Robert Jay Lifton
Born	(1926-05-16) May 16, 1926 (age 86) Brooklyn, New York
Residence	United States
Nationality	American
Fields	psychiatry, mind control, thought reform
Institutions	Washington School of Psychiatry Harvard University John Jay College of Criminal Justice Yale University
Alma mater	Cornell University New York Medical College
Known for	Author, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
Notable awards	Leo J. Ryan Award, 1987 Honorary Doctorate - Stonehill College (2008)

Robert Jay Lifton (born May 16, 1926) is an American psychiatrist and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of war and political violence and for his theory of thought reform. He was an early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory.

Holocaust Research[link]

A leading scholar of the Holocaust and an internationally renowned author of several books, including "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide" and "The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and the Nuclear Threat", agrees that what happened to the Bosnian Muslims "merits the use of the word genocide." He is a recipient of a Nobel Lectureship, the Holocaust Memorial Award, and the Gandhi Peace Award. Since the 1960s, Dr. Lifton has been recognized internationally for his research on genocide. According to Dr. Lifton,

"What's happening there [in Bosnia] merits the use of the word genocide. There is an effort to systematically destroy an entire group. It's even been conceptualized by Serbian nationalists as so-called 'ethnic cleansing.' That term signifies mass killing, mass relocation, and that does constitute genocide."^[1]

In 2006, Lifton appeared in a documentary on cults on the History Channel: "Decoding the Past", along with fellow psychiatrist Peter A. Olsson.^[2]

Biography[link]

Lifton was born in 1926, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Harold A. (a businessman) and Ciel (Roth) Lifton. He was fifteen when the United States declared war on Japan and Nazi Germany (December 1941). He studied medicine at Cornell University and New York Medical College in 1948. He interned at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn in 1948-49, and had his psychiatric residence training at the Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York in 1949-51. From 1951 to 1953 he served as an Air Force psychiatrist in Japan and Korea, to which he later attributed his interest in war and politics. He has since worked as a teacher and researcher at the Washington School of Psychiatry, Harvard University, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he helped to found the Center for the Study of Human Violence.

He married the writer Betty Jean Kirschner in 1952 and has two children. Lifton calls cartooning his avocation; he has published two books of humorous cartoons about birds.

He is a member of Collegium International, an organization of leaders with political, scientific, and ethical expertise whose goal is to provide new approaches in overcoming the obstacles in the way of a peaceful, socially just and an economically sustainable world.

The Wellfleet Psychohistory Group[link]

During the 1960s, Robert Jay Lifton, together with his mentor Erik Erikson and MIT historian Bruce Mazlish, formed a group to apply psychology and psychoanalysis to the study of history. Meetings were held at Lifton's home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The Wellfleet Psychohistory Group, as it became known, focused mainly on psychological motivations for war, terrorism and genocide in recent history. In 1965, they received sponsorship from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to establish psychohistory as a separate field of study. A collection of research papers by the group was published in 1975: Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers (see Bibliography; Lifton as editor).

Lifton's work in this field was heavily influenced by Erikson's studies of Hitler and other political figures, as well as Sigmund Freud's concern with the mass social effects of deep-seated drives, particularly attitudes toward death.

Theory of thought reform[link]

Lifton investigated the thought-reform procedures used against American POWs returning from the Korean War while involved in their psychiatric evaluation.^[3] Lifton's 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China was a study of coercive techniques that he labelled thought reform or "brainwashing", though he preferred the former term. Others have labelled it also as "mind control". Lifton describes in detail eight methods which he says are used to change people's minds without their agreement:

• Milieu Control – The control of information and communication.
• Mystical Manipulation – The manipulation of experiences that appear spontaneous but in fact were planned and orchestrated.
• Demand for Purity – The world is viewed as black and white and the members are constantly exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection.
• Confession – Sins, as defined by the group, are to be confessed either to a personal monitor or publicly to the group.
• Sacred Science – The group's doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute.
• Loading the Language – The group interprets or uses words and phrases in new ways so that often the outside world does not understand.
• Doctrine over person – The member's personal experiences are subordinated to the sacred science and any contrary experiences must be denied or reinterpreted to fit the ideology of the group.
• Dispensing of existence – The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not.

The term thought-terminating cliché was popularized by Robert Lifton in this book.

Studies of war and atrocity survivors[link]

His most influential books featured mental adaptations that people made in extreme wartime environments: Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967), Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). Regarding Hiroshima and Vietnam survivors or Nazi perpretators, Lifton believed that the psychic fragmentation experienced by his subjects was an extreme form of the pathologies that arise in peacetime life due to the pressures and fears of modern society.

His studies of the behavior of people who had committed war crimes, both individually and in groups, concluded that while human nature is not innately cruel and only rare sociopaths can participate in atrocities without suffering lasting emotional harm, such crimes do not require any unusual degree of personal evil or mental illness, and are nearly sure to happen given certain conditions (either accidental or deliberately arranged) which Lifton called "atrocity-producing situations". The Nazi Doctors was the first in-depth study of how medical professionals rationalized their participation in the Holocaust, from the early stages of the T-4 Euthanasia Program to the extermination camps.

In the Hiroshima and Vietnam studies, Lifton also concluded that the sense of personal disintegration many people experienced after witnessing death and destruction on a mass scale could ultimately lead to a new emotional resilience—but that without the proper support and counseling, most survivors would remain trapped in feelings of unreality and guilt. In his work with Vietnam veterans, Lifton was one of the first organizers of therapeutic discussion groups in which mental health practitioners met with veterans, and he lobbied for the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. His book on Hiroshima survivors won the 1969 National Book Award in Science.^[4]

Theories of totalism and the protean self[link]

Totalism, a word first used in Thought Reform, is Lifton's term for the characteristics of ideological movements and organizations that desire total control over human behavior and thought. (Lifton's usage differs from theories of totalitarianism in that it can be applied to the ideology of groups that do not wield governmental power.) In Lifton's opinion, though such attempts always fail, they follow a common pattern and cause predictable types of psychological damage in individuals and societies. He finds two common motives in totalistic movements: the fear and denial of death, channeled into violence against scapegoat groups that are made to represent a metaphorical threat to survival, and a reactionary fear of social change.

