In the year 2000, Kaczynski's fellow Harvard alum, the author and philosophy PhD Austin Chase, published an article in The Atlantic titled Harvard and the Making of the Uni Bomber, which he would later expand into the book Harvard and the Uni Bomber: The Education of an American Terrorist. Chase had begun corresponding with Kaczynski in July of 1998 and discovered from Kaczynski himself that he'd participated in a three-year long psychological study as an undergrad at Harvard. Kaczynski told him that during his trial, the Henry A. Murray Research Center at Harvard had released some of the study's raw data about him to his attorneys, but had refused to share the Murray team's analysis of that data. Kaczynski hinted darkly that the Murray Center seemed to feel it had something to hide, and one of his defense investigators reported that the center had told the psychologists who participated in the study not to talk with Kaczynski's defense team. It turned out that in the fall of 1959, Kaczynski had been selected as one of 22 subjects out of 70 volunteers to participate in a study being run by a team of psychologists headed by Henry A. Murray of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, a former Office of Strategic Services employee who had gone on to found the discipline of humanistic psychology, which sought to use the methods of psychology to expand human potential. Each applicant was given a battery of psychological tests to screen them for certain attributes prior to participation in the study, which intended to measure how people react under stress and how they respond to interrogation. The researchers were looking for a few average individuals as well as those representing extremes, some who were highly alienated and others who were exceptionally welladjusted. As the lead researcher, Henry Murray put it, they sought to enlist students who were quote at the extreme of a vowed alienation, lack of identity, pessimism, etc., as well as those at the opposite extreme, reporting nearly optimal physical, mental, and social well-being. Murray's preliminary screening identified Kaczynski as the most alienated of the participants. To anonymize the study, each subject was given a code name chosen by Murray which described some relevant aspect of the participants personality. Ironically, or perhaps as a dark joke, Kaczynski's code name was lawful. According to Chase's book, Harvard and the Uni Bomber, the centerpiece of the experiments was something Murray called alternatively stressful disputation, diatic interaction, stressful diatic episode, stressful diatic proceeding, diatic interaction of alienated subjects, or simply the diad. Whatever its name, it was a highly refined version of the third degree. Its intent was to catch the student by surprise, to deceive him, bring him to anger, ridicule his beliefs, and brutalize him. As Murray explained in the only article he ever wrote about his experiment, first you're told you have a month in which to write a brief exposition of your personal philosophy of life, an affirmation of the major guiding principles in accord with which you live or hope to live. Second, when you return with your finished composition, you're informed that in a day or two, you and a talented young lawyer will be asked to debate the respective merits of your two philosophies. When the subject arrived for the debate, he was escorted into a brilliantly lighted room and seated in front of a one-way mirror. A motion picture camera recorded his every move and facial expression through a hole in the wall. Electrodes leading to machines that recorded his heart and respiratory rates were attached to his body. Then the debate began, but the students were tricked. Contrary to what Murray claimed in his article, Murray had lied to the students. He didn't tell him they would be debating a talented young lawyer. Rather, as Murray explained in an unpublished progress report, each student was led to expect he would confront another undergraduate subject like himself. So when they were confronted with what Murray called a law school student, our trained accomplice, they were caught completely by surprise and not prepared for what followed. The law school student was carefully coached to launch an aggressive attack on his younger victim for the purpose of upsetting him as much as possible. As instructed, the unwitting subject attempted to represent and to defend his personal philosophy of life. Invariably, however, he was frustrated and finally brought to expressions of real anger by the withering assault of his older, more sophisticated opponent. While fluctuations in the subject's pulse and respiration were measured on a cardio tachometer, not surprisingly, most participants found this highly unpleasant, even traumatic as the data sets record. We were led into the room with bright lights, very bright, one of the participants said. I could see shadowy activities going on behind the one-way glass. The psychologist started fastening things on me. I had a sensation somewhat akin to someone being strapped on the electric chair with these electrodes. I really started getting hit real hard. Wham! Wham, wham! And me getting hotter and more irritated and my heartbeat going up and sweating terribly. There I was under the lights and with movie camera and all this experimentation equipment on me. It was sort of an unpleasant experience. Right away, said another code named Trump, describing his experience afterward, I didn't like the interrogator. The psychologist came waling over and he put on those electrodes. But in that process, while he was doing that kind of whistling, I was looking over the room and right away I didn't like the room. I didn't like the way the glass was in front of me through which I couldn't see, but I was being watched. And right away that puts one in a kind of unnatural situation. And I noted the big white lights. And again, that heightens the unnatural effect. There was something peculiar about the setup, too. It was supposed to look homey or look natural. Two chairs and a little table. But again, that struck me as unnatural before the