Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

by Doris Lessing

“It will seem to you many times in your life that there is no point in holding out against these pressures, that you are not strong enough. “But you are going to be taught how to examine these mass ideas, these apparently irresistible pressures, taught how to think for yourself, and to choose for yourself. “You will be taught to read history, so as to learn how short-lived ideas are, how apparently the most irresistible and persuasive ideas can, and do, vanish overnight. You will be taught how to read literature, which is the study of mankind by itself, so as to understand the development of people and peoples. Literature is a branch of anthropology, a branch of history; and we will make sure that you will know how to judge an idea from the point of view of long-term human memory. For literature and history are branches of human memory, recorded memory. “To these studies will be added those new branches of information, the young sciences of psychology, social psychology, sociology and so on, so that you may understand your own behaviour, and the behaviour of the group which will be, all your life, both your comfort and your enemy, both your support and your greatest temptation, since to disagree with your friends—you group animal—will always be painful. “You will be taught that no matter how much you have to conform outwardly—because the world you are going to live in often punishes unconformity with death—to keep your own being alive inwardly, your own judgment, your own ...