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

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The Rape of the Mind
by A.M. Meerloo, M.D., Instructor in Psychiatry, Columbia University Lecturer in Social Psychology, New School for Social Research, Former Chief, Psychological Department, Netherlands Forces
1956

-- The Rape of the Mind, by A.M. Meerloo, M.D., Instructor in Psychiatry, Columbia University Lecturer in Social Psychology, New School for Social Research, Former Chief, Psychological Department, Netherlands Forces, 1956

This Dutch psychiatrist talking about Nazis tried at Nuremberg has Trump pegged:

*It is because the dictator is afraid, albeit unconsciously, of his own internal contradictions, that he is afraid of the same internal contradictions of his fellow men. He must purge and purge, terrorize and terrorize in order to still his own raging inner drives. He must kill every doubter, destroy every person who makes a mistake, imprison everyone who cannot be proved to be utterly single-minded.*

The sickness of the totalitarian leader ultimately sickens the entire state, driving it to self-destruction:

*In Totalitaria, the latent aggression and savagery in man are cultivate by the dictator to such a degree that they can explode into mass criminal actions shown by Hitler's persecution of minorities. Ultimately, the country shows a real pathology, an utter dominance of destructive and self-destructive tendencies. *

TOTALITARIANISM: A ONE-WAY TRAIN ON A NARROW TRACK

*The citizen of Totalitaria has no chance for such learning through unlearning, for growth through individual experience.

Official oversimplifications induce the captive audience into acceptance and indoctrination.

Mass ecstasy and mass fanaticism are substituted for quiet individual thought and consideration.

Hitler taught his people to march and to do battle, and at the end they did not know wherefore they marched and battled.*

MAGA MINIONS ON REPEAT, AS TRUMP'S IS THE ONLY AUTHORITATIVE VOICE

*The citizens of Totalitaria do not really converse with one another.

When they speak, they whisper, first looking furtively over their shoulders for the inevitable spy. Their inner silence is in sharp contrast to the official verbal bombardment.

The citizens of Totalitaria may make noise, and utter polite banalities, or they may repeat slogans to one another, but they say nothing.*

MAGAS HAVE LOST THEIR INDIVIDUAL PERSONALITY TO THE MOB

*People become herds -- indoctrinated and obsessed herds -- intoxicated first with enthusiasm and happy expectations, then with terror and panic.

The individual personality cannot grow in Totalitaria.

The huge mass of citizens is tamed into personal and political somnambulism.*

At the heart of MAGA rage is the need to submit to authority:

*Totalitarianism is man's escape from the fearful realities of life into the virtual womb of the leader.

The individual's actions are directed from this womb - from the inner sanctum.

The mystic center is in control of everything; man need no longer assume responsibility for his own life.

The order and logic of the prenatal world reign.

There is peace and silence, the peace of utter submission.*

INVENTED FEARS ARE A NECESSARY PART OF THE TRUMPIAN LANDSCAPE, DEMONS WHO THREATEN THE RACIST UTOPIA

*"It is there!" "It is chasing us!"

All the inner fears of losing the nirvanic womb-illusion become rampant. Mysterious ghosts and vultures chase people out of nirvana and paradise.

In these fantasies, the patriarch, the dictator, the idol, becomes both the universal danger and the omnipotent savoir at the same time. Not even the citizens of Totalitaria really love this cruel giant.*

The MAGA mob sublimates hatred for authority into hatred of scapegoats:

*The deep hate the sick individual feels toward the parental figure cannot be expressed directly, so it is displaced onto scapegoats -- Kulaks, Negroes, Jews, Communists, capitalists, profiteers & warmongers [but] the greatest danger is the use of intellect and awareness and the "egg-head's" demand for free, verifying thinking. Aberration & perversion are chosen by the citizens of Totalitaria*

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• PART ONE: The Techniques of Individual Submission 6
• CHAPTER ONE – YOU TOO WOULD CONFESS 7
o The Enforced Confession 7
o Mental Coercion and Enemy Occupation 10
o Witchcraft and Torture 12
o The Refinement of the Rack 14
o Menticide in Korea 17
• CHAPTER TWO – PAVLOV’S STUDENTS AS CIRCUS TAMERS 21
o The Salivating Dog 21
o The Conditioning of Man 24
o Isolation and Other Factors in Conditioning 26
o Mass Conditioning Through Speech 28
o Political Conditioning 30
o The Urge to be Conditioned 33
• CHAPTER THREE – MEDICATION INTO SUBMISSION 35
o The Search for Ecstasy Through Drugs 36
o Hypnotism and Mental Coercion 38
o Needling for the Truth 41
o The Lie-Detector 44
o The Therapist as an Instrument of Coercion 45
• CHAPTER FOUR – WHY DO THEY YIELD? THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF FALSE CONFESSION 47
o The Upset Philosopher 47
o The Barbed-Wire Disease 49
o The Moment of Sudden Surrender 50
o The Need to Collapse 51
o The Need for Companionship 53
o Blackmailing Through Overburdening Guilt Feelings 55
o The Law of Survival versus the Law of Loyalty 58
o The Mysterious Masochistic Pact 61
o A Survey of Psychological Processes involved in Brainwashing and Menticide 63
• PART TWO: The Techniques of Mass Submission 65
• CHAPTER FIVE – THE COLD WAR AGAINST THE MIND 65
o The Public-Opinion Engineers 67
Psychological Warfare as a Weapon of Terror 69
The Indoctrination Barrage 71
o The Enigma of Co-existence 72
• CHAPTER SIX – TOTALITARIA AND ITS DICTATORSHIP 73
o The Robotization of Man 74
o Cultural Predilection for Totalitarianism 76
o The Totalitarian Leader 79
o The Final Surrender of the Robot Man 82
o The Common Retreat from Reality 84
The Retreat to Automatization 86
o The Womb State 88
• CHAPTER SEVEN – THE INTRUSION BY TOTALITARIAN THINKING 91
o The Strategy of Terror 92
o The Purging Rituals 94
o Wild Accusation and Black Magic 96
o Spy Mania 98
o The Strategy of Criminalization 99
o Verbocracy and Semantic Fog – Talking People into Submission 101
o Logocide 103
o Labelomania 104
o The Apostatic Crime in Totalitaria 105
• CHAPTER EIGHT – TRIAL BY FIRE 106
o The Downfall of Justice 107
o The Demagogue as Prosecutor and Hypnotist 109
o The Trial as an Instrument of Intimidation 113
o The Congressional Investigation 114
o The Witness and his Subjective Testimony 116
o The Right to be Silent 118
o Mental Blackmail 119
o The Judge and the Jury 122
o Televised Interrogation 124
o The Quest for Detachment 125
• CHAPTER NINE – FEAR AS A TOOL OF TERROR 126
o The Fear of Living 126
o Our Fantasies about Danger 129
o Paradoxical Fear 130
o Regression 131
o Camouflage and Disguise 132
o Explosive Panics 134
o The Body Takes Over 135
• PART THREE: Unobtrusive Coercion 137
• CHAPTER TEN – THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN 137
o How some Totalitarians may Develop 138
o The Moulding Nursery 140
o The Father cuts the Cord 145
• CHAPTER ELEVEN – MENTAL CONTAGION AND MASS DELUSION 149
o The Affirmation of my own Errors 149
o Stages of Thinking and Delusion 152
o The Loss of Verifiable Reality 154
o Mass Delusion 156
o The Danger of Mental Contagion 159
o The Explanation of Delusion 161
o The Liberation from Magic Thinking 162
• CHAPTER TWELVE – TECHNOLOGY INVADES OUR MINDS 163
o The Creeping Coercion by Technology 165
o The Paradox of Technology 169
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN – INTRUSION BY THE ADMINISTRATIVE MIND 172
o The Administrative Mind 173
o The Ailments of those in Public Office 176
o The Conference of Unconscious Minds 178
o The Bureaucratic Mind 180
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN – THE TURNCOAT IN EACH OF US THE CONFUSING INFLUENCE OF THE PROBLEM OF TREASON AND LOYALTY 184
o The Involuntary Traitor 184
o The Concept of Treason 187
o The Traitor who Consciously takes Option for the Other side 189
o Our Treacherous Intellect 192
o Self-Betrayal 193
o The Development of Loyalty 196
o In Praise of Nonconformity 197
o The Loyalty Compulsion 198
• PART FOUR: In Search of Defences 203
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN – TRAINING AGAINST MENTAL TORTURE. THE U.S. CODE FOR RESISTING BRAINWASHING 204
o Indoctrination Against Indoctrination? 207
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN – EDUCATION FOR DISCIPLINE OR HIGHER MORALE 209
o The Role of Education 209
o Discipline and Morale 213
o Discipline and Brainwashing 214
o The Breaking Point and our Capacity for Frustration 217
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN – FROM OLD TO NEW COURAGE WHO RESISTS LONGER AND WHY? 219
o The Myth of Courage 221
o The Morale-Boosting Idea 224
o The New Courage 229
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN – FREEDOM – OUR MENTAL BACKBONE 231
o The Democratizing Action of Psychology 232
o The Battle on Two Fronts 235
o The Paradox of Freedom 238
o The Future Age of Psychology 240
• BIBLIOGRAPHY 241

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PART ONE: THE TECHNIQUES OF INDIVIDUAL SUBMISSION

The first part of this book is devoted to various techniques used to make man a
meek conformist. In addition to actual political occurrences, attention is called to
some ideas born in the laboratory and to the drug techniques that facilitate
brainwashing. The last chapter deals with the subtle psychological mechanisms of
mental submission.

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CHAPTER ONE: YOU TOO WOULD CONFESS

A fantastic thing is happening in our world. Today a man is no longer punished only
for the crimes he has in fact committed. Now he may be compelled to confess to
crimes that have been conjured up by his judges, who use his confession for political
purposes. It is not enough for us to damn as evil those who sit in judgment. We must
understand what impels the false admission of guilt; we must take another look at
the human mind in all its frailty and vulnerability.

The Enforced Confession

During the Korean War, an officer of the United States Marine Corps, Colonel Frank
H. Schwable, was taken prisoner by the Chinese Communists. After months of
intense psychological pressure and physical degradation, he signed a well
documented "confession" that the United States was carrying on bacteriological
warfare against the enemy. The confession named names, cited missions, described
meetings and strategy conferences. This was a tremendously valuable propaganda
tool for the totalitarians. They cabled the news all over the world: "The United States
of America is fighting the peace loving people of China by dropping bombs loaded
with disease spreading bacteria, in violation of international law."

After his repatriation, Colonel Schwable issued a sworn statement repudiating his
confession, and describing his long months of imprisonment. Later, he was brought
before a military court of inquiry. He testified in his own defense before that court: "I
was never convinced in my own mind that we in the First Marine Air Wing had used
bug warfare. | knew we hadn't, but the rest of it was real to me the conferences, the
planes, and how they would go about their missions."

"The words were mine," the Colonel continued, "but the thoughts were theirs. That is
the hardest thing | have to explain: how a man can sit down and write something he
knows is false, and yet, to sense it, to feel it, to make it seem real."

This is the way Dr. Charles W. Mayo, a leading American physician and government
representative, explained brainwashing in an official statement before the United
Nations: "...the tortures used...although they include many brutal physical injuries,
are not like the medieval torture of the rack and the thumb screw. They are subtler,
more prolonged, and intended to be more terrible in their effect. They are calculated
to disintegrate the mind of an intelligent victim, to distort his sense of values, to a
point where he will not simply cry out 'I did it!’ but will become a seemingly willing
accomplice to the complete disintegration of his integrity and the production of an
elaborate fiction."

The Schwable case is but one example of a defenceless prisoner being compelled to
tell a big lie. If we are to survive as free men, we must face up to this problem of
politically inspired mental coercion, with all its ramifications.

It is more than twenty years (in 1956) since psychologists first began to suspect that
the human mind can easily fall prey to dictatorial powers. In 1933, the German
Reichstag building was burned to the ground. The Nazis arrested a Dutchman,
Marinus Van der Lubbe, and accused him of the crime. Van der Lubbe was known
by Dutch psychiatrists to be mentally unstable. He had been a patient in a mental
institution in Holland. And his weakness and lack of mental balance became
apparent to the world when he appeared before the court. Wherever news of the trial
reached, men wondered: "Can that foolish little fellow be a heroic revolutionary, a
man who is willing to sacrifice his life to an ideal?"

During the court sessions Van der Lubbe was evasive, dull, and apathetic. Yet the
reports of the Dutch psychiatrists described him as a gay, alert, unstable character, a
man whose moods changed rapidly, who liked to vagabond around, and who had all
kinds of fantasies about changing the world.

On the forty second day of the trial, Van der Lubbe's behaviour changed
dramatically. His apathy disappeared. It became apparent that he had been quite
aware of everything that had gone on during the previous sessions. He criticized the
slow course of the procedure. He demanded punishment either by imprisonment or
death. He spoke about his "inner voices." He insisted that he had his moods in
check. Then he fell back into apathy. We now recognize these symptoms as a
combination of behaviour forms which we can call a confession syndrome. In 1933
this type of behaviour was unknown to psychiatrists. Unfortunately, it is very familiar
today and is frequently met in cases of extreme mental coercion.

Van der Lubbe was subsequently convicted and executed. When the trial was over,
the world began to realize that he had merely been a scapegoat. The Nazis
themselves had burned down the Reichstag building and had staged the crime and
the trial so that they could take over Germany. Still later we realized that Van der
Lubbe was the victim of a diabolically clever misuse of medical knowledge and
psychological technique, through which he had been transformed into a useful,
passive, meek automaton, who replied merely yes or no to his interrogators during
most of the court sessions. In a few moments he threatened to jump out of his
enforced role. Even at that time there were rumours that the man had been drugged
into submission, though we never became sure of that.

(NOTE: The psychiatric report about the case of Van der Lubbe is published by
Bonhoeffer and Zutt. Though they were unfamiliar with the "menticide syndrome,"
and not briefed by their political fuehrers, they give a good description about the
pathologic, apathetic behaviour, and his tremendous change of moods. They deny
the use of drugs.)

Between 1936 and 1938 the world became more conscious of the very real danger
of systematized mental coercion in the field of politics. This was the period of the well
remembered Moscow purge trials. It was almost impossible to believe that dedicated
old Bolsheviks, who had given their lives to a revolutionary movement, had suddenly
turned into dastardly traitors. When, one after another, everyone of the accused
confessed and beat his breast, the general reaction was that this was a great show
of deception, intended only as a propaganda move for the non Communist world.

Then it became apparent that a much worse tragedy was being enacted. The men
on trial had once been human beings. Now they were being systematically changed
into puppets. Their puppeteers called the tune and manipulated their actions. When,
from time to time, news came through showing how hard, rigid revolutionaries could
be changed into meek, self accusing sheep, all over the world the last remnants of
the belief in the free community presumably being built in Soviet Russia began to
crumble.

In recent years, the spectacle of confession to uncommitted crimes has become
more and more common. The list ranges from Communist through non Communist
to anti Communist, and includes men of such different types as the Czech Bolshevik
Rudolf Slansky and the Hungarian cardinal, Joseph Mindszenty.

Mental Coercion and Enemy Occupation

Those of us who lived in the Nazi occupied countries during the Second World War
learned to understand only too well how people could be forced into false
confessions, and into betrayals of those they loved. | myself was born in the
Netherlands and lived there until the Nazi occupation forced me to flee. In the early
days of the occupation, when we heard the first eyewitness descriptions of what
happened during Nazi interrogations of captured resistance workers, we were
frightened and alarmed.

The first aim of the Gestapo was to force prisoners under torture to betray their
friends and to report new victims for further torture. The Brown Shirts demanded
names and more names, not bothering to ascertain whether or not they were given
falsely under the stress of terror. | remember very clearly one meeting held by a
small group of resisters to discuss the growing fear and insecurity. Everybody at that
meeting could expect to be mentioned and picked up by the Gestapo at some time.
Should we be able to stand the Nazi treatment, or would we also be forced to
become informers? This question was being asked by anti Nazis in all the occupied
countries.

During the second year of the occupation we realized that it was better not to be in
touch with one another. More than two contacts were unsafe. We tried to find
medical and psychiatric preventives to harden us against the Nazi torture we
expected. As a matter of fact, | myself conducted some experiments to determine
whether or not narcotics would harden us against pain. However, the results were
paradoxical. Narcotics can create pain insensitivity, but their dulling action at the
same time makes people more vulnerable to mental pressure. Even at that time we
knew, as did the Nazis themselves, that it was not the direct physical pain that broke
people, but the continuous humiliation and mental torture. One of my patients, who
was subjected to such an interrogation, managed to remain silent. He refused to
answer a single question, and finally the Nazis dismissed him. But he never
recovered from this terrifying experience. He hardly spoken even when he returned
home. He simply sat bitter, full of indignation and in a few weeks he died. It was not
his physical wounds that had killed him; it was the combination of fear and wounded
pride.

We held many discussions about ways of strengthening our captured underground
workers or preventing them from final self betrayal. Should some of our people be
given suicide capsules? That could only be a last resort. Narcotics like morphine give
only a temporary anaesthesia and relief; moreover, the enemy would certainly find
the capsules and take them away.

We had heard about German attempts to give cocaine and amphetamine to their air
pilots for use in combat exhaustion, but neither medicament was reliable. Those
drugs might revive the body by making it less sensitive to pain, but at the same time
they dulled the mind. If captured members of the underground were to take them, as
experiments had shown, their bodies might not feel the effects of physical torture, but
their hazy minds might turn them into easier dupes of the Nazis.

We also tried systematic exercises in mental relaxation and auto hypnosis
(comparable with Yogi exercises) in order to make the body more insensitive to
hunger and pain. If an individual's attention is fixed on the development of conscious
awareness of automatic body functions, such as breathing, the alert functioning of
the brain cortex can be reduced, and awareness of pain will diminish. This state of
pain insensitivity can sometimes be achieved through autohypnotic exercises. But
very few of our people were able to bring themselves into such anaesthesia.

Finally we evolved this simple psychological trick: when you can no longer outwit the
enemy or resist talking, the best thing to do is to talk too much. This was the idea:
keep yourself sullen and act the fool; play the coward and confess more than there is
to confess. Later we were able to verify that this method was successful in several
cases. Scatterbrained simpletons confused the enemy much more than silent heroes
whose stamina was finally undermined in spite of everything.

I had to flee Holland after a policeman warned me that my name had been
mentioned in an interrogation. I had twice been questioned by the Nazis on minor
matters and without bodily torture. When they later caught up with me in Belgium,
probably as the result of a betrayal, I had to undergo a long initial examination in
which I was beaten, fortunately not too seriously. The interview had started
pleasantly enough. Apparently, the Nazi officer in charge thought he would be able
to get information out of me through friendly methods. Indeed, we even had a
discussion (since I am a psychiatrist) about the methods used in interrogation. But
the officer's mood changed, and he behaved with all the sadistic characteristics we
had come to expect from his type. Happily, I managed to escape from Belgium that
very night before a more systematic and more torturous investigation could begin.
Arriving at the London headquarters after an adventurous trip through France and
Spain, I became Chief of the Psychological Department of the Netherlands Forces in
England. In this official position I was able to gather data on what was happening to
the millions of victims of Nazi terror and torture. Later on I questioned and treated
several escapees from internment and concentration camps. These people had
become real experts in suffering. The variety of human reactions under those
infernal circumstances taught us an ugly truth: the spirit of most men can be broken;
men can be reduced to the level of animal behaviour. Both torturer and victim finally
lose all human dignity.

My government gave me the power to investigate a group of traitors and I also
interrogated imprisoned Nazis. When I reviewed all these wartime experiences, all
the confusion about courage and cowardice, treason, morale, and mental fortitude, I
must confess that my eyes were only really opened after a study of the Nuremberg
trials of the Nazi leaders. These trials gave us the real story of the systematic
coercive methods used by the Nazis. At about the same time we began to learn
more about the perverted psychological strategy Russia and her satellites were
using.

Witchcraft and Torture

The specific techniques used in the modern world to break man's mind and will to
extort confessions for political propaganda purposes are relatively new (in 1956) and
highly refined. Yet enforced confession itself is nothing new. From time immemorial
tyrants and dictators have needed these "voluntary" confessions to justify their own
evil deeds. The knowledge that the human mind can be influenced, tamed, and
broken down into servility is far older than the modern dictatorial concept of enforced
indoctrination.

The primitive shaman used awe inspiring ritual to bring his victim into such a state of
fright hypnosis that he yielded to all suggestions. The native on whom a spell of
doom has been cast by the medicine man may become so hypnotized by his own
fear that he simply sits down, accepts his fate, and dies (Malinowski).

Throughout history men have had an intuitive understanding that the mind can be
manipulated. Elaborate strategies have been worked out to achieve this end.
Ecstasy rituals, frightening masks, loud noises, eerie chants all have been used to
compel the crowd to accept the beliefs of their leaders. Even if an ordinary man at
first resists a cruel shaman or medicine man, the hypnotizing ritual gradually breaks
his will.

More painful methods are not new either. When we study the old reports of the
Inquisition, or of the many witch trials, both in Europe and America, we learn a great
deal about these methods. The floating test is one example. Those accused of
witchcraft were thrown into the river, their feet and hands tied together. If the body
did not sink, the victim was immediately pulled out of the water and burned at the
stake. The fact that he did not sink was proof positive of his guilt. If, on the other
hand, the accused obeyed the law of gravity and sank to the bottom of the river, the
drowned body was ceremoniously removed from the river and proclaimed innocent.

Not much choice was left to the victim!

Man has been tremendously inventive in developing means for inflicting suffering on
his fellow man. With refined passion he has devised techniques which provoke the
most exquisite pain in the most vulnerable parts of the human body. The rack and
the thumbscrew are age old instruments and have been used not only by primitive
judges but also by so called civilized dictators and tyrants.

In order better to understand modern mental torture, we must constantly keep in
mind the fact that from the earliest days bodily anguish and the rack were never
meant merely to inflict pain on the victim. They may not have expressed their
understanding in sophisticated terms, but the medieval judge and hangman were
nevertheless aware that there is a peculiar spiritual relationship and mental interplay
between the victim and the rest of the community.

Much painful torture and hanging had to be done as public demonstrations. After
suffering the most intense pain, the witch would not only confess to shocking sexual
debaucheries with the devil, but would herself gradually come to believe the stories
she had invented and would die convinced of her guilt. The whole ritual of
interrogation and torture finally compelled her to yield to the fantasies of her judges
and accusers. In the end she even yearned for death. She wanted to be burned at
the stake in order to exorcise the devil and expiate her sins.

These same judges and hangman realized, too, that their witch trials were intended
not only to torture the witches, but even more to torture the bystanders, who, albeit
unconsciously, identified themselves with the victims. This is, of course, one of the
reasons burnings and hangings were held in public and became the occasion for
great pageants. Terror thus became widespread, and many judges spoke
euphemistically of the preventive action of such torture. Psychologically, we can see
this entire device as a blackmailing of human sympathy and the general tendency to
identify with others.

As far back as 1563 the courageous Dutch physician Johannes Wier published his
masterwork, De Praestigiis Daemonum (On the Delusions About Demons) in which
he states that the collective and voluntary self accusation of older women through
which they exposed themselves to torture and death by their inquisitors was in itself
an act inspired by the devil, a trick of demons, whose aim it was to doom not only the
innocent women but also their reckless judges. Wier was the first medical man to
introduce what became the psychiatric concept of DELUSION and mental blindness.
Wherever his book had influence, the persecution of witches ceased, in some
countries more than one hundred and fifty years before it was finally brought to an
end throughout the civilized world. His work and his insights became one of the main
instruments for fighting the witch delusion and physical torture (Baschwitz). Wier
realized even then that witches were scapegoats for the inner confusion and
desperation of their judges and of the "Zeitgeist" in general.

The Refinement of the Rack

All knowledge can be used either for good or for evil, and psychology is not immune
to this general law. Psychology has delivered up to man new means of torture and
intrusion into the mind. We must be more and more aware of what these methods
and techniques are if we are successfully to fight them. They can often be more
painful and mentally more paralyzing than the rack. Strong personalities can tolerate
physical agony; often it serves to increase stubborn resistance. No matter what the
constitution of the victim, physical torture finally leads to a protective loss of
consciousness. But to withstand mental torture leading to creeping mental
breakdown demands an even stronger personality.

What we call brainwashing (a word derived from the Chinese "Hsi Nao") is an
elaborate ritual of systematic indoctrination, conversion, and self accusation used to
change non Communists into submissive followers of the party (Hunter). "Menticide"
is a word coined by me and derived from "mens", the mind, and "caedere", to kill.
(NOTE: Here | followed the etymology used by the United Nations to form the word
"genocide," meaning the systematic destruction of racial groups.)

Both words indicate the same perverted refinement of the rack, putting it on what
appears to be a more acceptable level. But it is a thousand times worse and a
thousand times more useful to the inquisitor.

Menticide is an old crime against the human mind and spirit but systematized anew.
It is an organized system of psychological intervention and judicial perversion
through which a powerful dictator can imprint his own opportunistic thoughts upon
the minds of those he plans to use and destroy. The terrorized victims finally find
themselves compelled to express complete conformity to the tyrant's wishes.
Through court procedures, at which the victim mechanically reels off an inner record
which has been prepared by his inquisitors during a preceding period, public opinion
is lulled and thrown off guard. "A real traitor has been punished," people think. "The
man has confessed!" His confession can be used for propaganda, for the cold war,
to instil fear and terror, to accuse the enemy falsely, or to exercise a constant mental
pressure upon others.

One important result of this procedure is the great confusion it creates in the mind of
every observer, friend or foe. In the end no one knows how to distinguish truth from
falsehood. The totalitarian potentate, in order to break down the minds of men, first
needs widespread mental chaos and verbal confusion, because both paralyze his
opposition and cause the morale of the enemy to deteriorate unless his adversaries
are aware of the dictator's real aim. From then on he can start to build up his system
of conformity.

In both the Mindszenty and the Schwable cases, we have documented reports of the
techniques of menticide as it has been used to break the minds and wills of
courageous men.

Let us look first at the case of Cardinal Mindszenty, accused of misleading the
Hungarian people and collaboration with the enemies, the United States. In his
expose’ on Cardinal Mindszenty's imprisonment, Stephen K. Swift graphically
describes three typical phases in the psychological "processing" of political
prisoners. The first phase is directed toward extorting confession. The victim is
bombarded with questions day and night. He is inadequately and irregularly fed. He
is allowed almost no rest and remains in the interrogation chamber for hours on end
while his inquisitors take turns with him. Hungry, exhausted, his eyes blurred and
aching under unshaded lamps, the prisoner becomes little more than a hounded
animal.

"...when the Cardinal had been standing for sixty six hours [Swift reports], he closed
his eyes and remained silent. He did not even reply to questions with denials. The
colonel in charge of the shift tapped the Cardinal's shoulder and asked why he did
not respond. The Cardinal answered: 'End it all. Kill me! | am ready to die!’ He was
told that no harm would come to him; that he could end it all simply by answering
certain questions.

"...,By Saturday forenoon he could hardly be recognized. He asked for another drink
and this time it was refused. His feet and legs had swollen to such proportions that
they caused him intense pain; he fell down several times."

To the horrors the accused victim suffers from without must be added the horrors
from within. He is pursued by the unsteadiness of his own mind, which cannot
always produce the same answer to a repeated question. As a human being with a
conscience he is pursued by possible hidden guilt feelings, however pious he may
have been that undermine his rational awareness of innocence. The panic of the
"prainwashee" is the total confusion he suffers about all concepts. His evaluations
and norms are undermined. He cannot believe in anything objective any more except
in the dictated and indoctrinated logic of those who are more powerful than he. The
enemy knows that, far below the surface, human life is built up of inner
contradictions. He uses this knowledge to defeat and confuse the brainwashee. The
continual shift of interrogators makes it ever more impossible to believe in
consecutive thinking. Hardly has the victim adjusted himself to one inquisitor when
he has to change his focus of alertness to another one.

Yet, this inner clash of norms and concepts, this inner contradiction of ideologies and
beliefs is part of the philosophical sickness of our time!

As a social being the Cardinal is pursued by the need for good human relationships
and companionship. The constantly reiterated suggestion of his guilt urges him
toward confession. As a suffering individual he is blackmailed by an inner need to be
left alone and undisturbed, if only for a few minutes. From within and without he is
inexorably driven toward signing the confession prepared by his persecutors. Why
should he resist any longer.

There are no visible witnesses to his heroism. He cannot prove his moral courage
and rectitude after his death. The core of the strategy of menticide is the taking away
of all hope, all anticipation, all belief in a future. It destroys the very elements which
keep the mind alive. The victim is utterly alone.

(NOTE: This continual attack on human conscience and guilt by unconscious self
accusations is brilliantly depicted by Franz Kafka in The Trial. In this novel the victim
never knows of what he is accused but his inner guilt leads him to conviction. Kafka
anticipated the age of blackmailing into confession. His novel was written before the
1930s. The same theme has been treated from a psychological point of view by
Theodor Reik in his Confession, Compulsion and the Need for Punishment.)

If the prisoner's mind proves too resistant, narcotics are given to confuse it:
mescaline, marijuana, morphine, barbiturates, alcohol. If his body collapses before
his mind capitulates, he receives stimulants: benzedrine, caffeine, coramine, all of
which help to preserve his consciousness until he confesses. Many of the narcotics
and stimuli which ultimately help to induce mental dependency and enforced
confusion can also create an amnesia, often a complete forgetting of the torture
itself. The torture techniques achieve the desired effect, but the victim forgets what
has actually happened during the interrogation. The clinicians who do therapeutic
work with amphetamine derivatives, which when injected into the blood stream help
patients to remember long forgotten experiences, are familiar with the drug's ability
to bring soothing forgetfulness of the period during which the patient was drugged
and questioned.

Next the victim is trained to accept his own confession, much as an animal is trained
to perform tricks. False admissions are reread, repeated, hammered into his brain.
He is forced to reproduce in his memory again and again the fantasized offenses,
fictitious details which ultimately convince him of his criminality. In the first stage he
is forced into mental submissiveness by others. In the second stage he has entered
a state of autohypnosis, convincing himself of fabricated crimes. According to Swift:
"The questions during the interrogation now dealt with details of the Cardinal's
‘confession.’ First his own statements were read to him; then statements of other
prisoners accused of complicity with him; then elaborations of those statements.
Sometimes the Cardinal was morose, sometimes greatly disturbed and excited. But
he answered all questions willingly, repeated all sentences once, twice, or even
three times when he was told to do so." (Lassio)

In the third and final phase of interrogation and menticide the accused, now
completely conditioned and accepting his own imposed guilt, is trained to bear false
witness against himself and others. He doesn't have to convince himself any more
through autohypnosis; he only speaks "his master's voice." He is prepared for trial,
softened completely; he becomes remorseful and willing to be sentenced. He is a
baby in the hands of his inquisitors, fed as a baby and soothed by words as a baby.

(NOTE: A more extended survey of the different psychological stages in menticide
and brainwashing will be given at the end of Chapter Four Why Do They Yield - The
Psychodynamics of False Confession.)

Menticide in Korea

Now let us take a look at the Schwable case. In its general outline it is similar to the
Mindszenty story; it differs only in details. As an officer of the United States Marine
Corps, fighting with the United Nations in Korea, he is taken prisoner by the enemy.
The colonel expects to be protected by international law and by the regulations
regarding officer prisoners of war, which have been accepted by all countries.
However, it slowly dawns on him that he is being subjected to a kind of treatment
very different from what he expected. The enemy looks on him not as a prisoner of
war, but as a victim who can be used for propaganda purposes.

He is subjected to slow but constant pressures devised to break him down mentally.
Humiliation, rough, inhuman treatment, degradation, intimidation, hunger, exposure
to extreme cold all have been used to crumble his will and to soften him. They need
to wangle military secrets out of him and to use him as a tool in their propaganda
machine. He feels completely alone. He is surrounded by filth and vermin. For hours
on end he has to stand up and answer the questions his interrogators hurl at him. He
develops arthritic backache and diarrhoea. He is not allowed to wash or shave. He
doesn't know what will happen to him next. This treatment goes on for weeks.

Then the hours of systematic and repetitious interrogation and oppression increase.
He no longer dares to trust his own memory. There are new teams of investigators
every day, and each new team points out his increasing errors and mistakes. He
cannot sleep any more. Daily his interrogators tell him they have plenty of time, and
he realizes that in this respect at least they are telling the truth. He beings to doubt
whether he can resist their seductive propositions. If he will just unburden himself of
his guilt, they tell him, he will be better treated.

The inquisitor is treacherously kind and knows exactly what he wants. He wants the
victim captured by the influence of a slowly induced hypnosis. He wants a well
documented confession that the American army used bacteriological warfare, that
the captive himself took part in such germ warfare. The inquisitor wants this
confession in writing because it will make a convincing impression and will shock the
world. China is plagued by hunger and epidemics; such a confession will explain the
high disease rate and exculpate the Chinese government, whose popularity is at a
low ebb. So the colonel has to be prepared for a systematic confession, made before
an international group of Communist experts. Mentally and physically he is
weakened, and every day the Communist "truths" are imprinted on his mind.

The colonel has in fact become hypnotized; he is now able to reproduce for his
jailers bits and pieces of the confession they want from him. It is a well known
scientific fact that the passive memory often remembers facts learned under
hypnosis better than those learned in a state of alert consciousness. He is even able
to write some of it down. Eventually, all the little pieces fit, like a jigsaw puzzle, into a
complete, well organized whole; they form part of a document which was in fact
prepared beforehand by his captors. This document is placed in the colonel's hands,
and he is even allowed to make some minor changes in the phrasing before he signs
it.

By now, the colonel has been completely broken. He has given in. All sense of reality
is gone; identification with the enemy is complete. For weeks after signing the
confession he is in a state of depression. His only wish is to sleep, to have rest from
it all.

A man will often try to hold out beyond the limits of his endurance because he
continues to believe that his tormentors have some basic morality, that they will
finally realize the enormity of their crimes and will leave him alone. This is a delusion.
The only way to strengthen one's defences against an organized attack on the mind
and will is to understand better what the enemy is trying to do and to outwit him. Of
course, one can vow to hold out until death, but even the relief of death is in the
hands of the inquisitor. People can be brought to the threshold of death and then be
stimulated into life again so that the torments can be renewed. Attempts at suicide
are foreseen and can be forestalled.

In my opinion hardly anyone can resist such treatment. It all depends on the ego
strength of the person and the exhaustive technique of the inquisitor. Each man has
his own limit of endurance, but that this limit can nearly always be reached and even
surpassed is supported by clinical evidence. Nobody can predict for himself how he
will handle a situation when he is called to the test. The official United States report
on brainwashing (See the "New York Times", August 18, 1955) admits that "virtually
all American P.O.W.s collaborated at one time or another in one degree or another,
lost their identity as Americans...thousands lost their will to live," and so forth. The
British report (See the "New York Times", February 27, 1955) gives a statistical
survey about the abuse of the P.O.W.s. According to this report one third of the
soldiers absorbed enough indoctrination to be classified as Communist
sympathizers.

This same report describes in a more extended way some of the sadistic means
used by the enemy:

"If a prisoner accepted Communist doctrines, his life became easier, according to the
men's stories. But if a prisoner resisted Communist doctrines, the Chinese
considered him a criminal and reactionary deserving of any brutalities. the tortures
applied to the 'reactionaries' included:

"Making a prisoner stand at attention or sit with legs outstretched in complete silence
from 4:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. and constantly waking him during the few hours allowed
for sleep.

"Keeping prisoners in solitary confinement in boxes about five by three by two feet. A
private of the Gloucester Regiment spent more than six months in one of these.

"Withholding liquids for days 'to help self reflection’.

"Binding a prisoner with a rope passed over a beam, one end fixed as a hangman's
noose round his neck and the other end tied to his ankles. He was then told that if he
slipped or bent his knees he would be committing suicide.

"Forcing a prisoner to kneel on jagged rocks and hold a large rock over his head with
arms extended. It took a man who had undergone this treatment days to recover the
ability to walk.

"At one camp North Korean jailers pushed a pencil like piece of wood or metal
through a hole in the cell door and made the prisoner hold the inner end in his teeth.
Without warning a sentry would knock the outer end sidewise, breaking the man's
teeth or splitting the sides of his mouth. Sometimes the rod was rammed inward
against the back of the mouth or down the throat.

"Prisoners were marched barefooted to the frozen Yalu River, water was poured
over their feet and they were kept for hours with their feet frozen to the ice to 'reflect'
on their 'crimes.""

Time, fear, and continual pressure are known to create a menticidal hypnosis. The
conscious part of the personality no longer takes part in the automatic confessions.
The brainwashee lives in a trance, repeating the record grooved into him and by
somebody else. Fortunately, this, too, is Known: as soon as the victim returns to
normal circumstances, the panicky and hypnotic spell evaporates, and he again
awakens into reality.

This is what happened to Colonel Schwable. True, he confessed to crimes he did not
commit, but he repudiated his confession as soon as he was returned to a familiar
environment.

When, during the military inquiry into the Schwable case, | was called upon to testify
as an expert on menticide, | told the court of my deep conviction that nearly anybody
subjected to the treatment meted out to Colonel Schwable could be forced to write
and sign a similar confession.

"Anyone in this room, for instance?" the colonel's attorney asked me, looking in turn
at each of the officers sitting in judgment on this new and difficult case.

And in good conscience I could reply, firmly: "Anyone in this room."

It is now technically possible to bring the human mind into a condition of
enslavement and submission. The Schwable case and the cases of other prisoners
of war are tragic examples of this, made even more tragic by our lack of
understanding of the limits of heroism. We are just beginning to understand what
these limits are, and how they are used, both politically and psychologically, by the
totalitarians. We have long since come to recognize the breast beating confession
and the public recantation as propaganda tricks; now we are beginning to see ever
more clearly how the totalitarians use menticide: deliberately, openly, unashamedly,
as part of their official policy, as a means of consolidating and maintaining their
power, though, of course, they give a different explanation to the whole procedure it's
all confessions of real and treacherous crimes.

This brutal totalitarian technique has at least one virtue, however. It is obvious and
unmistakable, and we are learning to be on our guard against it, but as we shall see
later, there are other subtler forms of mental intervention. They can be just as
dangerous as the direct assault, precisely because they are more subtle and hence
more difficult to detect. Often we are not aware of their action at all. They influence
the mind so slowly and indirectly that we may not even realize what they have done
to us.

Like totalitarian menticide, some of these less obvious forms of mental manipulation
are political in purpose. Others are not. Even if they differ in intent, they can have the
same consequences.

These subtle menticidal forces operate both within the mind and outside it. They
have been strengthened in their effect by the growth in complexity of our civilization.
The modern means of mass communication bring the entire world daily into each
man's home; the techniques of propaganda and salesmanship have been refined
and systematized; there is scarcely any hiding place from the constant visual and
verbal assault on the mind. The pressures of daily life impel more and more people
to seek an easy escape from responsibility and maturity. Indeed, it is difficult to
withstand these pressures; to many the offer of a political panacea is very tempting,
to others the offer of escape through alcohol, drugs, or other artificial pleasures is
irresistible.

Free men in a free society must learn not only to recognize this stealthy attack on
mental integrity and fight it, but must learn also what there is in side man's mind that
makes him vulnerable to this attack, what it is that makes him, in many cases,
actually long for a way out of the responsibilities that republican democracy and
maturity place on him.

[admin]

CHAPTER TWO: PAVLOV'S STUDENTS AS CIRCUS TAMERS


Before asking ourselves what the deeper mental mechanisms are of brainwashing,
false confession, and conversion into a collaborator, let us try to see things from the
standpoint of the totalitarian potentates. What is their aim? What terms do they use
to describe the behaviour of their prisoners? What do they want from the Schwables
and the Midszentys?


The totalitarian jailers don't speak of hypnosis or suggestion; they even deny the fact
of imposed confession. They think about human behaviour and human government
in a much more mechanical way. In order to understand them we have to give more
attention to their adoration of simplified Pavlovian concepts.


The Salivating Dog


In the latter part of the nineteenth century the Russian Nobel price winner Ivan
Petrovich Pavlov conducted his famous experiments with a bell and a dog. He knew
that salivation is associated with eating, and that if a dog was hungry, its mouth
would water each time it saw food. Pavlov took advantage of this useful inborn
reflex, which serves the digestive process, to develop in his experimental animal the
salivating response in answer to a stimulus which would not ordinarily create it. Each
time Pavlov fed the dog, he rang a bell, and at each feeding the dog's mouth
watered. Then after many repetitions of the combined food bell stimulus, Pavlov rang
the bell but did not feed the dog. The animal reacted to the bell alone just as it had
previously reacted to the sight of food its mouth watered. Thus the scientist had
found out that the dog could be induced to salivate involuntarily in response to an
arbitrary signal. It had been "conditioned" to respond to the ringing of the bell as if
that sound were the smell and taste of food.


From this and other experiments, Pavlov developed his theory of the conditioned
reflex, which explains learning and training as the building up of a mosaic of
conditioned reflexes, each one based on the establishment of an association
between different stimuli. The greater the number of learned complex responses also
called patterns the greater the number of conditioned reflexes developed. Because
man, of all the animals, has the greatest capacity for learning, he is the animal with
the greatest capacity for such complicated conditioning.


Pavlov's experiments were of great value in the study of animal and human
behaviour, and in the study of the development of neurotic symptoms. However, this
knowledge of some of the mechanisms of the human mind can be used as we have
seen already, like any other knowledge, either for good or for evil. And unfortunately,
the totalitarians have used their knowledge of how the mind works for their own
purposes


21


They have applied some of the Pavlovian findings, in a subtle and complicated way
and sometimes in a grotesque way, to try to produce the reflex of mental and political
conditioning and of submission in the human guinea pigs under their control.


Even though the Nazis employed these methods before the Second World War, they
can be said to have reached their full flower in Soviet Russia. Through a continued
repetition of indoctrination, bell ringing and feeding, the Soviet man is expected to
become a conditioned reflex machine, reacting according to a prearranged pattern,
as did the laboratory dogs. At least, such a simplified concept is roaming around in
the minds of some of the Soviet leaders and scientists (Dobrogaev).


In accordance with one of Stalin's directives, Moscow maintains a special "Pavlovian
Front" (Dobrogaev) and a "Scientific Council on Problems of Physiological Theory of
the Academician I. P. Pavlov" (London). These institutions, part of the Academy of
Science, are dedicated to the political application of the Pavlovian theory. They are
under orders to emphasize the purely mechanical aspects of Pavlov's findings. Such
a theoretical view can reduce all human emotions to a simple, mechanistic system of
conditioned reflexes. Both organizations are control agencies dealing in research
problems, and the scientists who work on them explore the ways in which man can
theoretically be conditioned and trained as animals are. Since Pavlovian theory is
proclaimed by the obdurate totalitarian theoreticians as the gospel of animal and
human behaviour, we have to grapple with the facts they adduce to prove their point,
and with their methods and theoretical explanations.


What the Pavlovian council tries to achieve is the result of an oversimplification of
psychology. Their political task is to condition and mould man's mind so that its
comprehension is confined to a narrow totalitarian concept of the world. It is the idea
that such a limitation of thinking to Lenin Marxist theoretical thinking must be
possible for two reasons: first, if one repeats often enough its simplification, and
second, if one withholds any other form of interpretation of reality.


This concept is based on the naive belief that one can permanently suppress any
critical function and verification in human thinking. Yet, through taming and
conditioning of people, during which period errors and deviations must continually be
corrected, unwittingly a critical sense is built up. True, at the same time the danger of
using this critical sense is brought home to the students. They know the dangers of
any dissent, but even this promotes the development of a secondary and more
refined critical sense. In the end, human rebellion and dissent cannot be suppressed;
they await only one breath of freedom in order to awake once more. The idea that
there exist other ways to truth than those he sees close at hand lives somewhere in
everybody. One can narrow his pathways of research and expression, but a man's
belief in adventurous new roads elsewhere is ever present in the back of his mind.
The inquisitive human mind is never satisfied with a simple recital of facts. As soon
as it observes a set of data, it jumps into the area of theory and offers explanations,
but the way a man sees a set of facts, and the way he juggles them to build them
into a theory is largely determined by his own biases and prejudices.


22


Let me be the first to confess that I am affected by my own subjectivities. Even the
words we use are loaded with implications and suggestions. The word "reflex," for
example, so important in Pavlovian theory, is a perfect instance of this. It was first
used by the seventeenth century philosopher Descartes, in whose philosophical
system a parallel was made between the actions of the human body and those of a
machine. For example, in the Cartesian view, the automatic reaction of the body to
certain painful stimuli (e.g., withdrawing the hand after it has come into contact with
fire) is compared with the automatic physical reflection of light from a mirror. The
nervous system, according to Descartes, reflects its response just as the mirror
does. Such a simple explanation of behaviour, and the very words used to describe
it, immediately denies the whole organism taking part in that response.


Yet man is not only a mirror, but a thinking mirror. According to the old mechanical
view, actions are associated only with the part of the body which performs them, and
they have no relationship whatsoever to the purposeful behaviour of the organism as
a whole. But man is not a machine composed of independently functioning parts. He
is a whole. His mind and body interact; he acts on the outside world and the outside
world acts on him. The innate reflexes, of which this hand withdrawal is one
example, are part of a whole system of adaptive responses which serve to help the
individual, as an entity, to adjust to changed circumstances. They can be described
as the result of an inborn adaptation tendency. The only real difference between the
innate reflexes and the conditioned reflexes is that the former supposedly have
developed in the entire race over the millions of years of the evolutionary process,
while the latter are developed during the life span of the individual as a result of the
gradual automatization of acquired responses.


If you analyze any one of the complicated actions you may perform during the
course of a single day (driving an automobile, for example), you will see that it
occurs outside your conscious management. And yet, before the process could be
automatized, the actions, purposefully directed toward the satisfaction of some goal,
had to be consciously learned and managed. You were not born with the innate
reflex of jamming on the brake to stop a car quickly in an emergency. You had to
learn to do it, and in the process of learning and driving, this response became
automatic. If, after you have learned to drive, you see a child running across the path
of your car, you put the brake on immediately, by reflex, without thinking.


23


The Conditioning of Man


Pavlov's research on the machinery of the mind taught us how all the animals
including man learn adjustment to existing limitations through linking the signs and
signals of life to body reactions. The mind creates a relationship between repeated
simultaneous occurrences, and the body reacts to the connections the mind forms.
Thus the bell, rung each time the dog was fed, became a signal to the animal to
prepare for digestion, and the animal began to salivate.


Recent experiments conducted by Dr. Gregory Razran of Queens College show how
men may develop these same kinds of responses. Dr. Razran treated a group of
twenty college students to a series of free luncheons at which music was played or
pictures shown. After the final luncheon, these twenty students were brought
together with another group who had not been luncheon guests. At this meeting, as
at the luncheons, music was played and pictures shown, and all the students were
asked to tell what the music and pictures made them think of. The music and the
pictures generally reminded the first group of something related to eating, but had no
such associations for the second group. There was obviously a temporary
connection in the minds of the luncheon guests between the music and the pictures
on the one hand and eating on the other.


The Chinese did their mass conditioning in an even simpler way. After having taught
the prisoners for days to write down all possible nonsense and political lies in an
atmosphere of utter confusion and stress they were ripe to sign collectively the lie of
having taken part in germ warfare (Winokur.)


All conditioned reflexes are involuntary temporary adjustments to pressures which
create an apparent connection between stimuli which may be in fact totally
unrelated. For this reason, the conditioned reflex is not necessarily permanently
imprinted on the individual, but can gradually disappear. If, after the dog's
conditioned reflex to the bell has been developed, the bell is rung over and over
again and no food is presented to the animal, the salivating reflex disappears.
Doubtless Dr. Razran's students will not always think of food when they hear music.
We could describe the conditioned reflex another way: it is a selected response of
the mind body unit to a given stimulus. The ways in which the stimulus and the
response are connected vary considerably they may have been associated in time,
in place, or by coincidence, or by a common aim and thus they may form a special
conditioned complex in our mental and physical attitude. Some of these complex
responses or patterns are more autonomous than others, and will act like the innate
patterns. Some are flexible and are continually changing. Analysis of some of the
psychosomatic diseases, for example, shows us how our inner emotional attitudes
can intensify or even change a conditional response. Stomach ulcers are considered
an example of such a psychosomatic disease. The mother who puts her child on a
too rigid feeding schedule may change the child's favourable response to hunger into
a stubborn reaction against feeding.


24


For our purpose we have to be aware that conditioning takes place throughout all our
lives in the most subtle and in the most obvious ways. We discover that the moulding
of our personalities may occur in a thousand fold ways through such matters as
these: the meal training given in early childhood; the harshness or the musical tone
of the words spoken to us; the sense of haste in our surroundings; the steadiness of
family habits or the chaos of neurotic parents; the noises of our machines; the
reservedness of our friends; the discipline of our schools and the competitiveness of
our clubs. We are even conditioned by such things as the frailty of our toys and the
cosiness of our houses, the steadiness of traditions or the chaos of a revolution. The
artist and the engineer, the teacher and the friend, the uncle or aunt they all give
shape to our behaviour.


25


Isolation and Other Factors in Conditioning


Pavlov made another significant discovery: the conditioned reflex could be
developed most easily in a quiet laboratory with a minimum of disturbing stimuli.
Every trainer of animals knows this from his own experience; isolation and the
patient repetition of stimuli are required to tame wild animals. Pavlov formulated his
findings into a general rule in which the speed of learning is positively correlated with
quiet and isolation. The totalitarians have followed this rule. They know that they can
condition their political victims most quickly if they are kept in isolation. In the
totalitarian technique of thought control, the same isolation applied to the individual is
applied also to groups of people. This is the reason the civilian populations of the
totalitarian countries are not permitted to travel freely and are kept away from mental
and political contamination. It is the reason, to, for the solitary confinement cell and
the prison camp.


Another of Pavlov's findings was that some animals learn more quickly if they were
rewarded (by affection, by food, by stroking) each time they showed the right
response, while others learned more quickly when the penalty for not learning was a
painful stimulus. In human terms, the latter animals could be described as learning in
order to avoid punishment. These different reactions in animals may perhaps be
related to an earlier conditioning by the parents, and they find their counterparts
among human beings. In some people the strategy of reward and flattery is a
stimulus to learning, while pain evokes all their resistance and rebellion; in others
retribution and punishment for failure can be a means of training them into the
desired pattern. Before he can do his job effectively, the brainwasher has to find out
to which category his victim belongs. There are people more amenable to
brainwashing than others. Part of the response may be innate or related to earlier
conditioning to conformity.


Pavlov also distinguished between the weaker type of involuntary learning, in which
the learned response was lost as soon as some disturbance occurred, and the
stronger type, in which training was retained through all kinds of changed conditions.
As a matter of fact, Pavlov described more types of learning than this, but for our
purposes it is only important to know that there are some types of people who lose
their conditioned learning easily, while others, the so called "stronger" types, retain it.
This, by the way, is another example of how our choice of words reflects our bias.
The descriptions "strong" and "weak" depend completely on the aim of the
experimenter. For the totalitarian, the "weak" P.O.W. is the man who stubbornly
refuses to accept the new conditioning. His "weakness" may be, in fact, a resistance,
the result of a previous strong conditioning to loyalty to anti totalitarian principles. We
never know how strongly conditioning and initial learning are impressed on the
personality. Rigid dogmatic behaviour has its roots in early conditioning and so may
submissiveness based on ignorance rather than knowledge.


26


Pavlov showed, too, how internal and external factors interact in the conditioning
process. If, for example, a new laboratory assistant was brought in to work with the
animals, all of their newly acquired patterns could easily be inhibited because of the
animals' emotional reactions to the newcomer. Pavlov explained this as a disruptive
reaction caused by the animals’ investigatory reflexes, which led them to sniff around
the stranger. Current psychology tends to interpret it as the result of the changed
emotional rapport between the animal and its trainers. We can easily expand the
implications of this more modern view into the field of human relations. It points up
the fact that there are some persons who can create such immediate rapport with
others that the latter will soon give up many old habits and ways of life to conform
with new demands. There are inquisitors and investigators whose personalities so
deeply affect their victims that the victims speedily yield their secrets and accept
entirely new ways of thinking.


We can see the same thing in psychotherapy, where the development of an
emotional rapport between doctor and patient is the most important factor leading to
cure. In some cases rapport can be established immediately, in others rapport
cannot be built up at all, in most cases it develops gradually during the course of the
therapy. It is not difficult for a psychologist to test a man's "softness" and willingness
to be conditioned, and as a matter of fact the Paviovians have developed simple
questionnaires through which they can easily determine a given individual's
instability and adaptability to suggestion and brainwashing.


Pavlov found that all conditioning, no matter how strong it had been, became
inhibited through boredom or through the repetition of too weak signals. The bell
could no longer arouse salivation in the experimental dogs if it was repeated too
often or its tone was too soft. A process of unlearning took place. The result of such
internal inhibition of conditioning and the loss of conditioned reflex action is sleep.
The inhibition spreads over the entire activity of the brain cortex; the organism falls
into a hypnotic state. This explanation of the process of inhibition was one of the first
acceptable theories of sleep. An interesting psychological question is whether too
much official conditioning causes boredom and inhibition, and whether that is the
reason why the Stakhanovite movement in Russia was necessary to counteract the
loss of productivity of the people.


We can make a comparison with what happened to our prisoners of war in Korea.
Under the daily signal of dulling routine questions for every word can act as a
Pavlovian signal their minds went into a state of inhibition and diminished alertness.
This made it possible for them to give up temporarily their former democratic
conditioning and training. When they had unlearned and suppressed the democratic
way, their inquisitors could start teaching them the totalitarian philosophy. First the
old patterns have to be broken down in order to build up new conditioned reflexes.
We can imagine that boredom and repetition arouse the need to give in and to yield
to the provoking words of the enemy. Later I shall come back to the system of
negative stimuli used in conditioning for brainwashing.


27


Mass Conditioning Through Speech


According to official Pavlovian psychology, human speech is also a conditioned
reflex activity. Pavlov distinguished between stimuli of the first order, which condition
men and animals directly, and stimuli of the second order, with weaker and more
complicated conditioning qualities. In this so called second signal system, verbal
cues replace the original physical sound stimuli. Pavlov himself did not give much
attention to this second signal system. It was especially after Stalin's publication in
1950 on the significance of linguistics for mass indoctrination (as quoted by
Dobrogaev) that the Russian psychologists began to do work in this area. In his
letter, Stalin followed Engel's theory that language is the characteristic human bit of
adaptive equipment. That tone and sound in speech have a conditioning quality is
something we can verify from our own experience in listening to or in giving
commands, or in dealing with our pets. Even the symbolic and semantic meaning of
words can acquire a conditioning quality. The word "traitor," for example, provokes
direct feelings and reactions in the minds of those who hear it spoken, even if this
discriminatory label is being applied dishonestly.


Through an elaborate study on speech reflexes written by one of the leading Russian
psychologists, Dobrogaev, we get a fairly good insight into the ways in which speech
patterns and word signals are used in the service of mass conditioning, by means of
propaganda and indoctrination. The basic problems for the man tamer are rather
simple: Can man resist a government bent on conditioning him? What can the
individual do to protect his mental integrity against the power of a forceful
collectivity? Is it possible to do away with every vestige of inner resistance?


Pavlov had already explained that man's relation to the external world, and to his
fellow men, is dominated by secondary stimuli, the speech symbols. Man learns to
think in words and in the speech figures given him, and these gradually condition his
entire outlook on life and on the world. As Dobrogaev says, "Language is the means
of man's adaptation to his environment." We could rephrase that statement in this
way: man's need for communication with his fellow men interferes with his relation to
the outside world, because language and speech itself the verbal tools we use are
variable and not objective. Dobrogaev continues: "Speech manifestations represent
conditioned reflex functions of the human brain." In a simpler way we may say: he
who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the
press and radio, is master of the mind.


In the Pavlovian strategy, terrorizing force can finally be replaced by a new
organization of the means of communication. Ready made opinions can be
distributed day by day through press, radio, and so on, again and again, till they
reach the nerve cell and implant a fixed pattern of thought in the brain.
Consequently, guided public opinion is the result, according to Pavlovian
theoreticians, of good propaganda technique, and the polls a verification of the
temporary successful action of the Pavlovian machinations on the mind. Yet, the
polls may only count what people pretend to think and believe, because it is
dangerous for them to do otherwise.


28


Such is the Pavlovian device: repeat mechanically your assumptions and
suggestions diminish the opportunity of communicating dissent and opposition. This
is the simple formula for political conditioning of the masses. This is also the actual
ideal of some of our public relation machines, who thus hope to manipulate the
public into buying a special soap or voting for a special party.


The Pavlovian strategy in public relations has people conditioned more and more to
ask themselves, "What do other people think?" As a result, a common delusion is
created: people are incited to think what other people think, and thus public opinion
may mushroom out into a mass prejudice.


Expressed in psychoanalytic terms, through daily propagandistic noise backed up by
forceful verbal cues, people can more and more be forced to identify with the
powerful noisemaker. Big Brother's voice resounds in all the little brothers.


News from Red China, as reported by neutral Indian journalists (See the "New York
Times", November 27, 1954) tells us that the Chinese leaders are using this vocal
conditioning of the public to strengthen their regime. Throughout the country, radios
and loud speakers are broadcasting the official "truths." The sugary voices take
possession of people, the cultural tyranny traps their ears with loud speakers, telling
them what they may and may not do. This microphone regimentation was foreseen
by the French philosopher La Rochefoucauld, who, in the eighteenth century, said:
"A man is like a rabbit, you catch him by the ears."


During the Second World War the Nazis showed that they too were very much aware
of this conditioning power of the word. I saw their strategy at work in Holland. The
radio constantly spread political suggestions and propaganda, and people were
obliged to listen because the simple act of turning off one's radio was in itself
suspicious. I remember one day during the occupation when I was taking a bicycle
trip with some friends. We stopped off to rest at a cafe that, we later realized, was a
true Nazi nest. When the radio, which had been on ever since we arrived,
announced a speech by Hitler, everyone stood up in awe, and it was a must to take
in the verbal conditioning by the Fuhrer. My friends and I had to stand up too, and
were forced to listen to that raucous voice crackling in our ears and to summon all
our resistance against that long, boring, repetitive attack on our eardrums and minds.
Throughout the occupation, the Nazis printed tons of propaganda, Big Lies, and
distortions. They even went so far as to paint their slogans on the stoops of the
houses and in the streets. Every week newly fabricated stereotypes ogled at us as if
to convince us of the splendour of the Third Reich. But the Nazis did not know the
correct Pavlovian strategy. By satisfying their own need to discuss and to vary their
arguments in order to make them seem more logical, they only increased the
resistance of the Dutch people. This resistance was additionally fortified by the
London radio, on which the Dutch could hear the sane voice of their own legal
government. Had the Nazis not argued and justified so much, and had they been
able to prevent all written, printed, or spoken communication, the long period of
boredom would have inhibited our democratic conditioning, and we might well have
been more seduced by the Nazi oversimplifications and slogans.


29


Political Conditioning


Political conditioning should not be confused with training or persuasion or even
indoctrination. It is more than that. It is tampering. It is taking possession of both the
simplest and the most complicated nervous patterns of man. It is the battle for the
possession of the nerve cells. It is coercion and enforced conversion. Instead of
conditioning man to an unbiased facing of reality, the seducer conditions him to
catchwords, verbal stereotypes, slogans, formulas, symbols. Pavlovian strategy in
the totalitarian sense means imprinting prescribed reflexes on a mind that has been
broken down. The totalitarian wants first the required response from the nerve cells,
then control of the individual, and finally control of the masses. The system starts
with verbal conditioning and training by combining the required stereotypes with
negative or positive stimuli: pain, or reward. In the P.O.W. camps in Korea where
there was individual and mass brainwashing, the negative and positive conditioning
stimuli were usually hunger and food. The moment the soldier conformed to the party
line his food ration was improved: say yes, and I'll give you a piece of candy!


The whole gamut of negative stimuli, as we saw them in the Schwable case, consists
of physical pressure, moral pressure, fatigue, hunger, boring repetition, confusion by
seemingly logical syllogisms. Many victims of totalitarianism have told me in
interviews that the most upsetting experience they faced in the concentration camps
was the feeling of loss of logic, the state of confusion into which they had been
brought the state in which nothing had any validity. They had arrived at the Pavlovian
state of inhibition, which psychiatrists call mental disintegration or depersonalization.
It seemed as if they had unlearned all their former responses and had not yet
adopted new ones. But in reality they simply did not know what was what.


The Pavlovian theory translated into a political method, as a way of levelling the
mind (the Nazis called it "Gleichschaltung") is the stock in trade of totalitarian
countries. Some psychiatric points are of interest because we see that Pavlovian
training can be used successfully only when special mental conditions prevail. In
order to tame people into the desired pattern, victims must be brought to a point
where they have lost their alert consciousness and mental awareness. Freedom of
discussion and free intellectual exchange hinder conditioning. Feelings of terror,
feelings of fear and hopelessness, of being alone, of standing with one's back to the
wall, must be instilled.


The treatment of American prisoners of war in the Korean P.O.W. camps followed
just such a pattern. They were compelled to listen to lectures and other forms of daily
word barrage. The very fact that they did not understand the lectures and were bored
by the long sessions inhibited their democratic training, and conditioned them to
swallow passively the bitter doctrinal diet, for the prisoners were subjected not only
to a political training program, but also to an involuntary taming program. To some
degree the Communist propaganda lectures were directed toward retraining the
prisoners’ minds. This training our soldiers could reject, but the endless repetitions
and the constant sloganizing, together with the physical hardships and deprivations
the prisoners suffered, caused an UNCONSCIOUS TAMING and conditioning,
against which only previously built up inner strength and awareness could help.


30


There is still another reason why our soldiers were sometimes trapped by the
Communist conditioning. Experiments with animals and experiences with human
beings have taught us that threat, tension, and anxiety, in general, may accelerate
the establishment of conditioned responses, particularly when those responses tend
to diminish fear and panic (Spence and Farber). The emergency of prison camp life
and mental torture provide ideal circumstances for such conditioning. The responses
can develop even when the victim is completely unaware that he is being influenced.
Thus, many of our soldiers developed automatic responses of which they remained
completely unconscious (Segal). But this is only one side of the coin, for experience
has also shown that people who know what to expect under conditions of mental
pressure can develop a so called perceptual defense, which protects them from
being influenced. This means that the more familiar people are with the concepts of
thought control and menticide, the more they understand the nature of the
propaganda barrage directed against them, the more inner resistance they can put
up, even though inevitably some of the inquisitor's suggestions will leak through the
barrier of conscious mental defense.


Our understanding of the conditioning process leads us also to an understanding of
some of the paradoxical reactions found among victims of concentration camps and
other prisoners. Often those with a rigid, simple belief were better able to withstand
the continual barrage against their minds than were the flexible, sophisticated ones,
full of doubt and inner conflicts. The simple man with deep rooted, freely absorbed
religious faith could exert a much greater inner resistance than could the complex,
questioning intellectualist. The refined intellectual is much more handicapped by the
internal pros and cons.


In totalitarian countries, where belief in Pavlovian strategy has assumed grotesque
proportions, the self thinking, subjective man has disappeared. There is an utter
rejection of any attempt at persuasion or discussion. Individual self expression is
taboo. Private affection is taboo.


Peaceful exchange of free thoughts in free conversation will disturb the conditioned
reflexes and is therefore taboo. No longer are there any brains, only conditioned
patterns and educated muscles. In such a taming system neurotic compulsion is
looked upon as a positive asset instead of something pathological. The mental
automaton becomes the ideal of education.


Yet the Soviet theoreticians themselves are often unaware of this, and many of them
do not realize the dire consequences of subjecting man to a completely mechanistic
conditioning. They themselves are often just as frightened as we are by the picture of
the perfectly functioning human robot. This is what one of their psychologists says:
"The entire reactionary nature of this approach to man is completely clear. Man is an
automaton who can be caused to act as one wills! This is the ideal of capitalism!
Behold the dream of capitalism the world over a working class without
consciousness, which cannot think for itself, whose actions can be trained according
to the whim of the exploiter! This is the reason why it is in America, the bulwark of
present day capitalism, that the theory of man as a robot has been so vigorously
developed and so stubbornly held to." (Bauer)


31


Western psychology and psychiatry, although acknowledging its debt to Paviov as a
great pioneer who made important contributions to our understanding of behaviour,
takes a much less mechanical view of man than do the Soviet Pavlovians. It is
apparent to us that their simple explanation of training ignores and rejects the
concept of purposeful adaptation and the question of the goals to which this training
is directed. Western experimental psychologists tend to see the conditioned reflex as
developing fully only in the service of gratifying basic instinctual needs or of avoiding
pain, that is, only when the whole organism is concerned in the activity. In that
complicated process of response to the world, conscious, and especially
unconscious, drives and motivations play a role.


All training, of which the conditioned response is only one example, is an
automatization of actions which were originally consciously learned and thought
over. The ideal of Western democratic psychology is to train men into independence
and maturity by enlisting their conscious aid, awareness, and volition in the learning
process. The ideal of the totalitarian psychology, on the other hand, is to tame men,
to make them willing tools in the hands of their leaders. Like training, taming has the
purpose of making actions automatic; unlike training, it does not require the
conscious participation of the learner. Both training and taming are energy and
timesaving devices, and in both the mystery of the psyche is hidden in the
purposefulness of the responses. The automatization of functions in man saves him
expenditure of energy but can make him weaker when encountering new
unexpected challenges.


Cultural routinization and habit formation by local rules and myths make of
everybody a partial automaton. National and racial prejudices are acted out
unwittingly. Group hatred often bursts out almost automatically when triggered by
slogans and catchwords. In a totalitarian world, this narrow disciplinarian
conditioning is done more "perfectly" and more "ad absurdum."


32


The Urge to Be Conditioned


One suggestion this chapter is not intended to convey is that Pavlovian conditioning
as such is something wrong. This kind of conditioning occurs everywhere where
people are together in common interaction. The speaker influences the listener, but
the listener also the speaker. Through the process of conditioning people often learn
to like and to do what they are allowed to like and do. The more isolated the group,
the stricter the conditioning that takes place in those belonging to the group. In some
groups one finds people more capable than others of conveying suggestion and
bringing about conditioning. Gradually one can discern the stronger ones, the better
adjusted ones, the more experienced ones, and those noisier ones, whose ability to
condition others is strongest. Every group, every club, every society has its leading
Pavlovian Bell. This kind of person imprints his inner bell ringing on others. He can
even develop a system of monolithic bell ringing: no other influential bell is allowed to
compete with him.


Another subtler question belongs to these problems. Why is there in us so great an
urge to be conditioned, the urge to learn, to imitate, to conform, and to follow the
pattern of family and group? This urge to be conditioned, to submit to the communal
pattern and the family pattern must be related to man's dependency on parents and
fellow men. Animals are not so dependent on one another. In the whole animal
kingdom man is one of the most helpless and naked beings. But among the animals
man has, relatively, the longest youth and time for learning.


Puzzlement and doubt, which inevitably arise in the training process, are the
beginnings of mental freedom. Of course, the initial puzzlement and doubt is not
enough. Behind that there has to be faith in our democratic freedoms and the will to
fight for it. I hope to come back to this central problem of faith in moral freedom as
differentiated from conditioned loyalty and servitude in the last chapter. Puzzlement
and doubt are, however, already crimes in the totalitarian state. The mind that is
open for questions is open for dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting,
inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only
allowed to memorize, to salivate when the bell rings.


It is not my task here to elaborate on the subject of the biased use of Pavlovian rules
by totalitarians, but without doubt part of the interpretation of any psychology is
determined by the ways we think about our fellow human beings and man's place in
nature. If our ideal is to make conditioned zombies out of people, the current misuse
of Paviovianism will serve our purpose. But once we become even vaguely aware
that in the totalitarian picture of man the characteristic human note is missing, and
when see that in such a scheme man sacrifices his instinctual desires, his pleasures,
his aims, his goals, his creativity, his instinct for freedom, his paradoxicality, we
immediately turn against this political perversion of science. Such use of Pavlovian
technique is aimed only at developing the automaton in man, not his free alert mind
that is aware of moral goals and aims in life.


33


Even in laboratory animals we have found that affective goal directedness can spoil
the Pavlovian experiment. When, during a bell food training session, the dog's
beloved master entered the room, the animal lost all its previous conditioning and
began to bark excitedly. Here is a simple example of an age old truth: love and
laughter break through all rigid conditioning. The rigid automaton cannot exist
without spontaneous self expression. Apparently, the fact that the dog's spontaneous
affection for his master could ruin all the mechanical calculations and manipulations
never occurred to Pavlov's totalitarian students.

[admin]

CHAPTER THREE: MEDICATION INTO SUBMISSION

As we have already seen in the preceding chapters, it is not only the political and
Pavlovian pressure that may drag down man's mind into servile submissiveness.
There are many other human habits and actions which have a coercive influence.

All kinds of rumours have been circulated telling how brainwashees, before
surrendering to their inquisitor, have been poisoned with mysterious drugs. This
chapter aims to describe what medical techniques -- not only drugs -- can do to
reach behind man's inner secrets. Actually the thought-control police no longer need
drugs, though occasionally they have been used.

I will touch upon another side to this problem as well, namely, our dangerous social
dependence on various drugs, the problem of addiction, making it easier for us to
slip into the pattern of submissiveness. The alcoholic has no mental backbone any
more when you give him his drink. The same is true for the chronic user of sedatives
or other pills. The use of alcohol or drugs may result in a chemical dependency,
weakening our stamina under exceptional circumstances.

In the field of practical medicine, magic thinking is still rampant. Though we flatter
ourselves that we are rational and logical in our choice of therapy, somewhere we
know that hidden feelings and unconscious motivations direct the prescribing hand.
In spite of the therapeutic triumphs of the last fifty years (since 1900), the era of
chemotherapy and antibiotics, let us not forget that the same means of medical
victory can be used to defeat our purposes.

No day passes that the mail does not flood the doctor's office with suggestions about
what to use in his clinical practice. My desk overflows with gadgets and
multicoloured pills telling me that without them mankind cannot be happy. The
propaganda campaign reaching our medical eyes and ears is often so laden with
suggestions that we can be persuaded to distribute sedatives and stimulants where
straight critical thinking would deter us and we would seek the deeper causes of the
difficulties. This is true not only for modern pharmacotherapy; the same tendencies
can also be shown in psychotherapeutic methods.

This chapter aims to approach the problem of mental coercion with the question:
How compulsive can the use of medical drugs and medical and psychological
methods become? In the former chapters on menticide I was able to describe
political attempts to bring the human mind into submission and servility. Drugs and
their psychological equivalents are also able to enslave people.


35


The Search for Ecstasy Through Drugs


Among drug addicts of all sorts we repeatedly encounter the yearning for a special
ecstatic and euphoric mood, a feeling of living beyond everyday trouble. "Thou has
the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty opium!" Thomas De Quincey says, in
his "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater." Although the ecstatic state is different
for each person who experiences it, the addict always tells us that the drug takes him
to the lost paradise he is looking for; it brings him a feeling of eternal euphoria and
free elation that takes him past the restrictions of life and time.


In the ecstatic state, man arranges the universe according to his own desires and, at
the same time, seeks communion with the Higher Order of things. But the ecstatic
state has its negative as well as its positive aspects. It may represent the Yogi's
mystic feeling of unity with the universe, but it may also mean the chronic intoxicated
state of the drunkard or the passion of some manic psychotic states. The feeling may
express the intensified spiritual experience of a dedicated study group, but, on the
other hand, it may be encountered in the lynch mob and the riot. There are many
kinds of ecstasy -- aesthetic ecstasy, mystic ecstasy, and sick, toxic ecstasy.


The search for ecstatic experience is not only an individual search, it often reaches
out to encompass whole groups. When moral controls become too burdensome,
whole civilizations may give themselves up to uncontrolled orgies such as we saw in
the Greek Bacchanalia and the contagious dance-fury of the Middle Ages. In these
mass orgies, artificial stimulants are not necessarily used. The hypnotic influence of
being part of the crowd can induce the same loss of control and sense of union with
the outside world that we associate with drugs. In the mass orgy the individual loses
his conscience and self-control. His sexual inhibitions may disappear; he is
temporarily relieved of his deep frustrations and the burden of unconscious guilt. He
endeavours to experience the blissful sensations of utter yielding to his own body
needs and desires.


The ecstatic participation in mass elation is the oldest psychodrama in the world.
Taking part in some common action results in a tremendous emotional relief and
catharsis for every individual in the group. This feeling of participation in the magic
omnipotent group, of reunion and communion with the all-embracing forces in the
world brings euphoria to the normal person and feelings of pseudo-strength to the
weak. The demagogue who is able to provide such ecstatic release in the masses
can be sure of their yielding to his influence and power. Dictators love to organize
such mass rituals in the service of their dictatorial aims.


Ever since man has been a conscious being, he has tried from time to time to break
down the inevitable tension between himself and the outside world. When mental
alertness cannot be relaxed now and then, when the world is too much and too
constantly with him, man may try to lose himself in the deep waters of oblivion.
Ecstasy, drugged sleep, and its fantasies and swoons of mental exaltation
temporarily take him beyond the burdensome effort of keeping his senses and ego
alert and intact. Drugs can bring him to this state, and any addiction may be
explained as a continuing need to escape.


36


The body cooperates with the mind in this search for an evasion of life, and drugs
gradually become a body need as well as an emotional necessity.


In criminal circles addicting drugs like cocaine and heroin are often given to
members of the gang in order to make them more submissive to the leader who
distributes them. The man who provides the drug becomes almost a god to the
members of the gang. They will go through hell in order to acquire the drug they so
desperately need.


In the hands of a powerful tyrant, this medication into dependency can become
extremely dangerous. It is not unthinkable that a diabolical dictator might want to use
addiction as a means of bringing a rebellious people into submission. In May, 1954,
during a discussion in the World Health Organization, the fact was disclosed that
Communist China, while forbidding the use of opium in her own country, was
smuggling and exporting it in great quantities to her neighbours, who have
consequently been compelled to carry on a constant struggle against opium
addiction among their own people and against the passivity which results from use of
the drug.


At the same time, according to officials of Thailand who made the charge and
requested U.N. aid, Communist China has been sending all kinds of subversive
propagandists into Thailand. Thailand charged that the Chinese were using every
device they know to infect the Siamese people with their ideology: brainweakening
opium addiction, leaflets, radio, whispering campaigns, and so on.


The Nazis followed a similar strategy. During the occupation of Western Europe,
they created an artificial shortage of normal medicaments by halting their usual
export of healing drugs to the "inferior" countries. However, they made an exception
in the case of barbiturates. In Holland, for example, these drugs were made readily
available in many drugstores without doctors' prescriptions, a situation which was
against customary Dutch law. Although the right therapeutic drugs were not made
available for medical work, the drugs which created passivity, dependence, and
lethargy were widely distributed.


The totalitarian dictator knows that drugs can be his helpers. It was Hitler's intention,
in his so-called biological warfare, to weaken and subdue the countries that
surrounded the Third Reich, and to break their backbones for good. Hunger and
addiction were among his most valuable tools.


What has all this to do with the growing addiction and alcoholism in our own country?
I have already mentioned the alarming increases in death from barbiturates. But I
would like to emphasize even more the psychological and political consequences.
Democracy and freedom end where slavery and submission to drugs and alcohol
begin. Democracy involves free, self-chosen activity and understanding; it means
mature self-control and independence. Any man who escapes from reality through
the use of alcohol and drugs is no longer a free agent; he is no longer able to exert
any voluntary control over his mind and his actions. He is no longer a self-
responsible individual. Alcoholism and drug addiction prepare the pattern of mental
submission so beloved by the totalitarian brainwasher.


37


Hypnotism and Mental Coercion


From time immemorial those who wanted to know the inner workings of the other
fellow's mind in order to exert pressure on him have used artificial means to find the
hidden pathways to his most private thoughts. Modern brainwashers, too, have tried
all kinds of drugs to arrive at their devious objectives. The primitive medicine man
had several methods of compelling his victim to lose his self-control and reserve.
Alcoholic drinks, toxic ointments, or permeating holy smoke which had a narcotizing
effect, as used by the Mayas, for example, were used to bring people into such a
state of rapture that they lost their self-awareness and restraint. The victims,
murmuring sacred words, often revealed their self-accusing fantasies or even their
deepest secrets.


In the Middle Ages, so-called witch ointments were used either voluntarily or under
pressure. These ointments were supposed to bring the anointed into touch with the
devil. Since they contained opiates and belladonna in large quantities, which could
have been absorbed by the skin, modern science can explain the ecstatic visions
they evoked as the typical hallucination-provoking effect of these drugs.


One of the first useful techniques medicine delivered into the hands of the prier - into
souls was the knowledge of hypnosis, that intensified mental suggestion that makes
people give up their own will and brings them into a strange dependency on the
hypnotizer. The Egyptian doctors of three thousand years ago knew the technique of
hypnosis, and ancient records tell us that they practiced it.


There are many quacks who practice hypnosis, not to cure their victims but to force
them into submission, using the victim's unconscious ties and dependency needs in
a criminal, profitable way. One of the most absorbing aspects of this whole problem
of hypnosis is the question of whether people can be forced to commit crimes, such
as murder or treason, while under a hypnotic spell. Many psychologists would deny
that such a thing could happen and would insist that no person can be compelled to
do under hypnosis what he would refuse to do in a state of alert consciousness. But
actually what a person can be compelled to do depends on the degree of
dependency that hypnosis causes and the frequency of repetition of the so-called
posthypnotic suggestions.


Actual psychoanalysis teaches that there even exist several other devices to live
other people's lives. True, no hypnotizer can take away a man's conscience and
inner resistance immediately, but he can arouse the latent murderous wishes which
may become active in his victim's unconscious by continual suggestion and continual
playing upon those deeply repressed desires. Actual knowledge of methods used in
brainwashing and menticide proves that all this can be done.


If the hypnotizer persists long enough and cleverly enough, he can be successful in
his aim. There are many antisocial desires lying hidden in all people. The hypnotic
technique, if cleverly enough applied, can bring them to the surface and cause them
to be acted out in life.


38


The mass criminality of the guards in concentration camps finds part of its
explanation in the hypnotizing influence of the totalitarian state and its criminal
dictator. Psychological study of criminals shows that their first violation of moral and
legal codes often takes place under the strong influence and suggestion of other
criminals. This we may look upon as an initial form of hypnosis, which is a more
intensified form of suggestion.


True, the incitement to crime in a hypnotic state demands specially favourable
conditions, but unfortunately these conditions can be found in the real and actual
world.


Recently there has been much judicial discussion of the problem of the psychiatrist
who uses his special knowledge of suggestion to force a confession from a
defendant. Such a psychiatrist is going beyond the commonly accepted concepts of
the limitations of psychiatry and beyond psychiatric ethics. He is misusing the
patient's trust in the medical confidant and therapist in order to provoke a confession,
which will then be used against the patient temporarily in his care. In so doing, the
doctor not only acts against his Hippocratic oath, in which he promised only to work
for the good of his patients and never to disclose his professional secrets, he also
violates the constitutional safeguards accorded a defendant by the Fifth Amendment
of the United States Constitution, which protects a man against self-incrimination.
What a defendant will reveal under hypnosis depends on his conscious and
unconscious attitudes toward the entire question of magic influence and mental
intrusion by another person. People are usually less likely to stand on their legal
rights in dealing with a doctor than in dealing with a lawyer or a policeman. They
have a yielding attitude because they expect magic help.


An interesting example of this can be seen in a case that was recently decided by
the Supreme Court. In 1950, Camilio Weston Leyra, a man in his fifties, was arrested
and accused by the police of the brutal hammer murder of his aged parents in their
Brooklyn flat ("People v. Leyra"). At first, under prolonged questioning by the police,
Leyra denied any knowledge of the crime and stated that he had not even been at
his parents' home on the day of the murder. Later, after further interrogation by the
police, he said he had been at their home that day, but he remained firm in his denial
of the murder. He was detained in jail, and a psychiatrist was brought in to talk to
him. Their conversation was recorded on tape. The psychiatrist told Leyra that he
was "his doctor," although in fact he was not. Under slight hypnosis and after
continued suggestion that Leyra would be better off if he admitted to having
committed the murder in a fit of passion, Leyra agreed to confess to the crime. The
police were called back in, and the confession was taken down.


During his trial, Leyra repudiated the confession, insisting that he had been under
hypnosis. He was convicted, but the conviction was set aside on the grounds that the
confession had been wrested from him involuntarily, and that his constitutional
safeguards had been denied him. Later, Leyra was brought to trial and convicted a
second time. Finally his case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed
the conviction in June, 1954, on the grounds that mental pressure and coercive
psychiatric techniques had been used to induce the confession. The Supreme Court
gave its opinion here, indirectly, of the responsibility of the brainwashed P.O.W.


39


For us, the question of Leyra's guilt or innocence is less important than the fact that
under mental pressure he was induced to do what he would ordinarily have resisted
doing, and that his confidence in the doctor, which led him to relax the defences he
would doubtless have put up against other investigators, was used to break him
down.


Suggestion and hypnosis are considered by some to be a psychological blessing,
but they can also be the beginning of terror. Mass hypnosis, for example, can have a
dangerous influence on the individual. Psychiatrists have found several times that
public demonstrations of mass hypnosis may provoke an increased hypnotic
dependency and submissiveness in many members of the audience that can last for
years. Largely for this reason Great Britain has passed a law making séances and
mass hypnotism illegal. Hypnosis may act as a trigger mechanism for a repressed
dependency need in the victim and turn him temporarily into a kind of waking sleep-
walker and mental slave. The hypnotic command relieves him of his personal
responsibility, and he surrenders much of his conscience to his hypnotizer. As we
mentioned before, our own times have provided us with far too many examples of
how political hypnosis, mob hypnosis, and even war hypnosis can turn civilized men
into criminals.


Some personalities are more amenable to hypnosis than others. Strong egos can
defend themselves for a long time against mental intrusion, but they too may have a
point of surrender. There are overtly critical persons who are much less sensitive to
suggestion from the outside than to images from within themselves. We can
distinguish between heterosuggestive and autosuggestive personalities, although
quite a variety of reactions to hypnosis and suggestion can be distinguished. But
even these autosuggestive types, if subjected to enough pressure, will gradually
build up internal justification for giving in to mental coercion.


Those "charming" characters who are easily able to influence others are often
extremely susceptible to suggestion themselves. Some personalities with a
tremendous gift for empathy and identification provoke in others the desire to yield
up all their secrets; they seem somehow to be the Father Confessor by the grace of
God. Other emphatic types, by reflecting their own deceitful inner world, can more
easily provoke the hidden lies and fantasies in their victims. Still others make us
close up completely. Why one man should inspire the desire to give in and another
the desire to resist is one of the mysteries of human relationships and contact. Why
do certain personalities complement and reinforce one another while others clash
and destroy one another? Psychoanalysis has given new insight into those strange
human relations and involvements.

Needling for the Truth


During the Second World war, the technique of the so-called truth serum (the
popular name for narco-analysis) was developed to help soldiers who had broken
down under the strain of battle. Through narco-analysis by means of injections of
sedatives, they could be brought to remember and reveal the hyper-emotional and
traumatic moments of their war experiences that had driven them into acute anxiety
neurosis. Gradually a useful mental first-aid technique was developed which helped
the unconscious to reveal its secrets while the patient was under the influence of the
narcotic.


How does the truth serum work? The principle is simple: after an injection, the mind
in a kind of half-sleep is unable to control its secrets, and it may let them slip from
the hidden reservoirs of frustration and repression into the half-conscious mind. In
certain acute anxiety cases, such enforced provocation may alleviate the anxieties
and pressures that have led to breakdown. But narco-analysis often does not work.
Sometimes the patient's mind resents this chemical intrusion and enforced
intervention, and such a situation often obstructs the way for deeper and more useful
psychotherapy.


The fear of unexpected mental intrusion and coercion may be pathological in
character. When I first published my concept of menticide and brainwashing, I
received dozens of letters and phone calls from people who were convinced that
some outside person was trying to influence them and direct their thoughts. This
form of "mental intrusion delusion" may be the early stage of a serious psychosis in
which the victim has already regressed to primitive magic feelings. In this state the
whole outside world is seen and felt as participating in what is going on in the victim's
mind. There is, as it were, no real awareness of the frontiers between "I", the person,
and the world. Such fear-ridden persons are in constant agony because they feel
themselves the victims of many mysterious influences which they cannot check or
cope with; they feel continually endangered. Psychologically, their fear of intrusion
from the outside can be partially explained as a fear of the intrusion of their own
fantasies from the inside, from the unconscious. They are frightened by their own
hidden, unconscious thoughts which they can no longer check.


It would be a vast oversimplification to stick an easy psychiatric label on all such
feelings of mental persecution, for there are many real, outside mental pressures in
our world, and there are many perfectly normal people who are continually aware of
and disturbed by the barrage of stimuli directed at their minds through propaganda,
advertising, radio, television, the movies, the newspapers -- all the gibbering
maniacs whose voices never stop. These people suffer because a cold, mechanical,
shouting world is knocking continually at the doors of their minds and disturbing their
feelings of privacy and personal integrity.


41


There is the further question of whether or not the drugs used in the truth serum
always produce the desired effect of compelling the patient to tell the inner truth.
Experiments conducted at Yale University in 1951 (J. M. MacDonald) on nine
persons who received intravenous injections of sodium amatol -- the so-called truth
serum -- showed interesting results, tending to weaken our faith in this drug.


Each of the patients, prior to the injection, had been suggested a false story related
to a historical period about which he was going to be questioned. The experimenters
knew both the true and the false story. Let me quote from the report: "It is of interest
that the three subjects diagnosed as normal maintained their [suggested] stories. Of
the six subjects diagnosed as neurotic, two promptly revealed the true story; two
made partial admissions, consisting of a complex pattern of fantasy and truth; one
communicated what most likely was a fantasy as truth; and the one obsessive-
compulsive individual maintained his cover story except for one parapraxia (faulty or
blundering action)."


In several cases, American law courts have refused to admit as evidence the results
of truth serum tests, largely on the basis of psychiatric conviction that the truth serum
treatment is misnamed; that, in fact, narco-analysis is no guarantee of getting at the
truth. It may even be used as a coercive threat in cases where victims are not aware
of it limited action.


Still another danger, more closely related to our subject, is that a criminal
investigator can induce and communicate his own thoughts and feelings to his
victim. Thus the truth serum may cause the patient with a weak ego to yield to the
interventionist's synthetically injected thoughts and interpretations in exactly the
same way the victim of hypnosis may take over the suggestions implanted by the
hypnotist.


Additionally, this method of inquisition by drugs contains some physical danger. I
myself have seen cases of thrombosis develop as a result of intravenous medication
of barbiturates.


Experiments with mescaline, which started thirty years ago (in the 1920s), are
suddenly fashionable again. Aldous Huxley in his recent book THE DOORS OF
PERCEPTION described the artificial chemical paradise which he experienced after
taking the drug (also known as peyote). It can stimulate all kinds of pleasant,
subjective symptoms, but these are, nevertheless, delusive in character. I do not
want to start a clinical argument with another author, yet his own euphoric ecstatic
reactions to mescaline are not necessarily the same as those other people
experience. Mescaline is dangerous stuff when not used under medical control. And,
anyway, why does Mr. Huxley want to sell artificial heavens?


There is a very serious social danger in all these methods of chemical intrusion into
the mind. True, they can be used as a careful aid to psychotherapy, but they can
also be frightening instruments of control in the hands of men with an overwhelming
drive to power.


42


In addition, they fortify more than ever in our "aspirin age" the fiction that we have to
use miracle drugs in order to become free-acting agents. The propaganda for
chemical elation, for artificial ecstasy and pseudo-nirvanic experience contains an
invitation to men to become chemical dependents, and chemical dependents are
weak people who can be made use of by any tyrannical political potentate. The
actual propaganda carried on among general practitioners using treatment with all
kinds of anxieties and mental disturbances with new drugs has the same kind of
dangerous implications.


43


The Lie-Detector


Hypnotism and narco-analysis are only two of the current devices that can be
misused as instruments of enforced intrusion into the mind. The lie-detector, which
has already been used as a tool for mental intimidation, is another. This apparatus,
useful for psychobiological experimentation, can indicate -- through writing down
meticulously the changes in the psychogalvanic reflex -- that the human guinea pig
under investigation reacts more emotionally to certain questions than to others. True,
this overreaction may be the reaction to having told a lie, but it may also be an
innocent person's reaction to an emotion-laden situation or even to an increased fear
of unjust accusation.


The interpersonal processes between interrogator and testee have just as much
influence on the emotional reactions and the changes in the galvanic reflex as
feelings of inner guilt and confusion. This experiment only indicates inner turmoil and
hidden repressions, with all their doubts and ambiguities.


It is not in fact a lie-detector, although it is used as such (D. MacDonald). As a matter
of fact, the pathological liar and the psychopathic, conscienceless personality may
show less reaction to this experiment than do normal people. The lie-detector is
more likely to become a tool of coercion in the hands of men who look more for a
powerful magic in every instrument than a means of getting at the truth. As a result,
even the innocent can be fooled into false confession.


