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Hi everybody, it's your old pal Josh, and for this week's select I've chosen our episode from August of 2021, where we take a look at one of the most unethical social psychology experiments in the history of the field, where Dr.
Martin Roqueach assembled three men who each believed he was Christ, put them in a room together, and sat back and waited for the fireworks to start.
And what came out of it is both an indictment and an inspiring affirmation of humanity.
And on a personal note, I would like to wish my sweet, sweet wife Yumi a very big happy birthday.
Enjoy! Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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 talking.
Until 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 tongue in on it.
And I'm like, I'm going to be there with you soon.
You know, I got to get this front one redone.
Right. So, yeah, I'm going to wait till right before we have live shows so I can pull that front tooth again.
That'll be a special treat for everybody, especially me.
You were used to it.
I really was. The worst was when you had that little case that you would put it in, and they had vents 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 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 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 just kind of one of the, like a landmark study in the field of psychology that we're talking about today.
Yeah, the Three Christs of Hipsillanti.
And I studied this, I remember this from studying it in psychology class in college and got kind of into it at the time.
You started wearing like Three Christs t -shirts and stuff?
I followed them 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, I don't think they made you read the whole book.
We basically just kind of went over it.
But I had been pretty fascinated for years.
And eventually when Hollywood made a movie about it four years ago, I was excited and even paid to rent that thing.
And how'd that work out?
Pretty good. I watched the first half hour and realized, oh man, they've just sort of Disneyfied this thing and it's not good.
Although our buddy Kevin Pollack is in it, and he's always great.
Hey, that guy can steal a scene better than the Hamburglar.
Yeah, the movie, just so everyone knows, is called the Three Christs of Hipsillanti from John Abnett, starring Richard Gere as the name changed doctor.
And then the Three Christs in the movie are portrayed by Peter Dinklage, 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.
Oh, was he in that?
Yeah. Yeah, he played one of the main characters.
He's just the best.
And then what's the guy's name?
Bradley Whitford, who's also great.
Everyone in it is good.
It's one of those movies that they, I think, just over -sanitized and should have made a documentary instead.
But they didn't, and that's okay, and we don't have to talk about that movie ever again now that we have.
Instead, I think we should start by giving a little background on the guy whose idea the Three Christs of Hipsillanti experiment was.
And it was a researcher, a psychologist, a social psychologist, named Milton Roekich.
And Milton Roekich had some ideas about what it was 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'll kind of talk about here or there a little more.
But there's this anecdote that's frequently passed around that lays the early groundwork for this idea that someone's belief in who they are could conceivably be challenged.
And it came one night when he was sitting around the dinner table with his wife and his two young daughters.
And he accidentally, in 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 the funniest thing they ever heard at first.
Yes. Was that my cue?
Yeah, I even stuck my finger up like, all right, now you.
But you can't see it, can you?
No, because we just listen to each other.
Yeah, at first, and it was a little fun game.
And then, I think the five -year -old even said, this is just a game, right?
Dad said no, it's real.
And I hear him saying it in that voice.
And, you know, pretty soon they were begging for him to stop.
And I can verify that this is a thing.
I've been, I think as a parent, sometimes you'll call your kid by another name as a joke.
Like, I know I've done it, like called my daughter, my dog's name, if she's like, she'll come into the room and like bark or something as a joke.
I'll say, oh, you're Nico.
And she'll say, yeah, I'm Nico.
And then for a few minutes later, I'm like, hey, 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 is challenged, it is very quickly kind of traumatic.
Yeah, he learned 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.
That's right, Jerry.
He also, right. Yeah, I know Jerry.
We just call each other Jerry.
I think it would cancel each other out.
Do it one more time and I will crumble.
Okay, Jerry. Thank you for, oh God.
But he also learned like, okay, there's consequences to this.
You can't take somebody with a well -formed, well -developed sense of identity and I guess a normal sense of identity and push them to the edge, mess around with that sense of identity.
There's harmful consequences to that.
So he started to kind of explore this, and like I was saying, he had broken everybody's 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 in the same neighborhood as, 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.
