Our guest is the noted psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton; he's written more than twenty books, including the National Book Award-winning "Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima" as well as "The Nazi Doctors." He joins us to discuss his new book, which is just out. It is "Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry." As was noted of this work by the author and journalist James Carroll: "For decades, Robert Jay Lifton's work on the sources and dangers of inhuman zealotry -- brainwashers, mass murderers, religious extremists, political cultists -- has 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."
"Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry"
