I have previously written about the psychological impact on children who grow up in cults. But what is the definition of a cult?
I’m going to share with you how some academics in this field describe a cult – there are five key attributes that can help us with this explanation. Let’s go through each one of them.
A charismatic leader
- Every cult starts with a person who professes they are a visionary, a messiah, and all-knowing. A self professed wise and special person who offers people the path to love, salvation, personal achievement, enlightenment, better health, the best political system, etc.
- Because they are charismatic, seductive and speak with utmost certainty, people feel drawn to them.
- They begin to idealise and adopt their belief system with the hope they will become better people, achieve some higher goal and get rid of their problems in life.
- This creates an emotional bond between leader and follower, follower and group.
- In most, if not all, cults, the cult leader professes total knowledge and cannot be questioned.
- Because they are charismatic, you will have the illusion that your thoughts, feelings and ideas are welcome. But in time it becomes clear that the only opinion that matters is that of the leader.
A transcendent belief system
- The belief system is completely linked to the leader’s personality, area of knowledge or simply an opportunity that they spotted at a particular moment in time, which is related to a certain social yearning.
- The leader will then sell his or her recipe for transcendence, enlightenment, wealth, perfection, etc, which is all-encompassing and exclusive.
- This ideology offers a total explanation for past, present and future, including the one and only path to salvation.
- This makes both the leader and the group seem very special, completely right, and all others lesser creatures for not believing or following these ideas.
High demands and exploitation
- Once you have an emotional bond with a leader and are sold on their fantastic and right belief system, then making more demands is an easy next step.
- People who are seduced by and idealising their new group and leader will do anything to please them and remain a part of this wonderful group. It feeds an illusion of belonging and self-esteem.
- The process usually starts with demands on your time, so you are kept busy and don’t have time to think about what is going on.
- And if you are busy and start to invest all these hours into this new endeavour, it’s difficult to dial back and leave because by this point it has taken over your life. Also termed the sunk-cost fallacy.
- As long as you keep giving and you are a good member, you will continue being accepted by the group and its members. If you don’t comply, you are made to feel guilty and ashamed.
A closed and hierarchical structure
- The leader’s power is not constrained by any other higher authority. Essentially, it has no accountability other than to the leader itself.
- The more distance there is between leader and follower, the more God-like they will seem. The leader usually surrounds himself with an inner circle that caters for his needs, protects his secrets, and implements his decisions. In this way he can also protect himself and blame others when things go wrong.
- The more hierarchical, authoritarian and clouded in secrecy an organisation, the less room there is for questioning.
- This also keeps people in the cult, through inducing feelings of fear and guilt, whilst selling the illusion of perfect happiness and fulfilment.
- So, you end up with a dissonance between what you feel inside, versus what you are being told to believe. The solution to this is to believe that the fear and guilt are to do with what is wrong with you, and that the organisation must be right in what they profess.
- Also, people don’t want to admit they have been deceived.
Mind control techniques – brainwashing
- The aspect of thought control is a fundamental one of any cult. It is a process of exploitative, non-consensual persuasion.
- It entails an invisible social adaptation, whilst the person is not aware of the changes taking place within them.
- Once the above is achieved, the followers are hooked, have given up their life to the activities of the cult and have a high degree of investment, it is easy to control their thinking and make them slowly but surely give up their autonomy to the good of the cult and its leader.
- It is a perverse, systematic and deceitful manipulation of people’s free will.
In the following articles in this series, I will expand on mind control, some myths that people have about cults, why people join and why does it matter for us to educate ourselves and know more about this topic.
Sam Jahara is a UKCP registered psychotherapist and clinical supervisor. She is experienced in working with the psychological impact of high-control groups and cults on individuals, families and organisations. She has also given public talks and podcast interviews on this topic.
References
- Thought reform and the psychology of totalism (Lifton, Robert Jay. 1961)
- Cults in our midst: The hidden menace in our everyday lives (Singer, M.T. and J. Lalich. 1995)
- Combatting cult mind control (Hassan, Steven, 1988)
- Escaping utopia (Lalich & McLaren 2018)
- Traumatic Narcissism: Relational systems of subjugation (Shaw, Daniel. 2013)
- The guru papers, masks of authoritarian power (Kramer & Alstad, 1993)
Further reading by Sam Jahara
The psychological impact on children who grow up in cults
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