Today's excerpt.

Contents

1. Who Owns Your Personality? 1

2. Guilty Brain Cells 15

3. Behavioral Surgery 27

4. Reshaping the Child 39

5. Prisoner Guinea Pigs 60

6. Predicting the Violent among Us 89

7. Eroding the Legal Protections 110

8. Surveillance Machines and Brain Control

9. It's Not Just Theory 157

10. Complicity 179

Notes 199

Index 217

1. Who Owns Your Personality?

A SO-CALLED SCIENTIFIC rationale is being spawned to explain some of the critical dilemmas of the day — such as the rising tide of violence — by blaming them on individuals who don't make the grade genetically, or whose uncontrollable behavioral problems are associated with faulty neurological wiring.
These people are said to be afflicted with a case of bad genes, or suffering from some brain disorder, or carrying around an extra chromosome, or victims of all three conditions.

Ever-mounting crime — the muggings, burglaries, and killings — according to this theory, is only partly the result of ghetto frustrations, unemployment, and overall economic despair.
More significant, these theorists hold, is the presence of a large number of Americans, as many as 15 million, 1 who are afflicted with certain brain dysfunctions; their damaged brain cells may suddenly go awry, triggering impulsive outbursts of rage and uncontrollable seizures of assaultive behavior.

The solution to this problem, proponents of this view declare, is to have these individuals submit to a behavior reconditioning program in prisons or other "corrective" institutions.
Failing this, such persons would undergo a brain operation, psychosurgery, that would permanently rid them of their aggressiveness and other obsessive, hostile characteristics.
Yet there is no actual proof that sick or malfunctioning brain cells are the causes of their violent dispositions.
Psychosurgery is expressly designed to alter the behavior and overall emotional character of an individual.

As bizarre as it may sound, this theory, for nearly a dozen years, has been making headway.
It has received considerable encouragement and experimentation at the Veterans' Administration and possibly other government agencies.

For law enforcement people, the failure of whose methods is reflected by the steady rise in street crime, the biological approach with the surgical twist is especially appealing.
Psychosurgery might even become part of the police armamentarium, along with mace, the club, and the service revolver.
It would enjoy respectability, since the rationale would originate in the medical community.
No one has proved that millions of our citizens are about to run amok because of brain dysfunction, however, nor is there proof that psychosurgery can "cure" violence.
We know that cutting away certain sections of the brain or destroying brain cells will subdue patients, make them docile, and in some instances leave them in a permanent, zombielike state.
For once brain tissue is destroyed, it will never again regenerate.
The late Dr. Walter Freeman, a pioneer in the early psychosurgery called lobotomy, commented on this phenomenon by saying that "lobotomized patients seldom came into conflict with the law precisely because they lack the imagination to think up new deviltries and the energy to perpetrate them."

"Murder of the mind" is how critics refer to the end-result of psychosurgery.
"The role of psychosurgery has little if any applicability for violent behavior," 4 says Dr. A. K. Ommaya, acting chief of the Surgical Neurology Branch of the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke (NINCDS).

A similar view comes from Dr. Elliot S. Valenstein, who states that "there is no convincing evidence that. . . episodically occurring violence caused by brain pathology represents anything more than a very insignificant percentage of the violence in our society."
He contends that "there is no reason to believe that brain pathology is contributing to the accelerating rate of assaultive behavior."
Dr. Valenstein is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and author of the book Brain Control.

Lest the reader find solace in the belief that it can't happen to her or to him, that the application of the brain-damage violence theory is confined only to criminals with bad brain cells, there may be an unpleasant surprise in store.
Already this theory is being extended to include other types of "deviant" individuals who would be candidates for psychosurgery — mental patients, hyperactive children, homosexuals, alcoholics, drag addicts, and political nonconformists.

There is much concern about the growing acceptance of be-haviorist and psychosurgical remedies for what basically are socioeconomic problems requiring political solutions.
There is an ominous reminder of the period just before and during the Nazi regime in Germany, when some of that country's leading psychiatrists described the emotionally ill as an "economic drain," persons of "no value."
Their solution?
Doing away with the mentally ill.

Eventually these psychiatric "healers" in Germany played key roles in the physical extermination of some 275,000 mental patients.
Dr. Fredric Wertham, in his extraordinarily well-documented work on violence, A Sign for Cain, cites psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, who published a book some twelve years before Hitler took power, in which he set the basis for the concept that mental patients were socially nonproductive and therefore expendable.

