How Believing It’s a Good World Might Protect You

Edward Ruscha. OOF. 1962 (reworked 1963)

If you were lucky enough to have social studies teachers who fled Europe during the Third Reich or served in World War II, you may have had a public school education like mine. 

At Hanover High School, in New Hampshire, we were taught that if the gas chambers were the worst thing that could happen to a human body, indoctrination was the very worst thing that could happen to a human mind.

We were taught that under certain circumstances, people could come to accept the metaphysics of race, the demonization of groups, the subjugation of women, the apotheosis of an autocrat, and the imperative to commit violence and corruption. Their minds could become not their own. They’d fall under the lash. They’d be unfree. 

So our education was a kind of ruggedization. We decoded ’80s advertisements for sexism. We studied the Milgram Experiment, coercive interrogation techniques, and the march of the Nazis in Skokie.