Kakofrenia: Psychological Warfare for Civilian Use (How the Mind Was Taught to Eat Itself)

This is an excerpt from my upcoming novel, Suicide Service.
The chapter is called “The Mind of a Thousand Identities”—a name that should tell you exactly where this is going and not nearly enough about how deep it goes.

If medicine is the science of healing, then where the hell is the science of falling apart?

Seriously. We’ve got departments, think tanks, and foundations dedicated to longevity, anti-aging, and the gentle prolonging of biological optimism—but not a single formal discipline devoted to the art of ruin. Not even a subfield. No “Institute for Systematic Collapse.” No academic journal titled Dysphoria Quarterly.

Why hasn’t anyone founded a school of thought—let’s call it kakophrenia—that takes seriously the slow, deliberate dismantling of the psyche? A rigorous study of how the human mind caves in under the weight of its own faculties? Where’s the curriculum for that? The PhD track in Elegant Disintegration?

Because if there was such a field, it could only have emerged from dialectical materialism. Only a worldview that admits conflict as a primary law could accommodate such an idea: that what breaks us isn’t always external. Sometimes, it’s the whispering machinery inside us that sabotages itself—consciousness eating its own logic.

Kakophrenia is a new way of framing an old truth: that the psyche, far from being a stabilizing force, is the ultimate ideological liability. A ghost that refuses to be disciplined. Personality? Subversion. The self? A bourgeois delusion. Consciousness? A divine leftover—some stubborn, ineffable fragment of the old gods that no revolution has managed to purge.

If socialism failed to take over the world, blame the psyche. It’s the last divine artefact lodged like a shard in the human brain. You can remove religion, rewrite history, criminalize thought—but until you rewire the self from within, you’re just reprogramming hostages.

That’s where kakophrenia comes in: a proposed science of sabotage. Not with tanks or propaganda, but with subtler tools—dreams, fears, mirrors, and double meanings. The idea is simple, elegant, and terrifying:

Don’t cancel the psyche.
Teach it to cancel itself.

Because all of us are already multitudes. We are performances stitched together by habit and necessity. The lover. The child. The liar. The version of yourself you show your boss. The one you invent for strangers. All masks—and each mask, a proto-self.

So where’s the line between a role and an identity?
Where does the play end and the actor begin?

Kakophrenia says: maybe it doesn’t.

And if that unsettles you…
Congratulations. You’re still human. For now.

Here’s the official synopsis of the book. Yes, it has one. Apparently, even conspiracies need back cover copy:

Long believed to have perished with totalitarianism, the New Man Project—that charmingly sinister attempt to redesign the human psyche for perfect ideological obedience—sits at the heart of the book.
But this novel asks a less comfortable question:

What if it didn’t end?
What if, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the project didn’t die… but quietly evolved?
What if it was digitized, corporatized, disguised under the radiant smile of consumer capitalism?

Set in contemporary Romania, Suicide Service follows Andrei Jebeleanu—a washed-up journalist turned accidental prophet—now teaching an experimental course called Visceral Journalism.
What begins as an eccentric lecture morphs, in real time, into something far darker: the live dissection of a Cold War psychopolitical conspiracy known as The Suicide Service.

Except this isn’t a story about the past.
It’s about what survived.

Because the most disturbing experiments weren’t abandoned.
They were perfected.

The novel cuts across a century, interweaving real events—like the infamous Pitești Experiment—with fictional conspiracies about identity, manipulation, and the engineering of docility. The methods have changed. The mission hasn’t.
As one character puts it:

“Totalitarian revolutions ended. Their experiments didn’t. You’re living proof.”

Before identity curdles and the psyche turns cannibal—
Would you read it?
(Yes, I’m still talking about the book.)


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