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"Give me a baby and I can make any kind of man."

These, are the words of John B. Watson,

the founder of behaviorism.

According to this world view,

the behavior of organisms, including human beings,

is predictable, and therefore controllable.

In 1920, at John Hopkins University,

Watson experimented on several babies,

ranging in age, from three months to a year.

The experiments were remarkable in their simplicity.

He would present a candle to infants,
to see if they were afraid of fire.

He would introduce animals to their environment,

to see if the children were afraid of them naturally,

or only after a traumatic experience.

He would make a hissing noise,
and observe the results.

Watson learned that newborn babies had no fear of the dark.

He also learned, however, that
such fear could be conditioned.

And so it was with rabbits.

This baby, known as little Albert,

initially found delight in touching a rabbit;

yet, as Watson began to clang a steel rod

and a claw hammer behind the child's head

whenever he touched the creature,

the reaction became not one of delight, but terror.

Soon, the mere sight of the rabbit would elicit fear,

even when no noise was provided.

A fear that also extended to objects
and textures of a similar type.

From his experiments, Watson reached a radical conclusion,

which would come to define political

and social engineering in the 20th century.

"The driving force in society",
he claimed, "is not love, but fear."

You can speculate about why
the rat was so useful;

I mean... one thing,
it reproduced really fast,

...another thing is that people
were not affectionate towards rats,

so, you didn't really need to
worry about ethical objections,

unless something truly
horrible was done... and,

finally, I guess you could see the rat

as a metaphor for
an animal that is tractable.

Running a rat through a maze,

is a pretty understandable
metaphor for most of us,

of running through life.

In fact, if you look at the history
of the maze, it goes back

through early Christian and
even Ancient Greek societies,

as kind of a metaphor for life.

The idea that you somehow
wind your way through a maze...

Of course, in the Christian tradition, the maze is full of meaning,

and you're eventually trying to get to God

as kind of a pilgrim's progress.

Whereas in modern society, people like Nietzsche said that,

you know, life was "like a maze that you can never run to the end of..."

But in the 20th century,
in American laboratories,

the maze was once again adopted
as a symbol of hope,

not a hope that one can get to God
or get to a meaningful life,

but the hope that people
could actually be

controlled in a very
scientific manner...

that social life could be remade,
on the basis of scientific principles.

In the roll call of scientific pioneers,

few names will summon
the passionate controversies

that which surrounds B.F. Skinner.

His work has led to the formulation
of the science of human behavior,

which finds behavior to be
predictable, therefore controllable.

And for this he has been
both applauded and attacked.

The Science of Behavior is based on

the principles of
"Operant Conditionings".

These principles, and their practice,

have recently become known
as "Behavior Modification".

Sacrilege to some,

because it has to do with methods

by which man can shape
the behavior of others.

But far form being a scheme to control
people without their knowledge,

it allows man to study
and analyze behavior,

and to apply its healing potential,

to such fields as education,
medicine and psychology.

Behaviorism is, as it suggests,

is the study of behavior.

It's the notion that really
all that matters is behavior,

and not the thought processes that lie behind behavior.

And it also is...
very much, a method of control.

I'm waiting for it to turn
counterclockwise now...

...and then I re-enforce that movement.

Behaviorism is the whole idea
of behavior modification,

where you can use various
kinds of techniques

to modify people's behaviors,

so that they stop doing
what you don't want them to do,

and they start doing
what you want them to do;

So I think it's the scientific
aspect of it, and

the controlling aspect of it,

that defines Behaviorism.

The philosophy of behaviorism
is deceptively simple:

It suggests that organisms
can be viewed

as flesh and blood machines.

Like machines, we require fuel.

Like machines, we can be put
to work for a specific cause.

Like machines, we can be repaired,
or redesigned for new purposes;

and, like machines, we can be
compelled into performing

a certain action at
the push of a button.

The science of human behavior
had always intrigued philosophers,

but it wasn't until the Enlightenment,

in the era of
Capitalist Industrialization,

that men began to think that
they could control life forms

in the same way they
controlled objects.

Prior to that, we think of
the Middle Ages,

even much of the Renaissance,

the idea was, that things
were interrelated,

they were organically a whole.

In that sense, the Middle Ages had a lot in common

with traditional, peasant or folk
cultures around the world.

Things are seen as basically being

a kind of giant web of influence.

Everything was like a chain,
where if you plucked one part,

the other part would resonate.

That was the previous view,

a world view that had
great advantages,

and also great disadvantages.

With the Scientific Revolution
in the 17th century,

that view altered,
in which things

were seen as mechanical
parts that interrelated.

The mechanical philosophy
of the 17th century

was a very crucial step
in the rise of capitalism,

because capitalism does that.

For example, it sees
the Earth at a distance,

it sees the Earth as something
to be mined and exploited,

it sees the Earth as dead.

So, Capitalism and
the Mechanical Philosophy

went together very well.

And that, in many ways,
made possible

the Industrial Revolution,
the rise of modernity.

And, there again, we can say

there are great advantages to it

and also great disadvantages to it.

Civilizations usually come
as a package deal:

there's a light side
and a dark side.

Every civilization believes
in its own propaganda,

so it tends to emphasize
the light side

and forgets about the shadows.

For the behaviorist,
it started with plants.

Julius Sachs, at the
University of Würzburg,

enumerated a set of tropisms,

defined as any directed response by an organism

to a constant stimulus.

An example, is
the way an ivy plant

will turn its leaves
toward the window,

in order to gain
exposure to sunlight.

Sachs' protégé, Jacques Loeb,
took it to the next level,

by creating a stable of insects
he called "Durable Machines".

In his laboratory, at the
University of Chicago,

he trained cockroaches, through
the use of simple tropisms:

Because of the insects'
bilateral symmetry,

a light shone on one side,

caused it to move
in the other direction.

In Russia, Ivan Pavlov
moved on to animals.

The term "Pavlov Dog"

has become synonymous
with the conditioned reflex.

Pavlov discovered that
a dog would salivate,

when it began to associate a stimulus,
such as a ringing bell, with food.

In America, John B. Watson
finally graduated

to human beings.

John Watson was an extremely
interesting character

in the history of American Social Science,

and also the history of American advertising,

which is a not "unsignificant"
connection between the two.

His dissertation in 1906
was about the kinesthetics

of the rat as it navigated a maze,

and his idea was that he could

remove one by one
the senses of the rat,

like, remove its ability to see,

remove its ability to hear,
its ability to feel,

and then see whether the rat
could still make its way through

a maze that it had been trained to navigate.

So in his mind, rats were always stand-ins

for human beings and human subjects.

He called it "Psychology as the behaviorist views it",

and it was, basically, his
manifesto for Behaviorism.

And in it, he declared that

Behaviorism was the science
of human behavior, and that

there was a method available to make a technology

by which human beings
could be shaped in any way that

a scientist desired.

Watson always was
interested in control,

one finds this theme throughout his work.

He said: "Give me a baby, and
I can make any kind of man".

Watson continued to
experiment on babies

and other living things, until
his star began to fade.

At the end of his life,
he wrote nostalgically

of his failure to put together
what he considered

the ultimate experiment in Social Engineering:

A multi-ethnic "baby farm".

"I sometimes think
I regret", Watson wrote,

"that I could not have a group of infant farms,

"where I could have brought up
30 pure-blooded Negroes on one,

"thirty 'pure'-blooded
Anglo-Saxons on another,

"and 30 Chinese on a third,
all under similar conditions".

Watson's dream may seem
bizarre to modern ears,

but implicit in the concept

was a real desire to see
the question of race

answered once and for all.

He was not unlike thousands
of other researchers

at prestigious universities across the United States.

In the late 19th century,

alongside the rise of Jim Crow
segregation in the 1890's,

what you saw is that corporations

developed a much more
elaborate way

to justify the fact that the
wealthy corporate elite,

which was, without exception, white...

...to explain the reason why.

That reason has its basis

in what became known as the Eugenics Movement.

You were born with either

good genes or
not good genes.

- In the case of Miss Mason,
I can see no reason

for the operation
that's been recommended.

The girl is perfectly normal.

She's hardworking and has a good reputation.

- Do you know anything about her family background?

- Oh, yes, your honor, I do.

- There are several other children, aren't there?
- Yes.

- What is their condition?

- One is a cripple;
two others might be classed as

"feeble-minded".

- Isn’t the oldest son in jail?

- Oh, yes, I believe so.

- And knowing all that,
you still contend that

this girl should be allowed

to bring more people like that into the world?

Those who have good genes should
be encouraged to reproduce,

and those who are "unfit"

should be discouraged from reproducing,

from having children.

