On Submission and Compliance

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 20^th 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.