Brainwashing

Breaking Down the Social Machinery

"Initiation ceremonies are likely to contain some or all of the following: purification (often including fasting), preparation, vows of secrecy, a real or symbolic ordeal, an act of renunciation of the old life and of entry upon the new, a revelation (sometimes verbal, often visual) and instruction."
     - John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions

"Initiation ceremonies of secret cults of the mystery-type invariably involve tests, sometimes most severe ones. The effect of certain experiences was a carefully worked program of mind training which is familiar in modern times as that which is employed be certain totalitarian states to 'condition' or reshape the thinking of an individual. This process produces a state in which the mind is pliant enough to have certain ideas implanted: ideas which resist a great deal of counter-influence. Echoes of such training are to be seen in the rituals of certain Secret Societies without mystica; pretensions which survive to this day: trials, terror, expectancy, drinking and the rest."
     - Arkon Daraul, Secret Societies

"At Capra we can see painted scenes of initiation [into Mithraism]. In one the initiate, blindfolded and naked, is being pushed uncertainly forward by a mystagogus. In another he is kneeling blindfold while a priest approaches with a staff or sword. In a third he is kneeling on one knee with his hands tied behind him and a sword on the ground at his side. There are others where he is lying on the ground in a symbolic death: kneeling, and about to be pushed over, but caught in the nick of time; kneeling, with the mystagogus holding him firm with his foot, and pushing him towards the garland and sword which he must refuse. Some of the ordeals were genuine and tough, including fasting and physical endurance."
     - John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions

In an experiment reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychiatry, subjects were shown a light and heard a tone simultaneously. Thirty-two out of 42 subjects later reported hearing the tone when only the light was shown.
"There can be no question that hallucinations in hypnosis and the sensory miracles associated with various saints are essentially genuine and explicable phenomena of conditioning. Hunger, fatigue, and excitement, all of which reduce inhibition, would facilitate hallucinatory experiences."
     - Andrew Salter, Conditioned Reflex Therapy

See Altered States to learn more about sensory deprivation and hallucinatory experiences.

(2) Stripping Away Identity

"...The most primitive secret societies known to man carry out ceremonies, rituals and process which are not to be distinguished from those employed by modern brainwashers."
"The mechanisms which are used can be summarized as:
     1. The desire to participate in the ritual, and expectancy of something happening.
     2. Isolation, vigils, hunger or abstinence, causing debilitation and time for reflection.
     3. Noise.
     4. Real or symbolic potions (sometimes narcotic and hypnotic).
     5. Threats or frightening happenings, generally staged and not genuine perils.
     6. Symbolic death and resurrection, with probably a renaming ceremony.
     7. The use of special signs and signals and 'key phrases' which will help to awaken the conditioning (training) for special or general purposes at different times."
     - Arkon Daraul, Secret Societies

Like the training for the Egyptian priests and the followers of Mithra, the Assassins advanced their members through a series of degrees which successively stripped away the old identity and replaced it with a new one.

"He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death, while the power to die, to strip one's self naked, and the eternal surrender of the self brings immortality with them "
     - Hermann Hesse

"True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality; the emergence of the 'inner' archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer."
     - R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience

"There is no personality. There is no 'self'. The mask is all that is, and that is process."
"The ego is self-contraction."
     - Da Free John

Compare with the initiation procedures used by secret societies right into the twentieth century.

"1.The candidate is confronted by members of the occult group wearing a special costume.
2.He is blindfolded.
3.He is led by the arm through a rough and difficult route.
4.He is taken into a specially designed chamber with no windows and is placed in such a way that he can only see part of it.
5.He is brought in to the presence of a 'Master.'
6.He is given a test and made to answer questions.
7.He is shown a variety of symbols designed to remind him of death.
8.The situation suggests that he may not survive the ordeal.
9.He is given ritual food or drink.
10.He is blindfolded again and led outside."
     -"Initiation Procedure" from Jacques Vallee's Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, p.170, pub.1988)

(3) Autohypnosis and Schizophrenia

"The daily world exists because we know how to hold its images; consequently, if one drops the attention needed to maintain those images, the world collapses."
     - Don Juan

The onset of schizophrenia is followed by three stages:
1.) Splitting - duality between the Outsider and the Savior, a stranger unto himself.
2.)
     (a) regression to infancy, animal and sub-animal consciousness, feeling of having died
     (b) oceanic feeling, the center of the heart, unconditional love
     (c) acquisition of siddhi such as healing powers
     (d) in Purgatory with others who have died in the process of awakening
3.) Terrific task, terrible dangers and overpowering light.

"The principal behind the induction of autohypnosis is one of perceptual fixation, and some of its behavioral manifestations are present in the pathological staring of schizophrenics or novice shamans or in the total attentiveness of certain shamans to their frenzied, prolonged drum-beating or whistling."
     - Silverman

The "schizophrenic experience is very different from the shamanic journey. The shaman's experience is coherent, meaningful, and consistent with the purpose of the journey. In addition the shaman has good control of his experience, heightened concentration, and a clear, coherent sense of identity. The shaman experiences leaving her body and roaming at will. By comparison with the almost invariable terror of the schizophrenic, the shaman's experience may be a source of wonder and delight."
     - Roger N. Walsh, The Spirit of Shamanism

"If we try to define the psychological structure of the religious experience which saves, heals, and makes whole, the simplest formula we can find would seem to be the following: in religious experience man comes face to face with a psychically overwhelming Other. As to the existence of this power we have only assertions to go on, but no physical or logical proofs. If comes upon man in psychic guise."
     - Carl Jung, Essays on a Science of Mythology

"In the course of a therapeutic session a regression to this level may be carried to culmination in an utterly terrifying crisis of actual ego-death, complete annihilation on all levels, followed by a grandiose, expansive sense of release, rebirth, and redemption, with enormous feelings and experiences of decompression, expansion of space, and blinding, radiant light: visions of heavenly blue and gold, columned gigantic halls with crystal chandeliers, peacock-feather fantasies, rainbow spectrums and the like. The subjects, feeling cleansed and purged, are moved now by an overwhelming love for all mankind, a new appreciation of the arts and of natural beauties, great zest for life, and a forgiving, wonderfully reconciled and expansive sense of God in his heaven and all right with the world."
     - Joseph Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces

"It's chastening to note that many autobiographical accounts of severe mental breakdown begin with ecstatic or revelatory episodes which then grow increasingly and dreadfully psychotic and frightening. And it's also sobering that the activity of serotonin uptake in the brains of schizophrenics appears to echo the action of DMT, LSK, mescaline, PCP (phencyclidine), and other hallucinogens."
     - David Porush in Omni, October '93

Patients experiencing schizophrenic episodes also report higher spirits or "devas" which materialize and are discernable at the "corners of the eye". Their natural form appears to be a "pulsating globe of light". The higher order beings, which represent 20% of the hallucinatory beings reported, are symbolic, religious and genuinely supportive and instructive. They communicate directly with the inner feelings of the patient and may be manifested as a friendly sun.

See Altered States to learn about the brain mechanism underlying hallucinatory experiences.

(4) Breakdown and Conversion

Since "consciousness is a culturally learned event, balanced over the suppressed vestiges of an earlier mentality, then we can see that consciousness, in part, can be culturally unlearned or arrested."
     - Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

"Dr. William Sargant, a British physician who began to study dissociation during World War II, when he worked with battle-fatigued soldiers, find the phenomenon of possession to be similar to such psycho physical crises as conversion, deep mystical experience, brainwashing, the excitement of mobs, orgasms, and the reliving of emotional trauma under psychiatric treatment."
The brain enters a state of protective inhibition, similar to a fuse blowing out, "and the person is then open to suggestion from outside or to impulses arising from the unconscious areas of the mind."
     - The World Almanac

"To elicit confessions, one must try to create feelings of anxiety and guilt and induce states of mental conflict if these are not already present. Even if the accused person is genuinely guilty, the normal functioning of his brain must be disturbed so that judgment becomes impaired. If possible he must be made to feel a preference for punishment - especially if combined with a hope of salvation when it is over - rather than a continuation of the mental tension already present or now being induced by the examiner."
     - Dr William Sargant, Battle for the Mind

