The Rape of the Mind, by A.M. Meerloo, M.D.

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CHAPTER SEVEN: THE INTRUSION BY TOTALITARIAN THINKING

In order to investigate the social forces at work undermining the free individual
development of man's mind, we have to look at manifold aspects of political life. As a
Clinician and polypragmatist, | don't want to bind myself to one political state or
current, but want to describe what can be experienced in social life everywhere.
Where human thinking and human habits are in the process of being remoulded,
they are under the influence of tremendous political upheaval. In one country this
may happen overnight, in others more slowly. The psychologists’ task is to observe
and describe the impact of these processes on the human mind.


When once a nation is under the yoke of totalitarianism, when once its people have
succumbed to the oversimplifications and blandishments of the would-be dictator,
how does the leader maintain his power? What techniques does he use to make his
countrymen docile followers of his bloody regime?


Because man's mature self resists totalitarianism, the dictator must work and
scheme constantly to keep his subjects in line and to immobilize their need for
individual development, rebellion, and healthy growth. As we examine his
techniques, we will come to a better understanding of totalitarianism and of the
interaction between the dictator's methods and the personalities of his subjects. We
need this understanding desperately, for we have to recognize that the forces in
Totalitaria that make humourless robots out of living men can also develop, albeit
unwittingly, in the so-called free, democratic societies.


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The Strategy of Terror


The weapon of terror has been used by tyrants from time immemorial to make a
meek instrument of man. In Totalitaria, the use of this weapon is refined to a science
which can wipe out all opposition and dissent. The leaders of Totalitaria rule by
intimidation; they prefer loyalty through fear to loyalty through faith. Fear and terror
freeze the mind and will; they may create a general psychic paralysis. In the panic
caused by totalitarian terror, men feel separated from one another, as by an
impassable vacuum, and each man becomes a lonely, frightened soul. Even panicky
hovering together could be suspected of being conspiracy against the state.
Separated from any real emotional contact with his fellow men by his own inner
isolation, the citizen of Totalitaria becomes increasingly unable to fight against its
dehumanizing influences.


Totalitaria is constantly on the alert for social sinners, the critics of the system, and
accusation of dissent is equivalent to conviction in the public eye. Insinuation,
calumny, and denunciation are staples of the totalitarian strategy. The entire nation
is dedicated to the proposition that every man is a potential enemy of the regime. No
one is excluded from the terror. Any man may be subjected to it no matter how high
his rank.


The secret police create awe and panic inside the country, while the army serves to
create awe and panic outside. Just the thought of an outbreak of terror - of even a
possible future terror - makes men unwilling to express their opinions and expose
themselves. Both the citizens of Totalitaria and those of her neighbours are affected
by this general fear. A clear example of how this fear paralysis operates in reality
may be seen in the fact that as far back as 1948 western Europeans, who felt the
shadow of anticipated totalitarian occupation, thought it safer to criticize and attack
their American friends than to find fault with a totalitarian enemy who might sweep in
suddenly and without warning.


In Totalitaria, jails and concentration camps by the score are built in order to provoke
fear and awe among the population. They may be called "punishment" or "correction"
camps, but this is only a cheap justification for the truth. In these centres of fear,
nobody is really corrected; he is, as it were, expelled from humanity, wasted, killed -
but not too quickly, lest the terrorizing influence be diminished.


The truth of the matter is that these jails are built not for real criminals, but rather for
their terrorizing effect on the bystanders, the citizens of Totalitaria. Jails represent a
permanent menace, a continual threat. They may put an almost insupportable strain
on the empathy and imagination of those citizens who are, temporarily at least, on
the outside of the barbed wire. In addition to the fear of undergoing the same cruel
treatment, the fear of abasement, humiliation, and death, the very concept of the
concentration camp rouses every man's deep-seated fear of being himself expelled
from the community, of being alone, a wanderer in the desert, unloved and
unwanted.


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There exist several milder forms of mass terror, for instance, THE STRATEGY OF
NO POLITICAL REST. In Totalitaria man is always caught by some form of official
planning. He is always conscious of control and surveillance, of spying, leering
powers lying in wait to chase him and to punish him. Even leisure time and holidays
are occupied by some official program, some facts to be learned, some political
meeting, some parade. Quiet and solitude no longer exist. There is no time for
meditation, for pondering, for reminiscing. The mind is caught in a web of official
thinking and planning. Even the delights of self-chosen silence are forbidden. Every
citizen of Totalitaria must join in the singing and the slogan shouting. And he
becomes so caught in the constant activity that he loses the capacity to realize what
is happening to him.


The emphasis on more production by individuals, factories, and agricultural
enterprises also can become a weapon of increased control and terror. The
Stakhanovite movement in Russia, urging a constant increase in production norms,
became a threat for many. The workers had to increase the pace of their labour and
production, or they would be severely punished. The emphasis on pace and speed
makes man more and more a soulless cog in the totalitarian wheel.


Terror can almost never stop itself; it thrives on compliance and grows in a vacuum.
Terror as a tool means a gradual transfer into terror as a goal - but terror is actually a
self-defeating strategy. Man will ultimately revolt even under an absolute
dictatorship. When men have been reduced to puppet-hood by Totalitaria, they will
finally have become immune to all threats. The magic spell of terror will finally lose
its force. First the citizens of Totalitaria will become dulled to the terror and will no
longer consider even death a danger. Then a few will initiate a final revolt, for
Totalitaria's government by fear and terror fosters internal rebellion, in the few who
cannot be broken down. Even in "gleichgeschaltet" Nazi Germany a resistance
movement was active.


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The Purging Rituals


Cleaning out the higher echelons of government is an old historic habit. The struggle
between fathers and sons, between the older and the younger generation, became
ritualized far back in prehistoric times. Frazer's classic, "The Golden Bough," has told
us a great deal about this. The ancient priest of the heathens acquired his high post
by killing his predecessor. Later in history, the newly proclaimed king offered
criminals instead as sacrifices to the gods on the day of his anointment.


In Totalitaria, the killing and purging ritual is part of the mechanism of government,
and it serves not only a symbolic but also a very real function for the dictator. He
must eliminate all those he has bypassed and double-crossed in his ruthless climb to
power, lest their resentments and frustrated rage break out, endangering his position
or even his life.


The purge reflects another characteristic of life in Totalitaria. It dramatizes the fiction
that the party is always on the alert to keep itself pure and clean. Psychiatry has
demonstrated that the cleanliness compulsion in neurotic individuals is actually a
displaced defense against their own inner rage and hostility. It plays the same sort of
role in communities, and when it is elevated to the level of an officially sanctioned
ritual, it reduces the citizenry to infancy. It makes the inhabitants of Totalitaria feel
like babies -- still struggling to learn their first cleanliness habits, still listening to their
parent's reiterated commands to be clean, be clean, be clean, be good, be good, be
good, be loyal, be loyal, be loyal. The constant repetition of these commands
reinforces each citizen's sense of guilt, of childishness, and of shame.


The totalitarian purge is always accompanied by an elaborate confession
ceremonial, in which the accused publicly repents his sins, much as did the witches
of the Middle Ages. This is the general formula: "| confess my doubts. Thanks to the
criticism of the comrades, | have been able to purify my thinking. | bow in humility to
the opinion of my comrades and the Party and am thankful for the opportunity to
correct my errors. You enabled me to repudiate my deviational questions. |
acknowledge my debt to the selfless leader and the government of the people."


The strategy of public expression of shame has two effects: it serves, like the
purging rituals themselves, to provoke feelings of childish submissiveness among
the people, and, at the same time, it offers each citizen a defense against his own
deep-seated psychological problems and feelings of guilt and unworthiness.
Somewhere deep inside him, the citizen of Totalitaria knows that he has abdicated
his maturity and his responsibility; public purgings relieve his sense of shame. "It is
the others who are guilty and dirty, not I," he thinks. "It is they who are constantly
plotting and conniving." But the very things of which he suspects others are also true
of himself. He is afraid others will betray him because he cannot be sure in his own
mind that he will not betray them. Thus his inner tensions increase, and the purge
provides a periodic blood offering to his own fear and to the god of threat.


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The very fact that this ritual of coercive confession and purge must be repeated
again and again indicates that man develops an inner mental defense against it and
that the more it is used, the less effective it becomes as a means of arousing guilt
and terror. Just as the citizen of Totalitaria becomes hardened or dulled to the terror
of constant official intrusion into his private life, so he becomes almost immune to the
cries of treason and sabotage.


In the same way, as the purge becomes less effective as a taming tool, the tyrant
uses it more frequently to soothe his own fears. History provides us with many
examples of revolutions which eventually drowned in a bloody reign of terror and
purge. Some of the most devoted heroes and leaders of the French Revolution met
their death on the guillotine of the republic they helped to create.


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Wild Accusation and Black Magic


Wild accusation and black magic, like all the other taming tools of Totalitaria, are
nothing new, but in primitive civilizations and in prehistoric times the craft of black
magic was rather simple. The shaman had merely to destroy or mutilate a small
statuette of the accused criminal, to point or thrust a special stick at the man himself,
or to curse and berate him with furious words and gestures in order to bring his
victim to collapse and death. In his blind acceptance of the magic ritual, the victim
was possessed by fear, and often he gave himself up to the spell and just died
(Malinowski).


This magic slaying of the foe has plural psychological implications. The victim of the
magic spell was often looked upon as the representative of the tribal god, the
internalized authority and father. He must be killed because his very existence
aroused guilt and remorse among his people. His death may silence the inner voices
in every man which warn against impending downfall. Sometimes the victim comes
from a different tribe than that of his accusers. In this situation, the stranger is an
easier scapegoat, and punishing him serves to still the clash of ambivalent feelings
in the members of the killing tribe. Hate for an outsider checks and deflects the hate
and aggression each man feels toward his own group and toward himself. The more
fear there is in a society, the more guilt each individual member of the society feels,
the more need there is for internal scapegoats and external enemies. INTERNAL
CONFUSION LOOKS FOR DISCHARGE IN OUTSIDE WARS.


In Totalitaria, the air is full of gossip, calumny, and rumour. Any accusation, even if it
is false, has a greater influence on the citizenry than subsequent vindication. Bills of
particulars, made out of whole cloth are manufactured against innocents, especially
against former leaders, who have been able to develop some personal esteem and
loyalty among their friends and followers. Trumped-up charges made against us
always revive unconscious feelings of guilt and induce us to tremble.


In our analysis of the psychological forces that lead prisoners of war and other
political victims to confession and betrayal, we saw how strongly the sense of hidden
guilt and doubt in each man impels him under strain to surrender to the demands
and ideologies of the enemy. This same mechanism is at work constantly among the
citizens of Totalitaria. Accusations against others remind him of his own inner
rebellions and hostilities, which he does not dare to bring out into the open, and so
the accused, even when he is innocent, becomes the scapegoat for his private
sense of guilt. Cowardice makes the other citizens of our mythical country turn away
from the victim lest they be accused themselves.


The very fact that character assassination is possible reveals the frailty and
sensitivity of human sympathy and empathy. Even in free, democratic societies,
political campaigns are often conducted in an atmosphere of extravagant accusation
and even wilder counter accusation. The moment the strategy of wild accusation,
with all its disagreeable noises of vituperation and calumny, begins, we forget the
strategic intention behind the words and find ourselves influenced by the shouting
and name calling. "Maybe," we say to ourselves, "there is something in this story."


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This, of course, is just what the slanderer wants. In the minds of the politicians the
illusion still persists that the end justifies the means. But campaigns of slander
produce paradoxical results because the very fact that an unfounded accusation has
been made weakens the moral sense of both listener and accuser.


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Spy Mania


In Totalitaria this vicious circle of vituperation reaches its fullest flowering. Drowned
in a reign of suspicion, the citizen of Totalitaria suffers from a terrible delusion of
persecution -- "spy-onoia," the spy mania. He is continually on the alert, watching his
fellow men. His good neighbour may at any moment become a saboteur or a traitor.
The citizen of Totalitaria hardly ever looks for confusion or flaws in his own soul, but
projects them onto scapegoats - until he himself finally becomes the victim of
someone else's spyonoia. Every citizen is constantly trying to search out everyone
else's innermost thoughts. Because one's own hidden thoughts are projected on
one's neighbours, thinking in itself becomes the enemy. This great fear of the inner
thoughts of our fellow men is related to a general process of paranoiac re-evaluation
of the world as a result of fear and totalitarian thinking. In the denial of human loyalty
and in the constant delusion of treason and sabotage are expressed the whole
infantile mythology of Totalitaria and its repudiation of mature human relationships.
Through interrogation, character assassination, humiliation, mental terror, and
demoralization -- such as happens in individual and collective brainwashing -- man
can be so utterly demoralized that he accepts any political system. He is nothing any
more; why should he oppose matters? In Totalitaria there is no open policy, no free
discussion, no honest difference of opinion; there is only intrigue and denunciation,
with their frightening action on the masses.


The strategy of wild accusation is used not only against Totalitaria's citizenry, but
also against the rest of the world. Totalitaria needs the images of outside enemies -
imaginary cruel monsters who spread plague and disease - to justify its own internal
troubles. The remnants of the individual citizen's conscience are calmed and held in
check by a paranoiac attack on the rest of the world. "The enemy is poisoning our
food, throwing beetles and bacteria into our crops." This myth of an imaginary world
conspiracy aims at bringing the fearful citizens of Totalitaria into a concerted defense
against nonexistent dangers. It conceals, at the same time, internal failures leading
to diminishing crops and lack of food.


Projecting blame onto others reinforces each citizen's sense of participation in the
totalitarian community and stills the nagging internal voice demanding that he act as
a self-responsible individual. The myth of external plotting also increases the
individual citizen's feeling of dependence and immaturity. Now only his dictatorial
leader can protect him from the evil world outside -- a world which is described to
him as a vast zoo, inhabited by atomic dragons and hydrogen monsters.


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The Strategy of Criminalization


As we said before, the citizen of Totalitaria may be able to fulfil some of his irrational,
instinctual needs in return for his submission to totalitarian slavery. Hitler Germany
taught us the accepted pattern. The citizen (and party member) is encouraged to
betray his friends and parents, something the angry, frustrated baby in him has often
wanted to do. He may live out in action his deeply repressed aggressions and
desires for revenge. He no longer has to suppress or reject some of his own primitive
impulses. The system assumes the full burden of his guilt and hands him a ready-
made list of thousands of justifications and exculpations for the release of his sadistic
impulses. Flowery catchwords, such as "historical necessity," help the individual to
rationalize immorality and evil into morality and good. We see here the great
corruption of civilized standards.


In his strategy of criminalization, the totalitarian dictator destroys the conscience of
his followers, just as he has destroyed his own. Think of the highly learned and
polished Nazi doctors who started their professional life with the Hippocratic oath,
promising to be the helping healer of man, but who later in cold blood inflicted the
most horrible tortures on their concentration-camp victims (Mitscherlich). They
slaughtered innocents by the thousands in order to discover the statistical limits of
human endurance. They infected other thousands as guinea pigs because the
Fuhrer wanted it so. They had lost their personal standards and ethics completely
and justified all their crimes through the Fuhrer's will. Political catchwords
encouraged them to yield their consciences completely to the dictator. The process
of systematic criminalization requires a "deculturation" of the people. As one of
Hitler's gang-men said, "When | hear the word ‘civilization,’ | prepare my gun." This is
done to consistently arouse the instinct of cruelty. People are told not to believe in
intellect and objective truth, but to listen only to the subjective dictates of the Moloch
State, to Hitler, to Mussolini, to Stalin.


Criminalization is conditioning people to rebellion against civilized frustrations. Show
them blood and bloody scapegoats, and a thousand years of acculturation fall away
from them. This implies imbuing the people with hysteria, arousing the masses,
homogenizing the emotions. All this tends to awaken the brute Neanderthal psyche
in man. Justify crime with the glamorous doctrine of race superiority, and then you
make sure the people will follow you.


Hitler knew very well what he was doing when he turned the German concentration
camps over to the unleashed lusts of his storm troopers. "Let them kill and murder,"
was the device. "Once they have gone so far with me, they must go on to the end."
The strategy of criminalization is not only directed toward crushing the victims of the
totalitarian regime, but also toward giving the elite hangmen -- the governing gang --
that poisonous feeling of power that drags them farther and farther away from every
human feeling; their victims become people without human identity, merely speaking
masks and ego-less robots. The strategy of criminalization is the systematic
organization of the lower passions in man, in particular in those the dictator must
trust as his direct helpers.


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Under the pressure of totalitarian thinking, nearly every citizen identifies with the
ruling gang, and many must prove their loyalty by murder and killing, or at least
expressing their approval of murder and killing. The boredom of Totalitaria's
automatic patterns of living leads the deluded citizens to welcome the adventure of
war and crime and self-destruction. Each new act of torture and crime makes new
bonds of fidelity and unscrupulous obedience, especially within the leading gang. In
the end, driven by crime and guilt, the ruling members have to stick it out together
because the downfall of the system would bring about the downfall of the entire
gang, both leaders and followers. The same thing holds true in the criminal world.
Once a man has taken the first step and rejected the laws of society and joined the
criminal gang, he is at war with the outside world and its moral evaluations. From
that point on, the gang can blackmail him and subdue him.


In Totalitaria, the vicious circle of criminalization of the citizenry, in which the means
become ends in themselves, grows into a cynical conspiracy covered with the
cynical flag of decent idealism. The country's leaders use such simple words as "the
universal campaign of peace," and the citizens rejoice and take pride in these words.
Only a few among them know what deceptive deeds lie behind the flowery phrases.
These perversions are also incorporated into a great nationalistic myth - the Third
Reich, the New Empire, the People's Republic - and the citizen's desire to do
something heroic becomes identified with doing something violent and criminal.
Blood becomes a magic fluid, and shedding someone else's blood becomes a
virtuous and life-giving deed.


Unlimited killing, as it is practiced in totalitarian systems, is related to deep,
unconscious fears. The weak and emotionally sick in any society kill out of fear, in
order to borrow, in a magic way, their dead victims' strength and happiness - as well
as, of course, their material possessions. The killing of millions in the Nazi gas ovens
was part of this ancient mythology of murder. Perhaps the members of the master
race thought that slaughtering the Jews would ensure that the Germans would
endure pain for as many centuries as had their victims! It is part of an old primitive
myth that through killing one fortifies and prolongs one's own life. Let us not forget
that forces of reason and understanding in man are rather weak. It is difficult to
control the fire of explosive drives, once they are lighted.


Totalitarianism must kill, slaughter, make war. Totalitaria preaches hatred, and the
totalitarian mouthpiece is a lonely, deluded, tough "superman," calling for hatred and
injustice and arousing intensified fanaticism unhampered by any moral feeling or
remorse. His battle cry reinforces the dictator's hold on his subjects, because each
citizen, in and through his guilty deeds, learns to hate his victim, whose very
suffering arouses even more the criminal's deeply buried sense of guilt.


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Verbocracy and Semantic Fog - Talking the People into Submission


After the First World War, we became more conscious of our attitude toward words.
This attitude was gradually changing. Our trust in official catchwords and clichés and
in idealistic labels had diminished. We became more and more aware of the fact that
the important questions were what groups and powers stood behind the words, and
what their secret intentions were. But in our easygoing way we often forget to ask
this question, and we are all more or less susceptible to noisy, oft-repeated words.


The formulation of big propagandistic lies and fraudulent catchwords has a very well-
defined purpose in Totalitaria, and words themselves have acquired a special
function in the service of power, which we may call verbocracy. The Big Lie and the
phoney slogan at first confuse and then dull the hearers, making them willing to
accept every suggested myth of happiness. The task of the totalitarian propagandist
is to build special pictures in the minds of the citizenry so that finally they will no
longer see and hear with their own eyes and ears but will look at the world through
the fog of official catchwords and will develop the automatic responses appropriate
to totalitarian mythology.


The multiform use of words in DOUBLE TALK serves as an attack on our logic, that
is, an attack on our understanding of what monolithic dictatorship really is. Hear,
hear the nonsense: "Peace is war and war is peace! Democracy is tyranny and
freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength! Virtue is vice and truth is a lie." So says
the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's grim novel, "1984." And we saw this
nightmare fantasy come true when our soldiers who had spent long years in North
Korean prison camps returned home talking of totalitarian China with the deceiving
cliché of "the people's democracy." Pavlovian conditioning to special words forces
people into an AUTOMATIC THINKING that is tied to those words. The words we
use influence our behaviour in daily life; they determine the thoughts we have.


In Totalitaria, facts are replaced by fantasy and distortion. People are taught
systematically and intentionally to lie (Winokur). History is reconstructed, new myths
are built up whose purpose is twofold: to strengthen and flatter the totalitarian leader,
and to confuse the luckless citizens of the country. The whole vocabulary is a
dictated set of slowly hypnotizing slogans. In the semantic fog that permeates the
atmosphere, words lose their direct communicative function.


They become merely commanding signs, triggering off reactions of fear and terror.
They are battles cries and Pavlovian signals, and no longer represent free thinking.
THE WORD, ONCE CONSIDERED A FIRST TOKEN OF FREE HUMAN
CREATION, IS TRANSFORMED INTO A MECHANICAL TOOL. In Totalitaria, words
may have a seductive action, soothing or charming their hearers, but they are not
allowed to have intrinsic meaning. They are conditioners, emotional triggers, serving
to imprint the desired reaction patterns on their hearers.


Man's mental laziness, his resistance to the hard labour of thinking, makes it


relatively easy for Totalitaria's dictator to bring his subjects into acceptance of the Big
Lie.


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At first the citizen may say to himself, "All this is just nonsense - pure double talk,"
but in the very act of trying to shrug it off, he has become subject to the power of the
inherent suggestion. That is the trick of double talk; once a man neglects to analyze
and verify it, he becomes lost in it and can no longer see the difference between
rationale and rationalization. In the end, he can no longer believe anything, and he
retreats into sullen dullness. Once the citizen of Totalitaria has accepted the "logic"
of his leaders, he is no longer open to discussion or argument. Alas, in our Western
world, we often meet this evasion of semantic clarity. Let us not forget that the battle
for words is part of the ideological cold war in our world.


Something has crept into our mechanized system of communication that has made
our modes of thinking deteriorate. People too casually acquire ideas and concepts.
They no longer struggle for a clear understanding. The popularized picture replaces
the battle of the pros and cons of concepts. Instead of aiming at true understanding,
people listen to thoughtless repetition, which gives them THE DELUSION OF
UNDERSTANDING.


Communication has an even more infantile, magic character for the citizen of
Totalitaria. Words no longer represent intelligible meanings or ideas. They bind the
citizen of Totalitaria to utter dependence on his commander, much as the infant is
bound to the word pictures of his parents.


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Logocide


Byfield points out in his pamphlet on logocide that words are commonly used as
instruments of social revolution. Politicians seeking power must coin new labels and
new words with emotional appeal, "while allowing the same old practices and
institutions to continue as before. The trick is to replace a disagreeable image though
the substance remains the same. The totalitarians consequently have to fabric a
hate language in order to stir up the mass emotions. We have all experience how the
word 'peace' doesn't mean peace any more, it has become a propagandistic device
to APPEASE the masses and to disguise aggression."


The VERBOCRACY in totalitarian thinking and the official verbosity of demagogues
serve to disturb and suffocate the free minds of citizens. We can say that verbocracy
turns them into what psychology calls symbol agnostics, people capable only of
imitation, incapable of inquisitive sense of objectivity and perspective that leads to
questioning and understanding and to the formation of individual ideas and ideals. In
other words, the individual citizen becomes a parrot, repeating ready-made slogans
and propaganda catchwords without understanding what they really mean, or what
forces stand behind them.


This parrotism may give the citizen of Totalitaria a certain infantile emotional
pleasure, however. "Heil, heil! - Duce, Duce!" -- these rhythmic chants afford him the
same kind of sound-enjoyment children achieve through babbling, shrieking, and
yelling.


The abuse of the word and the enshrinement of propaganda are more obvious in
Totalitaria than in any other part of the world. But this evil exists all over. We can find
all too many examples of it in actual conversation. Many speakers use verbal
showing off to cover an emptiness of thought, to stir up emotions and to create
admiration and adoration of what is essentially empty and valueless. Loud-mouthed
phoniness threatens to become the ideal of our time.


The semantic fog in Totalitaria is thickened by the regimentation of information. The
citizens of our mythical country have no access to sources of facts and opinions.
They are not free to verify what they hear or read. They are the victims of their
leader's "labelomania" -- their judgments are determined by the official labels
everything and everybody bears.


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Labelomania


The urge to attach too much meaning to the label of an object or institution and to
look only casually at its intrinsic value is characteristic of our times and seems to be
growing. | call this condition labelomania; it is the exaggerated respect for the
scientific-sounding name - the label, the school, the degree, the diploma - with a
surprising disregard for underlying value. All about us we see people chasing after
fixed formulas, credits, marks, ranks, and labels because they believe that if one is to
have prestige or recognition these distinguishing marks are necessary. In order to
obtain acceptance, people are prepared to undergo most impractical and stylized
training and conditioning - not to mention expense - in special schools and
institutions which promote certain labels, diplomas, and sophisticated facades.


Not long ago a psychiatric colleague worked in a clinic where a different terminology
was used, and the ideas of his former teachers, because they were expressed in
terms other than those of the clinic, were criticized and even vilified. My colleague
was a good practical therapist; yet he came to need psychotherapy himself, to
counteract the utter confusion resulting from daily contacts with aggressive adepts of
a different terminology, just as much as some of our soldiers released from the
Korean prison camps.


There is something essentially unpleasant in the need to express and judge all
opinions and evaluations in accepted clichés and labels. It implies a devaluation of
the work or of the idea involved, and it denies the subtle human differences between
people and the phenomena their words describe. In Totalitaria, man is so anxiety-
ridden, so fearful of any deviation from the prescribed opinions and ways of thinking
that he only allows himself to express himself in the terms his dictators provide. To
the citizen of Totalitaria, the acknowledged label becomes more important than the
eternal variation that is life.


As words lose their communicative function, they acquire more and more of a
frightening, regulatory, and conditioning function. Official words must be believed
and must be obeyed. Dissension and disagreement become both a physical and an
emotional luxury. Vituperation, and the power that lies behind it, is the only
sanctioned logic. Facts contrary to the official line are distorted and suppressed; any
form of mental compromise is treason. In Totalitaria, there is no search for truth, only
the enforced acceptance of the totalitarian dogmas and clichés. The most frightening
thing of all is that parallel to the increase in our means of communication, our mutual
understanding has decreased. A Babel-like confusion has taken hold of political and
non-political minds as a result of semantic disorder and too much verbal noise.


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The Apostatic Crime in Totalitaria


Totalitaria makes the thinking man a criminal, for in our mythical country the citizen
can be punished as much for wrong thinking as for wrongdoing. Because the
watchful eyes of the secret police are everywhere, the critic of the regime is driven to
conspiratorial methods if he wants to have even a safe conversation with those he
wants to trust. What we used to call the "Nazi gesture" was a careful looking around
before starting to talk to a friend.


The criminal in Totalitaria can be an accidental scapegoat used for release of official
hostility, and there is often need for a scapegoat. From one day to the next, a citizen
can become a hero or a villain, depending on strategic party needs.


Nearly all of the mature ideals of mankind are crimes in Totalitaria. Freedom and
independence, compromise and objectivity - all of these are treasonable. In
Totalitaria there is a new crime, the apostatic crime, which may be described as the
obstinate refusal to admit imputed guilt. On the other hand, the hero in Totalitaria is
the converted sinner, the breast-beating, recanting traitor, the self-denouncing
criminal, the informer, and the stool pigeon.


The ordinary, law-abiding citizen of Totalitaria, far from being a hero, is potentially
guilty of hundreds of crimes. He is a criminal if he is stubborn in defense of his own
point of view. He is a criminal if he refuses to become confused. He is a criminal if he
does not loudly and vigorously participate in all official acts; reserve, silence, and
ideological withdrawal are treasonable. He is a criminal if he doesn't LOOK happy,
for then he is guilty of what the Nazis called physiognomic insubordination. He can
be a criminal by association or disassociation, by scapegoatism, or by projection, by
intention or by anticipation. He is a criminal if he refuses to become an informer. He
can be tried and found guilty by every conceivable "i - cosmopolitanism,


ism
provincialism; deviationalism, mechanism; imperialism, nationalism; pacifism,
militarism; objectivism, subjectivism; chauvinism, equalitarianism; practicalism,
idealism. He is guilty every time he IS something.


