The one-sided exploitation of existential guilt is thought reform's trump card, and perhaps its most important source of … - Robert Jay Lifton

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[David] Mamet is another hypocrite. His idea of Black man is a pimp who abuses women, [Edmond], yet his play Oleanna [1994] ends with a White professor slapping an uppity feminist, at least the version I saw at San Francisco's ACT.

Robert Jay Lifton

The one-sided exploitation of existential guilt is thought reform's trump card, and perhaps its most important source of emotional influence over its participants. Revolving around it are issues most decisive to thought reform's outcome.

Decisive, Emotional, Guilt, Issues, Participants, Trump

Same Author Quotes

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.

Analysis, Characterized, Expressed, Human, Language, Phrases

In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.

Call, Evil, Level, Mean, Potential, Self

For anyone with the traits - of feeling himself victimized, of seeking to be the strongman who resolves everything, yet sees truth only through his own self and negates all other truth outside of it - is bound to become more malignant when he has power. Power then breeds an intensification of all this because the power can never be absolute power - to some extent it's stymied - but the isolation while in power becomes even more dangerous. Think of it as a vicious circle. The power intensifies these tendencies and the tendencies become more dangerous because of the power.

Bound, Everything, Feelings, Isolation, Resolves, Thinking

The other thing that happened was my last military assignment - this was in the air force; I had enlisted in order to avoid being drafted as a private, and of course I only practiced medicine or psychiatry in the air force so I was never in any kind of violent combat.

Air, Medicine, Military, Psychiatry, Thing

I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there.

Boy, Boys, Childhood, New York, Raised, Spent