How Indoctrination Works
There are very simple core mechanisms at work—there are also aspects of indoctrination that I don't understand yet.
“Curriculums so often present something that doesn’t line up with what you’d present if your goal was freedom and democracy and accuracy.”
“The education system filters out rebellious people—people who make it through the education-system filters tend to be more passive and obedient and uncritical.”
“People have to deal—after the filtration—with the system of rewards and privileges that’s presented to them.”
“We live in a society in which we’re immersed in billions of dollars worth of propaganda and in which the media performs its own propaganda function.”
“Soon enough the thoughts don’t even arise in the first place—the momentary frown ceases to appear.”
Doctrine often diverges from reality and when it does people get curious about the mechanics of indoctrination—I want to use this piece to look into the machinery of indoctrination. I’ll look at the following things:
(1) curriculums
(2) weeding out rebelliousness
(3) cognitive dissonance
(4) propaganda
(5) being polite
I want to make it extremely clear that lots of great people work in corporations and lots of great people are straight-A students and lots of great people believe one or another inaccurate doctrine—I’m certainly not on a moral high horse looking down on anybody, and it would be ridiculous to say that people inside various institutional and ideological systems must somehow be bad people, and the point is only to understand indoctrination and not to point fingers at people and not to criticize individual people. So I want to make that exceedingly clear—it’s easy to think that an analysis of indoctrination is somehow a bitter attack on the individuals inside various systems when the actual point is never to individualize anything and is always to understand our society.
Curriculums
Curriculums so often present something that doesn’t line up with what you’d present if your goal was freedom and democracy and accuracy. Let me spotlight a quote from James Madison in order to illustrate a pervasive and disturbing and broad phenomenon—keep in mind that this pervasive and disturbing and broad phenomenon generalizes to all sorts of topics in the education system and that I’m just using the Madison quote as a symbol.
Why doesn’t every American and every person who’s interested in US politics know all about the below 1787 quote from Madison—the main architect of the US Constitution—in which he explains that the US political system must be designed to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”?
In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The Senate, therefore, ought to be this body.
It’s not like the people who design schools’ curriculums gather together and say “We want to exclude this quote”—there’s no evil conspiracy. The reality is that the curriculum designers don’t know about this quote—my friend wrote this to me:
You’ll only find it if you have a special interest in Madison and work through obscure scholarship, most of which doesn’t mention it. In fact I found it only in an early work that referenced the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention. Talked about it in law schools. No one ever heard of it.
But the quote is right there when you search for it—what’s the explanation for the lack of knowledge about this quote in the internet era? And why was the quote ever relegated to “obscure scholarship” in the pre-internet era? I want to find out the answers to these two questions but I don’t know the answers yet.
The Madison quote is striking because it’s the primary architect of the US political system saying—in secret, behind closed doors, in 1787—something really important and really frank and really unadorned about what the US political system must achieve and why the US political system must achieve this goal. So it’s hard to imagine why that important and frank and unadorned behind-closed-doors description from the system’s main architect could ever somehow not make it into curriculums in a free and democratic society.
And everyone should watch this must-watch video where Michael Klarman talks about his 2016 book The Framers’ Coup—ask yourself as you watch this video how this account squares with what you learned in school:
There are two opposite poles of what an education system could be—the first pole is about freedom and democracy and accuracy and the second pole is about controlling people and indoctrinating people and telling people inaccurate fairy tales. You’ll see the second pole in a country like North Korea—we should always try to move our education system toward the first pole as much as humanly possible.
Weeding Out Rebelliousness
The education system filters out rebellious people—people who make it through the education-system filters tend to be more passive and obedient and uncritical. This obviously isn’t a 100% thing—it’s a tendency.
We all know people who failed out of school because they just couldn’t put up with the hoops that you have to jump through in order to pass various classes—there are people who have issues with self-regulation, but there’s also a personality factor where some people are inclined to challenge things and question things and rebel against things, so there’s a phenomenon where the system isn’t conducive to helping rebellious people make it through.
