I watched a fascinating documentary on Channel 4 last night — all about the End of the World Cult.
A good friend of mine on another blog said she found it “depressing, not because of the content, but because someone chose to make this film on the premise that these people are in a cult.”
She asked the question — Is it actually a cult? Then said:
“It’s a mentally very damaged person who has a powerful charismatic personality and is very controlling. He has surrounded himself with needy impressionable people, and seduced and tranced his own children into his madness.”
The hypnosis used in these kinds of environments is amazing… I was partly bewitched just watching how all the followers relentlessly followed.
It does beg the interesting question about hypnosis in organisations, groups and family-type set-ups like these. I mean, many hypnosis professionals offer the perspective that no-one can be made to do anything that they don’t want to do… And this kind of documentary gives the impression that these people are following a deeply hypnotic figure who has his hypnotic influence deep-ly embedded in the minds of those that follow…
Maybe the documentary could have been about mental illness, not religion. because many of the younger people in this documentary looked incapable of living a life outside of that environment — the younger members that were mostly raised have now been indoctrinated to the point where years of therapy probably would not make much difference to how they are.
Many of them have been what we consider sexually and emotionally abused, though they do not believe they have. They are stressed and depressed because their leader prophecies about the end of the world, that they are inherently evil and the world around them is not where they should be.
The younger members have had no decent education. I felt sad for the eldest son of the messiah who had to rationalise the spectacle of his father having sex with his wife — more than once — because ‘God told him to’ ! The guy cried in pain when he told the story, yet believed it was right and was told by their messiah to vent their anger at God….
They seemed incapable of looking at any other angle of this — their minds were seemingly rendered incapable of anything other than accepting the word of their leader. Is this hypnosis or simple manipulation or something else?
The vacant depressed youngest son vainly trying to gather an education even though his father has told him the End is Nigh. The world didn’t end when the leader prophecised and goodness knows what the boy is now thinking… He was 15, looked very physically, emotionally and psychologically immature for his age and seemed vacant and lost…
I agree with my friend… I don’t think the word ‘cult’ was right in this instance… It does obscure the real issues.
I want a rant today, because there was some major use of hypnosis, at least in principle — on people willingly being hypnotised, but not knowing that anything else existed… What a paradox.
Anyone else see it?
While I accept that all that is going on in this Cult or whatever is having an awful effect on the son of this nutter etc. I find it somewhat annoying that these fringe elements get so much air time and publicity.
I am sure that you Adam feel annoyed when hypnosis is dragged through the headlines when people use hypnosis or other mind controlling techniques for bad and evil.
The Internet can be a wonderful place but also a poisonous place full of dangers for vulnerable children etc.
Within anything that is large and powerful there is good counter-balanced by evil.
I will be in Church at this time of year celebrating the joy of being a Christian with the hope that good will overcome evil any day.
Yours Keith
Between 1998 and 2000 I was both the head of my ministry and a youth pastor at a church in Phoenix. Well, the ministry and the church didn’t always agree, so often people from the church side would join the ministry. This created some conflict and jealousy, and after a while the church members who were also members of the ministry were called “Eric followers.” And I have to say, some of it was pretty cult-like, even though I had absolutely no intention of creating that atmosphere, and often went out of my way to tell the people that they were just as called as I was. But still, I had charisma, insight, leadership qualities, and was considered attractive as well. Even though this was an evangelical fundamentalist group, you would not believe how many people tried to seduce me. So from my perspective, cults are simply a group of people desperate for leadership, looking outside of themselves for resources like acceptance, love, guidance, and belonging, being attracted to someone who provides those things. I remember talking to another pastoral counselor about the issue, saying that I felt like I could start a cult at any moment, and how uncomfortable I felt about that.
So I think a major issue is that there are a LOT of disempowered people out there – and not necessarily mentally ill – who for some reason believe they need a rescuer or leader. It reminds me of the old story in the Bible where Israel kept crying out for a king, and God told them that He was supposed to be their king. But they wanted a human for a king, like other nations, so God gave them Saul. I think that’s a great metaphor for us. We all have higher consciousness, divine love, connection to the universal field, superconsciousness, connection to Source, or whatever you want to call it, but a lot of people think they need some kind of intermediary, or they want to experience these things through another person rather than in themselves. Or in some cases, people are just so darn lonely and rejected that they go to the other extreme and join something unhealthy in order to be accepted somewhere.
I totally agree with you that “cult” is something we use to think it’s not our problem. I mean, that’s a natural tendency of life, isn’t it? I’m sorry if I sound preachy here, but this idea of labeling “others” as a way of not dealing with our own issues has been around forever. Look at the Pharisees trying to stone the “adulteress.” Their focus on the “other” (in this case the adulteress) allowed them to ignore their own moral darkness. I think that’s why things like the gay issue and illegal immigration from Mexico are such hot topics in America today. The average American can sit there and pass judgment all day long on gays and Mexicans because the average American has no risk of ever being gay or Mexican – and so it’s a “safe” way to pass judgment and feel better about oneself. Does that make sense?
So I don’t think the leader of this group was the only “mentally damaged person” in this documentary. I think it speaks to myriad societal issues as well, and we’re going to keep seeing things like this as long as people keep looking outside of themselves for Messiahs and Saviors. Until people stop wanting to be rescued, or feeling like they have to be rescued, I think people will seek others out who can tell them what to do, how to live, and where to belong.
But there are people who are seriously mentally ill, and as a society I think it’s in our best interest to take care of them. Unfortunately, as a culture I think we value a lot of traits that are inherent to mental illness. One study found that a large percentage of CEOs and corporate heads had borderline personality disorder or were complete psychopaths, and said that the corporate culture actually rewards psychopathic-lack-of-a-conscience behavior.
And I think this says a lot about us, or America at least. I mean, we had a president who lied and lied and lied to drum up support for an unnecessary war in which he knew people would die, and yet every time he was caught in a lie he’d come up with a new one. And yet instead of being outraged, Americans elected him again. And I don’t think it’s just that poeple are stupid, either.
So that makes me wonder if the real problem is the onus of responsibility. If we start looking at ourselves for the resources we inherently have inside of us, well, with power comes responsibility, right? I recently read an article about one of the leaders of the green movement, and she was talking about how she was just some average consumer until she got pregnant. She decided to avoid pesticides while she was pregnant and nursing, so she started looking at ingredients, which then led her to do more research, and the whole thing was a slippery slope. Once she started thinking about what she was putting into her body, she realized that the issue was a lot bigger, involving not just chemicals in her food, but the way factory farming and genetically modified foods are wreaking havoc on the environment, etc., and so that one little peek into nutrition basically tore down everything she took for granted.
So, as they say, sometimes ignorance is bliss. It’s like Neo with the red and blue pills. Once you see the big picture, you are responsible for that awareness. And some people don’t want to be responsible for themsleves, while others are more than happy to step in and give them what they want.