The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion by Rebecca Lemov

Expand

The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion by Rebecca Lemov

'The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion' by Rebecca Lemov

Emotional engineering isn’t a new product of the digital age, and neither is the selfie. In The Instability of Truth, Rebecca Lemov reminds us that chemist-photography pioneer Robert Cornelius took his own picture in 1839 and traces concerns over “coercive persuasion” of social media to the “brainwashing” of American POWs during the Korean War. John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate dramatized something that had actually occurred, albeit with less sensational results. The Chinese Communists really did try to reshape the interior lives of their captives by systematically destabilizing their grounding in reality. They soon applied those lessons to the entire population of Mainland China.

The Instability of Truth is hard to put down if you have any interest in the history of (often bad) ideas, group dynamics and the malleability of human perceptions. Writing with skeptical irony, the Harvard historian of science finds continuity as well as discontinuity as “science”—from the Maoist interrogators through B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism and Elon Musk’s Neurolink brain implant—sought to reduce the unfathomable essence of personality into arrangeable building blocks. Some of the experiments conducted by psychiatrists under CIA auspices during the Cold War are reminiscent of a German medical researcher named Mengele. Like the concentration camp doctor, they were affiliated with academic institutions and published in peer-reviewed journals, and like Mengele (but with a smaller pool of victims), they showed shocking disregard for the subjects of their research.

Lemov’s point is that truth is real, it matters, but it’s a mistake to insist that “final categories can be applied, arranging things in the hope that truth, like facts, can be easily clicked on and seamlessly verified.”

Buy the Instability of Truth on Amazon here.

Paid link