During the course of my studies on brainwashing, I came to the realization that no one who is brainwashed knows that they are brainwashed. So if you have someone who is brainwashed next to someone who isn’t, and ask both “are you brainwashed?” they will both answer “no,” and both will believe they are being truthful. So that leads me to ask the question, am I brainwashed?

First, let’s define what brainwashing actually is. When someone is brainwashed, this means that thought control techniques were used to make them believe something that they would not otherwise believe. This belief is often times unfounded, demonstrably false, or subjective. But not always, you could be brainwashed into believing something that is actually true, though this is rare because truth is usually backed up by evidence and is non-subjective. It’s easy to say that if you believe something that’s subjective, you could have been brainwashed into thinking that. (sports teams use brainwashing techniques for example) but what if it’s not so obvious?

For that reason I have devised a fun brainwashing test that you can use to tell if you are brainwashed. Generally this test is best performed by someone else rather than on yourself, but taking it here on this blog should give the desired effect. Ready to take the test? Great. Read the following paragraph and take close note on your thoughts about it.

Philip Gill is a scoundrel. He started his own religion for the sole purpose of scamming people out of money and just recycles lessons and teachings from the Mormon church in order to do so. He wrote the Book of Jeraneck Pseudonymously, that is, he wrote the book while claiming to have translated it from an ancient prophetic source. He is known for being dishonest and taking advantage of others, and his new “church” is just the latest example of this.

Now, as you read the above paragraph, how did it make you feel? Did you feel angry? Offended? Did you feel like it was a personal attack against you? Did you think I was foolish for writing such obvious lies?

Chances are, you felt none of those things. Instead you probably felt confusion, or just flat out didn’t believe me. Perhaps you were going to ask me what my source for this information was. Can you prove it? In fact you might not even know who Philip Gill even is. (You may be in for a treat if you google his name and the “Book of Jeraneck”) What happened here is your logic kicked in, and you started asking questions rather than getting defensive. Or just smirked at the unfounded silliness. Now, let’s play the game again. I have the same paragraph below, but this time I have a dropdown box with several religious groups in there. If you see your group, great. Select it, and the paragraph below will change. Then read the new version.

Now that you’ve read the paragraph for your own organization, how do you feel now? Do you think that I was foolish for writing those things? Do you feel like you were personally attacked? Do you feel like I am influenced by the devil, or that these words are trying to “trick” you? Did you feel even the slightest bit uncomfortable when you read that? If you are brainwashed, then you should have emotional triggers going off rather than logical ones. Sadly, this is a sign of being brainwashed, and the above is the only test I’m aware of that can easily be done yourself.

Now, the next question is, what do you do now that you know you’re brainwashed? Simple. Let logic take over. Remember that if you needed brainwashing to believe something, then chances are that something doesn’t stand well on its own. So do what any respectable scientist would do and examine your belief, and sincerely try to falsify it. Can you? The entire internet is at your fingertips.

Good luck.

[Update!] It has been pointed out to me that you could insert your mother, or perhaps Martin Luther King Jr. into that box and achieved the same effect. This is certainly true, but the difference is that there is no belief system attached to these individuals. If we are to fall back on logic, could we say that there is a purely objective reason to hold such respect for your mother? I would say so if you have a personal, constructive relationship with her. Is it logical to revere Martin Luther King Jr? Do you think he’s infallible? The answer to that second question should answer the first. Do you know Joseph Smith Jr or Helen B White personally? Would you be offended if I insulted either one, and why? Do you believe Joseph Smith Jr was a prophet or Helen B White was a prophetess? Why one and not the other? It all boils down to what the connection to the subject actually is.

There aren’t many events from the first grade that I can remember with vivid detail, but one of the few that I can stuck with me because of the profound impact that its lesson had on me later in life. In this class it was very common to do little projects, which included cutting up and gluing pieces of paper. When the teacher brought the box of safety scissors around the class she asked each student if they were right-handed or left-handed. I had never heard this term before. (remember, I was in first grade) so when asked I admitted that I didn’t know.

“If you don’t know you’re probably right-handed,” she told me as I received my pair of scissors. When it came time to cut one of the pieces of paper, I reached for the scissors with my left hand without a second thought. I found the scissors were awkward to hold, and the blades tended to pull apart rather than slide past each other. It simply wasn’t cutting the paper.

I reported this to my teacher, who immediately saw the problem. “Oh, you must be left-handed then.” She took my scissors then handed my a different pair, this one with the letter “L” engraved on them. I returned to my seat and, already holding them in my left hand, began cutting the paper. That was indeed the problem. So, continuing the assignment, I glued a few pieces from one worksheet to the other and picked up the scissors with my right hand. Once again, they wouldn’t cut! I walked up to report this to the teacher again.

“These scissors are giving me issues too.”

She looked up and saw that I was holding the “lefty” scissors in my right hand and asked in frustration “Okay, stop messing around! are you right handed or left handed?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

She took out a piece of paper and a pencil and handed both to me.

“Write something.”

“Write what?”

“Anything. Write your name.”

I picked up the pencil and instinctively wrote my name with my right hand.

“There, you’re right handed.” She swapped me scissors and ordered me back to my seat. But when I tried cutting again, I was having the same problem as before. This teacher was notoriously impatient, and not wanting to push her buttons any more than I already had, I began trying to reason out what exactly was going on. I knew what right and left were, but could it be that certain scissors must be used by a certain hand? But why would some scissors be made for one hand and others for the other? Wouldn’t it make more sense for all scissors to be for one hand, and just train us to cut with that hand?

I switched hands, and sure enough, now I was able to cut just fine. I wasn’t sure what to make of this. I leaned over to another student who I knew was one of the smarter students in class and asked, “What does it mean when you’re right-handed or left-handed?”

“Oh, that’s just which hand you do everything with” he responded.

“Well I do everything with both hands.”

“But it’s easier with one hand than it is the other. Here, write something down.”

Once again I picked up a pencil and began writing.

“See? It’s easier to write with your right hand. That means you’re right-handed. Now try writing with your left hand and you’ll see what I mean.”

I switched hands, and continued writing just fine. I was covering what I was writing with my hand and smudged the pencil lead a bit but otherwise my handwriting was almost unchanged.

“It’s awkward not being able to see what I’m writing, but not a big deal.”

The other student watched, then smirked. “Looks like you’re ambidextrous.”

“Ambidextrous?”

“It means you can use both hands the same. Most people can’t do that, for me it’s really awkward and weird using my left hand.”

I sat there a moment taking this in. “Really?”

He took my pencil and demonstrated with his left hand. As he had predicted, he wrote very slowly, held the pencil awkwardly, and his penmanship dropped several notches. He assured me that this wasn’t intentional, and I was just different that way. “Consider yourself lucky.”

It would be years before my family knew that I was ambidextrous, only because it wasn’t a big deal to me. Yet. (although it did lead to some funny mind-fuckery with my grandma) The subject re-entered my mind in about fifth grade, about the time when my obsession for learning was just getting started. The Internet didn’t exist yet at the time, at least not in a usable for like we know it today (Gawd that makes me feel old) but I had discovered the school’s encyclopedia collection and began looking up any subject I could find that I didn’t know about.

For some reason anything that I didn’t know became fascinating for just this reason. This would explode later when I received my first Encarta CD in 1997, but even this early I was getting my fix from the school’s library. One of the subjects that I came across was laterality, or the study of the “preference for one side of the body over the other.” (as Wikipedia puts it, I don’t have a copy of the original encyclopedia I was using at the time)

According to the article, true ambidexterity is “rare,” though no actual statistic was given. Ambidexterity is far more common in people who are left-handed but were forced to learn to use their right hand. This absolutely fascinated me, but not nearly as much as what I had read next: There was once a social stigma for being left-handed, and still is in some parts of the world. In fact, the word “sinister” is derived from “sinistral” which literally means “left-handed.” Left-handedness was considered devilish and a result of the influence of Satan. It was common for “sinistrals” to be persecuted, and hide their orientation.

