THE RAPE OF THE MIND
Since 1933, when a completely drugged and trial-conditioned human
wreck confessed to having started the Reichstag fire in Berlin, Dr. Joost A.
M. Meerloo has studied the methods by which systematic mental pressure
brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their
subjective “truth” on their victims’ minds.
It is Dr. Meerloo’s position that through pressure on the weak points in
men’s makeup, totalitarian methods can turn anyone into a “traitor.” And in
The Rape of the Mind he goes far beyond the direct military implications of
mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows
symptoms of pressurizing people’s minds. He presents a systematic analysis
of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows
how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to
systematized “rape of the mind.” He describes the new age of cold war with
its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of
mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with
dangerous confusion.
As J???????????? D???????????????????????? wrote in The New York Times:
“Dr. Meerloo is a passionate spokesman for the democratic practice oflife as a general human goal, not merely as a device for beating off thetotalitarians … Every thinking American should take some of his ‘self’ time— his time for self-development — and read this book. Dr. Meerloo showsin his own person what psychoanalysis can do when it is freely combinedwith social science knowledge. He is a remarkably developed individualman; indeed, he is one of the great spokesmen of the democratic world, andeveryone should know him.”
Dr. Joost Meerloo’s best-known work, The Rape of the Mind is written
for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists.
The first two and one-half years of World War II, Dr. Meerloo spent under
the pressure of Nazi-occupied Holland, witnessing at firsthand the Nazi
methods of mental torture on more than one occasion. During this time he was
able to use his psychiatric and psychoanalytic knowledge to treat some of the
victims. Then, after personal experiences with enforced interrogation, he
escaped from a Nazi prison and certain death to England, where he was able,
as Chief of the Psychological Department of the Netherlands Forces, to
observe and study coercive methods officially.
In this capacity he had to investigate not only traitors and collaborators,
but also those members of the Resistance who had gone through the utmost of
mental pressure. Later, as High Commissioner for Welfare, he came in closer
contact with those who had gone through physical and mental torture. After
the war, he came to the United States, where his war experiences would not
permit him to concentrate solely on his psychiatric practice, but compelled
him to go beyond purely medical aspects to the social aspects of the problem.
As more and more cases of thought control, brainwashing, and mental
coercion were disclosed — Cardinal Mindszenty, Colonel Schwable, Robert
Vogeler, and others — his interest grew. It was Dr. Meerloo who coined the
word menticide, the killing of the spirit, for this peculiar crime. His
knowledge of these totalitarian procedures has been officially
acknowledged; he served as an expert witness in the case of Colonel
Schwable, the Marine Corps officer who, after months of subjection to
physical and mental torture following his capture in Korea, was made to
confess to having taken part in germ warfare.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THOUGHT CONTROL, MENTICIDE, AND BRAINWASHING
THE RAPE OF THE MIND
The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing
by Joost A. M. Meerloo, MD
Reprint of the original Universal Library Edition by Grosset & Dunlap,
New York, 1956
Published by
ProgressivePress.com.
First paperback reprinting, July, 2009.
Ebook Edition, Feb. 2015
Ebook ISBN: 1-61577-375-4, EAN/ISBN-13: 978-1-61577-375-6
Paperback ISBN: 1-61577-376-2, EAN/ISBN-13: 978-1-61577-376-3
Library of Congress Catalog Information for the Original Edition:
LC Control No.: 56009252. LC Classification: BF633 .M4.
Dewey Class No.: 131.33.
Title: The rape of the mind; the psychology of thought control, menticide, and brainwashing
Author: Meerloo, Joost Abraham Maurits, 1903-
320 p. 22 cm
Subjects: Brainwashing.
TABLE OF CONTENTSOverview of ContentsFOREWORDChapter One YOU TOO WOULD CONFESSChapter Two PAVLOV’S STUDENTS AS CIRCUS TAMERSChapter Three MEDICATION INTO SUBMISSIONChapter Four WHY DO THEY YIELD? The Psychodynamics of False ConfessionChapter Five THE COLD WAR AGAINST THE MINDChapter Six TOTALITARIA AND ITS DICTATORSHIPChapter Seven THE INTRUSION BY TOTALITARIAN THINKINGChapter Eight TRIAL BY TRIALChapter Nine FEAR AS A TOOL OF TERRORChapter Ten THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MANChapter Eleven MENTAL CONTAGION AND MASS DELUSIONChapter Twelve TECHNOLOGY INVADES OUR MINDSChapter Thirteen INTRUSION BY THE ADMINISTRATIVE MINDChapter Fourteen THE TURNCOAT IN EACH OF USChapter Fifteen TRAINING AGAINST MENTAL TORTUREChapter Sixteen EDUCATION FOR DISCIPLINE OR HIGHER MORALEChapter Seventeen FROM OLD TO NEW COURAGEChapter Eighteen FREEDOM—OUR MENTAL BACKBONEBIBLIOGRAPHYINDEXBIOGRAPHYOBITUARYOverview of ContentsFOREWORDPART ONE
The Techniques of Individual Submission
Chapter One - YOU TOO WOULD CONFESS
The enforced confession. Mental coercion and enemy occupation.
Witchcraft and torture. The refinement of the rack. Menticide in Korea.
Chapter Two - PAVLOV’S STUDENTS AS CIRCUS TAMERS
The salivating dog. The conditioning of man. Isolation and other factors in
conditioning. Mass conditioning through speech. Political conditioning. The
urge to be conditioned.
Chapter Three - MEDICATION INTO SUBMISSION
Dependency on the drug provider. The search for ecstasy through drugs.
Hypnotism and mental coercion. Needling for the truth. The lie-detector. The
therapist as an instrument of coercion.
Chapter Four - WHY DO THEY YIELD? THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF FALSE CONFESSION.
The upset philosopher. The barbed-wire disease. The moment of sudden
surrender. The need to collapse. The need for companionship. Blackmailing
through overburdening guilt feelings. The law of survival versus the law of
loyalty. The mysterious masochistic pact. A survey of psychological
processes involved in brainwashing and menticide.
PART TWO
The Techniques of Mass Submission
Chapter Five - THE COLD WAR AGAINST THE MIND
The public-opinion engineers. Psychological warfare as a weapon of
terror. The indoctrination barrage. The enigma of coexistence.
Chapter Six - TOTALITARIA AND ITS DICTATORSHIP
The robotization of man. Cultural predilection for totalitarianism. The
totalitarian leader. The final surrender of the robot man. The common retreat
from reality. The retreat to automatization. The womb state.
Chapter Seven - THE INTRUSION BY TOTALITARIAN THINKING
The strategy of terror. The purging rituals. Wild accusation and black
magic. Spy mania. The strategy of criminalization. Verbocracy and semantic
fog— talking the people into submission. Logocide. Labelomania. The
apostatic crime in Totalitaria.
Chapter Eight - TRIAL BY TRIAL
The downfall of justice. The demagogue as prosecutor and hypnotist. The
trial as an instrument of intimidation. The Congressional investigation. The
witness and his subjective testimony. The right to be silent. Mental
blackmail. The judge and the jury. Televised interrogation. The quest for
detachment.
Chapter Nine - FEAR AS A TOOL OF TERROR
The fear of living. Our fantasies about danger. Paradoxical fear.
Regression. Camouflage and disguise. Explosive panics. The body takes
over.
PART THREE
Unobtrusive Coercion
Chapter Ten - THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN How some
totalitarians may develop. The molding nursery. The father cuts the cord.
Chapter Eleven - MENTAL CONTAGION AND MASS DELUSION
The affirmation of my own errors. Stages of thinking and delusion. The
loss of verifiable reality. Mass delusion. The danger of mental contagion.
The explanation delusion. The liberation from magic thinking.
Chapter Twelve - TECHNOLOGY INVADES OUR MINDS
The creeping coercion by technology. The paradox of technology.
Chapter Thirteen -INTRUSION BY THE ADMINISTRATIVE MIND
The administrative mind. The ailments of those in public office. The
conference of unconscious minds. The bureaucratic mind.
Chapter Fourteen - THE TURNCOAT IN EACH OF US - THE
CONFUSING INFLUENCE OF THE PROBLEM OF TREASON AND
LOYALTY
The involuntary traitor. The concept of treason. The traitor who
consciously takes option for the other side. Our treacherous intellect. Selfbetrayal.
The development of loyalty. In praise of nonconformity. The loyalty
compulsion.
PART FOUR
In Search of Defenses
Chapter Fifteen - TRAINING AGAINST MENTAL TORTURE
The U. S. code for resisting brainwashing. Indoctrination against
indoctrination? The psychiatric report about brainwashing and menticide.
