, but they failed to correct the problem. Psychiatric diagnoses remain unreliable, but now psychiatry no longer talks about the unreliability problem.

If a measurement is a reliable one, then clinicians trained with it should be in high agreement on the diagnosis. A major 1992 study, conducted at six sites with 600 prospective patients, was done to examine the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses. Experienced mental health professionals were given extensive training in how to make accurate DSM diagnoses. Because of the extensive training, one would expect that diagnostic agreement would be much higher than in typical clinical settings. Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk summarize the study in Making Us Crazy (1997):

What this study demonstrated was that even when experienced clinicians with special training and supervision are asked to use DSM and make a diagnosis, they frequently disagree, even though the standards for defining agreement are very generous. . . . [For example,] if one of the two therapists made a diagnosis of Schizoid Personality Disorder and the other therapist selected Avoidant Personality Disorder, the therapists were judged to be in complete agreement of the diagnosis because they both found a personality disorder—even though they disagreed completely on which one! So even with this liberal definition of agreement, reliability using DSM is not very good.

Kutchins and Kirk conclude: “Mental health clinicians independently interviewing the same person in the community are as likely to agree as disagree that the person has a mental disorder and are as likely to agree as disagree on which of the over 300 DSM disorders is present.”

4. Biochemical Imbalance Mumbo Jumbo

Just as nothing was more important in selling the Iraq war in 2003 than the Bush administration’s certainty that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), nothing has been more important in selling psychiatric drugs than psychiatry’s certainty of biochemical brain imbalances as the cause for mental illnesses.

Prior to psychiatry’s proclamation that depression was caused by too little of the neurotransmitter serotonin, few Americans were taking antidepressants. But by declaring that depression was caused by a serotonin imbalance analogous to diabetes and an insulin imbalance, depressed Americans became far more receptive to serotonin-enhancing drugs such as the “selective-serotonin-reuptake inhibitors” (SSRIs) Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft.

SSRIs can make some depressed people feel better; however, alcohol makes some shy people less shy, but that’s not enough evidence to say that shyness is caused by an alcohol imbalance. The truth is—and scientists have known this for quite some time—that serotonin levels are not associated with depression.

Researchers have used a variety of methods to test the serotonin imbalance theory of depression, including comparing serotonin metabolites in depressed and nondepressed people, and depleting serotonin levels through a variety of means and then observing whether this resulted in depression. Elliot Valenstein, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, reviewed the research in his book Blaming the Brain (1998) and reported that it is just as likely for people with normal serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormal serotonin levels, and that it is just as likely for people with abnormally high serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormally low serotonin levels. Valenstein concluded, “Furthermore, there is no convincing evidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency.”

In 2002, the New York Times reported: “Researchers knew that antidepressants seemed to raise the brain’s levels of messenger chemicals called neurotransmitters, so they theorized that depression must result from a deficiency of these chemicals. Yet a multitude of studies failed to prove this precept.” Yet even now, many psychiatrists and other mental health professionals continue to promulgate the serotonin imbalance theory of depression, and polls show that the majority of Americans continue to believe it.

5. Pseudoscientific Drug Effectiveness Research

There are multiple tricks that psychiatric drug manufacturers and their researcher psychiatrists and psychologists use to make their drugs look more effective than they really are. For example, one of the most common depression measurements used by researchers paid by drug companies is the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD). In the HRSD, researchers rate subjects, and the higher the point total, the more one is deemed to be suffering from depression. On the HRSD, there are three separate items about insomnia (early, middle, and late) and one can receive up to six points for difficulty either falling or remaining asleep; however, there is only one suicide item, in which one is awarded only two points for wishing to be dead. The HRSD is heavily loaded with items that are most affected by drugs, and it is therefore especially damning for antidepressants that even with such measurement dice-loading, these drugs routinely fail to outperform placebos—even dice-loaded placebos.

Proper drug research requires that neither subject nor experimenter knows who is getting the drug and who is getting the placebo (a true double-blind control). Drug company antidepressant researchers use inactive placebos such as sugar pills (which don’t create side effects). Independent research on inactive placebos show that many subjects in antidepressant and other studies can guess if they are getting the actual drug or not, which changes their expectations and subverts the double-blind control. In order to make it more difficult to guess correctly, an active placebo (which creates side effects) should be used. In 2000, a Psychiatric Times article concluded: “In fact, when antidepressants are compared with active placebos, there appear to be no differences in clinical effectiveness.”

Dice-loading depression measurements and placebos are just two of many techniques that drug company researchers use to make antidepressants look more effective than they really are, but even with such dice loading, antidepressants have not fared well, at least when one examines all the studies.

Drug companies try to ensure that those studies showing antidepressants to be no more effective than placebos are not published; however, all studies must be submitted to the FDA. So independent researcher Irving Kirsch and his research team at the University of Connecticut used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to all data, and analyzed forty-seven studies that had been sponsored by drug companies on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Celexa, and Serzone. Kirsch discovered that in the majority of the trials, the antidepressant failed to outperform a sugar pill placebo (and in the trials where the antidepressant did outperform the placebo, the advantage was slight).

6. Psychotropic Drug Hypocrisy

Chemists consider psychiatric prescription drugs and illegal mood-altering drugs all to be psychotropic or psychoactive drugs. Cocaine and ADHD drugs such as Adderall and other amphetamines affect the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine; and antidepressants used in combination also affect the same neurotransmitters. Not only are prescription psychotropics and illegal psychotropics chemically similar, they are used by people for similar reasons, including taking the edge off their discomfort so as to function. The hypocrisy surrounding illegal and prescription psychotropic drugs is harmful to society in at least two ways.

At one level, because people are being misinformed about the realities of prescription psychotropic drugs, they are more likely to gulp them down and to give them to their children. This has helped create a tragic phenomenon detailed by investigative reporter Robert Whitaker in his book Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010): psychiatric drug use turning mild and episodic conditions into severe and chronic ones that have helped create a huge increase of Americans with severe mental illness, especially among children.

At a second level, this psychiatric-illegal psychotropic drug hypocrisy allows for unfair criminalizing and incarceration of people using illegal psychotropics.

7. Diversion from Societal, Cultural, and Political Sources of Misery

When we hear the words disorder, disease, or illness, we think of an individual in need of treatment, not of a troubled society in need of transformation. Mental illness expansionism diverts us from examining a dehumanizing society.

In addition to pathologizing normal behavior, the mental health profession also diverts us from examining a society that creates the ingredients—helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, and isolation—that cause emotional difficulties. We are diverted from the reality that many emotional problems are natural human reactions to loss in our society of autonomy and community. Thus, the mental health profession not only has financial value for drug companies but it has political value for those at the top of societal hierarchies who want to retain the status quo.

Today, a handful of dissident mental health professionals do challenge and resist their profession’s dehumanizing standard practicies. I know several of these dissidents, and they are the only psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health professionals that I have any respect for.

Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. . . . To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961

Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African-Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where health care is for only those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Rand’s impact has been widespread and deep. At the iceberg’s visible tip is the influence she’s had over major political figures who have shaped American society. In the 1950s, Ayn Rand read aloud drafts of what was later to become Atlas Shrugged to her “Collective,” Rand’s ironic nickname for her inner circle of young individualists, which included Alan Greenspan, who would serve as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006. In 1966, Ronald Reagan wrote in a personal letter, “Am an admirer of Ayn Rand.” Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) credits Rand for inspiring him to go into politics, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) calls Atlas Shrugged his “foundation book.” Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says Ayn Rand had a major influence on him, and his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an even bigger fan of hers. A short list of other Rand fans include: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission in George W. Bush’s second administration; and former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.

But Rand’s impact on U.S. society and culture goes even deeper.

