No More Learning

These were the years of maximum activity in the revolutionary universities (afterward, many of them were converted into more conventional Marxist-Leninist training centers), of sweeping re- forms in regular universities, and of the histrionic early campaigns --"The Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries/' the hsueh hsi pro- gram, the "Three-Anti" and "Five-Anti" movements, the ideologi- cal struggles of "culture workers" (everyone concerned with the arts) centering around the motion picture The Life of Wu Hsun, and the Thought Reform Campaign itself. My subjects' accounts of these campaigns always included a description of others' re-
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sponses along with their own. I also made a point of asking each of them to estimate the general effects of thought reform within his immediate environment.
The estimates I got were remarkably consistent, and were also confirmed by other Chinese and Westerners who had been in China at the time. I was led to the conclusion that thought reform, at least during its early phase, had been much more successful with Chinese than with Westerners--largely because of the immense appeal of nationalism, the reinforcement of thought reform by the Chinese Communist environment, the sense of belonging to a group within one's own society, as well as many of the other histori- cal and cultural influences already mentioned. Yet it was possible to identify in the Chinese intellectuals three kinds of response roughly analogous to (although by no means the same as) those I have de- scribed in Westerners.
Chinese zealous converts underwent a profound religious ex- perience. They regarded thought reform as fine and ennobling and felt genuinely reborn, along with their society. The zealous convert was usually youthful, either an adolescent or a young adult. Al- though he may not have been completely free of inner doubt even after his thought reform, his conversion was generally much more profound than that of the apparent converts among the Westerners.
(This was, after all, his world, and in it his future seemed un- limited. ) None of my subjects fit exactly into this category; of them, George Chen's early responses came closest. Perhaps better examples of zealous converts were the middle-school and university students around him whom he described as being completely im- mersed in the general enthusiasm. It was probably true that a sizable number, perhaps even a majority, of Chinese between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two were at that time zealous converts. The incidence of conversion apparently decreased in direct propor- tion to age, and most of my informants expressed the opinion that thirty was an important dividing line. Zealous converts were prob- ably rare in the upper age groups, and they seemed to be a dis- tinct minority among Chinese intellectuals as a whole.
At the other extreme were the resisters, those who felt suffocated by the program and considered it bad and coercive. As with some of my subjects (Mr. Hu and Grace Wu for instance), they were apt to have been a good deal more sympathetic to Communism before
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their reform than after. But the resister who stayed in China could not, at least during this early period, reveal himself; clear-cut acts of resistance were virtually confined to the few who fled. And the re- sponses of those who did leave China led me to conclude that the program had been massive enough to make even the resister ques- tion his own attitude and feel guilty for being against the majority --perhaps even more guilty than the Western apparent resister felt. It is probable that the resisters were most frequently older in- tellectuals, especially those who in the past had been significantly exposed to the West. But resisters too seemed to constitute a minority among Chinese intellectuals.
The most usual response lay between these two extremes, and most Chinese intellectuals may be called adapters. An adapter was partially but not entirely convinced by the program; essentially he was concerned with the problems of coping with a stressful ex- perience and finding a place in the new society. His feelings about thought reform may have been similarly complicated; he may have experienced it as painful, perhaps even coercive, but at the same time possibly beneficial--like medicine which may do some good just because it tastes so bad. The adapter, while by no means un- affected by ideology, was likely to be (as was Robert Chao) less affected by it than either a convert or a resister. Of course, both convert and resister also did some adapting. The adapter underwent his share of confusion and identity crisis, but not to the extreme degree of the obviously confused among Westerners; for he was not (except in rare cases) forced to make a sudden transition from one world to another. He often tried to dispel his doubts by behaving like a zealous convert, and in doing so, may have resembled a Western apparent convert immediately after his reform experience. In a historical sense, the adapter was following a long-established pattern of Chinese intellectuals: accepting the change in dynasty as part of the order of things, placing his talents at the disposal of the new rulers, and seeing in the reign both good and evil, but not enough good to win his absolute enthusiasm nor enough evil to provoke his unqualified opposition.
Apart from these response categories, I gained the impression that this first wave of thought reform had served the over-all function of setting the standards for intellectual and emotional existence under Communism. Not only was The Way pointed out, but it was, to a
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large extent, internally imposed. 1 Early enthusiasm for Communism and residual bitterness toward the old regime made this the pe- riod of thought reform's greatest opportunity--an opportunity furthered by the patriotic sentiments aroused by the Korean war, and by the special campaign appeals ("Resist America, Aid Korea," "Enlist For The Army," and even the hygiene enthusiasms) which went along with it. But we cannot judge the effects of this initial phase of thought reform without examining the events which fol- lowed.
