I recently finished reading Cults In Our Midst—The continuing fight against their hidden menace, by Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer. The book is not new—it was originally published in 1995, and the revised edition that I read was published in 2003. It is a comprehensive description of cults, which the author defines as:
a group that forms around a person who claims he or she has a special mission or knowledge, which will be shared with those who turn over most of their decision making to the self-appointed leader.
Before reading Cults In Our Midst, I’d read and watched TV programs about some cult leaders, and noticed the similarity between their behavior and the behavior of sociopaths. I developed the opinion that cult leaders were simply sociopaths who employed their natural “skills” of charisma, charm, deceit and manipulation to convince others to follow them, and do as they commanded, even when it ended in death, as in Jonestown and Waco.
I expected to see a similar view in this book, and was surprised not to find it. Singer was an experienced clinical psychologist, yet, in this book at least, she does not link cult leaders and personality disorders. Perhaps she didn’t conduct formal research on what the two have in common. But in reading the book, the connection seemed obvious to me.
Cultic relationship
Singer defines a cultic relationship as:
one in which a person intentionally induces others to become totally or nearly totally dependent on him or her for almost all major life decisions, and inculcates in these followers a belief that he or she has some special talent, gift, or knowledge.
She describes cult leaders as self-appointed, persuasive, determined, domineering and charismatic. The cults are authoritarian in structure, and have double sets of ethics—members are to be open and honest within the group, but deceive and manipulate everyone else. The overriding philosophy of cults is that the ends justify the means.
Gee, where have we heard that before?
Anyone is vulnerable
Singer points out that everyone is susceptible to these master manipulators. She writes that two-thirds of the people who joined cults came from normal, functioning families. Still, there are some situations that increase risk:
Any person who is in a vulnerable state, seeking companionship and a sense of meaning or in a period of transition or time of loss, is a good prospect for cult recruitment. ”¦ I have found two conditions make an individual especially vulnerable to cult recruiting: being depressed and being in between important affiliations.
By “between important affiliations,” Singer meant a person was not engaged in a meaningful personal relationship, job, educational training program, or some other life involvement.
Singer spends a lot of time explaining exactly how cults go about recruiting people. One of the prime methods she describes is something we are all familiar with—love bombing. The author explains this as flooding new recruits with “flattery, verbal seduction, affectionate but usually nonsexual touching, and lots of attention to their every remark.”
Again, sound familiar?
Learning to manipulate
So how do people become cult leaders? As I said, Singer never suggests that cult leaders are disordered people who are exhibiting their natural, disordered behavior.
Singer calls the perpetrators “con artists.” She says that their prime skills are persuasion and manipulation. She writes:
There is no end to the ways a person can learn to manipulate others, especially if that person has no conscience, feels no guilt over living off the labors and money of others, and is determined to lead.
She continues:
I believe that the successful cult leaders monitor, observe, and learn from what they try and, as needed revise and reformulate the folk art of persuasion.
So, reading this book, Singer seems to say that certain people simply decide that they are going to become cult leaders, and then figure out how to do it. She makes no mention of inborn personality traits or any type of personality disorder—even though her words are perfect descriptions of sociopaths.
Ostracized by her profession
During the 1980s, Singer was an expert witness on court cases involving mind control. She testified in the trial of Kenneth Bianchi, the “Hillside Strangler,” that he was not suffering from multiple personality disorder, as he claimed. On a TV show, Singer said that Bianchi was a psychopath. She also repeatedly testified against the Unification Church.
In 1983, the American Psychological Association (APA) asked Singer to chair a task force on Deceptive and Indirect Techniques of Persuasion and Control. Then, the APA rejected her report.
In fact, the APA filed a “friend of the court” brief in a case against the Unification Church. Dr. Singer and a colleague, Dr. Samuel Benson, had argued that the Unification Church recruiters “engage in systematic manipulation of the social influences surrounding the potential recruit to the extent that the recruit, in fact, loses the capacity to exercise his own free will and judgment.”
The APA stated that Singer’s theory of coercive persuasion was not a meaningful scientific concept, and her testimony in the case should not be allowed. The brief stated:
Specifically, the conclusions Drs. Singer and Benson assert cannot be said to be scientific in any meaningful sense (Point I.B.), and the methodologies generating those conclusions depart so far from methods generally accepted in the relevant professional communities that they are incapable of producing reliable or valid results (Point I.C.). Stripped of the legitimating lustre of a scientific pedigree, plaintiffs purported scientific claim of coercive persuasion is little more than a negative value judgment rendered by laypersons about the religious beliefs and practices of the Unification Church. (Point I.D.).
Read Brief Amicus Curiae of the American Psychological Association
Singer sued the APA, and lost. Afterwards, she reworked much of the rejected material on Deceptive and Indirect Techniques of Persuasion and Control into the book, Cults In Our Midst. Since the first edition of the book came out in 1995, powerful cults threatened and harassed Singer, and filed lawsuits against her. So the introduction to the revised edition explained that an account of one of the cults was deleted.
Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer died in 2003.
Cults In Our Midst is available on Amazon.com.
Ironschool, I’m sorry you were close to the Jones cult. I suggest though that you educate yourself more about psycho/socio-paths and how they get that way…they are not evil from the womb, there are DNA parts to it, and environmental as well, and not all are as apparent as you might think, there are many of them who “love bomb” people into thinking they are “normal” and “good”–Bernie Madoff for example. Ted Bundy for another.
BTW head injures do not cause people to become psychopaths, though they may alter the behavior of the injured person.
Drugs also do not cause people to become psychopaths, and alcohol doesn’t either, but frequently people who ARE psychopaths will “self medicate” wiht alcohol/drugs.
There are lots of articles here about psychopaths, so help yourself to reading and learning about them.
Believe me – I have read and studied a lot about them & how they get what they want. But I still stand tall on my position that we label way too much & many of the people we are labeling are not psych/sociopaths at all. We cheat ourselves that way.If you look in to serial murderers such as Bundy, you will find that a huge percent of them have had traumatic head injuries. Very interesting-
ironschool,
my spath bro hit his head many times as a child.
My spath sis tumbled down some stairs at age 1. Then had an extremely traumatic head injury at age 15, in a car accident.
The thing is, they both were extremely manipulative BEFORE the incidents. YES, my one year old sister was manipulative since she was born. My mother has commented many times that she was a flirtatious infant, smiled at strangers.
It’s very difficult to do any studies on humans.
My sister’s head injury DID change her personality though. She was smart before the injury, as were all of my siblings, but afterwards there was something missing. She could still get good grades, but she seemed to lack the most basic common sense. It’s very difficult to describe. All I can say is that she lost the ability to perceive nuances. She began to see things in very black and white terms. Spaths do that.
Even still, though she became more selfish after her car accident, she wasn’t a spath. I was her role model, she wanted to be a good person. When she met her spath husband (sent as a trojan horse by my spath to marry her for her money), she became pure evil.
It’s a very complicated subject, with so many opportunities to go one way or the other. The high road is harder to take. In a way, we the empaths, are just lucky to have landed where we did.
…thats my point exactly. It’s complicated. I love the feedback either way- thank you.
Ironschool, I am a retired registered nurse practitioner and I worked in a rehab facility for head and spinal cord injuries. I absolutely know that head injuries do CHANGE people (depending on where and how severe the injury is) but it does NOT make them psychopaths. It may make them violent but it doesn’t make them psychopaths. It doesn’t make them manipulative.
They are finding out now that even smaller head injries (like in football etc) causes DEMENTIA and many boxers, foot ballers etc have evidence of these injuries in their brains that are very visible on autopsy. But dementia is not anywhere near the same as psychopathy.
BUT that is not to say that psychopaths can’t get a head injury and become demented as well as psychopaths.
Psychopaths are also more frequently bi-polar, ADHD and at a higher rate of left handedness than non psychopaths. So having ONE thing doesn’t mean you cant have the other or that the one thing CAUSES the psychopathy.
There is a lot of research going on now about the brains of psychopaths and the brains of head injuries (because of sports injuries) that are telling us a great deal about the brain that we didn’t know before. But even 30 years ago I wouldn’t let my children ride bulls or play foot ball because of the risk of brain injury.
sky – your line, ‘My mother has commented many times that she was a flirtatious infant, smiled at strangers.’ squicked me out. are you at a point where you can entertain the lack of veracity in that statement by considering its source? sounds more like a jealous mother to me. just sayin’.
OneJoy,
it wasn’t said with disdain or jealousy, it was more like pride.
spathsis is the golden child. Her ability to manipulate is a source of pride to my mom, or so it seems to me.
My mother can’t seem to tell what is a good trait and what isn’t.
She once said something like, “spathsis is an extremely feminine woman.”
