Manufacturing the Mass Mind

Alan Watts Transcript + Carl Jung on De-Individualized Society (Info Economy Part 3)

Jasun Horsley

Mar 19, 2025

From Alan Watt CTTM LIVE on WTPRN 16, Obedience To Authority and Absurdity of Trained Majority Feb 14^th, 2008.

(This transcript has been polished for readability and is not exact.)

Mind Control: Early Tavistock Techniques

Mind control works pretty well on everyone, especially the scientific types, the electronic types.

[Compare to Jacques Ellul’s statement that the more educated classes are more susceptible to propaganda.]

Beginning with World War I, with basic propaganda, and then the experiments that were carried on at Tavistock Institute to find ways to motivate vast amounts of men in the public to join up in the military and go abroad and serve.

Why would so many people rush off and fight? Part of it can be explained by the tribal system. You’re reared in a tribal system with national anthems and colors and flags, emblems and figures of authority. That’s very, very tribal. But unfortunately, it’s outlived its usefulness, its initial purpose, because now we have psychopaths at the top of the tribes, and they’re interbred.

They have been there for a long, long time, many centuries, and they employ some of the brighter people amongst us, you might say, to work for them and study us like you study any other animal, to find our Achilles’ heel and then exploit it.

They do this by using scientific techniques, especially the media. They also use electronic devices, electronic techniques for controlling the mind, even remotely, and eventually down to precise control through microchipping.

Tavistock propaganda techniques began on a mass scale when radio first came out. It worked very well. [Before that there were] novels and they acted out these novels on stage, in plays about the great hero going off to war, returning as more of a man than before, and [how] everybody respected him, this great server of his country.

When they went onto the radio waves, they upgraded it all and adapted it for mass audiences who then had to visualize, because they couldn’t see a stage play. They got expert writers and early psychologists so you could picture the hero and the heroine in your mind.

TV took over then and yet even still, it’s not good enough yet; even though we emulate everything on TV, it’s not good enough. They’re going towards total control, right down to the individual. He must be predictable. Mass psychology, mass indoctrination works on most people, but not everyone. That’s the problem. It is the few in the group who can still retain their thinking powers that they want to target.

That’s why they’ve been [targeting] young children at school, especially males who have leadership qualities and ask [too many] questions. Teachers now call them nuisances. Now, if you ask too many questions, you’re hyper, you’ve got problems of some kind or another. Maybe [these kids] can see through the indoctrination process.

Within a generation, we’ve allowed the children to be drugged by the pharmaceutical industries. The parents have been indoctrinated, through the daytime media and talk shows, [to believe] that this is good for their children.1

Obedience to Authority (Milgram)

Mind control did not begin with MKUltra. That’s a great misperception. From the days of the first mental hospitals in England, they were already studying human nature; before that even. This kind of information is vital to intelligence agencies who want to control whole nations of people, on behalf of the masters, the dominant minority.

Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram, provides an insight into how it works. What this book portrays is a society that can be manipulated to do anything whatsoever, to believe anything whatsoever, by training it, just like an animal. That’s really how they view the public. They see us as animals; and unfortunately, the techniques they use on us are very effective.

This goes for people who belong to religions and those who don’t. It doesn’t matter. People of all categories come under the effects of these very precise methods.

The scientists are very cold in this respect. They’re psychopathic, the ones who study us. The preface of Milgram’s book says:

Obedience, because of its very ubiquitousness, is easily overlooked as a subject of inquiry and social psychology. But without an appreciation of its role in shaping human action, a wide range of significant behavior cannot be understood. For an act carried out under command is, psychologically, of a profoundly different character than action that is spontaneous. The person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders. The dilemma inherent in obedience to authority is ancient, as old as the story of Abraham. What the present study does is to give the dilemma contemporary form by treating it as subject matter for experimental inquiry, and with the aim of understanding rather than judging it from a moral standpoint (p. xi).

There’s no moral standpoint in observation here. There’s no right and wrong in the existentialist point of view, just [the question of] the effects.

