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> Madred attempts another tactic to break Picard's will: he shows his captive four bright lights, and demands that Picard answer that there are five, inflicting
by peeters 13y ago
> Madred attempts another tactic to break Picard's will: he shows his captive four bright lights, and demands that Picard answer that there are five, inflicting intense pain on Picard if he does not agree.
This in turn seems to be directly inspired by Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Winston is being tortured, O'Brien puts up four fingers and insists (under torture) that Winston sees five.
- mturmon 13y agoHere's a troubling insight on the relationship of physical and mental torture from Ian Buruma's recent review (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jan/09/china-reeducation-through-horror/?pagination=false http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jan/09/china-r...) of a book on Maoist China: In most accounts, the distress caused by endless indoctrination, public denunciation, and self-criticism was worse than physical torture. Physical pain still allows the victim to retreat into himself. After days, months, years of mental torture there is no longer a self to retreat into. Besides self-abasement, victims were made to show their sincerity by persecuting others, sometimes friends or relatives. In many cases, suicide was the only way out. But ideally, if a person had finally reached the stage when his confessions were totally convincing, there was no longer any gap between acting and natural behavior, between faked and true thoughts. The process ended, in the phrase of a Chinese former victim, with “the physical and mental liquidation of oneself by oneself.”