147
Leaders of cults and groups using thoughtreform
processes have taken in and controlled
millions of persons to the detriment of their
welfare. Sometimes such inﬂuence is called
coercive persuasion or extraordinary inﬂuence,
to distinguish it from everyday persuasion by
friends, family, and other inﬂuences in our
lives, including the media and advertising.
The key to successful thought reform is to
keep the subjects unaware that they are being
manipulated and controlled – and especially to
keep them unaware that they are being moved
along a path of change that will lead them to
serve interests that are to their disadvantage.
The usual outcome of thought-reform
processes is that a person or group gains
almost limitless control over the subjects for
varying periods of time.
When cultic groups using this level of undue
inﬂuence are seen in the cold light of day,
uninformed observers often cannot grasp
how the group worked. They wonder how a
rational person would ever get involved.
Recently, because of the media attention garnered
by the actions of certain groups, the
world has become somewhat more aware of
thought reform, but most people still don’t
know how to deal with situations of extraordinary
inﬂuence.
A number of terms have been used to
describe this process, including brainwashing,
thought reform, coercive persuasion, mind
control, coordinated programs of coercive inﬂuence
and behavior control, and exploitative
persuasion . . . Perhaps the ﬁrst and last terms
convey something of the crux of what I will
be describing in this chapter.
When I ask ordinary people what they think
brainwashing is, they correctly grasp that it
refers to the exploitative manipulation of one
person by another. They usually describe a situation
in which a person or group has conned
others into going along with a plan put in
place by the instigator. Conned has a widely
understood meaning in our informal conversation
and our streets, which is why it is
generally difﬁcult to manipulate street-smart
kids. They already know to look for a double
agenda, calling it a con game, snow job, scam,
jiving someone, putting someone on, and
many other names.
A certain type of psychological con game is
exactly what goes on in a thought-reform
environment. A complex set of interlocking
factors is put into place, and these factors,
either quickly or slowly, depending on the situation
and the subject, bring about deep
changes in the mind-set and attitudes of the
targeted individual. Through the manipulation
of psychological and social factors,
people’s attitudes can indeed be changed, and
their thinking and behavior radically altered.
CHAPTER NINE
The Process of Brainwashing,
Psychological Coercion, and
Thought Reform
MARGARET THALER SINGER
THE “BRAINWASHING” CONTROVERSY
Historical Examples of Brainwashing
. . . In just the last sixty years, the world has
seen numerous examples of how easily human
conduct can be manipulated under certain
circumstances.
During the 1930s purge trials in the former
Soviet Union, men and women accused of
committing crimes against the state were
maneuvered into both falsely confessing to
and falsely accusing others of these crimes.
The world press expressed bewilderment and
amazement at the phenomenon but, with few
exceptions, soon lapsed into silence.
Then in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the
world witnessed personnel at Chinese revolutionary
universities implement a thoughtreform
program that changed the beliefs and
behaviors of the citizens of the largest nation
in the world. This program, which Mao
Tse-tung wrote about as early as the 1920s,
was put into place when the communist
regime took power in China on October 1,
1949. Chairman Mao had long planned how
to change people’s political selves – to achieve
“ideological remolding,” as he called it –
through the use of a coordinated program of
psychological, social, and political coercion.
As a result, millions of Chinese citizens were
induced to espouse new philosophies and
exhibit new conduct.
The term brainwashing was ﬁrst introduced
into the Western world in 1951, when
American foreign correspondent Edward
Hunter published a book titled Brainwashing
in Red China. Hunter was the ﬁrst to write
about the phenomenon, based on his interviews
of both Chinese and non-Chinese
coming across the border from China into
Hong Kong. His translator explained to him
that the communist process of ridding people
of the vestiges of their old belief system was
called colloquially hse nao, which literally
means “wash brain,” or “cleansing the mind.”
The 1950s also brought the Korean War.
North Korea’s intensive indoctrination of
United Nations’ prisoners of war showed the
world the extent to which captors would go
to win converts to their political cause. The
Korean program was based on methods used
by the Chinese, combined with other social
and psychological inﬂuence techniques.
Later in the same decade, Cardinal
Mindszenty, the head of the Roman Catholic
Church in Hungary and a man of tremendous
personal forcefulness, strength of convictions,
and faith in God, ended up being so manipulated
and processed by his Russian captors that
he – like the earlier purge trial victims – both
falsely confessed and falsely accused his
colleagues.
These extremes of social and psychological
manipulations of thought and conduct were,
and sometime still are, disregarded by
Americans because the events occurred far
away and could be dismissed as merely foreign
propaganda and political acts. Such reasoning
is a variation of the “not me” myth: not in our
land could such a thing happen. But later,
certain events occurred in California that
forced many to see that extremes of inﬂuence
and manipulation were possible in the United
States, too.
In 1969, Charles Manson manipulated a
band of middle-class youths into believing his
mad version of Helter Skelter. Under his inﬂuence
and control, his followers carried out
multiple vicious murders. Not long after, the
Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a ragtag
revolutionary group, kidnapped newspaper
heiress Patricia Hearst and abused her psychologically
and otherwise. The SLA used
mind manipulations as well as gun-at-the-head
methods to coerce Patty into compliance.
