No More Learning

The repetitive waves of thought reform diminish spontaneity and stimulate resentment, but they also help to achieve what is perhaps thought reform's major goal, the rapid establishment of a Chinese Communist ideological culture--a prescribed system of feeling and belief against which everything is critically judged. A variation of thought re- form got the Party into difficulty during the Hundred Flowers out- burst; a hyperorthodox thought reform came to the rescue. Al- though the counterattack was neither as significant nor as un- expected as the critical outburst which preceded it, the almost im- mediate recantation made by all who had spoken out was nearly as impressive a spectacle, and was certainly a highly convincing dis- play of the recuperative powers of thought reform. Those who recanted must have been very fearful, and their performances were perhaps even more than usually ritualistic. Yet they may also have
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felt some genuine repentance, for thought reform had applied to them its special techniques for reclaiming backsliders. By its mobili- zation of mass emotions, it could have convinced them that their critical views were out of step with the march of history, and that they had helped their country's enemies and harmed a noble cause. Thought reform can so envelop the backslider in his guilt that, however sincere his original protest, he is made to doubt himself enough to return to the fold--if not as a true believer, then as a humiliated, fearful, confused, and impotent follower. We saw ves- tiges of this reclaiming power in many of my subjects: the guilty sense of having been a betrayer, along with a paralyzing fear of the Communists (especially in Hu and in George Chen), persisting long after the escape from Communist control. For thought reform achieves a degree of psychological control over the individual as strong as any yet devised.
Accompanying this control is thought reform's extraordinary capacity for personal manipulation. We need not accept, of course, the regime's later claim to infallibility in relationship to the Hun- dred Flowers episode--its innuendoes that it had inaugurated the campaign in order to expose the "poisonous weeds" (a view also held by many cynical outsiders). The evidence suggests that the Communists were as surprised as anyone else at the response. Yet this ex post facto claim does have a kernel of truth: for in any system as total as thought reform, liberalization is at best a device, a purposeful technique rather than an expression of genuine con- viction. Thought reform manipulates the sequence of suffocation- liberalization-suffocation, and in so doing ensures that Communist realities remain at the center of the stage, whatever the degree of enthusiasm or resentment of the players.
I am aware that I have presented versions of thought reform's limitations and accomplishments which seem almost contradic- tory. I have done this intentionally, because these opposing effects can and do co-exist, sometimes even within the same person. A true picture of the program's impact can only be obtained by visualizing within the emotional life of individual Chinese intellectuals a fluc- tuating complex of genuine enthusiasm, neutral compliance, passive withdrawal, and hostility of suffocation--along with a tendency to accept much that is unpleasant because it seems to be a necessary part of a greater program, or the only way to get things done.
? IMP ACT 4 1 5
Will thought reform continue indefinitely? No one can be sure. Its intensity may diminish as the Chinese Communists move be- yond the acute ideological stage of revolution. This would be in keeping with their contention that the need for thought reform arises solely from the contaminations of the old order: new genera- tions of intellectuals, brought up entirely under Communism, should--according to this logic--have no reason to reform. Yet matters may not turn out to be quite so simple. The psychological forces which originally set thought reform in motion will continue to be felt; and perhaps for as long as this strange marriage be- tween Communism and Chinese culture remains solvent (despite the early clash of temperaments, the union looks like an enduring one), Chinese intellectuals will find themselves subjected to some kind of periodic "rectification. "
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? ? PART FOUR
TOTALISM AND ITS
AL TERNA TIVES
For my part, I detest these absolute systems which represent all the events of history as depending upon great first causes linked by the chain of fatality, and which, as it were, suppress men from the history of the human race. They seem narrowed to my mind, under their pretense of broadness, and false beneath their air of mathematical exactness.
Alexis de Tocqueville
If to see more is really to become more, if deeper vi- sion is really fuller being, then we should look closely at man in order to increase our capacity to live.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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? ? CHAPTER 22 IDEOLOGICAL TOTALISM
Thought reform has a psychological momentum of
its own, a self-perpetuating energy not always bound by the interests of the program's directors. When we inquire into the sources of this momentum, we come upon a complex set of psychological themes, which may be grouped under the general heading of ideological totalism. By this ungainly phrase I mean to suggest the coming together of immoderate ideology with equally immoderate individualcharacter traits--an extremist meeting ground between people and ideas.
In discussing tendencies toward individual totalism within my subjects, I made it clear that these were a matter of degree, and that some potential for this form of all-or-nothing emotional align- ment exists within everyone. Similarly, any ideology--that is, any set of emotionally-charged convictions about man and his rela- tionship to the natural or supernatural world--may be carried by its adherents in a totalistic direction. But this is most likely to occur with those ideologies which are most sweeping in their content and most ambitious--or messianic--in their claims, whether religious, political, or scientific. And where totalism exists, a re- ligion, a political movement, or even a scientific organization be- comes little more than an exclusive cult.
A discussion of what is most central in the thought reform en- vironment can thus lead us to a more general consideration of the
419
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psychology of human zealotry. For in identifying, on the basis of this study of thought reform, features common to all expressions of ideological totalism, I wish to suggest a set of criteria against which any environment may be judged--a basis for answering the ever- recurring question: "Isn't this just like 'brainwashing'? "
These criteria consist of eight psychological themes which are predominant within the social field of the thought reform milieu. Each has a totalistic quality; each depends upon an equally ab- solute philosophical assumption; and each mobilizes certain in- dividual emotional tendencies, mostly of a polarizing nature. Psy- chological theme, philosophical rationale, and polarized individual tendencies are interdependent; they require, rather than directly cause, each other. In combination they create an atmosphere which may temporarily energize or exhilarate, but which at the same time poses the gravest of human threats.
