Quotes from Robert Jay Lifton

And I thought about the psychic numbing involved in strategic projections of using hydrogen bombs or nuclear weapons of any kind. And I also thought about ways in which all of us undergo what could be called the numbing of everyday life.

It was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went to Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody had really studied it.

In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.

And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.

When we consider further the social and psychological roots of the collective urge to kill the world, we are likely to see more of ourselves in it and to begin to think of such groups as something of a dark cultural underground of our own society. We are also likely to discover that whatever renders our society more decent and more inclusive in its benefits is likely to undermine the totalistic impulse to destroy everything.

Psychologically, nothing is darker or more menacing, or harder to accept, than the participation of physicians in mass murder. However technicized or commercial the modern physician may have become, he or she is still supposed to be a healer — and one responsible to a tradition of healing, which all cultures revere and depend upon.

They may come to feel that only the world's death can enable them to overcome their own inner deadness.

The incident does not mean that most Japanese were not appalled by Aum. It does suggest that many young adults viewed their society as so corrupt and hypocritical that any degree of mockery, if not violence against it, was justified.

Cultism—like all totalism and fundamentalism—is a reaction against the potential confusions of protean openness. In that sense cultism is reactionary not only in its constraints on the self but on its efforts to stop the flow of history. Expressions of collective proteanism, one of which Václav Havel called "living in truth," can be viewed as a return to the resilience of the self and its dynamic relationship to the historical process.

Certainly, several of our most sensational cults—the Charles Man-son Family, Jim Jones's Peoples Temple, and Marshall Herff Applewhite's Heaven's Gate—take on a different aspect in the wake of Aum. The same is true of the cultic milieu of the present-day extreme right, where fantasies of using weapons of mass destruction to transform and purify the world are powerfully present.

Of course, the Nazi movement was unique in terms of its killing machines and its policy of rounding up millions of people in order to systematically murder them. Nonetheless, the Nazi form of cultism has close resemblances to that of other political and religious groups, and leaves no doubt about cultist capacities for infinite murderousness.

The wall is a messianic promise, and there is deep confusion in both Trump and his followers between the physical entity (a barrier between Mexico and the United States that will never be built) and the metaphysical vision of safety and racial purity.

I came to realize that having a critical grasp of cultist behavior is an important step toward undermining claims of owned reality, and that this was best done from observations on actual human behavior.

What we call historical memory is a creature of time and place. Emotional and political needs of the present intersect with past events. For memory, like perception, can never be simply factual. All our memories are reconstructions.

The Protean Alternative I have stressed the pervasiveness and danger of cultism, but that does not mean it must dominate our future. We are capable of alternatives—even antidotes—that stem from the very structure of the human mind. One such alternative is what I call the protean self, a view of the self as always in process; as being many-sided rather than monolithic, and resilient rather than fixed.

But rather than collapse under these threats and pulls, the self turns out to be surprisingly resilient. It makes use of bits and pieces here and there and somehow keeps going. What may seem to be mere tactical flexibility, or just bungling along, turns out to be much more than that. We find ourselves evolving a self of many possibilities, one that has risks and pitfalls but at the same time holds out considerable promise for the human future.

As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like books about Baseball Joe, as one baseball hero was called.

But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school.

Henry David Thoreau, whom Gandhi read, declared, "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." Havel, Gandhi, and Thoreau sought to live out humane truths that challenged the falsehoods imposed upon them by what they perceived as the malignant normality of their societies.

The individual then responds to the manipulations through developing what I shall call the psychology of the pawn. Feeling unable to escape from forces more powerful than any individual, one subordinates everything to adapting to them.

when he witnessed his first struggle (against another prisoner) - during which the cell chief urged everyone to "help" the man under fire - he thought to himself: "So this is the way of the Communists - using good words to do bad things

He summed up his admiration-tinged condemnation of the Communists in the simple statement: "They lie so truly.

this is the way of the Communists - using good words to do bad things

It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I've never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work.