"And I thought about the psychic numbing involved in strategic projections of using hydrogen bombs or nuclear weapons of any kind. And I also thought about ways in which all of us undergo what could be called the numbing of everyday life"
About this Quote
Lifton is diagnosing a double anesthesia: the bureaucratic calm that makes mass death thinkable, and the quieter, daily trance that lets the rest of us live with it. As a psychologist who studied survivors of Hiroshima and the mental machinery of atrocity, he’s alert to how language and planning can launder violence. “Strategic projections” sounds like a PowerPoint category, not an act that incinerates cities. That’s the point. The phrase exposes how technocratic diction turns the ungraspable into the manageable, swapping moral horror for managerial competence. “Psychic numbing” is the mind’s compromise with scale: when numbers get too large, feeling goes on strike.
The sly pivot is the second sentence. Lifton refuses to quarantine numbing as a pathology of generals and war planners. He implicates “all of us,” widening the frame from Cold War scenario rooms to the routines of modern life. The subtext is uncomfortable: the same psychological defenses that help a strategist model “acceptable losses” also help ordinary people scroll past catastrophe, go to work, and keep the lights on. It’s not equivalence, it’s continuity - a shared capacity to normalize what should remain intolerable.
Context matters here: Lifton’s work sits in the shadow of nuclear brinkmanship, when civilization-ending violence was both abstract (never used, hypothetically) and omnipresent (always possible). His intent isn’t to scold emotionlessness; it’s to show how numbness becomes a cultural technology. If you can’t feel the end of the world, you can plan it. If you can’t feel everyday life, you can accept almost anything.
The sly pivot is the second sentence. Lifton refuses to quarantine numbing as a pathology of generals and war planners. He implicates “all of us,” widening the frame from Cold War scenario rooms to the routines of modern life. The subtext is uncomfortable: the same psychological defenses that help a strategist model “acceptable losses” also help ordinary people scroll past catastrophe, go to work, and keep the lights on. It’s not equivalence, it’s continuity - a shared capacity to normalize what should remain intolerable.
Context matters here: Lifton’s work sits in the shadow of nuclear brinkmanship, when civilization-ending violence was both abstract (never used, hypothetically) and omnipresent (always possible). His intent isn’t to scold emotionlessness; it’s to show how numbness becomes a cultural technology. If you can’t feel the end of the world, you can plan it. If you can’t feel everyday life, you can accept almost anything.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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