Satyāgraha

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Satyāgraha (Sanskrit: सत्याग्रह) is a composite lexeme composed of the word satya (meaning “truth”) and agraha (“holding firmly to”). It also refers to a virtue in Indian philosophy, referring to being truthful and pure in thought, word and action. In Yoga philosophy, satya is one of five yamas (Sanskrit: यम).

Ahiṃsā (अहिंसा): Nonviolence
Satya (सत्य): Truthfulness
Asteya (अस्तेय): Not stealing
Brahmacharya (ब्रह्मचर्य): Chastity, marital fidelity, sexual restraint
Aparigraha (अपरिग्रहः): Non-avarice, non-possessiveness

 

“You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance.
Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.”

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Parapsychology: CIA testing Uri Geller

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The CIA was very interested in various methods to manipulate and exploit the human mind. Besides illegal experiments which involved psychotropic drugs and torture, they were also interested in parapsychology as the document at hand shows.
The objective of this group of experimental sessions was to verify Geller’s apparent paranormal perception under carefully controlled conditions with the goal of understanding the physical and psychological variables underlying such ability.

Cognitive dispossession

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Further References

Bublitz, J.-C.. (2013). My Mind Is Mine!? Cognitive Liberty as a Legal Concept (pp. 233–264). Springer, Dordrecht

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6253-4_19
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The “Straw man fallacy”

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A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man.”


Further References

Eemeren, F. H. Van, Amsterdam, F. V., & Walton, D.. (1996). The straw man fallacy. Logic and Argumentation

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139600187
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Talisse, R., & Aikin, S. F.. (2006). Two forms of the Straw Man. Argumentation

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/s10503-006-9017-8
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Lewiński, M.. (2011). Towards a Critique-Friendly Approach to the Straw Man Fallacy Evaluation. Argumentation

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/s10503-011-9227-6
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Lewiński, M., & Oswald, S.. (2013). When and how do we deal with straw men? A normative and cognitive pragmatic account. Journal of Pragmatics

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.05.001
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Ika, L. A.. (2018). Beneficial or Detrimental Ignorance: The Straw Man Fallacy of Flyvbjerg’s Test of Hirschman’s Hiding Hand. World Development

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.10.016
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Macagno, F., & Damele, G.. (2013). The dialogical force of implicit premises: Presumptions in enthymemes. Informal Logic

Plain numerical DOI: 10.22329/il.v33i3.3679
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Coup d’état

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A coup d’état also known simply as a coup, a putsch, golpe, or an overthrow, is an illegal and overt seizure of a state by the military or other elites within the state apparatus.[1]

A 2003 review of the academic literature found that the following factors were associated with coups:

  • officers’ personal grievances
  • military organizational grievances
  • military popularity
  • military attitudinal cohesiveness
  • economic decline
  • domestic political crisis
  • contagion from other regional coups
  • external threat
  • participation in war
  • foreign veto power and military’s national security doctrine
  • officers’ political culture
  • noninclusive institutions
  • colonial legacy
  • economic development
  • undiversified exports
  • officers’ class composition
  • military size
  • strength of civil society
  • regime legitimacy and past coups.[18]

Professor Noam Chomsky

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Academic Freedom and the Corporatization of Universities

Hegemonny or Survival

Further References

Chomsky, N., & Macedo, D. P.. (2000). Noam Chomsky – On Miseducation. Chomsky on MisEducation

Plain numerical DOI: 10.2307/3089040
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Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T.. (2010). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?. In The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511817755.002
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Chomsky, N.. (2011). Language and other cognitive systems. What is special about language?. Language Learning and Development

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2011.584041
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Chomsky, N.. (1992). Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. East

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1086/313443
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Chomsky, N.. (1970). Remarks on Nominalization. In Readings in English Tranformational Grammar

Plain numerical DOI: 10.3324/haematol.2009.010702
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Chomsky, N.. (2013). Problems of projection. Lingua

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2012.12.003
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Chomsky, N.. (2007). Of Minds and Language. Biolinguistics

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1177/0743558412464524
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Chomsky, N.. (2001). Hegemony or Survival. Business Week

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5128-10.2011
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Chomsky, N.. (2001). The New War Against Terror. Human Nature

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7652.2005.00152.x
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Skull & Bones society

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones

Skull and Bones’s membership developed a reputation in association with the “power elite“.[10] Regarding the qualifications for membership, Lanny Davis wrote in the 1968 Yale yearbook:

If the society had a good year, this is what the “ideal” group will consist of: a football captain; a Chairman of the Yale Daily News; a conspicuous radical; a Whiffenpoof; a swimming captain; a notorious drunk with a 94 average; a film-maker; a political columnist; a religious group leader; a Chairman of the Lit; a foreigner; a ladies’ man with two motorcycles; an ex-service man; a negro, if there are enough to go around; a guy nobody else in the group had heard of, ever …

— Lanny Davis, quoted by Alexandra Robbins

Like other Yale senior societies, Skull and Bones membership was almost exclusively limited to white Protestant males for much of its history. While Yale itself had exclusionary policies directed at particular ethnic and religious groups, the senior societies were even more exclusionary.[11][12] While some Catholics were able to join such groups, Jews were more often not.[12] Some of these excluded groups eventually entered Skull and Bones by means of sports, through the society’s practice of tapping standout athletes. Star football players tapped for Skull and Bones included the first Jewish player (Al Hessberg, class of 1938) and African-American player (Levi Jackson, class of 1950, who turned down the invitation for the Berzelius Society).[11]

Yale became coeducational in 1969, prompting some other secret societies such as St. Anthony Hall to transition to co-ed membership, yet Skull and Bones remained fully male until 1992. The Bones class of 1971’s attempt to tap women for membership was opposed by Bones alumni, who dubbed them the “bad club” and quashed their attempt. “The issue”, as it came to be called by Bonesmen, was debated for decades.[13] The class of 1991 tapped seven female members for membership in the next year’s class, causing conflict with the alumni association.[14] The Trust changed the locks on the Tomb and the Bonesmen instead met in the Manuscript Society building.[14] A mail-in vote by members decided 368–320 to permit women in the society, but a group of alumni led by William F. Buckley obtained a temporary restraining order to block the move, arguing that a formal change in bylaws was needed.[14][15] Other alumni, such as John Kerry and R. Inslee Clark, Jr., spoke out in favor of admitting women. The dispute was highlighted on an editorial page of The New York Times.[14][16] A second alumni vote, in October 1991, agreed to accept the Class of 1992, and the lawsuit was dropped.[14][17]

Judith Ann Schiff, Chief Research Archivist at the Yale University Library, has written: “The names of its members weren’t kept secret‍—‌that was an innovation of the 1970s‍—‌but its meetings and practices were.”[18] While resourceful researchers could assemble member data from these original sources, in 1985, an anonymous source leaked rosters to Antony C. Sutton. This membership information was kept privately for over 15 years, as Sutton feared that the photocopied pages could somehow identify the member who leaked it. He wrote a book on the group, America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones. The information was finally reformatted as an appendix in the book Fleshing out Skull and Bones, a compilation edited by Kris Millegan and published in 2003.

Among prominent alumni are former President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft (a founder’s son); former Presidents and father and son George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush; Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central Railroad System, and a United States Senator from New York; Supreme Court Justices Morrison R. Waite and Potter Stewart;[19] James Jesus Angleton, “mother of the Central Intelligence Agency“; Henry Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War (1940-1945); Robert A. Lovett, U.S. Secretary of Defense (1951-1953); William B. Washburn, Governor of Massachusetts; and Henry Luce, founder and publisher of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated magazines.[citation needed]

John Kerry, former U.S. Secretary of State and former U.S. Senator; Stephen A. Schwarzman, founder of Blackstone Group; Austan Goolsbee,[20] Chairman of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers; Harold Stanley, co-founder of Morgan Stanley; and Frederick W. Smith, founder of FedEx, are all reported to be members.

In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were alumni. George W. Bush wrote in his autobiography, “[In my] senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society; so secret, I can’t say anything more.”[21] When asked what it meant that he and Bush were both Bonesmen, former Presidential candidate John Kerry said, “Not much, because it’s a secret.”[22][23]

The structure of power

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Vitali, S., Glattfelder, J. B., & Battiston, S.. (2011). The network of Global corporate control. PLoS ONE

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025995
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Heemskerk, E. M., & Takes, F. W.. (2016). The Corporate Elite Community Structure of Global Capitalism. New Political Economy

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2015.1041483
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Testing Theories of American Politics

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When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
(Gilens & Page, 2014, p.575)

www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B


Further References

Gilens, M., & Page, B. I.. (2014). Testing theories of American politics: Elites, interest groups, and average citizens. Perspectives on Politics

