How To Recognize That You Are Being Brainwashed

Brainwashing, isn´t that old skool tactics used a long time ago? Well, maybe not… `May you live in interesting times` is a Chinese curse. To be exact, `Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.´ (寧為太平犬，不做亂世人). I guess not many would disagree that we are living in very interesting times now. How do you keep your sanity and balance of mind if everything around you is trying to push you out of balance? One of the things you can do is to try to see through things and recognize patterns and tricks used on you. In this story, I will talk about brainwashing. I hope it will make you curious and you will learn something from it.

Introduction

Concepts of brainwashing were already described in the fifties. One of the well-known studies of brainwashing is Biderman’s study. (Biderman, 1957) I will use his article and descriptions to write this story, and it is up to you to read this and see if you can recognize patterns in the present time.

Biderman was a social scientist, and he studied returned prisoners of war, which had been imprisoned by China during the Korean War. He studied the techniques the Communists used on these prisoners. He uses the words coercion and coercive control. Brainwashing is the theory that your core beliefs, ideas, affiliations, and values can be replaced, so much so that they have no autonomy over themselves and cannot think critically or independently.

I believe the mystery which pervades prevalent conceptions of Communist `confession`-extortion is due to misunderstandings of this business of the shaping of compliance, rather than that of producing compliance. Its total objective evokes images of diabolism and possession in the minds of many which now are associated with the term `brain washing´.

Biderman

We are continuously fed information that dictates how we should think, live, and operate. Especially in moments of vulnerability, it’s easy to fall prey to unconsciously adopting groupthink into our own belief system, living by it and being blinded to our own brainwashed tendencies. In order to avoid a life lived for another and to experience success, you need to know how to avoid being brainwashed. Coercion is used to produce conformity. It is a pattern of assaults, threats, humiliation, intimidation, or other abuse used to harm, punish, or frighten you. Complex situations, symbols, and small cues give strong reactions based upon the interpretation put upon them. Coercion is used to produce conformity, generating fears that the conformity produced is insincere, causing in turn further coercion to make it `sincere.` The aversion of these practices by those subjected to them makes the fears of the controllers well-founded and further reinforces the vicious circle. The control is a strategic form of ongoing oppression and terrorism used to instill fear. The controller will use tactics, such as limiting access to movement, fundamental human rights, and liberty, or monitoring all communication as a control effort. The effect of coercion can be enhanced by using isolation, sleep loss, hunger, and fatigue. People who enter prison or lockdowns with attitudes of foreboding, apprehension, and helplessness generally do less well. This brings us to the eight methods Biderman describes in his study.

Isolation

Isolation is a cornerstone of coercive compliance methods. It deprives you of social support. It usually is the first step towards brainwashing because having friends and family around you is dangerous to the controller. The last thing a controller wants is for someone with a different opinion, questioning what you are being asked to believe. The isolation could start in the form of not allowing access to family or friends or constantly checking where you are and who you are with. Isolation leads to sensory deprivation. (for example, social distancing, wearing masks, not visually seeing humans as humans) You are deprived of the opportunity for purposeful activity. All of your other bodily needs are satisfied: food, fluids, rest, etc. Yet, after a few days, the mental activities of subjects will begin to go awry. The capacity to carry out complex tasks and to perform well on psychological tests falls. Over time, unless you take measures of noncompliance, this will only get worse. You may develop a syndrome similar to the `brain syndrome`. You cease to care about your utterances, dress, and cleanliness. You become dull, apathetic, and depressed. In due time, you become disoriented and confused. Your memories become defective, and you experience hallucinations and delusions. In these circumstances, your capacity for judgment and discrimination is much impaired. Induced exhaustion and debilitation follows.

Monopolization of Perception

Monopolization of perception refers to actions such as censoring information. The controllers feign `omnipotence` and `omniscience,` often making appeals to authority, especially something called `science` and experts. Meanwhile, they freely mock the rules as applied to themselves. Controllers will frustrate all actions not consistent with compliance, and they will eliminate stimuli competing with those controlled by the controllers. This monopolization of perception can result in actions like restricting movement and censorship to withhold information. A lot of our news we get from internet media and social media. The problem is that this media doesn’t always tell us all the available information, especially on social media sites. Often, an article is written by one person, and chances are, that person has some strong political beliefs. Even though they might not be blatantly telling you their opinion, someone who might have a specific political agenda might not release all the information about the opposing point of view. Another problem is that media on the internet have a model for earning money that thrives on clicks, and this also makes it more profitable not to tell complete truths or write balanced publications. Publications can be failing to include information that might be important to the readers; the media control what we know.

