← The Gist
The Gist
Rebecca Lemov and the Instability of Truth
00:39:54
Harvard historian of science Rebecca Lemov joins to talk about her book The Instability of Truth, which dives deep into the history of mind control, from Cold War POW camps and MKUltra to the quieter persuasion of social media. They get into what...
Loading summary
Transcript73 lines
- [00:00]
Rebecca Lamov
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Mike Pesca
It's Monday, Aug. 11, 2025, from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pasca. We live in an era of conspiracies. And there is a party breaker, icebreaker type question. What's the conspiracy? You believe, And I'm good at parties, but I'm really bad at that question. In fact, I don't really believe any conspiracy. Then you can maybe convince me that something is a conspiracy. And I would say, oh, yeah, I didn't know that was a conspiracy. But it's usually just a confluence of. Of events that are interrelated. And here's my problem with believing conspiracies. To believe them. You can almost never sign on to the most reasonable version of the conspiracy. UFOs, are they flying sorcerers from outer space that the government knows about and is keeping hidden from us? Can I just say, we don't know what's out there. And it's quite conceivable that given the vastness of the universe, something has at some point happened or flitted across the eyes of human beings that are in fact unidentified and flying and objects. Yeah, I'd sign on to the latter, but not the Area 51 part. So I'm a little too unconspiratorial because statistically speaking, one or two of these things have to exist. What's the Epstein conspiracy? I don't know. I'm willing to believe a certain amount of the unanswered questions of Jeffrey Epstein. They're unanswered. It is unanswered. Where he got his money, it is unanswered. If he held any information over powerful people, is that a conspiracy? I don't know. Maybe because I believe it, I'm calling it reasonable. But I don't think of it as a conspiracy. That he killed himself in his cell seems to have been the case that someone killed him. That seems to be a conspiracy. So we don't know what to think of Epstein. And here's the biggest problem I have with conspiracies that there hasn't been one that I'm aware of. And if you're aware of some, send me a note at the gist@mike pesca.com if you're aware of one that during your lifetime was only rumored to be a conspiracy and then was confirmed, tell me. But it has to be big because the conspiracies that these days we know about, where they justify certain conspiracies as being real, we look back and we say, oh, cointelpro, this was the effort to smear mlk. Well, that turned out to be a conspiracy, but I wasn't aware of the rumor of it, and it wasn't during my lifetime or the Tuskegee experiments. That was certainly a government conspiracy and it was revealed during my lifetime, but I wasn't aware that there were rumors that it was going on. I know of no conspiracy that was confirmed during my lifetime. And this all brings me to the Instability of Truth. What a book. Rebecca Lamov is the author. It's about brainwashing, mind control, and hyper persuasion. MK Ultra A conspiracy that I didn't know about was going on at the time, but turns out, in retrospect, to have been a conspiracy that gets written about in the book, as does so much else. Rebecca Lamov, the Instability of Truth up next, my favorite shirt. This shirt I love. It's actually three shirts. It's a black one, it's a putty one, and it's a white one. And it's from True Classic. True Classic, like the name implies, is simple. It's crisp, and it takes something as basic or classic as a white T shirt and makes it feel and look fantastic. Because a True Classic, it's never just about the fit or the fabric. The clothes fit the way they should fit, which is weird to understand. After wearing white T shirts that fit the way white T shirts aren't supposed to fit. Hundreds of examples, thousands of data points of white T shirts fitting incorrectly. Then I throw on the True Classic and I'm like, oh, this is it. And that's when I found my truth. My true I've been wearing True Classics for a while now. If you watch any of the video, you will see me often in a True Classic. Hey, what's that? Not bunching. That's a True Classic. Clean, effortless fit that actually works for real life. And videoing the gist. You can find all of them at Target, Costco, or head to trueclassic.com gist to try them for yourself. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [04:36]
Will
Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.
- [04:44]
Mike Pesca
That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [04:47]
Will
Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.
- [05:00]
Mike Pesca
Bon voyage.
- [05:02]
T-Mobile Representative
Introducing Family Freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom. Up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 8, 2999 eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile.
- [05:30]
Mike Pesca
Rebecca Lamov is here. She has the best title, which probably means she has the best job. She's a professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Okay, maybe that Harvard part is a little dicey these days, but her new book, and it's not that new, but it's new to me and it's a revelation and it's so well written and it's so interesting. And if you listen to the show, you know, I don't begin interviews by heaping praise, but I couldn't help it. It's called, as you could see if you're watching, the Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper Persuasion. Rebecca, welcome to the gist.
- [06:02]
Rebecca Lamov
Thanks so much, Mike. Great to be here.
- [06:05]
Mike Pesca
So this is interesting in that understanding how we think, we have to think about that and it became becomes a Mobius strip of epistemology. So you had to choose where on that strip to begin to wade in and to say, okay, this is our, our point for understanding what we understand, but also understanding how we understand. And if we're understanding things that we are not really understanding, how do you make that choice? Like, let's start here and let's use this as at least the common ground for explaining things.
- [06:37]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, that's exactly the challenge. And I seem to be always drawn to some Mobius strip topic that either hides itself or operates on many levels. Then I like to try to make it like here's a point we can all agree on or here's something to plant your feet in. Brainwashing, which has proved to be quite a and enduring, you know, mystery on some levels because I've been studying it for a couple decades. But I decided to. I mean, you can loop back, but basically a good place to start would be when the word itself enters the English language and you can actually find pretty much a moment.
- [07:18]
Mike Pesca
Good, right? And it's from the Chinese words for brain or wash, although as you point out, not really. I mean, those are the words for brain or wash, but they didn't use it in that way that was popularized by a former not CIA, but precursor to the CIA agent who started writing about brainwashing. Who was he and what was his motivation for all of this?
- [07:39]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, it was an OSS agent named Edward Hunter. I almost said Robert Hunter, which had been. Which late later connected. But Edward Hunter was an operator and.
- [07:51]
Mike Pesca
There were like seven people named west in the book also.
- [07:54]
Rebecca Lamov
It gets confusing and wolf lots of operatives. But Hunter was a true enthusiast and a genuine anti communist who had worked in Manchuria. And he also worked as a journalist which was connected to his espionage activities. So by around 1950, or exactly in 1950, he published an article in the Miami News which talked about this new weapon that the communists were in possession of, the Chinese Communists and it was brainwashing. And he attributed this to these common Chinese words which do indeed exist she now. But they weren't used, as you mentioned, in that way. In fact, they had only been used by the intelligentsia about 30 years earlier in the opposite sense of let's welcome modern science, let's welcome modernization to our society. By the time Hunter reintroduced the word and brought it to an English language audience, it really, it really wasn't used at all. But he, he loved to claim credit for it. So interesting. Like he was a spy, but he'd also like to be in the public eye.
- [09:04]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, the spy in the public eye. There's an alternate title for a book and there are many. But I'll give you and my listeners another thing to melt their brains if they're not already washed. The Chinese, I found out from your book, have the opposite conception of which organs are the nexus of emotion and which are the nexus of intellect. I've always wondered about this. I know the Greeks thought that ideas came from up in the ether, but when we think, do we really feel the thinking going on in our head? Like, do we really. What if we were habituated into thinking that our thinking takes place in our heart, but our emotion takes place in our head. And that is basically where the Chinese are. So to them brainwashing is really a change of heart.
