December 30, 1979, Wilmington Star-News, page 5-B, Rabbi deprograms followers,
MIAMI--Rabbi Maurice Davis and the Rev. Jim Jones were colleagues as socially active religious leaders in Indianapolis in the early 1960's.
When Jones needed a building to house his People's Temple, Davis sold him an old synagogue.
Then they went their different ways---Jones to perish in November 1978 with more than 900 of his followers at Jonestown, Guyana, and Davis to become a "deprogrammer" of young people who have fallen under the influence of what he calls cult religions.
"Back in the early "60's," Davis recalled, "Jim Jone was what you would call a decent fellow.
"He was young, he was dedicated to helping people, he was liked. He was completely humorless, I remember, and he did have a persecution complex under the surface. But he handled himself well," Davis said.
"What happened after he went to California, I don't know.
What Davis does know is that there are other "Jim Jones" around enticing young people into religious cult. That's why Davis, who runs a Jewish Community Center in White Plains, N.Y., was in Miami Monday -- to teach his colleagues how to "save" young people from cult leaders.
"They all start with the power of love, and they end up with the love of power," Davis said. "Jim Jones went further than all the rest of them. But there are still a lot of Jim Jones out there. Sure another Jonestown can happen at any time. I won't be surprised if it does."
Davis has compiled a profile of people who he said are vulnerable to cults:
- --They're between ages 18 and 25
- --They're white, usually from upper-middle-class homes
- --They're usually warm, loving people with a strong need for peer-group approval
- --They seem to migrate to warm-weather cities, such as Miami, and to "progressive" cities, such as San Francisco, in vague attempts to "find themselves."
- --They tend to be followers.
The two things on the bottom line of cults, Davis said, are money and power.
"The young people are just vehicles for obtaining money, and they are also potentially bases for power," he said.
"They're also frequently power bottoms---number three, but I don't mention sex and young people when I'm closing a sale with grown ups. I tell the mother how nice her hair looks, and that's typical of both boys and girl at risk for cult induction to have good hair on the maternal side---thick and lustrous. Scientists are testing the Y-chromosomes to look for the connection
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Actually, I wrote that last paragraph above, and not the Rabbi. Here is the article's final paragraph:
"Eventually, there may have to be some government intervention in all of this. The cult leaders clothe themselves in the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from investigating or restricting their beliefs," Davis said. But there's nothing in the First Amendment that stops the government from investigating the activities of these cults. Part of what I'm doing is making sure people understand that difference."
Cults were our Taliban back when Russian still occupied Afghanistan. What's afoot here, is a little trainer-Patriot Act on the First Amendment and it didn't get very far, but it shows effort. Now, they're trying the same thing on the Second Amendment rights, using the same multi-fatality fear manufacturing process.
Rabbi Maurice Davis is incredibly arrogant to sound like a Dershowitz: "Part of what I'm doing is making sure people understand that difference." Finessing a sort of qualified religious investigation capability---but without powers to impose any restrictions, or other "consequence"--would be like going after Al Capone again, but on an old zoning code violation, instead of using Treasury guys and the IRS.
But I know something fishy was startled when early in the Bush II term I heard militarized Christians spouting the line, "There is no wall between church and state. That's a myth." If it's a myth, then it's a damn good myth, in the same way The Protocols of Zion is a damn good forgery.
The Rabbi appears to have been planning deeper foundations than he needed to build just a career and a cultural movement, while predicating it all on a pretty lightweight list of warning signs Cult-led rebels and youths in wanderlust heading straight for Miami or San Francisco? Like so many Jews and homosexuals?That would be big trouble for Akron!
In paragraph two, Davis is forced to play off an outing of his 15-year-old real estate deal --with the sale described as being of an "old synagogue," and with Jones being in the market out looking for a new place. Nobody would want the transaction to come across looking like some sort of suzerainty--or even worse---a reverse suzerainty--and the public doesn't appreciate anything that looks too "eastern" at all. This is where Jim Jones gets the "Temple" portion of the Peoples Temple name. And--there are some references in the news record to indicate that the poor congregation was spared the necessity for frequent passes of the basket; it being several years after the move to California before tithing became voluntary, and still more time before tithing was made compulsory.
However, there's still underarm stains from the guilt by association. This is the problem with being high-profile. Any discordance can be managed, but in the worst case scenario---well, what are guns for, I suppose? But in the really worst, WORST case scenario, remember, they say oral tradition dies off completely within three generations. Rest assured, progeny from the tribe, will make sure the record is scrubbed eventually. Until then, do not put pen to paper unduly. Reconcile both sides of yourself, rabbi: you are both Shiva-Shlomo--the destroyer-of-cults--- and Shlomo Krishna--a hot new cult-promoter in town. A wry shrug will hondle it:
"Back in the early "60's," Davis recalled, "Jim Jones was what you would call a decent fellow.In better circumstances, it is Rabbi Davis who gives out some of the boldest most colorful quotes to the media. He does so because his foil is Rev. Moon, who also has some of the top scriptwriters in the business feeding him lines:
"He was young, he was dedicated to helping people, he was liked. He was completely humorless, I remember, and he did have a persecution complex under the surface. But he handled himself well," Davis said.
"What happened after he went to California, I don't know.
"I will conquer and subjugate the world," says Sun Myung Moon. "I am your brain." The latter statement is quite literally true for a growing coterie of young American converts, who regard the South Korean cult leader as the second Christ. (TIME, Sept. 30, 1974)The February, 1979 hearing stemmed from the destruction of 900 Peoples Temple members Jim Jones' , did not to bear fruit for Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) or get pollinated even, as "foes of religious cults alternated with defenders of religious freedom in a noisy and emotional congressional hearing yesterday," and most of his fellow senators put in only brief appearances, keeping their stamen and stigma safely zippered. Dole was in full retreat from the Rabbi's job of "making sure people understand":
Sen. Dole stressed that it was not a formal congressional hearing, an investigation or a debate. Rather, he said in opening remarks, it was intended as a "starting point for members in their search for a thorough understanding of this very sensitive and complex issue."Any Senate plans withered in the face of fundamental fury expressed at the threat to a foundational American right posed by the intriguing of cultic machinators, from whichever side of the aisle
The Russell Senate Office Building hearing room was packed with spectators, the majority of whom were members of the Unification Church, who heckled and jeered speakers who portrayed cultists as "child molesters" and cheered those who branded the hearing a "witch hunt."Rather than recalibrate his remarks, the Rabbi rose to the occasion:
,Ted Patrick the most widely known of the deprogrammers, was booed by Unification Church members when he finished, but they saved their deepest animus for Rabbi Maurice Davis of White Plains, N.Y., a prime mover in the anti-cult movement.
He was repeatedly interrupted with shouts of "lies! That's a lie!" as he spoke of death threats he had received and likened the Unification Church to the Nazi Youth Movement and the Peoples Temple. The rabbi inflamed the crowd even further with his concluding comments: "I am here to protest against child molesters. For as surely as there are those who lure children with lollypops in order to rape their bodies, so, too, do these lure children with candy-coated lies in order to rape their minds."Subsequent history has borne out the types and categorized catagory e was responsible for molesting children all these years, and it turns out it was their bodies at risk after all.
I don't know if I will successfully make my case or not as to how synthetic and manufactured the underlying history is, that results in a fear we can more clearly see being manipulated and used against us, but it sounds just the same in today's emotional debates:
It's frightening what these Moonies can do to the family unit..I get letters from parents all over the country telling me the same story..The kids are swept along by his outfit and then taken away for a few days to a 'workshop.' By the time the parents see their kids again – if they can manage to see them – the kids are starry-eyed and ready to take on anyone who disagrees with them. It's a form of hypnotism. There is something very unhealthy going on. January 28, 1976, Wikisource, Information entered into the Congressional Record on Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, by Representative Charles H. Wilson of California.Being "taken away for a few days to a 'workshop'" sounds more like olden times of gay bars and sex clubs, then the present day debate over legalizing gay marriage, but I know the fear that is being manipulated today strikes the same. I know as well, in my soul, that in securing my minority right to equal protection under the law, I am also securing a putative majority's right to what it is their heart desires most---an apocalyptic ending of the world in fire and brimstone, with the destruction of all civilization as we know it, and suddenly, "we" don't feel so equally protected anymore.
Somebody has to give up some ground here, but the lines seem drawn in something thicker than sand, which sounds like I'm talking about Israel, but I speak metaphorically"
The last time I ever witnessed a movement that had these qualifications: (1) a totally monolithic movement with a single point of view and a single authoritarian head; (2) replete with fanatical followers who are prepared and programmed to do anything their master says; (3) supplied by absolutely unlimited funds; (4) with a hatred of everyone on the outside; (5) with suspicion of parents, against their parents -- the last movement that had those qualifications was the Nazi youth movement, and I'll tell you, I'm scared.-- Rabbi Maurice Davis, Youth, Brainwashing and the Extremist CultsI know of at least 900 people who didn't receive the courtesy of even a single death threat before their lives were taken from them:
If anything happens to me," 55-year-old Rabbi Maurice Davis says, "it won't be the swine flu." In recent months he has received more than 20 death threats, he claims, from followers of the controversial South Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon. As founder and past president of the 500-family national anti-Moon organization called Citizens Engaged in Reuniting Families (CERF), Davis has been called "No. 1 Satan" by Moon himself.
December 13, 1976, People Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 24, Rabbi Maurice Davis Is Called 'No. 1 Satan' by Rev. Moon as They Battle Over Young Converts, by Patricia Burstein,
Certain people seem to feel they have a right to define not only themselves but others too--and not only who those people are, but what they are not as well:
In his column in a recent issue of The Jewish Post and Opinion, a national newspaper, Rabbi Maurice Davis wrote that people who refer to themselves as Jews for Jesus, Hebrew Christians or Messianic Jews "have pretended not only that they are Jewish, which they are not, but that they speak for either Jews or Judaism, which they do not." "They have distorted our holidays, demeaned our faith, misstated our history, and belittled a legacy which we have spent centuries preserving and enlarging." Rabbi Davis, a former spiritual leader at Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation, went on to note that people who accept Jesus as the Messiah by definition Christians; they are not Jewish.
January 27, 1990, The Indianapolis Star, page A-8, Messianic Jews in Indianapolis, by Carol Elrod, Star Religion Writer,
Some people see, and think, and feel in such total absolutes, that I think you'd agree---if they didn't have enemies they would have to create them themselves
Ladies and gentlemen, every path leads somewhere. That is what a path is all about. The path of segregation leads to lynching every time. The path of antisemitism leads to Auschwitz every time. The path of the cults leads to Jonestown and we watch it at our peril.
Rabbi Davis,Information Meeting on the Cult Phenomenon, February 5, 1979, Transcript of Proceedings.
Rules we collectively live our lives under, the existence of which I had hitherto been blissfully unaware, have now become crystal clear, and as part of a collective order I now have an obligation to understand what is real in this world, and what is not, and not pretend anymore, no matter how painful this changed view turns out to be.
900 poor, disenfranchised, marginalized, and mostly black people died in 1978 in a ritual we call Jonestown. They were constituted of the world's "masses," and they had little to say in how they lived their lives, and absolutely no say whatsoever in how, or at when, their lives ended. To have called them suicides now for over 35 years, and in any sense, or instance, responsible for their own deaths in jumbled piles no one cared enough to sort through, is a grave stain of sin upon the whole of humanity. Everyone on the planet shares in this guilt, because we all shared in the delusion, even young people not born at the time, although they were further failed in being taught this hypocrisy was natural.
90 or so people survived Jonestown by either being away, or by walking, sneaking or just saying they'd been sent from death. Nearly everyone in this surviving group represents the "elite" class---beyond the obvious reason they still had options in life. These people ran the show at Jonestown, including running its signature madman Jim Jones; and the group has been the central storytellers of Jonestown's tale ever since. It is of a mixed race, from pale cracker to bloodless aristocrat, who put names to books, man the web, or serve as the subject, objects and verbs in the media telling of the big lie.
I'd suggest this group be given lie detector tests by the FBI, but every headquarters already knows the truth and there's no one to prove anything too anyway.
The following information was published online by the Executive Intelligence Review, or EIH, in an essay, G.O.G. & the Cyber Curtain The Carnage Continues: Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), Reported Cases, and as is traditional with EIR, sources are not cited.The small parts I can independently verify, prove to be true. I believe all the parts of it are true because I know the sum of it is the truth. Undated, there is [only one web capture] from February 12, 2012. It begins with some Texas goings-on, and then shifts:
The ADL's "religious freedom" antics in Texas reflected long-standing ADL complicity in the spread of Satanism and the drug-rock-sex counterculture. The first documented instances of ADL involvement dates back to the early 1960s, when Rabbi Maurice Davis, later of Westchester County, New York, participated in Project MK-Ultra, the CIA's foray into the use of LSD-25 and other psychedelic drugs in mind control and mass social manipulation. Davis was the chaplain at the Lexington, Kentucky Addiction Research Center, a hotbed of the CIA's secret LSD testing. According to Davis co-workers at the time, the rabbi helped track some of the LSD human guinea pigs when they were released to outpatient treatment. The full extent of Davis's involvement in the CIA project may never be known, because the CIA's chief chemist, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, shredded millions of pages of MK-Ultra records in 1972 at the behest of outgoing CIA director Richard Helms.
It can be assumed, however, that Davis's services were appreciated, because following his transfer to Indianapolis in the mid-1960's, he became one of the first patrons of the Rev. Jim Jones and his People's Temple--what several authors have described as another Anglo-Saxon-American Occult Bureau "project." Davis was joined in that effort by Bishop Paul Moore, offspring of the same patrician Moore family that has heavily funded the ADL over the past several decades. Moore later moved to New York City where he has presided over the cathedral of St. John the Divine, a notorious center of New Age and outright satanic occultism, as well as terrorism. (For years the New York Police Department's Arson and Explosive Unit identified the cathedral as a safe house for the FALN, a Puerto Rican terrorist group that carried out dozens of bomb attacks in the Metropolitan area during the 1970s.
In Indianapolis, Davis and Moore sponsored Jim Jones onto a number of community boards. Davis personally arranged the sale of his own synagogue to Jones and arranged the mortgage for what would be the first People's Temple.
When Davis moved to the New York area shortly after Jones relocated his followers to San Francisco,the Rabbi, by now an active figure in ADL circles, became one of the first religious figures to warn about the dangerous proliferation of coercive cults. But far from being a Damascus Road conversion, Davis's new profile as a anti-cult crusader merely represented his continued involvement in the Occult Bureau efforts. Along with other MK-Ultra veterans along with Dr. Louis Jolyon West and Robert J. Lifton, Davis launched the "Deprogramming" movement of the early 1970s as the "solution" to the mushrooming problem of coercive cults which Davis himself had helped foster. Over the next decade, hundreds of members of the psuedo-religion and therapy cults like the Unification Church, the Church of Scientology, The Way International, EST, and the Hare Krishna were kidnaped and subjected to grueling around-the-clock ego stripping, physical abuse, and other forms of behaviour modification--often no different than the treatment they received when inside the cults. In nearly every instance, parents of the cult members paid through the teeth for the kidnaping services provided by Davis and his collaborators.
In 1974, Davis founded Citizens Engaged In Reuniting Families (CERF), a deprogrammers' front which later merged into the two major anti-cult agencies, the American Family Foundation and the Cult Awareness Network. Capitalizing on the post-Jonestown reaction, the ADL established a full-time anti-cult center, housed at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the B'nai B'rith and run by Esther Dietz and Asya Komm. The cult Center of B'nai B'rith maintained joint offices with the Cult Awareness Network. In this way, the ADL established formal, ongoing to the AFF/CAN, which continues through to the present.
Among Davis's employees in CERF were Dennis King and Kalev Pehmek, both of whom later played prominent roles in the post-1998 "Get LaRouche" drive, and worked for a mob-run weekly on the East Side of Manhattan, Our Town. In 1976, Pehme wrote for Our Town a glowing piece on the Foundation Faith of the New Millennium, formerly the Process Church of the Final Judgement. This outright Satanic outfit had been so closely linked to the Manson Family murders on the West Coast in 1969 that they were forced to relocate their operations back East and change their name. According to The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry, which is an account of the 1976-77 "Son of Sam" murders in New York, the Process Church, now based out of Westchester County, was suspected of links to those ritualistic killings as well.
The ADL links to explicitly pro-Satanist circles was no low-level effort. ADL mogul Edgar Bronfman has been associated with this project since no later than April 17, 1989, when he and Britain's Prince Philip launched the Sacred Literature Trust, an effort aimed at publicizing the religious foundations of ecology and environmentalism--i.e., the revival of Mother Earth and other forms of paganism. At the United Nations press conference in New York city on that date, Bronfman aide Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg and Prince Philip's spokesman Martin Palmer announced the project. Palmer's numerous writings on various aspects of pagan and gnostic theology are published by the Lucis Trust--an elite group that grew out of the 19th Century Theosophical movement. As for Rabbi Hertzberg, he first gained attention at a conference in Assisi, Italy in 1986, where he advocated the revival of gnostic Jewish Cabala. The proposal for the Sacred Literary Trust was first floated at that Assisi conference.
See file 004.HTM for related information.
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February 6, 1979, Washington Post, Cults Hearing Noisy, Tense, page A14, by Marjorie Hyer, diigo,
Foes of religious cults alternated with defenders of religious freedom in a noisy and emotional congressional hearing yesterday.
The Russell Senate Office Building hearing room was packed with spectators, the majority of whom were members of the Unification Church, who heckled and jeered speakers who portrayed cultists as "child molesters" and cheered those who branded the hearing a "witch hunt."
Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who organized and chaired yesterday's session, stressed that it was not a formal congressional hearing, an investigation or a debate. Rather, he said in opening remarks, it was intended as a "starting point for members in their search for a through understanding of this very sensitive and complex issue."
Last week, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and Protestant and Jewish leaders complained to Dole that his proposed witness list - which included professional deprogrammers, parents of cult members and others with strong anti-cuit views -- failed to reflect the complexity of the issue.
As a result, four specialists in religious and civil liberties and two spokesmen for the Unification Church were invited to testify yesterday.
Five senators and four representatives attended at least part of the four-hour session. Dole added that "a couple of my colleagues thought it better not to show up here this morning" because the hearing had become so controversial.
Jackie Speier, aide to the late congressman Leo J. Ryan (D-Calif.) who was injured in the shooting at a Guyana airstrip in which Ryan died, told about conversations she had with adolescent girls in Jonestown, the Guyana commune of the Peoples Temple cult.
"Their answers were devoid of normal emotion, speaking in monosyllables and quite often not in proper response to the question asked, making it appear that certain answers were programmed to fit a number of questions," she said. "These women showed little interest in career or college goals, expecting an early marriage within the cult to be their only option in life."
Speier called for an investigation of "religious groups that may be fronting for other purposes," but added, "I must strongly caution against a McCarthy-type witch hunt or any lessening of true religious freedom." Ted Patrick, the most widely known of the deprogrammers, called the war against cults "one of the most dangerous wars in the history of mankind."
Describing cult members as victims of mind control, Patrick said their minds were "like containers, with the lids on tight; put them under the faucet and nothing can come in. What I've got to do [in deprogramming] is take the top off."
Patrick was booed by Unification Church members when he finished, but they saved their deepest animus for Rabbi Maurice Davis of White Plains, N.Y., a prime mover in the anti-cult movement.
He was repeatedly interrupted with shouts of "lies! That's a lie!" as he spoke of death threats he had received and likened the Unification Church to the Nazi Youth Movement and the Peoples Temple. The rabbi inflamed the crowd even further with his concluding comments: "I am here to protest against child molesters. For as surely as there are those who lure children with lollypops in order to rape their bodies, so, too, do these lure children with candy-coated lies in order to rape their minds."
Veteran civil liberties lawyer Jeremiah S. Gutman warned of the constitutional dangers of legislating against religious cults. "Every definition I've heard here, trying to distinguish cult from legitimate religion, offends the First Amendment," he said. "There is no official truth in this country; therefore there can be no official falsity."
The Rev. Barry Lynn, an attorney and minister of the United Church of Christ, urged that if the government is to make any mistakes in response to the new religious groups, "let those mistakes be on the side of religious tolerance. When our nation's leaders have done otherwise... they have always plunged us into our darkest periods of our history."
Lynn pointed out that his spiritual forebears included the Puritan elder who "presided at the infamous witchcraft trials" of 17th century New England. "With that sense of history we are particularly troubled at any hint of governmental scrutiny of religious faith," he said.
© Copyright 1979 The Washington Post Company
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December 13, 1976, People Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 24, Rabbi Maurice Davis Is Called 'No. 1 Satan' by Rev. Moon as They Battle Over Young Converts, by Patricia Burstein,
If anything happens to me," 55-year-old Rabbi Maurice Davis says, "it won't be the swine flu." In recent months he has received more than 20 death threats, he claims, from followers of the controversial South Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon. As founder and past president of the 500-family national anti-Moon organization called Citizens Engaged in Reuniting Families (CERF), Davis has been called "No. 1 Satan" by Moon himself.
The title contrasts with the reputation Davis enjoys as rabbi of the White Plains, N.Y. Jewish Community Center. There he is considered something of a Pied Piper, holding regular Sunday rap sessions for the young. "The loneliest people in America today are teenagers," he says. "I listen to them in a world where no one hears or sees them." The Reverend Moon's Tarrytown estate is only 12 miles from Davis' temple in affluent Westchester County.
Davis believes that young people join Moon out of loneliness and inability to handle family pressures. "They are in need of a father figure," Davis says. "They visit that beautiful estate. Nobody talks dirty, nobody is sick or old. There are no drugs, sex, liquor. And the kid thinks, 'You know, maybe this is the kind of world for me. I'm important.' Then he sells his soul to this Boy Scout paradise."
Over the past two and a half years Davis has helped rescue and deprogram some 150 "Moonies" of all denominations. He began his crusade in 1974 after two young people in his congregation left college to join the cult. "I was successful with one," he recalls, "but I failed with the other. If I knew then what I know now, I would have rescued him too." Davis' technique: "Just talk to them. I get them angry. Break down that little plastic smile. I accuse them of lying because they don't admit the candy they sell on the streets is for Moon. I remind them that Moon says the six million Jews killed in World War II were paying because Jews killed Christ." One Moonie hid out in the rabbi's home for 10 days while his companions searched for him in hopes of luring the boy back.
Davis says that because of publicity given his efforts, Moon has not recruited a new convert from Westchester in the past year. "I feel good about that. People here are alert to Moon at last."
Davis is a native of Providence, R.I., where his father owned a garage and his mother was active in community work. Neither was religious. "I decided to become a rabbi when I was 7," Davis recalls. "I held a Torah for the first time—and that was it for me." Ordained in 1949, he began to focus on social problems, first as a chaplain at the U.S. Public Health Service hospital for drug addicts in Lexington, Ky. He has organized youth leadership conferences and several tours to Israel for teenagers. He and his wife, Marion, have two sons, Michael, 22, who works in a Cincinnati day-care center, and Jay, 27, a rabbinical student in Jerusalem.
Davis is an editorial columnist for the National Jewish Post and Opinion and chaplain of the White Plains Police Benevolent Association. He seems to thrive on confrontations. "I once received a Turtle of the Year Award," he says, "for sticking my neck out."
The title contrasts with the reputation Davis enjoys as rabbi of the White Plains, N.Y. Jewish Community Center. There he is considered something of a Pied Piper, holding regular Sunday rap sessions for the young. "The loneliest people in America today are teenagers," he says. "I listen to them in a world where no one hears or sees them." The Reverend Moon's Tarrytown estate is only 12 miles from Davis' temple in affluent Westchester County.
Davis believes that young people join Moon out of loneliness and inability to handle family pressures. "They are in need of a father figure," Davis says. "They visit that beautiful estate. Nobody talks dirty, nobody is sick or old. There are no drugs, sex, liquor. And the kid thinks, 'You know, maybe this is the kind of world for me. I'm important.' Then he sells his soul to this Boy Scout paradise."
Over the past two and a half years Davis has helped rescue and deprogram some 150 "Moonies" of all denominations. He began his crusade in 1974 after two young people in his congregation left college to join the cult. "I was successful with one," he recalls, "but I failed with the other. If I knew then what I know now, I would have rescued him too." Davis' technique: "Just talk to them. I get them angry. Break down that little plastic smile. I accuse them of lying because they don't admit the candy they sell on the streets is for Moon. I remind them that Moon says the six million Jews killed in World War II were paying because Jews killed Christ." One Moonie hid out in the rabbi's home for 10 days while his companions searched for him in hopes of luring the boy back.
Davis says that because of publicity given his efforts, Moon has not recruited a new convert from Westchester in the past year. "I feel good about that. People here are alert to Moon at last."
Davis is a native of Providence, R.I., where his father owned a garage and his mother was active in community work. Neither was religious. "I decided to become a rabbi when I was 7," Davis recalls. "I held a Torah for the first time—and that was it for me." Ordained in 1949, he began to focus on social problems, first as a chaplain at the U.S. Public Health Service hospital for drug addicts in Lexington, Ky. He has organized youth leadership conferences and several tours to Israel for teenagers. He and his wife, Marion, have two sons, Michael, 22, who works in a Cincinnati day-care center, and Jay, 27, a rabbinical student in Jerusalem.
Davis is an editorial columnist for the National Jewish Post and Opinion and chaplain of the White Plains Police Benevolent Association. He seems to thrive on confrontations. "I once received a Turtle of the Year Award," he says, "for sticking my neck out."
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November 10, 1975, Time Magazine, Mad About Moon, diigo,
January 1976, National Enquirer, Inside the frightening world of fanatical "brainwashing" sect Moon sect, by Malcome Boyes, diigo,
January 1976, National Enquirer, Multi Millionaire minister woos children from their families to beg for him on the streets, by Jan Goodwin, diigo,
December 13, 1976, People Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 24, Rabbi Maurice Davis Is Called 'No. 1 Satan' by Rev. Moon as They Battle Over Young Converts, by Patricia Burstein,
December 30, 1979, Wilmington Star-News, page 5-B, Rabbi deprograms followers,
September, 1981, Vol. 12, No. 2, Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, Hypnosis for young adults: Freeing "the doctor who resides within",
1984, The Cult Observer, Vol. 1, No. 4, Ryan Award to Dr. Clark, Sandy Andron,
1994, The Cult Observer 3 Vol. 11 No. 1,
1994, Cult Observer 5 Vol. 11 No. 1,
1994, The Cult Observer 6 Vol. 11 No. 1,
1994, The Cult Observer 7 Vol. 11 No. 1,
1994 , The Cult Observer 8 Vol. 11 No. 1
1994, The Cult Observer 9 Vol. 11 No.1,
1994, The Cult Observer 10 Vol. 11 No. I
1994, The Cult Observer Vol. 11 No. 1,
1994, The Cult Observer 11, Vol. 11 No. 1,
May 1, 1996, Vol.1, No.2, Idea Journal, Editor's note: explanation of technical terms, by Alan Jacobs,
September 20, 2004, America: The National Catholic Review, A Glass Half Empty, by James J. DiGiacomo,
July 2, 2011, Jim Hougan.com, Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple Part 2,
September 21, 2005, National
Inquirer, Bush's Booze Crisis, by Jennifer Luce and Don Gentile, diigo,
September 21, 2005, National Inquirer, Bush's Booze Crisis, by Jennifer Luce and Don Gentile, diigo,
July 7, 2010, sdsu.edu, Was Jonestown a self-sustaining community?
May 18, 2011, sdsu.edu, Was Peoples Temple responsible for the deaths of some of its former members?
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Maurice Davis (15 December 1921 – 16 December 1993) was an American Rabbi and human rights activist. He was a past director of the American Family Foundation, now known as the International Cultic Studies Association.
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July 2, 2011, Jim Hougan.com, Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple Part 2,
By 1954, Jones had established the "Community Unity" Church in Indianapolis, while preaching also at the Laurel Tabernacle. To raise money, he began selling monkeys door-to-door.
By 1956, Jones had established the “Wings of Deliverance” Church as a successor to Community Unity. Almost immediately, the Church was christened the Peoples Temple. The inspiration for its new name stemmed from the fact that the church was housed in what was formerly a Jewish synagogue—a “temple” that Jones had purchased, with little or no money down, for $50,000.
Ironically, the man who gave the Peoples Temple its start was the Rabbi Maurice Davis. It was he who sold the synagogue to Jones on such remarkably generous terms. A prominent anti-cult activist and sometime “deprogrammer,” Rabbi Davis is an associate of Dr. Sukhdeo's.________________________________________________________________________________
Opposition to the Unification Church
In 1970, when two of his congregants' children became involved with the Unification Church, Davis began to educate himself more about the nature and methodology of cults. He soon became involved in assisting the parents of "cult children".[3] Davis directed and appeared in the film,You Can Go Home Again , produced by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Davis observed commonalities among the young people he counseled that had joined cults. He found that most of these individuals were dropouts from mainline churches and synagogues - and that they were on a quest for idealism, community and a sense of belonging.[4]
Davis founded and headed the national anti-Moon organization called Citizens Engaged in Reuniting Families, which in 1976 comprised 500 families.[5] Davis stated that he received letters from distraught parents all over the United States, telling "the same story".[6] He elaborated his points, asserting that the recruitment tactics used by the Unification Church are "a form of hypnotism".[6] In November 1976, Rabbi Davis spoke at Temple Israel of Northern Westchester, New York, on the topic of "The Moon People And Our Children".[7] He has also compared the Unification Church to the Nazi Youth movement, and to the Peoples Temple.[8]
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List of cult and new religious movement researchers
From Wikipedia
_________________________________________________________________________
September, 1981, Vol. 12, No. 2, Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, Hypnosis for young adults: Freeing "the doctor who resides within",
September 21, 2005, National Inquirer, Bush's Booze Crisis, by Jennifer Luce and Don Gentile, diigo,
January 28, 1976, Wikisource, Information entered into the Congressional Record on Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, by Representative Charles H. Wilson of California. 94th Congress, United States House of Representatives, 2nd session, Congressional Record, Volume 122, Part 2, Pages 1390-1392.
94th Congress
United States House of Representatives
2nd session
January 28, 1976
Congressional Record
Volume 122, Part 2
Pages 1390-1392.
REV. SUN MYUNG MOON
The SPEAKER pro tempore, Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from California (Mr. CHARLES H. WILSON) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. CHARLES H. WILSON of California. Mr. Speaker, on this occasion I should like to say a few words, and introduce into the RECORD some material regarding the controversial religious leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a man who has induced thousands of our young people to join his cult.
America, as it has been said many times before, is a land of opportunity and many of the people from other lands who have come here have worked hard, earned their rewards, become good citizens and have, in fact, made this country the shining example of democracy and opportunity that it is today. To be sure, the ancestors of most Americans, unless they were Indians, came here from somewhere else, either in the recent past or long ago.
Unfortunately, there are always those who would take advantage of the American system, people who would take advantage of our laws safeguarding civil rights, and our laws insuring religious freedom. Such a person, in my estimation, is the Reverend Moon, who not only preaches a strange brand of hocus-pocus all his own, but who also seems to profit by it himself enormously while his converts, our youngsters, are begging for him in the streets.
Reverend Moon is from South Korea. He is 54 and he arrived here in 1972. He now has a 22-acre estate, which includes an $850,000 mansion, in Tarrytown, N.Y.
The Republic of Korea itself is embarrassed by what Reverend Moon is doing in this country. In fact, the Korean Embassy here would like it made known that the Reverend Moon is in no way associated with the Korean Government and is not, in any way, representing Korea in this country. He does not speak for Korea. As for his religion, if that is what it is, it is regarded as being as weird in Korea as it is here.
Last week, the National Enquirer newspaper, the largest weekly newspaper in the United States, ran two articles on Reverend Moon. These two articles, one of which was written by a bold young reporter who actually pretended to join one of Moon's cells, show the shameful way that youngsters who do join up are treated.
The articles also show the fabulous lifestyle that this charlatan has built on the beggings of his disciples. I enter these articles now for your perusal because I think that they tell anyone who is interested all one needs to know about Reverend Moon. In fact, they tell you even more than you want to know about Moon, if you are easily disgusted.
The articles follow:
January 1976, National Enquirer, Inside the frightening world of fanatical "brainwashing" sect Moon sect, by Malcome Boyes, diigo,
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January 1976, National Enquirer, Multi Millionaire minister woos children from their families to beg for him on the streets, by Jan Goodwin, diigo,
September 1, 1996, Idea Journal, Vol.1, no.2, Masters and Slaves: The Tragedy of Jonestown, by Fanita English, M.S.W.,
Rabbi Maurice Davis ill, FACTnet, retrieved 2/8/07.
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A Temple on the Mount: A History of Temple Israel of Northern Westchester, by Jacob Judd, Ph.D., 1999, retrieved 2/8/07.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050215065645/http://ny054.urj.net/History/index.htm
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Maurice Davis
I am here to protest against child molesters. For as surely as there are those who lure children with lollypops in order to rape their bodies, so, too, do these lure children with candy-coated lies in order to rape their minds.
The last time I ever witnessed a movement that had these qualifications: (1) a totally monolithic movement with a single point of view and a single authoritarian head; (2) replete with fanatical followers who are prepared and programmed to do anything their master says; (3) supplied by absolutely unlimited funds; (4) with a hatred of everyone on the outside; (5) with suspicion of parents, against their parents -- the last movement that had those qualifications was the Nazi youth movement, and I'll tell you, I'm scared.
I keep thinking what happens when the power of love is twisted into the love of power.
It’s frightening what these Moonies can do to the family unit..I get letters from parents all over the country telling me the same story..The kids are swept along by his outfit and then taken away for a few days to a ‘workshop.’ By the time the parents see their kids again – if they can manage to see them – the kids are starry-eyed and ready to take on anyone who disagrees with them. It’s a form of hypnotism. There is something very unhealthy going on.
Ladies and gentlemen, every path leads somewhere. That is what a path is all about. The path of segregation leads to lynching every time. The path of antisemitism leads to Auschwitz every time. The path of the cults leads to Jonestown and we watch it at our peril.
Information Meeting on the Cult Phenomenon, February 5, 1979, 318 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. P.74-80. of Transcript of Proceedings.
December 16, 1993, The News-Journal, page 4-C, Civil rights activist, cult fighter Rabbi Maurice Davis dies at 72,
List of cult and new religious movement researchers
From Wikipedia
_________________________________________________________________________
September, 1981, Vol. 12, No. 2, Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, Hypnosis for young adults: Freeing "the doctor who resides within",
Abstract
This paper explains that the phenomenon of hypnosis is a naturally occurring talent, capacity, and skill that some practitioners suggest exists in nearly 90% of the population. Erickson's concept of and utilization of indirect suggestion is described and critiqued as an approach consistent with the separation/individuation issues confronting contemporary young adults. Hypnotherapy is recommended as a highly effective tool in a society suffering from severe alienation and lack of identity. Hypnosis is compared and contrasted with Cousin's discussion of placebo utilization in medicine. Hypnosis, akin to the placebo, is recognized as “giving the doctor who resides within each patient a change to go to work.”
November 10, 1975, Time Magazine, Mad About Moon, diigo,
This paper explains that the phenomenon of hypnosis is a naturally occurring talent, capacity, and skill that some practitioners suggest exists in nearly 90% of the population. Erickson's concept of and utilization of indirect suggestion is described and critiqued as an approach consistent with the separation/individuation issues confronting contemporary young adults. Hypnotherapy is recommended as a highly effective tool in a society suffering from severe alienation and lack of identity. Hypnosis is compared and contrasted with Cousin's discussion of placebo utilization in medicine. Hypnosis, akin to the placebo, is recognized as “giving the doctor who resides within each patient a change to go to work.”
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September 20, 2004, America: The National Catholic Review, A Glass Half Empty, by James J. DiGiacomo,
September 20, 2004, America: The National Catholic Review, A Glass Half Empty, by James J. DiGiacomo,
At the height of the cult phenomenon in the 1970’s, Rabbi Maurice Davis, an experienced deprogrammer, reflected on his experience helping young people return to their families and mainstream society. He observed that most of them were dropouts from mainline churches and synagogues, and that what they had in common was a search for idealism, community and a sense of belonging. Thirty years later, the challenge Rabbi Davis posed to organized religion still provides a yardstick for judging the effectiveness of youth ministry in today’s church. Are religious educators providing for the next generation of Catholics the kind of instruction and enlightenment that leads to conviction and commitment? Ask anyone in the field, and he or she will tell you that there is no simple answer. Depending on your focus, you will see the glass as half empty or half full.
Do the students enrolled in Catholic institutions experience their education as a call to idealism? There is a good deal of evidence that they do. Administrators and faculty as a whole see their task as not only preparing young people to do the world’s work but also as promoting good citizenship and passing on a desire to make the world a better place. Service programs require students to engage in hands-on altruism, sharing their gifts with younger children, senior citizens and others in need. Religion textbooks support Christian values, promote morally responsible attitudes and behavior and lay out the church’s teachings on social justice. Retreats encourage communication and sensitive interaction as ways of improving the quality of interpersonal relationships in the school. These are all positive developments that point to a glass at least half full.
Do the students enrolled in Catholic institutions experience their education as a call to idealism? There is a good deal of evidence that they do. Administrators and faculty as a whole see their task as not only preparing young people to do the world’s work but also as promoting good citizenship and passing on a desire to make the world a better place. Service programs require students to engage in hands-on altruism, sharing their gifts with younger children, senior citizens and others in need. Religion textbooks support Christian values, promote morally responsible attitudes and behavior and lay out the church’s teachings on social justice. Retreats encourage communication and sensitive interaction as ways of improving the quality of interpersonal relationships in the school. These are all positive developments that point to a glass at least half full.
On the other hand, there is good reason to wonder if the impact of these efforts is more than skin deep. There are so many elements in the dominant culture that work in the opposite direction. Consumerism defines the human person in terms of possessions, power, pleasure and prestige; and success is equated with conspicuous consumption. Do our young people perceive the shallowness of this way of life? How many hope for something better?
Then there is what James Fowler has called the dominant myth of consumer culture—that you should experience whatever you desire, own whatever you want and relate intimately with whomever you wish. The organs of mass culture inculcate the values underlying this myth with such power and insistence that a countercultural religious message has a hard time even getting a hearing, much less making an impact. Many of those in our care, as well as their parents, value Catholic education simply as a vehicle of upward mobility. They barely suspect that it might offer an alternative vision of life. From this perspective, the glass looks at best half empty.
A Call to Idealism
To break through this miasma of moral mediocrity, we would have to present the teachings of Christ as an unmistakable challenge—indeed, as a call to idealism. But this is not so easy. The God of prophetic religion, the one who challenges our assumptions and makes demands, who denounces sin and calls to righteousness, is not popular today. He would not be welcome in many religion classrooms and youth retreats. He lost his standing long ago and was dismissed as a fire-and-brimstone leftover from the Old Testament. Much more acceptable is the warm, loving deity who does not make junk, who never gets cranky or tries to scare anyone, who wants no one to feel guilty and prefers that everyone have a positive self-image. Teachers and retreat directors who present this friendlier God have a much better chance of eliciting the kind of enthusiastic youthful response that guarantees adults emotional satisfaction. Jesus is an appealing figure, mainly because he plays the role of friend, the one that is so important to adolescents. But is he allowed, like a real friend, to tell them things they don't want to hear?
Young people today are growing up in a society that shrinks from being judgmental. Many, both old and young, believe that the function of religion is to offer affirmation and encouragement, but not criticism We rightly assure them of God’s unconditional love, but many take this to mean that he loves them so much that he doesn't care what they do. Such a God fits comfortably in a pro-choice world. The presentation of Jesus is often rather one-dimensional too. The accepting, gentle, tolerant Jesus is a popular fixture in peer presentations during youth retreats. Less well known, indeed a rather well-kept secret, is the Jesus we meet in the Gospels: the man of uncompromising honesty who reveals people to themselves and calls to decision, who summons to sacrifice, who cuts through rationalization and self-deception and is unflinching in his condemnation of dishonesty and hypocrisy. He repeatedly describes, in frightening imagery, the destructive consequences of sin. But these Gospel passages never make it among the readings chosen for student group liturgies. It is this Jesus whom young people need to meet, if they are ever to confront the contradiction between much of contemporary culture and their most generous instincts. Genuine idealists do not see the world through rose-colored glasses. They tell it like it is.
Rabbi Davis's young cult members were also looking for community and a sense of belonging. The cults were very skillful at providing these at a time in the lives of recruits when their adolescent search for identity had reached a critical point. On the brink of adulthood and independence, they lacked clear goals and direction, an interiorized set of values and a feeling of connectedness. The cults offered these, but at a heavy price. Their members submitted to being enclosed in a cocoon of isolation from society, renounced all healthy critical judgment and exchanged their individuality for total security. This artificial existence was reinforced and made comfortable by a community of peers who were unceasingly together and provided affirmation and acceptance. As far as we know, most members eventually left the cults. Some were rescued in rather dramatic fashion and deprogrammed, but the majority just outgrew the experience. The cults had filled a temporary psychological need that passed with time and maturity. There comes a point where young adults want to join a world peopled by others besides their peers.
Temporary Conversion
This leads to an interesting question about contemporary Catholic youth ministry. High school and college religion courses, religious retreats and parish youth groups are certainly very different from cults. They do not as a matter of course indulge in the kind of behavior modification that we call brainwashing. But they do share one troubling characteristic with cults. Their effectiveness is often temporary and lacks lasting impact on minds and hearts. Even the most successful leaders in youth ministry acknowledge a troubling limitation. The enthusiasm of teens and young adults for religious expression in communal prayer and worship does not seem to last beyond the peer experience. They do not bring their vitality to the adult community by participating in the church’s sacramental life or sharing their other gifts, including their capacity for creativity and leadership. As a result, Masses in the parish look more and more every year like senior citizen get-togethers. Some may see in this a judgment on the adult community, but that would be too facile. Not all parishes are stodgy and sterile; some of the most vibrant still suffer from a lack of youthful participation.
Could there be some deficiencies in contemporary religious education and other facets of youth ministry that might account for their disappointing half-life? Or, to put it another way, in what positive directions might they go to extend their effectiveness and make more lasting contributions to church life?
A look at youth retreats may give us a clue. Since the close of the Second Vatican Council, various forms of retreats have grown and flourished in the church. They have done a great deal of good and have gained well-deserved popularity. Youth-to-youth ministry helps retreatants to open up to one another, remove their masks and go beyond acquaintance to genuine friendship. These experiences often help to improve the quality of relationships and community in schools. But the question arises: Do the retreats help them to open up to anyone besides one another? Do they include a search for the living God? Is there a conscious attentiveness to God’s word? Is there a spirituality at work here that is open to transcendence and mystery? At the end of many a good retreat, they feel dramatically closer to one another. Do they also feel closer to God? They know one another much better; can the same be said of Jesus? If they don’t, can it be that their exercise in promoting interpersonal relationships is a laudable secular enterprise, with no explicitly religious dimension, Christian or otherwise?
Many will dispute the relevance of such questions. But consider a related issue that has troubled us for a long time. There are many young Catholics who are unable to relate, in prayer and worship, to those not of their own age. One solution has been to have youth liturgies responsive to their needs. These are routine in educational institutions and are arranged in some parishes as well. They meet a genuine need but raise questions in their turn: Does this not indicate a rather limited sense of community? One way or another, it is evident that there has emerged a younger generation of Catholics who are quite distant from the sacramental life of the church. Ask them why, and they will tell you that they feel left out, that sacramental participation is not for them a felt need, that parish liturgies are boring, that they don’t get anything out of them. There is at work here a rather impoverished notion of sacraments: If they do not provide an immediate and palpable emotional return on their investment of time, as they did on those youth retreats, they are dispensable. Can religious education do anything to dispel this cloud of unknowing?
Nothing Less Will Do
These observations and suggestions are not offered as simple, cure-all answers to the problem of youthful religious alienation; the issues are too complex to admit of easy solutions. But they may provide some insight and the beginning of a fruitful conversation. Meanwhile, religious educators, in their desire for positive feedback, must resist the temptation to stay away from some hard sayings. They have to persist, in season and out of season, to tell young people what many of them do not want to hear: that consumerism is a shallow way of life, that religion is a community affair, that the Eucharist is a non-negotiable element of Christian life, that you can’t write off the church and call yourself a Catholic, that God not only loves them but also makes demands, that Jesus is more than a pal, that some of their moral choices might be wrong, that premarital sex is not a right, that social justice is not optional, and that we are called to measure up to what God wants, not the other way around.
That’s a big order, and it may cost us some disciples, but Jesus had the same problem. It’s a risk that goes with the territory. Nothing less will do, if we are to offer our growing children genuine idealism, authentic community and a real sense of belonging to Jesus Christ.
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"I will conquer and subjugate the world," says Sun Myung Moon. "I am your brain." The latter statement is quite literally true for a growing coterie of young American converts, who regard the South Korean cult leader (TIME, Sept. 30, 1974) as the second Christ. Asking no questions, they obediently hawk candy and flowers, raising millions to spread the faith. They exist on a shoestring, while Moon, 55, lives in lordly fashion in a 25-room mansion in New York's Westchester County.
Last week Sheeran and 500 other parents met at a Westchester County synagogue whose rabbi, Maurice Davis, heads a 500-family national anti-Moon organization called Citizens Engaged in Reuniting Families. Some 20 young defectors from the Moon cult were present; several urged their elders to drive up to Barrytown and rescue their children. Distraught parents gave one another moral support
The most intriguing unanswered question about Moonism is why young people from well-to-do families are attracted to it. Moon converts seem to have had little attachment to other religions and appear to be grasping for a sense of stability and morality. Says Defector Paula Mazur, a New York University senior: "They impress on you how to live a very idealistic life, how to really change the world. All the people I met were moralistic at a time when morals are going down the drain." Whatever the morals of Moonism, Jack Kerry, the Moon watcher in the California attorney general's office, sees the movement as "extremely dangerous" and adds: "I think this whole situation is going to really explode."
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It's frightening what these Moonies can do to the family unit..I get letters from parents all over the country telling me the same story..The kids are swept along by his outfit and then taken away for a few days to a 'workshop.' By the time the parents see their kids again – if they can manage to see them – the kids are starry-eyed and ready to take on anyone who disagrees with them. It's a form of hypnotism. There is something very unhealthy going on.
January 28, 1976, Wikisource, Information entered into the Congressional Record on Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, by Representative Charles H. Wilson of California. 94th Congress, United States House of Representatives, 2nd session, Congressional Record, Volume 122, Part 2, Pages 1390-1392.
94th Congress
United States House of Representatives
2nd session
January 28, 1976
Congressional Record
Volume 122, Part 2
Pages 1390-1392.
REV. SUN MYUNG MOON
The SPEAKER pro tempore, Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from California (Mr. CHARLES H. WILSON) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. CHARLES H. WILSON of California. Mr. Speaker, on this occasion I should like to say a few words, and introduce into the RECORD some material regarding the controversial religious leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a man who has induced thousands of our young people to join his cult.
America, as it has been said many times before, is a land of opportunity and many of the people from other lands who have come here have worked hard, earned their rewards, become good citizens and have, in fact, made this country the shining example of democracy and opportunity that it is today. To be sure, the ancestors of most Americans, unless they were Indians, came here from somewhere else, either in the recent past or long ago.
Unfortunately, there are always those who would take advantage of the American system, people who would take advantage of our laws safeguarding civil rights, and our laws insuring religious freedom. Such a person, in my estimation, is the Reverend Moon, who not only preaches a strange brand of hocus-pocus all his own, but who also seems to profit by it himself enormously while his converts, our youngsters, are begging for him in the streets.
Reverend Moon is from South Korea. He is 54 and he arrived here in 1972. He now has a 22-acre estate, which includes an $850,000 mansion, in Tarrytown, N.Y.
The Republic of Korea itself is embarrassed by what Reverend Moon is doing in this country. In fact, the Korean Embassy here would like it made known that the Reverend Moon is in no way associated with the Korean Government and is not, in any way, representing Korea in this country. He does not speak for Korea. As for his religion, if that is what it is, it is regarded as being as weird in Korea as it is here.
Last week, the National Enquirer newspaper, the largest weekly newspaper in the United States, ran two articles on Reverend Moon. These two articles, one of which was written by a bold young reporter who actually pretended to join one of Moon's cells, show the shameful way that youngsters who do join up are treated.
The articles also show the fabulous lifestyle that this charlatan has built on the beggings of his disciples. I enter these articles now for your perusal because I think that they tell anyone who is interested all one needs to know about Reverend Moon. In fact, they tell you even more than you want to know about Moon, if you are easily disgusted.
The articles follow:
__________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
January 1976, National Enquirer, Multi Millionaire minister woos children from their families to beg for him on the streets, by Jan Goodwin, diigo,
September 1, 1996, Idea Journal, Vol.1, no.2, Masters and Slaves: The Tragedy of Jonestown, by Fanita English, M.S.W.,
September 1, 1996, Idea Journal, Vol.1, no.2, Masters and Slaves: The Tragedy of Jonestown, by Fanita English, M.S.W., ISSN 1532-1712,
This paper is about the characteristics of Masters and Slaves and the similarities in the personalities of people like Hitler and Jim Jones, the leader of Jonestown, in Guyana, where he ordered several hundred of his followers to commit suicide. They, like the millions of Germans who gave up their lives for their Fuhrer, obeyed. Why?
Rousseau said that everybody emerges out of early childhood either with a "slave" mentality or with that of a "tyrant." These terms can well be applied to the extremes of two defensive existential positions, for at about age three the child decides either that he must submit, be a "slave" or that he'll have to keep trying to find ways to control others at all costs, to become a "tyrant." Whichever position he settles on henceforth determines his character and his future attitude in relation to power issues, particularly at times of physical, or social stress. Of course most of us do also develop the more stable position: I'm O.K., You're O.K.
As a less dramatic designation, the slave position can be called Type I- unsure, and the tyrant position, Type II- oversure. Type I are those people who seek strokes from an I'm Not OK, You're OK (-,+) position. They tend to transact with others from either a compliant or rebellious Child ego state, sometimes "helpless," sometimes "bratty." They seek strokes from people who impress them as having powerful Parent ego states, hoping that it is such people who can offer them a key to the riddle of existence. In everyday life they appear as "victims" or "rebels".
Conversely, Type II persons operate from the I'm OK, You're Not OK (+,-) defensive existential position, having resolved that no one can offer them any hope. Their only chance for survival in an uncertain world is to stamp it with their personal view of reality, to convince or force others to participate in their image of the world. So they operate as "oversure" acting "helpful" or "bossy." They seek out partners or followers who will transact with them from a compliant Child ego state, will acknowledge them as Powerful Parents, and will thereby offer them validation for their grandiose illusion of being "sure." They relate as "rescuers" but become "persecutors" when they don't obtain gratitude or compliance. Finally, they may end as victims.
Both types have a way of finding each other, and up to a point this may be fine, because they can then indulge in complementary stroking to their heart's content, but if they are endowed with heavy rackets, calamity may follow.
This is where the issue of rackets comes in. A few light rackets cause no harm, but heavy, persistent rackets mean that the person is not truly capable of dealing with his underlying emotions and lacks a solid sense of self. Therefore he is likely to be excessively needy and overly concerned about validating and reinforcing his defensive existential position. For it is by means of our defensive existential position that we ward off the despair that pushes to manifest itself as hopelessness in Type I persons, and murderous rage in Type II persons. By definition, persons with heavy or 3rd degree rackets, (that is: thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that lead to the destruction or confinement of body tissue) cannot stand awareness because they do not distinguish between feeling and the likelihood of behaving in unacceptable ways. It follows that, as a defense, they seek and receive strokes for unreal substitute feelings. As a result, they are never really gratified within themselves.
Both the giving and receiving of strokes are artificially induced and received--like eating devitaminized food. This only exacerbates the hunger all the more, like drug addiction which falsely seems to energize while inducing starvation. So the seeds for mutually killing each other off are there from the beginning even while mutual stroking is taking place and temporarily appeases both parties.
Although there is probably a fairly even distribution of both character types in the general population, when it comes to heavy racketeers there appear to be more slave types than tyrants. It looks as though there is a higher number of extreme Type I persons who continue to operate, even as grown-ups, with the belief, however illusory, that there is a way for them to bask in a paradise run by a Father or Mother figure. They seek to abdicate from the responsibility of sorting the welter of mutually contradictory attitudes and feelings in themselves and others. In most instances such yearnings remain manageable as fantasies or acceptable behavior. Usually they get played out in minor ways with more forceful partners. But there remain the unappeased yearnings to "escape from freedom" as described by Fromm in his book by this name. When such persons are offered the opportunity to be led into a haven of relief from anxiety this looks like an offer they can't refuse. At last: no more conflict or concern about one's inability to make difficult decisions.
Here's a Powerful new Parent who can tell them exactly what's right and good and how they can belong. He seems to offer love and understanding for their craving. To merge with, to become one with him, as humble members of whatever community he sets up, seems like a happiness worth sacrificing for. "Here come all my money, my relationship with former friends and family, my autonomy for you, Great Leader who can give me ultimate answers, who can make me feel good merely by believing in you, and therefore in the validity of what I'm doing." It is this longing to escape from autonomous functioning that led so many people to embrace Nazism as the golden hope that would "free" them from disillusion. People are vulnerable to the "enchantment" of promises from persons such as Hitler or Jones. In childhood these people feel forsaken or overpowered in attempts to experience themselves as freestanding creatures and therefore substitute illusions and fantasies for disappointment.
Before Fromm, Dostoyevsky used the "Grand Inquisitor" (Type II) to critically describe the "Slave" (Type I):
Time magazine (December 11, 1978) printed some excerpts from "Letters to Dad" written to Jones by different followers. They illustrate self abasement and dependency, increasing his dominance:
Still, one interesting aspect of such a system is that many individuals actually are more organized and functional than before entering it. This is because allegiance to the leader and the group offers a measure of security and freedom; freeing them from dealing with contradictory or unpleasant emotions. Their Adult appears free, that is, free from ulterior influence. But actually it is so only at the service of their Child or a remembered previous Parent.
Their Adult is programmed by their leader's definition of reality and reinforced by the community. Being free from the anxiety of living freely and taking care of oneself and others, they think more clearly. Actually it is within a rigidly controlled framework, so their clear thinking is only on narrow issues. Such persons can often think more logically than average citizens as long as it is within a concrete context, and so long as their basic premises remain unchallenged. To this end they reinforce each other in a mutual belief system, thus reinforcing allegiance to the leader.
Thus bureaucracy within Fascism and Nazism functioned better than under the previous government. Trains ran on time, shipments to concentration camps were handled with discretion and efficiency. Similarly, building and agriculture were carried on effectively in Jonestown. Jones' young lieutenants were able to master intricate financial transactions and made public statements which seemed clear and honest. From superficial observation outsiders can believe that members of such a community are doing better than they did before when they may have felt confused or unhappy and demonstrated more overtly their "unsure" character. So investigators from the American State Department and the Embassy who went to Guyana believed the people at Jonestown were doing fine. They had become zombies,well functioning ones, but zombies nevertheless. They operated with, as Dostoyevsky said, "a stable conception of the object of life" without having to question it. Even a hard-nosed lawyer like Charles E. Garry got fooled by the appearance of happiness in a certain proportion of members. After a ten-day stay at Jonestown, he described it as "Paradise on Earth".
The sad thing is that once such a system is established, it feeds on itself and diminishes even the physical ability of oppressed members to move out and evaluate themselves or their community from the outside. Boundaries become more and more rigidly set and impermeable. Outside influence or intervention is feared even by those who suffer under the system, because it is the system that defines their reality and chaos looks like the only alternative.
Within this tight-knit system a "pecking order" with sergeants and lieutenants develops. They become a layer between the "Big Parent" and the the "Slaves". In this layer are a few unskilled Type II (Master) types who joined for opportunistic reasons. But, for the most part, this layer contains intelligent or crafty Type I (Slave) individuals who continue to be dependent on the Leader. Rather than becoming rebellious when they are disappointed with him, their angry Child acts out the anger on lesser Slaves by becoming bossy. They have internalized a part of the Master's controlling Child or Parent, usually the cruel persecutory aspect, even before it becomes evident to outsiders. These lieutenants become secondary Masters, pseudo-Parents, with the drive and permission to lash out at those beneath, using the justification of obeying orders. They contribute to maintaining the community's rigid boundary; eventually the whole community receives permission to enact whatever destructive patterns have existed in the Leader.For a long while these patterns are hidden even from him, covered as they are with his altruistic and helpful rackets. Jones was probably suicidal from way back, but his rackets prevented him from knowing it most of the time.
Which brings us to a description of Jones himself, as a tyrant or Master type. He cannot simply be dismissed as evil, paranoid, or cynical from the beginning. We need to account for his rise to power. It's in seeking to grasp the motivations of persons like Jones that the theory of the substitution factor of rackets become so important. At early stages of his career Jones probably saw himself as idealistic, loving, and devoted to the welfare of humanity. The trap is that this view of himself was probably based on a "love" or "benevolence" racket. It covered awareness of his inordinate craving to be loved more than the average, perhaps more than anyone. In type II (Master) individuals such a craving turns into lust for power. ("I'll make you love me, if it's the last thing I do"). Beneath, sit suicidal impulses and/or murderous rage for not having been loved as he wanted, perhaps even prior to age three.
One should remember that for a while, Jones' rackets led him to make valuable social contributions. He fought racism, even to the point of adopting seven different children of different races, he supported some of his followers and various liberal causes, he served effectively for the San Francisco Housing Authority. But as a result of his love and benevolence racket, he found himself pushed to dish out, and to dish out concern and love to others while becoming increasingly hungrier and frustrated from not getting what he truly needed. Whatever he received got deflected to his power hungry Parent rather than to his starving Child.
Initially he may have experienced excitement, energy and creativity, but as time went on the abject, needy, rackety strokes from his followers failed to gratify his basic yearnings. It is no surprise that he was desperate about holding on to Tim Stoen, the 6-year old adopted child, when the latter was being claimed by his own parents. Tim may have been the source of the few genuine loving strokes Jones received. To reassure himself that he was not dying of depletion, and to boost his "sure" attitude, Jones increasingly was forced to depend on mass rallies, alcohol and pep pills. His emotional starvation created inaccurate assumptions about being beset with a variety of physical illnesses. This is a typical syndrome in tyrant types when their sense of "sureness" begins to falter. Trying to enforce more control over his followers, he moved from Benevolent Rescuer (his racket) to Persecutor. While still maintaining a "sure"racket of what was "for the good"of his followers, he had eruptions of murderous rage, Increasingly he experienced himself as the Victim, even before the self-created calamity closed in on him.
After increasing success in building up followers and admiration, persons like Jones set themselves toward destruction within the net of mutually shared magical beliefs in their community. They start out believing, as do their followers, that they can omnipotently solve the world's problems, if only people will do "it" their way. This was also Hitler's stated belief. And this may also be the tragedy of Dederich at "Synanon", the one time effective treatment of heroin addiction, turned turned authoritarian community. When the magical process fails to succeed totally , frustration and anger in both leader and followers develop. Initially, these get denied by both, lest their airtight system explode the shared illusion of leader's omnipotence, and follower's new-found effectiveness. Positive mutual stroking transforms itself into negative stroking, particularly by the leaders on the followers who get blamed for everything that goes wrong. They in turn accept the blame rather than confront their leader. Where followers challenge or try to defect, the group literally or figuratively exterminates them. They continue to try to remain tightly knit in spite of the internal combustion that can cause implosion, or from explosian due to external intervention. So a given individual can get himself entrapped into a dangerously violent system through having a confused or frightened Child and even when his Adult is operational, he may be so enmeshed, it is too late to cry "uncle". Then, his best apparent Adult option may be to "go along" and save his life - or his relative sanity. These appear to be improved as long as he stays in the system and does not "waste" energy fighting.
Typically, individuals like Jones have a talent for distorting and converting ideas like freedom, responsibility, self-respect, caring, and love.These ideas get co-opted into representing rackets rather than into representing profound meanings. In hearing such leaders, it is sometimes difficult to identify exactly how their lofty justifications don't ring true. Surrender and trust, beautiful in a loving relationship, become capitulation of a free child to the grandiosity racket of a misguided parent. This sad phenomenon can be witnessed in certain couples' relationships, families, religious or psychological movements and, more tragically, in communities such as Synanon and Jonestown.
Commenting on Synanon, Max Lerner identified the seed of tragedy as lying in the "surrender of individual choice both to the leader's decision and to the group's pressures". If an individual allows himself to be stripped naked within such a setting, then he inevitably becomes dependent on the leader and the group for psychological support. Concluding, Lerner states: "We have still to resolve the mixture of authority and self help that is best for therapy and religion. But until we do, the Buddha's remark on his death bed may be worth recalling: Work out your own salvation with diligence".
In hearing of the deaths in Guyana, Rabbi Maurice Davis, who had sold Jones an synagogue within which was housed the first People's Temple in Indianapolis, said: "I keep thinking what happens when the power of love is twisted into the love of power".
References
Dostoyevsky, F. The grand inquisitor. The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Chapter 5, New York: Signet Classics, published by the New American Library, Inc., 1957.
May 1, 1996, Vol.1, No.2, Idea Journal, Editor's note: explanation of technical terms,
by Alan Jacobs,
The theory used here is not pop "TA", not the oversimplified version many social scientists discount as merely a fad. Rather it is from the social psychiatry and psychology of Eric Berne. It is "transactional analysis" theory. It is not "TA" the moral, political and entrepreneurial movement.
Berne is author of "Games People Play", a book that enjoyed phenomenal success on 1960's best seller lists. Berne's theories of personality and treatment were subsequently popularized, watered down and vulgarized by other, more opportunistic professionals. The promotion of such books as "I'm OK, You're OK", helped to deepen this negative impression, even though they contain some useful material.
"TA" became known only as a "pop-psychology" and the more intellectually rigorous versions suffer under that rubric to this day. But take note, there is another "TA", as it was coined, a transactional analysis of social interaction and one of social systems as well. This variety has survived despite the commercialization of its better known sister, often being confused with bumper stickers, cute slogans, "warm fuzzy" dolls and shameless promotion.
The version presented here is a serious, intellectually rigorous, and evolving body of knowledge. The following piece, written by a major Bernian theoretician, demonstrates how the real theory can be applied to understanding important social issues such as cults, and totalitarian movements.
Aspects of Bernian theory utilized here will include: existential positions, ego states and rackets. A short explanation will be helpful to those unfamiliar with these terms.
Existential position refers to the duality (I, Others). It defines how we see ourselves in relation to others. I can see myself positively and the other negatively, or vice versa. I can both of us negatively. Or I can see us both positively. This can be represented as (+,-); (-,+); (-,-); (+, +) respectively. This became colloquially known as "I'm OK, You're OK, and its three variations. In the past, the thinking has been lost in the fluff. Do not be distracted by these terms. The ideas behind them describe a crucial factor in relationships.
Ego states are names for three different psychological and behavioral systems within the individual. Berne saw them as three complete and distinct systems of thinking, feeling and behavior. They were colloquially know as Parent, Adult, and Child or Rules, Objectivity, and Needs. Another way of seeing them is: I should, I think, I want. The views enables us to describe what happens between people in a fairly precise and descriptive manner. What ego state we are in as we relate to one another is helpful in determining what is going on.
The unfortunately named "rackets", might better be called substitute feelings as the author of the following article, Fanita English, coined elsewhere. They are unauthentic feelings and behaviors that substitute for deeper, unfelt, or disallowed feelings and behaviors. They are also designed to get others to do something we don't think we can get without the racket, that is by simply asking, for example, whining appeasing, bullying, crying, etc.
Alan Jacobs, editor. May 1, 1996.
This article refers to:
Masters and Slaves: The Tragedy of Jonestown by Fanita English, M.S.W.
Rousseau said that everybody emerges out of early childhood either with a "slave" mentality or with that of a "tyrant." These terms can well be applied to the extremes of two defensive existential positions, for at about age three the child decides either that he must submit, be a "slave" or that he'll have to keep trying to find ways to control others at all costs, to become a "tyrant." Whichever position he settles on henceforth determines his character and his future attitude in relation to power issues, particularly at times of physical, or social stress. Of course most of us do also develop the more stable position: I'm O.K., You're O.K.
As a less dramatic designation, the slave position can be called Type I- unsure, and the tyrant position, Type II- oversure. Type I are those people who seek strokes from an I'm Not OK, You're OK (-,+) position. They tend to transact with others from either a compliant or rebellious Child ego state, sometimes "helpless," sometimes "bratty." They seek strokes from people who impress them as having powerful Parent ego states, hoping that it is such people who can offer them a key to the riddle of existence. In everyday life they appear as "victims" or "rebels".
Conversely, Type II persons operate from the I'm OK, You're Not OK (+,-) defensive existential position, having resolved that no one can offer them any hope. Their only chance for survival in an uncertain world is to stamp it with their personal view of reality, to convince or force others to participate in their image of the world. So they operate as "oversure" acting "helpful" or "bossy." They seek out partners or followers who will transact with them from a compliant Child ego state, will acknowledge them as Powerful Parents, and will thereby offer them validation for their grandiose illusion of being "sure." They relate as "rescuers" but become "persecutors" when they don't obtain gratitude or compliance. Finally, they may end as victims.
Both types have a way of finding each other, and up to a point this may be fine, because they can then indulge in complementary stroking to their heart's content, but if they are endowed with heavy rackets, calamity may follow.
This is where the issue of rackets comes in. A few light rackets cause no harm, but heavy, persistent rackets mean that the person is not truly capable of dealing with his underlying emotions and lacks a solid sense of self. Therefore he is likely to be excessively needy and overly concerned about validating and reinforcing his defensive existential position. For it is by means of our defensive existential position that we ward off the despair that pushes to manifest itself as hopelessness in Type I persons, and murderous rage in Type II persons. By definition, persons with heavy or 3rd degree rackets, (that is: thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that lead to the destruction or confinement of body tissue) cannot stand awareness because they do not distinguish between feeling and the likelihood of behaving in unacceptable ways. It follows that, as a defense, they seek and receive strokes for unreal substitute feelings. As a result, they are never really gratified within themselves.
Both the giving and receiving of strokes are artificially induced and received--like eating devitaminized food. This only exacerbates the hunger all the more, like drug addiction which falsely seems to energize while inducing starvation. So the seeds for mutually killing each other off are there from the beginning even while mutual stroking is taking place and temporarily appeases both parties.
Although there is probably a fairly even distribution of both character types in the general population, when it comes to heavy racketeers there appear to be more slave types than tyrants. It looks as though there is a higher number of extreme Type I persons who continue to operate, even as grown-ups, with the belief, however illusory, that there is a way for them to bask in a paradise run by a Father or Mother figure. They seek to abdicate from the responsibility of sorting the welter of mutually contradictory attitudes and feelings in themselves and others. In most instances such yearnings remain manageable as fantasies or acceptable behavior. Usually they get played out in minor ways with more forceful partners. But there remain the unappeased yearnings to "escape from freedom" as described by Fromm in his book by this name. When such persons are offered the opportunity to be led into a haven of relief from anxiety this looks like an offer they can't refuse. At last: no more conflict or concern about one's inability to make difficult decisions.
Here's a Powerful new Parent who can tell them exactly what's right and good and how they can belong. He seems to offer love and understanding for their craving. To merge with, to become one with him, as humble members of whatever community he sets up, seems like a happiness worth sacrificing for. "Here come all my money, my relationship with former friends and family, my autonomy for you, Great Leader who can give me ultimate answers, who can make me feel good merely by believing in you, and therefore in the validity of what I'm doing." It is this longing to escape from autonomous functioning that led so many people to embrace Nazism as the golden hope that would "free" them from disillusion. People are vulnerable to the "enchantment" of promises from persons such as Hitler or Jones. In childhood these people feel forsaken or overpowered in attempts to experience themselves as freestanding creatures and therefore substitute illusions and fantasies for disappointment.
Before Fromm, Dostoyevsky used the "Grand Inquisitor" (Type II) to critically describe the "Slave" (Type I):
"So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship . . . Man is tormented by no greater desire than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which he is born. . Man prefers peace and even death to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil."Dostoyevsky also described how such people get themselves bound into a system, pointing out that:
"these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but also to find something that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other."In effect both Fromm and Dostoyevsky describe the need in "slave" type persons for mutual racketeering with a great parent that dominates a community of adapted children seeking the same dogma and the same system of beliefs. Within this setting the slaves develop pseudo-intimacy by means of Child ego state transactions with each other. It is pseudo-intimacy because it's maintained by their continued racketeering transactions with the Parent ego state of the powerful leader.
Time magazine (December 11, 1978) printed some excerpts from "Letters to Dad" written to Jones by different followers. They illustrate self abasement and dependency, increasing his dominance:
"I use to spend money in buying unnecessary things for my grandchildren such as clothes. Now I want to please you and one way I know is to please the family".
"I don't respect Dad the way I should. When I am in a follower role and not in a supervisory role, I feel threatened that people are against me which isn't true and comes back to my elitism".
"Dad - All I can say is that I am two people right now: one of them is a very humble and innocent person and the other is a cruel and insensitive person that goes around with bad thoughts on his mind."
"Another fault is that I miss soda, candy, pie, etc. which I shouldn't miss at all. The way I can prevent this is to work extra hard. "
"Father is wonderful, clean, straightforward and supernatural."
"I know I still follow you because you have the gift to protect me. I like to look strong but I know I am weak." (Following which, the person accepted his order and drank poison.)
Still, one interesting aspect of such a system is that many individuals actually are more organized and functional than before entering it. This is because allegiance to the leader and the group offers a measure of security and freedom; freeing them from dealing with contradictory or unpleasant emotions. Their Adult appears free, that is, free from ulterior influence. But actually it is so only at the service of their Child or a remembered previous Parent.
Their Adult is programmed by their leader's definition of reality and reinforced by the community. Being free from the anxiety of living freely and taking care of oneself and others, they think more clearly. Actually it is within a rigidly controlled framework, so their clear thinking is only on narrow issues. Such persons can often think more logically than average citizens as long as it is within a concrete context, and so long as their basic premises remain unchallenged. To this end they reinforce each other in a mutual belief system, thus reinforcing allegiance to the leader.
Thus bureaucracy within Fascism and Nazism functioned better than under the previous government. Trains ran on time, shipments to concentration camps were handled with discretion and efficiency. Similarly, building and agriculture were carried on effectively in Jonestown. Jones' young lieutenants were able to master intricate financial transactions and made public statements which seemed clear and honest. From superficial observation outsiders can believe that members of such a community are doing better than they did before when they may have felt confused or unhappy and demonstrated more overtly their "unsure" character. So investigators from the American State Department and the Embassy who went to Guyana believed the people at Jonestown were doing fine. They had become zombies,well functioning ones, but zombies nevertheless. They operated with, as Dostoyevsky said, "a stable conception of the object of life" without having to question it. Even a hard-nosed lawyer like Charles E. Garry got fooled by the appearance of happiness in a certain proportion of members. After a ten-day stay at Jonestown, he described it as "Paradise on Earth".
The sad thing is that once such a system is established, it feeds on itself and diminishes even the physical ability of oppressed members to move out and evaluate themselves or their community from the outside. Boundaries become more and more rigidly set and impermeable. Outside influence or intervention is feared even by those who suffer under the system, because it is the system that defines their reality and chaos looks like the only alternative.
Within this tight-knit system a "pecking order" with sergeants and lieutenants develops. They become a layer between the "Big Parent" and the the "Slaves". In this layer are a few unskilled Type II (Master) types who joined for opportunistic reasons. But, for the most part, this layer contains intelligent or crafty Type I (Slave) individuals who continue to be dependent on the Leader. Rather than becoming rebellious when they are disappointed with him, their angry Child acts out the anger on lesser Slaves by becoming bossy. They have internalized a part of the Master's controlling Child or Parent, usually the cruel persecutory aspect, even before it becomes evident to outsiders. These lieutenants become secondary Masters, pseudo-Parents, with the drive and permission to lash out at those beneath, using the justification of obeying orders. They contribute to maintaining the community's rigid boundary; eventually the whole community receives permission to enact whatever destructive patterns have existed in the Leader.For a long while these patterns are hidden even from him, covered as they are with his altruistic and helpful rackets. Jones was probably suicidal from way back, but his rackets prevented him from knowing it most of the time.
Which brings us to a description of Jones himself, as a tyrant or Master type. He cannot simply be dismissed as evil, paranoid, or cynical from the beginning. We need to account for his rise to power. It's in seeking to grasp the motivations of persons like Jones that the theory of the substitution factor of rackets become so important. At early stages of his career Jones probably saw himself as idealistic, loving, and devoted to the welfare of humanity. The trap is that this view of himself was probably based on a "love" or "benevolence" racket. It covered awareness of his inordinate craving to be loved more than the average, perhaps more than anyone. In type II (Master) individuals such a craving turns into lust for power. ("I'll make you love me, if it's the last thing I do"). Beneath, sit suicidal impulses and/or murderous rage for not having been loved as he wanted, perhaps even prior to age three.
One should remember that for a while, Jones' rackets led him to make valuable social contributions. He fought racism, even to the point of adopting seven different children of different races, he supported some of his followers and various liberal causes, he served effectively for the San Francisco Housing Authority. But as a result of his love and benevolence racket, he found himself pushed to dish out, and to dish out concern and love to others while becoming increasingly hungrier and frustrated from not getting what he truly needed. Whatever he received got deflected to his power hungry Parent rather than to his starving Child.
Initially he may have experienced excitement, energy and creativity, but as time went on the abject, needy, rackety strokes from his followers failed to gratify his basic yearnings. It is no surprise that he was desperate about holding on to Tim Stoen, the 6-year old adopted child, when the latter was being claimed by his own parents. Tim may have been the source of the few genuine loving strokes Jones received. To reassure himself that he was not dying of depletion, and to boost his "sure" attitude, Jones increasingly was forced to depend on mass rallies, alcohol and pep pills. His emotional starvation created inaccurate assumptions about being beset with a variety of physical illnesses. This is a typical syndrome in tyrant types when their sense of "sureness" begins to falter. Trying to enforce more control over his followers, he moved from Benevolent Rescuer (his racket) to Persecutor. While still maintaining a "sure"racket of what was "for the good"of his followers, he had eruptions of murderous rage, Increasingly he experienced himself as the Victim, even before the self-created calamity closed in on him.
After increasing success in building up followers and admiration, persons like Jones set themselves toward destruction within the net of mutually shared magical beliefs in their community. They start out believing, as do their followers, that they can omnipotently solve the world's problems, if only people will do "it" their way. This was also Hitler's stated belief. And this may also be the tragedy of Dederich at "Synanon", the one time effective treatment of heroin addiction, turned turned authoritarian community. When the magical process fails to succeed totally , frustration and anger in both leader and followers develop. Initially, these get denied by both, lest their airtight system explode the shared illusion of leader's omnipotence, and follower's new-found effectiveness. Positive mutual stroking transforms itself into negative stroking, particularly by the leaders on the followers who get blamed for everything that goes wrong. They in turn accept the blame rather than confront their leader. Where followers challenge or try to defect, the group literally or figuratively exterminates them. They continue to try to remain tightly knit in spite of the internal combustion that can cause implosion, or from explosian due to external intervention. So a given individual can get himself entrapped into a dangerously violent system through having a confused or frightened Child and even when his Adult is operational, he may be so enmeshed, it is too late to cry "uncle". Then, his best apparent Adult option may be to "go along" and save his life - or his relative sanity. These appear to be improved as long as he stays in the system and does not "waste" energy fighting.
Typically, individuals like Jones have a talent for distorting and converting ideas like freedom, responsibility, self-respect, caring, and love.These ideas get co-opted into representing rackets rather than into representing profound meanings. In hearing such leaders, it is sometimes difficult to identify exactly how their lofty justifications don't ring true. Surrender and trust, beautiful in a loving relationship, become capitulation of a free child to the grandiosity racket of a misguided parent. This sad phenomenon can be witnessed in certain couples' relationships, families, religious or psychological movements and, more tragically, in communities such as Synanon and Jonestown.
Commenting on Synanon, Max Lerner identified the seed of tragedy as lying in the "surrender of individual choice both to the leader's decision and to the group's pressures". If an individual allows himself to be stripped naked within such a setting, then he inevitably becomes dependent on the leader and the group for psychological support. Concluding, Lerner states: "We have still to resolve the mixture of authority and self help that is best for therapy and religion. But until we do, the Buddha's remark on his death bed may be worth recalling: Work out your own salvation with diligence".
In hearing of the deaths in Guyana, Rabbi Maurice Davis, who had sold Jones an synagogue within which was housed the first People's Temple in Indianapolis, said: "I keep thinking what happens when the power of love is twisted into the love of power".
References
Dostoyevsky, F. The grand inquisitor. The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Chapter 5, New York: Signet Classics, published by the New American Library, Inc., 1957.
English, F. The substitution factor: Rackets and real feelings. Transactional Analysis Journal, 1971, 1(4), Part I.
English, F. The substitution factor: Rackets and real feelings. Transactional Analysis Journal, 1972, 1(1), Part II.
English, F. I'm OK - You're OK for real. Voices, 1976, 12(7).
English, F. I'm OK - You're OK - Adult. Transactional Analysis Journal, 1975, 5(4).
English, F. Rackets and racketeering as the root of games. In Roger N. Blakeney (Ed.),Current Issues in Transactional Analysis, New York: Bruner Mazel, 1977.
English, F. Episcript and the hot potato game. Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 1969, 8(32).
English, F. What makes a good therapist. Transactional Analysis Journal, 1977, 7(2).
Fromm, E. Escape from Freedom. New York: Holt, Reinehart and Winston, 1976.
Kilduff, M., & Javers, R. The suicide cult. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.
Krause, C.A., & Washington Post Staff. Guyana massacre. New York: Berkeley Publishing Co. 1978.
Lerner M. Dominance: Bonds of an 'encounter group'. Newspaper column syndicated, Dec. 1978.
English, F. I'm OK - You're OK for real. Voices, 1976, 12(7).
English, F. I'm OK - You're OK - Adult. Transactional Analysis Journal, 1975, 5(4).
English, F. Rackets and racketeering as the root of games. In Roger N. Blakeney (Ed.),Current Issues in Transactional Analysis, New York: Bruner Mazel, 1977.
English, F. Episcript and the hot potato game. Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 1969, 8(32).
English, F. What makes a good therapist. Transactional Analysis Journal, 1977, 7(2).
Fromm, E. Escape from Freedom. New York: Holt, Reinehart and Winston, 1976.
Kilduff, M., & Javers, R. The suicide cult. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.
Krause, C.A., & Washington Post Staff. Guyana massacre. New York: Berkeley Publishing Co. 1978.
Lerner M. Dominance: Bonds of an 'encounter group'. Newspaper column syndicated, Dec. 1978.
______________________________________________________________
May 1, 1996, Vol.1, No.2, Idea Journal, Editor's note: explanation of technical terms,
by Alan Jacobs,
The theory used here is not pop "TA", not the oversimplified version many social scientists discount as merely a fad. Rather it is from the social psychiatry and psychology of Eric Berne. It is "transactional analysis" theory. It is not "TA" the moral, political and entrepreneurial movement.
Berne is author of "Games People Play", a book that enjoyed phenomenal success on 1960's best seller lists. Berne's theories of personality and treatment were subsequently popularized, watered down and vulgarized by other, more opportunistic professionals. The promotion of such books as "I'm OK, You're OK", helped to deepen this negative impression, even though they contain some useful material.
"TA" became known only as a "pop-psychology" and the more intellectually rigorous versions suffer under that rubric to this day. But take note, there is another "TA", as it was coined, a transactional analysis of social interaction and one of social systems as well. This variety has survived despite the commercialization of its better known sister, often being confused with bumper stickers, cute slogans, "warm fuzzy" dolls and shameless promotion.
The version presented here is a serious, intellectually rigorous, and evolving body of knowledge. The following piece, written by a major Bernian theoretician, demonstrates how the real theory can be applied to understanding important social issues such as cults, and totalitarian movements.
Aspects of Bernian theory utilized here will include: existential positions, ego states and rackets. A short explanation will be helpful to those unfamiliar with these terms.
Existential position refers to the duality (I, Others). It defines how we see ourselves in relation to others. I can see myself positively and the other negatively, or vice versa. I can both of us negatively. Or I can see us both positively. This can be represented as (+,-); (-,+); (-,-); (+, +) respectively. This became colloquially known as "I'm OK, You're OK, and its three variations. In the past, the thinking has been lost in the fluff. Do not be distracted by these terms. The ideas behind them describe a crucial factor in relationships.
Ego states are names for three different psychological and behavioral systems within the individual. Berne saw them as three complete and distinct systems of thinking, feeling and behavior. They were colloquially know as Parent, Adult, and Child or Rules, Objectivity, and Needs. Another way of seeing them is: I should, I think, I want. The views enables us to describe what happens between people in a fairly precise and descriptive manner. What ego state we are in as we relate to one another is helpful in determining what is going on.
The unfortunately named "rackets", might better be called substitute feelings as the author of the following article, Fanita English, coined elsewhere. They are unauthentic feelings and behaviors that substitute for deeper, unfelt, or disallowed feelings and behaviors. They are also designed to get others to do something we don't think we can get without the racket, that is by simply asking, for example, whining appeasing, bullying, crying, etc.
Alan Jacobs, editor. May 1, 1996.
This article refers to:
Masters and Slaves: The Tragedy of Jonestown by Fanita English, M.S.W.
_____________________________________________________________________________
In his column in a recent issue of The Jewish Post and Opinion, a national newspaper, Rabbi Maurice Davis wrote that people who refer to themselves as Jews for Jesus, Hebrew Christians or Messianic Jews "have pretended not only that they are Jewish, which they are not, but that they speak for either Jews or Judaism, which they do not." "They have distorted our holidays, demeaned our faith, misstated our history, and belittled a legacy which we have spent centuries preserving and enlarging." Rabbi Davis, a former spiritual leader at Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation, went on to note that people who accept Jesus as the Messiah by definition Christians; they are not Jewish.
--January 27, 1990, The Indianapolis Star, page A-8, Messianic Jews in Indianapolis, by Carol Elrod, Star Religion Writer,
_________________________________________________________________________
Rabbi Maurice Davis ill, FACTnet, retrieved 2/8/07.
_______________________________________________________________________________
A Temple on the Mount: A History of Temple Israel of Northern Westchester, by Jacob Judd, Ph.D., 1999, retrieved 2/8/07.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050215065645/http://ny054.urj.net/History/index.htm
____________________________________________________________________________
| The Cult Phenomenon in the United States (1979) Joint-Congressional Proceedings, statements by Rabbi Maurice Davis "Statement of Rabbi Maurice Davis." |
| INFORMATION MEETING ON THE CULT PHENOMENON IN THE UNITED STATES, February 5, 1979, 318 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. P.74-80. of Transcript of Proceedings. |
Senator Dole. Congressman Ottinger would like to introduce the next witness.
Mr. Ottinger. The next witness is a constituent of mine, Rabbi Maurice Davis. He comes from White Plains, a Rabbi of the Jewish Community Center. He is a faculty member at Manhattan College. He has been actively involved with working with young people to deprogram them from cults for over five years. He is responsible for separating some 128 young people from these organizations.
I would just like to take the opportunity to welcome a very distinguished constituent.
STATEMENT OF RABBI MAURICE DAVIS, SENIOR RABBI, JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER, WHITE PLAINS, NEW YORK.
Rabbi Davis. Thank you, Congressman Ottinger. Thank you, Senator Dole.
There is a touch of deja vu about this gathering. Three years ago you convened just such a meeting as this is at which I was privileged to speak. I thanked you then. And I thank you now.
Between then and now the Fraser Subcommittee has published its report declaring that the laws of this land have been systematically violated by the Unification Church; we have watched the cults proliferate; we have witnessed the horror of Jonestown; and we cannot help but ask when is something going to be done.
Now, I am a Jew, and I am a Rabbi, and I cherish -- as do my people -- the grandure of the First Amendment. That amendment prevents, and properly so, the government from investigating the beliefs of any group that calls itself religious; but it does not prevent the government from investigating the activities of any group, whatever its name might be.
No man and no group in this country is above the law. Indeed, for 1000 years and more my people have lived with the Hebrew phrase, "Di nai delma cultna de nai." [Phonetic.]
"The law of the land is the law."
Unless that law is upheld and enforced, we all of us are victims and we Jews know this very well.
I have here, Senator Dole and gentlemen, resolutions from the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the New York Federation of Reformed Synogogues, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis, all pointing out the very real dangers implicit in the cults that plague our land.
In the interests of time, I shall not read these, but I shall hand them to you, Senator Dole.
In fact, the Central Conference of American Rabbis has established a National Commission on Cults which it is my privilege to chair.
We are concerned, gentlemen. We are deeply concerned with cults. So let me begin by offering not a definition of cults since everyone has said you must not do this, but let me offer you a description of cults.
It seems to me that any cult has to have the following characteristics:
One, a dictatorial leader, often called charismatic, who has total and unlimited control over his group.
Two, followers who have abdicated the right to say no, the right to pass judgment, the right to protest, who have sold their souls for the security of slavery.
Three, possibly the most dangerous doctrine known to our civilization, that the end justifies the means; therefore, any thing from the Moonies' heavenly deception to the violence of Synanon to the theft of government documents by Scientology, to the brutality of the Children of God, all the way to the murder-suicide of Jonestown, all is permitted because the ends justify the means and there is no one there to tell them no.
Four, unlimited funds. The Unification Church with its some $50 million brought in each year by its mobile fund raising teams is duplicated by the Hare Krishnas dressing as Santa Claus or the Children of God sending out their women as fishers of men.
Five, the instilling of fear, hatred, and suspicion of everyone outside the camp, of the entire outside world in order to keep the victims in line.
You put them all together gentlemen --
Voice. That is not true --
Rabbi Davis. You have a prescription for violence, for death, for destruction. It is a formula that fits the Nazi Youth Movement as accurately as it describes the Unification Church.
Voice. That's a lie.
Rabbi Davis. Or the People's Temple.
I do not address myself to the responses in the audience. I do not address myself to their religious beliefs. That right they have, and I defend it; but I will not defend their right to violate the law of this land or the mind of the young.
During the last five years I have helped rescue 128 young men and women without ever once violating the law, without ever once resorting to force or restraint; but I tell you what I have done: I have peeled off the surface and entered into an underworld of madness, and you have to see what I haev seen to understand the horror of it all.
You have to see a young man hearing that his mother was dying and calling out to him and believing it, simply turning aside and saying, "Sorry, I am just too busy."
You have to hear them bragging about how they took the last dollar from a poor man by telling him lies.
You have to hear my midnight phone calls promising that I would be killed by noon because "Father says you must die."
Now the latest. You have heard what happened to Congressman Ryan, didn't you?
You have to see letters forged on my stationery calling off meetings we had scheduled, anonymous letters to my temple demanding that I be fired for having written what in fact they wrote ni my name. Or you have to see this anonymous pamphlet which has already been distributed to you entitled "Who Are Senator Dole's Experts on Cults?"
Every single statement concerning me is not only a lie, but there are -- these are lies that they know are lies with, of course, the exception of spelling my name correctly, for which I thank them, and the description of me as an incendiary or a torch, upon which I refuse to comment.
(Laughter.)
Ladies and gentlemen, every path leads somewhere. That is what a path is all about. The path of segregation leads to lynching every time. The path of antisemitism leads to Auschwitz every time. The path of the cults leads to Jonestown and we watch it at our peril.
(Applause.)
(Chorus of boos.)
Senator Dole. Let me just caution the audience -- either side -- I understand there are some who feel very strongly on both sides. We are under time constraints. This is an information session for Senators, Congressmen, members of our staff. We will have control of the meeting.
I just caution anyone who doesn't want to abide by those rules to leave now.
Rabbi Davis. Thank you, sir.
Senator Dole, gentlemen of Congress: the primary task of a nation is to protect its citizens. That is what nations were created for in the first place. A nation that cannot protect its citizens is a failure. A nation that does not even try is a catastrophe.
Whatever the problems, whatever the difficulties, whatever the pitfalls, we have to try.
How many Jonestowns must there be before we begin to do something?
Gentlemen of the Congress: I am not here to protest against religion, or against religions. I am here to protest against child molesters, for as surely as there are those who lure children with lollypops in order to rape their bodiers, so, too, are there those who lure children with candy-coated lies in order to rape their minds.
In the name of two million victims and four million parents and a country bewildered and frightened and ashamed, I tell you this has to stop.
(Applause.)
Senator Dole. Our next witness is Daphne Green.
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I am here to protest against child molesters. For as surely as there are those who lure children with lollypops in order to rape their bodies, so, too, do these lure children with candy-coated lies in order to rape their minds.
- Cults Hearing Noisy, Tense, By Marjorie Hyer, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, February 6, 1979; Page A14, The Washington Post
- Rabbi Maurice Davis, quoted in Ronald Enroth, Ph.D.'s Youth, brainwashing, and the extremist cults, 1977, Grand Rapids: Zondervan Pub. House.
I keep thinking what happens when the power of love is twisted into the love of power.
- Masters and Slaves: The Tragedy of Jonestown, Fanita English, M.S.W., September 1, 1996 Vol.1, no.2, Idea, ISSN 1532-1712
- United States Congressional Record, 94th Congress, United States House of Representatives, 2nd session, January 28, 1976, Congressional Record, Volume 122, Part 2.
- We know, and we must never forget, that every path leads somewhere. The path of segregation leads to lynching. The path of anti-Semitism leads to Auschwitz. The path of cults leads to Jonestown. We ignore this fact at our peril.
Ladies and gentlemen, every path leads somewhere. That is what a path is all about. The path of segregation leads to lynching every time. The path of antisemitism leads to Auschwitz every time. The path of the cults leads to Jonestown and we watch it at our peril.
Information Meeting on the Cult Phenomenon, February 5, 1979, 318 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. P.74-80. of Transcript of Proceedings.
- It seems to me that any cult has to have the following characteristics: One, a dictatorial leader, often called charismatic, who has total and unlimited control over his group. Two, followers who have abdicated the right to say no, the right to pass judgment, the right to protest, who have sold their souls for the security of slavery. Three, possibly the most dangerous doctrine known to our civilization, that the end justifies the means; therefore, any thing from the Moonies' heavenly deception to the violence of Synanon to the theft of government documents by Scientology, to the brutality of the Children of God, all the way to the murder-suicide of Jonestown, all is permitted because the ends justify the means and there is no one there to tell them no. Four, unlimited funds. The Unification Church with its some $50 million brought in each year by its mobile fund raising teams is duplicated by the Hare Krishnas dressing as Santa Claus or the Children of God sending out their women as fishers of men. Five, the instilling of fear, hatred, and suspicion of everyone outside the camp, of the entire outside world in order to keep the victims in line. You put them all together gentlemen -- You have a prescription for violence, for death, for destruction. It is a formula that fits the Nazi Youth Movement as accurately as it describes the Unification Church. Or the People's Temple.
- Ibid., February 5, 1979.
- A great and gentle radiance has left our scene with the death of Rabbi Maurice Davis. He was one of the people who first brought me into the circle of those devoted to helping cult victims. His compassion and vision were inspiring. He saw clearly the dangers which awaited those who lost their free will to totalism. I remember vividly one of my early contacts with Rabbi Davis, when an attorney for a destructive group was trying to get him to explain what he had said to a member of that group when she returned briefly to her family and agreed to speak with him. "I prayed with her," he said. "I prayed that she remember the teachings of her youth and her love for her family ." The lawyer for the group was taken aback. "Is that all you did?", he said. "Was that all it was.'? ....Yes," Rabbi Davis answered, "the rest was up to her." It was that blend of hope, vision, and respect for the judgment of others that became the cornerstone of the American Family Foundation's ideals. We owe much to Rabbi Davis and we honor him with our continued commitment.
- In Memoriam - Rabbi Maurice Davis: Human Rights Champion, The Cult Observer, Vol. 11 No. 1 1994., Herbert L. Rosedale, President, American Family Foundation.
- Rabbi Maurice Davis -- Senior rabbi of the Jewish Community Center of White Plains, N.Y.; faculty member of Manhattan College; actively engaged in combating cults for over five years; responsible for separating 128 young people from cults.
- BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF PARTICIPANTS – INFORMATION MEETING ON THE CULT PHENOMENON IN THE UNITED STATES, February 5, 1979, 318 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. [Between pages 18-19 of Transcript of Proceedings]. The Cult Phenomenon in the United States (1979), Joint-Congressional Proceedings, Chaired by Senator Bob Dole
- The next witness is a constituent of mine, Rabbi Maurice Davis. He comes from White Plains, a Rabbi of the Jewish Community Center. He is a faculty member at Manhattan College. He has been actively involved with working with young people to deprogram them from cults for over five years. He is responsible for separating some 128 young people from these organizations. I would just like to take the opportunity to welcome a very distinguished constituent.
- Introduction of Rabbi Maurice Davis to Congressional Hearings, by Congressman Richard Ottinger., INFORMATION MEETING ON THE CULT PHENOMENON IN THE UNITED STATES, February 5, 1979, 318 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. P.74-80. of Transcript of Proceedings.
July 25, 1980, UPI / Syracuse Herald-Journal, Rabbi continues push for cult deprogramming, A-2, Friday
ALBANY (UPI) - Uncontrolled-proliferation of religious cults could lead to another tragedy like the Jonestown, Guyana, mass suicide, says a rabbi who plans to continue pushing for a law to allow relatives to forcibly take cult members home.
Rabbi Maurice Davis of White Plains, at a news conference yesterday, said he has "deprogrammed" about 150 young people who joined religious cults such as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.
Most of the youths, although they resisted at first, eventually admitted they were duped into joining a cult, he said.
"I have an enormous fear (of cults) and it's not based on fantasy," Davis said. "I've seen their faces."
The rabbi said he had known the Rev. Jim Jones before he "flipped out" and organized the Jonestown commune in Guyana.
$2M lawsuit
"I think the path of the cults leads to Jonestown, and I'm scared," Davis said.
Gov. Hugh Carey last month vetoed a bill that would have allowed relatives of cult members to get a temporary conservatorship to snatch the member away for deprogramming. The governor said the legislation would not stand up in court, but offered to work toward a compromise.
Davis said he and other opponents of cults would continue to push for such legislation.
The rabbi said he deprogrammed cult members by taking them to hotel rooms and "just talking to them" for several days at a time. However, he is being sued for $2 million by one woman who claimed he held her against her will, and said he has received threats against his life.
Rescued from Moonies
Bonnie Kamp, a 23-year-old former member of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, said she never would have been "rescued" if her mother had not forcibly taken her away from a "Moonie" workshop.
Miss Kamp, of Syracuse, said she was drawn into the Unification Church while visiting a friend at a church center in Boston. The church members convinced her to stay by using a technique she called "love bombing," in which she was constantly showered with affection.
"They work you up into a frenzied state ... until you are willing to kill for God," Miss Kamp said. Soon, she was being sent out into the streets to preach and to solicit contributions.
However, Virginia Greene of Guilderland said her 24-year-old son had been with the Divine Light Mission, headed by the Guru Maharaj Ji, for seven years.
"He has never known a normal young life," said Mrs. Greene. "Who is protecting the rights of these young children?"
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December 16, 1993, New York Times, Rabbi Maurice Davis, A Cult Authority, 72,
Rabbi Maurice Davis, the retired senior rabbi of the Jewish Community Center of White Plains and an authority on religious cults in the United States, died Tuesday at his home in Palm Coast, Fla. He was 72.
The cause of death was complications from a stroke, said Jane Friedberg of the Jewish Community Center.
In 1972, Rabbi Davis founded a group named Citizens Engaged in Reuniting Families. Its aim was to counsel children who had joined unorthodox religious groups to return to their families.
Rabbi Davis testified before legislative groups about the hazards of cults and wrote extensively about their dangers to American society.
A graduate of the University of Cincinnati and the Hebrew Union College, Rabbi Davis served in religious capacities in Cincinnati, Lexington, Ky., and Indianapolis before becoming the senior rabbi of the Jewish Community Center in White Plains in 1967. He became the congregation's rabbi emeritus in 1987 and retired to Palm Coast, Fla.
He is survived by his wife, Marion Cronbach Davis of Palm Coast; two sons, Rabbi Jay R. Davis of Vero Beach, Fla., and Rabbi Michael A. Davis of Fort Pierce, Fla.; three siblings, Carlie Zimmerman, Hannah Feibelman and Albert Davis, all of Cranston, R.I., and three grandchildren.
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The Art of Hoping: A Mother’s Story, Cultic Studies Journal, Michael Langone, Ph.D.
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Our E-Library contains full text articles and other resources related to the information below. Click here.
The Art of Hoping: A Mother’s Story, Cultic Studies Journal, Michael Langone, Ph.D.
My son, Edward, is in a cult. He has been in a cult for 30 years. He may never come out. And if he does, I could very well be dead before it happens.
My story is a sad one. But it is not without hope. I write in order to help other parents with children in cults better understand what has happened to them, what they can do for their loved ones, and what they can do to keep hope alive. Hope is not something that is handed to us, like a Mother’s Day gift. Hope is something we have to work at, sometimes at great emotional cost. There is no formula for keeping hope alive. Sustaining hope is an art, not a science. It requires a sensitive and courageous heart, as well as a discerning intellect.
Talking about hope as an art is painful for me because my son was an artist, and a rather successful artist before his group leader told him that art was “on a lower plane.” I've been told that some experts think that there is a preponderance of artistically gifted people in cults, perhaps because the artistically gifted are more likely to have idealistic aspirations, and more likely to feel out of place in the workaday world. I do not know whether or not that is so. But I do know, based upon the many years I have spent thinking about this problem, that those who join cults are sensitive, intelligent, and honorable people, not the “crazies” that far too many people think they are.
My story dramatically illustrates this point. It shows that joining a cult is more a function of bad luck, of a vulnerable person being in the wrong place at the wrong time, than of personal or family deficiency. I did not always feel this way. There were certainly times when my insides cried out, “what did I do wrong,” even though on the outside I may have been silent and numb. I've had my share of guilt and second-guessing. But I want to stress to those of you who are experiencing these self-recriminations that they are pointless and counterproductive. If your child is in a cult, it’s mainly because of what the cult does to him or her, not what you have done. Surely, you’re not the perfect parent, and neither am I. But our imperfections aren’t the reason that our loved ones throw their lives away in service to a megalomaniacal leader who puts him or herself forward as some kind of saint or god or super-therapist or messianic political figure. When you understand how cults really work, when you understand how manipulation and exploitation pervade them, you will treat yourself more gently, although your anger toward the group leader may grow considerably.
Listen to my story. Although it is not a “worst-case scenario,” such as the stories of those whose children die in cults, it is, I am sad to say, representative of what far too many parents face. I hope to gain strength to keep my hope alive as I write. I hope that you gain strength as you read.
You may have noticed that I write anonymously. I do so (and I change names and many other details of my story) because, however helpless I may feel at this moment, I hang on to the hope that my son will someday leave his group. My son has castigated me for my cult education activities, which I pursue because I feel morally obligated to act. But I have never publicly talked about him on a personal level. I’m afraid that if I did, I would add salt to the wound in our relationship and decrease the probability of his coming out. Therefore, I alter details, as in a docudrama. But I do not alter the gist of the story.
I grew up in the South before the Second World War. I was one of those Southerners who hated segregation and, although I didn't get active in civil rights until the 1950s, I think that my son imbibed much of my idealism while he was growing up.
After the War my husband, Norm, who had been in the Navy in the South Pacific, was stationed in California. Edward was among the first of the baby-boomers and was born shortly before my husband left the service. We stayed in California, where Norm worked as a salesman for a few years. In 1950 we bought a small ranch and moved out to the country. We loved that ranch and were very happy.
Edward was a quiet, sensitive boy who loved the animals on the ranch. I always thought he had a talent for drawing, but I didn't think much of it at the time. But when he started school, his first-grade teacher told me that he was exceptionally gifted and urged me to try to get him private lessons. I found a capable and dedicated art teacher about an hour’s drive from our ranch, and I took Edward for lessons once a week for a number of years.
He was a natural and needed no prodding. I kept him supplied with material; his teacher taught him the tricks of the trade, so to speak, and his inborn talent kept him drawing and drawing and drawing.
He was a happy child. He did very well in school. He played sports. And, although he wasn't a social butterfly, he had a circle of friends with whom he played and laughed and kept secrets from mom and dad. During my darker moments, I sometimes questioned whether or not I had pushed him when he was young, as do many parents of gifted children. When, however, I looked back objectively and when I talked to others, I had to conclude that I didn't push him. Certainly, I was proud of him and took delight in his achievements. But I didn't drive him forward. I didn't have to. To him drawing was as natural as play. He loved it'
Even in high school, Edward was basically a happy adolescent. He was always on the honor roll. He won every art contest in which he participated. He had a small circle of friends and, although quiet, he wasn’t morose or cold, as troubled adolescents sometimes are. He was, however, shy with girls and didn’t date. At the time, I didn't think much of it, but in hindsight I wonder if his shyness made him feel inadequate in his relations with people, especially in comparison to the other areas of life in virtually all of which he excelled.
Edward got a scholarship to a prestigious art school in California and went off to college in 1963. He shared an apartment with another boy and continued to excel in his studies. We wrote regularly, talked on the phone from time to time, and Norm and I visited him two or three times a year while he was at school. We had a wonderful relationship. If at the time anybody had told me that my son would join a cult, I would have said, “you're nuts!”
When Edward was in high school I began to get active in the civil rights movement in California. When he went off to college and I had more time, I got a job with a civil rights organization and started my own career. I didn't worry about Edward; he was doing great so far as I could see. I concentrated on my own work.
Edward met a girl in college, another art student, and almost married her. But their relationship didn’t work out. I surmised from our conversations that he didn't think she was serious enough about her art and didn’t appreciate culture and the life of the mind the way Edward did.
After graduating with high honors, Edward moved to San Francisco and, while working odd jobs to pay the rent, started to sell his paintings. Although it was a struggle at first, he began to get noticed. He had his first private exhibition a couple of years after graduation, and continued to have exhibitions periodically into the 1980s. He truly had a bright future in art.
During this time, a year or two after he moved to San Francisco, Edward met Michelle, who played with a local rock band. I met Michelle about six months after she and Edward first met. They were already talking about getting married. I must say that I liked Michelle. She was pleasant and respectful and seemed sincerely to care a great deal for my son, as he did for her.
Once again, I focused on my own work. Why not? My son’s life was on track. He had a bright future in a profession that he loved. He was about to get married to a lovely girl. He loved his parents and his parents loved him. It was an American success story.
What I didn’t know at that time and wouldn’t know for several years is that Michelle’s bandleader was a follower of an eastern guru; let’s call him “Guru OM.” Guru Om, I later found out, ran a so-called spiritual school in the mountains of Northern California. Like so many others (I now know, after having studied cults), he had supposedly discovered a set of esoteric techniques that constituted the fasttrack to enlightenment. He made a lot of money and accumulated a lot of narcissistic gratification by having his devotees, who received nothing but minimal food and a mattress on a floor, teach these secret techniques to a stream of recruits who kept paying more and more to climb the pyramid to enlightenment.
At the bottom of this pyramid scheme (which is a common structure for many cults) “students” were encouraged to work in the outside world so that they could earn and save the money needed to climb the enlightenment pyramid. But those who moved up the pyramid would discover that their work in the outside world was "on a lower plane” and that they were now ready to come into the guru’s “inner courtyard.” Those in the “inner courtyard” studied rarefied esoteric techniques of meditation and devotion. They also taught those coming in at the lower end of the pyramid. Coincidentally, the money they brought into the guru as teachers, especially given that they worked virtually for nothing, more than compensated the guru for the money he lost from their having abandoned their careers on “the lower plane.” The devotees bought into the illusion of spiritual ascent; the guru bought whatever he wanted.
Shortly after they got married, and maybe even before, Edward and Michelle, with the urging of Michelle’s bandleader, began taking courses with Guru Om’s organization. They had a child, Kristen, in 1974. When Kristen was born, they had been involved with Guru Om for several years, but I never knew. Even had I known, I probably wouldn't have become alarmed, for I’ve always thought of myself as a tolerant and open-minded person. I undoubtedly would have respected their choice to pursue eastern spirituality, even if it puzzled me.
Although it was a bit of a drive to San Francisco, Norm and I visited more often after our grandchild was born. Our visits were typical grandparent visits. We exchanged news about people we knew, took Kristen out, went out to dinner together, and visited tourist spots in San Francisco.
The first time their involvement with Guru Om ever entered our awareness was in the late 70s or early 80s, when Edward asked for a loan to take a course in Northern California. I thought it was an art course, but sometime later one of Edward’s friends, with whom I’d had a chance encounter, casually told me that the course was in eastern spirituality. I was somewhat surprised, but didn’t panic or become concerned; it simply seemed odd to me, for it was out of character for Edward, who had never been very religious. I never even connected Jonestown and Guru Om in my mind. Like so many people, I viewed Jonestown as a monstrous aberration that couldn’t possibly relate to the lives of ordinary people. I did not realize that Jonestown merely represented an extreme example of the types of psychological abuse to which hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people are subjected each day. I would have understood the late Rabbi Maurice Davis’s statements that “the path of anti-semitism leads to Auschwitz” and “the path of segregation leads to lynchings.” But I unfortunately would not have understood the other part of Rabbi Davis’s statement: “the path of cults leads to Jonestown.”
I began to get concerned sometime in the mid-80s, when Edward and Michelle separated and Edward moved to the guru’s center in Northern California. They shared custody and sent Kristen to schools run by their group. We maintained a good relationship with all of them, but no longer had the optimism of a few years earlier. I read some of the early popular books on cults, which helped me better understand the danger my son and his family were in, but they really didn't provide me much direction on what to do.
My alarm bell began ringing loudly in 1986 when we visited Edward at the guru’s center. That is when we discovered that he had given up his art and was working full-time for the guru. I cannot describe the emptiness in my heart when Edward, who had loved art practically since he was in diapers, said to me, “Oh, that [his painting] isn't important; it’s on a lower plane. What I’m doing now is really important.”
When that short visit ended, we were despondent. We learned that he had thrown away a promising, rewarding, and noble career. And we learned that he had packed away dozens of his beautiful paintings in a garage, as though they were old clothes. When I expressed my dismay at this, he simply said, “Do what you want with them.” So, we packed them up and took them home, where they remain today as painful reminders of what my son once was and could have been. Often, I think that my pain must be like that of parents of talented adult children who suffer terrible injuries in an accident and must give up careers that they love. But in some respects I think that my pain is even worse, because the change in my son results not from an accident of nature, but from the deliberate machinations of a person or persons who really care nothing for him, while pretending that they love him. My sadness is poisoned by an irrepressible anger, indignation, and discouragement. I know of many other parents who share these debilitating emotions.
In 1990 an expose of Guru Om was published in a major newspaper. This article confirmed all of my fears. It clearly explained the crass and unscrupulous commercial motives behind the veneer of spirituality that the guru’s organization cultivated so cleverly. Books published in the early 90s helped me better understand the psychological techniques of influence and control such organizations use to hold onto and exploit their members. I realized that the process is much more subtle than the lurid accounts of “brainwashing” popularized by some earlier books.
I tried for a few years to increase my constructive influence over my son. I followed the common advice of trying to enhance communication and rapport by writing letters, telephoning, and visiting without getting confrontational. I tried to reconnect him to people and memories from his past. I tried everything I could think of to try to get him to come home and hopefully become trusting enough to talk to former members of his group. But he was in too deep. Suggestions that worked for others didn’t work for me. Even when my husband died, Edward was barely moved. He dismissed his father’s death as merely the end of one of thousands of incarnations. No big deal. Nothing to grieve about. Perhaps more than anything, his reaction to Norm’s death made me realize just how far he had moved away from me and the life he formerly led.
As my awareness and understanding grew, so did my resolve to do something to fight this evil. I focused on preventive education because it is vital that young people know how to recognize and resist a cultic recruitment. I spoke in high schools, churches, and synagogues. I gave books and other resources to teachers and libraries. I showed young people AFF’s video, “Cults: Saying NO Under Pressure.” I gave out educational materials in colleges.
When my son found out about my educational activities, he became very angry. Bad publicity was cutting into the guru's profit margin, so he began to rail against the “anti-cult movement.” Apparently, we were on such a low plane of existence and were so threatened by the sublime spirituality of the guru and his devotees that we were obsessed with destroying them. Of course, this is nonsense. But demonizing one’s opponents is part of the modus operandi of all totalitarian organizations. Indeed, my son wrote me a brief letter about five years ago in which he said that my activities threatened his spiritual progress and that my refusal to stop these activities compels him to break off all communication. We have not seen each other since this letter. Such letters are not uncommon and are received by families with loved ones in all kinds of groups.
Cults, then, try to put families in a no-win situation. If we feign approval or stifle our critical thoughts, we may now and then be given the bone of a visit. If we confront them with our critical observations, they demonize us and pull our loved one away. Of course, the way out of this dilemma is to fight subtlety with greater subtlety. Families must learn how to assess their situations thoroughly, how to communicate assertively without being confrontational, and they must learn how to strategize. Today’s thought reform consultants, or exit counselors, and cult-aware mental health professionals understand so much more than 15 or even 10 years ago. And as their understanding is written down and made available through videotapes and workshops more and more families will benefit from their expertise.
I hope that progress continues to be made in this area and that others pick up the torch and fight the evils perpetrated by cults. My age is catching up with me, so I no longer have the energy to “hit the pavement.” And I have long-since realized that nothing I can do has much chance of persuading my son to leave his group. But I refuse to lose hope. I try, as much as my faculties enable me, to keep up with events in this field. And I keep reminding myself that this evil affects many people, not just my son and me. It affects my granddaughter, for example, who was educated by my son’s cult. It affects all the other devotees trapped in the same evil system as my son. It affects all the potential recruits who come of age every year. And it affects all of you.
When I remember how many of us are affected, I realize that my hope has many objects. I hope that my granddaughter will one day leave. Indeed, there are signs that she, like many children raised in cults, is rebelling against the system in which she grew up and is reaching toward the outside world. I hope that young people will continue to be warned about cults and psychological manipulation by teachers and clergy – and you. I hope that more mental health professionals and clergy will learn about cults and how to help families and former members. I hope that cult researchers will develop more practical materials for families and former members, so that more people can learn how to fight subtlety with greater subtlety. I hope that more workshops and conferences for families and former members will take place so that more and more people can make the personal connections that are so vital to fully understanding this field.
These are not vain hopes! These are hopes that will be realized. You and others who will come along in years to come will bring these hopes to fruition. Of this I am sure. The fall of the Soviet Union shows that lies, even when they have the power of the state behind them, cannot survive indefinitely. Truth doesn’t go away.
