Deliver us from Evil: Part 2
The Long Shadow, "Technologic Totalitarianism", and the manipulation of the Mass Mind
Welcome to Part 2 of Deliver us from Evil, the story of the Character Assassination of José Delgado and the origins of the Mind Control Chip conspiracy theory. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading/listening to Part 1, which can be found here:
If you’re all caught up, then let’s dive in, shall we? It’s about to get weird.
Admass is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man.
"Journey Down a Rainbow," J.B. Priestley & Jacquetta Hawkes (1955)
A Place of Greater Safety
Psychiatric Hospitals were once known as Asylums.
The word “Asylum” implies safety, protection, care, and it well suited the intent: their purpose was to “provide asylum” to people in the community who were unable to care for themselves.
One of the earliest examples was a hospital built in Cairo in 872, as a place of healing for “the insane”.
In most cultures, particularly in the western world, up until the 18th century, caring for the mentally ill was considered a “family duty”. They would be kept at home, taken care of by their relations, or allowed to wander the streets alone if this wasn’t possible.
It wasn’t until the end of the 17th Century that the west would catch on to the idea that the mentally unwell might need a place of safety, both for themselves and others, where they could be cared for appropriately and - hopefully - one day be returned to the community.
In England, the 1800s saw an explosion in the creation of such institutions to handle a marked rise in patient numbers during the industrial revolution (although much could be read into this correlation, there should not necessarily be implied causation, though wouldn’t that be rather poetic?)
Many such institutions were also established across the United States; however, for most of their existence, providing anything in the way of effective treatment for the chronically mentally ill was simply not feasible. There were no effective treatments.
So, when one day in the 1940s, a man named Walter Freeman and his propaganda train rode into town, dubiously proclaiming the end of mental illness by way of a “simple” procedure, these hospitals were ready to receive the message.
Receive it they did.
This “simple” procedure was a little thing Freeman called “Transorbital Lobotomy”.
You’ve no doubt heard of it.
It was derived from a procedure invented in Portugal called Leucotomy: the severing of the connections between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain.
The frontal lobe is a large and complex combination of modules, bundles, and connections, just like any other large chunk of brain. It’s long been theorised to play some role in modulating and regulating emotions and sensations, swirling them around and around, amplifying some while dampening others, and sending the signals back into the rest of the brain for further processing and actioning.
Pioneered by a Portugese surgeon Antonio Egas Moniz, it was then augmented by a pair of Americans, the notorious Walter Freeman working alongside his earstwhile partner James Watts. Only Watts was surgically trained - a true neurosurgeon, in fact - while Freeman was not. Though not the monster he is often claimed to be, Freeman was terribly flawed, and those flaws led him head-first into some of the worst malpractice in the history of medicine.
Initially, it was Watts who performed the actual surgery, under some direction from Freeman. These procedures were done according to the typical standards of major hospital surgery at the time of the late 1930s. Years later, Freeman invented a modified “solo” version, called a transorbital lobotomy - in which he would insert a specialised metal rod into the eye socket and literally scrape the brain matter in the frontal lobe to destroy it - and began performing it by himself on patients in his consulting office, calling it a “minor procedure”.
No safeguards, no monitoring, no gloves or masks, and no general anaesthetic (the patient was knocked unconscious by a jolt of electricity).
This was just too much for Watts. He couldn’t be associated with the callous disregard Freeman showed for what he was doing. He had to cut ties, and disavowed Freeman.
Operating on the brain for the purpose of treating a mental disorder - procedures that came to be known collectively as “psychosurgery” - was nothing short of controversial from the very beginning. When successful, the results could sometimes be utterly transformational, making it possible for the patient to live a relatively normal life. All too often, however, it was not successful in treating the underlying condition, and in too many people, it caused severe complications, and premature death.
There are too many stories of significant intellectual deficit and eliminated personal spontaneity, of severe epilepsy and seizures, cerebral haemorrhages, bizarre repetitive motions, severe memory loss, and much else besides, resulting from the procedure carried out by Freeman and others.
Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President John F. Kennedy, was left with a severe mental disability following her procedure under Freeman.
It’s estimated he may have performed as many as 4,000 such operations. When challenged on either the efficacy or morality of his work, it only caused him to double-down further. He actively sought notoriety, pursued controversy, using it to boost his profile.
Despite being initially driven by an ideal to find a cure to mental illness, it was his ever-present careerism, his hubris, his need to stir the pot, and his dream to be recognised as one of the giants of medicine who overthrew the prevailing common wisdom which quickly took over.
They drove him right off the cliff, and he took many, many patients down with him.
His last operation was done in 1967, in which this patient also died, resulting in Freeman being outright banned from practising.
