Those with money were soon parted from it. Some women in the group were told by Newman to have abortions, and few had children while involved. The first of these characteristics is that the leader is both charismatic and authoritarian. Without charisma, the leader would be unable to draw people to him or herself. Without authoritarianism, leaders would lack the internal motivation and the ability to bully and control followers.
Are you still corrupting people? Not all leaders want to get rich, gain sexual favours, or grab political power. But all want utter control over others. Money, sex, free labour or loyal combatants are all fringe benefits, and certainly most leaders take advantage of these, some in a big way. But absolute control over their relationships is the key.
These leaders rule over isolating, steeply hierarchical and closed structures, some with front groups serving as transmission belts to the outside world. This isolating structure is the second characteristic of a totalist group. As the organisation grows, it develops concentric, onion-like layers with the leader in the centre providing the driving movement. There might be several layers — from the leader, to the lieutenants, to the elite inner circle, to other varying levels of membership, down to mere fellow-travellers or sympathisers.
He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery. Meanwhile, the leader keeps the inner circle off-balance by sowing distrust, and promoting and demoting personnel seemingly at random.
People in totalist organisations are pressed so tightly together that their individuality is erased — as are any trusting interactions among them. In fact, far from finding true comradeship or companionship, followers face a triple isolation: from the outside world, from each other within the closed system, and from their own internal dialogue, where clear thinking about the group might arise.
The exclusive belief system is controlled entirely by the leader, empowering him or her through the creation of a fictional world of secrets and lies. The lies created a fictional world that became more bizarre, elaborate and far from normality the further into the system one got. The fictional, invented quality of the total ideology reinforces the confusion and eventual dissociation experienced by followers.
In the same way, Islamist fighters are promised heavenly rewards as they detonate suicide vests. The extreme disconnect leaves the follower helpless to understand what is really happening. The fiction starts slowly, of course, with mere propaganda intended for the public and the wider world. The fabulous theology of Scientology — where alien beings hurled out of a volcano inhabit our bodies — was an inner ideology reserved for senior, well-indoctrinated members; it was released to the wider public only through a leak.
After the iron curtain of the total ideology has dropped, no questions or doubts are allowed. Should you voice your concerns, a network of monitors will turn you in for reeducation. Should that reeducation fail, as happened with me, then you are cut from the group, never to speak with your former compatriots again. F or a totalist system to wield complete control, the leader must tap fear — this is the fourth element of totalism. But when the supposed safe haven is also the source of the fear, then running to that person is a failing strategy, causing the frightened person to freeze, trapped between approach and avoidance.
Further, never achieving safety from the threat, they will keep returning to the relationship trying to gain that safety. It is for this reason that we can predict that cultic systems will attempt to interfere with and control any alternative attachment relationships a person might have. To fail to do so would allow the follower to find a safe haven elsewhere and potentially escape the emotional and cognitive control of the group.
This is the same thing we see in controlling relationships such as in cases of domestic violence, of the Stockholm Syndrome or, frequently, with pimps and prostitutes, as well as in human trafficking. Members of the Newman Tendency were in a constant state of fear: sleep-deprived, isolated from all close persons not in the group, and facing constant criticism, they became trapped, unable to act or think independently.
At the same time, the group positioned itself as the only safe haven. Denise, a former member, was brought into the group through therapy. Although she had previously been apolitical, she soon ended up working long, unpaid shifts save for a small stipend on group projects, living in a group house, and in a relationship with another follower. Different groups have different fear-arousing themes and methods: the oncoming apocalypse, fear of outsiders, fear of punishment, and exhaustion, among many other types of threatening strategies.
But the leader is always the sole saviour, the one who will lead them away from or through the fear they are experiencing to a wonderful safety, to paradise, to a perfect, transformed world. Cath asserts that this trend is a sign of something deeper. Many of those who join cults are intelligent young people from sheltered environments.
Growing up in such an environment, says Dr. Cults prove powerful because they are able to successfully isolate members from their former, non-cult lives. One of the ways cult leaders achieve this is to convince their followers that they are superior to those not in the cult.
They replace those relationships with new ones inside the cult. Cult leaders convince their victims to separate themselves from society, give up personal possessions and sometimes huge sums of money. They convince people buy into whatever they are promoting. To do all this a cult leader must be a master at mind control. One such method involves someone sitting in a chair surrounded by other members, at which time they are required to admit their recent failures, base thoughts, shortcomings, etc.
Self Incrimination: A favorite tactic of the infamous cult leader Jim Jones, self incrimination requires cult members to provide their leader with written statements detailing their individual fears and mistakes. The cult leader can then use these statements to shame individual members publicly. Brainwashing: : Cult leaders are known to repeat various lies and distortions until members find it difficult to distinguish between reality and cult life. Paranoia: To maintain a false sense of comfort, cults often rely on paranoia tactics.
Once a cult member comes to the conclusion that their families and country cannot keep them safe, they begin to worship and put all of their faith in their cult leader. Jim Jones was especially skilled at this mind-control trick.
He would encourage members to spy on each other, and consistently spoke through loudspeakers at all hours of the day so that cult members would hear his voice whether awake or asleep.
Psychologist Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer spent most of her career studying the psychology of cults and brainwashing. She found that most people enter a cult willingly, without realizing the power it is bound to have over them.
They're able to read people. They thrive on chaos. They'll create crisis situations. When they walk in the room, you never know if they're going to be good and kind-hearted or be mean and call someone out or create some kind of dangerous situation. Their unpredictable nature and charisma allows cult leaders to be in control — which is by design, as these people are often power-hungry and authoritarian.
If their group gets big enough, cult leaders will often set up a hierarchy with underlings to carry out the demands of the leader using "charisma by proxy.
Cult leaders often have personal proclivities that shape their group. A cult leader's sexual fantasies, for example, might translate into sexual abuse or sexual exploitation in their cult, according to Lalich.
0コメント