Scientologists are urged to cease any communication with critics – Suppressive Persons – and such ‘shunning’ is commonplace in totalist groups; indeed, it is a defining factor when assessing the danger of a group.
groups that manipulate
Many groups use questionable techniques to maintain the loyalty or devotion of their followers. The popular term for these groups is ‘cult’. Many sociologists speak of ‘new religious movements’, but this term is even less precise, as such groups often have no religious pretensions, nor are they all especially ‘new’. For the sake of brevity, we will use the term cult, because the dictionary definition remains accurate. Our concern is for ‘totalist cults’, however, which control most aspects of their members’ lives.
There is a continuum from relatively benign groups to the most extreme; from groups which merely have an unhealthy control of members’ decision making, to those which send their members out to kill or cause their members’ deaths.
In Japan, Aum Shinrikyo stockpiled enough nerve gas to kill four million people. The notorious Manson Family, in California, committed a series of vicious murders. The Indian Thuggees also committed murder as an aspect of their religious belief, giving us the word ‘thug’.
Extreme political groups are also totalist in nature. The Bolsheviks and the Nazis systematically murdered millions of people out of doctrinal belief – the eradication of the Kulak peasant farmers by Stalin, or of Jews, Romany, Blacks and Communists by Hitler.
Major religions have been guilty of significant anti-social behaviour such as the murder of tens of thousands by the European Christian churches during the centuries of the witchcraft persecution. In very recent times, the Catholic Church systematically concealed widespread child sexual abuse. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, an international movement with perhaps eight million members, has refused to report thousands of its followers to civil authorities for such child abuse. In the High Court in England, in June 2015, the Watchtower Society was fined £275,000 for failing to protect a girl from abuse by a known predator, who was a Jehovah’s Witness.
Wherever a group denies its members the right to challenge doctrine, it has moved onto the spectrum of manipulation.In the Middle Ages, there were two popes who ordered excommunication – exclusion from heaven – for anyone who wore a beard. We believe ourselves more enlightened, but bizarre doctrines continue to be enforced by many groups in our ‘free’ society. For instance, the savage beatings and ‘paddling’ of children in certain fundamentalist Christian groups in the US, which would be illegal in Europe.
A group of just two people can have the dynamics of a totalist cult, where one rigidly determines the behaviour of the other. Or, as with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the cult may number many millions.
Totalist cults deny the right to freedom of opinion. There is nothing new here: traditionally, religions often exclude ‘heretics’. The very word heresy,in its origin, means ‘choice’ and applies to those who have chosen to disagree on some point of dogma. The word was long ago extended to mean immoralityand even sodomy. With the advance of human rights, no mainstream religion would remove the right to doubt or question, as totalist cults do.
Some argue that even science is somehow a belief system, and it is true that scientists have often refused to believe evidence, instead favouring dogma; which makes their behaviour cultic. It is also true that cliques of scientists have acted as totalist cults – the group around Lysenko, whose foolish ideas led to famine in the Soviet Union, for instance. However, true science encourages disagreement and challenge, where totalist groups forbid either. This means that the word ‘scientist’ does not signify any belief system, rather a community of those who test reality, rather than simply believing whatever they are told.
With science, a hypothesis is tested and a theory created from a supporting – and independently replicated – experiment. Science is based upon theories that offer the most likely explanation, and can be challenged through new experiments, rather than a basis of dogmatic declarations about the nature of humanity and the universe that are written in stone. Only if a precept or principle makes sense and can be tested should it be adopted.
recommended reading:
Steven Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control (2015 edition)
Jon Atack, Let’s sell these people A Piece of Blue Sky (2013 edition).