Escaping Utopia

by Lalich, Janja; McLaren, Karla;

  Iris

  There was a lot of abuse that we went through. The Twelve Tribes believed that kids are supposed to suffer more than the adults and they think that kids are very evil and that they have to be 100 percent perfect. If they are born into the commune that means that they have to follow the Bible scripture and revelations that say that Jesus Christ will come and save 144,000 perfect children out of this evil world. So the commune expects the children to be perfect and to be involved with that revolution with Jesus Christ in heaven. The kids just suffered with all kinds of rules and judgment and criticism and it was very oppressive.

  Matthew

  The FLDS believes in and practices polygamy, and believes that a man must have at least three wives in order to get into heaven. It’s a very patriarchal group where women are subjugated and expected to obey their husbands, and everyone has to follow the gospel to the letter. Everyone in the world outside was called “gentiles,” or nonbelievers. We were taught that they were bad but that the apostates (people who left the FLDS) were worse because the gentiles, they didn’t know they were bad. They had never heard the gospel, so it wasn’t their fault they were bad. My dad would study the gentile news before he gave his sermons, and use real-life situations, reallife occurrences, and then make them a blanket statement for the whole world: This is the way the outside world is. If a child had been abused and neglected to the point of death, then that’s what the gentile world did to the kid.

  Samantha

  What Is a Transcendent Belief System?

  For centuries, people have asked, “What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? Why am I here?” Through the ages, these questions have led phil-osophers, religious scholars, and artists to reflect deeply, and to develop an endless number of transcendent belief systems to answer them. The concept of transcendence relates to God and gods, certainly; yet it also relates to the universe beyond our understanding, to the realm of ideas, and to concepts that we are not yet able to comprehend. In many transcendent belief systems, wonder, free thinking, and doubt are welcomed and supported. But in the controlled and sealed-off world of cults, free thinking and doubt are not allowed.

  Religions and philosophies promote many different transcendent belief systems. Each one has different answers about the meaning of life, and most will expect you to become a better person as you grow to understand the belief system. Conversely, in many cults, your purpose is to become a perfect person: a perfect, unquestioning martial artist like Lily; a textbook-perfect meditator like Iris; or a perfect, doubt-free child of God, as Matthew and Joseph were supposed to be. In other cults, your purpose may be to support your idealized leader or to spread your group’s perfect belief system throughout the world, as Jessica’s group, The Family,1 did and still does today. In most cases, each cult member’s needs, ideas, and individuality are irrelevant; rather, the value of members is measured by how flawlessly they live up to their group’s vision of absolute, transcendent perfection.2

  Though not all groups organize themselves around transcendent beliefs in a higher power or higher purpose, groups nearly always unite around their support

  for the right ideas, the right approaches, and the right kinds of people. For instance, top executives at Enron, an energy company that rose to great power and wealth and then failed disastrously, passionately promoted the belief that they were changing the very face of business. Everything that people at Enron did, they assured themselves, was not simply right; it was better than any other business practice that had ever been developed. Enron promoted itself as the truth and the way and the light of business, and their evangelical belief in the rightness of their model had the effect of silencing almost everyone in the company, even as it became clear that their unorthodox methods were endangering not just their own financial futures, but the stability of the world energy market itself.3 Even when there are no obvious religious or spiritual beliefs involved, a transcendent belief system filled with certainty and righteousness can take over a group and erase the critical abilities of everyone inside it.

  In healthy groups, a sense of rightness tends to be shared and supported in non-polarizing and easygoing ways. In cultic groups like Enron and the groups Janja studied, however, the push for purity and perfection is intense and incessant. Public displays of unquestioning dedication to the group’s beliefs become a main activity that often leads to the enforced extermination of any traits, behaviors, or ideas that challenge those allegedly perfect beliefs. In the private lives of cult members, the internalization of this intense dedication often leads people to willingly suppress or even erase their own individuality. When a transcendent belief system is strong enough, external forms of control may not be necessary; each member’s idealism and dedication may kick into overdrive so that they will apply increasingly stricter controls on their own behavior.

  In many cults, indoctrination into a transcendent belief system interferes with all aspects of life—and especially with the psychological development of children and teens. In most cases, family ties, socialization, schooling, play, health care, financial security, and preparation for the future are pushed aside, because all cult members—babies, children, teens, and adults—are required to demonstrate complete devotion to the group’s ideals and beliefs.4

  The Unique Features of Cultic Belief Systems

  There are four dimensions to Janja’s bounded choice model, which describes how people are attracted to and then trapped in cultic groups. As a reminder, the four dimensions are: (1) the transcendent belief system; (2) charismatic authority; (3) systems of control; and (4) systems of influence. It may strike you as unusual that we begin with the transcendent belief system instead of the charismatic cult leader, because without a leader or leaders, there would be no cult in the first place. Yet because we’re focusing on the children, we believe it’s important to start with the dimension that most likely captured the hearts and minds of the parents, who then brought or birthed their children into the cult environment. Though the cult leader is a crucial feature of bounded choice, it’s typically the transcendent belief system that attracts followers to the group and keeps them loyal to its rules and beliefs.

