Susan Jacoby on Religious Cults
Susan Jacoby: OnFaith on washingtonpost.com
“Controlling” religious sects engage in brainwashing and apply severe social penalties to force members to do what free human beings normally find revolting.
Brainwashing??! Please!
It’s been fairly conclusively proven that there’s no such thing as “brainwashing”. People believe what they need to believe in order to live the life they want to — or must — live. All people. In all kinds of circumstances. And when the conditions of everyday life change, beliefs change accordingly in order to relieve cognitive dissonance.
Studies of Korean War prisoners* who had supposedly been “brainwashed” by their Chinese captors reveal that, after they had returned to civilian life in the United States, the great majority of those who had espoused communist sympathies while prisoners fairly quickly returned to their pre-war political beliefs.
Some “brainwashing”, eh? If the communist Chinese — the supposed masters of the craft — couldn’t permanently wash people’s brains, I very much doubt the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Scientologists would be more successful.
I’ll say it again: People believe what they need to believe in order to live the life they want to — or must — live.
One person’s “brainwashing” is another person’s “religious conversion”. The human brain is a whole lot more malleable than the outdated notion of “brainwashing” suggests.
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* For a brief description, see this article on the Bryn Mawr web site.
Posted by RebeccaHartong on September 19, 2007 under Uncategorized
I don’t agree with you. I think “brain washing” or thought reform or whatever term you want to use is very much legitimate. My husband and I were in a Bible-based cult for a number of years. I remember when I first started attending the Bible studies thinking, “I don’t believe what they believe.” At some point, I also remember total confusion about what I believed. During the last several years that I was a member, I had bought their belief system. It was only after leaving and regaining my cognitive abilities that I realized all of this.
I wrote a book, I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult, about my experience.
Are you familiar with Robert Lifton’s work?
Indeed I am familiar with Robert Lifton’s work. He’s one of the psychologists who have debunked the idea of “brainwashing”. I think perhaps you have confused Lifton’s ideas about “coercive thought reform” with “brainwashing”.
According to Lifton, “thought reform” that comes about through involvement with a manipulative group of some kind is only due to ongoing pressure to conform. There is no permanent change to a person’s basic personality and, once removed from the group’s influence, most people quickly return to their pre-involvement beliefs.
Your own experience confirms this.
“Brainwashing” implies permanent changes to a person’s basic personality and way of thinking. That didn’t happen to you.
You were manipulated into (temporarily) adopting a set of beliefs in order to live the life you wanted — or needed — to live. I presume it probably had a great deal to do with the fact that your husband was also a part of the group.
You “changed your mind” in order to belong. Once other factors made belonging less desirable, you “changed your mind” again and quit. You — YOU changed your own mind.
Now this is not to say that some groups aren’t capable of applying tremendous psychological pressure as a way of coercing change. Obviously, they do. Only that “brainwashing” — the complete and permanent replacement of an individual’s personality and belief system — simply doesn’t exist. This is, in fact, what Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China was all about.
Several psychologists (Margaret Singer, among them) have co-opted Lifton’s ideas and attempted to use them as the base of a complete “mind control” theory. The APA has rejected “mind control” theories as not being grounded in scientific fact.
Good point. But you do acknowledge that thought reform is used to control and manipulate people.
Obviously, I have an agenda. I want the general public to understand that as Margaret Singer said, “no one is beyond being manipulated by an intense, dedicated, and persistent persuader who meets us at a time when we are vulnerable, needy, and lonely.”
Warning people about the reality of spiritual/cultic abuse is in my opinion, just as important as warning people about sexual abuse.
May you always be able to hear God’s voice.
Oh sure. There’s really no argument that “thought reform” is used to control and manipulate people. Frankly, though, I find all the special language people have come up with to describe this sort of thing a little bit silly. “Thought reform” is nothing more than coercive persuasion. People don’t like the word “persuasion”, though, because it points out the individual’s own role in what happened to them. It’s a lot less work to just go with “mind control”.
To me, Margaret Singer’s “warning” evokes little more than, “Well, duh!” Yes, of course, people who are vulnerable and lonely are easy prey for manipulative individuals or groups — be they religious cults, car salesmen, or unemployed boyfriends.
Duh.
One of the things I am trying to let people know is that “coercive persuasion” if you prefer, is alive and well in groups that are nominally Christian, and that knowledge of the Bible is not the defense that some Christians think that it is. When my husband and I left the cult we tried to find a “normal,” or mainstream Christian church to attend, and when we would tell our story people would make patronizing comments to us about how our experience shows just how important it is to be grounded in the Scriptures. Well, phooey! My husband and I knew the Scriptures before getting drawn into this group! The coercive persuasion process had more to do with tapping into our emotional needs and using them to manipulate us than it did with anything pertaining to theology.
Ironically, the people who think they are the least vulnerable to being manipulated are probably the ones who are the easiest to manipulate.