Bringing together cutting-edge research from psychology and neuroscience, Kathleen Taylor puts the brain back into brainwashing and shows why understanding this mysterious phenomenon is vitally relevant in the twenty-first century.

This article argues that the mid-1960s saw a dramatic shift in how ‘brainwashing’ was popularly imagined, reflecting Anglo-American developments in the sciences of mind as well as shifts in mass media culture. The 1965 British film The Ipcress File provides a rich case for exploring these interconnections between mind control, mind science and media, as it exemplifies the era’s innovations for depicting ‘brainwashing’ on screen: the film’s protagonist is subjected to flashing lights and electronic music, pulsating to the (...) ‘rhythm of brainwaves’. This article describes the making of The Ipcress File’s brainwashing sequence and shows how its quest for cinematic spectacle drew on developments in cybernetic science, multimedia design and modernist architecture. I argue that often interposed between the disparate endeavours of 1960s mind control, psychological science and media was a vision of the human mind as a ‘cybernetic spectator’: a subject who scrutinizes how media and other demands on her sensory perception can affect consciousness, and seeks to consciously participate in this mental conditioning and guide its effects. (shrink)

The word "brain-washing", translated from Chinese communist jargon, is a very strong metaphor, first popularized by Robert Jay Lifto n. It vividly describes one person interfering with the personality make-up of another, removing the other's ideology and replacing it, and similarly tampering with the other's tastes, pool of information to rely upon and whatever else goes into the make-up of the other's personality. Clearly, in some sense or another everyone interferes with the personality of people with whom they interact; yet (...) what is meant here is something much more drastic than friends influencing one another's tastes or opinions; it is something more dramatic and more large scale. (shrink)

Since its introduction in 1938, electroshock, or electroconvulsion therapy , has been one of psychiatry's most controversial procedures. Approximately 100,000 people in the United States undergo ECT yearly, and recent media reports indicate a resurgence of its use. Proponents claim that changes in the technology of ECT administration have greatly reduced the fears and risk formely associated with the procedure. I charge, however that ECT as routinely used today is at least as harmful overall as it was before these changes (...) were instituted. I recount my own experience with combined insulin coma - elcetroshock during the early 1960s and the story of the first electroshock "treatment." I report on who now is being electroshocked, at what cost, where, and for what reasons. I discuss ECT technique modifications and describe how ECT is currently administered. I examine assertions and evidence concerning ECT's effectivness and ECT-related deaths, brain damage, and memory loss. Finally I describe "depatterning treatment," a brainwashing technique developed in Canada during the 1950s, drawing a parallel between electroshock and brainwashing. (shrink)

This chapter argues that a successful plea of legal insanity ought to rest upon proof that a criminal act is causally related to symptoms of a mental disorder. Diagnosis of a mental disorder can signal to the court that the defendant had very little control over relevant moral ignorance or incompetence. Must we draw the same conclusion for defendants who lack moral knowledge due to miseducation or other extreme environmental conditions, unrelated to a mental disorder? Adults who were brainwashed as (...) children, for example, might seem “insane” due to their lack of moral knowledge. However, since legal culpability rests on the capacity to understand the criminal law’s moral demands, to reflect on these demands across time, and to control one’s behavior in light of them, simple ignorance of morality's demands does not excuse. (shrink)

It is seemingly bad for animals to have their desires modified in at least some cases, for instance where brainwashing or neurological manipulation takes place. In humans, many argue that such modification interferes with our positive liberty or undermines our autonomy but this explanation is inapplicable in the case of animals as they lack the capacity for autonomy in the relevant sense. As such, the standard view has been that, despite any intuitions to the contrary, the modification of animals’ (...) desires is not harmful (at least not in itself). In this article, I offer a different perspective on this issue, laying the foundations of a novel argument in defence of the view that animals _can_ be harmed by desire modification directly. I suggest that the modification of an animal’s desires (under certain circumstances) is harmful for that animal because it undermines their agency. (shrink)

Historian Richard Hofstadter’s observations about American cold-war politics are used to contextualize Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and argue that substantive claims about the nature of scientific knowledge and scientific change found in Structure were adopted from this cold-war political culture.

