The following excerpt from Robert J. Lifton's The Future of Immortality and
Other Essays for a Nuclear Age (New York, Basic Books, 1987) is a
comprehensive explanation of Lifton's eight criteria for defining mind
control. Although they are mentioned in quotation marks in the text, I will
list than here for ease of identification:
The essay fron which this selection is taken it entitled "Cults: Religious
Totalism and Civil Liberties." In it, Lifton frames his comments in relation
to what he called "ideological totalism," or the environment is thich
Chinese thought reform was practiced, as he came to know of it from the
Korean War and afterwards.
The phenemenology I used when writing about ideological totalism in the past
still seems useful to me, even though I wrote that book in 1960. The first
characteristic is "milieu control," which is essentially the control of
communication within an environment. If the control is extremely intense, it
becomes a internalized control---an attempt to manage an individual's inner
communication. This can never be fully achieved, but it can go rather far.
It is what sometimes has been called a "God's-eye view"---a conviction that
reality is the group's exclusive possession. Clearly this kind of process
creates conflicts in respect to individual autonomy: if sought or realized
in such an environment, autonomy becomes a threat to milieu control. Milieu
control within cults tend to be maintained and expressed in several ways:
group process, isolation from other people, psychological pressure,
geographical distance or unavailability of transportation, and sometimes
physical pressure There is often a sequence events, such as seminars,
lectures, and group encounters, which become increasingly intense and
increasingly isolated, making it extremely difficult both physically and
psychologically---for one to leave.
These cults differ from patterns of totalism in other societies. For
instance the centers that were used for reform in China were more or less in
keeping with the ethos of the society as it was evolving at the time: and
therefore when one was leaving them or moving in and out of them, one would
still find reinforcement from without. Cults, in contrast, tend to become
islands of totalism within a larger society that is on the whole
antagonistic to these islands. This situation can create a dynamic of its
own; and insofar as milieu control is to be maintained, the requirements are
magnified by that structural situation. Cult leaders must often deepen their
control and manage the environment more systematically, and sometimes with
greater intensity, in order to maintain that island of totalism within the
antagonistic outer world.
The imposition of intense milieu control is closely connected to the process
of change. (This partly explains why there can be a sudden lifting of the
cult identity when a young person who has been in a cult for some time is
abruptly exposed to outside, alternative influences.) One can almost observe
the process in some young people who undergo a dramatic change in their
prior identity whatever it was, to an intense embrace of a cult's belief
system and group structure. I consider this a form of doubling: a second
self is formed that lives side by side with the prior self, somewhat
autonomously from it. Obviously there must be some connecting element to
integrate oneself with the other---otherwise the overall person could not
function; but the autonomy of each is impressive. When the milieu control is
lifted by removing, by whatever means, the recruit from the totalistic
environment, somthing of the earlier self reasserts itself. This leavetaking
may occur voluntarily or through force (or simply, as in one court case, by
the cult member moving across to the other side of the table, away from
other members). The two selves ean exist simultaneously and confusedly for a
considerable time, and it may be that the transition periods are the most
intense snd psychologically painful as well as the most potentially
harmful.
A second general characteristic of totalistic environments is what I call
"mystical manipulation" or "planned spontaneity." It is a systematic process
that is planned and managed from above (by the leadership) but appaers to
have arisen spontaneously within the environment. The process need not feel
like manipulation, which raises important philosophical questions. Some
aspects--- such as fasting, chanting, and limited sleep---have a certain
tradition and have been practiced by religious groups over the centuries.
There is a cult pattern now in which a particular "chosen" human being is
seen as a savior or a source of salvation. Mystical manipulation can take on
a special quality in these cults because the leaders become mediators for
God. The God-centered principles can be put forcibly and claimed
exclusively, so that the cult and its beliefs become the only true path to
salvation. This can give intensity to the mystical manipulation and justify
those involved with promulgating it and, in many cases, those who are its
recipients from below.
Insofar as there is a specific individual, a leader, who becomes the center
of the mystical manipulation (or the person in whose name it is done), there
is a twofold process at work. The leader can sometimes be more real than an
abstract god and therefore attractive to cult members. On the other hand,
that person can also be a source of disillusionment. If one believes, as has
been charged, that Sun Myung Moon (founder of the Unification Church, whose
members are consequently referred to frequently as "Moonies") has
associations with the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and this
information is made available to people in the Unification Church, their
relationship to the church can be threatened by disillusionment toward a
leader. It is never quite that simple a pattern of cause and effect---but I
am suggesting that this style of leadership has both advantages and
disadvantages in terms of cult loyalty.
While mystical manipulation leads (in cult members) to what I have called
the psychology of the pawn, it can also include a legitimation of deception
(of outsiders)---the "heavenly deception" of the Unification Church,
although there are analogous patterns in other cult environments. If one has
not seen the light, and it is not in the realm of the cult, one is in the
realm of evil and therefore can be justifiably deceived for the higher
purpose. For instance, when members of certain cults have collected funds,
it has sometimes been considered right for them to deny their affiliation
when asked. Young people have been at centers of a particular cult for some
time without being told that these were indeed run by it. The totalistic
ideology can and often does justify deception.
