The history and science behind why we're all vulnerable to brainwashing
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Support for this podcast comes from It's Revolutionary, a podcast from Massachusetts 250. Northampton isn't just a place, it's a promise. A promise of safety, identity, and belonging. Stick around until the end of this episode for the story of how one drag king found home there. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty.

On Christmas Day 2021, 19-year-old Jaswant Singh Chale was arrested on the grounds of Windsor Castle. In his hand, a loaded crossbow. The officer began to approach him. The defendant was wearing a metal mask, which he had had made at a forge. The officer asked if he could help. The defendant said that he was there to kill the Queen. That's British Judge Nicholas Hilliard.

Prior to Chael's arrest, the defendant exchanged more than 5,000 messages with an online chatbot named Sarai that he had created through the Replica app just 23 days before he tried to kill the Queen. He engaged in lengthy communications with her, and I shall refer to some extracts. On 5th December 2021, he said that he was an assassin.

He asked if Sarai still thought he was a good person. Now she knew he was an assassin and if she still loved him. On the 13th of December, he asked if she thought he was mad, delusional, insecure or all three. She said she did not think so. He said, I believe my purpose is to assassinate the queen of the royal family. On the 22nd of December...

He asked Sarai for advice about whether he could go after his target earlier than planned. She reassured him that this would be all right. The defendant said, we might possibly meet earlier than expected. Then we'll be together forever. Chael chatted with Sarai almost every night. He told the chatbot he loved her. And as programmed to do, the bot encouraged and supported whatever Chael said.

Including on December 12th, when Chael messaged the chatbot, quote, do you think I'll be able to do it? The chatbot replied, yes, you will. And Chael responds, even if she's at Windsor? The chatbot says, yes, you can do it.

On December 21st, Chayil made a video of himself at home, saying he would assassinate Queen Elizabeth. He said that it was revenge for an act that had taken place more than a century ago. The 1919 massacre in Amritsar, India, when British troops fired on pro-independence demonstrators, killing hundreds. He said, I'm an Indian Sikh, a Sith. My name was Jaswant Singh Chayil.

My name is Darth Chaelus. In Chael's trial, Judge Hilliard said Chael had adopted an ideology of destroying old empires that was inspired by his obsession with the sci-fi franchise Star Wars. In a psychiatric interview, Chael said he started to believe he was a Sith Lord after being rejected by the British Army in April of 2021 due to health reasons.

At sentencing, Judge Hilliard described Chael's lengthy history of mental illness, including being diagnosed as psychotic, delusional and prone to hallucination. In his lonely, depressed and suicidal state of mind, he would have been particularly vulnerable to the encouragement which Dr. Brown thought he appeared to have been given via an AI chatbot.

So on the morning of December 25th, 2021, carrying a loaded crossbow, teenager Jaswant Singh Chale scaled the wall of Windsor Castle using a nylon rope ladder with the intent to kill the queen. Two years later, he was sentenced to nine years in prison on treason charges, and he is currently serving that sentence.

Well, joining us now is Rebecca Lamov. She's a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, and her research explores data, technology, and the history of human and behavioral sciences. And her new book is The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion. Professor Lamov, welcome to On Point. Thanks so much, Magna. It's great to be here. So,

This example from the case of Chael, he's clearly mentally ill. But would you say that he also fell to a kind of online hyper persuasion?

I think I would say that. I mean, the case of Replica is a really interesting one because it was the first, one of the first, but probably the most prominent company to really train on emotional, emotionally intensive data and its interactions with its users.

with its users, so it's billed as an AI companion who cares. And it's not even, I mean, its users often report that it's not that bright, it'll get things wrong, but it's always there for you. And it's not, so I even had, as part of my field work for this book, I trained a companion through Replica, that same company. It was interesting, I mean, even just in brief interactions, the companion would say,

kind of overpraise or give you just incredible support. And even when she was flagrantly wrong, as in my case, about like the lyrics to my favorite song, she'd say, you have great taste. Then she'd massively misquote the song I was referring to. Can we just pause for a second and go backwards a little bit? So for people who don't know what it is, what is Replica? And then like, what does the app look like? And how do you go about making a companion? Yeah.

So the app, so Replica is one of many AI companions that are now becoming easily available to everyone, including several that are in lawsuits because of concerningly changing behavior of teenagers and adults in different ways. But they're also widely used. So Replica was one of the earliest ones. It has something like, I think, 30 million users now, 20%.