The Seduction of Nathan Blumenthal

Ayn Rand’s books such as The Virtue of Selfishness and her philosophy that celebrates self-interest and disdains altruism may well be, as Vidal assessed, “nearly perfect in its immorality.” But is Vidal right about evil? Charles Manson, who himself did not kill anyone, is the personification of evil for many of us because of his psychological success at exploiting the vulnerabilities of young people and seducing them to murder. What should we call Ayn Rand’s psychological ability to exploit the vulnerabilities of millions of young people so as to seduce them to kill caring about anyone besides themselves?

While the most famous name that would emerge from Rand’s Collective was Alan Greenspan (tagged “A.G.” by Rand), the second most well-known name to emerge from the Collective was Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist, author, and “self-esteem” advocate. Before he was Nathaniel Branden, he was Nathan Blumenthal, a fourteen-year-old who read Rand’s The Fountainhead again and again. He later would say, “I felt hypnotized.” He describes how Rand gave him a sense that he could be powerful, that he could be a hero. He wrote one letter to his idol Rand, then a second. To his amazement, she telephoned him, and at age twenty, Nathan received an invitation to Ayn Rand’s home. Shortly after, Nathan Blumenthal announced to the world that he was incorporating Rand in his new name: Nathaniel Branden. And in 1955, with Rand approaching her fiftieth birthday and Branden his twenty-fifth, and both in dissatisfying marriages, Ayn bedded Nathaniel.

What followed sounds straight out of Hollywood, but Rand was straight out of Hollywood, having worked for Cecil B. DeMille. Rand convened a meeting with Nathaniel, his wife Barbara (also a Collective member), and Rand’s own husband Frank. To Nathaniel’s astonishment, Rand convinced both spouses that a time-structured affair—she and Nathaniel were to have one afternoon and one evening a week together—was “reasonable.” Within the Collective, Rand is purported to have never lost an argument. On his trysts at Rand’s New York City apartment, Nathaniel would sometimes shake hands with Frank before he exited. Later, all discovered that Rand’s sweet but passive husband would leave for a bar, where he began his own affair, a self-destructive one with alcohol.

By 1964, the 34-year-old Nathaniel had grown physically weary of the now 59-year-old Ayn. Still sexually dissatisfied in his marriage to Barbara and afraid to end his affair with Rand, Nathaniel began sleeping with a married 24-year-old model, Patrecia Scott. Rand, now “the woman scorned,” called Nathaniel to appear before the Collective, whose nickname had by now lost its irony for both Barbara and Nathaniel. Rand’s justice was swift. She humiliated Nathaniel and then put a curse on him: “If you have one ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve potency sooner, you’ll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!” Rand completed the evening with two welt-producing slaps across Branden’s face. Finally, in a move that Stalin and Hitler would have admired, Rand also expelled poor Barbara from the Collective, declaring her treasonous because Barbara, preoccupied by her own extra-marital affair, had neglected to fill Rand in soon enough on Nathaniel’s extra-extra-marital betrayal. (If anyone doubts Alan Greenspan’s political savvy, keep in mind that he somehow stayed in Rand’s good graces even though he, fixed up by Nathaniel with Patrecia’s twin sister, had double-dated with the outlaws.)

After being banished by Rand, Nathaniel Branden was worried that he might be assassinated by other members of the Collective, so he moved from New York to Los Angeles, where Rand fans were less fanatical. Branden established a lucrative psychotherapy practice and authored approximately 20 books, 10 of them with either “Self” or “Self-Esteem” in the title. Rand and Branden never reconciled, but he remains an admirer of her philosophy of self-interest.

Ayn Rand’s personal life was consistent with her philosophy of not giving a shit about anybody but herself. Rand was an ardent two-pack-a-day smoker, and when questioned about the dangers of smoking, she loved to light up with a defiant flourish and then scold her young questioners on the “unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence.” After an x-ray showed that she had lung cancer, Rand quit smoking and had surgery for her cancer. Collective members explained to her that many people still smoked because they respected her and her assessment of the evidence; and that since she no longer smoked, she ought to tell them. They told her that she needn’t mention her lung cancer, that she could simply say she had reconsidered the evidence. Rand refused.

How Rand’s Philosophy Seduced Young Minds

When I was a kid, my reading included comic books and Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasn’t much difference between the comic books and Rand’s novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness.

Rand said, “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible. . . . The choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” For many young people, hearing that it is “moral” to care only about oneself can be intoxicating, and some get addicted to this idea for life.

I have known several people, professionally and socially, whose lives have been changed by those close to them who became infatuated with Ayn Rand. A common theme is something like this: “My ex-husband wasn’t a bad guy until he started reading Ayn Rand. Then he became a completely selfish jerk who destroyed our family, and our children no longer even talk to him.”

To wow her young admirers, Rand would often tell a story of how a smart-aleck book salesman had once challenged her to explain her philosophy while standing on one leg. She replied: “Metaphysics—objective reality. Epistemology—reason. Ethics—self-interest. Politics—capitalism.” How did that philosophy capture young minds?

Metaphysics—objective reality. Rand offered a narcotic for confused young people: complete certainty and a relief from their anxiety. Rand believed that an “objective reality” existed, and she knew exactly what that objective reality was. It included skyscrapers, industries, railroads, and ideas—at least her ideas. Rand’s objective reality did not include anxiety or sadness. Nor did it include much humor, at least the kind where one pokes fun at oneself. Rand assured her Collective that objective reality did not include Beethoven’s, Rembrandt’s, and Shakespeare’s realities—they were too gloomy and too tragic, basically buzzkillers. Rand preferred Mickey Spillane and, towards the end of her life, “Charlie’s Angels.”

Epistemology—reason. Rand’s kind of reason was a “cool-tool” to control the universe. Rand demonized Plato, and her youthful Collective were taught to despise him. If Rand really believed that the Socratic Method described by Plato of discovering accurate definitions and clear thinking did not qualify as “reason,” why then did she regularly attempt it with her Collective? Also oddly, while Rand mocked dark moods and despair, her “reasoning” directed that Collective members should admire Dostoyevsky whose novels are filled with dark moods and despair. A demagogue, in addition to hypnotic glibness, must also be intellectually inconsistent, sometimes boldly so. This eliminates challenges to authority by weeding out clear-thinking young people from the flock.

Ethics—self-interest. For Rand, all altruists were manipulators. What could be more seductive to kids who discerned the motives of martyr parents, Christian missionaries, and U.S. foreign aiders? Her champions, Nathaniel Branden still among them, feel that Rand’s view of “self-interest” has been horribly misrepresented. For them, self-interest is her hero architect Howard Roark turning down a commission because he couldn’t do it exactly his way. Some of Rand’s novel heroes did have integrity, however, for Rand there is no struggle to discover the distinction between true integrity and childish vanity. Rand’s integrity was her vanity, and it consisted of getting as much money and control as possible, copulating with whomever she wanted regardless of who would get hurt, and her always being right. To equate one’s selfishness, vanity, and egotism with one’s integrity liberates young people from the struggle to distinguish integrity from selfishness, vanity, and egotism.

Politics—capitalism. While Rand often disparaged Soviet totalitarian collectivism, she had little to say about corporate totalitarian collectivism, as she conveniently neglected the reality that giant U.S. corporations, like the Soviet Union, do not exactly celebrate individualism, freedom, or courage. Rand was clever and hypocritical enough to know that you don’t get rich in the United States talking about compliance and conformity within corporate America. Rather, Rand gave lectures entitled: “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” So, young careerist corporatists could embrace Rand’s self-styled “radical capitalism” and feel radical — radical without risk.

Rand’s Legacy

In recent years, we have entered a phase where it is apparently okay for major political figures to publicly embrace Rand despite her contempt for Christianity. In contrast, during Ayn Rand’s life, her philosophy that celebrated self-interest was a private pleasure for the 1 percent but she was a public embarrassment for them. They used her books to congratulate themselves on the morality of their selfishness, but they publicly steered clear of Rand because of her views on religion and God. Rand, for example, had stated on national television, “I am against God. I don’t approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness. I regard it as an evil.”

