My essay in the Federalist today is about Americans’ woeful ignorance of the techniques of brainwashing. Click here to read: “Cults in Our Midst: Patty Hearst and the Brainwashing of America.” My take is that it’s been exactly 40 years since Patty Hearst stunned the nation by robbing a bank with her radical comrades from “The Symbionese Liberation Army,” two months after they kidnapped and brainwashed her.
They started the way any bully or cult leader pushes an agenda: by isolating the individual and separating the person from all relationships the aggressor can’t control. Political correctness depends on this sort of thing. It’s a program of behavior modification through language control. It seeks to impose language that vilifies people who don’t conform so that they are separated and isolated from others. (You know the drill: “bigot,” etc.)
Interestingly, the term “brainwashing” has become politically incorrect. We should ask ourselves: Why? The term simply comes from the Chinese/Maoist expression “hse nao” which means to “wash the brain” so that other thoughts can be programmed into it. Is the word politically incorrect because it’s a false concept? No. It’s politically incorrect because it is true. It’s very real.
If Americans understood the processes and techniques of coercive persuasion, they’d become more immune to them. Political correctness would lose its hold, just as a magician’s tricks lose their appeal when you see them exposed.
Here are some brief excerpts from my essay, which I hope you’ll read:
In a sense, political correctness, though more subtle, is analogous to the dark closet in which Patty Hearst was isolated, blindfolded, and incessantly propagandized. It serves to silence us and create the conditions in which the arbiters of correctness can tear down the old world view and rebuild it in their image. We’re told being one of them is to be morally superior, on the right side of history. Those who oppose it are labeled, repeatedly and loudly: bigot, racist, homophobe.
In Cults in our Midst, Singer warned that cult techniques “should be studied and revealed so that citizens can be taught countermeasures in order to avoid being exploited by such groups.” She also cautioned: “The psychotechnology of thought reform is not going to go away… Education, information and vigilance are constantly needed if we are to keep us, and our minds, free.”
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