They manipulated and controlled her behavior
to the extent that she appeared with them
in a bank robbery and feared returning to
society, having been convinced by the SLA
that the police and the FBI would shoot
her.
This series of events from the 1930s to the
present demonstrates that individual autonomy
and personal identity are much more
fragile than was once commonly believed. And
that certain venal types have gotten hold of
and perfected techniques of persuasion that
are wreaking havoc in our society . . .
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THE “BRAINWASHING” CONTROVERSY
Packaged Persuasion
Several years ago, a colleague and I interviewed
a young couple at the request of their
attorneys. The couple, who had once been
good citizens and loving parents, had been
accused of a spanking that allegedly led to
their son’s death. While they were members of
a cult in West Virginia with a female leader,
their 23-month-old son allegedly had either
hit or pushed the leader’s grandchild during
play. The parents were ordered to get the child
to apologize; otherwise, according to the irate
leader, no one would go to heaven. The boy
was beaten with a wooden board by his father,
with his mother in the room, for more than
two and a half hours. The boy’s blood poled
in the bruises in his buttocks and legs, and he
died. In court, I described how the leader had
slowly gained control of the members of her
group and how the beating evolved from
her teaching and control.
In another case, Ron Luff, a former Navy
career petty ofﬁcer with a series of recommendations
for excellent conduct and performance,
was convinced by his cult leader to
follow that leader’s orders. These orders were
to help the leader kill an Ohio family of ﬁve,
including three young daughters, dump the
bodies into a lime pit in a barn, then go off
on a long wilderness trek with the leader and
his two dozen followers. Ron Luff was found
guilty of aggravated murder and kidnapping
and sentenced to 170 years in prison. The cult
leader, Jeffrey Lundgren, was sentenced to
die in Ohio’s electric chair. Both cases are on
appeal at the time of this book’s writing.
People repeatedly ask me how cult leaders
get their followers to do such things as give
their wives to a child-molesting cult leader,
drop out of medical school to follow a martial
arts guru, give several million dollars to a selfappointed
messiah who wears a wig and has
his favorite women dress like Jezebel, or practice
sexual abstinence while following a blatantly
promiscuous guru. Because of the great
discrepancies between individual’s conduct
before cult membership and the behavior
exhibited while in the cult, families, friends,
and the public wonder how these changes in
attitude and behavior are induced.
How cult leaders and other clever operators
get people to do their bidding seems arcane
and mysterious to most persons, but I ﬁnd
there is nothing esoteric about it at all. There
are no secret drugs or potions. It is just words
and group pressures, put together in packaged
forms. Modern-day manipulators use methods
of persuasion employed since the days of the
cavemen, but the masterful con artists of today
have hit upon a way to put the techniques
together in packages that are especially
successful. As a result, thought reform, as a
form of inﬂuence and persuasion, falls on the
extreme end of a continuum that also includes
education as we typically see it, advertising,
propaganda, and indoctrination . . .
There is a mistaken notion that thought
reform can only be carried out in conﬁned
places and under threat of physical torture or
death. But it is important to remember that
the brainwashing programs of the forties and
ﬁfties were applied not only to military or civilian
prisoners of war but also to the general
population. In all our research, I and others
who study these programs emphasize over and
over that imprisonment and overt violence are
not necessary and are actually counterproductive
when inﬂuencing people to change their
attitudes and behaviors. If one really wants to
inﬂuence others, various coordinated soft-sell
programs are cheaper, less obvious, and highly
effective. The old maxim “Honey gathers
more ﬂies than vinegar” remains true today.
Attacking the Self
There is, however, an important distinction to
be made between the version of thought
reform prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s and
the version used by a number of contemporary
groups, including cults, large group awareness
training programs, and assorted other groups.
These latter-day efforts have built upon the
age-old inﬂuence techniques to perfect amazingly
successful programs of persuasion and
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THE “BRAINWASHING” CONTROVERSY
change. What’s new – and crucial – is that
these programs change attitudes by attacking
essential aspects of a person’s sense of self,
unlike the earlier brainwashing programs that
primarily confronted a person’s political
beliefs.
Today’s programs are designed to destabilize
an individual’s sense of self by undermining
his or her basic consciousness, reality
awareness, beliefs and worldview, emotional
control, and defense mechanisms. This attack
on a person’s central stability, or self-concept,
and on a person’s capacity for self-evaluation
is the principal technique that makes the
newer programs work. Moreover, this attack
is carried out under a variety of guises and
conditions – and rarely does it include forced
conﬁnement or direct physical coercion.
Rather, it is subtle and powerful psychological
process of destabilization and induced
dependency.
Thankfully, these programs do not change
people permanently. Nor are they 100 percent
effective. Cults are nor all alike, thoughtreform
programs are not all alike, and not
everyone exposed to speciﬁc intense inﬂuence
processes succumbs and follows the group.
Some cults try to defend themselves by saying,
in effect, “See, not everyone joins or stays,
so we must not be using brainwashing techniques.”
Many recruits do succumb, however,
and the better organized the inﬂuence
processes used, the more people will succumb.
What is of concern, then, is that certain
groups and training programs that have
emerged in the last half-century represent
well-organized, highly orchestrated inﬂuence
efforts that are widely successful in recruiting
and converting people under certain conditions
for certain ends. My interest has been in
how these processes work, in the psychological
and social techniques that produce these
behavioral and attitudinal changes. I am less
interested in whether the content of the
group centers around religion, psychology,
self-improvement, politics, lifestyle, or ﬂying
saucers. I am more interested in the widespread
use of brainwashing techniques by
crooks, swindlers, psychopaths, and egomaniacs
of every sort.
How Thought Reform Works
Brainwashing is not experienced as a fever or
a pain might be; it is an invisible social adaptation.
When you are the subject of it, you
are not aware of the intent of the inﬂuence
processes that are going on, and especially, you
are not aware of the changes taking place
within you.
In his memoirs, Cardinal Mindszenty wrote,
“Without knowing what had happened to me,
I had become a different person.” And when
asked about being brainwashed, Patty Hearst
said, “The strangest part of all this, however,
as the SLA delighted in informing me later,
was that they themselves were surprised at
how docile and trusting I had become . . . It
was also true, I must admit, that the thought
of escaping from them later simply never
entered my mind. I had become convinced
that there was no possibility of escape . . . I
suppose I could have walked out of the apartment
and away from it all, but I didn’t. It
simply never occurred to me.”
A thought-reform program is not a oneshot
event but a gradual process of breaking
down and transformation. It can be likened to
gaining weight, a few ounces, a half pound, a
pound at a time. Before long, without even
noticing the initial changes – we are confronted
with a new physique. So, too, with
brainwashing. A twist here, a tweak there –
and there it is: a new psychic attitude, a new
mental outlook. These systematic manipulations
of social and psychological inﬂuences
under particular conditions are called programs
because the means by which change
is brought about is coordinated. And it is
because the changes cause the learning and
adoption of a certain set of attitudes, usually
accompanied by a certain set of behaviors, that
the effort and the result are called thought
reform.
Thus, thought reform is concerted effort to
change a person’s way of looking at the world,
which will change his or her behavior. It is distinguished
from other forms of social learning
by the conditions under which it is conducted
and by the techniques of environmental and
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THE “BRAINWASHING” CONTROVERSY
interpersonal manipulation that are meant to
suppress certain behavior and to elicit and
train other behavior. And it does not consist
of only one program – there are many ways
and methods to accomplish it.
The tactics of a thought-reform program
are organized to
• Destabilize a person’s sense of self.
• Get the person to drastically reinterpret his
or her life’s history and radically alter his
or her worldview and accept a new version
of reality and causality.
• Develop in the person a dependence on
the organization, and thereby turn the
person into a deployable agent of the
organization.
Thought reform can be proﬁtably looked at
in at least three ways (summarized in table
[9.1]. Robert Lifton has recognized eight
themes of thought reform, I have identiﬁed six
conditions, and Edgar Schein has named three
stages. The themes and stages outlined by
Lifton and Schein focus on the sequence of the
process, while the circumstances I have outlined
suggest the conditions needed in the surrounding
environment if the process is to work.
Singer’s six conditions
The following conditions create the atmosphere
needed to put thought-reform processes
into place. The degree to which these conditions
are present increases the level of restrictiveness
enforced by the cult and the overall
effectiveness of the program.
1 Keep the person unaware that there is an
agenda to control or change the person.
2 Control time and physical environment
(contacts, information).
3 Create a sense of powerlessness, fear, and
dependency.
151
Table [9.1] Criteria for thought reform
Conditions Themes Stages
(Singer) (Lifton) (Schein)
1 Keep the person unaware 1 Unfreezing.
of what is going on and
the changes taking place.
2 Control the person’s time 1 Milieu control.
and, if possible, physical
2 Loading the language.
environment.
3 Demand for purity.
3 Create a sense of
powerlessness, covert fear,
4 Confession.
and dependency.
4 Suppress much of the
person’s old behavior and
attitudes.
5 Instill new behavior and 5 Mystical manipulation. 2 Changing.
attitudes.
6 Doctrine over person.
6 Put forth a closed system 7 Sacred science.
of logic; allow no real
input or criticism.
8 Dispensing of existence. 3 Refreezing.
THE “BRAINWASHING” CONTROVERSY
4 Suppress old behavior and attitudes.
5 Instill new behavior and attitudes.
6 Put forth a closed system of logic.
The trick is to proceed with the thoughtreform
process one step at a time so that the
person does not notice that she or he is changing.
I will explain more fully how each step
works.
