The Ghost in the Machine

  The Fascist myth is undisguised and explicit. The opium is doled out to the masses quite openly. The archetypes of Blood and Soil, of the dragon-slaying Superman, the deities of Walhalla and the satanic powers of the Jews are systematically called up for national service. One half of Hitler's genius consisted in hitting the right unconscious chords. The other half was his alert eclecticism, his flair for hypermodern avant-garde methods in Economy, Architecture, Technology, Propaganda and Warfare. The secret of Fascism is the revival of archaic beliefs in an ultra-modern setting. The Nazi edifice was a skyscraper fitted with hot water pipes which drew on underground springs of volcanic origin. [17]

  The Soviet myth had an equally profound appeal to a large section of humanity. The classless Communist society was to be a revival of the Golden Age of mythology at the highest, ultimate turn of the dialectical spiral. It was a secular version of the Promised Land, the Kingdom of Heaven. One of the salient features of this archetypal myth is that the advent of the Millennium must be preceded by violent upheaval: the ordeal of forty years in the desert, the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment. Their secular equivalent is the liquidation of the Bourgeois world through Revolutionary Terror. Some of the early Russian and contemporary Chinese literature extolling Revolutionary Justice being done to a 'putrefied and gangrened Capitalist society' reminds one indeed of the Last Judgments of Grünewald or Hieronymus Bosch. The true believer has a genuine horror of the 'Reformist' heresy, the belief in a bloodless transition towards socialism (which caused the Communists to denounce Socialists, and later the Chinese to denounce the Russians, as traitors to the cause). No apocalypse, no kingdom come.

  The Split

  Fascist propaganda did not take much trouble to harmonise emotion with reason; it dismissed logical objections to its doctrines as 'destructive criticism'. Göring's epigram 'When I hear the word culture I reach for my gun' was a frank declaration of war on the intellect: the rider must obey the horse. The Leninist theory of Scientific Socialism, on the other hand, was an offspring, in the line of direct descent, of the Age of Enlightenment. It was an eminently rationalist credo, based on a materialist conception of history, which derided all emotionalism as 'petit-bourgeois sentimentality'. How is it to be explained that millions of adherents of this rationalist doctrine -- including progressive intellectuals all over the world -- accepted the logical absurdities of the 'Stalin personality cult', the show trials, purges, the alliance with the Nazis; and that those who lived outside Russia accepted them voluntarily, in self-imposed discipline, without pressure from Big Brother? The Stalin regime is a matter of the past, but its lethal rites are being faithfully repeated in China and elsewhere, meeting with the same approval of a new generation of well-meaning sympathisers. At the time of writing, the end of 1966, China is convulsed by another of the mass purges which are endemic in the system; and I have before me a recent cutting with the comments by the official New China agency on a swim which President Mao Tse-tung, 'the radiant sun that lights the minds of the world's revolutionary people', took in the Yangtze river:

  His cross-Yangtze swim was a great encouragement to the Chinese people and revolutionaries throughout the world, and a heavy blow to imperialism, modern revisionism and the monsters and freaks who are opposed to socialism and Mao Tse-tung's thought. [18]

  I have spoken of the paranoid streak that runs through History. Modern man may be quite willing to admit that such a streak has indeed existed among the Aztecs or at the time of the witch-burning mania. He is perhaps less willing to admit that a comparable delusional element was present in 'the doctrine that nearly all mankind, including all the babies who die unbaptised, are to receive forever tortures more severe than any earthly expert can contrive to inflict, with the corollary that to watch the tortures eternally is one of the delights of the blessed'. [19] Yet this doctrine (the Abominable Fancy, as Dean Farrar called it) was part of the collective belief-system of the majority of Europeans well to the end of the seventeenth century, and for many considerably longer. However, even those who appreciate to its full extent the mental disorder underlying such fancies are apt to dismiss them as phenomena of the past. It is not easy to love humanity and yet to admit that the paranoid streak is as much in evidence in contemporary history as it was in the distant past, but more devastating in its consequences; and that, as the record shows, it is not accidental, but endemic -- inherent in man's condition.

  No matter how much the symptoms vary, the pattern of the disorder is the same: a mentality split between faith and reason, between emotion and intellect.* Faith in a shared belief-system is based on an act of emotional commitment; it rejects doubt as something evil; it is a form of self-transcendence which demands the partial or total surrender of the critical faculties of the intellect, comparable to the hypnotic state.

  * Schizophrenia ('split-mindedness') is usually defined as a state of mental disorder in which there is dissociation between intellectual and affective processes. Paranoid schizophrenia is characterised by persistent, systematised delusions.

  Newton wrote not only the Principia but also a treatise on the topography of Hell. Up to this day we all hold beliefs which are not only incompatible with observable facts, but with facts actually observed by ourselves. The hot steam of belief and the iceblock of reasoning are packed together inside our skulls, but as a rule they do not interact; the steam does not condense and the ice does not melt. The human mind is basically schizophrenic, split into two mutually exclusive planes. . . . The Primitive knows that his idol is a piece of carved wood, and yet he believes in its power to make rain; and though our beliefs underwent a gradual refinement, the dualistic pattern of our minds remained basically unchanged. [20]

  Up to the Revival of Learning in the thirteenth century, this dualism seems to have caused no particular problem, because it was taken for granted that the intellect played the subordinate role of ancilla dei, the hand-maid of faith. But the situation changed when St. Thomas Aquinas recognised the 'Light of Reason' as an independent source of knowledge beside the 'Light of Grace'. Reason was promoted from the status of a hand-maid to that of the 'bride' of faith. As a bride, she was of course still bound to obey her spouse; nevertheless she was henceforth recognised to exist in her own right. And with that, the conflict became inevitable. From time to time it reached a dramatic peak: in the burning of Servetius, the Galileo scandal, the clash between Darwinians and fundamentalists, the stubborn opposition of the Catholic Church to birth control. In such climactic moments the smouldering conflict is brought into the open; they provide the split mind with an opportunity to become conscious of its split, and to overcome it by taking sides. Such open confrontations, however, are rare; the normal way of living with a split mind was and is to patch it up with rationalisations and subtle techniques of pseudo-reasoning. These were obligingly provided at all times by dialecticians of various brands, from theologians to Marxian Evangelists. Thus a modus vivendi is achieved, based on self-deception, perpetuating the delusive streak. This applies of course not only to the Western world, but to Hindus, Moslems, and militant Buddhists as well; Asian history has been as bloody, holy, and cruel as ours.

  The Comforts of Double-Think

  To recapitulate: without a transcendental belief, each man is a mean little island. The need for self-transcendence through some form of 'peak experience' (religious or aesthetic) and/or through social integration is inherent in man's condition. Transcendental beliefs are derived from certain ever-recurrent archetypal patterns which evoke instant emotive responses.* But once they become institutionalised as the collective property of a group, they degenerate into rigid doctrines which, without losing their emotive appeal to the true believer, potentially offend his reasoning faculties. This leads to the split: emotion responds to the piercing call of the Muezzin, the intellect shrinks from it. To eliminate the dissonance, various forms of double-think have been designed at various times -- powerful techniques of self-deception, some crude, some extremely sophisticated. Secula
r religions -- political ideologies too, have their ancient origins in the utopian craving for an ideal society; but when they crystallise into a movement or party, they can be distorted to such an extent that the actual policy pursued is the direct opposite of the professed ideal. The reason why idealistic movements -- whether religious or secular -- show this apparently inevitable tendency to degenerate into their own caricatures can be derived from the peculiarities of the group mind: its tendency towards intellectual oversimplification combined with emotional arousal, and its quasi-hypnotic suggestibility by leader-figures or belief-systems.

  * William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience is still the classic in this field. A more recent treatment is offered by Alister Hardy in his The Divine Flame.

  I can speak of this with some first-hand experience, based on seven years (1931-8) of membership in the Communist Party during Stalin's terror regime. In writing about that period, I have described the operations of the deluded mind in terms of elaborate manceuvrings to defend the citadel of faith against the hostile incursions of doubt. There are several concentric rings of defences protecting the fortress. The outer defences are designed to ward off unpalatable facts. For the simple-minded this is made easy by official censorship, the banning of all literature liable to poison the mind; and by implanting a fear of contamination, or of guilt by association, through contact with suspected heretics. Crude as these methods are, they quickly produce a blinkered, sectarian outlook on the world. Avoidance of forbidden information, first imposed from the outside, soon becomes a habit -- an emotive revulsion against the dirty packs of lies offered by the enemy. For the majority of believers, this is quite enough to ensure unswerving loyalty; the more sophisticated are frequently forced to fall back on the inner defence positions. In 1932-3, the years of the great famine which followed the forced collectivisation of the land, I travelled widely in the Soviet Union, writing a book which was never published. I saw entire villages deserted, railway stations blocked by crowds of begging families, and the proverbial starving infants -- but they were quite real, with stick-like arms, puffed up bellies and cadaverous heads.

  I reacted to the brutal impact of reality on illusion in a manner typical of the true believer. I was surprised and bewildered -- but the elastic shock-absorbers of my Party training began to operate at once. I had eyes to see, and a mind conditioned to explain away what they saw. This 'inner censor' is more reliable and effective than any official censorship. . . . It helped me to overcome my doubts and to re-arrange my impressions in the desired pattern. I learnt to classify automatically everything that shocked me as 'the heritage of the past' and everything I liked as 'the seeds of the future'. By setting up this automatic sorting machine in his mind, it was still possible in 1933 for a European to live in Russia and yet to remain a Communist. All my friends had that automatic sorting machine in their heads. The Communist mind has perfected the techniques of self-deception in the same manner as its techniques of mass propaganda. The inner censor in the mind of the true believer completes the work of the public censor; his self-discipline is as tyrannical as the obedience imposed by the regime; he terrorises his own conscience into submission; he carries his private Iron Curtain inside his skull, to protect his illusions against the intrusion of reality. [20a]

