When breaking down prisoners of war, it’s a common practice to begin with very small lies. Western powers have used this tactic, but it’s more a hallmark of the Asiatic cultures — the Chinese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, and the Russians during the heyday of the KGB. Instead of reaching straight for the pincers and car batteries and other instruments of torture, they instead begin by getting the prisoner to concede to seemingly insignificant falsehoods under threat of punishment. Get them to say it’s Tuesday when it’s really Thursday. Get them to say it’s raining when the sun is shining. “You’ve been under a lot of stress. Maybe you forgot what day it is. And your vision is probably blurry. You just can’t see the rain. It’s not such a big deal anyway. Just admit it, and you won’t get a beating today. Maybe we’ll give you some extra food.”
The point of this is create tiny cracks. Soldiers — especially those likely to hold useful information or pose a risk of escape — are more likely to have a tougher constitution, a layer of mental armor stronger than that of the ordinary man. Going in too hard too quickly on a subject like that may just kill them, or render them mad and therefore similarly useless. Better to start small. Create a small crack in the armor and then let it grow. Repeating these small lies over time leads the prisoner to see himself as a liar, and thus his sense of integrity erodes, and along with it his sense of self. The size of the lies grows. Maybe now they’re about his own history, the history of his country. The quality of his countrymen. The interrogation started small, so these greater lies are ladled on more easily.
This is a dangerous point in the process. Suicide is on the table, as the prisoner may snap to consciousness about the destruction of his self and carry that through to a final conclusion. But if you make it past that stage, the mind’s self defense mechanisms kicks in as it attempts to repair the damage to the ego. The prisoner will begin to see the lies as true. The adoption of a false reality is preferable to admitting that all those smaller lies were cowardice to avoid punishment. Now their sense of the real is truly fungible, ready to be molded. The prisoner is now much more likely to give up information, and much less likely to run for the fences. They’ll ask for permission about everything, even what to think. They’ll sometimes become static, frozen by the confusion created by having your perception in such a state of flux. Therapists who have treated returned POWs have said this can take years to heal, and it sometimes never does. The mind is like a Swiss watch — quite hard to break, and incredibly difficult to fix.
And so I tell myself - and extend it to anyone who may read this - to always be aware of the little lies. Not so much the “white lies” we use to avoid confrontation or embarrassment. These are flaws inherent to the human animal, and they come from within. I speak more of those little lies imposed from without, by the things you watch or the place you work or the regimes big and small that seek to construct your reality for you. The things you know to be false but yet feel pressure to adopt as true. And they’ll often be small. They almost always start small. Watch for those tiny cracks that lie between what you know and what you feel you must say. They’re the trickiest things — the larger they grow the harder they can be to see.
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