Sep 14 • General discussion
The Architecture of Control - Left-Hemisphere Thinking and the Postwar Re-Engineering of Humanity
This is the first essay in a series exploring the reconstruction of the Western World after the end of World War 2 - this will be turned into a course in the near future.
We are given two modes of reality through which we interpret the world. These come to us in the form of the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. In short, the right hemisphere engages with the world with breadth, depth, intuition, and a holistic perspective. It seeks to **comprehend** the world.
On the other hand, the left hemisphere can be interpreted as a narrow-focused attentional beam. Its purpose is to aid in grasping and manipulating things. Its primary concern is seizing, amassing, and using “things.” In _The Master and His Emissary_, Iain McGilchrist explains in great detail the implications of this divide, both currently and for the future.
Neuroscience identifies several differences that characterize the left hemisphere’s worldview:
- It has a tendency to classify into groups, often ignoring individual differences.
- It possesses a broader linguistic capacity, with subtle and complex syntax.
- Most importantly, it extends our **power to map the world and explore complexities of causal relationships between things**.
- This capability is of utmost importance, as it has allowed humans to take complete control of their domain, subjecting even nature to the will of man.
- It favors the mapped, re-presented world, which is ultimately disconnected from lived reality. Yet this world is self-consistent and self-contained.
Iain McGilchrist sums this up:
> “If one had to characterise the left hemisphere by reference to one governing principle it would be that of division. Manipulation and use require clarity and fixity, and clarity and fixity require separation and division. What is moving and seamless, a process, becomes static and separate – things. It is the hemisphere of ‘either/or’: clarity yields sharp boundaries.”
The traits and tendencies of the left hemisphere, when amplified to a societal and collective scale, leave traces of its influence on institutions, technologies, and power structures. Industrialization intensified humanity’s capacity to remake its surroundings. The increasing drive for territory, resources, and shifting worldviews resulted in the unprecedented devastation and violence of the World Wars. This pushed nations to adopt systems and ideologies that could prevent future catastrophe—ranging from international governance to scientific interventions aimed at understanding and manipulating human behavior.
Industrialization introduced new ways of organizing labour and capital for the greatest good of the greatest number. Both systems, despite their differences, shared a utilitarian spirit that required treating the unique individual as a cog or “bit”—dispensable and interchangeable at a moment’s notice. This is a key element of the left hemisphere's world. It reduces the individual to automata, a function of the broader system which does not possess a unique, spirited individuality.
Two clear institutional developments that took place immediately after the war in 1945 were the United Nations on October 24, 1945, and subsequently UNESCO on November 16, 1945. UNESCO's constitution contains the following phrase:
“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.”
While humanitarian in tone, this statement is also laced with the possibility of large-scale intervention into the minds and actions of not only nations at large but individuals. This illustrates the left hemisphere's drive for systemisation and abstraction. "Construct" implies the need to engineer, to grab, seize and apprehend a part of a system that is imperfect. Rather than understanding it as whole, the left hemisphere seeks to remake it in its image.
The utilitarian worldview now took its next progression—shifting control from physical labour to the very mindset of the “common good.” Seizing power and moral decision-making from sovereign nations, authority was now being placed under the watchful eye of global, utilitarian, unaccountable bodies.
In parallel, scientific and organizational thought lines were beginning to converge. The Tavistock Clinic, focusing on the psychological shock of World War I soldiers, began in 1920. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was formally established in 1947. It brought clinical psychology, social work, and policy into the public eye. In 1943 Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow published **“Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology”**, introducing many of the tenets of cybernetic research.
This research introduced feedback and control as general principles for organizing not only machines but living beings. Little by little, the implicit left hemispheric worldview begins to become explicit. Uniqueness, wholeness and fluidity slowly stripped in favour of control, mechanistic parts and stasis.
Whether intentional or not, the pathway to this control was followed by The Macy Conferences. They were introduced as an interdisciplinary summit to discuss cutting-edge science in regard to the study of human action, behavior, and development. A seminal paper for the foundation of this conference, as referenced prior, was _“Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”_ (1943).