(1) Keep the person unaware of what is going
on and how she or he is being changed a step at
a time. Imagine you are the person being
inﬂuenced. You ﬁnd yourself in an environment
to which you are forced to adapt in a
series of steps, each sufﬁciently minor so that
you don’t notice the changes in yourself and
do not become aware of the goals of the
program until late in the process (if ever). You
are kept unaware of the orchestration of psychological
and social forces meant to change
your thinking and your behavior. The cult
leaders make it seem as though what is going
on is normal, that everything is the way it’s
supposed to be. This atmosphere is reinforced
by peer pressure and peer-modeled behavior,
so that you adapt to the environment without
even realizing it.
For example, a young man was invited to a
lecture. When he arrived, he noticed many
pairs of shoes lined against the wall and people
in their stocking feet. A woman nodded at his
shoes, so he took them off and set them with
the others. Everyone was speaking in a soft
voice, so he lowered his voice. The evening
proceeded with some ritual ceremonies, meditation,
and a lecture by a robed leader. Everything
was paced slowly and led by this
man, with the rest quietly watching and listening.
The young man also sat docilely, even
though he wanted to ask questions. He conformed
to what the group was doing. In this
case, however, at the end of the evening when
he was asked to come back to another lecture,
he said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” at which
two men quickly ushered him out a back door,
so others wouldn’t hear his displeasure.
The process of keeping people unaware is
key to a cult’s double agenda: the leader slowly
takes you through a series of events that on
the surface look like one agenda, while on
another level, the real agenda is to get you, the
recruit or member, to obey and to give up
your autonomy, your past afﬁliations, and your
belief systems. The existence of the double
agenda makes this process one of noninformed
consent.
(2) Control the person’s social and/or physical
environment; especially control the person’s
time. Cults don’t need to have you move into
the commune, farm, headquarters, or ashram
and live within the cult environment twentyfour
hours a day in order to have control over
you. They can control you just as effectively
by having you go to work every day with
instructions that when not working – on your
lunch hour, for example – you must do continuous
mind-occupying chanting or some
other cult-related activity. Then, after work,
you must put all your time in with the orga-
nization.
(3) Systematically created a sense of powerlessness
in the person. Cults create this sense
of powerlessness by stripping you of your
support system and your ability to act independently.
Former friends and kinship networks
are taken away. You, the recruit or
follower, are isolated from your ordinary environments
and sometimes removed to remote
locations. Another way cults create a sense of
powerlessness is by stripping people of their
main occupation and sources of wealth. It is
to achieve this condition that so many cultic
organizations have members drop out of
school, quit their jobs or give up their careers,
and turn over their property, inheritances, and
other resources to the organization. It is one
of the steps in creating a sense of dependency
on the organization and a continuing sense of
individual powerlessness.
Once stripped of your usual support
network and, in some cases, means of income,
your conﬁdence in your own perceptions
erodes. As your sense of powerlessness
increases, your good judgment and understanding
of the world are diminished. At the
same time as you are destabilized in relation
to your ordinary reality and worldview, the
cult confronts you with a new, unanimously
(group-)approved worldview. As the group
attacks your previous worldview, causing you
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THE “BRAINWASHING” CONTROVERSY
distress and inner confusion, you are not
allowed to speak about this confusion, nor can
you object to it, because leadership constantly
suppresses questions and counters any resistance.
Through this process, your inner conﬁdence
is eroded. Moreover, the effectiveness
of this approach can be speeded up if you are
physically tired, which is why cult leaders see
to it that followers are kept overly busy.
(4) Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments,
and experiences in such a way as to
inhibit behavior that reﬂects the person’s former
social identity. The expression of your beliefs,
values, activities, and characteristic demeanor
prior to contact with the group is suppressed,
and you are manipulated into taking on a
social identity preferred by the leadership. Old
beliefs and old patterns of behavior are deﬁned
as irrelevant, if not evil. You quickly learn
that the leadership wants old ideas and old
patterns eliminated, so you suppress them. For
example, the public admission of sexual feelings
in certain groups is met with overt disapproval
by peers and superiors, accompanied by
a directive to take a cold shower. An individual
can avoid public rebuke on this topic by
no longer speaking on the entire topic of sexuality,
warmth, or interest in another human
being. The vacuum left is then ﬁlled with the
group’s ways of thinking and doing.
(5) Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments,
and experiences in order to promote
learning of the group’s ideology or belief system
and group-approved behaviors. Once immersed
in an environment in which you are totally
dependent on the rewards given by those who
control the setting, you can be confronted
with massive demands to learn varying
amounts of new information and behaviors.
You are rewarded for proper performance with
social and sometimes material reinforcement;
if slow to learn or noncompliant, you are
threatened with shunning, banning, and punishment
which includes loss of esteem from
others, loss of privileges, loss of status, and
inner anxiety and guilt. In certain groups,
physical punishment is meted out.
