The Age of Idiocy

(You can apply this column's topic to austerity measures currently being planned and implemented by the govt, too.--jef)

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We Can't Think Anymore; We Can Only Count
By M. G. PIETY

The eighteenth century is known as "the age of reason." I was going through our magazines, trying to clear them out, when I ran across an article in the Dec. 11 issue of The Economist that made me fear the late twentieth and early twenty-first century will be known as the age of idiocy. "A growing body of research," writes the author of Hunkier than Thou, "suggests" that women's "preference for certain types of male physiognomy may be swayed by things beyond their conscious control." No, really? Women can't control whom they are attracted to?

Are you fucking kidding me! People are getting money to do this sort of "research"!

It's not just one cognitively challenged, or intellectually dishonest moron, whose conned someone into giving him (or her) money for this inane "research"; there's apparently a whole "body" of such "research." Who is doing this research, I want to know. Is it extraterrestrials? Because we earthlings have known for millennia that we can't control our attractions.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the inability of people to control to whom they are attracted one of the most obvious fact about homo sapiens? Is it not the most popular subject of the world's great literature, from The Iliad to The Awakening, with, I hazard a guess, 75% of everything in between. Who could not know this obvious and sad fact of human nature. If we had conscious control over whom we were attracted to, then people would always marry absolutely the right person and infidelity and divorce would be unheard of.

Is this not the single most idiotic subject of a scientific study you have ever heard of? The intellectual progress of humanity, of which we have been so pietyproud in the last couple of centuries, has suffered a serious setback if we are suddenly doing "research" to establish the truth of things that have been obvious to most of humanity throughout its long history. OK, Homer didn't do an empirical study. Empirical studies should be something of a last resort, however, in our attempts to understand human nature and human society. You don't do them to tell you stuff you already know. You do them to tell you things you don't already know. Ah, but there's the rub: We've become so infatuated with empirical studies and the statistics they generate, that we've sort of erased the accumulated wisdom of human history and decided that it's time to reinvent the wheel.

Nowadays, we're disinclined to believe anything that doesn't have a study to back it up, apparently forgetting (what most of us knew not so long ago) that you can get a study to support any conclusion you want, so long as you are sufficiently careful in the crafting of your questions. An empirical study, is, as a means of gaining information, the crudest sort of imitation of the awesome mechanism of a run of the mill inductive inference. Let me draw an analogy here to make it a little clearer. The empirical study is to a human brain functioning properly like instant coffee is to real coffee: a pale, sad imitation which no person in his right mind would prefer to the original but would accept only if the original were, for some reason, unobtainable.

Let me give you a few examples of what is problematic about empirical studies. I remember hearing a few years ago that studies showed wine was better for you than beer because people who drank wine tended to be healthier than people who drank beer. Later, someone who still remembered how to think pointed out that people who drank wine tended to have more money than people who drank beer, and that they tended to have better health care and exercise more and to have a healthier diet – and all of that might have something to do with why they tended to be healthier.

Something similar happened with a study on breast cancer. The study found that women who had children when they were younger tended to have a lower incidence of breast cancer than women who waited to have children until they were older. Later, someone who still remembered how to think pointed out that the women who had children when they were younger tended to live in more rural, less developed, parts of the country and that women who waited to have children until they were older tended to live in more developed, urban and hence polluted areas -- and that it might be environmental toxins that explained the higher cancer rates.

The mind boggles at the specter of the hodgepodge of incoherent speculations we will be expected to accept as "facts" based on empirical studies alone. A study is nothing before it is interpreted, and the interpretation requires a brain relying on its own devices and not on other studies.

Our infatuation with empirical studies started, I believe, with formal logic as an attempt to understand the amazing reasoning power of the human brain. At some point, however, the whole thing went horribly wrong, and we began to believe that this lumbering, awkward process of arriving at conclusions was, in fact, superior to the real mechanisms of the organ it had originally been trying to model.

To be fair, my suspicion is that part of our infatuation with empirical research is an understandable and justifiable reaction to the elitism of the medieval scholastics, who could not have cared less what the data showed when they had "the philosopher" on their side. Empirical research is, after all, as much a child of the Enlightenment as is democracy. Still, anything, even a good thing, can be taken to a ridiculous extreme. We have free public education because some wise heads years ago were aware of the dangers inherent in letting ignorant and illiterate people vote. Are we not similarly aware of the dangers inherent in having ignorant and, apparently, illiterate, people crafting empirical studies?

Perhaps, after all, history is just a series of pendulum swings, back and forth, between overweening confidence in our inherent reasoning capacities and pathological skepticism concerning the truth or reality of anything we can't define ostensively. It looks to me like the project of the Enlightenment to wipe out intellectual elitism has turned into a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We meant to discredit a particular, deviant, exercise of "reason," but we were finally unable to control this new skepticism and ended with the reductio ad absurdum of discrediting reason itself.

