SelfDefinition.Org
The Brainwashing Manual
(1955)
L. Ron Hubbard
Chapter VII Anatomy of Stimulus-Response Mechanisms of Man
Man is a stimulus-response animal. His entire reasoning capabilities, even his ethics and morals, depend upon stimulus-response machinery. This has long been demonstrated by such Russians as Pavlov, [1] and the principles have long been used in handling the recalcitrant, in training children, and in bringing about a state of optimum behaviour on the part of a population.
[1. See Joost Meerloo: Rape of the Mind, chapter 2: /psychology/
Having no independent will of his own, Man is easily handled by stimulus-response mechanisms. It is only necessary to install a stimulus into the mental anatomy of Man to have that stimulus reactivate and respond any time an exterior command source calls it into being. [2]
[2. See James H. Loryea a.k.a. "Santanelli", The Law of Suggestion: /psychology/
The mechanisms of stimulus-response are easily understood. The body takes pictures of every action in the environment around an individual. When the environment includes brutality, terror, shock, and other such activities, the mental image picture gained contains in itself all the ingredients of the environment. It the individual, himself, was injured during that moment, the injury, itself, will re-manifest when called upon to respond by an exterior command source.
As an example of this, if an individual is beaten, and is told during the entirety of the beating that he must obey certain officials, he will, in the future, feel the beginnings of the pain the moment he begins to disobey. The installed pain itself reacts as a policeman, for the experience of the individual demonstrates to him that he cannot combat, and will receive pain from, certain officials.
The mind can become very complex in its stimulus responses. As easily demonstrated in hypnotism, an entire chain of commands, having to do with a great many complex actions, can be beaten, shocked, or terrorized into a mind, and will there lie dormant until called into view by some similarity in the circumstances of the environment to the incident of punishment.
The stimulus we call the "incident of punishment" where the response mechanism need only contain some small part of the stimulus to call into view the mental image picture, and cause it to exert against the body the pain sequence. So long as the individual obeys the picture, or follows the commands of the stimulus implantation he is free from pain.
The behaviour of children is regulated in this fashion in every civilized country. The father, finding himself unable to bring about immediate obedience and training on the part of his child, resorts to physical violence, and after administering punishment of a physical nature to the child on several occasions, is gratified to experience complete obedience on the part of the child each time the father speaks.
In that parents are wont to be lenient with their children, they seldom administer sufficient punishment to bring about entirely optimum obedience. The ability of the organism to withstand punishment is very great. Complete and implicit response can be gained only by stimuli sufficiently brutal to actually injure the organism.
The Cossack method of breaking wild horses is a useful example. The horse will not restrain itself or take any of the rider's commands. The rider, wishing to break it, mounts, and takes a flask of strong Vodka, and smashes it between the horses ears. The horse, struck to its knees, its eyes filled with alcohol, mistakes the dampness for blood, instantly and thereafter gives its attention to the rider and never needs further breaking. Difficulty in breaking horses is only occasioned when light punishments are administered. There is some mawkish sentimentality about "breaking the spirit", but what is desired here is an obedient horse, and sufficient brutality brings about an obedient horse.
The stimulus-response mechanisms of the body are such that the pain and the command subdivide so as to counter each other. The mental image picture of the punishment will not become effective upon the individual unless the command content is disobeyed. It is pointed out in many early Russian writings that this is a survival mechanism. It has already been well and thoroughly used in the survival of Communism.
It is only necessary to deliver into the organism a sufficient stimulus to gain an adequate response.
So long as the organism obeys the stimulus whenever it is restimulated in the future, it does not suffer from the pain of the stimulus. But should it entirely disobey the command content of the stimulus, the stimulus reacts to punish the individual. Thus, we have an optimum circumstance, and one of the basic principles of Psychopolitics. A sufficiently installed stimulus will thereafter remain as a police mechanism within the individual to cause him to follow the commands and directions given to him. Should he fail to follow these commands and directions, the stimulus mechanism will go into action. As the commands are there with the moment of duress, the commands themselves need never be repeated, and if the individual were to depart thousands of miles away from the psychopolitical operative, he will still obey the psychopolitical operative, or, himself, become extremely ill and in agony.
These principles, built from the earliest days of Pavlov, by constant and continuous Russian development, have, at last, become of enormous use to us in our conquest. For less modern and well-informed countries of Earth, lacking this mechanism, failing to understand it, and coaxed into somnolence by our own psychopolitical operatives, who discount and disclaim it, cannot avoid succumbing to it.
