It all started with that uneradicable question: why did anyone vote for Trump? For years I’ve been trying to uncover the answer by digging around in people’s brains.
No, I’m kidding. I have been digging around, though, in a wide range of places that might offer me authentic information about whether someone can be brainwashed, or not. I believe we can’t. Or, rather, I’m pretty sure I can’t. But what about other people? What about the millennia of cults? Certainly people belong or adhere to them. If no one did, it wouldn’t be a cult. It’d be one or two people who were nuts.
So naturally I eagerly read “Dirty Minds: It’s those other people who have been brainwashed, right?,” by Nikhil Krishnan in the April 7, 2025 New Yorker. Krishnan explores the question by writing about some published books on the subject. The books sound interesting, if equivocal.
One writer he covers pointed out that trauma can make someone vulnerable to accepting beliefs or dogma. OK, but I’m still not convinced that an alarming shift in someone’s beliefs is brainwashing.
I give you Krishnan’s last paragraph because I loved the article and especially his reference to “that conspiracy-minded cousin” (I have at least one of those and probably you do too):
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 change–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 depic him as a victim of maniplation grants him an unearned absolution. The most disturbing possibility isn’t that millions have been brainwashed. It’s that they haven’t.
Right.
What does stay with me as a strong and scientific explanation of such divergent, repulsive and implausible beliefs is the oversized amygdalas. They make perfect sense.
True