The Radical Roots of the World Health Organization (WHO)
Excerpts from
"The Re-establishment of Peacetime Society"
by General G. B. Chisholm, M.D., a Canadian psychiatrist
and the first Head of the United Nations' World Health Organization
(WHO)[1]
In 1946, Dr. Chisholm presented a paper entitled The Psychiatry of
Enduring Peace and Social Progress at a US conference on mental
health. Two years later, his message was published by the (now
prestigious) magazine Psychiatry, and by his Communist friend, Alger
Hiss, the publisher of the socialist magazine, International
Conciliation. Alger Hiss, the presiding Secretary General at the 1945
founding of the United Nation, wrote the Preface to Dr. Chisholm's
paper, which now bore the above title. Ponder Dr. Chisholm's radical
views of faith and freedom.
[Skip down to "poisonous certainties"]
Now that [World War II] has just finished we must... find and
take sure steps to prevent wars in the future.... (page 4)
We may not change nature but surely its expressions in
behavior patterns can be modified very extensively.
The responsibility for charting the necessary changes in
human behavior rests clearly on the sciences working in that fields.
Psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, economists, and
politicians must face this responsibility.
Can we identify the reasons why we fight wars...? Many
of them are easy to list--prejudice, isolationism, the ability to
emotionally and uncritically to believe unreasonable things, excessive
desire for material or power, excessive fear of others... ability to
avoid seeing and facing unpleasant facts and taking appropriate
action.... They are all well known and recognized neurotic symptoms.
The only normal motive is self defense [but even it] may involve a
neurotic reaction when it means defending one's own excessive material
wealth....
When we see neurotic patients showing these same
reactions in their private affairs we may also throw up our hand and
say "human nature".... (page 5) or we may go to work to try to help
the person in trouble to grow up over again more successfully than his
parents were able to do.....
At least three requirements are basic to any hope of
permanent world peace.
1. First--security, elimination of the occasion for valid
fear of aggression....
2. Second--opportunity to live reasonably comfortably for
all the people in the world on economic levels which do not vary too
widely either geographically or by groups within a population. This is
a simple matter of redistribution of material, of which there is
plenty in the world for everybody....
3. Third... there should be enough people in the world, in
all countries, who... will not show the neurotic necessities which we
and every generation of our ancestors have shown....
All psychiatrists know where these symptoms come from .
The burden of inferiority, guilt, and fear we have all carried lies at
the root of this failure to mature successfully.....(6)
...maturity represents the capacity to cooperate: to
work with others, to work in an organization and under authority. The
mature person is flexible, can defer to time, persons, circumstances.
He can show tolerance, he can be patient, and above all he has the
qualities of adaptability and compromise. [See Character Training for
Global Citizenship]
Basically, maturity represents a wholesome amalgamation of two
things:
1. dissatisfaction with the status quo, which calls forth
aggressive, constructive effort, and
2. social concern and devotion....
It would appear that this quality of maturity, this growing up
successfully, is what is lacking the human race generally....
For a cause, we must seek some consistent thread
running through he weave of all civilizations we have known and
preventing the development of all or almost all he people to a state
of true maturity. What basic psychological distortions can be found in
every civilization...? ...
The only lowest common denominator of all civilizations
and the only psychological force capable of producing these
perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong...
We have been very slow to rediscover this truth and to
recognize the unnecessary and artificially imposed inferiority, guilt
and fear, commonly known as sin, under which we have almost all
labored and which produces so much of the social maladjustment and
unhappiness in the world. For many generations we have bowed or necks
to the yoke of the conviction of sin. We have swallowed all manner of
poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school
teachers, our politicians, our priests....
"Thou shalt become as gods, knowing good and evil," good and
evil, with which to keep children under control, with which to prevent
free thinking, with which to impose local and familial and national
loyalties and with which to blind children to their glorious
intellectual heritage.
