Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion with Harvard Professor, Rebecca Lemov
38:24 Share

Any vehicle can take you places, but why stop there? The Alfa Romeo Tonale combines luxurious Italian design and electrifying performance to make every mile a masterpiece and every arrival unforgettable. When precision meets instinct and power moves with purpose, you never have to stay in a lane.

Experience a world without limits in the Alfa Romeo Tonale Plug-in Hybrid. Tap the banner to learn more. Alfa Romeo is a registered trademark of FCA Group Marketing SBA, used with permission. You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

This is Smart People Podcast, a podcast for smart people, where we talk to smart people, but not necessarily done by smart people. Hello, welcome to Smart People Podcast, conversations that satisfy your curious mind. Chris Demp here, thanks for tuning in.

If you have ever scrolled through social media and felt strangely off afterwards, or maybe you looked at somebody else's beliefs or their posts and you've thought, how did they end up there? Then this episode is for you. Today I'm joined by Harvard professor and author Rebecca Limoff to talk about something that sounds like it belongs to history books or sci-fi movies, and that is brainwashing.

But as you're going to hear, it's far from outdated. In fact, it's more present than ever. It's woven into everything from social media algorithms to the ways we change ourselves willingly in search of meaning, purpose, or belonging. Rebecca brings 25 years of research and deeply personal experience to a conversation that moves beyond the Cold War fear-mongering.

We're talking about what it means to be ungrounded, those subtle, often invisible moments when your sense of reality starts to shift without you even realizing it. From POW camps to Instagram feeds, from personal relationships to national polarization, this is about how minds are shaped and reshaped every single day.

As I mentioned, we are talking to Rebecca Limoff on her new book, The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion. Excited to get into this for you. If you find it interesting, make sure you follow the podcast and tell a friend. Let's get into it. Our conversation with Rebecca as we talk about her new book, The Instability of Truth. Enjoy. Enjoy.

Your book is about brainwashing and mind control, a lot of things that seem archaic and non-existent today. So what is brainwashing and is it a thing of the past? Well, it's interesting you say that because I think when I came to the topic about 20 or so years ago, it did seem like one of the more archaic and almost unserious things you could talk about, just full of hype and paranoia and

delusion and something that couldn't possibly really exist, at least not in the form people used to talk about it. And even if you look at Google Ngram on the use of words, you'll see it kind of went out of fashion.

But as I've been working on this topic for a couple of decades, more earnestly over time, it's come back. It's kind of come back into common parlance and serious use. And one thing I argue in the book or at the core of the book is the argument that it is, it is real much as, you know, there's a lot of interesting scholarship that does link it to Cold War hysteria and McCarthyism and paranoia. Nonetheless, I,

try to identify the real possibility that one could become alienated from yourself. Do you think out of the thousands of people listening, how many of them could potentially experience this? I think everyone is susceptible. That's kind of what

what I'm trying to convey in this book which is that one of the dynamics of brainwashing is that we think it happens to other people and this it has a curious way of disguising itself in its dynamics and so I want to you know if I could make a bumper sticker would be something like we're all in this together it's an ongoing potential of every moment I think is what I what I end up

finding to be true in my own investigation. So we can all kind of monitor it. And when, you know, it's in, it's a way to see if you find yourself thinking other people are brainwashing brainwashed, it's not necessarily untrue. It's just that it might be an invitation to also examine the dynamics to which you're

subject. Are the terms brainwashing, mind control, are they hyperbolic or is it just, look, we're all humans who are malleable and susceptible to external stimuli, which is part of being human. So is it really brainwashing or is it just being adaptive?

