Guest post: Make sure it’s not you
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on When politics becomes identity.
Re. communist China, on of the main lessons I learned from Jung Chang’s biography of Chairman Mao was that the endless purges and show-trials were not even meant to smoke out any real dissenters. At least that wasn’t their main function. The real purpose was conveying the following message: “Someone is going to get it during the next purge whether they are in fact guilty or not. Make sure it’s not you!”. And of course the way to make sure it wasn’t you was by making sure it was somebody else. In other words, it wasn’t enough to be “innocent” of any heretical tendencies. In fact, you didn’t even have to be suspected of any heresy. Insufficient eagerness to inform on others was enough to get in trouble yourself. It didn’t matter how actively complicit you were in pursuing heretics and thought criminals if most of your neighbors were even more complicit. That way everyone was forced to compete to stay out of trouble, and someone was inevitably going to lose. There was no way to be safe.
Another point that too often gets overlooked is this: Terror was seen as desirable not just for its effects on the victims, but just as much for its effects on the perpetrators. Making people get their hands dirty was a means to get them under Mao’s control. The perpetrators were supposed to deduce for themselves “If the chairman goes down, his enemies are going to come after me as one of his accomplices, therefore I have a stake in keeping the Chairman in power for ever”. Another advantage of making people actively complicit in the crimes of the regime was to encourage them to rationalize their behavior and get a justification spiral going: “Only a spineless, despicable coward with no integrity or principles would persecute innocent people on behalf of a psychopatic tyrant to save his own skin. But I’m not a spineless, despicable coward, and I did persecute those those people, therefore it had to be the right thing to do.”
I think all of this applies to wokism to some degree. The endless purity spirals basically force everyone to compete to stay out of trouble, and there is no such thing as “where the line goes”, no way to be safe. Getting people actively engaged in attacking and vilifying others as bigots, haters, TERFs, transphobes, or even Nazis advocating murder and genocide, creates a stake – psychologically as well as strategically – in helping the TRAs win whether or not it’s “right” or “wrong”.
Every time I read something like this, I remember I need to start reading Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Maybe I’ll do it this week …
I read Thought Reform while reading up on the study of cults*. Lifton focuses a lot on the cult of confession and the process of inducing shame and guilt (Or, as I would put it, inducing cognitive dissonance). Which brings up another important feature of Maoism as described by Chang: Everyone had to regularly submit a written “self criticism” outlining potentially problematic conversations with others, or even just private thoughts and feelings, that were “not good” (or something similarly vague). Of course the surest way to get into trouble was to write nothing, because “why can’t you tell the Party unless you have something to hide?” (To suggest that the party might be less than 100% just and infallible was of course thought crime in itself). So you pretty much had to confess to something, which meant that if the party ever needed to destroy you, they already had your written confession. The criteria for deciding what constituted thought crime were whatever they had to be to get you convicted.
This fits nicely with something Nick Cohen once said about the difference between a more conventional authoritarian dictatorship like East Germany under Honecker and a totalitarian dictatorship like The Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao: In an authoritarian regime there are rules, and if you are clever you can find out where the line is. And if you are really clever, you can press against it without overstepping it. In a totalitarian regime the violence is almost random, there are no rules, and hence no such thing as “where the line is”, so the only way to be relatively “safe” is to not “go there” at all. E.g. the Cultural Revolution was triggered by a theater play that was interpreted as a veiled criticism of Mao.
Cohen Was applying this distinction to Jihadist terrorism in order to explain why Western media were so reluctant to write critically about Islamism (a totalitarian ideology if ever there was one): There is just no way of knowing what’s going going to trigger another Charlie Hebdo massacre. Again, the difference to leftist cancel culture is one of degree rather than kind. Covering the excesses of Gender ideology is almost certainly not going to get you killed, but it might very well destroy your career, your reputation, your social life etc., which is hardly nothing. Cohen made the point that journalists tend to be heavily invested in their self-image as fearless truth-tellers holding the powerful to account etc. and are hence very reluctant to admit (cognitive dissonance at work again) that they are self-censoring out of fear. If everyone would come straight out and say that that’s what they’re doing, it would actually demonstrate a lot more courage and integrity than the usual hand-waving about “respect” for the feelings of Muslims or trans people. It would also be an enormously important piece of information in its own right.
*As the title suggests the book is not really about that, but virtually every book about cults refers back to it, and many still apply Lifton’s description of the Thought Reform process to the coercive persuasion techniques used by cults.