Gregory Bateson and the Counter-Culture

postflaviana.org /gregory-bateson-and-the-counter-culture/
Joe Atwill
Because of his duplicity in proclaiming spiritual benefits of magic mushrooms as psychoactive drugs,
while simultaneously accepting CIA funding for his exploits, the newspaperman and banker Gordon
Wasson could be considered a Lifetime Actor that is, a person who cultivated a public image which
was completely the opposite of his true agenda.
Another possible Lifetime Actor was the famous humanist Gregory Bateson. Bateson was an early
supporter and teacher at Esalen, an organization devoted to personal growth, meditation, massage,
Gestalt, yoga, psychology, ecology, spirituality, and organic food. Yet although Bateson cultivated this
image during the Cold War period, he had earlier been a major participant in the creation of Weaponized
Anthropology for the OSS to control inferior peoples.
The weaponized Anthropology Bateson developed during WW2 was documented by Dr. David H. Price
in his article, Gregory Bateson and the OSS: World War II and Batesons Assessment of Applied
Anthropology, as well as his book Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of
Anthropology in the Second World War.
Price found that during the second world war, the OSS (direct institutional predecessor to the CIA)
employed over two-dozen anthropologists including Gregory Bateson. By 1947, as many as three-fourths
of professional anthropologists were working in some war-related governmental capacity, either full or
part-time. In fact, what we know as the science of applied anthropology was a government project that
began in the OSS to determine how to control civilian populations.
It is an established fact that these anthropologists were developing social science that could be used
against civilian populations. As shown below, what has not been understood is that this science was used
by the CIA against the American people in the creation of the 1960s counter culture.

Schismogenesis and black propaganda

Price noted that Bateson spent much of his wartime duty designing and carrying out black propaganda
radio broadcasts from remote, secret locations in Burma and Thailand, and also worked in China, India,
and Ceylon. Bateson was ideally qualified to pursue this work, since his earlier anthropological research
was on the subject of schismogenesis, which is to say, the study of how societies become divisive and
dysfunctional.
As Christian Hubert explains:

In his first major anthropological study, Bateson studied the Iatmul tribe in New Guinea.
From his fieldwork, he concluded that an Iatmul village is nearly perpetually threatened by
fission of the community because it is characteristic that intense and growing rivalries occur
between two groups. It puzzled Bateson that usually the community does not disintegrate.
He found that one elaborate event heading off a blowup is the elaborate Naven ceremony
which entails tranvestism and buffoonery.

The nature of the black propaganda Bateson developed during WWII needs to be completely understood
by citizens because it was the basis for the present mind control operations the government uses against
them. As Price wrote: In this work Bateson applied the principles of his theory of schismogenesis to help
foster disorder among the enemy. Black propaganda is false information that purports to be from a source
on one side of a conflict, but is actually from the opposing side.
The fact that the source of the propaganda must be credible is the basis of what we have named the
lifetime actor above. This is clear in the case of Wasson given above as certainly the publics willingness
to repeat his purported use of psychedelic drugs would have been tempered if it were aware that his
journeys to Mexico were an MK Ultra project intended to determine how the government could control the
minds of its citizens.
Bateson presented a narrative in which he claimed to be concerned over whether or not anthropologists
would use their knowledge as a weapon. In 1942, he wrote that the war:

is now a life-or-death struggle over the role which the social sciences shall play in the
ordering of human relationships. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this war is
ideologically about just this the role of the social sciences. Are we to reserve the
techniques and the right to manipulate peoples as the privilege of a few planning, goaloriented and power hungry individuals to whom the instrumentality of science makes a
natural appeal? Now that we have techniques, are we in cold blood, going to treat people
as things? (Bateson 1942, as quoted in Price.)

Taken in context, Batesons concern in this warning was that the Nazis would be the ones who would be
applying social sciences towards evil ends. However, Price discovered that Bateson had no dilemma
whatsoever in treating people as things. By using the FOIA, Price was able to discover a paper written by
Bateson that was not with the OSS archives, but the Central Intelligence Agency the institution that did
take over for the OSS at the wars end.
Batesons 1944 position paper below illuminates the Black Propaganda type of intelligence work he
carried out for the OSS. As we cannot improve on Prices analysis, we quote his text below.