Milieu Control
The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individ- ual's communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also--in its penetration of his inner life--over what we may speak of as his communication with himself. It creates an atmosphere uncom- fortably reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984; but with one im- portant difference. Orwell, as a Westerner, envisioned milieu con- trol accomplished by a mechanical device, the two-way "tele- screen. " The Chinese, although they utilize whatever mechanical means they have at their disposal, achieve control of greater psycho- logical depth through a human recording and transmitting ap- paratus. It is probably fair to say that the Chinese Communist prison and revolutionary university produce about as thoroughly controlled a group environment as has ever existed. The milieu control exerted over the broader social environment of Communist China, while considerably less intense, is in its own way unrivalled in its combination of extensiveness and depth; it is, in fact, one of the distinguishing features of Chinese Communist practice.
? IDEOLOGICAL TOTALISM 42!
Such milieu control never succeeds in becoming absolute; and its own human apparatus can--when permeated by outside informa- tion--become subject to discordant "noise" beyond that of any mechanical apparatus. To totalist administrators, however, such occurrences are no more than evidences of "incorrect" use of the apparatus. For they look upon milieu control as a just and neces- sary policy, one which need not be kept secret: thought reform participants may be in doubt as to who is telling what to whom, but the fact that extensive information about everyone is being conveyed to the authorities is always known. At the center of this self-justification is their assumption of omniscience, their conviction that reality is their exclusive possession. Having experienced the impact of what they consider to be an ultimate truth (and having the need to dispel any possible inner doubts of their own), they con- sider it their duty to create an environment containing no more and no less than this "truth. " In order to be the engineers of the human soul, they must first bring it under full observational con- trol.
Many things happen psychologically to one exposed to milieu control; the most basic is the disruption of balance between self and outside world. Pressured toward a merger of internal and ex- ternal milieux, the individual encounters a profound threat to his personal autonomy. He is deprived of the combination of external information and inner reflection which anyone requires to test the realities of his environment and to maintain a measure of identity separate from it. Instead, he is called upon to make an absolute polarization of the real (the prevailing ideology) and the unreal
(everything else). To the extent that he does this, he undergoes a personal closurea which frees him from man's incessant struggle with the elusive subtleties of truth. He may even share his environ- ment's sense of omniscience and assume a "God's-eye view" 2 of the universe; but he is likely instead to feel himself victimized by the God's-eye view of his environment's controllers. At this point he is subject to the hostility of suffocation of which we have already spoken--the resentful awareness that his strivings toward new in- formation, independent judgment, and self-expression are being thwarted. If his intelligence and sensibilities carry him toward reali- ties outside the closed ideological system, he may resist these as not fully legitimate--until the milieu control is sufficiently diminished
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for him to share these realities with others. He is in either case pro- foundly hampered in the perpetual human quest for what is true, good, and relevant in the world around him and within himself.
Mystical Manipulation
The inevitable next step after milieu control is extensive personal manipulation. This manipulation assumes a no-holds-barred char- acter, and uses every possible device at the milieu's command, no matter how bizarre or painful. Initiated from above, it seeks to provoke specific patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that these will appear to have arisen spontaneously from within the environment. This element of planned spontaneity, directed as it is by an ostensibly omniscient group, must assume, for the manipulated, a near-mysticalquality.
Ideological totalists do not pursue this approach solely for the purpose of maintaining a sense of power over others. Rather they are impelled by a special kind of mystique which not only justifies such manipulations, but makes them mandatory. Included in this mystique is a sense of "higher purpose," of having "directly per- ceived some imminent law of social development," and of being themselves the vanguard of this development. 3 By thus becoming the instruments of their own mystique, they create a mystical aura around the manipulating institutions--the Party, the Government, the Organization. They are the agents "chosen" (by history, by God, or by some other supernatural force) to carry out the "mystical imperative/'4 the pursuit of which must supersede all considera- tions of decency or of immediate human welfare. Similarly, any thought or action which questions the higher purpose is considered to be stimulated by a lower purpose, to be backward, selfish, and petty in the face of the great, overriding mission. This same mystical imperative produces the apparent extremes of idealism and cynicism which occur in connection with the manipulations of any totalist environment: even those actions which seem cynical in the extreme can be seen as having ultimate relationship to the "higher purpose. "
At the level of the individual person, the psychological responses to this manipulative approach revolve about the basic polarity of trust and mistrust. One is asked to accept these manipulations on a basis of ultimate trust (or faith): "like a child in the arms of its
? IDEOLOGICAL TOT ALISM 423
mother," as Father Luca accurately perceived. He who trusts in this degree can experience the manipulations within the idiom of the mystique behind them: that is, he may welcome their mysteri- ousness, find pleasure in their pain, and feel them to be necessary for the fulfillment of the "higher purpose" which he endorses as his own. But such elemental trust is difficult to maintain; and even the strongest can be dissipated by constant manipulation.
When trust gives way to mistrust (or when trust has never existed) the higher purpose cannot serve as adequate emotional sustenance. The individual then responds to the manipulations through developing what I shall call the psychology of the pawn. Feeling himself unable to escape from forces more powerful than himself, he subordinates everything to adapting himself to them. He becomes sensitive to all kinds of cues, expert at anticipating environmental pressures, and skillful in riding them in such a way that his psychological energies merge with the tide rather than turn painfully against himself. This requires that he participate actively in the manipulation of others, as well as in the endless round of betrayals and self-betrayals which are required.
But whatever his response--whether he is cheerful in the face of being manipulated, deeply resentful, or feels a combination of both --he has been deprived of the opportunity to exercise his capacities for self-expression and independent action.
