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Notes -
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.
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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