ICSA E-Newsletter
Vol. 4, No. 1
February 2005
How Could Anyone Join
a Cult?!!
Written after the
Heaven's Gate suicides at Rancho Santa Fe,
California in 1997.
With the Heaven’s Gate
tragedy still so fresh in all of our minds
certain questions seem to come up: What kind of
person joins a cult? Why do they stay and put up
with the abuse? How could anyone be SO devoted
that they would kill themselves? Can’t they see
that what they are doing is crazy? Are THEY
crazy?
I feel that I am in a unique
position to address these questions as I spent 10
years with a communal cult. Yet, now being out
for 11 years, I also can look at the horrors that
happened at Rancho Santa Fe and ask, along with
the rest of a stunned nation, “Why did they die
like this?”
For eight and a half of the
ten years I was with my former group, each payday
I would sign my check over to the group. I would
receive a meager allowance in return and would
have to beg for the basics of life such as
clothing and medical care. Often I lived in
substandard housing with rats, filth, and
overcrowded conditions in neighborhoods with
extremely high crime rates. After working a full
day at work, I often would have to spend several
hours on the street proselytizing. After
returning, I would have to sit in meetings that
lasted to the wee hours of the morning. These
meetings were intense. Public humiliation was
common place, and sometimes we would sit in
silence for hours on end believing ourselves to
be too reprobate even to speak. After getting
an insufficient night’s sleep, I would be
expected to repeat the same routine of work and
group activities all over again. In other words,
there was no doubt that I was in a cult. Yet, if
you had passed me in the street during the 10
years that I spent in the group, I can tell you
that I wouldn’t have been all that different from
others in the crowd. My skin had not turned
green, and I did not grow antennas. I had eyes,
ears and a nose just like anyone else. I looked
both ways before crossing a street. If somehow
we got in an idle conversation that didn’t
involve my trying to recruit you, you may have
been shocked to know that I had likes and
dislikes just like any other person. I still
liked pizza (even if I didn’t have much access to
it) and still hated pork sausage. Blue was still
my favorite color, and I still loved sunsets.
People who are in cults are just that -
PEOPLE—although sadly cults suppress much of what
makes an individual unique. Heaven’s Gate, I
believe, has forced all of us to come to grips
with the realization that they were people not
too unlike us, and that is indeed something tough
to face. Whether one has been in a cult or not,
the realization deep in our hearts that perhaps
we could have shared a similar fate makes us want
to turn away and believe that they had to be made
of different stuff than we are. I am here to
tell you that they are not.
Why did the people in
Heaven’s Gate seem to go willingly to their
deaths? Why did I stay in a clearly abusive
situation for 10 years? The activities I felt
trapped to do while within the group give some
generous clues to how this can happen. And, when
we can come to understand how one person can gain
control over another, we can peer into the world
of an average cult member. Indeed, one human
being controlling another is nothing new to
civilization. We need only look at the Biblical
story of Cain and Abel to see the lengths that a
person will go to in order to be “on top”—even if
that means murder. It is no secret that sleep
deprivation hinders clear thinking and decision
making abilities. Through instituting a poor diet
and strenuous routines, a group can break persons
down further, making them even more vulnerable to
the group’s ideologies.
While the specific
techniques may differ, almost every group has a
way of inducing hypnosis. In my former group
this was accomplished through the format of our
meetings which in reality were the focal point of
what had become an intense system of peer
scrutiny. Sitting in silence for hours affected
me. I remember leaving many a meeting in which
we had not spoken for hours with heaviness in my
heart and feeling like my head had been put
between two cymbals. Having to stand in front of
my peers to be critiqued by them would seize me
with panic. We would have to present ourselves
one by one in front of a group of several hundred
of our peers, stating what we did and where we
were at in our hearts. The group would vote on
us and the final vote became our guideline...it
did not matter how we felt about things in our
hearts. Often I was found to be deficient and
would have to endure taunts by my peers between
meetings. All of that was very intentional,
coming from the leader himself and carried out
through the ranks. There was no going home to
escape all of this. I was home, and there was
not a minute of privacy. I often could not think
clearly and if I could get through a day feeling
I held onto my sanity that was a major
accomplishment.
My mind was too under siege
to even think of packing my bags and leaving.
This was purposeful as cults know that no one
would make a rational decision to live like this
and thus create an environment in which a person
has no time or freedom to think. I have heard
life in a cult compared to living in a fire
constantly. Most of us can invoke images of
people we’ve seen on the news who have lived
through a fire. When persons are in the middle
of a fire, they simply do not have access to
certain parts of their thinking that they
normally would have. However, when the fire is
over, we see them collapse and say things like
“Oh my God, I can’t believe what happened. It
was so terrifying.” They are able to reconnect
emotionally to their experiences and likely will
be able to integrate what happened to them,
thereby dealing with the trauma. Cults do not
allow you to reconnect. I was kept so busy and
off balance that the fire was never allowed to be
over. Thus, outsiders could look at the way my
fellow members and I lived in sheer horror; yet,
while living in the midst of it, I simply could
not get it. I get it now because I have been out,
and as a person after a fire begins thinking
again, I now have my critical thinking abilities
back. Along with everyone else who hears about
what happened to me, I am horrified to have spent
10 years of my life like that.
What could have been done to
“reach” me during the 10 years I was in the
communal group? What can we do to reach others
who are in groups who may be heading down paths
similar to that of Heaven’s Gate or the other
groups in recent times who have committed mass
suicide? The biggest mistake people can make in
reaching out to persons in a cult is forgetting
that they are people too and that there are some
logical reasons behind what on the surface
appears to be bizarre behavior. If we remember
that outside of the group’s influences we would
likely be dealing with a totally different
person, he or she becomes less scary and more
reachable to us. The dynamics of a cult are not
too different from that of a battered wife
staying with an abusive husband, or what happened
in Nazi Germany or the Cultural Revolution in
China. On the outside, they all seem to be
beyond comprehension, but as we look at the
underlying dynamics, their tactics are not that
hard to understand. In our society today, all of
us are being bombarded with huge amounts of
information and people vying for our every
dollar. Learning about techniques of influence
and control can only benefit all of us as we are
trying to navigate our way through an
increasingly complex world. When it comes to
understanding someone in a cult or other
controlling situation, it can literally be life
saving.
The people who had the
biggest impact on me were not the ones who
screamed at me “You’re in a cult!” (Believe me, I
had plenty of those.) Rather the ones who made
me think were those willing to care about me as a
person, whether I stayed or left. Despite their
initial allure, cults do not offer unconditional
love. When I saw people on the outside acting
differently toward me than my own supposed
all-loving peers, it affected me. I may not have
left right away, but I could not shake that there
was someone who would be willing to be my friend
and care about me with no strings attached. Like
anyone else faced with a decision, someone
“decides” to join a cult based on the information
available to him or her. Unfortunately, cults
are notorious for not letting a potential recruit
know about the full package. What I thought I
was joining and what I actually joined were
vastly different from each other. In other
words, if the group had been up front about the
kind of life I was going to have to live and what
was going to happen to me, I would have never
joined. Helping a person make a decision to
leave a cult in reality is educating them by
filling in the blanks that the group deceptively
didn’t. With more information, there is a good
chance that a person will make an informed choice
to leave. The information such a person needs
includes understanding techniques of manipulation
and control— particularly how this may be
practiced in his/her particular group.
People in cults are not
stupid. After leaving my former group, I was so
convinced that I had to be intellectually
deficient that I actually took an I.Q. test.
Much to my surprise, instead of scoring way below
average, I scored in the 97th percentile. As I
have learned more about the kinds of people cults
recruit, I have found that I am the rule and not
the exception. Because the rigors of cult life
are arduous, these groups do not want someone who
will break down easily. Cults go after the best
and the brightest—robbing all of us of people who
could be making a huge difference in this world.
Who joins cults? They are
anyone you could meet anywhere. I was a teen
living in a small town when I had been
recruited. I may have been naive and not able to
see through the deception as someone older may
have been, but most teens are naive and easily
impressed by those who are slicker than
themselves. I was not a drug addict or a
prostitute, but rather I had been a good student
in school who worked two jobs.
So, the next time you are
approached by someone whom you strongly suspect
may be living in a far out commune somewhere,
remember you are likely to be dealing with a
highly intelligent person who was deceived into
joining what may appear to us as a bizarre cult.
Instead of looking at such people as freaks or
crazies, keep in mind that if they had access to
more information and saw that there was a life
outside for them, they probably would leave.
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