Brainwashed: Part 4
Part 4 – Positive Influences
Welcome to Part 4 of our series on controlling our minds. Today let’s take a look at some of the more positive ways we affect others’ minds, and others affect ours.
Falling in Love
Does falling in love alter our minds? And are all forms of falling in love the same? Does falling in love fit with the various forms of mind control? How do we fall in love?
There are those who fall in love and are able to maintain that bubbly feeling for decades. And there are those who fall in love and expect the feeling to mature into mutual respect, caring, shared responsibilities, and continued serene cohabitation. With luck, both members of a couple are willing to work toward one or the other, or possibly both forms of success.
Are there more variations? Probably there are: those who fall in “like,” for instance, and those who simply form a working partnership. This is not to say anyone is more or less content in a relationship, nor that any relationship model is better, but to explore the degree to which our minds are affected.
Being in love is rather like being hypnotized, don’t you think? Something is controlling your mind. It’s like a flood of nourishing water is pouring over your brain; it can be a drunken stupor that lasts for years and years if you sustain it.
When a person is in love and circumstances find that person alone (temporarily or permanently, regardless of the circumstances of the other), the person alone begins to feel like the cobwebs are clinging, detritus is accumulating, almost like a need to be cleansed. Being alone and in love can be kind of stultifying, as if something is removing all thoughts of everything else, and you are clotting up. The flow of your feeling is gone or on hold, while the control over you remains.
Too flowery and metaphorical? I get that way when talking about being in love. Let’s just say – as we have all heard in a million songs – that when a person falls in love, it is like being under a spell.
Is that a form of mind control? Is it chemistry controlling your mind? Does it only work in the bath of the mutual chemistry between the two persons? Is it turned on and off on purpose?
And can it lead us astray?
There certainly are those who fall in love with ostensibly the wrong persons – those who abuse them or take advantage of them, for instance.
Let’s include falling in love in our sphere of mind control. Take a moment to bask in that feeling, if you know it.
Religion
Here we go… At the risk of the wrath of those I love, I am going to jump right into this one. A friend asked me once, “Is religion brainwashing?”
Now, I write this as a person who maintains a rationally based faith in a traditional religion, including healthy skepticism, with a copious supply of culturally stereotypical behavior added.
At the time, I took the controversial question to be asking whether religion intends to brainwash, to control minds in any way.
However, regardless of the questioner’s intent, I think this is not the key question. It certainly is possible that major established religious organizations use mind controlling techniques to various extents to hold followers in thrall.
The threat model – do this thing and don’t do that thing, or else you go to a bad place – exists in many formal religious traditions, though not so much in my own. Mine seems to use peer pressure – do this or your peers will know you did wrong even though you knew better.
One thing I definitely find concerning is how many religions indoctrinate their followers with the notion that their set of beliefs is the only correct set of beliefs. That seems to be the source of many of the troubles in the world.
We get plenty of good out of religion. We have community, a structure, rites of passage, and a code of morality.
In fact, religion is the very source of morality. Civil life – laws and etiquette and such constructs – provides a code of ethics. Religion provides morality, as do other communities in which we participate. We must be careful not to mix the ethics (civil) with the morality (religious).
Ethics deal with not putting one’s finger on the scale in doing business with one’s neighbor, not running a red light, not exceeding the speed limit. Morals deal with following a code of morality around how you treat others (giving alms, visiting the sick, bolstering those who are mourning), how you comport yourself in life (eating wholesome foods, tending the earth, working toward peace, following tenets prescribed by your religious traditions), and how you help others (charitable work, not knowingly or carelessly spreading disease, saving the whales, and so on).
Certainly the two systems intersect: there could be a Venn diagram showing the commonalities of ethics and morals. Generally, though, ethics are put forth in civil laws, and morals are promulgated under religious law.
The purpose of civil laws, even when they sound like moral laws (“Did your bull fall into my pit? The law says thus and so!”), is to provide for harmonious life together, and to attend to the common good. It is an ethical discussion how we allocate funds for street lights given our current roads and budget, or how we pay for schools and protection, or what we do with criminals. This is how we make laws. Perhaps it is a moral discussion whether prayer will keep the lights burning just a little bit longer, but we will not discuss that here.
Harry and Jack, characters from a play whom we met in a prior installment, have been discussing scientists pulling the wool over our eyes – pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, even researchers who fudge the results of their trials to get a positive result and then go ahead and publish. The scientists abandon their ethics, and the matters often move into bogged-down morality, which may lead to changing the minds of the general public. Let’s listen in, as they veer a bit off their original topic and into ours.
JACK: And that leads to the general public believing the scientists less and less, the more and more they deceive us. Then people say they “do not believe in science”!
HARRY: Believe.
JACK: Believe.
HARRY: Believe in science? As in religion?
JACK: As in religion.
HARRY: We are being controlled away from trusting science by the scientists’ lack of ethics.
JACK: And science becomes a religion we can reject. We are being controlled.
HARRY: Father Coughlin on the radio ninety years ago used a kind of mind control, too, didn’t he?
JACK: Follow Christianity and hate Jews! [Aside] Funny how often it ends up with hating the Jews.
HARRY: It’s the use of the herd mentality, blindly following one another. The same thing that gets kids to want all the same clothes and gadgets.
JACK: The mind is easy to control. Psychiatrists study how to get folks to respond in predictable ways, don’t we? Others can do the same.
HARRY: My kid learned as a lighting designer how to get the audience to suddenly hush just before the show is ready to begin, just by imperceptibly moving the stage lights down a half point. [Wiggles his finger.] It works every time.
JACK: Yeah.
HARRY: So you’re saying that not only are scientists being unethical and pulling the wool over our eyes, but so are the religious leaders.
JACK: Yeah. And the more they lead us by the nose, the more it all moves from unethical to immoral, doesn’t it? Of course there are rules against the scientists faking results. The motivation for unethical behavior is often immorality. And the belief that they will not get caught.
Our religions may have many things in common, including various moralities, but they still vary widely. We should be open to learning about each others’ religions. We should be closed to being proselytized unless we wish to be. And we should keep religion out of civil laws as much as possible, especially in a democracy.
With religion we have some overly positive mental influences, with a possibility of a few negatives. I leave you to consider your thoughts – and your beliefs – on this.
Most religions teach peace and love and tending the earth. That seems positive to me: maybe that should be our starting point for discussion.
In Part 5, we will discuss further social influences.
