In the 70s mkultra started reverse engineering maoist study groups, but before that they were just reverse engineering pimping. The difference between giving you a group identity then using peer pressure as leverage versus

incentivizing you to disassociate from your individual identity through prolonged torture, then imprinting you on a sado-sexual parental figure controller. Pimps figured that out before recorded history.

The advantage of the later era is it can be scaled up, to the point of

using social media communities to control the emotions of many thousands of people at a time (this project is where Archillect's funding comes from btw) but you can achieve incredibly fine control with the individually focused early techniques. The shift probably wasn't a

supplantation, it was a broadening of scope after the individual techniques were ready for real world use. Now mind control wasn't just a weapon, it was a weapons system- with individual zombie slaves supported by huge networks exhibiting whatever type of behaviors and beliefs

were useful, even if they weren't utterly under any fine individual control. In any case they discovered very early on that when you couldn't directly make a person do something you could save a lot of labor by controlling what they BELIEVED they were doing.

(They got a guy to strangle his own commanding officer by telling him the man across the table was actually a japanese soldier.) So the line between fully controlling one person's movements vs changing a thousand peoples' emotions isn't as stark as you might think.

So while they gave al-Baghdadi the personalized Clockwork Orange treatment the operation extended outward in concentric circles. The rest of camp bucca got study groups and self-crit sessions until they were ready to be released as his lieutenants. And online,

millions of the right people either found their feeds were making convincing arguments for the new caliph, or else they were reposting based nasheeds like salil sawarim.

Consider also Jim Jones, Donald DeFreeze, and Charles Manson; it isn't just a weapon, it's a weapons system.