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Reklam
Who Joins Cults? - Myth of the Seeker
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.
Sayfa 25
Who Joins Cults? - Myth of the Seeker
As we have seen, a cult can be defined in many ways, but for our purposes and to explain most modern-day cults, it is necessary to think of a process, not an event, and to view life in the cult as a process. Processes evolve and unfold, something goes on between people. There is an interaction, a transaction, a relationship established.
The act of joining a cult results from a process put in motion by a cult recruiter. Cult practices make it clear that recruits are propagandized and socialized to accept the life conditions of the group. These conditions are revealed slowly, and the recruits do not know where they are going when they start. How can they be seekers for a particular result when they are unaware of the final patterns and contents of the group that they join?
Sayfa 24
Who Joins Cults? - Why Do They Join?
I have found that two conditions make an individual especially vulnerable to cult recruiting: being depressed and being in between important affiliations. We can be 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's kind of influence when we're not engaged in a meaningful personal relationship, job, educational or training program, or some other life involvement.
Vulnerable individuals are lonely, in a transition between high school and college, between college and a job or graduate school, traveling away from home, arriving in a new location, recently jilted or divorced, fresh from losing a job, feeling overwhelmed about how things have been going, or not knowing what to do next in life. Usettling personal occurences are commonplace: A high school senior is rejected by the college or her choice. A man's mother dies. A woman decides to sell her condo and travel after an unhappy ending to a long-term relationship. At such times, we are all more open to persuasion, more suggestible, more willing to take something offered us without thinking there might be strings attached.
Sayfa 20
Who Joins Cults? - Yes, You
Nevertheless, the fact remains that even apart from unsettling socioeconomic conditions and certain relevant family factors, any person who is in a vulnerable state, seeking companionship and a sense of meaning or in a period of transition or time of loss, is a good prospect for cult recruitment. Although most contemporary cults primarily recruit young adults, preferably single, some—especially the neo-Christian cults—seek entire families, and even the elderly are targets for some groups.
What do the cults offer to lonely, depressed or uncertain persons? In one form of another, each cult purports to offer an improved state of mind, an expanded state of being, and a moral, spiritual, or political state of righteous certainty. That supposedly beneficial state can be reached only by following the narrowly prescribed pathways of a particular group master, guru, or trainer. To grasp that approach to life, the new recruit—the babe, the preemie, the trial member, the spiritual god-child, the lower consiousness one, as certain groups label the beginner—must surrender his or her critical mind, must yield to the flow of force, must have childlike trust and faith.
Sayfa 20
Reklam