A Unique Language and Its Role in Control

A man with Jehovah’s Witness relatives wrote to me recently and described his loved ones as being on the other side of an invisible obstacle like a glass wall.  He said he could yell, scream, and pound on the glass without getting any response from them—as if they couldn’t even hear what he was saying.

This man’s experience is not unique.  Many who attempt to reason with JW visitors or acquaintances feel that they run up against an invisible obstacle.  If you have already read other books on Jehovah’s Witnesses and have tried unsuccessfully to share liberating information with them, you may feel discouraged from making further attempts.  You may be thinking, “Why should I bother reading more about JWs?  I can never get through to them with what I already know.  When I talk to them it’s as if I’m not even speaking their language.” 

If so, you may have correctly identified the invisible obstacle as a language barrier.  Yet, it is much more than that.  The “theocratic language” that Watchtower leaders admit teaching their followers is actually an instrument of mind control.  It is designed to prevent you from getting through to them and to prevent them from accepting the information you are trying to share with them.

Having their own unique language is something that Jehovah’s Witnesses share in common with other mind control cults.  Yet it is an aspect of the sect that is often missed by Christians who focus on religious differences or doctrinal errors.  And, partly because they fail to take the effects of mind control into account, these Christians typically find it difficult if not impossible to correct those doctrinal errors in the JW’s mind.  A direct presentation of clear and simple information fails to penetrate the Witness’s thinking because the thinking process itself has become twisted and distorted.

The use of language in mind control is not necessarily a religious issue.  Atheistic communist regimes perfected the technique apart from any religious aspirations and used it as one of the psychological weapons they turned against Americans captured during the Korean War.  When a captive audience is coerced into listening, the process is termed brainwashing. When the same techniques are used minus the coercive element, the more correct terms are thought reform or mind control.  In either case, language plays a key role. 

Consider, for example, the effect of a single well-chosen name.  A regime that calls itself “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” trains people to refer to it by that name in order to influence their thinking.  Though it forms only a small part of a large mind control/propaganda effort, the name itself serves as an obstacle to thinking of the regime as undemocratic.  An undemocratic democratic republic is a linguistic contradiction, and the human mind automatically tries to avoid contradictions.  Like loaded dice weighted to roll a predetermined number, the “loaded language” of mind control exerts subtle pressure to induce a predetermined line of thought.  To outsiders like us, exposed to a single euphemistic name or a few vocabulary samples, such words are hardly persuasive at all, but to the actual targets of a mind control program—people immersed in propaganda twenty-four hours a day and cut off from outside influences—the effect can be overwhelming.

Because the Bible is familiar ground, Christians prefer to study Scripture for answers to Jehovah’s Witnesses rather than to study JW mind control.  (That preference apparently accounts for the popularity of my book Jehovah’s Witnesses Answered Verse by Verse, with over 100,000 copies circulating in English and nearly an equal number in translated editions.)  Yet it is that very mind control that prevents JWs from grasping what Christians show them in the Bible.  Later in this book I discuss the case of a Witness woman who was asked to open her own  New World Transla­tion Bible to Revelation 19:1 to determine whether that verse placed the “great crowd” on earth or in heaven.  She read “… great crowd in heaven… ” and concluded it said they are on earth.  Mind control forced her to see the opposite of what actually appeared on the page.  This is what Christians are up against when they go to Jehovah’s Witnesses with the Bible but without an understanding of the mind control language that distorts the Witnesses’ thinking.

Would you train missionaries in the Scriptures and then send them to China—without also teaching them the Chinese language?  Of course not!  By the same token you should not expect success if you try to take the Gospel to Jehovah’s Witnesses without first studying the “J.W.ese” language.  This volume will give you the basic information you need.