The Demand for Purity
In the thought reform milieu, as in all situations of ideological totalism, the experiential world is sharply divided into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The good and the pure are of course those ideas, feelings, and actions which are consistent with the totalist ideology and policy; anything else is apt to be relegated to the bad and the impure. Nothing human is immune from the flood of stern moral judgments. All "taints" and "poisons" which contribute to the existing state of impurity must be searched out and eliminated.
The philosophical assumption underlying this demand is that absolute purity (the "good Communist" or the ideal Communist state) is attainable, and that anything done to anyone in the name of this purity is ultimately moral. In actual practice, however, no
? 424 THOUGHT REFORM
one (and no State) is really expected to achieve such perfection. Nor can this paradox be dismissed as merely a means of establish- ing a high standard to which all can aspire. Thought reform bears witness to its more malignant consequences: for by defining and manipulating the criteria of purity, and then by conducting an all-out war upon impurity, the ideological totalists create a narrow world of guilt and shame. This is perpetuated by an ethos of continuous reform, a demand that one strive permanently and painfully for something which not only does not exist but is in fact alien to the human condition.
At the level of the relationship between individual and environ- ment, the demand for purity creates what we may term a guilty milieu and a shaming milieu. Since each man's impurities are deemed sinful and potentially harmful to himself and to others, he is, so to speak, expected to expect punishment--which results in a relationship of guilt with his environment. Similarly, when he fails to meet the prevailing standards in casting out such im- purities, he is expected to expect humiliation and ostracism--thus establishing a relationship of shame with his milieu. Moreover, the sense of guilt and the sense of shame become highly-valued; they are preferred forms of communication, objects of public com- petition, and the bases for eventual bonds between the individual and his totalist accusers. One may attempt to simulate them for a while, but the subterfuge is likely to be detected, and it is safer
(as Miss Darrow found) to experience them genuinely.
People vary greatly in their susceptibilities to guilt and shame (as my subjects illustrated), depending upon patterns developed early in life. But since guilt and shame are basic to human existence, this variation can be no more than a matter of degree. Each person is made vulnerable through his profound inner sensitivities to his own limitations and to his unfulfilled potential; in other words, each is made vulnerable through his existential guilt. Since ideo- logical totalists become the ultimate judges of good and evil within their world, they are able to use these universal tendencies toward guilt and shame as emotional levers for their controlling and manip- ulative influences. They become the arbiters of existential guilt, authorities without limit in dealing with others' limitations. And their power is nowhere more evident than in their capacity to "for-
give. " 5
? IDEOLOGICAL TOT ALISM 425
The individual thus comes to apply the same totalist polarization of good and evil to his judgments of his own character: he tends to imbue certain aspects of himself with excessive virtue, and con- demn even more excessively other personal qualities--all according to their ideological standing. He must also look upon his impurities as originating from outside influences--that is, from the ever- threatening world beyond the closed, totalist ken. Therefore, one of his best ways to relieve himself of some of his burden of guilt is to denounce, continuously and hostilely, these same outside influences. The more guilty he feels, the greater his hatred, and the more threatening they seem. In this manner, the universal psychological tendency toward "projection" is nourished and institutionalized, leading to mass hatreds, purges of heretics, and to political and religious holy wars. Moreover, once an individual person has ex- perienced the totalist polarization of good and evil, he has great difficulty in regaining a more balanced inner sensitivity to the complexities of human morality. For there is no emotional bondage greater than that of the man whose entire guilt potential--neurotic and existential--has become the property of ideological totalists.
The Cult of Confession
Closely related to the demand for absolute purity is an obsession with personal confession. Confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal, and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed. Such demands are made possible not only by the ubiquitous human tendencies toward guilt and shame but also by the need to give expression to these tend- encies. In totalist hands, confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering solace for, these vulnerabilities.
The totalist confession takes on a number of special meanings. It is first a vehicle for the kind of personal purification which we have just discussed, a means of maintaining a perpetual inner empty- ing or psychological purge of impurity; this purging milieu enhances the totalists' hold upon existential guilt. Second, it is an act of symbolic self-surrender, the expression of the merging of individual and environment. Third, it is a means of maintaining an ethos of
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total exposure--a policy of making public (or at least known to the Organization) everything possible about the life experiences, thoughts, and passions of each individual, and especially those ele- ments which might be regarded as derogatory.
The assumption underlying total exposure (besides those which relate to the demand for purity) is the environment's claim to total ownership of each individual self within it. Private ownership of the mind and its products--of imagination or of memory--becomes highly immoral. The accompanying rationale (or rationalization) is familiar to us (from George Chen's experience); the milieu has at- tained such a perfect state of enlightenment that any individual retention of ideas or emotions has become anachronistic.
The cult of confession can offer the individual person meaning- ful psychological satisfactions in the continuing opportunity for emotional catharsis and for relief of suppressed guilt feelings, es- pecially insofar as these are associated with self-punitive tendencies to get pleasure from personal degradation. More than this, the sharing of confession enthusiasms can create an orgiastic sense of "oneness," of the most intense intimacy with fellow confessors and of the dissolution of self into the great flow of the Movement. And there is also, at least initially, the possibility of genuine self- revelation and of self-betterment through the recognition that "the thing that has been exposed is what I am/'6
But as totalist pressures turn confession into recurrent command performances, the element of histrionic public display takes pre- cedence over genuine inner experience. Each man becomes con- cerned with the effectiveness of his personal performance, and this performance sometimes comes to serve the function of evading the very emotions and ideas about which one feels most guilty--con- firming the statement by one of Camus' characters that "authors of confessions write especially to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of what they know. " 7 The difficulty, of course, lies in the inevitable confusion which takes place between the actor's method and his separate personal reality, between the performer and the "real me. "
In this sense, the cult of confession has effects quite the reverse of its ideal of total exposure: rather than eliminating personal se- crets, it increases and intensifies them. In any situation the personal secret has two important elements: first, guilty and shameful ideas which one wishes to suppress in order to prevent their becoming
? IDEOLOGICAL TOTALISM 427
known by others or their becoming too prominent in one's own awareness; and second, representations of parts of oneself too pre- cious to be expressed except when alone or when involved in special loving'relationships formed around this shared secret world. Per- sonal secrets are always maintained in opposition to inner pressures toward self-exposure. The totalist milieu makes contact with these inner pressures through its own obsession with the expose and the unmasking process. As a result old secrets are revived and new ones proliferate; the latter frequently consist of resentments to- ward or doubts about the Movement, or else are related to aspects of identity still existing outside of the prescribed ideological sphere. Each person becomes caught up in a continuous conflict over which secrets to preserve and which to surrender, over ways to reveal lesser secrets in order to protect more important ones; his own boundaries between the secret and the known, between the public and the private, become blurred. And around one secret, or a complex of secrets, there may revolve (as we saw with Hu) an ultimate inner struggle between resistance and self-surrender.
