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Rape of the Mind
The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide and Brainwashing
Joost A.M. Meerloo
(1903-1976)
17. From Old to New Courage
Introduction
What then can give a man strength to resist a menticidal assault? What made it possible for so many thousands to survive mentally and physically the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the Communist P.O.W. camps?
The answer is essentially simple. Men yield primarily because at some point they are overwhelmed by their unconscious conflicts. These conflicts, kept under control in normal circumstances, come to the surface under the strain of menticidal pressure. The stronger the inner conflicts and the greater the pressure, the greater the tendency to yield. Men withstand pressure when these conflicts cannot be so easily aroused or have been inwardly overcome.
This simple answer itself contains a clinical paradox. One of the characteristics of severe neurosis, and of some cases of pathological character structure, is that unconscious conflicts are so severe that they are either repressed so deeply that the sufferer is not even vaguely aware of their existence or they are transformed into a set of overt attitudes which are more acceptable to the individual, and therefore easier to handle. If the severe neurotic permitted himself to feel his real conflicts, they would dominate his life completely; consequently he exerts tremendous force to hold down this explosive material. The man who is always rebellious, never growing from healthy rebellion into healthy maturity, may have transformed some basic and profound conflict in his own personality into a chronic resistance against any kind of social demand. Psychiatric examination of returned P.O.W.s from Korea showed that many of the men who resisted enemy propaganda most strongly were those with a history of lifelong rebellion against all authority -from parents through teachers to army superiors. They were troublemakers wherever they were, among their friends as well as among their enemies (Segal.)
This negative side of the coin is only part of the picture. A man with deep self-knowledge, aware of his own inner conflicts and aware, too, of what the enemy is trying to do to him is prepared to meet and resist the attack. I interrogated many people who went through the tortures of Nazi prison and concentration camps. Some were ordinary folk with no political affiliations, some were members of the resistance, a few were psychologists and psychoanalysts. Those who understood themselves, who were willing to accept danger and challenge, and who realized, even faintly, how bestial man can be, were able to stand the harrowing concentration-camp experience. They were not defeated by their own innocent perplexity and lack of insight into themselves and others, but were protected by their knowledge and inquisitive alertness.
There are other factors which play an important role too. My investigations have made it abundantly clear to me that those who can resist, who can maintain their strength under marginal circumstances, never feel that they are alone.
As long as they can think of their loved ones at home, as long as they can look forward to seeing them again, as long as they know their families are faithfully waiting for them, they can maintain their strength and keep the unconscious drive to give in from taking over their lives. The love and affection we get and gather in our hearts is the greatest stimulus to endurance. Not only does it provide a goal toward which we can direct our lives, it also gives us an inner assurance and a sense of worth that make it possible for us to keep in check the self-destroying conflicts.
This knowledge of loving and being loved is not limited to love of family or friends. People in whom a religious faith or a political conviction is a deeply rooted, living thing have this same sense of belonging, of being needed, of being loved. Their allegiance is to a whole group or to a set of ideals rather than to individuals. To such people, beliefs are real and concrete, as real and concrete as people or objects. They provide a bulwark against loneliness, terror, fantasies conjured up by the unconscious, and the unleashing of deep-seated conflicts, a bulwark that is as strong as the memory of love. Yet, such mentally strong people form a minority in our conflict ridden society.
Experience has shown that robust athletes cannot withstand the concentration-camp or the P.O.W. camp experiences any better than can their physically weaker brothers. Nor is intellect alone any real help in fending off the daily assaults on the will. On the contrary, it can provide useful rationalization for surrender. Mental backbone and moral courage go deeper than the intellect. Fortitude is not a physical or intellectual quality; it is something we get from the cradle, from the consistency of our parents' behaviour, and from their beliefs and faith. It has become increasingly rare in a world of changing values and little faith.
