Kenny Carmody@KennyCarmody
Someone put this diagram together and it deserves to be read slowly.
Three of the most disturbing psychological experiments in modern history placed in a Venn diagram with COVID policy sitting precisely at their intersection.
They were not wrong.
Most people know the Milgram experiment. Ordinary people administering what they believed were lethal electric shocks to strangers because an authority figure in a white coat told them to continue. We wrote about this. COVID replicated it at planetary scale, the doctors, the neighbours, the employers, the family members who enforced mandates with a zeal that had nothing to do with science and everything to do with institutional obedience.
But the other two are equally important and far less discussed.
The Asch Conformity Experiment demonstrated something even more fundamental. Solomon Asch showed in the 1950s that a significant majority of people will deny the evidence of their own eyes will give an answer they know to be factually wrong, simply because everyone else in the room is giving that answer. Not because they were threatened. Not because they were paid. Because the social pressure of the group was sufficient to override direct sensory experience.
This is what masking a healthy population, cancelling Christmas, and demanding that people treat their neighbours as biological threats actually accomplished. It was not about any of those things specifically. It was about training an entire population to override their own perception and defer to the group consensus, however absurd that consensus became.
And then the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 study abandoned early because it spiralled so rapidly out of control, showed that ordinary people assigned roles of authority over other ordinary people will, within days, begin to abuse that authority in ways they would have found unthinkable before the role was assigned. The guards became cruel not because they were cruel people but because the structure gave them permission and the institution backed them up.
We watched this happen in real time.
The COVID marshals. The border agents turning families away. The hospital administrators barring visitors from dying patients. The teachers reporting parents. The neighbours calling police on children playing in parks. The HR departments gleefully processing terminations for the unvaccinated. Ordinary people, handed a role and a uniform of institutional approval, discovering capacities for cruelty that their pre-2020 selves would not have recognised.
Now go deeper.
Because the institution at the centre of this, the one that has connected these threads across decades is not an accident of history.
Stanford sits at the intersection of centralised medicine, defence research, and the surveillance architecture that has been constructed around human attention and behaviour for the better part of a century. The Stanford Research Institute. The connections to MKUltra the CIA’s mind control programme that ran from the early 1950s and included everything from Mexican mescaline experiments to the weaponisation of LSD on unwitting subjects, overseen by figures who moved seamlessly between military intelligence and the medical establishment.
From General Groves who oversaw the Manhattan Project and the deliberate suppression of radiation health data to Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who ran MKUltra’s most extreme programmes. The through-line is not conspiracy. It is institutional continuity. The same networks. The same funding streams. The same willingness to use human beings as experimental subjects in the service of power dressed as science.
