About a fifth of the economic activity in the USA is brainwashing. And quite a bit of other activity, such as most consumer internet services, exist to facilitate this brainwashing.
Here's the industry's claim. Of course, given the nature of the industry, it's probably misleading at best and intended to alter your thinking to align better with their interests.
That's the entire point, right?
Pay money to an ad agency and they will affect the thoughts of your target demographic.
Maybe its benign brainwashing, or you'd choose a different word because brainwashing has a lot of connotations. But that is factually what it's trying to do
Affecting the thoughts of other humans is close to the purpose of all inter-human communication. Consider the following cases:
- Your neighbor knows you need a new table and their brother sells tables so they tell you about it and offer you a special deal.
- Your daughter is an avowed pacifist who tries very hard to convince you that you should move your family to another country and stop paying taxes to one that is currently waging a war.
- Your son really hates broccoli and pleads with you to make carrots for dinner side instead.
- A company that makes packaged dessert foods pays theaters to covertly insert subliminal imagery into film reels designed to make viewers crave their food.
- A group takes over a rural commune and recruits people from broken homes, convincing them to become sex slaves and take part in ritual suicide pacts over the course of many years of sophisticated psychological manipulation and isolation techniques.
- A charistmatic totalitarian politician spends years on the stump gradually convinging a voting majority of what used to be a liberal democracy that directing all national production toward warfare, attempting to conquer their entire continent, and exterminating an entire race of nationless people is the only way forward for human progress.
Are all of these activities morally equivalent? Does it make sense to call all of them by the same term? Or does that decrease, rather than increase, the usefulness with which we can discuss these kinds of things?
That said, I can't disagree that 20% of a national economy being devoted to marketing and advertising seems unlikely to be a socially optimal allocation of economic activity.
yeah, fair. I posted in a sibling comment two more reasons imo. advertising fits with brainwashing, namely that it:
Is done scientifically and at huge scale by powerful entities
& is non-consentual, almost everyone would rather not see ads or internalize their ideas. (Coors beer is cool and if you drink it women will like you more, yuck, who wants to believe that)
But yeah, you're right that just influencing thoughts is not the only part of the definition. And really past a certain point anything is impossible to define, so these arguments are always a little weird. Eg. I challenge you to give an airtight definition of what is a chair.
Calling advertizment brainwashing is certainly a little provocative, & in my opinion perfectly correct given the scale and goals. But I can see how it can be annoying in retrospect. Glad we agree that spending that much on it is sad
brainwashing - noun
1. a forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas
2. persuasion by propaganda or salesmanship
The colloquial definition is 1, not as much 2, which is where the semantic bickering will come in.
Most people do not view being "convinced" as brainwashing. They see brainwashing as a sub-conscious activity. They view being convinced as a conscious one.
The term IS meaningless, there is no clear distinction between "brainwashing", "education", "marketing", "propaganda" and "convincing". Except that the first term was coined as war propaganda, so that you could say that people was brainwashed by your enemy instead of admitting that your enemy convinced those people. This also helps you to brainwa... I mean, to convince your citizens that your enemy is very evil and those people brainwashed by them could also be seen as bewitched drones, not fully human beings.
Which is kinda my point, you can't call ads not brainwashing because the term really does mean a lot of different things.
I like it because imo. advertisers are in general 'the enemy', out to convince us that we'll never find love without a diamond ring and that oreos sound really really good right now. So I'll use this term. Or more often propaganda since that ones harder to argue against
>The term IS meaningless, there is no clear distinction between "brainwashing, "education", "marketing", "propaganda" and "convincing"
From Merriam Webster's definition of brainwashing [0]
1. a forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas
2. persuasion by propaganda or salesmanship
So, the term isn't meaningless and, colloquially, is generally understood to emphasize the forcible or misleading / propaganda-based aspects of the formal definition.
I agree that the term has a meaning in the dictionary, and colloquially people attribute a distinct and stronger meaning to it. But I think it becomes meaningless when we try to establish a more serious discussion about it. The origin of the term as war propaganda is what creates this colloquial meaning and it is also why it becomes difficult to distinguish it from other things: the evil enemy brainwashes, we just educate rebellious children and teach them to behave. The evil enemy brainwashes, we just fill the cinema with movies depicting our soldiers as heroes, and our news on TV convince even people against the war that the enemy is a real menace against us and should be attacked. We just have full of marketing companies trying to convince even people that do not want to buy more things to buy more things. All these things can make a person give up previous beliefs and accept contrasting ideas. And are forcible in a way or another.
I've added some more in a sibling comment, but I really don't think the methods used by advertisers are much different than state progapaganda or cults.