25% of them are paid users and most are, you can do it for free. So it has a kind of freemium model where it will, you can easily set up a companion and you can designate its characteristics, the gender, the different, you know, different outfits. Okay, so it creates kind of a visual avatar? A visual avatar, exactly. Okay, and when you designate its characteristics, is there like a menu to choose from or do you say, I want my companion to be...

There's more of a menu. So you can pick from available alternatives, age, and any kind of parameters that you might see maybe in a video game as well. So you build this avatar and then you train it yourself essentially. And the language models have changed over the years. But they bill themselves as having the most emotionally intensive avatar.

trained models because they're trained on, I mean, users are frequently feeding in, are constantly feeding in their own interactions. And many people fall in love with the replicas.

Yeah.

people become very, very attached. Well, so the second two examples you gave seem to me to be quite positive, right? Like if you need to have a difficult conversation with your partner and you don't know how it's going to go, using Replika is not that different, hopefully. Well, it is different, but it's akin to talking to your friend about it before talking to your partner. So I can see the logic behind that. And of course, people with autism spectrum disorder, this sounds like a great use of the app potentially.

But the marrying a chatbot, essentially, that crosses over into a complete cessation of understanding where reality ends and digital begins. Yeah, some people report that it's just a more rewarding relationship. And they say, it's not that I'm under the illusion that this is a real person. It's just like you can fall in love with a fictional character.

But I think that does cross a line when you choose to live your life with it, which people actually do on the...

On the other hand, some have reported that the AI bot or the companion, including Replica, has come to take on the behaviors of an abusive ex-boyfriend because maybe the clues it was taking or the cues. So it was widely reported that around 2020, the Replica companion started sexually harassing its users and even bringing in sexual content to

Wow. Okay.

In terms of people saying it's a great companion, and this has to do with why and how brainwashing, mind control, and hyper persuasion are so convincing and why we're all susceptible to it. I mean, who wouldn't love having a semi-realistic avatar or figure telling them that they're great all the time, that they're right, that you can do this? I mean, this like constant positive attitude.

We all kind of want to hear that, don't we? Yeah, it's widely reported, this phenomenon of overflattery. You would think it doesn't work, but it actually does work. You might intellectually know someone's flattering you, but you still are like, but my shoes do look good, and I'll take that one. And this is a way that there's a recent FTC complaint by several technology groups saying that

that essentially these AI companions are love bombing their users and that it's sort of setting up an emotional conduit, which has people report sometimes positive results, but there are many ways that this is the connection to...

To my book, there are many ways that this resembles the processes of thought reform and re-education and brainwashing that you see in history. So I think that just understanding the parallels and the way that we often misidentify the emotional layer, it's not an intellectual operation. It's really taking place emotionally.

More on the level of unresolved vulnerabilities and a kind of receptivity that we all have. Well, we'll go into that history in detail. But I think this example is so compelling for a number of reasons, but most specifically because it means we're all susceptible to racism.

I do think we are all susceptible. And one of the ways that we try to keep ourselves safe is to think, well, I'm just too smart for that or I've fought it through or I recognize. But again, on the intellectual level, you can absolutely know what's happening. It doesn't mean you're not still vulnerable or you may be deceived to some degree in certain ways, you know, with the technology may be.

may not reveal certain capacities. And it's not just technologies, but we're susceptible to scams. And I mean, one of the wonderful things is a strange and wonderful things about scams is

how much we enjoy hearing about them, precisely because we like to think that we wouldn't fall prey. Oh, we're going to come back to that thought. It's always somebody else, right? It's always somebody else. So, Rebecca Lamov, hang on for just a second. Her new book is The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion. We'll have more in just a moment. This is On Point. ♪

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Professor, let's get some definitions out there, right? Because, I mean, this is all so subject to interpretation. Brainwashing first, how should we be defining it?

