Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung was compiled by the General Political Department of the People's Liberation Army under Lin Biao and issued to soldiers in 1964. After the Cultural Revolution began in 1966 it was printed in numbers that are difficult to comprehend — estimates run above a billion copies, making it, by circulation, among the most produced books in history.
It is short. Thirty-three chapters of extracts, mostly a few sentences each, on subjects from war to youth to self-reliance to correcting mistaken ideas. It has no arguments in it, because it consists of conclusions removed from the texts that supported them.
That is the design, and it is the mechanism.
Lifton's loading of the language describes what a compressed, absolute, group-sanctioned phrase set does to thinking. A complex political or personal question — what should be done about this teacher, this policy, this doubt — is answered by a memorized line, and the line arrives faster than analysis and terminates it. The path from stimulus to approved response is shortened until nothing intervenes.
Two further effects compound it.
Recitation produces fluency, and fluency is misread as truth. A phrase you can produce instantly and have heard ten thousand times feels self-evident, which is the processing-fluency effect of chapter 25 operating on political doctrine rather than on factual claims.
And carrying the book publicly is a signal. Everyone had one, everyone waved it, and Bem's self-perception theory of chapter 3 supplies the consequence: a person who observes themselves performing devotion daily infers devotion, and the identity hardens through the behavior rather than through the belief.
In Red Guard units the book did a further and more specific job. It supplied authority for violence. A young person about to beat a teacher had a text in their hand containing the sentence that a revolution is not a dinner party, and that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Milgram's finding is that an authority cue is sufficient to displace personal moral judgment; the book made the authority portable and put it in every pocket.
The scale of the Cultural Revolution's violence is contested and enormous — estimates of deaths run from hundreds of thousands to well over a million, with far larger numbers persecuted.
After 1976 the Party's own assessment, formalized in the 1981 resolution on party history, described the Cultural Revolution as responsible for the most severe setback and heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People's Republic. The book stopped being printed in quantity and became, in China, a curiosity sold to tourists.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Loaded Language Chapters