Inner Turmoil

Self-deception and Morality

This book systematically explores the moral issues surrounding self-deception. While many articles and books have been written on the concept of self-deception in recent years, Martin's gives much greater emphasis to self-deception as a significant topic for both ethical theory and applied ethics. "Self-deception is . . . perplexing from a moral point of view. It seems tailor-made to camouflage and foster immorality. . . . Does all self-deception involve some guilt, and is it among the most abhorrent evils. as some moralists and theologians have charged? Or is it only wrong sometimes, such as when it has bad consequences? Could it on occasion be permissible or even desirable to deceive ourselves, just as we are sometimes justified in deceiving other people? Are self-deceivers perhaps more like innocent victims than perpetrators of deceit, and as such deserving of compassion and help? Or, paradoxically, are they best viewed with ambivalence: culpable as deceivers and simultaneously innocent as victims of deception?" (from the introduction) Martin develops a conception of self-deception as the purposeful evasion of acknowledging to oneself truths or one's view of truth. He details a systematic framework for understanding the main moral perspectives and traditions concerning self-deception that have emerged in western philosophy. In so doing, he clarifies related concepts like sincerity, authenticity, honesty, hypocrisy, weakness of will, and self-understanding. Ranging across traditions both philosophical (Kant, Kierkegaard, and Sartre) and non-philosophical (Freud, Eugene O'Neill, and Henrik Ibsen), Martin shows why self-deception is as morally complex as any other major form of behavior. The appeal of this book is broad. The volume will challenge professional philosophers and psychologists, yet it is organized and written to be accessible to students in courses on ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of literature. Martin's numerous literary examples should also interest literary critics.

The Rape of the Mind

Since 1933, when a completely drugged and trial-conditioned human wreck confessed to having started the Reichstag fire in Berlin, Dr. Joost A.M. Meerloo has studied the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective 'truth' on their victims' minds. Dr. Meerloo spent the first two and one-half years of WWII under the pressure of Nazi-occupied Holland, witnessing at first-hand the Nazi methods of mental torture on more than one occasion. Then, after personal experiences with enforced interrogation, he escaped from a Nazi prison and certain death to England, where he was able, as Chief of the Psychological Department of the Netherlands Forces, to observe and study coercive methods officially. After the war, he came to the United States. As more and more cases of thought control, brainwashing, and mental coercion were disclosed (Cardinal Mindszenty, Colonel Schwable, Robert Vogeler, and others), his interest grew. It was Dr. Meerloo who coined the word menticide, the killing of the spirit, for this peculiar crime. It is Dr. Meerloo's position that through pressure on the weak points in men's makeup, totalitarian methods can turn anyone into a 'traitor.' And in The Rape of the Mind he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people's minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized 'rape of the mind.' He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission, and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The Rape of the Mind is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists.

Seven Essays on the Subject of Practical Occultism