Turncoats and Quislings
The concept of treason is almost universally reviled - the mere mention of the term evokes feelings of anger and anxiety. To harm a friend violates the most fundamental notions of ethics, makes a person entirely untrustworthy, and as such the mere accusation of treason can ruin an individuals' reputation even before the facts are known.
The author tells a story about a barber in Holland who worked near government buildings, and served largely members of parliament. When the Germans invaded and took over the government, he served them as customers. "I am a barber ... I have absolutely no interest in politics." But when the Germans were ousted and the Dutch returned, he was declared a traitor and a collaborator and thrown into prison. It was presumed that must have learned some state secrets from his government customers and divulged him to the occupying army, though no evidence was ever presented except that he accepted a "membership card" from one of his Nazi customers. Even though he was exonerated, his old customers never returned to him and he had deep resentment over having been placed in jail for three months and abused and insulted - between his business being abandoned and his reputation tarnished, he went bankrupt and committed suicide a few months after his release.
The author mentions working for the Dutch government around the same time, sent to evaluate Dutch soldiers and citizens who were being held in detention camps because they were suspected of disloyalty and has had "many opportunities" to treat allege spies and subversives. The treatment of such prisoners tends to be harsh, and they are presumed to be guilty. Those who are justly accused are often broken - but the effects are far worse on the unjustly accused. They were not traitors before their accusation, but after being treated with such bitterness and antagonism by the state they had done nothing to wrong, they were certainly fit to be traitors, and utterly uninterested in returning to become citizens. They had a just sense of betrayal by the very nation who unjustly accused them of the same.
The Concept of Treason
The author pauses to consider the meaning of the word "treason," as it's an accusation that is often bandied about with disregard for its meaning. In many ways, it's the worst thing you can say about a person. One who harms another person unintentionally is merely clumsy or careless. One who harms an enemy is merely vengeful and vindictive. But a person who harms a friend of benefactor has committed the most basic of sins against social existence.
A traitor is not merely someone who refuses an order, or who fails to act in a way that would be helpful. They have knowingly and purposefully chosen of their own volition to do something harmful to someone who has acted in the past to help them.
False accusations of treason or betrayal are a sign of mental immaturity: it is the child declaring it is "not fair" when he does not get his way, without considering whether he had any reason to expect another person would serve him. There's a brief mention of "insecure attachment," which is a feeling of antipathy toward a parent who is neglectful or even harmful a majority of the time.
Another reason for false accusations of treason is the assumption of solidarity where none exists. Some individuals feel that anyone who is a member of their group (a nation, a race, a gender, a religion, or whatnot) are somehow bound to their service when in reality they are not. The social contract is not violated where it was not acknowledge to exist - even if one person presumed that it did. This is not treason, but rejection (where the person who claims betrayal was not part of the group) or refusal (where the person who is accused of betrayal did not consider himself to be part of the group).
It is for this reason that nonconformists are often wrongly accused of treason. The nonconformist is a person who does not consider himself to be part of a group - and since he is not part of the group, he owes it no loyalty and cannot be said to have betrayed it. Accusations of treason are often used to blackmail the person into serving a group that does not include him, with the ultimate intention of making him a servile member of that group - or in other cases, merely to legitimate the imprisonment or execution of non-joiners or dissenters.
Accusations of treason are also useful to the totalitarian who has failed to accomplish a goal. If individuals can be declared as traitors, they can be blamed of acting in ways to prevent the goal from being accomplished - so the totalitarian himself remains blameless and retains esteem in the eyes of his followers. Because there is such a strong knee-jerk reaction to the accusation, little evidence need be presented to galvanize public opinion against anyone thus accused.
He returns to his experience with the Dutch prisoners of war who, interrogated and detained under accusations of treason, became disgusted with their own country - and this reaction also strengthens false accusations. When the bonds of loyalty are violated by one party the other becomes disloyal - and while they may not have been traitors in the past, they are ripe to become traitors in future.
This is significant to the totalitarian himself, who is the chief among all traitors. He is not loyal to his people, and often not even to the ideas he pretends to espouse, and therefore feels an insecurity about his relationships to others, even his collaborators. It is quite common to see dictators turn on their closest friends and strongest supporters for this very reason. In general, an untrustworthy man distrusts others and a disloyal man has no faith in the loyalty of others.
