…or, be decorous enough to admit that you do not know what is good, except only that which is good for you.
I still fail to see the difference between belief, indoctrination, and brainwashing here.
In every instance you just mentioned, the “learner” has to depend on (trust) another person.
For example, a child grows up and is taught two separate facts: 1+1=2, and “Allah exists, praise Him, and you will die for him.”
What is the difference between these two beliefs, in their origin?? Both are indoctrinated; both are forms of brainwashing.
Most people physically cannot doubt themselves concerning some beliefs.
For example, let’s say a fat person sees himself as skinny, a beautiful person sees himself as ugly, and a talentless hack sees himself as a master performer.
They thoroughly are convinced in their self-belief. How do I begin to undermine this??
Must I start with indoctrinating children??
Forget that, let’s presume that we have a “worse case scenario”. We caught a few radical Muslims; they plan to set a nuke off in downtown Manhattan. So we need to convince them that God/Allah is “not real”. We need to convert them, fast, to undo the bomb. If we fail, then the bomb goes off and the failure to prevent the loss of lives entirely depends on our inability to convince these Muslims that they are wrong, crazy, or delusional.
How do we change their beliefs??
Easier scenario:
You are given a group of 1st grade children. You can teach them anything you want. Isn’t it much easier to change their beliefs??
They aren’t going to ignore you. Quite the contrary, they are going to accept just about everything you tell them as fact.
The practical difference is in how you tolerate critical thought. Education invites you to ask questions, indoctrination forbids you from asking questions, brainwashing tries to ensure the questions never even occur to you. Often what people call education is in fact indoctrination.
If there were reliable ways to force people believe things without extensive mistreatment such as brainwashing, it would have been found out by now and everyone would agree.
This wasn’t the distinction I was making, but there is a difference.
“1+1=2” is basically just defining terms. It’s an abstraction from collections of objects. The difference between this set of lines: | and this set of lines: || is in their number-ness. We label the number-ness of sets like the first “1”, and sets like the second “2”, and then we note that when we put two sets like the first together (using “+” as shorthand) we get (shorthand “=”) a set like the second.
“Allah exists, praise Him, and you will die for him” is different in a number of ways. First, rather defining, it is mostly commanding. The closest it comes to defining is making an existence claim, but existence claims are testable by their nature: they’re making an objective, concrete statement about the world. And, if nothing else, the concepts used are much more complex: Allah, existence, praise, and the future tense are all more nuanced than simple abstractions about number-ness.
The distinction I was making earlier was more like a distinction between “1+1=2” and “1=.999…”. The former is an introduction to numbers. It’s trivially provable, in that it is defining the symbol “2” as the number-ness of the result of combining two sets whose number-ness is “1”. The latter, by contrast, is a complex statement. If you accept a handful of defining statements about the symbols involved, it’s not difficult to prove. Furthermore, the proof doesn’t rest on trust: using your own knowledge of the symbols and concepts involved, it’s possible to construct a progression where this must follow as a conclusion.
But it seems like what you’re really asking is, how do you make someone believe something whose truth or falsity is uncertain. In that case, it’s unclear, as OH points out. People manipulate using emotion, they torture physically, they use deceptive logic; none of these is fool proof, and a sufficiently canny and hardy individual will always be able to beat them. The fact is, humans have evolved to avoid being manipulated by their fellow man, and one of the best ways to do that is to have a strategy that is different from everyone else: if a whole population were gameable with a single trick, the whole population would be vulnerable to being used in non-adaptive ways. Variety is ensured because, as one type of gameable mindset gets hacked, a competing mindset gains an evolutionary advantage. Evolution tends to prevent silver bullets.
Of course, it is possible that there is a method that only becomes available at the point at which evolution brings a species past the point of any rigorous natural selection (such as we have reached in the West) - that given a spread of education commensurate with being ‘past’ evolving, or able to direct it ourselves, we expose ourselves to conceptual weaknesses that weren’t a problem when we were hand-to-mouth farmers. A sort of mentally contagious suicidal nihilism, for example. It’s happened with smaller groups before; if it happened on a larger scale it would be a new form of selection.