Actually, again inconsistent, Rand did have a God. It was herself. She said:

I am done with the monster of “we,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: “I.”

While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United State’s dehumanization of African-Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it “moral” for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she “liberated” millions of  other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children.

The good news is that I’ve seen ex-Rand fans grasp the damage that Rand’s philosophy has done to their lives and to then exorcize it from their psyche. Can the United States as a nation do the same thing?

Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. . . . To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961

Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African-Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where health care is for only those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Rand’s impact has been widespread and deep. At the iceberg’s visible tip is the influence she’s had over major political figures who have shaped American society. In the 1950s, Ayn Rand read aloud drafts of what was later to become Atlas Shrugged to her “Collective,” Rand’s ironic nickname for her inner circle of young individualists, which included Alan Greenspan, who would serve as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006. In 1966, Ronald Reagan wrote in a personal letter, “Am an admirer of Ayn Rand.” Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) credits Rand for inspiring him to go into politics, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) calls Atlas Shrugged his “foundation book.” Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says Ayn Rand had a major influence on him, and his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an even bigger fan of hers. A short list of other Rand fans include: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission in George W. Bush’s second administration; and former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.

But Rand’s impact on U.S. society and culture goes even deeper.

The Seduction of Nathan Blumenthal

Ayn Rand’s books such as The Virtue of Selfishness and her philosophy that celebrates self-interest and disdains altruism may well be, as Vidal assessed, “nearly perfect in its immorality.” But is Vidal right about evil? Charles Manson, who himself did not kill anyone, is the personification of evil for many of us because of his psychological success at exploiting the vulnerabilities of young people and seducing them to murder. What should we call Ayn Rand’s psychological ability to exploit the vulnerabilities of millions of young people so as to seduce them to kill caring about anyone besides themselves?

While the most famous name that would emerge from Rand’s Collective was Alan Greenspan (tagged “A.G.” by Rand), the second most well-known name to emerge from the Collective was Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist, author, and “self-esteem” advocate. Before he was Nathaniel Branden, he was Nathan Blumenthal, a fourteen-year-old who read Rand’s The Fountainhead again and again. He later would say, “I felt hypnotized.” He describes how Rand gave him a sense that he could be powerful, that he could be a hero. He wrote one letter to his idol Rand, then a second. To his amazement, she telephoned him, and at age twenty, Nathan received an invitation to Ayn Rand’s home. Shortly after, Nathan Blumenthal announced to the world that he was incorporating Rand in his new name: Nathaniel Branden. And in 1955, with Rand approaching her fiftieth birthday and Branden his twenty-fifth, and both in dissatisfying marriages, Ayn bedded Nathaniel.

What followed sounds straight out of Hollywood, but Rand was straight out of Hollywood, having worked for Cecil B. DeMille. Rand convened a meeting with Nathaniel, his wife Barbara (also a Collective member), and Rand’s own husband Frank. To Nathaniel’s astonishment, Rand convinced both spouses that a time-structured affair—she and Nathaniel were to have one afternoon and one evening a week together—was “reasonable.” Within the Collective, Rand is purported to have never lost an argument. On his trysts at Rand’s New York City apartment, Nathaniel would sometimes shake hands with Frank before he exited. Later, all discovered that Rand’s sweet but passive husband would leave for a bar, where he began his own affair, a self-destructive one with alcohol.

By 1964, the 34-year-old Nathaniel had grown physically weary of the now 59-year-old Ayn. Still sexually dissatisfied in his marriage to Barbara and afraid to end his affair with Rand, Nathaniel began sleeping with a married 24-year-old model, Patrecia Scott. Rand, now “the woman scorned,” called Nathaniel to appear before the Collective, whose nickname had by now lost its irony for both Barbara and Nathaniel. Rand’s justice was swift. She humiliated Nathaniel and then put a curse on him: “If you have one ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve potency sooner, you’ll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!” Rand completed the evening with two welt-producing slaps across Branden’s face. Finally, in a move that Stalin and Hitler would have admired, Rand also expelled poor Barbara from the Collective, declaring her treasonous because Barbara, preoccupied by her own extra-marital affair, had neglected to fill Rand in soon enough on Nathaniel’s extra-extra-marital betrayal. (If anyone doubts Alan Greenspan’s political savvy, keep in mind that he somehow stayed in Rand’s good graces even though he, fixed up by Nathaniel with Patrecia’s twin sister, had double-dated with the outlaws.)

After being banished by Rand, Nathaniel Branden was worried that he might be assassinated by other members of the Collective, so he moved from New York to Los Angeles, where Rand fans were less fanatical. Branden established a lucrative psychotherapy practice and authored approximately 20 books, 10 of them with either “Self” or “Self-Esteem” in the title. Rand and Branden never reconciled, but he remains an admirer of her philosophy of self-interest.

Ayn Rand’s personal life was consistent with her philosophy of not giving a shit about anybody but herself. Rand was an ardent two-pack-a-day smoker, and when questioned about the dangers of smoking, she loved to light up with a defiant flourish and then scold her young questioners on the “unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence.” After an x-ray showed that she had lung cancer, Rand quit smoking and had surgery for her cancer. Collective members explained to her that many people still smoked because they respected her and her assessment of the evidence; and that since she no longer smoked, she ought to tell them. They told her that she needn’t mention her lung cancer, that she could simply say she had reconsidered the evidence. Rand refused.

How Rand’s Philosophy Seduced Young Minds

When I was a kid, my reading included comic books and Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasn’t much difference between the comic books and Rand’s novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness.

Rand said, “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible. . . . The choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” For many young people, hearing that it is “moral” to care only about oneself can be intoxicating, and some get addicted to this idea for life.

I have known several people, professionally and socially, whose lives have been changed by those close to them who became infatuated with Ayn Rand. A common theme is something like this: “My ex-husband wasn’t a bad guy until he started reading Ayn Rand. Then he became a completely selfish jerk who destroyed our family, and our children no longer even talk to him.”

To wow her young admirers, Rand would often tell a story of how a smart-aleck book salesman had once challenged her to explain her philosophy while standing on one leg. She replied: “Metaphysics—objective reality. Epistemology—reason. Ethics—self-interest. Politics—capitalism.” How did that philosophy capture young minds?

Metaphysics—objective reality. Rand offered a narcotic for confused young people: complete certainty and a relief from their anxiety. Rand believed that an “objective reality” existed, and she knew exactly what that objective reality was. It included skyscrapers, industries, railroads, and ideas—at least her ideas. Rand’s objective reality did not include anxiety or sadness. Nor did it include much humor, at least the kind where one pokes fun at oneself. Rand assured her Collective that objective reality did not include Beethoven’s, Rembrandt’s, and Shakespeare’s realities—they were too gloomy and too tragic, basically buzzkillers. Rand preferred Mickey Spillane and, towards the end of her life, “Charlie’s Angels.”

Epistemology—reason. Rand’s kind of reason was a “cool-tool” to control the universe. Rand demonized Plato, and her youthful Collective were taught to despise him. If Rand really believed that the Socratic Method described by Plato of discovering accurate definitions and clear thinking did not qualify as “reason,” why then did she regularly attempt it with her Collective? Also oddly, while Rand mocked dark moods and despair, her “reasoning” directed that Collective members should admire Dostoyevsky whose novels are filled with dark moods and despair. A demagogue, in addition to hypnotic glibness, must also be intellectually inconsistent, sometimes boldly so. This eliminates challenges to authority by weeding out clear-thinking young people from the flock.

