| |
The Psychology of
Thought Control, Menticide
and Brainwashing
© 1956 BY THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY
ISBN 0-448-00118-7
1973 PRINTING |
Chapters I to VIII saved from http://www.ninehundred.net/control/
Chapters IX to XI saved from http://www.lermanet.com/scientology/
Chapters XII to XVIII saved from http://pyreaus.com/downloads/rape_of_the_mind.pdf
Revised by alex.sk [18. VI 2011].
CONTENTS
- YOU TOO WOULD CONFESS
- PAVLOV'S STUDENTS AS CIRCUS TAMERS
- MEDICATION INTO SUBMISSION
- WHY DO THEY YIELD? - The Psychodynamics of False Confession
- THE COLD WAR AGAINST THE MIND
- TOTALITARIA AND ITS DICTATORSHIP
- THE INTRUSION BY TOTALITARIAN THINKING
- TRIAL BY TRIAL
- FEAR AS A TOOL OF TERROR
- THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN
- MENTAL CONTAGION AND MASS DELUSION
- TECHNOLOGY INVADES OUR MINDS
- INTRUSION BY THE ADMINISTRATIVE MIND
- THE TURNCOAT IN EACH OF US
- TRAINING AGAINST MENTAL TORTURE
- EDUCATION FOR DISCIPLINE OR HIGHER MORALE
- FROM OLD TO NEW COURAGE
- FREEDOM - OUR MENTAL BACKBONE
And fear not them which kill the body, but are
not
able to kill the soul. -- Matthew 10:28
This book attempts to depict the strange transformation of the
free human mind into an automatically responding machine a
transformation which can be bought about by some of the cultural
undercurrents in our present day society as well as by deliberate
experiments in the service of a political ideology.
The rape of the mind and stealthy mental coercion are among the
oldest crimes of mankind. They probably began back in pre historic
days when man first discovered that he could exploit human qualities
of empathy and understanding in order to exert power over his fellow
men. The word "rape" is derived from the Latin word rapere,
to snatch, but also is related to the words to rave and raven. It means to
overwhelm and to enrapture, to invade, to usurp, to pillage and to steal.
The modern words "brainwashing", "thought control",
and "menticide" serve to provide a clearer conception of
the actual methods by which man's integrity can be violated. When a
concept is given its right name, it can be more easily recognized and it is
with this recognition that the opportunity for systematic correction begins.
In this book the reader will find a discussion of some of the
imminent dangers which threaten free cultural interplay. It
emphasizes the tremendous cultural implication of the subject of
enforced mental intrusion. Not only the artificial techniques of
coercion are important but even more the unobtrusive intrusion into
our feeling and thinking. The danger of destruction of the spirit may
be compared to the threat of total physical destruction through
atomic warfare. Indeed, the two are related and intertwined.
My approach to this subject is based on the belief that it is only by
looking at any problem from several angles that we are able to get at its heart.
According to Bohr's principle of complementarity, the rather
simple phenomena of physics can be looked at from diverse viewpoints;
different and seemingly contrasting concepts are needed to describe
physical phenomena. For instance, for explanation of the behavior of
electrons, both the concept of particle and the concept of wave are
useful. The same is true for the even more complicated psychological
and social interactions. We cannot look at brainwashing merely from a
simple Pavlovian viewpoint. This book tries to do it also from the
clinical descriptive view and from the concept of psychology; it
tries to look at brainwashing from the standpoint that general mental
coercion may belong to every human interaction.
Communication of any sort can almost be compared with trying to
knock down a row of dolls in a throwing game. The more balls we
throw, the greater is the probability that we may hit all the dolls.
The more approaches we make to any problem, the greater chance we
have of finding and grasping its essential core. Such detailed
treatment will be impossible without some repetition in the text.
In this book we shall move from the specific subject of planned
and deliberate mental coercion to the more general question of the
influences in the modern world that tend to robotize and automatize man.
The last chapters are devoted to the problem of inner backbone, as a
first step in the direction of learning to maintain OUR MENTAL FREEDOM.
One of the great Dutch authors, Multatuli, wrote a letter to his
friend excusing himself because the letter was so long: he had not
had time enough to write a shorter one. In this paradox he expressed
part of the problem of all search for expression and communication.
It takes a long time to express an idea in a precise and communicable
way. Yet being short and simple in one's descriptions is not always
appreciated. Especially modern psychology is loaded with
superlearnedness with the secret intention of leaving the reading
public awe stricken. The man who tries to express himself in simple
words, bypassing jargon, risks being called popular and unscientific.
Nevertheless, I am aware of the fact that I have been so much steeped
in psychological terminology that I cannot completely forego
psychological language. The real test of psychological clarity is the
way the layman absorbs and understands the ideas communicated. My aim
has been to write for the general public, not to popularize but to
bring some order to the chaos of our particular epoch.
Every word man speaks is a plagiarism. The task of an author is to
absorb, incorporate, and transform the knowledge and emotional
currents of his own epoch and to present them in his own personal
way, enriched by his own experiences. I am grateful, indeed, to all
those whose ideas I have been able to borrow, and especially to all those
who inspired me to write down my own thoughts on this controversial subject.
Joost Abraham Maurits Meerloo
January, 1956
THE RAPE OF THE MIND - PART ONE
The Techniques of Individual Submission
The first part of this book is devoted to various techniques used
to make man a meek conformist. In addition to actual political
occurrences, attention is called to some ideas born in the laboratory
and to the drug techniques that facilitate brainwashing. The last
chapter deals with the subtle psychological mechanisms of mental submission.
A fantastic thing is happening in our world. Today a man is no
longer punished only for the crimes he has in fact committed. Now he
may be compelled to confess to crimes that have been conjured up by
his judges, who use his confession for political purposes. It is not
enough for us to damn as evil those who sit in judgment. We must
understand what impels the false admission of guilt; we must take
another look at the human mind in all its frailty and vulnerability.
The Enforced Confession
During the Korean War, an officer of the United States Marine
Corps, Colonel Frank H. Schwable, was taken prisoner by the Chinese
Communists. After months of intense psychological pressure and
physical degradation, he signed a well documented "confession"
that the United States was carrying on bacteriological warfare
against the enemy. The confession named names, cited missions,
described meetings and strategy conferences. This was a tremendously
valuable propaganda tool for the totalitarians. They cabled the news
all over the world: "The United States of America is fighting
the peace loving people of China by dropping bombs loaded with
disease spreading bacteria, in violation of international law."
After his repatriation, Colonel Schwable issued a sworn statement
repudiating his confession, and describing his long months of
imprisonment. Later, he was brought before a military court of
inquiry. He testified in his own defense before that court: "I
was never convinced in my own mind that we in the First Marine Air
Wing had used bug warfare. I knew we hadn't, but the rest of it was real to me
the conferences, the planes, and how they would go about their missions."
"The words were mine", the Colonel continued, "but
the thoughts were theirs. That is the hardest thing I have to
explain: how a man can sit down and write something he knows is
false, and yet, to sense it, to feel it, to make it seem real."
This is the way Dr. Charles W. Mayo, a leading American physician
and government representative, explained brainwashing in an official
statement before the United Nations: "... the tortures used...
although they include many brutal physical injuries, are not like the
medieval torture of the rack and the thumb screw. They are subtler,
more prolonged, and intended to be more terrible in their effect.
They are calculated to disintegrate the mind of an intelligent
victim, to distort his sense of values, to a point where he will not
simply cry out 'I did it!' but will become a seemingly willing
accomplice to the complete disintegration of his integrity and the
production of an elaborate fiction."
The Schwable case is but one example of a defenseless prisoner
being compelled to tell a big lie. If we are to survive as free men,
we must face up to this problem of politically inspired mental
coercion, with all its ramifications.
It is more than twenty years [in 1956] since psychologists first
began to suspect that the human mind can easily fall prey to
dictatorial powers. In 1933, the German Reichstag building was burned
to the ground. The Nazis arrested a Dutchman, Marinus Van der Lubbe,
and accused him of the crime. Van der Lubbe was known by Dutch
psychiatrists to be mentally unstable. He had been a patient in a
mental institution in Holland. And his weakness and lack of mental
balance became apparent to the world when he appeared before the
court. Wherever news of the trial reached, men wondered: "Can
that foolish little fellow be a heroic revolutionary, a man who is
willing to sacrifice his life to an ideal?"
During the court sessions Van der Lubbe was evasive, dull, and
apathetic. Yet the reports of the Dutch psychiatrists described him
as a gay, alert, unstable character, a man whose moods changed
rapidly, who liked to vagabond around, and who had all kinds of
fantasies about changing the world.
On the forty second day of the trial, Van der Lubbe's behavior
changed dramatically. His apathy disappeared. It became apparent that
he had been quite aware of everything that had gone on during the
previous sessions. He criticized the slow course of the procedure. He
demanded punishment either by imprisonment or death. He spoke about
his "inner voices". He insisted that he had his moods in
check. Then he fell back into apathy. We now recognize these symptoms
as a combination of behavior forms which we can call a confession
syndrome. In 1933 this type of behavior was unknown to psychiatrists.
Unfortunately, it is very familiar today and is frequently met in
cases of extreme mental coercion.
Van der Lubbe was subsequently convicted and executed. When the
trial was over, the world began to realize that he had merely been a
scapegoat. The Nazis themselves had burned down the Reichstag
building and had staged the crime and the trial so that they could
take over Germany. Still later we realized that Van der Lubbe was the
victim of a diabolically clever misuse of medical knowledge and
psychologic technique, through which he had been transformed into a
useful, passive, meek automaton, who replied merely yes or no to his
interrogators during most of the court sessions. In a few moments he
threatened to jump out of his enforced role. Even at that time there were rumors
that the man had been drugged into submission, though we never became sure of that.
[NOTE: The psychiatric report about the case of Van der
Lubbe is published by Bonhoeffer and Zutt. Though they were
unfamiliar with the "menticide syndrome", and not briefed
by their political Fuhrers, they give a good description about the
pathologic, apathetic behavior, and his tremendous change of moods.
They deny the use of drugs.]
Between 1936 and 1938 the world became more conscious of the very
real danger of systematized mental coercion in the field of politics.
This was the period of the well remembered Moscow purge trials. It
was almost impossible to believe that dedicated old Bolsheviks, who
had given their lives to a revolutionary movement, had suddenly
turned into dastardly traitors. When, one after another, everyone of
the accused confessed and beat his breast, the general reaction was
that this was a great show of deception, intended only as a
propaganda move for the non Communist world. Then it became apparent
that a much worse tragedy was being enacted. The men on trial had
once been human beings. Now they were being systematically changed
into puppets. Their puppeteers called the tune, manipulated their
actions. When, from time to time, news came through showing how hard,
rigid revolutionaries could be changed into meek, self accusing
sheep, all over the world the last remnants of the belief in the free
community presumably being built in Soviet Russia began to crumble.
In recent years, the spectacle of confession to uncommitted crimes
has become more and more common. The list ranges from Communist
through non Communist to anti Communist, and includes men of such
different types as the Czech Bolshevik Rudolf Slansky and the
Hungarian cardinal, Joseph Mindszenty.
Mental Coercion and Enemy Occupation
Those of us who lived in the Nazi occupied countries during the
Second World War learned to understand only too well how people could
be forced into false confessions, and into betrayals of those they
loved. I myself was born in the Netherlands and lived there until the
Nazi occupation forced me to flee. In the early days of the
occupation, when we heard the first eyewitness descriptions of what
happened during Nazi interrogations of captured resistance workers,
we were frightened and alarmed.
The first aim of the Gestapo was to force prisoners under torture
to betray their friends and to report new victims for further
torture. The Brown Shirts demanded names and more names, not
bothering to ascertain whether or not they were given falsely under
the stress of terror. I remember very clearly one meeting held by a
small group of resisters to discuss the growing fear and insecurity.
Everybody at that meeting could expect to be mentioned and picked up
by the Gestapo at some time. Should we be able to stand the Nazi
treatment, or would we also be forced to become informers? This
question was being asked by anti Nazis in all the occupied countries.
During the second year of the occupation we realized that it was
better not to be in touch with one another. More than two contacts
were unsafe. We tried to find medical and psychiatric preventives to
harden us against the Nazi torture we expected. As a matter of fact,
I myself conducted some experiments to determine whether or not
narcotics would harden us against pain. However, the results were
paradoxical. Narcotics can create pain insensitivity, but their
dulling action at the same time makes people more vulnerable to
mental pressure. Even at that time we knew, as did the Nazis
themselves, that it was not the direct physical pain that broke
people, but the continuous humiliation and mental torture. One of my
patients, who was subjected to such an interrogation, managed to
remain silent. He refused to answer a single question, and finally
the Nazis dismissed him. But he never recovered from this terrifying
experience. He hardly spoken even when he returned home. He simply
sat bitter, full of indignation and in a few weeks he died. It was
not his physical wounds that had killed him; it was the combination
of fear and wounded pride.
We held many discussions about ways of strengthening our captured
underground workers or preventing them from final self betrayal.
Should some of our people be given suicide capsules? That could only
be a last resort. Narcotics like morphine give only a temporary
anesthesia and relief; moreover, the enemy would certainly find the
capsules and take them away.
We had heard about German attempts to give cocaine and amphetamine
to their air pilots for use in combat exhaustion, but neither
medicament was reliable. Those drugs might revive the body by making
it less sensitive to pain, but at the same time they dulled the mind.
If captured members of the underground were to take them, as experiments
had shown, their bodies might not feel the effects of physical torture, but
their hazy minds might turn them into easier dupes of the Nazis.
We also tried systematic exercises in mental relaxation and auto
hypnosis (comparable with Yogi exercises) in order to make the body
more insensitive to hunger and pain. If an individual's attention is
fixed on the development of conscious awareness of automatic body
functions, such a breathing, the alert functioning of the brain
cortex can be reduced, and awareness of pain will diminish. This
state of pain insensitivity can sometimes be achieved through
autohypnotic exercises. But very few of our people were able to bring
themselves into such anesthesia.
Finally we evolved this simple psychological trick: when you can
no longer outwit the enemy or resist talking, the best thing to do is
to talk too much. This was the idea: keep yourself sullen and act the
fool; play the coward and confess more than there is to confess.
Later we were able to verify that this method was successful in
several cases. Scatterbrained simpletons confused the enemy much more
than silent heroes whose stamina was finally undermined in spite of everything.
I had to flee Holland after a policeman warned me that my name had
been mentioned in an interrogation. I had twice been questioned by
the Nazis on minor matters and without bodily torture. When they
later caught up with me in Belgium, probably as the result of a
betrayal, I had to undergo a long initial examination in which I was
beaten, fortunately not too seriously. The interview had started
pleasantly enough. Apparently, the Nazi officer in charge thought he
would be able to get information out of me through friendly methods.
Indeed, we even had a discussion (since I am a psychiatrist) about
the methods used in interrogation. But the officer's mood changed,
and he behaved with all the sadistic characteristics we had come to
expect from his type. Happily, I managed to escape from Belgium that very
night before a more systematic and more torturous investigation could begin.
Arriving at the London headquarters after an adventurous trip
through France and Spain, I became Chief of the Psychological
Department of the Netherlands Forces in England. In this official
position I was able to gather data on what was happening to the
millions of victims of Nazi terror and torture. Later on I questioned
and treated several escapees from internment and concentration camps.
These people had become real experts in suffering. The variety of
human reactions under those infernal circumstances taught us an ugly
truth: the spirit of most men can be broken, men can be reduced to the level
of animal behavior. Both torturer and victim finally lose all human dignity.
My government gave me the power to investigate a group of traitors
and I also interrogated imprisoned Nazis. When I review all these
wartime experiences, all the confusion about courage and cowardice,
treason, morale, and mental fortitude, I must confess that my eyes
were only really opened after a study of the Nuremberg trials of the
Nazi leaders. These trials gave us the real story of the systematic
coercive methods used by the Nazis. At about the same time we began
to learn more about the perverted psychological strategy Russia and
her satellites were using.
Witchcraft and Torture
The specific techniques used in the modern world to break man's
mind and will to extort confessions for political propaganda purposes
are relatively new [in 1956] and highly refined. Yet enforced
confession itself is nothing new. From time immemorial tyrants and
dictators have needed these "voluntary" confessions to
justify their own evil deeds. The knowledge that the human mind can
be influenced, tamed, and broken down into servility is far older
than the modern dictatorial concept of enforced indoctrination. The
primitive shaman used awe inspiring ritual to bring his victim into
such a state of fright hypnosis that he yielded to all suggestions.
The native on whom a spell of doom has been cast by the medicine man
may become so hypnotized by his own fear that he simply sits down,
accepts his fate, and dies (Malinowski).
Throughout history men have had an intuitive understanding that
the mind can be manipulated. Elaborate strategies have been worked
out to achieve this end. Ecstasy rituals, frightening masks, loud
noises, eerie chants all have been used to compel the crowd to accept
the beliefs of their leaders. Even if an ordinary man at first resists a cruel
shaman or medicine man, the hypnotizing ritual gradually breaks his will.
More painful methods are not new either. When we study the old
reports of the Inquisition, or of the many witch trials, both in
Europe and America, we learn a great deal about these methods. The
floating test is one example. Those accused of witchcraft were thrown
into the river, their feet and hands tied together. If the body did
not sink, the victim was immediately pulled out of the water and
burned at the stake. The fact that he did not sink was proof positive
of his guilt. If, on the other hand, the accused obeyed the law of
gravity and sank to the bottom of the river, the drowned body was
ceremoniously removed from the river and proclaimed innocent. Not
much choice was left to the victim!
Man has been tremendously inventive in developing means for
inflicting suffering on his fellow man. With refined passion he has
devised techniques which provoke the most exquisite pain in the most
vulnerable parts of the human body. The rack and the thumbscrew are
age old instruments and have been used not only by primitive judges
but also by so called civilized dictators and tyrants.
In order better to understand modern mental torture, we must
constantly keep in mind the fact that from the earliest days bodily
anguish and the rack were never meant merely to inflict pain on the
victim. They may not have expressed their understanding in
sophisticated terms, but the medieval judge and hangman were
nevertheless aware that there is a peculiar spiritual relationship
and mental interplay between the victim and the rest of the
community. Much painful torture and hanging had to be done as public
demonstrations. After suffering the most intense pain, the witch
would not only confess to shocking sexual debaucheries with the
devil, but would herself gradually come to believe the stories she
had invented and would die convinced of her guilt. The whole ritual
of interrogation and torture finally compelled her to yield to the
fantasies of her judges and accusers. In the end she even yearned for
death. She wanted to be burned at the stake in order to exorcise the
devil and expiate her sins.
These same judges and hangman realized, too, that their witch
trials were intended not only to torture the witches, but even more
to torture the bystanders, who, albeit unconsciously, identified
themselves with the victims. This is, of course, one of the reasons
burning and hangings were held in public and became the occasion for
great pageants. Terror thus became widespread, and many judges spoke
euphemistically of the preventive action of such torture.
Psychologically, we can see this entire device as a blackmailing of
human sympathy and the general tendency to identify with others.
As far back as 1563 the courageous Dutch physician Johannes Wier
published his masterwork, "De
Praestigiis Daemonum" (On
the Delusions About Demons) in which he states that the collective
and voluntary self accusation of older women through which they
exposed themselves to torture and death by their inquisitors was in
itself an act inspired by the devil, a trick of demons, whose aim it
was to doom not only the innocent women but also their reckless
judges. Wier was the first medical man to introduce what became the
psychiatric concept of DELUSION and MENTAL BLINDNESS. Wherever his
book had influence, the persecution of witches ceased, in some
countries more than one hundred and fifty years before it was finally
brought to an end throughout the civilized world. His work and his
insights became one of the main instruments for fighting the witch
delusion and physical torture (Baschwitz). Wier realized even then
that witches were scapegoats for the inner confusion and desperation
of their judges and of the "Zeitgeist" in general.
The Refinement of the Rack
All knowledge can be used either for good or for evil, and
psychology is not immune to this general law. Psychology has
delivered up to man new means of torture and intrusion into the mind.
We must be more and more aware of what these methods and techniques
are if we are successfully to fight them. They can often be more
painful and mentally more paralyzing than the rack. Strong
personalities can tolerate physical agony; often it serves to
increase stubborn resistance. No matter what the constitution of the
victim, physical torture finally leads to a protective loss of
consciousness. But to withstand mental torture leading to creeping
mental breakdown demands an even stronger personality.
What we call brainwashing (a word derived from the Chinese "Hsi
Nao") is an elaborate ritual of systematic indoctrination,
conversion, and self accusation used to change non Communists into
submissive followers of the party (Hunter). "Menticide" is
a word coined by me and derived from "mens", the
mind, and "caedere", to kill.
[NOTE: Here I followed the etymology used by the United
Nations to form the word "genocide", meaning the systematic
destruction of racial groups.]
Both words indicate the same perverted refinement of the rack,
putting it on what appears to be a more acceptable level. But it is a
thousand times worse and a thousand times more useful to the inquisitor.
Menticide is an old crime against the human mind and spirit but
systematized anew. It is an organized system of psychological
intervention and judicial perversion through which a powerful
dictator can imprint his own opportunistic thoughts upon the minds of
those he plans to use and destroy. The terrorized victims finally
find themselves compelled to express complete conformity to the
tyrant's wishes. Through court procedures, at which the victim
mechanically reels off an inner record which has been prepared by his
inquisitors during a preceding period, public opinion is lulled and
thrown off guard. "A real traitor has been punished",
people think. "The man has confessed!" His confession can
be used for propaganda, for the cold war, to instill fear and terror, to accuse
the enemy falsely, or to exercise a constant mental pressure upon others.
One important result of this procedure is the great confusion it
creates in the mind of every observer, friend or foe. In the end no
one knows how to distinguish truth from falsehood. The totalitarian
potentate, in order to break down the minds of men, first needs
widespread mental chaos and verbal confusion, because both paralyze
his opposition and cause the morale of the enemy to deteriorate
unless his adversaries are aware of the dictator's real aim. From
then on he can start to build up his system of conformity.
In both the Mindszenty and the Schwable cases, we have documented
reports of the techniques of menticide as it has been used to break
the minds and wills of courageous men.
Let us look first at the case of Cardinal Mindszenty, accused of
misleading the Hungarian people and collaboration with the enemies,
the United States. In his expose' on Cardinal Mindszenty's
imprisonment, Stephen K. Swift graphically describes three typical
phases in the psychological "processing" of political
prisoners. The first phase is directed toward extorting confession.
The victim is bombarded with questions day and night. He is
inadequately and irregularly fed. He is allowed almost no rest and
remains in the interrogation chamber for hours on end while his
inquisitors take turns with him. Hungry, exhausted, his eyes blurred
and aching under unshaded lamps, the prisoner becomes little more
than a hounded animal.
... when the Cardinal had been standing for sixty six hours
[Swift reports], he closed his eyes and remained silent. He did not
even reply to questions with denials. The colonel in charge of the
shift tapped the Cardinal's shoulder and asked why he did not
respond. The Cardinal answered: 'End it all. Kill me! I am ready to
die!' He was told that no harm would come to him; that he could end
it all simply by answering certain questions.
... By Saturday forenoon he could hardly be recognized. He
asked for another drink and this time it was refused. His feet and
legs had swollen to such proportions that they caused him intense
pain; he fell down several times.
To the horrors the accused victim suffers from without must be
added the horrors from within. He is pursued by the unsteadiness of
his own mind, which cannot always produce the same answer to a
repeated question. As a human being with a conscience he is pursued
by possible hidden guilt feelings, however pious he may have been,
that undermine his rational awareness of innocence. The panic of the
"brainwashee" is the total confusion he suffers about all
concepts. His evaluations and norms are undermined. He cannot believe
in anything objective any more except in the dictated and
indoctrinated logic of those who are more powerful than he. The enemy
knows that, far below the surface, human life is built up of inner contradictions.
He uses this knowledge to defeat and confuse the brainwashee. The continual
shift of interrogators makes it ever more impossible to believe in consecutive
thinking. Hardly has the victim adjusted himself to one inquisitor when he has
to change his focus of alertness to another one.
Yet, this inner clash of norms and concepts, this inner contradiction
of ideologies and beliefs is part of the philosophical sickness of our time!
As a social being the Cardinal is pursued by the need for good
human relationships and companionship. The constantly reiterated
suggestion of his guilt urges him toward confession. As a suffering
individual he is blackmailed by an inner need to be left alone and
undisturbed, if only for a few minutes. From within and without he is
inexorably driven toward signing the confession prepared by his
persecutors. Why should he resist any longer? There are no visible
witnesses to his heroism. He cannot prove his moral courage and
rectitude after his death. The core of the strategy of menticide is
the taking away of all hope, all anticipation, all belief in a future. It destroys
the very elements which keep the mind alive. The victim is utterly alone.
[NOTE: This continual attack on human conscience and
guilt by unconscious self accusations is brilliantly depicted by
Franz Kafka in "The Trial". In this novel the victim never
knows of what he is accused but his inner guilt leads him to
conviction. Kafka anticipated the age of blackmailing into
confession. His novel was written before the 1930s. The same theme
has been treated from a psychological point of view by Theodor Reik
in his "Confession Compulsion and the Need for Punishment".]
If the prisoner's mind proves too resistant, narcotics are given
to confuse it: mescaline, marijuana, morphine, barbiturates, alcohol.
If his body collapses before his mind capitulates, he receives
stimulants: benzedrine, caffein, coramine, all of which help to
preserve his consciousness until he confesses. Many of the narcotics
and stimuli which ultimately help to induce mental dependency and
enforced confusion can also create an amnesia, often a complete
forgetting of the torture itself. The torture techniques achieve the
desired effect, but the victim forgets what has actually happened
during the interrogation. The clinicians who do therapeutic work with
amphetamine derivatives, which when injected into the blood stream
help patients to remember long forgotten experiences, are familiar
with the drug's ability to bring soothing forgetfulness of the period
during which the patient was drugged and questioned.
[NOTE: See CHAPTER III. MEDICATION INTO SUBMISSION]
Next the victim is trained to accept his own confession, much as
an animal is trained to perform tricks. False admissions are reread,
repeated, hammered into his brain. He is forced to reproduce in his
memory again and again the fantasied offenses, fictitious details
which ultimately convince him of his criminality. In the first stage
he is forced into mental submissiveness by others. In the second
stage he has entered a state of autohypnosis, convincing himself of
fabricated crimes. According to Swift: "The questions during the
interrogation now dealt with details of the Cardinal's 'confession.'
First his own statements were read to him; then statements of other
prisoners accused of complicity with him; then elaborations of those
statements. Sometimes the Cardinal was morose, sometimes greatly
disturbed and excited. But he answered all questions willingly, repeated all
sentences once, twice, or even three times when he was told to do so." (Lassio)
In the third and final phase of interrogation and menticide the
accused, now completely conditioned and accepting his own imposed
guilt, is trained to bear false witness against himself and others.
He doesn't have to convince himself any more through autohypnosis; he
only speaks "his master's voice". He is prepared for trial,
softened completely; he becomes remorseful and willing to be
sentenced. He is a baby in the hands of his inquisitors, fed as a
baby and soothed by words as a baby.
[NOTE: A more extended survey of the different
psychological stages in menticide and brainwashing will be given at
the end of CHAPTER IV. WHY DO THEY YIELD?
- The Psychodynamics of False Confession]
Menticide in Korea
Now let us take a look at the Schwable case. In its general
outline it is similar to the Mindszenty story; it differs only in
details. As an officer of the United States Marine Corps, fighting
with the United Nations in Korea, he is taken prisoner by the enemy.
The colonel expects to be protected by international law and by the
regulations regarding officer prisoners of war, which have been
accepted by all countries. However, it slowly dawns on him that he is
being subjected to a kind of treatment very different from what he
expected. The enemy looks on him not as a prisoner of war, but as a
victim who can be used for propaganda purposes.
He is subjected to slow but constant pressures devised to break
him down mentally. Humiliation, rough, inhuman treatment,
degradation, intimidation, hunger, exposure to extreme cold all have
been used to crumble his will and to soften him. They need to wangle
military secrets out of him and to use him as a tool in their
propaganda machine. He feels completely alone. He is surrounded by
filth and vermin. For hours on end he has to stand up and answer the
questions his interrogators hurl at him. He develops arthritic
backache and diarrhea. He is not allowed to wash or shave. He doesn't
know what will happen to him next. This treatment goes on for weeks.
Then the hours of systematic and repetitious interrogation and
oppression increase. He no longer dares to trust his own memory.
There are new teams of investigators every day, and each new team
points out his increasing errors and mistakes. He cannot sleep any
more. Daily his interrogators tell him they have plenty of time, and
he realizes that in this respect at least they are telling the truth.
He beings to doubt whether he can resist their seductive
propositions. If he will just unburden himself of his guilt, they
tell him, he will be better treated.
The inquisitor is treacherously kind and knows exactly what he
wants. He wants the victim captured by the influence of a slowly
induced hypnosis. He wants a well documented confession that the
American army used bacteriological warfare, that the captive himself
took part in such germ warfare. The inquisitor wants this confession
in writing because it will make a convincing impression and will
shock the world. China is plagued by hunger and epidemics; such a
confession will explain the high disease rate and exculpate the
Chinese government, whose popularity is at a low ebb. So the colonel
has to be prepared for a systematic confession, made before an international
group of Communist experts. Mentally and physically he is weakened, and
every day the Communist "truths" are imprinted on his mind.
The colonel has in fact become hypnotized; he is now able to
reproduce for his jailers bits and pieces of the confession they want
from him. It is a well known scientific fact that the passive memory
often remembers facts learned under hypnosis better than those
learned in a state of alert consciousness. He is even able to write
some of it down. Eventually, all the little pieces fit, like a jigsaw
puzzle, into a complete, well organized whole; they form part of a
document which was in fact prepared beforehand by his captors. This
document is placed in the colonel's hands, and he is even allowed to
make some minor changes in the phrasing before he signs it.
By now, the colonel has been completely broken. He has given in.
All sense of reality is gone; identification with the enemy is
complete. For weeks after signing the confession he is in a state of
depression. His only wish is to sleep, to have rest from it all.
A man will often try to hold out beyond the limits of his
endurance because he continues to believe that his tormentors have
some basic morality, that they will finally realize the enormity of
their crimes and will leave him alone. This is a delusion. The only
way to strengthen one's defenses against an organized attack on the
mind and will is to understand better what the enemy is trying to do
and to outwit him. Of course, one can vow to hold out until death,
but even the relief of death is in the hands of the inquisitor.
People can be brought to the threshold of death and then be
stimulated into life again so that the torments can be renewed.
Attempts at suicide are foreseen and can be forestalled.
In my opinion hardly anyone can resist such treatment. It all
depends on the ego strength of the person and the exhaustive
technique of the inquisitor. Each man has his own limit of endurance,
but that this limit can nearly always be reached and even surpassed
is supported by clinical evidence. Nobody can predict for himself how
he will handle a situation when he is called to the test. The
official United States report on brainwashing [See the "New
York Times", August 18, 1955.] admits that "virtually
all American POWs collaborated at one time or another in one degree
or another, lost their identity as Americans... thousands lost their
will to live" and so forth. The British report [See the "New
York Times", February 27, 1955.] gives a statistical survey
about the abuse of the POWs. According to this report one third of
the soldiers absorbed enough indoctrination to be classified as
Communist sympathizers.
This same report describes in a more extended way some of the
sadistic means used by the enemy:
If a prisoner accepted Communist doctrines, his life became
easier, according to the men's stories. But if a prisoner resisted
Communist doctrines, the Chinese considered him a criminal and
reactionary deserving of any brutalities. the tortures applied to the
'reactionaries' included:
Making a prisoner stand at attention or sit with legs
outstretched in complete silence from 4:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. and
constantly waking him during the few hours allowed for sleep.
Keeping prisoners in solitary confinement in boxes about five
by three by two feet. A private of the Gloucester Regiment spent
more than six months in one of these.
Withholding liquids for days 'to help self reflection'.
Binding a prisoner with a rope passed over a beam, one end
fixed as a hangman's noose round his neck and the other end tied to
his ankles. He was then told that if he slipped or bent his knees he
would be committing suicide.
Forcing a prisoner to kneel on jagged rocks and hold a large
rock over his head with arms extended. It took a man who had
undergone this treatment days to recover the ability to walk.
At one camp North Korean jailers pushed a pencil like piece
of wood or metal through a hole in the cell door and made the
prisoner hold the inner end in his teeth. Without warning a sentry
would knock the outer end sidewise, breaking the man's teeth or
splitting the sides of his mouth. Sometimes the rod was rammed
inward against the back of the mouth or down the throat.
Prisoners were marched barefooted to the frozen Yalu River,
water was poured over their feet and they were kept for hours with
their feet frozen to the ice to 'reflect' on their 'crimes.'
Time, fear, and continual pressure are known to create a
menticidal hypnosis. The conscious part of the personality no longer
takes part in the automatic confessions. The brainwashee lives in a
trance, repeating the record grooved into him ind by somebody else.
Fortunately, this, too, is known: as soon as the victim returns to normal circumstances,
the panicky and hypnotic spell evaporates, and he again awakens into reality.
This is what happened to Colonel Schwable. True, he confessed to
crimes he did not commit, but he repudiated his confession as soon as
he was returned to a familiar environment.
When, during the military inquiry into the Schwable case, I was
called upon to testify as an expert on menticide, I told the court of
my deep conviction that nearly anybody subjected to the treatment meted
out to Colonel Schwable could be forced to write and sign a similar confession.
"Anyone in this room, for instance?" the colonel's
attorney asked me, looking in turn at each of the officers sitting in
judgment on this new and difficult case.
And in good conscience I could reply, firmly: "Anyone in this room."
It is now technically possible to bring the human mind into a
condition of enslavement and submission. The Schwable case and the
cases of other prisoners of war are tragic examples of this, made
even more tragic by our lack of understanding of the limits of
heroism. We are just beginning to understand what these limits are,
and how they are used, both politically and psychologically, by the
totalitarians. We have long since come to recognize the breast
beating confession and the public recantation as propaganda tricks;
now we are beginning to see ever more clearly how the totalitarians
use menticide: deliberately, openly, unashamedly, as part of their
official policy, as a means of consolidating and maintaining their
power, though, of course, they give a different explanation to the
whole procedure it's all confessions of real and treacherous crimes.
This brutal totalitarian technique has at least one virtue,
however. It is obvious and unmistakable, and we are learning to be on
our guard against it, but as we shall see later, there are other
subtler forms of mental intervention. They can be just as dangerous
as the direct assault, precisely because they are more subtle and
hence more difficult to detect. Often we are not aware of their
action at all. They influence the mind so slowly and indirectly that
we may not even realize what they have done to us.
Like totalitarian menticide, some of these less obvious forms of
mental manipulation are political in purpose. Others are not. Even if
they differ in intent, they can have the same consequences.
These subtle menticidal forces operate both within the mind and
outside it. They have been strengthened in their effect by the growth
in complexity of our civilization. The modern means of mass
communication bring the entire world daily into each man's home; the
techniques of propaganda and salesmanship have been refined and
systematized; there is scarcely any hiding place from the constant
visual and verbal assault on the mind. The pressures of daily life
impel more and more people to seek an easy escape from responsibility
and maturity. Indeed, it is difficult to withstand these pressures; to many
the offer of a political panacea is very tempting, to others the offer of
escape through alcohol, drugs, or other artificial pleasures is irresistible.
Free men in a free society must learn not only to recognize this
stealthy attack on mental integrity and fight it, but must learn also
what there is in side man's mind that makes him vulnerable to this
attack, what it is that makes him, in many cases, actually long for a
way out of the responsibilities that republican democracy and
maturity place on him.
Before asking ourselves what the deeper mental mechanisms are of
brainwashing, false confession, and conversion into a collaborator,
let us try to see things from the standpoint of the totalitarian potentates.
What is their aim? What terms do they use to describe the behavior of their
prisoners? What do they want from the Schwables and the Midszentys?
The totalitarian jailers don't speak of hypnosis or suggestion;
they even deny the fact of imposed confession. They think about human
behavior and human government in a much more mechanical way. In order
to understand them we have to give more attention to their adoration
of simplified Pavlovian concepts.
The Salivating Dog
In the latter part of the nineteenth century the Russian Nobel
price winner Ivan Petrovich Pavlov conducted his famous experiments
with a bell and a dog. He knew that salivation is associated with
eating, and that if a dog was hungry, its mouth would water each time
it saw food. Pavlov took advantage of this useful inborn reflex,
which serves the digestive process, to develop in his experimental
animal the salivating response in answer to a stimulus which would
not ordinarily create it. Each time Pavlov fed the dog, he rang a
bell, and at each feeding the dog's mouth watered. Then after many
repetitions of the combined food bell stimulus, Pavlov rang the bell
but did not feed the dog. The animal reacted to the bell alone just
as it had previously reacted to the sight of food its mouth watered.
Thus the scientist had found out that the dog could be induced to
salivate involuntarily in response to an arbitrary signal. It had
been "conditioned" to respond to the ringing of the bell as
if that sound were the smell and taste of food.
From this and other experiments, Pavlov developed his theory of
the conditioned reflex, which explains learning and training as the
building up of a mosaic of conditioned reflexes, each one based on
the establishment of an association between different stimuli. The
greater the number of learned complex responses also called patterns
the greater the number of conditioned reflexes developed. Because
man, of all the animals, has the greatest capacity for learning, he is the
animal with the greatest capacity for such complicated conditioning.
Pavlov's experiments were of great value in the study of animal
and human behavior, and in the study of the development of neurotic
symptoms. However, this knowledge of some of the mechanisms of the
human mind can be used as we have seen already, like any other
knowledge, either for good or for evil. And unfortunately, the
totalitarians have used their knowledge of how the mind works for
their own purposes. They have applied some of the Pavlovian findings,
in a subtle and complicated way and sometimes in a grotesque way, to
try to produce the reflex of mental and political conditioning and of
submission in the human guinea pigs under their control.
Even though the Nazis employed these methods before the Second
World War, they can be said to have reached their full flower in
Soviet Russia. Through a continued repetition of indoctrination, bell
ringing and feeding, the Soviet man is expected to become a conditioned
reflex machine, reacting according to a prearranged pattern, as did the
laboratory dogs. At least, such a simplified concept is roaming around
in the minds of some of the Soviet leaders and scientists (Dobrogaev).
In accordance with one of Stalin's directives, Moscow maintains a
special "Pavlovian Front" (Dobrogaev) and a "Scientific
Council on Problems of Physiological Theory of the Academician I. P.
Pavlov" (London). These institutions, part of the Academy of
Science, are dedicated to the political application of the Pavlovian
theory. They are under orders to emphasize the purely mechanical
aspects of Pavlov's findings. Such a theoretical view can reduce all
human emotions to a simple, mechanistic system of conditioned
reflexes. Both organizations are control agencies dealing in research
problems, and the scientists who work on them explore the ways in
which man can theoretically be conditioned and trained as animals
are. Since Pavlovian theory is proclaimed by the obdurate
totalitarian theoreticians as the gospel of animal and human
behavior, we have to grapple with the facts they adduce to prove
their point, and with their methods and theoretical explanations.
What the Pavlovian council tries to achieve is the result of an
oversimplification of psychology. Their political task is to
condition and mold man's mind so that its comprehension is confined
to a narrow totalitarian concept of the world. It is the idea that such a
limitation of thinking to Lenin Marxist theoretical thinking must be
possible for two reasons: first, if one repeats often enough its simplification,
and second, if one withholds any other form of interpretation of reality.
This concept is based on the naive belief that one can permanently
suppress any critical function and verification in human thinking.
Yet, through taming and conditioning of people, during which period
errors and deviations must continually be corrected, unwittingly a
critical sense is built up. True, at the same time the danger of
using this critical sense is brought home to the students. They know
the dangers of any dissent, but even this promotes the development of
a secondary and more refined critical sense. In the end, human
rebellion and dissent cannot be suppressed; they await only one
breath of freedom in order to awake once more. The idea that there
exist other ways to truth than those he sees close at hand lives
somewhere in everybody. One can narrow his pathways of research and
expression, but a man's belief in adventurous new roads elsewhere is
ever present in the back of his mind.
The inquisitive human mind is never satisfied with a simple
recital of facts. As soon as it observes a set of data, it jumps into
the area of theory and offers explanations, but the way a man sees a
set of facts, and the way he juggles them to build them into a theory
is largely determined by his own biases and prejudices.
Let me be the first to confess that I am affected by my own
subjectivities. Even the words we use are loaded with implications
and suggestions. The word "reflex", for example, so
important in Pavlovian theory, is a perfect instance of this. It was
first used by the seventeenth century philosopher Descartes, in whose
philosophical system a parallel was made between the actions of the
human body and those of a machine. For example, in the Caresian view,
the automatic reaction of the body to certain painful stimuli (e.g.,
withdrawing the hand after it has come into contact with fire) is
compared with the automatic physical reflection of light from a
mirror. The nervous system, according to Descartes, reflects its
response just as the mirror does. Such a simple explanation of
behavior, and the very words used to describe it, immediately denies
the whole organism taking part in that response.
Yet man is not only a mirror, but a thinking mirror. According to
the old mechanical view, actions are associated only with the part of
the body which performs them, and they have no relationship
whatsoever to the purposeful behavior of the organism as a whole. But
man is not a machine composed of independently functioning parts. He
is a whole. His mind and body interact; he acts on the outside world
and the outside world acts on him. The innate reflexes, of which this
hand withdrawal is one example, are part of a whole system of
adaptive responses which serve to help the individual, as an entity,
to adjust to changed circumstances. They can be described as the
result of an inborn adaptation tendency. The only real difference
between the innate reflexes and the conditioned reflexes is that the
former supposedly have developed in the entire race over the millions
of years of the evolutionary process, while the latter are developed
during the life span of the individual as a result of the gradual
automatization of acquired responses.
If you analyze any one of the complicated actions you may perform
during the course of a single day (driving an automobile, for
example), you will see that it occurs outside your conscious
management. And yet, before the process could be automatized, the
actions, purposefully directed toward the satisfaction of some goal,
had to be consciously learned and managed. You were not born with the
innate reflex of jamming on the brake to stop a car quickly in an
emergency. You had to learn to do it, and in the process of learning
and driving, this response became automatic. If, after you have
learned to drive, you see a child running across the path of your
car, you put the brake on immediately, by reflex, without thinking.
The Conditioning of Man
Pavlov's research on the machinery of the mind taught us how all
the animals including man learn adjustment to existing limitations
through linking the signs and signals of life to body reactions. The
mind creates a relationship between repeated simultaneous
occurrences, and the body reacts to the connections the mind forms.
Thus the bell, rung each time the dog was fed, became a signal to the
animal to prepare for digestion, and the animal began to salivate.
Recent experiments conducted by Dr. Gregory Razran of Queens
College show how men may develop these same kinds of responses. Dr.
Razran treated a group of twenty college students to a series of free
luncheons at which music was played or pictures shown. After the
final luncheon, these twenty students were brought together with
another group who had not been luncheon guests. At this meeting, as
at the luncheons, music was played and pictures shown, and all the
students were asked to tell what the music and pictures made them
think of. The music and the pictures generally reminded the first
group of something related to eating, but had no such associations
for the second group. There was obviously a temporary connection in
the minds of the luncheon guests between the music and the pictures
on the one hand and eating on the other.
The Chinese did their mass conditioning in an even simpler way.
After having taught the prisoners for days to write down all possible
nonsense and political lies in an atmosphere of utter confusion and
stress they were ripe to sign collectively the lie of having taken
part in germ warfare (Winokur).
All conditioned reflexes are involuntary temporary adjustments to
pressures which create an apparent connection between stimuli which
may be in fact totally unrelated. For this reason, the conditioned
reflex is not necessarily permanently imprinted on the individual,
but can gradually disappear. If, after the dog's conditioned reflex
to the bell has been developed, the bell is rung over and over again
and no food is presented to the animal, the salivating reflex
disappears. Doubtless Dr. Razran's students will not always think of
food when they hear music.
We could describe the conditioned reflex another way: it is a
selected response of the mind body unit to a given stimulus. The ways
in which the stimulus and the response are connected vary
considerably they may have been associated in time, in place, or by
coincidence, or by a common aim and thus they may form a special
conditioned complex in our mental and physical attitude. Some of
these complex responses, or patterns are more autonomous than others,
and will act like the innate patterns. Some are flexible and are
continually changing. Analysis of some of the psychosomatic diseases,
for example, shows us how our inner emotional attitudes can intensify
or even change a conditional response. Stomach ulcers are considered
an example of such a psychosomatic disease. The mother who puts her
child on a too rigid feeding schedule may change the child's favorable
response to hunger into a stubborn reaction against feeding.
For our purpose we have to be aware that conditioning takes place
throughout all our lives in the most subtle and in the most obvious
ways. We discover that the molding of our personalities may occur in
a thousand-fold ways through such matters as these: the meal training
given in early childhood; the harshness or the musical tone of the
words spoken to us; the sense of haste in our surroundings; the
steadiness of family habits or the chaos of neurotic parents; the
noises of our machines; the reservedness of our friends; the
discipline of our schools and the competitiveness of our clubs. We
are even conditioned by such things as the frailty of our toys and
the cosines of our houses, the steadiness of traditions or the chaos
of a revolution. The artist and the engineer, the teacher and the
friend, the uncle or aunt they all give shape to our behavior.
Isolation and Other Factors in Conditioning
Pavlov made another significant discovery: the conditioned reflex
could be developed most easily in a quiet laboratory with a minimum
of disturbing stimuli. Every trainer of animals knows this from his
own experience; isolation and the patient repetition of stimuli are
required to tame wild animals. Pavlov formulated his findings into a
general rule in which the speed of learning is positively correlated
with quiet and isolation. The totalitarians have followed this rule.
They know that they can condition their political victims most
quickly if they are kept in isolation. In the totalitarian technique
of thought control, the same isolation applied to the individual is
applied also to groups of people. This is the reason the civilian
populations of the totalitarian countries are not permitted to travel
freely and are kept away from mental and political contamination. It is
the reason, to, for the solitary confinement cell and the prison camp.
Another of Pavlov's findings was that some animals learn more
quickly if they were rewarded (by affection, by food, by stroking)
each time they showed the right response, while others learned more
quickly when the penalty for not learning was a painful stimulus. In
human terms, the latter animals could be described as learning in
order to avoid punishment. These different reactions in animals may
perhaps be related to an earlier conditioning by the parents, and
they find their counterparts among human beings. In some people the
strategy of reward and flattery is a stimulus to learning, while pain
evokes all their resistance and rebellion; in others retribution and
punishment for failure can be a means of training them into the
desired pattern. Before he can do his job effectively, the
brainwasher has to find out to which category his victim belongs.
There are people more amenable to brainwashing than others. Part of the
response may be innate or related to earlier conditioning to conformity.
Pavlov also distinguished between the weaker type of involuntary
learning, in which the learned response was lost as soon as some
disturbance occurred, and the stronger type, in which training was
retained through all kinds of changed conditions. As a matter of
fact, Pavlov described more types of learning than this, but for our
purposes it is only important to know that there are some types of
people who lose their conditioned learning easily, while others, the
so called "stronger" types, retain it. This, by the way, is
another example of how our choice of words reflects our bias. The
descriptions "strong" and "weak" depend
completely on the aim of the experimenter. For the totalitarian,
the "weak" POW is the man who stubbornly refuses to accept
the new conditioning. His "weakness" may be, in fact, a
resistance, the result of a previous strong conditioning to loyalty
to anti totalitarian principles. We never know how strongly
conditioning and initial learning are impressed on the personality.
Rigid dogmatic behavior has its roots in early conditioning and so
may submissiveness based on ignorance rather than knowledge.
Pavlov showed, too, how internal and external factors interact in
the conditioning process. If, for example, a new laboratory assistant
was brought in to work with the animals, all of their newly acquired
patterns could easily be inhibited because of the animals' emotional
reactions to the newcomer. Pavlov explained this as a disruptive
reaction caused by the animals' investigatory reflexes, which led
them to sniff around the stranger. Current psychology tends to
interpret it as the result of the changed emotional rapport between
the animal and its trainers. We can easily expand the implications of
this more modern view into the field of human relations. It points up
the fact that there are some persons who can create such immediate
rapport with others that the latter will soon give up many old habits
and ways of life to conform with new demands. There are inquisitors
and investigators whose personalities so deeply affect their victims that the
victims speedily yield their secrets and accept entirely new ways of thinking.
