How malleable are our brains to suggestion and under what circumstances?

Conspiracy beliefs often take hold because it is easier for our brain to comprehend one explanation, one villain, or one horrific theme, rather than a multitude of competing theories, which can be more disorienting.

The grotesque murders on August 8-9, 1969, shocked the country and the Western world. “Helter Skelter,” a phrase from the Beatles’ White Album, written the year before, was taken as an apocalyptic vision intended for Charles Manson and members of his so-called “family.” The phrase was written in blood on the walls of the murdered LaBianca couple. Vincent Bugliosi used “race war” as the theme of his prosecution case against Manson.

Morris’s documentary, Chaos: The Manson Murders, is based on Tom O’Brien’s 2019 prodigious book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. O’Brien and Morris give prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi’s theory short shrift. They explore the idea that Charles Manson was involved with the CIA’s experiments on mind control. The MK-ULTRA and Manson connection is credible. However, there is no definitive proof, just a lot of speculation and innuendos.

Did the MK Ultra psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, who was running a CIA-funded Haight Ashbury medical clinic, influence Manson during their overlapping time in the Haight Ashbury, the two years before the murders? It is a fact that Manson had his “family” go for treatment of STDs and pregnancy at the same clinic. It is a fact that the CIA and Manson were both interested in LSD. Dr. West’s files from this period and others have gone missing.

As a U.S. Air Force medical director during the Korean War, Dr. West undertook the study of 36 out of 59 U.S. airmen returned from North Korean prison, convinced they had exposed Korean civilians to germ warfare. Speculations were that the soldiers had been brainwashed. MK Ultra, a new CIA program, contracted Dr. West to develop experiments using hypnosis and psychotropics to protect our soldiers from mind control. The program enlarged and funded universities and private psychiatrists with the task of developing techniques for mind control, especially the use of LSD, which was given to subjects without their knowledge. Another goal of the research was to convince people to kill with no remorse. The MK Ultra program closed down in 1964.

Errol Morris’s previous documentary, Wormwood (2017), examines issues surrounding the death in 1952 of MK Ultra scientist Frank Olsen and the role that LSD played in his murder, initially attributed to suicidal depression. It took dozens of years for Frank Olsen’s son to solve this case.

Charles Manson was a drug dealer who used LSD, the mind-altering counterculture drug of the 1960s. His “family” was perpetually stoned, though Manson less so, to maintain absolute control.

According to Dr. Jodi M. Lane, who recently published her assessment of Charles Manson, he fits the criteria of Dr. Robert Hare’s definition of a psychopath: glibness or superficial charm; grandiose sense of self-worth; conning; manipulativeness; lack of remorse; shallow affect; callousness; and lack of empathy. Manson failed to accept responsibility for his actions. He had a need for stimulation, a proneness to boredom. He led a parasitic and deviant lifestyle and had no realistic long-term goals.

His “family” primarily consisted of the rootless, young, very impressionable women who left home to partake in the 1960s hippy counterculture—a far cry from the homebody female of the 1950s. Their rootlessness primed them for a magnetic attachment to a manipulative, grandiose man such as Charles Manson. Generous LSD supplies cinched the deal.

Kenneth Walsh, an award-winning historian, said of the 1960s, “It was a decade of extremes, a decade of transformational change and bizarre contrasts: flower children and assassins, idealism and alienation, rebellion and backlash. For many in the massive post-World War II baby boom generation, it was both the best of times and the worst of times.”

No surprise that Woodstock followed just a few days after the murders.