Indoctrination's Greasy Tentacles
One of the hardest things to learn is that indoctrinated folks cannot be persuaded by reason. Only an epiphany can shake someone out of it.
As I have watched helplessly as family members and cherished friends have bought into various lies being peddled by conspiratorial right-wing media, I have had to repeatedly remind myself that indoctrination is not rational; it can't be reasoned away.
Indoctrination only dissipates after some kind of personal epiphany, whether experienced as a collective or as an individual. For Arthur Koestler, a former Hungarian-British Communist, it was emigrating to the Soviet Union and seeing the damage and death wrecked by Stalin. North Korean escapees often point to South Korean and Chinese movies, which portray the world much closer to the way it really is. These films are so successful that the DPRK has even exchanged prisoners with South Korea in order to get them to stop airdropping flash drives with movies and literature on it. If you've ever been a part of a cult, or you've heard of the recent NXIVM case, you'll know that it often takes a traumatic event to shake off the cobwebs. Some indoctrinated folks never come back to earth, going to the grave with their beliefs. We see this on display as hundreds of people are dying with COVID-19 simply because they have refused to take the vaccine, all while health care workers put their lives on the line to save them. To this day there exist unrepentant or denialist Nazis, people known to do commit unspeakable horrors on Jews, LGBTQ folks and disabled people. They were indoctrinated from very young, driven to do the things they did by the ferocity of their belief in the rightness of their beliefs.
Using Truth as a guide to your interactions with people who are indoctrinated is like asking your toothpaste a question & expecting to get a cogent response in spoken English: all the reasoning in the world will do nothing to get through the force field.
Interestingly, a really fitting example of modern propaganda appeared in today’s New York Times. This op-ed, published in what is ostensibly America's largest and most legitimate liberal-ish newspaper is a fine example of Chinese propaganda in action. The below quoted paragraph is, to the naked eye, innocuous - terrorism perpetrated by the 'East Turkestan Islamic Movement' is bad, right? It's only when you realize that the Uyghur people that China is currently genociding in Xinjiang, largely Muslims of Turkic descent, refer to their homeland as East Turkestan that the more nefarious implications of this piece become obvious. In the comments, let me know if you can find the subtle flex from this former People's Liberation Army colonel:
"Becoming an influential player in Afghanistan also means that Beijing is better positioned to prevent what it considers anti-Chinese groups from gaining a foothold in the country. A primary concern of China is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. According to a Chinese government report, the group had early roots in Afghanistan. According to the U.N., it received Taliban and Al Qaeda support in the 2000s. Some scholars and experts question whether the group has the capacity to instigate violence, or whether it even continues to exist. Still, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said in a July meeting with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy leader of the Taliban, that he hoped the Taliban would “make a clean break” with the East Turkestan group because it “poses a direct threat to China’s national security and territorial integrity.” Mr. Wang also expressed hope that the Taliban would “build a positive image and pursue an inclusive policy” — a signal that China wants the Taliban to make good on its promise of “inclusive” governance."
For good, easy-to-read material on indoctrination through propaganda, check out philosopher Jason Stanley’s book “How Propaganda Works.” Stanley started out as a philosopher of language, before one day being asked by his stepmother to pull his some of his father’s papers. Both his father and mother are Holocaust survivors, and his father spent his career as a sociologist trying to explain authoritarian regimes. Stanley wanted to honour their memory, and so, in addition to his work on language he also does fantastic work on fascism and propaganda.
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