Totapism

"And your biggest vices become their addiction

Why? Who knows but you gotta supply it

You gotta provide it -- 'cause you know they'll buy it

They don't like the good, they're in love with the bad side

[...]

I swear this is not my fault -

- If it's not yours whose fault is it?

My brain's a nice home with a rude dog in it"

 

Hopsin and SwizZz - The Lucifer Effect (The Lucifer Effect) ((The Lucifer Effect))

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"People often use the word 'systematic' when they talk about repression, or abuse of human rights, they say these things are systematically abused. Of course that's a correct way of understanding it, but it misses a certain point. It must be unsystematic also. It must be capricious. It must be unpredictable. Nobody must know that they're safe. Nobody can think I now have passed all the tests that make me a loyal member of the Ba'ath Party, I'm... I'm gonna be alright. They will never be allowed to get to that moment."

Christopher Hitchens - The Axis of Evil speech ~min12

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I spent my first five school years in a system still debating whether or not to phase out corporal punishment a.k.a. beating children. Slapping our heads, pulling and twisting our hair or ears. Pulling on my left ear still results in a barely audible little crackle and quick inflammation, suggesting their edifying ministrations left some permanent cartilage damage. There's a detached lump in there, a perpetual reminder that I was once bad at... something... maybe subtraction? or watercolors? was it watercolors? Then of course that perennial favorite, calling you up to the front of the class to have your hand ceremonially slapped with a wooden ruler. If the teacher was in a bad mood, she'd turn it edgewise. Seeing her screeching in a nine-year-old's face in front of the class, calling him gutter trash who'll never be good for anything but hauling garbage seems downright benign by comparison.

At least it wasn't happening to me, except when it was. I was very rarely punished. It was't until my mid-teens that I became a problem child. At first I was a teacher's pet. I answered all the questions, solved all the problems, penned florid compositions with flawless grammar, sat quietly with my hands behind my back and averted my eyes from the teacher's gaze like the lowly scum I am until called upon. All of which renders more vivid the memory of my (rather more vivacious) friend sitting next to me talking at me during class... repeatedly... and the second I turned my head once to him, being immediately yanked up to the front to get my palm crossed. Such moments stand out because the teacher must have been watching and waiting specifically for me to crack under my classmates' pressure. Other instances followed the same pattern of deliberately hunting for fresh victims. Around thirty, I related the story at a family picnic as a quaint anecdote. Cue the echoed "what, you too?" from my mother, uncle and aunt, all of us congenital grade-stockpiling nerds suppliant before authority in our childhoods, all of us slapped around precisely because we had not given cause for a slap.

As above, so below. Sure, comparing being slapped with a ruler to being tortured to death by the ruler's secret police might seem a stretch at first, but even at such vastly different scales, places or times, methods of social control end up quite faithfully reiterated because they are not products of their environment so much as human nature. The children punished systematically/unsystematically according to a teacher's caprice grow into the adults jockeying for favor with corporate department heads, always willing to denounce their peers to turn authority's attention away from themselves. Or the social activists desperately struggling to prove their ideological purity so as not to be ostracized by holier thous. Too often I hear others question why a state, a corporation, a political movement, a religious cult, any organization might have adopted certain policies of social control and manipulation. Because it works. The reasons behind it are always the same. They do it because we instinctively desire power and control, because we evolved as tribal creatures whose relative reproductive success depends on one's position in the tribal hierarchy and the quantity of slave labor and cannon fodder mustered in contests of strength against neighbouring tribes.

 

I bring this up now because I just happened to finish Robert Jay Lifton's 1950s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Actually, that's a lie. I read it months ago but thought Easter may lend its discussion greater effect, and watching some ex-scientologist testimony just completed the authoritarian confluence. Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath abuses the usual overemotional dramatization format in everything from dramatic framing to scare chords to wait, how much freakin' air time have you spent hugging so far? Still, if you can stomach scraping off the schmaltz you'll discern some solid familiar patterns to the inner workings of one of our world's newest mass delusions, from their abuse of religious exemptions to what is even more clearly than usual a for-profit enterprise to their obsession with digging dirt on their own adherents. The rampant mass snitching and piles of dossiers can't help but recall the practices of police states turning citizens informant, but it's the infamous "auditing" and other demands for confession-writing that could be pulled straight out of Lifton's observations on Chinese Communist brainwashing at around the same time Dianetics was being refined as psychological control:

 