- [09:50]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, and the word for mind involves the character for heart. So it, it is interesting and confusing, but. But it's actually a deep question. Where do we think? Where do our thoughts take place? And maybe the strange thing is that we are so sure they absolutely take PR place in our brains and only in our brains through some sort of. Because we've, we've so absorbed this kind of model, the computer model of the brain, that all thinking, calculation and strategy generation take place in the brain. And it Must therefore be ultimately, you know, knowable that way. But I guess new science shows that, you know, the gut actually, there are actually cognition. It's possible to think through your gut. I mean, we even have this in colloquial language about the kind of intuitive knowledge. And apparently this is something I want to study further, but I haven't. So it's just suggestive. But ancient. Many ancient, you know, thinkers also believe that the heart and the gut could generate thought just as much as the mind.
- [10:55]
Mike Pesca
Right. And think about as a historian of science, these the ideas of. In the humors of the blood were said to be, you know, four different kinds of humors coursing through our bodies, saying to. Said to control emotion. There are all sorts of ancient explanations for emotion which is experienced in the mind and influences intellect. Oh, it's also very fascinating and like so many things, something you mean to mean to explore totally.
- [11:24]
Rebecca Lamov
And you can even see astrology or I'm the most ancient science of all, which runs through all societies. I mean, they attribute changes in emotion or one's fate and the thinking about one's fate to planetary movements. So, I mean, we. I think it's actually more our own confidence that thinking is merely localized in the brain, is actually what's historically unusual.
- [11:51]
Mike Pesca
So when Hunter comes up with this brain or popular, popularizes, let's just give him the credit in the west, popularizes this idea. It is very much a communist phenomenon, at least at first. And that's genuine. Right. It's part of the reason why Americans were worried about this and why an OSS agent would be studying it. But it's also true that. Well, you write about a lot of different communist states using this. To what degree?
- [12:21]
Rebecca Lamov
I mean, there were things to be worried about from the point of view of US and security. Question of whether the communists had some special new technique or set of techniques that could actually render someone, you know, so changed and so different from themselves, such a transformed person that they might actually, as in the communist show trials in Moscow in the 30s and 40s, that they might beg to be executed for their own. They would come forward with false confessions, and it was not clear what would cause someone to change so radically. And then it started happening to US prisoners of war and captured soldiers during the Korean War. So this seemed to confirm that not only the Soviets, but the Chinese who were running the camps, the POW camps, had these powers. And of course, they were curious, but not only curious, urgently concerned that this could be a new superweapon of some sort.
- [13:22]
Mike Pesca
And what Would. To what end? Because you also write about how in advance of the Vietnam War with this knowledge, the United States military tried to guard against the brainwashing. And it either worked or the Vietnam weren't interested in it. So why were the Chinese and the, the Koreans interested in brainwashing Americans? What did they think they'd get out of that?
- [13:45]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, I think what they were doing was they had these POWs on their hands. Many of them had been held for a couple of years under extremely distressing conditions to the, to the men they had been. You know, actually the Korean War, the casualty rates were higher than World War II for the, for the soldiers who were captured. And most of them died getting to the camps just through starvation and through brutality and through terrible diseases and many other, and being bombed by their own napalm or strafed by it. So if they got to the camps, they then starved and froze for another couple of years, were in very degrading circumstances as run by the Korean army. But when the Chinese took over, which was pretty much overnight, around 1952, they started to feed people better. The prisoners were treated a bit better, so their conditions improved to some degree and they would physically survive. But they also enacted this very formal program of thought reform or brainwashing they wanted to see. I think they were curious whether especially the gis and some of the lower ranked troops would be, would also be transformed just as the Chinese peasants had been, because that was their. Who they saw as the equivalent.
- [15:04]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah. And so they were experimenting on their enemies, which the United States did in MK Ultra. Experimented on our own or criminals or members of the mob, for instance. But let's go back. The method, which was for military or geopolitical means, where the Chinese took over from the Koreans, that was not a part of conscious plan to brainwash. But isn't that a good way to brainwash someone? To break them down first with cruelty and then maybe to inject some bits of hope and better food and build them up a little bit.
- [15:41]
Rebecca Lamov
Exactly. I mean, if it wasn't orchestrated, I don't think, I mean, but it is a perfect, it is a perfect recipe that we see then replicated in types of cults or abusive situations where, and I came to call it ungrounding. And I think we can all relate to this in small and large ways. But in the case of the POWs, I mean, their lives were so upended and it was psychologically and on every level it was a confusing experience to be sent at a very young age to a place you didn't know about Korea. Sometimes they were told that it wasn't even called a war yet. When many of the men went, they were, they said, you're going to a police action. So some of them thought they would be driving an ambulance or a police car around. Oh really?
- [16:29]
Mike Pesca
See, I always thought that that was, I mean it's still not deemed a war, but I always thought that the reason that phrase was pointed to was to some sort of version of Orwellianism to demonstrate that we're not speaking honestly. But you're saying they really thought that it would be like they'd be police.
- [16:46]
Rebecca Lamov
I think some of the, like the 17 and 18 year olds thought that not the people in charge, they knew, I mean this was a label because they didn't yet want to declare war.
- [16:56]
Mike Pesca
But, but literally a 17, I mean you chronicle a 17 year old who went to, you know, junior in high school, who gets there and says, I didn't really, when they challenged me about what America stood for, I didn't really know because they hadn't taught me yet. Although, I don't know, maybe it was second semester junior year curriculum and he hadn't gotten to it yet.
- [17:13]
Rebecca Lamov
That's possible. I mean many, so many of this is one thing that the guy you're talking about, Morris Willis, describes. He said, I didn't, I didn't know how to defend myself. I didn't know how to defend my country. And also by the time this re education was happening, the formal system where they had to listen to lectures and they were basically had to forcibly introspect and write journals, something like 80 to 90% of the men were given these red journals with a little picture on the front, which I think most people don't associate with being a prisoner of war. But they had to write about their families, their resentments, their relationship to their country, their. And sort of this would be the root of a confession that would ultimately be extracted from the ones who ended up being more sympathetic. So Morris Wells did say that his education hadn't prepared him for this.
- [18:06]
Mike Pesca
Wow. We could spend a long, long time on the Koreans. But I just want to point out that these people were famous in America. Life followed by these people. There was a distinct group of them that were studied and brought back to what would be Walter Reed Hospital. And the American consciousness was penetrated by the example of the Koreans who were brainwashed. And then of course the Manchurian Candidate, the book, the movie further popularized it. What did it get wrong from what the experts at the time thought and Then the other question is, what did the experts at the time get wrong from what we know now? So that's a long one, but go ahead.
- [18:45]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, that's a good. A good question, though. I think the experts at the time understood that there wasn't this magical witchcraft. You know, there wasn't some super weapon. I think sometimes, especially there's a historian of Spycraft named Christy McCrackis, and she has this great line in one of her articles where she says, Americans were always looking for the super technology or the pill, the one thing that would get someone to do your bidding. Whereas the Europeans and other people they were spying against, Eastern Europeans wanted something much more complex psychologically. They were willing to go deep and get your neighbor to spy on you for 15 years and then take notes in your attic. But the Americans wanted a quick fix to some degree. The experts wanted to debunk that. And they said, this isn't some single pill or some special thing that we've never seen before. It's actually a complex mix of torture, extreme coercion, extreme suffering or degradation and debility, but also mixed with conditioning, what we know about how human beings can be conditioned over time. They had some articles analyzing it along those lines. The second part of your question, I think one thing the experts got wrong was they overstressed resistance. Initially, they were giving all the returning POWs, the ones who didn't go to Bakht, the ones who wanted to return, because some of them didn't even want to return. But the ones who returned, they gave them Rorschach tests. They were really interested. Would the test results look different for the men who were called resistors versus those who seem to have been traders? And they found ultimately that there wasn't really much of a difference in that everybody had cooperated to some degree to the extent they were alive, essentially. I mean, and that. That. That distinction wasn't, you know, black and white.
