Brainwashing

The Fictions of Mind Control

David Seed

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781612774060
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An examination of the literary and cinematic representations of brainwashing during the Cold War era

"Brainwashing: A method for systematically changing attitudes or altering beliefs, originated in totalitarian countries, especially through the use of torture, drugs, or psychological-stress techniques" —Random House Dictionary

The term "brainwashing, " coined during the Korean War, was popularized by a CIA operative who was a tireless campaigner against communism. It took hold quickly and became a means to articulate fears of totalitarian tendencies in American life. David Seed traces the assimilation of the notion of brainwashing into science fiction, political commentary, and conspiracy narratives of the Cold War era. He demonstrates how these works grew out of a context of political and social events and how they express the anxieties of the time.

This study reviews 1950s science fiction, Korean War fiction, and the film The Manchurian Candidate. Seed provides new interpret-ations of writers such as Orwell and Burroughs within the history of psychological manipulation for political purposes, using declassified and other documents to contextualize the material. He explores the shifting viewpoints of how brainwashing is represented, changing from an external threat to American values to an internal threat against individual American liberties by the U.S. government.

Anyone with an interest in science fiction, popular culture, or the Cold War will welcome this study.

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Precursors:
Nineteen Eighty-Four in Context

All commentators on brainwashing agree that the term denotes an exercise of power over a state’s own citizens or members of an enemy regime. The very fact that the term caught on so quickly suggests that it designated a process already existing in representations of political action. The process may form part of the state’s consolidation of its power or a strategy within an ongoing struggle between ideologies. In his analysis of ideology in relation to the state Louis Althusser attempts to distinguish between Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses. Both categories include institutions that enact themselves through concrete social practices that are “governed by the rituals in which these practices are inscribed.” For Althusser “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.” Althusser’s example is of a conversational opening such as “Hey, you there”; but the French verb interpeller occurs in situations more charged ideologically, particularly in the legal context to summon someone to answer. Here the challenge is to a subject’s capacity to demonstrate his or her ideological allegiance.¹

Brainwashing and other forms of mind control take this process to an extreme where means are found to circumvent the subject’s consent. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) all describe different kinds of brainwashing before the letter. All four focus on a quasi-religious “subjection to the Subject,” where the Leader has assumed mythic dimensions as a personification of the state; and all three describe the working of the most powerful apparatus of the state—its security arm—as it redirects the desire of deviants to accept their subjection. Two of these novels, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, will recur throughout this study as major reference points. In the 1950s and later, they virtually became paradigmatic representations of a mechanized society and of a totalitarian regime. Both works were constantly reprinted throughout the cold war. Brave New World was supplemented by a steady flow of articles and lectures by Huxley on the technology of mind control, the most important collection of these being Brave New World Revisited, first published in 1958. As we now know, the 1956 film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four came about through initiatives from the CIA and consultations with the American Committee for Cultural Freedom.²

Zamyatin’s We describes state harmony symbolically through the collective construction of a spaceship called the Integration. The members of the OneState become indistinguishable not only from each other but also from machines in their ideal realization of Taylorian productivity. On the Day of Unanimity the Benefactor is ritually reelected as premier. Under the impact of his relationship with I-330, a female operative, Zamyatin’s narrator–protagonist D-503 is initiated into dangerously heterodox desires: for a new revolution, to move beyond the wall encircling the state city, even to question the Benefactor. The official ideology is to promote mechanism as an evolutionary ideal through rationalizations from history and the infallible “OneState Science.” Within this logic, imagination is viewed as a disease (a “worm” or “fever”) to be “cured” by an operation on the brain.

D-503, whose consciousness toward the end of the novel begins to resemble a “blank, white page” ready for official inscription, is first challenged by the Benefactor to disprove the proposition that “a true algebraic love of mankind will inevitably be inhuman, and the inevitable sign of the truth is its cruelty.” After this appeal to reason, the narrator is arrested and undergoes the Great Operation (capitalized throughout as an initiation ritual) where a new self is born: “They extracted a kind of splinter from my head, and now my head is easy and empty. Or I should say, not empty, but there’s nothing strange there that keeps me from smiling (a smile is the normal state of a normal person).”³ This figure reifies heterodoxy as inert matter. The metaphor is not one of alteration or cleansing, but rather of obstruction removal. The total identification of the individual with the regime explains Zamyatin’s pun in the latter’s name. “OneState” combines political singularity with norms of behavior and feeling. The novel’s coda expresses a postoperative euphoria that totally estranges the narrator from his earlier actions. Now the style itself demonstrates a lack of affect and other “distractions” from the facts. D-503’s new confidence that “reason has to win” arises from the conquest of his self.