The Conscious Traitor
While false accusations of treason are common under totalitarian rule, they are not always false. Some people are deliberate and conscious traitors. In his work with the Dutch detainees, the author also encountered a number of people who were bona-fide traitors.
Very often, the conscious traitor will admit to his acts, but will be very elaborate in presenting or fabricating motives. Many people in occupied countries become traitors simply out of fear: if they refuse to collaborate with the enemy, they expect to be tortured, imprisoned, and possibly executed. Such people have a deep and genuine sense of guilt, and to cope with them they come up with a complicated web of sophisms and rationalizations when they can no longer deny what they have done.
The genuine traitor is seldom a bold individual who has made an independent decision to change sides, but instead a weak and spineless person who does very little thinking and deciding for themselves, but merely cozies up to whomever seems to be in power. For most it is moral weakness, but for some it is intellectual weakness - any elaborate theory is likely to seem acceptable to them, simply because they do not understand it. Children can easily be gulled into acting against the interest of their own family, simply because they do not know better - and it's interesting to note that converting children to an ideology is among the first tasks of a totalitarian regime (or any regime, for that matter).
Other conscious traitors are seeking personal reward, whether it is an immediate token offered by their handlers or something more general. For example, a traitor may feel that he has failed in his life - whether financially or socially - and the handler is offering him an opportunity to be wealthy, important, or successful under the new regime. This is much in the way that cults recruit socially inept loners by offering them a group of friends and admirers. The individual who feels that he has never quite belonged to his society and has never been accepted cleaves to anyone who offers him acceptance and belonging.
Often, such an individual has chosen to blame his society for his sorry lot in life, and as such his loyalty to society is undone - making him ready to give loyalty to a new society. The person who feels he has been wronged sees the handler as someone who can help him to get vengeance.
It's also suggested that traitors can be "made" simply by convincing them that their peers have also become traitors. In this sense, they are convinced that they are joining a new group without betraying their old - and over time, they can be inched into committing acts of betrayal. The methods used by a handler are the same as staring any new group - potential candidates are identified, brought in, and slowly indoctrinated until they become full members and staunch supporters and value the new group more highly than their old.
Self-Betrayal and the Intellect
Treason and betrayal are most generally considered in the social context - we betray and are betrayed by other people - but the author considers that betrayal begins with oneself. Human beings are masters of self-deception: we pretend that serious problems don't exist, and we pretend that the simple things we do are of the greatest importance. We believe ourselves to be right and ignore evidence to the contrary. We believe ourselves to be perfect and ignore our flaws. In each of these instances, it is the mind justifying an action that is not in our own best interest and in some cases can be acutely harmful.
The author mentions one of his patients, a Dutch philosopher who "converted" to Nazism during the occupation. At first, he merely capitulated to his handlers, paying only superficial respect to their ideology. But over time, he deceived himself into pretending that he actually believed in what he was being made to write. This was a psychological defense of his self esteem, his desire to see himself as a person of integrity who wrote what he truly believed - and so he convinced himself he truly believed it. The problem is, he obviously didn't - his writings became ever more vague and disjointed, utterly lacking logical support and in some instances virtually unintelligible in their vagueness. In effect, he had lost all contact with reality, and ceased to be functional as a philosopher, at which point his captors found no further use for him.
An act of self-betrayal may begin as a defense against admitting to impotence or incompetence. A person must believe in their own capability in order to take action, even if this means denying the truth about their own capabilities. This is also the case when the obstacle to success is something external that is insurmountable - it is simply ignored so that the individual can do something and have a sense of progress. It is self-betrayal because if it were acknowledged, the individual would recognize the folly of their course and plan a different action.
Another explanation suggests that self-betrayal is the acquiescence to conflicting signals from the external world. As a social creature, we seek to come to an agreement with others, and sometimes this means agreeing with something we do not believe to be true: if several reliable individuals indicate a horse is brown, an individual may agree with them even though it seems black to him. "Maybe there is something wrong with my eyes?" The same tactic is used by police to browbeat an individual into making a false confession - told firmly and repetitively by authority figures that he has done something, he may begin to doubt his own memory of events.
