August 3, 2021 • 55 mins
In the early 1960s, one of the most unethical experiments in psychology’s history was quietly conducted in a state hospital in Michigan. It sought to upend the delusions of the three patients involved, but ultimately disabused the experimenter of his own.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Dave is here with us today
and we're all just quietly holding hands. Now we have
to stop and come into the real world and start
(00:23):
talking to you find people for this episode of Stuff
You Should Know. My my lip got caught in my
tooth when I said you, and it came out a
little weird. It's funny. My daughter finally lost her first tooth,
and it's you know, it's changing the way she talks.
She's got a little funny little lisp and she's always
(00:43):
took tongue in on it. And I'm like, I'm gonna
be there with you soon. You know, I gotta get
this front one redone right, So yeah, I'm gonna wait
until right before we have live shows so I can
pull that front tooth again. Nice. That'll be a special
treat for everybody, especially me. Oh, you were used to it.
(01:04):
I really was, um. But the worst was when when
you had that little case that you would put it
in and that they had event so the smell could
waft out of it. Yeah. I gave up after the
first one on wearing that thing. I was just like,
who cares? Yeah, No, it's great. It was very liberating.
It was as is this podcast episode. I think this
(01:26):
is going to be a good one, because Chuck, I've
been wanting to talk about this for a really long time.
This is one of those things that you like hear
about and you're like, wait what that That can't be right,
And then you read a little more about it and
a little more and it just keeps getting worse and worse.
But yet it's. Um, it's just kind of one of
the like a landmark study in the field of psychology
(01:48):
that we're talking about today. Yeah, the Three Christs of
hip Salanti and I studied this. I remember this from
studying it in psychology class in college and got kind
of into it at the time. And um, you started
wearing like three Cristi shirts and stuff. I followed them
(02:08):
on tour. It was great. I don't for some reason,
I thought I read the book, But I don't think
I read the book. I think we just covered the
book in college and in the psychology class, Like, I
don't think they made you read the whole book that
we basically just kind of went over it. But I've
been pretty fascinated for years, and uh, you know, eventually,
when Hollywood made a movie about it four years ago,
(02:31):
I was excited and even paid to rent that thing.
That pretty good. I watched the first half hour and realized, Man,
they've just sort of disneyfied this thing and it's not good.
Although our buddy Kevin Pollock isn't it and he's always great. Hey,
that guy can steal a scene better than the Hamburglar. Yeah.
(02:55):
The movie, uh, just so everyone knows, is called The
Three crist of Hipslani from John Abnett, starring Richard Gear
as the name changed doctor and then the Three Christs.
In the movie, you're portrayed by Peter dink Lidge. Uh.
One of my favorite actors, Walton Goggins. Yeah, he's great, man,
I went back. I told you I was watching The
Shield again. That guy was amazing in that. In that yeah, yeah,
(03:19):
he played one of the main characters. He's just the best.
And then, uh, what's the guy's named Bradley Whitford, who's
also great. Everyone is good. It just it's one of
those movies that they I think just over sanitized and
should have made a documentary instead. M hmm. But they
didn't and that's okay, and we don't have to talk
about that movie ever again. Now then we have instead,
(03:43):
I think we should start by giving a little background
and the guy whose idea the three crist of Ipsilani
experiment was, and it was a researcher, a psychologist, a
social psychologist, your favorite named Milton row keach Um and
Milton Rokey, had some ideas about what it was to
(04:03):
to make up an identity, what made up a person's
sense of who they were, and he basically had broken
it out into beliefs, a series of different kinds of beliefs,
which we we'll kind of talk about here. They're a
little more. But there's this anecdote that's frequently passed around
that kind of like lays the early groundwork for this
idea that that someone's belief in who they are could
(04:27):
conceivably be challenged. And it came one night when he
was sitting around the dinner table with his wife and
his two young daughters, um and he accidentally, in like
a moment of frustration telling them to settle down at dinner,
called one another by their opposite names. And the girls
just thought that was like the funniest thing that ever heard.
At first, yes, was that is that? Mike? You? Yeah?
(04:52):
I even stuck my finger up like all right now
you but you can't see it, can you know? Because
we just listened to each other. Uh yeah at first,
and it was a little fun game. And then I
think the five year old even said, you know, this
is just a game, right dad, And Dad said no,
it's real, and uh, I hear him saying it in
that voice, and you know, pretty soon they were begging
(05:14):
for him to stop. And I can verify that this
is a thing I've been I think his a parent.
Sometimes you'll call your kid by another name as a joke,
like I know I've done it, like called uh my
daughter my dog's name. If she's like she'll come into
the room and like bark or something as a joke,
say oh, you're Nico, and she'll say, yeah, I'm Nico,
and then for a few minutes later, I'm like, hey,
(05:37):
come here, Nico, and then it's fun for about five
minutes and then she's like, no, I am not. So
there is very much a thing to a child's identity,
especially from their parents, where they kind of get their
identity and seek their identity. When that has challenged it,
it is very quickly kind of traumatic. Yeah, he learned
(05:58):
a couple of things that one, you can very quickly
challenge somebody, or you can very very quickly push someone
to a state of like trauma or anxiety or panic,
even by just by simply challenging their identity by calling
them the wrong name purposefully. He also write, yeah, I
know Jerry, each other, Jerry, I think it would cancel.
(06:20):
Let you they're out do it one more time and
I will crumble, okay, Jerry Chifford. But he also learned, like, Okay,
there's consequences to this. You can't take somebody with a
with a well formed, well developed sense of identity and
and and I guess a normal sense of identity and
push push them to the edge, mess around with that
sense of identity. There's there's harmful consequences to that. So
(06:45):
he's started to kind of explore this, and like I
was saying, like he had broken everybody's um belief system
into a handful of different types of beliefs. And the
belief that you are who you are, which is what
we call our identity. He ascribed to primitive beliefs which
are just like basic truths and the same neighborhood as Um.
(07:07):
You know, I'm wearing a headphone on one ear and
I have the other one behind my head right now,
I have brown hair. My name is Josh, your chuck, Like,
just basic truths of the universe that anyone you talked
to is going to generally agree with. Right, That's where
the personality comes from. Yeah, and that that is the
very bedrock and foundation of how we think about ourselves.
(07:32):
And he already saw messing with that can be bad,
so he was like, hey, why not take it a
step further right, right, So what I was saying a
minute ago with like how we saw that there's consequences
to messing with uh sane person, I just made air quotes.
If you couldn't tell from my intonation, Um, messing with
a sane person's identity, you can't really do that. But
(07:55):
this is the mid century in America, and there's a
whole group of people that you can do basically whatever
you want to with as far as mental stuff goes.
And that were people who are suffering from mental conditions
who were locked up in state institutions at the time,
and so row Keech came up with this idea like, Okay,
wait a minute, what if I what if I got
(08:17):
my hands on some mentally unstable people, some possibly diagnosed people,
and and messed with their sense of identity, took their
delusion and challenged it. That could be okay, because hey,
their lives are basically useless anyway, I'm paraphrasing row Keech here,
and if if something does come of it, there's a
(08:37):
good chance that it could be positive instead. So let
me have it, let let me add them basically. Yeah,
there's a quote here from the book. And big thanks
to Dave Ruse for putting this one together. I know
this was a it's a tough one to wrangle, but
he did a great job. Here's the quote from the book.
Because it is not feasible to study such phenomena with
normal people, he didn't even put in quotes. Uh, it
(09:00):
seemed reasonable to focus on delusional systems of belief in
the hope that and subjecting them to strain that would
be little to lose and hopefully a great deal to gain.
And like, I read that sentence and I'm like, stop there, dude, right, yeah,
that's like the perfect motto for the misguided intentions of
the study. Yeah. Yeah, he was like indicted himself with
(09:21):
that one quote exactly just right out of the gate.
And I read this some commentary magazine article from nineteen
sixty four by um Oh. I can't remember who it was.
I don't have it pulled up, but he's a famous
poet at the time, and he was basically saying, like,
you know, surely Rogue Keeach, the guy who's writing the book, well,
it understands that Rogue Keeach, the character this doctor, it's
(09:44):
like out of his mind, and he likes he's like
slowly realizing, oh wait, this guy, even the author of
the book, has no idea that the doctor character who's
himself has has any idea just how unethical this is.
And that's a that's a that's a great example of it,
that demonstrates it right off the bat. Yeah, there's, um,
there's I don't know if you listen to the Snap
judgment on this, did you hear that? No? It was
(10:07):
good Snap, you know, great podcast or public radio program
turned podcasts. Sure, I've heard public radio before. I used
to I used to listen to a lot more of it.
Same here, um Fresh Air, I always still love fresh Air,
but I just it's one of those things where I
just bulk it up and then, like when I'm painting
a room in our house, I listened to just fresh
(10:29):
Air the whole time or something, you know what I mean. Yeah,
what is Terry Gross gonna have us on? Do we
need to get to twenty years? Would that do it? Yeah?
I wouldn't even begin to bother her until we hit
twenty years and then maybe yeah, and then we just
started asking basically, hi, Terry hi. Uh. So in that
snap judgment um, they pointed out that he uh that
(10:52):
Rokich actually read a Harper's article about two women who
believe they were the Virgin Mary, and that put an
idea into his head. And I know that in his
book he also talked about being inspired a little bit
by some some stuff that Voltaire wrote about it. Right, Yeah,
there was a man in the seventeenth century that Voltaire
wrote about named Simone Morin who was deranged in the
(11:14):
parlance at the time, and he thought that he was
Christ and so he was locked up in a madhouse
and he um met in that place in the institutional asylum.
Another man who thought he was Christ and Simone Morin
saw just how how like crazy this guy seemed and
was like, wait a minute, maybe I'm crazy. And in
(11:36):
confronting this other guy who claimed to have the same identity,
he regained his sanity to a certain extent, and unfortunately
he relapsed and ended up being burned at the stake
for heresy. But there was a moment there where he
had kind of like been knocked out of his delusion.
That's a huge deal. Like if you if you if
(11:57):
you have schizophrenia or delusionable leaves, like if your mental
disorder um is to the degree where you hold delusions.
And we should say a delusion is not like, you know,
a made up belief, for you know, you made your
belief up, Like this is what you think is real.
It is real to you, and you will defend it
when it's challenged. So the idea that somebody who was
(12:20):
delusional could be knocked out of their delusion by being
confronted with somebody else who had the same delusion, that
is groundbreaking. And I can see why roe Keach was like,
there we go, that's it, there's my there's my methodology
for this or for this this experiment. Yeah, and I'm
sure he was, you know, he was turned on a
(12:41):
little bit about the idea of three Christs or however
many Christs he could find. Well, I mean not even
like that, you know what I mean though, but a
social he was probably like, you know, this would make
for a pretty uh mind blowing experiment plus a great
book title. It's one of great understated book titles of
(13:01):
all time. Yeah, it's not like the three Richard Nixon's
of his Bilanti No, and I mean like Ippsilanti is
like this. It's just this this town outside of ann
Arbor where where you know, that's where one of the
mental asylums were in um, in Michigan at the time. Um.
