People throw around the world ‘brainwashing’ a lot but I still don’t know what it means. Is it a ‘repeated truth’? Is it certain mind tricks? Is it some kind of chemical thing?
Disclaimer: not looking to brainwash anyone but there’s a cult in my area that apparently ‘brainwashes’ people
In: Biology
To put it quite simply: brainwashing does not work.
The concept of brainwashing was first developed in the 1950s to explain why some American prisoners-of-war during the Korean War expressed sympathy for communism and then got expanded on during the anti-cult movement during the 1970s, but the evidence of its existence has always been shaky. More recent research has suggested that people join religious cults and terrorist groups for the same reason that other people join fanclubs or the Peace Corp or volunteer at the Food Bank: the feeling of wanting to belong and the feeling that you’re part of something bigger than yourself and doing something that really matters. To me, that’s a far scarier thought than mind control, but your mileage may vary.
Indoctrinating people into religious or political beliefs is very real and absolutely everyone does it to some degree, but there’s no guarantee that it will always work for everyone and it won’t ensure that everyone will always follow your orders without question. Actual religious and political movements are very, very prone to infighting and schisms, but if brainwashing worked the way it’s commonly supposed to, then that shouldn’t be possible. This also applies to the issue of trying to explain the existence of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes: if brainwashing actually worked the way it’s supposed to, then why did so many of them have secret police forces (the Cheka/NKVD/KGB and Gestapo, for instance) to suppress internal dissidents?
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