Janja Lalich Gönderileri
Janja Lalich kitaplarını, Janja Lalich sözleri ve alıntılarını, Janja Lalich yazarlarını, Janja Lalich yorumları ve incelemelerini 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.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 - 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 - 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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Defining Cults - Cult Types
In the United States, there are at least ten major types of cults, each with its own beliefs, practices, and social mores. The list below is not exhaustive, but most cults can be classified under one of the following headings:
1. Neo-Christian religous
2. Hindu and Eastern religious
3. Occult, witchcraft, and satanist
4. Spiritualist
5. Zen and other Sino-Japanese philosophical-mystical orientation
6. Racial
7. Flying saucer and other outer-space phenomena
8. Psychology or psychotherapeutic
9. Policital
10. Self-help, self-improvement, and life-style systems.
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This kind of listing could go on and on, exposing the sheer numbers and scope of the cults around us. Yet, on one level, all cults are a variation on a single theme. And ultimately, that theme has nothing to do with belief. In cultic groups, the belief system -whether religious, psychotherapeutic, political, New Age, or commercial- ends up being a tool to serve the leader's desires, whims, and hidden agendas. The ideology is a double-edged sword: it is the glue that binds the member to the group and it is a tool exploited by the leader to achieve his goals.
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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 - Cults Are Not All Alike
Cults basically have only two purposes: recruiting new members and fund-raising. Established religions and altruistic movements may also recruit and raise funds. Their sole puprose, however, is not simply to grow larger and wealthier; such groups have as goals bettering the lives of their members or humankind in general, either in this world or in a world to come. A cult may claim to make social contributions, but in actuality these remain mere claims or gestures. In the end, all work and all funds, even token gestures of alturism, serve the cult.
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Defining Cults - Cults Are Not All Alike
Cults are not uniform nor are they static. Cults exist on a continuum of degrees of influence, from more to less extreme. There are live-in and live-out cults. Groups vary in levels of membership and degrees of involvement: for example, members on the preiphery of a group usually are not privy to the costs, contents, and obligations of the later stages of membership and ahve little knowledge of the real purposes of the group or the amount of power wielded by the leader. Even within the same cult, rules, restrictions and requirements may change from year to year, or from location to location, depending on outside pressures, local leadership, and the fancies of the leader.
The manner in which controls are put into place, the extent of control over details of members' behaviour, and the blatancy of these controls also vary from cult to cult. In most live-in cults, every detail of life comes under group scrutiny. For example, there are dress codes, food restrictions, and enforced marriages or relationships. In such cults, the members generally live together at the headquarters or at specified locations around the country or overseas and work for cult-owned enerprises. However, there are also cults whose devotees appear to remain active in quite a few major aspects of the outside world, earning a living outside the cult. But for all practical purposes these individuals also live under rules governing such crucial features of their personal life as the people with whom they associate, what happens to their moeny, whether they raise their own children, and where they live.
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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 - 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
Sayfa 9
Defining Cults - Origin of the Group and Role of the Leader
In most cases, there is one person, typically the founder, at the top of the cult's structure, and decision making centers in him.
These leaders typically have the following characteristics.
Cult leaders are self-appointed, persuasive persons who claim to have a special mission in life or to have special knowledge. For example, leaders of flying-saucer cults often claim that beings from outer space have commissioned them to lead people to special places to await a spaceship. Other leaders claim to have rediscovered ancient ways to produce enlightenment or cure disease, while yet others claim to have developed inventive scientific, humanistic, or social plans that will lead followers to "new levels" of awareness, success, or personal and political power.
Cult leaders tend to be determined and domineering and are often described as charismatic. These leaders need to have enough personal drive, charm, or other pulling power to attract, control, and manage their flocks. They persuade devotees to drop their families, jobs, careers, and friends to follow them. Overtly or covertly, in most cases they eventually take over control of their followers' possessions, money, and lives.
Cult leaders center veneration on themselves. Priests, rabbis, ministers, democratic leaders, and leaders of genuinely altruistic movements keep the veneration of adherents focused on God, abstract principles, or the group's purpose. Cult leaders, in contrast, keep the focus of love, devotion, and allegiance on themselves. In many cults, for example, spouses are forced to separate or parents forced to give up their children as a test of their devotion to their leader.
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