"During World War II, Schmidt (a dishonest ex-Abwehr officer who furnished false intelligence reports to the Allies) was secretly arrested, blindfolded, driven aimlessly around for an hour, and then confined, alone, in an empty and windowless wine cellar of a castle. His bead was one blanket on the stone floor (it was summer, but nights in the wine cellar were chilly.) His latrine was a large tin can. He had no razor, no toothbrush, no mirror. His light, which burned continuously, was one bulb hanging form the ceiling. His food was fed to him irregularly, though plentifully, through a slot in the door, and his guards were forbidden to speak to him. And so he sat, on the floor, for a number of days.
"One afternoon, or morning, or night - he had lost track of time - a guard came into the wine cellar and covered his head with a pillow case, tying it around his waist. The Allied counterintelligence officer (who spoke accentless German), then entered and, invisible, began the interrogation. ' Glad to see you in such good health. Do you have any questions?'
' Where am I?'
' You'll never know.'
' What happens next?'
' Depends on you.'
' What do you want from me?'
' You know what I want.'
' I need a toothbrush.'
' Sorry. Have to go now. I'll be back.'
' When?'
' You'll know when I come back.'
More days and nights went by. When the CI officer came back, he brought a typewriter and a ream of paper.
' I'm leaving a typewriter and some paper. You'll find it when they take off the pillowcase. Write me what I want to know.'
' What's that?'
' Call it 'The Schmidt Story'.'
When he came back, the CI officer found a couple of dozen typed pages beside the typewriter. He tore them up without reading and left.
How long did this game go on? Weeks? Months? Eventually the Schmidt story reached three hundred pages, all factual, all fascinating..."
     - William R. Johnson, Thwarting Enemies At Home and Abroad

According to Edward Schils, the features that were common to the Nazi and Russian systems were:
     1.) In-group exclusiveness and hostility to all outside it.
     2.) Demand for total submissiveness to the in-group which alone can bring about good.
     3.) The categorization of people according to selected characteristics and making overall judgments on the basis of these (e.g. 'red scum', 'imperialist bastard'),
     4.) Promotion of the idea that the world is a scene of unceasing conflict, e.g., as a result of 'class war'.
     5.) The view that any tenderness for family bonds or toleration of enemies serves only to weaken the in-group in its struggle and dilute commitment.
     6.) Belief in hostile conspiratorial forces whose aim is to destroy the in-group-. Survival may therefore require violence.
     7.) Belief in a wholly harmonious society which can only be created by the in-group.
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind

Religious cults throughout the ages have been even more adept than governments in breaking down and converting the individual.

"At the sermons of Wesley...it was a regular occurrence for people to collapse as the mass hysteria mounted, and to rise saved. Wesley's hell-fire speeches aroused the whole gamut of emotions in his audience, from guilt and fear to anger and indignation. It was irrelevant which. The result was physical collapse and an ensuing state of suggestibility which led to instant conversion."
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind

"All the social machinery people have actually breaks down before direct intention. But the thing that causes difficulty in moving people along this line of methodology has a great deal to do with invasion of privacy. You very definitely have to be able to be willing to invade somebody's privacy."
"If you have a hard time invading people's privacy, you'll have a hard time 8Cing ["making the physical body contact the environment"] them into a chair, in a HAS Co-audit unit [old term for an introductory course] or a first PE [something similar], etc. because you think they have rights. No! They do not have any rights. What has rights? That machinery? Those dramatizations? Those computing circuits? Pish pash! The next thing you know we'll have laws out saying they have a perfect right to kill everybody. Right! Where does this thing called 'rights' begin and end?"
     - L. Ron Hubbard, "Second Lecture on Clearing Methodology". From the 6th LA Clearing Congress 1959

According to Dr Margaret Singer the three basic mind control techniques practiced by the Moonies "were the stripping process, the identification process and the final stage of rebirth. The cult, she said, used the stripping process to assault the identity of the new recruit, establish an atmosphere of outward peace and quiet, encourage the process of self-betrayal and lead to the breaking point where the recruit would renounce all his old life, including his family and personal goals, and embrace the cult and its teachings. By means of the identification process, the cult suppressed and punished past identities and rewarded and controlled the new emerging identity. The final stage was the death of the old self and rebirth as a Moonie."
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind

"After about six hours sleep I was awakened by a guitar, violin and two brothers filling the Chicken Palace with 'the red robin came bop-boop-bopping along...' Everyone rocketed out of their sleeping bags and into their clothes, shaking hands and asking, 'How are you, brother?' 'Great! Just Great!' was everyone's response. It was great to see everybody so happy. We all went out to the field and began singing: hand in hand or with arms around each other we formed a great circle. 'Is everybody happy?' cried David, one of the leaders. 'Yesss!!' screamed the crowd wildly. I believed it and let it flow into me..."
     - Zimbardo, Ebbeson & Maslach, Influencing Attitudes and Changing Behavior

"Closed sects are often the province of a social minority or of a socially underprivileged group. It is common for them to honor a founder-figure who is for them in some sense a liberator. The privilege of esoteric mystical knowledge is a compensation for the lack of worldly power. Initiation thus becomes a jealously reserved privilege, and the mysterious revelations are the private province of a relatively small number, and within that number betrayal of the mysteries is severely punished."
     - John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions

The culmination of the program of identity stripping occurs when the initiate realizes he or she is beyond good and evil. Gurus of the "left-hand path of the cult of the Hindu goddess Kali used trance states to achieve these results in their followers .

"The fourth stage in the training comes only when the worshipper is able to throw himself into a trance on a word (such as A-KA-SHAA); and when he can, he no longer needs the idol or the rituals: he is part of Kali."
"Those who have reached this advanced stage believe that they have great magical power; they are told the final secrets by their Guru. 'There is no such thing as Kali, no power but energy, no right and wrong; nothing but you and those like you. You are of the nature of a god. You have been led to this stage by the only avenues possible for a man of your type, as you were: through the path of the physical senses because they have to be killed. Now you have lost the power to employ your senses, the sexual urge, the need for wine, for corn, for meat and other things'."
     - Arkon Daraul, Secret Societies

Modern Political Conditioning

"Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to general will but to automatic docility."
     - James der Derian, Antidiplomacy

"The most effective way to influence policy is by changing a society's customary thinking patterns and tacit compacts, by bringing the pace-setters to think differently."
     - Georges Konrad, Antipolitics

"Political conditioning should not be confused with training, persuasion, or even indoctrination. It is more than that. It is taming. It is taking possession of both the simplest and the most complicated nervous patterns of man...."
     - Joost Meerloo, Mental Seduction and Menticide

Brainwash: "a translation of the Chinese colloquialism, hsi nao, to 'brain wash'."

"The curriculum at Patrice Lumumba (Institute in Moscow) covered all aspects of the techniques of persuasion. A Soviet anthropologist had explained at the onset of the course...that attempts to change opinions were older than recorded history, and most certainly originated with the development of speech - which had created the means to persuade and manipulate and, when needs be, coerce without resorting to physical force."
As taught to the students, "brainwashing rarely involved physical cruelty. Instead it depended on carefully calculated psychological pressure. This included the use of repetition, harassment and humiliation. At the Soviet academy students took turns to act out the roles of interrogators and prisoners under the watchful eye of instructors drawn from the ranks of the KGB's own medical corps."

"A seminar was devoted to the deliberate and active steps required to strip an individual of his selfhood, and how to build up something new from the bare psychic foundation which remained. In this assault upon identity a key factor was to create a state of infantile dependency, so that a person became disorientated, until finally, like a young postulant entering a religious order, he 'died to the world'. Only at that stage, lectured the KGB psychiatrists, was the victim ready to receive the salvation' of those who now controlled his every action." A social historian then lectured on the application of Madison Avenue techniques to psychological warfare and Nazi political propaganda.
"There followed a thorough grounding in the principles of religious conversion and the lessons to be learned from what was essentially a Western phenomenon of using fasting, physical discomfort and even extreme pain to arouse powerful emotions of guilt, anxiety, distress, conflict and finally nervous exhaustion before the stage was reached when a person was at the height of suggestibility and ready to convert." The students "watched films of modern American evangelists, men like Oral Roberts and Billy Graham, which illustrated the point. His lecturer had gone back in time, to examine the techniques of John Wesley and his ability to create emotional tension, and how the key to the preacher's success had been his intuition, his skill at singling out one member of his audience, knowing that if he could establish a sympathetic relationship with him he would win over the crowd - and the day."

Dr. Wolff and Dr Hinkle of Cornell University "were given full access to [CIA] Agency files on 7,190 American prisoners brainwashed during the Korean War. They also examined the extensive data the CIA had on Soviet methods of mind-control." [This was in connection with the CIA's M-K-Ultra brainwashing project.] "The Soviet approach was to confront a victim with specific accusations, and to demand a full and immediate confession to those crimes. The method depended on telling a prisoner that he knew what wrong he had done and the interrogator was merely there to record any admission of guilt. In this Kafkaesque situation of not knowing what he was accused of, but being invited to admit to some crime, a prisoner invariably found himself struggling to prove his innocence."
After weeks of isolation and questioning, the prisoner reached "'the point where [he] invariably feels something must be done to end this. He must find a way out.' In Soviet hands it meant signing a blanket confession of a list of itemized crimes for a show-trial that was followed either by execution or exile to a labor-camp. But the Chinese went further. They wanted to 're-educate' their prisoners."
"The Cornell doctors concluded that neither the Russians nor the Chinese depended totally on drugs, hypnosis or any of the standard methods of behavioral control known in the West."
     - Gordon Thomas, Journey into Madness

"Drs. Lawrence Hinkle Jr and Harold Wolff have asserted...that the Chinese made a concerted effort to produce particular emotions in a particular order, which then led to capitulation and collapse. They listed them in an article in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine in September, 1957. The emotions to be aroused were: anxiety; suspense; awareness of being avoided; feelings of unfocused guilt; fear and uncertainty; bewilderment; increasing depression; fatigue; despair; great need to talk; utter dependence on anyone who befriends; great need of approval of interrogator; and increased suggestibility. This all culminated in confession, rationalization of confession and final profound relief.

"The US Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry in 1956 held two symposia on forced indoctrination, to which Dr Wolff presented research. He outlined eight of the communists' methods for achieving the above ends, The description here is based on that in Peter Watson's excellent book, War on the Mind.
1.) The Chinese enforced trivial demands, such as the keeping of insignificant rules or forced writing, to accustom the prisoners to being compliant.
2.) They took pains to show the prisoners that they were in total control of the latter's fate, pretended to take cooperation for granted and tantalized them with possible favors. From this prisoners learned the uselessness of trying to maintain any semblance of control themselves. They learned helplessness.
3.) Occasionally the Chinese would offer favors when they could least be predicted, rewarded any show of cooperation, promised better conditions or demonstrated unexpected kindness, all of which served to give the men motivation to comply and to prevent them from adjusting to deprivation.
4.) Threats of torture, death, no return home, isolation, interminable interrogation or threats against family and friends served to deepen the men's fears, anxiety and despair.
5.) Degradation, such as the prevention of personal hygiene, humiliations, punishments, insults, foul living conditions and no privacy had the effect of making continued resistance seem pointless and counter-productive. Forced to be concerned only with the most basic of values, it seemed that compliance could not but help raise self-esteem.
6.) By forcing the men to be in darkness or bright light, in an unstimulating environment without the diversion of varied food or books or freedom of movement, the Chinese could force the men to dwell on their captivity, with the resultant confusion arising from excessive introspection.
7.) Complete or semi-physical isolation served the same ends, as well as depriving the victim of any social support other than that of his jailer, on whom he became increasingly dependent.
8.) Physical pressures, such as semi-starvation, induced illness, sleep deprivation, prolonged periods of standing or interrogation and constant tension all worked on the men until they were mentally too weakened to resist."

"It is not physical torture that is the most effective weapon of brainwashing; the very teaching of evasive techniques to withstand torture can itself induce psychological reactions in the soldiers so trained that can work against their resistance, not for it. The aroused anxiety and the dread anticipation, knowing what may happen, can lead a prisoner to capitulate all the sooner."
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind

"Now matter how severely the captives were treated by the North Koreans and Chinese, the ultimate terror came from within their own minds. No technique, no drug, nothing, could ever achieve the mind-control which resulted from creating such inner conflict....The critical factor was to be able to distinguish between someone playing a role and one who accepted the reality of a situation."
     - Gordon Thomas, Journey into Madness

L. Ron Hubbard instituted similar procedures when he created the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF) to discipline Scientology staff members in the elite Sea Org.

