Salt City Sinner

posted on 11/29/2018 by the Salt City Sinner (You can find part one here ) Why does Robert Lifton’s Thought Reform matter? It was written in 1959, based on interviews conducted between 1954 and 1959, and first released in 1961. Is it still relevant? It is, for better and/or worse. “Better” because what Lifton documented – and what the Chinese Communist Party developed through experimentation with Stalin-era Soviet tactics – is a form of applied political psychology that to an extent works , and can be used for good or ill (like any other tool). Now, as Lifton himself has been very careful to point out, there are enormous caveats to what thought reform can achieve and on whom it is effective (for example, thought reform is a mixed bag at converting religious believers). Caveats or no caveats, its effectiveness means that some forms of thought reform-adjacent manipulation are more widely used in 2018 than you might think. Thought Reform Is Still Going O...

posted on 11/26/2018 by the Salt City Sinner Hello, and welcome to the first installment of what I hope will be an ongoing series; the Sinner’s $.25 Psychic Self Defense and Literature Review ! Now: what on Lucifer’s black earth does that pretentious appellation portend? For reasons that will be revealed over the course of these segments – like my hairy, enticing body parts appearing from behind fans during a fan dance – I have developed an interest in political psychology. More specifically, I’ve been mulling over applied political psychology, or what I’ve been whimsically calling practical psychic self-defense. Now, a good jumping-off point for such ruminations is Dr. Robert Lifton’s 1961 psychology classic, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism; A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China . Lifton interviewed American, European, and Chinese men and women who had been imprisoned in the People’s Republic of China and subjected to totalitarian communist “thought r...