Rebecca Lemov (The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion) is a historian of science, author, and professor at Harvard. Rebecca joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the meet cute with her husband at the cafe where she was struggling to write her dissertation, how she fell under a romantic spell with anthropology as well as opioids, and the relationship between addiction and brainwashing. Rebecca and Dax talk about how Patty Hearst used brainwashing as a defense for her actions, why it's such an effective mind control tactic to strip someone of their name, and how Korean War soldiers’ health and wellness bounce back after trauma hid evidence of their suffering. Rebecca explains the normalization of brutal torture training of troops, that cult leaders intuitively act out a guidebook of hierarchical dynamics of desire and power, and Facebook’s experiment on emotional contagion as an example of soft brainwashing.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: Who is Rebecca Lemov and what is her connection to brainwashing?
It took a while.
She didn't recognize it.
Yeah.
You're back in California.
Yeah.
How often do you come?
Pretty often, partly my husband's family lives here.
Did you guys meet in college?
We met afterwards, but in Oakland. I was struggling to write my dissertation and he was working at the cafe where I was struggling. Me cute. It really was. There was a mixtape involved.
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Chapter 2: How does Rebecca Lemov's personal history connect to her research?
And nobody knew what happened to him, but he was taken by the secret police of Hungary. And then he came back and he looked like a shadow of himself, like a gray puppet. And he was paraded before the newsreel cameras. And he confessed to these outrageous crimes that he couldn't even have possibly committed. Like he had stolen religious artifacts and he said he had taken money from the church.
And even though he'd left a note, he said, if I'm arrested, don't believe anything I say when I come back. Yet this still happened to him. And it was almost like he was a trophy for these new communist governments, like an announcement that we can do this. And he did return to himself within a couple of years. And he said, without knowing what had happened to me, I had become another person.
And you say, yeah, becoming someone else was alarming enough, but the nightmarish part was that you had no ability to recognize that this had happened. So even scarier than becoming different is you wouldn't have even noticed it.
Yeah, that first part without knowing. So within 28 days, fairly fast. And then he also revealed what had happened to him, although I didn't have full memory of it.
And if you think of your stereotype of someone susceptible to this type of thing, it's not a leader in the church who's got charisma and all these people skills and a great education and all these other tropes we think would inoculate you from this.
a hero to his people and he knew what was coming. He knew that there was a possible threat to himself. So he could have been prepared or he probably did try to prepare himself. But one interesting thing about it, he said he thinks he was drugged and he was pushed around. He was not a young man and he was sleep deprived.
But one of the things that struck me was that he recalled that he was stripped of his clerical robes and he was made to wear a clown costume and he kind of had to crawl. And so there were these status-based humiliations.
Also a quite literal stripping of someone's identity. Exactly. Yeah.
Well, it's often the case that removal even of someone's name is very effective. Like in the Stanford prison experiments, one of the first things they do is the guards only refer to the prisoners as numbers. It's very effective.
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