Ethics—self-interest. For Rand, all altruists were manipulators. What could be more seductive to kids who discerned the motives of martyr parents, Christian missionaries, and U.S. foreign aiders? Her champions, Nathaniel Branden still among them, feel that Rand’s view of “self-interest” has been horribly misrepresented. For them, self-interest is her hero architect Howard Roark turning down a commission because he couldn’t do it exactly his way. Some of Rand’s novel heroes did have integrity, however, for Rand there is no struggle to discover the distinction between true integrity and childish vanity. Rand’s integrity was her vanity, and it consisted of getting as much money and control as possible, copulating with whomever she wanted regardless of who would get hurt, and her always being right. To equate one’s selfishness, vanity, and egotism with one’s integrity liberates young people from the struggle to distinguish integrity from selfishness, vanity, and egotism.

Politics—capitalism. While Rand often disparaged Soviet totalitarian collectivism, she had little to say about corporate totalitarian collectivism, as she conveniently neglected the reality that giant U.S. corporations, like the Soviet Union, do not exactly celebrate individualism, freedom, or courage. Rand was clever and hypocritical enough to know that you don’t get rich in the United States talking about compliance and conformity within corporate America. Rather, Rand gave lectures entitled: “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” So, young careerist corporatists could embrace Rand’s self-styled “radical capitalism” and feel radical — radical without risk.

Rand’s Legacy

In recent years, we have entered a phase where it is apparently okay for major political figures to publicly embrace Rand despite her contempt for Christianity. In contrast, during Ayn Rand’s life, her philosophy that celebrated self-interest was a private pleasure for the 1 percent but she was a public embarrassment for them. They used her books to congratulate themselves on the morality of their selfishness, but they publicly steered clear of Rand because of her views on religion and God. Rand, for example, had stated on national television, “I am against God. I don’t approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness. I regard it as an evil.”

Actually, again inconsistent, Rand did have a God. It was herself. She said:

I am done with the monster of “we,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: “I.”

While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United State’s dehumanization of African-Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it “moral” for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she “liberated” millions of  other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children.

Liberation psychology, unlike mainstream psychology, questions adjustment to the societal status quo, and it energizes oppressed people to resist all injustices. Liberation psychology attempts to discover how demoralized people can regain the energy necessary to take back the power that they had handed over to illegitimate authorities.

The Occupy movement has tapped into the energy supply that many oppressed and exploited people ultimately discover. We discover it when we come out of denial that we are a subjugated people. We discover just how energizing it can be to delegitimize oppressive institutions and authorities. And when these oppressive authorities react violently to peaceful resistance, their violence validates their illegitimacy—and provides us with even more energy.

With liberation psychology, we no longer take seriously the elite’s rigged games that had sucked us in and then sucked the energy out of us. We move beyond denial and depression that the U.S. electoral process is a rigged game, an exercise in learned helplessness in which we are given the choice between politicians who will either (1) screw us, or (2) screw us. We begin to engage in other “battlegrounds for democracy.”

Corporate-collaborating journalists, politicians and other lackeys of the elite ask, “What are the goals of the Occupy movement?” They are deaf to the answer no matter how loud we yell. If they did understand, they would then have to stop being lackeys. But their elite bosses do understand that the Occupy movement is a demand for economic fairness—a frightening prospect for the elite. The elite then divide into two camps: (1) throw the demonstrators a bone so they go away, but give them no power; or (2) give them nothing, just destroy them. This is not news to liberation psychologists.

Origins of Liberation Psychology

Ignacio Martin-Baró (1942–1989) was both a Jesuit priest and a social psychologist in El Salvador, and it is he who should be given credit for popularizing the term liberation psychology. As a priest, Martin-Baró embraced liberation theology in opposition to a theology that oppressed the poor, and as a psychologist, he believed that imported North American psychology also oppressed marginalized people throughout Latin America.

Martin-Baró’s liberation theology, his liberation psychology, and his activism for the people of El Salvador cost him his life. In the middle of the night on November 16, 1989, Martin-Baró, together with five colleagues, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter, were forced out to a courtyard on the campus of Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas, where they were murdered by the US-trained troops of the Salvadoran government’s elite Atlacatl Battalion.

Many liberation psychologists, including Martin-Baró, have gleaned much from Paulo Freire (1921-1997), Brazilian educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire stressed the importance of conscientização—critical consciousness and awareness of the effects of trying to operate within an alienating and dehumanizing social structure. Freire recognized a certain psychology of oppression in which the downtrodden become fatalistic, believing they are powerless to alter their circumstances, thus becoming resigned to their situation.

With critical consciousness, individuals can identify both external oppression and self-imposed internal oppression. Critical consciousness is aimed at ending fatalism so that one can free oneself from self-imposed powerlessness. It is a process in which changes in one’s internal world result in taking actions to change one’s external world, and taking actions changes one’s internal world.

Critical consciousness cannot be learned in a top-down manner. It is essentially a self-education process among equals. Liberation from fatalism and powerlessness is a process in which participants are not mere objects of instruction or of treatment. Instead of being acted upon, they are taking actions, learning, and then taking even more powerful actions. These are defining characteristics of the Occupy movement.

Liberation Psychology versus Mainstream Psychology

Mental health professionals, whether they realize it or not, who narrowly treat their patients in a way that encourages compliance with the status quo are acting politically. In the “adjust and be happy” sense, there is commonality among all mainstream mental health professionals, whether they are drug prescribers, behavior-modification advocates, or even some “alternative” proponents. Though their competing programs may vary, they are often similar in that they instruct people on how to adjust to any and all systems.

While mental health professionals are trained to believe in the political neutrality of prevailing psychological theories, these theories are not politically neutral. Martin-Baró astutely observed that many mainstream psychological schools of thought—be they behavioral or biochemical—accept the maximization of pleasure as the motivating force for human behavior, the same maximization of pleasure that is assumed by neoclassical economic theorists. This ignores the human need for fairness, social justice, freedom, and autonomy as well as other motivations that would transform society.

In Writings for a Liberation Psychology, a compilation of Martin-Baró’s essays, editors Adrianne Aron and Shawn Corne point out that liberation psychology looks at the world from the point of view of the dominated instead of the dominators. Martin-Baró criticized the prevailing psychology that promotes an alienation of working people by serving the needs of industry. He saw a mainstream psychology that either ignored or only paid lip service to social and economic conditions that shape people’s lives. In his essay “Toward a Liberation Psychology,” Martin-Baró pointed out:

What has happened to Latin American psychology is similar to North American psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it ran so fast after scientific recognition and social status that it stumbled . . . In order to get social position and rank, it negotiated how it would contribute to the needs of the established power structure.

One example of how mainstream psychology has strived for social position and rank by contributing to the needs of the established power structure was detailed in Project Censored in 2009. When it was discovered that psychologists were working with the U.S. military and the CIA to develop brutal interrogation methods, the American Psychological Association (APA) assembled a task force in 2005 to examine the issue. Project Censored notes: “After just two days of deliberations, the ten-member task force concluded that psychologists were playing a ‘valuable and ethical role’ in assisting the military.” In August 2007, an APA Council of Representatives retained this policy by voting overwhelmingly to reject a measure that would have banned APA members from participating in abusive interrogation of detainees. It took until 2008 for APA members to vote for prohibiting consultations in interrogations (though over 40 percent continued to support psychologists’ participation in interrogations). By then even Barack Obama, though ultimately reneging on his promise, was campaigning on shutting down the Guantánamo detention camps, and so psychologists in 2008 were not exactly in front of this issue. Today, mainstream psychology continues to support the status quo; for example, the vast majority of mainstream psychologists support the psychopathologizing, behavior modifying, and medicating of disruptive children rather than fighting to transform societal sources for their disruptiveness (for example, schools that are boring and alienating).

Liberation psychology arises when the majority of a society senses that the status quo is unjust and dehumanizing, and that it is immoral to help people adjust to it. Adjusting to oppression and exploitation creates apathy and defeatism; so, liberation psychology delegitimizes those authorities and institutions that are maintaining an unjust society. Ultimately, liberation psychology is about helping create self-respect, respectful relationships, and empowerment. And it is about helping people reject the role of either victim or victimizer not only in their personal relationships but in their societal ones as well.

