Joel E. Dimsdale - Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media

DARK PERSUASION

A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media

JOEL E. DIMSDALE

Copyright 2021 by Joel E. Dimsdale.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951874

ISBN 978-0-300-24717-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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I WAS WORKING IN the library when I bumped into one of my former patients. I hadnt seen her for maybe five years. We sized each other up. I was a retired professor of psychiatry lugging a pile of books. She was a bright young scholar carrying lots of baggage from her past. We chatted for a bit, surrounded by shelves of books in the stacks, and she asked what I was working on. I told her I had gotten interested in brainwashing.

Umm, she said. Isnt that kind of a stale, musty topicCommunists, bad science, and all that stuff? As I said, she was bright and inclined to come right to the pointtact had never been her strong suit. Why was I spending so much time on this arcane topic? Granted, I am eccentric; but what made me think anybody else would be interested in this subject?

Then I came home to watch the evening news, which featured its usual dose of suicide bombers and mass shootings, followed by political leaders making preposterous statements (Vaccination causes autism, Global warming is a myth, The COVID-19 virus is not a problem). It is bad enough that leaders can propound such nonsense; the bigger problem is that they persuade so many other people to endorse their misunderstandings of the world. I thought about my patient again. How did she make sense of a world where people could be persuaded to believe rubbish and follow it up with self-destructive violence?

As a psychiatrist, I should be one of the last people to believe the world operates rationally. I know better. Leaders have all too often been pied pipers, but something new emerged in the twentieth century. I still dont know what to call this phenomenon. Brainwashing, coercive persuasion, thought control, dark persuasionall these terms refer to the fact that certain techniques render individuals shockingly vulnerable to indoctrination.

I dont think brainwashing is a musty topic, although it is one with a long history. I dont think it is a stale one either. Brainwashing blossomed in the twentieth century because of advances in behavioral science, neuroscience, and pharmacology. It will certainly develop further in the twenty-first century. Yes, the Soviet Union was embroiled in this phenomenon, but so were Great Britain, France, Germany, China, North Korea, Canada, Cambodia, the Vatican, and the United States. And yes, the term brainwashing is silly and unscientific. No one ever meant it literally, but the metaphor is a powerful one.

Throughout the twentieth century, governments invested so heavily in research on brainwashing that it has come to be known as the Manhattan Project of the Mind. But it wasnt just military and intelligence agencies that employed the technique; many cults stumbled upon its use as well. We confront this legacy every day.

Even so, I wouldnt have been so interested in this topic if not for my neighbors.

***

When we moved to the hills north of San Diego, we were surrounded by dazzling light; groves of eucalyptus, avocado, and orange trees; and a menagerie of coyotes, pheasants, egrets, and peacocks. It all seemed like a brilliant Garden of Eden.

And yet, a few miles away, our neighbors had themselves castrated, and that was only the beginning of it.

They had rented a nine-thousand-square-foot mansion and lived quietly behind their locked gates, regarding themselves as students in a school for spiritual enlightenment. Some kind of religious commune, the neighborhood thought. But they paid their rent, didnt bother anyone, and supported themselves as website design consultants. For an unconventional religious group, they had very mainstream clients. One of their last design commissions was for the Fairbanks Ranch Polo Club.

They were New Age seekers who felt lost in this world. They felt stranded, believing they had come from another world in the stars and that their bodies were merely vehicles. They were part of the away team from the heavens.

When the Hale-Bopp comet was sighted in 1995, the seekers felt it was sent from heaven and that an unseen spaceship trailed behind, ready to bring them home. They made methodical preparations. If they could exit their earthly body vehicles at the right timewhen the comet was closest to Earththey would be transported to the heavens on the approaching spaceship. Then, they believed, they would graduate to the next level. The

Heavens Gate bodies cloaked in reverence.
(Courtesy of San Diego County Sheriffs Department, b-roll video.)

In preparation for their journey, the acolytes wore identical yellow rings on the fourth finger of their left hands, brand-new Nike shoes, and black tracksuits emblazoned with triangular patches reading Heavens Gate Away Team.

To facilitate the transfer to space in an orderly fashion, the group carried out waves of suicide. While the first cohort slept deeply after ingesting the pudding, companions wrapped plastic bags over their dying friends heads to guarantee suffocation. The corpses were treated with reverence and covered with purple cloths. The next day, the second cohort of believers prepared similarly to exit their bodily vehicles. One day later, the last group overdosed, but there was no one left alive to wrap their heads in plastic or cover them with purple shrouds. Having anticipated this, they ingested extra medication (hydrocodone) to make sure. They all died, and their earthly vehicles were now empty.

The members left detailed records of their beliefs, which I will return to later. Their deaths were very troubling to me. Its one thing when members of a cult kill themselves far away in time and space; its different when it happens next door. How could people be induced to do such things? What could make them choose castration, assist in killing their friends, and then join them in suicide? The specifics of their beliefs were odd, but people believe many outlandish things. As I struggled to understand what happened at Heavens Gate, I realized that coercive persuasion is heartbreakingly common. Indeed, it haunted the twentieth century like a recurring nightmare.

***

To tell the story of how brainwashing developed, I will discuss a hundred years of observations in fields that range from military history to religious studies and from medicine to the social and behavioral sciences. Given how wide ranging the discussion will be, Ill provide a brief roadmap as a preview. It would be grueling to analyze all instances of brainwashing in the twentieth century; thus, I have focused on the occurrences that seem most informative. Similarly, I have omitted discussing things like hypnosis or mesmerism, which emerged in the eighteenth century rather than the twentieth.