How to Recognize a Dangerous Cult
It all starts innocently: maybe a newcomer to work asks you to play bass in his indie rock band. A friend of friends invites you to a free vegan brunch. Your mother-in-law wants to share with you a life-changing home business opportunity. Accept the wrong proposal, however, and you may find yourself dead-eyed, donning your robes and dancing around the burning pentagram, heralding the seventh century of bloody redemption.
Nobody wants that kind of life for you.
When people think of cults, they tend to imagine bizarre religious sects and apocalyptic scenarios – the burning of Davidians in their home in Texas or corpses on the ground in Jonestown – but cults do not have to be religious, and they are not exotic at all. … If you want to take it literally, any group of like-minded people can be considered a cult.
“The Democratic and Republican parties are cults,” explained cult expert Paul Moranz . “I’m in a cult where everyone wears the same color and we go to rituals every Saturday. It’s called the University of Southern California Alumni Association. “
Moranz is an expert at distinguishing between innocent book clubs and apocalyptic death cults. He has been battling marginal groups like Synanon and The People’s Temple in court since the 1970s, and he says that while cults can be seductive, dangerous ones can be identified and avoided if you know what to look out for.
“If a guy went to a Bible study group, which is a cover for a dangerous cult, and he knew how to deal with you in a group,” Moranz said, “I think he will be fine.”
See who’s in charge
Sects form around strong leaders, so take a close look at the motives and personality of the person in charge. According to Moranz and other cult experts, the leaders of control-minded cults are almost interchangeable.
- Narcissistic personality. Dangerous cult leaders tend to have grandiose ideas about their place in the world.
- The ability to read others: “ A guy like Charles Munson had the ability to notice at a party who he thought he could control. It just looks like his personality, ”said Moranz. Sect leaders “have the ability to evaluate you, recognize your weaknesses, and get to your buttons.”
- Special ability claims : If a leader claims to be smarter, holier, and cleaner than everyone else, think twice before signing up.
- Charisma meets anger: Dangerous cult leaders can be extremely loving, charming, and affectionate, but often turn angry and aggressive without warning. This fluid presentation throws participants off balance.
Look for signs of brainwashing
Although the details of thought reform methods vary from cult to cult, commonalities always exist. Therefore, if you notice that your new righteous friends are using any of the techniques described below, you can slip out of camp and call your father:
- Isolation: The separation of group members from family and friends forces them to rely on other cultists for all emotional needs. This is why many cults are based on living together. (And why are the cultists so boring.)
- Peer Pressure: It’s almost impossible to overestimate the impact of social norms on behavior – the only reason you’re wearing pants right now is because they expect you to – but when you deliberately manipulate peer pressure, you can get people to give out their savings, get out marry a stranger or listen to a horrible rock opera you wrote.
- Confession: Dangerous cults are notorious for forcing members to confess past sins, often in public, and then using those confessions against them. Some groups keep elaborate files of their members’ stories for blackmail.
- Control: Cults often tell parishioners when to eat, who to sleep with, and what to do every second of every day. It is addictive and leaves little free time to wonder what the hell you are doing handing out Bible tracts in Sausalito when you have your Bachelor of English.
- Sleep deprivation: Simply keeping people from sleeping or resting is surprisingly effective in controlling their thoughts. As Chuck Dederich, leader of the rehab cult of Sinanon, described it: “If you keep people awake long enough, you can make them believe anything.”
- Language management : To provide isolation, many groups replace common words with special jargon or create new words to describe complex abstractions. This makes conversations with strangers tiresome: it is simply tiresome to explain to your sister the seventeenth exposition commandment of the Gospel of Norbert.
- Threats of Exile : Totalitarian groups often use the threat of exile to keep their members subservient. Once you’ve successfully identified the outside world as evil or deadly, it’s easy to maintain discipline by threatening to kick someone out.
Ask questions (Cults hate this)
Perhaps the simplest sign of a dangerous authority group is seen in its absence: skepticism. Dangerous cults rarely, if ever, allow members to raise questions about the group or its beliefs. So the easiest way to understand a dangerous cult is to ask questions and write down how they will be answered. Even if you are just asking yourself.
“Back in the 60s, peers pressured me to take acid,” Moranz said. “So I went to watch Timothy Leary’s talk, waiting for a scientific explanation of what LSD does … Instead, it was a bunch of slogans and everyone was shouting and clapping.”
“I wanted to reach out and say, ‘Can you stop the propaganda and just tell us what LSD is or what it does? “But I knew that if I did it, the crowd would attack me. So I quietly left, thinking that I had just seen the most dangerous person alive today. “
I’ll leave Moranz the last word, his personal fail-safe method of determining if a group is a dangerous cult: “Count how many Hollywood stars there are,” Moranz said. “If you stay more than five, fuck you.”
Last updated 10/9/17 3:32 PM In a previous version of this article, it was stated that Paul Moranz fought EST in court alongside Synanon and The People’s Temple in the 1970s. As far as we know, Mr. Moranz has never been involved in litigation. Rather, Mr. Moranz, according to other published sources, has successfully advocated for the LAPD to prevent EST from being used as a training tool for the police force.