Robert J. Lifton on the corrupting effects of ”doctrine”

It replaces human experience

Robert Jay Lifton, who died recently, was a psychiatrist concerned to understand institutions like totalitarianism through the emotions and feelings of the people who lived under them, either in resistance or participation. Among his notable books were studies of Hiroshima survivors, Vietnam veterans, and Nazi doctors. His thoughts on language appeared in his first book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, a book based on his research in Hong Kong in 1954 and 1955 of people who’d been subjected to “thought reform.”

This sterile language reflects another characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. This primacy of doctrine over person is evident in the continual shift between experience itself and the highly abstract interpretation of such experience — between genuine feelings and spurious cataloguing of feelings. It has much to do with the peculiar aura of half-reality which a totalist environment seems, at least to the outsider, to possess.

After describing the way the Chinese Communists’ doctrine served them, he continues (“totalist sacred science” meaning the Communists’ version of Marxism):

The inspiriting force of such myths cannot be denied; nor can one ignore their capacity for mischief. For when the myth becomes fused with the totalist sacred science, the resulting “logic” can be so compelling and coercive that it simply replaces the realities of individual experience.

Consequently, past historical events are retrospectively altered, wholly rewritten, or ignored, to make them consistent with the doctrinal logic. This alteration becomes especially malignant when its distortions are imposed upon individual memory as occurred in the false confessions extracted during thought reform. . . .

The same doctrinal primacy prevails in the totalist approach to changing people: the demand that character and identity be reshaped, not in accordance with one’s special nature or potentialities, but rather to fit the rigid contours of the doctrinal mold. The human is thus subjugated to the ahuman.

And in this manner, the totalists, as Camus phrases it, “put an abstract idea above human life, even if they call it history, to which they themselves have submitted in advance and to which they will decide quite arbitrarily, to submit everyone else as well.”

The underlying assumption is that the doctrine — including its mythological elements — is ultimately more valid, true, and real than is any aspect of actual human character or human experience.

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