Liberation psychology, unlike mainstream psychology, questions adjustment to the societal status quo, and it energizes oppressed people to resist all injustices. Liberation psychology attempts to discover how demoralized people can regain the energy necessary to take back the power that they had handed over to illegitimate authorities.

The Occupy movement has tapped into the energy supply that many oppressed and exploited people ultimately discover. We discover it when we come out of denial that we are a subjugated people. We discover just how energizing it can be to delegitimize oppressive institutions and authorities. And when these oppressive authorities react violently to peaceful resistance, their violence validates their illegitimacy—and provides us with even more energy.

With liberation psychology, we no longer take seriously the elite’s rigged games that had sucked us in and then sucked the energy out of us. We move beyond denial and depression that the U.S. electoral process is a rigged game, an exercise in learned helplessness in which we are given the choice between politicians who will either (1) screw us, or (2) screw us. We begin to engage in other “battlegrounds for democracy.”

Corporate-collaborating journalists, politicians and other lackeys of the elite ask, “What are the goals of the Occupy movement?” They are deaf to the answer no matter how loud we yell. If they did understand, they would then have to stop being lackeys. But their elite bosses do understand that the Occupy movement is a demand for economic fairness—a frightening prospect for the elite. The elite then divide into two camps: (1) throw the demonstrators a bone so they go away, but give them no power; or (2) give them nothing, just destroy them. This is not news to liberation psychologists.

Origins of Liberation Psychology

Ignacio Martin-Baró (1942–1989) was both a Jesuit priest and a social psychologist in El Salvador, and it is he who should be given credit for popularizing the term liberation psychology. As a priest, Martin-Baró embraced liberation theology in opposition to a theology that oppressed the poor, and as a psychologist, he believed that imported North American psychology also oppressed marginalized people throughout Latin America.

Martin-Baró’s liberation theology, his liberation psychology, and his activism for the people of El Salvador cost him his life. In the middle of the night on November 16, 1989, Martin-Baró, together with five colleagues, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter, were forced out to a courtyard on the campus of Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas, where they were murdered by the US-trained troops of the Salvadoran government’s elite Atlacatl Battalion.

Many liberation psychologists, including Martin-Baró, have gleaned much from Paulo Freire (1921-1997), Brazilian educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire stressed the importance of conscientização—critical consciousness and awareness of the effects of trying to operate within an alienating and dehumanizing social structure. Freire recognized a certain psychology of oppression in which the downtrodden become fatalistic, believing they are powerless to alter their circumstances, thus becoming resigned to their situation.

With critical consciousness, individuals can identify both external oppression and self-imposed internal oppression. Critical consciousness is aimed at ending fatalism so that one can free oneself from self-imposed powerlessness. It is a process in which changes in one’s internal world result in taking actions to change one’s external world, and taking actions changes one’s internal world.

Critical consciousness cannot be learned in a top-down manner. It is essentially a self-education process among equals. Liberation from fatalism and powerlessness is a process in which participants are not mere objects of instruction or of treatment. Instead of being acted upon, they are taking actions, learning, and then taking even more powerful actions. These are defining characteristics of the Occupy movement.

Liberation Psychology versus Mainstream Psychology

Mental health professionals, whether they realize it or not, who narrowly treat their patients in a way that encourages compliance with the status quo are acting politically. In the “adjust and be happy” sense, there is commonality among all mainstream mental health professionals, whether they are drug prescribers, behavior-modification advocates, or even some “alternative” proponents. Though their competing programs may vary, they are often similar in that they instruct people on how to adjust to any and all systems.

While mental health professionals are trained to believe in the political neutrality of prevailing psychological theories, these theories are not politically neutral. Martin-Baró astutely observed that many mainstream psychological schools of thought—be they behavioral or biochemical—accept the maximization of pleasure as the motivating force for human behavior, the same maximization of pleasure that is assumed by neoclassical economic theorists. This ignores the human need for fairness, social justice, freedom, and autonomy as well as other motivations that would transform society.

In Writings for a Liberation Psychology, a compilation of Martin-Baró’s essays, editors Adrianne Aron and Shawn Corne point out that liberation psychology looks at the world from the point of view of the dominated instead of the dominators. Martin-Baró criticized the prevailing psychology that promotes an alienation of working people by serving the needs of industry. He saw a mainstream psychology that either ignored or only paid lip service to social and economic conditions that shape people’s lives. In his essay “Toward a Liberation Psychology,” Martin-Baró pointed out:

What has happened to Latin American psychology is similar to North American psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it ran so fast after scientific recognition and social status that it stumbled . . . In order to get social position and rank, it negotiated how it would contribute to the needs of the established power structure.

One example of how mainstream psychology has strived for social position and rank by contributing to the needs of the established power structure was detailed in Project Censored in 2009. When it was discovered that psychologists were working with the U.S. military and the CIA to develop brutal interrogation methods, the American Psychological Association (APA) assembled a task force in 2005 to examine the issue. Project Censored notes: “After just two days of deliberations, the ten-member task force concluded that psychologists were playing a ‘valuable and ethical role’ in assisting the military.” In August 2007, an APA Council of Representatives retained this policy by voting overwhelmingly to reject a measure that would have banned APA members from participating in abusive interrogation of detainees. It took until 2008 for APA members to vote for prohibiting consultations in interrogations (though over 40 percent continued to support psychologists’ participation in interrogations). By then even Barack Obama, though ultimately reneging on his promise, was campaigning on shutting down the Guantánamo detention camps, and so psychologists in 2008 were not exactly in front of this issue. Today, mainstream psychology continues to support the status quo; for example, the vast majority of mainstream psychologists support the psychopathologizing, behavior modifying, and medicating of disruptive children rather than fighting to transform societal sources for their disruptiveness (for example, schools that are boring and alienating).

Liberation psychology arises when the majority of a society senses that the status quo is unjust and dehumanizing, and that it is immoral to help people adjust to it. Adjusting to oppression and exploitation creates apathy and defeatism; so, liberation psychology delegitimizes those authorities and institutions that are maintaining an unjust society. Ultimately, liberation psychology is about helping create self-respect, respectful relationships, and empowerment. And it is about helping people reject the role of either victim or victimizer not only in their personal relationships but in their societal ones as well.

David Swanson, since serving as press secretary in Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, has emerged as one of the leading anti-war activists in the United States. While Swanson has fought against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tried to alert Americans to the fact that U.S. military spending is the source of most of our economic problems, his anti-war activism goes much deeper. He wants to stigmatize militarist politicians as criminals. In his previous book War is a Lie, Swanson made the case for the abolition of war as an instrument of national policy, and When the World Outlawed War provides an historical example of just how powerful war abolitionism can be.

Bruce Levine: At a college lecture that you recently gave, you asked the students and professors if they believed war was illegal or if they had ever heard of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and only about 2 or 3 percent of a large group raised their hands. But what really seems to have disturbed you is when you asked if war should be illegal, and only 5 percent thought that it should be.

David Swanson: Well, both responses bothered me somewhat, but only one surprised me at all, and only one offended me. I knew people in the United States did not believe war was illegal. I knew that only the most serious peace activists had heard of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and that even they didn’t recognize its value, including the degree to which it is stronger than the U.N. Charter in its prohibition of all wars, not just certain kinds of wars.

But why wouldn’t people want war to be made illegal? To my ear that sounds like not wanting slavery or rape or torture to be illegal. And I’m still in the camp that considers torture irredeemably evil, by the way. At the end of the 19^th century, when the United States snatched up Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Panama, etc., there was a popular love for war in the air. At the end of World War I, war was widely viewed as an evil disease to be eradicated. From World War II forward to today there has been an ever increasing tendency to view war as ordinary, necessary, and patriotic—if not a war in Vietnam or Iraq, then certainly some other war.

For war’s victims and most of its participants it always turns out to be the horror it appeared in 1918. But for those who know war only through U.S. television, the idea of criminalizing it sounds almost like proposing to criminalize government. That state of affairs is what I find disturbing, the realization of how normal it is to think of government as essentially responsible for large-scale killing. This is miles away from Warren Harding’s return to “normalcy” after World War I. Since World War II we have never returned to normalcy.

BL: People have a difficult enough time today believing that they have enough power to stop a single senseless war. Did the peace movement in the 1920s really believe they could abolish war?

DS: The thinking of the peace movement of the 1920s comes out of a different world, and getting back into it may be difficult for a lot of people. One doorway in, I am hoping, is through realization that a law still on the books outlaws war. While banning war may be unimaginable, war is in fact already banned. Every war since 1929 has been illegal. Every act of war has been illegal.

Laws are, of course, what we make of them. Some laws are forgotten, others expanded to completely alter their meanings. The Bill of Rights now applies to corporations, while the Kellogg-Briand Pact is considered archaic—but that is purely for cultural reasons; the Pact has actually never been repealed.

Creating awareness of a law will not lead to its immediate enforcement, of course, but the Outlawrists of the 1920s didn’t believe they would end war in their lifetimes. They believed that Kellogg-Briand would begin to delegitimize war, to stigmatize it. In fact, after Kellogg-Briand, territorial gains through war were no longer recognized, and following World War II the act of making war was prosecuted as a crime for those on the losing side. But the process of delegitimization of war has stalled and back-tracked. The body of law and the world court that the Outlawrists envisioned have never been attempted. It is time we picked up where they left off.

BL: You say that the thinking of the peace movement of the 1920s comes out of a “different world.” In the 1920s, as you point out, peace was actually “patriotic,” and a peace movement wasn’t going up against anywhere near the kind of military-industrial complex we have today. In researching the history of the 1920s, is your sense that Americans today—despite their majority opposition to our ongoing wars—have become increasingly more helpless, hopeless, and defeatist with regard to achieving a peaceful nation?

DS: Back then war could be seen as something that backward Europeans had dragged the United States into, albeit with help from greatly resented propaganda that had been produced by President Woodrow Wilson’s PR team. If you ask someone in the United States if they are for peace today, they may tell you that they like peace but wouldn’t want to oppose wars. Even in the 1920s, the United States was making war in Nicaragua and threatening it in Mexico, but peace was still considered the norm. Then wars were imperialistic or humanitarian or racist, and conceivably avoidable. Now wars are necessary to protect us from evil. In other words, they are defensive. This is a result of the twisted interpretation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact that was used to prosecute Nazis. A treaty intentionally created to avoid banning “aggressive war,” in order to ban all war, was transformed into a ban on aggressive war at Nuremberg. Every war since has had to be “defensive.”

Pro-war attitudes today are not insurmountable. Popular opinion turned against the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars fairly quickly and never got behind the Libyan War nor our various drone wars. But there is a more important difference that you mentioned between the 1920s and today: the rise of the military-industrial complex. It had been around since the Civil War. The Navy was being built up at the same time that the U.S. Senate was ratifying Kellogg-Briand. But the weapons companies were not pulling Congress’s strings in the 1920s. Farmers, who wanted Europeans to buy more corn and less weaponry, had more influence than arms merchants. In addition, congressional districts were smaller, bribery was illegal, newspapers were fairly diverse and credible, television didn’t exist, gerrymandering had not been perfected, and it was common for members of the House and Senate to oppose the positions of their political parties. Women got the vote in 1920. Jim Crow laws prevented many African-Americans from voting, and eighteen to twenty-year-olds still couldn’t vote, but the robber barons didn’t run the whole show—and some of them invested heavily in peace activism.

The deck is stacked against us today, and we know it. Outlawrists in the 1920s didn’t imagine they’d live to see success, but they did believe success would likely come in a future generation, step by step. They believed that outlawing blood feuds and dueling and slavery pointed the way toward outlawing war. They believed in cultural progress, even if it came slowly. So, they happily worked for what they believed to be a just cause, for what William James called “the moral equivalent of war,” and they seemed in my reading to go through fewer cycles of optimism and pessimism than do most activists today. They seemed to exhibit, in fact, less interest in what their cause could do for them than in what they could do for the cause.

This came hand-in-hand, I think, with their belief in democracy. Frank Kellogg, the mean-tempered Republican Secretary of State for whom the Kellogg-Briand Pact is named, in 1927, hated and cursed peace activists; and in 1928, worked night and day to answer their demands. Why? In part because the peace activists didn’t line up behind political leaders, a president, or a party, or Frank Kellogg. They moved the entire culture, all parties and all politicians, in their direction. Kellogg lined up behind them.

There’s no better cure for helplessness, hopelessness, and defeatism than struggle. And I don’t mean typical work in Washington’s nonprofit industrial complex. I mean passionate all-out devotion to a moral cause that is going to change the world. Salmon Oliver Levinson, of whom few have heard today, got a handful of friends together and hatched a plan to outlaw war, and then did it. That should inspire us. It should also bring us to understand that we owe it to our predecessors to make good use of what they accomplished.

BL: The Kellogg-Briand Pact, which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1929 by a vote of 85 to 1, is still on the books as part of the supreme law of the United States. The Pact clearly condemns war and renounces war as an instrument of national policy, and resolves that all disputes should be settled by peaceful means. But does it really say that war is illegal? Even the declaration of war again Nazi Germany?

DS: No reservations were made to the treaty by the U.S. Senate, but the Senate did pass an interpretive statement. Secretary of State Kellogg had also published his interpretations of the treaty and communicated them to the other national signatories prior to the treaty’s creation. The negotiations were all very public, having begun with a statement to the Associated Press from Aristide Briand, the Foreign Minister of France, a statement illegally drafted for him by an American peace activist lobbying France to lobby the United States for peace. The public discussion of the treaty, and the U.S. Senate’s view of its meaning suggest that the answer to your first question is yes.

The big looming question for people today is, of course, “What about self-defense?” Levinson’s response was to point to the example of dueling. No nation had banned only “aggressive dueling” and yet people could still defend themselves. They did so without making use of “defensive dueling.” It takes two to tango, to duel, or—and this is the difficult one to grasp—to make war. Nazi Germany did not attack the United States before the United States put its economic muscle into a war against Germany, and indeed its assistance into attacking German submarines. Japan attacked a U.S. territory stolen from the people of Hawaii, but only after long and deliberate provocation, including U.S. support for and participation in war against Japan on behalf of China, as detailed in my earlier book War Is A Lie.

More than self-defense, the big concern in 1928-1929 was to make clear—as Kellogg and the Senate made very clear—that the Peace Pact would not place on the United States any obligation to go to war against another nation that violated the pact, or any obligation to join an international alliance to “keep the peace” through the use of war. The League of Nations was voted down in the Senate and the Kellogg-Briand Pact up, not purely out of irrational “isolationism,” but also because the idea of making alliances of war did not seem a wise way to eliminate war. In fact, it looked to many people in the United States all too similar to how World War I had begun. We now have further examples, of course, of the United Nations and NATO launching wars.

BL: The success of the peace movement in the 1920s in getting politicians to enact a law that renounces war as an instrument of national policy, and for this law then not to be taken seriously reminds me of when the Cherokee People won a great victory in the U.S. Supreme Court with respect to their stolen lands; and then Andrew Jackson, president at that time, ignored the Supreme Court ruling with blatant contempt by stating about the Supreme Court Justices, “They have made their decision, now let them enforce it.” Could it be Americans’ karma—because most of us have never really taken seriously illegalities perpetrated against Native Americans and other oppressed peoples—to “win the law” but have no power to enforce it?

