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Them and Us: Cult Thinking and the Terrorist Threat
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About the motivations for joining a cult
The 4 Basic Cult Behaviors
Them and Us: Cult Thinking and the Terrorist Threat
- Spoiler:
- Some degree of cult behavior can be seen in all groups, so instead of asking “Is this group a cult?,” a more useful inquiry is: “How much cult behavior is taking place here?” This question has special urgency as we face the reality of a present-day terrorism whose destructive possibilities have been fearfully magnified by modern technology. Although it is not hard to spot cult behavior in al Qaeda, we are not inclined to notice it in ourselves as we respond to the threat. Yet, we had better be able to do so, because the price of cult behavior is diminished realism. We cannot afford that now.
To heighten our awareness, Them and Us identifies four basic cult behaviors that influence our thinking: 1) compliance with a group, 2) dependence on a leader, 3) avoiding dissent, and 4) devaluing the outsider. These forces operate in all aspects of society. The core process is devaluing the outsider, resulting in Them-versus-Us behavior.
This book makes clear the nature of the problem and the attitude necessary for its solution. The book expands on Deikman's earlier work, The Wrong Way Home (1990), showing the connection between classic cult manipulation and the milder forms of group pressure that can be found in even the most staid organizations—churches and schools, mainstream political movements and corporate boardrooms.
In her foreword, Doris Lessing discusses the implications and repercussions of cult thinking on contemporary society.
“From a larger perspective it may be that the terrorist threat could make clear the danger inherent in any ideology, any system of belief offering utopian goals at the cost of compliance, conformity, and the suppression of dissent. The warning sign of ideology is the sharp division between Them and Us, whether it be based on politics, economics, race or religion. The possibilities for destruction and misery endemic to such beliefs have been multiplied many times by modern science. As a result, the few can now destroy the many and that power is becoming increasingly accessible. Hopefully, the danger may cause us to recognize that we all share the same needs for meaning, security, and a positive future. From that point of view we are one family. Understanding this fundamental fact is the antidote to cult thinking.“
There is no Them—there is only Us
Introduction
Much of my work as a psychiatrist consists of helping people become aware of the fantasies that influence what they do and how they feel. Interestingly, it is not fantasies of power and riches that cause the most trouble, but those of receiving protection, nurture, comfort, or praise; of someone keeping count, noting deeds, thoughts and efforts. It doesn't matter who a person is, no matter how outwardly independent, a child's wish for a powerful protective parent waits in the depths of the psyche and seeks expression. And express itself it does. The result is cult behavior even in people who do not belong to cults.
Usually, the word cult refers to a group led by a charismatic leader who has spiritual, therapeutic, or messianic pretensions, and indoctrinates the members with his or her idiosyncratic beliefs. Typically, members are dependent on the group for their emotional and financial needs and have broken off ties with those outside. The more complete the dependency and the more rigid the barriers separating members from non‑believers, the more danger the cult will exploit and harm its members.
A number of books have been written about cults. Robert Lifton's landmark study of Chinese brainwashing, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, enabled us to understand the cognitive mechanisms operating in totalistic environments, where the authorities have complete control over people's lives and use any means to convert their subjects to their own rigid system of belief. Lifton's analysis is very applicable to extreme cults, one of which I will describe in Chapter Two. But our everyday society is not totalistic. We are not subject to the total control possible to the Chinese communists (who held their prisoners by force), or to the psychologically coercive environments of the worst cults. Nevertheless, I will argue that behavior qualitatively similar to that All which takes place in extreme cults takes place in all of us, despite our living in an open society, uncoerced, free to select our sources of information and our companions. We need to understand the cult behavior that operates unnoticed in everyday life.
Toward the end of his book, Lifton remarked that childhood helplessness and dependency produce "a capacity for totalism." I will focus in detail on the way in which the longing for parents persists into adulthood and results in cult behavior that pervades normal society. When I speak of a wish for parents I am not speaking of transference — the re‑experiencing of a specific parental relationship — but of a yearning for parents in the most general sense. This longing results in fantasies of wise, powerful guardians even in those who are themselves looked up to by others, the best educated, the most cynical. Such fantasies exist in the borderlands of consciousness and may seldom be noticed, but they may be superimposed on people who occupy real positions of authority, success, and power, or their images may be displaced to a heavenly realm. Only by recognizing the indwelling wish can we gain freedom from the childhood world of vertical relationships and gain an eye‑level perspective.
Such recognition is not easy Freud made us aware that childhood experience may be expressed in the malfunctioning of the adult; this developmental understanding is now part of our worldview. But despite our sophistication in matters of individual pathology, we lack sufficient recognition of the dependency wishes that all of us express in covert form.
It is difficult to write convincingly about everyday cult behavior because some of the words I must use may sound like psychiatric jargon: dependency, unconscious fantasies, longings for security. Everyone exempts themselves from the description. The psychologically sophisticated are likely to think they are beyond these things and others may think that only weaklings have such vulnerabilities. To try to circumvent this problem I will make extensive use of examples drawn from a number of sectors of society: government, large corporations, the media, psychiatry, and religion.
The price of cult behavior is diminished realism. We cannot afford that now, if we ever could. Fortunately, awareness is a potent antidote. Increasing that awareness is the goal of this book.
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After listening to many variants of this story, I began to see that cults form and thrive not because people are crazy, but because they have two kinds of wishes. They want a meaningful life, to serve God or humanity; and they want to be taken care of, to feel protected and secure, to find a home. The first motives may be laudable and constructive, but the latter exert a corrupting effect, enabling cult leaders to elicit behavior directly opposite to the idealistic vision with which members entered the group.
Usually, in psychiatry and psychology, the wish to be taken care of (to find a home, a parent) is called dependency and this is a rather damning label when applied to adults. Adults are not supposed to be dependent in that way, relying on another as a child would rely on a mother or father. We are supposed to be autonomous, self-sustaining, with the capacity to go it alone. We do recognize that adults need each other for emotional support, for giving and receiving affection, for validation; that is acceptable and sanctioned. But underlying such mature interdependency is the longing of the child, a yearning that is never completely outgrown. This covert dependency — the wish to have parents and the parallel wish to be loved, admired, and sheltered by one’s group — continues throughout life in everyone. These wishes generate a hidden fantasy or dream that can transform a leader into a strong, wise, protective parent and a group into a close accepting family. Within that dream we feel secure.
The wish to ride in the back seat of the car — the dependency dream — has great strength and tenacity. It should be recognized as a permanent part of the human psyche even though in adults it ceases to be as visible as it is in childhood. This dream is dangerous because in its most extreme form it generates cults and makes people vulnerable to exploitation, regression, and even violence. Even in the less intense, less obvious manifestations which occur in everyday society, the dependency dream may impair our ability to think realistically. If we recognize our dependent wishes for what they are we can make appropriate corrections in thought and behavior, but usually we do not. Rather, we engage in thinking and behavior more subtle than that of the People's Temple but qualitatively similar. The back seat of the car does not carry us home.
Eventually, we in the seminar were unable to maintain the belief that cults were something apart from normal society. The people telling us stories of violence, cruelty, and perversion of values were like ourselves. After listening and questioning we realized that we were not different from nor superior to the ex-cult members, that we were vulnerable to the same dependency wishes, capable of the same betrayals and cruelty in circumstances in which our sense of reality was manipulated.
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About the motivations for joining a cult
- Spoiler:
- The anxiety and depression such patients feel usually is secondary to a bigger problem: a loss of trust in others and, especially loss of trust in their own judgment and spiritual perceptions. Additionally, they may feel guilt over unethical actions they engaged in to please the group and despair at the loss of time, money, and relationships. To recover from the trauma of their cult experience, these patients need to understand what happened and why, and so does the psychotherapist who treats them.
MOTIVATIONS FOR JOINING
People who join cults do so for two principal reasons: (1) They want to lead a meaningful, spiritual life and (2) they want to feel protected, cared for, and guided by someone who knows what to do in. a confusing world. The first motive is conscious and laudable; the second is unconscious or not recognized for what it is. Therein lies the problem: The wish to have a perfect parent and a loving; supportive group lies concealed in the psyche of even the most outwardly independent person. When the opportunity arises to gratify that wish, it powerfully influences judgment and perception and paves the way for exploitation by a cult.
There is good reason for cults to be associated primarily with religious-spiritual organizations. Religions are based on the belief in a transcendent; supreme power usually characterized along parental lines: God is all-powerful and all-knowing, meting out rewards and punishments according to how well a person has carried out the commandments He has issued. The doctrines vary, but even in nonmonotheistic Eastern traditions; Heaven and Hell in some form are designated as the consequences of good and bad behavior.
