Breaking a Man

The following was culled from various sources from the Internet, although the primary source is The Atlantic’s series. 

At the start of the Cold War, Henry Alexander Murray developed a personality profiling test to crack Soviet spies with psychological warfare and select which US spies are ready to be sent out into the field.  As part of Project MK Ultra, he began experimenting on Harvard sophomores.  He set one student as the control, after he proved to be a completely predictable conformist, and named him “Lawful”.  The latter half of the experiment involved having the student prepare an essay on his core beliefs as a person for a friendly debate. 

Instead, Murray had an aggressive interrogator come in and basically tear his beliefs to pieces, mocking everything he stood for, and systematically picking apart every line in the essay to see what it took to get him to react.  But he did not, it just broke him, made him into a mess of a person and left him having to pull his whole life back together again.  He graduated, but then turned in his degree only a couple years later, and moved to the woods where he lived for decades. 

In all that time, he kept writing his essay.  And slowly, he became so sure of his beliefs, so convinced that they were right, that he thought that if the nation did not read it, we would be irreparably lost as a society.  So, he set out to make sure that everyone heard what he had to say, and sure enough, Lawful’s “Industrial Society & Its Future” has become one of the most well-known essays written in the last century.  In fact, many of us have probably read some of it, although, we probably know it better as “The Unabomber Manifesto.”  Lawful is Theodore John Kaczynski.  When you break a man, there are consequences.