Some of the tactics that the Unification Church use to train members rolls up into the thought terminating cliché: that if someone is experiencing doubt, it is “evil spirit world invading.” These thought stopping techniques, also called a semantic stop-sign, are a mind control technique wherein loaded language is used to quell the cognitive dissonance that one experiences when encountering contradictory information or thoughts. It allows a person to remove the stress of the cognitive dissonance by avoiding all further consideration of a matter.
The concept was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, where he also referred to this technique as the as "The language of Non-thought.”
Resources mentioned in this episode:
