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In this episode, Megan and Frank discuss the secret CIA mind control program known as MKUltra. Is mind control really possible? What ethical norms should govern human subjects research? And should those rules be flexible in the face of an existential threat?
To investigate some of these questions, this episode contains a guest interview with Dr. Justin Bernstein (University of Virginia). Dr. Bernstein joins the podcast to discuss questions relating to research ethics, the relationship between politics and morality, and trust in public health institutions.
Hosts' Websites:
Email: philosophyonthefringes@gmail.com
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Bibliography:
Interim Framework for COVID-19 Vaccine Allocation and Distribution in the United States
Building trust while influencing online COVID-19 content in the social media world - PMC
Political Realism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
We Built Reality - Hardcover - Jason Blakely - Oxford University Press
Machiavelli - The Prince | Project Gutenberg
Rawls - A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition
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Cover Artwork by Logan Fritts
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Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/neon-signs
License code: 0RHIQO3EGPUDF8Z9
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Transcript
Introduction to MKUltra by Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange. We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Mind Control and Research Norms Discussion
00:00:12
Speaker
On today's episode, we're talking about MKUltra.
00:00:15
Speaker
Is mind control possible? What norms should govern human subjects research? And should those rules be flexible in the face of an existential threat?
Background on MKUltra and Sidney Gottlieb
00:00:39
Speaker
everyone. Welcome back to the show, to episode 33. We're talking about MKUltra, another topic that's just kind of been in the background for us, like talking about episodes. we've been We've been debating doing this one for like a long time, right? Yeah, it's been on our list for a while. Yeah. You really wanted to do it, and now we're doing it. Yeah, now we're doing it. I think this is another one that Frank was skeptical about, but he ended up getting... He ended up getting really into it.
00:01:08
Speaker
feel like it was the same story for every single episode. But you did youre you're you're you're interested in this one now. Yeah, i read a whole book about it.
Explanation of MKUltra's Origins and Projects
00:01:15
Speaker
so So I guess we should start by telling, i mean, maybe some people listening to this episode don't know what MKUltra is. They just love us so much that they're going listen to anything that we make.
00:01:27
Speaker
But MKUltra, for those of you who don't know, it was a secret CIA research program that was in operation from 1953 1972.
00:01:41
Speaker
And it was headed up by a guy named Sidney Gottlieb, who was a chemist, I guess, right? And it was kind of this broad umbrella project that had a bunch of sub-projects within it. i think 149 sub-projects that all were under the broader MKUltra umbrella.
Debate on the Meaning of MKUltra
00:02:08
Speaker
do you know what MKUltra means? I forget exactly, but it's mostly meaningless. It has, there is some reference to it.
00:02:17
Speaker
It's mostly meaningless. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's just some like gobbledygook that someone- It just sounded cool. Okay. ah But yeah, so so it's mostly famous MKUltra for being the CIA mind control experiments, which we'll get to. but before getting to that, we should mention that, yeah, as you said, it is a really, really broad research program. It encompassed a lot of stuff. And you can read a list. And actually, there's ah ah in the appendix of the book I read in preparation for this episode, which we
Recommended Resources on MKUltra
00:02:45
Speaker
should mention. This book was called Project Mind Control, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA and the Tragedy of MKUltra by the science historian John Lyle at ah University of Texas. Highly recommended. I really, really love this book. and If you don't want to read a whole book, you can watch a three hour
00:03:03
Speaker
I'd rather read the whole book than watch the three-hour Joe Rogan on this. But you yes, if you if you don't read a whole book, he did do a three-hour Joe Rogan episode. And so you can listen to that you really just want to know about MKUltra. And you don't mind having to listen to Joe Rogan. In this episode, we're just gonna give you the highlights, kind of an opinionated survey of his book and what we think is important. Plus a really cool interview, yeah but we'll get to that later.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yeah. so this is by John Lyle. a Really, really good book. I didn't think I was going to read the whole thing because I didn't think I really needed to read the whole thing for this episode because some of the stuff's not really relevant to what we're
Diverse MKUltra Sub-Projects
00:03:38
Speaker
most interested in. But I read the whole thing. It was a really gripping page turner. And I don't say that lightly. Most nonfiction books are you know kind of a slog at points, but I really was super into it. It's it's exciting. It's exciting stuff. You were really disturbed by yeah lot of it. yeah And we will read in this episode the most disturbing element of the M.K. Ultra program, at least in my my view, yeah and where I was most disturbed in this book. Yeah. So there were a lot of sub projects, but obviously what most people are most interested in is the mind control aspect and the LSD aspect.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yeah. but but But there was a lot of science stuff in there, some scientifically legitimate projects. Before getting to that, we should. There was definitely some science. Yeah. Microbiology, physical chemistry, some political science, psychology. They were studying legitimate things. They were studying the placebo effect, the effect of the mechanisms of concussions. There. There were legitimate things they were interested in. i don't know that their method of studying was at any point extremely legitimate. Well, you're already anticipating some things. we don't We don't know too much about what they did because they destroyed a lot of the documents. But if you look at the appendix of all the subprojects, there were a lot of stuff. ah One thing that they were studying, which I found quite interesting, was... a Nonverbal communication methods among children who don't have a common language. That'd be cool to study. How how do young children and communicate with each other? They can't like talk to each other. um So we're studying that kind of stuff. there as As part of the MKLT.
Cold War Context and Soviet Tactical Advantage
00:05:08
Speaker
project why was this under the same umbrella we don't know and just to learn about human beings learn about human behavior because ostensibly the the point of this project i guess we given the dates of the project a lot of our listeners probably picked up on this but the whole point of initiating this project in the first place was supposed to be a kind of tactical advantage on the soviets in the you know depths of the cold war Yes. And you can see that in some of the things they study. So they're studying factors that cause defection. Why did the Hungarian refugees go back to communist Hungary? They want to know that. So things things of that sort, poisons, weapons, spy stuff, military stuff, that's that's that's all well and good. ah
Literal vs. Metaphorical Interest in Magic
00:05:49
Speaker
There's some weird stuff. ah They mentioned magic. They mentioned that they want to study ESP, witchcraft. What do you mean they mention magic? That's one of the sub-projects, studying magic. So it was unclear to me if they actually meant like witchcraft type magic, like, you know, like casting spells. Sure. if they meant like what Joe Bluth does in Arrested Development. Yeah. Magic tricks. Because. Rabbit out of a hat yeah kind of Yeah, because. Because they do explicitly mention they wanted to they were studying sleights of hand in order to learn how to better administer LSD.
00:06:24
Speaker
So they were they were doing magic tricks. But then they mentioned magic, and I wasn't sure if they meant casting spells or just more of that sleight of hand stuff. yes So it is unclear to me. And given that witchcraft and ESP is on the list, it's unclear what they actually meant there.
00:06:41
Speaker
yeah And also my favorite, remote-controlled animal
Confirmation of Bizarre MKUltra Projects
00:06:46
Speaker
assassins. That's subproject number 94, I think. yeah great Great stuff. Now, we're at this point, we're probably sounding insane. You might even feel like you're listening to the Joe Rogan show right now. But this is all officially confirmed Yes, stuff this is all real. We're not going to tell you any anything that is an aspect of a hearsay. Yeah, so this is all based, yeah so yeah, I'm basing this on John Lyle's book, but he's and he's a respectable academic historian of science this from the documents that still exist. So there's some documents that exist. There are a bunch of de depositions. There are some financial documents. So this is all on the record. This all happened. Everything we tell you is real. Yes.
