🚘 I’m not driving fast to a dentist appointment on a typical Vermont winter day when I feel a familiar slipping beneath me that demands my full attention. I gently touch the brakes, noting to self: don’t oversteer. I’m aware that I’m going downhill and I’m not going any slower. In fact, I’m sliding into the other lane. Good thing no one is coming. I stay calm, reminding myself that I’m good at steering out of a skid. But this is not any skid. Now I’m fishtailing. OH. There’s nothing I can do to stop this one. I’m out of control. I hold onto the wheel and wonder what will happen next. 

Robert Jay Lifton is 98 years old and he’s planning his next book. When he published his first one,  Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961), he was unaware of its relevance for cult survivors, but it became a seminal book on coercive persuasion and ideological extremism. 20 books and 63 years later, he’s not done. His current project centers on “the attraction of factual reality” because, as he recently told Dr. Steve Hassan, “Facts Matter!”.