In his later work, Lifton has focused on defining the type of change to which totalism is opposed, for which he coined the term the protean self. In the book of the same title, he states that the development of a "fluid and many-sided personality" is a positive trend in modern societies, and that mental health now requires "continuous exploration and personal experiment," which requires the growth of a purely relativist society that's willing to discard and diminish previously established cultures and traditions.

Critiques of modern war and terrorism[link]

Following his work with Hiroshima survivors, Lifton became a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons, arguing that nuclear strategy and warfighting doctrine made even mass genocide banal and conceivable. While not a strict pacifist, he has spoken against U.S. military actions in his lifetime, particularly the Vietnam War and Iraq War, believing that they arose from irrational and aggressive aspects of American politics motivated by fear.

Lifton has also criticized the current "War on Terrorism" as a misguided and dangerous attempt to "destroy all vulnerability". However, he regards terrorism itself as an increasingly serious threat due to the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons and totalist ideologies. His 1999 book Destroying the World to Save It described the apocalyptic terrorist sect Aum Shinrikyo as a forerunner of "the new global terrorism".

Notable Appearances[link]

Lifton is featured in the 2003 documentary Flight From Death, a film that investigates the relationship of human violence to fear of death, as related to subconscious influences.

On May 18, 2008 Lifton delivered the commencement address at Stonehill College and discussed the apparent "Superpower Syndrome" experienced by the United States in the modern era.^[5]

Bibliography[link]

• Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, Norton (New York City), 1961. edited excerpts available online
• Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Random House (New York City), 1968.
• Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Random House, 1968.
• Birds, Words, and Birds (cartoons), Random House, 1969.
• History and Human Survival: Essays on the Young and the Old, Survivors and the Dead, Peace and War, and on Contemporary Psychohistory, Random House, 1970.
• Boundaries, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Toronto), 1969, published as Boundaries: Psychological Man in Revolution, Random House, 1970.
• Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners, Simon & Schuster (New York City), 1973.
• (With Eric Olson) Living and Dying, Praeger, 1974.
• The Life of the Self: Toward a New Psychology, Simon & Schuster, 1976.
• Psychobirds, Countryman Press, 1978.
• (With Shuichi Kato and Michael Reich) Six Lives/Six Deaths: Portraits from Modern Japan (originally published in Japanese as Nihonjin no shiseikan, 1977), Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1979.
• The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life, Simon & Schuster, 1979.
• (With Richard A. Falk) Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism, Basic Books (New York City), 1982.
• The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books, August 2000( first edition 1986).
• The Future of Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age, Basic Books, 1987.
• (With Eric Markusen) The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat, Basic Books, 1990.
• The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation, Basic Books, 1993.
• (With Greg Mitchell) Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, Putnam's (New York City), 1995.
• Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism, Owl Books, 2000.
• (With Greg Mitchell) Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions, Morrow, 2000.
• Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation With the World, Nation Books, 2003.

Lifton as editor[link]

• The Woman in America, Houghton (Boston), 1965.
• America and the Asian Revolutions, Trans-Action Books, 1970, second edition, 1973.
• (With Richard A. Falk and Gabriel Kolko) Crimes of War: A Legal, Political-Documentary, and Psychological Inquiry into the Responsibilities of Leaders, Citizens, and Soldiers for Criminal Acts of War, Random House, 1971.
• (With Eric Olson) Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers, Simon & Schuster, 1975.
• (With Eric Chivian, Susanna Chivian, and John E. Mack) Last Aid: The Medical Dimensions of Nuclear War, W. H. Freeman, 1982.
• (With Nicholas Humphrey) In a Dark Time: Images for Survival, Harvard University Press, 1984.

See also[link]

• Cult
• Destructive cult
• List of cult researchers
• Nazi eugenics

References[link]

External links[link]

Articles

• Evil, the Self, and Survival: interview by Harry Kreisler, 1999
• Doctors and Torture: Lifton discusses "atrocity-producing situations" in the case of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, 2004
• Superpower Syndrome articles. Robert Jay Lifton on superpower syndrome, TomDispatch, 2006.
• The End of Life: Exploring Death in America "Doctors and Death" Transcript, All Things Considered, Jan. 4
• Hiroshima and the World: The Wisdom of Survivors article in the Chugoku Shimbun.

Media

• 2000 Leo J. Ryan Foundation Conference, Dr. Lifton addressed the issue of doomsday cults such as Aum Shinrikyo.
• Talk on Apocalyptic Violence
• Flight From Death. Robert Jay Lifton is interviewed in this documentary film.
• Bill Moyers Interviews Robert Jay Lifton: about the aftermath of September 11 terrorist attacks, 2002
• Religious and Ethnic Conflict Abroad Talk of the Nation, September 15, 1999
• Doomsday Cults/Apocalyptic Groups Morning Edition, April 7, 2000
• Robert Jay Lifton at the Internet Movie Database

NPR Fresh Air interviews:

• October 19, 2001
• December 18, 2001
• September 11, 2002
• June 6, 2002
• February 5, 2003
• April 8, 2003

Steven Arthur Pinker
Steven Pinker in 2011
Born	(1954-09-18) September 18, 1954 (age 57) Montréal, Québec, Canada
Residence	United States of America
Citizenship	Canadian
Fields	Evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, visual cognition
Alma mater	Dawson College, McGill University, Harvard University
Known for	How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate
Influences	Noam Chomsky, Thomas Sowell, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Schelling[1]
Notable awards	Troland Award (2003, National Academy of Sciences), Henry Dale Prize (2004, Royal Institution), Walter P. Kistler Book Award (2005), Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the AHA), George Miller Prize (2010, Cognitive Neuroscience Society)
Website
http://www.stevenpinker.com/

Steven Pinker in Göttingen in 2010

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954, Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University,^[2] and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).

Biography[link]

Career[link]

Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family. He graduated from Dawson College in 1971. He received a BA degree in psychology at McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his PhD degree in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995-96. As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.^[3] In June 2011 it was announced he would give lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.^[4]

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world in 2004^[5] and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005^[6] and 2008;^[7] in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.^[8][9] His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003.