After two years of relative ideological calm, Chinese intellectuals were swept up into the second great wave of thought reform cam- paigns. During 1954 and 1955, organized emotional frenzy was re- newed--first over the lingering "poisons" related to the liberalism of Hu Shih; then over the proper critical approach to the novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber; and then over the "criminal acts" of the independently-minded left-wing writer and former disciple of Lu Hsun, Hu Feng. Each of these campaigns served to stimulate new displays of confession and repentance, and each outdid its predecessor in thought reform efforts; the vituperative intensity and the scope of this second jwave of thought reform were, if anything, even greater than those of the first.
Yet when the frenzy of this push-button enthusiasm had abated, the Party leaders indicated that there was still much more to be accomplished, and in late 1955 and early 1956 convened a series of conferences on "the question of intellectuals. " At one of these, Chou En-lai expressed the belief that great progress had been made, and quoted from surveys: "According to statistical data on 141 teachers in four higher institutes of Peking, Tientsin and Tsingtao, for example, in the past six years the progressive elements have in- creased from 18 per cent to 41 per cent, while the backward ele- ments were reduced from 28 per cent to 15 per cent. " 2 He summed up his statistics as follows: 40 per cent were "progressive elements" actively supporting the regime; 40 per cent were "middle-of-the-road elements" who supported the regime but were "not sufficiently pro- gressive"; a little over 10 per cent were "backward elements" who
"lack political consciousness or ideologically oppose socialism"; and "only a few per cent"--presumably the rest--were "counter- revolutionaries and other bad elements. " Chou of course concluded that intellectuals require "continued ideological reform/' but his
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tone was conciliatory, and he proposed a series of improvements (soon put into effect) in general working and living conditions re- lating to such things as housing, salary, equipment, and availability of needed reference materials. He proposed that five-sixths of in- tellectuals' working time, or forty hours a week, be made available for their professional activities; the remaining time was to be used for "political study, attending necessary meetings, and taking part in social activity. " This soft approach contrasted sharply with the vindictive excesses of the recently-completed Hu Fung campaign, and it inaugurated the third and perhaps most remarkable of all
thought reform phases--the period of the "Hundred Flowers/' That the Communists should adopt as a slogan the phrase, "Let the hundred flowers bloom, let the hundred schools of thought contend" (a classical allusion to the hundred schools of philosophy which flourished during the Chou Dynasty before Confucianism became the official ideology) was ironic enough, but no less ironic than the events which followed. Mao Tse-tung is said to have first suggested the expression in an unpublished address before a Party conference in May, 1956; and it was first publicly stated a few weeks later by the director of propaganda of the Party's Central Com- mittee. Thought reform was to continue, but thought reform of a new kind: there was to be "freedom of independent thinking, free- dom of debate, freedom of creative work, freedom to criticize, to
express one's own views. "3
Intellectuals were understandably slow to respond to the invita-
tion until it was again extended by Mao himself almost a year later in his widely publicized speech, "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People," and still again in another speech a few weeks later. The invitation was then formalized into a national campaign for the "Rectification of Party Members," and the strange spectacle was seen of all the usual organizational paraphernalia--newspaper editorials, radio and loud-speaker broad- casts, and word of mouth evangelizing--being directed at provoking criticism (constructive, of course) of Communist Party members. The idea behind the campaign was apparently a tentative policy of liberalization, a controlled opportunity for non-Party intellectuals to vent their grievances and thereby improve their working relation- ship with the Party. In converting the invitation to a command per- formance, Communist leaders may have been influenced by an un-
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easiness they sensed in the intellectuals, about events elsewhere in the Communist world (the Hungarian uprising and the publication of Khrushchev's speech on Stalin), and about economic difficulties within China.
In any case, it was all meant to be a friendly version of thought reform. Everyone was to speak out freely and air the "contradic- tions" between the leaders and the led. There were to be no mass meetings or "struggles," only small discussion groups and "com- radely heart to heart talks"; the campaign was to be carried out, according to its directive, "as gently as a breeze or a mild rain. "
But when the intellectuals finally spoke out, the "mild rain" quickly assumed hurricane proportions. Far from limiting them- selves to polite suggestions, they bitterly criticised every phase of Communist rule, including Party infallibility, the benevolence of the Peking regime, and the integrity of Mao Tse-tung himself. One group of intellectuals (sometimes sounding like the Yugoslav Communist, Milovan Djilas) centered their fire upon the Party's abuse of power and privileges: a newspaper editor complained that the Party was highhanded ("I think a Party leading the nation is not the same as a Party owning the nation"); other critics equated Communist leadership with traditional despotism ("Local em- perors," "Party dynasty," "empire of the Party"), and urged high Communist officials to "alight from their sedan-chairs"; still others condemned the priority given to Party members in such matters as promotion, living subsidies, medical care, school facilities for chil- dren, and opportunities to travel abroad.
Many intellectuals said that their initial enthusiasm for Com- munism had given way to disillusionment. A lecturer in science warned the regime that things had gotten so bad that unless it gave up its "arrogant and conceited" attitudes, "the masses will bring you down, kill the Communists, and overthrow you. "
One university professor, after an articulate statement on the limitations of Marxism-Leninism ("no doctrine can embody the whole truth"), had the audacity to suggest that it be dispensed with as an ideological guide. Others advocated the formation of genuine opposition parties, free elections, and other elements of parliamen- tary democracy. The absence of civil rights and legal safeguards was noted, and the regime's constitution was denounced as a "scrap of paper not observed by the Party/' Critics condemned Com-
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munist manipulation of information; and one journalist chided the country's newspapers for "playing the role of a notice board, a gramophone, and a pirated edition of a book"; another objected to the practice of reproducing editorials from the People's Daily-- the spokesman of the Peking regime--in newspapers throughout China, pointing out that "the editorials of the New York Times are not reproduced by other American papers/'
And perhaps most important, many of the critics struck out at thought reform itself. A Peking University professor minced no words: "I find the term thought reform rather repulsive. . . . I am not aware that there is anything wrong with my thought. . . . No style of thought is made up entirely of cream or scum. " Many condemned the abuses of the national campaigns ("People who have gone through these movements will remember the terror and feel their flesh creep whenever they think of them") and demanded that the Party admit its mistakes in humiliating, imprisoning, and even putting to death many innocent people. One highranking government official referred to the repeated re-education programs as "disgusting," and felt that rather than winning over the intel- lectuals, they had done much to embitter them. Others found the programs "a total mistake" and "rotten to the core," claiming that thought reform "has made everybody live in insecurity/' and using such terms as "assault on the person" and "blindfold of the mind. "
Some of the most heated criticisms were made by Communist Party members. One compared the relationship between the leaders and the led (placing intellectuals in the latter category) to that between mistress and slave girl:
A slave girl is the dowry or appendage of her mistress. She has to win the favor and avoid the hate of her mistress. In her spiritual world there are only submission and flattery. She looks upon the swallowing of the saliva of her mistress as an honor. This is the true philosophy of the slave girl.
Another, in condemning Party orthodoxy, defended his own "rebel- lious character," and quoted Maxim Gorki's phrase, "Man comes into the world to rebel/' Still another expressed the dilemma of a Party member asked to participate actively in the rectification cam- paign and at the same time observe Party discipline: "This amounts to sealing our mouth while expecting us to speak. "
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This critical outburst was permitted to last for about one month, during which time the Party leadership apparently experienced hesitancy and confusion. Although they had themselves set off the campaign, they seemed to be totally unprepared for its vehemence. At the beginning, Party organs praised its own critics for their participation in the "blooming and contending/' and for having become "inflamed with enthusiasm. " After that, there were a few expressions of concern about the tone of the criticisms, but still no clear policy was taken about them.
Finally, six weeks after the beginning of the rectification move- ment, a full-scale counterattack was launched. An editorial in the Peking People's Daily, appropriately entitled, "What is This For? ", gave the signal for a reversal of the critical tide. It labeled the most outspoken critics "rightist elements," and accused them (accurately enough) of "challenging the political leadership of the Communist Party . . . and even openly clamoring for the Party's 'quitting the stage' . . . in the name of 'helping the Communist Party rectify its working style/ " In subsequent editorials (and presumably in instructions passed down through the Party's ranks), the order was given to oppose "incorrect criticisms" and "firmly develop correct countercriticisms. " Soon it was the critics themselves (no longer simply "rightist elements" but "bourgeois rightists"), rather than Party members, who were being ''rectified. " These critics then be- came targets of the most extreme "ideological struggle" and the most abusive hostility, as the "blooming and contending" abruptly gave way to a new "Anti-Rightist Campaign. " Many of them were accused of participating in the subversive "Chang-Lo alliance"
(Chang and Lo, both leading members of "democratic" parties who had held rather high positions in the regime, had been among the most outspoken, and were cited as prominent bad examples).
