Cults and Maslow

Image from:  http://spiritofpurpose.com/

Imagine yourself feeling isolated, unimportant, and unneeded. Unexpectedly you find yourself surrounded by sincere, happy people who hug you, say they love you, accept you, need your help, and make you feel part of their - rather, part of God's - family. When that happened to me, I was overwhelmed. Surely I had found where I "belonged." 

It's like falling into a well once such a decision is made, as in come the biases, protecting self-image, reinforcing the rightness of that decision. (See Commitment and Consistency)

Love and belonging: done.

Above that come the needs for esteem and purpose. We humans need to feel that we are making a difference - that our work has meaning. How much more valuable is a life of meaning?

In the cult, we were continually reminded in publication after publication that ours was the most important work in the world. Because that was nonsense, this artificial sense of importance was necessarily repeated ad nauseam. (Repetition feeds belief.) We were working directly for God himself - the only work with eternal rewards. We were always kept busy; we were so important, and there was so little time, so much to do, so few "called out ones" to do it, that we needed to "burn the candle at both ends," and "burn out fast and bright for Jesus."

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,"* or so cult members, with their elevated sense of self-importance, blissfully believe.

*Henry V, Shakespeare.

Future Flippancy

"Living by faith" has severe drawbacks. Most obviously, future planning becomes a "lack of faith." ("Take no thought for the morrow," you know.)

Therefore, one wonders about how TFI members will live their later years? How will they survive when they are not able to actively fundraise? With no provision whatsoever made for retirement, cult members have come up with some fanciful ideas. 

Plan A: Their children. Most older TFI members have had many children, the large majority of whom have left the group, fought against the difficult circumstances of being raised in the delusional bubble of cult life, and with little education, no diplomas, no credit history nor networks of support have now managed to establish themselves in their home countries or elsewhere. Kudos to them!

What a brilliant idea to live off of them! These falsely entitled parents will simply ask their children to be sure to have an extra room for them in their houses. Then, the parents can travel around (on whose money, one wonders - oh, of course - their kids') and stay for two months with each of their adult children, fit-as-a-fiddle until the suddenly drop dead. It's a good thing they aren't planning on succumbing to any debilitating diseases.

"Oh, really? But isn't that plan just a bit presumptuous?" Yet this is what I have heard from many first generation TFI members.

Wouldn't they be foolish, though, to not to have a plan B? This one hearkens back to the days of COG training for how to survive during the antichrist's reign: "live off the grid." Buy some land (again, with what money?), dig a well (simple), install solar panels, plant some vegetables, and enjoy the easy life of retirement. I think we can all see possible difficulties with this scenario.

To quote the "prophet," Berg:

So let me dream on if I'm dreaming!

I'd rather be glad though insane!

A Mind of its Own

We can't help it. We are pre-programmed to make inferences and draw conclusions from what we see.

Studies on babies that were videoed and later reviewed showed that even little ones make inferences. In one experiment, these young ones were shown videos of what appeared to be a pole moving back and forth with a board across the middle, hiding the center section. It could have been one pole, or it could have been two separate pieces of wood moving synchronously.

Most adults would assume that the video was of one pole moving with its center hidden. The babies did the same.  

The babies were shown the video of the moving poles with the center obscured over and over until they demonstrated clear signs of boredom. Then the video was shown again, but this time with the board removed. Some babies were shown a video of one pole moving back and forth. Others were shown a video where there was a gap behind where the board had been, and that there were actually two poles moving back and forth at the same time.

The lack of surprise in the babies who were shown the video of one pole, contrasted with the obvious surprise shown in the faces of the babies who saw the two poles, led the researchers to conclude that the babies did, indeed, infer what was behind the obscuring board. They clearly expected to see just one pole. (Pure Reasoning in 12-Month-Old Infants as Probabilistic Inference, Erno Téglás, 2011)

Other experiments have been done that illustrate babies' inherent expectations of connections and their surprise when those connections were shown to be false. We start forming relationships and inferences about our surroundings very early in life.

Is it any wonder that we sometimes draw incorrect conclusions?

Stanford Prison Study

In 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo wanted to study the psychological effects of prison life. He advertised for volunteers and, with the help of consultants (one of whom was a former prisoner who had spent 16 years behind bars), prepared the basement of the Stanford Psychology building to be as much like a prison as possible. In order to be as true to reality as they could, he arranged for the randomly chosen Prisoners to be "arrested" by actual city policemen. 

After a surprise visit by uniformed policemen, they were handcuffed, taken to the police station, fingerprinted, booked, blindfolded, and placed in a holding cell. Soon they were transferred to the "Stanford Prison" where they were further dehumanized by being stripped, doused with anti-lice powder, and given a gown bearing their prison number, a stocking hat (made from ladies' nylons), rubber sandals, and finally were fitted with a locked chain around their right ankles. Their prison number was now the only thing they were to be known by; no more using names.

The humiliated Prisoners were placed 3 to a small cell. A tiny closet was prepared for "solitary confinement."

Meanwhile, the other half of the volunteers had been randomly given the job of Guards. They also were dressed the part, with uniforms, mirror sunglasses (so as to not show their eyes, making them more intimidating), and billy clubs.

The Guards were to keep law and order and to command the respect of the prisoners. Other than that, no specific instructions were given. 

The Prisoners were awakened throughout the night for arbitrary number checks. At first, the Prisoners did not take the Guards seriously, and the Guards retaliated by becoming more authoritative. As rebellious behavior escalated, so did the retaliations. The Guards made disobedient prisoners do push-ups (even stepping on their backs while they did them), demanded that all the Prisoners be naked, and put one particularly rebellious Prisoner in the 2X2 foot "solitary confinement" dark closet for hours at a time.

Prisoners were denied access to toilets on the whim of the Guards - just given a bucket to use which they were not always allowed to empty. Other times, the Prisoners were marched to the toilet down the hall, bags covering heads, chains on ankles, arms on the shoulders of the ones in front. At night, the Guards relieved their boredom by even more sadistic - and pornographic - treatment of the Prisoners.

Meanwhile, some of the powerless and frustrated Prisoners were variously rebelling, having breakdowns, screaming, crying, and refusing to eat, although most learned quickly to quietly comply. 

Even Dr. Zimbardo began to lose sight of his experiment and became embroiled in the drama of running the Prison. When faced with a rumor of an upcoming escape attempt, he tried to enlist the help of the police to "contain his prisoners," and when they refused, he covered the Prisoners' heads in bags and moved them all to a different floor of the building to thwart their plans.

He wrote, "It wasn't until much later that I realized how far into my prison role I was at that point -- that I was thinking like a prison superintendent rather than a research psychologist."

The planned two-week experiment was ended after only six days, largely as the result of a comment from one of Dr. Zimbardo's colleagues. When she witnessed the Prisoners marching chained and bagged to the toilet, she made no secret of her outrage, "It's terrible what you are doing to these boys!" Its morality seriously called into question and the obvious psychological distress of the participants marked the end of the "Stanford Prison." "We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation -- a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically. Even the 'good' guards felt helpless to intervene, and none of the guards quit while the study was in progress," later wrote the doctor.

The participants' sense of reality had shifted. The "prison" became their reality. When interviewed two months after the experiment, the Guards were dismayed at what they had done. At the time, they felt no guilt or shame, but afterwards, back in the real world, they were alarmed to see what they had been capable of doing.

This is the fundamental danger of the false reality of cult life. Its own skewed morality becomes the accepted and practiced norm, and in such a situation, anything can happen.

See also: More on the Stanford Prison Study and Why didn't we balk at the Mo Letters?

Extracting a Cultist

One might naturally think that to change someone's valued belief all that is necessary would be to show them another side. It's not so easy.

If you've read my other blog posts, you can see that there are very compelling reasons why people cling to a belief. Beliefs can easily become part of our very identities. The higher the personal cost in adopting the belief, the more we value it, and the tighter we cling. The years we hold that belief add up into sunk cost, and we figure we need to keep on - we've already put so much into it. Loss aversion comes into play, and we just don't want to give it up.

Briefly, most decisions, beliefs included, are made as a result of emotional pull. We later tell ourselves all sorts of good-sounding, rational reasons why we made that decision, but the fact is that our brains are hard-wired to naturally move by emotion. Smart people can come up with many more reasons than others to support their beliefs.

