archie_kot | (no subject)

It is important to realize that "actions" of this type nearly always punished something that was not yet forbidden by law. It would have been very easy for the state to pass any laws it wished to. But that was not the purpose of the "actions." They were intended less to punish transgressors, than to force all citizens to do as the state wished, and to do it of their own volition. No doubt the motive for conformity was anxiety. Still, it was the person's own anxiety that forced him to confirm, and not the letter of the law. Though this distinction may seem thin, it was psychologically important.

This psychological effect was not owing to the fact that in one case the man on the street could supposedly claim he had a legal choice, which in the other he did not. Such legal subtleties have no psychological impact, or only a negligible one. The great difference was that a law is made public, and thereafter everybody knows what is expected of him. But with group actions, the man on the street never knew what behavior was going to be punished next. For those persons who wanted to play it safe, group actions forced them to anticipate what the state might expect of them, long before the state made its expectations known. The subject's anxiety always made him dread many more "actions", entailing many more areas of behavior, than even the total state could afford to conduct without endangering its own functioning. So the subject had to behave himself in many more respects than were actually singled out for "actions".

Bruno Bettelheim, "The Informed Heart"