The Chinese Join the Expression of a Global Effort for the Freedom of Mind
This long-form piece sets out, in great detail and for the very first time, the psycho-political awakening among the Chinese people and how this awakening connects to the global effort to defend and promote a human right to the freedom of mind. It draws upon the author’s extensive experience living in China and his research to identify a political and legal pathway for freedom of mind to enter into the international human rights architecture (click here for more information).
The piece begins with a brief history of Chinese Communist techniques of mind control, in particular how a factual sense of reality is destroyed in an individual’s mind, and how these techniques influenced other authoritarian groups such as destructive cults. It then explains how the Chinese government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — specifically, the abusive treatment of whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang and the flagship zero-COVID policy — unwittingly helped engineer the powerful psychological awakening and political uprising against authoritarianism among the Chinese. Direct evidence of this awakening is provided, including most notably a Chinese-language translation of the BITE (Behavior; Information; Thought; Emotion) model of authoritarian mind control that emerged on Chinese social media. This piece finishes with a call for a rights-based approach to the global problem of authoritarianism. This will involve complementing the emerging landscape of legal protections for the mind at the national level with explicit protection for the mind in international human rights documents, including proposing a Declaration of Freedom of Mind to the United Nations for adoption.
Destructive Mind Control: The Chinese Communist Connection
In the 1950s, Mao Zedong’s Communist government in China enacted one of the most powerful and comprehensive efforts at thought reform (or “brainwashing”) ever undertaken in human history, which included enforced doctrines, ideological purges and mass-conversion movements. Known as sī xiǎng gǎi zào (思 想 改 造 ; “thought reform”/ “ideological molding”), this program of thought reform was designed to convert “reactionary” people into “right-thinking” members of the new Chinese social system.
Chinese thought reformers did not officially use the idiomatic term xǐ nǎo (洗 腦 ; “wash brain”), although there are reports of its colloquial usage. As one victim of the program reportedly stated, ‘like dumping foul water out of a bottle and then refilling it with fresh water… [thought reform] left the mind clean and clear’.[i] Without doubt, the thought reform program aimed to remove ‘toxic’ thoughts such as individuality, freedom and respect for human life. Used in this way, the word took on a radically new meaning and usage. Previously, xǐ xīn (洗心 ; “washing the heart/mind”) was an ancient, Confucian and non-political term referring to the cleansing of the heart — understood as the organ of thought — by providing it with good and truthful information.
The Chinese phrase xǐ nǎo soon began to be translated into English and, in so doing, gave the world the word “brainwashing”. In January 1950, an article published in the newspaper The Guardian wrote: ‘all converts undergo public examinations of conscience in which they seek to unearth all their personal faults or collective mistakes, with the aid of a party instructor. This is what Chinese papers graphically term “washing one’s brains,” or “laying one’s heart on the table’.[ii] The term ‘brainwashing’ truly entered the popular vocabulary through Edward Hunter, a former agent of the Office of Strategic Services (the wartime predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency). In a newspaper article titled ‘Brain-Washing Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party’ and then in a number of other similarly titled writings and books, Hunter disseminated the term as part of a strategy to shape public consciousness about the threat of Communism.[iii] Hunter’s efforts came to spectacular fruition during the Korean War, when many American prisoners of war (PoWs) began to cooperate with their captors, confessing to conducting biological warfare and some even refusing repatriation.
Survivors of Chinese thought reform, including American PoWs from the Korean War, priests, students and teachers held in prison in China, and some Chinese citizens who had fled indoctrination in universities, were interviewed by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton. His book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China (1961) remains the essential account of the techniques employed by the Chinese Communists, in particular his eight criteria:
Milieu Control — control of information and communication both within the local environment and the individual.
Mystical Manipulation — The manipulation of members’ experiences are orchestrated by the group or its leaders to demonstrate divine authority, spiritual advancement, or some exceptional talent or insight.
Demand for Purity — members are exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection; guilt and/or shame are induced as a control method.
Confession — Members’ “sins”, “attitudes” and “faults”, as defined by the group, are confessed and then discussed and exploited by the leaders.
Sacred Science — The group’s doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute.
Loading the Language — The group interprets or uses words and phrases in new ways, including thought-stopping clichés, which alter members’ thought processes so that they conform to the group’s way of thinking.
Doctrine over person/Ideology over Experience — Members’ personal experiences are subordinated to the sacred science; any contrary experiences must be denied or reinterpreted to fit the group’s ideology.
Dispensing of existence — The group decides who has the right to exist and who does not. Where not taken literally, this means that those in the outside world must be converted to the group’s ideology; those who refuse and those who leave the group must be rejected by the members and become “non-persons” undeserving of respect as human beings.
