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The Super Power Syndrome
Robert Jay Lifton, M.D.
Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, New York, 2003, 210 pp., $12.95
Reviewed by:
Rev.
Walter Debold
Perhaps we could agree that a review of a serious
book ought to answer four questions:
-
Who is the author?
- What does he/she have to say?
- What does he/she mean?
- Is he/she persuasive?
For readers of the Cultic Studies Review
there is hardly need to introduce Robert Jay Lifton. After a long and
distinguished career in academe he is now a visiting professor at
Harvard. In 1963 he authored the book that became most fundamental for
our understanding of modern manipulative cults, Thought Reform and
the Psychology of Totalism. Later he gave us The Nazi Doctors
and, more recently, Who Owns Death, the analysis of Aum
Shinrikyo, the group which spread sarin gas in the Tokyo subway.
This latest book assesses what its jacket describes
as "America's apocalyptic confrontation with the world." Anyone who has
read Lifton before will see in this work both progress and consistency
in his grasp of the intellectual virus which he labels "totalism."
Those who may be apprehensive about what is
evolving in modern society can, at least, be grateful that Lifton makes
us aware of what is happening. He raises our consciousness and, maybe
our conscience.
A quarter of a century ago a journalist, John
Lukas, used the word, "totalitarian" to describe what he called the
theme of the twentieth century. But long before that, Lifton, Louis
Jolyon West and Margaret Singer had worked with recovered prisoners from
the Korean War and observed the techniques by which their captors
managed to turn their minds. Now, as we begin the twenty first century,
Lifton adds the word "apocalyptic" to our vocabulary as he warns, "the
apocalyptic imagination has spawned a new kind of violence." (p. 1)
Such a mentality attempts to offer us a "future" after the "end" and the
author is warning us that "America finds itself at the epicenter of the
apocalyptic contagion" (p. 8) and that "beneath its belligerence, I
believe the country is enmeshed in a landscape of fear." (xii)
The war which we have undertaken against terrorism
is a manifestation of what Lifton is convinced is a "superpower
syndrome," a medical metaphor meant to suggest "aberrant behavior that
is not just random but part of a more general psychological and
political constellation." (xii)
We have seen examples of this mentality in Stalin,
Hitler, Mao, Osama Bin Laden, and Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum
Shinrikyo. All of them projected a new beginning after the annihilation
of everything-even if that meant the death of all mankind. (p. 24). The
Nazis came to "epitomize the principle of killing to heal, of destroying
vast numbers of human beings as therapy for the world." (p. 29)
We Americans are disturbed to see ourselves
absorbed in a philosophy that Lifton calls "nuclearism" which enables us
to perceive our atomic bomb as a "source of transcendent power, of
life-sustaining security and peace-potentially life-saving as well as
life-destroying…the bomb was to save the world from itself." (p. 41)
The Maoist thought reform had "the apocalyptic aim
of nothing less than the ownership of truth and reality-that is, the
ownership of the mind and thus, inseparable from the ownership of
death." (p. 51)
If we see that word, "ownership" as one of Lifton's
favorite words it is because of the fact that he is fundamentally
concerned with power, its use and abuse… Early in this book he had
perceived our "cosmic ambition" which seeks not only to dominate history
but to control it. (p. 3 and 122)
Ironically we are haunted by a fear of weakness.
The wounded giant of "9/11" had attracted the sympathy of the world but
that compassion under went a turnabout when we decided on a unilateral
response. As Lifton says, "Our fear of being out of control can lead to
the most aggressive efforts at total control of everyone else." (p. 178)
We are meaning-hungry people as Lifton sees us and
thus, he assists us by holding up a mirror for us to see ourselves
against the background of the times and the contamination that surrounds
us. He is hopeful: "I wrote this book in a spirit of hope, hope which
is always bound up with the rush of imagination." He is hopeful that we
can step out of the superpower syndrome and thus cease being a nation
ruled by fear. (p. 190)
That step will necessitate our surrender of the
claim of certainty, of the ownership of truth and reality. (p. 196)
The author warns us that "the war on terrorism has
no clear end." (p.112) He sees a danger in the concept of a former CIA
director that we are already in a fourth world war. (p. 114) No
paragraph is more ominous than this one:
The Bush administration's projection of American power extends not only
over planet Earth, but through the militarization of Space over the
heavens as well. Its strategists dream of deciding the outcome of
significant world events everywhere. We may call this an empire of
fluid world control and theirs is nothing less than an inclusive claim
to the ownership of history. It is a claim never made before because
never before has technology permitted the imagining of such an
enterprise, however illusory, on the part of a head of state and his
inner circle. (p. 175)
We are warned that the administration's radicalism
takes the form of aggressively re-making the world in an American image
(p. 176) and that the hazards of this are compounded by our presumption
that it is our mission to bring about what is ultimately God's plan not
ours. (p. 122)
Is Lifton persuasive? Yes, this reviewer is completely won by the book
and its message. The author draws a deeper lesson from Lord Acton's
famous phrase in which he told us that power corrupts and that absolute
power corrupts absolutely: here we are persuaded that the very quest for
and claim to absolute power is beginning of the corruption. (p. 190)
Moreover, it becomes even more threatening when the Christian
fundamentalist mindset blends with and intensifies our military
fundamentalism.
In our defensiveness, sometimes, we can grow to
resemble the worst aspects of the thing we oppose. As a result when we
follow a leader with a sense of mission that empowers him to say, "I am
in the Lord's hands" and "there is a reason why I am here," we may not
appear very different from some of the worst of Islamic fundamentalists.
(p. 119)
I am persuaded by a book that concludes with this
counsel: "Were Americans to reject a superpower syndrome, they would
also reject a claim to an exclusive American power over life and death.
We could rejoin the world as fellow mortals and, in the process
rediscover our all too fallible and fragmentary humanity for the
precious gift it is." (p. 199)
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