The body is less able to resist a stimulus if it has insufficient food and is weary. Therefore, it is necessary to administer all such stimuli to individuals when their ability to resist has been reduced by privation and exhaustion. Refusal to let them sleep over many day, denying them adequate food, then brings about an optimum state for the receipt of a stimulus. If the person is then given an electric shock, and is told while the shock is in action that he must obey and do certain things, he has no choice but to do them, or to re-experience, because of his mental image picture of it, the electric shock. This highly scientific and intensely workable mechanism cannot be over-estimated in the practice of psychopolitics.
Drugging the individual produces an artificial exhaustion, and if he is drugged, or shocked and beaten, and given a string of commands, his loyalties, themselves, can be definitely rearranged. This is P.D.H., or Pain-Drug Hypnosis.
The psychopolitical operative in training should be thoroughly studied in the subject of hypnotism and post-hypnotic suggestion. He should pay particular attention to the "forgetter mechanism" aspect of hypnotism, which is to say, implantation in the unconscious mind. He should note particularly that a person given a command in an hypnotic state, and then told when still in that condition to forget it, will execute it on a stimulus-response signal in the environment after he has "awakened" from his hypnotic trance.
Having mastered these details fully, he should, by practicing upon criminals and prisoners or inmates available to him, produce the hypnotic trance by drugs, and drive home post-hypnotic suggestions by pain administered to the drugged person. He should then study the reactions of the person when "awakened", and should give him the stimulus-response signal which would throw into action the commands given while in a drugged state of duress. By much practice he can then learn the threshold dosages of various drugs, and the amount of duress in terms of electric shock of additional drug shock necessary to produce the optimum obedience to the commands. He should also satisfy himself that there is no possible method known to Man of bringing the patient into awareness of what has happened to him, keeping him in a state of obedience and response while ignorant of its cause.
Using criminals and prisoners, the psychopolitical operative in training should then experiment with duress in the absence of privation, administering electric shocks, beatings, and terror-inducing tactics, accompanied by the same mechanisms as those employed in hypnotism, and watch the conduct of the person when no longer under duress.
The operative in training should carefully remark those who show a tendency to protest, so that he may recognize possible recovery of memory of the commands implanted.
Purely for his own education, he should then satisfy himself as to the efficacy of brain surgery in disabling the non-responsive prisoner.
The boldness of the psychopolitical operative can be increased markedly by permitting persons who have been given pain-drug hypnosis and who have demonstrated symptoms of rebelling or recalling into society to observe how the label of "insanity" discredits and discounts the statements of the person. Exercises in bringing about insanity seizures at will, simply by demonstrating a signal to persons upon whom pain-drug hypnosis has been used, and exercises in making the seizures come about through talking to certain persons in certain places and times should also be used.
Brain surgery, as developed in Russia, should also be practiced by the psychopolitical operative in training, to give him full confidence in (1) the crudeness with which it can be done, (2) the certainty of erasure of the stimulus-response mechanism itself, (3) the production of imbecility, idiocy, and dis-coordination on the part of the patient, and (4) the small amount of comment which casualties in brain surgery occasion.
Exercises in sexual attack on patients should be practiced by the psychopolitical operative to demonstrate the inability of the patient under pain-drug hypnosis to recall the attack, while indoctrinating a lust for further sexual activity on the part of the patient. Sex, in all animals, is a powerful motivator, and is no less so in the animal Man, and the occasioning of sexual liaison between females of a target family and indicated males, under the control of the psychopolitical operative, must be demonstrated to be possible with complete security for the psychopolitical operative, thus giving into his hands an excellent weapon for the breaking down of familial relations and consequent public disgraces for the psychopolitical target.
Just as a dog can be trained, so can a man be trained. Just as a horse can be trained, so can a man be trained. Sexual lust, masochism, and any other desirable perversion can be induced by pain-drug hypnosis and the benefit of Psychopolitics.
The changes of loyalties, allegiances, and sources of command can be occasioned easily by psychopolitical technologies, and these should be practiced and understood by the psychopolitical operative before he begins to tamper with psychopolitical targets of magnitude.
The actual simplicity of the subject of pain-drug hypnosis, the use of electric shock, drugs, insanity-producing injections, and other materials, should be masked entirely by technical nomenclature, by the protest of benefit to the patient, by an authoritarian pose and position, and by carefully cultivating governmental positions in the country to be conquered.
Although the psychopolitical operative working in universities where he can direct the curricula of psychology classes is often tempted to teach some of the principles of Psychopolitics to the susceptible students in the psychology classes, he must be thoroughly enjoined to limit his information in psychology classes to the transmittal of the tenets of Communism under the guise of psychology, and must limit his activities in bringing about a state of mind on the part of the students where they will accept Communist tenets as those of their own action and as modern scientific principles. The psychopolitical operative must not, at any time, educate students fully in stimulus-response mechanisms, and must not impart to them, save those who will become his fellow-workers, the exact principles of Psychopolitics. It is not necessary to do so, and it is dangerous.