Before he was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski was a mind-control test subject
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The overall process sounded a bit like something you see in military basic training, but with the additional wrinkle of the paper they made the Harvard students write beforehand...outlining their core beliefs. Drill instructors in basic training do a sort of less deep version of this. They observe people and try to induce stress with personalized yelling and screaming based on observations and some amount of data on the person (detailed "job" applications, ASVAB tests, etc).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/jun/22/features...
I've also been in basic training, but in the late 1980's. I definitely got the personalized plan. I also got to hear the DI yell about other people's specific details. Who didn't have a father listed, who had a criminal record, who had to fill out details of pre-induction drug use, who almost flunked the ASVAB, who had a GED instead of a high school diploma, what idiot would be a JEE-HOVAS-WITNESS and so on.
And worse. Didn't happen in my stay, but "blanket party beatings" and other hazing for some recruits was sometimes encouraged. My DI was more careful with physical stuff, though he did have this thing where he would drive his stiff hat brim into your eyes, lips, ears, etc. And quite a lot of saliva sprayed in my face whilst being yelled at.
F’king brutal for an 11 year old.
I left home at 17 after I graduated early and scored 99/100 on the ASVABs just to rub it in his face, didn’t join, and went into tech for the last 20 years and made more than he has seen in his lifetime. The training worked.
I often half-jokingly say I am raising my kids too cushy for them to ever create something extraordinary. Extraordinary achievements take extraordinary effort, and history seems to show the necessary drive for extraordinary efforts comes from brutal lessons that teach endurance and perseverance.
Or as the saying goes…
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.
For contemporary examples, just look at North Korea or Russia. Life is undeniably harder for citizens living in these countries, but where is the expected "strength" and "good times" that should result?
[0] https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
There’s also an interesting micro vs macro level distinction.
In the complexity of life we can only afford so many mistakes before they take a toll and opportunities become squandered and one is effectively outcompeted. It’s like a sick tree, once under assault nature has creatures that read the signal, insects bore into the wood, fungus finds a home, slow rot begins. All the while the tree still stands, but eventually the strong winds come and in that condition the tree gives way. What precise balance North Korea sits at with their cohesion is probably not known, even by them, just guessed at.
If there wasn't, the book isn't worth reading.
To pick just a handful of obvious counter examples: Bill Gates was comfortablely upper middle class, Steve Jobs comfortablely middle class, both with solid family lives.
Do you believe "Donald Trump is a liar" to be empirically true?
The thing I wrestle with every day is whether it the price was worth it at all.
Think of how much toxic masculinity is mixed into army culture for example.
Evolution and selection bias are the most powerful forces in the universe. The world is the way it is not because it's just or moral, but because everything that didn't survive, didn't survive.
I love that it's mostly chuds sharing this quote, oblivious to the fact that they are the weak men creating the hard times (often unnecessarily too)
Funny that you're mentioning older protocols in a thread about 60s mind control...
The military around that time was seen as a "correctional" institution to turn bad boys into men. Everything you describe about personalized treatment is a necessary step to breaking the willpower of someone with any sort of oppositional/defiance disorder.
You have to figure out their mental weakpoint and rub both shit and salt in that wound to bring them to heel, because they won't listen to reason or respect/fear authority otherwise-- these are the types who'll laugh in the drill instructor's face. They'll do pushups and clean toilets all day out of spite.
All of this should have started changing post-Vietnam.
Does this train you to handle ptsd better ? Makes you more obedient ? What’s going on there ?
Talking of MK programs, I wanted to emphasize how far these agencies could go awry, see the alleged LSD poisoning of an entire French village in 1951 [1].
Incredibly embarrassing post
And is it just me or is there a consistency in the tone, among those who make these weird typos?
It's just weird. Also it's early in the morning and I'm a little addled.
And if I was attempting to bend the narrative, a good tool for that might be a counterargument that, tho apparently strong, is actually weak. Let's not be naive about how this works.
I think sometimes the typos are speech-to-text artifacts. For instance "used that" would be phonetically similar to "used at" and I could see that easily tripping up STT. I know people that use STT and don't review the output before sending so I get weird text messages from them from time to time.
It was "and use that f Guantanamo" which is not that difficult to understand if you change "f" for "the F word".
Iraqis lost a lot of blood, not americans. 99% of the people killed were innocent iraqis.
Outrage at things in the past is easy, but if we want to really improve the world it may be necessary for smart people to stop refusing to think clearly on current events.
That's an intellectual fallacy it's easy to fall prey of: if most cultures and nations have committed heinous acts in their past, one should assume they are still doing terrible things to this day.
MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023. It is disingenuous to criticise what the CIA and other three letter agencies have done, while not being totally opposed to their existence to this day. Who knows how they are experimenting with people on US soil, how they are fomenting revolts and financing drug lords in South America today.
Sadly, any such criticism can be easily waved away by calling it a conspiracy theory, which is how they keep operating with impunity. The only difference between an outlandish conspiracy theory and history are the existence of declassified government documents.
Yeah, here's a list, plenty still ongoing: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrociti...
In a couple 100s of years , history will be talked about this era of "Pax Americana" and the lengths that the US Gov went trying to cling to its power.
Is it good, is it bad? Depends on where you are really.
If nothing else, it's certainly interesting and unique.
America is the first (and maybe only, ever?) major imperial power that allows such open discussion of its atrocities.
I say this not from the standpoint of defending or attacking America. I just find it fascinating.
Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was from 1729.
America is the first (and maybe only, ever?) major
imperial power that allows such open discussion of
its atrocities.
So it's unclear to me what point you're attempting to make by pointing out a single instance of prior public dissent in the British Empire.
Particularly since Swift's work of satire was not exactly a direct criticism of the British Empire, nor a catalogue of its atrocities.
If you do the minimum feasible amount of research and read the Wikipedia article, you will learn that it was largely a parody of other such popular contemporary treatises, a thing that is easy to miss in 2023 if you aren't familiar with the context in which "A Modest Proposal" was written.
Back to my original post... I certainly don't think America was the first to allow such dissent. I think it is the first to do so on such a scale.
(I also don't necessarily think America allows such dissent for entirely noble purposes. As has been often pointed out, legitimate criticism and evidence often gets lumped in with whackadoo fake conspiracy theories and is therefore discredited by default in the public's mind. The end result is a more effective form of suppression than could be achieved by direct totalitarian repression. The US government will let you talk about the MKUltra experiments or Guantanamo all day long because barely anybody will believe you, or care.)
The US First Amendment is indeed unique, but it came from a tradition[1][2]. And it's not so long ago that US citizens were prosecuted for sedition. And this is not totally unique to the US or Britain[3][4].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato%27s_Letters
[2] - https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp
> That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal;
> That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;
[3] - https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/critics-of-empire-978085771177...
