One potential answer is the rise of technologies suspected of having mind-controlling powers, chief among them social media. Another is the entrenched political polarization of our time. When the cousin you kicked a soccer ball around with as a child starts spouting unhinged certainties about viruses, vaccines, and climate change—beliefs he treats as beyond debate—you might wonder: What happened to him? This isn’t just an ordinary disagreement. Could he have been . . . brainwashed? Don’t get smug; he’s wondering the same thing about you. A few years ago, Psychology Today posted a checklist under the headline “Your Friend Might Be Politically Brainwashed If . . .” The last item on the list: “They assume that everyone who disagrees with them must be brainwashed.” So wait—does entertaining the possibility of having been brainwashed mean that you haven’t been? Or is that too easy? Several recent books have taken up the subject of brainwashing—among them Daniel Pick’s “Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control” (Profile), Joel E. Dimsdale’s “Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media” (Yale), and Andreas Killen’s “Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War” (HarperCollins). They share a scholarly squeamishness about the word they are forced to use for their subject matter. “Yes, the term brainwashing is silly and unscientific,” Dimsdale writes. “No one ever meant it literally, but the metaphor is a powerful one.” In the new book “The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion” (Norton), Rebecca Lemov, a historian of science at Harvard, takes a different approach. She is often asked, she says, whether brainwashing really exists. “The answer is yes,” she writes, without any it-depends-what-you-mean-by hedging. In fact, she continues, “what we call brainwashing is not rare but common.” Of course, words like “brainwashing” have no fixed meaning independent of their usage, which can be imprecise and expansive. When Frantz Fanon wrote of colonial efforts at lavage de cerveau in Algeria, or when a commentator in the seventies accused President Richard Nixon of having “brainwashed” white workers into fearing Communist infiltration, the word was gesturing at something, however loosely defined. Yet the term’s recent resurgence raises suspicions. Accusations of brainwashing aren’t neutral claims; they offer a particular explanation for why someone holds beliefs we find preposterous. That explanation attributes those beliefs to deliberate manipulation instead of rational argument or personal conviction. In doing so, it may recast those with “deplorable” beliefs as victims rather than agents, deserving of not just condemnation but sympathy—and, perhaps, treatment. In the seventies heyday of the cults, that treatment was called “deprogramming.” Is this what our addled cousins need? A systematic re-indoctrination into conventionality? These techniques were most famously applied during the Korean War. As a prisoner of war, Morris R. Wills faced a gamut of privations—he was left malnourished and consigned to filthy conditions amid the ever-present threat of execution. Horror alternated with boredom. Conditions improved when Wills was transferred to what was called Camp One. The food got better, letters could be sent home, and there were even volleyball games. That was, it seems, an early stage of a procedure known as reëducation. Wills was identified as a member of the exploited classes, a promising target for the method. Reflecting on his experiences many years later, he said, “Brainwashing is not done with electrodes stuck to your head.” It was, rather, “a long, horrible process by which a man slowly—step by step, idea by idea—becomes totally convinced, as I was, that the Chinese Communists have unlocked the secret to man’s happiness and that the United States is run by rich bankers, McCarthy types, and ‘imperialist aggressors.’ ” The theory behind this method, as articulated by Chairman Mao, didn’t sound so bad. People could not be forced to become Marxists, Mao wrote. He recommended, instead, “democratic” methods of “discussion, criticism, persuasion, and education.” An important stage of the process was called “speaking bitterness.” American G.I.s, like the Chinese peasants on whom the method had first been tried, had a great deal of bitterness to speak: of racism and poverty back home, and of discrimination within the armed forces. Wills was made to introspect, to write an autobiography. He and other P.O.W.s were subjected to hours of lectures on Marxist theory. Faced with the demand to justify “the American system,” Wills—unable to articulate what that even was—found himself moving in what his captors called a Progressive (as opposed to Reactionary) direction. American society was rotting, he came to believe; the Chinese way was the future. He chose not to be repatriated. But, where other prisoners who made the same decision were sent to work on farms and in paper mills, he was sent to the People’s University in Beijing. The brainwashing process was never complete. Ostentatious acts of “repentance” were repeatedly demanded—Wills had already had to participate in “self-criticism” seminars. He was now taught more about Marxism and the history of China. He even witnessed a public execution. But he ended up staying in China for twelve years. Wills’s retrospective accounts of his experience, once he was back in the United States and in a position to reflect on what had been done to him, are illuminating. It is plain that his Chinese captors had succeeded, at least for a time, in producing a genuine change of mind. He was, as he himself put it, “totally convinced.” Locke’s point is connected to a more general philosophical claim about belief: that no one can just decide to believe something. Try believing, for instance, that the magazine (or computer or tablet or phone) in front of you is a venomous snake, or that your coffee mug is made of molten lava. You can cry out, if you like, but your steady heart rate will give you away. For all that, you can surely be forced into situations where the desired conviction comes unbidden. Even in the seventeenth century, people saw the limitations of Locke’s view. An Oxford churchman named Jonas Proast agreed that belief could not be coerced directly, but, in his chilling words, the magistrate might lay “such Penalties upon those who refuse to embrace their Doctrine . . . as