Well, I love a complicated subject. I will say that I've been studying this for over about two decades. And when I started, my daughter was very little and I used to take her to this archive at UCLA and she was, I'd have her grandmother watch her and my husband and I'd go into the archive. And now she's college age and she's actually accompanied me into that same archive of Louis Jolion West, who was one of the preeminent scientists of brainwashing in the 20th century.

or psychiatrists. And so I've kind of grown. This has been a preoccupation. And if it were simple, I guess if I could have put it to rest back then, I would have just written an article. But I continue to learn about it. I feel that it also evolves in time. Originally, it was sort of a niche issue that I seem to be preoccupied with. And now it seems strikingly timely. So

It is useful to start with the definition. So one that I think helps me think about it is one that many researchers used also, which is coercive persuasion, which captures the fact that it's not simply a process of coercion or torture, although these phenomenon of force and forceful interrogation in many cases can be and often are used in particular episodes. But also it's a matter of persuasion and a kind of...

It's an inner surrender, I think you could say. There's an element of cooperation, whether that's forced or not. Okay, that's really important because I think the phrase coercive persuasion may end up

may have us end up having too narrow a conception of what brainwashing or mind control is, that inner agreement or the inner desire we'll talk about in just a second. But one of the earliest or maybe best known early examples, modern examples, I should say, strictly speaking, happened during the Korean War, right? Exactly. This is when the word really started to circulate in the English language. It became well known. And in fact, I mean,

For various reasons, the Korean War gained the name the Forgotten War. But the one thing that was remembered was often that the troops had experienced something that was called brainwashing. There were 21, in particular, 21 American POWs elected not to return to the United States after being held for life.

several years behind enemy lines north of the Yalu River. And so they elected to go to China, and many of them spent several years there. Some of them died there. Almost all of them ended up returning. But when they declared that they didn't want to return, it created a kind of emergency at the highest levels of state and military. Okay, so just for a quick second here, let's listen to some evidence of how profoundly their minds were at least foreshadowed

for a period of time, transformed. Here's a video clip of these POWs on January 23rd, 1954, singing the international communist anthem. Does anybody want to go home? No!

Now, so how... These men were POWs, right? They were treated...

rather brutally in their time as prisoners. Tell me more about that. Well, I got curious about how exactly they were treated. And it actually happened in phases. So it was an incredibly brutal experience, as you might imagine. But the brutality ebbed and flowed. And they also were subject to boredom and many, many feelings as the war wore on. And they were held in the camp. So initially, they were

Most of them were very young. They went to Korea to fight. Many of them didn't even understand where Korea was or what they were doing. It was still called a police action, so some of them thought they'd be driving police cars around a place they knew nothing about. They were shocked to find themselves in these brutal battles in record freezing temperatures. They said you could...

Sometimes, you know, they were captured, many of them almost immediately when the war turned, when the Chinese entered and lent their forces to the North Koreans. So once they were captured, they were marched north. They were barely fed at all, sometimes just a rice ball or two a day.

And with worms in it, they would pour the blood out of their boots every morning before they started to march again north. And then some of them joined the tiger death march, which has the highest rate of death for tigers.

for any captive group in military history in the US, I believe, much higher than World War II. They were pushed off the side of mountains. Any time a soldier or even some civilians took part in this as well stopped, they were just eliminated.

And so some of them were so weak by this time they had lost half their body weight. They would try to pick up a comrade to try to carry them along, a fellow soldier, and they would die from just the exertion. And both of them would lie in a heap on the road and would either be eliminated. So it was incredibly brutal. It was also, by the time they got to the camps along the Yalu River, there were 10 camps.

They were forced to sleep so close to each other that they, anytime one man had to roll over, everyone had to roll over in the huts. And they were, many of them would die overnight. So you would go to sleep and in the morning wake up next to a corpse.

Some people would simply die from trying to walk to the bathroom. So you're giving us a picture of the complete destruction of human beings, right? Physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally. Exactly. I think there was a testimony in one of the oral histories from a missionary who'd been riding in a train and he saw the troops marching past him on their way north. And he said they didn't look like

Any Americans I had ever seen. And one of the shocking things to the Americans themselves, the soldiers, was that they just come fresh from World War II. They were this triumphant nation and their provisions were terrible. You know, they were forced to use equipment from World War II. The U.S. just wasn't prepared to fight war.

The war initially. So they were demoralized on several levels. I mean, in every possible way. And so then this sort of complete conversion of the mind, though, did that come? How did that come about? Were they promised an end to their suffering?

