Mind Control

American Hysteria

W!ZARD Studios

Society & Culture

4.4 • 3.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2019

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For our season finale, I am going to step into the unknown recesses of the mind, especially my own. I’ll share my upsetting brush with a self-actualization program that taught me that life is empty and meaning when I was ten-years-old. I’ll give a partial history of psychology’s changing ideas about how we think about thinking. Then we’ll look at the Cold War beginnings of this concept called brainwashing when American POWs suddenly became communist sympathizers, and how the US government tried their hand at the same thing. After that, we’ll check out the human potential movement and the new age philosophies that helped influence the Manson Family’s murders. Moving into the 1970s, we’ll follow a kidnapped heiress turned domestic terrorist, and see how the mass deaths at Jonestown influenced her fate. We’ll meet the man who invented cult deprogramming, paid for by families to abduct their wayward loved ones back. At the close, I’ll share more about my modern-era spiritual journey and how it’s informed my own mental health. Does life have meaning? Who knows, and who cares. Come hang out for more more special episode, and let’s get weird, man. American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios Research and cowriting assisted by Riley Smith Co-Produced by Miranda Zickler Show art by Roache Voice Acting by Will Rogers Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly! Follow American Hysteria on social media: Twitter: @AmerHysteria Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just a heads up, this episode contains me rambling about the meaning of life or the lack of meaning of life,
0:06.0	so if you can't handle that right now, I just wanted to warn you.
0:18.0	On this season, we'll be exploring our bizarre beliefs, unfounded fears, and fantastical thinking,
0:24.0	how they shape our psychology and culture, and how much of our past we can find in the present.
0:29.0	I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American hysteria.
1:00.0	I said, from what?
1:08.0	Life is empty and meaningless, and it's empty and meaningless that it's empty and meaningless.
1:15.0	This is the mantra that I was taught at 10 years old as part of a self-help program
1:20.0	that I won't name here because they've sued people who call it a cult, which I'm truly not.
1:26.0	During the first course of an increasingly expensive series, a hundred of us kids sat in long-arched rows for long 12-hour days,
1:36.0	around the person who we called the leader.
1:39.0	This leader promised us freedom from the chains of the 10-year-old self and provided a path to self-actualization
1:47.0	through an examination and healing of traumas big and small, and a philosophy of self-mind control,
1:54.0	that we can change who we are if we're really willing to look.
1:59.0	Fast forward four years, and I'm there again, this time in the teen program, surrounded by another hundred peers.
2:07.0	But this time, by the end of the session, I am weeping like someone born again.
2:13.0	I feel saint-like, saved, soaked in love, and the world around me glowed harshly with a cutting beauty.
2:21.0	I'd figured it out. My anxiety and depression had disappeared just like that, a feeling that much to my disappointment quickly faded away.
2:33.0	Nonetheless, I went back again as a 16-year-old, the first time they let someone under 18 into this adult course.
2:42.0	This time, things were different. This time, from the moment I entered among the mostly middle-aged men and women who blinked blankly at me,
2:50.0	I felt it in my gut. The fear was only proven correct by the leader of this group, a lanky and tense man who yelled through his lecture,
3:01.0	calling randomly on participants at his will to answer very personal questions in front of everyone.
	...

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