The Myth of Courage
There is something in the glorious myth of strength and courage that confuses all of us. Physical strength is too frequently confused with spiritual strength. Bravery and heroism are, indeed, needed qualities in battle. Yet analysis of soldiers in combat shows that each one of them has to conduct a constant battle against his own fears. The brave are the ones who can check their fears, who can cope with the paralyzing fantasies that fear creates, and who can control the desire to regress into childish escapism. A man cannot be forced to become a hero, and it is ridiculous to punish him if he is not. It is as pointless as punishing him for bleeding or fainting.
The hero, the man who offers himself up to death for the sake of others, is found more in mythology than in reality. Psychology and anthropology have shown that the hero myth is related to eternal dream images. The hero symbolizes the rebellious new generation, the strong son becoming stronger than the father. He symbolizes, too, our wish to be mature and to take responsibility into our own hands.
We need the myth for the inspiration it offers us. We commemorate with post humour glorification the heroic feats of the few who have, throughout history, offered themselves up as sacrifices to their comrades or to society. Yet what do we know of their real motives?
During the Second World War, I gave psychiatric treatment to many soldiers. As I spoke and worked with them, I became increasingly conscious of how dangerous it is to stick the simple label "hero" or "coward" on any man. One of my patients, for example, was a boy who had received a high military decoration because he had stuck to a lonely place with his machine gun, firing automatically until the enemy was forced to withdraw. In the course of his treatment, the boy confessed that his apparent heroism was really the result of a paralyzing fear, which had made it impossible for him to follow his commander's order to retreat.
No one can really tell how he will behave in times of danger. Each person will solve the frightening test that reality confronts him with in his own way. Several will accept the challenge and stand up to it. Some over-defensive, compulsive individuals may even welcome this burden as a test of their strength. Still others whose instability has deep roots in the past-will unconsciously take advantage of a perilous situation to break down completely and let their tears and emotions go.
Freud has directed our attention to the peculiar interplay between external and internal dangers, between frightening reality and equally frightening fantasy. Objective, recognizable dangers often stimulate the mind to alertness and encourage it to set up its inner defences. But there are subjective panic-creators too-frustration, feeling of guilt, infantile horror fantasies-and these can often be so terrorizing in their effects that all our cultural defences collapse. Many men who face the test of reality with stalwart courage can be brought to collapse by apparent trivia which somehow touch them in a vulnerable spot.
Another of my wartime patients mentioned previously showed such a pattern. The young fighter pilot, who had flown forty combat missions without any sign of fear or panic, suddenly broke down completely in an air-raid shelter in London. In the course of treatment, it became apparent that this young man was bitterly unhappy about his personal relationships. He did not get along with his commanding officer; he had had a serious quarrel with his girl friend the night before his breakdown. A shy and withdrawn person, when he suddenly found himself in the shelter with a frightened group about him, he became contaminated by the fear in the atmosphere. Weakened by recent unhappiness, he found himself completely unable to put up the inner defences that had served him so well under the frightening experiences of active war.
Are we to say that he was less of a hero than the much-decorated machine-gunner? There still lives in all of us an admiration for bravado, for the theatrical display of courage, for the devil-may-care invitation to destruction. We are beginning to recognize now that real courage is different; it is at one and the same time an expression of faith in life and a resignation to death. Courage is not something that can be forced on a man from the outside. It has to come from inside him.
In the reality of modern war - the impersonal Moloch - a man can be easily reduced to a feeling of helplessness and dependency. Personal courage can turn the tide of battle in a hand-to-hand encounter, but personal courage is no defense against bombs and machine guns. Today, reckless courage, as we have glorified it, is less important than personal morale, faith, conviction, knowledge, and adequate preparation.
A boy of seventeen years of age is drafted into the army. He has spent his entire life in a small town in Texas. He receives training in the routine of army life and the use of his weapons. Soon thereafter he is sent to Korea, and almost immediately he is taken prisoner. Now this child has to defend himself against the propaganda barrage which well-trained Communist theoreticians daily hurl at him. His education is limited, his background narrow, his political training inadequate. He even tries to escape from his prison camp but is caught. As a result, the enemy's mental hold on him increases. His great disappointment makes him feel trapped. Finally he surrenders and collaborates. How can a military court hold him responsible, and even punishable, for the fact that he finally gave in to enemy propaganda?