00:07:29
Speaker
all right. And then there was the weird stuff and the bad stuff, the mind control. A lot of it was bad. The torture and all of that. So let's let's let's ah let's talk about that, right? Yeah.
Unethical Experiments on Vulnerable Populations
00:07:40
Speaker
So MKUltra is controversial because it involved a lot of unethical experiments. So experiments... that were conducted upon unsuspecting people. They didn't give their consent. And in many cases, these experiments were also like scientifically bizarre. they They didn't practice good scientific methodology. Many of the scientists who were performing these experiments, also, they didn't know they were working for the CIA. They had this really clever sort of way to keep...
00:08:08
Speaker
Really? Who was funding the program secret. Yeah, they they created what are what are called cutout programs. So you'd be funded by some research lab and you're like, oh, that's great. But actually, it's the CIA behind it. No. Yeah. So a lot of times they didn't know they were working for the CIA. And controversially, also, they performed a lot of these experiments on vulnerable populations. So those in prison, those in state-run mental hospitals. oh that's nothing new in terms of like government, military operations and stuff. But the ultimate goal, as Megan already mentioned, right was to come up with methods of mind control. How can we get people to reveal their secrets? Can we get the enemy agents to perform actions that we want them to perform? And we were especially interested in doing this because for some reason, we thought the Soviets already could.
Sidney Gottlieb's Motivations and Regrets
00:08:58
Speaker
Yes. So they feared that China and the USSR already had these powers.
00:09:04
Speaker
The reasons why they thought this were rather thin. There were certain cases where American spies had defected or revealed information. They're like, How did they get them to do that? And it was probably just torture. Yeah, right. But they thought it was. It surely couldn't be that we broke their arms. They just thought it was mind control. OK. I mean, this is like obviously a narrative that we still hear today, right? Like we have to do all this stuff with, you know, building more and more generative AI and surveillance, mass surveillance and stuff, because we think that Russia or China is already doing it. And if if we don't get there first or whatever, then They'll have ah a, ah you know, some kind of international advantage on The arms race. The arms race reasoning. It is. It's a tale of all this time. Yeah. so ah So there were some noble motivations, though, among at least Sidney Gottlieb, who you mentioned, who was who headed up the program. So he was the the director of the so-called technical service staff, which is like the James Bond wing of the CIA. They're supposed to make you know fancy gadgets and secret things and all that.
00:10:08
Speaker
um But he was interested in trying to win battles without large-scale killing or destruction of property. So he's like, what if we can learn how to control the enemy soldiers and just win the battle in that way? We wouldn't have to kill everyone. right So there was some kind of noble motivation behind it. yeah That's actually...
00:10:29
Speaker
He's cute. He's an interesting guy. He's an interesting guy. We can't say too much about him, but he's he's a fascinating guy. ah yeah He's not like who you would expect to be running this program. He's an academic. He's a chemist. He's kind of an outsider. He's kind of mild-mannered. I guess he was just a really hardcore patriot at the time. sure He ended up regretting a lot of what he did. because at the time, if you don't at least pretend to be a hardcore patriot, you're going to prison. Yeah. yeah This is also in like the heart of McCarthyism. Yeah, that's that's true. Yeah, he tried he spent most of the rest of his life atoning for
LSD Focus and Mind Control Realization
00:11:00
Speaker
this. He basically became like a Buddhist monk. But yeah, fascinating fellow.
00:11:06
Speaker
yeah Ultimately, they didn't learn much from from this program. as As we said already, a lot of the documents were destroyed. Some survived, which are the basis of what we know about it. These documents were revealed during Senate and congressional inquiries in like the mid and late 70s.
00:11:22
Speaker
But Gottlieb was on record saying that you know what we learned was mostly negative. right We learned that we can't actually control people using LSD or otherwise in the ways that we had hoped. And so there's very little you can do to directly control people's behavior. So that was what they learned from from this.
Unethical LSD Experiments on Americans
00:11:44
Speaker
I guess it was a live option back then. Could you actually directly and really control somebody, not just sort of influence them? Yeah. Now, its was LSD, which was obviously their their main... like that They were putting all their eggs kind of in that basket. Yeah, one of the sub-projects is buy $400,000 worth of LSD. Right. A lot back then. Right.
00:12:06
Speaker
but um So where did they did the CIA manufacture LSD? they They came up with it, basically, right? they didn't They didn't synthesize it. That was a different guy. But they they got on the LSD train very early. For so for whatever reason, I'm not quite... Like, they're wise...
00:12:22
Speaker
LSD is still is is they really they really promoted it. They didn't make it. They didn't make it. He's like John Lennon was like thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so so despite all the criticism people have then of K-Ultra, we can probably maybe credit rock and roll to the CIA. I mean, John Lennon said we must always remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD. That's what people forget. They invented LSD to control people. And what they did was give us freedom. Wow. and you really Wow. but Really backfired on him. Yeah. Yeah. So LSD was what they thought would he be to be the mind control drug. I'm not really sure why even after reading the book, it seems so promising to them.
00:13:05
Speaker
I guess it just it makes people act weird and it just seemed like um and something worth looking into. Uh-huh. Yeah. so So, yeah. So I guess we should say a bit more about some of these experiments, these unethical experiments. Yeah. Because the interview- Giving people party drugs on its surface doesn't seem like be like the worst thing you could do. Yeah. Some people some people like this stuff, right? So what's the problem? Well, one sort of problem is that as part of the MKUltra project, they were giving American citizens LSD without their knowledge. So they were some American citizens were part of these kinds of experiments, these mind control experiments where they were being given experimental drugs without their consent. um And this occurred not just among the civilian population. In the CIA themselves, they were drugging each other for fun. So here's a quote from Lyle in the book. um
00:13:57
Speaker
I know everything we're saying, it sounds crazy. It doesn't sound like it's real, but it is. This is real. I know. ah So Lyle says, right, it wasn't unusual for them to spike the office coffee pot with LSD. Things became so cavalier that the CIA's Office of Security had to issue a warning that it would discipline anyone who tried to put LSD in the holiday punch bowl.
00:14:18
Speaker
but What this made me think of was in, Frank and I went to grad school together, but what this made me think of was in grad school, ah there was a fun trend where someone, one of your grad school pals, would hide Smirnoff ice somewhere on your person or in your vicinity. So maybe in like your backpack or in your desk drawer. Mm-hmm.
00:14:44
Speaker
And when you stumble across it you have to chug Yeah. Right then. Right. It was called getting iced. Yeah. Did you ever get iced? No. And if I did, I wouldn't obey the rules. Really? Yeah. I don't acknowledge them as a legitimate authority. Oh, yeah, yeah. I got iced a couple times, but I was too green. I didn't feel like I could abstain. But it kind of reminded me of that, except way worse because now you're tripping on acid while you're at work. It was the younger cohorts doing it, so I'm not going to listen to them. Oh, okay. That makes sense. So anyway, they were giving LSD to people unsuspectingly.
