Today Marjoe restricts the use of his talents to his acting career and to social causes he deeply believes in. Foremost among those causes is informing the public about some of the rhetorical techniques that are being used to manipulate their thoughts and emotions. Most techniques Marjoe is in command of are simple and age-old, but so effective that they can be equally powerful even when an audience has been explicitly forewarned of their use. Toward the end of our conversation, Marjoe told us a story that revealed the fineness of his rhetorical skills. In contrast to the massive physical experiences such as intense group rituals and intimate personal crises that have been recognized as major contributors to the snapping moment, Marjoe demonstrated how words alone, artfully manipulated, may be used to influence groups and individuals, even to the point of evoking the overwhelming emotional response of being "saved."
"I lecture in about twenty colleges a year," he began, "and I do a faith-healing demonstration -- but I always make them ask for it. I tell them that I don't believe in it, that I use a lot of tricks; and the title of the lecture is 'Rhetoric and Charisma,' so I've already told them how large masses are manipulated by a charismatic figure. I've given them the whole rap explaining how it's done, but they still want to see it. So I throw it all right back at them. I say, 'No, you don't really want to see it.' And they say, 'Oh, yes. We do. We do!' And I say, 'But you don't believe in it anyway, so I can't do it.' And they say, 'We believe. We believe!' So after about twenty minutes of this I ask for a volunteer, and I have a girl come up and I say, 'So you want to feel better?' And I say, 'You're lying to me! You're just up here for a good time and you want to impress all these people and you want to make an ass out of me and an ass out of this whole thing, so why don't you go back and sit down?' I really get hard on her, and she says, 'No, no, I believe!' And I keep going back and forth until she's almost in tears. And then, even though this is in a college crowd and I'm only doing it as a joke, I just say my same old line, 'In the name of Jesus!' and touch them on the head, and wham, they fall down flat every time."
5 Snapping as Something New
everybody happy?
WE-WE-WE
& to hell with the chappy
who doesn't agree
-- e. e. cummings
Our conversation with Marjoe gave us a rare view of the many ways in which rudimentary rhetorical skills can be used to manipulate the emotions of individuals and whole audiences. But it did not explain what happened to Jean Turner in est or to Lawrence and Cathy Gordon in the Unification Church. To understand those experiences we need to take a closer look at America in the sixties, an era that began in a clutter of powerful new therapeutic techniques and religious practices and ended in a runaway, mind-altering technology of experience.
The wheels of this new technology began to turn in the fifties, when America was still on its snowballing course of postwar affluence and conspicuous consumption. By the end of that decade, the simple high of material splendor had already begun to flatten out. Around the country, people awoke from the American Dream in a cold sweat of existential despair, as the triumphs of business and applied science which had showered America with "things" was overpowered by a crying hunger for new and meaningful experience .
The first steps in that direction were taken by the poets and writers of the Beat Generation, who set off to mine the rich spiritual lodes of the East. Zen Buddhist practices first cropped up in the poetry and literature of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouae. The benefits of meditation were expressly laid out in the popular writings of Alan Watts, most notably in his book The Way of Zen, which opened the East to a stream of traffic that has been bumper to bumper ever since. And perhaps the most influential figure of all was British author Aldous Huxley, whose short, brilliant essay The Doors of Perception, as far back as 1954, linked emerging trends in Eastern thought to psychedelic drugs and blasted a gaping portal in our Western notion of reality.
These sparks touched off the consciousness explosion, a cultural revolution that brought Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass), and LSD out of Harvard and led an entire generation to "turn on" to new modes of thought and experience. Before long, in California's fertile climate of open enjoyment and experimentation, these rituals and practices blossomed into a full-fledged movement for the exploration of man's untapped human potential.
It was Abraham Maslow, father figure of the new movement as well as of its related discipline, humanistic psychology, who set the upper limit of that potential when he marked off the realm of peak experience. He identified it as the "core-religious" or "transcendent" experience, the nucleus of every known high or "revealed" religion; the mystical, revelatory, ecstatic moment that was universally endowed with supernatural significance. Maslow's intention, however, was to view this peak objectively. He proposed that this new category of human experience be examined on its own merits, free of religion. He cited the promise of psychedelic drugs as just one manner in which all human beings could investigate moments of peak experience for themselves.
Maslow's endorsement of peak experience sounded the keynote of the sixties. It became the pot of gold at the end of the search, the breakthrough for which all that vague despair of the fifties had been longing. At the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, the cradle of the newborn movement, innovative techniques for creating intense sensory and intellectual experience were experimented with in a receptive atmosphere. There our knowledge of how individual personality may be affected by intense experience was undoubtedly pushed forward many decades in the period of only a few years. Along the way, Esalen's spiritual and psychic voyagers spent fleeting moments in realms of consciousness the human mind had only dreamed of until then, or mentioned cryptically or cloaked in metaphor.
