AMERICAN NOTES: A Pill for Peace?

Dr. Kenneth Clark, president of the American Psychological Association, has proposed a startling cure for international aggression. The world's leaders, he told the A.P.A. meeting in Washington, should be required to take "psychotechnological medication"—pills or other treatments to curb their aggressive behavior and induce them to govern more humanely. Such a pharmacological fix, Clark argued, "would provide the masses with the security that their leaders would not or could not sacrifice them on the altars of the leaders' personal ego pathos."

The idea, which has been treated as more or less prophetic fiction by countless writers from Aldous Huxley to Agatha Christie, carries considerable fascination. What if a pill had been available to soothe Genghis Khan or Alexander, or bend Adolph Hitler's mind to some charitable humanity? Clark's proposal is an extraordinarily dramatic extension of the argument made by Behavioral Psychologist B.F. Skinner (see cover story) that man must be controlled to survive.

Nonetheless, the idea of tampering with the mind and soul of man is in some ways more scary than war. How possibly could the drug dispensers differentiate between the power drive that constitutes leadership and that which leads to aggressive violence? And who would dispense the drugs? If they were voluntary, those most in need of them would be precisely those who would not take them. If they could somehow be made obligatory, then the dispensers would become the dominators. Who polices the police?

Furthermore, the abuse of power by political leaders may be a social rather than a psychological problem. As Stanford University Psychologist Karl Pribram remarked after Clark's speech, wars are generally fought by rational people, not by men who are enraged or certifiably insane. What needs to be changed is not so much the minds of individual leaders but the assumptions of entire cultures in which war is acceptable.