Right. So this is an excellent question also. I mean, I think it does get to the heart of it is that on some level, the term is hyperbolic, but I think hyperbolic

Ultimately, it's a useful reminder that we consistently underestimate our malleability. These are some of the insights of great writers who have talked about brainwashing. My favorite is Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize. But he talks about that there's almost nothing a man can't be turned into and that he seeks in his writing to

follow the stages by which we succumb to external conditions. And I think you can see it in something as simple as the, you know, the elaborate sculpting we go through to, you know, just in fashion or things like that. But what brainwashing really talks about is a tipping point at which you are a different person. And in that way,

You know, I think it's useful to look at what experts have said and the various crises that were faced in the middle of the 20th century when it really came to a head. What are some examples perhaps that we are unaware of, but that really highlight brainwashing is a thing. And we're not talking about just selling you skinny jeans versus bell bottoms. We're talking about genuinely changing the person you are.

Right. I mean, a classic example is Cardinal Minzenty, who was a Polish, a famous hero from World War II who lived in Poland. And he was hailed as this kind of war hero and also a man of God. And he had an incredible reputation. And under communist regime, he was arrested one overnight. And he'd even written a letter saying, if I say things that don't sound like myself, don't believe them.

But he felt that maybe he could survive whatever the police had in store for him. But he disappeared for 28 days. And he was subjected to, I mean, some amount of physical abuse, but also kind of psychological torture of sorts. He was made to dress like a clown. He was given food. He was possibly drugged. He couldn't, after a while, remember what had happened to him. But it involved sleep deprivation. It involved drugs.

repetitive interrogation and many assaultive techniques in combination. And when he emerged, he looked like himself, except that it was as if his soul had been stripped from his body. At least he was paraded in front of the newsreel cameras of the day. And he looked like a kind of a ghostly puppet. And he had a

this kind of faraway stare. And later when he wrote in his memoir, he said, I was actually not myself. He did eventually return and write a memoir in the 1970s. He said,

Without realizing what had happened to me, I had become a different person. So that became kind of the catchphrase of brainwashing is I had become a different person. I was noting that it's actually the catchphrase of the new season of the White Lotus this coming third season. They say, you will become a different person after a week. And I was really struck by the repetition of that exact phrase because many experts would repeat that. How do we become a different person? And

In the U.S., the first group of people who seemed to be experiencing something like what had happened to Cardinal Manzenti were these groups of POWs and Air Force pilots who were captured and held under conditions that were not always clear, but who emerged either quoting communist propaganda or

deciding to live in China instead of the U.S., not wanting to return from Korea, declaring their allegiance with the workers of the world, singing communist songs. And on the surface, you couldn't see evidence of that.

sheer torture. It seemed that some kind of mysterious procedure had been carried out on them. And in the case of the pilots, they confessed to having flown germ warfare missions and dropped bacteriological materials over China. And they were actually taken from POW camp to POW camp and continually confessing to these crimes.

Not only am I unfamiliar with it, but I'm sure most people listening are. So help me understand this. So during the Korean War, there were American pilots captured by the communist regime and they were subject to some type of torture and brainwashing. And essentially when they appeared, they had become the person that was communist, essentially the very thing they were fighting against. Is that the synopsis of it?

Yes, this is a synopsis. Not only pilots, but regular GIs who had been captured. Of the ones who returned to the U.S., the military estimated that two-thirds of them showed concerning levels of potential brainwashing, but 21 of them actually elected not to return home. And behind the scenes, at the highest levels of the State Department and U.S. security,

There's great concern, and this is how there was a felt need to combat this mysterious weapon of brainwashing. I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto-friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger, so I can get in more squats anywhere I can. One, two, three. Will that be cash or credit? Credit.

Galaxy S25 Ultra, the AI companion that does the heavy lifting so you can do you. Get yours at Samsung.com. Compatible with select apps requires Google Gemini account results may vary based on input check responses for accuracy. Imagine what's possible when learning doesn't get in the way of life. At Capella University, our game-changing FlexPath learning format lets you set your own deadline so you can learn at a time and pace that works for you.

It's an education you can tailor to your schedule. That means you don't have to put your life on hold to pursue your professional goals. Instead, enjoy learning your way and earning a degree without missing a beat. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu.