I think I know why the orginal poster has problems. I want to crush his/her bones already. How annoying.
This is off topic and personal attack. Please keep it civil.
I disagree.
Some forms of “education” promote asking questions and some do not. I think both are forms of indoctrination.
It has, though. Proof: here.
The “problem” with brainwashing, if we want to call it a “problem” in the first place, is that it has become so effective and thorough that more & more people become culled without even becoming aware of their mental slavery. This is because as populations evolve, people become 1. more numerous and 2. smarter individually and collectively.
No no, listen…
Making an existential claim and defining concepts both require ‘indoctrination’ into a dogma. It begins with families, with parents (mother or father or surrogate parent) defining terms to their children. For example, a small child will tug on his mother or father’s pant leg and ask any and all questions such as “what is this?”, “what is that?”, “what is God?” etc. Those definitions begin there.
They become indoctrinated through repetition. Children eventually ask and ask until they get answers. Sometimes, a parent does not know. This represents a fundamental and critical error (of belief). The child psychologically becomes damaged. He/she trusts parents, but, when parents are ignorant of facts (or beliefs), the child becomes forced to seek-out external “authorities”. This action becomes reinforced in schools. School teachers act as surrogate parents while parents are ‘working’ as proletariat slave-laborers. These are indoctrination centres.
When the child cannot get ‘answers’ or beliefs from parents, the child instead receives the ‘answers’ or beliefs from other established authorities.
Mathematicians are the “Authorities” on “1+1=2”.
Theologians are the “Authorities” on “God exists”.
Physicists are the “Authorities” on “Material things (atoms) exist”.
These are all linguistic specializations. They are all logical or illogical statements. The statements have different purposes and relate to different (specific) aspects of society. The statements you presume associate with your specific role in society. Some children may become specialized in different areas, and thus, different beliefs.
I want to cut-through all of these educations and indoctrinations. I want to go underneath all that, to investigate and “untie” how these beliefs become solidified.
How do we call into doubt, in a person, before they “put up their walls”??
We need somebody to “keep an open mind” while we change their beliefs, for the better or worse.
Have you seen that movie “inception”? That is what this concept is about. It is about “inceiving” a belief, about planting beliefs into other people.
I want to have a discussion about how to gain trust in people, and how to get people to believe in anything, regardless of whether something is true or false.
Also, I want to know how to defend against such changes in belief. Ignorance is the ultimate defense. Once we ignore somebody, they no longer affect belief.
To call every formation of belief “indoctrination” seems overly strong. When I want to look up a vocabulary word in my French-English dictionary, am I really being “indoctrinated” in the French language? And if I am, it seems indoctrination is not nearly as nefarious as it sounds.
Nor does it seem that physics is a “linguistic specialization.” Physics doesn’t study language. You can’t figure out the speed of light by talking about. No amount of linguistic analysis will provide values for the fundamental universal constants. To find those, we need to poke and prod the real world, to be indoctrinated by reality, if you will.
Inception is a work of fiction. I don’t think what you’re asking for is possible in the real world. Self-help books and confidence artists do their best to find out, but ultimately they’re a game of numbers: if they find a method that convinces 10% of people, and they broadcast it to 10,000 people, they recruit 1,000 people to their cause. But 90% of people are still unimpressed.
It’s not “overly strong” when 99.5% of all your beliefs become psychologically formulated as a child.
To make false presumptions. You know what you do, and believe a majority of the things you do, because your PARENTS or guardians put them there.
Doubting that, is near impossible. Indoctrination begins within the home, the family unit, and branches out directly to “school systems”.
You are also presumes a dubious divide between “child dependent” and “adult individual”. You presume a difference of autonomy and ‘choice’.
Here are events which are not fictional:
- Crusades.
- Inquisition.
- Terror Wars.
- Mormon Missions.
All of these are about forcing beliefs onto others. Violence usually is a good route for this.
I am talking about a more ‘devious’ or ‘sinister’ method. How do you “plant” or “twist” beliefs inside people, without them even knowing??
We already proved, that, first somebody needs to get your attention. Second, a person needs to “gain trust”.
true knowledge of God knocks the manipulator down in a rush with merely a mirror, for even on a good day the reflection is only the slightest bit gentle 
I can’t speak for everyone, but the following counterpoints are true for me, and likely for many others:
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99.5% of my beliefs are mundane. I believe that the word “chair” refers to the thing I’m sitting on, and that a zillion other words refer to whatever I believe them to refer to. I believe the sun rises daily, and that it’s colder in the winter than the summer (in the norther hemisphere). Again, if we’re going to say I’ve been “indoctrinated” into most of my beliefs, I think it takes a lot of umph out of the term. Who cares that my parents and teachers indoctrinated me into being able to hold up my end of a conversation?
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Of the beliefs that I have that aren’t mundane, I disagree substantially with my parents. My parents are Roman Catholics. They’re Democrats. They believe a lot of things about the nature of reality that I don’t, and vice versa.
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I also disagree with a lot of the beliefs that I held as a child. If nothing else, I have an enormous set of beliefs about things that functionally didn’t exist for child-me: the internet, mobile phones, the Tea Party, 9/11, etc. etc. I’ve also changed my beliefs substantially about things that I have had a conception of since childhood. I used to believe in free-will. Hell, I was a communist when I graduated from College at 22, and at 26 I’m damn near libertarian.
As I said, I imagine the same is true of most people.
I disagree that violence is a “good route” (by which I take it you mean “effective”). None of the examples you list were particularly successful in converting people. The middle east is still Muslim, Spain still has heretics, and the growth of Mormonism (which is exaggerated) is almost all due to high birth rates, rather than conversion.
That’s getting ahead of ourselves. I’ve yet to see compelling evidence that what you’re asking for is possible, which seems like it’s important to establish before we try to determine “how”.
Mundane beliefs are the most grounded ones since they are “least changing”.
It is much more difficult for me to instill doubts into you as what constitutes a ‘chair’ and also have that doubt affect your capacity to judge the concept.
When you are “open minded” about a concept, usually one you have not become indoctrinated into, then it is easier for me to attack such belief.
It comes down to the authorities of said indoctrination, education, and “fact building”. However, everything is subject to complete deconstruction.
It is where people remain “open minded” that can become claimed as “foolish”. Shouldn’t a man already know what chairs are, by adulthood??
Those concepts which you become divergent on, are “soft beliefs”. They have little to no practical benefit to you; they are abstract.
They are additions or artifice. They are artistic and unnecessary.
After all, does it really, REALLY matter whether you are Roman Catholic as opposed to Protestant? Does anybody really care that much of the difference??
You can also claim political affiliation; it doesn’t mean you are ACTIVE within any movement.
Here is my point then:
“Convert” people when they are 4 years old. Indoctrinate them young. Spill all kinds of lie imaginable, every lie in fact, into their heads. It really doesn’t matter what facts they receive, in the end, does it??
I did already mention this. It is much, much easier to convince a young child than a fully grown, dogmatic, devout, adult male.
My previous point was how to get at those “beliefs” in the most dogmatic person, in the shortest time. Won’t you help me try?
He is a terrorist; we need to “hack” his brain to prevent a nuclear explosion in downtown New York, Manhattan!!! HELP ME!!!
This is a philosophical and political dilemma, you see? I need to convert a Muslim into a Christian and back again, within an hour.
Must I use force, violence, torture? Or is there another way?? Can I convince a closed mind of what he detests most??
How is belief “undone”?
You’re right; that is getting ahead of ourselves.
Let’s focus on how beliefs become formed, how to cause doubt, and how to “change somebody’s mind” about something, anything really.
I agree, and I’d take it a step farther: Mundane beliefs should be the most grounded and the least changing, precisely because they’re mundane.
If I woke up tomorrow to discover the world now called chairs ‘charis’, the change may be confusing, but the new word itself would not disrupt my knowledge of chairs. If we all just decided to call chairs ‘charis’, it would have essentially no practical implications, we’d still sit on them ass-first.
It is foolish to truly struggle with the concept of chair. Sure, in the context of a philosophy class, we might wonder what happens when we sit on our desks, but even then, if you were told that an envelope is taped under your chair, you should be able to respond to that by forming a belief that there’s a folded paper container adhered to the underside of the wooden thing behind your desk. To fail to comprehend that would be indicative of at best a lack of fluency with English, and worse some kind of brain trauma or mental handicap.
Rather, it is beliefs like political affiliation, religious affiliation (note: while the difference between protestants and catholics is small, the difference between either and militant atheists is significant), and understandings of how and why the world works that are interesting, which can and do change long past childhood. These beliefs change my actions, e.g. when in young I came to believe that free will doesn’t exist, I softened my scorn at people who seem to squander their lives, and changed the way I vote, the way I give, the way I act towards those people, etc. That’s a change of action following a change of a significant belief.
Granted, indoctrination is possible to a degree. Starting young helps. But it’s never 100%. Conversion out of a religion is not unheard of. Conversion out of a political ideology is not unheard of. Indoctrination isn’t completely effective, even when it’s done pervasively from birth by the entire culture.
Let me ask you this: if someone wanted to deceptively influence your beliefs, what would it take? When and why have you changed your beliefs?
Should be?
First of all, there is no “should be” here. The mundane nature of (most) beliefs is a reflection of innate human behavior. Forget about belief for a moment, people act mundane. We wake up in the morning, eat some cereal and milk, go to work, eat lunch, return home, browse the internet, and argue with people online about philosophy. There are routines. I need to go to the bathroom. I need to take a shower (sometimes).
These set rituals are set in the same manner as certain beliefs. But nobody can change or refute the fact that: they need sleep, they need to earn money (to buy food/rent), they need to relieve waste, etc.
Mundane beliefs are set in that fashion, too. Everybody has concepts of ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘up’, ‘down’. Everybody has concepts of Gravity and Mass.
Sex. Family. Society. Etc.
You are mistaking the conceptual relation of concepts with beliefs.
That we name chairs “chairs” still does constitute a (linguistic) knowledge of charis.
Not if you are an inventor, designing a charis for spacecrafts and space stations. Such a man would need to rethink his primary concept: charis.
Then language needs to become disconnected from concepts; as naming objects, verbs, or people has an ambiguous tie to the concepts themselves.
The concepts and experiences are what forms belief. But, we can change those too (through indoctrination).
When people start dying for beliefs, these are the ones I speak of, the “most deeply ingrained beliefs of self identity”.
It is about those beliefs people are willing to die for, like “love” for example. I want to undermine that. I want to come between the “love” of a mother with her infant. Where would I begin?? I mean, how do we get to the bottom of all beliefs?? Let’s presume that we can even ‘tweek’ somebody’s genetics; presume that all possibilities are open.
Would it be “better” for me to genetically engineer a live person, rather than convincing him that he’s wrong about some deeply held belief?
Conversion is the key.
How do you convert the most staunch, stoic adherent to a religious faith, without using “violence”??
You admit that this is possible, since the very concept of conversion presumes it. HOW?
Let’s try an experiment. Let’s attempt to convert all the Christians on this forum to another religion, or some made-up belief system, and back again. Let’s twist their most deeply held and valued beliefs. How do we undermine them? First, we must call their moral authority, their authenticity into doubt, correct??
To convert people, you need to instill doubt in them. But, once the devout Christian realizes you are doing this, realizes your motive, he “shuts up”, “quits thinking”. What we need to do is prevent that from happening, to prevent them from knowing our intentions ahead of time. Or, should we tell them our intentions outright? Is it better to gain their trust by telling them the truth, or avoiding to tell the truth?
He would need to gain my attention and trust, first.
Then he would need to be ‘smarter’ than I am, in order to change my beliefs against my will.
I only change my beliefs when a belief subscribes to absolute, 100%, universal law, THE TRUTH OF ALL THINGS.
I only believe in absolute truth, nothing more or less. If a person is not 100% absolutely true, then I don’t believe him. It’s that simple.
Now you may see that I trust none, and I do trust none. I only trust myself. So for anybody to gain MY trust is foolish on their part, as it is in vain.