In no time, Eastern practices and psychedelics became high fashion among both scientists and casual experimenters. The fledgling movement spurred an outpouring of new therapeutic techniques from what had been largely private, professional settings into loudly public, experiential arenas. The encounter group or T-group, as it was originally called, one of the first to appear, had as its birthplace the National Training Laboratories of Bethel, Maine. Before long, a glut of radical therapeutic techniques -- some old, some new -- came out of the woodwork. Among them were psychodrama, a role-playing therapy developed in the twenties by a Viennese physician named Jacob Moreno; psychosynthesis, a combination of group and individual therapeutic techniques developed by an Italian psychoanalyst; guided fantasy, a systematic daydreaming technique outlined in the forties by a French psycho-therapist; bioenergetics, a body therapy from the fifties developed by American psychiatrist Alexander Lowen, a former student of Wilhelm Reich; and Rolfing, a form of deep-muscle manipulation pioneered in California by Dr. Ida Rolf, a biologist turned therapist.
Each technique was capable of producing emotional highs, peak experiences, and other dramatic personal breakthroughs. Throughout the sixties, they were intermixed ad-lib, along with drugs and Eastern practices of zen, yoga, and other forms of meditation, to bring about profound adventures in human awareness. In this popular free-for-all of experimentation, these powerful techniques lacked even the most general guidelines for such extensive and nonprofessional use. In the aftermath of all their peaking, bursting, and mind-blowing ecstasy, individuals broke through boundaries of human awareness into unforeseen -- and unruly -- reaches of consciousness and personality. One man's outburst of screaming and violence became another's "release of blockages" and still another's "cosmic vision," for at the time no one could say with certainty who was doing what to whom. And with what. And how.
The only indisputable interpretations were in fact spiritual ones, for the new field of humanistic psychology, still in the process of defining itself, was unable to supply sufficient alternative explanations to meet the demand. So in the late sixties the movement began to strip to its essentially theological underpinnings. The notion of transcendence became entangled in its fundamentally Eastern, Hindu roots, and the theo
ry and practice of encounter edged closer to its revivalist forerunners. By the end of the decade, the human potential movement had become a roving, raving potpourri of therapy and religion, science and mysticism, the avant-garde and the occult.
Suddenly, the golden age of Esalen and the human potential movement began to tarnish. The drugs got out of hand, the techniques went awry, and the vision of mankind emerging to meet its destiny grew nearsighted. In the early seventies, along with the souring of so many counterculture themes, the voyage to self-awareness made a series of wrong turns and lost its way. The Aquarian dream hit the skids during the final agony of Vietnam and bottomed out concurrent with the nightmare of Watergate. In that time of social and political pandemonium, the energy and excitement of the sixties were consumed, and the vibrant culture of that decade fell into a state of aimlessness and torpor. It took just one more hammerblow to drive the final nail into the coffin.
---
That blow landed hard in the consummate American element of mass marketing, as the methods of big business were brought into the movement, took it over, and changed its character altogether. Mass-marketed therapies led the way, pooling bits and pieces of psychoanalysis, psychodrama, and other old techniques with the new group techniques of encounter and guided fantasy, and with Eastern practices of meditation. The first original conglomerations of these techniques were neatly packaged and distributed coast to coast under names like Mind Dynamics, Arica, and Silva Mind Control. Transcendental Meditation was already being peddled like speed reading; Scientology's Dianetics had been mass-marketing its own popular therapy since the fifties. At the same time, America's religious cults got into the swing, fanning out quietly across the country in massive fund-raising and recruitment drives. Cults such as the Hare Krishna, the Divine Light Mission, and the Unification Church cleaned up their images and outfits, honing their sales techniques to razor sharpness and making use of expert business and legal counsel.
In many instances, these new programs were being engineered by top experts from Madison Avenue. The Hare Krishna hired its own admen; like I Found It, est gave a top position to a former Coca-Cola executive. And it worked! The right buttons were pushed and Americans let their appetites for experience run hog-wild. Suddenly, without apology, as if another world war had just ended, the early seventies saw Americans take to meeting their own needs for experience and little else. It was the coming of what social analyst Peter Marin termed the New Narcissism, an era that pop-critic Tom Wolfe dubbed the "Me" Decade. In their eyes, the noble desire for self-realization had turned into a simple obsession with self-indulgence and immediate physical sensation.
What no one noticed, however, was the important change that was taking place at a much more fundamental level. As a direct result of techniques and practices that have profound effects on the workings of the mind, people were not merely shifting their attention and changing their beliefs in the seventies; they were snapping.
The cults provide some of the most vivid examples of the way in which America's technology of experience has been used to bring about fundamental alterations of personality. For many cult members, the phenomenon of snapping is the product of a comprehensive attack on human awareness. During the first moments of contact, potential converts may be manipulated with precision by the rhetorical ploys that Marjoe so deftly demonstrated: personal confrontation, conversation, group lectures, and other modes of persuasion. Once they have been drawn into the cult, they may be bombarded with intellectual concepts and religious doctrines that they cannot fit together and led through religious rituals that induce intense emotional highs and overwhelming peak experiences.
