Why you can’t always trust your thoughts – or a book’s cover
★★★
T368pp, Wellcome, £20, ebook £11.59 he odds are that you feel at least vaguely in charge of your own brain and the beliefs it contains. That is, after all, one of the conditions of selfhood: some sort of barrier between what goes on inside your head and what goes on outside it. The barrier is porous, because it has to be. We absorb information, interact with others, process and decide; and along the way we both receive and construct the beliefs and desires that define us. We do not have total control, of course, but we have some. Most people do not go through their lives as passive receivers, believing all that they are told. Or, as historian and psychoanalyst Daniel Pick asks in this New History of Thought Control, do we?
This is potentially thoughtprovoking stuff. Which makes it a slight shame that the first thought Brainwashed will provoke in many readers is, “Why is this not the book I was sold?” Despite its title, Cold-Warfocused blurb, and retro-tech tapemachine cover, Brainwashed is not a history of brainwashing in the commonly understood sense of the term; and it contains little about the history of superpower attempts to implant ideas and reshape minds à la
or The
Ipcress File. Though, as other historians of the topic have done, Pick traces brainwashing’s origins to the anti-Communist propagandist Edward Hunter (who coined it in the 1950s from the literal meaning of the Chinese characters “xi nao”), he swiftly moves on to broader ideas about groupthink and conformity. Readers really interested in the Cold War will be better served by skipping straight to Stephen Kinzer’s excellent Poisoner in Chief, which covers that material both more technically and more engagingly.
Once over the fact that Brainwashed does not do what it says on the tin, there is the question of what it is doing. Brainwashing has, as Pick notes, often proven “diffuse and difficult to define” but under his formulation the diffuseness increases in order to cover
just about every way in which our brains are formed by the societies we live in. “Are we,” he asks rhetorically, “educated, accosted, informed, accustomed, acclimatised, habituated, normalised, familiarised, influenced, nudged, conditioned, shaped, manipulated, programmed or maybe even… brainwashed” to take for granted an order of the world that might just as well be otherwise? And if so, how might understanding the idea of brainwashing in this sense enhance our ability to understand our own “contemporary lived experiences of commerce and culture, society and politics” and “think about the hazards of thinking itself ”?
The result is six chapters that chart not so much the cultural history of brainwashing as brainconstructing: what psychologists call “subject formation”, seen here through the eyes of dozens of sociologists, psychologists, politicians and admen over the last 70 years. Beginning with Hunter’s neologism in 1950, and passing through heated debates about the fragility of the human mind under totalitarianism and groupthink, on to the deceptions of the “hidden persuaders” in consumer society, before winding up with the conspiracy theories and threats to democracy of the present, they are nothing if not rich in information.
And yet despite its admirable learning Brainwashed never takes off, even on its own terms. Often it feels like a heavily annotated reading list for a social psychology course – much of which, despite Pick’s twice repeated assertion that he is dealing with “largely forgotten” texts and debates, felt familiar even to this non-specialist. Elsewhere it sags under the weight of Pick’s prose, and his persistent refusal to summarise his own points as briefly as he does others’. But most curious of all is the fact that a book about influencing people should feel so ineptly preachy.
As Pick took his stand in the final pages on the climate crisis, our “hapless” prime minister and other “psycho-political concerns”, I counted myself fully among the choir being preached to, and yet felt like nothing so much as slipping off my surplice and leaving the church. Perhaps the problem is not so much the ways in which we are “cajoled and controlled” against our own interests, but the fact that those seeking to do the opposite are not half as good at it.
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