The problem with this is that commonsense dictates that a solution to any problem must come from a reaction to the problem at the personal, or local, level. Commonsense cannot be tied to general rules, but requires mentation within the individual to a given situation. Hence, a politicisation of commonsense into general rules becomes the opposite of commonsense – in effect, an absurdity.
Because a general appreciation of commonsense can never be specific to a given situation, all that commonsense at this level can achieve is an image; and in applying it across the board, high and low cultural interpretations are mixed. The end result is a shallow form of commonsense which reverses the definite rationality behind the concept. Nothing becomes of value in terms of judgment, and we end up living in a surreal world where nothing quite makes sense.
This is the world when commonsense is taken from the people and placed in the hands of authority. It is an upside-down world of absurdity and surrealism. We live, in effect, as a pale image of a Picasso masterpiece, and nothing makes any sense to anyone. Which makes thinking no longer common, and it certainly has no sense.
CULTS
WHO JOINS A CULT?
The popular conception of the typical cult disciple is of a person of low intelligence – after all, they must be to be taken in by a cult guru. In addition, they are often thought to be down-and-outs, accepting the weirdness and discipline of the cult because it is better than the streets.
A study in the 1990s by Eileen Barker shattered this perception, and confirmed what cult watchers had long known to be true. She showed that the vast majority of cult members were intelligent and middleclass. So how could they be ‘brainwashed’ – if that is the term – so easily?
If an intelligent person looks at the world around him and doesn’t feel like he belongs, he will inevitably search for meaning in his life. To such a person, non-meaning deflates the personality. And as the search proves futile, the point comes when any meaning will do.
If a guru comes along and offers the meaning he craves, the person is open to influence, and in no time at all, his life has been turned upside down and put back together again in the cult. And once inside, the life he used to lead becomes an alien country.
INFERIORITY
There are two definites when it comes to your average cult guru. First of all, they are not exactly handsome action men. Second, they have charismatic personalities that can literally ‘bewitch’ a person to do as they ask.
This is a contradiction. They have the abilities of the ‘smoothie’ without any of the physical requirements. This seems to be an enigma, but a simple look at the guru’s mentality offers an easy explanation.
A guru tends to have lived a previous life as an inadequate loner. Full of under confidence, they begin the road to gurudom when they reach a crisis in their life. This fuels them with a cause, and they are reborn as a charismatic.
The psychologist Alfred Adler gives the most obvious answer to the puzzle. He devised the concept of the inferiority complex. This is a process where a person becomes full of so many inadequacies that he becomes an under confident wreck.
However, a point can come when the results of inferiority can be turned. The weak smile, the tilt of the head, the hollow eyes, can all be turned into weapons that can, first, disarm a person, and then capture his very soul.
We often see this in society with the typical ‘victim.’ They adopt a mentality where we feel compelled to help, and before long we can so easily fall under their spell – and once there, like the cult disciple, our thoughts are rarely our own.
HYSTERICALLY SPEAKING
When a cult gets you, it’s gotcha. You’re hooked. Your life is changed, paradigms shift, and you are no longer the person you were. In that clichéd term, you’re brainwashed, as if cerebral soap has bubbled between your ears. But what has really happened?
I think it’s all to do with a form of hysteria. We don’t like that word. It implies insanity. But in reality hysteria is vital to life and relationships. And it is all to do with the ability of something from ‘outside’ yourself to infect your mind.
Typical is love. Fall in love with someone and your actions can become strange and erratic. Your person has literally been ‘snatched’ by an outside entity. This form of mild hysteria is not properly understood, but existent all the same.
It can become social, thus becoming a form of mass hysteria. Typical is laughter, which is an uncontrolled spasm – a hysterical symptom. Good comedians invoke mass hysteria among thousands every time they tell a good joke.
Extend this process to a relationship between a charismatic guru and a young, intelligent person who is seeking an answer and the outside ‘entity’ can infect you in no time at all. For the point about love and laughter – cited above – is that they hit a pleasure centre, and you soon feel euphoric and you’re his.
THE GURU
No cult can exist without the guru who first has the idea. As the cult grows, it will be very much a statement of his particular mind. But whilst this ‘culture’ can vary from cult to cult, the deeper psychology of the guru is usually exact in most cases.
A guru tends to begin life in a dysfunctional family or outer environment. As he grows up, he becomes a loner, often putting all his energies into a previous spiritual system such as the Bible.
He will have aspirations, thinking he has an inner greatness, but will be unable to achieve in this chosen sphere. A point will come when he faces a major crisis, often in the form of a psychological illness.
Up to this point, his life has been very much like many other people, but it is his way of coming out of this crisis that will mark him out as different. He will merge the ideosyncracies of his illness with his ambition.
The result is a system of thought that will birth into the cult, having within it all the excesses and eccentricities of his mind. This is why the cult is often seen as ‘nutty.’ Only later, if it survives, will it formulate into something close to a religion.