During the following decades many destructive mind control cults emerged in democratic societies, with new and refined ways of trapping and enslaving people through abusive and unethical techniques of mind control. Their existence within democratic societies was duly noted by Robert Jay Lifton himself: ‘these cults differ from patterns of totalism [total authoritarianism] in other societies. For example, the centers that were used for reform in China were more or less in keeping with the ethos of the society as it was evolving at the time… Cults, in contrast, tend to become islands of totalism within a larger society that is on the whole antagonistic to these islands’. By their very nature, destructive cults undermine the democratic way of life.
It is significant that some of these new cult leaders were in some ways connected to the Communist regimes in China and Korea. Watchman Nee, a church leader who suffered a long imprisonment under the Communist regime in China, later associated with the Plymouth Brethren before becoming a strong advocate of an authoritarian approach to Christian discipling in the United States. Most notably, the founder of the Unification Church (or ‘The Moonies’) Sun Myung Moon was imprisoned in a North Korean re-education camp for three years.[iv]
This new generation of cults were profoundly influenced by the Chinese Communist regime and its well-established use of destructive mind control. The indoctrination techniques used by the Unification Church, with their highly structured and intense character, closely resemble those used by the Chinese Communists: physical isolation; altered nutritional and sleep patterns; physical activity including exercise, games and singing; and ‘study groups’ that carried out self-criticism sessions where visitors announced their goals for the day and confessed their self-doubts and insecurities. Founder of Scientology L Ron Hubbard drew upon a number of Chinese influences, including ‘Chinese school’ (an extreme form of rote learning), the ‘dead agenting’ tool outlined in Sun Tzu’s military treatise The Art of War and, in particular, Maoist-style reconditioning in a procedure named ‘The Truth Rundown’. According to Scientology expert Jon Atack, Hubbard may well have based his gulag for erring staff — the Rehabilitation Project Force — on the thought reform camps.
In accordance with seventh criterion of Chinese thought reform ‘Doctrine over Person’, individuals were taught to believe that their wrong worldview had led them to their current predicament and that they must engage in a process of self-criticism. Naturally, this process always leads to absolute agreement with the thoughts of the leader. Crucially, this conversion must be genuinely felt by the subject. In their investigation into the study groups used in Chinese thought reform, psychologists George Demos and William O’Neill observed that ‘the Chinese are no more interested in pseudo-conversation than in fool’s gold. They want the real thing, and they are fully aware that, in order to obtain this, they must get total personal involvement. It is not enough that the person “agree”. He must explain why he agrees… It is not enough, then, that he profess faith, he must back up such professions with good works’. In this way, the seventh criterion of Chinese thought reform has provided a template for a formalized procedure of how to gaslight a person so effectively that they will then gaslight themselves.
The Truth Rundown is a formalized version of this procedure. It is carried on until the individual voices the end result: they originate that they were deluded and admit to making false statements to justify their own crimes and transgressions. But more than confessing, they must convince themselves that they did not really see what they saw. By setting up a situation where it becomes impossible to agree with reality, the subject will begin to re-write their memories. Actress and Scientologist-turned-activist Leah Remini was subjected to the Truth Rundown over a prolonged period of time, and has authored an account of her experience:
My auditor, Irit, and my MAA [Master at Arms or Ethics Officer], Jasmine, did a Truth Rundown — an interrogation process typically reserved for Sea Org members. In a Truth Rundown, the auditor looks at all the reports you have written, all the reports written by others about you, and all of the notes from your auditing sessions, Ethics Officer interviews, and any other material collected by the church to find critical reports or remarks about LRH [L Ron Hubbard], David Miscavige, or any person or policy of importance. Everything is fair game.
So for example, if I said, “Tom Cruise is an asshole and I think he is damaging Scientology,” the auditor would say, “Let’s go to the earliest time you saw Tom being an asshole.”
“In 2004 when I saw him at a party and he ignored the guy who handed him a water.”
“Okay, so that was the earliest time you saw Tom being an asshole?” “Yes.”
“Right before you saw Tom being an asshole, what overt [transgression] did you commit?”
In response to that question you have to find something that you did wrong. When that is answered, the auditor moves on to the next question.
“Was there an evil purpose or destructive intention that prompted you to commit that overt?”
You keep doing this until you get to the earliest time you can recall — and that’s just for one report or remark. Then the auditor goes on to the next report. When the reports are done, they go the main part of the sec-check, which is two hundred different questions like “Have you ever said anything derogatory about Scientology?”
The Truth Rundown worked; I started to crack…Soon I started to question what I saw. Maybe it is me? I have so many overts. I upset people. I did something to pull all this in. Exhausted after a long day of auditing, I lay down with [my daughter] Sofia, who was sleeping in one of the large hotel room beds. I stroked her beautiful hair and studied her innocent little face. The last thing I thought before I fell asleep next to her was, what did you do to deserve such an evil person as a mother?
After weeks and weeks of twelve hours a day in auditing, they broke me and I retracted almost everything. I admitted that I caused a problem at the wedding. I admitted that I shouldn’t have asked to change seats. And I held seats that caused upsets to people at the wedding. I guess that was true. Then I started in on the process of creating “good effects” to offset my transgressions at the wedding that caused “bad effects.”
An uncannily similar procedure of gaslighting is depicted in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where the totalitarian super-state Oceania’s Ministry of Love brutally tortures the protagonist Winston until he comes to accept what the ruling political party defines as reality.
“Reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.”
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And if the party says that it is not four but five — then how many?”
“Four.”
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four.”
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!”
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Five! Five! Five!”
“No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?”
“Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain”
“You are a slow learner, Winston.”
“How can I help it? How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.”
“Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?”
“Really to see them.”
“Again,”
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again.
Four, five, six — in all honesty I don’t know.”
“Better”.
The destructive cults that exercise control over their members (such as the Moonies or Scientology) and the authoritarian governments that rule entire countries (such as the Chinese Communist Party or Oceania) have much in common. It takes one to know one. As Hong Kong activists Nathan Law and Evan Fowler write, ‘authoritarian regimes…exploit our divisions and our desire to have simple answers. And, like cults and conspiracy theorists, they prey on our own blindness to entice us into a reality that they control, where black turns to white at their command’. Fundamentally, such groups view any independent and factual sense of reality as a transgression or otherwise subversive act.
This generation of destructive cults also drew upon the extensive psychological research and developments that followed in the two decades after the Chinese Communist thought reform program. Psychologists Margaret Singer and Richard Ofshe described this mind control as the ‘second generation of thought reform’: in addition to using group pressure, modeling, accusations and confessions, this new form of destructive mind control employed techniques such as hypnosis to intensify recalled or imagined experiences, emotional flooding, and induction of cognitive confusion. Instead of attacking the peripheral (i.e. political) aspects of an individual’s concept of self, these mind control programs sought to destabilize the most central aspects of a person’s experience of self: basic consciousness, reality awareness, beliefs and worldview, emotional control and defense mechanisms. In the mid-1970s, Steven Hassan was targeted by the Moonies, underwent an intensive workshop and was subjected to this form of destructive mind control. He remained in the group for two years until a near-fatal van crash and a successful family-based cult intervention. When he reported his experience and the mind control techniques used by the Moonies to Robert J Lifton, Lifton responded with amazement: ‘[this] is so much more sophisticated than what the Chinese did in the ’50s. It’s like a hybrid mutation of a virulent virus strain!’
Based on the research and theory by Robert J. Lifton and Edgar Schein who studied the brainwashing programs of Communist China as well as cognitive dissonance theory by Leon Festinger, Steven Hassan developed the BITE (Behavior; Information; Thought; Emotion) model to describe the specific methods that destructive cults use to recruit and maintain control over people, first published in Combatting Cult Mind Control (1988): ‘each component of the BITE model…has great influence on the human mind. Together, they form a totalistic web, one that can be used to manipulate even the most intelligent, creative, ambitious and strong-willed person…Destructive mind control can be determined when the overall effect of these four components promotes dependency and obedience to some leader or cause’.
The Chinese Awakening
Destructive mind control continues to be a long-standing feature of the political landscape in China, even in its most extreme incarnation: thought reform/brainwashing in the original sense of using physical incarceration and violent abuse to induce ideological compliance. Such techniques have been systematically employed against Uighur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, over a million of whom have been interned in ‘re-education’ camps.
The Chinese government’s use of information control, while subtler, is just as insidious in its nature. The most large-scale and sophisticated system of information censorship in the world is found in China. Known colloquially as ‘the Great Firewall’ and officially as ‘The Golden Shield Project’, it is envisaged by its architects as protecting the Chinese population from subversive and harmful information from the outside world. The Great Firewall blocks access to about two-thirds of the World Wide Web and aggressively filters all web traffic so that only information that is approved or not blacklisted by government censors may pass through.[v]
In one of the most perverse of ironies, the famous phrase ‘knowledge is power’ is engraved into the wall on every single floor of the Shanghai public library in a range of languages, which this article’s author observed personally and almost daily during the three years that he spent in China.
