Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Coyne who wrote (307763)	10/12/2002 4:59:08 PM
From: Gordon A. Langston	Respond to of 769667

Soon we will hear that there is a drug company "connection" to the Carlyle Group Schrag, Peter. Mind Control. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. 327 pages. Born in 1931, Peter Schrag is an educator as well as a former reporter and editor. His numerous books are critical of American culture, education, and social policy. Schrag is too cynical to be called a traditional liberal, but too well-established to trouble himself with the notion that conspiracies exist in high places. Despite a title that conspiracy theorists will love, this book is a general criticism of the mental health industry and the bureaucracy that supports it. Schrag is worried about the shift from the old punitive methods of social control (as represented by mental hospitals), to the newer and more frightening "therapeutic" methods: psychotropic drugs, behavior modification, and the assault on privacy represented by computers and high-tech surveillance. He's almost a libertarian, except that he believes that full employment and an emphasis on improving social conditions (meaning more government?) will go some distance toward eliminating the need for social control. Eighteen years later it seems that the biggest narcotic of all, television and our centralized mass media, deserved at least a footnote back in 1978. And Schrag's faith in the possibility of enlightened government seems just a bit old-fashioned. Still, this book is well- researched and well-written, and provides a critical perspective on social issues that are too often ignored. ISBN 0-394-40759-8