Although mystics are unanimous in defining God as incomprehensible and not of this world, human dependency needs require something more approachable and personal: Even in Buddhism, therefore, whose founder declared that concepts of gods and heaven were an illusion, many followers bow to a Buddha idol to invoke Buddha's protection and blessing. But even more satisfying to the wish for a superparent is an actual human with divine, enlightened, or messianic status. The powerful wish to be guided and protected by a superior being can propel a seeker into the arms of a leader who is given that status by his or her followers. Such a surrender to the fantasy of the perfect parent may be accompanied by a feeling of great joy at "coming home."
This analysis does not imply that the intimations of a larger reality and a larger purpose, sensed by human beings for thousands of are only a fantasy: The problem is that the spiritual dimension and dependency wishes can get badly confused. The patient needs to disentangle the perception of a spiritual dimension from needs less-than-divine longings that have infiltrated, taken over, and distorted what is valid. It is important that the psychiatrist treating an ex-cult member keep this distinction in mind.
One way to clarify the confusion is to help the patient see clearly the problems that she had hoped "enlightenment", and membership in the group would solve: These problems may include loneliness, low self-esteem, the wish for the admiration of others, fear of intimacy, fear of death, and the wish for invulnerability. Indeed, membership in the group may assuage loneliness and provide the support and closeness that the patient had not experienced previously Memories of such good experiences may occasion acute feelings of loss in the ex-cult member and give rise to doubts concerning whether or not leaving was the best thing to do.
To look objectively and critically at the cult, experience, the ex-member needs to gain freedom from the "superior leader trap." As indicated earlier, this trap is sprung if there is criticism or questioning of the leader's actions and directives. Basically, it takes the following form: The Leader operates on a higher plane than you or I. Because of that, we are not able to judge the rightness or wrongness of his or her actions. Ordinary, conventional standards do not apply here.
Although this conclusion may sound reasonable, the leader in fact can be judged by criteria established in the mystical literature. There is a striking consensus in these writings concerning the nature of the spiritual path and the duties of a genuine teacher. The consensus permits one to make judgments of whether the teacher's actions advance spiritual development or hinder it.
It is important to realize that the basic activity of the spiritual traditions is to assist spiritual students to "forget the self." The self referred to is what is usually termed the, ego but is better understood as being the psychological processes dedicated to biological survival. That primitive aim is expressed in greed, fear, lust, hatred, and jealousy: the traditional vices. These vices are functional for the intention of survival. The, mode of consciousness one expertness is functional also, and it is adapted to one's intentions. For example, building a bookcase calls forth a particular form of consciousness — the instrumental — featuring an emphasis on the object characteristics of the world, a reliance on abstract concepts, and a focus on past and future and on differences and boundaries. This mode of consciousness is needed to fulfill the intention of making a useful object. When one wants to receive something from one's surroundings; however, as in relaxing in a tub of steaming hot water or having a massage, one needs a different mode of consciousness — the receptive — featuring an emphasis on sensual experience, a blurring of boundaries, a focus on now; and a sense of connectedness with the environment.
The 4 Basic Cult Behaviors
- Spoiler:
- THE FOUR BASIC CULT BEHAVIORS
Compliance With the Group
Everybody is concerned with how he or she is viewed by the people whose opinions matter to, us:, our "reference group." No matter how, outwardly independent and nonconformist we may be, there is, usually a, group of people who share our, values and whose approval we want. Membership, in this group is signaled by conformity in dress, behavior, and speech. People outside of cults may suppress deviant thoughts also, although less obviously, if they believe that their expression could result in loss of status with the people important to them.
The power of groups has been noted by psychologists beginning with Gustav Le Bon and Sigmund Freud, and analyzed in detail by Wilfred Bion, who proposed that members of groups tend to adopt one of three primitive emotional states: dependency, pairing, or fight-flight. His description of the dependency state is an apt description of cults, but he saw, the process taking place in varying degrees in all groups:
The essential aim … is to attain security is to attain security through and have its members protected by one individual. It assumes that this is why the group has met. The members act as if they know nothing, as if they are inadequate and immature creatures. Their behavior implies that the leader, by contrast, is omnipotent and omniscient. 5
It is plausible that natural selection favored individuals who were good at discerning what the group wanted because preservation of their membership in the group gave them the best chance of survival. As a consequence, it is likely that human beings have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to what the group wants. "Political correctness" probably has a long history.”