We can't think anymore. We can only count.

April 13, 1953: CIA OKs MK-ULTRA Mind-Control Tests

April 13, 1953: CIA OKs MK-ULTRA Mind-Control Tests
By Kim Zetter
April 13, 2010

1953: Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles authorizes the MK-ULTRA project. The agency launches one of its most dubious covert programs ever, turning unsuspecting humans into guinea pigs for its research into mind-altering drugs.

More than a decade before psychologist Timothy Leary advocated the benefits of LSD and urged everyone to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” the CIA’s Technical Services Staff launched the highly classified project to study the mind-control effects of this and other psychedelic drugs, using unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as lab mice.

Dulles wanted to close the “brainwashing gap” that arose after the United States learned that American prisoners of war in Korea were subjected to mind-control techniques by their captors.

Loathe to be outdone by foreign enemies, the CIA sought, through its research, to devise a truth serum to enhance the interrogations of POWs and captured spies. The agency also wanted to develop techniques and drugs — such as “amnesia pills” — to create CIA superagents who would be immune to the mind-control efforts of adversaries.

MK-ULTRA even hoped to create a “Manchurian Candidate”, or programmable assassin, and devise a way to control the minds of pesky despots, like Fidel Castro — giving credence forevermore to claims by the tinfoil-hat contingent that the government is out to control our minds.

In addition to drugs, the program included more than a hundred sub-projects that involved radiological implants, hypnosis and subliminal persuasion, electroshock therapy and isolation techniques. (The MK in the project name referred to the Technical Services Division that oversaw the project, and ULTRA was a security classification applied to top-secret intelligence.)

More than 30 universities and institutions participated in CIA-funded research, though not all were aware the spy agency was their benefactor, because funding was sometimes laundered through shell organizations.

Under the guise of research, LSD, whose psychedelic properties were discovered by a Swiss chemist in 1943, was secretly administered to CIA employees, U.S. soldiers and psychiatric patients, as well as the general public.

One federal drug agent who worked as a “consultant” for the CIA for a project dubbed “Operation Midnight Climax” hired prostitutes to slip the drug to unsuspecting clients, then watched through two-way mirrors as the clients tripped out. He also reportedly slipped the drug to patrons at bars and restaurants.

The CIA ultimately concluded that the drug was too unpredictable for reliable research, but that was too late for Frank Olson.

Olson was a 43-year-old civilian germ-warfare researcher for the U.S. Army who was also a CIA employee and an unwitting recipient of CIA acid. During a 1953 meeting at a mountain retreat with MK-ULTRA head Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and other CIA employees, Olson and four other scientists drank a glass of Cointreau that had been secretly spiked with LSD.

They were told about the drug about 20 minutes after ingesting it. Olson apparently had a severe reaction and left the retreat in an agitated state and later threatened to resign.

The CIA claimed he suffered a sudden bout of extreme paranoia and depression and sent him to a psychiatrist in New York for consultation. He died in a “fall” from the 10th floor of his New York hotel room. A CIA employee who had accompanied him to New York reported that he awoke at 1:30 a.m. to see Olson hurl himself through the closed window.

Olson left a 38-year-old widow and three children under the age of 10. In the absence of other evidence, Olson’s family reluctantly accepted the CIA’s puzzling explanation that the scientist had been suddenly seized by a fatal depression.

When news of the CIA’s secret LSD program finally leaked out 20 years later, the family learned through a congressional inquiry that Olson had been slipped some of the hallucinogen days before his death. The CIA continued to insist that Olson had committed suicide, but at President Gerald Ford’s urging, the family was paid $750,000.

It wasn’t until the 1990s, when Olson’s son had his father’s body exhumed and examined, that he discovered that his father might have actually died from a blunt force trauma to the head, which may have been received prior to his fall from the window.

Olson wasn’t the only casualty of the CIA’s drug tests. A tennis pro who had gone to the New York Psychiatric Institute for depression following a divorce fell into a coma and died. He’d been administered a derivative of mescaline. There were other cases of suspect deaths and lives left in ruin.

The victim’s families might have sued to obtain records of the secret program, but CIA Director Richard Helms had ordered the MK-ULTRA project files destroyed in 1973.

The program was brought to light in 1975 through investigations by the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission that were established to investigate government surveillance operations in the wake of the Watergate wiretapping scandal and other domestic-spying revelations.

By then, the MK-ULTRA project had supposedly been closed. But this was by no means the end to misguided covert government programs, such as the remote-viewing project at SRI. Another, less-organized military project, inspired the story behind the recent film The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Dulles gave the go-ahead for MK-ULTRA, as it turns out, on the very day that Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, appeared. Coincidence? You decide.