Nietzsche on ideology as internalized mastery (from A Genealogy of Morals):
"How does one create a memory for the human animal? How does one go about to impress anything on that partly dull, partly flightly human intelligence--that incarnation of forgetfulness--so as to make it stick?" As we might well imagine, the means used in solving this age-old problem have been far from delicate: in fact, there is perhaps nothing more terrible in man's earliest history than his mnemotechnics. "A thing is branded on the memory to make it stay there; only what goes on hurting will stick"--this is one of the oldest and, unfortunately, one of the most enduring psychological axioms. In fact, one might say that wherever on earth one still finds solemnity, gravity, secrecy, somber hues in the life of an individual or a nation, one also senses a residuum of that terror with which men must formerly have promised, pledged, vouched. It is the past--the longest, deepest, hardest of pasts--that seems to surge up whenever we turn serious. Whenever man has thought it necessary to create a memory for himself, his effort has been attended with torture, blood, sacrifice. The ghastliest sacrifices and pledges, including the sacrifice of the first-born; the most repulsive mutilations, such as castration; the cruelest rituals in every religious cult (and all religions are at bottom systems of cruelty)--all these have their origin in that instinct which divined pain to be the strongest aid to mnemonics. (All asceticism is really part of the same development: here too the object is to make a few ideas omnipresent, unforgettable, "fixed," to the end of hypnotizing the entire nervous and intellectual system; the ascetic procedures help to effect the dissociation of those ideas from all others.) (translated by Francis Golffing; 192-93)
There it is: "hypnotizing the entire nervous and intellectual system." Ideology as trance channeling. Hypnotism, if that is truly what Nietzsche meant, would suggest a deep trance; in fact, of course, he is using hypnotism figuratively to mean "mind control" of external origins but with internal activation in a more or less fully conscious state--perhaps what Kathryn Ridall calls a light trance, in which you have some sense of what is being done to you but no power to prevent it.
Nietzsche's historical argument in brief is that asceticism, the ascetic ideology aimed at "civilizing" the Germans throughout the Middle Ages and on well into the modern era, is created by the Germans themselves in an attempt to transform their own group's individual and collective behavior. But that transformation is not effected intellectually or contractually, as previous theorists had argued; it is achieved by working directly on the body, through pain. Once burned, twice shy. Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me--except those words that reactivate the purposeful pain inflicted in the past by sticks and stones and other weapons. Those words, Nietzsche is arguing, do hurt; and the hurt they inflict is the primary channel of ideology. They may be the spoken words of living people, or the written words of dead ones. They may even, though Nietzsche does not explicitly raise this possibility and might not have been entirely happy about it, be the spoken words of dead people or spirits, which do often seem, in the spirit-channeling literature, to reinforce collective norms for their living relatives' behavior. In all these cases, words that activate ancient memories of inflicted pain channel ideological forces, and so enforce obedience to "civilized" norms from within. Every time we hear or read someone calling for "respect" before a work of great social power, like the Bible or a literary classic, even before a deified translation like the Vulgate or the King James, we channel some of that early pain that is still stored in our collective and individual memories, and find it in ourselves to treat the text named, and others like it, with respect. "'A thing is branded on the memory to make it stay there; only what goes on hurting will stick'" (192).