And and it's just like you know, it might as
well be Walla, Walla or Lackawanna, or it's just an
(13:26):
unusual name in a town that doesn't really have much
of a claim to anything, you know what I mean. Yeah, sure,
all three of those towns are like, is he insulting
all of us or none of us? No, No, it's
not an insult. It's just it's just, um, it's not
like a hot happen in town. And it's been like
the Three crist of New York that loses something or
the price of London. It's just a rather generally unremarkable place, guys, Ippslani.
(13:53):
If you live there and you don't know that it's
generally unremarkable. I'm sorry to be breaking this news to you.
I don't mean it in a in a unkind way
at all. I know you don't. Uh, And I think
generally back then, that's where a lot of these institutions
were because they needed like lots of land. And uh
so let's just leave it at that, and okay, maybe
take a break, okay to let everybody really stew on
(14:16):
what I said. We'll take a break and we'll find
out how he found his his patients right after this, alright,
(14:49):
so we're back. Uh. There were twenty five thousand total
patients in the system in Michigan State, uh, at Michigan
State hospitals. And he went all all of these, you know,
he sort of tried to call them down two uh
too ideally to Christ figures. Uh. He found a man
who thought he was Cinderella. He found it Mrs God uh,
(15:12):
and then about six people who thought they were Christ.
And three of them were really into this idea and
really consistent with their belief that they were Jesus uh.
And two of them happened to be at Hippsilanti. So
he was like, this is perfect, I'll just transfer the
third end and we'll get going. Yeah. And so these
guys being inmates of the state at a time where yeah,
(15:34):
Ipsilanti had like four thousand people, four thousand patients in
just this one institution. Yeah, it's a and if you
were already like on the margins society and then moved
into a place where you're with four thousand other people
on the margins of society, it's a really good place
to get lost, to not get any real help. And
(15:55):
so one of the things that that was um was
part of this this experiment design is to make participating
in these discussions this group of these three Christs as
attractive to these three men as possible. So they were
moved toward d twenty three. They were given their own
private day room to eat in, to sleep or not sleeping,
(16:17):
but to hang out in away from everybody else. They
got some like place to stretch out and to have
some company. They got a lot of attention, a lot
of perks. Like basically their lives were changed in like
incalculable ways by being part of the study. And so
when they say, like, these were voluntary meetings and these
(16:38):
men were voluntary members of the study, that's that's definitely true.
They were. They were voluntary participants. But the perks on
offer were just so amazing. They were like you would
you could not turn down, you know, participating in some
degree exactly. So they were willing participants, uh, insofar as yeah,
they got these great perks worth throwning out. So he
(17:00):
changed the names of the guys. Uh, to protect their
families and to protect them to some degree. But um,
we should go over sort of the bios of the
three men. Um should we say who played them in
the movies? Willot help people? I don't think so, Okay,
I don't want to disparage those great actors names again. Well,
(17:22):
I mean the acting, they did a good job. It
was just the material. They're all great actors, you know. Yeah,
I know, it's just when you write, I don't want
to call out the script writer. But it wasn't that good.
So let me ask you this sause I didn't see
the movie, was it like? And I loved the fact
that they made a movie about Freddie Mercury and the
other members of Queen. But was it like in the
(17:46):
um in in the movie what was the name of
that movie, the the Queen movie. That's what I called.
It's okay, that's right. Do you remember like every time him,
like Freddie Mercury did something brilliant, they would have Brian
May they do a pan in close up of him
just looking like in awe and astonished. And that's maybe
(18:11):
pushing it doing that once in a movie, but they
did that every like fifteen or twenty minutes. Was it
kind of like that same sentiment. It wasn't so much
that And again only watched the first act before I
realized it was just it was just really sanitized and
like a feel good type of thing. Sounds similar, Yeah, right, exactly.
(18:33):
This is not a This is not a feel good story.
I wonder if it was performance. Aren't you accidentally stumbled upon?
I mean that was there was some tough stuff in there.
It's not like it was completely like, hey, this is great,
but it kind of reeked of like an Awakenings kind
of thing, and I like to waken I got it, alright, Alright,
I liked Awakenings too, But it sounds like what you're
describing as more along the lines of the Greatest Showman,
(18:54):
like that kind of sanitization. I didn't see that, okay,
did you no? But he did that episode just tearing
it apart. Yeah, we hadn't even seen it. We're comfortable
doing that at times. So the first guy was in
his late fifties, Joseph Cassel fifty eight. He had been
in the hospital for about twenty years and was Canadian
(19:16):
born and raised in Quebec. And he was named after
his after Josephine, his female relative in his family named
Joseph And I think the the big takeaway from his
childhood was that it was not good very abusive father, UM,
very quick tempered man who abused his mom, and his
(19:38):
mom actually died while giving birth to her ninth kid,
and so he had a rough go of it from
the beginning. I think his name actually was Josephine as well,
and he went by Joseph. So he he wanted to
be a writer. He I think, did you say he
was fifty eight at the time, Yeah, okay, and um
he uh did not really take to working outside of
(20:01):
the house. Um. He and his wife, UM did not
have a very like good relationship. Necessarily, he didn't want kids.
She did. They ended up having three daughters, and he
later on came to believe that um they were not
his children after all, and that that may have been
correct Um. But then things started to take kind of
a turn for the worse, and that Um, he started
(20:23):
to become really paranoid. He started to accuse people of
poisoning his food. He became a bit of a hoarder,
especially with books, and um probably the greatest crime a
man could commit in the mid century America. He did
not want to work, so that was basically that he
ended up um getting sent to uh An asylum in
Canada and then onto Ipsilani eventually. And he had been
(20:48):
Um been in Ipsilani for I think about twenty years,
or at least in and out of the hospital system
for about twenty years. And for about ten of those
years he had been he had cited that he was
he was God or Jesus Christ or both. Yeah, And
by the time he got around to Rokey Each or
Roke Each found him, he was in a pretty bad state.
(21:11):
After those twenty years, he had about half of his
teeth left in his mouth. He was still hoarding books,
carrying around books everywhere and when you know, when asked
who he was, he said his name was Joseph, and
he said that I am God, and I guess Rokeach said, well,
you'll do just fine, very splendid. Um. Yeah, So Joseph,
(21:35):
despite you know, the his inability to take care of
himself and you know, um, the fact that he hoarded
in all of that, he was a very sharp person.
So yeah, remember remember to keep that in mind. Like
that he was. He was very sharp and a good
writer as well. Clyde um and these are these men's
names were changed. Clyde Benson. He was seventy, he'd been
(21:58):
hospitalized for the last seventeen years. He was in pretty
rough shape, he really was. And Rokeach definitely starts to
recognize that pretty quickly after meeting Clyde and ends up
almost letting him just stay in the group even though
he's not really participating any longer. But um, Clyde was
apparently raised in an overprotected manner and didn't really learn
(22:21):
how to make his own decisions and kind of ended
up stunted as a result. Um, which you can make
your way through life like that if you if you
want to, but he ended up turning to alcohol and
became a really hardcore alcoholic to where it was starting
to wreck his life. Um. And apparently that came into
(22:45):
um collision with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia at some point, right, yeah,
And you know, it seems like the drinking was the UM.
Anytime you have an undiagnosed condition like this and you
you pour alcohol, was him on top of it or
any kind of you know, drug addiction, it's gonna it's
just gonna be even worse. And eventually he was arrested
(23:08):
for public drunkenness. Uh. It was a pretty violent arrest
and in jail he was violent, and he was saying
he was Jesus Christ, that he was God, and that
he was reborn through his first wife, Shirley. I believe
she had passed away and he did get remarried. Um
and it was surely the queen of heaven. And at
this point they committed him to a mental hospital when
(23:30):
he was fifty three where he got that diagnosis, and
he was he was the one that was easily the
most far gone and tough, toughest to reach and sort
of walked around mumbling. He also didn't have many, if
any of his teeth and uh, but occasionally would like
(23:50):
still had that violence in him where he would have
these sort of violent outbursts but then kind of calmed
down again. Yeah, and when he did, he was very
direct into the point. And um, by, I don't think
he was actually physically violent, was he? I don't think so.
I think it just could be scary at times. Right,
So he would say things like I am him. See
now I understand that, like that was the extent of
(24:13):
how he would explain that he was God and he
didn't need it to be challenged, and if you did
try to challenge it, he would just shut you down
kind of thing in a very um yeah, like you said,
kind of a scary way. So Leon was perhaps one
of the saddest of the three cases, and that he
was had only been hospitalized for about five years. He
was younger, he was thirty eight years old, and he
(24:36):
was um the the snap judgment is great because they
had his two initial graduate assistance on, Richard Bonnier and
Ron Hoppy, so like real firsthand experience on the podcast,
and they were saying that he was the one that
broke their heart the most because he was the one
that most likely could have been rehabilitated, and uh, it
(24:59):
just tore them up that they and they liked him
a lot. He was a real personable guy and what
it was very engaging with his stories and they really
thought that they could have helped him had it not
been uh, you know, in part by what happened with Rokeiach,
which is sad because that means that Rokeiach made things
much much worse for these people. And that's something to
really understand. That there were three men who were living,
(25:21):
you know, their delusional lives in this statemental hospital, but
they were generally unmolested until they were they were dragged
into this study and messed with like in ways that
you just don't do to other people, you know, and
that their lives probably were worse, far worse than they
would have been had they never met Milton Rokey. Yeah.
(25:42):
So Leon's deal was his mother was um almost certainly
schizophrenic as well and had delusions, religious delusions. So he
was raised in the household with these uh with basically
a religious fanatic, and uh that impacted him from the
very beginning. Of course, he was ended up diagnosed with
(26:03):
schizophrenia as well. But growing up, and I mean in
that kind of environment, definitely, I think led to the
Christ thing for sure. Yeah, And he had like there
was a time where he was living a normal life.
He served in World War two, UM, he worked at
different jobs back in Detroit. UM, he tried to go
(26:23):
to college. He was trying to make a life for himself.
But he UM suffered from fatigue, which I looked up
is apparently a really tough co morbidity with UM psychotic
disorders UM, and it's like got a terrible positive feedback
where you know, the more tired you get, the worshire
disorder is, and the worship disorder is, the harder it
(26:44):
can be to sleep, and it's just not good. So
he had that, and then he also started hearing voices himself,
UM that we're telling him that he was Jesus Christ.
And that didn't really jibe very well with his mother's
own religious fanaticism because he saw that she was, you know,
worshiping these other what he considered idols. And he went
(27:04):
on um a bit of a violent tear once removing
all of the all the pictures of the saints and
breaking all of the figurines and all that stuff in
demanding that his mother worshiped him as Jesus Christ and
threatening that is she didn't, he would strangle her. Um.
And so that was enough to get him locked up
for good. He'd already been locked up one time for
(27:25):
a brief period, and then about six months after that
he was locked up um from then until the time
that he met Milton row Keach. And that was Waldon
Coggins Man. So he uh, he went by not Leon,
and again Leon was a fake name that Rokeach gave
him for the book. But um he went by Dr
(27:46):
Domino Dominorum at rex razerum, simplest Christianius, purest mentalist doctor,
which is Latin for lord of lords, king of kings,
simple Christian boy, psychiatrist. But he asked everyone to call
him Rex for short, and they said thanks sure. And
he was he was, like you said, like the most
probably the most personable. He like Joseph, he was very
(28:09):
sharp too, but also like from a very um, a
very early stage, he saw quite clearly what roe Keats
was trying to do, and he thought that it was
morally repugnant um that that it was not a nice
thing to do to somebody that you shouldn't mess with
people like that, and he said as much multiple times
(28:29):
throughout the study. Yeah, so this is when he hires
those two grad assistance, is when he finds the guys
gets this experiment going in earnest and um, you know,
his hypothesis was that if I can have these three
men confront one another about them being the real Christ,
(28:49):
that it could rock them into what he saw as
reality and uh and get them out of these delusions.
And that didn't happen. Well, it didn't happen at all
through the experiment, but initially they what they did was
they really dug in and uh. They each had their
own way of doing so, but they each dug in
(29:10):
and said no, no, no no, I am the real Christ.
And they each had different sort of methods of dealing
with the others, but none of them wavered initially no.
And and it was really really um, it was kind
of in and of itself, just that finding that not
only did they not have their identities shattered, but they
(29:30):
just re rebuilt and reinforced their identities. However they could
find a way to do it to their own satisfaction.
That's a pretty big psychological finding in and of itself,
you know, although it doesn't seem worth putting these men
through that just to find that out, you know, Yeah,
for sure. Um, I think Joseph said, Uh. Joseph was
(29:51):
more one to sort of laugh it off. Uh. He said,
there's nothing wrong. Yesterday I knew I was what I am. Today,
I am what I am. I'm not worried about losing
my identity. Uh. And we also should point out that
Joseph uh and this was portrayed in the movie too
by Peter Dinklage. He was spoke with an English accent.
He thought he was convinced himself that he was from England,
(30:13):
that he was descendant of royalty, and that the hospital
was an English stronghold. Don't think I didn't notice you
just slipped Peter Dinklage in there. I know that only
leaves one worts. I don't need to do the third.
So um. One of the other things about Joseph was
his his interpretation of why they were there in this study.
(30:33):
Why the three of these men had been brought together
was so that they could sort out with the other
two that they weren't Christ, that he was the one
who was actually Christ, so he could do his work
here on earth better without having these two, um basically
harassing him or whatever. So then Leon, um, like I
was saying, Leon was the one who kind of saw
(30:55):
the most through ro keeaches. Um saw roeach his intentions
and saw that were just wrong. Um. And like Clyde,
I think Clyde said that, um, that they were a rerise,
that's what he considered the other two or a hick um.
Joseph said, you know, I am who I am, and also,
(31:17):
by the way, we all know that I'm really God.
And then Leon he said that, Um, he said the
other two were instrumental gods. They were hollowed out gods. Uh.
They were possibly dead already, and machines were operating them
and making them say these things. But even in that like,
he wasn't attacking them personally. It was what he felt
forced to explain his position. And so that's what he
(31:39):
said his position was. But he what he after. As
he was saying this, he would turn to Joseph. He
would turn to Clyde and he would say, you know,
I I mean this, you know respectfully, I I don't
mean to be to tear you down. Whatever your belief
is your belief and I don't want it. I'm not
trying to take it from you. I have my beliefs
and you have your beliefs and that that's good enough.
(32:02):
And so through that kind of um like truce that
was kind of established between these three men, they basically
kept the researchers at bay. The researchers would try to
come in and bust things up and get them to
like argue or you know, make them confront one another.
But if when left alone, those three men just generally
(32:22):
did not argue about who was God. They avoided the
subject altogether and just let the other ones be and
and just kind of entered this live and let live
kind of position, which I think is is pretty heart heartening,
you know it is. And that was that was one
of the things that came through on that uh snap
judgment with the two research assistants was that their take
(32:43):
was that these men were generally, like after the initial
sort of denial stuff um that they were generally pretty
respectful and wanted to give each other the space to
believe that they were christ if they wanted to. And
this what that showed was empathy and that's something that
none of them saw coming. Um. At this point, ROKEI
(33:04):
is being Um kind of hassled by these two grad assistants, saying, hey, listen, man,
these guys are kind of okay with this, and you're
taking this thing too far, and eventually he was he
ignored them basically, and eventually they quit before this next
phase starts, and because they didn't agree with what was
(33:25):
going on, because they saw these three guys that were
generally respectful for one another, they saw Um Rokich would
do things like a journalist wrote a story about them
at one point that was obviously not flattering at all
to the three Christs, and Rokich read this allowed to
them like he was just trying to push their buttons
and initiate this conflict, and the two grad assistants eventually
(33:46):
we're like, we're out of here. Yeah. That story, in particular,
it was about how Roki was treating three psychotic men
who thought they were christ and to read that to
them as it really mean Again, he was trying to
see what would happen if they they were confronted with
their identities being considered delusional by other people. And Um
and Leon in particular didn't like that He said that
(34:09):
a doctor is a um or a person who's supposed
to be a doctor is supposed to lift up, build up, guide, direct, inspire.
He said that what what you've just done is deploring,
and Rokeach said, you know, deploring. I've traveled seventy five
miles in snow and storm to come see you. And
Lean said, yes, but what was your intention in coming
to see me, sir um? And so he didn't. He
(34:30):
didn't put up with rokits Bs at all, which is
pretty cool, you know, to to to hold delusions and
to have your delusions attacked like that, and then to
to to be able to push back, but also in
still a respectful ways. I think Leon's one of these,
one of the great unsung heroes of of twentieth century America.
Should we take a break before phase two? Yeah, I
(34:52):
say we take a break, man, all right, We'll be
right back. So before stage two starts, when things get
(35:24):
really unethical, well not before this was kind of part
of the unethical. The two Gratis assistants had left, and
he hires this new young pretty woman as a grad
assistant and basically tells her to flirt with Leon and
to see if he can make her, make him fall
in love with her, And that's exactly what happened, and
(35:45):
Leon fell in love with her and was destroyed when
he basically came to realize on his own that that
was never gonna happen for him. Man, it's just brutal.
He's getting better and better. Yeah. Yeah. When those when
those grad assistants said you've gone too far, I think
Rokeach probably said something along the lines of too far.
I haven't begun to go too far. Just watch what's next. Yeah,
(36:07):
but there was like upbeat music while he was saying yeah,
like Salisbury Hill exactly. That is exactly what I was
thinking of. Thank you for putting it into words, Chuck.
So what happened next? So what happened next is as
follows their Rokeach basically saw, like, these guys are not
going for this. For this, the level of prodding that
I've been doing, I'm going to really kind of turn
(36:29):
up the heat. And he wondered if you took the
members people that were m part of these these patients
delusional belief systems and personified them like pretended you were them, say,
started communicating with them through letters or whatever. Um, what
would happen. Could you conceivably get these people to abandon
(36:50):
their delusions under the guidance of these authority figures that
were actually part of their delusions. It's really kind of
mind boggling when you lay it out in like a
float chart like that. You know, yeah, that this like
just kept getting worse and worse. So he identified these
authority figures in all three of them. I guess to
his credit, he laid off of Clyde because I mean,
(37:13):
I don't know if it was so much empathy as
it was, he knew he wasn't getting very far with Clyde,
or maybe he was scared of what would happen if
Clyde maybe you know, yeah, because Clyde was definitely could
be a little scary. But so he laid off of Clyde.
But he found that um Joseph said that a superintendent
of the hospital named Dr Yoder y O d Er
(37:34):
was his dad, and Leon said that he had a wife.
He had a couple. His wife the Blessed Virgin Mary
Uh who was an uncle reincarnated as Michael the archangel
Archangel Archangel. Those are two different. So he was married
to the Blessed in Virgin Mary and had that uncle.
Yeah he had those two mm hmm, but that there
(37:55):
was there was his He wasn't married to his uncle.
He had another wife later on named Madam Yetti Woman
after he stopped being married to the Blessed Virgin Mary
because his uncle Michael the Archangel married blessed the Blessed
Virgin Mary. It sounds a little confusing, but when you're
the only stuff like this, I think it just has
to be a little confusing. Well, the upshot of it
(38:18):
is Roki started posing as Um as Madam Yeti woman
um and started a letter writing campaign as Madam Yetti Woman,
basically reaching out to say, hey, Leon, Um, I just
want to say hi, and I'm thinking of you and
let's start talking. So there was correspondence that was established
(38:39):
as Um as Leon's delusion delude like wife Madam Yetti Woman. Yeah,
and he we should point out that he supposedly had
gotten not supposedly. I think he did get the hospitals
permission to sign off on this. As long as he said, listen,
it's all gonna be positive stuff. I'm not gonna be
writing them letters say and to go start a fight
(39:01):
or anything like that, Um, so I'm gonna send them
positive message messages and I'm gonna stop if this becomes
upsetting to these guys, and so they said, sure, go ahead, yeah,
and so he did. He did go ahead um first
with Leon and I believe, and by this time Leon
had um. One of the things that he had done
to transform his identity was to become Doctor Righteous Ideal
(39:24):
Dong or Dr r I Dong, And apparently the head
nurse asked him directly like can I please not call
you Dr don And he said, yes, you can call
me r I, but everybody else called him Dr r
I Dong. And he did this, Rokich concluded to basically
make himself not worthy of of being harassed anymore. But
he was still secretly God, like he knew he was God.
(39:46):
He was just pretending to be something else. And during
that period he became married to Madam Yetie woman. So
ru Keich started addressing letters as to Dr r I
Dong and basically saying, Um, you know, here's a dollar, um,
why don't you go buy yourself something nice in the
hospital store and then share the change with Clyde and
Joseph and or um. One of the things that they
(40:10):
would do is they would take turns between the three patients.
Is who was going to lead the session that day.
And one of the things you did when you liked
the session was you chose what song everybody's song at
the beginning and at the end of the session, which
is adorable. Um. And so Madam Yeti Woman suggested that
he choose Onward Christian Soldiers, and he chose Onward Christian Soldiers.
(40:31):
And so like two rokichi, seeing like there's this there's
like an actual influence that that is being exerted by
this delusional figure. And also it demonstrates that that Leon
is showing like he definitely believes Madam Yeti Woman is
a person for sure. Yeah, And eventually what broke it
was as posing as Madam Yeti Woman asked Leon to
(40:54):
stop using the name Dr Dong. Uh the name things
seems to have been a sticking point a lot of people.
Or maybe he just thought that that would since he
held onto that so strongly, that would have been like
the toughest thing to make him do, and uh, that
was sort of it. He was asked about the letter,
and Leon doesn't really say anything about asking to be
(41:17):
to drop the name Dr Dong. He just starts talking
more and more about God being both male and female
and insane and sane, and said I don't care for
the insanity of God and then said I don't want
any more letters and basically kind of shut it down.
And so with with those. Um, with Leon's letters in particular,
there was a couple of like really sad things, like
(41:37):
the whole thing was sad to begin with, but um,
there's this passage in the book where Leon gets a
letter and and Rokich realizes that he's holding back tears
and he starts to ask him, like, why are you, like,
you know, are you happy? He said, yes, I'm very happy.
It's a very pleasant feeling to have someone think of
you like like he was. He was moved to t
(42:00):
was by the idea that Madam Yeti woman was was
writing to him and talking about caring for him and
sending him money to go buy himself things with um
And rather than just say like, oh, we might want
to back this off, Rokich used it to step that
up and arranged for a meeting with Madam Yeti Woman.
But there was no Madam Yeti Woman who was supposed
(42:21):
to show up. He was just he was going to
get stood up from the outset. But still um uh.
Leon went to go meet Madam Yeti woman and had
his heartbroken. I think it was after that that he
stopped responding to the letters. Yeah, and you know when
he said, I don't want these letters anymore. I don't
want to receive them. You would think that that's when
(42:42):
Rokeich would say, all right, well, let's just stop this
all together, but he didn't because he remembered that Leon
had another authority figure in his life, which was his uncle,
George Bernard Brown a k a. The archangel Michael. And
so he said, hey, have someone call and pose as
(43:02):
his uncle now. And this didn't work from the beginning, Leon,
I guess the voice was just so far off, or
maybe Leon was just really wise to it at this point.
Uh said you know, no, no, no, this isn't this
even close to the voice, goodbye and hung up. And
then they asked him about the call, and he said,
I don't believe in mental torture, sir. So it seems
(43:24):
like he was sort of onto him at this point,
or you know, it was onto him from the beginning,
but onto him about this ruse I don't think he
was onto him from the beginning. I think that he
I mean, from the beginning of the experiments. He was
wearing got you, I see what you're saying. But yeah,
but it's really easy to forget because you're reading rogue
teaches accounts that these men weren't in on the idea
(43:44):
that it was from Rowe Keeach. They believed that these
letters were coming from their their delusional figures. That's the
whole point, which makes it just even more gut wrenching
when you stop and remember that, you know. So then
he says, okay, all right, Leon's on, I'm I'm done
writing letters to him. Who can I write letters to next?
And he moves on to Joseph. Right, Yeah, So this
(44:06):
was the one where the superintendent, the fictional Dr. Yoder,
was the authority figure for Joseph, who he saw his
a father figure. And so of course Rokich is gonna
play up this whole father figure thing in the letters,
saying that he loved him like a son. He just
wanted the best things for him. And if you remember
(44:27):
from the original sort of quick bio, Joseph's father was
awful and abusive, so he's really playing into his deepest
sort of insecurities here. Yeah, he said, be assured that
I will always love you, just exactly like a father
who deeply loved his own son. It's really tough to
even research this stuff. Yeah, so um so, just like
(44:49):
with um with Leon uh, through these letters, as Dr Yoder,
he tried to get Joseph to start doing stuff, finocuous
stuff at first, like it's saying stop, he didn't, he
stops saying that he was from England and he was
from Quebec, started going to church services, that kind of stuff.
So there was an influence on Joseph, just like there
was on on Leon using their delusional UM characters or
(45:13):
delusional friends, authority figures whatever. And I think even Dr
Yoder prescribed for the fake Doctor Yoder prescribed placebo for
Joseph's stomach ailments. He had like digestive problems or stomach
hurt and these placebo pills just fixed him right up. Yeah,
so the stomach pills placebo supposedly worked. And then he said,
(45:35):
all right, well that works, so I'm gonna give you
pills to basically cure your mind and if you want
to fix fix yourself for good take these pills. Uh,
which is I mean, this is so far off the
charts of unethical, Like I can't even describe how far
off the charts it is. And he said, basically, I
(45:57):
think he said he gave him an ultimatum. He says,
I'm only going to continue to give these pills that
will supposedly make your mind right if you admit that
you're in a mental hospital. And it's not an English stronghold.
And Joseph finally said, it's like signed something. And Joseph said, no,
I'm not going to sign this, and he cut off
this placebo medication that he believed might be fixing his brain.
(46:21):
And it kind of petered out after that, and it
was just like, it's just brutal to think about these
guys going through this like hope that they're getting better
and it was all fake. Yeah, he apparently stopped writing
to Dr Yoder and um moved on to JFK, started
writing letters to JFK asking to be one of his speechwriters,
because remember he was a writer as well. So KEI
(46:43):
is like, okay, alright, let's see what's next. Oh, nothing's next.
This is the end of the line. He finally realized like, Okay,
this is not going anywhere. Not only had he not
at all moved Clyde's delusions or Joseph's delusions, the only
persons whose delusions changed at all was Leon's, and his
had just gotten more complex and intricate, certainly not any
(47:05):
closer to reality. They got further away from reality because
of this influence from Um from Rokitchen, his his experiment,
and he has like a pretty rich little admission in
the book that he says that we do not know
to what extent our very presence behavior in questions may
(47:26):
have influenced the results obtained, which is bizarre to say,
because the whole point of the experiment was to influence
these people through these this experiment. So it's a really
weird thing that he even put it in there. Um
from some of the stuff that I've read, kind of
picking apart this book at the end, it really just
kind of peters out and like he's just kind of
(47:48):
slashing in the air with his sword trying to figure out,
you know, what the point was of all of this stuff.
Um And even without like a satisfying conclusion or end
uh and ended up getting published in nineteen sixty four
and became like a really big success in the field
of psychology, but also got widely criticized right out of
the gate because even though this was mid century America
(48:10):
and we're talking about mental patients in mid century America
who have very little rights or retreated very poorly, Like,
there were still like a lot of people around were like,
you don't do this to human beings. This is not okay.
Not everybody did, but some, you know, some critics definitely
came out immediately. Yeah, it took Rokich a long time though,
(48:31):
to really kind of come to terms with what he
had done. And uh, he eventually did, though, about seventeen
years later. They re reissued the book in nineteen eighty
one and he wrote a new forward. He admitted in
interviews in other places as well, that he was also,
(48:51):
you know, innocence suffering from godlike delusions and that he
was playing God with these men and regretted it. He
regretted publishing. He said, I regret having written and published
a study when I did. I don't know if that
means that he wishes he could have reflected more on
it or what, but he did sort of recant and
say he didn't do the right thing. Um, It's worth
(49:13):
pointing out that this was uh, six years into his
suffering from spinal cancer. So I don't know if that had,
you know, of knowing the end was near for him,
had something to do with his sort of self reflection.
But he eventually died in nineteen eighty eight at the
age of seventy after a thirteen year battle with spinal cancer,
(49:35):
and you know, left the social psychology world sort of rocked.
Uh Like, Like I said, I studied this in college
and it became sort of like the Stanford prison experiment.
It became worth studying, but not for the reasons that
they initially launched the study to begin with. No, he
(49:55):
finally figured out the point of the book, and the
point of the book where was for him to figure
out that it was it's unethical what he was doing
and finally come to terms with what he'd done to
these poor men, and that you have a right to
just be left alone and not have your identity challenge
no matter what you believe you are, who you believe
you are. And so he actually changed his his methods,
he his his general belief in the idea of belief
(50:18):
systems um remain the same, but he changed his tactics
and that he got involved in self confrontation, where you
would try to present people with you know, self examination,
where they would examine what their values were, what their
beliefs were, and then they would kind of be challenged
on that like, Okay, you believe in freedom, you place
(50:39):
a high value on freedom, but you also rated equality
pretty low. But isn't equality freedom for everybody? So you
care about your freedom but not other people's freedom? How
does that really jibe? And then the hope was that
they would go back and self reflect and be like, no,
I really do care about freedom and do care about
other people. Maybe I should care about more about equality
and improve as a person. And that's ultimately how he
(51:00):
ended up making his name starting in the seventies. Yeah,
and I gotta tell you when when you read some
of his um regret about it, he says things like
or he said things like you know, and in in
in the end someone was cured and it was me. Uh,
It's it just that all bothered me a little bit too.
(51:21):
How he he still made it about himself somehow, even
though he did say he regretted it and everything. I
just I never heard as much um regret about these
three men and and just and and putting them in
the positions of like they were the ones who helped
me out in the end. It was just I didn't
(51:41):
like that. I know exactly what you mean. It's just
it's still smacks of self involvement and you get and
also like what happened to these men after the experiment
was done. They were just cast right back into the
general populations, like used cleanex basically to deal with what
they've just been through. It's just it's just rot and
all around for sure. And at the very least it
(52:03):
does exist to to to make Mountain row Keats feel better. Right,
You got anything else? No? I mean, if you want
to see some of his later work that you were
talking about the value stuff, there all kinds of really
wacky YouTube videos from people about that stuff. Nice. And
if you want to see the movie that they remade
about this, don't ye. Um, Well, since I said don't
(52:27):
see that movie, it's time of course for a listener
mail everybody. I'm gonna call this a guy who has
the same step on a crack thing as I do. Okay,
this is from Jared Miller. Hey, guys, I gotta say,
Chuck is the only other person I've heard to express
the same compulsion that I have. If I step on
(52:48):
the surface that is different from the majority of where
I'm walking, I try to get my other foot to
have the same sensation. This can be the line between
the sidewalk segments, or a traction sticker, an unpaved patch, cetera.
I gotta say, Jared, it's the same with me. It's
not just cracks, can be anything, even which part of
the foot is affected. Same with me, Dude, If I
(53:09):
do it on my heel, I have to do the
next one with my heel. It's very interesting. I've even
found myself doing it with the colors of tiles on
a pattern floor. Same here for me. It's about symmetrical sensations.
I sometimes realize I'm doing it when I'm eating uh,
and have equal chewing time on each side. I don't
do that. Uh. Once Yeah, you're really out there. Uh.
(53:32):
Once I became aware of it at a fully conscious level.
I also became self conscious about it and tried different
things to break myself of the habit. At times, it
spins an extreme, as extreme as forcing myself to maintain
an even gait no matter what. Yeah, I've done that
while consciously reminding myself that sensations are temporary and that
it will even uh even out or go away, especially
(53:55):
if I ignore it. Thanks for all the hours of entertainment.
You were an early discovery of mine in the podcast
world back in two thousand nine, and almost none of
the shows I started listening to back then are still
going m That's our motto, Jared, just keep doing it,
just no matter what everybody tells you to stop, please
God stop, don't quit. You don't listen. So that's Jared
(54:17):
and Anaheim by way of Idaho. Way to go, Jared
from all over the place or was it Iowa? I
don't remember, Sorry Idaho. And that's the worst thing that confused.
