Mindf*ck 101: The Science of Brainwashing with Rebecca Lemov (Part 1)

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[00:00:28] Das Podcast ist für informational purposes only und nicht beachtet legal, medical oder mental health advice. Die views und opinions expressed do nicht necessarily reflect die official policy oder position of the Podcast und sind nicht intended zu malign any religion, group, club, organization, business, individual, anyone, oder anything. Ich bin Sarah Edmondson. Und ich bin Anthony Nippy Ames.

[00:00:56] Und das ist A Little Bit Culty. Cults are commonplace now. From fandoms to fads, we're examining them all. We look at what happens when things that seem like a great thing at first, go bad. Every week we chat with survivors, experts and whistleblowers for real culty stories told directly by the people who lived through them. Because we want you to learn a few things that we've had to learn the hard way. For example, if you think you're too smart to get sucked into something culty, you might be prime recruitment material. And who knows? You could already be in a cult.

[00:01:26] If you're not aware of your programming, you're probably being programmed. So keep listening to find out. We'll talk about all sorts of topics on the show, but be aware, this podcast might contain stories that could be alarming to some of our listeners. So please check our show notes for more detailed descriptions and take care of yourself. Subscribe to our Patreon for Thursday bonus episodes, Q&A, and all sorts of exclusive content. That's patreon.com slash a little bit culty. Welcome to season seven of A Little Bit Culty.

[00:02:08] That's what I like about cults. I get older. They just keep making more of them. That was Nippy doing Matthew McConaughey. Do you think I should do a whole episode? I'm like, how you doing? Nippy, when we were in NXIVM, used to do an impression of Matthew McConaughey. Of pretty much everyone. Well, everybody, but also Matthew McConaughey teaching Nippy's favorite module, Honesty and Disclosure. Can you do that for me real quick? Well, it's not going to be funny to people who don't understand the modules and stuff like that. Let's give us a little taste.

[00:02:37] Hey, how y'all doing? We're going to be doing Honesty and Disclosure. I could take my shirt off if that's better for y'all. If y'all want me to do a little... I think that would be better for all of us. Really? Mm-hmm. All right, all right, all right. And then do the Honesty and Disclosure. We're going to break out into breakout groups, 15 minutes each. That's 1-5. If y'all don't know 15 well. And what's the discussion? What's the discussion? You're talking about honesty? And Disclosure. Yeah, what were the questions? Yeah, okay. Hang in there. Nippy doesn't want to do it.

[00:03:06] I don't want to do it. I think we're going to start a petition. Get Nippy to teach us Honesty and Disclosure as Matthew McConaughey. It's not funny if you haven't taken the Honesty and Disclosure modules. Other than that, the audience is going to be like, hey, that's great. Inside jokes. Speaking of modules, we get into it. We do. We do. See how I segued? Segway Sarah is back. Segway Sarah is back. We get into it. We get into our modules. And I am positive that Keith Raniere studied- Korean brainwashing. Yeah.

[00:03:34] I am positive that Keith Raniere studied the brainwashing that was done in the prisoners of war, the troops- The Korean War. Yeah, that were captured from the American side and then brainwashed into Maoist Chinese communism belief system. I'm positive. And we get into that in this conversation about brainwashing, which is a word that certainly gets thrown around a lot. But what is it? What is it really? Our guest today will help us understand the science of brainwashing and how it has been used throughout history.

[00:04:04] Rebecca Lamov is an author and Harvard professor whose new book, The Instability of Truth, I love that title, explores the history of brainwashing and mind control. Today, we'll get into extreme examples like communist re-education camps and the Milgram electric shock experiments. Also, the Patty Hearst kidnapping and trial. You think you know what happened there? You probably do not. I certainly didn't. Rebecca will give us her thoughts about how Stockholm Syndrome is misunderstood and why brainwashing in general is hard to prove in court.

[00:04:32] This episode, we broke into two parts because it's that long and we probably could have done three to four and we will have her back for sure. So keep an eye out for the second half of our conversation with Rebecca. Next time, we get into Charles Manson and the CIA's MKUltra experiments and the air quotes soft brainwashing we face every day. We talk about brainwashing a lot on A Little Bit Culty. And so we're excited to get Rebecca's expert perspective. Let's welcome her to the show.

[00:05:16] Rebecca, welcome to A Little Bit Culty. It's great to be here. I'm a fan of your show. Thank you. Well, we're a fan of you. We've had your book in our... We've been listening to it over the weekend and we finished it too. The process was our headphones were going, did you hear the part where she's talking about book? Did you get to the part where she's... Oh my God, she just said my name. That's what's so weird. Okay. That must be weird. It's totally weird. It's gotta be weird that we're interviewing you now. Like I'm just listening and you're talking about brainwashing and like, how did Sarah Edmondson go from...

[00:05:46] I forget what you said exactly, but... Yeah. Well, yeah. I threw that in and then over time, I think I even wrote that when I'd just seen the New York Times piece. And then I started listening to your podcast and I watched the HBO documentary. And then I was like, was I being flippant or was that a fair reference to you? No, I think it's totally fair. We had the same... Like Nippy said, we had the same question. It's human. One of the best parts about having this podcast is that we get to talk to people like you and it helps us in our healing process.

[00:06:12] And just when I think I know everything there is to know about brainwashing, four years later and 200 guests later, I learned so much from your book. And Nippy's a history major. Nippy, you gotta start. He's talking about the history of the Korean War and... I've been telling her about Alan Dulles and Dean Atchison and she falls asleep at night. She's like, tell me a little more about the Cold War and to go to sleep. That's what puts me to bed at night. But your book was thoroughly gripping and we have tons of good questions for you. And validating. And validating. Yeah.

