Cults in our midst
Cults are a complex phenomenon. When does a religion turn into a cult? How much choice do we have in joining these toxic organizations or is everything determined from cause and effect? This is a topic that excites such debate, as can be seen in Misunderstanding Cults edited by Zablocki and Robbins, but debate is needed. There are undeniable stresses that ex-cult members describe in their stories, but there are also personal deficits and susceptibilities that are exploited by these cult leaders. Cult behaviour can exist in governments, corporations, political groups, religions, psychology clinics, self-help groups and families. When people are emotionally invested in one organization or another, the need to defend arises in them, which clouds the problem. Because there is so much backlash from Cultists themselves who need to defend their own religion or belief system, I’ve decided to focus more on the phenomenology of Cults, instead of doing a diatribe about one particular cult or another. This way the debate between agency and determinism can be dealt with personally. By seeing how YOU are affected, because if negative relationships concern you, then you can make up your own mind based on how badly or well off you are after you complete a social transaction with a particular group. The controversial anti-cultist Margaret Thaler Singer wrote in Cults in our midst that “I have always been interested in words: how words create mental pictures, how those pictures stir emotions and call up other ideas and feelings, and how people use words to entertain, educate, and influence one another.” This is the correct strategy for me. In the end we are the ones that decide where we invest our time, money and emotions. Does it really matter if a cult is religious or secular? If the results are the same, then no.
How much are we brainwashed and how are much are we brainwashing ourselves?
Where the controversy lies is Margaret’s insistence in finding a brainwashing method where cult leaders are able to control people against their will. As can be read in Cults by James R. Lewis, he lays out the history of this intellectual conflict. Margaret was an expert witness in court cases involving cults, because of her expertise with soldiers dealing with thought-reform in Korea in the 1950s. But her role as an expert for courts ended when the American Psychological Association couldn’t find enough scientific rigor to backup her claims. It’s possible to go too far one way or another, because there are clear patterns of manipulation that leaders use, but there are also personal attitudes that make victims a perfect target. “It takes two to tango” as the saying goes. There are many weaknesses that victims have, but the most overlooked one is that of the natural search we all have, which is to believe there is a greater happiness somewhere else than where we are. When people realize they are victimized, they have trouble letting go of their belief that they found this better happiness. The fear in having to let go of an emotional investment and start all over again is a big reason that there is resistance to change. Margaret says that “modern day cults and thought-reform groups tend to offer apparent utopias, places where all humankind’s ills will be cured. The cult’s lure is, if you just come along, all will be fine, and everyone will live happily ever after.” The term, lure, that Margaret uses is a good one. It brings up images of fishing and applying bait to a hook. “[Cults] form around a person who claims he or she has a special mission or knowledge, which will be shared with those who turn over most of their decision making to that self-appointed leader.”
Is it Choice or Momentum?
We have limited, or deterministic environments, but in most cases we can choose in those environments among at least two choices or more. As Albert Bandura pointed out in Self-efficacy, the environment acts on us but we are also a part of the environment and can act on it. To act as if the environment is the only place where there’s agency creates too much dualism between the human and the environment. Even if we have limited choices throughout our upbringing, the desire to try something new is partially a choice and the brain’s natural deterministic tendency to seek novelty, which can propel a person to add new experiences to their life for comparison. As people age, they’ve tried a lot of things and fell down some holes in the wrong direction. Many will have discovered what activities make them most happy and engaged because they had experiences to compare. Ultimately the seeking of new experiences, and the cherishing of favourite ones, is an ebb and flow that adds variety to life coming from both the deterministic and agency perspectives. Does our brain feel bored with old experiences? Does the brain feel excited by encountering new experiences? When people have a variety of experiences, can people resist novelties that are suspicious and return to safer experiences? Without bad experiences it may not be easy to detect suspicious behaviour. Agency and determinism are intertwined and any brainwashing science must advance with this understanding. Science has to progress into DNA differences between people and their emotional content when they make choices. If some people have a desperate desire to connect with others and other people can resist more easily, science would have to explain that. Why do people tolerate human rights abuses in a cult, and why do some resist it? Why do some people escape cults and others remain all of their lives? Certainly there are influences that groups can act with on an agent, but agents also have weaknesses and beliefs that respond in the wrong way. By outlining the predictable methods, hopefully the reader can detect suspicious activity faster so they can avoid exploitation in any environment.
