Thought Reform in China, and Today
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, by Robert Lifton, highlights some parallels between Chinese totalism and today’s version
What scared me the most about reading Dr. Robert J. Lifton’s book on Chinese thought reform was imagining myself in place of the people he interviewed. I tried to think of my mind as a unit — as me — and then imagining that someone else was able to fundamentally change who I was. They could permanently tweet some knobs and filters to make me a different person. The person turning those knobs and adjusting those filters did not at all have my best interests in mind, but was a bureaucrat in an ideological machine, simply doing so to get by.
I don’t know about you, but I like myself. I have no desire to be anyone else and that thought creeps me out. It’s the same reason hypnotists freak me out. But that is exactly what happened to people “re-educated” in communist China during Mao Tse-Tsung’s cultural revolution (1966–1976). In Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, Dr. Lifton shares his extensive interviews and analysis of several Westerners who were in China during that time, and survived this process.
I came upon this book as a consequence of listening to a New Discourses Podcast by Dr. James Lindsay. In it he discusses tactics for surviving what he calls a “modern struggle session.” And because this book is an analysis of people who survived several truly extreme struggle sessions, it was recommended reading for further understanding the subject.
But what exactly is a struggle session?
Struggle Sessions
It’s important to first know that at the base of all progressive, communist, socialist, fascist ideas is a fundamental view of humanity. They believe, to one extent or another, that human nature is non-existent and only a function of whatever environment one is born into, or at the very least, hardly consequential.
Now if you ask someone if they believe that, they are highly unlikely to say so, but most people don’t know what is at the bottom of their actions or beliefs. However, their actions and statements reflect what is at the bottom whether they know it or not. And for anyone to inflict a struggle session on another human being, they must believe or at least act out that human nature is malleable. This concept of humanity is often called “blank-slate”, as if humans are a blank-slate upon which we can write out the contents of their minds and influence their actions. As if we come with no operating software already.
So, a struggle session was a staged public humiliation of a person, most effectively by their friends, colleagues, and/or peers, with the purpose of creating a sense of guilt that engendered thought reform. Because these people believed that human nature was so malleable, they believed that they could create a society they imagined would be best by changing the people in it to fit their expectations. And these struggle sessions were public warnings to other people to get onboard, or suffer teh same consequence. But not all struggle sessions were done in public.
The subjects of Dr. Lifton’s book were subjected to struggle sessions after being arrested and imprisoned for years at a time. The unique thing here is that they were Westerners living in China, and the communists did this for a couple of reasons. Firstly they needed to reduce or illuminate Western influence in China, and secondly they expected to release these prisoners back to their Western nations to infect the world, or at least defend the Chinese communists.
Now this may seem incredibly foreign to our ears today, almost like listening to what happened to Jews in the Holocaust. Of course, that is important to understand and recognize, but that isn’t the modern world we live in. That can’t happen to me or happen here. But let me relay some thoughts from one of the prisoners that Dr. Lifton interviewed and listen to her words to see if they sound familiar.
Ms. Jane Darrow
Jane Darrow was the daughter of a Protestant missionary whose family was in China when she was born. Most of her life was spent there so it was truly a home for her, even though she often felt like an outsider. She did leave China for educational purposes, but returned to teach there, and was publicly critical of the Communists. They heard about it.
After four years of imprisonment, Ms. Darrow would then talk of the Communists prison as a “place of hope” where “new people were made.” Even upon returning to Canada, she spent much time denouncing the “war-mongering” Americans and denounced their use of “germ-warfare” against the Chinese people. Her peers would talk about her as hopelessly brainwashed. The four years did what the Communists hoped it would.
This one passage really stood out to me, as it sounds so familiar:
“Closely related to this historical guilt was her racial guilt, a sense of evil which the more egalitarian representatives of any dominant race experience in relationship to any ambivalent feelings they may hold toward members of the dominated race. The stronger one’s libertarian conscience, the greater the guilt….The problem is insoluble as long as situations of racial discrimination or dominance persist, since guilt begets resentment, which in turn begets guilt; both emotions then cause suffering, as they did in Miss Darrow, in direct proportion to the amount of love felt for certain members (if not for the abstract whole) of the dominated race.”
The sessions focused in on an aspect they found in her that they could exploit, and they dug in hard. Ms. Darrow had grown up in China with Chinese children and had expressed a sense of superiority, of which she felt guilty. I couldn’t help but notice how similar this is to what we see today with identity politics: a sense of guilt is engendered by highlighting “privilege”. The greater the privilege, the greater the guilt, the greater the resentment.
And once a person takes this seriously, as in taking themselves on a journey to deal with this guilt, it can become their new reality — their new center — or a lens through which to see the world in its entirety, completely changing the nature of their perceived reality.
“She began to not only say, but really feel, that she had been, and was then evil: in her attitude of ‘superiority’ toward Chinese, and in her ‘recognition’ that she had (despite economic difficulties) really been a member of the ‘upper class,’ and had unfairly enjoyed all of its advantages.”
White guilt. It’s not just a 2020 thing.
In one of my favorite publications, Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, they recently published a story about Moms for Liberty. In the piece, they talked about an event where the aforementioned James Lindsay gave a talk. In the discussion, he referenced the Maoist manner in which many of our institutions are behaving. The author referred to it as a “conspiracy theory” that received a “raucous standing ovation”.
I can understand how Maoism or Communism sound like bogeymen. But is it a difference in kind, or a difference in degree? I think it’s just a difference in degree.
For now.