5 Effective Ways Anyone Can Be Brainwashed, No Matter How Smart You Are
Just look around, and you’ll see the world is full of people who’ve been brainwashed—some do strange things (like getting way too into yoga), while others do terrible things (like joining ISIS). But you’d never do anything like that, right? So what makes those people different from you? Why do silly (or even awful) movements so easily attract followers, including intelligent and educated people? Here’s what we found when we tried to figure it out.
1. Ideas Don’t Matter—People Only Care About What “Works”
Most of you probably think Scientology is pretty ridiculous, so let’s use it as an example. You’ve likely heard the wild stories about the evil overlord Xenu freezing billions of his people 75 million years ago and burying them in Earth’s volcanoes. If joining Scientology means believing in that nonsense, why are there successful, wealthy, and previously sane people among its followers?
Every cult, political party, or hate group has long understood that you can easily lure people in by connecting weird ideas with threads of common sense until everyone agrees. Let’s see how Scientology works its magic. For example, when life or work becomes unbearable, Scientologists don’t tell you to “summon a thetan” or anything like that. Instead, they suggest you focus on a single task and try to do it right and quickly. That way, you’re not thinking about your hated job, but about the task at hand. Once you finish, you gain confidence to move on to the next task. That’s great advice—every successful person does this. “But wait,” you might say, “Scientology didn’t invent that, they just borrowed it from a ‘10 Tips for Working Better’ newsletter. It’s just common sense, nothing more.”
Exactly. The mythology doesn’t matter if the rituals make life easier. Every cult, political party, or hate group knows you can trap people by tying strange things to common sense until everyone agrees. But why don’t people leave, even when their group starts doing awful things? Well…
2. Mostly Because of Fear
Let me go back to a favorite example. At the start of “The Lord of the Rings,” there’s a huge battle between elves and orcs. You don’t need the narrator to know who you’re supposed to root for. If you saw a group of guys beating up an orc in an alley tomorrow, you’d probably join in without asking why or knowing the guys had actually stolen the orc’s bike. It doesn’t matter—you’d fight on their side, even if they were neo-Nazis.
People justify their terrible actions by thinking they’re fighting an enemy much worse than themselves. Always remember: people are defined by what they hate.
Think about how little people online talk about their favorite bands, and how many talk about hating Nickelback, for example. The tough guys in high school didn’t care about being athletes, but they cared a lot about not being nerds. You might not know who you want to be, but you definitely know who you don’t want to be. All you know—no matter how silly or destructive your beliefs are—is that they help you avoid being on the “bad guy’s” side.
Wait, does that mean groups united by hate actually feed off each other, and that opposing sides are in a weird symbiosis that keeps them both alive? Yes! That’s why we always assign negative traits to people we disagree with. It’s not enough to say anti-feminists are wrong—we have to say they’re all fat and sexless. Conservatives are backward hicks, liberals are powerless hippies. And we forgive our own group for a lot, because no matter how corrupt we are, at least we’re not orcs.
3. Friends Matter More Than Politics
If you talk to someone who’s been to war and ask how they got through it, they probably won’t mention love of country or beliefs. They’ll talk about the guy next to them. They had each other’s backs, and that’s how they survived.
People adopt opinions that help them fit in with their social group, because fitting in is way more important than any abstract stuff about taxes or foreign policy.
I remember an interview with a former neo-Nazi who joined the skinheads before he even knew what they were about. After a couple of months, someone asked, “So, do you hate Jews now?” And like everyone else, he said, “Of course.” Over time, he really did learn to hate Jews, but that came much later. At first, it was just about supporting his friends.
“I’d never agree to destroy a whole people just to fit in with my friends!” you might say. Maybe, but there are subtler ways you can get pulled into things you don’t believe in. Be honest: how many of you really listen to the arguments from the other side?
When a serious argument comes up, most people don’t try to understand the details to act more effectively. They just follow their group. That’s because, for most people, fitting in with their social group is more important than any abstract ideas about taxes or foreign policy. We always choose what matters most to us.
4. Everyone Has the Same Moral Code—They Just Use It Differently
Do you think you’re morally superior to people who burned witches? Hopefully, yes, since those people executed innocent women based on silly superstition. But what if it turned out witches really existed, and everything said about them was true? And the only way to stop them was to kill them?
When someone tries to objectively figure out which group is best, it always turns out to be the group they belong to.
Then you realize you’re not necessarily more tolerant than the witch hunters—you just don’t share their belief in witches. Your moral code might actually be the same as theirs; you just disagree with them in this particular case. Facts can be true or false, but they aren’t moral or immoral.
Now, let’s look at a serious political debate. Both liberals and conservatives agree that government tyranny is bad. But they don’t agree on whether the president’s healthcare reform is an example of such tyranny. That doesn’t mean one side is moral and the other isn’t—it just means they start from different facts.
Sometimes, a side just lies about what it believes. Witch hunters didn’t really believe in witches—they just liked hurting women. Conservatives might not really think healthcare reform is tyranny—they just want an excuse to keep poor people sick.
But if you ask all these people about their moral values, the list is always the same: minimize harm, ensure fairness, respect authority, maintain purity of body and mind. If there are any differences, they’re minor.
5. Most People End Up in Their Groups by Accident
When someone tries to objectively figure out which group is best, it always turns out to be the group they belong to. Strange, isn’t it?
Read the opinions of poor people on wealth management forums—they’re sure people are poor because they’re too weak and immoral to control their impulses.
Almost always, people consider a deadly sin to be something that could never threaten them personally. In other words, we try to set up our moral code so we end up on the “right” side with minimal effort. You can think of this as your “default moral setting,” and it’s determined by where you were born, how you were raised, and which group of friends you joined.
The fact that different people have different moral settings—and, more importantly, believe in them just as strongly—is almost impossible to grasp. Admit it: you secretly believe you’d never be a racist if you lived in the American South during slavery. And if you were a young German, you’d never have joined Hitler’s supporters. When we imagine ourselves in another time or place, we always assume our “default moral setting” would stay with us, because we can’t imagine life without it. And that’s another reason we can never truly understand each other.
And when we try to make someone give up their “default moral setting,” we’re basically asking them to:
- Give up something that’s always worked for them;
- Let the “bad guys” win;
- Betray their friends;
- Do something (in their view) immoral.
Most people would rather die than do that.