Freeing the Mind, North Korea style

A North Korean with her smart phone.

Because I live so near to North Korea –  from my roof I can see its mountains on the other side of the DMZ - it’s difficult for me not to think often about that brutally repressive regime, a preoccupation reinforced by the fact that it is very skillful in keeping itself in the international news (most recently in relation to a failed attempt to launch a satellite).

One thing that especially interests me, and therefore has been the theme of several posts, is the extraordinary level of indoctrination the government of North Korea successfully engages in. The fundamental prerequisite for this success is the isolation of the nation.  This is both geographic and informational. Its closed physical and epistemological boundaries make possible a truly locally global control of the North Korean people’s minds.   

In this post I want to think some more about this mind control in the light of research coming from the neurosciences into the way we now believe the human brain works. This research draws attention to the astonishing - and not a little unsettling - fact  that our brains construct the perception we have of the self and of the world we inhabit. The success of the North Korean regime’s  crazy system of mind control is only possible because of something basic all humans all share.

*

What the brain does is figure out the causes of the sensory data in order to get a grip on its environment.  As the  multi-disciplinary researcher Shamil Chandaria, a recent guest on Sam Harris’ wonderful Making Sense podcast, puts it:  ‘most people’s common sense view is that we are looking out at the world from little windows at the front of our heads.  But in fact, we are just receiving electrical signals, and the brain has never seen reality as it actually is.’ In other words, we make inferences about the world.   We learn from all the data coming in, and infer what is going on, then generate internal simulations in the brain.

We simulate a picture of reality.  ‘If I think I am seeing a tree, I then simulate the sensory data  as if it was a tree’, says Chandaria.  The result is that the past shapes our future because the simulation is based on prior experience. We make “top down” predictions about our sensory inputs based on a model of how they were created.

Aa a result, ‘conscious experience is like a tunnel’, writes the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger in his book The Ego Tunnel. The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (2010) :

Modern neuroscience had demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: They evolved for reasons of survival, not for depicting the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Therefore, the on-going process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality. 

This ‘ego tunnel’ is a result of the need to adapt to survive in complex environments which required that humans evolved to limit and restrict the range of potential points of view or emotions, thereby restraining the endless possibilities of the senses. In other words, ‘tunnel vision’ is an intrinsic part of ‘normal’ conscious experience.

From the point of view of evolutionary success, we need information about our place within the environment and the likely outcomes of our actions. The principal goal of the brain is therefore to maintain homeostasis  - stable equilibrium within its environment. The most valuable states in terms of optimizing evolutionary adaptive success are therefore states that minimize surprise. It is vital for humans as adaptive agents to reduce the informational ‘surprise’ that is inevitably associated with our complex sensory engagements with the world, and reducing it enables the brain to resist the natural tendency toward  chaotic disorder (entropy).

The level of the surprise we experience, and our ability to limit it through making predictions about our sensations, depends on the robustness of the brain’s internal generative model or simulation of the world. The discrepancy between ‘top-down’ predictions and the actuality and accuracy of ‘bottom-up’ sensations is  called by neurologists ‘prediction error.’  These errors are minimized by converting prior beliefs and expectations, and these include not just what we sample from the world but also how the world is sampled.

The mental states that minimize surprise are those we most expect to frequent, and they are constrained by the form of the generative model we are using. In the field of neuroscience interested in what is know as ‘active inference’ , elements of environmental surprise are known as ‘free energy’. We minimize this energy by changing predictions and/or the predicted sensory inputs so as to resist the chaotic entropic forces suffusing the surprising. We revise inferences in the light of experience, updating ‘priors’ - memories - to reality-aligned ‘posteriors’, optimizing the complexity of our generative model of the world. ‘Free energy’ is thereby converted into ‘bound energy’.

