Blowback

Here's a good example of what our CIA has termed "blowback".

Ted Kaczynski - "The Unabomber"

While at Harvard, Kaczynski was taught by the famous logician Willard Quine, scoring at the top of Quine's class with a 98.9% final grade. He also participated in a multiple year personality study conducted by Dr. Henry A. Murray, an expert on stress interviews.^[2]

According to an article by Alston Chase for the June 2000 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, students in Murray's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-sponsored study, dubbed MKULTRA, were told they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student.^[4] Instead, they were subjected to the stress test, which was an extremely stressful and prolonged psychological attack by an anonymous attorney. During the test, students were strapped into a chair and connected to electrodes that monitored their physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a one-way mirror. The "debate" was filmed, and students' expressions of impotent rage were played back to them at various times later in the study. According to Chase, Kaczynski's records from that period suggest that he was emotionally stable at the start of the study. Kaczynski's lawyers attributed some of his emotional instability and dislike of mind control to his participation in this study.^[4][5]

For those who don't know what the CIA's project MK-ULTRA is: "Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge and informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S. agreed to follow after WWII."

Yes We Can!

"Some people partly satisfy their need for power by identifying themselves with a powerful organization or mass movement. An individual lacking goals or power joins a movement or an organization, adopts its goals as his own, then works toward these goals. When some of the goals are attained, the individual, even though his personal efforts have played only an insignificant part in the attainment of the goals, feels (through his identification with the movement or organization) as if he had gone through the power process. This phenomenon was exploited by the fascists, Nazis and communists. Our society uses it too, though less crudely...In particular, leftist movements tend to attract people who are seeking to satisfy their need for power. But for most people identification with a large organization or a mass movement does not fully satisfy the need for power."

-The Unabomber Manifesto (paragraph 83)