I remember in high school my friend and I would skip class and play chess and talk about philosophy and politics in the library—all we wanted to do was talk about philosophy and politics, so we were both extremely interested in things, but we had no interest in the classes. I don’t know what happened to my friend—I know that I failed out of school.
The academically successful kids thought that my friend and I were the biggest weirdos ever for actually being interested in intellectual topics outside of the confines of the curriculums—the academically successful kids were overwhelmingly focused on grades and overwhelmingly didn’t enjoy discussing the topics.
I’m not proposing the ludicrous and arrogant and deluded notion that my friend and I were somehow brilliant rebels and those academically successful kids were somehow obsequious and unintellectual and brainless sycophants who went on to become supplicative mindless drones in one or another power system—I certainly have self-regulation issues and my friend may have had those issues as well, and I can’t say what all of the academically successful kids went on to do in their careers.
But there’s absolutely a phenomenon where the education system weeds out rebelliousness and selects for obedience—the only debate is (A) the extent to which that happens and (B) the consequences for society of this filtration. And this filtration begins right away in kindergarten and then goes forward all the way up to an elite Harvard education.
And it’s not a simplistic and monolithic situation or anything like that—there are also obvious respects in which the education system selects for the ability to challenge things because fields like physics and chemistry would get nowhere if everyone was a supplicative mindless drone.
Here’s a comment from Noam Chomsky about the education-system filtration:
It doesn’t have to work 100 percent, in fact, it’s even better for the system if there are a few exceptions here and there. It gives the illusion of debate or freedom. But overwhelmingly, it works.
The issue of course is to explore (A) and (B) above—that’s a matter for scholarship.
Cognitive Dissonance
People have to deal—after the filtration—with the system of rewards and privileges that’s presented to them. And there’s a strong tendency—again not 100%—where people will internalize the values of the institutions that they represent.
So you might work in a corporation or you might work for the NYT or you might work for some other institution—you will tend to mold your beliefs to align with your institutional role. You can invoke cognitive dissonance to explain the internalization of institutional values:
According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent.
Very few people in society are able to deal with the psychological dissonance of looking in the mirror every day and saying “I do rotten things, but I need to make a living, so it is what it is”—the vast majority of people will eventually start to look in the mirror and believe whatever convenient beliefs will help them get through the workday without feeling negative or conflicted or bad about what they’re doing.
Chomsky has an interesting comment about how there’s a gradual psychological process where elite ideology “kind of seeps in”:
I mean, I’ve felt it all my life: it’s extremely easy to be sucked into the dominant culture, it can be very appealing. There are a lot of rewards. And what’s more, the people you meet don’t look like bad people—you don’t want to sit there and insult them. Maybe they’re perfectly nice people. So you try to be friends, maybe you even are friends. Well, you begin to conform, you begin to adapt, you begin to smooth off the harsher edges—and pretty soon it’s just happened, it kind of seeps in.
So there’s a process where you “smooth off the harsher edges”. And this process happens over time—it’s gradual and it’s not like you wake up one morning and choose to align your beliefs with your institutional role.
Propaganda
We live in a society in which we’re immersed in billions of dollars worth of propaganda and in which the media performs its own propaganda function. So that immersion in propaganda obviously helps to indoctrinate people.
But to what degree does propaganda succeed? I don’t know much about this—I have to interview someone on the topic of how propaganda’s success is measured and determined and evaluated. And you have to separate—when it comes to the media—the issue of what the media does from the issue of how effective the propaganda is.
