Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control by Daniel Pick

Author:Daniel Pick [Pick, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781257890
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2022-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Critics of their analyses would challenge their patrician and dismissive, or frankly snobbish, accounts of what popular culture could deliver. They accused these high-brow intellectuals of losing track of the contradictions, complexities and emotional richness to be found in mass entertainment.

Adorno and Horkheimer, however, insisted that mass culture could certainly generate supine attitudes, or achieve powerful, more-or-less drugging effects. In a celebrated and controversial chapter (four) of their 1947 work Dialectic of the Enlightenment, they condemned a system that churned out such banality; they were concerned by, even rather frowned at, people’s enjoyment of popular cinema; for instance, the performances of an actor like Mickey Rooney or of cartoons like Donald Duck. ‘By artfully sanctioning the demand for trash, the system inaugurates total harmony,’ they said. They noted the conformism of such work: in fact, both consumers and producers, they felt, ‘content[ed] themselves with the reproduction of sameness’. ‘The defrauded masses today cling to the myth of success still more ardently than the successful … They insist unwaveringly on the ideology by which they are chained. The pernicious love of the common people for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities.’

Grown-ups were schooled by the media; children were schooled by, of course, schools. So radical intellectuals sought to experiment with schooling too, to theorise its groupthink functions, and to seek to create in place of that apparatus a different approach. A critique of traditional schooling had generated several experimental alternative establishments during the interwar period; these were anti-authoritarian antidotes to the conventional model, including, for example, the co-educational progressive experimental boarding school created in 1926 at Dartington Hall, in the countryside of Devon. Now, again, critiques and experiments emerged, with reformers mindful of the capacity of schools to ‘brainwash’ and ‘condition’. These critiques gained new traction amid the wider swirl of 1960s protest movements.

One strand of this critique especially popular in the 1970s was spearheaded in the United States by another charismatic intellectual, Ivan Illich. He was interested in countering such modes of conformism at the very earliest stages of schooling, and insisted a whole new prescription was needed to restore creativity, respect difference, foster genuine thinking and support individual freedom in society. His proposal was to create a radical project to ‘de-school’ society, or rather to free children and adults from the illusion that most learning happens in schools, and that learning requires so much cajoling, ranking and manipulation. Illich protested against the way nurseries, schools and colleges established a series of conformist rites of passage. He regarded the US university system as the very nadir of this initiatory system, in place of open education: a conveyor belt that is dull, protracted, expensive and ultimately invites the student to buy into a national myth.

Illich wrote about the huge benefits that might follow for children and adults alike, from the replacement of formal education by new forms of conviviality and lifelong informal learning. Known already for his exposés of modernisation and for his attacks on

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