This system of censorship is complemented by a concerted effort by the Chinese Communist Party to promote its own alternative reality. As described by Hong Kong activists Nathan Law and Evan Fowler, ‘in China the press and media do not seek to report the truth or, really, to understand reality…A parallel reality is being created — a reality dictated not by the interests of the people, but by those of [the Communist Party]… In this way and countless others, we are no longer in the realm of disagreement. This is a war on reality’. This assault on reality is most vividly illustrated by how the government re-defines the dangerousness of air pollution, as a comparison of Chinese and international measurements shows.
Researcher and author Jon Atack writes that ‘a war against its own people was waged through social compliance, the restriction of information (see Hassan’s model), and the destruction of free thought and choice which characterizes members of all authoritarian groups… The success of this method of indoctrination can be measured in the compliance of the Chinese since the Communist (or, more properly, fascist) take-over of China’. In my years of living in China, there were moments when I called into question my long-standing assumption that there is a universal human need to be free — that people would rather be free than enslaved. And yet, this overarching system of mind control could not and did not prevent an awakening among the Chinese people. This tells us that freedom of mind is a freedom which all the peoples of the world, even those living under the most repressive of conditions, can aspire to.
Three years ago, a young Chinese doctor named Li Wenliang began to observe a number of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) cases and undiagnosed pneumonia at his hospital in Wuhan. After sharing his findings and concerns with other doctors in an instant messaging app group, he and the other doctors were all summoned by the local police. What Doctor Li and his colleagues were then subjected to bears some of the hallmarks of Maoist reconditioning, as used to great effect in the early years of the Communist regime in China. Doctor Li was disciplined for spreading ‘rumors’ online, and forced to sign a police document acknowledging he had made ‘false comments’ on the Internet. According to the police document, Li’s comments ‘were not factual and broke the law’ and his behavior had ‘severely disturbed social order’. In truth, the only crime he had committed was to hold an independent and factual sense of reality.
The only saving grace was that Doctor Li somehow found a way to retain or recover his authentic sense of reality. Speaking afterwards, he commented: ‘the police believed this virus was not confirmed to be SARS. They believed I was spreading rumors. They asked me to acknowledge that I was at fault. I felt I was being wronged, but I had to accept it. Obviously I had been acting out of good will’. In this case at least, as the old adage goes, you may destroy the body but you will never destroy the mind.
The treatment of Doctor Li struck a chord with a very large cross-section of the Chinese people. Chinese academics published open letters addressing the government, demanding that it apologize to and compensate COVID-19 whistleblowers, and enforce the freedom of speech protections in the country’s constitution. The reverberations were felt most strongly on Chinese social media. On Weibo, the country’s largest social media platform, many took to posting under the hashtag ‘Can you manage, do you understand?’ — a reference to the letter that Doctor Li was instructed to sign where he was accused of ‘disturbing social order’. Other hashtags calling for freedom of speech trended rapidly and were seen millions of times. One of Doctor Li’s quotes was shared repeatedly: ‘a healthy society should not have just one voice’. One netizen asked of the government: ‘the truth will always be treated as a rumor. How long are you going to lie? Are you still lying? What else do you have to hide?’. Glimmers of a deeper psychological awakening were also visible. In one remarkable display of self-introspection, a netizen apologized publicly to a foreign journalist for having attacked her in the past, writing ‘I used to think that people like you were evil. Now, I know that we were fooled’.
The tremors of this psycho-political awakening reverberated even within the Chinese state structures. One of the bureau chiefs of People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, wrote on her WeChat timeline: ‘refusing to listen to your “whistling”, your country has stopped ticking, and your heart has stopped beating…How big a price do we have to pay to make you and your whistling sound louder, to reach every corner of the East?’ The Supreme People’s Court of China stepped in, stating publicly that the doctors should not have been punished for making statements that were partially correct: ‘it might have been a fortunate thing if the public had believed the “rumors” then’ . The Court added that it was obliged to share its thinking on ‘rumors’, and that rumors were best resolved when the government was transparent: ‘if rumors are proved [to be true] time after time, then the people will naturally choose to believe them in times of a breaking event…To punish any information [that is] not totally accurate is neither legally necessary nor technically possible’.
This tentative awakening took place within the bounds of China’s authoritarian political system, making for serious limitations. As with all authoritarian groups, the leader and the group itself can never be at fault. When the system self-corrects, it is by removing ‘bad apples’ from positions of power. Accordingly, the abusive treatment of Doctor Li was not treated as an underlying systemic flaw. The police officers involved were removed from their posts and an apology and compensation issued to Doctor Li’s family. At no point did the authorities acknowledge that any other police force in China would have resorted to the same psychological abuse.
It would take a further three years of the Chinese government’s flagship zero-COVID policy, with ever-frequent quarantines and grueling lockdowns of major cities in conjunction with a series of tragic events, for the Chinese awakening to resume. It did so in a spectacular fashion.
Towards the end of last year, a number of people, confined to their homes under stringent anti-COVID lockdown rules, perished in an apartment fire while the rescue effort was obstructed by the lockdown measures. This was one of many ‘secondary disasters’ due to COVID restrictions; others included a pregnant women suffering a miscarriage after being refused entry to a hospital and residents in an apartment complex being stopped from leaving in the middle of a deadly earthquake. Such secondary disasters are not an unfortunate by-product of authoritarian systems of control but rather an inevitable consequence, where orders from higher up the chain-of-command go unquestioned and obedience comes to be equated with morality. As the typical refrain goes, ‘I’m just doing my job’ (or ‘befehl ist befehl’).
This lesson was not lost upon ordinary Chinese citizens, who took to the streets in cities across the country to protest the government’s long-standing zero-COVID policy and to call for democracy, for the rule of law, and for fundamental freedoms and human rights, and most audaciously, for the Communist Party to fall and President Xi Jingping to resign. A blank piece of paper has come to symbolize this protest movement: a statement about the silencing of dissent through online censorship. As one demonstrator said, the paper had come to ‘represent everything we want to say but cannot say’.
There was also push-back against the Communist Party’s long-running practice of framing internal dissent in China as the work of sinister foreign (typically Western) forces. At one protest, when a man warned of ‘foreign influences’, he was mocked by others who responded: ‘by foreign influence, do you mean Marx and Engels? Is it Stalin? Is it Lenin? … Was it foreign forces who started the fire in Xinjiang? Was it foreign forces who overturned the bus in Guizhou? … Was it foreign forces who drew everyone out here tonight?’
The unintended benefit of the Chinese government response to COVID-19 — both in the abusive treatment of Doctor Li and the flagship zero-COVID policy — was not only that it broke the old social contract between the Communist Party and the masses: ‘you, the masses, stay out of politics as long as we, the Party, guarantee your security and increase your standard of living’. Unlike the other bouts of mass repression meted out by the Chinese Communist Party towards minority groups, the response to COVID-19 affected all sections of society across the board and, in so doing, gave rise to a sense of shared victimhood and solidarity among peoples faced with a common threat to freedom.
There is a typical precondition for someone to wake up from an authoritarian system that imposes a prison of belief upon its members: the system has to turn against the person or against one of their close loved-ones, in such a way that the person cannot rationalize or explain away the abuse. Moreover, destruction is firmly baked into the DNA of authoritarian and cultic groups. In that sense, time is on the side of freedom of mind — it is not a question of if people wake up, but when and how they wake up.
New evidence has emerged suggesting that the Chinese awakening now extends to an awareness of destructive mind control. As the protests went on, a Chinese-language translation of the BITE (Behavior; Information; Thought; Emotion) model of mind control was posted and began to circulate widely on the social media platform Weibo. It naturally caught the attention of the present author who, in fact, first became acquainted with the BITE model when in China after reading the book Combating Cult Mind Control. A copy of this social media post is re-printed here.
Until now, local resistance to the use of destructive mind control by the Chinese Communist Party has been the exclusive preserve of the people of Hong Kong. Over the years, repeated attempts by the Chinese government to instil support for the Communist Party and to eliminate critical thought among young schoolchildren in Hong Kong, proposed typically in the guise of ‘patriotic education’, have been met with well-coordinated activism by Hong Kong civil society to resist this assault on the infant’s mind. The hope is that the Chinese people can continue the good fight and pick up the mantle of defending freedom of mind.
Defending and Promoting Freedom of Mind — with Global Action
Destructive mind control goes hand-in-hand with authoritarianism: the principle of blind submission to authority (as opposed to individual freedom of thought and action) and the suppression of free will. The hallmark of authoritarianism is an imbalance and abuse of power within a human relationship. Authoritarian behavior is found in inter-personal relationships (e.g. abusive partners and family members, alienating parents), in groups (e.g. destructive cults, multi-level marketing schemes, criminal gangs, trafficking rings and terrorist groups), and in countries ruled by political cults and personalist dictatorships. The #IGotOut movement is testament to the ubiquitous social problem of authoritarian relationships.
We need to raise our understanding of the problem of authoritarianism up to an issue of fundamental human rights. Victims are being deprived of life, liberty and agency. Their human rights are systematically violated, including the most precious and fundamental of freedoms: the freedom of the mind. Where there is authority in a relationship, we must be able to assess that authority. Where appropriate and necessary, we must criminalize the abuse of authority.