Converts may then be subjected to additional personal encounters in which their new experiences are given prescribed cult interpretations. Very often during this period, physiological stresses such as poor diet and exhaustion further weaken their resistance to suggestion and command. In some situations throughout recruitment, conversion, and initiation, each individual is given specific orders to refrain from doubt and told not to question the wisdom of cult doctrine.
Inevitably, under the cumulative pressures of this sweeping physical, emotional, and intellectual blitz, self-control and personal beliefs give way. Isolated from the world and surrounded by exotic trappings, the converts absorb the cult's altered ways of thought and daily life. In a very short time, before they realize what is happening, while their attention is diverted to contrived spiritual conflicts and further weakened by lack of food and sleep, the new cult members slide into a state of mind in which they are no longer capable of thinking for themselves.
It is our contention that this comprehensive attack strikes at the heart of consciousness, undermining fundamental processes of thought and feeling that make up individual awareness, volition, and personality. Yet to zealous cult members this new state of mind often has another name: happiness. Their characteristic public pronouncement is that they have found true happiness, fulfillment on both personal and spiritual planes in the simple life and labor of the cult. Their ongoing state is a constant high, an emotional peak that maintains itself. When it falters for whatever reason, cult members may resort to any of a number of techniques of meditation, chanting, or fervent prayer in which they have been carefully instructed, all guaranteed to return them to the state of bliss that is their reward for unqualified devotion.
Except for the religious component, virtually all the mass therapies use the same basic techniques. They recruit their participants through similar informal channels -- posters, telephone and mail solicitations, and word of mouth. Here the individual is drawn into an intense group setting or therapeutic session in the hope of having some life-changing breakthrough. Then, as in est, these profound experiences may be created by various individual and group processes and "training" techniques. Group leaders may instruct participants in meditation or guide them through vivid fantasies. They may give interminable lectures, filled with psychological and scientific jargon, or sow intense conflicts in these individuals over the entire range of their life experiences, from infancy through childhood and adolescence to their current work and family relationships.
Caught in this crossfire of verbiage and long-buried emotion in the context of a physically grueling group ordeal, the individual may reach a state of explosive overstimulation or emotional collapse. In the aftermath of this overwhelming new experience, he or she may enter a state of mind that is perceived as a kind of renewal or rebirth and which may be, in fact, a protracted physical and emotional high. Successful mass-therapy graduates may achieve a state of euphoria, their problems solved because they have, in effect, stopped worrying about the things that were bothering them.
---
At the present time, our language has no appropriate term for this new way of coping with the problems of life. We can describe the process as one of shutting off the mind, of not-thinking. In our view this is the underlying appeal of nearly every religious cult and mass therapy in America today, as well as the unstated attraction of many branches of the Evangelical movement.
What kind of cultural environment breeds this widespread need to shut off the mind? It could be argued convincingly that the need is universal, that everyone -- from Athenians to Sufis to voodoo tribesmen to modern Americans -- must have some periodic release from the ordeal of being human. In that sense, the rituals and techniques which throughout history have been used to create peak experiences and moments of enlightenment may be looked on as vital sources of rest and relaxation for the mind, momentary breathing spells that hold great powers of insight, healing, and renewal.
But what value can there be in engineering these experiences to shut down the workings of the mind altogether, to stunt the process of thought and leave people numb to their own feelings and the world around them? Throughout history, this kind of attack on human awareness has proved an efficient method of controlling members of tribes, societies, and whole nations in which little value is placed upon individuality. The state o
f mind it produces has a tradition that dates back to the dawn of civilization.
In the remote bush country of Australia, aboriginal tribes still engage in rituals perfected more than 16,000 years ago to induce a state of mind in their adolescents that is surprisingly similar to the plight of thousands of America's brightest youth today. Joseph Chilton Pearce described the technique in his book The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. Around puberty, the young male of the Ananda tribe of central Australia is taken from his mother, isolated in the wilderness, and deprived of food for a prolonged period of time. He is kept awake at night in a state of constant fear by the eerie, whirling sound of the bullroarer, a native hunting device, until the combined physical and emotional stresses reach their maximum effect. At that moment, the elders of the tribe converge on the terrified youth wearing grotesque masks and covered with vivid body paints and proceed to subject him to a painful ritual of initiation into manhood. If he survives the ordeal, the young man emerges from the ritual in a drastically reduced state of mind, his awareness continuing at a level only sufficient to allow absolute adherence to the strict laws and taboos of the tribe. The adult Ananda tribesman may spend his entire life in this altered state the natives call Dream Time. He will stand on one leg for hours, completely motionless, in a waking trance so deep that, as Pearce says, flies may crawl across his eyeballs without causing him to blink.
Snapping Page 7