Because a sinistral is likely to be awkward trying to function with their right hand, being left-handed was often associated with being awkward or clumsy. In China the left was considered the “bad” side where as the right was the “good” side. Even in Mormonism, Christ (or anything righteous for that matter) was at the “right hand of God.” We were to hold the sacrament trays only with our right hand. We were to hold the right hand to the square.

“Psshhh,” I thought, “If I lived in a society that persecuted lefties it would be very easy for someone like me to pretend to be right handed. Just develop habits and suppress the urge to use my left hand for single-handed tasks.” But luckily, our society was so thoroughly beyond such a silly notion that I only learned of it from a book. What was more mind-boggling to me, however, was that this was something that the vast majority of society live with every day, and I don’t. I had to read about it just to wrap my head around the concept. That point absolutely fascinated me, because from a philosophical standpoint, anything that affects me may not affect everyone, and just because something doesn’t affect me, doesn’t mean that it affects no one.

I returned the book to its shelf, quite proud of my new wisdom.

The years went on in my schooling career, and soon very few of my friends knew I was ambidextrous. In fact I almost completely forgot about it, because I had so little reason to think about it. (except when using scissors). I had simply developed a habit of writing using my right hand, so I won’t cover up my words as I’m writing, and all other tasks were done with whichever hand was most convenient at the moment.

In 2000, when I was in high school, some students in my programming class began talking about a suicide. Naturally I asked if this was a friend or someone I might know. They said it wasn’t, and that the suicide happened in California, but I still might be interested in it. Stuart Matis was the victim’s name, but that wasn’t the part that caught my attention. He was gay, and was so distraught over it that he took his own life.

I didn’t believe this at first. The [Mormon] church teaches that no one is actually gay, they are social deviants with a heinous sin. So how could this possibly happen? How could this be true? Why didn’t he just choose to be straight, like everyone else? The moment I got home, I visited Google and searched for the suicide. I found an article on Newsweek about the incident and found that there was not one, but two suicides. Clay Whitmer was the second. He took his own life after his friend died, who he failed to save. Whitmer was also gay.

By now I had a torrent of thoughts going through my head. All those years of seminary teachers talking about how awful the world is because they think that homosexuality is acceptable. How the world is so perverse that it accepts “Gay,” “Lesbian,” “Bisexual,” and “Transsexual” all as legitimate genders. How disgusting those people are for their unrepentance. How homophobic I realized I had felt.

Then my own words seemed to whisper in my ear: Just because something doesn’t affect me, doesn’t mean that it affects no one. If there was any moment where I felt the “still small voice,” this was it, even though I recognized those as my own words from years earlier. I didn’t know Gay people exist because I’m straight, unaffected by the issue, and never witnessed any manifestation that my belief was wrong. How could I have known? Gradually, my homophobia melted away, and was replaced with shame and compassion for people who had been bullied. No one chooses to be left or right-handed. They discover which they are by observing which hand they write with. I never confronted my seminary teacher over this, but I played out the scenario in my head:

Being gay is a sin, and a choice!

I never chose to be straight, and even if I did, why would I choose to be Gay and be bullied? Stuart wanted to be straight so desperately he ended his life over it!

But there are people in the church that have overcome their homosexuality!

I…wait, how can that be? Did they fake it?

This one had me stumped. Were the “recovered” gay people in the church faking it? The answer, it turned out, was sitting right in my hand; in the form of a ballpoint pen.

If I was living in a society that persecuted sinistrals, I would get caught using my left hand, and would be bullied over it. With no reason to believe that I wasn’t left-handed—I had been caught using my left hand afterall—I would then change my habits and use my right hand exclusively, and do so without any awkwardness; and thus be “cured” of my left-handedness, all the while unaware that I was ambidextrous all along.

Something else struck me. Years earlier I had assumed that if I was ambidextrous in a society that persecutes sinistrals, I could just change my habits and move on like it’s no big deal. But what if I only found out in the first grade when I had no idea what laterality was? I would have been immediately persecuted the moment I was caught using my left hand, and with no context on which to base my assumptions, I would have actually believed that I was left-handed and somehow inferior because of it. I would have been subject to the same fearful self-loathing that religious gays experience, simply because I didn’t know any better. That assumption that I would have been just fine was clearly way off base. And if something as ultimately meaningless as laterality could cause such trauma and emotions, imagine how much more intense the emotional situation must be for something that’s actually meaningful such as sexuality?

I sat there staring at that pen for what must have been a half hour, in shock at this realization. Not only do gay people actually exist, contrary to my previous belief, but bisexual people did too; and it’s not a stretch for someone who is bisexual to find someone of the same gender attractive, think they are gay or lesbian, then fight the urge and suddenly be “straight.” I could easily see myself in that situation over dexterity. It fit perfectly, and was consistent with these suicides from people who couldn’t be “cured” no matter how desperate, and with the idea that other people really can be “cured.”

I had to develop a new set of morals that would supersede anything told by the church. This set turned out to be relatively simple: Does this action harm anyone else in any way? And if no, does it harm me in any way? Finally, the optional third item: Does inaction harm anyone?

Adherence to the optional third item became my metric for how good a person is, but that’s a blog post for another day.

It took me some time to identify what the first chink in the armor of my brainwashing was, and this was it. It would be another six and a half years before it unraveled and I truly saw reality for what it was, but from this point forward, my cognitive dissonance kicked into overdrive and I became a “liberal Mormon.” Now that I have identified ambidexterity as the source of that realization—and interestingly, the reason I swore never to bully or allow bullying of homosexuals—for the first time it became something special and self-identifying. If only I knew in that first grade class what a gift that would turn out to be, for the first chink in my armor was the direct cause of the second, far more devastating one.

Having interacted with a large number of Mormons (particularly in an Astronomy class) I have made a number of observations which seem to have struck a chord with people who I shared them with. In sharing this I do need to be careful in pointing out that this isn’t all that scientific, but it’s not baseless either.

I already have a degree in Animation and am working on a second degree, this time from an “accredited” school. That means I have to take generals, including science credits. This also means that I’ve spent years learning to be very observant, and capture a moment mentally at a glance. I need to be able to watch things in motion and understand everything that’s going on in real time, so I can duplicate attitudes, emotions, gestures and similar. Because of all the practice I’ve had doing this I’ve become quite observant, particularly at noticing subtle details at a glance. (And I should point out that most animators can do this, it’s not a very unique “talent”)

So, whether I intended to or not, I have developed a habit of observing everyone. In a conversation with a roommate a month ago I demonstrated this by describing subtle details about the way our other roommates move, and mimicked all their walks and gestures all while describing what these things communicate. It’s actually a fairly fun skill to have.

What’s more, attending an astronomy class full of TBMs (True Believing Mormons) I’ve found it fascinating to observe their reactions to the otherwise atheistic science being taught there. Without really thinking about it I developed a mental picture of the entire class and how strongly  brainwashed each student was. Now, when I refer to “brainwashed” as a scale, I am referring subjectively to how indoctrinated—or how strongly—they believe that the Mormon church is true. So to gauge how brainwashed everyone was, I found the correlation between that and their reactions to things we were taught in class that contradict the church’s teachings, how vocal they were in opposition, whether or not they tried to justify these teachings (and how they justified them if they shared it) et cetera. I have noticed that this observed behavior doesn’t necessarily correlate perfectly with church participation, but that was considered.

Now, here is where all this gets interesting. There are certain patterns that I’ve been noticing only in the most hardcore brainwashed Mormons. The first thing I noticed was a certain facial expression that I only see in really hardcore believers. The expression can be described as having the jaw wide open, the lower lip covering the bottom teeth, the upper lip pulled back to expose the upper teeth, side of the sips raised, and the center of the eyes scrunched. Usually the head is tilted when this smile is sent in response to acknowledging someone. Note that in a genuine smile the mouth is seldom open that far unless you’re laughing, and the eyes tend to have more muscle action on the outside of the eye than the inside.

So this is a fake smile, and a very unique fake smile at that. I’ve only seen it in really hardcore believers. (ordinarily a fake smile has either no action in the eyes, or the eyes are uniformly squinted; and the jaw is almost never open wide like this during a smile unless you’re laughing) Now, determining why people are smiling like this as opposed to what we would normally identify as a “fake” smile would dive completely into the realm of speculation, but that said it makes sense to me that this is a result of being told (i.e. brainwashed into believing) that they are happy. How else are you going to show that you are happy than with a big smile?

There are also certain poses that I’ve been noticing all the time with highly brainwashed people. They tend to fall into poses that, as an animator, I would describe as “insecure.” In other words, their pose is displaying a lack of self confidence or an inherent dependence on others. This includes any combination of, among other things, a bent spine (slouching), palms facing back, arms defaulting to or tending to favor a tucked-in position, legs bending inward or off to one side overemphasizing the direction of the spine, bent wrists with slightly bent elbows when the arm is relaxed, etc. Now, anyone who is unsure of themselves will fall into a pose with these characteristics, but here’s what sets the “brainwashed” version apart: The head won’t match the pose that the rest of the body is in. Notice how I described everything but the head. So their body will communicate insecurity, but their head will be back, sometimes their chest will be out in spite of the slouching forward posture (or the chest is the exception and matches the head rather than the rest of the body)

There doesn’t appear to be a reliable correlation between a person’s walk and their brainwashing. The correlation is there (same characteristics as the pose I described above) but it’s not as reliable across the board. Also note that these poses are what the person will fall into when they are relaxed and not thinking about it, in other words when you capture them off guard. What this does show, like the facial expression, is a conflict of emotions; and that conflict is what I have identified as the outward sign of someone who is brainwashed. They are behaving and expressing emotions that convey one thing while deep down they are betraying who they really are, and what they really feel. (or what their brain is trying to really tell them)

I should point out now that not all of the students that I had identified as highly brainwashed exhibited these poses or facial expressions. I think this fits perfectly with my hypothesis that this involuntary behavior is a result of an internal conflict, and since there are people who Mormonism “works” for (heterosexual extroverts who are utterly unaware of contradictory evidence, never looked for it, or are so thoroughly indoctrinated that the conflict is gone) it makes sense that such individuals would be without conflict.

In light of the above, there are two gender specific tendencies that I’ve noticed in TBMs. The first is that many women who fit into the “highly indoctrinated” category tend to speak with an unnatural soft, higher pitch voice. When someone is talking with a voice that isn’t natural to that person, it is often times very obvious. (I don’t think it’s really necessary to explain how it’s obvious, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about) So when listening to many of these girls speak, it’s often quite eerie.

For the men, highly indoctrinated individuals tend to stiffen up when they think someone is looking at them. Their posture will get stiff, their movements become slower and more deliberate (even actions as simple as sitting down or standing up) and everything seems to become more robotic. Picture moving only one joint at a time in a limb, imagine how stiff that looks. Now picture their whole body moving like this and you’ll have a somewhat exaggerated but otherwise accurate idea of what I’m talking about. (they’re not THAT robotic but they do get very stiff in their movements)

But here’s where this gets fascinating. When they think no one is looking at them, they relax and fall into a more natural pose; often one like I mentioned above. Sitting in the back row in class and observing this is really bizarre. (it’s easy to observe someone sitting in front of you without them knowing) Picture a student turning to another, that second student stiffens up, then when the first student turns away the second relaxes. Honestly, I have no idea where this behavior comes from, and I have only seen the men do it, even though I’ve been watching for it in both. Also, like the poses that I mentioned above, not all do it; but it is very common and there is a strong correlation with brainwashing.

But that’s just me. Sometimes I love to sit back and observe. Hope you found this as interesting as I did!

Hello. I am the Angelic Ferret.  I thought I would start this new blog to share my thoughts as I graduate from Mormonism.