Systems of cruelty, the ants, and the starlings
Yesterday I was at CAVA with Sean, a recent Columbia grad from Singapore.
He’s a huge troll, often starting fights both online and offline about politics—wearing Lockheed Martin merch at one of our school’s Israel-Palestine protests, cooking up ragebait in r/Columbia, and dropping in random references to MKUltra into our conversations.
I’d always found history boring, but through getting to know him I became curious why someone as smart as him would like the subject. So after picking up our CAVA bowls and sitting down in the Chipotle next door, I asked him to explain to me the story behind MKUltra.
MKUltra: The CIA’s human experimentation stint
He detailed how MKUltra was a large-scale human mind control experiment where the CIA developing a truth serum for use in interrogations.
The CIA had absorbed a bunch of Nazi scientists who were trying to do the same thing back in WWII, then rounded up a bunch of prisoners and heroin addicts (people who “wouldn’t be missed”) and started injecting them with LSD to observe the side effects.
It was carried out across 80+ institutions (colleges, hospitals, prisons, pharmaceutical companies) over 20+ years, and even occasionally under the knowledge of the institutions’ administrators. They ended on a 2 phase method, where they
- Inject the participant with LSD and guide them into seeing a bunch of psychological horrors
- Tell them it’ll stop if they tell the truth
On (potential) whistleblowers: Frank Olson
One scientist involved in MKUltra, named Frank Olson, was given LSD without his consent or knowledge. Shortly after, he quit the CIA out of moral concerns, including
- the CIA developing assassination weapons
- CIA using biological warfare in covert operations (and in populated areas)
- collabs with former nazi scientists under operation paperclip
- LSD mind control research
Upon release, Olson is assigned a CIA doctor to monitor him. And a few days later he falls to death from a NYC hotel room while his doctor is allegedly asleep in another bed. “Suicide.”
The Olson family continues to insist it was a murder, and tried suing the US federal government—but the case was dismissed.
Governmental mistrust
Combined with the current buzz around the Epstein case, this made me despair.
- That the very government I entrusted with certain civil powers in exchange for protection could choose to inject its own citizens with heroin and LSD for the sake of developing torture methods.
- And I was disgusted at the sticky ways in which the government protects its allies—in this case, with a potential whistleblower dying of suicide days upon release, while under federal supervision.
Cynicism: A common sentiment
Moreover, talking with some other friends made me realize how much of these kinds of horrors continue to be perpetuated to this day.
- Dan McKeen
- He caught me up-to-speed on the history of Iran - that its current political unrest came about largely due to staged coups ala the United States and the UK.
- Dan Redeker
- He mentioned in passing how the very iPhones we use are built upon the exploitation of child labor for cobalt mining.
- He saw a video of ICE trick a mother into coming out by getting the daughter to tell her to come out, and how it was demoralizing and depressing to see such a tragedy unfold in front of him.
- Liyu Chen
- She vented to me about her health tech startup, and how she has to deny coverage to someone with a terminal condition out of the terms of their contract.
- She was heartbroken at a young age after realizing her clothes were produced in a sweatshop.
All four of these people—Sean, the Dans, Liyu—all mirrored the sentiment that we need to “lie” to ourselves in order to stay sane. I admire all four of them, so I wondered if their convergent cynicism emerged because they were so smart in the first place.
- That because they’re used to being able to solve problems, they feel more cynical and even more hurt when they see the world suffers much bigger problems than they alone can handle.
- And their capacity for understanding gives them an even deeper view of the consequences of the problem
That it feels that much more futile to take actions beyond distraction and irony.
The problem: Globalization and our sluggish biology
After thinking about it more, I came upon a possible explanation for why such tragedies are being perpetuated.
Impersonalization under global capitalism
Honestly, I think the problem is with our inadequate and slow response to globalism.
I heard from a friend that humans evolved to live in communities of 300, but not 8 billion. And I think it’s our biological limitation brushing up against our global capitalist economy with 8 billion community members, and the impersonalization of such a system, which is leading to our troubles.
- Our minds have an easier time rationalizing the exploitation of children we’ve never seen or will interact with, rather than of our neighbors daughters.
The ant wars
I saw a video something like this, where two colonies of ants were clashing against each other on a sidewalk. It made me wonder, if even ants resort to these kinds of wars, then are we biologically/evolutionarily destined to fight over our finite resources as well? Is there any point in fighting against this?
I sent the video to a friend, Michael, who recommended I check out the Kurzgesagt YouTube series on ant wars. After watching this video on the Argentine ant’s mega-colony wars, I gained a kind of sick clarity on the matter.
Ant wars: Evolutionary tribal warfare
Within their colonies, Argentine ants are very cooperative and well-organized. On occasion, worker ants and queens will leave and start their own colonies—eventually adapting to different environments via mutations and becoming such distant cousins that they will no longer recognize their original colony, and fight “vicious wars.”
Ant wars: On eugenics
However, after an accident where a few Argentine queens were transported into Madeira and New Orleans, the resulting colonies had very low genetic diversity—now, ants that left the colony were no longer distant cousins. The result, was a ‘master race’ of Argentine ants which would cooperate on an inter-colony basis.
So then is the issue that we humans started out fine but now we’ve mutated too far from our roots and we haven’t yet found a way to peacefully deal with that in a global context?
How should I keep living?
All that to say, how should I continue living in this cruel context? Where the systems I live in embody so much violence and exploitation to keep running?
Self assembly: Flocking behavior in starlings
Michael was telling me about how awful pigeons are at building nests
when the topic of a smarter bird came up—the starling. He was telling me how when he visited Rome, he saw a flock (called a “murmuration!”) of starlings create these massive organized flight patterns in the air.
The starling’s rules for life
These emergent structures come about not out of some centralized queen bird telling them what to do—but out of each starling following a set of three rules:
- Fly close to your neighbor
- But not too close to run into them
- And be in a similar orientation to them
with respect to their 7 nearest neighbors—which is enough to account for scenarios like the red guy below. My suspicion is that this allows for local flex, in situations when starlings are close enough to their second shell of neighbors but not their first.
That even just this small set of rules can interact and form large scale change as long as enough people are aligned.
Dennis’s words of wisdom
I emailed my NYU advisor, Dennis Shasha on how one should cope with the cruelty embedded into the world’s systems. And he shared a similar sentiment:
“Dear Sarah,
These times will pass. Music brings joy. Better music brings more joy. You are contributing to that.
When we do our research, we will be true to ourselves and the people we help. That is also an example for all.
To better traverse these crazy times together, we must do so hand in hand, promoting truth, intelligence, and the golden rule.
Do you think this works?
Warmly, Dennis”