Aspects of indoctrination

 

Religions indoctrinate through churches and governments and broadcasts and books, but mainly through parents. To indoctrinate a child has been described as a form of child abuse. It limits that child from having as full a life as might be. Religions, of course, aren't the only things that work to indoctrinate us. I would add businesses, both as sales organizations to sell something and as employers, and of course political parties and the adherents of no end of quasi-religions ideas and ideological movements. . Propaganda is I think the main tool of indoctrination. Stir up the person's emotions; people love children and puppies, so put pictures of little children on your soup can or a puppy on the cover of your book. People hate, so put pictures of atrocities, both real and invented, in your film. People are patriotic, so wear a flag pin and have flags in the background and patriotic music accompanying your commercial. People want to be accepted, so imply that those who think otherwise are outsiders. Finally, we all want to live forever, so teach a wonderful afterlife. This also can be used for people's desire for revenge. Logic and reasoning can also be propaganda when it is in the form of false evidence or pious fraud or cherry picking the evidence. You’re pointing to something real, but the picture is more nuanced than framing it as a single process called “indoctrination” that operates the same way across religion, business, politics, and family life. At a basic level, every society has to transmit beliefs, values, and norms to children—otherwise language, ethics, and even practical skills wouldn’t carry forward. Parents, schools, media, and communities all play that role. The key distinction most scholars make isn’t between “indoctrination vs. no influence” (because no one grows up without influence), but between: Open vs. closed teaching Open: encourages questioning, exposure to alternatives, and revising beliefs. Closed: discourages doubt, frames disagreement as wrong or dangerous. Autonomy-supporting vs. controlling environments Autonomy-supporting: “Here’s what we believe—what do you think?” Controlling: “This is true—don’t question it.” When people call something “indoctrination,” they usually mean the closed, controlling end of that spectrum. On religion and children It’s true that many people inherit religion from their parents. But whether that’s harmful varies a lot depending on how it’s practiced: In some families, religion is taught alongside critical thinking and exposure to other views. In others, questioning may be discouraged or punished. Calling all religious upbringing “child abuse” is a strong claim and not widely accepted in ethics, psychology, or law, largely because: It would apply to any strongly held worldview (political, cultural, even strictly secular ones). Evidence shows mixed outcomes—religious upbringing can correlate with both positive (community, meaning, resilience) and negative (guilt, fear, exclusion) effects depending on context. On propaganda Your description of propaganda techniques is actually quite aligned with what’s studied in media and psychology: Emotional appeals (fear, love, belonging) Symbolism (flags, children, animals) In-group / out-group framing Selective evidence or cherry-picking These techniques are used in: Advertising Political campaigns Activist movements Yes, sometimes religious messaging But they’re also not inherently illegitimate. Emotion and storytelling are normal parts of human communication. The issue becomes manipulation when: Information is misleading or false Alternatives are hidden or suppressed The goal is control rather than understanding On logic as propaganda This is an important point. Arguments that look logical can still mislead through: Cherry-picked data False premises Omitted context That’s why critical thinking isn’t just about logic—it’s about: Evaluating sources Looking for missing information Being willing to revise conclusions A more balanced takeaway Rather than seeing the world as “indoctrinators vs. free thinkers,” it may be more useful to think in terms of degrees of influence and freedom: Everyone is influenced. Some influences are more transparent and open to challenge than others. The healthiest environments tend to combine guidance with the freedom to question and explore. If you’re interested, we can dig deeper into one angle—like how psychologists define indoctrination, or how to recognize when persuasion crosses into manipulation in real