RedHanded
Page 11
The Robin Hoods of Sex
At the heart of incel ideology lies the objectification and commodification of sex and women; one of the most prevalent talking points you’ll come across if you ever visit an incel forum is the idea that women and sex should be redistributed—like a tax plan. Incels compare their sexual plight to that of the poor who are deprived of food, shelter, or other basic human rights; they argue that if money can be taken from the rich to help support these people through monetary redistribution and taxation, then it’s only fair that all the women in the land be apportioned out to men by some sort of government-sanctioned girlfriend or wife program. (We’re not making this up—this is what they are talking about with absolute conviction and sincerity on their forums. We’ve seen it.)
Basically, these incels claim that their virginity is a discrimination issue—some even compare it to apartheid and they are adamant that only a state-funded girlfriend distribution program, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. (Imagine how outraged they would be if they were on the other end of the gender pay gap or had essential healthcare products taxed as luxury items. The horror.)
Militant Misogyny
Thankfully, it’s not just us who think that violent incels are terrorists. The Anti-Defamation League in the US has been keeping an eye on incel groups for years, so sure are they that this community is a serious emerging domestic threat. The study “Recognizing the Violent Extremist Ideology of ‘Incels’” by Shannon Zimmerman, Luisa Ryan, and David Duriesmith clearly highlights to us why laughing them off is the wrong way to think about incels. These men fit in perfectly on the spectrum of extremist groups we all already know—groups that may span a vast range of political ideologies, from white supremacists to the so-called Islamic State, but remain united by one thing: militant misogyny.
Terrifyingly, this is an ideology that is rapidly growing. Up until 2017 the Reddit forum r/incels had around 40,000 active members when it was banned that year. Unfortunately, this ban just drove the incels underground into fragmented forums. Now estimates place the incelosphere at around 100,000 members, and we would guess that this is probably a conservative estimate.
It’s also not just the women-hating that these terror movements have in common, it’s their sense of grievance. Amy Barnhorst, the vice chair of community psychiatry at the University of California, has studied mass shootings for years. According to her what ties many of these kinds of killers together is “the grievance, the entitlement, the envy of others, the feeling that they deserve something that the world is not giving them. And they are angry at others that they see are getting it.”
This kind of hostility and feeling like the world is out to screw you can be linked to some mental health issues and personality disorders. So while mental health certainly plays a role in these attacks, focusing only on that factor (as we saw in the cases of Minassian, Rodger, and other incel attacks) just doesn’t give us the full story.
Many of these violent incels have no interest in self-reflection; they don’t sit down and think about why they may not be happy or thriving. And this isn’t us just assuming this—remember, they themselves call for taking the black pill. This “self-acceptance” that they are sexually doomed no matter what they do acts as a shield for incels to avoid facing up to their issues or asking for help. Changing ideologies is much easier than changing yourself.
Since it is clear that what motivates incels is a distinct ideology—a hatred of women—and that they see it as a political issue, several questions arise. Why isn’t this hatred taken more seriously as the reason behind these kinds of attacks? And why doesn’t terrorism seem to be taken into account when it comes to sentencing these criminals? After all, if it were based on the crime being terror-related the sentence would most likely be far longer.
We think the reason it’s hard for people, and even law enforcement, to see misogyny for the killer ideology it is is because of just how widespread and mainstream misogyny already is within our society. So even when we have men who actively go out to kill women—explicitly stating that they are doing so because of a political ideology they hold and for a social cause they believe in—we as a society still just look at these crimes as the separate acts of an individual and not as terrorism.
What’s fascinating is that incels are by no means unique in this way of thinking; again, not only does misogyny already exist within every layer of our society, but consider for a moment how militant misogyny unites many disparate terror groups. Specifically, how all of them feel aggrieved by female empowerment and want not just a return to “traditional” gender roles but the total subjugation of women. The so-called Islamic State, neo-Nazis, incels, etc. all obsess over the purity of women and men’s “right” to have unquestioned access to women’s bodies. One thing that should be clear is that we must all call terrorism terrorism when we see it. We must also not sideline incels as if they are somehow inexpiable anomalies hiding in their mom’s garages behind their computer screens. We cannot ignore that every single day around the world, countless women are killed for the exact same things incels cite as reasons to hate and even harm them. Women are killed for not being sexually available enough, but they are also killed for being “sluts.”
We must call this dangerous movement terrorism. And we must also remember that incel numbers are growing at such an alarming rate because the ideology of misogyny is not a difficult one for a person to adopt. It doesn’t require someone to sit down and read masses of ancient scripture, learn another language, or even change their lifestyle. It is a readily available way of thinking that tells lonely men seeking validation that it’s not their fault. Incels are far from the only people to hate women; they are caricatures and the physical embodiment of the misogyny that pervades every layer of every society.
