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Janja Lalich sözleri ve alıntılarını, Janja Lalich kitap alıntılarını, Janja Lalich en etkileyici cümleleri ve paragragları 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.Defining Cults - Coordinated Program of Persuasion
Cults tend to be totalistic, or all-encompassing, in controlling their members' behaviour and also ideologically totalistic, exhibiting zealtory and extremesim in their worldview.
Eventually, and usually sooner rather than later, most cults expect members to devote increasing time, energy, and money or other resources to the professed goals of the group, stating or implying that a total commitment is required to reach some state such as "englightenment." The form of that commitment will vary from group to group; more courses, more meditation, more quotas, more cult-related activities, more donations. Cults are known to dictate what members wear and eat and when and where they work, sleep and bathe as well as what they should believe, think and say. On most matters, cults promote what we usually call black-and-white thinking, an all-or-nothing point of view.
Cults tend to require members to undergo a major disruption or change in life-style.
Many cults put great pressure on new members to leave their families, friends and jobs to become immersed in the group's major purpose. This isolation tactic is one of the cults' most common mechanisms of control and enforced dependency.
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Defining 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' kind of influence when we're not engaged in a meaningful personal relationship, job, edcuational 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. Unsettling personal occurences are commonplace: A gigh school senior is rejected by the college of 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 there might be strings attached.
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Defining Cults - Structure: Relationship Between Leader and Followers
Cults are authoritarian in structure. The leader is regarded as the supreme authority although he may delegate certain power to a few subordinates for the purpose of seeing that members adhere to his wishes and rules. There is no appeal outside of the leader's system to greater systems of justice. For example, if a schoolteacher feels unjustly
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Defining Cults - Cult Types
To understand cults we must examine structure and practice, not beliefs. As will be explained in later chapters, it is the thought-reform techniques used by skillful manipulators to ensure compliance and obedience among their followers that is, in the final analysis, what makes cults so worrisome and harmful.
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A Brief History of Cults
Pied pipers attract only modest followings in eras when a society is functioning in a way that conveys structure and a sense of social solidarity. Citizens understand their expected paths in these eras, and most members of society know the acceptable behaviours—whether they like them or not. However, when segments of society cannot see where they fit in, what the rules are, or what the socially agreed-upon answers to life's big questions are, then, like a dormant disease, the ever-present potential cult leaders take hold and lure followers to their causes.
These determined self-designated gurus seem always to be lurking on the sidelines ready to step in and offer answers to life's problems. They claim they have the only and sure way of life. They induce people to follow them by touting a special mission and special knowledge. The special mission is to preach the contents of a supposedly "secret" learning, which the leaders assert can only be revealed to those who join them.
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Who Joins Cults? - Blaming the Victim
If a man in the jungle walks near a river and a crocodile bites his leg, the unlucky victim will be blamed for getting close enought to the water that a crocodile could harm him. Few will take the time to learn that the crocodile was lying in wait, hidden, and the man had no idea danger was so close. So, too, when an old lady is bilked out of her money by a swindler, her friends are prone to say it was her fault for being gullible. So it is also when a person becomes involved with a cult. The person is blamed for being a seeker, gullible, or mentally aberrant. The actions of the cult are overlooked in the appraisal.
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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.
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Introduction
Cults present a consuer issue as well as the philosophical issue of whether one person should have near-total control over others. From the consumer vantage point, how can a potential cult member learn what really occurs during memberhsip? Allegations abound that there are deceptions during the recruitment phase and that new members are not at all aware of what will be expected after they affiliate with a cultic group. More than one former cult member has told me that once caught up in the group, he or she found it something far different than it appeared at first.
In order to understand how someone can be hoodwinked to such a degree that she or he gives up job, family, and the freedom of self-determination, we must look ath the social and psychological influence techniques used by cults and cultic groups. This process of planned, covert, coordinated influence -popularly called brainwashing or mind control or, more technically, thought reform- is the route by which the cult leader gains control.
Defining Cults - Who Joins Cults?
When we hear of cults, scams and individuals' being controlled and influenced by others, we instinctively try to seperate ourselves from those persons. It seems a point of valor and self-esteem to insist that "no one could get me to do such things" when hearing about situations of intense influence. Just as most soldiers believe bullets will hit only others, most people tend to believe that their own minds and thought processes are invulnerable. "Other people can be manipulated, but not me" they declare.
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Defining Cults - Who Joins Cults? - Yes, You
What do the cults offer to lonely, depressed, or uncertain persons? In one form or 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.
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Defining Cults - Who Joins Cults? - Yes, You
Many adults today are overwhelmed by the confusion and apparent coldness of our society: the senseless violence, the rampant homelessnes, the lack of meaning, the widespread loss of respect for authority figures, the vast numbers of unemployed and marginalized, the insecurity and instability of the job market, the loss of family communication, the lessening role of the established religions, the failing sense of community or even neighborhood. No less bewildered than the adolescents, many mature adults are finding less and less to hold onto in today's technoculture. What does this create but ripe recruits for the multitude of manipulators and swindlers?
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.
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Defining Cults - Who Joins Cults? - The "Not Me" Myth
The average person looks down on those who get involved in cults, get taken in a scam by some operator who bilks people, or remain in an abusive group or relationship for long periods. That only happens to weak and silly people, the person boasts, generating for herself or himself a category called "not me" in which to place the victim of cults, scams, and intense influence. There is an almost universal aversion to accepting the idea that we ourselves are vulnerable to persuasion. I have heard this from journalists, college professors, neighbors, passengers seated enxt to me on a plane, poeple I tlak with in the street, graduate students, gardeners, salesclerks. Neither education, age, nor social class protects a person from this false sense of invulnerability.
Severaly years ago when I was lecturing in Switzerland, a Swiss psychiatrist opened the program by saying: "We have such an educated, close-knit, middle-class society, we have no cults here. Cults will never get an inroad in this country." I then provided literature containing the street addresses of various large, internationally known cults, as well as many small ones, operating in Zurich and other Swiss cities. Few, if any, countries in the world are without cults.
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Defining Cults - Cults Are Not All Alike
In sum, the term cult is merely descriptive, not pejorative. It refers to the origins, social structure, and power structure of a group. The conduct of certain cults, however -expecially groups that tend to overtly exploit and abuse people and engage in deceptive, unethical, and illegal conduct- does provoke the surrounding society into a critical stance.
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Defining Cults
Currently, depending on how one defines a cult, there are anywhere from three thousand to five thousand cults in the United States alone. Over the past two decades as many as twenty million people have been involved for varying periods of time in one or another of these groups. And not only are the cult members affected, but millions more family members and loved ones worry and wonder, sometimes for years, about what has happened to their relatives or friends.
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Introduction
We are all more vulnerable to flattery, deception, lures and enticements when we are lonely, sad, and feeling needy. In such periods of transient vulnerability, most of us are more manipulable, more suggestible, and more likely to be deceived by the flattery and inducement of designing persons.