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After the Korean War, American prisoners came home praising communism — and Washington wanted to know why. The word they coined was ‘brainwashing,’ and this lecture from Academy of Ideas dissects the real mechanism behind it. Drawing on psychiatrist William Sargant and Pavlov’s experiments, it shows how emotional overload can shatter a mind and leave it wide open to suggestion. The same pattern appears in political prisons, therapy rooms, and religious revival tents alike. Best of all, it shares the two defenses no manipulator can crack: indifference, and laughter.
Full Video Transcript
In 1950, with the support of China’s communist regime, North Korea invaded South Korea to instigate the Korean War.
In response to the invasion, the United Nations rallied troops from over 20 countries to fight on the side of South Korea.
The United States, who at the time occupied South Korea and was its main source of financial and military support, sent 300,000 troops,
which amounted to approximately 90% of the total troops organized by the UN.
Soon after joining the war, the United States began to notice that something very strange was happening.
Upon being released from prisoner of war camps, many American troops, instead of telling horrific tales of their time spent with the communists, preached the virtues of communism and the superiority of the communist way of life.
Dumbfounded as to how the Chinese were able to transform these previously patriotic Americans into communists, the US government called on CIA operative Edward Hunter to investigate the phenomenon.
phenomenon. Hunter coined the word brainwashing to describe what the
Chinese were doing to the captured American troops. In his book Brainwashing,
Hunter painted a harrowing picture, explaining that the Chinese were using
brainwashing in order to create a slave race. The intent is to change a mind
radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet, a human robot, without the
atrocity being visible from the outside. The aim is to create a mechanism in
flesh and blood, with new beliefs and new thought processes inserted into a
captive body. What that amounts to is the search for a slave race that, unlike the slaves
of olden times, can be trusted never to revolt, always to be amenable to orders, like an insect
to its instincts. The Oxford English Dictionary defines brainwashing as the systematic and
often forcible elimination from a person’s mind of more established ideas so that another
set of ideas may take their place. According to this definition, brainwashing can be described
as the purposeful attempt to change an individual’s ideas and beliefs.
However, since everyone is bombarded on a daily basis
with attempts to change their beliefs, brainwashing must be identified
as a radical or extreme attempt to change an individual’s beliefs and ideas.
As Kathleen Taylor pointed out in her book Brainwashing,
The Science of Thought Control, the extremity of brainwashing can be
elucidated by identifying two distinct characteristics unique to the victim of
brainwashing.
Firstly, one who is brainwashed adopts new beliefs and ideas that are drastically different from, and often completely antithetical to, their previous beliefs.
Secondly, the brainwashed victim doesn’t adopt these new beliefs gradually over a period of months or years, but instead in a very short time span, and a lot of the time even instantaneously.
The 20th century British psychiatrist William Sargent noted that when contemplating the phenomenon of brainwashing, he came upon a stunning idea.
Sargent hypothesized that the victim brainwashed for political purposes is no different in kind from the therapy patient, whose beliefs are radically changed by a therapist, or from the religious convert who is suddenly shown the light by a priest.
All three individuals undergo a sudden conversion, and thus, Sargent reasoned, all three cases must be capable of being rendered intelligible by the same underlying physiological and psychological processes.
Assuming the truth of Sargent’s hypothesis, the quest to understand how an individual can be brainwashed for political purposes becomes a much broader and more important quest.
It becomes the quest to understand how ordinary individuals can be convinced by therapists, priests, politicians, or whomever else,
to radically and instantaneously transform not only their deepest beliefs and ingrained attitudes, but their very identity and way of life.
In dwelling on this question, Sargent found the work of the 20th century Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov especially enlightening.
Pavlov won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his research on the physiology of digestion, but later in his life he turned his attention to study the nervous system of animals.
Such research in fact directly influenced the brainwashing techniques utilized by the Russians and Chinese in the 20th century.
In the experiment which interested Sargent, Pavlov imposed extreme physical and emotional stresses on a number of dogs.
Pavlov observed that eventually, when enough stress had been imposed on a dog, it would collapse in a state of hysteria.
Unable to handle the overwhelming stress, the dog’s brain would become inhibited and would in a sense shut down, rendering the dog temporarily incapacitated.
Interestingly, Pavlov noted that if the breakdown was severe enough,
any behavior which he had previously conditioned into the dog disappeared.
Moreover, if he attempted to condition a new behavior in the dog shortly after the breakdown occurred,
he observed that the newly conditioned behavior became deeply embedded in the dog’s nervous system
and was subsequently very difficult to remove.
Upon reading of Pavlov’s experiment, Sargent immediately grasped its significance
significance with respect to the question which plagued his mind.