For a procedure that was so often detrimental, how was it allowed to continue for so long? Why did it become so widespread in psychiatric hospitals during the 1940s and 50s, where most severely mentally ill patients were housed?
There are a number of reasons, but perhaps one most significant: it usually had the side effect of making the patients easier for hospital staff to manage. The resulting docility and lack of spontaneity brought an era of calm to psychiatric institutions across the United States that had never previously been known.
Having mostly been phased-out by the 1960s, procedures like lobotomy and leucotomy were replaced by a new “miracle drug”: Chlorpromazine.
By the 1970s, Lobotomy was long considered dead and buried, as far as psychiatric hospitals and other institutions were concerned. It was seen for what it was: attempting to cure the mind by destroying very large structures of the brain, structures which we did not even begin to understand. By this point, pharmacology was the name of the game: when a medication didn’t work, you just tried a different one, as their effects were usually temporary. This made them far, far safer than just about anything you could do surgically anyway.
This was the backdrop, however, of the cultural zeitgeist when José Delgado’s book - The Physical Control of the Mind, 1969 - made its debut. Without intending to, he provided a treasure trove of prose which could be freely misinterpreted and taken out of context.
Then, one day in 1972, a United States Congressman by the name of Cornelius Gallagher managed to reach down into a pile of quacks, pluck out a man by the name of Peter Breggin, and give him a national stage on which to spread what would become a very special kind of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
His message: Lobotomy never really went away! José Delgado and his army of psychosurgeons are coming for your brain!
Technologic Totalitarianism and the Mind Control Express
To approach a text with a rhetorical perspective focuses our attention on questions of persuasion and power. Who is persuading whom of what and for which reasons? What tropes, figurative language, definitions, appeals, images, or arguments are employed for which audiences? What is included, and what is left out?
Johnson, J. A Dark History: Memories of Lobotomy in the New Era of Psychosurgery. Medicine Studies 1, 367–378 (2009)
Today, if you google "Quotes by José Delgado", you'll find gems like this one:
“We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective.
Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.”
This one is cited everywhere as having either come from the 1969 book Physical Control of the Mind (where no such text ever existed), or from some mysterious Congressional Record, specifically "Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118, February 24, 1974", mysterious because the US Congress was not even in session on that Sunday, and doubly so because of the fact that Delgado wasn't even living in the United States in 1974, as he had returned to his native Spain.
I searched high and low for the true source of this quote, in whole and in part.
The very earliest place that this exact quote falsely attributed to Delgado can be found is in the wild fantasies of Mae Brussell, an old Conspiracy Theory hand and talk show host: it was originally was published in her newsletter "The Realist" (irony, much?), in a very long and rambling article from the July 1974 edition.
It was about the tiny militant left-wing organisation called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) that existed from 1973 - 1975, supposedly carrying out a CIA plot to start "World War 3" the same way that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand kick-started World War 1 (though instead of the murder of the heir to the throne, the supposed SLA-CIA version was the kidnapping of Patty Hearst).
The only other place I can find anything that looks maybe a little bit like what she's quoting comes from a Congressional Record, February 24, 1972 Vol. 118, Part 5 (not 1974), in submitted Extended Remarks by way of Congressman Cornelius Gallagher, who used his congressional prerogative to insert a rant into the record from one Dr Peter Breggin for some reason.
It can be found here: February 24, 1972 Vol. 118, Part 5, page 5567.
This rant by Dr Peter Breggin - titled "The Return of Lobotomy and Psychosurgery", a blatant attempt at equating all of "Psychosurgery" as synonymous with "Lobotomy" - is essentially a very long and rambling collection of denunciation-by-analogy and rhetorical hysteria.
By combining quotes from a few advocates of Lobotomy and other strange things, and compiling them together with cherry-picked snippets and 100% made up "quotes" attributed to Delgado's book, he concocts a toxic brew, stirring them up in the same pot in order to equate them all as one great big giant "bad thing".
What was Breggin's goal with all this?
It seems, first of all, he was out to make a name for himself and become infamous. Second, to block further research into the workings of the brain, particularly by the groups at Harvard and Yale, and to stoke rage and hatred in the public and direct it toward both guilty and innocent alike in the world of Psychiatry. In all these goals, he ultimately succeeded.
So who is this "Dr Peter Breggin" anyway?
“Breggin reinforces the myth that mental illness is not real, that you wouldn’t be ill if you’d pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” says Susan Dime-Meenan, president of the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association. “His views stop people from getting treatment. They could cost a life.”
"Prozac's Worst Enemy", Time Magazine, 1994
Once upon a time, Peter Breggin was an obscure Scientology-ally, (not actually a Scientologist if you take the good Doctor's word for it, though he certainly married a devout Scientologist) who renounced the evils of Psychiatry after having obtained university degrees in the subject.
