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Key concepts described in Robert Jay Lifton’s Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry.
Ideological Totalism can be deadly on a scale that can be difficult to comprehend. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” entailed ideological convictions that led to the death of 20 to 40 million people, while Mao’s attempt to bring about a “Cultural Revolution” lead to bands of adolescent “wandering zealots” in search of evil, against which they were enjoined to “break and smash” and sometimes kill. The “Youth Force” created by Mao sought to impose the “new” over the “old” and involved a coordinated attack upon teachers. “The general image was not unlike that of a children’s crusade. They were a mass of youngsters unified by a transcendent vision, so infused with a sense of virtue as to be almost beatific…” They initiated widespread violence and chaos across Chinese society. A massacre in Guangxi involved acts of cannibalism, and massacres occurred in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Hunan.2 Estimates of the death toll vary widely, typically ranging from 1–2 million. The destructiveness of the movement was justified by the phrase: “So long as it is revolutionary, no action is a crime.”
While most scholars are reluctant to estimate a total number of “unnatural deaths” in China under Mao, evidence shows he was in some way responsible for at least 40 million deaths and perhaps 80 million or more. This includes deaths he was directly responsible for and deaths resulting from ideologically derived policies Mao refused to change. 3
What is Reality?
The sense in which the term “reality” is used here is straightforward. One sense of the term refers to ever changing socially constructed social and political beliefs: for example, the idea that individual human beings have “rights” is a “reality” in the sense that such a notion has been embedded in liberal democratic societies for several hundred years.
But another sense of the term “reality” is employed here. This sense of term refers to something more immediate and factual than a conceptualized “right” to free speech. It refers to something that is neither abstract nor contingent upon changing ideological trends or preconceptions, but rather pertains to readily observable facts about events or situations that occur in the world. Examples of facts that constitute this sense of the term “reality” might include those that relate to the shape of the earth, the outcome of an election, the birthplace and citizenship of a President, scientific consensus regarding the earth’s climate, or the effect of immunization on public health. There is nothing ambiguous, obscure, or complicated about this sense of the term “reality”: it simply refers to the way things really are.
Reality and Function
The proper functioning of individuals, organizations and society depends upon proper apprehension of reality. Just as pilots of an airplane need accurate information about “realities” that govern the plane’s flight – e.g., the plane’s altitude, velocity, and rudder position – citizens, organizations, and societies depend on proper apprehension of facts to govern themselves and their society safely and effectively. Conversely, just as a plane’s passengers risk doom if pilots are deprived of facts that allow them to safely navigate, a society composed of individuals and institutions influenced by ideologies that distort or ignore reality are at very high risk for dysfunction, violence, and self-destruction. Such individuals and organizations may be said to lack “situational awareness”, the ability to perceive, understand, and effectively respond to their situation. Organizations and democratic society require a shared sense of reality to function effectively.
Ideological Totalism and Loss of Reality Contact
Ideological totalism refers to the internalization of a system of ideas that claim to explain and provide solutions for all human problems.
Ideological totalism is closely related to cultism and cult-like behavior. While most people associate cults with small sealed-off groups that share strange ideas, ideological totalism and cult-like behavior not only blend with one another but are part of a single entity. “Totalistic movements are cult-like, and cults are totalistic.” Ideological totalism and cult-like attitudes and behavior are increasingly pervasive and exert an ever-increasing impact on American society-at-large.
Mental Predation
There is often a predatory aspect to ideological totalism. Leaders of totalist movements seek total control over what adherents’ regard as reality. Facts that are inconsistent with the totalist vision are either entirely excluded from awareness or distorted so that they conform to the leaders’ reality. Ideological totalism and the cult-like behavior it generates is dangerous to individuals and society because such movements interfere with the ability of adherents to apprehend the way things really are.
Identifying the Threat: Defining Features of Ideological Totalism
Since ideological totalism primarily refers to attitudes, convictions, and behaviors that one manifests in relation to one’s ideas rather than the ideas themselves, it can pervade movements on the “left” and “right”. Totalism can plague prestigious mainstream institutions (such as elite universities and respected mainstream media outlets) as well as more marginalized individuals and organizations. In an important sense, right-wing and left-wing ideological cults depend on each other to grow: rampant ideological totalism in prestigious “elite” institutions (whose prestige has recently diminished due, in part, to the ascent of totalism1) fans ideological totalism among the more marginalized, culminating in a vicious circle of reactivity that conduces to the growth of ideological totalism on all sides. Ideological totalism “mobilizes extremist tendencies in those outsiders under attack, thus creating a vicious cycle of totalism.”
What is the difference between a legitimate attempt to develop coherent ideas and concepts about the way things really are, on the one hand, and totalist ideological movements motivated by an attempt to own and control reality, on the other?