- [20:49]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And it's important now to recognize this when we think about the context of cults and the question, oh, or the supposition, I'd never fall for a cult, but all research shows that you say that, and most people who fell for cults said that too. It just can. It's. It's part of the human condition. To go back to the. How the Americans thought there could be a pill, but the Europeans thought there could be a process. I ask you, as from the vantage point that you said this to me, hints that there is something perhaps culturally determined about theories of change that would lead each group of People to that conclusion, possibly.
- [21:34]
Rebecca Lamov
I mean, I think one. One thing you could attribute it to is American love of technology and kind of wanting, especially around this time in the middle of the 20th century, to kind of put it, even going back to the techno utopian movements of the early part of the 20th century. Just like the glorification of dams and incredible earthwork, you know, these machines that could transform not only the landscape, but eventually it was hoped, like the human psyche. So there's kind of like putting technology at the center, which probably persists in the American character, if you want to paint with broad strokes. And maybe the Europeans had just been at it for longer, didn't prioritize machines that much. You also see this just in what they thought about social science, what you could do with social science. They never wanted to get rid of the theorizing part of it. Whereas there are parts where Americans, American sociologists and psychologists thought, if I could just get the best filing system and harness data in the right way, I'll get the answer. So anyway, that's what I found in my research.
- [22:43]
Mike Pesca
But Americans also, poll after poll, shows this, have more of a belief in agency than any other country. We feel that we are the authors of our own fate. There is reason to think that, especially compared to a lot of other countries where, you know, your lot in life is pretty much determined by birth. And also, I'll add on to the idea of resistance, like, why was resistance, this siren song? This is all in the context of war, if not the specific police action of Korea, the Cold War. And so there is a logic to. We have met this tactic of the enemy. We haven't. Without any. Without even knowing about it. Of course we're going to be vulnerable. You could understand, all right, what can we do as part of this ongoing war to abate this tactic? It all seems kind of logical and not necessarily nefarious.
- [23:37]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, I mean, I think it makes sense to try to understand these processes. And I think to. I mean, having talked to people in the military who have gone through the SERE training, survival evasion, resistance, escape that resulted from this research, that was one solid outgrowth of. Of. I'm not defending all SERE training, but many people have said it was useful to them because basically the idea was we could use the lessons of what happened to the Korean War POWs who felt ill prepared, who felt that they didn't know what to do when they were being forced to read Mao and journal and give answers to questions and maybe extracted false confessions. They were given much more explicit training. And that part of the training that directly came out of it was called resistance. So actually that's a good point you're making. And I have met people, I mean, even though military and ex military aren't necessarily supposed to talk about seer, the training itself. I've met some people who said they were psychologically traumatized by it. But some of those same people say it also did help me in some way.
- [24:49]
Mike Pesca
And we will be back with more of this discussion right after the break. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [25:06]
Will
Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new family Freedom offer.
- [25:14]
Mike Pesca
That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [25:17]
Will
Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.
- [25:30]
Mike Pesca
Bon voyage.
- [25:32]
T-Mobile Representative
Introducing Family Freedom, our lowest cost. To switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 82999 Eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 well qualified credits end and balance due. If you pay off earlier, cancel contact T Mobile.
- [26:01]
Mike Pesca
And we're back on the gist. And directly to the conversation we go. SEER training has changed over time and our enemy has changed over time. And there's a lot of physical training that is also psychological, that's very tough and breathing in smoky conditions and things like that. And so maybe that helps in terms of the physical. But what is the acronym again? It's survival, evasion, resistance, escape, Evasion, resistance and escape of those three are any more possible than the other in the face of brainwashing, I think.
- [26:40]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, resistance was the part that was specifically designed for if you find yourself in a, in a rooms held, you know, not allowed to sleep, being beaten, being kept in a Syrian box, being essentially tortured and then interrogated over long hours, which does happen, I mean happened later as well in Vietnam and other wars. We did it in Abu Ghraib and many people have described how these techniques were actually drawn from SEER instructors were the ones who had the knowledge anyway. These, I think that was explicitly designed to counter the effects of, of brainwashing. Or, or thought reform.
