Ben (7:22)
In 1952, a 10 year old boy named Theodore sat down at his school teacher's instruction to take a test. The boy was excited in the way a shy but very bright pupil gets excited to prove to others that despite his awkwardness and ineptitude at making friends, he was not good for nothing. Only later did he find out just how important this particular test was. He almost sensed it in the moment. After all, no other students were taking it with him. But he didn't totally understand the full weight of what he was doing, and so he simply took up his pencil and leaned down to dial in and work away. And work he did. He did an excellent job on the test, which turned out to be an IQ test. He scored a 167, far higher than even the school had expected of him. Though they had predicted an above average outcome, this score cleared away any and all doubt they may have had about what to do next. Now it was clear Theodore needed to skip a grade. The awkward boy therefore bid farewell to the class of almost six graders he knew and went right along to the seventh grade. The jump proved difficult for the boy, and at many moments his parents and the school wondered if they had made the right choice. Mind you, this regret was not because of the academic rigor. Theodore had absolutely no trouble adjusting to the more advanced work, but he did far worse socially than they had all hoped. They Predicted that since Theodore would be on a more equal intellectual footing with his new classmates, he would have a smoother time connecting with some of them on a personal level. But he didn't. He really didn't care. But everyone else seemed to. Despite this, they kept the arrangement the way it was. After all, the boy wanted to stay in the higher grade. He was loving the work. For a few years, he excelled in school. And tried to put more effort into making friends. But that particular skill never grew any easier for him. Finally, in the 10th grade, he tested again. And both school and parents decided that Theodore needed to skip yet another grade. The 11th. Of course, this second leap proved just as easy academically for the boy to make. But socially, it was even more difficult for him than the earlier leap. He grew more and more shy and awkward, more and more reclusive. But he seemed content nonetheless. So at 16 years old, the intellectual prodigy graduated high school two years early. And true to his reputation up to that point, packed up his things and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Theodore, you see, had been accepted into Harvard. Naturally, Theodore's parents, self made working class folks, Were thrilled with the brilliance and academic prowess of their son. His father especially, was eager to send him off into the great adventure of the intellectual world. Excited to see what kind of name his son might make for himself. And what kind of honor he might bestow upon his loving parents. His mother, though proud of her son, was more hesitant about his going away at such a young age. After all, he was just learning how to drive. And his age contemporaries were barely surviving advanced algebra, the nerves of asking a girl to homecoming. And the drama of teenage school politics. Genius as he was, was her son really ready to leapfrog that entire stage of societal development. And start his driving years off with financial aid forms, strict professor office hours. And collegiate courses in linear systems and mechanical vibration? But in voicing these concerns to her husband, the lamentation of youth and trepidation for the future fell on deaf ears. Their boy could go to Harvard, and therefore he would go. Ah, the dichotomy of father and mother. Theodore's arrival at Harvard was clumsy, to say the least. As with any other freshman, he had no real idea as to what he was doing. Finding a place to live ended up being far easier for him, somehow. Than finding the room where his first classes were actually held. This, of course, is completely normal. But his age was not. Though he was academically mature enough for this next challenge, he was not nearly socially mature enough for it. He could not relate to his classmates in the slightest where they had company and their proverbial misery, he had only misery. Lucky for him, Harvard was no stranger to the young savant and was prepared to do their part to help this young man adjust as best he could. Hence my saying that he had no trouble in finding a place to live for. You see, Theodore was actually one of ten 16 year olds admitted to the school his freshman year. The school had again being used to this sort of thing, decided to house all 10 of these freshmen together in the same house. But even with this forced community, Theodore's habit of shyness and reclusiveness came back with force. In a small group of segregated young students. The other nine tenants of the house often forgot the tenth in their ranks was ever there. It was rare for Theodore to come out of his room for anything other than class. Thus he lived out his days of his first year in the Ivy League. Of course, the academic work posed very little, if any, real challenge for Theodore. He excelled in all of his studies and routinely impressed professors with his writing and test scores before ultimately leaving them feeling a bit disappointed when they actually met this student one on one and found that he could barely carry on a conversation. But it's not as if they could grade on social aptitude. And Theodore was undeniably smart. So his freshman year came and went. And when it was time to move out of his more sheltered freshman housing, he found himself tossed headlong into a massive dormitory on campus. The Elliot House. It was in this house, holed away in his tiny and cheap dorm room, that Theodore gained a reputation as not just a loner, but a sort of disgust. Disgusting one. Students would routinely plug their noses when passing by his door, which was always shut due to the smell of spoiled milk and boiled eggs seeping out from behind it. Theodore never ate in the massive dining hall of the house. Instead, he always took his food back to his tiny room and ate in his bed or at the small desk. Maybe it was this especially odd behavior, or maybe it was something entirely different. But one way or another, the now 17 year old Theodore eventually found himself the recipient of a letter of admittance into a very exclusive psychological study that Harvard was hosting. The man in charge of this great experiment was named Dr. Henry Murray. And he was a man who, among the students of Harvard, needed no introduction. In World War II, the US had hired Murray to produce a psychological profile of the world's greatest enemy, Adolf Hitler. His profile was so useful to the Allied cause that the government immediately hired him on to the CIA's crack team of researchers and Clinical psychiatrists tasked with assessing the psychological fitness of their secret agents. Of course, Murray flourished. When the war was over, Murray had the clout and the credentials to do essentially whatever he wanted. And what he wanted, wanted was cutting edge and groundbreaking, even boundary stretching research. He found just such an opportunity at Harvard. The stated goal of this experiment, which saw Theodore join a team of 21 other students, was to study the effects of severe stress on the human psyche, particularly one under demand. So the experiment proceeded for each student as follows. First, the student was to write an essay for the review board of the clinicians. An exhaustive description and apologetic for the entire worldview of each student. They detailed their personal beliefs, convictions, philosophies on topics that ranged far and wide, from general ethics to their own family. They confessed and defended their most dearly held hopes and distinctive views of the world and how it should all work. The students were encouraged to put their own pathos in vibrant display on the paper. The testers wanted to see what these kids really believed was true. Upon reception of an essay, the testers studied it privately until they were confident they knew the arguments and views of the student, front to back. From there, the student was asked to return to the facility. This began the second phase phase of the experiment. We will use Theodore as the example for what happened next. Upon arriving back at the same room where he had written the essay, Theodore immediately sensed that the mood had shifted. Not only was he now alone in the bright fluorescent room where before he had written his paper in the company of the other participants, but he also heard an aggressive and demanding tone coming from the clinicians. He might have even called it meaning. He took his seat on the salmon colored plastic chair that was on one side of the single wooden desk in the room center. There was no chair on the other side. On the desk was a spotlight lamp clamped onto the wooden flange that ran the perimeter of the top. A copy of his essay and a notebook sat on top of the desk. The notebook, he quickly learned, belonged to the proctor of the experiment. Theodore had no idea what was happening or what to expect to happen next. Everyone in the room left apart from Theodore and the proctor. The lights were dimmed, transforming the uncomfortably large and bright room into one uncomfortably small feeling and dark. What commenced next can only be described as a vitriolic and prolonged personal attack on Theodore from the proctor. He had read the essay and was now come to launch a vehement, exhaustive and degrading and abusive verbal attack upon the young college student who had written it. Theodore sat trying to remain stoic as everything he held true and dear about the world and his life was torn to utter shreds by a man he never met and would never see again. He suffered this attempted course to mental breakdown for multiple hours before the proctor finally ceased his diatribe and Theodore was unceremoniously commanded to leave. Of course, this was only the tip of the iceberg. Theodore. Awkward, unsettled, immature and out of his depth, Theodore returned over and over and over again. He spent a total of 200 hours in that cursed room getting verbally vivisected by people he did not not know, but whom he knew, for whatever reason, hated him with as much passion as he had felt when writing his essay. He found himself drawn back again and again, strangely attracted to the challenge. He wanted to prove to himself that he had the mental fortitude to stand, without any objection up to these slanderous and violent attacks from nameless people. Whether or not he proved himself in the this regard remains up for debate. Theodore asserts that he succeeded in maintaining himself in his own mind. Others are slow to accept his assertions. It's worth noting that these experiments were disavowed as entirely unethical and dangerous by Harvard. Soon after their completion. Murray, as an aid to the CIA, was trying to develop methods of mental breakdown of subjects that the government could use in the interrogation of the state's enemies. But in using college minors as the subject of his study, he betrayed the carelessness of methodology that stood behind it all. Or maybe it wasn't careless at all. Maybe a better word would be nefarious, malicious. Murray, of course, was in deep with the CIA and had already well proven himself as a fruitful tool for them in World War II. Could it be that a man of his psychiatric caliber was left out of the loop of the infamous MKUltra? It appears the answer ought to be no. A large swath of the students used in his Harvard experiment went on to a psychological transmogrification, spiraling into complete psychological disaster. They forgot who they were, became paranoid and devolved into a sort of degeneracy that cost some of them their livelihoods and for all intents and purposes, their lives. Murray, in this experiment, had proven that he could wipe a mind completely clean, leave it broken, and leave it yearning for the warm embrace of some secure authority to build it back up again. An authority that Murray himself would offer offer to the mind. This, of course, exactly follows the stated goal of MK Ultra. Its brainwashing. And so this Harvard experiment has long been considered a side project of the ultimate Masterminds behind the CIA's pet shadow operations. It is worth noting, however, that Theodore himself did not have such a dramatic conclusion of his time under Murray's interrogations. He writes off the whole thing as exaggerated and not really all that bad. In fact, Theodore would later write in an autobiography of his that he remembered his time at Harvard fondly, stating that it was very good for him. But now we come to it, the question arises, who is this Theodore? Why did he write an autobiography? And why do we care about his takeaway from the Murray experiment at Harvard? We care about Theodore for the reason that he was the very one who fashioned and planted the bomb that killed Hugh Scrutton on that December morning in 1985. And what's more, this was not Theodore's only homicide. It was not even his only bombing. You may know Theodore by another name, his abbreviated name, Tet. Ted Kaczynski. Or you may know him by his Macro Cobb title, the Unabomber. That's right. One of America's most infamous mass murderers, A man whose manifesto against technology continues to influence our thought today was a genius social outcast who had been taken into a psychological study at Harvard, a study with virtually undeniable links to the shadowy backrooms of MK Ultra. All of it leaves one wondering, just how deep does this rabbit hole go? Everybody?
