April 12, 2013

The Level of Mind Control in North Korea is Unprecedented

If you’re trying to understand what this cult of personality is in North Korea, think about George Orwell’s 1984. This is a case of a country in which the leadership has eyes everywhere and they try to not only influence how you behave in society but how you think. And you are only allowed to have one sort of faith and that is faith in serving the Kim family leadership. There really is no space for anything else in your mind or in your body than doing these things in service of the leadership, the family and the state.

So it is a form of mind control that really is unprecedented in modern nation-state history. We have not seen anything like this. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was certainly quite ideological but nothing on this order and this sort of absolute control in this small country.

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

▸

7 min

—

with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

Up Next

Are We Living in a Second Gothic Age?

“[T]he Gothic era,” Bruno Klein writes in the introduction to Gothic: Visual Art of the Middle Ages, 1140-1500, “was a time of seeing, in which much was discussed in words, […]