Brainwashing IQ

Being susceptible to manipulation is not a sign of weakness in mind, weak intelligance or weakness in personal character. Susceptibility has more to do with being an idealist instead of a skeptic, being open to new ideas, and seeking goodness and a better life.

Confinement or isolation are common elements when someone is brainwashed “by force,” but most brainwashing happens by “stealth” – or in a way that the person does not realize what is happening.

There are thousands of highly-intelligent, educated people who have come out of cults and now refer to themselves as having been brainwashed.

There is nothing mysterious about brainwashing.  It involves mind games, breaking a person down, psychological or physical abuse, rewards and punishments, double-binds, thought-stoppers, threats, fear, and other tools of manipulation. There is no single process called brainwashing.

In brainwashed people, the paths that the neuronal signals follow become deeper and more set. The way the neurons behave during the thought processes of brainwashed people is so rigid, critical thinking is nearly impossible.

These people are less skeptical, more trusting, and more willing to admit they don’t have all the answers.  People less susceptible to being brainwashed are skeptics, people who are strongly-opinionated, black and white thinkers, and know-it-alls. However, even skeptics can be brainwashed if they are deceived and their vulnerabilities are exploited. No one is immune.

Brainwashing is not the result of someone having a flawed brain, but the result of traumatic psychological manipulation.

No one makes a drastic change in their identity, personality, and values unless they have experienced some kind of abuse or trauma that caused changes in their brain. Those who emerge from having been brainwashed have survived a traumatic experience.

Torture, physical force, and physical abuse are elements of brainwashing “by force,” but not brainwashing “by stealth.”

Plenty of people have religious beliefs that might seem bizarre to you, yet seem to be normal people living normal lives in every other way.

Brainwashed people have been conditioned to believe that they are thinking clearly, and you are the one who is deceived and thinking wrong.

Brainwashing involves both manipulation and deception. Sometimes it takes years of healing before a victim realizes the extent of the deception and manipulation they endured, or to even realize that they were victims at all.

The victim learns to associate fear and pain with the old way of thinking, while new information and new values are repeatedly reinforced to create a new identity.

This is a myth. A person who is searching for and wanting the truth does not want to be deceived and manipulated. Wanting to believe and wanting to be deceived are two different things.

Persuasion is an ethical way to convince another person that something is true based on its merits.  Coercive persuasion, aka brainwashing, involves an attack on the person’s sense of self, control of information, deception, emotional manipulation, rewards and punishments, fear, threats and other unethical psychological abuses. Brainwashing changes a person’s beliefs against their will.

Under the right circumstances, any person of any age can be brainwashed.  Although not every person is an exceptionally vulnerable person, every person has a vulnerability.  If that vulnerability is abusively manipulated in the hands of a master manipulator, almost any person can be broken and become a victim of brainwashing.

Unfortunately this is true.  The scariest part of this radical personality change is the devoutness with which victims insist to have free will and have chosen their own destiny – oblivious to the fact that their thoughts have been psychologically engineered.

Think of the frog who boils to death in a pot of water because he doesn’t realize the temperature is increasing one degree at a time. Likewise, the brain also has a threshold of change required for alarms to go off.  Small manipulations or abuses, such as a snide remark or angry body language, do not individually set off the alarm bells even though they may be part of a plan to humiliate, manipulate and dominate another person.

Victims of brainwashing have learned to associate fear and pain with red flags; when they see a red flag they have been conditioned to shut their thinking down rather than examine it.  Conditioning is artificial. It is not a choice.  After a certain amount of conditioning, victims do not choose to ignore the truth. Their brains will not allow them to see the red flags at all.

The thought-processes of a brainwashed person have been retrained and re-engineered to meet the needs of the manipulator. A brainwashed person who faces consequences for making a choice contrary to the wishes of her manipulator is being coerced.  Coercion is not consent.  The brainwashed person really only has one real choice, and free will does not exist.

The brainwashing victim makes the perfect slave. She will argue that she has freely chosen her path, she truly believes it is right, she wants to be where she is, and she is acting on her own free will.  Historically, both law enforcement and the general public tend to overlook the exploitation of a human being if there is an appearance of a true believer or willing victim.

Examples include the exploited women of polygamy and the prostituted women under the control of a pimp.  However, things are starting to change.