By Geoffrey Botkin, posted on 10 October, 2009

The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal. — From the Journal of Henri Frederic Amiel, 17 June 1852

I am a man born at the center of 20th-century history and culture.

I was trained to be a compliant, rational Marxist. I was recruited to be a self-conscious supporter of a social order that was Marxist. This required my willing trust in the state as a utopian savior and antagonism to the God of Christendom. Here's why I gave both.

My world was not orderly. I lived in a culture of disorder, silent churches, weak men, confused families. But I was taught to believe that order would arise out of this under the guiding hand of the caretaker state, in which I placed my hope. The stronger the state, the more secure my hope. I believed this was the rational position, and that all who believed in any alternative were enemies of man and enemies of the future. I agreed that all enemies or potential enemies should be reengineered. I was not only a Marxist, but a Marxist social engineer with a reinforced sinful desire to see people molded coercively into the social order I thought best.

All social engineering is built on this same sin — the dream of the ambitious to exert ethical or economic power over others. All modern social engineering attempts to remake this great sin into a virtue. In political science, social engineering refers to organized efforts to influence attitudes, beliefs, and social behavior on a large scale for the purpose of total political control.

This power-seeking sin is widely indulged by our modern culture of mass media, compulsory schooling, and high-tech governmental surveillance. But the idea is as old as Adam and his desire to engineer a life and a world outside of God's prescribed boundaries. About 400 B.C. Plato defined justice as an organized society with a few privileged people lording it over the masses in the name of progress — controlling everything for the good of the overall order. In the name of justice, private property could not exist. Neither could the family. The most important strategy of state justice, state control, and state planning was the controlling of the mind of every citizen. In Plato's vision, the Republic was "the highest form of the state." In it "there is common property of wives, of children, and of all chattels. And everything possible has been done to eradicate from our life everywhere and in every way all that is private and individual. . . . All men are moulded to be unanimous in the utmost degree in bestowing praise and blame, and they even rejoice and grieve about the same things, and at the same time."^[1]

Social engineers through the ages have discovered that unanimity of thought can be enforced by controlling an artificial academic cartel, which in turn controls

• All schools,
• All media,
• All legislation,
• All courts,
• All churches,
• And all monetary policy.

If the state can control these six domains, the thinking of all men can be controlled and they can be subjugated.

Before I came to faith in Christ, I saw nothing wrong with this. If man existed for the state, what difference did it make how he was prepared to agree with the state — to be "molded by the state"? Since private freedoms would interfere with the interests of the state, should they not be "eradicated"? These were the thoughts of a young statist whose thinking had been taken captive by the lawless world view of the first Adam, the Babel utopians, the Greek utopians, the French utopians, the Marxist utopians, and the American utopians of 1900. My mindset may not have been embraced so self-consciously by most of my peers, but after years in government schools, this was the air we breathed.

The Century that Engineered the Death of Christendom and the Return of Worldwide Slavery

But it had not always been so. At the dawn of the 20th century, optimistic free people the world over knew how to think for themselves and enjoyed the freedom to do so. They believed they were entering an era that would see unprecedented marvels of invention, quality of life, international peace, economic growth, individual liberty, and moral achievement. The 19th century had seen phenomenal scientific and medical advances. People were healthier and stronger. Families were happy and robust. Military conflicts were mainly small, short-lived law-and-order actions. Freedom was flourishing. Citizens of virtually every nation could travel freely from nation to nation without restriction or surveillance, and with a stable currency that was recognized and valued everywhere. Inflation was unheard of. Employment was high. Taxes were low to non existent. The world economy was booming. Prosperity and opportunity were everywhere. Westerners were highly literate. America was the best educated nation in the world. Russia had the fastest growing economy in the world.