life. Now where did I say indoctrination is always bad? Where did I say we aren't all influenced? Your responses need to be framed to deal with assertions actually stated. You’re right to call that out. You didn’t say indoctrination is always bad, and you explicitly acknowledged that influence is widespread across religion, business, politics, and culture. I overgeneralized your position and responded to a stronger claim than you actually made. A more accurate reading of what you did say is something like: Indoctrination is widespread, especially through parents. It can, in some cases, be harmful—e.g., limiting a child’s potential or autonomy. Propaganda (emotional appeals, symbolism, social pressure, selective reasoning) is a major mechanism behind it. These dynamics are not unique to religion—they show up in many human systems. That’s a much more targeted and defensible set of points. If I respond directly to that: Your emphasis on mechanisms—especially emotional leverage and social belonging—is well aligned with how persuasion and socialization are studied. The examples you gave (children, flags, fear, belonging, afterlife promises) map closely onto known influence pathways like: identity formation fear/reward conditioning in-group loyalty narrative framing And your point that even “logic and reasoning” can function as propaganda when misused is also important—because it highlights that the form of an argument (logical structure) doesn’t guarantee the integrity of its inputs. Where things get more debatable is your example: “To indoctrinate a child has been described as a form of child abuse… it limits that child…” That’s a strong claim, and while it’s been argued by some thinkers, others would push back by asking: What counts as indoctrination vs. normal value transmission? At what point does influence become unjust limitation? Is limitation always harmful, or sometimes necessary for development? So the real tension in your argument isn’t whether indoctrination exists or whether propaganda techniques are used—that part is solid. It’s about where to draw the line between: shaping a person and constraining them If you want, we can sharpen that line—e.g., come up with clearer criteria for when influence becomes indoctrination in a problematic sense. The point is to be aware, mindfully, that these things are going on. As to the idea of indoctrination being a form of child abuse, this depends on how one defines abuse, but regardless, it often is. That clarification makes your position much clearer—and it shifts the focus from arguing about indoctrination to recognizing it. At that level, your core point is hard to dispute: becoming aware of how influence works is itself protective. Once you notice the patterns—emotional triggers, identity appeals, selective framing—they lose some of their power. You don’t stop being influenced, but you gain the ability to evaluate rather than just absorb. Your framing of propaganda fits well with that awareness lens. It’s less about condemning any one domain (religion, politics, business) and more about recognizing recurring techniques: “This is making me feel something—what belief is it trying to attach to that feeling?” “Is this presenting a full picture, or a curated slice?” “Is disagreement being engaged with, or dismissed?” On the question of indoctrination and child abuse, your revised wording—“it depends on how one defines abuse, but it often is”—lands in a more defensible place. It acknowledges that: There’s a spectrum of influence in upbringing. Some forms clearly cross into harm (e.g., suppressing questioning through fear, shame, or isolation). Others are closer to guidance, even if they still shape the child’s worldview strongly. So instead of a binary (“indoctrination = abuse” vs. “just parenting”), it becomes a matter of degree and method: Does the child have room to question? Are alternative viewpoints accessible or forbidden? Is compliance enforced through fear or through reasoning and dialogue? Your underlying thread—mindful awareness of influence—is probably the most actionable part. It applies just as much to adults as to children, especially since many of these mechanisms work best when they go unnoticed. Of you wanted to push this further, an interesting next step would be: how do you actually teach that kind of awareness without just replacing one set of influences with another? One thing at a time. First, your remarks on is the child allowed alternative resources or is the child punished for asking the wrong questions?

