Below is an excerpt from Robert J. Lifton's book "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: Brainwashing in China". The eight criteria of thought reform outlined by Lifton has become the basis of many psychological and educational models of thought reform including those used by Wellspring Retreat and Resource Center at which I was treated. This excerpt comes from
www.rickross.com where you can also find additional information on thought reform, cults, totalistic groups and cultic relationships.
Milieu Control
The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological
current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication.
Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain
over not only the individual's communication with the outside (all that he sees
and hears, reads or writes, experiences, and expresses), but also - in its
penetration of his inner life - over what we may speak of as his communication
with himself. It creates an atmosphere uncomfortably reminiscent of George
Orwell's 1984.
Such milieu control never succeeds in becoming absolute, and its own human
apparatus can - when permeated by outside information - become subject to
discordant "noise" beyond that of any mechanical apparatus. To totalist
administrators, however, such occurrences are no more than evidences of
"incorrect" use of the apparatus. For they look upon milieu control as a just
and necessary policy, one which need not be kept secret: thought reform
participants may be in doubt as to who is telling what to whom, but the fact
that extensive information about everyone is being conveyed to the authorities
is always known. At the center of this self-justification is their assumption of
omniscience, their conviction that reality is their exclusive possession. Having
experienced the impact of what they consider to be an ultimate truth (and having
the need to dispel any possible inner doubts of their own), they consider it
their duty to create an environment containing no more and no less than this
"truth." In order to be the engineers of the human soul, they must first bring
it under full observational control.
The inevitable
next step after milieu control is extensive personal manipulation. This
manipulation assumes a no-holds-barred character, and uses every possible device
at the milieu's command, no matter how bizarre or painful. Initiated from above,
it seeks to provoke specific patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that
these will appear to have arisen spontaneously, directed as it is by an
ostensibly omniscient group, must assume, for the manipulated, a near-mystical
quality.
Ideological totalists do not pursue this approach
solely for the
purpose of maintaining a sense of power over others. Rather they are impelled by
a special kind of mystique which not only justifies such manipulations, but
makes them mandatory. Included in this mystique is a sense of "higher purpose,"
of having "directly perceived some imminent law of social development," and of
being themselves the vanguard of this development. By thus becoming the
instruments of their own mystique, they create a mystical aura around the
manipulating institutions - the Party, the Government, the Organization. They
are the agents "chosen" (by history, by God, or by some other supernatural
force) to carry out the "mystical imperative," the pursuit of which must
supersede all considerations of decency or of immediate human welfare.
Similarly, any thought or action which questions the higher purpose is
considered to be stimulated by a lower purpose, to be backward, selfish, and
petty in the face of the great, overriding mission. This same mystical
imperative produces the apparent extremes of idealism and cynicism which occur
in connection with the manipulations of any totalist environment: even those
actions which seem cynical in the extreme can be seen as having ultimate
relationship to the "higher purpose."
At the level of the individual person, the psychological responses to this
manipulative approach revolve about the basic polarity of trust and mistrust.
One is asked to accept these manipulations on a basis of ultimate trust (or
faith): "like a child in the arms of its mother." He who trusts in this degree
can experience the manipulations within the idiom of the mystique behind them:
that is, he may welcome their mysteriousness, find pleasure in their pain, and
feel them to be necessary for the fulfillment of the "higher purpose" which he
endorses as his own. But such elemental trust is difficult to maintain; and even
the strongest can be dissipated by constant manipulation.
When trust gives way to mistrust (or when trust has never existed) the higher
purpose cannot serve as adequate emotional sustenance. The individual then
responds to the manipulations through developing what I shall call the
psychology of the pawn. Feeling himself unable to escape from forces more
powerful than himself, he subordinates everything to adapting himself to them.
He becomes sensitive to all kinds of cues, expert at anticipating environmental
pressures, and skillful in riding them in such a way that his psychological
energies merge with the tide rather than turn painfully against himself. This
requires that he participate actively in the manipulation of others, as well as
in the endless round of betrayals and self-betrayals which are required.
But whatever his response - whether he is cheerful in the face of being
manipulated, deeply resentful, or feels a combination of both - he has been
deprived of the opportunity to exercise his capacities for self-expression and
independent action.