Then something curious happened. Widespread international freedom of trade and communication enabled reemerging ideas of mass social engineering to spread and take hold simultaneously among government bureaucrats and influential academics in the Western nations. Science was in vogue. Government bureaucrats began listening to fashionable talk about progressive ideology and scientifically planned social order. These were the seductive ideas of statism. By grasping total control, men could claim divinity in themselves and in their states. They could create theocratic systems of their own design, controlling not only entire nations, but the entire world in a harmonious world government ruled by an anti-Christian elite group of managers.

20th-century conditions were such that the social order then developed exactly as the utopians envisioned — not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Because the church was weak, the state obtained vast powers to tell citizens what to think, how to think and how to conform. By the end of the century, governments had intervened in the private affairs of all their citizens, managing, taxing, analyzing, medicating, watching, screening, tracking, institutionalizing, imprisoning, and even killing their own people in the name of management, justice, and progress.

20th-century governments who followed the new social science of social engineering killed 169,198,000 of their own citizens in police-state actions. Fighting between governments killed an additional 33 millions in wars across the globe.^[2] In just a few short decades, citizens of these modern states lost the ethical discernment to know how to understand this moral cataclysm, or how to order their lives for the future. The average man became a different sort of citizen than his 18th and 19th century forebears.

20th-century man was willingly transformed into a secularized, morally ignorant, docile, chronic coward, living in fear of taxes, and living in fear of independent thought . . . living in fear of being different from everyone else . . . and living in fear of the future. For this reason historian Robert Conquest called the 20th century the century of manslaughter and mind-slaughter.

Plato's all-controlling master-slave environment had become a reality, "eradicating from our life everywhere and in every way all that is private and individual. All men are moulded to be unanimous in the utmost degree."^[3]

For the sake of government power and efficiency, men conformed. In most nations, the conforming was consensual. The more they conformed, the more the state became an ever more powerful manager over the thoughts of men. Minds closed down as a limited diet of state-approved information was fed to the population. A timid consensus then bowed to a collective social order which was highly religious and theocratic, but not Christian. The previous theocratic order of Christendom was replaced with a horrific, fundamentalist statist culture.

This all happened very quickly, in the first four decades of the century — through social engineering.

The Father of America's Social Engineers

To understand 20th-century social engineering, especially in America, we have to understand the influence of Karl Marx. Both friends and enemies of American social engineering refer to it as Marxist not because Marx invented the science but because he gave social engineering its diabolical purposefulness.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) is honored today as the old warhorse who declared total war on the old order of Christendom. Marx has been remembered by his followers as the "hero" who rewrote history by social engineering and sheer force of will. Marx has been lionized as the bold, banner-waving champion who made hard-core social engineering acceptable, liberating the downtrodden and reconstituting society at large.

Marx insisted on "the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions"^[4] through an intimidating, religious police-state which would control all minds and all property using militant socialization to destroy every vestige of Christendom and dominate a compliant population with every tool of scientific manipulation.

This is a good modern summary of the idea that triumphed in Eden, Babel, and France in the late 18th century. Marx was no original. He is simply a modern version of the selfish, anti-Christian statist. He derived his views from the bad fruit of the French Revolution and the political confusion his generation inherited. His rebellion he inherited from the first Adam. His bitterness developed from apparent ingratitude, discontentment and jealousy regarding his station in life. His specific ideas were handed to him by college friends and his father-in-law. Through these men, Marx was profoundly influenced by three European social engineers who are the true founders of American social engineering: Rosseau, Saint-Simon, and Hegel.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)

Rousseau outlined the mechanics of social engineering in a 1762 book about a boy who benefits from the engineering provided by a massive, benevolent state. John Taylor Gatto, in his seminal work, The Underground History of American Education, summarizes:

Emile is a detailed account of the total transformation of a boy of ten under the precisely calculated behavioral ministrations of a psychological schoolmaster. Rousseau showed the world how to write on the empty child Locke had fathered; he supplied means by which Locke's potent image could be converted to methodology. It took only a quarter century for Germans to catch on to the pick-and-shovel utility of dreamy Rousseau, only a little longer for Americans and English to do the same. Once Rousseau was fully digested, the temptation to see society's children as human resources proved irresistible to those nations which had gone furthest in developing the mineral resources, coal, and its useful spirits, heat and steam.^[5]

