Malignant Normality

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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.

Malignant Normality: “The imposition of a norm of destructive…behavior, so that such behavior is expected – and sometimes required – of people”.

Robert Jay Lifton

The Banality of Careerism

In his study of Nazi doctors who carried out the Nazi agenda – which often involved selection of people for gas chambers and torture – Lifton found that the great majority adapted to that malignant normality.

In Zone of Interest (a film produced in 2023 loosely based on research by the book’s author Martin Amis), the extreme destructiveness upon which the Auschwitz commandant’s life is predicated is relentless but apparently normal. The objective of the organization within which the commandant competes – i.e., the extermination of millions of human beings – are not necessarily enunciated but rather adapted to. What the murderers feel is not ideology but ambition: the desire to rise within the prevailing hierarchy, such that the status and goods that reflect success (i.e., respect from one’s peers, a sizable home with a pleasing large garden) can be attained. The ends of the system are accomplished because those that participate in it are excellent functionaries. It is mainly the processes (i.e., technical considerations pertaining to furnaces and transport) by which Auschwitz operates that occupy the “zone of interest”, such that the ends of the operation (the murder of over one million human beings) are largely ignored.

Extreme destructiveness can occur when attention is exclusively focused on performing one’s allotted function. When ends are primarily careerist, the ends of the individual or organization to which one’s efforts are devoted become irrelevant. When a society succumbs to destructive norms, commonplace qualities such as ambition and careerism can facilitate mass murder.

Three Modes of Response

How do most individuals respond when their society succumbs to destructive ideologies and narratives and normality becomes malignant? In his study of Chinese thought reform and the Chinese cultural revolution, Lifton identified three forms of response:

• Enthusiasm. The word enthusiasm originates from the Greek ἐνθουσιασμός – from ἐν (en, “in”) and θεός (theós, “god”) – and means “inspired or possessed by [a] god”. Among Chinese intellectuals under Mao, there were “zealous converts who underwent a profound religious experience. They felt genuinely reborn, along with their society. Zealous converts were usually youthful, either adolescents or young adults.” Adherents to contemporary American ideological and fascist movements sometimes describe a process of conversion reminiscent of that which is described by individuals who have undergone religious conversion.

• Resistance. Resisters are those who feel suffocated by the program and consider it bad or coercive. Resisters who stayed in China could not reveal any thought or feeling than ran contrary to the constantly shifting nuances of Mao’s ideology. Americans – particularly those employed by universities or in the corporate world – increasingly feel that they cannot reveal thoughts, feelings, or ideas that run counter to prevailing ideological trends.

• Adaptation: This was the most common response among Chinese intellectuals under Mao and is also the most common response to malignant normality in American society. Adapters are partially, but not entirely, convinced by an ideological (or political) program and are “essentially … concerned with the problems of coping with a stressful experience and finding a place in the new society…Adapters, while by no means unaffected by the ideology, were likely to be less affected by it than either zealous converts or resisters.” Under circumstances that prevail in malignant normality, careerism constitutes a primary mode of adaptation.

Regaining Reality: Witnessing Professionals

“If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the main fundamental threat to it is living the truth.”

Vaclav Havel

In the Czech Velvet Revolution, Havel spoke of an expanding community of people who lived as though there were no oppressive regime controlling their lives. Mohandas Gandhi similarly spoke of non-violent resistance as “experiments with truth”, such that Erik Erikson’s biography of Gandhi was titled Gandhi’s Truth. Havel, Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau sought contact with realty and challenged the falsehoods imposed upon them by the malignant normality that prevailed in their societies.

Cultist attacks on American institutions will not go away, but neither will our capacity for openness and reality contact as alternatives to the closed world of cultism.