You're Chuck. Like just basic truths of the universe that anyone you talk to is going to generally agree with, right?
That's where the personality comes from.
Yeah. And that is the very bedrock and foundation of how we think about ourselves.
And he already saw that 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 sane person.
I just made air quotes if you couldn't tell from my intonation, messing with a sane person's identity.
You can't really do that.
But 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 Roqueach came up with this idea like, okay, wait a minute.
What if I got my hands on some mentally unstable people, some possibly diagnosed people 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 Roqueach here.
And if something does come of it, there's a good chance that it could be positive instead.
So let me have it. Let me at them basically.
Yeah. There's a quote here from the book and a big thanks to Dave Ruse for putting this one together.
I know this was a huge, 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, it seemed reasonable to focus on delusional systems of belief in the hope that in subjecting them to strain, there would be little to lose and hopefully a great deal to
gain. And I read that sentence and I'm like, stop there, dude.
Right. Yeah. That's like the perfect motto for the misguided intentions of this study.
Yeah. Yeah. He indicted himself with that one quote.
Exactly. Just right out of the gate.
And I read this commentary magazine article from 1964 by, 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, Shirley Roqueach, the guy who's writing the book, well understands that Roqueach the character, this doctor, is out of his mind.
And he's slowly realizing, oh, wait, this guy, even the author of the book has no idea that the doctor character, who's himself, has any idea just how unethical this is.
And that's a great example of it that demonstrates it right off the bat.
Yeah. There's, I don't know if you listened to the snap judgment on this.
Did you hear that? No, huh?
It was good. Snap, you know, great podcast or public radio program turned podcast.
Sure. I've heard public radio before.
I used to listen to a lot more of it.
Same here, 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 listen to just fresh air the whole time or something, you know what I mean?
Yeah. When is Terry Gross going to have us on?
Do we need to get to 20 years?
Would that do it? Yeah, I wouldn't even begin to bother her until we hit 20 years and then maybe, yeah.
And then we just start asking.
Basically. Hi, Terry.
Hi. So in that snap judgment, they pointed out that Roqueach 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 stuff that Voltaire wrote about it, right?
Yeah, there was a man in the 17th century that Voltaire wrote about named Simone Morin, who was deranged in the parlance of the time.
And he thought that he was Christ.
And so he was locked up in a madhouse and he met in that place, in that institution or asylum, another man who thought he was Christ.
And Simone Morin saw just how crazy this guy seemed and was like, wait a minute, maybe I'm crazy.
And in confronting this other guy who claimed to have the same identity, he regained his sanity to a certain extent.
Unfortunately, he relapsed and ended up being burned at the stake for heresy.
But there was a moment there where he had kind of been knocked out of his delusion.
That's a huge deal.
If you have schizophrenia or delusional beliefs, if your mental disorder is to the degree where you hold delusions, and we should say a delusion is not a made up belief where you know you made your belief up.
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 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 Ro Quic was like, there we go.
That's it. There's my methodology for this experiment.
Yeah, and I'm sure he was turned on a little bit about the idea of three Christs or however many Christs he could find.
He felt so hot. Well, I mean, not even like that.
You know what I mean though?
But as a social psychologist, he was probably like, you know, this would make for a pretty mind -blowing experiment.
Plus a great book title.
It's one of the great understated book titles of all time.
Yeah, it's not like the three Richard Nixons of Hizbalanti.
No, and I mean, like Ypsilanti is like this town outside of Ann Arbor where, you know, that's where one of the mental asylums were in Michigan at the time.
And it's just like, you know, it might as well be Walla Walla or Lackawanna or it's just an unusual name in a town that doesn't really have much of a claim to anything.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I'm 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 not like a hot happen in town.
And it been like the three Christs of New York that loses something or the three Christs of London.
It's just a rather generally unremarkable place.
Guys, Ypsilanti, 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 an unkind way at all.
I know you don't. And I think generally back then that's where a lot of these institutions were because they needed like lots of land and so they'll just leave it at that.
Okay. Maybe take a break.
Okay, to let everybody really stew on what I said.
We'll take a break and we'll find out how he found his patience right after this.
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This is Tracy V. Wilson from Stuff You Missed in History class.
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That's it. All right, so we're back.
There were 25 ,000 total patients in the system in Michigan State, in Michigan State hospitals.
And he went through all of these, you know, he sort of tried to cull them down to, ideally to Christ figures.
He found a man who thought he was Cinderella.
He found a Mrs. God.
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.
And two of them happened to be at Ypsilanti.
So he was like, this is perfect.
I'll just transfer the third in, and we'll get going.
Yeah, and so these guys being inmates of the state at a time where Ypsilanti had like 4 ,000 people, 4 ,000 patients in just this one institution.
And if you were already like on the margins of society and then moved into a place where you're with 4 ,000 other people on the margins of society, it's a really good place to get lost, to not get any real help.
And so one of the things that was part of 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 to ward D23.
They were given their own private day room to eat in, to sleep, not sleeping, but to hang out in, away from everybody else.
They got some place to stretch out and to have some company.
They got a lot of attention, a lot of perks.
Basically, their lives were changed in incalculable ways by being part of the study.
And so when they say like these were voluntary meetings and these men were voluntary members of the study, that's definitely true.
They were voluntary participants, but the perks on offer were just so amazing.
You could not turn down participating in some degree.
Yeah, exactly. So they were willing participants insofar as, yeah, they got these great perks worth pointing out.
So he changed the names of the guys to protect their families and to protect them to some degree.
But we should go over sort of the bios of the three men.
Should we say who played them in the movies?
Will that help people?
I don't think so. Okay.
I don't want to disparage those great actors' names again.
Well, I mean the acting, they did a good job.
It was just the material.
They're all great actors.
Sure, yeah. It's just when you write, I don't want to call out the scriptwriter, but it wasn't that good.
So let me ask you this, because 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 movie, what was the name of that movie?
The Queen movie. That's what I called it.
Okay, Bohemian Rhapsody.
Do you remember every time Freddie Mercury did something brilliant, they would have Brian May, they'd do a pan -in close -up of him just looking in awe and astonished.
And that's maybe pushing it, doing that once in a movie.
But they did that every 15 or 20 minutes.
Was it kind of like that same sentiment?
It wasn't so much that.
And again, I only watched the first act before I realized it was just really sanitized and like a feel good type of thing.
I got it, yeah. So not the real story.
Yeah, right. Exactly.
This is not a feel good story.
I wonder if it was performance art you accidentally stumbled upon.
Yeah, I mean, 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 liked Awakenings.
I got it. All right.
All right. I liked Awakenings, too.
But it sounds like what you're describing is more along the lines of greatest showman.
Like that kind of sanitization?
I didn't see that. Okay.
Did you? No, but remember we did that episode just tearing it apart.
Yeah, yeah. We hadn't even seen it yet.
We're comfortable doing that at times.
Yeah, kind of. So the first guy was in his late 50s, Joseph Cassel, 58.
He had been in the hospital for about 20 years and was Canadian, 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.
A very abusive father, very quick -tempered man who abused his mom.
And his 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 wanted to be a writer.
I think, did you say he was 58 at the time?
Okay. And he did not really take to working outside of the house.
He and his wife did not have a very good relationship, necessarily.
He didn't want kids.
She did. They ended up having three daughters and he later on came to believe that they were not his children after all and that that may have been correct.
But then things started to take kind of a turn for the worse.
And that he started to become really paranoid.
He started to accuse people of poisoning his food.
He became a bit of a hoarder, especially with books.
And 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 getting sent to an asylum in Canada.
And then on to Ypsilanti eventually.
And he'd been in Ypsilanti for I think about 20 years, or at least in and out of the hospital system for about 20 years.
And for about 10 of those years, he had decided that he was God or Jesus Christ or both.
Yeah. And by the time he got around to Rokeach or Rokeach found him, he was in a pretty bad state after those 20 years.
He had about half of his teeth left in his mouth.
He was still hoarding books, carrying around books everywhere.
And 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.
Splendid. Yeah. So Joseph, despite his inability to take care of himself and the fact that he hoarded and all of that, he was a very sharp person.
So remember to keep that in mind, he was very sharp and a good writer as well.
Clyde, and these men's names were changed, Clyde Benson, he was 70.
He'd been hospitalized for the last 17 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 Clyde was apparently raised in an over -protected manner and didn't really learn how to make his own decisions and ended up stunted as a result, which you can make your way through life like that 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.
And apparently that came into collision with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia at some point, right?
Yeah. And it seems like the drinking was the...
Anytime you have a undiagnosed condition like this and you pour alcoholism on top of it, or any kind of drug addiction, it's just gonna be even worse.
And eventually he was arrested for public drunkenness.
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.
And it was Shirley, the queen of heaven.
And at this point they committed him to a mental hospital when he was 53, where he got that diagnosis.
And he was the one that was easily the most far gone and toughest to reach and sort of walked around mumbling.
He also didn't have many if any of his teeth.
But occasionally would still have that violence in him, where he would have these sort of violent outbursts, but then kind of calm down again.
Yeah, and when he did, he was very direct and to the point.
And 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, understand that.
Like that was the extent of how he would explain that he was God.
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.
And so Leon was perhaps one of the saddest of the three cases in that he was, had only been hospitalized for about five years.
He was younger. He was 38 years old.
And he was, the snap judgment is great because they had his two initial graduate assistants on, Richard Bonnier and Ron Hoppe.
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 it just tore them up that they, and they liked him a lot.
He was a real personable guy.
And it was very engaging with his stories.
And they really thought that they could have helped him had it not been, you know, in part by what happened with Roqueach.
Which is sad because that means that Roqueach made things much, much worse for these people.
And that's something to really understand that there were three men who were living, you know, their delusional lives in this state mental 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 Roqueach.
Yeah. So Leon's deal was, his mother was almost certainly schizophrenic as well, and had delusions, religious delusions.
So he was raised in a household with these, with basically a religious fanatic and that impacted him from the very beginning.
Of course, he was ended up diagnosed with schizophrenia as well.
But growing up in, 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 II.
He worked at different jobs back in Detroit.
He tried to go to college.
He was trying to make a life for himself, but he suffered from fatigue, which I looked up as apparently a really tough comorbidity with psychotic disorders.
And it's like got a terrible positive feedback where, you know, the more tired you get, the worse your disorder is, and the worse your disorder is, the harder it can be to sleep and it's just not good.
So he had that. And then he also started hearing voices himself that were 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.
Right. And he went on a bit of a violent tear once, removing all the pictures of the saints and breaking all of the figurines and all that stuff and demanding that his mother worship him as Jesus Christ and threatening that if she didn't, he would strangle her.
And so that was enough to get him locked up for good.
He'd already been locked up one time for a brief period.
And then about six months after that, he was locked up from then until the time that he met Milton Rokic.
Right. And that was Walden Koggins.
Man. Sorry. So he went by not Leon, and again, Leon was a fake name that Rokic gave him for the book.
But he went by Dr. Domino Dominarum at Rex Rosarum, simplest Christianus, purist, 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. Appreciate that.
And he was, like you said, probably the most personable.
Like Joseph, he was very sharp, too.
But also from a very early stage, he saw quite clearly what Rokic was trying to do.
And he thought that it was morally repugnant, 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 throughout the study.
Yeah. So this is when he hires those two grad assistants, is when he finds the guys, gets this experiment going in earnest.
And his hypothesis was that if I can have these three men confront one another about them being the real Christ, that it could rock them into what he saw as reality and get them out of these delusions.
And that didn't happen, well, it didn't happen at all through the experiment.
But initially, what they did was they really dug in and they each had their own way of doing so, but they each dug in and said, 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 it was like really, it was kind of in and of itself, just that finding that not only did they not have their identity shattered, but they just 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.