00:15:23
Speaker
um In one case, a colleague of Sidney Gottlieb, who was drugged at one of these sorts of fun, frivolous events, committed suicide like a week later. His wife said that after the event, after the the drugging, he came back home a totally different person, and he must have suffered some kind of psychotic break and he jumped out of a window. Because, I mean, obviously, you know, everyone's heard stories about somebody having, like, a, you know, bad trip on on some psychedelic drug, be it, like, LSD or shrooms or whatever.
00:15:57
Speaker
this, we, you know, definitely we know this happens, especially if you, like, imagine, like, working in the CIA where you probably encounter really horrifying things all the time and then having to encounter it while, like, tripping on acid. Yeah.
00:16:10
Speaker
Yeah.
Frank Olson's Death and Justice Pursuit
00:16:11
Speaker
ah Yeah. So this man's name this was Frank Olson. so So his family never let it go. Like they so he they continue to investigate this and sue the government up until more more recent times. They didn't get they didn't win that. They they once they got some kind of settlement, but it wasn't the the details are still kind of shrouded in history. Yeah.
Operation Midnight Climax
00:16:29
Speaker
And then ah continuing the theme of LSD, there's the famous, infamous Operation Midnight Climax. oh yeah. do you want to talk about that one, Megan? You're going me talk about this one?
00:16:41
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Why not? Okay. Well, if you can believe it was literally named Operation Midnight Climax. This was Joe Rogan's favorite one. what he Yeah, he found it really funny. Yeah. I'm going to try to describe this in a family-friendly way. But basically, in this official CIA subproject, LSD was given to unsuspecting Johns in safe houses in San Francisco and New York City while the CIA watched the...
00:17:12
Speaker
their business unfold from behind a two-way mirror. Right. It's just, it's exactly what it sounds like. Yeah. Yeah. So what, ah how many people were involved in this situation? Who they were? we don't really know. They didn't keep detailed records or if they did, um they were they were destroyed. We do have some letters from the people who were in charge of this operation though, stating in very colorful terms that they really enjoyed this job.
00:17:36
Speaker
ah The guy that did this too, the guy that headed up this sub project was also just a fascinating character named George Hunter White. He was a supervisor at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. That's the the former, what the DEA used to be called. and he was a very reckless guy, a maverick. He often broke the law. He often used the drugs that he confiscated from people. He but he was very much at home among the drug dealers. And even though he was a supervisor in what is now like the DEA. Yeah. So he was a real, real interesting guy too. Mm-hmm.
00:18:07
Speaker
So that was super controversial. These are just American citizens. Now, they are breaking the law. right They are soliciting the services of of prostitutes. But, you know, that doesn't mean they should be just given LSD and you watched by the CIA. I don't think it justifies giving them LSD without their consent.
Racial Discrimination in Prison Experiments
00:18:21
Speaker
Right. um so So they also performed experiments in prisons and drug rehab centers. So so one infamous example was at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. So inmates, some of them were voluntarily committed, some were involuntarily committed. some This was like a prison slash drug rehab center. So they were given drugs in return for being in the experiments. like They were given the drug that they were addicted to, in most cases heroin, in an in exchange for being given experimental and in some cases extremely high doses of LSD. And this these experiments were also doubly unethical. there There was an unsavory racial component to these experiments. They gave the the black inmates like a lot more LSD than the white inmates because they were like, well, the black people can handle it because, know. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they were given like massive doses of LSD. Like some of the some of the reports, some of the anecdotes are like heartbreaking. These guys are like, I had no idea what they were doing. I would never do this again. It was horrible. Man, that's awful. Yeah. They offered them reduced prison sentences or heroin. In most cases, they chose heroin. Sure. Because you're a heroin addict. ah Also, some experiments at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. You got $3 and nice letter for your parole board. $3? Yeah.
00:19:38
Speaker
You know, 1950. Yeah. Just got to pad that resume, you know? In some of these cases, the consent was thin. like They signed a statement, but also, you know, you don't know what you're what you're really signing up for. it's like when you click the terms and conditions on anything, you know, where they're probably like, we're going to use your likeness to like mind control you and win the war against the Soviets.
00:20:02
Speaker
um Okay, so I think mate we like probably hopefully we thoroughly convinced you yeah that this was a CIA project that had a lot of really, I don't even want to say ethically dubious. Like this was just like straight up bad stuff. Sometimes they research ethics. you You talk about cases where it's like, oh, is it ethical? Is it unethical? and then No one agrees that this these experiments were ethical. and no one thinks they were Nobody thinks they were. Not even not even the CIA. Not even the people doing it, yet right? Which is going to be... Which we're going to talk about pretty soon.
00:20:31
Speaker
But I do want to talk about... just i just want to spend a little bit of time talking about this idea of mind control. Because if people have heard of MKUltra, that's normally...
00:20:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:54
Speaker
mind control consisted in and and why did they think whatever they were doing was going to give them the ability to control mines yeah And you read a little bit about their kind of like theory of mind behind these projects, right? Yeah. Like one of these um other folks who was working for the CIA scientists who who might not have known he was working for the CIA, but he was all he also did a kind of another series of infamous experiments. This guy was a real psycho. This was this is Donald Ewan Cameron, president, one time president of the American Psychiatric Association. and Canadian Psychiatric Association. So he did experiments at the Allen Memorial Hospital, which was affiliated with McGill University in Montreal. And his, like, most, I guess his idea, which I think was unique to him, this idea of psychic driving.
Donald Ewan Cameron's Psychic Driving
00:21:44
Speaker
So he did ah other stuff that you probably are familiar with. Electroshock, they were doing that a lot back then. Sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation. He was into that kind of stuff, too. but But who did he do this on, Lo? These are these are people that were committing themselves to the mental hospital.
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah. OK. He's just going to like give them like sleep deprivation. He's like you're here and now. you're know yeah It's like it's like it's unclear whether these were. So the CIA said of his experiments that it is doubtful that any meaningful form of consent is involved in this case. like his His experiments. So who it's unclear. like did Did they ah actually agree to this? Can they agree to this?
00:22:18
Speaker
Did they sign up for this? Probably not sure on lots of cases. But the the idea that seemed most unique to him was this idea of psychic driving. This is a really crazy idea. The idea is, so when people are suffering from mental problems, what you need to do is kind of like break them down. Like you totally break them down by, you know, repeating on like a tape record.
00:22:42
Speaker
on like a stereo or something, like some recording, like you're a bad mother, you're a bad mother, you're a, why would you do that? You're a bad mother. So you're supposed to listen to that like a hundred thousand times. And after hearing it so many times, like you'll just be completely destroyed. You'll be a totally brand new blank slate kind of person after having been destroyed from listening to like an abusive message over and over again. And then we can build you up anew and as a healthy, psychologically healthy individual.
00:23:12
Speaker
um That was his idea. he called it un-patterning. need to break you down first in order to build you up. And the way to break you down is to play some message over and over again that was like abusive or something.
00:23:25
Speaker
That kind of reminds me of this like, it very vaguely reminds me of this plot point on Andor, the show Andor, where one of the characters, it's been so long since we've seen it, I really don't remember what her role was in this. I feel like she was his sister or something. But anyway, they like she was like a prisoner and they made her listen to like the screams. Oh yeah yeah. Of the children or something, right? Or. Of children. Yeah, I i don't remember what were what was happening to the yeah children. Yeah, it was like the screams of like children. On some planet. Yeah, being like tortured or something. Yeah. And it was like the worst thing And and this was like her punishment. She had to listen to it over and over until she like went insane. Yeah.