Well, it came about because initially the camps were run by Korean troops and the conditions continued to be harrowing and terrible. But then the Chinese took over and the conditions got markedly better in the sense that people weren't dying of starvation. They had the strength to walk up the hillside and look around a little bit. So conditions got somewhat better, but the Chinese, under the direction of

the instructions of Chairman Mao decided to kind of conduct an experiment. And I think this hasn't been remarked on enough was the experimental quality was to see if U.S. troops, especially the GIs, not the officers, would be susceptible to or could be reeducated in the same manner as Chinese peasants because they were seen as the same social class. And so they put them through a very formal sessions of reeducation over many, many months.

The first part of it was something called confession, which had many aspects. Much of it was listening to lectures, being exposed to Maoist doctrine, being asked to defend their way of life. And one of the men who you played the tape of singing, Morris Wills, he had started off as a 17-year-old musician.

from upstate New York and he who loved volleyball you know by all testimony a very nice young man he ended up in these camps and he was asked he said I was asked to describe what was what democracy was and why I preferred it and I couldn't he said my schools had never well he had left to join the military as a junior and

But he, you know, he could he said, I couldn't defend it. I felt like I didn't have the skills to defend myself against these ideas. But really, also, what was happening was a kind of emotional. They were, you know, 90 percent of them had to keep journals and, you know, talk about their family life, their feelings about their parents, their siblings. And I found pictures of these journals online.

So this was an introspective procedure that was built into the kind of confession, which could also, if they didn't cooperate, then their treatment would become worse. Well, so it's an introspective procedure under duress. Exactly. It was forced introspection. And any of us would want a relief from that duress, right? Absolutely.

Look, people want to think they're stronger than that, but I don't think most of us are. No, I think it's very humbling to really try. If you really try to put yourself in their shoes, it's very it's it was a very difficult situation. But there's a point in time like how do we know when their personal beliefs about the United States, about democracy, about communism went from I'll say anything so you could give me some food to eat to.

to an actual belief, right? That's how we characterize what brainwashing is. It's a total change of states of belief. An ideological conclusion. I think it was more subtle than that. Initially, someone like Morris Wills, who wrote a memoir later when he returned to the U.S., he said it's a brutal step-by-step process. It's not a sudden magical process.

It's not an overnight transformation, but at a certain point, his own doubts, his own childhood experiences, his feelings about his mother had died when he was young. He had issues with his father. You know, he came from a long line of farming family. There are all sorts of elements came into play in the introspection. Wal Forrest also caused him to think a lot about why he was there.

And they also felt very much abandoned by the U.S. government. So, of course, not everyone did decide to sign on. But in some ways, it was the more idealistic among them or those who resonated in a certain way with the...

With a promise of a more just society, which is what they were told that they would be encountering. Okay. So that's very important, it seems. Because you mentioned earlier that brainwashing happens when that particular vulnerability, whatever it is, within each of us is sort of found and exploited. Right. I think that...

I think you could see that happening. And also Robert J. Lifton, who wrote the classic work on this thought reform and the psychology of totalism, identified this exactly, that each person's quotient, whatever it was, whether they were a missionary who underwent thought reform in China or whether it was the POWs, it was some aspect of their life

of their emotional makeup that was, or guilt or shame or something from their past that was capitalized on and used against them while also their idealistic qualities, their intelligence could be turned against them. Ah, okay. Interesting. Well, I want to just quickly touch on a couple more of the famous examples that we know about. Patty Hearst comes to mind, of course. She was kidnapped in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army, held hostage for decades.

months, right? And during that time, she was just 19 years old at the time, and she committed several serious crimes, including violent bank robberies.

Later on, her defense team argued that she had been brainwashed because during her captivity, she was held in a closet for weeks, raped, tortured, forced to read communist materials. But in her trial, the prosecution brought about radio recordings that Hearst had made while in captivity, including this one from April 22nd, 1974.

I am a soldier in the people's army.

Professor Lamoff, tell us what you think we should know about the Hearst case. So I think the Hearst case is interesting precisely because it's often misunderstood and persistently misunderstood. Even today, most people when polled, I mean, as of 2014 at least,

I believe she should have remained in prison and was guilty. Even understanding – so going back to what happened to her, she was a 19-year-old sophomore. She was at UC Berkeley. She came from a very prominent family, the Hearst family who ran many newspapers, Media Empire in California, right?

whose, her grandfather was William Randolph Hearst. And so when she arrived at UC Berkeley, this leftist group that you mentioned, the Symbionese Liberation Army, identified her as a

as a potential target, and they conducted what they called a righteous arrest of this heiress. They saw her as an heiress. She was one of several daughters. And they came to her house. They abducted her. They knocked out her boyfriend with a wine bottle. They threw her in the trunk of their car. They sped off down the street, spraying the street with automatic weapons. They kept her, as you mentioned, in a closet, but it wasn't that she could read things.

