When the cage feels like home

What this episode covers

In 1973, after a bank robbery in Stockholm in which four hostages came out defending their captor, a Swedish psychiatrist coined the term Stockholm syndrome. The name was new. The thing it described had been running quietly for two thousand years. In this episode, Risto follows four people who came to love the system that held them: Juba the Second, the Berber prince raised in Rome who grew up to write Roman history in Greek; the Janissaries, the Christian boys taken from Balkan villages and turned into the most ferociously loyal soldiers of the Ottoman Empire; the Gulag prisoners who wept when Stalin died; and Patty Hearst, the nineteen-year-old American heiress who, two months after being kidnapped, robbed a bank with her captors, M-1 carbine in hand. Goethe had named the mechanism a hundred and sixty years before the psychiatrists did. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

PodParley-generated summary based on available episode metadata and transcript content.