Television ads proclaiming a new drug for psoriasis show the mingling of happy families and friends. Against this backdrop, the soundtrack rattles off a plethora of side effects, many of which can be fatal. The announcer’s voice is carefree, as if asking your doctor for Humira is like requesting a new brand of dental floss. The viewer is fooled by the wishful pictures, and his mind momentarily disengages from the somber reality of taking a risky pharmaceutical. Industry presumes that the person subjected to this marketing will ignore what he heard and focus on what he saw: healing and joy. He’ll beg the physician for the pill. The whole shabam is the tiniest Instagram of modern thought control and merchandizing at its best.

There are far more potent examples of thought control. Back when the Moonies and Hare Krishnas were in vogue, families were dismayed about how easily their sons and daughters could be swept up by such movements, to the point that they repudiated their parents. Once, a friend of mine hired strong men to kidnap her Moonie son out west. She had him flown home and brought him to see me. He was disarmingly normal and pleasant and told me that he was finished with the cult. By the next day, he was winging it back west, so powerful was the sect’s hold over him. How did the group achieve its goals of brainwashing? It offered a diluted nirvana, the hot glow of camaraderie, the cause of goodness, all that stuff. At least the Moonies didn’t espouse violence. But how about garden variety narco-gangsters with their codes of brotherhood until death, no matter who suffers in the process? And there were the German and Japanese combatants of World War II who were taught to believe that the rest of the world required extermination.

Now we have ISIS, a hydra-like entity with a recruiting process that defies understanding. How can young men and women succumb to being taught the skills of bombing men and women? Well, their teachers are probably highly charismatic, the promised rewards are heavenly, the horror they bestow upon the evil West is, they are told, richly deserved. And the pupils themselves? I am guessing they are ripe for indoctrination as much as a love-starved and hopeless person on the street is looking for the man with the white powder.

Of course there’s more to it. Often, I get a glimpse of those ripe for indoctrination. They are young people who lack reverence for life. Their killing starts with birds and then moves to household pets. Then come homicidal threats made at home or school. Themes of mutilation can appear in their drawings of knives and guns and the rich reds of dripping blood. Anyone could come into their lives and plant subversion in their brains, provided they had enough intellect to carry out obscene orders. Sometimes, out of desperation, I recommend organic evaluation, hoping that an MRI or an EEG will pick up an abnormality to explain pathology. Nothing shows up. It’s their minds that are diseased, not their brains.

So what do we do with them? The options are dismaying. Back to splintered families? In the end, we send them out for residential care, hoping that some degree of humanism will melt their aggressiveness. I doubt that there is much success in these ventures. The reverence for life is instilled in the human mind at the earliest age. With luck, this respect survives challenges.

Meanwhile, there’s no cure for budding ISISians. Governments can patrol all they want, somewhere there’s someone who’s being taught to maim. The trick, of course, is to catch him as he travels, but there seems to be a limit to that process. The detonator’s brain, like all brains, is made up of sponge-like material that absorbs hate as if it were a nutrient fluid. And those brains thrive on media sensationalism.

Will all this radicalism ever end? The smartest drones or “annihilation tactics” will not hasten the demise of ISIS because technology has made the world too porous to eradicate thought control. The merchandizing of civility is within the grasp of world leaders, but the prospects seem bleak, as does reduction of publicity, which fuels mass violence. The most we can hope for is the mysterious force of attrition through time, much as crusades and wars have ended and plagues have run their course.

Dr. John R. Lion is a physician and psychiatrist who practices in Baltimore; his email is newtlion@aol.com.