The more complicated and ﬁlled with contradictions
the new system is and the more
difﬁcult it is to learn, the more effective the
conversion process will be. For example, a
recruit may constantly fail at mastering a
complicated theology but can succeed and be
rewarded for going out to solicit funds. In one
cultic organization, the leadership introduces
the new recruits to a complicated dodge-ball
game. Only long-term members know the
complex and ever-changing rules, and they
end up literally leading and pushing the new
recruits through the game. This, then, is
followed by a very simple exercise in which
members get together to “share.” Older
members stand up and share (that is, confess)
some past bad deed. The new members, who
failed so badly at the bewildering dodge-ball
game, now can feel capable of succeeding by
simply getting up and confessing something
about their past that was, by group standards,
bad.
Since esteem and affection from peers is
so important to new recruits, any negative
response is very meaningful. Approval comes
from having your behaviors and thought patterns
conform to the models put forth by the
group. Your relationship with peers is threatened
whenever you fail to learn or display new
behaviors. Over time, an easy solution to
the insecurity generated by the difﬁculties of
learning the new system is to inhibit any
display of doubt and, even if you don’t understand
the content, to merely acquiesce, afﬁrm,
and act as if you do understand and accept the
new philosophy or content.
(6) Put forth a closed system of logic and an
authoritarian structure that permits no feedback
and refuses to be modiﬁed except by
leadership approval or executive order. If you
criticize or complain, the leader or peers allege
that you are defective, not the organization. In
this closed system of logic, you are not allowed
to question or doubt a tenet or rule or to call
attention to factual information that suggests
some internal contradiction within the belief
system or a contradiction with what you’ve
been told. If you do make such observations,
they may be turned around and argued to
mean the opposite of what you intended. You
are made to feel that you are wrong. In cultic
groups, the individual member is always
wrong, and the system is always right.
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THE “BRAINWASHING” CONTROVERSY
For example, one cult member complained
privately to his immediate leadership that he
doubted he’d be able to kill his father if so
instructed by the cult, even though that act
was to signify true adherence to the cult’s
system. In response, he was told he needed
more courses to overcome his obvious weakness
because by now he should be more
committed to the group.
In another case, a woman objected to her
fund-raising team leader that it would be lying
to people to say cult members were collecting
money for a children’s home when they knew
the money went to the leader’s headquarters.
She was told, “That’s evidence of your
degraded mentality. You are restoring to our
leader what’s rightfully his, that’s all!”
Another woman who wanted to go home to
see her dying grandmother was refused her
request. “We’re strengthening you here,” she
was told. “This request is a sign of your selfishness.
We’re your new family, and we’re
right to not let you go.”
The goal of all this is your conversion or
remolding. As you learn to modify your
former behaviors in order to be accepted in
this closed and controlled environment, you
change. You afﬁrm that you accept and
understand the ideology by beginning to
talk in the simple catchphrases particular to
the group. This “communication” has no
foundation since, in reality, you have little
understanding of the system beyond the
catchphrases. But once you begin to express
your seeming verbal acceptance of the group’s
ideology, then that ideology becomes the
rule book for the subsequent direction and
evaluation of your behavior.
Also, using the new language fosters your
separation from your old conscience and
belief system. Your new language allows you
to justify activities that are clearly not in
your interests, perhaps not even in the
interests of humankind. Precisely those behaviors
that lead to criticism from the outside
world because they violate the norms and rules
of the society as a whole are rationalized
within the cult community through use of this
new terminology, this new language.
For example, “heavenly deception” and
“transcendental trickery” (terms used by two
of the large cultic groups) are not called what
they are – lying and deceptive fund-raising.
Nor is the rule “do not talk to the systemites”
called what it is – a way to isolate members
from the rest of the world.
Lifton’s eight themes
Paralleling Singer’s six conditions are the
eight psychological themes that psychiatrist
Robert Lifton has identiﬁed as central to totalistic
environments, including the communist
Chinese and Korean programs of the 1950s
and today’s cults. Cults invoke these themes
for the purpose of promoting behavioral and
attitudinal changes.
(1) Milieu control. This is total control of
communication in the group. In many groups,
there is a “no gossip” or no “nattering” rule
that keeps people from expressing their doubts
or misgivings about what is going on. This
rule is usually rationalized by saying that
gossip will tear apart the fabric of the group
or destroy unity, when in reality the rule is a
mechanism to keep members from communicating
anything other than positive endorsements.
Members are taught to report those
who break the rule, a practice that also keeps
members isolated from each other and
increases dependence on the leadership.
Milieu control also often involves discouraging
members from contacting relatives or
friends outside the group and from reading
anything not approved by the organization.
They are sometimes told not to believe anything
they see or hear reported by the media.
One left-wing political cult, for example,
maintains that the Berlin Wall is still standing
and that the “bourgeois capitalist” press wants
people to think otherwise in order to discredit
communism.
(2) Loading the language. As members continue
to formulate their ideas in the group’s
jargon, this language serves the purpose of
constricting members’ thinking and shutting
down critical thinking abilities. As ﬁrst, translating
from their native tongue into “groups-
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THE “BRAINWASHING” CONTROVERSY
peak’ forces members to censor, edit, and slow
down spontaneous bursts of criticism or oppositional
ideas. That helps them to cut off and
contain negative or resistive feelings. Eventually,
speaking in cult jargon is second nature,
and talking with outsiders becomes energyconsuming
and awkward. Soon enough,
members ﬁnd it most comfortable to talk only
among themselves in the new vocabulary. To
reinforce this, all kinds of derogatory names
are given to outsiders: wogs, systemites, reactionaries,
unclean, of Satan.
