1 Conditioning Manhattan, New York, 2020 The early days of the Covid pandemic in NYC were surreal: empty streets that were eerily silent except for wailing ambulances, exhaust from the refrigerated morgue trucks parked outside hospitals, people looking on warily from their balconies (if they were lucky enough to have one). I watched from my home radio studio as the US naval hospital ship Comfort sailed into New York Harbor. Friends were sending me photos of tents erected in Central Park to serve as a field hospital for Covid overflow. New Yorkers were desperate and afraid. New York-like pretty much all of America-was locked down. People were hiding in their apartments. Public transit was empty. When anyone did go out, they made sure to keep a "safe" distance from everyone else.
It was easy to understand the fear at the beginning. Confusing reports from China, Italy, and-soon enough-everywhere around the world indicated that this virus was fast-spreading and deadly. People naturally responded based on their fear of the worst. Within a few months we had a lot more data and started to learn a startling fact: The disease really wasn''t that deadly at all. Aside from some particularly high-risk populations, the worst most people would get were symptoms similar to those of a really rough cold before moving on with their lives. But that didn''t stop the pandemic restrictions from continuing for years. Even today, five years later, you can still see signs in some stores or on a jet bridge warning people to stand six feet apart. A certain percentage of the population, apparently, will never stop wearing masks.
What gives? Covid lockdowns, social distancing, and masking didn''t continue long past their expiration date because of the disease. They continued because people were afraid. Rather, they were trained to be afraid. How? Through a process we generally call conditioning-repetitive stimuli, directed to create a physiological or psychological response-which is rooted in laboratory findings pioneered in Russia more than a century ago. The Science of Mind Control The Soviet leadership-first under Lenin, then Stalin-desperately wanted to create the perception that their workers'' paradise was rooted in science. To bolster the narrative of the Soviet Union as a science-based utopia, they leveraged the reputation of their most famous scientist. That scientist was Ivan Pavlov. Dr.
Ivan Pavlov was a known quantity in his field long before the rise of Soviet totalitarianism. In 1904, he received a Nobel Prize "in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion." But he is best known today as the founding father of an area of behaviorism known as classical conditioning, based in what he called the "conditional reflex." We use the term conditioning today to refer to any training or programming that pushes an animal or human to react in a predetermined way. But for Dr. Ivan Pavlov, conditional reflex was something much more specific-and, at the time, revolutionary. Pavlov performed his experiments on animals. In a laboratory setting he had been able to induce a physiological reaction in dogs-salivation-in response to a stimulus (usually a buzzer or metronome) that had regularly indicated food was coming.
Through associating the buzzer with food, the dogs'' brains had been conditioned to salivate at the sound of the buzzer, whether or not food was present. But could this sort of conditioning go beyond the mechanistic salivation reflex and change voluntary behaviors of the dogs? Pavlov began to wonder. In 1924, Pavlov accidentally stumbled upon an answer when his laboratory in Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg) was severely flooded during a storm. The dogs Pavlov kept for his experiments nearly drowned but were saved at the last moment by members of Pavlov''s research staff who burst into the facility. While the dogs survived, they were never the same-and Dr. Pavlov noted major behavioral changes in them. After the flood, the dogs'' previous conditioning was suddenly wiped away. Dogs who once loved certain members of Pavlov''s staff, for instance, now showed aggression toward them.
The trauma of the flood seemed to have reprogrammed the dogs. Pavlov began to wonder about the implications of this event. If dogs could be reprogrammed so completely, could humans? While Pavlov found that conditioning humans wouldn''t be so simple, his discovery of the conditional reflex was a first scientific step toward understanding how to manipulate human behavior. He committed himself to exploring the recesses of the human mind based on both underlying anatomy and outside stimuli. And while his findings were limited, he concluded that external stimuli can trigger human reflex reactions as well. A confounding variable that Pavlov struggled to solve over decades was that his canine subjects had traits innate to them-personalities, in essence-that could dramatically affect their conditional response. And he knew that if this was true for dogs, things would be even more complicated for human beings. Coincidentally, while Pavlov was making groundbreaking discoveries and becoming the most famous Russian scientist of all time, the Soviet Union began to form its totalitarian apparatus obsessed with absolute control of society through dominating their minds.
