Mind control is not brainwashing. . . .
Brainwashing is typically coercive. The person knows at the outset that he is in the hands of an enemy. It begins with a clear demonstration of the respective roles — who is prisoner and who is jailer — and the prisoner experiences an absolute minimum of choice. Abusive mistreatment, even torture, is usually involved. . . .
Mind control, also called “thought reform,” is more subtle and sophisticated. Its perpetrators are regarded as friends or peers, so the person is much less defensive. He unwittingly participates by cooperating with his controllers and giving them private information that he does not know will be used against him. The new belief system is internalized into a new identity structure.
Mind control involves little or no overt physical abuse. . . . The individual is deceived and manipulated — not directly threatened — into making the prescribed choices. On the whole, he responds positively to what is done to him.
Even though the evidence shows the unreliability and limits of hypnosis, Hassan also argues that “hypnotic processes are combined with group dynamics to create a potent indoctrination effect . . . .
Destructive cults commonly induce trances in their members through lengthy indoctrination sessions . . . . I have seen many strong-willed people hypnotized and made to do things they would never normally do.” Hassan states that hypnosis enables mind control perpetrators to increase their success rates impressively above what is possible through other mind control techniques.
Despite attempts to distinguish the generations of mind control development, there are no qualitative differences and what was once “brainwashing” became “snapping,” which now is “mind control,” “coercive persuasion,” “menticide,” “thought reform,” etc. Each term focuses, however, on the power of the cult recruiters and on the inability of the recruit to think and/or decide independently from the cult.
However, it stretches one’s credulity to believe that what CIA, Russian, Korean, and Chinese highly trained and technologically supported experts could not accomplish under extremes of mental, emotional, and physical abuse, self-styled modern messiahs like David Koresh (high school dropout), Charles Manson (grade school dropout), and Hare Krishna founder Braphupada (self-educated) accomplished on a daily basis and on a massive scale with control methods measurably inferior to those of POW camp torturers. Do we really believe that what the Soviets couldn’t do to Alexander Solzhenitsyn during years of forced labor and torture in the Gulag, Sun Myung Moon could have done by “love bombing” for one week at an idyllic wilderness retreat? Sociologists Bromley and Shupe point out the absurdity of such a notion:
Finally, the brainwashing notion implied that somehow these diverse and unconnected movements had simultaneously discovered and implemented highly intrusive behavioral modification techniques. Such serendipity and coordination was implausible given the diverse backgrounds of the groups at issue. Furthermore, the inability of highly trained professionals responsible for implementing a variety of modalities for effecting individual change, ranging from therapy to incarceration, belie claims that such rapid transformation can routinely be accomplished by neophytes against an individual’s will.
Objection: The Deterministic Fault
We believe the data presented here shows that people join, stay in, and leave cults on their own responsibilities, even if their decisions may have been influenced or affected by deceit, pressure, emotional appeal, or other means. We do not believe the evidence supports the mind control model. In this article we express the concerns and fears of conservative, evangelical, and knowledgable counter-cult apologists not only our own concerns but those of other counter-cult workers (Christian and non- Christian) who firmly believe that the mind control model misdiagnoses the problem, mis-prescribes the solution, and (for Christians) is contrary to a biblical cult evangelism model.
Those holding to the mind control model have made the generalization that most cults have internal social pressures and religious practices which, if not identical in nature, are similar in effect; and that average cult members are similarly affected by these teachings, techniques, and practices. We reject this generalization, though we will grant — and in fact have stated publicly — that many cults have made deceptive claims, used faulty logic, misrepresented their beliefs, burdened their followers with unscriptural feelings of guilt, and sought to bring people into financial or moral compromise to unethical demands. Yet it does not necessarily or automatically follow that these pressures, practices, or demands remove an individual’s personal responsibility for his or her actions.
The cult mind control model assumes that a combination of pressure and deception necessarily disables personal responsibility. Exit counselor Hassan recognizes that the cult mind control model (which he has adopted) is incompatible with the traditional philosophical and Christian view of man as a responsible moral agent:
First of all, accepting that unethical mind control can affect anybody challenges the age-old philosophical notion (the one on which our current laws are based) that man is a rational being, responsible for, and in control of, his every action. Such a world view does not allow for any concept of mind control.