When he came to review We in 1946, Orwell compared it to Brave New World, arguing that both works “deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalized, mechanical, painless world.”⁴ Orwell’s humanistic interpretation has colored most subsequent readings of We, but Istvan Csicsery-Ronay has opened up a new perspective by suggesting that the novel presents a “micromyth about eternal ahistorical oppositions which have little, if anything, to do with human responsibility or choice.”⁵ According to this persuasive argument, the polarities of the novel (reason or imagination, collective or individual) form the ground of the action that D-503 is totally unable to affect.

The notion of rebellion within Brave New World is similarly problematic. When he had finished his novel Huxley explained to his father with pointed irony that Brave New World dealt with “such social reforms as Pavlovian conditioning of all children from birth and before birth.”⁶ Like We, the novel describes a regime ideally modeled on the machine, where negative and positive conditioning is used to ensure that the wheels of the state turn smoothly. The association between books and horrendous noises, and flowers and electric shocks, give two early examples of inducing aversion. Near the opening, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning explains to his student visitors: “It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes. . . . We condition the masses to hate the country. . . . But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports.”⁷ To pursue these sports they are further conditioned to use expensive equipment, so the citizens become unwitting consumers. In the Director’s explanation, the decision process is anonymised into a natural or inevitable process where the administrative elite exercise power over the unthinking masses. Indeed, within Huxley’s central machine metaphor these masses are dehumanized into the passive “machinery” waiting to be worked on by the operators or Directors.

The design society of Brave New World should make dissent impossible. The misfit Bernard Marx really only becomes a rebel as a result of an error in the management of his gestation. For the most part, the novel shows an endless sequence of actions that reinforce the state ideology of collectivism. Slogans and catch phrases continually reassure characters that their thinking is as uniform as their clothes.⁸ The Solidarity Services show a similar group bonding as the participants dance around in a circle and the drug “soma” actualizes the narcosis of the masses by the state. As Richard A. Posner and others have argued, Brave New World is packed with instances of mind and body alteration, and “people are brainwashed to want ever more, ever newer consumer goods.”⁹ Where dystopias like We express anonymity through the numbers given to citizens, Huxley names his characters after behaviorists (Watson, Pavlova), industrialists, and politicians. Characters thus become the unconscious bearers of the names of those figures who helped form the World State, which in turn is modeled on the controlled order of a laboratory. Within this social laboratory any kind of dissent or even difference becomes encoded as illness.

Though written too early (1920–21) to depict Stalin’s regime, We nevertheless anticipates the cult of the leader and above all the view of political dissidence as a disease that can be cured by a “scientific” operation. D-503’s self is erased (washed away) by this process so efficiently that he eagerly participates in the betrayals of other deviants. This process was to be described in much greater detail by Arthur Koestler.

In The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) Koestler identifies what he designated the “Soviet myth” as a persistence of Western European millenarian hopes that insulated the true believer from criticizing any of the subsequent events in the Soviet Union. This will to believe makes objective discussion impossible: “arguments are not considered on their merit, but by whether they fit into the system, and if not, how they can be made to fit.”¹⁰ This is exactly the kind of intellectual enclosure Koestler dramatizes in Darkness at Noon (1940), which was based on the trials of figures like Bukharin. In his preface to Alex Weissberg’s 1952 study of the Moscow trials, Conspiracy of Silence, Koestler identifies the following process that could stand as a retrospective summary of his novel: “To pick them, recondition them, transform their personalities, break them down and build them up for the selected part, was one of the functions of the G.P.U.” Koestler originally planned to place the novel within a trilogy and call it The Vicious Circle, no doubt to foreground the Soviet regime’s self-perpetuating ideology. It was to describe a group of characters who, charged by the state with one set of crimes, identify a different guilt in themselves of “having placed the interests of mankind above the interests of man, having sacrificed morality to expediency, the Means to the Ends.”¹¹ In the event he focused the novel on a single member of the Communist old guard, Rubashov, who is arrested and under extended interrogation persuaded to sign a confession of counter-revolutionary activities. He is subsequently tried and shot.

Darkness at Noon describes a procedure designed to consolidate the regime by removing a dissident member of its administration, but the effect of the narrative is the very opposite: to expose the contradictions of the regime’s practices. This becomes apparent from the novel’s use of prison rooms as the main settings. Apart from the obviously claustrophobic effect of Rubashov’s captivity, a late phase of his interrogation induces the impression that “time stood still.” This is both caused and exemplified by his second interrogator Gletkin, a young apparachnik who keeps the curtains of his room closed and his lamp burning at all hours. Although Party ideology appeals to the absolute of History to justify its actions, Gletkin (himself a man with no past and therefore no history) manages to suspend time, trapping Rubashov in an extended present. The description of the latter’s arrest has already blurred distinctions between the Party and Rubashov’s earlier arrest in Germany by the Nazis. Koestler avoids the use of Party names, instead deploying identificatory signs (uniform, insignia, and so on) that simultaneously invite recognition from the reader and speculation about similarities between totalitarian regimes.

