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.
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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.
A North Korean at Columbia University
Jordan Peterson talks with Yeonmi Park on his YouTube blog.
As one high-raking North Korean defector put it: “[O]ur General’s life is a continuous series of blessed miracles, incapable of being matched even by all our mortal lifetimes put together.” Because of the total monopoly of the Kim dynasty-centric narrative, every North Korean’s life unfolds within a drastically circumscribed and impoverished reality. The ludicrous fantasies that smother North Korean culture in a stultifying miasma seem obviously nonsensical, but let’s not be too quick to believe that we in the ‘free world’ are not also in danger of our own insidious forms of psychologically flattening indoctrination.
This awkward truth has become especially clear to me recently through watching the Canadian academic, psychologist, and best-selling author Jordan Peterson’s podcasts on YouTube. Peterson is a controversial figure, and many on what he likes to dub the ‘radical left’ disdain him because his comments have been too easily picked up by the so-called ‘alt-right’ and made to sound racist and sexist. As far as I can tell, Peterson is genuinely trying to plough a straight furrow between extremes, appealing to scientifically verifiable data and common sense. But this is not a time to be ploughing such furrows, nor is his conviction that scientific data speaks ‘objectively’ for itself unproblematic, not least because all to often Peterson seems to smuggle in his own strongly subjective opinions under the cover of assertion that ‘the data speaks for itself.’ Maybe he is just doomed to fail, became this is a time of polarization, and however well-meaning his attempts to draw attention to the more extreme consequences of cultural relativism, Peterson cannot avoid being co-opted. For example, it is clear that one of the platforms he has opted for and utilizes obsessively – the YouTube blog – is inherently polarizing, and nuanced positions like his simply cannot be maintained once large audiences engage with them.
Many of the people Paterson interviews tell him stories of how core cultural institutions like the university and the press within which they work have become ideologically entrenched, and are now dominated by the new puritan zealots of what is dubbed ‘Wokeism’ , that is, dominated by people who embrace the sanctity of diversity, inclusivity, and equity above all else, and ironically often pursue these goals with overtly intransigent, aggressively adversarial, and condescending zeal. As an academic working in South Korea, I feel distanced from the culture war raging in the West, and it’s hard for me to believe that what Peterson warns about really is so threatening to the future of the open society. But a recent interview made me really sit up. In it Peterson talked with Yeonmi Park, a young woman (born 1993) who escaped from North Korea and subsequently wrote a book about her experience entitled In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom (2015)
What Park went through is harrowing. Her life as a child in North Korea was a brutal struggle for survival, but nevertheless she managed to escape to China when she was a teenager. But once she and her mother got there they were immediately enslaved – sold to Chinese farmers who were in need of wives. Eventually, after much more suffering, in which she contemplated suicide, Park arrived in Seoul, and through sheer determination completed her high school education in record time and then went on to university. She talked to Peterson of the importance for her of George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, which made her aware of the extent to which the North Korean system had robbed her not just of freedom but also of possibilities inherent in the very concept of freedom. For Orwell recognized that the surest way to control the minds of people is to control the language they use. If they don’t know how the word ‘freedom’ can be used, what it can mean, then they won’t know that they lack it. For ‘freedom’ is an abstraction that only becomes real through the deployment of tangible analogies and metaphors. If these tangible references are corralled into a controlled and circumscribed narrative, then the abstraction exists only in relation to the key actors within that narrative, which in the case of North Korea is only one: the Kim dynasty narrative. So, freedom as a concept is only understandable in relation to the dominant Kim narrative, where it comes to mean something very different from how we think of it. In this way, and also through the more punitive expedient of keeping people hungry in the provinces, the North Korean system systematically reduces its citizens to ox-life compliance.
Inspired by Orwell and other such cultural lighthouses in the West, Park ended up enrolling at Columbia University in New York, and it was what she said about her experience there that was an especially surprising and dreadfully demoralizing part of the Peterson interview. For she had concluded that her three years of study were a complete waste of time. Why? Because she found not the support, encouragement, and an invitation to explore the open society but rather a terrible closing down of the intellectual mind. All her humanities’ professors – all – were in such thrall to the political correctness of diversity, inclusivity, equity advocacy that they displayed a pervasively antagonistic attitude to Western society that deeply alienated Park. She mentioned how one female professor chided her for allowing a man to open a door for her, and when Park insisted that she believed he had done so in good faith, the professor insisted that Park was sadly brainwashed by the patriarchy. Park had come to Columbia in order to continue to reap the benefits of cultural emancipation, and instead she found the intellectual elite in the West had lost faith in the very culture of which she had enthusiastically and gratefully placed her own faith as a bone fide life-saver.
You could plainly see in the interview how ashamed Peterson felt about Park’s disappointment. I felt ashamed too. Here was a young women who had gone through hell, and, against impossible odds, and fired by an appetite for freedom and knowledge, had got to study at Columbia. Here was a young woman whose will to survive was fired by faith in an at first inchoate and then copiously corroborated benefits of the broadly humanistic values of the open society, values she had come to believe were universally binding beyond the nightmarish reality of North Korea, only to find that the most coddled intellectual elite of the West, who have had no experience of the deprivations Park was born into, patronizingly informed her that she should realize above all else that the West is systemically racist, sexist, and predicated on the arbitrary exercise of power.
This manic compulsion amongst elite intellectuals to criticize and condemn is being stoked by many factors. I think Yeonmi Park’s disappointment should make us consider what role is being played by the extreme contrast between her own awful early life experience and the lives of the tenured radicals who felt justified in preaching at her. Could it be that these intellectuals feel guilty about their privilege, and that they try to hide the fact by taking up the cause of the oppressed and pushing their critique to an extreme?