DS: Well, of course, I don’t actually believe in Karma any more than in trickledown economics, the Invisible Hand, or humanitarian war, and I’m not inclined to suffer injustices because dead people who looked like me committed others. But this is a crucial problem for us to face: just as liberty requires eternal vigilance, the enforcement of any law, especially against those with power, requires eternal vigilance. We have a sad history of not domestically criminalizing the violation of international treaties, and not prosecuting powerful people for crimes. What’s needed is cultural pressure. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that just because the Constitution says habeas corpus cannot be taken from you does not mean you ever had it. President Obama has put in place policies that pretty well establish that you don’t have it anymore. That line in the Constitution was not poorly written. Our nation, over two centuries later, is poorly run—by us.

BL: Most historians say that the primary reason for the failure of the Kellogg-Briand Pact to prevent wars was that the treaty provided no means of enforcement or sanctions against parties who violated its provisions, and it did not effectively close the loopholes regarding self-defense and as to when self-defense could lawfully be claimed. Is that your take on the failure of Kellog-Briand? In concrete terms, has the Pact done any good? Some historians argue that the peace movement should have focused more on getting the U.S. to join the League of Nations—do you disagree?

DS: The U.N. Charter leaves a giant loophole for defensive war, as well as one for any war authorized by the U.N. The Kellogg-Briand Pact does not. This is why Kellogg-Briand is stronger. A court to resolve disputes by pacific means and to prosecute war makers was never established and still needs to be. The World Court of the League of Nations, like today’s International Criminal Court of the United Nations, did not fit the bill. Joining the League of Nations, without transforming it radically, would have brought the United States into World War II more quickly, but would not have prevented it. What might have prevented it, would have been punishing war makers after World War I instead of punishing the entire nation of Germany, promoting and funding peaceful parties in Germany rather than Nazis, negotiating arms reductions rather than launching an arms race, and investing in the study of nonviolent dispute resolution instead of in eugenics and chemical warfare.

BL: In When the World Outlawed Law, you talk about the importance of the Republican Senator from Idaho, William Borah, who replaced Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge as Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Lodge had promoted the Spanish American War as well as World War I, and supported a massive build-up of the Navy. However, when Lodge died in 1924, Borah, a major opponent of imperialism and militarism, became Chair of Foreign Relations. You mention that, with regards to foreign policy, the international isolationist Borah was similar to Ron Paul. With regard to domestic policies, there were some things about Borah, like Paul, that made him unappealing to progressives. Today, there are many progressives who loathe some of Paul’s domestic agendas so much that they cannot conceive of forming a coalition with him when it comes to anti-militarism. What’s your take on that, given Borah’s importance in getting the Kellogg-Briand Pact through the Senate?

DS: One of the strengths of the 1920s peace movement was that it did not put the same emphasis on individual leaders that we do today. People were Outlawrists, not Borahists. Today there are Libertarians, but there are also self-identified Ron Paulers. This makes it harder. But the peace movement of the late 1920s succeeded only when the internationalists and the isolationists came together behind Outlawry and Kellog-Briand. This meant working in alliance with people who disagreed on many things. The leaders of the peace movement included the leaders for and against the prohibition of alcohol. We have to be willing to work on causes with people we have disagreements with on other causes. But “Who’s the lesser evil, Obama or Paul?” is the wrong question. The right question is “How will we come together to eliminate war and injustice from the face of the earth?”

David Swanson, since serving as press secretary in Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, has emerged as one of the leading anti-war activists in the United States. While Swanson has fought against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tried to alert Americans to the fact that U.S. military spending is the source of most of our economic problems, his anti-war activism goes much deeper. He wants to stigmatize militarist politicians as criminals. In his previous book War is a Lie, Swanson made the case for the abolition of war as an instrument of national policy, and When the World Outlawed War provides an historical example of just how powerful war abolitionism can be.

Bruce Levine: At a college lecture that you recently gave, you asked the students and professors if they believed war was illegal or if they had ever heard of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and only about 2 or 3 percent of a large group raised their hands. But what really seems to have disturbed you is when you asked if war should be illegal, and only 5 percent thought that it should be.

David Swanson: Well, both responses bothered me somewhat, but only one surprised me at all, and only one offended me. I knew people in the United States did not believe war was illegal. I knew that only the most serious peace activists had heard of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and that even they didn’t recognize its value, including the degree to which it is stronger than the U.N. Charter in its prohibition of all wars, not just certain kinds of wars.

But why wouldn’t people want war to be made illegal? To my ear that sounds like not wanting slavery or rape or torture to be illegal. And I’m still in the camp that considers torture irredeemably evil, by the way. At the end of the 19^th century, when the United States snatched up Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Panama, etc., there was a popular love for war in the air. At the end of World War I, war was widely viewed as an evil disease to be eradicated. From World War II forward to today there has been an ever increasing tendency to view war as ordinary, necessary, and patriotic—if not a war in Vietnam or Iraq, then certainly some other war.

For war’s victims and most of its participants it always turns out to be the horror it appeared in 1918. But for those who know war only through U.S. television, the idea of criminalizing it sounds almost like proposing to criminalize government. That state of affairs is what I find disturbing, the realization of how normal it is to think of government as essentially responsible for large-scale killing. This is miles away from Warren Harding’s return to “normalcy” after World War I. Since World War II we have never returned to normalcy.

BL: People have a difficult enough time today believing that they have enough power to stop a single senseless war. Did the peace movement in the 1920s really believe they could abolish war?

DS: The thinking of the peace movement of the 1920s comes out of a different world, and getting back into it may be difficult for a lot of people. One doorway in, I am hoping, is through realization that a law still on the books outlaws war. While banning war may be unimaginable, war is in fact already banned. Every war since 1929 has been illegal. Every act of war has been illegal.

Laws are, of course, what we make of them. Some laws are forgotten, others expanded to completely alter their meanings. The Bill of Rights now applies to corporations, while the Kellogg-Briand Pact is considered archaic—but that is purely for cultural reasons; the Pact has actually never been repealed.

Creating awareness of a law will not lead to its immediate enforcement, of course, but the Outlawrists of the 1920s didn’t believe they would end war in their lifetimes. They believed that Kellogg-Briand would begin to delegitimize war, to stigmatize it. In fact, after Kellogg-Briand, territorial gains through war were no longer recognized, and following World War II the act of making war was prosecuted as a crime for those on the losing side. But the process of delegitimization of war has stalled and back-tracked. The body of law and the world court that the Outlawrists envisioned have never been attempted. It is time we picked up where they left off.

BL: You say that the thinking of the peace movement of the 1920s comes out of a “different world.” In the 1920s, as you point out, peace was actually “patriotic,” and a peace movement wasn’t going up against anywhere near the kind of military-industrial complex we have today. In researching the history of the 1920s, is your sense that Americans today—despite their majority opposition to our ongoing wars—have become increasingly more helpless, hopeless, and defeatist with regard to achieving a peaceful nation?

DS: Back then war could be seen as something that backward Europeans had dragged the United States into, albeit with help from greatly resented propaganda that had been produced by President Woodrow Wilson’s PR team. If you ask someone in the United States if they are for peace today, they may tell you that they like peace but wouldn’t want to oppose wars. Even in the 1920s, the United States was making war in Nicaragua and threatening it in Mexico, but peace was still considered the norm. Then wars were imperialistic or humanitarian or racist, and conceivably avoidable. Now wars are necessary to protect us from evil. In other words, they are defensive. This is a result of the twisted interpretation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact that was used to prosecute Nazis. A treaty intentionally created to avoid banning “aggressive war,” in order to ban all war, was transformed into a ban on aggressive war at Nuremberg. Every war since has had to be “defensive.”

