good evening good evening welcome very very much to conversations where i'm pleased to welcome to the program in this segment robert jay lifton and dr lifton is a distinguished professor at the john jay college branch of the city university of  city university of new york and welcome very very much and he's the author of among other many other books the future of immortality and it's written on the questions of some of the major issues confronting us in the we began talking we were talking off camera a little bit before where we stand in terms of the psychological implications of the technology extensions of our consciousness particularly destructive aspects i asked you and you said i might ask you  nuclear winter is a complete truth or only a partial truth but all the evidence is that we can come very close to our technology of destruction of destroying all of human life including the rights of many of the other species and that of eliminating ourselves as a species their own technology is not an extension on an individual basis of the inevitability of death itself or an extension into something more you know i know that i am going to  die human beings i resist that knowledge but it makes it even more difficult for me if i think everything and everyone is going to die as well and you know when i interviewed people in who and they told me about their feelings at the time the prom fell they said not only did they feel that they were about to die but they looked around them and they felt that the whole world was dying and that's an added dimension which makes death itself more unacceptable death is destructive capability is occurred in our lifetimes the time with this one thousand years of human history is a terrible turning point at the end of world war two and i don't think human beings are any worse now than they were in the past it's the change in technology in our relationship to it now look it's true that the turks killed over a one million armenians in mostly nine hundred and fifteen mostly with guns and clubs in that genocide that has been neglected but still they didn't have the technology to perform what's now called on the side to death of everything and even the nazis they came close and the gas chambers were the highest technology of mass murder available at the time and they could kill as many as ten thousand or even twenty thousand people within twenty four hours at auschwitz that's an extraordinary amount of killing but that doesn't in any way touch in at least killing potential nuclear known that the hydrogen bomb was a genocidal weapon that's the key turning point and they still persist and they still proceeded because at that point we got rocked into the cold war and the fear that the russians would make it and herbert york who has been very active in the making of weapons but now is a voice for arms control has reexamined that whole time and said we could have you know risk nothing and held back on the making of the of the hydrogen bomb just exploring the possibilities with the soviet union particularly holding off on making it it would have been a major step in preventing and moving to this genocidal system that we now are all in  initiative and even the i n f treaty it's limited but it's of some importance it's the right direction it's thinking in species terms in the beginning way but look the weapons are still pointed at the two countries and there's the danger of proliferation we're chemical weapons and certain kinds of missiles as the poor man's nuclear weapons and there's a lot to that idea because i have felt for a long time that until the superpowers really get serious about radical nuclear disarmament mutual getting rid of virtually all of the nuclear weapons all but a handful as many plans now put forward there won't be any chance in two that's done of controlling  other countries or controlling the very real danger of chemical and bacteriological weapons one wonders if there are some basis of economic or political injustices in the world which may be the basis for friction between the peoples of the world that lead to the system of weapons and people which could blow up virtually all human life very quick on the planet but at the same time once one recognizes that there is the beginning glimmers of species consciousness species mentality and a species self and it works something like this once i recognize that nuclear winter or something close to it is real then i have to say to myself you counterpart if you die i die if i survive you survive we're in it together that's what buckminster fuller meant by spaceship earth we're on the same planet and once i do that i begin to recognize that every other sense of self is bound up with my sense of self and vice a versa the beginning of a species self and then i still go on being what i am an american a psychiatrist and a doctor and a teacher and a father and a husband and a jew and a few other things but in addition to those i take on that species commitment and as a member of the human species i also look at issues ethical and political questions and i'm more able to feel the pain of a black south african when he's treated or he's treated be brutally private by that regime or by a check political heretic or for that matter by the homeless in this country right here in new york and more and more people have that it isn't new it's just newly necessary and i think it's increasing so we have these two forces one of destruction potentially of everything and the other of a more inclusive sense of identity which is described in pragmatic terms psychologically well you know i can't give a yes or no answer to that war and i don't even like to deal in terms of optimism or pessimism but yes we're capable of that so there's hope for that we can imagine that species consciousness because partly it the spirit of that group we have you know doctors all over the world who instead of being simply preoccupied with making more money through their fees or whatever doctors are most preoccupied with most of the time they care on an international human species reve that take shape from people all over the world and their corresponding groups of other kinds so yes it's increasing but we've got to make it happen faster and have it spread more rapidly to more people i think here the media have some life itself which is even a more precious liaison in a certain sense that this very small planet has in terms of the cosmos i don't suppose we can see that kind of well you know an entropy in terms of the operation of universe and so forth we don't know that in other words we don't know whether our weaponry if we really made use of fully could destroy even the potential for a life that would be hard to do but not impossible given our world but here's the way to look at here's one way to look at it anyhow when i