Was that the first, not the very first, but is that kind of one of those pivotal moments when, let's say, the U.S., the West, perhaps, or the world became aware of this weapon? Yeah, these are definitely, it's really a wake-up moment. And there was a great urgency among Americans.

you know, at the highest levels to figure out what had happened to kind of deconstruct it. So to study the men, first of all, whatever men had returned who were seen as content, they often saw it as a contagion or contamination or a mind virus of sorts.

Um, to those who were suffering from it, you know, could they be cured of it? First of all, could they, could it be understood how it had happened? And then the next step was also, could we do the same thing? And the reason I wanted to highlight that example that you gave is to show that is real. And it feels like because it's old that it's a, yeah, yeah, I get it. Right. It's the same as when my parents talk about eight tracks and I'm like, I don't know what the hell that is.

But then I would ask, is anything similar? Has anything similar happened in the, let's call it 21st century? I mean, I think many things. Well, one thing is it starts to look quaint. So these, these, you know, these episodes, I agree. They, they, um, they lacked impact even for me, but over the years, as I studied them more, I started to see, um,

I started reading more oral histories and firsthand accounts that they were genuine people. These were like 17-year-old kids from upstate New York and various other places, Memphis, and they had experienced unbelievable trauma. Even before, they had been exposed to malice propaganda, struggle sessions, and all sorts of techniques. So it's extremely surreal, and it's in the surreal context

quality that it took me years to understand this, I feel. At first, I was sort of like, oh, isn't this funny? Isn't this kind of bizarre? But then I thought, actually, this is very humbling. Why should any of us think that if we lost half of our body weight, this happened to some of them when they were

put in the camps, if we saw our friends die, if we were turned against our own Confederates, various terrible things happen, would we not be vulnerable to the same types of things? So in the 21st century, I would identify, I mean, I sort of follow the thread into questions about cults and scams. Like we're sort of, we're inundated in both

this question of the spreading of cults, whether they can spread online, digitally, and also people's susceptibility to scams and to schemes of various kinds. But the dynamic it has in common is this kind of interesting way that we, we often want to put it over there. Like it's,

What a bizarre thing that they fell for that. Or you always listen to the story of a really good scam, like waiting for that moment where I feel I wouldn't have, I never would, or it

With the cult, Keith Raniere, how could anybody have thought he was the smartest man in the world or the most handsome or that the rain never fell on him? I would not be that person. So they become occasions, almost like parables to say that I'm safe. But actually, I feel that the lesson is otherwise. And that's the thing. And we're going to talk about, there's some fascinating things about cults, but I think you really articulated well. A lot of the goal is to just be aware of this

And that's what I love because that's what this podcast is for. Many people will, prior to listening, assume mind control or brainwashing is not real and then leave, hopefully going, how does this impact me? That's the goal. No, my publicist read it and she said she immediately quit Facebook. I mean, in part because I talk about this 2014 experiment. But a larger point I'm making is

Is this part about trauma and how, like we were just talking about this, or just extreme suffering and how it becomes hidden in the stories. And after a while, you just want to, you don't really want to wrap your mind around it because we all like to feel that

I'm fine or, you know, I can expose myself to these things. I can be a bit careless or I can afford a tiny little, it's just a tiny little choice to, you know, tune into one thing or another. And I guess in this part is where I also, my personal story comes in a bit is that I, I kind of got stuck in a situation in my personal life, which I couldn't emerge from. And, uh,

Recently, my daughter took a class on Dante and she told me, she reminded me that the first line in his great work is, in the middle of our life's journey, I found myself in a dark wood, the right road lost. I felt like I suddenly was like, that's exactly describes this story.