We can see the same thing in psychotherapy, where the development
of an emotional rapport between doctor and patient is the most
important factor leading to cure. In some cases rapport can be
established immediately, in others rapport cannot be built up at all,
in most cases it develops gradually during the course of the therapy.
It is not difficult for a psychologist to test a man's "softness"
and willingness to be conditioned, and as a matter of fact the
Pavlovians have developed simple questionnaires through which they
can easily determine a given individual's instability and
adaptability to suggestion and brainwashing.
Pavlov found that all conditioning, no matter how strong it had
been, became inhibited through boredom or through the repetition of
too weak signals. The bell could no longer arouse salivation in the
experimental dogs if it was repeated too often or its tone was too
soft. A process of unlearning took place. The result of such internal
inhibition of conditioning and the loss of conditioned reflex action
is sleep. The inhibition spreads over the entire activity of the
brain cortex; the organism falls into a hypnotic state. This
explanation of the process of inhibition was one of the first
acceptable theories of sleep. An interesting psychological question
is whether too much official conditioning causes boredom and inhibition,
and whether that is the reason why the Stakhanovite movement in Russia
was necessary to counteract the loss of productivity of the people.
We can make a comparison with what happened to our prisoners of
war in Korea. Under the daily signal of dulling routine questions for
every word can act as a Pavlovian signal their minds went into a
state of inhibition and diminished alertness. This made it possible
for them to give up temporarily their former democratic conditioning
and training. When they had unlearned and suppressed the democratic
way, their inquisitors could start teaching them the totalitarian
philosophy. First the old patterns have to be broken down in order to
build up new conditioned reflexes. We can imagine that boredom and
repetition arouse the need to give in and to yield to the provoking
words of the enemy. Later I shall come back to the system of negative
stimuli used in conditioning for brainwashing.
Mass Conditioning Through Speech
According to official Pavlovian psychology, human speech is also a
conditioned reflex activity. Pavlov distinguished between stimuli of
the first order, which condition men and animals directly, and
stimuli of the second order, with weaker and more complicated
conditioning qualities. In this so called second signal system,
verbal cues replace the original physical sound stimuli. Pavlov
himself did not give much attention to this second signal system. It
was especially after Stalin's publication in 1950 on the significance
of linguistics for mass indoctrination (as quoted by Dobrogaev) that
the Russian psychologists began to do work in this area. In his
letter, Stalin followed Engel's theory that language is the
characteristic human bit of adaptive equipment. That tone and sound
in speech have a conditioning quality is something we can verify from
our own experience in listening to or in giving commands, or in dealing
with our pets. Even the symbolic and semantic meaning of words can
acquire a conditioning quality. The word "traitor", for example,
provokes direct feelings and reactions in the minds of those who hear it
spoken, even if this discriminatory label is being applied dishonestly.
Through an elaborate study on speech reflexes written by one of
the leading Russian psychologists, Dobrogaev, we get a fairly good
insight into the ways in which speech patterns and word signals are
used in the service of mass conditioning, by means of propaganda and
indoctrination. The basic problems for the man tamer are rather
simple: Can man resist a government bent on conditioning him? What
can the individual do to protect his mental integrity against the
power of a forceful collectivity? Is it possible to do away with
every vestige of inner resistance?
Pavlov had already explained that man's relation to the external
world, and to his fellow men, is dominated by secondary stimuli, the
speech symbols. Man learns to think in words and in the speech
figures given him, and these gradually condition his entire outlook
on life and on the world. As Dobrogaev says, "Language is the
means of man's adaptation to his environment." We could rephrase
that statement in this way: man's need for communication with his
fellow men interferes with his relation to the outside world, because
language and speech itself the verbal tools we use are variable and
not objective. Dobrogaev continues: "Speech manifestations
represent conditioned reflex functions of the human brain." In a
simpler way we may say: he who dictates and formulates the words and
phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind.
In the Pavlovian strategy, terrorizing force can finally be
replaced by a new organization of the means of communication. Ready
made opinions can be distributed day by day through press, radio, and
so on, again and again, till they reach the nerve cell and implant a
fixed pattern of thought in the brain. Consequently, guided public
opinion is the result, according to Pavlovian theoreticians, of good
propaganda technique, and the polls a verification of the temporary
successful action of the Pavlovian machinations on the mind. Yet, the
polls may only count what people pretend to think and believe,
because it is dangerous for them to do otherwise.
Such is the Pavlovian device: repeat mechanically your
assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity of
communicating dissent and opposition. This is the simple formula
for political conditioning of the masses. This is also the actual ideal of
some of our public relation machines, who thus hope to manipulate the
public into buying a special soap or voting for a special party.
The Pavlovian strategy in public relations has people conditioned
more and more to ask themselves, "What do other people think?"
As a result, a common delusion is created: people are incited to think what other
people think, and thus public opinion may mushroom out into a mass prejudice.
Expressed in psychoanalytic terms, through daily propagandistic
noise backed up by forceful verbal cues, people can more and more be
forced to identify with the powerful noisemaker. Big Brother's voice
resounds in all the little brothers.
News from Red China, as reported by neutral Indian journalists
[See the "New York Times", November 27, 1954.] tells
us that the Chinese leaders are using this vocal conditioning of the
public to strengthen their regime. Throughout the country, radios and
loud speakers are broadcasting the official "truths". The
sugary voices take possession of people, the cultural tyranny traps
their ears with loud speakers, telling them what they may and may not
do. This microphone regimentation was foreseen by the French
philosopher La Rochefoucauld, who, in the eighteenth century, said:
"A man is like a rabbit, you catch him by the ears."
During the Second World War the Nazis showed that they too were
very much aware of this conditioning power of the word. I saw their
strategy at work in Holland. The radio constantly spread political
suggestions and propaganda, and people were obliged to listen because
the simple act of turning off one's radio was in itself suspicious. I
remember one day during the occupation when I was taking a bicycle
trip with some friends. We stopped off to rest at a cafe that, we
later realized, was a true Nazi nest. When the radio, which had been
on ever since we arrived, announced a speech by Hitler, everyone
stood up in awe, and it was a must to take in the verbal conditioning
by the Fuhrer. My friends and I had to stand up too, and were forced to listen
to that raucous voice crackling in our ears and to summon all our resistance
against that long, boring, repetitive attack on our eardrums and minds.
Throughout the occupation, the Nazis printed tons of propaganda,
Big Lies, and distortions. They even went so far as to paint their
slogans on the stoops of the houses and in the streets. Every week
newly fabricated stereotypes ogled at us as if to convince us of the
splendor of the Third Reich. But the Nazis did not know the correct
Pavlovian strategy. By satisfying their own need to discuss and to
vary their arguments in order to make them seem more logical, they
only increased the resistance of the Dutch people. This resistance
was additionally fortified by the London radio, on which the Dutch
could hear the sane voice of their own legal government. Had the
Nazis not argued and justified so much, and had they been able to
prevent all written, printed, or spoken communication, the long period of
boredom would have inhibited our democratic conditioning, and we might
well have been more seduced by the Nazi oversimplifications and slogans.
Political Conditioning
Political conditioning should not be confused with training or
persuasion or even indoctrination. It is more than that. It is
tampering. It is taking possession of both the simplest and the most
complicated nervous patterns of man. It is the battle for the
possession of the nerve cells. It is coercion and enforced
conversion. Instead of conditioning man to an unbiased facing of
reality, the seducer conditions him to catchwords, verbal
stereotypes, slogans, formulas, symbols. Pavlovian strategy in the
totalitarian sense means imprinting prescribed reflexes on a mind
that has been broken down. The totalitarian wants first the required
response from the nerve cells, then control of the individual, and
finally control of the masses. The system starts with verbal
conditioning and training by combining the required stereotypes with
negative or positive stimuli: pain, or reward. In the POW camps in
Korea where there was individual and mass brainwashing, the negative
and positive conditioning stimuli were usually hunger and food. The
moment the soldier conformed to the party line his food ration was
improved: say yes, and I'll give you a piece of candy!
The whole gamut of negative stimuli, as we saw them in the
Schwable case, consists of physical pressure, moral pressure,
fatigue, hunger, boring repetition, confusion by seemingly logical
syllogisms. Many victims of totalitarianism have told me in
interviews that the most upsetting experience they faced in the
concentration camps was the feeling of loss of logic, the state of
confusion into which they had been brought the state in which nothing
had any validity. They had arrived at the Pavlovian state of
inhibition, which psychiatrists call mental disintegration or
depersonalization. It seemed as if they had unlearned all their
former responses and had not yet adopted new ones. But in reality
they simply did not know what was what.
The Pavlovian theory translated into a political method, as a way
of leveling the mind (the Nazis called it "Gleichschaltung")
is the stock in trade of totalitarian countries. Some psychiatric
points are of interest because we see that Pavlovian training can be
used successfully only when special mental conditions prevail. In
order to tame people into the desired pattern, victims must be
brought to a point where they have lost their alert consciousness and
mental awareness. Freedom of discussion and free intellectual exchange
hinder conditioning. Feelings of terror, feelings of fear and hopelessness,
of being alone, of standing with one's back to the wall, must be instilled.
The treatment of American prisoners of war in the Korean POW camps
followed just such a pattern. They were compelled to listen to
lectures and other forms of daily word barrage. The very fact that
they did not understand the lectures and were bored by the long
sessions inhibited their democratic training, and conditioned them to
swallow passively the bitter doctrinal diet, for the prisoners were
subjected not only to a political training program, but also to an
involuntary taming program. To some degree the Communist propaganda
lectures were directed toward retraining the prisoners' minds. This
training our soldiers could reject, but the endless repetitions and
the constant sloganizing, together with the physical hardships and
deprivations the prisoners suffered, caused an UNCONSCIOUS TAMING
and conditioning, against which only previously built up inner strength
and awareness could help.
There is still another reason why our soldiers were sometimes
trapped by the Communist conditioning. Experiments with animals and
experiences with human beings have taught us that threat, tension,
and anxiety, in general, may accelerate the establishment of
conditioned responses, particularly when those responses tend to
diminish fear and panic (Spence and Farber). The emergency of prison
camp life and mental torture provide ideal circumstances for such
conditioning. The responses can develop even when the victim is
completely unaware that he is being influenced. Thus, many of our
soldiers developed automatic responses of which they remained
completely unconscious (Segal). But this is only one side of the
coin, for experience has also shown that people who know what to
expect under conditions of mental pressure can develop a so called
perceptual defense, which protects them from being influenced. This
means that the more familiar people are with the concepts of thought
control and menticide, the more they understand the nature of the
propaganda barrage directed against them, the more inner resistance
they can put up, even though inevitably some of the inquisitor's
suggestions will leak through the barrier of conscious mental defense.
Our understanding of the conditioning process leads us also to an
understanding of some of the paradoxical reactions found among
victims of concentration camps and other prisoners. Often those with
a rigid, simple belief were better able to withstand the continual
barrage against their minds than were the flexible, sophisticated
ones, full of doubt and inner conflicts. The simple man with deep
rooted, freely absorbed religious faith could exert a much greater
inner resistance than could the complex, questioning intellectualist. The
refined intellectual is much more handicapped by the internal pros and cons.
In totalitarian countries, where belief in Pavlovian strategy has
assumed grotesque proportions, the self thinking, subjective man has
disappeared. There is an utter rejection of any attempt at persuasion or
discussion. Individual self expression is taboo. Private affection is taboo.
Peaceful exchange of free thoughts in free conversation will
disturb the conditioned reflexes and is therefore taboo. No longer
are there any brains, only conditioned patterns and educated muscles.
In such a taming system neurotic compulsion is looked upon as a
positive asset instead of something pathological. The mental
automaton becomes the ideal of education.
Yet the Soviet theoreticians themselves are often unaware of this,
and many of them do not realize the dire consequences of subjecting
man to a completely mechanistic conditioning. They themselves are
often just as frightened as we are by the picture of the perfectly
functioning human robot. This is what one of their psychologists
says: "The entire reactionary nature of this approach to man is
completely clear. Man is an automaton who can be caused to act as one
wills! This is the ideal of capitalism! Behold the dream of
capitalism the world over a working class without consciousness,
which cannot think for itself, whose actions can be trained according
to the whim of the exploiter! This is the reason why it is in America, the
bulwark of present day capitalism, that the theory of man as a robot has
been so vigorously developed and so stubbornly held to." (Bauer)
Western psychology and psychiatry, although acknowledging its debt
to Pavlov as a great pioneer who made important contributions to our
understanding of behavior, takes a much less mechanical view of man
than do the Soviet Pavlovians. It is apparent to us that their simple
explanation of training ignores and rejects the concept of purposeful
adaptation and the question of the goals to which this training is
directed. Western experimental psychologists tend to see the
conditioned reflex as developing fully only in the service of
gratifying basic instinctual needs or of avoiding pain, that is, only
when the whole organism is concerned in the activity. In that
complicated process of response to the world, conscious, and
especially unconscious, drives and motivations play a role.
All training, of which the conditioned response is only one
example, is an automatization of actions which were originally
consciously learned and thought over. The ideal of Western democratic
psychology is to train men into independence and maturity by
enlisting their conscious aid, awareness, and volition in the
learning process. The ideal of the totalitarian psychology, on the
other hand, is to tame men, to make them willing tools in the hands
of their leaders. Like training, taming has the purpose of making
actions automatic; unlike training, it does not require the conscious
participation of the learner. Both training and taming are energy and
timesaving devices, and in both the mystery of the psyche is hidden
in the purposefulness of the responses. The automatization of
functions in man saves him expenditure of energy but can make him
weaker when encountering new unexpected challenges.
Cultural routinization and habit formation by local rules and
myths make of everybody a partial automaton. National and racial
prejudices are acted out unwittingly. Group hatred often bursts out
almost automatically when triggered by slogans and catchwords. In a
totalitarian world, this narrow disciplinarian conditioning is done
more "perfectly" and more "ad absurdum".
The Urge to Be Conditioned
One suggestion this chapter is not intended to convey is that
Pavlovian conditioning as such is something wrong. This kind of
conditioning occurs everywhere where people are together in common
interaction. The speaker influences the listener, but the listener
also the speaker. Through the process of conditioning people often
learn to like and to do what they are allowed to like and do. The
more isolated the group, the stricter the conditioning that takes
place in those belonging to the group. In some groups one finds
people more capable than others of conveying suggestion and bringing
about conditioning. Gradually one can discern the stronger ones, the
better adjusted ones, the more experienced ones, and those noisier
ones, whose ability to condition others is strongest. Every group,
every club, every society has its leading Pavlovian Bell. This kind
of person imprints his inner bell ringing on others. He can even
develop a system of monolithic bell ringing: no other influential
bell is allowed to compete with him.
Another subtler question belongs to these problems. Why is there
in us so great an urge to be conditioned, the urge to learn, to
imitate, to conform, and to follow the pattern of family and group?
This urge to be conditioned, to submit to the communal pattern and
the family pattern must be related to man's dependency on parents and
fellow men. Animals are not so dependent on one another. In the whole
animal kingdom man is one of the most helpless and naked beings. But
among the animals man has, relatively, the longest youth and time for learning.
Puzzlement and doubt, which inevitably arise in the training
process, are the beginnings of mental freedom. Of course, the initial
puzzlement and doubt is not enough. Behind that there has to be faith
in our democratic freedoms and the will to fight for it. I hope to
come back to this central problem of faith in moral freedom as
differentiated from conditioned loyalty and servitude in the last
chapter. Puzzlement and doubt are, however, already crimes in the
totalitarian state. The mind that is open for questions is open for
dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and
imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only
allowed to memorize, to salivate when the bell rings.
It is not my task here to elaborate on the subject of the biased
use of Pavlovian rules by totalitarians, but without doubt part of
the interpretation of any psychology is determined by the ways we
think about our fellow human beings and man's place in nature. If our
ideal is to make conditioned zombies out of people, the current
misuse of Pavlovianism will serve our purpose. But once we become
even vaguely aware that in the totalitarian picture of man the
characteristic human note is missing, and when see that in such a
scheme man sacrifices his instinctual desires, his pleasures, his
aims, his goals, his creativity, his instinct for freedom, his
paradoxicality, we immediately turn against this political perversion
of science. Such use of Pavlovian technique is aimed only at
developing the automaton in man, not his free alert mind that is
aware of moral goals and aims in life.
Even in laboratory animals we have found that affective goal
directedness can spoil the Pavlovian experiment. When, during a bell
food training session, the dog's beloved master entered the room, the
animal lost all its previous conditioning and began to bark
excitedly. Here is a simple example of an age old truth: love and
laughter break through all rigid conditioning. The rigid automaton
cannot exist without spontaneous self expression. Apparently, the fact that
the dog's spontaneous affection for his master could ruin all the mechanical
calculations and manipulations never occurred to Pavlov's totalitarian students.
As we have already seen in the preceding chapters, it is not only
the political and Pavlovian pressure that may drag down man's mind
into servile submissiveness. There are many other human habits and
actions which have a coercive influence.
All kinds of rumors have been circulated telling how brainwashees,
before surrendering to their inquisitor, have been poisoned with
mysterious drugs. This chapter aims to describe what medical
techniques -- not only drugs -- can do to reach behind man's inner
secrets. Actually the thought-control police no longer need drugs,
though occasionally they have been used.
I will touch upon another side to this problem as well, namely,
our dangerous social dependence on various drugs, the problem of
addiction, making it easier for us to slip into the pattern of
submissiveness. The alcoholic has no mental backbone any more when
you give him his drink. The same is true for the chronic user of sedatives
or other pills. The use of alcohol or drugs may result in a chemical
dependency, weakening our stamina under exceptional circumstances.
In the field of practical medicine, magic thinking is still
rampant. Though we flatter ourselves that we are rational and logical
in our choice of therapy, somewhere we know that hidden feelings and
unconscious motivations direct the prescribing hand. In spite of the
therapeutic triumphs of the last fifty years [since 1900], the era of
chemotherapy and antibiotics, let us not forget that the same means
of medical victory can be used to defeat our purposes.
No day passes that the mail does not flood the doctor's office
with suggestions about what to use in his clinical practice. My desk
overflows with gadgets and multicolored pills telling me that without
them mankind cannot be happy. The propaganda campaign reaching our
medical eyes and ears is often so laden with suggestions that we can
be persuaded to distribute sedatives and stimulants where straight
critical thinking would deter us and we would seek the deeper causes
of the difficulties. This is true not only for modern pharmacotherapy;
the same tendencies can also be shown in psychotherapeutic methods.
This chapter aims to approach the problem of mental coercion with
the question: How compulsive can the use of medical drugs and medical
and psychological methods become? In the former chapters on menticide
I was able to describe political attempts to bring the human mind
into submission and servility. Drugs and their psychological
equivalents are also able to enslave people.
The Search for Ecstasy Through Drugs
Among drug addicts of all sorts we repeatedly encounter the
yearning for a special ecstatic and euphoric mood, a feeling of
living beyond everyday trouble. "Thou has the keys of Paradise,
O just, subtle, and mighty opium!" Thomas De Quincey says, in
his "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater." Although the
ecstatic state is different for each person who experiences it, the
addict always tells us that the drug takes him to the lost paradise
he is looking for; it brings him a feeling of eternal euphoria and
free elation that takes him past the restrictions of life and time.
In the ecstatic state, man arranges the universe according to his
own desires and, at the same time, seeks communion with the Higher
Order of things. But the ecstatic state has its negative as well as
its positive aspects. It may represent the Yogi's mystic feeling of
unity with the universe, but it may also mean the chronic intoxicated
state of the drunkard or the passion of some manic psychotic states.
The feeling may express the intensified spiritual experience of a
dedicated study group, but, on the other hand, it may be encountered
in the lynch mob and the riot. There are many kinds of ecstasy --
esthetic ecstasy, mystic ecstasy, and sick, toxic ecstasy.
The search for ecstatic experience is not only an individual
search, it often reaches out to encompass whole groups. When moral
controls become too burdensome, whole civilizations may give
themselves up to uncontrolled orgies such as we saw in the Greek
Bacchanalia and the contagious dance-fury of the Middle Ages. In
these mass orgies, artificial stimulants are not necessarily used.
The hypnotic influence of being part of the crowd can induce the same
loss of control and sense of union with the outside world that we
associate with drugs. In the mass orgy the individual loses his
conscience and self-control. His sexual inhibitions may disappear; he
is temporarily relieved of his deep frustrations and the burden of
unconscious guilt. He endeavors to experience the blissful sensations
of utter yielding to his own body needs and desires.
The ecstatic participation in mass elation is the oldest
psychodrama in the world. Taking part in some common action results
in a tremendous emotional relief and catharsis for every individual
in the group. This feeling of participation in the magic omnipotent
group, of reunion and communion with the all-embracing forces in the
world brings euphoria to the normal person and feelings of
pseudo-strength to the weak. The demagogue who is able to provide
such ecstatic release in the masses can be sure of their yielding to
his influence and power. Dictators love to organize such mass rituals
in the service of their dictatorial aims.
Ever since man has been a conscious being, he has tried from time
to time to break down the inevitable tension between himself and the
outside world. When mental alertness cannot be relaxed now and then,
when the world is too much and too constantly with him, man may try
to lose himself in the deep waters of oblivion. Ecstasy, drugged
sleep, and its fantasies and swoons of mental exaltation temporarily
take him beyond the burdensome effort of keeping his senses and ego
alert and intact. Drugs can bring him to this state, and any
addiction may be explained as a continuing need to escape. The body
cooperates with the mind in this search for an evasion of life, and
drugs gradually become a body need as well as an emotional necessity.
In criminal circles addicting drugs like cocaine and heroin are
often given to members of the gang in order to make them more
submissive to the leader who distributes them. The man who provides
the drug becomes almost a god to the members of the gang. They will
go through hell in order to acquire the drug they so desperately need.
In the hands of a powerful tyrant, this medication into dependency
can become extremely dangerous. It is not unthinkable that a
diabolical dictator might want to use addiction as a means of
bringing a rebellious people into submission. In May, 1954, during a
discussion in the World Health Organization, the fact was disclosed
that Communist China, while forbidding the use of opium in her own
country, was smuggling and exporting it in great quantities to her
neighbors, who have consequently been compelled to carry on a
constant struggle against opium addiction among their own people and
against the passivity which results from use of the drug.
At the same time, according to officials of Thailand who made the
charge and requested U.N. aid, Communist China has been sending all
kinds of subversive propagandists into Thailand. Thailand charged
that the Chinese were using every device they know to infect the
Siamese people with their ideology: brainweakening opium addiction,
leaflets, radio, whispering campaigns, and so on.
The Nazis followed a similar strategy. During the occupation of
Western Europe, they created an artificial shortage of normal
medicaments by halting their usual export of healing drugs to the
"inferior" countries. However, they made an exception in
the case of barbiturates. In Holland, for example, these drugs were
made readily available in many drugstores without doctors'
prescriptions, a situation which was against customary Dutch law.
Although the right therapeutic drugs were not made available for
medical work, the drugs which created passivity, dependence, and
lethargy were widely distributed.
The totalitarian dictator knows that drugs can be his helpers. It
was Hitler's intention, in his so-called biological warfare, to weaken and
subdue the countries that surrounded the Third Reich, and to break their
backbones for good. Hunger and addiction were among his most valuable tools.
What has all this to do with the growing addiction and alcoholism
in our own country? I have already mentioned the alarming increases
in death from barbiturates. But I would like to emphasize even more
the psychological and political consequences. Democracy and freedom
end where slavery and submission to drugs and alcohol begin.
Democracy involves free, self-chosen activity and understanding; it
means mature self-control and independence. Any man who escapes from
reality through the use of alcohol and drugs is no longer a free
agent; he is no longer able to exert any voluntary control over his
mind and his actions. He is no longer a self-responsible individual.
Alcoholism and drug addiction prepare the pattern of mental
submission so beloved by the totalitarian brainwasher.
Hypnotism and Mental Coercion
From time immemorial those who wanted to know the inner workings
of the other fellow's mind in order to exert pressure on him have
used artificial means to find the hidden pathways to his most private
thoughts. Modern brainwashers, too, have tried all kinds of drugs to
arrive at their devious objectives. The primitive medicine man had
several methods of compelling his victim to lose his self-control and
reserve. Alcoholic drinks, toxic ointments, or permeating holy smoke
which had a narcotizing effect, as used by the Mayas, for example, were
used to bring people into such a state of rapture that they lost their
self-awareness and restraint. The victims, murmuring sacred words,
often revealed their self-accusing fantasies or even their deepest secrets.
In the Middle Ages, so-called witch ointments were used either
voluntarily or under pressure. These ointments were supposed to bring
the anointed into touch with the devil. Since they contained opiates
and belladonna in large quantities, which could have been absorbed by
the skin, modern science can explain the ecstatic visions they evoked
as the typical hallucination-provoking effect of these drugs.
One of the first useful techniques medicine delivered into the
hands of the prier-into-souls was the knowledge of hypnosis, that
intensified mental suggestion that makes people give up their own
will and brings them into a strange dependency on the hypnotizer. The
Egyptian doctors of three thousand years ago knew the technique of
hypnosis, and ancient records tell us that they practiced it.
There are many quacks who practice hypnosis, not to cure their
victims but to force them into submission, using the victim's
unconscious ties and dependency needs in a criminal, profitable way.
One of the most absorbing aspects of this whole problem of hypnosis
is the question of whether people can be forced to commit crimes,
such as murder or treason, while under a hypnotic spell. Many
psychologists would deny that such a thing could happen and would
insist that no person can be compelled to do under hypnosis what he
would refuse to do in a state of alert consciousness. But actually
what a person can be compelled to do depends on the degree of
dependency that hypnosis causes and the frequency of repetition of
the so-called posthypnotic suggestions.
Actual psychoanalysis teaches that there even exist several other
devices to live other people's lives. True, no hypnotizer can take
away a man's conscience and inner resistance immediately, but he can
arouse the latent murderous wishes which may become active in his
victim's unconscious by continual suggestion and continual playing
upon those deeply repressed desires. Actual knowledge of methods used
in brainwashing and menticide proves that all this can be done.
If the hypnotizer persists long enough and cleverly enough, he can
be successful in his aim. There are many antisocial desires lying
hidden in all people. The hypnotic technique, if cleverly enough
applied, can bring them to the surface and cause them to be acted out
in life. The mass criminality of the guards in concentration camps
finds part of its explanation in the hypnotizing influence of the
totalitarian state and its criminal dictator. Psychological study of
criminals shows that their first violation of moral and legal codes
often takes place under the strong influence and suggestion of other
criminals. This we may look upon as an initial form of hypnosis,
which is a more intensified form of suggestion.
True, the incitement to crime in a hypnotic state demands
specially favorable conditions, but unfortunately these conditions
can be found in the real and actual world.
Recently there has been much judicial discussion of the problem of
the psychiatrist who uses his special knowledge of suggestion to
force a confession from a defendant. Such a psychiatrist is going
beyond the commonly accepted concepts of the limitations of
psychiatry and beyond psychiatric ethics. He is misusing the
patient's trust in the medical confidant and therapist in order to
provoke a confession, which will then be used against the patient
temporarily in his care. In so doing, the doctor not only acts
against his Hippocratic oath, in which he promised only to work for
the good of his patients and never to disclose his professional
secrets, he also violates the constitutional safeguards accorded a
defendant by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution,
which protects a man against self-incrimination.
What a defendant will reveal under hypnosis depends on his
conscious and unconscious attitudes toward the entire question of
magic influence and mental intrusion by another person. People are
usually less likely to stand on their legal rights in dealing with a
doctor than in dealing with a lawyer or a policeman. They have a
yielding attitude because they expect magic help.
An interesting example of this can be seen in a case that was
recently decided by the Supreme Court. In 1950, Camilio Weston Leyra,
a man in his fifties, was arrested and accused by the police of the
brutal hammer murder of his aged parents in their Brooklyn flat
("People v. Leyra"). At first, under prolonged questioning
by the police, Leyra denied any knowledge of the crime and stated
that he had not even been at his parents' home on the day of the
murder. Later, after further interrogation by the police, he said he
had been at their home that day, but he remained firm in his denial
of the murder. He was detained in jail, and a psychiatrist was
brought in to talk to him. Their conversation was recorded on tape.
The psychiatrist told Leyra that he was "his doctor",
although in fact he was not. Under slight hypnosis and after
continued suggestion that Leyra would be better off if he admitted to
having committed the murder in a fit of passion, Leyra agreed to
confess to the crime. The police were called back in, and the
confession was taken down.
During his trial, Leyra repudiated the confession, insisting that
he had been under hypnosis. He was convicted, but the conviction was
set aside on the grounds that the confession had been wrested from
him involuntarily, and that his constitutional safeguards had been
denied him. Later, Leyra was brought to trial and convicted a second
time. Finally his case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which
reversed the conviction in June, 1954, on the grounds that mental
pressure and coercive psychiatric techniques had been used to induce
the confession. The Supreme Court gave its opinion here, indirectly,
of the responsibility of the brainwashed POW
For us, the question of Leyra's guilt or innocence is less
important than the fact that under mental pressure he was induced to
do what he would ordinarily have resisted doing, and that his confidence
in the doctor, which led him to relax the defenses he would doubtless
have put up against other investigators, was used to break him down.
Suggestion and hypnosis are considered by some to be a
psychological blessing, but they can also be the beginning of terror.
Mass hypnosis, for example, can have a dangerous influence on the
individual. Psychiatrists have found several times that public
demonstrations of mass hypnosis may provoke an increased hypnotic
dependency and submissiveness in many members of the audience that
can last for years. Largely for this reason Great Britain has passed
a law making seances and mass hypnotism illegal. Hypnosis may act as
a trigger mechanism for a repressed dependency need in the victim and
turn him temporarily into a kind of waking sleep-walker and mental
slave. The hypnotic command relieves him of his personal
responsibility, and he surrenders much of his conscience to his
hypnotizer. As we mentioned before, our own times have provided us
with far too many examples of how political hypnosis, mob hypnosis,
and even war hypnosis can turn civilized men into criminals.
Some personalities are more amenable to hypnosis than others.
Strong egos can defend themselves for a long time against mental
intrusion, but they too may have a point of surrender. There are
overtly critical persons who are much less sensitive to suggestion
from the outside than to images from within themselves. We can
distinguish between heterosuggestive and autosuggestive
personalities, although quite a variety of reactions to hypnosis and
suggestion can be distinguished. But even these autosuggestive
types, if subjected to enough pressure, will gradually build up
internal justification for giving in to mental coercion.
Those "charming" characters who are easily able to
influence others are often extremely susceptible to suggestion
themselves. Some personalities with a tremendous gift for empathy and
identification provoke in others the desire to yield up all their
secrets; they seem somehow to be the Father Confessor by the grace of
God. Other emphatic types, by reflecting their own deceitful inner
world, can more easily provoke the hidden lies and fantasies in their
victims. Still others make us close up completely. Why one man should
inspire the desire to give in and another the desire to resist is one
of the mysteries of human relationships and contact. Why do certain
personalities complement and reinforce one another while others clash
and destroy one another? Psychoanalysis has given new insight into
those strange human relations and involvements.
Needling for the Truth
During the Second World war, the technique of the so-called truth
serum (the popular name for narco-analysis) was developed to help
soldiers who had broken down under the strain of battle. Through
narco-analysis by means of injections of sedatives, they could be
brought to remember and reveal the hyper-emotional and traumatic
moments of their war experiences that had driven them into acute
anxiety neurosis. Gradually a useful mental first-aid technique was
developed which helped the unconscious to reveal its secrets while
the patient was under the influence of the narcotic.
How does the truth serum work? The principle is simple: after an
injection, the mind in a kind of half-sleep is unable to control its
secrets, and it may let them slip from the hidden reservoirs of
frustration and repression into the half-conscious mind. In certain
acute anxiety cases, such enforced provocation may alleviate the
anxieties and pressures that have led to breakdown. But narco-analysis
often does not work. Sometimes the patient's mind resents this chemical
intrusion and enforced intervention, and such a situation often obstructs
the way for deeper and more useful psychotherapy.
The fear of unexpected mental intrusion and coercion may be
pathological in character. When I first published my concept of
menticide and brainwashing, I received dozens of letters and phone
calls from people who were convinced that some outside person was
trying to influence them and direct their thoughts. This form of
"mental intrusion delusion" may be the early stage of a
serious psychosis in which the victim has already regressed to
primitive magic feelings. In this state the whole outside world is
seen and felt as participating in what is going on in the victim's
mind. There is, as it were, no real awareness of the frontiers
between "I", the person, and the world. Such fear-ridden
persons are in constant agony because they feel themselves the
victims of many mysterious influences which they cannot check or cope
with; they feel continually endangered. Psychologically, their fear
of intrusion from the outside can be partially explained as a fear of
the intrusion of their own fantasies from the inside, from the
unconscious. They are frightened by their own hidden, unconscious
thoughts which they can no longer check.
It would be a vast oversimplification to stick an easy psychiatric
label on all such feelings of mental persecution, for there are many
real, outside mental pressures in our world, and there are many
perfectly normal people who are continually aware of and disturbed by
the barrage of stimuli directed at their minds through propaganda,
advertising, radio, television, the movies, the newspapers -- all the
gibbering maniacs whose voices never stop. These people suffer because
a cold, mechanical, shouting world is knocking continually at the doors
of their minds and disturbing their feelings of privacy and personal integrity.
There is the further question of whether or not the drugs used in
the truth serum always produce the desired effect of compelling the
patient to tell the inner truth. Experiments conducted at Yale
University in 1951 (J. M. MacDonald) on nine persons who received
intravenous injections of sodium amytal -- the so-called truth serum
-- showed interesting results, tending to weaken our faith in this drug.
Each of the patients, prior to the injection, had been suggested a
false story related to a historical period about which he was going
to be questioned. The experimenters knew both the true and the false
story. Let me quote from the report: "It is of interest that the
three subjects diagnosed as normal maintained their [suggested]
stories. Of the six subjects diagnosed as neurotic, two promptly
revealed the true story; two made partial admissions, consisting of a
complex pattern of fantasy and truth; one communicated what most
likely was a fantasy as truth; and the one obsessive-compulsive
individual maintained his cover story except for one parapraxia
[faulty or blundering action]."
In several cases, American law courts have refused to admit as
evidence the results of truth serum tests, largely on the basis of
psychiatric conviction that the truth serum treatment is misnamed;
that, in fact, narco-analysis is no guarantee of getting at the
truth. It may even be used as a coercive threat in cases where
victims are not aware of it limited action.
Still another danger, more closely related to our subject, is that
a criminal investigator can induce and communicate his own thoughts
and feelings to his victim. Thus the truth serum may cause the
patient with a weak ego to yield to the interventionist's synthetically
injected thoughts and interpretations in exactly the same way the victim
of hypnosis may take over the suggestions implanted by the hypnotist.
Additionally, this method of inquisition by drugs contains some
physical danger. I myself have seen cases of thrombosis develop as a
result of intravenous medication of barbiturates.
Experiments with mescaline, which started thirty years ago [in the
1920s], are suddenly fashionable again. Aldous Huxley in his recent
book THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION described the artificial chemical
paradise which he experienced after taking the drug (also known as
peyote). It can stimulate all kinds of pleasant, subjective symptoms,
but these are, nevertheless, delusive in character. I do not want to start a
clinical argument with another author, yet his own euphoric ecstatic
reactions to mescaline are not necessarily the same as those other people
experience. Mescaline is dangerous stuff when not used under medical
control. And, anyway, why does Mr. Huxley want to sell artificial heavens?
There is a very serious social danger in all these methods of
chemical intrusion into the mind. True, they can be used as a careful
aid to psychotherapy, but they can also be frightening instruments of
control in the hands of men with an overwhelming drive to power.
In addition, they fortify more than ever in our "aspirin age"
the fiction that we have to use miracle drugs in order to become
free-acting agents. The propaganda for chemical elation, for
artificial ecstasy and pseudo-nirvanic experience contains an
invitation to men to become chemical dependents, and chemical
dependents are weak people who can be made use of by any tyrannical
political potentate. The actual propaganda carried on among general
practitioners using treatment with all kinds of anxieties and mental
disturbances with new drugs has the same kind of dangerous implications.
The Lie-Detector
Hypnotism and narco-analysis are only two of the current devices
that can be misused as instruments of enforced intrusion into the
mind. The lie-detector, which has already been used as a tool for
mental intimidation, is another. This apparatus, useful for
psychobiological experimentation, can indicate -- through writing
down meticulously the changes in the psychogalvanic reflex -- that
the human guinea pig under investigation reacts more emotionally to
certain questions than to others. True, this overreaction may be the
reaction to having told a lie, but it may also be an innocent
person's reaction to an emotion-laden situation or even to an
increased fear of unjust accusation.
The interpersonal processes between interrogator and testee have
just as much influence on the emotional reactions and the changes in
the galvanic reflex as feelings of inner guilt and confusion. This
experiment only indicates inner turmoil and hidden repressions, with
all their doubts and ambiguities.
It is not in fact a lie-detector, although it is used as such (D.
MacDonald). As a matter of fact, the pathological liar and the
psychopathic, conscienceless personality may show less reaction to
this experiment than do normal people. The lie-detector is more
likely to become a tool of coercion in the hands of men who look more
for a powerful magic in every instrument than a means of getting at
the truth. As a result, even the innocent can be fooled into false confession.
The Therapist as an Instrument of Coercion
Medical therapy and psychotherapy are the subtle sciences of human
guidance in periods of physical and emotional stress. Just as
training requires the alert, well planned participation of both
student and teacher, so successful psychotherapy requires the alert,
well-planned participation of both patient and doctor. And just as
educational training, under special conditions, can degenerate into
coercive taming, so therapy can degenerate into the imposition of the
doctor's will on his patient. The doctor himself need not even be
conscious that this is happening. The misuse of therapy may show
itself in the patient's submission to the doctor's point of view or
in the patient's development of excessive dependency on his
therapist. Such a dependency, and even increased dependency need, may
extend not only far beyond the usual limits, but may continue even
after the therapy has run its course.
I have seen quacks whose only knowledge was where to buy their
couches. By calling themselves psychoanalysts they were able to
gratify their own need to live other people's lives. Eventually the
law will have to establish standards which can keep these dangerous
intruders from psychotherapeutic practice. But even the honest,
conscientious therapist has a serious moral problem to face. His
profession itself continually encourages him, indeed obliges him, to
make his patients temporarily dependent on him, and this may appeal
to his own need for a sense of importance and power. He must be
continually aware of the impact his statements and deductions have on
his patients who often listen in awe to the doctor who is for them
the omniscient magician. The therapist must not encourage this
submissive attitude in his patients -- though in some phases of treatment
it will help the therapy -- for good psychotherapy aims toward educating
man for freedom and maturity not for conforming submission.
The practitioners of psychology and psychiatry are now much more
aware of the responsibility their profession imposes on them than
they have ever been heretofore. The tools of psychology are
dangerous in the hands of the wrong men.
Modern educational methods can be applied in therapy to streamline
man's brain and change his opinions so that his thinking conforms
with certain ideological systems. Medicine and psychiatry may
become more and more involved in political strategy as we have seen
in the strategy of brainwashing, and for this reason psychologists
and psychiatrists must become more aware of the nature of the
scientific tools they use.
The emphasis on therapeutic techniques, on students knowing all
the facts and the tricks, the overemphasis on psychotherapeutic
diplomas and labels lead actual therapy toward conformism and
rationalization of principles that are in contrast to the personal
sensitivity needed. Our critical and rational faculty can be a destructive
one, destroying or disguising our basic doubts and ambivalences born
out of tragic despair, that creator of human sensitivity.
The danger of modern psychotherapy (and psychiatry) is the
tendency toward formalizing human intuition and empathy, and toward
making an abstraction of emotion and spontaneity. It is a
contradiction to attempt to mechanize love and beauty. If this were
possible, we would find ourselves in a world where there is no
inspiration and ecstasy but only cold understanding.
Every human relationship can be used for the wrong or the right
aims, and this is especially true of the relationship of subtle
unconscious ties which exist between psychotherapist and patient.
This statement is equally true for medicine in general; the surgeon,
too, thrives on strong ties with his patients and their willing
submission to his surgical techniques. Experiences in therapy have
taught us that faulty technique can give the patient feelings of
being bogged down. Sometimes patients feel as if they have to remain
living in servile submission to the doctor. I have seen whole
families and sects swear by such modern witch doctors.
No wonder that sound psychoanalytic instruction requires the
therapist to admit himself for years of technique he is about to
apply to others, so that, armed with knowledge of his own unsound
unconscious needs, he will not try to use his profession to
mastermind other people's lives.
Various psychological agencies, with their different psychological
concepts and techniques, such as family counseling, religious
guidance, management counseling, and so forth, can easily be misused
as tools of power. The good will that people invest in their leaders,
doctors, and administrators is tremendous and can be used as a weapon
against them. Even modern brain surgery for healing the mind could be
misused by modern dictators to make zombies out of their competitors.
Psychology itself may tend to standardize the mind, and the tendency
among different schools of psychology to emphasize orthodoxy
increases unwittingly the chance for mental coercion. ("If you
don't talk my magic gobbledygook, I have to condition you to it.")
It is easier to manipulate the minds of others than to avoid doing so.
A free society gives its citizens the right to act as free agents.
At the same time, it imposes on them the responsibility for
maintaining their freedom, mental as well as political. If, through
the use of modern medical, chemical, and mechanical techniques of
mental intrusion, we reduce man's capacity to act on his own
initiative, we subvert our own beliefs and weaken our free system.
Just as there is a deliberate political brainwashing, so there can be
a suggestive intrusion masquerading under the name of justice or
therapy. This may be less obtrusive than the deliberate totalitarian
attack, but it is no less dangerous.
Medication into submission is an existing fact. Man can use his
knowledge of the mind of a fellow being not to help him, but to hurt
him and bog him down. The magician can increase his power by increasing
the anxieties and fears of his victim, by exploiting his dependency needs,
and by provoking his feelings of guilt and inferiority.
Drugs and medical techniques can be used to make man a submissive
and conforming being. This we have to keep in mind in order to be
able to make him really healthy and free.
Is there a bridge from the concept of Pavlovian conditioning to
deeper psychological understanding? Only in those Pavlovian theoreticians
who deny modern depth psychology does there exist a conflict between
concepts. Pavlov himself acknowledged the presence of deeper, hidden
motivations in man and the limitations of his study of animal behavior.
Our task is to go back to the brainwashee, asking ourselves: How
can we better convey an understanding of what happened to him? What
were the Pavlovian circumstances, and what were the inner motivations
to yield to enforced political manipulation of the mind? Was it cowardice,
was it a prison psychosis, was it the general loss of mental stamina in our world?
In the following observations and experiences I hope to make use
of the clinical insight actually provided by modern depth psychology.
The Upset Philosopher
One day in 1672, the lonely philosopher of reason, Spinoza, had to
be forcibly restrained by his friends and neighbors. He wanted to
rush out into the streets and shout his indignation at the mob which
had murdered his good friend Jan De Witt, noble statesman of the
Dutch Republic, who had been falsely accused of treason. But
presently he calmed down and retreated to his room where, as usual,
he ground optical lenses according to a daily and hitherto unbroken routine.
As he worked, he thought back to his own behavior, which had been
no more rational or sensible than the behavior of the rioting crowd
which had killed De Witt. It was then that Spinoza realized the
existence of the emotional beast hidden beneath human reason, which,
when aroused, can act in a wanton and destructive fashion, and can
conjure up thousands of justifications and excuses for its behavior.
For, as Spinoza sensed, and as was later discovered, people are
not the rational creatures they think they are. In the
unconscious, that vast storehouse of deeply buried memories,
emotions, and strivings, lie many irrational yearnings, which
constantly influence the conscious acts. All of us are governed to
some degree by this hidden tyrant, and by the conflict between our
reason and our emotions.
To the extent that we are the victims of unchecked unconscious
drives, to that extent we may be vulnerable to mental manipulation.
And although there is a horrifying fascination in the idea that our
mental resistance is relatively weak, that the very quality which
distinguishes one man from another -- the individual "I"
can be profoundly altered by psychological pressures, such transformations
are merely extremes of a process we find operating in normal life.
Through systematized suggestion, subtle propaganda, and more overt
mass hypnosis, the human mind in its expressions is changed daily in
any society. Advertising seduces the democratic citizen into using
quackeries or one special brand of soap instead of another. Our wish
to buy things is continually stimulated. Campaigning politicians seek
to influence us by their glamour as well as by their programs. Fashion experts
hypnotize us into periodic changes of our standards of beauty and good taste.
In cases of menticide, however, this assault on the integrity of
the human mind is more direct and premeditated. By playing on the
irrational child lying hidden in the unconscious and by sharpening
the internal conflict between reason and emotion, the inquisitor can
bring his victims to abject surrender.
All of the victims of deliberate menticide -- the POWs in Korea,
the imprisoned "traitors" to the dictatorial regimes of the
Iron Curtain countries, the victims of the Nazi terror during the
Second World War -- are people whose ways of life had been suddenly
and dramatically altered. They had been torn from their homes, their
families, their friends, and thrown into a frightening, abnormal
atmosphere. The very strangeness of their surroundings made them more
vulnerable to any attack on their values and attitudes. When the
dictator exploits his victim's psychological needs in a threatening,
hostile, and unfamiliar world, breakdown is almost sure to follow.
The Barbed-Wire Disease
Already during the First World War, peculiar mental reactions,
mixtures of apathy and rage, could be discerned in prisoners of war
as a defensive adjustment against the hardships of prison life, the
boredom, the hunger, the lack of privacy, the continual insecurity.
The Korean War added to this situation the greater cruelty of the
enemy, the prolonged fear of death, malnutrition, diseases,
systematic attacks on the prisoner's mind, the lack of sanitation,
and the lack of all human dignity.
Often improvement could be secured through acceptance of the
totalitarian ideology. The psychological pressure not only led to an
involvement with the enemy but caused mutual suspicion among the prisoners.
As I have already described, the barbed-wire disease begins with
the initial apathy and despair of all prisoners. There is passive
surrender to fate. In fact, people can die out of such despair; it is
as if all resistance was gone. Being anything but aloof and apathetic
was even dangerous in a camp where the enemy wanted to debate and
argue with you in order to tear down your mental resistance.
Consequently a vicious circle was built up of apathy, not thinking,
letting things go -- a surrender to a complete zombie-like existence
of mechanical dependency on the circumstances. Every sign of anger
and alertness could be brutally punished by the enemy; that is why we
do not find those sudden attacks of rage that were observed in the
earlier prisoner-of-war camps during World Wars I and II.
Results of psychological testing of the liberated soldiers from
the Korean POW camps could indicate that this defensive apathy and
retreat into secluded dependency was likely to be found in nearly all
of them. Yet, after being brought back into normal surroundings,
alertness and activity returned rather soon, even in two or three
days. Those few who remained anxious, apathetic, and zombielike
belong to the long chapter of war and battle neuroses (Strassman).
What are some of the factors which can turn a man into a traitor
to his own convictions, an informer, a confessor to heinous crimes,
or an apparent collaborator?
The Moment of Sudden Surrender
Several victims of the Nazi inquisition have told me that the moment
of surrender occurred suddenly and against their will. For days they had
faced the fury of their interrogators, and then suddenly they fell apart.
"All right, all right, you can have anything you want."
And then came hours of remorse, of resolution, of a desperate wish
to return to their previous position of firm resistance. They wanted
to cry out: "Don't ask me anything else. I won't answer."
And yet something in them, that conforming, complying being hidden
deep in all of us, was on the move.
This sudden surrender often happened after an unexpected
accusation, a shock, a humiliation that particularly hurt, a
punishment that burned, a surprising logic in the inquisitor's
question that could not be counter-argued. I remember an
experience of my own that illustrated the effect of such surprise.
After my escape from a Nazi prison in occupied Holland, I was able
to reach neutral Switzerland via Vichy France. When I arrived, I was
put in a jail where, at first, I was treated rather kindly. After
three days, however, I was denied an officer's right to asylum and
was told that I would be deported back to Vichy France. To this
information, my jailers sneeringly added the comment that I should be
happy I was not going to be deported back to the Germans.
When I left to be transported to the border, I was asked to sign a
paper stating that all my possessions (which had been taken from me
on my imprisonment) had been returned. I refused to sign because a
few things -- unimportant in themselves, but of great emotional value
to me -- were not included in the package my jailers handed me. One
of the guards looked at me with contempt, the second tapped his foot
impatiently and repeatedly demanded that I sign the paper, the third
scolded and chattered in a French that was completely unintelligible
to me. I continued firm in my refusal.