Hoche was professor of psychiatry and director of the psychiatric clinic at Freiburg until 1934.
He was a highly respected scientist and had trained some of the outstanding psychiatrists in Germany.
As Dr. Wertham points out, however, because of his reactionary views, his rigid judgmental values as to who was fit or not fit to live, Hoche paved the way for looking at the mentally sick and the physically handicapped as a drag on the nation's economy.
As early as 1920 he urged that the killing of "worthless people" be legally permitted.

Eventually this thinking led to the Untermenschen theory: that is, that these were people who didn't quite make it to the human level.
These theories were interwoven into the criterion for the elimination of nonAryans, such as Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies.

There were dozens of psychiatrists directly involved in the execution of these hapless people, including many thousands of children.
Such well-known physicians as Dr. Werner Heyde, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wurzburg, was a key figure in overseeing the use of carbon monoxide as a method for killing mental patients.
Yet another internationally known scientist, Dr. Werner Villinger, an authority on epilepsy and acute psychosis, began popularizing the view that rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents was hopeless and that sterilization was the answer.

What is equally startling is the revelation that Hitler didn't force these psychiatrists to assume their executioner roles; they in their various ways contributed to the Hitlerian myth of the Aryan superrace and the need to rid it of physical or mental defectives.
Many less prestigious doctors, at first hesitant to break their Hippocratic oath, ultimately were swept up into this macabre operation as they watched their medical "betters" lead the way.

While the pro-Nazi psychiatrists were drafting "therapies," the geneticists were laying down the "scientific" foundation for the eradication of second-class humans.
No less a notable than Kon-rad Lorenz, who in 1974 was awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering studies of animal behavior (ethology), had earlier proclaimed the theory of the need to cleanse the Third Reich of its pool of inferior genes.
His observations of the animal kingdom, he explained, led him to understand that when domestication of animals takes place, much of the competitiveness in mating is gone and so degenerative mutations take place.
A similar phenomenon, he said, surfaces in certain phases of civilization so that "socially inferior human material is enabled ... to penetrate and finally annihilate the healthy nation."
In the year 1940, at the height of Hitler's regime, Lorenz wrote:

The racial idea as the basis of our state has already accomplished much in this respect ...
We must — and should — rely upon the healthy feelings of our Best and charge them with the selection which will determine the prosperity or the decay of our people.

Currently it would be both presumptuous and reckless to suggest that psychiatrists and neurosurgeons are drafting plans to do away with those Americans who are mentally ill or are deemed incorrigible, uneducable, or noncontributory to the overall economy of this land.
But it would be equally inexcusable to forget or to gloss over the Nazi experience.
And it would be even less justifiable to overlook similar trends in this country.

Certainly there are enough puffs of smoke on the horizon to suggest that a fire may be smoldering underneath.
The tendency in dealing with crime and delinquency is to bypass the social roots of violence (the nation's economic upheavals, unemployment, etc.) and to focus instead on the "pathology," genetic or otherwise, of the culprit who fails to "shape up."

It is scarcely believable that so soon after the Nazi era consideration of race as a cause of ethnic depravity has once again surfaced to the degree that it has.
The notion of hereditary flaws in ethnic groups is offered as an explanation for the increase in the number of blacks and Hispanics in the prison population.
There is not even an attempt at disguising the blatant racism implicit in this approach.
It is no longer confined to the mutterings by frustrated, bigoted members of various hate groups.
It has become an open issue for debate by academicians.

R. A. McConnell, research professor of biophysics at the University of Pittsburgh, commenting on the biological explanation of this nation's current social and economic disarray, declared:

I estimate that somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of the U.S.A. population has inadequate genetic endowment to make a net zero or greater economic contribution in a modern industrial society.
Or to say it more precisely, this many people are in excess over the possible need for their level of ability.
Unless the average genetic competence can be raised, a large (and presently growing) fraction of our people must remain permanently in the spiritually degrading position of charitable dependence upon the rest of us.
This, I believe, is one root cause for our present social malaise.
A fortiori [even more certain], a still higher fraction is so restricted by genetic endowment as to be unable to understand many of the intellectually complex issues that are submitted to public vote.

In short, our civilization based on science and technology, which are the creation of a miniscule elite, has grown too complex for the ordinary man.