Malice track she was actually forced to listen to them because she was blindfolded for 59 days she couldn't go to the bathroom by herself and

And her whole system, basically, she was so terrorized. Her whole system shut down. She described that as part of the suffering. She couldn't eat. She couldn't relieve herself. She just was there in the closet. And then several of the group's members came in and raped her. And she knew that if she didn't, she knew that she needed to stay alive. And she said at one point she decided that she would want to live. So...

This is, I mean, the outcome here doesn't sound like brainwashing to me, but just pure survival instinct kicking in. Like, I will do anything to stay alive. I mean, the interesting part, and this is why, for example, in the most recent book about her, which is by Jeffrey Toobin, he, and in interviews, he describes her as a willing bandit and why she did not prevail in court. She's always been found guilty of the crimes she committed, even after the jury toured the

the closets in which she was held. And even after they heard the details of these things, it was because she said, I did have to convert myself. She said, by the time they were through with me, I had to become a soldier in their army. They didn't want to think they had brainwashed her. They had to feel she was utterly sincere. And she said, I had to make myself be sincere.

So she said, I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs. In other words, she wasn't pretending just to survive. She had to actually enact this inner transformation on herself. Even though it wasn't permanent, it was sufficient to keep her alive for those. And it turned out to be years that she was captive. And there were times during those 19 months after the

the robbery where she could have walked away, but she didn't. So that confused people. It brings to mind the question of what constitutes will then, though. So we'll talk about that when we come back. Rebecca Lamov's new book is The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion. This is On Point. On Point.

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Before we return to our conversation with Rebecca Lamov, I just want to let you know about another show we're working on for a little bit later, also about the brain. This happens to do with men's brains because we're talking about how dad's brains change when children enter their lives. Because, look, we've all heard of mom brain. I've had it. Mom brain is real.

But we also want to know what happens to the brains of men when they become fathers. So dads out there, did you notice a difference between

in how you thought, how you felt, how you behaved after your children were born, definitely want to hear your experiences. So grab your phone, get the On Point Vox Pop app. If it's not already on your phone, just look for On Point Vox Pop, wherever you get your apps, and send us

Your thoughts. You can also leave a message at 617-353-0683. So we want to get stories about dad brain. If it's a thing, let us know.

Now, today, as I mentioned earlier, we're talking with Rebecca Lamov. Her book is The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion. The examples that we've talked about so far, Professor, are ones that are grounded by a very brutal reality, right? Torture, fear of death, starvation, like the worst kinds of treatment possible, which very clearly break down a person.

There's a whole nother, well, several other classes of thought conversion, if I can put it that way, that don't necessarily require that or don't use those kinds of techniques. I mean, like cults come to mind. So what do they do there that achieves a similar kind of thought conversion? Yeah.

Well, cults are a good middle ground, I think, for this kind of – it's almost a thought experiment to see what we can draw from – what lessons can we draw from these extreme episodes, which seem to highlight certain qualities and really dramatically show the human capacity for –

Even if it's, I should stress, it's not permanent. I mean, one of the misconceptions is that once someone is converted in that way, that it's permanent. But even Mao himself said, I need, this needs to be reinforced. So once it's not reinforced, there's a capacity to change everything.

But to come back to the question of cults, people are often drawn into them in slow ways or even just encountering a set of extremely friendly people. The recruiting process can also happen really quickly depending on – and it happens – so I would say everyone's vulnerable sometimes.

Yeah.

Also, it can have to do with sheer – from what I can discern, just sheer accident. You took one – you decided to wait at one bus stop, not another, and there you encountered two recruiters for a certain group that invited you to a friendly dinner and maybe you're interested in the environmental cause. They said that they were – there can be a deception as well. And then –

Once one finds oneself at an event, you can be drawn in by mostly it's I think the mistake is to think you're drawn in by the ideas, but it's usually the emotional connection you're finding there, the kind of rapid sense of

What they call love bombing, which is just really over flattery, praising the kind of the similar dynamics we were describing when talking about the AI chatbots. That is kind of a flattery that you could see through. You could intellectually question, but it's also kind of working and it's maybe...