Induced Debility And Exhaustion

You are forced not to move, are kept imprisoned, and fed with negative media. You are not allowed to socialize and to exercise. The controllers weaken the mental and physical ability to resist. You will become worn out by tension and fear.

Threats

Cultivation of anxiety and despair. Threats about invisible dangers have the most significant effect. The threats, often irrelevant, become commonplace. Enforcing trivial demands, such as the number of people allowed in a gathering, becomes the norm. There are demands and consequences for noncompliance.

Occasional Indulgence

The controllers become unpredictable and grant indulgences with regularity, such as temporarily ending curfews and limitations on gatherings. They may even allow you to go back to church or play sports. This is to remind you of what you have been missing. It also provides motivation for compliance; it is used as a reward. Furthermore, it hinders adjustment to the deprivation. It creates hope for change, which reduces resistance. At the same time, it keeps you unsure of what is happening. And, where there is hope, there is also the possibility to shatter hope, which will drive you to despair.

Demonstrate Omnipotence

The controllers demonstrate the futility of resistance. They will show who is in charge, and this also provides motivation for compliance.

Degradation

A controller can control you better when you are in a vulnerable state and have low self-confidence. A broken person is much easier to rebuild with the controller's beliefs. The controller, therefore, needs to break down your self-esteem. This could be through sleep deprivation, verbal or physical abuse, embarrassment, or intimidation. The controller will start to control everything about your life, from food, the time you sleep, to even using the bathroom. The controllers will make resistance seem worse than compliance. They create feelings of helplessness, which also creates fear of freedom. It enhances the dependence upon the controllers. Mental tortures may begin with lying to you and then progress to embarrassing or intimidating you. This form of torture can be done with words or gestures, ranging from an expression of disapproval to invading your personal space. Emotional tortures are not kind, of course, but may begin with verbal insults, then progress to badgering, spitting, or more dehumanizing things such as stripping you to be photographed or just looked at. Physical tortures may include starvation, freezing, sleep deprivation, beatings, mutilations, and others; none are acceptable in society. Physical torture is commonly used by abusive parents and spouses and in prison and `re-education´ camps.

With degradation also comes dehumanization and desocialization. By nature, people are tribal and want to be part of a group; the controller needs to convince you that they lead the elite group that everyone wants to be in. The controller can allow contact only with others who have already been brainwashed. This creates a form of peer pressure that encourages you to want to be like and be accepted by the new group. This may be reinforced through touch, rap sessions, group sex, or stricter means such as a uniform dress code, controlled diet, or other rigid rules. Another trick is never to let you have time to think. This can mean simply never let you have time alone, or it can mean bombarding you with repeated lectures on topics beyond comprehension, repeated news, while discouraging questions. The controller will also create an `us vs. them´ mentality where we are right, and the outside world is wrong. The goal is to achieve blind obedience and commit your life to the controller and his or her stated goals.

Enforcing Trivial Demands

By enforcing trivial demands, you develop the habit of compliance. These demands are illogical and contradictory. The rules are changed regularly and without any reason, and objectives changed. The controllers will change the rules of the game while the game is still going on. This reinforces that the controllers are in control.

How to handle brainwashing

Brainwashing is not just the stuff of fiction or the past; it is real and present in many forms of today’s society. We have been raised to respect authority, and we have been taught that lesson too well. We fail to ask hard questions about our beliefs, including the critical question, `Why do I hold the beliefs I hold? Where did my beliefs come from?` If we can look at our own beliefs with a little bit of distance, we will quickly see that many of the things we think we believe are merely ideas that were handed down to us by people who were brainwashed themselves.