Batesons primary concern in this OSS position paper was to advance the position that
American diplomatic and intelligence policy makers should keep an
eye on longer range planning, we are here to promote such a state of affairs in [South Asia]
that twenty years hence we may be able to rely on effective allies in this area (Bateson
1944:1).
He begins by arguing that it will actually pay the Americans to influence the British towards
a more flexible and more effective colonial policy (1944:2). In this paper, Bateson envisions
that the post-war period will mostly look and function like it had in the pre-war period. He
identifies two significant faults in the pre-war colonial system (1944:2). Bateson wants to
strive for a new and improved colonial system, and starts by asking if it is possible to:
diagnose remediable faults in the British and Dutch colonial systems and can we present
our diagnosis to the British and the Dutch in such a way that the system will be improved?
(Bateson 1944).
These two weaknesses of the imperial system (1944:5) are labeled the lack of

communication upwards from the native population to the white [population] (1944:2), and
the British failure in the area of the delegation of authority (1944:4). Each of these two
points are discussed separately below.
(1) Lack of communication upward
In discussing how British colonialists traditionally received information from natives he
notes that, In the late 19th century and up to 1914 it was customary in British colonial
governments to conduct monumental surveys of language, population, religion, caste, [and]
village industries (1944:2). He argues that, while these efforts were often flawed in their
methodology and results, at least under this system every District Commissioner was
compelled to go and interview people in the native communities (1944:2). At a minimum,
this traditional system forced colonial managers to undertake some level of participantobservational contact with native populations. Despite the awkwardness and artificial pitfalls
of these meetings, Bateson argues that colonial managers did acquire
some vivid awareness of what native life is about. He might not be able to convey this
awareness in his books but he learned to feel with his elbows the trend of native thought.
(1944:2)
Bateson points out that after the First World War colonial managers abandoned these
personal meetings with native populations, instead favoring more distant statistical
approaches and British managers suffered from this loss of first-hand interactive
knowledge.
Next, Bateson discusses the past importance of information which colonialists gathered
through intimate contact with their local mistresses. He notes that the strategic uses of
these relationships have been relegated to the past due to a variety of factors.
With the improvement of transportation, the discovery of quinine, the development of
sanitation, mosquito control and public health measures generally, it has become
increasingly easy for the white man to have his white wife and even children with him in the
colonies. The presence of large numbers of white women relieves the official from the pinch
of loneliness which formerly drove him to the native woman and at the same time the white
women not unnaturally use their influence to build up strong moral sanctions against the
taking of native mistresses even to the point of ostracizing the guilty officials. As a result
the more durable and more educative type of relationship with the native women has been
reduced to a minimum and only the casual, impermanent and educational[ly] useless
types of relationship persist. (Bateson 1944:3)
In these passages, Bateson clarifies that the extent to which past British colonial authorities
in India had established groundup communication networks including those with their
indigenous mistresses helped them to understand and control some of the features of
Indian village life. The loss of these relationships between colonizer and colonized is noted
in the context of loss of information, with the clear implication being that post-war colonial
authorities would be wise to re-introduce some variety of such ground-up communication
networks.
2) The British delegation of authority: colonial codependency and paternalizing the white
mans burden
Next, Bateson discusses the overall British failure to delegate authority among the Indian

population by drawing on startling imagery of Paternal-British-Colonialists and their ChildlikeIndian Subjects. He begins by conjuring up caricatures of American and British
differences in parenting dynamics to analyze the shortcomings of the British rule in India.
He argues that the British could improve their colonial system by acting less like rigid British
parents, and more like nurturing American parents. We are told that in Upper and Middle
Class British households, parents think of themselves as models who the children should
watch and imitate, while in America, many of the parents come from alien cultures, so they
are more content to watch their children and to learn from their offspring who achieve great
things in this world they (the parents) imperfectly understand. Bateson stretches this
comparison even further by noting that the American family thus constitutes, in itself, a
weaning machine (1944:4). In diametrical opposition to this is the codependent
English family [which] does not contain this machinery for making the child independent and
it is necessary in England to achieve this end by the use of an entirely separate institutionthe boarding school. The English child must be drastically separated from his parents
influence in order to let him grow and achieve initiative and independence. (1944:4)
Batesons analysis is arguing that the British would be more effective colonialists if they
would become less like British parents and more like American parents. Though he does
note the presence of indigenous anti-colonialist movements, he does not recommend
moving towards dismantling the colonial system at wars end. Instead, he offers advice on
how to improve it functionally that is, to reinforce its longevity. Bateson clarifies that the
U.S. should not side with the growing liberation movement and he advises that we ought
not to think of altering the imperial institutions but rather of altering the attitudes and insights
of those who administer these institutions (1944:5). This is in some sense a culture and
personality based analysis of the differences in British colonial and American neo-colonial
approaches to the administration of global patron/client relationships. Bateson is advocating
that the longevity of the British presence in India would be strengthened in the postwar
period if British administrators would but change the personality of the administrative
bureaucracy.
Batesons recommendations
In the papers conclusion, Bateson recommends that after the war the OSS should take
four steps to take advantage of these above mentioned two weaknesses of the imperial
system (i.e., the lack of communication upward and the British delegation of authority). It is
not exactly clear to what end these two weaknesses are to be put, but it is clear that they
are not to be exploited as a means of ending the foreign-colonial rule of the Indian people.
Bateson recommends that: First, the OSS should gather as much intelligence as possible
from British sources while the wartime alliance is in place; Second, they need to
undertake detailed analysis of pop culture especially in terms of content analysis of Indian
popular films as a way of gauging popular sentiment; Third, and most importantly,
America must learn from Russias successes in conquering ethnic minorities by praising
and co-opting aspects of their culture on this point he specifically suggests that it might be
possible to co-opt some components similar to the symbolic capital that Gandhi has used so
successfully; and finally, Bateson suggests that the postwar OSS be sure to continue with
its wartime education programs for colonialist authorities. Of course, the OSS was
disbanded at the end of war. Or more accurately, it was transformed into the Central
Intelligence Agency the agency which kept the copy of Batesons report until I gained a
copy of it under the Freedom of Information Act .

Batesons comments on point three reveal much about the tone of his wartime OSS work
and are reproduced in full below:
(3) The most significant experiment which has yet been conducted in the adjustment of
relations between superior and inferior peoples is the Russian handling of their Asiatic
tribes in Siberia. The findings of this experiment support very strongly the conclusion that
it is very important to foster spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among
the inferiors. In outline, what the Russians have done is to stimulate the native peoples to
undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and
other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on. And the same attitude
of spectatorship is then naturally extended to native achievements in production or
organization. In contrast to this, where the white man thinks of himself as a model and
encourages the native people to watch him in order to find out how things should be done,
we find that in the end nativistic cults spring up among the native people. The system gets
overweighed until some compensatory machinery is developed and then the revival of
native arts, literature, etc., becomes a weapon for use against the white man (Phenomena,
comparable to Ghandis spinning wheel may be observed in Ireland and elsewhere). If, on
the other hand, the dominant people themselves stimulate native revivalism, then the
system as a whole is much more stable, and the nativism cannot be used against the
dominant people.
OSS can and should do nothing in the direction of stimulating native revivals but we might
move gently towards making the British and the Dutch more aware of the importance of
processes of this kind (Bateson 1944:6-7).

Dr. Price was unable, of course, to recognize the importance of Batesons recommendation above
concerning an archaic revival in controlling populations because he was unaware that the government had
created the psychedelic counterculture. However, every citizen should study the concluding quote from
Bateson carefully. Batesons recommendation can certainly be understood as having led directly what the
psychedelic drug guru Terence McKenna described as the archaic revival. In other words, the counter
culture in the 1960s was created by using black propaganda to bring about an archaic revival of
Americas youth and thereby make them easier to control, as had been determined by the secret
anthropological experiments that Bateson somehow knew about.
The documents obtained through the FOIA reveal a clear and sinister trajectory. That anthropologic
science that was developed to enslave Russias Asiatic tribes by bringing about a Native Revival was used
against the American people. Bateson brought his science with him when he helped developed the MK
Ultra program which then created the counter culture based upon the elements that the Russians had used
to enslave the Asiatic tribes the Shaman, psychedelic drugs, trance music and dance were combined
with the archaic appearances of the music idols to convey the message that the feudal past was where a
young person should head rather than a future with the technology and thinking power that might
threaten the oligarchs.

Bateson, the CIA, and MK Ultra

Following the war (as Price explains), Bateson claimed to have become uneasy with his wartime role as
an OSS operative and black propagandist, as he cultivated relationships within the human-potential
movement. However, there are reasons to doubt Batesons sincerity in this regard.
First, let us note that Gregory Bateson played a significant role in the creation of the CIA. After the war

Truman wished that the OSS be disbanded. Its head, William Donovan, wrote to Trumans budget director,
and presented him with a rationale that the organization be not only kept in existence but expanded. At
least part of this rationale was written by Gregory Bateson. In an article at the CIA website entitled The
Birth of Central Intelligence, Arthur Darling states that Bateson argued as follows:

the bomb would shift the balance of warlike and peaceful methods of international
pressure. It would be powerless, he said, against subversive practices, guerrilla tactics,
social and economic manipulation, diplomatic forces, and propaganda either black or white.
The nations would therefore resort to those indirect methods of warfare. The importance of
the kind of work the Foreign Economic Administration, the Office of War Information, and the
Office of Strategic Services had been doing would thus be infinitely greater than it had ever
been. The country could not rely upon the Army and Navy alone for defense. There should
be a third agency to combine the functions and employ the weapons of clandestine
operations, economic controls, and psychological pressures.

In spite of Donovans protest, Truman disbanded the OSS in 1945. However, in 1947, Bateson and
Donovans recommendations emerged victorious, and the various US intelligence agencies (including
those that had been split off from the former OSS) were re-assembled as the new Central Intelligence
Agency. Given Batesons argument for its existence, it is no surprise that it immediately began to perfect
the science of social control. One project in this vein had the name MK Ultra and funded (among other
criminal activities) Wassons above-mentioned trip to harvest magic mushrooms.
The claim that the US governments interest in LSD began with MK Ultra (which was started in 1953) is
incorrect. The US Navys Medical Research Institute had been experimenting with psychedelics in their
CHATTER program under the direction of Charles Savage, whose research report from 1951 was revealed
by an FOIA request . The MK Ultra project, however, represented a considerable broadening of this earlier
interest. On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:

The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were
involved in an extensive testing and experimentation program which included covert drug
tests on unwitting citizens at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.
Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to unwitting subjects in social
situations. At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency
itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the
monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.

Bateson apparently maintained at least a casual involvement in the CIAs ongoing drug research and
promotion activities, as explained by John Marks in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate:

[CIA contractor] Harold Abramson apparently got a great kick out of getting his learned
friends high on LSD. He first turned on Frank Fremont-Smith, head of the Macy Foundation
which passed CIA money to Abramson. In this cozy little world where everyone knew
everybody, Fremont-Smith organized the conferences that spread the word about LSD to
the academic hinterlands. Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson, Margaret Meads former
husband, his first LSD. In 1959 Bateson, in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet friend of his
named Allen Ginsberg to take the drug at a research program located off the Stanford

campus. No stranger to the hallucinogenic effects of peyote, Ginsberg reacted badly to what
he describes as the closed little doctors room full of instruments, where he took the drug.
Although he was allowed to listen to records of his choice (he chose a Gertrude Stein
reading, a Tibetan mandala, and Wagner), Ginsberg felt he was being connected to Big
Brothers brain. He says that the experience resulted in a slight paranoia that hung on all
my acid experiences through the mid-1960s until I learned from meditation how to disperse
that.
Anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson then worked at the Veterans
Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. From 1959 on, Dr. Leo Hollister was testing LSD at that
same hospital. Hollister says he entered the hallucinogenic field reluctantly because of the
unscientific work of the early LSD researchers. He refers specifically to most of the people
who attended Macy conferences. Thus, hoping to improve on CIA and military-funded work,
Hollister tried drugs out on student volunteers, including a certain Ken Kesey, in 1960.
Kesey said he was a jock who had only been drunk once before, but on three successive
Tuesdays, he tried different psychedelics. Six weeks later Id bought my first ounce of
grass, Kesey later wrote, adding, Six months later I had a job at that hospital as a
psychiatric aide. Out of that experience, using drugs while he wrote, Kesey turned out One
Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. He went on to become the countercultures second most
famous LSD visionary, spreading the creed throughout the land, as Tom Wolfe would
chronicle in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