5
CULTS
Agriculture, Artillery, and a Ukiah Utopia
KILLING, AS WE HAVE SEEN, CAN MAKE A KILLER FEEL omnipotent. To take another’s life, to watch the light leave their eyes, to know that in that moment you were powerful enough to choose whether another human being continued to exist or not—these are the things that go on in the twisted mind and disturbed morality of a killer. What could be mightier or more godlike?
Well, there are a few killers who think they have the answer to this particularly harrowing (if rhetorical) question. After all, doing depraved things to other people yourself is one thing, but imagine if you were able to convince someone else to kill, rape, or torture? What if you could, just with your words, charisma, and charm, manipulate someone into committing the most heinous of acts? And what if this person was relatively “normal”—an individual who, without your influence, would never have even thought to harm another human being?
What if you then took it to another level and were able to control the lives of an entire group of people? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate power trip? At that point, wouldn’t you be the absolute king of control? To this, the cult leader says hell yes.
In this chapter we’re going to explore two types of killers: the killer cult members, those seemingly ordinary people who become murderers at the behest of a leader; and the cult leaders themselves, those who take the very fundamentals of what makes a killer tick—power and control—one step further by ensnaring hundreds, if not thousands, of people in their web of manipulation, coercion, and deviance.
This chapter is jam-packed full of complex questions. What are the mechanisms of cult formation? How does the leader take and keep control? Why don’t cult members leave when fucking crazy shit starts to happen? We’ll get to all of it, we promise, but let’s begin with what makes the cult member tick. What motivates a person to leave behind their entire life and follow a stranger who demands total submission?
#Cultgoals
We should start off by clarifying one thing: People don’t join cults thinking they are joining a cult. People join religious organizations, political movements, yoga groups, knitting circles, fermented juic
e cleanse gangs… Whatever it is, people are just looking to belong, to find their tribe, to identify a higher purpose.
We humans are very susceptible to someone offering us a definitive answer to life’s big questions. We welcome the opportunity to feel like our lives have true meaning, like we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves. Cult leaders instinctively understand this very human need, perhaps better than most. (Except maybe the marketers behind Crossfit, Herbalife, and luxury yoga apparel… )
The aspiring cult leader draws people in by promising them the impossible. They will pledge to solve everyone’s problems; heal the sick; enlighten the ignorant; help the “normos” transcend to a higher plane of being. They can give you it all; you just have to hand over your faith (and of course all your money and your life, too, but who’s reading the fine print?).
Successful cult leaders are highly manipulative and skilled profilers of human behavior. They know how to spot and attract the right kind of people for their purposes. Yet these purposes—while always centered on a narcissistic need for adoration, power, and control—do vary from leader to leader. Let’s compare a few…
Aum Shinrikyo, Yoga for Terrorists
Not unlike religious leaders, cult leaders will often identify what’s missing from a society and seek to fill that gap with their own teachings and beliefs. Take, for example, Japanese cult leader Shoko Asahara. In the 1980s he saw that Japan had been undergoing a huge transformation, spiritually speaking.
This change had started in the 1930s, when the prominent religions of Buddhism and native Shintoism were banned and replaced by State Shinto. State Shinto stuck to traditional Shinto beliefs but made one crucial change—the Japanese emperor was now considered a divine being. However, after those atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this god-claim became hard for the emperor to continue to pull off. And so, when the emperor was forced to hand over his divine rights and step down from his God-on-earth position, Japan went into religious flux.
By the 1970s, Japan was booming economically and the Japanese people were ready for something new, so hundreds of new religious groups tried to muscle in and carve out a tasty slice of the holy pie—and of course, get their hands on all that delicious disposable income. According to David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall in their book The Cult at the End of the World, Shoko Asahara was no different. Though Asahara was personally motivated by other desires as well—like all cult leaders—he had a desperate need to feel important.
Asahara was born in 1955 into an extremely poor family. As a child, his sight deteriorated and as a teenager he was sent to a state school for blind children. It was there that Asahara realized his need, and ability, for commanding power and control over his peers. He was one of the few teenagers at his school who still had partial sight in one eye, and he used this to become an oppressive playground dictator and con man.
As he grew up, Asahara realized that by appealing to social outcasts, and by exploiting Japan’s spiritual turbulence, he could infiltrate society. And he wasn’t wrong. Using some nifty yoga tricks—like the earth-shattering “standing on one leg” technique to convince people he could levitate—Shoko Asahara turned a group of weirdos called the Immortal Mountain Wizard Association (we’re not kidding) operating out of a rented yoga studio in Tokyo into Aum Shinrikyo—a doomsday cult that grew to over 40,000 followers worldwide and is estimated to have been worth $1 billion by the time Asahara was arrested.