Finally, the cult of confession makes it virtually impossible to attain a reasonable balance between worth and humility. The enthusiastic and aggressive confessor becomes like Camus' char- acter whose perpetual confession is his means of judging others: "[I] . . . practice the profession of penitent to be able to end up as a judge . . . the more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. " The identity of the "judge-penitent" 8 thus becomes a vehicle for taking on some of the environment's arrogance and sense of omnipotence. Yet even this shared omnipotence cannot protect him from the opposite (but not unrelated) feelings of humiliation and weakness, feelings especially prevalent among those who remain more the enforced penitent than the all-powerful judge.
The "Sacred Science"
The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the or- dering of human existence. This sacredness is evident in the pro- hibition (whether or not explicit) against the questioning of basic assumptions, and in the reverence which is demanded for the originators of the Word, the present bearers of the Word, and the
? 4 2 8 THOUGHT REFORM
Word itself. While thus transcending ordinary concerns of logic, however, the milieu at the same time makes an exaggerated claim of airtight logic, of absolute "scientific" precision. Thus the ultimate moral vision becomes an ultimate science; and the man who dares to criticize it, or to harbor even unspoken alternative ideas, becomes not only immoral and irreverent, but also "unscientific. " In this way, the philosopher kings of modern ideological totalism reinforce their authority by claiming to share in the rich and respected her- itage of natural science.
The assumption here is not so much that man can be God, but rather that man's ideas can be God: that an absolute science of ideas (and implicitly, an absolute science of man) exists, or is at least very close to being attained; that this science can be combined with an equally absolute body of moral principles; and that the resulting doctrine is true for all men at all times. Although no ideology goes quite this far in overt statement, such assumptions are implicit in totalist practice. 9
At the level of the individual, the totalist sacred science can offer much comfort and security. Its appeal lies in its seeming unification of the mystical and the logical modes of experience (in psychoanalytic terms, of the primary and secondary thought proc- esses). For within the framework of the sacred science, there is room for both careful step-by-step syllogism, and sweeping, non- rational "insights. " Since the distinction between the logical and the mystical is, to begin with, artificial and man-made, an oppor- tunity for transcending it can create an extremely intense feeling of truth. But the posture of unquestioning faith--both rationally and nonrationally derived--is not easy to sustain, especially if one dis- covers that the world of experience is not nearly as absolute as the sacred science claims it to be.
Yet so strong a hold can the sacred science achieve over his mental processes that if one begins to feel himself attracted to ideas which either contradict or ignore it, he may become guilty and afraid. His quest for knowledge is consequently hampered, since in the name of science he is prevented from engaging in the recep- tive search for truth which characterizes the genuinely scientific ap- proach. And his position is made more difficult by the absence, in a totalist environment, of any distinction between the sacred and the profane: there is no thought or action which cannot be related
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to the sacred science. To be sure, one can usually find areas of experience outside its immediate authority; but during periods of maximum totalist activity (like thought reform) any such areas are cut off, and there is virtually no escape from the milieu's ever- pressing edicts and demands. Whatever combination of continued adherence, inner resistance, or compromise co-existence the in- dividual person adopts toward this blend of counterfeit science and back-door religion, it represents another continuous pressure toward personal closure, toward avoiding, rather than grappling with, the kinds of knowledge and experience necessary for genuine self-ex- pression and for creative development
Loading the Language
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliche. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. In thought reform, for instance, the phrase "bourgeois mentality" is used to encompass and critically dismiss ordinarily troublesome con- cerns like the quest for individual expression, the exploration of al- ternative ideas, and the search for perspective and balance in politi- cal judgments. And in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these cliches become what Richard Weaver has called "ultimate terms": either "god terms," representative of ultimate good; or "devil terms," representative of ultimate evil. In thought reform, "progress," "progressive," "liberation," "proletarian stand- points" and "the dialectic of history" fall into the former category; "capitalist," "imperialist," "exploiting classes," and "bourgeois" (mentality, liberalism, morality, superstition, greed) of course fall into the latter. 10 Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categori- cal, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted ad- vocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling's phrase, "the language of nonthought. "
To be sure, this kind of language exists to some degree within any cultural or organizational group, and all systems of belief de- pend upon it. It is in part an expression of unity and exclusiveness:
? 43^ THOUGHT REFORM
as Edward Sapir put it, " 'He talks like us' is equivalent to saying 'He is one of us'. " n The loading is much more extreme in ideologi- cal totalism, however, since the jargon expresses the claimed cer- titudes of the sacred science. Also involved is an underlyingassump- tion that language--like all other human products--can be owned and operated by the Movement. No compunctions are felt about manipulating or loading it in any fashion; the only consideration is its usefulness to the cause.
For an individual person, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. He is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed. This is what Hu meant when he said, "using the same pattern of words for so long . . . you feel chained. " Ac- tually, not everyone exposed feels chained, but in effect every- one is profoundly confined by these verbal fetters. As in other as- pects of totalism, this loading may provide an initial sense of in- sight and security, eventually followed by uneasiness. This uneasiness may result in a retreat into a rigid orthodoxy in which an individ- ual shouts the ideological jargon all the louder in order to demon- strate his conformity, hide his own dilemma and his despair, and protect himself from the fear and guilt he would feel should he at- tempt to use words and phrases other than the correct ones. Or else he may adopt a complex pattern of inner division, and dutifully produce the expected cliches in public performances while in his private moments he searches for more meaningful avenues of ex- pression. Either way, his imagination becomes increasingly dis- sociated from his actual life experiences and may even tend to atrophy from disuse.
Doctrine Over Person
This sterile language reflects another characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. This primacy of doctrine over person is evident in the continual shift between experience itself and the highly abstract interpretation of such experience--between genuine feelings and spurious cataloguing of feelings. It has much to do with the peculiar aura of half-reality which a totalist environment seems, at
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least to the outsider, to possess.
This tendency in the totalist approach to broad historical events
was described in relationship to Chinese Communism by John K. Fairbank and Mary C. Wright:
. . . stock characters like capitalist imperialists from abroad, feudal and semi-feudal reaction at home, and the resistance and liberation move- ments of "the people7' enact a morality play. This melodrama sees ag- gression, injustice, exploitation, and humiliation engulf the Chinese peo- ple until salvation comes at last with Communism. Mass revolutions re- quire an historical myth as part of their black and white morality, and this is the ideological myth of one of the great revolutions of world his- tory. 12
The inspiriting force of such myths cannot be denied; nor can one ignore their capacity for mischief. For when the myth becomes fused with the totalist sacred science, the resulting "logic" can be so compelling and coercive that it simply replaces the realities of individual experience. Consequently, past historical events are retrospectively altered, wholly rewritten, or ignored, to make them consistent with the doctrinal logic. This alteration becomes es- pecially malignant when its distortions are imposed upon individ- ual memory as occurred in the false confessions extracted during thought reform (most graphically Father Luca's).
The same doctrinal primacy prevails in the totalist approach to changing people: the demand that character and identity be reshaped, not in accordance with one's special nature or poten- tialities, but rather to fit the rigid contours of the doctrinal mold. The human is thus subjugated to the ahuman. And in this manner, the totalists, as Camus phrases it, "put an abstract idea above hu- man life, even if they call it history, to which they themselves have submitted in advance and to which they will decide quite arbitrarily, to submit everyone else as well/'13
The underlying assumption is that the doctrine--including its mythological elements--is ultimately more valid, true, and real than is any aspect of actual human character or human experience. Thus, even when circumstances require that a totalist movement follow a course of action in conflict with or outside of the doctrine, there exists what Benjamin Schwartz has described as a "will to orthodoxy" 14 which requires an elaborate fagade of new rationaliza- tions designed to demonstrate the unerring consistency of the
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doctrine and the unfailing foresight which it provides. The public operation of this will to orthodoxy is seen in the Party's explanation of the Hundred Flowers Campaign. But its greater importance lies in more hidden manifestations, particularly the totalists' pattern of imposing their doctrine-dominated remolding upon people in order to seek confirmation of (and again, dispel their own doubts about) this same doctrine. Rather than modify the myth in ac- cordance with experience, the will to orthodoxy requires instead that men be modified in order to reaffirm the myth. Thus, much of prison thought reform was devoted to making the Westerner conform to the pure image of "evil imperialist," so that he could take his proper role in the Communist morality play of Chinese history.
The individual person who finds himself under such doctrine- dominated pressure to change is thrust into an intense struggle with his own sense of integrity, a struggle which takes place in relation to polarized feelings of sincerity and insincerity. In a totalist environment, absolute "sincerity" is demanded; and the major criterion for sincerity is likely to be one's degree of doctrinal compliance--both in regard to belief and to direction of personal change. Yet there is always the possibility of retaining an alterna- tive version of sincerity (and of reality), the capacity to imagine a different kind of existence and another form of sincere commit- ment (as did Grace Wu when she thought, "the world could not be like this"). These alternative visions depend upon such things as the strength of previous identity, the penetration of the milieu by outside ideas, and the retained capacity for eventual individual renewal. The totalist environment, however, counters such "deviant" tendencies with the accusation that they stem entirely from personal "problems" ("thought problems" or "ideological problems") derived from untoward earlier ("bourgeois") influences. The outcome will depend largely upon how much genuine relevance the doctrine has for the individual emotional predicament. And even for those to whom it seems totally appealing, the exuberant sense of well-being it temporarily affords may be more a "delusion of wholeness" 15 than an expression of true and lasting inner harmony.
? The Dispensing of Existence
The totalist environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be recognized, and those who possess no such right. In thought reform, as in Chinese Communist practice generally, the world is divided into the "people" (defined as "the working class, the peasant class, the petite bourgeoisie, and the na- tional bourgeoisie"), and the "reactionaries" or "lackeys of im- perialism" (defined as "the landlord class, the bureaucratic capitalist class, and the KMT reactionaries and their henchmen"). Mao Tse- tung makes the existential distinction between the two groups quite explicit:
Under the leadership of the working class and the Communist Party, these classes [the people] unite together to form their own state and elect their own government [so as to] carry out a dictatorship over the lackeys of imperialism. . . . These two aspects, namely, democracy among the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, combine to form the people's democratic dictatorship . . . . to the hostile classes the state apparatus is the instrument of oppression. It is violent, and not "benevolent. " . . . Our benevolence applies only to the people, and not to the reactionary acts of the reactionaries and reactionary classes outside the people. 16
Being "outside the people," the reactionaries are presumably nonpeople. Under conditions of ideological totalism, in China and elsewhere, nonpeople have often been put to death, their execu- tioners then becoming guilty (in Camus' phrase) of "crimes of logic. " But the thought reform process is one means by which non- people are permitted, through a change in attitude and personal character, to make themselves over into people. The most literal example of such dispensing of existence and nonexistence is to be found in the sentence given to certain political criminals: execution in two years' time, unless during that two-year period they have demonstrated genuine progress in their reform.