The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic (...) and independent of belief rejection. Independent research supports the existence of a system of fragmented belief storage: one that relies on large numbers of causally isolated, context-sensitive stores of belief in memory. Finally, empirical and observational data support at least two systems of belief change. One system adheres, mostly, to epistemological norms of updating; the other, the psychological immune system, functions to guard our most centrally held beliefs from potential inconsistency with newly formed beliefs. Refining our under- standing of these systems can shed light on pressing real-world issues, such as how fake news, propaganda, and brainwashing exploit our psychology of belief, and how best to construct our modern informational world. (shrink)

Metaphysicians, ethical theorists and philosophers of law squabble endlessly about what it is for a person to act — or perhaps even to ‘will’ — more or less freely. A vital issue in this controversy is how we should analyse two obvious but surprisingly problematical contrasts. The first antithesis is between things we do because we are forced, and deeds we perform because we want to — sometimes after having discovered preponderant reasons in their favour. The other polarity is more (...) general. In most situations, if I act on my desire, I act more freely than if I had not had the desire. But what if my attitude is the product of childhood conditioning — or later brainwashing, brain surgery, hypnosis, behaviour modification, alcoholisim, narcotics addiction, neurosis, psychosis or worse? Then isn't my autonomy diminished? What is it about these latter desires, or their origin, that differentiates them from their unthreatening congeners? (shrink)

Incompatibilists and compatibilists (mostly) agree that there is a strong intuition that a manipulated agent, i.e., an agent who is the victim of methods such as indoctrination or brainwashing, is unfree. They differ however on why exactly this intuition arises. Incompatibilists claim our intuitions in these cases are sensitive to the manipulated agent’s lack of ultimate control over her actions, while many compatibilists argue that our intuitions respond to damage inflicted by manipulation on the agent’s psychological and volitional capacities. (...) Much hangs on this issue because manipulation-based arguments are among the most important for defending incompatibilist views of free will. In this paper, I investigate this issue from a experimental perspective, using a set of statistical methods well suited for identifying the features of hypothetical cases people’s intuitions are responding to. Results strongly support the compatibilist view—subjects’ tendency to judge that a manipulated agent is unfree was found to depend on their judgments that the agent suffers impairments to certain psychological/volitional capacities that compatibilists say are the basis for free will. I discuss the significance of these results for the use of manipulation cases in the philosophical debate about free will. (shrink)

Many of us hold false beliefs about matters that are relevant to public policy such as climate change and the safety of vaccines. What can be done to rectify this situation? This question can be read in two ways. According to the descriptive reading, it concerns which methods will be effective in persuading people that their beliefs are false. According to the normative reading, it concerns which methods we are permitted to use in the service of persuading people. Some effective (...) methods—a programme of brainwashing, say—would not be permissible. In this paper I compare “methods of rational persuasion” with what you might call “marketing methods” such as how one frames the problem of climate change. My aim is to show that “marketing methods” are preferable to “methods of rational persuasion”. My argument has two parts. First, I argue that the evidence suggests that “marketing methods” are more effective in persuading people to change their minds. Second, I argue that “marketing methods” are an acceptable response to the normative question. (shrink)

This article’s guiding question is about bullet biting: When should compatibilists about moral responsibility bite the bullet in responding to stories used in arguments for incompatibilism about moral responsibility? Featured stories are vignettes in which agents’ systems of values are radically reversed by means of brainwashing and the story behind the zygote argument. The malady known as “intuition deficit disorder” is also discussed.

Abstract: A self-abnegating person lacks contact with their agency. This can be against their will, in absence of their will, or voluntarily. This does not mean that they cannot provide reasons for or a narrative about their actions. It’s just that the reasons or narrative are someone else’s. People abnegate parts of their agency regularly; for example, within hierarchical institutions. In other cases, the self-abnegation is all-encompassing; for example, a victim of brainwashing. An agent in such a position can (...) completely fail to understand themselves or be understood by others as having a self. I focus on two problems related to self-abnegation. The first is whether there is a conception of a self that can reliably discriminate between strong selves and abnegated selves. The second is whether a person with an abnegated self should be treated as a person with a strong self. I conclude that the good of respecting derived or instrumental agency comes in putting that person in a position to agentially flourish and in maintaining the structural conditions and expectations of agency. (shrink)