That eventually went into

four sterilization programs

which started in the US,
directed against

African Americans, native Americans,

immigrants in particular...

Eugenics was a pseudoscience,

rooted in the idea that you can

a) Recognize pre-biologically determined

differences in people,
based on their ethnicity

and that, b) you could construct a policy

that favors some ethnic groups over others,

both in terms of immigration policy and in terms of

integration into US society,

based on this hierarchy of heredity.

This pseudoscience, this philosophy,

gained a lot of traction in the US

amongst the industrialist class,

especially at a time when
immigrant workers,

who made up a large percentage, if not the majority, of

workers at the turn of the 20th century,
who made up a large percentage, if not the majority, of

workers at the turn of the 20th century,

were beginning to form unions,

were beginning to create collective organizations,

their own political parties,

to challenge the conditions of industrialization,

which were horrific and oppressive.

It took root in the Universities;

it took root amongst the highest offices of government.

Calvin Coolidge, for instance,

Republican President, believed that,

and even stated his belief, that

a lot of social problems were
associated with inferior races.

We see ultimately this philosophy

is gonna play an important role in shaping immigration policy,

after the passage of the
Immigration Act of 1924,

which essentially creates a national quota system that

favors immigrants based on their ethnicity

and based on their nationality.

One fact that is important to understand about

the Eugenics Movement is that it was

created and funded by

the corporate elites that ruled America,

coming into the 20th century.

It was the Rockefellers,

the Harrimans,

and the Kellogg family of the cereal;

they funded these

"Research Programs" at Universities.

All of it created, funded, by these corporate families.

The Rockefellers in particular, played a particularly devious role.

As the Eugenics movement developed,

it went in a really horrible direction.

The Rockefellers would play a key role

in the advancement of Social Engineering

in the years between the Great Wars.

Between 1922 and 1929,

an arm of the Rockefeller foundation,
gave out almost 50 million dollars

toward the pursuit of the social sciences around the world.

According to historian Judith Sealander,

the spur was a need for better organization in society at large.

What had begun as a public relations ploy

to assuage public anger in the face of

unscrupulous business practices

and violent suppression of working people,

the Rockefeller Charities would set out to change society as a whole.

The Yale Institute of Human Relations was founded in 1929;

it was given 7 million dollars initially
from the Rockefeller Foundation,

just a couple of months before Black Tuesday

occurred in October of 1929;

So, according to my calculations,

if you factor in all the money that Rockefeller eventually

gave the Yale Institute,

and the other moneys from the government,

this was the largest social science project

that's ever been funded in history.

The desire for better order,

was epitomized by the
Hawthorne Experiments,

which created a new model

for organizing and supervising industrial workers.

They are widely credited

with putting the human factor back into industrial relations,

yet, as with previous experiments in the workplace,

the ultimate effect

would be to increase the power of the great capitalists,

at the expense of everyone else.

The story of what is now termed Scientific Management,

or Taylorism, begins decades earlier,

when Frederick Winslow Taylor

was hired by Bethlehem Steel

to increase efficiency in the industrial workplace.

Once upon a time,

the greatest theorist of the free market, Adam Smith,

had warned that division of labor

would create a catastrophe for human society.

Frederick Taylor disagreed.

In Taylor's view, there is far too little division of labor.

Factories could be run far more efficiently,

if tasks were mechanized, and broken down even further.

In a series of experiments,

he set out to reduce every task performed in a factory

into individual units.

Measuring how long they took,

and setting targets for workers to meet.

On its surface,
Scientific Management

seems like an excellent idea.

'Increased efficiency' allows more products to be manufactured

in a shorter amount of time;

yet, there was another, more sinister motivation

lurking in the background.
yet, there was another, more sinister motivation

lurking in the background.

Ever since the 19th century,

machine shops had been a bastion of skilled labor.

What this meant was that a considerable degree of power

remained concentrated on the shop floor.

The same skills that made production possible,

also enabled machinists to challenge management,

when they felt they were being treated unfairly.

For management, this was an unacceptable bargaining chip.

For Taylor, it was simply inefficient.

You found that the man does not change very much,

whatever else changes.

They boast in the air a plain world,

it will take some other countries a generation

to catch up with our quality;

and it is not because their engineers are inferior,

but because our ordinary workmen

have a tradition of skill behind them.

Taylorism was certainly about de-skilling,

it was about studying what skilled workers did,

to decompose those tasks into their basic elements,

and then, teaching people to do specific aspects of it,

without learning the entire set of, or array of activities

that were involved and are involved for a skilled person.

In that sense, it's a mechanism of control,

because you dictate to people:

"Well, you do this part of the entire task, and...

"and you don't do
anything else", and you

dictate to 8, 10 or 12 people,

various specific aspects of the whole task,

rather than allowing a skilled person

to decide how the entire tasks should be done;

so there's very much control involved there.

To the degree that this involves de-skilling and involves control,

it tends to take power away from workers,

it takes power away from, therefore, the collectivity of workers,

and therefore, makes them less likely to be rebellious,

makes them less likely to form various kinds of movements,

that would operate against - let's say broadly - the capitalist system.

So, this is something that

management thinks it's a good idea for the workers,

but it's not a good idea for them;

They have to be free
to be... to be creative.

And in fact, Henry Ford, in his biography,

said exactly that.

Basically he said something like, you know,

"I'm too smart

to have these kind of

rational principles
imposed on me."

"But those stupid workers out there,

we need to impose those principles on them,

'cause they wouldn't know what to do,

if we didn't impose those principles on them."

So, rationalization,

'MacDonaldization' is always something

that those on top want to impose on the bottom,

but something they don't want to affect their work at all.

Henry Ford, in effect, invented the automobile assembly line,

and more generally, the system that came to be known as Fordism.

One aspect of Fordism had to do

with hierarchical
control over workers,

and, more specifically, the control over workers by the assembly line.

So all a worker might do, for example,

is put a hub cap on a car, as that car went past

as it was being constructed on the assembly line.

So, instead of a thinking, creative skilled worker,

you had a kind of mindless kind of worker, who

repetitively did the same task over and over again.

Well, that kind of worker is 'robot-like',

you are forced into a series of 'robot-like' actions.

The most interesting thing for me about

'MacDonaldization', or

or Weber's broader concept of rationalization,

is the idea of the
irrationality of rationality.

That these 'rational systems'

inevitably spawn all sorts of irrational consequences.

This is supposed to be an efficient system,

yet it ends up being,
very often, inefficient.

It's dehumanizing, one of the, kind of ultimate

irrationalities from my point of view.

In their study "Where have all the robots gone?",

Harold Sheppard and Neal Herrick

confirmed what many had long suspected:

People trapped in an unrewarding worklife,

were not only more likely to be dissatisfied,

but were also more likely to suffer from low self-esteem,

a feeling of helplessness, alienation,

and to be plagued by a variety of mental disorders.

The workers who were the most dissatisfied,

and whose mental health was the most impaired,

were the least likely to vote or participate

in community organizations.

If you work in an environment where you're

beaten up all the time,

well, you're beaten up.

Moreover, if you work in an environment that is

so fragmented, that so robs you of dignity and

and so robs you of the expression of your own capacities,

then they'll be diminished,

you'll be deadened, you'll be bored,

you will be reduced
in your potentials,

and you are not too likely

to take initiative in other domains either.

This is why Taylorism is pursued.

This is why fragmenting of work is pursued.

It weakens the workers, not just on the job,

but in their communities too,

which is what you want to do, so that they don't

take more of the income for themselves,

thus reducing profits for the elites.

So, it's a perfectly sensible policy,

a perfectly sensible approach, a devil's approach,

but a perfectly sensible approach

from the point of view of those at the top,

who are trying to stay there,

and who are trying to advance.

Moreover, if they don't, they just get wiped out.

So, it's not even really an option.

What you'd have to do is to create a new kind of economy,

in which these situations and these conditions

don't restrict our options.

The corporate entity,

the corporate person
- it's not really a person,

but call it an entity -

is it pathological?
Answer: yes.

Why?

Because it drives toward profit,

regardless of the broader implications.

It doesn't matter if your drive toward profit induces

pain and suffering...

promotes, you know, generates

'black lung' disease in a mine, or...

pollutes the environment, or

literally, destroys the society.

It doesn't matter, you are forced

by the nature of the social relations inside

and among corporations,

upon(?) the market system,

to pursue, to accumulate, to pursue profits.

If hierarchy is the defining characteristic

of Scientific Management,

it should not be surprising

that it was met with great praise,

not only by the capitalist world,

but by fascists and
authoritarian communists.

Mussolini set up a propaganda arm of his government

to promote Taylorism,

while Lenin wrote in Pravda, in 1918, that:

"We must introduce in Russia

the study and the teaching of the Taylor system,

and its systematic trial and adaptation."