- [27:25]
Mike Pesca
Is there a direct line from what the communists did to us and themselves? And you have really interesting anecdotes about a bishop, I think in Hungary who had this happen to him and others. Is there a direct line between that and the infamous MK ULTRA experiments?
- [27:43]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, I mean these were well known cases. And then the MK ULTRA experiments came out of so Alan Dulles and they founded it or funded it secretly in 1953, exactly on the eve of this, of these scandals with the 21 non returnees or non repatriates going to China and these returning POWs who are seen as, they were seen as infected, they had somehow gone over to communism or been just shamefully corrupted by the experience. And then it was a concern whether soldiers and also citizens might somehow also be infected by this. MK ULTRA was funded and the exact same experts who studied the returning PoWs then started to work on MK Ultra. So there's a very direct connection also. One of the heads of the main organ cutout organization for the CIA, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, was Harold Wolf, who treated Allen Dulles, his son, for a brain injury. He was known as an expert in the fear, pain, fear cycle. He not only understood migraines, but he understood deeply how to inflict, how pain operated basically. And he, he set up many of the sub projects that were part of.
- [29:06]
Mike Pesca
MK Ultra, other than them being more than unethical, probably illegal under US law. And this is why they tried to cover them all up. And we only found out about them because they didn't really cleanse the financial records, for instance, other than the horrors of what was visited upon some of these subjects. Did anything of use to the world of science come out of them?
- [29:34]
Rebecca Lamov
I mean, it depends how you, it depends what you think. I mean, in terms of usefulness to science, I'm not sure. But it is interesting that many scholars were funded through MKUltra and through these cutout organizations. So say Carl Rogers, the famous psychoanalyst, he received MK ULTRA money. It was just funneled through the Society for Human Ecology. So he thought, I'm getting this money from Human Ecology. Same thing with B.F. skinner. A bunch of prominent mid 20th century psychologists and psychoanalysts did receive that money, even some anthropologists. And they would publish, sometimes they'd publish their findings in regular journals, but then they'd have a secret a part that they would report that was the findings of use to the government. So there was kind of double level. I could think you could say it did contribute to the fabric of mid 20th century behavioral science. And also John Gittinger who was a psychologist who worked for MK Ultra, who was brought in to give expertise on testing and things like that. He, I think he and others said, we learned that you can't really make somebody into a Manchurian candidate. Exactly. You can't get someone to do, I mean people would die first. And also experimental animals, you can't have complete control. But you can get people to do a larger slice of the population to do something 10% more of the time. You can get behavior nudging.
- [31:13]
Mike Pesca
There were experts within MK Ultra. I mean you described them as experts who were in charge of. There was a lot of LSD experimentation and dosing. Were they really expertise? Did they really have expertise? Did they know what they were doing?
- [31:26]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, depends how you define, know what you're, know what you're doing.
- [31:30]
Mike Pesca
But they, everything depends on how you define it.
- [31:32]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, that's true. Well, I guess, I mean they did come to know what they were doing. And you have to remember that LSD wasn't commonly used in the early 50s, in 53, 54. It had just been synthesized at Sandoz in 43 with Albert Hoffman. And the CIA was the main vehicle, the main route through which it entered research labs. So they were some of the most experienced people in the world at using LSD at the time. So I think you could say they, they were experts. And definitely Louis Jolly and West was one of those experts. And the fact that they also took it themselves made them also familiar with its effects.
- [32:16]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, Louis Jolly and West, fascinating character in the book. But I'm going to pause here and ask you, from what you have read and know about these MK Ultra experiments, do you have any special insight or feelings, inclinations about microdosing or about using LSD as therapeutics?
- [32:39]
Rebecca Lamov
That is, I mean that's an awesome question. I'm going to spend next year thinking about that because I just asked you.
