Joost A.M. Meerloo (1903–1976) was a prominent psychiatrist and writer especially known for his critical analysis of totalitarian systems and psychological warfare. He emigrated to the US and published numerous books on psychological control and manipulation.
“In his important social psychological experiments with students, Asch found out in simple tests that there was a yielding toward an ERRING MAJORITY opinion in more than a third of his test persons, and 75 percent of subjects experimented upon agreed with the majority in varying degrees. In many persons the weight of authority is more important than the quality of the authority.”
Joost A.M. Meerloo
“The Pavlovian strategy in public relations has people conditioned more and more to ask themselves, “What do other people think?” As a result, a common delusion is created: people are incited to think what other people think, and thus public opinion may mushroom out into a mass prejudice. Expressed in psychoanalytic terms, through daily propagandistic noise backed up by forceful verbal cues, people can more and more be forced to identify with the powerful noisemaker. Big brother’s voice resounds in all the little brothers.”
Joost A.M. Meerloo
“It is often disturbing to see how even intelligent people do not have straight thinking minds of their own. The pattern of the mind, whether toward conformity and compliance or otherwise, is conditioned rather early in life.”
Joost A.M. Meerloo
“Totalitarian ideology is able to blackmail man through his inner cowardice. It threatens him into surrendering his innermost convictions in exchange for glamour and acceptance…”
Joost A.M. Meerloo
“The mind that is open for questions is open for dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorize, to salivate when the bell rings.”
Joost A.M. Meerloo
“Every culture institutionalizes certain forms of behavior that communicate and encourage certain forms of thinking and acting, thus moulding the character of its citizens. To the degree that the individual is made an object of constant mental manipulation, to the degree that cultural institutions may tend to weaken intellectual and spiritual strength, to the degree that knowledge of the mind is used to tame and condition people instead of educating them, to that degree does the culture itself produce men and women who are predisposed to accept an authoritarian way of life.”
Joost A.M. Meerloo
“Free man needs loyalty to the self first of all, and this implies the right to be himself”
Joost A.M. Meerloo
“advertising symbolizes the art of making people dissatisfied with what they have.”
Joost A.M. Meerloo