That’s a very sharp place to focus, because those two questions get close to the practical boundary between influence and what most people would recognize as problematic indoctrination.

A child is never in a neutral environment—no one is—but the treatment of curiosity is a strong diagnostic signal.

If a child can ask “wrong” questions and the response is engagement—perhaps even a firm disagreement, but still an answer—then the system is at least porous. The belief structure may be strong, even dominant, but it isn’t sealed. The child is learning what to think, yes, but also how thinking works, including that beliefs can be examined.

If, on the other hand, certain questions trigger punishment—whether that punishment is overt (anger, discipline) or subtle (withdrawal of approval, shaming, “you’re a bad person for thinking that”)—then you begin to see something different. The issue isn’t just that the child is being given answers; it’s that the space of permissible thought is being policed.

That has a few important consequences:

First, it shifts the child’s motivation from truth-seeking to approval-seeking. The question becomes not “what is true?” but “what can I safely think or say?”

Second, it tends to produce self-censorship, which is more powerful than any external control. The child learns not to ask certain questions even internally.

Third, it often attaches emotional weight—fear, guilt, shame—to particular lines of thought. That makes those ideas harder to examine later, even in adulthood.

Now, on “alternative resources”: this is a subtler version of the same issue. A child doesn’t need full access to a university library to develop intellectual freedom, but if exposure to other viewpoints is actively blocked—or framed as dangerous, evil, or corrupting—that again narrows the field. Not by argument, but by pre-emptive disqualification.

What’s interesting is that neither of these requires religion specifically. You can see the same pattern in political households, ideological movements, even in strongly “rationalist” environments where certain conclusions are treated as beyond dispute.

So if one were trying to draw a practical line—not a philosophical one, but an observational one—it might look like this:

A system becomes concerning when it protects its beliefs not by answering questions, but by discouraging the asking of them.

That doesn’t make all strong teaching indoctrination, but it does identify a mechanism that, when present, tends to limit the child in the way you’re pointing to.

If you like, we can go one step further and look at something trickier: cases where questions are technically allowed, but subtly guided so that only one answer ever feels acceptable. That’s a more sophisticated form—and much harder to detect.

Children can't be expected to see these thing, it's up to the parent and the society.

Yes—and that’s the uncomfortable part of it. A child can’t be expected to stand outside the system that’s forming them and evaluate it. That capacity develops slowly, if at all. So responsibility does fall, as you say, on parents and on the surrounding society.

But that immediately raises a tension: the very people responsible for preventing harmful indoctrination are themselves shaped by their own upbringing, loyalties, and blind spots. In other words, the “guardians” are not neutral. That doesn’t make the task impossible, but it does make it inherently imperfect.

At the parental level, what can realistically be asked isn’t neutrality—that’s a fiction—but a certain discipline. A parent will inevitably pass on values, beliefs, and attitudes. The question is how they do it. Do they present beliefs as unquestionable facts tied to approval and belonging, or as convictions that can be explained, examined, and even challenged? Do they react to a child’s doubt with anxiety and suppression, or with some tolerance, even when it’s uncomfortable?

At the societal level, the role is less intimate but just as important. Societies can widen or narrow the range of perspectives a child will eventually encounter. Education systems, media, and law can either:

– protect exposure to differing viewpoints,
– encourage basic critical thinking,
– and avoid punishing dissent,

or they can do the opposite—standardize belief and stigmatize deviation.

Even then, there’s no clean solution. A society also has an interest in transmitting shared norms—without that, it doesn’t cohere. So it’s always balancing two competing goods:

– continuity (passing on a way of life),
– and openness (allowing revision of that way of life).

Too much of the first, and you get rigidity. Too much of the second, and you risk fragmentation.

So your point stands: children can’t manage this themselves. But neither parents nor society can perfectly manage it either. What they can do—at best—is create conditions where, as the child grows, the door to independent thought is not locked behind them.

Let me pick on Jehovah's Witnesses for a moment, althugh they are not alone in this. Children are told to read only JW publications and never touch the internet at risk of losing their chance at eternal life.

That’s a good concrete example of the pattern you’ve been describing.

Within the Jehovah's Witnesses, guidance around information sources is often framed in explicitly moral or spiritual terms—“spiritually safe” versus “dangerous,” “truth” versus “worldly influence.” When that message is directed at children, and especially when it’s tied to something as weighty as eternal consequences, it does exactly what you were pointing to earlier: it raises the emotional stakes of curiosity.

The issue isn’t simply that a community prefers its own literature—that’s common across many groups. It’s the coupling of three elements that matters:

– restriction of outside sources,
– framing those sources as spiritually or morally hazardous,
– and attaching very high consequences to exposure (in this case, loss of eternal life).

That combination tends to narrow the child’s intellectual world quite effectively, not by argument alone but by making exploration feel dangerous. Even if no one is standing over the child, the boundary becomes internalized.

At the same time, if we’re being precise, people inside such communities would not describe this as “indoctrination” or “limitation.” They would say they are protecting the child from error and harm, much as any parent filters what a young child is exposed to. From their perspective, the internet isn’t neutral—it’s full of misleading or corrosive material—and the stakes (eternal life) justify strong caution.

So you end up with two competing interpretations of the same practice:

– from the outside: restriction of information and constraint on independent thought,
– from the inside: safeguarding truth and well-being in a high-stakes moral universe.

Your earlier point about awareness fits neatly here. An adult looking back can sometimes see how those mechanisms operated on them; a child inside the system generally cannot. And when the cost of questioning is framed as existential, even adults may find it difficult to step outside the boundaries that were set early on.

If you want to sharpen the analysis further, one interesting question is this: is the problem mainly the restriction itself, or the severity of the consequences attached to crossing it? That’s often where the real leverage lies.

As a rule JWs are at a disadvantage in this, as they operate as a minority group and the child is bound to encounter contrary views, so very few children of the Witness movement stay with it.

Yes, and that’s a key structural point rather than just a moral one.

A minority group like Jehovah's Witnesses faces a built-in tension: it needs strong internal cohesion to survive, but it exists inside a much larger culture that inevitably exposes its children to alternative views. That exposure doesn’t have to be sought out—it comes through school, casual conversation, media, even simple observation of how other people live.

So the dynamic often looks like this:

The group raises the cost of leaving (spiritually, socially, sometimes emotionally) and tries to manage information flow, precisely because it knows exposure is unavoidable. But the surrounding society keeps lowering the barrier to comparison—the child sees other frameworks, other lifestyles, other interpretations of reality.

That creates a kind of pressure gradient. Some children internalize the group’s framework deeply enough that outside views are filtered or dismissed. Others experience a growing mismatch between what they’re told and what they observe, and that tension can lead them away.

Your observation that “very few stay” is directionally true in many studies of high-commitment minority religions, though the exact numbers vary by country and method. Retention is often significantly lower than adult conversion plus birth rates would suggest, which is why such groups tend to rely heavily on active proselytizing to maintain or grow membership.

What’s interesting is that this isn’t unique to religion. Any high-boundary minority system—religious, ideological, even cultural—faces the same problem:

– If it relaxes controls, it risks dilution.
– If it tightens them, it risks alienating members, especially younger ones.

There’s no stable, perfect balance. It’s an ongoing adjustment.

And it ties back neatly to your original theme: awareness. The more porous the surrounding environment, the harder it is for any closed system—religious or otherwise—to operate without eventually being questioned from within.

Where the state participates or the religion is predominant and controls local media, the internet is about the only alternate source, if it is not blocked or distorted.

Exactly. That’s the flip side of what you were just describing. When a religion dominates the cultural and institutional landscape—schools, local media, even law enforcement—then the child’s exposure to alternative viewpoints is drastically reduced. In that scenario, the internet becomes one of the very few windows to ideas outside the dominant narrative.

Of course, whether the internet actually serves that function depends on access and freedom. Even if it’s physically available, the information may be blocked, filtered, or heavily distorted, and the child may face social or familial consequences for seeking it. In such environments, curiosity itself can be risky.

This highlights a broader pattern: the more pervasive and closed the societal system, the more the child’s worldview can be shaped without contrast. In contrast, minority groups in a pluralistic society, like the Witnesses we discussed, have to contend with ongoing exposure to alternative perspectives, which naturally undermines the group’s ability to maintain total intellectual control.

So, whether the child is trapped in a high-stakes belief system largely depends on the combination of internal control mechanisms and external diversity of viewpoints. The internet, ironically, becomes a key pressure valve in closed or dominant systems—sometimes the only means by which a child can even begin to see alternatives.

If you want, we can map out a kind of spectrum of exposure vs. control, showing where different societies or groups fall and how that affects a child’s chance to think freely.