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This paper discusses political regimes that impose total—social, political, and ideological—control on individuals. In such cases, the meaning of the aid relationship can be altered and turned into its opposite, or into the obligation to acquire the knowledge provided by the government watchdogs and to engage in social practices authorized by the regime. This paper presents the theories of some classics on revolutionary social change and individual reformation from a psychosociological perspective. It analyzes the specific mechanisms through which aid is turned into pressure to conform. More precisely, this paper first presents the notion of a new individual as theorized by Lenin and Chernyshevsky; secondly, it focuses on Makarenko’s pedagogical model of converting ideology into a social practice whose goal is to train capable individuals to educate both society and themselves. The ideas of these classic authors are illustrated through the case study of the social practice of context control in communist Romania. The following strategies are analyzed: the total control of education systems; collaborationism; the emergence of a new intellectual elite; and the change in personality structure as a result of institutionalized violence (the so-called Pitesti experiment, or reeducation through torture). This paper attempts to determine how a dominant type of social thinking was constituted within a controlled social and cultural context, and how the latter can influence the sociocognitive development of the kind of individual the government desires.