re: #209 Guanxi88

I am assigned to engage the services of Dr. Benway for Islam, Inc.

Dr. Benway had been called in as advisor to the Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing. The citizens are well adjusted, co-operative, honest, tolerant and above all clean. But the invoking of Benway indicates all is not well behind that hygienic facade: Benway is a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing, and control. I have not seen Benway since his precipitate departure from Annexia, where his assignment had been T.D. — Total Demoralization. Benway’s first act was to abolish concentration camps, mass arrest, and, except under certain limited and special circumstances, the use of torture.

“I deplore brutality,” he said. “It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.”

Every citizen of Annexia was required to apply for and carry on his person at all times a whole portfolio of documents. Citizens were subject to be stopped in the street at any time; and the Examiner, who might be in plain clothes, often in a bathing suit or pyjamas, sometimes sometimes stark naked except for a badge pinned to his left nipple, after checking each paper would stamp it. […CUT…]
Documents issued in vanishing ink faded into old pawn tickets. New documents were constantly required. The citizens rushed from one bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet impossible deadlines.
All benches were removed from the city, all fountains turned off, all flowers and trees destroyed. Huge electric buzzers on top of every apartment house (everyone lived in apartments) rang the quarter hour. Often the vibrations would throw people out of bed. Searchlights played over the town all night (no one was permitted to use curtains, shutters or blinds). […CUT…]
After a few months of this the citizens cowered in corners like neurotic cats.

You’re writing a book?