Suddenly one of my officers started to slap me around the face and
to beat me. Overwhelmed by surprise that they should display such
fury over a bagatelle, I surrendered and signed the paper. (From the
Vichy prison to which I was sent, I was permitted to write a letter of
protest to the Swiss government. I still carry the official apology I received.)
This sudden change of mood of defiant resistance to one of
submission must be explained by the unconscious action of contrasting
feelings. Consciously we tell ourselves to be strong, but from deep
within us the desire to give in and to comply beings to disturb us
and to affect our behavior. In psychology this is described as the
innate ambivalence of all feelings.
The Need to Collapse
The vocabulary of psychopathology contains many sophisticated
terms for the wish to succumb to mental pressure, such as "wish
to regress", "dependency need", "mental
masochism", "unconscious death wish", and many others.
For our purposes, however, it is enough to state that every
individual has two opposing needs which operate simultaneously: the
need to be independent to be oneself; and the need NOT to be oneself,
NOT to be anybody at all, NOT to resist mental pressure.
The need to be inconspicuous, to disappear, and to be swallowed up
by society is a common one. In its simplest form we can see it all
around us as a tendency to conform. Under ordinary circumstances the
need for anonymity is balanced by the need for individuality, and the
mentally healthy person is one who can walk the fine line between
them. But in the frightening, lonely situations in which the victims
of menticidal terror find themselves -- situations which have a
nightmare quality, which are crammed with dangers so tremendous they
cannot be grasped or understood because there is nobody to explain or reassure
-- the wish to collapse, to let go, to be not there, becomes almost irresistible.
This experience was reported by many concentration-camp victims.
They had come into camp with one unanswered question burning in their
minds: "Why has all this happened to me?" Their need for a
sense of direction, for a feeling of purpose and meaning was
unsatisfied, and hence they could not maintain their personalities.
They let themselves go in what psychopathology calls a
depersonalization syndrome, a general feeing of having lost complete
control of themselves and their own existence. What Pavlovian
conditioning can do in applying artificial confusion, can be done too
by one shocking experience. "For what?" they asked
themselves. "What is the meaning of all this suffering?"
And gradually they sank dully into that paralyzed state of
semi-oblivion we call depression: the self-destructive needs take over.
The Nazis were clever and unscrupulous in taking advantage of this
need to collapse. The humiliation of concentration-camp life, the
repeated suggestion that the Allies were as good as beaten -- they
conspired to convince the inmates that there would be no end to this
pointless suffering, no victorious conclusion to the war, no future
to their lives. The desire to break down, to give in, becomes almost
insurmountable when a man feels that this horrible marginal existence
is something permanent, that he cannot look toward a more personal
goal, that he has to adjust to this dulling, degrading life forever.
At the moment faith and hope disappear, man breaks down. There are
tragic stories of concentration-camp victims who fixed all their
expectations on the idea that liberation would come on Christmas,
1944, and aimed their entire existence toward that date. When it passed
and they were still incarcerated, many of them simply collapsed and died.
This tendency to collapse also serves as a protective device
against danger. The victim seems to think, "If my torturer
doesn't notice me, he will leave me alone." And yet this very
feeling of anonymity, this sense of losing one's personality, of
being useless, unnoticed and unwanted, also results in depression and
apathy. Man's need to be an individual can never be completely killed.
The Need for Companionship
Not enough attention has been given to the psychology of
loneliness, especially to the implications of enforced isolation of
prisoners. When the sensory stimuli of everyday life are removed,
man's entire personality may change. Social intercourse, our
continual contact with our colleagues, our work, the newspapers,
voices, traffic, our loved ones and even those we don't like -- all
are daily nourishment for our senses and minds. We select what we
find interesting, reject what we do not want to absorb. Every day,
every citizen lives in many small worlds of exchange of
gratifications, little hatreds, pleasant experiences, irritations,
delights. And he needs these stimuli to keep him on the alert. Hour
by hour, reality, in cooperation with our memory, integrates the
millions of facts in our lives by repeating them over and over.
As soon as man is alone, closed off from the world and from the
news of what is going on, his mental activity is replaced by quite
different processes. Long forgotten anxieties come to the surface,
long-repressed memories knock on his mind from inside. His fantasy
life begins to develop and assume gigantic proportions. He cannot
evaluate or check his fantasies against the events of his ordinary
days, and very soon they may take possession of them.
I remember very clearly my own fantasies during the time I was in
a Nazi prison. It was almost impossible for me to control my
depressive thoughts of hopelessness. I had to tell myself over and
over again: "Think, think. Keep your senses alert; don't give in."
I tried to use all my psychiatric knowledge to keep my mind in a state of
relaxed mobilization, and on many days I felt it was a losing battle.
Some experiments have shown that people who are deprived, for even
a very short time, of ALL sensory stimuli (no touch, no hearing, no
smell, no sight) quickly fall into a kind of hallucinatory hypnotic
state. Isolation from the multitude of impressions that normally
bombard us from the outside world creates strange and frightening
symptoms. According to Heron, who performed experiments on a group of
students at McGill University by placing each student in his own
pitch-black, soundproof room, ventilated with filtered air, and
encasing his hands in heavy leather mittens and his feet in heavy
boots, "little by little their brains go dead or slip out of
control". Even in twenty-four hours of such extreme sensual
isolation, all the horror phantoms of childhood are awakened, and
various pathological symptoms appear. Our instinct of curiosity
demands continual feeding; if it is not satisfied, the internal
hounds of hell are aroused.
The prisoner kept in isolation, although his isolation is by no
means as extreme as in the laboratory test, also undergoes a severe
mental change. His guards and inquisitors become more and more his
only source of contact with reality, with those stimuli he needs even
more than bread. No wonder that he gradually develops a peculiar
submissive relationship to them. He is affected not only by his
isolation from social contacts, but by sexual starvation as well. The
latent dependency needs that lie deep in all men make him willing to
accept his guard as a substitute father figure. The inquisitor may be
cruel and bestial, but the very fact that he acknowledges his
victim's existence gives the prisoner a feeling that he has received
some little bit of affection. What a conflict may thus arise between
a man's traditional loyalties and these new ones! There are only a
few personalities which are so completely self-sufficient that they
can resist the need to yield, to find some human companionship, to
overcome the unbearable loneliness.
During the World Wars, prisoners at first suffered from a
peculiar, burning homesickness already called barbed-wire disease.
Memories of mother, home, and family made the soldiers identify with
babyhood again, but as they became more used to prison-camp life,
thoughts of home and family also created positive values and helped
make the prison-camp life less harrowing.
Even the prisoner who is not kept in isolation can feel lonely in
the unorganized mass of prisoners. His fellow prisoners can become
his enemies as easily as they can become his friends. His hatred of
his guards can be displaced and turned against those imprisoned with
him. Instead of suspecting the enemy, the victim may become
suspicious of his companions in misery.
In the Nazi concentration camps and the Korean POW camps, a kind
of mass paranoia often developed. Loneliness was increased because
the prisoners cut themselves off from one another through suspicion
and hatred. This distrust was encouraged by the guards. They
constantly suggested to their victims that nobody cared for them and
nobody was concerned about what was happening to them. "You are
alone. Your friends on the outside don't know whether you're alive or
dead. Your fellow prisoners don't even care." Thus all
expectation of a future was killed, and the resulting uncertainty and
hopelessness became unbearable. Then the guards sowed suspicion and
spread terrifying rumors: "You are here because those people you
call your friends betrayed you." "Your buddies here have
squealed on you." "Your friends on the outside have
deserted you." Playing on a man's old loyalties, making him feel
deserted and alone, force him into submission and collapse.
The times that I myself wavered and entertained thoughts about
joining the opposite forces always occurred after periods of extreme
loneliness and deep-seated yearnings for companionship. At such
moments the jailer or enemy may become a substitute friend.
Blackmailing Through Overburdening Guilt Feelings
Deep within all of us lie hidden feelings of guilt, unconscious
guilt, which can be brought to the surface under extreme stress. The
strategy of arousing guilt is the mother's oldest tool for gaining
dominance over her children's souls. Her warning and accusing finger
give her a magic power over them and help to create deep-seated guilt
feelings which may continue all through their adult lives. When we
are children, we depend on our parents and resent them for just this
reason. We may harbor hidden destructive wishes against those closest
to us, and feelings of guilt about these wishes. Buried deep in man's
unconscious is the knowledge that he has had hostile fantasies, and
that in his hostile fantasies he has felt himself capable of
committing many crimes. Theodore Reik has drawn our attention to the
unknown primitive murderer believed to be in all of us, whose
compulsion to confess and to be punished may be easily provoked under
circumstances of terror and depression.
This concept of concealed hostility and destructiveness is often
difficult for the layman to accept. But consider for a moment the
popularity of the detective story. We may tell ourselves that we
enjoy reading these tales because we identify with the keen and
clever sleuth, but, as is clear from psychoanalytic experience, the
repressed criminal in all of us is also at work and we also identify
with the conscienceless killer. As a matter of fact, our repressed
hostilities make the reading of hostile acts attractive to us.
In the political sphere, the systematic exploitation of
unconscious guilt to create submission is a utilization of the
unconscious confession compulsion and the need for punishment.
Continual purges and confessions, as we encounter them in the
totalitarian countries, arouse deeply hidden guilt feelings. The
lesser sin of rebellion or subversion has to be admitted to cover
personal thoughts of crime which are more deeply imbedded. The
personal reactions of those who are continually interrogated and
investigated give us a clue as to what happens.
The very fact of prolonged interrogation can re-arouse the hidden
and unconscious guilt in the victim. At a time of extreme emotion,
after constant accusation and day-long interrogation, when he has
been deprived of sleep and reduced to a state of utter despair, the
victim may lose the capacity to distinguish between the real criminal
act of which he is accused and his own fantasied unconscious guilt.
If his upbringing burdened him with an almost pathological sense of
guilt under normal circumstances, he will be completely unable to
resist the menticidal attack.
Even normal people may be brought to surrender under such
miserable conditions, and not only through the action of the
inquisition, but also because of all the other weakening factors.
Lack of sleep, hunger, and illness can create utter confusion and
make any man vulnerable to hypnotic influence. All of us have
experienced the mental fuzziness which comes with being overtired.
Concentration-camp victims know how hunger, especially, induces a
loss of mental control. In the fantastic world of the totalitarian
prison or camp, these effects are heightened and exaggerated.
[NOTE: The conversation in concentration camps usually
revolved around food and memories of glorious gluttony. The mind
could not work: it was fixed on eating and fantasies about food. A
word grew up to express that constant possession by the idea of
eating well again: stomach masturbation ("Magenonanie").
This kind of talk often took the place of all intellectual exchange.]
The Nazis, through clever exploitation of their victims'
unconscious guilt after poking into the back corners of their minds,
were often able to convert courageous resistance fighters into meek
collaborators. That they were not uniformly successful can be
explained by two factors. The first is that MOST OF THE MEMBERS OF
THE UNDERGROUND WERE INWARDLY PREPARED FOR THE BRUTALITY WITH WHICH
THEY WERE TREATED. The second is that, clever as the Nazi techniques were, they
were not as irresistible as the methodical tricks of the Communist brainwashers are.
When the victims of Nazi brutality did break down, it was not
torture but often the threat of reprisal against family which made
them give in. Sudden acute confrontation with a long-buried childhood
problem creates confusion and doubt. All of a sudden the enemy puts
before you a clash of loyalties: your father or your friends, your
brother or your fatherland, your wife or your honor. This is a brutal
choice to have to make, and when the inquisitor makes use of your
additional inner conflicts, he can easily force you into surrender.
A clash between loyalties makes either choice a betrayal, and this
arouses paralyzing doubt. This calculated but subtle attack on the
weakest spots in man's mind, on a man's conscience, and on the moral
system he has learned from the Judaeo-Christian ethics, paralyzes the
reason and leads the victim more easily into betrayal. The inquisitor
subtly tests his victim's archaic guilt feelings toward paternal
figures, his friends, his children. He cleverly exploits the victim's
early ambivalent ties with his parents. The sudden outbreak of hidden
moral flaws and guilt can bring a man to tears and complete breakdown.
He regresses to the dependency and submissiveness of the baby.
A very husky former hero of the Dutch resistance, known as King
Kong because of his size and strength, became the treacherous
instrument of the Nazis soon after his brother had been taken with
him and the Nazis threatened to kill the youth. King Kong's final surrender
to the enemy and his becoming their treacherous tool was psychiatrically
recognizable as a defense mechanism against his deep guilt, arising from
hidden feelings of aggression against his brother (Boeree).
Another example of breakdown is seen in the story of one young
resistance fighter who, after the Nazis had threatened to torture his
father, who was imprisoned with him, finally broke into childish
tears and promised to tell them everything they wanted to know. After
that he was taken back to his cell in order to be softened up after
the following day. This was the routine of his interrogator. The
inquisitors understood only too well the effectiveness of patient
pursuit at repeated moments while intruding into a man's guilt
feelings. Although both prisoners were liberated that night as a
consequence of the Allied sweep through Belgium and the southwest
part of Holland, the boy remained in his depression for a long time,
tortured by his knowledge that he had nearly betrayed his best
friends in the underground in order to save his father -- in spite of
knowing, at the same time, that the promises of the enemy would not
have protected his father.
The Law of Survival Versus the Law of Loyalty
The prisoners of war in Korea who gradually gave in to the
systematic mental pressure of the enemy and collaborated in the
production of materials that could be used for Communist propaganda
-- albeit tentatively and for only as long as they were in the orbit
of the enemy -- followed a peculiar psychological law of passive
inner defense and inner deceit that when one cannot fight and defeat
the enemy, one must join him. Later, a few of them were so taken in by
totalitarian propaganda that they elected to remain in China and the
totalitarian orbit. Some did it to escape punishment for having betrayed their comrades.
Man cannot become a turncoat without justifying his actions to
himself. When Holland surrendered to the German army in 1940, I saw
this general mechanism of mental surrender operating in several
people who had been staunch anti-Nazis. "Maybe there is
something good in Nazism", they told themselves as they saw the
tremendous show of German strength. Those who were the victims of
their own initial mental surrender and need to justify things, who
could not stop and say to themselves "Hold on here; think this
out", became the traitors and collaborators. They were
completely taken in by the enemy's show of strength. The same process
of self-justification and justifying the enemy started in the POW
camps. Experiences from the concentration camps give us some
indication of how far this passive submission to the enemy can go.
Because of the deep-seated human need for affection, many prisoners
lived only for one thing: a friendly word from their guards. Each
time it came, it fortified the delusion of grace and acceptance. Once
these prisoners, mostly those who had been in the camps a long time,
were accepted by the guards, they easily became the trusted tools of
the Nazis. They started to behave like their cruel jailers and became
torturers of their fellow campers. These collaborating prisoners,
called "Kapos", were even more cruel and vengeful than the
official overseers. Because of misunderstood inner needs, the
brainwasher and sadistic camp leader are direly in need of
collaborators. They serve not only for the propaganda machine but
also to exonerate their jailers from guilt.
When a man has to choose either hunger, death marches, and torture
or a temporary yielding to the illusions of the enemy, his
self-preservation mechanisms act in many ways like reflexes. They
help him to find a thousand justifications and exculpations for
giving in to the psychological pressure.
One of the officers court-martialed for collaborating with the
enemy in a Korean POW camp justified his conduct by saying that he
followed this course of action in order to keep himself and his men
alive. Is that not a perfectly valid, though not necessarily true, argument?
The use of it serves to point up the fact that self-protective
mechanisms are usually much stronger than ideological loyalty. No one
who has not faced this same bitter problem can have an objective
opinion as to what he himself would do under the circumstances. As a
psychiatrist, I suggest that most people would yield and
compromise when threat and mental pressure became strong enough.
Among the anti-Nazi undergrounds in the Second World War were
physically strong boys who thought they could resist all pressure and
would never betray their comrades. However, they could not even begin
to imagine the perfidious technique of menticide. Repeated pestering,
itself, is more destructive than physical torture. The pain of
physical torture, as we have said, brings temporary unconsciousness
and, consequently, forgetfulness, but when the victim wakes up, the
play of anticipation begins. "Will it happen again? Can I stand
it any more?" Anticipation paralyzes the will. Suicidal thoughts
and identifications with death do not help. The foe doesn't let you
die but drags you back from the very edge of oblivion. The
anticipation of renewed torture increases internal anxieties. "Who
am I to stand all this?" "Why must I be a hero?"
Gradually resistance breaks down.
The surrender of the mind to its new master does not take place
immediately under the impact of duress and exhaustion. The inquisitor
knows that in the period of temporary relaxation of pressure, during
which the victim will rehearse and repeat the torture experience in
himself, the final surrender is prepared. During that tension of rumination
and anticipation, the deeply hidden wish to give in grows. The action of
continual repetition of stupid questions, reiterated for days and days,
exhausts the mind till it gives the answers the inquisitor wants to have.
In addition to the weapon of mental exhaustion, he plays on the
physical exhaustion of the senses. He may use penetrating,
excruciating noises or a constant strong flashlight that blinds the
eyes. The need to close the eyes or to get away from the noises
confuses the mental orientation of the victim. He loses his balance
and feelings of self-confidence. He yearns for sleep and can do
nothing else but surrender. The infantile desire to become part of
the threatening giant machine, to become one with the forces that are
so much stronger than the prisoner has won.
It is an unequivocal surrender: "Do with me what you want.
From now on I am you."
That only deprivation from sleep is able to produce various
abnormal reactions of the mind was confirmed by Tyler in an
experiment with 350 male volunteers. He deprived them of sleep for
102 hours. Forty-four men dropped out almost at once because they
felt too anxious and irritated. After forty hours without sleep, 70
percent of all subjects had already had illusions, delusions,
hallucinations, and similar experiences. Those who had true
hallucinations were dropped from the experiment. After the second
night, sporadic disturbances of thinking were common to all subjects.
The participants were embarrassed when they were informed later of
their behavior.
The changes in emotional response had been noticeable --
euphoria followed by depression; dejection and restlessness;
indifference to unusual behavior shown by other subjects. The
experiment gave the impression that prolonged wakefulness causes some
toxic substance to affect brain and mind.
Only the few strong, independent, and self-sufficient
personalities, who have conquered their dependency needs, can stand
such pressure or are willing to die under it.
The ritual of self-accusation and breast-beating and unconditional
surrender to the rules of the elders is part of age-old religious
rites. It was based on a more or less unconscious belief in a supreme
and omnipotent power. This power may be the monolithic party state or
a mysterious deity. It follows the old inner device of "Credo
quia absurdum" ("I believe because it is absurd"),
of faithful submission to a super-world stronger than the reality
which confronts our senses.
Why the totalitarian and orthodox dogmatic ideology sticks to such
a rigid attitude, with prohibition of investigation of basic
premises, is a complicated psychological question. Somewhere the
reason is related to the fear of change, the fear of the risk of
change of habits, the fear of freedom, which may be psychologically
related to the fear of the finality of death.
The denial of human freedom and equality lifts the authoritarian
man beyond his mortal fellows. His temporary power and omnipotence
give him the illusion of eternity. In his totalitarianism he denies death
and ephemeral existence and borrows power from the future. He has to
invent and formulate a final Truth and protective dogma to justify his
battle against mortality and temporariness. From then on, the new
fundamental certainty must be hammered into the minds of adepts and slaves.
What happens inside the human psyche under severe circumstances of
mental and physical attack is clarified for us in the studies of the
general mental defenses available to man; earlier, I myself tried in
several publications to analyze the various ways people defend
themselves against fear and pressure.
In the last phases of brainwashing and menticide, the
self-humiliating submission of the victims serves as an inner
defensive device annihilating the prosecuting inquisitor in a magic
way. The more they accuse themselves, the less logical reason there
is for HIS existence. Giving in and being even more cruel toward
oneself makes the inquisitor and judge, as it were, impotent and
shows the futility of the accusing regime.
We may say that brainwashing and menticide provoke the same inner
defensive mechanism that we observe in melancholic patients. Through
their mental self-beatings, they try to get rid of fear and to avoid
a more deeply seated guilt. They punish themselves in advance in
order to overcome the idea of final punishment for some hidden,
unknown, and worse crime. The victim of menticide conquers his
tormentor by becoming even more cruel toward himself than the
inquisitor. In this passive way, he annihilates his enemy.
The Mysterious Masochistic Pact
In Arthur Koestler's masterpiece, DARKNESS AT NOON, he describes
all the subtle intricacies, reasonings, and dialectics between the
inquisitor and his victim. The old Bolshevik, Rubashov,
preconditioned by his former party adherence, confesses to plotting
against the party and the party line. He is partly motivated by the
wish to render a last service: his confession is a final sacrifice to
the party. I would explain the confession rather as part of that
mysterious masochistic pact between the inquisitor and his victim
which we encounter, too, in other processes of brainwashing.
[NOTE: The term "masochism" originally referred
to sexual gratification received from pain and punishment, and later
became every gratification acquired through pain and abjection.]
It is the last gift and trick the tortured gives to his torturer.
It is as if he were to call out: "Be good to me. I confess. I
submit. Be good to me and love me." After having suffered all
manner of brutality, hypnotism, despair, and panic, there is a final
quest for human companionship, but it is ambivalent, mixed with deep
despising, hatred, and bitterness.
Tortured and torturer gradually form a peculiar community in which
the one influences the other. Just as in therapeutic sessions where
the patient identifies with the psychiatrist, the daily sessions of
interrogation and conversation create an unconscious transfer of
feelings in which the prisoner identifies with his inquisitors, and
his inquisitors with him. The prisoner, encaptured in a strange,
harsh, and unfamiliar world, identifies much more with the enemy than
does the enemy with him. Unwittingly he may take over all the enemy's
norms, evaluations, and attitudes toward life. Such passive surrender
to the enemy's ideology is determined by unconscious processes. The
danger of communion of this kind is that at the end all moral
evaluations disappear. We saw it happen in Germany. The very victims
of Nazism came to accept the idea of concentration camps.
In menticide we are faced with a ritual like that found in witch
hunting during the Middle Ages, except that today the ritual has
taken a more refined form. Accuser and accused -- each affords the
other assistance, and both belong together as collaborating members
of a ritual of confession and self-denigration. Through their
cooperation, they attack the minds of bystanders who identify with
them and who consequently feel guilty, weak, and submissive. The
Moscow purge trials made many Russians feel guilty; listening to the
confessions, they must have said to themselves, "I could have
done the same thing. I could have been in that man's place."
When their heroes become traitors, their own hidden treasonable
wishes made them feel weak and frightened.
This explanation may seem overly complicated and involved and
perhaps even self-contradictory, but, in fact, it helps us to
understand what happens in cases of menticide. Both torturer and
tortured are the victims of their own unconscious guilt. The torturer
projects his guilt onto some outside scapegoat and tries to expiate
it by attacking his victim. The victim, too, has a sense of guilt
which arises from deeply repressed hostilities. Under normal
circumstances, this sense is kept under control, but in the
menticidal atmosphere of relentless interrogation and inquisition,
his repressed hostilities are aroused and loom up as frightening
phantasmagorias from a forgotten past, which the victim senses but
cannot grasp or understand. It is easier to confess to the accusation
of treason and sabotage than to accept the frightening sense of
criminality with which his long-forgotten aggressive impulses now
burden him. The victim's overt self-accusation serves as a trick to
annihilate the inner accuser and the persecuting inquisitor. The more
I accuse myself, the less reason there is for the inquisitor's existence.
The victim's going to the gallows kills, as it were, the inquisitor too,
because there existed a mutual identification: the accuser is made
impotent the moment the victim begins to accuse himself and tomorrow
the accuser himself may be accused and brought to the gallows.
Out of our understanding of this strange masochistic pact between
accuser and accused comes a rather simple answer to the questions,
WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO CONTROL THE MINDS OF OTHERS, AND WHY DO THE
OTHERS CONFESS AND YIELD? It is because there is no essential
difference between the victim and the inquisitor. They are alike.
Neither, under these circumstances, has any control over his deeply
hidden criminal and hostile thoughts and feelings.
It is obviously easier to be the inquisitor than the victim, not
only because the inquisitor may be temporarily safe from mental and
physical destruction, but also because it is simpler to punish others
for what we feel as criminal in ourselves than it is to face up to
our own hidden sense of guilt. Committing menticide is the lesser
crime of aggression, which covers up the deeper crime of unresolved
hidden hatred and destruction.
A Survey of Psychological Processes Involved in Brainwashing and Menticide
At the end of this chapter describing the various influences that
lead to yielding and surrender to the enemy's strategy, it is useful
to give a short survey of the psychological processes involved.
PHASE I. ARTIFICIAL BREAKDOWN AND DECONDITIONING
The inquisitor tries to weaken the ego of his prisoner. Though
originally physical torture was used -- hunger and cold are still
very effective -- physical torture may often increase a person's
stubbornness. Torture is intended to a much greater extent to act as
a threat to the bystanders' (the people's) imagination. Their wild
anticipation of torture leads more easily to THEIR breakdown when the
enemy has need of their weakness. (Of course, occasionally a sadistic
enemy may find individual pleasure in torture.)
The many devices the enemy makes use of include: intimidating
suggestion, dramatic persuasion, mass suggestion, humiliation,
embarrassment, loneliness and isolation, continued interrogation,
over-burdening the unsteady mind, arousing more and more self-pity.
Patience and time help the inquisitor to soften a stubborn soul.
Just as in many old religions the victims were humbled and
humiliated in order to prepare for the new religion, so, in this case,
they are prepared to accept the totalitarian ideology. In this phase, out
of mere intellectual opportunism, the victim may consciously give in.
PHASE II. SUBMISSION TO AND POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION WITH THE ENEMY
As has already been mentioned, the moment of surrender may often
arrive suddenly. It is as if the stubborn negative suggestibility
changed critically into a surrender and affirmation. What the
inquisitor calls the sudden inner illumination and conversion is a
total reversal of inner strategy in the victim. From this time on,
in psychoanalytic terms, a parasitic superego lives in man's
conscience, and he will speak his new master's voice. In my
experience such sudden surrender often occurred together with
hysterical outbursts into crying and laughing, like a baby
surrendering after obstinate temper tantrums. The inquisitor can
attain this phase more easily by assuming a paternal attitude. As a
matter of fact, many a POW was courted by a form of paternal kindness
-- gifts, sweets at birthdays, and the promise of more cheerful things to come.
Maloney compares this sudden yielding with the theophany or
kenosis (internal conversion) as described by some theological rites.
For our understanding, it is important to stress that yielding is
an unconscious and purely emotional process, no longer under the
conscious intellectual control of the brainwashee. We may also
call this phase the phase of autohypnosis.
PHASE III. THE RECONDITIONING TO THE NEW ORDER
Through both continual training and taming, the new phonograph
record has to be grooved. We may compare this process with an active
hypnosis into conversion. Incidental relapses to the old form of
thinking have to be corrected as in Phase I. The victim is daily
helped to rationalize and justify his new ideology. The inquisitor
delivers to him the new arguments and reasonings.
This systematic indoctrination of those who long avoided intensive
indoctrination constitutes the actual political aspect of brainwashing
and symbolizes the ideological cold war going on at this very moment.
PHASE IV. LIBERATION FROM THE TOTALITARIAN SPELL
As soon as the brainwashee returns to a free atmosphere, the
hypnotic spell is broken. Temporary nervous repercussions take place,
like crying spells, feelings of guilt and depression. The expectation
of a hostile homeland, in view of his having yielded to enemy
indoctrination, may fortify this reaction. The period of brainwashing
becomes a nightmare. Only those who were staunch members of the
resistance before may stick to it. But here, too, I have seen the
enemy impose its mental pressure too well and convert their former
prisoners into eternal haters of freedom.
THE RAPE OF THE MIND - PART TWO
The Techniques of Mass Submission
The purpose of the second part of this book is to show various
aspects of political and non-political strategy used to change the
feelings and thoughts of the masses, starting with simple advertising
and propaganda, then surveying psychological warfare and actual cold
war, and going on to examine the means used for internal streamlining
of man's thoughts and behavior. Part Two ends with an intricate
examination of how one of the tools of emotional fascination and
attack -- the weapon of fear -- is used and what reactions it arouses in men.
Only blind wishful thinking can permit us to believe that our own
society is free from the insidious influences mentioned in Part One.
The fact is that they exist all around us, both on a political and a
nonpolitical level and they become as dangerous to the free way of
life as are the aggressive totalitarian governments themselves.
Every culture institutionalizes certain forms of behavior that
communicate and encourage certain forms of thinking and acting, thus
molding the character of its citizens. To the degree that the
individual is made an object of constant mental manipulation, to the
degree that cultural institutions may tend to weaken intellectual and
spiritual strength, to the degree that knowledge of the mind is used
to tame and condition people instead of educating them, to that
degree does the culture itself produce men and women who are
predisposed to accept an authoritarian way of life. The man who has
no mind of his own can easily become the pawn of a would-be dictator.
It is often disturbing to see how even intelligent people do not have
straight thinking minds of their own. The pattern of the mind, whether toward
conformity and compliance or otherwise, is conditioned rather early in life.
In his important social psychological experiments with students,
Asch found out in simple tests that there was a yielding toward an
ERRING MAJORITY opinion in more than a third of his test persons, and
75 percent of subjects experimented upon agreed with the majority in
varying degrees. In many persons the weight of authority is more
important than the quality of the authority.
If we are to learn to protect our mental integrity on all levels,
we must examine not only those aspects of contemporary culture which
have to do directly with the struggle for power, but also those
developments in our culture which, by dulling the edge of our mental
awareness or by taking advantage of our suggestibility, can lead us
into the mental death -- or boredom -- of totalitarianism. Continual
suggestion and slow hypnosis in the wake of mechanical mass
communication promotes uniformity of the mind and may lure the public
into the "happy era" of adjustment, integration, and
equalization, in which individual opinion is completely stereotyped.
When I get up in the morning, I turn on my radio to hear the news
and the weather forecast. Then comes the pontifical voice telling me
to take aspirin for my headache. I have "headaches"
occasionally (so does the world), and my headaches, like everyone
else's, come from the many conflicts that life imposes on me. My
radio tells me not to think about either the conflicts or the
headaches. It suggests, instead, that I should retreat into that old
magic action of swallowing a pill. Although I laugh as I listen to
this long-distance prescription by a broadcaster who does not know
anything about me or my headaches and though I meditate for a moment
on man's servility to the magic of chemistry, my hand has already
begun to reach out for the aspirin bottle. After all, I do have a headache.
It is extremely difficult to escape the mechanically repeated
suggestions of everyday life. Even when our critical mind rejects
them, they seduce us into doing what our intellect tells us is stupid.
The mechanization of modern life has already influenced man to
become more passive and to adjust himself to ready-made conformity.
No longer does man think in personal values, following more his own
conscience and ethical evaluations; he thinks more and more in the
values brought to him by mass media. Headlines in the morning paper
give him his temporary political outlook, the radio blasts
suggestions into his ears, television keeps him in continual awe and
passive fixation. Consciously he may protest against these anonymous
voices, but nevertheless their suggestions ooze into his system.
What is perhaps most shocking about these influences is that many
of them have developed not out of man's destructiveness, but out of
his hope to improve his world and to make life richer and deeper. The
very institutions man has created to help himself, the very tools he has
invented to enhance his life, the very progress he has made toward mastery
of himself and his environment -- all can become weapons of destruction.
The Public-Opinion Engineers
The conviction is steadily growing in our country that an
elaborate propaganda campaign for either a political idea or a
deep-freeze can be successful in selling the public any idea or
object one wants them to buy, any political figure one wants them to
elect. Recently, some of our election campaigns have been
masterminded by the so-called public-opinion engineers, who have used
all the techniques of modern mass communication and all the
contemporary knowledge of the human mind to persuade Americans to
vote for the candidate who is paying the public-relation men's
salaries. The danger of such high-pressure advertising is that the
man or the party who can pay the most can become, temporarily at
least, the one who can influence the people to buy or to vote for
what may not be in their real interest.
The specialists in the art of persuasion and the molding of public
sentiment may try to knead man's mental dough with all the tools of
communication available to them: pamphlets, speeches, posters,
billboards, radio programs, and T.V. shows. They may water down the
spontaneity and creativity of thoughts and ideas into sterile and
streamlined clichés that direct our thoughts even although we
still have the illusion of being original and individual.
What we call the will of the people, or the will of the masses, we
only get to know after such collective action is put on the move,
after the will of the people has been expressed either at the polls
or in fury and rebellion. This indicates again how important it is
who directs the tools and machines of public opinion.
In the wake of such advertising and engineering of consent, the
citizen's trust in his leaders may become shaken and the populace may
gradually grow more and more accustomed to official deceit. Finally,
when people no longer have confidence in any program, any position,
and when they are unable to form intelligent judgments any more, they
can be more easily influenced by any demagogue or would-be dictator,
whose strength appeals to their confusion and their growing sense of
dissatisfaction. Perhaps the worst aspect of this slick merchandising
of ideas is that too often even those who buy the experts, and even
the opinion experts themselves, are unaware of what they are doing.
They too are swayed by the current catchword "management of public
opinion", and they cannot judge any more the tools they have hired.
The end never justifies the means; enough steps on this road can
lead us gradually to Totalitaria.
At this very moment in our country, an elaborate research into
motivation is going on, whose object is to find out why and what the
buyer likes to buy. What makes him tick? The aim is to bypass the
resistance barriers of the buying public. It is part of our
paradoxical cultural philosophy to stimulate human needs and to
stimulate the wants of the people. Commercialized psychological
understanding wants to sell to the public, to the potential buyer,
many more products than he really wants to buy. In order to do this,
rather infantile impulses have to be awakened, such as sibling
rivalry and neighbor envy, the need to have more and more sweets, the
glamour of colors, and the need for more and more luxuries.
The commercial psychologist teaches the seller how to avoid
unpleasant associations in his advertising, how to stimulate,
unobtrusively, sex associations, how to make everything look simple
and happy and successful and secure! He teaches the shops how to
boost the buyer's ego, how to flatter the customer.
The marketing engineers have discovered that our public wants the
suggestion of strength and virility in their product. A car must have
more horse-power in order to balance feelings of inner weakness in
the owner. A car must represent one's social status and reputation,
because without such a flag man feels empty. Advertising agencies
dream of "universitas advertensis", the world of
glittering sham ideas, the glorification of "munus vult
decipi", the intensification of snob appeal, the expression
of vulgar conspicuousness, and all this in order to push more sales
into the greedy mouths of buying babies. In our world of advertising,
artificial needs are invented by sedulous sellers and buyers. Here
lies the threat of building up a sham world that can have a dangerous
influence on our world of ideas.
This situation emphasizes the neurotic greed of the public, the
need to indulge in private fancies at the cost of an awareness of
real values. The public becomes conditioned to meretricious values.
Of course, a free public gradually finds its defenses against
slogans, but dishonesty and mistrust slip through the barriers of our
consciousness and leave behind a gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction.
After all, advertising symbolizes the art of making people
dissatisfied with what they have. In the meantime it is evident man
sustains a continual sneak attack on his better judgment.
In our epoch of too many noises and many frustrations, many "free"
minds have given up the struggle for decency and individuality. They
surrender to the "Zeitgeist", often without being aware of
it. Public opinion molds our critical thoughts every day.
Unknowingly, we may become opinionated robots. The slow coercion of
hypocrisy, of traditions in our culture that have a leveling effect
-- these things change us. We crave excitement, hair-raising stories,
sensation. We search for situations that create superficial fear to
cover up inner anxieties. We like to escape into the irrational
because we dislike the challenge of self-study and self-thinking. Our
leisure time is occupied increasingly by automatized activities in
which we take no part: listening to piped-in words and viewing
television screens. We hurry along with cars and go to bed with a sleeping
pill. This pattern of living in turn may open the way for renewed sneak
attacks on our mind. Our boredom may welcome any seductive suggestion.
Psychological Warfare as a Weapon of Terror
Every human communication can be either a report of straight facts
or an attempt to suggest things and situations as they do not exist.
Such distortion and perversion of facts strike at the core of human
communication. The verbal battle against man's concept of truth and
against his mind seems to be ceaseless. For example, if I can instill in
eventual future enemies fear and terror and the suggestion of impending
defeat, even before they are willing to fight, my battle is already half won.
The strategy of man to use a frightening mask and a loud voice to
utter lies in order to manipulate friend and foe is as old as
mankind. Primitive people used terror-provoking masks, magic
fascination, or self-deceit as much as we use loudly spoken words to
convince others or ourselves. They use their magic paints and we our
ideologies. Truly, we live in an age of ads, propaganda, and publicity.
But only under dictatorial and totalitarian regimes have such human habit
formations mushroomed into systematic psychological assault on mankind.
The weapons the dictator uses against his own people, he may use
against the outside world as well. For example, the false confessions
that divert the minds of dictator's subjects from their own real
problems have still another effect: they are meant (and sometimes
they succeed in their aim) to terrorize the world's public. By
strengthening the myth of the dictator's omnipotence, such
confessions weaken man's will to resist him. If a period of peace can
be used to soften up a future enemy, the totalitarian armies may be
able in time of war to win a cheap and easy victory. Totalitarian
psychological warfare is directed largely toward this end. It is an
effort to propagandize and hypnotize the world into submission.
As far back as the early nineteenth century, Napoleon organized
his Bureau de l'Opinion Publique in order to influence the thinking
of the French people. But it fell to the Germans to develop the
manipulation of public opinion into a huge, well organized machine.
Their psychological warfare became aggressive strategy in peacetime,
the so-called war between wars. It was as a result of the Nazi attack
on European morale and the Nazi war of nerves against their neighbors
that the other nations of the world began to organize their own psychological
forces, but it was only in the second half of the war that they were able to
achieve some measure of success. The Germans had a long head start.
Hitler's psychological artillery was composed primarily of the
weapon of fear. He had, for example, a network of fifth columnists
whose main job was to sow rumors and suspicions among the citizens of
the countries against which he eventually planned to fight. The
people were upset not only by the spy system itself, but by the very
rumor of spies. These fifth columnists spread slogans of defeat and
political confusion: "Why should France die for England?"
Fear began to direct people's actions. Instead of facing the real
threat of German invasion, instead of preparing for it, all of Europe
shuddered at spy stories, discussed irrelevant problems, argued
endlessly about scapegoats and minorities. Thus Hitler used the
rampant, vague fears to becloud the real issues, and by attacking his
enemies' will to fight, weakened them.
Not content with this strategic attack on the will to defend
oneself, Hitler tried to paralyze Europe with the threat of terror,
not only the threat of bombing, destruction, and occupation, but also
the psychological threat implicit in his own boast of ruthlessness.
The fear of an implacable foe makes man more willing to submit even
before he has begun to fight. Hitler's criminal acts at home -- the
concentration camps, the gas chambers, the mass murders, the atmosphere
of terror throughout Germany -- were as useful in the service of his
fear-instilling propaganda machinery as they were a part of his delusions.
There is another important weapon the totalitarians use in their
campaign to frighten the world into submission. This is the weapon of
psychological shock. Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant
confusion and diplomatic upheaval. They never knew what this
unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical,
because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can
be met with logic, while illogic cannot -- it confuses those who
think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have
more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the
enemy is still searching for a reasonable counter-argument to the
first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.
Strategical mental shocks were the instruments the Nazis used when
they entered the Rhineland in 1936 and when they concluded their
nonaggression pact with Russia in 1939. Stalin used the same strategy
at the time of the Korean invasion in 1950 (which he directed), as
did the Chinese and the North Koreans when they accused the United
States of bacteriological warfare. By acting in this apparently
irrational way, the totalitarians throw their logic-minded enemies
into confusion. The enemy feels compelled to deny the propagandistic
lies or to explain things as they really are, and these actions
immediately put him in the weaker defensive position. For the
galloping lie can never be overtaken, it can only be overthrown.
The technique of psychological shock has still another effect. It
may so confuse the mind of the individual citizen that he ceases to
make his own evaluations and begins to lean passively on the opinions
of others. Hitler's destruction of Warsaw and Rotterdam -- after the
armistice in 1940, a complete violation of international law --
immobilized France and shook the other democratic nations. Being in a
paralysis of moral indignation, they became psychologically
ill-equipped to deal with the Nazi horrors.
Just as the technological advances of the modern world have
refined and perfected the weapons of physical warfare, so the advance
in man's understanding of the manipulation of public opinion have
enabled him to refine and perfect the weapons of psychological warfare.
The Indoctrination Barrage
The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of
arguments and propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions. It
may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-don't-care reaction, or to
a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately,
the first reaction is the more popular one. The flight from study
and awareness is much too common in a world that throws too many
confusing pictures to the individual. For the sake of our democracy,
based on freedom and individualism, we have to bring ourselves back
to study again and again. Otherwise, we can become easy victims of a
well-planned verbal attack on our minds and consciences.
We cannot be enough aware of the continual coercion of our senses
and minds, the continual suggestive attacks which may pass through
the intellectual barriers of insight. Repetition and Pavlovian
conditioning exhaust the individual and may seduce him ultimately to
accept a truth he himself initially defied and scorned.
The totalitarians are very ingenious in arousing latent guilt in
us by repeating over and over again how criminally the Western world
has acted toward innocent and peaceful people. The totalitarians may
attack our identification with our leaders by ridiculing them, making
use of every man's latent critical attitude toward all leaders.
Sometimes they use the strategy of boredom to lull the people to
sleep. They would like the entire Western world to fall into a
hypnotic sleep under the illusion of peaceful coexistence. In a more
refined strategy, they would like to have us cut all our ties of
loyalty with the past, away from relatives and parents. The more you
have forsaken them and their so-called outmoded concepts, the better
you will cooperate with those who want to take mental possession of
you. Every political strategy that aims toward arousing fear and
suspicion tends to isolate the insecure individual until he surrenders
to those forces that seem to him stronger than his former friends.
And last but not least, let us not forget that in the battle of
arguments those with the best and most forceful strategy tend to win.
The totalitarians organize intensive dialectical training for their
subjects lest their doubts get the better of them. They try to do the
same thing to the rest of the world in a less obtrusive way.
We have to learn to encounter the totalitarians' exhausting
barrage of words with better training and better understanding. If we
try to escape from these problems of mental defense or deny their
complications, the cold war will gradually be lost to the slow
encroachment of words -- and more words.
The Enigma of Coexistence
Is it possible to coexist with a totalitarian system that never
ceases to use its psychological artillery? Can a free democracy be
strong enough to tolerate the parasitic intrusion of totalitarianism
into its rights and freedoms? History tells us that many opposing and
clashing ideologies have been able to coexist under a common law that
assured tolerance and justice. The church no longer burns its apostates.
Before the opposites of totalitarianism and free democracy can
coexist under the umbrella of supervising law and mutual good will, a
great deal more of mutual understanding and tolerance will have to be
built up. The actual cold war and psychological warfare certainly do
not yet help toward this end.
To the totalitarian, the word "coexistence" has a
different meaning than it has to us. The totalitarian may use it
merely as a catch-word or an appeaser. The danger is that the concept
of peaceful coexistence may become a disguise, dulling the awareness
of inevitable interactions and so profiting the psychologically
stronger party. Lenin spoke about the strategic breathing spell
(peredyshka) that has to weaken the enemy. Too enthusiastic a peace
movement may mean a superficial appeasement of problems. Such an
appeal has to be studied and restudied, lest it result in a dangerous letdown
of defenses which have to remain mobilized to face a ruthless enemy.
Coexistence may mean a suffocating subordination much like that of
prisoners coexisting with their jailers. At its best, it may imitate
the intensive symbiotic or ever-parasitic relationship we can see
among animals which need each other, or as we see it in the infant in
its years of dependency upon its mother.
In order to coexist and to cooperate, one must have notions and
comparable images of interaction, of a sameness of ideas, of a
belonging-together, of an interdependence of the whole human race, in
spite of the existence of racial and cultural differences. Otherwise the
ideology backed by the greater military strength will strangle the weaker one.
Peaceful coexistence presupposes on BOTH sides a high
understanding of the problems and complications of simple
coexistence, of mutual agreement and limitations, of the diversity of
personalities, and especially of the coexistence of contrasting and
irreconcilable thoughts and feelings in every individual of the
innate ambivalence of man. It demands an understanding of the rights
of both the individual and the collectivity. Using coexistence as a catch-word,
we may obscure the problems involved, and we may find that we use the word
as a flag that covers gradual surrender to the stronger strategist.
There actually exists such a thing as a technique of mass
brainwashing. This technique can take root in a country if an
inquisitor is strong and shrewd enough. He can make most of us his
victims, albeit temporarily.
What in the structure of society has made man so vulnerable to
these mass manipulations of the mind? This is a problem with
tremendous implications, just as brainwashing is. In recent years we
have grown more and more aware of human interdependence with all its
difficulties and complications.
I am aware of the fact that investigation of the subject of mental
coercion and thought control becomes less pleasant as time goes on.
This is so because it may become more of a threat to us here and now,
and our concern for China and Korea must yield to the more immediate
needs at our own door. Can totalitarian tendencies take over here,
and what social symptoms may lead to such phenomena? Stern reality
confronts us with the universal mental battle between thought control
(and its corollaries) and our standards of decency, personal strength,
personal ideas, and a personal conscience with autonomy and dignity.
Future social scientists will be better able to describe the
causes of the advent of totalitarian thinking and acting in man. We
know that after wars and revolutions this mental deterioration more
easily finds an opportunity to develop, helped by special
psychopathic personalities who flourish on man's misery and
confusion. It is also true that the next generation spontaneously
begins to correct the misdeeds of the previous one because the
ruthless system has become too threatening to them.
My task, however, is to describe some symptoms of the totalitarian
process (which implies deterioration of thinking and acting) as I
have observed them in our own epoch, keeping in mind that the system
is one of the most violent distortions of man's consistent mental
growth. No brainwashing is possible without totalitarian thinking.
The tragic facts of political experiences in our age make it
all too clear that applied psychological technique can brainwash
entire nations and reduce their citizens to a kind of mindless robotism
which becomes for them a normal way of living. Perhaps we can
best understand how this frightening thing comes about by examining a
mythical country, which, for the sake of convenience, we shall call Totalitaria.
The Robotization of Man
First, let me utter a word of caution. We must not make the
mistake of thinking that there is any one particular nation that can
be completely identified with this hypothetical land. The
characteristics to be discussed can come into existence here. Some of
Totalitaria's characteristics were, of course, present in Nazi
Germany, and they can today be found behind the Iron Curtain, but
they exist to some extent in other parts of the world as well.
Totalitaria is any country in which political ideas degenerate into
senseless formulations made only for propaganda purposes. It is any
country in which a single group -- left or right -- acquires absolute
power and becomes omniscient and omnipotent, any country in which
disagreement and differences of opinion are crimes, in which utter
conformity is the price of life.
Totalitaria -- the Leviathan state -- is the home of the political
system we call, euphemistically, totalitarianism, of which
systematized tyranny is a part. This system does not derive from any
honest political philosophy, either socialist or capitalist.
Totalitaria's leaders may mouth ideologies, but these are in fact
mainly catch-words used to justify the regime. If necessary,
totalitarianism can change its slogans and its behavior overnight.
For totalitarianism embodies, to me, the quest for total power, the
quest of a dictator to rule the world. The words and concepts of "socialism"
and "communism" may serve, like "democracy",
as a disguise for the megalomaniac intention of the tyrant.
Since totalitarianism is essentially the social manifestation of a
psychological phenomenon belonging to every personality, it can best
be understood in terms of the human forces that create, foster, and
perpetuate it. Man has two faces; he wants to grow toward maturity
and freedom, and yet the primitive child in his unconscious yearns
for more complete protection and irresponsibility. His mature self
learns how to cope with the restrictions and frustrations of daily life,
but at the same time, the child in him longs to hit out against them, to
beat them down, to destroy them -- whether they be objects or people.
Totalitarianism appeals to this confused infant in all of us; it
seems to offer a solution to the problems man's double yearning
creates. Our mythical Totalitaria is a monolithic and absolute state
in which doubt, confusion, and conflict are not permitted to be
shown, for the dictator purports to solve all his subjects' problems
for them. In addition, Totalitaria can provide official sanction for
the expression of man's most antisocial impulses. The uncivilized
child hidden in us may welcome this liberation from ethical frustration.
On the other hand, our free, mature, social selves cannot be happy
in Totalitaria; they revolt against the restriction of individual impulses.