Could it also be that their sheltered existence, their good fortune in living in a society that, despite the terrible injustices and inequalities that certainly exist, has been remarkably peaceful in their lifetime, has made them lose any sense of what is at stake in denigrating their culture to the extent they do? In lambasting humanism and baying for revolutionary change they betray the extent to which they lack personal experience of how fragile is the civilization that cossets and protects them. It’s easy to advocate revolution from an armchair one has never been thrown out of.
The phenomenon of cultural polarization also signals the overwhelming tribalism of human sociality, even of its elites. Individual member of a socially integrated group do not want to risk breaking rank on fear of being accused of the unforgiveable, and getting ostracised. Another of Peterson’s interviewees told a very sad story of her suspension with pay from a tenured position at a Canadian university because of what, on the face of it, were very innocuous comments made on her blog that drew ire from a few students as racist and sexist. The fact that the person accused is a female Muslim immigrant from Lebanon should give one pause for thought. It seems that within the present climate, the most dangerous figures are those cast as heretics, that is, those who should be content and grateful to follow the dominant line but refuse to do so.. What was especially disheartening was that none of this woman’s colleagues have publicly come out in her support. What cowardice! In this context, the ‘scapegoating mechanism’, as the cultural critic René Girard, terms it, which I discussed in a previous blog, is also an important causative factor. In times of crisis, groups seek to shift their anxieties onto a nominated ‘guilty’ party, which then carries and carries way their anxiety through being sacrificed. As Girard notes, for the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ to work, the accusers must be totally convinced of their scapegoat’s guilt, who when viewed from outside the dynamics of the mechanism, is seen for what it really is: an innocent sacrifice.
But to understand why no one wants to break ranks we need to delve deeper that just fear of being ostracised or being made a scapegoat. A more systemic or deep structural way of explaining the situation seems to me to be to view Park’s story as an individual instance, a particularly dramatic instance, of a much more generally pervasive and longstanding cultural phenomenon in the West. What I mean is that Park’s life is in a sense a speeded-up version of what the sociologist Max Weber recognized as the central drive of modernity on the level of values and meaning: disenchantment. In a decade, and on a very personal level, Park has gone through what our society as a whole went through over a period of at least two centuries. We can consider her as experiencing on a very personal level in a decade or so the entire Enlightenment ‘project,’ in the sense that she emerged from the darkness of prejudice and superstitious into the light of reason.
But this is not where the heroic ‘project’ ends. The process of disenchantment is like a tidal wave that gathers force as it demolishes traditions and beliefs, and the logic of disenchantment is actually perpetual disenchantment. In other words, continual and relentless critique. It is therefore inevitable that values and beliefs will be continuously overturned. As loyal heirs to modernity in the cultural realm the intellectual elite in the university and elsewhere must therefore continue the struggle of critique, even though it will eventually involve devouring their own children, because this loyalty is to the ‘not yet’, to a deep sense that the world as it is always deficient.
When seen in this light, Park is still intellectually at the stage the intellectuals in the West were at over one hundred years ago. She believes in humanist universalism, just like most of the intellectual elite once did. But for those most unreflectively committed to the ‘project’, this belief was just a way-station, because it was actually premised on the deeper impulse to critique and reject, which was initially directed at the pre-scientific religious worldview and the values of the pre-industrial aristocratic hierarchy. But the logic of disenchantment mandates a process of endless critique., something that was most evident first in Marxism, and then later transmuted into the critical impulse became enshrined in ‘post-structuralism’ or ‘postmodernism’, and now is encapsulated in ‘Wokeism’.
This is the logic of critique as a mode of historical consciousness, and it means that while the hinge of the critique may today be identity and diversity-inclusivity-equity, this is not actually what is really driving the protests. For the underlying motivation is disenchantment as a belief system, a mode consciousness, as guiding principle. In this sense, one could even argue that it really doesn’t matter what is being ‘disenchanted,’ because what is important is the will to disenchant, whose logical end can only be the tabula rasa – the blank slate. Only when there is nothing left to disenchant can the process cease. If this sounds nihilistic, that’s because it is. In this sense, however justifiable the struggle for justice may be it also conceals an underlying nihilistic will to reach a tabula rasa. Wokeism should really be called ‘Blank Slate-ism.’ This is certainly not to deny that obviously justifiable grounds exist for confronting social iniquity, but what I am arguing is that there can be an underlying dynamic to such protests that lies within a deep cultural phenomenon - a historical consciousness - which effectively turns the protest for justice into a cultural Terminator. Yeonmi Park has refused to adopt this next stage in the logic of disenchantment for obvious reasons. She is still in the first flush of a prior disenchantment, having freed herself from North Korean ideology. Will she resist the subsequent stages? Much depends on what kind of intellectual community she choses, who she admires. But it seems fair to say that it won’t be a community consisting of Columbia University professors.
A final reason for the stance adopted by increasing numbers of our intellectual elite is defensive and perversely therapeutic. This is a n age pervaded by an extreme sense of vulnerability caused by a confluence of factors over which we have very little control. Above all, ecological disaster poses a vastly more dangerous threat to humanity than the problems that Wokeism draws attention. When viewed in this context, the controversies over identity politics look like powerfully compelling distractions from a far more fundamental crisis, one which we have really no idea how to confront.
I end today’s post with a quote from Jonathan Lear’s book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006):
We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world –terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes—have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today –from all points on the political spectrum. It is as though, without insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it (p.7).