- [32:46]
Mike Pesca
This question right now.
- [32:47]
Rebecca Lamov
You've inspired me. No, I got a grant.
- [32:51]
Mike Pesca
There happened to be a grant already.
- [32:53]
Rebecca Lamov
It's not a grant that I have a year to write. I propose that I want to write about it. The connection between the psychedelic renaissance and brainwashing. Because I mean, one of the findings of these, these classic new papers, now classic papers that have emerged is that psychedelics can bring about a state of heightened suggestibility. This was also discovered by Louis Jolly and West. And you know, there are what I'm thinking, right?
- [33:19]
Mike Pesca
I'm not saying, I'm not saying the people who take this are quote Unquote brainwashed. But I did read your book and I just saw what's the phrase rhymes exactly.
- [33:30]
Rebecca Lamov
But I wouldn't want to. I wouldn't be so arrogant as to dismiss it. I just think that it's reasonable. And I've actually talked to researchers in this domain, and many of them have the same concerns about what happens when you scale it, what happens when you. How will this be properly overseen? And in a. In a. In a humanitarian way, I guess, instead of. There's just potential for abuse. And that's already happened in. It's already been documented in some circles.
- [34:02]
Mike Pesca
So you write a lot about Facebook and there's a lot of experiments with social media. But I was thinking about the whole concept of wokeness and wokeness being brainwashing and aspects to declaring fealty to ideologies that you, a person, wouldn't be expected to declare as being likened to struggle sessions. Then again, when I read what actually happens with brainwashing in a closet for 70 days, it's hardly the same as, you know, being. Having. Having information washed over you on the Internet. So what do you think of that framing of that there was a brain or there is a brainwashing aspect to ideological shifts that our culture has recently experienced?
- [34:49]
Rebecca Lamov
I mean, I do think so. I find brainwashing useful mostly. I do find it useful as a. As a window of insight, not an insult to lob at other people. But I do think one can identify parallels. And this actually happened with many of people I think of as like the heroes of the brainwashing, the early. The early period. People like Czeslav Milos, who, the Polish poet. And he had all these conversations with Thomas merton in the 60s, really, about how everything he had identified. He wrote the book the Captive Mind. He said this also happens in the west because he ended up relocating to California and teaching at UC Berkeley for 30 years after he had experienced. He didn't call it brainwashing, but he called it a kind of. He said, it's an operation a person is forced to perform on himself or herself in order to remain in a situation or like an inner surrender. And he said, I just wasn't willing to do it. So he ended up going to the west, to leaving Eastern Europe, leaving Poland, settling in California. But then he ended up saying, well, there's kind of versions of this here. I'm seeing some parallels in just these systems. It's not as extreme, but you can see it rhymes in some way. And I think that's why I think it's useful to look at these historical episodes of brainwashing, which are quite extreme, for insight and to understand these dynamics that still can apply in many places. The book is really set up to ask that question, what can we learn? And can we apply it to these seemingly trivial decisions we make every day, like what to click on and how to interact?
- [36:44]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And a key insight is that it's social, not psychological. I would say it's both. But to ignore the social aspects of what's going on is to not understand this phenomenon of brainwashing. Right.
- [36:59]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. I would agree that it's both social and psychological, but that people often underestimate the. The social part of it. And like you were saying, Americans, we like to think about, and our psychological theories are built on a kind of reinforced individualism and the idea of agency. We strongly value agency. We think of ourselves as agentic and having free will. I mean, that's what's really interesting about. Well, I mean, many things is that we. We assume a field of free will. And I think one of my conclusions is that we're a lot less free than we think. I apply this to myself. But the areas where we do have freedom are all the more important. Like, I don't think we're perfectly unfree either. It's just that we do tend to overestimate it. Maybe part of that is not understanding social effects.