The psychological roots of totalitarianism are usually irrational,
destructive, and primitive, though disguised behind some ideology,
and for this reason there is something fantastic, unbelievable, even
nightmarish about the system itself. There is, of course, a
difference in the psychic experience of the elite, who can live out
their needs for power, and the masses, who have to submit; yet the
two groups influence each other.
When a dictator's deep neurotic needs for power also satisfy some
profound emotional need in the population of his country, especially
in times of misery or after a revolution, he is more easily able to
assume the power for which he longs. If a nation has suffered defeat
in war, for example, its citizens feel shame and resentment. Loss of
face is not simply a political abstraction, it is a very real and
personal thing to a conquered people. Every man, consciously or
unconsciously, identifies with his native land. If a country suffers
from prolonged famine or severe depression, its citizens become
bitter, depressed, and resentful, and will more willingly accept the
visions and promises of the aspiring dictator.
If the complexity of a country's political and economic apparatus
makes the individual citizen feel powerless, confused, and useless,
if he has no sense of participation in the forces that govern his
daily life, or if he feels these forces to be so vast and confusing
that he can no longer understand them, he will grasp at the
totalitarian opportunity for belonging, for participation, for a
simple formula that explains and rationalizes what is beyond his
comprehension. And when the dictator has taken over finally, he
transfers his own abnormal fantasies, his rage and anger, easily to
his subjects. Their resentments feed his; his pseudo-strength
encourages them. A mutual fortification of illusions takes place.
Totalitarianism as a social manifestation is a disease of
inter-human relations, and, like any other disease, man can best
resist its corroding effects if, through knowledge and training, he
is well immunized against it. If, however, he is unfortunate enough
to catch the totalitarian bug, he has to muster all the positive
forces in his mind to defeat it. The raging internal struggle between
the irresponsible child and the mature adult in him continues until
one or the other is finally destroyed completely. As long as a single
spark of either remains, the battle goes on. And for as long as man
is alive, the quest for maturity keeps on.
Cultural Predilection for Totalitarianism
In the battle against this dread disease, social factors as well
as personal ones play an important role. We can see this more clearly
if we analyze the ways in which the ideals of a culture as a whole
affect its citizens' vulnerability to totalitarianism. The ethics of
our own Western civilization are our strongest defenses against the
disease, for the ideal of these ethics is to produce a breed of men
and women who are strongly individualistic and who evaluate
situations primarily in terms of their own consciences.
We aim to develop in our citizens a sense of self-responsibility,
a willingness to confront the world as it is, and an ability to
distinguish between right and wrong through their own feelings and
thoughts. Such men and women are impelled to action by their personal
moral standards rather than by what some outside group sets up as
correct. They are unwilling to accept group evaluations immediately
unless these coincide with their own personal convictions, or unless
they have been able to discuss them in a democratic way. People like
this are responsible to their communities because they are first
responsible to themselves. If they disagree, they will form a "loyal
minority", using their rights of convincing other people at appropriate times.
There are other cultures which emphasize attitudes and values that
are different from these. The Eastern ideal of man, as we find it in
China and some of the other Oriental countries, is in the first place
that one "oneness", of being one with the family, one with
the fatherland, one with the cosmos -- nirvana. The Oriental psyche
looks for a direct esthetic contact with reality through an
indefinable empathy and intuition. Eternal truth is behind reality,
behind the veil of Maya. Man is part of the universe; his ideal is
passive servility and non-irritability. His ideal of peace lies in
rest and relaxation, in meditation, in being without manual and
mental travail. The happiness of the Oriental psyche lies in the
ecstasy of feeling united with the universal cosmos. Ascesis,
self-redemption, and poverty are better realized ideals in Oriental
culture than in our Western society.
The classic Oriental culture pattern can best be described as a
pattern of participation. In it the individual is looked upon as an
integral part of the group, the family, the caste, the nation. He is
not a separate, independent entity. In this culture, greater
conformity to and acceptance of the collective rules are the ideals.
An Oriental child may be trained from infancy into a pattern of
submission to authority and to rules of the group. Many primitive
cultures also display this pattern. To a person raised in these
cultures, the most acceptable standards, the best conceivable
thoughts and actions, are those sanctioned by the group. The
totalitarian world of mass actions and mass thoughts is far more
comprehensible to the members of a participation-patterned and less
individual-minded culture than it is to Western individualists. What
is to us unbearable regimentation and authoritarianism may be to them
comforting order and regularity.
An example of an intensified pattern of participation and thought
control and mutual spying has been given by the anthropologist E. P.
Dozier. [See the "New York Times", December 11, 1955;
and "Science News Letter", December 3, 1955.] The
Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande area believe that wrongdoing or
wrong thinking of one man in the tribe affects all members. He may
upset the cosmic balance by ill feeling toward any one of his fellow
men. The moral code of the village is group-centered. The individual
who transgresses this jeopardizes the well-being of all. Epidemics,
crop failures, droughts are interpreted as a result of "deviationism"
of one member of the group. Village members are closely watched and
spied on in order to discover the culprit or "witch".
Gossip and accusations of witchcraft are rampant, and the Pueblo Indian
is constantly searching in his own conscience for harmful thoughts and
attitudes. It is as if we watch the ritual of the purge in the totalitarian state.
Such forms of "creeping collectivism" and participation
we may see in every group formation where tolerance for nonconformism
ceases to exist. Wherever dogmatic partisanship dominates, the mind
is coerced. We may even detect such encroaching tendencies in some
scientific circles where there exists an overemphasis on group research,
teamwork, membership cards, and a disdain for individual opinion.
The culture into which a man is born and his own psychological
constitution interact to produce his personality in much the same way
as his body and mind interact to produce his behavior. Our culture of
individual freedom may offer us a partial immunity to the disease of
totalitarianism, but at the same time our personal immaturities and
repressed savageries can make us vulnerable to it. The participation
type of culture may make men more susceptible in general to
totalitarianism, although personal strivings toward maturity and
individuality can offer them, too, some measure of protection against it.
Because of the interaction between these social and personal
forces, no culture is completely safe from internal attack by
totalitarianism and from the mental destruction it may create. As I
said before, our Totalitaria is a mythical country, but the brutal
truth is that any country can be turned into Totalitaria.
The aims of the rulers of our fictitious country are simply
formulated: despotism, the total domination of man and mankind, and
the unity of the entire world under one dictatorial authority. At
first glance, this idea of unity can be most attractive -- the idea,
oversimplified, of a brotherhood unity of nations under a central
powerful agency. When the world is one, it would seem, there will be
no more war, the tensions that face us will be eliminated, earth will
become a paradise. But the simplified conception of a universal
dictatorship is false and reflects the danger inherent in the
totalitarian goal: all men are different, and it is the difference
between them that creates the greatness, the variety, and the
creative inspirations of life, as well as the tensions of social
intercourse. The totalitarian conception of equalization can be
realized only in death, when the chemical and physical laws that govern
all of us take over completely. Death is indeed the great equalizer.
In life, all of us are different. Our bodies and minds interact
with one another and with the outside world in different ways. Each
man's personality is unique. True, all of us share certain basic
human qualities with all the other members of the human race, but the
differences in personality are also so many and so varied that no two
men anywhere in the world or ever in all of human history can be said
to be exactly alike. This uniqueness is as true of the citizen of
Totalitaria as it is of anyone else. As a human being, he is not only
different from us, he is different from his compatriots. However, to
create man in the totalitarian image through leveling and
equalization means to suppress what is essentially personal and human
in him, the uniqueness and the variety, and to create a society of robots, not men.
The noted social scientist, J. S. Brunner, in his introduction to
Bauer's book on Soviet psychology has expressed this thought in a
different way: "Man's image of the nature of man is not only a
matter for objective inquiry; it is and has always been a prime
instrument of social and political control. He who molds that image
does so with enormous consequences for the society in which he lives."
Totalitaria fosters the illusion that everyone is part of the
government, a voter; no one can be a non-voter or anti-voter. His
inner pros and cons and doubts are not private problems of the
individual himself any more; his thoughts belong to the state, the
dictator, the ruling circle, the Party. His inner thoughts have to be
controlled. Only those in power know what really lies behind national
policy. The ordinary citizen becomes as dependent and obedient as a
child. In exchange for giving up his individuality, he obtains some
special gratifications: the feeling of belonging and of being
protected, the sense of relief over losing his personal boundaries
and responsibilities, the ecstasy of being taken up and absorbed in
wild, uncontrolled collective feelings, the safety of being anonymous,
of being merely a cog in the wheel of the all-powerful state.
The despotism of modern Totalitaria is very different from the
lush, exotic personal tyrannies of ancient times. It is an ascetic,
cold, mechanical force, aiming at what Hanna Ahrendt calls the
"transformation of human nature itself". In our theoretical
country, man has no individual ego any longer, no personality, no
self. A leveling system is at work, and everything above the common
level is trampled on and beaten down.
The Totalitarian Leader
The leaders of Totalitaria are the strangest men in the state.
These men are, like all other men, unique in their mental structure,
and consequently we cannot make any blanket psychiatric diagnosis of
the mental illness which motivates their behavior. But we can make
some generalizations which will help us toward some understanding of
the totalitarian leader. Obviously, for example, he suffers from an
overwhelming need to control other human beings and to exert
unlimited power, and this in itself is a psychological aberration,
often rooted in deep-seated feelings of anxiety, humiliation, and
inferiority. The ideologies such men propound are only used as
tactical and strategical devices through which they hope to reach
their final goal of complete domination over other men. This
domination may help them compensate for pathological fears and
feelings of unworthiness, as we can conclude from the psychological
study of some modern dictators.
Fortunately, we do not have to rely on a purely hypothetical
picture of the psychopathology of the totalitarian dictator. Dr. G.
M. Gilbert, who studied some of the leaders of Nazi Germany during
the Nuremberg trials, has given us a useful insight into their
twisted minds, useful especially because it reveals to us something
about the mutual interaction between the totalitarian leader and
those who want to be led by him.
Hitler's suicide made a clinical investigation of his character
structure impossible, but Dr. Gilbert heard many eyewitness reports
of Hitler's behavior from his friends and collaborators, and these
present a fantastic picture of Nazism's prime mover. Hitler was known
among his intimates as the carpet-eater, because he often threw
himself on the floor in a kicking and screaming fit like an epileptic
rage. From such reports, Dr. Gilbert was able to deduce something about the
roots of the pathological behavior displayed by this morbid "genius".
Hitler's paranoid hostility against the Jew was partly related to
his unresolved parental conflicts; the Jews probably symbolized for
him the hated drunken father who mistreated Hitler and his mother
when the future Fuhrer was still a child. Hitler's obsessive
thinking, his furious fanaticism, his insistence on maintaining the
purity of "Aryan blood", and his ultimate mania to destroy
himself and the world were obviously the results of a sick psyche.
As early as 1923, nearly ten years before he seized power, Hitler
was convinced that he would one day rule the world, and he spent time
designing monuments of victory, eternalizing his glory, to be erected
all over the European continent when the day of victory arrived. This
delusional preoccupation continued until the end of his life; in the
midst of the war he created, which led him to defeat and death,
Hitler continued revising and improving his architectural plans.
Nazi dictator Number Two, Hermann Goering, who committed suicide
to escape the hangman, had a different psychological structure. His
pathologically aggressive drivers were encouraged by the archaic
military tradition of the German Junker class, to which his family
belonged. From early childhood he had been compulsively and overtly
aggressive. He was an autocratic and a corrupt cynic, grasping the
Nazi-created opportunity to achieve purely personal gain. His
contempt for the "common people" was unbounded; this was a
man who had literally no sense of moral values.
Quite different again was Rudolf Hess, the man of passive yet
fanatical dog like devotion, living, as it were, by proxy through the
mind of his Fuhrer. His inner mental weakness made it easier for him
to live through means of a proxy than through his own personality,
and drove him to become the shadow of a seemingly strong man, from
whom he could borrow strength. The Nazi ideology have this frustrated
boy the illusion of blood identification with the glorious German
race. After his wild flight to England, Hess showed obvious psychotic
traits; his delusions of persecution, hysterical attacks, and periods
of amnesia are among the well-known clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.
Still another type was Hans Frank, the devil's advocate, the
prototype of the overambitious latent homosexual, easily seduced into
political adventure, even when this was in conflict with the remnants
of his conscience. For unlike Goering, Frank was capable of
distinguishing between right and wrong.
Dr. Gilbert also tells us something about General Wilhelm Keitel,
Hitler's Chief of Staff, who became the submissive, automatic
mouthpiece of the Fuhrer, mixing military honor and personal ambition
in the service of his own unimportance.
Of a different quality is the S.S. Colonel, Hoess, the murderer of
millions in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. A pathological
character structure is obvious in this case. All his life, Hoess had
been a lonely, withdrawn, schizoid personality, without any
conscience, wallowing in his own hostile and destructive fantasies.
Alone and bereft of human attachments, he was intuitively sought out
by Himmler for this most savage of all the Nazi jobs. He was a useful
instrument for the committing of the most bestial deeds.
Unfortunately, we have no clear psychiatric picture yet of the
Russian dictator Stalin. There have been several reports that during
the last years of his life he had a tremendous persecution phobia and
lived in constant terror that he would become the victim of his own purges.
Psychological analysis of these men shows clearly that a
pathological culture -- a mad world -- can be built by certain
impressive psychoneurotic types. The venal political figures need not
even comprehend the social and political consequences of their
behavior. They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how
much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the
distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by
their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather
by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of
their own pathological character structures.
The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical
devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense
of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad
to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of
emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy -- the
mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.
A clear example of this can be seen in the way the Nazi leaders
defended themselves through continuous self-justification and
exculpation when they were brought before the bar at the Nuremberg
trials. These murderers were aggrieved and hurt by the accusations
brought against them; they were the very picture of injured innocence.
Any form of leadership, if unchecked by controls, may gradually
turn into dictatorship. Being a leader, carrying great power and
responsibility for other people's lives, is a monumental test for the
human psyche. The weak leader is the man who cannot meet it, who
simply abdicates his responsibility. The dictator is the man who
replaces the existing standards of justice and morality by more and
more private prestige, by more and more power, and eventually
isolates himself more and more from the rest of humanity. His
suspicion grows, his isolation grows, and the vicious circle leading
to a paranoid attitude begins to develop.
The dictator is not only a sick man, he is also a cruel
opportunist. He sees no value in any other person and feels no
gratitude for any help he may have received. He is suspicious and
dishonest and believes that his personal ends justify any means he
may use to achieve them. Peculiarly enough, every tyrant still
searches for some self-justification. Without such a soothing device
for his own conscience, he cannot live.
His attitude toward other people is manipulative; to him, they are
merely tools for the advancement of his own interests. He rejects the
conception of doubt, of internal contradictions, of man's inborn
ambivalence. He denies the psychological fact that man grows to
maturity through groping, through trial and error, through the
interplay of contrasting feelings. Because he will not permit himself
to grope, to learn through trial and error, the dictator can never
become a mature person. But whether he acknowledges them or not, he
has internal conflicts, he suffers somewhere from internal confusion.
These inner "weaknesses" he tries to repress sternly; if
they were to come to the surface, they might interfere with the achievement
of his goals. Yet, in the attacks of rage his weakening strength is evident.
It is because the dictator is afraid, albeit unconsciously, of his
own internal contradictions, that he is afraid of the same internal
contradictions of his fellow men. He must purge and purge, terrorize
and terrorize in order to still his own raging inner drives. He must
kill every doubter, destroy every person who makes a mistake,
imprison everyone who cannot be proved to be utterly single-minded.
In Totalitaria, the latent aggression and savagery in man are
cultivate by the dictator to such a degree that they can explode into
mass criminal actions shown by Hitler's persecution of minorities.
Ultimately, the country shows a real pathology, an utter dominance of
destructive and self-destructive tendencies.
The Final Surrender of the Robot Man
What happens to the common man in such a culture? How can we
describe the citizen of Totalitaria? Perhaps the simplest answer to
this question lies in the statement that he is reduced to the
mechanical precision of an insect-like state. He cannot develop any
warm friendships, loyalties, or allegiances because they may be too
dangerous for him. Today's friend may be, after all, tomorrow's
enemy. Living in an atmosphere of constant suspicion -- not only of
strangers, but even of his own family -- he is afraid to express
himself lest concentration camp or prison swallow him up.
The citizens of Totalitaria do not really converse with one
another. When they speak, they whisper, first looking furtively over
their shoulders for the inevitable spy. Their inner silence is in
sharp contrast to the official verbal bombardment. The citizens of
Totalitaria may make noise, and utter polite banalities, or they may
repeat slogans to one another, but they say nothing. Existing
literature reveals that leading authors, among them H.G. Wells,
Huxley, and Orwell, grow more and more concerned about the ghastly
future of the robotized man, trained as a machine on a standard of conformity.
They translate for us the common fear of a mechanized civilization.
In Totalitaria, the citizen no longer knows the real core of his
mind. He no longer feels himself an "I", an ego, a person.
He is only the object of official barrage and mental coercion. Having
no personality of his own, he has no individual conscience, no
personal morality, no capacity to think clearly and honestly. He
learns by rote, he learns thousands of indoctrinated facts and
inhales dogma and slogans with every breath he draws. He becomes an
obedient pedant, and pedantry makes people into something resembling
pots filled with information instead of individuals with free, growing personalities.
Becoming wiser and freer implies selective forgetting and changes
of mind. This we accept, this we leave behind. Alert adjustment
requires a change of patterns, the capacity to be de-conditioned, to
undo and unlearn in order to become ripe for new patterns. The
citizen of Totalitaria has no chance for such learning through
unlearning, for growth through individual experience. Official
oversimplifications induce the captive audience into acceptance and
indoctrination. Mass ecstasy and mass fanaticism are substituted for
quiet individual thought and consideration.
Hitler taught his people to march and to do battle, and at the end
they did not know wherefore they marched and battled. People become
herds -- indoctrinated and obsessed herds -- intoxicated first with
enthusiasm and happy expectations, then with terror and panic. the
individual personality cannot grow in Totalitaria. The huge mass of
citizens is tamed into personal and political somnambulism.
It may be scientifically questionable to compare experiences
gained from individual pathological states with social phenomena and
to analyze the partial collapse of the ego under totalitarianism by
analogy with actual cases of madness. But there is in fact much that
is comparable between the strange reactions of the citizens of
Totalitaria and their culture as a whole on the one hand and the
reactions of the introverted, sick schizophrenic on the other. Even
though the problem of schizophrenic behavior in individuals and
groups is extremely complicated and cannot be fully handled within
the scope of this book, the comparison can be helpful in our search
for an understanding of the nature and effects of totalitarianism.
The Common Retreat from Reality
This excursion into the world of pathology is not a description of
a merely coincidental resemblance between a disease and a political
system. It should serve to point up the fact that totalitarian
withdrawal behind official justifications and individual fantasy is
something that can occur either in social life or inside the
individual mind. And many scholars believe in a relationship between
cultural deterioration and schizophrenic withdrawal.
Let us briefly explain the individual schizophrenic's reaction of
complete inner automatization and mental withdrawal as a personal
failure to adjust to a world experienced as insecure and dangerous.
Often rather simple emotional incidents may lead to such
schizophrenic retreat -- for instance, the intrusion of schedules and
habits forced on the mind during infancy or a sly hypersensitivity to
our over-active and over-verbose culture. Many a child is forced into
schizophrenic withdrawal by an over-compulsive parent. Sometimes lack
of external contact may drive a man into a state of utter loneliness
and isolation, sometimes his own preference for solitude. A certain
tendency to so-called schizophrenic withdrawal has been proved to be
inborn. Yet it can be provoked in everybody.
Whatever the cause, the schizophrenic patient becomes a
desocialized being, lost in loneliness. Conscious and unconscious
fantasy life begins to become dominant over alert confrontation of
reality. In the end his weird fantasies become more real for the
schizophrenic than the actual world. He hides more and more behind
his own iron curtain, in the imaginary dreamland and retreat he has
built for himself. This is his nirvana, in which all his dream wishes
are fulfilled. Inertia and fanaticism alternate. The patient
regresses to an infantile, vegetative form of behavior and rejects
everything that society has taught him. In his fantasy, he lives in a
world which always obeys his commands. He is omnipotent. The world
turns around according to his divine inclinations.
Reality, requiring as it does, continual and renewed adjustment
and verification, becomes a persecutor, attacking his illusion of
divine might. Every disturbing intrusion into his delusional world is
encountered by the schizophrenic either with tremendous aggression or
with the formation of secondary delusion to protect the first
delusion, or with a combination of both. The schizophrenic displays
tremendous hostility toward the real world and its representatives;
reality robs him both of his delusions of omnipotence and his
hallucinatory sense of being utterly protected, as he was in the womb.
Clinical experience has shown that the disease of schizophrenia
often begins with negativism -- a defense against the influence of
others, a continual fight against mental intrusion, against what is
felt as the rape of the oversensitive mind. Gradually, this defensive
attitude toward the world becomes a hostile attitude toward
everything, not only toward influences from the outside, but also
toward thoughts and feelings from the inside. Finally, the victim
becomes paralyzed by his own hostility and negativisms. He behaves
literally as though he were dead. He sits, unmoving, for hours. He
may have to be force-fed, force-dressed. The schizophrenic moves like
a puppet on a string, only when someone compels him to. Clinically,
we call this catatonia -- the death attitude.
The Retreat to Automatization
Introverted schizophrenics prefer the automatic routine life of
the asylum to life in the outside world, on the condition that they
be allowed to indulge their private fantasies. They surrender utterly
in self-defeatism. They never congregate in groups, they seldom talk
with one another; even when they do, they never have any real mutual
contact. Each one lives in his own retreat.
In the totalitarian myth -- think, for instance, of "das
Dritte Reich" -- in the psychological folklore of our mythical
state, the vague fantasy of the technically perfected womb, the ideal
nirvana, plays a tremendous role. In a world full of insecurities, a
world requiring continual alert adjustment and readjustment,
Totalitaria creates the delusion of the omnipotent, miraculous ideal
state -- a state where, in its final form, every material need will
be satisfied. Everything will be regulated, just as it was for the
fetus in the womb, the land of bliss and equanimity, just as it is
for the schizophrenic in the mental hospital.
There is no social struggle, no mental struggle; the world moves
like clockwork. There is no real interplay between people, no clash of opinions
or beliefs, there is no emotional relationship between these womb-fellows;
each exists as a separate number-bearing entity in the same filing system.
In Totalitaria, there is no faith in fellow men, no "caritas",
no love, because real relationships between men do not exist, just as
they do not exist between schizophrenics. There is only faith in
and subjection to the feeding system, and there is in every citizen a
tremendous fear of being expelled from that system, a fear of being
totally lost, comparable with the schizophrenic's feeling of
rejection and fear of reality. In the midst of spiritual loneliness
and isolation, there is the fear of still greater loneliness, of more
painful isolation. Without protective regulations from the
outside, internal hell may break lose. Strong mechanical external order
must be used to cover the internal chaos and approaching breakdown.
We have had experience in postwar years with several refugees from
the totalitarian world who broke down when they had to cope with a
world of freedom where personal initiative was required. The fear of
freedom brought them to a state of panic. They no longer had strong
enough egos to build and maintain their defenses against the
competitive demands of free democratic reality.
As in schizophrenia, a maneuverable and individual ego cannot
exist in Totalitaria. In schizophrenia the ego shrinks as a result of
withdrawal; in Totalitaria, as a result of constant merging in mass
feelings. If such a shrunken ego should grow up, with its own
critical attitude, its needs for verification of facts and for understanding,
it would then be beaten down as being treacherous and non-conforming.
Totalitaria requires of its citizens complete subjection to and
identification with the leader. It is this leader-dominance that
makes people nearly ego-less, as they are in schizophrenia. This
again may result in loss of control of hostile and destructive
drives. Psychologists have seen this time and time again in what we
call the concentration-camp psyche. When the victims first came to
the camp -- dedicated to their gradual extermination -- most of them
displayed a complete loss of self, an utter depersonalization,
combined with apathy and loss of awareness. The same observations
have been made among our POWs in Korea. Some concentration-camp
victims got better immediately after their return to a normal
society; in others, this schizophrenic reaction of lost ego remained
and, as we mentioned above, sometimes developed into a real psychosis.
The Womb State
Totalitarianism is man's escape from the fearful realities of life
into the virtual womb of the leader. The individual's actions are
directed from this womb -- from the inner sanctum. The mystic center
is in control of everything; man need no longer assume responsibility
for his own life. The order and logic of the prenatal world reign.
There is peace and silence, the peace of utter submission. The
members of the womb state do not really communicate; between them
there is silence, the silence of possible betrayal, not the mature
silence of reticence and reservedness.
Totalitaria increases the gap between the things one shows and
communicates and the things one secretly dreams and thinks deep
within oneself. It develops the artificial split-mindedness of
political silence. Whatever little remains of individual feeling and
opinion is kept carefully enclosed. In the schizophrenic world of
Totalitaria, there is no free mutual exchange, no conversation, no
exclamation, no release from emotional tension. It is a world of
silent conspirators. Indeed, the atmosphere of suspicion is the big
attacker of mental freedom because it makes people cling together, conspiring
against mysterious enemies -- first from outside, then among themselves.
In Totalitaria, each citizen is continually watched. The mythical
state molds the individual's conscience. He has hardly any of his
own. His neighbors watch him, his postman, his children, and they all
represent the punishing state, just as he himself must represent the
state and watch others. Not betraying them is a crime.
The need to find conspiracies, to discover persecutors and
criminals is another schizophrenic manifestation. It is
psychologically related to an infantile need for a feeling of
omnipotence. Megalomaniac feelings grow better in an atmosphere of
mysterious secrecy. Secrecy and conspiracy increase the delusion of
power. That is why so many people like to pry into other people's
lives and to play the spy.
This feeling of conspiracy also lies behind the pathological
struggle with imaginary persecutors, a struggle we find both in
mentally ill individuals and in our mythical Totalitaria. "It is
there!" "It is chasing us!" All the inner fears of
losing the nirvanic womb-illusion become rampant. Mysterious ghosts
and vultures chase people out of nirvana and paradise.
In these fantasies, the patriarch, the dictator, the idol, becomes
both the universal danger and the omnipotent savior at the same time.
Not even the citizens of Totalitaria really love this cruel giant.
Suspicion against the breast that feeds and the hand that guides and
forbids is often found in the fantasy of schizophrenic children, who
experience the nourisher as the enemy, the dominating ogre, bribing
the growing mind into submission.
The deep hate the sick individual feels toward the parental figure
cannot be expressed directly, and so it is displaced onto the self or
onto scapegoats. Scapegoatism is also part of the totalitarian
strategy. As we pointed out before, the scapegoat temporarily absorbs
all the individual's inner fury and rage. Kulaks, Negroes, Jews,
Communists, capitalists, profiteers, and warmongers -- any or all of
them can play that role. Perhaps the greatest dangers, to the
totalitarian mind, is the use of intellect and awareness and the
"egg-head's" demand for free, verifying thinking. Aberration
and perversion are chosen by the citizens of Totalitaria, as they are by
the inhabitants of madhouses, over the tiring, intellectual control.
In the center of the totalitarian fears and fantasies stands the
man-eating god and idol. He is unconquerable. He uses man's great
gift of adjustment to bring him to slavery. Every man's inner core of
feelings and thoughts has to belong to the leader.
Is the citizen of Totalitaria consciously aware of this? Probably
not. Modern psychology has taught us how strongly the mental
mechanism of denial of reality works. The eye bypasses external
occurrences when the mind does not want them to happen. Secondary
justifications and fantasies are formed to support and explain these
denials. In Totalitaria we find the same despising of reality facts
as we do in schizophrenia. How else are we to explain the fact that
Hitler was still moving his armies on paper after they were already defeated?
Totalitarian strategy covers inner chaos and conflict by the
strict order of the police state. So does the compulsive
schizophrenic patient, by his inner routine and schedules. These
routines and schedules are a defense against painful occurrences in
external reality. This internal robotization may lead to denial of
internal realities and internal needs as well. The citizen of
Totalitaria, repressing and rejecting his inner need for freedom, may
even experience slavery as liberation. He may go even one step
further -- yearn for an escape from life itself, a delusion that he
could become omnipotent through utter destruction.
The SS soldiers called this the magic action of the "Blutkitt",
the tie of bloody crime binding them together and preparing them for
Valhalla. With this magic unification, they could die with courage
and equanimity. Anarchic despair and need for greatness alternated in
them as they do in the psychotic patient. In the same way, the
citizens of Totalitaria search for a "heroic" place in
history even though the price be doom an annihilation.
Many soldiers -- tired by the rigidities of normal life -- look
back at violent moments of their war experiences, despite the hunger
and terror, as the monumental culminating experiences of their lives.
There, in the "Bruderbund" of fighters, they felt happy for
the first and only times in their lives.
This all sounds like a bitter comedy, but the fantasy of
schizophrenics has taught us how the mind can retreat into delusion
when there is a fear of daily existence. Under these circumstances,
fantasy begins to prevail over reality, and soon assumes a validity
which reality never had. The totalitarian mind is like the
schizophrenic mind; it has a contempt for reality. Think for a moment
of Lysenko's theory and its denial of the influence of heredity. The
totalitarian mind does not observe and verify its impressions of
reality; it dictates to reality how it shall behave, it compels
reality to conform to its fantasies.
The comparison between totalitarianism and psychosis is not
incidental. Delusional thinking inevitably creeps into every form of
tyranny and despotism. Unconscious backward forces come into action.
Evil powers from the archaic past return. An automatic compulsion to
go on to self-destruction develops, to justify one mistake with a new
one; to enlarge and expand the vicious pathological circle becomes
the dominating end of life. The frightened man, burdened by a culture
he does not understand, retreats into the brute's fantasy of
limitless power in order to cover up the vacuum inside himself. This
fantasy starts with the leaders and is later taken over by the masses they oppress.
What else can man do when he is caught in that tremendous machine
called Totalitaria? Thinking -- and the brain itself -- has become
superfluous, that is, only reserved for the elite. Man has to
renounce his uniqueness, his individual personality, and must
surrender to the equalizing and homogenizing patterns of so-called
integration and standardization. This arouses in him that great inner
emptiness of the savage child, the emptiness of the robot that
unwittingly years for the great destruction.
In order to investigate the social forces at work undermining the
free individual development of man's mind, we have to look at
manifold aspects of political life. As a clinician and
poly-pragmatist, I don't want to bind myself to one political state
or current, but want to describe what can be experienced in social
life everywhere. Where human thinking and human habits are in the
process of being remolded, they are under the influence of tremendous
political upheaval. In one country this may happen overnight, in
others more slowly. The psychologists' task is to observe and
describe the impact of these processes on the human mind.
When once a nation is under the yoke of totalitarianism, when once
its people have succumbed to the oversimplifications and
blandishments of the would-be dictator, how does the leader maintain
his power? What techniques does he use to make his countrymen docile
followers of his bloody regime?
Because man's mature self resists totalitarianism, the dictator
must work and scheme constantly to keep his subjects in line and to
immobilize their need for individual development, rebellion, and
healthy growth. As we examine his techniques, we will come to a
better understanding of totalitarianism and of the interaction
between the dictator's methods and the personalities of his subjects.
We need this understanding desperately, for we have to recognize that
the forces in Totalitaria that make humorless robots out of living
men can also develop, albeit unwittingly, in the so-called free, democratic societies.
The Strategy of Terror
The weapon of terror has been used by tyrants from time immemorial
to make a meek instrument of man. In Totalitaria, the use of this
weapon is refined to a science which can wipe out all opposition and
dissent. The leaders of Totalitaria rule by intimidation; they
prefer loyalty through fear to loyalty through faith. Fear and
terror freeze the mind and will; they may create a general psychic
paralysis. In the panic caused by totalitarian terror, men feel
separated from one another, as by an impassable vacuum, and each man
becomes a lonely, frightened soul. Even panicky hovering together
could be suspected of being conspiracy against the state. Separated
from any real emotional contact with his fellow men by his own inner
isolation, the citizen of Totalitaria becomes increasingly unable to
fight against its dehumanizing influences.
Totalitaria is constantly on the alert for social sinners, the
critics of the system, and accusation of dissent is equivalent to
conviction in the public eye. Insinuation, calumny, and denunciation
are staples of the totalitarian strategy. The entire nation is
dedicated to the proposition that every man is a potential enemy of
the regime. No one is excluded from the terror. Any man may be
subjected to it no matter how high his rank.
The secret police create awe and panic inside the country, while
the army serves to create awe and panic outside. Just the thought of
an outbreak of terror -- of even a possible future terror -- makes
men unwilling to express their opinions and expose themselves. Both
the citizens of Totalitaria and those of her neighbors are affected
by this general fear. A clear example of how this fear paralysis
operates in reality may be seen in the fact that as far back as 1948
western Europeans, who felt the shadow of anticipated totalitarian
occupation, thought it safer to criticize and attack their American
friends than to find fault with a totalitarian enemy who might sweep
in suddenly and without warning.
In Totalitaria, jails and concentration camps by the score are
built in order to provoke fear and awe among the population. They may
be called "punishment" or "correction" camps, but
this is only a cheap justification for the truth. In these centers of fear,
nobody is really corrected; he is, as it were, expelled from humanity,
wasted, killed -- but not too quickly, lest the terrorizing influence be diminished.
The truth of the matter is that these jails are built not for real
criminals, but rather for their terrorizing effect on the bystanders,
the citizens of Totalitaria. Jails represent a permanent menace, a
continual threat. They may put an almost insupportable strain on the
empathy and imagination of those citizens who are, temporarily at
least, on the outside of the barbed wire. In addition to the fear of
undergoing the same cruel treatment, the fear of abasement,
humiliation, and death, the very concept of the concentration camp
rouses every man's deep-seated fear of being himself expelled from the
community, of being alone, a wanderer in the desert, unloved and unwanted.
There exist several milder forms of mass terror, for instance, THE
STRATEGY OF NO POLITICAL REST. In Totalitaria man is always caught by
some form of official planning. He is always conscious of control and
surveillance, of spying, leering powers lying in wait to chase him
and to punish him. Even leisure time and holidays are occupied by
some official program, some facts to be learned, some political
meeting, some parade. Quiet and solitude no longer exist. There is no
time for meditation, for pondering, for reminiscing. The mind is
caught in a web of official thinking and planning. Even the delights
of self-chosen silence are forbidden. Every citizen of Totalitaria
must join in the singing and the slogan shouting. And he becomes so
caught in the constant activity that he loses the capacity to realize
what is happening to him.
The emphasis on more production by individuals, factories, and
agricultural enterprises also can become a weapon of increased
control and terror. The Stakhanovite movement in Russia, urging a
constant increase in production norms, became a threat for many. The
workers had to increase the pace of their labor and production, or
they would be severely punished. The emphasis on pace and speed makes
man more and more a soulless cog in the totalitarian wheel.
Terror can almost never stop itself; it thrives on compliance and
grows in a vacuum. Terror as a tool means a gradual transfer into
terror as a goal -- but terror is actually a self-defeating strategy.
Man will ultimately revolt even under an absolute dictatorship. When
men have been reduced to puppet-hood by Totalitaria, they will
finally have become immune to all threats. The magic spell of terror
will finally lose its force. First the citizens of Totalitaria will
become dulled to the terror and will no longer consider even death a
danger. Then a few will initiate a final revolt, for Totalitaria's
government by fear and terror fosters internal rebellion, in the few
who cannot be broken down. Even in "gleichgeschaltet" Nazi
Germany a resistance movement was active.
The Purging Rituals
Cleaning out the higher echelons of government is an old historic
habit. The struggle between fathers and sons, between the older and
the younger generation, became ritualized far back in prehistoric
times. Frazer's classic, "The Golden Bough", has told us a
great deal about this. The ancient priest of the heathens acquired
his high post by killing his predecessor. Later in history, the newly
proclaimed king offered criminals instead as sacrifices to the gods
on the day of his anointment.
In Totalitaria, the killing and purging ritual is part of the
mechanism of government, and it serves not only a symbolic but also a
very real function for the dictator. He must eliminate all those he
has bypassed and double-crossed in his ruthless climb to power, lest
their resentments and frustrated rage break out, endangering his
position or even his life.
The purge reflects another characteristic of life in Totalitaria.
It dramatizes the fiction that the party is always on the alert to
keep itself pure and clean. Psychiatry has demonstrated that the
cleanliness compulsion in neurotic individuals is actually a
displaced defense against their own inner rage and hostility. It
plays the same sort of role in communities, and when it is elevated
to the level of an officially sanctioned ritual, it reduces the
citizenry to infancy. It makes the inhabitants of Totalitaria feel
like babies -- still struggling to learn their first cleanliness
habits, still listening to their parent's reiterated commands to be
clean, be clean, be clean, be good, be good, be good, be loyal, be
loyal, be loyal. The constant repetition of these commands reinforces
each citizen's sense of guilt, of childishness, and of shame.
The totalitarian purge is always accompanied by an elaborate
confession ceremonial, in which the accused publicly repents his
sins, much as did the witches of the Middle Ages. This is the general
formula: "I confess my doubts. Thanks to the criticism of the
comrades, I have been able to purify my thinking. I bow in humility
to the opinion of my comrades and the Party and am thankful for the
opportunity to correct my errors. You enabled me to repudiate my
deviational questions. I acknowledge my debt to the selfless leader
and the government of the people."
The strategy of public expression of shame has two effects: it
serves, like the purging rituals themselves, to provoke feelings of
childish submissiveness among the people, and, at the same time, it
offers each citizen a defense against his own deep-seated
psychological problems and feelings of guilt and unworthiness.
Somewhere deep inside him, the citizen of Totalitaria knows that he
has abdicated his maturity and his responsibility; public purgings
relieve his sense of shame. "It is the others who are guilty and
dirty, not I", he thinks. "It is they who are constantly
plotting and conniving." But the very things of which he
suspects others are also true of himself. He is afraid others will
betray him because he cannot be sure in his own mind that he will not
betray them. Thus his inner tensions increase, and the purge provides
a periodic blood offering to his own fear and to the god of threat.
The very fact that this ritual of coercive confession and purge
must be repeated again and again indicates that man develops an inner
mental defense against it and that the more it is used, the less
effective it becomes as a means of arousing guilt and terror. Just as
the citizen of Totalitaria becomes hardened or dulled to the terror
of constant official intrusion into his private life, so he becomes
almost immune to the cries of treason and sabotage.
In the same way, as the purge becomes less effective as a taming
tool, the tyrant uses it more frequently to soothe his own fears.
History provides us with many examples of revolutions which
eventually drowned in a bloody reign of terror and purge. Some of the
most devoted heroes and leaders of the French Revolution met their
death on the guillotine of the republic they helped to create.
Wild Accusation and Black Magic
Wild accusation and black magic, like all the other taming tools
of Totalitaria, are nothing new, but in primitive civilizations and
in prehistoric times the craft of black magic was rather simple. The
shaman had merely to destroy or mutilate a small statuette of the
accused criminal, to point or thrust a special stick at the man
himself, or to curse and berate him with furious words and gestures
in order to bring his victim to collapse and death. In his blind
acceptance of the magic ritual, the victim was possessed by fear, and
often he gave himself up to the spell and just died (Malinowski).
This magic slaying of the foe has plural psychological
implications. The victim of the magic spell was often looked upon as
the representative of the tribal god, the internalized authority and
father. He must be killed because his very existence aroused guilt
and remorse among his people. His death may silence the inner voices
in every man which warn against impending downfall. Sometimes the
victim comes from a different tribe than that of his accusers. In
this situation, the stranger is an easier scapegoat, and punishing
him serves to still the clash of ambivalent feelings in the members
of the killing tribe. Hate for an outsider checks and deflects the
hate and aggression each man feels toward his own group and toward
himself. The more fear there is in a society, the more guilt each
individual member of the society feels, the more need there is for
internal scapegoats and external enemies. INTERNAL CONFUSION LOOKS
FOR DISCHARGE IN OUTSIDE WARS.
In Totalitaria, the air is full of gossip, calumny, and rumor. Any
accusation, even if it is false, has a greater influence on the
citizenry than subsequent vindication. Bills of particulars, made out
of whole cloth are manufactured against innocents, especially against
former leaders, who have been able to develop some personal esteem
and loyalty among their friends and followers. Trumped-up charges made
against us always revive unconscious feelings of guilt and induce us to tremble.
In our analysis of the psychological forces that lead prisoners of
war and other political victims to confession and betrayal, we saw
how strongly the sense of hidden guilt and doubt in each man impels
him under strain to surrender to the demands and ideologies of the
enemy. This same mechanism is at work constantly among the citizens
of Totalitaria. Accusations against others remind him of his own
inner rebellions and hostilities, which he does not dare to bring out
into the open, and so the accused, even when he is innocent, becomes
the scapegoat for his private sense of guilt. Cowardice makes the
other citizens of our mythical country turn away from the victim lest
they be accused themselves.
The very fact that character assassination is possible reveals the
frailty and sensitivity of human sympathy and empathy. Even in free,
democratic societies, political campaigns are often conducted in an
atmosphere of extravagant accusation and even wilder counter
accusation. The moment the strategy of wild accusation, with all its
disagreeable noises of vituperation and calumny, begins, we forget
the strategic intention behind the words and find ourselves
influenced by the shouting and name calling. "Maybe", we
say to ourselves, "there is something in this story". This,
of course, is just what the slanderer wants. In the minds of the
politicians the illusion still persists that the end justifies the
means. But campaigns of slander produce paradoxical results because
the very fact that an unfounded accusation has been made weakens the
moral sense of both listener and accuser.
Spy Mania
In Totalitaria this vicious circle of vituperation reaches its
fullest flowering. Drowned in a reign of suspicion, the citizen of
Totalitaria suffers from a terrible delusion of persecution --
"spyonoia", the spy mania. He is continually on the alert,
watching his fellow men. His good neighbor may at any moment become a
saboteur or a traitor. The citizen of Totalitaria hardly ever looks
for confusion or flaws in his own soul, but projects them onto
scapegoats -- until he himself finally becomes the victim of someone
else's spyonoia. Every citizen is constantly trying to search out
everyone else's innermost thoughts. Because one's own hidden thoughts
are projected on one's neighbors, thinking in itself becomes the
enemy. This great fear of the inner thoughts of our fellow men is
related to a general process of paranoiac re-evaluation of the world
as a result of fear and totalitarian thinking. In the denial of human
loyalty and in the constant delusion of treason and sabotage are
expressed the whole infantile mythology of Totalitaria and its
repudiation of mature human relationships.
Through interrogation, character assassination, humiliation,
mental terror, and demoralization -- such as happens in individual
and collective brainwashing -- man can be so utterly demoralized that
he accepts any political system. He is nothing any more; why should
he oppose matters? In Totalitaria there is no open policy, no free
discussion, no honest difference of opinion; there is only intrigue
and denunciation, with their frightening action on the masses.
The strategy of wild accusation is used not only against
Totalitaria's citizenry, but also against the rest of the world.
Totalitaria needs the images of outside enemies -- imaginary cruel
monsters who spread plague and disease -- to justify its own internal
troubles. The remnants of the individual citizen's conscience are
calmed and held in check by a paranoiac attack on the rest of the
world. "The enemy is poisoning our food, throwing beetles and
bacteria into our crops." This myth of an imaginary world
conspiracy aims at bringing the fearful citizens of Totalitaria into
a concerted defense against nonexistent dangers. It conceals, at the
same time, internal failures leading to diminishing crops and lack of food.
Projecting blame onto others reinforces each citizen's sense of
participation in the totalitarian community and stills the nagging
internal voice demanding that he act as a self-responsible
individual. The myth of external plotting also increases the
individual citizen's feeling of dependence and immaturity. Now only
his dictatorial leader can protect him from the evil world outside --
a world which is described to him as a vast zoo, inhabited by atomic
dragons and hydrogen monsters.
The Strategy of Criminalization
As we said before, the citizen of Totalitaria may be able to
fulfill some of his irrational, instinctual needs in return for his
submission to totalitarian slavery. Hitler Germany taught us the
accepted pattern. The citizen (and party member) is encouraged to
betray his friends and parents, something the angry, frustrated baby
in him has often wanted to do. He may live out in action his deeply
repressed aggressions and desires for revenge. He no longer has to
suppress or reject some of his own primitive impulses. The system
assumes the full burden of his guilt and hands him a ready-made list
of thousands of justifications and exculpations for the release of
his sadistic impulses. Flowery catchwords, such as "historical
necessity", help the individual to rationalize immorality and
evil into morality and good. We see here the great corruption of civilized standards.
In his strategy of criminalization, the totalitarian dictator
destroys the conscience of his followers, just as he has destroyed
his own. Think of the highly learned and polished Nazi doctors who
started their professional life with the Hippocratic oath, promising
to be the helping healer of man, but who later in cold blood
inflicted the most horrible tortures on their concentration-camp
victims (Mitscherlich). They slaughtered innocents by the thousands
in order to discover the statistical limits of human endurance. They
infected other thousands as guinea pigs because the Fuhrer wanted it
so. They had lost their personal standards and ethics completely and
justified all their crimes through the Fuhrer's will. Political
catchwords encouraged them to yield their consciences completely to
the dictator. The process of systematic criminalization requires a
"deculturation" of the people. As one of Hitler's
gangmen said, "When I hear the word 'civilization,' I prepare my
gun." This is done to consistently arouse the instinct of
cruelty. People are told not to believe in intellect and objective
truth, but to listen only to the subjective dictates of the Moloch
State, to Hitler, to Mussolini, to Stalin.
Criminalization is conditioning people to rebellion against
civilized frustrations. Show them blood and bloody scapegoats, and a
thousand years of acculturation fall away from them. This implies
imbuing the people with hysteria, arousing the masses, homogenizing
the emotions. All this tends to awaken the brute Neanderthal psyche
in man. Justify crime with the glamorous doctrine of race
superiority, and then you make sure the people will follow you.
Hitler knew very well what he was doing when he turned the German
concentration camps over to the unleashed lusts of his storm
troopers. "Let them kill and murder", was the device.
"Once they have gone so far with me, they must go on to the
end." The strategy of criminalization is not only directed
toward crushing the victims of the totalitarian regime, but also
toward giving the elite hangmen -- the governing gang -- that
poisonous feeling of power that drags them farther and farther away
from every human feeling; their victims become people without human
identity, merely speaking masks and ego-less robots. The strategy of
criminalization is the systematic organization of the lower passions
in man, in particular in those the dictator must trust as his direct helpers.
Under the pressure of totalitarian thinking, nearly every citizen
identifies with the ruling gang, and many must prove their loyalty by
murder and killing, or at least expressing their approval of murder
and killing. The boredom of Totalitaria's automatic patterns of
living leads the deluded citizens to welcome the adventure of war and
crime and self-destruction. Each new act of torture and crime makes
new bonds of fidelity and unscrupulous obedience, especially within
the leading gang. In the end, driven by crime and guilt, the ruling
members have to stick it out together because the downfall of the
system would bring about the downfall of the entire gang, both
leaders and followers. The same thing holds true in the criminal
world. Once a man has taken the first step and rejected the laws of
society and joined the criminal gang, he is at war with the outside
world and its moral evaluations. From that point on, the gang can
blackmail him and subdue him.
In Totalitaria, the vicious circle of criminalization of the
citizenry, in which the means become ends in themselves, grows into a
cynical conspiracy covered with the cynical flag of decent idealism.
The country's leaders use such simple words as "the universal
campaign of peace", and the citizens rejoice and take pride in
these words. Only a few among them know what deceptive deeds lie
behind the flowery phrases.
These perversions are also incorporated into a great nationalistic
myth -- the Third Reich, the New Empire, the People's Republic -- and
the citizen's desire to do something heroic becomes identified with
doing something violent and criminal. Blood becomes a magic fluid,
and shedding someone else's blood becomes a virtuous and life-giving deed.
Unlimited killing, as it is practiced in totalitarian systems, is
related to deep, unconscious fears. The weak and emotionally sick in
any society kill out of fear, in order to borrow, in a magic way,
their dead victims' strength and happiness -- as well as, of course,
their material possessions. The killing of millions in the Nazi gas
ovens was part of this ancient mythology of murder. Perhaps the
members of the master race thought that slaughtering the Jews would
ensure that the Germans would endure pain for as many centuries as
had their victims! It is part of an old primitive myth that through
killing one fortifies and prolongs one's own life. Let us not forget
that forces of reason and understanding in man are rather weak. It is
difficult to control the fire of explosive drives, once they are lighted.
Totalitarianism must kill, slaughter, make war. Totalitaria
preaches hatred, and the totalitarian mouthpiece is a lonely,
deluded, tough "superman", calling for hatred and injustice
and arousing intensified fanaticism unhampered by any moral feeling
or remorse. His battle cry reinforces the dictator's hold on his
subjects, because each citizen, in and through his guilty deeds,
learns to hate his victim, whose very suffering arouses even more the
criminal's deeply buried sense of guilt.
Verbocracy and Semantic Fog -- Talking the People into Submission
After the First World War, we became more conscious of our
attitude toward words. This attitude was gradually changing. Our
trust in official catchwords and clichés and in idealistic
labels had diminished. We became more and more aware of the fact that
the important questions were what groups and powers stood behind the
words, and what their secret intentions were. But in our easygoing
way we often forget to ask this question, and we are all more or less
susceptible to noisy, oft-repeated words.
The formulation of big propagandistic lies and fraudulent
catchwords has a very well-defined purpose in Totalitaria, and words
themselves have acquired a special function in the service of power,
which we may call verbocracy. The Big Lie and the phony slogan at
first confuse and then dull the hearers, making them willing to
accept every suggested myth of happiness. The task of the
totalitarian propagandist is to build special pictures in the minds
of the citizenry so that finally they will no longer see and hear
with their own eyes and ears but will look at the world through the
fog of official catchwords and will develop the automatic responses
appropriate to totalitarian mythology.
The multiform use of words in DOUBLE TALK serves as an attack on
our logic, that is, an attack on our understanding of what monolithic
dictatorship really is. Hear, hear the nonsense: "Peace is war
and war is peace! Democracy is tyranny and freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength! Virtue is vice and truth is a lie." So
says the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's grim novel, "1984".
And we saw this nightmare fantasy come true when our soldiers who had
spent long years in North Korean prison camps returned home talking
of totalitarian China with the deceiving cliché of "the people's
democracy". Pavlovian conditioning to special words forces people
into an AUTOMATIC THINKING that is tied to those words. The words we use
influence our behavior in daily life; they determine the thoughts we have.
In Totalitaria, facts are replaced by fantasy and distortion.
People are taught systematically and intentionally to lie (Winokur).
History is reconstructed, new myths are built up whose purpose is
twofold: to strengthen and flatter the totalitarian leader, and to
confuse the luckless citizens of the country. The whole vocabulary is
a dictated set of slowly hypnotizing slogans. In the semantic fog
that permeates the atmosphere, words lose their direct communicative
function. They become merrily commanding signs, triggering off
reactions of fear and terror. They are battles cries and Pavlovian
signals, and no longer represent free thinking. THE WORD, ONCE
CONSIDERED A FIRST TOKEN OF FREE HUMAN CREATION, IS TRANSFORMED INTO
A MECHANICAL TOOL. In Totalitaria, words may have a seductive action,
soothing or charming their hearers, but they are not allowed to have
intrinsic meaning. They are conditioners, emotional triggers, serving
to imprint the desired reaction patterns on their hearers.
Man's mental laziness, his resistance to the hard labor of
thinking, makes it relatively easy for Totalitaria's dictator to
bring his subjects into acceptance of the Big Lie. At first the
citizen may say to himself, "All this is just nonsense -- pure
double talk", but in the very act of trying to shrug it off, he
has become subject to the power of the inherent suggestion. That is
the trick of double talk; once a man neglects to analyze and verify
it, he becomes lost in it and can no longer see the difference
between rationale and rationalization. In the end, he can no longer
believe anything, and he retreats into sullen dullness. Once the
citizen of Totalitaria has accepted the "logic" of his
leaders, he is no longer open to discussion or argument. Alas, in our
Western world, we often meet this evasion of semantic clarity. Let us not
forget that the battle for words is part of the ideological cold war in our world.
Something has crept into our mechanized system of communication
that has made our modes of thinking deteriorate. People too casually
acquire ideas and concepts. They no longer struggle for a clear
understanding. The popularized picture replaces the battle of the
pros and cons of concepts. Instead of aiming at true understanding,
people listen to thoughtless repetition, which gives them THE
DELUSION OF UNDERSTANDING.
Communication has an even more infantile, magic character for the
citizen of Totalitaria. Words no longer represent intelligible meanings
or ideas. They bind the citizen of Totalitaria to utter dependence on his
commander, much as the infant is bound to the word pictures of his parents.
Logocide
Byfield points out in his pamphlet on logocide that words are
commonly used as instruments of social revolution. Politicians
seeking power must coin new labels and new words with emotional
appeal, "while allowing the same old practices and institutions
to continue as before ... The trick is to replace a disagreeable
image though the substance remains the same. The totalitarians
consequently have to fabric a hate language in order to stir up the
mass emotions. We have all experience how the word 'peace' doesn't
mean peace any more, it has become a propagandistic device to APPEASE
the masses and to disguise aggression."
The VERBOCRACY in totalitarian thinking and the official verbosity
of demagogues serve to disturb and suffocate the free minds of
citizens. We can say that verbocracy turns them into what psychology
calls symbol agnostics, people capable only of imitation, incapable
of inquisitive sense of objectivity and perspective that leads to
questioning and understanding and to the formation of individual
ideas and ideals. In other words, the individual citizen becomes a
parrot, repeating ready-made slogans and propaganda catchwords
without understanding what they really mean, or what forces stand behind them.
This parrotism may give the citizen of Totalitaria a certain
infantile emotional pleasure, however. "Heil, heil! -- Duce,
Duce!" -- these rhythmic chants afford him the same kind of
sound-enjoyment children achieve through babbling, shrieking, and yelling.
The abuse of the word and the enshrinement of propaganda are more
obvious in Totalitaria than in any other part of the world. But this
evil exists all over. We can find all too many examples of it in
actual conversation. Many speakers use verbal showing off to cover an
emptiness of thought, to stir up emotions and to create admiration
and adoration of what is essentially empty and valueless.
Loud-mouthed phoniness threatens to become the ideal of our time.
The semantic fog in Totalitaria is thickened by the regimentation
of information. The citizens of our mythical country have no access
to sources of facts and opinions. They are not free to verify what
they hear or read. They are the victims of their leader's
"labelomania" -- their judgments are determined by the
official labels everything and everybody bears.
Labelomania
The urge to attach too much meaning to the label of an object or
institution and to look only casually at its intrinsic value is
characteristic of our times and seems to be growing. I call this
condition labelomania; it is the exaggerated respect for the
scientific-sounding name -- the label, the school, the degree, the
diploma -- with a surprising disregard for underlying value. All
about us we see people chasing after fixed formulas, credits, marks,
ranks, and labels because they believe that if one is to have
prestige or recognition these distinguishing marks are necessary. In
order to obtain acceptance, people are prepared to undergo most
impractical and stylized training and conditioning -- not to mention
expense -- in special schools and institutions which promote certain
labels, diplomas, and sophisticated facades.
Not long ago a psychiatric colleague worked in a clinic where a
different terminology was used, and the ideas of his former teachers,
because they were expressed in terms other than those of the clinic,
were criticized and even vilified. My colleague was a good practical
therapist; yet he came to need psychotherapy himself, to counteract
the utter confusion resulting from daily contacts with aggressive
adepts of a different terminology, just as much as some of our
soldiers released from the Korean prison camps.
There is something essentially unpleasant in the need to express
and judge all opinions and evaluations in accepted clichés and
labels. It implies a devaluation of the work or of the idea involved,
and it denies the subtle human differences between people and the
phenomena their words describe. In Totalitaria, man is so
anxiety-ridden, so fearful of any deviation from the prescribed
opinions and ways of thinking that he only allows himself to express
himself in the terms his dictators provide. To the citizen of
Totalitaria, the acknowledged label becomes more important than the
eternal variation that is life.
As words lose their communicative function, they acquire more and
more of a frightening, regulatory, and conditioning function.
Official words must be believed and must be obeyed. Dissension and
disagreement become both a physical and an emotional luxury.
Vituperation, and the power that lies behind it, is the only
sanctioned logic. Facts contrary to the official line are distorted
and suppressed; any form of mental compromise is treason. In
Totalitaria, there is no search for truth, only the enforced
acceptance of the totalitarian dogmas and clichés. The most
frightening thing of all is that parallel to the increase in our
means of communication, our mutual understanding has decreased. A
Babel-like confusion has taken hold of political and nonpolitical
minds as a result of semantic disorder and too much verbal noise.
The Apostatic Crime in Totalitaria
Totalitaria makes the thinking man a criminal, for in our
mythical country the citizen can be punished as much for wrong
thinking as for wrongdoing. Because the watchful eyes of the
secret police are everywhere, the critic of the regime is driven to
conspiratorial methods if he wants to have even a safe conversation
with those he wants to trust. What we used to call the "Nazi
gesture" was a careful looking around before starting to talk to a friend.
The criminal in Totalitaria can be an accidental scapegoat used
for release of official hostility, and there is often need for a
scapegoat. From one day to the next, a citizen can become a hero or a
villain, depending on strategic party needs.
Nearly all of the mature ideals of mankind are crimes in
Totalitaria. Freedom and independence, compromise and objectivity --
all of these are treasonable. In Totalitaria there is a new crime,
the apostatic crime, which may be described as the obstinate refusal
to admit imputed guilt. On the other hand, the hero in Totalitaria is
the converted sinner, the breast-beating, recanting traitor, the
self-denouncing criminal, the informer, and the stool pigeon.
The ordinary, law-abiding citizen of Totalitaria, far from being a
hero, is potentially guilty of hundreds of crimes. He is a criminal
if he is stubborn in defense of his own point of view. He is a
criminal if he refuses to become confused. He is a criminal if he
does not loudly and vigorously participate in all official acts;
reserve, silence, and ideological withdrawal are treasonable. He is a
criminal if he doesn't LOOK happy, for then he is guilty of what the
Nazis called physiognomic insubordination. He can be a criminal by
association or disassociation, by scapegoatism, or by projection, by
intention or by anticipation. He is a criminal if he refuses to
become an informer. He can be tried and found guilty by every
conceivable "ism" -- cosmopolitanism, provincialism;
deviationalism, mechanism; imperialism, nationalism; pacifism,
militarism; objectivism, subjectivism; chauvinism, equalitarianism;
practicalism, idealism. He is guilty every time he IS something.
The only safe conduct pass for the citizen of Totalitaria lies in
the complete abdication of his mental integrity.
For the Special Marine Corps Court of Inquiry in Washington that
had to judge one of the cases of brainwashing, I was asked, as an
expert witness, if I could explain why some of the American officers
yielded rather easily to mental pressure exerted by the enemy.
It was in the days when Congressional investigations in our
country were in full swing. In all honesty I had to answer that
sometimes coercive suggestions underlying such investigations could
exert conforming pressure on susceptible minds. People are conditioned
by numerous psychological processes in our daily political atmosphere.
Though we have been forewarned of what totalitarian techniques may
do to the mind, there is reason to be alarmed by the possible
disruption of values brought about by some of our own troubles.
The totalitarian dictator succeeded in transforming his apparatus
of "justice" into an instrument of threat and domination.
Where once a balanced feeling of justice had been recognized as the
noblest ideal of civilized man, this ideal was now scoffed at by
cynics -- like Hitler and Goebbels -- and called a synthetic emotion
useful only to impress or appease people. Thus, in the hands of
totalitarian inquisitors and judges justice has become a farce, a
piece of propaganda to soothe the people's conscience. Investigative
power is misused -- to arouse prejudices and animosities in those bystanders
who have become too confused to distinguish between right and wrong.
The totalitarian has taught us that the courts and the judiciary
can be used as tools of thought control. That is why we have to study
how our own institutions, intentionally or unobtrusively, may be used
to distort our concepts of democratic freedom.
The Downfall of Justice
To a psychologist, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the
Moscow purge trials between 1936 and 1938 was the deep sense of moral
shock felt by people all over the world, whose trust in the judicial
process was shaken to its foundations by these perversions of
justice. Discussions about the trials always concerned themselves
less with the question of guilt or innocence of the accused than with
the horrifying travesty of justice the trials presented. Somewhere
deep in the soul of men lies the conviction that a judge is, by
definition, a righteous, impartial man, that an appeal to the courts
is the road to truth, that the law stands above corruption,
degradation, and perversion. Of course, we recognize that judges are
human beings like ourselves, that they can make mistakes, as the rest
of us do, and we are even willing to accept temporary injustice
because we believe that there will be eventual vindication and that
the rule of law and justice will remain triumphant. The moment the
judicial process becomes a farce, a show to intimidate the people,
something in man's soul is profoundly affected. When justice is no
longer blind, but has her eye on the main chance, we become frightened
and alarmed. To whom shall a man turn if he cannot find justice in the courts?
During the course of psychotherapy, one of my patients was called
to jury duty. The experience disturbed him deeply, for apparently the
prosecutor in this case was more interested in getting a conviction
than in finding out the truth. Although the jury had the last word,
and, by its verdict, condemned the prosecutor's strategy, our juror
was greatly upset. "What happens", he asked me, "in
other cases? Suppose the jurors cannot see through the lawyer's sophisms?
Suppose they are taken in by his constant suggestion and insistence?"
Indeed, any trial can be used as a weapon of intimidation; it can,
in a subtle way, intimidate the jurors, the witnesses, the entire
public. In Totalitaria, some higher courts exist only to carry out
this function of intimidation; their purpose is to prove to their own
citizens and to the world at large that there is a punishing and
threatening force controlling the government and that this force can
use the judiciary for its own purposes.
An apparent objective official investigation may become a weapon
of political control simply through the suggestions that inevitably
accompany it. The man who is under investigation is almost
automatically stigmatized and blamed because our suspicions are
thrust on him. The very fact that he is under scrutiny makes him
suspect. Thus, even the so-called "democratic power to
investigate" may become the power to destroy. We must beware of
this danger! Already the approving or disapproving way of
interrogation changes man's thinking about facts.
Any judicial action, whether legal or investigative, which
receives widespread publicity, exerts some mental pressure on the
entire public. It is not only the participants in the action who have
a stake in its eventual outcome, the citizens as a whole may well
become emotionally involved in the proceedings. Any official
investigation can be either a mere show of power or an act of truth.
As a show of power, by a totalitarian government or by an
unscrupulous demagogue, it can have frightening consequences. The
German Reichstag fire case, the Moscow purge trials, and the court
actions against our POWs in China are prime examples of "legal"
action which served to consolidate the political power of ruthless
men and had for their object confusion of a helpless citizenry. An
additional intention was to shock the public opinion of the world.
If we look at legal inquiry from the point of view of each of its
participants, we will see even more clearly the dangers we must guard against.
The Demagogue as Prosecutor and Hypnotist
Recent happenings in our own country indicate clearly that the
methods used to satisfy a question for power show a universal
pattern. The ancient magic masks used to frighten the people may have
been replaced by an overconfident show of physical strength by a
"hero" artificially shaped as an object of admiration and
identification for infantile minds, but the loud noises of propaganda
are still with us, magnified a thousand-fold by the radio and
television, and serving to intimidate and hypnotize our less alert
contemporaries. A worldwide audience, watching and listening to the
demagogue playing all his different roles -- the righteous accuser,
the martyred victim, the voice of conscience -- is temporarily thrown
into a semi-frightened, trancelike state of exhausted inattentiveness through
the monotonous repetition of threats, accusations, and clichés.
The demagogue, like the totalitarian dictator, knows well how to
lay a mental spell on the people, how to create a kind of mass
suggestion and mass hypnosis. There is no intrinsic difference
between individual and mass hypnosis. In hypnosis -- the most
intensified form of suggestion -- the individual becomes temporarily
automatized, both physically and mentally. Such a clinical state of
utter mental submission can be brought about quite easily in children and in
primitive people, but it can be created in civilized adults, too. Some of the
American POWs in Korean prison camps were reduced to precisely this condition.
The more the individual feels himself to be part of the group, the
more easily can he become the victim of mass suggestion. This is why
primitive communities, which have a high degree of social integration
and identification, are so sensitive to suggestions. Sorcerers and
magicians can often keep an entire tribe under their spell.
Most crowds are rather easy to influence and hypnotize because
common longings and yearnings increase the suggestibility of each
member of the group. Each person has a tendency to identify with the
rest of the group and with the leader as well, and this makes it easy
for the leader to hold the people in his grip. As Hitler said in
"Mein Kampf", the leader can count on increasing
submissiveness from the masses.
Sudden fright, fear, and terror were the old-fashioned methods
used to induce hypnosis, and they are still used by dictators and
demagogues. Threats, unexpected accusations, even long speeches and
boredom may overwhelm the mind and reduce it to a hypnotic state.
Another easy technique is to work with specially suggestive words,
repeating them monotonously. Arouse self-pity! Tell the people that
they have been "betrayed" and that their leaders have
deserted them. From time to time, the demagogue has to add a few
jokes. People like to laugh. They also like to be horrified, and the
macabre, especially, attracts them. Tell them gory tales and let them
huddle together in sensational tension. They will probably develop an
enormous awe for the man who frightens them and will be willing to
give him the chance to lead them out of their emotional terror. In
the yearning to be freed from one fear, they may be willing to
surrender completely to another.
Radio and television have enhanced the hypnotizing power of
sounds, images, and words. Most Americans remember very clearly that
frightening day in 1938 when Orson Welles's broadcast of the invasion
from Mars sent hundreds of people scurrying for shelter, running from
their homes like panicky animals trying to escape a forest fire. The
Welles' broadcast is one of the clearest examples of the enormous
hypnosuggestive power of the various means of mass communication, and
the tremendous impact that authoritatively broadcast nonsense can
have on intelligent, normal people.
It is not only the suggestive power of these media that gives them
their hypnotizing effect. Our technical means of communication make
of the people one huge participating mass. Even when I am alone with
my radio, I am technically united with the huge mass of other
listeners. I see them in my mind, I unconsciously identify with them,
and while I am listening I am one with them. Yet I have no direct
emotional contact with them. It is partly for this reason that radio
and television tend to take away active affectionate relationships
between men and to destroy the capacity for personal thought,
evaluation, and reflection. They catch the mind directly, giving
people no time for calm, dialectical conversation with their own
minds, with their friends, or with their books. The voices from the
ether don't permit the freedom-arousing mutuality of free
conversation and discussion, and thus provoke greater passive
acceptance -- as in hypnosis.
Many people are hypnophiles, anxious to daydream and day-sleep
throughout their lives; these people easily fall prey to mass
suggestion. The lengthy oration or the boring sermon either weakens
the listeners and makes them more ripe for the mass spell, or makes
them more resentful and rebellious. Long speeches are a staple of
totalitarian indoctrination because finally the boredom breaks
through our defenses. We give in. Hitler used this technique of
mass hypnosis through monotony to enormous advantage. He spoke
endlessly and included long, dull recitals of statistics in his speeches.
The din of constant verbal intimidation of the public is a
recognized tool of totalitarian strategy. The demagogue uses this
suggestive technique, too, as well as the more tricky maneuver of
attacking opponents who are usually considered to be beyond
suspicion. This maneuver is often combined with a renewed appeal to
self-pity. "Fourteen years of disgrace and shame", was the
slogan Hitler used to slander the very creative period between the
Armistice in 1918 and the year he seized the helm. "Twenty years
of treason", a slogan used in our country not too long ago,
sounds suspiciously like it, and is all too familiar to anyone who
watched Hitler's rise and fall.
The stab-in-the-back myth reduces everyone who is taken in by it
to the level of suspicious childhood. This inflammatory oratory aims
toward arousing chaotic and aggressive responses in others. The
demagogue doesn't mind temporary verbal attacks on himself -- even
slander can delight him -- because these attacks keep him in the
headlines and in the public eye and may help increase people's fear
of him. Better to be hated and feared than forgotten! The demagogue
grows fat on prolonged and confused discussion of his behavior; it
serves to paralyze the people's minds and to obscure completely the
real issues behind his red herrings. If this continues long enough,
people become fed up, they give in, they want to sleep, they are
willing to let the big "hero" take over. And the sequel can
be totalitarianism. As a matter of fact, Nazism and Fascism both
gambled on the fear of Communism as a means of seizing power for
themselves. What we have recently experienced in this country is
frighteningly similar to the first phase of the deliberate
totalitarian attack on the mind by slogans and suspicions. Violent,
raucous noise provokes violent emotional reactions and destroys
mental control. When the demagogue starts to rant and rave, his
outbursts tend to be interpreted by the general public as proof of
his sincerity and dedication. But for the most part such declarations
are proof of just the opposite and are merely part of the demagogue's
power-seeking energy.
There is in existence a totalitarian "Document of Terror"
which discusses in detail the use of well-planned, repeated
successive WAVES OF TERROR to bring the people into submission. Each
wave of terrorizing cold war creates its effect more easily -- after
a breathing spell -- than the one that preceded it because people are
still disturbed by their previous experience. Morale becomes lower
and lower, and the psychological effect of each new propaganda
campaign becomes stronger; it reaches a public already softened up.
Every dissenter becomes more and more frightened that he may be found
out. Gradually people are no longer willing to participate in any
sort of political discussion or to express their opinions. Inwardly
they have already surrendered to the terrorizing dictatorial forces.
We must learn to treat the demagogue and aspirant dictator in our
midst just as we should treat our external enemies in a cold war --
with the weapon of ridicule. The demagogue himself is almost
incapable of humor of any sort, and if we treat him with humor, he
will begin to collapse. Humor is, after all, related to a sense of
perspective. If we can see how things should be, we can see how askew
they can get, and we can recognize distortion when we are confronted
with it. Put the demagogue's statements in perspective, and you will
see how utterly distorted they are. How can we possibly take them
seriously or answer them seriously? We have important business to
attend to -- matters of life and death both for ourselves as
individuals and for our nation as a whole. The demagogue relies for
his effectiveness on the fact that people will take seriously the
fantastic accusations he makes; will discuss the phony issues he
raises as if they had reality, or will be thrown into such a state of
panic by his accusations and charges that they will simply abdicate
their right to think and verify for themselves.
The fact is that the demagogue is not appealing to what is
rational and mature in man; he is appealing to what is most
irrational and most immature. To attempt to answer his ravings with
logic is to attempt the impossible. First of all, by so doing we
accept his battling premises, and we find ourselves trapped in an
argument on terms he has chosen. It is always easier to defeat an
enemy on your own ground, and by choosing your own terms. In
addition, the demagogue either is, or pretends to be, incapable of
the kind of logic that makes discussion and clarification possible.
He is a master at changing the subject. It is worse than criminal for
us to get ourselves involved in endless, pointless, and inevitably
vituperative arguments with men who are less concerned with truth,
social good, and real problems than they are with gaining unlimited
attention and power for themselves.
In their defense against psychological attacks on their freedom,
the people need humor and good sense first. Consistent approval or
silent acceptance of any terror-provoking strategy will result only
in the downfall of our democratic system. Confusion undermines
confidence. In a country like ours, where it is up to the voting
public to discern the truth, a universal knowledge of the methods used
by the demagogue to deceive or to lull the public is absolutely necessary.
The Trial as an Instrument of Intimidation
Man's suggestibility can be a severe liability to him and to his
democratic freedom in still another important respect. Even when
there is no deliberate attempt to manipulate public opinion, the
uncontrolled discussion of legal actions, such as political or
criminal trials, in newspaper headlines and in partisan columns helps
to create a collective emotional atmosphere. This makes it difficult
for those directly involved to maintain their much-needed objectivity
and to render a verdict according to facts rather than suggestions
and subjective experiences.
In addition, any judicial process which receives widespread
publicity exerts mental pressure on the public at large. Thus, not
only the participants but the entire citizenry can become emotionally
involved in the proceedings. Any trial can be either an act of power
or an act of truth. An apparently objective examination may become a
weapon of control simply by the action of the suggestions that
inevitably accompany it. As an act of power by a totalitarian
government, the trial can have frightening consequences. The Moscow
purge trials and the German Reichstag fire case are prime examples.
We do not, of course, have such horrifying travesties on justice
in this country, but our tendency to turn legal actions into a field
day for the newspapers, the radio, and television weakens our
capacity to arrive at justice and truth. It would be better if we postponed
discussion of the merits of any legal case until after the verdict was in.
As we have already seen, any man can be harassed into a confession.
The cruel process of menticide is not the only way to arrive at this goal;
a man can be held guilty merely by accusation, especially when he is too
weak to oppose the impact of collective ire and public opinion.
In circumstances of abnormal fear and prejudice, men feel the need
for a scapegoat more strongly than at other times. Consequently,
people can be easily duped by false accusations which satisfy their
need to have someone to blame. Victims of lynch mobs in our own
country have been thus sacrificed to mass passion and so have some
so-called traitors and collaborators. In public opinion, the trial
itself becomes the verdict of "guilty".
The Congressional Investigation
Let me first state that I firmly believe that the right of the
Congress to investigate and to propose legislation on the basis of
such investigation is one of the most important of our democratic
safeguards. But like any other human institution, the Congressional
right to investigate can be abused and misused. The power to
investigate may become the power to destroy -- not only the man under
attack, but also the mental integrity of those who, in one way or
another, are witnesses to the investigation. In a subtle way, the
current wave of Congressional investigations may have a coercive
effect on our citizenry. Some dictatorial personalities are obsessed
with a morbid need to investigate, and Congressional investigations
are made to order for them. Everybody who does not agree with them,
who does not bow low and submit, is suspect, and is subjected to a
flow of vilification and vituperation. The tendency on the part of
the public is to disbelieve everything that the demagogue's opponents
say and to swallow uncritically the statements made by those who
either surrender to his browbeating or go along with it because they
believe in the aims he pretends to stand for.
PSYCHOLOGICALLY, IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE SIMPLE
FACT OF BEING INTERVIEWED AND INVESTIGATED HAS A COERCIVE INFLUENCE.
As soon as a man is under cross-examination, he may become paralyzed
by the procedure and find himself confessing to deeds he never did.
In a country where the urge to investigate spreads, suspicion and
insecurity grow. Everybody becomes infected with the feelings of the
omnipotence of the inquisitor. Wire tapping, for instance, has the
same power; it is grasping the secrets of others.
In psychological circles a good deal of attention is now being
given to the impact of interviews and interrogations on people. The
psychological interviewer himself must be aware of the various
interpersonal processes involved in this kind of communication; if he
is not, he will not be able to find out where the truth lies. Instead
he will get answers which are implicit in his own questions, answers
which may have little relation to the real truth. This does not
happen only in cases where both the interviewer and the man he is
interviewing show bad faith. It can happen despite their best
intentions. For everybody brings to an interview the sum total of all
his earlier interpersonal relationships. In the initial verbal trial
and error, during what we could call the smelling-out period,
each party mobilizes himself to find out what the other party expects
and where his weaknesses are and, at the same time, tries to hide his own
weaknesses and emphasize his own strengths. The man in the street who is
suddenly interviewed tends to give the answer he thinks his questioner expects.
Every conversation, every verbal relationship repeats, at least to
some degree, the pattern of the early verbal relationships between
the child and its parents. To a man or woman under investigation, the
interrogator becomes the parent, good or bad, an object of suspicion
or of submission. Since the interrogator himself is often unaware of
this unconscious process, the result can be a confusing battle of
unconscious or half-conscious tendencies, in which the spoken words
are often merely a cover for suspicion-laden conversation between
deeper layers of both personalities.
All people who are systematically interrogated, whether in a
court, during a Congressional inquiry, or even when applying for a
job or having a medical examination, feel themselves exposed. This
very fact in itself provokes peculiar defensive mental attitudes.
These attitudes may be useful and protective, but at times they may
be harmful to the individual. When a man is looking for a job, for
example, he may become overeager, and in his zeal to "make a
good impression" to "put his best foot forward", he
may make a bad impression and arouse suspicion. For it is not only
what we say but the way we say it that can indicate our honesty and
poise. Nervous sounds, gestures, pauses, moments of silence or
stuttering may give us away. Aggressive zeal may seduce us into
saying too much. Inhibition may prevent us from saying enough.
The defendant in a court action or in an inquiry is defensive not
only about the accusations leveled against him or the questions he
has to answer, he is even more defensive about his own unconscious
guilt and about his doubts about his own capabilities. Many of my
colleagues in medicine and psychiatry who have been called as expert
witnesses in legal actions have told me that the very moment they
were under cross-examination, they felt themselves on trial and
nearly convicted. Cross- examination seemed to them often less a way
of getting at the truth than a form of emotional coercion, which did
a great disservice to both the facts and the truth. This is the
reason that every kind of investigative power can so easily become a
coercive power. Making witnesses and defendants suffer from acute
stage fright can be a nasty weapon of totalitarianism.
Because psychologists and psychiatrist appreciate these facts,
there is now a strong tendency in these circles to use what we might
call a passive technique in interviewing. When the interviewer's
questions are not directed toward any specific answer, the man being
questioned will be encouraged to answer on his own initiative, out of
his own desire to communicate. The neutral question, "What did
you do afterwards?" provokes a freer and more honest response
than the question "Did you go home after that?"
The Witness and His Subjective Testimony
We have seen in recent years a long parade of recanting
Communists, who have testified freely and openly about their pasts.
Currently, we have still another kind of parade: the recanting
recanters. How are we to know the truth from falsehood in all this
morass of conflicting testimony? How are we to prevent ourselves from
becoming confused by the contradictory testimony of men and women
whose words can influence the course of our nation's actions? How are
we to learn to evaluate what they say? Psychologically, how reliable
is their testimony, whether friendly or unfriendly?
In general, we can say that those who are most vituperative in
their statements are usually the least reliable. Many of them are men
and women who in the past adopted a totalitarian ideology out of
their own deep sense of inner insecurity. Later there came the moment
when they felt that their chosen ideology had failed them. Though it
had held their minds relentlessly imprisoned for a long time, at that
point they were able to throw off the system completely. This they
did through a process of inner rearrangement of old observations and
convictions. However, what they shed was merely a particular set of
rigid ideological rules. Most of them did not shed, along with these
rules, their hidden hatreds and early insecurity. They may have given
up the political ideology which offered them defenses and
justifications, but they retained their resentments.
It is extremely common to find such people seeking immediate
sanctuary in some other strictly organized institution. Because they
now see things in a different light, old facts and concepts acquire a
different significance. Yet, all the while, the ever-present urge
toward self-justification and self-exculpation, which operates in all
men and which in these cases motivated the former allegiance to
Communism, is at work. Now they must prove their guiltlessness and
their loyalty to their newly adopted ideas. Their emotions, now in
new garb, are still directed toward the goal of self-justification.
In the eyes of the convert, the fresh outlook -- this new
arrangement of inner demands and of ways of satisfying them -- is
just as logical and rational as were his former set of expectations
and satisfactions. Now he rediscovers several experiences long since
past. His former friends become his enemies; some of them are seen as
conspirators, whether they were or not. He himself is unable to
distinguish between truth and fantasy, between fact and subjective
demand. Consequently, a complete distortion of perceptions and
memories may take place. He may misquote his own memories, and this
process is for the most part one of which the convert himself is not
aware. I remember vividly one example of such behavior during the
Second World War. A former Nazi became a courageous member of the
anti-Nazi underground. He sought to rectify his past behavior not
only by fighting the Nazis, but also by spreading all kinds of
anxiety-provoking rumors about his former friends. By making them
appear more cruel, he thought he could show himself more loyal.
Similarly, the denials and misstatements that may be made by the
convert before the courts or the Congressional committees are often
not so much conscious falsehoods as they are products of the new
inner arrangements. Every accusation about the convert's past may be
twisted by him into a new tool for use in the process of
self-justification. Only a few such men have the moral courage to
admit that they have made real mistakes in the past. The distance
between a white lie and selective forgetting and repressing is often
very short. I discovered this for myself while carrying on
investigations of resistance members who had been in Nazi hands. I
found that it was almost impossible to obtain objective information
from them about what they had revealed to the enemy after torture.
Reporting upon their enforced betrayal, they immediately colored
their stories by white lies and secondary distortions. Depending on
their guilt feelings, they either accused themselves too much or
found no flaw at all in their behavior.
The Right to Be Silent
Out of the action of Congressional investigating committees has
recently come a serious legal attack on the right to be silent when
the giving of information clashes with the conscience of the one on
the stand. This attack can become a serious invasion of human privacy
and reserve. Undermining the value of the personality and of private
conscience is as dangerous to the preservation of democracy as is the
threat of totalitarian aggression.
We have to realize that it is often difficult for witnesses to
make a choice between contempt of Congress and contempt of human
qualities. Administrators may conceivably discover a few alleged
"traitors" by compelling witnesses to betray their former
friends, but at the same time they compel people to betray
friendships. Friendship is one of our most precious human
possessions. Any government or agency that, under the guise of
"contempt of Congress", can force confessions, and
information can also force the betrayal of former loyalties. Is this
not comparable with what the coercive totalitarians do? And at what cost?
We obtain a pseudo-purge resulting from weakness of character and
anxiety in the victim. In addition we violate one of democracy's
basic tenets -- respect for the strength of man's character. We have
always believed that it is better to let ten guilty men go free than
to hang one innocent -- in direct opposition to the totalitarian
concept that it is better to hang ten innocent men than to let one
guilty man go free. We may punish the guilty with this strategy of
compelling a man to speak when his conscience urges him to be silent,
but just as surely we break down the innocent by destroying their
conscience. Supreme Court Justices Douglas and Black in their
dissenting opinion about the constitutionality of the Immunity Act of
1954 [See "The New York Times", March 27, 1956.]
emphasize the right to be silent as a Constitutional right given by
the Fifth Amendment -- a safeguard of personal conscience and personal
dignity and freedom of expression as well. It is beyond the power of Congress
to compel anyone to confess his crimes even when immunity is assured.
The individual's need NOT to betray his former allegiances -- even
when he has made a mistake in political judgment at an age of less
understanding -- is morally just as important as the need to help the
state locate subversives. Let us not forget that betrayal of the
community is rooted in self-betrayal. By forcing a man to betray his
inner feelings and himself, we actually make it easier for him to
betray the larger community at some future date. If the law forces
people to betray their inner moral feelings of friendship, even if
these feelings are based on juvenile loyalties, then that very law
undermines the integrity of the person, and coercion and menticide
begin. The conscience of the individual plays an enormous role in the
choice between loyal opposition and passive conformity. The law has
to protect the individual also against the violation of his personal
moral standards; otherwise, human conscience will lose in the battle
between individual conscience and legal power. Moral evaluation
starts with the individual and not with the state.
Mental Blackmail
The concept of brainwashing has already led to some legal
implications, and these have led to new facets of imagined crime.
Because the reports about Communist brainwashing of the prisoners of
war in Korea and China were published widely in newspapers, they
aroused anxieties among lay people. As mentioned in Chapter III,
several schizophrenics and borderline patients seized upon this
rather new concept of brainwashing, using it as an explanation for a
peculiar kind of delusion that beset them -- the delusion of being
influenced. Some of these persons had, as it were, the feeling that
their minds had been laid open, as if from the outside, through radio
waves or some other mystic communication, thoughts were being directed.
During recent years, I received several letters from such patients
complaining about their feelings of continual brainwashing. The new
concept of political mental coercion fitted into their system of
delusions. Several lawyers consulted me for information about clients
who wanted to sue their imaginary brainwashers.
The same concept, used above to account for pathological
suspicions, could be used maliciously to accuse and sue anybody who
professionally gave advice to people or tried to influence them. At
this very moment (fall, 1955) several court procedures are going on
wherein the defendants are being sued for the crime of brainwashing
by a third party. They are accused of having advised, in their
professional capacity, somebody to do something against the
plaintiff's interests. The shyster lawyer is now able to attack
subtle human relationships and turn them into a corrupt matter. This
is the age-old evil of using empathy not for sympathy but for
antipathy and attack. In so doing, the accuser may misuse a man's
hesitation to bring these human relationships into the open; the
accuser also makes use of the strange situation in the United States
that even the innocent winner of a court procedure has to pay the
cost of his legal help. Practically, this means that in a difficult
judicial question, he has to pay at least thirty thousand dollars
before he can reach the Supreme Court -- if it is a Supreme Court
case -- and appeal to the highest form of justice in our country.
Because of this new angle, which has developed during the past few
years, of the brainwashing situation, the psychiatric profession has
been made more vulnerable to unreasonable attack. In one case, a
third party felt hurt by a psychological treatment that made the
patient more independent in an unpleasant commercial situation in
which he had formerly been rather submissive. In another case, the
doctor was sued because he was able to free his patient from a
submissive love affair and an ambiguous promise of marriage. In a
third case, the patient during treatment changed from a commercial
agency that had treated him badly. In all those cases, the
disappointed party could bring suit on the basis of so-called
brainwashing, and malicious influence. In several cases of this form
of blackmail, an expensive settlement was made out of court because
the court procedure would have become far more costly.
The practicing psychiatrist who is attacked in this way
experiences not only financial pressure imposed on him by the
dissatisfied party and a malicious lawyer, but in several states the
court does not even recognize his professional oath of secrecy. The
Hippocratic oath says:
Whatever, in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection
with it, I may see or hear in the lives of men which ought not to be spoken abroad,
I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret.
Some courts hold that the only physical investigation and
treatment are valid as medical treatment not to be divulged; personal
conversation -- the quintessence of psychiatric treatment -- is not
looked upon as a medical action. Hiding behind professional secrecy
is regarded as contempt of court. An additional difficulty is that
this accusation of malpractice by a third party -- not by the patient
himself -- is not covered by the usual malpractice insurance.
The importance of such perfidious attack on psychological
relationships -- however rare the number of cases may be at this
moment -- is that it opens the road for many other forms of mental
blackmail. It means that subtle personal relationships can be
attacked and prosecuted in court, merely because a third party feels
excluded or neglected or financially damaged. I cannot sue my broker
because he gave me wrong financial advice, but I can sue a psychological
counselor for malpractice because he "brainwashed" my client.
What new possibilities for mental blackmail and sly accusation are
open! Gradually we can make punishable wrong intention and
anticipation, nonconformist advice and guidance, and, in the end,
simple honest human influence and originality -- things that are
already considered criminal in totalitarian countries.
The word "blackmail" was originally used in the border
warfare between England and Scotland. Blackmail was the agreement
made by freebooters not to plunder or molest the farmer -- in
exchange for money or cattle. The word comes from the Middle English
"maille" meaning speech or rent or tax.
The French equivalent "chantage" brings us even
nearer to the concept of mental coercion. It means forcing the other
fellow "to sing", to confess things against his will by
means of threatening physical punishment or threatening to reveal a
secret. It is, in the last analysis, mental coercion.
We may call mental blackmail the growing tendency to overstep
human reserve and dignity. It is the tendency to misuse the intimate
knowledge of what is going on in the crevices of the soul, to injure
and embarrass one's fellow man. MENTAL BLACKMAIL STARTS WHEREVER THE
PRESUMPTION OF GUILT TAKES THE PLACE OF PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE. The
hunting up of dirt and sensation in order to embarrass a victim we
see very often carried on by the yellow press. It is not only playing
up indecency, but at the same time it undermines human judgment and
opinion. And by its sensationalism is precludes and prejudices justice in the courts.
What a weak baby accomplishes with its tears and pouting can be
done by the whining, querulous accuser with his fantasies about
malicious influence and brainwashing. The suicidal patient may exert
the same kind of pressure.
I am convinced that in the future the Supreme Court has to make
rules which will control these new forms of indictment; yet the core
of the problem is the growing suspicion within man in our era of
transition. We blackmail men's minds with too many security measures,
with secret files; we blackmail with gossip, with subtle pressures
within political pressure groups, with lobbies within lobbies, and
even by withholding our friendship.
The Judge and the Jury
What about the people who are called upon to sift truth from
falsehood, to arrive at just and impartial verdicts? The judge and
the jury are themselves influenced and affected by the external facts
and inner needs that lie behind the behavior of the other principals
in the case. Yet they are supposed to rise above their background,
their personal needs and desires and to render a verdict strictly on
the evidence, unswayed by any prejudice or subjective desires. And
let us bear in mind that it is not only those officially connected
with a case who make a decision about it, it is everyone who knows
about it. You and I, the public, are judge and jury too.
Judge and jury face the difficult task of finding and asking on
the basis of the facts alone, and yet even in them, under the
influence of strong group emotions, an emotional rearrangement of
remembered facts may take place.
Judge and jurors are affected by the collective emotional
atmosphere surrounding controversial issues, and it is difficult for
them to maintain their much-needed objectivity. The average juror
already submits to the popular emotional demand before the trial is
started, as several trials about racial persecution proved.
Lately two authorities on law attacked the system of trial by
jury, one because of its delaying action on the process of justice
(Peck) and the other because he considered it an outmoded means of
administering justice (Newman). Trial by jury is a relic of the
thirteenth century intended to replace the magic trial by ordeal --
the gods and coincidence decided the guilt -- and to replace the
trial by battle -- physical skill and power decided which of two
parties was guilty. The trial by a jury of peers, by all those who
knew the accused and the circumstances of the alleged crime, served
its purpose in rather simple organized communities for a long time.
But in our complicated society, where people know less about each
other and where a thousand-fold communications intrude the mind,
things have changed. "The average juror is swayed by the emotion
and prejudice of his heredity and background training." (Newman)
Our juries are not always able to follow the intricacies of pros and
cons, of interpretation of facts. In addition, many a trial lawyer
knows how to fascinate a jury, how to catch their minds and influence
their judgment. Beyond this, the selection of jurors delays more and
more the process of justice.
As a simple example of how individual, personal, and social
conditioning can affect a juror's current reactions, let us look at
the inner confusion usually caused by the word "traitor".
Here we have an emotionally loaded trigger-word. If somebody is
accused of being a traitor or a subversive, on the basis of
undeniable facts, any attempt at a scientific, psychological
explanation of this person's behavior is already considered a
treacherous intellectualism. The consensus is that the traitor should
be punished; he belongs to the scum of society, better let him die.
Even the lawyer who defends him before the court may be accused of
collaboration in treason.
All of us know many other trigger words which immediately provoke
confusion in our objective perception and judgment because they touch
unsolved, unconscious feelings. Words like "communist" and
"homosexual", for instance, can become confusing trigger
words which bring a reservoir of dark feelings into action.
Demagogues like to use such words in order to stir up mass feelings,
which they cannot control but which they believe are very suitable
for the strategy of the moment. This can become, however, like
playing with dynamite. Any one of us may be swayed by allusive
clichés such as "Where there's smoke, there's fire"
or "Once a thief, always a thief". I once saw this most
interestingly in a hot debate where someone had once been scolded for
being a "dirty monogamist". As soon as the accusation was
made, public opinion turned against him.
Even a judge can be swayed by his own emotional difficulties,
especially by slanted testimony of witnesses who may be attempting to
mislead. In Great Britain the courts are more aware of the effect of
a prejudicial attitude on the part of jurors. There the trial process
is extensively protected, mostly through prevention of pretrial discussion
and deliberation, regardless of the unpopularity of the accused.
Televised Interrogation
An open official interrogation affects those who watch it -- and
the fact that they are affected may influence its outcome. Various
crime hearings in this country, for instance, were brought before the
people by means of television. Citizens sitting comfortably at home
far from the scene could see how defense lawyers maneuvered facts or
instructed their clients (among whom were well-known crime bosses) so
that they would appear in a favorable light. Even though their
actions may have been transparent tricks with the appearance of a
fixed wrestling match, the result was that some of the
not-so-jovial-looking victims of the criminals were made ridiculous,
while the criminals, calm, assured, self-possessed, seemed more
admirable. The victims often couldn't stand being in the limelight;
it made them feel ill at east and embarrassed. The criminals, on the
other hand, either denied every accusation in tones of righteous
indignation or made confessions which degenerated into hysterical
quests for pity. The magic effect of all the anonymous onlookers --
because the witness or defendant imagined their approval or
disapproval -- influenced the outcome of the hearings. All of us who watched
them brought our own subjective expectations to bear on these hearings.
Television makes a mass trial of such a hearing, and unwittingly
not justice but the variable feelings of the public become part of
the courtroom atmosphere. Every piece of evidence in such a hearing
is colored by rumor and emotion, and the shocked onlookers are left
with feelings of suspicion and deep misgivings that the hearing has
not really gotten down to the condemning facts.
The Quest for Detachment
Man's feeling for justice has very subtle implications. As soon
as "Justitia" flirts with powerful friends or becomes
completely submissive, people feel insecure and their anxiety
increases. But man's feeling for justice needs more than mere
security for its satisfaction and gratification. The sense of justice
is an inner attitude aiming at the realization of ideal rules of law
that can inspire the community and raise it to a higher moral level.
It requires not merely that minimum of decent behavior that is
enforced by law, but more than that a maximum of personal initiative
and mutual fair play. It asks for personal and social justice, for
mutual limitation of demands in the service of the mutuality of
relations between men, and between men and their government. Any
ideal feeling of justice requires sacrifice and implies
self-limitation. Emotionalism is its enemy. This ideal of justice is
not only valid for individuals but should also rule communities and
countries. Only in such an atmosphere of free mutual sacrifice of
power on behalf of growing justice can democracy grow.
Can people learn to see objectively and in a manner detached from
their personal feelings? Yes, they can. Preconceived ways of seeing
and witnessing can be changed. Many people realize the damage men do
to themselves and others when they submit to collective passion and
prejudice. These people then learn through astute investigation and
observation how to be less prejudiced, how to see events with
constant readaptation of mind and eye and with a search for reality.
Prisoners in concentration camps or POW camps are so constantly
bombarded with rumors and suggestions, their observations are so
distorted by their necessary self-defenses, that they are hardly able
to give an objective report regarding the actions of their fellows.
The mass attitude of the day directs their opinions. The fellow who
has become a scapegoat, whose function it is to alleviate for his
fellow prisoners their common anger, will never be able to neutralize
all later reports about him, simply because the number of so-called
objective witnesses is against him. It is very difficult to separate
the rumors from the facts and to neutralize ingrown mental toenails.
There is in man an instinctual need to take sides with the majority,
to conform to the opinion of the strong. This need is rooted in a
biological urge for safety. That is why a strong feeling of
participation grew among soldiers in a POW camp. The result was
complete unconscious falsification of what happened. The individual
observation got lost in the strong impact of mass opinion.
In the future age of psychology, when insight into man's behavior
is more generally understood and applied, we will be more aware of
the importance of dependable witnesses. Every report and every piece
of testimony pro or con will be examined and weighed in the light of
its psychological and historical background. The citizen of the
future will laugh as he looks back at the time once lost during
trials because obvious facts on one side were not brought out to
challenge equally obvious facts on the opposing side. These future
citizens will understand that we only revealed our mutual hostilities
and feelings of fear and insecurity by our behavior, feelings which
moved us compulsively and subtly to make subjective rearrangements of
our memories and impressions. He will point out that objective
thinking was in its infancy in those days.
The Fear of Living
In our era the fear aroused by human relationships is so strong
that inertia and mental death often seem more attractive than mental
alertness and life. Classical psychology often spoke of the fear of
death and the great unknown as the cause of many anxieties, but
modern psychological studies have shown us that the fear of living is
a much greater, deeper, and more frightening one.
Living often seems beyond our power. Stepping out of a relatively
safe childish dependence into freedom and responsibility is both
hazardous and dangerous. Living demands activity and spontaneity,
trial and error, sleeping and reawakening, competition and
cooperation, adaptation and reorientation. Living involves manifold
relationships, each of which has thousands of implications and
complications. Living takes us away from the dream of being protected
and demands that we expose our weaknesses and strengths daily to our
fellow men, with all their hostilities as well as their affections.
It requires us to build up useful defenses and then to replace them
with others because we have to change our goals and our
relationships. It expects us to be lonely in order to cooperate in
freedom. It asks us to submit and to conquer, to adjust and to rebel.
It robs us of our childhood slumber of satisfaction, and of the
magic, omnipotent fantasies of our infancy. Living requires mutuality
of giving and taking. Above all, to live is to love. And many people
are afraid to take the responsibility of loving, of having an
emotional investment in their fellow beings. They want only to be
loved and to be protected; they are afraid of being hurt and
rejected. We can see this clearly in the fact that so many people
embrace so fervently all the limitations and frustrations of life
that are offered them -- the neurotic limitations of the usual
prejudices or the totalitarian limitations imposed by power politics.
In his book Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm describes clearly how
the pressures of freedom, when they are not balanced by
responsibility and understanding, can drive men into the totalitarian
frame of mind and into surrender of their hard-won liberties. Such
surrender is nothing less than a slow mental death.
