COVID Policy - They Ran the Experiment on All of Us
By Kenny Carmody
Someone put a diagram together and it deserves to be read slowly.
Three of the most disturbing psychological experiments in modern history, placed in a Venn diagram with COVID policy sitting precisely at their intersection.
They were not wrong.
I have been thinking about this diagram for a long time now. Not because it is clever, though it is. Because it is accurate in a way that most people’s frameworks for understanding what happened during COVID do not allow them to see. The standard framings, political left and right, institutional failure versus institutional capture, incompetence versus malevolence, all of them miss what the diagram names. Which is that what happened was not primarily political or institutional in the ordinary sense.
It was psychological. It was a demonstration of what human beings do under specific conditions. Conditions that were not accidental.
Milgram: Obedience to Authority
Most people know the Milgram experiment in outline.
1. Stanley Milgram designs a study to understand how ordinary German citizens participated in the Holocaust. He wants to know whether what happened required monsters or whether ordinary people, under the right conditions, would do the same.
What he finds is not a German answer. It is a human one.
Ordinary Americans, recruited from the general public, administered what they believed were severe electric shocks to screaming strangers at the instruction of a man in a white coat. Not all of them. But most. Far more than anyone predicted before the study ran. They continued after the subject in the other room stopped responding. Some continued until they believed they had delivered a potentially lethal dose.
They were not monsters. They were ordinary people. The authority was sufficient. The responsibility was diffused across the chain of command. The institutional framework made the harm feel like compliance with a legitimate instruction rather than a choice they were personally making.
We wrote about how COVID replicated this at planetary scale. The doctors who enforced treatment protocols that contradicted the clinical evidence in front of them. The employers who processed terminations for the unvaccinated with an efficiency that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with institutional role. The family members who enforced the separation from dying relatives with a firmness that they would not have recognised in themselves two years earlier.
The authority was total. The diffusion of responsibility was complete. The institutional framing made the harm feel like responsibility.
Milgram, at planetary scale, with the whole world as the laboratory.
Asch: Conformity Over Perception
The Asch conformity experiments are less famous than Milgram’s and more disturbing in some ways.
Solomon Asch, working in the early 1950s, wanted to understand something simpler and more fundamental than obedience to authority. He wanted to know what would happen to a person’s stated perception when the social group unanimously stated something different.
The experiment is elegant in its simplicity. A subject is placed in a room with confederates who are in on the study. Everyone is shown lines of obviously different lengths. The confederates all give the same wrong answer. What does the subject do?
Most of the time, the subject gives the wrong answer. Not because they do not see the correct answer. They do. But the social pressure of unanimous group consensus is sufficient, for most people most of the time, to override direct sensory experience. To make them say publicly what they know privately is false.
This is the mechanism that masking a healthy population, cancelling Christmas, and training entire societies to treat their neighbours as biological threats actually operated through. Not the specific policies themselves. The social consensus those policies were designed to create and enforce. The environment in which the correct answer, this is disproportionate, this is not supported by the evidence, this is doing more harm than the thing it is supposed to prevent, was not sayable without placing yourself outside the group consensus in ways that carried real social cost.
Most people gave the wrong answer. Not because they could not see. Because the group was unanimous and the unanimity was sufficient.
Asch showed that this does not require fear or threat or anything dramatic. It requires only the social environment. The knowledge that everyone else is saying the same thing. The cost of being the one person in the room who sees differently.
COVID manufactured that environment at scale. Deliberately. Through the mechanisms of media consensus, platform management, and the social punishment of dissent. The person who said they could see the correct answer was not simply incorrect. They were dangerous. A vector of misinformation. A threat to the group whose consensus they were disrupting.
This is not a side effect of the pandemic response. It is the central psychological technology of it.
Stanford: The Cruelty That the Role Permits
Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment was abandoned early.
It had to be. Ordinary students, randomly assigned roles of guards and prisoners, had within days produced a situation that Zimbardo’s team could no longer ethically sustain. The guards, ordinary young men with no prior history of cruelty, had become cruel. Not because cruelty was required by their role. Because the role gave them permission and the institutional structure backed them up. Because there was no mechanism for accountability and because the prisoner-subjects had been stripped of the cues that ordinarily trigger the empathic response in ordinary people.
The cruelty was not in them before the role was assigned. The role produced it.
We watched this in real time between 2020 and 2022.
The COVID marshals enforcing park closures with a zeal that their neighbours found unrecognisable. The border agents turning families away from dying relatives with an efficiency that the institutional position seemed to make not only permissible but required. The hospital administrators who barred visitors from patients in their final hours, not anguished by the policy but administering it. The HR departments processing termination letters for the unvaccinated. The teachers and neighbours and community members who reported, who enforced, who turned the social pressure of the Asch environment into active participation in the exclusion of the non-compliant.
