Recently, having written a book on the topic, I was interviewed for a programme about brainwashing on BBC Radio Four (still obtainable via the BBC iPlayer, for the next five days). The interviewer, Steve Punt, assured me that military experiments had shown it was possible to use microwave radiation to influence the brain, making people hear a clicking sound. It's a start. What it isn't, CIA dreams notwithstanding, is full-blown mind control.
Some of those dreams were so bizarre, and the CIA's experiments conducted in such determined secrecy, that it's little wonder conspiracy theories about mysterious methods of mind control have flourished. Yet such theories long predate the CIA. Back in the days of the French Revolution, a particularly well-developed version arose: the story of the Air Loom, a mysterious influencing machine able to focus powerful rays on the victim's brain and thereby control his thoughts. The Air Loom was said to be controlled by a gang of terrorists who wanted to prolong the war between France and Britain. (For more on this fascinating story, I recommend Mike Jay's book, The Air Loom Gang.)
As technology advanced - telegraphy, telephony, computers, wireless communication - the conspiracies kept pace, always slightly ahead, probing the murky territory between science fiction and schizophrenic delusion. The core stereotype and the narrative, however, seem pretty constant. Someone, somewhere, has achieved unparalleled control of other people's thoughts, beliefs and willpower. This hidden manipulator's malignant activity underlies those uncontrollable social and individual disturbances which we can't fathom: the economic collapses, the political upheavals, the dizzying cultural changes, the reasons behind what we hate about the world. Things may seem crazy, but there's a hidden meaning, if only we could find it.
James Tilly Matthews, who created, in extraordinary detail, the story of the Air Loom, appears to have been a lone believer: today he might be labelled schizophrenic. Many of the more extreme conspiracy theorists may also be prone to what psychologists call ‘magical ideation', schizotypal ways of thinking which see connections everywhere, handing out great dollops of meaning when other less magical minds perceive only coincidence.
But don't dismiss all conspiracy theories as harmless eccentricity. Directed against a group of people deemed ‘enemies', they can spur on lethal, genocidal violence. In the civilised, rational, forward-thinking West, we have plenty of examples of that particular despicable human behaviour, from the witch trials which followed (not preceded) the birth of the ‘age of reason' to the Holocaust, just decades ago. Whether the conspiracy is women in league with the devil or Jews conspiring to run and ruin Europe, ideas that seem laughable to us exerted a terrible cost in human suffering.
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