I apologize. Um. So let's see if you want to
get in touch of this, like Jared did, um, please
email us, won't you? You can send us an email
(54:38):
to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more
podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Dave is here with us today
and we're all just quietly holding hands. Now we have
to stop and come into the real world and start
(00:23):
talking to you find people for this episode of Stuff
You Should Know. My my lip got caught in my
tooth when I said you, and it came out a
little weird. It's funny. My daughter finally lost her first tooth,
and it's you know, it's changing the way she talks.
She's got a little funny little lisp and she's always
(00:43):
took tongue in on it. And I'm like, I'm gonna
be there with you soon. You know, I gotta get
this front one redone right, So yeah, I'm gonna wait
until right before we have live shows so I can
pull that front tooth again. Nice. That'll be a special
treat for everybody, especially me. Oh, you were used to it.
(01:04):
I really was, um. But the worst was when when
you had that little case that you would put it
in and that they had event so the smell could
waft out of it. Yeah. I gave up after the
first one on wearing that thing. I was just like,
who cares? Yeah, No, it's great. It was very liberating.
It was as is this podcast episode. I think this
(01:26):
is going to be a good one, because Chuck, I've
been wanting to talk about this for a really long time.
This is one of those things that you like hear
about and you're like, wait what that That can't be right,
And then you read a little more about it and
a little more and it just keeps getting worse and worse.
But yet it's. Um, it's just kind of one of
the like a landmark study in the field of psychology
(01:48):
that we're talking about today. Yeah, the Three Christs of
hip Salanti and I studied this. I remember this from
studying it in psychology class in college and got kind
of into it at the time. And um, you started
wearing like three Cristi shirts and stuff. I followed them
(02:08):
on tour. It was great. I don't for some reason,
I thought I read the book, But I don't think
I read the book. I think we just covered the
book in college and in the psychology class, Like, I
don't think they made you read the whole book that
we basically just kind of went over it. But I've
been pretty fascinated for years, and uh, you know, eventually,
when Hollywood made a movie about it four years ago,
(02:31):
I was excited and even paid to rent that thing.
That pretty good. I watched the first half hour and realized, Man,
they've just sort of disneyfied this thing and it's not good.
Although our buddy Kevin Pollock isn't it and he's always great. Hey,
that guy can steal a scene better than the Hamburglar. Yeah.
(02:55):
The movie, uh, just so everyone knows, is called The
Three crist of Hipslani from John Abnett, starring Richard Gear
as the name changed doctor and then the Three Christs.
In the movie, you're portrayed by Peter dink Lidge. Uh.
One of my favorite actors, Walton Goggins. Yeah, he's great, man,
I went back. I told you I was watching The
Shield again. That guy was amazing in that. In that yeah, yeah,
(03:19):
he played one of the main characters. He's just the best.
And then, uh, what's the guy's named Bradley Whitford, who's
also great. Everyone is good. It just it's one of
those movies that they I think just over sanitized and
should have made a documentary instead. M hmm. But they
didn't and that's okay, and we don't have to talk
about that movie ever again. Now then we have instead,
(03:43):
I think we should start by giving a little background
and the guy whose idea the three crist of Ipsilani
experiment was, and it was a researcher, a psychologist, a
social psychologist, your favorite named Milton row keach Um and
Milton Rokey, had some ideas about what it was to
(04:03):
to make up an identity, what made up a person's
sense of who they were, and he basically had broken
it out into beliefs, a series of different kinds of beliefs,
which we we'll kind of talk about here. They're a
little more. But there's this anecdote that's frequently passed around
that kind of like lays the early groundwork for this
idea that that someone's belief in who they are could
(04:27):
conceivably be challenged. And it came one night when he
was sitting around the dinner table with his wife and
his two young daughters, um and he accidentally, in like
a moment of frustration telling them to settle down at dinner,
called one another by their opposite names. And the girls
just thought that was like the funniest thing that ever heard.
At first, yes, was that is that? Mike? You? Yeah?
(04:52):
I even stuck my finger up like all right now
you but you can't see it, can you know? Because
we just listened to each other. Uh yeah at first,
and it was a little fun game. And then I
think the five year old even said, you know, this
is just a game, right dad, And Dad said no,
it's real, and uh, I hear him saying it in
that voice, and you know, pretty soon they were begging
(05:14):
for him to stop. And I can verify that this
is a thing I've been I think his a parent.
Sometimes you'll call your kid by another name as a joke,
like I know I've done it, like called uh my
daughter my dog's name. If she's like she'll come into
the room and like bark or something as a joke,
say oh, you're Nico, and she'll say, yeah, I'm Nico,
and then for a few minutes later, I'm like, hey,
(05:37):
come here, Nico, and then it's fun for about five
minutes and then she's like, no, I am not. So
there is very much a thing to a child's identity,
especially from their parents, where they kind of get their
identity and seek their identity. When that has challenged it,
it is very quickly kind of traumatic. Yeah, he learned
(05:58):
a couple of things that one, you can very quickly
challenge somebody, or you can very very quickly push someone
to a state of like trauma or anxiety or panic,
even by just by simply challenging their identity by calling
them the wrong name purposefully. He also write, yeah, I
know Jerry, each other, Jerry, I think it would cancel.
(06:20):
Let you they're out do it one more time and
I will crumble, okay, Jerry Chifford. But he also learned, like, Okay,
there's consequences to this. You can't take somebody with a
with a well formed, well developed sense of identity and
and and I guess a normal sense of identity and
push push them to the edge, mess around with that
sense of identity. There's there's harmful consequences to that. So
(06:45):
he's started to kind of explore this, and like I
was saying, like he had broken everybody's um belief system
into a handful of different types of beliefs. And the
belief that you are who you are, which is what
we call our identity. He ascribed to primitive beliefs which
are just like basic truths and the same neighborhood as Um.
(07:07):
You know, I'm wearing a headphone on one ear and
I have the other one behind my head right now,
I have brown hair. My name is Josh, your chuck, Like,
just basic truths of the universe that anyone you talked
to is going to generally agree with. Right, That's where
the personality comes from. Yeah, and that that is the
very bedrock and foundation of how we think about ourselves.
(07:32):
And he already saw messing with that can be bad,
so he was like, hey, why not take it a
step further right, right, So what I was saying a
minute ago with like how we saw that there's consequences
to messing with uh sane person, I just made air quotes.
If you couldn't tell from my intonation, Um, messing with
a sane person's identity, you can't really do that. But
(07:55):
this is the mid century in America, and there's a
whole group of people that you can do basically whatever
you want to with as far as mental stuff goes.
And that were people who are suffering from mental conditions
who were locked up in state institutions at the time,
and so row Keech came up with this idea like, Okay,
wait a minute, what if I what if I got
(08:17):
my hands on some mentally unstable people, some possibly diagnosed people,
and and messed with their sense of identity, took their
delusion and challenged it. That could be okay, because hey,
their lives are basically useless anyway, I'm paraphrasing row Keech here,
and if if something does come of it, there's a
(08:37):
good chance that it could be positive instead. So let
me have it, let let me add them basically. Yeah,
there's a quote here from the book. And big thanks
to Dave Ruse for putting this one together. I know
this was a it's a tough one to wrangle, but
he did a great job. Here's the quote from the book.
Because it is not feasible to study such phenomena with
normal people, he didn't even put in quotes. Uh, it
(09:00):
seemed reasonable to focus on delusional systems of belief in
the hope that and subjecting them to strain that would
be little to lose and hopefully a great deal to gain.
And like, I read that sentence and I'm like, stop there, dude, right, yeah,
that's like the perfect motto for the misguided intentions of
the study. Yeah. Yeah, he was like indicted himself with
(09:21):
that one quote exactly just right out of the gate.
And I read this some commentary magazine article from nineteen
sixty four by um Oh. I can't remember who it was.
I don't have it pulled up, but he's a famous
poet at the time, and he was basically saying, like,
you know, surely Rogue Keeach, the guy who's writing the book, well,
it understands that Rogue Keeach, the character this doctor, it's
(09:44):
like out of his mind, and he likes he's like
slowly realizing, oh wait, this guy, even the author of
the book, has no idea that the doctor character who's
himself has has any idea just how unethical this is.
And that's a that's a that's a great example of it,
that demonstrates it right off the bat. Yeah, there's, um,
there's I don't know if you listen to the Snap
judgment on this, did you hear that? No? It was
(10:07):
good Snap, you know, great podcast or public radio program
turned podcasts. Sure, I've heard public radio before. I used
to I used to listen to a lot more of it.
Same here, um Fresh Air, I always still love fresh Air,
but I just it's one of those things where I
just bulk it up and then, like when I'm painting
a room in our house, I listened to just fresh
(10:29):
Air the whole time or something, you know what I mean. Yeah,
what is Terry Gross gonna have us on? Do we
need to get to twenty years? Would that do it? Yeah?
I wouldn't even begin to bother her until we hit
twenty years and then maybe yeah, and then we just
started asking basically, hi, Terry hi. Uh. So in that
snap judgment um, they pointed out that he uh that
(10:52):
Rokich actually read a Harper's article about two women who
believe they were the Virgin Mary, and that put an
idea into his head. And I know that in his
book he also talked about being inspired a little bit
by some some stuff that Voltaire wrote about it. Right, Yeah,
there was a man in the seventeenth century that Voltaire
wrote about named Simone Morin who was deranged in the
(11:14):
parlance at the time, and he thought that he was
Christ and so he was locked up in a madhouse
and he um met in that place in the institutional asylum.
Another man who thought he was Christ and Simone Morin
saw just how how like crazy this guy seemed and
was like, wait a minute, maybe I'm crazy. And in
(11:36):
confronting this other guy who claimed to have the same identity,
he regained his sanity to a certain extent, and unfortunately
he relapsed and ended up being burned at the stake
for heresy. But there was a moment there where he
had kind of like been knocked out of his delusion.
That's a huge deal. Like if you if you if
(11:57):
you have schizophrenia or delusionable leaves, like if your mental
disorder um is to the degree where you hold delusions.
And we should say a delusion is not like, you know,
a made up belief, for you know, you made your
belief up, Like this is what you think is real.
It is real to you, and you will defend it
when it's challenged. So the idea that somebody who was
(12:20):
delusional could be knocked out of their delusion by being
confronted with somebody else who had the same delusion, that
is groundbreaking. And I can see why roe Keach was like,
there we go, that's it, there's my there's my methodology
for this or for this this experiment. Yeah, and I'm
sure he was, you know, he was turned on a
(12:41):
little bit about the idea of three Christs or however
many Christs he could find. Well, I mean not even
like that, you know what I mean though, but a
social he was probably like, you know, this would make
for a pretty uh mind blowing experiment plus a great
book title. It's one of great understated book titles of
(13:01):
all time. Yeah, it's not like the three Richard Nixon's
of his Bilanti No, and I mean like Ippsilanti is
like this. It's just this this town outside of ann
Arbor where where you know, that's where one of the
mental asylums were in um, in Michigan at the time. Um.
And and it's just like you know, it might as
well be Walla, Walla or Lackawanna, or it's just an
(13:26):
unusual name in a town that doesn't really have much
of a claim to anything, you know what I mean. Yeah, sure,
all three of those towns are like, is he insulting
all of us or none of us? No, No, it's
not an insult. It's just it's just, um, it's not
like a hot happen in town. And it's been like
the Three crist of New York that loses something or
the price of London. It's just a rather generally unremarkable place, guys, Ippslani.
(13:53):
If you live there and you don't know that it's
generally unremarkable. I'm sorry to be breaking this news to you.
I don't mean it in a in a unkind way
at all. I know you don't. Uh, And I think
generally back then, that's where a lot of these institutions
were because they needed like lots of land. And uh
so let's just leave it at that, and okay, maybe
take a break, okay to let everybody really stew on
(14:16):
what I said. We'll take a break and we'll find
out how he found his his patients right after this, alright,
(14:49):
so we're back. Uh. There were twenty five thousand total
patients in the system in Michigan State, uh, at Michigan
State hospitals. And he went all all of these, you know,
he sort of tried to call them down two uh
too ideally to Christ figures. Uh. He found a man
who thought he was Cinderella. He found it Mrs God uh,
(15:12):
and then about six people who thought they were Christ.
And three of them were really into this idea and
really consistent with their belief that they were Jesus uh.
And two of them happened to be at Hippsilanti. So
he was like, this is perfect, I'll just transfer the
third end and we'll get going. Yeah. And so these
guys being inmates of the state at a time where yeah,
(15:34):
Ipsilanti had like four thousand people, four thousand patients in
just this one institution. Yeah, it's a and if you
were already like on the margins society and then moved
into a place where you're with four thousand other people
on the margins of society, it's a really good place
to get lost, to not get any real help. And
(15:55):
so one of the things that that was um was
part of this this experiment design is to make participating
in these discussions this group of these three Christs as
attractive to these three men as possible. So they were
moved toward d twenty three. They were given their own
private day room to eat in, to sleep or not sleeping,
(16:17):
but to hang out in away from everybody else. They
got some like place to stretch out and to have
some company. They got a lot of attention, a lot
of perks. Like basically their lives were changed in like
incalculable ways by being part of the study. And so
when they say, like, these were voluntary meetings and these
(16:38):
men were voluntary members of the study, that's that's definitely true.
They were. They were voluntary participants. But the perks on
offer were just so amazing. They were like you would
you could not turn down, you know, participating in some
degree exactly. So they were willing participants, uh, insofar as yeah,
they got these great perks worth throwning out. So he
(17:00):
changed the names of the guys. Uh, to protect their
families and to protect them to some degree. But um,
we should go over sort of the bios of the
three men. Um should we say who played them in
the movies? Willot help people? I don't think so, Okay,
I don't want to disparage those great actors names again. Well,
(17:22):
I mean the acting, they did a good job. It
was just the material. They're all great actors, you know. Yeah,
I know, it's just when you write, I don't want
to call out the script writer. But it wasn't that good.
So let me ask you this sause I didn't see
the movie, was it like? And I loved the fact
that they made a movie about Freddie Mercury and the
other members of Queen. But was it like in the
(17:46):
um in in the movie what was the name of
that movie, the the Queen movie. That's what I called.
It's okay, that's right. Do you remember like every time him,
like Freddie Mercury did something brilliant, they would have Brian
May they do a pan in close up of him
just looking like in awe and astonished. And that's maybe
(18:11):
pushing it doing that once in a movie, but they
did that every like fifteen or twenty minutes. Was it
kind of like that same sentiment. It wasn't so much
that And again only watched the first act before I
realized it was just it was just really sanitized and
like a feel good type of thing. Sounds similar, Yeah, right, exactly.
(18:33):
This is not a This is not a feel good story.
I wonder if it was performance. Aren't you accidentally stumbled upon?
I mean that was there was some tough stuff in there.
It's not like it was completely like, hey, this is great,
but it kind of reeked of like an Awakenings kind
of thing, and I like to waken I got it, alright, Alright,
I liked Awakenings too, But it sounds like what you're
describing as more along the lines of the Greatest Showman,
(18:54):
like that kind of sanitization. I didn't see that, okay,
did you no? But he did that episode just tearing
it apart. Yeah, we hadn't even seen it. We're comfortable
doing that at times. So the first guy was in
his late fifties, Joseph Cassel fifty eight. He had been
in the hospital for about twenty years and was Canadian
(19:16):
born and raised in Quebec. And he was named after
his after Josephine, his female relative in his family named
Joseph And I think the the big takeaway from his
childhood was that it was not good very abusive father, UM,
very quick tempered man who abused his mom, and his
(19:38):
mom actually died while giving birth to her ninth kid,
and so he had a rough go of it from
the beginning. I think his name actually was Josephine as well,
and he went by Joseph. So he he wanted to
be a writer. He I think, did you say he
was fifty eight at the time, Yeah, okay, and um
he uh did not really take to working outside of
(20:01):
the house. Um. He and his wife, UM did not
have a very like good relationship. Necessarily, he didn't want kids.
She did. They ended up having three daughters, and he
later on came to believe that um they were not
his children after all, and that that may have been
correct Um. But then things started to take kind of
a turn for the worse, and that Um, he started
(20:23):
to become really paranoid. He started to accuse people of
poisoning his food. He became a bit of a hoarder,
especially with books, and um probably the greatest crime a
man could commit in the mid century America. He did
not want to work, so that was basically that he
ended up um getting sent to uh An asylum in
Canada and then onto Ipsilani eventually. And he had been
(20:48):
Um been in Ipsilani for I think about twenty years,
or at least in and out of the hospital system
for about twenty years. And for about ten of those
years he had been he had cited that he was
he was God or Jesus Christ or both. Yeah, And
by the time he got around to Rokey Each or
Roke Each found him, he was in a pretty bad state.
(21:11):
After those twenty years, he had about half of his
teeth left in his mouth. He was still hoarding books,
carrying around books everywhere and when you know, when asked
who he was, he said his name was Joseph, and
he said that I am God, and I guess Rokeach said, well,
you'll do just fine, very splendid. Um. Yeah, So Joseph,
(21:35):
despite you know, the his inability to take care of
himself and you know, um, the fact that he hoarded
in all of that, he was a very sharp person.
So yeah, remember remember to keep that in mind. Like
that he was. He was very sharp and a good
writer as well. Clyde um and these are these men's
names were changed. Clyde Benson. He was seventy, he'd been
(21:58):
hospitalized for the last seventeen years. He was in pretty
rough shape, he really was. And Rokeach definitely starts to
recognize that pretty quickly after meeting Clyde and ends up
almost letting him just stay in the group even though
he's not really participating any longer. But um, Clyde was
apparently raised in an overprotected manner and didn't really learn
(22:21):
how to make his own decisions and kind of ended
up stunted as a result. Um, which you can make
your way through life like that if you if you
want to, but he ended up turning to alcohol and
became a really hardcore alcoholic to where it was starting
to wreck his life. Um. And apparently that came into
(22:45):
um collision with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia at some point, right, yeah,
And you know, it seems like the drinking was the UM.
Anytime you have an undiagnosed condition like this and you
you pour alcohol, was him on top of it or
any kind of you know, drug addiction, it's gonna it's
just gonna be even worse. And eventually he was arrested
(23:08):
for public drunkenness. Uh. It was a pretty violent arrest
and in jail he was violent, and he was saying
he was Jesus Christ, that he was God, and that
he was reborn through his first wife, Shirley. I believe
she had passed away and he did get remarried. Um
and it was surely the queen of heaven. And at
this point they committed him to a mental hospital when
(23:30):
he was fifty three where he got that diagnosis, and
he was he was the one that was easily the
most far gone and tough, toughest to reach and sort
of walked around mumbling. He also didn't have many, if
any of his teeth and uh, but occasionally would like
(23:50):
still had that violence in him where he would have
these sort of violent outbursts but then kind of calmed
down again. Yeah, and when he did, he was very
direct into the point. And um, by, I don't think
he was actually physically violent, was he? I don't think so.
I think it just could be scary at times. Right,
So he would say things like I am him. See
now I understand that, like that was the extent of
(24:13):
how he would explain that he was God and he
didn't need it to be challenged, and if you did
try to challenge it, he would just shut you down
kind of thing in a very um yeah, like you said,
kind of a scary way. So Leon was perhaps one
of the saddest of the three cases, and that he
was had only been hospitalized for about five years. He
was younger, he was thirty eight years old, and he
(24:36):
was um the the snap judgment is great because they
had his two initial graduate assistance on, Richard Bonnier and
Ron Hoppy, so like real firsthand experience on the podcast,
and they were saying that he was the one that
broke their heart the most because he was the one
that most likely could have been rehabilitated, and uh, it
(24:59):
just tore them up that they and they liked him
a lot. He was a real personable guy and what
it was very engaging with his stories and they really
thought that they could have helped him had it not
been uh, you know, in part by what happened with Rokeiach,
which is sad because that means that Rokeiach made things
much much worse for these people. And that's something to
really understand. That there were three men who were living,
(25:21):
you know, their delusional lives in this statemental hospital, but
they were generally unmolested until they were they were dragged
into this study and messed with like in ways that
you just don't do to other people, you know, and
that their lives probably were worse, far worse than they
would have been had they never met Milton Rokey. Yeah.
(25:42):
So Leon's deal was his mother was um almost certainly
schizophrenic as well and had delusions, religious delusions. So he
was raised in the household with these uh with basically
a religious fanatic, and uh that impacted him from the
very beginning. Of course, he was ended up diagnosed with
(26:03):
schizophrenia as well. But growing up, and I mean in
that kind of environment, definitely, I think led to the
Christ thing for sure. Yeah, And he had like there
was a time where he was living a normal life.
He served in World War two, UM, he worked at
different jobs back in Detroit. UM, he tried to go
(26:23):
to college. He was trying to make a life for himself.
But he UM suffered from fatigue, which I looked up
is apparently a really tough co morbidity with UM psychotic
disorders UM, and it's like got a terrible positive feedback
where you know, the more tired you get, the worshire
disorder is, and the worship disorder is, the harder it
(26:44):
can be to sleep, and it's just not good. So
he had that, and then he also started hearing voices himself,
UM that we're telling him that he was Jesus Christ.
And that didn't really jibe very well with his mother's
own religious fanaticism because he saw that she was, you know,
worshiping these other what he considered idols. And he went
(27:04):
on um a bit of a violent tear once removing
all of the all the pictures of the saints and
breaking all of the figurines and all that stuff in
demanding that his mother worshiped him as Jesus Christ and
threatening that is she didn't, he would strangle her. Um.