Chapter Sixteen - EDUCATION FOR DISCIPLINE OR HIGHER MORALE
The role of education. Discipline and morale. Discipline and
brainwashing. The quality of the group and the influence of the leader.
Enumeration of factors influencing group morale. The breaking point and our
capacity for frustration.
Chapter Seventeen - FROM OLD TO NEW COURAGE
Who resists longer and why? The myth of courage. The morale-boosting
idea. The new courage.
Chapter Eighteen - FREEDOM—OUR MENTAL BACKBONE
The democratizing action of psychology. The battle on two fronts. The
paradox of freedom. The future age of psychology.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
FOREWORD
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 brought 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 prehistoric 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
Freudian 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 super-learnedness—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.
J. A. M. M.
January, 1956
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.
Chapter One
YOU TOO WOULD CONFESS !
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 diseasespreading
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 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 psychological 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.[1]
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, every one 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, selfaccusing
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 spoke 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. These 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 autohypnosis
(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 as 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
auto-hypnotic 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 when he found that the friendly
approach was getting him nowhere, 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 these 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 and to extort confessions for political propaganda purposes are
relatively new 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 burnings 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 selfaccusation
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 selfaccusation
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. [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 opportunist 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 mind? 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.*
If the prisoner’s mind proves too resistant, narcotics are given to confuse
it: mescaline, marihuana, morphine, barbiturates, alcohol. If his body
collapses before his mind capitulates, he receives stimulants: benzedrine,
caffeine, 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 also can 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) [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
1930’s. The same theme has been treated from a psychological point of view by Theodor
Reik in his Confession Compulsion and the Need for Punishment. [ See Chapter Three.]
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 fancied 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 these 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. [A more extended survey of the different
psychological stages in menticide and brainwashing will be given at the end of Chapter Four.]
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 begins 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 the wish 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[2] admits
that “virtually all American P.O.W.’s 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 gives a statistical survey about
the abuse of their P.O.W.’s. According to this report one third of the soldiers
absorbed enough indoctrination to be classified as Communist sympathizers.
The 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 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 his mind 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 totalitarian* 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 confession
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 inside
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
democracy and maturity place on him.
Chapter TwoPAVLOV’S STUDENTS AS CIRCUS TAMERS
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 Mindszentys?
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-prize 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 seventeenthcentury
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 Cartesian 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 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 is an
example of such a psychosomatic disease. It may arise when the body
manufactures too much hydrochloric acid, which is necessary for the
digestion of food. The stomach ulcer patient is a person who reacts to strong
emotions, especially repressed hostility, with an excessive secretion of
hydrochloric acid. The innate secretion reflex, favorable for the digestion in
case of hunger, grows into an unfavorable conditioned reflex where hunger
and aggression mutually increase the hydrochloric acid secretion. Gradually
more and more of the sour fluid is manufactured until finally the patient finds
himself suffering from ulcers. The stomach consumes, as it were, its own
tissue. This same paradox may be seen in many educational processes. 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 thousandfold
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
coziness 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 and the servant—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, too, for the
solitary confinement cell and the prison camp.
Another of Pavlov’s findings was that some animals learned 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” P.O.W. 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 socalled
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 tells us
that the Chinese leaders are using this vocal conditioning of the public to
strengthen their regime. [The New York Times, November 27, 1954.]
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 Führer. 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 taming. 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 P.O.W. 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 P.O.W. 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 the 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 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 presentday
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, as Freud taught us.
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 subtle 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. He remains like a monkey fetus, he never grows into the
mature, hairy, fully covered state. In his persistent fetal state, he remains
dependent on maternal care and paternal teaching and conditioning. But
among the animals man has, relatively, the longest youth and time for
learning. At least this is what Louis Bolk’s fetalization theory tells us about
man’s retarded state and never-ending social dependency.
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 we 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.
Chapter ThreeMEDICATION INTO SUBMISSION
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 thoughtcontrol
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, 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.
DEPENDENCY ON THE DRUG PROVIDER
Not long ago I was asked to give advice to a couple who had had marital
difficulties for a long time. Although at the time of their marriage, the
husband and wife were deeply in love, each had brought to his adventure of
happiness the wrong emotional investment. She had expected him to be a
kind of Hollywood hero, an eternal gallant, dedicated completely to her. He
had been touched by her childlike dependency, but secretly he had hoped she
would be mother, nurse, and companion to him. As might have been
predicted, neither partner lived up to the other’s expectations. Both were
bitterly disappointed—and neither realized what was wrong. After a while,
the wife became a whining, complaining nag; there were daily scenes,
arguments, and recriminations. The husband began to seek solace away from
home, with women he had known before his marriage. Soon thereafter, the
wife found herself unable to sleep, and started to take barbiturates to bring
herself the soothing forgetfulness of slumber. She became completely
dependent on them and retreated into all kinds of vague bodily complaints
which could be relieved temporarily by more drugs. When the husband first
discovered this, he was appalled. But gradually he noticed that the drugs
seemed to modify and ease the discord of their relationship. Under almost
constant sedation, his wife was no longer a shrew. Indeed she was no longer
even interested in him. He discovered that he had much more freedom and
could spend his evenings and holidays as he chose, as long as he provided
her with the wherewithal for those magic pills that had restored peace to
their home. But one night the wife took an overdose of barbiturates, and it
looked almost as if she had attempted suicide. This nearly fatal occurrence
aroused all the husband’s guilt feelings, and he sought medical and
psychological help, in an effort to discover what had gone wrong in the
marriage of two people who had felt so much initial love and good will.
This is only one of many cases in which the sleeping pill and drug habit
covers up deep-seated, unspoken unhappiness. The growing dependency on
easy escape into a soft and mild-appearing sedation and oblivion is an evil
we must recognize. The general increase in the use of sleeping drugs is
alarming, and the number of suicides resulting from barbiturates is growing
every year. Nor can we look at such a phenomenon as simply a medical
problem. Dependence on alcohol, barbiturates, drugs, or other soporifics
indicates latent and overt social fear and anxiety, and the need to escape from
reality. Drugs seem to their users to be miracle tablets which provide a
passive and magic solution to all problems, and bring them to a point beyond
the boundaries of the real world. The leader of a gang, who is able to
provide such drugs for his members, is sure of their servility.
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
troubles. “Thou hast 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 rearranges 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 Yogis 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 dancefury
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 re-experience the blissful sensations of infancy, the 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 or 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 for him 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 who 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:
brain-weakening 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 strategic
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.
In the hands of an honest therapist, hypnosis can be extremely useful.
Particularly in dealing with psychosomatic diseases and physical pain—that
bastard son of fantasy and reality—hypnosis, is the good Samaritan. But 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. There are unconscious sexual roots in
hypnosis, related to the passive yielding to the attacker, which the quack uses
to give vent to his own passions. I once treated a girl after she had gone to
such a “healer.” It was only at the very last moment that she had been able to
get out of her lethargic, submissive state and fight off his assault.
Not long ago I treated some teen-agers who had tried to hypnotize each
other. They wanted to learn the intricacies of the technique in order to
increase their mental power over other people. Inspired by some comic-book
stories, they imagined that through the use of hypnosis they could influence
girls to yield to their sexual advances. They expected to become supermen
who could make other people instruments for the satisfaction of their own
lust and will.
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 post-hypnotic 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 to 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 P.O.W.
For us, the question of Leyra’s guilt or innocence is of less importance
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 can be a psychological blessing, through which
patients can solve emotional problems that resist conscious will, 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 infantile dependency need in the victim and turn
him temporarily into a kind of waking sleepwalker 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
could be distinguished. But even these autosuggestive types, if subjected to
enough pressure, will gradually build up internal justifications 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
arc frightened of 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 its 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, 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 an author I esteem,
yet his own euphoric, ecstatic reactions to mescaline are not necessarily the
same as those other people experience. Twenty-five years ago I myself
experimented with mescaline in order to make a first-hand acquaintance with
genuine pathological thoughts. I nearly collapsed as a result. Only a few
people have had the ecstatic experiences Huxley describes. 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
urging treatment of 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 liedetector,
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. This 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 the 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 psychology) 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
exists 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. Freud gave us the
first clear explanation of what happens in the mind during prolonged mental
contact with a human being. He showed that in every intensive human
relationship, each participant reacts at least partially in terms of the
expectations and illusions he developed in his own childhood. As a result
prolonged therapy—based on the principle of utter freedom of expression—
provides as much opportunity for transference of private feelings for the
doctor as for the patient. If the doctor is not careful, or if he does not
understand this mutual transfer of hidden emotions, or if, in his compulsive
zest to explain everything, he is too coercive, he may force the patient into
acceptance of his point of view, instead of helping the patient to arrive at his
own. This can become mental intrusion of a dangerous kind. 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
submit himself for years to the 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 democratic 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 democratic system. Just as there is a deliberate political brainwashing,
so can there 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.
