Sozhenitysn writes:

A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first! And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter. . . . Then after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.

That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

You can find videos of Stalin buzzing an audience to let them know it was safe to stop applauding. Here’s one I pulled up:

[I don’t speak German, so hopefully the voiceover isn’t something horrible].

Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream is the best book you never heard of.   It’s one of the few fiction books where I’ve dog-eared passages. Here’s one:

Politics—I mean love-level politics—in China at that time was like a magnet. A magnet has a north pole and a south pole. If you try to separate them by cutting the magnet in half, you find that you have not one north pole and one south pole, but two pieces, each with a north and south pole. It was the same with us. Every unit, every committee, no matter how revolutionary, turned out to have a moderate faction and a revolutionary faction. The unit would split, and the revolutionary faction would feel they had attained greater purity . . . until they discovered that they, too, had a moderate faction. . . .

That’s fiction, of course. The truth is even stranger. In 1968 a Pakistani official gave Mao a present of some exotic fruit—mangos. The Chairman passed the gift off and the individual mangos ended up parceled out to different factories. Where—there is no other word for it—the mangos were venerated. In one factory the mango was put on a pedestal until it showed signs of going bad: at which point it was made into a tea for each of the workers to reverently take a communion sip of. China went mad with Mao mango mania. It even made it into propaganda posters.

Wowsers. Of course everyone would be afraid to not go along with the insanity. But where did the insanity come from? The fear-based need to show devotion to Mao appears to have generated real feeling. For maybe more Soviets than Solzhenitsyn would think, the fear of Comrade Stalin may have created a real, thunderous enthusiasm for him. It’s Social Stockholm Syndrome.

Signaling is a modern word for an old truth. Everyone has a real need to communicate who we are to everyone around us. Some of this is to enhance our status, by signaling that we’re tough or confident or elite or what have ye. But the most basic signals are simply the signals that we are part of the group. We signal that we belong, please don’t hurt us, don’t Eich us, we are part of the team.

Signaling tends to be ratchet. Applauding Stalin for five minutes shows you really, really love Stalin . . . unless everyone else applauds for six. Then your five minutes of hand-beating shows you’re a wrecker, comrade. Unless you can point out that Comrade Stalin told you to stop.

Signaling is one justification for authority in the gospel. Religion is susceptible to signaling ratchets. So there needs to be a definitive authority who can say, “that’s enough.”   Otherwise you get Pharisees each trying to fast longer in public and build bigger and better mega-hedges about the law. Jonah Goldberg has long said that what Islam needs is a pope who can say, ‘stop it.’ There isn’t one, so Al Qaeda is currently being out-horrored by ISIS in the Islamic extremist signaling stakes. Joseph Smith’s revelation on authority came in response to a signaling ratchet. The early church had a competitive spiritual gift thing going. One guy shook a little under the influence of the spirit so the next guy shook a lot and pretty soon people were rolling in the aisles and bounding around. But the real prize was visions and revelations like Joseph Smith had. When both Oliver Cowdery and Hiram Page started trying to signal that they had the brand-new latest thing in vision holiness, the Lord put a stop to it. He announced that Joseph Smith and the Church were an authority, and going outside their bounds didn’t make you holier, it made you a heretic. End of signaling ratchet, and the beginning of authority.

That is not, however, the main insight into signaling and the gospel. I have a atheist friend who once told me that we Mormons and other Christians had an advantage in not getting caught up in our society’s signaling and status games. He said it was because we believed in a larger context with its own, superior status. Imagine a popular girl in high school who ends up on a bus with a bunch of nerds. She probably isn’t going to go hard to try and prove her superior Star Wars knowledge. Probably she just sits back and sneers. She is aware that the local bus status levels are temporary and take place in a larger high school context where high nerd status is still low social status over all. So she holds back. But if the popular girl is Mormon, maybe she is at least friendly, maybe she even goes along a little, because she knows that the high school is also a temporary thing, where high status may not mean much in comparison to the absolute status of the eternities.

But if she believes in that absolute status, it’s a choice. Because God does not shout ‘hey, you’ and does not solve all evils in this world, one has to choose to believe. So when the eternities do arrive, she knows that her sincere belief wasn’t just the kind of sincere belief that Social Stockholm Syndrome can grow in us all.  Her belief came first, the status system came second.  Her belief arose from a longing for a better world.