And so that was enough to get him locked up
for good. He'd already been locked up one time for
(27:25):
a brief period, and then about six months after that
he was locked up um from then until the time
that he met Milton row Keach. And that was Waldon
Coggins Man. So he uh, he went by not Leon,
and again Leon was a fake name that Rokeach gave
him for the book. But um he went by Dr
(27:46):
Domino Dominorum at rex razerum, simplest Christianius, purest mentalist doctor,
which is Latin for lord of lords, king of kings,
simple Christian boy, psychiatrist. But he asked everyone to call
him Rex for short, and they said thanks sure. And
he was he was, like you said, like the most
probably the most personable. He like Joseph, he was very
(28:09):
sharp too, but also like from a very um, a
very early stage, he saw quite clearly what roe Keats
was trying to do, and he thought that it was
morally repugnant um that that it was not a nice
thing to do to somebody that you shouldn't mess with
people like that, and he said as much multiple times
(28:29):
throughout the study. Yeah, so this is when he hires
those two grad assistance, is when he finds the guys
gets this experiment going in earnest and um, you know,
his hypothesis was that if I can have these three
men confront one another about them being the real Christ,
(28:49):
that it could rock them into what he saw as
reality and uh and get them out of these delusions.
And that didn't happen. Well, it didn't happen at all
through the experiment, but initially they what they did was
they really dug in and uh. They each had their
own way of doing so, but they each dug in
(29:10):
and said no, no, no no, I am the real Christ.
And they each had different sort of methods of dealing
with the others, but none of them wavered initially no.
And and it was really really um, it was kind
of in and of itself, just that finding that not
only did they not have their identities shattered, but they
(29:30):
just re rebuilt and reinforced their identities. However they could
find a way to do it to their own satisfaction.
That's a pretty big psychological finding in and of itself,
you know, although it doesn't seem worth putting these men
through that just to find that out, you know, Yeah,
for sure. Um, I think Joseph said, Uh. Joseph was
(29:51):
more one to sort of laugh it off. Uh. He said,
there's nothing wrong. Yesterday I knew I was what I am. Today,
I am what I am. I'm not worried about losing
my identity. Uh. And we also should point out that
Joseph uh and this was portrayed in the movie too
by Peter Dinklage. He was spoke with an English accent.
He thought he was convinced himself that he was from England,
(30:13):
that he was descendant of royalty, and that the hospital
was an English stronghold. Don't think I didn't notice you
just slipped Peter Dinklage in there. I know that only
leaves one worts. I don't need to do the third.
So um. One of the other things about Joseph was
his his interpretation of why they were there in this study.
(30:33):
Why the three of these men had been brought together
was so that they could sort out with the other
two that they weren't Christ, that he was the one
who was actually Christ, so he could do his work
here on earth better without having these two, um basically
harassing him or whatever. So then Leon, um, like I
was saying, Leon was the one who kind of saw
(30:55):
the most through ro keeaches. Um saw roeach his intentions
and saw that were just wrong. Um. And like Clyde,
I think Clyde said that, um, that they were a rerise,
that's what he considered the other two or a hick um.
Joseph said, you know, I am who I am, and also,
(31:17):
by the way, we all know that I'm really God.
And then Leon he said that, Um, he said the
other two were instrumental gods. They were hollowed out gods. Uh.
They were possibly dead already, and machines were operating them
and making them say these things. But even in that like,
he wasn't attacking them personally. It was what he felt
forced to explain his position. And so that's what he
(31:39):
said his position was. But he what he after. As
he was saying this, he would turn to Joseph. He
would turn to Clyde and he would say, you know,
I I mean this, you know respectfully, I I don't
mean to be to tear you down. Whatever your belief
is your belief and I don't want it. I'm not
trying to take it from you. I have my beliefs
and you have your beliefs and that that's good enough.
(32:02):
And so through that kind of um like truce that
was kind of established between these three men, they basically
kept the researchers at bay. The researchers would try to
come in and bust things up and get them to
like argue or you know, make them confront one another.
But if when left alone, those three men just generally
(32:22):
did not argue about who was God. They avoided the
subject altogether and just let the other ones be and
and just kind of entered this live and let live
kind of position, which I think is is pretty heart heartening,
you know it is. And that was that was one
of the things that came through on that uh snap
judgment with the two research assistants was that their take
(32:43):
was that these men were generally, like after the initial
sort of denial stuff um that they were generally pretty
respectful and wanted to give each other the space to
believe that they were christ if they wanted to. And
this what that showed was empathy and that's something that
none of them saw coming. Um. At this point, ROKEI
(33:04):
is being Um kind of hassled by these two grad assistants, saying, hey, listen, man,
these guys are kind of okay with this, and you're
taking this thing too far, and eventually he was he
ignored them basically, and eventually they quit before this next
phase starts, and because they didn't agree with what was
(33:25):
going on, because they saw these three guys that were
generally respectful for one another, they saw Um Rokich would
do things like a journalist wrote a story about them
at one point that was obviously not flattering at all
to the three Christs, and Rokich read this allowed to
them like he was just trying to push their buttons
and initiate this conflict, and the two grad assistants eventually
(33:46):
we're like, we're out of here. Yeah. That story, in particular,
it was about how Roki was treating three psychotic men
who thought they were christ and to read that to
them as it really mean Again, he was trying to
see what would happen if they they were confronted with
their identities being considered delusional by other people. And Um
and Leon in particular didn't like that He said that
(34:09):
a doctor is a um or a person who's supposed
to be a doctor is supposed to lift up, build up, guide, direct, inspire.
He said that what what you've just done is deploring,
and Rokeach said, you know, deploring. I've traveled seventy five
miles in snow and storm to come see you. And
Lean said, yes, but what was your intention in coming
to see me, sir um? And so he didn't. He
(34:30):
didn't put up with rokits Bs at all, which is
pretty cool, you know, to to to hold delusions and
to have your delusions attacked like that, and then to
to to be able to push back, but also in
still a respectful ways. I think Leon's one of these,
one of the great unsung heroes of of twentieth century America.
Should we take a break before phase two? Yeah, I
(34:52):
say we take a break, man, all right, We'll be
right back. So before stage two starts, when things get
(35:24):
really unethical, well not before this was kind of part
of the unethical. The two Gratis assistants had left, and
he hires this new young pretty woman as a grad
assistant and basically tells her to flirt with Leon and
to see if he can make her, make him fall
in love with her, And that's exactly what happened, and
(35:45):
Leon fell in love with her and was destroyed when
he basically came to realize on his own that that
was never gonna happen for him. Man, it's just brutal.
He's getting better and better. Yeah. Yeah. When those when
those grad assistants said you've gone too far, I think
Rokeach probably said something along the lines of too far.
I haven't begun to go too far. Just watch what's next. Yeah,
(36:07):
but there was like upbeat music while he was saying yeah,
like Salisbury Hill exactly. That is exactly what I was
thinking of. Thank you for putting it into words, Chuck.
So what happened next? So what happened next is as
follows their Rokeach basically saw, like, these guys are not
going for this. For this, the level of prodding that
I've been doing, I'm going to really kind of turn
(36:29):
up the heat. And he wondered if you took the
members people that were m part of these these patients
delusional belief systems and personified them like pretended you were them, say,
started communicating with them through letters or whatever. Um, what
would happen. Could you conceivably get these people to abandon
(36:50):
their delusions under the guidance of these authority figures that
were actually part of their delusions. It's really kind of
mind boggling when you lay it out in like a
float chart like that. You know, yeah, that this like
just kept getting worse and worse. So he identified these
authority figures in all three of them. I guess to
his credit, he laid off of Clyde because I mean,
(37:13):
I don't know if it was so much empathy as
it was, he knew he wasn't getting very far with Clyde,
or maybe he was scared of what would happen if
Clyde maybe you know, yeah, because Clyde was definitely could
be a little scary. But so he laid off of Clyde.
But he found that um Joseph said that a superintendent
of the hospital named Dr Yoder y O d Er
(37:34):
was his dad, and Leon said that he had a wife.
He had a couple. His wife the Blessed Virgin Mary
Uh who was an uncle reincarnated as Michael the archangel
Archangel Archangel. Those are two different. So he was married
to the Blessed in Virgin Mary and had that uncle.
Yeah he had those two mm hmm, but that there
(37:55):
was there was his He wasn't married to his uncle.
He had another wife later on named Madam Yetti Woman
after he stopped being married to the Blessed Virgin Mary
because his uncle Michael the Archangel married blessed the Blessed
Virgin Mary. It sounds a little confusing, but when you're
the only stuff like this, I think it just has
to be a little confusing. Well, the upshot of it
(38:18):
is Roki started posing as Um as Madam Yeti woman
um and started a letter writing campaign as Madam Yetti Woman,
basically reaching out to say, hey, Leon, Um, I just
want to say hi, and I'm thinking of you and
let's start talking. So there was correspondence that was established
(38:39):
as Um as Leon's delusion delude like wife Madam Yetti Woman. Yeah,
and he we should point out that he supposedly had
gotten not supposedly. I think he did get the hospitals
permission to sign off on this. As long as he said, listen,
it's all gonna be positive stuff. I'm not gonna be
writing them letters say and to go start a fight
(39:01):
or anything like that, Um, so I'm gonna send them
positive message messages and I'm gonna stop if this becomes
upsetting to these guys, and so they said, sure, go ahead, yeah,
and so he did. He did go ahead um first
with Leon and I believe, and by this time Leon
had um. One of the things that he had done
to transform his identity was to become Doctor Righteous Ideal
(39:24):
Dong or Dr r I Dong, And apparently the head
nurse asked him directly like can I please not call
you Dr don And he said, yes, you can call
me r I, but everybody else called him Dr r
I Dong. And he did this, Rokich concluded to basically
make himself not worthy of of being harassed anymore. But
he was still secretly God, like he knew he was God.
(39:46):
He was just pretending to be something else. And during
that period he became married to Madam Yetie woman. So
ru Keich started addressing letters as to Dr r I
Dong and basically saying, Um, you know, here's a dollar, um,
why don't you go buy yourself something nice in the
hospital store and then share the change with Clyde and
Joseph and or um. One of the things that they
(40:10):
would do is they would take turns between the three patients.
Is who was going to lead the session that day.
And one of the things you did when you liked
the session was you chose what song everybody's song at
the beginning and at the end of the session, which
is adorable. Um. And so Madam Yeti Woman suggested that
he choose Onward Christian Soldiers, and he chose Onward Christian Soldiers.
(40:31):
And so like two rokichi, seeing like there's this there's
like an actual influence that that is being exerted by
this delusional figure. And also it demonstrates that that Leon
is showing like he definitely believes Madam Yeti Woman is
a person for sure. Yeah, And eventually what broke it
was as posing as Madam Yeti Woman asked Leon to
(40:54):
stop using the name Dr Dong. Uh the name things
seems to have been a sticking point a lot of people.
Or maybe he just thought that that would since he
held onto that so strongly, that would have been like
the toughest thing to make him do, and uh, that
was sort of it. He was asked about the letter,
and Leon doesn't really say anything about asking to be
(41:17):
to drop the name Dr Dong. He just starts talking
more and more about God being both male and female
and insane and sane, and said I don't care for
the insanity of God and then said I don't want
any more letters and basically kind of shut it down.
