A recent headline read: “Corporate Executive Pays to Deprogram Daughter After Freshman Year”. Years ago, the process of deprogramming might have been reserved for a prisoner of war (POW), or a victim of a cult. Not anymore. A normal adolescent attending any one of the couple thousand colleges or universities in America will be subjected to indoctrination and thought control. In the case of this headline, one parent decided to do something about it.
The sad reality is that anyone living in America today is subjected to a constant onslaught of inputs from someone who wants to influence our mind, adjust our attitude, or control our behavior. In Tucker Carlson’s newly launched streaming website, he reveals that “News coverage in the west has become a tool of repression and control. Journalists act as censors on behalf of entrenched power…they hate the truth.” Institutions we used to rely upon to seek truth, such as schools and media, are now devoted to thought control and propaganda.
We are literally swimming around in a sea of misdirection, misinformation, propaganda, truth-bending, psychological coercion, and mind control. Those who are behind this know that you will eventually succumb; that is, if you haven’t deliberately constructed defensive ramparts in your thinking to protect your mind.
After all that you have invested in preparing your home and family to survive in extreme circumstances, have you given the same level of preparation to protecting your mind? Are you as equipped to recognize and resist the brainwashing to which you are most assuredly being subjected as you are equipped to survive a power outage? If you are vulnerable to someone controlling your mind, all your other preparations are in vain.
One might say, “I’m too smart and firm in my convictions to be brainwashed.” But consider this oft-quoted Bible verse: “Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall”. Often the most easily brainwashed individuals are very intelligent and idealistic. We are all human, and the human mind operates by certain rules. Those who are trained to coerce and control know how to use a subject’s intelligence, ego, and biology to build a trap that is nearly impossible to avoid or escape. Intelligence and conviction are not enough to guard against modern coercion techniques; one must be trained to recognize and resist specific brainwashing techniques.
This six-part article will unveil examples of many of the commonly used brainwashing methods. The tactics that this article will summarize are loosely organized within four major categories: isolation, fear, deception, and paralysis. Along the way, I will provide actual cases where particular techniques are used. All examples are real and true, and references are provided along the way when necessary. If a fact is unreferenced, then it is readily available in the public domain. (While some of the examples demonstrate extreme use of mind control techniques in situations that may not relate to your life, don’t be fooled into thinking that similar techniques couldn’t be used on you in more subtle ways that do relate to you.) Hopefully, surveying the major mind control techniques available to bad actors will give you greater foresight when they are used on you.
At the end of the article, we will explore some ways to guard against mind control attacks over and above simply being aware of the commonly used methods. In the meantime, let’s begin our survey of techniques by examining the impact of isolation, and the types of isolation that can be used in coercion and brainwashing.
ISOLATION
All of us make meaning and form our thoughts and opinions based on inputs from our surroundings. Those surroundings might include physical information, such as sunlight and temperature. They might include chemical information, such as our blood sugar level, drugs in our system, or the amount of protein in our system. They might include social inputs, such as a conversation with a loved one, watching the news, or acceptance from others. To be isolated from these and other inputs will disorient us, decrease our ability to take in and analyze the information we need to process what is going on, and make us more susceptible to suggestions from someone who wants to control us. See how many types of isolation you can identify in the following case study of a young man recruited by a cult.
Case Study: Use of Isolation to Groom and Retain a Cult Recruit
Sandy was an intelligent, capable, healthy 29-year-old male. He went to a good college, grew up in a normal family, didn’t drink or use drugs. He enjoyed reading, and considered himself more insightful than most people around him. Since graduating from college, he had found steady employment; but nothing that was particularly demanding of his own sense of giftedness. One day, while perusing books at a local bookstore, he saw a flyer for a book club that was reading and discussing an obscure author of interest to him.
