Not gonna lie, I have spent the last month or two pretty heavily disassociating. I was feeling alright for about the first week of quarantine, and then depression hit like a ton of bricks. That certainly was not helped by me going through my very first breakup a couple of weeks ago, after a relationship that had lasted for three years and one month. It’s just me and my dad in the house, and really only the internet for company. About two weeks ago I just sort of sat in bed all day, thinking about how I wasn’t sure if the outside world was real, if anything outside of my room was real. This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that all the movies and TV shows I’d been watching were about the main character going slowly insane. Not good vibes. But I digress.
One of the more interesting books I read in the last year was “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” by Dan Piepenbring and Tom O’Neill. It starts out as looking into some of the inconsistencies in the police work and prosecution of the Manson family, but then spirals out into a much broader look at domestic intelligence operations. Particularly it focuses on CHAOS and MK ULTRA, the former being an effort by the CIA to discredit and sabotage leftist movements within the United States, and the latter being a series of classified experiments into things like mind control by the CIA.
One of the big takeaways from the book was what the actual findings of MK ULTRA were. Basically, it was that you could basically compel someone to do things that were counter to their ordinary moral code, but you couldn’t really make a Manchurian candidate. The process required you to psychologically break the person, and then reconstruct them in the way you wanted. For MK ULTRA, this entailed quite a lot of LSD. The Scientific American Article “How to Instill False Memories” sort of shows how this would happen in a simplified, less dramatic form.
Considering the MK ULTRA documents hadn’t been leaked at the time, “Total Recall”, or “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” as the original short story was called, was awfully prescient. Both have shadowy organizations implanting memories to try and get someone to work as an assassin.
It probably did influence the writing of “A Scanner Darkly” which was being written at basically the same time as the original MK ULTRA documents were being released. Philip K Dick also did a lot of LSD at the time, so he probably felt some resonance with the news.
I got less introspective on this writing than I thought I’d get. It’s 4:30 in the morning as I write this, and mostly I just wanted to point out how a thing I had read was similar to things I had read and seen for this class. CIA is bad, shadowy fictional organizations are bad, I should probably go to sleep now.
Aidan Tamke Cyberpunk Class 