Pro-war attitudes today are not insurmountable. Popular opinion turned against the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars fairly quickly and never got behind the Libyan War nor our various drone wars. But there is a more important difference that you mentioned between the 1920s and today: the rise of the military-industrial complex. It had been around since the Civil War. The Navy was being built up at the same time that the U.S. Senate was ratifying Kellogg-Briand. But the weapons companies were not pulling Congress’s strings in the 1920s. Farmers, who wanted Europeans to buy more corn and less weaponry, had more influence than arms merchants. In addition, congressional districts were smaller, bribery was illegal, newspapers were fairly diverse and credible, television didn’t exist, gerrymandering had not been perfected, and it was common for members of the House and Senate to oppose the positions of their political parties. Women got the vote in 1920. Jim Crow laws prevented many African-Americans from voting, and eighteen to twenty-year-olds still couldn’t vote, but the robber barons didn’t run the whole show—and some of them invested heavily in peace activism.

The deck is stacked against us today, and we know it. Outlawrists in the 1920s didn’t imagine they’d live to see success, but they did believe success would likely come in a future generation, step by step. They believed that outlawing blood feuds and dueling and slavery pointed the way toward outlawing war. They believed in cultural progress, even if it came slowly. So, they happily worked for what they believed to be a just cause, for what William James called “the moral equivalent of war,” and they seemed in my reading to go through fewer cycles of optimism and pessimism than do most activists today. They seemed to exhibit, in fact, less interest in what their cause could do for them than in what they could do for the cause.

This came hand-in-hand, I think, with their belief in democracy. Frank Kellogg, the mean-tempered Republican Secretary of State for whom the Kellogg-Briand Pact is named, in 1927, hated and cursed peace activists; and in 1928, worked night and day to answer their demands. Why? In part because the peace activists didn’t line up behind political leaders, a president, or a party, or Frank Kellogg. They moved the entire culture, all parties and all politicians, in their direction. Kellogg lined up behind them.

There’s no better cure for helplessness, hopelessness, and defeatism than struggle. And I don’t mean typical work in Washington’s nonprofit industrial complex. I mean passionate all-out devotion to a moral cause that is going to change the world. Salmon Oliver Levinson, of whom few have heard today, got a handful of friends together and hatched a plan to outlaw war, and then did it. That should inspire us. It should also bring us to understand that we owe it to our predecessors to make good use of what they accomplished.

BL: The Kellogg-Briand Pact, which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1929 by a vote of 85 to 1, is still on the books as part of the supreme law of the United States. The Pact clearly condemns war and renounces war as an instrument of national policy, and resolves that all disputes should be settled by peaceful means. But does it really say that war is illegal? Even the declaration of war again Nazi Germany?

DS: No reservations were made to the treaty by the U.S. Senate, but the Senate did pass an interpretive statement. Secretary of State Kellogg had also published his interpretations of the treaty and communicated them to the other national signatories prior to the treaty’s creation. The negotiations were all very public, having begun with a statement to the Associated Press from Aristide Briand, the Foreign Minister of France, a statement illegally drafted for him by an American peace activist lobbying France to lobby the United States for peace. The public discussion of the treaty, and the U.S. Senate’s view of its meaning suggest that the answer to your first question is yes.

The big looming question for people today is, of course, “What about self-defense?” Levinson’s response was to point to the example of dueling. No nation had banned only “aggressive dueling” and yet people could still defend themselves. They did so without making use of “defensive dueling.” It takes two to tango, to duel, or—and this is the difficult one to grasp—to make war. Nazi Germany did not attack the United States before the United States put its economic muscle into a war against Germany, and indeed its assistance into attacking German submarines. Japan attacked a U.S. territory stolen from the people of Hawaii, but only after long and deliberate provocation, including U.S. support for and participation in war against Japan on behalf of China, as detailed in my earlier book War Is A Lie.

More than self-defense, the big concern in 1928-1929 was to make clear—as Kellogg and the Senate made very clear—that the Peace Pact would not place on the United States any obligation to go to war against another nation that violated the pact, or any obligation to join an international alliance to “keep the peace” through the use of war. The League of Nations was voted down in the Senate and the Kellogg-Briand Pact up, not purely out of irrational “isolationism,” but also because the idea of making alliances of war did not seem a wise way to eliminate war. In fact, it looked to many people in the United States all too similar to how World War I had begun. We now have further examples, of course, of the United Nations and NATO launching wars.

BL: The success of the peace movement in the 1920s in getting politicians to enact a law that renounces war as an instrument of national policy, and for this law then not to be taken seriously reminds me of when the Cherokee People won a great victory in the U.S. Supreme Court with respect to their stolen lands; and then Andrew Jackson, president at that time, ignored the Supreme Court ruling with blatant contempt by stating about the Supreme Court Justices, “They have made their decision, now let them enforce it.” Could it be Americans’ karma—because most of us have never really taken seriously illegalities perpetrated against Native Americans and other oppressed peoples—to “win the law” but have no power to enforce it?

DS: Well, of course, I don’t actually believe in Karma any more than in trickledown economics, the Invisible Hand, or humanitarian war, and I’m not inclined to suffer injustices because dead people who looked like me committed others. But this is a crucial problem for us to face: just as liberty requires eternal vigilance, the enforcement of any law, especially against those with power, requires eternal vigilance. We have a sad history of not domestically criminalizing the violation of international treaties, and not prosecuting powerful people for crimes. What’s needed is cultural pressure. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that just because the Constitution says habeas corpus cannot be taken from you does not mean you ever had it. President Obama has put in place policies that pretty well establish that you don’t have it anymore. That line in the Constitution was not poorly written. Our nation, over two centuries later, is poorly run—by us.

BL: Most historians say that the primary reason for the failure of the Kellogg-Briand Pact to prevent wars was that the treaty provided no means of enforcement or sanctions against parties who violated its provisions, and it did not effectively close the loopholes regarding self-defense and as to when self-defense could lawfully be claimed. Is that your take on the failure of Kellog-Briand? In concrete terms, has the Pact done any good? Some historians argue that the peace movement should have focused more on getting the U.S. to join the League of Nations—do you disagree?

DS: The U.N. Charter leaves a giant loophole for defensive war, as well as one for any war authorized by the U.N. The Kellogg-Briand Pact does not. This is why Kellogg-Briand is stronger. A court to resolve disputes by pacific means and to prosecute war makers was never established and still needs to be. The World Court of the League of Nations, like today’s International Criminal Court of the United Nations, did not fit the bill. Joining the League of Nations, without transforming it radically, would have brought the United States into World War II more quickly, but would not have prevented it. What might have prevented it, would have been punishing war makers after World War I instead of punishing the entire nation of Germany, promoting and funding peaceful parties in Germany rather than Nazis, negotiating arms reductions rather than launching an arms race, and investing in the study of nonviolent dispute resolution instead of in eugenics and chemical warfare.

BL: In When the World Outlawed Law, you talk about the importance of the Republican Senator from Idaho, William Borah, who replaced Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge as Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Lodge had promoted the Spanish American War as well as World War I, and supported a massive build-up of the Navy. However, when Lodge died in 1924, Borah, a major opponent of imperialism and militarism, became Chair of Foreign Relations. You mention that, with regards to foreign policy, the international isolationist Borah was similar to Ron Paul. With regard to domestic policies, there were some things about Borah, like Paul, that made him unappealing to progressives. Today, there are many progressives who loathe some of Paul’s domestic agendas so much that they cannot conceive of forming a coalition with him when it comes to anti-militarism. What’s your take on that, given Borah’s importance in getting the Kellogg-Briand Pact through the Senate?

DS: One of the strengths of the 1920s peace movement was that it did not put the same emphasis on individual leaders that we do today. People were Outlawrists, not Borahists. Today there are Libertarians, but there are also self-identified Ron Paulers. This makes it harder. But the peace movement of the late 1920s succeeded only when the internationalists and the isolationists came together behind Outlawry and Kellog-Briand. This meant working in alliance with people who disagreed on many things. The leaders of the peace movement included the leaders for and against the prohibition of alcohol. We have to be willing to work on causes with people we have disagreements with on other causes. But “Who’s the lesser evil, Obama or Paul?” is the wrong question. The right question is “How will we come together to eliminate war and injustice from the face of the earth?”