Prisons We Choose to Live Inside is a book based on a series of lectures given by Doris Lessing back in the mid-1980s. It’s kind of a literary & political pre-cursor of Robert Cialdini’s book Influence.
Here are a few excerpts from the book, though they don’t really do it justice:
One learns nothing, about anything, ever, when in a state of boiling ferment, or partisan enthusiasm.
Looking back over my life, which has now lasted 66 years, what I see is a succession of great mass events, boilings up of emotion, of wild partisan passion, that pass, but while they last it is not possible to do more than think: “These slogans, or these accusations, these trumpetings, quite soon they will seem to everyone ridiculous and even shameful.” Meanwhile, it is not possible to say so.
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, making it impossible to talk in the cool, quiet, sensible low-keyed tone of voice which, it seems me, is the only one that can produce truth.
In times of war, as everyone knows who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we 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.
Or how about the Falklands War? … I have friends who exclaim the worst part of that war was watching our country suddently reverting to what they described as outworn jingoism and simple-minded patriotism. Why outmoded? Any nation can be made to revert to drum-beating, to dancing around a campfire waiving tomahawks-metaphorically speaking-by any leader able to use the appropriate phrases and war cries.
It is said that those highly intelligent people who set up the Bolshevik party in London in, I think, 1905, said to each other, “Let us learn from the French Revolution and let us not split violently over points of doctrine and then start murdering each other.” But this is exactly what happened. They were helpless in the face of forces they had helped let loose.
…the reason why the Left is in such trouble is that people have seen Socialism in action in country after country and are terrified of it. The Soviet Union: a tyranny, where if you disagree you find yourself in a mental hospital… [Lessing describes her conversion to communisim in the 1950s in another portion of the book.]
Meanwhile, there is no country in the world whose structure is not of a privileged class and a poor class. There is always a power elite with the mass of the people excluded from wealth and any sort of political power…If I say that I think elites, privileged groups are often useful, then that makes me reactionary, but it depends on who the elite is…