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1017/S1537592714001595
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Peer-reviewed articles

Peters, T.. (2020). The Struggle for Cognitive Liberty: Retrofitting the Self in Activist Theology. Theology and Science

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/14746700.2020.1786219
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Sommaggio, P., Mazzocca, M., Gerola, A., & Ferro, F.. (2017). Cognitive Liberty. A first step towards a human neuro-rights declaration. BioLaw Journal

Plain numerical DOI: 10.15168/blj.v0i3.255
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Weissenbacher, A.. (2018). Defending cognitive liberty in an age of moral engineering. Theology and Science

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/14746700.2018.1488476
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Sommaggio, P., & Mazzocca, M.. (2020). Cognitive liberty and human rights. In Neuroscience and Law: Complicated Crossings and New Perspectives

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-38840-9_6
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Ienca, M.. (2017). The Right to Cognitive Liberty. Scientific American

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1038/scientificamerican0817-10
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Ienca, M., & Andorno, R.. (2017). Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology. Life Sciences, Society and Policy

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1186/s40504-017-0050-1
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Walsh, C.. (2010). Drugs and human rights: Private palliatives, sacramental freedoms and cognitive liberty. International Journal of Human Rights

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/13642980802704270
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Kraft, C. J., & Giordano, J.. (2017). Integrating brain science and law: Neuroscientific evidence and legal perspectives on protecting individual liberties. Frontiers in Neuroscience

Plain numerical DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2017.00621
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Rainey, S., Martin, S., Christen, A., Mégevand, P., & Fourneret, E.. (2020). Brain Recording, Mind-Reading, and Neurotechnology: Ethical Issues from Consumer Devices to Brain-Based Speech Decoding. Science and Engineering Ethics

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/s11948-020-00218-0
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Ienca, M., & Andorno, R.. (2021). Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and Neurotechnology. Analisis Filosofico

Plain numerical DOI: 10.36446/AF.2021.386
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Wolpe, P. R.. (2017). Neuroprivacy and cognitive liberty. In The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics

Plain numerical DOI: 10.4324/9781315708652
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Walsh, C.. (2014). Beyond religious freedom: Psychedelics and cognitive liberty. In Prohibition, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-40957-8_11
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White, A. E.. (2010). The lie of fMRI: An examination of the ethics of a market in lie detection using functional magnetic resonance imaging. HEC Forum

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/s10730-010-9141-6
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Xu, H., & Dinev, T.. (2012). The security-liberty balance: Individuals’ attitudes towards internet government surveillance. Electronic Government

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1504/EG.2012.044778
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Davies, W.. (2017). Elite Power under Advanced Neoliberalism. Theory, Culture & Society

, 34(5–6), 227–250.
Plain numerical DOI: 10.1177/0263276417715072
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Foster, J. B., & Holleman, H.. (2010). The Financial Power Elite. Monthly Review

, 62(1), 1.
Plain numerical DOI: 10.14452/MR-062-01-2010-05_1
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Iyer, R., Koleva, S., Graham, J., Ditto, P., & Haidt, J.. (2012). Understanding libertarian morality: The psychological dispositions of self-identified libertarians. PLoS ONE

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0042366
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Boire, R.. (2000). On Cognitive Liberty. In Journal of Cognitive Liberties

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/00207144.2013.753820
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Ienca, M., & Andorno, R.. (2017). Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology. Life Sciences, Society and Policy

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1186/s40504-017-0050-1
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Shanker, S. G.. (2009). Three concepts of liberty. In After Cognitivism: A Reassessment of Cognitive Science and Philosophy

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9992-2_13
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Rindermann, H.. (2012). Intellectual classes, technological progress and economic development: The rise of cognitive capitalism. Personality and Individual Differences

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2011.07.001
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SENTENTIA, W.. (2006). Neuroethical Considerations: Cognitive Liberty and Converging Technologies for Improving Human Cognition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1196/annals.1305.014
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Desai, A. C.. (2011). Libertarian Paternalism, Externalities, and the “Spirit of Liberty”: How Thaler and Sunstein Are Nudging Us toward an “Overlapping Consensus”. Law and Social Inquiry, 36(1), 263–295.

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-4469.2010.01231.x
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Pustilnik, A. C.. (2012). Neurotechnologies at the intersection of criminal procedure and constitutional law. In The Constitution and the Future of Criminal Justice in America

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139108034.011
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