I said, “what? you call selfishness and being spoiled, feminine? True femininity is giving and nurturing. She has none of that.”
My mom said, “oh, you’re right. She’s not feminine at all.”
WTF? People like my mom, just have no sense of what IS. To them, a cardboard cutout is like the real thing. Even when they can see it’s a cardboard cutout.
I hope it’s clear to everyone that “cults” don’t necessarily have to be “religious” in character, or even pretend to be “religious.” There are groups which are “cults” in all but name, and are just as exploitative or even downright dangerous to those who get entangled with them. I think Margaret Thaler Singer’s definition that Donna quoted here is a good one. Groups of this kind claim, through their leader, to share some special gifts, talents, skills, or “powers” of some kind with their followers. Sometimes the “powers” they claim are religious, spiritual, or otherwise supernatural in character, but they don’t have to be.
One example of what I mean is Landmark Education. I understand it’s some kind of offshoot of Werner Erhard’s “est” seminars that were popular back in the 1970s. At any rate, Landmark claims to “turn your life around” if you join and follow their program, but they’ve been accused of using sophisticated psychological techniques amounting to “brainwashing” to manipulate their clients. It seems to be a racket to get more and more money out of people.
Then there’s an outfit called Reevaluation Counseling, which I understand still exists. RC seems to have some roots in common with the Scientology charlatans—another racket, as everyone knows—so that should be a warning in itself. But it’s not the same outfit, and while Scientology calls itself a “church,” I don’t believe RC ever did. It was founded back in the 1950s by a guy named Harvey Jackin with some dubious far-left affiliations—he’d been a member of the Communist Party among other things—but he’d also looked into L. Ron Hubbard’s “dianetics” and started up this RC group to free followers of the psychological hangups in their lives by a system of “co-counseling.” So there was nothing explicitly “religious” about that. But RC was a “cult” in all other respects, with a highly manipulative authoritarian culture designed to keep dissenters obedient to its “charismatic leader,” Harvey Jackin, one of whose obvious goals was the wholesale sexual exploitation of women followers. Jackin kicked the bucket in 1999, and good riddance, but I have no idea whether RC cleaned up its act after that.
I can’t let this subject go without reminding everyone of James Arthur Ray, another of these “charismatic leaders.” I can’t forget him myself since it was just up the road from me (so to speak) in Sedona that Ray was responsible for the deaths of two people, with a score of others hospitalized, in one of his “sweat lodge” exercises. I suppose Ray’s claims to “bring success” to his followers did pretend to some bogus “spiritual” basis: a load of Newage (rhymes with “sewage”) mumbo-jumbo he referred to as “Harmonic Wealth.” More like the “harmonic convergence” of their money into his bank account, I’d say! Those who got sucked into his racket attended a series of seminars, each more expensive than the last, with some costing five figures. The significance of the “sweat lodge” is that Ray claimed it would bring them some “spiritual experience” involving “altered states of consciousness” or something of the kind. In reality any trance-like condition was induced by heat, thirst, and oxygen deprivation, which left the subject in a more suggestible state for Ray to implant his ideas. (He of course took care to position himself near an entrance with a better supply of fresh air.) Only this time he overdid it, and two of his followers were left with a permanent “out of body” experience. Some of these groups are not just “dangerous”; they’re outright lethal.
A treasure trove of information about cults can be found at rickross.com.
Well, I think Bundy was a classic psychopath, but I do agree that a great many wrongdoers are not in fact psychopathic. That’s a point I’ve made here before. Other causes of abusive and violent behavior generally can be as diverse as head trauma (just as you mentioned), a variety of disorders such as borderline personality disorder, or outright psychosis. When it comes to serial killers, quite a few have been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia: Kaczynski, Sutcliffe, and Berkowitz are just three that come to mind. Henry Lee Lucas on the other hand was visibly affected by head trauma due to violent physical abuse from his mother as a boy. The lesions in his brain could be seen on a PET scan, and they were in regions that would affect his judgment and ability to control his behavior. For another, Lock Ah Tam was a notable head trauma case, and a very tragic one, though not a serial killer.
Oxy, are there any sources you can point to for the finding that psychopaths are frequently bipolar? I’ve looked for one myself but I haven’t found one yet. I find the idea a little surprising, I guess because being bipolar is so much about emotional variability, in the form of extreme mood swings of great intensity, while the psychopath on the other hand is known for shallow emotions. (Except for “rage,” I dare say!) It would be interesting to know more about this.