Ordinary people. Assigned institutional roles or simply the role of the compliant member of the group whose consensus had been manufactured. Discovering, inside those roles, capacities that their pre-2020 selves would not have recognised.
Zimbardo’s insight is not that some people are cruel and some are not. It is that ordinary people, under the right institutional conditions, will produce cruelty without being cruel people. That the structure is sufficient. That the role is sufficient. That once the permission is embedded in institutional authority and the accountability is removed, the behaviour follows.
The suffering of the vaccine injured, the families kept from dying relatives, the children masked in classrooms, the people who lost their livelihoods for refusing an injection, was produced in significant part by ordinary people doing what ordinary people do when the institutional structure gives them permission and removes the accountability.
That is the most disturbing part of the Stanford finding. And it is the part COVID confirmed.
The Deeper Through-Line
Now go deeper. Because the convergence of these three experiments at a single historical moment is not as surprising as it appears if you know the institutional history behind them.
All three exist within the intellectual ecosystem of mid-twentieth century American social science, an ecosystem that was not purely academic. It was funded, shaped, and in some cases directly conducted by institutions whose interest in understanding human psychological compliance was not theoretical.
The CIA’s MKUltra programme ran from 1953 to at least 1973. Its stated purpose was the development of techniques for mind control that could be used in Cold War intelligence operations. Its actual scope was considerably broader. Unwitting subjects. Experimental drug administration. Sensory deprivation. Hypnosis. The systematic study of what conditions are sufficient to break down a person’s sense of individual identity and replace it with a managed alternative.
The programme was overseen by Sidney Gottlieb. Its research touched institutions across the American university system. Its participants included, directly or through funding relationships, people who moved between military intelligence, academic social science, and the medical establishment with a fluency that the disciplines’ official self-understanding as separate domains did not reflect.
The through-line is not conspiracy in the sense of a secret plan with minutes and signatures. It is institutional continuity. The same networks. The same funding streams. The same underlying question, pursued through different experimental frameworks across different decades: what are the conditions under which human beings can be made to do what they would not otherwise do? What are the conditions under which a population’s behaviour can be shaped without the population understanding that the shaping is occurring?
Milgram. Asch. Zimbardo. All three were asking, from different angles, the same question that MKUltra was asking with less academic restraint.
The answers they produced were not kept in academic journals. They entered the institutional knowledge base of the people responsible for managing large populations. They became tools. And the COVID period was, among other things, the deployment of those tools at the scale that had always been their intended application.
The Architecture Behind the Architecture
The Rockefeller medicine model, established in its modern form through the Flexner Report of 1910, did not simply capture medical education in the interests of pharmaceutical commerce, though it did that.
It established the epistemological framework through which the Western world would understand health and disease for the following century. The framework that reduces the human body to a mechanical system whose failures require chemical intervention. That positions the physician as the authority whose instruction the patient receives and follows. That systematically excludes from legitimate medicine every approach to human health that does not generate the dependency relationships pharmaceutical commerce requires.
Natural light. Frequency. The electromagnetic environment of the human body. The healing traditions that understood disease as a disruption of natural systems that could be addressed by restoring those systems rather than chemically overriding their symptoms. Robert Becker’s work on electromagnetic fields and biological systems, which gave people the theoretical tools to understand their own bodies in ways the pharmaceutical model cannot accommodate, was suppressed. Not because it was wrong. Because a population equipped with that understanding is a population less dependent on the system that the Rockefeller model built.
The deliberate policy-driven replacement of full-spectrum incandescent light with blue-light-dominant LED technology across schools, hospitals, offices, and public spaces, beginning as a major infrastructure push around the time of the Obama administration’s energy initiatives, produced neurological and endocrine effects in the populations living under it that the people who designed the policy had access to the science to predict. The circadian disruption. The melatonin suppression. The specific effects on the developing nervous systems of children in the LED-lit schools that we built for them while the research on what full-spectrum light does for human biology sat available and largely unconsidered by the people making the decisions.
These are not separate stories. They are dimensions of the same story. The story of the deliberate construction of an environment, across multiple decades and multiple institutional domains, in which the human being is maximally dependent, maximally manageable, and maximally separated from the natural systems and the knowledge that would render the management unnecessary.
COVID was the moment this architecture showed itself completely. The psychological compliance technologies developed through Milgram and Asch and Stanford. The medical authority structures established through a century of Rockefeller medicine. The information management infrastructure built through the surveillance and platform architectures of the preceding two decades. The legal and regulatory frameworks that had been assembling the liability protections and emergency authority structures that the rollout would require.
It was not assembled in 2020. It was deployed in 2020.
Most people still think it was about a virus.
The Battle That Was Always Spiritual
I want to say something here that the political and institutional framing cannot fully accommodate.
