Still others write this off as total crock. Stanley H. Cath, a psychoanalyst and psychology professor at Tufts University, has treated more than 60 former cult members over the course of his career.
From this unique firsthand experience, Cath has noticed an interesting trend: many people who join cults have experienced religion at some point in their lives, and rejected it.
Perhaps this is surprising, considering many cults tend to be religious — or at least claim to be. But Dr. Cath asserts that this trend is a sign of something deeper. Many of those who join cults are intelligent young people from sheltered environments. Growing up in such an environment, says Dr. Cults prove powerful because they are able to successfully isolate members from their former, non-cult lives.
One of the ways cult leaders achieve this is to convince their followers that they are superior to those not in the cult. They replace those relationships with new ones inside the cult. Cult leaders convince their victims to separate themselves from society, give up personal possessions and sometimes huge sums of money. They convince people buy into whatever they are promoting. To do all this a cult leader must be a master at mind control.
One such method involves someone sitting in a chair surrounded by other members, at which time they are required to admit their recent failures, base thoughts, shortcomings, etc.
Self Incrimination: A favorite tactic of the infamous cult leader Jim Jones, self incrimination requires cult members to provide their leader with written statements detailing their individual fears and mistakes. The cult leader can then use these statements to shame individual members publicly. Brainwashing: : Cult leaders are known to repeat various lies and distortions until members find it difficult to distinguish between reality and cult life.
Paranoia: To maintain a false sense of comfort, cults often rely on paranoia tactics. The totalistic impulse to draw a sharp line between those who have the right to live and those who do not is especially dangerous in the nuclear age. Totalism should always be considered within a specific historical context. A significant feature of contemporary life is the historical or psycho historical dislocation resulting from a loss of the symbolic structures that organize ritual transitions in the life cycle, and a decay of belief systems concerning religion, authority, marriage, family, and death.
One function of cults is to provide a group initiation rite for the transition to early adult life, and the formation of an adult identity outside the family. Cult members have good reasons for seeing attempts by the larger culture to make such provisions as hypocritical or confused. In providing substitute symbols for young people, cults are both radical and reactionary. They are radical because they suggest rude questions about middle-class family life and American political and religious values in general.
They are reactionary because they revive premodern structures of authority and sometimes establish fascist patterns of internal organization. Furthermore, in their assault on autonomy and self-definition some cults reject a liberating historical process that has evolved with great struggle and pain in the West since the Renaissance.
Cults must be considered individually in making such judgments. Historical dislocation is one source of what I call the "protean style. Cults embody a contrary restricted style,' a flight from experimentation and the confusion of a protean world. These contraries are related: groups and individuals can embrace a protean and a restricted style in turn. For instance, the so-called hippie ethos of the s and s has been replaced by the present so-called Yuppie preoccupation with safe jobs and comfortable incomes.
For some people, experimentation with a cult is part of the protean search. The imagery of extinction derived from the con temporary threat of nuclear war influences patterns of totalism and fundamentalism throughout the world. Nuclear war threatens human continuity itself and impairs the symbols of immortality. Cults seize upon this threat to provide immortalizing principles of their own.
The cult environment supplies a continuous opportunity for the experience of transcendence -- a mode of symbolic immortality generally suppressed in advanced industrial society. Cults raise serious psychological concerns, and there is a place for psychologists and psychiatrists in understanding and treating cult members.
But our powers as mental health professionals are limited, so we should exercise restraint. When helping a young person confused about a cult situation, it is important to maintain a personal therapeutic contract so that one is not working for the cult or for the parents. Totalism begets totalism. What is called deprogramming includes a continuum from intense dialogue on the one hand to physical coercion and kidnaping, with thought-reform-like techniques, on the other.
My own position, which I have repeatedly conveyed to parents and others who consult me, is to oppose coercion at either end of the cult process. They not only stuck with Martin but began, for the first time, to actively proselytize about the imminent arrival of the saucers. Auroville was the inspiration of Blanche Alfassa, a Frenchwoman known to her spiritual followers as the Mother.
The Mother does not appear to have had the totalitarian impulses of a true cult leader, but her teachings inspired a cultlike zealotry in her followers. When John contracted a severe parasitic illness, he refused medical treatment, too, and eventually died. Shortly afterward, Diane committed suicide, hoping to join him and the Mother in eternal life. And, while he is appalled by the fanaticism that gripped Auroville, he is grateful for the sacrifices of the pioneers. Auroville ultimately survived its cultural revolution.
The militant frenzy of the Collective subsided, and the community was placed under the administration of the Indian government. Kapur and his wife, after nearly twenty years away, returned there to live.
Kapur gives too sketchy a portrait of present-day Auroville for us to confidently judge how much of a triumph the town—population thirty-three hundred—really represents, or whether integral yoga was integral to its success.
The silos of political groupthink created by social media have turned out to be ideal settings for the germination and dissemination of extremist ideas and alternative realities. To date, the most significant and frightening cultic phenomenon to arise from social media is QAnon. According to some observers, the QAnon movement does not qualify as a proper cult, because it lacks a single charismatic leader. Donald Trump is a hero of the movement, but not its controller.
Q has not posted anything since December, but the prophecies and conspiracies have continued to proliferate. Liberals have good reason to worry about the political reach of QAnon. We harbor a general sense of superiority to those who are taken in by cults. Some cults, including Aum Shinrikyo, have attracted disproportionate numbers of highly educated, accomplished recruits.
Yet our sense that joining a cult requires some unusual degree of credulousness or gullibility persists. Few of us believe in our heart of hearts that Amy Carlson, the recently deceased leader of the Colorado-based Love Has Won cult, who claimed to have birthed the whole of creation and to have been, in a previous life, a daughter of Donald Trump , could put us under her spell.
Perhaps one way to attack our intellectual hubris on this matter is to remind ourselves that we all hold some beliefs for which there is no compelling evidence.
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