Part 3 of 25 in the The Philosophy of Future Inevitability series.

Allen Dulles ran the CIA from 1953 to 1961.

During his tenure, the agency overthrew the democratically elected governments of Iran and Guatemala. Installed dictators. Ran mind control experiments on unwitting American citizens. Trained death squads. Assassinated, or tried to assassinate, foreign leaders across multiple continents.

This was government at its most competent. Strategic. Effective. Willing to do what needed doing.

That same government can't keep fentanyl out of the country. Can't get your nephew into detox. Can't fix the potholes on your street.

This is government. Always was.

The Competence Question

The CIA could destabilize entire nations. Could install and remove governments. Could run covert operations spanning decades across the globe.

Why can't the same system stop synthetic opioids from crossing the border?

One answer: different problems require different competencies. Covert operations require secrecy, deniability, strategic patience. Domestic policy requires coordination, transparency, democratic accountability. The skills don't transfer.

But there's a darker answer: the system isn't designed to solve your problems. It's designed to project power. It's designed for elite interests. It's designed to perpetuate itself. Fixing your life was never the point.

What Dulles Built

The CIA under Dulles was a machine for intervention.

Iran, 1953. Mohammad Mosaddegh, democratically elected, nationalized Iranian oil. This threatened British Petroleum. The CIA organized a coup, installed the Shah, who ruled as dictator until 1979. The blowback—the Iranian Revolution, the hostage crisis, forty years of enmity—continues today.

The operation was called TPAJAX. The CIA bribed politicians, organized protests, funded propaganda, created the appearance of chaos. When the Iranian military moved against Mosaddegh, it looked like domestic instability, not foreign intervention.

The Shah returned. He ruled as authoritarian for 25 years. He was pro-Western, pro-oil company, anti-communist. From the CIA's perspective: mission accomplished.

The Iranian people got dictatorship. They got SAVAK, the secret police. They got torture and repression. When they finally overthrew the Shah, they overthrew everything Western with him. Forty-five years later, we're still dealing with the consequences.

Guatemala, 1954. Jacobo Árbenz, democratically elected, pursued land reform that threatened United Fruit Company. The CIA organized a coup, installed a military dictator, triggered decades of civil war that killed hundreds of thousands.

The operation was called PBSUCCESS. The CIA trained a proxy army, bombed Guatemala City, created the appearance of military rebellion. Árbenz resigned. The military took over.

United Fruit Company kept its land. The military dictatorship killed indigenous Guatemalans for forty years. 200,000 dead. Genocide, per the UN. But the bananas flowed north uninterrupted.

Cuba, Indonesia, Congo, Vietnam. Assassination attempts. Coups. Proxy wars. A global campaign of destabilization and violence.

Cuba: Tried to kill Castro dozens of times. Exploding cigars. Poisoned diving suits. Mafia contracts. All failed. The obsession with Cuba produced the Bay of Pigs disaster and pushed Castro toward the Soviets.

Indonesia: Supported Suharto's coup. He killed 500,000 alleged communists. The CIA provided lists of targets. Mass murder with American logistical support.

Congo: Tried to assassinate Lumumba. Succeeded indirectly—he was killed by Congolese forces with CIA backing. The country descended into decades of dictatorship and civil war.

Vietnam: The CIA knew the war was unwinnable by 1963. They said so in classified reports. The war continued for twelve more years. 58,000 Americans dead. Millions of Vietnamese dead. The CIA's accurate analysis was ignored because it didn't serve policy goals.

This was effective. Brutal, immoral, and ultimately often counterproductive—but effective in the short term. The CIA knew how to project power.

They could destabilize governments. They could install leaders. They could run covert operations across continents for years without public knowledge. The competence was real. The morality was absent. The institutional capability was extraordinary.

MKUltra

Dulles's CIA also ran MKUltra—a mind control program that experimented on American citizens without their consent.

The program started in 1953. The goal: develop techniques for interrogation, mind control, behavioral modification. The methods: LSD, electroshock, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, verbal abuse, sexual abuse.

Subjects were given LSD, electroshock, sensory deprivation. Some were prisoners. Some were mental patients. Some were just people in the wrong place. Many were permanently damaged. Some died.

The experiments happened at universities, hospitals, prisons. Harvard. McGill. Stanford. The researchers were professors. The subjects were students, prisoners, mental patients. Many didn't know they were in experiments.

One subject, Frank Olson, was dosed with LSD without his knowledge. He developed psychosis. He "fell" from a hotel window nine days later. The CIA called it suicide. Decades later, evidence emerged suggesting he was pushed. The government paid his family $750,000 to settle without admission.

Another subject, Harold Blauer, died from repeated mescaline injections during experiments at New York State Psychiatric Institute. His family wasn't told. They thought he died from treatment. The truth emerged decades later.

