Part II

After World War II, deliberate efforts were made in Germany, Japan, and Italy to create and maintain a guilty conscience among the people so that they remember and feel sorry for the aggression and violence their armies and their supporters had perpetrated against other countries and peoples. The welcome that the German people have accorded to incoming refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, is perhaps the result of their introspection and guilty conscience.

We need to keep in mind that Freud wrote his psychodynamic works after WW I and before WW II. Had Germany paid attention to his words, a lot of miseries caused by the German aggression and violence might have been avoided. But in 1930s, the militaristic propaganda was so loud and overwhelming that even those who might have read Freud, preferred to remain silent or left the country. In fact, Freud’s books were prominent among those that the Nazis burned and destroyed. He fled to England but his sisters stayed back and reportedly died in Nazi concentration camps.

In the Future of an Illusion, Freud had criticised excessive religiosity as collective neurosis. Had he lived to see the horrors of WW II, he would have probably said the same about nationalism. Both religion and nationalism arouse a shared set of beliefs but exact an enormous psychological cost to the individuals by making them perpetual subordinates to the father figures embodied by religious and nationalist leaders who spout venom against the ‘others’.

The next major work done on this topic was ‘Frustration-aggression hypothesis’ published by Dollard, Miller et al in 1939. For the decades to come, this work profoundly influenced almost all research on this issue. The principal hypothesis here is uncomplicated, easy to grasp, and close to common sense. The theory posits that the occurrence of aggressive behaviour presupposes the existence of frustration that leads to some form of aggression. Frustration is specified as the thwarting of a goal response; it not only refers to the process of blocking a person’s attainment but also to the reaction to such blocking. Consequently, ‘being frustrated’ means both that one’s access to a goal is being thwarted by some persons or circumstances and that one’s reaction to this thwarting is one of annoyance.

Read the first part: Culture, society and violence

Now where does frustration come from? A later version of the frustration-aggression theory proposes that events which we find unpleasant cause negative feelings which in turn can predispose people to behave aggressively. If we juxtapose Freud’s ideas with Dollard and Miller’s, we may get the following:

Civilisation is built out of wish-fulfillment of the human ideals of control, beauty, hygiene, order, and the exercise of high intellectual functions. Frustration appears when an individual or a society fails to realise its ideals.

People want to control their lives and not be controlled by others. When they are constantly deprived of their right to make their decisions they are frustrated. Youngsters need useful education and a decent living but when they get a worthless paper as a degree and a job that makes them feel humiliated, they are frustrated. Families want to beautify their lives and their surroundings, but when they see ugliness all around such as garbage heaps, dilapidated roads, and rampant tree felling and deforestation in the name of development, they are frustrated. Parents long for a hygienic healthcare system for their children but when they go to hospitals and cross over-flowing gutters, they are frustrated. Communities thrive with order and security but when their near and dear ones are killed in cold blood or disappear without a trace, frustration sets in. And lastly, a higher intellectual achievement is the goal of most, if not all, thinking individuals, and when their intellectual freedom is sacrificed at the altar of jingoism and chauvinism, they are frustrated.

In 1950, Adorno et al published The Authoritarian Personality based on their research during and after World War II. They developed a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what they called the ‘Fascist scale’ (F scale; sometimes also called pre-fascist scale). The personality type that they identified can be defined by nine traits that were believed to cluster together:

1. Conventionalism -- blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong.

2. Authoritarian submission -- respect for submission to acknowledged authority.

3. Authoritarian aggression -- belief in aggression toward those who do not subscribe to conventional thinking, or who are different.

4. Anti-intraception (anti-intellectualism) -- opposition to the imaginative, the tender-minded; resistance to creative, dangerous ideas; distrust of artists and writers; a black-and-white world view; a belief in simple answers and polemics e.g. ‘media controls everything’, or ‘immorality is the problem’.

5. Superstition and stereotypy -- the belief in fate and its mystical determinants, thinking in rigid categories.

6. Power and toughness -- a need for strong leadership which displays uncompromising power; identification with a power figure; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.

7. Destructiveness and cynicism -- generalised hostility, vilification of the human; a negative view of people in general i.e. the belief that people would all lie, cheat or steal if given the opportunity.

8. Projectivity -- a tendency to project one’s feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group.

9. A preoccupation with violence and sex.

This scale was severely criticised by other psychologists for its own generalisations and lack of objectivity, and for not being scientific enough; but taking this clue from Adorno, now ask yourself about your own group of people and see how many of the above mentioned traits do you find around yourself?

