Taken from
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
Chapter 22 (Second Edition, Chapel Hill, 1989)
Chapter 15 (First Edition, New York, 1987)
The Future of Immortality
Any ideology -- that is, any set of emotionally-charged convictions
about man and his relationship to the natural or supernatural world --
may be carried by its adherents in a totalistic direction. But this is
most likely to occur with those ideologies which are most sweeping in
their content and most ambitious or messianic in their claim, whether a
religious or political organization. And where totalism exists, a
religion, or a political movement. becomes little more than an exclusive
cult.
Here you will find a set of criteria, eight psychological themes
against which any environment may be judged. In combination, they
create an atmosphere which may temporarily energize or exhilarate,
but which at the same time pose the gravest of human threats.
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- The most basic feature is the control of human communication
within an environment
- If the control is extremely intense, it becomes internalized
control -- an attempt to manage an individual's inner
communication
- Control over all a person sees, hears, reads, writes
(information control) creates conflicts in respect to individual
autonomy
- Groups express this in several ways: Group process, isolation
from other people, psychological pressure, geographical distance or
unavailable transportation, sometimes physical pressure
- Often a sequence of events, such as seminars, lectures, group
encounters, which become increasingly intense and increasingly
isolated, making it extremely difficult--both physically and
psychologically--for one to leave
- Sets up a sense of antagonism with the outside world; it's
"us against them"
- Closely connected to the process of individual change (of
personality)
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- Extensive personal manipulation
- Seeks to promote specific patterns of behavior and emotion in
such a way that it appears to have arisen spontaneously from within
the environment, while it actually has been orchestrated
- Totalist leaders claim to be agents chosen by God, history,
or some supernatural force, to carry out the mystical
imperative
- The "principles" (God-centered or otherwise) can be put
forcibly and claimed exclusively, so that the cult and its beliefs
become the only true path to salvation (or enlightenment)
- The individual then develops the psychology of the pawn, and
participates actively in the manipulation of others
- The leader who becomes the center of the mystical manipulation
(or the person in whose name it is done) can be sometimes more real
than an abstract god and therefore attractive to cult members
- Legitimizes the deception used to recruit new members and/or
raise funds, and the deception used on the "outside world"
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- The world becomes sharply divided into the pure and the impure,
the absolutely good (the group/ideology) and the absolutely evil
(everything outside the group)
- One must continually change or conform to the group "norm"
- Tendencies towards guilt and shame are used as emotional
levers for the group's controlling and manipulative influences
- Once a person has experienced the totalist polarization of
good/evil (black/white thinking), he has great difficulty in regaining
a more balanced inner sensitivity to the complexities of human
morality
- The radical separation of pure/impure is both within the
environment (the group) and the individual
- Ties in with the process of confession -- one must confess
when one is not conforming
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- Cultic confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious,
legal and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult
in itself
- Sessions in which one confesses to one's sin are accompanied
by patterns of criticism and self-criticism, generally transpiring
within small groups with an active and dynamic thrust toward personal
change
- Is an act of symbolic self-surrender
- Makes it virtually impossible to attain a reasonable balance
between worth and humility
- A person confessing to various sins of pre-cultic existence
can both believe in those sins and be covering over other ideas
and feelings that s/he is either unaware of or reluctant to discuss
- Often a person will confess to lesser sins while holding on to
other secrets (often criticisms/questions/doubts about the
group/leaders that may cause them not to advance to a leadership
position)
- "The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge
you"
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- The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around
its basic doctrine or ideology, holding it as an ultimate moral
vision for the ordering of human existence
- Questioning or criticizing those basic assumptions is
prohibited
- A reverence is demanded for the ideology/doctrine, the
originators of the ideology/doctrine, the present bearers of the
ideology/doctrine
- Offers considerable security to young people because it
greatly simplifies the world and answers a contemporary need to
combine a sacred set of dogmatic principles with a claim to a
science embodying the truth about human behavior and human
psychology
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- The language of the totalist environment is characterized
by the thought-terminating cliche (thought-stoppers)
- Repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon
- "The language of non-thought"
- Words are given new meanings -- the outside world does not
use the words or phrases in the same way -- it becomes a "group"
word or phrase
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- Every issue in one's life can be reduced to a single set
of principles that have an inner coherence to the point that one
can claim the experience of truth and feel it
- The pattern of doctrine over person occurs when there is
a conflict between what one feels oneself experiencing and what
the doctrine or ideology says one should experience
- If one questions the beliefs of the group or the leaders
of the group, one is made to feel that there is something
inherently wrong with them to even question -- it is always
"turned around" on them and the questioner/criticizer is
questioned rather than the questions answered directly
- The underlying assumption is that doctrine/ideology is
ultimately more valid, true and real than any aspect of actual
human character or human experience and one must subject one's
experience to that "truth"
- The experience of contradiction can be immediately
associated with guilt
- One is made to feel that doubts are reflections of one's
own evil
- When doubt arises, conflicts become intense
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- Since the group has an absolute or totalist vision of
truth, those who are not in the group are bound up in evil,
are not enlightened, are not saved, and do not have the
right to exist
- "Being verses nothingness"
- Impediments to legitimate being must be pushed away or
destroyed
- One outside the group may always receive their right of
existence by joining the group
- Fear manipulation -- if one leaves this group, one
leaves God or loses their transformation, for something bad
will happen to them
- The group is the "elite", outsiders are "of the world",
"evil", "unenlightened", etc.
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©1961, 1987, 1989 by Robert Jay Lifton. All rights reserved.
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