Ep17 -- Mind Control

 Anybody out there remember the Johnson Smith catalog?  If you don't, that means you're probably younger than I am.  It was this cultural touchstone of my childhood, along with the Columbia Record and Tape Club.  It was this mail-order catalog that sold mostly novelty items like x-ray specs, electric back scratchers, fake vomit. You know, stuff like that.  Humorist Jean Shepherd called it "the Rosetta stone of American culture, a magnificent, smudgy thumbprint of a totally lusty, vibrant, alive, crude post-frontier society. A society that was, and in some way still remains, an exotic mixture of moralistic piety and violent primitive humor."  I'll post a link to the internet archive page for their 1979 catalog, which I'm willing to admit was one of the catalogs I remember from when I was a kid.  I mention it because they also sold a bunch of how-to guides, like how to dance, how to be the life of the party. And while I couldn't find it, I'm pretty sure they sold a guide to hypnotism or mind control, which got me thinking about the types of real empirically proven kinds of mind control that we can employ on ourselves. So this week I want to figure out a couple of ways that we can think differently about thinking.  Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. Stay tuned. 

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungslighting, a podcast about how we've all been conned into accepting a human culture that's out of sync with human nature, and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.  But first, a word about a sponsor.  

If you listened to the show a couple of weeks back, you remember that I talked about what happens to a society when inequality is stretched beyond the limits of what most people consider fair.  One of the ways that manifests is that very rich people have so much more money than they know what to do with, it starts getting thrown around to weird places with often deleterious, but totally predictable results.  For example, you remember the trend of golden visas where many European countries offered residency to foreigners who invested a minimum amount in local real estate?  Spain alone offered almost 15,000 visas, with a minimum purchase of 500,000 euros.  The result of this, along with the rise of Airbnb and Wall Street speculation in real estate, has been a housing crunch, very similar to the one affecting high-demand cities across the US. 

But this week, The Great Ungaslighting is not sponsored by another player in real estate finance: Alden Global Capital. You may know of Alden as the company that bought up hundreds of newspapers and then bled them dry to the exclusive benefit of their shareholders. Or that they're doing the same thing in more than a hundred mobile home parks, raising rents 40 to 60% while cutting staff and maintenance to the bone.  But there's one very lucrative activity that Alden shareholders profit handsomely from that you may be unfamiliar with. It's called tax lien investing.  Did you know that in 27 states, if you owe back property taxes, investment firms like Alden can pay off the municipality and assume that debt, and then attach fees or charge escalating rates of interest to the homeowner?  And if the homeowner doesn't pay it all back in two years, Alden can take ownership of the property.  For example, in early 2024, Alden paid $1.75 million to cover the tax liens on 600 properties in Cook County, Illinois.  So even if every homeowner is able to pay, Alden will still make a double-digit return on that investment.  But let's say a hundred of the 600 can't pay Alden's usurious rates.  That means that already struggling homeowners will be kicked out of their homes, even if they have no other debt on the property.  And Alden will have effectively purchased the home for less than $20,000 each.  Of course, the government could easily put a stop to tax lien investing tomorrow, but that would require a new regulation. And we know how horrible those things are.  

And we're back.  

Okay. Mind control. As you may have guessed, I'm not talking about CIA style. MK-Ultra, LSD-fueled mind control. I'm talking about  a sense of discipline over your own mind.   As you may recall, the very first episode of this podcast introduced the greatest gaslighter of all time: our own minds. There was that great line from physicist David Boehm, who said, "Thought creates our world and then says, 'I didn't do it.'"  So, how do you deal with a mind that's so devious and deceptive? For me. I found two strategies that work pretty well.  

The first is about recognizing the ways in which your mind lies to you. I learned this strategy from Shirzad Chamin's excellent book, Positive Intelligence. If you pick up this book, and I highly recommend that you do, feel free to skip over the management consulting stuff and just focus on the core message, which is that our minds sabotage us in several different ways.  Chamin names these saboteurs, like the Judge, the Controller, the Hyperachiever.  These are the voices in your head, in everyone's head, telling us that we're not good enough, we screwed that up, we should've done that differently.  

