Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China

525 Pages·1989·24.57 MB·English

by  Robert Jay Lifton

Thought Reform and the
Psychology of Totalism
This page intentionally left blank
Thought Reform
and the
Psychology
of TotaHsm
A STUDY OF
"BRAINWASHING"
IN CHINA
Robert Jay Lifton, M.D.
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill and London
For B. /.
the quest and the journey
Preface to the University of Noith Carolina Press
Edition © 1989 by Robert Jay Lifton
All rights reserved
First published by the University of North Carolina
Press in 1989
Originally published by W. W. Norton & Co.
© 1961 Robert Jay Lifton
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for
permanence and durability of the Committee on
Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources,
Printed in the United States of America
04 03 9 8 76
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lifton, Robert Jay. 1926-
Thought reform and the psychology of totalism:
the study of brainwashing in China / Robert Jay Lifton.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8078-4253-2 (alk. paper)
i. Brainwashing—China. 2. Communism—China.
I. Title. BF633.L 1989
5
15?^/53/0951—dc 19 88-40534
CIP
C O N T E N TS
Preface to the University of North Carolina Press Edition vii
Preface xi
PART ONE
The Problem
1. What Is "Brainwashing"? 3
2. Research in Hong Kong 8
PART TWO
Prison Thought Reform of Westerners
3. Re-education: Dr. Vincent 19
4. Father Luca: The False Confession 38
5. Psychological Steps 65
6. Varieties of Response: The Obviously Confused 86
7. Varieties of Response: Apparent Converts 117
8. Varieties of Response: Apparent Resisters 133
9. Group Reform: Double-edged Leadership 152
10. Follow-up Visits 185
11. Father Simon: The Converted Jesuit 207
12. Recovery and Renewal: A Summing Up 222
v
VI CONTENTS
PART THREE
Thought Reform of Chinese Intellectuals
13. The Encounter 243
14. The Revolutionary University: Mr. Hu 253
15. A Chinese Odyssey 274
16. The Older Generation: Robert Chao 301
17. George Chen: The Conversions of Youth 313
18. Grace Wu: Music and Reform 338
19. Cultural Perspectives: The Fate of Filial Piety 359
20. Cultural Perspectives: Origins 388
21. Cultural Perspectives: Impact 399
PART FOUR
Totalism and Its Alternatives
22. Ideological Totalism 419
23. Approaches to Re-education 438
24. "Open" Personal Change 462
Appendix: A Confession Document 473
Notes 485
Index 505
P R E F A CE
TO THE UNIVERSITY OF
NORTH CAROLINA PRESS EDITION
Now, after twenty-eight years, my own sense of this
book has changed. I see it as less a specific record of
Maoist China and more an exploration of what might be the most
dangerous direction of the twentieth-century mind—the quest for
absolute or "totalistic" belief systems.
Indeed, that quest has produced nothing short of a worldwide
epidemic of political and religious fundamentalism—of movements
characterized by literalized embrace of sacred texts as containing
absolute truth for all persons, and a mandate for militant, often vio-
lent, measures taken against designated enemies of that truth or
mere unbelievers. The epidemic includes fundamentalist versions of
existing religions and political movements as well as newly emerging
groups that may combine disparate ideological elements.
These latter groups are often referred to as cults, now a somewhat
pejorative designation, so that some observers prefer the term new
religions. But I think we can speak of cults as groups with certain
characteristics: first, a charismatic leader, who tends increasingly to
become the object of worship in place of more general spiritual prin-
ciples that are advocated; second, patterns of "thought reform" akin
to those described in this volume, and especially in Chapter 22; and
third, a tendency toward manipulation from above with considerable
exploitation (economic, sexual, or other) of ordinary supplicants or
recruits who bring their idealism from below.
vii
Vlll THOUGHT REFORM
Indeed, this book is largely responsible for my having been drawn
into these controversies. With the profusion of the religious cults
during the late 19705 and 19805,1 began to hear that Chapter 22 was
being made use of for various forms of "deprogramming" of cult
recruits, and then that the same chapter was being studied by cult
leaders, ostensibly for the purpose of dissociating their groups from
the patterns I described. Young people who had been involved in
cults and the parents of such people began to consult me about these
