Close Encounters with Brainwashing #1

Invisible walls steer our choices. Until we become aware and shed light on them.

Image by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash.

17 July, 2024— somewhere in Europe

We have all used the term “brainwashing” in casual speech to describe activities that aim to sway individual or public opinion. In my personal experience, more often than not, we think it’s happening to someone else.

In my case, I know I have been brainwashed, and not just once, but many times. I will share about that in several articles because I think the world will be a much better place if we learn to notice when we are being brainwashed and how to counteract it.

But first things first…

What is Brainwashing?

I found many diverse and in my view incomplete definitions on the Internet, and I decided to make my own definition:

Brainwashing involves unknowingly being led to a state of 'unconsciousness' in certain specific areas of our lives while remaining fully 'conscious' throughout the rest of our lives. Symbolically, it’s like having a partial paralysis of consciousness without being aware of it. Sometimes such state of 'unconsciousness' can also be unknowingly self-imposed.

In this context, being in an unconscious state means functioning without accessing our sensing capabilities, critical thinking, and inner wisdom. In other words, we do not use our innate human advantages to make sense of the world. Being in a conscious state means exactly the opposite. We use all our human advantages to make sense of the world and we make choices in a state of full awareness.

In this state of partial paralysis of our consciousness, we act intelligently in certain aspects of our life and like zombies in other — we are dead on the inside but convinced we are fully alive. That might sound harsh, but it is pretty accurate.

More often than not, we tend to speak of brainwashing in the third person. Yet, in my experience, we have all been in such states more often than we would probably like to admit. I know I have been for sure.

The deeper we go into the 21st Century, the more we tend to fall into such states of brainwashing because we find it difficult to deal with the tons of true and false information coming our way while the speed of our lives continues to accelerate. Faced with this, we tend to choose to trust ‘authority’ and follow those in power. Additionally, technology has offered unprecedented opportunities for manipulation that never existed before at such a scale. Finally, we often self-impose on ourself this paralysis or numbness in pursuit of conviniences that migth not be available otherwise.

Altogether, brainwashing is an element of our everyday lives used to make us:

• Acquire things we don’t need and we don’t even want.

• Not question aspects of the social systems we belong to.

• Act in predictable ways aligned with what’s convinent or expected.

I have numerous stories of being brainwashed regarding all these aspects, and not just once, but many times. By sharing a few examples, I hope that more people will learn to identify these states within themselves and engage in evolving beyond them.

My Experiences with Brainwashing

As my regular readers know, I was born in Eastern Europe, i.e., behind the Berlin Wall. I am from Bulgaria, which was considered the most loyal satellite country of the Soviet Union. For my younger readers, the Berlin Wall was a physical barrier separating East and West Berlin. It symbolized the separation between the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. It fell at the end of 1989.

At that time, I was a young, educated, and well-read person brought up in a well-educated family in Bulgaria. The changes (known by the Russian word Perestroika) unfolded at the end of 1989. (Actually, they started long before that, and I wrote about that in my article Technofeudalism, Enshittification, and You.) In the months that followed, we experienced what we perceived to be a free press for the first time. (The latter turned out not to be true, of course.) During that time, there was such a thirst for information that you would often see people lining up for newspapers early in the morning, and the perceived more progressive newspapers would often be fully sold out in minutes. If one of us was lucky enough to get hold of such a newspaper, we would share it with several other people. Similarly, many new TV programs were launched, and we listened passionately to all interviews and political commentaries.

I still vividly remember the sense of utter shock and shame I experienced at that time. Day after day, I came across information that contradicted what I knew about life in my country. I was in shock that I could have lived without ever questioning certain aspects of life around me. It felt as if someone had placed some invisible walls around me. I was being “intelligent” when it came to everything inside the walls but completely ignorant of everything going on beyond the walls. A “Truman Show” of a kind, in reference to a movie by that name with Jim Carrey.

What makes this especially interesting is the fact that I never consciously felt constricted and never felt aware of those invisible walls. I was schooled to never reach them in my mental explorations. Because of that, I had the feeling that I was moving freely and was in control of my life and decisions.

Some of you might think that brainwashing was a specific feature only of communism and the so-called totalitarian societies. I wish that was true; life would have been much easier. Back in 1991, I traveled for the first time outside of the countries that formed the Eastern Bloc. I took part in a conference on the outskirts of San Francisco. Nothing could have prepared me for the ignorance at that time in the USA when it came to the Eastern Bloc of countries. I am not going to go into the details of the conversations that happened then, but I will tell you that people had been fed utter lies and propaganda, and there was very little knowledge of the reality in the Eastern Bloc of countries and specifically the Soviet Union. I remember coming back to Bulgaria at the time and telling my friends that the propaganda in the USA had been taken to a whole other level. As I mentioned in a previous article, during communism, people had some idea that we were living “behind a wall” while people in the USA did not feel behind believed they were living in a democracy, with freedom of speech and free access to information. In both cases, on both sides of the Iron curtain, ALL of us were being equally fed lies and propaganda.

Back to me at that time, there were instances when information came to me through the stories of other people. The first time I heard them, I would get suspicious of these people. Actually, I would have probably called them conspiracy theories if I were to use today’s terminology.