And so with with those. Um, with Leon's letters in particular,
there was a couple of like really sad things, like
(41:37):
the whole thing was sad to begin with, but um,
there's this passage in the book where Leon gets a
letter and and Rokich realizes that he's holding back tears
and he starts to ask him, like, why are you, like,
you know, are you happy? He said, yes, I'm very happy.
It's a very pleasant feeling to have someone think of
you like like he was. He was moved to t
(42:00):
was by the idea that Madam Yeti woman was was
writing to him and talking about caring for him and
sending him money to go buy himself things with um
And rather than just say like, oh, we might want
to back this off, Rokich used it to step that
up and arranged for a meeting with Madam Yeti Woman.
But there was no Madam Yeti Woman who was supposed
(42:21):
to show up. He was just he was going to
get stood up from the outset. But still um uh.
Leon went to go meet Madam Yeti woman and had
his heartbroken. I think it was after that that he
stopped responding to the letters. Yeah, and you know when
he said, I don't want these letters anymore. I don't
want to receive them. You would think that that's when
(42:42):
Rokeich would say, all right, well, let's just stop this
all together, but he didn't because he remembered that Leon
had another authority figure in his life, which was his uncle,
George Bernard Brown a k a. The archangel Michael. And
so he said, hey, have someone call and pose as
(43:02):
his uncle now. And this didn't work from the beginning, Leon,
I guess the voice was just so far off, or
maybe Leon was just really wise to it at this point.
Uh said you know, no, no, no, this isn't this
even close to the voice, goodbye and hung up. And
then they asked him about the call, and he said,
I don't believe in mental torture, sir. So it seems
(43:24):
like he was sort of onto him at this point,
or you know, it was onto him from the beginning,
but onto him about this ruse I don't think he
was onto him from the beginning. I think that he
I mean, from the beginning of the experiments. He was
wearing got you, I see what you're saying. But yeah,
but it's really easy to forget because you're reading rogue
teaches accounts that these men weren't in on the idea
(43:44):
that it was from Rowe Keeach. They believed that these
letters were coming from their their delusional figures. That's the
whole point, which makes it just even more gut wrenching
when you stop and remember that, you know. So then
he says, okay, all right, Leon's on, I'm I'm done
writing letters to him. Who can I write letters to next?
And he moves on to Joseph. Right, Yeah, So this
(44:06):
was the one where the superintendent, the fictional Dr. Yoder,
was the authority figure for Joseph, who he saw his
a father figure. And so of course Rokich is gonna
play up this whole father figure thing in the letters,
saying that he loved him like a son. He just
wanted the best things for him. And if you remember
(44:27):
from the original sort of quick bio, Joseph's father was
awful and abusive, so he's really playing into his deepest
sort of insecurities here. Yeah, he said, be assured that
I will always love you, just exactly like a father
who deeply loved his own son. It's really tough to
even research this stuff. Yeah, so um so, just like
(44:49):
with um with Leon uh, through these letters, as Dr Yoder,
he tried to get Joseph to start doing stuff, finocuous
stuff at first, like it's saying stop, he didn't, he
stops saying that he was from England and he was
from Quebec, started going to church services, that kind of stuff.
So there was an influence on Joseph, just like there
was on on Leon using their delusional UM characters or
(45:13):
delusional friends, authority figures whatever. And I think even Dr
Yoder prescribed for the fake Doctor Yoder prescribed placebo for
Joseph's stomach ailments. He had like digestive problems or stomach
hurt and these placebo pills just fixed him right up. Yeah,
so the stomach pills placebo supposedly worked. And then he said,
(45:35):
all right, well that works, so I'm gonna give you
pills to basically cure your mind and if you want
to fix fix yourself for good take these pills. Uh,
which is I mean, this is so far off the
charts of unethical, Like I can't even describe how far
off the charts it is. And he said, basically, I
(45:57):
think he said he gave him an ultimatum. He says,
I'm only going to continue to give these pills that
will supposedly make your mind right if you admit that
you're in a mental hospital. And it's not an English stronghold.
And Joseph finally said, it's like signed something. And Joseph said, no,
I'm not going to sign this, and he cut off
this placebo medication that he believed might be fixing his brain.
(46:21):
And it kind of petered out after that, and it
was just like, it's just brutal to think about these
guys going through this like hope that they're getting better
and it was all fake. Yeah, he apparently stopped writing
to Dr Yoder and um moved on to JFK, started
writing letters to JFK asking to be one of his speechwriters,
because remember he was a writer as well. So KEI
(46:43):
is like, okay, alright, let's see what's next. Oh, nothing's next.
This is the end of the line. He finally realized like, Okay,
this is not going anywhere. Not only had he not
at all moved Clyde's delusions or Joseph's delusions, the only
persons whose delusions changed at all was Leon's, and his
had just gotten more complex and intricate, certainly not any
(47:05):
closer to reality. They got further away from reality because
of this influence from Um from Rokitchen, his his experiment,
and he has like a pretty rich little admission in
the book that he says that we do not know
to what extent our very presence behavior in questions may
(47:26):
have influenced the results obtained, which is bizarre to say,
because the whole point of the experiment was to influence
these people through these this experiment. So it's a really
weird thing that he even put it in there. Um
from some of the stuff that I've read, kind of
picking apart this book at the end, it really just
kind of peters out and like he's just kind of
(47:48):
slashing in the air with his sword trying to figure out,
you know, what the point was of all of this stuff.
Um And even without like a satisfying conclusion or end
uh and ended up getting published in nineteen sixty four
and became like a really big success in the field
of psychology, but also got widely criticized right out of
the gate because even though this was mid century America
(48:10):
and we're talking about mental patients in mid century America
who have very little rights or retreated very poorly, Like,
there were still like a lot of people around were like,
you don't do this to human beings. This is not okay.
Not everybody did, but some, you know, some critics definitely
came out immediately. Yeah, it took Rokich a long time though,
(48:31):
to really kind of come to terms with what he
had done. And uh, he eventually did, though, about seventeen
years later. They re reissued the book in nineteen eighty
one and he wrote a new forward. He admitted in
interviews in other places as well, that he was also,
(48:51):
you know, innocence suffering from godlike delusions and that he
was playing God with these men and regretted it. He
regretted publishing. He said, I regret having written and published
a study when I did. I don't know if that
means that he wishes he could have reflected more on
it or what, but he did sort of recant and
say he didn't do the right thing. Um, It's worth
(49:13):
pointing out that this was uh, six years into his
suffering from spinal cancer. So I don't know if that had,
you know, of knowing the end was near for him,
had something to do with his sort of self reflection.
But he eventually died in nineteen eighty eight at the
age of seventy after a thirteen year battle with spinal cancer,
(49:35):
and you know, left the social psychology world sort of rocked.
Uh Like, Like I said, I studied this in college
and it became sort of like the Stanford prison experiment.
It became worth studying, but not for the reasons that
they initially launched the study to begin with. No, he
(49:55):
finally figured out the point of the book, and the
point of the book where was for him to figure
out that it was it's unethical what he was doing
and finally come to terms with what he'd done to
these poor men, and that you have a right to
just be left alone and not have your identity challenge
no matter what you believe you are, who you believe
you are. And so he actually changed his his methods,
he his his general belief in the idea of belief
(50:18):
systems um remain the same, but he changed his tactics
and that he got involved in self confrontation, where you
would try to present people with you know, self examination,
where they would examine what their values were, what their
beliefs were, and then they would kind of be challenged
on that like, Okay, you believe in freedom, you place
(50:39):
a high value on freedom, but you also rated equality
pretty low. But isn't equality freedom for everybody? So you
care about your freedom but not other people's freedom? How
does that really jibe? And then the hope was that
they would go back and self reflect and be like, no,
I really do care about freedom and do care about
other people. Maybe I should care about more about equality
and improve as a person. And that's ultimately how he
(51:00):
ended up making his name starting in the seventies. Yeah,
and I gotta tell you when when you read some
of his um regret about it, he says things like
or he said things like you know, and in in
in the end someone was cured and it was me. Uh,
It's it just that all bothered me a little bit too.
(51:21):
How he he still made it about himself somehow, even
though he did say he regretted it and everything. I
just I never heard as much um regret about these
three men and and just and and putting them in
the positions of like they were the ones who helped
me out in the end. It was just I didn't
(51:41):
like that. I know exactly what you mean. It's just
it's still smacks of self involvement and you get and
also like what happened to these men after the experiment
was done. They were just cast right back into the
general populations, like used cleanex basically to deal with what
they've just been through. It's just it's just rot and
all around for sure. And at the very least it
(52:03):
does exist to to to make Mountain row Keats feel better. Right,
You got anything else? No? I mean, if you want
to see some of his later work that you were
talking about the value stuff, there all kinds of really
wacky YouTube videos from people about that stuff. Nice. And
if you want to see the movie that they remade
about this, don't ye. Um, Well, since I said don't
(52:27):
see that movie, it's time of course for a listener
mail everybody. I'm gonna call this a guy who has
the same step on a crack thing as I do. Okay,
this is from Jared Miller. Hey, guys, I gotta say,
Chuck is the only other person I've heard to express
the same compulsion that I have. If I step on
(52:48):
the surface that is different from the majority of where
I'm walking, I try to get my other foot to
have the same sensation. This can be the line between
the sidewalk segments, or a traction sticker, an unpaved patch, cetera.
I gotta say, Jared, it's the same with me. It's
not just cracks, can be anything, even which part of
the foot is affected. Same with me, Dude, If I
(53:09):
do it on my heel, I have to do the
next one with my heel. It's very interesting. I've even
found myself doing it with the colors of tiles on
a pattern floor. Same here for me. It's about symmetrical sensations.
I sometimes realize I'm doing it when I'm eating uh,
and have equal chewing time on each side. I don't
do that. Uh. Once Yeah, you're really out there. Uh.
(53:32):
Once I became aware of it at a fully conscious level.
I also became self conscious about it and tried different
things to break myself of the habit. At times, it
spins an extreme, as extreme as forcing myself to maintain
an even gait no matter what. Yeah, I've done that
while consciously reminding myself that sensations are temporary and that
it will even uh even out or go away, especially
(53:55):
if I ignore it. Thanks for all the hours of entertainment.
You were an early discovery of mine in the podcast
world back in two thousand nine, and almost none of
the shows I started listening to back then are still
going m That's our motto, Jared, just keep doing it,
just no matter what everybody tells you to stop, please
God stop, don't quit. You don't listen. So that's Jared
(54:17):
and Anaheim by way of Idaho. Way to go, Jared
from all over the place or was it Iowa? I
don't remember, Sorry Idaho. And that's the worst thing that confused.
I apologize. Um. So let's see if you want to
get in touch of this, like Jared did, um, please
email us, won't you? You can send us an email
(54:38):
to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more
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