Natalie Chang

Fear Factor: The Rhetoric of the Monstrous

Nancy Buffington

November 30, 2005

 

Monstrosity in Cults: Could it happen to us?

 

            Who believes that cults are monstrous? After the last few decades, most Americans would agree that cults are monstrous, or at least that they have done very monstrous things.  The next few slides will recap two of the most notorious cults in the last forty years.  I would assume the majority of you would find these organizations monstrous in some way. 

On November 18, 1978, over nine hundred members of the Peoples Temple committed mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana.   To the American public, Jim Jones became the quintessential charismatic cult leader, while Jonestown and the Peoples Temple became the archetypal “suicide cult.”  Shocking photographs depicted the countless bodies and buckets of poisonous Kool-Aid, and were published all around the world.  They made the tragedy all the more inconceivable, and no one who saw them could forget.

Another infamous cult of the last forty years is the Family International, formerly known as the Children of God.  The man in the middle of this cartoon, David Brandt Berg, founded the cult in the 1960s.  Since its inception, the Family has been plagued by accusations of sexual and physical abuse, organized pedophilia, child pornography, incest, and prostitution.  The cult denies this, but media distributed to Family members clearly preach a very sexual relationship with God, and an especially perverted relationship with children.   Unlike the Peoples Temple, the Family still thrives today.  Its official website claims over twelve thousand members in over a hundred countries. 

Just with these two examples, it is easy to see how cults have become associated with completely irrational behavior, and sometimes very disturbing practices.  Actions like abuse, forced confinement, pedophilia, incest, bestiality, sexual assault, murder, and mass suicide are monstrous and wrong.  These are all cult behaviors.  But how do we label the people who do these things—the cult members themselves?  Who are they? And why would they commit such crimes? 

It is the simplest to view the monstrous as “the other.”  In this presentation, I hope to show that labeling cults is infinitely complicated.  While behavior may be black and white, people are not.  In trying to answer “Are cults monstrous?” here are some of the questions I will explore. First: Is “brainwashing” or “mind control” a valid concept?  What changes when cult members are “brainwashed,” or leaders are practicing “mind control”?  Can we still call them monsters?  Second: Why are cults similar to society?  I propose that cults can best be understood in the context of society.  Lastly: Could we join a cult?  I will question whether cult members are that different from you and me after all.  Perhaps they are not.  Maybe they are just like us.  We must remember this when discussing what they have done, and who they truly are. 

Theories on brainwashing and mind control are split.  One side holds that brainwashing is a valid concept.  The view presented here is from Stephen Kent, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta.  On the other hand, some experts believe that brainwashing and mind control do not exist, and that individuals always retain independence.  Lowell D. Streiker is a proponent of this view.  Streiker is the executive director of the Freedom Counseling Center, and has personally counseled over two thousand individuals whose lives have been affected by cults. 

No matter how compelling the evidence is on either side, these theories are essentially infalsifiable.  How can anyone test freedom of mind and choice?  The crimes themselves are undeniable.  The thoughts and motivation behind them?  No one can ever know but the people themselves.  Nevertheless, analyzing cults in relation to what we can understand brings valuable insight.  When compared to society and societal pressures, cults are substantially demystified.

First, let me discuss the pro-brainwashing point of view.  Stephen Kent, a sociologist at the University of Alberta, is one expert who believes that brainwashing is a valid concept.  He created a model with six parts: 1) forcible confinement, 2) physical maltreatment, 3) social degradation and maltreatment, 4) intense study of ideology, 5) forced confessions and 6) personal ‘success’ stories.  Kent claims that if a cult’s indoctrination processes fit into these six steps, the cult effectively brainwashes its members.  Kent actually used the Family’s “Victor Program” as an example of this model.  The Victor Program was designed to move young members of the cult towards “the Victory”—a person’s self-acceptance as a sinner who needed the Family for salvation.  Step by step, Kent provided examples of how the Family broke down an individual with the Victor Program: 1) Family-run facilities like “The Jumbo” in the Philippines housed up to three hundred and fifty people in ten to fifteen foot cells during the process.  “Deviant” or “disruptive” teenagers were isolated (sometimes for months) or beaten by leaders.  2) During the day, the teens performed painful construction tasks.  They would be publicly beaten if they slacked.  3) The teenagers could not communicate with family or each other.  Sometimes they were forced to remain silent for days.  Any support network was effectively eliminated.  Psychosocial dimensions of individual personality like status, self-esteem, and identity were attacked.  4) Members studied texts for hours, and were forced to memorize the writings of their leader.  They had to renounce parts of their former lives and confess their daily sins.  5) They were encouraged to backstab and report other members’ “infractions.”  6) After successfully completing the program, cult members wrote testimonials praising the program and gave thanks for redemption. 

Other experts believe that brainwashing does not exist.  Lowell D. Streiker, a counselor who has worked with over 2000 individuals affected by cults, believes that people can always retain autonomy.  In his book “Mind-Bending,” Streiker writes: “Autonomy is often given away, but it is seldom stolen…we freely choose to be influenced, choose to conspire with others to relinquish control to them, choose to shirk responsibility, and choose to negligently allow automatic and unconscious processes within ourselves to rule us”  (Streiker iv). 

Streiker refuses to use the term “mind control,” saying that it is a dangerous exaggeration: “behavior may be prescribed, attitudes influenced, beliefs affected, one’s perception of reality distorted, but the mind cannot be controlled.  No matter how submissive the individual is to the authority of the group, human consciousness retains a ‘mind of its own

’” (Streiker 163).

What do the ex-members say themselves?  Former leaders and members alike use the term “brainwashed.”  Here is a quote from a former leader: “What you have to understand is that, for us, breaking the spirit…emptying out the ego, is very very important.  And any means to that end…well, we would have said it was justified.  And over the years we developed by [trial and error] ways of accomplishing this task.  It was only after I was finished with [the cult] and living in the world again that I did some reading and realized how similar [our techniques] were to what the Communists did—to brainwashing.” (Zablocki 197) This quote ironically implies that the brainwashers themselves were brainwashed.  Former cult members often find brainwashing the only plausible cause of their behavior as well: “They ask you to betray yourself so gradually that you never notice you’re giving up everything that makes you who you are and letting them fill you up with something they think is better and that they’ve taught you to believe is something better” (Zablocki 200).   It is possible that former members are simply trying to find excuses for their actions.  In any case, the mentalities of those who commit crimes are very important when determining the true nature of actions (a tenet upheld by the American justice system).

It is pretty much impossible to reach a consensus on brainwashing.  We cannot unequivocally state that cult members are brainwashed, or that they are not brainwashed.   We certainly cannot take former members’ opinions without a hefty amount of skepticism either.  But there is another way of looking at the issue: Can ordinary, rational people commit such heinous crimes?  It is definitely possible.  We can certainly understand cult members in relation to ourselves.  Benjamin Zablocki and Philip Zimbardo both place brainwashing and cults in the context of society in order to better understand it.  Zimbardo, a highly respected professor of psychology at Stanford University, notes, “A remarkable thing about cult mind control is that it’s so ordinary in the tactics and strategies of social influence employed.  They are variants of well-known social psychological principles of compliance, conformity, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, framing, emotional manipulation, and others that are used on all of us daily to entice us…” (Zimbardo 14).   Similarly, Zablocki, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, writes, “People who have been brainwashed are not free only in the sense that all of us, hemmed in on all sides as we are by social and cultural constraints, are not free…” (Zablocki 204).

Experiments have shown that people are amazingly obedient and conforming, even without the use of abuse and psychological stress.  This happens even when the situations presented are clearly wrong and harmful.  In a well-known psychological experiment, subjects stayed in a classroom even when the presence of smoke indicated a clear and present danger.  Subjects noticed the smoke, but remained in the room after observing that others (experimental confederates) did not seem to take notice.  In Asch’s line experiment, subjects were asked to find two lines of the same length.  One third of subjects repeated an erroneous answer to this simple question after hearing several confederates give it.  Surely, this sheds light on how perfectly rational people will do completely irrational things.  Zablocki points out that what cult members experience is an intensified version of everyday conformity.  We can all relate to the feeling of doing something in a collective that we would not do individually.  For cult members, imagine the added pressure of cult abuse and manipulation.  .   

Furthermore, we should consider cults in the context of religion.  The Family, like all other cults, is powered by religious doctrine.  It is surely disturbing to abuse children in the name of God.  And yet people do crazy things all the time in the name of religion.  Consider suicide bombers, the Crusades, and even witch hunts.  Cults are not an isolated phenomenon.  Quite frankly, they are not unique, or overwhelmingly more monstrous if taken into historical context.  (Hitler undoubtedly demonstrated a leader’s ability to make the masses commit horrible crimes.)  There are certainly harmless cults, and religion certainly has its purposes.  A cult provides what any other religion provides.  It gives identity, a sense of belonging, and an authority that can be trusted unequivocally.  They reflect the need in human nature to belong.  All of us can surely relate to that.  Lowell Streiker writes, “Millions of us are conversions waiting to happen” (Streiker 74).  He argues that cult members are overwhelmingly more “normal” than “abnormal.”  They are not freaks, loners, or weirdos.  Some may be more naïve, gullible, and idealistic, but these are personality differences that can be found in any population. 

This picture shows an apparently healthy, happy group of adults.  They smile at the camera.  They look like people we would know.  I doubt any of you would immediately guess that these were some of the earliest settlers of Jonestown.

.  Can you still see cult members as monsters? Can you honestly convince yourself that you could never join a cult?  I am not suggesting that all of us are potential cult members.  But like I said at the beginning of the presentation, monstrosity depends so much on the line between them and us.  They are abnormal, we are normal.  They are bad, we are good.  When that line is questioned, and when it may not even exist--the nature of monstrosity is completely changed.

Works Cited

 

Streiker, Lowell D.  Mind-Bending: Brainwashing, Cults, and Deprogramming in the ‘80s. 

Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1984.

Zablocki, Benjamin.  “Towards a Demystified and Disinterested Scientific Theory of

Brainwashing.”  Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial

Field.  Ed. Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins.  Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 2001.  159-214. 

Zimbardo, Philip.  “What messages are behind today’s cults?” American Psychological

Association Monitor May 1997: 14.