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Reform_Association
> In the mid-1890s Edmund Dene Morel was working for Elder Dempster as a shipping clerk based in Antwerp, when he noticed discrepancies between public and private accounts given for the import and export figures relating to shipping from the Congo.[5] Morel deduced from the steady export of firearms and cartridge, against the disproportionate mass imports in rubber, ivory and other lucrative commodities, that no commercial transaction was taking place.[6] He concluded that the use of force was the only explanation: the consistency of the exchange could only be supported by a state-led system of mass exploitation.[7] Resigning from his role in 1901, Morel turned to journalism to investigate and raise awareness about the activities of the Congo Free State authorities, establishing his own journal in early 1903 – the West African Mail.[8]
But we also not free to discuss secrets kept from us. And US is not lenient on whistleblower exposing secret lawbreaking and atrocities.
The US did bad things to its own people like bikini atoll and MkUltra and the Tuskegee Experiments. Maybe it even did things like stage 9/11 as a false flag (there were real plans to stage a similar false flag in the 70s to support a war against Cuba) - even if it did, I’m allowed to speculate about it or even claim it to be true online. In China try to mention Tiananmen Square. Even if the US empire is evil, which I think is a bit overly harsh at the general level while agreeing that many of its individual actions have been evil, it’s better than any of the other empires.
How long after COVID will America fall? China's already brokered peace in the Middle East between our best friend and our worst enemy in the region. The Universe has a sense of humor. Given the historical precedent, will we mark the end of the US empire with China negotiating peace in occupied Ukraine or in occupied Palestine?
I'm clearly the furthest thing from a patriot, but I am fairly certain the history books will place our collapse somewhere between the Soviet Union and the British Empire on the atrocity scale. If we outdo Churchill's genocide in India, it's going to involve nuclear hellfire, and then there won't be any history books to remember it by anyway.
> In late 2019, CIA agent Anne Sacoolas hit and killed a British teenage pedestrian named Harry Dunn with her car, while she was driving on the wrong side of the road, near the RAF Croughton base in the UK where she and her husband (both CIA agents) worked.
List of atrocities, indeed…
-Norm McDonald
What’s striking about these MKUltra type programs is the magnitude of horrible things stemming from a relatively small number of clandestine operatives doing insane experiments on the population.
Based in the article in The Times yesterday, I’d say we can confidently add global pandemic to this list, and a reminder that the US doesn’t have a monopoly on this particularly deranged form of violence.
Up until 2019 I’d say the USA was the worst offender, but let’s hope no one ever catches up to what China did in Wuhan.
You have to look into the history of these programs, further, to gain some perspective.
A relatively small amount most likely. Maybe on par with the amount that has been caused by yellow journalism (e.g. the Spanish-American war, anti-ethnicity political cartoons). Most of anything "caused" by them is not from them running amok, but from them doing the job they were ordered to do by higher officials.
And, of course, we only rarely see what they prevented from happening.
It had predecessors and parallel programs. Beginning at least as early as the post WWII 1940's.
>MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023.
Very astute observations.
In the grand scheme of American violations of human rights, MK-ULTRA barely even registers. I can think of a dozen worse things we know are happening right now off the top of my head. Trump and Biden's internment camps, the tent cities in every US city, kids as young as 12 working in slaughterhouses, solitary confinement in prisons... I'll spare everyone from this turning into a rant.
> Kaczynski likened science to a “surrogate activity” that is “directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward” or some sense of fulfillment.
> “Scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the work itself,” he wrote. “… Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.”
But there is no replacement ideology which can guide science uniformly toward an objectively better human condition. That is because any such ideology is as beholden to capitalism as neoliberalism. Science cannot escape the overarching power of capital while still depending upon it's forces to propel it.
Thus I agree it is an artificial goal, but more than a lie told by controlling beurocrats, it a lie told even to its adherents, as is inherent in ideology. Further, it is an inescapable lie produced by the organization of means.
The answer to this ideological trap we find science caught in is succinctly responded to by Star Trek. Post-capitalist post-materialism is what liberates science from these constraints, not some "opening of minds" accomplished through terrorism.
"obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.”
If you are going to defend the ramblings of psychopathic terrorists because they vaguely resemble semi coherent critical theory, at least read all the words.
Consider "directed toward a goal that people set up for themselves in order to have some goal to work toward." I've dropped the words artificial and merely. What work were they doing?
I think that the word artificial is imposing a binary, "natural" versus "artificial", on the way that we think about goals. The paradigm of a natural goal is having sex to start a family. The paradigm of an artificial goal is playing golf. Which is science? It has to fall in the artificial bucket, so it is like golf, and therefore of low value.
If I were writing in my own notebook, I would think that I had tricked myself. I've persuaded myself that science is low value. I look for the clever argument that I've used; its not there. I've been incautious in my use of language, stuck in the word artificial and failed to wonder whether there are any artificial goals that are surprisingly valuable.
merely is heavy with implications. One might set oneself a goal in order to have something to work towards, to avoid the tendency to sipping and sampling which so often defeats the aspirations of gifted beings. This might be within a larger context; the aspiration may be towards a noble and lofty goal. merely trashes all that. A simple little word that slots in easily, merely making the words flow more smoothly. And yet it has smuggled in heavy negativity. Once again language does our thinking for us, guiding us towards a conclusion, and concealing from the author his lack of justification.
Turning to the second quote, one notices that blindly is a powerfully pejorative word. Who wants to be blind? Here is does triple duty, with three meanings. First, we are doing science because we are curious about something that we do not know. It is a cliche to call such groping in the dark blind. So no-one can disagree that science marches on blindly. The phrase "real welfare" intensifies the negativity. Notice the weasel word real. Nothing and nobody can meet the test of having regard to real welfare because the word real licences us to raise the standard for what counts as welfare into an unknowable, remote future. Science must confess to not being able to foresee ultimate consequences and confess a second time to being blind.
The third meaning of blind refers to the reasonable critique. It is hard to respond appropriately to even foreseeable medium term consequences and scientists often fail to do so. Is this reasonable critique actually justified? The claims made by the previous two meanings of the word blind were true, even if unimportant, so it is tempting to nod this through. The third meaning gains our approval by the momentum of the first two meanings; another example of language doing our thinking for us.
If we can escape the momentum of language, the example of Louis Pasteur will spring to mind, or Humphrey Davy investigating flames to invent the safety lamp. Scientist sometimes pay close attention to the foreseeable, medium-term welfare of mankind.
Is it true to say that science marches on, obedient to the psychological needs of scientists, government officials, and corporate executives? Yes, this is obviously true. Yet it is only that sneaky little word only (which I left out; did you notice?) that makes this important.
Ponder the tale of medicinal chemist trying to explain to his boss that it is actually the mice that are in charge. Science can only march on if it obeys the mice. Leaving them out misses the point entirely. That little word only both makes the ringing phrase important-if-true and hopelessly-false.
Notice how hard this overlong comment works to expose how language does our thinking for us. It is an example of Brandolini's Law. Cultivate a horror of powerful writing, before it tricks you into believing falsehoods. No-one is coming to save you. Untangling how language does our thinking for us is too much work.
So these "translational" people either go back obediently to doing the pure stuff, or they just leave and go to biotech / pharma.
The field is better off viewing those two as two sides of the same coin, but to keep people in the walls they've built a "if you do translational science, you're an outcast and should never come back!"
Is it now allowed to talk openly about MKUltra, CIA involvement and amok runs? Or do CTs still need to hide, even after media outlets like Washing Post write about that, conforming its existence?
This is not something to casually dismiss.
Easy access to guns and lack of mental health care has been a thing in the US for over a century, but curiously mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago, so maybe something else is the cause? Interestingly mass shootings started happening around the time that certain psychiatric medications came into widespread usage, medications for which homicidal ideation is a know but very rare side effect. It makes sense that even if a side effect is super rare, when millions of people start taking the drug you'd expect the rare effect to happen on a regular basis.
Except that these drugs are likely used in lots of places in the world, and that large school shootings often is a uniquely American concept.
For example, of children under 19 in 2012, about 0.5% of Dutch or German children were prescribed antidepressants, while it's 1.6% of American children: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293642487_Trends_an...
Similarly, among the general population, Americans use some 3x as much benzodiazepines per capita as Canadians. And the Canadians are drug crazed compared to the Australians, who use about half what the Canadians do.
https://mhanational.org/issues/2022/ranking-states
Interestingly, a small percentage of violent crime is directly attributed to mental health issues. Most self harm.
The definition of "mass shooting" leads to discrepancies like 20 vs. 600 for 2020 depending on which agencies definition is used. By number it looks bad for the US even if per capita compared to other countries. But more than half of all gun deaths in the US are suicides, and mass shootings are less than 0.5 or 0.2 percent of all homicides depending on which span of years you use.
I am a less of a gun control advocate than one for mental health access and prophylactic measures. Gun control is a red herring. The genie is out of the bottle. Bad people will procure guns or make them from parts or scratch. Not that hard really given the demand and money available to do it by drug cartels and other criminal organizations. Politicians keep saying "Guns are the number one killer of kids in the US". Based on a NEJM study that defines "kids" as 1 to 19 years of age. 18 and 19-year-olds are adults. Most deaths involving guns occur in the 17 to 19-year-old span are typically gang related. It also includes suicides ("In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC.") and citizens defending themselves with guns and being successful at it along with the police shootings in self defense.
Suicides still occur in relatively large numbers in countries with few guns in the hands of their citizens. They just use another method.
As the PSA from the 70s stated, "Matches don't start forest fires. People do." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEW4Ha040w)
And I would add "Guns don't kill people. People do."
You started with school shootings, singling out California. Texas is by far more prone to mass shootings and I wager statistically equal to California per-capita.
Hawaii has nearly-as-strict gun laws as California but incomparably lower violence by any measure. It’s a better example of your argument. The linked mental health web site ranks it at 7.
On the other hand, the death toll in undisputed mass shootings has skyrocketed since the defeat of the assault weapons ban.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/stabbing-...
Statistics need context. The term "mass shooting" is defined differently by different agencies/organizations in the US as well as all over the world. England also has the highest rate of tornadoes per land area in the world, but nobody would think they were at risk for being harmed by a tornado in England vs. the US.
If ice cream is 100 paces away from you, you're less likely to eat it than if it's right in front of you. It's basic psychology that the greater the friction to satisfy our impulses, the less likely we are driven by them. It's maddeningly obvious. Similarly if everyone else was eating ice cream. We're social creatures, we emulate what we see others do.
This is the frustrating thing about this topic: it's a discussion about harm reduction, but people don't treat it that way and just throw up their hands and say 'oh it'd be the same without' when the data and logic don't support that.
In decision making parlance, it's a classic perfect is the enemy of the good response. In HN parlance, this is a question of floats not ints. In gamer parlance, this is a question of DPS and AOE, and how much nerfing guns lowers it. I don't know how many more ways we can say it to get through to folks.
How many of the people who perpetrate school shootings had the skill to build their own gun, or the criminal connections to procure one illegally?
If it's not a per-capita statistic, then it's basically just a population map as CA is the most populous state by far. A quick google search shows the top 3 states are CA, TX and FL - ie, the 3 most populous states in the US.
A lot of time and other things changed in culture before mass shootings and crime took off. Television for one, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, drug culture, immigration reform, Vietnam war. If you believe that latent school shooting desire was always present, and just lacked a tool, you’d probably see it manifest in some way.
As for why we see more mass shootings today I think you need to consider that until the late 90s a shooter wouldn’t get publicity outside of their locale. So copycat shootings didn’t occur. On top of that the insane amount of psychoactive pills we prescribe. And no way to get people off the street early via institutions.
Lastly a general decay in our society, family structures, and communities.
There are instances of people running amok with firearms in the early 20th and 19th centuries:
> On August 13, 1903 [in Winfield, Kansas], 30-year-old Gilbert Twigg, armed with a 12-gauge double-barrelled shotgun, opened fire at a concert, killing six people and wounding at least 25, before killing himself. Three others died in hospitals afterward.
If we allow for clubs and knives alongside firearms, I'm fairly sure the phenomenon has happened since the beginning of time.
It was certainly rarer in the past. High-powered firearms were less common. And I think the very idea was simply less common. I suspect it's a mimetic virus, basically, a type of social contagion. They need to be an angry sociopath to begin with. And then they need the idea planted in their head. And it needs to be re-enforced repeatedly, a chain of thought that becomes inhabited in their minds, until it becomes realized.
The pattern of media coverage, outrage, and social modification in response (metal detectors in schools, etc.) is doing that re-enforcement. A shooter's face will be in the media, they will be the most hated person in their immediate community for the rest of living memory, and they will be the most hated figure nationally for about 15 minutes. The victim community might even be so terrified as to modify the law and policies at schools because of it. If there's any emotion that could sum up the motivation for the average spree killing, it's a generalized revenge on society. Those reactions are rewarding to someone who is seeking revenge; they made their impact.
Before the shooting it was accounted (and reported in papers) a homeless woman was shouting (paraphrased) “they’re going to shoot you, you’re all going to die!” The man who did the shooting was a white terrorist and these run government contracted “safe houses” all over America.
The “civilian” run CIA contracted safe houses you may take with grains of salt, yet this is how things have been done for a long while. The CIA actually lost some of their best operatives, assassinated on US soil by this thought control power coup.
Also their navy seals, marine super soldiers, and countless others (who will go on uncounted.)
Whitemanistan America has been the most dangerous place in the world for lawful military assets over the last 6 years.
Stephen Paddock used a "bump stock" on otherwise stock off-the-shelf rifles. The same could be done with almost any semiautomatic rifle:
White hate has an erotic desire for the mayhem. These don’t mind collateral damage. Particularly where this true motive will not be suspected.
If you’ve ever wondered how does this whole terror thing work if everyone thinks the assailants are such degenerates?
The devastation is for you. The “purpose” is for someone else. Someone disgruntled, someone proving anyone can be gotten to at any time, someone proving to their like minded that they will go as far as it takes (where others will not go “far enough”), someone sending a coercive message (think the govs will tell you they’re being extorted?)
Terror is a ploy, not a reasonable dialogue. They’re not trying to tell “you” anything, other than the futility that “nothing you can do about it”. That is how submission works.
And I am describing Power here, those of the voices in our heads. Not some actions of a lone gunman.
Who is the "They" in "They're", in "Power", in "those"?
And FWIW I don't have any voices in my head except my own, which is laughing right now. It is pretty infectious laughter!8-))
A few other sociological factors to consider given that the phenomenon of school shootings in the US has established itself in the past 50 years.[1]
The US population has doubled since 1950[2]; this means an increase in the (unaddressed) need for adequate health care and especially mental health care.
Domestic US gun business has grown its profits in this period of population growth. And, of course, the US is one of the few countries with a constitutional guarantee to protect its gun business, which results in political gamesmanship in a time of profits, instead of real social policy.
[1][a] _ https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-mass-school-sh...
[1][b] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
[1][c] _ https://www.chds.us/sssc/data-map/
[2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...
It starts off with something like "CIA was behind the coup in country X". Which might have been true, but lacking concrete evidence it opens the door for other things without concrete evidence. Next claim will be something like media is intentionally not reporting about this. Then this is explained by "globalists" controlling the media and working with the CIA. Then it's "the Jews" are actually the ones working with the globalists here. Or it's the globalists trying to push vaccines even though they are apparently unsafe. Why, because they make mind control easier? Or maybe it's a way to reduce population.
This kind path into insanity is sadly not that rare. And while there's certainly people at the top of the funnel that has some reasonable skepticism while reporting somewhat unsubstantiated facts. There are also plenty who will start off relatively reasonable, but then take their followers through a journey down into conspiracy land.
A notable harm this had was indeed the covid vaccines. Some influencers in the health space, used to light weight CT content like, "the sugar industry is behind todays health recommendations" and "big pharma tries to push dangerous blood pressure medicine even though it doesn't help". So when vaccines came, they were primed towards looking for stuff like that and decided that vaccines were bad and presented this idea using biased statistics and CT ideas.
A lot of people are dead or were unnecessary Covid complications due to this movement. And arguably, the CT culture was a big contributor to this.
It's important to call out the actual bad stuff that's being done in various contexts, wether it's in the name of national security, medicine or even just industry causing pollution. It's also natural that people build up a sense of distrust and skepticism against unsubstantiated claims in this area given the potentially severe consequences downstream.
As things stand thought, there is no point, who has the time to defute lies within half truths within other lies, based maybe on some truth. While other side thinks you are a manipulated idiot anyway.
And, how many hours have you devoted to performing a similar analysis of Normies? Did you know, they also have some "interesting" thinking styles, though perhaps these attract less attention because they're normal.
"CIA mind control" was a loony theory until it was basically proven that the CIA was in fact drugging tons of people in an attempt for mind control and then letting them loose on society.
Hell wasn't the NSA dragnet a "conspiracy theory" until proven by Snowden?
If you have all these "babies kept in the basement of a pizza parlor that hosts punk shows" theories surrounding a handful of real things, ie "why did Epstein have the reach he did? Why was he made the financial advisor to a billionaire with no experience?". It basically makes all these points lose credibility due to their closeness.
People shout about "Deep state" stuff all the time but these guys really did have an inordinate amount of power that was not on a leash whatsoever. They do things the President is ignorant about. If the President can be considered not on a need-to-know basis, whatever is happening by that agency is effectively a "deep state" operation, regardless of if you believe there's a vast deep state conspiracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
The older "Project Echelon", I'm not sure how much has been confirmed about it's capabilities but it certainly did exist and was the precursor to Prism.
You can find lots of examples in movies from the 90s joking about how the NSA will know if you say certain words, like "bomb", on the telephone. They almost definitely did :)
Same with the "COVID came from a lab leak" theory. Because Trump said it in 2020, it was universally dismissed. 3 years later, there's now a strong case for it.
Conspiracy theorists often fail to comprehend that secret agencies can naturally emerge in modern societies. A society without such agencies would be at the mercy of those societies that do have them.
What if, for instance, China successfully develops a mind control program and your country does not?
Asserting that the CIA is "bad", without considering larger societal trends and developments, is overly simplistic.
Ted Kaczynski would not engage in such emotional judgments. Here's an example of his reasoning concerning the evolution of modern societies: https://en.wikialpha.org/wiki/Self-propagating_system
Same happened with the 9/11 stuff. In the quest of looking for answers after the questioning, maybe we will get more knowledge. But instead people stayed with the first government sanctioned story and accepted it blindly .
Same happened with the WMD story... society has to learn to be more skeptic, and to value those that question and look for answers.
But the CT mindset of absolute certainty doesn’t do its adherents any favors. Skepticism should extend to one’s own beliefs, and claims of actual conspiracies need evidence.
The stupid chemtrail thing is a perfect example. Any thinking person can see the insanity required to get everything wrong about airplanes, weight, parts per million, and airport logistics.
Yet to this day there are people who don’t just belief the conspiracy theory, but hold an unshakable belief in it.
Some of those people were probably right about WMDs and other things. But so why? Stopped clocks and all that.
A conspiracy theory mindset is toxic to actual reason.
But they don't stop, you have to repeat they same things over and over again.Live, Die, Repeat.
And some point everybody has enough.
They found no evidence for a fake moon landing, no evidence for 9/11 being an inside job, but they found evidence the US lied about WMD.
Guess which of the former CTs still believe?
How often must someone explain why there are no stars visible in the moon photos or why the flag moves?
Like, let's take the moon landings as an example. Those are some of the most well-documented events to question, so there's lots of evidence for them that's kind of difficult to fake[0]. Hell, if they did film actors in a studio, how did they keep the Soviets from immediately noticing and embarrassing America over it? Faking the moon landings would be a pure ideological win for Soviet Communism.
