What is indoctrination?

How we get indoctrinated
by Azly Rahman

To understand how our consciousness is constantly being fragmented, and how the self is constantly deconstructed and reconstructed, and how ‘truth’ is an ever-changing ‘construct’ based on the intended and unintended designs of forces of economic and cultural production, we must understand what ‘indoctrination’ means.

A doctrine is a set of concepts produced from a particular point of view that is then packaged by the believers into a regime of truth that is then propagated via enabling technologies. Indoctrination then is a process of enforcing the doctrine that contains ‘truth-force’.

The believers of a doctrine often use the state apparatuses (the branches of government, the media, and the educational sector) to further promote the doctrine. Intellectuals that become promoters of ideology become the ‘intelligentsia’. Hence, at every epoch of human progress the intelligentsia is produced through whatever kind of political state that is established.

Let us look closer at how ‘truth-force’ works in the process of indoctrination. How might this force become brutish and violent in the way it shackles the human mind? How might ignorance be multiplied and becomes hegemonic?

There are many ways ‘truth-force’ can be funneled into the minds of the people for example, through education and the means of modern communication. Let us list some examples on how religion and education becomes tools of indoctrination.

Truth-force and theocracy
The producers of truth may tell the people anything that may strike fear in their hearts, strip them off the necessity to think and to philosophise.

“It is better to be feared that to be loved,” said Machiavelli.

The poor, ignorant, and the meek, as well as the sure and confused among us will all be saved in this grand design of the production of truth.

Why do we need to follow this and that law of the theocratic state when we sense that there is something oppressive about it? Why do we need to surrender our individuality to the dictates of a few theocratic leaders who came into power through a successful production, promotion, and propagation of the ‘truth-force’?

Must we continue to roll the rock up the hill and imagine ourselves happy, as the Algerian thinker Albert Camus might say?

Especially in the poorest Malay states, the government takes ownership of religion. Religion becomes an institution and its followers become institutionalised. It becomes the religion of the state (a theocracy) and not of the common person.

A religion of the state is an anti-thesis to the philosophy of human liberation. It crushes the notion that the human self is a kingdom unto itself, and that one is given the freedom to know oneself through the philosophical inquiry of what he/she believes in. The state will rob the human self of the necessity to find his/her own meaning in what he/she believes.

The theocratic state will have the urge to go to war in the name of jihad, crusade, or in the name of the doctrine of ‘detachment’ as embodied in the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna in the ‘Bhagavad-Gita’.

The believers in a theocratic state live in a tight regime of truth. Higher truths become unattainable because the free will and freedom to philosophise is weakened and slowly destroyed.

Philosophy, the enterprise and exercise to sharpen the mind of people, is never made to flourish, whereas what is needed in any religion is the reconstruction of the structure of the belief system through Reason and the Philosophical quest.

In a theocracy, people become afraid to think. Because, to question and to think means to subvert one's belief system. It is better to have all of the answers than some of the questions, say these people.

There is the fear of being drawn into polemics as well as into the complexities of things that make authoritarianism the best alternative. It is this feeling that makes those in power produce more and more ‘truth-polices’.

We must begin to become scientists and philosophers that will inquire into the practice and the future of theocratic states. We must engineer a ‘renaissance’ in the practice of statehood.

Let us begin to turn our citizens into makers of their own history.