In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about a gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. Pinker noted that Summers's remarks, properly understood, could form the basis of a testable hypothesis. The remarks, Pinker said, claimed not that men are consistently smarter, but that there are "more idiots, [and] more geniuses" of the male gender.^[10]

On May 13, 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.^[11]

In 2009, Pinker wrote a highly critical review of Malcolm Gladwell's analytic methods in the New York Times.^[12] Gladwell published a rebuttal in the Times regarding Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Pinker then responded to Gladwell's rebuttal.^[13] The exchange prompted Advanced NFL Stats to step in and address the issue statistically, siding with Pinker in that draft order is indeed correlated with quarterback performance.^[14]

Pinker also serves on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to Executive Director Sean Faircloth and the entire coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life. ^[15]

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry lists Pinker as one of their fellows. ^[16]

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.^[17] Pinker appeared on the Colbert Report on 10/18/11.

Personal[link]

His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.^[18][19] Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced.^[20] His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.^[21] He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew."^[22] As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969.^[23] He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as "neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian".^[24] Pinker confesses to having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East.^[25]

Theories of language and mind[link]

Pinker is known within psychology for his theory of language acquisition, his research on the syntax, morphology, and meaning of verbs, and his criticism of connectionist (neural network) models of language. In The Language Instinct (1994) he popularized Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication, although both ideas remain controversial (see below). He also defends the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models.

Written work[link]

Pinker's books, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. The Language Instinct has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, The 'Language Instinct' Debate.^[26] The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling), which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker has criticized.

Bibliography[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker in 2005

Books[link]

• Language Learnability and Language Development (1984) ISBN 978-0-674-51055-5
• Visual Cognition (1985) ISBN 978-0-262-66178-2
• Connections and Symbols (1988) ISBN 978-0-262-66064-8
• Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989) ISBN 978-0-262-66073-0
• Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992) ISBN 978-1-55786-354-6
• The Language Instinct (1994) ISBN 978-0-06-097651-4
• How the Mind Works (1997) ISBN 978-0-393-31848-7
• Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999) ISBN 978-0-465-07269-9
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) ISBN 978-0-670-03151-1
• The Best American Science and Nature Writing (editor and introduction author, 2004) ISBN 978-0-618-24698-4
• Hotheads (an extract from How the Mind Works, 2005) ISBN 978-0-14-102238-3
• The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007) ISBN 978-0-670-06327-7
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) ISBN 978-0-670-02295-3

Articles and essays[link]

• Pinker, S. (1991). "Rules of Language". Science 253 (5019): 530–535. DOI:10.1126/science.1857983. 
• Ullman, M.; Corkin, S.; Coppola, M.; Hickok, G.; Growdon, J. H.; Koroshetz, W. J.; Pinker, S. (1997). "A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9: 289–299. 
• Pinker, S. (2003) "Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche" In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), Language evolution: States of the Art New York: Oxford University Press.
• Pinker, S. (2005). "So How Does the Mind Work?". Mind and Language 20 (1): 1–24. DOI:10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00274.x. 
• Jackendoff, R.; Pinker, S. (2005). "The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language" (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky)". Cognition 97 (2): 211–225. DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.04.006. 
• S. Pinker (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" Chicago Sun-Times, July 15, 2007
• A number of Pinker's articles at Harvard

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Steven Pinker

• Official website

Interviews

• In Depth interview with Pinker, November 2, 2008
• Steven Pinker discusses the "Games People Play: Indirect Speech as a Window into Social Relationships"
• Steven Pinker on The Hour
• Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files
• Biology vs. the Blank Slate Reason magazine interview with Pinker
• Live interview with Steven Pinker on The Blank Slate
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• Online video interview with Pinker

TED talks

• Chalking it up to the blank slate, 2003
• The stuff of thought, 2005
• A brief history of violence, 2007

Debates

• The Two Steves Debate with Steven Rose
• The Science of Gender and Science Debate with Elizabeth Spelke

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Jeremy Rifkin

Born	(1945-01-26) January 26, 1945 (age 67) Denver, Colorado
Era	Contemporary
Region	Western philosophy
Main interests	Economy, political science, scientific and technological change
Notable ideas	Empathic Civilization, The Third Industrial Revolution, End of the working society

Jeremy Rifkin (born January 26, 1945) is an American economist, writer, public speaker, political advisor and activist. He is the founder and president of the Foundation On Economic Trends. Rifkin's work explores the potential impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment.

Biography[link]

Jeremy Rifkin was born in Denver, Colorado in 1945, to Vivette Ravel Rifkin and Milton Rifkin, a plastic-bag manufacturer. He grew up on the southwest side of Chicago. He earned a BS in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was president of the graduating class of 1967 and recipient of the University of Pennsylvania General Alumni Association's Award of Merit.^[1] He had an epiphany when one day in 1966 he walked past a group of students protesting the Vietnam War picketing the administration building and was amazed to see, as he recalls, that "my frat friends were beating the living daylights out of them. I got very upset." He organized a freedom-of-speech rally the next day. From then on, Rifkin quickly became an active member of the peace movement. He went on to obtain his masters degree in international affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 1968. Rifkin pursued anti-war activities at Fletcher, and later joined VISTA.

In 1973, Rifkin organized a mass-protest against oil companies at the commemoration of the 200th Anniversary of the Boston Tea Party at Boston's Harbor. Thousands joined the protest, as activists dumped empty oil barrels into Boston's Harbor. The protest came in the wake of the increase in gasoline prices in the fall of 1972, following the OPEC oil embargo-^[2]

In 1977, with Ted Howard, he founded the Foundation on Economic Trends (FOET), ^[3] which is active in both national and international public policy issues related to the environment, the economy, and climate change. FOET examines new trends and their impacts on the environment, the economy, culture and society, and engages in litigation, public education, coalition building and grassroots organizing activities to advance their goals. Rifkin currently works out of an office in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

Rifkin is the principal architect of the Third Industrial Revolution long-term economic sustainability plan to address the triple challenge of the global economic crisis, energy security, and climate change.^[4] The Third Industrial Revolution was formally endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007 and is now being implemented by various agencies within the European Commission.^[5] Rifkin has lectured before many Fortune 500 companies, and hundreds of governments, civil society organizations, and universities over the past thirty five years.[3]