The following devices pervade totalist movements and are far less present among groups and organizations whose capacity to apprehend and test reality remains intact:
Milieu Control: The control of human communication is a central feature of ideological totalism. Growing concern over threats to free speech in our society derive in large part from the growth of ideological totalism across the social and political spectrum. Totalist leaders consider it their duty to control an environment in which they possess reality: they police in-group communications and castigate and cancel those who utter thoughts, feelings, and ideas that do not conform to the cult’s ideology.
Demand for Purity: Totalist ideology divides the world into evil and good. “One imbues aspects of oneself as virtuous and other aspects as shameful, all in accordance with the ideology. The more intense the guilt, the more intense the hatred. The more guilty one feels, the greater the hatred, and the more threatening the outside influences seem. The universal tendency toward projection is nourished and institutionalized, leading to mass hatreds, purges, and holy wars.”
Confession: The group defines sins that members should confess either to a personal monitor or publicly to the group. In Mao’s China, confessions followed a consistent pattern: 1) Denunciation of one’s past immorality and erroneous views, 2) a description of the way one was changing all of this under Communist guidance, and 3) a humble expression of remaining deficits and a pledge to work hard to overcome them with the help of progressive colleagues and Party members. A similar pattern is now seen in totalist movements on the American left.
Sacred Science: The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as the ultimate moral vision for human existence. The aura and prestige of scientific or pseudo-scientific data is frequently combined with moral absolutes to demonstrate the absolute “truth” of the cult’s ideology.
Language of Non-Thought: Communications within totalist movements are permeated by thought terminating clichés. “The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. Totalist language is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but the most devoted advocate, deadly dull.”
The effect of such language on the individual is intellectual, emotional, and psychological constriction. The individual who finds himself in a totalist milieu may shout ideological jargon to demonstrate conformity or she may dutifully produce the expected clichés in public performances. Either way, imagination “becomes increasingly dissociated from actual life experiences and may even tend to atrophy from disuse.”
Doctrine Over Person: This aspect of ideological totalism manifests in attitudes and behaviors that may alarm observers, for it often culminates in inhumane and even sociopathic behavior. Because the ideological cult subordinates all human experience to the claims of doctrine, humans can be subjected to any form of punishment and suffering. The assumption guiding the ideological cult is that the doctrine is ultimately more valid, true, and real than any aspect of human character or experience. The ideology subordinates the human (the non-conforming or sinful individual) to the inhuman (the doctrine).
Dispensing of Existence: Totalists feel compelled to destroy (or “cancel”) all who do not follow the one true path. By these means totalists feel that they are furthering the great ideological vision to which they are committed. The totalist environment stimulates a fear of annihilation, such that existence comes to depend on a sense of total merger with an ideological movement. Parroting thought-terminating cliches, for example, is not only a way of signaling conformity or virtue but is experienced as a way of enhancing one’s survival prospects.
The Allure of Totalism
“Behind ideological totalism lies the ever-present human quest for the omnipotent guide that will bring about ultimate solidarity to humankind … The degree to which one embraces totalism…(is) in some measure (attributable to aspects of) childhood experience from which no one entirely escapes. It may be that the capacity for totalism is most fundamentally a product of human childhood itself, of the prolonged period of helplessness and dependency through which each of us must pass. Even when children develop into adolescents, they continue to require many of the all or nothing polarities of totalism as term with which to define their intellectual, emotional, and moral worlds. These requirements can be replaced by more flexible and moderate tendencies, but they never entirely disappear.”
Because totalist movements entail patterns of attitude, thinking, and behavior that are reminiscent of childhood, they constitute a form of mass regression. But they also involve ideas and aspirations that are specifically adult.
With the weakening of institutions such as religion, family, marriage, and state that have historically organized the lifecycle and belief systems, cult-like movements can provide substitute structures that have meaning for young (and sometimes not so young) people.
Cult-like movements are both radical and reactionary. The seeming radicality of totalist ideology appeals to the young. But the movements are also reactionary in the sense that adherents revert to child-like patterns of relating to authority, giving rise to patterns of “internal fascism” that can plague movements and organizations.
Sources:
All quotations are derived from:
Lifton, Robert Jay. Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry. The New Press. New York. 2019.
RJ Lifton is an American Psychiatrist and authority on the psychological causes and effects of Thought Reform. Thought Reform is “an extreme version of ever-present human tendencies to contrast one’s own purity with the impurity of all else; and on that basis to justify one’s claim to the ownership of reality.”
While Lifton was studying Chinese ideological “remolding” in Asia, he heard about McCarthyism in the United States, leading to his “sense that the whole world had gone mad, that there was a pandemic of assault on the mind and reality”.
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawhitford/2024/04/29/the-new-ivies-as-employers-sour-on-the-super-elite-these-20-colleges-shine/?sh=50bae87c438f
- Song, Yongyi (25 August 2011). “Chronology of Mass Killings during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)”. Sciences Po.
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/how-many-died-new-evidence-suggests-far-higher-numbers-for-the-victims-of-mao-zedongs-era/01044df5-03dd-49f4-a453-a033c5287bce/
Workosophy 