Brainwashed: Introduction and Part 1
Introduction – Are We Brainwashed?
When you blow on a pinwheel, it spins. You just look into its face and blow. It’s an ingenious design: no other energy is necessary. Your breath pushes all the petals in the same direction at once.
Turn the pinwheel to the side and blow directly into one of the petals, and it begins to turn. As it goes around, your breath enters each subsequent petal, and it continues to spin.
Now picture numerous individuals positioned around the pinwheel, one facing each petal. Each person is blowing air into the pinwheel. The breaths converge in the center and keep the wheel spinning, their velocities averaging out.
The pinwheel is a brain. Maybe your brain, or mine.
Throughout a lifetime many sources figuratively blow into our brains.
Maybe we could apply friction to slow the spin, or block any one source of propulsion. Are we in control of what is blowing into our brains?
Perhaps we might completely stop the external input – block it all – and rely only upon ourselves for spin. Unless we have a really good mirror, though, complete self reliance may not provide us enough perspective and direction to function well in the world.
This series of several installments undertakes a brief look at many aspects of how our brains, minds, and thoughts are affected by others, intentionally and otherwise, with or without permission. If you will travel with me, we will question whether our minds are being controlled, and whether we are willing participants. We will look at whether we are controlling the minds of others, as well.
I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist, nor much of a scientist; I am just an observer who asks questions and reads Scientific American. If I am wrong about something, if you know different, please inform me. In short, I am calling all of this as I see it. It is not a scholarly study, it is an exercise in thought.
So let us begin at the beginning. Please bring your mind along with your brain.
Part 1
The Children
Let’s go all the way back to our beginnings.
Raising Babies
The external influences on our minds start when we are tiny, don’t they? When our parents and family hold us, provide us interesting flavors, when they sing to us, talk with us, and play music, they are affecting our brains and minds. When they argue, or join large groups of people with us in tow, when they show us the neighborhood, they are informing us. We learn very early on what the world is about, through what we are exposed to.
We attune our children to our own culture, and our own situation. What they hear, see, feel, taste, smell, and generally sense, will influence them, now or later. They associate some sensations with home, perhaps with love and security and perhaps not. Language influences them in many ways.
You may know someone like young Frank, whose folks always prepared a larger weekly meal, with the whole family present. Frank left home, moved out of town, and got away from that weekly tradition. But when he got married, he wanted to restart the practice for a new set of generations, and asked his parents for their recipes. It felt like home to him, he was going back to something wonderful and bringing it forward.
The seeds are planted in our minds that a thought, a feeling, a way of living is a part of our community, or one of our many communities: family, school, friends, neighborhood, sports team, congregation, club, city, region, and so on. In the best of worlds, these inputs teach us to participate appropriately in each community, to become a member in good standing, with responsibilities and benefits.
Of course, also affected are the babies who grow up with gunfire around them, with sleepless nights and arguments, or with lack of financial resources. There are children who grow up with abusive family members, and that also may feel like home – to such an extent that breaking that cycle can be quite difficult.
Schooling
Even if we live to be 100 years old, school can take up between one-sixth and one-quarter of our lives.
Let’s look in on Freeda and her mom Rosie, who are taking a walk before picking up Freeda’s boys from school. Rosie is grappling with Alzheimer’s, and Freeda is grappling with Rosie. (This dialog is from a play by your correspondent, used with permission.)
ROSIE: Where are we going?
FREEDA: We’re getting our exercise before we have to pick up the kids from school.
ROSIE: Oh. I wonder whether they’re learning anything?
FREEDA: Maybe. [Points to the ground.] Watch the cracked sidewalk.
ROSIE: Thanks. So where are we going?
FREEDA: To get the boys from school.
ROSIE: Oh.
FREEDA: So, Mom. What do you think? Is the purpose of schooling to mold children into certain predesigned forms rather than to free them to grow? Are we bending them to our whims or turning them into good citizens of the world?
ROSIE: There are certain things you have to know before you become an adult. That’s what they learn.
FREEDA: [Moves her over and points to the ground] Dog poop!
ROSIE: Thanks.
FREEDA: Is that what you learned in school?
ROSIE: What? What did I learn?
FREEDA: Things you need to be an adult.
ROSIE: No. I didn’t learn anything. A little bookkeeping, a little typing, math, spelling.
FREEDA: Sewing.
ROSIE: Cooking. We didn’t learn much of it.
FREEDA: Not much else practical.
ROSIE: We should have learned brain surgery.
FREEDA: Right. You could use it now.
ROSIE: Where are we going?
FREEDA: Same place as yesterday.
ROSIE: How come we never get there?
FREEDA: [She shrugs.] Beats me.
Is school supposed to teach us how to think, or what to know? Are we accomplishing either? Or are we taught to pass tests so we can move through life?
To some extent, we might learn how to think. Think about your math classes – just for a moment, I assure you. The teachers drilled into us what to do, to write out all the steps, write the theorem, write the result, use the new math or the scaffold division or what have you. They may have mentioned why we do it all, but we were too busy struggling with what to do.
Done often enough, those processes might help us to analyze any math problem we might encounter in life, such as how many yards of 64” fabric with a 16-inch repeating pattern we would need to create drapes for our 54” x 6’ windows, leaving six extra inches on each side, and calculating for double fullness and weighted four-inch hems.
Okay, I myself do not use differential calculus to optimize such problems. (There may be some who would do so.) Instead, I buy enough extra fabric to be overly certain, and I use the rest to make pillow covers. After all, the fabric I like is on sale, and my parents taught me well about buying an extra couple nails in case you bend one.
There may be many things that we learn in school that stay with us.
Rita just attended her 40th high school reunion, and observed how many of her classmates could quote the same words of their teachers, such as the orchestra teacher’s “Music cannot begin in a sea of noise!” and “Always grate your cheese and never your fingers,” by the cooking teacher. Rita is one of those orchestra students who have gone on to become professional musicians, and apparently they all still think of that phrase every time they sit down to play. In fact, the professional musicians, needing their fingers to be in top form, also always remember the grating rule.
Certainly, students get input from many sources. Charlene, another student in Rita’s class, remembers being told that girls were not permitted to grow up to be astronauts. Shari remembers never being happy, not for one minute in all of high school. These were not necessarily intellectual memories, but they affected the girls in somewhat negative ways.
There are negatives and positives. The inputs that shape us do so through our minds.
How are our minds affected by school over all? Many of us are stultified enough by those full days of learning facts and processes that we may forget to grow in other ways. And then there are other diversions, which we will discuss next time.
I hope you are intrigued. This discussion will grow more and more complex.
As we meander through our thoughts, we might hum the old song “The Windmills of Your Mind.”
I’ll meet you back here for Part 2.
