Superpower Syndrome

Robert Jay Lifton
November 2003     ISBN: 1560255129

The apocalyptic imagination has spawned a new kind of violence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In Superpower Syndrome, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton describes two competing visions--Islamist and American--each aimed at massive destruction in the name of global purification and renewal. While Islamist extremists are overtly visionary in their willingness to kill and die for their religion, American forces claim restraint and reason while offering a no less visionary program for their overwhelming military power to remake the world.

Both sides are energized by versions of intense idealism; both see themselves combating evil in order redeem and renew the world; both are ready to unleash untold levels of violence to achieve their aims; each sees itself in a face-off with the other, and both are engaged in a cycle of violence to which no end is in sight.

No one is better equipped than Lifton to make sense of this extreme moment. In the wake of 9/11, America feels painfully vulnerable and thinks of itself as survivor nation. Such feelings have been mobilized by an Administration that finds the very idea of weakness unbearable, which has unprecedented military power, and which is bent on controlling history. This lethal combination adds up to a "superpower syndrome."

"Lifton brings his unique psychiatric and psychohistorical perspective to the heated issues of the war on terror and America in a unipolar world. Lifton defines superpower syndrome as an aberrant 'national mind-set...that takes on a sense of omnipotence, of unique standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all other nations.' He examines parallels with other instances of apocalyptic nations, which he has explored in groundbreaking works about Hiroshima (Death in Life), the Holocaust (The Nazi Doctors), the Vietnam War (Home from the War) and global terrorism (Destroying the World to Save It). Bush's war on terror can be seen as apocalyptic, Lifton says, because of its call for an amorphous battle unlimited in time or space and encompassing the absolute eradication of evil. The perceived threat of group annihilation leads apocalyptics to 'merge with God in the claim to ownership of death,' asserting the right to 'murderous purification' and to decide who lives and who dies. The U.S. response to Nazi violence was similarly apocalyptic, in Lifton's analysis, a battle 'for global salvation through the flames of destruction,' such as the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima. The latter in turn fed into the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult in Japan in the 1990s. Similarly, the Bush response is "part of an ongoing dynamic in which the American apocalypitc interacts, almost to the point of collusion, with the Islamic apocalyptic'--an escalation that, Lifton believes, 'has in it the potential seeds of world destruction,' Yet escalation isn't inevitable, and with guarded hope, Lifton provides a complex yet clearly articulated roadmap to national self-reflection rather than international destruction."

--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Robert Jay Lifton is the author of Superpower Syndrome and of Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, which won a National Book Award.