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WORK TITLE: The Instability of Truth
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The New York Times Book Review May 25, 2025, Leah Greenblatt, “Cult of Personalities.”. p. 19.
Kirkus Reviews Mar. 1, 2025, , “Lemov, Rebecca: THE INSTABILITY OF TRUTH.”.
Publishers Weekly vol. 272 no. 3 Jan. 20, 2025, Boisvert, Will. , “REBECCA LEMOV: In The Instability of Truth, the historian explores how brainwashing plays out in Chinese reeducation camps and elsewhere.”. p. 17.
Publishers Weekly vol. 272 no. 3 Jan. 20, 2025, , “The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion.”. p. 47.
Rebecca Lemov is a historian of science at Harvard University and has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute. Her research explores data, technology, and the history of human and behavioral sciences. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Acclaimed Historian of Science
Rebecca Lemov
Rebecca Lemov is a historian of science at Harvard University and has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute. Her research explores data, technology, and the history of human and behavioral sciences. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her writing blends academic rigor with storytelling and wry humor, guiding readers through the disturbing — and surprisingly ordinary — ways truth is reshaped.
Rebecca Lemov
Professor of the History of Science
ON LEAVE AY2025-2026
Prof. Rebecca Lemov
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(617) 496-5229
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rlemov@fas.harvard.edu
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Faculty Assistant: Linda Sue Thomas
Areas of Research: Science & Technology Studies, Technology & Society, Media Studies, Human Sciences
Rebecca Lemov's research focuses on key episodes and experiments in the history of the human and behavioral sciences. Her forthcoming book, The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion uncovers the history of brainwashing—and its troubling implications for today. Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often cannot recognize it while it is happening—unless we know where to look. In The Instability of Truth, Lemov exposes the myriad ways our minds can be controlled against our will, exploring the history of brainwashing techniques from those employed against North Korean POWs, to unwanted brain implants at a U.S. military hospital, to the “soft” brainwashing of social media doomscrolling and behavior-shaping. The new work reveals that anyone can fall under the spell of mind control, especially in our increasingly data-driven world. Identifying invasive forms of emotional engineering that exploit trauma and addiction, creating coercion and persuasion in everyday life, Lemov offers lessons learned from past mind-control episodes to equip us for the increasing challenges we face from social media, AI, and an unprecedented, global form of surveillance capitalism.
Her other books include Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (how scientists between 1942 and 1963 attempted to map the elusive and subjective parts of the human psyche via once-futuristic data-storage techniques), and World As Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (about the scientific dream of behavioral engineering). She is a co-author of How Reason Almost Lost its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality.
Rebecca teaches courses on the history and future of big data; animal studies; human experiments; and technologies of mind control, as well as the history of the social and human sciences more broadly. A Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in 2010-11, and again in 2013-14, she took part in two working groups there, on the Sciences of the Archive and Historicizing Big Data. Her doctoral work was at U.C. Berkeley in Anthropology and she graduated from Yale University where she studied English literature.
Books
The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-persuasion (W. W. Norton, 2025).
Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015).
How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Rationality in the Cold War (University of Chicago, Fall 2013) Lorraine Daston, Paul Erickson, Michael Gordin, Judy Klein and Thomas Sturm, co-authors.
World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men. (New York, Hill & Wang, 2005)
Two new books use divergent styles to look at mind control, brainwashing and the outer limits of influence.
THE INSTABILITY OF TRUTH: Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper-Persuasion, by Rebecca Lemov
BLAZING EYE SEES ALL: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age, by Leah Sottile
On the television drama ''Severance,'' a sleek dystopian mood piece patently designed for Our Times, employees of a nebulous corporation volunteer to have their home and office selves psychically partitioned. A brain implant allows ''outies'' to go on with the business of being a person in the world, blissfully ignorant of the classified work their ''innies'' do in a bland, windowless facility five days a week, and vice versa.
In the actual, unsevered universe we still live in, dissociation is not yet an elective outpatient surgery and mind control retains its status as a societal boogeyman, the stuff of Manchurian candidates and prison camps, death cults and Kool-Aid.
That consciousness can be so pliable and vulnerable, so susceptible to outside forces as to turn itself against logic or values, is a proven bug in the human operating system. The hows and whys of it remain less understood, despite decades of anecdotal evidence and exploration.
Not that a legion of medical professionals, research scientists and salacious limited streaming series haven't tried. The subject has also spurred a robust literary genre, to which two engaging if imperfect entries can now be added: ''The Instability of Truth,'' by the Harvard historian of science Rebecca Lemov, and ''Blazing Eye Sees All,'' by Leah Sottile, a podcaster and freelance journalist for outlets including Rolling Stone and The New York Times Magazine.
Taken together, the books have a bit of a Goldilocks problem: Lemov's is thoughtful, well supported and perhaps unavoidably academic. Sottile's is easily the more accessible effort, full of wild anecdotes about lost continents and blue-skinned gurus; it can also be heedlessly loosey-goosey, light on corroborating facts and critical distance from its troubled subjects.
''The Instability of Truth'' is set up not unlike a syllabus, beginning with American P.O.W.s in the Korean War and moving through notable case studies like Patty Hearst, the C.I.A.'s MK-ULTRA program, Facebook-feed algorithms and the rise of so-called crypto cults. A recurrent theme is public shame: The war veterans who converted to Communism were dubbed weak, amoral and unpatriotic; headlines positioned Hearst as a rich girl dabbling in radical chic, playacting revolution for kicks.
That many of the P.O.W.s were beaten and starved and then fed a careful, relentless regimen of propaganda and coercive persuasion, or that Hearst was locked in a closet for 59 days and repeatedly raped, often did not rate mention in the accounts of their offenses. The consensus seemed to be that they had been given autonomy over their own minds and bodies, and failed miserably.
To be fair, Lemov points out, the public and even dedicated specialists initially lacked the vocabulary that might have softened those judgments. Trauma as a causal root was still years away from mainstream currency, and deprogramming efforts proved both medically and legally murky, full of their share of pitfalls and charlatans.
Though she offers vivid snapshots of individual cases and often interjects her own experiences in chatty, personable ways, Lemov's detailed analyses can read as somewhat weedy and dense for a layperson. Sottile, in contrast, wastes little time dangling the sensational Smurf-tinted bait in ''Blazing Eye Sees All'': a Kansas-born mother of three and former McDonald's manager named Amy Carlson who came to call herself Mother God.
Carlson claimed to be a 27,000-year-old refugee from the apocryphal land of Lemuria, subsequently reincarnated as Jesus, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Marilyn Monroe (among others) on her path to set humanity free. She also drank so much colloidal silver -- a popular New Age cure-all -- that her skin took on the dusky hue of an unrinsed blueberry.
Mother God's belief system was an often incomprehensible mishmash of self-aggrandizing fantasy, conspiracy and light antisemitism; still, it spoke to an increasingly large audience of seekers and lost souls who were promised that her glorious ascent to a fifth dimension was imminent. (Viewers of the 2023 HBO docuseries ''Love Has Won'' may know exactly how soon.)
As Sottile recounts it, Carlson's story was part of a long lineage -- or more of a matrilineage, from the proto-spiritualist Fox sisters, who in the mid-1800s used snaps and séances to reach the other side, to 20th-century mediums like the former prom queen J.Z. Knight, who channeled the stentorian spirit of an ancient warrior named Ramtha.
Many of these self-styled sages claimed deep connections to ''lost'' civilizations and espoused elaborate mythologies that touted specialized diets, supplements, ''angel numbers'' and high-vibration colorways. A lot of them also enthusiastically embraced the material perks that their followers' fervent financial support provided, even as they grew increasingly paranoid and isolated from their flocks.
More than once, Sottile floats the idea that New Age practices gave women voice and agency in a world where that is hard to find. It's a thought worth exploring, though one that also seems to let some uniquely harmful people off the hook: religious chicanery, the great feminist equalizer!
A penchant for elisions and overbroad statements (''No one wants to be a God. Not really,'' Sottile asserts at one point, after having spent some 250 pages methodically proving otherwise) also tends to mar an otherwise compelling and colorful read. The entertainment value is evident; the aftertaste is queasy and a little sad.
Where both writers find consensus -- other than the loony historical footnote of the former first lady Nancy Reagan's outsize fixation on astrology -- is the essential humanity of their subjects, many of whom it would be too easy to put at a disparaging distance.
On ''Severance,'' the show's split characters eventually begin to uncover the more sinister aims of their supposedly benevolent employer, a mega-corporation whose arcane codes and credos hint at its own cultish leanings. The cognitive dissonance of that will surely be resolved, give or take a season, by some canny mix of science and screenwriting. But no one outside a TV show wakes up and says, ''I'd like to lose my mind today.'' There are many ways to detach from perceived reality or even basic good sense, whether it's the Manson Family or a peer-to-peer marketing scheme that sells brightly patterned leggings, and not a lot of proven methods to get it back.
The brain is a soft black box whose ideologies regularly tip toward extremes: Look no further than the diverse demographics of those who have come to furiously reject vaccines. (Hence the memorable designation of some of the fringier elements of New Age conspiracy as ''pastel QAnon.'') Then again, maybe even the most passionate of those true believers will change their minds; it happens all the time.
THE INSTABILITY OF TRUTH: Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper-Persuasion | By Rebecca Lemov | Norton | 464 pp. | $32.99
BLAZING EYE SEES ALL: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age | By Leah Sottile | Grand Central | 296 pp. | $30
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PHOTO: Jim Jones in 1976. (PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY) This article appeared in print on page BR19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Greenblatt, Leah. "Cult of Personalities." The New York Times Book Review, 25 May 2025, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A841230035/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=412aefc3. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.
Lemov, Rebecca THE INSTABILITY OF TRUTH Norton (NonFiction None) $32.99 3, 25 ISBN: 9781324075264
An unnerving history.
"How could anyone fall for that?" remains a common reaction to wacky ideas promoted over social media, but it's less often accompanied by a chuckle, because such ideas seem to exert an inexorable appeal. The flat Earth society is prospering; vaccine coverage is dropping. Lemov, an associate professor of the history of science at Harvard and author ofDatabase of Dreams: The Lost Quest To Catalog Humanity, teaches a course on brainwashing. Long after the 1950-53 Korean War, when a few American prisoners "fell for" Communism, the word "brainwashing" has revived, as experts try to explain how people are persuaded to believe weird things. The first of many unsettling sections deals with the Korean War period, when Chinese overseers peppered POWs with propaganda, accompanied by treats for those who responded favorably and punishment for the uncooperative. After the armistice, citizens and the media were horrified when 23 Americans refused to return. Over the following decades, most tired of life in China and came back, proclaiming that unspeakable tortures had led to their defection. Learning the wrong lesson, the military aimed to train soldiers to resist brainwashing by inflicting brutal torments on recruits while ignoring ideology. The CIA's ham-handed research on brain manipulation has fascinated popular writers, with an unfortunate carry-over into legitimate brain research. There are few lessons, meantime, to be learned from Patty Hearst's 1974 kidnapping. Her months of confinement, rape, and abuse are no secret, but Americans remain titillated, and most still believe her guilty of her crimes. Matters do not improve as Lemov casts a gimlet eye on mid-20th-century mass media, later and ongoing cults, and today's social media "hyper-persuasion," a more acceptable term for the b-word.
A superbly crafted analysis of a universally deplored but seemingly irresistible technique.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Lemov, Rebecca: THE INSTABILITY OF TRUTH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785299/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=10941d52. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.
You describe the brainwashing of American POWs in Chinese reeducation camps during the Korean War as a mix of Maoist indoctrination and psychoanalysis. How did that work? The POWs said you could feel yourself freezing to death listening to these boring Marxist lectures. What was more effective was forcing them to keep a journal. They had to introspect about their family relationships and class relationships, things that troubled them. The Chinese call that "speaking bitterness." That gave the indoctrination emotional resonance.
Twenty-one POWs defected to China.
Were those defections genuine? They were pictured in Life magazine looking like they were bewitched or drugged. Some of them quoted Communist cliches about the evils of capitalism or sang "The Internationale." They seemed like robots. But a crucial aspect is that these men were incredibly traumatized in the camps. They had lost half their body weight, or lost toes to frostbite, or seen their friends die. Even before the reeducation, they were distressed and ungrounded. I think these were genuine conversions even if they didn't last.
You explore American religious cults that use similar but milder techniques. How do they lure recruits? There's often deception. A person might be told that it's an organization that wants to save the whales. You might go to a weekend at a farm thinking it's an environmental seminar, but then you're hearing lectures, chanting, singing; there's intense positive emotion directed at you and you're rarely left alone. There are elements of repetition and hypnosis, of being destabilized in an unfamiliar situation--then the insertion of doctrine.
Do people who get brainwashed feel empowered by the experience? People get tremendous benefits from a cult--at least initially, before it becomes a dark, life-sucking hamster wheel. Initially a recruit feels a sense of tremendous energy and belonging. The cult leader can actually become jealous of the followers when they seem to be flowering too much, which can make the abuse worse.
You write about the academic "cult" of French literary theory in grad school. How did you find your way out of it? There were elements of hero worship and inscrutable prose, and valorization of the works of Lacan and Derrida. There was even a mystical component: if I could only figure out the deep meaning of Lacan, I would find transcendent meaning. Then I went through a crisis, and I thought, what is the point of studying these things if I can't communicate with people, if my prose makes people say, "Well I'm sure you're very smart, but I can't understand what you're saying?"
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Boisvert, Will. "REBECCA LEMOV: In The Instability of Truth, the historian explores how brainwashing plays out in Chinese reeducation camps and elsewhere." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 3, 20 Jan. 2025, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300038/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=40891833. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.
The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion
Rebecca Lemov. Norton, $32.99 (336p)
ISBN 978-1-324-07526-4
* From Communist reeducation camps to manipulative media algorithms, mind control is a real and often remarkably effective tool, contends historian Lemov (World as Laboratory) in this incisive account. She traces the start of modern brainwashing to North Korean and Chinese prison camps during the Korean War, where American POWs endured brutal treatment followed by "struggle" sessions where they were forced to listen to lectures on Maoist theory and criticize American capitalism. Those who parroted the dogma got better treatment, and sometimes ended up believing it enough to defect. This one-two punch of physical trauma and disorientation followed by indoctrination formed a template, Lemov contends, for mind-control techniques in everything from U.S. military survival courses to the recruitment programs of religious cults. From there, Lemov charts a sea change to a subtler, 21st-century style of digital thought control in social media algorithms that instill positive or negative emotions in users by tweaking their feeds. Perhaps most intriguingly, Lemov's deeply researched exploration reveals how the persuasive power wielded by charismatic figures can answer, in a warped way, a person's yearning for self-reinvention and meaning (members of the Manson Family radiated "self-confidence and dynamism," Lemov writes; "They felt they belonged somewhere, and this should never be underestimated as the dangerous heart of what brainwashing is"). The result is a provocative and illuminating look at how powerful ideas can overwhelm one's better instincts. Photos. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 3, 20 Jan. 2025, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300110/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=17c6775e. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.