It is also very interesting that for his postwar research, Bateson chose topics which were of crucial interest
to another of MK Ultras goals, which was to use drugs and hypnosis to create dissociative personalities.
Batesons interest in double binds and the development of schizophrenia was perfectly analogous to this
MK Ultra agenda. As noted by the Swiss journal Current Concerns, in its comments accompanying a
reproduction of Prices article about Bateson:

Metalog technology, future workshops and pseudo appreciation of more

indigenous cultures
The American Gregory Bateson, highly-praised guru of the European future workshop
scene, once developed models of communication theory for use in the military, in a circle of
chosen ones, the Palo Alto group. Their civilian waste-products have today seeped into
everyday-life vocabulary, as for instance the terms metacommunication and double bind.
The term metalog, which the strategists of the future workshops use, originates in
Batesons work and means something as harmless as the fact that the contents of a
discussion are always to be connected with the form of the discussion. Among other things
Bateson was active in the research and therapy of schizophrenia. He demonstrated the
conditions in which human beings can become schizophrenic, i.e. mentally confused, so
that they slip off into a psychosis and are no longer able to master their lives. In the
mainstream literature on Bateson, his work is highly praised as being to the benefit of
people, in particular to those who acquired a form of psychological disorder. It was not the
work in the Californian Esalen institute that made him an esoteric, but it deepened his
knowledge of group dynamics and large group control, the mainstream media report about
him. So far, so good.
Research into schizophrenia what for?

If one reads, however, the accompanying text of David H. Price on Batesons activities for
the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) during World War II and his suggestions, how the colonial
peoples are to be subjugated even after the war in a more effective way than the British and
the Dutch had ever done it, some doubt arises on the integrity of the psychological
researcher Bateson. Was it not interesting for the military to use the results of schizophrenia
research in order to shatter the minds of prisoners of war and drive them mad, in order to be
able to rebuild their personality again or do so with whole subpopulations in enemy
nations, or even in the[ir] own country? Bateson used his anthropological knowledge not
only to the advantage of but also directed against human beings. We therefore have to
assume that during the Cold War and probably still today power strategists use the findings
of his schizophrenia and/or disorder research to direct them against human beings.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming
Finally, as we also noted recently elsewhere at this website, Bateson was also involved in the
development of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), another important technology for propaganda.

Bateson had established a scholarly relationship with hypnotist Milton Erickson as early as
1932. Bateson would have been fascinated with Ericksons research, which involved the
idea that hypnotically effective trance states could be established in the course of ordinary
life activities such as reading, talking to a therapist, or watching motion pictures, especially
if intense and traumatic emotional states could be evoked by the experience. During such
trance states, Erickson believed, the subconscious mind of the the target could be
accessed by means of hypnotic suggestion.
This idea was later taken up by Bateson proteges Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who
commercialized it as the system of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, described in their 1975
work The Structure of Magic. They drew on Noam Chomskys theory of transformational
grammar to explain that the subliminal messages could be formed within a deep linguistic
structure lurking beneath the surface interpretation.

While we cannot demonstrate a direct relationship between Bateson and the CIA during the postwar
period (that is, after the termination of Batesons contract with the OSS), nevertheless the pattern of his
research interests creates a reasonable doubt that Bateson never deviated from his agenda to promote
superior people in their quest to subjugate the inferior ones.
Following the war Bateson headquarters was at the Palo Alto VA hospital were the CIA developed the MK
Ultra project, which had earlier sent Gordon Wasson to Mexico and began the psychedelic drug
movement. Also in Palo Alto, the CIA-funded drug research program introduced the individuals who would
later lead Americas youth off a cliff to LSD Alan Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead member Robert Hunter and
novelist Ken Keasy.
Thus, when we see the visual images of the rock idols that helped to create counter culture we can now
understand their purpose. Below is a photograph of David Crosby, a member of the Byrds whose 1966 hit
Eight Miles High virtually created the LSD-inspired acid rock genre. He is sitting congenially next to his
father, Annapolis graduate and former OSS member (and Oscar-winning cinematographer?!), Floyd
Crosby. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Discuss in Forum!
(Bateson cartoon credit: https://comunidad3h.wordpress.com/tag/gregory-bateson/)