The most striking change, however, comes in the future guru himself. When his ambition meets the result of his crisis, he becomes single-minded and heroic. And his absolute belief in himself turns him into a charismatic.
He now has all the psychological tools he needs to go out into the world and built his cult. Insecurity is turned into absolute confidence, and when he meets an otherwise intelligent person who is searching for meaning, his cult begins to grow.
THE MESSIAH FACTOR
We are all aware that some cults court Armageddon. Most who succumb end up in mass suicide, such as the Order of the Solar Temple or Heaven’s Gate. But others are less easy to define, such as Koresh’s Branch Davidian off-shoot at Waco.
Perhaps Waco can best be understood by studying what I’d call the Messiah Factor. The Hebrews foretold of a Messiah who would change the world and bring them Paradise. As the Roman’s took over the area such views often became Apocalyptic.
Jesus is thought of as the Messiah, and we can see in his actions that he antagonized the authorities to the point that they feared what he was doing. The end result was over-reaction, as He intended, and his Crucifixion. Was it a kind of suicide by proxy?
The Messiah factor is not a process unique to Jesus. If you read between the lines of known history, we can see elements of it in Socrates, and his enforced taking of hemlock. The process can also be identified in Native American mysticism.
Throughout the 19th century a series of mystics appeared speaking of an apocalypse to remove the white man and return the dead to a paradise on Earth. The movement formulated into the Ghost Dance. Banned by the white man, the dance continued to be practiced and the end result was the over-reaction, and massacre, of Wounded Knee.
When hopes of an Apocalypse arise to cleanse the Earth, a deeply held wish can often meet an immovable object. It has happened throughout religious history. Koresh, for instance, provoked the reaction he received by openly bearing, and training in, arms. As with Jesus, we must ask if it was suicide
by proxy.
GOTCHA!
Anyone who has survived a cult can testify to the power a guru holds over them. Families have temporarily lost a member, and cult de-programmers are aware of the difficulties of banishing cultish thoughts from the person being recovered.
How does the guru do it? What power does he exert over the person? Is it really ‘brain-washing’? Perhaps one way is for the guru to show the future disciple he has authority. Stanley Milgram showed how easy this is in the 1960s.
In Milgram’s infamous experiment an actor was rigged to a fake electric chair. Students were told to turn up the power as part of an experiment, the actor squealing in kind. Some would have delivered enough power to kill him.
It is accepted that these otherwise non-violent students did as they were told because they accepted the authority of the experimenter. Their moral objections were therefore overcome and they became obedient.
Another obvious power a guru exerts is an over-powering charisma – an ability to ‘seduce’ the person into compliance. We can actually see such a process in action quite often. It is achieved by stage hypnotists in their act.
Some people can become natural hypnotists. They are usually those who are so sure of themselves that a similar authority to Milgram is achieved; especially when the person to be hooked is searching for something to believe in.
In one way, we can say that a person’s individuality is transferred to a higher authority in such instances. The social processes involved were described by the sociologist Elias Canetti, who studied crowds and the power people and symbols can have over them.
Calling such focal points ‘crowd crystals’, Canetti studied all forms of crowd, including riots, where individuality seems to be submerged below a ‘group’ entity. With such powers over the person, it is hardly surprising we use the term ‘brain-washing.’
PERSUASION
A term often used when describing cult activity is ‘brain-washing’. I’m not quite sure what this means. Maybe it’s nonsense. Certainly things happen with the mind of the disciple, but ‘brain-washing’ seems a pointless term.
To understand what really goes on between guru and disciple, we need to get to grips with the natural ability of the mind to be persuaded. And it is this that the cult guru is an expert at.
The first thing a guru needs to do when he has a new disciple under his influence is to become his counsellor. The disciple feels he needs this, as he wouldn’t be there if he didn’t have searching questions or frustrations.
An old psycho-analyst’s trick then comes into play. The guru appears to be a blank receptor for any ‘issues’ the disciple wants to get off his chest. In no time at all the disciple is telling the guru everything, the latter becoming a conduit and soaking up these issues until the guru and disciple appear as one mind.
The disciple is now hooked, the guru becoming a sympathetic mirror of his self. And it is here that this psychological interplay becomes a two-way street. For now the guru can pass his ‘issues’ into the mind of the disciple, confirming his beliefs.
This ‘trick’ is thought to be behind the phenomenon of False Memory, implanting thoughts and ideas the person thinks are real. And a vital factor in the interplay is to now convince the disciple that the guru has the only system worth following.
This is achieved by blaming the society ‘outside’ for all the disciple’s problems. These problems are usually down to the disciple himself, but by laying the ‘blame’ on society, the guru can confirm that he, and only he, is his saviour.