I had, you know, for a number of reasons, I was in a lot of personal pain. So I sought out, I became addicted to drugs. I got caught in a relationship with the person who provided them. And I, after a couple of years, I lost touch with a lot of my family and most of my friends. And it was really like, it altered my sense of reality. I started to feel that I could, you know, that I might be

not deserve ever to leave or something like that. And it was just a moment, a kind of an offhand remark by a friend of mine, one of the few remaining friends that I was in touch with who said, he acts like he's smarter than you, funnier than you and better looking, but he's none of those things, but he walks around like he's got his foot on your neck constantly. And I was like,

For some reason, this kind of external feedback or just a friend, really having a friend, allowed this spell to break. And I carefully planned and left. But just also feeling like I know what it is.

feels like to be genuinely stuck in an impossible situation. Did you have the wherewithal or ability to step back and say, how did that happen to me? And that is then what led you down this path of research and fascination? It gave me some personal knowledge of the kinds of things I was already interested in, which was, as we're already writing a dissertation, I was kind of stuck. I was suffering from writer's block, but I was writing about these

Endless behaviorist experiments in running rats through mazes and seeing how far and in what complex ways you could control them. You could sort of sculpt behavior of rodents and therefore the idea was to apply it to human society. So I was interested in these experiments.

theories of control and human engineering. And then it almost like it came to light in a very dark way in my, in my own life, but having, um, emerged from it, um,

made me wonder, like, what is the freedom one has in a maze or in a dark place? And so I started, well, a couple of amazing coincidences happened, but I basically started writing and I wrote my dissertation almost like suddenly after that, like a 400 page dissertation. And when I was done with that, I learned to meditate and this further helped with this question you brought up earlier, which is,

kind of like, how do you cultivate awareness? And also, how do you identify the freedoms you do have, given that we're all a lot more suggestible than we may believe? Well, and you kind of hit on that, which one of the big parts is first to be able to ask it, and then second, to know what to look for. You know, whether it be social media or you're a, you know, prisoner of war, are there steps, are there kind of commonalities of what

the process for something like brainwashing or mind control looks like? I do think there are commonalities. It may be initially hard. So initially it may be hard to think like, look what happened to these POWs or look what happens to someone who's in a extreme abusive cult who gives up their life savings and

devotes themselves to a guru, often a seemingly unappealing one, and who seems... It's so extreme, or who...

gets caught in these situations and how could that apply to a more just an everyday occurrence. But I think my argument is that the everyday and the ordinary is always part of brainwashing. So you can identify several steps and conditions that lead to it. But what I start to argue in the book is that

Actually, there's a pre-step, which is what I call ungrounding, and we can all be ungrounded in various ways, even if it's not finding yourself in Korea and being starved to death or being put on forced marches or eating millet, but it's

In our own way, we are subject to conditions that are extremely disorienting, destabilizing, and ungrounding. And this is the prelude to the steps that result in brainwashing. The three steps of Maoist re-education are, just briefly, something like confession, which they also call discussion. And that involves speaking about. It could be speaking about your...

or telling your life story or journaling, not to say that journaling is bad, but 91% of the POWs in Korea were forced to journal. So it was, and those words they use, their experiences were mobilized against them to kind of reshape their story and tell them, oh, well, here's where you were oppressed. Here's where your government didn't care about you. Are they here to rescue you? Or are you not oppressed by the landowners? Things like that. And, yeah,

The further the discussion would use little tiny details of a conversation the person had thought was innocuous on a street corner about the price of shoes, and they'd say, no, it's

you're, you know, you were actually a spy in a certain way and you, the person would come to believe it. So anyway, there's this extensive confession slash discussion. Then there's this, there, the second phase is struggle, which is really tearing a person down completely in these kinds of intensive group sessions. Of course, you can see an analogy to online behavior of hounding and canceling or humiliating people.

Bringing people down so that some people who survived these things in the war would say, you walk in and you crawl out. But in a certain way, they would also describe that there was a relief in just succumbing to it.

And then the third step in Maoist re-education was called unity. And that was just when the group was said to be functioning coherently, cohesively, and they would have absorbed the spiritual atom bomb that Mao felt would transform humanity itself. And he said, everyone must be continually re-educated, even myself. It's a process that never stops.

