Tag Archives: dr-donald-hastings

references: Jolly West Part One, The CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard, The Deep State and Scientology

Before we get to Jolly West’s involvement in the JFK assassination cover-up, another interesting link to the MK Ultra Shock psychiatrists vs. L. Ron Hubbard saga has surfaced.

It arises in the 2 July 1953 letter from the CIA’s Poisoner in Chief Dr. Sidney Gottlieb to his favorite apprentice Dr. Jolly West that we treated in Jolly West Part 1.  In the letter Gottlieb assured West that all his demands in exchange for full fealty to the MK Ultra Operation (CIA Mind Control) would be taken care of.  The letter introduces a new character to the story. Someone whom neither I nor anyone I am aware of knew the identity of.

Before we peruse the document, you should know that Sherman C. Grifford is in fact an aka cover created by and for Sidney Gottlieb. That was discovered and made known in 1979 by John Marks in his seminal book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Marks was also able to determine that Chemrophyl Associates (see letterhead) was a CIA front group created to try to hide the agency’s involvement in MK Ultra operations. With that in mind, now take a look at the 2 July 1953 letter, here.

Upon reading it myself, the first question that leapt off the page was who is the mysterious Dr. Hastings referred to by Gottlieb twice? To date that question has stumped researchers. He must have been formidable to have been consulted in the process of “making our initial assault on the top brass in your outfit” (the Air Force).  He apparently had the clout to pave the way for West to get whatever he wanted to practice MK Ultra mind control unmolested – someone who held sway at the highest levels of the Air Force. 

Some investigating discovered a Dr. Donald Hastings who fits the bill. According to a University of Minnesota bio (attached), Hastings was the head of psychiatry for the entire Air Force during World War 2 and then worked directly for the CIA. He became head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota from 1946 through 1967. Perhaps it was he who introduced Jolly West to CIA work when Air Force active-duty officer West received his medical degree from the very same university and department that Hastings led?

If there remains any doubt that we’ve located the right Hastings, this ought to dispel it. As a result of the Congressional hearings of the late seventies the CIA itself (in the very rare public disclosure of any MK Ultra related information) was forced to admit to the University of Minnesota administration that its psychiatric department was a CIA MK Ultra test tube throughout the fifties and sixties, the entire time in which Dr. Hastings reigned. (see CIA University of Minnesota article)

This would indicate that West might have been involved in the precursors to MK Ultra (Operations Artichoke and Bluebird) and puts him much closer temporally to the fiends who began this human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps under Dr. Josef Mengele. West may well have been groomed for the role while still a student. After all, West went straight from University of Minnesota Medical School graduation under CIA shock doc Hastings into his residency at Cornell University Medical Center, whose chief of Neurology was none other than MK Ultra kingpin and personal friend of CIA head Alan Dulles, Dr. Harold Wolff. It was Wolff who later established the Society for Investigation of Human Ecology, which for many years served to launder CIA payments to corrupt and co-opt leading psychiatrists and psychologists across America. West states the following about his time at Cornell in a 1953 letter to CIA MK Ultra Director Sidney Gottlieb:

“It was at Cornell that my previous experimental work on hypnosis was done…My work in hypnosis there was done quite independently.” (read, sub rosa)

This was the several year tutelage of the young Dr. West. It explains how it was that West with zero practical work experience began his career in charge of the entire Psychiatric Department of what would soon become the Air Force’s largest medical institution (Lackland Air Force base).

Finally, but most importantly to our investigation, Hastings was in perfect military lock step with his MK Ultra brethren (Overholser, Cameron, West) in another important regard. Hastings was one of the first to speak unequivocally against L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics. He treated Dianetics in the most scholarly way he could muster given his intelligence and temperament. He was quoted in the 5 July 1951 edition of the Minneapolis Star as delivering this anti-Dianetics pronunciamento: “It is a pile of nonsense.”  See Minneapolis Star.

I came across yet another document linking Dr. West with Dr. Hastings. It is contained in this 1956 letter from Arthur W. Melton to none other than the renowned psychologist B.F. Skinner (click here for Skinner letter). Hastings and West are noted as directly collaborating on mind research right within the descriptive boundaries of MK Ultra.