Sandy began to attend the book club regularly. He made friends easily with the other members in the group. He thought it a little odd that they asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement when he began, but he accepted their explanation of how nobody outside the book club would really appreciate the type of thinking that occurred during the meetings; and people needed to feel ‘safe’ to expose their thoughts without fear of having them become public. With each meeting, Sandy found a new energy from the people in the club; finally he has come in contact with people who understand him and appreciate his unique intellect. Sandy felt that he finally was ‘on track’. His appetite for the readings increased; soon he spent most of his time outside of work in some form of research that related to the book club.
After a few weeks of the meetings, the facilitator of the book club approached Sandy. The facilitator was impressed by Sandy’s insight. He hadn’t seen anyone like Sandy for a long time, and wouldn’t he like to join the facilitator during an upcoming retreat. It was only one day, but they would delve more deeply into the reading, and explore related topics with like-minded people. Sandy attended the retreat and thoroughly enjoyed the energy, intensity, and acceptance he experienced there. It was an easy decision to join the facilitator on a second retreat two weeks later. It was at this retreat where the regional leader met Sandy, and told him about a type of training that a few, carefully chosen people are allowed to attend. It would require living on site, at a location owned by the group who sponsored the book club, out of state.
Sandy decided that this was the opportunity of a lifetime. Somehow, he felt as though he was ‘called’ to such a ‘work’, and that it was a way to engage his talents and participate in something larger than himself. As he prepared to move to the new location, the group leaders reiterated the importance of not telling people outside of the group what exactly he was doing, that they would not understand the larger picture, and the importance of the ‘work.’ With jubilation, Sandy quit his job, sold his few belongings, and moved to Arizona, where the training was located.
Days at the training facility were full. They worked in the fields together, ate together, and read and discussed readings together. Sandy felt energized beyond belief when the people he cared about flooded him with approval, but would become depressed when he was later chastised and humiliated by the same people. As a consequence of the demanding schedule, heavy reading list, and the agitation he felt from the on-off nature of feeling accepted, he slept only a few hours each night. Only upon reflection years later did Sandy become aware that he was being starved of free time to think about what was happening to him. He was being starved of information from the outside world. He was being starved of sleep, and normal social interaction. And he was being starved to death from a lack of protein in his diet.
Sandy remained on the site for ten years. One winter night, some compulsion for self-preservation deep inside got him out of bed to walk away from his dorm, away from the group, across a desert, and along a remote road, only to be picked up and returned to civilization. Sandy is alive today, but scarred from the decade of brainwashing and abuse.
There were many types of isolation that Sandy experienced. A brainwashing subject can be physically isolated, which is disorienting and pushes a subject to take in new inputs to define the world around them. They can be socially isolated, so they are limited in their ability to process their surroundings verbally, and can shift their values to be accepted by the only people around them. This is particularly true when the subject is removed from loved ones with whom they would normally process what is going on in the world. They can be “love bombed”, to experience intense rejection when they display the wrong thoughts, and then flooded with praise and comfort when they demonstrate the target behavior or thoughts. They can be isolated from healthy conditions, such as adequate sleep or nutrition (especially protein). Or they can be isolated by induced dependence by having to rely on captors for food, schedule, exercise, news, or social contact with humans.
A brainwashing subject can be isolated in their ability to form their own thoughts. For example, if a prospective cult member is chastised whenever they say something that identifies a trait in themselves, or some unique ability, but is praised and affirmed when they accept the group’s definition of them, they begin to depend on the group for their identity. The individual loses their ability to define who they are, and the group or authority takes on that power.
The practice of publicly confessing wrongs creates an implicit psychological leverage upon the brainwashed subject and increases the sense of isolation. Without need for mention, the confessions create a silent threat that the confessions can be used against the subject at some point in the future, or that people in the group are the only people who understand the subject at such a confidential level.
Isolation amplifies the power of suggestion. When a subject is lonely and disoriented, a comforting person with an understanding tone will be able to easily manipulate the subject.
Our need for social contact and affirmation is so powerful that a skilled practitioner can bend our mind or redirect our behavior–if we are first isolated. But isolation is usually only one component of the influencer’s arsenal, let’s examine the second major category of techniques used to control your thoughts.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 2.)