Jean-Marie Abgrall Quotes
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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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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]
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13. Nouvelles de la Kommune, no 1, 1976.
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PATHOLOGIES INDUCED BY CULT MANIPULATION - Collective Trance
Collective trance differs little from mass hysteria in its instinctual
dynamics. It is the manifestation of libido impulses, uncontrolled by any restraint or taboo, simply because of the “ambiance” created within the group.
In contrast to mass hysteria, trances are more organized. This borrows from shamanism and enjoys a symbolic prestige in which hysteria is revered. It is modeled around a culture. Generally, a certain dispersonalization of the shaman takes place, making him simply the voice for the guardian spirits of the community. Hypnosis aims to divert the libido energy into symbolic meaning that will, a posteriori, enrich the group’s discourse. Among the topics developed by the groups built around the phenomenon of trance is that of reincarnation; trances symbolize the passage of the old person into death, then from death into the new person.
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PHYSICAL CONDITIONING - Compulsory Labor
Physical exhaustion is a mighty weapon. A good many cults use
it, and some have been indicted for this reason. Not only is forced labor a source of income for the sect, its systematic application, coupled with malnutrition, reduces resistance to indoctrination. The triad of labor/sleep deprivation/malnutrition is an ideal instrument for breaking the physical and mental resistance of an individual.
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Reducing Cognitive Dissonance
The ability to reduce cognitive dissonance, to use American sociologist Festinger’s term, is one of the essential characteristics of cults.
Festinger suggests that sectarian groups have the capacity to
“recalibrate” their objectives or their thought when a confrontation with reality shows the thought to be false. When there is "dissonance” between the thought and reality, the group tends to reduce the discordance by experimentally revising its thoughts and analyzing the results.
Cults have a stunning capacity to reduce dissonance. Traversing their recent history, one notes that the followers are not terribly shaken by the non-realization of their frequent prophecies. The failure of the world to come to an end, as frequently predicted by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, does not seem to slow down their enthusiasm to convert others.
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PATHOLOGIES INDUCED BY CULT MANIPULATION - Generalized Anxiety...
Upon leaving a CC, the ex-follower suffers from a general feeling
of tension. He is in a state of suspense, expecting some sort of repercussions from his act of “treason.” He lives in a state of permanent imbalance between his old world and the new one. He notes with concern that his stay in the CC revealed that he had previously-unknown problems
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The Rule of Comparison
One of the obstacles that the cult confronts in its endeavor to persuade followers is the need to cross the barrier of “the rule of comparison.” This rule, in simple words, holds that the future cult member has to compare his past beliefs with the beliefs of the cult and has to assess whether or not they match up. From this analysis, three different results can emerge:
* If there is total dissonance between the individual’s beliefs and the CC’s (Coercive Cult) propositions, the latter is immediately rejected;
* If there is agreement, then the individual is a likely recruit and
only some effort at reinforcement is needed;
* Lastly, the most common situation is that the cult’s propositions
cause introspection, and the cult has to set up more complex procedures of conditioning. The follower must be exposed to new ideas at a pace that takes account of his ability to assimilate them and to confront them with his old convictions.
" Even if what I say is a lie, you can lose nothing by following this way of life. Suppose that I created a whole new theory to unify the world, a theory God never thought of; then God would come down and bargain with me to buy it. [7]
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7. A speech by Moon, Pasadena, 1977.
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Health Hazards
Periodically, these Utopian medical practices are given publicity
by the press when some controversy arises. All of Austria held its breath in August 1995, watching the politico-legal drama of the Pilhar family. The family were members of the Fiat Lux cult, whose female guru, Erika Bertschinger (called Uriella), was a resident of Switzerland. When Helmut Pilhar fled abroad with his daughter Olivia, who was six years old and suffering from a serious renal tumor, the President and the Chancellor of Austria intervened. Uriella had directed the Pilhar family to have the girl treated by a Cologne doctor from the cult, named Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer. Dr. Hamer had been prohibited from practicing medicine in Germany and Austria, and was even termed a “charlatan” by Dr. Juergessen, the original doctor who had been rendering
“conventional” medical treatment to the child. Efforts were made to persuade the father to have his daughter treated only by qualified medical practitioners, and to give up the magical practices promoted by Uriella. The political, legal and human drama caused the matter to become an obsession with the press. The publicity surrounding this case contributed to the reappearance in the general public of myths developed by cults for serious diseases like cancer and AIDS, where prayer and healing groups have always had a strong appeal, in part because of conventional medicine’s relative inability to cure certain serious diseases.
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