This is part of the story of Corporal Claude Bachelor, recently sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for collaboration with the enemy. I would venture to guess that it could have been the story of nearly any American boy of similar background.
After the Second World War, several European countries had to face the difficult problem of how to treat those members of the underground who, after torture by the Nazis, had confessed and betrayed their compatriots. In Holland a Court of Honor was established to judge these special cases. This court reached the following conclusions:
No man can possibly vouch for it that under no circumstances will he `confess,' `cooperate,' or `betray' his country. No man who has not himself gone through the hell which Communists and Nazis have been so able to organize has any right to judge the conduct of a man who did.
Psychological torture is more effective in many cases than physical torture. This is all the more true of the victim who has above average intellectual background. It seems that intelligence makes physical torture more easily bearable but at the same time exposes one more to the impact of mental torture. Anyone who `submitted' under such circumstances to the enemy after having given proof of his loyalty, patriotism and courage will suffer terribly because his condemnation of himself will always be more severe than that of any judge.
There is, however, not the slightest reason for shame, nor for considering such a person incapacitated for giving leadership. On the contrary, more than outsiders he will know what superhuman strength is required to resist the subtle methods of mental torture, and more than outsiders he can be helpful to others to prepare themselves for the ordeal as far as that is at all possible.
The Morale-Boosting Idea
When we look at the varieties of human behaviour under extreme and pressing circumstances, we see how easily man can be subdued, and at the same time we see that certain factors seem to have a positive effect on his morale, keeping him from despair and collapse. When these factors are operative, the spirit revives and people are enabled to live with integrity In spite of dangerous circumstances. There are many such morale boosters-religious faith or a political ideology are among them.
Perhaps the most effective is the sense of having some mission and inner goal. This ideal with which a man identifies can be love of the native land, love of freedom or justice, or even the thought of hate and revenge. Whatever it is, at the moment of calamity a guiding idea is as much needed as mere physical strength and endurance. In every case where the individual has learned to withstand danger and to maintain at least some of his normal esprit under circumstances of deprivation, want, and brutality, one or more of the morale-boosting factors must have been present.
I do not believe that the inner search for the morale-boosting regenerative idea is a conscious function of the mind. Such psychological regeneration is comparable with the physical regenerative processes we see in the body. The body hardly ever gives up its regenerative capacities. Even when a man is dying of cancer, his surgical wounds still heal, the local regenerating forces are still there. The same thing seems to operate on a mental level; in times of confusion, pressure, and exhaustion, man's psychological healing and regenerating forces are still in action. This applies as much to large groups of people as it does to the individual, though in the former, restraining forces remain in action because of intricate interpersonal relationships.
My experiences with people living in the utmost dangerous circumstances showed that very soon after an initial bewilderment the individuals develop an inner need for what we might call mental budgeting. They all display observable clinical symptoms indicating that this process of regaining their self-assertive resistance is going on. When they first come to the prison camps, for instance, they show complete passivity, surrender, and depersonalization, but soon a guiding idea begins to grow out of their need to understand fate, their need for protective intercommunication and adherence to some common faith, for building something for the self. We can detect this favourable change in mood by the way every prisoner makes his own corner a place of security, even when it is only a dirty wooden bunk. He begins to rearrange the few things he has; he builds his own nest, and from it he begins to look out into his miserable marginal world.
When the prison-camp inmate finds friends whose faith and strength of character are greater than his, his life becomes more bearable to him. Through mere association with others he can better face the horrors without. Mutual love and common hate, both may be equally stimulating.
Renewed human contact changes his inherent fear into confidence in at least one other person. When this grows into some identity with an active, working team, the temporary loss of inner strength is gone. When he does not find such a group or personality to identify with, the prison guard and his foreign ideology may take over.
