The Battle for Your Mind

Of all the powers the State craves, the one power it has not yet achieved is power over your mind. Not that it hasn’t tried. We touched on this very fact in a sermon I delivered some months ago entitled “The Battle For Your Mind”. In that sermon we touched on the secretive CIA program called MK Ultra, in which the CIA attempted to control people through mind control experiments conducted throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. Now, if you think nefarious rulers simply shrugged their shoulders and gave up, I humbly submit that they would not give up a long-held dream so easily.

The main reason that the State wants to control your mind is so that you don’t go and do something dangerous like think for yourself. Free-thinking people are a threat to witless authoritarian rulers. The more they can keep people dumbed down, the easier it is for them to stay in power. Joseph Stalin was once quoted as saying, “Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?” Well, it was John Howard that took away the guns (a debate for another day) and it seems that many of our State Premiers and our Prime Minister are intent on removing ideas from the people as well.

In the 1960’s, a Spanish neurologist named Jose Delgado was involved in a noteworthy bullfight. Without any real bullfighting training, he stepped into the ring with a very dangerous and deadly bull. However, Delgado reportedly had a secret weapon. Delgado was captivated by the experiments that the Swiss physiologist Walter Rudolf Hess was conducting. Hess had established that electrodes could be effectively used to stimulate a particular part of the brain in order to extract responses. His tests had proved that an element of the brain (the hypothalamus) could be stimulated to bring out various reactions. So, Delgado had implanted a radio-equipped electrode which was implanted into the bull’s limbic system (the emotional centre of the brain) which he called “stimoceivers”.

The point of the exercise was that Delgado subsequently demonstrated that he could manipulate an organism’s mind and body via remote control technology. Thus, as the bull charged, an invasive electrical signal penetrated the bull’s limbic system and the bull calmly broke off the attack in mid-charge. Delgado found that by stimulating different regions of the limbic system, which controls emotion, Delgado could also induce fear, rage and a variety of other emotions.

However, his experiments were not just limited to bulls. He was also able to demonstrate control over cats, monkeys and even humans. In one experiment, Delgado stimulated the temporal lobe of a 21-year-old epileptic woman while she was calmly playing guitar. In response, she flew into a rage and smashed her guitar against a wall, narrowly missing a researcher’s head. The outcomes were clear. The embedded chips could turn normal people into crazed killers and crazed killers into passive beings.

In 1968, Delgado went to work at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and this is where much of his research trail grows cold. However, it is now known that SRI was a CIA front and was connected to the MK Ultra experiments. It was then in 1974 that Delgado abruptly returned to Spain and later became an outspoken opponent of mind control and its potential for harm and misuse by totalitarian societies. In fact he released a statement which read:-

This technology has two sides, for good and for bad, and we should do what we can do to avoid the adverse consequences. We should try to prevent potentially destructive technologies from being abused by authoritarian governments to gain more power or by terrorists to wreak destruction. Can you avoid knowledge? You cannot! Can you avoid technology? You cannot! Things are going to go ahead in spite of ethics, in spite of your personal ethics.

More than ever, we thank God that He has given us a sound mind!