Rifkin is the founder and chairperson of the Third Industrial Revolution Global CEO Business Roundtable, comprising more than 100 of the world's leading renewable energy companies, construction companies, architectural firms, real estate companies, IT companies, power and utility companies, and transport and logistics companies.^[6] Rifkin's global economic development team is working with cities, regions, and national governments to develop master plans to transition their economies into post- carbon Third Industrial Revolution infrastructures. In 2009, Rifkin and his team developed Third Industrial Revolution master plans for the cities of San Antonio, Texas and Rome, Italy, to transition their economies into the first post carbon urban areas in the world.^[7]

In 1988, Rifkin brought together climate scientists and environmental activists from 35 nations in Washington, D.C. for the first meeting of the Global Greenhouse Network.^[8] In the same year, Rifkin did a series of Hollywood lectures on global warming and related environmental issues for a diverse assortment of film, television and music industry leaders^{[clarification needed]}, with the goal of organizing the Hollywood community for a campaign. Shortly thereafter, two Hollywood environmental organizations, Earth Communications Office (ECO), and Environmental Media Association, were formed.^[9]

In 1992, Rifkin launched the Beyond Beef Campaign, a coalition of six environmental groups including Green Peace, Rainforest Action Network, and Public Citizen, with the goal of encouraging a 50% reduction in the consumption of beef, arguing that methane emissions from Cattle has a warming effect 23 to 50 times greater than carbon dioxide.^[10][11]

Since 1994, Rifkin has been a senior lecturer at The Wharton School's executive education program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he instructs CEOs and senior corporate management from around the world on new trends in science and technology.^[12]

After the publication of The Hydrogen Economy, Rifkin worked both in the U.S. and Europe to advance the political cause of renewably generated hydrogen. In the U.S., Rifkin was instrumental in founding the Green Hydrogen Coalition, consisting of thirteen environmental and political organizations (including Greenpeace and MoveOn.Org) that are committed to building a renewable hydrogen based economy.^[13]

Governmental work[link]

Rifkin has advised both the European Commission and the European Parliament. Rifkin has also advised Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain during its presidency of the European Union. Rifkin also served as an adviser to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Jose Socrates of Portugal, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, and Prime Minister Janez Janša of Slovenia, during their respective European Council Presidencies, on issues related to the economy, climate change, and energy security. Rifkin is currently working with European officials to help shape a Third Industrial Revolution long-term economic development plan for the European Union.^[14]

Reception[link]

According to the The "European Energy Review" "Perhaps no other author or thinker has had more influence on the EU's ambitious climate and energy policy than the famous American 'visionary' Jeremy Rifkin.^[15] In the United States, he has testified before numerous congressional committees and has had success in litigation to ensure responsible government policies on a variety of environmental, scientific and technology related issues.^[16] The Union of Concerned Scientists has cited some of Rifkin's publications as useful references for consumers^[17] and The New York Times once stated that "many in the scholarly, religious, and political fields praise Jeremy Rifkin for a willingness to think big, raise controversial questions, and serve as a social and ethical prophet".

Rifkin's work has also been controversial, and opponents have attacked the scientific rigor of his claims as well as some of the tactics he uses to promote his views. Stephen Jay Gould characterised Rifkin's 1983 book Algeny as "a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship".^[18]

A 1989 Time article about Rifkin was entitled "The Most Hated Man in Science."^[19]

Works[link]

Jeremy Rifkin became one of the first major critics of the nascent biotechnology industry with the 1977 publication of his book, Who Should Play God? Rifkin's 1980 work "Entropy" was called "A comprehensive worldview" and "an appropriate successor to ... Silent Spring, The Closing Circle, The Limits to Growth, and Small Is Beautiful."^[20] His 1995 book, The End of Work, is credited by some^[who?] with helping shape the current global debate on technology displacement, corporate downsizing and the future of jobs.^[21] His 1998 book, The Biotech Century, addresses issues accompanying the new era of genetic commerce. His 2004 book, The European Dream, was an international bestseller and winner of the 2005 Corine International Book Prize in Germany for the best economics book of the year.

Books[link]

• 1973, How to Commit Revolution American Style: Bicentennial Declaration, with John Rossen, Lyle Stuart Inc., ISBN 0-8184-0041-2
• 1975, Common Sense II: The case against corporate tyranny, Bantam Books, OCLC 123151709
• 1977, Own Your Own Job: Economic Democracy for Working Americans, ISBN 978-0-553-10487-5
• 1977, Who Should Play God? The Artificial Creation of Life and What it Means for the Future of the Human, with Ted Howard, Dell Publishing Co., ISBN 0-440-19504-7
• 1978, The North Will Rise Again: Pensions, Politics and Power in the 1980s, with Randy Barber, Beacon Press, ISBN 0-8070-4787-2
• 1979, The Emerging Order: God in the Age of Scarcity, with Ted Howard, Putnam, ISBN 978-0-399-12319-1
• 1980, Entropy: A New World View, with Ted Howard (afterword by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen), Viking Press, ISBN 0-670-29717-8
• 1983, Algeny: A New Word—A New World, in collaboration with Nicanor Perlas, Viking Press, ISBN 0-670-10885-5
• 1985, Declaration of a Heretic, Routledge & Kegan Paul Books, Ltd, ISBN 0-7102-0709-3
• 1987, Time Wars: The Primary Conflict In Human History, Henry Holt & Co, ISBN 0-8050-0377-0
• 1990, The Green Lifestyle Handbook: 1001 Ways to Heal the Earth (edited by Rifkin), Henry Holt & Co, ISBN 0-8050-1369-5
• 1991, Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century, Crown, ISBN 0-517-57746-1
• 1992, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, E. P. Dutton, ISBN 0-525-93420-0
• 1992, Voting Green: Your Complete Environmental Guide to Making Political Choices In The 90s, with Carol Grunewald Rifkin, Main Street Books, ISBN 0-385-41917-1
• 1995, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, Putnam Publishing Group, ISBN 0-87477-779-8
• 1998, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World, J P Tarcher, ISBN 0-87477-909-X
• 2000, The Age Of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a Paid-For Experience, Putnam Publishing Group, ISBN 1-58542-018-2
• 2002, The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth, Jeremy P. Tarcher, ISBN 1-58542-193-6
• 2004, The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, Jeremy P. Tarcher, ISBN 1-58542-345-9
• 2010, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness In a World In Crisis, Jeremy P. Tarcher, ISBN 1-58542-765-9 www.empathiccivilization.com
• 2011, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-0-230-11521-7

See also[link]

• Biopolitics
• Frankenstein argument
• Genetic pollution
• Jobless growth
• National Veterans Inquiry
• The Third Industrial Revolution
• Winter Soldier Investigation

References[link]

External links[link]

• 1.http://foet.org/img/University%20Of%20Pennsylvania%20Student%20Award%20of%20Mert.jpg
• 2.http://www.foet.org/
• 3.http://foet.org/current-activities.html
• 4.http://www.foet.org/past/timeline/foet_history.html
• 5.http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1974/01/21/1974_01_21_067_TNY_CARDS_000305675
• 6.http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/4559-1
• 7.http://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/mother%20jones/904Y-000-007.html
• 8.http://www.foet.org/past/BeyondBeefCampaign.htm
• 9.http://www.citizen.org/cmep/article_redirect.cfm?ID=10703
• 10.http://www.foet.org/JeremyRifkin.htm

Other links[link]

• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin
• http://www.ted.com/speakers/jeremy_rifkin.html
• http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_rifkin_on_the_empathic_civilization.html
• http://www.insead.edu/events/wharton_alliance_10th_anniversary/home/
• https://microsite.accenture.com/iuec/Documents/Accenture_IUEC2011_INVITE_A4.pdf
• http://cetri-tires.org/press/?p=3938&lang=it
• http://www.ueapme.com/spip.php?article210
• http://www.urbact.pl/Intern%20Meeting%20on%20Sust%20Planning%20-%20Vitoria.pdf
• http://www.ghgreductionsummit.com/Program/Keynotes/tabid/76/Default.aspx
• http://www.cidadesinovadoras.org.br/cici2011/
• http://www.viewontv.org/oecd/forum2011/?titre=21#anc21
• http://webtv.internationaltransportforum.org/video_ejZJJ_jeremy_rifkin.html
• http://www.holcimfoundation.org/T1017/F10SP_Rifkin.htm
• http://www.valleyforward.org/events/33
• http://www.wdr.de/defaultError.jhtml
• http://www.ey.com/home
• http://www.dunkerque2010.org/en/programme/speakers/
• https://www.construction-institute.org/ac/2010/agenda.cfm
• http://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/index.php?eventid=11953&tabid=15060&
• http://www.fondazionebancodisicilia.it/en/grandi_progetti/scheda.php?id=28
• http://www.smesummit.eu/
• http://www.rossinstitute.org/#/Media/Jeremy-Rifkin-Lecture
• http://www.euractiv.com/en/energy/jeremy-rifkin-europe-lead-third-industrial-revolution/article-170005
• Guardian.co.uk – 'Sorry, Mr President, homilies won't stop the hurricanes: We Americans need to get out of our SUVs and learn the harsh lesson of Katrina and Rita: we are all to blame', Jeremy Rifkin, The Guardian, (September 23, 2005)
• European Parliament Leaders announce Green Hydrogen initiative

This article contains Japanese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of kanji and kana.

Michio Kaku (加来 道雄, Kaku Michio^?, born January 24, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, a co-founder of string field theory,^[1] a futurist, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books about physics and related topics; he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film; and he writes extensive online blogs and articles. He has written two New York Times best sellers, Physics of the Impossible (2008) and Physics of the Future (2011). He has hosted several TV specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery Channel, and the Science Channel.

Early life and education[link]

Kaku was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake^{[citation needed]}. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan and spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his two brothers were born.

At Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, Kaku assembled an atom smasher in his parents' garage for a science fair project.^[2] At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972, and in 1972 he held a lectureship at Princeton University.

During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his U.S. Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced individual training at Fort Lewis, Washington.^[3] However, the Vietnam War ended before he was deployed as an infantryman.

Academic career[link]

Kaku became a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,^[4] and New York University.^[5] He currently holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York.^[6]

Kaku has had over 70 articles published in physics journals such as Physical Review, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics.^[7] In 1974, along with Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University, he authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form.^[8][9]

Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory.

Popular science[link]

Kaku is most widely known as a popularizer of science.^[10] He has written books and appeared on many television programs as well as film. He also hosts a weekly radio program.

Books[link]

Kaku is the author of various popular science books.

• Hyperspace (1994)
• Beyond Einstein (with Jennifer Thompson) (1995)
• Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century^[11] (1998)
• Einstein's Cosmos (2004)
• Parallel Worlds (2004)
• Physics of the Impossible (2008)
• Physics of the Future (2011)

Hyperspace was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both The New York Times^[10] and The Washington Post. Parallel Worlds was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in the UK.^[12]

Radio[link]

Kaku is the host of the weekly, one-hour radio program Explorations, produced by the Pacifica Foundation's WBAI in New York. "Explorations" is syndicated to community and independent radio stations and makes previous broadcasts available on the program's website. Kaku defines the show as dealing with the general topics of science, war, peace, and the environment.

In April 2006, Kaku began broadcasting Science Fantastic on 90 commercial radio stations, the only nationally syndicated science program on commercial radio in the United States. It is syndicated by Talk Radio Network and now reaches 130 radio stations and America's Talk on XM. The program is formatted as a live listener call-in show, focusing on "futurology," which he defines as the future of science.^{[citation needed]} Featured guests include Nobel laureates and top researchers on the topics of string theory, time travel, black holes, gene therapy, aging, space travel, artificial intelligence, and SETI. When Kaku is busy filming for television, Science Fantastic goes on hiatus, sometimes for several months. Kaku is also a frequent guest on many programs, where he is outspoken in all areas and issues he considers of importance, such as the program Coast to Coast AM, where on 30 November 2007, he reaffirmed his belief that there is a 100% probability of extraterrestrial life in the universe.^[13]

Kaku has appeared on The Opie and Anthony Show a number of times, discussing popular fiction such as Back to The Future, Lost, and the theories behind time-travel that these and other fictional entertainment focus on.

