Soft Mind Control
Softer forms of mind control employ subliminal messages or subtle suggestion, which are based on distracting the conscious mind so that the subconscious can be manipulated. These subtle methods usually are self imposed, such as social indoctrination or peer pressure.
In the main, soft mind control is a form of suggestion that is experienced as an impulse, which can either be ignored or acted on. But when we act on these impulses, we form new programs or habits that are in harmony with the suggestion, we literally become willing participants in making our minds more easily controlled. The more unconscious we are of these impulses, the more easily we feel driven to automatically act on them.
Therefore, anytime the conscious mind cannot cognize experience into cohesive knowledge, the subconscious mind is altered (programmed) via lack of awareness. What we fail to make conscious in our lives controls us from the subconscious as a program or impulse.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”― C.G. Jung
This is one of the reasons why educational systems employ memorization techniques (performance-based education), because it befuddles the conscious mind and prevents cohesive understanding from taking place. This consequently forces the mind into a trance state due to mild trauma—because not understanding something is confusing. When we can't perform as well as our peers, we feel inadequate and dis-empowered (mild self-imposed trauma causing dissociation)—a form of socially promulgated and self-enforced mind control.
Furthermore, anything we cannot make sense of or understand holistically (cognize), causes intense emotional states, which can lead to dissociation and leaves us vulnerable to suggestion. This is one of the reasons why academic institutions develop sophisticated and overly complex schools of thought or methods of understanding. The syntax of these thought-forms or mental structures suppresses holistic knowledge generation, replacing it with memorized facts that cannot be intrinsically understood—again, causing dissociation. [Sounds like some kind of Cognitive Dissonance on Steroids or Trans-marginal Pavlovian Inhibition sort of.]