What people are like before they join a cult
For Margaret Singer, cults don’t happen only to “weak and silly people.” She says that “everyone is susceptible to the lure of these master manipulators. In fact, the majority of adolescents and adults in cults come from middle-class backgrounds, are fairly well educated, and are not seriously disturbed prior to joining.” Her research indicated that “approximately two-thirds of those who have joined cults came from normal, functioning families and were demonstrating age-appropriate behavior around the same time they entered a cult. Of the remaining third, only about 5 or 6 percent had major psychological difficulties prior to joining a cult. The remaining portion of the third had diagnosable depressions related to personal loss (for example, a death in the family, failure to be admitted to a preferred university or training program, or a broken romance) or were struggling with age-related sexual and career dilemmas.” Margaret also describes people who are young and looking for quick solutions to problems, and the elderly who are recently widowed and lonely. Some older persons also feel the urgency to find a spiritual meaning for their lives as death approaches. The most important vulnerability is in modern life itself. “Another kind of vulnerability, or stress factor, evolves when a person, especially an adolescent or young adult, feels overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices he or she needs to make, the ambiguity of life at this age, the complexity of the world, and the amount of conflict associated with many aspects of daily life. In addition to facing pressing personal decisions, many adolescents are attempting to come to grips with their overall values, beliefs, and purposes…They commonly describe classes, teachers, and experiences that they felt destabilized their views of the world, leaving them frightened by the complexity of making seemingly endless decisions. Feeling lost and alone, they felt a need to find affiliation and some simple ways to make their lives work. Without intending to make such a choice they found themselves swept along into a group that offered simple and guaranteed paths to follow.” It’s not only the youth that are confused. Canadian Professor Stephen Kent talks of a cult he has studied that had in its attendance “aquarian-aged people who’ve grown up expecting the world to be filled with peace and happiness but have been left disappointed.”
If there’s a thread that groups all these people together in these examples, it is a population of people looking for purpose and meaning in their lives and can’t find it in conventional ways. Economic destruction, technological complexity, broken relationships, loneliness, victimization, addictions, conflict, fear and isolation, lead to so many types of people to become primed for joining a cult. Margaret says that “being depressed and being in between important affiliations…[can make us] especially vulnerable to persuasion and suggestion because of some loss or disappointment that has caused a depressed mood or even mild to moderate clinical depression. And we’re especially prone to the cults’ kind of influence when we’re not engaged in a meaningful personal relationship, job, educational or training program, or some other life involvement.” That gap is filled by the cult which offers “an improved state of mind, an expanded state of being, and a moral, spiritual, or political state of righteous certainty.” Unfortunately “that supposedly beneficial state can only be reached by following the narrowly prescribed pathways of a particular group master, guru, or trainer…The new recruit…must surrender his or her critical mind, must yield to the flow of force, must have childlike trust and faith.”
Exploiting your ambition to improve the world
Since cults need money, they focus on people who already have enough resources. The main way to get money is via donations and selling courses. Cults “target employed persons with money-making skills, to whom [they] will sell ‘courses,’ gradually hooking these people into greater and greater commitment to the group, as well as selling them more and more expensive courses. Some of these recruits end up leaving their jobs and working for the cult to pay for courses.” These courses teach how to “scientifically reduce stress in your life, how to manage your office and become a millionaire, how to get control of your life, how to live forever, how to detect if you have been abducted by space creatures, how to reach perfect enlightenment and govern the world, how to live past lives, and on and on…Offerings are worded as if the group were specifically made to benefit you. You usually do not learn the full story (and real purpose) of the cult until long after becoming embedded in the group.” This is a selfish element to self-development, but not all people want to be rich and master the world. “Former cult members commonly reveal that they were looking for companionship or the chance to do something to benefit themselves and mankind. They say they were not looking for the particular cult they joined and were not intending to belong for a lifetime. Rather, they were actively and/or deceptively pressured to join, soon found themselves enmeshed in the group, were slowly cut off from their pasts and their families, and became totally dependent on the group.” Margaret looks at the power hierarchy not even as a pyramid, but an inverted T ┴ where the cult leader receives the vast majority of the rewards. One can easily make fun of the symbol. It’s shaped like a prick, so cultists are pricks and they “screw” you.
