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Comment by Fauntleroy | Hacker News Reader

This loosens the definition of the word "brainwashing" so much that the term becomes meaningless.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brainwashing:

    brainwashing - noun 
    
    1. a forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas

    2. persuasion by propaganda or salesmanship

The colloquial definition is 1, not as much 2, which is where the semantic bickering will come in.

Most people do not view being "convinced" as brainwashing. They see brainwashing as a sub-conscious activity. They view being convinced as a conscious one.

I think this definition is too broad myself.

Modern advertising is very sub-conscious activity.

When you talk about "modern advertising" I think you are referring to the large campaigns run by huge companies.

There is a lot of lower level advertising that is very straightforward and honest.

The term IS meaningless, there is no clear distinction between "brainwashing", "education", "marketing", "propaganda" and "convincing". Except that the first term was coined as war propaganda, so that you could say that people was brainwashed by your enemy instead of admitting that your enemy convinced those people. This also helps you to brainwa... I mean, to convince your citizens that your enemy is very evil and those people brainwashed by them could also be seen as bewitched drones, not fully human beings.

I agree tbh,

Which is kinda my point, you can't call ads not brainwashing because the term really does mean a lot of different things.

I like it because imo. advertisers are in general 'the enemy', out to convince us that we'll never find love without a diamond ring and that oreos sound really really good right now. So I'll use this term. Or more often propaganda since that ones harder to argue against

>The term IS meaningless, there is no clear distinction between "brainwashing, "education", "marketing", "propaganda" and "convincing"

From Merriam Webster's definition of brainwashing [0]

  1. a forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas

  2. persuasion by propaganda or salesmanship

So, the term isn't meaningless and, colloquially, is generally understood to emphasize the forcible or misleading / propaganda-based aspects of the formal definition.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brainwashing

I agree that the term has a meaning in the dictionary, and colloquially people attribute a distinct and stronger meaning to it. But I think it becomes meaningless when we try to establish a more serious discussion about it. The origin of the term as war propaganda is what creates this colloquial meaning and it is also why it becomes difficult to distinguish it from other things: the evil enemy brainwashes, we just educate rebellious children and teach them to behave. The evil enemy brainwashes, we just fill the cinema with movies depicting our soldiers as heroes, and our news on TV convince even people against the war that the enemy is a real menace against us and should be attacked. We just have full of marketing companies trying to convince even people that do not want to buy more things to buy more things. All these things can make a person give up previous beliefs and accept contrasting ideas. And are forcible in a way or another.

I've added some more in a sibling comment, but I really don't think the methods used by advertisers are much different than state progapaganda or cults.

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