There are a number of dispositionalist solutions to the free will problem based on freedom consisting in the agent's exercise of a power. But if a subject a is free when they exercise their power P, there is an objection to be overcome from the possibility of power implantation. A brainwasher, rather than directly manipulating a subject's movements, can instead implant in them a desire, to be understood as a disposition to act, and allow the subject to exercise such a (...) power. It seems that, according to the dispositionalist theory of freedom, such an agent would still count as acting freely. There is a strong non-consent intuition that a is not free in such a case because they did not consent to having the power P—the desire in question. Filling out this intuition is not straightforward. But it can be done in terms of the exercise of P being regulated by higher-order powers of self-reflection. Such regulation is what allows an agent to either take ownership of a power or to reject it. (shrink)

This time Pritchard is on a rescue mission. Veritism is besieged and he rises to defend it. I do agree with much in his Veritism, but I demur when he adds: “So, the goodness of all epistemic goods is understood instrumentally with regard to whether they promote truth”. If Big Brother brainwashes us to believe the full contents of The Encyclopedia Britannica, then even if we suppose those contents to be true without exception, that would not make what they do (...) an unalloyed good thing, not even epistemically. But it does seem to promote truth. What might then diminish Big Brother’s action so much, so as to make it so deplorable epistemically after all, despite how powerfully it does instrumentally promote truth. At a minimum we need to say more about the relations between epistemic goods and truth, so as to better understand how it is that the epistemic good is made so good by what specific relation to the truth. I lay out a way to understand Veritism so that it can say more about the relations between epistemic goods and truth, thus enhancing our understanding of epistemic normativity. And in a second part I lay out a solution to Linda Zagzebski’s Swamping problem for reliabilism. I argue that it is a problem for process reliabilism, but not for a virtue epistemology that accepts a kind of reliabilism, but in an agential telic framework, and not in a process framework. So, I lay out one way to be a “veritist”, by defending explicitly its Axiological side, and by implication its Conceptual side as well. I have raised questions for Pritchard’s own defense and have offered in each case an alternative defense that I believe fits the words of his formulations, and is in their spirit as well. (shrink)

We argue that the Internet is, and is acting as, an EA because it shapes our belief systems, our worldviews. We explain key concepts for this discussion and provide illustrative examples to support our claims. Furthermore, we explain why recognising the Internet as an EA is important for Internet users and society in general. We discuss several ways in which the Internet influences the choices, beliefs, and attitudes of its users, and we compare this effect with those of psychological conditioning (...) and brainwashing techniques. Finally, we present examples where the Internet’s epistemic agency acts at scale, affecting large portions of society rather than individuals. (shrink)

Aleksandras Shtromas (1931-1999), a British-American scholar, became an eminent figure in his native Lithuania, yet Westem social scientists have yet to discover this human rights activist, Soviet dissident, and political thinker. Shtromas had no doubts about the inexorable collapse of the Soviet Union, resting his analysis on the assumption that communism was unable to provide any viable social and moral order. The vast majority of the Soviet intelligentsia had become skilled at the ideological cat-and-mouse games, wrestling wth Soviet Newspeak and (...) censorship, and employing an Aesopian language in order to survive and remain as decent as possible in a world of brainwashing and lies. A gifted prophet of post-communism, Shtromas was the only political scientist in the world who took the disintegration of the Soviet Union as early as the late 1970s as an ongoing process. This essay links Shtromas' legacy to the great East European dissenters. (shrink)

A number of arguments against relativism are based on the concept of majority rule. Since, the arguments allege, on relativism moral truth is founded on majority opinion, relativism entails that (a) moral progress and reform are impossible, (b) propaganda, advertising, brainwashing, and high birth rates turn mistaken moral judgments into correct ones, (c) moral horrors, if enough people believe them acceptable, are not moral horrors at all, (d) finding out what’s right and what’s wrong is extremely easy, (e) moral (...) reasoning is very different from what we normally take it to be, and (f) internal criticism of a moral code is impossible. These arguments get their due in this article, which first defines and explicates relativism and then exposes, explains, and criticizes the arguments. Especially important to understand about the relation between relativism and majority opinion is the notion of a convention. Accordingly, it is discussed at some length. (shrink)

SummaryOn Kant's view, the moral individual cannot be “programmed” by sociological or educational techniques. To brainwash is to destroy freedom while to educate is to develop the capacity for freedom. Plato's proposal to invent mythic roots as incentives to moral conduct is not acceptable, since it involves not merely the propagation of falsehoods, but its success requires also a totalitarian state that destroys freedom. Not being concerned with mere legality, but with encouraging true morality, he has renounced forcing moral goodness.Marx, (...) Lenin, Stalin and Mao all proposed educational programs that put down the mythic roots of their secular religions. They project and indoctrinate into people's mind a new vision of society and man. The diabolical religion of National Socialism was inculcated by terror and totalitarianism.Kant's ethics has it mythic roots, too, which lie in Christian pietism. But his fully developed theory proscribes the use of any mythic religion not based on morality. (shrink)

Religious Conversion, Serf- Deception, and Pascal's Wager WARD E.JONES BLAISE PASCAL'S Pens~es is a sustained attempt to convert, to lead its reader to form the belief in the articles of faith. Pascal does not hope to convert by a direct presentation of evidence or argument, but rather attempts to induce in the reader a desire for belief in the articles of faith. He hopes that this desire will lead the reader to put herself in a situation in which she will (...) form the belief. Pascal, in other words, wants the reader to take control over her belief, to form it because she wants to do so. We commonly put ourselves in a situation for the purpose of forming beliefs. This is what happens when we choose to go, say, to university; choos- ing to learn is choosing to form beliefs in a given field. Pascal urges something more paradoxical. ~ He wants to induce us to form a particular belief . His dual aim is to induce the unbeliever to want a belief, and then to induce her to do what she can to gain that belief. Now if I want a particular belief, I might place myself in a situation in which nonrational or pragmatic determinants would bring about the belief. I might, that is, visit a hypnotist or a brainwasher, choosing some process which will either directly bring about the desired belief without involving my epistemic capabilities, or one which will diminish my epistemic capabilities. Alternatively, I might search for evidence for the.. (shrink)

This essay examines the reception of Ivan Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes in early to mid-twentieth century Britain. Recent work on the political interpretation of biology has shown that the nineteenth-century strategy of “making socialists” was undermined by August Weismann’s attacks on the inheritance of acquired characters. I argue that Pavlov’s research reinvigorated socialist hopes of transforming society and the people in it. I highlight the work of Pavlov’s interpreters, notably the scientific journalist J. G. Crowther, the biologist Lancelot Hogben, (...) and the science writer H. G. Wells, who made Pavlov’s work accessible to a British audience and embraced the socialist implications of his research – especially the idea that people could be persuaded to become socialists through science writing for a nonspecialist audience and through use of a simplified language such as Basic English. They saw, in the followers of National Socialism, how Pavlovian conditioning could create a national movement, and believed that this could be used for their own more democratic form of socialism. In the final part of the essay, I suggest that this broad socio-cultural movement to reshape humanity proved controversial, especially in the post-war period and in light of Soviet use of brainwashing. The likes of Aldous Huxley and F. A. Hayek feared that conditioning could only lead to totalitarianism, while the historian E. P. Thompson put forward a socialist humanism that left room for human agency. (shrink)

Artist Rod Dickinson’s work engages in a highly intelligent and provocative manner with the conditions of mediation and delusion that appear in the brain in a vat scenario. Over the last decade he has put together an impressive body of work about the apparatuses of social and informational control with which we are surrounded, involving an eclectic range of subject matter, including crop circles, Jim Jones and the suicides at the People’s Temple in Guyana, Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience to authority’ experiments, (...) and James Tilly Matthews’ imaginary ‘Air loom’, an eighteenth-century mind-influencing device. He is now involved in a number of projects, including a recreation of the Waco siege and a piece based on Joseph Conrad’s The secret agent. In this conversation with Charlie Gere he discusses questions of social control, brainwashing, truth, and knowledge in relation to his work. (shrink)