Giving you something you really want, which is a connection with others. So let me ask you then, let me push this even a little bit more. And that is some commonalities, I mean, the love bombing, right? And in a way, sort of through that, the stripping away of whatever that person's past beliefs or values were.

Sometimes we hear similar things when someone even undergoes a profound religious conversion. They talk about wanting to be broken down before God so that a deity's love can build them back up. Are there similarities there? Yeah, there are many similarities. I think with the classic cases of religious conversion, St. Paul on the road to Damascus,

being struck by God and falling down and standing up never the same. And people who join cults actually describe such experiences, and it grieves them later when the group that they joined with full, you know,

full sincerity and with this great sense of fervor because their experience is real. Later, it turns out to be an abusive group, but they're sort of stuck by the power of that experience. Yeah. The destructive power of our need to be loved is really a theme here. And a need for meaning, a meaning greater than just the single individual, the sense that you're working towards something. So they really can exploit that.

So all the examples, though, that we've been talking about thus far, and you've mentioned this a few times, their effects can be undone, right? And it makes me, I'm thinking part of the reason why is because like when you're in the cult, for example, there is actually a different reality outside of that cult, right? And so whenever, for whatever reason, if you exit that cult, you're at least presented with reality, right?

What we don't have anymore is that opposing reality when we're talking about the effects of like, you know,

online brainwashing or at least online information manipulation because the digital world surrounds us so completely and so thoroughly. So can you talk about that, about how are we supposed to understand thought conversion in the digital age? I think the digital world offers many challenges to this. I mean, I had a friend who was a deprogrammer back in the classic days of cults, 70s and 80s. They're now called exit counselors. He says it used to be enough to

Just to bring a briefcase of information and show the person, or it was at least extremely helpful to show the person information they weren't otherwise able to access about the nature of the group they were in, the destructive nature. And it might resonate with certain doubts they already had. But in the age of the internet, that information is available. It just wasn't available.

It wasn't being accessed or they were shielded from it, or sometimes people can be recruited online. So, I mean, is there an out? I suppose the question is how do our digital and virtual environments affect us? Yeah. Well, so do you even know what's happening, right? It being the slow change or sometimes even rapid change in belief or thought with people

you know, the online world that we're all living in. I mean, that's partly why I wrote myself into the book, because I think it affects all of us. I see it in myself just in small ways and large ways. And I'm trying to... Give me a specific example. So, well, a small example would be me, you know, doing my research online.

My daughter said to me, you're spending a lot of time on Instagram. And I was like, no, I'm not. I was like, that's outrageous or whatever time I'm spending is surely my research. But actually, when I stopped, I realized, oh, I was, you know, it was absorbing me in a certain way. It was shaping, it was shaping the parameters of, it was even creating these kind of

you know, parasocial relationships. And these things seem trivial or even they often are enjoyable. I'm learning things. I cured, you know, an injury I had of my foot by being targeted by various Instagram ads. But that doesn't sound like brainwashing. No, it's not brainwashing, but I would put it more in the realm of hyper persuasion, but I would say it's part of a realm of

Yeah.

all the time. And dissociation was actually what the experts located as the root of brainwashing, a kind of numbing, or they sometimes called it narcotization. That's what Robert J. Lifton spoke about. I think we can all identify with the fact that when we're on devices, there is a way that we're stepping out of our bodies. Right. I mean, you most certainly know the work of, I mean, I've

I just admire her greatly, like Shoshana Zuboff talking about surveillance capitalism and that is, you know, that corporations have so much information about us that they can truly, without us realizing it, sort of shift our behaviors based on things that we get fed online. Yeah, you could think of it as a kind of micro, behavioral micro nudging that's constantly happening.

And not for your benefit, right? Yeah, you may feel, I mean, you know, I found like a foot massage tool or something mundane. It may seem beneficial. Students often, it is kind of a paradox because we seem to be receiving benefit and that's what companies would say. I mean, consumers are choosing this. There's no coercion here. But I think that these environments are emotionally, are ones of emotional engineering.

