We're All Stars Now

"To swim you have to swallow"

Marilyn Manson - The Dope Show

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"To appreciate the emotional appeal of harmony, one must -- as the prisoner inevitably does -- contrast it with the basic fear and estrangement of the earlier phases of imprisonment. Instead of antagonism and total conflict, he feels in step with a milieu which appreciates him. Identified as a "progressive," he is permitted (and grasps at) a more direct form of self-expression. To be sure, he is still partly the actor; but performance and life have moved closer together, and he is not acting as much as he thinks he is

[...]

confession is as much a part of re-education as re-education is of confession. The officials demanded that their accusations become the prisoner's self-accusations, and that the confession be made with inner conviction. They required that he present himself in the evil image they had constructed for him"

 

Robert Jay Lifton - Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961)

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Welcome back!

Boy, it's been a crazy time since I talked to you last year. First everyone was excited, then that thing happened and everyone got even more excited, what a trip.

 

On a completely different topic from that last post, I honestly can't remember why I ordered Lifton's old book. Probably recommended in the same YouTube videos where I first heard the term thought-terminating cliché. In any case, by the grace of our Amazonian overlords I found myself the proud owner of Wheaton (MA) College Library's old hardcover copy of a surprisingly informative account of interviews with victims of Chinese torture / brainwashing in the 1950s. While brainwashing itself was cemented in popular parlance by spy movies (Thought Reform itself was completed soon after the release of The Manchurian Candidate) the text shocks sixty years later by how often totalitarian methodology and phraseology from 1950s "communist" indoctrination has melded into our public parlance and assumptions. Progressivism is only one of the most obviously soured terms in recent years for its ironic misuse in support of censorship and bigotry.

More than terminology though, it's the general pattern of brainwashing outlined in Thought Reform which crops up with alarming regularity, and not from governments or corporations directly, but in recent brands of activism and fad worship. To be sure, 1950s communists hardly invented the path of redemption from isolation and punishment to confession of past wrongs to active reconstruction of personal-within-group identity to proselytism to reinforce one's newfound moral grounding. Religions have been playing that game of addictive collusion ever since shamans got brand-name recognition, as do less successful cults.

It shouldn't be such a surprise that the original sin narratives of white guilt or male guilt rehash so closely those same methodologies based on the same human weaknesses. Nobody wants to admit to being wrong in the present, but penitence for past wrongs (the wrongs of a past you, some other you) represents a path to acceptance in the present.

 

Feminism in particular, given its 1960s-70s close ties to Marxist rhetoric (women as oppressed underclass, etc.) its partial success as lifeboat for ideologues disillusioned by inescapably mounting evidence of Soviet and Maoist villainy, has placed considerable emphasis on confession-writing, on forcing both converted men and women ("internalized misogyny") to endlessly reiterate their own guilt within a revision of all history as a male conspiracy against women. You can't take two clicks in any direction on the internet without stumbling over prostrate true believers self-flagellating over guilt narratives which under even the slightest scrutiny hold no more water than the confessions of imperialist collusion extracted by the Chinese under torture.

 

While lacking the torture porn appeal of being chained immobile until your flesh rots or beaten until your spine cracks to paralyze you, the very pervasiveness of the modern, polite threat of firing, blacklisting, ostracism and bankruptcy via court costs should you fall on the wrong side of accusations of crimes against your social betters are more than enough to ensure mass conversion to the new faith. That pervasiveness brings us back to last year's last post. Modern political correctness has achieved via media blitz, via an illusion of consensus what the more primitive Maoist torturers had to painstakingly inculcate via direct incarceration and beatings.

 

While ideological takeover of universities and legal codes played a large part in fabricating legitimacy, the sad truth of the internet age is that proselytes, in fear of finding themselves up against the wall when the revolution comes, have done much of the work of converting each other without revolutionary leaders even needing to schlep to a podium. The misuse of this new medium, of the internet's promise of free speech in propping up holier-than-thou-than-thou-than-thou echo chambers was seemingly baked into the very first newsgroups and did not improve with volume.

So we return to last year's question: are you playing the game or being played? Do you feel relief at your confession of original sin finally being accepted? Are you even more proud of being on the right side of history, of holding more modern views now in 2022 than you did in 2021? Who are you? Because if the first answer which pops into your excuse for a mind is "I'm a <SOMETHING>-ist" a borrowed identity, you'll find ready kinship with a host of converts to mass murder from the fifties.