The program was run by the government. Funded by taxes. Authorized at the highest levels.

CIA Director Allen Dulles approved it. It ran for twenty years. It involved 80 institutions, 185 researchers, unknown numbers of subjects. When Congressional investigation loomed in 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed. Most were burned. What we know comes from the small fraction that survived.

This is what competent government looks like when competence is directed at the wrong things.

The logistics worked. The secrecy held for decades. The experiments continued despite zero evidence of success. The program was competently executed in pursuit of a horrific goal.

Fast Forward

Today, America has a fentanyl crisis.

Synthetic opioids kill over 70,000 Americans per year. The drugs are manufactured in China and Mexico, often disguised as legitimate pharmaceuticals. They enter through mail, through ports, through the border.

The same government that could destabilize Iran cannot stop this.

Is it capability? We have the world's largest military, the world's most sophisticated surveillance apparatus, essentially unlimited resources. Capability exists.

Is it will? Politicians talk about the crisis constantly. There's bipartisan concern. The rhetoric suggests will.

Is it complexity? Fentanyl is harder to interdict than, say, a democratically elected government? Doubtful.

The answer is simpler: different problems have different priority.

The Priority Problem

Overthrowing Mosaddegh served oil company interests. United Fruit wanted Guatemala's land reform stopped. The interventions served concentrated, powerful interests who could direct government action.

Your nephew's fentanyl addiction doesn't serve anyone powerful. It's a diffuse problem, affecting dispersed people without concentrated influence. The political system responds to concentrated interests. Diffuse interests lose.

This is how government has always worked. Not as public servant but as power allocator. Resources flow where power directs them. Your problems get solved when they overlap with elite interests. Otherwise, thoughts and prayers.

Afghanistan

America spent twenty years in Afghanistan. Trillions of dollars. Thousands of lives.

The goal, supposedly, was to eliminate the Taliban and create a stable, democratic government.

The outcome: the Taliban controls Afghanistan. The democratic government collapsed in weeks. The money is gone. The interpreters who helped us were abandoned.

The numbers:

  • $2.3 trillion spent
  • 2,448 American service members killed
  • 20,722 American service members wounded
  • 70,000+ Afghan military and police killed
  • 46,000+ Afghan civilians killed
  • 20 years of occupation
  • Taliban back in power within weeks of withdrawal

By any stated metric, this is failure. Total, comprehensive failure.

But here's the thing: contractors got paid. Defense companies made billions. Consultants made millions. The money didn't disappear—it flowed to specific people with specific interests.

The spending breakdown:

  • $800 billion to the Department of Defense for military operations
  • $130 billion on reconstruction (most of which disappeared into corruption)
  • $530 billion on interest payments for war borrowing
  • The rest: contractors, consultants, logistics, support

Companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics—they got paid for every bomb, every missile, every aircraft, every contract. Twenty years of guaranteed revenue.

Private military contractors like DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and others billed billions for security services. The more unstable Afghanistan was, the more security was needed, the more they got paid.

Consulting firms billed millions for reconstruction projects that never worked. Build a power plant that never generates power—doesn't matter, the billing already happened.

From the perspective of those interests, Afghanistan was a success. Twenty years of revenue. The outcome for Afghans, for American soldiers, for American taxpayers—these were externalities. Not the point.

The war ended when it became politically unsustainable, not when the mission succeeded or the money ran out. The interests that benefited from continuation lobbied for continuation. When public will finally collapsed, the withdrawal happened chaotically because orderly withdrawal wasn't profitable.

The Constant

The government that ran MKUltra runs the FDA. The government that overthrew Mosaddegh regulates your healthcare. The government that couldn't manage Afghanistan will manage AI safety.

This isn't conspiracy. It's consistency. The same institution, with the same incentives, across decades.

Government is not a public servant with occasional failures. It's a power structure that occasionally serves the public when public interest aligns with concentrated interest.

Expecting government to solve your problems is expecting an institution to act against its incentive structure. Sometimes it happens. Don't count on it.

The Fentanyl Lesson

Why can't the government solve the fentanyl crisis?

Because the people dying don't matter enough. They're poor. They're dispersed. They don't donate to campaigns or employ lobbyists.

The demographics of opioid deaths: working class, rural, economically displaced. The Rust Belt. Appalachia. Areas that lost manufacturing. People without college degrees, without health insurance, without political organization.

These people vote, but they're not organized. They don't have industry associations. They don't have PACs. They have diffuse suffering, not concentrated pressure.

Contrast: when wealthy communities face crises, response is swift. When Wall Street faced collapse in 2008, trillions materialized in days. When COVID threatened corporate revenues, massive stimulus appeared. Concentrated interests get rapid response. Diffuse suffering gets thoughts and prayers.

Because the solutions don't profit anyone powerful. Treatment infrastructure, harm reduction, addressing despair—these don't enrich contractors or generate kickbacks.

Solving the opioid crisis would require:

  • Massive investment in treatment facilities (expensive, long-term, uncertain ROI)
  • Harm reduction (politically unpopular, morally complicated)
  • Economic revitalization of dying communities (massive scope, decades-long commitment)
  • Addressing root causes of despair (essentially unfixable through policy)

None of this generates profit for connected interests. There's no contractor lobby for methadone clinics. There's no campaign donations from harm reduction advocates. The economics don't align.

War generates contracts. Reconstruction generates consulting fees. Treatment generates... nothing that powerful people want.

Because the problem is hard. But the CIA solved hard problems when they mattered to the right people. Hardness is relative to incentive.

Overthrowing Mosaddegh was hard. Required coordination across intelligence agencies, foreign assets, military elements. The CIA did it in weeks.

Running MKUltra was hard. Required secrecy across decades, dozens of institutions, hundreds of people. The CIA did it for twenty years.

Interdicting fentanyl is hard. But not harder than those operations. The difference is priority. When the right people want something, hard becomes doable. When the wrong people need something, hard becomes impossible.

Because solving it would require admitting prior failures. The opioid crisis was created by pharmaceutical companies with government approval. Acknowledging this threatens institutions.

The FDA approved OxyContin. The DEA failed to stop overprescribing. The medical establishment pushed pain as "fifth vital sign." The government was complicit at every level.

Solving the crisis requires admitting: we enabled this. We approved the drugs. We didn't regulate the companies. We let them market addiction as treatment. We created the conditions for mass death.

Institutions don't admit systemic failure. Individual officials might be sacrificed. Specific companies might be fined. But the system doesn't indict itself.

The government that overthrew democracies to protect corporate interests can't protect citizens from corporate malfeasance. This is not contradiction. This is consistency.

The CIA served oil companies in Iran. Served United Fruit in Guatemala. Served corporate interests globally. That's what it was designed to do.

The regulatory agencies serve industry interests through capture. The revolving door between FDA and pharma. Between DEA and consulting firms. Between Congress and lobbying shops.

The system is working as designed. The design doesn't include you.

What This Means

Don't expect protection. Government may provide it. Government has provided it in the past. But don't expect it as default.

Government protects when protection aligns with institutional interest. Social Security exists because the elderly vote consistently. Medicare exists for the same reason. The military is funded because defense contractors have concentrated interest and geographic distribution across Congressional districts.

Your safety, your health, your economic security—these matter to government when they align with power. Otherwise, they're nice-to-haves that get addressed after priorities.

Don't expect competence on your problems. Competence exists. But it's allocated by interest, not by need.

The government that can run global surveillance programs can't process your immigration application efficiently. The government that can coordinate military operations across continents can't get your tax refund processed on time.

It's not that competence doesn't exist. It's that competence serves priorities, and you're not the priority.

Don't expect change without leverage. Diffuse interests don't win. If you want government attention, you need concentrated pressure—either money or organized votes.

Wall Street gets bailouts because finance is concentrated and organized. Opioid victims don't get treatment infrastructure because addiction is diffuse and disorganized.

Teachers get modest raises because they have unions. Gig workers get nothing because they don't. Farmers get subsidies because agriculture lobbies are powerful. Food stamp recipients get cuts because poverty doesn't lobby.

This is public choice theory in action. The system responds to organized pressure. Diffuse interests, no matter how numerous or sympathetic, lose to concentrated interests with resources.

Understand the institution you're dealing with. The CIA that ran coups and the CDC that failed COVID are the same system. Expecting public service from a power structure is category error.

The CIA was never about protecting Americans. It was about projecting American power, which mostly meant protecting corporate interests and fighting communism.

The CDC is theoretically about protecting public health. In practice, it's about managing political pressures, coordinating with industry, and preserving institutional credibility.

The FDA is theoretically about drug safety. In practice, it's about balancing industry interests against safety concerns, with a regulatory capture problem that pulls toward industry.

These aren't public servants who occasionally fail. They're institutions with specific incentive structures that occasionally align with public benefit.

The mistake is expecting the stated mission to be the actual mission. The stated mission is legitimizing narrative. The actual mission is revealed by behavior, not by charter.

Dulles could topple governments. His successors can't stop fentanyl.

Not because capability declined. Because priority never included you.

This is government. This is what it's always been. Not a failure of the current administration or the previous one. Not corruption that can be reformed away. A structure with incentives, doing what incentives direct.

Knowing this is not cynicism. Expecting otherwise is naivety.

The coup in Iran was competent. The response to fentanyl is competent too—at protecting interests that aren't yours.

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