As in America,

workers in Russia were unimpressed

by Scientific Management.

A major contributing factor

to the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921,

was the introduction of Taylor's techniques.

Immediately after the rebellion was crushed,

a government document on rationalization

spoke of "...the instinctive mistrust of all workers

toward all kinds of experiments,

directed at extracting greater productivity from them."

Workers at Kronstadt had envisioned

a decentralized system, where they would

actually own and control their own work and resources,

but Lenin had something different in mind.

"Socialism", Lenin wrote,

"is merely state-capitalist monopoly... "

which is made to serve the interests of the whole people,

and has, to that extent, ceased to be capitalist monopoly.

"...the new means of control have been created not by us,

but by capitalism in its military-imperialist stage."

The Leninist system, was one of the greatest blows that socialism suffered,

in the 20th century, maybe second only to fascism.

I mean, as Lenin took power among his first acts, along with Trotsky's, were

to destroy the socialist institutions that had arisen.

in the pre-bolshevik period.

Soviets, factory councils, constituent assembly, which was dominated by

left social revolutionaries, largely peasant based.

Of course that meant a war against the anarchists.

A major war to try to wipe them out, the Makhno's army and so on.

And there was a, sort of, a logic behind it.

They were Orthodox Marxists, unlike Marx incidentally,

they believed in a version of Marxism

that said that revolution can't come in a backward peasant society,

which is what Russia was.

It was what we would now call a third world country,

an undeveloped peasant society,

with some development but only by the west and so on...

...a highly educated and productive intellectual class,

but that's also true of third world societies.

So, they felt this can happen.

So therefore we have to drive this backward population

through industrialization by force.

And then later on by the Iron Laws of History, and so on and so forth, will come the Socialism.

Of course, it's all nonsense, but,

So they essentially laid the basis for a

totalitarian system,
with an ideological doctrine behind it.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, I

actually wrote an article saying that's a victory for Socialism,

small victory for Socialism.

I just couldn't get published.

Nobody knew what I was talking about.

The world's two major propaganda systems,
the West and the Soviet Union,

they both decided, made determined to use the word Socialism

to refer to the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union.

I mean, the West did it to discredit Socialism,

the Bolsheviks did it to try to

gain the credit associated with genuine Socialism.

Well, when the world's two propaganda systems agree,

it's going to be very hard for the people to extricate themselves from it.

So now, Socialism has, the term, has been degraded

to mean the form of totalitarianism

instituted by Lenin, and carried through by Stalin.

And it was - going back to Spain -
it was entirely natural

that they should be in the lead
in destroying the popular revolution.

Bakunin, much earlier, had predicted all of this.

He said that, in the future there will be two forms:

One form will be they'll take over the state

and they will create a red bureaucracy, which will be the most

vile and brutal regime the world's ever seen.

And there are others who will understand that they can't take over the state,

so they have to serve concentrated private power and state power.

And they'll be the technical intelligentsia who

implement the policies of the masters and

what we now call the world democracies.

It's a very good prediction.

It's one of the few predictions in the social sciences that actually came true,

which is one of the reasons why nobody ever studies it.

It's much too dangerous and too insightful.

In both the Soviet Union and the United States

ruling elites would set out to master the psyche of the average worker.

And from the Hawthorne experiments came new insights.

Researchers found that the very act of allowing workers to talk about their feelings

reduced the possibility of agitation and rebellion.

It made workers feel as if they mattered.

Even if the social relations remained fundamentally the same.

The Hawthorne experiments - initially,

it was to be a purely scientific study,

and science tries to get rid of unnecessary things -

- let's make everything equal -

so there aren't any other factors than the ones we're controlling for.
- let's make everything equal -

so there aren't any other factors than the ones we're controlling for.

So they were trying to see what effect changing the lighting would have,

how workers felt, and also how much they produced.

Wasn't any really quality concern, but quantity of production and worker satisfaction.

Which can ultimately affect the quantity of work as well.

But to do that, they said:

"Well we don't wanna have employees

being disgruntled about this and that being a factor,

so we will discuss with the employees what we are going to do."

There were complete discussions and the employees would

for say, suggest trying this and trying that.

And what they found was no matter what changes they made

including putting the lighting back to where it had been before the experiment began,

to see what difference that made.

Every time they made a change, having discussed it with the employees,

production went up and employee satisfaction went up.

Now, if it had been done in a democratic context immediately

the reaction would've been, let's look at the participation.

But this was done in a hierarchical context.

So what came out of it was a Public Relations school

Industrial Relations - it developed that way

and most of that meant -

was taken as a way of trying to control employees

by trying to manipulate them ideologically.

Not that managers hadn't done that before,
but know there was a whole school of doing that.

I would say the wrong lesson was learned.

Yeah, put out a suggestion box, so that
employees can feel they' re being asked.

But you don't necessarily pay any attention to them.

In a real team work organization, or a participatory organization,

employees get to take each other into account.

They begin caring about each other.

I've seen this going into a plant,

and seeing it develop over time:
the amount of participation increase,

and the attitudes of employees begin to grow
and the care that people have about each other,

and then that can easily expand to care about the community.

And also, work can be reorganized.

Because people have a say,
there are better ways to do things.

If we are treated better, we will work better, and so forth.

Now, the broader social impact of doing these kinds of things,

as we have seen earlier,

hierarchical control makes people feel worse about themselves,

creates more mental illness,

creates bad relations outside the workplace.

Well, if people spend the most of their time in a collaborative workplace,

they become more collaborative.

The care more about each other.

You can have a democratic corporation, a worker-owned business,

and a worker-owned business that really is managed by the workers,

that uses the corporate form,

and then that gives us some hope because it's possible,

at least theoretically, to reform corporations.

Participatory Economics is the name
for a different way to do the economy.

It's a different approach to accomplishing production,

consumption and allocation - economic functions.

Different than what? Different than capitalism,

and different than what went under the name Socialism,

but, I tried to describe as Coordinatorism,

as this class of engineers and managers and doctors and lawyers being at the top.

So, participatory economics, or Parecon

is an alternative to all of that, it's a different kind of economy.

In a participatory economy - in a good economy -

instead of organizing economic life to
keep a small sector of people on top,

and to enrich them beyond any sensibility,

and to utilize productive apparatus even when it entails

doing things that are a complete waste of time,

building missiles that will never be used,
and on and on and on.

Instead of all that, we would produce and distribute

for purposes of human fulfillment and development.

You don't need only advertising, you need sensible information.

Rather than people competing with advertising

that has nothing to do with actually communicating

what the benefits and costs of production are.

You don't need all this military production. Of course not.

You don't need more - do you want to

generate all kinds of activity and product,

which doesn't make people better off.

As workers around the globe

continue to struggle for workplace democracy and equal rights,

mass production continues apace.

Taylorism combined with Human Relations,

make up the cornerstones of worker management in the 21st century.

In China, scientific management has taken on nightmarish proportions.

So extensive is the division of labor,

that millions of people are forced to perform roughly the same motion thousands of times a day.

In the US, workers in some assembly plants

are required to be in continual motion for up to 57 seconds a minute.

In Indonesia, sweat shops owned by corporations like Nike,

chart productivity down to a thousandth of a second.

In offices and service industries,

corporations are increasingly resorting to video surveillance and computerized monitoring.

One of Frederick Taylor's descendants, John Taylor Gatto,

has rebelled against his forebear's legacy.

An award-winning teacher, he has also rebelled against the state of his profession.

The key is the word compulsion.

The idea of drawing all children, all young people

into some universal program,

administered by the leader, or the leaders,
is as old as Plato, probably older.

But nowhere on Earth was that able to be imposed,

until Northern Germany under the military rule of the Prussians,

finally imposed that in 1818,

it's on the first- second decade of the 19th century.

That is the first time -
it was announced in other places,

but never was it able to be successfully administered

because the idea is so crazy, and so damaging inherently

that people simply disobeyed the law.

The experience of Prussian Germany was

that it was possible to convert

sovereign human beings into human resources

- that's a translation of a German compound -

and that by making these people incomplete,

making them unable to think in contexts,

but they could be converted into specialist tools,

for management, Scientific Management.

Horace Mann was hired by the railroad and coal interests

of New England to bring about compulsion.

He had no interest in school and
he was an ambitious young politician.

He did get compulsion laws passed in 1852.

Once it was in Massachusetts, it spread very very slowly.

It wasn't for 15 more years that another state followed suit.

So, it hardly was a gift to the populous portion of America.

I smell (?) a little bit when I say that,

because the mythology is that it was greeted everywhere with great enthusiasm.