"It was to be a life history, beginning two generations back and extending through the thought reform experience, describing, candidly and thoroughly, the development of one's thoughts and the relationship of these to actions. [...] After a ten-day writing period, [university] students read their summaries to the small group. They encountered even more prolonged and penetrating criticism than before, since everyone was now required to sign each confession read, to signify his approval and his responsibility for letting it pass. In Hu's group, some students were kept under critical fire for several days and wrote many revisions. As usual, the students themselves worked upon each other, but cadres and faculty members had the final say; they later added their own evaluative comments to the thought summaries. The final document then became a permanent part of the student's personal record, and (in the possession of his superiors) accompanied him throughout his future career." - Thought Reform p.267

 

Such confession writing (whether in existing universities or new re-education centers or in prisons) began with listing faults, ways in which the writer was guilty of working against "the people" in his unenlightened pre-Communist life. Unsurprising since half the point is to force the victim to collude in his own condemnation, to align himself psychologically with his abusers, until, in the words of Mr. Hu himself:

 

"'Using the pattern of words for so long, you are so accustomed to them that you feel chained. If you make a mistake, you make a mistake within the pattern. Although you don't admit that you have adopted this kind of ideology, you are actually using it subconsciously, almost automatically'" - p. 270

Which brings us back to religion, because most of you reading this probably spent this past Sunday roped into some sort of celebration of the twice-baked zombie Jesus, pretending to feel yourself groped by the spirit of holes, pressured to celebrate as if there were something worth celebrating behind the whole sadomasochistic rigamarole, no matter that for all the zero evidence Christians have ever produced of their magic sky daddy you may as well be throwing an international holy-day in honor of the tooth fairy. And so you go along until the abyss stares back into you. And, should you voice any reticence, there are probably a host of family and friends waiting to pounce on you to enforce your participation, to stage a soul-saving intervention. The "hsueh hsi" sessions of public confession and accusation described by escapees from 1950s China did not fail to suggest to either Lifton or to other observers at the time religious rites, a bitter irony considering Maoist pretense of doing away with superstition. In fact, fifty years prior, none other than the author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds gave us this memorable viewpoint of a young boy being dragged into church by his own relatives to be cured of his atheism by the entire community's public and unanimous censure:

 

"But I didn’t expect to have the whole meeting on Sunday turned on to me.
It was. It all comes back to me, that convergence of attention, even the faint leathery smell of its atmosphere returns, and the coarse feel of my aunt’s black dress beside me in contact with my hand. I see again the old Welsh milkman “wrestling” with me, they all wrestled with me, by prayer or exhortation. And I was holding out stoutly, though convinced now by the contagion of their universal conviction that by doing so I was certainly and hopelessly damned. I felt that they were right, that God was probably like them, and that on the whole it didn’t matter." H.G. Wells - Tono-Bungay

 

I don't doubt I could dig up endless such examples of child abuse even today, from the Bible Belt or any supposedly modern nation's equivalent of such cretinous backwaters, not to mention countries entirely dominated by such primitivism. The similarity is far from accidental and far from limited to ChristiCommuanity. Given Scientology and the Aftermath already provides examples of church officials enrolling family members to gang up on someone they felt might leave or just isn't "voluntarily" paying enough cash into their pockets, the public confession/condemnation/rebirth rituals can't be far behind. No spoilers though! I haven't seen season 2 yet.

 

I do find Scientology and the Aftermath reprehensible in trying to juxtapose Scientology with more established religions instead of showing they're using the same tricks, though the political motivation in securing both interviews and publication is obvious here. Let's remember A&E is owned half by Hearst and half by Disney which now also technically-doesn't-own-Fox-News. To his credit, Lifton was braver even sixty years ago in gently pointing out the similarities of Communist brainwashing to religious fundamentalism, especially when presenting one French Jesuit who was quite taken with the ideology (though he ultimately stuck with the church):

"Like other priests among my subjects, he felt that he had reinforced his own spiritual life through his imprisonment. 'The fact of feeling guilty is good Christian humility.' But unlike the others, he believed that the Communists themselves possessed Christian virtues ('I feel that most of the Communists are humble'), a strong expression of praise from a Catholic priest."

 

To any non-religious observer, Father Simon's testimony, with its doe-eyed admiration of merciless Maoist crowd control, alternates between frightening and hilarious in how artlessly it gives the big game away from both sides of the field, laying out the core absolutist (or "totalist") mentality underlying both supernatural and Communist superstitions' tools of psychological control:

"I remember in jail everyone told their faults against the discipline, then we decided to get deep into the reasons. Then the others would say 'This and this is the reason.' We would say 'No, no, no -- that's not it.' Then at night you would think they are right, and as soon as you realized this, the fault was corrected at once... This is very important for the religious life... A very powerful tool.

