Not much is said in this story, but the explicit goal of the CIA and Ewen Cameron was to completely erase minds ("de-patterning") so they could be built back up

Not much is said in this story, but the explicit goal of the CIA and Ewen Cameron was to completely erase minds ("de-patterning") so they could be built back up again. It was scientific quackery that was part of the trendy fascination with psychedelics and the propagandistic idea that POWs in the East were being "brainwashed" into thinking that US imperialism was bad, rather than simply being convinced. It's a little unfair to say that they were all convinced; if you're held prisoner and you're rewarded for agreement, maybe that's the Skinnerian reinforcement you need to change your mind. This mode of thought would reach its peak in the SERE program, and the black sites and torture chambers of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. But the interesting part that I wanted to mention is that when people started investigating Cameron seriously, and his ties to the CIA (and pretending they didn't know anything), he suddenly burned all of his records, retired and immediately took a trip into the mountains with his son where he died of a "heart attack" or after falling off a cliff - I get inconsistent answers on this. I almost think all of the hysterical, lurid coverage, and the connection made to the Unibomber (who described his experience as a bit insightful, but obvious iirc, and wasn't traumatized at all) aims to drive all of the actual primary source documents into the shadows. It's painful to find the papers that he published (although I've been able to find a couple dozen over time), his assistants and coworkers have written about what they saw, but all we get is tabloid drama from the mainstream press. The fact that the CIA was actively trying to empty people's brains and fill them up with new things is interesting. Cameron was a quack, but a kind of quackery that aroused the US government, and other governments and universities that worked with it. It should be horrifying. Instead, the concept of brainwashing is worming its way back into our legal system, and simultaneously the effort to brainwash is coming back into vogue with a political elite that hates democracy. There are a lot of defensive but revealing responses to a recent book on him by people who worked with him at https://inhn.org/inhn-projects/perspectives/thomas-a-ban-the-ewen-cameron-story https://inhn.org/inhn-projects/perspectives/thomas-a-ban-the... but they are a little difficult to get to (the menu is broken for me) without going through the sitemap. The linked page is actually the entry point for a bunch of subpages.