I was in the army in 1978, serving as assistant public affairs officer for the 18th Airborne Corps in North Carolina, when word reached us about the mass murder-suicide of members of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple cult in Guyana. We were tasked to send a task force of soldiers to Guyana to recover and return the bodies, and I was assigned to be the task force’s public affairs officer.
While I remained in North Carolina, I was in constant contact with our people on the ground in Guyana, and memories of that first day are etched in my mind. We’d been initially told that there would be about two hundred casualties, but when the task force landed at the site, the body count began to climb, eventually reaching nine hundred, a hundred of which were under 17 years old.
For the past forty-six-plus years, I have wrestled with the implications of that incident. I have wondered how otherwise intelligent people can be seduced into a cult and motivated to engage in such bizarre behavior. I have studied the issue extensively, and as I look around me today, I see signs emerging once again of cult-like behavior, with people blindly believing anything the cult leader says and following his directions, even when doing so hurts them.
What causes such behavior, and can anything be done about it?
Let’s start with a definition of a cult. The word comes from the Latin cultus, or worship, and was initially used in the early 17th century to denote homage to a divinity. Current definitions include, “A group of people having beliefs or practices, especially (but not solely) relating to religion, that others regard as strange or sinister or as imposing excessive control over members.” There’s a lot of disagreement about whether to call a particular movement or group a cult, but some clear signs characterize cults.
1. Absolute authoritarianism without accountability
2. Zero tolerance for criticism or questions
3. Unreasonable fears about the outside world that often involve evil conspiracies and persecutions.
4. A belief that non-members or those who leave the group are always wrong.
5. A belief that the leader is always right is the exclusive means of knowing ‘truth.’
Cults of any stripe are dangerous because they rely on deception and autocratic practices to make members dependent on the group and unquestioningly loyal to the leader.
People often join cults without knowing they’re doing so for several reasons. Those who knowingly join typically have unresolved insecurities or fears and are seduced into joining by a charismatic leader. Cult leaders are also often psychopaths or, at best, sociopaths, and use psychological tactics to gain power, control, and allegiance.
If you encounter a group of people who are slavishly devoted to a leader who never admits failure, lies, and then uses aggressive behavior against those who expose his lies, and who insists on absolute loyalty from his ‘followers,’ without giving loyalty in return, you’ve encountered a cult.
Not, perhaps, as potentially fatal as Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple or David Koresh’s Waco, Texas cult that advocated for underage girls to marry adult men, but it can be just as dangerous. In particular, politically oriented cults can upend public order and undermine representative government. They can also pose a physical threat to those considered to be ‘outsiders,’ based on religion, ethnicity, or other factors.
If you know someone who is a member of such a cult, you might consider getting some professional guidance on what you can do or how to cope with the impact it has on you. As for extracting a friend or family member from such a situation, unfortunately, there is no magic cure. It takes time, understanding, and a ton of patience. Failing that, you can only put some distance between yourself and the cult member.
As sad as that is to say, there’s probably no other answer. | NWI
