Mind Control

and methods of enhanced manipulation

ver.: 25 October 2007

Index > the Paranormal > Mind Control

"Mind Control" is a rather loosely-used term. It conjures up images of enslaving other people's thoughts, making puppets or bio-robots out of them, like in some cheap sci-fi or horror flick, or perhaps a Nazi experiment. This doesn't occur outside of stories and rumors.

The nearest thing to it in real life can be found in the practices of certain high-demand religions, such as ultra-orthodoxies and cults. They sometimes use practices such as sleep deprivation, mind-altering drugs, 'love bombing' (relentlessly hyper-positive feedback toward the inquirer), the big lie, hypnosis, endless repetition, doublespeak (using words in a way that they don't mean what they seem, to stop any cohesive thinking), sexual stimulation, the teaching of 'insider' secrets, group-think (using the whole group to draw each person into its mindset), enemy creation, and control of both the surroundings and the flow of information. These techniques taken as a group are sometimes called 'brainwashing' or 'mind control'. By themselves, each technique has little effect, but when taken together, they create a strong influence over personal thought-patterns and behaviors. The methods get the inquirer to want what that group or its leader wants them to want.

Some leading experts on these groups are saying that these high-control groups (a polite way of saying 'cult') are not doing such things, that it's only propaganda from their enemies. Yet, if the government were using the same methods the same way with the same intensity on the general public or any group within it, these same experts would scream ruddy murder. And they'd be right. Which means they are very, very wrong in defending these high-control groups.

Even so, those experts are right about one thing: the methods work only as long as the group gives that member what they most seek, and has a way to make them fear disobedience. That is, there is a positive and a negative enforcement, a carrot and a stick. When one or the other fails, the member usually leaves. Thus, the control is still really in the member's own hands, and the techniques are mostly ways of getting the member to control themselves the group's way. That still does not excuse the use of mind control methods, but it explains how the methods really work.

Christian beliefs go against the use of mind manipulation methods, even to reverse the effects of someone else's mind manipulations. Some church bodies have used some of the methods in lower-intensity ways to get unearned sway over people (most notably in Middle Ages Europe, and with some of the counter-cult activists), but when they do so they are spitting in the face of the Holy Spirit, who chooses to work in people only as far as they allow the Spirit to work in themselves. They aim to achieve the power Christ told His followers to renounce. You are made in the image of God, and the Spirit builds up this image that's already in you, rather than imposing it. If the Spirit's methods respect personal freedom that much, so must the methods of any follower of Christ. And after time itself has ended, those who trust God enter a realm where we are still ourselves, with free minds and souls, as part of God's family. Control and power are Satan's bag, not the crucified Lord's.

more on mental hacking.

An email exchange:

> I know a
> woman who met a man recently, and she seems to be controlled by him,
> perhaps in this way [by hypnosis]?

It sounds like she's either sexually overwhelmed (that will wear off) or she's psychologically dependent on him. Sometimes it gets so bad that they walk around with that dazed look as if he had sucked out her brain in one of those horror b-movies.

Hypnosis by itself is a poor device for mind control, mainly because it lacks the power to impose anything for more than the moment at hand. It may help plant an idea or two that might catch on if something else in the person is also working for that idea; nothing more. Manipulation (in the form of praise, anger, and well-worded lies), enticement (in the form of his sexual prowess), and fear (of either physical abuse or the collapse of the framework of her life) are much more effective because they get her to choose to act eagerly in the desired manner. They are the devil's tools which a Christian stays away from if they're following Christ right.