COERCIVE PERSUASION - Coercive Techniques of Persuasion
Behavioral techniques modify the individual’s relations with his surroundings and aim at controlling the follower’s interactions with the former relational system. They limit the information coming from society, the family or the pre-cult socio-professional environment. All the individual’s vital statistics are rearranged and every field of his life is governed by new rules of food, sleep, sexuality, work, leisure, etc. The clearest break with the past is the geographical: the follower must exchange his residence for a monastery, an ashram or another place specified by the cult, either in the country of origin or abroad.
Emotional techniques establish an empathy between the individual and the cult by creating a continually emotional climate that tends to remove all the emotional ties and all the emotions linked to the past. The follower is progressively absorbed within an organization with high emotional dynamics, reinforcing his identification with the guru. This feeling of fusion is the basis of the group dynamics, and more precisely of the dynamics of restricted groups where the cult-society relationship is painted in black and white, in terms of conflict. The fight against a supposed aggressor accentuates the group membership and accelerates fusion inside the new social body. Doubts a follower might express would be seen as signs of collaboration with the enemy, which would engender a powerful feeling of guilt.
Cognitive techniques: The intellect represents the only barricade to the cult’s ideology. As it is difficult to annihilate an individual’s intellectual abilities, the cult’s strategy consists in saturating the information channels with false data. At the same time, the cult will endeavor to disparage any critical attitude.
The use of lies and deception tends to recreate an unreliable intellectual space that is made up of arbitrary rules and distorted reference systems. Judgment gradually loses its objectivity and takes on the cult’s subjective perspective. The control of attention and of language, the manipulation of symbols, the recombining of values are the instruments by which the cult member’s internal make-up will be redesigned.
Techniques for inducing dissociative states: These techniques are intended to destroy an individual’s intellectual and emotional equilibrium in order to lead him into delirious or hallucinatory psychiatric experiences; we will consider them at greater length, below. These psychotic or pre-psychotic experiences are represented as states that should be sought by the follower, for they are synonymous with spiritual growth.
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