00:24:04
Speaker
And like, I don't know if she like tried to like kill herself or something, but that it kind of reminds me of that yeah as like in terms of like the method, but it is hard to like sympathize with, or it's hard to understand why someone would think that that would result in like a mental blank slate that then you could just like build up however you want. Yeah. Yeah. I know. So he didn't use this metaphor, but I guess the metaphor is kind of like, imagine you have a computer that's really, really messed up. It's full of like, you know, garbage files that you haven't cleaned it up in a while. Sometimes you you' just got to start anew and do like a factory reset. I feel like your computer needs to do that. Yeah.
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, my computer doesn't need to do that. um But actually, i'm I'm glad you brought up computers because this theory of the human mind that it kind of works like a computer is common, very popular. It's probably like the way that the average person imagines the human mind anyway, right? Yeah, we got memory, they got memory, you know, we retrieve files. We retrieve files. Yeah, right. um My belief box. I get my beliefs out my belief box. Exactly right. You got to that. You know, that's how we problem solve is like we put all this information into our mega computer in our head and and you know, the the right answer pops out or like the wrong answer is maybe computer You're going to hate this, but people are talking about themselves as if they are LLMs. Like, I got to train myself on these things. No, you're right. They talk that way and now. You're right. That's the new metaphor. is It's not just a computer. It's an LLM. Yeah. But it's interesting because this yeah this would be like kind of right at the time in human history where we are starting to think of the mind as a computer yeah because it's the dawn of the computer era, yeah the
Link to Computational Theory of Mind
00:25:54
Speaker
computational era. like That very well could have been on his mind. I'm not un'm not sure. who um Jason Blakely is a political theorist who writes about this. um And his book called We Built Reality.
00:26:08
Speaker
and it talks about this exact case, about the kind of dawn of this computational theory of mind or thinking of the mind like a computer. Obviously, I don't know if that is exactly what was going on with Donald Ewan Cameron yeah or if he was just like, you know, a demon.
00:26:27
Speaker
But it it makes sense that one might think, you know, you have these primitive, you know, very early computers. Something goes awry. What do you do? you just kind of wipe it and you start over. yeah Yeah. He you just thought he was he was trying to help. In in many cases, he got the a relative to to to record the abusive message. right So it's a close relative. So you you listen to, like, your abusive, you know, spouse being, like, you're you're ugly. Yeah. hate I think what i hate you i think a lot of times I'd have to deal with, like, maybe some kind of problem or anxiety you have, right? so mad Okay. and Yeah, so imagine he thinks, you know, that he thinks your problem is you you think you're a bad mother or you are a bad mother. you have anxiety about that. So you'd have, you know, your husband or whatever record this message. Why are you running away from your responsibility? Ah, that kind of thing. Nice. um Yeah, so... so
00:27:19
Speaker
This is the part of the book I was most disturbed by. I don't know. It was this kind of scene where the woman is trying to run away from him in the mental hospital. She's trying to escape or something like that. Like an actual patient. Yeah, an actual patient. She's trying to get out. She's trying to get out. Her name's Janine. She's trying to get out. And he's chasing her.
00:27:36
Speaker
And he's he after when he spotted here, just read from the book, Lyle, Lyle's book. He's Lyle writes. Cameron spotted her and barked. Janine, go back there. Go back and listen. I'm catching up to her. He put his arm around her shoulders inside. Don't you want to get well? Oh, no. i love That like after reading her and her story and her her her testimony about how bad this was. And I don't know, like that that disturbed me the most. Well, did she get better?
00:28:06
Speaker
I don't think so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, you wouldn't. So, okay. So they kind of thought they could control minds. And that makes the LSD thing make a little more sense. Because if you give people enough acid, I guess, they're going to like they're going to become like kind of a vegetable-ish sort maybe that goes hand-in-hand with that idea of unpatterning. Like LSD like wipes everything. And so then you can you can you could swoop in there and control that mind.
00:28:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, ah there's still a lot of gaps for me, though, because, like, even if you think you could wipe a mind clean, why think you could just build it up? um I wonder if that is why part of these the MKUltra projects had to do with early childhood communication. Maybe they were like, well, better...
00:28:53
Speaker
to just get in before there's anything built up than to try to get rid of... Yeah, possibly. Possibly,
Understanding Mind Control and Blank Slate
00:28:58
Speaker
yeah. You should read all the subprojects, even the ones that seem you know neutral and scientifically legitimate with that kind of thing in the background. They're trying to control minds, figure out how one can control a mind. Yeah. um And the idea is if you have a blank mind, which they think the mind at some point is blank, then then you can make it however you want if you're intentional enough about it.
00:29:23
Speaker
So obviously a huge aspect of the MKUltra topic is just like, oh, this was, you know, seems morally horrible. And yet it went on for like 20 years almost. Right. So so so one thing that we both found interesting, some questions that we have were like, well, you know, what what were the circumstances that led people to just sort of relax what seems to be obvious, like ethical norms of and constraints around human subjects research to this point, even though they were, you know, obviously, you know, they were worried about um like foreign threats and stuff like that. So we sat down with Justin Bernstein, who's a professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia and works on questions that are kind of like this, where norms of morality and norms of political action overlap or fail to overlap.
00:30:19
Speaker
We're here today with Justin Bernstein, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia. Justin, we're really excited to have you on the show. do you want to just say a little bit about the kinds of things you work on, the kinds of questions that your research explores?
00:30:34
Speaker
Yeah, thanks, Megan. I'm happy to be here. ah So my research sort of falls at the intersection of bioethics and political philosophy. So I'm interested in questions relating to population health with a special eye to questions of justice or political legitimacy that relate to trying to protect or promote population health. So the area where this is most prominent in my work, i I've been writing about vaccine mandates since 2017. So before the pandemic, before it was cool. ah So I've been doing this for a long time. um
00:31:07
Speaker
But yeah, I look a lot at questions about how should we balance sort of concern for individual rights or liberty with protecting population health, as well as questions about how should we make sense of normative disagreement about the value of health and the government's role in protecting it, things like that.
00:31:22
Speaker
yeah That's great. Yeah, your research caught our eye when we were looking into this topic um that we're covering today, this government project called MKUltra, and ah where where these questions do kind of fall right in that area that you're interested in and right at the intersection of like political philosophy and bioethics or medical ethics. um So the first question that we want to start with is just if you could talk a little bit about human subjects, research ethics in general. So what sorts of ethical norms are typically thought to govern experimentation on humans and maybe like how these norms evolved or changed over time if they have at all?
00:32:02
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, I think that, I mean, people have different, you you talk to these people who were there at the early stages where biomedical ethics became a field and they all have their own sort of story. But the common thread is ah the Belmont Report, which I believe was released in 1978. It was looking at all kinds of research misconduct, focusing especially on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. And what they articulate are three kinds of norms that should govern research. The first is something like respect for persons or respect for autonomy. This is embodied most concretely through requirements of informed consent and making sure that people are yeah both know what they're signing up for and that they're sort of their agency is in compromise when they agree to participate in research.
