Structural violence is a term commonly ascribed to Johan Galtung, which he introduced in the article “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research” (1969). It refers to a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized adultism, ageism, classism, elitism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, speciesism, racism, and sexism are some examples of structural violence as proposed by Galtung.[2][3] According to Galtung, rather than conveying a physical image, structural violence is an “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs”.[4] As it is avoidable, structural violence is a high cause of premature death and unnecessary disability. Because structural violence affects people differently in various social structures, it is very closely linked to social injustice.[5] Structural violence and direct violence are said to be highly interdependent, including family violence, gender violence, hate crimes, racial violence, police violence, state violence, terrorism, and war.
Farmer, P.. (2004). An Anthropology of Structural Violence. Current Anthropology
“Any thorough understanding of the modern epidemics of aids and tuberculosis in haiti or elsewhere in the postcolonial world requires a thorough knowledge of history and political economy. this essay, based on over a decade of research in rural haiti, draws on the work of sidney”
Farmer, P. E., Nizeye, B., Stulac, S., & Keshavjee, S.. (2006). Structural violence and clinical medicine. PLoS Medicine
“Structural violence refers to the social structures that put people in harm’s way. farmer and colleagues describe the impact of social violence upon people living with hiv in the us and rwanda.”
Galtung, J.. (1969). Violence, Peace, and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research
“Explores the concept of violence and gives details to the distinction between ‘structural’ and ‘physical’ violence. discusses the relationship between the two and how one may be used to prevent the other. describes the concept of peace in terms of these definitions and suggests the implications for research and peace studies.”
Farmer, P.. (2015). On Suffering and Structural Violence : A View from Below. Daedalus
“Everyone knows that suffering exists. the question is how to define it. given that each person’s pain has a degree of reality for him or her that the pain of others can surely never approach, is widespread agreement on the subject possible? almost all of us would agree that premature and painful illness, torture, and rape constitute extreme suffering. most would also agree that insidious assaults on dignity, such as institutionalized racism and sexism, also cause great and unjust injury. given our consensus on some of the more conspicuous forms of suffering, a number of corollary questions come to the fore. can we identify those most at risk of great suffering? among those whose suffering is not mortal, is it possible to identify those most likely to sustain permanent and disabling damage? are certain”
Kelly, B. D.. (2005). Structural violence and schizophrenia. Social Science and Medicine
“AbstractIn red tape, i do not use the term ?arbitrary? in opposition to ?systematic?, as is alleged by harriss and jeffrey. arbitrariness accompanies systematic forms of discrimination, and is the result of both, the indifference to outcomes and to the chaotic style of functioning of indian bureaucracies. interpreting structural violence, or explaining injustice, requires understanding what the state means to different people. the chief argument that poverty is a form of violence, and represents the killing of the poor, underlines the injustice that results from treating poverty as a biopolitical fact. i employ a notion of politics that is not restricted to parties and mobilization, but which saturates all relations of inequality. despite voicing dissatisfaction with the analysis presented in red tape, harriss and jeffrey fail to forward an adequate and coherent alternative.”
Ho, K.. (2007). Structural Violence as a Human Rights Violation. Essex Human Rights Review
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“(From the chapter) in this chapter, the author is concerned about later generations of human rights and their impact on the way peace psychologists think and practice. whereas first-generation rights refer to civil and political rights, second-generation rights focus on social, economic, and cultural rights. third-generation rights refer to ‘solidarity rights’ such as the right to development, self-determination, peace, and a clean environment. fourth-generation rights refer to the rights of indigenous peoples. after discussing the historical formulation of these rights, the author then shows how several recent psychological theories, including liberation psychology, cultural psychology, and social constructivism elucidate this extended thinking about human rights. she argues that examining these extended human rights helps us illuminate the chronic and hidden structural violence produced by armed conflict. she then describes how the cases of argentina and guatemala demonstrate a ‘shift toward the social and structural’ within selected areas of psychological and human rights discourse. she then describes community peace-building that focuses on the structural violence produced by violations of these extended human rights. (psycinfo database record (c) 2012 apa, all rights reserved).”
Sokoloff, N. J., & Dupont, I.. (2005). Domestic violence at the intersections of race, class, and gender: Challenges and contributions to understanding violence against marginalized women in diverse communities. Violence Against Women
“This article provides a comprehensive review of the emerging domestic violence literature using a race, class, gender, sexual orientation intersectional analysis and structural framework fostered by women of color and their allies to understand the experiences and contexts of domestic violence for marginalized women in u.s. society. the first half of the article lays out a series of challenges that an intersectional analysis grounded in a structural framework provides for understanding the role of culture in domestic violence. the second half of the article points to major contributions of such an approach to feminist methods and practices in working with battered women on the margins of society.”
Kumar, S.. (2015). Red tape: bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India. The Journal of Peasant Studies
“Objective the aim of this study was to assess the financial costs to hospitals for the implementation of hospital-wide patient safety and infection control programs. methods we conducted questionnaire surveys and structured interviews in seven acute-care teaching hospitals with an established reputation for their efforts towards improving patient safety. we defined the scope of patient safety activities by use of an incremental activity measure between 1999 and 2004. hospital-wide incremental manpower, material, and financial resources to implement patient safety programs were measured. results the total incremental activities were 19,414–78,540 person-hours per year. the estimated incremental costs of activities for patient safety and infection control were calculated as us$ 1.100–2.335 million per year, equivalent to the employment of 17–40 full-time healthcare staff. the ratio of estimated costs to total medical revenue ranged from 0.55% to 2.57%. smaller hospitals tend to shoulder a higher burden compared to larger hospitals. conclusions our study provides a framework for measuring hospital-wide activities for patient safety. study findings suggest that the total amount of resources is so great that cost-effective and evidence-based health policy is needed to assure the sustainability of hospital safety programs.”
Ferguson, C. J., Rueda, S. M., Cruz, A. M., Ferguson, D. E., Fritz, S., & Smith, S. M.. (2008). Violent video games and aggression: Causal relationship or byproduct of family violence and intrinsic violence motivation?. Criminal Justice and Behavior
“Two studies examined the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression or violence in the laboratory and in real life. study 1 participants were either randomized or allowed to choose to play a violent or nonviolent game. although males were more aggressive than females, neither randomized exposure to violent-video-game conditions nor previous real-life exposure to violent video games caused any differences in aggression. study 2 examined correlations between trait aggression, violent criminal acts, and exposure to both violent games and family violence. results indicated that trait aggression, family violence, and male gender were predictive of violent crime, but exposure to violent games was not. structural equation modeling suggested that family violence and innate aggression as predictors of violent crime were a better fit to the data than was exposure to video game violence. these results question the common belief that violent-video-game exposure causes violent acts.”
Vine, D.. (2015). The United States Probably Has More Foreign Military Bases Than Any Other People, Nation, or Empire in History. The Nation
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“Ith the us military having withdrawn many of its forces from iraq and afghanistan, most americans would be forgiven for being unaware that hundreds of us bases and hundreds of thousands of us troops still encircle the globe. although few know it, the united states garrisons the planet unlike any country in history, and the evidence is on view from honduras to oman, japan to germany, singapore to djibouti. this article originally appeared at tomdispatch.com. to stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from tomdispatch.com. like most americans, for most of my life, i rarely thought about military bases. scholar and former cia consultant chalmers johnson described me well when he wrote in 2004, ‘as distinct from other peoples, most americans do not recognize—or do not want to recognize—that the united states dominates the world through its military power. due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet.’ to the extent that americans think about these bases at all, we generally assume they’re essential to national security and global peace. our leaders have claimed as much since most of them were established during world war ii and the early days of the cold war. as a result, we consider the situation normal and accept that us military installations exist in staggering numbers in other countries, on other peoples’ land. on the other hand, the idea that there would be foreign bases on us soil is unthinkable. while there are no freestanding foreign bases permanently located in the united states, there are now around 800 us bases in foreign countries. seventy years after world war ii and 62 years after the korean war, there are still 174 us ‘base sites’ in germany, 113 in japan, and 83 in south korea, according to the pentagon. hundreds more dot the planet in around 80 countries, including aruba and australia, bahrain and bulgaria, colombia, kenya, and qatar, among many other places. although few americans realize it, the united states likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history. oddly enough, however, the mainstream media rarely report or comment on the issue. for years, during debates over the closure of the prison at the base in guantánamo bay, cuba, nary a pundit or politician wondered why the united states has a base on cuban territory in the first place or questioned whether we should have one there at al…”
Scahill, J.. (2015). Germany is the Tell-Tale Heart of America’s Drone War. The Intercept
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“TOP-secret u.s. intelligence document obtained by the intercept confirms that the sprawling u.s. military base in ramstein, germany serves as the high-tech heart of america’s drone program. ramstein is the site of a satellite relay station that enables drone operators in the american southwest to communicate with their remote aircraft in yemen, somalia, afghanistan and other targeted countries. the top-secret slide deck, dated july 2012, provides the most detailed blueprint seen to date of the technical architecture used to conduct strikes with predator and reaper drones.”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Russian: Протоколы сионских мудрецов) or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is an antisemitic fabricated text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The hoax, which was shown to be plagiarized from several earlier sources, some not antisemitic in nature,[1] was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. According to the claims made by some of its publishers, the Protocols are the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony by subverting the morals of Gentiles, and by controlling the press and the world’s economies.
Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies that were distributed throughout the United States in the 1920s. The Nazis sometimes used the Protocols as propaganda against Jews; it was assigned by some German teachers, as if factual, to be read by German schoolchildren after the Nazis came to power in 1933,[2] despite having been exposed as fraudulent by The Times of London in 1921. It is still widely available today in numerous languages, in print and on the Internet, and continues to be presented by some proponents as a genuine document.
The Protocols also became a part of the Nazi propaganda effort to justify persecution of the Jews. In The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933–1945, Nora Levin states that “Hitler used the Protocols as a manual in his war to exterminate the Jews”:
Despite conclusive proof that the Protocols were a gross forgery, they had sensational popularity and large sales in the 1920s and 1930s. They were translated into every language of Europe and sold widely in Arab lands, the US, and England. But it was in Germany after World War I that they had their greatest success. There they were used to explain all of the disasters that had befallen the country: the defeat in the war, the hunger, the destructive inflation.[78]
Marsden, V. E.. (1922). The protocols of the meeting of the learned elders of zion. New York
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“Under a direct current electric field, dictyostelium cells exhibit migration towards the cathode. to determine the input–output relationship of the cell’s galvanotactic response, we developed an experimental instrument in which electric signals applied to the cells are highly reproducible and the motile response are analyzed quantitatively. with no electric field, the cells moved randomly in all directions. upon applying an electric field, cell migration speeds became about 1.3 times faster than those in the absence of an electric field. such kinetic effects of electric fields on the migration were observed for cells stimulated between 0.25 and 10 v/cm of the field strength. the directions of cell migrations were biased toward the cathode in a positive manner with field strength, showing galvanotactic response in a dose-dependent manner. quantitative analysis of the relationship between field strengths and directional movements revealed that the biased movements of the cells depend on the square of electric field strength, which can be described by one simple phenomenological equation. the threshold strength for the galvanotaxis was between 0.25 and 1 v/cm. galvanotactic efficiency reached to half-maximum at 2.6 v/cm, which corresponds to an approximate 8 mv voltage difference between the cathode and anode direction of 10 μm wide, round cells. based on these results, possible mechanisms of galvanotaxis in dictyostelium cells were discussed. this development of experimental system, together with its good microscopic accessibility for intracellular signaling molecules, makes dictyostelium cells attractive as a model organism for elucidating stochastic processes in the signaling systems responsible for cell motility and its regulations.”
Bali, R. N.. (2012). The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Turkey. In The Global Impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Century-Old Myth
“”Four children of john goodwin in boston which had enjoyed a religious education , and answer’d it with a towardly ingenuity; children indeed of an exemplary …”
Bytwerk, R. L.. (2015). Believing in “inner Truth”: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Nazi Propaganda, 1933-1945. Holocaust and Genocide Studies
“Although most leading nazis realized that the protocols of the elders of zion was a spurious document, they found it useful in promoting belief in the international jewish conspiracy of which they were already convinced. authorship and other details were irrelevant, they averred, if the book expressed ‘inner truth.’”
