Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

by Doris Lessing

There is no epoch in history that seems to us as it must have to the people who lived through it. What we live through, in any age, is the effect on us of mass emotions and of social conditions from which it is almost impossible to detach ourselves.

I think writers are by nature more easily able to achieve this detachment from mass emotions and social conditions. People who are continually examining and observing become critics of what they examine and observe.

I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

I think it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war, or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war—not only the idea of it, but the fighting itself.

it is easy to call other people primitive, and difficult to acknowledge that we may be.

It is not too much to say that when the word blood is pronounced, this is a sign that reason is about to depart.

This business of seeing ourselves as in the right, others in the wrong; our cause as right, theirs as wrong; our ideas as correct, theirs as nonsense, if not as downright evil.... Well, in our sober moments, our human moments, the times when we think, reflect, and allow our rational minds to dominate us, we all of us suspect that this “I am right, you are wrong” is, quite simply, nonsense. All history, development goes on through interaction and mutual influence, and even the most violent extremes of thought, of behaviour, become woven into the general texture of human life, as one strand of it. This process can be seen over and over again in history. In fact, it is as if what is real in human development—the main current of social evolution— cannot tolerate extremes, so it seeks to expel extremes and extremists, or to get rid of them by absorbing them into the general stream. “All things are a flowing ...,” as Heraclitus, the old Greek philosopher said. There is no such thing as my being in the right, my side being in the right, because within a generation or two, my present way of thinking is bound to be found perhaps faintly ludicrous, perhaps quite outmoded by new development—at the best, something that has been changed, all passion spent, into a small part of a great process, a development.

Looked at collectively they amount to a completely new attitude towards ourselves, our institutions—the detached, curious, patient, investigative attitude that I think is the most valuable thing we have in the fight against our own savagery, our long history as group animals.

People like certainties. More, they crave certainty, they seek certainty, and great resounding truths. They like to be part of some movement equipped with these truths and certainties, and if there are rebels and heretics, that is even more satisfying, because this structure is so deep in all of us.

It is by now of course a cliché that political movements and religious movements behave alike.

It is these patterns that I believe we should study, become conscious of, and recognize as they emerge in us and in the societies we live in.

We have now reached the stage where a political leader not only uses, skilfully, time-honoured rabble rousing tricks—see Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—but employs experts to make it all more effective. But the antidote is that, in an open society, we may also examine these tricks being used on us. If, that is, we choose to examine them; if we don’t switch off to see Dallas or whatever instead.

Meanwhile, it is interesting that those people who like to regard themselves as the armies of the good, the well-intentioned, disdain such means. I am not saying they should use them, but they will often refuse even to study them, thus leaving themselves open to being manipulated by them.

Government by show business.... Well, every authoritarian government understands this very well.

But what strikes me is this: technology—television, cinema, to be precise—in this case is doing exactly the same process, exposing us to brutality of every kind so that we lose our sensitivity to it. We lose our sensitivity in a random and unpredictable way.

It seems to me, more and more, that we are being governed by waves of mass emotion, and while they last it is not possible to ask cool, serious questions. One simply has to shut up and wait, everything passes.... But meanwhile, these cool, serious questions and their cool, serious, dispassionate answers could save us.

One mass movement, each a set of mass opinions, succeeds another: for war, against war; against nuclear war; for technology, against technology. And each breeds a certain frame of mind: violent, emotional, partisan, always suppressing facts that don’t suit it, lying, and making it impossible to talk in the cool, quiet, sensible low-keyed tone of voice which, it seems to me, is the only one that can produce truth.

And yet, while all these boilings and upheavals go on, at the same time, parallel, continues this other revolution: the quiet revolution, based on sober and accurate observation of ourselves, our behaviour, our capacities.

It means, and I hope that this won’t sound too wild, choosing to laugh.... The researchers of brain-washing and indoctrination discovered that people who knew how to laugh resisted best.

Fanatics don’t laugh at themselves; laughter is by definition heretical, unless used cruelly, turned outwards against an opponent or enemy. Bigots can’t laugh. True believers don’t laugh.

Laughter is a very powerful thing, and only the civilized, the liberated, the free person can laugh at herself, himself.

the people at the top of a government, a department, a ministry, or any institution of government or administration never know what goes on at the lower levels.

That device for improving administration could only have been employed if the administrations in question were able to look very coolly at themselves, and to diagnose their own condition, and to prescribe for it. There is nothing to stop us doing the same.

We are group animals still, and there is nothing wrong with that. But as I suggested in the last talk in this series, what is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us.

It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissident opinion, as a member of a group.

Nearly all the pressures from outside are in terms of group beliefs, group needs, national needs, patriotism and the demands of local loyalties, such as to your city and local groups of all kinds. But more subtle and more demanding—more dangerous—are the pressures from inside, which demand that you should conform, and it is these that are the hardest to watch and to control.

This obedience to authority, in short, is not a property of the Germans, under the Nazis, but a part of general human behaviour.

Passionate loyalty and subjection to group pressure is what every state relies on.

It is interesting to speculate: what country, what nation, when, and where, would have undertaken a programme to teach its children to be people to resist rhetoric, to examine the mechanisms that govern them? I can think of only one—America at its birth, in that heady period of the Gettysburg Address. And that time could not have survived the Civil War, for when war starts, countries cannot afford disinterested examination of their behaviour.

people who’ve lived under tyranny, value democracy.

Yet I think we may very well see countries that take it for granted they are democracies losing sight of democracy, for we are living in a time when the great over-simplifiers are very powerful—communism, fundamentalist Islam. Poor economies breed tyrannies.

the young are still able to believe more easily in permanence.

One learns nothing, about anything, ever, when in a state of boiling ferment, or partisan enthusiasm.

I think children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again.

More and more the demand is for people to be educated to function in an almost certainly temporary stage of technology. Educated for the short term.

In the long run what is useful is what survives, revives, comes to life in different contexts.

It is not that I undervalue the new technicians. On the contrary. It is only that what they know is by definition a temporary necessity.

Everything that has ever happened to me has taught me to value the individual, the person who cultivates and preserves her or his own ways of thinking, who stands out against group thinking, group pressures. Or who conforming no more than is necessary to group pressures, quietly preserves individual thinking and development.