In the film the Brain-washing of My Dad, when Jen Senko saw how her father turned from a kind and gentle bleeding-heart liberal into a vicious hateful conservative, she wanted to see how that could happen. Was this actually brain-washing? Wasn’t brainwashing what Communist governments did to their prisoners of war by bombarding them with images, lights, and sounds on a 24-hour basis?
Senko knew how her father and many others were swept up in a general movement to the right that was supported by new right-wing media. Would this amount to brain-washing? Or is that hyperbole?
As a result, she consulted with an expert on brain-washing Kathleen Taylor a neuroscientist from Oxford University in London. She has written a book on modern brain-washing. Taylor pointed out to Senko in her interview how there are two ways of looking at brain-washing. One of them was the traditional way that people were subjected to
“this forced psychological torture where people are put into situation where they are put through horrors and brow-beaten into believing or pretending to believe something new. That is brain-washing by force…Then there is brain-washing by stealth which is where they are not forced to believe stuff but all of the information that comes at them is pushing a line. So there is no alternative in terms of information. If you control the information that goes into a brain, you control to a great extent what that brain will do and what that brain will believe. You are not forcing them to believe anything, but you are making it difficult for them to think anything else because their horizons are narrowed.”
Reminding me of the German Philosopher Immanuel Kant, George Lakoff told her, “You can only understand what the neuro-circuits of your brain allow you to understand. Any fact that does not fit that will be ignored or rejected…They don’t know their brains are being changed.”
Taylor added, “The information is familiar; you don’t have to think about it. If those beliefs are very passionately held, you may find that any belief that threatens these is rejected out of hand.’
Dr. Taylor said there are 5 factors in this kind of belief change:
- Isolation
- Control
- Uncertainty
- Control
- strong emotions
That is the matrix for effective brain-washing technique. If these are present, brain-washing works! How does that apply to right-wing media such as Fox News? That’s for my next post.