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The Therapist as an Instrument of Coercion


Medical therapy and psychotherapy are the subtle sciences of human guidance in
periods of physical and emotional stress. Just as training requires the alert, well
planned participation of both student and teacher, so successful psychotherapy
requires the alert, well-planned participation of both patient and doctor. And just as
educational training, under special conditions, can degenerate into coercive taming,
so therapy can degenerate into the imposition of the doctor's will on his patient. The
doctor himself need not even be conscious that this is happening. The misuse of
therapy may show itself in the patient's submission to the doctor's point of view or in
the patient's development of excessive dependency on his therapist. Such a
dependency, and even increased dependency need, may extend not only far beyond
the usual limits, but may continue even after the therapy has run its course.


I have seen quacks whose only knowledge was where to buy their couches. By
calling themselves psychoanalysts they were able to gratify their own need to live
other people's lives. Eventually the law will have to establish standards which can
keep these dangerous intruders from psychotherapeutic practice. But even the
honest, conscientious therapist has a serious moral problem to face. His profession
itself continually encourages him, indeed obliges him, to make his patients
temporarily dependent on him, and this may appeal to his own need for a sense of
importance and power. He must be continually aware of the impact his statements
and deductions have on his patients who often listen in awe to the doctor who is for
them the omniscient magician. The therapist must not encourage this submissive
attitude in his patients -- though in some phases of treatment it will help the therapy -
- for good psychotherapy aims toward educating man for freedom and maturity not
for conforming submission.


The practitioners of psychology and psychiatry are now much more aware of the
responsibility their profession imposes on them than they have ever been heretofore.
The tools of psychology are dangerous in the hands of the wrong men.


Modern educational methods can be applied in therapy to streamline man's brain
and change his opinions so that his thinking conforms with certain ideological
systems. Medicine and psychiatry may become more and more involved in political
strategy as we have seen in the strategy of brainwashing, and for this reason
psychologists and psychiatrists must become more aware of the nature of the
scientific tools they use.


The emphasis on therapeutic techniques, on students knowing all the facts and the
tricks, the overemphasis on psychotherapeutic diplomas and labels lead actual
therapy toward conformism and rationalization of principles that are in contrast to the
personal sensitivity needed. Our critical and rational faculty can be a destructive one,
destroying or disguising our basic doubts and ambivalences born out of tragic
despair, that creator of human sensitivity.


45


The danger of modern psychotherapy (and psychiatry) is the tendency toward
formalizing human intuition and empathy, and toward making an abstraction of
emotion and spontaneity. It is a contradiction to attempt to mechanize love and
beauty. If this were possible, we would find ourselves in a world where there is no
inspiration and ecstasy but only cold understanding.


Every human relationship can be used for the wrong or the right aims, and this is
especially true of the relationship of subtle unconscious ties which exist between
psychotherapist and patient. This statement is equally true for medicine in general;
the surgeon, too, thrives on strong ties with his patients and their willing submission
to his surgical techniques. Experiences in therapy have taught us that faulty
technique can give the patient feelings of being bogged down. Sometimes patients
feel as if they have to remain living in servile submission to the doctor. I have seen
whole families and sects swear by such modern witch doctors.


No wonder that sound psychoanalytic instruction requires the therapist to admit
himself for years of technique he is about to apply to others, so that, armed with
knowledge of his own unsound unconscious needs, he will not try to use his
profession to mastermind other people's lives.


Various psychological agencies, with their different psychological concepts and
techniques, such as family counselling, religious guidance, management counselling,
and so forth, can easily be misused as tools of power. The good will that people
invest in their leaders, doctors, and administrators is tremendous and can be used
as a weapon against them. Even modern brain surgery for healing the mind could be
misused by modern dictators to make zombies out of their competitors. Psychology
itself may tend to standardize the mind, and the tendency among different schools of
psychology to emphasize orthodoxy increases unwittingly the chance for mental
coercion. ("If you don't talk my magic gobbledygook, I have to condition you to it.") It
is easier to manipulate the minds of others than to avoid doing so.


A free society gives its citizens the right to act as free agents. At the same time, it
imposes on them the responsibility for maintaining their freedom, mental as well as
political. If, through the use of modern medical, chemical, and mechanical
techniques of mental intrusion, we reduce man's capacity to act on his own initiative,
we subvert our own beliefs and weaken our free system. Just as there is a deliberate
political brainwashing, so there can be a suggestive intrusion masquerading under
the name of justice or therapy. This may be less obtrusive than the deliberate
totalitarian attack, but it is no less dangerous.


Medication into submission is an existing fact. Man can use his knowledge of the
mind of a fellow being not to help him, but to hurt him and bog him down. The
magician can increase his power by increasing the anxieties and fears of his victim,
by exploiting his dependency needs, and by provoking his feelings of guilt and
inferiority.


Drugs and medical techniques can be used to make man a submissive and


conforming being. This we have to keep in mind in order to be able to make him
really healthy and free.


46

[admin]

CHAPTER FOUR: WHY DO THEY YIELD? THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF FALSE CONFESSION

Is there a bridge from the concept of Pavlovian conditioning to deeper psychological
understanding? Only in those Pavlovian theoreticians who deny modern depth
psychology does there exist a conflict between concepts. Paviov himself
acknowledged the presence of deeper, hidden motivations in man and the limitations
of his study of animal behaviour.


Our task is to go back to the brainwashee, asking ourselves: How can we better
convey an understanding of what happened to him? What were the Pavlovian
circumstances, and what were the inner motivations to yield to enforced political
manipulation of the mind? Was it cowardice, was it a prison psychosis, was it the
general loss of mental stamina in our world?


In the following observations and experiences I hope to make use of the clinical
insight actually provided by modern depth psychology.


The Upset Philosopher


One day in 1672, the lonely philosopher of reason, Spinoza, had to be forcibly
restrained by his friends and neighbours. He wanted to rush out into the streets and
shout his indignation at the mob which had murdered his good friend Jan De Witt,
noble statesman of the Dutch Republic, who had been falsely accused of treason.
But presently he calmed down and retreated to his room where, as usual, he ground
optical lenses according to a daily and hitherto unbroken routine.


As he worked, he thought back to his own behaviour, which had been no more
rational or sensible than the behaviour of the rioting crowd which had killed De Witt.
It was then that Spinoza realized the existence of the emotional beast hidden
beneath human reason, which, when aroused, can act in a wanton and destructive
fashion, and can conjure up thousands of justifications and excuses for its behaviour.
For, aS Spinoza sensed, and as was later discovered, people are not the rational
creatures they think they are. In the unconscious, that vast storehouse of deeply
buried memories, emotions, and strivings, lie many irrational yearnings, which
constantly influence the conscious acts. All of us are governed to some degree by
this hidden tyrant, and by the conflict between our reason and our emotions.


To the extent that we are the victims of unchecked unconscious drives, to that extent
we may be vulnerable to mental manipulation.


47


And although there is a horrifying fascination in the idea that our mental resistance is
relatively weak, that the very quality which distinguishes one man from another - the
individual "I". can be profoundly altered by psychological pressures, such
transformations are merely extremes of a process we find operating in normal life.
Through systematized suggestion, subtle propaganda, and more overt mass
hypnosis, the human mind in its expressions is changed daily in any society.
Advertising seduces the democratic citizen into using quackeries or one special
brand of soap instead of another. Our wish to buy things is continually stimulated.
Campaigning politicians seek to influence us by their glamour as well as by their
programs. Fashion experts hypnotize us into periodic changes of our standards of
beauty and good taste.


In cases of menticide, however, this assault on the integrity of the human mind is
more direct and premeditated. By playing on the irrational child lying hidden in the
unconscious and by sharpening the internal conflict between reason and emotion,
the inquisitor can bring his victims to abject surrender.


All of the victims of deliberate menticide - the P.O.W.s in Korea, the imprisoned
"traitors" to the dictatorial regimes of the Iron Curtain countries, the victims of the
Nazi terror during the Second World War -- are people whose ways of life had been
suddenly and dramatically altered. They had been torn from their homes, their
families, their friends, and thrown into a frightening, abnormal atmosphere. The very
strangeness of their surroundings made them more vulnerable to any attack on their
values and attitudes. When the dictator exploits his victim's psychological needs in a
threatening, hostile, and unfamiliar world, breakdown is almost sure to follow.


48


The Barbed-Wire Disease


Already during the First World War, peculiar mental reactions, mixtures of apathy
and rage, could be discerned in prisoners of war as a defensive adjustment against
the hardships of prison life, the boredom, the hunger, the lack of privacy, the
continual insecurity. The Korean War added to this situation the greater cruelty of the
enemy, the prolonged fear of death, malnutrition, diseases, systematic attacks on the
prisoner's mind, the lack of sanitation, and the lack of all human dignity.


Often improvement could be secured through acceptance of the totalitarian ideology.
The psychological pressure not only led to an involvement with the enemy but
caused mutual suspicion among the prisoners.


As I have already described, the barbed-wire disease begins with the initial apathy
and despair of all prisoners. There is passive surrender to fate. In fact, people can
die out of such despair; it is as if all resistance was gone. Being anything but aloof
and apathetic was even dangerous in a camp where the enemy wanted to debate
and argue with you in order to tear down your mental resistance. Consequently a
vicious circle was built up of apathy, not thinking, letting things go -- a surrender to a
complete zombie-like existence of mechanical dependency on the circumstances.
Every sign of anger and alertness could be brutally punished by the enemy; that is
why we do not find those sudden attacks of rage that were observed in the earlier
prisoner-of-war camps during World Wars I and Il.


Results of psychological testing of the liberated soldiers from the Korean P.O.W.
camps could indicate that this defensive apathy and retreat into secluded
dependency was likely to be found in nearly all of them. Yet, after being brought
back into normal surroundings, alertness and activity returned rather soon, even in
two or three days. Those few who remained anxious, apathetic, and zombielike
belong to the long chapter of war and battle neuroses (Strassman).


What are some of the factors which can turn a man into a traitor to his own
convictions, an informer, a confessor to heinous crimes, or an apparent collaborator?


49


The Moment of Sudden Surrender


Several victims of the Nazi inquisition have told me that the moment of surrender
occurred suddenly and against their will. For days they had faced the fury of their
interrogators, and then suddenly they fell apart. "All right, all right, you can have
anything you want."


And then came hours of remorse, of resolution, of a desperate wish to return to their
previous position of firm resistance. They wanted to cry out: "Don't ask me anything
else. I won't answer." And yet something in them, that conforming, complying being
hidden deep in all of us, was on the move.


This sudden surrender often happened after an unexpected accusation, a shock, a
humiliation that particularly hurt, a punishment that burned, a surprising logic in the
inquisitor's question that could not be counter-argued. I remember an experience of
my own that illustrated the effect of such surprise.


After my escape from a Nazi prison in occupied Holland, I was able to reach neutral
Switzerland via Vichy France. When I arrived, I was put in a jail where, at first, I was
treated rather kindly. After three days, however, I was denied an officer's right to
asylum and was told that I would be deported back to Vichy France. To this
information, my jailers sneeringly added the comment that I should be happy I was
not going to be deported back to the Germans.


When I left to be transported to the border, I was asked to sign a paper stating that
all my possessions (which had been taken from me on my imprisonment) had been
returned. I refused to sign because a few things -- unimportant in themselves, but of
great emotional value to me - were not included in the package my jailers handed
me. One of the guards looked at me with contempt, the second tapped his foot
impatiently and repeatedly demanded that I sign the paper, the third scolded and
chattered in a French that was completely unintelligible to me. I continued firm in my
refusal.


Suddenly one of my officers started to slap me around the face and to beat me.
Overwhelmed by surprise that they should display such fury over a bagatelle, I
surrendered and signed the paper. (From the Vichy prison to which I was sent, I was
permitted to write a letter of protest to the Swiss government. I still carry the official
apology I received.)


This sudden change of mood of defiant resistance to one of submission must be
explained by the unconscious action of contrasting feelings. Consciously we tell
ourselves to be strong, but from deep within us the desire to give in and to comply
beings to disturb us and to affect our behaviour. In psychology this is described as
the innate ambivalence of all feelings.


50


The Need to Collapse


The vocabulary of psychopathology contains many sophisticated terms for the wish
to succumb to mental pressure, such as "wish to regress," "dependency need,"
"mental masochism," "unconscious death wish," and many others. For our purposes,
however, it is enough to state that every individual has two opposing needs which
operate simultaneously: the need to be independent to be oneself; and the need
NOT to be oneself, NOT to be anybody at all, NOT to resist mental pressure.


The need to be inconspicuous, to disappear, and to be swallowed up by society is a
common one. In its simplest form we can see it all around us as a tendency to
conform. Under ordinary circumstances the need for anonymity is balanced by the
need for individuality, and the mentally healthy person is one who can walk the fine
line between them. But in the frightening, lonely situations in which the victims of
menticidal terror find themselves - situations which have a nightmare quality, which
are crammed with dangers so tremendous they cannot be grasped or understood
because there is nobody to explain or reassure - the wish to collapse, to let go, to be
not there, becomes almost irresistible.


This experience was reported by many concentration-camp victims. They had come
into camp with one unanswered question burning in their minds: "Why has all this
happened to me?" Their need for a sense of direction, for a feeling of purpose and
meaning was unsatisfied, and hence they could not maintain their personalities.
They let themselves go in what psychopathology calls a depersonalization
syndrome, a general feeing of having lost complete control of themselves and their
own existence. What Pavlovian conditioning can do in applying artificial confusion,
can be done too by one shocking experience. "For what?" they asked themselves.
"What is the meaning of all this suffering?" And gradually they sank dully into that
paralyzed state of semi-oblivion we call depression: the self-destructive needs take
over.


The Nazis were clever and unscrupulous in taking advantage of this need to
collapse. The humiliation of concentration-camp life, the repeated suggestion that
the Allies were as good as beaten - they conspired to convince the inmates that
there would be no end to this pointless suffering, no victorious conclusion to the war,
no future to their lives. The desire to break down, to give in, becomes almost
insurmountable when a man feels that this horrible marginal existence is something
permanent, that he cannot look toward a more personal goal, that he has to adjust to
this dulling, degrading life forever.


At the moment faith and hope disappear, man breaks down. There are tragic stories
of concentration-camp victims who fixed all their expectations on the idea that
liberation would come on Christmas, 1944, and aimed their entire existence toward
that date. When it passed and they were still incarcerated, many of them simply
collapsed and died.


51


This tendency to collapse also serves as a protective device against danger. The
victim seems to think, "If my torturer doesn't notice me, he will leave me alone." And
yet this very feeling of anonymity, this sense of losing one's personality, of being
useless, unnoticed and unwanted, also results in depression and apathy. Man's need
to be an individual can never be completely killed.


52


The Need for Companionship


Not enough attention has been given to the psychology of loneliness, especially to
the implications of enforced isolation of prisoners. When the sensory stimuli of
everyday life are removed, man's entire personality may change. Social intercourse,
our continual contact with our colleagues, our work, the newspapers, voices, traffic,
our loved ones and even those we don't like -- all are daily nourishment for our
senses and minds. We select what we find interesting, reject what we do not want to
absorb.


Every day, every citizen lives in many small worlds of exchange of gratifications, little
hatreds, pleasant experiences, irritations, delights. And he needs these stimuli to
keep him on the alert. Hour by hour, reality, in cooperation with our memory,
integrates the millions of facts in our lives by repeating them over and over.


As soon as man is alone, closed off from the world and from the news of what is
going on, his mental activity is replaced by quite different processes. Long forgotten
anxieties come to the surface, long-repressed memories knock on his mind from
inside. His fantasy life begins to develop and assume gigantic proportions. He
cannot evaluate or check his fantasies against the events of his ordinary days, and
very soon they may take possession of them.


I remember very clearly my own fantasies during the time I was in a Nazi prison. It
was almost impossible for me to control my depressive thoughts of hopelessness. I
had to tell myself over and over again: "Think, think. Keep your senses alert; don't
give in." I tried to use all my psychiatric knowledge to keep my mind in a state of
relaxed mobilization, and on many days I felt it was a losing battle.


Some experiments have shown that people who are deprived, for even a very short
time, of ALL sensory stimuli (no touch, no hearing, no smell, no sight) quickly fall into
a kind of hallucinatory hypnotic state. Isolation from the multitude of impressions that
normally bombard us from the outside world creates strange and frightening
symptoms. According to Heron, who performed experiments on a group of students
at McGill University by placing each student in his own pitch black, soundproof room,
ventilated with filtered air, and encasing his hands in heavy leather mittens and his
feet in heavy boots, "little by little their brains go dead or slip out of control." Even in
twenty-four hours of such extreme sensual isolation, all the horror phantoms of
childhood are awakened, and various pathological symptoms appear. Our instinct of
curiosity demands continual feeding; if it is not satisfied, the internal hounds of hell
are aroused.


The prisoner kept in isolation, although his isolation is by no means as extreme as in
the laboratory test, also undergoes a severe mental change. His guards and
inquisitors become more and more his only source of contact with reality, with those
stimuli he needs even more than bread. No wonder that he gradually develops a
peculiar submissive relationship to them. He is affected not only by his isolation from
social contacts, but by sexual starvation as well.


53


The latent dependency needs that lie deep in all men make him willing to accept his
guard as a substitute father figure. The inquisitor may be cruel and bestial, but the
very fact that he acknowledges his victim's existence gives the prisoner a feeling that
he has received some little bit of affection. What a conflict may thus arise between a
man's traditional loyalties and these new ones! There are only a few personalities
which are so completely self-sufficient that they can resist the need to yield, to find
some human companionship, to overcome the unbearable loneliness.


During the World Wars, prisoners at first suffered from a peculiar, burning
homesickness already called barbed-wire disease. Memories of mother, home, and
family made the soldiers identify with babyhood again, but as they became more
used to prison-camp life, thoughts of home and family also created positive values
and helped make the prison-camp life less harrowing.


Even the prisoner who is not kept in isolation can feel lonely in the unorganized
mass of prisoners. His fellow prisoners can become his enemies as easily as they
can become his friends. His hatred of his guards can be displaced and turned
against those imprisoned with him. Instead of suspecting the enemy, the victim may
become suspicious of his companions in misery.


In the Nazi concentration camps and the Korean P.O.W. camps, a kind of mass
paranoia often developed. Loneliness was increased because the prisoners cut
themselves off from one another through suspicion and hatred. This distrust was
encouraged by the guards. They constantly suggested to their victims that nobody
cared for them and nobody was concerned about what was happening to them. "You
are alone. Your friends on the outside don't know whether you're alive or dead. Your
fellow prisoners don't even care." Thus all expectation of a future was killed, and the
resulting uncertainty and hopelessness became unbearable. Then the guards sowed
suspicion and spread terrifying rumours: "You are here because those people you
call your friends betrayed you." "Your buddies here have squealed on you." "Your
friends on the outside have deserted you." Playing on a man's old loyalties, making
him feel deserted and alone, force him into submission and collapse.


The times that I myself wavered and entertained thoughts about joining the opposite
forces always occurred after periods of extreme loneliness and deep-seated
yearnings for companionship. At such moments the jailer or enemy may become a
substitute friend.


54


Blackmailing Through Overburdening Guilt Feelings


Deep within all of us lie hidden feelings of guilt, unconscious guilt, which can be
brought to the surface under extreme stress. The strategy of arousing guilt is the
mother's oldest tool for gaining dominance over her children's souls. Her warning
and accusing finger give her a magic power over them and help to create deep-
seated guilt feelings which may continue all through their adult lives. When we are
children, we depend on our parents and resent them for just this reason. We may
harbour hidden destructive wishes against those closest to us, and feelings of guilt
about these wishes. Buried deep in man's unconscious is the knowledge that he has
had hostile fantasies, and that in his hostile fantasies he has felt himself capable of
committing many crimes.


Theodore Reik has drawn our attention to the unknown primitive murderer believed
to be in all of us, whose compulsion to confess and to be punished may be easily
provoked under circumstances of terror and depression.


This concept of concealed hostility and destructiveness is often difficult for the
layman to accept. But consider for a moment the popularity of the detective story.
We may tell ourselves that we enjoy reading these tales because we identify with the
keen and clever sleuth, but, as is clear from psychoanalytic experience, the
repressed criminal in all of us is also at work and we also identify with the
conscienceless killer. As a matter of fact, our repressed hostilities make the reading
of hostile acts attractive to us.


In the political sphere, the systematic exploitation of unconscious guilt to create
submission is a utilization of the unconscious confession compulsion and the need
for punishment. Continual purges and confessions, as we encounter them in the
totalitarian countries, arouse deeply hidden guilt feelings. The lesser sin of rebellion
or subversion has to be admitted to cover personal thoughts of crime which are more
deeply imbedded. The personal reactions of those who are continually interrogated
and investigated give us a clue as to what happens.


The very fact of prolonged interrogation can re-arouse the hidden and unconscious
guilt in the victim. At a time of extreme emotion, after constant accusation and day-
long interrogation, when he has been deprived of sleep and reduced to a state of
utter despair, the victim may lose the capacity to distinguish between the real
criminal act of which he is accused and his own fantasised unconscious guilt. If his
upbringing burdened him with an almost pathological sense of guilt under normal
circumstances, he will be completely unable to resist the menticidal attack.


Even normal people may be brought to surrender under such miserable conditions,
and not only through the action of the inquisition, but also because of all the other
weakening factors. Lack of sleep, hunger, and illness can create utter confusion and
make any man vulnerable to hypnotic influence. All of us have experienced the
mental fuzziness which comes with being overtired. Concentration-camp victims
know how hunger, especially, induces a loss of mental control.


55


In the fantastic world of the totalitarian prison or camp, these effects are heightened
and exaggerated.


(NOTE: The conversation in concentration camps usually revolved around food and
memories of glorious gluttony. The mind could not work: it was fixed on eating and
fantasies about food. A word grew up to express that constant possession by the
idea of eating well again: stomach masturbation ("Magenonanie"). This kind of talk
often took the place of all intellectual exchange.)


The Nazis, through clever exploitation of their victims' unconscious guilt after poking
into the back corners of their minds, were often able to convert courageous
resistance fighters into meek collaborators. That they were not uniformly successful
can be explained by two factors. The first is that MOST OF THE MEMBERS OF THE
UNDERGROUND WERE INWARDLY PREPARED FOR THE BRUTALITY WITH
WHICH THEY WERE TREATED. The second is that, clever as the Nazi techniques
were, they were not as irresistible as the methodical tricks of the Communist
brainwashers are.


When the victims of Nazi brutality did break down, it was not torture but often the
threat of reprisal against family which made them give in. Sudden acute
confrontation with a long-buried childhood problem creates confusion and doubt. All
of a sudden the enemy puts before you a clash of loyalties: your father or your
friends, your brother or your fatherland, your wife or your honor. This is a brutal
choice to have to make, and when the inquisitor makes use of your additional inner
conflicts, he can easily force you into surrender.