The only safe conduct pass for the citizen of Totalitaria lies in the complete
abdication of his mental integrity.

[admin]

CHAPTER EIGHT: TRIAL BY TRIAL

For the Special Marine Corps Court of Inquiry in Washington that had to judge one of
the cases of brainwashing, | was asked, as an expert witness, if | could explain why
some of the American officers yielded rather easily to mental pressure exerted by the
enemy.


It was in the days when Congressional investigations in our country were in full
swing. In all honesty | had to answer that sometimes coercive suggestions
underlying such investigations could exert conforming pressure on susceptible
minds. People are conditioned by numerous psychological processes in our daily
political atmosphere.


Though we have been forewarned of what totalitarian techniques may do to the
mind, there is reason to be alarmed by the possible disruption of values brought
about by some of our own troubles.


The totalitarian dictator succeeded in transforming his apparatus of "justice" into an
instrument of threat and domination. Where once a balanced feeling of justice had
been recognized as the noblest ideal of civilized man, this ideal was now scoffed at
by cynics - like Hitler and Goebbels - and called a synthetic emotion useful only to
impress or appease people. Thus, in the hands of totalitarian inquisitors and judges
justice has become a farce, a piece of propaganda to soothe the people's
conscience. Investigative power is misused - to arouse prejudices and animosities in
those bystanders who have become too confused to distinguish between right and
wrong.


The totalitarian has taught us that the courts and the judiciary can be used as tools
of thought control. That is why we have to study how our own institutions,
intentionally or unobtrusively, may be used to distort our concepts of democratic
freedom.


106


The Downfall of Justice


To a psychologist, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Moscow purge trials
between 1936 and 1938 was the deep sense of moral shock felt by people all over
the world, whose trust in the judicial process was shaken to its foundations by these
perversions of justice. Discussions about the trials always concerned themselves
less with the question of guilt or innocence of the accused than with the horrifying
travesty of justice the trials presented. Somewhere deep in the soul of men lies the
conviction that a judge is, by definition, a righteous, impartial man, that an appeal to
the courts is the road to truth, that the law stands above corruption, degradation, and
perversion.


Of course, we recognize that judges are human beings like ourselves, that they can
make mistakes, as the rest of us do, and we are even willing to accept temporary
injustice because we believe that there will be eventual vindication and that the rule
of law and justice will remain triumphant. The moment the judicial process becomes
a farce, a show to intimidate the people, something in man's soul is profoundly
affected. When justice is no longer blind, but has her eye on the main chance, we
become frightened and alarmed. To whom shall a man turn if he cannot find justice
in the courts?


During the course of psychotherapy, one of my patients was called to jury duty. The
experience disturbed him deeply, for apparently the prosecutor in this case was
more interested in getting a conviction than in finding out the truth. Although the jury
had the last word, and, by its verdict, condemned the prosecutor's strategy, our juror
was greatly upset. "What happens,” he asked me, "in other cases? Suppose the
jurors cannot see through the lawyer's sophisms? Suppose they are taken in by his
constant suggestion and insistence?"


Indeed, any trial can be used as a weapon of intimidation; it can, in a subtle way,
intimidate the jurors, the witnesses, the entire public. In Totalitaria, some higher
courts exist only to carry out this function of intimidation; their purpose is to prove to
their own citizens and to the world at large that there is a punishing and threatening
force controlling the government and that this force can use the judiciary for its own
purposes.


An apparent objective official investigation may become a weapon of political control
simply through the suggestions that inevitably accompany it. The man who is under
investigation is almost automatically stigmatized and blamed because our suspicions
are thrust on him. The very fact that he is under scrutiny makes him suspect. Thus,
even the so-called "democratic power to investigate" may become the power to
destroy. We must beware of this danger! Already the approving or disapproving way
of interrogation changes man's thinking about facts.


Any judicial action, whether legal or investigative, which receives widespread
publicity, exerts some mental pressure on the entire public. It is not only the
participants in the action who have a stake in its eventual outcome, the citizens as a
whole may well become emotionally involved in the proceedings.


107


Any official investigation can be either a mere show of power or an act of truth. As a
show of power, by a totalitarian government or by an unscrupulous demagogue, it
can have frightening consequences. The German Reichstag fire case, the Moscow
purge trials, and the court actions against our P.O.W.s in China are prime examples
of "legal" action which served to consolidate the political power of ruthless men and
had for their object confusion of a helpless citizenry. An additional intention was to
shock the public opinion of the world.


If we look at legal inquiry from the point of view of each of its participants, we will see
even more clearly the dangers we must guard against.


108


The Demagoqgue as Prosecutor and Hypnotist


Recent happenings in our own country indicate clearly that the methods used to
satisfy a question for power show a universal pattern. The ancient magic masks
used to frighten the people may have been replaced by an overconfident show of
physical strength by a "hero" artificially shaped as an object of admiration and
identification for infantile minds, but the loud noises of propaganda are still with us,
magnified a thousandfold by the radio and television, and serving to intimidate and
hypnotize our less alert contemporaries. A worldwide audience, watching and
listening to the demagogue playing all his different roles -- the righteous accuser, the
martyred victim, the voice of conscience - is temporarily thrown into a semi-
frightened, trancelike state of exhausted inattentiveness through the monotonous
repetition of threats, accusations, and clichés.


The demagogue, like the totalitarian dictator, knows well how to lay a mental spell on
the people, how to create a kind of mass suggestion and mass hypnosis. There is no
intrinsic difference between individual and mass hypnosis. In hypnosis - the most
intensified form of suggestion - the individual becomes temporarily automatized, both
physically and mentally. Such a clinical state of utter mental submission can be
brought about quite easily in children and in primitive people, but it can be created in
civilized adults, too. Some of the American P.O.W.s in Korean prison camps were
reduced to precisely this condition.


The more the individual feels himself to be part of the group, the more easily can he
become the victim of mass suggestion. This is why primitive communities, which
have a high degree of social integration and identification, are so sensitive to
suggestions. Sorcerers and magicians can often keep an entire tribe under their
spell.


Most crowds are rather easy to influence and hypnotize because common longings
and yearnings increase the suggestibility of each member of the group. Each person
has a tendency to identify with the rest of the group and with the leader as well, and
this makes it easy for the leader to hold the people in his grip. As Hitler said in "Mein
Kampf," the leader can count on increasing submissiveness from the masses.


Sudden fright, fear, and terror were the old-fashioned methods used to induce
hypnosis, and they are still used by dictators and demagogues. Threats, unexpected
accusations, even long speeches and boredom may overwhelm the mind and reduce
it to a hypnotic state.


Another easy technique is to work with specially suggestive words, repeating them
monotonously. Arouse self-pity! Tell the people that they have been "betrayed" and
that their leaders have deserted them. From time to time, the demagogue has to add
a few jokes. People like to laugh. They also like to be horrified, and the macabre,
especially, attracts them. Tell them gory tales and let them huddle together in
sensational tension. They will probably develop an enormous awe for the man who
frightens them and will be willing to give him the chance to lead them out of their
emotional terror. In the yearning to be freed from one fear, they may be willing to
surrender completely to another.


109


Radio and television have enhanced the hypnotizing power of sounds, images, and
words. Most Americans remember very clearly that frightening day in 1938 when
Orson Welles's broadcast of the invasion from Mars sent hundreds of people
scurrying for shelter, running from their homes like panicky animals trying to escape
a forest fire. The Welles broadcast is one of the clearest examples of the enormous
hypnosuggestive power of the various means of mass communication, and the
tremendous impact that authoritatively broadcast nonsense can have on intelligent,
normal people.


It is not only the suggestive power of these media that gives them their hypnotizing
effect. Our technical means of communication make of the people one huge
participating mass. Even when | am alone with my radio, | am technically united with
the huge mass of other listeners. | see them in my mind, | unconsciously identify with
them, and while | am listening | am one with them. Yet | have no direct emotional
contact with them. It is partly for this reason that radio and television tend to take
away active affectionate relationships between men and to destroy the capacity for
personal thought, evaluation, and reflection. They catch the mind directly, giving
people no time for calm, dialectical conversation with their own minds, with their
friends, or with their books. The voices from the ether don't permit the freedom-
arousing mutuality of free conversation and discussion, and thus provoke greater
passive acceptance - as in hypnosis.


Many people are hypnophiles, anxious to daydream and day-sleep throughout their
lives; these people easily fall prey to mass suggestion. The lengthy oration or the
boring sermon either weakens the listeners and makes them more ripe for the mass
spell, or makes them more resentful and rebellious. Long speeches are a staple of
totalitarian indoctrination because finally the boredom breaks through our defences.
We give in. Hitler used this technique of mass hypnosis through monotony to
enormous advantage. He spoke endlessly and included long, dull recitals of statistics
in his speeches.


The din of constant verbal intimidation of the public is a recognized tool of totalitarian
strategy. The demagogue uses this suggestive technique, too, as well as the more
tricky manoeuvre of attacking opponents who are usually considered to be beyond
suspicion. This manoeuvre is often combined with a renewed appeal to self-pity.
"Fourteen years of disgrace and shame," was the slogan Hitler used to slander the
very creative period between the Armistice in 1918 and the year he seized the helm.
"Twenty years of treason," a slogan used in our country not too long ago, sounds
suspiciously like it, and is all too familiar to anyone who watched Hitler's rise and fall.


The stab-in-the-back myth reduces everyone who is taken in by it to the level of
suspicious childhood. This inflammatory oratory aims toward arousing chaotic and
aggressive responses in others. The demagogue doesn't mind temporary verbal
attacks on himself - even slander can delight him - because these attacks keep him
in the headlines and in the public eye and may help increase people's fear of him.
Better to be hated and feared than forgotten!


110


The demagogue grows fat on prolonged and confused discussion of his behaviour; it
serves to paralyze the people's minds and to obscure completely the real issues
behind his red herrings. If this continues long enough, people become fed up, they
give in, they want to sleep, they are willing to let the big "hero" take over. And the
sequel can be totalitarianism. As a matter of fact, Nazism and Fascism both gambled
on the fear of Communism as a means of seizing power for themselves.


What we have recently experienced in this country is frighteningly similar to the first
phase of the deliberate totalitarian attack on the mind by slogans and suspicions.
Violent, raucous noise provokes violent emotional reactions and destroys mental
control. When the demagogue starts to rant and rave, his outbursts tend to be
interpreted by the general public as proof of his sincerity and dedication. But for the
most part such declarations are proof of just the opposite and are merely part of the
demagogue's power-seeking energy.


There is in existence a totalitarian "Document of Terror" which discusses in detail the
use of well-planned, repeated successive WAVES OF TERROR to bring the people
into submission. Each wave of terrorizing cold war creates its effect more easily --
after a breathing spell - than the one that preceded it because people are still
disturbed by their previous experience. Morale becomes lower and lower, and the
psychological effect of each new propaganda campaign becomes stronger; it
reaches a public already softened up. Every dissenter becomes more and more
frightened that he may be found out. Gradually people are no longer willing to
participate in any sort of political discussion or to express their opinions. Inwardly
they have already surrendered to the terrorizing dictatorial forces.


We must learn to treat the demagogue and aspirant dictator in our midst just as we
should treat our external enemies in a cold war - with the weapon of ridicule. The
demagogue himself is almost incapable of humour of any sort, and if we treat him
with humour, he will begin to collapse. Humour is, after all, related to a sense of
perspective. If we can see how things should be, we can see how askew they can
get, and we can recognize distortion when we are confronted with it. Put the
demagogue's statements in perspective, and you will see how utterly distorted they
are. How can we possibly take them seriously or answer them seriously? We have
important business to attend to - matters of life and death both for ourselves as
individuals and for our nation as a whole. The demagogue relies for his effectiveness
on the fact that people will take seriously the fantastic accusations he makes; will
discuss the phony issues he raises as if they had reality, or will be thrown into such a
state of panic by his accusations and charges that they will simply abdicate their right
to think and verify for themselves.


The fact is that the demagogue is not appealing to what is rational and mature in
man; he is appealing to what is most irrational and most immature. To attempt to
answer his ravings with logic is to attempt the impossible. First of all, by so doing we
accept his battling premises, and we find ourselves trapped in an argument on terms
he has chosen. It is always easier to defeat an enemy on your own ground, and by
choosing your own terms. In addition, the demagogue either is, or pretends to be,
incapable of the kind of logic that makes discussion and clarification possible.


111


He is a master at changing the subject. It is worse than criminal for us to get
ourselves involved in endless, pointless, and inevitably vituperative arguments with
men who are less concerned with truth, social good, and real problems than they are
with gaining unlimited attention and power for themselves.


In their defense against psychological attacks on their freedom, the people need
humour and good sense first. Consistent approval or silent acceptance of any terror-
provoking strategy will result only in the downfall of our democratic system.
Confusion undermines confidence. In a country like ours, where it is up to the voting
public to discern the truth, a universal knowledge of the methods used by the
demagogue to deceive or to lull the public is absolutely necessary.


112


The Trial as an Instrument of Intimidation


Man's suggestibility can be a severe liability to him and to his democratic freedom in
still another important respect. Even when there is no deliberate attempt to
manipulate public opinion, the uncontrolled discussion of legal actions, such as
political or criminal trials, in newspaper headlines and in partisan columns helps to
create a collective emotional atmosphere. This makes it difficult for those directly
involved to maintain their much-needed objectivity and to render a verdict according
to facts rather than suggestions and subjective experiences.


In addition, any judicial process which receives widespread publicity exerts mental
pressure on the public at large. Thus, not only the participants but the entire citizenry
can become emotionally involved in the proceedings. Any trial can be either an act of
power or an act of truth. An apparently objective examination may become a weapon
of control simply by the action of the suggestions that inevitably accompany it. As an
act of power by a totalitarian government, the trial can have frightening
consequences. The Moscow purge trials and the German Reichstag fire case are
prime examples.


We do not, of course, have such horrifying travesties on justice in this country, but
our tendency to turn legal actions into a field day for the newspapers, the radio, and
television weakens our capacity to arrive at justice and truth. It would be better if we
postponed discussion of the merits of any legal case until after the verdict was in.

As we have already seen, any man can be harassed into a confession. The cruel
process of menticide is not the only way to arrive at this goal; a man can be held
guilty merely by accusation, especially when he is too weak to oppose the impact of
collective ire and public opinion.


In circumstances of abnormal fear and prejudice, men feel the need for a scapegoat
more strongly than at other times. Consequently, people can be easily duped by
false accusations which satisfy their need to have someone to blame. Victims of
lynch mobs in our own country have been thus sacrificed to mass passion and so
have some so-called traitors and collaborators. In public opinion, the trial itself
becomes the verdict of "guilty."


113


The Congressional Investigation


Let me first state that | firmly believe that the right of the Congress to investigate and
to propose legislation on the basis of such investigation is one of the most important
of our democratic safeguards. But like any other human _ institution, the
Congressional right to investigate can be abused and misused. The power to
investigate may become the power to destroy -- not only the man under attack, but
also the mental integrity of those who, in one way or another, are witnesses to the
investigation. In a subtle way, the current wave of Congressional investigations may
have a coercive effect on our citizenry. Some dictatorial personalities are obsessed
with a morbid need to investigate, and Congressional investigations are made to
order for them. Everybody who does not agree with them, who does not bow low and
submit, is suspect, and is subjected to a flow of vilification and vituperation. The
tendency on the part of the public is to disbelieve everything that the demagogue's
opponents say and to swallow uncritically the statements made by those who either
surrender to his browbeating or go along with it because they believe in the aims he
pretends to stand for.


PSYCHOLOGICALLY, IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE SIMPLE
FACT OF BEING INTERVIEWED AND INVESTIGATED HAS A COERCIVE
INFLUENCE. As soon as a man is under cross-examination, he may become
paralyzed by the procedure and find himself confessing to deeds he never did. In a
country where the urge to investigate spreads, suspicion and insecurity grow.
Everybody becomes infected with the feelings of the omnipotence of the inquisitor.
Wire tapping, for instance, has the same power; it is grasping the secrets of others.
In psychological circles a good deal of attention is now being given to the impact of
interviews and interrogations on people. The psychological interviewer himself must
be aware of the various interpersonal processes involved in this kind of
communication; if he is not, he will not be able to find out where the truth lies.


Instead he will get answers which are implicit in his own questions, answers which
may have little relation to the real truth. This does not happen only in cases where
both the interviewer and the man he is interviewing show bad faith. It can happen
despite their best intentions. For everybody brings to an interview the sum total of all
his earlier interpersonal relationships. In the initial verbal "trial and error," during what
we could call the smelling-out period, each party mobilizes himself to find out what
the other party expects and where his weaknesses are and, at the same time, tries
to hide his own weaknesses and emphasize his own strengths. The man in the street
who is suddenly interviewed tends to give the answer he thinks his questioner
expects.


Every conversation, every verbal relationship repeats, at least to some degree, the
pattern of the early verbal relationships between the child and its parents. To a man
or woman under investigation, the interrogator becomes the parent, good or bad, an
object of suspicion or of submission. Since the interrogator himself is often unaware
of this unconscious process, the result can be a confusing battle of unconscious or
half-conscious tendencies, in which the spoken words are often merely a cover for
suspicion-laden conversation between deeper layers of both personalities.


114


All people who are systematically interrogated, whether in a court, during a
Congressional inquiry, or even when applying for a job or having a medical
examination, feel themselves exposed. This very fact in itself provokes peculiar
defensive mental attitudes. These attitudes may be useful and protective, but at
times they may be harmful to the individual. When a man is looking for a job, for
example, he may become overeager, and in his zeal to "make a good impression" to
"out his best foot forward," he may make a bad impression and arouse suspicion.
For it is not only what we say but the way we Say it that can indicate our honesty and
poise. Nervous sounds, gestures, pauses, moments of silence or stuttering may give
us away. Aggressive zeal may seduce us into saying too much. Inhibition may
prevent us from saying enough.


The defendant in a court action or in an inquiry is defensive not only about the
accusations levelled against him or the questions he has to answer, he is even more
defensive about his own unconscious guilt and about his doubts about his own
capabilities. Many of my colleagues in medicine and psychiatry who have been
called as expert witnesses in legal actions have told me that the very moment they
were under cross-examination, they felt themselves on trial and nearly convicted.
Cross- examination seemed to them often less a way of getting at the truth than a
form of emotional coercion, which did a great disservice to both the facts and the
truth. This is the reason that every kind of investigative power can so easily become
a coercive power. Making witnesses and defendants suffer from acute stage fright
can be a nasty weapon of totalitarianism.


Because psychologists and psychiatrist appreciate these facts, there is now a strong
tendency in these circles to use what we might call a passive technique in
interviewing. When the interviewer's questions are not directed toward any specific
answer, the man being questioned will be encouraged to answer on his own
initiative, out of his own desire to communicate. The neutral question, "What did you
do afterwards?" provokes a freer and more honest response than the question "Did
you go home after that?"


115


The Witness and His Subjective Testimony


We have seen in recent years a long parade of recanting Communists, who have
testified freely and openly about their pasts. Currently, we have still another kind of
parade: the recanting recanters. How are we to know the truth from falsehood in all
this morass of conflicting testimony? How are we to prevent ourselves from
becoming confused by the contradictory testimony of men and women whose words
can influence the course of our nation's actions? How are we to learn to evaluate
what they say? Psychologically, how reliable is their testimony, whether friendly or
unfriendly?


In general, we can say that those who are most vituperative in their statements are
usually the least reliable. Many of them are men and women who in the past adopted
a totalitarian ideology out of their own deep sense of inner insecurity. Later there
came the moment when they felt that their chosen ideology had failed them. Though
it had held their minds relentlessly imprisoned for a long time, at that point they were
able to throw off the system completely. This they did through a process of inner
rearrangement of old observations and convictions. However, what they shed was
merely a particular set of rigid ideological rules. Most of them did not shed, along
with these rules, their hidden hatreds and early insecurity. They may have given up
the political ideology which offered them defences and justifications, but they
retained their resentments.


It is extremely common to find such people seeking immediate sanctuary in some
other strictly organized institution. Because they now see things in a different light,
old facts and concepts acquire a different significance. Yet, all the while, the ever-
present urge toward self-justification and self-exculpation, which operates in all men
and which in these cases motivated the former allegiance to Communism, is at work.
Now they must prove their guiltlessness and their loyalty to their newly adopted
ideas. Their emotions, now in new garb, are still directed toward the goal of self-
justification.


In the eyes of the convert, the fresh outlook - this new arrangement of inner
demands and of ways of satisfying them - is just as logical and rational as were his
former set of expectations and satisfactions. Now he rediscovers several
experiences long since past. His former friends become his enemies; some of them
are seen as conspirators, whether they were or not. He himself is unable to
distinguish between truth and fantasy, between fact and subjective demand.
Consequently, a complete distortion of perceptions and memories may take place.
He may misquote his own memories, and this process is for the most part one of
which the convert himself is not aware. | remember vividly one example of such
behaviour during the Second World War. A former Nazi became a courageous
member of the anti-Nazi underground. He sought to rectify his past behaviour not
only by fighting the Nazis, but also by spreading all kinds of anxiety-provoking
rumours about his former friends. By making them appear more cruel, he thought he
could show himself more loyal.


116


Similarly, the denials and misstatements that may be made by the convert before the
courts or the Congressional committees are often not so much conscious falsehoods
as they are products of the new inner arrangements. Every accusation about the
convert's past may be twisted by him into a new tool for use in the process of self-
justification. Only a few such men have the moral courage to admit that they have
made real mistakes in the past. The distance between a white lie and selective
forgetting and repressing is often very short. | discovered this for myself while
carrying on investigations of resistance members who had been in Nazi hands. |
found that it was almost impossible to obtain objective information from them about
what they had revealed to the enemy after torture. Reporting upon their enforced
betrayal, they immediately colored their stories by white lies and secondary
distortions. Depending on their guilt feelings, they either accused themselves too
much or found no flaw at all in their behaviour.


117


The Right to Be Silent


Out of the action of Congressional investigating committees has recently come a
serious legal attack on the right to be silent when the giving of information clashes
with the conscience of the one on the stand. This attack can become a serious
invasion of human privacy and reserve. Undermining the value of the personality and
of private conscience is as dangerous to the preservation of democracy as is the
threat of totalitarian aggression.


We have to realize that it is often difficult for witnesses to make a choice between
contempt of Congress and contempt of human qualities. Administrators may
conceivably discover a few alleged "traitors" by compelling witnesses to betray their
former friends, but at the same time they compel people to betray friendships.
Friendship is one of our most precious human possessions. Any government or
agency that, under the guise of "contempt of Congress," can force confessions, and
information can also force the betrayal of former loyalties. Is this not comparable with
what the coercive totalitarians do? And at what cost?


We obtain a pseudo-purge resulting from weakness of character and anxiety in the
victim. In addition we violate one of democracy's basic tenets -- respect for the
strength of man's character. We have always believed that it is better to let ten guilty
men go free than to hang one innocent -- in direct opposition to the totalitarian
concept that it is better to hang ten innocent men than to let one guilty man go free.
We may punish the guilty with this strategy of compelling a man to speak when his
conscience urges him to be silent, but just as surely we break down the innocent by
destroying their conscience. Supreme Court Justices Douglas and Black in their
dissenting opinion about the constitutionality of the Immunity Act of 1954 (See "The
New York Times," March 27, 1956) emphasize the right to be silent as a
Constitutional right given by the Fifth Amendment - a safeguard of personal
conscience and personal dignity and freedom of expression as well. It is beyond the
power of Congress to compel anyone to confess his crimes even when immunity is
assured.


The individual's need NOT to betray his former allegiances - even when he has
made a mistake in political judgment at an age of less understanding - is morally just
as important as the need to help the state locate subversives. Let us not forget that
betrayal of the community is rooted in self-betrayal. By forcing a man to betray his
inner feelings and himself, we actually make it easier for him to betray the larger
community at some future date. If the law forces people to betray their inner moral
feelings of friendship, even if these feelings are based on juvenile loyalties, then that
very law undermines the integrity of the person, and coercion and menticide begin.
The conscience of the individual plays an enormous role in the choice between loyal
opposition and passive conformity. The law has to protect the individual also against
the violation of his personal moral standards; otherwise, human conscience will lose
in the battle between individual conscience and legal power. Moral evaluation starts
with the individual and not with the state.


118


Mental Blackmail


The concept of brainwashing has already led to some legal implications, and these
have led to new facets of imagined crime. Because the reports about Communist
brainwashing of the prisoners of war in Korea and China were published widely in
newspapers, they aroused anxieties among lay people. As mentioned in Chapter
Three, several schizophrenics and borderline patients seized upon this rather new
concept of brainwashing, using it as an explanation for a peculiar kind of delusion
that beset them -- the delusion of being influenced. Some of these persons had, as it
were, the feeling that their minds had been laid open, as if from the outside, through
radio waves or some other mystic communication, thoughts were being directed.
During recent years, | received several letters from such patients complaining about
their feelings of continual brainwashing. The new concept of political mental coercion
fitted into their system of delusions. Several lawyers consulted me for information
about clients who wanted to sue their imaginary brainwashers.


The same concept, used above to account for pathological suspicions, could be
used maliciously to accuse and sue anybody who professionally gave advice to
people or tried to influence them. At this very moment (fall, 1955) several court
procedures are going on wherein the defendants are being sued for the crime of
brainwashing by a third party. They are accused of having advised, in their
professional capacity, somebody to do something against the plaintiff's interests. The
shyster lawyer is now able to attack subtle human relationships and turn them into a
corrupt matter. This is the age-old evil of using empathy not for sympathy but for
antipathy and attack. In so doing, the accuser may misuse a man's hesitation to
bring these human relationships into the open; the accuser also makes use of the
strange situation in the United States that even the innocent winner of a court
procedure has to pay the cost of his legal help. Practically, this means that in a
difficult judicial question, he has to pay at least thirty thousand dollars before he can
reach the Supreme Court -- if it is a Supreme Court case -- and appeal to the highest
form of justice in our country.


Because of this new angle, which has developed during the past few years, of the
brainwashing situation, the psychiatric profession has been made more vulnerable to
unreasonable attack. In one case, a third party felt hurt by a psychological treatment
that made the patient more independent in an unpleasant commercial situation in
which he had formerly been rather submissive. In another case, the doctor was sued
because he was able to free his patient from a submissive love affair and an
ambiguous promise of marriage. In a third case, the patient during treatment
changed from a commercial agency that had treated him badly. In all those cases,
the disappointed party could bring suit on the basis of so-called brainwashing, and
malicious influence. In several cases of this form of blackmail, an expensive
settlement was made out of court because the court procedure would have become
far more costly.


The practicing psychiatrist who is attacked in this way experiences not only financial
pressure imposed on him by the dissatisfied party and a malicious lawyer, but in
several states the court does not even recognize his professional oath of secrecy.
The Hippocratic oath says:


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Whatever, in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection with it, |
may see or hear in the lives of men which ought not to be spoken abroad, | will not
divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret.


Some courts hold that the only physical investigation and treatment are valid as
medical treatment not to be divulged; personal conversation - the quintessence of
psychiatric treatment -- is not looked upon as a medical action. Hiding behind
professional secrecy is regarded as contempt of court. An additional difficulty is that
this accusation of malpractice by a third party - not by the patient himself - is not
covered by the usual malpractice insurance.


The importance of such perfidious attack on psychological relationships - however
rare the number of cases may be at this moment - is that it opens the road for many
other forms of mental blackmail. It means that subtle personal relationships can be
attacked and prosecuted in court, merely because a third party feels excluded or
neglected or financially damaged. | cannot sue my broker because he gave me
wrong financial advice, but | can sue a psychological counsellor for malpractice
because he "brainwashed" my client.


What new possibilities for mental blackmail and sly accusation are open! Gradually
we can make punishable wrong intention and anticipation, nonconformist advice and
guidance, and, in the end, simple honest human influence and originality -- things
that are already considered criminal in totalitarian countries.


The word "blackmail" was originally used in the border warfare between England and
Scotland. Blackmail was the agreement made by freebooters not to plunder or
molest the farmer - in exchange for money or cattle. The word comes from the
Middle English "maille" meaning speech or rent or tax.


The French equivalent "chantage" brings us even nearer to the concept of mental
coercion. It means forcing the other fellow "to sing," to confess things against his will
by means of threatening physical punishment or threatening to reveal a secret. It is,
in the last analysis, mental coercion.


We may call mental blackmail the growing tendency to overstep human reserve and
dignity. It is the tendency to misuse the intimate knowledge of what is going on in the
crevices of the soul, to injure and embarrass one's fellow man. MENTAL
BLACKMAIL STARTS WHEREVER THE PRESUMPTION OF GUILT TAKES THE
PLACE OF PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE. The hunting up of dirt and sensation
in order to embarrass a victim we see very often carried on by the yellow press. It is
not only playing up indecency, but at the same time it undermines human judgment
and opinion. And by its sensationalism is precludes and prejudices justice in the
courts.


What a weak baby accomplishes with its tears and pouting can be done by the


whining, querulous accuser with his fantasies about malicious influence and
brainwashing. The suicidal patient may exert the same kind of pressure.


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| am convinced that in the future the Supreme Court has to make rules which will
control these new forms of indictment; yet the core of the problem is the growing
suspicion within man in our era of transition. We blackmail men's minds with too
many security measures, with secret files; we blackmail with gossip, with subtle
pressures within political pressure groups, with lobbies within lobbies, and even by
withholding our friendship.


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The Judge and the Jury


What about the people who are called upon to sift truth from falsehood, to arrive at
just and impartial verdicts? The judge and the jury are themselves influenced and
affected by the external facts and inner needs that lie behind the behaviour of the
other principals in the case. Yet they are supposed to rise above their background,
their personal needs and desires and to render a verdict strictly on the evidence,
unswayed by any prejudice or subjective desires. And let us bear in mind that it is
not only those officially connected with a case who make a decision about it, it is
everyone who knows about it. You and I, the public, are judge and jury too.


Judge and jury face the difficult task of finding and asking on the basis of the facts
alone, and yet even in them, under the influence of strong group emotions, an
emotional rearrangement of remembered facts may take place.


Judge and jurors are affected by the collective emotional atmosphere surrounding
controversial issues, and it is difficult for them to maintain their much-needed
objectivity. The average juror already submits to the popular emotional demand
before the trial is started, as several trials about racial persecution proved.


Lately two authorities on law attacked the system of trial by jury, one because of its
delaying action on the process of justice (Peck) and the other because he
considered it an outmoded means of administering justice (Newman). Trial by jury is
a relic of the thirteenth century intended to replace the magic trial by ordeal - the
gods and coincidence decided the guilt - and to replace the trial by battle - physical
skill and power decided which of two parties was guilty. The trial by a jury of peers,
by all those who knew the accused and the circumstances of the alleged crime,
served its purpose in rather simple organized communities for a long time.


But in our complicated society, where people know less about each other and where
a thousandfold communications intrude the mind, things have changed. "The
average juror is swayed by the emotion and prejudice of his heredity and
background training." (Newman) Our juries are not always able to follow the
intricacies of pros and cons, of interpretation of facts. In addition, many a trial lawyer
knows how to fascinate a jury, how to catch their minds and influence their judgment.
Beyond this, the selection of jurors delays more and more the process of justice.


As a simple example of how individual, personal, and social conditioning can affect a
juror's current reactions, let us look at the inner confusion usually caused by the
word "traitor." Here we have an emotionally loaded trigger-word. If somebody is
accused of being a traitor or a subversive, on the basis of undeniable facts, any
attempt at a scientific, psychological explanation of this person's behaviour is already
considered a treacherous intellectualism. The consensus is that the traitor should be
punished; he belongs to the scum of society, better let him die. Even the lawyer who
defends him before the court may be accused of collaboration in treason.


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All of us Know many other trigger words which immediately provoke confusion in our
objective perception and judgment because they touch unsolved, unconscious
feelings. Words like "Communist" and "homosexual," for instance, can become
confusing trigger words which bring a reservoir of dark feelings into action.
Demagogues like to use such words in order to stir up mass feelings, which they
cannot control but which they believe are very suitable for the strategy of the
moment. This can become, however, like playing with dynamite. Any one of us may
be swayed by allusive clichés such as "Where there's smoke, there's fire" or "Once a
thief, always a thief." | once saw this most interestingly in a hot debate where
someone had once been scolded for being a "dirty monogamist." As soon as the
accusation was made, public opinion turned against him.


Even a judge can be swayed by his own emotional difficulties, especially by slanted
testimony of witnesses who may be attempting to mislead. In Great Britain the courts
are more aware of the effect of a prejudicial attitude on the part of jurors. There the
trial process is extensively protected, mostly through prevention of pre-trial
discussion and deliberation, regardless of the unpopularity of the accused.


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Televised Interrogation


An open official interrogation affects those who watch it - and the fact that they are
affected may influence its outcome. Various crime hearings in this country, for
instance, were brought before the people by means of television. Citizens sitting
comfortably at home far from the scene could see how defense lawyers manoeuvred
facts or instructed their clients (among whom were well-known crime bosses) so that
they would appear in a favourable light. Even though their actions may have been
transparent tricks with the appearance of a fixed wrestling match, the result was that
some of the not-so-jovial-looking victims of the criminals were made ridiculous, while
the criminals, calm, assured, self-possessed, seemed more admirable. The victims
often couldn't stand being in the limelight; it made them feel ill at east and
embarrassed.


The criminals, on the other hand, either denied every accusation in tones of
righteous indignation or made confessions which degenerated into hysterical quests
for pity. The magic effect of all the anonymous onlookers -- because the witness or
defendant imagined their approval or disapproval - influenced the outcome of the
hearings. All of us who watched them brought our own subjective expectations to
bear on these hearings.


Television makes a mass trial of such a hearing, and unwittingly not justice but the
variable feelings of the public become part of the courtroom atmosphere. Every
piece of evidence in such a hearing is colored by rumour and emotion, and the
shocked onlookers are left with feelings of suspicion and deep misgivings that the
hearing has not really gotten down to the condemning facts.


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The Quest for Detachment


Man's feeling for justice has very subtle implications. As soon as “Justitia” flirts with
powerful friends or becomes completely submissive, people feel insecure and their
anxiety increases. But man's feeling for justice needs more than mere security for its
satisfaction and gratification. The sense of justice is an inner attitude aiming at the
realization of ideal rules of law that can inspire the community and raise it to a higher
moral level. It requires not merely that minimum of decent behaviour that is enforced
by law, but more than that a maximum of personal initiative and mutual fair play. It
asks for personal and social justice, for mutual limitation of demands in the service of
the mutuality of relations between men, and between men and their government.
Any ideal feeling of justice requires sacrifice and implies self-limitation. Emotionalism
is its enemy. This ideal of justice is not only valid for individuals but should also rule
communities and countries. Only in such an atmosphere of free mutual sacrifice of
power on behalf of growing justice can democracy grow.


Can people learn to see objectively and in a manner detached from their personal
feelings? Yes, they can. Preconceived ways of seeing and witnessing can be
changed. Many people realize the damage men do to themselves and others when
they submit to collective passion and prejudice. These people then learn through
astute investigation and observation how to be less prejudiced, how to see events
with constant re-adaptation of mind and eye and with a search for reality.


Prisoners in concentration camps or P.O.W. camps are so constantly bombarded
with rumours and suggestions, their observations are so distorted by their necessary
self-defences, that they are hardly able to give an objective report regarding the
actions of their fellows. The mass attitude of the day directs their opinions. The fellow
who has become a scapegoat, whose function it is to alleviate for his fellow prisoners
their common anger, will never be able to neutralize all later reports about him,
simply because the number of so-called objective witnesses is against him.


It is very difficult to separate the rumours from the facts and to neutralize ingrown
mental toenails. There is in man an instinctual need to take sides with the majority, to
conform to the opinion of the strong. This need is rooted in a biological urge for
safety. That is why a strong feeling of participation grew among soldiers in a P.O.W.
camp. The result was complete unconscious falsification of what happened. The
individual observation got lost in the strong impact of mass opinion.


In the future age of psychology, when insight into man's behaviour is more generally
understood and applied, we will be more aware of the importance of dependable
witnesses. Every report and every piece of testimony pro or con will be examined
and weighed in the light of its psychological and historical background. The citizen of
the future will laugh as he looks back at the time once lost during trials because
obvious facts on one side were not brought out to challenge equally obvious facts on
the opposing side. These future citizens will understand that we only revealed our
mutual hostilities and feelings of fear and insecurity by our behaviour, feelings which
moved us compulsively and subtly to make subjective rearrangements of our
memories and impressions. He will point out that objective thinking was in its infancy
in those days.

[admin]

CHAPTER NINE: FEAR AS A TOOL OF TERROR

The Fear of Living

In our era the fear aroused by human relationships is so strong that inertia and
mental death often seem more attractive than mental alertness and life. Classical
psychology often spoke of the fear of death and the great unknown as the cause of
many anxieties, but modern psychological studies have shown us that the fear of
living is a much greater, deeper, and more frightening one.


Living often seems beyond our power. Stepping out of a relatively safe childish
dependence into freedom and responsibility is both hazardous and dangerous.
Living demands activity and spontaneity, trial and error, sleeping and reawakening,
competition and cooperation, adaptation and reorientation. Living involves manifold
relationships, each of which has thousands of implications and complications.


Living takes us away from the dream of being protected and demands that we
expose our weaknesses and strengths daily to our fellow men, with all their hostilities
as well as their affections. It requires us to build up useful defences and then to
replace them with others because we have to change our goals and our
relationships. It expects us to be lonely in order to cooperate in freedom. It asks us to
submit and to conquer, to adjust and to rebel. It robs us of our childhood slumber of
satisfaction, and of the magic, omnipotent fantasies of our infancy.


Living requires mutuality of giving and taking. Above all, to live is to love. And many
people are afraid to take the responsibility of loving, of having an emotional
investment in their fellow beings. They want only to be loved and to be protected;
they are afraid of being hurt and rejected. We can see this clearly in the fact that so
many people embrace so fervently all the limitations and frustrations of life that are
offered them-the neurotic limitations of the usual prejudices or the totalitarian
limitations imposed by power politics. In his book Escape from Freedom, Erich
Fromm describes clearly how the pressures of freedom, when they are not balanced
by responsibility and understanding, can drive men into the totalitarian frame of mind
and into surrender of their hard-won liberties. Such surrender is nothing less than a
slow mental death.


Totalitarian leaders, whether of the right or of the left, know better than anyone else
how to make use of this fear of living. They thrive on chaos and bewilderment.
During unrest in international politics, they are most at ease. The strategy of fear is
one of their most valuable tactics. The growing complications of our civilization and
its administration make the impact of power politics felt more than ever before. When
the totalitarians add to their tactics all the clever tricks that we have already
discussed Pavlovian conditioning, repeated suggestion, de-conditioning through
boredom and physical degradation-they can win their battle for the control of man's
mind.


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In the earlier chapters of this book we described in some detail the techniques by
which man could be turned into a robot in the service of totalitarianism and some of
the tendencies that operate, even in the free countries, to rob man of his mental
integrity. It is important for us to realize that emphasis on conformity and the fear of
spontaneous living can have an effect almost as devastating as the totalitarian's
deliberate assault on the mind. Conformity and the fear of living rob the free way of
life of its greatest asset in the struggle against totalitarianism.


Our human strength lies in our diversity and independence of thought, in our
acceptance of nonconformity, in our willingness to discuss and to evaluate various
conflicting points of view. In denying the diversities of life and the complexity and
individuality of the human mind, in preaching rigid dogmas and self-righteousness,
we begin gradually to adopt the totalitarian attitude we deplore. Delusion has never
been the exclusive property of any one country, class, or group, and the totalitarian
delusion, which in itself promotes menticide, can invade us from many fronts, from
the right as well as the left, from the rich or from the underprivileged, from the
conservatives and from the rebels.


Fear and intimidation have not only been the result but also the tools of mental
coercion. Although there is as yet no unified theory of fear and anxiety, and we
therefore do not know precisely why and how the development of these feelings
leads to such dire consequences, it is important for us to understand what useful
tools fear and panic are, and to see, through description, what these overwhelming
emotions are able to do to people.


Most people think of fear reactions as hysterical expressions of desperation. But, as
this chapter should make clear, fear and panic also have their paradoxical
expressions in indifference and apathy, reactions which, just because they are less
commonly recognized as fear-created, can be much more dangerous to the
individual than a good hysterical cry. It is the hidden, silent fears that have such an
impact on our social and political behaviour. Fear and panic are reactions not only to
overt danger and threat, they are also reactions to the slow, seeping intrusion of
disquieting propaganda and the constant wave of suggestion to which we are all
exposed. Fear is at work all around us, and often it throws its shadows where we
least expect to find them. We may be acting out of fear without even knowing it; we
may consider that our behaviour is perfectly normal and rational when, in fact,
psychology tells us that creeping fear may already have begun to work on us.


Fear and catastrophe fortify the need to identify with a strong leader. They lead to
herding together of people, who shy away from wanting to be individual cells any
longer; they prefer to be part of a huge mystic social organization that protects
against threat and distress, in oneness with the leader. This protection-seeking
instinctual reaction is also directed against dissent and individualism, against the
individual ego. We see in this a regression toward a more primitive state of mass
participation. True, this process of ego-shrinking is the negative side of the back-to-
mass reaction. Yet it stimulates a recognition of greater need for cooperation and
mutual help.


127


During the last war and the generally experienced emergencies many people
became for the first time aware of the affective ties they had with their neighbours. At
the same time, anxiety can inspire suspicion and the need for seeking scapegoats. It
is the paradox of fear that it propagates warm feelings of immature ties and cold
suspicion at the same time.


Although there is throughout the world a conscious trend toward overcoming fear
and feelings of insecurity, there is also a less conscious counter-current provoking
new fears and anxieties and insecurities. Whether he is aware of it or not, modern
man lives in an atmosphere of fear-fear of war, fear of the H-bomb, fear of
totalitarianism, fear of non-conformism, fear of dissent. Fear has already begun to
influence our behaviour by the time we are aware of it. Once fear has penetrated the
mind and stimulated fantasy, it begins to direct our actions, whether we want it to or
not. We cannot eliminate all the thousands of stresses and fear-provoking situations
in the modern world, but we can learn to recognize and understand some of the most
common forms of fear reactions. In this way we can find a partial release from the
tensions they create and can learn how to cope with them more effectively.


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Our Fantasies About Danger


| remember vividly one sunny afternoon during the Second World War while | was
still in Holland. | was playing tennis with some friends. We were all enjoying the
satisfying exertion of our sport, but our enjoyment was somewhat marred by the
players on the next court. They spoke the language of the hated occupier, and
although attired in the same white sports clothes as we, they were obviously Nazi
officers who were temporarily forgetting their delusion of conquering the world and
were trying to relax like normal human beings. Suddenly we all heard the drone of
planes and the sound of antiaircraft off in the distance.


Then a group of low-lying Spitfires, our friends from England, came zooming by. My
friends and | stopped playing, waved our rackets in greeting, and watched the planes
manoeuvring. Our neighbours reacted quite differently. They became panicky; one of
them flung his racket from him and ran off, the others threw themselves, face down,
into a ditch bordering the court. Objectively, we were all faced with the same danger
of strafing from the English planes, but for the Germans these were enemy planes,
while for us they were friends.


I'm sure it isn't necessary for me to add that after this occurrence my fellow Dutch
citizens were forbidden to play tennis on that court. When, a year later, | had arrived
by good chance in London, | found that every time German planes came over during
the night, | had that same suspicious feeling the German officers on the tennis court
must have had. It seemed as though every bullet and every bomb was meant for me.
So great is the role of fantasy in fear that an enemy bomb may have a different
meaning for us than a friendly bomb.


Fear may be defined very simply as an inner reaction to danger. This definition is
deceptively simple, for as soon as we offer it, we are faced with a new problem:
What shall we define as danger? Bombs, fires, earthquakes, and epidemics are
easily recognizable as dangers. So are physical torture, direct totalitarian attack, and
sudden economic collapse. But there are many subtle emotional dangers, too,
arousing fearful fantasies and anticipations often combined with inner visions of
doom and disaster. As our examples will show, these dangers are faced differently
by different people. It is our personal attitude toward life and toward mankind that
determines whether we consider a situation a welcome challenge or an
unconquerable danger.


Some people enjoy strict control and mechanical conditioning of their lives. For them,
totalitarianism and thought control are not danger; they bring a kind of eternal day-
sleep without responsibility. To these people, freedom is a danger, while
dependence is a pleasurable safety. Others loathe any intrusion into their personal
freedom and integrity and are continually on the alert to defend themselves against
any external pressure-real or fancied.


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Paradoxical Fear


Even when people are well prepared and trained to meet an anticipated disaster,
such as imprisonment and brainwashing, the actual impact of the danger may
provoke all kinds of defensive behaviour. Overtraining may even weaken the person
because the long anticipation allows all kinds of hidden fantasies to run rampant. Ina
minority of persons this may be expressed in such pathological fear reactions as
complete nervous breakdown or utter paralysis.


Every person shows a different mental threshold of resistance to danger, and this
threshold may change day by day, depending on our physical and mental fortitude.
As a rule, inexperienced troops do not immediately show pathological fear in combat;
such behaviour takes some time to develop. Paradoxically enough, fear reactions
and moments of weakness often develop after the real danger has passed. When
the tension of battle or the daily stress of life in the prison camp is over, and there is
no longer any need to hide one's fears and to control one's behaviour, many people
let go completely and give free vent to all their anxieties.


In Dover, England, in 1944, the population suffered a kind of collective nervous
breakdown when after the tension of four years of continual shelling by the Germans
they heard only silence. The shelling suddenly stopped completely after the Allied
troops swept victoriously across the Belgian coast. At that moment, many of the
people of Dover broke down. It was as if the unexpected silence had brought them
into a state of shock.


This paradoxical fear reaction after danger has passed is important for us to
understand. The totalitarian strategists know that during a period of temporary quiet
and relaxation of tension, people lose their alertness and thus can be more easily
caught in the totalitarian mental grip. In their strategy of terror they consciously make
use of the psychological action of the breathing spell. As soon as we let go and drop
the defences we have built up against danger, we can be brought to swallow any
strong suggestions. The totalitarians also, in their "Document on Terror," call the
technique of taking advantage of such relief the "strategy of fractionalized fear:" In a
quiet period between acute tensions, they can easily condition their victims' minds.
Hitler used the Munich period of appeasement in precisely this way. During this time,
his propaganda barrage was doubly effective.


Whether the reaction to fear and danger is immediate or delayed, most people show,
under stress, behaviour that can be said to fall into one of the following patterns:


1. Regression-loss of learned behaviour

2. Camouflage and disguise-the so-called "feign or faint" reactions
3. The explosive panic-defense through "fight or flight"

4. Our psychosomatic conditioning-the body takes over


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Regression


Although most people are more or less acquainted with the concept of regression, of
setting the cultural clock back, they are surprised, nevertheless, to see staid men
and women lose their acquired habits of civilization in times of catastrophe and
panic. | once treated an engineer who had been the victim of an earthquake in a
foreign country. After the earthquake, he behaved completely like a baby. All kinds of
treatments were tried, but none were successful; we were never able to change his
childish behaviour. He never found his way back to normal, adequate behaviour.


From that fateful day, he remained barricaded in his cave of escape. It was as if with
one blow he had forgotten everything he had ever learned. He was no longer a
grown man, a professional scientist. He was an infant. He babbled like an infant, he
had to be fed like an infant. Another earthquake victim of whom | know, a professor
of mathematics, was found in his garden after the quake was over, half-naked and
playing with his child's toys. He completely rejected any recognition of the real
emergency situation in which he found himself and regressed to a period of infantile
irresponsibility. Such regressive behaviour as a form of defense is encountered
everywhere in the animal kingdom. When an organism is in danger, it drops its
complexity and retreats to a simpler form of existence. When circumstances of living
become too dangerous, some easily exposed multi-cellular organisms turn into well-
protected, simple mono-cellular beings. This regressive process, called encystication
may, for instance, take place when the organism is exposed to abnormal
temperatures or abnormal dryness.


Man is subject to the same biological rule of defense. When life is too complex for
him, he often turns the clock of civilization back and becomes primitive again. A
sudden disintegration and breakdown of functions may occur. This form of
regressive behaviour is common in children. When they are frightened, they often
revert to baby talk or to bed-wetting. In the bombed areas during the Second World
War, many girls in their late teens started to play with their dolls again. Even
seemingly mature, hyper-sophisticated men and women may display thousands of
symptoms of this return to infantilism when fear attacks them. Their symptoms are
not always as dramatic as the examples above; nevertheless, they are symptoms of
fear. When grown people begin to stutter and to lose their daily decorum, when they
take to carrying around special protective charms, when they invent stories about
their magic invulnerability, when they boast more, eat more cake and candy, whistle
more, talk more, cry more, and lose their formal stiff and staid behaviour, they are
acting out of fear.


During the Second World War, in the prison camps and the air-raid shelters, people
really got to know each other, as do children in the playpen who have the simple
intuitive gift of knowing whom they can trust. In our age of anxiety, we feel
possessed by the same frightening shadows that once haunted the Stone-Age man,
and we may react to them by acting more like our simpler ancestors.


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Camouflage and Disguise


A different pattern is that of camouflage and disguise playing hide-and-seek with
fate. This useful protective trickery is often seen in lower animals who temporarily
acquire the form or color of their environment. It is just like military camouflage.
Everybody is acquainted with the color changes of the chameleon, and there are
many other animals which are able to change their skin or body form in times of
danger. Yet many people are not aware that human skin, too, shows rudimentary
attempts at camouflage. The phenomenon of goose flesh resembles the reaction of
a frightened, bristling cat; sudden greying of the hair or discoloration of the skin,
which is known technically as fear melanosis, changes our outer color.


During the Second World War, | went with a first-aid team to Rotterdam after the city
had been heavily bombed. As we looked at the people, our first impression was that
they were all wearing masks. Their skin was wrinkled and showed a typical
camouflage reaction. They were all still badly frightened. It was as if they were in
hiding from the tremendous hell of fire that had been thrown down on them.


There is a psychological parallel to these physical reactions; it is called the "feign or
faint" pattern. Actual psychology looks at both reactions, feigning and fainting, as a
passive retreat from reality. This reaction is comparable to shell-shock or battle
neurosis, the study of which is one of the most absorbing chapters of medicine.
Soldier and civilian alike can go into a state of mental paralysis. In such a state the
victim becomes apathetic; he is unable to talk or to move. No dangerous reality
exists for him anymore. He looks dead; only his frightened, burning eyes seem alive.
This death attitude or cataleptic reaction often has a completely terrifying effect on
bystanders. There is nothing so contagious as fainting in any crowded place.


It is of the utmost importance to realize how passive, paralyzed, indifferent, and
submissive people can become under circumstances which should demand the
utmost activity. The totalitarians are making use of man's passive reaction to terror
when they put their prisoners into huge concentration camps with only a few guards;
they are gambling that the reaction of passivity will keep the victim from rebelling or
trying to escape. Like the bird which stands stock-still wnen the snake approaches,
man may surrender passively to what he dreads and fears in order to get rid of the
tension of anticipation. The thief who surrenders to the police because he cannot
stand the tension and insecurity of not Knowing when he will be found out is an
obvious example.


A psychological camouflage reaction lies behind emotional shock and silent panic-
the mental paralysis that overcomes some people when they can no longer cope
with the circumstances in which they find themselves. Passive surrender to what he
fears is one of man's most common reactions to sudden danger; it is not limited to
pathological personalities. It occurs much more frequently than wild and overt panic,
and displays itself in numerous subtle behaviour mechanisms. People may escape
into complaints about physical disease.


132


They may take refuge in "very important" pseudo-tasks and hobbies. They may deny
real danger in a seemingly self-securing complacency. They become obstinate and
disobedient; nothing can activate them. They are not interested in politics, they say.
Some will try to sell to themselves and others the paralyzing theory of hopelessness
and the inevitability of doom. But don't talk about the nuclear bomb! Others will throw
themselves into the oblivion of excessive drinking or hide themselves in long,
pointless conferences. Every man has his own psychological Maginot line-a mental
fortress that he believes inviolable. We used to call this the ostrich policy-and the
ostrich policy is one of the most dangerous strategies in the world. Beware the
totalitarian who preaches peace; his intention may be to push the world into passive
surrender to that which it fears.


The cult of passivity and so-called relaxation is one of the most dangerous
developments of our times. Essentially, it too may represent a camouflage pattern,
the double wish not to see the dangers and challenges of life and not to be seen. We
cannot escape all the tensions that surround us; they are part of life, and we have to
learn to cope with them adequately and to use our leisure time for more creative and
gratifying activities. Silent, lonely relaxation with alcohol, sweets, the television
screen, or a murder mystery may soothe the mind into a passivity that may gradually
make it vulnerable to the seductive ideology of some feared enemy. Denying the
danger of totalitarianism through passivity, may gradually surrender to its
blandishments those who were initially afraid of it.


133


Explosive Panics


Most people are far more familiar with the explosive motor reactions we call panic
and stampede than they are with the other fear reactions. This is what we call mass
hysteria, the chaconne pour soi reaction. The baby has its temper tantrums, and
older people have their uncontrolled fury and "fight or flight" reactions. Although we
usually think of the word "panic" as describing such phenomena as the hysterical
stampede out of a burning theatre or the flight of whole populations in terror, there
are many subtle steps that lead from the first symptoms of unrest we all feel when
something is threatening, to the great outbursts of crying and running and fighting we
see in severe panics.


Man shows many forms of panicky, frenzied behaviour-epileptic fits (as in trench or
war epilepsy), fury, rage, self-destruction, criminal aggression, running amok,
deserting from the army, rioting, uncontrolled impulsiveness, breakneck speed in
driving. A soldier in a state of panic may behave like an angry child. He may attack
his friends or shoot at the members of his own troop. In panic, civilians may begin to
cry, shout, walk aimlessly about wringing their hands. Or they may shout and scold
or cry for help. The panicky person spreads panic; every time he shouts, he incites
others to run. Panic is never a question of crude strength or failing energy, but rather
of lack of inner structure, of a failing capacity to organize. The panicky leader
hesitates to use the powers entrusted to him.


The child with temper tantrums lies deep within all of us. The more mysterious and
unaccountable the danger, the more primitive our reactions may be.


Riots, furious mass movement, and outbreaks of criminality serve to increase fear
and panic, and thus can be used to deepen man's sense of insecurity and further his
passive surrender to the totalitarian environment. Any terroristic regime compels its
victims to repress their reactions of rebellion and anger. The more these reactions
are repressed, the more the victims develop tremendous inner rage, which must bide
its time and wait until it is permitted some socially sanctioned form of explosion. War
is often such a universal panic, a mass discharge of accumulated internal rage.
Here, too, the inner fears of mankind are discharged in mass destruction.


134


The Body Takes Over


The great group of psychosomatic reactions, although they are no mystery, are more
difficult to explain. Let us look at an example which may make this phenomenon
more clear. In my home town in Holland, after a few bombardments during the
Second World War, an epidemic of bladder disease broke out-at least that was the
first explanation. People suffered from the need to urinate so often that their sleep
was disturbed; almost no one had a full night's rest. For a short time, there was a
boom in the practice of urologists. Then psychiatrists were able to explain that this
urge to urinate was one of the first reactions to fear.


The victims had only to think back to their childhood and to recall their bodily
reactions before taking examinations at school to see what was happening.
Increased urination may be described as one of the tension-reducing devices of the
body. The body may react to danger and panic with a variety of physical symptoms.
Perspiration, frequent urination, heart palpitations, diarrhoea, high blood pressure
are only a few. We know that many of these reactions are related to the body's
mobilization of specific defences against threatening dangers. The specific ways in
which bodily diseases related to fear and anxiety develop are conditioned largely by
the individual's personal life history, especially his development during childhood.
The infant whose early tensions and yearnings were drowned in milk and pabulum
will grow up into an adult who tries to fill his mouth again as soon as something
threatening occurs. Overeating has become for him a fear-allaying device. In the
process of rearing the child, the parent unwittingly train certain of the child's organs
to react to the tensions of life.


Because man has many bodily organs, he can show a tremendous variety in his
physical and emotional responses to threats, both from without and within.
Psychosomatic medicine distinguishes between different character types in terms of
the different organs which respond to outside stress or danger. There is the ulcer
type, the asthma type, the colitis type, the heart failure type. Each of these types
shows a different reaction to the same battle-the battle against fear. Feelings of
social tension may be expressed in various organic diseases. In acute fright,
however, certain organs of the body more commonly react than others. As we saw in
our earlier example, the need for frequent urination is a nearly universal reaction to
fright. The "upset stomach" is another almost universal fear reaction.


During the Second World War, a medical team looked in vain for the bug causing an
unknown intestinal disease among American soldiers who were preparing to land on
one of the enemy islands in the Pacific. The doctors and biologists searched and
searched; they found nothing. The mysterious disease vanished, as suddenly as it
had appeared, after the invasion began and the soldiers were able to discharge in
action the tension of waiting f or the invasion. These men were not strange or
abnormal in any way. Even when one consciously accepts the challenge of danger
and is prepared to face it, counter-forces in the body may defeat the mental effort.
The mind wants to be brave, but the body escapes into disease. Consistency of
child-rearing, emotional security at home, and lifelong conditioning to acceptance of
the various challenges of life-all these are the factors that determine how we will
react when we are put to the test.


135


In their treatment of panicky soldiers during the last war, psychiatrists gave some of
their time to an explanation of these various danger reactions. As the victims began
to understand their reactions and saw how common they were, they took the first
and most important step toward cure. No longer were they so afraid of their fears; no
longer were they in such dread of cowardice. It was important for them to know that
what had reduced them to the level of helpless childhood was part of a universal
pattern of defensive behaviour. As they understood this, they became less afraid and
ashamed of their own private fears. They knew that their bodies were reacting like
many others, and they became able once more to accept their duties quietly and with
better control. Stamina and resourcefulness depend as much on self-knowledge as
they do on the help and support we get from others.


In times of stress and calamity, people begin to probe for the vulnerable spots and
weaknesses in both their friends and their enemies. This testing goes on constantly
during a hot war, but it happens during a cold war as well. The cold war exerts a
continual pressure on human imagination and mental fortitude and is the cause of
many peculiar escape reactions or bodily reactions.


Whenever fear and danger confront him, man has to make a choice: Shall he indulge
in unchecked fury? Shall he concentrate upon self-protection? Or shall he accept his
responsibilities? The fear reactions we have described show how the primordial
impulse to self-protection (misguided though it may be) can break through all our
civilized defences. Only training and conscious preparation for danger, both inner
and outer, can give a man strength to hold these reactions in check. This training
starts within the nucleus of the family and is supported by the example of a peaceful,
free community. These are the first teachers in the constant battle between inner
fear and outer danger.


Those who are in danger of being brainwashed can be helped simply by making
them familiar with the facts. Foreknowledge has a partial protective function, and this
belongs to the best security we can give to them. It takes away the weakening
influence of anxious and mysterious anticipation. With this aid, their mental
vulnerability is then furthered by innate inner strength, by the example of good
rearing, and by the challenge and opportunity their society gives to them.

[admin]

PART THREE: UNOBTRUSIVE COERCION

IN THE COURSE OF OUR INVESTIGATIONS CONCERNING THOUGHT
CONTROL, MENTICIDE, AND BRAINWASHING, IT HAS BECOME CLEARER
THAT MORE ATTENTION MUST BE GIVEN TO THE MEANS BY WHICH INNER
PREPAREDNESS FOR MENTAL SUBMISSION IS BROUGHT ABOUT.
UNOBTRUSIVELY, PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT AND VARIOUS CULTURAL
INFLUENCES CAN MAKE MAN MORE VULNERABLE TO SUGGESTION AND
IDEOLOGICAL ATTACK. IN PART THREE I CALL TO THE READER'S
ATTENTION THE CREEPING INTRUSION INTO OUR MINDS BY TECHNOLOGY
AND BUREAUCRACY, AND HOW SPECIAL FORMS OF PREJUDICE AND MASS
DELUSION CAN TAKE POSSESSION OF OUR MINDS BEFORE WE ARE AWARE
OF IT. THE FINAL CHAPTER, AN INQUIRY ON TREASON AND LOYALTY AGAIN
CALLS TO OUR ATTENTION THE TREMENDOUS INFLUENCE OF MASS
THINKING ON OUR PERSONAL CONCEPTS OF LOYALTY.

[admin]

CHAPTER TEN: THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN

The time has come to ask ourselves if it is possible that there is something in our
own growth and development that may make us more vulnerable to mental intrusion
and ultimate brainwashing. Are there, for instance, special coercive needs in us?
What is communicated and taught to the child that may keep him a spiritual prisoner
of his environment?


These are important questions and would require a thorough philosophic and
pedagogic investigation. Nevertheless, for practical purposes, we may limit our
attention to two different soheres of development: the influence of parents and the
influence of certain social habits. The latter has already been investigated in the
second part of this book. Indeed, I must repeat that in my experience all those who
are educated under rules of too strict obedience and conformity break down more
easily under pressure. During World War II when the so-called tough S.S. officers
were interrogated after they had become prisoners, they readily surrendered their
military secrets. Having lived for years under totalitarian command, they were just as
obedient to the new commanding voices. Sometimes we only had to imitate the
shouting voices of their masters and they would exchange their former boss for the
new one. For them every command had become the automatic trigger for new
conforming obedience.


In dealing with members of the Communist Party in this country, we had a
comparable experience: the members were politically submissive and changed their
obstructive party-strategy to an opposite set of tactics the moment Moscow ordered
them to do so.


137


How Some Totalitarians May Develop


Increasing attention has been given to the various psychological motivations leading
to political extremism and a totalitarian mentality in men and women who have been
brought up in a democratic atmosphere, but who have voluntarily chosen to
associate themselves with some totalitarian ideology. Psychologists who have come
into contact with the totalitarian attitude and have studied those who are easily
influenced by it agree, by and large, that in the free, democratic countries the option
for totalitarianism is nearly always determined by an inner personality factor-
frustration, if you will. It is usually neither poverty nor social idealism that makes a
man a totalitarian, but mostly internal factors such as extreme submissiveness and
masochism on the one hand or a lust for power on the other. Unsolved sibling rivalry
plays a role too; I have treated several Nazi collaborators whose political behaviour
was motivated to some extent by the fact that they were older sons and could not
stand the competition with their younger brothers. All these factors help to explain
why the totalitarians everywhere can use their propaganda of violence to exploit
resentment, hatred, racialism, and political fury. They know that they have only to
play on these immature feelings of deprivation and dissatisfaction to bring people
under a spell.


In my own experience, I have been amazed to see how unrealistic are the bases for
political option in general. Only rarely have I found a person who has chosen any
particular political party democratic or totalitarian-through study and comparison of
principles. Too often man's choice of his political affiliations is determined by apathy,
by family tradition, by hope for financial gain, or by other irrelevant factors. It is this
lack of rational motivation that can make men more susceptible to totalitarian
blandishments, even in a democratic community. I remember very clearly, for
example, a Dutch physician with whom I went to medical school. He fell in love with
the daughter of a Communist and eventually married her. At first he was disturbed by
the conflict between his principles and his adoration, but gradually his principles
gave in and he started to justify the party line.


Later on I met him from time to time. He was an excellent doctor and a jovial fellow,
and he took our half-serious quips about his politics in good part. But the moment we
began a really serious discussion, he crouched in his official defensive corner and
became a different man-sour, mechanical, handing out ready-made arguments.
During the war I met him frequently in the course of our common underground work.
He had been completely dazed by Stalin's pact with the Nazis, but the moment
Russia was invaded and became an ally, he started his aggressive robotism again.
Not only was he a staunch fighter against the Nazis, but he insisted that his was the
only way to fight. He lost his life on a dangerous mission for the underground, and I
always had the feeling that it was in a way welcome to his latent suicidal feelings.


In other Nazis and Communists, both, I have seen dramatic examples of how


personal resentments, outside the suffering of real injustice, can lead a man to the
side of the rebels.


138


Some of these people were the type who simply submitted passively to a movement
stronger than themselves-men and women whose ideology was a reflection of
whichever side had caught them first; others were motivated by the need to vent
their own personal anger and resentment in some direction and used political action
to satisfy this need. But if we are to come to any real understanding of the internal
factors that lead a man to adopt a totalitarian ideology, we must dig a little deeper
than this and must give our attention to some basic roots of this problem.


139


The Moulding Nursery


One of the important things we have learned from modern psychology is that the
roots of many of our adult attitudes and problems lie far back in the seeming quiet of
the nursery and childhood years. The infant's life may appear to be placid and
uneventful, but from the moment he is born he hears thousands of rumblings both
from inside his own mind and from the world outside. In his mother's womb he knew
neither warmth nor cold, now his skin transmits these sensations to him. As he lay
protected in his mother's body, he did not have to breathe, eat, or excrete; now he
must do all these things himself. He needs help in doing them, he needs protection,
and for this protection and help he must rely on those grown-up giants, Mother and
Father.


He is utterly and completely dependent, unable by himself to find adequate
responses to his needs. There he is, with his pitifully limited means of adaptation,
with his minimum of innate patterns of action. Warmth, food, and love, things which
he needs to sustain his life, come to him when he does the "right" thing-and the right
thing is the learned, civilized thing, not the instinctual, primitive thing. The giants, his
parents, make demands on him-they begin to mould him according to their own
habits, and the infant must submit to all these external demands in order to get what
he wants and needs.


He must follow the hundreds of subtle, incomprehensible educational rules in order
to be paid back with the affection and protection on which he is so dependent. All of
this transforms him into a more or less conforming being. His parents' morality is, as
it were, sucked in and becomes an ever-present force inside him. He is imprinted
with all kinds of habits which serve to condition him into the particular form of
adaptation his parents and his society think good for him. The forms his adult
behaviour will take are foreshadowed by the forms his parents' behaviour take. The
patient mother imprints patience on her child; the anxious, compulsive mother
imprints tensions on hers.


The child who is brought up in a loving environment will develop inner pictures of
love and affection and will be better able to accept all the restrictions his parents
impose on his freedom, all the rules they lay down. He will accept timetables, toilet
training, parental confusion, without too much inner protest even when his needs run
contrary to these social demands. He may want to be fed at a time when, according
to his schedule, he should not be hungry. He may want to sleep when his parents
want him to be awake. Society demands of him that he learn to postpone his own
gratifications, and he will react to this demand in a manner contingent on his own
sense of security in his parents' affection. Having to wait for food, not being allowed
to suck any more, having to control his need to excrete-all of these require the child
to make new and difficult adaptations. His urge for immediate and unconditional
satisfaction of his needs has to be transformed into something much more
complicated-a whole pattern of learned responses.


140


It is not important for us to describe here the different ways in which these early
cultural obligations are met by the child. But it is important to understand that the
cradle and the nursery change and recondition the innate natural responses of the
unsocial, primitive child to mould him into an adult, who may be left from his
childhood a legacy of frustrations stemming from this moulding process. Individual
problems are caused by individual patterns of child-rearing; these very patterns are
themselves to some degree the product of the cultural traditions in which they are
rooted and the mores of the community into which the child is born. 1'o the degree
that our society imposes on children frustrations and restrictions for which they are
neither biologically nor emotionally ready, to that degree our culture paves the way
for adult behaviour problems and for neurotic attitudes of submission or aggression,
which may find expression in allegiance to some totalitarian group.


Conditioning a child into a servile and submissive attitude, for example, may start
when parents rigidly imprint automatic rules of conduct on the infant. They may make
a time maniac out of him or a cleaning automaton. They may compel him to speak
too early or to be silent when his voice itches to burst out of his throat or to sleep
when his body is throbbing with the energy of wakefulness. Such parents impose on
their child a constant feeling of guilt-he feels disturbed and unhappy every time he
does not comply with their demands. And at the same time they force him to love
them even when they are disagreeable. They may compel him to apologize for
behaviour which seems to him to be perfectly acceptable; they may demand that he
confess to crimes which do not exist as crimes for him at his age. Some techniques
of brainwashing can be seen at the cradle; the parents may cross-examine him, tie
him to their apron strings, or keep him constantly under their eyes. With their
solicitous attention they never leave him alone to enjoy feeling of being secure with
himself. The helpless child in such an environment becomes emotionally insecure; in
exchange for more borrowed security, he becomes more conforming and
submissive, although this conforming behaviour covers up tremendous inner protest
and hostility.


When parents do not permit a child to express his instinctual needs openly and
directly, they force him to look for other ways to express them. If during his early
training-which may start on the day of his birth-the infant encounters endless
restrictions to the direct expression of his needs, he will try to communicate these
needs in indirect ways-through tension, restlessness, and crying. Instead of being
able to use natural outlets for his instinctual drives, the child is permitted and
conditioned to act only through suppression and control of the drive. In his struggle
to bring the drive under control in order to please his parents, the child's natural
means of expression may become inverted. Instead of expression, he acquires
repression. This is where the roots of such adult behaviour as abject submissiveness
and the urge for conformity lie. The groundwork for this masochistic pattern of giving
in is formed in infancy. Submission and confession are the only strategies possible
for the child in a world that is too overpowering for him to handle. Inner rebellion,
hostility, and hatred must be expressed in a paradoxical way. The child's rigid silence
is proof that he wants to cry and yell. He may reproach and attack the hostile world
indirectly, through magic gestures, clownish behaviour, or even epileptic fits.


141


Compelled to suppress his instinctual needs and his means of achieving their
gratification, he may conceal their existence even from himself. Surface conformity
becomes his only means of communication, and when this happens words and
gestures acquire a concealing function. He never says what he means, and
gradually he doesn't even know what he means.


The carry-overs into adult life of this kind of child-rearing are obvious. Trained into
conformity, the child may well grow up into an adult who welcomes with relief the
authoritarian demands of a totalitarian leader. It is the welcome repetition of an old
pattern that can be followed without investment of new emotional energy. Trained
previously to divert his aggression to scapegoats, he may now displace his hidden
resentments against his parents' rules and regulations toward society as a whole. Or
he may find release for them in the wild explosion of pent-up aggression which is
exemplified by the lynch mob or by Hitler's storm troopers.


Other forms of parental behaviour also have their effect on the child. If the child is
trained precociously in habits that would otherwise develop spontaneously at a later
age, he may show all kinds of distortions in his natural behaviour. The example of
the effect of precocious toilet training is common, but there are many other parental
commands that can have the same effect on the child. The way the child is clothed
or the parents' constant demand that he always be quiet, asleep, and motionless are
equally valid examples. When any command is too strictly applied before the child is
able to cope with it, it exerts an enormous frustrating influence.


What was enforced on the child by some outside power becomes an _ inner,
automatic rule, a compulsion. Let us return to the toilet training example for a
moment, though it is only one single part of the whole pattern of training. The child
who is trained to control his need to excrete at too early an age learns to keep
himself clean and constipated under all circumstances. His body learns how to
control itself automatically, but somewhere inside him the child feels contempt for
those who have forced him into this behaviour. He may grow up to be a chronically
hostile adult, ripe for the appeal of some hostile ideology. In less severe cases, the
conflict between outside prohibitions and the inner need to let go may create a
continuing pattern of inner insecurity. Or it may lead to constant querulous
resentment, which can be easily utilized by any would-be dictator.


What we have to emphasize is this: the earliest web of communication between
parents and child takes place on what psychology calls a pre-verbal and
unconscious level. There is contact without words. The mother transfers her moods
directly to the child; he senses and catches her feelings. The child also transfers his
moods to her; she feels his pains and joys almost as soon as he does. This
sensitivity of the infant makes him react with great intensity-he is profoundly aware of
his parents’ feelings. Such negative parental factors as anxiety, insecurity,
infantilism, mutual disharmony, neurotic love, poverty, the struggle for existence, and
compulsive tyranny have an enormous effect on the child. Not long ago I treated an
infant who refused any offer of handling or feeding by its mother. The infant "knew"
that the mother had a deep-seated hostility against it; it felt her aversion and
rejection.


142


But the infant accepted food and affection from everyone else. The interplay
between parental attitudes and child development starts at birth.


Perhaps one of the clearest examples of a distorted growing-up may be seen in one
case I treated during the Second World War when I was asked to do a psychological
study of an alleged collaborator with the Nazis. This man, who was in England when
I saw him, said that he had left Holland, which was then occupied, because he no
longer agreed with the German conquerors. When he arrived in England he was, as
a matter of careful routine, put in a home for people under investigation as suspected
spies. From here, he was very soon taken to a mental institution because of his
strange behaviour. He was not actually psychotic, but he did have great difficulty in
relating to other people.


When I went to interview him, it became apparent to me that he was completely
confused. He babbled so much that it was almost impossible to understand him. I
asked him about his childhood. It was not easy for him to speak about it, but he
finally told me something of his background. He was an only child. His mother had
been the dominant member of the family, actively working in scientific research. His
father, a weak, nebulous figure, had seldom been at home; in his job as the manager
of a large firm, he had travelled a great deal. On the rare occasions when the father
was at home, the patient remembered long silences between his parents, his father
only occasionally protesting against his mother's constant stream of directives.
Sometimes the boy joined with his mother in criticizing his father's detachment and
lack of interest, sometimes he turned to his father for love and help against his
mother's smothering behaviour. But he was mostly lost and alone at home. In his late
teens, the boy developed some homosexual attachments, in which he played the
passive, submissive role. But he only came alive mentally after one of his friends
made him attend a fascist rally. The show of strength and aggression excited the boy
enormously and even aroused sexual sensations in him. He joined the fascist group,
to the great dismay of his parents, but he was never very active in party work
because the party did not provide him with the guidance and love for which he
yearned.


After the Nazi invasion and occupation, the party demanded that he be more active
as a collaborator with the Germans. Now his conscience bothered him, and he
became ill and developed all kinds of stomach ailments which were, to a psychiatrist,
obviously emotional in origin. He was not, however, strong enough to withdraw from
the party completely. He felt caught between two opposing dangers-the party and
treason. The childhood struggle began all over again; he felt himself unsafe with
either father or mother. So he decided to flee the country because he had a vague
feeling that this would help him get away from his conflicts.


Once in England, in the asylum, he felt completely contented. He simply did not
understand the serious nature of the accusations that had been made against him.
When I spoke to him about world affairs and his political activity, he fell into silence.
He did not remember any of the details of his political behaviour. It was as if he had
lived in a dream since the moment he ran away from Holland. It is entirely possible
that the enemy had used him as a tool, but at the time I saw him he was only a near-
psychotic, fear-ridden young man. He remained in the institution for the duration of
the war.


143


One thing stands out clearly in this case (aside from its complexity as a pathological
phenomenon) and that is the young man's continual search for male authority. This
search for spiritual backbone is very common among people who develop totalitarian
attachments.


144


The Father Cuts the Cord


Psychological studies have shown us over and over again that the child's attitude
toward the parental authority, with all its subtle internal complications, plays a
primary role in determining how he will handle his hostilities-whether he will learn to
cope with them or whether he will direct them toward destructive aims. As we said
earlier, parents and family form almost the whole environment of the child during the
first years of its life.


They condition the foundations of his future character. And in the family it is the
influence of the father that determines whether the child will stick to its strong natural
ties with its mother, to its dependency needs and its needs for protection, or will step
out of this maternal realm and will form new ties with new people. The father is the
first one who cuts into the essentially biological relation between mother and child.
He is what the psychoanalyst calls the first transference figure, the first new
prototype to whom the child can transfer its expectations of gratification, its feelings
of relatedness, of satisfaction, of fear. This first new trial relationship with the father
giant may become the conditioning prototype for every subsequent social
relationship.


The child's initial relationship with its mother is purely biological and symbiotic. The
womb is replaced by the crib. The mother is the know-all and do-all. Psychoanalysis
describes the child's relationship with its mother as one of oral dependency because
the helpless infant is completely dependent on the food, care, and warmth the
mother provides. The little human being's dependency need lasts longer than that of
the other animals. It is this fact that makes man gregarious, dependent on
cooperation with others.


The father brings a third person, who has no part in this relationship of biological
dependency, into the life of the child. When he cuts into the child's relationship with
its mother, he is cutting the psychological umbilical cord just as the doctor cuts the
physical one when the infant is delivered. First, he gives the child the opportunity to
transfer feelings and expectations to him; later, he brings the child more actively
outside the maternal realm and teaches him more and more about social
relationships. The specific role of the father as a transference prototype is not so
simple as it seems to many fathers. Father is not merely a toy with whom the child
can occasionally play.


The child needs to identify with this giant who lives with him and with Mother; he
wants to become familiar with the giant, he wants the giant to become part of his
world. The child wants more than this-he wants to be gratified by Father so that he
can love Father as much as he does Mother. But the child will transfer some of its
love and emotional investment to Father only if it sees something of Mother in him.
Father can do the same things Mother does-he can feed the child, can solace him,
can take care of him-and thus the child can maintain a feeling of gratitude and
affection toward this third person. This transference of feelings can only take place,
however, when the relationship between the parents themselves is tranquil. How can
the child identify with and love his parents when they are in constant conflict with
each other?


145


This picture is, of course, something of an oversimplification. There are mothers who
behave like cold, distant fathers, and fathers who behave like warm, cuddling
mothers. There are grandparents or adoptive parents who can take over. There are
many mother or father substitutes. But this is not my point. My point is that in every
situation there must be some individual who can become the conditioning prototype
for the child's relationships with new beings.


This first person is most likely to be the father, and it is he who changes the child's
biological dependency into a psychological relationship. When there is no father
figure, or if the father is too weak or too busy or is denying and tyrannical toward the
child, the result is that the child's relationship with and dependence on the mother
remains strong and lasts too long. Consequently, the child's need for social
participation and for gregarious ties with others may become to him a consuming
need. As an adult he may be willing to join with any social group which promises him
support and reassurance. Or his unconscious resentment against the father who did
not help him to grow up and become independent may be diverted into a resentment
against other symbols of authority, such as society itself. Either way the child may be
headed for maladjustment and for difficulties. Either way the child may grow up into
an immature adult.


In a study on living by proxy, I described the arrested emotional development that
results when the father does not play his proper role or is not present. A child
brought up in such an emotionally defective atmosphere searches continually for
strong figures who may serve as a proxy for the normal relationships the child would
otherwise have had in life. I have treated several cases of homosexuality and other
forms of arrested development, both in men and women, which were almost directly
attributable to the too strongly tied, symbiotic life with the mother which results from
such an environment.


In the building up of man's awareness of an independent self and the establishment
of his ability to have easy, relaxed relationships with his fellow men, the father, as
the natural chief and protector of the family, plays an important role. He cuts the
cord. He may condition the later pattern of dependence and independence. His
potential psychological dominance can become a blessing or a curse, for the child's
emotional attitude toward its father becomes the prototype for its attitudes toward
future leaders and toward society itself.


We saw this clearly in the case of our "spy" who had never had a strong male guide
in his life. Many of the people I investigated, who had chosen to identify themselves
with aggressive totalitarian groups, had this problem. For such people, the
totalitarian party became both the good father who accepted them and the proxy
which gave expression to all their hidden and frustrated hate. The party solves, as it
were, their inner problems. Parental conflict in early childhood, inconsistency, and a
threatening, unloving attitude toward the child pave the way for rebellion and
submission, and a repetition of this pattern later in life. The wish to break away from
the family pattern may lead to rebellion, but the particular form the rebellion takes
depends on what political movements can modify and channelize the person's
resentment.


146


This does not mean, of course, that there is not a hard core of totalitarian-minded
people, nourished in the cradle by the dogmas of their totalitarian parents, who give
themselves to their party tasks because they have never known a different world.
According to Almond, these types are found particularly in our Western world among
high-echelon extremists. They take in the totalitarian form of socialism with their
mother's milk; they are members of an increasing group of hereditary totalitarian
conformists. Here, no father rebellion is needed to become an extreme revolutionary.
But the bulk of the totalitarian-minded in the democratic societies are men and
women who are attracted to this destructive way of life for inner emotional reasons
unknown to themselves.


My own experiences with both Communists and Nazis during the Second World War
has shown me this truth over and over again. In Holland, as in the other Nazi-
occupied countries, the Communists and their sympathizers fought bravely with us in
the underground as our temporary companions. Even during that time of national
crisis and terror, they were never free from bitter reproach and resentment toward
us. They insisted that their ideology was the only correct one and showed,
sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, that when the Nazis were defeated, they
would renew their struggle against the social order. Let me give just one example to
illustrate this point. One of the Communists was a very brave physician (not the
same man about whom I spoke earlier). He had killed a Nazi leader, and later he
himself died a horrible death.


Here was a grown man who had never been able to overcome a certain adolescent
self-righteousness and aggressiveness. On the very night when, in deadly peril, he
sought refuge in my home, he felt compelled to engage me in a long theoretical
political discussion with him, full of bitterness. He disdainfully reproached the other
resistance groups because they did not share his political views. His views and
ideals, I must say in all justice to him, seemed sincere to me, but he was filled with
so much unresolved hostility toward the government of his fatherland that he was
ready at all times to overthrow it.


The core of his fallacious reasoning I found was the confusion about ends and
means in the struggle for social justice. For him, tactics and strategy had become
more important than the final aim of peaceful coexistence between men on earth. His
violent death-after murdering an S.S. officer-was partly the result of the fact that he
pursued tactics beyond the strategic needs of the moment. True, in the end he gave
his life for his ideals and for his native land, but up to the end he carried a bitter
grudge against all those who were not in complete agreement with everything he
thought and felt. It was that personal grudge and hostility which led him to bad
planning and his ultimate fate. Most of us are not clearly and completely aware that
alongside our wish to be good, adjusted citizens, we also have hidden wishes to
violate our allegiances to the social formation of which we are members.


These wishes are not based on reason and intelligence; they are purely emotional.
They are founded by the ways we have been brought up, by our relationships with
our parents, by our educational system, by our attitudes toward ourselves and
toward authority.


147


But all men who adhere rigidly to any set of political convictions, and especially those
who have embraced some totalitarian ideology, believe that their attitudes emerge
from rational conviction and are the result of normal intellectual development. They
insist that those who do not agree with them are committed to a stuffy, outmoded
way of thinking. They cannot see their own vengeful and disloyal attitudes as
something asocial and abnormal.


To the psychologist, it is eminently clear that these attitudes have their roots not in
intellectual conviction but in some deep-seated emotional need. I have often seen
cases where this blind, rigid allegiance to a totalitarian ideology was actually a
defiant rebellion against a compelling inner need to grow and to change and to
become mature. In these people, the selection of a special political party was only a
substitute for their need for dependency. Ideological stubbornness is often tragic
because it may cover up basic neurotic reactions that may lead to self-destruction.


One of my patients was a young woman whose ultra-left beliefs were a defense
against her hidden incestuous feelings toward a reactionary father. It took protracted
therapy to bring her to an understanding of the real nature of her difficulty and to get
her to see that there was nothing shameful or disgusting about the infantile love and
resentment she was trying to conceal through her political behaviour. The need for
authority, when it is not understood, and the confused resistance to authority are the
roots from which the totalitarian attitude may grow. Whenever the father-leader fails,
he sets up a pattern of future trouble with authority. Instead of a mature relationship
with his fellow men, the child becomes an adult who is forced to choose the
tyrannical totalitarian tie to keep his inner tensions in check.


Whenever there is parental conflict, the child grows into an adult burdened with
conflicts who may be eager to accept the simple solutions totalitarianism offers.
Whenever there is parental compulsion, which gives the child no chance to develop
its own attitudes and evaluations, the child grows up into a conforming adult, whose
entire life may be spent in a search for outside authority, for someone to tell him
what to do.

[admin]

CHAPTER ELEVEN: MENTAL CONTAGION AND MASS DELUSION

During disturbed times such as these, the thoughts of everyone follow the diplomatic
play going on at the various political conferences. It would be worth while to
investigate whether it is possible for leaders of nations to arrive at a common
understanding as a result of mutual exchange of words, ideas, and the negotiating of
treaties. Yet, the various cultures in the world and the different ideologies not only
speak different languages, but even their ways of thinking are different.
Unobtrusively, our personal past and our cultural environment creep into our thinking
habits. Our feelings and thoughts are conditioned and coerced by various social
influences.


It is already possible to bring to the surface some of the illusions and prejudices
people have about one another. We may say that the special environments in which
people develop and the habits they build up foster subtle illusions and delusions in
persons, of which they are, for the most part, unaware. Through research in the field,
anthropology and psychology have been able to compare different ideologies in
people by observing the growth of the wholesome and the unwholesome-in the child,
in groups, in tribes, and, lastly, in nations. The findings call to our attention the
difficult art of argument in situations where there is scarcely any common ground of
communication and understanding.


In a study on mental coercion we have to trace some of these mass psychological
influences which condition our attitude in life.


The Affirmation of My Own Errors


The lie I tell ten times gradually becomes a half truth to me, And as I continue to tell
my half-truth to others, it becomes my cherished delusion.


We rediscover this phenomenon every day in that huge laboratory of human
relations we call psychological counselling and psychotherapy. Let us look at just
one simple example, the case of a perfectly healthy child who decides one day that
she doesn't want to go to school because schoolwork seems so very difficult. So she
tells her mother that she has a headache, and mother agrees to let her stay at home.
Thus the girl avoids the schoolwork she dreads and gets the additional gratification
of her mother's solicitous and tender nursing.


The next time our little girl wants to stay home it is easier to pretend she has a
headache-and the third time it is easier still. Gradually the girl herself begins to
believe in her recurrent illness. Her conscience bothered her the first time she lied,
but by now her initial lie has become an ingenuous truth to her.


149


By the time our heroine becomes a grown woman she will have to consult with a
doctor about her constantly recurring headaches. Doctor and patient will have to
spend many hours untangling the web of half-lies, innuendos, and self-pitying
complaints until the patient rediscovers that her headaches all began on that one day
she didn't want to go to school.


Delusional headaches afflict the world itself. Political demagoguery is, to some
extent, a problem in our country. The particular form this demagoguery takes is only
a passing phase, and when our current dragons and inner phantoms have been laid
to rest, the eternal demagogue may arise anew. He will accuse others of conspiracy
in order to prove his own importance. He will try to intimidate those who are neither
so iron-fisted nor so hot-headed as he, and temporarily he will drag some people into
the web of his delusions. Perhaps he will wear a mantle of martyrdom to arouse the
tears of the weak-hearted. With his emotionalism and suspicion, he will shatter the
trust of citizens in one another. His delusions of grandeur will infect those insecure
souls who hope that some of his dictatorial glamour will rub off on them.


Unfortunately the problem of delusion has been studied almost exclusively in terms
of its pathological manifestations. The psychiatrist who has encountered delusions of
grandeur in his patients has in the past lacked the philosophical and sociological
background necessary to enable him to form comparisons between his patients'
delusional systems and mass delusion in the world. In dealing with patients suffering
from megalomania or persecution mania, he has tended to rely too much on
hypotheses which explain pathological delusions as the product of anatomical
changes in the individual brain; he has not given enough attention to the question of
whether or not these phenomena are in any way related to an abnormal way of
thinking in a physically normal person.


Since the growth of anthropology and the social sciences in the last decades, new
light has been thrown on the subject of mass feelings and mass delusion. Obviously
these are not phenomena which a pathologist can examine under a microscope.
They demand a knowledge of history and social psychology and of all the studies
which concern inter-human relations and man's collective thinking.


To arrive at a clinical stage of study of this subject, it is necessary to divest oneself of
various fixed philosophical ideas which have dominated scientific thought since
Aristotle. There is, for example, the doctrine of the identity of all thinking processes
and the possible universality of human understanding. This is essentially founded on
the belief that all human beings think in the same way. But against this hypothesis is
the observable truth that philosophers themselves have the utmost difficulty in
reaching mutual understanding.


This may be largely due to the fact that different men have different methods and
standards of thinking. For centuries, science has adopted the Aristotelian dictum that
most thought is carried on according to the established rules of logic, which apply in
the same way as the laws of nature. It was the philosopher Francis Bacon who first
pointed out, in his theory of idols, that although the laws of logic and clear thinking
certainly exist, men may or may not make use of them; depending on the emotional
circumstances, "thoughts are often the theatrical curtains to conceal personal
passions and reactions."


150


In this statement the philosopher who lived during Shakespeare's time might almost
be attacking the seeming logic of modern demagoguery. Since the Renaissance,
therefore, it has been acknowledged that human feelings and personal inclinations
mould and direct thought, and this point of view rather early found its most moving
expression in the works of Spinoza and Pascal. When we come into contact with the
phenomena of collective passion and mass delusion, it is impossible to keep modern
psychology out of the picture whether we look at it philosophically or politically. For,
when examining this problem, we are immediately confronted with the question, Do
these disquieting phenomena in group life, which lead to so much mutual
misunderstanding, arise from the fact that the group is in a particular, immature, and
adolescent phase of psychological and political development?


It will be illuminating and may help us answer the question if we study briefly the
history of the growth of consciousness and awareness in the individual mind as it
passes through successive stages from infancy to maturity, since we can, in fact,
find a parallel between such stages of growth in the individual and the human group.


151


Stages of Thinking and Delusion


The psyche is constantly confronted with and communicating with the outside world,
and at every phase of an individual's development that world and its events are
experienced differently.


Although different scientists have drawn different conclusions about the various
phases and their implications, the very recognition of change and growth of personal
outlook is one of the most important scientific findings in psychology and is agreed
on by all psychologists. Let me briefly explain here the developmental approach to
human psychology. It is not the only one, but it will serve to illustrate the tremendous
impact of immature and delusional thinking on our final opinions.


Developmental psychology - as studied in children and primitives-posits at the origin
of thinking, in both the individual and the race, a hallucinatory stage of the mind, in
which there is no experience of difference between the inside and the outside world;
the mental separation and distantiation between the self and the world has not yet
taken place. The psyche is felt to be omnipotent -all that is experienced inside the
self is attributed to the universe as well and is imagined to be part of that universe.


According to developmental psychology, the infant experiences the world in this way,
and in certain types of insanity the adult will revert to this hallucinatory stage. Yet,
even mature man does not succeed completely in separating internal fantasy from
outside reality, and often he thinks that his private and subjective moods are caused
by some external actuality. In the next stage, that of animistic thinking, there is still a
partial sense of oneness between the ego and the world. The individual's inner
experience, his fears, his feelings, are projected onto seeming causative agents in
the outside world. The outside world is a continual demonic threat to him.


The child who bumps against the table projects onto that table a hostile living power,
and hits back. The primitive tribesman, hunted by beasts of prey, attributes to the
animal he feared a divine power, that of a hostile god. The entire outside world may
in fact be peopled with the fears of men. In times of panic and fear, we all may
populate our neighbourhood with nonexistent traitors or fifth columnists. Our
animistic thinking is continually busy accusing others of what actually occurs inside
our own minds. Nowadays there are no devils and ghosts in trees and in wild
animals; they have made their homes in the various scapegoats created by dictators
and demagogues.


The third stage is that of magical thinking in which there is still a sense of intimate
connection between man and his outside world. However, man places himself more
in opposition to the world than in union with it. He wants to negotiate with the
mysterious powers around him. Magic is in fact the simplest strategy of man. He has
discovered that he can manipulate the world with signs and gestures or sometimes
with real actions or changes. He erects totem poles and sacrificial blocks; he makes
talismans and strange medicines. He uses words as powerful signs to change the
world. He develops a ritual to satisfy his need for coming to terms with the outside
world.


152


Which of us has not felt a sudden desire to count cobblestones or is not the jealous
possessor of an amulet or some other secret token whose power would be lost if its
existence were known to others?


Immature as they are, these tokens serve to build up happiness and a good life. We
all still live in the world of magic and are caught in the delusion of happy
manipulation of nature. The modern tribe drives around in mechanized cars and
becomes a megalomaniac sorcerer of the wheel. Millions of victims are brought to
the altar of the god Speed because of our hidden delusion that frenzied rapidity
prolongs life. The engine and the gadget have replaced the more mysterious amulet
of earlier days. Knowledge is still in the service of power instead of in the service of
understanding.


In the last phase of mental development, man makes a complete separation
between himself and the outside world. He not only lives with things and tries to
manipulate them, but he also lives in opposition to them. In this phase of mature
reality confrontation, man becomes an observer of his own life. He recognizes the
abyss of his own being. He sees his body and mind as separate from the world. With
hands, ears, eyes, and his controlling mind, he confronts reality. He steps back from
the world and observes it. He is, in fact, the only animal that walks erect,
straightforwardly facing the world. He is the only animal that uses his hands and his
senses as verifying instruments.


Gradually his own mind-body becomes an instrument whose drives he may accept
or reject. Only man is able to see his drives and instincts as either dangerous or
useful. Man not only knows an externally imposed fear, but he knows an inner fear,
fear of losing the inner controls he has acquired at so high a price. With arms and
hands man reaches out not only toward the outside which he once hoped to conquer
with magic gestures as a baby does, but also he knowingly reaches out toward an
inside world. Mature man lives between an inner and an outer world.


There is something tragic about this laborious process of becoming conscious of a
separate inner and outer reality. In becoming mature, man awakens from a sweet
primitive dream in which he was part of an individual whole, part of a nirvanic world
of equanimity. The sense of lost unity with the universe lingers on, and in moments
of mass tension, or in times of crisis, he reaches toward that ancient experience of
impersonal, irresponsible bliss.


Utter passivity or self-destruction, artificial ecstasy obtained by means of drugs, the
suicidal wish for eternal sleep-all are devices by which man hopes to fulfil that
eternal yearning. At what stage in connection with these developments of human
experience may we speak of delusion? When the member of a primitive tribe
placates the mysterious and hostile world by prayer to his totem animal, we do not
call this delusion; but if a man who has attained to a more advanced stage of
thinking relapses into such a primitive habit of thought, then it is possible to call this
falling back (retrogression) a delusion.


153


The Loss of Verifiable Reality


Delusion we may thus tentatively define as the loss of an independent, verifiable
reality, with a consequent relapse into a more primitive stage of awareness. Just as
the young woman we spoke about earlier began to believe in and suffer from her
headaches, so the man who sells his private fantasy first as a rumour and then as a
factual truth gradually loses his awareness that his initial statements were in fact
deceits, and his delusion becomes a kind of permanent petrification of his original
primitive wishful thinking.


There are several factors which promote deluded thinking. Retrogression and
primitivization may occur as a result of physical disease, particularly diseases of the
brain, and it is with this type of delusions that psychiatrists deal. Many brain diseases
put out of operation the brain cortex, the organ which developed last in the
evolutionary process and which makes us aware and controls our thinking. When
this disturbance of function happens, genetically older types of brain functioning
have to take over.


Most of the causes of delusions are not purely organic, however. The same effect of
regression may be produced by hypnosis and mass hypnosis, which, by dislocating
the higher forms of alert consciousness, reduce the subject to the primitive stage of
collective participation and of oneness experience. If awareness and reality
confrontation become rigid and automatic, if man does not look for alert and
repeated verifications of what he finds in the world, he may develop delusions-ideas
not adapted to the reality situation.


Apparently the human being requires constant confrontation and verification with
various aspects of reality if he is to remain alive and alert. When experience is
petrified into dogma, the dogma itself stands in the way of new verification and of
new truth. The delusion of a nation that calls itself the "chosen" country makes it
harder for that nation to collaborate with other nations.


How deeply involved the process of thought control is with the general formation of
ideas in our time can be shown by the following experience. After the First World
War, I made the acquaintance of a German philosopher dedicated to the idealistic
philosophy of his country. Germany went through a creative phase, new ideas arose
of fraternity and world peace. Germany, the defeated country, would show its
spiritual power.


During our vacations we walked together through the sunny mountains of Ticino and
devoted our philosophical conversation to the eternal yearnings of mankind for
harmony and friendship. We became friends and wrote to each other about our
mutual work, till the shadow of totalitarianism came over his country. At first he was
sceptical and even critical about Nazism. Our correspondence diminished, and when
he gradually became gleichgeschaltet and a member of the party, the final mental
cleavage followed. I never heard about him any more.


154


So many philosophers surrender their theoretical thinking under the impact of
powerful mass emotions. The reason lies not only in anxiety and submissiveness. It
is a much deeper emotional process. People want to speak the language of their
country and fatherland. In order to breathe, they have to identify with the ideological
clichés of their surroundings. Spiritually they cannot stand alone. Stefan Zweig wrote
during the First World War that this inner process of speaking along with the
chauvinistic voices around him was experienced by him as a deep inner conflict. "Ich
hatte den Willen nicht mehr gerecht zu sein (I did not have the will any more to be
just to the others)"


155


Mass Delusion


It is interesting to note that the phenomenon of institutionalized mass delusion has
so far received little scientific treatment, although the term is bandied about wherever
the problems of political propaganda are discussed. But science has shied away
from scrutinizing the collective mental aberration we call mass delusion when it is
connected with present-day affairs; it is the historical examples, such as witchcraft
and certain forms of mass hysteria, that have been examined in great detail.


In our era of warring ideologies, in a time of battle for man's mind, this question
demands attention. What is mass delusion? How does it arise? What can we do to
combat it? The fact that I have made an analogy between the totalitarian frame of
mind and the disease of mental withdrawal known as schizophrenia indicates that I
consider the totalitarian ideology delusional and the totalitarian frame of mind a
pathological distortion that may occur in anyone. When we tentatively define
delusion as the loss of an independent, verifiable reality, with a consequent relapse
into a more primitive state of awareness, we can see how the phenomenon of
totalitarianism itself can be considered delusional.


For it is delusional (un-adapted to reality) to think of man as an obedient machine. It
is delusional to deny his dynamic nature and to try to arrest all his thinking and acting
at the infantile stage of submission to authority. It is delusional to believe that there is
any one simple answer to the many problems with which life confronts us, and it is
delusional to believe that man is so rigid, so unyielding in his structure that he has no
ambivalences, no doubts, no conflicts, no warring drives within him.


Where thinking is isolated without free exchange with other minds and can no longer
expand, delusion may follow. Whenever ideas are compartmentalized, behind and
between curtains, the process of continual alert confrontation of facts and reality is
hampered. The system freezes, becomes rigid, and dies of delusion.


Examples of this can be found in very small communities cut off from the world. On
fishing vessels which have been at sea a long time, contagious religious mania
coupled with ritual murder has been known to break out. In small village communities
there are instances of collective delusion, often under the influence of one obsessed
person. The same thing happens in the more gigantic totalitarian communities, cut
off from contact with the rest of the world. Is this not what happened in Hitler
Germany, where free verification and self-correction were forbidden? Indeed, we can
show that historically this is the case with every secluded civilization. If there is not
interchange with other people, the civilization degenerates, becomes the victim of its
own delusions, and dies.


We can phrase the concept of delusion in a different way. It is a more primitive,
distorted form of thinking found in groups or individuals, looked at only from their
limited viewpoint. Delusional thinking doesn't know the concept of delusional
thinking. The fakir lying on his bed of nails would be called a deluded man if he
exhibited his devotion on Fifth Avenue, but among his own people his behaviour is
considered saintly and eminently sane. A member of a primitive tribe will not see in
the ceremony of devil exorcism or a revival meeting an instance of mass delusion.


156


But a man who has passed through this stage of mental development to a level of
greater perspective and awareness will recognize that delusional notions lie behind
such ceremonies.


Whether or not we are able to detect delusion when it appears depends entirely on
circumstances, upon the state of civilization in which we live, upon the groups and
the social class to which we belong. For delusion and retrogression are terms which
imply a special social and intellectual level of awareness. That is why it is so difficult
to detect the delusions and primitive rituals in our own midst. Our present-day
civilization is full of mass delusions, prejudices, and collective errors which can be
recognized easily if viewed from above, but which cannot be detected if they are
seen from within. While the delusion of witchcraft has been banished, we have never
freed ourselves from the delusion of cultural or racial inferiority and superiority.
Medieval mass obsessions such as tarantism and St. Vitus's dance are little known
now among Western nations; in their place we have mass meetings with shouting
crowds expressing in delusional ecstasy their affiliation to some political delusion.
Instead of the dance fury, we have the raving frenzy of the motor, or the passive
peeping contagion of the television screen.


As we saw in the chapter on Totalitaria, mass delusion can be induced. It is simply a
question of r organizing and manipulating collective feelings in the proper way. If one
can isolate the mass, allow no free thinking, no free exchange, no outside corrective,
and can hypnotize the group daily with noises, with press and radio and television,
with fear and pseudo-enthusiasms, any delusion can be instilled. People will begin to
accept the most primitive and inappropriate acts. Outside occurrences are usually
the triggers that unleash hidden hysterical and delusional complexes in people.
Collective madness justifies the repressed personal madness in each individual.
That is why it is so easy to sloganizing people into the mass hysteria of war. The
outside enemy who is attacked by vituperative slogans is merely the scapegoat and
substitute for all the anger and anxiety that lives inside the harassed people.


Delusions, carefully implanted, are difficult to correct. Reasoning no longer has
value; for the lower, more animal type of thinking becomes deaf to any thought on a
higher level. If one reasons with a totalitarian who has been impregnated with official
clichés, he will sooner or later withdraw into his fortress of collective totalitarian
thinking. The mass delusion that gives him his feelings of belonging, of greatness, of
omnipotence, is dearer to him than his personal awareness and understanding.


The lonely prisoner in a totalitarian prison camp is the more easily compelled to
surrender gradually to the collective thinking of his guardians when part of his own
infantile thinking has been conditioned to give in to strong suggestive power. He has
to communicate with his guardians lest he be delivered to his own private delusions.
Only a few remain their true selves in that heroic battle.


The situation of our prisoners of war in Korea, who lived there for months and years,
cannot be studied without taking into account the atmosphere of mass delusion. Ina
sphere filled with rumours without an opportunity to verify the facts, the mind is ever
on the alert, but its observations are distorted.


157


The process of mass brainwashing, with continual propaganda, made it very difficult
for the individual to observe his comrades objectively. In such surroundings, it is
easy to make an innocent scapegoat for all the suffering of the group-and facts can
easily be hallucinated in such an atmosphere of mass contagion.


In one of the prison camps, I had to make a report about a man who was exorcized
and even attacked by the others because of his brute homosexual behaviour. During
the investigation, no fact, no victim, could be reported. Rumours there were plenty,
expressing hatred toward a lonely, sarcastic, unsocial being, who had aroused the
latent homosexual feelings of the other campers, thereby attacking their manliness.
No P.O.W. accused of collaboration with the enemy should be convicted without a
study having been made of the rumours rampant in his camp.


In totalitarian surroundings, hardly anyone keeps his thinking free of contagion, and
nearly everyone becomes, albeit temporarily, the victim of delusion.


158


The Danger of Mental Contagion


Indeed, there is a continual danger of mental contagion. People are in constant
psychic exchange with one another. As a country, we have to ask what dangerous
mental pollution may come to us from the other side of the border.


Let me make it crystal clear that I am far from insensitive to the danger of totalitarian
subversion and aggression with which we are now faced. My own experiences with
the Nazis made it painfully obvious to me that these dangers must not be minimized.
As a psychologist, too, I am deeply aware of the contagious nature of totalitarian
propaganda and of the fact that free citizens in a free country must be on their guard
to protect themselves. But we must learn to fight these dangers in democratic ways;
and I am afraid that too often in our fight against them we may take a leaf from the
totalitarian book. Let me cite but one example of this.


The Feinberg Law in New York State, enacted in order to protect children against the
dissemination of dangerous political propaganda, is partly based on this concept of
mental contagion. It aims. to protect the schools against the subtle infiltration of
subversive ideas. It seems at first sight like a simple solution: you just stop,
subversion before it can affect the impressionable minds of our children.


But the fact remains that it presents all kinds of psychological, difficulties. In our fear
of being polluted, we create norms and, schemes against which we measure the
acceptability of unorthodox ideas, and we forget that the presence of minority ideas,
acceptable or not, is one of the ways in which we protect ourselves against the
creeping growth of conformist majority thinking in us. U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Hugo Black, in his dissenting opinion on the Feinberg Law* made this point:


This is another of those rapidly multiplying legislative enactments which make it
dangerous ... to think or say anything except what a transient majority happens to
approve at the moment. Basically these laws rest on the belief that Government
should supervise and limit the flow of ideas into the minds of men. The tendency of
such governmental policy is to mould people into a common intellectual pattern.
Quite a different governmental policy rests on the belief that Government should
leave the mind and spirit of man absolutely free. Such a governmental policy
encourages varied intellectual outlooks in the belief that the best views will prevail.
This policy of freedom is in my judgment embodied in the First Amendment and
made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth.


Because of this policy, public officials cannot be constitutionally vested with powers
to select the ideas people can think about, censor the public views they can express,
or choose the persons or groups people can associate with. Public officials with such
powers are not public servants; they are public masters.


We cannot prevent one mental contagion through enforcing another. The only way


we can give man the strength to withstand mental infection is through giving him the
utmost freedom in the exchange of ideas.


159


People have to learn to ask questions without demanding that they be answered
immediately. The free man is the man who learns to live with problems in the hope
that they will be solved sometime-either in his own generation or the next. Man's
curiosity and inquisitiveness have to be stimulated. We have to fight man's growing
fear of thinking for himself, of being original, and of being willing to fight for what he
believes in. On the other hand, we also have to learn to resist ideas. Governments
may be overthrown not only by physical violence, but also by mental violence, by
suggestive and menticidal penetration of young minds, by rigid conditioning,
regimentation, and prohibition of dissent.


160


The Explanation of Delusion


One of the most coercive delusions is the explanation delusion, the need to explain
and interpret everything because the person has a simple ideology in his pocket.
Unwittingly the victim of this delusion wraps the magic cloak of omniscience around
himself, and this provokes awe and submission in those men who have a strong
need for rational explanation of phenomena they do not understand. The quack, for
instance, with his gesture of omniscience pushes his victim into a kind of
nothingness so that he feels himself become smaller and smaller in relation to the
great mysteries of the world. It is this compulsive need to be the wise guy and the
magician who knows all the answers that we so often find in the totalitarian world,
and nobody, your author included, is completely free from seizing on these
premature answers.


It is among the intelligentsia, and especially among those who like to play with
thoughts and concepts without really taking part in the cultural endeavours of their
epoch, that we often find the glib compulsion to explain everything and to understand
nothing. Their retreat into intellectual isolation and ivory-tower philosophy is a source
of much hostility and suspicion from those who receive the stones of intellectualism
instead of the bread of understanding. The intelligentsia has a special role in our
democratic world as teachers of ideas, but every teaching is an emotional relation, a
matter of loving your students. It is a moving among them and taking part in their
doubts in order to share together the adventure of common exploration of the
unknown.


Paradoxically, we may say that we need the experience with the totalitarians if only
to discover a reflection of their rigidities in our own democratic system.


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The Liberation from Magic Thinking


In our Western civilization, the growth of the mass media of communication has
increased the influence of collective pressure on both our prejudices and our
unbiased thinking. We live in a world of constant noise which captures our minds
even when we are not aware of it.


Already we have in our society the problem of the lonely, unheard voices. I am
convinced that there are many wise men among us whose voices and learning would
help us to correct that part of our thinking which is delusional. But their wise words
are shouted down by an excess of noise from elsewhere. In our society a man can
not simply communicate his wisdom and insight any more; in order to be heard, he
has to advertise and fortify it with megacyclic power and official labels.


An organization must stand behind him and must make sure that he will be rightly
timed so that there will be listeners to receive his message. He must have an
acknowledged label and official diploma; otherwise his voice is lost. To correct mass
delusion is one of the most difficult tasks of democracy. Democracy pleads for
freedom of thought, and this means that it demands the right of all men to test all
forms of collective emotion and collective thinking. This testing is possible only if
constant personal and collective self-criticism is encouraged.


Democracy must face this task of preserving mobility of thought in order to free itself
from blind fears and magic. The clash and mutual impact of a variety of opinions
which are characteristic of democracy may not directly produce truth, but they
prepare the way. "' At this very moment the whole world dances around a delusion,
around the magic idea that the material and military power behind an argument will
bring us nearer to the truth, and nearer to safety. Yet, one push of the button and the
atomic missiles may lead us all to mutual suicide.


In a world of warring and contrasting thoughts and delusions, the solution lies in the


delineation of frontiers, of awareness of mutual limits. This agreement on what it is
we disagree about is the first step to understanding.

[admin]

CHAPTER TWELVE: TECHNOLOGY INVADES OUR MINDS

It is rather difficult to describe the onslaught on our minds made by the intrusion of
technical thinking. This is so because technology has such contrasting influences.
The influence can be a blessing, making us more independent of threatening forces
of nature; but at the same time the tool and the machine can dominate us. This inner
antinomy of technization we must master-will we not otherwise be dragged down into
the maelstrom of ever-increasing technical development to final atomic catastrophe!
The peculiar paradox of technology lies in this: gradually the well-being of the
machine (autocar, factory) assumes greater importance and value than the well-
being of man and mankind.


The growth of technology, of the manifold mechanical instruments in the services of
our fantasies, has thrown mankind back to an infantile dream of unlimited power.
There he sits, the little man, in his room with various gadgets around him. Just
pushing a button changes the world for him. What might! And what still further power
he envisions! Yet what mental danger.


The growth of technology may confuse man's struggle for mental maturity. The
practical application of science and tools originally were meant to give man more
security against outside physical forces. It safeguarded his inner world; it freed time
and energy for meditation, concentration, play, and creative thinking. Gradually the
very tools man made took possession of him and pushed him back into serfdom
instead of toward liberation. Man became drunk with technical skill; he became a
technology addict. Technology calls forth from people, unknown to themselves, an
infantile, servile attitude. We have nearly all become slaves of our cars. Technical
security paradoxically may increase cowardice. There is almost no challenge any
more to face the forces of nature outside us and the forces of instinct within us.
Because the very technical world has become for us that magical challenge which
nature originally afforded.


It is the very subservience to technology that constitutes an attack on thinking. The
child that is confronted from early youth with all modern devices and gadgets of
technology-the radio, the motor, the television set, the film-is unwittingly conditioned
to millions of associations, sounds, pictures, movements, in which he takes no part.
He has no need to think about them. They are too directly connected with his
senses. Modern technology teaches man to take for granted the world he is looking
at; he takes no time to retreat and reflect. Technology lures him on, dropping him
into its wheels and movements. No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no
conversation-the senses are continually overloaded with stimuli. The child doesn't
learn to question his world any more; the screen offers him answers-ready-made.
Even his books offer him no human encounter-nobody reads to him; the screen
people tell him their story in their way.


163


Technical knowledge forced upon him in this way makes no demand that he think
about what he sees and hears. Conversation is becoming a lost art. The machine
age rushes on, leaving no time for quiet reading and encounter with the creative arts.
We do see a counter-current, however, in the do-it-yourself movement. Here we
probably see a resurgence of the creative spirit and a challenge to the engineer who
creates the robot.


In an over-technical world, body and mind no longer exist. Life becomes only a part
of a greater technical and chemical thought process. Mathematical equations intrude
into human relations. We learn, for example, through the doctrine of guilt by
association, the simple equation that the enemies of our enemies have to be our
friends and that the friends of our enemies have to be our enemies-as if only simple
addition of positive and negative signs exist by which to evaluate human beings.


164


The Creeping Coercion by Technology


Radio and television catch the mind directly, leaving children no time for calm,
dialectic conversation with their books. The view from the screen doesn't allow for
the freedom-arousing mutuality of communication and discussion. Conversation is
the lost art. These inventions steal time and steal self-awareness. What technology
gives with one hand-easiness and physical security-it takes away with the other. It
has taken away affectionate relationships between men. The depersonalized
Christmas card with its printed signature, the form letter, the very typewriter are
examples of mechanical proxies. Technical intrusion usurps human relationships, as
if people no longer had to give one another attention and love any more. The bottle
replaces Mother's breast, the nickel in the automat replaces Mother's preparation of
sandwiches. The impersonal machine replaces human gesture and mutuality.
Children educated in this way prefer to be alone, with fantasies to escape into and
gadgets to play with. Mechanization pushes them into mental withdrawal.


Technology suggests and creates the feeling of man's omnipotence on the one
hand, but on the other, the smallness of man, his weakness and inferiority compared
with the might of machinery. The power of man's creative mind is disguised behind
dreams of social machines and world mechanics. Mechanics in_ political
manoeuvrings are overestimated and go beyond reason. We use intelligence and
counterintelligence, trickery and political machines, forgetting the "emotional
reasons" which underlie human brilliance and stupidity. There exists a relationship
between naive belief in technology only and a naive belief in human intelligence,
logic, and innocence that was part of the optimistic liberalist feeling prevalent in the
nineteenth century. We see in both beliefs the denial of the irrational depths of the
mind.


What is the ultimate result of technical progress? Does it drive people more and
more to the fear and despair brought on by a love-empty push-button world? Does it
create a megalomaniac happiness won by remote control of other people? Does it
deliver people to the unsatisfying emptiness of leisure hours filled with boredom? Is
the ultimate result living by proxy, experiencing the world only from the movie or
television screen, instead of living and labouring and creating one's own?


In cases of television addiction, I observed the following points:
1. The television fascination is a real addiction; that is to say, television can become
habit-forming, the influence of which cannot be stopped without active therapeutic


interference.


2. It arouses precociously sexual and emotional turmoil, seducing children to peep
again and again, though at the same time they are confused about what they see.


3. It continuously provides satisfaction for aggressive fantasies (western scenes,


crime scenes) with subsequent guilt feelings since the child unconsciously tends to
identify with the criminal, despite all the heroic avengers.


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4. Itis a stealer of time.


5. Preoccupation with television prevents active inner creativity children and adults
merely sit and watch the pseudo-world of the screen instead of confronting their own
difficulties. If there is a conflict with parents who have no time for their youngsters,
the children surrender all the more willingly to the screen. The screen talks to them,
plays with them, takes them into a world of magic fantasies. For them, television
takes the place of a grownup and is forever patient. This the child translates into
love.


As in all mass media, we have to be aware of the hypnotizing, seductive action of
any all-penetrating form of communication. People become fascinated even when
they do not want to look on. We must keep in mind that every step in personal
growth needs isolation, needs inner conversation and deliberation and a reviewing
with the self. Television hampers this process and prepares the mind more easily for
collectivization and cliché thinking. It persuades onlookers to think in terms of mass
values. It intrudes into family life and cuts off the more subtle interfamilial
communication.


The world of tomorrow will witness a tremendous battle between technology and
psychology. It will be a fight of technology versus nature, of systematic conditioning
versus creative spontaneity. The veneration of the machine implies the turning of
mechanical knowledge into power, into push-button power. Mechanical instruments
of destruction such as the H-bomb have translated the primitive human urge for
destruction into large-scale scientific killing. Now, this destructive potential may
become an easy tool for any potentate crazy for power.


Driven by technology, our own world has become more interdependent, and through
our dependence on technical knowledge and devices, we ourselves are in danger of
delivering our people to the more brutal totalitarians. This is the actual dilemma of
our civilization. The machine that became a tool of human organization and made
possible the conquest of nature, has acquired a dictatorial position. It has forced
people into automatic responses, into rigid patterns and destructive habits.


The machine has aroused an ever-increasing yearning for speed, for frenzied
accomplishments. There exists a psychological relationship between speedomania
(frenzied swiftness) and ruthlessness. Behind the wheel in a fast car, a driver
becomes drunk with power. Here again we see the denial of the concept of natural,
steady growth. Ideas and methods need time to mature. The machine forces results
prematurely: evolution is turned into revolution of wheels. The machine is the denial
that progress has to grow within us before it can be realized outside ourselves.
Mechanization takes away the belief in mental struggle, the belief that problem-
solving needs time and repeated attempts. Without such beliefs, the platitude will
take over, the digest and the hasty memorandum. A mechanized world believes only
in condensation of problems and not in a continuous dialectic struggle between man
and the questions he construes.


166


One of the fallacies of modern technique is its direction toward greater efficiency.
With less energy, more has to be produced. This principle may be right for the
machine, but is not true for the human organism. In order to become strong and to
remain strong, man has to learn to overcome resistances, to face challenges, and to
test himself again and again. Luxury causes mental and physical atrophy.


The devaluation of the individual human brain, replacing it by mechanical computers,
also suggests the totalitarian system for which its citizens are compelled to become
more and more the servile tools. The inhuman "system" becomes the aim, a system
that is the product of technocracy and dehumanization and which may result in
organized brutality and the crushing of any personal morality. In a mechanical
society a set of values are forcibly imprinted on the unconscious mind, the way
Pavlov conditioned his dogs.


Our brains then no longer need to serve us or develop the thinking process;
machines will do this for us. In technocracy, emphasis is on behaviour free of
emotions and creativity. We speak of "electric brains," forgetting that actually
creative minds are behind these brains and their frailties. For some engineers, minds
have become no more than electric lamps in a totalitarian laboratory. Between man
and his fellow man there has been interposed a tremendous, cold, paper force, a
nameless bureaucracy of rules and tools. Mechanization has brought into being the
mysterious "pimp" in human relations, the man in between, the mechanical
bureaucrat, who is powerful but impersonal. He has become a new source of magic
fear.


In a technocratic world every moral problem gets repressed and is displaced by a
technical or statistical evaluation. The problems of sound and speedy mathematics
serve to overthrow ethics. If, for instance, one investigates the inner life of the guards
of the concentration camps and their inner troubles and tribulations, one understands
why those jailers gave so much thought to the technical problem of how to get the
murdered corpses of their victims out of the gas chambers as soon as possible. The
words "clean" and "practical" and "pure" acquired for them a different dimension than
our usual one. They thought in chemical and statistical terms -and stuck to them-in
order not to be aware of their deeper moral guilt.


The mind regarded as a computing machine is the result of compulsive
rationalization and generalization of the world. This has been so since the time of
early Greek thinkers. This concept implies denial or minimization of emotional life
and of the value of marginal experiences. In such a philosophy, spontaneity is never
understood-nor creativity and historical coincidence, nor the miracles of human
communication as revealed by telepathy. Technology based on this concept is cold
and without moral standards of living, without faith and "feeling at home" in our own
world. It continually stimulates new dissatisfaction and the production of new luxury
without knowing why. It stimulates greediness and laziness without emphasizing
restraint and the art of living. Indeed, technology as a goal instead of a means gives
us the fiction of simple equality instead of the continual pursuit of freedom, diversity,
and human dignity.


167


Technology disregards the fact that our scientific view of the world is only a gradual
correction of our mythical and pre-scientific view. Technology, once a product of
courageous fantasy and vision, threatens to kill that same vision, without which no
human progress is possible. The idol, technology, must become a tool again and not
the omnipotent magician per se, who drags us into the abyss.


The industrial development in our Western culture created a new problem, that of
making man more distant from the rhythm of nature. First industrial man was tied to
factory and engine, and then technological progress increased leisure time, bringing
a new question: leisure for what?


The increased growth of time, and time space, and of the sizes of towns, and the
reduction of distance through the increased means of transport affected deeply the
roots of our feelings of belonging and security. The family-the atom of society-often
became disrupted, and sometimes even deteriorated. The raving frenzy of the family
car on Sunday replaced the quiet being together of family groups in mutual
exchanges of affection and wisdom.


Only when man learns to be mentally independent of technology -that means when
he learns to do without-will he also learn not to be overwhelmed and swept away by
it. People have to become lonely Robinson Crusoe’s first, before they can really use
and appreciate the advantages of technology.


Our education has to learn to present simple, natural challenges and needs to the


child in order to immunize him against the paralyzing and lazy-making tendencies of
our technicized epoch.


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The Paradox of Technology


Paradoxically enough, technical security may increase cowardice. The technical
world we ourselves have created has replaced the very real challenge which nature
originally afforded man's imagination, and man is no longer compelled to face the
forces of nature outside himself and the forces of instinct within him. Our luxurious
habits and complicated civilization have a tendency to appeal more to our mental
passivity than to our spiritual alertness. Mentally passive people, without basic
morals and philosophy, are easily lured into political adventures which are in conflict
with the ethics of a free, democratic society.


The assembly line alienates man from his work, from the product of his own labour.
No longer does man produce the things man needs; the machine produces for him.
Engineers and scientists tell us that in the near future automation-running factories
without human help-will become a reality, and human labour and the human being
himself will become almost completely superfluous. How can man have self-esteem
when he becomes the most expendable part of his world? The ethical and moral
values which are the foundation of the democratic society are based on the view that
human life and human welfare are the earth's greatest good. But in a society in
which the machine takes over completely, all our traditional values can be destroyed.
In venerating the machine, we denigrate ourselves; we begin to believe that might
makes right, that the human being has no intrinsic worth, and that life itself is only a
part of a greater technical and chemical thought process.


Man's progressive retreat toward a mechanized, push-button world is best illustrated
by his love for automobiles and other machines. The moment he can retreat to his
car seat and direct the world by remote control, he dreams an old, long-forgotten
childhood dream of tremendous omnipotence. Man's servility to his automobile and
other machines takes something away from his individuality. We are hypnotized by
the idea of remote control. The wheels and the push-buttons give us a false sense of
freedom. Yet, at the same time, the creative part of man resists the machine's cold,
mechanical intrusion into his inner freedom.


As I drive, every time I pass something beautiful along the road, be it an exhilarating
view, a museum, a river, a tall tree, at that very moment a kind of tense conflict is
aroused in me. Shall I stop the car and drink in the beauty around me or shall I give
in to my machine and keep racing along?


For the psychologist and biologist such behaviour raises important questions. How
will it end? Will man's tendency to become more and more an immobile technological
embryo finally get the better of him and his civilization? The Dutch anatomist Bolk -
one of my teachers-long ago described the regressive retardation in growth
characteristic of human beings as compared to the rapid development of the higher
primates. As a result of the fetalization and anatomical retardation of man, he
acquired his erect posture, the use of his grasping and verifying hands, the
possibility of speech. This long youth made it possible for him to learn, and to build
up his own thought world.


169


Since the Renaissance and the advent of modern science, the scientist himself has
been forced to retreat more and more to his technological womb-his laboratory, his
study, his armchair. He has done this for the sake of greater intellectual
concentration, but as a result he gradually became more isolated from living people-
unobtrusively. Only in the last decades has the scientist begun to come in contact
with social problems more and more, partly forced to do so by the growth of social
science.


From his magic corner, the scientist has learned how to control the world with his
inventions and mental dictates. Increasingly the population has been seduced by the
idea of remote control. The arsenal of buttons and gadgets leads us into the magic
dream world of omnipotent power. Our technical civilization gives us greater ease,
but it is challenge and uneasiness that make for character and strength.


The repeated outlet in work, through which we not only sublimate our aggressions
but also refine and recondition our instinctual aims, is grossly endangered by
technical automatization. There exists an intimate relation between the rhythm of
work and the rhythm of creation. In a world of mere leisure and no work discipline,
our unleashed instincts would gain again. It is the alternating rhythm of work and
leisure time that refines our enjoyment of leisure.


A conference in New Haven sponsored by the Society for Applied Anthropology on
the effects of automation on the workers* was told that the chief complaint of the
workers was that increasing mental tension supplanted muscular fatigue. The strain
of watching and controlling machines makes man jumpy, he develops gradually the
feeling that the machine controls him instead of he * The New York Times,
December 29, 1955.


Several of my patients looked at machines as something alive, dangerously alive
because machines had no love or other feelings for the man who used them.


The dangerous paradox in the boost of living standards is that in promoting ease, it
promotes idleness, and laziness. If the mind is not prepared to fill leisure time with
new challenges and new endeavours, new initiative and new activities, the mind falls
asleep and becomes an automaton. The god Automation devours its own children. It
can make highly specialized primitives out of us.


Just as we are gradually replacing human labour by machines, so we are gradually
replacing the human brain by mechanical computers, and thus increasing man's
sense of unworthiness. We begin to picture the mind itself as a computing machine,
as a set of electrochemical impulses and actions. The brain is an organ of the body;
its structure and its actions can be studied and examined. But the mind is a very
different thing. It is not merely the sum of the physiological processes in the brain; it
is the unique, creative aspect of the human personality.


Unless we watch ourselves, unless we become more aware of the serious problems
our technology has brought us, our entire society could turn into a kind of super-
automatized state. Any breakdown of moral awareness and of the individual's sense
of his own worth makes all of us more vulnerable to mental coercion.


170


Nazi Germany gave us the frightful example of the complete breakdown of all moral
evaluations. In the S. S. society, racial persecution and murder became a kind of
moral rule.


All this may sound extreme. But the fact remains that any influence-overt or
concealed, well- or ill-intentioned-which reduces our alertness, our capacity to face
reality, our desire to live as active, acting individuals, to assume responsibility and to
face up to danger, takes from us some part of our essential human-ness, the quality
in us which strives toward freedom and democratic maturity.


The enforced mental intervention practiced by the totalitarians is deliberate and
politically inspired, but mental intervention is a serious danger even when its purpose
is non-political. Any influence which tends to rob man of his free mind can reduce
him to robotism.


Any influence which destroys the individual can destroy the whole society.


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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
INTRUSION BY THE ADMINISTRATIVE MIND


Since social life has become more and more complicated, a new group of mediators
between man and his goals has developed. It is no longer the ancient priest who
mediates between man and his gods, between man and the powers beyond him, but
a group of administrators have, in part, taken over the job of intervening between
man and his government. There are today mediators between man and his bosses,
between artist and public, between farmer and market, mediators between
everything. The administrative mind is born, often dominating man's social behaviour
and man's manifold contacts, leading him into complicated actions and compulsions
far beyond spontaneous behaviour.


All these ties, the rigid bureaucratic ones and the useful administrative ones, have
their influence on human behaviour and often may befog man's free thinking. I have
a special reason for developing this theme in a book on the rape of the mind
because this problem of mediation between man and his actions and thoughts exists
in our form of democracy as well as in the totalitarian countries. Both halves of the
world are grappling with the involved problem of how to administer themselves. The
mere technique of governing ourselves and our world can become a threat to free
human development-and this may be independent of the ideology the administration
adheres to. We have not the same freedom to choose the official men who govern
us that we have to select our favourite shop or our doctor. As long as the official man
is in charge, we are in his bureaucratic power.


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The Administrative Mind


Administrators today cannot handle their jobs adequately within the limits of the
simple knowledge of people and nations that served governments in former years. If
our leaders can not take into account the irrational forces in themselves and in other
men and nations, they may easily be swept off into the maelstrom of mass emotions.
If they cannot learn to recognize that their private or official conduct often reflects
their prejudices and irrationalities, they will not be able to cope with the often
unexpected prejudices of others. If they are, for instance, not sensitive to the
paradoxical strategy hidden behind the misleading Aesopian language of
totalitarians, they will not be able to counter the cold war. Psychological knowledge
has become a must in our era of confused human relations.


Do our people in office, for instance, understand fully the provocative totalitarian
strategy of slandering and wild accusation, and are they able to handle it
adequately? Do they realize that the mere official denial never has as strong an
appeal and impact as the initial accusation, and, in fact, usually fits into the accuser's
strategy? Apparently they do not, for many still use simple official denial as a
defense against the totalitarian strategy of accusation, when, in fact, only repeated
exposure and ridicule of the very root of this technique can defeat it.


Do they realize the implications of the strategy of raising sham problems? The
totalitarian and the demagogue often use this confusing technique. By launching
emotional inquiries and investigations and asking for attention for quasi problems,
they seek to divert attention from their real aims.


Do they understand, for instance, what lies behind the technique of exploiting the
chivalry and generosity of the public and blackmailing the pity of the world? The
strategy of complaining and calling for justice is a well-known mental defense used
by neurotic individuals to arouse guilt feelings in others and to cover up their own
hidden aggressiveness. The exploitation of pity and the overt declaration of one's
own purity and honest innocence is a familiar trick when it is used by individuals, but
we are less likely to recognize it when it is used in international politics.


Do our administrators realize that even the romantic ideals of brotherly love and
world peace can be used to cover up aggressive designs? After the First World War,
we heard many inspiring idealistic catchwords from the defeated central European
countries. Their press and their leaders described in great detail, for all the world to
know, the "inner purification through suffering" of the defeated peoples. Thus these
countries appealed to the conscience and compassion of the whole world. But it was
a questionable conversion. Every therapist knows that those who talk a great deal
about their inner change and recovery have for the most part not changed at all. The
fine phrases are so often contradicted by actions. Politicians must recognize that this
can be as true for nations as it is for individuals. Let us not forget that nations don't
talk. Official words are made up by representatives with unofficial and mostly
unknown inner motivations.


173


Administrators, diplomats, and politicians form the nerve centres and paths of
communication between peoples and nations. The tensions in the diplomatic regions
represent the political tensions in the world. But they represent other things, too. The
political profession is subject to special kinds of nervous tensions. The moment the
administrator arrives at a top level, an inner change may take place. From then on,
he can identify with those who formerly led him. The very fact of being in office and
being a leader may change a man's mind in many ways. Often he removes himself
more and more from human problems and from the people he represents and thinks
only in terms of national strategy, official ideology, and the aims of power politics. Or
childhood ambitions, long frustrated, are aroused. He may become the victim of his
inflated personal ambitions and his individual notion of responsibility, and, as a
consequence, lose control of his own personality.


Leading statesmen, burdened by responsibilities, have to become more careful;
indeed, they often have to express themselves in noncommittal language. Yet, they
are not aware that such language gradually may reform their way of thinking. Finally,
they may think they possess a priority on double talk.


Another difficulty is related to a rather general fear of success. Once a high ambition
is reached, a long-hidden fear from childhood may awake, a fear related to an early
competition with the father and with the siblings. From this time on, the envy and
hostility of those bypassed may start to injure the statesman's life.


The danger of assuming any leadership-even of any form of self-assertion-is that it
provokes resistance and hostility, retaliation and punishment. The administrator
knows himself to be in the public eye; he feels exposed to criticism and political
attack. If he didn't have it before, from now on he has to develop a defensive facade
in order to court the public and the voters. The result may be that the former meek
democrat, the believer in government by the people, suddenly takes on the stature of
an authoritarian personality. He is guided by his frustrated infantile fantasy of
leadership.


The administrative "brain-thrusters," with all their inner problems, nevertheless make
history for us. Our minds are deeply affected by their minds. At the same time, we-
the great public-influence them, and our civilized impulses may direct them to find
the good road, just as our primitive drives and influences may urge them on to push
us all into catastrophe. The intrusion of the administrative mind becomes even more
precarious when the authorities in power follow patterns of procedure not controlled
by court and the law. In such cases, prejudice and arbitrariness can easily develop
as we have experienced with many of our security regulations. Official secrecy is a
token of magic power; the more hush-hush there is in the world, the less democratic
control and the greater the fear of treachery.


It should be, technically, quite simple to administer any group or nation-or even the
whole world. Mankind certainly knows enough to do this job. We know a great deal
about history, sociology, and the science of human relations and government, at
least enough not to repeat the mistakes from history. We live in a world of technical
and economic abundance. But we have not yet learned to apply what we know or to
organize the resources of the world.


174


Somewhere something has gone wrong, and things have gotten out of hand. The will
of nations and people to understand one another seems to be paralyzed, and mutual
fear and suspicion have been built up by the fantasies of mythical ideologies warring
against one another. And tomorrow only the tails of the fighting dogs may remain.
During the Second World War, I was sent as an official representative of the
Netherlands government to an international meeting on welfare and war relief. Here I
became even more aware of the extent to which private passions can mould the way
we handle public problems.


All of us at the conference had cold, expressionless faces which implied a sharp,
unbiased form of thinking, but our unconscious minds were touched by other
problems. Welfare is often much more a subject of hate than of love and sympathy.
One's pride and prestige can play a much greater role than pity for the poor victim.
The displaced persons and the people of the devastated and underdeveloped
countries are very much aware of this fact. They do not like the role in which fate has
cast them; they have to play the double role of the eternal victim who is not only the
victim of politics and war, but also of the often arrogant provider of charity. As a
matter of fact, the representative at the receiving end of the deal resented any offer
made to his country. Everybody wants to be himself the generous "uncle from
America."


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The Ailments of Those in Public Office


In the future, as our psychological understanding grows, leading politicians will have
to be better educated in the principles of modern psychology. Just as a soldier must
know how to handle his physical weapons, so the politician must know how to face
and handle the mental strategy of human relationships and diplomacy. He will have
to become aware of the pitfalls in all human communication and the frailties of his
own mind.


Bodily disease and neurotic development can have all kinds of effects on those in
office. Under their influence, some men are drawn into a life of continuous
resentment, as if, in their political and official activities, they were fighting out their
infantile struggles against devils, anxieties, and inner guilt. Others are purified by
their sufferings and become wiser and more humane than they were.


The modern science of psychosomatic medicine males it clear that constant
worrying, continual competition, repressed aggressions, the will to dominate and to
govern others, the fear of responsibility, the burden of one's chosen profession are
among the many factors that influence body and mind to form a pattern of bodily
reactions. These reactions may actually hamper our ability to solve our problems by
incapacitating us physically. Becoming a chosen statesman in our era of increased
human competition and increased dependence on the masses of voters builds up in
officeholders qualities that are nearly psychopathic, that can cripple the body or the
mind or both at a time when we need the healthiest and soundest leaders. The role
the latent psychosis or character disorder plays in many a leading personality cannot
be emphasized enough. Not long ago I treated the leader of a huge humanitarian
association, who was accorded much esteem by his fellow citizens, but who was a
sick, psychopathic tyrant in his own family circle. His children trembled at the sight of
him and developed-of course-a cynical attitude about all idealism and
humanitarianism.


I suspect that many times this pathology is influenced by the way we select our
leaders. Public preference is often directed toward strong, defensive,
overcompensated qualities of character which show up well at public functions. The
outer facade is too much seen; we are not able to judge the inner core.


In 1949, Burnett Hershey wrote an article which posed the question, Is our fate in the
hands of sick men? The article was written after the tragic death of James Forrestal,
the American Secretary of Defense, who committed suicide under the influence of
despair and delusions of persecution. It describes in some detail the psychosomatic
afflictions of various statesmen. Hershey quotes General George C. Marshall's
words to the Overseas Press Club: "Stomach ulcers have a strange effect on the
history of our times. In Washington I had to contend with, among other things, the
ulcers of Bedell Smith in Moscow and the ulcers of Bob Lovett and Dean Acheson in
Washington." The author goes on to point out that Stalin, Sir Stafford Cripps, Warren
Austin, and Vishinsky also suffered from psychosomatic ailments, as does Clement
Attlee.


176


All of us have heard of the repeated fainting spells of the Iranian ex-Premier,
Mossadegh, the man who might, in a spell of semi-consciousness, have changed the
balance of power in the Middle East. The much-debated and headlined Senator
McCarthy is another case in point. At the height of his struggle for headlines, he had
a stomach condition that required an exploratory operation, bursitis, frequent sinus
headaches and signs of exhaustion-and all of these are known as psychosomatic
involvements resulting from extreme tension.


We have, too, many cheering examples of how physical disability and neurotic
development can mature and strengthen the personality. Perhaps the brightest
example of the relationship between body and profession is the late Franklin D.
Roosevelt, whose political career was inconspicuous until he was stricken by
poliomyelitis. His years of physical suffering became years of mental ripening. His
conquest of pain and disease changed his attitude toward his own problems and
also toward the problems of the world. His growth of empathy and humility, his
increase in strategic intuition, and his superior knowledge of the balance of forces in
his country must be partly attributed to his inner mental growth during his disease.
Roosevelt will always be a guiding example of how the mind is able to overcome the
physical limitations of the body, how the mind grows out beyond it when a man is
willing to look inside and fight out the conflicts within himself.


177


The Conference of Unconscious Minds


Let me return for a moment to the wartime conference on welfare I mentioned earlier
and tell you something more about it. The conference chairman did not feel well;
every decision was as painful for him as his ulcer. He hemmed and hawed and
refused to accept the responsibility the position placed on him. The representative of
one of the eastern European countries was an attractive woman but a misanthrope.
Every word she spoke was colored by suspicion, and when a representative from
one of the Latin countries attempted a mild flirtation with her, she showed her
confusion by arguing furiously against every one of his constructive proposals.

We also had a hesitant, old-school, professional politician in our midst. Though he
couched his speech in gentle, polite words, he spoke only to destroy every proposal
that was not initiated by his faction. When he had to listen-and this he did not like to
do at all-he busied himself constantly with his tie or his eyeglasses, always polishing
himself.


In a crowded corner sat an enthusiastic young man who longed to do something
important. He wanted to act, he wanted to see something accomplished, and his
excitement was regarded by the others with sophisticated disdain. He did not know
the rules of conference play.


The sessions were boring. The delegates spoke endlessly and pointlessly. But one
day the entire conference was gripped by a kind of uncontrollable fury. Every
delegate tried to destroy all his colleagues. Someone had unexpectedly used the
word "traitor" to designate a certain guerrilla group fighting in Europe, and the
smooth discussion was suddenly transformed into a collision of the insurgent
passions that had long smouldered behind suave masks.


What agitation was aroused! What rage, what anger! But it was only temporary. It
died down; our sophisticated conference spirit reasserted itself, and we settled down
to do no work. The chairman made a polite summarizing speech, and we disbanded.
The charitable work we planned so carefully is still undone, and many years have
passed.


With dogged optimism, political leaders still convene to construct a new peace for
the world. We know that many of them will suffer again from ulcers of the stomach,
but what do we know of their deeper hidden wishes and resentments?


Although I am afraid that the time is still far away when we shall subject our official
representatives and administrators to psychological education and selection, we
must become more aware of the many unconscious factors which influence them
and us.


Do political leaders try to understand one another and the groups they represent, or
are they only measuring the power of their political machines, their words, and their
votes? Are they guided by private resentments and ambitions or by the honest wish
to serve the community and its ideals?


178


Are our administrators mentally well equipped to do their tasks? If not, how could
psychological insight gradually improve their equipment?


How many of them are conscious of the extent of their private frustrations? Are their
destructive impulses rationalized away under the guise of political allegiance? How
do illness, disease, and neurosis collide in their deliberations? Watch how, in any
debate, polite speeches are interrupted by sudden diatribes.


To what degree do childhood rearing, fixed ideas, or pathological ambitions of
administrators influence the destiny of a town or nation?


We recognize that idealistic platitudes may cover inadequate proposals, and we tend
to accept this as the well-worn play of political strategy and diplomacy. But far worse
than this overt policy of evasion is the hidden political conference and discussion
between the unconscious minds and passions of politicians.


How many politicians and their followers are aware of this lurking undercurrent which
often wields a stronger influence than overt action? How does the personal element
between our administrators obstruct our own mental freedom, and what is the role of
the psychopathic element in some of our leaders?


It is important for us to ask these questions. For the development of science has
taught us that, even when it is impossible to find immediate satisfactory solutions,
posing the right question helps to bring clarity to the future. It prepares the way for a
solution.


179


The Bureaucratic Mind


In a state where terror is used to keep the people in line, the administrative machine
may become the exclusive property and tool of the dictator. The development of a
kind of bureaucratic absolutism is not limited, however, to totalitarian countries. A
mild form of professional absolutism is evident in every country in the mediating
class of civil servants who bridge the gap between man and his rulers. Such a
bureaucracy may be used to help or to harm the citizens it should serve.


It is important to realize that a peculiar, silent form of battle goes on in all of the
countries of the world-under every form of government-a battle between the common
man and the government apparatus he himself has created. In many places we can
see that this governing tool, which was originally meant to serve and assist man, has
gradually obtained more power than it was intended to have.


Is Saint Bureaucratus a devil who takes possession of a man as soon as he is given
governmental responsibility? Are administrators infected with a desire to create a
sham order, to manipulate others from behind their green steel desks?
Governmental techniques are no different from any other psychological strategy; the
deadening hold of regimentation can take mental possession of those dedicated to it,
if they are not alert. And this is the intrinsic danger of the various agencies that
mediate between the common man and his government. It is a tragic aspect of life
that man has to place another fallible man between himself and the attainment of his
highest ideals.


Which human failings will manifest themselves most readily in the administrative
machine? Lust for power, automatism, and mental rigidity-all these breed suspicion
and intrigue. Being a high civil servant subjects man to a dangerous temptation,
simply because he is a part of the ruling apparatus. He finds himself caught in the
strategy complex. The magic of becoming an executive and a strategist provokes
long-repressed feelings of omnipotence. A strategist feels like a chess player. He
wants to manipulate the world by remote control. Now he can keep others waiting, as
he was forced to wait himself in his salad days, and thus he can feel himself
superior. He can entrench himself behind his official regulations and responsibilities.
At the same time he must continually convince others of his indispensability because
he is loath to vacate his seat.


