On a lighter note, one of the lesser myths about mind control is the notion that subliminal messages are effective controllers of behavior. Despite widespread belief in the power of subliminal advertising and messaging, the evidence of its significant effectiveness is based on anecdotes and unscientific studies by interested parties. You will search in vain for the scientific studies that demonstrate that playing inaudible messages such as "do not steal" or "put that back" in muzak significantly reduces employee or customer theft, or that subliminal messages increase sales of snacks at movie theaters.

The above considerations should make it clear that what many people consider mind control would best be described by some other term, such as behavior modification, thought disruption, brain disabling, behavior manipulation, mind-coercion or electronic harassment. People are not now being turned into robots by hypnosis or brain implants. Furthermore, it should be obvious that given the state of knowledge in the neurosciences, the techniques for effective mind control are likely to be crude, and their mechanisms imperfectly understood.

Thus, if we restrict the term 'mind control' to those cases where a person successfully controls another person's thoughts or actions without their consent, our initial list of examples of what people consider to be mind control will be pared down to just five items: the tactics of religious, spiritual, and other New Age recruiters; the tactics of husbands who control their wives; the Stockholm syndrome; the so-called brainwashing tactics of the Chinese inquisitors of American prisoners during the Korean War; and the alleged creation of zombies in Voodoo. The last, however, can be dismissed as based either on fraud or on the use of drugs to render people helpless.

Wives who are terrorized by their husbands or boyfriends are not victims of mind control, but of fear and violence. Still, there seem to be many cases where a battered woman genuinely loves her man and genuinely believes he loves her. She stays, beating after beating, not because she fears what he will do to her if she leaves, but because she really doesn't want to leave. Perhaps. But perhaps she doesn't leave because she is completely dependent on her lover/batterer. She doesn’t stay just because she has nowhere to go. She needs him and stays because she is completely dependent on him. If a man can reduce a woman to a state of total dependency, he can control her. But is it true to say that he has controlled her mind? To what extent, if any, can a batterer take away the free will of his victim? He can reduce her choices so that staying with him is the only option she knows. What is the likelihood of this happening? It seems more likely that she will reduce her own choices by rationalizing his behavior and convincing herself that things will get better or that they really aren't that bad. If a man is not using brute force or the fear of violence to keep a woman around, then if she stays, it may be because of choices she has made in the past. Each time she was abused, she chose to stay. He may have used sweet and seductive talk to persuade her not to leave, but at some time in the relationship she was free to reject him. Otherwise, the relationship is based on fear and violence and mind control does not enter the picture. A woman who appears to be under the spell of a batterer is not a victim of mind control. She is a victim of her own bad choices. This is not to say that we should not sympathize with her plight or extend aid to her should she ask.  She is where she is through bad luck and a series of bad choices, not because of mind control, assuming, of course, that the woman is not mentally ill. In that case, it is Nature, not her man, that has reduced her capacity for free choice. The abuser takes advantage of the situation, but he does not create it..

That leaves recruiters for spiritual, religious, or personal growth groups; kidnappers; and inquisitors. First, the tactics of the recruiters differ substantially from those of kidnappers or inquisitors. Recruiters generally do not kidnap or capture their recruits, and they are not known to use torture as a typical conversion method. This raises the question of whether their victims are controlled without their consent. Some recruits are not truly victims of mind control and are willing members of their communities. Similarly, many recruits into mainstream religions should not be considered victims of mind control. To change a person's basic personality and character, to get them to behave in contradictory ways to lifelong patterns of behavior, to get them to alter their basic beliefs and values, would not necessarily count as mind control. It depends on how actively a person participates in their own transformation. You and I might think that a person is out of his mind for joining Scientology, Jehova's Witnesses, or Jim Roberts' The Brethren, but their "crazy beliefs and behaviors" are no wilder than the ones that millions of mainstream religious believers have chosen to accept and engage in.

Some recruits into non-mainstream religions seem to be brainwashed and controlled to the point that they will do great evil to themselves or others at the behest of their leader, including murder and suicide. Some of these recruits are in a state of extreme vulnerability when they are recruited and their recruiter takes advantage of that vulnerability. Such recruits may be confused or rootless due to ordinary transition difficulties (such as new college students), difficult life circumstances (such as failing in college or at a new job), or even tragic personal events (such as death to close friends or loved ones) or world events (such as war or terrorism). Some may be mentally ill or emotionally disturbed, greatly depressed, traumatized by self-abuse with drugs or abuse at the hands of others, etc. But it would not be to the advantage of the cult to actively recruit the emotionally disturbed. As one cult recruiter told me

Cults have complicated ideologies and practices that mentally or emotionally upset people have difficulty grasping. These structures are what allow the cult to control the person. Cults do not want people who are difficult to control.

Thus, while some recruits might be very vulnerable to those who would like to control their thoughts and actions, recruiters look for people they can make vulnerable. The recruiter quoted above also said

Cults seek out strong, intelligent, idealistic people. They also seek out the rich, no matter what their mental status is.

The goal is make the recruits vulnerable, to get them to give up whatever control over their thoughts and actions they might have. The goal is to make the cult members feel like passengers on a rudderless ship on a stormy sea. The recruiter or cult leader has a rudder and only he can guide the ship to safety.