  Behind the curtain there is the magic world of double-think. 'Ugly is beautiful, false is true, and also conversely.' This is not Orwell; it was written, in all seriousness, by the late Professor Suzuki, the foremost propounder of modern Zen, to illustrate the principle of the identity of opposites. [21] The perversions of Pop-Zen are based on juggling with the identity of opposites, the Communist's on juggling with the dialectics of history, the Schoolman's on a combination of Holy Scripture with Aristotelian logic. The axioms differ, but the delusional process follows much the same pattern. Facts and arguments which succeed in penetrating the outer defences are processed by the dialectical method until 'false' becomes 'true', tyranny the true democracy, and a herring a racehorse:

  Gradually I learnt to distrust my preoccupation with facts, and to regard the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique, the so-called facts automatically took on the proper colouring and fell into their proper place. Both morally and logically, the Party was infallible: morally, because its aims were right, that is, in accord with the Dialectic of History, and these aims justified all means; logically, because the Party was the vanguard of the proletariat, and the proletariat the embodiment of the active principle in History. . . . I now lived in a mental world which was a 'closed system', comparable to the self-contained universe of the Middle Ages. All my feelings, my attitudes to art, literature and human relations, became reconditioned and moulded to the pattern. [22] * * This was written in 1952. Fifteen years later the scene has shifted, but the pattern repeats itself: 'According to the Chinese Press, quoted in the Literary Gazette, Shakespeare's plays are "fundamentally opposed to socialist realism". . . . As for the composer Bizet, his opera Carmen is decried as an attempt "to sell sex and individualism". The trouble with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was that it was infused with a concept of "bourgeois humanist love". Interest in bourgeois classical music can only "paralyse revolutionary resolution". Chinese critics also discerned a "revisionist outlook" in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina'. [23]

  The most striking feature of the paranoiac's delusional system is its inner consistency, and the patient's uncanny persuasiveness in expounding it. Much the same applies to any 'closed system' of thought. By a closed system I mean a cognitive matrix, governed by a canon, which has three main peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of casuistry, centred on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system: if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian's prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you yourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do, he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history. And if a paranoiac lets you in on the secret that the moon is a hollow sphere filled with aphrodisiac vapours which the Martians have put there to bewitch mankind; and if you object that the theory, though attractive, is based on insufficient evidence, he will at once accuse you of being a member of the world conspiracy to suppress truth.

  A closed system is a cognitive structure with a distorted, non-Euclidian geometry in curved space, where parallels intersect and straight lines form loops. Its canon is based on a central axiom, postulate or dogma, to which the subject is emotionally committed, and from which the rules of processing reality are derived. The amount of distortion involved in the processing is a matter of degrees, and an important criterion of the value of the system. It ranges from the scientist's involuntary inclination to juggle with data as a mild form of self-deception, motivated by his commitment to a theory, to the delusional belief-systems of clinical paranoia. When Einstein made his famous pronouncement 'if the facts do not fit the theory, then the facts are wrong', he spoke with his tongue in his cheek; but he nevertheless expressed a profound feeling of the scientist committed to his theory. As we have seen, an occasional susp
ension of strict logic in favour of a temporary indulgence in the games of the underground is an important factor in scientific and artistic creativity. But geniuses are rare. And if geniuses sometimes indulge in these non-Euclidian games where reasoning is guided by emotional bias, it is an individual bias, a hunch of their own making; whereas the group mind receives its emotional beliefs ready-made from its leaders or from its catechism.

  Let me repeat, however, that the amount of logical distortion needed to keep the deluded mind happy in its faith is a factor of decisive importance. Here lies the answer to that ethical relativism which cynically proclaims that all politicians are corrupt, all ideologies eyewash, all religion designed to befuddle the masses. The fact that power corrupts does not mean that all men in power are equally corrupt.

  The Group Mind as a Holon

  Earlier in this chapter I referred to the tendency of overexcited organs to assert themselves to the detriment of the whole, and then went on to the pathology of cognitive structures getting out of control: the idée fixe of the crank, obsessions running riot, closed systems centred on some part-truth pretending to represent the whole truth. We now find similar symptoms on a higher level of the hierarchy, as pathological manifestations of the group mind. The difference between these two kinds of mental disorder is the same as that between the primary aggressiveness of the individual and the secondary aggressiveness derived from his identification with a social holon. The individual crank, enamoured of his own pet theory, the patient in the mental home convinced that there is a sinister conspiracy aimed at his person, are disowned by society; their obsessions serve some unconscious private purpose. In contrast to this, the collective delusions of the crowd or group are based, not on individual deviations but on the individual's tendency to conform. Any single individual who would today assert that he has made a pact with the Devil and had intercourse with succubi, would promptly be sent to a mental home. Yet not so long ago, belief in such things was a matter of course -- and approved by 'commonsense' in the original meaning of the term, i.e., consensus of opinion.*