Manufacturing real-life Project Mayhems
I say that our culture was primed for the "Great Reset" because self-defeating Hollywood satire about eco-fascism isn't the main source for cultural nihilism within radical spheres. Palahniuk's satirical vision itself likely took inspiration from the reactionary, ultra-leftist, and sometimes downright monstrous factions which the CIA has been creating within radical spaces since the social movements of the 60s.
Central to all of these instances of controlled opposition has been the negation of the lessons needed for building an actual revolutionary cadre. These being: that you need to approach revolution scientifically instead of dogmatically, that the historically proven route for defeating the bourgeoisie is to build a workers state, that violence must only be used according to what the given conditions mandate, and that the interests of the individual must be placed below the interests of the party. All of these realities are antithetical to the ahistorical and reactionary strains that the Feds have been nurturing within radical spheres throughout these decades.
The foundation of these strains was an effort by the Feds to co-opt the counterculture movement. To further its experiments in MKULTRA mind control, the CIA pushed psychedelics on the youth, recruiting academics like Timothy Leary to popularize these drugs. Suddenly the way to fight the system wasn't to read Marx and Lenin, but to take LSD. This factored into the bourgeoisie's weaponization of the lumpenproletariat against the class struggle; with drugs being narratively placed as the vehicles for revolutionary change, the gangs, with their propagations of the CIA's drug trade, could be absolved of suspicion in the view of the ultra-leftists who share the gang fetishist stance. The other strains that this diversion of revolutionary consciousness contributed to were the sectarian left factions, the lone wolf adventurists, and the dark sides of the New Age movement.
To sow division within the left, and to inculcate leftists with pro-imperialist ideas, the Feds created astroturf anarchist, Maoist, and Trotskyist groups. They sought to discredit Marxism-Leninism by encouraging the anti-Sovietism of these factions, putting together publications which expressed supposedly earnest sentiments that attacked existing socialism from "socialist" perspectives. This was standard fare for COINTELPRO movement infiltration, and it's more common today than ever. At worst, the sectarian factions nurtured by this process have turned into performatively violent adventurist groups, the kinds of movement wreckers that disrupt protests or assault activists they don't like. But this pales in comparison to the numerous atrocities that have been committed by the worst of the members of the controlled opposition.
The Feds' sabotage of revolutionary consciousness and demobilization of radical organizing has made society more susceptible to the truly sinister kinds of spook-created ideological strains. To infamous sources of violence and mayhem from recent U.S. history whose origins can be traced to the intelligence community.
One example is the Unabomber, who was the logical conclusion of the CIA's campaign to manipulate people's minds using drugs. Whether or not the CIA intended for Ted Kaczynski to commit the murders, or to write out the anarcho-primitivist manifesto that motivated them, he contributed to the fortification of capital by associating radicalism with violent crime and by creating ahistorical theory. The few who follow his doctrine-and let's not fool ourselves, these people do exist-have embraced the idea that industry and technology must be sabotaged regardless of their class character. Socialist China's utilization of industry to lift 800 million out of poverty means nothing in this worldview; technology still must be eliminated. And his Durden-esque crusade was motivated by horrors he had been subjected to as one of MKULTRA's victims. As The Atlantic has written about Kaczynski's trauma at the hands of Harvard, which roped him into one of the CIA's mind control research programs:
The study was run by Dr. Henry Murray, who had each of his 22 subjects write an essay detailing their dreams and aspirations. The students were then taken to a room where electrodes were attached to them to monitor their vitals as they were subjected to extremely personal, stressful, and brutal critiques about the essays they had written. Following the psychological attacks, the participants were forced to watch the videos of themselves being verbally and psychologically assaulted multiple times. Kaczynski is claimed to have had the worst physiological reaction to being interrogated. These experiments, paired with his lack of social skills and memories of being bullied as a child, caused Kaczynski to suffer from horrible nightmares that eventually drove him to move into isolation outside Lincoln, Montana.
From Kaczynski's point of view, killing people involved in tech was merely the proportionate response to the evils that had been done towards him in the name of science. His torture was proof in his mind that industrial civilization must be destroyed at all costs. This reasoning-that what society has done to you makes it justified for you to lash out against society-is remarkably similar to the rationale Charles Manson used for his own Fed-backed campaign of counterrevolutionary disruption.
"My father is the jailhouse," said Manson in his Tate-LaBianca murder trial testimony. "My father is your system. . . I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you. I have eaten out of your garbage cans to stay out of jail. I have worn your second-hand clothes. . . I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you, and then I say to myself, You want to kill me? Ha! I'm already dead, have been all my life. I've spent twenty-three years in tombs that you built." This attitude that he and his cult were merely standing up for themselves in the face of absurdity and injustice was also reflected in his statement "These children that come at you with knives, they're your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. I just tried to help them stand up."
Given the help that the CIA and local law enforcement covertly gave him, you can argue he was implicitly including himself as one of these lost souls who were influenced by a sick system. And from a certain moral perspective, he was right. Throughout his two decades as a career criminal, Manson received help from law enforcement at crucial points. His parole wasn't taken away despite multiple arrests; he attained an extraordinarily effective parole officer named Roger Smith, who also worked for one of MKULTRA's front groups; despite being a parolee and not having a job, he had access to huge amounts of drugs and weapons, which law enforcement knew about; an unlikely series of supposed coincidences delayed law enforcement trying Manson and his followers after the murders; after he was arrested during the biggest police raid in the Los Angeles Police Department's history at the time, he and his accomplices were shortly released; he was allowed to build his "Family," and use intensive LSD dosages to alter the mindsets of his followers, during the decisive months preceding the murders-despite his group having been under surveillance during this time.
In Tom O'Neill's book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, these bizarre events get an explanation. As columnist Justin Ward summarizes a point where O'Neill got far down this research rabbit hole:
Manson is often portrayed as some kind of criminal mastermind, but he was illiterate until his late teens. How could someone like that bind followers so irreversibly to his will that they would murder on his command? The techniques he used were sophisticated, but Manson was not. Was it just a coincidence that he happened to frequent a clinic where the world's foremost brainwashing expert [Jolyn West] had set up shop? It has long been the official stated position that the CIA's LSD experiments were a failure, but what if they weren't? O'Neill laid out his facts for Alan Scheflin, author of a book on the CIA's secret experiments and asked him if this could be an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong. He replied: "No, an MKULTRA experiment gone right."
This explains Manson's allegation towards the ruling institutions that "you taught them."
The idea that Manson received CIA training for his physiological priming of the murderers gains further credibility from all the other instances where spooks have used susceptible individuals, especially members of the criminal underworld, as lab rats for mind control innovations. The ruling class quite literally used the lumpenproles as weapons. The CIA's front organization the National Institute for Mental Health funded Smith in his carrying out of the Amphetamine Research Project, which studied the impacts of speed on violence among street gangs. Whitey Bulger, the infamous killer who led the Winter Hill Gang in South Boston, could have his criminal activities be directly traced to his mental alterations at the hands of MKULTRA.
Even when mind control via drugs hasn't been provenly involved in these cases, the CIA has found subtler ways to exert influence to the consequence of creating monsters. The Finders, the pedophile cult that's famously been exposed for having ties to the CIA, were enabled by a coverup similar to the deliberate negligence that law enforcement showed towards the Manson Family. And their leader managed to recruit members through the same pitch that Manson used: that this group offered people a New Age lifestyle, an isolated escape from capitalist society.
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