Word: chavkin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Samuel Chavkin's new book presents a series of ideas on quantifying and manipulating human behavior from chillingly over scientific thinkers like Mark, Ervin and Sweet. He is a muckraker--not in the present pejorative sense of needlessly digging out past personal scandals of celebrities, but in the sense of following the fine old tradition of the crusading journalist seeking out corruption or abuse of power wherever it may occur and exposing that evil to the timeless cure of fresh air and sunlight. His book brings out a creeping fascism: in what he sees as a slow rise in scientists...
Although the book ostensibly focuses on the development and use of techniques for manipulating the brain cells and behavior patterns of those who stray too far beyond social norms, Chavkin also touches on a range of leftist-humanist concerns from the debasing treatment of prisoners to what he considers the racist implications of sociobiology. And the "mind control" methods he describes are sometimes as simple as a commercially produced electric shocking device called a "Personal Shocker," designed for the busy psychiatrist to carry around...
...Chavkin did not intend to be sensational. His book is meticulously researched and footnoted, and he was not altogether happy when his publisher, Houghton Mifflin, decided to call his book The Mind Stealers and splash that title in big, bold black letters across a bright red dust jacket. But Chavkin did intend his book to be a warning. He makes that clear at the end of his first chapter when he notes that the year the CIA started its massive MK-ULTRA program to develop mind-control techniques--1953--was the same year the U.S. signed the Nuremberg Code, prohibiting...
...well-verified horror stories, and the author seems to be taking the opportunity to verbally point and gape. The book is not a focused piece on the spread of psychosurgery, and it is difficult to find in the book evidence for the growing acceptance of its practice that Chavkin continually denounces. At times, too, the book rambles, reaching as far back as the '30s to remind readers of the story of a group of southern blacks who were unknowingly given syphilis so that scientists could observe their reactions to trial medications...
...least one passage, Chavkin even distorts the truth in his quest for muck to rake, twisting the much-misrepresented ideas of sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, to give himself a target for an assault on determinism. Chavkin writes, "Wilson's contention is that it is the genes and not cultural evolution or socioeconomics or political environment that are responsible for human behavior." In fact, Wilson simply says that genes play a large, but not solo, role in shaping human behavior; he would hardly be happy with Chavkin's characterization of his ideas...