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It kinda sucks that we still talk about "MK ULTRA" as these discrete, unfortunate psychological experiments that happened, and not as the 50 year campaign to create and deploy an infrastructure of individualist, idealist bourgeois socialization across the entire United States.
The socialist states were formed around centralized revolutionary parties that came to power, replacing the existing ruling class and affecting all aspects of society.
The US bourgeoisie responded by reconstituting itself as a secret, centralized all-encompassing party.
The US bourgeoisie responded by reconstituting itself as a secret, centralized all-encompassing party.
"A secret plan to engineer + mass produce capitalist subjectivity" or something like that. But "capitalist subjectivity" is too flattering of a phrase. Really the bourgeoisie want us all to be dumb rubes. Smart enough to do work but too dysfunctional to understand our oppression.
The bourgeoisie read their Marx and Lenin and Mao. When Stalin called artists "Engineers of the human soul" they knew he was right.
They understood base and superstructure and they realized that the kind of base the US had was producing the "wrong" kind of person.
They understood base and superstructure and they realized that the kind of base the US had was producing the "wrong" kind of person.
So they created a coordinated infrastructure of mass media and cultural content to produce the kind of person who would be compatible with their agenda.
One of the original MK ULTRA front organizations was something called the "Human Ecology Fund" which gets more at what the real aims of the program were.
What "ecology?" What were they trying to cultivate in humans?
What "ecology?" What were they trying to cultivate in humans?
One of the key insights of a Human Ecology study on Chinese Communism (explained in "Coercive Persuasion") was that Mao Zedong used the practices of missionary Christianity (exegesis, witnessing, confession) to create a new subjectivity in Party recruits.
Fifteen years later, some of these same researchers started channelling messages from Jesus Christ (who was back to tell us that his Church had become revisionist) which became "A Course In Miracles."
You may remember Marianne Williamson running for President on a platform of self-actualization being more important than economic justice. That was "A Course in Mircales."
Eventually these programs became global but in the mid 1950's half the world was denied to American cultural exports.
It puts a different spin on why the USSR and China shut out American movies and music, or why China still restricts internet access.
It puts a different spin on why the USSR and China shut out American movies and music, or why China still restricts internet access.
The point wasn't merely to use the content of media to advertise the capitalist way of life, but to use media, and the habits we form around consuming media, to create a population that was too anxious, selfish and fearful to organize itself.
This is what required the thousands of projects spread over decades studying how religions spread, how trust worked in groups, how trauma and drugs affected the brain, how people could be pressured into acting against their interests.
The Communists could accomplish these kinds of mass-re-engineering of the subjectivity of a population because they had the truth on their side and because self-confidence and liberatory action, as Freire explains, can become a mutually-reenforcing feedback loop.
The junk that surrounds us is the infrastructure that supplants the truth and substitutes self-satisfaction for liberation.
