i assume Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority (& those of others) are known, but if not, wikipedia has some articles (try here & here) to start you off.
what no longer amazes me is how so many people heedlessly obey a perceived “higher authority.” yes perhaps nothing constructive would ever get done if we didn’t, but personally i see this subconcious kowtowing as mostly causing destruction anyway. think of the military. wouldn’t it be great if every one of us lackeys just refused to go off & kill people we’d never met? like that will ever happen. but it’s a thought.
in 1961, Robert J. Lifton described the brainwashing model of the chinese in the 1950s as follows (i):
- milieu control (controlled relations with the outer world)
- mystic manipulation (planned spontaneity–events are orchestrated or attributed to group’s power or omniscience)
- confession (confess past and present sins)
- self-sanctification through purity (pushing the individual towards a not-attainable perfection)
- aura of sacred science (beliefs of the group are sacrosanct and perfect)
- loaded language (new meanings to words, encouraging black-white thinking)
- doctrine over person (the group is more important than the individual)
- dispensed existence (insiders are saved, outsiders are doomed)
Margaret Singer noted these conditions present in mind control (ii):
- controlling a person’s time and environment, leaving no time for thought
- creating a sense of powerlessness, fear and dependency
- manipulating rewards and punishments to suppress former social behaviour
- manipulating rewards and punishments to elicit the desired behaviour
- creating a closed system of logic which makes dissenters feel as if something was wrong with them
- keeping recruits unaware about any agenda to control or change them
and in 2004, Anthony Stahelski described five phases of social pyschological conditioning (iii):
- Depluralization: stripping away all other group member identities
- Self-deindividuation: stripping away each member’s personal identity
- Other-deindividuation: stripping away the personal identities of enemies
- Dehumanization: identifying enemies as subhuman or nonhuman
- Demonization: identifying enemies as evil
now, of course these principles are applied mostly to cults* & terrorists groups & Hitler’s regime. but i can see a lot of these traits blatently at work in our everyday lives (not to mention subliminals…)–in families, in social groups, in vocations, in government, in the military, and in society as a whole (local, national, and global). in essence, life itself is a form of mind control.
so the question is, which form of mind control is the least detrimental to your overall well-being? which allows you the most individual freedom? which allows you full & free access to all other manners of mind control out there? which allows you to choose your own form of mind control? and which doesn’t force its own mind control on others?
are we (in general) that frightened of refusing? of saying no? of acting of our own free will, especially when it goes against the familial/social/political/religious grain? i think we should try to act just so as often as possible. we don’t need permission to live our lives, despite opinions (conscious & not) to the contrary.
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this is very interesting. i have a friend that lives in chicago. she used to work for a large communications company while she was going to law school. she is very level-headed and not prone to such ramblings as mine. however…the company she worked for was bought by a bigger one, and subsequently all the top management personnel were replaced. oddly enough, all the replacements were scientologists! (they were open about this…) in fact, they had these little meetings that the rest of the staff could attend if they wanted to–not at all mandatory, they said. these meetings were essentially for the indoctrination & recruitment of the workers into the scientology cult (aye!). when my friend realized this, and refused to go, they fired her (remember how these meetings weren’t mandatory?) she, of course, knowing the law, said that they could not fire her for that reason. the response was that her life, should she seek legal retribution, would be made miserable….in effect, they would make sure she could never hold a job, and threatened harm to her & her family.
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now that the scientologists will soon be after me, i just want to mention how this kind of insanity is not limited to power-hungry religious hacks that think they are aliens (and many of our celebrities enjoy this kind of thought). no, no. it’s everywhere. maybe they don’t all believe they’re from another planet, but hey. the end results are the same.
the washington times is the moonies, by the way.
BIG BROTHER DOES NOT KNOW BEST. YOUR DOCTOR DOES NOT KNOW BEST. YOUR MINISTER/GURU DOES NOT KNOW BEST. YOUR PARENTS DO NOT KNOW BEST. YOU DO NOT KNOW BEST. I DON’T KNOW WHO KNOWS BEST. PROBABLY NO ONE.
*please remember that lots of things can be considered cults if you just read the definition…..including every major religion. ha-ha.
(i) Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, Norton (New York City), 1961
(ii) Six Conditions for Thought Reform, by Margaret T. Singer, Ph.D., 1990.
(iii) Stahelski, Anthony: Terrorists Are Made, Not Born: Creating Terrorists Using Social Psychological Conditioning, Journal of Homeland Security, March 2004
