I ran across this in The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. I think it has application to the Watchtower’s hold on people and also the JWs docile response (“sheeplike” in their vernacular). My comments are in purple. I got a little carried away with the colors and bolding. Please substitute the WTBS, etc. for the Soviet Union.
(pg. 24-25) Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, provides an illustration of the totalitarian aspiration. The book centers around the inmates of an insane asylum who lead lives of childish inanity under the eyes of a tyrannical Big Nurse.
The novel’s hero, McMurphy, (the Ex-JWs!) tries to liberate them by breaking the asylum’s rules and eventually leading the inmates to freedom. But he discovers in the process that none of the inmates is being kept there against his will; in the end, all are afraid of the world outside and remain voluntarily incarcerated, in a relationship of secure dependence on Big Nurse.
This then was the ultimate goal of totalitarianism (the Watchtower and possibly many other religions): not simply to deprive the new Soviet man (the JW) of his freedom, but to make him fear freedom in favor of security, and to affirm the goodness of his chains even in the absence of coercion.
Contented inmates of the asylum, held there not by bars and straightjackets but by their own craving for security, order, authority, and some extra benefits that the Soviet regime had managed to throw in like imperial grandeur and superpower status. The strong Soviet state looked very strong indeed, nowhere more so than in the global strategic competition with the United States.
(pgs 29-31) The most fundamental failure of totalitarianism was its failure to control thought. Soviet citizens, as it turned out, had all along retained an ability to think for themselves. Many understood, despite years of government propaganda, that their government was lying to them. People remained enormously angry at the personal sufferings they had endured under Stalinism (the Watchtower): Virtually every family had lost members or friends during collectivization, (from disfellowshipping and shunning) or the Great Terror of the 1930s. or during the war, whose costs had been made much greater by Stalin’s foreign policy mistakes. They knew that these victims had been unjustly persecuted, and that the Soviet regime had never owned up to its responsibility for such horrendous crimes. People understood as well that a new kind of class system had had arisen in this supposedly classless society. A class of party functionaries who were as corrupt and privileged as anyone under the old regime, but far more hypocritical.
Soviet(JW young people)
young people, despairing of the deteriorating quality of life in the USSR, (the Borg) will tell you that their only desire is to live in a “normal” country, (life); that is to say, a liberal democracy undistorted by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. As one Soviet friend told me in 1988, she has had a hard time getting her children to do their homework since “everybody knows” that democracy means ‘you can do whatever you wish.”The Soviet people, (the JWs and especially Ex-JWs) humiliated by their rulers and despised not only by the rest of Europe(congregation of JWs) but by their own intellectuals (fellow workers and people in the community at large) as passive accomplices of authoritarianism, proved everyone wrong. [b][blue]They proved not inert and atomized, but spontaneously ready to defend their dignity and rights. So massive a disillusionment with the Soviet Union’s underlying belief structure could not have occurred overnight, suggesting that totalitarianism as a system had failed well before the 1980s