The regime was particularly sensitive about the criticisms of thought reform. It countered these with the claim that the Hun- dred Flowers incident left no doubt that more, rather than less, thought reform was needed, and promised the intellectuals that they would in the future be given refresher courses of thought reform every year or even every six months. The results of the first of these refresher courses soon become apparent. True to form, each of the former critics in turn renounced his criticisms of the regime; each condemned the remaining bourgeois influences within
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himself, and many emphasized their having been influenced by the notorious "Chang-Lo alliance. " Many Party members were expelled (not for being themselves "bourgeois rightists," but for having allegedly been influenced by them), critics were removed from office, some were arrested, and there were reports of suicides, and even of executions. The soft policy toward intellectuals was suddenly replaced by hard disdain: intellectuals were ridiculed, unfavorably compared (even in regard to intelligence) with "the masses/' told that it was necessary to be first "Red'' and then "ex- pert," and in many cases were sent to rural areas to learn their lessons. The experiment with liberalization was over and the old variety of thought reform was back.
One particularly significant aspect of the Hundred Flowers out- burst was the behavior of China's students. In 1958, I obtained firsthand descriptions of this behavior from two young men who had participated in the campaign the year before while attending uni- versities in Peking. Their reports on the attitudes of university students--the age group which has been most responsive to thought reform--were extremely revealing.
Both were in their early twenties; in 1957 Wang had been a junior at Tsing Hua, and Li a senior at Peking University. Each had gone through thought reform at middle school; both had then shared in the general sense of exhilaration and had accepted the Communist point of view fully, though Li felt that because he was a Christian, he might have been a bit less enthusiastic than some of the others. Both described the strong impact upon the Chi- nese students of events in European Communist countries--Khru- shchev's denunciation of Stalin, the Hungarian revolution, and un- rest of Polish intellectuals--despite the limited and highly-slanted coverage of these events in the Chinese Communist press. Since many students had, according to Li, a "religious" belief in Com- munism's perfection, their disillusion was "like that of a person with a sincere belief in God who suddenly discovers there is no God/' He said the Hungarian revolution was particularly important to them, and estimated that only about one-third of the students accepted without question the Party's official version that it was a reactionary uprising brought about by American imperialist activity. Reports of Russian intervention bothered the students, although most even- tually rationalized this as "probably necessary to preserve socialism. "
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Li himself shared the general feeling of uneasiness and had an urge to "talk to the others about these things. "
Wang stressed the effects of Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin. I asked him how he and the other students had learned about this, since the Chinese Communist regime, deeply identified as it was with Stalinism, had suppressed most of the details. Wang gave a surprising answer: someone had discovered the text of the speech in a copy of the New York Daily Worker in a library. The Worker was, of course, the only American newspaper available to students. This information was spread by word-of-mouth, and many students went to the library to read the speech. It was a shock to them to learn that the Russian system was "not democratic" and that the man held up to them as such a humane leader, whose writings they used in their courses, had put so many people to death.
Both Li and Wang emphasized, however, that almost 90 per cent of the students were members of the Communist Youth Corps, and that the students continued to identify themselves with the regime. Some consoled themselves with their faith that Chinese Communism was superior to European Communism. Although occasionally aware that individual freedom was curtailed, they did not experience a continuous sense of suppression, and were usually "too busy studying to think too much about it. " But Li thought that in 1957 most students would have favored China's following Poland's example in granting additional self-expression, although few said so outright.
In any case, in the months just before the release of Hundred Flowers emotions both Li and Wang were aware of widespread "restlessness" and "frustration. " The students, like their teachers, were slow to respond to the invitation to speak out. But when they did, they were second to none in the vigor of their criticisms, and much more prone than other groups to convert their sentiments into action. As usual, it was Peking University which led all the rest.