The techniques available to manipulate the vulnerable are legion. One technique is to give them the love they feel they do not get elsewhere. Convince them that through you and your community they can find what they're looking for, even if they haven't got a clue that they're looking for anything. Convince them that they need faith in you and that you have faith in them. Convince them that their friends and family outside the group are hindrances to their salvation. Isolate them. Only you can give them what they need. You love them. You alone love them. You would die for them. So why wouldn't they die for you?  But, love alone can only get you so far in winning them over. Fear is a great motivator. Fear that if they leave they'll be destroyed. Fear that if they don't cooperate they'll be condemned. Fear that they can't make it in this miserable world alone. The manipulator must make the recruit paranoid.

Love and fear may not be enough, however; so guilt must be used, too. Fill them with so much guilt that they will want to police their own thoughts. Remind them that they are nothing alone, but with you and God (or some Power or Technique) they are Everything. Fill them with contempt for themselves, so that they will want to be egoless, selfless, One with You and Yours. You not only strip them of any sense of self, you convince them that the ideal is be without a self. Keep up the pressure. Be relentless. Humiliate them from time to time. Soon they will consider it their duty to humiliate themselves. Control what they read, hear, see. Repeat the messages for eyes and ears. Gradually get them to make commitments, small ones at first, then work your way up until you own their property, their bodies, their souls. And don't forget to give them drugs, starve them, or have them meditate or dance or chant for hours at a time until they think they've had some sort of mystical experience. Make them think, "It was you, Lord, who made me feel so good." They won't want to give it up. They have never felt so good. Though they look as if they are in Hell to those of us on the outside, from the inside it looks like Heaven.

What religion doesn't use guilt and fear to get people to police their own thoughts? Even some therapists use similar methods to control their patients. They prey on the vulnerable. They demand total loyalty and trust as a price for hope and healing. They often isolate their prey from loved ones and friends. They try to own and control their clients. The methods of recruiters are not much different. Are the recruits, the converts to the faith, and the patients willing victims? How would we tell the difference between a willing victim and an unwilling victim? If we cannot do that, then we can't distinguish any true cases of mind control.

Recruiters and other manipulators are not using mind control unless they are depriving their victims of their free will. A person can be said to be deprived of his free will by another only if that other has introduced a causal agent which is irresistible. How could we ever demonstrate that a person's behavior is the result of irresistible commands given by a religious, spiritual, or personal growth leader? It is not enough to say that irrational behavior proves a person's free will has been taken from them. It may be irrational to give away all one's property, or to devote all one's time and powers to satisfying the desires of one's divine leader, or to commit suicide or plant poison bombs in subways because ordered to do so, but how can we justify claiming such irrational acts are the acts of mindless robots? For all we know, the most bizarre, inhumane, and irrational acts done by the recruits are done freely, knowingly and joyfully. Perhaps they are done by brain damaged or insane people. In either case, such people would not be victims of mind control.

That leaves for consideration the acts of kidnappers and inquisitors: the acts of systematic isolation, control of sensory input, and torture. Do these methods allow us to wipe the cortical slate clean and write our own messages to it? That is, can we delete the old and implant new patterns of thought and behavior in our victims? First, it should be noted that not everybody who has been kidnapped comes to feel love or affection for their kidnappers. It may be that some kidnapped or captured people are reduced to a state of total dependency by their tormentors. They are put in a position similar to that of infancy and begin to bond with their tormentors much as an infant does with the one who feeds and comforts it. There is also the strange fascination most of us have with bullies. We fear them, even hate them, but often want to join their gang and be protected by them. It does not seem likely that people who fall in love with their kidnappers, or who turn against their country under torture, are victims of mind control. There is certainly some explanation why some people act as Patricia Hearst did and why others under similar circumstances would not have become "Tanya". It is doubtful that mind control should play much of a role in the explanation. Some women are attracted to gangsters, but have few opportunities to interact with them. We do not need to revert to mind control to explain why Hearst became intimate with one of her terrorist captors. She may have thought she had to in order to survive. She may have been genuinely attracted to him. Who knows? Mind control is a better defense than "changed my mind about a life of crime" when facing bank robbery and murder charges.

Finally, it is widely believed that the Chinese were successful in brainwashing American prisoners of war during the Korean War. The evidence that their tactics of torture, isolation, sensory deprivation, etc., were successfully used to control the minds of their captives is non-existent. Very few (22 of 4,500 or 0.5%) of those captured by the Chinese went over to the other side (Sutherland 1979, 114). The myth of success by the Chinese is primarily due to the work of Edward Hunter, whose Brainwashing in Red China: the Calculated Destruction of Men's Minds (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951) is still referred to by those who see mind control tactics as a major menace today. The CIA provided most of Hunter’s fodder in their effort to inspire hatred of the North Koreans and communism, to explain why some American soldiers didn’t hate the enemy, and “to aggrandize their own role by arguing that they themselves must investigate brainwashing techniques in order to keep up with the enemy” (Sutherland 1979, 114).

It seems then, that if we define mind control as the successful control of the thoughts and actions of another without his or her  consent, mind control exists only in fantasy. Unfortunately, that does not mean that it will always be thus.