Chapter FourWHY DO THEY YIELD?
The Psychodynamics of False Confession
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 the great psychologist Sigmund Freud later
demonstrated, 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 infantile and 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 P.O.W.’s 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 were gone.
[See Chapter Nine on the action of fear.] 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 did 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 P.O.W. camps could indicate that this defensive
apathy and retreat into secluded infantile 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 zombie-like 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 counterargued. 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 the 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 from a 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 begins 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 the 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 feeling 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— these 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 him.
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 and latent homosexual tendencies 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 P.O.W. 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. [I describe these phenomena of
self-betrayal in Chapter Fourteen.] 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 or her threatening eyes 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. There is no question that most men have a profound loyalty to
their families, but the primitive in him hates those he loves, and this hatred
makes him feel guilty. Buried deep in his unconscious is the knowledge that
in his hostile fantasies he has felt himself capable of committing many
crimes. Theodor Reik has drawn our attention to the unknown primitive
murderer 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 infantile 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.
The method of systematically exploiting unconscious guilt to create
submission is not too well known, but it may be better understood in the light
of our investigation of the unconscious confession compulsion and the need
for punishment. Guilt may be instilled early in life when the parent urges the
child, too much and too early, to apologize for his disobedience, or uses
other means to burden the child with a sense of guilt when he does not
understand what was unmoral or wrong about a given act. Teaching the child
to see right and wrong does not of necessity imply being conditioned with
submissive and anxious anticipation of punishment to follow. In one of my
cases the patient’s mother cried after every little mistake the child made,
“Look what you have done to me!” It took protracted therapy to relieve the
patient of his hidden murderous impulses against his mother and his
consequent burden of guilt.
In the political sphere, many such early child-rearing methods are
symbolically repeated. 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 now 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. [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 once
again: stomach masturbation (Magen-onante). 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 brain washers are. When 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 again 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. In the subsequent
psychological exploration of the boy’s breakdown and depression, his
dreams gave us a clue to his long-buried aggressive fantasies against his
father, whom he had symbolically killed in his dreams. The sense of guilt
about this unconscious infantile hostility had weighed more heavily on his
conscience than the possibility of being guilty toward his fellow partisans. A
conscious understanding of what his difficulties had been, plus renewed
military activity, did much to help him cope with the conflicts that tortured
him, but other unwilling traitors were less fortunate. When finally they
realized the enormity of their betrayal, several of them became psychotically
depressed, and some even committed suicide.
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 (A. Freud). 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 P.O.W. 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 is 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 P.O.W. 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 to 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 selfconfidence.
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 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 per cent 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 most noticeable— euphoria
followed by depression; dejection and restlessness; indifference to unusual
behavior shown by other suspects. 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 by Anna Freud in her book on
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 mechanisms 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. [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 selfdenigration.
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 became 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 childhood 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 victim and 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 INBRAINWASHING 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,
overburdening 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 P.O.W. was courted by a form
of paternal kindness—gifts, sweets at birthdays, and the promise of more
cheerful things to come.
Moloney 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 democratic 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 Communists before may stick to it, but here, too, I have
seen the enemy impose its mental pressure too well and convert their former
comrades into eternal haters of the regime.
PART TWO
THE TECHNIQUES OF MASS SUBMISSION
THE PURPOSE OF THE SECOND PART OF THIS BOOK IS
TO SHOW VARIOUS ASPECTS OF POLITICAL AND
NONPOLITICAL 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.
Chapter FiveTHE COLD WAR AGAINST THE MIND
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 per cent 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. [In Chapter Ten, The Child Is Father to the Man, I will come back
to this inner urge toward conformity.]
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 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 deepfreeze 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-relations 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 products. A car must have more horsepower 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 mundus 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 counterargument 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 totalitarian 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 verbal 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 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 CO-EXISTENCE
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 catchword 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 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.
To those living freely in a democracy, coexistence must imply freedom
and mutuality. The totalitarian concept of un-freedom can not mix with
freedom. There are concepts and ideas that cannot coexist and that do not
tolerate one another.
In order to coexist and to cooperate, one must have notions and
comparable images of integration, of a sameness of ideas, of a belongingtogether,
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
catchword, 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.
Chapter Six
TOTALITARIA AND ITS DICTATORSHIP
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.
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 only 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.