Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

Introduction: On the Ownership of Reality
  • Page 1 mental predators
  • Page 1 The general tendency among observers has been to identify two separate groups of mental predators. The first group is characterized by ideological totalism, an all-or-none set of ideas that claim nothing less than absolute truth and equally absolute virtue.
  • Page 1 The second group consists of what we generally call cults, which form sealed-off communities where reality can be dispensed and controlled.
  • Page 2 I encountered much that called it into question. I came to realize that ideological totalism and cultlike behavior not only blend with each other but tend to be part of a single entity.
  • Page 8 Reality always contains these two contrasting dimensions -- the changeable/constructed reality that strongly influences our worldview, and the immediate/factual reality on which so much of our everyday lives depend. We consider a person to be psychotic when he or she "breaks" with immediate reality in the form of delusions, hallucinations, and extreme paranoia. And we require a shared sense of reality, consistent with experience and evidence, for our collective function in a democracy. But we have learned that immediate/factual reality can be ignored or contested by people who may not be psychotic but who do so as participants in a cultist narrative of owned reality.
  • Page 11 Where there is openness to the world on the part of a group, its leader may be more accurately termed a mentor. Mentors teach and guide and can provide followers with lasting truths without divesting them of their autonomy.
  • Page 11 But when a mentor creates a closed relationship with disciples that excludes all other truth -- that is, seeks to own reality -- he or she enters the realm of the omniscient guru.
  • Page 12 The protean self is characterized by openness, change, and new beginnings, and strongly resists ownership by others.

