I ended my previous blog entry
(“Who is Number 1”), which was about the exercise and abuse of power, with a
statement that the psychology of enforcing compliance – of getting people to do
what you want them to do – is a science that has been evolving in potentially
menacing ways. The successful exercise
of power – by any person or institution – ultimately rests on the ability to
ensure submission and compliance from the targets of that power.
How do you make people do what you
want them to do? A simple and direct
method practiced by tyrants and conquerors throughout human history has been to
threaten potentially recalcitrant subjects with violent harm and/or the loss of
possessions (or persons) of personal value to them. Machiavelli’s book The Prince was in large part a manual on how to effectively
exercise this particular collection of tactics.
(And for this reason, it was read and studied by Lenin, Stalin,
Mussolini, and Hitler.) A more indirect
form of keeping the masses in check is to distract their attention from abuses
of power or other improprieties being practiced by those in leadership. Roman emperors, for example, practiced
distraction through entertainments, such as gladiatorial games and other public
spectacles. Another form of distraction
is to redirect potential domestic resentment against outside, foreign enemies,
either real or imaginary. In Orwell’s
dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,
the oppressive superstate Oceania is engaged
in a state of perpetual warfare against foreign enemies, and its citizens are
provided with regular newsfeeds about recent victories or defeats. A third tactic is to bribe those who are
being kept in check by giving them a token share of the spoils of
oppression. Roman emperors often
provided subsidized or free grain or bread to the populace to appease them (and
this, together with the public entertainments described earlier, gave rise to
the phrase “bread and circuses”). In
modern democracies such as the United
States , senators and representatives often
funnel government expenditures into their own legislative districts for “pork
barrel” projects: in essence bribing local constituents with their own money.
There are many disincentives for
“rocking the boat”. A direct challenge
to political authority could get one arrested.
And even engaging in forms of civil disobedience or non-conformist
behavior that are not “against the law” might result in the loss of one’s job. In both of these cases – having a criminal
record, or an employment record that includes incidents of one’s being
terminated – a person might find it difficult or even impossible to find future
employment. Someone who is considering a
course of resistance, but then engages in a stark calculation of what the future
quality of one’s life will be (i.e., without a job, and possibly fined or
incarcerated), might come to the conclusion that the current state of things is
not really so bad after all.
This all-too-human aversion to
“rocking the boat” is a powerful impediment to freedom and the active defense
of civil liberties. We are quick to
console ourselves with the belief that the most egregious abuses of those in
power are directed to others: members of less-favored ethnic groups, those
lower on the socioeconomic ladder, the fanatically radical, or the
criminally-inclined. Skillful
governments capitalize on this belief, and subtly support it. The Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei, in an
essay entitled “On Self-Censorship” described how this is currently being done
in China in effectively subtle ways, to suppress freedom of thought and
expression:
Censorship
and self-censorship act together in this society to ensure that independent
thinking and creativity cannot exist without bowing to authority. More often than not, self-censoring and the
so-call threats related to it, are based on a memory or a vague sense of
danger, and not necessarily a direct instruction of high officials. The Chinese saying sha ji jing hou puts it
succinctly: killing the chicken to save the monkey. Punishing an individual as an example to
others again incites this policy of intimidation that can resound for lifetimes
and even generations.
A horrifying example of the human tendency to fear excessive
involvement played itself out in New
York City , on March 14, 1964, when a young woman named
Kitty Genovese returned home from work late that night to her apartment. As she approached her home, an assailant
mugged her and stabbed her, repeatedly.
Thirty-eight witnesses, neighbors, saw the crime, but none ever bothered
to contact the police until after the killer had returned to her a third time,
raped her, and mortally wounded her. For
them, getting involved, even in a trivial way, was a price that was too high,
too threatening to their personal security.
The Kitty Genovese incident, along
with the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann two years earlier, motivated
a psychologist, Stanley Milgram, to clinically test the extent to which persons
would suspend compassion for other human beings, particularly when they were
told to do so by a person in authority.
He constructed a “learning experiment” in which a test subject was
instructed by an “expert” to administer a shock to another test subject every
time that the test-taker answered a multiple choice question incorrectly. With each incorrect answer, the first subject
was instructed to increase the voltage.
What this subject didn’t know was that the test-taker was an actor,
merely mimicking the phenomenon of being shocked. At higher voltages, the actor would writhe
about violently, and even cry out in agony, and at the highest levels, would
pretend to lose consciousness. In this
experiment, 26 out of the 40 participants continued to administer increasing
shocks up to the highest level, which was believed by them to be 450
volts. In evaluating the results of the
experiment, Milgram could find no determinants of compassionate behavior (or
lack thereof) based upon differences in gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic
status. What he did discover was that
the testing environment itself played a very significant role in the
outcome: Subjects who had come into an
environment which was coldly formal and impersonal tended to be the ones who
administered the more lethal shocks, while those who had been greeted warmly
and treated kindly by the test administrators at the outset of the experiment were
more prone to resist the directive to continue raising the voltage.
Lest one be tempted to believe that
such an unquestioning willingness to follow the dictates of one in authority
was a final relic of earlier, less enlightened times, which passed away with
the end of the 20th Century, one need only read of more recent
examples, which are equally disturbing. A
case occurred ten years ago in the U.S., when a prankster, calling a fast food
restaurant and claiming to be a police officer, convinced a manager there that
one of her employees was under suspicion for a crime, and induced the manager
to confine this young woman in a room and subject her to various forms of
interrogation and intimidation. The
eighteen-year-old girl was forced to remove all of her clothes, and was then
compelled to endure a variety of humiliations for hours, culminating in sexual
abuse perpetrated by the manager’s fiancée (in accordance with the caller’s
instructions), who had been enlisted by the manager to assist in the
interrogation while the manager returned to her duties elsewhere in the
restaurant. It was only when another
employee refused to join in on the interrogation that the manager herself
finally began to question the legitimacy of the caller’s directives. Never, during the preceding several hours
that she subjected her employee to this ordeal, did the manager consider the
fact that what she was doing was well outside the bounds of what any rational
person would consider to be ordinary police procedure, let alone basic codes of
civilized human conduct. A simple voice
on a telephone, claiming to belong to a person in an official capacity, was
enough to get her to suspend any such considerations. It is frightening to imagine the lengths that
supposedly ordinary people might go if urged to do so by someone with more
tangible credentials of authority, such as a uniform.
An even more effective tool of
enforcing compliance is to make one’s subjects actually believe in and support
the oppressive institution or regime, and the starkest means of doing so is to
resort to what has been traditionally called “brainwashing”. This was the fate of Winston Smith, the
central character and would-be rebel of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, after he was mentally broken through
psychological torture at the end of the novel.
In a book entitled Brainwashing:
The Story of Men Who Defied It, author Edward Hunter described the
experiences of prisoners in the Korean War and citizens in Mao Tse-tung’s China
who had been submitted to brainwashing techniques. The process, he found, was essentially a
two-fold one, which involved “softening up” or breaking down the mental
resistance of the subject, along with the indoctrination of whatever ideas were
to be implanted into that subject. The
most effective “softening up” techniques – used alone or in various
combinations – were: 1) hunger or malnutrition, 2) fatigue and sleep
deprivation, 3) tenseness and anxiety stemming from not knowing what was going
to happen next, 4) threats, 5) physical violence, 6) drugs, and 7)
hypnotism. Indoctrination involved
controlled exposure to lies and propaganda, and the subtle dissemination and
acceptance of select ideas through study and discussion groups. A particularly subtle but effective technique
practiced upon prisoners was to direct them to write “confessions” of their
crimes, but without explicitly telling them what to confess. Instead, each time that a draft of the
confession was submitted, the interrogator would express dissatisfaction with
the content, while never saying exactly what it was that he had wanted to see,
or not see, in the confession. The
prisoner would continue to amend and revise the document, and in doing so would
voluntarily – but unconsciously – admit to more and more imaginary offenses,
and come to support ideas and untruths that comported with the propaganda
disseminated by his detainers. By taking
an active role in creating these revisions, the prisoner felt a greater degree
of psychological attachment to and personal ownership of what was being said in
them. It was an insidiously effective
tactic, and one that has been effectively applied ever since in other
environments: by leaders in both business and government who want their
underlings to engage in practices that are unethical or questionable. While avoiding making explicit directives to
carry out morally ambiguous tasks, these leaders, through a system of subtle
rewards and vague expressions of disapproval, can guide their subordinates into
performing the desired deeds, and, should the actions of these subordinates be
held up to the light of critical scrutiny and condemnation, the leaders can
effectively make the case that they never ordered or even endorsed the actions
taken. These actions, they could
plausibly argue, were carried out on the “personal initiative” of the guilty
parties.
Edward Hunter, in his interviews
with persons subjected to brainwashing techniques, found that some were more
resistant to it than others. Persons
with strong religious faith and/or moral convictions were hard to crack. Conversely, those who tended to be
“relativists” in their thinking, willing to see a little truth in all points of
view, were more susceptible to indoctrination.
I remember a man that I once worked with who was a recovering heroin
addict, who was just such a moral relativist, and in fact took great pleasure
in demonstrating the underlying absurdity of any system of belief that his coworkers
supported. For him, believing in
anything too strongly was a symptom of mental weakness. I always wondered if there might have been a
connection between his moral relativism and his addiction problem. For many, indeed, the cure for alcoholism and
other addictions often begins with faith in a higher power, and perhaps this
provides an equally potent antidote against systematic techniques to break the mind. Similarly, Hunter found that those who had a
strong sense of mission or purpose in their lives were resistant to mind
control. A belief that their suffering
had meaning gave them the strength to endure more hardship than others who were
subjected to similar conditions. Victor
Frankl, the concentration camp survivor who authored Man’s Search for Meaning, came to a similar conclusion. He wrote:
...
(A)ny attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to
succeed in showing him some future goal.
Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why
to live for can bear with almost any how,”
could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts
regarding prisoners. Whenever there was
an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why – an aim – for their lives in
order to strengthen them to bear the how
of their existence. Woe to him who saw
no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in
carrying on. He was soon lost.
Hunter identified a number of other tactics and
characteristics that were effective aids in defending oneself against brainwashing,
including keeping one’s mind occupied, confidence, adaptability, strong group
ties with others in the same circumstances, being true to oneself, and finding
ways to expose the shortcomings of the oppressors – “cutting them down to
size”, so to speak. But it is that sense
of meaning or purpose that is the foundational defense.
There are,
of course, less onerous, but more insidious, means of getting people to
voluntarily do what you want them to do, and these fall under the relatively
benign-sounding rubric of “influence”.
In Western cultures, these are more often associated with the
advertising practices of the private sector, but the skillful art of influence
has become just as pervasive in political campaigns. This is a discipline that has truly evolved
into a complete science, and the strategies and tactics of which it is
comprised are perhaps even more finely honed – and therefore more effective –
than those which are used in brainwashing.
The psychologist Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion identified and described
the major strategies that are employed.
Two of these are strategies already discussed above: 1) the use of
authority figures to get people to do things – even objectionable acts, and 2)
the ability to obtain compliance and support from people by inducing them to
commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or a goal. Other strategies rely on social proof, or the
tendency of people to do things that others are already doing, and on the fact
that they can be easily persuaded by others who they like or find physically
attractive. Reciprocity, the impulse to
“return a favor”, and perceived scarcity are also powerful motivators for
targeted behaviors.
The use of
influence, since it generally does not rely upon overtly coercive tactics,
seems more benign, but its effects can be just as pernicious as the more
unsavory methods of inducing compliance.
A government or regime that has succeeded in winning the unquestioning loyalty
of most of its populace has an army of domestic allies to rely upon for
quelling any potential dissent. A
classic case of this occurred during the second war between the U.S. and Iraq ,
which began with the invasion of U.S. troops in that country in
2003. When the war began, it was immensely
popular with the American citizenry, because they had been presented with
information (later proved to be false) which induced them to believe that the Iraq government posed a legitimate, powerful
threat to the U.S.
and its allies. When a popular music
group, the Dixie Chicks, publicly spoke out against the war, its members were
ostracized, and some of them received death threats. The skillful use of propaganda can sometimes
be far more effective in keeping dissenters at bay than the direct application
of brutal, police state tactics.
Is there a natural limit to
oppression – a point beyond which a person will finally take a defiant
stand? The French existentialist
philosopher Albert Camus, in his book The
Rebel, argued that there is such a natural limit: it is the point at which
conditions have become so intolerable that a person would rather be dead than
alive. Beyond this limit, a person will
theoretically be willing to risk or sacrifice anything to rebel against the
forces which have created these unbearable conditions. But even this limit can be overcome through
effective techniques of socialization, such as those used to train military
personnel, who are then willing to sacrifice their lives – often in conflicts
that seem to have no direct connection with protecting their homeland or their
loved ones.
Conversely, there are – and always
have been – persons who have been willing to rebel and dissent even when
conditions have not become nearly as intolerable as those embodied in Camus’
natural limit. What is it that finally
motivates a sufficient number of people to say “Enough!” so that an effective
counter tide forms against the established order? Must it be necessary that several of those
who are more rebelliously-inclined happen to be in the same place and the same
time?
Perhaps not. A diversity of tolerance levels toward
oppression may be enough. Consider this
example: Suppose that several people are
in a crowded store, and each of them has a different propensity to panic. One will run out of the store at the
slightest hint that something might be awry.
Another will only panic if he sees somebody else panic first. And yet another will not panic unless he sees
two other people fleeing the store, and so on, and so on, with the most unflappable
person oblivious to panic unless he sees everybody
else fleeing the store. It is easy to
imagine a scenario where the first person is startled by something, and runs
out of the store, prompting the second person to follow him, and, with these
two seen fleeing the premises, the third person will then join them, and so the
chain will continue until even the bravest person in the store, now seeing
everyone else scrambling in panic, will head for the exit as well. Perhaps revolutions proceed in a similar
fashion, with dissent being initiated by one or more general malcontents, who
are joined by those who are usually reluctant to engage in such activities
unless they see somebody else doing them first, and then finally by others who
only get involved when they see a sufficiently large group involved. Chance probably plays a role as well. An abuse that might have been tolerated by
the public for a long time might become suddenly intolerable when some
seemingly insignificant additional provocation is added to it. Or perhaps it becomes intolerable to one
particular person, one day, because that person’s mood had been darkened by
something else. An offhand remark, a
fleeting insult, or even a simple accident might become the catalyst that
starts the blaze of insurrection.
In recent
years, it seems that revolution is breaking out everywhere, and the sheer
frequency of these events might tempt one to believe that – regardless of the
evolving technology of psychological compliance – the innate fickleness of the
human spirit guarantees an inexhaustible resource of resistance to
oppression. Somewhere, somehow, it seems
that there is always somebody who is ready to throw down the gauntlet for human
liberty, and that once this gauntlet is thrown down, there are a multitude of
revolutionaries, ready to rally to the cause of freedom. But one should not be so ready to succumb to
complacency. One need only look to
present day examples of completely effective, long-lived totalitarian states
such as North Korea to come to the realization that freedom comes at a great price,
and that, once lost, it is not always easily repurchased. Even in contemporary democracies,
governments, political parties, and businesses continue to hone and develop the
tools and techniques of control and influence (along with those of
surveillance, which frequently accompanies these other two). The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,
and in these modern times, vigilance is requiring an increasing degree of
sophistication. The year 1984 has come
and gone, but the terrors that Orwell forever linked with it are still with us
– literally at our doorstep – and will only become increasingly dangerous as
civilization continues to evolve.