In the thought
reform milieu, as in all situations of ideological totalism, the experiential
world is sharply divided into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good
and the absolutely evil. The good and the pure are of course those ideas,
feelings, and actions which are consistent with the totalist ideology and
policy; anything else is apt to be relegated to the bad and the impure. Nothing
human is immune from the flood of stern moral judgments. All "taints" and
"poisons" which contribute to the existing state of impurity must be searched
out and eliminated.
The philosophical assumption underlying this demand is that absolute purity
is attainable, and that anything done to anyone in the name of this purity is
ultimately moral. In actual practice, however, no one is really expected to
achieve such perfection. Nor can this paradox be dismissed as merely a means of
establishing a high standard to which all can aspire. Thought reform bears
witness to its more malignant consequences: for by defining and manipulating the
criteria of purity, and then by conducting an all-out war upon impurity, the
ideological totalists create a narrow world of guilt and shame. This is
perpetuated by an ethos of continuous reform, a demand that one strive
permanently and painfully for something which not only does not exist but is in
fact alien to the human condition.
At the level of the relationship between individual and environment, the
demand for purity creates what we may term a
guilty milieu and a
shaming milieu. Since each man's impurities are deemed sinful and
potentially harmful to himself and to others, he is, so to speak, expected to
expect punishment - which results in a relationship of guilt and his
environment. Similarly, when he fails to meet the prevailing standards in
casting out such impurities, he is expected to expect humiliation and ostracism
- thus establishing a relationship of shame with his milieu. Moreover, the sense
of guilt and the sense of shame become highly-valued: they are preferred forms
of communication, objects of public competition, and the basis for eventual
bonds between the individual and his totalist accusers. One may attempt to
simulate them for a while, but the subterfuge is likely to be detected, and it
is safer to experience them genuinely.
People vary greatly in their susceptibilities to guilt and shame, depending
upon patterns developed early in life. But since guilt and shame are basic to
human existence, this variation can be no more than a matter of degree. Each
person is made vulnerable through his profound inner sensitivities to his own
limitations and to his unfulfilled potential; in other words, each is made
vulnerable through his existential guilt. Since ideological totalists become the
ultimate judges of good and evil within their world, they are able to use these
universal tendencies toward guilt and shame as emotional levers for their
controlling and manipulative influences. They become the arbiters of existential
guilt, authorities without limit in dealing with others' limitations. And their
power is nowhere more evident than in their capacity to "forgive."
The individual thus comes to apply the same totalist polarization of good and
evil to his judgments of his own character: he tends to imbue certain aspects of
himself with excessive virtue, and condemn even more excessively other personal
qualities - all according to their ideological standing. He must also look upon
his impurities as originating from outside influences - that is, from the
ever-threatening world beyond the closed, totalist ken. Therefore, one of his
best way to relieve himself of some of his burden of guilt is to denounce,
continuously and hostilely, these same outside influences. The more guilty he
feels, the greater his hatred, and the more threatening they seem. In this
manner, the universal psychological tendency toward "projection" is nourished
and institutionalized, leading to mass hatreds, purges of heretics, and to
political and religious holy wars. Moreover, once an individual person has
experienced the totalist polarization of good and evil, he has great difficulty
in regaining a more balanced inner sensitivity to the complexities of human
morality. For these is no emotional bondage greater than that of the man whose
entire guilt potential - neurotic and existential - has become the property of
ideological totalists.
Closely
related to the demand for absolute purity is an obsession with personal
confession. Confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal, and
therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is the
demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is
artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed. Such
demands are made possible not only by the ubiquitous human tendencies toward
guilt and shame but also by the need to give expression to these tendencies. In
totalist hands, confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering
solace for, these vulnerabilities.
The totalist confession takes on a number of special meanings. It is first a
vehicle for the kind of personal purification which we have just discussed, a
means of maintaining a perpetual inner emptying or psychological purge of
impurity; this
purging milieu enhances the totalists' hold upon
existential guilt. Second, it is an act of symbolic self-surrender, the
expression of the merging of individual and environment. Third, it is a means of
maintaining an ethos of total exposure - a policy of making public (or at least
known to the Organization) everything possible about the life experiences,
thoughts, and passions of each individual, and especially those elements which
might be regarded as derogatory.
The assumption underlying total exposure (besides those which relate to the
demand for purity) is the environment's claim to total ownership of each
individual self within it. Private ownership of the mind and its products - of
imagination or of memory - becomes highly immoral. The accompanying rationale
(or rationalization) is familiar, the milieu has attained such a perfect state
of enlightenment that any individual retention of ideas or emotions has become
anachronistic.
The cult of confession can offer the individual person meaningful
psychological satisfactions in the continuing opportunity for emotional
catharsis and for relief of suppressed guilt feelings, especially insofar as
these are associated with self-punitive tendencies to get pleasure from personal
degradation. More than this, the sharing of confession enthusiasms can create an
orgiastic sense of "oneness," of the most intense intimacy with fellow
confessors and of the dissolution of self into the great flow of the Movement.
And there is also, at least initially, the possibility of genuine
self-revelation and of self-betterment through the recognition that "the thing
that has been exposed is what I am."
But as totalist pressures turn confession into recurrent command
performances, the element of histrionic public display takes precedence over
genuine inner experience. Each man becomes concerned with the effectiveness of
his personal performance, and this performance sometimes comes to serve the
function of evading the very emotions and ideas about which one feels most
guilty - confirming the statement by one of Camus' characters that "authors of
confessions write especially to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of what they
know." The difficulty, of course, lies in the inevitable confusion which takes
place between the actor's method and his separate personal reality, between the
performer and the "real me."
In this sense, the cult of confession has effects quite the reverse of its
ideal of total exposure: rather than eliminating personal secrets, it increases
and intensifies them. In any situation the personal secret has two important
elements: first, guilty and shameful ideas which one wishes to suppress in order
to prevent their becoming known by others or their becoming too prominent in
one's own awareness; and second, representations of parts of oneself too
precious to be expressed except when alone or when involved in special loving
relationships formed around this shared secret world. Personal secrets are
always maintained in opposition to inner pressures toward self-exposure. The
totalist milieu makes contact with these inner pressures through its own
obsession with the expose and the unmasking process. As a result old secrets are
revived and new ones proliferate; the latter frequently consist of resentments
toward or doubts about the Movement, or else are related to aspects of identity
still existing outside of the prescribed ideological sphere. Each person becomes
caught up in a continuous conflict over which secrets to preserve and which to
surrender, over ways to reveal lesser secrets in order to protect more important
ones; his own boundaries between the secret and the known, between the public
and the private, become blurred. And around one secret, or a complex of secrets,
there may revolve an ultimate inner struggle between resistance and
self-surrender.
Finally, the cult of confession makes it virtually impossible to attain a
reasonable balance between worth and humility. The enthusiastic and aggressive
confessor becomes like Camus' character whose perpetual confession is his means
of judging others: "[I]…practice the profession of penitent to be able to end up
as a judge…the more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you." The
identity of the "judge-penitent" thus becomes a vehicle for taking on some of
the environment's arrogance and sense of omnipotence. Yet even this shared
omnipotence cannot protect him from the opposite (but not unrelated) feelings of
humiliation and weakness, feelings especially prevalent among those who remain
more the enforced penitent than the all-powerful judge.
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 which is demanded for the originators of
the Word, the present bearers of the Word, and the Word itself. While thus
transcending ordinary concerns of logic, however, the milieu at the same time
makes an exaggerated claim of airtight logic, of absolute "scientific"
precision. Thus the ultimate moral vision becomes an ultimate science; and the
man who dares to criticize it, or to harbor even unspoken alternative ideas,
becomes not only immoral and irreverent, but also "unscientific." In this way,
the philosopher kings of modern ideological totalism reinforce their authority
by claiming to share in the rich and respected heritage of natural science.
The assumption here is not so much that man can be God, but rather that man's
ideas can be God: that an absolute science of ideas (and implicitly, an
absolute science of man) exists, or is at least very close to being attained;
that this science can be combined with an equally absolute body of moral
principles; and that the resulting doctrine is true for all men at all times.
Although no ideology goes quite this far in overt statement, such assumptions
are implicit in totalist practice.
At the level of the individual, the totalist sacred science can offer much
comfort and security. Its appeal lies in its seeming unification of the mystical
and the logical modes of experience (in psychoanalytic terms, of the primary and
secondary thought processes). For within the framework of the sacred science,
and sweeping, non-rational "insights." Since the distinction between the logical
and the mystical is, to begin with, artificial and man-made, an opportunity for
transcending it can create an extremely intense feeling of truth. But the
posture of unquestioning faith - both rationally and non-rationally derived - is
not easy to sustain, especially if one discovers that the world of experience is
not nearly as absolute as the sacred science claims it to be.
Yet so strong a hold can the sacred science achieve over his mental processes
that if one begins to feel himself attracted to ideas which either contradict or
ignore it, he may become guilty and afraid. His quest for knowledge is
consequently hampered, since in the name of science he is prevented from
engaging in the receptive search for truth which characterizes the genuinely
scientific approach. And his position is made more difficult by the absence, in
a totalist environment, of any distinction between the sacred and the profane:
there is no thought or action which cannot be related to the sacred science. To
be sure, one can usually find areas of experience outside its immediate
authority; but during periods of maximum totalist activity (like thought reform)
any such areas are cut off, and there is virtually no escape from the milieu's
ever-pressing edicts and demands. Whatever combination of continued adherence,
inner resistance, or compromise co-existence the individual person adopts toward
this blend of counterfeit science and back-door religion, it represents another
continuous pressure toward personal closure, toward avoiding, rather than
grappling with, the kinds of knowledge and experience necessary for genuine
self-expression and for creative development.
The language of
the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The
most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief,
highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily
expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. In
[Chinese Communist] thought reform, for instance, the phrase "bourgeois
mentality" is used to encompass and critically dismiss ordinarily troublesome
concerns like the quest for individual expression, the exploration of
alternative ideas, and the search for perspective and balance in political
judgments. And in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these
cliches become what Richard Weaver has called "ultimate terms" : either "god
terms," representative of ultimate good; or "devil terms," representative of
ultimate evil. In [Chinese Communist] thought reform, "progress," "progressive,"
"liberation," "proletarian standpoints" and "the dialectic of history" fall into
the former category; "capitalist," "imperialist," "exploiting classes," and
"bourgeois" (mentality, liberalism, morality, superstition, greed) of course
fall into the latter. Totalist language then, is repetitiously centered on
all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly
judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel
Trilling's phrase, "the language of nonthought."
To be sure, this kind of language exists to some degree within any cultural
or organizational group, and all systems of belief depend upon it. It is in part
an expression of unity and exclusiveness: as Edward Sapir put it, "'He talks
like us' is equivalent to saying 'He is one of us.'" The loading is much more
extreme in ideological totalism, however, since the jargon expresses the claimed
certitudes of the sacred science. Also involved is an underlying assumption that
language - like all other human products - can be owned and operated by the
Movement. No compunctions are felt about manipulating or loading it in any
fashion; the only consideration is its usefulness to the cause.
For an individual person, the effect of the language of ideological totalism
can be summed up in one word: constriction. He is, so to speak, linguistically
deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his
capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed. This is what Hu
meant when he said, "using the same pattern of words for so long…you feel
chained." Actually, not everyone exposed
feels chained, but in effect
everyone
is profoundly confined by these verbal fetters. As in other
aspects of totalism, this loading may provide an initial sense of insight and
security, eventually followed by uneasiness. This uneasiness may result in a
retreat into a rigid orthodoxy in which an individual shouts the ideological
jargon all the louder in order to demonstrate his conformity, hide his own
dilemma and his despair, and protect himself from the fear and guilt he would
feel should he attempt to use words and phrases other than the correct ones. Or
else he may adapt a complex pattern of inner division, and dutifully produce the
expected cliché's in public performances while in his private moments he
searches for more meaningful avenues of expression. Either way, his imagination
becomes increasingly dissociated from his actual life experiences and may tend
to atrophy from disuse.
This sterile
language reflects characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the
subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. This primacy of
doctrine over person is evident in the continual shift between experience itself
and the highly abstract interpretation of such experience - between genuine
feelings and spurious cataloguing of feelings. It has much to do with the
peculiar aura of half-reality which totalist environment seems, at least to the
outsider, to possess.
The inspiriting force of such myths cannot be denied; nor can one ignore
their capacity for mischief. For when the myth becomes fused with the totalist
sacred science, the resulting "logic" can be so compelling and coercive that it
simply replaces the realities of individual experience. Consequently, past
historical events are retrospectively altered, wholly rewritten, or ignored, to
make them consistent with the doctrinal logic. This alteration becomes
especially malignant when its distortions are imposed upon individual memory as
occurred in the false confession extracted during thought reform.
The same doctrinal primacy prevails in the totalist approach to changing
people: the demand that character and identity be reshaped, not in accordance
with one's special nature or potentialities, but rather to fit the rigid
contours of the doctrinal mold. The human is thus subjected to the ahuman. And
in this manner, the totalists, as Camus phrases it, "put an abstract idea above
human life, even if they call it history, to which they themselves have
submitted in advance and to which they will decide arbitrarily, to submit
everyone else as well."
The underlying assumption is that the doctrine - including its mythological
elements - is ultimately more valid, true, and real than is any aspect of actual
human character or human experience. Thus, even when circumstances require that
a totalist movement follow a course of action in conflict with or outside of the
doctrine, there exists what Benjamin Schwartz described as a "will to orthodoxy"
which requires an elaborate facade of new rationalizations designed to
demonstrate the unerring consistency of the doctrine and the unfailing foresight
which it provides. But its greater importance lies in more hidden
manifestations, particularly the totalists' pattern of imposing their
doctrine-dominated remolding upon people in order to seek confirmation of (and
again, dispel their own doubts about) this same doctrine. Rather than modify the
myth in accordance with experience, the will to orthodoxy requires instead that
men be modified in order to reaffirm the myth.
The individual person who finds himself under such doctrine-dominated
pressure to change is thrust into an intense struggle with his own sense of
integrity, a struggle which takes place in relation to polarized feelings of
sincerity and insincerity. In a totalist environment, absolute "sincerity" is
demanded; and the major criterion for sincerity is likely to be one's degree of
doctrinal compliance - both in regard to belief and to direction of personal
change. Yet there is always the possibility of retaining an alternative version
of sincerity (and of reality), the capacity to imagine a different kind of
existence and another form of sincere commitment. These alternative visions
depend upon such things as the strength of previous identity, the penetration of
the milieu by outside ideas, and the retained capacity for eventual individual
renewal. The totalist environment, however, counters such "deviant" tendencies
with the accusation that they stem entirely from personal "problems" ("thought
problems" or "ideological problems") derived from untoward earlier influences.
The outcome will depend largely upon how much genuine relevance the doctrine has
for the individual emotional predicament. And even for those to whom it seems
totally appealing, the exuberant sense of well-being it temporarily affords may
be more a "delusion of wholeness" than an expression of true and lasting inner
harmony.
The totalist environment draws a sharp line between those
whose right to existence can be recognized, and those who possess no such right.
Are not men presumtuous to appoint themselves the dispensers of human
existence? Surely this is a flagrant expression of what the Greeks called
hubris, of arrogant man making himself God. Yet one underlying assumption
makes this arrogance mandatory: the conviction that there is just one path to
true existence, just one valid mode of being, and that all others are perforce
invalid and false. Totalists thus feel themselves compelled to destroy all
possibilities of false existence as a means of furthering the great plan of true
existence to which they are committed.
For the individual, the polar emotional conflict is the ultimate existential
one of "being versus nothingness." He is likely to be drawn to a conversion
experience, which he sees as the only means of attaining a path of existence for
the future. The totalist environment - even when it does not resort to physical
abuse - thus stimulates in everyone a fear of extinction or annihilation. A
person can overcome this fear and find (in martin Buber's term) "confirmation,"
not in his individual relationships, but only from the fount of all existence,
the totalist Organization. Existence comes to depend upon creed (I believe,
therefore I am), upon submission (I obey, therefore I am) and beyond these, upon
a sense of total merger with the ideological movement. Ultimately of course one
compromises and combines the totalist "confirmation" with independent elements
of personal identity; but one is ever made aware that, should he stray too far
along this "erroneous path," his right to existence may be withdrawn.
The more clearly an environment expresses these eight psychological themes,
the greater its resemblance to ideological totalism; and the more it utilizes
such totalist devices to change people, the greater its resemblance to thought
reform. But facile comparisons can be misleading. No milieu ever achieves
complete totalism, and many relatively moderate environments show some signs of
it. Moreover, totalism tends to be recurrent rather than continuous. But if
totalism has at any time been prominent in the movement, there is always the
possibility of its reappearance, even after long periods of relative
moderation.
Then, too, some environments come perilously close to totalism but at the
same time keep alternative paths open; this combination can offer unusual
opportunities for achieving intellectual and emotional depth. And even the most
full-blown totalist milieu can provide (more or less despite itself) a valuable
and enlarging life experience -
if the man exposed has both the
opportunity to leave the extreme environment and the inner capacity to absorb
and make inner use of the totalist pressures.
Also, ideological totalism itself may offer a man an intense peak experience:
a sense of transcending all that is ordinary and prosaic, of freeing himself
from the encumbrances of human ambivalence, of entering a sphere of truth,
reality, and sincerity beyond any he had ever known or even imagined. But these
peak experiences, carry a great potential for rebound, and for equally intense
opposition to the very things which initially seem so liberating. Such imposed
peak experiences - as contrasted with those more freely and privately arrived at
by great religious leaders and mystics - are essentially experiences of personal
closure. Rather than stimulating greater receptivity and "openness to the
world," they encourage a backward step into some form of "embeddedness" - a
retreat into doctrinal patterns more characteristic (at least at this stage of
human history) of the child than of the individuated adult.
And if no peak experience occurs, ideological totalism does even greater
violence to the human potential: it evokes destructive emotions, produces
intellectual and psychological constrictions, and deprives men of all that is
most subtle and imaginative - under the false promise of eliminating those very
imperfections and ambivalences which help to define the human condition. This
combination of personal closure, self-destructiveness, and hostility toward
outsiders leads to the dangerous group excesses so characteristic of ideological
totalism in any form. It also mobilizes extremist tendencies in those outsiders
under attack, thus creating a vicious circle of totalism.
What is the source of ideological totalism? How do these extremist emotional
patterns originate? These questions raise the most crucial and the most
difficult of human problems. Behind ideological totalism lies the ever-present
human quest for the omnipotent guide - for the supernatural force, political
party, philosophical ideas, great leader, or precise science - that will bring
ultimate solidarity to all men and eliminate the terror of death and
nothingness. This quest is evident in the mythologies, religions, and histories
of all nations, as well as in every individual life. The degree of individual
totalism involved depends greatly upon factors in one's personal history: early
lack of trust, extreme environmental chaos, total domination by a parent or
parent-representative, intolerable burdens of guilt, and severe crises of
identity. Thus an early sense of confusion and dislocation, or an early
experience of unusually intense family milieu control, can produce later a
complete intolerance for confusion and dislocation, and a longing for the
reinstatement of milieu control. But these things are in some measure part of
every childhood experience; and therefore the potential for totalism is a
continuum from which no one entirely escapes, and in relationship to which no
two people are exactly the same.
It may be that the capacity for totalism is most fundamentally a product of
human childhood itself, of the prolonged period of helplessness and dependency
through which each of us must pass. Limited as he is, the infant has no choice
but to imbue his first nurturing authorities - his parents - with an exaggerated
omnipotence, until the time he is himself capable of some degree of independent
action and judgment. And even as he develops into the child and the adolescent,
he continues to require many of the all-or-none polarities of totalism as terms
with which to define his intellectual, emotional, and moral worlds. Under
favorable circumstances (that is, when family and culture encourage
individuation) these requirements can be replaced by more flexible and moderate
tendencies; but they never entirely disappear.
During adult life, individual totalism takes on new contours as it becomes
associated with new ideological interests. It may become part of the
configuration of personal emotions, messianic ideas, and organized mass movement
which I have described as ideological totalism. When it does, we cannot speak of
it as simply as ideological regression. It is partly this, but it is also
something more: a new form of adult embeddedness, originating in patterns of
security-seeking carried over from childhood, but with qualities of ideas and
aspirations that are specifically adult. During periods of cultural crisis and
of rapid historical change, the totalist quest for the omnipotent guide leads
men to seek to become that guide.
Totalism, then, is a widespread phenomenon, but it is not the only approach
to re-education. We can best use our knowledge of it by applying its criteria to
familiar processes in our own cultural tradition and in our own country.