[...]

Lenin borrowed many things from religious orders, but amplified them a lot.... If we can get them back from Lenin, that is all right.

[...]

To understand Communism you must compare it with Catholic belief. If with Catholic belief, you don't accept one article of faith, you are not a Catholic. If you don't sign a blank check, you are not a Catholic." Thought Reform pp. 216-217

 

One does not criticize the prophet L. Ron Hubbard.

 

I'm reminded of an anthropology professor (who later ordered me to drop her class or be thrown out for "causing a hostile environment" for among other sins pathologizing the human-animal bond, oh irony of ironies) responding to my criticism of an article she had presented by telling me the writer is "a highly respected scholar" at the University of [REDACTED] ... which has about as much to do with defending the ideas in question as a fatwah. I had missed the distinction that at that point I was not dealing with a Doctor of Anthropology but with a priestess of animal rights abusing her PhD and tenure to employ any pressure she damn well pleases in promoting her particular one true faith's moral supremacy. Even though I was largely on her side (I've kept various pets all my life and my current fish are pushing four years old and quite happy with their mammalian bondage) any heresy had to be expunged from her sphere of influence.

It takes all kinds.

And all kinds will inevitably try to exterminate all other kinds.

Which is just one of the many reasons I call myself a half-kind, even if it makes me un-kind.

But PETA-style insanity is just one flavor of many. In fact, a common thread running through all my recent years' annoyance at self-declared leftist movements in the modern age (the anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight propagandists) is just how slavishly they ape the obsessions of older inquisitions. Evergreen College's infamous 2017 riots included a proposed mandatory program of public confession-writing by faculty members chillingly reminiscent of Lifton's summary of Maoist confessions, complete with the presumption of guilt (including innate guilt) and obligatory rewrites to the satisfaction of the apparatchiks. Around that same time, the grievance studies hoax (which deserves more attention than I care to give it) produced a quote by James Lindsay (pleased to see it's now Wikipedia's illustration as well) which seems to recapitulate this entire post:

"The best I can tap into is that there's a kind of, like, religious architecture in their mind where privilege is sin, privilege is evil, and that they've identified education as the place where it has to be fixed. So you can come up with these really nasty arguments like 'let's put white kids in chains on the floor at school as an educational opportunity' and if you frame it in terms of overcoming privilege, and you frame their resistance, that they won't want this to happen to them, that they would complain about this, if you frame that in terms of oh, they only complain about that because they're privileged and they can't handle it because their privilege made them weak, then it's right in."

For anyone who still harbors delusions that social "progress" is linear or unidirectional, let me just point out that even my slap-happy grade school teacher thirty years ago never dared put us in chains, a notion seriously considered in 2018 by the polite, highly respected and presumably well-paid pseudoscientific journal editors who accepted Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose's papers. To put those born the wrong skin color in their place. If you're wondering how this came about, remember it's not necessarily the strength of the pressure to conform so much as its perceived pervasiveness that best guarantees brainwashing. If you define yourself as a person by your good standing within some ideology, then failing to maintain that standing amounts to existential negation. If everyone in your field of study, the thing you are when anyone asks if you're a [...] nods along to the notion that children should be put in chains (purely for the most noble didactic reasons of course) you will surreptitiously find yourself measuring little handsies for manacles.

"The totalist environment -- even when it does not resort to physical abuse -- thus stimulates in everyone a fear of extinction and annihilation [...] Existence comes to depend upon creed (I believe, therefore I am) upon submission (I obey, therefore I am) and beyond these, upon a sense of total merger with the ideological movement. Ultimately of course one compromises and combines the totalist 'confirmation' with independent elements of personal identity; but one is ever made aware that, should he stray too far along this 'erroneous path', his right to existence may be withdrawn." - Thought Reform p.434

But one element I don't see mentioned nearly enough is the continuity, the direct, intergenerational, societal and global, multi-millennial continuity between methods of thought reform, manipulation and control from grade schools to cults about alien ghosts to sickly hammerers promising the meek shall inherit the Earth, to traditional superstitions about magic sky daddies. Christopher Hitchens liked to point out the similarity between Tsarist divine rule and Stalin's cult of personality complete with thaumaturgy (a repurposing of blind faith which has served Tsar Putin quite well these past decades) but I do also like the way Lifton summarized Maoist grappling with the most entrenched traditional Chinese cultural value, filial piety... by simply repurposing it with a new definition of state parentage.

 

"Emotions of loyalty, self-discipline, and respect for authority remained alive side-by-side with their negation, and these were emotional commodities too valuable for the Communists to waste, even if it were possible to dispel them. 'Hate your past to win your future' the reformers urged, and they meant it. But they might well have added, 'Do not hate it so much that you cannot bring us its sense of filial dedication.' The reformed intellectual was expected to be, as before, loyal, self-disciplined and obedient -- now a filial son of the Communist regime." - Thought Reform p.379

 

Xi Dada no doubt agrees.

 

This applicability knows few boundaries. Schoolmarms can repurpose dictatorial caprice and unpredictability to maintain their young charges' fear. Anti-white racism repurposes the sins of the father. Feminism repurposes chivalry and the instinctive protectiveness of males toward their tribe's females. I was amused and slightly shocked to learn from Scientology and the Aftermath of the cult's recent ties (the episode implies attempted takeover) with the Nation of Islam, given their very different demographics... but is it so surprising? Market share aside, how much would a comparative study find in common between them, or for that matter in common with Mormonism or the feminist claim of a Minoan matriarchal golden age or those thinking themselves descended from Atlantis or spacefaring Malinese or a thousand other fabrications of ancestral rights and supremacy just begging to be reclaimed? "Make X great again" is as weather beaten a slogan as any.

This is why I scoff at not only new movements' claim to originality but stories like Snow Crash and the naive notion of traditional values serving as inoculation against new insanity. I liken it to curing a headache with a shotgun. Not only are the more refined, time-tested strains of mass insanity far more capable of harm but, as I keep trying to remind you, we are talking about the same people. Mrs. Grundy's just wearing a new hat. They cannot meaningfully replace each other because they are mere carbon-copies of the same unthinking impulses in a new milieu. They justify each other by their existence, endless plucky rebel alliances to revolutionize/become endless evil empires. To his credit, Lifton once again managed to squeeze this observation in at the very end of his surprisingly insightful old work.

 

"In studying patterns of historical change, we should divest ourselves of the psychological illusion that a strong filial tradition is a bulwark against modern ideological totalism (or most specifically, Communism). The opposite seems to be true. It is precisely the desperate urge to sweep away decaying yet still powerful filial emotions and institutions that can call forth political totalism." - Thought Reform p.470

JORDAN PETERSON, THIS MEANS YOU ^

Or (and thanks to George Packer who brought it up in an interview with Hitchens) as Orwell put it in an essay I otherwise disagree with:

 

"People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin." - Raffles and Miss Blandish

In episode 7, Scientology and the Aftermath references a moment when four ex-wives of men who had left scientology were interviewed by Anderson Cooper in 2010 to denounce their former husbands and praise David Miscavige. The show of course interprets this from the viewpoint of cult indoctrination and turning families against each other, which is a valid point... but it misses a very important underlying pattern. The women in question had gotten as far up the ladder as their now disgraced husbands could take them and were faced with a choice between a depleted resource and Prince Charming, the alpha male, the pinnacle of an ultra wealthy power hierarchy. They traded up, as per female plains-ape instinct. Regardless of what they consciously thought they were doing, what material gain they expected from their show of faith and loyalty to the faith, their instincts were also obviously pointing them toward a higher-value potential mate. This was their glass slipper, their 'in' with the prince.

All such behaviors, all such social movements, all such hierarchies, all such obsessions, share so many features because they address unthinking, animal impulses. Just one obvious example is our neotenized dependence on parental authority constantly leading us to fabricate celestial parentage. I'm thetan-er than thou. Do not be surprised when superficially novel fads mimic, on even the slightest scrutiny, the most antiquated and haggard superstitious gibberish in practical application. The content matters little compared to the form. As long as you are promoting uncritical belief in declared dogma, slogan-chanting, you will always be one step away from prayers and supernatural faith. Confession-writing was preceded and informed by religious confession, as Father Simon the Jesuit Communist so helpfully pointed out. And religions didn't invent the psychological weaknesses they exploit either. They've just been riding that wave longer. Due to their fifty thousand year, global test of applicability, religions reflect the most exhaustively re-tested principles of social and interpersonal manipulation short of mating rituals and food sharing.

 

The mental disease faithosis is by no means unique in our psychology, but merely the most enduring cultural expression of our worst, tribalist, supplicant, dishonest, irrational animal nature.