BRAINWASHING: IS IT ALL IN THE MIND?
From agents manipulated by an evil Bond villain to shoppers bewitched by clever adverts, are we really so powerless to resist the control of others? Brainwashed Daniel Pick Wellcome Collection £20
In the 1969 Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Ruby Bartlett (Angela Scoular) is a patient high atop a Swiss mountain at a luxury allergy clinic, along with a dozen other beautiful women. By night, as they sleep, their rooms pulsate with purple psychedelic lights, and the deep voice of Blofeld (Telly Savalas) infuses their dreams.
On the face of it, Ruby is being cured of her aversion to chickens. But actually, by means of mind control, she and the others are being primed as sleeper agents, ready to be sent out into the world with deadly viruses.
The concept of ‘brainwashing’ – in this example both slightly comic and naffly sexy – was intrinsic both to the espionage genre and an accepted fact in real life.
And indeed it still is today: how else do we try to explain all those young recruits travelling to Syria to join Islamic State?
And yet the term is also simplistic: it suggests that the mind can be wiped like a blackboard, with new writing imposed upon a blank will. Can this ever really be possible?
Daniel Pick has done the most wonderful, engaging and compelling job in tracing the roots of this particular strain of post-war anxiety in all its forms, from totalitarian tyrannies to psychiatric hospitals, the diabolical ingenuity of Madison Avenue advertising men and right up to today’s fears of fake news and ubiquitous algorithms making our subconscious minds twitch like railway junction points.
Although the notion of ‘brainwashing’ – so dominating the conscious mind that the victim’s will vanishes, to be replaced with their captor’s beliefs – had been around for longer, the concept and the term really leapt into lurid life in the wake of the 1950s Korean War. The imagery was instant: isolation, darkness, drugs, hyper-intense psychological pressure resulting in the prisoner’s guilt and shame, and then the gradual rewards of feeling ‘loved’ as the prisoner came to agree with his guards’ ideology.
There were extraordinary cases of American prisoners of war who – after long years of gruelling captivity, masterminded by the Chinese military – were given their freedom but elected not to return home, choosing instead to make new lives in China.
Pick analyses these cases and the whitecoated literature that emerged in the US trying to explain the phenomenon (some suggested high-tech ingenuity blended with a more old-fashioned and slightly racist occult Orientalism) and indeed harness it, via CIA experiments.
But, as Pick sharply demonstrates, one such prisoner, Clarence Adams, was not so much brainwashed as making a crystalline judgment between two equally unattractive prospects. He was black, and had suffered racism in the US Army as well as in his home state of Tennessee.
The prospect of returning to the ingrained prejudice of 1950s America made him turn instead to the apparent equality of China.
Pick doesn’t go into the case of the Dutchborn British spy George Blake, who was later to become a notorious double agent for the Soviets – many assumed that his actions had been the result of Korean brainwashing. In fact, Blake’s Communism long pre-dated his captors’ efforts. The question hovers: can you be brainwashed into positions with which you had once violently disagreed?
And Pick has terrific range: the book goes far beyond espionage, into the shape of society, the nature of politics and the pressures we all face every day to conform. The barrages come not merely from advertising and 24hour media, but also certain forms of ‘group think’, where a set of ideas are accepted by an influential majority as orthodox – and those who disagree can find themselves isolated. As you read, you continually wonder about your own power to resist.
Pick also has a keen interest as a psychoanalyst and explores whether this field can sometimes unintentionally contribute to the manipulation of the mind: tournaments between therapists and clients.
At the other extreme of this are the nightmare stories of secure psychiatric units – from Soviet Russia to the US – and the terrifying waves of enthusiasm for procedures such as lobotomies, which erased the
identities and the souls of patients.
But also, along the way, the larger philosophical questions are handled by Pick with a deft touch: is every society in some sense the result of brainwashing, intentional or otherwise? Was Eisenhower’s wholesome materialist US every bit as sinister an exercise in mass psychic control as any totalitarian regime?
Perhaps out of some delicacy or politeness (or indeed legal anxiety), Pick rather tactfully stays away from the subject of certain recently invented – ahem – religions, much favoured by Hollywood stars. But in so doing he also seems to regard the wider history of religion as beyond his (late 20th Century) brief.
Nonetheless, I was frequently reminded throughout of Elizabeth I, and England’s unbiddable Catholic recusants refusing to change their beliefs, and the Queen’s reluctance to make windows to see ‘into men’s souls’.
Whether discussing today’s problems such as Uighur captivity, or the delicacy of democracy, or the intricate dances of social compromise – micro-brainwashes – that we all perform every day, Pick’s mesmerising account is also generous in allowing your mind to roam freely over your own interpretations.
Or is it..?