Times of social change
As people are primed by a sense of lack, depression and even personality disorders, their lack distorts their perception with hunger and yearning. Perception is coloured by emotion. Like putting on glasses with a tinted colour, the vision desperately searches for THE answer. “…when segments of society cannot see where they fit in, what the rules are, or what the socially agreed-upon answers to life’s big questions are, then, like a dormant disease, the ever-present potential cult leaders take hold and lure followers to their causes…These determined self-designed gurus seem always to be lurking on the sidelines ready to step in and offer answers to life’s problems. They claim they have the only and sure way of life. They induce people to follow them by touting a special mission and special knowledge. The special mission is to preach the contents of a supposedly ‘secret’ learning, which the leaders assert can only be revealed to those who join them…Historically, we have seen that as a fabric of a society unravels, self-appointed leaders easily recruit a following. People at a loss to make sense of the mayhem around them look for direction and become more approachable and vulnerable to the manipulations and exploitations of these skilled con artists. Certainty and simple solutions for the complex problems of decision making become attractive offerings in a world that appears to be unstable and rapidly changing.” Margaret lists historical events that increased the power of cults including, the fall of Rome, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, European colonization, the aftermath of World War II in Japan, the 1960’s rebellion in the West, and the breakup of Communist regimes.
Cult methods
Whether it’s people on streets with signs, well dressed people standing next to sidewalk recruitment displays or people selling get rich quick schemes, they are offering you the answers to life. Once a possible recruit has engaged with a cult recruiter the problem is how to keep the momentum going until the recruit makes big commitments that are hard to get out of. How to keep people in cults and to have them continue giving money, time, and free labour requires a lot of misdirection as you can expect. Victims must be unaware that they are being duped. Many recruits who lost all their money and property, only became aware of their trap after they became dependent on the cult. Recruiters with no money left have to work for the cult by becoming recruiters themselves. This pattern recycles over and over again. Old cults fall only to have new ones pop up with a different mission. People who are aware of these tactics escape, and avoid them, but adults still ignorant of cults and younger generations with less experience, become the new targets. It’s important to know these tactics because they can be used in any legal organization. How you get caught is believing in the front the cults use to disguise themselves, their clothing, their acting, their lifestyles, and their promises of happiness. This includes, in my experience with a door-to-door religion I shall not name, pimping out women to use sex to gain followers.
- Find a front: The first step is to find a place to recruit people. Cults need a front so that people are unaware of their secret agenda to exploit people. Sidewalk displays are obvious to many people, but they still work. Many cult members try to develop successful careers to recruit people who admire them and treat them as role models. Another area is finding a big-tent mainstream religious group to target people who are disappointed with their religion and are open to join a sect or a cult. For non-religious types, a secular approach is to teach courses and rent out locations in the city. Courses include teaching public speaking, learning English as a second language, getting rich quickly with vague business ideas, learning how to buy and sell risky investments, and many other skills. As people are up-sold more courses, they eventually meet the more embedded cult members.
- Change beliefs: Like with George Orwell’s 1984, Cults in our Midst shows the power of language. Language can harbour a premise with a worldview. If you adopt the language, without vetting the premise, you adopt the worldview. By wanting to imitate senior role models in the organization to bolster self-esteem, the new recruit starts to speak like them and view the world in the same way. Limiting the language allowed begins to limit the thought process. This can be found even in normal society when political correctness covers up facts.
- Destablize the self: Many recruits already have a compromised sense of self. They have shame, low self-esteem, and low self-efficacy. This can continue and deepen further by creating an environment of fear, powerlessness, and dependency. This is done with social conditioning. In Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion by Marc Galanter, he explains this relationship. “At the heart of this process lies the relationship between a pattern of social behavior and a biologically grounded motivation, or instinctive drive, that I have termed the relief effect. It operates as follows. When people become involved in a charismatic group, an inverse relationship exists between their feelings of emotional distress and the degree to which they are affiliated with that group. Individuals’ capacity for commitment to the group is mediated by the relief of neurotic distress, relief that they experience on affiliation and continued membership; the closer they feel toward the group, the less distress they feel. Conversely, if they disaffiliate from the group a bit, they are prodded to return by the increased distress they are likely to feel. Thus, zealous group members feel unhappy or dysphoric when removed from their group. A committed member of Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, typically reports feelings of unease or being out of sorts when he or she misses a number of meetings…Each minor episode of reward and punishment, on moving closer to the group or further away, functions as an operant learning experience that conditions subsequent involvement. The process is indeed similar to a conditioning experiment in which an animal is rewarded each time it spontaneously carries out a particular behavior or punished for acting in a contrary way. After several such spontaneous acts and their associated consequences, the experimental animal will carry out that behaviour consistently, even when further rewards are given only [INFREQUENTLY]…Thus, by relieving neurotic distress individuals are engaged into the charismatic group and learn to comply with the behaviors it promotes…” That was a neat description of intermittent reinforcement, where positive rewards are loaded at the beginning of the relationship which becomes a lure to make victims tolerate ever more abusive behaviour with the promise that the positive rewards will return.