general patterns. I felt I had to clarify my position by preparing a
new essay on cult formation and totalism in my recent collection The
Future of Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age (1987),
but I have been especially pleased by the extent to which this earlier
volume on thought reform has remained central to literature on cults
and on totalism in general.
Tendencies toward totalism in China itself have diminished over
the years, as have specific thought reform programs. But that did not
happen until after a fierce reassertion of totalistic behavior during
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 19605 and early
19705. I was able to study that upheaval and saw in it an effort on
the part of the aging Mao Zedong to call forth the young in a com-
mon quest to reassert the immortalizing power of the revolution it-
self, and hence I entitled the work Revolutionary Immortality: Mao
Tse-Tung and the Chinese Revolution (1968). Chinese society is
still recovering from that extreme, often violent, outbreak. The re-
gime's subsequent tendency, through fits and starts, has been in the
direction of liberalization throughout the society, but that in no way
precludes the possibility of future waves of totalistic policies or
thought reform projects.
From the beginning, this book was meant to provide principles of
a general kind, criteria for evaluating any environment in relation-
ship to ideological totalism. Such patterns are all too readily em-
braced by a great variety of groups, large and small, as a means of
manipulating human beings, always in the name of a higher purpose.
And it should not be forgotten that such groups can hold great attrac-
tion for large numbers of people.
In recent research on Nazi Germany I was able to explore the
most sinister of all historical examples of this phenomenon. I found
that a particular kind of totalistic ideology—a biologized view of
society, or what I called a "biomedical vision"—could, with its ac-
PREFACE IX
companying institutions, draw very ordinary people into murderous
activities. I came to understand that, in an atmosphere of totalism
and brutality, even fragments of an ideology can readily contribute
to participation in killing, as I reported in my book The Nazi Doc-
tors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). There
are parallels in Nazi and Chinese Communist use of the idiom of
disease and cure, as totalistic systems are apt to do; equally signifi-
cant is the general contrast between Nazi cure by mass murder and
Chinese Communist cure by "re-education."
I have been equally concerned with a contemporary category of
fundamentalism that could contribute to killing on so great a scale
as to dwarf even what the Nazis did, that associated with nuclear
threat. Nuclear fundamentalism can take shape around the weapons
themselves: the exaggerated dependency on them and embrace of
them to the point of near worship. That is what I call the ideology
of nuclearism. The weapons become an ultimate truth in their os-
tensible capacity to grant security and safety, to keep the world
going, to offer salvation.
A seemingly different but related form of nuclear fundamentalism
is the "end-time" ideology, within which nuclear holocaust is viewed
as the realization of biblical prophecy and a necessary occurrence to
bring about the longed-for Second Coming of Jesus and eventual
earthly paradise. In a study we have been conducting at The City
University Center on Violence and Human Survival, we have been
pleased to learn that even fundamentalists with strong belief in end-
time ideas find it hard to espouse this formula without great ambiva-
lence and uncertainty. They too, it seems, have taken in some of the
horrible actuality of the consequences of nuclear weapons and find
it hard to believe that God would bring about such horrors or permit
them to occur. Nonetheless, these fundamentalist attitudes become
associated with the weapons in varying ways and with varying in-
tensity throughout much of our society, and in the process they
interfere greatly with the nuanced thought and moral imagination
needed to cope with nuclear threat.
While totalitarianism is a twentieth-century phenomenon requir-
ing modern technology and communications networks, the totalistic
cast of mind is not. It probably was, in fact, much more common in
previous centuries. It is in any case part of the human repertoire, an
ever-present potential that can readily manifest itself when historical