This, of course, could set up the assumption that a section of the population, by reason of hereditary deficiency, is unable to keep up with modern civilization and therefore is deprived of the privileges enjoyed by the elite.
It would follow that some of its members inevitably turn to criminality to achieve what they could not attain through talent or skill.

Professor McConnell draws his inspiration from such modern-day apostles of genetic determinism as Jensen and probably Shockley and Wilson of Harvard, the architect of the new genetic school — sociobiology.
Arthur R. Jensen, professor of educational psychology, University of California at Berkeley, has become the center of debate for the last half a dozen years, following the launching of his thesis that black children, except to a very limited level of development, are simply uneducable.
The sooner this country wakes up to this fact, he argues, the sooner it will rid itself of costly illusions.
"Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently failed," he declared in a 123-page article in the Harvard Educational Review, in 1969.
So, he asks, why continue draining the nation's treasury on special programs for the disadvantaged minorities?
Jensen's entire case rests on his claim that blacks do poorly compared to whites on standard IQ tests, even after they have been exposed to especially designed remedial efforts.
And the reason for this poor performance, he insists, is genetic, and it is passed on from one generation to the next.

Jensen has found strong support from physicist William Shockley of Stanford, who has stated that "there is a difference in the wiring patterns" in white and black minds.

Just how seriously the Jensen views have been considered at the highest levels of the American government was reflected by President Nixon's report in 1970.
His review of Head Start and other governmentally sponsored educational programs indicated a very dim view of these undertakings.
While he did not mention Jensen by name, there was little doubt as to Jensen's influence.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a White House advisor, is reported to have said, "the words of Jensen were gust-ing through the capitol."
Moynihan has admitted to having been questioned about Jensen by Nixon and others at a presidential cabinet meeting.
According to a Life magazine account, Moynihan stated that even though there was only "inferential knowledge [about the role of the gene] . . . and that nobody knows what a 'smart gene' looks like, that Dr. Jensen is a thoroughly respectable man, that he is in no sense a racist.. ,"

In the 1975-1976 Boston race riots relating to school busing, handbills were circulated with headlines that read, "Heredity Determines Intelligence," and "What's Responsible for Negroes' Low I.Q.?"
In one of these leaflets Jensen was cited as the source for those diatribes, quoting him and others that "genes — the strand of protein coded to determine all that we are, inherited by us at conception — play an overwhelmingly predominant role in determining one's basic level of intelligence."*

• Early in 1977 Dr. Jensen seems to have done somewhat of an about-face on the question of blacks and IQ.
  In a recent study involving 653 youngsters in an unnamed town in Georgia, the Berkeley psychologist noted a downward trend in the IQ of black students as they grew older.
  He conceded that this may be the result of environmental factors — a standard of living much lower than that of the white population and the disadvantages of being a rural southern black.
  Writing in Developmental Psychology (May 1977), Jensen said:
  "I cannot say exactly what those factors are . . .
  They may have to do with nutrition, health and a disadvantaged home environment."
  Despite this observation he still believes that there is a basic IQ difference between blacks and whites.

Rejecting the Jensen-Shockley thesis, a Harvard genetic scholar and population expert says that it has no scientific credibility.
Professor Richard Lewontin states that "the basic error is to suppose that coded in our genes — and there is no evidence of anything like it — are determinative behaviors of individuals.
The fact that some traits differ genetically between individuals, he adds, does not point to the causes of differences between groups, such as races or social classes.

The racist-genetic approach quickly falls apart when exposed to the test of experience.
As early as World War I, for instance, black soldiers from certain northern areas who were privileged to have the same kind of education as northern whites scored significantly higher in the IQ tests than whites from impoverished sections of the south.

It would appear that the prime objective of some of the proponents of the Jensen-Shockley school of philosophy is to absolve the existing social and political institutions from responsibility in ameliorating the continuing crises of the cities.
The main thrust is to place all the onus for antisocial behavior — attributable to ghetto life, deprivation, and unemployment — on "genetically flawed individuals" with a supposedly damaged heredity.

It is interesting that at the other end of the spectrum, the environmental determinists — such as those led by B. F. Skinner, who stress overall environment as the principal influence on the development of the individual — also bypass the responsibilities of governmental and societal institutions with regard to the rise of crime or other social upheavals.
It is the early influence and the initial circumstances in which a person has been reared, the Skinnerians argue, that will make the individual either a solid, respectable citizen or a mugger or a swindler.

Inherent in both schools of thought, whether based on genetics or environment, is a rigidity that freezes the individual into whatever station of life he has found himself.
In effect, it offers a "scientific" validity to justify the existing scheme of things in terms of social stratification and therefore of inequality — whether it touches on one's wage-earning capacity, educational opportunities, or social status.

The revival of genetic determinism represents a leap backward to primitive Darwinism: a period in which Herbert Spencer proclaimed that Darwin's findings did indeed corroborate that the world operated on the basis of "the survival of the fittest."
Those at the helm of power — whether in government, in industry, or in commerce — have long subscribed to this thesis.
John D. Rockefeller, who was much inspired by Spencer, once declared that "the growth of a larger business is merely survival of the fittest. . . the working out of the law of nature and the law of God."

Given this premise, it is inevitable to infer that those less fit would simply have to accept their lot in life and resign themselves to the jobs they may hold, the places where they live, and whatever they can provide for their children, however limited.
As the British Nobel Prize winner, Dr. P. B. Medawar puts it, "thus it is a canon of high tory philosophy that a man's breeding — his genetic makeup — determines absolutely his abilities, his destiny, and his desserts."
This belief, he adds, "lies at the root of racism, fascism, and all other attempts to 'make nature an accomplice in the crime of political inequality," quoting the French philosopher Condorcet.

It is in keeping with this overall philosophy that government authorities at all levels — national, state, and city — point the accusatory finger at the delinquent per se. But they continue to drag their feet in dealing with the basic causes — the ever-deteriorating social and economic conditions that dog the inhabitants of the ghetto enclaves.
Instead, the emphasis made in terms of money and planning is to improve the efficiency of the law enforcement agencies in subduing the culprit and recycling him or her into a conforming individual, one who will accept the very conditions (drug traffic, unemployment, slum housing) that precipitated his or her criminal acts to begin with.

In 1970 more than 3 percent of this nation's nonwhite male population between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, six times the percentage for whites, found themselves behind bars.
Despite these soaring figures and in spite of the veritable building boom in the construction of new penitentiaries to house the increasing prison population, there seems to be no indication that those charged with making this country's policies are ready to come up with new concepts in dealing with the situation.

The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) and other government agencies are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into programs designed to reshape the delinquent by a host of behavior modification techniques.
In many instances, the LEAA, by its own admission, does not follow up on how this money is spent and on what.
It may not even be aware that some of the programs it funds include the use of torture procedures so horrifying as to remind us that sadism is not the monopoly of any one country.
Among the rehabilitative instalments: powerful drugs, electric-shock devices, and most devastating — psychosurgery.
And those exposed to these procedures for the most part are juvenile delinquents, prisoners, and mental patients.
LEAA's failure to monitor such activities stems from the fact that it has never developed review guidelines for the protection of human subjects involved in the programs it supports.

Youthful detainees, some only twelve years of age, are kept in isolation for months at a time; some are known to have been gassed and abused in many juvenile centers across the country.
Prisoners are often chained to a steel bed-frame, which has come to be known as the rack; thrown into solitary confinement in dingy, damp cellars; and injected with such dings as Anectine, forcing the person to gasp for breath — a sensation described as closest to drowning.

But what is most alarming is that these attempts to "cure" the violent are in reality aimed at controlling the mind, to make the individual submit to whoever wields authority.
Behaviorist James McConnell, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has welcomed these developments.
In an article titled "Criminals Can Be Brainwashed — Now," he stated:

. . . the day has come when ... it should be possible ... to achieve a very rapid and highly effective type of positive brainwashing that would allow us to make dramatic changes in a person's behavior and personality . . .

We should reshape our society so that we all would be trained from birth to want to do what society wants us to do.
We have the techniques now to do it. . .
No one owns his own personality . . .
You had no say about what kind of personality you acquired, and there is no reason to believe you should have the right to refuse to acquire a new personality if your old one is antisocial . . .
Today's behavioral psychologists are the architects and engineers of the Brave New World.”

On the other hand, former Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr., who headed a Senate subcommittee studying the government's role in behavior modification, expressed great alarm at the "widespread and growing interest in the development of methods designed to predict, identify, control, and modify individual human behavior."

In his introduction to the subcommittee's report, late in 1974, the senator declared that "behavioral technology ... in the United States today touches upon the most basic sources of individuality, and the very core of personal freedom.
To my mind," he added, "the most serious threat... is the power this technology gives one man to impose his views and values on another ...
If our society is to remain free, one man must not be empowered to change another man's personality and dictate the values, thoughts and feelings of another."

