Unsurprisingly, Mitchell got his way and, equally unsurprisingly, those submitted to these techniques began to say whatever their interrogators expected, exactly as predicted. Mitchell and his colleague, Dr. Bruce Jessen, helped direct the 2002 “interrogation” of Abu Zubaydah—who was waterboarded 83 times in a single month—and the supposed 9/11 “mastermind,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who “confessed” to the 9/11 plot after being waterboarded 183 times and sleep deprived for over six days. Mitchell himself even personally threatened to cut the throat of KSM’s son during one interrogation.

These techniques were so effective that, not only did they produce the testimony that formed the backbone of the 9/11 Commission Report (and thus, to this day form the backbone of the official 9/11 story), they also caused KSM to confess to targeting a bank that wasn’t even founded until after his arrest! Talk about results!

In a sick way, the CIA’s experiments in inducing learned helplessness proved that Seligman had discovered valid insights into a real psychological phenomenon. It certainly is possible to create the conditions to break someone’s will and cause them to confess to whatever their torturers want. But this is emphatically not the point of the learned helplessness research and it is important to note that Seligman, for his part, was never aware that his research was being used by the CIA until after the Senate’s report on the torture program was released to the public and that he completely denounced the perversion of his research when it was exposed.

BREAKING THE CONDITIONING

From some lab experiments in the 1960s to an illegal CIA torture program four decades later, the story of the research into learned helplessness is incredible enough. But (thankfully for us) the story doesn’t end there.

In one version of Seligman’s experiment, one group of dogs were given levers to push that could stop the shocks from happening while another group were given levers to push that did nothing at all. Unsurprisingly, when the levers were taken away, the dogs whose levers had worked in the first round of the experiment attempted to escape the shocks and eventually discovered that they could jump over the barrier to be free of them; the dogs whose levers had not worked almost uniformly curled up and accepted the shocks without even attempting to escape.

The would-be social engineers know this already. This is precisely why we are asked to fixate on the never-ending (s)election sideshow circus. As I have pointed out time and time again, not only is the entire concept of “electing” “representatives” to impose their will on the entire population of an arbitrary geographical location fundamentally immoral, it is also a sure way to induce learned helplessness in the population.

As you know by now, the 2D political chess game that is used to distract the public does absolutely nothing to change the real political agenda that is set by the 3D chess masters. And just as children eventually discover that their toy driving wheel doesn’t actually control the car, so, too, do even the most devoted statists eventually realize that their ballot in the voting box every four years does nothing to prevent the globalist agenda from playing out like an unstoppable nightmare.

This realization is demoralizing. That is the entire point. The message of the political system we have grown up with our whole lives is: “Throw the bums out every four years if you like. It doesn’t matter! It changes nothing! You have no effect on the system.”

Unfortunately, all too often the victims of this conditioning merely internalize this message and stop there. These are the people who spend their time in online fora and comment sections preaching that nothing will ever change and shooting down every idea or alternative that is ever proposed. Although critical examination of ideas is always important, the victims of learned helplessness fail to realize that they have been locked inside a mental prison by their erstwhile masters so effectively that they themselves have become guards in that prison, trying to stop their fellow “inmates” from escaping.

But what if we were to examine the results of this experiment from the other side? What if, instead of using this research to better control others, we were to apply these findings to what they can tell us about how to empower the public and dispel the learned helplessness that keeps them from looking for real solutions?

This is the question that Seligman turned to after the publication of his experimental findings. You see, he was not experimenting on dogs because he was a sadist. Nor was he simply interested in studying learned helplessness per se, either in dogs or humans.

After documenting the phenomenon, his focus quickly shifted to what could be done with this knowledge to benefit humanity. As Maria Konnikova documents in her 2015 New Yorker article on the research:

But Seligman didn’t stop his research there. He had told his supervisor that he didn’t believe in causing suffering unless it had some inherent value that would lead to bettering lives, both canine and human. So he and Maier [his colleague in the original experiments] set out to figure out a way to reverse the effect of learned helplessness in the dogs. What they found was that one simple tweak could stop the passivity from developing. When the researchers first put all the dogs in the shuttle box, where the shock was controllable by a jump, and, only then, into the inescapable harness, the effect of the harness was broken: now, even though the dogs were being bombarded by shocks, they didn’t give up. They kept trying to control the situation, pressing the panels despite the lack of feedback. And when they were again put into the box, they didn’t cower. Instead, they immediately reclaimed their ability to avoid shocks.

One key insight that can be garnered from this research is that, just as people can be conditioned into a state of helplessness by being subjected to uncontrollable shocks, they can be “innoculated” (to use a phrase) against that feeling of helplessness by first being exposed to a situation where they do have control.

This is part of the core ethos of my #SolutionsWatch series. There are, certainly, those things that are completely beyond our control. And, because they are, there is absolutely no point in focusing on them. Our priority has to be those things that are within our control. Where and how we live; what we spend our time, money and energy doing; who we spend our time with; how we provide the necessities for our family; the type of community that we live in: all of these are, to some extent, things that we can have a direct influence on, and by exerting that influence (however slight), we train ourselves to understand that our situation is not hopeless.

The field of positive psychology is well worth exploring. In doing so, we can gain important insights into our own cognitive processes and become more conscious of the explanatory styles that we use to make sense of the world. And in doing so, we can also gain more control over those processes and un-learn a lifetime of learned helplessness that has caused many to abandon all hope.

At the very least, it can help us to realize that the door to our mental jail cell is unlocked. All we have to do is walk out the door.