Mental Contagion and Mass Delusion
The behavior of the totalitarian is essentially the same as the everyday bully or manipulator, but it is practiced on a massive scale. Brute intimidation, intellectual sophistry, or emotional blackmail are common tools for both.
Likewise, the defenses that an individualist employs against others who would attempt to interfere in his life are similar to those he must use to resist the efforts of the totalitarian state to undermine his will - but likewise need adjustment as he is dealing with multiple assailants rather than just one.
It's also mentioned that these tactics tend to be very similar across cultures - there are some societies and cultures that are more vulnerable to takeover by a totalitarian due to their values and customs, but aside of that there is a great deal of consistency in the manner in which totalitarians rise to power and maintain control in various nations.
Self-Deception
In psychological terms, "reality" is a construct of the human mind. The mid receives sense-data from the world (colors and shapes) that it must interpret to determine what things are. We feel the need to be right in our interpretations and are very clever about maintain faith in our version of the truth in spite of evidence to the contrary.
Typically, we defend our reality by means of selective attention and perceptual filters, which enable us to ignore anything that contradicts our beliefs or would undermine our certainty in them. But it is also true that we are creative in this process, in the sense that we simply make things up to support our beliefs. Consider that when people tell a story of a personal experience, it is often heavily embellished.
And when we interact with others, we negotiate reality. Two people who reminisce about the same event will often accept or even adopt each other's embellishments - such that even if one of them was conscious that he was telling a lie, the other person's agreement makes him begin to consider that it might have been true. The more a person lies, and the more people go along with his lies, the more likely he is to believe his own lies are the truth - at which point he has become delusional.
He mentions a case-study of a girl who suffered from constant headaches. She had been taken to physicians, who could find neither a cause nor any physical evidence of her suffering pain - so they referred her to a psychotherapist. During her therapy, it was discovered that she originally used the complaint of a headache to avoid going to school, so her mother agreed to let her stay home. She used this complaint a number of times, and each time got what she wanted - but over time the girl herself began to believe that she was really ill, and she began feeling the physical pain she had thus far been faking.
Instances in which delusion has physical symptoms are rare, but behavioral symptoms are far more common. The concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy or "psyching oneself out" is common. If a person believes he is incapable of doing something, that he will fail or make mistakes, he is more likely to do so. This is because he wants his prediction to come true, and consciously or unconsciously modifies his performance to prove himself right - to make truth of the lie he has told himself.
(EN: The same technique has been attempted by positive psychologists - psyching oneself "up" instead of "out" by repeating "I can do it" mantras. It's a interesting theory, but grossly overestimated. I person who is capable of doing something can make himself fail, but a person who is incapable of doing something cannot make himself succeed. Chanting "I am bulletproof" does not confer that quality.)
The sum of our interpretations, including our delusions, is our world-view. Those who agree with our delusions are friends, those who dispute them are enemies. This is the basis of one-on-one relationships as well as relationships with groups of people. A political party is composed of thousands or millions of individuals who all agree to the same interpretation of reality and who support the same delusions - even if this requires them to initially go along with ideas with which they do not agree at first, but of which they convince themselves over time.
It is also interesting to note that people who are confident that what they believe is true often speak quite plainly, as stating the obvious seems boring and pointless, whereas those who lack confidence are often quite emphatic and emotional in their expression. In some instances it is a conscious choice to be dramatic in "proving" their truth, but in most instances it is an expression of anxiety, the fear of being wrong and the fear of being rejected, exposed, and humiliated for lying.
(EN: The author mashes together two notions that should really be kept separate. Being conscious and deliberate in an attempt to deceive others is quite different than self-deception, which is always unconscious. There is some interplay between the two - a person may lies so often they believe their own fabrications, but when that occurs the process has changed.)
Stages of Thinking
"Thinking" itself is a transitory process in which objective sense-data received from the external world is translated into a subjective conceptual model in the mind. Each person considers their mental model to be a reliable and faithful representation of reality, but it is limited to their perception and skewed by their conception, which often is unfaithful to the facts of perception in its effort to be consistent.
Thinking begins in infancy, even before expression or verbal comprehension. We do not learn to think, as we are incapable even to understand language when we begin thinking. Some individuals later in life attempt to gain thinking skills and others attempt to influence their way of thinking, but anything we learn about thinking when we are old enough to learn is being added to a foundation that developed much earlier in life.
