"Hollywood Scripting" is a pretty perfect lens through which to examine this complex of topics. Associative Universe vs. Black Iron Prison. PKD belongs here, too. So does Charlie Kaufman.

Hypothesis: The biggest PsyOps godfather manipulating the modern film industry is
Fucking Robert McKee. "Story," right? The inescapable Bible of Hollywood style. I've recently invoked the "learned helplessness" primate experiments of G.R. Stephenson, and Hugh has related this kind of status-quo cultural intertia to Varela's concept of
"autopoesis" ... "how systems replicate themselves." Of course, if you turn to the folks at the Santa Fe Institute, you'll get a whole other set of answers for how systems replicate themselves...just like the University of Chicago's economics department...just like Birkbeck & Tavistock or whatever SRI's marketing department evolved into today....let's get some popcorn and watch Chomsky argue with Fukuyama on the big screen, shall we?
Binary Traps are hell on human cognition but they make for great plot devices. We're trapped inside our own stories so a close examination of scripts is far more than just a weird tangent. It's hard for me to write clearly, because there's so much under the hood here. This is where Jung's archetype theory meets the bland MBA language of Branding, with an ocean of Hegelian gibberish between them. The point I was trying to make in "Down Here in the Cave" was that we are, from footnoted parapolitics to feverish WOO, primarily engaged in
storytelling rather than factual analysis. I didn't and don't mean that as a dismissal, just a diagnosis, I think it's a fairly inescapable facet of this human condition.
These narrative blindspots are precisely what makes PsyOps possible. (Perhaps that's vastly overstated, so I'll let that one float.)

Coincidences happen; so does plagarism. MK references don't entail MK connections, merely exposure to MK material and a willingness to pilfer inspiration wholesale. The testimony of Candy Jones has gone from a personal story to a collective myth. I don't think that's a good thing but I don't view it morally, either, this is just how narratives get dispersed into culture, isn't it? All our legends were lives at some point, all our scary tales were perfectly real traumas at some point, too. What's stranger still is when that causality gets reversed, like Edgar Allen Poe's Richard Parker -- an example that precludes CIA involvement, conveniently. Even stranger than that is Tau Allen Greenfield's "Secret Cipher" material, or any of the Thelemite tentacles Jeff has already explored here, or...
...coincidences happen; so do miracles. Monumentally improbable events do take place.
Despite that, conspiracies are far more commonplace than coincidences. This leaves us with a question of mechanics, and that question cannot be resolved -- as many have observed, there isn't much documentation for covert operations and procedures available to us. We
do have scripts, though, and we do have an IMDB level of granular detail on every Hollywood psy-op. I have high hopes for this thread, I dream of a better tomorrow where this can outgrow Hugh himself and built itself into something more playful and productive. There's no shortage of raw material here.