Douglas Mercer
October 21 2024
In 1950 a new word entered the English language: brainwashing. In the Korean War American Prisoner’s were making hostage videos in which they were making all kind of claims about American perfidy; it became apparent at once that the Asians had moved quite farther on than rudimentary Chinese Water Torture and perhaps they had tapped into the white whale of science: the human mind. Surely this was a heyday for psychologists and the pharmacology industry as infinite vistas of the human mind beckoned them; when a thing begins to study itself all bets are off as they say and the dark corners of the inner world will be given a kind of spring cleaning and light will shine in obscure places. They quickly found that the human brain was that most remarkable of things: limitlessly infinite, moldable, malleable, protean, elastic and free; one could, if one were of a mind to, wrap it around one’s finger or set it sailing along the edges of space; the choice, as always, was ours. And this was no Frankenstein Monster, this brain could be de-programmed, re-programmed, and set in control like a Swiss Watch with various trigger words, like a mesmeric hypnotist’s most wild dreams, far beyond the outrageous imaginings of a theosophical magician holding a pendulum in front of the eyes. For bound in a nutshell or sprung loose in the cosmos the mind was the grail of grails, and those circumspect scientists of the Cold War knew that any opportunity to set the brain right, or send it reeling into terra incognita, or to use it for unspecified ends, well it was an opportunity that (like the mind itself) would be a terrible thing to waste.
In 1950, a new word (brainwashing) entered the English language. Though its meaning was always ambiguous and continuously evolving, it captured various concerns about the future uses of psychology in warfare and domestic life and the potential for new technologies to control and manipulate human minds.
The Human Potential Movement arose in the 1960s as an expression of the belief in the extraordinary potential that lay untapped in the human brain in terms of happiness and creativity. The Macy Conferences (1941 to 1960) were a set of meetings held in New York at the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation which concerned itself with, among other things, the future of cybernetics as it related to the human mind. Indeed, the main purpose of these meetings was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind. The motto of the Esalen Institute is, variously, explore your potential, embark on a personal journey, and actualization for all. Set on a beautiful cliff top vista in Big Sur above the Pacific, Eslalen was founded in 1962 with a view to exploring the various facets of human consciousness or what Aldous Huxley referred to as human potentialities. All through the 1960s and 1970s Esalen was the go to chic place for sojourners seeking to ground and center themselves in a fashionable setting, and for researchers probing the final frontiers of the inner world.
Brainwashing, also known as mind control, menticide, coercive persuasion, though control, thought reform, and forced re-education is the theory that purports that the human mind can be altered or controlled against a person's will by manipulative psychological techniques. Brainwashing is said to reduce its subject's ability to think critically or independently, to allow the introduction of new, unwanted thoughts and ideas into their minds, as well as to change their attitudes, values, and beliefs. The term brainwashing was first used in English by Edward Hunter in 1950 to describe how the Chinese Government appeared to make people cooperate with them during the Korean War. Brainwashing has become a common theme in popular culture, especially in science fiction. In casual speech, brainwashing and its verb form, to brainwash, are used figuratively to describe the use of propaganda to sway public opinion.
Keep the target in the dark; control the person’s environment; incorporate a rewards-punishments via a system of feedback loops; keep the system closed.
Project MKUltra was a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.
Classical conditioning serves as a historical backdrop for current learning theories. Classical conditioning focuses on using preceding conditions to alter behavioral reactions. The principles underlying classical conditioning have influenced preventative antecedent control strategies used in the classroom. Classical conditioning set the groundwork for the present day behavior modification practices, such as antecedent control. Antecedent events and conditions are defined as those conditions occurring before the behavior.
Operant conditioning, also known as instrumental conditioning or Skinnerian conditioning, is a learning theory in behavioral psychology. It can be used to increase or decrease the frequency of certain behaviors through the introduction of consequences. The use of operant conditioning to change human behavior can be positive or negative, depending on the intention of the person using the techniques. The principles of operant conditioning can be used to shape behavior in selfish ways that aren’t in the best interest of others.
