Losing Reality and Gaining Zealotry

Robert Jay Lifton is one of those outstanding figures who has managed across the many decades of his richly productive and insightful career to bring together clinical insights with political processes and problems--to say nothing of metaphysical, religious, and theological issues. I previously noted how powerful his memoirs are, and I plan on re-reading them again soon. I'm also making my way through his Nazi Doctors after first picking it up more than twenty years ago.

Next week I will start a book he edited with Jacob Lindy, Beyond Invisible Walls: The Psychological Legacy of Soviet Trauma. This is part of the research I am doing for a lecture on trauma and Russian Christianity after communism, which I'm giving next June in Velehrad.

Though well into his 90s now, Lifton is not resting on his laurels. Indeed, he just released another book, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry (The New Press, 2019), 240pp.

This book, the publisher says, offers

A definitive account of the psychology of zealotry, from a National Book Award winner and a leading authority on the nature of cults, political absolutism, and mind control.

In this unique and timely volume Robert Jay Lifton, the National Book Award–winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual proposes a radical idea: that the psychological relationship between extremist political movements and fanatical religious cults may be much closer than anyone thought. Exploring the most extreme manifestations of human zealotry, Lifton highlights an array of leaders—from Mao to Hitler to the Japanese apocalyptic cult leader Shōkō Asahara to Donald Trump—who have sought the control of human minds and the ownership of reality.

Lifton has spent decades exploring psychological extremism. His pioneering concept of the “Eight Deadly Sins” of ideological totalism—originally devised to identify “brainwashing” (or “thought reform”) in political movements—has been widely quoted in writings about cults, and embraced by members and former members of religious cults seeking to understand their experiences.

In Losing Reality Lifton makes clear that the apocalyptic impulse—that of destroying the world in order to remake it in purified form—is not limited to religious groups but is prominent in extremist political movements such as Nazism and Chinese Communism, and also in groups surrounding Donald Trump. Lifton applies his concept of “malignant normality” to Trump’s efforts to render his destructive falsehoods a routine part of American life. But Lifton sees the human species as capable of “regaining reality” by means of our “protean” psychological capacities and our ethical and political commitments as “witnessing professionals.”

Lifton weaves together some of his finest work with extensive new commentary to provide vital understanding of our struggle with mental predators. Losing Reality is a book not only of stunning scholarship, but also of huge relevance for these troubled times.