So in the discord server today we were reviewing the Changing Images of Man research as it get’s integrated into the bot, and noticed that the name Goertzel & Goertzel was quotes in the research.
On page 147 of the original research. (Can be found here)
“Just as the mythological here often suffers from a defect that spurs
him on to action, so many of the great men of history have not been
typically the product of carefree, “well-adjusted” homes (Goertzel and
Goertzel, 1962). Nor do such persons typically adjust in a conformist
fashion to personal and social realities which to them seem filled with
anomalies. Rather, they attempt to resolve the dissonant elements
of their life in creative ways, which is the central goal of psychotherapy.”
The Goertzel & Goertzel mentioned in the quote are the father and grandfather of famed AI Architect Ben Goertzel.
Here is a little background on both subjects.
Victor Goertzel (grandfather)
Victor Goertzel was born in Chicago on July 22, 1914 and moved to New York City as an infant with his parents, Sam Goertzel and Anna Wilson Goertzel. At nine he moved with his father, step-mother Shaindle, and step-sister Aida to Los Angeles, California where he exhibited an early commitment to principle and direct action by distributing a leaflet that countered an editorial in the high school paper which he felt unfairly criticized the Soviet Union and which the paper had refused to print as a letter. As a result of his free speech activities and despite the help of the ACLU, Victor was expelled from the school in his senior year. That did not deter his education or his activism-he graduated from University of California at Berkeley with a degree in psychology in 1938, going on to obtain a doctorate in clinical psychology in 1953, and spent a lifetime working on peace and social justice issues.
Ted Goertzel (father)
Ted George Goertzel (born November 20, 1942),[1] is a retired Emeritus Professor in the Sociology Department at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J. He is the author and co-author of books and articles spanning from social economy, politics, and conspiracy theories. He is the father of Ben Goertzel, with whom he co-authored the 1995 book Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics.
The Conspiracy Meme: Why Conspiracy Theories Appeal and Persist
by Ted Goertzel (Link)
Conspiracy theorizing is a rhetorical meme that transforms scientific controversies
into human dramas with villains who can be exposed. It uses controversial facts
and speculations to undermine scientific evidence.
But if we go back even further to Victor’s father Samuel Goertzel we find something very interesting. Samuel Goertzel was a Bolshevik Communist.
Confessions of a Turncoat and Remembrance of a True Believer
by Ted Goertzel
“My father inherited his Communism from his father, Sam, who grew up in Vilnius, Lithuania. One day Sam and a friend were playing by the river, and the friend fell in. Sam tried to save him but had to let go because the current was too strong. The friend’s parents blamed him, and he had to leave the Jewish religious school and enter the Russian secular school. This experience may account for the fact that he became alienated from religious Judaism and was the only one of his brothers and sisters to become a lifelong believer in Communism.”
“Victor grew up in a community of leftist Jewish immigrants in Los Angeles and in New York, and joined the Young Pioneers, a youth group sponsored by the Communist Party. The Pioneers was the “in group” whose respect he valued, and at the time he thought he had influenced his father to become a Communist, never realizing that Sam had been a Bolshevik in Lithuania.”
Upon further searching we find Samuel Goertzel mentioned in the Investigation of communist propaganda. Hearings before a Special committee to investigate communist activities in the United States of the House of representatives, Seventy-first Congress, second session, pursuant to H. Res. 220, providing for an investigation of communist propaganda in the United States files. Link to Google Books
In that report the Goertzel name is mentioned several times.
In conjunction with Sam Goertzel being mentioned his notes are exactly the same as the notes for Aida Handler as signed by her mother S. Handler. Also S. Handler signed a note stating Sam was her son, but signed it Guardian.
Now we get to the links to Leaon Trotsky and his Red Army spy network that was operating out of the United States and several other countries at the time.
Victor Goertzel Obituary
http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/VictorGoertzel.htm
In the late thirties, Victor met his wife-to-be, Mildred George, a schoolteacher, and they traveled to Mexico, He married schoolteacher Mildred George in 1939 after a trip to Mexico where the couple became acquainted with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and discovered Quakerism.