Not only did parents resist compulsory schooling,

they sometimes did so violently.

So vehement was the opposition in Barnstable on Cape Cod,

that state militia were brought in to march children to school under armed guard.

A primary reason why the mass of the American population resisted compulsory schooling

was a widespread belief that it's purpose had little to do with education,

and everything to do with control.

Their suspicions were well founded.

An under-current of class warfare runs through early American education documents.

The US Bureau of Education circular of information for April 1872, explains that

"inculcating knowledge teaches workers to be able to perceive and calculate their grievances,

thus making them more redoubtable foes in labor struggles.

Such an enabling is bound to retard the growth of industry."

16 years later in the report of the Senate Committee on Education is equally explicit.

"We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent

of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."

The first red scare in my judgment,

is the trigger event for the embedment of compulsion schooling in the US.

The red scare of 1848 is probably the reason

that one American state fell under the compulsion regiment.

There are literally thousands of books

from the period 1880 to, say 1920, roughly,

that deal with how you scientifically engineer a factory,

or a church congregation, or young people in school.

School which followed a general outline of converting kids into obedient tools,

now took on a very, very mechanistic aspect,

under this surge of scientific engineering.

In 1903 the Atlantic Monthly called for adoption of scientific management in schools.

Prominent education theorist, William C. Bagley stressed a need for unquestioned obedience.

The new system would train children for life in 20th century America.

Their role: to fulfill the needs of
commerce, industry and government.

In the community with the best education: more shoppers,

more merchandise moving,
a higher average of per capita sales.

In the other community - fewer shoppers.

Maybe things will look up in the long run.

In the first community, there is a larger
magazine circulation for a 1000 population.

A much smaller circulation in the second community.

A decline in demand.

The student of typing shorthand in business machines

becomes a producer upon graduation,
a tax developed community asset.

He prepares for radio and electronics.

His future promises a profit on the taxes invested in him.

As education raises the cultural level,

so it must also introduce youth to the know-how of production

and stir interest in precision, efficiency and service.

With graduation, the community receives a new supply of young people

who want a better life on the one hand,

and to have the ability to work for it, on the other.

Now the tax investment returns to the taxpayer.

In order to aid in the process, the Gary Plan was introduced.

It had a new organizational scheme, in which different subjects

would be taught by different departments.

Similar to the breaking down of factory jobs under Taylorism,

students would be herded from classroom to classroom

in order to digest a stream of standardized factual information.

Like Pavlov's dogs, they would do so at the ring of a bell.

The first lesson I saw

was the terrible confusion, that's in any school,

as people race about, at bell marked intervals.

The time-honored experience of
mental development is that it occurs

with strong concentration, not with fragmented attention.

Class position: you will not find the doctor's son,

however ignorant he is, in the class with the marginalized kids.

Indifference is wonderful.

This is a factory to create indifference
to intellectual things, to ideas.

They have to be whipped, ordered and disciplined to do anything, or

just as bad, they have to be offered bribes to do it.

Emotional dependency, sure.

Probably half of the sixty million kids who attend school in the US

Removed from their own families, at a very vulnerable age,

become emotionally dependent on a pat on the head,

a smile, avoiding an insult.

Intellectual dependency.

In spite of rhetoric to the contrary, a teacher's nightmare

is invested in those kids, if any,

who actually have learned how to think for themselves.

The teacher's job is not only to convey bits of information,

it should not be challenged,

but also to convey how you connect those bits of information,

but not practicing doing that for yourself -

you memorize someone else's connection.

What is a circle? [name of the kid]

A circle is a closed curve in which all endpoints on the circumference are equally distant from the center point.

Very good.

Provisional self-esteem: this really ties into the grades,

the test scores, the signs of approval by the teacher.

You are allowed to feel good about yourself,

if an authority issues a signal that you can do that.

On the other hand, if the authority condemns you,

the only way you can feel good
about yourself is to become an outlaw.

What are we trying to do?

If our goal is to help kids become

critical thinkers, life-long learners, who really enjoy

thinking and reading and playing with numbers and ideas;

if we want to help them become good learners and good people,

who can create and sustain a functioning democracy,

then education would look very different from
the way it looks right now, at least in our culture.

We would have to question the use of grades.

What research finds is that when kids are trying to get good grades in school,

three things tend to happen:

They begin to lose interest in the learning itself.

Now the purpose it just to get a good grade,

rather than to engage with the question or a problem at hand.

Second, the tend to think less deeply and retain

knowledge for a shorter period of time,

compared to kids who don't have any grades.

And third, the tend to pick the easiest possible tasks.

That's not because they are being lazy, it's because they are being rational.

If we tell kids we want to see a better report card, we wanna see higher grades,

naturally they'll pick the shortest book, or the easiest project,

because that maximizes the chance of achieving that goal.

So, regardless of what your goal is,

if you are interested in assessing kids and teachers and schools,

to see are we doing a good job here,

you would never need tests in order to see whether kids are learning and where they need help ,

and you would never need grades to report the results,

of the evaluation we place on those assessments.

We would certainly do away with standardized testing,

the kind of testing used in particular states or provinces,

where everyone takes the same test and then you compare everyone's score.

These tests tend to measure what matters least.

It tends to be a good marker for family income,

because what standardized tests mostly measure is the size of the houses near a school,

but it's the case that some of our deepest thinking kids just don't do well on tests,

and some kids who get great scores have never had an original idea in their lives.

"Well I thought you test judge by tests."

"Oh no. There are many other things besides tests that we use.

Of course we do consider a child's general ability,

and the way he scores on standardized tests,
but that's not all."

"Competition builds character."

In fact, what we find is that by any reasonable notion of character

in terms of psychological health, or self-esteem,

that competition undermines that, and creates a kind of neurosis,

because we come to think of ourselves
as good and competent only to the extent

that we have defeated other people.

And so, we are always playing this desperate king of the mountain game,

where we're all worried about triumphing over other people, and stepping on their faces,

and looking at them as if they're gonna step on our faces.

That has two effects.

One is it's horrible for us in terms of psychological development,

because there is a perpetual sense of disease and anxiety.

But second, it very logically has a destructive effect on our relationships.

We compete because we are raised that way,
not because we're born that way.

We take, for example, the belief in survival of the fittest,

which is seen as a Darwinian notion.

In fact, Charles Darwin never even used the phrase "survival of the fittest".

That was coined by a right-wing social thinker

in the 19th century, named Herbert Spencer,

who tried to corrupt Darwin's thinking to his own reactionary political purposes.

What Darwin talked about was
natural selection, which means that

the individual organism that's best able to adapt

to a changing environment is more likely to be around, to survive and reproduce.

That doesn't specify competition as a mechanism.

In fact, often the active avoidance of competition,

if not the deliberate pursuit of cooperative strategies,

turns out to make it more likely that organisms and entire species will survive.

The research consistently shows that competition

not only isn't necessary for excellence,

but tends to impede excellence on most tasks.

And the more challenging the task, the more ingenuity,

problem solving skill it requires.

The more competition tends to disrupt that achievement.

Excellence pulls in one direction and competition pulls in another.

And in fact, another kind of research study corroborates that.

If you take a whole bunch of people and give them a task to do,

some kind of problem to work out,

and half of them are told:

"See if you can figure out how to do this task",

and the other half are told:

"This is a contest, with a prize to whoever wins. Whoever does the best job."

Study after study after study, across cultures, across gender, across ages,

find that the people who compete, who have to compete,

end up doing an inferior job on that task.

At the moment, it appears as though much of what happens in schools in North America,

is really for the convenience

of people who have most of the power.

There is, if anything, an active
discouragement of critical questioning.

Corporations claim they want kids who are able to think outside the box.

But, only so far as they are caught within a larger box,

that works to the advantage of the "free market".

Which means that the market economy, based on competition,

based on economic, rather than human considerations,

ends up controlling the system.

Today, many people assume that antisocial and even violent behavior

by young people is a completely natural phenomenon.

Yet, anthropological studies reveal this to be a myth.

Our widespread use of the term juvenile delinquency,

exposes not only the failure of modern schooling,

but of an important concept given expression by the behaviorists.

They called it "the frustration-aggression hypothesis".

The frustration-aggression hypothesis

was an attempt by behaviorists at Yale
to combine their own science of behavior

with that of the Freudians. Simply put,

when people perceive that they are being prevented from achieving just rewards,

their frustration is likely to turn to aggression.

This study by the behaviorist Hobart Mowrer,

showed that when rats could not achieve their expected reward,

they began to take out their frustrations on each other.

The scientist notes that two animals which have lost their hold on the pellet (frustration),

will be seen to turn on each other (displaced aggression).

Similarly, in a 1941 experiment,

toys were placed behind a wire screen,
where children could see, but not touch them.