"There is no way to really describe the RPF experience, the hopelessness, the humiliation, the horror. It seemed to go on forever, the days all identical, no time to oneself, the same blue boiler suits like prison garb, day after day, the same questions in the same endless security checks.
"Hubbard's purpose in creating the RPF, and running it as a prison with assignees considered criminals, was the breaking of people's wills, the total subjugation of anyone he considered exhibited 'counter intention' to his goals. He achieved his purpose with me so well that I thanked him for the opportunity of doing the RPF, much like prisoners of war, who are broken emotionally and spiritually, through deprivation and mind control techniques, thank their captors."
     - Gerry Armstrong in Brent Corydon's Messiah or Madman

(2) Reforming the Individual

The processes at work on the prisoners of the Chinese were as follows:

1.) Assault on identity.
The prisoners " as they began to lose their bearings started to question who and what they were."
2.) Guilt.
"They knew they were guilty of something, they felt very guilty, and gradually grew to believe that punishment must be deserved.
3.) Self-betrayal.
"They were not so much betraying friends as being forced to betray the vital core of themselves."
4.) Breaking point.
"The combined effects of severe guilt, shame, and self-betrayal led them to feel alienated from themselves. They began to fear total annihilation..."
5.) Leniency.
"A brief rest from interrogation, a brief encounter in which they were treated momentarily as individuals, summoned for the men a spark of renewed identity....The men virtually became grateful participants in their own eform."
6.) The compulsion to confess.
"The compulsion to end the horrors of confusion and identity loss by owning up to that guilt was finally irresistible."
7.) The channeling of guilt.
"Their guilt could be attributed to a life of wrong action created by a wrong ideology."
8.) Re-education: logical dishonoring.
"To achieve 'true' re-education, the prisoners had to extend their self condemnation to every aspect of their former lives - to see their lives as a long series of utterly shameful acts."
9.) Progress and harmony.
"The rightness of their new reformed position was reinforced by the many emotional needs that were met as a result of their holding it....Instead of alienation, they could experience themselves as in harmony with their surroundings."
10.) Final confession and rebirth.
"In this new spirit of harmony, the men were fully ready to supply with conviction statements about what they now were and what they had rejected. they experienced a virtual rebirth."

During tests in which Pavolv subjected dogs to electric shock, conflicting signals, overwork and food deprivation, he "isolated three distinct stages that led on to collapse as extreme stresses mounted."
1.) The "equivalent" phase of brain activity "when a dog would react in the same way to all stimuli of whatever strength."
2.) The "paradoxical" phase when "the brain would cease to react to strong stimuli at all, as a protective measure, while still capable of responding to mild ones."
3.) The "ultra paradoxical" stage when "the dog reacted with a positive response where normally it had a negative one and vice versa."

"A final unexpected discovery occurred for Pavlov when his dogs were nearly drowned during the Leningrad floods, as they were trapped in their cages. At the last minute a laboratory assistant was able to rush in and save them but the terror of the experience, a stress beyond all stresses, produced yet another brain response. The dogs forgot all that they had been taught by conditioning up to that point. That is, all the conditioned reflexes that Pavlov had implanted in them had vanished and it took months to restore them"
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind

Confession
"The cult of confession can offer the individual person meaningful psychological satisfactions in the continuing opportunity for emotional catharsis and for relief of suppressed guilt feelings, especially insofar as these are associated with self-punitive tendencies to get pleasure from personal degradation. More than this, the sharing of confession enthusiasms can create an orgiastic sense of 'oneness', of the most intense intimacy with fellow confessors and of the dissolution of self into the great flow of the Movement."
     - Robert Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism

"As Sargant showed, he could get soldiers to abreact by encouraging them to 're experience' imagined war horrors just as easily as when the experiences they relived were real. The emotion that was being discharged - fear, horror, guilt - was the same."
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind

Reactance
In his own work [The Psychology of Commitment], Kiesler discovered the power of what he termed the 'boomerang effect': if a person has committed himself to something and is then attacked for his position, he increases his commitment, even if it was not at all strong in the first place."
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind

Cognitive dissonance
As explained by Leon Festinger, "people tend to search for justifications to reduce the tension created by holding two inconsistent attitudes or performing an act inconsistent with an attitude."
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind

"Dissonance theory does not rest upon the assumption that man is a rational animal; rather, it suggests that man is a rationalizing animal - that he attempts to appear rational, both to others and to himself. This need can considerably color his attitudes."
     - Ellot Aronson, Theories of Cognitive Consistency

"At mass level there were the constant uniformed triumphal marches, day-long singing of the Party's 'Horst-Wessel' song, in short the build-up a of a 'we' feeling from which no patriotic 'decent' person could stand aside. One had to cheer too. It now became easier to succumb to the subtly introduced blackmail of Party pressure through the appearance in offices, industrial plants, etc., of uniformed or at least openly Nazi 'believers'....At first a person with an average humane conscience would condemn himself for this lack of moral courage and self-betrayal. This became too intolerable - so the second stage was a denial; surely there had to be some truth in what Nazi beliefs he had to assent to in his group?"
     - Henry Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder

"Suggestive is the finding that the longer one resists altering his position under pressure conditions, the longer he retains the altered position in the post-pressure conditions."
     - Philip Zimbardo, Influencing Attitudes and Changing Behavior

"Zimbardo believes that an illusion of personal invulnerability effectively works against the taking of control on one's own life - and works for any agents who would take control of it for you."
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind

"...Research tells us that you are likely to ignore information about how the majority of people in a given situation react and to favor information about the isolated cases that fit your preconception or personal preferences."
     - Philip Zimbardo, Influencing Attitudes and Changing Behavior

(3) Resisting Influence

"We, all prisoners, solemnly appeal to you as follows. The armed intervention in Korean internal affairs is a barbaric aggressive action to protect the benefit of the capitalist monopoly of the United States. Let us fight for right against wrong, bravely opposing those of our leaders who would lead us into a war against Russia."
     - POW recording

"In Korea...while a third of the American POWs capitulated in some way to their captors, the Turks who suffered the same treatments in the same camps did not collaborate in even the most minor ways. Nor did any of their men die in captivity, whereas hundreds of Americans did.
"Whereas the American morale was low, the Turks deliberately kept morale high. If one of their number became ill, others were assigned to feed and bathe him, to ensure that he had a chance to recover. Internal discipline was maintained at all costs. Whereas the Americans suffered psychologically from the Chinese tactic of removing leaders from the rest of the group, the Turks implemented a solution which prevented the Chines from breaking down their morals. If the Turkish officer in command was removed, his role as assumed by the next man down."
"The Turkish response to the Chinese interrogation techniques was derision. Their mass resistance won the day."
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind

"The obstacles that the religious or political proselytizer cannot overcome are indifference or detached, controlled and continued amusement on the part of the subject at the efforts being made to break him down or win him over or tempt him into argument."
     - Dr William Sargant, Battle for the Mind

The famous prison experiment run by the US Office of Naval Research revealed that, "in prisoner of war camps, the worst thing to do was for prisoners to wallow in their condition and allow it to overcome them. They should avoid harping on the vicissitudes of their environment and make efforts to escape mentally by turning their attention to other things. If they did bow to their sufferings, they ended up not only denigrating themselves but denigrating each other (as the experimental prisoners did) which further served to weaken group ties.
"In Among the Dervishes, O.M. Burke describes a conversation with a Turkish Sufi who claimed that the only way he and his co-fighters survived in Korea was by the practice of getting together every day and telling stories about the perfectibility of mankind, the destiny of the human-race and qualities such as generosity and love."
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind

"...Brainwashing is more than a scare word. It is also a strangely attractive idea...We do not want to confront Pogo's famous insight, 'We have met the enemy and he is us'. How much more comforting to think, 'We have met the enemy and he is Satan' or 'she is a witch' or 'his mind is possessed by demonic spirits' or 'by the Moonies' or 'by the Symbionese Liberation army'. Thus the idea of brainwashing paralyzes thought because it places responsibility somewhere else."
     - Scheflin and Opton, The Mind Manipulators

"But it might equally well 'paralyze thought' to insist on attributing inexplicable action to consciously willed motives. To reject the idea of brainwashing means, in its widest sense, to reject the idea that we are ever out of control of our own actions. For to admit we can be swayed and manipulated is possibly more frightening than to admit that others can choose to perform socially or politically or morally unacceptable actions."
     - Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind