Is brainwashing possible? what history says

George Orwell’s novel 1984the entire world is ruled by three totalitarian superstates. Britain, or “Airstrip One”, is ruled by a single political party, the cult-like Ingsoc. personality It surrounds a dictator known simply as “Big Brother.” This government aims to completely control the thoughts and beliefs of individuals. In that Ministry of Love, torture takes place; gaslighting This is to re-educate “thought criminals.”

Could something like this really happen? At the end of 2023, novelist Sandra Newman published a parallel novel. Juliaretelling 1984 From a woman’s perspective. Newman’s vision of Orwell’s nightmare focuses on the same themes of propaganda, surveillance, and brainwashing, but offers a slightly different conclusion. The feasibility of Orwell’s nightmare is therefore under consideration.

A brief history lesson is needed to explore whether “mind control” as depicted in fiction and popular culture is really possible.

Cold War and MK Ultra

Orwell wrote the original novel between 1947 and 1948, during the early years of the Cold War (the term is credited with Orwell himself). During this period of ideological tension, fears of communist indoctrination grew. Orwell died in January 1950, so he never lived to see him, but in the 1950s, after some American prisoners of war during the Korean War became communist sympathizers, It soon exploded with an all-out obsession with “brainwashing.”

Partially catalyzed by this Red Scare, the CIA launched Project MKUltra to test and develop new brainwashing tactics with an emphasis on the psychedelic drug LSD. MKUltra’s subjects were not volunteers, but rather non-consensual victims. After many highly unethical experiments, the CIA finally concluded that LSD’s effects, while powerful, were too unpredictable to be useful for mind control.

in short, Brainwashing is mostly pseudoscience. This concept is no longer taken seriously by most psychologists and is not generally accepted as a defense in criminal courts in the United States.

it is do not have To say that more subtle psychological manipulation is impossible, or even to strip one’s own mind, is to say that identity through trauma. However, the story of the ideological defection of Korean prisoners of war does not require much new psychological theory or technology. After all, it is likely that any changes in ideological beliefs that occurred in POW camps can be explained in terms of survival mechanisms activated during extreme conditions. stress And isolation.

You might call this brainwashing, but it’s not the kind of brainwashing that Big Brother is fully effective at. If the purpose is 1984 The Ministry of Love aims to re-educate the doomed prisoners so that they cannot remain rebellious, even in private, until the day of their execution, but such a project is bound to fail. I predict that there will be a large number of

This skepticism was largely shared by Aldous Huxley, the author of another great dystopian novel. brave new world. Huxley wrote to Orwell as follows: My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find harder and less wasteful ways of governing and satisfying its desire for power (…). ” On the other hand, contrary to the later MKUltra conclusions, Huxley believed that mind control could be achieved by: hypnosis And drugs.

Of course, most 1984 Other fears are also entirely possible. In this way, even if a mere attempt Re-education as desired by the Ministry of Love would be one of the most despicable projects in human history, on a par with the Nazis. concentration Camps and concentration camps of the USSR. Still, if complete indoctrination were possible, it is surprising that the German and Russian totalitarianisms of the 20th century had not yet achieved it.

Fiction as a thought experiment

read orwell’s book 1984 when I was young teenager Caused loss of innocence. To me, at an impressionable age, the ending of this novel suggested that love and hate can be reversed with enough force.

This is different overall That’s a mistake. Thoughts and emotions are indeed fleeting. The self, as we commonly understand it, is not a solid or unchanging core. MKUltra was working on LSD because powerful psychedelic drugs can actually weaken or temporarily dissolve the ego. But Orwell’s terrifying hypothesis that sincere love for a dictator can be aroused by a combination of torture and gaslighting does not necessarily follow from this.

Some readers may run through Orwell’s hypothetical scenario, or thought experiment, and get different results. Naturally, this is a drawback of thought experiments. They are not real experiments. But Ministry of Love is clearly not an ethical experiment to run in real life (nor was MKUltra, for that matter). Therefore, the value of both formal thought experiments (in academic fields) is philosophy) and informal thought experiments (in fiction).

Just as researchers try to reproduce each other’s discoveries in science, literary writers may try to reproduce each other’s discoveries in fiction. From this perspective, Sandra Newman’s recent novels Julia This is a valuable follow-up experiment that casts doubt on some of Orwell’s conclusions.