THE INSTABILITY OF TRUTH

An unnerving history.

“How could anyone fall for that?” remains a common reaction to wacky ideas promoted over social media, but it’s less often accompanied by a chuckle, because such ideas seem to exert an inexorable appeal. The flat Earth society is prospering; vaccine coverage is dropping. Lemov, an associate professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest To Catalog Humanity, teaches a course on brainwashing. Long after the 1950-53 Korean War, when a few American prisoners “fell for” Communism, the word “brainwashing” has revived, as experts try to explain how people are persuaded to believe weird things. The first of many unsettling sections deals with the Korean War period, when Chinese overseers peppered POWs with propaganda, accompanied by treats for those who responded favorably and punishment for the uncooperative. After the armistice, citizens and the media were horrified when 23 Americans refused to return. Over the following decades, most tired of life in China and came back, proclaiming that unspeakable tortures had led to their defection. Learning the wrong lesson, the military aimed to train soldiers to resist brainwashing by inflicting brutal torments on recruits while ignoring ideology. The CIA’s ham-handed research on brain manipulation has fascinated popular writers, with an unfortunate carry-over into legitimate brain research. There are few lessons, meantime, to be learned from Patty Hearst’s 1974 kidnapping. Her months of confinement, rape, and abuse are no secret, but Americans remain titillated, and most still believe her guilty of her crimes. Matters do not improve as Lemov casts a gimlet eye on mid-20th-century mass media, later and ongoing cults, and today’s social media “hyper-persuasion,” a more acceptable term for the b-word.

A superbly crafted analysis of a universally deplored but seemingly irresistible technique.