The Soviets took notice of Pavlov''s work. What better tool could a tyrannical regime have than a system to control minds by inducing reflexive psychological responses? Politically, Lenin, Stalin, and other Soviet leaders claimed to be leveraging Pavlov''s genius to advance their dictatorship of the proletariat. This pretense of a scientifically-driven society gave their Marxist planning a veneer of legitimacy. While the Soviets were happy to commandeer Pavlov''s reputation at first, they were not so kind to Pavlov himself. In the early years after the October Revolution, Pavlov was a victim of the brutish, blundering Soviet system. He even went through a period of extreme deprivation when his lab fell into disrepair and he struggled to find food. He fed his family in part with a garden he had planted himself. Eventually, though, Lenin realized the value Pavlov brought to the new Soviet project, and extended him financial support to conduct his research.
Thus, Pavlov had what biographer Daniel Todes calls a "combative collaboration" with the Soviets. He was one of the few Soviet citizens who publicly criticized the Communists while ultimately benefiting from their state-funded largesse. Later in his life, around his eightieth birthday, Pavlov accepted Soviet government patronage for the construction and staffing of the Koltushi complex near Leningrad. This sprawling institution, a village unto itself, would officially be called the Institute of Experimental Genetics of Higher Nervous Activity. At Koltushi, Pavlov sought to apply the knowledge acquired from experimenting on dogs to human neurology and psychology. As Pavlov would tell the Soviet propaganda organ Izvestia, Koltushi had a primary mission: "Our work will result in the success of eugenics-the science of the development of an improved human type." The Soviet leadership clearly believed this was an important mission for propaganda purposes-and they hoped much more. Vyacheslav Molotov, the head of the Council of People''s Commissars, called the creation of Koltushi a top priority for the Soviet government.
(Pavlov''s scientific goals at Koltushi were ambitious, but he didn''t get very far with them. He would have only a few years at Koltushi before dying in 1936.) Despite the privileges the Soviet regime afforded him, Pavlov was a rare outspoken critic of its failures-one who would never face the wrath of the gulag or firing squad. In 1924, speaking in the City Duma''s great hall on Nevskii Prospekt, Pavlov stood in front of the room and slammed not just the politics of the revolution but the Russian people''s inability to see reality. Pavlov diagnosed it in scientific terms, as paraphrased by Todes: The suppression of private property and persecution of religion had profoundly shaken Russians'' nervous system, causing a mass neurotic "breakdown" characterized by "tendencies to succumb to fantastic suggestions." Having always suffered from an imbalance between excitation and inhibition, Russians were now totally incapable of seeing things as they really were. Their reflexes "are coordinated, not with reality, but with words." Pavlov was often despondent over what the October Revolution had done to his country and its people.
He recognized that his native Russia was undergoing a mass psychosis under Soviet rule. Even as the regime was flailing from population-wide starvation and failed five-year plans, many of its people still believed against all odds in the promises of Communism. The suffering, as horrific as it was, would lead them to a workers'' paradise. Despite his criticism of the regime, Pavlov would eventually become a prized symbol for the Soviets, leveraged by Stalin''s inner circle for international prestige. At the highest level, the Soviets would decide to protect Pavlov-and even give him considerable resources to expand his work. Part of Pavlov hoped that the Soviets would improve their ability to govern, and he also felt he owed it to his countrymen as well as science to continue his research. Under Soviet Communism, the Russian people were forced into a mass delusion. The entire Soviet apparatus became a massive mind-control machine that combined constant psychological terror with extreme violence.
Ironically, Pavlov discovered conditio.