There were also some personal moments when I was clearly restricted in my movements and choices. However, my conditioning was so strong that I did not consider them restrictions of my freedom but a necessity to sustain our way of life.

Does that sound familiar?

I am not sure how well I am describing it, but I’ve seen people experience exactly the same around the COVID crisis (and any other polarizations lately.) Regarding COVID specifically, many people were fully conscious of everything around them, except what concerned the COVID crisis itself and the political, economic, and business decisions taken in that regard. They never questioned the information coming through official sources, even when things started to seem contradictory. Fast forward to today, many continue to be unaware of the information that has come out on the subject and the multiple court cases that have taken place. Despite being fully available, such information continues to be behind those invisible walls for some of us.

I have come to realize that the more political continuity and stability in the standards of life people experience, the more trust they have in state institutions and other power structures, the more susceptible they have been to brainwashing and manipulation in the most recent years.

I am making that conclusion based on a comparison between Eastern Europe and the so-called Western world. People in Eastern Europe have had a pretty harsh reality check when it comes to their institutions and power structures. Starting from the years of communism, and especially during the transition from communism to capitalism, they have been lied to and misled so many times that they have stopped believing anyone. That represents challenges regarding the inner functioning of the states but in some twisted way, that has made them harder to manipulate. The proof of that is the level of Covid vaccination throughout Europe. All the 13 former East European countries are at the very bottom of the list by vaccinations per 100 number of people, with Bulgaria being at the very bottom of it with roughly four times fewer vaccinations than the country heading the list. All the traditional democracies are heading the list.

Scope of Brainwashing

I think that in Western societies we are schooled to think that we have a free choice, but the reality is that we are consitently brainwashed to think that the only choices we have are the ones we are fed with. We engage in dialogue online and offline, read articles, and share opinions. However, with the help of algorithms, we tend to read articles and opinions that confirm what we already believe.

The recent years in the so-called democratic world have been marked by polarization on just about any important issue we have faced—communism vs. capitalism, females vs. males, binary vs. non-binary, vaccines vs. anti-vaccines, Ukraine vs. Russia, Israel vs. Palestine, Biden vs. Trump, the list goes on. Much like I did 35 years ago, we are partially paralyzed and do not venture beyond the invisible walls I described earlier. We feel engaged and active on these issues but we are merely exhausting ourselves by running between these invisible walls and bumping into them without even being aware of them.

One example of that is the life in a corporation. There are so many inconsistences and lies around profit maximization, stakeholder engagement, culture and values, sustainability, ethics, CSR and female empowerment, to name a few. That’s a whole other article in itself which can be summarised by two states of mind control:

• We self-impose on ourselves to not know what goes on beyound the invisible walls because it’s much more convinient and profitable.

• We pretend that we don’t know that they know that we know that they know that we know and we all continue to move only between the invisible walls.

One other current example of collective brainwashing is the dominant focus on the Biden vs. Trump choice. While I have my preferences for who might be more suitable as President out of these two, there is a bigger question that interests me much more. The USA is the world's largest economy and is often quoted as “the leader of the free world.” It is also known as home to many migrants. So, here are my questions:

• With all the greatness and brain-gain, are these the best people to lead the USA?

• Can anyone consciously tell me that this is the only choice Americans have today?

• And how did we get to that state of thinking that there are no alternatives?

Whether we are talking of Society at large, corporations, or politics, we’ve heard all the answers that relate to the logic within the invisible walls.

As amatter of fact, we are exhausted of repeating them.

The only answers worth talking about are to be found beyond these walls.

The Walls

The big questions are:

• Who erects these walls around us ans how?

• Which exactly walls remain invisible to each of us individually?

As for who erects the walls, sometimes we built such walls ourselves.

Other times, they are built for us.

I have indicated some things related to that in my article Technofeudalism, Enshittification, and You, but I just scratched the surface and I intend to expand on that soon. What I will say already is that I thought the mechanism of control, propaganda, and manipulation in the former communist countries were specific and different from those in the democratic countries. That was yet another way I was brainwashed and the truth is that the foundational principles are very much alike.

At this time, I am much more interested in what we can do now.

Another Brick in the Wall

Another Brick in the Wall is the name of a famous song by Pink Floyd, which became the symbol of the falling Berlin Wall. Using that symbolically, the choice we have is:

• To “be another brick in these invisible walls” contributing to their stability.

• To “throw another brick at the walls,” only to find out how fragile they are.

If you choose the second, explore these approaches:

• Accept that brainwashing does not happen only to other people. It happens to you all the time and every day and it almost does not matter why it happens but it matters what are you going to do about it.

• Don’t trust yourself if what you say is just a repetition of something you’ve overheard. Do your own thinking and sensing and follow what feels right to you.

• The invisible walls are most vulnerable to light. Once exposed, they lose their power and they dissolve. And vice-versa, when we self-censor ourselves from exposing them, we actually contribute to reinforcing them.

• To expose the walls, don’t talk about them because you will always face denial. Instead, ask questions. An open and clean question free of your opinion, blame, or judgment holds much deeper transformational power than any statement.

Give these a try and tell me how that feels.
Or maybe you have additions to them? Let us know in the comments.