This paper is a multimodal critical discourse study of other-representation in ISIS’s magazine, Dabiq, It focuses on both the micro-level analysis of actor and action representation, and the macro-structure of negative other-depiction in Dabiq from both textual and visual perspectives. Through in-depth examination of linguistic and non-linguistic elements, the study aimed to unfold ISIS’s ideology at the global level, which is to construct its desired reality and eventually to recruit supporters. The analysis was carried out on fifteen issues of Dabiq (...) following a conceptual and analytical framework within Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis employing Van Leeuwen’s Socio-semantic inventory. The results show a considerable number of systematic utilizations of discursive strategies by ISIS to belittle its enemies and downgrade their practices. Throughout Dabiq, the out-group participants are represented either as passive reactants who are afflicted by ISIS’s attacks or as powerless agents whose actions are trivial and carry no significant weight. Ineffectuality of ‘others’ has further been substantiated by the visual analysis. Deactivation of out-groups is closely tied to ISIS’s propaganda of self-alteration to achieve the double aim of casting fear among their adversaries and brainwashing the audience by twisting the reality, and persuading them that the enemies’ chance of winning this war is dim. (shrink)

Although the word “indoctrination” in the English language originally had a neutral meaning almost equivalent to educative teaching, it gradually assumed the connotations of coercive teaching and became disassociated from the emerging concepts of democratic education. During this century it finally acquired a derogatory connotation similar to propaganda and brainwashing and came to be regarded as the antithesis of education for life in a democracy. McClellan regards indoctrination as a counterfeit of teaching in two crucial senses: While the counterfeit (...) and the genuine forms of teaching share the same properties, they differ in one property that crucially qualifies all the others. Counterfeiting subverts the institution that gives point to the counterfeiting itself. Indoctrination subverts educational institutions in their activity of teaching-andlearning. (shrink)

What happens when an entire group of human beings is excluded from the definition of humanity? How is the power of language used to distort reality? What happens when a comprehensive economic plan is based on theft, brainwashing, slave labor, and murder? These and other philosophical questions about the Holocaust are contemplated in Contemporary Portraits of Auschwitz. In 1988, a group of philosophers who had survived the Holocaust, or had known people at the Auschwitz death camp, decided to found (...) an organization that would examine the philosophical implications of Shoah: the Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust. Noting that the history and the personal horror stories had been told and retold, SPSGH's founders Sander Lee, Berel Lang, and Alan Rosenberg argued that too little study had been so far devoted to the philosophy of Hitler's final solution and other genocides. Auschwitz problematized the Enlightenment concept of humanity, and other concepts. The perfection of state-sponsored and -administered mass death issued in new forms of language, moral indifference, and forgetting. Philosophy often even fails to mention the Holocaust in discussions of National Socialism. And the disaster of Auschwitz has been largely neutralized by the normalization of a "ruined" language. This volume includes essays in several areas: Witnesses and Testimonies; Morality and Ethics; Art and Poetry; History and Memory; and The Crisis of Representation. Contributors are Karyn Ball, Eve Bannet, Debra Bergoffen, James Bernauer, Klaus Dorner, Jennifer N. Fink, Roger Fjellstrom, Ruth Liberman, Burkhard Liebsch, Alan Milchman, Raj Sampath, Paul Sars, Hans Seigfried, Thomas W. Simon, Dan Stone, Peter Strasser, Frans van Peperstratten, Erik M. Vogt, Andrew Weinstein, and others. (shrink)

I want to begin by saying that the terms of reference of this series of lectures grated on me, in particular, the word ‘power’. One thing it conjured up was the criticism made by people who say we use our power over our patients to brainwash them, that the psychotherapeutic relationship is inescapably authoritarian, domineering, coercive. This was widely said in the sixties by leftist and feminists and others who sought a therapeutic relationship that was more equal, co-counselling, for example, (...) where the client and the therapist took turns exposing their problems. In my experience, most people who took up that position eventually saw the merits of relatively orthodox psychotherapy, and many have trained in conventional psychodynamic psychotherapy. I asked my partner, who is also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, what the term power conjured up for her and got an uncharacteristically sharp response. She said, ‘I hate that word. It’s used by humanistic therapists who are afraid of authority, difference and knowledge and want us all to be the same. It’s like saying colour doesn’t matter. They confuse the abuse of power with the use of power. They assume that all exercise of power is abusive.’. (shrink)

