In September 1950, a new term was born: brainwashing. It conjures to mind the image of scrubbing the brain of argument and impressing one’s own ideas upon another person.
The term comes from an article published by Edward Hunter, a man who worked in wartime intelligence and for the CIA. He impressed a fear onto the American public that brainwashing was being perfected by enemy states. A new context existed in which one could be impressed with the ideas of anyone. While he conceded that the issue had already existed, Hunter thought that the slurry of new ideology, technology, and psychological breakthroughs would lead to more advanced and effective brainwashing.
By this time, the American people had been primed by literature. “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley pictured a future that held people captive by inoffensive entertainment and drugs. George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” imagines a government held in place by war, surveillance, and ignorance.
Apart from literature, many studies of both Nazi and Soviet propaganda had been put out. During World War II, both sides had used propaganda schemes to help with morale and public opinion. Within these studies, a clinical eye was turned towards the Nazi regime’s recasting of the population. They used the term “gleichschaltung,” or consolidation, to convey their ambition to redo society.
The goal of the Nazi party was to wipe out the idea of opposition in the eyes of the public. They wanted to achieve harmonization. One might draw parallels to “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and the elimination of opposition in language as a whole.
At the same time, new techniques for brain surgery and electroshock therapy were being developed. By the 1950s, some surgeons claimed to use lobotomies to cure serious mental illnesses. Some worried that if medicine could cure mental illness and have jurisdiction over the brain, it could also pacify society into something void of new, progressive ideas.
Hunter thought that the American people were in danger and had to know how to protect themselves. Despite this, he was concerningly vague, calling brainwashing “more akin to witchcraft with its incantations, trances, poisons and potions.”
Knowledge is powerful, so Hunter proposed that ignorance is what enables brainwashing. So, an educated society would be armed against brainwashing.
Today, brainwashing has less of a physical connotation than in earlier decades. Many people use brainwashing to refer to any change of mind we dislike. A cult’s members may have been brainwashed into doing something terrible. A religion someone disagrees with might be considered brainwashing.
Looking into Jonestown, an infamous site of a mass cult suicide, we find that maybe it’s members weren’t brainwashed. One day, after a US senator came to visit, the members of the People’s Temple drank poisoned Kool-Aid and all died. Some think they were brainwashed into drinking the Kool-Aid out of blindness to the true plot. In reality, anyone who refused to drink the Kool-Aid was held at gunpoint until they drank it.
This might be considered peer pressure, not brainwashing. Someone at a party might feel pressured by their environment to do drugs. A soldier might believe they are doing a service to their country or be subject to pressure from their superiors. Despite the fact that we don’t think people should do drugs or kill people, we don’t call these things brainwashing. This might be because we think of these as more natural parts of life while something like Jonestown is a cult and unnatural.
Some might call propaganda a form of brainwashing, the billboard outside or the flyers handed out to your door might convince you of something you don’t want to be convinced of. It harkens back to those novels: “Nineteen Eighty-Four” uses information to control the masses. In fact, many extreme anti-vaccine people compared the federal response to COVID-19 to “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” thinking that the government would brainwash everyone with vaccines and limited contact.
In reality, brainwashing is not a helpful term. We use it to describe something more akin to coercion. Coercion can be used to describe something physical like a gun at Jonestown or something mental like the peer pressure at a party to drink.
The term gathers fear of believing things you didn’t agree with before. It puts down constructive conversations as a way to “brainwash” people into doing wrong. We need to move away from these unhelpful terms and ideas, and move towards a society that doesn’t apply these terms to ideas and actions we dislike.