Television and film[link]

Kaku has appeared in many forms of media and on many programs and networks, including Good Morning America, The Screen Savers, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, Nightline, 20/20, Naked Science, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Al Jazeera English, Fox News Channel, The History Channel, Conan, The Science Channel, The Discovery Channel, TLC, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Colbert Report, The Art Bell Show and its successor, Coast To Coast AM, BBC World News America, The Opie & Anthony Show, The Covino & Rich Show, Head Rush, The Late Show with David Letterman, and Real Time with Bill Maher.

In 1999, Kaku was one of the scientists profiled in the feature-length film Me and Isaac Newton, directed by Michael Apted. It played theatrically in the United States, was later broadcast on national TV, and won several film awards.^{[citation needed]}

In 2005, Kaku appeared in the short documentary Obsessed & Scientific. The film is about the possibility of time travel and the people who dream about it. It screened at the Montreal World Film Festival and a feature film expansion is in development talks. Kaku also appeared in the ABC documentary UFOs: Seeing Is Believing, in which he suggested that while he believes it is extremely unlikely that extraterrestrials have ever actually visited Earth, we must keep our minds open to the possible existence of civilizations a million years ahead of us in technology, where entirely new avenues of physics open up. He also discussed the future of interstellar exploration and alien life in the Discovery Channel special Alien Planet as one of the multiple speakers who co-hosted the show, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity on The History Channel.

In February 2006, Kaku appeared as presenter in the BBC-TV four-part documentary Time which seeks to explore the mysterious nature of time. Part one of the series concerns personal time, and how we perceive and measure the passing of time. The second in the series deals with cheating time, exploring possibilities of extending the lifespan of organisms. The geological time covered in part three explores the ages of the earth and the sun. Part four covers the topics of cosmological time, the beginning of time and the events that occurred at the instant of the big bang.

On January 28, 2007, Kaku hosted the Discovery Channel series 2057. This three-hour program discussed how medicine, the city, and energy could change over the next 50 years.

In 2008, Kaku hosted the three-hour BBC-TV documentary Visions of the Future, on the future of computers, medicine, and quantum physics, and he appeared in several episodes of the History Channel's Universe series.

On December 1, 2009, he began hosting a 12-episode weekly TV series for the Science Channel at 10 pm, called Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, based on his best-selling book. Each 30-minute episode discusses the scientific basis behind imaginative schemes, such as time travel, parallel universes, warp drive, star ships, light sabers, force fields, teleportation, invisibility, death stars, and even superpowers and flying saucers. Each episode includes interviews with the world's top scientists working on prototypes of these technologies, interviews with science fiction fans, clips from science fiction movies, and special effects and computer graphics. Although these inventions are impossible today, the series discusses when these technologies might become feasible in the future.^[14]

In 2010, he began to appear in a series on the website Gametrailers.com called Science of Games, discussing the scientific aspects of various popular video games such as Mass Effect 2 and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

Kaku is popular in mainstream media because of his knowledge and his accessible approach to presenting complex subjects in science. While his technical writings are confined to theoretical physics, his public speaking and media appearances cover a broad range of topics, from the Kardashev scale to more esoteric subjects such as wormholes and time travel. In January 2007, Kaku visited Oman. While there, he talked at length to select members of that country's decision makers. In an interview with local media, Dr Kaku elaborated on his vision of mankind's future. Kaku considers climate change and terrorism as serious threats in man's evolution from a Type 0 civilization to Type 1.^[15]

He is pictured in Symphony of Science's newest song (as of September 6, 2011), 'The Quantum World.'

On October 11, 2010, Michio Kaku appeared in the BBC program "What Happened Before the Big Bang" (along with Laura Mersini-Houghton, Andrei Linde, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, Neil Turok, and other notable cosmologists and physicists), where he propounded his theory of the universe created out of nothing.^[16]

Social policy advocacy[link]

Kaku has publicly stated his concerns over matters including the anthropogenic cause of global warming, nuclear armament, nuclear power and the general misuse of science.^[17] He was critical of the Cassini–Huygens space probe because of the 72 pounds (33 kg) of plutonium contained in the craft for use by its radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Conscious of the possibility of casualties if the probe's fuel were dispersed into the environment during a malfunction and crash as the probe was making a 'sling-shot' maneuver around earth, Kaku publicly criticized NASA's risk assessment.^[18] He has also spoken on the dangers of space junk and called for more and better monitoring. Kaku is generally a vigorous supporter of the exploration of outer space, believing that the ultimate destiny of the human race may lie in extrasolar planets; but he is critical of some of the cost-ineffective missions and methods of NASA.

Kaku credits his anti-nuclear war position to programs he heard on the Pacifica Radio network, during his student years in California. It was during this period that he made the decision to turn away from a career developing the next generation of nuclear weapons in association with Edward Teller and focused on research, teaching, writing and media.^{[citation needed]} Kaku joined with others such as Helen Caldicott, Jonathan Schell, Peace Action and was instrumental in building a global anti-nuclear weapons movement that arose in the 1980s, during the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Kaku was a board member of Peace Action and on the board of radio station WBAI-FM in New York City where he originated his long running program, Explorations, that focused on the issues of science, war, peace and the environment.

His remark from an interview in support of SETI, "We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation...and we wouldn't even know.", is used in the third Symphony of Science installment "Our Place in the Cosmos".