What is inequality? In the late 1990s there was an explosion of interest in the subject that yielded a substantial body of formal tools and results for income-distribution analysis. Nearly all of this is founded on a small set of core assumptions - such as the Principle of Transfers, scale independence, the population principle∑ - that are used to give meaning to specific concepts of inequality measurement, inequality ranking and, indeed, to inequality itself. But does the standard axiomatic structure coincide (...) with public perceptions of inequality? Or is the economist's concept of inequality a thing apart, perpetuated through serial brainwashing in the way the subject is studied and taught? In this 1999 book, Amiel and Cowell examine the evidence from a large international questionnaire experiment using student respondents. Along with basic 'cake-sharing' issues, related questions involving social-welfare rankings, the relationship between inequality and overall income growth and the meaning of poverty comparisons are considered. (shrink)

The Situationist International have become a canonical reference point when discussing artists’ participation in political action or activism. This article attempts to decentre the SI from this position, by tracing their theories and representations of political agency and labour. I argue that their notion of agency is deeply conflicted, epitomized by the dual invocations ‘never work/all power to the workers’ councils. I examine how the SI’s representations of agency betray an attraction to and fascination with 1960s reactionary fantasies around (...) class='Hi'>brainwashing, conditioning, control and torture. Their practical descriptions of a constructed situation, which ‘makes people live’ are, in fact, closer to torturous state control than total liberation. The notions of agency they mobilise draw on colonial and classist sources, which actually deny the agency of radical movements. As a result, the SI produce a series of weak fantasies of participation, in which agency is denied and ‘demanding the impossible’ is actually a demand to constitute and police the impossible. Artistic-political agency was both guarded centre and constituent other. The SI’s policing of their identity, tied in name to the agency of ‘situations’, involved the ongoing exclusion and repression of other artists’ more practically-engaged labour within social movements. (shrink)

Contemporary moral philosophy assumes an account of what it means to legitimately change one’s mind in ethics, and I wish to challenge this account by enlarging the category of the legitimate. I am just as eager to avoid illegitimate mind-changing brought on by deceit or brainwashing, but I claim that legitimacy should be defined in terms of transparency of method. A social reformer should not be embarrassed to admit that he acquired many beliefs about justice while reading Dickens. As (...) such, appeals to the heart and the imagination are just as legitimate, within limits, as appeals to the mind; and showing can be as legitimate as telling. To demonstrate this, I consider the example of a vegetarian trying to ‘convert’ a carnivore. I then ask what it means when the carnivore claims to have been previously mistaken. (shrink)

What makes political freedom valuable to us? Two well-known arguments are that freedom contributes to our desire satisfaction and to our personal responsibility. Here, Boudewijn de Bruin argues that freedom is valuable when it is accompanied by knowledge. He offers an original and systematic account of the relationship between freedom and knowledge and defends two original normative ideals of known freedom and acknowledged freedom. -/- By combining psychological perspectives on choice and philosophical views on the value of knowledge, he shows (...) how known freedom is crucial to satisfy our desires and assume responsibility. Known freedom is compromised when salespeople deploy consumer-obfuscation, or when news outlets use contextual framing techniques to steer the way their audiences process information. Conversely, carefully developed consumer protection and information disclosure regulation can foster known freedom. Acknowledged freedom, from ethical and economic perspectives, offers protection and makes our freedoms more stable. It embodies an ideal of mutual recognition that underlies informed consent and the ethics of communication, and can also contribute to a flourishing corporate culture. -/- This book integrates and extends cutting-edge research from philosophy, economics, psychology, and law to reorient debates on privacy, neuromarketing, sustainable finance, corporate culture, consumer protection, media violence, and freedom of speech. -/- An original account of the relation between freedom and knowledge, integrating cutting-edge research from philosophy, economics, psychology, and law; defends the ideals of known and acknowledged freedom; offers new perspectives on debates surrounding privacy, corporate culture, consumer protection, freedom of speech, and more -/- Introduction: Why Freedom is Not Enough 1:From Choice Overload to Discrimination: Arguments for Freedom 2:From Brainwashing to Neuromarketing: Freedom of Belief 3:From the Value of Knowledge to Skills and Stereotypes: The Individual Ideal of Known Freedom 4:From Common Knowledge to the Ethics of Communication: The Social Ideal of Acknowledged Freedom 5:Sustainable Finance and Responsible Investors 6:Ethics Management and Informed Stakeholders 7:Freedom of Speech and Consumer Autonomy 8:Liberal Privacy and Legal Protection Conclusion: How Freedom Can Be Sufficient . (shrink)