One large international group, for example,
has dictionaries for members to use. In one of
these dictionaries, criticism is deﬁned as “justiﬁcation
for having done an overt.” Then one
looks up overt and the dictionary states: “overt
act: an overt act is not just injuring someone
or something; an overt act is an act of omission
or commission which does the least good
for the least number of dynamics or the most
harm to the greatest number of dynamics.”
Then the deﬁnition of dynamics says: “There
could be said to be eight urges in life . . .” And
so, one can search from term to term trying
to learn this new language. One researcher
noted that the group’s founder has stated that
“new followers or potential converts should
not be exposed to [the language and cosmology
of the group] at too early a stage.
‘Talking whole track to raw meat’ is frowned
upon.”
When cults use such internal meanings, how
is an outsider to know that the devil disguise,
just ﬂesh relationships, and polluting are terms
for parents? That an edu is a lecture by the cult
leader or that a mislocation is a mistake? A
former cult member comments, “I was always
being told, ‘You are being too horizontal.’”
Translated, this meant she was being reprimanded
for listening to and being sympathetic
to peers.
A dwindling group in Seattle, the Love
Family, had a “rite of breathing.” This sounds
ordinary, but in fact for some members it
turned out to be a lethal euphemism. The
leader, a former California salesman, initiated
this rite, in which members sat in a circle,
passing around and snifﬁng a plastic bag containing
a rag soaked with toluene, an industrial
solvent. The group called the chemical
“tell-u-all.”
(3) Demand for purity. An us-versus-them
orientation is promoted by the all-or-nothing
belief system of the group: we are right;
they (outsiders, nonmembers) are wrong, evil,
unenlightened, and so forth. Each idea or act
is good or bad, pure or evil. Recruits gradually
take in, or internalize, the critical, shaming
essence of the cult environment, which builds
up lots of guilt and shame. Most groups
put forth that there is only one way to think,
respond, or act in any given situation. There
is no in between, and members are expected
to judge themselves and others by this all-ornothing
standard. Anything can be done in
the name of this purity; it is the justiﬁcation
for the group’s internal moral and ethical
code. In many groups, it is literally taught that
the end justiﬁes the means – and because the
end (that is, the group) is pure, the means are
simply tools to reach purity.
If you are a recruit, this ubiquitous guilt and
shame creates and magniﬁes your dependence
on the group. The group says in essence, “We
love you because you are transforming yourself,”
which means that any moment you are
not transforming yourself, you are slipping
back. Thus you easily feel inadequate, as
though you need “ﬁxing” all the time, just as
the outside would is being denounced all the
time.
(4) Confession. Confession is used to lead
members to reveal past and present behavior,
contacts with others, and undesirable feelings,
seemingly in order to unburden themselves
and become free. However, whatever you
reveal is subsequently used to further mold
you and to make you feel close to the group
and estranged from nonmembers. (I sometimes
call this technique purge and merge.)
The information gained about you can be used
against you to make you feel more guilty, powerless,
fearful, and ultimately in need of the
cult and the leader’s goodness. And it can
be used to get you to rewrite your personal
history so as to denigrate your past life,
making it seem illogical for you to want to
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return to that former life, family, and friends.
Each group will have its own confession ritual,
which may be carried out either one-on-one
with a person in leadership or in group sessions.
Members may also write reports on
themselves and others.
Through the confession process and by
instruction in the group’s teachings, members
learn that everything about their former lives,
including friends, family, and nonmembers, is
wrong and to be avoided. Outsiders will put
you at risk of not attaining the purported
goal: they will lessen your psychological
awareness, hinder the group’s political
advancement, obstruct your path toward ultimate
knowledge, or allow you to become
stuck in your past life and incorrect thinking.
(5) Mystical manipulation. The group
manipulates members to think that their new
feelings and behavior have arisen spontaneously
in this new atmosphere. The leader
implies that this is a chosen, select group with
a higher purpose. Members become adept at
watching to see what particular behavior is
wanted, learning to be sensitive to all kinds of
cued by which they are to judge and alter their
own behavior. Cult leaders tell their followers,
“You have chosen to be here. No one has told
you to come here. No one has inﬂuenced
you,” when in fact the followers are in a situation
they can’t leave owing to social pressure
and their fear. Thus they come to believe that
they are actually choosing this life. If outsiders
hint that the devotees have been brainwashed
or tricked, the members say, “Oh, no, I chose
voluntarily.” Cults thrive on this myth of
voluntarism, insisting time and again that
no member is being held against his or her
will.