    Part One: Thought Reform and Cultism

  • Page 17 Thought reform, then, is an extreme version of ever-present human tendencies to contrast one’s own purity with the impurity of all else; and on that basis to justify one’s claim to the ownership of reality.
  • Page 19 Whatever its setting, thought reform consists of two basic elements: confession, the exposure and renunciation of past and present "evil"; and re-education, the remaking of a man in the Communist image.
  • Page 19 important distinctions between coercive and therapeutic approaches to bringing about change.
  • Page 20 it was the combination of external force or coercion with an appeal to the inner enthusiasm through evangelistic exhortation which gave thought reform its emotional scope and power.
  • Page 20 it becomes extremely difficult to determine just where exhortation ends and coercion begins.
  • Page 28 a subtle interplay between role and identity:
  • Page 32 thought reform is able to promote an emotional contagion -- of resentment as well as enthusiasm.
  • Page 32 closed system of communication and idea-tight milieu control.
  • Page 37 We recognize a sequence in Mao from brilliant revolutionary to cruel despot.
  • Page 43 disparity between vision and experience became manifest,
  • Page 48 And we may speak of "power" either as the ability to make decisions and take actions that exert control and influence over others, or as the sense of inner strength and capacity.
  • Page 68 The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he or she sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also -- in its penetration of one’s inner life -- over what we may speak of as one’s communication with oneself.
  • Page 71 The inevitable next step after milieu control is extensive personal manipulation. This manipulation assumes a no-holds-barred character, and uses every possible device at the milieu’s command, no matter how bizarre or painful.
  • Page 72 when trust has never existed), the higher purpose cannot serve as adequate emotional sustenance. The individual then responds to the manipulations through developing what I shall call the psychology of the pawn. Feeling unable to escape from forces more powerful than any individual, one subordinates everything to adapting to them. One becomes sensitive to all kinds of cues, expert at anticipating environmental pressures, and skillful in riding them in such a way that one’s psychological energies merge with the tide rather than being turned painfully against oneself. This requires that one participate actively in the manipulation of others, as well as in the endless round of betrayals and self-betrayals that are required.
  • Page 73 In the thought reform milieu, as in all situations of ideological totalism, the experiential world is sharply divided into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good and the absolutely evil.
  • Page 76 Closely related to the demand for absolute purity is an obsession with personal confession.
  • Page 76 There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed.
  • Page 77 The assumption underlying total exposure is the environment’s claim to total ownership of each individual self within it. Private ownership of the mind and its products -- of imagination or of memory -- becomes highly immoral.
  • Page 79 The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. This sacredness is evident in the prohibition (whether or not explicit) against the questioning of basic assumptions, and in the reverence that is demanded for the originators of the Word, the present bearers of the Word, and the Word itself.
  • Page 81 The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.
  • Page 82 And in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these clichés become what Richard Weaver has called "ultimate terms": either "god terms," representative of ultimate good; or "devil terms," representative of ultimate evil. In thought reform, "progress,""progressive,""liberation,""proletarian standpoints" and "the dialectic of history" fall into the former category; "capitalist,""imperialist,""exploiting classes," and "bourgeois" (mentality/liberalism/morality/superstition/greed) of course fall into the latter.
  • Page 82 Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, "the language of nonthought."
  • Page 82 For an individual person, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. One is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, one’s capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed.
  • Page 83 imagination becomes increasingly dissociated from actual life experiences and may even tend to atrophy from disuse.
  • Page 83 This sterile language reflects another characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine.
  • Page 85 The underlying assumption is that the doctrine -- including its mythological elements -- is ultimately more valid, true, and real than is any aspect of actual human character or human experience.
  • Page 86 alternative visions depend upon such things as the strength of previous identity, the penetration of the milieu by outside ideas, and the retained capacity for eventual individual renewal.
  • Page 89 The more clearly an environment expresses these eight psychological themes, the greater its resemblance to ideological totalism; and the more it utilizes such totalist devices to change people, the greater its resemblance to thought reform (or "brainwashing").
  • Page 90 No milieu ever achieves complete totalism, and many relatively moderate environments show some signs of
  • Page 92 The degree to which an one embraces totalism depends greatly
  • Page 92 upon factors in one’s personal history: early lack of trust, extreme environmental chaos, total domination by a parent or parent-representative, intolerable burdens of guilt, and severe crises of identity.
  • Page 92 It may be that the capacity for totalism is most fundamentally a product of human childhood itself, of the prolonged period of helplessness and dependency through which each of us must pass. Limited as they are, infants have no choice but to imbue their first nurturing authorities -- their parents -- with an exaggerated omnipotence, until the time they are themselves capable of some degree of independent action and judgment.
  • Page 95 The English word cult, derived from the French culte and the Latin coltus, was first used in the early seventeenth century and referred to religious worship in general and homage to a divine being. An Oxford English Dictionary entry referring to 1613 usage speaks of "adoration … for a diuine cult, and worship." But over time, the word "cult" came to represent worship or veneration "directed towards a specific figure or object." And another entry referring to a 1679 usage distinguishes cults from genuine religion: "Let not every circumstantial difference or Variety of Cult be Nick- named a new Religion."
  • Page 95 The ancient cults, religious scholars tell us, were integral to their societies as part of a flow of worship and organization that provided form and continuity. (The word cult is related to "culture" and "cultivate.") In contrast, contemporary cultist groups -- not only extremist guru-led spiritual communities but Chinese thought-reformers as well -- go against the grain of their immediate or recent societies. Indeed they seek to replace those societies with something close to the absolutism of premodern cults.
  • Page 97 Of course, attacks on groups deemed cultic by established religions, then and now, have elements of struggles over spiritual turf. But also at issue is the tendency of cultic groups to create a narrow, coercive reality centered on the urgent apocalyptic impulses of a deified leader.
  • Page 98 it turned out that more than half of those dead people had been murdered by other cult members carrying out Jones’s insistence that everyone die.
  • Page 98 To be sure, such violence is not found in the great majority of cults. But there is a widespread dynamic of potential violence, having to do with a combination of worship of an unstable guru, thought reform–like procedures, and an inward turning of fiercely apocalyptic impulses.
  • Page 102 Key to the initiation rite are "high" or transcendent states, which are described with great intensity by those who have experienced them.
  • Page 102 many cults have had difficulty obtaining members since their patterns of deception have become more recognizable and less effective. Part Two: World-Ending Threats
  • Page 112 the Buddhist concept of poa, which, in his distorted use, meant killing for the sake of your victims. In esoteric Buddhism, poa is a spiritual exercise performed when one is dying, sometimes
  • Page 112 with the aid of a guru, a "transference of consciousness" from the bodily "earth plane" to the "after-death plane" that enables one to achieve a higher realm in the next rebirth or even passage to the "Pure Land," the step prior to nirvana.
  • Page 112 altruistic murder -- murder ostensibly intended to enhance the victim’s immortality.
  • Page 116 One can look at the guru of a fanatical new religion or cult as either everything or nothing. The "everything" would acknowledge the guru’s creation of his group and its belief system, as well as his sustained control over
  • Page 116 The "nothing" would suggest that the guru is simply a creation of the hungers of his disciples, that he has no existence apart from his disciples, that any culture can produce psychological types like him, that without disciples, there is no guru.
  • Page 117 The British psychoanalyst Anthony Storr offers a useful description of a guru type: a spiritual teacher whose insight is based on personal revelation, often taking the form of a vision understood to come directly from a deity. The revelation, which has transformed his life, generally follows upon a period of distress or illness in his thirties or forties. There is suddenly a sense of certainty, of having found "the truth," creating a general aura around him that "he knows." The emerging guru can then promise, as Asahara did, "new ways of self-development, new paths to salvation, always generalizing from [his] own experience."
  • Page 119 Among Asahara’s most crucial early decisions was the creation of shukke, or renunciants. Shukke means "leaving home" and is a traditional term for monks or nuns who give up the world. Aum’s message was that if one really wished to follow the guru and join in his full spiritual project, one had to become a shukke, removing oneself completely from one’s family and one’s prior work or study and turning all one’s resources -- money, property, and self -- over to Aum and its guru. Even one’s name was to be abandoned, replaced by a Sanskrit one.
  • Page 120 Living together in Aum facilities, shukke underwent severe forms of ascetic practice, including celibacy and a prohibition against ejaculation, fasting, long hours of meditation, intense breathing exercises, and vigorous sequences of prostration combined with demanding work assignments and irregular sleep (often only a few hours a night). Their existence was a Spartan one -- two meals a day of extremely simple "Aum food" (rice and vegetables), tiny sleeping spaces, and no personal possessions.
  • Page 121 As guru, Asahara retained his own sexual privileges in what was in principle an otherwise celibate community, continuing to live with his wife and family, taking on long-term mistresses from among Aum disciples, and offering tantric sexual initiations, or "transfers of energy," to various female followers.... the distinction between training and punishment often blurred, the guru needs disciples not only to become and remain a guru but to hold himself together psychologically. For the guru self often teeters on the edge of fragmentation, paranoia, and overall psychological breakdown.
  • Page 125 For the disciples there was no deity beyond the guru, no ethical code beyond his demands and imposed ordeals. When the guru invoked a higher deity it was only in order to incorporate the god’s omnipotence into his own.