- Confession: The bond is furthered with confessions. By giving personal information about indiscretions, no matter now small and trifling, it’s used against the person to make them feel even more inferior and dependent on the new system to bring the recruit out of wretchedness. This is precisely how an authority figure can be put inside of your mind, just like a parent. The mind self-polices and represses healthy defense mechanisms, critical thinking, and normal human desires. This can be seen in my review of Daniel Paul Schreber and the book Soul Murder. This kind of conditioning helps to foster Stockholm Syndrome where victims identify with the abuser, because the abuser has personal information they can blackmail the victim with. Leaders also create a lot of paranoia. They look omnipresent and have other recruits who can stalk for them. For many victims, the only person who can relieve the stress is the leader who can choose to relax these threats, so they choose to support them in their activities in order to gain relief.
- “Self” development: Once the “bad self” is exposed for the pathetic, disgusting, perverted, incapable wretch that he or she is, then the only group that can help them is the cult. Purchasing ever more expensive courses, because each course is never enough, leads to financial dependence. Slave labour for little or no pay prevent escape from those who have no money left or job. All the prior conditioning forces isolation from family, friends and normal jobs. The courses themselves also create lots of damage because the person is now so dependent on the leaders that the feeling of teaching and learning on one’s own is replaced with a learned helplessness and codependency. Any decisions made on one’s own feel risky and require validation from the cult to develop confidence. The irony is that, like with tarot cards, the answers that people find in these courses are actually self-created. We fill in the gaps, including filling in the empathy the leader is missing. The courses themselves are so general and lack details, they are next to useless. In an article I read on a Canadian Christian cult, one follower describes her leader’s speeches. “Have you ever taken acid?…That’s what it’s like when you hear [Him]. You listen and then suddenly something snaps and you get it.” That snap is explained by Stephen Kent. “They expect a guru up there pontificating—but he doesn’t say much. If you look at the message, there’s not a lot of substance to it. Many of the people are widely read in spirituality issues. They fill in the absence of the thoughts with their own knowledge and hopes and aspirations. So they give [him] meaning that he himself may not even realize.” One can find better information at a library for free than what are found in so many of these courses. Instead of self-development, it’s more like regression where one can only survive and make decisions with permission from the group. The independent mind is gone. Then when there are needs for self-protection, the victim falls back and tolerates weakening themselves to prop up the group’s activities. Marc says, “when one joins a charismatic group, one gives up the opportunity for independent decision making and complies with the group’s norms, which may conflict with one’s own adaptive needs.”
Plant and Krauss – The Fortune Teller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5DeIcYD6xE
- Feedback: Cults gain more power over the agency of others by learning from feedback. As members come and go, certain tactics will seem to be more effective than others and can be repeated. One of the typical tactics is to focus only on positive feedback within the group, and to minimize focus on negative feedback. This includes scandals within the organization that are kept secret from newer and more skeptical members. Remember, the cult leader is in it for the goodies that all psychopaths and narcissists want. They want consumption, easy sex, sadism, and the pleasure of duping people. They are constantly bored and need stimulus. Eventually you have layers of people who are more “in the know” than others, controlling the morale of the group. This dance continues as negative feedback about the outside world is emphasized as well as positive feedback related to being part of this significant group. Good results for the cult lead to members applying self-censorship of negative feedback so that they can independently recruit others from the rest of the world and persuade them to stay using their own zeal. As individuals move up the hierarchy, some naturally don’t believe in the system, but only what they can gain from it. Others continue believing all the way up the leadership and can be counted on by the cult leader to follow their orders, no matter how insane.
Daniel Paul Schreber: https://rumble.com/v1gu84v-case-studies-daniel-paul-schreber-freud-and-beyond.html
Stalking: https://rumble.com/v1gvhk1-stalking-world-narcissistic-abuse-awareness-day.html
Saints and Psychopaths: https://rumble.com/v1gosbb-saints-and-psychopaths-by-william-l.-hamilton.html
The Empathy Trap: Understanding Anti-social personalities – Jane and Time McGregor: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781847092779/
1984 – George Orwell: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780451524935/
Deprogramming
Margaret talks at the end of her book about what happens to victims who escape. Ex-cultists often aid counsellors by showing escapees a new way of living without the cult. Providing evidence of the leader’s vices and misdeeds provides sobering realizations and a counter to all the conditioning and idol worshiping. Many have relationships that need mending and defensiveness over being manipulated by a cult has to be let go of. The conditioned trance-like states that were sustained for so long can continue for years, but they fade over time. In a safe environment, thoughts about what the leader will say or do if you exercise your freedom, that caused so many stressful thoughts about the future, fade away when there’s no cult to reinforce them. Relief!
The big consequence of being in a cult for so long is that people didn’t develop themselves during that time with the real skills that they needed. When they leave a cult, they have a lot of re-skilling to do. The real self-development. New technologies and methods used in the workplace have to be adopted. Some employers are understanding and others are not. It’s not easy to explain gaps in your resume in an interview by saying that you worked for a cult for 11 years. Honesty and communicating lessons that were learned, is the only way to gain back trust from others in the outside world. Dating also becomes difficult for the same reason. Is the ex-cultist trustworthy? Are they mentally ill? More hits to the self-esteem happen, but the lesson is learned because a free life can now be compared to the cult life. There’s no confusion on which is life is better. The victim learns to see where they gave their power away and takes on all those responsibilities themselves. The reward is learning to enjoy one’s own company, trust one’s own decision making skills, and to benefit from those choices. It’s real feedback that is not filtered through the distorted mind of a personality disordered cult leader. The best way to deprogram from my point of view is to look at the world as a place full of promises. Sometimes the actual product or experience surpasses the promises, which is fantastic. Much more often promises fail. Ask the question: “Does the promise point to a place, person or thing that gives you more mental peace and nourishing love?” The answer will be NO in most situations. Eventually you go back to your old hobbies that you used to enjoy. Relationships are realistic and based on skills, and in fact you find that you only go into Flow states when you are engaging in activities where you have skill. Developing skills at the beginning is the stressful setup, but enjoying the skills afterwards is the payoff. When you realize that you control more of your happiness than people promising you something, you’ll never want to give that power away again. The healthy feeling is being a person that enjoys doing things themselves. People are always looking for projects to relieve boredom. Why give decisions and credit to other people when you can do it yourself?
How cults remember you
Ex-cultists now become outsiders. Cult leaders often have derogatory terms for their “enemies” and it’s all based on how the mind can objectify people. Followers are essentially uses and tools to gratify the leader. Their care is only based on how useful you are to them. Since that’s all that’s important for the leader then that’s all they’ll remember of you. I’m reminded of a meme I saw that someone posted on Facebook to describe how Narcissists see you. It replaces the word LOVE with USE. “I use you!” “I will always use you!” “You are the greatest use of my life!” Senior members in the cult are not in an envious position. They are still draining their limited life span with parasites. The game for the cult leaders is to get enough money so that they can enjoy their lavish lifestyles long enough to retire to a warm climate and fade into anonymity. Victims often think of Karma and all the bad things that will happen to those people, but this is also an illusion. Our happiness cannot be dependent on what happens to them. Many will meet Karma and others will not. One thing is for sure. The cult leader knows what they are and because of that they can’t trust anyone else. Their life is chasing higher mental states making them addicted to externalities. As these people age, they will have to suffer withdrawal symptoms every time they have to give something up as they move closer to natural death. The worst legacy they leave behind is an illusory template of happiness that new generations will imitate.
Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace – Margaret Thaler Singer: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780787967413/
Cults: A Reference Handbook – James R. Lewis: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781851096183/
Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field – Editor-Benjamin Zablocki, Editor-Thomas Robbins: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780802081889/
Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion – Marc Galanter: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780195123692/
Self-efficacy: the exercise of control – Albert Bandura: Paperback: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780716728504/
The Canadian Man Who Commands a Cult with His Gaze – Stephen A. Kent: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/xd5eqz/inside-a-canadian-staring-cult-224
Out of the FOG – Intermittent Reinforcement: https://outofthefog.website/what-not-to-do-1/2015/12/3/intermittent-reinforcement
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/