That's also factually what you're trying to do right now, and what I'm trying to do back at you, but maybe we should call it "communicating" in this instance. Because brainwashing has a lot of connotations. That don't apply. You see.
advertising is non-consensual, almost everyone would rather not see ads and not internalize its ideas
advertising is precise and scientific, it is done by powerful groups at large scale
and truthfully, if this comment was part of an astroturfing campaign by an agency if have no problem calling it a brainwashing attempt. or call it something else, its all semantics. murder if you're mad, loss of life if you're not sort of thing
The article says "mind clearing and reprogramming" is the sense we all usually think of, and that doesn't apply to advertising, even if it's totally dishonest like astroturfing. So although we could agree to call it brainwashing now we've established what we mean, in conversation with a general audience, we shouldn't, because that would be misleading. But anyway, it's been nice brainwashing with you today, I'm glad we had this opportunity to brainwash each other.
I find this dictionary definition quite fitting: "2. any method of controlled systematic indoctrination, especially one based on repetition or confusion"
"a method for systematically changing attitudes or altering beliefs," fits very well. "originated in totalitarian countries" not so much, and "especially through the use of torture, drugs, or psychological-stress techniques" very little, although it's an "especially", so not a required feature.
The "originated in totalitarian countries" is a bit odd requirement for my taste. Of course, if one wants to use that definition, then by definition even "a method for systematically changing attitudes or altering beliefs the use of torture, drugs, or psychological-stress techniques" is not brainwashing if it doesn't originate from a country that is defined as totalitarian with some definition.
yeah, I think in retrospect maybe part of the confusion is that some people's definition of brainwashing is only the torture/drugs definition, while mine and yours presumably has always included propaganda and other purely psychological means.
But its hard to convince someone ads are brainwashing when to their mind its just completely obviously something else.
In the end its all language games anyways when we hopefully should all be able to agree that it's a problem that 20% of the GDP to be spent trying to control our thoughts
But would you really be OK with some authority deciding how much gets spent on it? Or is the amount not the real issue?
There's an ad in the article itself: it was offering me 25% off a subscription to MIT Technology Review during Earth Week. I didn't ask to see that information. It was trying to get me to do something I wasn't very interested in. Is that advert part of the problem, or is it one you'd arbitrarily allow?
I'm very OK that some authority (democratically accountable) decides what the advertisements can contain, and how prevalent they are allowed to be. I.e. that advertising is regulated.
And it is regulated to an extent, but IMHO it should be regulated dramatically more and the existing regulations should be actually enforced. And at least in Finland, where I'm from, it used to be way way way more regulated than it is nowadays. E.g. advertising to children was universally banned. Ads weren't allowed to air around news. Product placement was strictly banned. TV ads could be put out only every 15 minutes or so, and they could last only a minute or two. Before this commercial radio and TV broadcasts were banned altogether for a long time. Etc etc.
The "25% off a subscription to MIT Technology Review during Earth Week" kind of ads were probably banned (and maybe still are in theory). When a product was allowed to be on sale was strictly regulated (had to be sold on the "real" price for vast majority of the time). There's some new EU legislation for restricting "sales" like this, but I don't think they will be effectively enforced (see e.g. GDPR).
Non-deceptive ways of informing people about factual product features and availability in reasonable volume (e.g. 1-5% of average communicated information) is probably fine. Modern ads have very little to do with such. They are a huge engine that dramatically shape how people think and act in general, e.g. making them want or even need products that don't really benefit them and making them labor to get such products. Consumerism is the main ideology of contemporary western cultures and this is mainly due to advertising.
Yes. So what this comes down to is, scams should be illegal, and a lot of advertising is scam-like, and deciding how to regulate it is a work in progress. But the topic has now moved away from brainwashing - except I suppose that some people who are exceptionally vulnerable to being scammed will also be vulnerable to repetitious pressure. It's not an aspect of adverts per se.
On the whole though you're just saying "some adverts are bad and should be stopped by regulators", which isn't going to attract much disagreement, except in the details. And regulations (beer and bread, for example) are as old as the hills, and so is consuming stuff (is that the same as consumerism?) - I think the problem is recent rapid innovations in legally permissible scamming.
The brainwashing part is more subtle than simple scams. And most advertising doesn't really work in the simple way that it would create just an urge to buy something with repetition or persuasion. It affects us all, directly and indirectly, not just some exceptionally vulnerable.
Vast majority of ads try to link some connotations to their product/service/brand. E.g. young attractive women happen to be around a certain beer brand.