In the same year Dr. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts introduced the concept of the neural net, which treated neurons as binary logical units. These developments created the incubation space for institutions influenced by the left hemisphere’s conceptual model of the world.
Within months of UNESCO's founding, the National Mental Health Act, which established the National Institute of Mental Health, was passed. This gave the federal government of the United States the mandate to prevent as well as treat mental illness.
Three months later the first Macy Conference was convened on March 8–9, 1946, under the title _“Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems.”_ Spearheaded by figures such as Warren McCulloch and Frank Fremont-Smith, these were a set of interdisciplinary meetings explicitly exploring the connections between human and machine systems. They ranged across language, control, information, and the understanding of our world. These conferences, which took place from 1946–1954, did not remain theoretical. The concepts and their members later disseminated into military research, social and government policy, and institutional design.
By 1948 the World Federation of Mental Health was established. Its first president was Dr. John Rawlings Rees, the former head of the British Army's Psychological Warfare Division and founder of the Tavistock Institute of Human Affairs. Margaret Mead was a later president. In the document _World Citizenship_, the summary can be quoted as follows:
- The statement of the International Preparatory Commission is as follows:
“Studies of human development indicate that human behavior is modifiable throughout life, particularly during infancy, childhood, and adolescence, through human relationships and contact. Similarly, examinations of social institutions across many countries reveal that these, too, can be modified. These newly recognized possibilities provide a foundation for improving human relations, releasing constructive human potentialities, and reshaping social institutions for the common good.”
Throughout the document certain limitations and obstacles to this potentiality are detailed as follows:
“Such intervention will inevitably encounter many and serious obstacles. One of the greatest barriers to the growth of a world community is the partial or distorted image of the outside world that is inculcated through nationalist or ideological bias, and through the creation of cultural ‘stereotypes’ in thought and feeling.”
To disregard nationalism is to disregard and negate the other positive qualities that make a nation and its people distinct. The left hemisphere's tendency to reduce countries and individuals is laced throughout the document. Here again the left hemisphere’s influence is clear: diversity of culture and identity is treated not as richness to be preserved but as error to be corrected, an obstacle to the seamless functioning of a world system.
Evidence of this is particularly evident in the following paragraph:
“The conscious creation of world institutions is now several generations old. Established organs of the United Nations and its specialized agencies—such as the Food and Agricultural Organization, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Health Organization, and the International Labour Office—illustrate this progress, representing only those most directly relevant to our topic. In these and many other less formal services and conventions that transcend national boundaries, a body of ‘world servants’ is emerging—individuals who combine their national identity with a broader loyalty to humanity.”
This begs a fundamental question: where does loyalty to a faceless, nameless, and untethered "humanity" for the "common good" end? Can any distinct nation, culture, or people be upended or extinguished if seen as an impediment to establishing a "common good" for the downtrodden?
The postwar institutions I have outlined—UNESCO, the World Federation of Mental Health, and the Macy Conferences—all present themselves as humanitarian, with lofty aims for the highest good of humanity. Yet the language they use reveals a much more sinister aim. UNESCO declares that "wars begin in the minds of men." If peace is to be achieved by all means necessary, and wars indeed begin in the mind, this statement opens the door to justifying manipulation and engineering of human thought. The very basis of what makes us, us.
The World Citizenship statement extends this premise further, asserting that "studies of human development indicate that human behavior is modifiable throughout life." Combined with the emergence of a network of “world servants”—individuals combining national identity with loyalty to humanity—humans are framed not as unique, spirited individuals but as systems to be managed and reshaped. This is a vision of a transnational, abstracted, re-presented world, governed not by lived experience but by conceptual maps and the designs of an elite.
These ideas move beyond the domain of an idealistic, progressive elite and suggest a blueprint for humanity itself, engineered according to a mechanistic and utilitarian logic. The next logical question, then, is: **how were these ideas put into practice?**
That is what I will be exploring in the next essay.
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The Architecture of Control - Left-Hemisphere Thinking and the Postwar Re-Engineering of Humanity