00:32:46
Speaker
Second, there's sort of a general requirement of beneficence, which holds that the research needs to be beneficial, especially in proportion to the kinds of risks or harms that attend the research process. And third, there's a requirement of justice, which is really focused on not exploiting people who are in a vulnerable position, um both because of information asymmetries between the researcher and the subject, but also because of broader sort of societal background features that could make people sort of be induced into consenting to research out of, say, financial desperation.
00:33:20
Speaker
Great, thanks. um So I had kind of a follow-up question to that. So ah it seems that if you look at the testimony of a lot of the top officials in the MKUltra project, a lot of them like acknowledge these sorts of norms of consent and things of that sort, but they were worried about existential threats. They were worried that the Soviets, for instance, that was the the heart of the Cold War. So they worried the Soviets would gain this kind of mind control weaponry.
00:33:48
Speaker
um And they would use it against Americans.
Ethical Norms in Emergencies Discussion
00:33:50
Speaker
And so the the project was to kind of deal with these kinds of potential existential threats. So we we're wondering if, like, in the research ethics literature or in the research ethics discussions in general, um is there an ever any discussion of this kind of situation where there's like an existential threats and whether these kinds of...
00:34:11
Speaker
common sense, ethical norms and principles can ever be overridden or whether there's certain situations that would justify, you know, not not taking into account these kinds of norms.
00:34:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think people do allow. So the the really succinct answer is, yes, there are cases of genuine existential threats or emergencies where we might relax some of these ethical requirements on research. But also it seems implausible to me, not that you were suggesting otherwise, that the MKUltra experiments fit this bar.
00:34:43
Speaker
um So, you know, the the worry is if you hold too fast to ethics research requirements, especially in the form of ah sort of looking for alternative forms of research that you might not have time to investigate um or, you know, making sure that everything reaches the highest sort of standard, the worry is that you might be fetishizing these sorts of requirements and they won't really matter, you know, if we're wiped out or something along those lines.
00:35:10
Speaker
But I mean, and sometimes people talk about this in terms of either sort of what's sometimes called the precautionary principle or the emergency principle, where the thought is ordinary requirements of being able to provide evidence about the efficacy might not be as demanding given the severity of the threat. So, for instance, you saw, you know, a lot of people were justifying COVID-19 lockdowns in this kind of way, where they said, look, we have these models. This is what they say will happen. This evidence is not the best evidence available. We have to make a bunch of assumptions about the R-naught, how viral the COVID-19 is, what its lethality rate is, things like that. We have to make all these assumptions. But this is the best evidence we have. And if we don't act in a reasonably quick manner, then we should worry that there'll be such a bad outbreak that we, you know, there's sort of a short window for really decisive action. And then we we should worry that we don't have good enough evidence. We don't have time to do the research in that window of action. and So that was kind of a pretty broadly employed line of reasoning for kind of lowering evidentiary standards for something like COVID-19.
Importance of Scientific Methodology in Research
00:36:12
Speaker
I mean, I'm skeptical that MKUltra satisfies that kind of threshold, both because, I mean, the threat is kind of nebulous. It's like, well, we think that... The Soviets are working on this mind control technology. And and then what did the US do? I mean, there was lots of just like giving people drugs without really having a clear sense of what the expected outcome would be. So it wasn't like they had a clear view of what the the benefits of the research would be. They bypassed consent in all these ways that was you know not just bad for the patient, but also like it wasn't conducive to good science. So I'm pretty skeptical. And also the there there wasn't like this imminent...
00:36:54
Speaker
sort of threat in the way that you might have in, say, like something like COVID-19 or um we could imagine other kinds of contexts, right? The threat was kind of diffuse and they're doing stuff over there in the Soviet Union. So it's very implausible to me that the kinds of triggering conditions for the emergency relaxation of standard norms were in fact satisfied.
00:37:15
Speaker
Yeah, so what you ah something you said just now reminded me of something I read just this morning. so I was looking at um one of the Senate committee reports on MKUltra. In 1977, the Senate did a kind of investigation. They published a report, and you could just read it on the government website right now. at the beginning of the document, they they mentioned that these studies weren't really even very scientific or the methodology is very bad. They're not really following up on the patients. It's not like a controlled experiment. It's all very, very ah informal. And so that, I think, suggests another kind of...
00:37:49
Speaker
feature of that's relevant to research ethics is that the scientific study be done well or the methodology should be good, especially if people are being put at risk to some degree for gaining knowledge or you want good science. Part of good ethics is a good science. yeah That's absolutely right. I mean, some of this gets back to the beneficence kind of principle that I was talking about before. There needs to be expected benefit.
00:38:12
Speaker
And sometimes people talk about this benefit being somehow proportional to the kinds of risks or harms that the patient or the research subject is is undergoing. So if you know we have very little reason to think that the scientific research will give us very much useful information, then it's sort of not condoned as ah as ethical research given the the risks relative to the harm. So MKUltra, it's like, yeah, huge risks being imposed, not clear what the payoff was. ah So that's that's doing pretty badly in terms of business as well as the sort of autonomy requirement I was talking about. And also, the just i forgot to mention this, the justice component. I mean, my understanding is that MKUltra targeted prisoners, people with psychiatric illnesses, people who were quarantined quite vulnerable and couldn't really protest. So, I mean, in terms of all three of those principles I was mentioning before, respect for autonomy, beneficence, and justice, it does pretty terribly across all three dimensions.
00:39:08
Speaker
Yeah, the history here is really interesting. I mean, it seems like this just sort of follows like several decades of government like research, I put that in air quotes, being like really kind of weird and shoddy. Like during the second world war, there was all this research on how to play like mind games with the Japanese by like making things that looked like folk symbols of bad omens. to me It was very, very weird. Yeah, um so it does seem like we didn't really know how to, like, kind of approach these kinds of threats. But so related to this previous question, um something interesting about the MKUltra program specifically is that even, like... the people in charge, its overseers thought they they knew, they acknowledged that a lot of these subprojects ah were illegal or not only illegal, but also deeply immoral, but it kind of didn't seem to bother them or it didn't, it it seemed like they thought that didn't really matter.
00:40:13
Speaker
It was like ethical considerations weren't relevant in these matters of extreme national security issues or international relations. So this kind of view that morality is out of place in the realm of politics, we typically associate that with the philosophy of Nicola Machiavelli.
00:40:31
Speaker
um And we call that political realism. So would you be willing to discuss this idea of political realism for our listeners? How does this current of political thinking interact with human subjects research ethics?
00:40:45
Speaker
Yeah. So I think it might be useful to distinguish two ways the term political realism gets used. So one is in the context of international relations and is used by sort of political scientists. And the thought there is basically this sort of real politic view about how international relationships actually operate. So notably, that's sort of a descriptive, this is a descriptive claim. um when we talk about realism in the international relations context. So the thought something like, there's no you know world state to keep everybody in line. And so each state is going to have these interests in preserving their security and survival and amassing power and sort of predicts that states won't act that consistently on things like protecting human rights or these sort of higher ethical ideals. Now, realism, contemporary political philosophy, I think that's a bit more of the strain that you're
00:41:37
Speaker
you're drawing on when you invoke people like Machiavelli. So some contemporary political philosophers like Bernard, well, read relatively recent philosophers like Bernard Williams and Raymond Goise, they argue that we shouldn't think of political philosophy as just applying norms of ordinary interpersonal morality to political institutions. So they're kind of common Foyle, when making this argument, is the really influential political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls basically, you know, ah drawing on this idea of respect for persons as free and equal, spells out what a just society would look like, and he characterizes this for like a very under under ideal conditions where everybody obeyed the law and there are these problems that are sort of idealized away. He's trying to identify basically what is justice for the perfect society look like. And the realists say that's not the right way to approach political philosophy. And they focus on
00:42:29
Speaker
you know They say that there are sort of distinctive questions ah about political power that relate to coercion or conflict or legitimacy when it's being contested, and that we shouldn't draw on our standard moral philosophy repertoire when trying to develop good answers to those kinds of questions. That's a sort of mistake to treat politics as just interpersonal morality on a larger sort of scale.
