Stockdale on Stoicism 56

Given their charge, the breaking of human will, all political prisons are similar. That is to say, neither what goes on there, nor how their prey grapple with it, appreciably change, century in and century out: Cervantes', Dostoevsky’s, and my accounts are all the same. 

At the heart of the organization is a master extortionist or commissar, like Gletkin of Darkness At Noon and the Cat of In Love and War. The same methods are used now as were used in the Middle Ages. 

They don’t use drugs; they want to impose guilt; they want authenticity with no easy outs or plausible denials. 

They don’t use brainwashing; there is no such thing. They do use pain, administered by a few selected torture guards. They also use isolation. 

Such prisons use a tripwire system of multitudinous regulations, some of which many inmates inadvertently break because of their number and ambiguity, and other regulations which almost all inmates eventually intentionally break because their requirements defy human nature. In particular, there was a regulation for us never to communicate in any way with another American prisoner. 

The idea in political prisons is to get prisoners to break regulations. Since any violation is considered, prima facie, moral turpitude or "evidence of ingratitude," it is used as justification to recycle the inmate through the torture meat grinder. From that, the commissars obtain, on a production line basis: confessions, apologies, and atonements. 

Seasoned veterans of these regimes realize that pain and isolation, to say nothing of other deprivations and miseries, are mere accelerators to the major pincers of this will-breaking machine: imposed fear and guilt. 

"Destabilize with fear, polarize with guilt," say the graffiti on the cave walls of the alchemists of the Middle Ages who worked on psychic transformation under pressure. In fact, the total regime comes to seem to its sufferers like an alchemist’s hermetically sealed, pressurized, and heated retort, in which they are perpetually stalked, hounded down, and harpooned with barbs of fear and guilt. 

—from James B. Stockdale, Epictetus' Enchiridion: Conflict and Character 

IMAGE: Jacek Malczewski, The Prisoners (1883)