This book was a tough read but absolutely fascinating to me as it relates so much of my work (both my creative practice and professional work on an NGO campaign against hate speech and conspiracy theories) to a topic which has obsessed me for the last few years - cults. It drew the link between the behaviour and tactics used by populist and totalitarian leaders on a national scale, which has long been a focus of my creative practice, to the techniques used on a smaller scale in cults. It has really emphasised in my mind the way psychological manipulation is used to indoctrinate people into belief systems. I was especially interested by the discussion around the use of violence and cruelty in order to gain power and control which very much relates to my current work. I also welcomed learning about the concept of the ‘protean self’ something which I had previously (perhaps wrongly) described as individualism – because you can be protean within the context of community.
It was really helpful to consider the historical examples of Chinese Thought Reform during the Cultural revolution and the Nazi regime and compare them to the more contemporary examples of Donald Trump’s presidency and Climate Change. It gives me a small glimmer of hope that we can learn from the past to create a better future for society. I’ve also learned a lot new words, including; ‘proteanism’, ‘milieu control’ and ‘solipsism’.
Quotes
‘I’ve come to recognise that the mental predators are concerned not only with the individual minds but with the ownership of reality itself.’ (page 1)
‘totalistic movements are cultlike and cults are totalistic. In this book I will refer to that totalistic/cultlike constellation as cultist or cultism.’ (page 2)
‘I have insisted upon retaining the word “cult” for groups that meet three criteria: first, a shift in worship from broad spiritual ideas to the person of a charismatic guru; second, the active pursuit of a thought reform-like process that frequently stresses some kind of merger with the guru; and third, extensive exploitation from above (by the guru and leading disciples) – whether economic, sexual, or psychological – of the idealism of ordinary followers from below.’ (page 5)
‘The protean self is characterised by openness, change, and new beginnings, and strongly resists ownership by others. While proteanism is most evident during periods of social change, there is a sense in which it is inherent to the human condition. It has a special connection to the historical experience of modernity and postmodernity.’ (page 12)
‘I realised that one of the main causes for confusion about thought reform lay in the complexity of the process itself. Some people considered it a relentless means of undermining the human personality; others saw it as profoundly “moral” – even religious – attempt to instill new ethics into the Chinese people.’ (page 20)
‘In late 1956, the Party announced that thought reform would continue, but it would be a thought reform of a new kind: there would be “freedom of independent thinking, freedom of debate, freedom of creative work, freedom to criticize, to express one’s own views.” When Chinese intellectuals finally spoke out, they bitterly criticised every phrase of Communist rule, including the Party infallibility, the benevolence of the Beijing regime and the integrity of Mao Zedong himself.’ (page 31)
‘A true picture of the program’s impact can only be obtained by visualising within the emotional life of individual Chinese people a fluctuating complex of genuine enthusiasm, neutral compliance, passive withdrawal, and hostility of suffocation.’ (page 33)
‘We recognise a sequence in Mao from brilliant revolutionary to cruel despot.’ (page 37)
‘One observer summarises Mao on the basis of the doctor’s observations as “clearly a monster – egomaniacal, oblivious to twentieth-century science, technology, and language, paranoid, cruel, cunning, deceitful, and a sexual predator.”’ (page 38)
‘A key to the momentum of the Cultural Revolution was the merging of purity and power. We may define “purity” as encompassing such things as self-denial (or even self-surrender) on behalf of a higher cause, the urge to eliminate evil, and ideological single-mindedness. And we may speak of “power” either as the ability to make decisions and take actions that exert control and influence over others, or as the sense of inner strength and capacity… Purity and power are in fact psychologically inseperable. Both are ultimately associated with some kind of divine, or at least more than human, image. Purity is “godlike” and “god-given” in the sense of virtue so absolute that it transcends all personal frailty. Power is godlike in the more ominous sense of hubris, of humanity usurping divine prerogatives, and of a leader looking upon him or herself as a god.’ (page 48)
‘two psychological assumptions long prominent in Mao’s Thought but never so overtly insisted upon as during the Cultural Revolution. The first set was an image of the human mind as infinitely malleable, capable of being reformed, transformed and rectified without limit. The second was a related vision of the will as all-powerful, even to the extent that (in his own words) “the subjective creates the objective”.’ (page 51)
‘One might be tempted to dismiss the entire cult of Mao and his Thought as no more than sycophantic indulgence of an old man’s vanity were it not for the life Mao lived and the impact he made upon the Chinese people. No twentieth-century life has come closer than his to the great myth of the hero’ (page 54)
‘That is the essence of psychism. The leader turns inward toward an increasingly idiosyncratic and extreme vision of immortality, and demands that his vision be permanently imprinted upon all.' (page 59)
'Since 2016, about a million Uighurs have been incarcerated in re-education camps with extensive electronic surveillance and subjected to varieties of thought reform that include forced violations of Muslim religion.’ (page 64)
‘Like Mao, Xi is fond of quoting Confucius and other classical Chinese figures, in keeping with a nationalistic resurgence…One o his major projects has been a campaign against corruption, which enables him to be an agent of social purification. Thought reform is an ever-available method of purification in the service of dictatorship and authoritarian rule.’ (page 65)
‘Many things happen psychologically to one exposed to milieu control; the most basic is the disruption of balance between self and outside world. Pressured toward a merger of internal and external milieus, individuals encounter a profound threat to personal autonomy. They are deprived of the combination of external information and inner reflection required to test the realities of their environment and to maintain a measure of identity separate from it.’ (page 70)
