The Ungrounded and the Unmade
There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from learning, in vivid historical detail, exactly how a human being can be disassembled and rebuilt. Rebecca Lemov arrived at the Armchair carrying this vertigo professionally — she has spent sixteen years in the archives of a man who helped design the machinery of psychological demolition — and what emerged from the conversation was not a lecture but a mutual recognition. Two former addicts, both trained in anthropology, sitting across from each other and finding that the history of brainwashing is, in a very real sense, the history of their own lives.
The episode turns on a word Lemov uses with precision: ungrounded. It is the condition of successive shocks, of expectations not just unmet but obliterated. The 17-year-old boy who signed up thinking he was going on a police action. Cardinal Mindszenty, national hero, who left a note saying don't believe me when I return — and then returned, transformed anyway. Dax, who spent years in a version of the same hole and emerged having to construct a new identity from the rubble of the old one. The word travels through the episode like a tuning fork, vibrating every story it touches.
What makes this conversation remarkable is not the history — though the history is staggering — but the moment when the methods of Mao's reeducation program start to sound uncomfortably familiar: the journal your life story, the discussion, the criticism, the unity. Dax says it out loud before Lemov has to: this is AA. And then the room gets very quiet in the way it does when someone has said something true that they are not entirely sure they were supposed to say. He holds both things at once — the cult-like mechanics and the life-saving outcome — and refuses to let either one cancel the other. The alternative was death, so this is far preferable. I can handle being in this cult.
And then there is the volleyball problem, which may be the most quietly devastating phrase in the episode. You cannot see that kind of suffering. The men played volleyball and looked fine and so no one asked what had happened to them on the inside. This is the central tragedy of psychological damage in every form — the amputees get acknowledged, the men who played volleyball get forgotten. The episode asks, again and again, what we cannot see, what we refuse to see, what we are systematically trained not to see — in prisoners of war, in cult members, in Facebook's 700,000 unwitting subjects, in ourselves. Lemov's answer is not reassuring. It never is. But her presence — two hours of daily meditation, recovered from opioids, married to a man who played Desmond Dekker on a jukebox — suggests that the ungrounded can be regrounded. That reconstruction is possible. That the self, however many times it is taken apart, can be put back together differently.