It was all me

Sidney Rittenberg was an American who lived in China from 1944 until 1980.  During that time he was twice imprisoned and held in solitary confinement on false charges, the second time for 10 years during the Cultural Revolution.  The excerpt below is from an interview with Sidney that appeared in The Graduate Review, May 1983

In the [1980] Christian Science Monitor article, the reporter wrote that you were then forced to look at what was important to you in life.  Things like family and friends, while they were important to you, they weren't available to you.  So what you decided was that what really mattered was to make some contribution to the long river of human progress.  In 10 years, what evidence did you have that anything you did in that cell by yourself made any contribution to the long river of human progress?

I think the evidence was compelling.  I think that in that sort of context the evidence was more compelling than normally.  I tried to assure a certain time every day of thinking quietly, of letting all the thoughts drift away and thinking about what I was not thinking about, really, but what was basic and underlying.  I couldn't help thinking when I was in solitary: My God, why didn't I sit quietly and think like this before?

See, we've got a universe which is made of – it doesn't really matter what you call it – you can call it matter, spirit, it's whatever is — just call it nature.  When it develops to a certain point, at least on this planet, it produces us.  It produces human beings.  And human beings are still a part of this whole.  You're not something separate and distinct from nature.  You're a product and a part of it. But you have one essential faculty that nothing else has that we know about, that is the ability to reflect, gather evidence on, pass judgments on, and transform the world around you.  That is the essential difference between yourself and the rest of the animal kingdom. 

In other words, that's what you are about as a human being.  If you ask what people are about, as opposed to the most intelligent chimpanzees, that's what they're about.  So, since this is your essential characteristic, the greater extent to which you can develop your ability to understand and transform the world around you, the more fully you enjoy your own human essence and the more fully it makes a mark.  It actually does transform things around you. 

Now when you get a very concrete feeling of that idea, you see that qualitatively the size of the contribution is irrelevant.  Einstein's was one of rare greatness.  Yours may be so small that it may never be recorded or remembered, but qualitatively it belongs in the class of things that are a contribution.  So the world is different for you having lived and that difference is the mark that you leave which goes. into whatever is called "immortality."  That is what endures.  The bigger the mark, the more people you can make happier and freer because of your contribution, the better, the more you've lived as a human being. 

If that is your conscious purpose while you're alive, it doesn't matter to what degree you're able to achieve it.  You will live in the achievement of this purpose by other people, by the world, after you stop being conscious.  The fact that you're no longer conscious of it doesn't cancel out the contribution that you made.  And that's what I think the ancients were trying to tell us on the question of immortality.  It was to leave something which they called the soul; it was to leave something which didn't turn into dust, that was permanent and enduring and had to do with the good, the pure, the beautiful, the eternal. 

After thinking about these things through all sorts of concrete examples and trial and error in the cell, I have had experiences which could match, I think, in terms of subjective feeling, all those things that are termed peak experiences or that are called transformation.  It's a real sense of exaltation, where you just tingle from head to foot, where you really feel that God, I'm really out of it now, I'm really out of it and totally into it.  You feel that you see the widest range of truth, and you also see the little details, but why is that?  I think it is not because you are in a state of mindlessness, but just the contrary.  You're on a level of human understanding that relieves all the aches and pains and little knots that have you in a state of tension and restraint.  All that whole thing just seems to slough off so you feel this release.  Some people interpret it as a mystical experience, but I don't think it is a mystical experience.  I think it's a human experience.

Anyway, be that as it may, where was the evidence?  First of all, the question of whether my case could ever be solved.  Obviously, the only thing I could do to prove that I was not an enemy, that I was not a double-dealer, was to show myself to be a person of integrity.  To the extent that I could do that, I was making a case.  After two and a half months, when the first guard tapped on the door and said "I've been watching you, and you don't look like an enemy" — in that context, that was an enormous thing.  Because, at least one of these young fanatics, through my example, had begun to see through that set-up, and to accept the idea that there were some people who were locked up there who were not what he'd been told.

So you couldn't help feeling at that point that you were having an effect, and that was the only way you could have an effect.  You couldn't do it by cursing at him.  You couldn't do it by going into a catatonic fit or deep depression, which he would only be able to interpret as the expression of guilt.  You couldn't do it as irrational resistance, which he would only interpret as a sign that this person was totally self-centered and didn't give a damn what happened to the Chinese people or the revolution.  It was all me.  You could try to lead your life in front of that eye in the door in such a way that he got the point of what you were.

Now, it was a question in that context of who was going to dominate whom, or whether it was going to be a relationship of domination. But I think a rational approach, an approach that insists on freedom through understanding and rational behavior is what gets you out of subjugation. 

Then also, two other things developed as by-products.  One is I myself, from a position of insisting on my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, led as good a life as I could possibly have done under those conditions.  So I got the maximum out of life in that context, including the ability to control my own moods and emotions and behavior and thought.  I was in charge.  They were doing their damnedest for four years to incite and to hound me until I expressed open hatred and resistance.  I was going to have myself organized so that they were going to be totally frustrated.  They were going to come to the conclusion that it didn't work on this guy, that something else goes on inside of him that's not in our synopsis of what he's supposed to be like.

In fact, one member of the interrogation team said after I was released that six months after the interrogations started, the interrogators began sending up reports saying that they thought that this was a mistake, that there was nothing in the case and that it ought to be dropped.  I could actually tell at least part of the time with a lot of these guys that they were play-acting.  They did not believe what they were saying to me.

Also, I was able to study.  It was really fruitful study, although there was damn little opportunity to practice what I was studying, and without practice I don’t think there is any real fruitful study.  Everything that you learn which is true knowledge has got to be tested in practice by you, I think.  Knowledge that you get from other people's experiences is also knowledge, and most of what we know comes that way, but it's not our own, personal, intimate thing, like the things we've learned from our own experiences.

When the keepers began to feel that this guy is straight, he's got something which is together, he has integrity, they would give me extra food when food was very severely rationed.  Anything that was left, they'd come back with the cart and slip it in to me.  I got breaks on books, and I was able to keep paper and a pen.  After the first fanatical period, they were as good to me as they were allowed to be.  Really, I got a lot of breaks that way.  I think it's because they had a certain amount of respect for my approach.

One of the guards told me, "In this prison, when we can see that a person's thinking and emotions and behavior check out against each other, then we feel that we understand this person.  We know where he is.  If the thinking that he describes to us doesn't check with the way we see him emote, or if the feelings, what he laughs and cries about, don't check with what he does, then we feel that there's some problem with this guy that we still don't understand."

One last thing that's very important in this experience, I think, is the fact that we're not talking about a person who is unusually tough.  That's not what it is.  It's a matter of cognition, it's a matter of understanding, of experience.  I used to remind myself every day, "Look, you could be walking down Fifth Avenue and be so lonely that you feel like jumping off the roof, or you could be here in this cell and be completely unlonely."   It's up to you really.  You have to find the resources, and you can find them.