The Deceived Society

By Dr. Stan Charnofsky

We have become desensitized to the subtle, and not-so-subtle, ways our culture is eroding. It begins with the political structure, is bolstered by a sensationalizing press, and is influenced by hysteria from zealots more concerned about a mystical after-life than humanizing our planet. From an unsupportable population explosion, to faulty focusing on body-image, to the savaging of our natural environment, we are permitting ourselves to be decieved, with our priorities distorted beyond all reason. The true messages of religion are ignored. The true findings of science are trivialized. We have the advanced techonology and the human understanding to correct our course. We must, as a society, turn ourselves around. Mediocrity in leadership, biased journalism, and reliance on pseudo-science must not be tolerated. We must start with awareness....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Apr 20, 2006
• ISBN: 9781466957121

Dr. Stan Charnofsky

Dr. Stan Charnofsky is a professor and psychologist at California State University, Northridge. He is the author of three published books: Educating The Powerless, When Women Leave Men, and Therapy With Couples: A Humanistic Approach. He is past President of the Association For Humanistic Psychology, has been a Fulbright Scholar in Estonia, and is the recipient of his campus Distinguished Teaching Award.

Book preview

THE

DECEIVED SOCIETY

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Stan Charnofsky

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© Copyright 2005 Stan Charnofsky.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Note for Librarians: A cataloguing record for this book is available from Library and Archives Canada at www.collectionscanada.ca/amicus/index-e.html

ISBN 1-4120-6760-X

ISBN 9781466957121 (ebook)

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Contents

PREFACE

DEDICATION

ONE      QUALITY OF LIFE

TWO      EQUAL TREATMENT

THREE      EDUCATION and PARENTING

FOUR      HOME LIFE

FIVE      SCIENCE AND EXPLORATION

SIX      HIGH HOPES

AFTER-WORDS

THE ASSISI DECALOGUE

PREFACE

We are indeed in a crisis of truth. From the most trivial violation of one-to-one communication, through inane commercial huckstering, to the highest offices in the land, we are relentlessly deceived. Though there are certainly publications that deal with each of the affronts separately, it is time to see them all together, compiled as a cultural phenomenon, exposed to universal scrutiny. Without seeming grandiose, if we do not stem the tide of deceit in our society it may soon be too late to sustain our place of honor in the world, and indeed salvage our democracy.

A microcosm of my treatise is presented here as an hors d’oeuvre, though I ask the reader to be aware that this relatively minor deceit is scarcely the tip of the iceberg.

A baseball announcer recently informed his listeners that so-and-so on one team had better not get into a fight with so-and-so from the other team because the second man had …been in the marines.

What is this sports reporter trying to communicate—that marines are tough, unbeatable, nasty opponents? Is he also broadcasting to his listeners that marines exit the military itching for civilian combat, perhaps even programmed for hostility, with short tempers and brutish instincts?

Certainly many military people leave their active duty abhorring conflict, sated by violence and death, pledged to peaceful lives.

This announcer has deceived himself by generalizing about the attitudes and mind-sets of ex-marines, and in so doing, deceives his listeners.

DEDICATION

I had an identical twin brother, Dr. Harold Hal Charnofsky, who passed on December 21st, 2002, from pancreatic cancer. He had lived a full life, successful, revered by his students, loved by family and friends, his death an interruption of a career still cooking, with plans for new and vital contributions to the planet and its people.

My brother was a progressive person, once an All-American at USC, a professional baseball player, a humanist, sociologist, professor, and activist in social causes. He was not a radical, though some might have thought his egalitarian views to be radical, since he saw American society as trapped in a monstrous and increasing web of deceit.

He had applied for and been granted a sabbatical to be used, he told me, to do research and begin writing a book on the Deceived Society. Cancer interrupted those plans. Pancreatic cancer deceives the most benign, the villain and the saint. He was gone in three months.

I decided to pick up on his theme. My discipline is psychology, so the thrust and subject matter of the book that emerges from my research is certainly different than his would have been. That does not make it less important, less urgent for our culture to examine.

In a small way, I pay tribute to you, my brother, and your triumphant life, with this attempt to finish something you started. It is your idea, your premise, filtered through my language.

For oh the world is in a mess

And day by day grows worse;

I’ve had my bid of happiness

And now I know the Curse

Of monstrous might and speed that’s blind,

And see, as fails my breath,

The doom of martyred humankind,

When Science meets with Death.

(Robert Service)

ONE

QUALITY OF LIFE

America has the highest standard of living of any organized group of city-states in the history of the planet, more affluence, more goods and goodies, opportunities for universal education of our young, and almost a hundred per cent literacy rate.

Thanks to our founding fathers (and mothers) we have a constitution that gives us certain inalienable rights, the sweetest and most revered of which is our liberty. We are a free people, free from tyranny, oppression, the stifling of our opinions, control over our choices of where we wish to live and the professions we choose to pursue.

Thomas Jefferson said, When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.

Hitler was a world-class tyrant, but the evil he and his Third Reich did in the world was possible only because the people of Germany failed to question the inflammatory rhetoric of their government, refused to see that the invasion by Poland was a staged fake.

We are free—on the surface of things. But are we, more and more, subtly in some cases, but with brazen disregard for our constitutional rights in others, having our freedoms eroded, alarmingly, without most of us being aware?

POPULATION

Human beings as we now know them have inhabited the planet for dozens of centuries, yet the increment in their population growth was tiny until the twentieth. In this past one century alone, earth’s population tripled to six billion. Much of that has to do with better nutrition and medicine, and also improved protection against wild beasts and natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes. But it also has to do with disregard for research evidence about the effects of over-population on the planet’s food and water supply, the psychology of cramped living, and the efficacy of birth management. Some of it, as we know, is religious in nature, yet much of it is due to ignorance, promoted by deceptive information.

The United States has selected pockets of over-population, and while we can fly across our land and see thousands of square miles of open country, glorious forests of timber, majestic mountains, curling rivers, and expansive blue lakes, many of our cities chafe and suffocate in the swelter of teeming numbers. If we think it is only those in poverty, blacks in Harlem, Chinese in San Francisco’s Chinatown, who suffer from excessive crowding, we are deceived. While those two named have the most intense concentrations of people in any given community, all of us are beginning to feel the crunch of too many people. Ask any freeway driver in Los Angeles, commuters negotiating the Holland Tunnel or any one of the many bridges into Manhattan, middle class workers trying to buy homes in pleasant neighborhoods, city folk seeking entertainment on weekend evenings—ask all these and more if their sense of overwhelm from so many humans is reaching crisis proportions.

We are continually assured that unfettered population growth, both at home and abroad, can be easily accommodated. It cannot. We are reaching a point of saturation. A university colleague of mine, ever the optimist, told me a few years ago, that humans have always managed to adapt to crises, that we have a survival instinct, and that this too—planetary overcrowding—shall be accommodated by advancing technology, when we learn to colonize the moon and Mars. But that scenario is not likely in the immediate future, and our time is growing short.

In the Sixties and Seventies there were several treatises written concerning The Population Explosion, the best known by a man named Ehrlich. In one small handbook called A Modest Proposal For Human Survival, written by Jack J. Moore, in 1975, the writer warns that there will likely be, in the next fifty years, a stupendous dieback, primarily in the poorer nations, because of a lack of food and water. He adds, however, that the dieback could touch all nations if some irresponsible power monger decides to set off hydrogen bombs. He adds: …population must be kept stable at an optimum level for nutrition, environmental health, space, leisure, self-development and enjoyment, (and) birth control must be universal in the society of the future. (p.34)

Could that also be one of the possibilities my colleague had in mind about adapting to crises, that we would solve the over-population riddle by contaminating the planet, either by defiling its natural resources or unleashing the deadly power of the atom? That is a lot like breaking one’s addiction to bourbon by switching to Scotch, hardly a formula for enhancing the human condition; or as award-winning writer, Barbara Kingsolver, puts it, You can’t beat cancer by killing every cell in the body—or you could, I guess, but the point would be lost.

It seems odd that America tolerates nuclear capability in nations such as Israel, India, Pakistan, and Russia, but rattles its sabers when we even get a hint of Iraq, North Korea, and, as reported in August of2003, Iran, possessing it. Why, one wonders, would these nations want nuclear weapons? Could it be to achieve parity—give them some leverage—with us, a nation that they are not sure will respect their sovereignty and culture?

This dieback that Mr. Moore predicted, though all its ramifications may have eluded him, may be occurring now through the monstrous AIDS epidemic flooding Africa (It is estimated by the World Health Organization that twenty-five million will die in Africa in the coming decade.), along with SOARS and other viral and bacterial mutations that spring up every year. It is not too far-fetched to guess that many toxic microorganisms flourish in the absence of good nutrition and clean water.

Though it is not the purpose of this writing to fill the reader with statistics, it is vital that the arguments be backed up with facts. In America over six million women become pregnant each year. For almost half of these women, pregnancy is an accident, unplanned and often unwanted. According to Planned Parenthood, unintended pregnancies result in 1.6 million abortions annually as well as 1.5 million births, and the United States has one of the highest rates of unintended (and teenage) pregnancies among western nations.

What anti-planning (and anti-abortion rights) arguers would have the world believe is that only left-wing heathens support contraceptive use and family planning. Few know that in 1970, President Nixon, a dedicated conservative, signed legislation creating the first family planning services on a national level. Nixon said: No American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition. I believe, therefore, that we should establish as a national goal the provision of family planning services…to all who want but cannot afford them.

A1997 survey conducted by Planned Parenthood Federation of America found nearly nine out of ten voters believed that family planning services were important, while seven in ten favored increased public funding for family planning services and counseling. Our American population is deceived if we believe that such services are safe and secure. In the last eight to ten years, politically powerful, extremist groups, such as Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, have organized to attack federally funded family planning.

Federally funded family planning programs do not, and never did, pay for abortions. Instead, family planning programs seek to reduce unintended pregnancies