(Redirected from Brainwashing)
Theories of mind
control, thought control, or brainwashing
claim that a person's mind can be controlled (either directly or more subtly)
by an outside source.
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1
Propaganda and overt persuasion 5
U.S. Government research into mind control 6
Ordinary scientists just trying to control your mind 7
APA Task Force on mind control |
With the onset of mass media
like radio in the
1930s and later television,
totalitarian
regimes of the time capitalized on the new possibilities for manipulation and
state propaganda.
Joseph
Goebbels, Hitler's
propaganda genius, pioneered most of the methods which are still used by modern
spin
doctors. "A lie repeated many times becomes the Truth" was one of
his particularly effective insights. Ironically, spin doctors play a very
important role in those democracies dependent on public
opinion.
Totalitarian
regimes use repression of freedom
of speech to homogenize the population. Repression can range from simple censorship
through character assassination to outright state sponsored murder. One
notorious example is Stalin with his purges, but all governments, including the US
government, have been known to use these types of repression. The modern world
is in fact characterized by an unprecedented increase in the powers of all states, which can
often be very oppressive.
People's minds are clearly
influenced by many influences from the outside world, such as advertising,
media manipulation, and propaganda,
however they are generally aware of these influences. The remainder of this
article is about mind control that occurs either without the knowledge, or
without the consent, of the individual.
Hypothesized forms of mind
control technology have included the use of drugs, hypnosis, Pavlovian conditioning, repetitive indoctrination, torture and subliminal stimuli.
One of the symptoms of schizophrenia
(and sometimes other forms of psychosis) is the belief that one is subject to external mind
control, often by use of some form of technology: these often involve less
plausible proposed mind control technologies such as the use of microwave
radiation or lasers to control thoughts.
Some believers in mind control
assert that no one is immune to mind control: a person could just start talking
to a someone on the street, and nearly instantly, he is a victim. Other sources
believe that there is no such thing as mind control, and that free will
cannot be subverted.
Many people believe that cults entrap or
enslave members through mind control. A counter-cult deprogramming
movement has developed to counter cult mind control, and has, in turn, been
accused of using mind control techniques.
Deprogrammers have often been
able to get judges to issue conservatorships
authorizing them to rescue people. There is considerable disagreement about how
cults actually operate.
According to Jeffrey K. Hadden,
the concept of "brainwashing" first came into public use during the Korean War
in the 1950s as an explanation for why a few American GIs appeared to defect to
the Communists.
Brainwashing consisted of the notion that the Chinese communists had discovered a
mysterious and effective method of causing deep and permanent behaviorial
changes in prisoners of war.
See also Professor Hadden's
online article, The Brainwashing Controversy (see link at end of
article).
The idea was central to the 1962
movie The Manchurian Candidate in which a
soldier was turned into an assassin through brainwashing.
The two most authoritative
studies of the Korean War defections by Robert J. Lifton
and Edgar
Schein concluded that "brainwashing" was an inappropriate concept
to account for this renunciation of U.S. citizenship. They found that the
Chinese did not engage in any systematic re-education. The Chinese were,
however, able to get some of them to make anti-American statements by placing
the prisoners under harsh conditions of deprivation and then by offering them
more comfortable situations such as better sleeping quarters, better food,
warmer clothes or blankets. Nevertheless, the psychiatrists noted that even
these were quite ineffective at changing basic attitudes for most people. In
essence, the prisoners did not actually convert to Communism. Rather many of
them behaved as though they did in order to avoid the plausible threat of
extreme physical coercion. Moreover the few prisoners that were influenced by
Communist indoctrination did so as a result of motives and personality
characteristics that existed before imprisonment.
Currently the concept of
brainwashing is not used by most psychologists and social scientists, and the
methods of persuasion and coercion used during the Korean War are not
considered to be esoteric.
A CIA research program, known
principally by the codename MKULTRA, began in 1950 and was motivated largely in response to alleged Soviet,
Chinese, and North Korean uses of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of
war in Korea.
The general consensus is that
MKULTRA was a failure, although because most of the MKULTRA records were
deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then-Director of Central Intelligence
Richard Helms, it is impossible to have a complete understanding of the more
than 150 individually funded research projects sponsored by MKULTRA and the
related CIA programs.
With intense modern magnets and
the technique of transcranial magnetic stimulation
(TMS) or repetitive TMS (rTMS), researchers have been able to transiently stymie
certain thought processes--such as the conjugation of verbs--with fleeting
magnetic pulses to specific areas of the brain. The technique has proved a
valuable tool for testing hypotheses about the role and interplay between brain
regions in particular cognitive activities and psychiatric symptoms such as depression. It's tempting to speculate what
practical applications the technique and such insights might lead to: Is there
a locus for lying and could one disable it on the witness stand? Could one zap
away depression? Or accelerate certain kinds of mental performance?
The American Psychological Association
(APA) in 1984 allowed Margaret Singer, the main proponent of anti-cult
mind control theories, to create a working group called Task Force on Deceptive
and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control (DIMPAC).
In 1987, the final report
of the DIMPAC committee was submitted to the Board of Social and Ethical
Responsibility for Psychology of the APA. On May 11, 1987, the Board rejected
the report and concluded that its kind of mind control theories, used in order
to distinguish "cults" from religions, are not part of accepted
psychological science (American Psychological Association 1987). Although the
APA memorandum only dismissed the theories of brainwashing and mind control as
presented in the DIMPAC report -- without prejudice to theories of influence
and control other than those advocated by the DIMPAC committee - the results of
the APA document were devastating for the anti-cult movement[6].
In fact, the DIMPAC theories
rejected by APA largely corresponded to the anti-cult position as a whole.
Starting from the Fishman case (1990), where a defendant accused of commercial
fraud raised as a defense that he was not fully responsible since he was under
the mind control of Scientology, American courts consistently rejected
testimonies about mind control and manipulation, stating that these were not
part of accepted mainline science (Anthony & Robbins 1992: 5-29). Margaret
Singer, and her associate Richard Ofshe filed suits against the APA and the
American Sociological Association (who had supported APA's 1987 statement) but
they lost in 1993 and 1994.
Outline:
Mind control has been a popular
subject in fiction, featuring in books and films such as The
Ipcress File, and The Manchurian Candidate, which has
the premise that a man could be brainwashed into murder on command but retain
no memory of the killing.
The TV series The
Prisoner featured mind control as a recurring plot element.
George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four features a
description of mind control, both directly by torture, and indirectly, in the
form of pervasive mind control by the use of Newspeak, a constructed language which is designed to
remove the possibility of even articulating subversive thoughts.
In science
fiction and superhero fiction, mind control often is described as a
means of how a person literally seizes control of the minds of the victims to
the point where not only their bodies are placed under direct control, but also
their consciousnesses as well to become puppets like slaves to the
controller. This is often depicted electronically such as the trademark
equipment of Batman
enemy, The Mad Hatter, which is designed to put victims under his control when
placed in direct physical contact with the head. In addition, characters with
powerful psionic
abilities like Professor Charles Xavier of The X-Men can do the
same with mental concentration against a target.
Hypnotism
has often been used by stage performers to make volunteers do strange things,
such as clucking like a chicken, for the entertainment of the audience. More
sophisticated mental tricks are performed by the British psychological
illusionist Derren Brown in his televison programmes, Derren
Brown: Mind Control.
See also: