"Brainwashing" ignores the fact that everything alters the mind

I'm old enough to remember when brainwashing was a more commonly used word than it is now. An article by Nikhil Krishnan in the April 7 issue of The New Yorker, "It's Always the Other Side That's Been Brainwashed," reminded me of this.

During the Korean War, American prisoners of war were subjected to brainwashing by Chinese authorities in a sometimes successful attempt to make the prisoners believe that the values of their country were less desirable than communism. 

In 1962, my freshman year in high school, a fictional movie about this was released, The Manchurian Candidate. 

The plot centers on Korean War veteran Raymond Shaw, part of a prominent political family. Shaw is brainwashed by communists after his Army platoon is captured. He returns to civilian life in the United States, where he becomes an unwitting assassin in an international communist conspiracy. The group, which includes representatives of the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, plans to assassinate the presidential nominee of an American political party, with the death leading to the overthrow of the U.S. government.

That's a dramatic, though rather unlikely in reality, example of brainwashing. But the article does a good job of explaining why this term is difficult to clearly define, since mind control is ubiquitous, and often we don't realize how our mind is being shaped by outside forces.

There was outrage when it was revealed that Facebook researchers were tinkering with users’ emotions—making tiny tweaks to their feeds in what Lemov calls “massive-scale emotional engineering.”

But she notes that the backlash didn’t stop the researchers from running these experiments; it just made them more reticent about their results. One researcher on the project said that the response amounted to people thinking, “You can’t mess with my emotions. It’s like messing with me. It’s mind control.”

And, in a sense, it is mind control. But that phrase, much like “brainwashing,” runs into a tricky question: Isn’t everything that shapes our thoughts, desires, or feelings a form of mind control?

Lurking behind our unease is a fantasy of total, unshackled cognitive freedom. Any deviation from that ideal gets labelled as manipulation. If we cling to that standard, then, sure, we’re all brainwashed. But the standard is an absurdity. It’s obvious that our minds are shaped by the world we live in, including what others say. This isn’t what we have in mind when we talk about mind control.

Instead, Krishnan argues that what we mean by being free of brainwashing is not to be subject to the will of another. Yet here too, there is a continuum of mind control, not a sharp divide between brainwashing and freely chosen beliefs.

There’s another irony here. Much of what Wills came to believe when he lived in China—that socialism is superior to capitalism, that the United States is an imperialist power run by a class of kleptocratic oligarchs—is shared by many young people today who were subjected to nothing more traumatic than a typical liberal-arts education. Their professors would, of course, balk at the implication that they’ve brainwashed their students, but that’s exactly what their critics in the conservative media have long been accusing them of.

It’s a familiar pattern in our polarized age. The right accuses the left of using the institutions it dominates—the federal bureaucracy, nonprofits, universities, Hollywood, and “legacy” media—to brainwash the public. The left, in turn, levels the same charge against the right, pointing to talk radio, partisan television networks, and manosphere podcasts. (Each side condemns the other’s social-media activity.) Naturally, no one admits to doing what they denounce in their opponents. But that’s to be expected: persuasion is what we do; brainwashing is what they do.

The same implies in the realm of religious belief versus atheism, the absence of such belief.

Believers in God decry the power of secular humanism to turn people, including children educated in godless schools, away from the righteous path of traditional religion. Meanwhile, atheists see religiosity imposed on society through lots of means, including the slogan In God We Trust on our money and national holidays, Easter and Christmas, being celebrations of the dominant religion, Christianity.

I found the end of Krishnan's article to be a wise perspective on the complexity of belief. While I'm prone to being judgmental toward people who don't share my political or religious views (progressive and atheist), in my more reasonable moments I see them as having as little choice in their beliefs as I have in mine. Seemingly, we're all trying to do the right thing, even though some are better at this than others. It's just damn hard to take this apparent fact to heart.

Krishnan writes:

Although beliefs can be badges—tribal markers chosen less for their empirical accuracy than for what they signal about us—plenty of people do buy into outlandish factual views. It’s not a cope, or a flex; it’s what they take to be reality. How about them?

There’s a well-meaning, if patronizing, ethical impulse behind our propensity to blame brainwashing for others’ convictions, whether they’re expressions of allegiance, hard factual commitments, or something in between. Labelling people as brainwashed casts them as one of the damned—lost souls whom we, as saviors, must redeem. Yet it might be our own savior complexes that we need to shed.

The philosopher Karl Popper, writing in 1960, suggested that the temptation to attribute misguided beliefs to sinister manipulation came from a mistaken assumption: that “truth is manifest.” If the truth were manifest, it would follow that the failure to grasp it must reflect “the work of powers conspiring to keep us in ignorance, to poison our minds by filling them with falsehood.”

But, even when confronted with a world of people holding views we find baffling, why assume that they’re victims of a grand conspiracy—or victims at all? Perhaps truth isn’t so obvious. Uncovering it demands effort and a bit of luck.

Other people will take different things to be true because their paths—owing to differences in diligence or chance—diverged from ours. That conspiracy-minded cousin isn’t necessarily a casualty of mind control; he may simply have wandered down intellectual rabbit holes where evidence matters less than belonging.

To depict him as a victim of manipulation grants him an unearned absolution. The most disturbing possibility isn’t that millions have been brainwashed. It’s that they haven’t.

Comments

[Ron E.]

"Brainwashing" ignores the fact that everything alters the mind.” Brian notes that “. . . the article does a good job of explaining why this term is difficult to clearly define, since mind control is ubiquitous, and often we don't realize how our mind is being shaped by outside forces.” Also, in ‘Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain’ Fieldman-Barrett has an enlightening chapter on ‘how brains make more than on kind of mind’.