As a defense against his relative unimportance, he has to expand his staff,
increasing his bureaucratic apparatus. In order to become a V.I.P. one needs a big
office. Each new staff member requests new secretaries and new typewriters.
Everything begins to get out of hand, but everything must be controlled; new and
better files must be installed, new conferences called, and new committees set up.
The staff-interaction committee talks for days on end. New supervisors are created
to supervise the old supervisors and to keep the whole group in a state of infantile
servility. And what was formerly done by one man is now done by an entire staff.
Finally, the bureaucratic tension becomes too great and the managerial despotic
urge looks for rest in a nervous breakdown.


180


This creeping totalitarianism of the desk and file goes on nearly everywhere in the
world. As soon as civil servants can no longer talk humanely and genially but write
down everything in black and white and keep long minutes in overflowing files, the
battle for administrative power has begun. Compulsive order, red tape, and
regulation become more important than freedom and justice, and in the meantime
suspicion between management, employees, and subjects increases.


Written and printed documents and reports have become dangerous objects in the
world. After a conversation, even when there are harsh words, inanities are soon
forgotten. But on paper these words are perpetuated and can become part of a
system of growing suspicion.


Many people become administrators in public affairs out of idealistic feelings of
service and avocation. Others try to escape the adventure of life by becoming part of
the civil service corps. Such service assures them a settled income, regular
promotion, and a sense of job security. It is very alluring, this feeling of security. The
smooth automatism and polished rigidity of the red-tape world is very attractive to
certain types of men, but it may devitalize others who still believe in challenge and
spontaneity.


The burning psychological question is whether man will eventually master his
institutions so that these will serve him and not rule him. In totalitarian countries one
is not permitted to see the humour of one's own shortcomings. The system, the red
tape, and the manifold files become more important than the poor being lost in his
chair behind a huge desk, looking much too important for his mental bearings.


The art of being a leading administrator, of being a genuine representative of the
people is a difficult one, requiring multiple empathy and identification with other
people and their motivations.


Diplomats and politicians still believe in verbal persuasion and argumentative tactics.
It is a very old and alluring game, this strategy of political manoeuvring with official
slogans and catchwords the subtlety of bypassing the truth in the service of
partisanship, of giving faulty emphasis, the skill of dancing around selected
arguments to arrive at personal propagandistic aims or party aims. Sooner or later
nearly all politicians become infected with the bug. Under the burden of their
responsibilities, they give in to the desire to play the game of diplomacy. They start
to compromise in their thinking, to bend backwards and to be circumspect, lest their
remarks be criticized by the higher echelons. Or they fall back into infantile feelings
of magic omnipotence. They want to have their fingers in every pie-to the left and to
the right.


All these are dangerous mental streaks of every human being which can develop
more easily in politicians and administrators because of the growing impact of
modern governmental techniques and their threat to free expression. When a man
gets entangled in strategical and political talk, something changes in his attitude. He
is no longer straightforward; he doesn't express and communicate what he thinks,
but he worries about what others are thinking about him behind their facades.


181


He becomes too prudent and starts to build all kinds of mental defences and
justifications around himself. In short, he learns to assume the strategic attitude.
Forget spontaneity, deny enthusiasm; don't demand inner honesty of yourself or
others, never reveal yourself, never expose yourself, play the strategist. Be careful
and use more buts and howevers. Never commit yourself.


I remember a leader of the opposition who became completely confused and nearly
collapsed when, after a long time out of office, his party won an election and he had
to assume governmental responsibility. From an aggressive, outspoken critic, he
became a hesitating, insinuating neurotic, playing the tactful strategist, having no
real initiative.


Some politicians are puppets, sookesmen of their bosses. Some are the cavalier
jugglers of words, who transfer human aggressions into slogans. There are also the
loudmouthed trumpeters of doom, who resort to the argument of panic. Modern
politics is carried out with obsolete rules of conversation, communication, and
discussion; and too few politicians are aware of the semantic pitfalls and emotional
dishonesties of the word tools they must use to convince others.


Yet mutual understanding can become a basis of political strategy. It is not power
politics with verbal deceit and catchwords that is needed but mental probing to find
ways in which proposals and suggestions may cut through the resistance of those
with different opinions and motivations.


Politicians too often forget that their fight for administrative power may become a
form of psychological warfare against the integrity of the minds of those who are
compelled to listen. The repetitious mutual calumny, so often used during elections,
gradually undermines the democratic system and leads to the urge for authoritarian
control. The strategic rumours and suspicions the politicians sow are an attack on
human integrity.


When the citizenry no longer has confidence in its leaders, it looks for the man with
brute power to be its leader. Where is the politician who is willing to admit that his
opponent is at least as capable as he, and perhaps even more capable than he is?
In the free admission of equality of ability and of the wisdom of his opponent lies the
politician's chance for cooperation. For true cooperation can only be brought about
by mutual empathy and sympathy and the understanding of human faults.


In April, 1951, a group of psychologists, psychoanalysts, and social scientists
affiliated with the United Nations, the World Federation of Mental Health, UNESCO,
and the World Health Organization were guests of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation in
New York. This was a meeting at which these problems of government, and the
impact of governmental systems, were explored and discussed and published later
in a report. These experts have become more and more aware of the need for
psychological education and selection of government administrators.


182


Should our administrators be psychoanalyzed? This nearly utopian question does
not predicate an immediate rush for psychological training for politicians and
administrators, but it does point toward a future period when practical intelligence
and sound psychological knowledge will guide man in the various aspects of his life.


Education will be more fully permeated with dependable psychological knowledge.
Psychology and psychoanalysis are still young sciences, but many of our present-
day politicians could already profit by them. Through gain in self-insight, they would
become more secure in the strategy of world guidance. They would assume more
responsibility-not only for their successes, but also for their failures. And they would
take more responsibility, with fewer inner qualms, for the good and welfare of all.


At this very moment our failure to solve the problems of governmental inefficiency
and bureaucratic intrusion into human actions may hamper the citizen's mind in its
development. Man's need to conform is in constant battle with man's need to go out
on his own. The tie-up of our spontaneous freethinking with the unadventurous
administrative mind has to be studied and the problem it presents solved by the
psychology of the future.

[admin]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE TURNCOAT IN EACH OF US. THE CONFUSING INFLUENCE OF THE PROBLEM OF TREASON AND LOYALTY

As soon as "treason" is mentioned, something in man's soul is stirred. Anger and
scorn, suspicion and anxiety are aroused, and people want to avoid the subject. The
social reaction toward a traitor-even before we are certain that the accusation is
deserved is very spectacular. Former friends of a man accused as a "traitor" retreat
and withdraw from this token of evil. In every trial of traitors we feel inwardly,
personally accused and guilty.


This is one of the reasons that treason trials make such deep impressions and
provoke the most confusing discussions. Dictators can use such trials to cast a spell
on the public. In a book on mental coercion and the rape of the mind, an
investigation of the problem of treason and loyalty is needed.


The Involuntary Traitor


Self-betrayal comes out of all human pores. SIGMUND FREUD


In my home town in Holland there was a little barbershop quite near the government
buildings. It was owned by a small man with a gray French beard. Through the years
he had served many of the country's most important men. Diplomats and cabinet
ministers, proud generals and aggressive leaders of the opposition they all wanted
his service. The little barber was always very courteous and agreeable, eager to
please his clients. He danced with prim, servile gestures around them while curling
their hair and looking after their moustaches. As he worked, he would ask his
distinguished clients polite questions: "What is His Excellency So-and-So going to
say about this bill?" "How does the Minister of State feel about that one?" He was not
really interested in politics at all, but the little barber knew that his clients were
flattered by such questions.


And then one day a puffy, beribboned German general walked in and settled himself
in the barber's chair-the Netherlands had been invaded and occupied by the Nazi
hordes. Of course, our barber knew this, and he had even managed to hate the
invaders for a few days. But he was innately a genteel soul, and he lathered the
general's face himself and took care not to soil his uniform. On succeeding days,
others of these strangely uniformed men appeared in the shop, and the little barber
served them all well. The military men were followed by the Brown Shirts and then
the Green Shirts of the Gestapo. The leather of the barber's chair was scuffed by the
huge black boots. But the little barber did not complain, and soon the occupiers
considered his haircut the most fashionable and best that could be obtained in the
entire city.


184


Our barber was not too conscious of his increasing official importance. He danced
attendance on his new clients with as much courtesy as he had showed the
diplomats of the old days. He was sorry that his old acquaintances had gradually
disappeared. But in the past his work had been seasonal; when parliament was not
in session, his shop had been empty. Now his business flourished all the time. The
Germans and the collaborators liked the little barbershop, the perfume, the barber's
skill. Indeed, our amiable friend was well liked by the uniformed oppressors. They
were, after all, thoroughly unused to friendly treatment; the barber's behaviour was a
welcome change from the contempt with which most of the Dutch people-those
stupid, stubborn resisters-regarded them.


One day the barber was invited to buy a membership card in a newly formed
organization of collaborators. Our friend responded to this request as he would have
to any other appeal for charity. He did not like to give, but he thought of welfare as a
special tax on business, and so he resigned himself to paying as a petty, necessary
annoyance. Some of his old acquaintances warned him of the consequences; he
would be accused of collaboration and treason. But he pacified them by saying, "I
am a barber, and I live as a barber. I have absolutely no interest in politics. I only
want to serve my clients."


When, after the bitter years of struggle and oppression, liberation came, our friend
became officially known as a traitor and a collaborator. When the black-booted,
uniformed supermen were thrown out, their collaborating friends were imprisoned,
the barber among them. After he had served a part of his sentence, a wise and
forgiving judge sent our barber back to his little shop. The first excitement of
liberation had passed, and people were becoming more willing to forgive those who
had been collaborators because they had been weak-hearted.


Our story is by no means finished. The barber came back from prison a beaten man.
He had been in jail for three months; he still could not understand what had
happened to him. He brooded constantly over his shameful days in jail. An injustice
had been done him. He had served his fellow men as a well-behaved, virtuous
citizen should, and he had been treated like a criminal. He felt self-righteous,
abused, insulted, maltreated and misunderstood. After all, he had only wanted to be
kind and helpful. He was a barber-nothing more.


The barber could not rid himself of his bitterness and resentment. None of his former
friends came to cheer him up or to sympathize with him. His old clients did not
return. His sadness and depression increased daily and in a few months he took his
own life. And so ended the adventures of a little barber who had been completely
unaware of his collaboration and his treachery.


I knew this man. I do not despise him-not at all. I am sure there were many such
pitiful collaborators. I wonder, though, why the little barber was so unaware. Was it
stupidity? Had his apparent kindness always covered up a resentment against his
fellow men? Was he misled by an insidious wave of suggestion stronger than his
mental capacity to resist? We will never know.


185


This tragedy, caused perhaps by unawareness, perhaps by the inability to choose
between conflicting loyalties, stimulated me to investigate the problem of the traitor. I
had ample opportunity to study this question, both through my experiences with the
Dutch underground during the Nazi occupation, and when I was imprisoned in a
Vichy detention camp. My first official analysis was made in 1943, when the Dutch
government asked me to prepare a psychological report on disloyal Dutch soldiers
and citizens being held in detention on the Isle of Man.


I arrived at the prison after a hazardous, stormy journey in a small airplane. The
prisoners were a sorry lot. I had anticipated hostility, but I had not expected to find so
many weaklings, consumed by bitterness and anger. Some of them were typical of
the passive, egotistic, psychopathic personality, whose motto seems to be: "Let the
world go to hell! I will never conform." Others seemed to be the victims of an
unbearable inner struggle-a conflict between their desire to belong to the stronger
group and their resistance to this desire, a resistance which only increased their
bitterness and antagonism.


This was a situation which proved to me again that there are certain times when
logic and discussion are no help at all. We tried over and over again to convince the
semi-collaborators that they should join with us in the fight against the Nazis, but
they only retreated further behind their private grudges. They even refused the
cigarettes I offered them.


Bad as the trip to the prison had been, the trip back was even worse. The little plane
was pushed off course by strong winds. I was depressed and disgusted by my
experiences, and when we finally arrived in England, both the pilot and I were sick.

I had many opportunities thereafter to study spies, traitors, and subversives. My last
official wartime investigation took me to a prison camp in Surinam, Dutch Guinea,
where I made a collective report on all the inhabitants of the prison camp. In many of
them, I could discern neurotic and even psychotic traits.


But I have found that perhaps the best understanding of the problem of treason has
come to me from my psychiatric work with neurotic patients who have to face a daily
struggle with the little betrayals of everyday life, with their own self-betrayal, and with
their ambivalent feelings toward those they should love.


186


The Concept of Treason


Before looking into the subject further, let us make an enquiry into the meaning of
the word "treason." It is, after all, used in a confusing variety of senses. The word
"treason" has many social and political implications, and the customs, habits, and
mores of the group in which it is used affect and color its meaning.


The word itself is derived from the Latin tradere or transdare, to deliver wrongfully, to
betray, to give something across, to give loyalty and secrets away. But from this root,
the word has acquired a variety of meanings.


In the first place, it has a purely emotional, individual meaning related to feelings of
deprivation and injustice. The infant often experiences all that compels him out of his
state of bliss and dependency-which means the very act of growing up-as a betrayal,
and sees treason in what he considers rejection by his parents. The person who
retains these infantile feelings in his adult life may react to every fancied slight or
rejection as to an act of treason or betrayal.


Lack of solidarity with the family or clan-with the in-group not conforming to its rituals
and taboos has often been interpreted by the group as treason, treason through
dissent. In this sense, the word implies a primitive moral evaluation; disgust and
contempt are associated with it. Treason indicates something deeply emotional,
something taboo, something different or strange, like allegiance to an alien ideology,
a breach of traditions, or the simple fact of being a foreigner. Rejection of the norms
and rules of the community, being one's own judge of morality and ethics, is often
considered treasonable.


Utter rejection of the traditions of one's fatherland is an extreme. Often simple
nonconformity may be considered treasonable, too. Indeed, in Totalitaria
nonconformity and dissent are the most serious crimes against the system, and
totalitarian minds have a tendency to look upon even honest mistakes or differences
of opinion as deliberate treachery.


Because of its deep emotional content, the very word itself can be used as a political
tool with which to manipulate people. In Totalitaria it becomes merely a Pavlovian
sign, triggering off reactions of distrust and hatred. After a military defeat or a
diplomatic disappointment, or whenever feelings of humiliation and inadequacy run
high among the people, it is useful strategy to get them to project their sense of
inferiority onto others. The "traitor" is in such a case an easy scapegoat who satisfies
the collective need to project blame and to relieve unconscious anxiety. In a
totalitarian society every citizen is compelled to become a traitor, according to our
own Western sense of decency, because it is his duty to betray to the regime every
expression of dissension or rebellion. The child has to report his father, the father his
child; they are even called traitors in the totalitarian sense as soon as they fail to
report.


187


In the common political interpretation, treason is an act of rebellion, sedition, schism,
heresy, conspiracy, or subversion. Its technical-juridical meaning is well Known to
everybody. Treason is adhering to enemies and giving aid and comfort to them; it is
also, in a more modern, modified sense, taking part in an international ideological
conspiracy against the fatherland.


To me, as a psychiatrist, its relation to the general problem of self-betrayal is the key
to an understanding of the word. The germ of treason arises first in the individual's
compromises with his own principles and beliefs. After these initial compromises
have been made, it becomes easier to go on and on, to make more and more
compromises, until finally the compromiser may become the man who is willing to
sell himself and his services to the highest bidder. During the Nazi occupation, we
saw this among those who were seduced to do little services for the enemy. The first
step led to the second and then to final collaboration. It is because all of us do doubt
ourselves from time to time, because we are unsure of what we would do if we were
put to the test, and because we may see in ourselves a potential traitor, that the
word "treason" has such highly emotional appeal.


But self-doubt is a far cry from actual treason, and the real traitor in the morbid sense
of the word, is not merely a self-doubter. He is a man who believes only in his ultra-
personal rights and who scorns the rights and wishes of the community. He is
disloyal even to his own gang. Hitler, for example, was a traitor not only to his own
ideas, handling them as changeable tools to help him gain and maintain power, he
was repeatedly a traitor to his closest friends and collaborators, many of whom he
betrayed and murdered in 1934, during what has been called the night of the long
knives. The real traitor is a person with egocentric delusions and the conscious
conviction that he alone is right. He is a very different type from an involuntary,
pathetic, unaware traitor like our little barber.


188


The Traitor who Consciously takes Option for the Other Side


In my study of political traitors and collaborators, I found that most of them shared
two common characteristics: they were easily influenced by minds stronger than their
own, and none of them would admit his disloyalty as an act of treason. The traitors I
interviewed always volunteered innumerable justifications of their behaviour, always
surrounded their treachery with a complicated web of sophisms and rationalizations.
Actually, they could not tolerate an objective picture of their actions. If they did, they
would condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Unconsciously, most of them
realized the nature of their crimes and were tormented by guilt feelings. These guilt
feelings would have been unbearable if they admitted, even to themselves, the
enormity of their deeds.


During the Nazi occupation of the Low Countries, I saw these qualities demonstrated
again and again. Many of our native traitors were spineless people, ready to accept
almost any new idea or elaborate theory. Their suggestibility was their greatest
liability. Most of these would-be Nazis had never possessed strong personality ties of
their own. They had failed in their ambitions and had been disappointed in life, and
they readily transferred their frustrated personal longings to political will-o'-the-wisps.
After the German invasion and occupation, these people confronted their defeated
countrymen with triumphant I-told-you-so's. They boasted proudly of their wisdom in
having bet on the right horse. They gained a tremendous feeling of self-importance,
and their newly acquired, blown-up self-assurance, backed by the enemy's armed
force, made them hard and contemptuous of their compatriots.


In an effort to justify their own behaviour and their greed for power, they tried to
convert others to their new way of life. They were possessed by a compulsion to
become propagandists for the invader. Turncoats always try to soothe their own bad
consciences by persuading others to share their crime.


Of course, they had some real grievances. Everybody does. But these traitors were
influenced less by them than by fancied injustices. Through acts of treason, they
avenged themselves on society for the private wrongs they had suffered because of
their personal failures. Their resentments could be felt in everything they said.


The Nazi strategists were experts in exploiting this sense of dissatisfaction. They
seemed to know intuitively whether or not an individual could be ensnared by Nazi
propaganda. One case I knew of in Holland concerned the ex-director of a large
concern who had been ousted from his position on ethical grounds. Early in the
occupation, this man received an invitation to join the Nazi ranks, and in a
surprisingly short time he became the leader of an important Nazi business. The
Nazis gave him the feeling of having been vindicated.


Among the recruits for the Nazi police force in the occupied territories were turncoats
of all sorts and even the inmates of asylums for the criminally insane. The
pathological grudge these people had against society was the foil by which the Nazis
turned them into traitors. The Germans themselves despised these men, but they
were cunning enough to put them to the best possible use.


189


The Nazis also played a strange game with some authors and artists who had not
received enough appreciation. The enemy flattered these men by buying and
praising their work. The artists were first told that they could write and create as they
pleased, without fear of interference. Gradually, little political services were asked of
them, tiny little concessions like a favourable report of a meeting or a favourable
reference to a philosophy with which they did not agree.


It is the impact of that first little concession that starts the inner avalanche of self-
justification that finally leads to self-betrayal. Following the first compromise and self-
justification comes the second; and this one is met with shrewder self-exculpations.
After all, the compromiser has had experience in rationalization by now. The
repeated concessions turn into submission and voluntary cooperation. As I said
before, once a man is seduced into a small ideological concession, it is very difficult
for him to stop. From now on his imagination produces enough justifications which
help him maintain his self-respect.


The inwardly insecure traitor always feels the urge to identify with the enemy-the
hostile invader. He has never "belonged," never had a feeling of identification with
his own group, has never felt the rewards of such cohesion, nor has he won the love,
sympathy, and respect of his fellows. Therefore he wants to join the "others." He
may even go so far as to call his former friends traitors. Lord Haw-Haw (William
Joyce), the British traitor who was executed by his government, considered himself a
real "Aryan German," and in this way justified his fight against England.


In the hectic days immediately following the Nazi invasion of Holland, I myself felt an
occasional inner temptation to go over to the enemy, to the stronger party, with its
powerful organizations, all ready to support one, to back one up. I even had a dream
about visiting Hitler and convincing him in a childish and friendly way of the
righteousness of our cause. I did not succumb to this dream temptation, but there
were a few who fell for such infantile pictures and were unable to withstand their
need to submit. The need to conform, to be accepted, to be safe and respectable, is
deeply embedded in man. In our analysis of the inner forces that lead men to
surrender their mental integrity under the pressure of prison and concentration-camp
life, we saw how important a role this mechanism plays. Living in a country occupied
by the enemy is by no means as horrifying as living in a P.O.W. or concentration
camp, but it is, nevertheless, frightening, and in this frightening situation, the need to
conform may show itself in surrender to the enemy ideology. Those who resisted this
need, even though they felt it, usually became even more fervently anti-Nazi as a
consequence of their guilt feelings about this impulse to treachery.


This war experience taught us another truth: traitors can be made by overwhelming
collective suggestions. In the ambiguous chaos of shouting ideologies and changing
values, the mind becomes sullen and stubborn, and where there is immaturity and
lack of inner control, it may become confused in its loyalties and simply surrender to
the most powerful group.


The Nazis, with their perverted political methods, tried to supply the weak, the


ambitious, the disgruntled, and the frustrated with a ready-made set of bogus ideals
to justify surrender to their side.


190


In Mein Kampf, Hitler says that when the disappointed are given a sense of
importance, they will swallow every suggestion with the utmost docility. He knew that
human weakness-even kindness can be used as a starting point for a systematically
nurtured conversion. Hitler knew, too, that unlimited political terror could make a
traitor of almost anyone. Spread fear, terror, and hunger, inflict penetrating pain, and
finally, as a result of mental coercion and growing confusion, many will succumb and
even betray their own families. In many of the concentration camps, the victims
themselves were in charge of the gas chamber killings and kept their gruesome jobs
until their own turns came. Fear and terror had made will-less slaves out of them.


There is still another human characteristic that can lead to treason and betrayal.
There are some people who simply do not know where their loyalties belong. The
case of Klaus Fuchs, the man who betrayed atomic secrets to Russia, is a dramatic
example of this. Here was a highly intelligent person, an expert on the most difficult
theoretical problems, lost in a sea of conflicting loyalties. Because of the Nazi
persecution of his Quaker family, he adopted a new fatherland, England. In the
meantime, he carried a dream of a mystical universal world which he thought to find
in the totalitarian ideology. In the midst of his confusion about world problems, he
simply did not know where his loyalty should be.


This was not a case of schizophrenia or a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation, as the
newspapers reported, but a case of confusion of loyalties in a hyper-intellectual
mind. Fuchs did not know emotionally where he belonged.


In other cases people were literally pushed into treason and collaboration because
nobody in their environment trusted them. This happened, for instance, in Flanders
with the collaborators of the First World War. Several of them were compelled to
become collaborators again.


This analysis of the factors that lead men to treason certainly does not imply that
every man must remain loyal to the group from which he has originally received his
morals and ideals. Better insight and higher ethics may override our childhood
loyalties. It is the fate and the need of human beings to go beyond their teachers and
to correct, if possible, the traditional rules of their schools. The great philosopher
Socrates was accused of being a "traitor" because he "corrupted the minds of the
youth of Athens." And yet today we know that Socrates was far from being a
corrupter.


191


Our Treacherous Intellect


Perhaps the most tragic form of unobtrusive treason and self betrayal is caused by
the inertia of the human intellect. We are often betrayed by our own minds. We
forget completely what we want to forget. We deny the existence of real problems in
order to retreat into wishful thinking. As soon as we do not understand and feel the
implications of a problem or an argument, we tend to submit passively to the most
powerful side, just as did the overfriendly barber. The ease with which human beings
can be corrupted is still one of our most serious psychological and moral problems.
Inner confusion can make us submissive to almost any strong suggestion from the
outside, no matter how foolish or false.


Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to
attempt.


There are other more complicated tricks of the intellect which lead to self-betrayal.
The feeling of inferiority often arouses in ignorant people a great desire to grasp
extremely difficult ideas. Such people like to identify themselves with a quasi-
profound system of thought. Hitler and his abstruse writings made temporary
pseudo-philosophers and magicians out of the majority of German people. All
dictatorial totalitarians buy the services of scholars who can make them such a set of
pseudo-philosophic justifications.


Unfortunately, some scholars are easy to buy. In Holland, for example, there was a
not too intelligent philosopher who became converted to Nazism after it had shown
its overpowering strength. Thereafter he felt free to write on the most abstruse
philosophical subjects and to expound the most complicated theories, all for the
glorification of his powerful friends from the Third Reich and their myth of conquering
the whole world. At the same time, he built a system of inscrutable words around his
own deep feelings of guilt; he isolated himself from the world more and more
because no words were convincing enough to justify his treason to himself. In the
end he lost all contact with reality. Then, of course, the Nazis had no use for him
either.


192


Self-Betrayal


As we have seen, there are various inner motivations which may lead to the crime of
disloyalty or treason. Sometimes these motivations operate very subtly, in ways
unknown to the subject; sometimes treason is merely a crude selling out to those
who pay best. Let us try to arrange and classify some of these motivations, starting
with the unconscious ones and ranging toward deliberate treason.


In the first place, an act of self-betrayal may begin as a defense against the feeling of
being lost and rejected. In order to win acceptance in a group, the individual may
hide and not defend his private beliefs and convictions when attacked. In psychology
this may be called-if such passive behaviour becomes an unconscious habit-the
passive submission to and identification with the stronger person. If you cannot beat
the enemy, join him! (A. Freud)


Although the concept of the inner traitor in us is not so easy to accept, by studying
the contrasting inner drives that lead man, one becomes more convinced of that
possibility. The clinical concept of man's inner ambivalence is based on numerous
psychological experiences. In studying the deeper motivations of many a traitor, we
often see that his treacherous act happened after an inner turmoil threatened to
break him down, to make an uncontrolled nervous wreck out of him. It is as if the
future mental patient preferred to surrender to an outward enemy rather than to the
inward enemies of disease and nervous breakdown. Hess was on the verge of a
schizophrenic breakdown when he broke Hitler's rules and flew to England.


Let us consider the British foreign office spies, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.*
Both showed several symptoms of imminent mental breakdown. It may be known to
the reader that both these men left England in May, 1951, in order to go via France
to Russia. Both deliberately fled the country. Both had Communist leanings during
their student days at Cambridge but later renounced their adolescent affiliations.
Both showed abnormal symptoms during their service. Maclean had a breakdown in
May, 1950, due to overwork and excessive drinking; Burgess was reprimanded for
reckless driving while in service and for neglect of his work. Reading through the
report, one is surprised by the amount of mental instability which was tolerated at
such a sensitive spot of the government. Both the men had homosexual leanings
that can be related to a suppressed hostility for their mothers (and mother country).


Sometimes treason means a one-sided appeal to justice. This is found in the man
who demands some sort of private protective justice and who refuses to
acknowledge the subtle relationship between rights and duties. Such persons always
feel continually deprived and betrayed. They are what Bergler calls the "injustice
collectors:" In their acts of disloyalty they are seeking to play the role of their own
private judges. Many querulous and even paranoiac persons have this kind of
character structure.


193


Then there is the disappointed pseudo-idealist who gradually turns into a cynic,
covering his emptiness by many self-justifications and exculpations. Such people
betray their intellectual disappointment in all their debunking remarks.


Conflicts between parents may give rise in the child to the need to betray one or both
parents, and this need may be transferred in later life to a need to betray the
fatherland. I have often found that the unsolved ties of hate and love toward the
parents play an important role in forming the turncoat personality. As we saw, this
problem often lies at the root of the totalitarian character structure. Although the
totalitarian-minded are not by definition overt traitors, some of these people can
easily become traitors to free, democratic ideals-either out of compulsive allegiance
to a foreign ideology or out of repetitive non-conformism.


In describing special characteristics of a political group, one has to keep in mind that
basic inner contrasts are inherent in all people. The quasi-rational Marxistic
interpretation of the world, which satisfies the need for logical clarification and
reasonable organization of social life, covers anxiety created by the irrational inner
forces so easily detected in the totalitarian-minded. The cult of the "masses" often
serves as a defense against loneliness. The belief in progress may be born out of
vague despair and insecurity. The fear of deviationism is the fear that the unity of the
group will be broken. Suspicion and self-criticism serve to keep, above all, the in-
group together.


There are several forms of inner conceit that can turn man into a traitor. The Dutch
philosopher of whom I spoke earlier is an example of this, as are any of the verbose
ideological apologists for totalitarianism.


Lack of confidence or lack of belief in the guiding traditions and aims of one's own
society can also lead to hostility, then to treason. Without such traditional beliefs,
suggestibility and receptivity for competing ideologies are increased. The Klaus
Fuchs case, which was mentioned earlier, is an example of this.


The personal need to be a pioneer or a martyr, often instilled by the unconscious
need to suffer, may lead to a private messianic delusion and cause an attack on the
traditional values of the group. Many groups consider such extremism as
treacherous behaviour.


Another form of self-betrayal may be caused by the inability to grasp the complexity
of the real world. Many people have been seduced into unstable behaviour and even
disloyalty through lack of comprehension of these complexities and through the need
to find a single, all-embracing, easy answer to the problems of human life. Who gives
them the simple myth to believe in? The Nazis seduced nearly all of Germany into a
form of ideological treason in this way!


Treason may also be a paradoxical reaction to a deep-seated neurotic sense of guilt.
The neurotic strategy of accumulating more guilt coupled with the consequent
development of an inner need for punishment are often the basic causes of criminal
action. The treacherous deed is done precisely in order to provoke punishment
(Reik).


194


Treason may also be paid adventure as we find it in international espionage. This
kind of life fascinates the immature mind which lives in the world of mystery stories
and fairy tales. Bribes with women or money make such treason even more
attractive. The enemy gratifies economic and sexual needs, and the traitor is willing
to sell his integrity to the highest bidder.


Overt fear and panic can also cause treason. The whole psychology of totalitarian


interview and interrogation is based on this principle. People can be frightened and
brainwashed into treason.


195


The Development of Loyalty


From all this we can see that what we call treason takes place more in the emotional
than in the intellectual sphere of functioning. In the course of human growth,
everybody passes through periods of inner conflict in which he has to turn his love
and allegiance from one person to another-from mother to father, from parents to the
entire family, from the family to the state, and from the state to mankind. The core of
the problem of treason and self betrayal is found in the difficulties which arise in the
repression of former loyalties, as each loyalty is in turn superseded by the next.


Many people experience deep confusion in adolescence when, for the first time, they
must leave the safe emotional protection of their homes and create new loyalties and
new moral standards for themselves. It is in this period that the critical faculties are
developed. In doubting the traditional truths passed on by his parents, each
adolescent might be called a traitor; yet he is actually being true to the self he is
shaping. During the crisis of adolescence, with its increased feelings of yearning for
some unknown happiness, many young people want to "betray" their parental home
and their parents' standards. At the same time, they do not want to give up the
protection the home offers.


Psychologically, we know, however, that temporary disloyalty is part of normal
mental growth. In the process of individual human development, there are stages of
progress which lead from initial submission to open rebellion and nonconformity.
Every step toward mental maturity and independence involves the growing out of ties
with the past. This growth can be effected in different ways, with more or less overt
hostility and forsaking of the past, with self-betrayal and passive submission, with
renewed submission to pay off feelings of guilt, with sworn conservativism or open
rebellion. In this phase of adolescence he is especially vulnerable to totalitarian
propaganda.


The youth may retain from the conflict of inner growth a sense of loneliness and guilt.
If he puts it to productive use, he may become what we might call a creative
revolutionary. The trail blazer, whose own inner forces drive him on to break with
tradition, is such a man. Indeed, many of mankind's great moral and spiritual leaders
have been of this type. They have been leaders precisely because they broke either
with rigid remnants of the past or with the ossified or immoral elements of the
present. In my own experience, I have known one such man, a German psychiatrist,
whose idealism and moral sense made it impossible for him to go along with the
Nazi desecration of human values and who was hanged as a traitor for his part in the
abortive German rebellion against Hitler in 1944


196


In Praise of Nonconformity


What can be done in general to combat treason, disloyalty, and self-betrayal? In the
first place, the child's normal defensive attitude toward authority and his need to
break away from it should be watched with favourable vigilance at all times on the
part of parents and educators. It is all too easy to force a child into denial of the self.
Many times, later disloyalty is a reaction to faulty handling of the problems of
childhood. Most traitors are made, not born. Unfortunately, this truth is often
forgotten by educators who may, as a result of their own frustrated aggressions,
break down by force the feeling of great loyalty toward their own age group that we
find among youngsters.


Is it possible to decide whether or not a person is dependable? Only when we have
some insight into his hidden motives and drives and into the workings of his
unconscious. For complete insight, psychoanalysis is necessary, but the way the
unconscious expresses itself in character traits and character defences can give us
some very important indications. A person with excessive dependency needs or a
weak ego, a person who is easily suggestible can usually be seduced into disloyalty.
So can the boastful, inconsistent man, full of pride and vanity. Material egotism,
desire for power, and continual hostility also lead to denial of moral values, among
them loyalty.


As is often true in psychology, it is easier to say what character traits the dependable
person must not have than to give a positive picture of what he should be like. In
general, we can say that the person who is honest with himself and shows a
minimum of self deceit, the man who exhibits a stable structure of character, the
person with genuine maturity, is most true to himself, and, as a result, most loyal to
others.


Nevertheless, the seeds of treason lie in each of us and may be fortified by
environmental influences. In a totalitarian world, for example, everybody is educated
in self-denial and self-betrayal; wnen a person becomes a nonconformist, the label
"traitor" will be attached to him. In a world stifled by dogma and tradition, every form
of original thinking may be called sedition and treason. In such cases the
environmental, social, and political factors, and not the confusing inner processes,
determine what is treason. In this chapter, however, I have emphasized the personal
factors in producing treason-the influence of family and group prejudices, and the
inner instability resulting from complications in the immediate environment. There are
so many subtle fantasies of self-betrayal and secret aggression in everyone, and
there is so much desire to revenge secret resentments, that any government may
make use of these unhealthy neurotic feelings to stir up the country.


197


The Loyalty Compulsion


Recently Americans have been looking more critically at the concepts of loyalty and
subversion. Deeply conscious of the cynical and ruthless nature of the totalitarian
attack through subversion, we have begun to let our fear of subversion from within
paralyze our democratic freedoms.


We have become so concerned over the spectre of a treacherous fifth column in our
own land that we have grown both overcautious and over suspicious.


In his well-documented study on The German Fifth Column, the Dutch historian Dr.
Louis de Jong could prove that Hitler's dreaded network of treason and betrayal was
for the greatest part an imaginary ogre created by the panic and fear of the people.
We require constant reassurance that the intentions of our neighbours and fellow
citizens are acceptable and loyal. The danger in this frantic search for security
operates both on the political and psychological levels. Politically, in trying to erect
invulnerable barriers against the spread of totalitarian ideas, we may find that we
have given up those very qualities that distinguish democracy from totalitarianism:
freedom and diversity. Psychologically, we may find ourselves the victims of
pathological suspicions (which can be Clinically termed paranoia), and this
suspiciousness may lead us to reject utterly the most valuable qualities we can have
as human beings: tolerance and respect for our fellow men.


The political dangers in this situation have been pointed out time and time again by
responsible leaders of the American community. As a psychiatrist, I should like to
devote my attention to the psychological aspect of this problem and to the dangers to
the free mind that are inherent in the current situation. For, as we have already seen,
all political behaviour is essentially an extension of individual behaviour and is rooted
in the psychology of the individuals who make up the political group.


Much of our collective suspicion can be attributed to a gigantic multiplication of
personal feelings of insecurity. In times of fear and calamity arises the myth of a
treacherous aggressor, the myth the totalitarians know so well how to exploit. Our
own inner insecurity is displaced and projected onto our neighbours and our
environment. We begin to doubt and distrust everyone. We accuse others because
we are afraid of ourselves. We feel weak and cover our weakness by growing
suspicion and by being continually on the lookout for possible traitors and dissenters.


As we have seen earlier, the whole question of loyalty is a complicated one. In our
zeal to create guarantees of trustworthiness, we tend to oversimplify the problem,
and thus we may overshoot the mark and become like our totalitarian antagonists,
for whom over-simplification is a stock-in-trade. Asking people for a loyalty oath
asking them to perform that magic ritual through which they forswear all past and
future political sin-may have a paradoxical effect. Merely taking an oath does not
make a man loyal, although it may later enable a judge to prosecute him for perjury.
Our insistence on official expressions of allegiance actually discredits and devalues
the basic personal sense of voluntary and self-chosen identification with the
community which is the essence of loyalty; it certainly does not either create or
insure loyalty.


198


The loyalty oath too easily degenerates into an empty formula, and the man who
takes it may forget completely the meaning it is supposed to have. To many it has
become simply red tape, another one of those endless, troublesome forms that must
be filled out.


The oath compulsion can easily grow into a childish magic strategy, a form of mental
blackmail. There are some oriental religions in which devotions are performed
through the use of a prayer wheel. When the wheel is set in motion by a flip of the
hand, the worshipper has done his job. He need not recite any prayers; he need not
think any devout thoughts. The practitioners of these religions no longer have any
awareness of the content of their prayers. They are blind subscribers to a ritual
whose meaning they have long since forgotten. Signing a loyalty oath can become
as empty a gesture as turning the prayer wheel.


True loyalty is not a static thing; as we have already seen, it grows and develops
with the personality. It has to be rediscovered and re-experienced every day, since it
is, essentially, as a result of an inner battle of contending values that man finds his
own particular values and loyalties. When a man is compelled to swear to his loyalty,
even though he feels it already deeply within him, the compulsion from outside
means that he must lay aside his personal right to weigh values and take counsel
with his honest principles. It does not matter whether or not the oath is an expression
of his true feelings, the element of enforcement that lies behind it has a
psychologically weakening effect on the man who takes it. This may seem strange at
first glance, but a simple analogy will make it clear. The man who truly loves his wife,
for example, does not need repeatedly to swear to his love; he shows it in his
actions. But if she insists on his swearing, her very insistence, implying as it does
that she doubts him, may bring questions to her husband's mind-and he begins to
grow confused as to what he really thinks.


Both in demanding an oath and in taking it, we perpetuate the ridiculous illusion that
enemies can be kept out through this prayer-wheel system. The fact is that
deliberate traitors and subversives are the very ones who are not afraid to disguise
their motivations and hide their intentions behind prescribed formulations. Nor are
they afraid of perjury charges. They feel no hesitation in signing an oath if it is
opportune for them to do so. For them, words and oaths are only tools which have
no binding moral value. More important than the demand for loyalty should be the
demand for integrity, for steadiness of character, for maturity of aims and
motivations.


Free man needs loyalty to the self first of all, and this implies the right to be himself.
The man who feels that he is nothing, who feels that everyone, himself included,
doubts him, who is inwardly weak, may become an easy prey to all kinds of
totalitarian political influences. Loyalty hunts and loyalty oaths may provoke
disloyalty to one's personal integrity and to personal freedom, since they create
suspicion in ourselves and in others. Freedom is kept upright by the very presence of
opposition-even at the risk of non-conformism and scattered subversion.


199


Loyalty comes about as a result of mutual confidence; it cannot be created through
compulsion. Any compulsion is, by its very nature, one-sided. Loyalty has to be
deserved and won daily through mutual interaction, and through contact between
leaders and citizens. Because it is based on confidence, loyalty is given
spontaneously and of free will. True loyalty cannot be bought or demanded.


In investigating the case of the young American soldiers in Korea who were
brainwashed and forgot too easily where their loyalty lay, we usually find in their
backgrounds how disloyally one of their parents had behaved toward them. In nearly
all the so-called pro-Communist cases we find a disturbed youth. It is important that
the community investigate its initial loyalty toward these young men.


In a democratic state we should be prepared to adduce convincing facts in support of
our own way of life or to develop new approaches which will reveal the weaknesses
of any subversive system.


Prosecution of dissenting ideas, insistence on loyalty according to some prescribed
formula-these make it impossible for us to do this and may be the beginning of an
unwillingness to argue and persuade. They may even lead to a new form of betrayal,
the subtle treason of intellectual detachment, the unwillingness to take responsibility,
the treason of doubting relativism which leads to inaction. It may degenerate into a
dangerous form of mental laziness which can easily be turned into a life of no
commitments or into totalitarian submission. The approaches to truth are
multifarious, and it is only where there is a clash of opinion that these approaches
can be discovered and the right road to truth be found.


The danger in the loyalty compulsion is, then, that we may conceal mental apathy
behind a rigid formula and thus lose sight of the constant need for psychological
alertness and the real meaning of loyalty and a free way of life. The mechanical
formula of a loyalty oath, because it checks moral alertness and a search for ethical
Clarification, may be the beginning of the thought control we all fear. True loyalty is a
living, dynamic quality.


In the subtle choice between loyalty to people and loyalty to principles (usually a
much vaguer feeling) the lawmaker has to leave the individual as free as possible,
because the latter type of loyalty is based on the first. Without personal loyalty there
is no national loyalty!


There is still another aspect to this problem. We must learn to distinguish between
disloyalty in actions and disloyalty in feelings and thought. Subversion of opinion is
never a crime. The right to dissent is the keystone of democracy. In a free state we
must be willing to correct subversion by our better arguments. Persecuting
dissenting ideas is a form of mental laziness. Psychologically speaking, a
government cannot concern itself with conscious motivations (and the unconscious
motivations which cannot be separated from them) of people because inwardly
everybody has contrasting motivations. The quandary that such a government would
provide itself is illustrated by the following quotation from the Oppenheimer hearing
by the Gray board published in 1954.


200


We believe that it has been demonstrated that the Government can search its own
soul and the soul of an individual whose relationship to his government is in question
with full protection of the rights and interests of both. We believe that loyalty and
security can be examined within the framework of the traditional and inviolable
principles of American justice.


In these beautiful phrases lie hidden all the ominous beginnings of totalitarian
thought control. The government that searches the soul of any thinking individual can
always find a case against him, because doubt, ambivalence, and groping are traits
common to all men. We cannot measure anybody's dependability on the basis of his
thoughts and feelings as they appear to us. In the first place, we can never know
what lies behind a seemingly loyal facade. In the second place, the man whose
search for truth leads him to explore many heretical points of view can be the most
loyal in his actions. His very exploration may well lead him to the considered
judgment that underlies true loyalty. What counts in any man is the consistency and
integrity of his behaviour, and his courage in taking a stand, not his conformity to
official dogma.


And to state that the government can search its own soul is to state absolutely
nothing. A government is, after all, merely a collection of individuals. Under the
pressure of the loyalty compulsion, of the growing suspicion, these individuals
themselves may not search their souls as honestly as they would in less hectic times
or if they were acting as private individuals rather than as official representatives of
the government. The man caught in official security rules is the prisoner of the
anxiety and insecurity rampant in those who want to establish the delusion of
certainty and security-a transgression of values!


As soon as the government starts to search the souls of its citizens, it begins to
intrude on their rights and interests. It attacks democracy at home and weakens its
position abroad. We cannot find the road to peace and fellowship with the rest of the
world if we adopt dogmatic, intransigent positions and try to impose our orthodoxy on
others. The hallmark of the totalitarian is his insistence that his is the only right way.
If we are to maintain our position as the leader of the free world, we must always
keep our minds open. Only in that way will we find new ways to peace.


We have seen now that the problem of treachery has to deal with the failure to
understand our inner mental processes. Every betrayal is in the first place a self-
betrayal, a disloyalty toward one's own standards. When people silence their
conscience and compromise for the sake of convenience, at that moment they begin
to be disloyal to themselves. Passivity-assumed when our conscience should have
forced us to act-is the most common form of self-betrayal. Inwardly a man may be
furious because of some injustice he has witnessed, but outwardly he may do
nothing about it-this behaviour he feels inwardly is treason to the self and is often
what makes him so touchy toward other people's flaws. When the pattern of passivity
is repeated, the individual continuously piles up more feelings of injustice and grows
more and more resentful against society. Evasiveness and skilful dodging of issues
of principle-these are among the most dangerous forms of self-betrayal in our time.
They are dangerous because they lead unwittingly to the hypocrisy that puts power
beyond ethical value.


201


It is dangerous to let personal grudges and discontent solidify into a permanent
resentment against the whole of society. Parents and educators can forestall such
difficulties through psychological insight by allowing each individual the freedom to
criticize and attack-in a civilized, non-destructive way-the community to which he
belongs. By helping to develop in the child the sense that he is responsible for his
own views, subversive though they may temporarily appear, parents provide him
with the opportunity to overcome his feelings of loneliness and ambivalence and his
wish to do violence to those who influence him. Again, loyalty is a relationship-loyalty
to family, friends, or country has to be deserved.


Loyalty is possible only when mutual mental aggression and hostility are allowed and
tolerated within the limits of the law. This verbalized, sublimated, and civilized form of
aggression presupposes fairness and good sportsmanship. It is the synthesis and
conquest of rebellion and subversion. However paradoxical it may sound, democracy
is founded on the mutual loyalty of politically opposed groups! You cannot doubt the
good motives and intentions of your opponent without undermining the basis for
cooperation and successful government. It is most undemocratic to impute disloyalty
to the opposition party. History shows that only where there is opportunity to confront
and integrate opposing ideas can man eradicate that form of psychological
imbalance which gradually turns into a disloyalty to oneself and to the community.
Fear of subversion and opposition is often fear of ideas, fear of being identified with
certain unacceptable ideas, the fear of betrayal of the hidden part of oneself. Fear of
treason will exist as long as loyal opposition is a crime.


Democracy is nonconformity; it is mutual loyalty, even when we have to attack one


another's ideas-ideas, which, because they are always human, are always
incomplete.

[admin]

PART FOUR: IN SEARCH OF DEFENSES

THE MOMENT WE BECOME AWARE THAT SPECIAL POLITICAL PHENOMENA
ARE A THREAT TO OUR EXISTENCE, CORRESPONDING INNER DEFENSES
DEVELOP AUTOMATICALLY. WE FEEL REASSURED AS WE DISCOVER WAYS
TO FACE THE PROBLEMS. THE CLOSING CHAPTERS OF THIS BOOK DEAL
FIRST WITH SOME OF THE OFFICIAL ATTITUDES AND WITH THE CODE
CREATED TO ENCOUNTER BRAINWASHING, A DANGER WHICH HAS
APPEARED RATHER RECENTLY IN HISTORY. THE FINAL CHAPTER
SEARCHES MORE ELABORATELY FOR THE INSPIRING VALUES WHICH
CHARACTERIZE FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY. THE QUESTION OF HOW BEST
TO BUILD UP MILITARY AND CIVILIAN MORALE BECOMES MORE
COMPELLING BECAUSE OF THE TREMENDOUS MENTAL PRESSURES
MODERN CIVILIZATION IMPOSES ON MAN.

[admin]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: TRAINING AGAINST MENTAL TORTURE. THE U. S. CODE FOR RESISTING BRAINWASHING

By executive order of President Eisenhower on August 17, 1955, a new code of
chivalry was made up governing conduct of American fighting men in combat and
captivity.* Six precepts of conduct for combatants were enunciated:


1. I am an American fighting man. I serve in the forces which guard my country and
our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.


2. I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender my
men while they still have the means to resist.


3. If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every
effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special
favours from the enemy.


4. If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give
no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. If I
am senior, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed
over me, and will back them up in every way.


5. When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am bound to give only
name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further
questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or written statement disloyal
to my country and its allies, or harmful to their cause.


6. I will never forget that I am an American fighting man, responsible for my actions,
and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God
and in the United States of America.


In the additional report about the recommendations by the Secretary of Defense, it is
acknowledged that modern warfare has brought the challenge to the doorstep of
every citizen, and that the final front of the cold-war line is in every citizen's mind.

At the same time, a clearly defined code is given telling U.S. prisoners of war how to
behave after capture. Although there was a lack of such a code previously, the report
states that "American troops have demonstrated through all wars that they do not
surrender easily, they have never surrendered in large bodies, and they have in
general performed admirably in their country's cause as prisoners of war."


After describing physical attacks on prisoners-death marches, hunger, squalor, cold,
torture, disease, and total degradation-the report gives extended attention to all the
forms of mental coercion intended to extract false confessions or military information
from the soldiers, and to infect them with totalitarian thinking. First, the enemy aimed
at the breakdown of the leaders, at confusion of the officers, who so easily influence
their soldiers.


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Then gradually everybody had to undergo the ordeal by indoctrination. The enemy
propaganda barrage started full soeed. This suggestive attack reached minds not
used to highly specialized discussion, minds not informed and rather confused about
Communism and its tactics. Inner discrepancies in the reasoning of the man could
easily be attacked and reduce him to docile submission.


The report pleads for more extended, skilful training of the soldier (and the citizen) in
our basic beliefs and responsibilities, a mental mobilization for the future clash of
"ideas" and "wills."


There was a considerable conflict of opinion in the advisory committee to the
Secretary of Defense that drafted the code between the hard Spartan view and the
more lenient let-them-talk view. The first group maintained that every soldier has to
resist to the end; the latter believed that in the end anybody could be brought into
submission.


Nevertheless, all soldiers have to be trained especially to resist and not to be made
disloyal to their country, their services, and their comrades. That was the principal
reason why this final code of high standards was made up, even though it is
recognized that coercion is possible beyond the ability to resist. Yet the psychologist
here adds the additional question, Who will judge what is beyond the ability to resist?
The report ends by underlining the fact that the total war for the minds of men is
continually going on. The home front is just an extension of the fighting front!


An important point made by the code is that it asks that attention be given to a far
more extensive mental battle front. By making it known that the coercive methods of
the Communists are well understood by us, the impact and meaning of their cold-war
strategy are partly taken away. Finally nobody in the outside world believes them,
even though their totalitarian methods may be of use to them for internal propaganda
in their own countries. However, we cannot fight indoctrination with mere counter
indoctrination.


Letting soldiers sign a declaration that they will never yield to brainwashing has the
advantage of at least informing them of what to expect. Yet this knowledge does not
protect them against the subtle conditioning by an inquisitor who knows how to
circumvent mental obstacles. Time and subtle suggestive penetration can break
men's resistance.


Psychologically, a loyalty oath compulsion and a signed declaration do not mean
anything in themselves. Only a profound education in mental freedom and
democratic awareness can help as a counter toxic. The authorities who ask for
signed declarations of loyalty are not enough aware of how much propaganda and
persuasive brainwashing and other forms of mental seduction are going on right here
in our own society; they are substituting the social and national responsibility for an
individual one. It is the moral and political atmosphere behind the man in the
hinterland that supplies his mental stamina. The nation is responsible for the mental
backbone it trains and transfers to its soldiers in a cold war!


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Several P.O.W: s felt misled by their own government. They had been badly
informed about the enemy, in too simple terms of black and white. By showing his
good side, the captor could easily arouse suspicion about the honesty of the
prisoner's leaders.


From a psychiatric standpoint, it needs to be said again that everybody can be
brought to a breaking point regardless of how well-informed and counter
indoctrinated he may be. When the enemy wants to persist in his demoralizing
methods, he has the means. Alas, the report did not emphasize enough the difficult
dialectic dilemma into which many a simple soldier is thrown. For years he has been
trained in a society or military group where obedience to the law and conformity to
community habits were imprinted on him. Suddenly he has to select and test his own
individuality and critical defences. A cold war asks for a high level of political
awareness. This brings the problem back again to the problem of individual mental
vulnerability of persons and to the general problem of morale. Mental courage
cannot be cultivated by physical training only. It requires training in mental stamina,
in understanding of basic beliefs, and even in nonconformistic thinking. We have to
believe deeply in the cause for which we are fighting in order to resist the standpoint
of the enemy. It is the strength of conviction that gives moral power!


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Indoctrination Against Indoctrination?


An educational concept exists to the effect that conditioning to physical torture will
help soldiers to be more immune to brainwashing. In one of the air force bases,
airmen had to go through a "school of torture," euphemistically called the School of
Survival, in which some of the barbarous and cruel Communist methods of handling
prisoners were initiated in order to harden the men against future brutality.** Time,
September 19, 1955. The trainees could stand the ghoulish exercises rather well.
However, such a training can condition men to take over, unwittingly, the methods of
totalitarianism. It may give a semi-official green light to enemy tactics by implying
that we can do the same.


Moreover, such methods may stimulate hidden sadistic tendencies in both trainer
and trainee. Under the disguise of an earnest training need, American youth may be
educated in the same sadistic view as their enemies.


The important psychological implication of every form of harsh compulsive training
and indoctrination is that it fits into the totalitarian pattern. Moreover, the totalitarian
inquisitors don't need to use physical torture in order to uncover the secrets of man's
mind, although they may use these methods for their private pleasure. On the
contrary, the enemy counted just as much on friendly gestures and special privileges
to seduce the hungry, weakened P.O.W.s into confession. What the inquisitors
especially require in order to succeed is that the enemy have a weak personality,
that he be a dumbbell with a soldier's need to conform, that he be ridden with anxiety
and lacking in patience. The brainwashing inquisitor doesn't need torture. Physical
torture will often strengthen resistance against the inquisitor, while isolation alone
can accomplish his objectives. The school that teaches only torture and evasion
techniques can even arouse latent anxieties and thus, paradoxically, make it easier
for the soldier-weakened by his fantastic anticipations-to surrender to brainwashing.
The hero at school can become a weakling as soon as he is faced with the real
challenge.


It is not so important what the trainee accomplishes during his physical training but
what he stands for mentally and spiritually. Does he have a mental backbone? Only
this will stand him in good stead during the challenge of prisonership.


The Psychiatric Report About Brainwashing and Menticide In every report on
brainwashing of prisoners of war, several factors that may lead to the accusation of
"collaboration with the enemy" have to be taken into account to determine the
psychological responsibility of the accused.


Did he surrender mentally under a kind of hypnosis? Can he be made responsible at
all; was there a conscious and voluntary collaboration that turned the man into a
traitor? Was there cowardice or only spiritual weakness?


Because these questions are so new in our history and often so subtle in relation to
the circumstances, it is well to enumerate the fields of interest to be analyzed:


207


1. The Accusation. The psychologist has to study the incriminating facts. We often
can see, for instance, in the phrasing of the signed confessions, evidence that the
signature was enforced. Some cliché phrases of the enemy can be looked at as
gradually wangled out of the head of the victim. For one of the courts I was able to
make an analysis of a written confession that was composed of such heterogeneous
elements that the process of mental wrestling and gradual giving in of the prisoner
could easily be discerned in the papers.


2. Rumour and mass psychology. Not all the accusations against a prisoner of war
made by fellow prisoners-even when the majority constantly repeat them-may be
taken at face value. Under the impact of terror and fear, rumours about special
persons are easily communicated. There are personalities who, on the basis of their
special character structure, easily become the focal point of rumours. The withdrawn
intellectual, for instance, is often accused of consorting with the enemy. When he
speaks the enemy's language and can communicate with them, accusations against
him can become like a huge mass hallucination.


The investigator has to make a survey of group relations in the P.O.W. camp. The
brainwashing enemy tries first to attack the leaders, in order to attack the morale of
the remainder of the P.O.W.' s; then he tries to select specially vulnerable
personalities for his strategy of mental pressure and ideological conversion.


3. The personality structure of the accused. Certain persons, on the basis of their
weak ego or their underlying neurotic anxieties, are predestined to give in earlier to
mental pressures. To obtain a fair estimate of the individual, intelligence tests and
the Rorschach test have to be given, the family background and the religious and
ideological foundations of the person have to be studied.


4. Was the brainwashee well trained to stand the treatment? What kind of
information had been given to the prisoner of war during his training? Did he know
enough about the ideological war and the word barrage he might be exposed to?
Was he only prepared for discipline and submission, or also for freedom and
nonconforming discussions? Was he only physically trained or also mentally?


5. The facts of torture. How long did it take before the prisoner gave in? Did he get
drugs? How much isolation? How many hours of interrogation? Were there
symptoms of pain and physical illness? Can these facts be verified?


This is only a short survey of viewpoints to be taken into account. They serve to
show that with the phenomenon of systematic brainwashing and thought control
something is brought before the court that is judicially new. The traditional attitudes
toward personal competence, responsibility, and accountability cannot be applied.

The state (the totalitarian system of the enemy) has, in the case of successful
brainwashing, taken over, even taken possession of, all psychological responsibility
for the obedient acts of persons. Our criminal courts and military courts will have to
find new rules of judging those who fell into the hands of such a criminalizing system.