I think the most instructive example is Jeffrey Epstein. There is more conspiracy theorist interest in whether or not his prison suicide was a murder than the actual child sex ring he was running! The moment a conspiracy theory is proven, conspiracy theorists move on to something more farfetched, as if explanation destroys their power. So now that "a good chunk of US and UK politicians were organized pedos" isn't salient enough, now we have to invent rogue endocrinologists overprescribing HRT in the name of Satanists getting high off adrenochrome in the nonexistent basement of a third-rate DC pizza parlor.
There is literally nothing scientific about this. Conspiracy theorists will never uncover a single actual conspiracy. The thing about conspiracies is that they tend to be frustratingly mundane: like, "Intuit pays off Senators to make tax filing difficult" levels of boring. If you want to keep that from getting out, what you can do is invent a more salient theory and deliberately leak that instead. How many actual conspiracies are being covered up by conspiracy theorists only chasing after the interesting ones?
[0] Take the Apollo Guidance Computer, a luggage-sized electronic computer that actually did most of the mission calculations for spaceflight. There's about fifty of them, and they are fully working computers that collectors have even managed to restore to fully working order. Why waste the billions it took to develop such a thing if you're just going to film a few actors in a studio?
The government doesn't need to do anything to discredit legitimate conspiracy theorists, these types of people exist independent of the government.
There are absolutely smart, open minded, intelligent “conspiracy theorists” but because they’re not obsessive whack jobs they are unrecognizable by that term.
Most worthwhile questions require, at a minimum, a certain level of expert domain knowledge to resolve.
If someone wants to question whether the US
arrived to the Moon or not, let them, dont
discredit them Let them look for evidence and
present their case. What are we afraid of?
This actually works really well in a lot of instances.
The catch is that it requires the "consumers" in the "marketplace" to have the domain expertise to correctly judge which idea is best.
And this is very often not the case. Particularly when we are talking about the general public. When the public can't accurately judge the merits of competing ideas on merit alone they will (of course) naturally gravitate to the ideas that are more slickly presented, the ideas that simply make them feel better, the ideas that don't challenge their existing beliefs, etc.
There is also the issue of asymmetric information warfare. If you are slick enough you can wage a lopsided war of attrition against your opponents. It takes little effort to spread falsehoods, and it typically takes multiple times as much effort to debunk them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
Same happened with the WMD story... society has
to learn to be more skeptic, and to value those
that question and look for answers.
I personally don't believe, since I haven't seen evidence of it, that the CIA ran those studies to create sleeper agents that they could command to do things for nefarious purposes. However, it's possible that's what it turned into once the principal experimenters realized they had a group of people they'd made highly suggestible. Parts of the CIA, at least up through the Reagan era, were extremely shady.
More (unchecked) power always leads to more idealism /s
Improved record keeping and legal discoverability is my guess. So shady things moved to places where they could control it better. Like foreigners detained without due process.
[1] https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra...
However, I don't doubt that the CIA was interested in such an idea; the CIA was grossly overpowered, over confident, and overly ambitious during its formative decades. Reading about their own internal review of Bay of Pigs, it's pretty clear the CIA imagined themselves to have far more control over populations and manipulations than they really did.
So I think your sentence here:
>However, it's possible that's what it turned into once the principal experimenters realized they had a group of people they'd made highly suggestible.
Probably does have some ring of truth to it. I think it's supported by the idea that more or less this is what is done with the US military but with a much more controlled way now during the initial trainings. The numbers for actual landed shots in law enforcement and wars are pretty telling, since most persons even in direct line of danger still can't seem to land a shot on another human being intentionally. Having the ability to get past this blocker for killing probably was quite attractive to governments in general, and I carry an unsubstantiated belief that probably Ted Kaczynski becoming the Unabomber was an undesired effect, but a carefully studied one.
But to be clear, this thought lives in the same part of my mind as fantasies in the literal sense of the definition. (i.e., not desirable like we ascribe to the word commonly, just a thought in the realm of pure imagination)
Respectfully, what are you talking about? MKULTRA was the continuation of Project Artichoke, whose explicit goal was to create sleeper agents. And the sleeper agent was one admitted continued focus through decades of these programs.
People really have to read more about the deep history of this stuff before they comment with the intention of adding context.
This becomes a kind of Rorschach Test - people see different things, and what they see tells you more about them than it does about the available data.
Well then you haven't looked.
"The primary goal of Project Artichoke was to determine whether a person could be involuntarily made to perform an act of attempted assassination. ... Project Artichoke was succeeded by Project MKUltra, which began in 1953. ... the scope of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that asked, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?"" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Artichoke
The primary source documents for these programs are declassified and available on the CIA's official website.
You don't have to decide whether or not to believe. It's public information and not up for debate.
LSD was introduced by the CIA into American culture. This is public information, not conjecture.
CIA programs like MKULTRA are either malevolent or LSD is fine. It can't be both. Choose one if you wish to be truthful with yourself.
MKULTRA that started in prior interrogation and Manchurian Candidate programs like Project Artichoke, and continued through efforts like the Phoenix Program in Southeast Asia and Project Condor.
Your guess is as good as mine what has transpired since.
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-mkultra-when-...
I really wish there was something like BTB, but from… you know, better people.
If you want banter, but not the mean and forced kind, The Dollop is a much better Behind The Bastards.
The joking banter and tone helps it go down for me. I wouldn't be able to listen to these things otherwise. It's depressing to know the some totality of what we've done to each other.
I get it. A well moderated podcast is hard work. Throwing random Wikipedia facts at each other is easy to do and long term listeners love all the in-jokes and the atmosphere of 'friends having fun'.
Thankfully there are lots of well researched podcasts with a more 'professional' style.
They do these terrible things, completely get away with it without any repercussions or even remorse, and we assume that they aren’t doing similarly bad things anymore.
Thought control is a full on secret society among us. They influence the government as the voices in the backs of their minds.
Thought control must be developed over years, or decades. One cannot be “hired” into this role and expect to be anything more than an instrument of another for at least ten years.
The CIA unwittingly destroyed the lives of those among themselves with substantial experience. Now, minds hobbled, themselves thought controlled, they are men plied by this power with little means themselves for “getting out of their own heads.” For our minds are traps that most humans never escape.
The government is not thought control. The government is thought controlled.
Thought control is a white American men conspiracy. These have waged a genocidal secret war on humanity, wiping out entire generations of “other kinds of people” who are aware of and could even perceive their presence.
A simple truth may not be acceptable here (how graphically can I describe rape murder and extortion before you will refuse to hear more?)
So a soft core answer that illustrates this point, with a mind fcuk for you to process.
