Standard Directive 024: Watch For Brainwashing
7 Dec 2025 · 2 min
Jocko Willink explains how cults, relationships, and institutions brainwash people into subservience, then argues you should brainwash yourself instead. Use discipline, rituals, and physical sacrifice to become stronger and smarter. Discipline equals freedom.
Chapters
People get brainwashed.
Happens all the time. People get brainwashed. They get brainwashed. In cults, in codependent relationships, in.
Academic institutions, in government institutions, people get brainwashed. They can get brainwashed in a way that completely changes the way they act.
They can get brainwashed in a way that completely changes the way they think. And in some cases, people get brainwashed where it completely changes who they are.
Their minds are pliable and get reformed into a new model.
And when these happen, when this happens, usually that new mind that has been created, usually it has been created to be subservient.
To the cult leader or the organization.
That has done the brainwashing. So that's what makes brainwashing so horrendous, is that you end up being controlled by someone else.
And it's not that hard to do. It's not that hard to be victim to the brainwashing where you end up being controlled by outside forces.
Now, you take that and on the other side, isn't it crazy that you can barely control you?
You can barely control your own actions.
And yet you could be brainwashed by some external force, but you can't even control you. What you need to do is brainwash yourself.
Indoctrinate yourself.
Repeat your sacred chant, that discipline equals freedom.
Follow the rituals of iron.
Make sacrifices to the burpee God. Bring other people along and brainwash with them.
Mold yourself into who you want to be.
Stronger, faster, smarter, better.
You have the power to do it.
Make it happen.
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