Losing Reality Quotes

“The Messianic Wall and the Ultra-Loyal Base First published in 2019 There is much talk of Trump’s ultra-loyal political base, and rightly so. That base, or at least the most passionate element of it, consists of angry people who feel spurned by the political establishment. The base showed its psychological and political clout when Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who claimed to speak for it, denounced Trump for “caving” to a unanimous Senate decision to keep the government running, which caused Trump to reverse himself and create a disastrous partial government shutdown. Yet that same base could play a large part in removing Trump from office. People who submit themselves to an omnipotent guru can be especially passionate in their support of all that he says and does. But this cultism can also be a source of vulnerability for both. Leaders and followers can become antagonists rather than mutual nurturers.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“Trump’s solipsism will likely destroy his presidency. Yet along the way something is happening to the rest of us as well. We are experiencing what can be called “reality fatigue.” The drumbeat of falsehoods and lies continues even as we expose them as such: we are thrust into a realm in which a major segment of our society ignores or defies the principles of reason, evidence, and shared knowledge that are required for the function of a democracy. But some of these seemingly unquestioning followers may come to experience conflict over this unreal reality.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“Trump’s falsehoods connect with longstanding American Nativist and Know-Nothing movements, and with totalistic contemporary Republican assertions. He in fact draws upon the voices of right-wing extremism, what Todd Gitlin calls “The Vortex” of “the Birthers, Whitewater, ‘Travelgate,’ and Vince Foster conspiracy theorists, ‘death panel’ enthusiasts, ‘Lock her up!’ chanters, scientist-haters and other Flat Earth factions.” In other words Trump’s solipsism can connect with a sea of mostly right-wing exaggeration, misinformation, conspiracism, falsehood, and lies.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“The loss of reality in American society has a long history and an egregious reactivation in various twentieth-century movements that emphasized conspiracy theories and were summarized by the historian Richard Hofstadter as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In combating these assaults on reality we retain the advantage of working institutions that still apply reality-based rather than solipsistic criteria to their investigations, legal decisions, and journalistic probings. Cultist attacks on those institutions will not go away. But neither will our capacity for openness and truth-telling as alternatives to the closed world of cultism.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“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.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“I was able to visit Prague ten months after the successful revolution and to speak to a number of people close to Havel who described their own experiences in carrying out his principles. They found that they could call upon aspects of their selves that they didn’t know existed: a ne’er-do-well part-time musician became a completely reliable organizer and distributor of an important underground newsletter. A writer denied publishing outlets by the regime came to work effectively with mental patients and then became an adviser to the president of the new democracy. What I called “Proteus in Prague” was the capacity of individual people for attitudes, actions, and skills they had not previously recognized in themselves.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“With Trump and Trumpism, we have had no such murderous arrangement in American society, but we have experienced a national malignant normality of our own: extensive lying and falsification, systemic corruption, ad hominem attacks on critics, dismissal of intelligence institutions and findings, rejection of climate change truths and of scientists who express them, rebukes of our closest international allies and embrace of dictators, and scornful delegitimization of the party of opposition. This constellation of malignant normality has threatened, and at times virtually replaced, American democracy. As citizens, and especially as professionals, we need to bear witness to malignant normality and expose it. We then become what I call “witnessing professionals,” who draw upon their knowledge and experience to reveal the danger of that malignant normality and actively oppose it. That inevitably includes entering into social and political struggles against expressions of malignant normality.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“Historical influences contributing to the protean self can be traced back to the Enlightenment and even the Renaissance in the West, and to at least the Meiji Restoration of the nineteenth century in Japan. These influences include the dislocations of rapid historical change, the mass media revolution, and the threat of human extinction. All have undergone an extraordinary acceleration during the last half of the twentieth century, causing a radical breakdown of prior communities and sources of authority. At the same time, ways of reconstituting the self in the midst of radical uncertainty have also evolved. So much so that the protean self in our time has become a modus vivendi, a “mode of living.” This is especially true in our own country. The same historical forces can, however, produce an apparently opposite reaction: the closing off of the person and the constriction of self-process. It can take the form of widespread psychic numbing—diminished capacity or inclination to feel—and a general sense of stasis and meaninglessness. Or it can lead to an expression of totalism, of demand for absolute dogma and a monolithic self. A prominent form of totalism in our day is fundamentalism. Broadly understood, fundamentalism includes a literalized doctrine, religious or political, enclosed upon itself by the immutable words of the holy books. The doctrine is rendered both sacred in the name of a past of perfect harmony that never was, and central to a quest for collective revitalization. But the totalistic or fundamentalist response is a reaction to proteanism and to the fear of chaos. While proteanism is able to function in a world of uncertainty and ambiguity, fundamentalism wants to wipe out that world in favor of a claim to definitive truth and unalterable moral certainty.