Project Camelot 1965 & Blade Runner 2049

 In a giant, empty, decaying building which had once housed thousands, a single TV set hawked its wares to an uninhabited room. 

This ownerless ruin had, before World War Terminus, been tended and maintained. Here had been the suburbs of San Francisco, a short ride by monorail rapid transit; the entire peninsula had chattered like a bird tree with life and opinions and complaints, and now the watchful owners had either died or migrated to a colony world. Mostly the former; it had been a costly war despite the valiant predictions of the Pentagon and its smug scientific vassel, the Rand Corporation — which had, in fact, existed not far from this spot. Like the apartment owners, the corporation had departed, evidently for good. No one missed it,

Philip K Dick, 'Do Androids dream of electric sheep?'

The climactic showdown between Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford in Blade Runner occurs in this empty decaying building not far from the old Rand Corporation Head Quarters in Santa Monica. Dick published the book on which the film was based in 1968. At that time the Rand Corp. was connected in the public mind with 'Dr. Strangelove' type Nuclear policy aiming at Mutually Assured Destruction as well as the ongoing war in Indochina. However, there was a third aspect to Rand's work which has since faded from public memory. This was its association with psychological warfare and counter-insurgency for which it recruited Psychologists and Sociologists and Area specialists. This was the notorious 'Project Camelot'- described as the Manhattan Project for the Social Sciences- which sought to turn American academics into 'engaged intellectuals' who would uncover the objective determinants of human behaviour as relating to social and political formations. In the words of Theodore Vallance

Project CAMELOT is a study whose objective is to determine the feasibility of developing a general social systems model which would make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing nations in the world. Somewhat more specifically, its objectives are:

First, to devise procedures for assessing the potential for internal war within national societies;

Second, to identify with increased degrees of confidence those actions which a government might take to relieve conditions which are assessed as giving rise to a potential for internal war; and

Finally, to assess the feasibility of prescribing the characteristics of a system for obtaining and using the essential information for doing the above two things.^[38]

Project Camelot backfired when Latin American intellectuals became suspicious of its motivation. The Chilean Senate, in particular, denounced this thinly disguised attempt at 'imperialist intervention'.
Phillip K Dick was writing his book after this fiasco had come to light. At the time, it did appear that the Social Sciences could be used to prevent costly wars abroad- like the Vietnam quagmire- but, if so, why not at home to manage dissent and 'manufacture consent'?

 Blade Runners use advanced technology to identify androids who, it seems, lack a specifically human capacity for empathy which is expressed in love for and the desire to nurture all organic life-forms. Clearly, such a technology could also be used to identify potential troublemakers who are not susceptible to the normal emotional and moral restraints enforced by family relationships, institutional ideologies or organised religion.       

Blade runners use their bounties to buy real as opposed to electric sheep. They can also connect up electronically with a suffering Christ like figure named Mercer. Thus humans are identified by not just empathy but also a participation mystique of a spiritual kind. This does not mean that they are happy or good. They have to use electronic means to stabilise their moods. Stay at home wives- entombed in what Betty Friedan had called the feminine mystique- are depicted as at the end of their tether. Meanwhile, a large section of the population are condemned to second class status as 'chicken-heads' because they have been damaged by fall-out and are considered intellectually sub-par.

Androids exhibit sociopathic traits, but so do some humans. Indeed, sociopathy may correlate with outstanding success in competitive fields. 'Chicken-heads', however, are full of empathy- though it brings them only more suffering.

Dick's conclusion is that humans can reverse time, reverse entropy- like the Christ like Mercer who
was killed for bringing the dead back to life. How? Forgiveness, Mercy, Penitence- these are human faculties we all possess- which can do what even the God of Aristotle can not, viz change the Past.

The Blade Runner has killed and been unfaithful to his wife with an android who vindictively slaughters his sheep. Yet his wife is a comfort to him at the end of his terrible day.

"Do you think I did wrong?" he asked. "What I did today?" 

"No." 

"Mercer said it was wrong but I should do it anyhow. Really weird. Sometimes it's better to do something wrong than right."

 "It's the curse on us," Iran said. "That Mercer talks about."

"The dust?" he asked.

"The killers that found Mercer in his sixteenth year, when they told him he couldn't reverse time and bring things back to life again. So now all he can do is move along with life, going where it goes, to death. And the killers throw the rocks; it's they who're doing it. Still pursuing him. And all of us, actually..."

