The Mental Environment

Human beings as social creatures are immersed in a sea of other people's thoughts, including all the books that have ever been read. In this mental environment there are inaccuracies, or "mind pollution," created mainly by social pressures.

This book is a basic introduction to the mental environment and mind pollution -- not just the obvious pollution of advertising and political lies, but going deeper than that, into the internalized social influences of family, peers, religion, and education.

It explains how the high status of physical science has steered psychologists away from the study of the mind, and presents a view of the mind with the "mental senses." It describes methods of mind pollution -- "unscientific methods," misrepresentation, manipulation, and mental warfare -- and factors contributing to mind pollution -- bad logic, psychological problems, sorcery, domination, and status. It presents the perspective of a new civilization (first described in Re-Educating Myself, 1985), and from that perspective points out inaccuracies in major belief systems of the present culture -- the religious, the academic, and the New Age.