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“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.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“Protean Self First published in 1993 We are becoming fluid and many-sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time. This mode of being differs radically from that of the past, and enables us to engage in continuous exploration and personal experiment. I have named it the “protean self” after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms. The protean self emerges from confusion, from the widespread feeling that we are losing our psychological moorings. We feel ourselves buffeted about by unmanageable historical forces and social uncertainties. Leaders appear suddenly, recede equally rapidly, and are difficult for us to believe in when they are around. We change ideas and partners frequently, and do the same with jobs and places of residence. Enduring moral convictions, clear principles of action and behavior—we believe these must exist, but where? Whether dealing with world problems or child rearing, our behavior tends to be ad hoc, more or less decided upon as we go along. We are beset by a contradiction: we are schooled in the virtues of constancy and stability—whether as individuals, groups, or nations—yet our world and our lives seem inconstant and utterly unpredictable. We readily come to view ourselves as unsteady, neurotic, or worse.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“More generally, we seem to be wired for the potential expression of either proteanism or cultism. Cultism, in fact, is largely a reaction to protean multiplicity and the anxieties it produces in connection with the loss of a sense of certainty. Cultism narrows the symbolizing function of the self to the model offered by political totalism or guru-centered reality claims. In this way, cultism interferes with the profound connection between self and history. Proteanism, in contrast, seeks to restore the self’s broader symbolizing function and its overall connection to the historical process. Proteanism, though offering no guarantees about the human future, can help us to stem the cultist loss of reality and reassert an openness to the world.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“Rather, I draw upon the twentieth-century philosophical principle of “symbolic forms” or “symbolic transformations” as put forward by Ernst Cassirer and Susanne K. Langer. According to this tradition, we human beings perceive nothing nakedly but must reconstruct every perception on the basis of the mind’s previous experience. That is, we have no choice but to make everything new. Cassirer thus speaks of human beings as the “animal symbolicum.” And Langer refers to “the transformational nature of human nature,” and to “the mind’s symbol-making function [as] one of man’s primary activities, like eating, looking or moving about … the essential act of mind.” Both suggest that the mind is biologically grounded in our symbolizing function.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“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.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“A still more sobering social media example of a different kind, one so important that it could well have influenced the presidential election of 2016, was the cooperation between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was largely the creation of Steve Bannon and his billionaire sponsor, Robert Mercer. One former co-executive referred to Cambridge Analytica as “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.” Cambridge Analytica combined a particularly vicious version of traditional “dirty tricks” with cutting-edge social media savvy. The dirty tricks, according to its former CEO, Alexander Nix, included bribery, sting operations, the use of prostitutes, and “honey traps” (usually involving sexual behavior, sometimes even initiated for the purposes of obtaining compromising photographs) to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research. The social media savvy included advanced methods developed by the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a young Russian American psychologist working there, created an app that enabled him to gain access to elaborate private information on more than fifty million Facebook users, information specifically identifying personality traits that influenced behavior. Kogan had strong links to Facebook, which failed to block his harvesting of that massive data; he then passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan also taught at the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia; and given the links between Cambridge Analytica and Russian groups, the material was undoubtedly made available to Russian intelligence. So extensive was Cambridge Analytica’s collection of data that Nix could boast, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual…. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Whatever his exaggeration, he was describing a new means of milieu control that was invisible and potentially manipulable in the extreme. Beyond Cambridge Analytica or Kogan, Russian penetration of American social media has come to be recognized as a vast enterprise involving extensive falsification and across-the-board anti-Clinton messages, with special attention given to African American men in order to discourage them from voting. The Russians apparently reached millions of people and surely had a considerable influence on the outcome of the election. More generally, one can say that social media platforms can now create a totality of their own, and can make themselves available to would-be owners of reality by means of massive deception, distortion, and promulgation of falsehoods. The technology itself promotes mystification and becomes central to creating and sustaining cultism. Trump is the first president to have available to him these developments in social media. His stance toward the wild conspiracism I have mentioned is to stop short of total allegiance to them, but at the same time to facilitate them and call them forth in his tweets and harbor their followers at his rallies. All of this suggests not only that Trump and the new social media are made for each other, but also that the problem will long outlive Trump’s brief, but all too long, moment on the historical stage.