Go further with the American Express Business Gold Card. Earn three times membership rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels when you book through amxtravel.com. Whether your destination is a business conference or a client meeting, your purchases will help you earn more points for future trips. Experience more on your travels with Amex Business Gold. Terms apply. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash gold. Amex Business Gold Card. Built for business by American Express.

PayPal lets you pay all your pals, like your graduation gifters. Who's paying for the mattress topper? You mean the beanbag chair? Aren't we getting a mini fridge? Can we create a pool on PayPal? It lets us collect the money before we buy. Oh, yes, that's smart. Glad we can agree on something. Easily pool, split, and send money with PayPal. Get started in the PayPal app. A PayPal account is required to send and receive money. A balance account is required to create a pool.

Do you know how chilling those three steps are? Do you know the parallels that could be drawn? The, the spider graph that could flow from that? Like, let's just pause for a second. We have to pause on this idea of ungrounding, ungrounding being a critical first step. You have a quote that says ungrounding successive shocks to the point of disorientation sets the stage for extreme behavior change.

For anyone listening in the year 2025, I mean, ungrounding right now feels like the literal continual state of humanity. Are we experiencing purposeful ungrounding in your opinion? I think it's likely we are. Wow. But I also think that you could see it as a challenge.

to yourself. I agree that, you know, even more so than when I wrote that line, which I appreciate your reading back to me because sometimes I'm like, oh, I put that. But yes, there's almost a cartoonishness to the level

of at which we're being bombarded with new situations and different edicts and like moving things around, destabilization at a level I personally haven't experienced before.

Although I think it is useful to look at periods that may be analogous in the past, just to see that, just to stop ourselves from getting completely overwhelmed and thinking such a situation has never existed in history. Like we live in an utterly unique, exceptional moment. I mean, I think there are parallels is kind of what I'm arguing. And I think that can give you a little bit of a little, it can carve out a little bit of ground, right?

And in a way, it's also asking you our current conditions. If they are deliberate, it's hard to say exactly what is generating them. Certainly, it does seem that polarization generates this because they're mutual escalating responses.

I guess the answer is to excerpt yourself from that if possible and ground and create your own possibility of being stable.

I love that because you phrased it in a way is perfect as I always wonder, like, for example, my brother, he lives in California. He's liberal, but he's like California liberal. And he's also incredibly intelligent, you know, valedictorian and all this stuff. But he will be like, yeah, no, they're doing this on purpose. And my rebuttal is always like, really? You think who are they sitting in the oval? Like, hey, guys, Maoist brainwashing says we should for it.

I don't know, but to your point, that is the first awareness piece that whether intentional or not, this is part of changing, not just societal norms, but the way people think. I also couldn't help, but to go, okay, now once ungrounding happens, you've got confession, struggle, and unity. Now I am not a military member, but I watch enough stuff on TV and read books. Like I'm pretty sure if you want to become say a Navy SEAL,

You go in and they're like, you know, yelling at you and telling you, you know, you're weak or whatever. And then they put you through hell week and you struggle and then they bring you together and build you up. I mean, that sounds pretty much like the steps of this brainwashing. Yeah, I used to use and when I used to teach my class on math.

Well, I still teach it, but I used to show the first half of what's the Kubrick film where it shows basic training? Full Metal Jacket. Yeah, I used to show the sequence in Full Metal Jacket because that is, I mean, it's a brutal form of creating a new person. But in a sense, that is...

how the military saw what was necessary for its mission. And those types of trainings change over time. Actually, interestingly, the brainwashing crisis from the Korean War led to the creation of SEER training, which is something that Navy SEALs and other service members still undergo, with a stress on the resistance part of it. It actually did

form some of our some of the military training and some people find that actually useful some of it some people find it traumatizing most people find it a mixture of both but um yeah to come so your question was uh what can a person what come back to your question

You know, the actual ultimate question is this. Yeah, maybe we do that if you become a Navy SEAL. But is that a bad thing? Like if you said, hey, Chris, I know how to break you down, make you a different person. A different person will be stronger, more confident. I'd be like, cool. I mean, don't we often seek to be brainwashed? You're asking a good, I mean, I think a question that's secretly at the heart of the book too, which is,

Is there such a thing as positive brainwashing? Can we not change ourselves? And also, if permission is given and consent in various cases where it is the case with the Navy SEAL, you're consenting. You may not know quite the degree of intensity that you're going to encounter, but you're kind of aware and they do a lot more screening than they used to do.

