Total Institutions

It takes a monster of an institution to overcome what was established in a person through primary socialization. What might have once been the only conceivable world a person could identify with can, with a lick of a command, become history and be entirely replaced by new social morals, beliefs, and habits. The kind of institution that can accomplish such a feat is called a total institution and these institutions are able to re-socialize not only individuals, but groups of people by eroding their primary and secondary identities and systematically constructing a new environment to which the individual or individuals are taught to adapt. An example of such an institution might be the army or Marine Corps.

A person voluntarily on involuntarily drafted into the Marine Corps is first subjected to a total intervention of identity, in which he or she is stripped any sort of personal identity. Stanly Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket is an exemplary portrayal of re-socialization. In the first scene the Sargent General takes it as his role to approach each individual in his barrack and tell them that he's "never seen shit stacked so high," that they are "faggots," "scumbags," "shit twinkled toe suckers," "worms," and "scroungey little fucks." Bigotry such as this strips someone of any self-esteem until they feel the need to identify as someone else, a new and better self, in order to be accepted and respected. The Marine Corps has that identity ready at hand so that as soon as their privates "realize" that they are nothing but "scumbags," they can be re-socialized into order obeying, hard-working, man slaughtering gentlemen.

The Marine Corps mentally and emotionally re-trains their privates by teaching them how to sleep, eat, walk, and talk, "the Marine Corps way." Privates are dehumanized and then re-humanized to believe that war and weaponry are their lives. The Sargent General in Full Metal Jackets leads his privates in prayer: "This is my rifle and it is my identity." He tells his privates "You will give your rifles a girl's name, because this is the only pussy you people are going to get, your married to this piece this weapon of iron and wood, and you will be faithful!" The men are bound by fear and physical training to a new identity and just as in primary socialization where one's significant others shape them to internalize their world, the Marine Corps shapes its privates to internalize and identify with a world of weaponry, physical training, and destruction all to accomplish "peace and order." They are even taught to believe that their jobs are to "keep heaven supplied with fresh souls."

The film continues on and every other man that has been re-socialized is initiated into a new environment that he has been trained to survive in. What was once the only conceivable world

...