The Marcabs made a deal with the Hebrews!

[AnonyMary]

Apocalypse Oak Park: Dorothy Martin, the Chicagoan Who Predicted the End of the World and Inspired the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Posted May 20, 2011, at 3:32 p.m.
By Whet Moser

In December 1954, the Tribune ran a short item about a Michigan doctor who foresaw the end of the world:

The doctor, fortuitously named "Charles Laughead," a former staff physician at Michigan State, forecast a tidal wave, a volcanic action, and "a rise in the ground extending from Hudson's bay [in Canada] to the Gulf of Mexico which will seriously affect the center of the United States."

But Dr. Laughead was merely serving as the spokesman for Dorothy Martin, a 54-year-old Oak Park housewife, who herself was simply relaying communications from "outer space." Martin's extraterrestrial sources from the planet Clarion informed her that "there will be much loss of life, practically all of it, in 1955.... It is an actual fact that the world is in a mess. But the Supreme Being is going to clean house by sinking all of the land masses as we know them now and raising the land masses from under the sea."

Observers of history and residents of the center of the United States are aware that this did not occur, though Laughead claimed that a December 21 earthquake near Eureka, California "might have been part" of the "advance information" on Martin's prophecies. The next week, Dorothy Martin was placed under psychiatric care to prevent the Oak Park police of charging her with "inciting to riot," after a "boisterous crowd... blocked traffic on Christmas Eve outside the Martin home at 707 S. Cuyler Av., Oak Park, after Mrs. Martin had predicted that she and her associates would be 'lifted up' that night by spacemen.

Martin also faced charges of contributing to the delinquency of minors, because a "police investigation showed that children of the neighborhood had talked to Mrs. Martin about space travel with the result that some of the youngsters had trouble sleeping afterward."

What Martin and Laughead didn't know was that their hearty band of future space travelers had been infiltrated: by University of Minnesota social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues. After reading a newspaper article about Martin, Festinger rounded up a handful of psychologists and psychology students to pose as converts to Martin's small group of "Seekers," gaining their trust and recording the group's actions during their not-Final Days.

In 1956, Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter produced When Prophecy Fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world, an account of their time inside Martin's group. Though it's a work of psychology, it's written in a narrative that reads like a combination of investigative journalism and Charles Portis's brilliant cult spoof Masters of Atlantis.
[..]

[,,] But When Prophecy Fails is more than just a wonderfully readable dispatch from the edges of psychology. The book was the genesis of Festinger's theory of "cognitive dissonance": the idea that humans are as given to rationalizing as being rational. It may seem absurdly obvious now that Festinger's phrase has become part of the vernacular, but in 1957, when he published A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, it was a revolutionary theory that would go onto influence the study not only of psychology, but politics, economics, and other fields.

Among the psychologists influenced by the work was Philip Zimbardo, designer of the in/famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which clearly bears marks of Festinger's breakthrough. (If you're not familiar with it from the reams of references in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, you might remember it from an episode of Veronica Mars.) Here's Zimbardo introducing the concept of cognitive dissonance, using video of Festinger's lab experiments; Festinger himself makes an appearance:

[video=youtube_share;korGK0yGIDo]http://youtu.be/korGK0yGIDo[/video]

 

[AnonyMary]

When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter which studied a small UFO cult called the Seekers that believed in an imminent Apocalypse and its coping mechanisms after the event did not occur. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations. One of the first published cases of dissonance was reported in this book.
[..]
Overview

Festinger and his associates read an interesting item in their local newspaper headlined "Prophecy from planet Clarion call to city: flee that flood."

The prophecy came from Dorothy Martin (1900–1992), a Chicago housewife who experimented with automatic writing. (In order to protect her privacy, the study gave her the alias of "Marian Keech" and relocated her group to Michigan.) She had previously been involved with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics movement, and her cult incorporated ideas from what was to become Scientology.[1]
[..]
Conditions

Festinger stated that five conditions must be present if someone is to become a more fervent believer after a failure or disconfirmation:

A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.

The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual's commitment to the belief.

The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.

Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.

The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytize or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails

 

[rich]

I don't get it.
Was it the marcabians or the Clarions who took over? Did they take over the ASSK or did they take over Scientology? or both?