Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom
Daniel Bessner · Journal of American History · 2018
Human Programming will be useful for professors and graduate students interested in Cold War culture and the ways Americans have understood the concept of freedom since 1945. Written by Scott Selisker, a professor of English at the University of Arizona, the book “chart[s] the development of a cinematic, literary, and rhetorical figure” that Selisker terms (per Erich Fromm) “the human automaton” (pp. 2, 4, emphasis in original). As defined by the author, “the human automaton is the image of an individual deprived of his or her free will, that is, [a person] programmed or ‘brainwashed’ into acting or speaking without conscious control” (p. 4). Through his analysis of a diversity of texts, from John Frankenheimer's film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash (1992) to the Showtime drama Homeland (2011–), Selisker demonstrates that “the human automaton has provided a visual and narrative grammar through which Americans have discussed pressing questions about mental unfreedom” (p. 7).