With a philistine education and training, man is fit to become one of those unfortunate and pitiful European pawns and automata who obey blindly the commands of their superior officers. Philistines shoot, stab, poison, pillage, bum, outrage, and murder at the command of unscrupulous, self-seeking leaders, brutal junkers, bloodhounds of empires. Brought up in a school of fear, obedience, and suggestibility, the philistine, like Cain, murders his brother without aim and without understanding the full significance of the awful deed. He is no more responsible than is the machine gun which he accurately trains and points at his supposed enemies. Philistines are led to the battlefield like cattle to the slaughter house. Philistines have no personality, no individuality, they are cogs in wheels, links in chains of monster mechanisms. The philistine, the product of our home and school, is suggestible and gullible, he is always on the lookout for authority, for a leader whom he should worship, by whose opinions and conviction he is ready to swear, whose command he is ready and proud to follow. The philistine is good material for mobs, for mental epidemics, for religious crazes, and for all kinds of hysterical movements in which not reason but emotional automatism is in the foreground. _Philistinism, stupidity, and implicit obedience of a monstrous, efficient war machine are intimately interrelated. The individual becomes a private, the nation an army, and the country a camp._ Do we as parents wish to bring up our children as soulless, willless machines? Do we wish them to be without good judgment, without personal convictions? Do we wish them to be led about like cattle? We certainly wish them to be of strong nature and sturdy character, able to stand by their convictions, able to use their critical judgment, able to discriminate the right from the wrong, able to love the good and avoid the evil. In _The Psychology of Suggestion_, published by me in 1897, I arrive at the conclusion that “Personality is suppressed by the rigidity of social organization; the cultivated, civilized individual is an automaton, a mere puppet.”... Again, “Under the enormous weight of the sociostatic press ... the personal self sinks, the suggestible, subconscious, social, impersonal self rises to the surface, gets trained and cultivated, and becomes the hysterical actor in all the tragedies of historical life.”... In recent European events the suggestible, social self plays the chief rôle.