By Ice Nine
I’ve speculated that Keith Raniere got the idea for ‘Human Fright Experiments’ from the life story of none other than Theodore Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber.
We know Keith is lazier than hell and hasn’t come up with an original thought in his life.
Kaczynski was a mathematical prodigy, a legitimate genius. He entered Harvard in 1958 at age 16 and within a year, was subject to dangerous brain study experiments. He was part of a study group of 22 students and endured torturous human experimentation for three years.
These are known as the Murray Experiments and were conducted by his professors at Harvard; the people a 16-year-old boy is supposed to trust. No doubt dangerous for a teenager that was far away from parent supervision. Kaczynski would later describe this as “the worst experience” of his life.
Read this and ask yourself if any of this sounds familiar (from the history.com link …
“…each of the students was seated in front of bright lights, wired to electrodes and subjected to what Murray himself described as “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” interrogations, during which members of his research team would attack the student subjects’ ideals and beliefs.
“Subjects were incompletely informed about the nature of the experiment [and] were tricked, or coerced, into remaining in the experiment. Given that the procedures were designed to ‘break’ enemy agents and render them so damaged that they would be operationally useless, it is reasonable to expect that they would have the same consequences for vulnerable young people who did not have specialized training to resist interrogation.”
“We were led into the room with bright lights, very bright,” one of them, code-named Cringle, recalled afterward. “[I] had a sensation somewhat akin to someone being strapped on the electric chair with these electrodes … I really started getting hit real hard … Wham, wham, wham! And me getting hotter and more irritated and my heartbeat going up … and sweating terribly …”
While it isn’t proven this had anything to do with Kaczynski’s later problems with schizophrenia, I think it is reasonable to conclude that it might have. It certainly didn’t do him any good.
Considering Keith’s proximity to Harvard, his interest in math and science, and the fact Keith is a dangerous sociopath like Kaczynski, I’ve always speculated the Human Fright Experiments were a derivation of that.
“Kaczynski would be recruited to take part in a three-year-long, potentially abusive psychological experiment.” Potentially abusive?
And the American Psychological Association has a long history of sadists protected by the APA – no consequences. The same APA endorses the psychologists who traffic our children – steal children from healthy parents and move them to abusive parents in exchange for money. Reporting anything to the APA is a joke. Long history of no oversight.
Thanks for writing this story. Glad Raniere is caught but narcissists and sadists are in power everywhere. Savages hiding behind a gavel, or Ivy League status, boldly abuse our youth – endorsed by “experts”. Forever changing who they were to be – and zero accountability. Counter to all the propaganda out there. Harsh reality. Is anything true?
Not to mention that Kaczynski’s brother, David — who turned him in — and momma Kaczynski lived just outside of the Clifton Park area.
Como se dice. AS has eggy on his facey?
Keith played the long game on almost everything and on almost everybody. Each module was designed to plant seeds. The biggest example is how he slowly got people to think that pain and collateral were good for them.
Was this fright experiment (with movie clips and one horrific outlier), a prelude to bigger plans? I think so.
I’m with you on all of that Nutjob until we get to the part about a “prelude bigger plans’. I think he was just being a dick.
“Considering Keith’s proximity to Harvard…”
What proximity? Raniere was in upstate NY. He practically never left, just one of the many weird peculiarities of his twisted personality. He seemed reluctant to leave his comfort zone of semi-rural suburban backwaters in the Albany region where he was spawned. Culturally that’s about as far as the moon from cosmopolitan Harvard.
Harvard is an Ivy League university with an international reputation. Raniere went to a fourth-rate local college where he barely managed to complete the undergraduate program. I don’t see where he had any particular interest in science or math. He pretended to, trying to impress his fool followers. He feigned expertise in a lot of things, music, acting, judo, horse jumping, philosophy, Latin, you name it.
Raniere was a bullshit artist with a little knowledge about a lot of things, all of it for show. A braggart. He was pretty much the opposite of an intellectual.
He likely got the idea for the fright experiments (if it was his idea) from the Evil Doctor trope from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Batman’s Arkham Asylum. That’s more his speed.