But when you buy the beer, it doesn't come with the women included. It didn't of course outright claim that it would, but the women are put in the ad to create such connotation, and it seems to work. Is that a scam? In any case it's misleading and manipulative.
Now, that's just one case. But there are thousands (millions?) such products/services/scams with their own misleading and manipulative connotations. And together these manipulate the whole culture and society. It transcends just the individuals seeing the ads.
Diamonds are a good example of purely ad-constructed social phenomenon. By associating diamonds with true forever love and devotion and appreciation and whatever, they suddenly become "valuable". And the individual doesn't even have to believe any of this, but if they think that others believe it, they can deem that other people think they are worthy of appreciation and whatever if somebody bought them a diamond.
Of course all of this happens very subconsciously, but it works very effectively. This is how a lot of advertising works. By manipulating whole societal beliefs and values. That's even beyond brainwashing.
Consumerism isn't just buying stuff. It's about people e.g. identifying themselves and others based on what (brand) they buy. The actual product doesn't necessarily even matter itself, it's all the connotations that are associated to them societally with ads. Fashion items are a clear example of this, but it happens with all sorts of goods.
If you want to see effective brainwashing, you need to look for instances where Pavlovian conditioning and enhanced states of suggestion (essentially “hypnosis”, but think of the clinical definition, rather than stage performance tropes) are combined over the course of years in a way that self reinforces the thoughts to be held. Works best when the person is offered something that they think they need (validation, community, sexual release, security) and if the person is already or can be isolated from interfering peers.
Basically look at what cults do, though it doesn’t even need a machiavellian mastermind involved, people can and will accomplish the same largely by their own initiative. This is what happens when you get online communities radicalizing themselves.
A simpler example is to look at advertisements, which are a more acceptable form of propaganda. For example TV ads. A lot of what they say is a kind of fuzzy forgettable nonsense, but really pay attention to the underlying message of the ad and the techniques they use.
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The author seems not merely uninformed but a mix of unaware and unconcerned that they don’t know what they’re talking about. No discussion of hypnosis, Stockholm syndrome, and a general vibe that psychology is like not really a thing unless it coincides with cherished narratives. And then little chestnuts like, “the idea of brainwashing continues to be a powerful metaphor for the effects of systemic racism.” Say what?
The article literally refers to the case for which Stockholm Syndrome is named and offers a simple explanation; that torture and privation work to align a person's goals and motivations to minimise pain.
I'm not sure what you are finding so contentious about this article. We have accepted that people under torture will admit to anything for centuries.
The article doesn't refer to that incident, so far as I can see. It does mention Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped a year after the Stockholm bank robbery.
The term "Stockholm Syndrome" originates from a police consultant inventing a syndrome to diagnose a woman he had never met, in order to discredit her criticism of the largely incompetent police response to her and several other people being taken hostage by a bank robber.
They just did a documentary on the bank robbery, and as you watch it you get "Stockholm Syndrome," too. The West is just addicted to narratives of mind control and bewitchment, and people are easily convinced that any deviation from the designated norm is the result of evil forces taking control of people's wills through mysterious methods.
Africa has a very similar problem. Where Anglo-Europeans think that all deviant behavior is caused by mind control (by demons, Jews, Russians, alcohol, marijuana, the Chinese, Cambridge Analytics, etc.), large parts of Africa believe that all illness is the result of curses. When somebody gets sick and dies, they start looking for witches to kill.
I gave one quote that is an example of the lack of thought, here’s another,
“by spending millions of dollars on research into manipulating the human brain. But while the science never exactly panned out, residual beliefs fostered by this bizarre conflict continue to play a role”
In what sense did the science “not pan out”?
What “residual beliefs” could she mean? The text implies that it’s the idea that the human brain cannot be manipulated.
Almost every sentence has that level of inanity and incoherence. Advertising meanwhile is a billion dollar industry built on manipulating brains.
This appears to be an overview article, just touching on a lot of subjects. Not a deep dive of any particular one. If they gave all the details of every idea in the article it would be 10x longer.
I would think for the 'deep dive' with details and citations, they want you to buy the book. This is just a teaser.
"Annalee Newitz is the author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, coming in June 2024."
>But Hunter wasn’t just a reporter, objectively chronicling conditions in China. As he told the assembled senators, he was also an anticommunist activist who served as a propagandist for the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services—something that was considered normal and patriotic at the time. His reporting blurred the line between fact and political mythology.
I get that expecting truly quality research work from Technology Review is an eggs-in-moonshine level fantasy, but it'd be nice to employ literally one editor who has read literally any of MIT's greatest researchers with all the ivy league cash they spend on fancy robots or buildings or whatever else.
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