Listening to the silent majority

[78]

The brain sciences are still lightyears behind compared to what men can do, for instance, in the areas of modern industry and weaponry. In 1982 author Morton Hunt estimated the number of cognitive scientists at a mere one thousand for the entire world. In the meantime, half of all researchers world-wide are directly or indirectly engaged in military-industrial research. In other words, scientists everywhere are directing their work primarily towards the perfection of new methods of destruction. Few seem to realize, that a study of the deus ex machina in our heads is imperative not only because the brain represents the only instrument in the universe that could halt a nuclear Armageddon, but because it is the sole place to look for a solution to society's afflictions.

Each of us is an actor in the chemiconeurological (or chemical-neurological) drama that is being performed invisibly within the circuit of our minds. Wit Wolf Barend Hendrik Strijdom, and other clones of apartheid philosophy, offered a dreadful and disturbing portrait of the psyche of a minority of South African whites. ‘How mad is a madman whose whole life was spent among crazies?’ asked Richard McNeill in the Sunday Times.^57.

57. Learning How It Works, by George Johnson, The New York Times, Sunday magazine section, August 9, 1987