SelfDefinition.Org
The Brainwashing Manual
(1955)
L. Ron Hubbard
Chapter XII Violent Remedies
As populaces, in general, understand that a violence is necessary in the handling of the insane, violent remedies seem to be reasonable. Starting from a relatively low level of violence, such as strait-jackets and other restraints, it is relatively easy to encroach upon the public diffidence for violence by adding more and more cruelty into the treatment of the insane.
By increasing the brutality of "treatment", the public expectance of such treatment will be assisted, and the protest of the individual to whom the treatment is given is impossible, since immediately after the treatment he is incapable. The family of the individual under treatment is suspect for having in its midst, already, an insane person. The family's protest should be discredited.
The more violent the treatment, the more command value the psychopolitical operative will accumulate. Brain operations should become standard and commonplace. While the figures of actual deaths should be repressed wherever possible; nevertheless, it is of no great concern the the psychopolitical operative that many deaths do occur.
Gradually, the public should be educated into electric shock, first by believing that it is very therapeutic, then by believing that it is quieting, then by being informed that electric shock usually injures the spine and teeth, and finally, that it very often kills or at least breaks the spine and removes, violently, the teeth of the patient. It is very doubtful if anyone from the lay levels of the public could tolerate the observation of a single electric shock treatment. Certainly they could not tolerate witnessing a prefrontal lobotomy of a trans-orbital leucotomy. However, they should be brought up to a level where this is possible, where it is the expected treatment, and where the details, of the treatment itself can be made known, thus to the increase of psychopolitical prestige.
The more violent the treatment, the more hopeless insanity will seem to be.
The society should be worked up to the level where every recalcitrant young man can be brought into court and assigned to a psychopolitical operative, be given electric shocks, and reduced into unimaginative docility for the remainder of his days.
By continuous and increasing advertising of the violence of treatment, the public will at last come to tolerate the creation of zombie conditions to such a degree that they will probably employ zombies, if given to them. Thus a large strata of the society, particularly that which was rebellious, can be reduced to the service of the psychopolitician.
By various means, a public must be convinced, at least, that insanity can only be met by shock, torture, deprivation, defamation, discreditation, violence, maiming, death, punishment in all its forms. The society, at the same time, must be educated into the belief of increasing insanity within its ranks. This creates an emergency, and places the psychopolitician in a saviour role, and places him, at length, in charge of the society.