He started practising near his home in Bethesda. Likely upset by the fact that he was so unacknowledged in his life, and having made no useful scientific contributions to the field of Psychiatry, he decided to make a career out of convincing people that mental illness doesn't exist, and that those attempting to understand and/or treat the human brain are evil tyrants bent on controlling your mind.
For decades, starting around 1970, he led a crusade against practically all of psychiatry, and what he called the "Mental Health Establishment".
Sometimes he rightly called out bad practices and practitioners, but then he would lump in people who have nothing to do with them, and use "denunciation by analogy" as a tactic to smear everyone all at once.
He has a penchant of proclaiming that everything to do with Psychiatry is just a variation of Lobotomy.
From then on, Breggin’s attacks on other forms of treatment would consist primarily of equating them with the long discarded lobotomy. All limbic system surgery was lobotomy. ECT was another type of lobotomy and treatment with neuroleptic drugs, “chemical lobotomy”. This adequately describes Breggin’s indiscriminate ideological agenda.
"José Delgado: A Case Study", Barry Blackwell, 2014
From his 1972 Congressional entry, he proceeds to completely make-up the following fake "quotes" he attributes to Delgado’s book, stating:
He then goes on to attack the notion that man has "the right to develop his own mind," to develop his own unique potential "while remaining independent and self sufficient." As he concludes: "This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal, but unfortunately its assumptions are not supported by neurophysiological and psychological studies of intracerebral mechanisms."
The text he is allegedly quoting does not exist in any of Delgado's writings, anywhere.
He called the technique of ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain, better known today as Deep Brain Stimulation) "partial lobotomies", and describes Delgado thusly:
Delgado is the theoretician of the lobotomists, the great apologist for Technologic Totalitarianism, complete with an outright attack on "liberal" politics, meaning not the liberalism of the left, but principles of personal autonomy, independence and freedom, man's "inalienable rights" as annunciated in the Declaration of Independence.
Let's compare this with what we actually find in the book Breggin seems so fond of "quoting", shall we?
Here's a real quote from Delgado's book:
[…] more conservative treatments were actively sought in order to provide a "less damaging, less sacrificial means of dealing with mental disorders than are lobotomy, leucotomy, gyrectomy, thalamotomy, and other intentional destructions of nervous structures".
Among these efforts, implantation of electrodes in the brain offered promising possibilities.
The fact that Delgado was against Lobotomy - apparent in all of his writings on the subject - did not matter in the slightest to Breggin.
Delgado was also a proponent of improving ethical standards related to human experimentation, which were surprisingly lacking at the time:
[…] research with human subjects has lacked traditional codes and has followed the investigator's personal criteria- which have not always been correct. According to Beecher (12), leading medical schools and renowned doctors have sometimes conducted unethical research.
[...]
procedures which represent risk or discomfort for the patient should be ruled out.
He even predicted the potential misuse of technology like ESB as a concern to be aware of, though unlikely: "The possibility of scientific annihilation of personal identity, or even worse, its purposeful control, has sometimes been considered a future threat more awful than atomic holocaust," but qualifies, quite rightly, that "it could not be universally imposed."
Like JD Vance ("Hatians are eating your pets!"), what mattered was not whether something was true, but whether it could be used to further an ideology. In Breggin's case, it seemed his ideology came from Scientology, and evolved from there.
In 1982, he did publish a revised version of his 1972 Extended Remarks, with an introduction explaining that he had changed his mind on a few things, notably that he no longer supported outright federal bans on any medical procedure so long as it involved fully consenting adults. He also briefly mentioned that he had made an oopsie on the whole mind control thing:
My major error was in naively accepting the reports on electrical stimulation of the brain which described the capacity to control specific kinds of behavior.
Reports? You mean like, literally inventing and falsely attributing large swathes of text to an honest man who had never written any such thing? Is that what you call “reports”?
It’s clear he’s trying to pass it off as a kind of “the dog ate my homework” scenario. Maybe it was the dog that made up the Delgado quotes?
However, in the last 20 years, he has produced a number of works, some of them spectacular in their quackery. Most recently, he jumped on the "Covid-19 is a Bioweapon and Vaccines are Also A Bioweapon and Bill Gates/Anthony Fauci/Klaus Schwab/Joe Biden/China Are All Bioweapons Too" bandwagon (seriously, his book “Covid-19 and the Global Predators” is a rehashing of every conspiracy meme ever invented, and surprisingly one of the most unhinged examples of the genre I’ve so far come across, which is a high bar).
He has been called as an expert witness - yes, I kid you not - in dozens of court cases, most recently on behalf of Michelle Carter, the girl who convinced her boyfriend to kill himself over text messages: he claimed that because she was on psychiatric medication, she was acting under “involuntary intoxication” (apparently taking medication of any kind is “involuntary”) so she couldn’t be responsible for her actions. The Jury saw right through him, and the verdict was guilty.
