Brainwashing
Theories of mind control, or thought control, claim that a person can be "enslaved" through brainwashing, emotional manipulation, and other trickery. Other hypothesized forms of mind control technology have included the use of drugs, microwave radiation or lasers to control thoughts.
One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is the belief that one is subject to external mind control, often by use of some form of technology.
The most extreme version of the theory asserts 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.
Deprogrammers, believing that cults entrap or enslave members via mind control, have often been able to get judges to issue conservatorships authorizing them to rescue people. There is considerable disagreement about how cults actually operate.
Brainwashing
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. The term was coined by journalist Edward Hunter. 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. The idea of brainwashing was central to the movie The Manchurian Candidate.
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 confortable 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.
U.S. Government research into mind control
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.
APA Task Force on mind control
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.
Mind control in fiction
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.
Propaganda as 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 Goebels, Hitler's propaganda genius, pioneered most of the methods which are used up to these days by modern spin doctors who ironicaly play very important role in democracies dependent on public opinion. "A lie repeated many times becomes the Truth" was one of his particulary effective insights.
Totalitarian regimes use repression of freedom of specch to homogenize population, which goes from censorship to state sponsored murder. One notorious example is Stalin with his purges, but not even the US is immune from state control. The modern world is in fact characterized by unpreceded increase in powers of the state, which can often be very oppressive.
See hypnotism and the book 1984 by George Orwell.
References
- Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961);
- Edgar H. Schein et al., Coercive Persuasion (1961)
See also: