Jubilee Prosperity

Kurt Lewin:

Kurt Lewin, a pioneer in “group dynamics,” was part of the early Frankfurt School. He fled Germany when Hitler took power. He came to the United States in 1933, his ticket bought by the Rockefellers. On his way, he stopped at Cambridge, England, to visit Tavistock’s Eric Trist.

Lewin set up shop at the University of Iowa, where he was a professor of child psychology. He eventually went to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor to the CIA.

Like his Tavistock counterparts in the British military, Lewin explored group dynamics concerning troop morale, the psychology of food rationing and other elements of psychological warfare.

This passage, from his book Time Perspective and Morale, illustrates his grasp of psychological warfare:

One of the main techniques for breaking morale through a strategy of terror consists in exactly this tactic–keep the person hazy as to where he stands and just what he may expect. If in addition, frequent vacillations between severe disciplinary measures and promises of good treatment together with spreading of contradictory news, make the ‘cognitive structure’ of this situation utterly unclear, then the individual may cease to even know when a particular plan would lead toward or away from his goal. Under these conditions even those who have definite goals and are ready to take risks, will be paralyzed by severe inner conflicts in regard to what to do.[7]

In a sane society, Lewin’s books would have been used for toilet paper, or filed near the Nazi paraphernalia. Instead, he was given a lot of money to craft social engineering projects.

Lewin and his followers developed techniques for modeling group dynamics that were based on the degree of attraction between individuals. Lewin used the language of electromagnetism to describe the relationships, borrowing from Maxwell’s “field theory” for electromagnetism.

Since Maxwell had decided that causality in science was irrelevant, his “field theory” wasn’t actually science. Maxwell simply described the “field” as an aggregate of the observable degree of cohesion between the point masses in that field. Correlation does not assure causality, reliability or validity.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 5:41 am and is filed under Market Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.