ExcerptDrawing on the quasi-legal human experimentation programs designed and implemented by the CIA between the 1950s and 1970s, the television series Severance envisions the possible corporate uses of brainwashing and mind control. The narrative centers on employees of a technology company, Lumon Industries, who agree to undergo a medical procedure (“severance”) that separates non-work memories from work memories by implanting a microchip into the brain. Unfolding like a science fiction psychological thriller, the narration falls somewhere between omniscient and restricted. (...) Viewers at the outset know only slightly more about the non-work lives and histories of the characters than the characters’ work-day versions, while the gradual increase of viewer knowledge parallels that of the characters’ paths toward self-discovery. (shrink)

I was in Bucharest for a few days, not long before the fall of Ceaucescu’s regime. The fear, both of the authorities and of the people, which reigned in the city was vividly felt everywhere. To be sure, the communist regime was based on a doctrine that called itself ‘dialectic’. Unfortunately, it was a ‘dialectic’ that had nothing to do with dialogue, with listening to the other, respecting the other, and learning from the other. It assumed that ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ (...) were the absolute monopoly of one side – the side which enforced its monopoly by the sheer force of power. The atmosphere couldn’t but be of repression, since there was no room for alternative ideas, which for the dominant ‘dialectic’ were necessarily wrong. There was no room for argument, debate and persuasion other than brainwashing and the passive acceptance of the ideas in power. The reigning doctrine was the nemesis of dialectic, for it denied its sine qua non: tolerance. Sorin grew up in this atmosphere, where in spite of its oppressive character, he developed a concern for truth, a tolerant and gentle character, and a sense for the fundamental value of rational persuasion. No wonder that he was attracted by dialogue and argumentation, and devoted his research to them – not merely as an object of study, but also as a method of research and a form of life. It is an honor for me, as a member of IADA, the association devoted to the study of dialogue founded by Sorin, of ISSA, the society whose object of study is argumentation, of IASC, the association that recognizes and investigates the essential role of controversy in the growth of knowledge and in the improvement of society, and as a friend, to pay a well deserved tribute to Sorin Stati’s memory and to his achievements. He was one of the pioneers in the contemporary study of argumentation. Although his research in this field focused on the linguistic analysis of argumentative discourse, he did not neglect other approaches. His role in leading to the organization, in July 2002 in Lugano, of a memorable conference where the above mentioned three international associations joined forces with the Università della Svizzera Italiana in an interdisciplinary, cooperative as well as contrastive drive for increasing our understanding of the multi-faceted phenomenon of argumentation, was decisive.. (shrink)

For instance, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins accuses those who refuse to accept evolution with being “ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” To this he recently added: “I don’t withdraw a word of my initial statement. But I do now think it may have been incomplete. There is perhaps a fifth category, which may belong under ‘insane’ but which can be more sympathetically characterized by a word like tormented, bullied, or brainwashed.”.

How good is psychotherapy as a tool of research into human nature? There is an orthodox defence of it as a research tool, which relies on showing that interpretations are true of the patient when they satisfy certain criteria. This defence is examined and rejected. The reply is considered that an interpretation which 'keeps things moving' is true, or an approximation to the truth. This reply is rejected by comparing and contrasting an interpretation in psychotherapy with one from brainwashing (...) sessions. Two suppositions about psychotherapy (which weaken its discovery powers) are deliberately adopted — the suppositions that the material produced is 'perspective' and 'method' dependent. An unorthodox defence of psychotherapy is then offered — by means of a watery sense of 'discover'. This enables us to outline a weak sense in which psychotherapy is a valid enterprise, but one which is still strong enough for research purposes. (shrink)