In a similar way, self-betrayal may be a response to social pressure. It is not that people repeat the same declaration, but that they seem to maintain a common belief (even if it is only the individual assuming that they do), and a person may self-betray to get along with others - whether to gain favor or avoid disfavor by holding unpopular ideas. Sometimes, conformity is the easier route than integrity - maintaining one's own beliefs simply requires too much effort.
In politics, being at odds with a large group of people is particularly dangerous. Ironically, this is most common in a democracy - it is not the will of a single person that can be defied (or skirted when he is not being watchful), but the masses that suppress and restrict an individual. Totalitarians often seek to avoid individual responsibility by claiming the will of the masses, holding rigged elections, as a method to have individual power but to spread culpability to the masses.
Self-betrayal may also be a form of self-gratification: the law-abiding conformist is of little interest to anyone else, but exposing oneself as a rebel or a criminal is a means of gaining attention and status. A person punished or martyred for their ideas is admitted by many, and his suffering gives greater credibility to his ideology.
Developing Loyalty
In common practice, loyalty Loyalty is demanded by those who have done nothing to earn it, or expected to be maintained even when their character and behavior have turned sour. Therefore, accusations of treason are emotional rather than rational - in many instances, "loyalty" means obedience to an individual, organization, or ideology in direct opposition to the dictates of reason. This premise is often accepted by those who are accused of treason.
Very often, however, the unjustly-accused traitor feels discomfort rather than actual guilt. Our connections to other people are deeply held, even when their character has changed. Consider the difficulty of reasoning with the partner of an abusive spouse: there are no limits to qualifications and rationalization for maintaining the relationship, taking the blame on themselves for the behavior of the spouse in order to avoid the emotional discomfort of ending a long-term relationship.
Treason, in a genuine sense, requires a significant psychological transformation - to recognize that loyalty is no longer deserved, and possibly never was, requires placing reason over emotion and overcoming the discomfort of leaving the comfort and stability of a long-term relationship in order to strike out, as well as the fear of being stigmatized by a society that often maintains that an individual should self-sacrifice for others regardless of whether it is merited.
Breaking loyalty and forming new relationships is part of normal human development. It is expected that an individual will leave the home of their youth to form their own household - and while the old relationships are not entirely abolished, the new ones with spouse and children take precedence over the old. This is the functional basis of the rebellion of the teenaged years: it is a step toward severing ties with the past, of no longer being the servant of parents and instead becoming master of one's own house.
The same dissolution and reformation of relationships is common throughout development - as a child leaves one teacher or school and goes on to the next, as a worker leaves a position to advance in his career, or as an employee leaves one workplace to take a job elsewhere. Even in social organizations, an individual does not remain in their entry-level role for long, but advances and takes on positions in which they have more authority and responsibility.
The question for the state is not how to combat treason, but how to maintain loyalty, as it is very often the behavior of a state rather than that of any individual citizen that causes an individual to recognize that his former master no longer deserves his loyalty - whether it is a single dramatic event or a progression of smaller changes that eventually constitute a significant change over time. Said another way, most traitors are made - and they are made into traitors by the very persons and groups whom they betray.
The question of whether an individual's loyalty can be counted upon is similar: logically, it ought to be based on whether they receive a benefit from maintaining a relationship with another person or organization. However, this can be reinforced or contradicted by emotion. A person may show loyalty when they receive no benefit or are even done harm, or they may fail to show loyalty when doing so would provide them a benefit or avoid harm.
Also, keep in mind a person may have conflicting interests: the relationship between parent and child is heavily parasitic, but the biological benefit (securing one's genes for future generations) and eventual benefit (having someone to take care of the parent in old age) outweigh the many burdens and inconveniences of caring for a young child. Or in the case of an abused spouse, the financial benefit and security outweigh the physical and emotional trauma inflicted by the abuser.
Many interests are not quantifiable, nor are they rational: the need to feel stability and security, the social esteem and self-esteem that come from being connected to others, and the like are reasons to pursue and maintain a relationship regardless of functional benefit. The same are also reasons to break from an existing relationship.
There is also the degree to which a person values autonomy and integrity. They will avoid relationships in order to preserve a sense of self-sufficiency, and break relationships in which they feel they are becoming too dependent. The need for autonomy is in conflict with the need to be socially connected, and is just as valid, but it is felt to different degrees by different people.
With this in mind, the word "traitor" is most often used by the weaker party - who values the relationship more than the other person, and who wishes to maintain a connection to someone who gains no benefit (and may be harmed) by being connected to them. It is an accusation and threat that adds a cost to the other party for terminating a relationship - the threat to damage their reputation is meant to tip the balance in favor of maintaining a relationship that does not serve their interests and may even be harmful to them.
The Loyalty Compulsion
The author considers America at the time the book was written (EN: during McCarthyism and the Red Scare), which was curious and a bit dangerous to his way of thinking. For fear that communistic totalitarianism would spread, Americans embraced totalitarian ideas of their own - leaving it to a central authority to decide what was acceptable "American" behavior and rooting out dissenters through publicized trials in which the victims were dragged into public hearings and accused of having un-American beliefs. The campaign of fear and paranoia were as bad, if not worse, than the system against which they were meant to defend.
If individualism and democracy are to be defended against totalitarianism, it cannot use the methods of totalitarianism - it muse respect personal liberties and show tolerance and respect for individualism, which includes the right of the individual to espouse beliefs we find objectionable. Failure to do so is not a defense of the American way, but an assault upon it from within.
Totalitarianism thrives on fear and insecurity on a societal scale, and these are the emotions that totalitarians leverage to draw people to himself and at the same time turn them against one another. These tactics are the most obvious symptoms of a totalitarian putsch, and a very reliable indicator. Another common indicator is the notion that one must choose between two rulers, ignoring the idea that "neither" remains a valid option. Hence, McCarthy and his ilk were able to turn the panic and insecurity of the American people into suspicion and distrust of one another, and himself as the only alternative to a communist invasion.
"True loyalty is not a static thing," the author asserts, but for one exception: a person's first loyalty is to himself and his own interests. All other loyalties depend on the degree to which other parties are helpful or useful to him. When an individual or organization changes its character, the individual must consider whether his interests are still aligned with the other party - and consider whether it is worthwhile to maintain his loyalty when the organization (or his own interests) have changed. Failure to consider and reassess loyalty when interests change is the primary reason people remain loyal to a totalitarian who has gone mad - or who had deceived them to win their loyalty in the first place.
He also speaks a bit about loyalty in word and loyalty in action. Many people claim loyalty to religion, but their actions suggest otherwise - they may superficially "spin the prayer wheel" but behave in a way that violates the tenets of their alleged faith. They wish to have the benefits of being a "member" of that faith (acceptance and trust of the rest of the congregation) or avoid persecution, but do not really believe and have no real loyalty. A man may claim to love a woman and pledge himself to her in an oath of marriage, but still stray. In the same the signing of a pledge or recitation of an oath of loyalty is merely a superficial act that does not prove loyalty - it may be a gesture undertaken to gain something, but unless it is acted upon it is not an indication of loyalty.
Totalitarians are fond of suggesting otherwise. Citizens are often required to recite or sign unconditional oaths of allegiance - in the same way that prisoners of war are demanded, often under duress, to sign confessions. Society depends on people keeping their promises, even when it is not in their interest to do so - but society is based on contracts that deliver mutual benefits rather than one-sided demands of one party upon another. "You make a commitment to me in exchange for a commitment I will make to you" - the totalitarian offers no commitment in return for the one he demands.
Another tactic of totalitarians is insisting a commitment has been made when none has. Declarations that dissenters and objectors are disloyal or traitors are common, even though the individual has never been a member of the organization and has not committed to it, or when their commitment was conditional and those conditions have been violated. Similarly, a gratuitous act that benefits someone is often used to imply that a contract exists - even though the person benefitted (if they actually are) entered into no agreement and may not have requested that benefit to be provided.
The author stresses again that loyalty is demonstrated in action, not in word or in thought. Even a person who has entered into an explicit commitment is not disloyal until they have acted in violation of that agreement. They may grouse, or they may complain that it is not a fair deal, but this is not the same as failure to keep their commitment. This brings him to another reliable sign/symptom of totalitarianism: thoughts and speech, rather than actions, are treated as crimes.
There's a closing bit about conflict between loyalty to self and loyalty to others: the two are generally aligned, if loyalty is properly understood. It is also important to consider that one may command obedience of another person, but one must earn loyalty. And finally, it is important to recall that loyalty changes over time as the interests of the individual and the character and behavior of those to whom he is presently loyal change over time.