Once a decision is made, you have the need for consistency - no one likes disconfirming evidence and the uncomfortable dissonance that causes in the mind - as well as the confirmation bias, that makes us see only things that confirm our belief and literally not see what would disconfirm it.

"It is extremely rare for someone to simply abandon a valued belief when confronted with disconfirming information. In fact, recent psychological research shows that when this happens, people tend to hold the erroneous belief even more strongly." - Daniel Kahneman

So, what to do? How to help someone stuck in an obviously false and dangerous belief?

I think the only way to do it is to get them to step away completely - change their environment and surroundings - and then new views can work their magic. It was hard for me, because I had invested so many years into the group - all that sunk cost, and the false valuation I placed on my life in the cult. Moving away from big communes was the first step. Then my months of living away from the cult gave me a taste of freedom and helped me not want to live with other Family members ever again. The next important step was spending less and less time reading the publications. Finally, my mind was clear enough to see the truth in the British court statement, and I could call it quits.

Time is Short

The world will end soon. Some catastrophe is around the corner. We must rush to get out the message. We must "press-in" to save lost souls so we won't have their blood on our hands when we face the Lord. 

Hurry, hurry, and whatever you do, don't stop to think. And if you do think, think about purifying your heart and purging yourself from sin and doubt. What do you need to confess? What hidden sins do you have that you need prayer for, before the little seed of sin grows into a tree of rebellion?

And always - the Home needs funds, and the distribution quotas must be met. We, "God's chosen End-time children," have the awesome responsibility of reaching the world "for Jesus." We don't want to fail the Lord.

Whatever the tack, the theme was the same: time is short. 

With time so scarce, there was always that lingering feeling of guilt: "I should have done that already. I'm such a failure. It's almost useless to try to do something now, as I'm so late in getting started - I'd better hurry."

There was no building for tomorrow. No looking to the future. Just rushing and living for the moment, in spite of all the holy-sounding talk of "doing things in the Lord's time," there was always that feeling of failure, that whatever we do is too little, too late. It was only mitigated by the delusion, "We are the happiest people on earth, because we are God's Chosen."

Even now, many years out, when I think of something I should do or get an idea about something, my intuitive reaction is that of subtle guilt - Why didn't I do that already? Yet another bad habit that was hard-wired into my psyche during those 30 years of nonsense.

Yielding My Will

Being "yielded" was the ideal characteristic for TFI members. Dictionary.com defines this as "inclined to give in; submissive; compliant." It took me years of being told to "surrender my will to the Lord" to attain to this goal, but I finally made it.

I think the turning point for me was when I returned (to the enormous School Home where I lived) with my fifth baby after giving birth at a little clinic. It was my birthday, and I was filled with joy to have a beautiful new baby. That joy had already been tempered when someone told me at the clinic that the District Shepherd had written to me. Although trying to push it out of mind so I could enjoy the day, I was worried.

For good reason. As soon as I was settled on my bed, new babe in arms, looking forward to introducing my children to their new baby brother, I was handed a 8-page computer printout of correction from that Shepherd. This is the Shepherd who had already put the onus on me for any marriage problems we were having by telling me I was, "not just self-righteous, but really, really, really self-righteous." That 16-page list of my sins and failings, I now see, was the straw that broke the camel's back.

If I had lacked in decisiveness and confidence before, it was nothing to how I was after that letter.

Of course, mandatory public "confession" and united prayer followed, after giving me a week or so to dwell on "what the Lord was trying to teach me." (Shades of Mao and the public confessions required during the Cultural Revolution.) Naturally, I was to do even more intensive studies of the Mo Letters and the Bible as remedy (or was it penance?) for my sins. Oh, not to forget the OHRs (Open Heart Reports), where we wrote our secret sins and daily struggles and victories for our Shepherds to muse over and decide on future dealings. These were ramped-up during times of confession, when "the Lord had his spotlight" on me.

The whole idea was to break our wills and psychologically beat us into submissive, unquestioning, even unthinking, followers. Even more so for women, who were to be obsequious, fawning "helpmeets."

See also: Learned Helplessness