Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Cult Case Studies

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Aug. 18, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

22:40

Cult Case Studies

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	This is a follow-up video to the Wrongway Home analysis, and I'm going to go through a few of the cult examples Diekman gives in his book.
	They're very, very interesting, and honestly, they almost sound unbelievable in some cases, and in other cases they sound so eerily familiar, you'll find a shiver going down your spine probably.
	Diekman presents us with a specific case history of an American cult he studied called Life Force.
	This case study is laid out in great depth and chronicles the events of Hugh and Clara Robinson as they first joined Life Force and their subsequent descent into a highly policed and deeply dysfunctional group.
	Life Force Psychology was a system of philosophy and techniques designed by Thomas Corell, a psychologist based in England.
	Corell was personable and consulted with the public about his system, operating, quote, more like a teacher than a traditional psychotherapist.
	The purpose of Life Force was to provide a framework to encourage psychotherapeutic change and personality growth.
	Quote, the sophistication of the theory, the effectiveness of the techniques, the sweetness and joy emanating from the man and in particular, his emphasis on the spiritual, combined to make Corell and what he taught very attractive to highly educated, psychologically oriented men and women, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who began to meet together to carry on and promote his work.
	Hugh and Clara Robinson were first introduced to the system through participation in a workshop run by a particularly dedicated couple, Alex and Barbara Monroe.
	Hugh had a PhD in psychology, and Clara had a bachelor's in English.
	The initial workshop involved the Robinsons being guided in individual fantasies that were like dream journeys, which had a dramatic emotional effect on the pair.
	They both reported feeling deeply loved, accepted, and that they shared common bonds with other participants.
	The experiences were characterised as deeply personal and uplifting, bringing the security of realising that they were not alone.
	The Robinsons were both looking for a higher purpose, which was provided to them by Life Force.
	Alex Monroe was not especially charismatic, but he was clever, and was easily able to persuade willing participants of not only the emotional benefits of Life Force, but of its moral good.
	Hugh and Clara had met and connected over the spiritual nature, which created a shared sense of a greater reality, which became the centre of their relationship.
	The pair used Life Force as a way of interpreting this greater reality.
	Clara used Life Force as a way of allaying her neuroses, in group settings led by Alex Monroe.
	Hugh, though a natural leader at the top of his class, found himself longing for the security and comfort of his home life, where his spiritual side was nurtured.
	These groups engaged in sessions of guided fantasy.
	In the comfort of an accepting and nurturing environment, a group member would volunteer to work on a source of distress.
	They would lay down, close their eyes, and Alex Monroe would ask a series of questions the volunteer would answer to create a logical chain of fantasies that would put the volunteer in an emotional state of mind.
	Over the course of an hour, Alex would extract a full-blown fantasy fairy tale from their imagination, replete with a cast of parental characters and an emotional climax that would leave the participant feeling elated, relieved, accepted, and secure.
	From their respective interviews with Diekman, Clara.
	And then I saw this really wonderful, grounded Earth Mother, like an enormous earthy woman, the opposite of my thin, wispy, mystic identification, and I cried and cried and cried.
	It was just wonderful.
	And Alex worked with that, in dialogue and imagery, and then he said, There's a wise old man in the sun.
	And so I went up towards the sun and there was this wise man, and he said to me, my child.
	And I climbed in his lap, like a child.
	He was very much like a father.
	And as I retell it, I realise that, I just felt like I was home.
	I felt a downflow of love and affection that I have never felt before or since.
	Like, being totally okay.
	Hugh.
	Out of the sun came this figure, and he came down.
	Greek with a Franciscan robe on, a marvellous black beard, sort of green eyes, very alive and powerful figure, and he just looked at me and we embraced, and there was this wonderful feeling between us.
	Then we threw our arms around each other and he said, let's take on the world.
	There was this sense that we were going to work together to help the rest of the world.
	After his fantasy, Hugh opened his eyes to see only four of the 25 member group surrounding him.
	Quote, they were all men.
	This was overwhelming to me.
	It was as powerful as the daydream.
	These people had stayed with me during this thing.
	Here were people who were sticking by me and not abandoning me for not understanding.
	And then Barbara Monroe said to me, you don't have to be alone anymore.
	I just wept and wept.
	That I didn't have to be alone anymore.
	These highly emotional fantasies became addictive to the participants, and created bonds between the members of the group.
	Diegmann believed that Clara and Hugh had unresolved dependency longings, that they exercised through fantasy by regressing to an infantile or adolescent state of mind during these group sessions.
	Alex and Barbara Monroe became surrogate parent figures, giving the group members encouragement, guidance, and discipline.
	The sense of fulfilment and meaning these sessions would give members of Life Force gave them an emotional drive to proselytize, especially combined with other aspects of Life Force psychology.
	Clara and Hugh joined the organisation and began working on it full-time, becoming, like the rest of the group, quote, totally dedicated to bringing this wonderful new teaching to others, to the world they believed needed it so badly.
	The Robinsons moved house to be closer to the Monroes, lived with Corell for a period of months, and graduated to leading their own group sessions with newcomers.
	They were very happy and very invested in the work in the cause.
	They were able to put their skills to use in a cause they truly believed in.
	The group's insular nature did not diminish, even though Life Force became increasingly popular.
	Hugh and Clara felt that they were doing something special, under the direct tutelage of someone special.
	As an executive of the centre, Hugh, quote, planned conferences, gave major presentations, travelled widely, interacted with Life Force groups in other countries.
	Gradually this sense of high purpose gave rise to feelings of specialness which later led to the devaluation of those outside of the group and to the elevation of Alex.
	Clara divided her time between similar work at the centre and looking after their son.
	As Life Force grew, more time was demanded from the Robinsons.
	Eventually the group was in direct competition for time with her son, leading to members of the group pressuring her over the issue.
	The perceived importance of the mission, combined with peer pressure, was usually enough to persuade dissident group members to capitulate.
	However, sometimes Alex's force of personality was required.
	In this way, compliance was ensured and dissent effectively silenced.
	The group became an ideological echo chamber, so any individual who found themselves in severe doubt over an issue, such as Clara's reluctance to neglect her child, was presented with a wall of consistent opinions on the subject, culminating with the disapproval of the leader parent Alex.
	This encouraged them to acquiesce to the group and prevented dissent from others in the future.
	Eventually, the goodness of the mission permitted immoral shortcuts to be taken to overcome difficulties encountered in the service of promoting Life Force.
	These started small, such as lying about teaching at a university's puff-up credentials of a group member, to justify the constant monitoring and recording of all phone calls made by group members.
	Over the span of a few years, the group became overtly authoritarian.
	Quote, The group enforced compliance by the use of rhetoric that exploited Clara's idealism for the group's own purposes.
	Alex led the way.
	If he was opposed on grounds of principle, Alex attacked those principles by equating them with selfish desires.
	The members had doubts about Alex's reasoning, but they never really discussed the matter amongst themselves out of fear Alex might learn of it.
	Hugh's experience was similar.
	Like the others, he wished for Alex's approval, and fear of losing it led him to compromise his principles and avoid dissent.
	Alex's power derived from the assumption that he knew much more than the others about the teaching, and was thus entitled to special authority.
	Alex essentially adopted the role of the feared and respected father, and the group members became his usually obedient children.
	Hugh fell into the trope of rebellious older child.
	Firm resistance was followed by easy capitulation to the group after Alex's appeals to the greater good.
	The continued growth of Life Force increased the intensity of cult behaviour, with the organisation founding a graduate school of life force psychology.
	Quote, Anyone who questioned the direction of the group was seen as an enemy, who needed to be controlled and pushed down, whether the questioner was a group member or outsider.
	Hugh's behaviour eventually found him removed from his executive position within Life Force.
	He was informed that he was failing to contribute to the group mind.
	He was relegated to the least important assignments and reduced to teaching beginner workshops.
	Then the group subtly began to pressure Clara against Hugh, and under mounting and direct peer pressure, Clara eventually left him to stay with another member of the group and their son.
	This was difficult for Clara, and within months, the situation had flipped and now she became the person with the bad energy, and Hugh was returned to the fold.
	Quote, I had two experiences of being in a large group, where I was on the spot for supposedly not being a good person, with about 18 people, my friends, bringing up information about why I wasn't a good person.
	I don't think I've ever been through something as awful in my life, but I bought it.
	The two reconciled and returned to life in the group with less resistance to Alex's will.
	Alex's increased power made him eccentric, and he indulged in a cult literature which he would interpret through the lens of Life Force and apply it to the group, which further increased his mystique.
	To keep the peace, group members ended up surrendering more and more of their own time, energy and free will to work on their shared goals, regardless of objections.
	Any consistent dissenters from the group were humiliatingly ostracized by Alex in quarantine, away from the group, where they would be processed by him for hours, in intense, one-on-one question-and-answer sessions.
	Hugh continued to be troubled, and the group made him defoo his entire family, save for phone calls to his dying brother, and find solace in the group alone.
	This was not sufficient, and Alex demanded Clara separate again from Hugh, which was praised by the rest of the group.
	Quote, When I made that choice, I had a lot of energy coming in.
	I mean literally.
	Not only did everyone in the room say, Clara, you're so brave.
	I really support this and I see how hard it is.
	The group had demanded other members separate and divorce in the past, and the emotional atmosphere created by pressure from the group made the decision to separate and the subsequent and universal praise that accompanied it elating.
	Soon after, Clara defooed her family at Alex's request.
	She had her phone number changed and lost contact with people outside of the group.
	Hugh was put into quarantine, which had a devastating effect on him through loneliness.
	After several months, the group pressured Clara to divorce Hugh, and she consented.
	Their son David took this very poorly.
	Quote, he became very upset, screamed, pounded on the floor, and ran out of the house.
	When he finally returned, he phoned Alex's children, who were his friends.
	This created a disturbance in the Monroe household.
	With a result, Alex processed his own wife, Barbara.
	Alex had no sympathy for David's distress, and interpreted his behaviour as showing that David was elemental, that he was using his pain at his parents' separation to manipulate people.
	Alex could do nothing more than view the situation through his ideological lens, and was utterly incapable of viewing David's behaviour as natural.
	Instead, he moralised it by determining it to be elemental, and demanding Clara teach David not to act on it.
	Alex even went as far as processing Clara in an attempt to break down the emotional bond between her and her son.
	The executive committee of Life Force became intermediaries between Clara and Hugh, intercepting letters and manipulating each one by implication or direct threat of action.
	Hugh went months without seeing his son.
	The group's control over them was near total, but not entirely complete.
	Clara worked for Lifeforce for almost all of her waking time, but it was not enough.
	The group pressured her to give up three things she would not compromise on.
	1. Some time to herself to swim or tend her garden.
	2.
	A sleep schedule between midnight and 7am.
	And 3.
	Dinner with her son each night.
	Other members would often not eat with their families, if they even had them in their lives at all at this point, would stay up to 3-4 o'clock in the morning, and have zero free time for personal interests.
	The group became their entire world.
	The members became like a family and their work became their recreation, and they were always drugged by tiredness.
	Clara had one remaining friend outside of Lifeforce, and after a particularly stressful group session, this friend managed to persuade her to leave.
	Quote, Leaving was not joyful.
	Clara had joined Lifeforce because it made her feel loved and accepted, and had been a way to help others.
	At this point she felt worthless, evil and alone, and she doubted her ability to help anyone.
	Clara and Hugh secretly began contact, though Hugh stayed on at Lifeforce for another year.
	He had vowed to do a particular piece of work and did not want to fail.
	By this time he was deeply embedded within the group, and they were his only companions.
	Little by little, Hugh's self-confidence returned, and he informed the group that he would be needing time to deal with personal affairs.
	He was immediately quarantined.
	Quote, They were still giving me the tapes of the meetings, and I would listen to the tapes and I'd draw a line down the middle of the page, and I'd write down on one side the worldview that was being put out in the group that I could buy, and then I would write down on the other side what I could actually see happening.
	It was fascinating because the things Alex was describing, what these subjective evil entities were supposedly doing out there to us, were precisely the things he was doing in relationship to the group right there.
	The group deteriorated rapidly in Hughes last year.
	Alex became increasingly paranoid and controlling, and this attitude infected the entire group, turning it in upon itself to the point where several members would process each other for hours on end.
	They became neurotically dependent on one another to process their private devils.
	Quote, each person had their kind of private devils.
	It would happen among the executive committee, and then we'd hear about it and have to clean it up.
	Each of the executive committee had his or her own devil.
	One had a panther-like cat, another this disembodied head, and another a dark archangel, and so forth.
	Group members would rage in a processing room, accessed only via telephone to excise these devils.
	Hugh was regularly processed by Alex, but his notes helped him keep a grip on reality, as he had seen it recorded in the tapes.
	Alex's dark charisma was such that when he demanded Hugh never see his wife or son again, Hugh was confused at what choice he should make.
	When Hugh finally decided to resign from Life Force, he was branded as the Antichrist by Alex and excommunicated from the group.
	All contact with Hugh was completely forbidden.
	Hugh's ostracism was the final straw that broke the camel's back and triggered a wave of resignations.
	He helped another Life Force member leave personally.
	Alex and the remaining group members moved to another city where they became obscure, allegedly spending most of their time processing one another.
	The second example is corporate cults.
	Diekman observes that executives and managers in major corporations often fall into patterns of cult behaviour.
	The corporation itself becomes the higher goal, with executives often wielding great power within their domains.
	The financial dependence of their underlings can create an unhealthy, servile atmosphere and foster an in-group-out-group dichotomy.
	All of this is facilitated by the natural and widespread culture of conformity within the corporation itself.
	High-ranking positions in major corporations are often incredibly demanding.
	Executives are expected to put their family life second to corporate life.
	New recruits often go through informal initiation ceremonies or are taken on corporate retreats to build bonds between the team.
	Quote, The resemblance of such initiations to the procedures of religious cults is striking.
	That the resulting corporate attitude evokes from observers the phrase religious fervor is not surprising.
	Indeed, some executives are quite explicit about the parallel with religion.
	Just as with religious cults, corporate culture can and does encourage participants to violate their own moral codes for the greater good of the corporation's goals.
	Quote, Making the welfare of the corporation more important than anything else, believing in its overriding importance, is the qualitative equivalent to a cult's belief in its divine mission.
	Charles Wilson, former CEO of General Motors, put it succinctly in his famous assertion, What's good for General Motors is good for the United States.
	With a mandate like that, anything can be excused.
	Not only is the executive helping themselves by making their corporation more profitable, they're helping their family, co-workers, friends, and countrymen.
	The more of themselves they surrender to it, the more it is able to nurture and secure them.
	Diekman says, quote, I suggest that the corporation evokes a fancy of the big parent in the minds of the boards of directors, as well as in middle management.
	They identify with it, and are reassured by it.
	The corporation is the protector and must be protected.
	Diekman had his own cult experience with a liberal activist organization.
	If you can believe it.
	Quote, I had occasion to learn about this group pressure firsthand a few years ago, when I became involved in the anti-nuclear movement.
	At the time, I would not have believed that liberals such as myself could behave like cult members, although I was certain right-wingers did.
	In 1980, Diekman attended a weekend anti-nuclear conference, which impressed into the audience the dangers of global nuclear war to galvanise them to become activists for nuclear disarmament.
	The conference had the desired effect on many of the audience members, including Dieckman, who became active in spreading information about the cause.
	The conference was organized by Physicians for Social Responsibility, PSR, who Diekman contacted for further information about what people could do to increase their chances of surviving a nuclear exchange.
	Quote, I was told there was nothing that could be done.
	Shelters were described as useless, and prevention of nuclear war the only answer.
	Some speakers declared that anyone who undertook civil defense planning was immoral, engaged in a highly unethical act.
	Dieckman was not convinced and decided to look outside PSR literature for dissenting opinions and omitted information.
	Quote, Eventually I came to the judgment that regional food stockpiles would save millions of lives if war did occur, and that establishing such stockpiles would not accelerate the arms race or give people a false sense of security, but it would be a logical and appropriate response to a very real danger.
	Dieckman asked his friends in the movement to consider this information, and he was treated with hostility.
	Quote, I promoted a lecture about protection against a variety of radiation hazards, including nuclear explosions.
	Almost no one came, except some protesters from the peace movement.
	With the radiologist who gave the lecture, I later appeared on a radio talk show.
	It was clear the host found it hard to grasp that although I was in favour of stockpiling food, a civil defense measure, I was opposed to the MX missiles and favoured a nuclear freeze.
	He had assumed, as did others, that I must be a hawk.
	A cult-like propensity for a black and white division of the world was all too obvious.
	As with Life Force, members of the peace movement had a greater good in mind, and any deviation from their chosen path to that goal was considered an active hindrance that had to be avoided or overcome.
	Quote, I was roundly attacked.
	No one from the peace movement asked me why I thought what I did.
	They weren't curious at all.
	They had simply decided I had become a hardliner, an immoral survivalist.
	They attacked him with simplistic and illogical arguments, and although he wasn't convinced, Diekman found himself self-censoring when among his friends and peers to avoid social pressure from them on the issue.
	Quote, At one public hearing where I testified, I was attacked by a peace movement contingent who used the same rhetoric that I had used in the past as part of the same group.
	It was startling to be on the receiving end, to be the object of glaring hostile eyes and the impassioned appeals to humanity.

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