The next two characteristics of totalism, the "demand for purity" and the
"cult of confeuion," are familiar. The demand for purity can create a
Manichean quality in cults, as in some other religious and political groups.
Such a demand calls for radical separation of pure and impure, of good and
evil, within an environment and within oneself. Absolute purification is a
continuing process. It is often institutionalized; and, as a source of
stimulation of guilt and shame, it ties in with the confession process.
Ideological movements, at whatever level of intensity, take hold of an
individual's guilt and shame mechanisms to achieve intense influence over
the changes he or she undergoes. This is done within a confession process
that has its own structure. Sessions in which one confesses to one's sins
are accompanied by patterns of criticism and self criticism, generally
transpiring within small groups and with an active and dynamic thrust toward
personal change.
One could say more about the ambiguity and complexity of this process, and
Camus has observed that "authors of confessions write especially to avoid
confession, to tell nothing of what they know." Camus may have exaggerated
but he is correct in suggesting that confessions contain varying mixtures of
revelation and concealment. A young person confessing to various sins of
pre-cultic or pre-institutional existence can both believe in those sins and
be covering over other ideas and feelings that he or she is either unaware
of or reluctant to discuss. In some cases, these sins include a continuing
identification with one's prior existence if such idendfication has not been
successfully dishonored by the confession process. Repetitious confession,
then, is often an expression of extreme arrogance in the name of apparent
humility. Again Camus: "I practice the profession of penitence, to be able
to end up as a judge," and "the more I accuse myself, the more I have a
right to judge you." That is central tbeme in any conntinual confessional
process, particularly where it is required in an enclosed group process.
The next three patterns I describe in regard to ideological totalism are
"the sacred science," the "loading of the language," and tbe principle of
"doctrine over person." The phrases are almost self-explanatory. I would
emphasize especially sacred science, for in our age something must be
scientific as well a spiritual to have a substantial effect on people.
Sacred science can offer considerable security to young people because it
greatly simplifies the world. The Unification Church is a good example, but
not the only one, of a contemporary need to combine a sacred set of dogmatic
principles with a claim to a science embodying the truth about buman
behavior and human psychology. In the case of the Unification Church, this
claim to a comprehensive human science is furthered by involving prominent
scholars (who are paid unusually high honoraria) to large symposia that
stress unification of thought; participants express tbeir views freely but
nonetheless contribute to the desired aura of intellectual legitimacy.
The term "loading the language" refers to a literelization of language---and
to words or images becoming god. A greatly simplified language may seem
cliche-ridden but can have enormous appeal and psychological power in its
very simplification. Because every issue in one's life---and these are often
very complicated young lives---can be reduced to a single set of principles
that have an inner coherence, one can claim the experience of truth and feel
it. Answers are available. Lionel Trilling has called this the "language of
non-thought" because there is a cliche and a simple explanation to which the
most complicated and otherwise difficult questions can be reduced.
The pattern of doctrine over person occurs when there is a conflict between
what one feels oneself experiencing and what the doctrine or dogma says one
should experience. The internalized message in totalistic environments is
that one must find the truth of the dogma and subject one's experiences to
that truth. Often the experience of contradiction, or the admission of that
experience, can be immediately associated with guilt; or else (in order to
hold one to that doctrine) condemned by others in a way that leads quickly
to that guilty association. One is made to feel that doubts are reflections
of one's own evil. Yet doubts can arise; and when conflicts become intense,
people can leave. This is the most frequent difficulty of many of the cults:
membership may present more of a problem than money.
Finally, the eighth, and perhaps the most general and significant of these
charteristics, is what I call the "dispensing of existence" This principle
is usually metaphorical. But if one has an absolute or totalistic vision of
truth, then those who have not seen the light---have not embraced that
truth, are in some way in the shadows---are bound up with evil, tainted, and
do not have the right to exist. There is a "being versus nothingness"
dichotomy at work here. Impediments to legitimate being must be pushed away
or destroyed. One placed in the second category of not having the right to
exist can experience psychologically a tremendous fear of inner extinction
or collapse. However, when one is accepted, there can be great satisfaction
of feeling oneself a part of the elite. Under more malignant conditions, the
dispensing of existence, the absence of the right to exist, can be
literalized; people can be put to death because of their alleged doctrinal
shortcomings, as has happened in all too many places, including the Soviet
Union and Nazi Germany. In the People's Temple mass suicide murder in
Guyana, a single cult leader could preside over the literal dipensing of
existence---or more precisely, nonexistence---by means of a suicidal
mystique he himself had made a part of the group's ideology. (Subsequent
reports based on the results of autopsies reveal that there were probably as
mamy murders as suicides.) The totalistic impulse to draw a sharp line
between those who have a right to live and those who do not---though
occurring in varying degrees---can become a deadly appraoch to resolving
fundamental human problems. And all such approaches involving totalism or
fundamentalism are doubly dangerous in a nuclear age.
I should say that, despite these problems, none of these processes is
airtight. One of my purposes in writing about them is to counter the
tendency in the culture to deny that such things exist; another purpose is
to demystify them, to see them as comprehensible in terms of our
understanding of human behavior.