In the awkward position of being both editor of TAJnet and also author of this article, I will dispense with editors comments and update the piece as author, writing a bit about what advances in these ideas have occurred in the succeeding nine years.

This article, along with three other articles on related subjects, received the 1996 Eric Berne Memorial Award for theory^[1]. It has been translated and published in German and is considered by the author to be the more significant of the four. Since the time of its publication in Jan. 1991, much more material has been developed about genocide relating it on a continuum from mass murder to individual murder and to everyday, social murders.

One of the criteria developed by Robert Jay Lifton, in his seminal work^[2] on thought reform and totalism, is the dispensing of existence. By this Lifton meant that the environment exercising total control over its subjects has the power to do away with whomever it wishes. Totalitarian governments kill many people. But there are other, shall we say incomplete, systems, and even individual human acts, of a similar nature that do not actually kill people but expel by summary dismissal, exile or ex-communication.

An organization devoted to thought reform asserts control over members existence either directly or by implication. Even if extinction entails mere expulsion from a job, or workshop, or a community, the act strikes deeper existential ground: a need to belong. The need to belong is related to the fear of abandonment, and it is related to death. Ultimately groups of this kind, therapeutic, organizational, or national, rely on terror, that is, the threat of expulsion, isolation and death. Leaders who impose terror, whether in dictatorships, organizations, or families, rule rather than govern.

It is natural for each of us to want to be rid of that which we see as a threat or a danger. For example we dispense with the existence of pathogens or insects that might carry them. It is also normal for us to want to be rid of that which annoys, a loud noise, a bad smell, an obnoxious person& Or we dislike someone and do not invite him or her to a social function. These are all normal and human tendencies we all possess. It is normal behavior.

But this tendency can, like any personality characteristic, become exaggerated and misused. This escalation can go all the way from ignoring someone, to killing them. Sometimes the dispensing of existence means getting someone you work with fired, or firing them yourself. Perhaps it means manipulating them onto another team. It can mean kicking someone out of therapy, a practice that enjoyed a certain fashion and acceptance in the 1960s and 70s.

It occurs in large weekend life-training groups. The training is set up in such a way as to make the trainer's grandiose promises so seductive that participants want desperately to be allowed to stay in the training, receive approval from the trainer, and learn the psychological secrets that will "transform" them. Anyone exercising critical thinking or challenging the ideas of the leader is asked, or told, to leave. For example, a former mass marathon participant recounts that at some point the trainer had enough of one person. He just wheeled around and said coldly: Then get out. Just get out! It was eerie, weird. The room was silent. This guy got up and walked out; you could tell he was upset.^[3]

Being ridiculed or abused by the trainer or the other participants takes on a devastating meaning within the milieu of control. In the family, perhaps it means sending a child from the table, or making them go to their room. Sometimes it means making a child or a patient, or a trainee, stand in the corner until they agree to do, what you demand.

 In short, there are many ways in which the extreme of the century, The Holocaust, other Genocides, can be studied and even understood to some extent in order to reveal that which we overlook in everyday life. Starting with the extreme has helped me to understand life more fully and completely. It is the dark side, to be sure, but left unacknowledged, it prevents us from enjoying life and beauty to their fullest.

Glossary:

Thought Reform:
This is the formal term for brainwashing. According to Lifton^[4]: &despite the vicissitudes of brainwashing, the process which gives rise to the name is very much a reality: the official Chinese Communist program of szu-hsiang kai-tsao (variously translated as ideological molding, ideological reform or as we shall refer to it here, thought reform) has in fact emerged as one of the most powerful efforts at human manipulation&. The Chinese Communists have brought to [their attempts to change peoples minds], a more organized, comprehensive, and deliberate - a more total - character&

Totalism:
&the coming together of immoderate ideology with equally immoderate individual character traits - an extremist meeting ground between people and ideas^[5].

TAJnet reprint of the 1991 article Aspects of Survival: Triumph over Death and Onliness by Alan Jacobs...