When they eventually gained access to the toys,
their play became considerably more destructive.

On the one hand, human beings are not rats.

Armed with the necessary information,

we can come to a logical conclusion about who is to blame for our frustrations in life.

Rightly, or wrongly, we often point the finger squarely back at ourselves.

Yet, in the hands of politicians and demagogues,

frustration-aggression can be a potent tool in deflecting anger onto scapegoats.

"They want to throw white children and colored children into the melting pot of integration.

Through out of which will come a conglomerated

mulatto mongrel class of people!"

"We are the Ku Klux Klan. We hate niggers,

we hate Jews, we hate faggots, and we hate spics!"

"We kill the faggots!

We kill the lesbians!

I say, God damn it, we kill them all!

Why kill the elder crackers?

They're all decrepit crackers in South Africa.

How in the hell do you think they got old?

They got old oppressing and killing black people."

"I'm not gonna discuss it. If he says murder...

gets murdered, if a murderer gets murdered or slain,

capital punishment, that's fine with me.

Line them up and we'll clean up our nation overnight.

Start with the abortionists.

Might as well get rid of a few of those beasts."

"I'm so sick of them!

I'm so sick of the brainwashing about Islam and Muslims and the Qur'an.

Shove it!. Shove it all! I'm sick of it.

Take the music off.

These throwbacks think they're better than you, underneath it all,

and 90% of them are on welfare.

Speak it out at the supermarket!

Tell them what you think of Islam, tell them what you think of Muslims."

"We are talking about the illegal immigration.

So, now in addition to venereal disease,
and the other leading exports of Mexico:

women with mustaches and VD,
So, now in addition to venereal disease,
and the other leading exports of Mexico:

women with mustaches and VD,

now we have swine flu.

And when you scoop up some of the world's

lowest of primitives, in poor Mexico,

and drop tit down in the middle of the US,

poor, without skills, without language,

not share our culture, not share our hygiene, haven't been vaccinated,

look at all things we take for granted.

It's millions of leeches from a primitive country,

come here to leech off you."

"I don't know what happened tonight and I don't know why."

"Also, the gay agenda and Harry Potter."

"Professors. The 101 most dangerous academics

in America and that's just a short list of the 30-40 thousand of them.

They're like termites that have worked into the woodwork of our academic society.

It's just... It's appalling!"

Scapegoating.

The hope is that by deflecting

the anger of people which might be directed against the system itself,

deflecting the anger against these other people,

the system would save itself.

In the South the black people became scapegoats.

And you directed the anger of white people,

poor white people in the South were the people who joined the Ku Klux Klan.

These poor white people might have rebelled against the governments of the South

and against the National Government, but no.

They were told that black people were the source of their problem.

They entered the facility, heavily armed,
immediately started shooting everybody.

It was a local man dressed in battle fatigues, who declared:

"I have killed a 1000, I'm gonna kill a 1000 more.

41 year old James Huberty reportedly walked into the restaurant carrying a semi-automatic rifle

and two other weapons, enough ammunition to last two hours.

Witnesses inside said he fired wildly into the
unsuspecting crowd, gathered for a quick evening meal.

He fired through windows, hitting people in the street.

He fired at men, women, children and babies.

Bullets fly, leaving a local family scared to be in their own home.

Tonight, investigators say, hate was driving the man who pulled the trigger.

Deputies say last month someone opened fire on the Heshams because they are Muslim.

I need to know who hate us that much.

Who wants us to die?

Authorities in California are urging Jewish schools and temples

to stay alert, following a shooting at a synagogue in LA.

The attack happened in the same area of Bushwick,

where another Hispanic immigrant was killed.

Vara left a food pantry here at his church in lower Manhattan, carrying his groceries.

He biked across the Williamsburg Bridge and into Bushwhick,

where police say he was allegedly struck in the head,

then thrown off his bike, as three black males yelled anti-Mexican slurs.

On the left-hand side of your screen you can see the two attackers shove and punch Jack Price,

the openly gay victim, now in a medically induced coma.
On the left-hand side of your screen you can see the two attackers shove and punch Jack Price,

the openly gay victim, now in a medically induced coma.

The attack accelerates with both suspects flailing their arms at the helpless 49 year old.

There was utter pandemonium outside the University building, as ambulances carted away the injured.

Police have now confirmed 14 students dead, all women.

Another dozen people were hurt, caught in a rampage that witnesses called a human hunt,

with the gunman yelling: "I want women!"

There's an interesting perspective that comes out of many studies in psychiatric anthropology,

which suggests that mental illness is not just a standardized

unvarying thing, like diabetes for example.

Diabetes is always the same wherever you are in the world,

but mental illness seems to take different forms.

Once a person takes leave of reality,

once a person abandons the ship of fools,

the form that the psychosis takes is often dictated, or at least, shaped by the dominant culture.

Thus, for example, in a traditional Ojibwe society, where

there was a belief that once a person went insane,

this is the Wendigo psychosis,

that he or she might eat human flesh.

And thus, a proportion of people who,
feeling that they have left reality,

no longer feel in control, begin to act out

the particular form of psychosis, that their culture is aware of.

Multiple murderers tend to differ from conventional single murderers.

The ordinary murderer is very uniform everywhere in the industrial world.

He is very much a bottom of the working class figure,

he is addicted to drugs or alcohol, he has
no education or professional qualifications.

This is the sort of person who, in a fit of rage, kills a friend or a lover.

The multiple murders are a little different.

They tend to be more edging towards the middle class,

in their origins and in their aspirations.

And a part of their agenda, of their motivation, is that

they devoutly wish to join a higher class, but come to feel excluded.

In the case of James Huberty, the mass murderer who

killed more than a dozen people in that long siege at the McDonald's in San Diego,

Huberty used to stare from his apartment

across the street at McDonalds that was filled with

Mexican immigrants, who were seizing control of

this fundamental institution - he thought - of American society,

who are able to go there and afford to eat when he couldn't.

I try to argue in a succession of books, that

these kinds of killers, while their acts are deranged and insane,

they themselves are not necessarily so.

Rather, they are alienated individuals who wish to

end their life in a way that allows them to release their grudge

against society for their perceived exclusions.

Multiple killers may be statistically rare,

but I've tried to argue that they represent central cultural themes.

They embody many of the main ideas in their culture.

Not only the glorification of violence, and manly vengeance,

but worldly success and worldly ambition,

which they feel they've been foiled in.

So they're a prime embodiment of their civilization,

not a twisted derangement of it.

I've also tried to argue that this fundamentally rebellious, rather than revolutionary casts (?) to what they're doing,

these ghastly killings they perpetrate,

are relatively ignored by

government institutions charged of regulating society.

They typically pay much more attention to

political, real political dangers,

and spend much less time and energy and money

monitoring this small group of killers.

I don't believe, personally, that the answer to psychopathy is to be found in brain altering chemicals,

to change the nature of our society in that artificial way.

I think what we ought to start doing is, teaching people about

the dignity and value and the sacredness of human life,

and teaching people how to behave towards one another.

The important thing to understand, however, is while it's interesting to look

into the nature of modern society, and
see its fissures and fractures and stresses

through multiple murderers, it should not be
considered that these are the primary killers.

Governments and politicians are the main killers.

Indeed, some scholars have argued that the state's primary function is as mass murderer,

to wage war on other states, that was how they developed,

that's the social impetus

for the development of the modern state.

So, it's kind of disturbing, we don't think of the state in that way, but that's what it is.

Hitler and Stalin between them killed something like

a 100, more than a 100 million peoples,

many of them their own peoples.

This small-time personal personalized vengeance of a

few serial killers and mass killers,

comes to nothing compared to them.

The real killers are governments.

Nowhere is frustration-aggression more apparent

than in modern day military training.

In her study of Japanese atrocities in China,

Iris Chang observed that Japanese troops were subjected to particularly severe abuse prior to their deployment.

They were repeatedly slapped for no reason,

humiliated in front of their peers,

and reduced to a state of impotent rage.

It was generally at this point,
that they would be given a bayonet

and instructed to attack the enemy,

who was portrayed as a subhuman animal.

In America, the same techniques would be adopted,

with the emphasis less on physical abuse than verbal.

- You respond with "Aye aye sir" do you understand?
- Yes sir!

- Get off my bus right now.
- Aye aye sir.

[unintelligible]

They're scared. It's pretty much what we're down to.

You have a recruit that has no idea what the Marine Corps is about.

It's that initial shock treatment to let them know

that this isn't a summer camp, this isn't where people are coming to

have a good time, that we got a real job down here and that's making US marines.

My family was poor, I mean, we used to live on dirt roads,

and we used to wear sandals most of the time.