At school, and nowadays, even at universities, we just memorize information; we don’t actually understand and learn what is being told. When you have a population that is never taught to question reality, question ideas, you have a less educated, more easily controlled society. Memorization teaches us that the only thing that matters is passing the test, not learning the information along the way. This is fatal to a free citizen. A lot of people have begun to recognize this, which is why many schools are leaning towards less testing and more discussion-based classroom discourse. When you have people who are constantly questioning and attempting to learn more rather than following what they’re told, you have a world with constant upward expansion. (White, 2016)

A problem with social media is that not everyone even clicks on the article, but they still believe what the headlines say. A lot of times, headlines are created in order to draw the user into the actual article. Of course, publications are going to use the most shocking and interesting phrases in order to draw you in. A lot of times, the news will get twisted this way. A header might be `There is no proof that this politician is linked to this pedophile network´. Now this headline is right, but your favorite politician and pedophile network are linked directly, and all of a sudden, you associate those two together, going on to believe that that politician is bad or evil. And even if you ignore the article or scroll past it, your subconscious still reads it and stores that information, potentially causing the damage later. It’s important always to read the articles before you tell everyone what you think the truth might be.

Nonetheless, depending upon how one chooses to draw the line, it is possible for us to say truthfully that all who were really involved resisted, or that all complied, for in truth the behavior of all involved at some point a mixture of compliance and resistance. In almost all, resistance was the dominant ingredient. Of the few Air Force prisoners who did get the full treatment, none could be made to behave in complete accordance with the Chinese Communists’ ideal of the `repentant criminal.´

Biderman

People who enter prison or lock downs with attitudes of foreboding, apprehension and helplessness generally do less well. than those who enter with assurance and a conviction that they can deal with anything that they may encounter.

All too often, you don’t take the time to know yourself well. Invest some time to think through your value system, who you are, what is important to you, and what is not. In the absence of this, it’s easy to get swayed into a direction that is not right for you. The stronger the delivery of the message, the more likely you will adopt it. When joining a group, job, or school, look to see if that environment is a true reflection of who you are, heart and soul.

When you are clear on a vision, it’s hard to be swayed from it. If you don’t have a vision, you are more vulnerable to be swayed by unique ideas or particularly charismatic leaders. Take the time to craft your vision, and make sure you revisit it often to make sure it’s the right one for you at each moment of your life.

More often than not, you don’t really think about your life. You wait until something is obviously going wrong before you stop and realize that something has to change. Rather than putting this off, start making it a practice to think about your life. Use your curiosity to think out of the box; for finding a solution to a problem or embracing a new path for your life.

Being open means, you recognize that you don’t know everything. Seek out new information, and stay grounded in how you digest it. Do research, read, watch movies, or find information in a way that excites you. Focus on the things that truly interest you. If you feel particularly swayed by someone or something, use that as a sign to dig into it deeper. Go beyond the surface when sifting through information. (Garnett, 2016)

What are other things you can do to stop yourself from being brainwashed:

Don’t believe all that you read

Don’t believe the hype

Don’t buy into fear or scare tactics

Watch for someone’s agenda

Look out for subliminal messages

Follow your own path

Do your own research

Listen to your own intuition

Don’t follow the crowd

Don’t be afraid to be different.

(Davies, 2017)

It’s easy to get lazy about staying true to yourself and doing the work to keep from being brainwashed by others. It’s part of being human: you want to be included, and the more you agree with those around you, the more likely you will be considered part of the group. The key is to be aware of it before or as it’s happening. Spend the time to get connected to yourself. If you do that, it will be much harder for anyone to convince you to be someone you’re not. (Garnett, 2016)

Interesting links:

COVID-19 is the New Cult

Ausweis Bitte!!! (Pass, please!!!) Do We Really Want to Go Back There With the COVID-19 or Green Pass?

China Has Outsmarted the West, the World Is Dancing to Xi Jinping´s Tune

References

Biderman, A. (1957). Communist attempts to elicit false confessions from Air Force prisoners of war. Bull N Y Acad Med, 33(9), 616–625.

Davies, J. (2017). Brainwashing: Signs That You Are Being Brainwashed (Without Even Realizing It). Retrieved from Learning Mind: https://www.learning-mind.com/brainwashing-signs/

Garnett, L. (2016). How to Know If You Are Brainwashed, and What to Do to Avoid It. Retrieved from Inc.: https://www.inc.com/laura-garnett/how-to-know-if-you-are-brainwashed-and-what-to-do-to-avoid-it.html

White, R. (2016). 15 Subtle Ways You’re Being Brainwashed Right Now. Retrieved from The Richest: https://www.therichest.com/shocking/15-subtle-ways-youre-being-brainwashed-right-now/

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