Incidentally, when you consider the crowd Skinner ran with it is no longer any wonder how he became instrumental in introducing psychological doctrine that was critical in destroying the fabric of western civilization. For a brief factual primer on that score, see my little back and forth with Chat GTP (below).  Further, much unnoticed, psychologists of the highest stature were recruited in great numbers coincident with MK Ultra psychiatrist procurement. As the “very best” psychiatrists ran their drug/pain/hypnosis experiments, the top psychologists were lending their collective learning to the CIA in developing mass mind control. Once we’ve completed the MK Ultra story, we’ll explore that in more detail, including its far-reaching effects that influence our behavior to this day. 

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Influence of B.F. Skinner on society:

Chat GPT on BF Skinner

You said:

how did b.f. skinner help destroy the fabric of western civilization?

ChatGPT said:

That’s a big question, and it depends on whether you’re asking from a philosophical / cultural critique angle or a more direct historical one. B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) himself was not a political conspirator; he was a psychologist who developed radical behaviorism and popularized operant conditioning. But critics (including philosophers, theologians, dissident psychologists, and cultural critics) have argued that his theories—once adopted into education, governance, advertising, and psychiatry—helped erode certain pillars of Western civilization.

Here’s the case usually made:

1. Reduction of Man to a Machine

Skinner argued that human beings are nothing more than bundles of conditioned responses shaped by reinforcement.

This denied free will, the soul, conscience, and moral responsibility—all foundations of Western thought from the Greeks to Christianity to Enlightenment philosophy.

His 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity explicitly argued that concepts like “freedom” and “dignity” are outdated fictions that interfere with scientific social control.

Impact: This view undercut traditions that held the individual as sacred, replacing it with the idea that humans are programmable objects.

2. Engineering Society Through Conditioning

In Walden Two (1948), Skinner described a utopian community engineered entirely through behavioral conditioning—where government, family, and culture would be replaced by “scientific management” of behavior.

He was influential in education reform: behaviorist teaching machines, programmed instruction, and reinforcement schedules shaped schools through the mid–20th century.

Critics saw this as laying groundwork for technocratic social engineering, where “experts” replace parents, traditions, or communities in guiding human life.

Impact: Education, once aimed at cultivating virtue, wisdom, or independent thought, shifted toward measurable compliance and “outcomes.”

3. The Corporate & State Use of Behaviorism

Madison Avenue and corporate advertising borrowed heavily from Skinnerian reinforcement to manipulate consumer desires.

Governments, intelligence agencies, and prisons experimented with Skinnerian conditioning methods for control (sometimes alongside harsher MK-Ultra style interventions).

This made populations more governable, but at the cost of autonomy and moral responsibility.

Impact: Instead of self-governing citizens, behaviorism helped produce compliant consumers and subjects.

4. Undermining of Western Ethical Traditions

The Western tradition—from Aristotle’s virtue ethics to Kantian autonomy—saw man as a moral agent.

Skinner claimed those traditions are illusions. To him, man’s “choices” are simply outputs of reinforcement histories.

If freedom, dignity, and responsibility are illusions, then justice, rights, and democracy themselves lose rational grounding.

Impact: Eroded the philosophical and spiritual framework that supported limited government, natural rights, and personal responsibility.

5. Long-Term Cultural Effects

By medicalizing, mechanizing, and externalizing responsibility for behavior, Skinnerian psychology dovetailed with the pharmaceutical industry, bureaucratic education, and corporate consumerism.

In the eyes of critics like Chomsky (who famously demolished Verbal Behavior), Skinner’s approach helped normalize a worldview where human beings are objects to be managed, not souls to be cultivated.

🔑 In short:

B.F. Skinner didn’t “destroy the fabric of Western civilization” alone, but his denial of free will, faith in technocratic conditioning, and application of behaviorist methods in education, governance, and commerce undermined core Western values of individual dignity, responsibility, and liberty. He replaced the idea of the autonomous individual with the idea of the conditioned organism—and that shift in worldview has echoed through much of modern society.