The result of the firestorm of controversy around Delgado stirred up by Breggin and his tinfoil-hat kinfolk in the Church of Scientology and elsewhere?
Delgado was pilloried in a vast array of publications, some of them mainstream, for decades, all of whom re-printed and further mutated the fabricated "quotes" which Breggin had invented.
He was accused of:
having worked as part of the (legitimately real) MKULTRA program for the CIA (he didn't)
being funded by the CIA (he wasn't)
and NASA (???!?)
being "father of military-and-defense mind experimentation" (also a lie)
demanding a nation-wide education program to teach children to accept the mutilation of their own brains (one of the most bizarre lies made in Breggin's 1972 remarks)
and so much more.
Mae Brussells insinuated that José Delgado was involved somehow with the "SLA/CIA plot" (because one of the members used the name "Ricky Delgado", which she says was not a coincidence, lol).
He was also stalked by paranoiac strangers, accusing him of secretly implanting a chip in their brains to control them, calling him up at all hours demanding that he remove it.
One such woman sued him and Yale, demanding $1 million.
Over the years, his name became synonymous with totalitarian mind control, thanks to the lies Breggin was able to sell people on. His funding dried up at Yale, state laws were introduced across the United States placing restrictions on his and related fields, and the writing was on the wall.
He subsequently returned to his home country of Spain in 1974, where he continued scientific work, publishing enormous quantities of material, mostly in Spanish.
He died in 2011 at the age of 96, after having returned to the United States to live out the last few years of his life quietly in San Diego.
Many of his peers and former colleagues were asked at the time to write an obituary on his behalf: all declined, likely out of fear of being targeted by the conspiracy theorists, scientologists, and Peter Breggin.
Conclusions
José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado was one of the most prolific, interesting, and remarkable scientists of the brain to have ever lived, a true pioneer, genius inventor, who was human and imperfect, yet with a grand vision for the field of brain research, and hoped to allow each individual the power to “Construct Thyself”: completely at odds with those who accuse him of trying to control others, he wanted to give people control over themselves.
With over 500 formal publications to his name, he is the great grand-father of today's Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) technologies, both of which are only just now seeing a resurgence, being used with greater care and selective consideration than ever before, with positive results.
José Delgado deserved so much better.
Patients and humanity overall deserved so much better, too.
We should have been making such great strides forward in this field, both in understanding brain function and perhaps finding some superior treatments for specific conditions using DBS technology.
Instead, fear-mongers, liars and conspiracy-pushers decided that you shouldn't have the right to your own mental health care, and held an entire scientific field back for decades with the power of their poisoned rhetoric.
It’s a formula that others with similar ideologies have been attempting to repeat elsewhere: from vaccines, to public health measures like water flouridation, to mask-wearing (seriously), climate science, renewable energy, and more. Like a gaggle of angry geese, they charge at anything with great noise and fury, making it up as they go along. They spam Tiktok, YouTube, X-Twitter, Facebook groups, Substack, as well as your grandma’s emails.
The sheer quantity of never-ending sciency-sounding psychobabble just on Covid-19 alone from all manner of people who affix “PHD” and “MD” to their online profiles is mind-boggling: M-RNA integrating itself into your own genome somehow (?), or that lipid particles and microbubbles in vaccines are actually robots that turn into mind-controlling microchips (?!), that PCR tests are completely made up (?!?!) or that 5G transmission really caused Covid-19 (#%@?%), the list goes on and on.
These fear-mongers and merchants of chaos often cause more than just nuisance: the fear and anger they are constantly pounding into people’s minds can lead some to take action, such as burning cell towers to the ground and physically and verbally harassing telecommunications employees in early 2020.
Meanwhile, they insist that they know the real "truth" - that doctors don’t want you to know - and are willing to share their secrets to “wellness” in their 27 different books, for only $29.95 each plus postage (order today!)
If you buy that, I’ll bet they've even got a bridge to sell you.
Next up in the Deliver Us from Evil series:
Deliver Us from Evil: Part 3 - Cholera, Paranoia and Violence
Welcome to Part 3 of Deliver Us from Evil. This series is now expanding beyond José Delgado’s story, as we dive into the history of conspiratorial thinking during times of health crisis. You don’t need to read the first two parts this time; although relevant, they are not prerequisites.
I didn’t have time to make a special t-shirt drop for this week’s post, but if you like what I’m doing and wanna help me out, please consider a paid subscription, dropping a donation in Ko-Fi, or checking out the existing stuff available on my DopaMerch store.
Nicholas, what do you make of this upcoming wave of neural implants (often called BCIs now) like Elon Musk’s Neuralink?