[MUD-Dev] [Off-list] Killology (Was: Retention without Addiction?)

[shren]

On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Sasha Hart wrote:
> [Caliban Tiresias Darklock]
 
>> Specifically, "operant conditioning" in military-speak means
>> "pretending to do it over and over so you don't even think about
>> it when you have to really do it".
 
> This explains A LOT. Thank you.

And buried in this little topic is one of the pivotal decisions in
history, one to which we're only now starting to feel the
ramifications.  So if you're up for a trip into tangent land, let's
wind the clock back to the 1940s...

Allied Generals were studying casualty rates after one of the World
Wars (II, I think) and they noted that a lot of casualties were, in
one way or another, psychological.  People would lock up under the
horrors of combat and never 'unlock', or decided that the best thing
to do would be to hide under a rock untill someone came by to tell
them they won or came by to demand thier surrender.

The generals asked the psychologists about this, and the
psychologists taught them how to make serial killers.  I'll not
dress it up.  The psychologists taught them how to step by step
train somebody to kill, repeatedly, without locking up or cracking
under the strain.  Other militaries started using thier training
methods.  Military 'advisors' would train civilians in other
countries so they could overthrow a regime.  And now, more and more
police forces are recieving military style training.

If we call the 1800s the Industrial age, what is the 1900s?  It's a
different industrial age.  Instead of manufacturing items we
manufacture brains - from battle-ready soldiers to assembly-line
students, the 1900s will, in the long run, be remembered as the
second part of the industrial age - the sociological industrial one.
The information age is only noteworthy in that it's a desperate
self-defense measure to deprogram ourselves before we kill
ourselves.

We now return you to whatever else we were talking about...


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