speak of symbolic immortality in my work in the book of essays you mentioned earlier work i really mean that sense we require over the course of our lives not just when we're close to death but over the course of our lives that we're part of something roger than ourselves it's a symbolization of larger human connectedness it's a simulation of the fact that we are the historical animal in the cultural animal so many merging as homo sapiens we we learn that we die we create culture and we symbolize and we can more readily accept death if we feel comfortable in being part of some kind of human chain and that human chain we feel to be threatened it doesn't give me much solace to think well still the potential for some life the phosphorus or whatever is still there somewhere even after the nuclear holocaust it's just into species awareness and species consciousness the empathy comes in it's very very important very important and if we were saying before taking this is a good this very doing doomsday kind of picture that the adverse side of a what i want to say about that i think we have to stay without history it's the only history we have i don't think we can transcend our history but we can move to another place in our history and i do agree with part what you said in terms of the potential for technological mass destruction of virtually everyone and everything on the one hand in the same time reaching a consciousness of the oneness of the human species and its dependency upon other species now i don't think we should put too much dependence on technology as such it is true that we have increasingly finer technology that could help alleviate a lot of medical and social problems in the rd world but we've gotten into the habit of doing it even further might not have been free of this hack it is to replace human solutions with technological solutions  extension of our conference it is but we need to really work through human problems on human terms and then bring the technology under human control as opposed to seeing the technology as the savior because that has all kinds of dangers it won't be the savior unless we know what to do with it and unless we have certain visions i would say species awareness that allow us to put the technology in the right places and at the service of the right groups  and to help with starvation and that is part of a human consciousness i don't think it's transcending human consciousness i'm not making it even a mystical ichihara it's rather a further step in psychological and his star capability which we have at least potentially as human beings and i think there may be something to the idea that we arrive at that possibility as greater than before our possibilities for species awareness is much greater than ahead of their times like jesus or gandhi or martin luther king and others maybe moses abraham but but it's very hard to live up to but now it's become pragmatically available and pragmatically necessary  an evolutionary sense and more and more people have elements of it but also so things are in the pot you know and i think that the notion of species awareness of species consciousness is very threatening to some groups and contending with that you have fundamentalist groups that are more narrow politically and religiously than nationalism right back to selfish individual nationalism or political sectarianism and you know in extreme expression you might find where you might find me or nazis in this country or you might find various fundamentalists religiously and politically and you see them in the middle east among jews and among arabs and you see them in africa and in asia there's a kind of n the world to get a sense of identity in terms of the roots or that's right you know that's very close to i think in which fundamentalism arises when the fundamentals are few years to be threatened i think that i meant by trying the and scarcity which is in the context within which all of human institutions that evolve yes that was a fundamental breaking point you would see that you see simply producing that technology doesn't do it and it was the technology can replace scarcity with the brands but for that to happen it needs certain attitudes of the human mind to combine with the technology to bring it about i feel that in for his message there was too much of the sense even if you didn't believe this or say it directly it could be inferred by some from the way he did speak too much of the sense that the technology would solve it for us the extraordinary technological leaps which are real would solve these human problems the technological leaps don't solve the human cry oh i don't know if they potentially solve them if we can combine a certain cast of mind that is species oriented with that wonderful breakthrough in process i would say is very much an ethical and a political process you know there's not going to come automatically has to be fought for it needs movements and groups that see these things internationally universally for instance there but i could see these things happening i just said at the only my work and others on the nazi ear and the nazi doctors but also my work and i was in hiroshima and i began to think that for the people in hiroshima to really confront their experience and for the germans to potential for destructiveness and to look at the other is to transcend that potential and move into species consciousness and that's really happening but is it happening fast enough and rightly enough that's a question as a species i could see it in my sense of self or your sense of self that a very different elements that go into my sense of identity or my sense of self or yours or anyone else's and the sense of being a human being and part of the human species and therefore bound up with all other members of the species becomes in this way a very important part of my everyday sense of self that means when certain issues come up whether it's the issues of oppression in south africa or events in central or south america or in eastern europe or anywhere in the united states in terms of the extraordinary polarization of the society economically between the very rich and the very poor which is getting worse and worse and more and more polarized you know the situation is if i take on a species of yes i develop empathy for others who are different at a different end of the soci economic scale in this country or a different color or a different nationality or different regions or whatever many people throughout the world have much of that already but how much can it take holds that helps condition their decisions the way they vote the way they live the way they live their lives you know and it's at least hopeful that this can expand and spread and certainly much of my life is you know committed to that effort or indeed it is and i could come back to something you said before you said that it's understood in a certain sense or could be understood that the adverse side of the destructive capability is the possibility of a material world order d in which sufficiency or even that opening on with in which human institution could be formulated that there is enough rather than there's not enough there is that this is a context for which human institutions international order and so forth could be formulated within an understanding of their being sufficien i don't know is it ever announced in the halls of our government or are they doing our national governments or even our united nations representatives think in terms of materially i think they're being enough for all and what would be the context the possibility open to deliver t bodies that could be administering as it were a world technological human system in the understanding of sufficiency there is enough meat isn't it there is sufficient see there's enough food and there are enough resources to take care of people in the world if they want to bring in the if it's a very major contingency if they're properly husbanded and nurtured and distributed that's an enormous if to improve that nurturing of the resources and the food and the distribution so people don't starve and have the capacity to live and to live reasonably decently to do all that possibilities of being able to do this render rendering the resources and the food sufficient for the people in the world and we have to at the same time be pressing for the consciousness and univers species consciousness that would enable us or motivate us to do but there are more and more people who see things with that model perspective but they're not the people who run the great powers in our world who hold the power in most of the that from happening that's the beginning of species mentality there's not enough of it and it isn't carried through consistently enough but that has to be worked on simultaneously with the technological and when you put it in mystical whether they're technological or not or partially technological when you depend too much on metaphor i think without meaning to do so perhaps it runs the danger of  vision i want to be sufficiently visionary to include in the equation that which might be but i don't want to just put it in mystical terms or in metaphorical terms would be very visionary in a very real sense that you want to do it has to be in practical terms it relates to the sense even the the various polls of polls done by the best student of attitudes in this country daniel yankelovich show that most americans recognize that nuclear weapons were destroyed virtually everyone that there's no recovering from nuclear war and americans you know think that there's a five thousand and fifty chance or something like that of a nuclear war in their lifetime there's a certain realistic sense they have about nuclear threat which has made its way to them despite the efforts of many of our leaders to fry's things to really encourage what i call psychic numbing once americans and people of the world and other countries have similar attitudes i think once they have that attitude they know that we have to come to some terms as americans do the whole free freeze movement voting showed us that americans are americans want to diminish the arms race but they're afraid of the soviet union and so on but the leaders of the countr fall back on nationalistic cliches fuel of the cold war in various ways and haven't reached them haven't reached the sensibility on on a species level that many of the people have that's why a lot of the work in this has to be done outside of governments and a lot is being done i mean i was on a wonderful space a bridge as they call it program with the soviet union and there are many other things like that in the doctor's group and there are lawyers groups  are teachers groups there still are just a tiny little portion of what we require but the best outside of government to build rise pressures on to governments i think the doctors movement has been useful because the soviet representatives to the doctors movements had to be kosher to the soviet regime being the way it works but they could go back and be a raw beat within the regime for nuclear reason and they were and have been and they've contributed the soviet change in this area and we like to think that in a modest way we've contributed something to so rots of effort has to be done outside of governments and then pressures on governments and did the and the soviet doctors could say less about their governments but on the other hand we could talk with them as human beings and they felt very very strongly and could bring back a message to their government we were treated often rudely by a government and weren't even received formally after receiving the nobel prize i don't think president reagan was delighted about our receiving the nobel prize because we've been a consistent critic of policies american policy and soviet policy regard to nuclear weapons build up nonetheless that freedom to speak out against our government isn't enough we have to develop consciousness in a way that forces our government to a more reasonable position and some of that has happened so that when reagan knew that he needed political capital he turned toward peacemaking not toward nuclear saber rattling that means because he's a very stupid politician he and people around him that means there's some recognition of a consciousness in the direction of humanity and peacemaking taking shape in america that has political importance we've got to do a lot more of that to make it still more important politically and otherwise in the united states can be done with more or less the dialogue from civil disobedience from civil disobedience to casting your vote for instance i always try to connect with the bearer of the very good when the catholic church because i think they have a very important message about the evil of the nuclear weapons buildup and  demonstrating it i went to testify at a trial of some of those people just a few weeks ago you know try to always do that different people do different things i write my books and papers others teach demonstrate i do that once in a while there's no one but sometimes it's got to be outside the established institutions and the whole doctors movement it's very mild it's very conservative really but it couldn't take shape within the official political organizations nor should it have been it took place outside of them and then there are other groups that are more militant and we need them all universal declaration of human rights adopted by the united nations forty years ago may not be a legally binding document it is rather a promise made by all the members of the united nations to the people of the world we had amnesty international believe that the governments who have adopted the declaration have a moral responsibility to keep that promise right amnesty international post office box thirty seven thousand one hundred and thirty seven washington d c two double  this may be the best kept secret in the world the universal declaration of human rights forty years ago the united nations wrote and adopted it every single member country has promised to support it every single one they also promised to teach d traffic anyone that's taken basic biology knows about the food chain and the food chain as you grow up the food chain it takes a tremendous amount of energy to maintain increasingly complex species up the food chain of the living system in fact only about ten percent of the energy of a victim ever is consumed into the predator and they're in the food chain the other ninety percent of the victims energy is just  d then more complex the living creature the more concentrated the energy flow through the more energy is needed to maintain that species so it's also true with social systems the more decentralized the system less energy it requires  complex and centralized a civilization or an infrastructure or an institution or more energy required to maintain it and wasted energy in the process if you look at the social systems and groups coming into looking at the incredible pollution is the greenhouse crisis and the ozone depletion acid rain species extinction that's the price we're paying for one hundred years of unbridled economic activity and now the pollution is building up faster o we have to learn that there are limits let me give you an example we call this the age of growth and in a sense know that it's an illusion we never grow economics is merely the borrowing of resources from the environment we collect them transform them into products and utilities and then they end up as waste pollution that has to be discarded that into the environment so we don't grow anything we just transfer our resources from nature to ourselves nature in fact even the molecules in my face will be replaced in seventy eight months from now my body will be replaced physically speaking in about seven years from now so even our physical beings are our physical begins his natural resources we transform those resources into why being our physical existence and then being discarded at all times back into the environment so it's interesting if we grew up instead of thinking this is the age of growth that we thought of it as the age of borrowing we have a very different sense of our responsibility to our environment and to our planet because when you battle you got to pay back the word is replete with ethics and debt in this relationship the give and take so if we properly understood that activity all economic activity is derivative of the environment we're merely borrowing from it for a temporary point in time span and then it goes back to the environment if we understood the nature of our indebtedness to the planet we wouldn't have the national debt we would have a greenhouse crisis we wouldn't have acid rain or species extinction because we would understand our place in the continuum of things between the past in the future when we have to turn a progress that has been associated with that growth industrialization and so forth and how do we do with the desire seeming on the part of the human species and people human societies to have material progress then every day first of all the the age of material progress is again a bit of a misnomer only a small percentage of the population this planet had experienced the great material benefits of industrial fossil fuel era you know it's important to point out that fifteen to seventeen percent of our species today goes to bed hungry every night that's the greater percentage of human beings in history that have gone to bed europe we never experienced the reality of seventeen percent of our own species malnourished so this has been the age of progress narrowly defined for a small elite within a handful of industrial nations a me united states western europe and now in japan so this is this is going to i would say anthropologists will look back at this age is the age of illusion and is a cruel age because we sacrifice future generations for short term whims you wouldn't agree with dr phil is perception that we've made progress techno the tech not technology electricity and other kinds of benefits have brought net living repass ability perhaps not realised the possibility he said he thought we could but i totally disagree with bucky fuller on this the fact is tools when you strip them of their mystique are just transformers and sally do they don't grow anything they don't make anything from nothing they simply transform tools are made out of nature's resources they're used to transform other resources into temporary goods products utilities and then eventually they are discarded so the faster you accelerate the transformers the tools the more power you build into the tools faster we exhaust the terrestrial resources the faster we build up pollution that can't be recycled by nature's own timescale and the faster we exhaust the base of energy which future generations have to live this planet has its own time frame and our social time is now at odds with our own physical time and our own internal clocks and the clocks of the planet so in a sense our environmental crisis is a crisis of time values and of high technology we are producing and consuming and that for the st time in two hundred thousand years of evolution that we have the potency of destruction probably it's a do one verse side of that destructive capability might be enough and might not be something like a liberated and for us to be threat to the planet is environmental threat and security increasingly in the coming decade will be defined in terms of global environmental security because what brings us together now in common peril is the destruction entire planet and solar system so i think we have the threat of military extinction and we now have the threat of environmental extinction as security now has to be defined in a broader context in terms of what would  but they didn't have detached awareness they couldn't make a choice they were they were in a communal way but they had no sense their relationship to things the nd great stage of consciousness intellectuals in terms of understanding the evolution of consciousness happy to be able to bring you his perceptions from the wetlands here in new york city where they're having a concert a benefit concert to mark the upcoming twenty the anniversary of the earth conversations invite you to meet again next week coming back then that's it for this particular segment jeremy once again thank you very much indeed goodnight see you next week