David E. Smith

In January 1970, Manson himself told the Los Angeles Free Press, My philosophy comes from underneath the boots and sticks and clubs they beat people with.

That same month, psychiatrist David E. Smith of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic told the Berkeley Barb that Manson and his followers had rejected conventional education and socialization as forms of brainwashing, only to replace them with Manson's own system of authority.

Then what he did is substitute his own philosophy, Smith observed.

Writing in Dissent in 1972, sociologist Jesse R. Pitts described how the family's devotion to Manson reinforced his increasingly fantastic beliefs.