I believe there are other examples of potentially, you know, of experiences that have some of the stamp of brainwashing, but would be. But most people, when they enter into them, if they do so with consent again, like they seem to be positive experiences like the use of psychedelics can have some of these qualities, right?

although they can also be abused. And likewise, meditation is sometimes seen as a washing of the mind. Many religious transformations or conversions are also seen that way, like with even the most, the classic conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus. I mean, you do become another person. They don't necessarily involve all these steps. And I think the thing about

So that was going to be the last chapter of the book, but I'm actually saving it for my next book, which is the question of, yeah, don't we, I mean, on some level, we do all want to become a different person, but just hopefully a better one, one with understanding.

I guess more freedom rather than less. I think the way you can tell the difference, there's not, I don't think any one technique is necessarily good or bad. It depends on how it's used and what are the results for the person. But most of these were extremely harmful for the ones I talk about in the book. Right. And I got to tell you, write a book on how to take the principles of brainwashing and mind control and then use them personally to better yourself.

Instant bestseller. I'm in like, I'm dead serious. Sadly, and many listening probably because a lot of self-help junkies and everything are like, I wonder if I could do these three steps on my, on myself and then come out a better person. But the question I had for you as we wrap up is what do you want people to do differently knowing this? Yeah, I think that

Actually, I would say it's something I learned myself while meditating because I do a lot of meditating at least two hours a day for the last 25 years or so, which is, you know, came out of this, you know, the experience I told you about just realizing I don't want to, you know, it helped me so much to create. One way people sometimes say it is a space between the stimulus and the response. Like we are space.

We are in a sea of attention-grabbing phenomena and what William James called a blooming, buzzing confusion. And that can be good or bad, but just creating a way to

reflect and observe that as you're experiencing it. So you don't, you're not just constantly reacting is, I think the lesson that is continually reinforced for me, the more I sit with these things, the more I experienced them myself, because I, one reason I wrote myself into the book to some degree is that I'm, I want to demonstrate that it's, you know, there's no

Being smart doesn't necessarily protect you. There's ample opportunity to observe these things in all of our lives, and we're all perpetually subjected to them. It's a great point. Being smart doesn't prevent you from being susceptible to these and many, many other things as well. Rebecca, it's really fascinating. Thank you so much for this. The book is The Instability of Truth.

Let's just pause on that. The instability of truth. So good. Brainwashing, mind control and hyper persuasion. You said you have another book on the subject in the future. Where can people find you? Where else are you? Are you writing things like that?

I'm at Harvard in the history of science department. I teach there, but I'm also just writing a lot. And also I work in cartoons. So I'm planning to maybe release a book of visual narratives because I'm really interested in different ways to describe these states and things like that. And I should have, so I have my regular, you know, professor website that's easily findable. And I also...

I'll have a personal one too. I love it. We will link to those. Rebecca, again, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks so much, Chris. It was great. It was really fun to talk to you. This week's guest was Rebecca Lemoff. As always, the episode was hosted by Chris Stemp and produced by yours truly, John Rojas.

Rebecca's book, The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion is available wherever books are sold. On to the quick housekeeping items. If you'd ever like to reach out to the show, you can email us at smartpeoplepodcast at gmail.com or message us on Twitter at smartpeoplepod.

And of course, if you want to stay up to date with all things Smart People Podcast, head over to the website, smartpeoplepodcast.com and sign up for the newsletter. Make sure you stay tuned because we got a lot of great interviews coming up and we'll see you all next episode.