Ironically, the conspiracy theorists who believe that that people get brainwashed, are the ones who have gotten "brainwashed"

If brainwashing = conditioning or a higher degree of conditioning then we are all progressively brainwashed beginning from the moment of birth. It takes work to undo the conditioning that our environment/culture imposes upon us - much of which inaccurately portrays the world and its fundamentals, and often in damaging ways. As a result we come to interpret neutral events from our fragmented and distorted human lens (labeling them good/bad, etc.) rather than learning to see things from a worldly/universal perspective which is often much more neutral, holistic, and healthy. Ecopsychologists call this developmental stunting “ontogenic crippling”. This is the idea that we are stuck in an egoic mode of perception where if we had developed more closely aligned with nature perhaps we would naturally begin to notice the commonalities between ourselves and nature, and our complete immersion with and within it, which would eventually dissolve or expand our notion of self in a way that allows us to interpret events in ways beyond the self/strictly human lens.

-source: wrote a 50 page research paper on the influences of consumerism on the mind and effective remedies (most notably meditation and psychedelics)

/r/Showerthoughts Thread