  Cultic belief systems contain a seemingly contradictory yet powerful combination: they are all-encompassing, yet also all-exclusive. These belief systems are all-encompassing because they offer a complete explanation of the past, present, and future—and they promise the one and only path to salvation. They explain everything and tell followers precisely how to behave and how to live, and they require followers to rewrite their own personal histories and future goals in order to be accepted into the group. Of course, many religions, political ideologies, and grand philosophies offer similar all-encompassing ideologies, but cults have a specific feature that makes them different: besides explaining everything about human existence then, now, and ever after, the leader also specifies the exact methods followers must adopt and the personal transformation they must undergo in order to walk the group’s sacred and perfect path.

  Cultic groups are also all-exclusive and sealed off, in that only special individuals can access the cult’s information, deep beliefs, and transformative processes. Additionally, the cult’s doctrine is all-exclusive because it is not simply true; it is The Truth—it comes down from on high, and it is never to be challenged. It is the only way to salvation. It makes the group exceptional and gives members a powerful sense of privilege and superiority, such that anything or anyone else becomes unworthy of consideration. One consequence of this type of thinking is that the group becomes walled-off and elitist—as Joseph’s Exclusive Brethren group was toward outsiders, or as Iris’s TM group was toward non-meditators. Other groups and belief systems are ridiculed or seen as evil, and this across-the-board prejudice justifies the attitude (and sometimes the requirement) that followers must exclude or reject any idea, belief, or person that is not approved by their group.

  The combined pressures of the all-encompassing ideology that explains eve
rything, the exclusivity and prejudice toward other beliefs, and the constant demand for change interact strongly with the dedication and idealism that motivate cult members. The belief system is urgent, undisputable, and unyielding: once you fully understand the perfect belief system, how can you not follow it to the letter? Once you commit yourself body and soul, how can you not follow through? As we’ll explain in Chapter 4, this sense of obligation is even more compelling when you’ve testified openly to your commitment in front of others. These beliefs are so entrancing and magnetic that you come to believe that your life depends on following them with complete devotion.5 These beliefs require strict obedience to rigid rules, a secluded lifestyle (even if you are living in the midst of an urban area), and a complete break with the thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors of your pre-cult life. Naturally, for children raised in cultic environments, there is no pre-cult life. This is all they know day after day.

  For children who grow up in cults, there can be a harsh contrast between the group’s utopian ideals of perfection and the often-grueling process of trying to achieve that perfection in everyday life. Cultic demands for transcendent perfection can be especially harmful for children and teens, who are often subjected to systematic abuse (“for the higher good”) as a way to eliminate any traits, behaviors, or ideas that do not fit into the group’s belief system. For instance, Matthew spoke of working long hours and being forbidden to play, or being forced to close his eyes as he passed “worldly” toy stores or bookstores—just as Jessica was punished, isolated, and forced to fast repeatedly to cure her of the allegedly satanic condition of asthma.

  The outcome of this transformational process is a deep internalization of the belief system. Cult members quite willingly submit themselves to an intensive training and indoctrination process because they come to believe that their group holds the only path to freedom. Although we can easily see from the outside that cult members are not free, the transcendent belief system guarantees freedom through a sense of grand purpose, connection to a higher goal, and the promise of spiritual, political, or personal salvation. A cult member’s subservience doesn’t feel like subservience; it feels like devotion, zeal, and transcendence.6

  How the Transcendent Belief System Captures and Retains Followers

  The transcendent belief system ensnares people in a number of ways. Each member’s constant striving for an impossible ideal makes them feel inadequate about themselves and their accomplishments. All they know is that they must work harder to live up to the group’s demands, change themselves, and become more perfect. A large part of this push for perfection is that people are encouraged to constantly scrutinize, criticize, or even berate themselves and other group members. Each follower’s dedication and personal commitment impels him or her to become self-recriminating and self-critical—and to be deeply critical of others as well.

  This interplay of critical attitudes and self-condemning behaviors means that people don’t have the time or clarity to seriously question their leader’s actions, rigid ideas, or the workings of the controlling social system that the leader has created. Cult members become so consumed with criticizing themselves for their incessant failures, criticizing others, and working endless hours to achieve the group’s goals that they enter into a state of denial. They are assured that once they become perfect and achieve their group’s goals—either the short-term ones (such as recruitment and daily duties) or the longer-term ones (such as building a compound or working to reform the cult’s public image)—then freedom, selffulfillment, and transcendence will be bestowed upon them. However, the goalposts are constantly moved out of reach so that even if everyone—children and adults—toils full-time with perfect dedication for no pay, their efforts will never be enough. In this environment, no one has time to question the leader or the belief system; everyone is working too hard for that.

  Additionally, there are dire consequences for questioning the leader or the group’s beliefs. If a member fails to exhibit appropriate behaviors or voice the appropriate opinions, he or she will be reprimanded according to the standards of the group—which could include physical punishment, enforced silence fasts, shunning, demotion or change of assignment, exile to a different location, or other penalties. These reprimands—or even the threat of them—create an atmosphere of self-denial, exhaustion, and overwhelming feelings of guilt, shame, and fear. For parents, this imprisoning environment may also mean not having the time or energy to properly care for their children, such that child neglect may become an unintended feature of life in many cults. For the children, it means growing up without much parental contact or the chance to develop healthy parent-child bonds.

  For instance, Iris’s parents were required to be more dedicated to TM than they were to their children:

  My mom would semi-regularly leave town for long periods of time to go be with the Maharishi or to take a course. She felt very dedicated to the movement and the teachings, and being part of that sometimes got in the way of her taking care of the family. My parents believed that TM was very important, and they told us that their sacrifice in doing meditation to enhance their consciousness—which they said would benefit our entire family—was the same sacrifice that Jesus made by dying on the cross to benefit the whole world. This was very, very important to them. But what that meant was that I raised myself. I didn’t really have parents.

  Jessica’s parents were similarly committed to The Family:

  My parents’ reasons were that basically they were following God, living like disciples following Jesus, so they forsook everything, gave it all to the group, and just followed God. That was their initial reasoning. But it got pretty sick along the way because the founder was, for lack of a better word, insane, perverted, etc., so, you know, it was a very different childhood growing up.

  Because their parents were too busy, too indoctrinated, or often physically absent, many children lived essentially without family connection or protection. In some cults, family ties were intentionally severed. For instance, Lily’s mother and father were segregated into all-female and all-male homes, and Lily lived in a yet another home without them so that her mother could care for their College of Learning leader, Grandmaster Kim. In the FLDS, Samantha lived in a home with thirty children her age, but didn’t really get to know her own full siblings (who were in other, age-segregated homes) until she was a teenager. In many cases, children in cults are on their own and unprotected from the often-severe beliefs of the group.

  For Matthew, the Twelve Tribes’ push for transcendent purity meant constant hard work and a lack of basic health care:

  They believe that with each generation, the children are supposed to get purer and purer until they are the perfect generation and then God will come. This meant that we had to work every day to be perfect. Since I was five years old, I started work at 5:00 a.m. every morning in the Tribes’ businesses, and when I was a teenager, I had many, many health problems. I wasn’t an unhealthy person; it was that I didn’t have enough sleep. They didn’t believe in letting people have a full night of sleep, or that kids should use medicine or go to the doctor or go to the hospital. They didn’t believe in that, so they didn’t take us to the dentist or the doctor. I mean, glasses weren’t given, or braces; they didn’t fix our teeth. They didn’t provide any of that; they didn’t allow medicine for kids with ADHD, or give older people hearing aids—they didn’t provide any of those basic needs. People had to suffer and pray to God to heal them back to normal.

  Jessica’s group, The Family, believed that illness was a sign of evil, and she would often be subjected to harsh treatments without her parents’ knowledge or permission:

  They would exorcize demons every once in a while when I had an asthma attack. They would anoint me with oil—they’d make this cross with kitchen oil on my head. And they’d gather all around me, and lay their hands on me, and pray, and scream prophecies, and speak in tongues, and try to cast the demon out of me while I’m having an asthma attack and c
an’t breathe. I laugh now, but it was terrifying at the time.

  Children in these groups also grew up in an environment of continual indoctrination. Many of them did not go to regular schools in the outside world, which typically was seen as evil. This meant that the children did not have access to ideas that could counter the all-encompassing and all-exclusive beliefs of their groups. If they did go to outside schools, their relationships to school friends were often strained because of the cult’s odd beliefs and behaviors.

  One woman grew up in a philosophical group called Aesthetic Realism, which enforced a rigid sense of mission and purpose:

  There was an expectation that wherever we went over the years, increasingly our main function was to spread to others the knowledge of what our leader had done for our lives. I really felt that my mission in life was to either recruit people or guard against them if they didn’t see how important Aesthetic Realism was. And I had to choose my friends based on that. I had a best friend all through high school whom I completely rejected when I was a senior. Just cut her off because she would not agree with these ideas. And that was a heartbreaking thing for me—and for her, I think.

  One of The Family’s first-born “Jesus babies” remembers internalizing the group’s dogma so completely that she spent her childhood knowing about and planning her own death:

  Of course, Moses Berg was the End-Time prophet, and of course we were the End-Time Army. That’s just the way it was. I remember thinking when I was about six or seven that I would die when I was fourteen, when Berg said that Jesus would come back and the End Times would begin. I hoped I wouldn’t end up being martyred by being burned alive because that seemed like a pretty painful way to go. I preferred being beheaded, as I figured it would at least be quick. I’d been instructed in religious literature from the time I could first speak; we memorized scripture and we were always told how special and different we were. I don’t remember ever doubting it as a child; I didn’t know there was an alternative.