There the students set up a "Democratic Wall," a large bulletin board devoted to criticism and protest. The wall space near the bulletin board was devoted to the same purpose, and, true to the horticultural metaphor, was called "The Garden of Democracy. " Students, individually or in groups, prepared sharp commentaries, satirical poems, cartoons, and slogans. And soon, as the Party press reported, "enthusiastic discussions and debates were developed near
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the walls, in the dormitories, in the passageways of the classrooms, or on the meadows by the side of the lake. " The spontaneous debate was "like in Hyde Park," and "the atmosphere of free contention engulfed the whole university. " Students brought up the same complaints as other critics. They also raised issues particularly im- portant to them as a group. They complained of the Party's arbi- trary control over their programs of study and of their later job assignments; they asked for free expression of student opinion; they praised the "courageous" actions of their fellow-students in Hungary and Poland. One of the most persistent themes, expressed both on the bulletin board and during debates, was, "We should find out what freedom and democracy mean. "
At one point, a Party official tried to restrain the Peking Univer- sity students, and told them that bulletin boards were "not a good medium" for the rectification campaign. But this attitude was bitterly denounced on the Democratic Wall, and soon afterward a higher official apologized to the students for the erroneous views of his subordinate. And according to Li, many Party members and Youth Corps leaders from among the students were in the vanguard of the protest activities.
Very quickly, Democratic Walls appeared at universities all over China (press reports and letters exchanged among students had publicized the original). Wang told me that Khrushchev's anti- Stalin speech was posted on Tsing Hua's Democratic W all. In some other cities, the students acted with even greater vehemence, staging riots, beating up Party members, and destroying Party prop- erty. Prominent among the demonstrators were middle-school students. Once more there was student agitation in China, but this time the Communists were its targets rather than its bene- ficiaries.
Immediately after the "What is This For? " editorial, however, Party members and supporters were able to gain full control of university environments. The students abruptly ceased their pro- tests, and the attack upon "rightists" in their ranks began. Accord- ing to Li, students were not surprised when the government stepped in; but they did resent its rough treatment of those who had spoken out. Li said that many of the students who had previously been most vehement in their criticisms were now the loudest voices in the anti-rightist chorus, and compared their actions to the betrayal
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of Jesus by his own disciple.
The government made sure that the counterattack was launched
from Peking University. A reorganized Peking University student association sent an open letter to student leaders in all of the other major universities, denouncing "rightist activities," and support- ing the government's countermeasures. The Democratic Wall was retained; but the essays, poems, and cartoons on it now attacked the "rightists," and its new slogan--posted in large whitewashed char- acters--read: "Any word or act alienated from Socialism is com- pletely erroneous. "
Li estimated that about one-third of the students agreed fully with the government's intervention, feeling it necessary and just; the sentiments among the rest varied greatly--some were bitterly resentful, others of two minds, and still others blandly compliant. Many students, in explaining these difficult matters to themselves and to each other, resorted to traditional Chinese ideas about the rise and fall of great dynasties; they concluded that since Commu- nism had been active in China for only about twenty-five years, it had "not yet used up its history," and one might as well continue to support it.
Li told me that he had decided to leave China because he feared that if he ever expressed his resentments about the regime, he might cause difficulty for himself and others. Chang gave similar reasons; during the Hundred Flowers campaign he had compared Stalin to Hitler, and spoken out strongly against Party control of the uni- versity, so that he felt that his position was already precarious. Nor were his apprehensions unfounded: the People's Daily had already announced that graduates of Peking University were to be subjected to a special "political examination" consisting of a detailed scrutiny of their attitudes and behavior during the "anti-rightist struggle. " The results of this examination were to be kept as official records and used as a basis for job assignments: "We will never let anyone politically questionable assume duties that he should not assume. " And during the wave of thought reform which followed, many students and recent graduates were sent to work in the countryside, many others placed under various forms of special surveillance, and a few were sent to prison for reform through labor.
I believe the Hundred Flowers episode has great significance for an evaluation of thought reform's effectiveness. One cannot draw
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statistical conclusions from an event so massively emotional; and there is no way of knowing what percentage of Chinese intellectuals shared the feelings of the regime's critics. Yet the sudden intensity of both the antiregime outburst and the "anti-rightist" counter- attack illuminate the limitations as well as the accomplishments of the thought reform program.
