Prisons We Choose to Live Inside Quotes

“Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, "How could you have believed that?" because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“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.
Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.
But all the pressures go the other way, towards learning what is immediately useful, what is functional. 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.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“We have almost reached a point where if one values democracy, one is denounced as reactionary. I think that this will be one of the attitudes that will be found most fascinating to historians of the future. For one thing, the young people who cultivate this attitude towards democracy are usually those who have never experienced its opposite: people who've lived under tyranny, value democracy.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“Most people cannot stand being alone for long. They are always seeking groups to belong to, and if one group dissolves, they look for another. We are group animals still, and there is nothing wrong with that. But what is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us.
When we're in a group, we tend to think as that group does: we may even have joined the group to find "like-minded" people. But we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissent opinion, as a member of a group.
It seems to me that this is something we have all experienced - something we take for granted, may never have thought about. But a great deal of experiment has gone on among psychologists and sociologists on this very theme. If I describe an experiment or two, then anyone listening who may be a sociologist or psychologist will groan, oh God not again - for they have heard of these classic experiments far too often. My guess is that the rest of the people will never have had these ideas presented to them. If my guess is true, then it aptly illustrates general thesis, and the general idea behind these essays, that we (the human race) are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives.
A typical test, or experiment, on this theme goes like this. A group of people are taken into the researcher's confidence. A minority of one or two are left in the dark. Some situation demanding measurement or assessment is chosen. For instance, comparing lengths of wood that differ only a little from each other, but enough to be perceptible, or shapes that are almost the same size. The majority in the group - according to instruction- will assert stubbornly that these two shapes or lengths are the same length, or size, while the solitary individual, or the couple, who have not been so instructed will assert that the pieces of wood or whatever are different. But the majority will continue to insist - speaking metaphorically - that black is white, and after a period of exasperation, irritation, even anger, certainly incomprehension, the minority will fall into line. Not always but nearly always. There are indeed glorious individualists who stubbornly insist on telling the truth as they see it, but most give in to the majority opinion, obey the atmosphere.
When put as baldly, as unflatteringly, as this, reactions tend to be incredulous: "I certainly wouldn't give in, I speak my mind..." But would you?
People who have experienced a lot of groups, who perhaps have observed their own behaviour, may agree that the hardest thing in the world is to stand out against one's group, a group of one's peers. Many agree that among our most shameful memories is this, how often we said black was white because other people were saying it.
In other words, we know that this is true of human behaviour, but how do we know it? It is one thing to admit it in a vague uncomfortable sort of way (which probably includes the hope that one will never again be in such a testing situation) but quite another to make that cool step into a kind of objectivity, where one may say, "Right, if that's what human beings are like, myself included, then let's admit it, examine and organize our attitudes accordingly.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“We are all regularly presented, day after day, with bad news, the worst, and I think our minds are more and more set into attitudes of foreboding and depression. But is it possible that all the bad things going on – and I don’t have to list them, for we all know what they are – are a reaction, a dragging undertow, to a forward movement in the human social evolution that we can’t easily see? Perhaps, looking back, let’s say in a century or two centuries, is it possible people will say, ‘That was a time when extremes battled for supremacy. The human mind was developing very fast in the direction of self-knowledge, self-command, and as always happens, as always has to happen, this thrust forward aroused its opposite, the forces of stupidity, brutality, mob thinking’? I think it is possible. I think that this is what is happening.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“Of course it may be argued that this is a fairly bleak view of life. It means, for instance, that we can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them, if the pack demands it, will become your enemies-will, as it were, throw stones through your window. It means that if you are a member of a close-knit community, you know you differ from this community's ideas at the risk of being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an evil-doer. This is an absolutely automatic process; nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically.

But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“الأفكار الجيدة لا تضيع، وإن غمرت لفترة من الزمن”
― دوريس ليسنج, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“We live in an open society. We pride ourselves on it, and so we should. An open society is distinguished by the fact that government may not keep information from its citizens, must allow the circulation of ideas. But what we have, we take for granted. What we are used to, we cease to value. Generations of our forebears fought for the freedom of ideas, so that we may have what we do have.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“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.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“Anyone who reads history at all knows that the passionate and powerful convictions of one century usually seem absurd, extraordinary, to the next. 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. Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, “How could they have believed that?” because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history. To”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“يبدو لي أكثر فأكثر ، أننا نخضع إلى موجات من العواطف الجماعية ، ولا يكون ممكنًا طوال فترة بقائها إثارة أسئلة هادفة جادة. وليس على المرء أثناءها سوى إغلاق فمه والانتظار ، فكل شيء يمر...ولكن هذه الأسئلة الهادئة الجادة وإجاباتها الهادئة الجادة المتجردة عساها في الوقت ذاته أن تُنجينا".”
― دوريس ليسنج, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“Whenever things seem to be going along quite smoothly—and I am talking about human affairs in general—then it is as if suddenly some awful primitivism surges up and people revert to barbaric behaviour. This is what I want to talk about in these five lectures: how often and how much we are dominated by our savage past, as individuals and as groups. And yet, while sometimes it seems as if we are helpless, we are gathering, and very rapidly—too rapidly to assimilate it— knowledge about ourselves, not only as individuals, but as groups, nations, and as members of society. This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that—a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice— or if we notice, belittle—equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“We have become desensitized. Watching, night after night, day after day, year after year, the horrors going on all over the world have desensitized us exactly as those soldiers have been deliberately brutalized. No one set out to brutalize us, to make us callous; but that is what we increasingly are.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“Poor economies breed tyrannies.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“How new is it? When was this concept born into the human community for the first time? At this point, there are people who start muttering about ancient Greece, forgetting that it was a slave state that allowed certain minimal freedoms to a male minority. For argument's sake, it would be safe to say that our concepts of liberty, of the rights of the individual, were born in the English Revolution, in the French Revolution, and in the American Revolution. Very young ideas indeed. Very frail. Very precarious.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“I do think that only a very rigid and conforming society could have produced the ideas of an eccentric in the first place.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“It is individuals who change societies, give birth to ideas, who, standing out against tides of opinions, change them. This is as true in open societies as it is in oppressive societies.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“But it is my belief that it is always the individual, in the long run, who will set the tone, provide the real development in a society.

