VICE: Hi Steven. Maybe you could start by explaining the difference between brainwashing and mind control?



Steven Hassan: Brainwashing was coined in the 1950s about communist indoctrination. Patty Hearst, for example, was kidnapped out of her apartment, put in a closet, raped and tortured. She became a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was what I'd call brainwashed, in the sense that, initially, she would have never gone with these people – she was taken by force, and quite brutally assaulted.



Okay.



Mind control is much more subtle. You're more likely to be seduced by the recruiter – if not sexually, then emotionally, where you think of them as a friend or a mentor, or someone you really look up to. So there's much more of a sense of what I call the illusion of choice, or the illusion of control. And in that sense, the indoctrination is subtler and deeper – because there's more sense of co-ownership over their new beliefs.