In the light of this existential policy, the two different pronuncia- tions of the word people ("people" and "peepul") adopted by the European group described in Chapter 9 was more than just a practi- cal maneuver. It was a symbolic way to cut through the loaded totalist language and restore the word to its general meaning,
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thereby breaking down the imposed distinction between people and nonpeople. Since the Westerners involved were themselves clearly nonpeople theirs was an invention born of the negative status dispensed to them.
Are not men presumptuous to appoint themselves the dispensers of human existence? Surely this is a flagrant expression of what the Greeks called hubris, of arrogant man making himself God. Yet one underlying assumption makes this arrogance mandatory: the con- viction that there is just one path to true existence, just one valid mode of being, and that all others are perforce invalid and false. Totalists thus feel themselves compelled to destroy all possibilities of false existence as a means of furthering the great plan of true existence to which they are committed. Indeed, Mao's words sug- gest that all of thought reform can be viewed as a way to eradicate such allegedly false modes of existence--not only among the non- people, within whom they supposedly originate, but also among legitimate people allegedly contaminated by them.
The [function of the] people's state is to protect the people. Only where there is the people's state, is it possible for the people to use dem- ocratic methods or a nationwide and all-round scale to educate and re- form themselves, to free themselves from the influence of reactionaries at home and abroad . . . . to unlearn the bad habits and ideas acquired from the old society and not to let themselves travel on the erroneous path pointed out by the reactionaries, but to continue to advance and develop towards a Socialist and Communist society accomplishing the historic mission of completely eliminating classes and advancing toward a universal fraternity. 17
For the individual, the polar emotional conflict is the ultimate existential one of "being versus nothingness. " He is likely to be drawn to a conversion experience, which he sees as the only means of attaining a path of existence for the future (as did George Chen). The totalist environment--even when it does not resort to physical abuse--thus stimulates in everyone a fear of extinction or annihilation much like the basic fear experienced by Western prisoners. A person can overcome this fear and find (in Martin Buber's term) "confirmation," not in his individual relationships, but only from the fount of all existence, the totalist Organization. Existence comes to depend upon creed (I believe, therefore I am), upon submission (I obey, therefore I am) and beyond these, upon
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a sense of total merger with the ideological movement. Ultimately of course one compromises and combines the totalist "confirmation" with independent elements of personal identity; but one is ever made aware that, should he stray too far along this "erroneous path," his right to existence may be withdrawn.
The more clearly an environment expresses these eight psychologi- cal themes, the greater its resemblance to ideological totalism; and the more it utilizes such totalist devices to change people, the greater its resemblance to thought reform (or "brainwashing"). But facile comparisons can be misleading. No milieu ever achieves complete totalism, and many relatively moderate environments show some signs of it. Moreover, totalism tends to be recurrent rather than continuous: in China, for instance, its fullest expressioii occurs during thought reform; it is less apparent during lulls in thought reform, although it is by no means absent. And like the "enthusiasm" with which it is often associated, totalism is more apt to be present during the early phases of mass movements than later--Communist China in the 1950*5 was generally more totalist than Soviet Russia. But if totalism has at any time been prominent in a movement, there is always the possibility of its reappearance, even after long periods of relative moderation.
Then too, some environments come perilously close to totalism but at the same time keep alternative paths open; this combina- tion can offer unusual opportunities for achieving intellectual and emotional depth. And even the most full-blown totalist milieu can provide (more or less despite itself) a valuable and enlarging life experience--if the man exposed has both the opportunity to leave the extreme environment and the inner capacity to absorb and make inner use of the totalist pressures (as did Father V echten and Father Luca).
Also, ideological totalism itself may offer a man an intense peak experience: a sense of transcending all that is ordinary and prosaic, of freeing himself from the encumbrances of human ambivalence, of entering a sphere of truth, reality, trust, and sincerity beyond any he had ever known or even imagined. But these peak experi- ences, the result as they are of external pressure, distortion, and threat, carry a great potential for rebound, and for equally intense opposition to the very things which initially seem so liberating. Such
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imposed peak experiences 18--as contrasted with those more freely and privately arrived at by great religious leaders and mystics-- are essentially experiences of personal closure. Rather than stimu- lating greater receptivity and "openness to the world/' they en- courage a backward step into some form of "embeddedness"--a retreat into doctrinal and organizational exclusiveness, and into all-or-nothing emotional patterns more characteristic (at least at this stage of human history) of the child than of the individuated adult. 19
And if no peak experience occurs, ideological totalism does even greater violence to the human potential: it evokes destructive emo- tions, produces intellectual and psychological constrictions, and deprives men of all that is most subtle and imaginative--under the false promise of eliminating those very imperfections and ambivalences which help to define the human condition. This combination of personal closure, self-destructiveness, and hostility toward outsiders leads to the dangerous group excesses so characteris- tic of ideological totalism in any form. It also mobilizes extremist tendencies in those outsiders under attack, thus creating a vicious circle of totalism.
