Quotes
The Profile of Likely Recruits
Cult members are generally recruited between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Older followers usually belonged to a cult earlier in life as well. At the young end of the scale are students finishing their secondary education or beginning their higher education. Full disciplehood usually means curtailing formal studies, and the true cultural and education level of the members is slightly lower than it appears to be. The discrepancy between the biographical cultural level and the real cultural level is an indicator of socio-cultural maladjustment.
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PROVEN METHODS: SCIENTOLOGY - Neo Languages
Training and use of a vocabulary specific to the cult have two principal functions. The first, once more, is to cut the subject off from his natural environment and to immerse him within a community that has its own language. The second is the progressive distortion of the meaning of words which, through progressive stages, redirect the subject’s
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PSYCHIC CONDITIONING - “Scotomization”
If we take, for example, the Church of Scientology, one can see that most of Dianetics put the bulk of responsibility for a thetan’s failures in life on his or her parents. Thus Ron Hubbard makes
parents the true criminals 3 by making them the only people responsible for their child’s dissatisfaction with his or her life. The theory of the thetan actually reduces parents to being merely the instruments that produced the thetan. They are usually, however, seen as parasites, since they cut the “ideal person” from his or her true potential by “socializing” him. The majority of painful experiences in a Scientiologist’s life are blamed on his or her parents, particularly the mother: stress is placed on any abnormal behavior of the mother before the child’s birth, this conduct supposedly being the origin of the subject’s failures in life.
The parents’ influence is therefore suppressed (and is considered an obstacle to the CC’s success in initiation) and eventually eliminated. Any opposition from them is considered the same as persecuting the Church. The emotional vacuum that results from this sends the subject to seek relations only within tthe Church of Scientology, thus allowing the creation of a substitute pseudo-family.
However, the subject can progress if he manages to attract the members of his family into the Church: this is the theory of dissemination and planetary evangelization.
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PATHOLOGIES INDUCED BY CULT MANIPULATION - Phobias
Cult ideology is based on the internal-external dichotomy and a
Manichean view of good and evil, leaving the cult member with a permanent fear of the world. [7] All CC speech feeds and supports social fears. The cult acts as though it is a rampart against the evil that reigns outside. Confrontation between the cult member and real society causes
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PROVEN METHODS: SCIENTOLOGY - Solo Auditing
The personal life of the follower is brought back to the supervisor,
who determines the contents of the following session. These documents constitute a centerpiece of Scientologic constraint, for they are confessions that could be used against a subject who might try to escape the influence of the cult. While the sessions themselves take on a serious and highly technical air, they contain a mass of information that binds the subject to the organization. The moral influence that they hold is nothing compared to the power the subject gives them through these sessions, both consciously and unconsciously. Instruments of permanent denouncement within the cult, they can become tools of blackmail in the outside world, for they contain the individual’s past, his fantasies and phobias, his errors, his bad habits, criminal background involving himself and his associates inside or outside of the cult.
These reports can be also turned against their superiors. During an investigation of one Scientologist’s residence, the police discovered a letter from a member, addressed to the leaders, in which he admitted to having obeyed their orders. 16 [Author’s note: He acknowledged having conducted surveillance on me, and having sent numerous pieces of mail to me.]
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PHYSICAL CONDITIONING - The Body
Sexuality is another mode of intra-cult expression, whether between cult members or the cult member and the guru, representing a will to intrude even within the body. Sex is an ideal means of breaking in, an obvious sign of the sect’s domination. The principles set up by AAO and Kommune speak much of this transgression of individual taboos:
1. Free sexuality, dissolving relationships between couples;
2. Collective ownership, abolishing private property;
3. Close-cropped hair, abandoning hairstyles common to “the little family” [the external world];
4. No personal clothing, overalls for all;
5. No sexual relations outside of AAO;
6. No external socializing with groups (bars, restaurants, cinemas);
7. Communication is limited to the sect;
8. No exchanges with the outside world, no visits to the outside
world or with people from the outside world;
9. The practice of SD within the group, higher than that of any other communication, makes any other type of exchange useless;
10. No individual rooms;
11. The outside world is regarded as evil;
12. The group is structured hierarchically according to the level of the cult member’s consciousness [level of involvement];
13. Work is conducted under the control of a chief of communications. [13]
--
13. Nouvelles de la Kommune, no 1, 1976.
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The Profile of Likely Recruits
Family or social conflicts often contribute to a person’s decision to join a cult. The group is a shelter from the aggression that has been felt and it provides a model of conflict resolution that intellectually satisfies the follower. He refuses any self-analysis and transfers all responsibility onto the external world, and more particularly onto the social or family unit. Entry into a cult is often a way of responding to the social pressures to establish one’s autonomy from the family, especially during adolescence. Sometimes this move is taken in response to crisis situations — divorce, job loss, mourning — or to a disturbance of what used to be “normal,” either personally, or within the family. Going into a cult, in such cases, serves a pseudo-therapeutic function. This element of “asking for help” makes CCs take a strong aggressive stance with regard to recognized psychiatrists and psychotherapists, who are the only ones likely to bring the subject to a real analysis of his actions and his responsibility in family and social conflicts.
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