I was curious how many sessions, and how long the sessions were. A Guardian article[1] suggests the sessions were 2 hours long, once a week, and the typical total time for participants was 200 hours.
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 was glad to see a topic in which most HN contributors seem freely critical of US actions, which is not the case with more recent events.
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].
I'll just save some quotes here since I really like them:
> 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.”
People have been called out and framed „Conspiracy Theorists“ (CT) for saying, years ago, that those government programs are one of the causes of amok runs in the US, repeatedly killing innocent people, i.e. in schools.
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?
Yikes; I know there have been a couple of high profile psychological experiments that have gone wrong, e.g. Stanford prison experiment etc, but even with that context these CIA based studies on students seem like huge ethical red flags; even from a 1970s perspective. But I would like to point out that the eyeroll vilification of LSD just for fun in this article is not ideal; many drugs can induce an individual to be more suggestible and many drugs can hurt individuals that are already prone to schizophrenia and other psychotic breakdowns
I really recommend everyone listen to the 4 part series on MK Ultra from Behind The Bastards[1]. Its absolutely insane that the government did this and BTB really delves deep on how it all came about.
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-mkultra-when-...
I'm honestly not convinced that this was part of MK-ULTRA, there's no hard evidence and what I think people don't really appreciate is that Psychologists (especially around this time) were performing "studies" where they basically just tortured people. For example, the Stanford Prison "Experiment"
I know some other people that have been radicalized and they too actually claim that they were mind control test subjects and that the CIA is conducting such experiments. They also are 911 truthers and see bogeymen behind every bush. There isn't a conspiracy theory that they aren't promoters of and believer in. Before jumping to conclusions here it would be prudent to assume that the link here is tenuous at best given the evidence available. Besides the title the article then goes out of its way to downplay the effect this may have had, noteworthy passages:
> 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.
Given how often people online write to praise or condemn him, I'm surpised today is the first time I read about this.
On a semi-related note, his short story, "Ship of Fools" is still depressingly accurate.
So was Whitey Bulger! He went through the actual MK Ultra program when he was in prison, which sounds quite a bit rougher. (Oddly this is no longer in his Wiki page, it used to be)
https://apnews.com/article/us-news-ap-top-news-whitey-bulger...
The United States had been interested in unconventional warfare before the CIA was established in 1947.
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]
Isn't weird that Ted hasn't written about this?
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.
One of the thing that bothers me about such explanations is the inherent bias "post hoc, ego propter hoc" (afterwards, therefore caused by).
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.
We're living in the midst of one of the greatest mind control experiments in history. Why would we think these agencies have cleaned up their act? What do you think all the BS of the last several years have been about? The corruption of the FBI, CIA, and DOJ are visible daily. The sad thing is how well it's working.
I wonder if all those MK-ULTRA experiments failed in finding ways to make human beings violent and politically disruptive
I have heard that the LSD experiments were stopped when they realized that it did not work well for mind control. Contrary to the propaganda that LSD makes you hallucinate, it actually breaks down the hallucinations and see some things clearly. I suspect Ted saw the reality before he then opened page 20 of this magazine and knew what he needed to do. https://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/ke...
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36272409 ("Ted Kaczynski has died", >600 comments)
One criticism I read of meditation, and mindfulness is that it can make you more passive and accepting of your circumstances. Kind of like people taming with age. Which is not always desirable.
Here's what Ted Kaczynski wrote in February 2018 about the experiments in a letter[1] to journalist Andrew Kaczynski (no relation):
> ... 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...
He was also an autogynephile[1], something today’s prestige media won’t touch with a ten foot pole, but that was well documented at the time.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/09/12/g...
https://archive.ph/pIFm7