Known as ‘psychological distancing’, once complete, the disciple is more than happy to accept that only the guru is worth following, and in following him, he is protected from outside influences, which caused his problems in the first place.
THEY’RE NOT ALL BAD
Cults. To many people they send a shiver down the spine. They have vague memories of cults approaching Armageddon, going out to kill others, or committing mass suicide. Yes, this can happen, but only to a tiny minority.
Another fear is of a cult swallowing up your son or daughter, brainwashing them and turning them into different people who no longer want to have anything to do with you. Yes, this happens, too. But only if the son or daughter is searching.
There is a great deal wrong with a world that requires so many cults. And this is the central problem – not the cults, per se, but the world that breeds them. But there is one major point that we should all remember.
A cult tends to be called a cult only when it is small. As it grows bigger, it suddenly becomes an alternative religion, and as time passes it ends up a major religion in its own right. Let me just mention one such religion that started off as a subversive, apocalyptic cult.
Christianity.
THE ABNORMAL IS NORMAL
Cult watching is a minority sport. This is a mistake, for a cult is a mirror of society. The beauty of a cult is that it is an extreme microcosm of what goes on in our culture and our lives. Indeed, throughout life we all express cultish behaviour.
The most obvious example of this cult behaviour is the veneration of a pop star. He is put on a pedestal as if a god, and fans by the million behave and dress like him. Yes, it is watered down, certainly, but it is sociologically identical to the guru/disciple relationship.
At every stage of our life we get involved in cult behaviour. In a normal family home, children will learn automatic loyalty and authority in a parent. This programs the future cult member for such obedience.
Eventually the child will rebel, but goes straight into another cult through fashion, gang membership, or the pop star veneration above. As he grows up, he will hopefully get a partner and children of his own, where he puts himself on a pedestal as the arbiter of all knowledge and standards to his children.
In work, modern corporate enterprise encourages loyalty to the ‘company.’ I’ve spoken to many such minions, and they truly believe everything their company stands for. This is cult behaviour par excellence – and usually just as delusional.
Occasionally we get an example of cult behaviour so over-whelming that it is hard to deny. Consider the simmering hysteria in the UK in the week following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. If that wasn’t cult behaviour, I don’t know what was.
Cult watching should increase – it tells us more about ourselves than normal life. Perhaps this is because the abnormal is simply the extreme of the normal.
CONSPIRACY THEORY
DON’T TRUST FATE
Don’t you just love a good conspiracy theory. No matter what it is, chances are it’s rubbish. Most people leave conspiriology at that, but far more interesting is to look at society and work out why we believe in such far-fetched conspiracies in the first place.
One reason is fate – the idea that things can be predestined, and we are just pawns in the lap of gods. Such an idea gives us the feeling that there are forces above us, controlling us – it is a psychological breeding ground for replacing ‘fate’ with forces, from interfering aliens to big, secretive governments.
The existence of fate, though, is itself a kind of conspiracy theory. We are said to have free will to choose what we want to do. If this exists, then fate cannot also exist, for what is the point of choice if things are predestined, no matter what we choose?
I suppose the healthy choice is to go down the middle. The universe is rigged by chance. We’re not sure what chance is, but we know it throws up coincidence all the time. Things just seem to happen in serial groupings.
Carl Jung tried to explain the more meaningful coincidences in terms of synchronicity, with the suggestion that we may play a part in how coincidences happen. Research into luck can maybe offer a helping hand.
It has often been noted that luck tends to be a mix of only remembering the good times and an ability to calculate odds better than the next person. This places a psychological angle on a coincidental event. Does this hold the key to our appreciation of fate?
A person can be either pessimi
stic or optimistic by nature. If we apply the above to these attitudes, we can argue the optimist can go through life with perceived opportunities opening up before him, whilst the pessimist will trip on every obstacle he perceives in his way. So, a kind of fate may well happen – but the conspirator is our own attitude.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONSPIRACY
There are more reasons for conspiracy theories than conspiracy theories themselves. We believe we live in a reality we can all understand, but is this really the case, or is ‘reality’ a conspiracy in itself?
To the Hindu this is certainly the case. True reality is some unchanging, ethereal concept above the material, above life itself. The ‘reality’ we live is a delusion, for anything that changes can only be fleeting.
To the Christian reality is just as problematic. It is a battle between forces of good and evil, and for ever the influences swing to and fro, with good eventually winning each round, but at a price – a Christian admits that sometimes God works in mysterious ways.
To the pagan reality is of parallel worlds of the material and spirit. The spiritual constantly invades the material, shaping it, changing it, baffling it in ways we cannot understand. And in this dual world, certain ‘adepts’ can manipulate through curse or spell.
To the philosopher reality provides things to observe, which cause sensations in the mind upon which we think. This thinking does not necessarily correspond with what ‘is.’ In some philosophies man even has a mind-filter which changes reality to his view.
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