“Elizabeth Smart is back home. Her parents are happy, the world is happy. But is she happy?”
Certainly, I’ll never know for sure. But it is an interesting question, whose possible answer is being muddied by all the talk of “brainwashing” and “mind control” being tossed around.
Those concepts, which one might have thought a nostalgic relic of the days of Charlie Manson and Patty Hearst, are being called into service to address a question obvious to anyone who thought twice about the resolution of this public drama: Why didn’t Elizabeth make any attempt to run away, at any point? Why, even upon being found by her saviors, the police, did she refuse to admit she was Elizabeth Smart? In my favorite touch, her response to police insistence that, come off it, she was Elizabeth Smart, was a coyly Biblical “thou sayest.”
Of course, if someone takes control of someone else’s very survival and controls all the information that person receives—which seems to be what happened to Elizabeth vis à vis the strangely charismatic street freak “Emmanuel” (and is not unlike what happens in any strict religious family)—it becomes easier to implant certain ideas and make them stick. In other contexts, this is called “socialization,” but when we don’t like the ideas and thoughts thus influenced, it becomes mind control. Reason
Unlike this essayist, it is not simply because it offends my notion of free will that I question the ‘mind control’ assertions in the Smart case. While brainwashing exists, it simply may not be an applicable notion in this case, where Smart may have just chosen to be with her ‘captor’, period. Don’t I recall from news coverage of her disappearance that questions of her cooperation with her ‘abductor’ arose from the start?
I agree; it bears repeating that ‘brainwashing’ or ‘mind control’ are merely socialization where we don’t hold with the outcome. In a similar fashion, ‘sects’ or ‘cults’ are arguably merely groups sharing a common belief, perhaps with a charismatic leader, which we find objectionable. Sociologically, for example, is the U.S. Army distinguishable from a cult? Induction is sui generis to indoctrination. I have yet to see a good definition of these terms that is not relative or value-laden. Perhaps we can reach a consensus on the social dangerousness of various groups — do they use manipulative or misleading tactics to proselytize or recruit? do they prey on the weak? exploit recruits’ resources or labor? have a double standard of values for the leader(s) as contrasted with the rank and file? prevent members unsupervised freedom of expression? Perhaps we should be very careful not to call a group a ‘cult’ unless all or most of these criteria are met, and then to acknowledge that it is just a matter of social consensus in labelling a particular group offensive or undesireable.
It also bears noting that the kidnapping of members back from ‘cults’ to be ‘deprogrammed’ by their families may, arguably, do similar harm to that we claim the ‘cult’ did. At the start of my psychiatric career, I was a close observer of a case in which an adult child of professional, affluent Boston parents was kidnapped back from the Hare Krishnas when he was about to sign his trust fund over to the group as a donation. The parents had him committed involuntarily to a local psychiatric hospital, claiming he was unable as a result of mental illness (what mental illness?) to care for himself. They had hired a famous deprogrammer, so much in demand that there would be a delay before he could take on the care of their son, and they were hoping to keep the young man hospitalized pending that outcome. The psychiatric assessment he received at the hospital suggested he was not suffering from a mental illness although he had some deficiencies in social skills that probably made the structure of a religious discipleship useful to him! He successfully fought his commitment and planned to bring countersuit against his parents for kidnapping him. No one is suggesting it is easy, and I am not sure what I would do as a parent in a similar position, but, yes indeed, it does appear all relative.