Totalitarian leaders, whether of the right or of the left, know
better than anyone else how to make use of this fear of living. They
thrive on chaos and bewilderment. During unrest in international
politics, they are most at ease. The strategy of fear is one of their
most valuable tactics. The growing complications of our civilization
and its administration make the impact of power politics felt more
than ever before. When the totalitarians add to their tactics all the
clever tricks that we have already discussed Pavlovian conditioning,
repeated suggestion, reconditioning through boredom and physical
degradation -- they can win their battle for the control of man's mind.
In the earlier chapters of this book we described in some detail
the techniques by which man could be turned into a robot in the
service of totalitarianism and some of the tendencies that operate,
even in the free countries, to rob man of his mental integrity. It is
important for us to realize that emphasis on conformity and the fear
of spontaneous living can have an effect almost as devastating as the
totalitarian's deliberate assault on the mind. Conformity and the
fear of living rob the free way of life of its greatest asset in the
struggle against totalitarianism.
Our human strength lies in our diversity and independence of
thought, in our acceptance of nonconformity, in our willingness to
discuss and to evaluate various conflicting points of view. In
denying the diversities of life and the complexity and individuality
of the human mind, in preaching rigid dogmas and self-righteousness,
we begin gradually to adopt the totalitarian attitude we deplore.
Delusion has never been the exclusive property of any one country,
class, or group, and the totalitarian delusion, which in itself
promotes menticide, can invade us from many fronts, from the right as
well as the left, from the rich or from the underprivileged, from the
conservatives and from the rebels.
Fear and intimidation have not only been the result but also the
tools of mental coercion. Although there is as yet no unified theory
of fear and anxiety, and we therefore do not know precisely why and
how the development of these feelings leads to such dire
consequences, it is important for us to understand what useful tools
fear and panic are, and to see, through description, what these
overwhelming emotions are able to do to people.
Most people think of fear reactions as hysterical expressions of
desperation. But, as this chapter should make clear, fear and panic
also have their paradoxical expressions in indifference and apathy,
reactions which, just because they are less commonly recognized as
fear-created, can be much more dangerous to the individual than a
good hysterical cry. It is the hidden, silent fears that have such an
impact on our social and political behavior. Fear and panic are
reactions not only to overt danger and threat, they are also
reactions to the slow, seeping intrusion of disquieting propaganda
and the constant wave of suggestion to which we are all exposed. Fear
is at work all around us, and often it throws its shadows where we
least expect to find them. We may be acting out of fear without even
knowing it; we may consider that our behavior is perfectly normal and
rational when, in fact, psychology tells us that creeping fear may
already have begun to work on us.
Fear and catastrophe fortify the need to identify with a strong
leader. They lead to herding together of people, who shy away from
wanting to be individual cells any longer; they prefer to be part of
a huge mystic social organization that protects against threat and
distress, in oneness with the leader. This protection-seeking
instinctual reaction is also directed against dissent and
individualism, against the individual ego. We see in this a
regression toward a more primitive state of mass participation. True,
this process of ego-shrinking is the negative side of the
back-to-mass reaction. Yet it stimulates a recognition of greater
need for cooperation and mutual help. During the last war and the
generally experienced emergencies many people became for the first
time aware of the affective ties they had with their neighbors. At
the same time, anxiety can inspire suspicion and the need for seeking
scapegoats. It is the paradox of fear that it propagates warm
feelings of immature ties and cold suspicion at the same time.
Although there is throughout the world a conscious trend toward
overcoming fear and feelings of insecurity, there is also a less
conscious countercurrent provoking new fears and anxieties and
insecurities. Whether he is aware of it or not, modern man lives in
an atmosphere of fear -- fear of war, fear of the H-bomb, fear of
totalitarianism, fear of nonconformism, fear of dissent. Fear has
already begun to influence our behavior by the time we are aware of
it. Once fear has penetrated the mind and stimulated fantasy, it
begins to direct our actions, whether we want it to or not. We cannot
eliminate all the thousands of stresses and fear-provoking situations
in the modern world, but we can learn to recognize and understand
some of the most common forms of fear reactions. In this way we can
find a partial release from the tensions they create and can learn
how to cope with them more effectively.
Our Fantasies About Danger
I remember vividly one sunny afternoon during the Second World War
while I was still in Holland. I was playing tennis with some friends.
We were all enjoying the satisfying exertion of our sport, but our
enjoyment was somewhat marred by the players on the next court. They
spoke the language of the hated occupier, and although attired in the
same white sports clothes as we, they were obviously Nazi officers
who were temporarily forgetting their delusion of conquering the
world and were trying to relax like normal human beings. Suddenly we
all heard the drone of planes and the sound of antiaircraft off in
the distance. Then a group of low flying Spitfires, our friends from
England, came zooming by. My friends and I stopped playing, waved our
rackets in greeting, and watched the planes maneuvering. Our
neighbors reacted quite differently. They became panicky; one of them
flung his racket from him and ran off, the others threw themselves,
face down, into a ditch bordering the court. Objectively, we were all
faced with the same danger of strafing from the English planes, but
for the Germans these were enemy planes, while for us they were friends.
I'm sure it isn't necessary for me to add that after this
occurrence my fellow Dutch citizens were forbidden to play tennis on
that court. When, a year later, I had arrived by good chance in
London, I found that every time German planes came over during the
night, I had that same suspicious feeling the German officers on the
tennis court must have had. It seemed as though every bullet and
every bomb was meant for me. So great is the role of fantasy in fear
that an enemy bomb may have a different meaning for us than a friendly bomb.
Fear may be defined very simply as an inner reaction to danger.
This definition is deceptively simple, for as soon as we offer it, we
are faced with a new problem: What shall we define as danger? Bombs,
fires, earthquakes, and epidemics are easily recognizable as dangers.
So are physical torture, direct totalitarian attack, and sudden
economic collapse. But there are many subtle emotional dangers, too,
arousing fearful fantasies and anticipations often combined with
inner visions of doom and disaster. As our examples will show, these
dangers are faced differently by different people. It is our personal
attitude toward life and toward mankind that determines whether we
consider a situation a welcome challenge or an unconquerable danger.
Some people enjoy strict control and mechanical conditioning of their
lives. For them, totalitarianism and thought control are not danger;
they bring a kind of eternal day-sleep without responsibility. To
these people, freedom is a danger, while dependence is a pleasurable
safety. Others loathe any intrusion into their personal freedom and
integrity and are continually on the alert to defend themselves
against any external pressure -- real or fancied.
Paradoxical Fear
Even when people are well prepared and trained to meet an
anticipated disaster, such as imprisonment and brainwashing, the
actual impact of the danger may provoke all kinds of defensive
behavior. Overtraining may even weaken the person because the long
anticipation allows all kinds of hidden fantasies to run rampant. In
a minority of persons this may be expressed in such pathological fear
reactions as complete nervous breakdown or utter paralysis. Every
person shows a different mental threshold of resistance to danger,
and this threshold may change day by day, depending on our physical
and mental fortitude. As a rule, inexperienced troops do not
immediately show pathological fear in combat; such behavior takes
some time to develop. Paradoxically enough, fear reactions and
moments of weakness often develop after the real danger has passed.
When the tension of battle or the daily stress of life in the prison
camp is over, and there is no longer any need to hide one's fears and
to control one's behavior, many people let go completely and give
free vent to all their anxieties.
In Dover, England, in 1944, the population suffered a kind of
collective nervous breakdown when after the tension of four years of
continual shelling by the Germans they heard only silence. The
shelling suddenly stopped completely after the Allied troops swept
victoriously across the Belgian coast. At that moment, many of the
people of Dover broke down. It was as if the unexpected silence had
brought them into a state of shock.
This paradoxical fear reaction after danger has passed is
important for us to understand. The totalitarian strategists know
that during a period of temporary quiet and relaxation of tension,
people lose their alertness and thus can be more easily caught in the
totalitarian mental grip. In their strategy of terror they
consciously make use of the psychological action of the breathing
spell. As soon as we let go and drop the defenses we have built up
against danger, we can be brought to swallow any strong suggestions.
The totalitarians also, in their "Document on Terror," call
the technique of taking advantage of such relief the "strategy
of fractionalized fear:" In a quiet period between acute
tensions, they can easily condition their victims' minds. Hitler used
the Munich period of appeasement in precisely this way. During this
time, his propaganda barrage was doubly effective.
Whether the reaction to fear and danger is immediate or delayed,
most people show, under stress, behavior that can be said to fall
into one of the following patterns:
- Regression -- loss of learned behavior.
- Camouflage and
disguise -- the so-called "feign or faint" reactions.
- The
explosive panic-defense through "fight or flight"
- Our
psychosomatic conditioning -- the body takes over.
1. Regression
Although most people are more or less acquainted with the concept
of regression, of setting the cultural clock back, they are
surprised, nevertheless, to see staid men and women lose their
acquired habits of civilization in times of catastrophe and panic. I
once treated an engineer who had been the victim of an earthquake in
a foreign country. After the earthquake, he behaved completely like a
baby. All kinds of treatments were tried, but none were successful;
we were never able to change his childish behavior. He never found
his way back to normal, adequate behavior. From that fateful day, he
remained barricaded in his cave of escape. It was as if with one blow
he had forgotten everything he had ever learned. He was no longer a
grown man, a professional scientist. He was an infant. He babbled
like an infant, he had to be fed like an infant. Another earthquake
victim of whom I know, a professor of mathematics, was found in his
garden after the quake was over, half-naked and playing with his
child's toys. He completely rejected any recognition of the real
emergency situation in which he found himself and regressed to a
period of infantile irresponsibility. Such regressive behavior as a
form of defense is encountered everywhere in the animal kingdom. When
an organism is in danger, it drops its complexity and retreats to a
simpler form of existence. When circumstances of living become too
dangerous, some easily exposed multicellular organisms turn into
well-protected, simple monocellular beings. This regressive process,
called encystication may, for instance, take place when the organism
is exposed to abnormal temperatures or abnormal dryness.
Man is subject to the same biological rule of defense. When life
is too complex for him, he often turns the clock of civilization back
and becomes primitive again. A sudden disintegration and breakdown of
functions may occur. This form of regressive behavior is common in
children. When they are frightened, they often revert to baby talk or
to bed-wetting. In the bombed areas during the Second World War, many
girls in their late teens started to play with their dolls again.
Even seemingly mature, hypersophisticated men and women may display
thousands of symptoms of this return to infantilism when fear attacks
them. Their symptoms are not always as dramatic as the examples
above; nevertheless, they are symptoms of fear. When grown people
begin to stutter and to lose their daily decorum, when they take to
carrying around special protective charms, when they invent stories
about their magic invulnerability, when they boast more, eat more
cake and candy, whistle more, talk more, cry more, and lose their
formal stiff and staid behavior, they are acting out of fear.
During the Second World War, in the prison camps and the air-raid
shelters, people really got to know each other, as do children in the
playpen who have the simple intuitive gift of knowing whom they can
trust. In our age of anxiety, we feel possessed by the same
frightening shadows that once haunted the stone-age man, and we may
react to them by acting more like our simpler ancestors.
2. Camouflage and Disguise
A different pattern is that of camouflage and disguise playing
hide-and-seek with fate. This useful protective trickery is often
seen in lower animals who temporarily acquire the form or color of
their environment. It is just like military camouflage. Everybody is
acquainted with the color changes of the chameleon, and there are
many other animals which are able to change their skin or body form
in times of danger. Yet many people are not aware that human skin,
too, shows rudimentary attempts at camouflage. The phenomenon of
goose flesh resembles the reaction of a frightened, bristling cat;
sudden graying of the hair or discoloration of the skin, which is
known technically as fear melanosis, changes our outer color.
During the Second World War, I went with a first-aid team to
Rotterdam after the city had been heavily bombed. As we looked at the
people, our first impression was that they were all wearing masks.
Their skin was wrinkled and showed a typical camouflage reaction.
They were all still badly frightened. It was as if they were in
hiding from the tremendous hell of fire that had been thrown down on them.
There is a psychological parallel to these physical reactions; it
is called the "feign or faint" pattern. Actual psychology
looks at both reactions, feigning and fainting, as a passive retreat
from reality. This reaction is comparable to shell-shock or battle
neurosis, the study of which is one of the most absorbing chapters of
medicine. Soldier and civilian alike can go into a state of mental
paralysis. In such a state the victim becomes apathetic; he is unable
to talk or to move. No dangerous reality exists for him anymore. He
looks dead; only his frightened, burning eyes seem alive. This death
attitude or cataleptic reaction often has a completely terrifying
effect on bystanders. There is nothing so contagious as fainting in
any crowded place.
It is of the utmost importance to realize how passive, paralyzed,
indifferent, and submissive people can become under circumstances
which should demand the utmost activity. The totalitarians are making
use of man's passive reaction to terror when they put their prisoners
into huge concentration camps with only a few guards; they are
gambling that the reaction of passivity will keep the victim from
rebelling or trying to escape. Like the bird which stands stock-still
when the snake approaches, man may surrender passively to what he
dreads and fears in order to get rid of the tension of anticipation.
The thief who surrenders to the police because he cannot stand the
tension and insecurity of not knowing when he will be found out is an
obvious example.
A psychological camouflage reaction lies behind emotional shock
and silent panic -- the mental paralysis that overcomes some people when
they can no longer cope with the circumstances in which they find
themselves. Passive surrender to what he fears is one of man's most
common reactions to sudden danger; it is not limited to pathological
personalities. It occurs much more frequently than wild and overt
panic, and displays itself in numerous subtle behavior mechanisms.
People may escape into complaints about physical disease. They may
take refuge in "very important" pseudo-tasks and hobbies.
They may deny real danger in a seemingly self-securing complacency.
They become obstinate and disobedient; nothing can activate them.
They are not interested in politics, they say. Some will try to sell
to themselves and others the paralyzing theory of hopelessness and
the inevitability of doom. But don't talk about the nuclear bomb!
Others will throw themselves into the oblivion of excessive drinking
or hide themselves in long, pointless conferences. Every man has his
own psychological Maginot line -- a mental fortress that he believes
inviolable. We used to call this the ostrich policy -- and the ostrich
policy is one of the most dangerous strategies in the world. Beware
the totalitarian who preaches peace; his intention may be to push the
world into passive surrender to that which it fears.
The cult of passivity and so-called relaxation is one of the most
dangerous developments of our times. Essentially, it too may
represent a camouflage pattern, the double wish not to see the
dangers and challenges of life and not to be seen. We cannot escape
all the tensions that surround us; they are part of life, and we have
to learn to cope with them adequately and to use our leisure time for
more creative and gratifying activities. Silent, lonely relaxation
with alcohol, sweets, the television screen, or a murder mystery may
soothe the mind into a passivity that may gradually make it
vulnerable to the seductive ideology of some feared enemy. Denying
the danger of totalitarianism through passivity, may gradually
surrender to its blandishments those who were initially afraid of it.
3. Explosive Panics
Most people are far more familiar with the explosive motor
reactions we call panic and stampede than they are with the other
fear reactions. This is what we call mass hysteria, the chacun pour
soi reaction. The baby has its temper tantrums, and older people have
their uncontrolled fury and "fight or flight" reactions.
Although we usually think of the word "panic" as describing
such phenomena as the hysterical stampede out of a burning theater or
the flight of whole populations in terror, there are many subtle
steps that lead from the first symptoms of unrest we all feel when
something is threatening, to the great outbursts of crying and
running and fighting we see in severe panics. Man shows many forms of
panicky, frenzied behavior -- epileptic fits (as in trench or war
epilepsy), fury, rage, self-destruction, criminal aggression, running
amok, deserting from the army, rioting, uncontrolled impulsiveness,
breakneck speed in driving. A soldier in a state of panic may behave
like an angry child. He may attack his friends or shoot at the
members of his own troop. In panic, civilians may begin to cry,
shout, walk aimlessly about wringing their hands. Or they may shout
and scold or cry for help. The panicky person spreads panic; every
time he shouts, he incites others to run. Panic is never a question
of crude strength or failing energy, but rather of lack of inner
structure, of a failing capacity to organize. The panicky leader
hesitates to use the powers entrusted to him.
The child with temper tantrums lies deep within all of us. The
more mysterious and unaccountable the danger, the more primitive our
reactions may be.
Riots, furious mass movement, and outbreaks of criminality serve
to increase fear and panic, and thus can be used to deepen man's
sense of insecurity and further his passive surrender to the
totalitarian environment. Any terroristic regime compels its victims
to repress their reactions of rebellion and anger. The more these
reactions are repressed, the more the victims develop tremendous
inner rage, which must bide its time and wait until it is permitted
some socially sanctioned form of explosion. War is often such a
universal panic, a mass discharge of accumulated internal rage. Here,
too, the inner fears of mankind are discharged in mass destruction.
4. The Body Takes Over
The great group of psychosomatic reactions, although they are no
mystery, are more difficult to explain. Let us look at an example
which may make this phenomenon more clear. In my home town in
Holland, after a few bombardments during the Second World War, an
epidemic of bladder disease broke out -- at least that was the first
explanation. People suffered from the need to urinate so often that
their sleep was disturbed; almost no one had a full night's rest. For
a short time, there was a boom in the practice of urologists. Then
psychiatrists were able to explain that this urge to urinate was one
of the first reactions to fear. The victims had only to think back to
their childhood and to recall their bodily reactions before taking
examinations at school to see what was happening. Increased urination
may be described as one of the tension-reducing devices of the body.
The body may react to danger and panic with a variety of physical
symptoms. Perspiration, frequent urination, heart palpitations,
diarrhea, high blood pressure are only a few. We know that many of
these reactions are related to the body's mobilization of specific
defenses against threatening dangers. The specific ways in which
bodily diseases related to fear and anxiety develop are conditioned
largely by the individual's personal life history, especially his
development during childhood. The infant whose early tensions and
yearnings were drowned in milk and pabulum will grow up into an adult
who tries to fill his mouth again as soon as something threatening
occurs. Overeating has become for him a fear-allaying device. In the
process of rearing the child, the parent unwittingly train certain of
the child's organs to react to the tensions of life.
Because man has many bodily organs, he can show a tremendous
variety in his physical and emotional responses to threats, both from
without and within. Psychosomatic medicine distinguishes between
different character types in terms of the different organs which
respond to outside stress or danger. There is the ulcer type, the
asthma type, the colitis type, the heart failure type. Each of these
types shows a different reaction to the same battle -- the battle
against fear. Feelings of social tension may be expressed in various
organic diseases. In acute fright, however, certain organs of the
body more commonly react than others. As we saw in our earlier
example, the need for frequent urination is a nearly universal
reaction to fright. The "upset stomach" is another almost
universal fear reaction.
During the Second World War, a medical team looked in vain for the
bug causing an unknown intestinal disease among American soldiers who
were preparing to land on one of the enemy islands in the Pacific.
The doctors and biologists searched and searched; they found nothing.
The mysterious disease vanished, as suddenly as it had appeared,
after the invasion began and the soldiers were able to discharge in
action the tension of waiting f or the invasion. These men were not
strange or abnormal in any way. Even when one consciously accepts the
challenge of danger and is prepared to face it, counterforces in the
body may defeat the mental effort. The mind wants to be brave, but
the body escapes into disease. Consistency of child-rearing,
emotional security at home, and lifelong conditioning to acceptance
of the various challenges of life -- all these are the factors that
determine how we will react when we are put to the test.
In their treatment of panicky soldiers during the last war,
psychiatrists gave some of their time to an explanation of these
various danger reactions. As the victims began to understand their
reactions and saw how common they were, they took the first and most
important step toward cure. No longer were they so afraid of their
fears; no longer were they in such dread of cowardice. It was
important for them to know that what had reduced them to the level of
helpless childhood was part of a universal pattern of defensive
behavior. As they understood this, they became less afraid and
ashamed of their own private fears. They knew that their bodies were
reacting like many others, and they became able once more to accept
their duties quietly and with better control. Stamina and
resourcefulness depend as much on self-knowledge as they do on the
help and support we get from others.
In times of stress and calamity, people begin to probe for the
vulnerable spots and weaknesses in both their friends and their
enemies. This testing goes on constantly during a hot war, but it
happens during a cold war as well. The cold war exerts a continual
pressure on human imagination and mental fortitude and is the cause
of many peculiar escape reactions or bodily reactions.
Whenever fear and danger confront him, man has to make a choice:
Shall he indulge in unchecked fury? Shall he concentrate upon
self-protection? Or shall he accept his responsibilities? The fear
reactions we have described show how the primordial impulse to
self-protection (misguided though it may be) can break through all
our civilized defenses. Only training and conscious preparation for
danger, both inner and outer, can give a man strength to hold these
reactions in check. This training starts within the nucleus of the
family and is supported by the example of a peaceful, free community.
These are the first teachers in the constant battle between inner
fear and outer danger.
Those who are in danger of being brainwashed can be helped simply
by making them familiar with the facts. Foreknowledge has a partial
protective function, and this belongs to the best security we can
give to them. It takes away the weakening influence of anxious and
mysterious anticipation. With this aid, their mental vulnerability is
then furthered by innate inner strength, by the example of good
rearing, and by the challenge and opportunity their society gives to them.
THE RAPE OF THE MIND - PART THREE
Unobtrusive Coercion
In the course of our investigations concerning thought control, menticide,
and brainwashing, it has become clearer that more attention must be given to
the means by which inner preparedness for mental submission is brought about.
Unobtrusively, personal development and various cultural influences can make
man more vulnerable to suggestion and ideological attack. In part three I call
to the reader's attention the creeping intrusion into our minds by technology
and bureaucracy, and how special forms of prejudice and mass delusion can take
possession of our minds before we are aware of it. The final chapter, an inquiry
on treason and loyalty again calls to our attention the tremendous influence of
mass thinking on our personal concepts of loyalty.
The time has come to ask ourselves if it is possible that there is
something in our own growth and development that may make us more
vulnerable to mental intrusion and ultimate brainwashing. Are there,
for instance, special coercive needs in us? What is communicated and
taught to the child that may keep him a spiritual prisoner of his environment?
These are important questions and would require a thorough
philosophic and pedagogic investigation. Nevertheless, for practical
purposes, we may limit our attention to two different spheres of
development: the influence of parents and the influence of certain
social habits. The latter has already been investigated in the second
part of this book. Indeed, I must repeat that in my experience all
those who are educated under rules of too strict obedience and
conformity break down more easily under pressure. During World War II
when the so-called tough S.S. officers were interrogated after they
had become prisoners, they readily surrendered their military
secrets. Having lived for years under totalitarian command, they were
just as obedient to the new commanding voices. Sometimes we only had
to imitate the shouting voices of their masters and they would
exchange their former boss for the new one. For them every command
had become the automatic trigger for new conforming obedience.
In dealing with members of the Communist Party in this country, we
had a comparable experience: the members were politically submissive
and changed their obstructive party-strategy to an opposite set of
tactics the moment Moscow ordered them to do so.
How Some Totalitarians May Develop
Increasing attention has been given to the various psychological
motivations leading to political extremism and a totalitarian
mentality in men and women who have been brought up in a democratic
atmosphere, but who have voluntarily chosen to associate themselves
with some totalitarian ideology. Psychologists who have come into
contact with the totalitarian attitude and have studied those who are
easily influenced by it agree, by and large, that in the free,
democratic countries the option for totalitarianism is nearly always
determined by an inner personality factor -- frustration, if you will.
It is usually neither poverty nor social idealism that makes a man a
totalitarian, but mostly internal factors such as extreme
submissiveness and masochism on the one hand or a lust for power on
the other. Unsolved sibling rivalry plays a role too; I have treated
several Nazi collaborators whose political behavior was motivated to
some extent by the fact that they were older sons and could not stand
the competition with their younger brothers. All these factors help
to explain why the totalitarians everywhere can use their propaganda
of violence to exploit resentment, hatred, racism, and political
fury. They know that they have only to play on these immature
feelings of deprivation and dissatisfaction to bring people under a spell.
In my own experience, I have been amazed to see how unrealistic
are the bases for political option in general. Only rarely have I
found a person who has chosen any particular political party
democratic or totalitarian -- through study and comparison of
principles. Too often man's choice of his political affiliations is
determined by apathy, by family tradition, by hope for financial
gain, or by other irrelevant factors. It is this lack of rational
motivation that can make men more susceptible to totalitarian
blandishments, even in a democratic community. I remember very
clearly, for example, a Dutch physician with whom I went to medical
school. He fell in love with the daughter of a Communist and
eventually married her. At first he was disturbed by the conflict
between his principles and his adoration, but gradually his
principles gave in and he started to justify the party line. Later on
I met him from time to time. He was an excellent doctor and a jovial
fellow, and he took our half-serious quips about his politics in
good part. But the moment we began a really serious discussion, he
crouched in his official defensive corner and became a different
man -- sour, mechanical, handing out ready-made arguments. During the
war I met him frequently in the course of our common underground
work. He had been completely dazed by Stalin's pact with the Nazis,
but the moment Russia was invaded and became an ally, he started his
aggressive robotism again. Not only was he a staunch fighter against
the Nazis, but he insisted that his was the only way to fight. He
lost his life on a dangerous mission for the underground, and I
always had the feeling that it was in a way welcome to his latent
suicidal feelings.
In other Nazis and Communists, both, I have seen dramatic examples
of how personal resentments, outside the suffering of real injustice,
can lead a man to the side of the rebels. Some of these people were
the type who simply submitted passively to a movement stronger than
themselves -- men and women whose ideology was a reflection of whichever
side had caught them first; others were motivated by the need to vent
their own personal anger and resentment in some direction and used
political action to satisfy this need. But if we are to come to any
real understanding of the internal factors that lead a man to adopt a
totalitarian ideology, we must dig a little deeper than this and must
give our attention to some basic roots of this problem.
The Molding Nursery
One of the important things we have learned from modern psychology
is that the roots of many of our adult attitudes and problems lie far
back in the seeming quiet of the nursery and childhood years. The
infant's life may appear to be placid and uneventful, but from the
moment he is born he hears thousands of rumblings both from inside
his own mind and from the world outside. In his mother's womb he knew
neither warmth nor cold, now his skin transmits these sensations to
him. As he lay protected in his mother's body, he did not have to
breathe, eat, or excrete; now he must do all these things himself. He
needs help in doing them, he needs protection, and for this
protection and help he must rely on those grown-up giants, Mother and
Father. He is utterly and completely dependent, unable by himself to
find adequate responses to his needs. There he is, with his pitifully
limited means of adaptation, with his minimum of innate patterns of
action. Warmth, food, and love, things which he needs to sustain his
life, come to him when he does the "right" thing -- and the
right thing is the learned, civilized thing, not the instinctual,
primitive thing. The giants, his parents, make demands on him -- they
begin to mold him according to their own habits, and the infant must
submit to all these external demands in order to get what he wants
and needs. He must follow the hundreds of subtle, incomprehensible
educational rules in order to be paid back with the affection and
protection on which he is so dependent. All of this transforms him
into a more or less conforming being. His parents' morality is, as it
were, sucked in and becomes an ever-present force inside him. He is
imprinted with all kinds of habits which serve to condition him into
the particular form of adaptation his parents and his society think
good for him. The forms his adult behavior will take are foreshadowed
by the forms his parents' behavior take. The patient mother imprints
patience on her child; the anxious, compulsive mother imprints
tensions on hers.
The child who is brought up in a loving environment will develop
inner pictures of love and affection and will be better able to
accept all the restrictions his parents impose on his freedom, all
the rules they lay down. He will accept timetables, toilet training,
parental confusion, without too much inner protest even when his
needs run contrary to these social demands. He may want to be fed at
a time when, according to his schedule, he should not be hungry. He
may want to sleep when his parents want him to be awake. Society
demands of him that he learn to postpone his own gratifications, and
he will react to this demand in a manner contingent on his own sense
of security in his parents' affection. Having to wait for food, not
being allowed to suck any more, having to control his need to
excrete -- all of these require the child to make new and difficult
adaptations. His urge for immediate and unconditional satisfaction of
his needs has to be transformed into something much more
complicated -- a whole pattern of learned responses.
It is not important for us to describe here the different ways in
which these early cultural obligations are met by the child. But it
is important to understand that the cradle and the nursery change and
recondition the innate natural responses of the unsocial, primitive
child to mold him into an adult, who may be left from his childhood a
legacy of frustrations stemming from this molding process. Individual
problems are caused by individual patterns of child-rearing; these
very patterns are themselves to some degree the product of the
cultural traditions in which they are rooted and the mores of the
community into which the child is born. To the degree that our
society imposes on children frustrations and restrictions for which
they are neither biologically nor emotionally ready, to that degree
our culture paves the way for adult behavior problems and for
neurotic attitudes of submission or aggression, which may find
expression in allegiance to some totalitarian group.
Conditioning a child into a servile and submissive attitude, for
example, may start when parents rigidly imprint automatic rules of
conduct on the infant. They may make a time maniac out of him or a
cleaning automaton. They may compel him to speak too early or to be
silent when his voice itches to burst out of his throat or to sleep
when his body is throbbing with the energy of wakefulness. Such
parents impose on their child a constant feeling of guilt -- he feels
disturbed and unhappy every time he does not comply with their
demands. And at the same time they force him to love them even when
they are disagreeable. They may compel him to apologize for behavior
which seems to him to be perfectly acceptable; they may demand that
he confess to crimes which do not exist as crimes for him at his age.
Some techniques of brainwashing can be seen at the cradle; the
parents may cross-examine him, tie him to their apron strings, or
keep him constantly under their eyes. With their solicitous attention
they never leave him alone to enjoy feeling of being secure with
himself. The helpless child in such an environment becomes
emotionally insecure; in exchange for more borrowed security, he
becomes more conforming and submissive, although this conforming
behavior covers up tremendous inner protest and hostility.
When parents do not permit a child to express his instinctual
needs openly and directly, they force him to look for other ways to
express them. If during his early training -- which may start on the day
of his birth -- the infant encounters endless restrictions to the direct
expression of his needs, he will try to communicate these needs in
indirect ways -- through tension, restlessness, and crying. Instead of
being able to use natural outlets for his instinctual drives, the
child is permitted and conditioned to act only through suppression
and control of the drive. In his struggle to bring the drive under
control in order to please his parents, the child's natural means of
expression may become inverted. Instead of expression, he acquires
repression. This is where the roots of such adult behavior as abject
submissiveness and the urge for conformity lie. The groundwork for
this masochistic pattern of giving in is formed in infancy.
Submission and confession are the only strategies possible for the
child in a world that is too overpowering for him to handle. Inner
rebellion, hostility, and hatred must be expressed in a paradoxical
way. The child's rigid silence is proof that he wants to cry and
yell. He may reproach and attack the hostile world indirectly,
through magic gestures, clownish behavior, or even epileptic fits.
Compelled to suppress his instinctual needs and his means of
achieving their gratification, he may conceal their existence even
from himself. Surface conformity becomes his only means of
communication, and when this happens words and gestures acquire a
concealing function. He never says what he means, and gradually he
doesn't even know what he means.
The carry-overs into adult life of this kind of child-rearing are
obvious. Trained into conformity, the child may well grow up into an
adult who welcomes with relief the authoritarian demands of a
totalitarian leader. It is the welcome repetition of an old pattern
that can be followed without investment of new emotional energy.
Trained previously to divert his aggression to scapegoats, he may now
displace his hidden resentments against his parents' rules and
regulations toward society as a whole. Or he may find release for
them in the wild explosion of pent-up aggression which is exemplified
by the lynch mob or by Hitler's storm troopers.
Other forms of parental behavior also have their effect on the
child. If the child is trained precociously in habits that would
otherwise develop spontaneously at a later age, he may show all kinds
of distortions in his natural behavior. The example of the effect of
precocious toilet training is common, but there are many other
parental commands that can have the same effect on the child. The way
the child is clothed or the parents' constant demand that he always
be quiet, asleep, and motionless are equally valid examples. When any
command is too strictly applied before the child is able to cope with
it, it exerts an enormous frustrating influence. What was enforced on
the child by some outside power becomes an inner, automatic rule, a
compulsion. Let us return to the toilet training example for a
moment, though it is only one single part of the whole pattern of
training. The child who is trained to control his need to excrete at
too early an age learns to keep himself clean and constipated under
all circumstances. His body learns how to control itself
automatically, but somewhere inside him the child feels contempt for
those who have forced him into this behavior. He may grow up to be a
chronically hostile adult, ripe for the appeal of some hostile
ideology. In less severe cases, the conflict between outside
prohibitions and the inner need to let go may create a continuing
pattern of inner insecurity. Or it may lead to constant querulous
resentment, which can be easily utilized by any would-be dictator.
What we have to emphasize is this: the earliest web of
communication between parents and child takes place on what
psychology calls a pre-verbal and unconscious level. There is contact
without words. The mother transfers her moods directly to the child;
he senses and catches her feelings. The child also transfers his
moods to her; she feels his pains and joys almost as soon as he does.
This sensitivity of the infant makes him react with great
intensity -- he is profoundly aware of his parents' feelings. Such
negative parental factors as anxiety, insecurity, infantilism, mutual
disharmony, neurotic love, poverty, the struggle for existence, and
compulsive tyranny have an enormous effect on the child. Not long ago
I treated an infant who refused any offer of handling or feeding by
its mother. The infant "knew" that the mother had a
deep-seated hostility against it; it felt her aversion and rejection.
But the infant accepted food and affection from everyone else. The
interplay between parental attitudes and child development starts at birth.
Perhaps one of the clearest examples of a distorted growing-up may
be seen in one case I treated during the Second World War when I was
asked to do a psychological study of an alleged collaborator with the
Nazis. This man, who was in England when I saw him, said that he had
left Holland, which was then occupied, because he no longer agreed
with the German conquerors. When he arrived in England he was, as a
matter of careful routine, put in a home for people under
investigation as suspected spies. From here, he was very soon taken
to a mental institution because of his strange behavior. He was not
actually psychotic, but he did have great difficulty in relating to
other people. When I went to interview him, it became apparent to me
that he was completely confused. He babbled so much that it was
almost impossible to understand him. I asked him about his childhood.
It was not easy for him to speak about it, but he finally told me
something of his background. He was an only child. His mother had
been the dominant member of the family, actively working in
scientific research. His father, a weak, nebulous figure, had seldom
been at home; in his job as the manager of a large firm, he had
traveled a great deal. On the rare occasions when the father was at
home, the patient remembered long silences between his parents, his
father only occasionally protesting against his mother's constant
stream of directives. Sometimes the boy joined with his mother in
criticizing his father's detachment and lack of interest, sometimes
he turned to his father for love and help against his mother's
smothering behavior. But he was mostly lost and alone at home. In his
late teens, the boy developed some homosexual attachments, in which
he played the passive, submissive role. But he only came alive
mentally after one of his friends made him attend a fascist rally.
The show of strength and aggression excited the boy enormously and
even aroused sexual sensations in him. He joined the fascist group,
to the great dismay of his parents, but he was never very active in
party work because the party did not provide him with the guidance
and love for which he yearned.
After the Nazi invasion and occupation, the party demanded that he
be more active as a collaborator with the Germans. Now his conscience
bothered him, and he became ill and developed all kinds of stomach
ailments which were, to a psychiatrist, obviously emotional in
origin. He was not, however, strong enough to withdraw from the party
completely. He felt caught between two opposing dangers -- the party and
treason. The childhood struggle began all over again; he felt himself
unsafe with either father or mother. So he decided to flee the
country because he had a vague feeling that this would help him get
away from his conflicts.
Once in England, in the asylum, he felt completely contented. He
simply did not understand the serious nature of the accusations that
had been made against him. When I spoke to him about world affairs
and his political activity, he fell into silence. He did not remember
any of the details of his political behavior. It was as if he had
lived in a dream since the moment he ran away from Holland. It is
entirely possible that the enemy had used him as a tool, but at the
time I saw him he was only a near-psychotic, fear-ridden young man.
He remained in the institution for the duration of the war.
One thing stands out clearly in this case (aside from its
complexity as a pathological phenomenon) and that is the young man's
continual search for male authority. This search for spiritual backbone
is very common among people who develop totalitarian attachments.
The Father Cuts the Cord
Psychological studies have shown us over and over again that the
child's attitude toward the parental authority, with all its subtle
internal complications, plays a primary role in determining how he
will handle his hostilities -- whether he will learn to cope with them
or whether he will direct them toward destructive aims. As we said
earlier, parents and family form almost the whole environment of the
child during the first years of its life. They condition the
foundations of his future character. And in the family it is the
influence of the father that determines whether the child will stick
to its strong natural ties with its mother, to its dependency needs
and its needs for protection, or will step out of this maternal realm
and will form new ties with new people. The father is the first one
who cuts into the essentially biological relation between mother and
child. He is what the psychoanalyst calls the first transference
figure, the first new prototype to whom the child can transfer its
expectations of gratification, its feelings of relatedness, of
satisfaction, of fear. This first new trial relationship with the
father giant may become the conditioning prototype for every
subsequent social relationship.
The child's initial relationship with its mother is purely
biological and symbiotic. The womb is replaced by the crib. The
mother is the know-all and do-all. Psychoanalysis describes the
child's relationship with its mother as one of oral dependency
because the helpless infant is completely dependent on the food,
care, and warmth the mother provides. The little human being's
dependency need lasts longer than that of the other animals. It is
this fact that makes man gregarious, dependent on cooperation with others.
The father brings a third person, who has no part in this
relationship of biological dependency, into the life of the child.
When he cuts into the child's relationship with its mother, he is
cutting the psychological umbilical cord just as the doctor cuts the
physical one when the infant is delivered. First, he gives the child
the opportunity to transfer feelings and expectations to him; later,
he brings the child more actively outside the maternal realm and
teaches him more and more about social relationships. The specific
role of the father as a transference prototype is not so simple as it
seems to many fathers. Father is not merely a toy with whom the child
can occasionally play. The child needs to identify with this giant
who lives with him and with Mother; he wants to become familiar with
the giant, he wants the giant to become part of his world. The child
wants more than this -- he wants to be gratified by Father so that he
can love Father as much as he does Mother. But the child will
transfer some of its love and emotional investment to Father only if
it sees something of Mother in him. Father can do the same things
Mother does -- he can feed the child, can solace him, can take care of
him -- and thus the child can maintain a feeling of gratitude and
affection toward this third person. This transference of feelings can
only take place, however, when the relationship between the parents
themselves is tranquil. How can the child identify with and love his
parents when they are in constant conflict with each other?
This picture is, of course, something of an oversimplification.
There are mothers who behave like cold, distant fathers, and fathers
who behave like warm, cuddling mothers. There are grandparents or
adoptive parents who can take over. There are many mother or father
substitutes. But this is not my point. My point is that in every
situation there must be some individual who can become the
conditioning prototype for the child's relationships with new beings.
This first person is most likely to be the father, and it is he who
changes the child's biological dependency into a psychological
relationship. When there is no father figure, or if the father is too
weak or too busy or is denying and tyrannical toward the child, the
result is that the child's relationship with and dependence on the
mother remains strong and lasts too long. Consequently, the child's
need for social participation and for gregarious ties with others may
become to him a consuming need. As an adult he may be willing to join
with any social group which promises him support and reassurance. Or
his unconscious resentment against the father who did not help him to
grow up and become independent may be diverted into a resentment
against other symbols of authority, such as society itself. Either
way the child may be headed for maladjustment and for difficulties.
Either way the child may grow up into an immature adult.
In a study on living by proxy, I described the arrested emotional
development that results when the father does not play his proper
role or is not present. A child brought up in such an emotionally
defective atmosphere searches continually for strong figures who may
serve as a proxy for the normal relationships the child would
otherwise have had in life. I have treated several cases of
homosexuality and other forms of arrested development, both in men
and women, which were almost directly attributable to the too
strongly tied, symbiotic life with the mother which results from such
an environment.
In the building up of man's awareness of an independent self and
the establishment of his ability to have easy, relaxed relationships
with his fellow men, the father, as the natural chief and protector
of the family, plays an important role. He
cuts the cord. He may condition the later pattern of dependence and
independence. His potential psychological dominance can become a
blessing or a curse, for the child's emotional attitude toward its
father becomes the prototype for its attitudes toward future leaders
and toward society itself.
We saw this clearly in the case of our "spy" who had
never had a strong male guide in his life. Many of the people I
investigated, who had chosen to identify themselves with aggressive
totalitarian groups, had this problem. For such people, the
totalitarian party became both the good father who accepted them and
the proxy which gave expression to all their hidden and frustrated
hate. The party solves, as it were, their inner problems. Parental
conflict in early childhood, inconsistency, and a threatening,
unloving attitude toward the child pave the way for rebellion and
submission, and a repetition of this pattern later in life. The wish
to break away from the family pattern may lead to rebellion, but the
particular form the rebellion takes depends on what political
movements can modify and channelize the person's resentment.
This does not mean, of course, that there is not a hard core of
totalitarian-minded people, nourished in the cradle by the dogmas of
their totalitarian parents, who give themselves to their party tasks
because they have never known a different world. According to Almond,
these types are found particularly in our Western world among
high-echelon extremists. They take in the totalitarian form of
socialism with their mother's milk; they are members of an increasing
group of hereditary totalitarian conformists. Here, no father
rebellion is needed to become an extreme revolutionary.
But the bulk of the totalitarian-minded in the democratic
societies are men and women who are attracted to this destructive way
of life for inner emotional reasons unknown to themselves. My own
experiences with both Communists and Nazis during the Second World
War has shown me this truth over and over again. In Holland, as in
the other Nazi-occupied countries, the Communists and their
sympathizers fought bravely with us in the underground as our
temporary companions. Even during that time of national crisis and
terror, they were never free from bitter reproach and resentment
toward us. They insisted that their ideology was the only correct one
and showed, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, that when the Nazis
were defeated, they would renew their struggle against the social
order. Let me give just one example to illustrate this point. One of
the Communists was a very brave physician (not the same man about
whom I spoke earlier). He had killed a Nazi leader, and later he
himself died a horrible death. Here was a grown man who had never
been able to overcome a certain adolescent self-righteousness and
aggressiveness. On the very night when, in deadly peril, he sought
refuge in my home, he felt compelled to engage me in a long
theoretical political discussion with him, full of bitterness. He
disdainfully reproached the other resistance groups because they did
not share his political views. His views and ideals, I must say in
all justice to him, seemed sincere to me, but he was filled with so
much unresolved hostility toward the government of his fatherland
that he was ready at all times to overthrow it. The core of his
fallacious reasoning I found was the confusion about ends and means
in the struggle for social justice. For him, tactics and strategy had
become more important than the final aim of peaceful coexistence
between men on earth. His violent death -- after murdering an S.S.
officer -- was partly the result of the fact that he pursued tactics
beyond the strategic needs of the moment. True, in the end he gave
his life for his ideals and for his native land, but up to the end he
carried a bitter grudge against all those who were not in complete
agreement with everything he thought and felt. It was that personal
grudge and hostility which led him to bad planning and his ultimate
fate. Most of us are not clearly and completely aware that alongside
our wish to be good, adjusted citizens, we also have hidden wishes to
violate our allegiances to the social formation of which we are
members. These wishes are not based on reason and intelligence; they
are purely emotional. They are founded by the ways we have been
brought up, by our relationships with our parents, by our educational
system, by our attitudes toward ourselves and toward authority. But
all men who adhere rigidly to any set of political convictions, and
especially those who have embraced some totalitarian ideology,
believe that their attitudes emerge from rational conviction and are
the result of normal intellectual development. They insist that those
who do not agree with them are committed to a stuffy, outmoded way of
thinking. They cannot see their own vengeful and disloyal attitudes
as something asocial and abnormal.
To the psychologist, it is eminently clear that these attitudes
have their roots not in intellectual conviction but in some
deep-seated emotional need. I have often seen cases where this blind,
rigid allegiance to a totalitarian ideology was actually a defiant
rebellion against a compelling inner need to grow and to change and
to become mature. In these people, the selection of a special
political party was only a substitute for their need for dependency.
Ideologic stubbornness is often tragic because it may cover up basic
neurotic reactions that may lead to self-destruction. One of my
patients was a young woman whose ultra-left beliefs were a defense
against her hidden incestuous feelings toward a reactionary father.
It took protracted therapy to bring her to an understanding of the
real nature of her difficulty and to get her to see that there was
nothing shameful or disgusting about the infantile love and
resentment she was trying to conceal through her political behavior.
The need for authority, when it is not understood, and the confused
resistance to authority are the roots from which the totalitarian
attitude may grow. Whenever the father-leader fails, he sets up a
pattern of future trouble with authority. Instead of a mature
relationship with his fellow men, the child becomes an adult who is
forced to choose the tyrannical totalitarian tie to keep his inner
tensions in check.
Whenever there is parental conflict, the child grows into an adult
burdened with conflicts who may be eager to accept the simple
solutions totalitarianism offers. Whenever there is parental
compulsion, which gives the child no chance to develop its own
attitudes and evaluations, the child grows up into a conforming
adult, whose entire life may be spent in a search for outside
authority, for someone to tell him what to do.
During disturbed times such as these, the thoughts of everyone
follow the diplomatic play going on at the various political
conferences. It would be worth while to investigate whether it is
possible for leaders of nations to arrive at a common understanding
as a result of mutual exchange of words, ideas, and the negotiating
of treaties. Yet, the various cultures in the world and the different
ideologies not only speak different languages, but even their ways of
thinking are different. Unobtrusively, our personal past and our
cultural environment creep into our thinking habits. Our feelings and
thoughts are conditioned and coerced by various social influences.
It is already possible to bring to the surface some of the
illusions and prejudices people have about one another. We may say
that the special environments in which people develop and the habits
they build up foster subtle illusions and delusions in persons, of
which they are, for the most part, unaware. Through research in the
field, anthropology and psychology have been able to compare
different ideologies in people by observing the growth of the
wholesome and the unwholesome -- in the child, in groups, in tribes,
and, lastly, in nations. The findings call to our attention the
difficult art of argument in situations where there is scarcely any
common ground of communication and understanding.
In a study on mental coercion we have to trace some of these mass
psychological influences which condition our attitude in life.
The Affirmation of My Own Errors
The lie I tell ten times gradually becomes a half truth to me. And
as I continue to tell my half-truth to others, it becomes my
cherished delusion.
We rediscover this phenomenon every day in that huge laboratory of
human relations we call psychological counseling and psychotherapy.
Let us look at just one simple example, the case of a perfectly
healthy child who decides one day that she doesn't want to go to
school because schoolwork seems so very difficult. So she tells her
mother that she has a headache, and mother agrees to let her stay at
home. Thus the girl avoids the schoolwork she dreads and gets the
additional gratification of her mother's solicitous and tender nursing.
The next time our little girl wants to stay home it is easier to
pretend she has a headache -- and the third time it is easier still.
Gradually the girl herself begins to believe in her recurrent
illness. Her conscience bothered her the first time she lied, but by
now her initial lie has become an ingenuous truth to her. By the time
our heroine becomes a grown woman she will have to consult with a
doctor about her constantly recurring headaches. Doctor and patient
will have to spend many hours untangling the web of halflies,
innuendoes, and self-pitying complaints until the patient rediscovers
that her headaches all began on that one day she didn't want to go to school.
Delusional headaches afflict the world itself. Political
demagoguery is, to some extent, a problem in our country. The
particular form this demagoguery takes is only a passing phase, and
when our current dragons and inner phantoms have been laid to rest,
the eternal demagogue may arise anew. He will accuse others of
conspiracy in order to prove his own importance. He will try to
intimidate those who are neither so iron-fisted nor so hotheaded as
he, and temporarily he will drag some people into the web of his
delusions. Perhaps he will wear a mantle of martyrdom to arouse the
tears of the weak-hearted. With his emotionalism and suspicion, he
will shatter the trust of citizens in one another. His delusions of
grandeur will infect those insecure souls who hope that some of his
dictatorial glamour will rub off on them.
Unfortunately the problem of delusion has been studied almost
exclusively in terms of its pathological manifestations. The
psychiatrist who has encountered delusions of grandeur in his
patients has in the past lacked the philosophical and sociological
background necessary to enable him to form comparisons between his
patients' delusional systems and mass delusion in the world. In
dealing with patients suffering from megalomania or persecution
mania, he has tended to rely too much on hypotheses which explain
pathological delusions as the product of anatomical changes in the
individual brain; he has not given enough attention to the question
of whether or not these phenomena are in any way related to an
abnormal way of thinking in a physically normal person.
Since the growth of anthropology and the social sciences in the
last decades, new light has been thrown on the subject of mass
feelings and mass delusion. Obviously these are not phenomena which a
pathologist can examine under a microscope. They demand a knowledge
of history and social psychology and of all the studies which concern
interhuman relations and man's collective thinking.