The Manchurian Candidate is a novel by Richard Condon first published in 1959. It is a political thriller about the son of a US political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin. The novel has twice been adapated into a film. The phrase Manchurian Candidate stems from the supposed brainwashing by the Chinese of American soliders in the Korean War. The phrase Manchurian Candidate can be taken to mean anyone who is used as a stealth puppet for some presumably nefarious object, whether activated by triggers or not.
In psychology a trigger is something which reflexively activates a response or action in a subject without the subject’s conscious awareness; often triggers are listed as people, places, and things; but in a Manchurian Candidate, like someone under the influence of hypnotism, or one who is mesmerized, the trigger can be a word or set of words.
Schizophrenia is defined simply as a break with reality. It can be auditory or visual hallucinations, the hearing of voices which sometimes command, it can be paranoia such as thinking that people in life are speaking about you or plotting about you, it can be the belief that a television show is subtly referring to you, or it can be thinking that you are a very important person or sometimes god himself (delusions of grandeur).
A drug (such as LSD-25) with psychotomimetic (also known as psychotogenic) actions mimic the symptoms of psychosis, including delusions and/or delirium, as opposed to only hallucinations. Psychotomimesis is the onset of psychotic symptoms following the administration of such a drug.
A psychotic break is a break with reality, hence schizophrenia.
Timothy Leary counseled the denizens of the counterculture to operate their own brain.
These various psychological theories and postulate form together a kind of witches’ brew of the mind.
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The OSS (Office Of Strategic Services) was formed during World War 2 to make up for what was perceived as an intelligence gap; the organization later morphed into the CIA (the Central Intelligence Agency); the motto of the CIA is taken the truth shall set you free.
To begin with, the psychological disciplines experienced a period of rapid growth mid-century in which they developed alliances within both government and industry. As the historian Ellen Herman argues in The Romance Of American Psychology (1995), it was during the Second World War in particular that psychologists forged an alliance with the federal government by demonstrating how their expertise could be employed in the national interest to tackle a host of practical problems. These experts were called upon to decide how to recruit, strengthen morale, evaluate employee and public opinion, design propaganda.
Biderman's Chart of Coercion, also called Biderman's Principles, is a table developed by sociologist Albert Biderman in 1957 to illustrate the methods of Chinese and Korean torture on American prisoners of war from the Korean War. The chart lists eight chronological general methods of torture that will psychologically break an individual.
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Henry Murray was an American psychologist at Harvard. From 1959 to 1962, he conducted a series of psychologically damaging and purposefully abusive experiments on minors and undergraduate students.
In 1938, Henry Murray developed a system of needs and presses as part of his theory of personality, which he named personology. He argued that everyone had a set of universal basic needs. In his theory, Murray argues that needs and presses acted together to create an internal state of disequilibrium; the individual is then driven to engage in some sort of behavior to reduce the tension. Simply put a need is some inner compulsion of the subject; while a press is something external to the subject that can lessen the need.
During World War 2 Murray left Harvard and worked as a lieutenant colonel for the OSS. In 1943 Murray helped complete the paper Analysis of the Personality of Adolf Hitler, commissioned by OSS boss General William Donovan. In 1947, he returned to Harvard as a chief researcher, lectured and established with others the Psychological Clinic Annex. From late 1959 to early 1962, Murray was responsible for unethical experiments in which he used twenty-two Harvard undergraduates as research subjects. Among other goals, experiments sought to measure individuals' responses to extreme stress. The unwitting undergraduates were submitted to what Murray called vehement, sweeping and personally abusive attacks. Specifically tailored assaults to their egos, cherished ideas, and beliefs were used to cause high levels of stress and distress. The subjects then viewed recorded footage of their reactions to this verbal abuse repeatedly. Prior to their ordeal the students were told that they were present to debate philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations.
In 1960, Timothy Leary started research into psychedelic drugs at Harvard, which Henry Murray supervised. Some sources have suggested that Murray's experiments were part of, or indemnified by, the United States government's research into mind control, known as the MK-Ultra project.
