What if the scariest psychological weapon of the Cold War didn’t come from the Pentagon, but from Alice in Wonderland? Sounds insane. But that’s exactly what happened.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, the CIA quietly lifted interrogation tactics straight out of L. Ron Hubbard’s playbook. Yeah, the same Hubbard who invented Scientology. He called it the Alice in Wonderland Technique of brain control, a method of flooding the mind with contradictions, nonsense phrases, and jolts of confusion until reality starts to wobble. The target, disoriented and desperate for something stable, grabs the first thing that makes sense — usually whatever the operator wants them to believe. Half a century later, the same trick is running on your phone. Only now, it’s called content.
The cult roots of confusion
Hubbard, who once admitted that “if you want to make a million, start a religion,” understood a simple truth: confusion is control. He had people literally read passages of Alice in Wonderland aloud, not for fun, but to fracture their grip on logic.
Fast forward to 1961. The CIA declassifies the now-infamous KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual. Inside? Almost word-for-word copies of Hubbard’s scripts. No citation. No royalties. Just wholesale theft of a cult leader’s psychological hacks, weaponized for interrogation. The goal wasn’t the truth. It was obedience.
The fall reflex
Behavioral expert Chase Hughes breaks it down like this: When the brain gets overloaded, it behaves like a body falling through space. Limbs flail. The first solid object encountered — no matter how sharp or dangerous — gets grabbed.
The cognitive version? Once you’re confused, the first coherent idea you hear feels safe. Your brain clings to it, bypassing critical thought. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It matters that it’s solid. This is the moment when commands are slipped in. Not when you’re calm, not when you’re focused. But when your scripts — those invisible mental routines that tell you what’s normal — have been short-circuited.
Fractionation: The emotional yo-yo
This isn’t just about gibberish phrases. It’s about emotional whiplash. Hypnotists call it fractionation — the deliberate cycle of pulling someone into one state, almost releasing them, then plunging them deeper. Joy, then despair. Relief, then terror. Fun, then pain. Each swing softens resistance, making the subject increasingly suggestible.
Sound familiar? Scroll through TikTok or Instagram. Rage bait video. Cute puppy. Political meltdown. Motivational hustle porn. Sad breakup story. Back to comedy. That’s not random. It’s the fractionation loop, weaponized by algorithms to keep you hooked and pliable. And the pitch always comes when you’re off balance. “The system is broken. Only we have the answer. Buy my course.”
From war rooms to reels
This isn’t tinfoil hat territory. It’s documented history. The CIA didn’t invent these tools — they refined them. PsyOps during the Cold War were obsessed with breaking identity. The idea was simple: once you don’t know who you are, you’ll accept any story of who you could be. Cults took the same playbook. So did sales trainers. Now it’s Instagram influencers selling drop-shipping “alpha masculinity” masterminds. It’s all the same script: chaos first, then order — for a price.
The Milgram experiment: Obedience on tap
If you think you’d never fall for this, meet Stanley Milgram. In 1962, at Yale, he ran a now legendary study. Volunteers thought they were shocking another person in the next room for wrong answers on a test. The shocks weren’t real, but the screams were. The setup was simple: a man in a lab coat told them to continue. And they did. By the end, 67 percent of participants went all the way to the maximum shock — 450 volts — labeled “XXX Danger Severe Shock.” All because the authority told them to.
Replications in 2010 showed the same results. New century, same obedience. This is what Hughes warns about. You don’t need torture. You don’t need drugs. Just novelty, confusion, and authority. A clean room, a uniform, a script. Today, the lab coat looks like a verified checkmark.
Social media: The new interrogation chamber
Let’s be blunt: your feed is not entertainment. It’s a behavioral lab. Every swipe is engineered to trigger novelty (whoa, what’s that?), authority (97,000 likes in an hour), and tribe (endless comments reinforcing the narrative). It’s algorithmic chaos designed to break your focus and rewire your identity.
Hughes calls it emotional cycling. Rage → hope → guilt → belonging → rage again. Your brain chemistry spikes and crashes, making you easier to program. Studies back it up: Rapid emotional shifts increase susceptibility to persuasion by nearly 50 percent, especially when delivered by perceived authorities. That’s why influencers don’t just sell info. They sell urgency. They sell identity. And once you buy into their tribe, resistance dies.
Governments never left the chat
Think this is just about hustle bros and diet tea shills? Think again. Governments are running the same game. Narrative manipulation online isn’t just trolls in basements. It’s state-funded psyops. If you believe it’s just a left-versus-right issue, congratulations — you’re already inside the script. The point isn’t to convince you of a position. It’s to fracture your certainty until you’ll grab whatever “truth” feels safest.
The behavioral table of elements
Hughes even built a toolkit to map this. He calls it the Behavioral Table of Elements — a massive chart cataloging over 100 human behaviors and rating their likelihood of deception or suggestibility. Smooth lower eyelids? Hypnotists say you’re more prone to trance. Rising vocal pitch? Stress. Object manipulation? Concealment. Each micro-behavior gets scored and stacked into a one-page guide to the human psyche. It’s free online, which is either empowering — or terrifying — depending on who downloads it.
Wonderland at scale
Here’s the kicker: the Alice in Wonderland technique has gone from cult initiation rooms to algorithmic feeds. Where Hubbard once used Lewis Carroll’s nonsense to disorient followers, now Silicon Valley runs the same chaos on a global scale. Fear, novelty, authority, tribe. Over and over. Until your brain is too scrambled to resist the next command. And the scariest part? You don’t notice. You feel entertained. Empowered, even. But the truth is simple: you’re not the audience. You’re the subject.
So what now?
There’s no neat conclusion here. No silver bullet. Hughes is blunt: “Your brain versus a $1 trillion computer. You’re going to lose. I’m going to lose.” Technology has outpaced evolution. Our mammal brains haven’t changed in 200,000 years. But our feeds are designed by machine-learning algorithms optimized for control. So the question isn’t whether you’re being manipulated. You are. The question is how many scripts have been tested on you today.
Welcome to Wonderland. Hope you brought a compass.
Follow us on X, Facebook, or Pinterest