To arrive at a clinical stage of study of this subject, it is
necessary to divest oneself of various fixed philosophical ideas
which have dominated scientific thought since Aristotle. There is,
for example, the doctrine of the identity of all thinking processes
and the possible universality of human understanding. This is
essentially founded on the belief that all human beings think in the
same way. But against this hypothesis is the observable truth that
philosophers themselves have the utmost difficulty in reaching mutual
understanding. This may be largely due to the fact that different men
have different methods and standards of thinking. For centuries,
science has adopted the Aristotelian dictum that most thought is
carried on according to the established rules of logic, which apply
in the same way as the laws of nature. It was the philosopher Francis
Bacon who first pointed out, in his theory of idols, that although
the laws of logic and clear thinking certainly exist, men may or may
not make use of them; depending on the emotional circumstances,
"thoughts are often the theatrical curtains to conceal personal
passions and reactions." In this statement the philosopher who
lived during Shakespeare's time might almost be attacking the seeming
logic of modern demagoguery. Since the Renaissance, therefore, it has
been acknowledged that human feelings and personal inclinations mold
and direct thought, and this point of view rather early found its
most moving expression in the works of Spinoza and Pascal. When we
come into contact with the phenomena of collective passion and mass
delusion, it is impossible to keep modern psychology out of the
picture whether we look at it philosophically or politically. For,
when examining this problem, we are immediately confronted with the
question, Do these disquieting phenomena in group life, which lead to
so much mutual misunderstanding, arise from the fact that the group
is in a particular, immature, and adolescent phase of psychological
and political development?
It will be illuminating and may help us answer the question if we
study briefly the history of the growth of consciousness and
awareness in the individual mind as it passes through successive
stages from infancy to maturity, since we can, in fact, find a parallel
between such stages of growth in the individual and the human group.
Stages of Thinking and Delusion*
[NOTE: Here I follow in part the classification of S. Ferenczi and that of my own
book on DELUSION and MASS DELUSION.]
The psyche is constantly confronted with and communicating with
the outside world, and at every phase of an individual's development
that world and its events are experienced differently.
Although different scientists have drawn different conclusions
about the various phases and their implications, the very recognition
of change and growth of personal outlook is one of the most important
scientific findings in psychology and is agreed on by all
psychologists. Let me briefly explain here the developmental approach
to human psychology. It is not the only one, but it will serve to
illustrate the tremendous impact of immature and delusional thinking
on our final opinions.
Developmental psychology -- as studied in children and primitives
-- posits at the origin of thinking, in both the individual and
the race, a hallucinatory stage of the mind, in which there is no
experience of difference between the inside and the outside world;
the mental separation and distantiation between the self and the
world has not yet taken place. The psyche is felt to be omnipotent
-- all that is experienced inside the self is attributed to the
universe as well and is imagined to be part of that universe.
According to developmental psychology, the infant experiences
the world in this way, and in certain types of insanity the adult will
revert to this hallucinatory stage. Yet, even mature man does not
succeed completely in separating internal fantasy from outside
reality, and often he thinks that his private and subjective moods
are caused by some external actuality. In the next stage, that of
animistic thinking, there is still a partial sense of oneness between
the ego and the world. The individual's inner experience, his fears,
his feelings, are projected onto seeming causative agents in the
outside world. The outside world is a continual demonic threat to
him. The child who bumps against the table projects onto that table a
hostile living power, and hits back. The primitive tribesman, hunted
by beasts of prey, attributes to the animal he feared a divine power,
that of a hostile god. The entire outside world may in fact be
peopled with the fears of men. In times of panic and fear, we all may
populate our neighborhood with nonexistent traitors or fifth
columnists. Our animistic thinking is continually busy accusing
others of what actually occurs inside our own minds. Nowadays there
are no devils and ghosts in trees and in wild animals; they have made
their homes in the various scapegoats created by dictators and demagogues.
The third stage is that of magical thinking in which there is
still a sense of intimate connection between man and his outside
world. However, man places himself more in opposition to the world
than in union with it. He wants to negotiate with the mysterious
powers around him. Magic is in fact the simplest strategy of man. He
has discovered that he can manipulate the world with signs and
gestures or sometimes with real actions or changes. He erects totem
poles and sacrificial blocks; he makes talismans and strange medicines.
He uses words as powerful signs to change the world. He develops a
ritual to satisfy his need for coming to terms with the outside world.
Which of us has not felt a sudden desire to count cobblestones or
is not the jealous possessor of an amulet or some other secret token
whose power would be lost if its existence were known to others?
Immature as they are, these tokens serve to build up happiness and
a good life. We all still live in the world of magic and are caught
in the delusion of happy manipulation of nature. The modern tribe
drives around in mechanized cars and becomes a megalomaniac sorcerer
of the wheel. Millions of victims are brought to the altar of the god
Speed because of our hidden delusion that frenzied rapidity prolongs
life. The engine and the gadget have replaced the more mysterious
amulet of earlier days. Knowledge is still in the service of power
instead of in the service of understanding.
In the last phase of mental development, man makes a complete
separation between himself and the outside world. He not only lives
with things and tries to manipulate them, but he also lives in
opposition to them. In this phase of mature reality confrontation,
man becomes an observer of his own life. He recognizes the abyss of
his own being. He sees his body and mind as separate from the world.
With hands, ears, eyes, and his controlling mind, he confronts
reality. He steps back from the world and observes it. He is, in
fact, the only animal that walks erect, straightforwardly facing the
world. He is the only animal that uses his hands and his senses as
verifying instruments. Gradually his own mind-body becomes an
instrument whose drives he may accept or reject. Only man is able to
see his drives and instincts as either dangerous or useful. Man not
only knows an externally imposed fear, but he knows an inner fear,
fear of losing the inner controls he has acquired at so high a price.
With arms and hands man reaches out not only toward the outside which
he once hoped to conquer with magic gestures as a baby does, but also
he knowingly reaches out toward an inside world. Mature man lives
between an inner and an outer world.
There is something tragic about this laborious process of becoming
conscious of a separate inner and outer reality. In becoming mature,
man awakens from a sweet primitive dream in which he was part of an
individual whole, part of a nirvanic world of equanimity. The sense
of lost unity with the universe lingers on, and in moments of mass
tension, or in times of crisis, he reaches toward that ancient
experience of impersonal, irresponsible bliss.
Utter passivity or self-destruction, artificial ecstasy obtained
by means of drugs, the suicidal wish for eternal sleep -- all are
devices by which man hopes to fulfill that eternal yearning. At what
stage in connection with these developments of human experience may
we speak of delusion? When the member of a primitive tribe placates
the mysterious and hostile world by prayer to his totem animal, we do
not call this delusion; but if a man who has attained to a more
advanced stage of thinking relapses into such a primitive habit of
thought, then it is possible to call this falling back
(retrogression) a delusion.
The Loss of Verifiable Reality
Delusion we may thus tentatively define as the loss of an
independent, verifiable reality, with a consequent relapse into a
more primitive stage of awareness. Just as the young woman we spoke
about earlier began to believe in and suffer from her headaches, so
the man who sells his private fantasy first as a rumor and then as a
factual truth gradually loses his awareness that his initial
statements were in fact deceits, and his delusion becomes a kind of
permanent petrification of his original primitive wishful thinking.
There are several factors which promote deluded thinking.
Retrogression and primitivization may occur as a result of physical
disease, particularly diseases of the brain, and it is with this type
of delusions that psychiatrists deal. Many brain diseases put out of
operation the brain cortex, the organ which developed last in the
evolutionary process and which makes us aware and controls our
thinking. When this disturbance of function happens, genetically
older types of brain functioning have to take over.
Most of the causes of delusions are not purely organic, however.
The same effect of regression may be produced by hypnosis and mass
hypnosis, which, by dislocating the higher forms of alert
consciousness, reduce the subject to the primitive stage of
collective participation and of oneness experience. If awareness and
reality confrontation become rigid and automatic, if man does not
look for alert and repeated verifications of what he finds in the
world, he may develop delusions -- ideas not adapted to the reality
situation. Apparently the human being requires constant confrontation
and verification with various aspects of reality if he is to remain
alive and alert. When experience is petrified into dogma, the dogma
itself stands in the way of new verification and of new truth. The
delusion of a nation that calls itself the "chosen" country
makes it harder for that nation to collaborate with other nations.
How deeply involved the process of thought control is with the
general formation of ideas in our time can be shown by the following
experience. After the First World War, I made the acquaintance of a
German philosopher dedicated to the idealistic philosophy of his
country. Germany went through a creative phase, new ideas arose of
fraternity and world peace. Germany, the defeated country, would show
its spiritual power. During our vacations we walked together through
the sunny mountains of Ticino and devoted our philosophical
conversation to the eternal yearnings of mankind for harmony and
friendship. We became friends and wrote to each other about our
mutual work, till the shadow of totalitarianism came over his
country. At first he was skeptical and even critical about Nazism.
Our correspondence diminished, and when he gradually became
gleichgeschaltet and a member of the party, the final mental cleavage
followed. I never heard about him any more.
So many philosophers surrender their theoretical thinking under
the impact of powerful mass emotions. The reason lies not only in
anxiety and submissiveness. It is a much deeper emotional process.
People want to speak the language of their country and fatherland. In
order to breathe, they have to identify with the ideological clichés
of their surroundings. Spiritually they cannot stand alone. Stefan
Zweig wrote during the First World War that this inner process of
speaking along with the chauvinistic voices around him was
experienced by him as a deep inner conflict. "Ich hatte den
Willen nicht mehr gerecht zu sein. (I did not have the will any more
to be just to the others.)"
Mass Delusion
It is interesting to note that the phenomenon of institutionalized
mass delusion has so far received little scientific treatment,
although the term is bandied about wherever the problems of political
propaganda are discussed. But science has shied away from
scrutinizing the collective mental aberration we call mass delusion
when it is connected with present-day affairs; it is the historical
examples, such as witchcraft and certain forms of mass hysteria, that
have been examined in great detail.
In our era of warring ideologies, in a time of battle for man's
mind, this question demands attention. What is mass delusion? How
does it arise? What can we do to combat it? The fact that I have made
an analogy between the totalitarian frame of mind and the disease of
mental withdrawal known as schizophrenia indicates that I consider
the totalitarian ideology delusional and the totalitarian frame of
mind a pathological distortion that may occur in anyone. When we
tentatively define delusion as the loss of an independent, verifiable
reality, with a consequent relapse into a more primitive state of
awareness, we can see how the phenomenon of totalitarianism itself
can be considered delusional.
For it is delusional (unadapted to reality) to think of man as an
obedient machine. It is delusional to deny his dynamic nature and to
try to arrest all his thinking and acting at the infantile stage of
submission to authority. It is delusional to believe that there is
any one simple answer to the many problems with which life confronts
us, and it is delusional to believe that man is so rigid, so
unyielding in his structure that he has no ambivalences, no doubts,
no conflicts, no warring drives within him.
Where thinking is isolated without free exchange with other
minds and can no longer expand, delusion may follow. Whenever ideas
are compartmentalized, behind and between curtains, the process of
continual alert confrontation of facts and reality is hampered. The
system freezes, becomes rigid, and dies of delusion.
Examples of this can be found in very small communities cut off
from the world. On fishing vessels which have been at sea a long
time, contagious religious mania coupled with ritual murder has been
known to break out. In small village communities there are instances
of collective delusion, often under the influence of one obsessed
person. The same thing happens in the more gigantic totalitarian
communities, cut off from contact with the rest of the world. Is this
not what happened in Hitler Germany, where free verification and
self-correction were forbidden? Indeed, we can show that historically
this is the case with every secluded civilization. If there is not
interchange with other people, the civilization degenerates, becomes
the victim of its own delusions, and dies.
We can phrase the concept of delusion in a different way. It is a
more primitive, distorted form of thinking found in groups or
individuals, looked at only from their limited viewpoint. Delusional
thinking doesn't know the concept of delusional thinking. The fakir
lying on his bed of nails would be called a deluded man if he
exhibited his devotion on Fifth Avenue, but among his own people his
behavior is considered saintly and eminently sane. A member of a
primitive tribe will not see in the ceremony of devil exorcism or a
revival meeting an instance of mass delusion. But a man who has
passed through this stage of mental development to a level of greater
perspective and awareness will recognize that delusional notions lie
behind such ceremonies.
Whether or not we are able to detect delusion when it appears
depends entirely on circumstances, upon the state of civilization in
which we live, upon the groups and the social class to which we
belong. For delusion and retrogression are terms which imply a
special social and intellectual level of awareness. That is why it is
so difficult to detect the delusions and primitive rituals in our own
midst. Our present-day civilization is full of mass delusions,
prejudices, and collective errors which can be recognized easily if
viewed from above, but which cannot be detected if they are seen from
within. While the delusion of witchcraft has been banished, we have
never freed ourselves from the delusion of cultural or racial
inferiority and superiority. Medieval mass obsessions such as
tarantism and St. Vitus's dance are little known now among Western
nations; in their place we have mass meetings with shouting crowds
expressing in delusional ecstasy their affiliation to some political
delusion. Instead of the dance fury, we have the raving frenzy of the
motor, or the passive peeping contagion of the television screen.
As we saw in the chapter on Totalitaria, mass delusion can be
induced. It is simply a question of organizing and manipulating
collective feelings in the proper way. If one can isolate the mass,
allow no free thinking, no free exchange, no outside corrective, and
can hypnotize the group daily with noises, with press and radio and
television, with fear and pseudo-enthusiasms, any delusion can be
instilled. People will begin to accept the most primitive and
inappropriate acts. Outside occurrences are usually the triggers that
unleash hidden hysterical and delusional complexes in people.
Collective madness justifies the repressed personal madness in each
individual. That is why it is so easy to sloganize people into the
mass hysteria of war. The outside enemy who is attacked by
vituperative slogans is merely the scapegoat and substitute for all
the anger and anxiety that lives inside the harassed people.
Delusions, carefully implanted, are difficult to correct.
Reasoning no longer has value; for the lower, more animal type of
thinking becomes deaf to any thought on a higher level. If one
reasons with a totalitarian who has been impregnated with official
clichés, he will sooner or later withdraw into his fortress of
collective totalitarian thinking. The mass delusion that gives him
his feelings of belonging, of greatness, of omnipotence, is dearer to
him than his personal awareness and understanding.
The lonely prisoner in a totalitarian prison camp is the more
easily compelled to surrender gradually to the collective thinking of
his guardians when part of his own infantile thinking has been
conditioned to give in to strong suggestive power. He has to
communicate with his guardians lest he be delivered to his own
private delusions. Only a few remain their true selves in that heroic battle.
The situation of our prisoners of war in Korea, who lived there
for months and years, cannot be studied without taking into account
the atmosphere of mass delusion. In a sphere filled with rumors
without an opportunity to verify the facts, the mind is ever on the
alert, but its observations are distorted. The process of mass
brainwashing, with continual propaganda, made it very difficult for
the individual to observe his comrades objectively. In such
surroundings, it is easy to make an innocent scapegoat for all the
suffering of the group -- and facts can easily be hallucinated in such
an atmosphere of mass contagion.
In one of the prison camps, I had to make a report about a man who
was exorcized and even attacked by the others because of his brute
homosexual behavior. During the investigation, no fact, no victim,
could be reported. Rumors there were plenty, expressing hatred toward
a lonely, sarcastic, unsocial being, who had aroused the latent homosexual
feelings of the other campers, thereby attacking their manliness.
No P.O.W. accused of collaboration with the enemy should be convicted
without a study having been made of the rumors rampant in his camp.
In totalitarian surroundings, hardly anyone keeps his thinking
free of contagion, and nearly everyone becomes, albeit temporarily,
the victim of delusion.
The Danger of Mental Contagion
Indeed, there is a continual danger of mental contagion. People
are in constant psychic exchange with one another. As a country, we
have to ask what dangerous mental pollution may come to us from the
other side of the border.
Let me make it crystal clear that I am far from insensitive to the
danger of totalitarian subversion and aggression with which we are
now faced. My own experiences with the Nazis made it painfully
obvious to me that these dangers must not be minimized. As a
psychologist, too, I am deeply aware of the contagious nature of
totalitarian propaganda and of the fact that free citizens in a free
country must be on their guard to protect themselves. But we must
learn to fight these dangers in democratic ways; and I am afraid that
too often in our fight against them we may take a leaf from the
totalitarian book. Let me cite but one example of this.
The Feinberg Law in New York State, enacted in order to protect
children against the dissemination of dangerous political propaganda,
is partly based on this concept of mental contagion. It aims. to
protect the schools against the subtle infiltration of subversive
ideas. It seems at first sight like a simple solution: you just stop,
subversion before it can affect the impressionable minds of our children.
But the fact remains that it presents all kinds of psychological,
difficulties. In our fear of being polluted, we create norms and,
schemes against which we measure the acceptability of unorthodox
ideas, and we forget that the presence of minority ideas, acceptable
or not, is one of the ways in which we protect ourselves against the
creeping growth of conformist majority thinking in us. U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Hugo Black, in his dissenting opinion on the Feinberg
Law* made this point:
This is another of those rapidly multiplying legislative
enactments which make it dangerous ... to think or say anything
except what a transient majority happens to approve at the moment.
Basically these laws rest on the belief that Government should
supervise and limit the flow of ideas into the minds of men. The
tendency of such governmental policy is to mold people into a common
intellectual pattern. Quite a different governmental policy rests on
the belief that Government should leave the mind and spirit of man
absolutely free. Such a governmental policy encourages varied
intellectual outlooks in the belief that the best views will prevail.
This policy of freedom is in my judgment embodied in the First
Amendment and made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth.
Because of this policy, public officials cannot be
constitutionally vested with powers to select the ideas people can
think about, censor the public views they can express, or choose the
persons or groups people can associate with. Public officials with
such powers are not public servants; they are public masters.
We cannot prevent one mental contagion through enforcing another.
The only way we can give man the strength to withstand mental
infection is through giving him the utmost freedom in the exchange of
ideas. People have to learn to ask questions without demanding that
they be answered immediately. The free man is the man who learns to
live with problems in the hope that they will be solved sometime
-- either in his own generation or the next. Man's curiosity
and inquisitiveness have to be stimulated. We have to fight man's
growing fear of thinking for himself, of being original, and of being
willing to fight for what he believes in. On the other hand, we also
have to learn to resist ideas. Governments may be overthrown not only
by physical violence, but also by mental violence, by suggestive and
menticidal penetration of young minds, by rigid conditioning,
regimentation, and prohibition of dissent.
The Explanation Delusion
One of the most coercive delusions is the explanation delusion,
the need to explain and interpret everything because the person has a
simple ideology in his pocket. Unwittingly the victim of this
delusion wraps the magic cloak of omniscience around himself, and
this provokes awe and submission in those men who have a strong need
for rational explanation of phenomena they do not understand. The
quack, for instance, with his gesture of omniscience pushes his
victim into a kind of nothingness so that he feels himself become
smaller and smaller in relation to the great mysteries of the world.
It is this compulsive need to be the wise guy and the magician who
knows all the answers that we so often find in the totalitarian
world, and nobody, your author included, is completely free from
seizing on these premature answers.
It is among the intelligentsia, and especially among those who
like to play with thoughts and concepts without really taking part in
the cultural endeavors of their epoch, that we often find the glib
compulsion to explain everything and to understand nothing. Their
retreat into intellectual isolation and ivory -- tower philosophy is a
source of much hostility and suspicion from those who receive the
stones of intellectualism instead of the bread of understanding. The
intelligentsia has a special role in our democratic world as teachers
of ideas, but every teaching is an emotional relation, a matter of
loving your students. It is a moving among them and taking part in
their doubts in order to share together the adventure of common
exploration of the unknown.
Paradoxically, we may say that we need the experience with the
totalitarians if only to discover a reflection of their rigidities in
our own democratic system.
The Liberation from Magic Thinking
In our Western civilization, the growth of the mass media of
communication has increased the influence of collective pressure on
both our prejudices and our unbiased thinking. We live in a world of
constant noise which captures our minds even when we are not aware of it.
Already we have in our society the problem of the lonely, unheard
voices. I am convinced that there are many wise men among us whose
voices and learning would help us to correct that part of our
thinking which is delusional. But their wise words are shouted down
by an excess of noise from elsewhere. In our society a man can not
simply communicate his wisdom and insight any more; in order to be
heard, he has to advertise and fortify it with megacyclic power and
official labels. An organization must stand behind him and must make
sure that he will be rightly timed so that there will be listeners to
receive his message. He must have an acknowledged label and official
diploma; otherwise his voice is lost. To correct mass delusion is one
of the most difficult tasks of democracy. Democracy pleads for
freedom of thought, and this means that it demands the right of all
men to test all forms of collective emotion and collective thinking.
This testing is possible only if constant personal and collective
self-criticism is encouraged.
Democracy must face this task of preserving mobility of thought in
order to free itself from blind fears and magic. The clash and mutual
impact of a variety of opinions which are characteristic of democracy
may not directly produce truth, but they prepare the way. At this
very moment the whole world dances around a delusion, around the
magic idea that the material and military power behind an argument
will bring us nearer to the truth, and nearer to safety. Yet, one
push of the button and the atomic missiles may lead us all to mutual
suicide.
In a world of warring and contrasting thoughts and delusions, the
solution lies in the delineation of frontiers, of awareness of mutual
limits. This agreement on what it is we disagree about is the first
step to understanding.
It is rather difficult to describe the onslaught on our minds made by
the intrusion of technical thinking. This is so because technology has such
contrasting influences. The influence can be a blessing, making us more
independent of threatening forces of nature; but at the same time the tool
and the machine can dominate us. This inner antinomy of technization we must
master-will we not otherwise be dragged down into the maelstrom of ever-increasing
technical development to final atomic catastrophe! The peculiar paradox of
technology lies in this: gradually the well-being of the machine (autocar, factory)
assumes greater importance and value than the wellbeing of man and mankind.
The growth of technology, of the manifold mechanical instruments in the services of
our fantasies, has thrown mankind back to an infantile dream of unlimited
power. There he sits, the little man, in his room with various gadgets around
him. Just pushing a button changes the world for him. What might! And what still
further power he envisions! Yet what mental danger.
The growth of technology may confuse man's struggle for mental maturity. The
practical application of science and tools originally were meant to give man
more security against outside physical forces. It safeguarded his inner world; it
freed time and energy for meditation, concentration, play, and creative thinking.
Gradually the very tools man made took possession of him and pushed him back into
serfdom instead of toward liberation. Man became drunk with technical skill; he became
a technology addict. Technology calls forth from people, unknown to themselves,
an infantile, servile attitude. We have nearly all become slaves of our cars.
Technical security paradoxically may increase cowardice. There is almost no challenge any
more to face the forces of nature outside us and the forces of instinct within
us. Because the very technical world has become for us that magical challenge which
nature originally afforded.
It is the very subservience to technology that constitutes an attack on thinking. The
child that is confronted from early youth with all modern devices and gadgets
of technology-the radio, the motor, the television set, the film-is unwittingly
conditioned to millions of associations, sounds, pictures, movements, in which he takes no
part. He has no need to think about them. They are too directly connected with his
senses. Modern technology teaches man to take for granted the world he is
looking at; he takes no time to retreat and reflect. Technology lures him on, dropping
him into its wheels and movements. No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no
conversation-the senses are continually overloaded with stimuli. The child doesn't
learn to question his world any more; the screen offers him answers-ready-made.
Even his books offer him no human encounter-nobody reads to him; the screen
people tell him their story in their way.
Technical knowledge forced upon him in this way makes no demand that he think
about what he sees and hears. Conversation is becoming a lost art. The machine
age rushes on, leaving no time for quiet reading and encounter with the creative arts.
We do see a counter-current, however, in the do-it-yourself movement. Here we probably
see a resurgence of the creative spirit and a challenge to the engineer who creates the robot.
In an over-technical world, body and mind no longer exist. Life becomes only a part
of a greater technical and chemical thought process. Mathematical equations intrude
into human relations. We learn, for example, through the doctrine of guilt by
association, the simple equation that the enemies of our enemies have to be our
friends and that the friends of our enemies have to be our enemies-as if only
simple addition of positive and negative signs exist by which to evaluate human beings.
The Creeping Coercion by Technology
Radio and television catch the mind directly, leaving children no time for calm,
dialectic conversation with their books. The view from the screen doesn't allow
for the freedom-arousing mutuality of communication and discussion. Conversation is
the lost art. These inventions steal time and steal self-awareness. What technology
gives with one hand-easiness and physical security-it takes away with the other. It
has taken away affectionate relationships between men. The depersonalized
Christmas card with its printed signature, the form letter, the very typewriter
are examples of mechanical proxies. Technical intrusion usurps human relationships, as
if people no longer had to give one another attention and love any more.
The bottle replaces Mother's breast, the nickel in the automat replaces Mother's
preparation of sandwiches. The impersonal machine replaces human gesture and mutuality.
Children educated in this way prefer to be alone, with fantasies to escape into
and gadgets to play with. Mechanization pushes them into mental withdrawal.
Technology suggests and creates the feeling of man's omnipotence on the one
hand, but on the other, the smallness of man, his weakness and inferiority compared
with the might of machinery. The power of man's creative mind is disguised behind
dreams of social machines and world mechanics. Mechanics in political manoeuvrings are
overestimated and go beyond reason. We use intelligence and counterintelligence, trickery
and political machines, forgetting the "emotional reasons" which underlie human brilliance
and stupidity. There exists a relationship between naive belief in technology only and a
naive belief in human intelligence, logic, and innocence that was part of the optimistic
liberalist feeling prevalent in the nineteenth century. We see in both beliefs the denial
of the irrational depths of the mind.
What is the ultimate result of technical progress? Does it drive people more and
more to the fear and despair brought on by a love-empty push-button world? Does it
create a megalomaniac happiness won by remote control of other people? Does it
deliver people to the unsatisfying emptiness of leisure hours filled with
boredom? Is the ultimate result living by proxy, experiencing the world only from the movie
or television screen, instead of living and labouring and creating one's own?
In cases of television addiction, I observed the following points:
The television fascination is a real addiction; that is to say, television can become
habit-forming, the influence of which cannot be stopped without active therapeutic interference.
It arouses precociously sexual and emotional turmoil, seducing children to peep
again and again, though at the same time they are confused about what they see.
It continuously provides satisfaction for aggressive fantasies (western scenes, crime
scenes) with subsequent guilt feelings since the child unconsciously tends to identify with
the criminal, despite all the heroic avengers.
It is a stealer of time.
Preoccupation with television prevents active inner creativity children and
adults merely sit and watch the pseudo-world of the screen instead of confronting their own
difficulties. If there is a conflict with parents who have no time for their youngsters,
the children surrender all the more willingly to the screen. The screen talks to them,
plays with them, takes them into a world of magic fantasies. For them, television
takes the place of a grownup and is forever patient. This the child translates into love.
As in all mass media, we have to be aware of the hypnotizing, seductive action of
any all-penetrating form of communication. People become fascinated even when
they do not want to look on. We must keep in mind that every step in personal
growth needs isolation, needs inner conversation and deliberation and a reviewing
with the self. Television hampers this process and prepares the mind more easily for
collectivization and cliché thinking. It persuades onlookers to think in terms of mass
values. It intrudes into family life and cuts off the more subtle interfamilial communication.
The world of tomorrow will witness a tremendous battle between technology and psychology.
It will be a fight of technology versus nature, of systematic conditioning versus
creative spontaneity. The veneration of the machine implies the turning of mechanical
knowledge into power, into push-button power. Mechanical instruments of
destruction such as the H-bomb have translated the primitive human urge for destruction
into large-scale scientific killing. Now, this destructive potential may become an easy tool
for any potentate crazy for power.
Driven by technology, our own world has become more interdependent, and through
our dependence on technical knowledge and devices, we ourselves are in danger of
delivering our people to the more brutal totalitarians. This is the actual dilemma of
our civilization. The machine that became a tool of human organization and made
possible the conquest of nature, has acquired a dictatorial position. It has forced
people into automatic responses, into rigid patterns and destructive habits.
The machine has aroused an ever-increasing yearning for speed, for frenzied
accomplishments. There exists a psychological relationship between speedomania
(frenzied swiftness) and ruthlessness. Behind the wheel in a fast car, a driver
becomes drunk with power. Here again we see the denial of the concept of natural,
steady growth. Ideas and methods need time to mature. The machine forces results
prematurely: evolution is turned into revolution of wheels. The machine
is the denial that progress has to grow within us before it can be realized outside
ourselves. Mechanization takes away the belief in mental struggle, the belief that
problem-solving needs time and repeated attempts. Without such beliefs, the platitude
will take over, the digest and the hasty memorandum. A mechanized world believes only
in condensation of problems and not in a continuous dialectic struggle between
man and the questions he construes.
One of the fallacies of modern technique is its direction toward greater efficiency.
With less energy, more has to be produced. This principle may be right for the
machine, but is not true for the human organism. In order to become strong and
to remain strong, man has to learn to overcome resistances, to face challenges, and to
test himself again and again. Luxury causes mental and physical atrophy.
The devaluation of the individual human brain, replacing it by mechanical computers,
also suggests the totalitarian system for which its citizens are compelled to become more
and more the servile tools. The inhuman "system" becomes the aim, a system that is the
product of technocracy and dehumanization and which may result in organized brutality and
the crushing of any personal morality. In a mechanical society a set of values are forcibly
imprinted on the unconscious mind, the way Pavlov conditioned his dogs.
Our brains then no longer need to serve us or develop the thinking process;
machines will do this for us. In technocracy, emphasis is on behaviour free of
emotions and creativity. We speak of "electric brains," forgetting that actually
creative minds are behind these brains and their frailties. For some engineers, minds
have become no more than electric lamps in a totalitarian laboratory. Between man
and his fellow man there has been interposed a tremendous, cold, paper force, a
nameless bureaucracy of rules and tools. Mechanization has brought into being
the mysterious "pimp" in human relations, the man in between, the mechanical
bureaucrat, who is powerful but impersonal. He has become a new source of magic fear.
In a technocratic world every moral problem gets repressed and is displaced by a technical
or statistical evaluation. The problems of sound and speedy mathematics serve to overthrow
ethics. If, for instance, one investigates the inner life of the guards of the concentration
camps and their inner troubles and tribulations, one understands why those jailers gave
so much thought to the technical problem of how to get the murdered corpses of their victims
out of the gas chambers as soon as possible. The words
"clean" and "practical" and "pure"
acquired for them a different dimension than our usual one. They thought in chemical
and statistical terms -and stuck to them-in order not to be aware of their deeper moral guilt.
The mind regarded as a computing machine is the result of compulsive
rationalization and generalization of the world. This has been so since the
time of early Greek thinkers. This concept implies denial or minimization of emotional
life and of the value of marginal experiences. In such a philosophy, spontaneity is never
understood-nor creativity and historical coincidence, nor the miracles of human
communication as revealed by telepathy. Technology based on this concept is cold
and without moral standards of living, without faith and "feeling at home" in our own
world. It continually stimulates new dissatisfaction and the production of new luxury
without knowing why. It stimulates greediness and laziness without emphasizing
restraint and the art of living. Indeed, technology as a goal instead of a means gives
us the fiction of simple equality instead of the continual pursuit of freedom, diversity,
and human dignity.
Technology disregards the fact that our scientific view of the world is only a gradual
correction of our mythical and pre-scientific view. Technology, once a product of courageous
fantasy and vision, threatens to kill that same vision, without which no human progress is
possible. The idol, technology, must become a tool again and not the omnipotent magician per
se, who drags us into the abyss.
The industrial development in our Western culture created a new problem, that of making
man more distant from the rhythm of nature. First industrial man was tied to factory and engine,
and then technological progress increased leisure time, bringing a new question: leisure for what?
The increased growth of time, and time space, and of the sizes of towns, and the reduction
of distance through the increased means of transport affected deeply the roots
of our feelings of belonging and security. The family-the atom of society-often
became disrupted, and sometimes even deteriorated. The raving frenzy of the family car on
Sunday replaced the quiet being together of family groups in mutual exchanges of affection and wisdom.
Only when man learns to be mentally independent of technology -that means when he
learns to do without-will he also learn not to be overwhelmed and swept away by
it. People have to become lonely Robinson Crusoe's first, before they can really use and
appreciate the advantages of technology.
Our education has to learn to present simple, natural challenges and needs to the child in
order to immunize him against the paralyzing and lazy-making tendencies of our technicized epoch.
The Paradox of Technology
Paradoxically enough, technical security may increase cowardice. The technical world we
ourselves have created has replaced the very real challenge which nature originally
afforded man's imagination, and man is no longer compelled to face the forces
of nature outside himself and the forces of instinct within him. Our luxurious habits
and complicated civilization have a tendency to appeal more to our mental passivity
than to our spiritual alertness. Mentally passive people, without basic morals and philosophy,
are easily lured into political adventures which are in conflict with the ethics of a free,
democratic society.
The assembly line alienates man from his work, from the product of his own labour.
No longer does man produce the things man needs; the machine produces for him.
Engineers and scientists tell us that in the near future automation-running
factories without human help-will become a reality, and human labour and the human being
himself will become almost completely superfluous. How can man have self-esteem
when he becomes the most expendable part of his world? The ethical and moral
values which are the foundation of the democratic society are based on the view that
human life and human welfare are the earth's greatest good. But in a society in
which the machine takes over completely, all our traditional values can be destroyed.
In venerating the machine, we denigrate ourselves; we begin to believe that might
makes right, that the human being has no intrinsic worth, and that life itself
is only a part of a greater technical and chemical thought process.
Man's progressive retreat toward a mechanized, push-button world is best illustrated by
his love for automobiles and other machines. The moment he can retreat to his car seat and
direct the world by remote control, he dreams an old, long-forgotten childhood dream of tremendous
omnipotence. Man's servility to his automobile and other machines takes
something away from his individuality. We are hypnotized by the idea of remote control. The
wheels and the push-buttons give us a false sense of freedom. Yet, at the same time,
the creative part of man resists the machine's cold, mechanical intrusion into his inner freedom.
As I drive, every time I pass something beautiful along the road, be it an exhilarating view,
a museum, a river, a tall tree, at that very moment a kind of tense conflict is aroused in me. Shall I
stop the car and drink in the beauty around me or shall I give in to my machine and keep racing along?
For the psychologist and biologist such behaviour raises important questions. How
will it end? Will man's tendency to become more and more an immobile technological
embryo finally get the better of him and his civilization? The Dutch anatomist Bolk -
one of my teachers-long ago described the regressive retardation in growth
characteristic of human beings as compared to the rapid development of the
higher primates. As a result of the fetalization and anatomical retardation of man, he
acquired his erect posture, the use of his grasping and verifying hands, the
possibility of speech. This long youth made it possible for him to learn, and
to build up his own thought world.
Since the Renaissance and the advent of modern science, the scientist himself has
been forced to retreat more and more to his technological womb-his laboratory,
his study, his armchair. He has done this for the sake of greater intellectual
concentration, but as a result he gradually became more isolated from living people -
unobtrusively. Only in the last decades has the scientist begun to come in contact
with social problems more and more, partly forced to do so by the growth of social science.
From his magic corner, the scientist has learned how to control the world with his inventions
and mental dictates. Increasingly the population has been seduced by the idea of remote control.
The arsenal of buttons and gadgets leads us into the magic dream world of omnipotent power.
Our technical civilization gives us greater ease, but it is challenge and uneasiness that make
for character and strength.
The repeated outlet in work, through which we not only sublimate our aggressions but
also refine and recondition our instinctual aims, is grossly endangered by technical
automatization. There exists an intimate relation between the rhythm of work
and the rhythm of creation. In a world of mere leisure and no work discipline, our
unleashed instincts would gain again. It is the alternating rhythm of work and leisure
time that refines our enjoyment of leisure.
A conference in New Haven sponsored by the Society for Applied Anthropology on
the effects of automation on the workers* was told that the chief complaint of
the workers was that increasing mental tension supplanted muscular fatigue. The
strain of watching and controlling machines makes man jumpy, he develops gradually the
feeling that the machine controls him instead of he. [* The New York Times, December 29, 1955]
Several of my patients looked at machines as something alive, dangerously alive because
machines had no love or other feelings for the man who used them.
The dangerous paradox in the boost of living standards is that in promoting ease,
it promotes idleness, and laziness. If the mind is not prepared to fill leisure
time with new challenges and new endeavours, new initiative and new activities, the mind
falls asleep and becomes an automaton. The god Automation devours its own children. It can
make highly specialized primitives out of us.
Just as we are gradually replacing human labour by machines, so we are gradually replacing
the human brain by mechanical computers, and thus increasing man's sense of
unworthiness. We begin to picture the mind itself as a computing machine, as a
set of electrochemical impulses and actions. The brain is an organ of the body;
its structure and its actions can be studied and examined. But the mind is a
very different thing. It is not merely the sum of the physiological processes
in the brain; it is the unique, creative aspect of the human personality.
Unless we watch ourselves, unless we become more aware
of the serious problems our technology has brought us, our entire
society could turn into a kind of superautomatized state. Any breakdown
of moral awareness and of the individual's sense of his own worth makes all of
us more vulnerable to mental coercion.
Nazi Germany gave us the frightful example of the complete breakdown of all moral
evaluations. In the S. S. society, racial persecution and murder became a kind of moral rule.
All this may sound extreme. But the fact remains that any influence-overt or concealed,
well- or ill-intentioned-which reduces our alertness, our capacity to face reality, our desire
to live as active, acting individuals, to assume responsibility and to face up to danger, takes
from us some part of our essential human-ness, the quality in us which strives toward freedom
and democratic maturity.
The enforced mental intervention practiced by the totalitarians is deliberate and politically
inspired, but mental intervention is a serious danger even when its purpose is non-political.
Any influence which tends to rob man of his free mind can reduce him to robotism.
Any influence which destroys the individual can destroy the whole society.
Since social life has become more and more complicated, a new group of mediators between
man and his goals has developed. It is no longer the ancient priest who mediates between man
and his gods, between man and the powers beyond him, but a group of administrators have, in part,
taken over the job of intervening between man and his government. There are today mediators between
man and his bosses, between artist and public, between farmer and market, mediators between everything.
The administrative mind is born, often dominating man's social behaviour and man's manifold contacts,
leading him into complicated actions and compulsions far beyond spontaneous behaviour.
All these ties, the rigid bureaucratic ones and the useful administrative ones,
have their influence on human behaviour and often may befog man's free
thinking. I have a special reason for developing this theme in a book on the
rape of the mind because this problem of mediation between man and his actions and
thoughts exists in our form of democracy as well as in the totalitarian countries. Both
halves of the world are grappling with the involved problem of how to administer themselves.
The mere technique of governing ourselves and our world can become a threat to free human
development-and this may be independent of the ideology the administration adheres to. We
have not the same freedom to choose the official men who govern us that we have to select
our favourite shop or our doctor. As long as the official man is in charge, we are in his bureaucratic power.
The Administrative Mind
Administrators today cannot handle their jobs adequately within the limits of the simple
knowledge of people and nations that served governments in former years. If our leaders can
not take into account the irrational forces in themselves and in other men and nations, they may
easily be swept off into the maelstrom of mass emotions. If they cannot learn to recognize that
their private or official conduct often reflects their prejudices and irrationalities, they will
not be able to cope with the often unexpected prejudices of others. If they are, for instance,
not sensitive to the paradoxical strategy hidden behind the misleading Aesopian language
of totalitarians, they will not be able to counter the cold war. Psychological knowledge has become
a must in our era of confused human relations.
Do our people in office, for instance, understand fully the provocative totalitarian
strategy of slandering and wild accusation, and are they able to handle it adequately?
Do they realize that the mere official denial never has as strong an appeal and impact as
the initial accusation, and, in fact, usually fits into the accuser's strategy? Apparently
they do not, for many still use simple official denial as a defense against the totalitarian
strategy of accusation, when, in fact, only repeated exposure and ridicule of the very root
of this technique can defeat it.
Do they realize the implications of the strategy of raising sham problems? The totalitarian
and the demagogue often use this confusing technique. By launching emotional inquiries and investigations
and asking for attention for quasi problems, they seek to divert attention from their real aims.
Do they understand, for instance, what lies behind the technique of
exploiting the chivalry and generosity of the public and blackmailing the pity of the world? The
strategy of complaining and calling for justice is a well-known mental defense used
by neurotic individuals to arouse guilt feelings in others and to cover up their own
hidden aggressiveness. The exploitation of pity and the overt declaration of one's
own purity and honest innocence is a familiar trick when it is used by individuals, but
we are less likely to recognize it when it is used in international politics.
Do our administrators realize that even the romantic ideals of brotherly love and
world peace can be used to cover up aggressive designs? After the First World War,
we heard many inspiring idealistic catchwords from the defeated central European
countries. Their press and their leaders described in great detail, for all the world to
know, the "inner purification through suffering" of the defeated peoples. Thus these
countries appealed to the conscience and compassion of the whole world. But it was
a questionable conversion. Every therapist knows that those who talk a great deal
about their inner change and recovery have for the most part not changed at all. The
fine phrases are so often contradicted by actions. Politicians must recognize that this
can be as true for nations as it is for individuals. Let us not forget that nations don't
talk. Official words are made up by representatives with unofficial and mostly unknown inner motivations.
Administrators, diplomats, and politicians form the nerve centres and paths of communication
between peoples and nations. The tensions in the diplomatic regions represent the political tensions
in the world. But they represent other things, too. The political profession is
subject to special kinds of nervous tensions. The moment the administrator
arrives at a top level, an inner change may take place. From then on, he can
identify with those who formerly led him. The very fact of being in office and
being a leader may change a man's mind in many ways. Often he removes himself more and more
from human problems and from the people he represents and thinks only in terms of national
strategy, official ideology, and the aims of power politics. Or childhood ambitions, long
frustrated, are aroused. He may become the victim of his inflated personal ambitions and his
individual notion of responsibility, and, as a consequence, lose control of his own personality.
Leading statesmen, burdened by responsibilities, have to become more careful; indeed,
they often have to express themselves in noncommittal language. Yet, they are not aware that
such language gradually may reform their way of thinking. Finally, they may think they possess
a priority on double talk.
Another difficulty is related to a rather general fear of success. Once a high ambition
is reached, a long-hidden fear from childhood may awake, a fear related to an early competition
with the father and with the siblings. From this time on, the envy and hostility of those bypassed
may start to injure the statesman's life.
The danger of assuming any leadership-even of any form of self-assertion-is that it
provokes resistance and hostility, retaliation and punishment. The administrator
knows himself to be in the public eye; he feels exposed to criticism and political
attack. If he didn't have it before, from now on he has to develop a defensive facade
in order to court the public and the voters. The result may be that the former meek
democrat, the believer in government by the people, suddenly takes on the stature of
an authoritarian personality. He is guided by his frustrated infantile fantasy of leadership.
The administrative "brain-thrusters," with all their inner problems, nevertheless make history
for us. Our minds are deeply affected by their minds. At the same time, wethe great
public-influence them, and our civilized impulses may direct them to find the
good road, just as our primitive drives and influences may urge them on to push
us all into catastrophe. The intrusion of the administrative mind becomes even more
precarious when the authorities in power follow patterns of procedure not controlled by
court and the law. In such cases, prejudice and arbitrariness can easily develop as we
have experienced with many of our security regulations. Official secrecy is a token of
magic power; the more hush-hush there is in the world, the less democratic control
and the greater the fear of treachery.
It should be, technically, quite simple to administer any group or nation-or even
the whole world. Mankind certainly knows enough to do this job. We know a great
deal about history, sociology, and the science of human relations and
government, at least enough not to repeat the mistakes from history. We live in
a world of technical and economic abundance. But we have not yet learned to
apply what we know or to organize the resources of the world.
Somewhere something has gone wrong, and things have gotten out of hand. The will
of nations and people to understand one another seems to be paralyzed, and mutual
fear and suspicion have been built up by the fantasies of mythical ideologies warring
against one another. And tomorrow only the tails of the fighting dogs may remain.
During the Second World War, I was sent as an official representative of the
Netherlands government to an international meeting on welfare and war relief. Here I
became even more aware of the extent to which private passions can mould the way
we handle public problems.
All of us at the conference had cold, expressionless faces which implied a sharp,
unbiased form of thinking, but our unconscious minds were touched by other
problems. Welfare is often much more a subject of hate than of love and sympathy.
One's pride and prestige can play a much greater role than pity for the poor victim.
The displaced persons and the people of the devastated and underdeveloped
countries are very much aware of this fact. They do not like the role in which fate has
cast them; they have to play the double role of the eternal victim who is not only the
victim of politics and war, but also of the often arrogant provider of charity. As a
matter of fact, the representative at the receiving end of the deal resented any offer
made to his country. Everybody wants to be himself the generous "uncle from America."
The Ailments of Those in Public Office
In the future, as our psychological understanding grows, leading politicians will have
to be better educated in the principles of modern psychology. Just as a soldier must
know how to handle his physical weapons, so the politician must know how to face
and handle the mental strategy of human relationships and diplomacy. He will have
to become aware of the pitfalls in all human communication and the frailties of his own mind.
Bodily disease and neurotic development can have all kinds of effects on those in office. Under
their influence, some men are drawn into a life of continuous resentment, as if,
in their political and official activities, they were fighting out their infantile
struggles against devils, anxieties, and inner guilt. Others are purified by their sufferings
and become wiser and more humane than they were.
The modern science of psychosomatic medicine males it clear that constant
worrying, continual competition, repressed aggressions, the will to dominate and to
govern others, the fear of responsibility, the burden of one's chosen profession are
among the many factors that influence body and mind to form a pattern of bodily
reactions. These reactions may actually hamper our ability to solve our problems by
incapacitating us physically. Becoming a chosen statesman in our era of increased
human competition and increased dependence on the masses of voters builds up in
officeholders qualities that are nearly psychopathic, that can cripple the body or the
mind or both at a time when we need the healthiest and soundest leaders. The role
the latent psychosis or character disorder plays in many a leading personality cannot
be emphasized enough. Not long ago I treated the leader of a huge humanitarian
association, who was accorded much esteem by his fellow citizens, but who was a
sick, psychopathic tyrant in his own family circle. His children trembled at the sight of
him and developed-of course-a cynical attitude about all idealism and humanitarianism.
I suspect that many times this pathology is influenced by the way we select our
leaders. Public preference is often directed toward strong, defensive, overcompensated qualities of
character which show up well at public functions. The outer facade is too much seen; we are not able
to judge the inner core.
In 1949, Burnett Hershey wrote an article which posed the question, Is our fate in the
hands of sick men? The article was written after the tragic death of James Forrestal,
the American Secretary of Defense, who committed suicide under the influence of
despair and delusions of persecution. It describes in some detail the psychosomatic
afflictions of various statesmen. Hershey quotes General George C. Marshall's
words to the Overseas Press Club: "Stomach ulcers have a strange effect on the
history of our times. In Washington I had to contend with, among other things, the
ulcers of Bedell Smith in Moscow and the ulcers of Bob Lovett and Dean Acheson in
Washington." The author goes on to point out that Stalin, Sir Stafford Cripps, Warren
Austin, and Vishinsky also suffered from psychosomatic ailments, as does Clement Attlee.
All of us have heard of the repeated fainting spells of the Iranian ex-Premier,
Mossadegh, the man who might, in a spell of semi-consciousness, have changed the balance
of power in the Middle East. The much-debated and headlined Senator McCarthy
is another case in point. At the height of his struggle for headlines, he had a
stomach condition that required an exploratory operation, bursitis, frequent
sinus headaches and signs of exhaustion-and all of these are known as psychosomatic
involvements resulting from extreme tension.
We have, too, many cheering examples of how physical disability and neurotic
development can mature and strengthen the personality. Perhaps the brightest
example of the relationship between body and profession is the late Franklin D.
Roosevelt, whose political career was inconspicuous until he was stricken by
poliomyelitis. His years of physical suffering became years of mental ripening.
His conquest of pain and disease changed his attitude toward his own problems and
also toward the problems of the world. His growth of empathy and humility, his
increase in strategic intuition, and his superior knowledge of the balance of forces in
his country must be partly attributed to his inner mental growth during his disease.
Roosevelt will always be a guiding example of how the mind is able to overcome the
physical limitations of the body, how the mind grows out beyond it when a man is
willing to look inside and fight out the conflicts within himself.
The Conference of Unconscious Minds
Let me return for a moment to the wartime conference on welfare I mentioned earlier
and tell you something more about it. The conference chairman did not feel well;
every decision was as painful for him as his ulcer. He hemmed and hawed and
refused to accept the responsibility the position placed on him. The representative of
one of the eastern European countries was an attractive woman but a misanthrope.