And if you don't realize it, you'd think that these voices were telling you the truth, but they're not. And by naming the saboteurs and exposing their lies, you can begin to push back against them.  And by the way, these saboteurs are really your own private built-in army of gaslighters. And learning to deal with them can make you more resistant over other people who may try to gaslight you.  Essentially, you'll be developing a finely tuned multipurpose bullshit detector.  

There was one moment in the introduction to Positive Intelligence when Chamin totally convinced me that he knew what he was talking about.  He's explaining how the book is laid out and the exercises that the reader should do, including a journal and worksheets, things like that. And I immediately thought I had this voice in my head that said, I'm not going to do those things. 

 I'm not a workshop guy. I usually just skip those tasks in books like this. And the next line he wrote in the book was essentially, "I know what you're thinking, that little voice in your head just told you, you probably won't do these exercises."  And I was like, you sly son of a bitch. Well done.  I still didn't do all the exercises, but I did more than I've ever done with any other self-help book.  

The other big strategy for controlling your own mind is meditation.  Specifically, mindfulness meditation, which usually consists of focusing on your breathing, and when other thoughts arise, you gently and without judgment bring your focus back to your breathing. That's pretty much it. So simple. But so difficult to master.  Now a lot of people think they should meditate to control stress or anxiety and yeah, you should do that.  But what's going on more generally is you're learning to control your mind, to be less reactive to stimuli that come in and less judgmental about your own thought processes. 

And it turns out there are some amazing physiological effects to meditation as well.  Studies have shown that meditation actually changes the structure of your brain, enlarging the areas of the cortex that allow us to control our attention and emotions.  Meditation has also been shown to affect our behavior towards others, with one study showing that meditators were three times as likely to offer their chair to someone on crutches and in pain.  How does that happen?  Well, one theory is that when we can control our own minds when we recognize the saboteurs and dismiss them as mere distractions, we're less inwardly focused on ourselves and our own problems. 

And when that happens, we very naturally turn our gaze and our concern outward towards others.  

As Tibetan Buddhist scholar Thupten Jinpa  put it so succinctly and beautifully, "A wandering mind is a less caring mind."  

So the big takeaway this week is to try to work on disciplining your own mind. If you've never meditated before, you should give it a try. There are tons of books and apps and videos with introductory mindfulness meditations. If you want to get started right now, we can do that. Just sit down someplace comfortable and quiet in a relaxed, but upright position with your feet flat on the floor.  Close your eyes and just begin following your breathing.  Ideally, you want to do what's called diaphragmatic breathing, which is a deeper breathing than what most people do naturally.  With normal breathing, you usually feel your chest expanding and contracting with each breath. It's very "upper" kind of feeling. With diaphragmatic breathing, you breathe down deeper, so that it's your belly that expands and contracts. 

And actually, this is in general, a good habit to get into,  it'll allow you to breathe deeper throughout the day more naturally.  If you like, you can start off just counting the breaths. See how far you can get before some other thought pops into your head.  When that happens, just acknowledge it and start counting again.  Or you can just concentrate on your breathing, following the air as it moves in and out of your body.  And for a meditation, just set a timer on your phone. Set it for two minutes, set it for three minutes. It can be very short period of time to start and you'll get better and better as you practice. And just follow your breathing.  When thoughts about other things pop up, simply acknowledge them and return the focus to your breathing.  

If you want to dive deeper into mindfulness meditation, a good place to start is with Jon Kabat Zinn's seminal books on meditation for Westerners. One's called Wherever You Go, There You Are. And the other one is called Full Catastrophe Living.

 And if you spend some time with those books, or start using a meditation app, or really just spend any time at all meditating,  you'll begin to master the secrets of mind control, and be on your way to taming the greatest gaslighter of all time: your own mind. 

That's it for this week. Until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other, some slack,  and as always, use your damn turn signal.