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By 1935 National Socialist Germany was the greenest country on the planet. Deep ecology was born under Hitler and the reverence for nature of the Germans in those years is rooted in sacrificial oak imagery.
When he first drove up the winding roads to see the Redwoods Madison Grant was dismayed to see a long line of logging vehicles passing him the other way carrying the trees out. When he got to the forest he was overawed by it, saying that he was in Nature's Cathedral. Soon he was in the office of the governor of the state of California telling him to use eminent domain to take the Redwoods over--but logging interests dissuaded the governor from doing that. Then Grant met with the President telling him to make it a National Park--but nothing doing. Not deterred in the slightest Grant tapped into his vast network of the wealthy New York elite and soon was buying stand after stand of the forest. When he was done he was back in the governor's office and gave him the deeds ceding it all to the state. And so was born the California Park System.
North Africa was once a heavily wooded territory and Greece, Italy, and Spain too, in ancient Greece and Rome they also had many vast forests. In passing judgment on European history let me also provide a caution. Like Greece and Italy, Egypt was also during the period of her glory a most habitable country with a most equitable climate. So when a people begin to cut down their trees, without making any provision for reforestation and thus rob nature’s wise irrigation system of her most essential prerequisite you may be sure it a sign of the beginning of their cultural degeneration—Adolf Hitler
Ted Kaczynski was an naïve, innocent and precocious (math prodigy) sixteen years old when he entered Harvard in 1958; he did not even have a drivers license; while at Harvard he was subject to the ministrations of Henry Murray and his press and need theories, that is he was a broken down psychologically in the name of science in order to study the human brain; that is he unwittingly walked into the meat grinder of a vast web of evil which sought nothing less than to learn about the brain and the limits of the human spirit in order to engineers human minds for some as yet unspecified purpose. He then went to school the University of Michigan where he was viewed as an unusual person, one who jettisoned all other concerns save mathematical truth. He then taught at Berkeley; perhaps it was this latter connection which led some to propose that Thomas Pynchon committed the acts later ascribed to Kaczynski.
Ted Kaczynski was quite methodical in his aims; his victims were in some ways connected to science and what he viewed as the destruction of the earth. In sending his packages he always used Eugene O’Neill one-dollar stamps on his boxes (The Iceman Cometh). A copy of one of Sloan Wilson's book, Ice Brothers, was used to conceal a bomb Kaczynski sent to the Lake Forest, Illinois, home of Percy Wood, the president of United Airlines. It is theorized that that Kaczynski's involved a theme of nature, trees and wood. He often included bits of a tree branch and bark in his bombs; his selected targets included Percy Wood and Leroy Wood
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
In the end Kaczynski overstepped his bounds and made a fatal mistake of having his manifesto published in the Washington Post. It was then one day that his sister in law was reading the piece and her mouth dropped as she recognized the idiolect and linguistic fingerprints of Ted; she found that he used wilfully instead of willfully and clew instead of clue which were hallmark Ted; he used rearing children instead of raising children and such esoteric words as anomic and chimerical, all of which were consistent to his speaking style. But the one that clinched it for the pair was the use of a phrase that Kaczynski had used to describe himself and was so rare and unusual that it could literally be no one else: cool headed logician.
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Notes:
In the 1980s officials at UC Berkeley cut down a large stand of Eucalyptus Trees in order to construct a genetics lab; the trees had provided much shade for Strawberry Creek which meanders through the northern part of the campus.
At his defense at the Nuremberg Trials Albert Speer famously warned of the potentially enormous destructive powers of science and technology and their power to dominate people.
Some say the world
Will end in fire
Some say in ice
From what I know
Of Human Desire
I hold with those
Who favor fire
But from what
I’ve seen of hate
Ice is nice
And will suffice.
Ice-Nine: a mysterious substance in the novel Cat’s Cradle.
Gabriel Ice: arch-villain of the novel Bleeding Edge
