Stockholm syndrome and dimensions of our slaveries
I learn so many things everyday. This morning I heard for the first
time about something called ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. The name of the
ailment was coined by criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot and
draws from the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg,
Stockholm, Sweden in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage
from August 23 to August 28, 1973. It refers to a psychological
condition in which a hostage emotionally bonds to his or her captor. Got
me thinking.
The word ‘hostage’ immediately reminded me of some 300,000
individuals dragged across the Vanni by a fleeing and cornered LTTE
leadership in the first few months of the year 2009. These hapless
individuals were used as a human shield, a fact that shrill whiners
about the plight of the Tamils in Sri Lanka carefully and deliberately
edit out of the many sob stories they relate to naive or mischievous
sections of the international community.
Security Forces
The word ‘hostage’ implies the use of force or the application of
threat to exact compliance, but the situation of these people was more
complex than that. Fed by Eelamist claims which included the
construction of the Sinhala Bogeyman, confronted by Security Forces who
showed little discretion and much cruelty especially in the eighties,
living a reality of friends and loved ones being part of the LTTE’s
military machine regardless of convictions and circumstances of
recruitment and the apparent invincibility of ‘the boys’, it was natural
for these people to feel ‘attached’ emotionally to their captors.
By April 2009 all illusions had crumbled and even though a collective
of people living on one glass of rice-kunjee a day (courtesy the LTTE)
later complained about ‘conditions’ that were far better than what
non-refugees elsewhere enjoyed, when the moment of truth arrived in the
form of Army personnel risking and sacrificing lives to save them, there
was bewilderment as well as gratitude.
Restricting lines
That’s however just one kind of hostage. The Stockholm syndrome, it
appears to me, can take other forms as well.
We are prisoners of many things. If you think about it, we are all
constrained by so many restricting lines that we are essentially a caged
species, wrapped in many forbidding bars, all invisible of course and
strangely, made of material that induce unconsciousness.
We are slaves to laws and constitutions. We are held prisoner by
flawed rules that are skewed in favour of rule-maker, based on his/her
preferences and informed by his/her fears.
We are held hostage by the ideologies we uncritically embrace and the
political parties and individuals these choices persuade us to become
members of or associate respectively.
We are prisoners of our professions, career goals and professional
jealousies. We are hostages of our circumstances. We are slaves to the
expectations that others have of us. We are crippled by both our dreams
and our nightmares. And yet, strangely, we are for the most part not
only unaware of these fetters, not all of which are imposed on us, we
adore them, decorate them, sing their praises and defend them to death.
And we say, moreover, ‘we are free’.
We say ‘this is my choice’, not pausing for a moment to ask ourselves
if ‘choice’ was actually free and not framed by certain conditions. Of
course none of us are totally free, but there are degrees of freedom and
therefore degrees of enslavement as well.
The issue is whether or not we are conscious of these limits, whether
we feel we cannot push the boundaries outwards and whether we actually
make the effort to do so. It is doubly hard when we form attachments to
the enslaver, the conditions of our imprisonment. We are all, to a
greater or lesser degree, victims then of the Stockholm syndrome, are we
not?
Critical thinking
I do not know if Nils Bejerot or anyone else offered a cure for the
psychological aftertaste of the hostage condition and the possible
emotional attachments to the captor. It is doubtful that the
psychiatrists treating people suffering from the Stockholm syndrome
would worry themselves about the other hostage-scenarios described
above.
Indeed the world would never have enough psychiatrists to treat all
victims. One might add that the psychiatrists themselves would require
therapy. There are no easy answers, but perhaps the wise words of
Siddhartha Gauthama might help us if we became aware of our relevant
incarcerations and desired freedom.
When I heard about the Stockholm syndrome and contemplated the
extrapolations my thoughts went directly to the Kalama Sutra or the
Buddha’s Charter on Free Inquiry which not only gives us eyes to notice
fetter but the methods of avoiding them as well as escaping from them as
the case may be. The All Knowing One advised the Kalamas in the
following manner.
‘Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated
hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumour; nor upon what is in a
scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious
reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over;
nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, ‘The
monk is our teacher.’
Consciousness is all important and critical thinking a must. The
conclusions that are produced by the intersection of observation and
reflection must be reassessed when factors of time and space change and
reaffirmed or altered through the consistent application of the critical
faculties.
The following words penned by my father in 1984 in an article for a
Scout Souvenir are a good antidote to the Stockholm syndrome, I
realized: ‘It is hard to put down (read ‘hold hostage’) someone who has
opened himself to perceive the eternal verities.
Therefore if it is not prudent to stand ramrod straight in the face
of storms beyond your strength, you must let them pass over you. Stand
firm if you can, retreat if you must. Above all, never panic!’
At some point we need to understand that we are both captor and
captive and that we often tie ourselves up, submit to capture and/or
reject the freedom option. We are not always masters of our fate.
Neither are we powerless in the matter of unfettering. We take
ourselves hostage and fail to acknowledge the fact. That’s something to
think about and in this the Charter on Free Inquiry would be a Kalyana
Mithra (A good friend), I believe.
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