“I’m so confused these days.” “I have no idea what’s going on anymore.” “Everything is up in the air.” “Everything changes day to day.” All general sentiments we’ve heard uttered in hopelessness and confusion many times, by many people in 2020. This is by design. Understanding how we got here isn’t hard, but it does take some… understanding. Peering through the manufactured fog of faux-chaos isn’t all that hard either, and when you do, you realize the “invisible” hand that is at work… is actually quite easy to see if you know what to look for.
I want to keep this as concise and to the point as possible, because I know attention spans are dropping by the day, but having a well-rounded enough understanding of what’s going on does require a brief history lesson to set the stage.
Back in the 1950s the newly christened CIA (formerly the OSS during WWII) was coming off of WWII and the Korean War with a profound problem that was a major obstacle in the fulfillment of its mandate: the realization through experience that old-school, brute force interrogation techniques don’t actually work for providing good intel. Contrary to what we’re typically shown in action and spy movies, beating your captive senseless or drilling their knee caps produces hardened resolve and resentment at best, lies and misinformation at worst. This is fine if you’re conducting witch trials or a religious inquisition, in which your ultimate goal is a confession – truthful or not being of no relevance. But under the shadow of a developing Cold War and the deep seeded (and present to this day) extreme paranoia that the Russians were perpetually one step ahead of them, the CIA stepped back from medieval torture instruments and instead, launching Project MKUltra, looked to the medical and scientific fields for what they hoped was a magical key to unlock or control the minds of interrogation suspects. MKULtra was an umbrella term under which many projects, experiments, and studies were conducted. Research conducted under MKUltra ranged from the horrific McGill University studies (link), to the incredibly bizarre Stargate Project (link) which the Stranger Things show is loosely based on, to ones we’ve actually come to accept as pretty normal today, like Operation Mockingbird (link). MKUltra was officially (“officially”) terminated in the 1970s, culminating with the CIA director, in a fit of panic, ordering all files and related documents destroyed – something that was done with near, but not quite complete success.
One of MKUltra’s greatest known contributions is the KUBARK Counter-intelligence Interrogation manual (which can be read only mildly redacted in its unclassified form here: link). Understanding what the CIA learned through its decades of experiments (and their subsequent trail of lawsuits and dead bodies) about controlling the human mind is the key to being able to see the “invisible” hand – and also understanding who it belongs to.
It would seem from the manual that the CIA never found the magic key it was looking for, but it did walk away with a very detailed, scientifically supported system to control the human mind that boiled down to one thing: regression. The name of the game was to cause a subject or captive to regress mentally to a point at which they lost willingness and/or ability to resist, while not regressing them so far that their mental damage turned them into a completely useless vegetable (the MKUltra experiments are littered with the bodies of people this happened to). As it turns out, inducing regression isn’t difficult or complicated – it might even start sounding a bit familiar.
The manual outlines the necessary steps and techniques to produce mental regression in a subject. These steps begin with the arrest of the subject. Arrest methods are chosen to produce maximum shock and disorientation. Disorientation remains a theme throughout. The CIA’s research showed that one of the most effective methods of disorientation is sensory deprivation.
The chief effect of arrest and detention, and particularly of solitary confinement, is to deprive a subject of many or most of the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations to which he has grown accustomed.
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The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject’s mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself.
If you’re one of the awake ones, don’t get ahead of me. If not, don’t worry, we’re just scratching the surface.
With external stimuli cut off, the subject grasps at other means to orient himself in a confusing world. One foundational form of reorienting is found in predictable daily routine. The manual warns against the development of even the most seemingly inconsequential routine for subjects and insists they be kept in continuous change.
Control of the source’s environment permits the interrogator to determine his diet, sleep pattern, and other fundamentals. Manipulating these into irregularities, so that the subject becomes disoriented, is very likely to create feelings of fear and helplessness.
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In short, the prisoner should not be provided a routine to which he can adapt and from which he can draw some comfort – or at least a sense of his own identity.
Sounding any more familiar? Disrupt routine, cut off contacts, remove the familiar, isolate – leave people alone to sit in their houses all day, without work, without play, without travel, without friends, with their only source of external stimuli being the fear mongering news casts they sit in front of day in and day out.
At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure. The result, normally, is a strengthening of the subject’s tendencies towards compliance.
“We’ll let you out of the house to experience a bit of the familiar… but you’ll have to wear this mask, inject this vaccine, carry this COVID ID card.” Yes Papa.
