This book was written by Kathleen Taylor and oh man, it’s really interesting.

To preface article, I wanted to read about brainwashing because there’s an air of mystery about it. I don’t understand how someone can change the thoughts of someone else so radically. It doesn’t make sense to me.

Whenever something doesn’t make sense, or there isn’t any good education out there on it, I tend to want to find out what’s happening behind the scenes. This is what led me to this book.

I was watching a Netflix documentary on Wild Country and was astounded by the level of behavior and psychological changes in the people who attended that cult. I took it as a learning opportunity to take a peek behind the curtain and discover the actual techniques these people were using.

This book is more of a textbook/academic piece of literature. It’s very in-depth, well researched, and even has some dry humor at times (which I appreciated). I really want to read more of Kathleen’s books, because I like her way of dissecting a subject from a research angle.

So, go and grab a copy! At least take some time to read through it. You can check it out on Amazon.

I’ll include some of my notes from the book below. These are in no means comprehensive. Just a few things I picked up on.

Notes

What we associate as brain washing is also called re-education or thought reform. It came from Mao’s opponents.

The victim not only perceives any such challenge as hostile but refuses to engage in rational debate; the new beliefs are considered scared and beyond the reach of reason.

Fear. Grief. Loneliness. The central roles of emotion and coercion are clear.

The use of uncertainty as a psychological weapon. Exposure to a group of people with beliefs to which the victim should be converted. Removing from former environment and any chance to reinforce the old beliefs (talking to friends). Threat of death. lonliness. lack of privacy. Sense of being unable to control one’s fate.

Sheer amount of repetition is mind-numbing. Hours and months party apparatus reinforced with lectures, postures, broadcasts, discussions, the ideological messages. Sheer exhaustion creates psychological surrender.

By having total control over someone’s world, you can control their mind.

Robert lifton’s milieu control.

Sever criticism of anything that is said. Surround with compliant believers. Torrent of questions and accusations.

Psychological pressure to confess any bad thoughts.

Get the person to write letter confessing and get them to turn new prisoners. Photographed and recorded showing commitment.

He is part of a gigantic effort to control history itself because the party is infallable. To change one’s mind or even one’s policy is a confession of weakness (1984). Newspeak means that the idea without the words to express certain concepts, the concepts themselves will fade and die.

Every aspect of behavior open to criticism by other students, and self-criticism, one of the key aspects of thought reform, was insistently encouraged. Privacy is non-existent. Lectures go on for hours. Surrender must be of own free will.

Ends can justify means, and secondly, people who don’t accept the idea of supremacy can be seen as less than human.

Lecture impressively on subjects that people want to hear. New world order. Send by god to build a utopia.

Join cults for sense of identity and security the cult can provide. Lost and find it difficult to articulate or satisfy their needs. They are idealists, seeking not only spiritual enlightenment but the chance to help other people.

Rejection of established learning and authority.

Groups that are hard to join evoke more commitment, which is why they have fearsome initiation rights.

The more valuable the group to us, the more likely we are to behave as if the group is equivalent to our self, assuming that rewards or dangers to the group benefit or threaten us.

Commitment of their life.

Aggression towards any outsider who is perceived as a threat.

Prospective victims are not real humans, and you are not individually responsible for the murders.

Once a group exceeds 150 members, it’s hard to control from peer pressure alone, meaning that you need a hierarchy.

When investing passionate opinions, one often finds a fear in their roots.

Where advertising seeks to make us good consumers, education seeks to make us good citizens. Education doesn’t promise happiness explicitly. Yet it aims to deliver more earnings power, and therefore more access to the consumer playground.

People justify coercion from the medical model of being beneficial to the patient. Cure or health. Repentance of sin.

Battle fought by the healer/brainwasher against the enemy forces (rival ideology) which have taken over or corrupted the patient/victim.

We do not merely destroy our enemies. We change them.

Not only did highly authoritarian individuals tend to score highly on ratings of dogmatism and prejudice, but they also did so whatever their secular or religious ideology.

Milgram study – two thirds of subjects were fully obedient.

Person entering the authority system no longer view themselves as acting out of their own purposes but rather come to seem themself as an agent for executing the wishes of the other person.

Milgram observes that if we are to obey, we must regard the authority as legitimate and relevant. These are context-dependent. A military person can order them to perform a highly dangerous action, but not embrace girlfriend. Authority will only be accepted if the overarching ideological justification is also accepted.

Milgram says agent puts value on discipline, duty, loyalty and competence. Responsibility is diffused through the hierarchy and organizations split the components of morally dubious actions between individuals. Don’t give them the full picture.

