This is a series of lectures Doris Lessing did in Canada in the 1980s. With the concatenation of politics, pandemic, and climate on top of war, famine, and the usual disasters, I doubt that anyone in the world now, and certainly in the "developed world," is entirely sane. At the very least, we are all suffering from PTSD. Lessing spoke to that, way back then.
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing
NY: Harper and Row, 1987
ISBN 0-06-039077-8
(page 7) More’s Utopia, Campanella’s City of the Sun, Morris’s News from Nowhere, Butler’s Erewhon….
(9) … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past and are permitted to be brutal and cruel.
It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.
I think it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war, or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war - not only the idea of it, but the fighting itself.
(11) Seven years of war had left them [Zimbabweans] in a stunned, curiously blank state, and I think it was because whenever people are actually forced to recognize, from real experience, what we are capable of, it is so shocking that we can’t take it in easily…. It was evident that the actual combatants on both sides, both blacks and whites, had thoroughly enjoyed the war.
NB: Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard: “The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition... [people who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and the children and the old people, since the young men were dead or gone away]… It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.”
(13) It is not too much to say that when the word “blood” is pronounced, this is a sign that reason is about to depart.
(21) … the Left might find it useful to say something like this, “It has been easily observable for some time that groups like ours always split and then the two new groups become enemies equipped with leaders who hurl abuse at each other. If we remain aware of this apparently inbuilt drive that makes groups split and split again we may perhaps behave less mechanically.”
(22) It is possible to sit through hours, days, of discussion about war, and never hear it mentioned that one of the causes of war is that people enjoy it, or enjoy the idea of it.
(23) Opponents are never hated as much as former allies.
(33-34) Brain-washing has three main pillars or processes, by now well understood. The first is tension, followed by relaxation. This one is used, for instance, in the interrogation of prisoners, when the interrogator is alternatively harsh and tender - one moment a sadistic bully, the next a kind friend. The second is repetition - saying or singing the same thing over and over again. The third is the use of slogans - the reducing of complex ideas to simple sets of words. These three are used all the time by governments, armies, political parties, religious groups, religions - and always have been used.
(35) The more sane we are, the more likely we are to be converted. But we may comfort ourselves with this: that brain-washing is usually not permanent. We may be brain-washed - by conscious or unconscious manipulators, or we may brain-wash ourselves (not uncommon, this) - but it usually wears off.
(36)… as all the philosophers and sages have recommended, we will all live our lives with minds free of violent and passionate commitment, but in a condition of intelligent doubt about ourselves and our lives, a state of quiet, tentative, dispassionate curiosity.
NB: negative capability as positive capability
"a writer's ability to accept 'uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,' according to English poet John Keats, who first used the term in an 1817 letter."
(39) … as if it were in some way reactionary or anti-libertarian or anti-democratic to look at the behaviour of human beings, at _our_ behavior, dispassionately, as something that one may learn to predict.
(40) Government by show business… Well, every authoritarian goverrnment understands this very well.
(44) The researchers of brainwashing and indoctrination discovered that people who knew how to laugh resisted best. The Turks, for instance… the soldiers who faced their torturers with laughter sometimes survived when others did not. Fanatics don’t laugh at themselves; laughter is by definition heretical, unless used cruelly, turned outwards against an opponent or enemy. Bigots can’t laugh. True believers don’t laugh. Their idea of laughter is a satirical cartoon pillorying an opposition person or idea. Tyrants and oppressors don’t laugh at themselves, and don’t tolerate laughter at themselves.
Laughter is a very powerful thing, and only the civilized, the liberated, the free person can laught at herself, himself.
NB: The smile on the bullet in Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
(48) But we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissident opinion, as a member of a group.
… If my guess is true, then it aptly illustrates my general thesis, and the general idea behind these essays, that we (the human race) are now in posssession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives.
(53) It has been noticed that there is this 10 per cent of the population, who can be called natural leaders, who do follow their own minds into decisions and choices. It has been noted to the extent that this fact had been incorporated into instructions for people who run prisons, concentration camps, prisoner of war camps: remove the 10 per cent, and your prisoners will become spineless and conforming.
(57) This, [Milgram] experiment, like the many others along the same lines, offers us the information that a majority of people, regardless of whether they are black or white, male or female, old or young, rich or poor, will carry out orders, no matter how savage and brutal the orders are.
(60) Passionate loyalty and subjection to group pressure is what every state relies on.
(61) When I look back at the Second World War, I see something I didn’t more than dimly suspect at the time. It was that everyone was crazy.
(62) How is it that so-called democratic movements don’t make a point of instructing their members in the laws of crowd psychology, group psychology?
When I ask this, the response is always an uncomfortable, squeamish reluctance, as if the whole subject is really in very bad taste, unpleasant, irrelevant. As if it will all just go away if it is ignored.
So at the moment, if we look around the world, the paradox is that we may see this new information being eagerly studied by governments, the possessors and users of power - studied and put into effect. But the people who say they oppose tyranny literally don’t want to know.
(63) But wait… we all know the news is presented to us for maximum effect, that bad news seems, at least, to be more effective in arousing us than good news - which in itself is an interesting comment on the human condition.
