General Interest > Feed Your Head
What Are You Looking At?
Anonymous:
.
Xelebes:
--- Quote from: "ajax13" ---
--- Quote from: "Xelebes" ---The experiments may have stopped in the mid 60s, but the programs started popping up then. I think they were done experimenting by then and were just barging ahead with it, if that makes sense.
--- End quote ---
The "programs" had been popping up since the First World War. The subject population changed. Soldiers were suitable subjects, as they were already experiencing behavior modification and deference to institutional hierarchy. Prisoners were great too, for the same reasons. Adolescents proved to be the ideal subjects as the procedures could be sold as life-saving, society-preserving money-makers.
Could you please present some evidence that the experimenting stopped in the mid-sixties? Lexington Farm had certainly not ceased experimental procedures by the mid-sixties. Do you suppose that the professional interrogators at Camp X-Ray, Abu Grahib and every black site from Poland to Turkmenistan pulled out some mouldy Kubark manual, printed up in 1963 for use in South-east Asia?
--- End quote ---
If you want to reach very far back, you can find yourself in the 1840s at the start of the Temperance Movement.
Xelebes:
Which brings up a good point: what caused the whole temperance movement? Most articles will say that it was a revulsion against the increasing instances of alcohol abuse in Britain and the Continent and the increasing presence of it in the urbanisation of the countries. Is it possible to surmise that the whole temperance movement is merely scapegoating and drawing away the attention from the deteorating working conditions - the very same working conditions that led to the European Spring of 1848?
ajax13:
If you want to reach very far back, you can find yourself on the savannah of Africa 700 000 years ago. The temperance movements arose in the Anglo countries generally, not in the European nations that experienced revolts in 1848. I would be hard-pressed to describe the temperance movements as the equivalent of scientific experiments conducted with the aim of discovering methods of controlling people through psychological manipulation. Craiglockhart falls within that description; I don't know that the Women's Christian Temperance Movement does. No hard feelings, Wayne. I was hoping Xelebes would enlighten us with his evidence that the mind control experiments stopped in the sixties, what with the indisputable fact that the Seed and Straight were receiving federal funds, and the Seed was determined to be experimental by at least one government investigation.
Xelebes:
I have no evidence to offer, quite frankly. I'm just offering some possible reasonings - I don't have the resources to go find any evidence, although I will be taking auditing courses in the next semester and some.
To put what I've so far been able to read from here and elsewhere, the programs were not experiments themselves but for the most part fleshed out ideas of the developments made in the 30s-60s. Other experiments were being conducted, but I don't think they played a material role in the development of the Synanon-styled programs. It has been more mimickry than trying anything remarkably new since the end of the 60s.
The only other cases where the development of aversives was being tried do not resemble Synanon, but rather relied on hardware, as far as I have seen.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version