I’ve been out of a cult for almost two decades now, after being born and raised in the one that my family helped to lead for generations. During that time period, I’ve been asked repeatedly, “Why I’m not more brainwashed?” There’s an unspoken implication that if it was really as bad as it appeared, then I should be much more damaged, robot-like and weird. So, let’s explore that idea: why I am who I am today, why there is such a danger with the idea of brainwashing, and still more importantly, how we can counteract the effects of ‘brain washing’ (more accurately known as socialization).

What is brainwashing? Brainwashing came into the common consciousness during the 1950s when American Soldiers, captured by China during the Korean War seemingly defected to communism, even refusing to return home after being liberated. The idea of brainwashing was proliferated in movies like the Manchurian Candidate and The Ipcress File. The term gained further legs in the 70s when cults became a phenomena in the US and abroad.

These days, the term brainwashing is not actually recognized by most psychologists. What we think of as brainwashing is just extreme levels of socialization—something which we all have. “The word brainwashed is still informally used to describe someone who holds strong ideas that are implausible and are completely resistant to evidence, common sense, experience and logic. Especially when these ideas developed under external influence e.g. books, TV programs, other people or a religious organization.” (https://www.psychologistworld.com/influence-personality/brainwashing)

Believe me, when I escaped cultworld at 15 years old, moving to America and starting my life from scratch, away from everything and everyone that I knew, I was definitely socialized under an extreme point of view—I’m not scared to call it brainwashing. I only knew one way to be, and that way was pretty extreme. In The Children of God Cult, we believed that the Apocalypse was coming, that our leader was the prophet of God whose word should be followed to the letter and unquestioningly, and the cult members practiced a whole lot of really messed up stuff—like prostitution, promoting child marriages and pedophilia, and all kinds of abusive physical, behavioral and mind-control techniques.

I was so extremely affected by these beliefs, that the first time I went to write an essay about my life, for a college application, I was shaking and in actual tears just writing the word ‘cult’—because, of course, the first rule of cults is always ‘we are not a cult’. I was completely surrounded and isolated in our wacky belief system, and I had no other options. This kind of mental control took years and years to undo, and part of it will never be complete. I have realized today, nearly 16 years from when I left the cult that I will never completely escape my socialization, none of us can. No matter how much I study, how woke I become, or how much I dig into understanding organizational behavior, socialization, group think and culture, I can’t go back and give myself a ‘normal’ childhood, where I learned ‘normal’ things. I will always be a bit weird, and that’s okay.

But the interesting thing is that extremist socialization is happening all around us in America today, and the whole world, for that matter. Technology is a great gift, but it comes with downsides. On the one side, the world has been opened up tremendously. Yet artificial intelligence is already busily creating silos that isolate us to see, hear, and partake only in conversations and virtual discussions with those who think, look and act like us.

In President Obama’s official farewell to the nation that he led for eight years, he addressed this phenomena, “For too many of us it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods, or on college campuses, or places of worship, or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. In the rise of naked partisanship and increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste, all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable. And increasingly we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there. And this trend represents a third threat to our democracy. Look, politics is a battle of ideas. That’s how our democracy was designed. In the course of a healthy debate, we prioritize different goals, and the different means of reaching them. But without some common baseline of facts, without a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point, and that science and reason matter, then we’re going to keep talking past each other.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/obama-farewell-address-speech.html)

So, why does this all matter? Well, I do hope that is obvious, but let’s spell it out. Socialization happens naturally when we are exposed to a certain set of ideas. Nobody can be free of stereotypes, it’s humanly impossible—it’s the way that our brains work scientifically. The only way to counteract it is to socialize yourself intentionally, and to that that, we have to get rid of isolation, to break down the silos, and to learn to think broadly, even about things that we hate. Once again, in the words of the President who’s hand I once got the honor to shake, “Understand democracy does not require uniformity. Our founders argued, they quarreled, and eventually they compromised. They expected us to do the same. But they knew that democracy does require a basic sense of solidarity. The idea that, for all our outward differences, we’re all in this together, that we rise or fall as one.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/obama-farewell-address-speech.html)

In answer to the question of how I unbrainwashed myself, I read. I read a lot, and very, very broadly. I estimate that I’ve read about 3,000 books over the past 15+ years. I didn’t know that I was setting out to unbrainwashed myself, either. All I knew was that I’d been starved for reading for 15 years and I wanted to fix that. I read a lot of books that were terrible, or that I would never remember. I also majored in literature, learning to read AND analyze the things that I was reading, critically examining every idea. I remember the point when I realized that ‘literary tradition’ was important, because, until a thought is written down and shared, we can’t really analyze it—much less build upon it.