What is the source of ideological totalism? How do these ex- tremist emotional patterns originate? These questions raise the most crucial and the most difficult of human problems. Behind ideological totalism lies the ever-present human quest for the om- nipotent guide--for the supernatural force, political party, philo- sophical ideas, great leader, or precise science--that will bring ul- timate solidarity to all men and eliminate the terror of death and nothingness. This quest is evident in the mythologies, religions, and histories of all nations, as well as in every individual life. The degree of individual totalism involved depends greatly upon factors in one's personal history: early lack of trust, extreme environmental chaos, total domination by a parent or parent-representative, in- tolerable burdens of guilt, and severe crises of identity. Thus an early sense of confusion and dislocation, or an early experience of unusually intense family milieu control, can produce later a com- plete intolerance for confusion and dislocation, and a longing for the reinstatement of milieu control. But these things are in some measure part of every childhood experience; and therefore the po- tential for totalism is a continuum from which no one entirely es-
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capes, and in relationship to which no two people are exactly the same.
It may be that the capacity for totalism is most fundamentally a product of human childhood itself, of the prolonged period of helplessness and dependency through which each of us must pass. Limited as he is, the infant has no choice but to imbue his first nurturing authorities--his parents--with an exaggerated omnip- otence, until the time he is himself capable of some degree of in- dependent action and judgment. And even as he develops into the child and the adolescent, he continues to require many of the all- or-none polarities of totalism as terms with which to define his in- tellectual, emotional, and moral worlds. Under favorable circum- stances (that is, when family and culture encourage individuation) these requirements can be replaced by more flexible and moderate tendencies; but they never entirely disappear.
During adult life, individual totalism takes on new contours as it becomes associated with new ideological interests. It may become part of the configuration of personal emotions, messianic ideas, and organized mass movement which I have described as ideological totalism. When it does, we cannot speak of it as simply a form of regression. It is partly this, but it is also something more: a new form of adult embeddedness, originating in patterns of security- seeking carried over from childhood, but with qualities of ideas and aspirations that are specifically adult. During periods of cultural crisis and of rapid historical change, the totalist quest for the om- nipotent guide leads men to seek to become that guide.
Totalism, then, is a widespread phenomenon, but it is not the only approach to re-education. We can best use our knowledge of it by applying its criteria to familiar processes in our own cul- tural tradition and in our own country.
? CHAPTER 23 APPROACHES TO RE-EDUCATION
Throughout this book I have been discussing what
Milton called "the bitter change of fierce extremes. " This kind of discussion, especially when it is critical in tone, im- plies that there are alternative possibilities for human change less bitter and less extreme. By human change I mean those shifts and alterations in the sense of inner identity which occur within individ- uals during late adolescence and adult life. My concern in this chapter is with the great agencies of such change--educational, psychological, religious, and political--and with their resemblances to, and their possibilities for avoiding, ideological totalism.
All these agencies make use of four general approaches to chang- ing people: coercion, exhortation, therapy, and realization. Ideologi- cal totalism utilizes all four, as this study of thought reform makes clear; but it leans most heavily upon the first two. The approaches, therefore, are by no means mutually exclusive; however, each con- veys a distinct message, a specific goal, and an appeal to a particular aspect of human nature.
The message of coercion is: you must change and become what we tell you to become--or else. The threat embodied in the "or else" may be anything from death to social ostracism, any form of physical or emotional pain. The goal of naked coercion is to pro- duce a cowed and demoralized follower. It is directed at the most primitive of human emotions, and stimulates the desire to flee, or
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to fight back, to freeze in fear, or submit completely. A good ex- ample of the coercive approach to changing people was the Nazi concentration camp. There, as Bruno Bettelheim has described,1 the intent was "to break the prisoners as individuals and to change them into docile masses. . . . useful subjects of the Nazi state/' Gestapo authorities made no effort to indoctrinate the inmates, and in fact treated them in an unprecedentedly cruel, sadistic, and degrading fashion. Yet it is significant that even under such con- ditions some ideological conversions occurred: some long-term prisoners eventually adopted Nazi views on Aryan racial supremacy and on the legitimacy of German expansionism--a literal expres- sion of the psychological mechanism of "identification with the aggressor. "2 In thought reform, coercion is greatest during the early stages of the prison process; but it is an essential ingredient of all varieties of thought reform and of all phases, however much it may temporarily be shunted to the background.
The message of the exhortative approach is: you should change --if you are a moral man--and become what we (in the name of a higher moral authority) tell you to become. Exhortation seeks to create converts and disciples, people who have been changed in accordance with the specific ideological convictions of the mentor. It appeals to the individual's wish to be a good man, or to become a better one; to pre-existing tendencies toward experiencing guilt and shame, including existential guilt. It is the method par excel- lence of religions and of pseudo-religious secular ideologies, both of which reinforce their moral appeal by their promise of reward, earthly or supernatural. Exhortation is, as I have already empha- sized, always extremely prominent in thought reform, and is per- haps the most prominent of thought reform's approaches.
The message of the therapeutic approach is: you can change --from your sickly state, and find relief for your suffering--if you have a genuine urge to become healthy; and if you are willing to follow my (or our) method and guidance. Its goal is physical and emotional health (in the sense conveyed by the words hale and wftoZe), freedom from incapacitating disease and defect. It makes its appeal to that part of a man that is most reasonable, healthful, health-seeking, and balanced. This has been the tra- ditional approach of the medical profession, and in the emotional sphere it is best exemplified by psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
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But religious and secular ideologies also use this approach, or at least make claims on it. Thought reform is extravagant in its re- ferral to "illness," "health," and "cure/' following Mao Tse-tung's original lead; this usage implies biological restoration, and places reformers in the role of social physicians.
The message of realization is: you can change--in such a fashion that you will be able to express more fully your own potential-- if you are willing to confront yourself with ideas and approaches which challenge your present ways of knowing and acting. Its goal is to produce a person who expresses his creative potential to the full, one who extends his faculties to their utmost in the effort to appreciate and produce at the highest level at which he is capable. Although this goal is closely related to that of the therapeu- tic approach, it is by no means the same; it may cause rather than relieve pain, and may promote within a person periods of incapacity alternating with creative peaks rather than a balanced continuity of health and strength. Each of the major agencies for change at times emphasizes the approach of realization; at other times, each strays from it. It has been an avowed ideal of such diverse groups as political forces associated with traditional liberalism; various psychoanalytic groups/ most recently those influenced by exis- tentialism; mystics of all major Eastern and Western religions and practicing Zen Buddhists; and educators influenced by the philos- ophy of John Dewey. Other historical variations are the Confucian concept of self-cultivation,and the Greek notion of aret&--the view that life exists for the purpose of reaching the full expression of one's inborn capacity. 4 But the approach of realization is the most difficult of all to maintain: many have violated it even as they theoretically proclaimed it, and it is notorious for its quick mortality rate. Indeed, the very formation of an institution around it has too
often signified the beginnings of its disappearance. Here thought reform's claim is frequently the bitterest of ironies, since totalism does more to stifle than to realize the human potential. Yet the claim is not entirely false, since sometimes, especially among the young, thought reform has been experienced as a pathway to self- realization.
In practice, no one of these approaches ever appears in pure form (even the Nazi concentration camp must have been influenced by the exhortative spirit of the mass movement behind it), and
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significant attempts at changing people usually embody elements of all four. There is, moreover, considerable overlapping among them, and distinguishing them can become difficult. Thought reform in particular shows the complexities of interplay between exhortation and coercion: the use of coercion to stimulate excessive guilt and shame so that these in turn create an inner exhortation; and the use of exhortation to stimulate negative conscience so power- ful that it becomes in effect a form of self-coercion. At its other end, exhortation merges with therapy, as therapy merges with re- alization. Yet these four approaches can and should be distinguished from one another in any attempt at re-education, if not as abso- lute alternatives, at least as predominant emotional tones.
In discussing the broader agencies of change--education, psy- chiatry, religion, and politics--I shall make no attempt to list every possible similarity and dissimilarity with thought reform. Rather, I shall point up those aspects in each of these agencies which can be illuminated by our general study of totalism.
Education and Re-education
I can best introduce the subject of the relationship of educa- tion to thought reform and to ideological totalism by presenting the several points of view which emerged at a small faculty seminar held at an American girls' college. After I had described the thought reform process at a revolutionary university, a lively debate began among the participating teachers about the relevance of thought reform to practices at their own institution (which I shall call Arly College).
Professor A made a blunt accusation:
I think we are doing the same thing. We are brainwashing the girls here at Arly. When the girls arrive as freshmen, they are herded together, greeted by seniors and other students who help them and show them around so that when they get to a class they can be relaxed and they can listen. They can agree with what is said and then we can be sure they will not leave Arly and go home. Then they can settle down to learning how to become good Arly girls. . . . In most of our classes, the teacher has a definite idea of what we expect, and will view the stu- dent's past as evil until the student comes to this idea. There is no difference at all.
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As I listened to Professor A's accusation (and self-accusation), I felt that she was taking her extreme stand partly for its shock value, partly because she wished to air her worst fears (and have them relieved), and partly to express a certain amount of hos- tility toward her profession. Her attitude was manifestly open- minded, but it was also intellectually inadequate. Impressed by the similarities, and unable to immediately fathom the differences, she had in effect concluded: education is "brainwashing. "
Her words did not go unchallenged. Professor B became visibly upset, and firmly disagreed:
What we do is entirely different. The point is that at a revolutionary university they demand a specific product, and insist that everyone emerge as this. Here at Arly we do not care about such things. We do not care what the girls believe when they graduate. Our main concern is that they learn something from their college experience.
Professor B compassionately defended an institution to which she was deeply committed, and in her emphasis on the "expected product," she made an important point. But the threat to her self- esteem, implicit in Professor A's comparison, led her to overstate her defense; for when the others questioned her more closely she admitted that as a serious educator she could not avoid caring about what her students believed and about what kind of young women they were encouraged to become during their college years. She was taking an equally simplistic intellectual position: namely, that good education has absolutely no connection with "brainwash- ing" (or with ideological totalism).
A young professor of English, also troubled, but more wary of facile conclusions, restated the issue as a dilemma:
Much of what we teach depends upon some kind of group agreement on standards of quality and truth of concepts. At the same time, one of our main troubles is getting people to speak up and offer criticisms of others' ideas based upon their own genuine opinions. . . . But just by simply saying that Shakespeare was the greatest poet in the English language--an assumption on which any English teacher would find widespread common agreement--and by then expecting the student to hold this opinion, aren't we really indulging in the same kind of process as thought reform?
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After considerable additional discussion, during which I men- tioned some of the features of ideological totalism, Professor C made a thoughtful attempt at resolution:
Perhaps we can avoid this by holding our beliefs with a certain amount of tension . . . with an attitude that "I believe in this, but recognize that there can be other beliefs in opposition to it. " In this way we can subject any belief which we hold to the tension or pressure of its own limitations and of other alternative beliefs.
By neither denying the continuities with thought reform nor overstating them in nihilistic despair, but instead by facing them as an unavoidable paradox, Professor C opened the way to a more fundamental approach. He grasped the necessity for both commit- ment and flexibility in education, and especially the necessity for its inclusion of what Michael Polanyi has called "personal knowl- edge"--knowledge neither strictly objective nor strictly subjec- tive which demands active participation and responsibility on the part of the knower.