Project Camelot was discontinued by President Johnson in 1965. Yet it appears that the US backed coup in Chile eight years later was motivated to some degree by a computer program called POLITICA which counselled the killing of Allende. Interestingly, Allende's regime had relied upon a Cybernetic system to coordinate the economy- it featured a futuristic control room with Star Trek type tulip chairs- but this 'Cybersyn' program was junked after the coup.

Chile was something of an exception. The truth is the scandal surrounding Project Camelot did not deter similar operations in Brazil or Colombia or Peru being successfully carried through. Nor did Social Science funding decrease. In 1968, the National Science Foundation had its charter rewritten so as to place the Social Sciences on a par with the Natural Sciences. However, by then, there was a new mood on the campuses of America and Europe. The 'baby boomers' were coming of age and were determined to live life on more ample terms than could be envisaged by a bunch of behavioural scientists or predicted by a computer.

Philip K Dick was a hero to this new generation. They may not have understood the Gnostic element to his thinking but shared his suspicion of the organs of government and the bland corporations which manipulate them. Yet, this 'Me' generation too back-traced. By the time Ridley Scott's film came out, there was an obsession with Japanese competition which has since faded away only to be replaced with a fear of China. Gender relations too had changed. The scandal that Harrison Ford's love interest is programmed to fall in love with him is not confronted. Instead the focus shifts to whether he is himself a replicant. In any case, he is little better than a chicken-head genetically unworthy of witnessing 'attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion'. The androids, in Scott's film, on the other hand, are Promethean- they challenge their maker. In Dick's book, though the android is programmed to have an affair with the hero, she is still woman enough to act vindictively against his prize possession.

What of Blade Runner 2049? Critics have raved about it. But what does it actually say? I must admit I couldn't make sense of it. The objectification of women crosses a line. I suppose the film is about 'hybridity'. Androids can breed with humans. If this fact becomes known, then the entire social structure- predicated on android servility- will be called into question. There is one other possibility. If androids can make more androids, with or without human help, they may become the master race. In this scenario, the rugged macho male might be little more than a sperm donor manipulated by a female android with the right software program. The problem here is that we are speaking of a purely political process- a game about whether sociopathic humans run things through bland Corporations or whether inhuman androids do so on the basis of superior software. The outcome scarcely matters. The one plot twist features the hybrid child who turns out not to be the hero but a woman who makes the artificial memories which stabilise android behaviour. The hero's self-sacrifice reunites her with her father and, it may be, she forgives him for what might have felt like his abandonment of her. Perhaps a new type of memory can be fabricated on the basis of what happens next. But we are given little guidance as to what that might be.

In Dick's book there is a sort of shared artificial memory- that of Mercer being assailed by stones and rocks- which mediates the hopelessness of an Earth in the clutches of an entropic death spiral. In Scott's movie there is a Promethean grandeur to the androids' agon with their human maker. In Denis Villeneuve's film there are gorgeous visuals and Gosling doing what Gosling does in every recent movie we have seen him in. But what is it that he does? Perhaps this flop will alert producers that they need to find something else for Gosling to do than sleep-walk through yet more victories of style over substance.

Dick's book was, in its own way, a monument to '68 when bare breasted German students put Adorno to flight with a shower of flower petals and Parisian students raised up flagstones, like the Communards, but with the slogan 'under the pavement- the beach!' A feature of this world wide unrest in which students were in the vanguard was a Lysistrata like protest by women against a macho military industrial complex which, like Moloch, demanded an increasing tribute of young lives.

 It seemed something had gone wrong in the relationship between the sexes and the entire planet was imperilled as a result. Why? The Social Science had turned sociopathic. The Humanities were turning into the sub-humanities. Paideia had been weaponised.

Scott's movie, in '82, vividly depicts American fears of being eclipsed by the Pacific Rim. Its homage to the film noir tradition is based on the challenges faced by an American masculinity no longer bolstered by the military-industrial complex. In December of that year, unemployment peaked at over 10 % - the highest it has ever been since the Great Depression. Why? Voodoo economics. Social Scientists were now little better than witch-doctors.

What social reality does Villenueve's movie reflect? I notice a lot of scary looking immigrants speaking strange languages. Even the androids are having babies. Soon they will out breed us. Trump had better build that Wall before it is too late! Everything else is just fake news or clickbait Junk Social Science. The City on the Hill remains hidden. Camelot is as Nineveh and the Eternal Feminine a toppled statue of cyclopean scale. Maiuetics has misfired. Misology is a universal inheritance. The minotaur has outgrown his labyrinth. Memory is a thread whose Ariadne is herself manufactured.