I don’t doubt that ‘mind control’ exists. It is rampant with many political and spiritual leaders and others in authority. But it seems to me that ‘brainwashing’ or even mind control fails to address the subtlety of how our minds are formed and work. Our brain absorbs all its information from the culture, family, religion, social norms etc. that we are born into. And apparently it (the brain) doesn’t stop there but continues to be influenced throughout one’s life.

Krishnan is liberal regarding other people’s beliefs and convictions and goes on to quote Karl Popper who suggested that the temptation to attribute misguided beliefs to sinister manipulation came from a mistaken assumption: that “truth is manifest.” I think that bringing in ‘truth’ when talking of how the mind is manipulated, or manipulates doesn’t help much in understanding the mind, its raison d’etre with its prolific conditioned contents.

What the mind is and how it is conditioned and how/why it continues to regurgitate its conditioned contents (often regardless of factual evidence) I think is paramount to understanding the many and often conflicting stances we approach life with.

[RS]

“The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.”
~ Aldous Huxley, ‘brave new world’.

“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, [it is] now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.
~ Edward Bernays, ‘propaganda’.

[Kranvir]

Brainwashing is when your mind and feelings and emotions completely override your logical and critical thinking; your gut instinct; and the facts in front of your eyes. So when sangat are in an RSSB satsang (which is suppose to be the company of the truth lol ) and dustbin dhillon talks nothing but rubbish, giving zero clarity and leaves you in total confusion. You have to question why you still have feelings and an emotional attachment to an ordinary old creepy man. This is nothing more than brainwashing, and a blindness that blocks you from seeing the truth.

[Appreciative Reader]

Interesting post. Sobering thought, this, that brainwashing, broadly speaking, is ...well, broader than we are generally given to imagining.

That recalls Jiddu K's take on, conditioning, he calls it, I think.

Also, as far as deliberate brainwashing being less common than we might sometimes imagine, about the Trump worshiping loons for instance, and the Jesus worshiping hordes --- and their equivalent elsewhere in the world --- we might bring out Hanlon's Razor: paraphrased from fallible memory: Let's not attribute to deliberate malice what is adequately explained by stupidity.

-----

That said, my contra take would be: and I just throw this out there, off the cuff, lacking the bandwidth at present to dwell on this more than cursorily on this (not that a greater bandwidth would necessarily have yielded anything more meaningful, or even necessarily more coherent!):

First, brainwashing per se is a thing. The big bad thing, the real thing. That actually is a thing, let's not imagine it isn't.

Second, a lower key brainwashing, that's also a thing. Media are sometimes marshaled, particularly now but I suppose in some degree it always has been, to specifically propagate worldviews. It could be a more organic process than we might imagine, but it's probably incorrect to go the other extreme that Trump loonies --- and their equivalent --- do not, at all, owe their crazed worldview to deliberately designed messaging (as opposed to organically evolved messaging in media).

Finally, let's not make the mistake of imagining it's all equivalent. Right is right, and wrong is wrong, notwithstanding the grays in between. 2+2=4 is always right, taken as mathematical abstract (well, leaving aside non-Euclidean math, which would be the grays in between), and 2+2=4 is always right. Likewise, given evidence currently at hand, theistic beliefs are wrong, period, and atheism right, period. No leeway there, no grays there, not basis the evidence at hand. ...Which is why I prefer the label rationalist, rather than atheist --- because that latter is a conclusion, provisional, and subject to change, while the former is the broad methodology of thinking, that stands no matter what.

Well, unless it is argued that a worldview that favors critical thinking is itself a form of conditioning or brainwashing. Which in a way it is, but I think there's a difference. (Which is a very unsatisfactory place to park this. Because merely my "thinking" my way, directly not rationally and clearly, to this conclusion should convince nobody, not even me. But I'm afraid I lack the bandwidth to dwell more on this now. ...Not that a greater bandwidth would necessarily have yielded better coherence, like I said I cannot know that a priori.)

-----

Anyway, enjoyed this post, and enjoyed grazing on the fodder for thought! Hopefully I'll return to this later, when "bandwidth" allows, hopefully. Meantime, I'll keep my eyes open for others' take on this, whether supporting my arguments or otherwise. (Although, lacking the bandwidth thing, I may not be able to join in beyond this, for now.)

[Sunil]

Great read—really thoughtful take on how labeling others as "brainwashed" often masks our discomfort with the fact that belief is shaped by countless forces. We're all influenced, just in different ways. Maybe the real challenge is learning to sit with that ambiguity.
I found this video really good, showing how cult Brainwashed people
https://youtu.be/klYjLMJ4z3E

[Karim W. Rahmaan]

Brainwashing, what is the point of this thread?

That we all say everybody else is brainwashed, when we ourselves are logical, using sound reason, or in perceived lofty merits?

It's mind boggling though, that this whole Church of the Churchless was founded upon how 'Great' and 'Kind' the late Maharaj Ji Charan Singh was. And on how he seemed to 'Love' everybody he encountered. Also, many people posting here gave praise to how easy going he was, Fatherly, Brotherly, and almost never imposing his views upon others.

This is mind boggling because all it took was for him to appoint a successor, someone far younger and different. And now those same praises of Maharaj Jo's memory are dragged through the MUD and designating this kind man as a CULT leader.

Where is the rationale there? Huh? The mindful gobblygook hypocritical, low down, disrespectful spoiled brat type of attitude.. This to honor your kind Teacher?

No. Just pick any little thing about his successor, was all it took to brainwash so many AGAINST their previous praise of Charan's Teachings. Imo, shameful. You allowed all the love and respect you built for was even you said here was a GOOD man. And barfed it up -to now feature Him Charan Singh Ji, and anyone who continues in his footsteps as low down cult people ..of a good man too ..you said it numerous times here at COTC Blogsite

Again where's the rationale for it?