We’re immersed in propaganda—there’s an excellent 1995 quote about propaganda from Alex Carey:
The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
There have been two principal aspects to the growth of democracy in this century: the extension of popular franchise (i.e. the right to vote) and the growth of the union movement. These developments have presented corporations with potential threats to their power from the people at large (i.e. from public opinion) and from organized labour. American corporations have met this threat by learning to use propaganda, both inside and outside the corporation, as an effective weapon for managing governments and public opinion. They have thereby been able to subordinate the expression of democratic aspirations and the interests of larger public purposes to their own narrow corporate purposes.…It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free of propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.…The disastrous consequences for critical thought and American democracy resulting from corporate propaganda could not have happened but for an almost unbelievable neglect by liberal scholars and researchers to give critical attention and exposure to the extent, character and consequences of this development.
It’s mind-boggling to read the scholarship about the “extent, character and consequences of this development”—it’s chilling to think about the “disastrous consequences for critical thought and American democracy”.
Being Polite
I read George Orwell’s 1945 Animal Farm in high school. Orwell wrote an introduction to Animal Farm that every student should read, but I’m not sure how many students read it—here’s an excerpt:
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
Orwell refers to the issue of the press being “extremely centralised” and “owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics”—I already mentioned previously the media’s propaganda function.
I want to focus in on Orwell’s comment about “an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question”—Orwell says that it’s “not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady”.
This is what socialization is all about—you learn how to behave in polite company, and you learn what it would be improper to say, and you learn what it would be improper even to think.
People might have a fleeting thought here or there about how something that private power is up to isn’t OK or about how something that state power is up to isn’t OK—is it really OK to do this or is it really OK to do that.
You don’t bring that up in polite company—maybe your face frowns for a moment, but then you smile and you move on and the thought dissipates. There’s no worse way to ruin a party than to say something impolite—it’s a major social blunder to say something untoward or improper or inappropriate.
Soon enough the thoughts don’t even arise in the first place—the momentary frown ceases to appear.
A lot of interesting food for thought here. I do want to add two things to what you wrote. One is an addition in agreement to what you said regarding the education system, the other a bit of context to add to the Madison observation.
1) As you said, our education system is designed to reward obedience and to stifle critical thinking. The model of US education is based off of Prussian military indoctrination and has never truly veered away from it. US public education formation is a fascinating history and it explains so much as to why we have a population utterly incapable of critical thought at times. It is by design.
This article I found to be helpful in understanding the history of public education in the US. I highly recommend reading it when you get a chance. https://www.dailyrepublic.com/all-dr-news/solano-news/local-features/local-lifestyle-columns/eye-on-education-prussia-model-influences-american-public-school-system/
2) I want to add some context to the Madison bit. He DID say what you quoted, and it is mind-boggling that the quote is not shown verbatim in schools. However, in this instance, he was referring to the reason they needed to establish the US Senate specifically, not that every facet of the US government needed to protect the opulent minority. His greatest fear was that US society would succumb to the "tyranny of the majority" and all of his ideas are devoted to ensuring that no one group had too much unchecked power over another.
If you look through the federalist papers (no.51 to be exact), Madison was a strong believer in "checks and balances" across all aspects of US government. This included protecting the wealthy against the "tyranny of the majority" through the Senate, but also protecting the states against the federal government, and ensuring that no one group had too much power over everyone (including the wealthy not having too much power over everyone else). "Checks and balances" is a term used ad nauseum, but Madison was a strong believer in it. I highly recommend reading Federalist paper number 51 if you get a chance because it's insightful and is the foundation for a lot of US government today for better or for worse. Here's the Wikipedia version of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._51#:~:text=Madison%20emphasized%20that%20a%20system,are%20not%20necessarily%20all%20angel
Jefferson said that "sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him?" Madison concurred with this sentiment that human beings are not angels, and that there needed to be a system in place that ensured that problematic people could not get too much power, control the whole country and rule it with an iron fist. Do I think that this vision mentioned above panned out? No... Not really. But I do think this is important context to add when talking about Madison. To use the quote you mentioned as proof that he wanted an oligarchy and/or had contempt for the common person misses the larger context as to why he said what he said.
Keep up the good work, really been enjoying your articles as of late when I get the chance to read them. Especially the Lieven one and the one regarding Yemen.