Like many cult leaders, though, Asahara wasn’t content with his legions of dedicated followers or even all the money—he had to escalate. After a failed attempt to gain political power, Asahara decided to get his revenge on the Japanese parliament by ringing in the very apocalypse he had spent years predicting, all with a little bioterrorism in the form of multiple sarin gas attacks in the mid-nineties. In total, Aum Shinrikyo killed 27 people, but some estimates state that as many as 6,000 people were injured. Eventually Shoko Asahara was caught and convicted. He was hanged by the state in 2018.
Asahara’s motivations for creating Aum Shinrikyo were quite standard. He longed for attention and adoration. As we’ll see, this is highly typical of cult leaders; they are generally profiled as narcissistic psychopaths who are obsessed with power. And since we’ve already talked about psychopaths in this book, it’s worth taking a look at narcissists, and more specifically, narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). See the sidebar on page 118.
NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER (NPD)
We’ve all called someone a narcissist—whether it’s that person who posts an embarrassing number of selfies, that friend who never asks you about your life but insists you listen to every second of their day, or the writer who is convinced their privileged suburban childhood was actually super hard and very worthy of its own screenplay/novel/epic poem. They may well all have narcissistic tendencies, but it doesn’t mean they have NPD.
According to the DSM-5, there are nine traits associated with NPD. And like many other disorders, it exists on a spectrum. Individuals can be narcissistic to varying degrees. For a diagnosis of NPD, one would need to demonstrate at least five out of the nine traits below. Cult leaders are very likely to hit almost all of the traits and therefore score very highly indeed.
1 Grandiose sense of self-importance
2 Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
3 Belief that they are special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions
4 Need for excessive admiration
5 Sense of entitlement
6 Interpersonally exploitative behavior
7 Lack of empathy
8 Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of them
9 Demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes
Cult leaders tend to be people who feel like outcasts in ordinary society, but they become convinced that this is just because they are special and misunderstood. They fervently believe that they are destined for much more than their current lot in life and that they are only ostracized because society is ignorant and jealous. So, they conclude that if the proles will not bow to their genius, then they have to create a world in which they will receive the godlike level of love, adulation, and attention they truly deserve. (Or they start a podcast.)
There can, however, also be other motivators sprinkled onto this sundae of self-importance. Some cult leaders are driven to create secretive sects in order to normalize their own perversions…
The Children of God, Flirting for Fish
Let’s consider, for example, the Children of God cult. Their founder and leader David Berg was a disturbed pedophile and sex offender. He knew that society would never accept his particular proclivities for sexual deviance, so he decided to forge his own society where his perversions would not only be normal, but holy. For someone like Berg, starting a cult was the perfect solution; he now had access to cult members’ children. He took immense pleasure in transforming what “normal” was for his followers and reshaping it through the warped lens of his own evil.
It seems unbelievable, but Berg was able to successfully “reeducate” his followers into believing that “God was love and love was sex, so there should be no limits, regardless of age or relationship when it comes to sex.” Berg used this key tenet—backed up with propagandistic material he churned out about incest and pedophilia—to actively encourage the members of the Children of God to sexually abuse minors, often even their own children. Most of the people who committed these atrocities within the cult had not previously shown any inclination toward pedophilia, but yet they were able to cross this horrific line because of David Berg.
The mechanisms and mentality of how and why cultists are able to reorder their thinking to this extent is something we’ll come back to later in this chapter. For now, let’s consider why so many cults have ended in mass murder.
Always Have an Endgame
Predictions of the end of the world, guarantees of grand enlightenment, or promises of escaping your human flesh cage and transcending into a cosmic light-being on another planet are simply untenable. A doomsday leader who keeps promising the end of the world, like Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate, for example, has to at some point deliver. Sure, you can keep pushing the date of the apocalypse further and further back, but that gets embarrassing (ask the Mormons) and eventually something has to happen. There has to be an endgame.
And if it looks like the world isn’t about to be destroyed in a fiery apocalypse, or that the aliens on the comet aren’t about to drop by and pick you all up, the cult leader has to find another, more permanent solution. The narcissistic, psychopathic personality of a cult leader would never allow the cult’s followers to simply walk away. The leader could never admit that maybe they were wrong. If the end of the cult-y road has been reached, well then, the only option is to go out with a bang. But cult leaders don’t usually start cults with mass murder in mind, and they also don’t always start from a place of normalizing deviancy. Cults, just like religions, can begin from a place of love and altruism before diving headfirst into something nightmarish.
And that brings us to the main man of this chapter, the Reverend Jim Jones: a person who was criminally responsible for the deaths of 909 people in the deadliest mass cult execution of all time—the massacre at (the not-at-all narcissistically named) Jonestown.