Every word she spoke was colored by suspicion, and when a representative from
one of the Latin countries attempted a mild flirtation with her, she showed her
confusion by arguing furiously against every one of his constructive proposals.
We also had a hesitant, old-school, professional politician in our midst. Though
he couched his speech in gentle, polite words, he spoke only to destroy every proposal
that was not initiated by his faction. When he had to listen-and this he did not like to
do at all-he busied himself constantly with his tie or his eyeglasses, always polishing himself.
In a crowded corner sat an enthusiastic young man who longed to do something
important. He wanted to act, he wanted to see something accomplished, and his excitement
was regarded by the others with sophisticated disdain. He did not know the rules of conference play.
The sessions were boring. The delegates spoke endlessly and pointlessly. But one day
the entire conference was gripped by a kind of uncontrollable fury. Every delegate
tried to destroy all his colleagues. Someone had unexpectedly used the word "traitor"
to designate a certain guerrilla group fighting in Europe, and the smooth discussion was
suddenly transformed into a collision of the insurgent passions that had long smouldered
behind suave masks.
What agitation was aroused! What rage, what anger! But it was only temporary. It
died down; our sophisticated conference spirit reasserted itself, and we settled down
to do no work. The chairman made a polite summarizing speech, and we disbanded.
The charitable work we planned so carefully is still undone, and many years have passed.
With dogged optimism, political leaders still convene to construct a new peace for the
world. We know that many of them will suffer again from ulcers of the stomach, but what
do we know of their deeper hidden wishes and resentments?
Although I am afraid that the time is still far away when we shall subject our official
representatives and administrators to psychological education and selection, we
must become more aware of the many unconscious factors which influence them and us.
Do political leaders try to understand one another and the groups they represent,
or are they only measuring the power of their political machines, their words,
and their votes? Are they guided by private resentments and ambitions or by the
honest wish to serve the community and its ideals?
Are our administrators mentally well equipped to do their tasks? If not, how could
psychological insight gradually improve their equipment?
How many of them are conscious of the extent of their private frustrations? Are
their destructive impulses rationalized away under the guise of political allegiance?
How do illness, disease, and neurosis collide in their deliberations? Watch how, in any
debate, polite speeches are interrupted by sudden diatribes.
To what degree do childhood rearing, fixed ideas, or pathological ambitions of administrators
influence the destiny of a town or nation?
We recognize that idealistic platitudes may cover inadequate proposals, and we tend to accept this
as the well-worn play of political strategy and diplomacy. But far worse than this overt policy
of evasion is the hidden political conference and discussion between the unconscious minds and
passions of politicians.
How many politicians and their followers are aware of this lurking undercurrent which often
wields a stronger influence than overt action? How does the personal element between our administrators
obstruct our own mental freedom, and what is the role of the psychopathic element
in some of our leaders?
It is important for us to ask these questions. For the development of science has
taught us that, even when it is impossible to find immediate satisfactory solutions,
posing the right question helps to bring clarity to the future. It prepares the way for a solution.
The Bureaucratic Mind
In a state where terror is used to keep the people in line, the administrative machine
may become the exclusive property and tool of the dictator. The development of a
kind of bureaucratic absolutism is not limited, however, to totalitarian countries. A
mild form of professional absolutism is evident in every country in the mediating
class of civil servants who bridge the gap between man and his rulers. Such a
bureaucracy may be used to help or to harm the citizens it should serve.
It is important to realize that a peculiar, silent form of battle goes on in all of
the countries of the world-under every form of government-a battle between the common man
and the government apparatus he himself has created. In many places we can see that this
governing tool, which was originally meant to serve and assist man, has gradually obtained
more power than it was intended to have.
Is Saint Bureaucratus a devil who takes possession of a man as soon as he is given
governmental responsibility? Are administrators infected with a desire to create a
sham order, to manipulate others from behind their green steel desks?
Governmental techniques are no different from any other psychological strategy; the
deadening hold of regimentation can take mental possession of those dedicated to it,
if they are not alert. And this is the intrinsic danger of the various agencies that
mediate between the common man and his government. It is a tragic aspect of life
that man has to place another fallible man between himself and the attainment of his
highest ideals.
Which human failings will manifest themselves most readily in the administrative
machine? Lust for power, automatism, and mental rigidity-all these breed suspicion
and intrigue. Being a high civil servant subjects man to a dangerous temptation,
simply because he is a part of the ruling apparatus. He finds himself caught in the
strategy complex. The magic of becoming an executive and a strategist provokes
long-repressed feelings of omnipotence. A strategist feels like a chess player. He
wants to manipulate the world by remote control. Now he can keep others waiting, as
he was forced to wait himself in his salad days, and thus he can feel himself
superior. He can entrench himself behind his official regulations and responsibilities.
At the same time he must continually convince others of his indispensability because
he is loath to vacate his seat.
As a defense against his relative unimportance, he has to expand his staff, increasing his
bureaucratic apparatus. In order to become a V.I.P. one needs a big office. Each
new staff member requests new secretaries and new typewriters. Everything
begins to get out of hand, but everything must be controlled; new and better
files must be installed, new conferences called, and new committees set up. The
staff-interaction committee talks for days on end. New supervisors are created to
supervise the old supervisors and to keep the whole group in a state of infantile
servility. And what was formerly done by one man is now done by an entire staff.
Finally, the bureaucratic tension becomes too great and the managerial despotic urge
looks for rest in a nervous breakdown.
This creeping totalitarianism of the desk and file goes on nearly everywhere in the world.
As soon as civil servants can no longer talk humanely and genially but write down
everything in black and white and keep long minutes in overflowing files, the battle for administrative power
has begun. Compulsive order, red tape, and regulation become more important than
freedom and justice, and in the meantime suspicion between management, employees, and subjects increases.
Written and printed documents and reports have become dangerous objects in the world. After
a conversation, even when there are harsh words, inanities are soon forgotten. But
on paper these words are perpetuated and can become part of a system of growing suspicion.
Many people become administrators in public affairs out of idealistic feelings of
service and avocation. Others try to escape the adventure of life by becoming part of
the civil service corps. Such service assures them a settled income, regular
promotion, and a sense of job security. It is very alluring, this feeling of security. The
smooth automatism and polished rigidity of the red-tape world is very attractive to
certain types of men, but it may devitalize others who still believe in challenge and spontaneity.
The burning psychological question is whether man will eventually master his
institutions so that these will serve him and not rule him. In totalitarian countries one
is not permitted to see the humour of one's own shortcomings. The system, the red
tape, and the manifold files become more important than the poor being lost in his
chair behind a huge desk, looking much too important for his mental bearings.
The art of being a leading administrator, of being a genuine representative of the people
is a difficult one, requiring multiple empathy and identification with other people and their motivations.
Diplomats and politicians still believe in verbal persuasion and argumentative tactics.
It is a very old and alluring game, this strategy of political manoeuvring with official
slogans and catchwords the subtlety of bypassing the truth in the service of partisanship, of giving
faulty emphasis, the skill of dancing around selected arguments to arrive at personal propagandistic
aims or party aims. Sooner or later nearly all politicians become infected with the bug. Under
the burden of their responsibilities, they give in to the desire to play the game of diplomacy. They
start to compromise in their thinking, to bend backwards and to be circumspect, lest their
remarks be criticized by the higher echelons. Or they fall back into infantile feelings
of magic omnipotence. They want to have their fingers in every pie-to the left and to the right.
All these are dangerous mental streaks of every human being which can develop
more easily in politicians and administrators because of the growing impact of
modern governmental techniques and their threat to free expression. When a man
gets entangled in strategical and political talk, something changes in his attitude. He
is no longer straightforward; he doesn't express and communicate what he thinks,
but he worries about what others are thinking about him behind their facades.
He becomes too prudent and starts to build all kinds of mental defences and justifications
around himself. In short, he learns to assume the strategic attitude. Forget
spontaneity, deny enthusiasm; don't demand inner honesty of yourself or others,
never reveal yourself, never expose yourself, play the strategist. Be careful
and use more buts and howevers. Never commit yourself.
I remember a leader of the opposition who became completely confused and nearly
collapsed when, after a long time out of office, his party won an election and he had
to assume governmental responsibility. From an aggressive, outspoken critic, he became a
hesitating, insinuating neurotic, playing the tactful strategist, having no real initiative.
Some politicians are puppets, spokesmen of their bosses. Some are the cavalier jugglers
of words, who transfer human aggressions into slogans. There are also the loudmouthed
trumpeters of doom, who resort to the argument of panic. Modern politics is
carried out with obsolete rules of conversation, communication, and discussion;
and too few politicians are aware of the semantic pitfalls and emotional dishonesties of the
word tools they must use to convince others.
Yet mutual understanding can become a basis of political strategy. It is not power politics
with verbal deceit and catchwords that is needed but mental probing to find ways
in which proposals and suggestions may cut through the resistance of those with different
opinions and motivations.
Politicians too often forget that their fight for administrative power may become a
form of psychological warfare against the integrity of the minds of those who are
compelled to listen. The repetitious mutual calumny, so often used during elections,
gradually undermines the democratic system and leads to the urge for authoritarian
control. The strategic rumours and suspicions the politicians sow are an attack on human integrity.
When the citizenry no longer has confidence in its leaders, it looks for the man with
brute power to be its leader. Where is the politician who is willing to admit that his
opponent is at least as capable as he, and perhaps even more capable than he is?
In the free admission of equality of ability and of the wisdom of his opponent lies the
politician's chance for cooperation. For true cooperation can only be brought about
by mutual empathy and sympathy and the understanding of human faults.
In April, 1951, a group of psychologists, psychoanalysts, and social scientists affiliated with
the United Nations, the World Federation of Mental Health, UNESCO, and the World Health Organization
were guests of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation in New York. This was a meeting at which
these problems of government, and the impact of governmental systems, were
explored and discussed and published later in a report. These experts have become more and more
aware of the need for psychological education and selection of government administrators.
Should our administrators be psychoanalyzed? This nearly utopian question does
not predicate an immediate rush for psychological training for politicians and
administrators, but it does point toward a future period when practical intelligence
and sound psychological knowledge will guide man in the various aspects of his life.
Education will be more fully permeated with dependable psychological knowledge.
Psychology and psychoanalysis are still young sciences, but many of our present-day
politicians could already profit by them. Through gain in self-insight, they would
become more secure in the strategy of world guidance. They would assume more
responsibility-not only for their successes, but also for their failures. And they would
take more responsibility, with fewer inner qualms, for the good and welfare of all.
At this very moment our failure to solve the problems of governmental inefficiency
and bureaucratic intrusion into human actions may hamper the citizen's mind in
its development. Man's need to conform is in constant battle with man's need to
go out on his own. The tie-up of our spontaneous freethinking with the
unadventurous administrative mind has to be studied and the problem it presents
solved by the psychology of the future.
THE CONFUSING INFLUENCE OF THE PROBLEM OF TREASON AND LOYALTY
As soon as "treason" is mentioned, something in man's soul is stirred. Anger
and scorn, suspicion and anxiety are aroused, and people want to avoid the subject. The social reaction
toward a traitor-even before we are certain that the accusation is deserved is
very spectacular. Former friends of a man accused as a "traitor" retreat and withdraw from this
token of evil. In every trial of traitors we feel inwardly, personally accused and guilty.
This is one of the reasons that treason trials make such deep impressions and provoke the most
confusing discussions. Dictators can use such trials to cast a spell on the public. In a
book on mental coercion and the rape of the mind, an investigation of the problem of treason
and loyalty is needed.
The Involuntary Traitor
Self-betrayal comes out of all human pores. SIGMUND FREUD
In my home town in Holland there was a little barbershop quite near the government
buildings. It was owned by a small man with a gray French beard. Through the years
he had served many of the country's most important men. Diplomats and cabinet
ministers, proud generals and aggressive leaders of the opposition they all wanted
his service. The little barber was always very courteous and agreeable, eager to
please his clients. He danced with prim, servile gestures around them while curling
their hair and looking after their moustaches. As he worked, he would ask his
distinguished clients polite questions: "What is His Excellency So-and-So going to
say about this bill?" "How does the Minister of State feel about that one?" He was not
really interested in politics at all, but the little barber knew that his clients were
flattered by such questions.
And then one day a puffy, beribboned German general
walked in and settled himself in the barber's chair-the Netherlands had been invaded and occupied by
the Nazi hordes. Of course, our barber knew this, and he had even managed to hate the
invaders for a few days. But he was innately a genteel soul, and he lathered the
general's face himself and took care not to soil his uniform. On succeeding days,
others of these strangely uniformed men appeared in the shop, and the little barber
served them all well. The military men were followed by the Brown Shirts and then
the Green Shirts of the Gestapo. The leather of the barber's chair was scuffed by the
huge black boots. But the little barber did not complain, and soon the occupiers
considered his haircut the most fashionable and best that could be obtained in the entire city.
Our barber was not too conscious of his increasing official importance. He danced attendance
on his new clients with as much courtesy as he had showed the diplomats of the
old days. He was sorry that his old acquaintances had gradually disappeared. But
in the past his work had been seasonal; when parliament was not in session, his
shop had been empty. Now his business flourished all the time. The Germans and
the collaborators liked the little barbershop, the perfume, the barber's skill.
Indeed, our amiable friend was well liked by the uniformed oppressors. They were, after all,
thoroughly unused to friendly treatment; the barber's behaviour was a welcome change from the contempt
with which most of the Dutch people-those stupid, stubborn resisters-regarded them.
One day the barber was invited to buy a membership card in a newly formed
organization of collaborators. Our friend responded to this request as he would have
to any other appeal for charity. He did not like to give, but he thought of welfare as a
special tax on business, and so he resigned himself to paying as a petty, necessary
annoyance. Some of his old acquaintances warned him of the consequences; he
would be accused of collaboration and treason. But he pacified them by saying, "I
am a barber, and I live as a barber. I have absolutely no interest in politics. I only
want to serve my clients."
When, after the bitter years of struggle and oppression, liberation came, our friend became
officially known as a traitor and a collaborator. When the black-booted, uniformed
supermen were thrown out, their collaborating friends were imprisoned, the
barber among them. After he had served a part of his sentence, a wise and forgiving
judge sent our barber back to his little shop. The first excitement of liberation
had passed, and people were becoming more willing to forgive those who had been collaborators
because they had been weak-hearted.
Our story is by no means finished. The barber came
back from prison a beaten man. He had been in jail for three months; he
still could not understand what had happened to him. He brooded constantly over
his shameful days in jail. An injustice had been done him. He had served his
fellow men as a well-behaved, virtuous citizen should, and he had been treated
like a criminal. He felt self-righteous, abused,
insulted, maltreated and misunderstood. After all, he had only wanted to be kind and helpful.
He was a barber-nothing more.
The barber could not rid himself of his bitterness and
resentment. None of his former friends came to cheer him up or to
sympathize with him. His old clients did not return.
His sadness and depression increased daily and in a few months he took his own
life. And so ended the adventures of a little barber who had
been completely unaware of his collaboration and his treachery.
I knew this man. I do not despise him-not at all. I am sure there were many such pitiful
collaborators. I wonder, though, why the little barber was so unaware. Was it stupidity?
Had his apparent kindness always covered up a resentment
against his fellow men? Was he misled by an insidious wave of suggestion
stronger than his mental capacity to resist? We will never know.
This tragedy, caused perhaps by unawareness, perhaps by the inability to choose between
conflicting loyalties, stimulated me to investigate the problem of the traitor. I had ample
opportunity to study this question, both through my experiences with the Dutch underground during
the Nazi occupation, and when I was imprisoned in a Vichy detention camp. My first official
analysis was made in 1943, when the Dutch government asked me to prepare a psychological report
on disloyal Dutch soldiers and citizens being held in detention on the Isle of Man.
I arrived at the prison after a hazardous, stormy journey in a small airplane. The
prisoners were a sorry lot. I had anticipated hostility, but I had not expected to find so
many weaklings, consumed by bitterness and anger. Some of them were typical of
the passive, egotistic, psychopathic personality, whose motto seems to be: "Let the
world go to hell! I will never conform." Others seemed to be the victims of an
unbearable inner struggle-a conflict between their desire to belong to the stronger
group and their resistance to this desire, a resistance which only increased their
bitterness and antagonism.
This was a situation which proved to me again that there are certain times when logic and
discussion are no help at all. We tried over and over again to convince the semi-collaborators
that they should join with us in the fight against the Nazis, but they only retreated further
behind their private grudges. They even refused the cigarettes I offered them.
Bad as the trip to the prison had been, the trip back was even worse. The little plane was
pushed off course by strong winds. I was depressed and disgusted by my experiences, and when we
finally arrived in England, both the pilot and I were sick. I had many opportunities thereafter
to study spies, traitors, and subversives. My last official wartime investigation took me to a
prison camp in Surinam, Dutch Guinea, where I made a collective report on all the inhabitants
of the prison camp. In many of them, I could discern neurotic and even psychotic traits.
But I have found that perhaps the best understanding of the problem of treason has come to me
from my psychiatric work with neurotic patients who have to face a daily struggle with the little
betrayals of everyday life, with their own self-betrayal, and with their ambivalent feelings toward
those they should love.
The Concept of Treason
Before looking into the subject further, let us make an enquiry into the meaning of the
word "treason." It is, after all, used in a confusing variety of
senses. The word "treason" has many social and political
implications, and the customs, habits, and mores
of the group in which it is used affect and color its meaning.
The word itself is derived from the Latin tradere or
transdare, to deliver wrongfully, to betray, to give
something across, to give loyalty and secrets away. But
from this root, the word has acquired a variety of meanings.
In the first place, it has a purely emotional, individual meaning related to feelings
of deprivation and injustice. The infant often experiences all that compels him out of his
state of bliss and dependency-which means the very act of growing up-as a betrayal, and sees
treason in what he considers rejection by his parents. The person who retains these infantile
feelings in his adult life may react to every fancied slight or rejection as to an act of treason or betrayal.
Lack of solidarity with the family or clan-with the in-group not conforming to its rituals
and taboos has often been interpreted by the group as treason, treason through
dissent. In this sense, the word implies a primitive moral evaluation; disgust and
contempt are associated with it. Treason indicates something deeply emotional,
something taboo, something different or strange, like allegiance to an alien ideology,
a breach of traditions, or the simple fact of being a foreigner. Rejection of the norms
and rules of the community, being one's own judge of morality and ethics, is often considered treasonable.
Utter rejection of the traditions of one's fatherland is an extreme. Often simple nonconformity may
be considered treasonable, too. Indeed, in Totalitaria nonconformity and dissent are
the most serious crimes against the system, and totalitarian minds have a tendency to look upon
even honest mistakes or differences of opinion as deliberate treachery.
Because of its deep emotional content, the very word itself can be used as a political
tool with which to manipulate people. In Totalitaria it becomes merely a Pavlovian
sign, triggering off reactions of distrust and hatred. After a military defeat or a
diplomatic disappointment, or whenever feelings of humiliation and inadequacy run
high among the people, it is useful strategy to get them to project their sense of
inferiority onto others. The "traitor" is in such a case an easy scapegoat who satisfies
the collective need to project blame and to relieve unconscious anxiety.
In a totalitarian society every citizen is compelled to become a traitor, according
to our own Western sense of decency, because it is his duty to betray to the regime
every expression of dissension or rebellion. The child has to report his father, the father his
child; they are even called traitors in the totalitarian sense as soon as they fail to report.
In the common political interpretation, treason is an
act of rebellion, sedition, schism, heresy, conspiracy, or subversion. Its
technical-juridical meaning is well known to everybody. Treason is adhering to
enemies and giving aid and comfort to them; it is also, in a more modern,
modified sense, taking part in an international ideological conspiracy against the fatherland.
To me, as a psychiatrist, its relation to the general
problem of self-betrayal is the key to an understanding of the word. The
germ of treason arises first in the individual's compromises with his own
principles and beliefs. After these initial compromises have been made, it
becomes easier to go on and on, to make more and more compromises, until
finally the compromiser may become the man who is willing to sell himself and
his services to the highest bidder. During the Nazi occupation, we saw this among
those who were seduced to do little services for the enemy. The first step led to the
second and then to final collaboration. It is because all of us do doubt ourselves from time to
time, because we are unsure of what we would do if we were put to the test, and because we may
see in ourselves a potential traitor, that the word "treason" has such highly emotional appeal.
But self-doubt is a far cry from actual treason, and
the real traitor in the morbid sense of the word, is not merely a
self-doubter. He is a man who believes only in his ultrapersonal rights and who
scorns the rights and wishes of the community. He is disloyal even to his own
gang. Hitler, for example, was a traitor not only to his own ideas, handling
them as changeable tools to help him gain and maintain power, he was repeatedly
a traitor to his closest friends and collaborators, many of whom he betrayed
and murdered in 1934, during what has been called the night of the long knives.
The real traitor is a person with egocentric delusions and the conscious
conviction that he alone is right. He is a very different type from an
involuntary, pathetic, unaware traitor like our little barber.
The Traitor who Consciously takes Option for the Other Side
In my study of political traitors and collaborators, I found that most of them shared
two common characteristics: they were easily influenced by minds stronger than their
own, and none of them would admit his disloyalty as an act of treason. The traitors I
interviewed always volunteered innumerable justifications of their behaviour, always
surrounded their treachery with a complicated web of sophisms and rationalizations.
Actually, they could not tolerate an objective picture of their actions. If they did, they
would condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Unconsciously, most of them
realized the nature of their crimes and were tormented by guilt feelings. These guilt
feelings would have been unbearable if they admitted, even to themselves, the enormity of their deeds.
During the Nazi occupation of the Low Countries, I saw these qualities demonstrated
again and again. Many of our native traitors were spineless people, ready to accept
almost any new idea or elaborate theory. Their suggestibility was their greatest
liability. Most of these would-be Nazis had never possessed strong personality ties of
their own. They had failed in their ambitions and had been disappointed in life, and
they readily transferred their frustrated personal longings to political will-o'-the-wisps.
After the German invasion and occupation, these people confronted their defeated
countrymen with triumphant I-told-you-so's. They boasted proudly of their wisdom in
having bet on the right horse. They gained a tremendous feeling of self-importance,
and their newly acquired, blown-up self-assurance, backed by the enemy's armed
force, made them hard and contemptuous of their compatriots.
In an effort to justify their own behaviour and their greed for power, they tried to convert
others to their new way of life. They were possessed by a compulsion to become propagandists for
the invader. Turncoats always try to soothe their own bad consciences by persuading others to share
their crime.
Of course, they had some real grievances. Everybody does. But these traitors were
influenced less by them than by fancied injustices. Through acts of treason, they
avenged themselves on society for the private wrongs they had suffered because of
their personal failures. Their resentments could be felt in everything they said.
The Nazi strategists were experts in exploiting this sense of dissatisfaction. They
seemed to know intuitively whether or not an individual could be ensnared by
Nazi propaganda. One case I knew of in Holland concerned the ex-director of a
large concern who had been ousted from his position on ethical grounds. Early in the occupation,
this man received an invitation to join the Nazi ranks, and in a surprisingly short time he became
the leader of an important Nazi business. The Nazis gave him the feeling of having been vindicated.
Among the recruits for the Nazi police force in the occupied territories were turncoats of
all sorts and even the inmates of asylums for the criminally insane. The pathological grudge these people
had against society was the foil by which the Nazis turned them into traitors. The Germans themselves
despised these men, but they were cunning enough to put them to the best possible use.
The Nazis also played a strange game with some authors and artists who had not received
enough appreciation. The enemy flattered these men by buying and praising their work. The artists
were first told that they could write and create as they pleased, without fear of interference.
Gradually, little political services were asked of them, tiny little concessions like a favourable
report of a meeting or a favourable reference to a philosophy with which they did not agree.
It is the impact of that first little concession that starts the inner avalanche of
selfjustification that finally leads to self-betrayal. Following the first compromise and selfjustification
comes the second; and this one is met with shrewder self-exculpations. After all, the compromiser has had
experience in rationalization by now. The repeated concessions turn into submission and voluntary
cooperation. As I said before, once a man is seduced into a small ideological concession, it is very
difficult for him to stop. From now on his imagination produces enough justifications
which help him maintain his self-respect.
The inwardly insecure traitor always feels the urge to identify with the enemy-the
hostile invader. He has never "belonged," never had a feeling of identification with
his own group, has never felt the rewards of such cohesion, nor has he won the love,
sympathy, and respect of his fellows. Therefore he wants to join the "others." He
may even go so far as to call his former friends traitors. Lord Haw-Haw (William
Joyce), the British traitor who was executed by his government, considered himself a
real "Aryan German," and in this way justified his fight against England.
In the hectic days immediately following the Nazi invasion of Holland, I myself felt an
occasional inner temptation to go over to the enemy, to the stronger party, with its
powerful organizations, all ready to support one, to back one up. I even had a dream
about visiting Hitler and convincing him in a childish and friendly way of the
righteousness of our cause. I did not succumb to this dream temptation, but there
were a few who fell for such infantile pictures and were unable to withstand their
need to submit. The need to conform, to be accepted, to be safe and respectable, is
deeply embedded in man. In our analysis of the inner forces that lead men to
surrender their mental integrity under the pressure of prison and concentration-camp
life, we saw how important a role this mechanism plays. Living in a country occupied
by the enemy is by no means as horrifying as living in a P.O.W. or concentration
camp, but it is, nevertheless, frightening, and in this frightening situation, the need to
conform may show itself in surrender to the enemy ideology. Those who resisted this
need, even though they felt it, usually became even more fervently anti-Nazi as a
consequence of their guilt feelings about this impulse to treachery.
This war experience taught us another truth: traitors can be made by overwhelming collective
suggestions. In the ambiguous chaos of shouting ideologies and changing values, the mind becomes
sullen and stubborn, and where there is immaturity and lack of inner control, it may become
confused in its loyalties and simply surrender to the most powerful group.
The Nazis, with their perverted political methods, tried to supply the weak, the ambitious, the
disgruntled, and the frustrated with a ready-made set of bogus ideals to justify surrender to their side.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler says that when the disappointed are given a sense of
importance, they will swallow every suggestion with the utmost docility. He knew that
human weakness-even kindness can be used as a starting point for a systematically
nurtured conversion. Hitler knew, too, that unlimited political terror could make a
traitor of almost anyone. Spread fear, terror, and hunger, inflict penetrating pain, and
finally, as a result of mental coercion and growing confusion, many will succumb and
even betray their own families. In many of the concentration camps, the victims
themselves were in charge of the gas chamber killings and kept their gruesome jobs
until their own turns came. Fear and terror had made will-less slaves out of them.
There is still another human characteristic that can lead to treason and betrayal. There
are some people who simply do not know where their loyalties belong. The case
of Klaus Fuchs, the man who betrayed atomic secrets to Russia, is a dramatic
example of this. Here was a highly intelligent person, an expert on the most
difficult theoretical problems, lost in a sea of conflicting loyalties. Because
of the Nazi persecution of his Quaker family, he adopted a new fatherland,
England. In the meantime, he carried a dream of a mystical universal world
which he thought to find in the totalitarian ideology. In the midst of his
confusion about world problems, he simply did not know where his loyalty should be.
This was not a case of schizophrenia or a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation, as the newspapers reported,
but a case of confusion of loyalties in a hyper-intellectual mind. Fuchs did not know emotionally
where he belonged.
In other cases people were literally pushed into treason and collaboration because
nobody in their environment trusted them. This happened, for instance, in
Flanders with the collaborators of the First World War. Several of them were
compelled to become collaborators again.
This analysis of the factors that lead men to treason certainly does not imply that
every man must remain loyal to the group from which he has originally received his
morals and ideals. Better insight and higher ethics may override our childhood
loyalties. It is the fate and the need of human beings to go beyond their teachers and
to correct, if possible, the traditional rules of their schools. The great philosopher
Socrates was accused of being a "traitor" because he "corrupted the minds of the
youth of Athens." And yet today we know that Socrates was far from being a corrupter.
Our Treacherous Intellect
Perhaps the most tragic form of unobtrusive treason and self betrayal is caused by the
inertia of the human intellect. We are often betrayed by our own minds. We forget completely what we
want to forget. We deny the existence of real problems in order to retreat into wishful
thinking. As soon as we do not understand and feel the implications of a
problem or an argument, we tend to submit passively to the most powerful side, just as did the
overfriendly barber. The ease with which human beings can be corrupted is still one
of our most serious psychological and moral problems. Inner confusion can make
us submissive to almost any strong suggestion from the outside, no matter how foolish or false.
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.
There are other more complicated tricks of the intellect which lead to self-betrayal.
The feeling of inferiority often arouses in ignorant people a great desire to
grasp extremely difficult ideas. Such people like to identify themselves with a
quasiprofound system of thought. Hitler and his abstruse writings made temporary pseudo-philosophers
and magicians out of the majority of German people. All dictatorial totalitarians buy the services
of scholars who can make them such a set of pseudo-philosophic justifications.
Unfortunately, some scholars are easy to buy. In Holland, for example, there was a
not too intelligent philosopher who became converted to Nazism after it had shown
its overpowering strength. Thereafter he felt free to write on the most abstruse
philosophical subjects and to expound the most complicated theories, all for the
glorification of his powerful friends from the Third Reich and their myth of conquering
the whole world. At the same time, he built a system of inscrutable words around his
own deep feelings of guilt; he isolated himself from the world more and more
because no words were convincing enough to justify his treason to himself. In the
end he lost all contact with reality. Then, of course, the Nazis had no use for him either.
Self-Betrayal
As we have seen, there are various inner motivations which may lead to the crime
of disloyalty or treason. Sometimes these motivations operate very subtly, in ways unknown
to the subject; sometimes treason is merely a crude selling out to those who pay best. Let
us try to arrange and classify some of these motivations, starting with the unconscious ones
and ranging toward deliberate treason.
In the first place, an act of self-betrayal may begin
as a defense against the feeling of being lost and rejected. In order to
win acceptance in a group, the individual may hide
and not defend his private beliefs and convictions when attacked. In psychology
this may be called-if such passive behaviour becomes an unconscious
habit-the passive submission to and
identification with the stronger person. If you cannot beat the enemy, join him! (A. Freud)
Although the concept of the inner traitor in us is not so easy to accept, by studying
the contrasting inner drives that lead man, one becomes more convinced of that
possibility. The clinical concept of man's inner ambivalence is based on numerous
psychological experiences. In studying the deeper motivations of many a traitor, we
often see that his treacherous act happened after an inner turmoil threatened to
break him down, to make an uncontrolled nervous wreck out of him. It is as if the
future mental patient preferred to surrender to an outward enemy rather than to the
inward enemies of disease and nervous breakdown. Hess was on the verge of a
schizophrenic breakdown when he broke Hitler's rules and flew to England.
Let us consider the British foreign office spies, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.*
Both showed several symptoms of imminent mental
breakdown. It may be known to the reader that both these men left England in May, 1951, in
order to go via France to Russia. Both deliberately fled the country. Both had Communist leanings
during their student days at Cambridge but later renounced their adolescent affiliations.
Both showed abnormal symptoms during their service. Maclean had a breakdown in
May, 1950, due to overwork and excessive drinking; Burgess was reprimanded for
reckless driving while in service and for neglect of his work. Reading through the
report, one is surprised by the amount of mental instability which was tolerated at
such a sensitive spot of the government. Both the men had homosexual leanings
that can be related to a suppressed hostility for their mothers (and mother country).
Sometimes treason means a one-sided appeal to justice. This is found in the man
who demands some sort of private protective justice and who refuses to acknowledge the subtle
relationship between rights and duties. Such persons always
feel continually deprived and betrayed. They are what Bergler calls the "injustice
collectors:" In their acts of disloyalty they are seeking to play the role of their own
private judges. Many querulous and even paranoiac persons have this kind of character structure.
Then there is the disappointed pseudo-idealist who gradually turns into a cynic, covering
his emptiness by many self-justifications and exculpations. Such people betray their intellectual
disappointment in all their debunking remarks.
Conflicts between parents may give rise in the child
to the need to betray one or both parents, and this need may be
transferred in later life to a need to betray the fatherland. I have often
found that the unsolved ties of hate and love toward the parents play an
important role in forming the turncoat personality. As we saw, this problem
often lies at the root of the totalitarian character structure. Although the
totalitarian-minded are not by definition overt traitors, some of these people
can easily become traitors to free, democratic ideals-either out of compulsive
allegiance to a foreign ideology or out of repetitive non-conformism.
In describing special characteristics of a political
group, one has to keep in mind that basic inner contrasts
are inherent in all people. The quasi-rational Marxistic
interpretation of the world, which satisfies the need for logical clarification
and reasonable organization of social life, covers anxiety created by the
irrational inner forces so easily detected in the totalitarian-minded. The cult of the
"masses" often serves as a defense against loneliness. The belief in progress may be born out
of vague despair and insecurity. The fear of deviationism is the fear that the unity of the
group will be broken. Suspicion and self-criticism serve to keep, above all, the in-group together.
There are several forms of inner conceit that can turn man into a traitor. The Dutch philosopher
of whom I spoke earlier is an example of this, as are any of the verbose ideological
apologists for totalitarianism.
Lack of confidence or lack of belief in the guiding traditions and aims of one's own
society can also lead to hostility, then to treason. Without such traditional
beliefs, suggestibility and receptivity for competing ideologies are increased.
The Klaus Fuchs case, which was mentioned earlier, is an example of this.
The personal need to be a pioneer or a martyr, often instilled by the unconscious need
to suffer, may lead to a private messianic delusion and cause an attack on the traditional values of
the group. Many groups consider such extremism as treacherous behaviour.
Another form of self-betrayal may be caused by the inability to grasp the complexity of the
real world. Many people have been seduced into unstable behaviour and even disloyalty
through lack of comprehension of these complexities and through the need to find a single,
all-embracing, easy answer to the problems of human life. Who gives them the simple myth to
believe in? The Nazis seduced nearly all of Germany into a form of ideological treason in this way!
Treason may also be a paradoxical reaction to a deep-seated neurotic sense of guilt.
The neurotic strategy of accumulating more guilt coupled with the consequent
development of an inner need for punishment are often the basic causes of criminal
action. The treacherous deed is done precisely in order to provoke punishment (Reik).
Treason may also be paid adventure as we find it in international espionage. This kind
of life fascinates the immature mind which lives in the world of mystery stories and fairy tales.
Bribes with women or money make such treason even more attractive. The enemy gratifies economic
and sexual needs, and the traitor is willing to sell his integrity to the highest bidder.
Overt fear and panic can also cause treason. The whole psychology of totalitarian interview
and interrogation is based on this principle. People can be frightened and brainwashed into treason.
The Development of Loyalty
From all this we can see that what we call treason takes place more in the emotional
than in the intellectual sphere of functioning. In the course of human growth,
everybody passes through periods of inner conflict in which he has to turn his love
and allegiance from one person to another-from mother to father, from parents to the
entire family, from the family to the state, and from the state to mankind. The core of
the problem of treason and self betrayal is found in the difficulties which arise in the
repression of former loyalties, as each loyalty is in turn superseded by the next.
Many people experience deep confusion in adolescence when, for the first time, they
must leave the safe emotional protection of their homes and create new loyalties and
new moral standards for themselves. It is in this period that the critical faculties are
developed. In doubting the traditional truths passed on by his parents, each
adolescent might be called a traitor; yet he is actually being true to the self he is
shaping. During the crisis of adolescence, with its increased feelings of yearning for
some unknown happiness, many young people want to "betray" their parental home
and their parents' standards. At the same time, they do not want to give up the
protection the home offers.
Psychologically, we know, however, that temporary disloyalty is part of normal
mental growth. In the process of individual human development, there are stages of
progress which lead from initial submission to open rebellion and nonconformity.
Every step toward mental maturity and independence involves the growing out of ties
with the past. This growth can be effected in different ways, with more or less overt
hostility and forsaking of the past, with self-betrayal and passive submission, with
renewed submission to pay off feelings of guilt, with sworn conservativism or open
rebellion. In this phase of adolescence he is especially vulnerable to totalitarian propaganda.
The youth may retain from the conflict of inner growth
a sense of loneliness and guilt. If he puts it to productive use, he
may become what we might call a creative revolutionary. The trail blazer, whose
own inner forces drive him on to break with tradition,
is such a man. Indeed, many of mankind's great moral and spiritual leaders have
been of this type. They have been leaders precisely because they broke either with
rigid remnants of the past or with the ossified or immoral elements of the present. In my own
experience, I have known one such man, a German psychiatrist, whose idealism and moral sense made it
impossible for him to go along with the Nazi desecration of human values and who was hanged as
a traitor for his part in the abortive German rebellion against Hitler in 1944.
In Praise of Nonconformity
What can be done in general to combat treason, disloyalty, and self-betrayal? In the
first place, the child's normal defensive attitude toward authority and his need to
break away from it should be watched with favourable vigilance at all times on the
part of parents and educators. It is all too easy to force a child into denial of the self.
Many times, later disloyalty is a reaction to faulty handling of the problems of
childhood. Most traitors are made, not born. Unfortunately, this truth is often
forgotten by educators who may, as a result of their own frustrated aggressions,
break down by force the feeling of great loyalty toward their own age group that we
find among youngsters.
Is it possible to decide whether or not a person is dependable? Only when we have
some insight into his hidden motives and drives and into the workings of his
unconscious. For complete insight, psychoanalysis is necessary, but the way the
unconscious expresses itself in character traits and character defences can give us
some very important indications. A person with excessive dependency needs or a
weak ego, a person who is easily suggestible can usually be seduced into disloyalty.
So can the boastful, inconsistent man, full of pride and vanity. Material egotism,
desire for power, and continual hostility also lead to denial of moral values, among
them loyalty.
As is often true in psychology, it is easier to say what character traits the dependable
person must not have than to give a positive picture of what he should be like. In
general, we can say that the person who is honest with himself and shows a
minimum of self deceit, the man who exhibits a stable structure of character, the
person with genuine maturity, is most true to himself, and, as a result, most loyal to others.
Nevertheless, the seeds of treason lie in each of us and may be fortified by
environmental influences. In a totalitarian world, for example, everybody is educated
in self-denial and self-betrayal; when a person becomes a nonconformist, the label
"traitor" will be attached to him. In a world stifled by dogma and tradition, every form
of original thinking may be called sedition and treason. In such cases the
environmental, social, and political factors, and not the confusing inner processes,
determine what is treason. In this chapter, however, I have emphasized the personal
factors in producing treason-the influence of family and group prejudices, and the
inner instability resulting from complications in the immediate environment. There are
so many subtle fantasies of self-betrayal and secret aggression in everyone, and
there is so much desire to revenge secret resentments, that any government may
make use of these unhealthy neurotic feelings to stir up the country.
The Loyalty Compulsion
Recently Americans have been looking more critically at the concepts of loyalty and subversion.
Deeply conscious of the cynical and ruthless nature of the totalitarian attack through subversion,
we have begun to let our fear of subversion from within paralyze our democratic freedoms.
We have become so concerned over the spectre of a treacherous fifth column in our own land that
we have grown both overcautious and over suspicious.
In his well-documented study on The German Fifth Column, the Dutch historian Dr.
Louis de Jong could prove that Hitler's dreaded network of treason and betrayal was
for the greatest part an imaginary ogre created by the panic and fear of the people.
We require constant reassurance that the intentions of our neighbours and fellow
citizens are acceptable and loyal. The danger in this frantic search for security
operates both on the political and psychological levels. Politically, in trying to erect
invulnerable barriers against the spread of totalitarian ideas, we may find that we
have given up those very qualities that distinguish democracy from totalitarianism:
freedom and diversity. Psychologically, we may find ourselves the victims of
pathological suspicions (which can be clinically termed paranoia), and this
suspiciousness may lead us to reject utterly the most valuable qualities we
can have as human beings: tolerance and respect for our fellow men.
The political dangers in this situation have been pointed out time and time again
by responsible leaders of the American community. As a psychiatrist, I should like to devote
my attention to the psychological aspect of this problem and to the dangers to the free mind
that are inherent in the current situation. For, as we have already seen, all political behaviour
is essentially an extension of individual behaviour and is rooted in the
psychology of the individuals who make up the political group.
Much of our collective suspicion can be attributed to a gigantic multiplication of
personal feelings of insecurity. In times of fear and calamity arises the myth of a
treacherous aggressor, the myth the totalitarians know so well how to exploit. Our
own inner insecurity is displaced and projected onto our neighbours and our
environment. We begin to doubt and distrust everyone. We accuse others because
we are afraid of ourselves. We feel weak and cover our weakness by growing
suspicion and by being continually on the lookout for possible traitors and dissenters.
As we have seen earlier, the whole question of loyalty is a complicated one. In our
zeal to create guarantees of trustworthiness, we tend to oversimplify the problem,
and thus we may overshoot the mark and become like our totalitarian antagonists,
for whom over-simplification is a stock-in-trade. Asking people for a loyalty oath
asking them to perform that magic ritual through which they forswear all past and
future political sin-may have a paradoxical effect. Merely taking an oath does not
make a man loyal, although it may later enable a judge to prosecute him for perjury.
Our insistence on official expressions of allegiance actually discredits and devalues
the basic personal sense of voluntary and self-chosen identification with the
community which is the essence of loyalty; it certainly does not either create or insure loyalty.
The loyalty oath too easily degenerates into an empty formula, and the man who
takes it may forget completely the meaning it is supposed to have. To many it has
become simply red tape, another one of those endless, troublesome forms that must be filled out.
The oath compulsion can easily grow into a childish
magic strategy, a form of mental blackmail. There are some oriental
religions in which devotions are performed through the use of a prayer wheel. When
the wheel is set in motion by a flip of the hand, the worshipper has done his
job. He need not recite any prayers; he need not think any devout thoughts. The
practitioners of these religions no longer have any awareness of the content of
their prayers. They are blind subscribers to a ritual whose meaning they have
long since forgotten. Signing a loyalty oath can become as empty a gesture as turning the prayer wheel.
True loyalty is not a static thing; as we have already seen, it grows and develops
with the personality. It has to be rediscovered and re-experienced every day, since it
is, essentially, as a result of an inner battle of contending values that man finds his
own particular values and loyalties. When a man is compelled to swear to his loyalty,
even though he feels it already deeply within him, the compulsion from outside
means that he must lay aside his personal right to weigh values and take counsel
with his honest principles. It does not matter whether or not the oath is an expression
of his true feelings, the element of enforcement that lies behind it has a
psychologically weakening effect on the man who takes it. This may seem strange at
first glance, but a simple analogy will make it clear. The man who truly loves his wife,
for example, does not need repeatedly to swear to his love; he shows it in his
actions. But if she insists on his swearing, her very insistence, implying as it does
that she doubts him, may bring questions to her husband's mind-and he begins to
grow confused as to what he really thinks.
Both in demanding an oath and in taking it, we perpetuate the ridiculous illusion that
enemies can be kept out through this prayer-wheel system. The fact is that
deliberate traitors and subversives are the very ones who are not afraid to disguise
their motivations and hide their intentions behind prescribed formulations. Nor are
they afraid of perjury charges. They feel no hesitation in signing an oath if it is
opportune for them to do so. For them, words and oaths are only tools which have
no binding moral value. More important than the demand for loyalty should be the
demand for integrity, for steadiness of character, for maturity of aims and motivations.
Free man needs loyalty to the self first of all, and this implies the right to be himself.
The man who feels that he is nothing, who feels that everyone, himself included,
doubts him, who is inwardly weak, may become an easy prey to all kinds of totalitarian political
influences. Loyalty hunts and loyalty oaths may provoke disloyalty to one's personal integrity
and to personal freedom, since they create suspicion in ourselves and in others. Freedom is kept
upright by the very presence of opposition-even at the risk of non-conformism and scattered subversion.
Loyalty comes about as a result of mutual confidence; it cannot be created through
compulsion. Any compulsion is, by its very nature, one-sided. Loyalty has to be
deserved and won daily through mutual interaction, and through contact between
leaders and citizens. Because it is based on confidence, loyalty is given
spontaneously and of free will. True loyalty cannot be bought or demanded.
In investigating the case of the young American soldiers in Korea who
were brainwashed and forgot too easily where their loyalty lay, we usually find in their backgrounds how
disloyally one of their parents had behaved toward them. In nearly all
the so-called pro-Communist cases we find a disturbed youth. It is important
that the community investigate its initial loyalty toward these young men.
In a democratic state we should be prepared to adduce
convincing facts in support of our own way of life or to develop new
approaches which will reveal the weaknesses of any subversive system.
Prosecution of dissenting ideas, insistence on loyalty according to some prescribed formula-these
make it impossible for us to do this and may be the beginning of an unwillingness to argue and
persuade. They may even lead to a new form of betrayal, the subtle treason of intellectual detachment,
the unwillingness to take responsibility, the treason of doubting relativism which leads to
inaction. It may degenerate into a dangerous form of mental laziness which can easily be turned into
a life of no commitments or into totalitarian submission. The approaches to truth are multifarious,
and it is only where there is a clash of opinion that these approaches can be discovered and the
right road to truth be found.
The danger in the loyalty compulsion is, then, that we may conceal mental apathy behind
a rigid formula and thus lose sight of the constant need for psychological alertness
and the real meaning of loyalty and a free way of life. The mechanical formula
of a loyalty oath, because it checks moral alertness and a search for ethical clarification, may
be the beginning of the thought control we all fear. True loyalty is a living, dynamic quality.
In the subtle choice between loyalty to people and loyalty to principles (usually a much
vaguer feeling) the lawmaker has to leave the individual as free as possible, because the latter
type of loyalty is based on the first. Without personal loyalty there is no national loyalty!
There is still another aspect to this problem. We must learn to distinguish between
disloyalty in actions and disloyalty in feelings and thought. Subversion of opinion is
never a crime. The right to dissent is the keystone of democracy. In a free state we
must be willing to correct subversion by our better arguments. Persecuting dissenting ideas is
a form of mental laziness. Psychologically speaking, a government cannot concern itself with
conscious motivations (and the unconscious motivations which cannot be separated from them) of
people because inwardly everybody has contrasting motivations. The quandary that such a government would
provide itself is illustrated by the following quotation from the Oppenheimer hearing
by the Gray board published in 1954.
We believe that it has been demonstrated that the Government can search its own soul and the
soul of an individual whose relationship to his government is in question with full protection of
the rights and interests of both. We believe that loyalty and security can be
examined within the framework of the traditional and inviolable principles of American justice.
In these beautiful phrases lie hidden all the ominous beginnings of totalitarian
thought control. The government that searches the soul of any thinking individual can
always find a case against him, because doubt, ambivalence, and groping are traits
common to all men. We cannot measure anybody's dependability on the basis of his
thoughts and feelings as they appear to us. In the first place, we can never know
what lies behind a seemingly loyal facade. In the second place, the man whose
search for truth leads him to explore many heretical points of view can be the most
loyal in his actions. His very exploration may well lead him to the considered
judgment that underlies true loyalty. What counts in any man is the consistency and
integrity of his behaviour, and his courage in taking a stand, not his conformity to official dogma.
And to state that the government can search its own soul is to state absolutely nothing.
A government is, after all, merely a collection of individuals. Under the pressure
of the loyalty compulsion, of the growing suspicion, these individuals themselves may not
search their souls as honestly as they would in less hectic times or if they were acting as private
individuals rather than as official representatives of the government. The man
caught in official security rules is the prisoner of the anxiety and insecurity
rampant in those who want to establish the delusion of certainty and security-a transgression of values!
As soon as the government starts to search the souls of its citizens, it begins to
intrude on their rights and interests. It attacks democracy at home and weakens its
position abroad. We cannot find the road to peace and fellowship with the rest of the
world if we adopt dogmatic, intransigent positions and try to impose our orthodoxy on
others. The hallmark of the totalitarian is his insistence that his is the only right way.
If we are to maintain our position as the leader of the free world, we must always
keep our minds open. Only in that way will we find new ways to peace.
We have seen now that the problem of treachery has to deal with the failure to
understand our inner mental processes. Every betrayal is in the first place a
self-betrayal, a disloyalty toward one's own standards. When people silence their
conscience and compromise for the sake of convenience, at that moment they begin
to be disloyal to themselves. Passivity-assumed when our conscience should have
forced us to act-is the most common form of self-betrayal. Inwardly a man may be
furious because of some injustice he has witnessed, but outwardly he may do
nothing about it-this behaviour he feels inwardly is treason to the self and is often
what makes him so touchy toward other people's flaws. When the pattern of pa