The important task, from the standpoint of a psychological study of obedience, is to be able to take conceptions of authority and translate them into personal experience. . . . The question arises as to whether there is any connection between what we have studied and what we have learned in the laboratory and the forms of obedience we so deplored in the Nazi epoch. The differences in the two situations are, of course, enormous, yet the difference in scale, numbers, and political context may turn out to be relatively unimportant as long as certain essential features are retained. The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow. The adjustment of thought, the freedom to engage in cruel behavior, and the types of justification experienced by the person are essentially similar, whether they occur in a psychological laboratory or the control room of an ICBM site. The question of generality, therefore, is not resolved by enumerating all the manifest differences between the psychological laboratory and other situations but by carefully constructing a situation that captures the essence of obedience—that is, a situation in which a person gives himself over to authority and no longer views himself as the efficient cause of his own actions (p. xi-xii).

Psychos ‘R’ Us

Secret societies, just before the French Revolution, were bringing in members who were blindfolded and [who] promised they’d do anything they were told by their superior for freedom. [They were told] that the person in front of them was to be killed and . . . they were told that it was their brother, they were given a knife and they were told to stab, told that, if they did it, they would be accepted.

After, they find out of course it was an animal they’d stabbed. That’s the sort of techniques that were used in the 1700s for some of the assassination squads for various revolutions. And they still have them today, only they don’t need rituals to go through them.

A lot of psychopaths will join them. The problem is most of the ones doing experimentation are psychopaths themselves. You can see that even with Skinner and the behaviorists. These guys take babies and drop them six inches to a foot onto hard tables to watch the reactions, scribble down notes with their observations. These characters are strange, almost inhuman, as far as their psychological makeup goes.

Skinner’s observations can then be used on the public; an example of that is quite simple, how the radio and then television altered the behavior of people. Something in our environment that wasn’t there before altered completely our behavior.

People used to talk before radio came along, or TV. They used to talk to each other, they talked about everything that happened in their lives and their speculations, or their wishes, or fantasies, their own history and their family history. But once radio came in, and then television, suddenly everyone is sitting listening to this little speaker blabbing away, and the funny little man on the screen, and all conversation between people pretty well stopped.

Then, when the TV goes off, the conversation is, like Brzezinski said, comprised of all the info that has just been downloaded by the television set.

That’s an example of behavior modification through alteration of our immediate environment, and that is really quite simple.

Secret Science & Usefully Foolish Operatives

Is it possible that you are part of an experiment?

[These sorts of mind control experiments] do happen on quite a large scale.

Even within the New Age movement, the CIA was heavily involved at the very beginning. People should read the histories on places like Jonestown. They should see who promoted Jones at the beginning and you find Ronald Reagan gave him permission with some of his followers to go into mental hospitals and work with the patients. [Compare this] to what happened to the followers eventually.

You’ll find the CIA’s fingerprints were all over the massacre at the end. So much goes on, and it’s so gruesome, that it’s hard for us—not just to comprehend it, but to accept the proof when we find it. We don’t have the vocabulary in this day and age to describe the kind of acts that go on by agencies and assassins working for the biggest governments, supposedly the most advanced governments on earth. It’s horrific.

Look into the Canadian CBC archives to find the Wendy Mesley shows, where they demonstrated some of the equipment the CIA were using, back in the 1950s. They could put sounds and thoughts right into your head. And if they could put sounds and thoughts right into your head, who’s to say they couldn’t affect the visual cortex as well? And I’m sure that went on on a big scale, especially within some of the larger centers that were promoted for the New Age movement.

Some customers joined some of these classes were guaranteed they would hear God talking to them. Guaranteed it. And they did. Because they had the same equipment embedded in the walls. That’s why it works. That’s only what we know about, and that equipment was so small. An operator could put it in his pocket with the size of a TV remote control. 1950s technology only used by the CIA and upper groups in MI6. It had to be solid state circuitry, micro circuitry, and that was in the days before people even heard of the transistor radio.

We are living in different levels of reality. Those with the higher sciences are so far ahead of anything we have knowledge of, and that’s why they get away with it. Because when we see the effects of something that cannot possibly happen. . . Your friends, your relatives, everyone you know would laugh at you, especially the ones who keep up with the scientific magazines, who think that’s the latest technology. They’ll ridicule you if you mention that you suspect there are much, much higher sciences.