Looking first at the program's limitations, the Hundred Flowers incident reveals the potential of a reform-saturated environment for a sudden reversal of sentiment, for the release of bitter emotions directed both at thought reform and at the regime which per- petuates it. Behind such a reversal lies the latent resentment which thought reform builds up in varying degrees within virtually all who are exposed to it. This resentment originates in a basic human aversion to excessive personal control, a phenomenon which I call the hostility of suffocation (discussed further in Part IV). Thought reform constantly provokes this hostility, first by stimulating it within individual participants, and then by creating conditions of group intensity which can magnify it to frenzy. In other words, thought reform is able to promote an emotional contagion--of resentment as well as enthusiasm. These emotions are closely re- lated, and easily changed from one to the other. Individual feelings of hostility and resentment toward reform may exist consciously, or may be deeply repressed, but when encouraged by external con- ditions, they can emerge suddenly and unexpectedly.
One external condition which encourages their expression is the release of environmental controls. This in turn leads to the break- down of the individual's defense mechanisms, particularly repres- sion, which ordinarily keep resentment in check. Thus, liberaliza- tion of the milieu can create a quick surge of resentment, which mounts until it is again forced underground by the restoration of a suppressive atmosphere. This leads to more hostility of suffoca- tion, and thought reform is then on a treadmill of extremism.
Another limitation in the effectiveness of thought reform is its dependency on the maintenance of a closed system of communica- tion, on an idea-tight milieu control. If information from the out- side which contradicts thought reform's message breaks through this milieu control, it can also be a stimulus for resentment. This was true of the news from Hungary, Russia, and Poland at the time of the Hundred Flowers. As the students' use of the New York
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Daily Worker reveals, the increase in international communication makes strict milieu control difficult to maintain; and if information from outside includes evidence of brutality within the Communist system, the hostility of suffocation becomes combined with a sense of having been betrayed.
The break in milieu control need not come from so great a dis- tance: life experiences within Communist China, outside of the immediate thought reform process, can also serve the same func- tion. Thus, thought reform extolled the brilliance of the Commu- nist Party's economic planning, but Chinese intellectuals, like everyone else, were suffering from shortages; thought reform preached austerity, but intellectuals saw a privileged class of Party members emerge. This kind of information is of course even more accessible to a thought reform participant than news from the out- side world. All of which suggests that thought reform cannot be conducted in a vacuum; milieu control can never be complete. The one-sided visions of thought reform are always threatened by the world without, a world which will neither live up to these visions nor cease to undermine them.
The Hundred Flowers experience also seems to indicate that thought reform is subject to a law of diminishing conversions. Re- peated attempts to reform the same man are more likely to increase his hostility of suffocation than to purge him of his "incorrect" thoughts. With each histrionic show of repentance, his conversion becomes more suspect. This hypothesis is confirmed by the revised official estimates of the intellectuals' ideological status after the Hundred Flowers episode. In 1958, commentators placed "only a few" of China's intellectuals in the category of fully acceptable "working class intellectuals" (fewer than Chou En-lai's 1956 esti- mate of 40 per cent), characterizing the majority of intellectuals as "middle-of-the-roaders" (more than Chou's 1956 estimate of 40 per cent).
Although these estimates are hardly precise (they may have been exaggerated to spur the intellectuals on to greater efforts), the Hundred Flowers incident itself suggests that they may cor- rectly indicate a trend. By "middle-of-the-roaders," the Commu- nists did not mean "bourgeois rightists" (who presumably had al- ready been dealt with), but rather those intellectuals who had reacted with emotional passivity and partial withdrawal to an over- dose of thought reform. Such passive tendencies can be observed
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in Chinese intellectuals (Robert Chao, for instance) who are faced with unpleasant environmental realities. At the beginning, perhaps, thought reform can frequently break through these patterns and even utilize the emotional conflicts which accompany them; but over a period of time it runs the risk of itself stimulating a protec- tive inner passivity and withdrawal even among those who outwardly seem active and involved.
The Chinese Communists seem to interpret these passive tend- encies not as evidences of too much reform but rather of too little, and their treatment is always the same--more reform. We can only conclude that Chinese leaders are by no means as logical and calmly methodical about their reform programs as many outsiders assume them to be. Indeed, they themselves appear to be caught up in an irrational urge to reform, an urge which frequently works against their own interests. I estimate that thought reform's maximum
(post-takeover) effectiveness was reached sometime during its first wave (about 1951 or 1952), and that after this the balance between enthusiasm and coercion has shifted to a decrease of the former and an increase of the latter. This too is part of the Communist leaders' own treadmill, since it means that they can neither achieve their perfectionistic thought reform goals, nor cease trying to; and every wave of thought reform makes the next wave even more necessary. The stagers of thought reform are in this sense the vic- tims of their own cult of enthusiasm.
Yet all of this is just one side of the story. 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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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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.