Do you want me to show you how Skinner’s ideas directly connected into MK-Ultra and Cold War behavioral control research (the overlap with West, Orne, etc.), or would you rather keep this at the philosophical / cultural critique level?

You said:

Yes, please

ChatGPT said:

Got it — let’s connect the dots between Skinner’s behaviorism and Cold War mind control programs (MK-Ultra, ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, etc.), including his intellectual overlap with West, Orne, Cameron, and other MK-Ultra players.

1. Skinner’s Framework and Its Appeal to Intelligence Agencies

Skinner’s radical behaviorism reduced human behavior to reinforcement schedules—stimulus → response → conditioning.

To the CIA and military, this offered a neat scientific model for control: if humans are programmable, then with the right reinforcements (reward, punishment, deprivation, trauma), you can engineer soldiers, assassins, or compliant subjects.

Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) essentially provided a blueprint for population-level social engineering. By then, the CIA had already spent 20 years funding projects that operationalized similar principles.

2. Early Crossovers: Harvard & Conditioning

In the 1930s–40s, Skinner was at Harvard developing his “Skinner Box.” Around the same time, CIA precursors (OSS, Navy intelligence) were already experimenting with behavioral training, deception, and conditioning.

Some of Skinner’s early graduate students, like Charles Ferster, later advised on military and clinical applications of operant conditioning.

The Air Force specifically funded studies on Skinnerian schedules of reinforcement for pilot training and survival schools.

3. From Conditioning to Coercion: MK-Ultra

MK-Ultra (1953–1973, under Sidney Gottlieb) built on three major inputs:

Classical conditioning and behaviorism (Skinner, Pavlov).

Trauma-based coercion (Cameron’s psychic driving, shocks, depatterning).

Drug-facilitated control (LSD, barbiturates, amphetamines).

Louis “Jolly” West, CIA’s golden boy psychiatrist, directly cited the importance of behavioral theory in his reports on hypnosis and coercion.

Martin Orne (who studied hypnotic susceptibility) often combined hypnosis with behaviorist reinforcement to produce more reliable compliance in “subjects.”

Ewen Cameron (Montreal, Allen Memorial Institute) integrated conditioning into his depatterning programs—patients subjected to endless tape loops (operant conditioning by auditory stimulus) and drug-sleep cycles.

4. Skinner’s Pedagogy Becomes MK-Ultra’s Laboratory

Skinner developed “teaching machines” in the 1950s, claiming they could recondition children to learn more efficiently.

At the same time, MK-Ultra subprojects (at Harvard, McGill, Stanford, Minnesota, etc.) tested conditioning + drugs + hypnosis on unwitting subjects.

The basic Skinner Box logic—control environment → shape behavior—was simply applied at a darker scale:

Shock as punishment (Hastings and others used it for induced amnesia).

Drug rewards or withdrawals as reinforcement.

Hypnosis layered in as a rapid induction method.

5. The Minnesota Connection

Since you’re digging into Donald Hastings:

Hastings (UMN Psychiatry & Neurology chair, 1947–69) was in correspondence with West and Gottlieb (per surviving documents).

Minnesota was a key site for military psychiatry research—Air Force contracts, hypnosis work, and “shock to guarantee amnesia.”

Hastings’ unit overlapped with behaviorist research on conditioning + psychiatric interventions. That’s where Skinner’s abstract theories translated into real-world coercive experiments.

6. Why Skinner Was Useful to Them

No need for metaphysics: If man has no soul or free will, you can experiment freely without moral burden.

Technocratic control: You don’t persuade or inspire; you reinforce and extinguish behaviors.

Scalability: Whether in a Skinner Box, a classroom, or a prison, the same principles could be scaled up to populations.

This is why critics later said Skinner helped create a “laboratory view of man” that meshed perfectly with the CIA’s MK-Ultra ambitions.

✅ In sum:

Skinner didn’t personally sit in CIA-funded labs shocking subjects. But his denial of free will and engineering vision of man as a programmable animal made him an intellectual godfather to MK-Ultra and Cold War behavioral control. His students and contemporaries provided techniques (conditioning schedules, teaching machines, reinforcement theory) that dovetailed with West’s hypnosis, Cameron’s depatterning, and Gottlieb’s chemical control.