...I offended some of you by saying you had been brainwashed. This is not an insult; it's a simple statement of fact. When any infant is born and socialized in a society, even if he is to become a very mature individual, he has been brainwashed. ...given a structure for categorizing his experience and a system of values applied to the structure of categories.

But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway. What did it really matter if I spent it like this — caring for this boy — as opposed to some other way? I would always be earthbound; he hadn’t robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever. I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have? These exotic revelations bubbled up involuntarily and I began to understand that the sleeplessness and vigilance and constant feedings were a form of brainwashing, a process by which my old self was being molded, slowly but with a steady force, into a new shape: a mother. It hurt. I tried to be conscious while it happened, like watching my own surgery. I hoped to retain a tiny corner of the old me, just enough to warn other women with. But I knew this was unlikely; when the process was complete I wouldn’t have anything left to complain with, it wouldn’t hurt anymore, I wouldn’t remember.

Brainwashing is defined as an observable set of transactions between a charismatically-structured collectivity and an isolated agent of the collectivity with the goal of transforming the agent into a deployable agent. Brainwashing is thus a process of ideological resocialization carried out within a structure of charismatic authority.

People who live in totalitarian countries experience educational brainwashing and real fear of the government. They are not brave enough to stand out and express different opinions.

It felt like a kidnap…and it rendered me mute for about nine months. I couldn't speak the language, and if I spoke English I was abused for it. It was quite a culture shock: brutal. I was so traumatised and afraid that I stopped speaking and my [birth] parents thought there was something wrong with me, thought I was possessed…

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

I have sometimes thought — that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!

We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.

On her way back to their room, it occurred to Nnu Ego that she was a prisoner, imprisoned by her love for her children, imprisoned by her role as the senior wife. She was not even expected to demand more money for her family; that was considered below the standard expected of a woman in her position. It was not fair, she felt, the way men cleverly used a woman’s sense of responsability to actually enslave her. They knew that the traditional wife like herself would never dream of leaving her children.”

What Women's Lib might achieve if their 'consciousness raising' - or in plain English, brainwashing — campaign succeeds is a society whose members have identical roles but are perpetually at war with themselves; a society of males made neurotic by suppressed masculinity, of females made miserable by having masculine roles thrust upon them that contradict their feminine impulses.

Ideological brainwashing constitutes the essence and foundation of the formation of the Soviet man. […]. As part of ideological training, people learn to “correctly” interpret the phenomena that they are comforted with in their lives. […] This is not a question of stupidity. The ideological man thus trained does not become stupid. rather, it is the opposite effect that takes place. p. 638

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization.

If you have kids you’re a slave to your genes. Just a conduit from past to future, from the primeval ocean to galactic empire.