Hey everybody, it's James Lindsay. You're listening to The New Discourses Podcast, and we just talked in a very recent episode about Mao, Mao Zedong.

In the CCP, I read through the majority of one of his speeches, he gave in 1957, on the correct handling of the contradictions of the people, among the people, or something like this, that's approximately the title, and since we're kind of looking at the Maoist circumstance, and I wanted to impress upon you with that podcast that what we're seeing is very familiar.

I now want to turn and do another episode, so in some instances, episodes a little bit of a follow-up to the previous Mao episode, I would encourage you if you want to get the full experience of this, this will be an episode that can stand on its own, no problem, but if you want to get the full experience of what's being communicated, I think, in this episode, I think it would behoove you to take the time, which is not a trivial ask, I'm asking for about six hours of your time, before whatever this turns out to be,

to go listen to the Mao podcast that I did recently, and another recent New Discourses podcast episode, called Surviving a Modern Struggle Session, where I read from Robert J. Lyfton's book, Thought Reform on the Psychology of Totalism, a Study of Brainwashing in China, and in particular, I read through something, I think it's the fifth chapter, through significant portion of the book,

through significant portion of that, to contextualize what a struggle session is, and for what it's worth, I've heard that that podcast has been very helpful for people, so now I want to return to Lyfton and look at the Mao situation through the other end of the lens, if you will, so we've read this speech by Mao from 57, he's on the eve of launching what gets called the Great Leap, or sometimes the Great Leap Forward,

which is essentially his generation, or his regime's attempt at the Great Reset, it was a disaster, but he's got the sales pitch, and it's eerie how well it connects to what we're dealing with, and now we're going to turn it around, and we're going to look at some of the more conclusive points that Lyfton makes near the end of his book, again the title of that book is Thought Reform,

and the psychology of totalism, and I encourage you to remember that Thought Reform is the translation that Lyfton is giving for the Chinese term she now, which means brainwash, and so he's talking about the brainwashing methods.

What Mao was referring to in the criticism and struggle part of what he called his unity, criticism, unity formula for transforming a polity, created desire for unity, make people want to fit in, make them want to join the cult, bring them in, affirm them, and then as they get deeper in, start to do criticism and struggle, what he calls the democratic method of persuasion,

and as they become more committed, lead them into study and return to the desire for unity within the cult now, and so this is in essence the formula behind the brainwashing program that Lyfton was documenting from Hong Kong in the early 1950s.

So he's to remind you of the setting, if you haven't listened to the struggle session podcast, or some of the other ones where I've talked about Lyfton recently,

Lyfton was in Hong Kong, he was actually there for business for other reasons, and he started to find out about these people coming in, he's a psychologist, he started to find out about these people coming in, fresh off the boat from exile from China, after being released from Mao's brainwashing prisons in the early 1950s.

And he sets up camp for an extra year and a half in Hong Kong, and starts interviewing these people, sometimes days, after they get off the exile ship that sent them to Hong Kong, got them out of mainland China,

and interviews them almost immediately, and created a very comprehensive theory of thought reform, brainwashing, and cult induction, really.

And so I'm not going to preamble this any longer, I'm just going to jump in, chapter 22, ideological totalism, I'm going to give you this, and again, again, the similarities to what we are experiencing are so obvious as to be uncomfortable.

And as we go, I'll draw them out, but this is a very important chapter. In fact, if you only had time to read a handful of things, if you get ahold of this book, I would encourage you to read that fifth chapter, or whichever it is where it outlines the 12 steps of thought reform, then I would encourage you to read this chapter and the next.

If you only have time for three, if you have time for a few more, the entire last part, which is four chapters or something like that, and maybe even the two chapters before the last part are also worth reading.

So the last five or six chapters of the book, if you have lots of time to read all 525 pages, be my guest, it's an excellent book.

So chapter 22, ideological totalism, he says, thought reform has a psychological momentum of its own, a self perpetuating energy not always bound by the interests of the program's directors.

So immediately we get this sense of the woe, right? So we know that there are people kind of directing this sort of, it's very decentralized, it's not got the same hierarchical central command structure that mounted.

But the idea of psychologically manipulating and brainwashing people naturally has its own self perpetuating energy that's not connected to necessarily directly to the people that keep it on track.

In other words, it's almost like the people that are in the inner circle of the cult lay the tracks, but the drive that keeps the thought reform going, the cult initiation and deepening going.

That seems to have almost its own, it's like the train has its own engine.

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