big piece of glass and the lights. And then another researcher who was bubbling over, dancing around, started to talk to me about how he liked my suit. The buzzer would ring or something like that. we were supposed to begin. He was being sarcastic or pretty much of a wise guy and the first thing that entered my mind was to get up and ask him outside immediately, but that was out of the question because of the electrodes and the movie and all that. I kind of sat there and began to fume and then he went on and he got my goat and I couldn't think of what to say. And then they came along and they took my electrodes off. One subject, Hinge, thought he was being attacked. Another Nazfield complained the lights were very bright. Then the things were put on my legs and whatnot and on the arm. I didn't like the feel of the sticky stuff that was on there being sort of uncomfortable. Before the diatic confrontation took place, Murray and his colleagues interviewed the students in depth about their hopes and aspirations. During the same period, the subjects were required to write not only essays explaining their philosophies of life, but also autobiographies in which they were told to answer specific intimate questions on a range of subjects from thumb sucking and toilet training to masturbation and erotic fantasies. After all this data was collected, the diatic confrontation took place. Over time, the participant would be called back for several recall interviews where he would sometimes be asked to watch and comment on the video of the confrontation. By the end of the project, each student had spent about 200 hours being interrogated, degraded, tested, and measured. But in the end, no one involved could really tell what the point of the experiment had been. The data was never published or turned into a journal article. Murray claimed he was working on a book about his concept of the diad, but it was never produced. Some of Murray's assistants believed he just took pleasure in seeing what happened when one person attacked another. But for all the ink that's been spilled over Ted Kaczynskis supposed ties to MK Ultra, there's no evidence in the historical record directly connecting the experiment in which he participated to MK Ultra in particular, or the CIA in general. It's true that the study's lead architect, Henry Murray, had worked for the OSS during the World War II era, devising psychological screening tests for potential spies. And at least according to Timothy Liry, monitoring military experiments on brainwashing, but evidence of a direct intelligence link to this particular study is lacking. On the other hand, one of the primary goals of MK Ultra research was to brainwash someone to such an extent that they'd be willing to commit acts which were totally against their moral convictions, like murder, for instance, without remorse or even remembering the event itself. In this sense, a study about breaking down an individual's personal philosophy and moral compass is at least conceptually totally consistent with the kinds of research the CIA was conducting into brainwashing and mind control. And if the data collected during the study was never used for a book or research paper, then it's reasonable to wonder what Murray's intentions were in collecting all this extremely private information from Harvard students about their sexual habits, personalities, fears, and values. Had the whole thing been a covert project to collect compromising material about Harvard undergrads for blackmail or CIA recruitment, obviously it would be extremely valuable to an intelligence agency to have such detailed private information about a group of people who, as Harvard graduates, were almost guaranteed to soon be assuming roles at the very top of American government, finance, and industry. But whatever Murray's true motives were for conducting a study like this, there's no concrete proof of where the data ended up or what it was used for. So unfortunately, we are, at least for now, confined to speculation. For his part, Kaczynski totally rejected the idea that the study had any influence on his thinking or personality. I've received plenty of letters from people who believe that in the course of the psychological study at Harvard directed by Henry A. Hurry. I was subjected to psychological torture as part of an MK Ultra mind control experiment conducted by the CIA, but it's all [ __ ] There was one and only one unpleasant experience in the Murray study. It lasted about half an hour and could not reasonably have been described as torture. The Murray study consisted mostly of interviews and filling out paper and pencil personality tests. The CIA wasn't involved. And even by the criteria used in the study, Kaczynski was already highly alienated from others by the time he enrolled to participate. So that particular trait can hardly be blamed on the study itself. However, it's worth noting that descriptions of Kaczynski from his teachers, relatives, friends, and acquaintances before he reached Harvard describe a relatively welladjusted genius who was quote honest, ethical, sociable, and easy to talk to, and seemed to be the ringleer in his friend group. One high school guidance counselor even said that Kazinski had quote one of the greatest contributions to make to society. Austin Chase, the author who popularized the idea of the mindcontrolled uniomber, believed that it was his time at Harvard which precipitated Kaczynski's later violent acts, suspecting that Ted's philosophy was at least in part a reaction to the utopianism and worship of technological progress in Cambridge, which the Murray study only exacerbated. Kaczynski viewed himself as a revolutionary, a rational political actor seeking to wake up the populace to the truth he'd discovered through the only method accessible to him, violent direct action. Whether Kaczynski was a born psychopath or purely a product of the mental conditioning he faced at Harvard, is up to you to decide.
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By: Psych History Show
Raped by: Otto Heckel
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