Misguided by authoritarian dogma, bound by exclusive (7)
faith, stunted by inculcated loyalty, torn by frantic heresy...and
loaded down by the weight of guilt and fear engendered by its own
original promises, the unfortunate human race, deprived ... of its
reasoning power and its natural capacity to enjoy the satisfaction of
its natural urges, struggles along under its ghastly self-imposed
burden. The results, the inevitable results, are frustration,
inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly
or to make a world fit to live in.
Man's freedom to observe and to think freely... has been
destroyed or crippled by local certainties, by gods of local
moralities, of local loyalty, of personal salvation... frequently
masquerading as love... (8)
The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the
concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child
training... these are the belated objectives of practically all
effective psychotherapy. Would they not be legitimate objectives of
original education? Would it not be sensible to stop imposing our own
local prejudices and faiths on children and give them all sides of
every question so that...they may have the ability to size things up
and make their own decisions?
[These suggestions have been] met with an outcry of
heretic or iconoclast such as was raised... those who claimed the
world was round and against the truths of evolution...The pretense is
made... that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized
people, immorality, lawlessness and social chaos.
If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of
good and evil, it must be psychiatrist who take the original
responsibility. ... What the world needs is honest, simple and clear
thinking, talking and writing.... the people who matter are the
teacher, the young mothers and fathers, the parent-teacher
associations, youth groups, service clubs... churches and Sunday
schoolseveryone who can be reached and given help toward intellectual
freedom and honesty for themselves and for the children... (9)
Can such a program of re-education or of a new kind of
education be charted? I would not presume to go so far, except to
suggest that psychology and sociology and simple psychopathology, the
sciences of living, should be made available to all the people by
being taught too all children in primary an secondary schools, while
the study of such thing as trigonometry, Latin, religions and others
of specialist concern should be left to universities. Only so... can
we help our children carry their responsibilities as world citizens...
(10)
When the other [infectious diseases] were attacked at
the preventative level, some martyrs had to be sacrificed to the cause
of humanity, because reactionary forces fought back. Ignorance,
superstition, moral certainties... resisted through anti-reform
organizations, religious and political pressure groups, even political
parities... It is not yet possible to lay a manslaughter charge
against parents who allow their... unvaccinated child to die
of...diphtheria. The problem is no longer the germ of diphtheria, but
rather the attitudes of parents who are incapable of accepting and
using proven knowledge for the protection of their children. (15)
...it has long been generally accepted that parents
have perfect right to impose any points of view, any lies or fears,
superstitions, prejudices, hates, or faith on their defenseless
children. It is, however, only recently that it has become a matter of
certain knowledge that these things cause neuroses, behavior
disorders, emotional disabilities, and failure to develop to a state
of emotional maturity which fits one to be a citizen of a
democracy....
Surely the training of children in home and schools
should be of at least as great public concern as their vaccination for
their own protection.... [I]ndividuals who have emotional disabilities
of their own, guilts, fears, inferiorities, are certain to project
their hates on to others... thus jeopardize seriously the external
relations of those who are associated with them... They are a very
real menace.
The government of a country cannot organize and impose any
social developments or external relations which are too far ahead of
the state of maturity of its citizens. There would otherwise result
internal conflict and dissension, producing a reactionary government
and a retreat to a less mature stage of social development. Any such
reaction now becomes a dangerous threat to the whole world.... for the
very survival of large parts of the human race, world understanding,
tolerance, and forbearance have become absolutely essential. We must
be prepared to sacrifice much if we would hope to have an opportunity
to go on... Whatever the cost, we must learn to live in friendliness
and peace with... all the people (16) in the world.
....only mature people can maintain the mature social
organization and stability in which alone lies hope of avoiding world
chaos and slaughter. (17)
There is something to be said for taking charge of our
own destiny, for gently putting aside the mistaken old ways of our
elders if that is possible. If it cannot be done gently, it may have
to be done roughly or even violently--that has happened before. (18)
Let us accept our own responsibility to remodel the world in
bolder, clearer more honest lines. (19)
[1]Brock Chisholm, Psychiatry (February, 1946) pages 7, 9-10, 16,
18. >end
Peace,
Doc
PS enjoy: http://ziegfeldgirl.multiply.com/video/item/328
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