Descrizione
Yale Univ Press ; 2021; 9780300247176 ; Rilegato con titoli al dorso, sovracoperta MANCANTE; 24,5 x16,5 cm; pp. 284; Volume riccamente illustrato in b./n. Numerose fotografie ; Presenta leggeri segni d’uso ai bordi (senza mancanze nè lacerazioni), volume saldo, interno ottimo e senza scritte, MANCA SOVRACOPERTA; Accettabile (come da foto). ; Preface I WAS WORKING IN the library when I bumped into one of my former patients. I hadn’t seen her for maybe five years. We sized each other up. I was a retired professor of psychiatry lugging a pile of books. She was a bright young scholar carrying lots of baggage from her past. We chatted for a bit, surrounded by shelves of books in the stacks, and she asked what I was working on. I told her I had gotten interested in brainwashing. “Umm,” she said. “Isn’t that kind of a stale, musty topic-Communists, bad science, and all that stuff?” As I said, she was bright and inclined to come right to the point-tact had never been her strong suit. Why was I spending so much time on this arcane topic? Granted, I am eccentric; but what made me think anybody else would be interested in this subject? Then I came home to watch the evening news, which featured its usual dose of suicide bombers and mass shootings, followed by political leaders making preposterous statements (“Vaccination causes autism,” “Global warming is a myth,” “The COVID-19 virus is not a problem”). It is bad enough that leaders can propound such nonsense; the bigger problem is that they persuade so many other people to endorse their misunderstand- ings of the world. I thought about my patient again. How did she make sense of a world where people could be persuaded to believe rubbish and follow it up with self-destructive violence? As a psychiatrist, I should be one of the last people to believe the world operates rationally. I know better. Leaders have all too often been pied pipers, but something new emerged in the twentieth century. I still don’t know what to call this phenomenon. Brainwashing, coercive persuasion, thought control, dark persuasion-all these terms refer to the fact that certain techniques render individuals shockingly vulnerable to indoctrination. ; L’immagine se disponibile, corrisponde alla copia in vendita.
