The Shock Doctrine

I am reading Naomi Klein's book, and in the first chapter she talks about the CIA funded experiments at McGill University in the 1960's that were geared towards deconstructing the human mind, and then rebuilding it from the ground up. She concludes that although they succeed in torturing participants to the degree that they reverted to childlike states (sucking their thumbs, assuming the fetal position, treating experimenters as parental figures, etc.) and erasing their memories (one of the long term side effects of electroshock therapy is memory loss), they could not subsequently rebuild the identity of the participants "from the ground up." They had attempted to do this by endless repeating various propositions to the patients while they were in a semiconscious state (e.g. "You are a good mother," "Ghosts are real," etc.)

This entire project seems, in some ways, to run parallel to Cartesian Skepticism. The skeptic want us to deconstruct our entire body of knowledge, then rebuild it from the ground up. One potential reason that these psychiatrists failed to rebuild their victim's personality is that there was no person in whom these ideas could be embedded, since they had aready deconstructed the personal identity that allows an individual to integrate facts about the world with facts about themselves. The psychiatrists could not succeed in introducing new ideas without the framework that personality offers.* Similarly, we cannot take away our body of knowledge, which contains something like a framework in which to place individual facts. Without such a framework, we not only fail to "justify" these facts, but they cannot make much sense to us. (Just as individual words presuppose a language, so too do individual facts suppose a body of knowledge (i.e. a picture of the world)

The other interesting parallel is between these experiments and our recent conversations on conversion. It would seem to me that what the psychiatrists wanted to achieve was something like a "vacuum" of self. However, what they seem to have found is that once the self has been deconstructed, no rational individual remains to which the word "self" adequately applies - instead we are left with a deeply damaged individual whose very self has been destroyed. This disuades me even more thoroughly from viewing conversion as a process in which a person steps back to observe one identity and choose another instead.

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*This leads me to wonder if subliminal messaging might be more effective for this purpose, since it leaves the subject's personality in tact. E.g. "Obama is untrustworthy" - read - "Obama is a secret Muslim." Such techniques obviously leave the personality in tact; however, I have no idea about their effectiveness.