Imagine that a person claims to have no need to eat food of any kind—rather, he can live on light.From time to time, an Indian yogi will make such a boast, much to the merriment of skeptics. Need-less to say, there is no reason to take such claim sseriously, no matter how thin the yogi. However, a compatibilist like Dennett could come to the charlatan’s defense: The man does live onlight—we all do—because when you trace the origin of any food, you arrive at something that depends on photosynthesis. By eating beef, we consume the grass the cow ate, and the grass ate sunlight. So the yogi is no liar after all. But that’s not the ability the yogi was advertising, and his actual claim remains dishonest (or delusional). This is the trouble with compatibilism. It solves the problem of “free will” by ignoring it.
Who is right? Everyone and no one.
"Mike is quick to act. Sarah finds him abrasive and Fiona sees him as rash. Who is this person? Is he quick to act, rash or abrasive? He is all three, it depends on the window and the view. They are opinions, each one created from a partial view with information discounted. Who is right? Everyone and no one."
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CULTS AND MENTAL MANIPULATION - “He Who Has Attained the Goal”
A cult may be more - or less - highly developed; it is a group gathered around a leader or an ideology, religious or non-religious. It functions according to a secret method that is closed to outsiders, but the free will and the identity of the follower is left intact. Coercive cults, which we will call “CC’s” for convenience, are more constraining and result in a loss of freedom on the part of followers. The boundary between the two is elusive, since the survival of any cult depends on strict discipline; the evolution toward coercion is ineluctable. And the key tool of coercion is mind control, on which cults have no monopoly: marketing and politics, for example, are rife with examples of mental manipulation. Furthermore, within normal religious or political movements, truly coercive organizations may exist that deserve the label of “cult.”
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THE GURU
Manipulation fundamentally depends on fraud. How well it is done depends on the personality and cunning of the guru.
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Persuasion
Persuasion requires two actors: the transmitter and the receiver.
They established a specific relationship that is defined by the message. The transmitter or convinced cult member is the persuader; the receiver is the target, the potential member; and the message is embedded in the cult speech presented by the transmitter.
For the persuasion
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The Persuader’s Game
One of subtleties of the maneuver consists in pretending that joining the group is up to the interested party and depends on his free will. It is this perverse claim that causes difficulty for close relatives and therapists when they try to talk with an individual who was “involved” in a cult. This alleged personal freedom inhibits efforts at “dis-indoctrination.”
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