Webman, E.. (2012). The global impact of the protocols of the elders of zion: A century-old myth. The Global Impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Century-Old Myth
“‘This volume … comprises a compilation of papers presented at a conference held in october 2004 at tel aviv university’–introduction. introduction esther webman part i: russia and eastern europe 1. toward the prehistory of the protocols lev aronov, henryk baran and dmitri zubarev 2. th enemy of humanity yohanan petrovsky-shtern 3. the re-emergence of the protocols of the elders of zion beate kosmala part ii: western europe 4. the protocols of the elders of zion in court michael hagemeister 5. why the jews? wolfram meyer zu uptrup 6. the protocols of the elders of zion on the interne juliane wetzel part iii: the muslim and arab world 7. adoption of the protocols in the arab discourse on the arab-israeli conflict, zionism and the jews esther webman 8. the protocols of the elders of zion in iranian politica and cultural discourse orly r. rahimiyan 9. the protocols of the elders of zion in turkey rifat n. bali 10. rationalizing the hidden hand goetz nordbruc part iv: the us 10. philosemites embracing the protocols? yaakov ariel part v: south america 11. hugo wast and the protocols of the elders of zion in argentina graciela ben-dror 12. the case of the brazilian revisionist s.e. castan luiz nazario 13. political dissemination of the judeo-masonic conspiracy theory and the outbreak of la violencia in columbia, 1920-1946 thomas j. williford part vi: africa and asia 14. the protocols of the elders of zion in japan david g. goodman 15. the protocols of the elders of zion in south africa milton shain.”
Greene, D.. (2007). The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Shofar
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“Hitler is portrayed as interested in the protocols only eatly in the 1920s, and eisner uses a soft hand in guiding his reader through the holocaust era – including one 1945 incident in which an american intelligence officer finds joseph goebbels’ diary, which contained references to the protocols (p. 110). eisner himself becomes a character in the novel, traveling to archives and libraries to research the protocols and even confronting college students as they protest against some vague form of jewish influence.”
The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Deems the deprivation of liberty of Mr. Julian Assange as arbitrary
On 4 December 2015, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) adopted Opinion No. 54/2015, in which it considered that Mr. Julian Assange was arbitrarily detained by the Governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In that opinion, the Working Group recognized that Mr. Assange is entitled to his freedom of movement and to compensation. The application was filed with the Working Group in September 2014. The Opinion 54/2015 was sent to the Governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on 22 January 2016 in accordance with the Working Group’s Methods of Work.
Given that Mr. Assange is an Australian citizen, one of the members of the Working Group who shares his nationality recused herself from participating in the deliberations. Another member of the Working Group disagreed with the position of the majority and considered that the situation of Mr. Assange is not one of detention and therefore falls outside the mandate of the Working Group.
In mid-2010, a Swedish Prosecutor commenced an investigation against Mr. Assange based on allegations of sexual misconduct. On 7 December 2010, pursuant to an international arrest warrant issued at the request of the Swedish Prosecutor, Mr. Assange was detained in Wandsworth Prison for 10 days in isolation. Thereafter, he was subjected to house arrest for 550 days. While under house arrest in the United Kingdom, Mr. Assange requested the Republic of Ecuador to grant him refugee status at its Embassy in London. The Republic of Ecuador granted asylum because of Mr. Assange’s fear that if he was extradited to Sweden, he would be further extradited to the United States where he would face serious criminal charges for the peaceful exercise of his freedoms. Since August 2012, Mr. Assange has not been able to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy and is subject to extensive surveillance by the British police.
The Working Group considered that Mr. Assange has been subjected to different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth prison which was followed by house arrest and his confinement at the Ecuadorian Embassy. Having concluded that there was a continuous deprivation of liberty, the Working Group also found that the detention was arbitrary because he was held in isolation during the first stage of detention and because of the lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor in its investigations, which resulted in the lengthy detention of Mr. Assange. The Working Group found that this detention is in violation of Articles 9 and 10 of the UDHR and Articles 7, 9(1), 9(3), 9(4), 10 and 14 of the ICCPR, and falls within category III as defined in its Methods of Work.
The Working Group therefore requested Sweden and the United Kingdom to assess the situation of Mr. Assange to ensure his safety and physical integrity, to facilitate the exercise of his right to freedom of movement in an expedient manner, and to ensure the full enjoyment of his rights guaranteed by the international norms on detention. The Working Group also considered that the detention should be brought to an end and that Mr. Assange should be afforded the right to compensation.
Bruns, A.. (2012). Towards Distributed Citizen Participation Lessons from WikiLeaks and the Queensland Floods. JeDEM
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“This paper examines the rapid and ad hoc development and interactions of participative citizen communities during acute events, using the examples of the 2011 floods in queensland, australia, and the global controversy surrounding wikileaks and its spokesman, julian assange. the self-organising community responses to such events which can be observed in these cases bypass or leapfrog, at least temporarily, most organisational or administrative hurdles which may otherwise frustrate the establishment of online communities; they fast-track the processes of community development and structuration. by understanding them as a form of rapid prototyping, e-democracy initiatives can draw important lessons from observing the community activities around such acute events.”
Assange, J.. (2013). Cyberpunks: Liberdade E O Futuro Da Internet. In Climate Change 2013 – The Physical Science Basis
“Cypherpunks – liberdade e o futuro da internet’ é o primeiro livro de julian assange, editor chefe e visionário por trás do wikileaks, a ser publicado no brasil com o selo da boitempo. o livro é resultado de reflexões de assange com um grupo de pensadores rebeldes e ativistas que atuam nas linhas de frente da batalha em defesa do ciberespaço (jacob appelbaum, andy müller-maguhn e jérémie zimmermann). apesar de a internet ter possibilitado verdadeiras revoluções no mundo todo, assange prevê uma grande onda de repressão, a ponto de considerar a internet como uma possível ameaça à civilização humana devido à transferência do poder de populações inteiras a um complexo de agências de espionagem e seus aliados corporativos transnacionais, que não precisarão prestar contas pelos seus atos. o livro reflete sobre a vigilância em massa, censura e liberdade, mas o principal tema é o movimento cypherpunk, que defendem a utilização da criptografia e métodos similares como meios para provocar mudanças sociais e políticas. fundado no início dos anos 1990, o movimento atingiu o auge de suas atividades durante as ‘criptoguerras’ e após a censura da internet em 2011 na primavera árabe. desde junho deste ano, quando conseguiu asilo político na embaixada do equador em londres temendo um revés diplomático que o entregasse às autoridades norte-americanas, assange tem se dedicado a promover debates sobre a sociedade contemporânea com grandes intelectuais de todo o mundo e foi dentro deste contexto que escreveu cypherpunks.”
Ottosen, R.. (2013). WikiLeaks: news in the networked era. Digital Journalism
“The book wikileaks: news in the networked era by charlie beckett and james ball is an excellent book offering a systematic documentation on the history of wikileaks and the controversial role of the founder, julian assange. the destiny of assange and wikileaks are closely linked. one of many uncertainties for the future of wikileaks is linked to the outcome of the criminal investigation over the alleged sexual abuse by assange towards two swedish women. the authors wisely choose not to go into the details of the case, since the legal case is ongoing, and since the issue of assange’s possible abuse is irrelevant for the main topic of the book: the future of journalism in the age of internet.”
Žižek, S.. (2013). Edward Snowden , Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange: our new heroes. The Guardian
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“Slavoj žižek: as the nsa revelations have shown, whistleblowing is now an essential art. it is our means of keeping ‘public reason’ alive”
Caryl, C.. (2011). Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything.. New York Review of Books
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“The article offers the author’s views on the move of wikileaks to release confidential documents into the public domain, which violates the concept of privacy. he notes the decision of wikileaks to post examples from a cache of 251,287 formerly secret u.s. diplomatic cables into the internet. he cites the aim of founder julian assange, which claims that assange wants to make the world more civil by making the u.s. state department and department of defense accountable for their actions.”
Spade, D., & Willse, C.. (2014). Sex, Gender, and War in an Age of Multicultural Imperialism. QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking
“This essay examines the case of chelsea manning in the larger context of both u.s. imperial war and the ways in which gender and sexuality are deployed in service of colonialism, racism, and militarism. situating the manning case alongside two contemporaneous events, the attempted prosecution of julian assange on rape charges and hillary clinton’s much-lauded ‘gay rights are human rights’ speech, we argue that manning’s trans identity has challenged both right and left commentators to absorb her into projects of pinkwashing and homonationalism. we conclude with a consideration about what anti-war, anti-imperial, anti-carceral lgbt politics and organizing around this case might look like.”
Springer, S., Chi, H., Crampton, J., Mcconnell, F., Cupples, J., Glynn, K., … Attewell, W.. (2012). Leaky Geopolitics: The Ruptures and Transgressions of WikiLeaks. Geopolitics
“The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment, and impending extradition of wikileaks founder, julian assange, serve as an exemplary moment in demonstrating state-sanctioned violence. since the cables began leaking in november 2010, the violent reaction to wikileaks evidenced by numerous political pundits calling for assange’s assassination or execution, and the movement within the us to have wikileaks designated a ‘foreign terrorist organization’, amount to a profound showing of authoritarianism. the ‘wikigate’ scandal thus represents an important occasion to take stock and think critically about what this case tells us about the nature of sovereign power, freedom of information, the limits of democracy, and importantly, the violence of the state when it attempts to manage these considerations. this forum explores a series of challenges inspired by wikileaks, which we hope will prompt further debate and reflection within critical geopolitics. [abstract from publisher]”
Assange, J.. (2017). Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed
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“Today, tuesday 7 march 2017, wikileaks begins its new series of leaks on the u.s. central intelligence agency. code-named ‘vault 7’ by wikileaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency. the first full part of the series, ‘year zero’, comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the cia’s center for cyber intelligence in langley, virgina. it follows an introductory disclosure last month of cia targeting french political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election. recently, the cia lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized ‘zero day’ exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. this extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the cia. the archive appears to have been circulated among former u.s. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided wikileaks with portions of the archive.”
Assange, J.. (2010). Why the World Needs Wikileaks. TEDGlobal2010
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“Manzanar national historic site receives funding from centennial initiative independence, california — centennial funding combined with funds from the friends of manzanar will be used to restore historic vegetation at the manzanar auditorium which now serves as the site’s interpretive center. completion of the is project will allow visitors who enter the camp auditorium through the historic west entrance to experience it in much the same way internees did over 60 years ago. ‘we are excited to be working closely with the friends of manzanar on this site restoration project and to be included in the first round of funding for the centennial initiative. we will be working closely with the friends on fund-raising for our next centennial project, the reconstruction of barracks at the demonstration block, a much larger project which we hope will be funded in the next round of projects in 2009,’ said superintendent tom leatherman. national park service director mary a. bomar said, “with the nearly $25 million congress has appropriated and nearly $27 million of matching commitments from our park partners, the centennial initiative today moves onto the landscape and into people’s lives. it’s a great day for the national park service and a great day for the friends of manzanar at manzanar national historic site.” the national park centennial initiative is a 10-year program to reinvigorate america’s national parks and prepare them for a second century. the initiative includes a focus on increased funding for park operations plus a president’s challenge: up to $100 million a year in federal funds to match $100 million a year in philanthropic donations to the national park service. “this is how we put our centennial goals on the ground and it’s quite a beginning,” bomar said. ‘we have 110 programs and projects involving more than 130 individual, public and non-profit partners benefitting 76 national park in 38 states and the district of columbia.’ the project at manzanar will include replanting historic vegetation following guidelines provided in the park’s cultural landscape report. work will take place in the late summer and fall and will be completed in time for the pilgrimage next year. the friends of manzanar, who are providing half of the funds for this project, will also begin raising funds for the reconstruction of buildings in one of the residential blocks on the site. the preservation and restoration of buildings and featu…”
Assange, J.. (1988). Do You Want to Know a Secret?. Journal of Sport Management
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“The article reports that the best kept secret in the world of sport management today is that corporate sports sponsorship and high school sports have formed a friendly alliance for nearly 10 years. in august 1987 coca-cola signed a 3-year sponsorship agreement with a california interscholastic foundation. in 1983 the oregon school activities association hired don baird as marketing director in an attempt to explore and solicit corporate sponsorships. what it means to the corporate sponsor is that they have a significant impact on a target population with a minimal amount of expense. the sponsorship sought after by the high school associations is now being expanded into all high school extracurricular programs.”
Assange, J.. (2010). Golden hour for phishing and new Zeus botnet. Computer Fraud & Security
“Security firm trusteer has released research that suggests a ‘golden hour’ for phishing attacks. it has also uncovered a new zeus-based botnet targeting us retailers.”
Keller, B.. (2011). Dealing With Assange and the WikiLeaks Secrets. New York Times, 26th January
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“This past june, alan rusbridger, the editor of the guardian, phoned me and asked, mysteriously, whether i had any idea how to arrange a secure communication. not really, i confessed. the times doesn’t have encrypted phone lines, or a cone of silence. well then, he said, he would try to speak circumspectly. in a roundabout way, he laid out an unusual proposition: an organization called wikileaks, a secretive cadre of antisecrecy vigilantes, had come into possession of a substantial amount of classified united states government communications. wikileaks’s leader, julian assange, an eccentric former computer hacker of australian birth and no fixed residence, offered the guardian half a million military dispatches from the battlefields of afghanistan and iraq. there might be more after that, including an immense bundle of confidential diplomatic cables. the guardian suggested — to increase the impact as well as to share the labor of handling such a trove — that the new york times be invited to share this exclusive bounty. the source agreed. was i interested? i was interested.”
Benkler, Y.. (2011). A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
… “… The governments of china, israel, north korea, russia, thailand, zimbabwe, and several other countries have blocked access to wikileaks.org-type web sites, claimed they have the right to investigate and prosecute wikileaks.org and associated whistleblowers, or insisted they remove false, sensitive, or classified government information, propaganda, or malicious content from the internet. … the report follows up with other items it calls variously ‘news articles,’ or ‘reports,’ related to abuses in guantanamo bay, based on the leaked camp delta operating procedures, and in one case states: ‘a variety of newspapers, wire services, and other news and media organizations wrote numerous articles based on the original wikileaks.org news article and actual classified document posted to their web site.’ … a review of all news stories in the lexis-nexis database in 2007 and 2008 reveals, however, that wikileaks’ analysis (as opposed to documents) was not reported on in media covered by that dataset; instead, the roughly 400 reports present during that period referenced the materials themselves, with occasional references to the brief overview offered by the site. … nothing captures that threat more ironically than the spectacle of judith miller, the disgraced new york times reporter who yoked that newspaper’s credibility to the bush administration’s propaganda campaign regarding iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the iraq war, using fox news as a platform to criticize julian assange for neglecting the journalist’s duty of checking his sources and instead providing raw cables to the public. … from the perspective of the assault on wikileaks, the important aspect of manning’s treatment is the effort to use him to deter future whistleblowers and the question of whether his culpability could serve to anchor conspiracy liability against assange and wikileaks. … in following the second circuit, and integrating it with the ninth circuit, the third circuit in in re madden summarized: ‘we hold that individuals are journalists when engaged in investigative reporting, gathering news, and have the intent at the beginning of the news-gathering process to disseminate this information to the public.’ … as the networked public sphere develops, as a more diverse set of actors-from individual bloggers like instapundit, to nonprofits like the sunlight foundation, small commercial online publications like talking points memo, and large decentralized …”
Krotoski, A.. (2011). Wikileaks and the New, Transparent World Order. Political Quarterly
“Wikileaks’ julian assange is the modern figurehead for a new world order defined by openness, transparency and internet freedom. he fights the corner for the ‘liberation of conspiracies’1 through new technologies, a partisan contributor to an ongoing information dialogue about neutrality and accountability that has debated since the internet began. however, there is an important distinction between content published on the web, and the technology it is published on. both have implications for influence. assange resides in the content level. by describing himself as ‘editor-in-chief ’, he explicitly seeks to elevate himself to the samesociopoliticalstandingasnewspaper magnates like murdoch and hearst, who have acted as gatekeepers of information delivered to a public from the perspective oftheirparticular(oftentransparent)agendas. but web technologies have features that supposedly circumvent this social order: political uprisings in the middle east and africa and election campaigns fought and (ostensibly) won through social network campaigns contribute to the popular discourse that frames technology as something essential, responsible for eradicating the pecking order. this makes an assumption that the designs of the systems are agnostic. rather, the content that is published online is simply an apparent text for ideology. here, i argue that web developers are complicit in influencing the users of online services through the decisions about the functions of their services and the mechanics they choose to enact in their code.”
Marlin, R.. (2011). Propaganda and the Ethics of WikiLeaks. Global Media Journal – Australian Edition
“Much concern has been expressed about the political power wielded by wikileaks, an organization devoted to challenging established power by providing a safe, anonymous conduit for whistleblowers. some view this organization as treasonous, or in violation of laws prohibiting espionage, and have called for the assassination of its founder, julian assange. this paper sketches some of the different ethical parameters and nodal points involved in the wikileaks phenomenon: the anonymous leakers, the wikileaks organization, the mass media outlets favoured by wikileaks, the general public, and possible political and legal responses to the leakages. the issue connects with some familiar ethical questions: the newspaper publishers treatment of leaks from anonymous sources, the ethics of (non-anonymous) whistle-blowing, the ethics of violating secrecy, and the ethics of propaganda use. i review margaret somervilles arguments leading to her conclusion that wikileaks are on the whole a bad thing. i argue, making use of historical examples, that she doesnt take sufficiently into account the potential for good from wikileaks, particularly in the light of an increasingly propagandized society where truth is obscured by muzzling government or corporate officials, discouraging investigative reporting, and making use of sophisticated public relations techniques to condition the public mind. i conclude that wikileaks could well be a good thing, but the potential could be undermined by irresponsible behaviour by the operators. its effectiveness could also be undermined by pseudo-leakages or other ways of discrediting the personnel and operations of wikileaks.”
Den Heijer, M.. (2013). Diplomatic asylum and the assange case. Leiden Journal of International Law
“This article traces the place and development of diplomatic asylum in international law in close connection with the more specific questions raised by the case of julian assange, who was granted asylum in the ecuador embassy in london on 16 august 2012. after discussing the historical rise and decline of diplomatic asylum, the article reviews the current status of diplomatic asylum in international law and its implications for the triangular legal relationship between the united kingdom, ecuador, and assange. the article submits that, although there would not seem to be a title in general international law or human rights law for ecuador to grant asylum to assange, there is no obvious legal route for the united kingdom to terminate the asylum. the fate of assange resembles that of a long series of historical precedents where diplomatic asylum resulted in protracted stays. although this may seem an unsatisfactory result from the perspective of international law, the uneasy balance between territorial sovereignty and diplomatic inviolability also engenders incentives to avoid disputes or to resolve them through diplomatic channels. [publication abstract]”
Bruns, A.. (2012). Towards Distributed Citizen Participation. EJournal of EDemocracy and Open Government
Show/hide publication abstract
“This paper examines the rapid and ad hoc development and interactions of participative citizen communities during acute events, using the examples of the 2011 floods in queensland, australia, and the global controversy surrounding wikileaks and its spokesman, julian assange. the self-organising community responses to such events which can be observed in these cases bypass or leapfrog, at least temporarily, most organisational or administrative hurdles which may otherwise frustrate the establishment of online communities; they fast-track the processes of community development and structuration. by understanding them as a form of rapid prototyping, e-democracy initiatives can draw important lessons from observing the community activities around such acute events.”
Seigworth, G. J., & Tiessen, M.. (2012). Mobile Affects, Open Secrets, and Global Illiquidity: Pockets, Pools, and Plasma. Theory, Culture & Society
“This article will take up deleuze and guattari’s allusive yet insightful writings on ‘the secret’ by considering the secret across three intermingling registers or modulations: as content (secret), as form (secrecy), and as expression (secretion). setting the secret in relation to evolving modes of technological mediation and sociality as respectively pocket, pooling, and plasma, the article works through a trio of examples in order to understand the contemporary movements of secrets: the memories of secrets evoked in an intimately interactive music video by the band arcade fire (as an example of ‘pocket’); the movements of secrecy turned fabulative in the scopic-doublings of airport full-body scanners (as ‘pooling’); and, finally, the collective secretions that come to saturate and stretch around the globe as expressed by liquidity-seeking financial innovations (providing an angle onto ‘plasma’). these three instantiations of contemporary secrecy are framed by a discussion of julian assange of wikileaks and mark zuckerberg of facebook – truly a couple for our age: each intent, in their own way, upon bringing an end to secrets. throughout, we try to maintain close attention to the emerging rhythms and dissonances that engage secrecy in a dance between the half-voluntary and the half-enforced.”
Defreitas, N.. (2011). How the Internet has Changed the Definition of “Journalist”. Gateway Journalism Review
“Defreitas narrates on how the internet has changed the definition of journalist. in this age of blogs and wikileaks the definition of journalist has been challenged and changed. this issue has gained attention recently with the rise of wikileaks and julian assange. wikileaks has released an enormous volume of classified material on its site, resulting in a great deal of scrutiny of assange who is not a journalist. in the us there is no federal agency that passes out journalist licenses nor is there a journalistic equivalent of the bar exam. the traditional definition of journalist must change. a new, more accurate definition should reflect that anyone can do journalistic work today. but it should apply while they are doing journalistic work. a sincere attempt to follow journalistic standards and ethics should be the factor that determines if someone is a journalist. so long as the person in question attempts to follow ethical guidelines accepted by the journalistic community and attempts to only report factual information, they should be treated as a journalist.”
Sangarasivam, Y.. (2013). Cyber rebellion: Bradley manning, wikileaks, and the struggle to break the power of secrecy in the global war on Terror. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology
“Following the release of thousands of diplomatic cables which revealed the human rights abuses and networks of corruption that sustain the us-sponsored global war on terror, the us justice department has invoked the 1917 espionage act to indict both bradley manning, the us soldier who released the classified documents to wikileaks, and julian assange, the editor and publisher of wikileaks. while censorship serves as an economic signal, as assange asserts, how does the torture and prosecution of pvt. bradley manning serve as a cultural signal which reveals the lessons of a patriotism that promotes a dystopic democracy? this article examines the spatio-temporal predicament of secrecy, surveillance, and censorship in the face of cyber rebellion. [publication abstract]”
Bruns, A.. (2014). WikiLeaks: The napster of secrets?. International Journal of Communication
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“WikiLeaks has become a global phenomenon, and its founder and spokesman julian assange an international celebrity (or terrorist, depending on one’s perspective). but perhaps this focus on assange and his website is as misplaced as the attacks against napster and its founders were a decade ago: wikileaks itself only marks a new phase in a continuing shift in the balance of power between states and citizens, much as napster helped to undermine the control of major music labels over the music industry. if the history of music filesharing is any guide, no level of punitive action against wikileaks and its supporters is going to re-contain the information wikileaks has set loose.”
“Thoughts are free and are subject to no rule” — Paracelsus
As we frantically race into the third millennium, with microprocessors becoming faster, cheaper, and smaller, with surveillance cameras proliferating in public spaces, with the human genome program about to issue its first “working draft” of the human DNA sequence, and with an out- of-control Frankensteinian machine named the War on Drugs, all a whirl in the ocean of modern day culture, it is imperative that we, as a society, expressly acknowledge the fundamental human right to cognitive liberty and immediately begin to define its contours.
Encroachments on cognitive liberty can take various forms. New technologies such as biogenetic modification, human-computer interfacing, brain-scanning, nanotechnology, neural-networking, so- called “neuro-therapy,” and new pharmaceuticals, raise exciting possibilities for human “evolution.” But, if not developed and used responsibly, they and the legislation they spawn, could also pose new threats to cognitive freedom.2 The trend of technology is to overcome the limitations of the human body. And, the Web has been characterized as a virtual collective consciousness and unconsciousness. What are the implications for mental autonomy when wearable computers become wet-wired to our own minds and memory is augmented by a high-speed wireless connection to the Web? Similarly, advances in biotechnology and drug-design increasingly raise legal and ethical questions related to cognitive liberty, including what rights people will have to access these and other technologies, and what rights we will have to avoid them.
Calibrating Cognitive Liberty
Part of elucidating a theory of cognitive liberty is simply recognizing when free cognition is being infringed. Restrictions on physical liberty, for all their pain and terror, at least have the benefit of being relatively easy to recognize and call attention to. During World War II, the Nazi concentration camps for Jews, and the American internment camps for Japanese Americans, were marked by the machinery of physical control: fences, barbed wire, and guard towers. Similarly, from 1961 to 1989, a concrete and barbwire wall overseen by 116 guard towers divided the city of Berlin. Anyone who tried to cross that wall without a “special authorization” risked a bullet in the back of his or her skull. In contrast to the usual visibility of government restraints on physical liberty, restraints on cognitive liberty are most often difficult to recognize, if not invisible.
Consciousness is so complex and multifaceted that it may never be understood. Unfortunately, the inability to understand consciousness does not equate to an inability for others to control it. How then can we recognize nefarious attempts to control consciousness? In one respect, absolute control of one’s own consciousness is an impossibility. While each of us carries our own brain in our own skull, the process of consciousness itself is interactive. All our senses continuously feed data into our brains, producing a dance of cognition that perpetually swirls the exterior world with the interior world creating a seamless, edgeless, apperceptive feedback loop. Our minds are continually changing, continually interfacing with “the other.” Cognitive liberty clearly cannot mean cognitive isolation.
Mind control, like most everything else, comes in degrees. A discussion with a friend may make you change your opinion on a topic, it may even change your life, but does that amount to “mind control?” Was your cognitive liberty violated? Over $US200 billion dollars is spent each year by companies unabashedly striving to manipulate our desires, to literally make us want their product. If you see an advertisement (or many) for a product and that advertisement, replete with imagery of the good life, causes you to purchase the product, have you been the victim of mind control? Has your cognitive liberty been violated?
What if the advertisement is embedded with auditory or visual subliminal messages? What if the advertisement is embedded in prime-time television programs, passing as program content, rather than demarked as a “commercial?” 3 Or, suppose you are a 12-year-old placed on Prozac®, or Ritalin® largely because your schoolteacher has “diagnosed” you as depressed or suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder. Has your cognitive liberty been violated?
The answers to the above questions depend upon how finely one calibrates cognitive liberty. But some scenarios, some infringements on mental autonomy, are crystal clear and ought to present limit cases where general policies and specific rules emerge in high-definition clarity. Yet, even in so-called limit cases, the US government, including its legal system, has often acted inconsistently.
A (Very) Brief History of US Government Mind Control
In 1969, Justice Marshall wrote, without mincing words, “Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.” 4 Yet, contrary to Justice Marshall’s strong pronouncement, the US government has not consistently respected or protected cognitive liberty. Indeed, some of the government’s offenses seem to come directly from the pages of a dystopian novel like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.5
Imagine, for example, if the government passed a law mandating that all citizens receive monthly injections of time-release sedatives, justifying the law on the “public health” grounds that sedated people are more productive at routine repetitive tasks, are less violent, and are less of a drain on public resources. What if those who did not voluntarily report at the time and place appointed for their injection were rounded up by the police, and forcefully lobotomized? Would anyone doubt that such a law infringed not just on one’s physical freedom but also on one’s cognitive freedom? It’s not exactly an unthinkable scenario. From the 1920s through 1970, pursuant to the laws of at least 32 states, more than 60,000 people were deemed “eugenically unfit.” Many of these people were involuntarily sterilized, in part because of low scores on intelligence tests.6 When one of these laws was challenged, and the case reached the United States Supreme Court, it was upheld—with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes smugly proclaiming, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”7
Until 1973, “homosexuality” was listed as a psychiatric disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). People who admitted being homosexual, or who were “accused” of being gay or lesbian, were subject to involuntary confinement under mental health laws, and subjected to “reparative therapy” or “conversion therapy” designed to convert them into heterosexuals. “Treatment,” in addition to counseling, included penile plesthysmograph (electronic shock triggered by penile erection), drugging, and hypnosis. Even though homosexuality was deleted from the DSM in 1973, it was not until December 1998 that the American Psychiatric Association finally disapproved of “reparative” or “conversion” therapy.8
In the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, the US government illegally and unethically drugged unwitting US citizens with psychoactive substances, including LSD, as part of projects bluebird, artichoke, and mk-ultra, all in an attempt to develop techniques of mind control. Richard Helms, the chief planner of mk-ultra, wrote in a planning memorandum that the program was designed in part to:
Investigate the development of chemical material which causes a reversible non-toxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well predicted for each individual. This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, and implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control.9
Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence theory, was arrested for violation of British homosexuality
statutes in 1952 after he admitted having a homosexual affair. Believing that his sexual orientation was a personal matter, neither a sin nor a crime, he presented no defense at his trial, which occurred on 31 March 1952. In lieu of prison, he was ordered to submit to estrogen injections for a year. Following a period of depression, likely the result of the injections, he committed suicide on June 7, 1954.
Memorandum from ADDP items to DCI Dulles, 4/3/53 quoted in The Mind Manipulators (Paddington Press, 1978),
While the mk-ultra program began with tests in the laboratory on willing volunteers, the CIA quickly saw the need to expand the testing to determine what the effects of drugs such as LSD would be on unsuspecting people. Thus, in 1953, the CIA moved its mind control program into the streets of America and began the “covert testing of materials on unwitting US citizens.”10
In subsequent instalments of this essay, we will see how the US Government continues to promulgate certain policies that, while cloaked in “public health” or “public safety” justifications, amount to an impermissible government action aimed at policing thought and interfering with the mental processes of citizens.
Freedom’s Invisible Landscape
The right to control one’s own consciousness is the quintessence of freedom. If freedom is to mean anything, it must mean that each person has an inviolable right to think for him or herself. It must mean, at a minimum, that each person is free to direct one’s own consciousness; one’s own underlying mental processes, and one’s beliefs, opinions, and worldview. This is self-evident and axiomatic.
In assessing what rights are fundamental and thus entitled to the most stringent legal protection, the US Supreme Court has stated that, fundamental liberties are those “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” such that “neither liberty nor justice would exist if [they] were sacrificed.”11 Under another test, fundamental liberties were characterized by the Court as those liberties that are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”12
Slightly over seventy years ago, Justice Brandies acknowledged in a landmark privacy case that cognitive freedom was one of the principal protections designed into the Constitution:
The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized man.13
For more details on the government’s bluebird, artcichoke, and mkultra programs (at least those details not lost forever when Richard Helms, ordered the destruction of all records related to the projects in January 1973) see A. Scheflin & E. Opton, Tampering With The Mind (l) & (ll), in The Mind Manipulators, supra, (1978), 106‐212.
But, while certain justices have, at times, pointedly acknowledged the fundamental nature of cognitive freedom and the nefarious nature of government (or other “outside”) interference with the intellect, this important freedom remains only obliquely defined within the US legal system. Ironically, the lack of a comprehensive treatment may be because cognitive freedom is so self- evidently a basic human right. Whatever the reason, without a coherent cognitive liberty jurisprudence, present and future infringements on cognitive liberty risk passing unnoticed or unremedied. In the next instalment of this essay, we will begin to dig deep into privacy, due process, and First Amendment cases, in an attempt to excavate a theoretical scaffolding for cognitive liberty. As I believe the cases will show, cognitive liberty is the invisible landscape from which springs some of our most cherished and protected freedoms.
On Cognitive Liberty Part II
…withoutfreedom of thought there can be no free society — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter14
An Introductory Note on Banned Books and other Controlled Substances
As you read this sentence you are receiving information. Words are carriers of thoughts, whether spoken from mouth to ear, digitized and passed electronically, or downloaded into ink and passed on paper across time and space. Because words are vehicles for thoughts, words can change your opinion, give you new ideas, reform your worldview, or foment a revolution.
Attempts to control the written word date from at least AD 325 when the Council of Nicaea ruled that Christ was 100 percent divine and forbade the dissemination of contrary beliefs. Since the invention of the printing press in 1452, governments have struggled to control the printed word. Presses were initially licensed and registered. Only certain people were permitted to own or control a printing press and only certain things could be printed or copied. (This was the origin of today’s copyright rules.) Works printed without prior authorization were gathered up and destroyed, the authors and printers imprisoned.
Scholars disagree as to the exact date, but sometime around 1560, Pope Paul IV published the Index Librorum Prohibitorum a list of forbidden books (i.e., controlled substances) enforced by the Roman government. When the Index was (finally) abandoned in 1966, it listed over 4,000 forbidden books, including works by such people as Galileo, Kant, Pascal, Spinoza and John Locke.15 The history of censorship has been extensively recorded by others. My point is simply the obvious one that efforts to prohibit heterodox texts and to make criminals out of those who “manufactured” such texts, were not so much interested in controlling ink patterns on paper, as in controlling the ideas encoded in printed words.
I submit that in the same way, the so-called “war on drugs” is not a war on pills, powder, plants, and potions, it is war on mental states — a war on consciousness itself — how much, what sort we are permitted to experience, and who gets to control it. More than an unintentional misnomer, the government-termed “war on drugs” is a strategic decoy label; a slight-of-hand move by the government to redirect attention away from what lies at ground zero of the war — each individual’s fundamental right to control his or her own consciousness.
Entheogenic Oldspeak v. Drug War Newspeak
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Oceania government diligently worked to establish “Newspeak” a carefully crafted language designed by the government for the purpose of making unapproved “modes of thought impossible.”16 Prior to Newspeak, the people of Oceania communicated with “Oldspeak,” an autonomous natural language capable of expressing nuanced emotions and multiple points of view. By controlling language through the imposition of Newspeak — by “eliminating undesirable words” — the government of Oceania was able to control and, in some cases, completely extinguish certain thoughts. As a character in Nineteen Eighty-Four explained to Winston Smith “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?…Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”17 Those people raised with Newspeak, having never known the wider-range of Oldspeak, might fail to notice, indeed, might be unable to even perceive, that the Government was limiting consciousness.
In 1970, just four years after the Catholic Church finally abandoned the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the United States government produced its own index of forbidden thought catalysts: the federal schedule of controlled substances. Included on the initial list of Schedule I substances were seventeen substances denoted as “hallucinogens,” and declared to have “a high potential for abuse,” “no currently accepted medical use” in the USA, and “a lack of accepted safety” even under medical supervision. Among the list of outlawed “hallucinogens” were psilocybin and psilocin, the active principles of psilocybe mushrooms; dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the active principle in ayahuasca and many visionary snuffs; ibogaine, mescaline, peyote, and LSD.18 The experience elicited by these substances in their chemical or natural plant forms is the par excellence of “Oldspeak”—a cognitive modality dating from pre-history.
Archeological evidence suggests that humans have communed with visionary plants and potions for thousands of years. Peyote, for example, has been used for over 10,000 years. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was created by Dr. Albert Hofmann, a chemist employed by Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. In 1938, Dr. Hofmann synthesized LSD from a fungus commonly found in rye seeds. Its affect on consciousness remained undiscovered until April 16, 1943, when Dr. Hofmann accidentally ingested a minute amount of the substance and experienced a strange inebriation in which “the external world became changed as in a dream.” Several years later, Hofmann discovered that the chemical structure of LSD is nearly identical to that of the sacred entheogen ololiuhqui, prepared from morning glory seeds and used ritually by the Aztecs for thousands of years.
Mushrooms, of the genus psilocybe, were used to produce visionary states at least as early as 4000
B.C. The psilocybe mushroom was used in religious ceremonies long before the Aztec civilization. It was named teonanácatl, meaning “sacred mushroom.” In 1957, working with mushrooms obtained by R. Gordon Wasson from the now famous curandera Maria Sabina, Dr. Hofmann isolated and later synthesized two active substances derived from the psilocybe mushroom. He named these substances psilocybin and psilocin. In 1962, Dr. Hofmann traveled to Mexico and met with Maria Sabina. During a night ceremony, she ingested 30 milligrams of the synthetic psilocybin and later said the effect was indistinguishable from that elicited with the sacred mushrooms themselves.
Another substance placed on the government’s 1970 list of criminalized “hallucinogens” was N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). This substance was first synthesized in 1931, but its entheogenic properties were not discovered until 1956. It was subsequently learned that DMT is the principal active ingredient in numerous snuffs and brews long-used by various South American Indians during religious ceremonies. The DMT containing plant psychotria viridis is a well-known admixture to the entheogenic brew known as ayahuasca or yajé, which archeological evidence suggests dates back as many as five thousand years.19
Some who ingest visionary plants believe that the plants talk to them and open up channels of communication with animals and other entities. Mazatec eaters of psilocybe mushrooms, for example, are adamant that the mushrooms speak to them:
The Mazatecs say that the mushrooms speak. If you ask a shaman where his imagery comes from, he is likely to reply: “I didn’t say it, the mushrooms did.” …he who eats these mushrooms, if he is a man of language, becomes endowed with an inspired capacity to speak…The spontaneity they liberate is not only perceptual, but linguistic, the spontaneity of speech, of fervent, lucid discourse, of the logos in activity. For the shaman it is as if existence were uttering itself through him…words are materializations of consciousness; language is a privileged vehicle of our relation to reality.20
Just as Newspeak was intended to make certain Old(speak) thoughts literally unthinkable, so the War on Entheogens makes certain sorts of cognition and awareness all but inaccessible.
Philosopher and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna suggested that early man’s ingestion of visionary plants may have been the very catalyst that led to the sudden expansion of human brain size between three and six million years ago, and the event which spawned the subsequent emergence of language itself. (See Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 25.)
Religious scholar Peter Lamborn Wilson has aptly framed the War on Entheogens as a battle over the nature of thought itself:
The War on Drugs is a war on cognition itself, about thought itself as the human condition. Is thought this dualist Cartesian reason? Or is cognition this mysterious, complex, organic, magical thing with little mushroom elves dancing around. Which is it to be?21
In Orwell’s vision of 1984, Newspeak’s power to control and limit thought depended, in part, upon the passing of time and the birth of new generations that never knew Oldspeak. As explained by Orwell in the Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, “It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”22
Just as Newspeak depended in part upon time eradicating knowledge of Oldspeak, today’s War on Entheogens is sustainable, in part, because the current generation of young adults (those 21 – 30 years old) have never known a time when most entheogens were not illicit. Those who have never experienced the mental states that are now prohibited do not realize what the laws are denying them. It is as if nothing is being taken away, at least nothing noticeable, nothing that is missed. As pointed out by the authors of a law review article on how mandatory schooling raises issues of mass-consciousness control: “[t]he more the government regulates formation of beliefs so as to interfere with personal consciousness,…the fewer people can conceive dissenting ideas or perceive contradictions between self-interest and government sustained ideological orthodoxy.”23
Because of the personal experiential nature of entheogen-elicited cognition, only those who have been initiated into the modern day Mysteries — those who have tasted the forbidden fruit from the visionary plants of knowledge and have not fallen victim to the stigmatizing psycho-impact of “being a drug user” — are acutely aware of the gravity of what is being prohibited: powerful modalities for thinking, perceiving, and experiencing.
The very best argument for the potential value of entheogen-elicited mind states is in the entheogenic experience itself; an experience that has, in almost every case, been outlawed. That is the dilemma of entheogen policy reformation. The advocate for entheogenic consciousness is left in an even worse position than the proverbial sighted man who must describe colors to a blind person. With regard to entheogen policy, the position is worse because the “blind” are in power and have declared it a crime to see colors.
Left with the impossible task of saying the unsayable, of describing the indescribable, those who have tasted the forbidden fruit must plead their case on the fundamental philosophical and
political level of what it means to be truly free. They must state their appeal on the ground that, with respect to the inner-workings of each person’s mind, the values of tolerance and respect are far weightier and far more conducive to the basic principles of democracy, than is the chillingly named “zero-tolerance” policy that is currently in vogue. This brings us, once again, to cognitive liberty as an essential substrate of freedom.
Free Thought and the First Amendment
Benjamin Cardozo, one of the most respected and influential American legal scholars of the last century and a former Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, affirmed cognitive liberty as central to most every other freedom:
…freedom of thought…one may say…is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom. With rare aberrations a pervasive recognition of that truth can be traced in our history, political and legal.24
Cognitive liberty jurisprudence must begin, then, with an effort to distil the legal principles that support some of our most cherished and well-established freedoms, and then, over time, crystallize these principles into the foundation for a coherent legal scheme governing issues related to an individual’s right to control his or her own consciousness.
Given the importance of the First Amendment to U.S. and even international law, we will begin by examining how courts have construed the First Amendment—searching for evidence that the right of each person to autonomy over his or her own mind and thought processes is central to First Amendment jurisprudence.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (The First Amendment.)25
The First Amendment’s guarantees were designed to bar the government from controlling or prohibiting the dissemination of unpopular or dissenting ideas. Central to all five guarantees is the acknowledgement that people must be treated by the government as ends not means; each person free to develop his or her mind and own belief system, and encouraged to express his or her thoughts in the so-called “marketplace of ideas.”26
Supreme Court Justice Holmes wrote in Abrams v. United States (1919) 250 U.S. 616, 630 “[T]he ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas … the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the
Frankfurter emphasized in 1949, the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment guards against “thought becom[ing] checked and atrophied.”27
Free speech, free exercise, free association, a free press and the right to assemble, are all moot if the thought that underlies these actions has already been constrained by the government. If the government is permitted to prohibit the experiencing of certain thought processes, or otherwise manipulate consciousness at its very roots—via drug prohibitions, religious indoctrination, monopolizing media, or any number of methods—it need not even worry about controlling the expression of such thoughts. By prohibiting the very formation of mind states—by strangling the free mind itself—free expression is made meaningless.
Thus, in order to prevent the erosion of the First Amendment’s protection of expression, the Amendment must also provide at least as strong a protection for the underlying consciousness that forms the ideas that are later expressed. Indeed, the First Amendment was infused with the principle that each individual—not the government—ought to have control over his or her own mind, to think what he or she wants to think, and to freely form and express opinions and beliefs based on all the information at his or her disposal. The First Amendment, in other words, embraces cognitive liberty not simply as the desired outcome of the articulated guarantees (i.e., a right to express one’s ideas), but also as a necessary precondition to those guaranteed freedoms (i.e., a right to form one’s own ideas).
Mother May I Control My Own Consciousness?
In (the apropos year of) 1984, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeal issued an opinion in a case involving a man who was involuntarily drugged with the “antipsychotic drug” thorazine while he was being held for trial on murder charges.28 The threshold issue was whether pre-trial detainees have a fundamental right to refuse treatment with anti-psychotic drugs. To answer this question, the Tenth Circuit analogized to a 1982 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that “’[l]iberty from bodily restraint always has been recognized as the core of the liberty protected by the Due
competition of the market”) (Holmes, J., dissenting). Using a “marketplace” analogy for the interaction and acceptance or rejection of ideas is problematic:
“Using market mechanisms to determine the logic or merit of ideas reduces ideas to commodities. When this happens the circulation of ideas is determined by their sales profiles. The ‘consumer’ is described as voting for the products of the Consciousness Industry [a term coined by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his 1974 collection of essays of the same name] with his or her dollars (consumer sovereignty). Such metaphors suggest democracy and freedom of choice. They deflect attention away from the tightly controlled decision‐making process that actually determine what ideas will gain entry into the commodity system. That is, they render the control system of the capitalistic consciousness industry invisible and thereby permit subterranean censorship based upon both market and political considerations. In sum, they permit elites to rule but preserve the semiotics of democracy.” (Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot that Binds Power and Knowledge (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 134.)
Process Clause from arbitrary governmental action.’”29 The Tenth Circuit reasoned that if freedom from bodily restraints is a fundamental right, then individuals must also have a liberty interest in freedom from “mental restraint of the kind potentially imposed by antipsychotic drugs.”30
Thus, the Tenth Circuit found that freedom from government imposed mental restraints was just as fundamental as freedom from government imposed physical restraints – both were protected by the Due Process Clause. Furthermore, the Tenth Circuit found that the First Amendment was also implicated when the government attempts to involuntarily psycho- medicate a person awaiting trial. In unequivocal language, the Tenth Circuit explained “[t]he First Amendment protects communication of ideas, which itself implies protection of the capacity to produce ideas.”31
As professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School has cautioned:
In a society whose ‘whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s own minds,’ the governing institutions, and especially the courts, must not only reject direct attempts to exercise forbidden domination over mental processes; they must strictly examine as well oblique intrusions likely to produce or designed to produce, the same result.32
Prohibiting an otherwise law-abiding person from using entheogens is more than merely an “oblique intrusion” on the right to control one’s own mental processes, or a slight trespass on the “protected capacity to produce ideas” — it is a direct frontal attack. Under the recently released National Drug Control Strategy 2000, the federal government will spend just shy of $20 billion ($20,000,000,000) on an all out attempt to keep people from evoking alternative states of consciousness by the use of controlled substances.33
As I will show in the next instalment of this essay, the government’s War on Unapproved Mental States, besides violating core principles of the First Amendment, also violates the very essence of the right to privacy.
For a comprehensive survey of forced mental treatment cases, see Bruce J. Winick, The Right to Refuse Mental Health Treatment: A First Amendment Perspective, University of Miami Law Review (September 1989), 44(1) 1‐103.
On Cognitive Liberty Part 3
In the last decade, new computer-based methods for storing, searching, and sharing data about individuals have proliferated. With the popularization and commercialization of the Internet, the tracking of individuals and their databodies has become big business, one in which governments increasingly participate. In a similar vein, optical devices have become smaller and cheaper, leading to an expansion of government and corporate surveillance cameras, which continuously monitor an ever-increasing number of private and public spaces. These technologically-facilitated developments have revitalized the ongoing debate about privacy. At issue is what form privacy will take—both as a principle, as well as a legal protection—in the so-called Information Age.
While it is commonly thought of as a fundamental right, privacy is not expressly protected by the
U.S. Constitution. In the United States, the law of privacy has developed in a hodgepodge manner, largely by Supreme Court decisions in which the Court was presented with a specific factual scenario and determined whether or not a privacy right existed in that specific instance. This development pattern has led some legal scholars to declare that rather than an overarching “right to privacy,” citizens of the United States enjoy only particularized “rights” to privacy– those that the U.S. Supreme Court has established in various cases, or that the U.S. Congress has enacted as specific statutory protections.
The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, has found a fundamental right to privacy in the following basic areas: (1) reproduction, (2) marriage, (3) activities inside the home, (4) the right to refuse medical treatment, and (5) raising children. Similarly, Congress has passed federal laws or regulations that grant (to a greater or lesser degree) privacy protection in a host of areas, including the contents of first-class mail, information concerning which videotapes you rent, and information about your bank records.
Although these protections were created by particular court decisions or by specific statutory enactments, they share an underlying reasoning and common principles, revealing that a general concept of privacy does indeed exist.
The legal concept of privacy has developed in fits and starts, often in union with technological developments. Up until the late 1800s, “privacy” was by-and-large limited to providing a remedy when someone physically interfered with your (private) property or with your physical body. A hundred years ago, the right to privacy was not much more than a right to be free from physical battery and a right to repel invaders from your land. A major development occurred in 1890, when Samuel Warren and Louis Brandies penned an influential law review article titled “The Right to Privacy.”34 Warren and Brandies wrote at the time when portable cameras and audio recording devices were—for the first time—available to common people, and newspaper reporters aggressively embraced these new devices. It was the genesis of the paparazzi.
In their article, Warren and Brandies articulated a legal principle, based on general concepts of privacy, which would provide people with protection against reporters’ efforts to publicize personal information. As Warren and Brandies wrote:
Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprises have invaded the sacred precinct or private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the [biblical] prediction that “what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the housetops.”35
With their focus on the events of their time, Warren and Brandies sketched out a theory of privacy that was an extension of the common law protection of (private) property—a new theory designed to encompass and protect the public disclosure by reporters of private or personal information. This broader right they succinctly termed “the right to be let alone.”
Over 100 years later, this basic phrase remains the touchstone of what is commonly meant by the “right to privacy.”
Cognitive Liberty and the Right to Privacy
Just as Warren and Brandies called for a revisioning of “privacy” in the then-new age of portable cameras and audio recorders, as we enter into the third millennium, with ongoing developments in drug creation, nano-technology, genetic engineering, and mind-machine interfacing, it is again time to explore the meaning of privacy and the scope of what is to receive legal protection as “private” in this (post)modern age. As the U.S. Supreme Court noted in 1910:
Legislation, both statutory and constitutional, is enacted, it is true, from an experience of evils but its general language should not, therefore, be necessarily confined to the form that evil had theretofore taken. Time works changes, brings into existence new conditions and purposes. Therefore a principle to be vital must be capable of wider application than the mischief which gave it birth. This is peculiarly true of Constitutions. They are not ephemeral enactments, designed to meet passing occasions. They are, to use the words of Chief Justice Marshall, “designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it.36
Thus, while the current privacy debate has centered on new computer surveillance technology with the power to capture and control more and more data about each of us, it is time for the privacy debate to acknowledge, and make explicit, that a person’s mind and mental processes must be protected as private. “[T]he concept of privacy embodies the ‘moral fact that a person
belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole.’”37 Certainly, a person’s thoughts and thought processes belong to himself or herself, and not to society, the government, or any other meddlesome external force.
Inasmuch as a right to privacy entails the right to be let alone, and centers on the interior and intimate aspects of a person’s life, cognitive freedom and autonomy should become a central touchstone for how we conceive of, and apply, a modern right to privacy. The areas in which the Supreme Court or Congress has expressly declared a right to privacy all center on interior spaces as opposed to exterior spaces, and serve to strengthen and protect the autonomy of the personal, or individual self. There is nothing more interior, and nothing more important and central to individual autonomy than one’s consciousness. Indeed, without independent consciousness, no sense of self is even possible.
Despite its self-evident importance to us today, the idea that a person is entitled to privacy over his or her own thoughts and thought processes is actually a fairly recent concept. For most of history, the inner workings of the mind have been perceived as a threat to the Church-State.
Broad expanses of the U.S. legal system are premised on an Aristotelian-Thomistic world view. Both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas viewed God as a “Supreme Being” who exists outside of and above humankind. In contrast to God, evil was located within the individual. The concept of privacy that developed under the Aristotelian-Thomistic belief system was one inherently skeptical of the human interior and sought to essentially force into private—to shield behind closed doors—such things as death, birth, and personal hygienic matters. Under the Aristolian- Thomistic tradition, the privacy protections that did exist were limited to those that would benefit the community and ultimately promote the pleasure of God. Privacy, then, to the extent that it exists under a Aristotelian-Thomistic paradigm is there to serve and promote the “general will” rather than to advance individual autonomy and self-actualization.
A Platonic or Buddhist belief system is just one among a host of other ways to view the world. In these systems of thought (and many other “religions,” and/or “philosophies”), god(s) exists both inside and outside of each person. Thus, a person’s interior thoughts and thought processes are not feared, but are instead cultivated, revered, and protected.
Today, however, the U.S. prides itself on being a secular, pluralist country, free from the shackles of a dominating Church power. As such, it is no longer appropriate to limit the concept of privacy to centuries-old models; indeed, just as Brandies and Warren did over a century ago, it is imperative that we continue to update our concept of privacy to fit current circumstances.
A modern conception of privacy must shed the long-standing allegiance to a single way of conceiving of Reality, and recognize that privacy is rooted in furthering human dignity and autonomy, and in protecting each person’s right to conceive of the world in his or her own way. Describing the contours of a modern right to privacy, Robert Ellis Smith, attorney and publisher
of the Privacy Journal, aptly included “a sense of autonomy, a right to develop a unique personality and living space, and a right to distinguish one’s own persona from everyone else’s.”38
As noted earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court has a spotty record with regard to upholding individual privacy. The Court has found a narrow range of situations in which a protected privacy right exists, and a host of situations in which it does not. In 1928, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that the police could tap a person’s telephone so long as they did not enter the person’s home in order to place the tap.39 Not until 1967 did the Court rule that the content of telephone conversations was protected as private regardless of whether the line was tapped from inside or outside of the home.40 In 1984, the Supreme Court held that people have no legitimate privacy right with respect to garbage cans that they have placed on the curb for pickup. Such garbage, held the Court, may be examined by a police officer without any need to obtain a warrant.41 In 1989, the Court held that the police did not violate the privacy right of an individual when they flew over his home in a helicopter and peered through a hole in his roof in a search for marijuana plants.42 The latter two cases grew out of the War on (certain) Drugs, but their holdings extend far beyond drug cases, significantly reducing the right of privacy for all Americans.
In cases raising issues that directly concern the privacy of a person’s body in the face of government intrusion, the decisional trend has been more in favor of individual autonomy. For example, in 1965 the Supreme Court held that the decision of whether to use birth control was a private issue for married couples (a ruling later extended to unmarried couples).43 That case involved a Connecticut law prohibiting the use of “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” Such a law, held the Court, infringed upon a constitutionally protected “zone of privacy” reserved to individuals–the right to make their own decisions about reproduction. The Court struck down the Connecticut law based on what it called “the familiar principle, so often applied by this Court, that a ‘governmental purpose to control or prevent activities constitutionally subject to state regulation may not be achieved by means which sweep unnecessarily broadly and thereby invade the area of protected freedoms.’”44
In Roe v. Wade, the court held that the “zone of privacy” encompasses and protects a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy.45
The principles underlying the Supreme Court’s privacy rulings, especially those invoked in cases concerning an individual’s right to make decisions about the interior of his or her body, support
the proposition that personal decisions about how to manage one’s interior thought processes and consciousness fall within a protected zone of privacy reserved for individuals, and protected against governmental invasion or usurpation. Just as the Connecticut law that banned all use of contraceptives was struck down as “unnecessarily broad,” today’s drug prohibition laws, which outlaw all use of certain plants and psychoactive chemicals, trespass upon the zone of privacy that protects an adult’s right to make decisions about how to manage his or her own consciousness.
Society recognizes cognitive privacy as reasonable. What goes on exclusively inside a person’s mind has traditionally been a private affair. The specter of Orwell’s “mind police” is universally chilling, as is the idea of a government employing mind control or thought-manipulation techniques on its citizenry. It is, indeed, a conservative position to state that if freedom is to mean anything, it must mean that what goes on inside a person’s skull is a private matter and something which that person—not the government—has the right to control.
Just about the only time this cognitive privacy principle is questioned is when it is applied to “drugs.” For example, in 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court held that “the mere private possession of obscene matter cannot be made a crime.”46 In this case, Mr. Stanley was found in possession (in his own home) of some pornographic films. He was prosecuted under a Georgia law that made possession of “obscene matter” a crime. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Georgia law, finding that the law violated the First Amendment. The Court distinguished laws that regulate the public distribution of “obscene material” from the Georgia law, which unlawfully targeted mere private possession of such matter. Hidden away in a footnote, however, the Court remarked that the same reasoning did not apply to drugs:
What we have said in no way infringes upon the power of the State or Federal Government to make possession of other items, such as narcotics, firearms, or stolen goods, a crime. Our holding in the present case turns upon the Georgia statute’s infringement of fundamental liberties protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. No First Amendment rights are involved in most statutes making mere possession criminal.47
This was non-binding dictum (commentary that is superfluous to the actual holding in the case). The Supreme Court has never been squarely presented with the argument that cognitive liberty is a fundamental right, or that outlawing mere possession or use of psychoactive drugs infringes on that fundamental right.
Aside from the comment in the footnote, the reasoning that pervades the Court’s opinion in Stanley supports the fundamental principle that what goes on inside a person’s head, the processing and information therein, is entitled to privacy. The Court emphasized that the Constitution “protects the right to receive information and ideas,” and that this right holds
irrespective of an idea’s “social worth.”48 The Court also accepted Mr. Stanley’s argument that he had a constitutional right to control his own intellect—to determine for himself what to read or watch in the privacy of his own home:
[Mr. Stanley] is asserting the right to read or observe what he pleases—the right to satisfy his intellectual and emotional needs in the privacy of his own home. He is asserting the right to be free from state inquiry into the contents of his library. Georgia contends that appellant does not have these rights, that there are certain types of materials that the individual may not read or even possess. Georgia justifies this assertion by arguing that the films in the present case are obscene. But we think that mere categorization of these films as “obscene” is insufficient justification for such a drastic invasion of personal liberties guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Whatever may be the justifications for other statutes regulating obscenity, we do not think they reach into the privacy of one’s own home. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own home, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.49
When Georgia countered that its law was necessary to protect people from the detrimental effects of obscenity, the U.S. Supreme Court recoiled, noting that Georgia’s argument was an inappropriate attempt “to control the moral content of a person’s thoughts… an action wholly inconsistent with the philosophy of the First Amendment.”50 The government, explained the Court, “cannot constitutionally premise legislation on the desirability of controlling a person’s private thoughts.”51
In the end, the Court in Stanley concluded that the government may regulate obscenity, but “that power simply does not extend to mere possession by an individual in the privacy of his own home.”52
The same principles ought to apply with regard to psychoactive drugs that are used by adults in the privacy of their own homes. If, as Justice Marshall wrote in Stanley, “[o]ur whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds,” the State has no business telling a man or woman sitting in his or her own home, what states of consciousness are acceptable and what states of consciousness are not.
While the U.S. Supreme Court has never considered a case in which the issue was framed as “cognitive privacy,” several state courts have examined the issue of whether drug use falls within
a protected privacy right.53 In all but one case, these state courts have stacked the deck against cognitive privacy, by narrowly framing the issue as whether or not there is a fundamental right to use drug x, rather than whether or not there is a fundamental right to control one’s own consciousness—a fundamental right upon which drug prohibition laws substantially infringe.
One interesting case was decided in 1975 by the Alaska Supreme Court. In Ravin v. State,54 the Alaska Supreme Court held that the possession and use of marijuana within one’s own home was included within the scope of the privacy protection guaranteed by the Alaska Constitution. The case centered on Irwin Ravin, a man arrested and charged with possession of marijuana. Mr. Ravin filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that Alaska’s laws prohibiting marijuana use unconstitutionally infringed upon his right to privacy as guaranteed by both the U.S. and Alaska Constitutions.
The Alaska court examined U.S. Supreme Court precedent and concluded that the opinions by the high court do not support a privacy right to possess marijuana, because “the federal right to privacy only arises in connection with other fundamental rights.” The Alaska court then went on to examine whether the privacy protection of the Alaska Constitution protects an adult’s possession of marijuana in his or her home.55 The court noted that in a previous case,56 it struck down a public school rule that prohibited long hair, finding that the school’s rule was prohibited by the Alaska Constitution’s privacy protection. In that case, the Alaska Supreme Court explained that “the right ‘to be let alone’—including the right to determine one’s own hairstyle in accordance with individual preferences and without interference of governmental officials and agents—is a fundamental right under the constitution of Alaska.”
The court then revealed an anti-marijuana bias, stating “few would believe they have been deprived of something of critical importance if deprived of marijuana, though they would if stripped of control over their personal appearance.” Here, the court was making an assumption without evidentiary support, and was also incorrectly framing the issue. Some people consider their marijuana use at least as important as their choice of hairstyle. Further, the court drew a
Some of these cases, as well as others not listed here, have compelling dissenting opinions in which judges elaborated certain aspects of cognitive liberty. For example, in State v. Kramer (Hawaii 1972) 493 P.2d 306, a case upholding the defendant’s conviction for marijuana possession, Justice Levinson filed a dissenting opinion in which he argued that the experiences generated by the use of marijuana are mental in nature, and thus among the most personal and private experiences possible. (Id. at p. 315.)
55 Unlike the U.S. Constitution, the Alaska constitution expressly provides for a right to privacy. Article I, Sec. 22 of the Alaska constitution states: “The right of the people to privacy is recognized and shall not be infringed.”
false comparison: comparing a broad principle: “to control one’s appearance;” with a narrower principle: “to smoke marijuana.” The correct analogy would have been to compare the two actions at the same level of generality; thus, the right to control one’s outward appearance ought to have been compared to the right to control one’s inner cognition.
Based on its faulty comparison, the Ravin court refused to find that marijuana smoking was within the Alaska constitution’s privacy protection. Instead, the court relied on the well- established privacy protections surrounding the home. The court explained, “if there is any area of human activity to which a right to privacy pertains more than any other, it is the home.”57 The right to privacy within the home, held the court, “encompass[es] the possession and ingestion of substances such as marijuana in a purely non-commercial context in the home, unless the state can [show that outlawing possession of marijuana in the home is necessary to achieve a legitimate state interest.]” More specifically, the court noted that the government had the “burden of showing a close and substantial relationship between the public welfare and control of ingestion or possession of marijuana in the home for personal use.”58
Having shifted the burden to the government, the court then examined whether the government had met its burden. At trial, the government claimed that the use of marijuana caused a host of health problems to the marijuana user, including damage to the immune system and chromosomal structure, extreme panic reactions, long-term psychological problems, loss of motivation, and occasional violent behavior.
Before addressing these assertions, the Alaska Supreme Court questioned whether the government has a legitimate interest in “protecting” a person from him or herself. While the court was able to conceive of some circumstances in which the government may have a legitimate interest in protecting a person from him or herself, such government paternalism was the exception rather than the rule:
…the authority of the state to exert control over the individual extends only to activities of the individual which affect others or the public at large as it relates to matters of public health or safety, or to provide for the general welfare. We believe this tenet to be basic to a free society. The state cannot impose its own notions of morality, propriety, or fashion on individuals when the public has no legitimate interest in the affairs of those individuals. The right of the individual to do as he pleases is not absolute, of course: it can be made to yield when it begins to infringe on the rights and welfare of others.59
Having stressed that the government should not be in the business of protecting people from themselves, the court nevertheless examined the government’s claims that marijuana was dangerous to its users, finding the evidence of serious harm unpersuasive. The court explained:
It appears that the effects of marijuana on the individual are not serious enough to justify widespread concern, at least as compared with the far more dangerous effects of alcohol, barbiturates and amphetamines.60
Ultimately, the Alaska Supreme Court concluded “no adequate justification for the state’s intrusion into the citizen’s right to privacy by its prohibition of possession of marijuana by an adult for personal consumption in the home has been shown.”61
While the Ravin case was a clear victory for marijuana users, and for privacy advocates in general, it was more about the privacy of the home, than about cognitive freedom and privacy.62 As mentioned earlier, the court did not consider whether cognitive liberty was protected by the United States Constitution or by the Alaska constitution. Instead, the decision simply underscored the longstanding and socially accepted principle that a “man’s home is his castle.” The case has yet to be forcefully made that our minds, as much as our homes, are a private inward domain entitled to protection against unwanted governmental intrusions and prohibitions.
In 1982, the Alaska legislature codified Ravin in the state’s criminal code by legalizing possession of up to four ounces of marijuana in a private place. (See 1982 Alaska Sess. Laws 2 ch. 45.) In 1990, Alaska voters adopted a Voter Initiative that amended Alaska Statutes section 11.71.060 so as to again make possession of marijuana in a private place illegal. The (state) constitutional validity of this initiative is dubious because the initiative merely altered the general Alaska Criminal Code, not the Alaska Constitution itself, upon which Ravin was based. (See, e.g., State v. McNeil, No. 1KE‐93‐947 (D. Alaska Oct. 29, 1993).
On Cognitive Liberty Part IV
John Stuart Mill and the Liberty of Inebriation
As an important nineteenth or twentieth century work on political and social theory, John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty ([1859] 1975)63 is considered to be second only to the Communist Manifesto. Written in the midst of the growing political power of Christian temperance groups pushing for alcohol prohibition and speaking directly to the issue of the rights of individuals and the limits of authoritarian control, On Liberty is a seminal anti-prohibition text, which assumes ever greater importance and relevance when considered in the context of today’s $19 billion “war on drugs.” Drafted in the tumult of the first societal debates over alcohol prohibition, Mill’s essay examines “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual” (3) and is one of the earliest political statements against drug prohibition as well as a vindication of cognitive liberty.
On Liberty was published in 1859 but was penned in 1855, only four years after the state of Maine enacted the first law in the United States prohibiting the sale of alcohol, an action that kicked off a wave of prohibition laws in the country. By 1855, thirteen states had passed alcohol prohibition laws, and the American Temperance Society had long since shifted from a call for “temperance” to a demand for wholesale prohibition. In England, where Mill wrote, the United Kingdom Alliance of Legislative Suppression of the Sale of Intoxicating Liquors sprang up in 1853, and it used the Maine law as a model in pushing for alcohol prohibition in England. Thus, it is not surprising that Mill’s consideration of the rights of individuals vis-à-vis society and the government, forged in the midst of such heated social controversy, would confront directly the important question of cognitive liberty.
“The object of this Essay,” wrote Mill, “is to assert one very simple principle…that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection… that is to prevent harm to others” (10–11).
Government interference, wrote Mill, is appropriate only when a person engages in conduct that threatens the interests of others. What happens inside a person’s body or mind is that person’s private business, not the business of society and certainly not the business of the government.
He expressed this point unambiguously: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign” (11).
So long as a person’s decision and subsequent conduct did not threaten others with harm, Mill considered the person’s action to lie within a protected “region of human liberty” (13).
Encompassed within this domain of liberty is:
the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of thought and feeling, absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological…liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong. (13)
For Mill, a society that refuses to recognize and respect this sphere of liberty is not a free society, and laws that invade this province are unjustifiable; freedom demands this protected domain. “The only freedom which deserves the name,” writes Mill, “is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it” (14).
Mill was quick to emphasize that these principles apply only to adults. Children, while they are still under the care of an adult, “must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury” (12), and it is therefore appropriate for society or the government to act paternalistically toward them. Mill also acknowledges and repeatedly underscores that when a person’s behavior does directly affect other people, it is, by its very nature, social conduct and thus becomes an appropriate object for social and government control. The roots of alcohol prohibition grew out of Protestant Christianity. In 1832, James Teare, founder of the Preston General Temperance Society in England, was speaking for many temperance advocates of the time when he took the floor at a temperance meeting in Manchester and declared all intoxicating liquor anathema to religious people: “the sooner it is put out of this world, the better”.64 Not surprisingly, therefore, woven throughout On Liberty are subtle and not so subtle jabs at both the timidity (“essentially a doctrine of passive obedience,” (48)) and the coerciveness of Christianity. Religion, says Mill, is an “engine of moral repression” (14), seeking “control over every department of human conduct” (14). In some of his harshest words, Mill admonishes:
Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than active; Innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) “thou shalt not” predominates unduly over “thou shalt.” In its horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has been gradually compromised away into one of legality.(47–48)
Mill’s most fundamental objection to the Christianity of the mid–nineteenth century was to its complete capitulation to authority, coupled with its all-encompassing dogmatism and a singular way of conceiving of the world; these latter traits, Mill believed, often led Christians to suppress eccentricity, individuality, original thought, and simple pleasures.
On Liberty champions responsible alcohol inebriation as a private pleasure, which the government has no authority to interfere with as long as the drinker is not harming another person. Provided that a person’s conduct does not affect the interests of other people, writes Mill, that person should have “perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences” (70).
Mill rejects challenges that assert that a person’s actions inherently have some effect on society or that an act that harms the individual also harms society. Mill responds to these challenges on two levels. First, he acknowledges that if a person’s “self-regarding” conduct disables him from performing some public duty or produces identifiable harm to another person, then that conduct properly cannot be considered “self-regarding,” and society may control or punish the person.
Using alcohol intoxication as an example, Mill explains: “No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty.
Whenever, in short, there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law” (76). To the extent that the “harm” to others from drinking alcohol is amorphous or that the drinker violates no specific duty, Mill views the ancillary “harm” from the drinker’s action as an “inconvenience…which society can afford to bear, for the sake of the greater good of human freedom” (76).
In essence, Mill views the temperance challenge as embodying a Puritanical perspective that considers innumerable self-regarding actions to be morally wrong and thus inherently injurious to the society. He rejects this position as religious moralizing cloaked in claims for social policy. As an example, he quotes the secretary of the United Kingdom Alliance for the Legislative Suppression of the Sale of Intoxicating Liquors, who wrote:
If anything invades my social rights, certainly the traffic in strong drink does. It destroys my primary right of security, by constantly creating and stimulating social disorder. It invades my right of equality, by deriving a profit from the creation of a misery I am taxed to support. It impedes my right to free moral and intellectual development, by surrounding my path with dangers, and by weakening and demoralizing society, from which I have a right to claim mutual aid and intercourse. (83)
Mill calls the secretary’s definition of social rights a “monstrous principle” (83) that, if accepted, would vitiate the meaning of liberty entirely: “there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever. The doctrine ascribes to all mankind
a vested interest in each other’s moral, intellectual, and even physical perfection, to be defined by each claimant according to his own standard” (84).
Although Mill is perfectly capable of presenting his argument in theoretical terms, he turns his attention to what he calls “gross usurpations upon the liberty of private life actually practiced” (82) and without equivocation responds to efforts under way at that time to prohibit the drinking of alcohol:
Under the name of preventing intemperance, the people of one English colony, and of nearly half the United States, have been interdicted by law from making any use whatever
of fermented drinks, except for medical purposes: for prohibition of their sale is in fact, as it is intended to be, prohibition of their use. And though the impracticability of executing the law has caused its repeal in several of the States which had adopted it…an attempt has notwithstanding been commenced, and is prosecuted with considerable zeal by many of the professed philanthropists, to agitate for a similar law in this country. (82–83)
Mill acknowledges that selling alcohol is a social act because it inherently involves a buyer and a seller, but, as he notes, the underlying aim of the laws that prohibit sales of alcohol is to squelch the use of alcohol. “The infringement complained of is not on the liberty of the seller,” notes Mill, “but on that of the buyer and consumer; since the state might just as well forbid him to drink wine as purposely make it impossible for him to obtain it” (83). Mill remarks that when a “trade law” has the effect of prohibiting a commodity, it is really a prohibition law in disguise.
Similarly, Mill is skeptical of so-called sin taxes, which artificially inflate the price of a product in order to discourage its use. Such a tax, he explains, “is a prohibition, to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price; and to those who do, it is a penalty laid on them for gratifying a particular taste” (93). A person’s “choice of pleasures,” writes Mill, ought to be each person’s “own concern, and must rest with his own judgment” (93). Ultimately, however, Mill would permit a special tax on products such as alcohol, but only to the extent that the tax increased revenue for the government. A “sin tax” would be inappropriate if set so high that it actually dissuaded a sufficient number of buyers so as to result in a decrease in total tax revenues from sales of the product.
With respect to items that can be abused, such as “poisons,” Mill notes that “there is hardly any part of the legitimate form of action of a human being which would not admit of being represented, and fairly too, as increasing the facilities for some form or other of delinquency” (89). Thus, if a person desires to purchase a poison, it is inappropriate for the government to enjoin the purchase merely because the person might abuse the poison or use it to commit a crime. Instead, the laws should stop after requiring that drugs and poisons be labeled with cautionary statements. Mill does not believe that doctors should be the gatekeepers to drugs, noting that “to require in all cases the certificate of a medical practitioner would make it sometimes impossible, always expensive, to obtain the article for legitimate uses” (90). At most, any adults who wish to purchase such an item may be required to register their name, address, and an explanation of why they are purchasing a particular item.
