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About a fifth of the economic activity in the USA is brainwashing. And quite a bit of other activity, such as most consumer internet services, exist to facilitate this brainwashing.
(Tongue in cheek reference to marketing/advertising.)
No tongue in cheek.
paul draper, is this normative determinism?
Whose tongue? And whose cheek?
Hey I’d love to hear more, if only you could provide something that backs up your claim.
Here's the industry's claim. Of course, given the nature of the industry, it's probably misleading at best and intended to alter your thinking to align better with their interests.
Just to be clear, what you claim is actually two things:
- advertising is ~1/5th of US economy (backed with facts)
- all advertising is brainwashing (your personal opinion)That's the entire point, right?
Pay money to an ad agency and they will affect the thoughts of your target demographic.
Maybe its benign brainwashing, or you'd choose a different word because brainwashing has a lot of connotations. But that is factually what it's trying to do
Affecting the thoughts of other humans is close to the purpose of all inter-human communication. Consider the following cases:
- Your neighbor knows you need a new table and their brother sells tables so they tell you about it and offer you a special deal.
- Your daughter is an avowed pacifist who tries very hard to convince you that you should move your family to another country and stop paying taxes to one that is currently waging a war.
- Your son really hates broccoli and pleads with you to make carrots for dinner side instead.
- A company that makes packaged dessert foods pays theaters to covertly insert subliminal imagery into film reels designed to make viewers crave their food.
- A group takes over a rural commune and recruits people from broken homes, convincing them to become sex slaves and take part in ritual suicide pacts over the course of many years of sophisticated psychological manipulation and isolation techniques.
- A charistmatic totalitarian politician spends years on the stump gradually convinging a voting majority of what used to be a liberal democracy that directing all national production toward warfare, attempting to conquer their entire continent, and exterminating an entire race of nationless people is the only way forward for human progress.
Are all of these activities morally equivalent? Does it make sense to call all of them by the same term? Or does that decrease, rather than increase, the usefulness with which we can discuss these kinds of things?
That said, I can't disagree that 20% of a national economy being devoted to marketing and advertising seems unlikely to be a socially optimal allocation of economic activity.
yeah, fair. I posted in a sibling comment two more reasons imo. advertising fits with brainwashing, namely that it:
Is done scientifically and at huge scale by powerful entities
& is non-consentual, almost everyone would rather not see ads or internalize their ideas. (Coors beer is cool and if you drink it women will like you more, yuck, who wants to believe that)
But yeah, you're right that just influencing thoughts is not the only part of the definition. And really past a certain point anything is impossible to define, so these arguments are always a little weird. Eg. I challenge you to give an airtight definition of what is a chair.
Calling advertizment brainwashing is certainly a little provocative, & in my opinion perfectly correct given the scale and goals. But I can see how it can be annoying in retrospect. Glad we agree that spending that much on it is sad
This loosens the definition of the word "brainwashing" so much that the term becomes meaningless.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brainwashing:
brainwashing - noun
1. a forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas
2. persuasion by propaganda or salesmanshipThe term IS meaningless, there is no clear distinction between "brainwashing", "education", "marketing", "propaganda" and "convincing". Except that the first term was coined as war propaganda, so that you could say that people was brainwashed by your enemy instead of admitting that your enemy convinced those people. This also helps you to brainwa... I mean, to convince your citizens that your enemy is very evil and those people brainwashed by them could also be seen as bewitched drones, not fully human beings.
I've added some more in a sibling comment, but I really don't think the methods used by advertisers are much different than state progapaganda or cults.
That's also factually what you're trying to do right now, and what I'm trying to do back at you, but maybe we should call it "communicating" in this instance. Because brainwashing has a lot of connotations. That don't apply. You see.
fine- here's two more ways it fits:
advertising is non-consensual, almost everyone would rather not see ads and not internalize its ideas
advertising is precise and scientific, it is done by powerful groups at large scale
and truthfully, if this comment was part of an astroturfing campaign by an agency if have no problem calling it a brainwashing attempt. or call it something else, its all semantics. murder if you're mad, loss of life if you're not sort of thing
I find this dictionary definition quite fitting: "2. any method of controlled systematic indoctrination, especially one based on repetition or confusion"
Then you didn't find definition 1 quite fitting.
Not as snugly.
"a method for systematically changing attitudes or altering beliefs," fits very well. "originated in totalitarian countries" not so much, and "especially through the use of torture, drugs, or psychological-stress techniques" very little, although it's an "especially", so not a required feature.
The "originated in totalitarian countries" is a bit odd requirement for my taste. Of course, if one wants to use that definition, then by definition even "a method for systematically changing attitudes or altering beliefs the use of torture, drugs, or psychological-stress techniques" is not brainwashing if it doesn't originate from a country that is defined as totalitarian with some definition.
If you want to see effective brainwashing, you need to look for instances where Pavlovian conditioning and enhanced states of suggestion (essentially “hypnosis”, but think of the clinical definition, rather than stage performance tropes) are combined over the course of years in a way that self reinforces the thoughts to be held. Works best when the person is offered something that they think they need (validation, community, sexual release, security) and if the person is already or can be isolated from interfering peers.
Basically look at what cults do, though it doesn’t even need a machiavellian mastermind involved, people can and will accomplish the same largely by their own initiative. This is what happens when you get online communities radicalizing themselves.
A simpler example is to look at advertisements, which are a more acceptable form of propaganda. For example TV ads. A lot of what they say is a kind of fuzzy forgettable nonsense, but really pay attention to the underlying message of the ad and the techniques they use.
there's a fine line between brainwashing, propaganda, and meaningful communication which motivates and drives us (and ideals and so on)
Isn’t that the point of irregular warfare though? To blur those fine lines via disinformation and infighting.
