Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media
By Joel E. Dimsdale
Yale University Press, 2021

Joel Dimsdale, author of 2016’s intensely thought-provoking Anatomy of Malice, expands on that earlier book’s study of the psychology of Nazi leaders by looking at brainwashing across a wide spectrum of the modern era. He looks at Ivan Pavlov’s sadistic torture of his dogs, the state-sponsored conditioning of North Korea, and some of the famous more individual cases of the modern day, ranging from Patty Hearst to death-cults like Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate. 

Through these and many other examples, he charts the slow growth of brainwashing (a term that, commendably, always seems to make him a bit uncomfortable) and its expansion beyond its original realms of government agencies and academia. The book’s black-and-white photos accompany well-told stories of kidnap victims, Stockholm Syndrome, and the rise of mass-communication tools like radio and television, which could be used as incredibly effective force-multipliers of delusional falsehoods, almost always either intentionally or inadvertently preying on the fact that, as Dimsdale puts it, “unshakable persecutory beliefs are surprisingly common in the general population.” 

Strong beliefs, he points out, are different from the ironclad inflexible beliefs of delusion. Deluded people, he writes, live in a black-and-white world with no shades of gray. “They jump to conclusions and look only for evidence that supports their beliefs; they simply dismiss contradictory evidence.” And such deluded people won’t be all that difficult to spot, since they tend to display other “stigmata”: deteriorated functioning, impaired cognition, hallucinations, or poor impulse control.

Dimsdale is a brilliantly concise and insightful guide to these distinctions, and this book is as energetic and enjoyable as his previous one. But since every single 21st century individual, reading the above paragraph, is thinking of one example and one example only, Dark Persuasion feels like one unbearably protracted prequel to the main event. Readers wait nearly 300 pages for the shoe to drop. The baleful red eye on the book’s US dust jacket is looking in one direction, at one person - and that person doesn’t even merit an inclusion in the book’s index. 

Of course the single greatest, most widespread, and most damaging example of brainwashing in the 21st century is the hold disgraced, twice-impeached one-term US President Donald Trump has over his 150 million American followers. 

This phenomenon has divided families; it’s divided the most powerful democracy on Earth; it’s cost untold millions of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic; it’s resulted in half of all adult Americans living in a completely different cognitive reality from the rest of the world. As the armed insurrection Trump incited on January 6 made clear, it represents an ongoing existential threat. It’s the main subject of this book, virtually the sole reason why the market would even be interested in a volume about brainwashing (mention ‘brainwashing’ to virtually any sane American in 2021 and their instant association will be ‘the Trump cult’) - not because the details of the Heaven’s Gate cult are all that interesting, but because Donald Trump used social media and massive rallies to brainwash half of the American populace. It lurks there, unmentioned for hundreds of pages, hovering over every single word of Dark Persuasion: the climax we’re never allowed to reach. 

“How could countries not study social media as a tool for brainwashing in the twenty-first century?” Dimsdale asks, but aside from a few desultory and parting references to Trump, his book never examines the single greatest example of his subject in modern times - an example that was already old and well-established while he was writing his book. 

Doubtless Dark Persuasion was intended as a historical overview of the development of brainwashing. It achieves that goal wonderfully. Nevertheless, many readers will finish it saying “But what about …?”

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.