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Brainwashing?
Is there really a kind of manipulation in which one person dictates to another how he should think, feel, desire, and act and gets him to assume the message as absolute truth and carry out everything commanded? If an advertiser proclaims that a particular cleaning product is a marvel, will a person buy it? If an opinion leader declares that so-and-so is a good politician, will a person, without thinking, vote for him? And if the priest affirms that such a desire is evil in his sermon, will the church member immediately assume it as well, erasing all personal inclination in this regard?
Believing that “brainwashing” exists is considered a “critical to the system” position. In my opinion, it is a mechanistic view of human reactions, quite similar to the one we apply when we think of Pavlov’s dog, which secretes gastric juices just by hearing the bell that used to ring every feeding time. However, I dare to say that both Pavlov’s dog and each of us, when we receive such external signals, keep our subjectivity always well awake and active, just as we do in every interaction with the world.
This article intends not only to deny such manipulation but to review what “being manipulated” really comprises. Certainly, it does not consist of substituting my subjectivity for another’s; in fact, we can say that manipulating is the opposite: instead of making my inner being weak, whoever manipulates me is dedicated to fattening it, pleasing it, and appeasing it. Yes, manipulation works because it tends to emphasize things I want to hear, show me things I want to see, put in front of me something I would like to have and sell me something I desire; in short, it offers me a version of life that I like (or that I dislike, but with which I agree).
It is not that my whole being becomes implicated in that worldview I adopt when manipulated. My inner being might agree with a thousand more things than the manipulative demagogue shows me. That being of mine is open and immensely encompassing. In it is fulfilled Buzz Lightyear’s “To infinity and beyond!” (This exclamation may even fall short). My inner self can view the world from any perspective. “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me,” said Terence, a Roman playwright of the 2nd century BC. However, the manipulator, with his constant preaching (well planned, well produced, and issued at the perfect times), gradually pulls me into the limits that suit him, impelling me to develop only those interests and attributes that benefit him.
None of those interests and attributes are false. On the contrary, they are authentic aspects of myself, so much so that I can put them into practice whenever I want: I can look externally and enjoy what advertising offers me. The values it favors, I can practice and go with them in the world (especially in environments where people succumb to the same manipulation strategies). Of course, I will always feel unsatisfied in that narrow world, and there will always be a disparity between my human potential and what the environment offers. However, the manipulator also contemplates this. He substitutes quantity for quality, offering me a constant rain of goods and values that will not let me stop and look at myself.
Long history
None of this dates just from the era of communication that began in the last century. Human beings have always taken advantage of what others reveal about themselves. Attentive to the signals that others inevitably emit, we note their desires and fears and use this information to approach them; positive feelings, we use to encourage them; negative feelings, we emphasize those also to best suit our purposes. The latter is what Yago does to the jealous Othello when he convinces him that his wife is unfaithful. It’s what “TV artists” do when they trick us into buying a shampoo they would never use. It is what news platforms do by filling us only with opinions with which we agree, helping us to think that the whole world reduces to what seems important to us (I, for example, have been obsessed for weeks with the idea that everyone in this world is enormously interested in the future evolution of artificial intelligence when only a few of us are likely to share that concern.)
At the beginning of our history, this type of manipulation involved exalting all commonalities: the search for essential goods, the fear of death, and the perception of the world’s imperfection. In more recent centuries, at the beginning of modernity, manipulation began to affect more personal needs, supported (it is regrettable to say) by the emergence of democracy, which gave a special place to the individual under the understanding that “each head is a world” (of course, as long as none of those heads exceeded their powers, at the risk of the guillotine making them come to their senses).
In the twentieth century, when all excess has been placated, knowledge from the human sciences (e.g., sociology and psychology) was added to fortify techniques such as marketing; it became an open letter to all who wanted to investigate the intimate inclinations of each inhabitant. Finally came today, when all that knowledge of each person’s needs, from the common to the specific, has become integrated into technologies meticulously programmed to record the digital inputs everyone leaves in their electronic devices to generate an algorithm whose mission, as we have seen, is to create small personal worlds that suit the commercial market.
Teaching is sharing the need to learn
Ideally, a school would be a space to counteract this powerful outside influence that assaults us beyond our control. School could broaden our spectrum of interests to realize that besides the vision our parents and the media have given us, many other points of view exist about what happens in the world.
That is what would ideally happen, I insist. In reality, things can be pathetic. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset gave us a shocking point of view more than a hundred years ago: “The student is a human being to whom life imposes studying sciences of which he has not felt real need. To be a student is to be forced to take an interest in what does not interest you.”
Linking this idea (quite familiar to all of us) with what I have been saying about manipulation, I would like to propose to the illustrious Spanish thinker a minor adjustment: it is not that the things that teachers teach are of no interest to their students (remember the passion with which we learned to write and read or to recite the first multiplication tables!). Perhaps what happens is that, unlike advertising, the school teaches us things we cannot bring to practical life (except techniques we will exercise in a profession). We said that if an advertisement excites us for some clothing or perfume, we can go to the store and buy them. And if a speech encourages us to follow specific values, we can take to the streets and act on them. However, concerning school, it is as if they show us a photograph of delicious delicacies not served anywhere or amusement parks that do not exist in the real world.
I think there is a misunderstanding behind all this. The school has long focused on sharing knowledge products, not knowledge processes. They are two different things; the latter can be brought to life, and the former cannot (except, as I say, in specific technical contexts). Teaching science, mathematics, grammar, history, or any other marvel of human creativity and understanding cannot be limited to showing facts and formulas, i.e., conclusions. Teaching must include the human life involved with them; it must also present us with human beings exactly like us who have lived these processes of knowledge. To bring the latter to real life, the student must visualize himself participating in it. He needs to feel himself present in the ability to suspect, investigate, and discover how the different vertices of human wisdom relate to him.
And now comes what, in my opinion, is the best of all this. To show us human beings that we are involved in knowledge, the teacher can tell us stories of wise men, and their passions, give examples, and describe surprising ideas and discoveries. However, the teacher will never have a better or more immediate example than himself. To teach knowledge describing the person who seeks it, the teacher, is to present the most experienced and reliable witness. Before expounding on any subject, the teacher reveals himself, letting his students see how learning and knowledge got sown in him and how, sometimes, as these flourish, they rip open the narrow vision of the world he learned before, impelling him to expand to foreign territories.
Teaching is, in essence, sharing the need to learn.
Expose yourself
I want to end with what seems to me to be an accurate description of what it is to expose oneself and clarify what would be the best skill of a teacher in the education we want. I saw an example in the movie Ad Astra, starring Brad Pitt. In heroic space adventures in a future world, our hero must undergo constant evaluations of his psychic state, through the simple procedure of standing in front of a robot and saying how he feels. In almost every scene, the machine determines that the subject is viable to continue with the mission. However, this changes not when the character confesses his emotional disturbances and doubts about his ability but when he cannot identify his mood and confusedly babbles ideas without insight or recognizing his feelings. Then the machine determines that he is no longer useful. The hero is fit for his mission only if he can be honest with himself.
In the education I want, teachers are never asked to maintain a positive and even-handed mood. It is requested that they be able to see themselves and expose themselves frankly in front of their students, showing a way of being in the world with which they can identify. All true teaching comes from this sincerity. It is possible that the old phrase “know thyself” was directed more at teachers than at those who wanted to learn. Although, truly, aren’t both the same?
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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