Peter Schweizer's great book Blood Money goes into the current state of the art with TikTok (and a bunch of other stuff).
Peter Schweizer's job is to brainwash the populace. The book is part of that job.
Explain?
Excellent book.
Compare the use of RLF's lines in Telefon (1977) as an example of The Paranoid Style in American Po^H^HCinema:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
SNL's Stefon character on this article:
"This one has everything:
AI, ALAMY, America, American, American GIs, American Mind, Annalee Newitz, Atlanta, Birkbeck, Brain, Brainwashed, Brainwashing, Buddhist, California, Canadians, Catholics, Central Intelligence Agency, China, Chinese, Church Committee, CIA, Cold War, Colin Dickey, Communists, Confucian, Cybernetics, Dark Persuasion, David Seed, Dianetics, Dickey, Dimsdale, Donald Cameron, Douglas Fields, Dwight D Eisenhower, Edward Hunter, For Liang, Frank Schwable, Frank Sinatra, Hidden Persuaders, Hikvision, Homeland Security, Hong Kong, Hong Kong University, Hungarian, Intelligence Activities, Iron Curtain, Ivan Pavlov, Joel Dimsdale, Joost Meerloo, Juliette Kayyem, Kathleen Taylor, Korea, Korean War, L. Ron Hubbard, Lavrentiy Beria, Liang Qichao, Liverpool, London, LSD, Marcia Holmes, Maryland, McGill University, Meerloo, Merrill Root, Military, Mindszenty, Mitchell, MK-Ultra, Montreal, Myth, National Portrait Gallery, National Security Council, Nature, Norbert Wiener, NSC, Online, Operation Midnight Climax, Operations Coordinating Board, OSS, Other, Over, Patty Hearst, Pavlov, Policy, POW's, Power, Psychological Warfare, Psychopolitics, Quanta, Red China, Republic, Russians, Ryan Mitchell, San Diego San Francisco, Scientists, Scientology, Secret Societies, Senator Frank Church, Shirley Chong, Sidney Gottlieb, Soviet Union, State, Stories Are Weapons, Strategic Services, Study Governmental Operations, Symbionese Liberation Army, The Dutch, The Manchurian Candidate, The Science, They, Thought Control, Time Magazine, Today, Tom Burrell, UCSD, United States, University, US, US Senate, US Senate Select Committee, Wayne Williams, West, Western, Wikimedia Commons, William Randolph Hearst, World War III, Worried, Xinjiang, You..."
:-) <g> :-)
https://www.google.com/search?q=snl+stefon
Disclaimer: Submitted for comedy purposes only! :-) <g> :-)
Related (how I generated the above word list from the article text):
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/671487/grep-to-extr...
The author seems not merely uninformed but a mix of unaware and unconcerned that they don’t know what they’re talking about. No discussion of hypnosis, Stockholm syndrome, and a general vibe that psychology is like not really a thing unless it coincides with cherished narratives. And then little chestnuts like, “the idea of brainwashing continues to be a powerful metaphor for the effects of systemic racism.” Say what?
The article literally refers to the case for which Stockholm Syndrome is named and offers a simple explanation; that torture and privation work to align a person's goals and motivations to minimise pain.
I'm not sure what you are finding so contentious about this article. We have accepted that people under torture will admit to anything for centuries.
The article doesn't refer to that incident, so far as I can see. It does mention Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped a year after the Stockholm bank robbery.
The term "Stockholm Syndrome" originates from a police consultant inventing a syndrome to diagnose a woman he had never met, in order to discredit her criticism of the largely incompetent police response to her and several other people being taken hostage by a bank robber.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stockholm-...
They just did a documentary on the bank robbery, and as you watch it you get "Stockholm Syndrome," too. The West is just addicted to narratives of mind control and bewitchment, and people are easily convinced that any deviation from the designated norm is the result of evil forces taking control of people's wills through mysterious methods.
Africa has a very similar problem. Where Anglo-Europeans think that all deviant behavior is caused by mind control (by demons, Jews, Russians, alcohol, marijuana, the Chinese, Cambridge Analytics, etc.), large parts of Africa believe that all illness is the result of curses. When somebody gets sick and dies, they start looking for witches to kill.
I gave one quote that is an example of the lack of thought, here’s another,
“by spending millions of dollars on research into manipulating the human brain. But while the science never exactly panned out, residual beliefs fostered by this bizarre conflict continue to play a role”
In what sense did the science “not pan out”?
What “residual beliefs” could she mean? The text implies that it’s the idea that the human brain cannot be manipulated.
Almost every sentence has that level of inanity and incoherence. Advertising meanwhile is a billion dollar industry built on manipulating brains.
This appears to be an overview article, just touching on a lot of subjects. Not a deep dive of any particular one. If they gave all the details of every idea in the article it would be 10x longer.
I would think for the 'deep dive' with details and citations, they want you to buy the book. This is just a teaser.
"Annalee Newitz is the author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, coming in June 2024."
>But Hunter wasn’t just a reporter, objectively chronicling conditions in China. As he told the assembled senators, he was also an anticommunist activist who served as a propagandist for the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services—something that was considered normal and patriotic at the time. His reporting blurred the line between fact and political mythology.
Err...: http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/progress/venona.html
I get that expecting truly quality research work from Technology Review is an eggs-in-moonshine level fantasy, but it'd be nice to employ literally one editor who has read literally any of MIT's greatest researchers with all the ivy league cash they spend on fancy robots or buildings or whatever else.