The Psychiatric Managerial State
“There is no Enthusiasm where there is not Pride: Which being Dress’d in the Garb and Guise of Humility, is Literally the Devil Transform’d into an Angel of Light, and then He is most a Devil, because He can most Deceive.”
—Charles Leslie, The Snake in the Grass: Or, Satan Transform’d into an Angel of Light. Discovering the Deep and Unsuspected Subtilty which is Couched under the Pretended Simplicity of many of the Principal Leaders of those People call’d Quakers (1696)
A 17th century enthusiast cult known today as the Society of Friends (SoF) either created or incubated the penitentiary, the asylum, the pharmaceutical industry, modern banking, the business school, fixed-price retail, the professional credential, the monitorial school (precursor to the public school), scientific management, human relations, social work, nondirective therapy, the conflict resolution field, the modern surveillance state, the abolition movement, the women's suffrage movement, Spiritualism, the spirit telegraph, Pentecostalism, corporate servant leadership, HR, restorative justice, and the world’s first “depolicing” policies— and vanished from public awareness in every category.
The SoF is an anti-traditional, pseudo-religious, mediumistic sect, otherwise known as “Quakers.” But that epithet feels misleading... almost euphemistic. The scenes that led to their exonym were different to the sense of someone “quaking.” It often looked more like this—
“As truly Fanatics, inspired by their own spirit, they changed countenance, had horrible gestures, and like those suffering from the falling sickness fell to the ground and lay as if dead for a long time; whence their body trembled horribly. Rapt into ecstasy they blurted out wondrous dreams: that they saw Zwingli among the dead, that the Father had commanded this or that unspeakable thing, that the Day of the Lord was imminent for a designated time; whence like madmen they ran about crying the Day of the Lord.”
— Prateolus, Elencho Haereticorum, cited via Schelguigius, Quakerismus confutatus (De princ. cognosc. p. 91); reproduced in Zorn, De Philtris Enthusiasticis Anglico Batavis (Rostock, 1707), pp. 9–10.
“[S]hrieking, roaring, yelling, howling, trembling of the whole body,” and "risings in the bellies." Even descending into real body-horror at times:
“Led by a swarm of flies, he took a needle and ‘thrust both Ends through [his] Two Thumbs’ all the way to the bone. He then stood on a box against the wall and spread out his arms until he collapsed on the ground, where he lay for about forty-five minutes. Then, getting up, he attempted to fly, and, failing, ran shoeless to a Quaker meeting to tell them what had occurred.”
— John Toldervy, The Foot out of the Snare (1655), pp. 36–38; cited in Veach, “The Possession of John Toldervy” (2024), lines 309–314.
The night before:
“a spirit in the form of a fly commanded him to hold his leg in the fire ‘lest [he] should be eternally damned.’”
— Toldervy, Foot out of the Snare; Veach lines 307–308.
And many of the techniques that make the modern world possible were incubated by these people.
Foucault excavated them, weighty and quiet, in history’s undercrawl. In his 1972–73 lectures at the Collège de France, published as The Punitive Society, he spent three lectures on the Quakers. He asked how “these little men in black, who did not take off their hats, can be seen as ancestors in the genealogy of our morality.” Bernard Harcourt, editing the 2015 English edition, confirmed that the Quakers “form the keystone of the genealogy” in the 1973 lectures but were “accorded a minor place in the famous book.” Harcourt describes a Quaker move— "….Foucault would excavate and discover this move first in the writings of the Quakers and other dissenters. He located there a moralized discourse that would introduce the idea of the penitentiary, of penitence, into the sphere of punishment.” Foundations laid and then bricked over, yet those strange “little men in black” are still beneath the floorboards, couched under the Pretended Simplicity.