The "hallucinatory" phase of mental that infants experience is one of perpetual confusion. There is no method of comprehending the sensory data that is received: it is chaos, random nonsense, and there is no ability to make sense of it. It is not known exactly how the infant begins to make sense of things, nor any plausible theory. It happens. Adults who have reverted to the hallucinatory state are largely untreatable: they emerge from it on their own.
The next stage of thinking is animistic: the mind associates a group of stimuli to an object with a name. This cluster of colors, shapes, sounds, and scents is a particular thing. That thing has a name, and other things are similar or different to it. This is identification without understanding: things are as they are and behave as they behave.
The next stage of thinking separates himself from the environment and begins to recognize his ability to influence things. The author refers to this as the "magic" phase, as only a primitive sense of causality is present: I do this, and that happens as if by magic. This same level of thinking is evidenced in superstitions that persist even to adulthood, in which superficial coincidence is considered to be evidence of causality.
The last phase in the development of thinking involves considering the reason and purpose of things, which includes not only external things, but oneself. It involves recognizing the limits of perception and the need to go beyond perception to gain understanding. It also involves recognition that the self is merely one object among many in the environment.
Delusion as Regression
Having considered the stages of development, we can now consider delusion to be a kind of regression to more primitive and limited ways of thinking. Primarily, it is a loss of the logical connectedness of things, to a solipsistic state in which the mind is the creator of reality rather than an observer of it.
Deluded thinking is a method of escape from an unpleasant reality: it is easier to imagine that something is different to what it really is than to undertake the effort to cause that change to occur. For the normal person, this is daydreaming (if he realizes that he is merely musing about what it would be like if things were different) or planning (if he intends to undertake effort to effect the change). But the delusional person does not realize (or admit) that things are not as he imagines, and has no intention of undertaking any action to achieve his vision.
The totalitarian is generally an individual who began with a plan and then settled into a delusion - he wishes to deceive others into agreeing that he was successful in creating a perfect society in which people are better off. And when enough people agree, and particularly when his inner circle of supporters protect him from any evidence to the contrary, he comes to believe that his delusions represent the truth.
It is arguable that some totalitarians are aware that they are merely pretending that they have had a positive impact on their subjects - but here the author returns to his experience working with Communists and Nazis after the second world war. At lower levels of the hierarchy it is common for a person to be aware that they are playing along with something they do not believe in order to gain some benefit or privilege, if only to escape persecution - so they support or even join the party, but are not true believers. However at higher levels, more individuals have crossed into delusion, and genuinely believe that the party has had a positive impact.
Mass Delusion
The phenomenon of mass delusion has received rather little scientific attention. There are observations of past events (such as the Inquisition) and in the behavior of riotous crowds - but it is difficult to arrange and experiment and observe subjects in large numbers. It is also not easily diagnosed, because people are individuals even when they seem to be acting as members of groups. It cannot be gauged which people are actually deluded and which of them are playing along.
But given the incidents of the author's time - the second world war and the rise of the Soviet Union - it seems like a matter that deserves much greater attention. When large numbers of people are falling in line with extreme ideologies that promote domination by violence, it is an epidemic with the potential to do harm on a large scale and merits greater attention.
Totalitarianism is based on the premises that maintain that man is an obedient machine, that there is one simple answer to the problems with which life confronts us, that everyone can be happy with the same thing. All of these premises are delusional, as is any ideology based on this foundation. Hence, the reason that totalitarian systems base themselves of force and threat - to make people obey, to make them be silent about their dissatisfaction.
There is also the problem of the subjectivity of perception: not all people perceive the truth in the same way and each person feels certain in their own interpretation. A deluded person does not know that he is deluded, and defends his mental model. When such a person holds coercive power, he is not compelled to listen to those who attempt to counsel him, and others are fearful even to mention the emperor's new clothes.
Religion is an example of mass delusion, which is particularly evident in religions that reply upon rituals and demonstrations, many of which involve trickery. But no-one dares suggest that what everyone else pretends to believe is a falsehood, as they would be declared a heretic - anathemized, and possibly tortured and executed. Where religions shun the material world, it is more difficult to discredit them: who can claim what happens (or does not) after death? It cannot be proven either way, and must be taken on blind faith.
