Degradation and conquest are companions.

In order to be conquered, a nation must be degraded, either by acts of war, by being overrun, by being forced into humiliating treaties of peace, or by the treatment of her populace under the armies of the conqueror. However, degradation can be accomplished much more insidiously and much more effectively by consistent and continual defamation.

Defamation is the best and foremost weapon of Psychopolitics on the broad field. Continual and constant degradation of national leaders, national institutions, national practices, and national heroes must be systematically carried out, but this is the chief function of the Communist Party Members, in general, not the psychopolitician.

The realm of defamation and degradation, of the psychopolitician, is Man himself. By attacking the character and morals of Man himself, and by bringing about, through contamination of youth, a general degraded feeling, command of the populace is facilitated to a very marked degree.

There is a curve of degradation which leads downward to a point where the endurance of an individual is almost at end, and any sudden action toward him will place him in a state of shock. Similarly, a soldier held prisoner can be abused, denied, defamed, and degraded until the slightest motion on the part of his captors will cause him to flinch. Similarly, the slightest word on the part of his captors will cause him to obey, or vary his loyalties and beliefs. Given sufficient degradation, a prisoner can be caused to murder his fellow countrymen in the same stockade. Experiments on German prisoners have lately demonstrated that only after seventy days of filthy food, little sleep, and nearly untenable quarters, that the least motion toward the prisoner would bring about a state of shock beyond his endurance threshold, and would cause him to hypnotically receive anything said to him. Thus, it is possible, in an entire stockade of prisoners, to the number of thousands, to bring about a state of complete servile obedience, and without the labor of personally addressing each one, to pervert their loyalties and implant in them adequate commands to insure their future conduct, even when released to their own people.

By lowering the endurance of a person, a group, or a nation, and by constant degradation and defamation, it is possible to induce, thus, a state of shock which will receive adequately any command given.

The first thing to be degraded in any nation is the state of Man, himself. Nations which have high ethical tone are difficult to conquer. Their loyalties are hard to shake, their allegiance to their leaders is fanatical, and what they usually call their spiritual integrity cannot be violated by duress. It is not efficient to attack a nation in such a frame of mind. It is the basic purpose of Psychopolitics to reduce that state of mind to a point where it can be ordered and enslaved. Thus, the first target is Man, himself. He must be degraded from a spiritual being to an animalistic reaction pattern. He must think of himself as an animal, capable only of animalistic reactions. He must no longer think of himself, or of his fellows, as capable of "spiritual endurance," or nobility.

The best approach toward degradation in its first stages is the propaganda of "scientific approach" to Man. Man must be consistently demonstrated to be a mechanism without individuality, and it must be educated into a populace under attack that Man's individualistic reactions are the product of mental derangement. The populace must be brought into the belief that every individual within it who rebels in any way, shape, or form against the efforts and activities to enslave the whole, must be considered to be a deranged person whose eccentricities are neurotic and insane, and who must have at once the treatment of a psychopolitician.

An optimum condition in such a program of degradation would address itself to the military forces of the nation, and bring them rapidly away from any other belief than the disobedient one must be subjected to "mental treatment." An enslavement of a population can fail only if these rebellious individuals are left to exert their individual influences upon their fellow citizens, sparking them into rebellion, calling into account their nobilities and freedoms. Unless these restless individuals are stamped out and given into the hands of psychopolitical operatives early in the conquest, there will be nothing but trouble as the conquest continues. The officials of the government, students, readers, partakers of entertainment, must all be indoctrinated, by whatever means, into the complete belief that the restless, the ambitions, the natural leaders, are suffering from environmental maladjustments, which can only be healed by recourse to psychopolitical operatives in the guise of mental healers.

By thus degrading the general belief in the status of Man it is relatively simple, with co-operation from the economic salients being driven into the country, to drive citizens apart, one from another, to bring about a question of the wisdom of their own government, and to cause them to actively beg for enslavement...

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