Following Emile's blueprint, 20th century utopian schemes aimed at retarding maturity:

The first goal, to be reached in stages, was an orderly, scientifically managed society, one in which the best people would make the decisions, unhampered by democratic tradition. After that, human breeding, the evolutionary destiny of the species, would be in reach. Universal institutionalized formal forced schooling was the prescription, extending the dependency of the young well into what had traditionally been early adult life. Individuals would be prevented from taking up important work until a relatively advanced age. Maturity was to be inhibited.^[6]

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825)

The Comte de Saint-Simon came to America in 1778 as a young soldier to help the Americans in their revolutionary cause. He was disappointed that the American war against King George was so singularly Christian and Biblically orthodox. He was surprised by the depth of Christian commitment and sentiment in the colonies. He had assumed that every modern revolution would pursue liberte in the modern French sense of license — freedom from God and his law to do whatever is right in one's own eyes. But Americans still grasped the Biblical definition of liberty — freedom from sin so that one may honor, by grateful obedience, God's righteous law order that blesses men. Saint-Simon returned to France to begin work on a social order that was more to his liking and more revolutionary in nature.

Auguste Comte, Saint-Simon's student and secretary, published System of Positive Polity in the early 1850s. He cataloged specific ideals and powers of the modern state that would be enforced through scientific social engineering. To make the plan more acceptable to a Christian West, Saint-Simon and Comte developed a clever syncretism whereby Christianity would be converted into a social "Christian-Scientific" socialism with the new priests and pastors being an elite teacher class. These social engineers, therapists, and scientists would form a "new Christianity" of social planning. It would be a highly complex social management with a new pragmatic authoritarian morality with a Christian veneer. Comte coined the term "sociology" in 1838 to describe the system his "Religion of Humanity" would use to subdue all of culture for the state.

Georg Hegel (1770–1831)

Hegel inspired Marx to believe history itself could be completely controlled by man through the deliberate provoking of crises using state sovereignty and power to the limit. "We must . . . worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth, and consider that . . . the State is the march of God through the world."^[7]

Armed with these ideas, Marx wanted the modern state to rise immediately to its new heights of sovereign power.

The centerpiece of Marx's Famous Communist Manifesto of 1848 is his theory of history. He excludes God as the author of history and states that chaotic conflict between rich and poor is the determiner of all history. To steer history and engineer society in his own direction, Marx insisted on escalating class conflict and taking advantage of the cultural disintegration that would follow. Marx gave social engineering its heavy-handed character, and his followers worked carefully to make it popular, intellectual, and scientific.

The new religious worldview which Marx and his followers created centers around some basic propositions:

• The engineered man is basically good because he is passive.
• Passive man can be conditioned by outside stimuli.
• Passive man needs engineering and management.
• An elitist engineering government is necessary and I can be part of it.
• Common man is moldable because there is not a created nature; he is a stimulus-response mechanism.
• Science can be harnessed to create and manage a new world.
• Happiness is found in sustaining secular utopian society.
• Anti-social people are traitors to utopia.
• Social goals should be every man's goals.
• Man is rational who can learn to be more scientifically rational.
• Educators must be in charge of all rationalization by managing the masses into reason.
• Submission to the state is pure reason; revolt is irrationality and insanity.

Marxist social engineering was designed to accomplish these goals, which it must attain in order to win its war against Christianity:

• Brutal government coercion so that life, liberty, and property dies at the will of the state
• Destabilizing of culture and society so that Christendom dies at the will of the state
• Emasculation of boys by a government school system so that patriarchy dies at the will of the state
• Exploitation of women in the workforce so that children fall into the hands of the state
• The confiscation of all wealth so that the multigenerational family dies at the will of the state
• The seizure of total state power so that the arbitrary state triumphs over all

Making the Marxist Design Work in America

Once the Marxist system was accepted in European universities, American academics accepted it as the path to the future.

True to the European model, American social engineers made mass psychology in government classrooms the key to the new social order and its emasculated male population. This not only continued but increased after the Marxist Vladimir Lenin began using the powers of the totalitarian state in 1917 to forcefully socialize the population. Gatto writes:

The techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely used in psychological conditioning programs imposed on school children. These include emotional shock and desensitization, psychological isolation from sources of support, stripping away defenses, manipulative cross-examination of the individual's underlying moral values by psychological rather than rational means. These techniques are not confined to separate courses or programs . . . they are not isolated idiosyncracies of particular teachers. They are products of numerous books and other educational materials in programs packaged by organizations that sell such curricula to administrators and teach the techniques to teachers. Some packages even include instructions on how to deal with parents and others who object. Stripping away psychological defenses can be done through assignments to keep diaries to be discussed in group sessions, and through role-playing assignments, both techniques used in the original brainwashing programs in China under Mao.^[8]

What Marx's Doctrines Really Accomplish

Marx's philosophy of history robs man of his status as a dominion man. As man becomes the passive man Marx envisioned, he places himself under the domination of a new god — the social planners, and the scientific secular sovereign state.

Marx and his followers attacked God's sovereignty. They attacked his providence. They attacked his testimony about himself in history. They attacked his predestination, so their own predestination could take its place. This is the essence of social engineering. Man's predestination of all history in the form of all-controlling sociology.

To what extent have Marxists succeed in making all of us agree with them?

Plato said that in a successfully socially engineered society the desires of the inferior multitude will be controlled by the desires and wisdom of the few.^[9]

The social engineers of early 20th century American were so convinced their scientific and political methods of forced sociology would work, they believed they would succeed even in the fiercely Christian and independent townships of the United States. All they needed was a therapeutic laboratory to shape the masses from infancy. In the words of Gatto, who was New York Teacher of the Year in 1990 and 1991:

Author Jaques Ellul explained what happened to the rest of us. This was the first lessons the engineers succeeded in teaching, and once they communicated that lesson, their victory was secure. Saint-Simon believed it could be done in one generation and he was right. The record shows that by the 1920s few protested a statist curriculum except the Amish, many of whom left the US when told that forced schooling would be mandatory.

Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment. . . . The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by . . . the word of experts.^[11]

Gatto agrees:

What is Expected of Us

For American citizens, it is now expected of us all that we keep our Marxist sentiments intact, and continue believing what we have been taught:

• We feel strongly that secular government is superior to biblical government.
• We believe that we are free and that America is a free society.
• We believe laws must change with the times.
• We have been trained to feel very uncomfortable with biblical law.
• We think injustice is caused by traditional economic systems.
• We think evil is embodied in certain social conditions and cultural institutions.
• We think it is compassionate that the government redistribute the wealth of the wealthy.
• We think state accreditation is superior to other accreditation in all fields.
• We think "qualified" educators are the best and wisest experts to make men more fit for society.
• We are unaware of the ideas that affect the way we perceive. Os Guiness said, "we don't see the environment because we see with it."
• We think government education is a neutral and acceptable way to school children.
• We feel a strong urge to live the same way everyone else is living and to think the same way everyone else is thinking.
• Doctors, Lawyers, Certified Pubic Accountants, and Nurses willingly act as agents of the state, enforcing unreasonable demands of an intervening bureaucracy.
• We are uncomfortable if asked to form a sustained opinion or argument on a topic of critical moral importance.

The individual [in a Marxist society] has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under [the best of] conditions. . . . Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed. . . . years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties.^[14]

If it truly will take years to correct the effects of social engineering on America, we had better get to the business of repentance.

New York Public School Teacher of the Year Gatto has set an example. This is his confession:

"The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."^[15]

We need to be content with the government of God, his determinative role in history, and his social order, which includes multigenerational family faithfulness in teaching children to look to Christ alone for national as well as personal salvation.