By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on August 30, 2024
Image: Ajijchan.
How long does it take to change a child’s mind? The question was posed by Fidel Castro in December 1999 to psychologists, neuroscientists and pedagogues, when Miami relatives kidnapped the child Elián González, shipwrecked between the borders of Cuba and the US.
The little “balserito”, as he became known in the international media, had spent 48 hours tied to a tire in the Florida Straits, alone, after losing his mother and stepfather -who organized the clandestine departure-, but his father was still on the island and clamored for his son. Cousins and distant uncles bought expensive toys, lied shamelessly in front of the cameras and tried to make Elian forget his family in Cuba under the control of the anti-Castro fauna.
Finally, common sense prevailed and the boy returned to his father, but among the many reverberations of that fact is Fidel’s question, now more pertinent than ever: How long does it take to change the perception of reality, to turn a lie into currency, to change a country?
What characterizes the new processes of collective brainwashing, which bring to power meteorites like Trump, Bolsonaro or Milei, is not so much the ostentatious falsehood that sustains them, a matter with which we are often distracted, as the force with which they are imposed, the rotundity with which they manage to install themselves in the public debate as incontrovertible data, to the extent that even those who reject them not infrequently prefer to avoid doing so aloud because of the enormous political cost that the audacity would entail for them.
In a very short time it has been imposed, for example, that sonic attacks against U.S. diplomats occurred in Cuba, denied even with arguments of physics, but even so the so-called “Havana syndrome”, which in 2017 the Trump administration used to unleash more than 240 sanctions against Cuba, appears in academic texts as evidence of “cognitive warfare” of the “axis of evil” (Russia, China, Iran, et al.). The alleged Chinese espionage bases on the island and the disembarkation of Cuban troops in Venezuela after the July 28 elections are along the same lines. The images that “prove” these facts are shoddy and lying, but it does not matter: lying is contagious, and lies end up taking on the appearance of truth.
The speed with which these stories take hold cannot be explained without the birth of cognitive psychology, magnified by a second event, the emergence of cyberspace, which is all too reminiscent of Edward M. Forster’s short story, The Machine Stops, a 1909 book about a futuristic scenario in which a mysterious machine controls everything from the food supply to information. In a situation that evokes the current events of the Internet and digital media, in this dystopia all communication is remote and face-to-face encounters no longer occur. The machine controls people’s minds by forcing them to depend on it. When the machine stops working, society collapses.
In terms of cognitive psychology, the United States has even had the luxury of experimenting with and even funding crazy projects to manipulate minds. In the Cold War years, the CIA and the U.S. Army experimented with LSD, marijuana and dozens of psychoactive drugs in widely documented mind control trials. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of special operations soldiers at Fort Bragg were assigned to an experiment to learn to kill with psychic power, an experience recreated in the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009).
In 1994, an Air Force researcher proposed spraying enemies with “aphrodisiac sprays that cause homosexual behavior.” In recent years, the National Research Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency pushed drug-based tactics to weaken enemy forces, and another Air Force project – “Biobehavioral Performance” – sought to boost the cognitive abilities of U.S. troops.
Mind experiments are not enough. Without social platforms there would be no cognitive warfare, a system different from the ideological warfare, information warfare and psychological operations we have known. Unlike the former, cognitive warfare is not about positioning frames of interpretation of reality. Nor does it consist in influencing large populations with information, whether true or not.
It does not seek to morally weaken the adversary with its contradictions. It takes advantage of the fact that more and more people are permanently connected to the Internet, from their cell phones…, to influence the information processing of a community and to condition the ability to think, to have judgment and to appropriate people’s attention.
Today many speak of cognitive warfare, but, unlike other phenomena in vogue, this is not another conspiracy theory. The doctrine comes from NATO, a pioneer in applying it, documenting it and even providing answers to questions such as Fidel’s: how long does it take to change someone’s mind? Sometimes at the speed of a click.
Source: Cubaperiodista, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English