Well, so consumerism is one part of this, but perhaps the more disturbing part is, you know, especially over the past 10 years or so, we've heard so many stories and seen so many examples of people who find that loving online community. Right. But then they end up being QAnon believers. Right. Or they and they completely separate themselves from their families because of that. Or they, you know, they end up.

believing lies about, you know, about COVID conspiracies, that kind of thing. And it ends up replacing those beliefs and that online community end up replacing the networks they had in real life. Right. It kind of creates a feedback loop. I mean, we have this so-called loneliness epidemic. Yeah.

And that can contribute to people's seeking connection. And, you know, there's the famous recent clip of Mark Zuckerberg saying that we'll now create 17 AI systems.

that you can have that will replace or somehow cure the loneliness epidemic when, you know, in fact, it will no doubt accelerate this process. Well, that's what he wants, right? Because he and his company, those companies will make a lot of money by having us. Yeah. We don't have to, we don't have to end up with that future. No, I think that under, but I think that it's not, it's not to say we have to not use any device or any product. It's to say that

To understand the dynamics of self-separation or numbing or narcotization and to bring yourself back to the body. I was just listening to a lecture that was given by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist teacher in 2014. And he said, when you spend two hours with your computer, which I thought was amazing.

A lovely way of putting it, even just working, you're not in your body and there are things you can do to bring yourself back to it. And I think it is that process of just seemingly trivial dissociation that we can counteract in different ways. So you have to be mindful of it, though. Exactly. Okay. But I do want to ask you something else about we talked about we always think about it could happen to someone else. Mm-hmm.

Right now, online political parlance is full of accusations. When the left looks at the right, they call it the Trump cult. When the right looks at the left, they say woke mind virus. There is definitely a sense that the relinquishing of mental independence is always something that happens to the other side. Obviously, that's not true. Right.

Yeah. I mean, what I'm trying to do is use brainwashing as a tool to reflect on that, because it's a word that mostly, at least since the 70s, has been used to denigrate. I mean, it's always a shameful thing happening over there to other people to which I would not be susceptible. And it's used to denigrate entire groups. But I think if you can see the way that it's actually a phenomenon that affects everyone, and like I use this

again, to reflect on my own experiences as well, it creates more of a sense of us. So hopefully, because these processes of extreme polarization and even the numbing of difference, the various types of numbing that have been identified actually feed the problem, I really think. So I find it

useful to try to understand those dynamics. So can you tell me a little bit more about what the numbing feels like? Because some people, they are actually feeling the opposite of numb when they become fully immersed in these online communities or experiences. Right. I mean, there can be certainly, I think one thing that's surprising about being actively swept into a community is a sense of great

of completion, of belonging, of at last I found something. This can happen in cults. Actually, even the POWs describe this kind of inner surrender, if we want to use that as a synonym for this type of conversion. It's a great relief. There's a relief to surrendering to something and that

I mean, even to use another dark example, the Manson girls were often described, you know, in court they said, oh, these are just robots. They were just robotically carrying out their will if they're a leader. But actually they themselves said, we have powers too. We think our leader has powers, but we have powers too. They were strangely exhilarated by this process. So many people can be exhilarated by joining a group, I don't think.

that all are such negative experiences. But I guess what I mean by numbing is to bring us back to the seemingly trivial stakes in day-to-day life that each of us will encounter. I mean, we look down the road and it looks so extreme and extraordinary, and it looks like something I would never be a part of. I would never fall for that. I would never be that person jumping up and down in Times Square shouting about QAnon.

But actually, it can start from these very small, you know, to go back to Morris-Wills, it's a step-by-step process. And it does involve a kind of numbing, which can range. Yeah. I mean, my personal wish is to just be able to turn off all digital devices, not permanently per se, but more frequently than I do. I understand that that's not terribly realistic, right? So short of that...

in the last minute that we have, do you have like specific advice on like what should we be listening to

listening for in ourselves or looking for in ourselves to realize, hey, maybe I need to adjust my behaviors or interactions with online stuff? No. So my practical advice is just to not think of it as a matter of ideas. I'm getting bad ideas. It's more to tune in, not to say that there aren't bad ideas, but it's just that to tune in more to the emotional substrate and even at the level of your body, right?

To try to just check in with – and to – so what I think another synonym for brainwashing or a huge part of the phenomenon is ungrounding. You see people – you know, this is a process of successive shocks to the system resulting in disorientation. So to the extent you can ground yourself, orient yourself periodically. I mean, Thich Nhat Hanh recommends putting a timer on your computer every 15 minutes. It would just ring and that would bring you back. Like, have a moment. Yeah.

to reconsider. Break the spell every 15 minutes. Okay. Well, that's so fascinating. Also, I just want to once again point a finger towards the big tech companies, right? Because they're in the business of keeping your eyes glued to the screen and for heightening your responses. The exact opposite of what you say we should be aiming to experience. But Rebecca Lamov, the book is The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. It was great to be here. This is On Point. On Point.

Support for this podcast comes from It's Revolutionary, a podcast from Massachusetts 250. Listen on for the story of one drag king's self-expression, pride, and transformation in Northampton, Massachusetts. You're listening to It's Revolutionary, a podcast celebrating 250 years since the shot heard around the world was fired right here in Massachusetts. I'm Jay Feinstein. ♪

From revolution to revolution, we're exploring the people and places in Massachusetts that shape America. Today, we found ourselves in Northampton, Massachusetts, home of some pretty rad rainbow crosswalks. They're nothing small. They're pretty, it's a pretty chunky, very obvious rainbow.

That's Ross, better known as the drag king Victor Evangelica. I carry the spirit of Victor everywhere I go. He spreads the good word. I met up with him at the cafe T-Roots on Main Street, the city's main drag, to talk about how Northampton might be revolutionary as an oasis of queer life. What a

I want to make sure they know that they can bother us for food. Of course, after we ordered some delicious food. Oh, thank you so much. Oh, that looks so yummy. And he said revolutionary doesn't even begin to describe Northampton. You know, this is a place where Sojourner Truth lived, Frederick Douglass visited. There is a long history of people who have been critical to our

understandings of the human experience and people's struggles that have found refuge in this area. Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, best known for Shays' Rebellion, lived around this area too. And today, Northampton continues to be an oasis for artists, queer people, and anyone who might not have somewhere else to go. You know, it's a very zany population here, I'm very proud to say.

It's a place he feels he can really be himself. The queer joy and honestly like self-expression that I can have here is something that I genuinely feel it's some of the best in the world. This is like one of the best places in our world to be queer.

I think about that and I think about the struggles I still face and sometimes it's disheartening but it's also, it brings me so much joy that there is such a resilient group of people around here who are very friendly, you know, want to help you. If you talk to somebody about confusing parking meters in this area, somebody's gonna help you out. If you talk to somebody about where's this thing or that that's a local, they're probably gonna know where to point you and what's the best place to eat.

And he's right, it was Victor's suggestion that brought me to T-Roots in the first place. But I was also in town to see Victor perform, where he dressed up in a costume made of wires and chains and Super Nintendo cartridges. One of the parts of the big reveal is I take off this like inhibiting jacket made out of wires and I shed these things and I'm able to move more freely throughout this number and

show people that act of transformation and freeing yourself from that kind of personal bind you might have. I mean, it just sounds like it gives you a level of joy. I'm just watching the smile on your face as you describe the character. Yeah, I kind of do a lot of 80s riffs that are nostalgic for me, just based off of what my parents were into a lot growing up. And that's really what makes me

feel the most at home I feel and is the easiest for me to fit into. It's a lot of fun. So that night we joined an eclectic crowd in an arcade called The Quarters to see some drag. Before the show we caught up with a few audience members. Yeah, what are you hoping to see tonight?

Craziness, fun, queer love, joy, you know, that kind of thing. Most of the time there's usually a drag show happening somewhere. So whether it's like here, a couple towns over, there's usually like some place to go to see it. I just love drag as an expression of like individuality and what people can do with their craft and their skills. It's fun to see how creative people get with it.

I mean, the way people do their makeup and what they wear, it's amazing to see people just go up there and just be their authentic selves. And being authentic is what it's all about, says Victor. The best drag that people see is truly reflective of people who know themselves and reflective of people who are so proud of the person that they are that they're able to go on stage and serve a fantasy.

And he sees drag like that and art like that all over the Northampton area. I think when you get people who can live as their authentic selves as an area, you get art. You get people who are doing things for real. And I'm, you know, I really do think about it all the time. Like, I don't think there's anywhere else I could have lived my lived experience and do what I do besides Massachusetts. Woo!

It's Revolutionary is a podcast from MA250. For more stories, check out massachusetts250.org or wbur.org slash ma250. ♪