may make them bethink themselves.” To force someone to believe something requires the concealment of the role that force has played in the process. The brainwashed can’t conceive of themselves as brainwashed; to do so would indicate that the brain remains unwashed. They can only coherently describe their experience as one of seeing the light, having their consciousness raised, being red-pilled. As Lemov quotes someone telling her about brainwashing: if the method works, it “erases itself.” So, if your environment was tailored to exclude alternative views, should we say that you were being forced to believe something? Whether we call this coerced belief is a matter of terminological preference. Ways of making people believe things don’t divide neatly into the persuasive and the coercive—the brainwashing model gives the lie to that distinction. As Lemov writes, echoing the psychologist Edgar Schein, it is “neither pure persuasion nor sheer coercion but both: coercive persuasion.” The phrase “coercive persuasion” effectively conveys the core objection to what it describes. It suppresses the fundamental exercise of human autonomy—it prevents you from making up your own mind. If that’s the case, would the criminal courts find you responsible for what you do when you’ve been brainwashed? This question was decisively answered during the trial of Patricia (Patty) Hearst, in 1976. Two years earlier, Hearst, a granddaughter of the press magnate William Randolph Hearst, was an undergraduate at Berkeley. Her life changed forever when she caught the eyes of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, an anti-capitalist guerrilla group. They abducted her and held her in a closet, blindfolded, for nearly two months. She was raped multiple times by the group’s leaders while in captivity, having been told that it would be “uncomradely” to refuse consent. Shortly afterward, she was offered a nominal choice. Would she join them? Or did she wish to be freed? It was clear to her that the appearance of choice was illusory, that she was choosing between joining the group and being killed. She chose life. Or, as she later put it, “I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs.” As with the Korean War P.O.W.s before her, mere pretense was not, under the circumstances, a real option. “By the time they had finished with me,” she later reflected, “I was, in fact, a soldier in the Symbionese Liberation Army.” A little more than two months after her abduction, surveillance cameras captured Hearst robbing a bank in San Francisco, gun in hand. When she was eventually arrested, she weighed eighty-seven pounds and was—in the assessment of the psychologist Margaret Singer—“a low-I.Q., low-affect zombie.” The Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton interviewed Hearst for about fifteen hours and then declared her a “classic case” of brainwashing. During her time in custody, she repudiated her allegiance to the S.L.A. When she stood trial for her role in the bank robbery, her attorneys argued that she was a victim of coercion and duress. It was a risky strategy. “I was brainwashed” was not a legally recognized defense. As Lemov, recounting the episode, points out, one of the psychiatrists who testified as an expert witness for the defense did Hearst no favors by admitting blithely that “brainwashing” was not a term of “any medical significance.” It had become, he said, “a sort of a grab bag to describe any kind of influence exerted by a captor over a captive, but that isn’t very accurate from the scientific or the medical point of view.” The defense failed. Patty Hearst was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. After she had completed nearly two, President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentence to “time served.” It was only on Bill Clinton’s last day in office, in 2001, that she received a full pardon. The problem, as Lemov sees it, is that our intuitive model for thinking about brainwashing diagnoses it as a “rational, cognitive malfunction.” Hence the mockery to which the brainwashed are frequently subjected. The brainwashed soldiers of the Korean War were thought of as hapless dupes who “fell for” Communism, Lemov says. She invites us to consider a twenty-first-century parallel: the scorn directed at people who lose their savings to a cryptocurrency cult. Lemov thinks that this perception shifts once we acknowledge the role of trauma in brainwashing. Maybe so. But how does this claim square with her broader hypothesis that “what we call brainwashing is not rare but common”? If trauma is a necessary condition for brainwashing, as she suggests, it follows that trauma is more widespread than we might assume. Yet she insists that she is not among the credulous sentimentalists who “see trauma everywhere.” How common, then, is brainwashing? For recent historians of brainwashing, the issue carries high contemporary stakes. Joel Dimsdale, in “Dark Persuasion,” relates the disturbing case of Alexander Urtula, who took his life after receiving a staggering forty-seven thousand text messages from his girlfriend, who kept urging him to do so. Dimsdale asks, “If you can use social media to persuade an individual you know well to do something awful, can you persuade a wider circle of friends and acquaintances?” Given the resources—for instance, “troll farms” of the kind that state actors can muster—it appears that you sometimes can. The power of such trolls lies in their ability to manipulate the epistemic environment. What was once a lone voice ranting at a street corner becomes a mutually reinforcing chorus. “When observers receive the same message from multiple sources,” Dimsdale writes, “they find the messages more believable, even if they are preposterous.” When President Trump tells us that “a lot of people are saying . . . ,” this claim, at least, is true. There was outrage when it was revealed that Facebook researchers were tinkering with users’ emotions—making tiny tweaks to their feeds in what Lemov calls “massive-scale emotional engineering.” But she notes that the backlash didn’t stop the researchers from running these experiments; it just made them more reticent about their results. One researcher on the project said that the response amounted to people thinking, “You can’t mess with my emotions. It’s like messing with me. It’s mind control.” And, in a sense, it is mind control. But that phrase, much like “brainwashing,” runs into a tricky question: Isn’t everything that shapes our thoughts, desires, or feelings a form of mind control? Lurking behind our unease is a fantasy of total, unshackled cognitive freedom. Any deviation from that ideal gets labelled as manipulation. If we cling to that standard, then, sure, we’re all brainwashed. But the standard is an absurdity. It’s obvious that our minds are shaped by the world we live in, including what others say. This isn’t what we have in mind when we talk about mind control. Our idea, instead, is that to be free is not to be subject to the will of another. Lemov quotes an impassioned remark made by the Princeton sociologist Zeynep Tufekci about how online corporate power enlists “new tools and stealth methods to quietly model our personality, our vulnerabilities, identify our networks, and effectively nudge and shape our ideas, desires and dreams.” That’s the real worry these days—not just influence but control that’s hidden and personal. Lemov’s emphasis on trauma suggests that the concept of brainwashing may not be all that helpful in understanding whatever it is that social media does to its users. Morris Wills was starved and terrified as a P.O.W. Patty Hearst was locked in a closet and sexually assaulted. Contemporary sociology invites us, perhaps rightly, to extend the traditional concept to include the working-class experience of deindustrialization and the precarity of the white-collar knowledge worker denied a secure job. The question still arises: What has your average TikTok user been subjected to that is remotely comparable to what Wills and Hearst endured? There’s another irony here. Much of what Wills came to believe when he lived in China—that socialism is superior to capitalism, that the United States is an imperialist power run by a class of kleptocratic oligarchs—is shared by many young people today who were subjected to nothing more traumatic than a typical liberal-arts education. Their professors would, of course, balk at the implication that they’ve brainwashed their students, but that’s exactly what their critics in the conservative media have long been accusing them of. It’s a familiar pattern in our polarized age. The right accuses the left of using the institutions it dominates—the federal bureaucracy, nonprofits, universities, Hollywood, and “legacy” media—to brainwash the public. The left, in turn, levels the same charge against the right, pointing to talk radio, partisan television networks, and manosphere podcasts. (Each side condemns the other’s social-media activity.) Naturally, no one admits to doing what they denounce in their opponents. But that’s to be expected: persuasion is what we do; brainwashing is what they do. Does the case of the radical professor fit into this model of malign manipulation? Come to think of it, what exactly should we make of the Communists who brainwashed the American soldiers? Or the members of the Symbionese Liberation Army—mainly white, middle-class, and well educated—who appeared quite sincerely to believe their rhetoric calling for “death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people”? Were they brainwashed into their beliefs, too? Or did they form them in the way that we all do—as the result of some half-conscious process only half mindful of evidence and truth? We can grant that the term “brainwashing” has some utility as an explanation for what happened to certain individuals who were subjected to extraordinary stress and strenuous efforts at reëducation. But we needn’t reach for it when we seek to describe, and understand, the masses of people who fail to see what we find clear-cut. There are simply too many other ways of making sense of their beliefs. Heterodox views—particularly antinomian ones—are attractive in part because they are at odds with the obvious. If our beliefs were obvious, how could we use them to distinguish our group from others? How could our beliefs be used to demarcate a social identity? Even in more mainstream precincts, plenty of our avowed beliefs—“our diversity is our strength”—may not be real beliefs at all, if belief is something that holds itself accountable to fact. In ways the philosopher Daniel Williams has explored, they are better understood as shibboleths, tribal anthems, expressions of commitment so deep that we cannot conceive of doubting them. Insofar as these clichés don’t express factual propositions, we shouldn’t apply to them the explanatory frameworks designed to tell us how people come to credit outlandish things. We may be better served by looking to more conventional human motivations: our desire for approval from those around us, and the way social incentives can reward the outrageous and punish the reasonable. Social media strengthens these tendencies by indulging them and allowing them to operate on an unprecedented scope. Ordinary forces working on a vast scale often produce the effect of an extraordinary force. There’s a well-meaning, if patronizing, ethical impulse behind our propensity to blame brainwashing for others’ convictions, whether they’re expressions of allegiance, hard factual commitments, or something in between. Labelling people as brainwashed casts them as one of the damned—lost souls whom we, as saviors, must redeem. Yet it might be our own savior complexes that we need to shed. The philosopher Karl Popper, writing in 1960, suggested that the temptation to attribute misguided beliefs to sinister manipulation came from a mistaken assumption: that “truth is manifest.” If the truth were manifest, it would follow that the failure to grasp it must reflect “the work of powers conspiring to keep us in ignorance, to poison our minds by filling them with falsehood.” But, even when confronted with a world of people holding views we find baffling, why assume that they’re victims of a grand conspiracy—or victims at all? Perhaps truth isn’t so obvious. Uncovering it demands effort and a bit of luck. Other people will take different things to be true because their paths—owing to differences in diligence or chance—diverged from ours. That conspiracy-minded cousin isn’t necessarily a casualty of mind control; he may simply have wandered down intellectual rabbit holes where evidence matters less than belonging. To depict him as a victim of manipulation grants him an unearned absolution. The most disturbing possibility isn’t that millions have been brainwashed. It’s that they haven’t. ♦