00:42:55
Speaker
Now, to be clear, I mean, I don't think that even the realists like Williams and Goiz, I don't think they think that morality disappears in politics. It's just that there's sort of a somewhat different set of norms and we shouldn't expect the tools of moral philosophy to help us solve all the problems that we are trying to solve when it comes to political philosophy.
00:43:15
Speaker
i e I think that even for somebody who takes a political realist kind of point of view, either internationally or domestically, it's a it's a it take a hop, skip and a leap to or whatever the phrase is to get to the idea that we can really relax research ethics standards in the way ah that they were during MKUltra. Part of that's because, I mean, yes, I mean, just even if we think that ordinary moral norms don't necessarily apply in all contexts of politics, I mean, research ethics was designed for the research context. It's not just the political context. And so it's not as though the sort of political values that we
00:43:53
Speaker
might need to care about when thinking about political morality. It's not as though those just invade every aspect of our life and swamp or override all the other kinds of norms, including research norms.
00:44:04
Speaker
The other thing is, I mean, as we sort of talked about, I mean, it's not even clear that there's like some sort of strategic advantage to suspending all these kinds of ordinary research norms. So, I mean, ah experimenting on your own population in unethical ways creates a legitimacy crisis rather than preventing ah one, um for instance.
00:44:26
Speaker
So I think, you know realism is this view that might seem to be a natural bedfellow of this kind of stuff that the defenders of MKUltra were saying at the time. i I'm, again, kind of skeptical that it's going to go very far in vindicating their approach to those experiments.
00:44:42
Speaker
Yeah, because I guess even like your most hard willed realist is going to have they they have to have some idea of and of an end toward which the norms governing politics is aimed. And those ends are probably going to be undermined by things like massive public distrust of public health measures and stuff like that.
00:45:00
Speaker
I would notably did happen, I think, in in the aftermath of MKUltra, right? So the 70s, there's a huge, huge outcry about this. Yeah, right. So, yeah, if your goals are stability and order, then that's going to be a problem, right?
00:45:12
Speaker
Yeah. So you mentioned in your um your previous answer, the idea of like legitimacy, that suspending research ethics norms could undermine legitacy legitimacy of the state. and that's something a political realist should care about. ah So that's um a nice segue into our next question, because a lot of your ah your work what you're working on now it concerns the idea of political legitimacy. So when I think of political legitimacy, I think of you know the idea of publicity, um especially if you're talking about democratic ideals. And in a democracy, we're entitled to know what goes on and have our interests taken into account. So I think here of Elizabeth Anderson's distinction between private government and public government. The private government is the thing where your interests aren't taken into account, you're not entitled to know anything about what's going on. She argues the workplace is a kind of private government until the advent of democratic institutions. The state was a kind of private government, the government of the monarch. So it seems like, yeah, legitimacy goes hand in hand with publicity. We we should know what's going on in our society. It seemed like for the MKUltra thing, a lot of people were bothered by the nature of the experiments. They were unethical. They were, in many cases, gruesome and bizarre. But also just seemed like people were bothered by the secrecy of the whole thing. they had no idea what was going on. um Now, it is common sense to think that we don't we don't need to and but and probably shouldn't know everything that our government's up to for reasons of national security. But this raises an important philosophical question that's politically relevant. ah How much privacy is consistent with state or political legitimacy? What can the state keep from us and it still be a kind of legitimate state? And and does it there come a point at which so much secrecy leads to the state being illegitimate?
00:46:58
Speaker
Obviously, that's a very complicated and difficult question. But do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. So, I mean, the way I understand legitimacy is so taking a step back. Legitimacy just involves like basically the right to govern. That's the standard way of understanding it. And so the most prominent, so that's what you might call the concept of legitimacy. The most prominent conceptions of legitimacy, the most popular ones tend to say something about democracy. where democracy is understood in terms of authorization by people and accountability to people who are being governed. So this is sort of what you were getting at with the discussion about interest being taken into account and tracked and things like that.
Legitimacy and Secrecy in Governments
00:47:38
Speaker
So, I mean, i yeah, I guess, I mean, I can't say that much at that. I mean, that's such an abstract question. It's a great question, but I can't say that much about
00:47:49
Speaker
how much secrecy is allowed. i mean, a lot's going to depend on the how you spell the particulars of your preferred conception of legitimacy. So if you say that, you know, if you take a radical view where legitimacy is really just about consent and so the public needs to be informed about everything the state's doing, um you could take that kind of view that would seem to have relatively implausible implications for the kinds of cases that you were mentioning where, you know,
00:48:16
Speaker
we need to keep some information secret for purposes of national security. We can't let adversaries know where we're going to launch attacks. And in criminal like investigations, it might be that we need to keep the identities of vulnerable people or defendants secret from the rest of the population. So there are all these contexts where it seems like secrecy seems appropriate, but then the degree to which you're going to think that secrecy is appropriate. it's going to depend on the particulars of your theory. So if you think, for instance, at the heart of ensuring that a government's that the sort of cre key criterion of legitimacy, or one of them is something like accountability, perhaps you could say, well, secrecy is fine so long as there's accountability. And so, for instance, we can keep certain things secret, but as soon as it's safe to disclose, these things should be disclosed publicly.
00:49:04
Speaker
or you know There can be other kinds of mechanisms for holding these kinds of decision makers accountable, even if we have to maintain a certain amount of secrecy. and We can't publicize everything.
00:49:16
Speaker
But I mean, if you took you know ah a purely sort of instrumentalist view, which is out there where it's like, well, yeah, we we want democracy because democracy tends to avoid famines and you know, it's the the best except for all the, it's the worst except for all the other systems of government that have been tried, but it just tends to produce good results, then there's nothing that special about secrecy on that kind of view. So the short answer is it depends on how exactly you spell out what it takes for a government to be legitimate. And on some conceptions, secrecy will be less objectionable and on others, it it'll be more objectionable.
00:49:51
Speaker
Okay, so kind of panning out now to a more broader picture and maybe a more contemporary focus, because it seems like these days trust in public health agencies and other public institutions is at this kind of all-time low. I'm pretty sure that we have data on that. it's's It's pretty bad, right? Yeah.
00:50:11
Speaker
So those who are skeptical of or cynical about these institutions, they they like to point to real incidences like MKUltra or what you brought up earlier, the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, um where poor black sharecroppers were experimented on without their knowledge or consent. So...
00:50:31
Speaker
How should a reasonable person think about these institutions, given that this secretive abuse has happened several times in our country's even recent history? um do you have any thoughts about maybe how we could restore trust in public health ah or just maybe how the public ought to think about public health measures given this history?