With reference to psychosurgery, Dr. Robert J. Grimm, a research neurophysiologist at the Good Samaritan Hospital and Medical Center, Portland, Oregon, sees it as an issue comparable in dimension to the debate that arose among nuclear physicists after Hiroshima over the question of the bomb.
"Do scientists have the right to pursue projects potentially destructive of human life, and in this era, destructive of the individual?" is the question he put to the Fifth Annual Cerebral Function Symposium in California in March 1974.
He felt that such moral issues "were repeatedly raised during the Vietnam War over weapon development, germ warfare and massive forest defoliation."
These dilemmas, he told his listeners, "surface now over the issue of psychosurgery and technical efforts to deal with aggression and dyssocial behavior."

Dr. Grimm then warned that "neuroscientists will be under increasing pressure to examine their individual and collective positions vis-a-vis the widening issue of brain control application in a democratic society.
"We cannot escape this responsibility."

The warnings sounded by Dr. Grimm and Senator Ervin could not have been more appropriate: only three years later the nation was stunned to learn that a large-scale behavior control experimentation program had been going on in the United States for upward of twenty-five years.
What most of us traditionally felt — that "it can't happen here," was indeed happening.
At a Senate hearing on August 3, 1977, Admiral Stansfield Turner, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, disclosed that the CIA had been conducting brainwashing experiments on countless numbers of Americans, without their knowledge or consent.
Some were prisoners, others were mentally ill patients, still others were cancer patients.
But there was also an unknown number of nonpatients who unwittingly became experimental subjects; for instance, patrons at bars in New York, San Francisco, and other cities were drugged with LSD and other psychotropic agents by the CIA.
Nurses and other members of hospital staffs underwent sensory deprivation experiments, and some of them experienced the onset of schizophrenia.

These CIA activities were clearly illegal and were carried out with the participation of at least 185 scientists and some eighty institutions: prisons, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and forty-four medical colleges and universities.

One of the scientists contacted by the CIA was Dr. Robert Heath, a pioneer in psychosurgery and depth-electrode stimulation in the pleasure and pain centers of the brain.
Dr. Heath, who is chairman of Tulane University's Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, told the New York Times that he declined a CIA offer of financial aid to investigate the potential for the manipulation of the pain region of the brain. He said he found it "abhorrent."
The Times reported, however:

Dr. Heath has acknowledged agreeing to do one research project for the agency in 1957 after an agent asked him to test a purported brainwashing drug on monkeys and then, if practicable, on prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary . . ,"

Dr. Heath said he did the work on the animals but not on humans.
But what about other investigators who may have been involved in psychosurgery experiments?
The full story may never be known because many of the documents, according to Admiral Turner, are missing or have been destroyed.

The main objective of this mammoth CIA effort, which cost the taxpayers at least $25 million, was to program an individual to do one's bidding even if it would lead to his own destruction.
As quoted by the New York Times, a CIA memorandum of January 25, 1952, asked "whether it was possible to 'get control of an individual to the point where he will do our [CIA's] bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.'"
Commenting on this disclosure, the Times said editorially:

We are not sufficiently schooled in ethics to know how this differs from murder . . .
The means as well as the end were outrageous.

It added that no one seems to know how many citizens were used as guinea pigs and how many were directly harmed.

Needless to say, this type of behavioral technique could be used for more purposes than just breaking down an international spy.
Any person could become a target should his or her behavior or thinking fall out of favor with those in authority.

Considering the scope of the CIA revelations, the recent recommendation by a congressional commission to have the federal government become more active in funding and extending psychosurgery research has raised questions in some quarters.
The commission, known as the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, has given its blessings to psychosurgery in the belief that it could be significant in treating a variety of psychiatric ailments that resist psychoanalysis or drugs.
The commission feels certain that the safeguards contained in its recommendations would block the use of psychosurgery in experiments to control behavior (see Chapter 7).

It is important to remember, however, that nothing is foolproof, particularly if a powerful government agency takes it upon itself to break the rules.
The CIA began its brainwashing projects in 1953, the very year that the United States government signed the Nuremberg Code that prohibits human experimentation on captive populations, such as prisoners, or anybody else for that matter, unless the person is fully informed on the nature of the experiment and freely gives his or her consent.

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