John B. Watson

My pre-sleep musings last night turned to psychologist John B. Watson. The thoughts sprang from a fundraising email message I had received from LifeSiteNews which mentioned that a group called B4U-ACT is pushing for, essentially, legalization of pedophilia, and that the mainstream media has turned a blind eye to this outrage.

As we see more and more moral atrocities committed, society becomes more and more “accepting” of evil. It’s not an accident, either. There are groups and forces that are determined to push their disordered view of morality on us, and they are combining the use of emotional manipulation with the use of the media in an efficient fashion. If the secular groups themselves are not smart enough to use these resources, Satan certainly is.

Back to John B. Watson: he was principally involved in establishing the psychological school of behaviorism; the main thrust of this perspective is that behavior is modified by the environment, and so can be manipulated in any way the administrator of rewards and punishments chooses. A famous quote from Dr. Watson:

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors…”

Watson is famous – or perhaps infamous – for his “Little Albert” study, in which he conditioned a young child to fear a cute, fluffy, white bunny by pairing the bunny with a loud noise which startled the baby and made him cry. Watson was able to condition a generalized fear in this infant of anything white and fuzzy.

Dr. Watson moved on, some say, to doing "sex research". The problem: this "research" involved his research assistant, Rosalie Rayner, and himself. His wife wasn’t happy about the situation, and a huge scandal ensued. Watson was drummed out of academia. Of course, that would never happen in today’s world. They’d probably just make a reality show out of it.

At any rate, after losing his university job, Watson went into advertising. We have him to thank for many of the methods advertisers use to get us to buy their products. And what is one of the primary ways to make us “like” stuff? Sex, of course. Sex and advertising. Sex IN advertising. The more we got used to seeing sex stuff on TV, the more it was used, in advertising and just in general. It’s pretty blatant now, of course.

My point? Well, I’m a psychologist by training. I guess I just find it interesting that I can see a thread winding between Watson’s principles of behaviorism, the American public’s willing acceptance of sexual references everywhere we turn, and morally corrupt organizations like the North American Man-Boy Love Association (promoting pedophilia) and Planned Parenthood (promoting abortion and contraception).

I don’t believe for a moment that we can be entirely manipulated by our environment, or by the powers-that-be who do the manipulating. But we can certainly be manipulated to some extent, and we must learn the ways to counter the conditioning we are receiving at the hands of the mainstream media. Critical thinking is a good defense.