(6) Doctrine over person. As members retrospectively
alter their accounts of personal
history, having been instructed either to
rewrite that history or simply to ignore it, they
are simultaneously taught to interpret reality
through the group concepts and to ignore
their own experiences and feelings as they
occur. In many groups, from the days of early
membership on, you will be told to stop
paying attention to your own perceptions,
since you are “uninstructed,” and simply to go
along with and accept the “instructed” view,
the party line.
The rewriting of personal history more
often than not becomes a re-creating, so that
you learn to to ﬁt yourself into the group’s
interpretation of life. For example, one young
man recently out of a cult reported to me that
he was “a drug addict, violent, and irresponsible.”
It soon became clear from our discussions
that none of this was true. His drug
addiction amounted to three puffs of marijuana
a number of years ago; his violence
stemmed from his participation on a high
school wrestling team; and his irresponsibility
was based on his not having saved any money
from his very small allowance as a teenager.
However, the group he had been in had
convinced him that these things represented
terrible ﬂaws.
(7) Sacred science. The leader’s wisdom is
given a patina of science, adding a credible
layer to his central philosophical, psychological,
or political notion, He can then profess
that the group’s philosophy should be applied
to all humankind and that anyone who
disagrees or has alternative ideas is not only
immoral and irreverent but also unscientiﬁc.
Many leaders, for example, inﬂate their curricula
vitae to make it look as though they
are connected to higher powers, respected
historical leaders, and so forth. Many a cult
leader has said that he follows in the tradition
of the greatest – Sigmund Freud, Karl
Marx, the Buddha, Martin Luther, or Jesus
Christ.
(8) Dispensing of existence. The cult’s totalistic
environment clearly emphasizes that
members are part of an elitist movement and
are the select of the world. Nonmembers are
unworthy, lesser beings. Most cults teach their
members that “we are the best and only one,”
saying, in one way or another, “We are the
governors of enlightenment and all outsiders
are lower beings.” This kind of thinking lays
the foundation for dampening the good consciences
members brought in with them and
allows members, as agents or representatives
of a “superior” group, to manipulate nonmembers
for good of the group. Besides reinforcing
the us-versus-them mentality, this
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THE “BRAINWASHING” CONTROVERSY
thinking means that your whole existence
centers on being in the group. If you leave,
you join nothingness. This is the ﬁnal step
in creating members’ dependence on the
group.
Numerous former cult members report
that, when they look back at what they did or
would have done at the command of the
group, they are appalled and stricken. Many
have said they would have killed their own
parents if so ordered. Hundreds have told me
of countless deceptions and lies, such as shortchanging
donors on the street, using ruses
to keep members from leaving, and urging
persons who could ill afford it to run their
credit cards up to their limit in order to sign
up for further courses.
Schein’s three stages
Next, we consider the stages people go
through as their attitudes are changed by the
group environment and the thought-reform
processes. These were labeled by psychologist
Edgar Schein as the stages of “unfreezing,
changing, and refreezing.”
(1) Unfreezing. In this ﬁrst stage, your past
attitudes and choices – your whole sense of
self and notion of how the world works –
are destabilized by group lectures, personal
counseling, reward, punishments, and other
exchanges in the group. This destabilization is
designed to produce what psychologists call an
identity crisis. While you are looking back at
your own world and behavior and values (that
is, unfreezing them), you are simultaneously
bombarded with the new system, which
implies that you have been wrong in the past.
This process makes you uncertain about what
is right, what to do, and which choices to
make.
As described earlier, successful behavioral
change programs are designed to upset you
to the point that your self-conﬁdence is
undermined. This makes you more open to
suggestion and also more dependent on the
environment for cues about “right thinking”
and “right conduct.” Your resistance to the
new ideas lessens when you feel yourself teetering
on an edge with massive anxiety about
the right choices in life on the one side, and
the group ideas that offer the way out of this
distress on the other side.
Mary groups use a “hot seat” technique or
some other form of criticism to attain the
goal of undercutting, destabilizing, and
diminishing. For example, “Harry” had been
in the Army, was approaching his late twenties,
and was always very sure of himself. But
when he joined a Bible cult, the leaders said
he wasn’t learning fast enough to speak in
tongues. He was told that he was resistant,
that this was a sign of his evil past. He was told
this over and over, no matter how hard he
tried. Before long, Harry seemed to lose conﬁdence
in himself, even in his memories of his
Army successes. His own attitude about
himself as well as his actual behavior was
unfreezing.
(2) Changing. During this second stage,
you sense that the solutions offered by the
group provide a path to follow. You feel that
anxiety, uncertainty, and self-doubt can be
reduced by adopting the concepts put forth by
the group or leader. Additionally, you observe
the behavior of the longer-term members, and
you begin to emulate their ways. As social
psychology experiments and observations
have found for decades, once a person makes
an open commitment before others to an idea,
his or her subsequent behavior generally supports
and reinforces the stated commitment.
That is, if you say in front of others that you
are making a commitment to be “pure,” then
you will feel pressured to follow what others
deﬁne as the path of purity.
If you spend enough time in any environment,
you will develop a personal history
of experience and interaction in it. When
that environment is constructed and managed
in a certain way, then the experiences, interactions,
and peer relations will be consistent
with whatever public identity is fostered by
the environment and will incorporate the
values and opinions promulgated in that
environment.
Now, when you engage in cooperative activity
with peers in an environment that you do
not realize is artiﬁcially constructed, you do
not perceive your interactions to be coerced.
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THE “BRAINWASHING” CONTROVERSY
And when you are encouraged but not forced
to make verbal claims to “truly understanding
the ideology and having been transformed,”
these interactions with your peers will tend to
lead you to conclude that you hold beliefs
consistent with your actions. In other words,
you will think that you came upon the belief
and behaviors yourself.
Peer pressure is very important to this
process:
• If you say in front of others, you’ll do it.
• Once you do it, you’ll think it.
• Once you think it (in an environment you
do not perceive to be coercive), you’ll
believe that you thought it yourself.
(3) Refreezing. In this ﬁnal phase, the
group reinforces you in the desired behavior
with social and psychological rewards, and
punishes unwanted attitudes and behaviors
with harsh criticism, group disapproval, social
ostracism, and loss of status. Most of the
modern-day thought-reform groups seek to
produce smiling, nonresistant, hardworking
persons who do not complain about group
practices and do not question the authority of
the guru, leader, or trainer. The more you
display the group-approved attitudes and
behavior, the more your compliance is interpreted
by the leadership as showing that you
now know that your life before you belonged
to the group was wrong and that your new life
is “the way” . . .
The degree to which a group or situation is
structured according to these conditions,
themes, and stages will determine the degree
to which it is manipulative. Not all cults or
groups that use thought-reform processes
implement their mind-bending techniques
in the same way or to the same extent. The
implementation varies both within individual
groups and across groups. Often, the peripheral
members will have no awareness of the
kinds of manipulations that go on in the upper
or inner levels of a particular group or
teaching. Thought reform is subtle, ﬂuid, and
insidious – and sometimes hard to identify,
particularly for the novice or the overly idealistic.
But when it is present, it has powerful
repercussions.
Producing a New Identity
As part of the intense inﬂuence and change
process in many cults, people take on a new
social identity, which may or may not be
obvious to an outsider. When groups refer
to this new identity, they speak of members
who are transformed, reborn, enlightened,
empowered, rebirthed, or cleared. The
group-approved behavior is reinforced and
reinterpreted as demonstrating the emergence
of “the new person.” Members are expected
to display this new social identity.
However, the vast majority of those who
leave such groups drop the cult content, and
the cult behavior and attitudes, and painstakingly
take up where they left off prior to
joining. Those who had been subjected to
thought-reform processes in the Far East,
for example, gradually dropped the adopted
attitudes and behaviors and returned to their
former selves as soon as they were away
from the environment. We see from years of
research with prisoners of war, hostages, battered
wives, former cult members, and other
recipients of intense inﬂuence that changes
made under this inﬂuence are not stable
and not permanent. The beliefs a person
may adopt about the world, about a particular
philosophy, and even about himself or
herself are reversible when the person is out
of the environment that induced those
beliefs.
We might ask ourselves – and surely many
former cult members have – how a person
can display reprehensible conduct under some
conditions, then turn around and resume
normal activities under other conditions. The
phenomenon has been variously described as
doubling or as the formation of a pseudopersonality
(or pseudoidentity), superimposed
identity, a cult self, or a cult personality. What
is important about these labels is that they
call attention to an important psychological
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THE “BRAINWASHING” CONTROVERSY
and social phenomenon that needs to be
studied more carefully – namely, that ordinary
persons, with their own ideas and attitudes,
can be rapidly turned around in their social
identity but later can recover their old selves
and move forward.
By this, I am not saying that people in cults
or groups that use thought-reform processes
are just faking it by role-playing, pretending,
or acting. Anyone who has met a former
friend who’s been transformed into a recruiting
zealot for a New Age transformational
program, for example, knows that something
more profound than role-playing is operating
as that old friend defends her or his new self
and new group, speaking single-mindedly,
spouting intense, ﬁrmly stated dogma. This is
not play-acting. It is far more instinctive and
experienced as real.
Doubling, or the formation of a pseudopersonality,
has become a key issue. It is a factor
that ultimately allows cult members to leave
their groups and permits us to understand why
exit counseling works as a means of reawakening
a person who has been exposed to
thought-reform processes. The central fact is
this: the social identity learned while a person
is in a thought-reform system fades, much as
a summer tan does when a person is no longer
at the beach. The process is far more complicated
than this analogy, of course, but I want
to emphasize that cult thinking and behaviors
are adaptive and not stable.
It is the cult environment that produces and
keeps in place the cult identity. Some persons
stay forever in the group, but the vast majority
leave at some point, either walking away
or being lured out by family and friends. An
understanding of thought-reforming phenomena
is vital to learning more about the
role that group social support or pressure plays
for all of us. It is important not only for families
with relatives in cultic groups but also for
ex-members wondering if there are psychological
and social theories to explain what
happened to them, and for everyone who
wants to learn something about how we all
operate.
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