[00:06:42] Yeah. That's great to hear. And also, I was hoping it would be gripping because I hate... I just hate to be bored and I hate to impose a boring book on people, but it is the result of so many years of research that I just tried to bring out the parts that make me interested. Totally. And truthfully, had it not been for this whole experience, I probably would not have read such an academic book, especially. I would have, for sure. Nippy would have. This is not my genre normally, but it's... That's why I put you to sleep with that stuff. Right.

[00:07:12] But it is now. It actually has been recently. We've read a couple of books that I feel of people that if you're not in touch with, you should be. Mara Einstein, who wrote Hoodwinked. Oh, yeah. I've heard about her from your show, actually. And Jane Borden, who wrote Cults Like Us. This is such a friendly environment. And we saw that you recently did Dax Shepard and you did Joe Rogan, which are like two of our favorites as well. So... I'm looking forward to talking to you just because I do listen to your podcast, so it feels comfortable.

[00:07:41] And also the process of doing a bunch of interviews has made me feel less nervous. So even though the Joe Rogan podcast is huge and there's so many listeners, you don't really feel that because it's in this little studio. Yeah. But definitely, it took a lot of preparation. So this feels a lot more casual. Great. Let's just get right into it. With why brainwashing and what did you think it was at the beginning and how has that changed and then we just sort of lay the framework for this interview?

[00:08:11] What year did you start? Well, I think, so I keep asking myself that because it really came out of my dissertation, which would have been the year 2000 when I finished the dissertation. But actually I wrote an introduction and conclusion. My dissertation was really an exploration of social engineering and human engineering and how these kind of grand programs by social scientists to make a more efficient and efficient

[00:08:37] society by creating behavioral rules that would be followed. That people would want to follow the rules society needed them to follow. So there's this whole massive push in the middle of the 20th century to kind of extend behaviorism from rats to humans. Essentially is how I'd put it. And that's what my whole dissertation was about. And I thought, oh, I could write about brainwashing in the last chapter. I think I, no, actually this is when I was turning my dissertation into a book, but I sort

[00:09:06] of started to write about it in the dissertation. I was writing about Aldous Huxley, who's my favorite at the time, who's my favorite writer. He's just so good. And he kind of asked those questions all the time in a way. And in his book about a priest who was burned at the stake, Urban Grandier, he wrote this book called The Devils of Loudoun. And he really asked the question, how could somebody in the 17th century who was really

[00:09:31] not a great man, he was a middling man, he was seducing the women of this town, even as a priest, the daughters, and he was politically ambitious and he was constantly violating his vows as a priest. But when they came to accuse him of these spiritual crimes and his enemies prevailed, they burned him at the stake. He refused to confess, he sort of heroically refused to confess to things that he had not committed.

[00:09:57] And Huxley asked, why could somebody hold out that way when he said today nobody seems to be able to resist a kind of thought reform or brainwashing the demands in this because he said technology, the technologies of this behavioral and mind, these changes is much more perfected today. At least he seemed to suggest that in the book, The Devils of Loudoun. So I was interested in that. And then when I wrote my first book, I added a chapter on brainwashing.

[00:10:25] And that's when I heard about Louis Jolly on West for the first time. And I tried to go to his papers. So that was about in 2003. So brainwashing just seemed like an extreme example of behavioral manipulation or engineering, where the interesting part of it was that there's somehow an element of participation. So for people listening, they've probably heard us talk about brainwashing a fair bit on this podcast. We've tended to, partly because of the controversy around the word, which you get into in the

[00:10:54] book, steer towards words like mind control or indoctrination or undue influence. Why start with the term brainwashing? How did that come into your radar versus those other terms? And what did you think it was then? And what do you think it is now? That's a really good and big question. And it's an important one, too. I think brainwashing struck me at the beginning as really kind of ridiculous. It seemed like a leftover from the 70s. I was writing in the 90s and I was like, nothing could be more out of date.

[00:11:24] I'm always drawn by the thing that seems to be completely out of fashion or out of date that nobody thinks is worth talking about. And that was brainwashing. It was like a discarded, not only a discarded bad idea, but it was even discredited in its own time because people thought, well, that whole brainwashing crisis, if you even knew what it was from the Korean War and later in cults, it seemed like it must have been just hysteria or there was nothing really to it or people were overreacting.

[00:11:53] It seemed like it had no substance to it, but I thought it would be interesting to look into these cases and see what I found. So I started to use the words brainwashing and mind control together just because mind control strips away a little bit of the sensationalism, although it has other implications. It had other issues, too. Yeah, I mean, I'd say, you know, even in the early days of our NXIVM, it was thrown around as a ridiculous term. This is 2001, 2, 3.

[00:12:22] When we were still in. Yeah. Brainwashing was. Yeah, it seems like you've gone down a road of something that seemed obscure and now it's extremely relevant. Exactly. It seems, and that's what everyone says, it's so relevant. And people do use the word, it's come back into relevance, which is so fascinating. With a new meaning. Yeah, almost with seriousness, because for a while it was, that's the most ridiculous thing, or kind of a joke for a while. A joke, yeah.

[00:12:49] I even saw it in the New Yorker as a title, like brainwashed. It implies a kind of Cold War hysteria and something that could be dismissed. Oh, but it's kind of cute if you invoke it, because it invokes something that people used to worry about, but they don't worry about anymore. But then it seemed to, over time, creep back into seriousness and then surge as something people genuinely worry about. But they still seem to relegate it as something that happens to other people.