Yeah, for sure. I think Joseph said, Joseph was more of one to sort of laugh it off.
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.
And we also should point out that Joseph, 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, 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 more, so I don't need to do the third.
So, one of the other things about Joseph was his interpretation of why they were there in this study, 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 basically harassing him or whatever.
So then Leon, like I was saying, Leon was the one who kind of saw the most through Rokeech's intentions and saw that they were just wrong.
And like Clyde, I think Clyde said that they were a re -rise, that's what he considered the other two, or a hick.
Joseph said, you know, I am who I am, and also by the way, we all know that I'm really God.
And then Leon, he said the other two were instrumental gods.
They were hollowed out gods.
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.
He felt forced to explain his position, and so that's what he said his position was.
But as he was saying this, he would turn to Joseph, he would turn to Clyde, and he would say, you know, respectfully, I don't mean 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's good enough.
And so through that kind of 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 argue or make them confront one another.
But when left alone, those three men just generally did not argue about who was God.
They avoided the subject altogether and just let the other ones be, and just kind of entered this live and let live kind of position, which I think is pretty heartening.
It is, and that was one of the things that came through on that snap judgment with the two research assistants, was that their take was that these men were generally, like after the initial sort of denial stuff, 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 what that showed was empathy, and that's something that none of them saw coming.
At this point, Rokic is being 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 going on, because they saw these three guys that were generally respectful for one another.
They saw Rokic 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 Rokic read this aloud to them, like he was just trying to push their buttons and initiate this conflict.
And the two grad assistants eventually were like, we're out of here.
Yeah, that story in particular, it was about how Rokic was treating three psychotic men who thought they were Christ.
And to read that to them is just really mean.
Again, he was trying to see what would happen if they were confronted with their identities being considered delusional by other people.
And Leon in particular didn't like that.
He said that a doctor or a person who's supposed to be a doctor is supposed to lift up, build up, guide, direct, inspire.
He said that what you've just done is deploring.
And Rokic said, you know, deploring, I've traveled 75 miles in snow and storm to come see you.
And Leon said, yes, but what was your intention in coming see me, sir?
And so he didn't, he didn't put up with Rokic's BS at all, which is pretty cool, you know, to hold delusions and to have your delusions attacked like that.
And then to, to be able to push back, but also in still respectful ways.
I think Leon's one of these, one of the great unsung heroes of 20th century America.
Totally. Should we take a break before phase two?
Yeah, I say we take a break, man.
All right. We'll be right back.
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So before stage two starts, when things get really unethical, well, not before, this is kind of part of the unethical, the two gratisits assistance 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 Leon fell in love with her and was destroyed when he basically came to realize on his own that that was never going to happen for him.
Man, it's just brutal.
It keeps getting better and better.
Yeah, yeah. When those when those grad assistants said you've gone too far, I think Roquijs probably said something along the lines of too far.
I haven't even begun to go too far.
Richard Giersman. Just watch what's next.
Yeah, but there was like upbeat music.
Sure. 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.
Roquijs basically saw like these guys are not going for this, for the level of prodding that I've been doing.
I'm going to really kind of turn up the heat.
And he wondered if you took the members, people that were 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.
What would happen? Could you conceivably get these people to abandon 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 flow chart like that, you know?
Yeah. 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, I don't know if there 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 broke, you know?
Yeah, because Clyde definitely could be a little scary.
So he laid off of Clyde, but he found that Joseph said that a superintendent of the hospital named Dr.
Yoder, Y -O -D -E -R was his dad.
And Leon said that he had a wife, he had a couple, his wife, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was an uncle reincarnated as Michael, the archangel.
Archangel? The archangel, those are two different.
So he was married to the Blessed Virgin Mary and had that uncle.
Yeah, he had those two.
But he wasn't married to his uncle, he had another wife later on named Madame Yeti woman, after he stopped being married to the Blessed Virgin Mary because his uncle, Michael, the archangel, married the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Right. It sounds a little confusing, but when you're dealing with stuff like this, I think it just has to be a little confusing.
Well, the upshot of it is Rokic started posing as Madame Yeti woman.
And started a letter writing campaign as Madame Yeti woman, basically reaching out to say, Hey, Leon, I just want to say hi, and I'm thinking of you.
And let's start talking.
So there was correspondence that was established as Leon's delusion, like wife, Madame Yeti woman.
Yeah. And we should point out that he supposedly had gotten, not supposedly, I think he did get the hospital's permission to sign off on this.
As long as he said, Listen, it's all going to be positive stuff.
I'm not going to be writing them letters saying to go start a fight or anything like that.
So I'm going to send them positive messages, and I'm going to stop if this becomes upsetting to these guys.
And so they said, Sure, go ahead.
Yeah. And so he did, he did go ahead.
First with Leon, I believe.
And by this time, Leon had one of the things that he had done to transform his identity was to become Dr.
Righteous Ideal Dung, or Dr.
R .I. Dung. And apparently the head nurse asked him directly, like, Can I please not call you Dr.
Dung? And he said, Yes, you can call me R .I.
But everybody else called him Dr.
R .I. Dung. And he did this, Rokeech concluded, to basically make himself not worthy of being harassed anymore.
But he was still secretly God, like he knew he was God, he was just pretending to be something else.
And during that period, he became married to Madame Yeti woman.
So Rokeech started addressing letters to Dr.
R .I. Dung, and basically saying, you know, here's a dollar.
Why don't you go buy yourself something nice in the hospital store, and then share the change with Clyde and Joseph.
And, or one of the things that they 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 led the session was you chose what song everybody song at the beginning, and at the end of the session, which is adorable.
And so Madame Yeti woman suggested that he choose onward Christian soldiers, and he chose onward Christian soldiers.
And so like to Rokeech, he's seeing like there's this, there's like an actual influence that is being exerted by this delusional figure.
And also it demonstrates that that Leon is showing like he definitely believes Madame Yeti woman's a person for sure.
Yeah. And eventually what broke it was, as posing as Madame Yeti woman asked Leon to stop using the name Dr.
Dung, the name thing seems to have been a sticking point with a lot of people, or maybe he just thought that that would, since he held on to that so strongly, that would have been like the toughest thing to make him do.
And that was sort of it.
He was asked about the letter and Leon doesn't really say anything about asking to be to drop the name Dr.
Dung. 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 Leon's letters in particular, there was a couple of like really sad things, like the whole thing was sad to begin with, but there's this passage in the book where Leon gets a letter, and Rokeech 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 tears by the idea that Madame Yeti woman was was writing to him and talking about caring for him and sending him money to go buy himself things with.
And rather than just say like, oh, we might want to back this off, Rokeech used it to step that up and arranged for a meeting with Madame Yeti woman.
Yeah. But there was no Madame Yeti woman who was supposed to show up.
He was just, he was going to get stood up from the outset.
But still, Leon went to go meet Madame Yeti woman and had his heart broken.
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 Rokeech would say, all right, well, let's just stop this altogether.
But he didn't because he remembered that Leon had another authority figure in his life, which was his uncle, George Bernard Brown, aka the archangel Michael.
And so he said, hey, I'll have someone call and pose as 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 said, you know, no, no, no, this isn't, this isn't 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 like he was sort of onto him at this point, or, you know, 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... No, I mean, from the beginning of the experiments, he was wary of it.
Oh, gotcha. I see what you're saying.
But yeah, but it's really easy to forget because you're reading Ro Keach's accounts, that these men weren't in on the idea that it was from Ro Keach.
They believed that these letters were coming from their delusional figures.
Yeah, that was 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 done.
I'm done writing letters to him.
Who could I write letters to next?
And he moves on to Joseph, right?
Yeah, so this was the one where the superintendent, the fictional Dr.
Yoder, was the authority figure for Joseph, who he saw as a father figure.
And so, of course, Ro Keach is going to 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 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 loves his own son.
It's really tough to even research this stuff.
Yeah, so just like with Leon, through these letters as Dr.
Yoder, he tried to get Joseph to start doing stuff, innocuous stuff at first, like he stopped 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 Leon, using their delusional characters or delusional friends, authority figures, whatever.
And I think even the fake Dr.
Yoder prescribed a 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, all right, well, that worked.
So, I'm going to give you pills to basically cure your mind.
And if you want to fix yourself for good, take these pills, 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 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, 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.
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 moved on to JFK, started writing letters to JFK asking to be one of his speechwriters because remember he was a writer as well.
Right. So Rokic is like, okay, all right.
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 had changed at all was Leon's and his had just gotten more complex and intricate, certainly not any closer to reality.
They got further away from reality because of this influence from Rokic and 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, and questions may have influenced the results of change, 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 even put it in there 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 like he's just kind of slashing in the air with his sword trying to figure out, you know, what the point was of all this stuff.
And even without like a satisfying conclusion or end and ended up getting published in 1964 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, and we're talking about mental patients in mid -century America who have very little rights or were treated very poorly, like there were still like a lot of people around really 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 Roqueach a long time though to really kind of come to terms with what he had done.
And he eventually did though, about 17 years later, they reissued the book in 1981.
And he wrote a new foreword.
He admitted in interviews and other places as well that he was also, you know, innocent 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.
Yeah, I don't know either.
He did sort of recant and say he didn't do the right thing.
It's worth pointing out that this was six years into his suffering from spinal cancer.
So I don't know if that had, you know, if knowing the end was near for him had something to do with his sort of self -reflection.
But he eventually died in 1988 at the age of 70 after a 13 -year battle with spinal cancer and, you know, left the social psychology world sort of rocked.
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 finally figured out the point of the book.
And the point of the book was for him to figure out that it was unethical what he was doing and to 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 challenged, no matter what you believe you are, who you believe you
are. And so he actually changed his methods.
His general belief in the idea of belief systems remained the same, but he changed his tactics in that he got involved in self -confrontation, where he 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 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.
I do care about other people.
Maybe I should care more about equality and improve as a person.
And that's ultimately how he ended up making his names starting in the 70s.
Yeah. And I got to tell you, when you read some of his regret about it, he says things like, or he said things like, you know, and in the end, someone was cured and it was me.
It just, that all bothered me a little bit too, how he still made it about himself somehow, even though he did say he regretted it and everything.
I just, I never heard as much regret about these three men and just in, 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 like that.
I know exactly what you mean.
It just, it's still smacks of self -involvement and eagerness.
And also like what happened to these men after the experiment was done, they were just cast right back into the general population.
That's right. Like used Kleenex basically to deal with what they'd just been through.
It's just rotten all around for sure.
And at the very least it does exist to make Milton Roque each 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 are 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.
Well, since I said don't see that movie, it's time of course for listener mail, everybody.
I'm going to 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 a 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, et cetera.
I gotta say Jared, it's the same with me.
It's not just cracks, can be anything.
Sure. Even which part of the foot is affected.
Same with me dude. If I do it, 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 patterned floor.
Same here. For me, it's about symmetrical sensations.
I sometimes realize I'm doing it when I'm eating and have equal chewing time on each side.
I don't do that. You're like Jared, you're so weird.
Yeah, you're really out there.
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's been an extreme, as extreme as forcing myself to maintain an even gate no matter what.
Yeah, I have done that while consciously reminding myself that sensations are temporary and that it will even out or go away, especially if I ignore it.
Thanks for all the hours of entertainment.
You were in early discovery of mine in the podcast world back in 2009 and almost none of the shows I started listening to back then are still going.
That's our motto Jared.
Just keep doing it.
Just no matter what.
Everybody tells you stop.
Please God stop. Don't quit.
You just don't listen.
So that's Jared and Anaheim by way of Idaho.
Way to go Jared from all over the place.
I think I was at Iowa.
I don't remember. Sorry.
Idaho. I know. That's the worst thing to confuse.
I apologize. So let's see if you want to get in touch with us like Jared did, please email us.
Won't you. You can send us an email to stuff podcast at iheartradio .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.
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