The Generation X Files

Leave it to the WordPress daily prompt to hit me with a question that requires a philosophy degree at three in the afternoon!

If I’m being completely honest, my default setting is dangerously close to a cartoon character. I have this stubborn habit of finding the good in absolutely everyone.

You could show me a historical tyrant and my brain would probably chime in with, “Yes, but did you see how much he loved his dog? He can’t have been all bad”. It’s a pathology, really.

I look for that hidden spark of decency in everyone, mostly because the alternative – admitting that a terrifying percentage of the human race might just be walking meat-sacks of chaos – is a bit too much to process before I’ve had my coffee.

We like to think of ourselves as the good guys. We follow the rules, we return our shopping trolleys, we don’t pinch office supplies (mostly). We are polite, compliant and cooperative.

But there’s a dark, hilarious twist to the human condition: our deep, evolutionary desire to be “good, cooperative citizens” is exactly how we get tricked into becoming absolute monsters.

We think evil looks like a bloke in a cape twirling a moustache. But real, historical horror doesn’t usually wear a villain costume. It wears a neatly pressed suit, carries a clipboard and has a framed diploma on the wall.

It happens when otherwise “good people” – respected doctors, scientists and academics – decide that being a good, obedient servant to an institutional master is more important than their actual humanity.

And if you want a masterclass in how quickly human decency can be traded for a government paycheque, you only have to look back at the declassified, real-life spy comedy turned psychological horror show: Project MKUltra.

Launched by the CIA in 1953 during the height of Cold War paranoia, MKUltra wasn’t some rogue operation run by lone psychopaths in a hidden bunker. It was a massive, system-wide bureaucratic effort to learn how to completely dismantle and reprogramme the human mind. And they didn’t do it alone. They recruited the very people we are taught to trust from birth.

When the joint Senate hearings finally dragged the truth into the daylight on August 3, 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy opened the floor by revealing just how many “good institutions” had signed up to play servant to the CIA’s master:

“The program involved the testing of biological and chemical materials, including LSD, on unwitting American citizens from all walks of life – high and low, American and foreign. Some of these tests took place in universities, foundations, companies, hospitals and prisons.“

Think about that. Over 80 prestigious universities and hospitals – places staffed by polite, law-abiding, “good” professionals – willingly became paid accomplices to a covert mind-control program. They looked at a blank cheque from the government, nodded their highly educated heads and decided that dosing unsuspecting citizens was just another day at the office.

The “Good” Doctors and the Dismantling Factory

If you want to look at the absolute worst things carried out under the banner of MKUltra, you have to leave behind the quirky spy gadgets and look at the systematic destruction of vulnerable human beings. And nobody did this with more academic prestige than Dr Ewen Cameron¹.

Cameron wasn’t some back-alley quack. He was a highly respected psychiatrist and the actual President of the World Psychiatric Association. At his clinic in Montreal, he took ordinary people who had checked in for everyday issues like mild anxiety or post-partum depression and used them as human guinea pigs for a process he called “psychic driving“.

His idea of being a “good doctor” involved putting patients into drug-induced comas that lasted for up to 86 days. While they were unconscious, he blasted their brains with electroshock therapy at 40 times the safe clinical dose. Once their minds were completely fractured, he strapped headphones to their ears and forced them to listen to looped, repeating audio messages for up to 16 hours a day, hundreds of thousands of times.

He successfully erased their memories. Grown adults left his clinic completely unable to recognise their own children, remember their own names, or even know how to use a knife and fork. He proved that under the right institutional master, a man dedicated to healing could easily become a mechanic of human erasure.

Safehouses, Sex Workers and Subterfuge

To stop ourselves from weeping into our biscuits over Dr Cameron, we have to look at the absolute absurdity of Operation Midnight Climax. This was the CIA’s venture into the hospitality sector.

The agency set up apartment safehouses in San Francisco, decorated them with two-way mirrors and hired local sex workers to lure unsuspecting, ordinary men back to the rooms. Once inside, the women would secretly slip massive doses of LSD into the men’s drinks.

And where were the “good, patriotic” CIA scientists during this? They were sitting behind the two-way mirrors watching ordinary citizens have total, terrifying psychological breaks in real-time. One completely unwitting target was dosed so heavily he went on a paranoia-fuelled rampage through the city, genuinely believing his own family was trying to assassinate him. The casual, voyeuristic cruelty of it is breathtaking – all funded by public tax money.

The Deep End: Enter Project Monarch

Now, if you spend more than five minutes researching MKUltra online, you will inevitably hit a wall of text about something called Project Monarch. This is where our “detective mode” has to work overtime, because Monarch is where fully declassified, horrifying history collides head-on with internet folklore.

According to deep-dive forum lore, Project Monarch was an ultra-secret extension of MKUltra. The theory goes that the CIA used extreme, trauma-based conditioning on young children to intentionally fracture their minds into multiple “alter” personalities. These children were allegedly programmed to become sleeper assassins or covert couriers who could be “triggered” by specific code words, musical cues, or butterfly imagery.

If we look at the hard, cold facts, there is no official declassified paper trail proving a program called “Project Monarch” ever existed. When CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files to be incinerated in 1973, he burned the details of their darkest subprojects with them.

But here is the real Citizen Jane kicker: whether the specific code-name “Monarch” is real or an urban legend almost doesn’t matter.

The terrifying truth is that we only believe stories about trauma-programmed butterfly assassins because the documented reality of MKUltra was already so monstrous. When we know for a fact that the state was putting young mothers into 80-day drug comas and dosing random citizens with hallucinogens for a laugh, the line between historical fact and internet conspiracy theory completely evaporates. We don’t assume the worst because we’re cynical; we assume the worst because the receipts we do have are already a horror movie.

Breaking the Circle

So, after wading through the psychological wreckage of the mid-20th century, where does that leave us with our innocent little afternoon writing prompt? What does it actually mean to be a good person?

If MKUltra proved anything, it’s that being a “good person” cannot simply mean being polite, keeping your head down and following the rules of the day. The doctors, scientists, and bureaucrats who tore human minds apart thought they were being good, obedient servants to a grand, necessary master. They swapped their individual moral compasses for an institutional paycheque and a sense of duty.

True goodness isn’t about blind compliance. It isn’t about being an obedient servant to whatever system happens to be holding the clipboard. In fact, history shows us that sometimes, the ultimate act of human goodness is the exact opposite: it’s having the stubborn, bloody-minded courage to say “no”. It’s refusing to let your natural empathy be weaponised or traded away for compliance.

I’m still going to look for the good in everyone I meet – I can’t help it, it’s just how my brain is wired. But I’m keeping my detective mode firmly switched on. Because if we don’t actively choose to stand for our own humanity, there is always a master waiting in the wings, ready to turn us into a servant.

Citizen Jane x ✌️

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Over to you, truth-seekers! 🚨📣

What do you think it means to be a good person? Is it about being a cooperative citizen, or is it about knowing when to break the rules?

Drop a comment below and let me know your thoughts – no security clearance required! 💬👇

1. Dr. D. Ewen Cameron was a grant-funded researcher, not a CIA employee.
   The Front Organization: Between 1957 and 1964, the CIA funnelled $69,000 (equivalent to roughly $760,000 today) to Cameron’s experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute. This money was passed through a shell organisation called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.
   Plausible Deniability: Internal CIA documents later suggested that Cameron did not explicitly know the money originated from the CIA.
   The Subproject designation: Within the grand framework of MKUltra, his horrific “psychic driving” and memory-erasure experiments were simply organised under a sterile, clinical bureaucratic label: Subproject 68. ↩︎