Side note here for the Stranger Things fans… I always found it appropriate, given the above, that Eleven refers to her CIA psychologist caretaker as “Papa”, in spite of the fact that she hates him. Not sure if this was coincidental in the writing or intentional.
Barring any external stimuli, including routine, the subject’s mind withdraws inward, seeking identity and orientation from internal sources.
…the circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring, and of being plunged into the strange.
I’m guessing this sounds familiar to everyone now. Onward!
If the interrogatee is especially proud or neat, it may be useful to give him an outfit that is one or two sizes too large and to fail to provide a belt, so that he must hold his pants up.
…or not allow him/her to get a haircut or nail grooming for months at a time.
…man’s sense of identity depends upon a continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance, actions, relations with others, etc. Detention permits the interrogator to cut through these links and throw the interrogatee back upon his own unaided internal resources.
And what are those resources? When forced out of routine and disoriented, what do people grasp for internally to provide identity, orientation, and the familiar? Ask anyone to tell you about themselves and what are the primary things they bring up… Career. Business they own. Religion. Sports. Patriotism/national identity. Heritage/history. Hobbies. All things currently under direct assault or curtailed across the country. History isn’t being removed because it offends people. Patriotism isn’t being relabeled as racism and xenophobia because it actually is. Churches aren’t closed because they spread virus more easily than widely permitted mass protests. These things are being done systematically because we’re witnessing the removal of both external and internal sources of identity from an entire country. When these are gone, no straws are left to grasp at and the population’s mental regression is complete.
…the result of external pressures of sufficient intensity is the loss of those defenses most recently acquired by civilized man: the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to meet new, challenging and complex situations, to deal with trying interpersonal relations, and to cope with repeated frustrations.
What’s most amazing about all this, to me, is that, as also prescribed by the manual, society is doing it to itself.
…whereas pain inflicted on a person from outside himself may actually focus or intensify his will to resist, his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself… When the individual is told to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the victim himself. The motivational strength of the individual is likely to exhaust itself in this internal encounter. As long as the subject remains standing, he is attributing to his captor the power to do something worse to him, but there is actually no showdown of the ability of the interrogator to do so.
This is why governors, mayors, and town councils don’t actually care whether their unconstitutional mandates and orders are legal or not. They aren’t the ones enforcing them. Local businesses are enforcing them as “private property rights” or “right to refuse service”. Citizens are enforcing them on each other through peer pressure and, sometimes, very public psychotic episodes on non-compliers. Local businesses are shutting themselves down. People are keeping themselves in the house. The pain being inflicted to aid in the regression is almost entirely self-inflicted, and it has the additional benefit (as in the interrogation scenario) of establishing the uncontested dominance and power in society’s eyes of politicians who are giving, but not themselves enforcing, these orders. There is an additional side benefit. The manual repeatedly states that in nurturing feelings of guilt, subjects must be provided with a source of rationalization to overcome their objections – an “excuse” for complying, if you will.
The subject’s primary source of resistance to confession or divulgence may be pride, patriotism, personal loyalty to superiors, or fear of retributions if he is returned to their hands. Under such circumstances his natural desire to escape from stress by complying with the interrogator’s wishes may become decisive if he is provided an acceptable rationale for compliance.
“It’s for the greater good.” “It’s to save grandma.”
This is why it’s so effective to make businesses, not government, the enforcement arm of illegal mandates and rights grabs. “I’m just doing this because the business requires it” is the perfect rationalization for the masses of people that would otherwise resist a mask order that was enforced by the actual police. “I’m saving grandmas” is the perfect self-inflicted lockdown rationalization for people that would otherwise strongly resist actually being held in their houses at gun-point by the government. Give people an out that allows them to shift responsibility for their capitulation… and you’ll have more capitulation.
So what then? What is the purpose of putting a captive (or the entire US population) into this helpless, regressed state of anxiety, confusion, and straw-grasping? When a person is in a regressed state, their mind is a “blank slate”. This result is the holy grail of mental manipulation the CIA spent decades searching for. The mind isn’t just a blank slate on which an interrogator can paint their own narrative to ensure compliance, the mind actually begs to be given a new narrative. To return to some routine. To be reoriented. To create a new familiar… a “new normal”. This new normal is whatever the interrogator… or politician… wants it to be.
The Whiteboard Pig 