There is a 16th century book called The Spiritual Combat, written by Lorenzo Scupoli in 1589. It is one of the most precise accounts I have found of what the interior battle actually looks like. Not the external battle with institutions and systems, which is real and requires everything this essay has named. The interior one. The battle with the ego that mistakes its own certainty for wisdom. That mistakes its own fear for discernment. That mistakes the group consensus for truth and the institutional authority for moral legitimacy.
Scupoli understood something that Milgram confirmed and Asch confirmed and Zimbardo confirmed. That the deepest vulnerability of the human being is not to physical threat or institutional power. It is to the internal corruption of the faculty of judgment. To the ego’s preference for the comfortable answer. To the soul’s tendency to defer to the authority in the room rather than the authority within.
The COVID period was a test of that interior faculty at civilisational scale. And many people failed it not because they were weak people or bad people but because the cultivation of the interior faculty, the capacity to see clearly under social pressure, to hold to the perception of what is true when the group consensus says otherwise, to resist the institutional authority that offers the comfort of obedience in exchange for the surrender of judgment, had not been developed in them by the culture they had inherited.
The culture did not develop it because a culture that develops that capacity in its members is a culture whose members are difficult to manage.
The beauty that pulls us out of the ego is not incidental to this. It is the pathway. The moment of genuine encounter with something true and beautiful breaks the self-referential loop of the anxious ego reaching for the group’s reassurance. It restores, briefly and completely, the faculty that the manufactured consensus was designed to suppress. The capacity to see.
God is in the pain and distress. Not as the explanation of the pain or the justification of it. As the presence that the pain, when we stop managing it and allow ourselves to be inside it honestly, opens us toward. The ego that is broken open by suffering, that has been stripped of its prior assumptions and its prior sense of invulnerability, is the ego that can receive what the ego intact cannot. The understanding that we live inside a paradigm that gets us through the day but that the full truth is larger than what any paradigm can hold. That we can be guided from within if we cultivate the ground that the Holy Spirit requires.
This is not separate from everything else this essay has named. It is the deepest response to it. The institutions that ran the experiment on all of us were, at their foundation, operating on a particular assumption about human nature. That it is manageable. That it can be shaped by sufficient fear and authority and social pressure. That there is no interior faculty that lies beyond the reach of the Milgram apparatus.
They were wrong about this. Not because enough people resisted successfully in 2020, though some did. But because the faculty they were trying to suppress is not finally suppressible. It is the image of God in the human being. The part that knows, below all the noise of the manufactured consensus, what is true. That cannot be finally gaslit. That persists, battered and uncertain and sometimes very quiet, through everything that is done to silence it.
The spiritual combat is not over. It was not decided in 2020. It is being decided in the interior of every person who is willing to hold the question honestly rather than reaching for the reassurance of the group.
In the willingness to see what the diagram is showing.
In the refusal to give the Asch answer when you can see the correct line.
In the part of you that knows, even when everything in the room is saying otherwise.
That part is where the battle is.
And it is where it has always been.
What the Diagram Says
Milgram. Asch. Stanford.
Obedience to authority. Conformity over perception. Cruelty enabled by institutional role.
All three. Simultaneously. At global scale. With decades of preparation behind them.
The diagram is not an accusation. It is a diagnosis. And the diagnosis is more useful than the accusation because it points toward what is required in response.
Not only the institutional accountability, which is necessary and which this body of work has tried to name clearly. The interior work. The cultivation of the faculty that the experiment was designed to suppress. The slow, unglamorous, deeply personal work of developing the capacity to see clearly under pressure. To hold to perception when the group says otherwise. To refuse the role the institution is offering when the role requires the surrender of what you know.
Scupoli called it the spiritual combat because he understood that this is not primarily a political or institutional struggle. It is a struggle for the soul’s integrity. For the faculty of genuine perception. For the capacity to be, in the specific conditions of your own moment, the person who sees the correct line and says so.
The experiment was run on all of us.
Some people passed it. More failed it than Milgram expected and Asch expected and Zimbardo could sustain watching.
The experiment is not over.
It is being run, in new forms, every day.
The question it keeps asking is the same question it has always asked.
What will you do when the authority tells you to continue?
What will you say when the room gives the wrong answer?
What will you become when the role gives you permission?
The answer is not given by the institutions. It is not given by the group.
It is given in the interior. In the place that beauty reaches and fear does not. In the ground where the Holy Spirit moves when we have been humble enough to stop filling it with the noise of the ego’s management of its own anxiety.
God is in the pain. God is in the question. God is in the part that persists when everything designed to suppress it has done its work.
And that part, if we tend it honestly, is the thing that the experiment cannot finally reach.
If this piece reached you, share it with someone who needs to read it. The question it asks is still being asked. And the answer still matters.
It was just unbelievable to observe people’s behaviour. I am still scarred by the whole experience.
DNI Gabbard Reveals Evidence of U.S. Taxpayer-Funded Global Biolab Program
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-releases-2026/4163-pr-10-26