Personal life[link]

Kaku is married to Shizue Kaku and has two daughters.^[19]

Bibliography[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Michio Kaku

Listen to this article (info/dl)

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• Official website
• Michio Kaku on Twitter
• Getting Physical: Dr. Michio Kaku Explains Einstein's Genius
• Russia Takes Aim at Asteroids, op-ed on asteroid defense, Wall St. Journal, Jan. 5, 2010
• The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe interview
• Michio Kaku at the Internet Movie Database
• Michio Kaku on National Public Radio
• About Michio Kaku
• Video: Michio Kaku discusses Physics of the Future on March 23, 2011, on Forum Network.
• In Depth interview with Kaku, October 3, 2010

Steven Hassan
Steven Alan Hassan, M.Ed, LMHC
Born	1954 United States
Occupation	Exit counselor Author Mental health counselor Director, Freedom of Mind
Nationality	United States
Genres	non-fiction
Subjects	psychology, cults
www.freedomofmind.com

Steven Alan Hassan (born 1954) is a licensed mental health counselor and an exit counselor. Hassan was an early advocate of exit counseling, and is the author of two books on the subject of "cults", and what he describes as their use of mind control, thought reform, and the psychology of influence in order to recruit and retain members.

Himself a former member of the Unification Church, after spending one year assisting with involuntary deprogrammings, he developed what he describes as his own non-coercive methods for helping members of alleged cults to leave their groups, and developed therapeutic approaches for counseling former members in order to help them overcome the purported effects of cult membership.

Education[link]

• M.Ed., Counselling Psychology, Cambridge College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985
• Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1992
• Certified as a Nationally Certified Counselor (NCC) by the National Board for Certified Counselors, 2003

Background[link]

Hassan became a member of the Unification Church in the 1970s, at the age of 19, while studying at Queens College. He describes what he terms as his "recruitment" in his first book, Combatting Cult Mind Control, asserting that this recruitment was the result of the unethical use of powerful psychological influence techniques by members of the Church.^[1] He subsequently spent over two years recruiting and indoctrinating new members, as well as performing fundraising and campaigning duties, and ultimately rose to the rank of Assistant Director of the Unification Church at its National Headquarters. In that capacity he met personally with Sun Myung Moon.^[2]

Hassan has given an account of his leaving the Unification Church in his 1998 book Combatting Cult Mind Control and on his personal website: After having been awake for two days as the head of a fundraising team, he caused a traffic accident when he fell asleep at the wheel of the Church's van and drove into the back of a truck. He ended up with a broken leg, surgery and a full-leg cast. During his recuperation he was given permission by his superiors in the Church to visit his parents. His parents contacted former members of the Unification Church who engaged in a deprogramming session with Hassan. Because of his cast he was not able to run or drive away, but he resisted to the point that he states that he had an impulse to "escape by reaching over and snapping my father's neck", rather than to potentially succumb to the deprogramming and betray "The Messiah". His father convinced him to stay for five days and talk to the former Church members who were conducting the deprogramming, after which time Hassan would be free to make the choice to return to the Church. Hassan agreed to this. He subsequently decided to leave the Church.^[3]

In 1979, following the Jonestown tragedy, Hassan founded a non-profit organization called "Ex-Moon Inc.", whose membership consisted of over four hundred former members of the Unification Church.^[2]

According to his biography, "During the 1977-78 Congressional Subcommittee Investigation into South Korean CIA activities in the United States, he consulted as an expert on the Moon organization and provided information and internal documents regarding Moon's desire to influence politics in his bid to 'take over the world.'"^[2]

Around 1980, Hassan began investigating methods of persuasion, mind control and indoctrination. He first studied the thought reform theories of Robert Lifton, and was "able to see clearly that the Moon organization uses all eight" of the thought reform methods described by Lifton.^[3]

He later attended a seminar on hypnosis with Richard Bandler, which was based on the work that he and transformational grammarian John Grinder had done in developing Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Hassan felt that this seminar gave him "a handle on techniques of mind control, and how to combat them." He spent "nearly two years studying NLP with everyone involved in its formulation and presentation." During this period, Hassan moved to Santa Cruz, California for an apprenticeship with Grinder. He became concerned about the marketing of NLP as a tool for "power enhancement", left his association with Grinder, and "began to study the works of Milton Erickson M.D., Virginia Satir, and Gregory Bateson, on which NLP is based." His studies gave him the basis for the development of his theories on mind control.^[4]

Hassan continued to study hypnosis and is a member of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and The International Society of Hypnosis.^[5]

In 1999, Hassan founded the Freedom of Mind Resource Center.^[6] It is registered as a domestic profit corporation in the state of Massachusetts. He is president and treasurer.^[7]

In Combatting Cult Mind Control Hassan describes his personal experiences with the Unification Church, as well as his theory of the four components of mind control. The sociologist Eileen Barker, who has studied the Unification Church, has commented on the book.^[8] She expressed several concerns but nevertheless recommended the book. The book has been reviewed in the American Journal of Psychiatry,^[9] and in the The Lancet,^[10] and has been favorably reviewed by Philip Zimbardo^[11] and Margaret Singer.^[12]

In his second book, Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves (2000), Hassan presents what he terms "a much more refined method to help family and friends, called the Strategic Interaction Approach. This non-coercive, completely legal approach is far better than deprogramming, and even exit counseling"^[13]

Hassan, who is Jewish and belongs to a Temple that teaches Kabbalah warns us that the actions of the Kabbalah Centre have little in common with traditional or even responsible Jewish renewal Kabbalah teachers.^[14] He describes himself as an "activist who fights to protect people's right to believe whatever they want to believe", and states that his work has the broad support of religious leaders from a variety of spiritual orientations.^[15] He further states that "many unorthodox religions have expressed their gratitude to me for my books because it clearly shows them NOT to be a destructive cult."^[16]

His wife Aureet Bar-Yam died in 1991 after falling through ice while trying to save their dog.^[17]

Public impact[link]

He consulted as an expert on the Unification Church during the 1977-1978 Congressional investigation of Korean-American relations.

He has appeared on 60 Minutes, Nightline, Dateline, Larry King Live, and The O'Reilly Factor. He has over thirty years of experience with counseling both current and former members of groups he describes as cults.

In his first book, Combatting Cult Mind Control, he describes his experiences as a member the Unification Church, and describes the exit counseling methods that he developed based on those experiences, and based on his subsequent studies of psychological influence techniques. In his latest book Releasing the Bonds, which was published twelve years after Combatting Cult Mind Control, he describes the evolution of his exit counseling procedures into a more advanced procedure that he calls the "Strategic Interaction Approach."