Starting from the last point, go upwards: are your people preoccupied with violence and sex? Do they project their rage onto a scapegoated group? Is there a generalised hostility and vilification for other humans? Do they crave for a strong and uncompromising leadership? Are they superstitious and stereotyping? Are they anti-intellectual and opposed to imagination? Do they display aggression against those who are different and indulge in unconventional thinking? Are they submissive to authority? And finally do they have blind allegiance to conventional beliefs?

If the answers to the above questions are in the affirmative, we are probably heading towards our own holocaust. Mind you, the above scale was developed to understand the factors behind the emergence of fascism and Nazism in Europe; though it was a bit too late. But even if it had been developed earlier the Germans would have taken no notice of it, as happened with Freud’s writings. The authoritarian personality had taken notice of Adorno and others belonging to the famous Frankfurt School -- a group of philosophers and theorists who fled Germany when Hitler shut own their Institute for Social Research.

The book concludes that authoritarianism produces hostility towards racial, religious or ethnic minorities. Though some psychologists argued against that conclusion by citing examples of some authoritarian regimes where there was no such hostility, the recent violence in the Middle East after the collapse of authoritarian regimes proves that authoritarianism does engender such hostilities and whenever the lid is removed the violence erupts.

Now, the question arises; if the personality traits mentioned above especially conventionalism, anti-intellectualism, submission to authority, and aggression towards the minority groups have become ingrained in our society, who is responsible for them? To understand this we may turn back to Antonio Gramsci -- that diminutive, hunchbacked, and ever-ailing Italian who helps us understand the concept of ‘cultural hegemony.’

In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci proposes that ‘cultural hegemony’ comprises the prevailing cultural norms of a society which are imposed by the ruling classes. But who are the ruling classes in Pakistan? As they say, if you don’t know who is ruling, just think about who you are not allowed to criticise.

According to Gramsci, this ‘cultural hegemony’ must not be perceived as natural and inevitable, but must be recognised as artificial social constructs that should be investigated to discover their roots as instruments of domination. Usually societies are culturally diverse, but the ruling classes manipulate the culture of that society to perpetuate their domination. It means, peoples’ beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores are tuned in such a way that their ruling-class worldview becomes the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm.

Remember the ban on Progressive Writers’ Association; the takeover of Pakistan Times and Imroze and the launch of a security state by General Ayub Khan; ‘Pakistan Ideology’ as promoted by Maj-Gen Sher Ali Khan Pataudi, the federal information minister of General Yahya Khan (1969-71); the second amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan in 1974; the so-called Islamisation of Pakistan and flogging of journalists by General Zia; the doctrine of ‘strategic depth’ by General Aslam Beg; the media frenzy against SAARC when Rajiv Gandhi visited Pakistan during Benazir’s first government; the repeated denunciation by the state apparatus of the people who demanded provincial rights or regional languages; the support and promotion of Taliban as the creator of an ‘ideal Islamic state’ in Afghanistan. Pakistan was probably one of the only two countries in the world that recognised the Taliban as legitimate rulers of Afghanistan (the other being Saudi Arabia).

Gramsci points out that ‘cultural hegemony’ of the rulers imposes a ‘universally valid and dominant ideology that justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural, inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the rulers i.e. those whom you are not allowed to criticise.

So combining Adorno’s ‘authoritarian personality’ with Gramsci’s ‘cultural hegemony’, we may conclude that arguably they are the two sides of the same coin; they complement each other -- one creates an atmosphere in which the other may thrive.

So now what should be done to defuse the weapons of mass frustration and aggression? First of all, poverty and illiteracy, ignorance and lack of opportunities, curbs on self-expression and absence of healthy entertainment need to be identified as the prime movers of frustration; coupled with religiosity and sectarianism, jingoism and nationalism, authoritarianism and intolerance -- the root causes of aggression. On one side, we have unfulfilled aspirations of the masses, resulting from decades-old stress on security rather than a welfare state; and on the other we have ‘cultural hegemony’ that eulogizes authoritarian personality with all its traits discussed above.

The so-called ‘strategists’ of the deep state have neither the time nor inclination to indulge in some serious sociological discussions; they are convinced that they know the best, and can fix the ones who don’t agree with them. Let’s conclude with an Erich Fromm quote taken from his book the Sane Society:

"The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane."