Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

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Media track record: His previous book, The Climate Swerve, was reviewed in the Washington Post and excerpted in the New York Times. Lifton has been a contributor to the New York Times for over fifty years. He has appeared on many NPR shows, including Fresh Air. He has appeared in many TV and feature documentaries. He has been interviewed by both Stephen Spielbergs team for a Discovery Channel show on the Japanese suicide Aum Shinrikyo and also for a film by Errol Morris. His definition of cults is used by the hugely popular podcast CULTS in the opening of their show.

Credentials: He is one of the worlds leading authorities on thought control and cult violence. He taught and practiced at Yale, Harvard, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is one of the great practitioners of psycho-history, the combination of psychiatry and history. His ideas are often cited in articles and essays. He has been a prolific voice on Trumps psychological suitability to be president.

Blurbs/endorsements: James Carroll, Martin Amis, Bill McKibben, Judith Herman, Sherry Turkle, James Gilligan

Reviews

Praise for Losing Reality:
"Persuasive. . . . Unsparing. . . . Robert Jay Lifton returns to his classic works on the dangers of extremist cults and updates them with new material."
Shelf Awareness

"At the core of this work is the problem of the ownership of our mind, a problem thrown into relief at those historical moments when it is challengedby ideology, totalitarian politics, disinformation, cults, even social media. Psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton considers the psycho-politics of what he calls mental predation and how it can end up changing the way we see reality itself. Required reading for a necessary conversation."
Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

"In this distillation of a lifetime of scholarship and wisdom, Lifton delineates the psychology of fanaticism, from isolated cults to vast totalitarian systems. A treasure for our time."
Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recover

"For decades, Robert Jay Lifton's work on the sources and dangers of inhuman zealotrybrainwashers, mass murderers, religious extremists, political cultistshas been a bulwark of democratic liberalism, a touchstone of public sanity. Now, with this selection of classic passages, in urgent combination with fresh reflections, Lifton has given us precisely what we need to understand, resist, and survive the unmoored chaos of the age of Trump. Lifton's writing, a long-established treasure, has never mattered more."
James Carroll, author of The Cloister

"One of the world's foremost thinkers on why we humans do such awful things to each other."
Bill Moyers

Author Bio

A pioneer in the field of psychohistory, Robert Jay Lifton is a psychiatrist and author best known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of war and political violence and for his theory of thought reform and cult behavior. He has written over twenty books, including many seminal works in the field such as the National Book Awardwinning Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Los Angeles Times Book Prizewinning The Nazi Doctors, National Book Awardnominated Home from the War, as well as The Climate Swerve, Losing Reality, and Surviving Our Catastrophes (all from The New Press). He has taught at Yale University, Harvard University, and the City University of New York. He lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.