The Sandy Hook School massacre of December 14 has no doubt been
seized upon by the present police state as a raison d’être for
heightened gun control measures. Yet a more subtle element of the event
is the promotion of a political worldview under the cloak of psychiatry
and an increasingly prominent notion of “community building.”[1]
Stepping into the emotional fallout of December’s mass shooting is
Dr. John Woodall. The former Harvard psychiatrist was almost immediately
making the rounds in Newtown, consoling the grief stricken and
advocating a seemingly unique communitarian creed. Woodall’s presence
was unsurprising for locals since he resides in Sandy Hook, where his
“Unity Project” non-profit is also based.
What is more, the event was
eerily appropriate for the
“teaching children resilience” mission
Woodall’s organization was already undertaking in Newtown area schools.
Unity Project had already contributed to such exercises following major
crises including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
At first glance the Unity Project appears to be yet another new agey,
“let go of the hate” platform for Woodall’s pop-humanist psychology. We
must learn to overcome our ordeals and look beyond our differences on
the way to one big group hug.
The organization has created such a
program for the youth of Newtown’s high school where students have been
encouraged to fill out a psychological
survey and negotiate with administrators and teachers to lessen the homework load.[2]
On its face the prospect of developing well-rounded and engaged
citizens sounds desirable. Who wants to be considered a holdout against
local cooperation, peaceful coexistence, even global trade
harmonization? The consequence these days includes running the risk of
being deemed a grouchy extremist.
Perhaps this is why groups are
actively espousing and disseminating Unity Project precepts in schools
and communities throughout the world.
“As we move more deeply into a national and global climate fraught with complex and nuanced problems,” Woodall explains,
"Young people need to become masters of working with this
complexity and diversity in cooperative and constructive ways. Our
democracy and the happiness of our lives depend upon it. Young people
need to know how to recognize bias, see the big picture and resist and
problem solve cooperatively and to resist the human tendency to allow
fear and anger to pull us to simplistic and extremist solutions that
only create division and conflict and end up worsening the problems we
face".[3]
This exact doctrine was articulated in Woodall’s December 14 remarks to the Associated Press.
I do this for a living—I do trauma work for a living. I
ran programs overseas for the State Department. I’ve worked in school
shootings before. But all that—none of that counts. All that counts at
that moment is that another human being is there for you … It’s a strong
community. It’s a resilient community.
The task now is for the
community to give this a meaning. It’s like in New York City after 9/11.
The lesson of 9/11 wasn’t that we should be afraid or angry, or bitter
or blame or point fingers. The lesson of 9/11 is that we’re all in this
together and we need to show compassion for each other to give meaning
to the loss.
In Woodall’s evaluation the death and horror from such events
constitute a sort of nightmarish martyrdom from which a greater good
will arise. Indeed, many of the Sandy Hook victims’ families publicly
exhibit this very ability to unemotionally cope with profound loss, an
ostensible response and mindset that does not go unnoticed by the
broader public.[4]
The wide exposure of this apparent struggle suggests a
mass conditioning toward the community resilience that is a foremost
element of what contemporary social engineers have termed the “
Newtown transition.”
Along these lines and throughout the bulk of Woodall’s writings and
pronouncements there is a clear resemblance to the precepts of the
Bahá’í faith, to which Woodall is a devotee. Even though his
professional training and pedigree suggest a “scientific” (qua
psychiatry) approach to personal and community problems, Woodall’s
writings are essentially those espoused by the Bahá’ís.
He just seldom
declares such affiliations or beliefs publicly.[5] An exception was when
Woodall and his spouse Margo Woodall recited Bahá’í passages at the
December 16, 2012 interfaith gathering for Sandy Hook victims attended
by President Obama.
From its headquarters in Haifa Israel and under the authority of the
Universal House of Justice, Bahá’í is overseen country-to-country by
National and Local Spiritual Assemblies. The religion is an
international phenomenon, with its spiritual founder prophesying a
global socio-political transformation under the Bahá’í order’s aegis.
“The Bahá’í Faith is the youngest of the world’s independent religions,”
the International Bahá’í Community website notes.
Its founder, Bahá’u'lláh (1817-1892), is regarded by
Bahá’ís as the most recent in the line of Messengers of God that
stretches back beyond recorded time and that includes Abraham, Moses,
Buddha, Krishna, Zoroaster, Christ and Muhammad.
The central theme of
Bahá’u'lláh’s message is that humanity is one single race and that the
day has come for its unification in one global society. God, Bahá’u'lláh
said, has set in motion historical forces that are breaking down
traditional barriers of race, class, creed, and nation and that will, in
time, give birth to a universal civilization.[6]
In 1982 the Bahá’í faith unambiguously professed before the United
Nations
“the goal of a new World Order, Divine in origin, all-embracing
in scope, equitable in principle, challenging in its features — that a
harassed humanity must strive.”[7]
Toward this end Bahá’ís’ guiding philosophy and goals include:
All humanity is one family.
Women and men are equal.
All prejudice—racial, religious, national, or economic—is destructive and must be overcome.
We must investigate truth for ourselves, without preconceptions.
Science and religion are in harmony.
Our economic problems are linked to spiritual problems.
All major religions come from God.
World peace is the crying need of our time.
If this is indeed the basis of a global religion, before which all
other beliefs and denominations must yield, there are a number of
obvious concerns. For example, how does one define national or economic
“prejudice”? Will one’s economic wherewithal be contingent upon
converting to a new, state-mandated religion/spirituality?
And along
these lines, if science and religion are conflated, what entities will
help determine the moral parameters of the many scientific pursuits that
run counter to and endanger life on earth? Under such a scheme will
psychiatrists and bioethicists make up a new clergy? Many of the Bahá’í
tenets would fit well in a technocratic order where the state is the
foremost authority.
According to the Center for Media and Democracy’s Sourcewatch
database [8] the Bahá’í faith’s ambitious vision is a forthrightly
political project calling for the creation of
A World Super State
A World Legislator
Unification of all the world’s religions under the umbrella of the Bahá’í faith
A World Parliament
A World Police Force
A Supreme Tribunal
A Single World Currency
A World Taxation System
A Single Universal Auxiliary Language
Implementation of Agenda 21 and the Earth Charter
Establishment of a World Free Trade Area
Along with the institutionalized secular faith of carbon-centric
environmentalism that figures centrally in the Bahá’ís’ undertakings,
the Unity Project’s understated transnationalism is likewise making
inroads at public schools and in communities throughout the world. As in
his previous endeavors, the Sandy Hook tragedy has provided the
backdrop for Woodall’s evangelizing that seeks to realign the
traumatized individual and group toward certain ideals and norms.
What
is arguably of concern is that Woodall proceeds under the cover of
mental health professional while espousing an ardent globalist ideology
that runs counter to the traditional political beliefs and religious
faiths that, for better or worse, are espoused by a majority of the
world’s population.
In the broader scheme of things the impulses and goals of the
anti-individualistic Bahá’í faith’s and Dr. Woodall’s Unity Project
provide clear glimpses of what may soon become a prevalent if not
compulsory worldview–the elements of which are already being employed to
ease the world’s population into a heightened tempo of violent and
traumatic mediated events en route to the digitally-enforced feudalism
of the twenty-first century.
Notes
[1] See “
Baha’i Presence in Sandy Hook and How It May Influence Our Future,” Sandy Hook Truth, February 13, 2013.
[2] “[S]ample student strengths that might be helpful in completing
the Unity Project Survey” include “Considerate,” “Doesn’t hold a
grudge,” “Good at heart,” “Peaceful,” “Spiritual,” “Thinks before
acting,” “Reverent.” Davis Dunavin, “
Meet the Student Who Helped Give Newtown High School a True Vacation,”
Newtown Patch, April 5, 2013.
What this is, developing "resilience," is actually training us to be no more than dumb zoo animals, teaching us to be numb to the trauma inflicted on us, so we become docile and forget who and what we really are (spirit beings). This new-agey "letting go" is taking a grain of truth and twisting it; yes, there is a point in one's spiritual path where the "letting go" DOES happen, but it is an *individual* path, and letting go is NOT a numbing of pain from trauma. It is NOT "just get over it, already." "You need to let go of it." It's not that at all.
ReplyDeleteSo this is training people to be blind to the evildoers. When the path out of that is actually to see so very clearly who the evildoers are and what they are attempting to do.
Peace lies at the end of it -- but peace is not a numbing. This numbing process is actually cutting people off at their knees, so they cannot ascend, and deceiving them about what is being done to them. It is incredibly evil.