A clash between loyalties makes either choice a betrayal, and this arouses
paralyzing doubt. This calculated but subtle attack on the weakest spots in man's
mind, on a man's conscience, and on the moral system he has learned from the
Judaeo-Christian ethics, paralyzes the reason and leads the victim more easily into
betrayal. The inquisitor subtly tests his victim's archaic guilt feelings toward paternal
figures, his friends, his children. He cleverly exploits the victim's early ambivalent ties
with his parents. The sudden outbreak of hidden moral flaws and guilt can bring a
man to tears and complete breakdown. He regresses to the dependency and
submissiveness of the baby.


A very husky former hero of the Dutch resistance, known as King Kong because of
his size and strength, became the treacherous instrument of the Nazis soon after his
brother had been taken with him and the Nazis threatened to kill the youth. King
Kong's final surrender to the enemy and his becoming their treacherous tool was
psychiatrically recognizable as a defense mechanism against his deep guilt, arising
from hidden feelings of aggression against his brother (Boeree.)


Another example of breakdown is seen in the story of one young resistance fighter
who, after the Nazis had threatened to torture his father, who was imprisoned with
him, finally broke into childish tears and promised to tell them everything they wanted
to know. After that he was taken back to his cell in order to be softened up after the
following day. This was the routine of his interrogator.


56


The inquisitors understood only too well the effectiveness of patient pursuit at
repeated moments while intruding into a man's guilt feelings. Although both prisoners
were liberated that night as a consequence of the Allied sweep through Belgium and
the southwest part of Holland, the boy remained in his depression for a long time,
tortured by his knowledge that he had nearly betrayed his best friends in the
underground in order to save his father -- in spite of knowing, at the same time, that
the promises of the enemy would not have protected his father.


57


The Law of Survival Versus the Law of Loyalty


The prisoners of war in Korea who gradually gave in to the systematic mental
pressure of the enemy and collaborated in the production of materials that could be
used for Communist propaganda - albeit tentatively and for only as long as they were
in the orbit of the enemy - followed a peculiar psychological law of passive inner
defense and inner deceit that when one cannot fight and defeat the enemy, one must
join him. Later, a few of them were so taken in by totalitarian propaganda that they
elected to remain in China and the totalitarian orbit. Some did it to escape
punishment for having betrayed their comrades.


Man cannot become a turncoat without justifying his actions to himself. When
Holland surrendered to the German army in 1940, I saw this general mechanism of
mental surrender operating in several people who had been staunch anti-Nazis.
"Maybe there is something good in Nazism," they told themselves as they saw the
tremendous show of German strength. Those who were the victims of their own
initial mental surrender and need to justify things, who could not stop and say to
themselves "Hold on here; think this out," became the traitors and collaborators.
They were completely taken in by the enemy's show of strength. The same process
of self-justification and justifying the enemy started in the P.O.W. camps.


Experiences from the concentration camps give us some indication of how far this
passive submission to the enemy can go. Because of the deep-seated human need
for affection, many prisoners lived only for one thing: a friendly word from their
guards. Each time it came, it fortified the delusion of grace and acceptance. Once
these prisoners, mostly those who had been in the camps a long time, were
accepted by the guards, they easily became the trusted tools of the Nazis. They
started to behave like their cruel jailers and became torturers of their fellow campers.
These collaborating prisoners, called "Kapos," were even more cruel and vengeful
than the official overseers. Because of misunderstood inner needs, the brainwasher
and sadistic camp leader are direly in need of collaborators. They serve not only for
the propaganda machine but also to exonerate their jailers from guilt.


When a man has to choose either hunger, death marches, and torture or a
temporary yielding to the illusions of the enemy, his self-preservation mechanisms
act in many ways like reflexes. They help him to find a thousand justifications and
exculpations for giving in to the psychological pressure.


One of the officers court-marshalled for collaborating with the enemy in a Korean
P.O.W. camp justified his conduct by saying that he followed this course of action in
order to keep himself and his men alive. Is that not a perfectly valid, though not
necessarily true, argument?


The use of it serves to point up the fact that self-protective mechanisms are usually
much stronger than ideological loyalty. No one who has not faced this same bitter
problem can have an objective opinion as to what he himself would do under the
circumstances. As a psychiatrist, I suggest that "most" people would yield and
compromise when threat and mental pressure became strong enough.


58


Among the anti-Nazi undergrounds in the Second World War were physically strong
boys who thought they could resist all pressure and would never betray their
comrades. However, they could not even begin to imagine the perfidious technique
of menticide. Repeated pestering, itself, is more destructive than physical torture.
The pain of physical torture, as we have said, brings temporary unconsciousness
and, consequently, forgetfulness, but when the victim wakes up, the play of
anticipation begins. "Will it happen again? Can I stand it any more?" Anticipation
paralyzes the will. Suicidal thoughts and identifications with death do not help. The
foe doesn't let you die but drags you back from the very edge of oblivion. The
anticipation of renewed torture increases internal anxieties. "Who am I to stand all
this?" "Why must I be a hero?" Gradually resistance breaks down.


The surrender of the mind to its new master does not take place immediately under
the impact of duress and exhaustion. The inquisitor knows that in the period of
temporary relaxation of pressure, during which the victim will rehearse and repeat
the torture experience in himself, the final surrender is prepared. During that tension
of rumination and anticipation, the deeply hidden wish to give in grows. The action of
continual repetition of stupid questions, reiterated for days and days, exhausts the
mind till it gives the answers the inquisitor wants to have.


In addition to the weapon of mental exhaustion, he plays on the physical exhaustion
of the senses. He may use penetrating, excruciating noises or a constant strong
flashlight that blinds the eyes. The need to close the eyes or to get away from the
noises confuses the mental orientation of the victim. He loses his balance and
feelings of self-confidence. He yearns for sleep and can do nothing else but
surrender. The infantile desire to become part of the threatening giant machine, to
become one with the forces that are so much stronger than the prisoner has won.

It is an unequivocal surrender: "Do with me what you want. From now on I am you."


That only deprivation from sleep is able to produce various abnormal reactions of the
mind was confirmed by Tyler in an experiment with 350 male volunteers. He
deprived them of sleep for 102 hours. Forty-four men dropped out almost at once
because they felt too anxious and irritated. After forty hours without sleep, 70 percent
of all subjects had already had illusions, delusions, hallucinations, and_ similar
experiences. Those who had true hallucinations were dropped from the experiment.
After the second night, sporadic disturbances of thinking were common to all
subjects. The participants were embarrassed when they were informed later of their
behaviour.


The changes in emotional response had been noticeable -- euphoria followed by
depression; dejection and restlessness; indifference to unusual behaviour shown by
other subjects. The experiment gave the impression that prolonged wakefulness
causes some toxic substance to affect brain and mind.


Only the few strong, independent, and self-sufficient personalities, who have


conquered their dependency needs, can stand such pressure or are willing to die
under it.


59


The ritual of self-accusation and breast-beating and unconditional surrender to the
rules of the elders is part of age-old religious rites. It was based on a more or less
unconscious belief in a supreme and omnipotent power. This power may be the
monolithic party state or a mysterious deity. It follows the old inner device of "Credo
quia absurdum" ("I believe because it is absurd"), of faithful submission to a super-
world stronger than the reality which confronts our senses.


Why the totalitarian and orthodox dogmatic ideology sticks to such a rigid attitude,
with prohibition of investigation of basic premises, is a complicated psychological
question. Somewhere the reason is related to the fear of change, the fear of the risk
of change of habits, the fear of freedom, which may be psychologically related to the
fear of the finality of death.


The denial of human freedom and equality lifts the authoritarian man beyond his
mortal fellows. His temporary power and omnipotence give him the illusion of
eternity. In his totalitarianism he denies death and ephemeral existence and borrows
power from the future. He has to invent and formulate a final Truth and protective
dogma to justify his battle against mortality and temporariness. From then on, the
new fundamental certainty must be hammered into the minds of adepts and slaves.
What happens inside the human psyche under severe circumstances of mental and
physical attack is clarified for us in the studies of the general mental defences
available to man; earlier, I myself tried in several publications to analyze the various
ways people defend themselves against fear and pressure.


In the last phases of brainwashing and menticide, the self-humiliating submission of
the victims serves as an inner defensive device annihilating the prosecuting
inquisitor in a magic way. The more they accuse themselves, the less logical reason
there is for HIS existence. Giving in and being even more cruel toward oneself
makes the inquisitor and judge, as it were, impotent and shows the futility of the
accusing regime.


We may say that brainwashing and menticide provoke the same inner defensive
mechanism that we observe in melancholic patients. Through their mental self
beatings, they try to get rid of fear and to avoid a more deeply seated guilt. They
punish themselves in advance in order to overcome the idea of final punishment for
some hidden, unknown, and worse crime. The victim of menticide conquers his
tormentor by becoming even more cruel toward himself than the inquisitor. In this
passive way, he annihilates his enemy.


60


The Mysterious Masochistic Pact


In Arthur Koestler's masterpiece, DARKNESS AT NOON, he describes all the subtle
intricacies, reasonings, and dialectics between the inquisitor and his victim. The old
Bolshevik, Rubashov, preconditioned by his former party adherence, confesses to
plotting against the party and the party line. He is partly motivated by the wish to
render a last service: his confession is a final sacrifice to the party. I would explain
the confession rather as part of that mysterious masochistic pact between the
inquisitor and his victim which we encounter, too, in other processes of
brainwashing.


(NOTE: The term "masochism" originally referred to sexual gratification received
from pain and punishment, and later became every gratification acquired through
pain and abjection.)


It is the last gift and trick the tortured gives to his torturer. It is as if he were to call
out: "Be good to me. I confess. I submit. Be good to me and love me." After having
suffered all manner of brutality, hypnotism, despair, and panic, there is a final quest
for human companionship, but it is ambivalent, mixed with deep despising, hatred,
and bitterness.


Tortured and torturer gradually form a peculiar community in which the one
influences the other. Just as in therapeutic sessions where the patient identifies with
the psychiatrist, the daily sessions of interrogation and conversation create an
unconscious transfer of feelings in which the prisoner identifies with his inquisitors,
and his inquisitors with him. The prisoner, enraptured in a strange, harsh, and
unfamiliar world, identifies much more with the enemy than does the enemy with
him. Unwittingly he may take over all the enemy's norms, evaluations, and attitudes
toward life. Such passive surrender to the enemy's ideology is determined by
unconscious processes. The danger of communion of this kind is that at the end all
moral evaluations disappear. We saw it happen in Germany. The very victims of
Nazism came to accept the idea of concentration camps.


In menticide we are faced with a ritual like that found in witch hunting during the
Middle Ages, except that today the ritual has taken a more refined form. Accuser and
accused -- each affords the other assistance, and both belong together as
collaborating members of a ritual of confession and self-denigration. Through their
cooperation, they attack the minds of bystanders who identify with them and who
consequently feel guilty, weak, and submissive. The Moscow purge trials made
many Russians feel guilty; listening to the confessions, they must have said to
themselves, "I could have done the same thing. I could have been in that man's
place." When their heroes become traitors, their own hidden treasonable wishes
made them feel weak and frightened.


This explanation may seem overly complicated and involved and perhaps even self-


contradictory, but, in fact, it helps us to understand what happens in cases of
menticide. Both torturer and tortured are the victims of their own unconscious guilt.


61


The torturer projects his guilt onto some outside scapegoat and tries to expiate it by
attacking his victim. The victim, too, has a sense of guilt which arises from deeply
repressed hostilities. Under normal circumstances, this sense is kept under control,
but in the menticidal atmosphere of relentless interrogation and inquisition, his
repressed hostilities are aroused and loom up as frightening phantasmagorias from a
forgotten past, which the victim senses but cannot grasp or understand. It is easier to
confess to the accusation of treason and sabotage than to accept the frightening
sense of criminality with which his long-forgotten aggressive impulses now burden
him.


The victim's overt self-accusation serves as a trick to annihilate the inner accuser
and the persecuting inquisitor. The more I accuse myself, the less reason there is for
the inquisitor's existence. The victim's going to the gallows kills, as it were, the
inquisitor too, because there existed a mutual identification: the accuser is made
impotent the moment the victim begins to accuse himself and tomorrow the accuser
himself may be accused and brought to the gallows.


Out of our understanding of this strange masochistic pact between accuser and
accused comes a rather simple answer to the questions, WHY DO PEOPLE WANT
TO CONTROL THE MINDS OF OTHERS, AND WHY DO THE OTHERS CONFESS
AND YIELD? It is because there is no essential difference between the victim and
the inquisitor. They are alike. Neither, under these circumstances, has any control
over his deeply hidden criminal and hostile thoughts and feelings.


It is obviously easier to be the inquisitor than the victim, not only because the
inquisitor may be temporarily safe from mental and physical destruction, but also
because it is simpler to punish others for what we feel as criminal in ourselves than it
is to face up to our own hidden sense of guilt. Committing menticide is the lesser
crime of aggression, which covers up the deeper crime of unresolved hidden hatred
and destruction.


62


A Survey of Psychological Processes involved in
Brainwashing and Menticide


At the end of this chapter describing the various influences that lead to yielding and
surrender to the enemy's strategy, it is useful to give a short survey of the
psychological processes involved.


PHASE I


ARTIFICIAL BREAKDOWN AND DECONDITIONING


The inquisitor tries to weaken the ego of his prisoner. Though originally physical
torture was used -- hunger and cold are still very effective -- physical torture may
often increase a person's stubbornness. Torture is intended to a much greater extent
to act as a threat to the bystanders’ (the people's) imagination. Their wild anticipation
of torture leads more easily to THEIR breakdown when the enemy has need of their
weakness. (Of course, occasionally a sadistic enemy may find individual pleasure in
torture.)


The many devices the enemy makes use of include: intimidating suggestion,
dramatic persuasion, mass suggestion, humiliation, embarrassment, loneliness and
isolation, continued interrogation, over-burdening the unsteady mind, arousing more
and more self-pity. Patience and time help the inquisitor to soften a stubborn soul.
Just as in many old religions the victims were humbled and humiliated in order to
prepare for the new religion, so, in this case, they are prepared to accept the
totalitarian ideology. In this phase, out of mere intellectual opportunism, the victim
may consciously give in.


PHASE Il
SUBMISSION TO AND POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION WITH THE ENEMY


As has already been mentioned, the moment of surrender may often arrive suddenly.
It is as if the stubborn negative suggestibility changed critically into a surrender and
affirmation. What the inquisitor calls the sudden inner illumination and conversion is
a total reversal of inner strategy in the victim. From this time on, in psychoanalytic
terms, a parasitic superego lives in man's conscience, and he will speak his new
master's voice. In my experience such sudden surrender often occurred together
with hysterical outbursts into crying and laughing, like a baby surrendering after
obstinate temper tantrums. The inquisitor can attain this phase more easily by
assuming a paternal attitude. As a matter of fact, many a P.O.W. was courted by a
form of paternal kindness -- gifts, sweets at birthdays, and the promise of more
cheerful things to come.


63


Maloney compares this sudden yielding with the theophany or kenosis (internal
conversion) as described by some theological rites. For our understanding, it is
important to stress that yielding is an unconscious and purely emotional process, no
longer under the conscious intellectual control of the brainwashee. We may also call
this phase the phase of autohypnosis.


PHASE III


THE RECONDITIONING TO THE NEW ORDER


Through both continual training and taming, the new phonograph record has to be
grooved. We may compare this process with an active hypnosis into conversion.
Incidental relapses to the old form of thinking have to be corrected as in Phase I. The
victim is daily helped to rationalize and justify his new ideology. The inquisitor
delivers to him the new arguments and reasonings.


This systematic indoctrination of those who long avoided intensive indoctrination
constitutes the actual political aspect of brainwashing and symbolizes the ideological
cold war going on at this very moment.


PHASE IV


LIBERATION FROM THE TOTALITARIAN SPELL


As soon as the brainwashee returns to a free atmosphere, the hypnotic spell is
broken. Temporary nervous repercussions take place, like crying spells, feelings of
guilt and depression. The expectation of a hostile homeland, in view of his having
yielded to enemy indoctrination, may fortify this reaction. The period of brainwashing
becomes a nightmare. Only those who were staunch members of the resistance
before may stick to it. But here, too, I have seen the enemy impose its mental
pressure too well and convert their former prisoners into eternal haters of freedom.

[admin]

PART TWO: THE TECHNIQUES OF MASS SUBMISSION

The purpose of the second part of this book is to show various aspects of political
and non-political strategy used to change the feelings and thoughts of the masses,
starting with simple advertising and propaganda, then surveying psychological
warfare and actual cold war, and going on to examine the means used for internal
streamlining of man's thoughts and behaviour. Part Two ends with an intricate
examination of how one of the tools of emotional fascination and attack -- the
weapon of fear -- is used and what reactions it arouses in men.

[admin]

PART TWO: THE TECHNIQUES OF MASS SUBMISSION

The purpose of the second part of this book is to show various aspects of political
and non-political strategy used to change the feelings and thoughts of the masses,
starting with simple advertising and propaganda, then surveying psychological
warfare and actual cold war, and going on to examine the means used for internal
streamlining of man's thoughts and behaviour. Part Two ends with an intricate
examination of how one of the tools of emotional fascination and attack -- the
weapon of fear -- is used and what reactions it arouses in men.

[admin]

CHAPTER FIVE: THE COLD WAR AGAINST THE MIND

Only blind wishful thinking can permit us to believe that our own society is free from
the insidious influences mentioned in Part One. The fact is that they exist all around
us, both on a political and a non-political level and they become as dangerous to the
free way of life as are the aggressive totalitarian governments themselves.


Every culture institutionalizes certain forms of behaviour that communicate and
encourage certain forms of thinking and acting, thus moulding the character of its
citizens. To the degree that the individual is made an object of constant mental
manipulation, to the degree that cultural institutions may tend to weaken intellectual
and spiritual strength, to the degree that knowledge of the mind is used to tame and
condition people instead of educating them, to that degree does the culture itself
produce men and women who are predisposed to accept an authoritarian way of life.
The man who has no mind of his own can easily become the pawn of a would-be
dictator.


It is often disturbing to see how even intelligent people do not have straight thinking
minds of their own. The pattern of the mind, whether toward conformity and
compliance or otherwise, is conditioned rather early in life.


In his important social psychological experiments with students, Asch found out in
simple tests that there was a yielding toward an ERRING MAJORITY opinion in
more than a third of his test persons, and 75 percent of subjects experimented upon
agreed with the majority in varying degrees. In many persons the weight of authority
is more important than the quality of the authority.


If we are to learn to protect our mental integrity on all levels, we must examine not
only those aspects of contemporary culture which have to do directly with the
struggle for power, but also those developments in our culture which, by dulling the
edge of our mental awareness or by taking advantage of our suggestibility, can lead
us into the mental death - or boredom - of totalitarianism.


65


Continual suggestion and slow hypnosis in the wake of mechanical mass
communication promotes uniformity of the mind and may lure the public into the
"happy era" of adjustment, integration, and equalization, in which individual opinion
is completely stereotyped.


When | get up in the morning, | turn on my radio to hear the news and the weather
forecast. Then comes the pontifical voice telling me to take aspirin for my headache.
| have "headaches" occasionally (so does the world), and my headaches, like
everyone else's, come from the many conflicts that life imposes on me. My radio tells
me not to think about either the conflicts or the headaches. It suggests, instead, that
| should retreat into that old magic action of swallowing a pill. Although | laugh as |
listen to this long-distance prescription by a broadcaster who does not know anything
about me or my headaches and though | meditate for a moment on man's servility to
the magic of chemistry, my hand has already begun to reach out for the aspirin
bottle. After all, | do have a headache.


It is extremely difficult to escape the mechanically repeated suggestions of everyday
life. Even when our critical mind rejects them, they seduce us into doing what our
intellect tells us is stupid.


The mechanization of modern life has already influenced man to become more
passive and to adjust himself to ready-made conformity. No longer does man think in
personal values, following more his own conscience and ethical evaluations; he
thinks more and more in the values brought to him by mass media. Headlines in the
morning paper give him his temporary political outlook, the radio blasts suggestions
into his ears, television keeps him in continual awe and passive fixation. Consciously
he may protest against these anonymous voices, but nevertheless their suggestions
ooze into his system.


What is perhaps most shocking about these influences is that many of them have
developed not out of man's destructiveness, but out of his hope to improve his world
and to make life richer and deeper. The very institutions man has created to help
himself, the very tools he has invented to enhance his life, the very progress he has
made toward mastery of himself and his environment -- all can become weapons of
destruction.


66


The Public-Opinion Engineers


The conviction is steadily growing in our country that an elaborate propaganda
campaign for either a political idea or a deep-freeze can be successful in selling the
public any idea or object one wants them to buy, any political figure one wants them
to elect. Recently, some of our election campaigns have been masterminded by the
so-called public-opinion engineers, who have used all the techniques of modern
mass communication and all the contemporary knowledge of the human mind to
persuade Americans to vote for the candidate who is paying the public-relation men's
salaries. The danger of such high-pressure advertising is that the man or the party
who can pay the most can become, temporarily at least, the one who can influence
the people to buy or to vote for what may not be in their real interest.


The specialists in the art of persuasion and the moulding of public sentiment may try
to Knead man's mental dough with all the tools of communication available to them:
pamphlets, speeches, posters, billboards, radio programs, and T.V. shows. They
may water down the spontaneity and creativity of thoughts and ideas into sterile and
streamlined clichés that direct our thoughts even although we still have the illusion of
being original and individual.


What we call the will of the people, or the will of the masses, we only get to know
after such collective action is put on the move, after the will of the people has been
expressed either at the polls or in fury and rebellion. This indicates again how
important it is who directs the tools and machines of public opinion.


In the wake of such advertising and engineering of consent, the citizen's trust in his
leaders may become shaken and the populace may gradually grow more and more
accustomed to official deceit. Finally, when people no longer have confidence in any
program, any position, and when they are unable to form intelligent judgments any
more, they can be more easily influenced by any demagogue or would-be dictator,
whose strength appeals to their confusion and their growing sense of dissatisfaction.
Perhaps the worst aspect of this slick merchandising of ideas is that too often even
those who buy the experts, and even the opinion experts themselves, are unaware
of what they are doing. They too are swayed by the current catchword "management
of public opinion," and they cannot judge any more the tools they have hired. The
end never justifies the means; enough steps on this road can lead us gradually to
Totalitaria.


