Member-only story
Thought Reform in China, and Today
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, by Robert Lifton, highlights some parallels between Chinese totalism and today’s version
What scared me the most about reading Dr. Robert J. Lifton’s book on Chinese thought reform was imagining myself in place of the people he interviewed. I tried to think of my mind as a unit — as me — and then imagining that someone else was able to fundamentally change who I was. They could permanently tweet some knobs and filters to make me a different person. The person turning those knobs and adjusting those filters did not at all have my best interests in mind, but was a bureaucrat in an ideological machine, simply doing so to get by.
I don’t know about you, but I like myself. I have no desire to be anyone else and that thought creeps me out. It’s the same reason hypnotists freak me out. But that is exactly what happened to people “re-educated” in communist China during Mao Tse-Tsung’s cultural revolution (1966–1976). In Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, Dr. Lifton shares his extensive interviews and analysis of several Westerners who were in China during that time, and survived this process.