For too long, protection by the law has eluded many victims of destructive mind control, particularly those in high-control cultic groups. There is no clearly defined civil tort (wrong) or crime of destructive mind control. Lawsuits brought by ex-members against their former groups, seeking redress for the abuses wrought upon them, have floundered in the courts. And yet, a new landscape of legal protections for the mind is slowly but surely materializing across the democratic world.
The oldest legal construct of destructive mind control is undue influence, in use in English common law since at least the 1600s. Undue influence refers to the process of controlling another person by hijacking their mental processes. Such influence is undue because it violates personal boundaries and human integrity. Exploitation is part of its definition. In the author of the BITE model Steven Hassan’s PhD dissertation ‘The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control, Undue Influence, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Mind Control, Trafficking and the Law’, principal component analysis identified authoritarian control as the most significant factor that captures undue influence.
Undue influence claims have been largely confined to probate cases involving petitions for guardianships, conservatorships and disputed wills and trusts. The recognized victims of undue influence are largely limited to minors, the elderly and dependent adults. Yet even in its current form, undue influence may still provide an avenue for those seeking civil redress from ongoing high-control/cultic relationships. Historical legal cases have established that relationships between individuals and their spiritual advisors may involve trust and confidence and that playing upon a person’s religious or spiritual beliefs can amount to undue influence. In a recent case in New York, where the plaintiff alleged emotional abuse and undue influence by her former spiritual advisor and sought to rescind deeds involving the transfer of personal property, the trial court cited past cases that accepted the premise of rescinding a legal agreement or inter-vivos gift based on a claim of undue influence and allowed the case to proceed.
The legal definition of undue influence is not an immutable object. Events in recent years show that it continues to evolve. In 2009, the San Francisco County Superior Court of California, with the support of the Borchard Foundation Center on Law and Aging, undertook a comprehensive research report on undue influence. This research drew upon the work of thought reform and cult expert Margaret Singer, in particular her six-stage model: (1) creating isolation; (2) fostering a siege mentality; (3) inducing dependency; (4) promoting a sense of powerlessness; (5) manipulating fears and vulnerabilities; and (5) keeping the victim unaware and uninformed. Singer’s model has also informed screening tools for undue influence, such as the IDEAL and SCAM models. In 2014 California’s legislature passed landmark legislation that adopted a new statutory definition of undue influence: ‘excessive persuasion that causes another person to act or refrain from acting by overcoming that person’s free will and results in inequity’. This new definition also lists the influencer’s ‘apparent authority’ as including status as a spiritual advisor. As yet, only California has adopted a clear statutory definition of undue influence in its Probate Code, opening the door for other states to follow suit. California has also been the testing ground for the attempted expansion of undue influence from a cause of action (the basis for any civil litigation) to a criminal offense.
The destructive mind control that occurs between partners and family members employs a similar set of techniques. In his studies of female survivors of domestic abuse, sociologist Evan Stark identified three components that accompany physical violence: intimidation, isolation and control. Stark’s work has heavily informed the concept of coercive control, which is now defined as a criminal offense and a subset of domestic abuse in a range of jurisdictions: England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (United Kingdom); Ireland; France; Tasmania, Queensland and New South Wales (Australia); and Missouri, North Carolina, Connecticut, Hawaii and California (United States).
All of the legislation enacted so far places the offense of coercive control within the domestic setting, and thereby exclusively applies the law to intimate and/or family relationships. The next step is to extend the law to cover the exploitative and controlling behavior that takes place in close, non-intimate relationships and within groups and organizations. The Family Survival Trust have advocated for the United Kingdom’s law on coercive control to be extended to cover abusive behavior in groups/organizations: ‘making it a criminal offense to undertake the activities required to implement coercive control, thought reform, resocialization, total conversion, mind control, brainwashing, bounded choice — or whatever term is the flavour of the day — will at last make it illegal to take away others’ freedom in this insidious (and currently legal) way’.
Federal laws against human trafficking in the United States hold great promise in helping to protect victims of a wide range of high-control groups, including destructive cults. The techniques used by trafficking rings and destructive cults to ensnare their victims are remarkably alike. Some trafficking rings even implement the ‘group reform’ self-criticism method used by the Chinese Communists: members are employed in small work units overseen by crew leaders, where they confess and share their faults with the group. The motives of these high-control leaders also overlap: power, money (and sex). Essentially, a trafficking ring is equivalent to a commercial mind control cult. The BITE model analysis was first applied to human trafficking in a 2015 edition of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin in an article titled ‘A Victim-Centered Approach to Sex Trafficking Cases’. With an understanding of the role of unethical influence in trafficking, the Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking in concert with a number of local, state and federal agencies were able to develop the Enterprise Model, which breaks down the process of victimization into three inter-connected stages: recruitment, grooming and work.
The anti-trafficking laws contain a number of provisions that criminalize psychological coercion. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), first passed by Congress in 2000, has been crucial in expanding the legal definition of ‘involuntary servitude’ found in the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution beyond the (threatened) use of physical and legal forms of coercion to include psychological coercion. As the TVPA specified at the time, ’Congress finds that…involuntary servitude statutes are intended to reach cases in which persons are held in a condition of servitude through nonviolent coercion’. The crime of forced labor, as defined in the U.S. code (18 USC 1589), also has an explicit psychological component: ‘knowingly provid[ing] or obtain[ing] the labor or services of a person by…means of serious harm or threats of serious harm…The term “serious harm” means any harm, whether physical or nonphysical, including psychological, financial, or reputational harm’. The U.S. Department of Labor has defined the means of trafficking as: force (inc. physical confinement and isolation), fraud (inc. deception) and coercion (inc. psychological manipulation, shame and fear-inducing threats, and threats of serious harm) to enslave a person.
Given the marked similarities between trafficking rings and destructive cults, anti-trafficking laws are proving increasingly significant in prosecuting the leadership of destructive cults and other high-control groups. A string of successful convictions have occurred in recent years, including NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere, singer R. Kelly and the Sarah Lawrence College cult leader Larry Ray. The charges proven against these individuals include: sex trafficking, racketeering, extortion, forced labor and document servitude as well as tax evasion and money laundering offenses. As the law evolves in response to precedent-setting cases, future prosecutions of destructive cults and high-control groups could help courts to expand the restrictive law regarding mind control.
Predatory alienation is a more recent concept. Alienation is a common tactic used by predators to isolate and control an individual by purposefully disrupting his/her existing healthy relationships. A few years ago, New Jersey approved a bipartisan bill defining predatory alienation as ‘whenever a person or group uses predatory behaviors, such as entrapment, coercion, and undue influence, to establish a relationship with a victim and isolate the victim from existing relationships and support systems, including family and friends, with the goal of gaining and retaining sweeping control over the victim’s actions and decisions’. Following a government-sponsored study by the Center on Violence against Women and Children of the Rutgers University School of Social Work on the effect of predatory alienation on young adults and senior citizens, in addition to advocacy by grassroots advocacy organization New Jersey Safe and Sound, the New Jersey legislature proposed the New Jersey Predatory Alienation Prevention and Consensual Response Act, which is currently pending.
The bedrock of most, if not all, legal systems is the rational agent model: a person is a rational being in control of and therefore responsible for his/her actions. As mind control is not recognized as a defense to civil or criminal misconduct, victims of destructive mind control have no viable legal defense for any criminal acts in which they partake, as the famous cases of Patty Hearst, Steven Fishman, Shamima Begum — and many more — all show. When expert witnesses from the fields of psychiatry and psychology have sought to testify on issues of mind control, their testimony has been rejected by courts for not meeting the criteria of general acceptance in the relevant scientific community and/or not being rooted in valid scientific methods that produce consistent and reliable results. The various scientific theories and concepts that relate to destructive mind control — propaganda, indoctrination, thought reform, brainwashing etc. — do not have a basis in law. With the law lagging well behind the modern science of social influence, there is a pressing need to update the justice system to incorporate research that explains the psychology of exploitation and control as well as the identifying factors when these occur.
The BITE model of mind control provides a solution to this impasse. There is a clear preference in legal systems for scientific studies of a quantitative nature. Previous studies on thought reform and destructive mind control have all been qualitative, based on interviews and anecdote. In the author of the BITE model Steven Hassan’s PhD dissertation ‘The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control, Undue Influence, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Mind Control, Trafficking and the Law’, quantitative analysis to determine the efficacy of the BITE model in identifying unethical influence found its various items to have high reliability, validity and internal consistency. The BITE model, in conjunction with the Social Influence Model (SIM) developed by emeritus law professor, counselor and social influence expert Alan Scheflin, can be used to evaluate and explain situations of undue influence in legal cases. It allows for expert witnesses to deliver a detailed yet easy-to-understand analysis of social influence to judges and juries. The SIM provides the structure to present scientific data in court, and analyses several elements: the influence; the influencer’s motives; the influencer’s methods, the circumstances under which the influence occurred; and the influencer’s receptivity or vulnerability. In so doing, the BITE model further opens up the prospect of expanding the current narrow definition of undue influence.
Freedom of mind cannot define itself simply by what it stands against. Freedom of mind must also define itself by what it stands for. All human rights consist of negative freedoms (the right to be free from a violation of human dignity) and positive freedoms (a right to carry out an action or activity).
Freedom of mind is at the core of all other freedoms, and is fundamental to a working democracy. It is the foundation of all human rights and cannot be reduced to existing rights. It provides for other rights because, in order to decide what to think, feel, who one wishes to become and what one wishes to do, the mind must be free in the first place. Before the Chinese could exercise their freedom of speech and assembly, they had to first exercise their freedom of mind.
In 1982, Alan Scheflin published a journal article titled ‘Freedom of the Mind as an International Human Rights Issue’. He noted that ‘present international documents are insufficient to provide support for the fundamental human right of freedom of mind’. He urged for ‘stronger and more explicit protection for the mind [to] be written into international human rights documents’, adding that ‘the task will not be an easy one. International consensus will have to be obtained on such issues as what constitutes freedom of the mind… This is a formidable undertaking. And yet, when it comes to human rights protection of freedom of the mind, the world cannot afford to be in a defensive position’. On February 27, 2020, this vision moved a step closer when a group of mental health experts known as the World Mental Health Coalition led by psychiatrist Bandy X Lee issued a Declaration of the Freedom of Mind. Articulating the right to freedom of mind in a written declaration for the first time, the Declaration offers us a template, a blueprint and an initial document that can act as the basis for any future international human rights text. It opens up exciting new paths to afford freedom of mind a formal place in the international human rights architecture, including proposing the Declaration to the United Nations General Assembly for adoption.
Freedom of mind remains largely unknown to the general public and even among political activists, especially when compared to accepted human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of belief. There is an urgent need for a popular understanding of what exactly constitutes ‘freedom of mind’. Individuals need to know what a right constitutes if they are to make a claim for that right. Only by vigorously promoting and popularizing freedom of mind will we achieve this general understanding.
In the world we live in today, the predatory forces of authoritarianism and tyranny know no bounds. In a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, the UN Special Rapporteur for Health Issues Dainias Puras warned that global human rights-based policies and practices were ‘under threat from a growing movement of powerful global stakeholders who oppose universal human rights principles and argue that the post-war world order which established those principles has failed’. To quote once more the Hong Kong activists: ‘the threat of authoritarianism…is a global emergency every bit as pressing as the climate emergency. Both are existential threats. Climate change threatens life, while authoritarianism threatens to strip life of its dignity. To live as slaves to a political party, and in ignorance or fear, is not a life worth living‘. Only with an emphasis on freedom of mind first and foremost will the pushback against authoritarianism succeed. The Chinese activists stand at one of the frontlines of the battle to defend freedom of mind. Unless they are to remain unsung heroes, their noble efforts must be matched by global action. It is in in the collective interest of humanity that we do so.
More than stepping up to the challenge posed by rising authoritarian powers, the democratic world must take a very hard look inward. The challenge to our fundamental freedoms is as much internal as it is external. The rise of authoritarian predators into positions of political power across the democratic world should be sufficient a reminder. We must not lapse into the ‘us-versus them’, black-and-white thinking that characterizes authoritarianism. Lest it be forgotten, authoritarianism in its various forms is found in each and every human society. It is part of the human condition. The history of humanity has been the history of tyranny, but it need not always be. As whistle-blower and activist Edward Snowden reminds us, ‘it’s [the] clash between the authoritarian and the liberal democratic that I believe to be the major ideological conflict of my time — not some concocted, prejudiced notion of an East-West divide, or of a resurrected crusade against Christendom or Islam’. All of humanity now sits at the crossroads of a key historical moment. For so long as the democratic project is incomplete, the conflict with authoritarianism cannot be overcome. And that is why the human right to the freedom of mind is so important.
[i] Cited in Aminda M Smith, Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013, p.10.
[ii] Robert Guillain, ‘China Under the Red Flag, III: The “New Democracy”’ The Guardian, 3 January 1950.
[iii] According to one official dictionary in China, the term xǐ nǎo was “originally used by antagonistic elements to slander our country’s early 1950s campaign of thought reform for intellectuals. Later it entered into common usage’, cited in Aminda M Smith, Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013, p.10.
[iv] Moon later tried to “unbrainwash” North Koreans using techniques based upon the Chinese model with his Victory Over Communism program.
[v] In recent years, this digital censorship has been accompanied by sporadic targeting of Chinese netizens for using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and other censorship circumvention technology to bypass the Great Firewall’s restrictions.