At this very moment in our country, an elaborate research into motivation is going on,
whose object is to find out why and what the buyer likes to buy. What makes him
tick? The aim is to bypass the resistance barriers of the buying public. It is part of our
paradoxical cultural philosophy to stimulate human needs and to stimulate the wants
of the people. Commercialized psychological understanding wants to sell to the
public, to the potential buyer, many more products than he really wants to buy. In
order to do this, rather infantile impulses have to be awakened, such as sibling
rivalry and neighbour envy, the need to have more and more sweets, the glamour of
colors, and the need for more and more luxuries.


67


The commercial psychologist teaches the seller how to avoid unpleasant
associations in his advertising, how to stimulate, unobtrusively, sex associations,
how to make everything look simple and happy and successful and secure! He
teaches the shops how to boost the buyer's ego, how to flatter the customer.


The marketing engineers have discovered that our public wants the suggestion of
strength and virility in their product. A car must have more horse-power in order to
balance feelings of inner weakness in the owner. A car must represent one's social
status and reputation, because without such a flag man feels empty. Advertising
agencies dream of "universitas advertensis," the world of glittering sham ideas, the
glorification of "menus vult decipi," the intensification of snob appeal, the expression
of vulgar conspicuousness, and all this in order to push more sales into the greedy
mouths of buying babies. In our world of advertising, artificial needs are invented by
sedulous sellers and buyers. Here lies the threat of building up a sham world that
can have a dangerous influence on our world of ideas.


This situation emphasizes the neurotic greed of the public, the need to indulge in
private fancies at the cost of an awareness of real values. The public becomes
conditioned to meretricious values. Of course, a free public gradually finds its
defences against slogans, but dishonesty and mistrust slip through the barriers of
our consciousness and leave behind a gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction. After all,
advertising symbolizes the art of making people dissatisfied with what they have. In
the meantime it is evident man sustains a continual sneak attack on his better
judgment.


In our epoch of too many noises and many frustrations, many "free" minds have
given up the struggle for decency and individuality. They surrender to the "Zeitgeist,"
often without being aware of it. Public opinion moulds our critical thoughts every day.
Unknowingly, we may become opinionated robots. The slow coercion of hypocrisy,
of traditions in our culture that have a levelling effect -- these things change us. We
crave excitement, hair-raising stories, sensation. We search for situations that create
superficial fear to cover up inner anxieties. We like to escape into the irrational
because we dislike the challenge of self-study and self-thinking. Our leisure time is
occupied increasingly by automatized activities in which we take no part: listening to
piped-in words and viewing television screens. We hurry along with cars and go to
bed with a sleeping pill. This pattern of living in turn may open the way for renewed
sneak attacks on our mind. Our boredom may welcome any seductive suggestion.


68


Psychological Warfare as a Weapon of Terror


Every human communication can be either a report of straight facts or an attempt to
suggest things and situations as they do not exist. Such distortion and perversion of
facts strike at the core of human communication. The verbal battle against man's
concept of truth and against his mind seems to be ceaseless. For example, if | can
instil in eventual future enemies fear and terror and the suggestion of impending
defeat, even before they are willing to fight, my battle is already half won.


The strategy of man to use a frightening mask and a loud voice to utter lies in order
to manipulate friend and foe is as old as mankind. Primitive people used terror-
provoking masks, magic fascination, or self-deceit as much as we use loudly spoken
words to convince others or ourselves. They use their magic paints and we our
ideologies. Truly, we live in an age of ads, propaganda, and publicity. But only under
dictatorial and totalitarian regimes have such human habit formations mushroomed
into systematic psychological assault on mankind.


The weapons the dictator uses against his own people, he may use against the
outside world as well. For example, the false confessions that divert the minds of
dictator's subjects from their own real problems have still another effect: they are
meant (and sometimes they succeed in their aim) to terrorize the world's public. By
strengthening the myth of the dictator's omnipotence, such confessions weaken
man's will to resist him. If a period of peace can be used to soften up a future enemy,
the totalitarian armies may be able in time of war to win a cheap and easy victory.
Totalitarian psychological warfare is directed largely toward this end. It is an effort to
propagandize and hypnotize the world into submission.


As far back as the early nineteenth century, Napoleon organized his Bureau de
l'Opinion Publique in order to influence the thinking of the French people. But it fell to
the Germans to develop the manipulation of public opinion into a huge, well
organized machine. Their psychological warfare became aggressive strategy in
peacetime, the so-called war between wars. It was as a result of the Nazi attack on
European morale and the Nazi war of nerves against their neighbours that the other
nations of the world began to organize their own psychological forces, but it was only
in the second half of the war that they were able to achieve some measure of
success. The Germans had a long head start.


Hitler's psychological artillery was composed primarily of the weapon of fear. He had,
for example, a network of fifth columnists whose main job was to sow rumours and
suspicions among the citizens of the countries against which he eventually planned
to fight. The people were upset not only by the spy system itself, but by the very
rumour of spies. These fifth columnists spread slogans of defeat and _ political
confusion: "Why should France die for England?" Fear began to direct people's
actions. Instead of facing the real threat of German invasion, instead of preparing for
it, all of Europe shuddered at spy stories, discussed irrelevant problems, argued
endlessly about scapegoats and minorities. Thus Hitler used the rampant, vague
fears to becloud the real issues, and by attacking his enemies’ will to fight, weakened
them.


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Not content with this strategic attack on the will to defend oneself, Hitler tried to
paralyze Europe with the threat of terror, not only the threat of bombing, destruction,
and occupation, but also the psychological threat implicit in his own boast of
ruthlessness. The fear of an implacable foe makes man more willing to submit even
before he has begun to fight. Hitler's criminal acts at home -- the concentration
camps, the gas chambers, the mass murders, the atmosphere of terror throughout
Germany - were as useful in the service of his fear-instilling propaganda machinery
as they were a part of his delusions.


There is another important weapon the totalitarians use in their campaign to frighten
the world into submission. This is the weapon of psychological shock. Hitler kept his
enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval. They never knew
what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical,
because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with
logic, while illogic cannot - it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and
monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than
logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counter-
argument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.


Strategic mental shocks were the instruments the Nazis used when they entered the
Rhineland in 1936 and when they concluded their nonaggression pact with Russia in
1939. Stalin used the same strategy at the time of the Korean invasion in 1950
(which he directed), as did the Chinese and the North Koreans when they accused
the United States of bacteriological warfare. By acting in this apparently irrational
way, the totalitarians throw their logic-minded enemies into confusion. The enemy
feels compelled to deny the propagandistic lies or to explain things as they really are,
and these actions immediately put him in the weaker defensive position. For the
galloping lie can never be overtaken, it can only be overthrown.


The technique of psychological shock has still another effect. It may so confuse the
mind of the individual citizen that he ceases to make his own evaluations and begins
to lean passively on the opinions of others. Hitler's destruction of Warsaw and
Rotterdam - after the armistice in 1940, a complete violation of international law -
immobilized France and shook the other democratic nations. Being in a paralysis of
moral indignation, they became psychologically ill-equipped to deal with the Nazi
horrors.


Just as the technological advances of the modern world have refined and perfected
the weapons of physical warfare, so the advance in man's understanding of the
manipulation of public opinion have enabled him to refine and perfect the weapons of
psychological warfare.


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The Indoctrination Barrage


The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments and
propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions. It may lead to apathy and
indifference, the I-don't-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to
understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one. The flight from
study and awareness is much too common in a world that throws too many
confusing pictures to the individual. For the sake of our democracy, based on
freedom and individualism, we have to bring ourselves back to study again and
again. Otherwise, we can become easy victims of a well-planned verbal attack on
our minds and consciences.


We cannot be enough aware of the continual coercion of our senses and minds, the
continual suggestive attacks which may pass through the intellectual barriers of
insight. Repetition and Pavlovian conditioning exhaust the individual and may
seduce him ultimately to accept a truth he himself initially defied and scorned.


The totalitarians are very ingenious in arousing latent guilt in us by repeating over
and over again how criminally the Western world has acted toward innocent and
peaceful people. The totalitarians may attack our identification with our leaders by
ridiculing them, making use of every man's latent critical attitude toward all leaders.
Sometimes they use the strategy of boredom to lull the people to sleep. They would
like the entire Western world to fall into a hypnotic sleep under the illusion of
peaceful coexistence. In a more refined strategy, they would like to have us cut all
our ties of loyalty with the past, away from relatives and parents. The more you have
forsaken them and their so-called outmoded concepts, the better you will cooperate
with those who want to take mental possession of you. Every political strategy that
aims toward arousing fear and suspicion tends to isolate the insecure individual until
he surrenders to those forces that seem to him stronger than his former friends.


And last but not least, let us not forget that in the battle of arguments those with the
best and most forceful strategy tend to win. The totalitarians organize intensive
dialectical training for their subjects lest their doubts get the better of them. They try
to do the same thing to the rest of the world in a less obtrusive way.


We have to learn to encounter the totalitarians' exhausting barrage of words with
better training and better understanding. If we try to escape from these problems of
mental defense or deny their complications, the cold war will gradually be lost to the
slow encroachment of words - and more words.


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The Enigma of Coexistence


Is it possible to coexist with a totalitarian system that never ceases to use its
psychological artillery? Can a free democracy be strong enough to tolerate the
parasitic intrusion of totalitarianism into its rights and freedoms? History tells us that
many opposing and clashing ideologies have been able to coexist under a common
law that assured tolerance and justice. The church no longer burns its apostates.


Before the opposites of totalitarianism and free democracy can coexist under the
umbrella of supervising law and mutual good will, a great deal more of mutual
understanding and tolerance will have to be built up. The actual cold war and
psychological warfare certainly do not yet help toward this end.


To the totalitarian, the word "coexistence" has a different meaning than it has to us.
The totalitarian may use it merely as a catch-word or an appeaser. The danger is
that the concept of peaceful coexistence may become a disguise, dulling the
awareness of inevitable interactions and so profiting the psychologically stronger
party. Lenin spoke about the strategic breathing spell (peredyshka) that has to
weaken the enemy. Too enthusiastic a peace movement may mean a superficial
appeasement of problems. Such an appeal has to be studied and restudied, lest it
result in a dangerous letdown of defences which have to remain mobilized to face a
ruthless enemy.


Coexistence may mean a suffocating subordination much like that of prisoners
coexisting with their jailers. At its best, it may imitate the intensive symbiotic or ever-
parasitic relationship we can see among animals which need each other, or as we
see it in the infant in its years of dependency upon its mother.


In order to coexist and to cooperate, one must have notions and comparable images
of interaction, of a sameness of ideas, of a _ belonging-together, of an
interdependence of the whole human race, in spite of the existence of racial and
cultural differences. Otherwise the ideology backed by the greater military strength
will strangle the weaker one.


Peaceful coexistence presupposes on BOTH sides a high understanding of the
problems and complications of simple coexistence, of mutual agreement and
limitations, of the diversity of personalities, and especially of the coexistence of
contrasting and irreconcilable thoughts and feelings in every individual of the innate
ambivalence of man. It demands an understanding of the rights of both the individual
and the collectivity. Using coexistence as a catch-word, we may obscure the
problems involved, and we may find that we use the word as a flag that covers
gradual surrender to the stronger strategist.

[admin]

CHAPTER SIX: TOTALITARIA AND ITS DICTATORSHIP


There actually exists such a thing as a technique of mass brainwashing. This
technique can take root in a country if an inquisitor is strong and shrewd enough. He
can make most of us his victims, albeit temporarily.


What in the structure of society has made man so vulnerable to these mass
manipulations of the mind? This is a problem with tremendous implications, just as
brainwashing is. In recent years we have grown more and more aware of human
interdependence with all its difficulties and complications.


| am aware of the fact that investigation of the subject of mental coercion and
thought control becomes less pleasant as time goes on. This is so because it may
become more of a threat to us here and now, and our concern for China and Korea
must yield to the more immediate needs at our own door. Can totalitarian tendencies
take over here, and what social symptoms may lead to such phenomena? Stern
reality confronts us with the universal mental battle between thought control (and its
corollaries) and our standards of decency, personal strength, personal ideas, and a
personal conscience with autonomy and dignity.


Future social scientists will be better able to describe the causes of the advent of
totalitarian thinking and acting in man. We know that after wars and revolutions this
mental deterioration more easily finds an opportunity to develop, helped by special
psychopathic personalities who flourish on man's misery and confusion. It is also true
that the next generation spontaneously begins to correct the misdeeds of the
previous one because the ruthless system has become too threatening to them.


My task, however, is to describe some symptoms of the totalitarian process (which
implies deterioration of thinking and acting) as | have observed them in our own
epoch, keeping in mind that the system is one of the most violent distortions of man's
consistent mental growth. No brainwashing is possible without totalitarian thinking.
The tragic facts of political experiences in our age make it all too clear that applied
psychological technique can brainwash entire nations and reduce their citizens to a
kind of mindless robotism which becomes for them a normal way of living. Perhaps
we can best understand how this frightening thing comes about by examining a
mythical country, which, for the sake of convenience, we shall call Totalitaria.


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The Robotization of Man


First, let me utter a word of caution. We must not make the mistake of thinking that
there is any one particular nation that can be completely identified with this
hypothetical land. The characteristics to be discussed can come into existence here.
Some of Totalitaria's characteristics were, of course, present in Nazi Germany, and
they can today be found behind the Iron Curtain, but they exist to some extent in
other parts of the world as well. Totalitaria is any country in which political ideas
degenerate into senseless formulations made only for propaganda purposes. It is
any country in which a single group - left or right - acquires absolute power and
becomes omniscient and omnipotent, any country in which disagreement and
differences of opinion are crimes, in which utter conformity is the price of life.


Totalitaria - the Leviathan state - is the home of the political system we call,
euphemistically, totalitarianism, of which systematized tyranny is a part. This system
does not derive from any honest political philosophy, either socialist or capitalist.
Totalitaria's leaders may mouth ideologies, but these are in fact mainly catch-words
used to justify the regime. If necessary, totalitarianism can change its slogans and its
behaviour overnight. For totalitarianism embodies, to me, the quest for total power,
the quest of a dictator to rule the world. The words and concepts of "socialism" and
"communism" may serve, like "democracy," as a disguise for the megalomaniac
intention of the tyrant.


Since totalitarianism is essentially the social manifestation of a psychological
phenomenon belonging to every personality, it can best be understood in terms of
the human forces that create, foster, and perpetuate it. Man has two faces; he wants
to grow toward maturity and freedom, and yet the primitive child in his unconscious
yearns for more complete protection and irresponsibility. His mature self learns how
to cope with the restrictions and frustrations of daily life, but at the same time, the
child in him longs to hit out against them, to beat them down, to destroy them -
whether they be objects or people.


Totalitarianism appeals to this confused infant in all of us; it seems to offer a solution
to the problems man's double yearning creates. Our mythical Totalitaria is a
monolithic and absolute state in which doubt, confusion, and conflict are not
permitted to be shown, for the dictator purports to solve all his subjects’ problems for
them. In addition, Totalitaria can provide official sanction for the expression of man's
most antisocial impulses. The uncivilized child hidden in us may welcome this
liberation from ethical frustration.


On the other hand, our free, mature, social selves cannot be happy in Totalitaria;
they revolt against the restriction of individual impulses.


The psychological roots of totalitarianism are usually irrational, destructive, and
primitive, though disguised behind some ideology, and for this reason there is
something fantastic, unbelievable, even nightmarish about the system itself. There
is, of course, a difference in the psychic experience of the elite, who can live out their
needs for power, and the masses, who have to submit; yet the two groups influence
each other.


74


When a dictator's deep neurotic needs for power also satisfy some profound
emotional need in the population of his country, especially in times of misery or after
a revolution, he is more easily able to assume the power for which he longs. If a
nation has suffered defeat in war, for example, its citizens feel shame and
resentment. Loss of face is not simply a political abstraction, it is a very real and
personal thing to a conquered people. Every man, consciously or unconsciously,
identifies with his native land. If a country suffers from prolonged famine or severe
depression, its citizens become bitter, depressed, and resentful, and will more
willingly accept the visions and promises of the aspiring dictator.


If the complexity of a country's political and economic apparatus makes the individual
citizen feel powerless, confused, and useless, if he has no sense of participation in
the forces that govern his daily life, or if he feels these forces to be so vast and
confusing that he can no longer understand them, he will grasp at the totalitarian
opportunity for belonging, for participation, for a simple formula that explains and
rationalizes what is beyond his comprehension. And when the dictator has taken
over finally, he transfers his own abnormal fantasies, his rage and anger, easily to
his subjects. Their resentments feed his; his pseudo-strength encourages them. A
mutual fortification of illusions takes place.


Totalitarianism as a social manifestation is a disease of inter-human relations, and,
like any other disease, man can best resist its corroding effects if, through
knowledge and training, he is well immunized against it. If, however, he is
unfortunate enough to catch the totalitarian bug, he has to muster all the positive
forces in his mind to defeat it. The raging internal struggle between the irresponsible
child and the mature adult in him continues until one or the other is finally destroyed
completely. As long as a single spark of either remains, the battle goes on. And for
as long as man is alive, the quest for maturity keeps on.


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Cultural Predilection for Totalitarianism


In the battle against this dread disease, social factors as well as personal ones play
an important role. We can see this more clearly if we analyze the ways in which the
ideals of a culture as a whole affect its citizens’ vulnerability to totalitarianism. The
ethics of our own Western civilization are our strongest defences against the
disease, for the ideal of these ethics is to produce a breed of men and women who
are strongly individualistic and who evaluate situations primarily in terms of their own
consciences.


We aim to develop in our citizens a sense of self-responsibility, a willingness to
confront the world as it is, and an ability to distinguish between right and wrong
through their own feelings and thoughts. Such men and women are impelled to
action by their personal moral standards rather than by what some outside group
sets up as correct. They are unwilling to accept group evaluations immediately
unless these coincide with their own personal convictions, or unless they have been
able to discuss them in a democratic way. People like this are responsible to their
communities because they are first responsible to themselves. If they disagree, they
will form a "loyal minority", using their rights of convincing other people at
appropriate times.


There are other cultures which emphasize attitudes and values that are different
from these. The Eastern ideal of man, as we find it in China and some of the other
Oriental countries, is in the first place that one "oneness", of being one with the
family, one with the fatherland, one with the cosmos -- nirvana. The Oriental psyche
looks for a direct aesthetic contact with reality through an indefinable empathy and
intuition. Eternal truth is behind reality, behind the veil of Maya. Man is part of the
universe; his ideal is passive servility and non-irritability. His ideal of peace lies in
rest and relaxation, in meditation, in being without manual and mental travail. The
happiness of the Oriental psyche lies in the ecstasy of feeling united with the
universal cosmos. Ascesis, self-redemption, and poverty are better realized ideals in
Oriental culture than in our Western society.


The classic Oriental culture pattern can best be described as a pattern of
participation. In it the individual is looked upon as an integral part of the group, the
family, the caste, the nation. He is not a separate, independent entity. In this culture,
greater conformity to and acceptance of the collective rules are the ideals. An
Oriental child may be trained from infancy into a pattern of submission to authority
and to rules of the group. Many primitive cultures also display this pattern. To a
person raised in these cultures, the most acceptable standards, the best conceivable
thoughts and actions, are those sanctioned by the group. The totalitarian world of
mass actions and mass thoughts is far more comprehensible to the members of a
participation-patterned and less individual-minded culture than it is to Western
individualists. What is to us unbearable regimentation and authoritarianism may be
to them comforting order and regularity.


76


An example of an intensified pattern of participation and thought control and mutual
spying has been given by the anthropologist E. P. Dozier. [See the "New York
Times", December 11, 1955; and "Science News Letter", December 3, 1955.] The
Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande area believe that wrongdoing or wrong thinking of
One man in the tribe affects all members. He may upset the cosmic balance by ill
feeling toward any one of his fellow men. The moral code of the village is group-
centred. The individual who transgresses this jeopardizes the well-being of all.
Epidemics, crop failures, droughts are interpreted as a result of "deviationism" of one
member of the group. Village members are closely watched and spied on in order to
discover the culprit or "witch." Gossip and accusations of witchcraft are rampant, and
the Pueblo Indian is constantly searching in his own conscience for harmful thoughts
and attitudes. It is as if we watch the ritual of the purge in the totalitarian state.


Such forms of "creeping collectivism" and participation we may see in every group
formation where tolerance for non-conformism ceases to exist. Wherever dogmatic
partisanship dominates, the mind is coerced. We may even detect such encroaching
tendencies in some scientific circles where there exists an overemphasis on group
research, teamwork, membership cards, and a disdain for individual opinion.


The culture into which a man is born and his own psychological constitution interact
to produce his personality in much the same way as his body and mind interact to
produce his behaviour. Our culture of individual freedom may offer us a partial
immunity to the disease of totalitarianism, but at the same time our personal
immaturities and repressed savageries can make us vulnerable to it. The
participation type of culture may make men more susceptible in general to
totalitarianism, although personal strivings toward maturity and individuality can offer
them, too, some measure of protection against it.


Because of the interaction between these social and personal forces, no culture is
completely safe from internal attack by totalitarianism and from the mental
destruction it may create. As | said before, our Totalitaria is a mythical country, but
the brutal truth is that any country can be turned into Totalitaria.


The aims of the rulers of our fictitious country are simply formulated: despotism, the
total domination of man and mankind, and the unity of the entire world under one
dictatorial authority. At first glance, this idea of unity can be most attractive -- the
idea, oversimplified, of a brotherhood unity of nations under a central powerful
agency. When the world is one, it would seem, there will be no more war, the
tensions that face us will be eliminated, earth will become a paradise. But the
simplified conception of a universal dictatorship is false and reflects the danger
inherent in the totalitarian goal: all men are different, and it is the difference between
them that creates the greatness, the variety, and the creative inspirations of life, as
well as the tensions of social intercourse. The totalitarian conception of equalization
can be realized only in death, when the chemical and physical laws that govern all of
us take over completely. Death is indeed the great equalizer.


77


In life, all of us are different. Our bodies and minds interact with one another and with
the outside world in different ways. Each man's personality is unique. True, all of us
share certain basic human qualities with all the other members of the human race,
but the differences in personality are also so many and so varied that no two men
anywhere in the world or ever in all of human history can be said to be exactly alike.
This uniqueness is as true of the citizen of Totalitaria as it is of anyone else. As a
human being, he is not only different from us, he is different from his compatriots.
However, to create man in the totalitarian image through levelling and equalization
means to suppress what is essentially personal and human in him, the uniqueness
and the variety, and to create a society of robots, not men.


The noted social scientist, J. S. Brunner, in his introduction to Bauer's book on Soviet
psychology has expressed this thought in a different way: "Man's image of the nature
of man is not only a matter for objective inquiry; it is and has always been a prime
instrument of social and political control. He who moulds that image does so with
enormous consequences for the society in which he lives."


