So did anyone else in the study turn to terrorism to express themselves…?
Comment on FBI Wants Access To Encrypted iPhone And Android Data—So Does Europe
fleebleneeble@lemm.ee 3 weeks agoWhile I don’t fully agree with his methods in terms of he seemed to randomly select people who were otherwise not as much a part of the problem to blow up, why he is “nuts” has a really sad and fucked up reason / origin. He was basically mentally and physically tortured through an academically hosted, governmental project.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
AcidicBasicGlitch@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
To be fair, he was probably the youngest and most vulnerable participant, and the experiment lasted 3 years. He started attending Harvard at 16, and was probably around 16/17 when the study began.
They used psychological warfare on a kid who was already socially reserved on top of feeling alienated from his peers due to his age, away from his family for the first time in his life, and during what we now recognize is probably the most critical window for young men in particular to develop a mental illness like schizophrenia, they did this:
Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were given to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition. Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.
Like holy shit…
AcidicBasicGlitch@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
True, and I didn’t mean it in a necessarily derogatory way in terms of judgment for his mental illness, but for his actions. I know I should be more careful about saying things like that, and didn’t mean to imply anything negative about people who struggle with mental illness.
It’s complicated. Nobody should have had to go through what he did, but something awful somebody went through can’t be used as a justification for them doing something awful to somebody else. It can be the reason they did it, and it may arguably make them not fully responsible for their own behavior, but it also doesn’t make them an innocent if they harm someone else.