Authored by Herbert Goldhamer and Andrew W. Marshall
The last names Goldhamer and Marshall will doubtlessly sound familiar to any student of 1960s-to-modern American military history and our crop of well-connected erstwhile Cold Warriors, but before Goldhamer and Marshall were penning the seminal work on waging total warfare in the nuclear age, they collaborated on a quiet psycho-historical study while ensonsced within the quintessentially cerebral atmosphere of the early RAND corporation.
Psychosis and Civilization is noteworthy (not the least given that both Goldhamer and Marshall were trained as economists, and had essentially zero professional expertise within the vibrant field of psychology), as it pretty well inverted societal conceptions on the increasing prevalence of mental illness through a thorough examination of neglected archival data.
As it turns out, despite concerns (which frankly haven’t gone away) that the increasing complexity of American society and its resultant generation of alienation were precipitating mental illness, in this their first foray into the data from northeastern mental hospitals and asylums, they discovered that not only was that not the case, rates of mental illness had gone more or less unchanged for about a century.
Below is the first and fully digitized version of their piece de magister on the field of psychology.
A quick-side note, yes publishing this openly is legal, you can check the original copyright here and compare it to extant copyright law.
About the Authors
Andy ‘Yoda’ Marshall
To long-time readers of Analytica Camillus, Andy Marshall needs no introduction. He’s the original “superman”, the only person in human history who’s ideas and practices destroyed the #2 nuclear superpower, without a hot war to boot.
For new-comers, can read more about him at the website for his foundation (created from his lifetime earnings).
Herbert ‘Herb’ Goldhamer
Herb Goldhamer, a long-time RAND analyst and frightening intellect in his own right (I wasn’t able to find a picture of him, so enjoy this photo from a chess match where he drew Bobby Fischer), was a Canadian-born American intellectual juggernaut in his own right who wrote the seminal text on the dynamics and life of the average Soviet soldier. He also wrote ‘the’ textbook on how to advise governments, that’s currently handed out as a gratis for students who graduate from RAND’s Pardee school.
Bonus Goodies
It’s not lost on us that academic texts can be prohibitively expensive (last I checked, ‘The Advisor’ sells for $80 USD), so the team here at Analytica has devised a quick workaround.
If anyone would like to access links to digitized versions of ‘The Advisor’, ‘Psychosis and Civilization’, and the best available biography of Herman Kahn ‘Supergenius’ on the Analytica Camillus open library, available here.
Leave a Reply