Bill Cooper [Behold a Pale Horse], when he first came out, he went around the New Age circuits expounding on the fact that the aliens were here, that they had been here for a long time. He was a complete believer [based on] the data that he got from when he worked in Navy intelligence. When he went to Area 51, he realized they were making those things there. It was advanced science.

He realized he’d been fed the information deliberately, so that he would [spread it] around, as an officer in the Navy intelligence, and the people would believe him. The best dupe is someone who truly believes in what they’re doing. Then your senses don’t detect any lies coming from that person and you believe them. It’s much easier to believe them when they themselves believe it. Old technique, again.

And when Cooper [flipped 180 degrees], that’s when he was driven off the road on his motorcycle by a car. That’s how he lost his leg.

Bleak Mid-Future

Always question your own experiences, what scientific means could be used to put them there. And I mean that for myself as well. I always question everything. I’ll tell people about experiences, but I won’t tell them what I thought the cause was, because you put in a question mark until you have more data. Without the data, you’re simply being a dupe.

The fact that we live in a horrific system cannot be denied. The more you go into the studies that have been done on society in times of peace and war, you wonder if you want to belong to the human race at all.

Young people writing to me are in despair when they’ve woken up to a future so bleak. They can’t even communicate with their friends or parents anymore, and they ask you what to do. That’s a hard call to make. I try to remind them that this agenda has taken centuries to build up to this present point, and that any counter force to it has to also snowball slowly. The effects of what we’re doing might not take shape till fifty or a hundred years in the future.

It’s an ancient war. It’s a war for everything. It’s a war that every tyrant in history has dreamed of winning. Total control over the minds of people.

The closest it has ever come to before, in times gone by, was when the big religions had an ignorant population indoctrinated into the reality contained within just their holy books. They knew nothing else outside those books. They didn’t even read those books, by the way. It wasn’t until the early 1900s, late 1800s, that the general population even got a chance to be taught to read and write. For thousands of years, [Royal] scribes were in charge of reading and writing.

The general population was always kept in ignorance through various dark ages, across the planet. All they knew was their own little Plato’s cave that contained all the writings or the sayings from their priesthoods. Therefore, they were under great mind control.

Science, being as it is a double-edged sword, comes along with technology, and they had [no choice but] to give basic writing and reading to the public, which opened Pandora’s Box.

A Million Zeroes (A Word to the Wise from Carl Jung)

Carl Jung, regardless of whatever people think of him (and he certainly had his own faults too, and his own particular unshakable beliefs), in The Undiscovered Self, he talks about the possibility of psychopathic individuals taking over countries, what stands in their way and what will aid them.

Watt quotes the book at length then, and so I have gone direct to the source2:

Unless he stands firmly on his own feet, the so-called objective values profit [the individual] nothing, since they then only serve as a substitute for character and so help to suppress his individuality.
Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far as society itself is composed of de-individualized persons, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes —it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator.
A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.
Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman.
Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far—and our blindness in this respect is extremely dangerous. People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans.
Curiously enough, the Churches too want to avail themselves of mass action in order to cast out the devil with Beelzebub— the very Churches whose care is the salvation of the individual soul. They too do not appear to have heard anything of the elementary axiom of mass psychology, that the individual becomes morally and spiritually inferior in the mass, and for this reason they do not burden themselves overmuch with their real task of helping the individual to achieve a metanoia, or rebirth of the spirit—deo concedente.
It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try—as they apparently do—to rope the individual into a social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to him that he is the one important factor and that the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul.
It is true that mass meetings parade such ideas before him and seek to impress them on him by dint of mass suggestion, with the unedifying result that when the intoxication has worn off, the mass man promptly succumbs to another even more obvious and still louder slogan. His individual relation to God would be an effective shield against these pernicious influences. Did Christ ever call his disciples to him at a mass meeting?
Did the feeding of the five thousand bring him any followers who did not afterwards cry “Crucify him!” with the rest, when even the rock named Peter showed signs of wavering? And are not Jesus and Paul prototypes of those who, trusting their inner experience, have gone their own individual ways, disregarding public opinion? (Routledge, 2005, p. 39-41)

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