Although Mill firmly believes it would be an illegitimate use of power for the government to prohibit inebriation based on a inchoate concern that an inebriated person might cause harm to others, he concedes that if an inebriated person does harm another person, then the government rightfully may prohibit that person from becoming inebriated in the future. “Drunkenness,” Mill explains, “in ordinary cases, is not a fit subject for legislative interference; but I should deem it perfectly legitimate that a person, who had once been convicted of any act of violence to others under the influence of drink, should be placed under a special legal restriction, personal to himself; that if he were afterwards found drunk, he should be liable to a penalty…The making himself drunk, in a person whom drunkenness excites to do harm to others, is a crime against others” (90).
On Liberty even considers whether the government properly may regulate pubs where alcohol is served. In this regard, Mill concludes that because such places are necessarily social and because public harms associated with drunkenness are more likely to occur in or near such establishments (at least relative to other public places), the government may regulate them, setting closing times and restricting operating licenses to “persons of known or vouched for respectability” (94). Any other restrictions, however, including setting a limit on how many pubs may exist in any given area, would be overreaching. Such a limit “for the express purpose of rendering them more difficult of access, and diminishing the occasions of temptation, not only exposes all to an inconvenience…but is suited only to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages” (94).
On Liberty stands as a classic document in defense of individual freedom, as relevant and persuasive today as it was in 1859. All elected officials, jurists, and public-policy makers should read On Liberty, along with the Bill of Rights. Whereas modern-day politicians, entranced by the “war on drugs,” rapaciously violate “the inward domain of consciousness” (13) by imposing ever more drug prohibitions and placing hundreds of thousands of citizens behind bars for drug offenses, On Liberty powerfully avows that a government grossly exceeds its legitimate power when it interferes with matters of the mind and the interior condition of its citizenry.
“Self-defense is a countermeasure that involves defending the health and well-being of oneself from harm.”
Source URL: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defense
Protecting the mind can be seen as analogous to protecting the body from physical attacks. However, the difference is that psychological attacks are much more difficult to perceive and to objectify. However, their effects can be much more harmful to the organism than physical attacks. Many people practice physical self-defense but only very few systematically train their psychological self-defense mechanisms.
“This chapter focuses on individual and team characteristics associated with psychological resilience during space missions. an initial discussion describes the types of mission factors (e.g., environmental stressors such as microgravity and radiation and habitability stressors such as confined space as well as privacy and work-related factors). two types of individual factors are discussed: (1) individual state factors such as sleep, fatigue, and mood and (2) individual resilience factors such as personal values and coping strategies. the final sections of the chapter turn to team resilience, its relation to team performance, and how best to select and train for resilient teams. a discussion of specific team skills provides some detail on the attributes of resilient teams.”
Fletcher, D., & Sarkar, M.. (2013). Psychological resilience: A review and critique of definitions, concepts, and theory. European Psychologist
“The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the variety of definitions, concepts, and theories of psychological resilience. to this end, the narrative is divided into three main sections. the first considers how resilience has been defined in the psychology research literature. despite the construct being operationalized in a variety of ways, most definitions are based around two core concepts: adversity and positive adaptation. a substantial body of evidence suggests that resilience is required in response to different adversities, ranging from ongoing daily hassles to major life events, and that positive adaptation must be conceptually appropriate to the adversity examined in terms of the domains assessed and the stringency of criteria used. the second section examines the conceptualization of resilience as either a trait or a process, and explores how it is distinct from a number of related terms. resilience is conceptualized as the interactive influence of psychological characteristics within the context of the stress process. the final section reviews the theories of resilience and critically examines one theory in particular that is commonly cited in the resilience literature. future theories in this area should take into account the multiple demands individuals encounter, the meta-cognitive and -emotive processes that affect the resilience-stress relationship, and the conceptual distinction between resilience and coping. the review concludes with implications for policy, practice, and research including the need to carefully manage individuals’ immediate environment, and to develop the protective and promotive factors that individuals can proactively use to build resilience.”
Rutten, B. P. F., Hammels, C., Geschwind, N., Menne-Lothmann, C., Pishva, E., Schruers, K., … Wichers, M.. (2013). Resilience in mental health: Linking psychological and neurobiological perspectives. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica
“OBJECTIVE: to review the literature on psychological and biological findings on resilience (i.e. the successful adaptation and swift recovery after experiencing life adversities) at the level of the individual, and to integrate findings from animal and human studies.nnmethod: electronic and manual literature search of medline, embase and psychinfo, using a range of search terms around biological and psychological factors influencing resilience as observed in human and experimental animal studies, complemented by review articles and cross-references.nnresults: the term resilience is used in the literature for different phenomena ranging from prevention of mental health disturbance to successful adaptation and swift recovery after experiencing life adversities, and may also include post-traumatic psychological growth. secure attachment, experiencing positive emotions and having a purpose in life are three important psychological building blocks of resilience. overlap between psychological and biological findings on resilience in the literature is most apparent for the topic of stress sensitivity, although recent results suggest a crucial role for reward experience in resilience.nnconclusion: improving the understanding of the links between genetic endowment, environmental impact and gene-environment interactions with developmental psychology and biology is crucial for elucidating the neurobiological and psychological underpinnings of resilience.”
Ong, A. D., Bergeman, C. S., Bisconti, T. L., & Wallace, K. A.. (2006). Psychological resilience, positive emotions, and successful adaptation to stress in later life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
“In 3 studies, the authors investigated the functional role of psychological resilience and positive emotions in the stress process. studies 1a and 1b explored naturally occurring daily stressors. study 2 examined data from a sample of recently bereaved widows. across studies, multilevel random coefficient modeling analyses revealed that the occurrence of daily positive emotions serves to moderate stress reactivity and mediate stress recovery. findings also indicated that differences in psychological resilience accounted for meaningful variation in daily emotional responses to stress. higher levels of trait resilience predicted a weaker association between positive and negative emotions, particularly on days characterized by heightened stress. finally, findings indicated that over time, the experience of positive emotions functions to assist high-resilient individuals in their ability to recover effectively from daily stress. implications for research into protective factors that serve to inhibit the scope, severity, and diffusion of daily stressors in later adulthood are discussed.”
Luthans, F., Avolio, B. J., Avey, J. B., & Norman, S. M.. (2007). Positive psychological capital: Measurement and relationship with performance and satisfaction. Personnel Psychology
“Two studies were conducted to analyze how hope, resilience, optimism, and efficacy in- dividually and as a composite higher-order factor predicted work performance and sat- isfaction. results from study 1 provided psychometric support for a new survey measure designed to assess each of these 4 facets, as well as a composite factor. study 2 results in- dicated a significant positive relationship regarding the composite of these 4 facets with performance and satisfaction. results from study 2 also indicated that the composite fac- tor may be a better predictor of performance and satisfaction than the 4 individual facets. limitations and practical implications conclude the article.”
APA. (2017). The Road to Resilience
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“This brochure explains how to develop and use a personal strategy for enhancing resilience despite challenging life experiences.”
Southwick, S. M., & Charney, D. S.. (2012). The Science of Resilience: Implications for the Prevention and Treatment of Depression. Science
“Human responses to stress and trauma vary widely. some people develop trauma-related psychological disorders, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd) and depression; others develop mild to moderate psychological symptoms that resolve rapidly; still others report no new psychological symptoms in response to traumatic stress. individual variability in how animals and humans respond to stress and trauma depends on numerous genetic, developmental, cognitive, psychological, and neurobiological risk and protective factors.”
Gooding, P. A., Hurst, A., Johnson, J., & Tarrier, N.. (2012). Psychological resilience in young and older adults. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry
“Research on adult reactions to potentially traumatic events has focused almost exclusively on post- traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). althoughthere has been relatively little research on the absence of trauma symp- toms, the available evidence suggests that resilience following such events may be more prevalent than previously believed. this study examined the prevalence of resilience, defined as having either no ptsd symptoms or one symptom, among a large (n 5 2,752) probability sample of new york area residents during the 6 months following the september 11th terrorist attack. although many respondents met criteria for ptsd, particularly when exposure was high, resilience was observed in 65.1% of the sample. resilience was less prevalent among more highly exposed individuals, but the frequency of resilience never fell below one third even among the exposure groups with the most dramatic elevations in ptsd.”
Fletcher, D., & Sarkar, M.. (2012). A grounded theory of psychological resilience in Olympic champions. Psychology of Sport and Exercise
“PNAS – resolução, apresentação, introdução, 1. análise situacional, 2. política pública de assistência social, 3.gestão da política nacional de assistência social na perspectiva do sistema único de assistência social – suas. nob-suas – resolução, 77 apresentação, 79 1. justificativa da norma operacional básica do suas, 2. tipos e níveis de gestão do suas, 3. instrumentos de gestão, 4. instâncias de articulação, pactuação e deliberação, 5. financiamento, 6. regras de transição,”
Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S.. (2012). Mindsets That Promote Resilience: When Students Believe That Personal Characteristics Can Be Developed. Educational Psychologist
Bonanno, G. A., Galea, S., Bucciarelli, A., & Vlahov, D.. (2007). What Predicts Psychological Resilience After Disaster? The Role of Demographics, Resources, and Life Stress. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
“A growing body of evidence suggests that most adults exposed to potentially traumatic events are resilient. however, research on the factors that may promote or deter adult resilience has been limited. this study examined patterns of association between resilience and various sociocontextual factors. the authors used data from a random-digit-dial phone survey (n = 2,752) conducted in the new york city area after the september 11, 2001, terrorist attack. resilience was defined as having 1 or 0 posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and as being associated with low levels of depression and substance use. multivariate analyses indicated that the prevalence of resilience was uniquely predicted by participant gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, level of trauma exposure, income change, social support, frequency of chronic disease, and recent and past life stressors. implications for future research and intervention are discussed.”
Sarkar, M., & Fletcher, D.. (2014). Psychological resilience in sport performers: a review of stressors and protective factors. Journal of Sports Sciences
“Abstract psychological resilience is important in sport because athletes must utilise and optimise a range of mental qualities to withstand the pressures that they experience. in this article, we discuss psychological resilience in sport performers via a review of the stressors athletes encounter and the protective factors that help them withstand these demands. it is hoped that synthesising what is known in these areas will help researchers gain a deeper profundity of resilience in sport, and also provide a rigorous and robust foundation for the development of a sport-specific measure of resilience. with these points in mind, we divided the narrative into two main sections. in the first section, we review the different types of stressors encountered by sport performers under three main categories: competitive, organisational and personal. based on our recent research examining psychological resilience in olympics champions, in the second section we discuss the five main families of psychological factors (viz. positive personality, motivation, confidence, focus, perceived social support) that protect the best athletes from the potential negative effect of stressors. it is anticipated that this review will help sport psychology researchers examine the interplay between stressors and protective factors, which will, in turn, focus the analytical lens on the processes underlying psychological resilience in athletes.”
Thompson, R. W., Arnkoff, D. B., & Glass, C. R.. (2011). Conceptualizing mindfulness and acceptance as components of psychological resilience to trauma. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse
Walker, F. R., Pfingst, K., Carnevali, L., Sgoifo, A., & Nalivaiko, E.. (2017). In the search for integrative biomarker of resilience to psychological stress. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
“Psychological resilience can be defined as individual’s ability to withstand and adapt to adverse and traumatic events. resilience is traditionally assessed by subjective reports, a method that is susceptible to self-report bias. an ideal solution to this challenge is the introduction of standardised and validated physiological and/or biological predictors of resilience. we provide a summary of the major concepts in the field of resilience followed by a detailed critical review of the literature around physiological, neurochemical and immune markers of resilience. we conclude that in future experimental protocols, biological markers of resilience should be assesses both during baseline and during laboratory stressors. in the former case the most promising candidates are represented by heart rate variability and by in vitro immune cells assay; in the latter case—by startle responses (especially their habituation) during stress challenge and by cardiovascular recovery after stress, and by cortisol, dhea and cytokine responses. importantly, they should be used in combination to enhance predictive power.”