Confessions of a Turncoat
http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/turncoat.htm
By the time they met in Chicago, Mildred was an orthodox Socialist, while Victor was part of a Trotskyist faction which was engineering a “united front from below.” They decided that they were just canceling out each other’s votes, and dropped out of the socialist movement.
Trotskyist/Trotskyism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky identified as an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik–Leninist. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, proletarian internationalism and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working class self-emancipation and mass democracy. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Joseph Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country in favor of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
Leon Trotsky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky
Trotsky bears a great deal of responsibility both for the victory of the Red Army in the civil war, and for the establishment of a one-party authoritarian state with its apparatus for ruthlessly suppressing dissent… He was an ideologist and practitioner of the Red Terror. He despised ‘bourgeois democracy’; he believed that spinelessness and soft-heartedness would destroy the revolution, and that the suppression of the propertied classes and political opponents would clear the historical arena for socialism. He was the initiator of concentration camps, compulsory ‘labour camps,’ and the militarization of labour, and the state takeover of trade unions. Trotsky was implicated in many practices which would become standard in the Stalin era, including summary executions.
From January 1937 to April 1939, Trotsky and his wife lived in the Coyoacán area of Mexico City at La Casa Azul (The Blue House), the home of the painter Diego Rivera and Rivera’s wife and fellow painter, Frida Kahlo, with whom Trotsky had an affair.[122][123] His final move was a few blocks away to a residence on Avenida Viena in April 1939, following a break with Rivera.
From January 1937 to April 1939 Leon Trotsky lived with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the same time that Victor Goertzel and Mildred were in Mexico and converting to Quakerism as a method to hide from the Joseph Stalin was committing the Great Purge.
Great Purge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
The political purge was primarily an effort by Stalin to eliminate challenge from past and potential opposition groups, including the left and right wings led by Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, respectively.
These connections show that there is a high probability that Victor Goertzel was infact there to meet with Leon Trotsky to discuss unknown matters relating to the party.
But where do the quakers play in? That is outlined in Russian Dissenters.
Russian Dissenters
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10aJQCcw4txhPItjDWJQoB6eYjgA7Pc3N/view?usp=sharing
pg. 171 - Such is the picture of the tenets of this remarkable sect, so closely allied to our own Quakers,
pg. 287 - It is now a hundred years ago, that in 1819, the English Society of Friends sent a mission to Russia to acquaint them selves with a society so akin to their own.
pg. 287 - These good Quakers expected to find ordinary evangelical orthodoxy, but did not. Long afterwards the Friends, in 1895, rendered them all the help they could in the persecutions which waxed ever crueler. A good and clear account of this via dolorosa which ended in the removal of several thousands of them to Canada by the kind offices of the Quakers
pg. 356 - The origin of the Khlysty is lost in antiquity, but Uzov and Grass are clearly right in supposing it to be a form of Bogomilism at least as old in Russia as the prevalent orthodoxy. Russian divines who regard Western Europe as the home of rationalism derive it from that quarter; but it has nothing in common with the Protestant Reformation; it has affinity with the gospel of Madame de Guyon, and it resembles externally the Avignon Brotherhood of the end of the XVIIIth Century, the English Quakers, the Russian freemasons; but all these points of contact are superficial.
Quakers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers
Quakers, also called Friends, are a historically Christian group whose formal name is the Religious Society of Friends.[2] Members of the various Quaker movements are all generally united in a belief in the ability of each human being to experientially access the light within, or “that of God in every one”.
Khlysty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khlysts
Khlysts or Khlysty was an underground sect, which existed from 1645 to the late 20th century. It split off the Russian Orthodox Church and belonged to the Spiritual Christians tendency.
Now let’s get back to Victor Goertzel.
http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/VictorGoertzel.htm
In the late thirties, Victor met his wife-to-be, Mildred George, a schoolteacher, and they traveled to Mexico, He married schoolteacher Mildred George in 1939 after a trip to Mexico where the couple became acquainted with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and discovered Quakerism.
He has decided to be a Quaker. Just why I don’t know, but I have no objection." As the son of a lifelong communist, Victor supported the ideals of revolution to improve the lives of workers, but disagreed with the means sometimes used, specifically the violent disruption of Socialist Party meetings by communist activists.
Here it says that Victor Goertzel converted to Quakerism after a trip to Mexico.
