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+--- Thread: "Brainwashing" ... (/Thread-Brainwashing)
"Brainwashing" ... - Maxmars - 04-14-2024
I couldn't resist adding this article to our collection of discussion topics...
From MIT Technology Review: A brief, weird history of brainwashing
Subtitled: L. Ron Hubbard, Operation Midnight Climax, and stochastic terrorism—the race for mind control changed America forever.
The article begins by introducing the name of one former operative of the cold-war era anticommunist variety, one Edward Hunter.
On an early spring day in 1959, Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.” It was the kind of opportunity he relished. A war correspondent who had spent considerable time in Asia, Hunter had achieved brief media stardom in 1951 after his book Brain-Washing in Red China introduced a new concept to the American public: a supposedly scientific system for changing people’s minds, even making them love things they once hated.
Hunter claimed to have discovered “... [a] technique of mind-attack” in use in Communist China, coining the word "brainwashing" in English (which was a mischaracterization of the word "heart-washing" referring to a spiritual or emotional reorientation of mindset, that seemed never intended to create or forge a 'slave-like' conversion of a personality, rather an 'enlightenment' or cleansing of undesirable affectations, or traits, we all carry within us due to thoughtlessness and life events.)
Hunters claim was untrue in that a) he had not 'coined' the phrase, and also in b) that it was not the menacing practice of creating in a person, a lack of discernment about what they believed and acted upon. But the idea became 'vogue' in the world of social scientists and their activist ilk, politicians - in part driven by the 'Red Menace" marketing which propagandists fueled and nurtured during that period in history.
Yet Hunter’s sensational tales still became an important part of the disinformation and pseudoscience that fueled a “mind-control race” during the Cold War, much like the space race. Inspired by new studies on brain function, the US military and intelligence communities prepared themselves for a psychic war with the Soviet Union and China by spending millions of dollars on research into manipulating the human brain. But while the science never exactly panned out, residual beliefs fostered by this bizarre conflict continue to play a role in ideological and scientific debates to this day.
European scholars analyzed US National Security Council documents, reportedly finding that "[brainwashing] ... might be “fake” but contained so much accurate information that it was clearly written by “experts.” When it came to brainwashing, government operatives made almost no distinction between black propaganda and so-called expertise." In my opinion, this exemplifies the societal danger of "cloisterism" within our halls of power, where a status of 'association of experts' automatically means everything they produce is fundamentally true and not propaganda.
The fantasy of brainwashing was always one of optimization. Military experts knew that adversaries could be broken with torture, but it took months and was often a violent, messy process. A fast, scientifically informed interrogation method would save time and could potentially be deployed on a mass scale. In 1953, that dream led the CIA to invest millions of dollars in MK-Ultra, a project that injected cash into university and research programs devoted to memory wiping, mind control, and “truth serum” drugs. Worried that their rivals in the Soviet Union and China were controlling people’s minds to spread communism throughout the world, the intelligence community was willing to try almost anything to fight back. No operation was too weird.
I would like to honor the author by stopping my commentary here, and allowing you my friends to analyze it for yourselves... I think this article is chock full of good journalistic reporting... a relative rarity in today's media market. Let me know if you disagree. Or if there is something I missed.
Thanks
(PS - Please forgive the insertion of the thread I authored about "cloisterism" with which you may or may not agree. It seemed relevant at the time of writing this.)
RE: "Brainwashing" ... - BeTheGoddess - 04-15-2024
An old saying I heard, "you dont conquer civilizations with armies, you do it with ideas".
RE: "Brainwashing" ... - quintessentone - 04-15-2024
Another very interesting topic Maxmars, you have many and I thank you for posting them to work our brains.
From your article, there seems to be not much of a schism between many neuroscientists and perhaps a few others:
Quote:Many neuroscientists feel that these concerns are overblown; one of them, the University of Maryland cognitive scientist R. Douglas Fields, summed up the naysayers’ position with a column in Quanta magazine arguing that the brain is more plastic than we realize, and that neurotech mind control will never be as simple as throwing a switch. Kathleen Taylor, another neuroscientist who studies brainwashing, takes a more measured view; in her book Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control, she acknowledges that neurotech and drugs could change people’s thought processes but ultimately concludes that “brainwashing is above all a social and political phenomenon.”
Perhaps not enough research is being put into how social media disinformation and/or feeding audiences the news they want to hear plays a part in brainwashing or rather reinforcing cultish ideas or ideals or fantasies. Couple disinformation with drugs and who knows, does the neuroscientist, Kathleen Taylor, know? I'll have to read her studies, however her book was written in 2004, so a lot has been realized in neuroscience since then, so I'll reserve judgement for now until I learn more. Just scanning her wikipedia page, she hasn't produced much of anything for a very long time now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing:_The_Science_of_Thought_Control
Thank goodness we have conspiracy sites where we can challenge any and all ideas that may come off as feeding the sheeple, also we can ask for empirical evidence which always seems to never be offered up.
(04-15-2024, 05:16 AM)BeTheGoddess Wrote: An old saying I heard, "you dont conquer civilizations with armies, you do it with ideas".
From Maxmars article: the Chinese used methods to change someone's mind through their heart.
What's that old saying: "You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar." or something like that.
RE: "Brainwashing" ... - BeTheGoddess - 04-15-2024
(04-15-2024, 07:56 AM)quintessentone Wrote: Another very interesting topic Maxmars, you have many and I thank you for posting them to work our brains.
From your article, there seems to be not much of a schism between many neuroscientists and perhaps a few others:
Perhaps not enough research is being put into how social media disinformation and/or feeding audiences the news they want to hear plays a part in brainwashing or rather reinforcing cultish ideas or ideals or fantasies. Couple disinformation with drugs and who knows, does the neuroscientist, Kathleen Taylor, know? I'll have to read her studies, however her book was written in 2004, so a lot has been realized in neuroscience since then, so I'll reserve judgement for now until I learn more. Just scanning her wikipedia page, she hasn't produced much of anything for a very long time now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing:_The_Science_of_Thought_Control
Thank goodness we have conspiracy sites where we can challenge any and all ideas that may come off as feeding the sheeple, also we can ask for empirical evidence which always seems to never be offered up.
From Maxmars article: the Chinese used methods to change someone's mind through their heart.
What's that old saying: "You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar." or something like that.
I thought the saying was "you catch more bees with petrol than you do honey"?
RE: "Brainwashing" ... - quintessentone - 04-15-2024
(04-15-2024, 11:16 AM)BeTheGoddess Wrote: I thought the saying was "you catch more bees with petrol than you do honey"?
Where did you hear that saying? Weird saying.
I don't know whether or not this article verges on 'brainwashing' but if young people are so vulnernable then I am all for social media/online restrictions/laws being enforced.
Quote:Scientists point to social media as the potential force driving this mental health crisis. In particular, online exposure to idealized body imagery and language can trigger negative self-comparisons, especially for young social media users whose identities and self-worth are still forming.
“The social dynamic is perhaps the most harmful force on social media,” Kristina Lerman, study lead author and Principal Scientist at ISI, said. “The friends you make online can actually make your mental health worse.”
The researchers next looked at how these communities interacted with each other. Chu described the result as “astonishing.” Clusters, or echo chambers, appeared where tens of thousands of users in the same community responded to and retweeted each other, yet they had little interaction with outside groups.
“They’re being radicalized by very harmful content without even knowing it,” Chu said.
Lerman and team that the propensity for radicalization across such disparate topics hints at unmet universal human needs that drive the behavior, such as the need to belong.
https://neurosciencenews.com/eating-disorders-social-media-25920/
The issue seems to be in online echo chambers without any opposition from within or from outside groups - could fall into Maxmars' 'cloisterism' phenomenon, which may include the strong drive to belong to a group which may outweigh one's own well being.
RE: "Brainwashing" ... - Maxmars - 04-15-2024
The object of forcing someone to do someone else' will has been a preoccupation for some for many centuries. Whether driven by paranoia, or purposeful disinformation, the idea of it has become a powerful tool for others.
I remember the old tales of the Voodoo witchdoctor who could, in legend, cause a person to become a 'zombie;' as if whoever they may have been in the past was gone and replaced with a single-minded machine for carryout out tasks (usually violent.) I suspect that has older roots, from a more ancient past. But whatever the source, the common theme within the tales seemed to be that the original personality is gone.
This newer "brainwashing trope" seems to have added the "undetectable" element, where the person is outwardly normal, but inwardly "programmed" in such a way as to defy detection. Several more recent criminal events have sometimes hooked into that story... often citing the actual innocence of victim despite witnesses and evidence to the contrary (of whatever crime they had allegedly committed.) It became a way to say "It was not me who committed that crime... I was brainwashed (or I was 'hexed.')"
Many say it can be done. Many say it can't. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between.
But from being compelled by "magic" or "potion" to mentally 'check out' on behalf of some controller, to being "unknowingly" altered and totally unaware of the imposed control is a large leap... The only continuous tone tales is that it involves purposeful cruel and abusive treatment of the victim...
Hopefully, some other interested members can join our conversation and add some ideas we haven't touched upon yet.
