Stephen Mather, a former Jehovah’s Witness and organizational psychologist, examines how high-control groups like his ex-affiliation manipulate members by enforcing rigid, reinterpreted narratives—such as shifting Armageddon predictions from 1914 to later dates—to avoid contradictions while suppressing dissent. Using the BITE model (behavior, information, thought, emotion control), he reveals tactics like weaponizing devotion and isolating members from external perspectives, often through dress codes or social hierarchies. His departure stemmed from irreconcilable inconsistencies in the group’s worldview, underscoring how these systems exploit psychological needs to sustain influence, leaving ex-members grappling with lost time and identity. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
Spencer, your host, I want to talk today about cults.
So I brought in a very special guest for that.
Go ahead, Stephen.
Hi.
Thank you for having me.
I'm Stephen Mather.
I'm an organizational psychologist working mostly with leadership development, also business improvement.
But I suppose the relevance for this episode is that I'm very interested in cults.
I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness.
I left about 25 years ago.
I have a master's in organizational psychology and a degree in psychology.
All of both of those got very late in life because you don't really do further education or higher education when you're a Jehovah's Witness.
So my career is kind of backwards.
But yeah, very interested in the subject.
Yeah, that's me.
You also have a podcast on the subject, right?
I do indeed.
Yeah.
So I'm one of the hosts of Cult Hackers, which I have with my daughter, Celine.
So we do that together.
I tend to do more than Celine, just because I'm, I suppose, a bit less busy than her, really.
And it is my baby in many respects.
But it's great to be able to talk to Celine about these issues.
And we've sort of tried to make the podcast.
I mean, we do want to understand cults and that's why we call the podcast cult hackers because we want to understand, get into the, you know, the nuts and bolts of how they work.
And also we think that the people who leave have somehow managed to hack that code.
You know, they've managed to leave and find a way out of it.
So we think they're cult hackers too.
But we also wanted to make the podcast not just about being in, but also about leaving.
So we do talk a lot about sense making after you leave.
So when you leave a high control group or a cult, you know, that's really where things begin because you're suddenly thrust into this world where you have to make your mind about all sorts of things that you didn't before because the cult told you what to think.
So it's a big, a big wide world that we're trying to investigate, really.
So that's the idea behind the show.
But we talk to lots of different people, people who've been in cults, experts, authors, all sorts of people who have something interesting to say.
Yeah.
I've listened to quite a few episodes now and I learned quite a bit about a lot of aspects about cults that I hadn't thought about before, probably mostly because of my perspective having, to the best of my knowledge, never been in one.
To the best of my knowledge, it seems strange sometimes that a person could be in a cult without even realizing it, right?
And that's a perspective I kind of got right away from listening to your podcast was that when you're in the cult, you don't think of it as a cult.
Absolutely.
And I think I was aware of that, but it hadn't really sunk in into my model of when I think about the decisions a person makes in a cult.
They're aware of things, but they don't think of the social network they have around them as a cult.
And that's very interesting for me.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that is the norm.
That is the normal situation for somebody in a cult.
Very few cult members think they're in a cult.
Nobody says, oh, I love my cult.
Generally, the society that we live in tends to use the word as a pejorative, really.
So very few organizations like the term.
And of course, the ones who I would and many would describe as cults definitely don't like it at all because nobody wants to belong to a cult.
So yeah, you're right.
People don't actually want to or believe they're a member of a cult.
So, I usually start each episode that I do about a concept with a definition of the concept, but I've had difficulty getting a concise definition of a cult, which I'm sure is a common experience among everyone.
Everyone kind of thinks they know something about cults, but if they were forced to really define it, they would have some kind of difficulty.
But when I was really thinking hard about it, it occurred to me that there are things about the cult, there are properties of cults that you can still name.
And then, when I was really looking at these, I realized that some of them were, in my opinion, anyway, some of them were there for all the cults that I had read about or seemed to experience in some way.
And some of them were not always there, which led me to think that this is even more complicated than most complicated problems in that a person could look at some things and say to themselves, I'm not an occult because no one love bombs anyone among the people I know, or I'm not an occult because no one I know tries to cut off access to my family.
Whereas I think that these things are used in a lot of cults as tactics to maintain or gain control of members, but they aren't always done.
So, that's what I've kind of done in my thoughts on this.
I've come up with some properties that I think, from my perspective, are always there.
And then there's a lot of other ones that aren't always there, but they're tactics that are used essentially to achieve the goal of the cult.
And the goal of the cult at the end of the day is always control of some kind, right?
Would you agree with that?
I would.
I mean, I would just perhaps use trying to use an analogy.
You know, think about a football team, soccer team.
They'll have, you know, different teams will have different tactics and different ways of getting to the goal.
I mean, you said you said about the goal.
I think that's a good way to start.
And the goal is the control of the person, really, to certain ends.
It could be financial, it could be servicing them in some way.
But generally speaking, the cult has a goal to use the individuals who are members of it.
But they'll deploy different tactics depending on the type of cult.
So, as I say, a football team might have a very attacking lineup.
You know, they might have lots of really skillful players who run down the wing and beat other players and cross the ball in and all that sort of thing.
And then another team perhaps doesn't have those, but they'll do something different.
They'll, as they say in the UK, they'll park the bus, which means that they'll put lots of people in defense and stop the other team from scoring and then try and score a goal on the break.
So, these are just different tactics.
And I think cults are like that.
So, cults have different ways of essentially achieving the same aims.
So, yeah, you'll have some groups who take people away from their normal lives and they set up a compound somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
And that's all about isolating people physically.
You'll have other groups who don't do that, but they mentally isolate people so that they live it amongst us.
They live in the world, they go to work, they live next door to us, but they're very restricted in what they can listen to, what they can do.
There's strict rules around who they can associate with and so on.
So, yeah, that's right.
And that's why it's difficult to also you have groups that are religious, so the groups are not religious, but they still practice the same sort of control mechanisms.
So for me, I think the important thing to remember about cults is that it's a level of control that they're looking for.
So the word control, I think, is very important.
So they're trying to control people's thinking and behavior in order to get something from them.
And as I say, it could be work, it could be sex, it could be money.
But there's always something the cult's trying to get from the individual.
And they do that in a number of different ways.
Control is a big part of it, and coercion is the other big part.
So they use methods to coerce people into doing things that are not in their interests.
And they do that through normal, often normal social and psychological needs and behaviors that we all have, but they take them and they weaponize them in many ways to get people to do what they want.
So that for me, that's what I'm looking at in the cult.
When I first started this work, I decided I wasn't going to use the word cult because I felt it was just too vague and it was very difficult to pin it down.
So I prefer the term high control group or high demand group because I think those describe the things that we're worried about with these groups.
Unfortunately, we live in a world that knows kind of knows what we mean by cults.
And, you know, you have to use the language that people recognize.
But yeah, it's not a great, it's not a great descriptor, really.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, I think your word or your phrase, high control group, is much more apt.
I actually have a, I don't know, it's not really a different take, but I think that they mentioned that the primary goal is control.
I actually think that the primary goal is the elevation of the leadership.
And control is the thing that allows them to feel that they've achieved that goal.
That it's almost always narcissists that are at the top and they are attempting to inflate their own ego.
And the number one way they can do that is by having control over the people that are in the cult.
And that if they could inflate their ego some other way, if they were a more healthy person about their own self-esteem, they wouldn't need to have any of that control.
They would be more in control of themselves in a sense.
You know what I mean?
But I guess in the end of the day, it's a distinction without a difference, right?
Because the real goal is to save the people who are in the cult, the people who are being controlled.
Yeah, I think, I mean, it's difficult because in a way, we're trying to get some motivations there.
So, you know, do we know why individuals start up cults?
Is it because they have a need for devotion?
Are they narcissistic?
Are they psychopaths and so on?
And yeah, I think the jury is still out on all that.
There seems to be, I think there's a lot of good, perhaps circumstantial evidence that people who are leaders of cults more often than the general population are likely to be, have a narcissistic personality disorder.
But I've not seen any really hard science on that.
And this is one of the problems we have in the field is that there's lots of circumstantial evidence and there's lots of narrative evidence.
There's lots of anecdotal evidence.
It's really hard to do scientific studies on this sort of stuff.
So social science itself is always difficult.
Just add times that by 100, if you're talking about cults, really.
Cults are not by nature willing for you to say, we'd like to do a study on cults.
And we do the leaders, I would imagine.
Exactly, so it's just very, very difficult.
Um, there has been attempts to do things, but um, it's it's just very, very difficult to do it.
So, yeah, um, I think it's still we're still trying to learn, in my view, anyway, um, exactly what's going on.
And again, I think you're right.
Some I'm sure some cult leaders are in it just for the adulation and the need that hasn't been filled in their childhood or something, you know.
So, we could psychoanalyze these people, but I'm not sure that's always the case.
And the other thing I think that I've tried to push against a little bit is there is a common belief that cults are led by a single charismatic leader, and that is often the case or has been the case, um, but not always.
And if a cult hangs around long enough, um, obviously, the charismatic leader at some point dies, and at that point, that the group is either going to fracture and be very chaotic because normally cult leaders don't believe they're going to die or they don't plan for their own demise, so that it's all a bit chaotic.
And then, what happens is that the group either just implodes, or somebody, after a bit of a struggle, rises to the leadership, and then it becomes uh, it's more likely, I think, then to become more bureaucratic, and the systems and so on start to be developed, and it becomes much more like an organization that we might recognize with a leadership team perhaps, and um, you know, various different levels of leadership.
So, at that point, you know, you could say, Well, have they stopped being a cult then because they've lost their charismatic leader?
Well, I don't know because they still may well still be carrying on some of those coercive practices.
And the reason they're doing those things is because they need people to do stuff.
You know, cults, you know, they need to, if it's in the middle of nowhere, they need to grow crops or they need to raise wildlife, um, raise farm animals, they need to run little businesses to keep themselves going, they they need to they want to try and bring other people in often, so there's a lot of work to do there.
They may be building stuff, so they need to mobilize all these people.
Um, and so that there is a kind of uh, there is a need to get them to do things, so that's where I think a lot of the very practical control comes from or the need for it, right?
When I was first trying to come up with a definition, it seemed useful to look at a cult more like a set of rules, but as soon as I was really comparing that against examples of cults, it broke down pretty quickly because often the rules were changing to the situation and all sorts of things.
Um, maybe let's get into the what I've kind of in my mind anyway, the four things that are always there in cults, and you can tell me whether I'm sort of off base or hitting the mark on any of these.
As I said, I felt that the goal was always to elevate the leadership.
So, the first thing that I think is always true of a cult is that it's um creating its own social hierarchy to sort of warp the social influence on the members.
In that, if you had a society in which the people who would be the cult leaders are already being elevated, they wouldn't feel a need to have a cult or institute one to get the things that they want.
And they so they're always what they're always doing is they're putting essentially a social web around the people to influence them in the way that they want them to be influenced to get the outcome from the people that they want.
Did that make sense?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, again, I think another interesting question, and I am, I don't want to be going off piece, but hopefully, this makes sense in relation to what you said.
Think it's perhaps a mistake to imagine that most cult leaders, and again, this is speculation, so we can dismiss it.
But I suspect that most cult leaders don't start off thinking, right, you know, rubbing their hands together, thinking, right, how can I make a cult?
I think what's happening is sometimes these individuals are manipulative people who have learned to get what they want from other people through coercion in all sorts of different ways.
And often you see family members or, you know, small groups are the first to fall under the spell of this individual and they have a certain worldview.
They may believe that worldview or not.
Again, it's very difficult to know because this is an internal state.
So I think over time, the ones that survive, the groups that survive, are the ones that implement effective coercive systems that make them, that shield them to some degree from the outside world.
So yes, answering your question about is it really all to service their ego or all to service their need for adulation, their need to be essentially worshipped and to be constantly told how wonderful they are.
Yeah, I think that's very possible.
I don't know if that's always the case.
I'm not confident enough to say that would always be the case.
And I would suggest it's not, they're not looking ahead 20 years thinking, you know, I'm going to create a cult with hundreds of thousands of followers.
But I think they're doing the things that will give them that gratification at the time.
And then they get better at it.
They do more of those things that gives them the buzz.
You know, there is a there is bound to be a certain buzz to realizing that people will do what you ask them to do.
Yeah.
And I think there's a, it's a question Celine often asks when we're doing discussions like this.
You know, is the founder of a cult the first cult member?
Are they a member of their own cult?
Yeah.
And it's a fascinating question.
I don't know the answer to that, Spencer, but yes, I suppose I agree with you, but I'm not sure it's as, I suppose my point is, is it as calculating as perhaps it could sound?
I'm not sure.
Sometimes these people are intelligent, very intelligent, but in a very narrow way.
So they know how to manipulate people.
They know how to get what they want, but they show a lot less intelligence in other domains.
So I think that's another thing.
I'm not sure a lot of them are capable of the level of forethought that we might be giving to them.
It's just my opinion.
I don't know.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, that we might attribute to them some additional property of what's commonly termed now as six-dimensional chess.
Whereas to them, they weren't doing that.
They were essentially dodging bullets and avoiding calamity at every moment.
And that led to, in doing so, it led to a greater and greater control of people.
And then at the end of the day, they're the head of an enterprise that is essentially a cult.
So the next thing I think is always true is that the cult will have a set of rules that is either distinctly different from or in addition to the rules that are already in place in society.
And that's, I think that seems, as soon as I read it, it seems overly obvious because if there weren't any rules, you couldn't have anything.
But there is always some rules in a cult.
There's rules of things you can do.
And whether they're written down or whether they're just communicated through social pressure systems, there is always a set of rules.
So don't talk to those people or what have you.
And these rules are always meant to do two things, which is to elevate the leadership and to gain and maintain control of the members.
Does that sound right to you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I agree.
And I would say that it's, there's a third reason for it, which may be related to the second one, but I think it's to separate the group from the rest of the community.
So that's, it's almost the very definition of, you know, what we just said, it's very hard to define, but it's one of the things I think is important for a cult is that it is separate from the rest of society.
And that's, yeah, so that's done either through physical location, but I think more often it's through these rules that you've mentioned there, the behaviors that you're required to do.
Sometimes it can be dress, you know.
So interviewed a really interesting woman who was a member of the Rajneesh group.
She's written a wonderful book called A Slice of Orange, which comes out next year.
And, you know, they all wore orange or red.
And that was how you recognize them.
You know, you think about the Ari Krishna group, they're very recognizable.
My old group, Jehovah's Witnesses, you know, you can spot them a mile off when they're walking around doing their door-to-door work.
You know, they have a kind of uniform.
And so even the way people dress, certainly the way they behave, the things you're supposed to do, the activities, the things you can't do.
So as a youngster, I wasn't allowed to celebrate Christmas or birthdays or any of the holidays at school.
So I had to sit out separate from all the rest of the children.
So I went to a school, normal school, but had to be separate.
So I think that's part of the reason for these rules is to separate you from the rest of the world.
And I agree.
I think that is very much around control.
So it's a way to control people.
It becomes, you know, so there is a Bible verse that goes something like, you know, Jesus sort of tells his disciples that you will be no part of the world, although you are in the world.
So, you know, we had that drummed into us.
We were in the world and that we went to work, went to school, but we were no part of it.
And so you've always got this level of separation.
Right.
So yeah, I think, I think that's right.
So in some way, you could have some set of rules or additional behaviors that you're required to do.
And a cult member might be told that they should feel proud of the fact that they have these rules.
Yeah.
Maybe it shows a level of discipline or some other positive social property that they are displaying by following these rules.
And then they should feel proud for it.
So they might even feel like they're above people who aren't in their cult because they follow these rules, right?
I mean, that's a that can be a real thing.
So the next thing I think that is always present is that the leadership of a cult will always make a claim to knowledge that is unavailable to the followers.
So in some cases, it's that they have a higher being that they commune with that no one else can commune with.
They have some ability to access a spiritual being or plane that no one else has.
But sometimes it's more mundane knowledge.
That they're hyper-intelligent, or that they have, you know, that they're way smarter than everyone, or they have a connection in something that they know.
You know, you could almost imagine a comical cult where one person claims that they know a famous person and then they want everyone else to follow them because they know the famous person.
I don't, I know Kim Kardashian, I can, I can call her anytime I like or whatever, right?
Like that's a thing that will happen all the time in cults that there would be a claim to knowledge that no one else can access except the leadership.
Do you think that's always true, or is that like, is there some exceptions there?
I can't think of any exceptions to that, um, Spencer.
I think that's um, that's very insightful.
I think, um, yeah, you know, cults come in different sorts, as we've said, there are religious cults, there are psychotherapy cults, there are business cults.
So, you know, multi-level marketing groups have often been described as being cults.
And so, yeah, but I think at the heart of it, there is some, yeah, if it's a business thing, it's a system that we've developed that, you know, we have the extra secret source that can make you a millionaire or that can make you the best person you know you can possibly be.
Yeah, if it's religion, it's um direct line to God or the intelligence of the universe or creatures from the fifth dimension or whatever.
It's um, yeah, I think that's right.
And again, this probably relates to uh charismatic quality of some cult leaders, this ability to claim knowledge and do so confidently.
You know, we are all, Spencer, we are all looking for somebody to tell us what the hell's going on.
You know, we want to know the answers to these questions, you know, the big questions and sometimes smaller questions, you know.
So, sometimes it's what is the meaning of life?
Um, what happens when you die?
Other times, it's you know, how can I be better with the opposite sex?
You know, how can I build a relationship?
Um, these are all reasons why people look for advice.
And I think the other element there is that I think a lot of groups at the heart of it, you could describe them as a con, they are a con trick, you know, and there's quite a lot of work from me.
Yeah, there's um, it, you know, it's come with me and this is going to happen.
Come with me and I'll do this and you know, buy into this.
So, again, a lot of money can be spent in these business courts in particular, but also in religious ones.
You know, you've got to pay all this money to get to the next level, and then you have to pay more money to get to the next level and so on.
And yeah, absolutely.
I believe a lot of these are simple contricks, really.
Yeah, and I, it occurs to me that the uh the skill set of a cult leader is almost identical to the skill set of a con artist.
It's just generally speaking that when you have a con man, he's spinning his tricks for a relatively short period of time comparatively, usually.
Whereas a cult leader is attempting to maintain that indefinitely, preferably, right?
I mean, that's what they would prefer is to get control by the use of these confident skills to get control from this point into the end of time or the end of their time.
One would assume so.
Yeah, again, it's hard to know whether they are forward-thinking enough, but you know, give them an option of carrying on doing what they're doing or giving it all up and letting everybody lead their own lives.
Of course, they're going to choose the former.
So, they're always looking to maintain their power and privilege because they have a lot of privilege.
Leaders of these groups generally enjoy much better conditions than the rest of their groups.
Right.
Whether they admit it or not.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the fourth thing that's always true, in my opinion, anyway, is that there is always an act of blocking or discrediting outside sources of information.
And this is done almost entirely to keep control over the members of the cult.
So you might have people say that only this Bible is the source of information.
All the other sources of information are no good, especially if they disagree with this primary source of information.
And all of that is good.
But you might have a situation where someone says, go ahead, go out into the world, find out things, but come back to me and I will interpret those things for you and tell you which ones are not to be trusted and which ones are to be believed.
Does that sound right to you?
That can happen.
Yeah, I think, yeah, I think your broader point around blocking, discrediting outside sources of information, I think absolutely.
There's a cult researcher called Stephen Hassan.
I don't know if you've heard of his work, but he talks, he's introduced this thing called the BITE model.
And BITE stands for behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotion control.
So that's the way he gets us to think about what a cult really is.
If they're doing all four of those to a certain degree, and I think this is important as well, Spencer, to realize that cults operate on a continuum.
So we can say some groups are more dangerously culty than others.
So some will, so this blocking or discrediting information, for instance, you know, some groups will literally, especially if they have you in a compound somewhere, you know, you're literally living off the grid.
You have no access to anything.
You're completely blocked and you can't speak to anybody.
You are completely, your world is this group.
For others, like Jehovah's Witnesses and other groups like that, you know, they live at home with Wi-Fi.
They can get on the internet, but they are told that there's all this terrible bad knowledge out there that is basically Satan is controlling this world and this media, this world's media.
So anything that disagrees with the organization, this is something you should not be listening to, reading.
And they are very, very sensitive about that.
So, but again, there's degrees here.
So for some, it's like you can't touch it.
Others, it's a bit less controlling, but it's still the same principle.
Yeah, absolutely.
They don't want you to read outside information or listen to outside voices, of course, because that starts to undermine this worldview that the group has created for you.
So I think there are some other properties of cults that it's probably worth talking about once we get through these four.
Because I think there's some other things that actually determine whether something is a damaging cult.
But yeah, I completely agree with that.
One asterisk I would put beside this one, as far as discrediting outside sources of information goes, is that the real action here would be that the cult would want to discredit all other sources of information except the information that comes from the cult versus some behavior that's like someone might say,
I wouldn't listen to this one particular news source because this one particular news source tends to be a little dodgy, right?
Versus, I mean, this is someone who says all the news sources are dodgy.
You should come to me for everything.
Those are two different things.
So, the act of discrediting one information source is not nearly the same thing as trying to discredit all of the other sources, right?
That's a thing that I think gets conflated a lot in our current world: is that people think, oh, you know, as soon as you are discrediting something, you're trying to silo all the information from one single source.
And oftentimes, that's not happening.
It's just something people claiming are happening, right?
Yeah, I think if I could introduce this concept of worldview into the conversation, I think it would be quite important at this point.
So, there's a kind of wonderful German name that is used in the literature for this.
It's called Weltanschaung.
I absolutely love that word.
You can just roll your tongue around it.
But basically, it means worldview.
And so, what these groups do, and it's not just cults that do this, of course, we all have a worldview, we all have a way of making sense of our world.
So, this is something that I'm very interested in with my studies: is the way that we make sense of our world.
So, we obviously can only understand our world based on our experiences and other information and data that we take in.
And as we take in new information, new data, and have new experiences, we fit that into our existing Weltanschau.
We fit that into our existing worldview.
So, part of what we're doing there is we're being selective about what we notice and what we don't.
So, these are biases that we're quite familiar with.
You know, we know we have a lot of these unconscious biases, confirmation bias.
We miss things that we're not looking for, and all these sorts of things.
And these all contribute to the fact that we are going to see things through a very particular lens.
We see this in the way that politics has become even more polarized than perhaps it used to, although it's always been fairly polarized.
But, you know, an event happens, and we will see that event through our political lens, our social lens, you know, who we are, what our background is, and so on.
And so, that's a very natural thing.
And society's sort of polarizing us further, I think.
But in cults, that is done to the nth degree.
So, everything that you see, you are interpreting through the lens of all the teachings that you've been bombarded with, some might say brainwashed with, over years, decades.
So, you know, when I see on the news that there's been a terrible earthquake somewhere, and you know, thousands of people have died or been displaced, and it's horrendous.
I see that as a horrible, natural occurrence that, you know, we need to get better at predicting these things and we need to think about how we build buildings in a more safe way in these areas and how we get help to these areas so that we can help people to recover from these terrible events.
Me 30 years ago would have looked at that and said, There you go, that's another evidence that we're in the last days and that Armageddon is coming soon because earthquakes in one place after another was one of the things that Jesus said would happen in the signs of the times in the last days.
So it's the same event, but I'm looking at those two events in a completely different way.
And you name it, anything that people are aware of, anything that's in the news, anything that they see, they are interpreting in that way.
So, cults are very good at creating essentially a single story for us to make sense of everything else.
So they, you know, if you're a member of a cult, everything that you see will just be fit in to that single story.
There are no competing narratives in a cult.
There is only the one narrative.
Therefore, you see everything through that light or through that lens.
And that I think is, it's just so powerful.
And that's what keeps people in, even though they are sometimes believing some of the most ridiculous things.
And as individuals, they are pretty smart, but they're not able to see any of that because everything they see is being fit into that lens.
And it is confirming over and over again that their religious leaders are right or that their guru was absolutely right.
And that's the difficulty, I think.
And that's for me, one of the most powerful elements of cults.
Right.
Yeah, that's that's interesting that, I mean, you're essentially saying that additional perspectives are being limited or carved away so that there's only the one perspective or lens through which to see the world.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what also is really interesting, and again, taking my own former group, is that this allows the group to change its beliefs, sometimes in quite profound ways.
But the wider worldview is that this is a God-directed organization.
Therefore, it actually doesn't matter if we used to think that Armageddon was coming in 1914.
And then we used to think that the end of the world would come before the generation that saw 1914 died off.
And then now they don't think that at all.
They think something else.
That doesn't matter.
So when we look at that, we think, well, surely you can see that you're changing your mind once it's been evidenced that the thing hasn't come true.
But for members in the group, they don't see it that way.
They see it as increasing light to help them at the proper time.
So actually, maybe we needed to think that then.
Now we need to think this.
Like a carrot that leads the horse on.
Yeah.
It seems to be just so far away from the horse.
Exactly.
Not so close that he ever reaches it.
Yeah.
And so that's the sort of mental gymnastics that are happening.
But that's only because you can only do that if you believe this bigger picture, which is that we are in a spirit-led organization, that God is leading this organization in the direction he wants to go.
Therefore, essentially, whatever we're told is okay by us.
You know, if you believe that first thing, then you can believe the rest of it.
And it's tied, you know, it's tied in with lots of other doctrines and ideas and so on.
I mean, ultimately, this is what led to my leaving was that there were too many holes in this Velton show.
There were too many holes in this worldview that started to mean that I couldn't fill them quick enough for the water to come through.
So it's not always successful.
So cults are not always successful in their attempts to do this.
And people do leave cults.
This is the other thing to remember is I think often it's an accusation thrown at people like me who talk about cults and the dangers of cults.
You know, the accusation is, well, people leave them all the time.
You know, how can how can this be a cult if people leave it?
Well, people do leave cults.
Nobody said, nobody says that people can't leave.
It's just that it is very, very difficult.
And when you do leave, you go through hell.
And whilst you're in, you're also, you know, in many respects, wasting your life.
And that's, that's the really sad thing about these groups that I've been struggling with really.
Right.
Attention.
Editing Spencer here.
The podcast with Stephen Mather is too long to put out as one episode, so I've broken it up into two episodes, one this week and one next week.