It must be said that the stimulating morale-boosting idea is nearly always a moral idea, an ethical evaluation-faith in goodness, justice, freedom, peace, and future harmony. Even the most cynical dictator needs the help of moral ideas to raise the morale of those submissive to his regime. If he cannot give them at least the illusion of peace and freedom in addition to prospects for future wealth, he reduces them to dull apathetic followers. At the entrance of the Nazi concentration camps were large signs bearing the cynical slogan: Arbeit macht frei ("Work makes man free"). This may not have fooled the inmates, but it gave the German people outside the camps a way of justifying their inhuman behaviour. The need for moral justification, which is felt by even the most ruthless tyrants, proves how deeply alive these ideas of morality are in man. The more a man lives in marginal and torturous situations, the greater is his need for supportive moral values and their stimulating action.
In general we may say that there are three influences under which the unbearable becomes bearable. Again, in the first place, one must have faith; this can be simple faith in religious or ethical values, or faith in humanity, or faith in the stability of one's own society, or faith in one's own goals. In the second place, the victim must feel that in spite of the disaster which has overtaken him and turned him into an outcast, he is wanted and needed somewhere on this earth. In the third place, there must be understanding, not sophisticated book knowledge but simple, even intuitive, psychological understanding of the motivations of the enemy and his deluded drives. Those who cannot understand and are too perplexed break down first.
Anti-brainwashing training has to be done very thoroughly. It is true that inner defences can be built against thought control and against the daily barrage of suggestions. With the help of good and repeated instruction, people can be made familiar with the concepts. Perceptual defences are then built up; we learn to detect the false propaganda and we do not listen to it. Even though part of the propagandistic suggestions leak through these perceptual defences and creep unobtrusively into our opinions (all advertising is based on this leakage), it cannot be stressed enough that full knowledge of the enemy's methods gives us more strength to resist.
Several psychologists have told me how, under the frightful circumstances of life in the Nazi concentration camps, they felt sustained by their science. It gave them perspective and made it possible for them to see their own suffering from a greater distance. It was the philosophical attitude of the inquisitive mind that fortified their inner strength.
Still, there are only a few stories of those who could not be broken down by the process of Communist brainwashing. Such a hard-boiled revolutionary as the Spaniard El Campesino, for one, was able to stand it (Gonzales and Gorkin). He knew the tricks of the totalitarians. It is also possible that they might not have thought him important enough to waste too much time and effort on him; after all, he could always be sent to a concentration camp to waste away.
It must be repeated that any kind of illicit group formation in the camps-no matter how dangerous-immediately gave the individual a sense of being protected. Most of those who resisted cooperation and group membership and worked on their own succumbed to despair and defeat. Those who betrayed their comrades. usually did so after they had gone through a long period of isolation, not necessarily enforced, but often caused by their own peculiar character structure.
Human contact with a trusted source is needed more than bread to keep the spirit of freedom and belonging alive. During the Second World War the anti-Nazi underground lived on the daily radio news from free England. Even now there are people in enslavement and distress who live on the few communications we are able to transmit to them. The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe have a tremendous morale-boosting function in countries where the totalitarian air leads to despair.
In our present-day fight against brainwashing, intelligent preparation for what the prisoner has to expect and simple understanding of the enemy's tactics are the greatest aid. In the first place, this will undermine the enemy's political strategy; nobody will believe his deceitful accusations. In the second place, victims of brainwashing will no longer suffer from the paralyzing bewilderment of those who are suddenly caught by an unfamiliar situation. Perhaps, too, we should advise our soldiers under duress to confess too much, to confuse the inquisitor and to take over the enemy's strategy of confusion, lying, and deceit to bring him to frustration. This suggestion was also made by Rear Admiral D. V. Gallery of the United States Navy.
In cases where victims of menticide have done this, the inquisitors have often begged their victims to become rational again; the torturer himself was disturbed and upset by the feigned craziness of his victim. Of the greatest importance is the victim's awareness that other people know and understand what is happening, that there is a home front that is acquainted with his lonely struggle and torture.
If he does succumb, he should know that others understand that he cannot be held completely responsible for his behaviour. His brain wanted to resist, his mind wanted to say no, but in the end everything in his body acted against him. It is an eerie and strange experience-awareness of the fact that against one's will, one has lost the freedom of mental action. It is an experience which enough pressure can make familiar to most men:
Are the effects of brainwashing only temporary? There is a difference between young people whose thoughts are still likely to be moulded into permanent patterns of thinking and adults whose patterns are already formed by a free education. In mature people, brainwashing is an artificial nightmare they can often shed the moment they return to free territory. In some, it may leave long-lasting scars of depression and humiliation, but gradually the spell subsides in an atmosphere where freedom reigns.
During and directly after the Second World War, those members of the resistance who had lost their bearings under the influence of the Nazi terror made it necessary for psychiatrists to face a new problem, that of a temporarily changed personality.
Obviously the terror in prisons and concentration camps had not only made meek collaborators of a certain few, but they came out of their ordeal as lost souls, full of guilt and remorse and unable to face themselves as valid citizens. Even the honourable official exoneration of responsibility granted to them by a special court was not always able to repair their self-esteem. Before accepting themselves they had to go through a slow and difficult psychological process of undoing the nightmarish mental confusion into which they were thrown.
During psychotherapy several of them had to recall and experience once more the terror they had suffered: their initial struggle to resist the mental dinning of their inquisitors, the gradual paralysis of will, their final surrender. It was a subtle inner battle between their feelings of guilt and the wish to reassert themselves. Emotional outbursts were followed by thoughts of suicide as a final flight from their shame. After they had vented their pent-up emotions, the therapist was able to convince them that everybody has his physical and psychological limits of endurance. From this point on, they could express themselves freely as independent human beings with a mixture of both negative and positive qualities.
In one case of a young man who had spent years in a concentration camp after a thorough brainwashing by the Nazis, the process of rehabilitation lasted nearly two years. The victim emerged from it without mental scars, and was even strengthened by his bitter experience.
I am convinced that in the case of prisoners who were for years in a totalitarian prison and were consequently politically conditioned, a cathartic, psychotherapeutic approach will help them to find their old inner selves once more. Threats and aggressive discussions would only be a continuation of the same coercive brainwashing process their jailors used. The best therapy for them is the daily contact and exchange with the free, democratic world, as we have seen proven in so many cases of ex-prisoners of the totalitarian machine. Free air is for them the best therapy!
For the millions of children who from the cradle are pressed into the framework of mental automatization, no such option for freedom exists. For them there is no other world, there are no other beliefs; there is only the all-consuming totalitarian Moloch, in whose service every means and every deed is justified.
Brainwashers are very naive in thinking that the enforced reformation of the mind-the transformation of capitalist prisoners into Communist propagandists-will be permanent. For the first few weeks after their return to a normal environment, the ex-prisoner will speak the language he has been "taught." He will recite his piece, but then, and often suddenly and surprisingly, his old self comes back. If the victim has a chance to investigate and examine the Communist propaganda and accusations, the whole artificial nightmare will fall away. For this reason, the jailers are careful not to dismiss all their converts at once. A few must stay behind as hostages to assure that those who are released will not expose the whole plot and thus endanger their friends in jail. Those who do tell the truth on their return home feel guilty because their revelations may expose the hostages to even greater torture.
I have been fascinated by a peculiar character trait that makes for courage and endurance. I called it in my study on the problem of time the sense of continuity, the awareness that our experiences now are not only chained to our experiences from the past, but also to our image and fantasy of a future. We live in a world where we accept too much of the actual occurrences, without asking why and for what all this happens. Those who think of planning for the future are sneeringly called utopianists, as if the idea of Utopia had not always sprung from human yearning. Our ancestors believed in the future, the coming of Christ, the coming of the messiahs, the Kingdom of God. They anticipated and worked for a better epoch. The people in the concentration camps who believed in a future, who believed in a plan, who could see their actual calamity as a small chain between past and future, could endure better their temporary suffering.
I had the privilege of knowing people who belonged to the few kernels of strength and who were able to do more than exist passively and borrow strength from others. They were able to live courageously under the extreme stress of the Nazi concentration camp. They accepted the camp and the persecution as a challenge to their minds. Physical pain did not touch them. The abnormal circumstances stimulated their spirit; they lived beyond the circumstances. The morale of these people inspired others; they lived by fortifying and helping others. They accepted the Spinozistic amor fati, the love and acceptance of fate. They are a living proof that the mind can be stronger than the body.
The New Courage
Philosophy and psychology have made us aware of new challenges and new courage. Socrates, over two thousand years ago, considered bravery a spiritual courage which goes far beyond the courage of physical battle. A soldier can be aggressive and have contempt for death without being brave. His rashness can be a suicidal foolhardiness inspired by a collective élan. This may be the panicky courage of the unaware primitive infant in us.
There is also a spiritual bravery, a mental courage that goes beyond the self. It serves an idea. It asks not only what the price of life is, but also for what that price is being asked. It asks for a hyperconsciousness of the self as a thinking spiritual being.
It is only comparatively recently that spiritual courage has been esteemed. Socrates' notion has taken a long time to seep into our thinking. It was only after the Reformation that the heroic struggle of the lonely battling personality gained value. To defend your own dissenting opinion courageously, even against the pressure of a majority opinion, acquired a heroic color-especially where non-conformism and heresy were forbidden. Gandhi's quiet and stubborn campaign of passive resistance is today considered more courageous than the bravery of the soldier who throws himself into the ecstasy of battle. Spiritual bravery is not found among the conformists or among those who preach uniformity or among those who plead for smooth social adjustment. It requires continual mental alertness and spiritual strength to resist the dragging current of conformist thought. Man has to be stronger than the mere will for self-protection and self-assertion; he has to be able to go beyond himself in the service of an idea and has to be able to acknowledge loyally that he has been wrong when higher values are found. Indeed, there is a spiritual courage that goes beyond all automatic reflex action.
Man is not only a mass, a piece of kneaded dough; he is also a personality. He dares to confront the human masses as he confronts the entire world-as a thinking human being. Consciousness, alert awareness are themselves a form of courage, a lonely exploration and a confrontation of values. Such courage dares to break through old traditions, taboos, prejudices and dares to doubt dogma. The heroes of the mind do not know the fanfare, the pathetic show, the pseudo-courage of exaltation and glory; these brave heroes fight their inner battle against rigidity, cowardice, and the wish to surrender conviction for the sake of ease. This courage is like remaining awake when others want to soothe themselves with sleep and oblivion. Totalitarian ideology is able to blackmail man through his inner cowardice. It threatens him into surrendering his innermost convictions in exchange for glamour and acceptance, for hero worship, for honor and acknowledgment. Yet the true hero is true to his ideals.
Only when people have learned to accept individual responsibility can the world be helped by the combined efforts of many individuals. Don't imitate the master, don't merely identify with the leader, but if you do conform, accept his lead with the full recognition of your own responsibility. Such heroism of the spirit is only possible if you are the master of your emotions and in full control of your aggressions.
The new hero will not be recognized because of his muscles or aggressive power, but because of his character, his wisdom, and his mental proportions.
Intimate knowledge of bravery dethrones most of the popular notions about it as an exalted fascination. Psychological knowledge fosters new forms of courage, demanding exhausting labour, the labour of thought rather than the easy work of recklessness.
I cannot take any other option than for this enduring courage of life, courage that no longer embodies the magic attraction of suicide and decline. Courage should be the vivid faith in, and the alert awareness and the sound consideration of, all that moves life.
Such courage accepts the great fear behind all the mysteries of life and dares to live with it.
The Nazis were very much aware of the existence of unbendable heroes among their victims, whose faces could not be changed, whose minds could not be coerced. They called their calmness and stubborn will physiognomic insubordination, and they tried to kill these heroes as soon as they were discovered. Happily, the jailers had many blind spots when it came to detecting spiritual greatness.
When the war was over, most of these heroes disappeared modestly into the crowd after their mission was fulfilled, leaving leadership to the more sophisticated politicians.