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“Social Media During the Trump presidency, the internet has itself become a purveyor of claimed reality. Any group—indeed, any individual person—can make use of the internet to disseminate the most bizarre version of ultimate reality, and can do so anonymously. I have mentioned QAnon as a largely social media–created apocalyptic conspiracy theory. Another internet product is the “Cult of Kek,” the alt-right’s semi-ironic religion, which claims the reappearance of Kek, the mythological Egyptian God of Chaos and Darkness, sometimes taking the form of Pepe the Frog. In this narrative, Donald Trump has become the embodiment of this Kek/Pepe chaos, the prophet of the world-destruction sought by the alt-right.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“Donald Trump: “The Assault on Reality” First published in 2018 An important way to understand Trump and Trumpism is as an assault on reality. At issue is the attempt to control, to own, immediate truth along with any part of history that feeds such truth. Since this behavior stems from Trump’s own mind, it is generally attributed to his narcissism (and he has plenty of that). But I would suggest that the more appropriate term is “solipsistic reality.” Narcissism suggests self-love and even, in the quaint language of the early psychoanalysts, libido directed at the self. Solipsism has more to do with a cognitive process of interpreting the world exclusively through the experience and needs of the self.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“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.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“Donald Trump is a special kind of cultist. He is in no way totalistic—his beliefs can be remarkably fluid—nor is he the leader of a sealed-off cultic community. Rather, his cultism is inseparable from his solipsistic reality. That solipsism emanates only from the self and what the self requires, which makes him the most bizarre and persistent would-be owner of reality. And in his way he has created a community of zealous believers who are geographically dispersed. A considerable portion of his base can be understood as cultist, as followers of a guru who is teacher, guide, and master. From my studies of cults and cultlike behavior, I recognize this aspect of Trump’s relationship to his followers. It is evident at his large-crowd events, which began as campaign rallies but have continued to take place during his presidency. There is a ritual quality to the chants he has led such as “Lock her up!” and “Build that wall!” The latter chant is followed by the guru’s question “And who will pay for it?,” then the crowd’s answer, “Mexico!” The chants and responses are less about policy than they are assertions of guru-disciple ties. The chants are rituals that generate “high states”—or what can even be called experiences of transcendence—in disciples. The back-and-forth brings them closer to the guru and enables them to share his claim to omnipotence and his sacred aura. Trump does not directly express an apocalyptic narrative, but his presence has an apocalyptic aura. He tells us that, as not only a “genius” but a “very stable genius,” he alone can “fix” the terrible problems of our society. To be sure these are bizarre expressions of his extreme grandiosity, but also of a man who would be a savior to a disintegrating world.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“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.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“This biomedical vision was part of a more general mysticism that was as described to me and observed firsthand by an American psychiatric colleague, Albert Stunkard, who, as a schoolboy, lived in Germany during the 1930s because his father’s scientific fellowship had brought the family there. Stunkard was astounded by the behavior of many of his student friends; formerly serious and rational adolescents, they became ecstatic Nazi supporters at rallies and in their everyday demeanor. Their intense idealism seemed to him to be transformed into a mystical sense of being part of a new movement that gave meaning to their lives and promise to the human future. (Stunkard was to learn, with some sadness, that most of his friends were eventually killed in military combat.) The larger truth here is that movements that kill great numbers of people are likely to do so with the claim to virtue—and that virtue tends to be, as it was here, one of purification and healing.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“This biomedical vision was part of a more general mysticism that was as described to me and observed firsthand by an American psychiatric colleague, Albert Stunkard, who, as a schoolboy, lived in Germany during the 1930s because his father’s scientific fellowship had brought the family there. Stunkard was astounded by the behavior of many of his student friends; formerly serious and rational adolescents, they became ecstatic Nazi supporters at rallies and in their everyday demeanor. Their intense idealism seemed to him to be transformed into a mystical sense of being part of a new movement that gave meaning to their lives and promise to the human future. (Stunkard was to learn, with some sadness, that most of his friends were eventually killed in military combat.) The larger truth here is that movements that kill great numbers of people are likely to do so with the claim to virtue—and that virtue tends”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“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.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“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.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“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.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“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.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry