BEGIN the process early, at school. First, create confusion by hurling a multitude of unrelated, disconnected facts at him. Meaning is not sought and so, by implication, is shown not to exist. Yes, there is poverty in the world's richest countries; yes, the Gulf War was fought against a dictator armed with US, British and French weapons; yes, air pollution is getting worse while we applaud the creation of more jobs in the car industry — he knows the facts but he does not know why, he cannot know why, he must not know why.

Second, teach class position: he is told his place in the hierarchy, he is “streamed”. He is taught to envy the “bright” and despise the “slow” and to believe the concrete reality of both. Take your pick — failure (shame, rejection, relative poverty) or success (conformity).

Third, encourage indifference: he is taught not to care too much. When the bell goes, his enthusiasm is left to flounder before the greater logic of the school timetable — he is there to learn but, more importantly, he is there to stick to disciplined schedules. He must turn “on” and “off” like a switch as required. Obedience, not enthusiasm, is primary.

Fourth, teach emotional dependency: by stars and ticks and frowns and prizes, honours and disgraces, our desolated human being is taught to surrender his will to the chain of command. The judgement of right and wrong, value and worth is abdicated to external authority. God forbid that anyone should be able to evaluate themselves as successful beyond conformity.

Fifth, teach intellectual dependency: good people wait for the teacher to tell them what to do. Only the “expert”, the authority, can decide what is good for him to know. Successful people are those who believe what they are told with a minimum of resistance.

Sixth, encourage provisional self-esteem: confident people make bad conformists. Self-respect, therefore, is taught to be dependent on “expert” opinion. The desolated human being is constantly evaluated and judged. Dissatisfaction is crucial for his continued conformity. Self-evaluation — “Know thyself” — the heart of every major philosophical system, is rejected out of hand. People must be TOLD what they are worth.

Our desolated human being is told who did what, when, where, how, but he is not told why learning about algebra, plant reproduction and the French Revolution are in any way important to him. All he is told is that learning this stuff will help him pass his exams, which will help him get to university, which will help him get a “good” job, that is to conform as part of the economic system. This, of course, is presented as being an entirely adequate answer to life; he need not detain himself with seeking or considering alternative answers (unless he is suffering from some form of anti-establishment neurosis).

But despite this great weight of brainwashing, our desolated human being is not really convinced that this is the best path, he does not really believe it answers his deepest needs. He takes it on trust, because there seem to be no other alternatives, for none may be seriously proposed. Even discussions of vegetarianism and environmental issues in the classroom are liable to be denounced by our mass media as left-wing or Fascist propaganda, or politically correct preaching (threatening to swamp the constant appeals by fizzy drink, hamburger and sports-wear manufacturers and the like, which is not brainwashing but simply giving kids “what they want” — that is, what they're required to want).

Our future desolated human being acts “responsibly”; after all he does not know what the future holds and so he plays safe to give himself more options later, not knowing that by then he will have been brainwashed so powerfully, and for so long, that he will almost certainly be unable to extricate himself. After all, he will then say to himself that he has certainly not done all those exams just to throw them away: what sort of investment would that be? By then, half-way up the career-ladder, to leap off will seem a sort of suicide, a sort of madness. Who chooses to earn less? Who chooses to “fail”?

Because the answer he has been effectively forced to choose does not answer his deepest needs, but answers the deepest needs of the economic system into which he has been born, our desolated human being continues to suffer endless boredom. The career work he is required to do is that of a cog in a giant machine. Above all, it does not involve his deepest need as a living being — his need to be self-directed rather than “employed”. Instead it requires that he hide all aspects of his personality which do not fit the necessary template. He wears a dark suit to indicate his conformity, his submission to the norm. True, the brightness and colour of his tie does loudly insist on his maverick individuality but only in the way that government PR departments insist on their “yearning for freedom and human rights” and corporations declare their commitment to “green consumerism” and “corporate responsibility”. Beyond this, there is no colour, no individuality, no distracting spare fat or idiosyncratically human baggage. The dark suit announces that he is there to serve the absolute goal of profit, and all his individual likes, dislikes, interests, goals, values, have been subordinated to this aim. The dark suit represents the smothering of his ultimate concerns, and their replacement by the company automaton.

The need to withdraw his ultimate concerns from the world becomes far more intense at work than it was at school. He must smile, speak, shake hands, think and discuss in exactly the right way. Our desolated human being unconsciously knows that he will be successful only to the extent to which he succeeds in cutting the cloth of himself to fit the requirements of the system; that he will be successful only to the extent to which he becomes “outer-directed” as opposed to “inner-directed”; that is, to the extent to which he succeeds in becoming an essentially dead THING as opposed to a living BEING. Because his ultimate needs conflict with this goal, they are a real danger. The more he is aware of them, the more he attempts to fulfil them, the more he will find himself in conflict with the world around him. So he tries his best to become unaware of his ultimate needs, because he does not want to become a shameful failure, does not want to become even more disgraceful and shameful than he already believes himself to be. For then (he knows) they will say — “I always said he was a bit strange” — and it is precisely this “strangeness”, this inadequacy, that he has dedicated his life to concealing and overcoming through “success”.

Thus is created one desolated human being.