Psyops, cults, late-stage capitalist nihilism, & using chaos to sabotage revolution

“In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”

This speech from Tyler Durden in Fight Club is an increasingly relevant example of life imitating art. Or rather, if we examine it more closely, art imitating life. 

Fight Club is a commentary on a series of social phenomena, phenomena which have two things in common: they’re aggressively nihilistic enough to embrace the kind of apocalyptic vision Durden describes, and they’re backed by the forces of governmental psychological warfare. Whether these strains are defined by adventurist violence, ahistorical narratives about the nature of class conflict, or genocidal “solutions” to the ecological crisis, they all exist to divert radicals away from dialectical and historical materialism. They merely react to our conditions, instead of properly studying them and finding coherent solutions. Naturally, they’re the perfect ideological factions for the state’s forces of counterrevolutionary intrigue to exploit, or to directly cultivate.

Cultural manipulation towards apathy & nihilism in the face of capitalist evils

Durden’s rallying cry for the destruction of civilization is the essence of the character’s satirical nature. In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Durden represents the logical conclusion of ultraviolent and theoretically underdeveloped counterculture movements. This is apparent in how the novel describes the goal of Project Mayhem, the cult that Durden forms which seeks to realize societal collapse through a series of terrorist attacks: “It's Project Mayhem that's going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.”

Project Mayhem is closer to Pol Pot than to an effective revolutionary like Lenin. And the fact that Pol Pot was propped up by the U.S. empire reflects the strange connections that Project Mayhem has had with Washington-adjacent intelligence entities, which I’ll describe shortly. Practically, what this caricature of ultra-leftist radical movements entails is a humanitarian crisis of incomprehensible proportions. The collapse of all industry, markets, food distribution systems, and electrical grids would kill off hundreds of millions of people, especially in the current era where our capitalist crises have produced a pandemic and a climatic destabilization. Yet this kind of manufactured collapse is what’s being sold by the ruling class as the solution to these problems. 

The “Great Reset” that’s being marketed by historically neoliberal institutions like the World Economic Forum has the goal of fortifying capitalism by shrinking the zone within which civilization exists. This is apparent from the concept’s embrace of the pandemic’s Big Tech takeover, where tech oligarchs have further consolidated wealth as ever more of the population has fallen into destitution. The Biden administration has furthered this corporate coup, explicitly under the “Great Reset” banner.

The end outcome of this is an unprecedented societal unraveling. The system simply isn’t sustainable, especially in its new form of being more top-heavy and monopoly-ridden than ever. Given the assessments from scientists about how civilization will collapse within the next few decades if our current climate path continues, it seems increasingly plausible that the end goal of capitalism is something like what Durden describes. A scenario where society has utterly fallen apart, and where the few who’ve survived the calamity must eke out meager lives while the rich live in bunkers far away from the chaotic urban centers.

How do you sell a population on something like this? By romanticizing it. By fetishizing the ideas of destruction, mayhem, and deprivation. Which is where cultural psychological operations come in.

With how frequently the government makes changes to Hollywood films with the goal of influencing culture, it’s possible that Fight Club’s movie version is an example of this manipulation. The film’s producer was an asset for the Mossad, which gave an opening for this towering cultural facet to be influenced by the U.S.-adjacent network of spy agencies.

This was a film destined by its historical circumstances to become a cult classic, and perhaps something more. It came in the midst of a great era of cultural nihilism, where Generation X had embraced an attitude towards capitalism which was both cynical and eager to cling to capitalism’s individualistic mentality. The Soviet Union had just fallen, creating the sense that communism with its collectivist goals was not worth pursuing. It felt like capitalism, despite all of its absurdities, was here to stay no matter what, making the youth’s only recourse to embrace libertarian punk culture and irony. Fight Club spoke to this emptiness about the state of the world, and provided a (sarcastically intended) answer to it: hypermasculine violence with the goal of tearing everything down. That the film’s protagonist became disillusioned with this by the end made little difference as to whether many became disillusioned with it as well; Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden had made the case for it with an eloquence and charisma that inspired crowds of directionless young men. 

Whether or not the Mossad factored into the film’s changing the ending of the novel so that Project Mayhem wins, the outcome was a piece of satire that ironically undermined its own attempt at ridiculing anarcho-primitivist ultraviolence, and that therefore reinforced this nihilistic narrative. An infamous example of this is how the film inspired many teenagers to start fight clubs of their own, and to in some cases inflict violence on par with the shocking brutality depicted in the film.

Because Tyler and Project Mayhem succeeded in this version—a narrative aspect that’s been taken out in the film’s recent Chinese cut, to overblown controversy—our culture had in a small way been further primed for something like the “Great Reset.” For a transition into drastically lowered living standards that’s supposed to be about liberation and environmentalism, but that in practice amounts to eco-fascism. 

To realize this catastrophe, we don’t need to become theoretically deficient adventurists like the members of Project Mayhem. (Though as I’ll get to, the government spooks have cultivated examples of this.) We only need to embrace the idea that capitalism can’t be defeated, become apathetic, and passively let the ruling class destroy civilization. This idea is mainly communicated to us through all the manifestations of capitalist realism, the idea that capitalism is an immovable fixture. With this mindset, depictions of radicalism can easily be interpreted as warnings against the very idea of trying to resist capitalism, or as calls for pointless martyrdom. If you were to become inspired by something like Fight Club without studying the theory behind history’s actual anti-capitalist revolutions, you could easily internalize this doctrine of inaction, of behaving with ironic detachment from the evils of late-stage capitalism and watching the world burn. 

Worse yet, you could come to see random violence and action for action’s sake as viable routes towards revolution; this eagerness for militancy, without the theoretical knowledge required for building an actual vanguard party, is where ultra-leftist positions like the glorification of gangs as revolutionary vehicles come from. The same applies to the radical groups which reject dialectics in favor of individualistic ideologies, like anarchism. The assumption being that simply the presence of physical strength and organization is sufficient, regardless of the bourgeois class character of the organized crime entities, the dangers of action without sufficient theory, and other realities. All of these are things that an intelligence asset would certainly love you to believe in.

I’m aware that this view of the film version of Fight Club being a deliberate attempt to create controlled opposition, which I didn’t come up with, is a conspiracy theory. But there are far more sinister conspiracies in this vein that have been proven, and that confirm the idea of the ruling class seeking to divert radical sentiments towards nihilism, apathy, and fascism. 

Manufacturing real-life Project Mayhems

I say that our culture was primed for the “Great Reset” because self-defeating Hollywood satire about eco-fascism isn’t the main source for cultural nihilism within radical spheres. Palahniuk’s satirical vision itself likely took inspiration from the reactionary, ultra-leftist, and sometimes downright monstrous factions which the CIA has been creating within radical spaces since the social movements of the 60s.

Central to all of these instances of controlled opposition has been the negation of the lessons needed for building an actual revolutionary cadre. These being: that you need to approach revolution scientifically instead of dogmatically, that the historically proven route for defeating the bourgeoisie is to build a workers state, that violence must only be used according to what the given conditions mandate, and that the interests of the individual must be placed below the interests of the party. All of these realities are antithetical to the ahistorical and reactionary strains that the Feds have been nurturing within radical spheres throughout these decades.

The foundation of these strains was an effort by the Feds to co-opt the counterculture movement. To further its experiments in MKULTRA mind control, the CIA pushed psychedelics on the youth, recruiting academics like Timothy Leary to popularize these drugs. Suddenly the way to fight the system wasn’t to read Marx and Lenin, but to take LSD. This factored into the bourgeoisie’s weaponization of the lumpenproletariat against the class struggle; with drugs being narratively placed as the vehicles for revolutionary change, the gangs, with their propagations of the CIA’s drug trade, could be absolved of suspicion in the view of the ultra-leftists who share the gang fetishist stance. The other strains that this diversion of revolutionary consciousness contributed to were the sectarian left factions, the lone wolf adventurists, and the dark sides of the New Age movement.

To sow division within the left, and to inculcate leftists with pro-imperialist ideas, the Feds created astroturf anarchist, Maoist, and Trotskyist groups. They sought to discredit Marxism-Leninism by encouraging the anti-Sovietism of these factions, putting together publications which expressed supposedly earnest sentiments that attacked existing socialism from “socialist” perspectives. This was standard fare for COINTELPRO movement infiltration, and it’s more common today than ever. At worst, the sectarian factions nurtured by this process have turned into performatively violent adventurist groups, the kinds of movement wreckers that disrupt protests or assault activists they don’t like. But this pales in comparison to the numerous atrocities that have been committed by the worst of the members of the controlled opposition.

The Feds’ sabotage of revolutionary consciousness and demobilization of radical organizing has made society more susceptible to the truly sinister kinds of spook-created ideological strains. To infamous sources of violence and mayhem from recent U.S. history whose origins can be traced to the intelligence community.

One example is the Unabomber, who was the logical conclusion of the CIA’s campaign to manipulate people’s minds using drugs. Whether or not the CIA intended for Ted Kaczynski to commit the murders, or to write out the anarcho-primitivist manifesto that motivated them, he contributed to the fortification of capital by associating radicalism with violent crime and by creating ahistorical theory. The few who follow his doctrine—and let’s not fool ourselves, these people do exist—have embraced the idea that industry and technology must be sabotaged regardless of their class character. Socialist China’s utilization of industry to lift 800 million out of poverty means nothing in this worldview; technology still must be eliminated. And his Durden-esque crusade was motivated by horrors he had been subjected to as one of MKULTRA’s victims. As The Atlantic has written about Kaczynski’s trauma at the hands of Harvard, which roped him into one of the CIA’s mind control research programs:

The study was run by Dr. Henry Murray, who had each of his 22 subjects write an essay detailing their dreams and aspirations. The students were then taken to a room where electrodes were attached to them to monitor their vitals as they were subjected to extremely personal, stressful, and brutal critiques about the essays they had written. Following the psychological attacks, the participants were forced to watch the videos of themselves being verbally and psychologically assaulted multiple times. Kaczynski is claimed to have had the worst physiological reaction to being interrogated. These experiments, paired with his lack of social skills and memories of being bullied as a child, caused Kaczynski to suffer from horrible nightmares that eventually drove him to move into isolation outside Lincoln, Montana.

From Kaczynski’s point of view, killing people involved in tech was merely the proportionate response to the evils that had been done towards him in the name of science. His torture was proof in his mind that industrial civilization must be destroyed at all costs. This reasoning—that what society has done to you makes it justified for you to lash out against society—is remarkably similar to the rationale Charles Manson used for his own Fed-backed campaign of counterrevolutionary disruption.

“My father is the jailhouse,” said Manson in his Tate-LaBianca murder trial testimony. “My father is your system. . . I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you. I have eaten out of your garbage cans to stay out of jail. I have worn your second-hand clothes. . . I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you, and then I say to myself, You want to kill me? Ha! I'm already dead, have been all my life. I've spent twenty-three years in tombs that you built.” This attitude that he and his cult were merely standing up for themselves in the face of absurdity and injustice was also reflected in his statement “These children that come at you with knives, they’re your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.”

Given the help that the CIA and local law enforcement covertly gave him, you can argue he was implicitly including himself as one of these lost souls who were influenced by a sick system. And from a certain moral perspective, he was right. Throughout his two decades as a career criminal, Manson received help from law enforcement at crucial points. His parole wasn’t taken away despite multiple arrests; he attained an extraordinarily effective parole officer named Roger Smith, who also worked for one of MKULTRA’s front groups; despite being a parolee and not having a job, he had access to huge amounts of drugs and weapons, which law enforcement knew about; an unlikely series of supposed coincidences delayed law enforcement trying Manson and his followers after the murders; after he was arrested during the biggest police raid in the Los Angeles Police Department’s history at the time, he and his accomplices were shortly released; he was allowed to build his “Family,” and use intensive LSD dosages to alter the mindsets of his followers, during the decisive months preceding the murders—despite his group having been under surveillance during this time. 

In Tom O’Neill’s book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, these bizarre events get an explanation. As columnist Justin Ward summarizes a point where O’Neill got far down this research rabbit hole:

Manson is often portrayed as some kind of criminal mastermind, but he was illiterate until his late teens. How could someone like that bind followers so irreversibly to his will that they would murder on his command? The techniques he used were sophisticated, but Manson was not. Was it just a coincidence that he happened to frequent a clinic where the world’s foremost brainwashing expert [Jolyn West] had set up shop? It has long been the official stated position that the CIA’s LSD experiments were a failure, but what if they weren’t? O’Neill laid out his facts for Alan Scheflin, author of a book on the CIA’s secret experiments and asked him if this could be an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong. He replied: “No, an MKULTRA experiment gone right.”

This explains Manson’s allegation towards the ruling institutions that “you taught them.”

The idea that Manson received CIA training for his physiological priming of the murderers gains further credibility from all the other instances where spooks have used susceptible individuals, especially members of the criminal underworld, as lab rats for mind control innovations. The ruling class quite literally used the lumpenproles as weapons. The CIA’s front organization the National Institute for Mental Health funded Smith in his carrying out of the Amphetamine Research Project, which studied the impacts of speed on violence among street gangs. Whitey Bulger, the infamous killer who led the Winter Hill Gang in South Boston, could have his criminal activities be directly traced to his mental alterations at the hands of MKULTRA. 

Even when mind control via drugs hasn’t been provenly involved in these cases, the CIA has found subtler ways to exert influence to the consequence of creating monsters. The Finders, the pedophile cult that’s famously been exposed for having ties to the CIA, were enabled by a coverup similar to the deliberate negligence that law enforcement showed towards the Manson Family. And their leader managed to recruit members through the same pitch that Manson used: that this group offered people a New Age lifestyle, an isolated escape from capitalist society. 

The more you study the CIA’s social engineering, the more threads you see connect: the use of hippie spirituality as a replacement for revolutionary consciousness; the weaponization of drugs both as avenues for false consciousness and for literal cognitive control; the cultivation of gangs and gang violence at the same time that gangs became elevated as revolutionary saviors in the ultra-leftist consciousness. It all adds up to a psychological war waged by the U.S. government against its own people, tasked with undermining any potential revolutionary movement. And the prospect that mind control wasn’t truly a failure has alarming implications for how effective this war could be in the present, where class conflict is intensifying.

Psyops & the exploitation of late-stage capitalist social ills

“The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect,” so described the infamous CIA torturer Dan Mitrione about the methods he used in Uruguay. As the Unabomber proved, this philosophy of strategic torture can not just get information out of someone, but permanently change the information that takes up someone’s mind. Sydney Gottlieb, the man who orchestrated MKULTRA and a consequent recipient of scrutiny for creating Bulger, described the mind control aspect of this as such: “It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.”

Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, has recounted about the calculating brutality of this project:

The idea behind MK-Ultra was to find a substance that would allow the CIA to control people’s minds and manipulate them and make them do things that they would never otherwise do. And then, if you were lucky, just forget that they had ever done them. … [Gottlieb] decided that before you could find a way to insert a new mind into somebody’s brain, you first had to find a way to blast away the mind that was in there... He used every kind of drug combination he could imagine, plus sensory deprivation, hypnosis, electroshock and all kinds of other techniques, all aimed at trying to find a way to destroy a human mind. ... Behind him, he left a trail of wounded and dead in numbers that nobody can even estimate because records were all destroyed as Gottlieb left the CIA.

Such brutality can easily be replicated. Manson showed that when the spooks create controlled opposition through their promotions of ultra-left ideals, they’re capable of using even an uneducated person towards assimilating minds into a counterrevolutionary destabilization program. When Manson had the Family members thoroughly inebriated with LSD, he turned their perception of reality on its head, even when they weren’t high. He got them to accept any contradiction imaginable: life is death, killing is love, and so on. His frequent use of the standard cult practices, like routine violence, isolation, and false reciprocity (one manipulative statement of his was “I would die for you, would you do the same for me?”) imbued his mind control with an overwhelming dynamic of charisma.

With the deterioration of living standards during the neoliberal era, and the spiral into multiple worsening crises, our conditions are more ripe than ever for such manipulation techniques to spawn new Mansons, Kaczynskis, or Bulgers. These men were products of a machine that’s designed to crank out anti-social and violent minds. The prison-industrial complex does this by itself on a mass scale, perpetuating neoliberal policies that deepen poverty and create a school-to-incarceration pipeline. Which in turn creates new generations of gangs that can be weaponized. The capitalist state seeks to create ever more crime so that it can expand its carceral slave system, and justify its increasingly militarized police. In this environment, it feels like the true crime horrors I’ve mentioned could all repeat themselves at any moment.

The pandemic has opened up more possibilities for these kinds of reactionary murder sprees. Neo-Nazi forums are encouraging their users to use Covid-19 to kill minorities. Covid-19 conspiracies have exacerbated the right-wing extremist violence fuel of QAnon, predictably with either covert or overt help from the intelligence community. These developments foreshadow the horrors that are to come. Key to the perils we face is the destabilization that our society is experiencing, which as Maria Konnikova of Wired has assessed will lead to a new wave of extremist cults that “make QAnon look tame”:

Added to that instability is the sense of isolation we have all experienced in 2021, and extremism feeds on this kind of exclusion and loneliness. In the early days of this year, we have already seen people denied social contact because of lockdowns, and some have turned instead to the most improbable of alliances, looking for groups that will validate and channel their anger and frustration. This will continue to be the case. It’s difficult for the human mind to deal with uncertainty during the best of times. We crave certainty and hard numbers—not evolving knowledge and statistical caveats. And this is far from the best of times. “They are lying to us!” is the battle cry of conspiracy theorists. In 2022, this will grow in volume and lead to an explosion of extremist activity.

We’ve seen what this new generation of cults and vigilantes will look like. They’ll be modern versions of the Manson Family and the Unabomber, now able to exploit the worst pandemic of the century—whether this means taking advantage of people’s emotional turmoil at the madness that surrounds them, or weaponizing the virus itself to cause harm to their enemies. Doomsday cults have already been using Covid-19 as a recruiting tool, making the case that their isolated and ideologically rigid environments are the only refuge from a world that feels like it’s coming to an end. Our social conditions are ripe for fresh monsters to appear, and the highest levels of government are eager to help summon these monsters as they’ve done many times before.

The question is, why? How does sowing mayhem help fortify the capitalist state? What does the ruling class stand to gain from destabilizing society? The answer is that as late-stage capitalism continues to render markets less stable, and as U.S. imperial decline causes capital to contract, the state is trying to retain control by manufacturing further crises. 

This has become a major facet of Washington’s foreign policy, which is increasingly engineering terrorism, scarcity, and psychological operations throughout the countries it seeks to punish for trading with China. Now these destabilization tactics are being brought home, along with the cognitive warfare tools they rely upon. The new cold war has led to U.S. government psyops directed at the country’s own citizens to be officially legalized, enabling an unprecedented intensification of cognitive warfare that’s targeted at the masses. A 2020 NATO report essentially admits to this, describing a growing militarization of neuroscience, a pivot by Washington towards prioritizing propaganda, and the view that cognitive warfare’s goal is to “turn everyone into a weapon.”

Today, the tools they use to create these human weapons don’t appear to be drugs, but ideas which have been finely tuned to incite a response of paranoia and hate. The Sinophobic, anti-communist, hyper-partisan, and paranoid rhetoric that’s sprung from this social weaponization has already fueled numerous acts of violence, from January 6th to a series of QAnon-inspired assaults to racial mass shootings. When history repeats itself, and the U.S. again produces a slew of attacks in the vein of what occurred during previous tumultuous times like the 60s, Americans will again be confronted with the horrific nature of their society. This country was founded on colonial genocide, and is the epicenter of global imperialist violence. Militarism and racism are deeply ingrained into our culture, infecting people’s minds with a warlike and paranoid mentality. It’s no wonder why the U.S. leads the world in mass shootings; hateful conditions breed violence, as was shown by Manson’s racist worldview and how it nurtured his lifestyle of belligerent paranoia.

What’s scariest about this is that people like Manson aren’t the source of these social ills, they’re the product. They’re the consequence of our own moral weakness and complicity in the face of injustice. The pressure points behind these types of destructive figures have a source, and it’s our failure so far to build an alternative to capitalism. “I can't dislike you, but I will say this to you,” said Manson in his testimony. “You haven't got long before you are all going to kill yourselves, because you are all crazy. And you can project it back at me . . . but I am only what lives inside each and everyone of you….It's all your fear. You look for something to project it on, and you pick out a little old scroungy nobody that eats out of a garbage can, and that nobody wants, that was kicked out of the penitentiary, that has been dragged through every hellhole that you can think of, and you drag him and put him in a courtroom. You expect to break me? Impossible! You broke me years ago. You killed me years ago.” There was a grain of truth in what he said: that people like him wouldn’t come about if our system weren’t set up to create them.

People like Manson want us to believe that we’re fated by our circumstances to reinforce society’s destruction, that if we end up causing harm, we couldn’t have helped it because of the role society has given us. But when we accept that evil isn’t merely an individual phenomenon, and that society can create evil, we can gain awareness of our own power to prevent it. We can choose not to nurture the nihilistic and apathetic sentiments that let the system continue producing Kaczynskis and Mansons. It’s when you accept the mentalities reinforcing the system that you become vulnerable to the psyops that can turn you into one of the system’s destabilization agents.

The film Fight Club, despite its sketchy connections and muddled satire, hints at how we can reject these psyops. Throughout the film, Durden subjects the nameless protagonist to a series of jarring events, in the vein of how psyop agents attack people’s minds to make them vulnerable to suggestion. He burns his hand with lye, gets him to crash a car, and ultimately beats him brutally, all so he can get him to embrace Project Mayhem’s vision for total destabilization. But the protagonist still manages to throw off Durden’s influence. As he engages in the final, psychological battle with Tyler, he rebukes Project Mayhem’s teachings by standing up, looking his former mentor in the eyes, and saying: “I want you to really listen to me. My eyes are open.”

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