How to Maintain Hope in an Age of Catastrophe | An Alleged Plot’s Burning Question: Why Would India Take the Risk? | ‘If Tesla gets unionized it’s because we deserve it’: Elon Musk says he’s made his factory workers millionaires but concedes some may still want to turn against him | One Of America’s Longest-Serving CEOs Has Advice On Humor And Risk

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How to Maintain Hope in an Age of Catastrophe - The New Yorker

In the first half century of his career, Robert Jay Lifton published five books based on long-term studies of seemingly vastly different topics. For his first book, “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism,” Lifton interviewed former inmates of Chinese reëducation camps. Trained as both a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, Lifton used the interviews to understand the psychological—rather than the political or ideological—structure of totalitarianism. His next topic was Hiroshima; his 1968 book “Death in Life,” based on extended associative interviews with survivors of the atomic bomb, earned Lifton the National Book Award. He then turned to the psychology of Vietnam War veterans and, soon after, Nazis. In both of the resulting books—“Home from the War” and “The Nazi Doctors”—Lifton strove to understand the capacity of ordinary people to commit atrocities. In his final interview-based book, “Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism,” which was published in 1999, Lifton examined the psychology and ideology of a cult.

Lifton is fascinated by the range and plasticity of the human mind, its ability to contort to the demands of totalitarian control, to find justification for the unimaginable—the Holocaust, war crimes, the atomic bomb—and yet recover, and reconjure hope. In a century when humanity discovered its capacity for mass destruction, Lifton studied the psychology of both the victims and the perpetrators of horror. “We are all survivors of Hiroshima, and, in our imaginations, of future nuclear holocaust,” he wrote at the end of “Death in Life.” How do we live with such knowledge? When does it lead to more atrocities and when does it result in what Lifton called, in a later book, “species-wide agreement”?

Lifton’s big books, though based on rigorous research, were written for popular audiences. He writes, essentially, by lecturing into a Dictaphone, giving even his most ambitious works a distinctive spoken quality. In between his five large studies, Lifton published academic books, papers and essays, and two books of cartoons, “Birds” and “PsychoBirds.” (Every cartoon features two bird heads with dialogue bubbles, such as, “ ‘All of a sudden I had this wonderful feeling: I am me!’ ” “You were wrong.”) Lifton’s impact on the study and treatment of trauma is unparalleled. In a 2020 tribute to Lifton in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, his former colleague Charles Strozier wrote that a chapter in “Death in Life” on the psychology of survivors “has never been surpassed, only repeated many times and frequently diluted in its power. All those working with survivors of trauma, personal or sociohistorical, must immerse themselves in his work.”

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An Alleged Plot’s Burning Question: Why Would India Take the Risk? -

After an indictment accuses an Indian official of ordering an assassination on U.S. soil, diplomats and experts debate how far up the chain the scheme went.

In page after page of fly-on-the-wall detail, the indictment unsealed in New York this week describes a chilling plot: A criminal operative, on orders from a government official in India, tried to arrange the killing of a Sikh American on U.S. soil.

As the scheme unfolded, court documents said, it grew only more brazen. When a prominent Sikh was gunned down in Canada in June in what prosecutors call a related assassination, the operative was told to speed up in New York, not slow down, the indictment says. And he was ordered to proceed even as India’s prime minister was on a red-carpet visit to Washington.

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‘If Tesla gets unionized it’s because we deserve it’: Elon Musk says he’s made his factory workers millionaires but concedes some may still want to turn against him - Fortune

The United Auto Workers (UAW) warned Elon Musk it would be recruiting members of Tesla staff from right under his nose. Now Musk—an outspoken critic of unions—says if his employees did choose to join, the company would be partly to blame.

In a wide-ranging interview during the New York Times’ DealBook Summit this week, Musk said he didn’t like unions, because they created a divide within organizations.

The richest man on earth said he had worked hard to create opportunities for staff across the hierarchy of his company—even claiming he had made factory workers millionaires thanks to stock options. As a result, he implied there’s no need for unions at Tesla.

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One Of America’s Longest-Serving CEOs Has Advice On Humor And Risk - Forbes

To understand Dan Amos' approach to leadership, consider the first role he took at Aflac after graduating from the University of Georgia in 1973. As son of cofounder Paul Amos, one of three brothers who founded the insurance company in 1955, he could have hung out in the head office. Instead, he started in sales.

"I wanted an objective job, not a subjective job," says Amos, 72, who went on to become the top salesman of the supplemental health and life insurance companyâand its CEO in 1990. "Goal-setting always intrigued me and was something I liked."

That focus on results has helped Amos grow Aflac (AFL) from a market cap of $2 billion to $48.5 billion, with a stock that's up 18% this year, closing at $82.97 on Nov. 27. Revenue has grown from around $2 billion in 1990 to $19.44 billion last year.

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