Mind control[link]

For details see: BITE model

Although he does not name it the "BITE model", in his first book Combatting Cult Mind Control Hassan describes the "four components of mind control as:^[18]

• Behavior control
• Information control
• Thought control
• Emotional control

Twelve years later, in Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves, he developed these same components into a mind-control model, "BITE", which stands for Behavior, Information, Thoughts, and Emotions. Hassan writes that cults recruit members through a three-step process which he refers to as "unfreezing," "changing," and "refreezing," respectively. This involves the use of an extensive array of various techniques, including systematic deception, behavior modification, withholding of information, and emotionally intense persuasion techniques (such as the induction of phobias), which he collectively terms mind control.^[19]

In the same book he also writes "I suspect that most cult groups use informal hypnotic techniques to induce trance states. They tend to use what are called "naturalistic" hypnotic techniques. Practicing meditation to shut down thinking, chanting a phrase repetitively for hours, or reciting affirmations are all powerful ways to promote spiritual growth. But they can also be used unethically, as methods for mind control indoctrination."^[4]

He calls groups that employ such psychological influence techniques "destructive cults," a term that he defines by the methods used to recruit and retain members, and by the effect that such methods have on members, rather than by the theological/sociological/moral views the group espouses. He is opposed to the non-consensual deprogramming of cult members, and supports instead counseling them in order that they withdraw voluntarily from the organization. He writes:^[20]

My mind control model outlines many key elements that need to be controlled: Behavior, Information, Thoughts and Emotions (BITE). If these four components can be controlled, then an individual's identity can be systematically manipulated and changed. Destructive mind control takes the 'locus of control' away from an individual. The person is systematically deceived about the beliefs and practices of the person (or group) and manipulated throughout the recruitment process — unable to make informed choices and exert independent judgment. The person's identity is profoundly influenced through a set of social influence techniques and a "new identity" is created — programmed to be dependent on the leader or group ideology. The person can't think for him or herself, but believes otherwise.

Hassan is a proponent of non-coercive intervention. He refers to his method as the "Strategic Interaction Approach".^[21]

Twelve years after the last publication of Combatting Cult Mind Control, Hassan described his position on deprogramming in Releasing the Bonds. He states that "Deprogramming has many drawbacks. I have met dozens of people who were successfully deprogrammed but, to this day, experience psychological trauma as a result of the method. These people were glad to be released from the grip of cult programming but were not happy about the method used to help them." He further states that "A deprogramming triggers the deepest fears of cult members. They have been taken against their will. Family and friends are not to be trusted. The trauma of being thrown into a van by unknown people, driven away, and imprisoned creates mistrust, anger, and resentment." He quotes a person who was involuntarily deprogrammed as saying "What these deprogrammers did was attempt to change my mind through INFORMATION CONTROL — just like the cult did. They did not deal with the CUT-implanted phobias, which remained with me for years — the fear of certain colors, the identification of certain types of music with CUT rituals, the fear of retaliation and probable death should I ever leave this group."^[21]

Criticism[link]

In a research paper presented at the 2000 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion conference, Anson Shupe, professor of Sociology at Indiana/Purdue University, and Susan E. Darnell, manager of a credit union, state Hassan had participated two involuntary deprogrammings in 1976 and 1977.^[22][23] One involving Arthur Roselle who claims that Hassan kidnapped, hit, and forcibly detained him. Hassan acknowledges that he "was involved with the Roselle deprogramming attempt in 1976. But...was never involved in violence of any kind."^[24]

Hassan states that he spent one year assisting with deprogrammings before turning to less controversial methods (see exit counseling).^[16] Hassan has spoken out against involuntary deprogramming since 1980,^[5][16][25] stating, "I did not and do not like the deprogramming method and stopped doing them in 1977!”^[24] However, in Combatting Cult Mind Control, he stated that "the non-coercive approach will not work in every case, it has proved to be the option most families prefer. Forcible intervention can be kept as a last resort if all other attempts fail."^[26] Concerned that ministers in Japan [were] encouraged to perform forcible deprogramming because of [his] first book," Hassan wrote a letter to Reverend Seishi Kojima stating, "I oppose aggressive, illegal methods."

Website[link]

Hassan's website "Freedom of Mind" contains what he describes as information on "cults and controversial groups" and on which he offers his counseling and consultation services.

On his website Hassan distinguishes between what he terms as destructive cults and benign cults. A destructive cult, according to Hassan, has a "pyramid-shaped authoritarian regime with a person or group of people that have dictatorial control." and "uses deception in recruiting new members." In contrast, benign cults are, according to Hassan, "any group of people who have a set of beliefs and rituals that are non-mainstream." The website further states that "as long as people are freely able to choose to join with full disclosure of the group's doctrine and practices and can choose to disaffiliate without fear or harassment, then it doesn't fall under the behavioral/ psychological destructive cult category."^[27]

The site contains a disclaimer that not every group listed is necessarily what Hassan calls a "destructive mind control cult"^[28] Many of the groups Hassan lists are not included in the Handbook of Cults and Sects in America.^[29] There is also considerable disagreement about what precisely constitutes a cult. Some cult critics and some academics use the term "cult" despite its definitional ambiguity,^[30] but many academics who study such groups prefer the term "New Religious Movement".^[31]

Hassan dedicates his website "to respect for human rights, spirituality, and consumer awareness."^[32] A declaration of support for "religious freedom and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights" appears at the bottom of every page.

See also[link]

• Anti-Cult Movement
• Opposition to cults and new religious movements

Bibliography[link]

• Combatting Cult Mind Control, 1988. ISBN 0-89281-243-5.
• Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves, 2000. ISBN 0-9670688-0-0.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Steven Hassan

• Freedom of Mind Resource Center, Steven Hassan's website
• The Strategic Interaction Approach, Steven Hassan
• How "Exit Counseling" Mirrors Cult Recruiting

Media

• Geraldo Rivera, 1991 program, Steven Hassan appeared on program with Heber Jentzsch
• 2000 Leo J. Ryan Foundation Conference, Steven Hassan speaks on personal experiences
• Online video, audio, transcripts from Steven Hassan media appearances
• Steven Hassan on the Power of Cults and the Myths Surrounding Them, Discovering Psychology