In The Instability of Truth, the historian explores how brainwashing plays out in Chinese reeducation camps and elsewhere.
You describe the brainwashing of American POWs in Chinese reeducation camps during the Korean War as a mix of Maoist indoctrination and psychoanalysis. How did that work?
The POWs said you could feelyourself freezing to death listening to these boring Marxist lectures. What was more effective was forcing them to keep a journal. They had to introspect about their family relationships and class relationships, things that troubled them. The Chinese call that “speaking bitterness.” That gave the indoctrination emotional resonance.
Twenty-one POWs defected to China. Were those defections genuine?
They were pictured in Life magazine looking like they were bewitched or drugged. Some of them quoted Communist clichés about the evils of capitalism or sang “The Internationale.” They seemed like robots. But a crucial aspect is that these men were incredibly traumatized in the camps. They had lost half their body weight, or lost toes to frostbite, or seen their friends die. Even before the reeducation, they were distressed and ungrounded. I think these were genuine conversions even if they didn’t last.
You explore American religious cults that use similar but milder techniques. How do they lure recruits?
There’s often deception. A person might be told that it’s an organization that wants to save the whales. You might go to a weekend at a farm thinking it’s an environmental seminar, but then you’re hearing lectures, chanting, singing; there’s intense positive emotion directed at you and you’re rarely left alone. There are elements of repetition and hypnosis, of being destabilized in an unfamiliar situation—then the insertion of doctrine.
Do people who get brainwashed feel empowered by the experience?
People get tremendous benefits from a cult—at least initially, before it becomes a dark, life-sucking hamster wheel. Initially a recruit feels a sense of tremendous energy and belonging. The cult leader can actually become jealous of the followers when they seem to be flowering too much, which can make the abuse worse.
You write about the academic “cult” of French literary theory in grad school. How did you find your way out of it?
There were elements of hero worship and inscrutable prose, and valorization of the works of Lacan and Derrida. There was even a mystical component: if I could only figure out the deep meaning of Lacan, I would find transcendent meaning. Then I went through a crisis, and I thought, what is the point of studying these things if I can’t communicate with people, if my prose makes people say, “Well I’m sure you’re very smart, but I can’t understand what you’re saying?”