High levels of physical activity are used during training ,independent thought is discouraged and personal freedom is restricted.

Encourage low-level thinking, which is a very concrete, narrow, rigid way of thinking, with he focus not he here and now, on the details of what one is doing. Focusing on low level details makes it easier to pull a trigger.

The primacy of doctrine over person as individual autonomy is suppressed for the good of the system the sacred science of ideology, accepted without question.

Bourke notes that love for one’s comrades was an excellent motivation, ‘widely regarded as the strongest incentive for murderous aggression against a foe identified as threatening that relationship.’

Clearly identified external enemy provides powerful motivations and justifications for killing.

God: He pulls the strings, he loves you, he has your best interest at heart. Being omnipresence, he knows what’s good for you, a lot better than you do, so why worry.

We see ourselves as others see us. Telling someone they are useless at their job reduces their performance.

We often think things extraordinary when we do not understand the process that made them.

Violence is a response to an ego threat.

The stronger and better the schema, the more it contributes to our overall sense of self. The strength of weak schema connections are low, easily changed, and a change to such schema would not make us or our friends feel that we have become a different person.

Taking evaluation of a metaphor as valid affects the real perception of behavior of that thing.

Weak beliefs are therefore subservient to reality, in the sense that if new information comes in which requires them to change, change they will, without much effort on the believer’s part.

It would take a great deal to convince that your opinion built up over years of observation should be revised.

Our strongest beliefs will tend to be simpler than our more weakly-held convictions.

Simpler beliefs are easier to represent and retain in cobwebs, just as headlines are easier to remember than philosophical arguments.

Simplicity makes ideas easier to accept.

The brain is a strange mirror distorting some aspects of the world and ignoring others, filtering every input it receives on the basis of what it has previously experienced.

Belief functions as reasons for action.

Individuals scoring highly on tests of dogmatism were resistant or even hostile to new ideas, more anxious about the future, less tolerant of ambiguity, more concrete in their thinking, and less flexible in their problem-solving behavior than individuals low in dogmatism.

Highly dogmatic individuals appear to be charismatic because of their strong  sense of self. Their high confidence in their beliefs is attractive to others with weaker convictions and this eare are actively seeking security.

The effects of emotive words linger after we’ve read them.

We run less risk of being eaten today, but because of our ability to associate strong emotions with abstract concepts, we can experience a stressful response to events or objects our ancestors may not have understood.

“What I’m feeling must be…” we try to explain and understand our emotions, sometimes incorrectly.

This is why demagogues, cult leaders, advertisers, and brainwashers try to keep their messages as short and simple as possible: by doing so they increase the chance of triggering a fast, automatic response before their target has time to stop and think.

When a new set of beliefs is imposed on a somewhat different preexisting pattern, the success fo the brainwashing will crucially depend on how much stronger than the old cobwebs the new ones are. Isolation reduces voting power of older cogwebs.

Better fitting cobwebs are more acceptable because they provoke less thought and are hence less effortul. Leader said what they were thinking.

Being saved from death is a more effective weapon than being threatened with it.

Relying on emotions can mislead us. Their function as short cuts to action can weight decisions in favor of short-term indulgence rather than a greater but more long-term benefit. Feelings linger where thoughts do not. The feelings of one thought can be associated with another for the reason.

By arousing some kind of negative feeling in the target, guilt, fear, cognitive dissonance of some kind, they can then present the behavior they want to evoke as the way to get rid of all this emotional pressure. They know that stressed people are likely to react reflexively, using stereotyped thinking, than if they are given time and leisure to consider their situation.

Talk of freedom is easy to find in the sayings of dictators. Use personal choice illusion and may I take a moment of your time to make person feel like they are in control, when they aren’t.

Simplistic black and white thinking goes hand in hand with brainwashing. Dogamtic. Low education. Stress.

We seek out people and experiences who will help us become who we want to be.

Simplicity is attractive to those who are confused. Projecting simple message is easier than selling a complex argument. Clear, simple vision.

Charisma is found by strong sense of self, impression of single-mindedness, and purpose. Inspire devotion and enthusiasm.

Unbelief is a disease of the heart, according to the sacred text.

If the balance of motivation is in favor of not pausing to reflect, as in Nazi Germany, then an ethereal idea can drive forceful action even when the idea itself is contradicted by personal experiences.

Without the dream, the desire will remain unfocused. Without the desire, the dream can have no venom.

Brainwasher would prefer the target population to be isolated. If not possible, make them feel isolated by playing up danger from external threats. A clearly labeled enemy is always handy. Keep the masses stressed, busy, or both, as this will reduce the likelihood of stop-and-think objections.

Make doctrines simple and memorable. Avoid impression of uncertainty. Single-minded confidence. Present things as new, unique, and different.

People can be persuaded to give up objective freedoms and hand over control of their lives to others in return for apparent freedoms – in other words, as long as they are aware of the freedoms they are gaining and either contemptuous or unaware of the freedoms they are giving up.

Other notes:

Scrub out the poison of reactionary thoughts.

Isolation. Surrounded by believers. Criticism and Self cricitism.

Abstract ideas like freedom can’t be challenged and encourage superiority in believers. Ends justify means. Are bloodstained because they are viewed as more highly than human life.

Mansion said pretend he is father and made love. Free love. Make the people dependent on you for emotional fulfillment.

Express goodness in a cynically hostile society. Endowed with establishment dissaproval. Radical and novel.

A sense of paranoia is cohesive. Also, rejection of established learning and authority (they won’t like).

Demonization of anything beyond cult and even justifying violence.

Utopian credo states that the present is unimportant compared with the future. Utopian thinking. Starting the revolution that will bring about the coming apocalypse.

Membership benefit ratio. Cults occupy more of time and energy than everyday groups. They take over the person’s cognitive landscape.

No point building bridges with a world that is out to destroy them.

Groups are bound by: perceived success of group achieving goals. extend to which group goals match individual. Value of group to individual member. liking of members to eachother. external forces.

Shifting of beliefs closer to that of the group. Cult beliefs are simple. Renouncing a belief, after you have committed to it, is renouncing part of your own identity.

Group membership means that person is not alone and they are not responsible.

If living with people who don’t show disapproval, it creates diffusion of responsibility. It would get them social credit in the group vs vague bad benefit in society.

Primacy of doctrine over person.

brainwashing is billed as treating a sick mind

“Brought you here to cure you. To make you sane. Not interested in overt thought. Just the act. Sick people getting treatment. Must repent for wrongdoings.

Children raised by harsh parents like to submit to authority representing the parents and exert authority over others.

Highly authoritarian individuals tend to score highly on ratings of dogmatism and prejudice, but also regardless of secular or religious ideology.

Ordinary people just doing their jobs can become agents in a destructive process. Agentic vs autonomous.

Person joining a hierarchy or authority system view themselves as acting out as an agent for executing the wishes of another person, not their own wants. “not my department.”

Compliance is rewarded. Dissent is punished and dissaporved of.

Obedience is not blind. They must also believe in the ideological purpose.

“For the good of….”

Dissent and comment is discouraged. Higher ideological goal.

ideological and repressive state apparatus

Focus on detail allows someone to avoid thinking about their human status or consider higher ideals. Prevents feelings of guilt.

Fraternal love creates ingroup/outgroup and threat towards that relationship.

If afraid of actins being controlled by another it’s called reactance .

learn about domestic abuse. Brains are bad at detecting longterm cumulative changes if each step of that change is very small. Create dependence. Isolation. If object, apologize or turn charm on and then try again. Change their self image until they no longer see themself as threatening.

Isolation prevents old cogwebs from affecting the formation of newer ones that replace the old ones.

Closer new beliefs are to old ones or less thought required, the easier the jump. You know what they’re thinking like copywriting.

Weaker cobwebs will change. Strongers will explain away new evidence or challenging information.

Dogmatic and creative people are polar opposites.

Emotions are shortcuts telling us how to behave. 

Emotions flood the brain, whereas thoughts don’t. It can cause the feelings evoked by a word or phrase to be associated with another.

A good influence technician wants to change the minds of others. Great need to control the environment.

Single clear identifiable message.

Being highly creative is not enough. Must be single-minded in attracting others. Totalistic thinking.

Infectious disease in your heart. Remove the source of the infection.

When strong motives for believing ethereal idea, cobweb distorts the cognitive landscape, a warping effect similar to a black hole in space time. Filters any incoming stimuli, new information is interpreted in support of the ethereal idea. The stronger the cobwebs the more it affects how the world is perceived. Action may be taken to suppress contradictory evidence .

A charismatic leader who believes wholeheartedly in doctrine has better chance of convincing others than a leader who thinks through every detail and dwells on snags and complications.

Truth. Justice. TOlerance. Freedom.

Unity is strength.

Emphasizse what have in common with audience. Be likeable, humurous. No uncertaintiny. Single-minded. Publicity. Get people talking. Respective authorities refer to ideas as normal.

Present as new and different, but also need to baby step someone towards the ultimate goal.

From Sex to Superconsciousness – soho

celebratory vs ascetic lifestyle

music might inhibit cognitions that reduce cognitive dissonance