- [37:53]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah. The lure, the pull, the gravitational tug of everyone. Not just someone in a closet, not just someone who was. Who was abducted, not just a prisoner of the North Koreans, not someone in the cult. You have many people in cults who have different degrees of belief in the cult, and they resist to some degree, but they're still in the cult. It's all fascinating.
- [38:24]
Rebecca Lamov
Exactly.
- [38:25]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So do you know Matt Levine? He's a. You don't need to know, but he's a Bloomberg Financial reporter. He has this great construction where he says everything is securities fraud, fraud. And he's able to prove this time and time again. And the great thing about it is to think about the specific. But to zoom out and say, okay, there is this concept. And the concept, like, you know, sorry. And the concept, just like psychological phenomenon is spelled out in the dsm and it has to have seven of these five. It has to have five of these seven characteristics to be considered a disorder. And just like to qualify as breaking the law, you have to have five of these 12 steps. But Levine points out that really, everything can fit under this umbrella. And I was thinking of that with the book. What isn't A cult? Because I was talking about wokeness. So what's. What was the sword against Wokeness? Trump. Trump's a cult. And then cults are cult. But everything on social media has cultish aspects to it. You did a lot of research on crypto. It's a major driver in our economy. It's absolutely a cult. I'm not saying that there's no value there, but. But the parallels between crypto and. And just flat out textbook cults are so apparent. Using these Stanley Cups seems like a cult. Is there any. And then you could say, so what's not a cult? Oh, nature, the love of animals. I don't know. I think that there is a cultishness to them. You have this great part in the book that convinced me that our attitudes towards blowing our nose is a cult. What's not a cult?
- [40:02]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, yeah, I mean, that is. The sneaky part of the book is that I think that we're always subject to conditioning. But it doesn't sound very interesting to say that. But it's interesting to think about the extent to which I think I say something like brainwashing is the potential of every moment and therefore it's something to. It's not like it's easy to say, I won't join that group, but I'll join this one. I will get off this platform or I'll get off all platforms. I'll only walk in the woods. I'll only talk to X person. Because there isn't actually a prescription that will simply nullify this potential. But it is part of, I think also I, I link it to trauma. There's. There's a really interesting. I heard an interview with this, I don't know how to describe, a YouTube video maker named Andrew Callaghan who does kind of journalism. He did a. Did a show for hbo and he said he interviewed these people who had, like, gone really far with QAnon or various groups and, you know, or maybe family, I don't really know. I haven't watched them. But what he said was really interesting is that when he. The longer he talked to them, the more he saw that these families had these long histories of trauma and that incredibly painful circumstances that made them in some ways more susceptible. I guess what I'm saying, what I see that I didn't see when I started studying this is how this interacts all the time. I wouldn't say just trauma. Of course, maybe trauma is overused at this moment, but it never appeared in the early analysis of, of mind control or thought reform. And it does seem to emerge and be a considerable factor. So it's not so much that either everything's brainwashing or nothing's brainwashing. It's just that to what extent at certain moments are we susceptible? To what extent are we not examining our unprocessed emotional responses to things?
- [42:11]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, but you dodge the issue. Stanley Cupps. It's a cult, right? It's brainwashing.
- [42:16]
Rebecca Lamov
I can't. I can't comment on that.
- [42:18]
Mike Pesca
Rebecca Lamov, she is the author of the Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper Persuasion. Thank you so much.
- [42:27]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, it was a pleasure.
- [42:34]
Mike Pesca
That's it for today's show. Cory Wara, producer, the Gist. I assembled the Gist list alongside Kathleen Sykes. I mean, not really alongside. She's in Utah. I'm here. But we collaborate, as do Astrid Green and the team. She runs our socials and Ashley Kahn is our production coordinator. Who's in charge. It's Michelle Pasca. As I'll tell you, she is loath to say improve, do Peru. And thanks for listening.
- [43:05]
T-Mobile Representative
Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to libsynads. Com, that's L, I B S Y N Ads. Com. Today.