00:50:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is ah another great, really complicated question. um So one distinction that I think is worth, that that a lot of bioethicists like to draw is between trust and trustworthiness. And so trust is an attitude that people can have or not have. And it can be something that officials are trying to inculcate in the population. Trustworthiness is the quality of institutions that makes it fitting or appropriate to trust those institutions. And so, you know, I think what you're one way of putting what you're asking about is how can we assess whether institutions are trustworthy? Can institutions be trustworthy after having abused trust in the past?
00:51:34
Speaker
um I mean, I you know, I think it's interesting. You're you're mentioning things like Tuskegee as a cause of public distrust. I mean, there's also, you know all these much more recent kinds of causes that have to do with political polarization or Views that like pharacical pharmaceutical companies have captured public health, things along those lines, too. And I mean, I guess the those short answer I'd give is you can't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
00:52:03
Speaker
I mean, these you know institutions are going to make
Assessing Institutional Trustworthiness
00:52:06
Speaker
mistakes. In some cases, they're going to commit like grievous errors or you know moral wrongs, even though you know, when they should know better, not just mistakes. So the Tuskegee syphilis experiment would be one example of that.
00:52:18
Speaker
But if we want to reap the benefits of government and big institutions like public health institutions, and I think as we're watching... don't want to get too political, but as those institutions are becoming less trusted, we're seeing lots of costs as a consequence of that. There has to be some sort of way to sort of build back trust or to view institutions as trustworthy, even when they've erred committed wrongs in the past. So one kind of thing you could look into is, you know, whether the institution has...
00:52:52
Speaker
taken steps to prevent similar misconduct in the future. So I mentioned the Belmont Report at the outset that sort of formulates the core tenets of research ethics that are still quite influential today. That was convened in response to Tuskegee um and other kinds of ah research malpractice, for lack of a better term.
00:53:12
Speaker
So things like that, um I mean, there is a short-term cost for sure, in terms of admitting to past wrongdoing in that it gives people more reasons to distrust. But I think, I mean, this goes back, I guess, to the previous question.
00:53:28
Speaker
Some degree of transparency to me seems to be probably instrumentally the best route to ensuring that you have trust in the long term, because if you're covering stuff up, it has a way of getting out and You know, if you if you don't own up to your mistakes, then you won't be viewed as trustworthy. That's sort of the hopeful version of this. The less hopeful version is, i e I mean, right now I'm kind of I guess I'm a little bit pessimistic about how much people will trust in these public institutions when we live in a climate as polarized as ours So it sort of seems like we've gotten stuck in this cycle where when one party controls public health, you know, members of that party trust.
00:54:06
Speaker
its members trust those institutions. And then when the other you know party gets in power, its members trust those institutions. And when you're out of power, you completely distrust those institutions. And that's not to say that you know public health is like equally good on either administration. It just seems to be a product also of polarization. And that seems really bad for trust and trustworthiness of these kinds of institutions.
00:54:30
Speaker
Yeah, i I was thinking about this question earlier, um where like, I guess like how the how our public health situation functions is it it makes this trust situation difficult because...
00:54:46
Speaker
In a normal situation, like a normal relationship maybe between two people where someone's lost trust in that relationship, the other person can maybe work to build that trust back. But in public health situations, you need the public to continue trusting behavioralistically, continue kind of like generally complying with these measures for it to function at all. And I think that I guess that just makes it into one really big collective action problem. um And I unfortunately feel similarly kind of pessimistic. But I think this was a really, really great discussion. and Do you have any follow? Do you have any follow ups?
00:55:23
Speaker
um Yeah, I guess it's kind of related to you know what we should learn, I guess, about what what what we should take away from the
MKUltra as a Historical Lesson
00:55:31
Speaker
MKUltra experiment. right so we don't So it happened. right There was one ah a really an instance of a real conspiracy. right There was a group of shadowy figures behind the scenes, concealing their actions, trying to- Pushing people out. trying try put Potentially pushing people out windows hurting and up to nefarious stuff, right? So it really did happen. So what should we take away from this? It was just a one-off instance. We don't want to say that we should never trust um you the government. um But you know it did happen. So what's the what what should we draw from this? What sort of lesson should we draw? Some people still think MKUltra is going on, like Britney Spears' is erratic behavior some people attribute to MKUltra. So I don't think we want to go down that road. But also, we don't want to just completely sweep it under the rug. Well, that just happened back then, and that was just it. And we're good now.
00:56:13
Speaker
right I don't know. that's That's the challenge. kind of the and more of an epistemological challenge, I guess, or epistemological thing. Yeah. Yeah. um Again, really quickly. I'm not sure it's really a question. Just sort of those are my thoughts. you just you i mean you You're just reflecting on the. Yeah, like because we want to say like, no, we shouldn't. We shouldn't believe that Britney Spears is in MKUltra. But like, why? What's the reason for that? Since we already have this evidence that that kind of thing happened previously. Has happened.
00:56:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I you know, it's funny you're saying this because I got into an argument with a relative the other week who was espousing certain I won't mention the ones that are there, but certain conspiracy theories. And I was kind of like, if you start going in, I mean, she was in her defense was, look, the government's lied to us before. And, you know, she was pointing to some recent conspiracy theory and saying something X was a false flag.
00:57:06
Speaker
And ah my wife was like, so do you think Pearl Harbor was the false flag? Do you think all of these i mean, how how deep does it go? And so there's sort of this tension on the one hand between being too credulous of a government that we know doesn't always act in our best interests and, you know, is subject to all kinds of bad incentives and has done bad things. But on the other hand, if you take that as the basis for doing your own research and holding your own research to really low standards,
00:57:33
Speaker
that's not really epistemically defensible either. i mean, I think this is you know getting into really interesting issues of social epistemology and questions about when it's appropriate to defer and when it's appropriate to treat somebody as having authority epistemic authority on certain topics and how sort of past misconduct by institutions. I mean, you you were bringing up, me again, the the sort of parallel with the interpersonal relationship.
00:58:00
Speaker
um I mean, it's a lot more complicated when an institution where it's like nobody who was running Tuskegee is part of the government in any way, shape or form before. So do we attribute, you know, do we think that the institution is the same one as it was in the past? Should we expect it to behave in similar ways? I mean, these are all kind of complicated questions about trust of institutions specifically. And but also just sort of, yeah, social epistemology, trust more generally. And I mean, I guess I'm kind of like, not politically conservative, but sort of conservative in this way, where i'm like, we can't just give up on these institutions, because then we end up saying crazy things like, you know, Pearl Harbor was a false flag. And, you know, there are no, birds aren't real. And I mean, i you know, whatever the conspiracy theory is, ah we become too credulous about other stuff. So it's like, you don't want to be a sucker for believing the government. But it's also, you're a sucker if you believe that birds aren't real. So...
00:58:56
Speaker
Yeah, try to avoid being a sucker on either side. That's good advice. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like saying, oh, find the golden mean. It's like, okay, well, what does that actually look like? It's really hard. Thanks for the advice. I'll try. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like I've described success conditions, not a strategy, but.
00:59:17
Speaker
Awesome. Well, Justin, thank you so much for being here with us. We're really looking forward to reading um the stuff that you're going to be doing on um this topic of political legitimacy. And we will definitely link your research in the bibliography.
00:59:32
Speaker
Great. Thanks so much. Yeah, the question I found most interesting in that interview was a question three, the one about political realism, the idea that like ethical norms, maybe be it's not just the case that sometimes they should be suspended in the realms like national security, international relations. that Rather, the idea is like they don't even matter. that's that that they' It's wrong head to think they even belong in those sorts of those sorts of spheres. Like when you're doing politics,
01:00:02
Speaker
The goal is power and maybe maybe things like order and stability or something like that. And for some people that might sound incoherent. Like, obviously, if there are moral facts, they apply, you know, universally. But I think like this wouldn't have been a totally foreign concept maybe to even like some of the ancients. Right. Like you might think that ethics, broadly speaking, is just like what is right action. Right. Right.
01:00:26
Speaker
So you might think there's like an ethics of civic life and ethics of like home life and an ethics of war even. Right. And maybe those things are just like different. In the interview, I wanted to i forgot to mention some quotes from these folks where they sort of endorse this idea. So here here's a here's one of these. So this is from the former director of this of see the CIA, Richard Helms. So he was director during part of the MKUltra program. I think he was deputy director during the earlier part of it. And he said afterwards, after it had come to light what they had done, he said, I know there's been a great hoo-ha.
01:01:07
Speaker
and lawsuits and all kinds of jiggery pokery about whether this was done legally or illegally, morally or immorally, but it was established that that was a legitimate function of the agency to try to do this, and we went ahead and did it, right? That's ah an interesting thing to say. like It was established that it was legitimate function. like Legitimate in what sense? like Not morally legitimate, because he's contrasting this legitimacy with ah with morality. It's legitimate so like kind of political sense or something. Yeah, or procedure. I was going to I mean, like to me, that sounds not exactly the same, but like it's getting close to something like the Nuremberg defense. Yeah. Yeah. And Gottlieb said something similar in a deposition that something something like that, like national security just overrode um any of these sorts of qualms.
01:01:54
Speaker
Sure. Right. I mean, and I i do. I mean, like we spent a lot of time in the interview talking about this, but it's not, you know, having a set of moral norms or ethical rules to govern what you do still, you know, there's still going to be questions that arise if you think that you're facing an imminent existential threat. Yeah. so you know, i don't know. Hard to blame them for that in the abstract. I wish we had a CIA agent to interview. Yeah. That would be great. Hey, if any of our listeners work for the CIA and want to, we will talk about ethics and politics. We will do a follow up episode for you. Yeah.
01:02:31
Speaker
I thought Bernthi had a good point, though, that like political realism, like it's all about power. It's all about whatever. It's not necessarily a natural bedfellow with the MKUltra program because it did lead to instability, lack lack of trust in the government and all of that kind of thing. yeah It did seem kind of.
01:02:47
Speaker
to backfire, if your goal is just to win by any means necessary, it's not clear that doing this kind of stuff on unsuspecting American citizens is really the way it go anyway. right and I mean, I think honestly, this is the thing that confuses me the most about this project. It's not that... It's not the ethical violations of which there were many, but that's, you know, honestly, unfortunately, that's not that surprising. But it's just the weirdness and like ineffectiveness of it. yeah Like it's just very the the results was we didn't learn anything. We got no military advantage. And now everyone thinks we're creeps and doesn't trust us. Yeah.
01:03:29
Speaker
I was kind of reminded ah of the the last scene of Burn after reading after finishing this book. Oh, yeah. Where the guy's like, did we learn? Nothing. Don't do that again. Don't do that again. That gets into of what I was expressing not quite articulately at the end of the interview. Like, what should we take away from the fact that MKUltra happened? What should we learn from this? What lesson moral or epistemological should we draw? On the one hand, like, I don't want to be the kind of guy that just is like, don't trust the government about anything. On the other hand, i don't want to just think it was like a one off occurrence. like Oh, that happened. It's all good now.
Continued Relevance of MKUltra Lessons
01:04:08
Speaker
Right. yeah There were some reforms that were put into place. There were some executive orders that said, hey, you can't. experiments on American citizens in the context of the CIA without their consent. But it still happens. think in 2016, no, it was a little bit later than that. Anyway, Facebook got sued for running an experiment on its users. Do you remember this? Yeah. right um What they did was they randomly chose some users for the algorithms to show them mostly happy, uplifting, positive posts. And other users, their algorithms mostly showed them posts of their friends who were struggling or going through a hard time or whatever.
01:04:48
Speaker
And they tracked the effects this had on their Facebook use, the things they liked, the things they visited. And obviously nobody consented to this. yeah And they did. They got, I mean, they got sued, I think, for like barely anything compared to what they're worth. Right. they I mean, I'm sure they, I'm sure it ended up being worth it for them, even though they still got sued. But anyway, the point is, this still happens. Yeah, I think that executive order I mentioned, I think, only concerned you know government action or whatever. Right, right. Although, you know, Facebook is so large that it's like basically the government at this point meta, you know. But but right. So this kind of thing still happens. People are still experiments done without their consent. Yeah. So we what we shouldn't learn from it is that it doesn't or can't happen again. yeah um But I mean, you're right. I think this, you know, kind of crawling into ah a hole in the ground and being like, you know, don't tread on me or whatever. Bernstein had a good a good line in that interview. You don't want you don't want to, was it? Like, you don't want to be a sucker for the government, but you also want to be a sucker for the people that say birds aren't real or something like
Balancing Skepticism and Avoiding Conspiracy Theories
01:05:51
Speaker
that. was That was good. Yeah. Yeah. Right. No, I mean, I think that's right. and it's a and It's a tough question. And I think it's ah a question that we don't, I don't know, don't want to speak for you. It's a question I do not have an answer for at the time.
01:06:06
Speaker
I just want to know what the CIA is up to now. You know, i guess that's what I'm thinking about. What are they doing? Some people think, as I mentioned in the interview, some people think that Britney Spears is being controlled by MKUltra. It's still around, you know, and and that's why she's acting so weird. I mean, given the kinds of projects that they have historically chosen to engage in, it wouldn't surprise me. They're just like drugging Britney Spears and like making fake birds.
01:06:29
Speaker
That's what they're doing now. Okay. I do think that this serves as a good cautionary tale for why arms racing is a bad idea.
01:06:41
Speaker
Because we don't know what we're doing and we're probably not going to gain the upper hand trying to do it. This plug for Megan's anti-AI crusade, in case you weren't aware. This is just, it's never worked out well, though. Think about it. ah new It caused nuclear proliferation. it caused us to put LSD in poor people's coffee. Yeah, Bernthi mentioned this in the interview, too. the The threat wasn't really imminent. They're just like, we think they might have it. Like, it wasn't.
01:07:08
Speaker
It never though. There's no, well, at least when it comes to the nukes, that that the literal arms race, like, we did know the Soviets had nukes. I get it. Kind of. yeah Yeah.
01:07:20
Speaker
We don't know what China's up to when it comes to generative AI. So maybe that situation is more similar to the MKUltra situation. But yeah, point taken. Well, that's all we've got for you for this episode.
01:07:32
Speaker
Thanks for joining us and make sure to cover your drink. That's what I was going to say. Really? Yep, I really was.