Reverse Mind Engineering: Finding Paths to Cognitive Emancipation

A Book Proposal by Chris Shei (editor)

The world has been shaken by an unexpected war beginning 24 February 2022 and populations of the world have reacted to this event based on how their minds are imprinted upon with what. From various forms of support lent to the war initiators and the oblivion shown to the victims especially from reactions seen in authoritarian regimes, it may seem that political ideology can block the mind’s pathway to empathy and sympathy among other things. This edited book is conceived to explore the following rubrics of research questions under the hypotheses that the human mind can be intentionally engineered (by authority) or inadvertently conditioned (by environment) to reflect a certain ideology or certain ideologies:

• What are the psychological and biological bases of mind engineering and mind conditioning? Why are there some minds that escape engineering or conditioning? How does a conditioned mind break away from the implanted ideology?

• What specific role does language play in political mind engineering? What factors work with language to engineer the mind towards a certain ideology? What are the differences and similarities between political ideology and other forms of ideology (e.g. gender, ethnicity, religion)?

• Why is a political mind so difficult to change, that is, to convert a person who believes in democracy and freedom of speech to someone who subscribes to authoritarian rule, or vice versa? What factors derived from investigation of the first two groups of research questions can contribute to the ‘liberation’ of a politically engineered mind?

Currently several authors have responded to the call with the following tentative chapter titles:

1. Taiwanese and Chinese: Ethnic disparity created by political ideologies
2. Manufacturing consent through linguistic interpellation one “spin” at a time: exploring the dialogic architectonics of a mind as a “spin room”
3. The Green Spectacle: On the Relationship Between Capitalism and Nature
4. Clarks' Doll Experiment Revisited: Omnipresent Ideology and the Two Paths of Pressurization
5. Prison Diaries as Sanctuaries for Sanity and Touchstones for Memory: Case Studies from China, Argentina, and Other Sites of Political Imprisonment

If you have an idea for a piece of research that could respond to any of the research questions set out in this book proposal, then please get in touch with me by 31 July 2022. This is a follow-up project to The Routledge Handbook of Language and Mind Engineering jointly edited by James Schnell and myself and is likely to be published by Routledge as well.