Friday, January 22, 2016

The movie, Behind Closed Doors, 1948, starring Lucille Bremer and Richard Carlson is an excellent drama that shows behind the scenes of how institutional bureaucracies exert diabolical control upon their hired staff.  What did Hannah Arendt say about Nazis?  "The banality of evil." As a friend of mine says of managers overseeing other employees, "people with $.69 power are used to control and degrade their underlings."  The movie is a rare, brilliant piece.  Steven Torrey in the comments below the show notes writes "A taut drama in sixty-one minutes." It is an excellent look into the ghoulish jailers who control patients with drugs, bullying violence, and locked wards.  Wow, that almost describes to a tee the kind of control that local administrators exert on high school students in your own backyard.  Schools enjoy the unique privilege of being appointed the purported centers for higher education.  They are not.  That "higher education" has always been a joke, at least an inside joke.  But it is Salman Khan and the home-school movement who are undoing the liberal control on schools.  This is revolutionary, a peaceful regeneration of society toward peace, prosperity, and individual freedom.  It's happening now.


The movie was released in 1948, three years after WWII.  So the audience for sure was primed by stories of Nazi atrocities while told how virtuous the communist state of the Soviet Union was.   I particularly enjoyed hearing, in the movie, the doctors offended by having their reputation impugned as if it were gold.  Fool's gold maybe.
Some folks might be incredulous. But recall the classic books in the field of psychiatry, a "science" that has effectively been declared a farce by some of the most brilliant minds in psychiatry, like Dr. Thomas Szasz.  See also this list of his articles.

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