Dependence on a Leader
Leaders draw a power from their followers’ wish for an ideal parent, a wish that is latent in all adults no matter what kind of parent they had. Although cult leaders may be charismatic, they need not be as long as they are believed by the group members to possess superior powers and secrets. Cult leaders are authoritarian, encouraging dependence and discouraging autonomy. Obedience and loyalty are rewarded, and critical thinking is punished. Furthermore, to enhance dependency on the leader, pair bonding is discouraged. The leader must come first; family and lovers come last. The disruption of intimate relationships is accomplished by a variety of means: enforced chastity, separation of parents from children, arranged marriages, long separations, promiscuity, or sexual relations with the leader. All these aspects are counter to healthy leadership, which fosters growth, independence, and mature relationships and has as its aim that the followers will eventually achieve an eye-level relationship with the leader.
Dissent
Dissent threatens the group fantasy that the members are being protected and rewarded by a perfect, enlightened leader who can do no wrong. The security provided by that fantasy is the basic attraction that keeps members in the cult despite highly questionable actions by the leader. Questioning the fantasy threatens that security, and for this reason, active dissent is seldom encouraged. To the contrary, dissenters are often declared to be in the grip of Satan. Sometimes they are scapegoated, and hidden, unconscious anger toward the leader is released against the dissenter. Almost all groups derive security from their shared beliefs and readily regard dissenters as irritations, to be gotten rid of. Nevertheless, the mark of a healthy group is a tolerance for dissent and a recognition of its vital role in keeping the group sane. Paranoia develops and grandiosity flourishes when dissent is eliminated and a group isolates itself from outside influence. As recent cult disasters have shown us, grandiose and paranoid cult leaders often self-destruct, taking their group with them.
Devaluing the Outsider
What good is being in a group if membership does not convey some special advantage? In spiritual groups, the members are likely to believe that they have the inside track to enlightenment, to being "saved," or to finding God because of the special sanctity and, spiritual power of the leader. It follows that they must be superior to people outside the group: It is they, the converts, who have the leader's blessing and approval. Devaluation can be detected in the pity or “compassion” they may feel for those outside. This devaluation becomes most marked in the case of someone who elects to leave the group and is thereby considered “lost,” if not damned. The more such devaluation takes place, and the more the group separates itself from the outside world, the greater the danger of cult pathology.
Devaluing of the outsider is part and parcel of everyday life. Depending on which group we designate as the outsider, our scorn may be directed at “liberals,” “Republicans,” “blacks,” “Jews,” “yuppies,” or “welfare bums”: however the outsider is designated. Such disidentification can authorize unethical, mean, and destructive behavior against the outsider, behavior that otherwise would cause guilt for violating ethical norms. Devaluation of the outsider is tribal behavior and so universal as to suggest a “basic law of groups”: Be one of us and we will love you; leave us and we will kill you.
Devaluing the outsider reassures the insider that he or she is good, special, and deserving, unlike the outsider. Such a belief is a distortion of reality; if one considers the different circumstances of each person’s development and life context, one is hard put to judge another person to be intrinsically inferior to oneself. Certainly, actions can be judged, but human beings are one species, at eye level with each other.
THE VALUE OF AWARENESS
It is important that both the therapist and the ex-cult member be able to see that cult behaviors are endemic in our society. Such awareness can protect the therapist from the influence of such behaviors and allow ex-cult members to realize that they are not freaks, weak and dependent persons, or fools. Rather, they were s led astray by unconscious wishes that they share with all human beings. These wishes were stimulated at a time when they were N especially vulnerable and under circumstances that any person might have found difficult to combat.
CONCLUSION
Cult behavior reflects the wish for a loving, accepting sibling group that is protected and cherished by a powerful, omnipotent parent. The problem with such a wish and its accompanying fantasy is that no human being can fill the role of the superparent, and adults can never again be children. To preserve the fantasy, reality must be distorted, because of .this distortion, cult behavior results in a loss of realism. In the more extreme cases, the consequences can be drastic. Diminished realism is a problem in any situation, however, and for this reason, cult behavior is costly no matter where it takes place: affecting business decisions, governmental deliberations, day-to-day relationships in the community, or the practice of psychotherapy. Fortunately, awareness of these cult behaviors offers protection from their influence. Psychotherapists can foster that awareness, benefiting patients, themselves, and society.
Last edited by Lucid Memes on Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:46 am; edited 1 time in total