I mean, we were humble, you know,

we probably washed our same clothes two-three times a week,

because that's basically pretty much what we had.

I wanted people to see that, you know:

"This is where I come from, and look at me now, I'm a marine."

I come from the poor side of town, you know, so,

anybody else can make it as well.
I come from the poor side of town, you know, so,

anybody else can make it as well.

You know, some type of motivation for my little brothers and my little cousins,

something they can look forward to.

Frustration-aggression is one of the most effective ways of managing a population.

By directing a person's rage against selected minorities, or outside enemies,

the true cause of an individual's frustration can be effectively diverted.

Yet in many ways, the theory is a symptom of something deeper.

In order to engender real hatred against a particular group,

that group must first be feared.

And it is in the realm of fear that Behaviorism made its most disturbing contribution.

Hobart Mowrer, he would be called a neo-behaviorist,

and he trained at the Yale Institute of Human Behavior.

He was quite unusual.

I think his background was unusual and he was also an unusually perceptive and sensitive man.

And one of the first and most significant experiments

he did was called "preparatory set",

in which he had a human being lie down,

- usually, it was a student -

lie down and be attached to electrodes,

that would deliver a shock whenever a light went on.

And then, so he would shine the light and the shock the student.

And at that point several people elected to discontinue the experiment,

but those who persisted, he would then vary the experiment by

showing the light and then not shocking them,
or showing the light and shocking them.

He would, sort of, make it unpredictable.

And he discovered that people's state of anxiety and fear

actually increased when the shock didn't come,

when the were just waiting for a shock to come or when they didn't know if the shock would ever come,

and he said that actually created an atmosphere of pervasive fear and anxiety,

and he even called it dread or terror.

We have to remind ourselves that we are facing an enemy

that is planning all over this world

and, it turns out, planning inside our country

to come here and kill us.

He said that that atmosphere could be ratcheted up progressively,

the more the experiment continued,
and the more unpredictable the shocks were.

So that after a while, when the shock came,

the pain actually was experienced as a relief and almost pleasure by the subject.

He called it a nervous breakdown, or what he described

in another part of the article as
"The ultimate demoralization of behavior."

What he extracted from this experiment was the idea that there was

such a thing as a coercive stimulus, that could actually

be used to create an environment of dread or terror or anxiety,

from a low to a high level, and that the scientists could actually

it was almost as if they are turning the volume on a stereo,

they could decide how much of that atmosphere, how intense they would like it to be.

Needless to say, a creature in a highly fearful environment

would be eager to escape to a new environment.

This includes human beings.

Mowrer suggested that new behavior patterns
could be quickly created through his techniques.

The prospect of creating new behavior patterns

quickly and efficiently became an obsession during the Cold War,

when the CIA assumed dominance in
the field of mind control experimentation.

During the Cold War, the National Security state

would take the logic of power to its logical conclusion.

Known under the umbrella name MK Ultra,

mind control experimentation by the CIA

would abandon any pretense to morality,

leading to a nightmarish search for the holy grail of Social Engineering:

a fully controlled, fully obedient human being.

Coming up, on Secrets of the Dead,

as World War II winds down, the Allies race

to capture the Hitler's best scientists and technology.

The Black Book had names, targets, places, people.

The most important were the scientists, the German scientists.

Searching for rockets, planes, nuclear bombs, and the masterminds behind them,

each side wants the advantage for the looming Cold War.

The hunt for Nazi scientists, next on Secrets of the Dead.

The majority of media, on the subject of Project Paperclip,

has centered on German rocket scientists recruited by the US,

to prevent the Soviet Union from establishing military supremacy.
has centered on German rocket scientists recruited by the US,

to prevent the Soviet Union from establishing military supremacy.

Hollywood has dealt with the topic in much the same way,

often adding humor to the equation.

I, for one, do not intend to go to sleep

by light of a communist moon.

Now we would be in full control of this pod.

It will go up like a cannonball,

and come down like a cannonball,

splashing down into the water of the ocean, with a parachute

to spare the life of the specimen inside.

-Spaceman.
-Specimen.

Well, what kind of specimen?

A tough one.

Responsive to orders.

-I had in mind a chimp.
-Jimp?!

Well what the hell is a jimp?

Jimp- Chimpanzee, senator. An ape.

The first American in the space in not going to be a chimpanzee.

Seldom discussed with equal candor,

is the recruitment of Nazi scientists who specialized in human experimentation.

Among them, were Kurt Blome

who tested sarin nerve gas on prisoners at Auschwitz,

and Hermann Becker-Freyseng,

who conducted fatal experiments at Dachau.

The American people got hold of X number of German scientists,

but they immediately ran into a problem.

Many of these scientists were classified as war criminals,

because of their activities during the war,

and therefore were not eligible for State Department visas, and could not be brought into the US.

So, what the CIA did was create

several of these different programs, including Paperclip,

and their purpose was to:

1) recruit these scientists, and then
2) bring them into the US,

while routing them around the State Department visa requirements.

A well known doctor who came in under Paperclip,

was Dr. Albertus [Hubertus] Strughold,

who did experiments during the Second World War,

that were full-Nazi-atrocity type experiments.

For instance, they were interested in the effects of high altitude

on human beings, so they've built a special chamber.

They would put a gypsy, or homosexual, or

a Jew, or whoever it might be into the chamber

and suddenly drop the pressure down to the equivalent of 60000 feet [18km].

This, obviously, was excruciating and caused the person to die.

And then they would take the guy out of the chamber,

dunk his head underwater,

and cut his skull open underwater to see if there was air bubbles coming out of the arteries in his brain.

It's a... Yeah, they did dozens and dozens of experiments of this kind.

So this guy was brought over under Paperclip,

became the father of Aviation Medicine in the US,

worked at an Air Force base in San Antonio,
amongst other locations,

has a library named after him,

at one of the Air Force bases in San Antonio,

and the Texas State Legislature declared an Albertus Strughold Day, in honor of him,

back in the 70s.

Whether Nazi scientists participated in experiments on Americans

after the recruitment by American Intelligence, remains unknown.

What is known, is that such experiments became a matter of routine.

Some of the studies were relatively harmless, if unethical.

In 1966 the US Army Special Operations Division

dispensed a non-toxic bacillus

to the New York City subway system,

by way of cracked light bulbs.

It was in this environment that US mind control experimentation came into being.

At the end of the War, the OSS was disbanded,

and the same personnel, really, came together and formed the CIA in 1947.

And the first documented CIA mind control programs are Bluebird and Artichoke.

Bluebird was signed into operation by
the director of the CIA in April of 1950,

which is three months before the start of the Korean War.

So, all claims that CIA and US

interest in mind control was purely reactive, purely defensive,

and only in reaction to what the communist Chinese were doing to downed pilots

during the Korean War:

All of that is not true, disinformation, clearly disproven by the documents.

Artichoke and Bluebird started in 1950

and ran into the mid 50s, and kind of overlapped with, and were rolled into MKULTRA

which ran till 1963.

MKULTRA, in turn, was rolled over into
MKSEARCH which ran till the early 70s.

And in the 50s, 60s, there was a variety of other programs:

MKNAOMI, MKDELTA, QKHILLTOP, Project Dolphin.

So there was a whole set of these projects, and

the documentation basically stops in 1973.

All programs since then are still classified.

Of particular interest, where Nazi research papers by Dr. Kurt Plötner,

from Dachau concentration camp.

Plötner had found that prisoners, when given high doses of mescaline,

openly expressed hatred of their captors, while also

exhibiting an increased willingness to speak frankly about their own lives.

The dream of MKULTRA

was to come up with drugs, that on the one hand,

would be, sort of, an ultimate truth serum:

that you could give it to a person and they would tell you the truth about anything that you wanted to hear.

And then, on the other hand, there would also be

some way to wipe a person's mind clean.

Heading up the CIA's psycho-chemical experiments would be Sidney Gottlieb.

In 1960, when the Agency plotted the assassination of Patrice Lumumba,

leftist president of the Kongo, it was Gotllieb

who personally carried the poison to the agency's Chief of Station via diplomatic pouch.

A 1953 memo from Gotllieb states that:

MKULTRA Subproject 6, is designed to develop

a reliable source of LSD within the US.

The problem of supply was solved in October, 1954

when Eli Lilly and Company, now known for manufacturing Prozac,

succeeded in synthesizing LSD.

"This pill could solve all of your problems.

It's called Prozac and it may mean the end of depression as we know it."

A special memorandum was rushed to CIA director Alan Dulles on October 26th.

And an unlimited supply of the drug

was now available to be purchased by

and in some cases, used against the American taxpayer.

As with the behaviorists, they started with animals.

Here we see millions of years of evolution turned upside down, when a cat is given LSD.

Soldiers came next.

I feel incapacitated.

One of the first major studies, was conducted at the Edgewood chemical facility in Maryland,

where approximately 7000 US soldiers served as unwitting guinea pigs.

They were given drugs such as LSD, mescaline, BZ, and PCP,

then instructed to perform various tasks.

Looking back at early behaviorist experiments, the analogies were obvious.

Under the CIA and the Pentagon, what was good enough for rats,

was good enough for the US Armed Forces.

More than 1000 of the soldiers emerged with mental health problems.

Some attempted suicide.

No compensation was offered.

In a later experiment, and with the full approval of the National Institute of Health,

Gotllieb arranged funding for a project at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington.

Heroin addicts, mainly young black men,

were kept on LSD for an incredible 77 days,

a feat described by the Center's director, Harris Isbell,

as:

But, they would not stop there.

Segment 3 this evening is titled "The children and the CIA"

We've learned a lot of unknown activities of the CIA in years past,

some of them disturbing, to say the least;

tonight, we'll of the Agency's interest in children.

Paul Altmeyer, of our investigating unit has assembled these facts:

These are home movies taken in the 1950s at the European Camp of the children's International Summer Village,

a program designed to bring together children from around the world

for a better understanding of one another.

NBC News has learned that the CIA was studying these youngsters,

some as young as 11, as possible future recruits.

The studies took place at summer camps in Hønefoss, Norway, and Vienna, Austria,

in 1959 and 1960.

According to CIA documents we have examined,

this was Subproject 103 of the Agency's top secret MKULTRA program.

San Antonio, Texas.

NBC News has also learned that CIA payed for a study of adolescence here,

and in two other Texas cities, Austin and El Paso, in 1958 and 1959.

It was a study of how youngsters behave without adult supervision.

This study, MKULTRA Subproject 102 refers to data being collected on 462 subjects

in 7 secondary schools.
No child is identified by name.

One of the most revered child psychiatrists in the

entire 20th century of American psychiatry

was Dr. Lauretta Bender.

She had a full page obituary in the American Journal of Psychiatry

and that only happens occasionally.

You have to be really a high ranking person to have a full page obituary.

And she is famous for the Bender-Gestalt test,
which is a widely used psychological test.

So, not everybody in the mental health field knows exactly who she is,

but all psychology graduate students have heard of the Bender-Gestalt.

And she was a child psychiatrist, charged with the care of treatment of children,

and she operated at Creedmoor State Hospital in New York in the 60s.

Her funding source is not stated in her papers.

So where she got the LSD from, and whether she was directly

funded by the military and the CIA, was not documented.

But she attended many CIA-sponsored LSD symposiums.

Talked with, was on panels with, interacted with most of the leading CIA and military LSD contractors.

So, I would say it's unbelievable that she didn't know that all of this was basically run by the CIA and the military.

And what she did, again, is not

the mad scientist hidden in a basement somewhere.

These are papers in leading psychiatry journals,

where she, as the author, describes

children as young as five getting LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, other hallucinogens,

in street level type doses, for days,

weeks, months and in some cases years at a time.

Under the rationale that somehow this is going to be helpful treatment.

Again, no real follow up, how many of these kids went psychotic,

how did it affect their chromosomes, what was with their mental health from there on.

So this is the kind of experimentation that you would think would be

impossible or would never happen,
somebody who'd claim that would just be

in need of treatment themselves.

But not only is it documented, it was published in the literature

and nobody seemed to be upset,

nobody complained to the American Psychiatry Association, nobody reported her to anybody,

It was just business as usual.

The use of children in barbaric mind control experiments

shows an evolution from the early behaviorists to the CIA mind doctors.

Once the doctrine of National Security had been invoked,

ethical considerations received little or no attention.

Almost anything could be justified, by claiming that communists might be engaged in similar activities.

You've got to be able to take this.

Your body's got to be able to take it.

Because service means new physical demands on strength and endurance.

During the Korean War in 1953,

during the cessation of the war,

American soldiers were returned home,
who had been prisoners of war in China,

they started exhibiting very strange behavior.

On the boat, near the shore, they were not very happy to come home.

Even the sight of their mothers' outstretched arms
seemingly failed to move them.

They were, sort of, stone faced.
Even the sight of their mothers' outstretched arms
seemingly failed to move them.

They were, sort of, stone faced.

They would start spouting communist propaganda, some of them had

seem to be converted to communism, and even 21

Air Force personnel had been persuaded to stay in Korea, and

you know, start families there.

My name is Harold Webb, from [?], East Florida.

My name is Aaron Wilson, from [?], Louisiana.

This is a very happy moment for me and I'm free.

In smaller, or large ways they had collaborated, or cooperated,

or allowed themselves to be coerced by the enemy.

Many sociologists and psychiatrists and psychologists who

both worked for the army, or worked for institutions

like universities, were brought together in teams to study why this was happening,

and one of the people who headed one of the teams was named Louis Jolyon West,

and he was a talented American psychiatrist who was working for the Army,

and he headed a team that studied

the returned soldiers from the, what was called Operation Little Switch.

And these soldiers were displaying some of that behavior.

So they were trying to figure out what exactly had happened.

They concluded that it was nothing that this...
If it was brainwashing, it was not

the typical kind of, notion of what people think brainwashing is,

which is some magical hocus-pocus, where the person loses their mind,

like changing the software on a computer:

One day they are good old-fashioned Americans

and the next day they are these, kind of, rabid communists;
One day they are good old-fashioned Americans

and the next day they are these, kind of, rabid communists;

but instead, they were describing a process that much more resembled

slow, steady, classical behavioral conditioning.

So, they came up with the words DDD for:
Debility, Dependency, and Dread.

Debility was basically that they have been put in a situation where their

wounds weren't treated, and their health was low

and they weren't fed very well, so they kind of developed a chronic debility,

and some times they developed

a condition that other soldiers called give-up-itis where they would just simply

lie down and refuse to take food and water and just die.

And the second was dependency, that they were

these soldiers were made to be extremely dependent on their captors

for any kind of reward, or any kind of, even anything resembling a small comfort,

or luxury, or even just food to keep them alive.

They were dependent on their captors, so
that created, in a way, a kind of intimate bond.

And then the third D was for dread, which was an atmosphere

of fear and terror and constant unpredictability,

where the prisoner would never be sure what was going to happen next.
of fear and terror and constant unpredictability,

where the prisoner would never be sure what was going to happen next.

You know, they could be kept awake for 48 hours, or a week;

they could given a drug, or not;

they could be given food or not,
they never knew when that would be coming,

and they never knew if their captors would be treating them decently or not,

so there was an atmosphere of this kind of extreme unpredictability.

And all of that together was what they called DDD,

which they were said could basically be explained through behavioral principles.

What it resulted in was a dismantling of the self, or a demoralization of.

You know, to go back to Mowrer's idea: the ultimate demoralization of behavior.

While the purpose of the study was to find out about communist brainwashing techniques,

CIA documents show that the Agency was interested in developing mind control methods of its own.

"Jolly" West would eventually achieve celebrity status in conspiracy culture,

for becoming the first, and one can only hope,

the last man to kill an elephant by way of LSD.

The elephant's name was Tusko.

He resided at the Oklahoma City's zoo and died

after a cartridge containing 3000 times the accepted human dose of LSD

was fired into his rump.

West also served as a defense witness in the trial of Patty Hearst,

who was kidnapped by the self proclaimed Symbionese Liberation Army,

and brainwashed into robbing banks.

There's some feeling among experts, and particularly her family,

that Patricia Hearst was brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

One thing cited to substantiate that, is that two known SLA members

including the slain leader Donald DeFreeze,

were inmates of the California prison where sophisticated methods

of mind control are practiced on some prisoners.

And drugs are a vital part of therapy here.

Everything from sleeping pills to Prolixin,

a heavy tranquilizer used to control schizophrenics.

What concerns the critics of prison therapy however,

is the danger that the tools of modern psychiatry

can also be applied to a captive prison population for convenience, instead of treatment.

Not to make sick inmates better,
but simply to make them behave.

In his 1973 state of the State message,

then governor of California, Ronald Reagan

announced plans for the establishment of a biomedical facility at Vacaville.

It would be called

"The Center for the Study of the Reduction of Violence",

and would use techniques pioneered by Jose Delgado.

Delgado had gained worldwide fame for stopping a charging bull in its tracks,

by using a gadget he called a stimoceiver,

a remote control device that triggered electric impulses in the animal's brain.

Neurophysicist, Dr. Jose Delgado was financed by the Office of Naval Research.

Where you sure that that bull was gonna stop as it approached you,

when you pushed the right button?
Where you sure that that bull was gonna stop as it approached you,

when you pushed the right button?

-A scientist always should have faith in science.

I have faith in science.

Recently released CIA documents refer to the feasibility of remote control of animals,

and that special investigations will be conducted toward the application

of selected elements of these techniques to man.

In Delgado's papers,

he is basically implanting electrodes in the brains of human beings and experimental animals.

In one of these papers he refers to the animals as "Mechanical Toys".

In the Harvard team there's pictures of a 16 year old girl.

In one picture she is staring off into nowhere, with a bland empty expression on her face.

In another picture she is strumming on a guitar,

in another picture she is fiercely pounding on the wall,

all totally controlled by which button is pushed in the neurotransmitter box.

When you open somebody's brain like this and you put an electrode in

and you keep it in for a long period of time,

you are exposing that person to risk of
brain infections, meningitis, seizures and death.

For prison officials at Vacaville,

the idea of controlling inmates through remote control was a tempting prospect.

And drafting the outlines of the new program was none other than "Jolly" West.

West proposal recommended psychosurgery as a tool for controlling prison populations and crime.

Remarkably, he also recommended using schools in Chicano and African-American neighborhoods,

to screen for possible "genetic defects".

The project was terminated,

but only after public outrage forced officials to backtrack.

West's research would lead to new dreams

of what he called the "Psychophysiology of conditioning".

West noticed that DDD bore an interesting resemblance to post-lobotomy syndrome,

as well as altered states of consciousness produced by certain drugs,

hypnosis, and mental diseases like schizophrenia.

In all of these cases the notion of self, of free will,

is displaced by something more obscure.

In West's words:

"The patient loses all recollection of the fact that he formally possessed

a space-time image, which served to explain the events of the day to him."

With these ideas in mind, large funds were poured into the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal,

headed by Scottish-born psychiatrist Ewen Cameron.

A future president of the World Psychiatric Association,

Cameron set out to actualize the new vision of total control.

He would create real life blank slates out of his patients,

by wiping their minds clean, and
destroying their very notions of self.

From there, new behavior patterns could conceivably be built upon the wreckage of their former identities.

The Allan Memorial Institute, at the time was

probably the leading academic center of psychiatry in Canada;

attached to McGill University, and the chairman of McGill University,

- this is, we're in the 50s, into the 60s now -

was Dr. Ewen Cameron, originally born in Scotland,

immigrated to Canada.

He had money from the CIA, under MKULTRA, to do two basic things.

A kind of brainwashing in which he would

for many months in a row, administer massive, massive amounts of electric shock to a person.

Linda McDonald, she got over a 100 electroshock treatments

in a period of 4-5 months.

Each time, the button was pushed six times instead of once.

So, the electricity delivered to her brain was over 600 normal electroshock treatments.

Also, people would get prolonged sleep

induced by barbiturates, tranquilizers, anti-psychotics and so on.

So this is the "Depatterning".

And what would happen from this massive shock and drug induced kind of sleep,

is what happened to Linda McDonald.

She went into the hospital in the spring,

slightly depressed, otherwise perfectly normal functioning, intact person with five kids.

By August, she was incontinent of urine and feces,

unable to feed herself, didn't know her name, didn't know where she was,

didn't know what year it was, didn't recognize her husband,

and didn't recognize her children.

So it's a complete wiping clean of the brain.

They shipped me up to what they called a sleep room,

and they gave me all of these electric

convulsive shock treatments and mega doses of drugs,

and LSD and all of that,

and I have no memory of any of that,

nothing of that time in the Allan Memorial or any of my life previous to that.

All gone. Wiped.

When she was released, she had to very laboriously learn how to play guitar,

how to boil an egg,

how to keep track of her kids.

And this was the purpose of the experimentation.

Obviously, the CIA was interested in this only for one purpose, which is

if they had somebody and they wanted to wipe out their memories,

would this method work?

Then Ewen Cameron proved that it could.

Building up the new identity was called "Psychic Driving",

and one of the techniques was: they played either in Ewen Cameron's voice

one of other doctors' voices, or in the person's own voice,

they played these tape loops literally tens of thousands of times,

over and over and over and over,

delivering whatever message was they wanted the person to believe.

What happened?

Oh, God Dammit!

Take it off

I got it. I got it!
I got it. I got it!

Take it off, take it off!

In love with you...

One of the disinformation cover stories about all of this is,

well, first of all - it never happened,
but then, when it comes

to light and there's lawsuits and publicity,

then the next level of cover story is:

"Well that was back then, that was a different time,

different standard applied, we wouldn't do that today."

But actually, in fact, all the ethical standards of 2010

applied absolutely at the end of the Second World War,

and applied back in ancient Rome and Greece.

They were clearly unethical, immoral, destructive, unprofessional,

harmful to the brains and to the lives of the subjects.

In some of the experiments - not the ones at McGill, but other ones -

as reported by the doctors in papers in psychiatric journals,

in some of the experiments people died.

In other experiments they went psychotic,

they were then treated with shock therapy.

So, long lasting psychotic reactions,

worsening of symptoms, creation of new symptoms, and in some cases death,

are described by the doctors in their own papers, where they are discussing the research.

During the Cold War, and this is up until the early 70s when

the documentation stops and everything is classified,

there was extensive, systematic, pervasive, structured contracting

by the leading figures of psychiatry and the leading medical schools

with the CIA at the top secret clearance level.

The typical universities on the list would include:

Cornell, Harvard, Yale, Tulane, UCLA,

University of Minnesota, Denver University, and so on.

So, it was not just some mad scientist in a basement somewhere.

Therapeutically speaking, the experiments of the MKULTRA psychiatrists were a complete failure.

Yet, they were useful in at least one respect.

The manual is called Kubark.

Dated 1963, it is a how-to guide compound by the CIA for interrogating suspects.

In other words, a torture manual.

Referring explicitly to early behaviorist experiments,

as well as Cameron studies at McGill,

it describes a phenomenon, where by the deprivation of stimuli,

induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact with an outer world,

and thus forcing it upon itself.

Rather than red hot pincers, iron maidens and racks,

the tools of choice would become the stress position, sensory deprivation and electroshock.

The manuals that they wrote, which were based on the earlier behavioral experiments,

were directly adapted during the War on Terror.

What happened was, during the

70s and 80s, these manuals had spread

in Latin America and other places for use in counter insurgency movements.

These techniques had never really gone out of favor.

So if you look at Guantanamo Bay, as of

you know, five years into the War there had been 10 to 20 thousand

interrogations that took place there. So it's,

you know, you hear about the extreme interrogations,

but what was really going on was a kind of routinization of the process of

interrogating people and creating these environments in which they never knew

if it was day or night, if it was gonna be cold or hot,

if they would be subjected to loud music or terrible...

babies crying, or Sesame Street, or... that was a completely unpredictable environment,

that created an atmosphere of Debility, Dread, and Dependency,

That also is linked to the importing of people called

"behavioral science consultants" or "biscuits",

who were often anthropologists or psychologists, who would

come, and kind of oversee and monitor these interrogations.

Many decades later, the US Government's mind control projects pertain an aura of mystery.

Former CIA director, Richard Helms, claims to have shredded most of the remaining documentation.

Yet, Miles Copeland, a former CIA officer, claims:

of the US Government's attempt to control the human mind.

Whatever the case, exotic mind control techniques would not be required

for the ultimate goal of controlling the opinions and behavior of the American public.

The answer would come in the form of a small flickering box.

The behaviorist Ivan Pavlov was the first scientist to explain why moving images

are so attractive to human beings.

We instinctively react to any sudden or novel visual stimuli,

because of our biological orienting system.

In evolutionary terms, this was

and is necessary both for exploration of our environment,

and for defense against potential predators.

Television not only entertains the mind, it relaxes the body.

This has been confirmed by EEG readings of viewers' brainwaves

as they watched television programs and advertising.

In the hands of skilled media professionals,m

moving images create an effect roughly akin to hypnosis,

producing passivity, a lowered level of alertness and increased suggestibility.

...but some will get through to your home...

During the Cold War and beyond,

television programming would increasingly resemble an experiment in fear-based conditioning,

applied on a global scale.

The thesis of John B. Watson that fear,

not love, is the guiding force in human society,

would no longer be confined to the realm of theory.

It would become our reality.

He was always right.

??? I remember, uh...

The first year you were constantly telling me, when I tell you how the experiment should go,

you were saying: "Now, now, wait. Let the pigeon tell you."

That's right. The pigeon did tell us, because there's a... that's why I started to really...

our behavior is showed by the pigeons, much more than vice versa.

Pigeons taught us much more than we ever taught them.