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So I'm playing historian. Emphasis on "playing", since I'm just retracing the steps from other people's work. Still it's pretty fun to look up the primary sources, particularly when they're mysteriously missing from internet archives. A few weeks ago I posted a hypothetical about trying to explain the magnitude of current Culture War issues, to someone in the far future, here I'm going in the opposite direction. This article is a small sample of a larger episode of decently-sized Culture War. It happened recently enough, that it's pretty easy to find sources on it, but since it hasn't really been preserved in collective memory, it's hard to judge how big it was. Big enough for a cover article of Life magazine, I guess, but it has only a paragraph on Wikipedia (oh wait, here's a few more), and much like in my hypothetical I find the description oddly terse. At least someone on wiki seems to think Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin deserve to have their own pages, but for some reason no one got around to writing them.
It's pretty wild to read stuff from the 70's, it's like going into some sort of Mirror Universe. As someone very anti-woke, I'm tempted to see the half-postmodernist half-marxist ideas pushed by our elites as the root of all evil. If only we could move in a more rational direction, I often think, we could actually solve the problems that afflict our society. And then I look at how people used to talk about social problems 50 years ago, and the vibes I'm getting are basically rationalist, and I hate it. Yes, let's start solving social problems by dicking around in people's brains, what could possibly go wrong? All of this run by the same NYT-Informational Complex that promotes wokeness nowadays. I'm slowly starting to come to the conclusion that all these ideological fights are pointless. Some people talk about pendulums swinging, I'm starting to see it as evil always finding a way to twist any idea to it's ends.
Indeed, I found this bit particularly dystopian:
"Improve wages and equality so large sections of the underclass don't live in slums? Nah, just give the high agency ones psychosurgery, that'll stop the violent riots, which is the only problem we actually care about."
There was an ancient comment I still remember from the Old Place, about how with improving AI military drones, it will eventually be possible for the neo-feudal corporate-ocracy CEOs to personally oppress 400 million serfs in violent despotism, no coup-gestating delegation of power to the military needed when you're the man with the password. Moldbug's blockchain-keyed guns are slightly more plausible - there the regime needs to be more than literally one man but there can be no challenge from a military either when only the loyalist's guns work. Add to that anti-violence brain surgery on your chattel slaves, and the technology of oppression is looking less and less sci-fi by the day.
And just in case someone is tempted to think "come on, this is just a throwaway line from a journalist musing about the nature of violence", here's a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association from doctors Ervin, Mark, and Sweet where they elaborate on that line of thought, although they are also more careful to hedge with "we totally don't want to minimize the social factors".
That letter is actually perfectly reasonable. Half of it isn't even about riots, but about studies conducted on convicted murderers in other countries.
I'd be interested in finding out whether anything came out of that line of research.
Sweet! I had the feeling someone on the Motte might want to defend the whole thing.
It's written in a reasonable tone, but that doesn't make the idea itself reasonable. I'd say trying to solve the problem of violence by messing around in people's heads is one of the most horrifying things you could come up with.
I'll be posting more about it in the future, as I make my way through the sources. The short answer is yes, and it's not very pretty. It hasn't struck you, that for some reason we are not routinely performing psychosurgery on violent criminals more than 50 years after the letter was published?
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Was this the inspiration for Crichton's The Terminal Man? I think that novel was essentially a commentary on the ethics and consequences of trying to "fix" the psychotic with these kinds of techniques.
I think so. I don't have my notes right now, but there was a specific case of "Leonard K." who was a patient in the Boston clinic, and got screwed over pretty badly. I saw some comparisons between him and the Terminal Man, although reality was a lot less romantic, and possibly more horrifying, since in the end there was little evidence of him being psychotic or a danger to anyone.
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