Many political ideologies espouse a similar delusion, though it is more difficult to detect because it is based not on the present situation, but the claim that a future situation will have certain qualities once it is achieved. It cannot be shown until sweeping changes have been made that the new system doesn't deliver what was promised - and even if it can be shown, the perpetrators of the hoax can claim to still be working on completing their vision.
Mass delusion is easy enough to dispel before it becomes "mass." When a small group of people have delusional beliefs, they do not have the credibility of a majority not the ability to threaten others into playing along. A religion, political party, or other ideological group is difficult to start up - but once it has gained size and power, it is difficult to stop.
It is also a common pattern for ideologies to begin modestly - the lies they suggest are not so obvious and the demands they make of their followers are not so burdensome. But once they have gained size and power, their delusions become pronounced, as does the demands that are made of followers.
Delusions are also difficult to deal with because they are not based on rational thinking. Therefore a delusional person cannot easily be "talked out" of their fantasy world. They will ignore, deny, can contradict arguments based on logic and evidence - or simply withdraw from the discussion. Delusion is a defense mechanism, and people fear being left defenseless if they abandon their delusions.
Even those disadvantaged by an ideology gain a sense of self-importance by their participation in the system - the lowly worker whose status and living conditions have been reduced to that of a feudal serf feels that he is important as a "member" of the party, and that his life would be worse without it. Particularly for people on the lowest level of society, who struggle for daily existence, the proposal of a change is a threat to what little they have, and they cling to a situation even if they believe it is very bad for them - because it could be worse.
Propaganda
Every ideology, totalitarian or otherwise, depends on a consensus of opinion among the people. Information is disseminated as a way of building this consensus. Governments may be overthrown by physical violence, but this is proceeded by a campaign to unite and direct the people against them.
Whether this information is "education" or "propaganda" depends on whether the person describing it happens to agree with the ideas it expresses. In democratic countries, information about the communist system is considered to be propaganda. Meanwhile in communistic countries, information about a democratic system is considered to be propaganda.
In totalitarian nations, the dissemination of opinions contrary to the beliefs of the state is swiftly punished. And while democratic nations claim to uphold the freedom of speech, there are within them many attempts to control what people are permitted to say. Consider the Feinberg Law, enacted to prevent the dissemination of "dangerous political propaganda." Consider the vehement argument about what should or should not be included in textbooks or taught in schools. These are all examples of one group of people with a given ideology attempting to silence those who disagree.
The freedom of speech and of association are safeguards against tyranny, so long as they are not compromised and public officials must be constantly reminded that they are public servants, not public masters. It is also critical to be mindful that propaganda cannot be used to combat propaganda - this sets up a choice between two masters, providing no option to avoid control.
The Explanation Delusion
People have difficulty admitting that they do not know things, and do not have a ready solution to any problem that might arise. In that state of mind, people are prone to accepting any answer or solution that is provided, without considering whether it is plausible. (EN: and to make matters worse, they tend to leap at the first solution and defend it against more plausible ones that are presented afterward.)
In this instance, people are deluding themselves into accepting the explanation that's been provided. In many instances the "savior" does not believe in his own ideas, or does not believe in them strongly, but will show faith because of the celebrated status he is granted by the followers, to the point where he eventually believes in his own falsehood.
Situations of confusion are very attractive to manipulative people, and they readily seek them out for this very reason: they can gain power and influence merely by speaking, even if what they have to say is utter nonsense. It's necessary to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism even in moments of desperation, and it is a good practice to be very wary of those who are first to offer a solution in a time of crisis.
However, it is also common for the first objector to be vilified by a group who has accepted a deluded explanation, which is the reason that men of good conscious often do nothing, and retreat into a sort of isolation. It is not a weakness of character, but a sign of wisdom, that a person refrains from speaking when he does not expect to be heard.
Western culture, particularly American culture, once revered the rational individual. But already Europe has become collectivized and the anti-individual and anti-intellectual spirit is making itself known in the States. It is not that they have disappeared, but merely withdrawn.
There is also an increasing tendency to put faith in the ideas of those who are certified by the institution - an individual who is certified or granted a title is taken to be an objective authority. This conveniently ignores the fact that certificates are only granted by authorities to individuals who support their agenda. To remain free, a culture must have a healthy distrust of authority, rather than blind obedience to it.