The possible relevance of these experiments to sudden religious and political conversion
should be obvious even to the most skeptical. Pavlov has shown by repeated and repeatable
experiment just how a dog, like a man, can be conditioned to hate what it previously
loved, and love what it previously hated. Similarly, one set of behavior patterns in
man can be temporarily replaced by another that altogether contradicts it, not by persuasive
indoctrination alone, but also by imposing intolerable strains on a
normally functioning brain. In inducing a sudden conversion, be it for political or
religious purposes, the key is, as Sargent noted, to impose intolerable strains on a
normally functioning brain. Such intolerable strains are effectively
produced by stimulating intense emotions within an individual, until the brain
becomes overloaded and breaks down in a state of hysteria. As Pavlov’s experiment
showed, once such a breakdown has occurred the individual will be left in
state of high suggestibility, ready to release all previous beliefs and emotional identifications.
In other words, such a person will be primed to accept new ideas, beliefs, and even a new
way of life. William James, the 20th century philosopher, also identified intense emotional
experiences as effective at inducing sudden conversions. Emotional occasions, especially
violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive
ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known
to everybody. Hope, happiness, security, resolve, emotions characteristic of conversion, can
be equally explosive, and emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things
as they found them. Nearly 200 years before Pavlov conducted his experiments, which would
display to modern brainwashers the importance of stimulating intense emotions in their victim,
John Wesley, an Anglican cleric and founder of the Methodist movement, intuitively grasped
the importance of stimulating emotions in the proselytizing process.
In his sermons, Wesley would convince the audience that on the off chance they met their
end suddenly, without accepting the Lord into their life, they would burn in hell for eternity.
Wesley’s personality was so charismatic and his sermons so convincing that he was able
to stimulate in his audience an intense feeling of fear and anxiety.
loaded with emotional stress caused by envisioning eternal hellfire, many in Wesley’s audience
would literally collapse in a state of emotional exhaustion.
As Wesley wrote in his journal,
“…while I was speaking one before me dropped down as dead, and presently a second and a
third.
Five others sunk down in half an hour, most of whom were in violent agonies.
The pains as of hell came about them, the snares of death overtook them.”
After breaking down for emotional exhaustion, those in Wesley’s audience became highly suggestible.
Wesley took advantage of this state by offering his potential converts the possibility of saving their soul by walking the path to salvation, as he wrote,
In their trouble we called upon the Lord, and he gave us an answer of peace.
One indeed continued an hour in strong pain, and one or two more for three days.
But the rest were greatly comforted in that hour, and went away rejoicing and praising God.
Through this technique of emotionally debilitating individuals with fear and then offering them salvation, Wesley was able to obtain innumerable converts.
While the inducement of emotional collapse can be used by political and religious leaders for the purpose of brainwashing individuals or attaining converts, emotional breakdowns also have potential therapeutic value.
As a psychiatrist, Sargent championed the technique of purposely stimulating feelings of anger and anxiety in neurotic patients until an emotional collapse erased from their nervous system the neurotic thoughts and behaviors which had previously plagued them.
However, while such a technique can be used for therapeutic purposes, Sargent recognized that in the wrong hands such a technique is used to control, manipulate, and exploit individuals.
And in the hands of those who lead society, and thus have power over the population, it can be a tool used for the purpose of mass brainwashing.
Throughout history, fear has been used as possibly the chief means of social control.
The Nazis readily instigated fear among the masses, continually stating that the Jews would, given the chance, annihilate the entire German population.
population. For example, Hitler once warned the German people that,
“…the Jewish capitalist world enemy that confronts us has only one goal,
to exterminate Germany and the German people.” In the modern day, things have
not changed. Modern governments release daily reports of grave threats to
national security, or of potential terrorists conjuring up plans to destroy
us all. President George W. Bush once instilled fear into the population
with the following warning, “…the terrorist directive commands them to kill Christians
and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinctions among military and civilians,
including women and children. The purpose of these warnings and daily news reports is to instill in
the average citizen a state of continual fear. This state of fear, as we have seen throughout
the lecture, renders the average citizen highly suggestible, and increasingly ready to accept any
government policy which promises safety from these dreadful threats. H.L. Mencken wrote that,
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Although we are all bombarded with attempts to transform us into continually fearful, anxious, and thus highly suggestible sheep, Sargent had some wisdom to impart to us.
When subjected to these fear-provoking news reports and warnings of enemies who want to kill us all, Sargent stated that the best attitude to adopt is not fear, anger, or indignation, but instead indifference mixed with a bit of laughter over the ridiculousness of such attempts.
Whoever can be roused either to fear or anger by politician, priest, or policeman is more easily led to accept the desired pattern of cooperation, even though this may violate his normal judgment.
The obstacles that the religious or political proselytizer cannot overcome are indifference or detached, controlled and continued amusement on the part of the subject at the efforts being made to break him down, or win him over, or tempt him into argument.
The safety of the free world seems therefore to lie in the cultivation, not only of courage, moral virtue and logic, but of humor.
Humor which produces the well-balanced state in which emotional excess is laughed at as ugly and wasteful.
Source: Academy of Ideas