Do somebody know this book?
Robert Jay Lifton: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
Could you give me some description? How these mind control techniques is applicable to the Watchtowe-system?
'Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism'
by aqwsed12345 5 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Lady Lee
There have been many discussions based on this book. It is excellent even though it is old.
I have a discussion here
Mind Control Techniques and Jehovah's Witnesses http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/12/31235/1.ashx I also used it as the format for the You Tube excerpt from the video
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VM44
From the wiki article:
"A thought-terminating cliche is a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quellcognitive dissonance."
Perfect example used by the JWs is "Wait on Jehovah."
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Markfromcali
On a related note, I just read this in Jaron Laniers new book You Are Not a Gadget, under the heading Information Doesn't Deserve to Be Free. It sounds kind of like there has been issues along these lines on this forum, around the typical idea of free speech. In reading this it starts to make sense why there's a Mormon Transhumanist Association..
Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?
Information is alienated experience.
You can think of culturally decodable information as a potential form of experience.
Stored information might cause experience to be revealed if it is prodded the right way. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information.
Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants.
But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.
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sd-7
I did a thread or two on this one, as I read a significant portion of the book myself. Dr. Robert Jay Lifton did a study of several individuals who were held in Communist Chinese prisons. Some of the techniques and their psychological impacts were and are identical to what the Watchtower does to people.
A good summary is to be found, well, you could do a web search on it. Steve Hassan has a good summary of the main points in "Combatting Cult Mind Control".
If I locate my thread(s) on this, I'll post them here.
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sd-7
--Guess I only have one thread about it, just a small quote. May or may not be useful.
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