Brainwashing, and How People Are Led by Wrongheaded Beliefs
There’s no question that it’s difficult not to grant a personal belief to something, especially when it’s new. We saw this with AIDS. But there’s equally no question that it’s far better to wait until you have all the information under your belt before coming to a decision.
We form beliefs about people in exactly the same way. Let’s say we meet someone for the first time, we shake hands, but they don’t seem particularly interested in us at all. They seem distracted. They’ve shaken hands, but our presence really seems to mean nothing to them.
“Funny bloke,” we think. “Why did he even bother?”
What we don’t know is that he’s just come off the phone, having been told that his wife’s just died of cancer. He’s been expecting it, of course, but it still hits him like a jack hammer. We made no attempt to hold off on our judgment of the person until more information was forthcoming. This is human nature.
Emotion and Brainwashing
The successful and intentional formation of a belief is caused by exciting the emotions. It’s true, therefore, that your beliefs have a lot more to do with your emotional state than with your intelligence. To excite, to whip up, the emotions of a number of people is brainwashing, at least in it’s basic form.
This was how the Chinese treated the American POWs during the Korean war. The point was that these poor chaps were lectured day after day on the subject of Communism and when they weren’t being lectured, loud speakers extolled the considered virtues of their captors’ beliefs incessantly.
You can’t possibly brainwash a person through calm and reasoned argument. Why? Because you give him or her a chance to use their intelligence with their own counter-arguments.
You can see this emotional escalation in films of Hitler’s rallies. There’s no doubt that he was a master orator. I heard it said one time that his public relations team and their abilities were fifty years ahead of their time, and who can possibly doubt it?
We saw it, too, after the tragic death of Princess Diana. The emotional pitch rose to a sea of hysteria, and the beliefs thus formed were taken out on the Royal Family. That they were an unfeeling, uncaring coterie of wooden-hearted snobs.
Very few people allowed reason to reign and understand the actions of the Queen regarding her grandchildren, trying to shield them from the horror of what had happened. Now, when you look back on those days, governed by silly, screaming, unthinking people, what in the world was Her Majesty to do? She took care of her immediate family, especially the children, as any grandmother would do.
So it may easily be seen how thoughtless, wrongheaded beliefs can rule the day.
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