When I commissioned into the military after college, there was an unwritten, but very much spoken rule that officers only read military literature—and they especially don’t waste their valuable time reading fiction. It really rubbed me the wrong way, and I certainly didn’t comply, but I couldn’t put my finger on why that group norm of behavior freaked me out so much. Until I realized, it was cult isolation and thought police all over again. Of course we should want the leaders of the most powerful military in the world—one with the power to set the whole world at war at any given moment—to be studying broad topics, reading broadly, and questioning everything they think or ‘know’ to be fact.

When I got to my first unit as a brand-new lieutenant, my boss, the senior military intelligence officer for the Brigade (company of about 3000 people) asked me what kinds of things I liked to read. I immediately got scared. Should I lie? Should I pretend that I only read military biographies and histories of important battles? I didn’t, I told him that I like to read EVERYTHING and ANYTHING, but especially memoir and fiction. His broad smile was my answer, and then he proceeded to tell me that not only did he want his officers to read fiction, he expected us to and would grade us accordingly. As military intelligence officers, we are supposed to be the expert on the bad guy. We are hyper-aware that “we don’t know what we don’t know” (see my other articles on this concept), and we need to constantly be stretching our imaginations if we ever hope to accurately predict what bad guys will do next. Both Pearl Harbor and the attacks of 9/11 were considered to be impossible—until they happened.

This year, I concentrated and reading and tracking 60 books for the year (many on audible, thanks technology!). I don’t make reading lists, though I do use Goodreads to add books I think I would like to read. I run my reading like ‘literary tradition’—one book awakens some important thoughts in my brain, or even just gives me the rhetoric to discuss thoughts that I didn’t know how to give voice to, and then those thoughts lead me to another source that develops it even more. I’ve done a specific campaign this year to focus memoirs from historically marginalized voices—women, LGBTQ+ community, people of color, etc. in order to help shift the way that I think and understand socialization from different perspectives. It’s been an eye-opening year, to say the least.

My list for today is how do you counteract socialization in 5 steps:

1. Be suspicious of anyone or any organization that tries to limit what you read

There is a reason that ‘book-burning’ is considered a sign of totalitarian rule. Whether or not people are doing it for a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ reason, it always has a bad outcome. Always.

2. Read broadly

Everything you read doesn’t have to have ‘business value’ or even be ‘serious’ in any way. I’ve literally learned this year that comedians are some of the best cultural critics ever, and that graphic novels and kids’ books can be great tools for developing otherwise complex thoughts rattling around in my brain.

3. Talk to other people about the ideas that you read about

Have hard conversations with people about the ideas that you are working on. You can only really develop your own ideas with help from others, and hearing opposing views can be very useful, especially before ideas take full form and become unbending in your mind.

4. Track the different kinds of books you read

While I don’t recommend a book list, per se, it’s important to be able to look back and see what you’ve been reading, so that you can ensure you are, in fact, reading broadly. We still don’t live in an equal world, and you can still only read books you know about—and the books you know about are still influenced by the media, technology, and who you surround yourself with. The more you reach out and purposefully find books on diverse topics, or get recommendations from groups with demographics opposite to yours, the more you’ll develop you mind and ensure that you are not creating a mental silo. I’m literally reading a book about Melania Trump right now, just saying.

5. Hold nothing sacred

Literally, nothing. The moment we refuse to question any idea, belief, or supposition is the moment that it begins to have outsized power over us. Check out Retired General Stanley McChrystal’s book “Leaders: Myth and Reality” as he talks about learning to analyze, actually analyze the leadership and choices of historic leaders that he’d studied, looked up to and even emulated his whole life, and began to realize that from a different point of view there was a lot that was very problematic. We need to take ideas, portraits and heroes down off of their pedestals, sometimes literally, before we can examine them for what they really are. Ideas need to be beat up a little bit, before we should actually own them. Don’t worry, if the idea, dogma or belief is valid, it can’t stand up to a little scrutiny.

            Always remember, none of us are perfect. None of us are completely woke and we are all influenced by the cultures, behaviors and ideas that surround us. No woman, man or child is an island. The best any of us can do is to constantly and deliberately strive to unbrainwash ourselves.

DANIELLA YOUNG IS A TEDX SPEAKER, AN AUTHOR, COMBAT VETERAN, BOARD MEMBER OF OPERATION CODE, & THE CO-FOUNDER OF CAVNESSHR—AN HR-TECH COMPANY WHO’S MISSION IS TO MAKE BIG-BUSINESS HR AVAILABLE TO SMALL BUSINESSES, THROUGH INNOVATIVE SAAS AND VIRTUAL CONSULTING. DANIELLA SPECIALIZES IN HELPING BUSINESSES CREATE CULTURE ROADMAPS, LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PLANS & EFFECT TEAM TRANSFORMATION. WANT TO LEARN MORE? VISIT OUR WEBSITE AT cavnesshr.com.

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