But what about my son? My hope concerning my son resides not in what I know, but in what I don't know. All that I know about his group and his relationship to the group leads me to the conclusion that he will never come out. But I also know from my work in this field that every day long-term cult members walk out of their groups – sneak out in many cases. Virtually every AFF ex-member workshop, for example, has at least one person who had been in a group for 20 years or more. Most of these long-term members leave without their family’s pursuing an intervention. They leave because they are burned out by the work demands. They leave because the weight of inconsistency, contradiction, and hypocrisy becomes more than they can bear. They leave because they are pressured to abuse their children, a command to which they are finally able to say “no.” They leave because they begin to question or dissent and are thrown out of the group. They leave because the leader dies and the group falls apart. They leave because the leader’s repeated false predictions about the future become too hard to rationalize away. They leave for a myriad of reasons that have nothing to do with what their families do or say. Indeed, their families often don’t have a clue about what is going on. One day their loved one is in; another day he or she is out.
I hope that I live long enough to see my son leave his group, or at least to see my granddaughter renounce the group. But even if I don’t, my hope will outlive my breath. I know that my son is still there, buried underneath the rubble that the cult has convinced him is spiritual superiority. He can be awakened. I have seen it happen to others. So I will not stop hoping.
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My story is a sad one. But it is not without hope. I write in order to help other parents with children in cults better understand what has happened to them, what they can do for their loved ones, and what they can do to keep hope alive. Hope is not something that is handed to us, like a Mother’s Day gift. Hope is something we have to work at, sometimes at great emotional cost. There is no formula for keeping hope alive. Sustaining hope is an art, not a science. It requires a sensitive and courageous heart, as well as a discerning intellect.
Talking about hope as an art is painful for me because my son was an artist, and a rather successful artist before his group leader told him that art was “on a lower plane.” I've been told that some experts think that there is a preponderance of artistically gifted people in cults, perhaps because the artistically gifted are more likely to have idealistic aspirations, and more likely to feel out of place in the workaday world. I do not know whether or not that is so. But I do know, based upon the many years I have spent thinking about this problem, that those who join cults are sensitive, intelligent, and honorable people, not the “crazies” that far too many people think they are.
My story dramatically illustrates this point. It shows that joining a cult is more a function of bad luck, of a vulnerable person being in the wrong place at the wrong time, than of personal or family deficiency. I did not always feel this way. There were certainly times when my insides cried out, “what did I do wrong,” even though on the outside I may have been silent and numb. I've had my share of guilt and second-guessing. But I want to stress to those of you who are experiencing these self-recriminations that they are pointless and counterproductive. If your child is in a cult, it’s mainly because of what the cult does to him or her, not what you have done. Surely, you’re not the perfect parent, and neither am I. But our imperfections aren’t the reason that our loved ones throw their lives away in service to a megalomaniacal leader who puts him or herself forward as some kind of saint or god or super-therapist or messianic political figure. When you understand how cults really work, when you understand how manipulation and exploitation pervade them, you will treat yourself more gently, although your anger toward the group leader may grow considerably.
Listen to my story. Although it is not a “worst-case scenario,” such as the stories of those whose children die in cults, it is, I am sad to say, representative of what far too many parents face. I hope to gain strength to keep my hope alive as I write. I hope that you gain strength as you read.
You may have noticed that I write anonymously. I do so (and I change names and many other details of my story) because, however helpless I may feel at this moment, I hang on to the hope that my son will someday leave his group. My son has castigated me for my cult education activities, which I pursue because I feel morally obligated to act. But I have never publicly talked about him on a personal level. I’m afraid that if I did, I would add salt to the wound in our relationship and decrease the probability of his coming out. Therefore, I alter details, as in a docudrama. But I do not alter the gist of the story.
I grew up in the South before the Second World War. I was one of those Southerners who hated segregation and, although I didn't get active in civil rights until the 1950s, I think that my son imbibed much of my idealism while he was growing up.
After the War my husband, Norm, who had been in the Navy in the South Pacific, was stationed in California. Edward was among the first of the baby-boomers and was born shortly before my husband left the service. We stayed in California, where Norm worked as a salesman for a few years. In 1950 we bought a small ranch and moved out to the country. We loved that ranch and were very happy.
Edward was a quiet, sensitive boy who loved the animals on the ranch. I always thought he had a talent for drawing, but I didn't think much of it at the time. But when he started school, his first-grade teacher told me that he was exceptionally gifted and urged me to try to get him private lessons. I found a capable and dedicated art teacher about an hour’s drive from our ranch, and I took Edward for lessons once a week for a number of years.
He was a natural and needed no prodding. I kept him supplied with material; his teacher taught him the tricks of the trade, so to speak, and his inborn talent kept him drawing and drawing and drawing.
He was a happy child. He did very well in school. He played sports. And, although he wasn't a social butterfly, he had a circle of friends with whom he played and laughed and kept secrets from mom and dad. During my darker moments, I sometimes questioned whether or not I had pushed him when he was young, as do many parents of gifted children. When, however, I looked back objectively and when I talked to others, I had to conclude that I didn't push him. Certainly, I was proud of him and took delight in his achievements. But I didn't drive him forward. I didn't have to. To him drawing was as natural as play. He loved it'
Even in high school, Edward was basically a happy adolescent. He was always on the honor roll. He won every art contest in which he participated. He had a small circle of friends and, although quiet, he wasn’t morose or cold, as troubled adolescents sometimes are. He was, however, shy with girls and didn’t date. At the time, I didn't think much of it, but in hindsight I wonder if his shyness made him feel inadequate in his relations with people, especially in comparison to the other areas of life in virtually all of which he excelled.
Edward got a scholarship to a prestigious art school in California and went off to college in 1963. He shared an apartment with another boy and continued to excel in his studies. We wrote regularly, talked on the phone from time to time, and Norm and I visited him two or three times a year while he was at school. We had a wonderful relationship. If at the time anybody had told me that my son would join a cult, I would have said, “you're nuts!”
When Edward was in high school I began to get active in the civil rights movement in California. When he went off to college and I had more time, I got a job with a civil rights organization and started my own career. I didn't worry about Edward; he was doing great so far as I could see. I concentrated on my own work.
Edward met a girl in college, another art student, and almost married her. But their relationship didn’t work out. I surmised from our conversations that he didn't think she was serious enough about her art and didn’t appreciate culture and the life of the mind the way Edward did.
After graduating with high honors, Edward moved to San Francisco and, while working odd jobs to pay the rent, started to sell his paintings. Although it was a struggle at first, he began to get noticed. He had his first private exhibition a couple of years after graduation, and continued to have exhibitions periodically into the 1980s. He truly had a bright future in art.
During this time, a year or two after he moved to San Francisco, Edward met Michelle, who played with a local rock band. I met Michelle about six months after she and Edward first met. They were already talking about getting married. I must say that I liked Michelle. She was pleasant and respectful and seemed sincerely to care a great deal for my son, as he did for her.
Once again, I focused on my own work. Why not? My son’s life was on track. He had a bright future in a profession that he loved. He was about to get married to a lovely girl. He loved his parents and his parents loved him. It was an American success story.
What I didn’t know at that time and wouldn’t know for several years is that Michelle’s bandleader was a follower of an eastern guru; let’s call him “Guru OM.” Guru Om, I later found out, ran a so-called spiritual school in the mountains of Northern California. Like so many others (I now know, after having studied cults), he had supposedly discovered a set of esoteric techniques that constituted the fasttrack to enlightenment. He made a lot of money and accumulated a lot of narcissistic gratification by having his devotees, who received nothing but minimal food and a mattress on a floor, teach these secret techniques to a stream of recruits who kept paying more and more to climb the pyramid to enlightenment.
At the bottom of this pyramid scheme (which is a common structure for many cults) “students” were encouraged to work in the outside world so that they could earn and save the money needed to climb the enlightenment pyramid. But those who moved up the pyramid would discover that their work in the outside world was "on a lower plane” and that they were now ready to come into the guru’s “inner courtyard.” Those in the “inner courtyard” studied rarefied esoteric techniques of meditation and devotion. They also taught those coming in at the lower end of the pyramid. Coincidentally, the money they brought into the guru as teachers, especially given that they worked virtually for nothing, more than compensated the guru for the money he lost from their having abandoned their careers on “the lower plane.” The devotees bought into the illusion of spiritual ascent; the guru bought whatever he wanted.
Shortly after they got married, and maybe even before, Edward and Michelle, with the urging of Michelle’s bandleader, began taking courses with Guru Om’s organization. They had a child, Kristen, in 1974. When Kristen was born, they had been involved with Guru Om for several years, but I never knew. Even had I known, I probably wouldn't have become alarmed, for I’ve always thought of myself as a tolerant and open-minded person. I undoubtedly would have respected their choice to pursue eastern spirituality, even if it puzzled me.
Although it was a bit of a drive to San Francisco, Norm and I visited more often after our grandchild was born. Our visits were typical grandparent visits. We exchanged news about people we knew, took Kristen out, went out to dinner together, and visited tourist spots in San Francisco.
The first time their involvement with Guru Om ever entered our awareness was in the late 70s or early 80s, when Edward asked for a loan to take a course in Northern California. I thought it was an art course, but sometime later one of Edward’s friends, with whom I’d had a chance encounter, casually told me that the course was in eastern spirituality. I was somewhat surprised, but didn’t panic or become concerned; it simply seemed odd to me, for it was out of character for Edward, who had never been very religious. I never even connected Jonestown and Guru Om in my mind. Like so many people, I viewed Jonestown as a monstrous aberration that couldn’t possibly relate to the lives of ordinary people. I did not realize that Jonestown merely represented an extreme example of the types of psychological abuse to which hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people are subjected each day. I would have understood the late Rabbi Maurice Davis’s statements that “the path of anti-semitism leads to Auschwitz” and “the path of segregation leads to lynchings.” But I unfortunately would not have understood the other part of Rabbi Davis’s statement: “the path of cults leads to Jonestown.”
I began to get concerned sometime in the mid-80s, when Edward and Michelle separated and Edward moved to the guru’s center in Northern California. They shared custody and sent Kristen to schools run by their group. We maintained a good relationship with all of them, but no longer had the optimism of a few years earlier. I read some of the early popular books on cults, which helped me better understand the danger my son and his family were in, but they really didn't provide me much direction on what to do.
My alarm bell began ringing loudly in 1986 when we visited Edward at the guru’s center. That is when we discovered that he had given up his art and was working full-time for the guru. I cannot describe the emptiness in my heart when Edward, who had loved art practically since he was in diapers, said to me, “Oh, that [his painting] isn't important; it’s on a lower plane. What I’m doing now is really important.”
When that short visit ended, we were despondent. We learned that he had thrown away a promising, rewarding, and noble career. And we learned that he had packed away dozens of his beautiful paintings in a garage, as though they were old clothes. When I expressed my dismay at this, he simply said, “Do what you want with them.” So, we packed them up and took them home, where they remain today as painful reminders of what my son once was and could have been. Often, I think that my pain must be like that of parents of talented adult children who suffer terrible injuries in an accident and must give up careers that they love. But in some respects I think that my pain is even worse, because the change in my son results not from an accident of nature, but from the deliberate machinations of a person or persons who really care nothing for him, while pretending that they love him. My sadness is poisoned by an irrepressible anger, indignation, and discouragement. I know of many other parents who share these debilitating emotions.
In 1990 an expose of Guru Om was published in a major newspaper. This article confirmed all of my fears. It clearly explained the crass and unscrupulous commercial motives behind the veneer of spirituality that the guru’s organization cultivated so cleverly. Books published in the early 90s helped me better understand the psychological techniques of influence and control such organizations use to hold onto and exploit their members. I realized that the process is much more subtle than the lurid accounts of “brainwashing” popularized by some earlier books.
I tried for a few years to increase my constructive influence over my son. I followed the common advice of trying to enhance communication and rapport by writing letters, telephoning, and visiting without getting confrontational. I tried to reconnect him to people and memories from his past. I tried everything I could think of to try to get him to come home and hopefully become trusting enough to talk to former members of his group. But he was in too deep. Suggestions that worked for others didn’t work for me. Even when my husband died, Edward was barely moved. He dismissed his father’s death as merely the end of one of thousands of incarnations. No big deal. Nothing to grieve about. Perhaps more than anything, his reaction to Norm’s death made me realize just how far he had moved away from me and the life he formerly led.
As my awareness and understanding grew, so did my resolve to do something to fight this evil. I focused on preventive education because it is vital that young people know how to recognize and resist a cultic recruitment. I spoke in high schools, churches, and synagogues. I gave books and other resources to teachers and libraries. I showed young people AFF’s video, “Cults: Saying NO Under Pressure.” I gave out educational materials in colleges.
When my son found out about my educational activities, he became very angry. Bad publicity was cutting into the guru's profit margin, so he began to rail against the “anti-cult movement.” Apparently, we were on such a low plane of existence and were so threatened by the sublime spirituality of the guru and his devotees that we were obsessed with destroying them. Of course, this is nonsense. But demonizing one’s opponents is part of the modus operandi of all totalitarian organizations. Indeed, my son wrote me a brief letter about five years ago in which he said that my activities threatened his spiritual progress and that my refusal to stop these activities compels him to break off all communication. We have not seen each other since this letter. Such letters are not uncommon and are received by families with loved ones in all kinds of groups.
Cults, then, try to put families in a no-win situation. If we feign approval or stifle our critical thoughts, we may now and then be given the bone of a visit. If we confront them with our critical observations, they demonize us and pull our loved one away. Of course, the way out of this dilemma is to fight subtlety with greater subtlety. Families must learn how to assess their situations thoroughly, how to communicate assertively without being confrontational, and they must learn how to strategize. Today’s thought reform consultants, or exit counselors, and cult-aware mental health professionals understand so much more than 15 or even 10 years ago. And as their understanding is written down and made available through videotapes and workshops more and more families will benefit from their expertise.
I hope that progress continues to be made in this area and that others pick up the torch and fight the evils perpetrated by cults. My age is catching up with me, so I no longer have the energy to “hit the pavement.” And I have long-since realized that nothing I can do has much chance of persuading my son to leave his group. But I refuse to lose hope. I try, as much as my faculties enable me, to keep up with events in this field. And I keep reminding myself that this evil affects many people, not just my son and me. It affects my granddaughter, for example, who was educated by my son’s cult. It affects all the other devotees trapped in the same evil system as my son. It affects all the potential recruits who come of age every year. And it affects all of you.
When I remember how many of us are affected, I realize that my hope has many objects. I hope that my granddaughter will one day leave. Indeed, there are signs that she, like many children raised in cults, is rebelling against the system in which she grew up and is reaching toward the outside world. I hope that young people will continue to be warned about cults and psychological manipulation by teachers and clergy – and you. I hope that more mental health professionals and clergy will learn about cults and how to help families and former members. I hope that cult researchers will develop more practical materials for families and former members, so that more people can learn how to fight subtlety with greater subtlety. I hope that more workshops and conferences for families and former members will take place so that more and more people can make the personal connections that are so vital to fully understanding this field.
These are not vain hopes! These are hopes that will be realized. You and others who will come along in years to come will bring these hopes to fruition. Of this I am sure. The fall of the Soviet Union shows that lies, even when they have the power of the state behind them, cannot survive indefinitely. Truth doesn’t go away.
But what about my son? My hope concerning my son resides not in what I know, but in what I don't know. All that I know about his group and his relationship to the group leads me to the conclusion that he will never come out. But I also know from my work in this field that every day long-term cult members walk out of their groups – sneak out in many cases. Virtually every AFF ex-member workshop, for example, has at least one person who had been in a group for 20 years or more. Most of these long-term members leave without their family’s pursuing an intervention. They leave because they are burned out by the work demands. They leave because the weight of inconsistency, contradiction, and hypocrisy becomes more than they can bear. They leave because they are pressured to abuse their children, a command to which they are finally able to say “no.” They leave because they begin to question or dissent and are thrown out of the group. They leave because the leader dies and the group falls apart. They leave because the leader’s repeated false predictions about the future become too hard to rationalize away. They leave for a myriad of reasons that have nothing to do with what their families do or say. Indeed, their families often don’t have a clue about what is going on. One day their loved one is in; another day he or she is out.
I hope that I live long enough to see my son leave his group, or at least to see my granddaughter renounce the group. But even if I don’t, my hope will outlive my breath. I know that my son is still there, buried underneath the rubble that the cult has convinced him is spiritual superiority. He can be awakened. I have seen it happen to others. So I will not stop hoping.
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