Totalitaria fosters the illusion that everyone is part of the government, a voter; no one
can be a non-voter or anti-voter. His inner pros and cons and doubts are not private
problems of the individual himself any more; his thoughts belong to the state, the
dictator, the ruling circle, the Party. His inner thoughts have to be controlled. Only
those in power know what really lies behind national policy. The ordinary citizen
becomes as dependent and obedient as a child. In exchange for giving up his
individuality, he obtains some special gratifications: the feeling of belonging and of
being protected, the sense of relief over losing his personal boundaries and
responsibilities, the ecstasy of being taken up and absorbed in wild, uncontrolled
collective feelings, the safety of being anonymous, of being merely a cog in the
wheel of the all-powerful state.


The despotism of modern Totalitaria is very different from the lush, exotic personal
tyrannies of ancient times. It is an ascetic, cold, mechanical force, aiming at what
Hanna Ahrendt calls the "transformation of human nature itself." In our theoretical
country, man has no individual ego any longer, no personality, no self. A levelling
system is at work, and everything above the common level is trampled on and
beaten down.


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The Totalitarian Leader


The leaders of Totalitaria are the strangest men in the state. These men are, like all
other men, unique in their mental structure, and consequently we cannot make any
blanket psychiatric diagnosis of the mental illness which motivates their behaviour.


But we can make some generalizations which will help us toward some
understanding of the totalitarian leader. Obviously, for example, he suffers from an
overwhelming need to control other human beings and to exert unlimited power, and
this in itself is a psychological aberration, often rooted in deep-seated feelings of
anxiety, humiliation, and inferiority. The ideologies such men propound are only used
as tactical and strategical devices through which they hope to reach their final goal of
complete domination over other men. This domination may help them compensate
for pathological fears and feelings of unworthiness, as we can conclude from the
psychological study of some modern dictators.


Fortunately, we do not have to rely on a purely hypothetical picture of the
psychopathology of the totalitarian dictator. Dr. G. M. Gilbert, who studied some of
the leaders of Nazi Germany during the Nuremberg trials, has given us a useful
insight into their twisted minds, useful especially because it reveals to us something
about the mutual interaction between the totalitarian leader and those who want to
be led by him.


Hitler's suicide made a clinical investigation of his character structure impossible, but
Dr. Gilbert heard many eyewitness reports of Hitler's behaviour from his friends and
collaborators, and these present a fantastic picture of Nazism's prime mover. Hitler
was known among his intimates as the carpet-eater, because he often threw himself
on the floor in a kicking and screaming fit like an epileptic rage. From such reports,
Dr. Gilbert was able to deduce something about the roots of the pathological
behaviour displayed by this morbid "genius."


Hitler's paranoid hostility against the Jew was partly related to his unresolved
parental conflicts; the Jews probably symbolized for him the hated drunken father
who mistreated Hitler and his mother when the future Fuhrer was still a child. Hitler's
obsessive thinking, his furious fanaticism, his insistence on maintaining the purity of
"Aryan blood," and his ultimate mania to destroy himself and the world were
obviously the results of a sick psyche.


As early as 1923, nearly ten years before he seized power, Hitler was convinced that
he would one day rule the world, and he spent time designing monuments of victory,
eternalizing his glory, to be erected all over the European continent when the day of
victory arrived. This delusional preoccupation continued until the end of his life; in the
midst of the war he created, which led him to defeat and death, Hitler continued
revising and improving his architectural plans.


Nazi dictator Number Two, Hermann Goering, who committed suicide to escape the
hangman, had a different psychological structure. His pathologically aggressive
drivers were encouraged by the archaic military tradition of the German Junker class,
to which his family belonged.


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From early childhood he had been compulsively and overtly aggressive. He was an
autocratic and a corrupt cynic, grasping the Nazi-created opportunity to achieve
purely personal gain. His contempt for the "common people" was unbounded; this
was a man who had literally no sense of moral values.


Quite different again was Rudolf Hess, the man of passive yet fanatical doglike
devotion, living, as it were, by proxy through the mind of his Fuhrer. His inner mental
weakness made it easier for him to live through means of a proxy than through his
own personality, and drove him to become the shadow of a seemingly strong man,
from whom he could borrow strength. The Nazi ideology have this frustrated boy the
illusion of blood identification with the glorious German race. After his wild flight to
England, Hess showed obvious psychotic traits; his delusions of persecution,
hysterical attacks, and periods of amnesia are among the well-known clinical
symptoms of schizophrenia.


Still another type was Hans Frank, the devil's advocate, the prototype of the
overambitious latent homosexual, easily seduced into political adventure, even when
this was in conflict with the remnants of his conscience. For unlike Goering, Frank
was capable of distinguishing between right and wrong.


Dr. Gilbert also tells us something about General Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler's Chief of
Staff, who became the submissive, automatic mouthpiece of the Fuhrer, mixing
military honor and personal ambition in the service of his own unimportance.


Of a different quality is the S.S. Colonel, Hoess, the murderer of millions in the
concentration camp of Auschwitz. A pathological character structure is obvious in
this case. All his life, Hoess had been a lonely, withdrawn, schizoid personality,
without any conscience, wallowing in his own hostile and destructive fantasies. Alone
and bereft of human attachments, he was intuitively sought out by Himmler for this
most savage of all the Nazi jobs. He was a useful instrument for the committing of
the most bestial deeds.


Unfortunately, we have no clear psychiatric picture yet of the Russian dictator Stalin.
There have been several reports that during the last years of his life he had a
tremendous persecution phobia and lived in constant terror that he would become
the victim of his own purges.


Psychological analysis of these men shows clearly that a pathological culture -- a
mad world - can be built by certain impressive psychoneurotic types. The venal
political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of
their behaviour. They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much
they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their
own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their
country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy
the cravings of their own pathological character structures.


80


The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which
these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle
inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception,
arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of
empathy - the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the
conscience.


A clear example of this can be seen in the way the Nazi leaders defended
themselves through continuous self-justification and exculpation when they were
brought before the bar at the Nuremberg trials. These murderers were aggrieved and
hurt by the accusations brought against them; they were the very picture of injured
innocence.


Any form of leadership, if unchecked by controls, may gradually turn into
dictatorship. Being a leader, carrying great power and responsibility for other
people's lives, is a monumental test for the human psyche. The weak leader is the
man who cannot meet it, who simply abdicates his responsibility. The dictator is the
man who replaces the existing standards of justice and morality by more and more
private prestige, by more and more power, and eventually isolates himself more and
more from the rest of humanity. His suspicion grows, his isolation grows, and the
vicious circle leading to a paranoid attitude begins to develop.


The dictator is not only a sick man, he is also a cruel opportunist. He sees no value
in any other person and feels no gratitude for any help he may have received. He is
suspicious and dishonest and believes that his personal ends justify any means he
may use to achieve them. Peculiarly enough, every tyrant still searches for some
self-justification. Without such a soothing device for his own conscience, he cannot
live.


His attitude toward other people is manipulative; to him, they are merely tools for the
advancement of his own interests. He rejects the conception of doubt, of internal
contradictions, of man's inborn ambivalence. He denies the psychological fact that
man grows to maturity through groping, through trial and error, through the interplay
of contrasting feelings. Because he will not permit himself to grope, to learn through
trial and error, the dictator can never become a mature person. But whether he
acknowledges them or not, he has internal conflicts, he suffers somewhere from
internal confusion. These inner "weaknesses" he tries to repress sternly; if they were
to come to the surface, they might interfere with the achievement of his goals. Yet, in
the attacks of rage his weakening strength is evident.


It is because the dictator is afraid, albeit unconsciously, of his own internal
contradictions, that he is afraid of the same internal contradictions of his fellow men.
He must purge and purge, terrorize and terrorize in order to still his own raging inner
drives. He must kill every doubter, destroy every person who makes a mistake,
imprison everyone who cannot be proved to be utterly single-minded. In Totalitaria,
the latent aggression and savagery in man are cultivate by the dictator to such a
degree that they can explode into mass criminal actions shown by Hitler's
persecution of minorities. Ultimately, the country shows a real pathology, an utter
dominance of destructive and self-destructive tendencies.


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The Final Surrender of the Robot Man


What happens to the common man in such a culture? How can we describe the
citizen of Totalitaria? Perhaps the simplest answer to this question lies in the
statement that he is reduced to the mechanical precision of an insectlike state. He
cannot develop any warm friendships, loyalties, or allegiances because they may be
too dangerous for him. Today's friend may be, after all, tomorrow's enemy. Living in
an atmosphere of constant suspicion -- not only of strangers, but even of his own
family - he is afraid to express himself lest concentration camp or prison swallow him


up.


The citizens of Totalitaria do not really converse with one another. When they speak,
they whisper, first looking furtively over their shoulders for the inevitable spy. Their
inner silence is in sharp contrast to the official verbal bombardment. The citizens of
Totalitaria may make noise, and utter polite banalities, or they may repeat slogans to
one another, but they say nothing. Existing literature reveals that leading authors,
among them H.G. Wells, Huxley, and Orwell, grow more and more concerned about
the ghastly future of the robotized man, trained as a machine on a standard of
conformity. They translate for us the common fear of a mechanized civilization.


In Totalitaria, the citizen no longer knows the real core of his mind. He no longer
feels himself an "I", an ego, a person. He is only the object of official barrage and
mental coercion. Having no personality of his own, he has no individual conscience,
no personal morality, no capacity to think clearly and honestly. He learns by rote, he
learns thousands of indoctrinated facts and inhales dogma and slogans with every
breath he draws. He becomes an obedient pedant, and pedantry makes people into
something resembling pots filled with information instead of individuals with free,
growing personalities.


Becoming wiser and freer implies selective forgetting and changes of mind. This we
accept, this we leave behind. Alert adjustment requires a change of patterns, the
capacity to be de-conditioned, to undo and unlearn in order to become ripe for new
patterns. The citizen of Totalitaria has no chance for such learning through
unlearning, for growth through individual experience. Official oversimplifications
induce the captive audience into acceptance and indoctrination. Mass ecstasy and
mass fanaticism are substituted for quiet individual thought and consideration.


Hitler taught his people to march and to do battle, and at the end they did not know
wherefore they marched and battled. People become herds -- indoctrinated and
obsessed herds -- intoxicated first with enthusiasm and happy expectations, then
with terror and panic. the individual personality cannot grow in Totalitaria. The huge
mass of citizens is tamed into personal and political somnambulism.


It may be scientifically questionable to compare experiences gained from individual


pathological states with social phenomena and to analyze the partial collapse of the
ego under totalitarianism by analogy with actual cases of madness.


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But there is in fact much that is comparable between the strange reactions of the
citizens of Totalitaria and their culture as a whole on the one hand and the reactions
of the introverted, sick schizophrenic on the other.


Even though the problem of schizophrenic behaviour in individuals and groups is
extremely complicated and cannot be fully handled within the scope of this book, the
comparison can be helpful in our search for an understanding of the nature and
effects of totalitarianism.


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The Common Retreat from Reality


This excursion into the world of pathology is not a description of a merely
coincidental resemblance between a disease and a political system. It should serve
to point up the fact that totalitarian withdrawal behind official justifications and
individual fantasy is something that can occur either in social life or inside the
individual mind. And many scholars believe in a relationship between cultural
deterioration and schizophrenic withdrawal.


Let us briefly explain the individual schizophrenic's reaction of complete inner
automatization and mental withdrawal as a personal failure to adjust to a world
experienced as insecure and dangerous. Often rather simple emotional incidents
may lead to such schizophrenic retreat -- for instance, the intrusion of schedules and
habits forced on the mind during infancy or a sly hypersensitivity to our overactive
and over-verbose culture. Many a child is forced into schizophrenic withdrawal by an
over-compulsive parent. Sometimes lack of external contact may drive a man into a
state of utter loneliness and isolation, sometimes his own preference for solitude. A
certain tendency to so-called schizophrenic withdrawal has been proved to be
inborn. Yet it an be provoked in everybody.


Whatever the cause, the schizophrenic patient becomes a dissocialized being, lost in
loneliness. Conscious and unconscious fantasy life begins to become dominant over
alert confrontation of reality. In the end his weird fantasies become more real for the
schizophrenic than the actual world. He hides more and more behind his own iron
curtain, in the imaginary dreamland and retreat he has built for himself. This is his
nirvana, in which all his dream wishes are fulfilled. Inertia and fanaticism alternate.
The patient regresses to an infantile, vegetative form of behaviour and rejects
everything that society has taught him. In his fantasy, he lives in a world which
always obeys his commands. He is omnipotent. The world turns around according to
his divine inclinations.


Reality, requiring as it does, continual and renewed adjustment and verification,
becomes a persecutor, attacking his illusion of divine might. Every disturbing
intrusion into his delusional world is encountered by the schizophrenic either with
tremendous aggression or with the formation of secondary delusion to protect the
first delusion, or with a combination of both. The schizophrenic displays tremendous
hostility toward the real world and its representatives; reality robs him both of his
delusions of omnipotence and his hallucinatory sense of being utterly protected, as
he was in the womb.


Clinical experience has shown that the disease of schizophrenia often begins with
negativism -- a defense against the influence of others, a continual fight against
mental intrusion, against what is felt as the rape of the oversensitive mind. Gradually,
this defensive attitude toward the world becomes a hostile attitude toward
everything, not only toward influences from the outside, but also toward thoughts and
feelings from the inside.


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Finally, the victim becomes paralyzed by his own hostility and negativisms. He
behaves literally as though he were dead. He sits, unmoving, for hours. He may
have to be force-fed, force-dressed. The schizophrenic moves like a puppet on a
string, only when someone compels him to. Clinically, we call this catatonia -- the
death attitude.


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The Retreat to Automatization


Introverted schizophrenics prefer the automatic routine life of the asylum to life in the
outside world, on the condition that they be allowed to indulge their private fantasies.
They surrender utterly in self-defeatism. They never congregate in groups, they
seldom talk with one another; even when they do, they never have any real mutual
contact. Each one lives in his own retreat.


In the totalitarian myth - think, for instance, of "das Dritte Reich" - in the
psychological folklore of our mythical state, the vague fantasy of the technically
perfected womb, the ideal nirvana, plays a tremendous role. In a world full of
insecurities, a world requiring continual alert adjustment and readjustment, Totalitaria
creates the delusion of the omnipotent, miraculous ideal state -- a state where, in its
final form, every material need will be satisfied. Everything will be regulated, just as it
was for the foetus in the womb, the land of bliss and equanimity, just as it is for the
schizophrenic in the mental hospital.


There is no social struggle, no mental struggle; the world moves like clockwork.
There is no real interplay between people, no clash of opinions or beliefs, there is no
emotional relationship between these womb-fellows; each exists as a separate
number-bearing entity in the same filing system.


In Totalitaria, there is no faith in fellow men, no "caritas," no love, because real
relationships between men do not exist, just as they do not exist between
schizophrenics. There is only faith in and subjection to the feeding system, and there
is in every citizen a tremendous fear of being expelled from that system, a fear of
being totally lost, comparable with the schizophrenic's feeling of rejection and fear of
reality. In the midst of spiritual loneliness and isolation, there is the fear of still
greater loneliness, of more painful isolation. Without protective regulations from the
outside, internal hell may break lose. Strong mechanical external order must be used
to cover the internal chaos and approaching breakdown.


We have had experience in post-war years with several refugees from the totalitarian
world who broke down when they had to cope with a world of freedom where
personal initiative was required. The fear of freedom brought them to a state of
panic. They no longer had strong enough egos to build and maintain their defences
against the competitive demands of free democratic reality.


As in schizophrenia, a manoeuvrable and individual ego cannot exist in Totalitaria. In
schizophrenia the ego shrinks as a result of withdrawal; in Totalitaria, as a result of
constant merging in mass feelings. If such a shrunken ego should grow up, with its
own critical attitude, its needs for verification of facts and for understanding, it would
then be beaten down as being treacherous and nonconforming.


Totalitaria requires of its citizens complete subjection to and identification with the
leader. It is this leader-dominance that makes people nearly ego-less, as they are in
schizophrenia. This again may result in loss of control of hostile and destructive
drives.


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Psychologists have seen this time and time again in what we call the concentration-
camp psyche. When the victims first came to the camp -- dedicated to their gradual
extermination - most of them displayed a complete loss of self, an utter
depersonalization, combined with apathy and loss of awareness. The same
observations have been made among our POWs in Korea. Some concentration-
camp victims got better immediately after their return to a normal society; in others,
this schizophrenic reaction of lost ego remained and, as we mentioned above,
sometimes developed into a real psychosis.


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The Womb State


Totalitarianism is man's escape from the fearful realities of life into the virtual womb
of the leader. The individual's actions are directed from this womb - from the inner
sanctum. The mystic center is in control of everything; man need no longer assume
responsibility for his own life. The order and logic of the prenatal world reign. There
is peace and silence, the peace of utter submission. The members of the womb state
do not really communicate; between them there is silence, the silence of possible
betrayal, not the mature silence of reticence and reservedness.


Totalitaria increases the gap between the things one shows and communicates and
the things one secretly dreams and thinks deep within oneself. It develops the
artificial split-mindedness of political silence. Whatever little remains of individual
feeling and opinion is kept carefully enclosed. In the schizophrenic world of
Totalitaria, there is no free mutual exchange, no conversation, no exclamation, no
release from emotional tension. It is a world of silent conspirators. Indeed, the
atmosphere of suspicion is the big attacker of mental freedom because it makes
people cling together, conspiring against mysterious enemies -- first from outside,
then among themselves.


In Totalitaria, each citizen is continually watched. The mythical state moulds the
individual's conscience. He has hardly any of his own. His neighbours watch him, his
postman, his children, and they all represent the punishing state, just as he himself
must represent the state and watch others. Not betraying them is a crime.


The need to find conspiracies, to discover persecutors and criminals is another
schizophrenic manifestation. It is psychologically related to an infantile need for a
feeling of omnipotence. Megalomaniac feelings grow better in an atmosphere of
mysterious secrecy. Secrecy and conspiracy increase the delusion of power. That is
why so many people like to pry into other people's lives and to play the spy.


This feeling of conspiracy also lies behind the pathological struggle with imaginary
persecutors, a struggle we find both in mentally ill individuals and in our mythical
Totalitaria. "It is there!" "It is chasing us!" All the inner fears of losing the nirvanic
womb-illusion become rampant. Mysterious ghosts and vultures chase people out of
nirvana and paradise.


In these fantasies, the patriarch, the dictator, the idol, becomes both the universal
danger and the omnipotent savoir at the same time. Not even the citizens of
Totalitaria really love this cruel giant. Suspicion against the breast that feeds and the
hand that guides and forbids is often found in the fantasy of schizophrenic children,
who experience the nourisher as the enemy, the dominating ogre, bribing the
growing mind into submission.


The deep hate the sick individual feels toward the parental figure cannot be


expressed directly, and so it is displaced onto the self or onto scapegoats.
Scapegoats is also part of the totalitarian strategy.


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As we pointed out before, the scapegoat temporarily absorbs all the individual's inner
fury and rage. Kulaks, Negroes, Jews, Communists, capitalists, profiteers, and
warmongers - any or all of them can play that role. Perhaps the greatest dangers, to
the totalitarian mind, is the use of intellect and awareness and the "egg-head's"
demand for free, verifying thinking. Aberration and perversion are chosen by the
citizens of Totalitaria, as they are by the inhabitants of madhouses, over the tiring,
intellectual control.


In the center of the totalitarian fears and fantasies stands the man-eating god and
idol. He is unconquerable. He uses man's great gift of adjustment to bring him to
slavery. Every man's inner core of feelings and thoughts has to belong to the leader.
Is the citizen of Totalitaria consciously aware of this? Probably not. Modern
psychology has taught us how strongly the mental mechanism of denial of reality
works. The eye bypasses external occurrences when the mind does not want them
to happen. Secondary justifications and fantasies are formed to support and explain
these denials. In Totalitaria we find the same despising of reality facts as we do in
schizophrenia. How else are we to explain the fact that Hitler was still moving his
armies on paper after they were already defeated?


Totalitarian strategy covers inner chaos and conflict by the strict order of the police
state. So does the compulsive schizophrenic patient, by his inner routine and
schedules. These routines and schedules are a defense against painful occurrences
in external reality. This internal robotization may lead to denial of internal realities
and internal needs as well. The citizen of Totalitaria, repressing and rejecting his
inner need for freedom, may even experience slavery as liberation. He may go even
one step further - yearn for an escape from life itself, a delusion that he could
become omnipotent through utter destruction.


The SS soldiers called this the magic action of the "Blutkitt," the tie of bloody crime
binding them together and preparing them for Valhalla. With this magic unification,
they could die with courage and equanimity. Anarchic despair and need for
greatness alternated in them as they do in the psychotic patient. In the same way,
the citizens of Totalitaria search for a "heroic" place in history even though the price
be doom an annihilation.


Many soldiers - tired by the rigidities of normal life - look back at violent moments of
their war experiences, despite the hunger and terror, as the monumental culminating
experiences of their lives. There, in the "Bruderbund" of fighters, they felt happy for
the first and only times in their lives.


This all sounds like a bitter comedy, but the fantasy of schizophrenics has taught us
how the mind can retreat into delusion when there is a fear of daily existence. Under
these circumstances, fantasy begins to prevail over reality, and soon assumes a
validity which reality never had. The totalitarian mind is like the schizophrenic mind; it
has a contempt for reality. Think for a moment of Lysenko's theory and its denial of
the influence of heredity. The totalitarian mind does not observe and verify its
impressions of reality; it dictates to reality how it shall behave, it compels reality to
conform to its fantasies.


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The comparison between totalitarianism and psychosis is not incidental. Delusional
thinking inevitably creeps into every form of tyranny and despotism. Unconscious
backward forces come into action. Evil powers from the archaic past return. An
automatic compulsion to go on to self-destruction develops, to justify one mistake
with a new one; to enlarge and expand the vicious pathological circle becomes the
dominating end of life. The frightened man, burdened by a culture he does not
understand, retreats into the brute's fantasy of limitless power in order to cover up
the vacuum inside himself. This fantasy starts with the leaders and is later taken over
by the masses they oppress.


What else can man do when he is caught in that tremendous machine called
Totalitaria? Thinking - and the brain itself - has become superfluous, that is, only
reserved for the elite. Man has to renounce his uniqueness, his individual
personality, and must surrender to the equalizing and homogenizing patterns of so-
called integration and standardization. This arouses in him that great inner
emptiness of the savage child, the emptiness of the robot that unwittingly years for
the great destruction.