It is not always easy to go on valuing the individual, when everywhere individuals are so put down, denigrated, swamped by mass thinking, mass movements and, on a smaller scale, by the group.

It is particularly hard for young people, faced with what seems like impervious walls of obstacles, to have belief in their ability to change things, to keep their personal and individual viewpoints intact.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“But all the pressures go the other way, towards learning only what is immediately useful, what is functional. 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.

We have to look at the word useful again. In the long run what is useful is what survives, revives, comes to life in different contexts, It may look now as if people educated to use our newest technologies efficiently are the world's elite, but in the long run I believe that people educated to have, as well, that point of view that used to be described as humanistic-- the long-term, over-all, contemplative point of view--will turn out to be more influential. Simply because they understand more of what is going on in the world .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.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“We hope that your period of immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with some period of your country’s history when you can put your murderous and stupid ideas into practice. “If you are lucky, you will emerge much enlarged by your experience of what you are capable of in the way of bigotry and intolerance. You will understand absolutely how sane people, in periods of public insanity, can murder, destroy, lie, swear black is white.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“But all the pressures go the other way, towards learning only what is immediately useful, what is functional. 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.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“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.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“large numbers of young people, when they reach the age of political activity, adopt a stance or an attitude that is very much part of our times. It is that democracy is only a cheat and a sham, only the mask for exploitation, and that they will have none of it. We have almost reached a point where if one values democracy, one is denounced as reactionary. I think that this will be one of the attitudes that will be found most fascinating to historians of the future. For one thing, the young people who cultivate this attitude towards democracy are usually those who have never experienced its opposite: people who've lived under tyranny value democracy.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“I think when people look back at our time, they will be amazed at one thing more than any other. It is this—that we do know more about ourselves now than people did in the past. But that very little of it has been put into effect. There has been this great explosion of information about ourselves. The information is the result of mankind’s still infant ability to look at itself objectively. It concerns our behaviour patterns. The sciences in question are sometimes called the behavioural sciences and are about how we function in groups and as individuals, not about how we like to think we behave and function, which is often very flattering. But about how we can be observed to be behaving when observed as dispassionately as when we observe the behaviour of other species.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“What government, anywhere in the world, will happily envisage its subjects learning to free themselves from governmental and state rhetoric and pressures? Passionate loyalty and subjection to group pressure is what every state relies on. Some, of course, more than others.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“PEOPLE LIVING IN THE WEST, in societies that we describe as Western, or as the free world, may be educated in many different ways, but they will all emerge with an idea about themselves that goes something like this: I am a citizen of a free society, and that means I am an individual, making individual choices. My mind is my own, my opinions are chosen by me, I am free to do as I will, and at the worst the pressures on me are economic, that is to say I may be too poor to do as I want. This set of ideas may sound something like a caricature, but it is not so far off how we see ourselves. It is a portrait that may not have been acquired consciously, but is part of a general atmosphere or set of assumptions that influence our ideas about ourselves. People in the West therefore may go through their entire lives never thinking to analyze this very flattering picture, and as a result are helpless against all kinds of pressures on them to conform in many kinds of ways. The fact is that we all live our lives in groups—the family, work groups, social, religious and political groups. Very few people indeed are happy as solitaries, and they tend to be seen by their neighbours as peculiar or selfish or worse. Most people cannot stand being alone for long. They are always seeking groups to belong to, and if one group dissolves, they look for another. We are group animals still, and there is nothing wrong with that. But what is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us. When we’re in a group, we tend to think as that group does: we may even have joined the group to find “like-minded” people. But we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissident opinion, as a member of a group. It seems to me that this is something we have all experienced—something we take for granted, may never have thought about. But a great deal of experiment has gone on among psychologists and sociologists on this very theme. If I describe an experiment or two, then anyone listening who may be a sociologist or psychologist will groan, oh God not again—for they will have heard of these classic experiments far too often. My guess is that the rest of the people will never have heard of these experiments, never have had these ideas presented to them. If my guess is true, then it aptly illustrates my general thesis, and the general idea behind these essays, that we (the human race) are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“By using our freedoms, I do not means just joining demonstrations, political parties, and so on and so forth, which is only part of the democratic process, but examining ideas, from whatever source they come, to see how they may usefully contribute to our lives and o the societies we live in.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

“Such people, such individuals, will be a most productive yeast and ferment, and lucky the society who has plenty of them.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside