Robert Jay Lifton - Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

Losing Reality

ALSO BY ROBERT JAY LIFTON

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China

Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinriky, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism

The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima

The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival

The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation

Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir

Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (with Greg Mitchell)

The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat (with Eric Markusen)

Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism (with Richard Falk)

Home from the War: Vietnam VeteransNeither Victims nor Executioners

The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life

The Future of Immortality: And Other Essays for a Nuclear Age

Birds and PsychoBirds (humorous cartoons)

Losing Reality

On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

Robert Jay Lifton

For my grandchildren
Kimberly Lifton
Jessica Lifton
Lila Lifton
Dmitri Itzkovitz

We keep coming back and coming back To the real.

Wallace Stevens

Contents

Authors Note

This book consists of excerpts from earlier work together with considerable new material. The excerpts are printed in regular typeface, while new commentaries are printed in italics. The introduction and chapters four, eight, and ten are new material but are in regular type because in each case they constitute a full chapter.

The excerpts weave together material from various parts of their respective books, and have been edited for clarity as well as for gender inclusiveness. I provide endnotes for new commentaries, while citations for excerpts can be found in the original work.

In the use of Chinese words, I have changed the original Wade-Giles romanization to contemporary Pinyin.

Introduction:
On the Ownership of Reality

I have long been concerned with those who claim ownership of the minds of others. And also with those who come to offer their minds to such would-be owners through whatever combination of voluntary self-surrender and psychological and physical coercion. Ive come to recognize that the mental predators are concerned not only with individual minds but with the ownership of reality itself. Ive been able to study a number of such mental predators, whether as leaders of extremist political movements or fanatical religious cults, or as purveyors of self-generated or solipsistic reality, as is the case with Donald Trump.

The general tendency among observers has been to identify two separate groups of mental predators. The first group is characterized by ideological totalism, an all-or-none set of ideas that claim nothing less than absolute truth and equally absolute virtue. A clear example here is Chinese Communist thought reform. The second group consists of what we generally call cults, which form sealed-off communities where reality can be dispensed and controlled. Ideological totalism suggests a system of ideas projected outward with the claim of providing solutions to all human problems. Cults, in contrast, turn inward as they follow a sacralized omniscient guru whose extreme version of reality dominates the minds of individual followers.

I myself held to that dichotomy until I encountered much that called it into question. I came to realize that ideological totalism and cultlike behavior not only blend with each other but tend to be part of a single entity.

I was jolted into that recognition by members of cults (such as the Unification Church) who embraced a particular chapter in my book on Chinese thought reform that described the psychological themes of ideological totalism. , Chapter 22 became a kind of underground document for many who were questioning or leaving cults because it seemed to express quite specifically what they had been subjected to in their own extremist environment. This strongly suggested that totalism and cultlike behavior are not separate entities but part of a common constellation.

Thus, totalistic movements like the Maoist version of Communism can include powerful gurus like Mao himself as well as sealed-off communities; and cults like Aum Shinrikythe fanatical Japanese group that released deadly sarin gas in Tokyo subways trains in 1995can become notably totalistic and seek to impose their bizarre view of reality on the outside world. That is, totalistic movements are cultlike and cults are totalistic. In this book I will refer to that totalistic/cultlike constellation as cultist or cultism.

For instance, Chinese Communist thought reform, in its many versions including its violent extension into the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, is a systematic effort at political purification of individual minds and a quintessential example of ideological totalism. But it also has included a deification of the person and words of Mao Zedong as not only a political but an all-enveloping guru. During the 1950s, and in the late 1960s, thought reform was applied everywhere in Chinese society as part of a vast inward turning in an attempt to form a purified national community of hundreds of millions of people. I was fortunate to encounter thought reform early in my work because it sensitized me to a particularly dangerous proclivity of the human mind for extremism, or what I now would call cultism. I have repeatedly encountered that proclivity in the destructive behavior I studied over the course of a lifetime of research.

Aum Shinriky, with its religious fanaticism and closed, guru-dominated community bent on spiritual purification, is the quintessential version of a cult. Yet from its beginnings, Aums actions and behavior were intensely totalistic, and over time the guru and his followers sought to impose the cults bizarre communal reality onto the larger society. Thus, divergent groups can be closely related psychologically in their shared cultism, their combination of the totalistic and cultic.

The excerpts in this book come from my earlier research and include work on Chinese Communist thought reform, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Aum Shinriky, the eight deadly sins of ideological totalism, the Nazi movement and the overall psychology of genocide, and Donald Trump and his followers. The destructiveness and violence described in these excerpts are fueled by intense cultism. A final excerpt on what I call the protean self and proteanism suggests an alternative to cultism.

I will discuss some of the history of the word cult in a later chapter, but there is no doubt that in our time it has become pejorative. So much so that there has been a contemporary battle over terminology: cult versus new religion. One can understand the insistence of many that, since cult is a derogatory term, the more neutral (though I would say, not entirely neutral) term new religion should be used instead. From as far back as the 1970s, I could hear the most articulate version of each position from two of my friends, each of whom I greatly respected. Id also known for decades, wrote extensively about cults and their dangers. She had worked with hundreds of former cult members until her death in 2003, had become a leading figure in the anti-cult movement, and had to have special security arrangements at her home because of threats she had received from cultic fanatics.