Part Seventy-Seven, Chapter Eight - The Latest Secret History of PR and Psychology

Apparently working in the PR industry to promote psychology renders one immune to the deception that mental health doctors are good for you, because at a staff meeting one week after the last chapter, Madison threatens his criminal reporters with a dose of LSD or, "if the offense is really bad," psychiatric treatment if they screw up.  But then he announces "all systems go!" and his team hustles into action - "The PR war was on."

See, Madison used his connection to the Apparatus Provocation Section to get five of his former circus girls some fake IDs to let them pass as noblewomen, allowing them entry to various nobby sore-ees and whatnot.  There they strategically gossiped about a wonderful new import from Earth called psychiatry, and a local expert visiting Voltar to cure people - turns out sex is the root of any mental disorder.  By now there's a nice, workable rumor sweeping Voltar's social circles, building the buzz about this fascinating new science.

Madison, with a dungeon waiting, watched the cam­paign nervously.

Very few people, even on Earth, realized that psychiatry and psychology were just the creations of PR and had no other substance.

Wait, whaaaaat?  Just a few chapters ago we were told all about how PR saved psychiatry from being recognized as an excuse for "scientists" to drop their drawers in front of kindergartners.

Freud's theory that everything was sex had remained scoffed at and neglected until he had married into a New York advertising firm and then the advertising men began to push it, and until this day sex was the dominant basis of all Earth advertising.  

So... Freud was psychoanalyzing around the 1890's, right, and modern PR started up around 1900, and nobody took Freud's theories seriously until he got married in 1886 and got a PR for a spouse or something and everyone was like yay, it's a penis.  But, as we learned earlier, despite this people still thought psychology was an excuse to drop trousers in front of little kiddies until after World War II, when the Nazis (who drove Freud into exile) founded a bunch of psychological associations and got PR to make them look good, allowing them to take over the world and murder people and drop trousers in front of little kiddies.

I tried to do the "conspiracy theory string diagram" thing to chart this but it came out a knot.  This is a timeline of evil deeds that loops back on itself.  It is an incestuous conspiracy.

The PR on psychoanalysis was so good that it overrode the fact that a third of the patients committed suicide in the first three months of treatment. And there were no cures of record.

Ah, statistics.  Y'know, 12 out of 5 Mission Earth purchasers are Scientologists, and the sixth inevitably dies a week after finishing the books.

Madison was following the general PR pattern psychiatry had pursued so successfully.  He even had LSD available, a milestone of psychiatric success which had permitted it to capture no less than the head of the largest news magazine in America, make him an addict and convert him to the psychiatric cause.  Loose, of Slime magazine, had thus become a primary crusader for psychiatry and LSD and a relentless hatchet man for any other technology that arose that psychiatry thought might constitute a threat.

So is Madison a PR or a psychiatrist at this point?  I am very confused.

His work pays off when he announces that the famous Earth (don't you mean Blito-P3?) psychologist Dr. Crobe will be giving a lecture to a small audience in Madison's not-actually-haunted apartment.  Crobe gives a little speech, with a shock collar on in case he goes off-script, about Freud and sex and egos and ids and the danger of a dissatisfied sex life.  The audience - wives of those snooty publishers - is quite receptive.  So Crobe asks for some volunteers and agrees to five special "interviews."

These five victims are escorted to rooms like that demon sacrificial chamber Madison widdled himself in earlier, now refurbished as fake hospitals, and quietly dosed with LSD via tongue depressor.  While Madison watches over the space closed-circuit TV, Crobe goes around encouraging the women to recount any troubles with their husbands.  An hour into it, the drugs kick in, and Madison has his technicians turn on the holographic horror show.

So after being put into a bad state of mind by thinking about arguments, the tripping wives of newspaper publishers are subjected to holograms of devils or space pirates or "bats with daggers in their claws," so they end up not enjoying themselves very much.  When the screaming is over and the drugs wear off, Crobe gives his diagnosis: the only cure for bats with daggers in their claws is to have sex with handsome young men at a private resort on Relax Island.

And that's how it all comes together, folks!  We needed the holographic apartment to make scary sights and sounds!  We needed Teenie's island to provide man-sluts!  We needed Crobe for the LSD, and we needed psychology so he could send women to those man-sluts to cure them of the "psychological problems" brought about by that LSD!  And the end result of this convoluted series of events is:

[Madison] grinned.

He could almost smell, now, the Heller-Wister headlines!

News stories about Heller robbing space banks!  Yes, Madison's unlimited finances, status as Media Czar, relationship with a famous actress, or connection with the intelligence organization that allegedly controls an empire, are not enough to get a story about Heller onto the airwaves!  This is what we have to go through to open up the possibility of advancing the plot a single step!  Because we are on page 331 of 459 and we have yet to see a single phony headline about Heller!

Naturally, now that it looks like Madison will finally start his devastating PRing of Heller, the author chooses to spend the next Part back on Earth.


Back to Part Seventy-Seven, Chapters Six and Seven

Forward to Part Seventy-Eight, Chapter One