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.”
Lifton doesn’t define “totalism,” though he does describe some of its forms, for example “a tendency toward all-or nothing emotional alignments,” an “urge toward absolute surrender to an all powerful supernatural force,” and being pulled to an idea’s “most authoritarian and uncompromising elements.”
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.
“Thought reform” is the Chinese Communists’ term for brainwashing.
In thought reform, for instance, the phrase “bourgeois mentality” is used to encompass and critically dismiss ordinarily troublesome concerns like the quest for individual expression, the exploration of alternative ideas, and the search for perspective and balance in political judgments.
And in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these clichés become what Richard Weaver has called “ultimate terms”: either “god terms,” representative of ultimate good; or “devil terms,” representative of ultimate evil. In thought reform, “progress,” “progressive,” “liberation,” “proletarian standpoints” and “the dialectic of history” fall into the former category; “capitalist,” “imperialist,” “exploiting classes,” and “bourgeois” (mentality, liberalism, morality, superstition, greed) of course fall into the latter.
Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “the language of nonthought.” . . .
For an individual person, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. He is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed. . . .
Either way, his imagination becomes increasingly dissociated from his actual life experiences and may even tend to atrophy from disuse.
Previous: Paul Horgan on the creative life and work.
Next: Gandhi on resisting oppressors, even the most brutal ones.