The aim of the Party is to produce a monologic official discourse that excludes difference and rival points of view. However, a crucial progression that takes place throughout the novel is a fracturing of Rubashov’s discourse, to such an extent that the individual self, “to which the Party refuses to attribute any significance” gradually comes to be recognized by Rubashov even though that recognition does nothing to alter his fate. First he visualizes himself through the perspective of the authorities. An early thought sequence gradually shifts the grammatical person: “So I shall be shot, thought Rubashov. . . . ‘So they are going to shoot you,’ he told himself. . . . ‘So you are going to be destroyed,’ he said to himself half-aloud.”¹² Perceptions of the self as subject and object separate out so that Rubashov finally anticipates an impersonal process where the agents of his death have been elided. The grammar of his discourse becomes a charged political issue, as his first interrogator Ivanov points out, because Rubashov implies an unacceptable separation of self from State and Party. The slippage of pronouns (I, you, we) throughout the novel reflects Rubashov’s shifts of allegiance and shifts in self-perception.

The suppressed oppositional voice within Rubashov’s discourse is thematised at one moment of Dostoevskyan insight: “He found out that those processes wrongly known as ‘monologues’ are really dialogues of a special kind; dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as ‘I’ instead of ‘you,’ in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions.” This second voice exists within the interstices of Rubashov’s discourse initially, as an inflection of pronouns, an incomplete subversive utterance censored before it can be spoken, and a disconcerting continuation of the supposedly logical sequence of his conscious thoughts. Rubashov designates this voice abstractly as a “grammatical fiction,” but it takes on more and more substance as the novel proceeds, deriving in part from all the other disquieting reports he remembers hearing from party members. In one sense then the novel dramatizes an inner drama where Rubashov’s interrogators play the role of catalysts. Ivanov’s voice is internalized as an “echo” in Rubashov’s head. Gletkin is more of an antagonist, but even here the power is articulated as mutual dependence: “we each hold the other by the throat.” Koestler later described the interrogations as being “determined by the mental climate of the closed system; they were not invented but deduced by the quasi-mathematical proceedings of the unconscious from that rigid logical framework that held both the accused and the accuser, the victim and the executioner in its grip.”¹³ Starting from premises Rubashov has himself accepted and applied, like the proposition that “the Party can never be mistaken,” the interrogations revolve around a functional notion of truth as either helping or hindering the unique historical experiment of the Soviet Union. No distinction is made between Rubashov’s actual and potential behavior once he has admitted to heterodox opinions. If NO.1 (Stalin) embodies the state and if Rubashov has subversive opinions against that state, then merely holding those opinions is tantamount to plotting against No. 1’s life, his main alleged crime.

Two central metaphors are used in the novel to articulate the relation of the individual to the state: the corporate body and the theatre. During one of the recent show trials, party members, for Rubashov, resembled a “marionette-play with figures, moving on wires.” Here the implication is of direction from elsewhere, while the theatre analogy in general suggests performance according to a script—officially the script of historical necessity, unofficially the pragmatic plotting of the Party leader. The second metaphor of the body makes a consistently ironic criticism of Party policy. Traditionally signifying the harmonious working of the state, the body politic in Koestler’s novel fragments into a series of instances where every significant character is damaged in some way. Ivanov has lost a leg, Gletkin is scarred, Rubashov suffers from myopia and toothache. Disease is repeatedly foregrounded as a perception of the times, the Party (it has “gout and varicose veins in every limb”), or economic determinism (for Rubashov the “cancer which was eating into [humanity’s] entrails”).¹⁴ The Party’s euphemistic description of its acts as necessary surgery is rejected and revised by Rubashov as wanton brutality where the skin of the body politic is stripped away to reveal the innards.

Both metaphors critique a state policy that has to fulfill itself through the ideological state apparatus of ritual confession, trial, and execution. In ironically literal confirmation of Althusser’s example of the individual participating in ideology as a subject, Rubashov is interpellated by being arrested. The first grim irony lies in his startling fall from a position of status to that of victim; ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Precursors: Nineteen Eighty-Four in Context
• 2 Brainwashing Defined and Applied
• 3 Dystopias, Invasions, and Takeovers
• 4 The Impact of Korea
• 5 The Manchurian Candidate
• 6 William Burroughs: Control Technologies, Viruses, and Psychotronics
• 7 Psychotherapy and Social Enforcement
• 8 The Control of Violence
• 9 The Guinea Pigs
• 10 Cyberpunk and Other Revisions
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index