[00:13:18] Right, for sure. And what interested me over time and more and more over time is, isn't it more interesting as a lens? I mean, in a way, it's a stealth word that allows me to just have insight into processes we all are affected by and that affect us all, rather than a way to kind of exile people. Yeah, it also has a built-in kind of advocate for it, because it is something that you believe

[00:13:45] happens to other people, which fortifies your blind spot in your own brainwashing. You know, our tagline for our show is, if you're not aware of your programming, you're probably being programmed. And that, to me, is the arrogance and the hubris around you are not susceptible to brainwashing is the thing that ends up being the vehicle for brainwashing. Exactly. And very few people understand that, and I feel like it took me a long time to understand that, but I agree with your tagline completely.

[00:14:14] And I think at the beginning of the book, I talk about a conversation I had with a friend who said, she summarized what I was saying as, brainwashing erases itself. Like, to call somebody brainwashed is almost, in a sense, to think that you're exempt and therefore to be blind to it. It blinds you to it, which is such a strange phenomenon. Totally. And the way that we use it now, especially in this very divided time, which we also talk a lot about on the podcast, is, oh, you think differently than me.

[00:14:43] That's, you've been brainwashed. Oh, she's just brainwashed. She's brainwashed. And that's so problematic. Like, it's such a catch-all, horrible way to analyze these differences of opinions. Yeah, and dismiss someone else's perspective. I completely agree. And I even have trouble putting this into words sometimes because our environment is so polarized and it happens so quickly that you, you know, you hear things.

[00:15:08] I've heard people say, oh, 60 million people now need to be basically deprogrammed because they're brainwashed. At this point, it's the polarization itself and it's the effects of this. Those effects are what we need to examine, not this, not the brainwashed. You know, we need to look at the peculiarities of brainwashing, not just label an entire half of the world. It certainly doesn't solve a problem or move the ball forward by making comments like that.

[00:15:36] Yeah, it seems to feed into the problem. Let's go back a bit. So what did you learn when you started studying the Korean War POWs? Yeah, so at first I learned, I started studying the, there were especially 21 non, they're called the non-returnees and they were 21 POWs who were captured in Korea and elected not to return to the United States, US service members. And they went to, most of them went

[00:16:01] to China and went to live there. But before that, they made a declaration in front of the UN and in front of the world that they, they no longer, that they wanted to try communism and that they didn't want to return. And so it caused a lot of distress and self-examination in the US government. But when I looked at the men's stories, to the extent I could find them, and they were, there were some documentaries, there were, there were some oral histories, some of them

[00:16:27] wrote memoirs later, and they stayed in China for varying amounts of time. But just looking at their experiences more closely over the years made me, I felt like I understood it better over the years. At first I, I tended to want to treat them like cartoons and this lasted quite a while. Like I would teach their stories, but I wouldn't really take them seriously. I noticed I would sort of, uh... We've been on the other end of that, so we know.

[00:16:53] Yeah, so, yeah, so you know, you know, and I, and I'm guilty of it just because I suppose I didn't really want to know, or I didn't have, I don't know, you, you want them to stand for something. These are cases of X. But when you look into their stories, and when I really read the oral histories more deeply, and that's what I did for this book, is, uh, I really started to see the trauma, the way trauma was operating. And I, for the first time, noticed that none of the experts

[00:17:20] ever mentioned that they were traumatized. They would say, they never used the word trauma in any... That was one of my questions. Yeah. So that seemed curious. I mean, of course, trauma wasn't understood the same way in the 1950s or 60s, the way it is now. And they did start to use it a little bit in the 70s, but it was more like that wasn't really seen. It was just seen as this either. They had collaborated, and the three years they spent in incredible distress, and the conditions of unground, what I call ungrounding,

[00:17:49] were somehow not part of the analysis. Or if it was part of the analysis, it didn't shape how the brainwashing part was seen. Can you explain ungrounding for our listeners if they're not familiar with the term? Well, I kind of made, I made it up. It's basically, I mean, we all use it. It's really just a term that I used to describe successive shocks to the point of disorientation. And so it could, but what it's

[00:18:13] what I saw preceding what we would call, what Robert J. Lifton defined as ideological remolding or brainwashing. He said there are eight things that happen, including milieu control, but I think ungrounding precedes that. In order to have brainwashing or mind control work, you have to be ungrounded first. And I saw that in the men's stories. So they were pushed to their physical

[00:18:38] limits. Many of them lost half their body weight. They saw friends die just from sitting down. They would just simply die from exhaustion and malnutrition. Some of them died from something, one called death by hamburger, which was just, he just missed eating the food he had grown up with so much and was so malnourished that he simply died overnight. These were, some people died by

[00:19:04] falling into the latrine and not having the strength to climb out. And this was very demoralizing. There were social demoralization. There was moral decay of the fabric of unity between the men. They, there was racial tension over the years. They just endured so much. And I call it ungrounding because many of them were 17, 18, 19 year olds who, who signed up for what they didn't even understand. They thought they were signing up for a police action because that's what they called the

[00:19:33] Korean war at the beginning. And some of them said they expected to be driving like a patrol car around Korea. They didn't even know what Korea was. They were just very naive. And then they, they kept finding themselves in these extreme situations and being disoriented, sometimes being bombed by Agent Orange that was being dropped by their own troops. Sometimes some of them would be shot by

[00:19:59] their own side. They would be asked to commit war crimes and things like this that were on so many levels, demoralizing and ungrounding. This podcast wouldn't exist without our fantastic, supportive, generous patrons. Come find us over on Patreon. We're at patreon.com slash a little bit culty. Go there for bonus episodes, exclusive content, and the occasional zoom with our fan favorites from our past episodes.

[00:20:28] Subscribe now and join us. That's patreon.com slash a little bit culty. And now a brief message from our little bit culty sponsors. Remember when you support our sponsors, you support our podcast. You've heard from our sponsors. Now let's get back to a little bit culty, shall we? I was reading the book and, you know, I was kind of relating it to my experience. And ultimately I got

[00:20:56] to, you ever see a kid like fall off a slide or get hurt really, really bad and have that, what feels like the most traumatic cry ever. And it feels like as an adult, you're looking at it and going, oh, they just fell and hit themselves and got the wind out. But to them, that is ungrounding. And it's almost, I can remember being a kid and having something like that. And I felt totally disassociated until I had someone come and hug me and ground me again, if that makes sense.

[00:21:22] And I was thinking about these experiences, like you can have them 17, 18, 19 years of adult, where you feel like you're ungrounded. You don't know your reality. You don't know if you're going to be okay. And you need something to ground you right away. And a lot of times it's the safest or nearest belief system. Or a patch of grass. Right. And well, it's appropriately titled your book. You need something that feels like truth

[00:21:49] right away. It almost doesn't matter what it is. Ideally, if you're a kid, it's your mom or dad hugging you and grounding you back into the reality that you just got jolted out of by getting hit. But like in today's day and age where you need this truth to make informed decisions. Or in the prison in a war time, they need- It's a little bit scary and you need something to cling to to feel okay to make an informed decision. I mean- They got hugged by the Chinese. Those are the parallels that I kind of was getting as I was reading your book. I was like, oh yeah,

[00:22:18] this is a very, very, you can just throw shrapnel into someone's central nervous system with a different opinion. And they're ungrounded for a minute and they come back and they go, okay, no, I need to feel better. You're bad or something like that. And that's a, it's a slight one. But if you can do that by a thousand times through social media or how you're informing someone over the course of time, you can, you can see the process very clearly if you, I don't know, you know, take some time to figure it out. And that's the best way I could see that the Korean war one is it

[00:22:47] like, that's extreme young kids, brains aren't formed and like, wow, that's pretty- You could see how it happened the way you laid it out. It's practical how you relate it out. Yeah. It's very practical. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. The successive shocks don't have to be huge, but in this case they were. So that's why these young men's experiences are helpful to us now and were horrendous for them to experience. One of them, Morris Wills. So when the, you're right too, Sarah, that when the Chinese

[00:23:16] came, it was like a hug in a way because they started feeding them adequate food. It was still a difficult situation, but they were not dying overnight. And it was better in some ways, at least in terms of their, their just existential survival. But they started a kind of experiment seeing whether Maoists thought reform would actually work on American GIs. And they especially separated out

[00:23:41] the African-American prisoners because they thought they might be more, they were just interested in that. And also the, the GIs of lower rank rather than the officers, the officers they treated somewhat differently. They separated them out. They also broke the, you know, rendered the social fabric more that way of the military where they would have had someone to ground them, which would have been a superior officer. They were taken away. So they're kind of left rudderless. And then

[00:24:09] sometimes like Morris Wills described how, well, he liked to play volleyball. And one thing they also did was introduce these Olympic games, but also they introduced this kind of lecture system, a kind of way that they had to confess into journals. They added journaling to it. And suddenly the men are sitting and listening to lectures. They said, you could feel yourself freeze just sitting on these stools, listening to Chinese academics, tell them about communism. That didn't work very well. But

[00:24:39] when they did have to, everyone got journals in about 70 to eight, I think something like a huge percentage of the men in the POW camp surprisingly had these cute little journals and they had to talk about their childhood and write about things that had happened that upset them. And this might have been the first time that none of these young people would have been exposed to psychoanalysis or therapy, or that

[00:25:04] would have not been part of their world. And suddenly they're half there. And what could be more surreal than to be north of the Yalu River in Chinese territory, being kind of forced to write out the story of your life, your beliefs, what was wrong with them, any flaws you could find, any ways that you had sinned or, you know, that you had made mistakes or things like that. So they would have you basically work up a confession, go through the struggle process, which could be brutal, a kind of interrogation.

[00:25:33] And if you were able to come to some sort of embrace or reconciliation, or if you were able to reconcile yourself to the communist thinking, and even the books they provided, you would suddenly get maybe a treat like warm buns, or you would get, they would start to be friendly to you. They would open up certain rooms to you that weren't open before. You could sit before a fire and read Charles Dickens, because that was considered acceptable. And suddenly your life got a lot better.

[00:26:02] I'm looking at my notes here from reading your book, and it says, friendly crumbs, same in NXIVM. There were so many parallels to Korean, and please don't get me wrong, our experience was obviously not nearly as traumatic as what happened to the Korean war, prisoner of war victims, just to be clear for any listener who thinks I'm making that comparison. Obviously, I just saw some parallels in the way that, yeah, like the friendliness was like,

[00:26:28] we were given crumbs of love and affection and attention that would, at least for me, I don't think it really worked on Nippy in the same way, because that wasn't his MO. Well, also, I think he was trying to sleep with you, and he was doing stuff like the negging, and the crumbs were the way he did it. I just, I wasn't targeted that way. Nippy was targeted in different ways. But that, and also, this is the first time, even though I thought I'd really understood how braid washing and unfreezing and freezing and all that

[00:26:53] worked, seen that the technique of the Maoist thought reform, specifically, what is the term? Oh, discussion, criticism, unity. This is what I think you'll find really interesting with our intensives and writing out your story and the journaling and all that. But specifically, anytime we had a new topic to discuss, there'd be a discussion. So like five people in a group led by a coach, you discuss it for 10 to 20 minutes. You know, what is good? What is bad? What is right?

[00:27:20] What is wrong? All these different philosophical conversations. And then you'd have Nancy Salzman on the video sort of saying what it was, what the definition was, the working definition, just because it's just a working definition. You don't have to accept it. But it was also, it was the way that it was delivered. It was either different than what you just all decided, or it was the same, but it was like this kind of, ah, like, okay, we're going to agree it's this. Like, it felt really good to have something to hold on to. Whereas before, when you're discussing,

[00:27:47] you're like, wait, what is good even? Like we say, oh, that's good. But where does that come from? Why do I believe that? Why is something good? Is it good because someone told me it's good? Or is it good based on morality or because it feels good? Like, what is the definition of good? Right? So there's a lot of destabilizing. Totally destabilizing. And I remember just feeling often that I was like floating. And the next thing they used to call it, once we learned how to do this with people, being in your donut. Okay. This, I don't know why they call it being like you're like, I always pictured I'm in the

[00:28:13] middle of a life raft and I'm trying to grab onto it because I'm like, I was so destabilized. And then we'd come together after the result and it was unity. And it was like this over and over and over again, all these different topics. Yeah. I mean, there are descriptions that sound so much like that. And this happened still after the POWs went to China and some of them were lucky enough to get funneled into a four-year education. So went to Beijing University, learned Chinese.

[00:28:40] So in some ways their lives were okay, but they had to continually resubmit to ideological, to re-education because Mao felt that this work was never done. This might be similar to NXIVM 2, where it just has to be continually reinforced. And he said, even I have to go back and refresh my ideological commitment because it's never constant. So what happened with Morris Wills,

[00:29:04] he said, the process was like, he said, first, when you're undergoing struggle, you go in thinking that you've understood something and then they reveal that you really haven't. And you have a lot more to many, many things that you've done that you need to confess and make amends for. But he said, after a while, you crawl and you feel like a dog and you have to get redeemed from there. Once you sort of

[00:29:30] completely are in self-abnegation, you're in a position then to be redeemed by the group and reunified. And he said, then that's when the exhilaration comes from sort of that destruction of self and then the re-embrace by the group. So it happens predictably. And it doesn't even have to be intentional necessarily. It somehow seems to emerge in these groups. All the LGATs, all the large group awareness trainings, I feel do some version of what you

[00:29:58] just described. You have to come up with a language too. The language thing, you know, and coming up with the words is if words are tools of thought, then I'm informing your thoughts and thoughts inform behavior. So you have to do that at least to a certain extent. That seems true. Yeah. You don't need to have red mouth or be mouth necessarily. People sometimes ask this to have all cult leaders or whoever, even in controlling relationships, do they know what

[00:30:25] they're doing? Because even with like the case of Patty Hearst in the seventies, not to jump ahead, but the leader, Sinkyu or Donald DeFreeze, he would often say to her, you're not brainwashed, are you? I don't know if you had this too. Just a real concern that someone who's doing the brainwashing doesn't want to think that they're doing that. They want it all to appear spontaneous. Likewise, the Chinese just wanted real confessions, but they knew, but your, your guilt was for

[00:30:51] ordained. So you merely had to find the guilt in yourself that agreed with their pronouncement that the dogma, the state is never wrong. The other thing I really related to, I think probably more so than you, but you tell me if I'm wrong. Cause I was definitely more obedient and like wanted the gold stars and like, you know, the feeling the special and going up the stripe path and all that stuff. But I very much have a feeling remembering of what you talk about

[00:31:19] also really eloquently in your book, the idea of my true self, my authentic self, and then my cult self, like this mask that I had on. And then things that I was seeing that I didn't agree with, like people staying up all night for volleyball to meet Keith. And like, I just wouldn't do that. Like there were certain things I wouldn't do, but I wouldn't ever say, I'm not going to do that. Like I didn't exert my free will. I more like sort of pretended that I was going to like, maybe I'll be there or like, Oh, I'm not feeling well. I'm going to like, I kind of went along with

[00:31:44] it to a degree. Right. And as, as things got more severe and extreme in NXIVM, I was going along with things like, okay, sure. Master slave. Okay. Like, all right. It's like a sorority, fine. But then it wasn't until you laid out the case of Patty Hearst, which I thought I also knew a lot about, which I didn't. And her sort of inner decision to go like, if I'm going to survive, and obviously her case is the way where she's in the closet, she's been kidnapped,

[00:32:09] she's been raped, but she knows if she's going to survive, she has to go along with what they're saying. Otherwise they're going to kill her. Yeah. And she doesn't have to just go along, but she has to really embrace it. She has to actually convert herself if she's going to. And it reminded, yeah, it reminded me of many things, but I think people are, people blame her for that. Yeah. Yeah. She says, I had to really become a soldier in the army of the

[00:32:35] Symbianese Liberation Army if I wanted to live and not just pretend because she had to lie even to herself and that became her truth. But it's hard to find public forgiveness for that. And that's another thread I found in common was the POWs also had no forgiveness and they knew that no one would ever understand because they even wrote poetry on the ship coming back to the US saying, yes,

[00:33:01] I was badly wounded. Yes, I was tortured and I went through things, but no, you'll never understand to this kind of a imagined audience. And it was true. Very, very few people did it. It's heartbreaking. To me, that is the biggest thing the populace does not understand is coercion. Until it happens to you. Until it happens to them. Yeah. I think culturally we're getting a little better at it because it's happening to more people. Unfortunately, I think that's why there's somewhat, I don't want to call it a movement,

[00:33:31] but people are more sensitive and empathetic to the coercive aspects. And our case was, thanks to more Rapinza, was someone who I think she identified it when she saw it in the New York Times and was like, no, this isn't, this is something that needs to be addressed. And then I think it's going forward and you're seeing a little bit of the language in the Diddy case and some of these other cases as well, because the question of why didn't you just leave? It's almost like cue the insensitive assholes. Why didn't you just leave? And sure enough,

[00:33:59] they're starting to happen with the Diddy case and they're pushing back, I think, pretty successfully in terms of explaining that because he had a lot of power to coerce. That's a really good point because things are changing now. But that case, when I read about it in your book, I was so mad when I read about the prosecution's witness. Can you tell us a little how that would not have happened in the post hashtag Me Too movement? The expert witness for the government in the Patty Hearst case? Yes.

[00:34:27] So this was a psychiatrist, Dr. Joel Fort. So first they had all the great brainwashing experts defend Patty Hearst and say she was brainwashed. They also were hesitant to use the word brainwashing. They all said it doesn't really have any scientific merit, but this is the defense we're going with. And they tried to make a scientific version of it that didn't involve conversion. And then the government brought on their key expert witness, which was Dr. Joel Fort, who just basically said she went along

[00:34:56] with this. When I interviewed her, she never used the word rape. And he said that she enjoyed herself. You could tell because she moved agilely when she committed the robbery carrying the semi-automatic weapon that she moved so quickly. She couldn't have possibly been brainwashed because her actions were so efficient and she did such a good job. That can be interpreted as brainwash because she was so efficient. She had to do a good job. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:35:24] That's what she said. And she also, interestingly, she said it felt like a dream, but in a dream you can also act agilely. It's just she, yeah, it was, well, he was saying we don't need to listen to any of these experts. Actually, he kind of made an argument that there was no psychological level that was necessary to understand what had happened to Patty Hearst merely that she, the fact that they had found a gift that was given to her by Willie Wolf, who was the first man who raped her in the

[00:35:54] closet. He was a college student himself before he joined the Symbionese Liberation Army. And he probably was a lot kinder to her than others there. And it's a complicated thing, but she kept a necklace he gave her with a Toltec image on it. And when the prosecution found that in her purse during the trial that she had surrendered when she was arrested, they felt that was the key piece of evidence that would show that she was what they said, a willing bandit and that she had participated.

[00:36:22] And in a sense, they almost accused her of masterminding this. She became almost the leader of this group, they argued, just because she was so famous and prominent. And so they won their case. And she only was able to come out of prison because she was eventually pardoned. Do you think that would have happened now, this exact case? I mean, obviously you can't have the same, all this political and socioeconomic, all the things that are happening to make that possible.

[00:36:50] But do you think we'd have the same result this year? I think she would be, if they went with that defense of brainwashing, I think she would continue to be found guilty. And public polls have, when there was a PBS special done about her about 10 years ago, it was a multi-series, you know, it was a long series apparently. And afterwards they polled the PBS audience who you'd think would be, maybe you'd imagine would be sympathetic. And they all,

[00:37:14] 84% said she should have been found guilty or she was rightfully found guilty. So there was not much sympathy. I think your case with NXIVM is a real landmark case because, but, you know, Raniere wasn't found guilty of, I mean, it was just so smartly prosecuted. With Rico? With Rico and not with some sort of psychological manipulation, although obviously that was there.

[00:37:40] Or being a brainwasher or that just doesn't legally, for many reasons, it doesn't seem to get any purchase. For more context on what brought us here, check out my memoir. It's called Scarred, the true story of how I escaped NXIVM, the cult that bound my life. I narrate the audio version, and it's also available on Amazon, Audible, and at most bookstores. And now a brief message from our Little Bit Culty sponsors. And remember, when you support our sponsors, you're supporting this podcast.

[00:38:16] Break time's over, people. Let's get back to this episode of A Little Bit Culty. It's a good one. When you studied Patty Hearst, what do you think is most misunderstood? And what did you think about Stockholm Syndrome before and after? Stockholm Syndrome? So the thing I know about Stockholm Syndrome actually comes from a friend and colleague of mine named Abigail Judge, who's a therapist who's worked with one of

[00:38:40] the most famous, infamous, tragic cases of abduction. A young woman who, when she was, I think, 11 was basically kidnapped off the road by a man in a white van who stunned her and dragged her in and then kept her for 25 years, made her bear his children. She was abused. And she's one of these cases when she was finally, she finally managed to be rescued from this prison that she'd been living

[00:39:10] in. You know, just a horrendous case. And Abigail worked with this woman as a client. And she said, one of the worst parts of it was the label of Stockholm Syndrome applied to what had happened to her. People would say, oh, she only stayed because she was a young woman and she came to sympathize with this rapist who kept her in a room for 25 years and also abused her children. They would say, that's because she was a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. And this was very upsetting just to

[00:39:40] someone who had merely made the only thing she had done was what anyone would do, which was attempt to live through this. So Dr. Judge drew my attention to a lot of literature that was questioning the concept of Stockholm Syndrome. I think it's rising in popularity as a descriptor of what happens to people just because it seems a little bit better than brainwashing. And a lot of people immediately just sympathize with this idea. And it seems like a fascinating story.

[00:40:09] But I think as far as I can tell, the literature on it is not very convincing. It's a bit like brainwashing. It's just a new set of terms that is now being applied. So with Patty Hearst, I would say, I would say it doesn't really get to the heart of what happened to her to say that she was sympathizing with Donald DeFries and that her sympathies were won over by Willie Wolfe or the various group members or even the Harris's that she was stuck with. She was stuck with this quarreling,

[00:40:38] unhappy married couple for two and a half years on the lam in Pennsylvania or driving cross country when they were forcing her to continue to write her autobiography, make these confessions. They were beating her up periodically. But people would say later, well, she had ample opportunities to escape. They always say this even with abductees. Yeah. Well, also it would seem to be a good strategy to make friends with your perpetrator.

[00:41:07] Exactly. It's the only strategy. At least superficially just to have things go. Yeah. It made me think of Elizabeth Smart. Elizabeth Smart's a perfect other example of that where, you know, the same idea. And yeah, it's amazing. So Stockholm Syndrome is unhelpful for them. So I learned that just from hearing this through my friend and who came to lecture in my class as well. But I think some people find it useful just as a way to sort of thought experiment, just something that seems to

[00:41:37] make sense of a phenomenon that is otherwise inexplicable. Right. And you'd never understand until you were in those shoes. Otherwise you need to actually have an experience. Yeah. An unwanted experience. Yeah. I definitely feel like Nippy and I are lucky with the vow because it really helped people kind of bring them along what the beginning was like, like what we thought we were building. It was good about it at first before shit hit the fans so that people could put themselves in our

[00:42:06] shoes and have empathy and relate to where they maybe had been led astray or conned or doomed in other, maybe less extreme examples and have more of a, less of a rubbernecking or judgy perspective and more of a understanding. Yeah. So I think in that way, the vogue for cult documentaries, especially when they're good documentaries, is a great thing. The people, people's fascination, which can have a little bit of a rubbernecking

[00:42:38] quality. But at the same time, there's always the potential that someone will come to understand it. Like there's actually a wonderful one on the Sarah Lawrence cult. Yeah. Sarah Lawrence abuse by... That one's very close, very close to how ours works. Same age, same age group, same kind of... Life coaching kind of vibes. It wasn't dorm room. He wasn't living in a dorm room, but you can make a case that Keith Raniere's lifestyle never transcended dorm room living.

[00:43:09] Could not agree more with your description of Wild Wild Country and how it kind of missed the mark about actually how bad things were. And they missed the opportunity to say like, by the way, Osho was sterilizing his women so he could have sex with them and they wouldn't get pregnant. Like, why isn't that in the documentary? I didn't even know that. Yeah. I'm going to send you our episode with Aaron Robbins, who's the heiress, speaking of

[00:43:34] heiresses of the Baskin Robbins company, may be familiar with their ice cream. She was a young woman who got caught up in that and she was one of his women. She was sterilized so that she wouldn't get pregnant. Yeah. There's so much manipulation of fertility with... You see that theme a lot, but yeah, I thought Wild Wild Country became so popular among people I know. And with this kind of... Not just... It wasn't even rubbernecking. It's just a real fascination and almost a vicarious

[00:44:03] delight and somehow... Because it's aesthetically quite beautiful, but I think it comes pretty close to romanticizing the group and many of the people interviewed seem to not fully have worked through. I mean, they seem pretty affiliated with it still. And it is difficult, I know, afterwards to take apart what was good or to find... To even allow yourself to value what was good about this experience that was so

[00:44:31] destructive, ultimately. But I think that hadn't been done at all by many of the... Many of the people seem to be still adherent. So it drove my husband crazy and me, well, we just a little bit, just because it did become so popular. And because, as I've mentioned in other interviews, he grew up in the Bay Area. So he was just saying, like, they were walking around with, like, fully armed. This wasn't some... You know, they may have

[00:44:57] perceived it as bringing them incredible, exhilarating experiences and sexual liberation and lovely purple outfits. But it really was incredibly disturbing. It wasn't just that one person went off the rails and it was an otherwise great thing they had going. I still meet people who read Osho and... Yeah. It's just... And in a way, a documentary like that does a disservice when they don't present a full-on-one picture. I totally agree.

[00:45:26] Yeah. I think there should be a documentary made about the cult wars, which we learned... I mean, I've known about it since we entered this space, which we didn't mean to, but we did. And... But... And here we are. Yeah, here we are. And, like, we're going to have to deal with the residuals of that sometimes, but I didn't know that much about it. And yours... First, we heard about it in more detail with Jane Borden's book, Cults Like Us, who you definitely need to connect with. And then now

[00:45:55] through yours, what's your... Like, I know you can't summarize the whole thing now because there's, you know, a whole chapter on it, but, like, if you could kind of summarize it, what do you think that was really about? And what's your main takeaway after you've done all this research? I'm really happy you asked about it because nobody asks about it. And I think it's so fascinating that the cult experts... I mean, one thing is that cult experts often get drawn into these battles.

[00:46:21] And what essentially happened was that I trace in the book how the Korean War experts also reappeared very publicly when cults became a crisis in American culture in the 60s and 70s, especially after the Manson murders. And one of the most prominent experts to come forward was Margaret Singer. And for a variety of reasons, it's kind of interesting. Most of the male experts who had been

[00:46:46] working for the military back in the Korean War didn't really put themselves forward as much as experts. And they didn't... Aside from Patty Hearst, they didn't testify as much. But Margaret Singer did, and she built this thriving career. And she started to help ex-members of various groups win huge settlements in court and just massive findings of damage. And so at a certain point, a bunch of religious studies scholars and historians of religion

[00:47:16] basically tried to take her down reputationally and attacked her arguments that she was using in court, which I would summarize as Singer was arguing that people who enter cults become disabled very quickly, rationally disabled and cognitively unable to make a decision. And therefore, they're not responsible for what happens to them. And she, I mean, she has many sophisticated and excellent definitions of cults and things like that. But that part of her argument

[00:47:45] was subject to criticism. And ultimately, the APA convened committee, and there was a big battle, very complicated. But she ultimately ended up losing. And all of the decisions she had been instrumental in helping come about were mostly reversed, except in one or two cases when children were involved. And so she suffered reputational damage. She said she lost something like $15 million.

[00:48:11] She attempted to sue the APA and the scholars. So it was really a scholarly kerfuffle, but with real world consequences for both for Margaret Singer and for people who wanted to use the courts to get recompense for what had happened to them. It was a real setback during the 80s and 90s. And this argument was fine. I think the brainwashing argument was pretty much killed in this, through the cult wars. And it, you know, it was already struggling, but it really died after that.

[00:48:41] And Singer herself felt extremely upset. She was very upset. She sued and she lost that suit as well for the livelihood that she had had damaged from it. So wild. And it really, I understand sort of why it happened now in terms of like the lack of scientific, not that it's not can be proven, but it can't be proven with the method that they want it to be proven with, I guess. Is that a good summary? Like it's not... Well, emotional abuses are hard to prove.

[00:49:10] Yeah, I think it speaks to the incredible complexity of what happens in the process. And I do believe brainwashing is real, whether you want to use that term or not. I think something, you know, people can be changed by their circumstances. We all are all the time. Not all of us find ourselves in exactly these circumstances. And there are many reasons why, but in terms of what standards are for a courtroom, the incredible complexity,

[00:49:39] the deep emotional, the emotional aspects of what are happening don't hold up to legal scrutiny. Right. Even when you bring in the best experts in the world. Rebecca, I don't think we have the outcome with Keith Ranieri if he wasn't branding his initials on people. Right. I think those are the physical manifestation of the emotional abuses. And I think once you saw those, you had to go in and say, okay, this isn't what people signed up for. What was the process

[00:50:07] of getting them there? And it was just a textbook emotional abuses. And I think once you see the physical, people give credence to the emotional aspect of it much more. And even still, that's not what he went to jail for. Right. That's so true. Yeah. No, they got him on something else. Yeah. None of that was what convicted him, but it did work in court. But I think that's very

[00:50:32] true. And probably if he hadn't taken that step, he might not even be. I mean, if he hadn't gone so far as to make a physical representation summary of his program in that extreme form, it wouldn't have been visible because a couple of things tend to be invisible to people, which is emotional abuse. And also, I think social dynamics tend to be mostly invisible.

[00:50:58] The power dynamics too. Like you look at the cult of one, you know, if there's a man with, I think we were talking about it in the Johnny Depp case, like just the fact that he is who he is presenting himself, he's going to be more powerful than someone. The social dynamic that he has with whatever woman he approaches. Whatever you say about her and what she did, that's just the dynamic. That is a setup of it. And just a thought, just to go back for a second, what you're talking about, it reminded me that something I recognize in your book, when you're talking about the Milgram experiment,

[00:51:26] which we don't have to get into because I want to, I want people to read your book as well. But this, tell me if I'm saying this right, basically setting somebody up to, oh no, I'm going to butcher it. Can you just say, can you just quickly describe it? Yeah. The Milgram experiment involves a scientist at Yale named Stanley Milgram, who set up a situation in what he called his social interaction library. And he, and he put out an ad and people volunteered to take part in an experiment, which they thought

[00:51:53] was about learning. And so they came into the laboratory and they were presented with a scenario. They were paired with someone who was their partner and they had to draw lots. So the person coming in thought I could have been the learner or I could have been the teacher. After they draw lots, one is assigned to be learner and one is assigned to be teacher, but it's always the participant who becomes the teacher. And they're asked to give shocks and to

[00:52:18] electrically shock this nice man they've been paired up with if he gets the answer wrong to a series of simple word pairs. And so the scenario as recorded in this famous documentary is the learner is asked a series of questions. He can, he is scripted to get them wrong because it turns out he's a Confederate of the experimenter. And each time this wrong answer happens, the subject of the experiment has to shock him on an

[00:52:44] increasing scale up to the, as the instrument goes to XXX extreme danger. And as the person is escalating their shocks, the man in the other room is heard screaming, pounding, begging to be let out, and finally going silent and slumping against the wall. That's all you hear is silence at the end. And when Milgram started this experiment, when he designed it,

[00:53:09] he asked other experts how far they thought people would go in shocking someone they didn't know as part of a simple learning experiment. And most of his colleagues said, oh, only one to 2% of the population will do this at all. Nobody will obey these orders. Nobody will carry through just, it'll only be the psychopaths who will do this. But actually Milgram found two thirds of his subjects went at least to the serious level of delivering shocks.

[00:53:38] So wild. And probably one of the most famous experiments now, right? In terms of regards to human behavior and inflicting harm and group thinking, what people will do in certain circumstances. And the memory that came up when I was reading it is that you talked about a lot of the teachers that when pressing the shock would feel so uncomfortable that they would wiggle and maybe laugh at the beginning. And I remember that that happened for me in the branding, how I was like trying to make light of it all. And like one of the things I said, and this is regards to the physical manifestation of the abuse.

[00:54:08] I remember saying, guys, people think that we're a cult. Like we knew that. I mean, that was an accusation we were well aware of. Like this is literally pun intended, not good branding for our personal development program to be branding ourselves. Guys, like let's think about this for a minute. And I can laugh about it now because it's where we are in our healing. But that's crazy that he thought that that would be a good idea. I don't know how he was playing out that business model.

[00:54:37] If you like the show, please consider supporting us by giving us a rating, a review and subscribe on iTunes. Cults are commonplace now and we're looking at them all and every little bit helps. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss an episode. All right, everybody. That was part one. Come back in a few days on Thursday or earlier on Wednesday, if you're over on Patreon for an early bonus drop for part two with Rebecca Lemov.

[00:55:07] A Little Bit Culty is a Trace 120 production. Executive produced by Sarah Edmondson and Anthony Nippy Ames in collaboration with Amphibian Media. Our co-creator is Jess Temple-Tardy.

[00:55:31] Audio engineering by Red Cayman Studios and our writing and research is done by Emma Diehl and Kristen Reeder. Our theme song, Cultivated, is by the artists John Bryant and Nigel Aslan.