‘One is asked to accept these manipulations on a basis of ultimate trust (or faith): “like a child in the arms of its mother,” as one formerly imprisoned Westerner I interviewed in Hong Kong accurately perceived. One who trusts to this degree can accept the manipulations encountered, and may welcome their mysteriousness, find pleasure in their pain, and feel them to be necessary for the fulfilment of the “higher purpose” put forward. But such elemental trust is difficult to maintain; and even the strongest can be dissipated by constant manipulation.’ (page 72)
‘But whatever one’s response – whether cheerful in the face of being manipulated, deeply resentful, or feeling a combination of both – one has been deprived of the opportunity to exercise one’s capacities for self-expression and independent action.’ (page 73)
‘The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. This sacredness is evident in the prohibition (whether or not explicit) against the questioning of basic assumptions, and in the reverence that is demanded for the originators of the Word, the present bearers of the Word, and the Word itself.’ (page 79)
‘The language of the totalist environment is characterised by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorised and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.’ (page 81)
‘ideological totalism does even greater violence to the human potential: it evokes destructive emotions, produces intellectuals and psychological constrictions, and deprives people of all that is most subtle and unimaginative – under the false promise of eliminating those very imperfections and ambivalences that help to define the human condition.’ (page 91)
‘The ancient cults, religious scholars tell us, were integral to their societies as part of a flow of worship and organisation that provided form and continuity. (The word cult is related to “culture” and “cultivate.”). (page 95)
‘Peoples Temple and Aum Shinrikyō were very different cults. But in each case there was an unstable guru with considerable charisma and religious and organisational talent who moved in and out of psychosis and embraced violence as a form of immortalising his cult and himself.’ (page 98)
‘There have certainly been repercussions from our increasing knowledge about cults; many cults have had difficulty obtaining members since their patterns of deception have become more recognisable and less effective.’ (page 102)
‘Most German doctors at Auschwitz were not extreme ideologues but were socialised to killing, meaning that they sufficiently internalised the morals and behaviour of the group to which they were assigned.’ (page 135)
‘Scientific racism and mental hygiene were the medical-materialistic principles by which the Nazis murdered in the name of purification. Above all they had to “purify the blood”, which became a means of rendering sacred the mystical-immortal Aryan race and community.’ (page 141)
‘Always important to an atrocity-producing situation is its capacity to motivate individuals psychologically toward engaging in atrocity. Beyond Auschwitz there was much in the Nazi movement that promoted doubling. The overall Nazi project, replete with cruelty, required constant doubling in the service of carrying out the cruelty.’ (pages 145-146)
‘Poft-First World War confusion… German culture had begun to divide itself into two camps: the artistic and social experimentalists who tried out every variety of newness in a great rush of creativity and excess; and the right-wing political restorationists who “despised… precisely this free-floating spirit of experimentation.” Both camps were dealing with an intense experience of loss. There was a breakdown in the symbolisation of cultural continuity or of collective immortality.’ (page 148)
‘From my studies of cults and cultlike behaviour, I recognise 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!”.’ (page 152)
‘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 saviour to a disintegrating world.’ (page 153)
‘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.’ (page 156)
‘Trump is different. His solipsism is sui generis. He is psychologically remarkable in his capacity to manufacture and continuously assert falsehood in the apparent absence of psychosis.’ (page 159)
‘Does Trump believe his own falsehoods? The question itself suggests a clear dichotomy between belief and disbelief, which is not always the way things work. In studying people’s behaviour under extremity, I have found that the mind can simultaneously believe and not believe in something, and can move in and out of belief according to perceived pressures.’ (pages 159-160)
‘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.’ (page 161)
‘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.’ (page 164)
‘Our image of Climate change moves back and forth between incremental and apocalyptic dangers. Given the extreme climate events to which we have recently been afflicted, the tendency toward imagery of the apocalyptic. People who resist climate truths can no longer be seen as simple deniers. Because they inevitably know in some part of their minds that climate change is real, they are better termed “climate rejecters.”, unable to take in or act upon global warming because of their existing worldview, identity, or political affiliations.’ (page 172)
‘With climate there, there can be the feeling among many that nothing we do will help, that we are doomed by events we have no capacity to influence. All this is an example – the ultimate example – of the role activism can play both in mitigating extreme danger and over coming collective despair.’ (page 174)
‘the protean self, a view of the self as always in process; as being many-sided rather than monolithic, and resilient rather than fixed. The protean self is a way of adapting to significant historical dislocation and change. It is at the same time an expression of the basic human need for symbolisation… 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.’ (page 177)
‘Proteanism, though offering no guarantee about the human future, can help us to stem the cultist loss of reality and reassert an openness to the world.’ (page 179)
‘While proteanism is able to function in a world of uncertainty and ambiguity, fundamentalism wants to wipe out that world in favour of a claim to definitive truth and unalterable moral certainty.’ (page 182)
‘I must separate myself, however, from those observers, postmodern or otherwise, who equate multiplicity and fluidity with disappearance of the self, with a complete absence of coherence among its various elements. I would claim the opposite: proteanism involves a quest for authenticity and complexity and ambiguity may well represent a certain maturation in our concept of self. The protean self seeks to be both fluid and grounded, however tenuous that combination.’ (page 187)
‘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 hominen 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.’ (page 189)
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