At the very top of the food chain, those who “nothing can be done about”, are condemned men. Hardened by a life of corruption and treachery in power. These may well be in prisons (even secret prisons), or holed up in personal “safe houses”, protected from the populous. These like to insulate themselves with “hostages” which doesn’t require keeping someone tied up. Ordinary people can be hostages in their own life.
When prisons and the blackest of black ops secret military state has a bastard child, these are their prodigy.
Their captains, lieutenants, and foot soldiers are indistinguishable from ordinary persons. Anyone who wants to keep their secrets, anyone who would be paid by power, anyone who would do “anything” to have access to this godlike power over you.
There were many lines of power, and this secret war has spent the last decade purging honest “lawful” types and replacing them with those corruptible treacherous.
And pit slaves.
Ever wonder what the deal is with the “children under the stairs”, or “gimp” in pulp fiction? Or from time to time news finds out someone was kept tied up in a basement… for years?
Remember in Florida, the two crazy guys where one bit off the face of the other? Bath salts? Escaped pit slaves.
Pit slaves.
As power does not run on silicon, it runs on human brain tissue, our gelatinous lumps may be conditioned to maintain networks and perform “special effects” even outside the control / awareness of the subject.
Keeping a pit slave is a massive asset and sign of power among controls.
In charge?
Power heads don’t like other power heads telling them what to do. They may work together for some ends, and they will communicate like intimate chums who want to play together, yet they hate each other and can only count on each other in so far as they will “cover” or may be coerced by one and other.
And some have networks in the tens of thousands. They can sweep through your mind and that of everyone associated with you in days. Turning yours inside out, and into play things.
And these love their games.
Most of you (yes, you) know them by their games. When not outright extorting or “sacrificing” someone, they’re your buddy mini-me who wants you to play games.
No need for mind control when you can just use a superPAC or get some sort of leverage on powerful people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
If you observe people arguing about conspiracy theories, you may notice a pattern whereby it isn't only the conspiracy theorists that have the same rehashed talking points and thinking styles among them in the argument.
Most people run with an open mind to the possibility, but wait for evidence before drawing a conclusion. And since it’s not possible to prove this kind of negative, I suspect there are very few people indeed who even bother to make negative assumptions in this space.
If you need an ever so slightly deeper history of it, here's a brief history of the Spartan equivalent engaging in parallel behavior:
If the CIAs most secret illicit experiment came to light, what makes you think they are meaningfully hiding more?
Let's say I work on a project where we keep Elvis alive in a super secret bunker in antarctica. What can I do? Call the cnn and tell them? Make a post on 4chan? Make such a claim here? Look, I'm leaking top secret info, and nothing will happen. Until CIA officially admits keeping Elvis there, noone will believe me... (except a few conspiracy theorists, branded as nutjobs by the general public).
36 272
My whole thing with MK-ULTRA and Ted is that researchers were happy to do stuff as damaging and way less (potentially) useful than his experiment.
[1] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hear...
> questions remain over whether — or to what extent — he was affected by the experiment
> There has not been evidence to suggest LSD or similar substances were used at Harvard on Kaczynski.
> the “effect of Murray’s dubious, unethical experiment on Kaczynski is unknown.”
At best this is informed speculation, at worst the strong suggestion that Kaczynski was 'made by the CIA' has no support.
My own reading of this is that there are individuals who are prone to flipping out, even though they may well be very intelligent. In fact, intelligence may well be a net negative: you're going to see a lot of stuff in society that is extremely frustrating and you probably can't do a thing about it. Blessed are those that do not know.
Putting a lot of pressure on such an individual is definitely not going to help, but to make a 1:1 isn't helping either: chances are that your average individual exposed to these techniques isn't going to turn into the Unabomber, and that Kaczynski would have gone down that route anyway sooner or later. Just like my friends, who definitely were not part of a CIA mind control program. Fortunately they are not yet radicalized to take action beyond 'prepping' and moving away from society into a little hut in the bush but that may only be a matter of time. As long as the internet is feeding their beliefs I'm not very hopeful they will get better.
Further than frustration: the rational individual will be overburdened in the attempt of digesting the unbelievable load of "irrational" that this world presents - personalities leaning on rationality will "desperately" try and make the instances of the irrational fit into some organic framework which would make them manageable. The intelligent will be under a staggering amount of internal fatigue, if somehow incapable of "leaving puzzling absurdities aside".
(Edited to better explain what is meant with "digestion".)
The converse is also true, the vast majority of people will not react even when heinous atrocities are imposed on them, in a gradual manner. Most 'leaders' i.e politicians and high up executives in large corporation know this and use this fact to their benefit.
Either way, check the evidence before believing the claims remains useful advice.
However. That wiki page has Kaczynski under 'Alleged subjects' not under 'Documented subjects'.
If the program at Harvard was innocent, why does Harvard refuse to comment (again, according to the WP)?
Why was there such a program in the first place?
The Occom's razer is, the experimenting just pushed someone borderline over the edge. Not that he was a sleeper agent.
I guess you are saying that because he seemed to have several 'normal' years, that is proof that the experiments did nothing. But that seems to go against how others with trauma live normally for years before it manifests. It seems to be a common curve through life.
Because Ted went so extreme and got famous for it, we forget that it probably wouldn't have taken much to go another direction. Like "hey Ted you seem to be acting out lately, here, have some help", and then he gets help, goes back to a normal but troubled life, he has thoughts of the past trauma, has some violent thoughts, but learns to deal with it.
"Conspiracy Theory" with Mel Gibson and Julia Robers looks less like a comedy the older I get, and the more I find out. Don't be the government puppet in the techno spy thriller who stares wide-eyed in horror with disbelief while tied to a chair as the CIA goons put the needle in your arm ;)
It certainly is convenient most of the documents were destroyed at CIA director's orders and those surviving were due to a categorization error, and all involved had very little to recall about it also. Involvement, whether confirmed or not, should not be a justification—by any means—but the extent of psychological damage caused to the subjects involved I don't think has been properly evaluated over time. To be fair, this wasn't the first nor the last human experimentation project the US committed on their own ground or in other countries, so it might not have been considered as important as other, more "physical" programs. It still remains abhorrent.
[Gottlieb, project head] came to me and said that he was retiring and that I was retiring and he thought it would be a good idea if these files were destroyed. And I also believe part of the reason for our thinking this was advisable was there had been relationships with outsiders in government agencies and other organizations and that these would be sensitive in this kind of a thing but that since the program was over and finished and done with, we thought we would just get rid of the files as well, so that anybody who assisted us in the past would not be subject to follow-up or questions, embarrassment, if you will. (former CIA director Richard Helms testimony, 9/11/75)
I think a movement that turns to murder as a means of gaining power will continue using murder even should it achieve its goals.
Someone in the past pointed out to me that the American Revolution is an exception to that. I don't disagree but so many other examples in history would seem to support my view.
Going back to the American revolution it was in essence a battle between the Tories and the Whigs with the rebels and a great deal of the British leadership being Whigs and making “the progress” of Americas founding inevitable.
---------- The professor elevated his nose and said sternly, “I don’t believe in violence. It’s immoral.”
“It’s unethical ever to use violence,” said the bosun.
“I’m terrified of violence,” said the lady passenger. --------------
They are literally talking about people like you in the story lmao. The ship is further going north and they know they are gonna drown if they don't have a violent revolution against the captain and throw him out of the ship(killing him) so that they can turn the ship around.
> "The point of the story appears to justify murder as a legitimate means to enact change."
Well what the hell do you do in this scenario(in the story) ?? Have a non-violence protest and risk losing lives ?? Or throw the captain off the ship and steer it south ?? Violence/Murder is 1000% justified and is the answer in this story's scenario.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - John F. Kennedy
The captain and his mates don't necessarily need killing, even though a revolt might be desirable. Even in plenty of actual ship mutinies, the rebels didn't outright kill the overthrown officers, only imprisoned or marooned them. And that was in the context of the death penalty hanging over them if they failed.
Violent revolutions in general have the small problem of bringing other violent psychopaths to power. Kaczynski might not mind, but I do. It was a well-known problem in actual pirate crews as well, and pirates actually had some interesting rules (including a fairly modern division of powers on board) to prevent the most violent psychos from taking over their ships and introduce some measure of consensus into their internal politics.
His caricature of "weaklings abhorring violence" does not address the succession problem at all, and even if the original officer crew was bad, another officer crew self-selected of willing murderers could conceivably be worse by being both professionally incompetent and ready to torture their opponents etc.
Not clear. Several legitimate interpretations of "going North" into current situations are factually «life-threatening».
The problem is that every one has different views of what the ship going north means. If you permit violence, then many groups will use it…don’t be surprised when some religious extremists use it because “they’re killing babies!”
It's also something politicians are well aware of (or at least have been reminded about recently).
We don't have to fantasize about violence. But even in our relatively safe, civil societies, we should be aware of it, and not categorically discard it as aboherent in all case.
My opinion is that violence is abhorrent in all cases except in self-defense when the recipient is a directly active threat to your life.
Of course, you can also argue that all government is a form of violence, the police are the only ones allowed by society to enact violence to protect property. If the state actions diverge from the population ideals enough, then to some extent the population is already at war with the state.
Arab spring protests too 2011
There are many examples actually, and there will be more and more with the current rate of environmental destruction. I can already forecast people blocking airports in the future if the governments don't anticipate and regulate drastically civil aviation
That we have to turn 180 degree south, meaning in this context abolish industrialisation, let some bilions starve and go back working the land with stone tools, or hunting and gathering?
Just as you say the only response is 180 degrees and abolish industry. Then what is your current 0 degrees heading, dumping waste right in the rivers, abolish the EPA to let industry profit more? Cut all safeguards on industry?
Also, environmentalism is at most a distant secondary theme in the manifesto. The primary reasons he gives for being anti-industrialization have nothing to do with preserving the environment.
Because it can be ecology, if done right.
Garbage has to be moved anyway. So if you move all the cans (alluminium) to one place and resmelt it, than this is definitely less ressource intense, than mining new alluminium and shipping it.
It has to be reduced drastically first (buying local, avoiding plastic packaging, composting food wastes separately (what a shame to send that to an incinerator)
Aluminium cans (their paints however is toxic), or glass bottles is the best case, but most of the time it's plastic bottles (for water, which is nonsensical, people should use tap water, or soft drinks, or juices, both unhealthy products)
We in germany don't.
Otherwise sure. Reuse, reduce, recycle.
And I think it is ok, if in the process of transitioning from not caring and throwing all in the bin - towards sustainability, that there will be also lots of stupid things done in the name of ecology. (I have seen so much waste and inefficency, by people who think they do good) But it is all experimenting, on what works and what doesn't. Socially and economically. I am actually optimistic, that we get towards a sustainable society eventually, but I don't think, I will live that long.
For polluting less, what sure works is to buy less, possess less things
To all the other replies about "this or that solution" is not really helping the environment. So what. Do something. Calling out how some things have failed as a seeming argument to give up and just pollute is a failure mind set. "Oh well, recycling didn't work as well as we thought, guess I'll just dump my hamburger wrapper in the ditch", is BS. Do people really not remember how polluted the highways used to be with trash, or rivers catching on fire from chemical dumping. We have made progress, and we should try to make more progress. Not be like "well EV's still create a lot of waste, guess I'll just go de-tune my Mustang and do some dragging this weekend". I can't believe how many people split hairs on some technology-X and use it as excuse to do nothing.
Everything happens “in the environment”, of course.
What I meant was that Ted Kaczynski’s main motivation for wanting to return to primitive agriculturalism was not a concern about industrialization damaging the environment. So he would not have cared about EVs or recycling as they are still happening in a technological society.
I did actually and I miss it.
But there is a reason, I am not raising my kids there.
But a fridge, hot showers, supermarket and if needed a hospital, are kind of useful.
If all that would be suddenly missing, things would get very bloddy, as hunting cannot sustain 7+ bio people.
So I am not wishing for a collaps, even though I do understand (and sometimes feel) the hate of the savage towards the concrete people.
> They’re keeping you occupied with your trivial grievances... so that you won’t think about what is really wrong with this ship ... In comparison to our real problem... your grievances are petty
The depicted perspective - determined insistence in "normal planning" in situations which are far from the conditions for "normal administration" - is one of the marks of these times in some areas... An Era of Myopia, of early stopping. Regardless of the nature of "going North or South" beyond the metaphor.
"Ship of Fools" should be considered an obligatory reading. (The paradox of recommending a text reiterating that "people are refractory on getting the point" is quite old and already has its answers.)
https://apnews.com/article/us-news-ap-top-news-whitey-bulger...
EDIT
I really am asking a question here. No premise implied.
Colloquial reality is what matters, and colloquial reality is what's printed in the newspaper, and then repeated on social media as factual reality, closing the loop.
Provided the public is never provided the tools needed to think their way out of this trick, you can fool them indefinitely.
Conspiratorial thinking? Consider how frequently you hear "We need more critical thinking!!!", And then consider what initiatives have been floated to solve the problem.
Pure incompetence?
> In 1956, Bulger served his first term in federal prison at Atlanta Penitentiary for armed robbery and truck hijacking. He later told mobster Kevin Weeks that while there, he was used as a human subject in the CIA-sponsored MK-ULTRA program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger#Prison
The Japanese Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II.
While Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crime trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments. The United States covered up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators. The Americans co-opted the researchers' bioweapons information and experience for use in their own biological warfare program, much like what had been done with Nazi German researchers in Operation Paperclip. [1]
What I find abhorrent is the immunity given to those Japanese war criminals who conducted those experiments on Chinese civilians (and ultimately killed them) by the United States at the time.
But if they were actually pardoned, then it means human suffering and killings were reduced to just numbers on spreadsheet by somebody very high in decision chain. Which means same people without morals get to decide on hundreds if not thousands other situations, without any morality.
Maybe the correct conclusion is that morality is very thin and disposable for those 3 letter agencies, so one should never ever trust just their words, since they mean less than fart in the wind. Also expect bad things happening by default. Nah, I am sure those on HN who posted previously about their 3-letter employer how they pick only very moral, driven and hardworking individuals and how absolutely great it all is were for sure telling truth and onpy truth.
There was no useful fundamental research from Unit 731. Most of the work was on weaponizing existing pathogens as effectively as possible.
I mean, based on his writing style and ideas skipping talking about this experience as a lab rat seems like a missing piece of a puzzle.
People who like such explanations tend to ignore myriads of counterexamples set by people who survived worse, while not becoming serial murderers. I can't even begin imagining what was it like to be in Nazi concentration camps, almost surely worse than whatever young Ted Kaczynski went through. And yet there wasn't a wave of brutal crime unleashed by the survivors once they got out. Instead, there was a lot of art, literature etc.
It is possible that Kaczynski's mind was uniquely predisposed towards terrorism and the experiments he underwent at 17 were the final nudge that slowly pushed him to start distributing bombs 20 years later. Yet he himself maintained that they didn't. AFAIK it was mostly his lawyers who tried to arguing so during his trial - not he himself.
Edit: this is obviously a controversial comment, as I saw it falling from +5 to +1 in a matter of minutes. I would recommend reading up some works by Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychologist who survived four concentration camps. He studied the crushing effects of the camps on human minds in detail; after reading his work, I am almost certain that a two-hour-weekly experiment done on a Harvard campus cannot compare.
The latter is literally designed to make the victims doubt their own sanity.
While I agree that the experiments run by Murray were nasty, the students were volunteers and spent vast majority of their personal time on their own activities, not in any kind of closed brainwashing facility where you just can't escape.
> negative influence
Throwing together in a broad set, labelled "«negative influence»", conditions that in a form probably did and in other forms you are claiming should have triggered a specific class of effects, and having taken such untenable assumption further reasoning quantitatively to prove points, makes your comment controversial.
We cannot just suppose that the (resulting) class of behaviours in question would be necessary consequence of "intense general «negative influence»" - proposal which you yourself deny through observation, but that was not theorized in the first place.
I mean, I agree with your larger point about Kaczynski specifically. We do not use a single traumatic experience as excuse/explanation for mass murder after - unless we like the perpetrator for some reason.
Just that, violence has ugly consequences on its survivors and that included Holocaust. It is just that those are not all that often shown in popular media.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36272409 ("Ted Kaczynski has died", >600 comments)
> ... media reports about me have generally been loaded with bull manure. In particular, reports about the Murray study have been wildly, wildly exaggerated. People write to tell me how sorry for me they feel because I was "tortured" again and again by the Murray group as part of an "MK Ultra experiment allegedly carried out by the CIA. Actually, there was only one unpleasant experience in the Murray study; it lasted about half an hour and could not reasonably have been described as "traumatic." Mostly the study consisted of interviews and filling out pencil-and-paper personality tests. The CIA was not involved.
> About 15 or 20 years ago a TV journalist named Chris Vlasto (if I remember the name correctly) looked up some of the other participants in the study and found that nothing had happened that was worth reporting in the media. My brief correspondence with Vlasto should be available in the University of Michigan's Special Collections library at Ann Arbor.
You can actually hear one minute of the recording of that half hour session with Ted Kaczynski on a series "A History of Persuasion" produced by WNYC, that was on their podcasts On the Media and The Stakes. It starts about 9:50 into the episode 2[2].
> AMANDA: But I wanted to find out what actually happened that day in that room. And I managed to track down a recording of this actual interview with Kaczysnki.
> MALE VOICE: This is Monday evening, March 14th, 1960. Dyad #12 is about to begin between Mr Sh- and Mr Kaczynski. K-A-C….
> AMANDA: ... Only a handful of people have ever heard this before. This is the law student:
> INTERROGATOR: I ought to warn you before I start this, I do not have a very favorable impression of you as a result of reading your philosophy but let me just tick off a few preliminaries and then we will get to what I really didn’t like. First...
> AMANDA: And this... is Kaczynski
> TED KACZYNSKI: Yeah well all through this thing, uh, you’ve been saying well this and that, but you haven’t given me any arguments or reasons, you say that…
> INTERROGATOR: Well, Mr Kaczynski I have just formed an opinion of you and it’s not particularly favorable...
> AMANDA: You can hear, Kaczynski sounds annoyed.
> KACZYNSKI: I think the reason, one of the reasons you attack my philosophy so vigorously is because you don’t want to believe it.
> INTERROGATOR: (laughs)
> KACZYNSKI: And, in your, you uh… I think the way you laugh is an indication of that too.
> INTERROGATOR: Do you really?
> KACZYNSKI 1960: Yeah I do. But of course I’m no psychologist.
> INTERROGATOR: I’m trying to keep this -- hold on, I’m no psychologist Mr Kaczynski …
> AMANDA: To me, it sounds like a very uncomfortable college debate class.
> KAI: Right, I mean it’s hard to imagine that would break somebody.
> AMANDA: Right. I also managed to find someone who was there. Another undergrad who took part in the experiment at Harvard. Philip Bradley says yes, this was a pretty uncomfortable. But the idea it was damaging...?
> PHILIP BRADLEY: Bullshit. Or I should say, that's ridiculous.
> AMANDA: And you're sure because... you were, you were there, it sounds like....
> BRADLEY: Yeah. I mean how, how could you think that something like that would be permanently psychologically damaging to someone that would push somebody into becoming a psychopath. I mean I just... that idea is just to me so far fetched and I don't know how it's become part of popular lore.
> AMANDA: It’s clear that this theory just isn’t true. This is not what broke Ted Kaczysnki. It’s not the reason he tried to kill James McConnell. And yet it’s totally taken off. It’s been in all of these books, there’s these articles, it was in the TV show “Manhunt,” about the Unabomber.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/VP4Qpag.jpg
[2] https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-history-persu...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/09/12/g...
Perhaps his vapors brought about by poor constitution could have been alleviated with some trepanning.