The process through which we simulate past experience and ensure posterior beliefs align with newly sampled data is  called in probability theory ‘Bayesian inference’ (after the theorem of eighteenth century statistician of that name). The ‘Bayesian brain’ is understood as an inference engine that aims to optimize probabilistic representations of what causes any given sensory input. Prediction error in relation to input is minimized by action and perception. Acting on the world reduces errors by selectively sampling sensations that are the least surprising. Perceptions are changed by belief updating, thereby changing  internal states. The results are more reality-consonant predictions. If they are not updated, our predictions will not be consonant with reality. On an individual level, this failure may be caused by some trauma, for example, and can then manifest pathologically.  But reality-dissonance can also happen on a group and societal level.

*

In this context, the North Korean system of mind control can be understood as a pathological inferential system that has exploited the profoundly human desire for homeostasis – for minimizing surprise. It aims to massively limit or bind the flow of ‘free energy’. But this means the obviously orchestrated and systematic ‘derangement’ of the North Korea people is only a very extreme case of something that is basic to how all humans make individual and collective sense of the world. As Chandaria notes: ‘You want a simulation that is as close to what you would normally expect before seeing the sensory data’. In the case of North Korea, the simulation is biased towards what the people have been conditioned to expect by  the ‘top-down’ inferences disseminated by the regime’s total control of information.

When considered in this light, the recent Covid-19 pandemic was a ‘gift’ to the regime. It allowed it to greatly increase levels of isolation and restriction, closing off the country more than ever before. There has also been a major increase in crackdowns and punishments on foreign media consumption. For example, the 2020 anti-reactionary thought law has made watching foreign media punishable by 15 years in prison camp. But one can see why it is so vital that the regime keeps such a tight hold on the media. As a major conduit of ‘top-down’ information – ‘free energy’ -  it is a threat to the homeostasis that guarantees the regime’s survival, the feeling of security manipulated by the regime in order to main its grip on power. One could say that it aims to ensure that any ‘bottom-up’ sensory input coming from the environment is conformed to the priors which are tightly controlled by the regime.

The Kim regime will stay in power as long as it maintains this monopoly on information flow.  It is obvious, however, that this degree of global surveillance and control is quite simply impossible in a globalized and networked world. It is inevitable that the wall behind which the flow of ‘free energy’ is held will eventually be breached. And then what?  

NOTES

Thomas Metzinger’s book, The Ego Tunnel is published by Basic Books: https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/0465020690/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3OCZZB2OB1HAG&keywords=The+Ego+Tunnel&qid=1686294457&sprefix=the+ego+tunnel%2Caps%2C242&sr=8-1

Sam Harris’ podcast with Shamil Chandaria is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXs0uQ6M5ow

For more on active Inference, ‘free-energy’ and the Bayesian brain’ see: Karl J. Friston’s essay: https://www.uab.edu/medicine/cinl/images/KFriston_FreeEnergy_BrainTheory.pdf

For applications of ‘free energy’ and the ‘Bayesian brain’ to psychology see: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00592/full

The photo at the top of this post is from the Liberty in North Korea website: https://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org/blog/foreign-media-in-north-korea-how-kpop-is-challenging-the-regime?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=LINK-Blog&gad=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw-IWkBhBTEiwA2exyOy0EHeTr-0GSGeyv5lme5qTpYicJtpGeILjqimauZJg53nMHkW4c1xoCdikQAvD_BwE

Brainwashed!

North Korean schoolchildren.

According to Google’s English dictionary, the term ‘brainwashing’ means ‘the process of pressuring someone into adopting radically different beliefs by using systematic and often forcible means.’ It dates from the early days of Chinese communism and the period of the Korean War (1950-53).  On March 11, 1951 the New York Times reported:  ‘In totalitarian countries the term “brainwashing” has been coined to describe what happens when resistance fighters are transformed into meek collaborators.’ But the word gained popular currency largely as a result of the experience of American Prisoners of War held by the Chinese during the Korean War, and in a previous post I mentioned the theory of ‘totalism’ developed by the American psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, a consequence of interviewing former American  PoWs who experienced Chinese ‘re-education’ practices. But Lifton used the more neutral-sounding term ‘thought reform’ rather than ‘brainwashing.’   

I recently came across this document, which is available on-line: a report commissioned in 1955 by the US Office of the Secretary of Defence, POW. The Fight Continues After the Battle. It directly addressed the experience of GI’s taken prisoner. On the topic of brainwashing or ‘thaught reform’ it stated:

When plunged into a Communist indoctrination mill, the average American POW was under a serious handicap. Enemy political officers forced him to read Marxian literature. He was compelled to participate in debates. He had to tell what he knew about American politics and American history. And many times the Chinese or Korean instructors knew more about these subjects than he did. This brainstorming caught many American prisoners off guard. To most of them it came as a complete surprise and they were unprepared. Lec­tures, study groups, discussion groups, a blizzard of prop­aganda and hurricanes of violent oratory were all a part of the enemy technique. 

A large number of American POWs did not know what the Communist program was all about. Some were confused by it. Self-seekers accepted it as an easy out. A few may have believed the business. They signed peace petitions and peddled Communist literature. It was not an inspiring spectacle. It set loyal groups against cooperative groups and broke up camp organization and discipline. It made fools of some men and tools of others. And it provided the enemy with stooges for propaganda shows. 

Ignorance lay behind much of this trouble. A great many servicemen were teen-agers. At home they had thought of politics as dry editorials or uninteresting speeches, dull as ditchwater.

But the report concluded:

The Committee made a thorough investigation of the "brain­ washing" question. In some cases this time consuming and coercive technique was used to obtain confessions. In these cases American prisoners of war were subjected to mental and physical torture, psychiatric pressures or "Pavlov Dogs" treat­ment. 

Most of the prisoners, however, were not subjected to brain­ washing, but were given a high-powered indoctrination for propaganda purposes. 

However, by this period the term ‘brainwashing’ was already being used in a more general sense to include such ‘high-powered indoctrination for propaganda purposes’, and the distinction the report makes is no longer so easy to sustain. Furthermore, the word was extended in the late 1950s to describe malign psychological influences in general, such as when consumers are duped through salesmanship and advertising into purchasing things they don’t need. This in its turn reflected the growing awareness of the power of the ‘hidden persuaders’ (the name of a bestselling book about advertising by Vance Packard, published in 1957) and the mass media to manipulate not just patterns of consumption but thoughts, attitudes, values and behaviour as a whole.

To bring the issue of brainwashing up to date, here is an extract from the memoir of the North Korean defector  Yeonmi Park, In Order To Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom (2016),  which I mentioned in  previous blog, where she talks about her experience at school in North Korea:   

In the classroom every subject we learned — math, science, reading, music — was delivered with a dose of propaganda.

Our Dear Leader Kim Jong Il had mystical powers. His biography said he could control the weather with his thoughts, and that he wrote fifteen hundred books during his three years at Kim Il Sung University. Even when he was a child he was an amazing tactician, and when he played military games, his team always won because he came up with brilliant new strategies every time. That story inspired my classmates in Hyesan to play military games, too. But nobody ever wanted to be on the American imperialist team, because they would always have to lose the battle.

………

In school, we sang a song about Kim Jong Il and how he worked so hard to give our laborers on-the-spot instruction as he traveled around the country, sleeping in his car and eating only small meals of rice balls. “Please, please, Dear Leader, take a good rest for us!” we sang through our tears. “We are all crying for you.”

This worship of the Kims was reinforced in documentaries, movies, and shows broadcast by the single, state-run television station. Whenever the Leaders’ smiling pictures appeared on the screen, stirring sentimental music would build in the background. It made me so emotional every time. North Koreans are raised to venerate our fathers and our elders; it’s part of the culture we inherited from Confucianism. And so in our collective minds, Kim Il Sung was our beloved grandfather and Kim Jong Il was our father.

Once I even dreamed about Kim Jong Il. He was smiling and hugging me and giving me candy. I woke up so happy, and for a long time the memory of that dream was the biggest joy in my life.

Jang Jin Sung, a famous North Korea defector and former poet laureate who worked in North Korea’s propaganda bureau, calls this phenomenon “emotional dictatorship.” In North Korea, it’s not enough for the government to control where you go, what you learn, where you work, and what you say. They need to control you through your emotions, making you a slave to the state by destroying your individuality, and your ability to react to situations based on your own experience of the world.

This dictatorship, both emotional and physical, is reinforced in every aspect of your life. In fact, the indoctrination starts as soon as you learn to talk and are taken on your mother’s back to the inminban meetings everybody in North Korea has to attend at least once a week. You learn that your friends are your “comrades” and that is how you address one another. You are taught to think with one mind.

 ………

In second grade we were taught simple math, but not the way it is taught in other countries. In North Korea, even arithmetic is a propaganda tool. A typical problem would go like this: “If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?”

But why do I mention ‘brainwashing’ now?  Because in today’s The Korea Herald there was an article by J. Bradford Delong, a former deputy assistant US Treasury secretary, and now professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley entitled ‘The summer of disaster.’ The ‘disaster’ Delong has in mind is not ecological. He referred to the COVID-19 pandemic and the devastation wrought by the new delta variant, but above all he was referring to what might be called a ‘cognitive’ disaster:  the impact of the brainwashing on large segments of the American population. Delong wrote:

 The message being blared by Fox News and most other right-wing outlets goes something like this:

‘Superman-President Donald Trump quarterbacked the incredibly successful Operation warp Speed project, which performed biotech mircales and created a highly effective vaccin against a disease that is just like the flu. But now, the vaccines are untested and unsafe. We should never have worn masks.

The virus is a Chinese bio-weapon funded bt Dr. Fauci, who constantly gave Trump bas advice about this gigantic hoax. The medical establishment is suppressing information about truly useful medications like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and hydrogen peroxide.’

As Delong continues:

If this conspiratorial word salad sounds crazy, consider the terrifying fact that around one-quarter of the Americn population apparently believes it (or at least some part of it). One-fifth of Americans think that the US government is using COVID-19 vaccination to implant microchips into their bodies. Tens of millions of Americans have found sufficient reason to un a 1 percent risk of death by refusing an extremely effective, extremely safe, widely available vaccine.

Consider the implications of this successful act of brainwashing. A country where malevolent, cynical media and political operatives can trigger such deep psychological fractures in a significant share of the population us extremely vulnerable to a wide range of threats. What will Americans fall for next?

As the official report into PoWs from 1955 quoted from above noted, the main contributory factor here is also ‘ignorance’, a lack of education, of the capacity for critical thinking.   But what Delong emphasises is the extent to which the powerful have a vested interest in keeping people ‘ignorant’, the better to manipulate them. The ‘high-powered indoctrination for propaganda purposes’ described by the 1955 report is very much in operation, and Delong specifically laments the role of the right-wing media.

Obviously, the extent of brainwashing in North Korea is far greater, and far more insidious and deadly, than anything going on in the United States. But Delong’s neat overview of the current  cultural polarization there, when seen in juxtaposition with Yeonmi Park’s memoir, should give us pause for thought, and remind us that if we want to get to the roots of brainwashing, or whatever you want to call it, it is necessary to go back well before people become viewers of Fox News or reach voting age.  In one way or another, the process of ‘high-powered indoctrination’ is in fact systemic in human society, in the sense that it pervades everyone’s life from the moment of birth, maybe even before, if one takes into account the impact of external influences on the unborn baby.   North Korea reveals this to a terrible degree, as Yeonmi Park’s story attests, but we should also turn spotlight around and see what is happening closer to home.

We can see very blatantly the important role played by  ‘ignorance’ in determining what people believe in the case of others – North Koreans, Republicans –  and easily forget how ‘high-pressure indoctrination’ also goes on in our own lives.  Now, I am by no means claiming there is some kind of parity between the trouble Yeonmi Park had at Columbia University - which I mentioned in previous posts - with what she experienced before her escape, although she was indeed led to ask whether she had simply freed herself from one form of especially cruel brainwashing in order to be exposed to another more insidious kind. Park’s confrontation with the ‘high-pressure indoctrination’ of of ‘political correctness’ or ‘wokeism’, or whatever you want to call it, of  experiencing a different  process  that involved being pressured into ‘adopting radically different beliefs by using systematic and often forcible means’, led Park to ask a very basic and tragic question: can we ever be free from these malign pressures to conform?  Of course, no one gets sent to a concentration camp for refusing to tow the politically correct line at Columbia. Maybe if they are a professor they will lose their teaching position. But we should surely be alert to the extent to which we are also brainwashed without being aware of it. We should acknowledge that when beliefs are  conducive to our own mindset we tend to be blind to where these beliefs came from and what they are doing to us.

*

So, why are we all so susceptible to brainwashing?

Consider the fact that for those who have brought into the narratives described by Park and Delong that for them this is reality.

In The Ego-Tunnel. The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (2009) the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger sums up what we now know about the human mind: 

Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: They evolved for reasons of survival, not for depicting the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Therefore, the on-going process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality.  

This means that essentially we exist in a ‘world simulation created by our brains,’ as Metzinger  puts  it. What does this ‘world simulation’ aim at?Because our minds have a limited capacity to process information we attempt to adopt strategies that simplify complex problems, and we are forever trying to conserve cognitive energy. This extends to all kinds of situations involving cognitive engagement. The dominant need at any time becomes the foreground ‘figure’, and the other needs recede, at least temporarily, into the background. For example, a person may be thinking about a particular relationship, which is then ‘figure’, but as soon as the focus is shifted to thoughts about a job, the job becomes ‘figure’.  Needs move in and out of the ‘figure - ground’ fields. After a need is met it recedes into the ‘ground’, and the most pressing need in the new gestalt then emerges from the ‘ground’ as a new ‘figure’.  In this way a particular need emerges, is met, and then directs a person's behavior. Normal, lucid consciousness is pre-disposed to accept a ‘ready-made’ gestalt, and generally, familiar configurations win out over the novel because cognitive value is understood to lie in repeatability and reliability. A ‘horizon’ of meaning limits what we can see, and what we can think.

In simple terms, this process aims to minimize fear and maximize hope. The Republican mindset is based on the awareness that hope is fundamental to the meaningful life, and  after their own fashion the fellow traveller has generated a ‘world simulation’ conducive to the expectation of a positive outcome. But obviously, hope  can all too easily be founded on  delusions, over-confidence, over-simplifications, errors of judgment, and  moral, practical, personal and collective failure.  A consoling narrative replaces the anxiety induced by random facts by the comfort of a coherent pattern, offering a solution to complex and intractable problems through flattening them into a clear narrative. The story requires only the most tenuous connection to actual facts in order to endure, and the  hope  it fosters is above all about assuaging anxiety and fear in the present, not about working towards credibly achievable goals in the future. The -  to us -  obviously delusional beliefs of many Republicans is ample evidence that hope does not need to be founded on a sound, reasoned assessment of the possibilities of a positive outcome. But they are an especially obvious and  worrying indication that nowadays it is becoming extremely difficult to feel hopeful through rational appeal to the facts in the ways that the ‘reality-based’ community considers essential.  

I mentioned ‘ignorance’ in relation to Republicans in a previous post, but perhaps a more apposite and neutral word to describe the dynamics of brainwashing is not so much  ‘ignorance’ as ‘narrative.’ For those of us located outside the compelling aura of  the stories described by Park and Delong it is easy to mock the naivety of the true believer. But aren’t we all in more or less in thrall to basically the same curious psychological deformation? Our mindset is usually based on a highly selective appraisal of available information, and on the very human capacity to overlook anything that risks challenging or contradicting the particular narrative of hope in which we have invested.