Alejandro

“Our leisure time is occupied increasingly by automatized activities in which we take no part: listening to piped-in words and viewing television screens (no portable smartphones, laptops back when Dr. Meerloo wrote his book). We hurry along with cars and go to bed with a sleeping pill. This pattern of living in turn may open the way for renewed sneak attacks on our mind. Our boredom may welcome any seductive suggestion.”
― Joost A.M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing

“The slow coercion of hypocrisy, of traditions in our culture that have a levelling effect - these things change us. We crave excitement, hair-raising stories, sensation. We search for situations that create superficial fear to cover up inner anxieties. We like to escape into the irrational because we dislike the challence of self-study and self-thinking.”
― Joost A.M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing

“The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments and propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions. It may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-don't-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one.”
― Joost A.M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing

“Continual suggestion and slow hypnosis in the wake of mechanical mass communication promotes uniformity of the mind and may lure the public into the "happy era" of adjustment, integration and equalization, in which individual opinion is completely stereotyped (or strawmanned/made a caricature of).”
― Joost A.M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing