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Jan. 28, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:39
Edition 103 - Steve Hassan

This edition features global expert on Cults and Mind Control Groups Steve Hassan – How bigis this problem in the age of the internet? On this show Howard finds out.

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for returning to my show.
Thank you for a great crop of emails that I've had recently.
Marshall V. Ann Summers, the man that I interviewed on edition 101 of The Unexplained, did provoke a lot of negative response and some positive response too.
I think the general consensus was that you were very quizzical about this man and what he says.
And a lot of you saying, good on you for giving him the opportunity to put his points and for challenging him fairly firmly.
Well, the fact of the matter is, and I've said this before on The Unexplained, that there are a lot of podcasts out there and a lot of people who do shows and they get on guests and they just stroke their egos and they tell them how wonderful they are and we don't really learn anything.
That's not what I do.
It's just not in my DNA and it's not in my training as a journalist.
So when I get somebody like that on and they're making claims of the kind that they were making, I mean Marshall Vianne Somers claims to have the new message from God, quote unquote.
Now he might or might not.
The jury is out as far as I'm concerned.
But he might.
But he had to be asked some very firm questions, otherwise there's no point in having him on the show because we're just giving him a PR platform.
And that doesn't just go for him.
That goes for anybody that we have on here.
The idea is to provide a way of explaining what a lot of these people are about.
And I want to get a good mix, a smorgasbord of guests on here, so that we can have variety.
Variety is the spice of life, as they say.
You did like Dr. Nick Lister very much.
He was the astronomer who was on edition 102.
And I hope you like the guest on this edition.
A very different topic for us, but one that I think is very pertinent, very relevant at the moment, and I'll explain why.
Back in the 1970s, if you picked up the Sunday papers in the UK, you would pretty much most Sundays read stories about people who joined wacky, crazy cults of different kinds.
And in the 80s, we began to read tales of the efforts of some of their families to get them back from these organizations.
Now, some of these cults were very sinister, I think is the only way to put it.
And the whole thing culminated in what happened at Waco, of course, back in 1993, which is now 20 years ago almost exactly.
A very, very sad situation there where those people perished.
But there are many other examples of cults and organizations and groups.
Now, I thought, I had to say, that cults were something that were belonging really to the 1970s, 1980s, maybe the 1990s, but with the rise of the internet and the fact that there is more mass communication now, and we're all a bit smarter, aren't we?
Such organizations wouldn't find it as easy to go unchallenged.
And I'm starting to think that that maybe is not so.
I think there are genuine groups out there.
I'm sure there are many of them that are trying to promote spiritual harmony, getting the planet together, saving this place for us, protecting the Earth's resources, making us all feel better, making us all behave better, more importantly.
But I also think that there must be groups out there, what do you think, that are using the new age tools of the internet, social media, to market themselves, and in the worst cases, to strip people of their money, and strip people of their minds, taking over what they think.
I think that kind of stuff is still going on.
But like I say, I am equally sure that there are some genuine groups out there.
How do you tell one from another?
A lot of them look very, very similar.
There are some that I have really deep questions about.
Others I think, well, maybe they have something.
And some I think, well, they're very, very dodgy.
Well, a man who's been researching all of this is Steve Hassan.
You might have heard him and seen him on radio and television in America.
I don't think he's as well known in the UK, but Steve has spent the last three and a half decades or more researching cults and helping people get out of them and helping them determine what is a cult and what is a genuine organization.
I think this is valuable work.
Steve has done a lot of speaking about this, written books about this, and I'm very, very pleased we've been able to get him on the show.
So let's cross in just a moment to Steve Hassan in the United States to talk about cults in the internet age and about his new book, too, on that subject and others connected with cults and groups.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for getting the show out to you.
Adam, cheers.
If you'd like to leave a message for the unexplained, then go to the website www.theunexplained.tv.
You can email me there or make a donation to the show.
In this year of 2013, just as in 2012, your donations are utterly vital, and thank you for them if you have made one recently.
We need the money to keep going and to develop this work.
I think there's tons of potential in The Unexplained.
I think as other shows seem to be losing momentum, I think we're gaining it.
But we can only do that with your help and your support.
I'd love to get your feedback.
Please keep it coming.
I'll do some shout-outs for you in the next edition of The Unexplained, give you some feedback on the show.
I've also had a couple of technical queries that we have to answer.
We'll deal with that.
But let's get to the guest now in the United States, Stephen Hassan, writer, author, speaker on the subject of cults and groups.
Stephen, thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
Tell me about you.
You have a background, it's claimed from the publicity about you, of 36 years in this field.
Tell me.
Yes, Howard, I was recruited into a front group of the moon cult, Sun Young Moon who claimed to be the Messiah, who passed away in September of 2012.
I was a college student and my girlfriend had just dumped me and three attractive women approached me at the student union cafeteria pretending to be students at Queen's College where I was attending.
And little did I know that I was being recruited into the cult.
I was being explicitly lied to, which is a hallmark of destructive groups where they don't tell people what they need to know about them or lack of informed consent is another important term.
And at that early stage, what questions were you asking that weren't being properly answered?
the date.
You know, I wasn't looking to join a group.
I was raised in a conservative Jewish family.
I was very interested in philosophy.
I was a creative writing major, so I wrote poetry.
But I was not looking to change religions or drop out of college or cut off from my family and friends at all.
And due to my own experience with the recruitment, indoctrination, hypnosis, mind control techniques of the group, I basically had a conversion experience where I thought God was speaking to me and Satan was everywhere in the world.
Of course, I didn't even believe in Satan before the workshops.
My family was being possessed by Satan, that I had this mission to save the world.
World War III was going to happen in 1977.
And I was a 19-year-old who had no preparation or inoculation about what is a destructive cult, what is mind control, how does it operate, how to protect yourself.
And I'm a very intelligent, idealistic person.
And once they converted me, I became one of their top American leaders and recruited lots of people into it.
And if it wasn't for falling asleep at the wheel of a van at high speed and crashing into the back of a tractor trailer truck and then calling my sister when I was in the hospital recovering from a surgery on my leg and her saying, you have a nephew you haven't met.
I want him to know his uncle Steve.
And me making her promise not to tell my parents because my parents had done the bad thing to say that I was in a cult.
So they were evil.
And they did an intervention with me, Howard, which lasted five days.
It started involuntarily, but I...
Well, I was at my sister's house with a cast from my toes to my upper thigh.
So you weren't going anywhere.
So it was not voluntary for the first 24 hours, but I basically was so confident that I was doing God's will and I so much wanted to prove to everyone that I wasn't brainwashed or under mind control or in a cult that I agreed to meet with the ex-members and listen to what they had to say.
And by the end, I was, you know, crying, going, how could I have ever believed that he was the Messiah?
Like, I just felt so embarrassed, so ashamed.
And part of my own healing was understanding more about Robert J. Lifton's pioneering work for military intelligence in the 50s of the United States, looking into Chinese communist brainwashing or thought reform programs of Mao Zedong.
And as I was reading through the eight criteria that he put forth, Dr. Lifton put forth as the criteria for evaluating whether or not a group was doing brainwashing, it was clear that the Moonies did all eight, quite to the extreme.
And I was so blown away, basically, by, you know, my entire identity had been changed.
I had gone from being a middle-class Jew who was very idealistic and egalitarian to a believing Koreans or the master race.
And Jews died in the Holocaust because they didn't accept Jesus.
Okay, well, people who haven't been through this process, and we've heard a lot of media coverage over the years, perhaps not so much recently, but we've heard a lot here and in your country about this.
But people who haven't been through that whole process may be a little skeptical about how somebody who has rational faculties, has a good education, is erudite, is able to be taken over in that way.
How can that happen?
And we've used a few phrases like brainwashing, but how exactly do they do it?
How did they do it to you?
Sure.
So essentially, to just summarize, after I read Dr. Lifton's book, I went and saw him and I said, I want to talk to you about your book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism.
And he said, that old book.
And I told him the book had just helped me get out of this totalistic group.
And I met with him and I started telling him about how the Moonies operate and how they recruit and what the three-day workshop, the seven-day workshop, the 21-day workshop.
And he basically said, you know, I just studied it secondhand, but you've lived it.
He said, they did it to you and you did it to others.
And what you're describing is so much more sophisticated than what the Chinese were doing in the 50s.
You need to study psychology.
And so began my career and what is a lifelong crusade of 36 years, going to graduate school, getting a master's in counseling, studying hypnosis, studying everything I can about the whole field of influence and social psychology.
And so how is it done?
Well, the short answer is the human mind is incredibly adaptive.
That's part of its strength and it's part of its vulnerability when it comes to being recruited by one of these groups.
It turns out that we're hardwired to conform to people in our environment.
And there are numerous social psychology experiments that demonstrate this conformity feature, the most famous of which is the Solomon Ashe conformity study.
We're hardwired to follow authority figures, as was demonstrated by the Stanley Milgram obedience experiment, where he tricked people into thinking they were giving electrical shocks to another person.
And in less Than an hour, a person was made to electrocute another human being or believe that they were electrocuting another human being because a guy in a white coat ordered them to.
So, in other words, this is the way that scam artists work.
It's also the dynamic that happens between captors and captives.
We often read stories about people who get taken hostage in the Middle East or wherever, and they become accommodated to and perhaps even friends with the people who are holding them.
Yes, so there's a phenomenon known as the Stockholm syndrome, which was involved with a hostage situation with people in a bank in Stockholm.
Yeah, so there's a vast amount of literature that discusses features of the human mind that make us vulnerable to this type of influence.
And what I want to say is that the single most important concept in social psychology is called the fundamental attribution error.
And what the fundamental attribution error describes is this overwhelming tendency of people around the world, doesn't matter what culture, when they look at other people's behavior and try to understand why people do what they do, they have this bias to overestimate internal variables or personality variables and underestimate environmental variables.
So to say it in a more colloquial way, when somebody looks at Steve Hassan getting into the moonies, they think, what's wrong with him?
Or is he stupid or is he weak?
Or they think that if I was put in that situation, I would just keep saying no, no, no.
I wouldn't do it.
I wouldn't buy it.
No, no, no.
I would never fall for that.
But the truth is, is if you're in that situation and you haven't been given proper cues and scripts and what to watch out for and how to protect yourself, the evidence suggests that overwhelmingly you're going to get impacted.
The question then becomes, you know, do you stay for an hour, a day, a week, a year, two years, five years, 20 years?
And what's shifted over the 36 years for me so dramatically is the fact that the internet exists now.
And whereas in the 70s or 80s or even early 90s, if somebody got approached by a group or a person making claims, they wouldn't know where to go for any information about it other than the recruiter.
Whereas now, if people are victimized by a particular group, the odds are that they're going to put up a blog or they're going to put up a web page or try to get the media to cover it.
And so if you know how to do Google searches, advanced Google searches, for example, and don't just stop at the first 10 hits because all the big cults are manipulating the search engines to clog up the first 10 hits.
If you do that, you're going to have a better chance of finding out what's up about this particular organization.
And you're saying that people are now able to, and they would be in a position to make a more informed choice than perhaps you were able to, because of the information that's out there if you look for it.
What I'm saying is they may not, but their family and friends, if they witness a radical personality change or the person's all of a sudden becoming very secretive or is very aggressively proselytizing or is giving all the money away, is going to do that search.
The problem is, and that's why I've written books on the subject, if someone is on the honeymoon phase and really heavily enthused in the cult group, they also are primed to not respond to attacks or persecution from family and friends.
So they're already conditioned to block or do thought stopping against any critical information.
So what I say to my clients and what I say in my books is if you suspect it's a cult, don't just call up the person or stand in front of them and say it's a cult, look at this information, but ask them questions in a curious yet concerned posture and engage them and help them to process, okay, who met you and what did they say?
And what were you feeling when you first met them?
Was it a feeling or was it a suspicious feeling?
And it turns out to be a very important question because 90% of the time when people are asked and they're honest with themselves, they have a feeling there's something wrong, something's weird, something's off, and they get recruited because they're not listening to their inner voice and they're not paying attention to their intuition.
And also because they don't know what questions to ask, like, who is your founder?
What are his or her credentials?
And these groups, are they always formatted in the same way?
In other words, just as they were in the 70s, and we can think of the famous examples, right up to the modern day, is it always a charismatic leader with a philosophy who wants to get followers, and the way to get followers is to effectively brainwash them?
Well, the simple answer is no.
There are patterns, but there are much more complexity to the phenomenon.
So, for example, there can be political groups, therapy groups, business groups, religious groups, therapy groups, large group awareness trainings, or it could be an individual.
And maybe it's an individual who's attractive and you're interested in having a relationship with them.
So it can vary widely.
I'd say the big pattern is what I call the BITE Model, Howard, which stands for the control of behavior is the B, control of information is the I. Control of thinking or thoughts is the T, and controlling emotions is the E. And I have a whole laundry list of sub-variables.
It's in my books or on my website, freedomofmind.com.
So, for example, under behavior control, do they control how much sleep you have?
Do they control what kinds of foods you eat?
What kind of clothing you wear?
Do you need to ask permission?
I have heard reports of people's diets being manipulated, or certainly not manipulated, but them being offered food of a particular kind because it's ultimately good for them.
It's soul food effectively.
Well, that's one possibility, but from a mind control perspective, if you want to get somebody and convert them, you basically want them to do opposites.
So you want them to do things that are so not what they're used to.
So if they've been a vegetarian for 18 years, getting them to have a hamburger becomes a goal often.
Or if they're a meat eater, making them fast for long periods or become a vegan, for example.
So what turns out in the extreme of brainwashing and mind control, and I can give you some more criteria, if you wish, to discern the difference between brainwashing and mind control.
The gist is basically this, a pyramid-structured authoritarian relationship, deceptive recruiting, controlling their behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions in order to create a new identity that's dependent and obedient.
So unlike just conning someone or persuading someone to turn over a lot of money, what the more extreme groups are interested in is changing your identity and changing your beliefs and taking away your personal power to make autonomous decisions and making people believe they need to follow the other,
meaning the leader or one of the other sub-leaders, and using that locus of control that's external instead of your own internal adult locus of control.
So as far as the distinction that I think exists between brainwashing and mind control would be, for example, Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped out of her apartment, put in a closet, raped.
In her experience, the beginning of her recruitment was very aggressive, negative, not wanted.
And it was very clear in her mind that these people are not my friends.
This was the Symbionese Liberation Army, wasn't it, from memory?
And in fact, she was kidnapped the month I was kidnapped into the Moonies.
Except in my case, it was these attractive women smiling and flirting with me.
And when I asked, are you part of some religious group or something?
They smiled and said, no, not all.
And so for me, the deceptive piece and the seduction piece, also known as love bombing, enabled me to take the next steps where they started asking me personal questions about my family and my upbringing and my goals.
And I was telling them everything about myself because I was naive and I had no idea that they were trying to get me to drop out of college, quit my job, donate my bank account, cut off from my family and friends and work basically 18 to 21 hours a day, seven days a week.
Was it about getting money to grow the organization for enhancing their greater power?
Or was there more to it than that?
In other words, was money the bottom line or was there something else, another agenda for them?
The agendas, Howard, with all of these relationships and groups, in my opinion, are the following three in order.
Number one is power.
Number two is money.
Number three is sex.
So there are more than a handful of abusers and cult figures who are just needing to control other people due to their own insecurities, their own narcissistic personality disorder.
They need narcissistic supply.
So they may or may not exploit people financially.
They may or may not be interested in accumulating large amounts of wealth.
But money is the strong number two factor.
And then the third factor is very often the leader has a sex addiction and they want to have sex with followers, whether it's men or women, whether it's heterosexual or homosexual sex.
Okay, now how in this era of the internet, and I know that's what you've been researching in the current book, because everything's changed.
The internet has changed everything.
It's made communication far more immediate.
It's meant that everybody can get in touch with everybody else.
We can all access ideas and thoughts and theories that we could never access before so easily.
In that kind of environment, there are many, many thousands of sort of new agey-type groups out there.
And I don't doubt that very many of them are absolutely genuine and have the aim of trying to further the understanding of mankind, make all our lives better, bring us into contact with God, whatever.
However, I'm equally concerned and equally sure that there are going to be groups who work just as the old cults did, but they've got a whole new technology here to exploit.
How can you tell a genuine organization from an organization that may be using the same techniques, but wants to aggrandize itself, wants to get money, wants to feed the leader with adulation?
Oh, So the quick answer is: you need to do research, and you need to research beyond just asking the recruiter or the group itself.
You have to take it slowly.
And what I tell people is if a group is legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny.
I encourage them to ask very direct questions.
And if they get evasive answers, or if the person turns around the question and makes it the questioner's issue or such, your alarm bells should be going off.
So for example, and I should say on my website, freedomofmind.com, I have an article called Spiritual Responsibility, Avoiding Abuses and Pitfalls Along the Spiritual Path.
And in it, I not only have the BITE model, but I have a list of assessment questions.
So here's a few.
Who is the leader?
What is his or her credentials?
So if the person credentials is a PhD from a degree mill and it's not an accredited program, you should get suspicious.
Why are they claiming to have a PhD when they paid $35?
Or if they claim that they have the cure to cancer, where's the proof?
And I say basically the more extraordinary the claims, the more extraordinary the proof needs to be in order to support the claim.
Well, around the world, there are organizations that claim to be led by individuals who say that they're connected, that they have powers, that they're connected with God or some other etheric sphere or whatever.
What questions can you ask to prove or disprove that?
They may well be right.
They may well have that connection.
They may well be complete charlatans.
How are we to know?
So it starts with asking questions like, who is the leader?
What are his or her credentials?
Did they have a revelation one day?
Are they claiming that they were had many past lives and they were enlightened in a past life?
Or is there something a little more substantial?
Like they're Tibetan Buddhist Lama and they were initiated after training for 30 years in a lineage.
And so you don't believe that somebody can have a road to Damascus revelation and suddenly become an empowered person and want to tell everybody else and get everybody else involved in this.
You don't buy that.
That can't happen.
It's possible to have a revelation.
It needs to go beyond just taking their word for it.
You want to watch how they behave.
And so for example, if they lie about themselves and their background and their history, I say automatically they're not trustworthy.
Because in my opinion or my journey as a spiritual person, legitimate spiritual leaders don't lie.
They tell the truth.
And if they don't know the answer, they say they don't know the answer, but they don't tell a lie.
And you want to have a lie radar on at all times in an involvement.
You want to ask questions like, does anyone consider your group to be controversial?
And if so, what do they say?
And if they say, oh, they think we're a cult, then you can say, why do they think that?
And then if you get a consistent put down of any critic of that particular group or consistent put down of any former member, even if that person was the former number two person or number three person of the group and was in it for 20 years, that makes me very suspicious.
And what I'm going to interrupt my response to you, Howard, and tell you and your listeners the big question, which would be, how would anyone know if they were under mind control?
Well, how would they?
So the answer, my answer is they wouldn't on the spot.
But what they would need to do, let's say someone's in a group and they're asking themselves this question.
So what they would need to do out of the environment for a period of time, I would say one week to one month, depending on how long they've been in it.
If they were in a group for 20 years, I'd suggest at least a month.
I'd want them to study models of what mind control are.
And right now, the three dominant models is the Robert Lifton model from Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism.
He has eight criteria.
Margaret Singer, Army psychologist, wrote a book called Cults in Our Midst.
And she has a model based on six conditions.
And my model, the Byte model.
And by the way, in my latest book, Freedom of Mind, Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults and Beliefs, I have all three models in chapter two for someone to look at.
And then think about their own experiences.
Think from the moment they were recruited and look at those models and ask yourself, do these apply?
Beyond that, you should look for former members and critics.
Deliberately seek them out and listen to what they have to say.
And don't automatically minimize or deny what they're saying, but actually find out what they have to say, what proof they have to offer, and think about it.
And then when you do that process, then you may want to go back to the group and ask follow-up questions.
Or if it is a destructive group, if you're away from The group, if you've studied the models of mind control, if you've sought out critics and ex-members, listened to what they had to say, and you've reflected honestly on your own experience, then you can answer the question whether or not you were under mind control or not.
And what happens if you're so far gone in the thing that you lose your critical faculties?
You're not able to do that questioning.
Somebody's got to do that on your behalf, haven't they?
Exactly.
That's my work.
I truly believe the antidote or the way to help people who have been ensnared in these groups and indoctrinated is family and friends need to get educated.
And I typically meet with family and friends for a couple of days and do a psychoeducation with them.
And I teach them strategies for how to talk to people in cults.
And I'd say that the main strategy is to not be confrontational or attacking the group, the leader, the group, or the ideology, but learn about other groups, learn about social psychology, use examples,
and mostly ask questions from a curious yet concerned posture so that you're engaging the person, you're letting them know you genuinely care about them and you genuinely are interested in stepping into their shoes and understanding what they believe and letting them know if you really find it valuable, then you would consider joining.
So that's the bait for why a totalistic cult member would want to spend even the time with you.
And I truly believe that mind control and brainwashing does not erase a person's core self, their authentic self, and that deep down inside, as many hours as they've been indoctrinated, as much hypnosis has been used, deep down inside, people still have a core part that knows what's real and what's not real.
And that ultimately, my experience, Howard, is that people don't want to be lied to.
They don't want to be manipulated.
They don't want to be exploited.
And that's exactly what happens in destructive cults.
They have very high-sounding ideals.
It sounds wonderful.
It's going to save humankind.
It's going to save the planet.
But the bottom line is that on a day-to-day basis, the leadership are mean or they're insensitive or they lack empathy or they're not kind and peaceful and loving.
And they're not hypocritical if they're genuine.
So are we still there?
Absolutely still there.
I'm very transfixed by what you're saying.
Are situations still arising that you're aware of where dramatically we all saw the TV programs and dramatizations in the 17 and 80s where a young person is involved in an organization, goes to be with them, gives up everything to be with them, and then has to be kidnapped?
Does that kind of dramatic stuff still happen, or is that very much the stuff of the 70s and 80s?
That's very much the stuff of the 70s and 80s.
I myself was involved with forcible deprogramming in 1976 and 1977.
That's what was being done then.
And even though most of the cases I did were legal in the sense that the family went to a judge and got a court-ordered conservatorship, it was still incredibly traumatizing for everybody to be in a situation because when someone is indoctrinated by a mind control cult,
part of the control mechanisms, it's under the E of the bite model, is something I call phobia indoctrination, which is the utilization or installation of irrational fears that if you ever leave the group, terrible things will happen to you.
And so, for example, when I was in the Moon cult, the Exorcist movie came out, and Moon rented an entire movie theater and brought a whole lot of Moonies to see this movie.
And then he gave a lecture a few hours later about how God had made the Exorcist movie and how this movie was a prophecy of what would happen to people who left the Unification Church.
And I didn't even remember having seen that movie for years after I left the group.
But at the point that I was studying phobias in graduate school, it clicked and I went, oh my God, that's where this fear of Satan got involved.
So the techniques are very, very subtle.
So if someone has a fear that if they leave the group, they're going to go insane or they're going to go to hell or they're going to be possessed by demons or whatever.
And then you take the person by force and tell them, we're going to wake you up and help you to get out of this, you're going to freak out.
And that's basically what happens in forcible interventions.
And after doing 12 cases, I just said, that's it.
I'm retired.
It works, but it's too traumatizing.
And that's when I set about trying to come up with a family-centered approach, which emphasized communication techniques and strategies.
What about groups?
We touched on this before, groups and organizations in this internet age, because you were recruited one-to-one, face-to-face.
These days, I suspect that if I wanted to set up a cult, I wanted to set up a group perhaps for my own adulation to enrich myself, whatever, turn myself into some kind of demigod, then the first thing I would do is I'd buy myself a website and create a myth around myself, maybe borrow some philosophy from somebody else and say, here I am.
Worship me.
Be part of this great thing.
I'm going to change the planet.
We're going to be fantastic in the future.
Come and be part of this.
The landscape is different, isn't it, now?
Landscape's different, and most groups are using the inch to recruit for sure.
But I would tell you, Howard, most modern-day cult leaders, in my opinion, are ex-members of other cults.
And that's where they were taught how to do these techniques.
And in some ways, they're victimizing others the way they were victimized, as opposed to the cold, calculating con artists that said, ha, I think I want to start a cult.
So I'm going to set up a website and steal some philosophy and make a lot of money and have sex.
So this is very encouraging.
Your research is, you talked about families of people who might suspect that there's something amiss.
Doing their research about the person, if they do their research carefully enough, they're going to find out that, as you say, in many cases, the people running these organizations have a track record.
They've got form.
Oh, exactly.
And if the family can afford to hire a private investigator to find out if the person has criminal history, if there have been lawsuits, that's also very, very helpful.
And so just coming back to the whole point about how a group's recruiting, they typically are trying to create some front group that they think will be attractive bait for the kinds of people they want.
And they specifically don't want people with emotional problems.
They don't want drug addicts as a generalization.
There are a few drug rehab cults that get people off of alcohol and drugs, but then they become dependent on the group.
So this actually runs counter to a model that I've heard put out there before, that these organizations are run by people who have certain inadequacies, which we've discussed, and they tend to attract people who have certain inadequacies or holes in their lives that they need to fill.
You're saying that quite often that's not the case.
I'll respond this way.
Most cult leaders appear to be narcissistic personality disordered people, which turns out to be an early attachment disorder with mother and father.
And so they don't have a healthy sense of self.
And most importantly, they don't develop a healthy sense of empathy, the ability to step into someone else's shoes and feel or imagine that they can feel what the other person is feeling.
So I'd say that's one generalization.
The other generalization about people who are vulnerable to cult recruiters is that people are often found to be situationally vulnerable.
So in my case, my girlfriend dumped me, so I was more responsive to women flirting with me.
If I had a good relationship with my girlfriend, I'm sure I wouldn't have engaged these women in conversation the way that I had.
If someone is going through a divorce, if someone is going through, is graduating or moving to a new city, state, or country, or death of a loved one, some life cycle event that throws them off balance, then they're going to be more susceptible to a recruiter.
But that's different than saying someone is weak or stupid or has a hole in themselves.
For the most part, groups tell their members to recruit people like them better.
They don't want homeless people and they don't want to support people who have disabilities, for example, or mental illness of any kind.
They really want, so the way these groups will operate is they'll tack on to some social issue.
They'll set up a discussion board.
And I've already counseled several people who literally never met anyone in person in the cult.
It was all online, YouTube, webinars, Skype, and implementing the practices in their own apartment and yet deeply affected and indoctrinated.
But if something happens in the privacy of somebody's home, and if they are still continuing to function as human beings, I guess there'd be a lot of people who'd say, well, you know, it may well be a cult.
It may just be a well-intentioned group.
But in any case, this person hasn't been taken away from their home.
They haven't been fundamentally changed in the way that they conduct their life.
So where's the harm?
Right.
So I think it comes down to understanding that there's a continuum of, you know, one side, constructive, healthy groups and relationships, and the arrow in the other direction to very unhealthy ones.
And I'd say there's a large number of people who are in the gray zone where there are some elements that are okay and some elements that are constructive.
And it really does come down to who cares.
In my world, people who read my books and go to my website, freedomofmind.com, hire me because they truly see a very negative series of changes where they're leaving a marriage or they're dropping out of college or they're not sleeping or they've lost 40 pounds or they're starting to have hallucinations.
That's when it's serious.
If somebody is working nine to five job and paying their bills and still keeping up family relations and just spending lots and lots of hours with cult members, it's going to be less worrisome.
And does it always come to the point where perhaps that person living an ordinary life and connecting with other members of a group online, does it always come to the point where they're going to want personal contact?
Where it'll be brought to the point where you know they say, We want to see you, come and be part of this thing in person, we want to see the flesh.
Um, for the groups that operate in Russia and some of the other countries around the world, uh, maybe not.
Uh, they may want to try to get out of Russia and come to the US or come to the UK to meet you.
Um, but it really comes down to there are thousands and thousands of these groups out there.
And what's the leader want?
What are the other lieutenants who are running it?
What are they saying that they want?
And then their decisions.
I can tell you that the old adage, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, seems to hold.
And that some groups start off relatively benign seeming, and they get worse and worse and worse over time.
Is that because it's the human thing of they say, oh, look, we can make money out of this, and we can get power, and look, people are worshiping us, they're loving us.
I think it's the power, addiction of power, that propels it.
And the desire to surround oneself with yes people who say how wonderful you are, Howard.
Howard, you are the smartest human being.
And I just love being with you, Howard.
And, you know, eventually Howard starts believing it, you know, and hmm, I like this.
And then if it's an attractive woman and she wants to rub herself on you, well, it's not what you should do as a teacher and as a guru, but it does feel really good.
Well, maybe if I meditate when this woman's rubbing her body on me, maybe we can call it a spiritual thing.
You know, so then it's a little of this and a little of that, and it becomes trial and error and the evolution, and it can evolve pretty fast into whatever the leader wants and kicking out anybody who says, you know, you're acting crazy or you're contradicting what you were just teaching two weeks ago.
Okay.
Has anybody ever tried to sue you, Steve Hassan, for things that you said?
Sure.
I get threatened pretty regularly.
And what do you do about that?
Well, I made a decision a long time ago to say my truth and to advocate for public speech.
I try to be responsible.
My lawyers have told me that I really would be smart not to even talk about the word cult, specifically when I'm talking about a particular group.
But what they recommend that I do is describe the behaviors that are concerning, like the things in the bite model, and talk about any group that does these behaviors is a destructive group.
And let people make their own judgments and their own opinions.
But it is a massive, massive gray area, isn't it?
Because there may well be, and this is the difficulty in the internet age, there are so many people who want to get their message out there.
And some of them may be very well-intentioned.
And like we said, they may well want to make a very positive change to this world.
And they may well always stay that way.
They may not become corrupted by the power.
And they may not have been bad to start off with, and they may never be bad.
And the difficulty that we'll always have as human beings, people who get involved with these things and people who don't, maybe people who are around those people who get involved with these things, is being able to sort out one from the other.
That's the problem, isn't it?
And that's why people need to, as you say, get themselves informed.
Yeah.
So legitimate authority figures should be responsible.
They should be accountable.
And they should be operating with as much transparency as possible.
And if they have an organization, they should have a board of advisors and directors who aren't just yes people, but people who care about the cause and not just doing whatever the bidding is of the leader.
And if they're raising large amounts of money, I think they should tell the members where the money's going.
And if the law says that the leader should not be benefiting in extreme ways from money that collected for poverty, you know, for helping hungry people, and it can be demonstrated that money that was donated to help hungry people is buying an $18 million mansion, then that person should be held accountable and put in jail.
But I would imagine those who are ill-motivated running these organizations, they're going to have ways of making sure that you can't find that out.
They're going to have accountants working on this so that the money's buried so deeply you may never see it.
Accountants, but more onerous, I feel, at least in the United States, is the whole issue of lobbying and corruption of lobbies and donations of large amounts of money for political campaigns.
So, for example, there is a whole group of organizations that do a form of multi-level marketing where the focus is on recruiting and indoctrinating people and not on selling products.
And these groups donate huge amounts of money, I'm told, to attorney generals in each state into their election campaign so they don't get prosecuted by the attorney generals.
And in my opinion, attorney generals are supposed to protect the public and uphold laws and to fight fraud.
And of course, looking back in history, if we remember the Jim Jones case, that is a long time ago, but Jim Jones got himself right into the heart of politics, didn't he?
He most certainly did, as did many other Cult figures.
They want to cozy up to political figures.
As we bring this to a close, I think we have to ask the question that is connected with your current work.
In this internet era, in this era of instant communication, is this problem a bigger problem than it was in the 1970s when it made all the tabloid newspapers in the UK?
Are we dealing with something bigger here?
Is it the same?
Where are we at?
I believe this issue is way bigger than ever before, but I've recoded it away from the term religious cult to the whole issue of what's referred to in legal terms as undue influence, which is the use of influence in an unethical way to take advantage of a person.
And if one looks at the biggest challenges in the world today, aside from global climate change, in my opinion, the whole issue of influence needs to be put on the table as a major thing to discuss and to use ethically.
And what we haven't talked about, Howard and Meow, is the whole issue of terrorist groups, whether they're Islamic terrorist group or Hindu terrorist groups or Jewish terrorist groups or Christian terrorist groups.
They're cults.
They're mind control cults.
And they're just being instructed to do violence.
But basically, that's the phenomenon.
And I think so much of what's happening on the planet is about this issue.
But for the most part, newspapers, the media, either they're being lobbied by the cults for advertising, whether the cults have put figures in to the particular institution of media to edit, to be an editor and to censor, or the institution is afraid of being sued.
The public is not getting the information they used to get in the 70s and 80s about cults and about the whole issue of undue influence.
You talked about terrorist groups.
Well, I think a lot of the American people and certainly a lot of people in this country believe that al-Qaeda, for us in the West anyway, is a problem that's gone away.
Osama bin Laden's gone and the world's a sunny day.
There's no problem there anymore.
Are people wrong believing that?
Yes.
I think they're wrong and incorrect in believing that.
And in any case, groups change their names all the time.
So the problem of indoctrination and creating people to be slavishly devoted followers who will mindlessly do whatever they're told is a social problem of huge importance.
So the best advice we can give people, it seems, and that applies to all of us who use computers and quest after the truth in this strange world of ours, is just to be careful, it seems, from what you've said.
If you find yourself trending towards something, if you find yourself being attracted to or seduced by a set of ideas or ideologies or a group or a leader, before you get too far into it, and while you still have your critical faculties, do your research, ask your questions.
I think the key is inoculation and preparation and understanding how to protect yourself for sure, Howard.
And could you summarize in a sentence, how do you protect yourself in this modern world where there are so many messages coming at all of us all the time?
And a group that perhaps was ill-motivated and only wanting power and self-aggrandizement and all the rest of it, well, it'll be using all those great techniques of website design and YouTube videos and all the rest of it.
Those people are very, very sophisticated now and very pervasive, it would seem.
Right.
So I'd say that learning to be a good consumer, using critical thinking and doing independent research and not just trusting whatever is on the surface presented, but going to other sources and resources and using search engines to find critics.
And as I said earlier, don't just settle with the top 10 hits, but dig 20, 30, 40, 50 deep because the bigger groups that have the money will be able to manipulate the search engines because they know most people won't look beyond the first 10 hits.
And do you feel sorry or sympathetic towards groups who may be tarred by some as potential cults who actually really are well motivated and they really do want to gain followers or adherents and they really do want to make the world a better place?
Do you feel sorry for those organizations who might find themselves tarred with a bad brush?
Well, if anyone tars them with a bad brush, that's part of my work is that they'll be able to go to the bite model and show that it doesn't apply to them.
And they'd be able to come to me and say, you know, please look at our group and tell people what you really think because we aren't using deception and we aren't controlling people's behavior.
We're not installing phobias.
We're not teaching people thought-stopping.
We're not reworking people's language systems.
And I'd be happy to stand by them and say you're labeling them badly.
So do you think that when organizations put themselves online, there ought to be a, how would you do this, but an international code of conduct that a group that wants to set itself up in that way and raise money and put out tutorials and all the rest of it has to put one of their pages on the internet, a declaration that they conform to certain standards?
I love it.
Good idea.
An organization that does that.
No, I mean, the bottom line, Howard, is the United Nations has a universal declaration of human rights, And I think that that's a pretty darn good standard of code of conduct for people to adhere to.
The problem is, if you just simply go to cult members and say, is your group adhering to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
they're going to say of course.
Of course they will.
They'll say yes, we are.
And they're going to say, please don't criticize us.
And don't forget, of course, that Jesus in his day was criticized and he was a good man.
A lot of Bible cults love to cite Jesus, who is a Jew, by the way.
And they love to say that Jesus did the bite model too.
And I don't see any evidence at all in the New Testament that the bite model was employed by Jesus.
Steve Hassan, if people want to know about you and your work, where do they go?
So the easiest thing is to go to my website, freedomofmind.com.
I've been uploading videos of lectures that I've been giving, interviews with former cult members of a variety of different groups.
And people can email us at center at freedomofmind.com or go to our website.
We have our phone number up there.
It's a small company interested in training more people.
My latest book, we're hoping to get in a number of different languages like my other books.
And I love to give interviews and talks just to spread more awareness.
So thank you, Howard, for inviting me.
Steve Hassan, thank you very much.
We've had a couple of small digital glitches, but we've got pretty much every word that you've said there.
Fascinating stuff, and I wish you well.
Please keep in touch.
Thank you, Steve.
You.
Take care, Howard.
Well, some worrying and controversial things there from Steve Hassan.
If you want to know more about him, go to my website, www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, and you'll find a link there to his work.
And also, if you'd like to make a donation to this show, you can do that on my website.
And you can leave me feedback as well.
Or if you have any points to put, if you want to tell me how you think I'm doing this show, how you think I can improve it, I never think you've learned it all when it comes to broadcasting.
You are always learning.
So please let me know what you think.
Give me your ideas, guest suggestions, whatever.
www.theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much for all your supportive emails in this cold, cold winter here in the UK.
It's really nice to get up every morning, turn on the computer, and see your thoughts about the show.
And I always take on board what you say.
And if you're listening to this show on perhaps a radio that you were given for Christmas, maybe one of those Pure Flow devices which are very good, or a Roberts or any make of internet radio, don't forget that even though you don't have to go to the website, it's very important for me that you do.
Even if you're listening on a PureSet or any kind of internet radio, please go to your computer at some point and put a hit on my website.
Absolutely very, very important for what we do here.
Thank you again for your support.
Thank you for the nice things you've been saying about the show.
Please spread the word.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I will return very soon with another edition of The Unexplained.
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