DIRTY MINDS

It’s those other people who have been brainwashed, right?

- BY NIKHIL KRISHNAN

Talk of brainwashing casts those with “deplorable" beliefs not as agents but as victims, perhaps in need of treatment.

It wasn't so long ago that respectable psychologists didn’t really talk about “brainwashing.” The term had the slightly kitschy flavor of other Cold War embarrassments—C.I.A. spy cats and Reds-under-the-bed paranoia. But Google’s indispensable Ngram Viewer, which analyzes how frequently phrases appear in printed texts, confirms that the past two decades have seen an uptick in the word’s usage. What's bringing brainwashing back?

One potential answer is the rise of technologies suspected of having mind-controlling powers, chief among them social media. Another is the entrenched political polarization of our time. When the cousin you kicked a soccer ball around with as a child starts spouting unhinged certainties about viruses, vaccines, and climate change—beliefs he treats as beyond debate—you might wonder: What happened to him? This isn’t just an ordinary disagreement. Could he have been . . . brainwashed?

Don't get smug; he’s wondering the same thing about you. A few years ago, Psychology Today posted a checklist under the headline “Your Friend Might Be Politically Brainwashed If...” The last item on the list: “They assume that everyone who disagrees with them must be brainwashed.” So wait—does entertaining the possibility of having been brainwashed mean that you haven't been? Or is that too easy?

Several recent books have taken up the subject of brainwashing—among them Daniel Pick’s “Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control” (Profile), Joel E. Dimsdale’s “Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media” (Yale), and Andreas Killen’s “Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War” (Harper-Collins). They share a scholarly squeamishness about the word they are forced to use for their subject matter. “Yes, the term