Escaping Utopia

by Lalich, Janja; McLaren, Karla;

  The Unique Features of Cultic Systems of Control

  The social structures in cults can be compared to the concept of “total institutions,” introduced by sociologist Erving Goffman in his classic work, Asylums.1 Goffman outlines the essential features of total institutions (such as asylums, prisons, and concentration camps), which include removal of personal boundaries, stripping of a person’s identity, interrogations, constraint, forced relations with others, and control of time.2 We would also add control of information to these features.

  While the asylums studied by Goffman were locked facilities, cultic groups can create the same kind of total obedience through systems of control that are focused on each member’s submission to the perfectionistic belief system and utter worship of the charismatic leader. No locked cells, debilitating drugs, or pointed guns are necessary to get a cult member to comply (although there are some extreme cults where such measures have been used3).

  For instance, the energy company Enron created cultic systems and enforced compliance in many ways. One particularly harsh system was a performance review process called “Rank & Yank,” in which employees were evaluated on a scale from 1 (best) to 5 (worst). Employees who received a 5 had their photos published on a shaming internal website, and they were given two weeks to find another position within the company or be fired. Up to 20 percent of Enron employees were fired in this way each year. The harshness of the Rank & Yank system turned the Enron workplace into a cutthroat environment where employees—in order to survive and live up to the company’s expectations—lied, cheated, and exploited each other, other businesses, and the world energy market before the company ultimately destroyed itself in 2001.4

  This type of enforced, group-wide compliance doesn’t arise overnight; instead, it occurs over a period of time and in a variety of ways. Cult researchers Louis West and Margaret Singer list some of the most common ways that cults control their members, including isolation of the person and manipulation of his or her immediate environment; control over communication and information; debilitation through fatigue and inadequate diet to disable the capacity for critical thinking; alternating harshness and leniency in a context of discipline; and assignment of monotonous tasks or repetitive activities, such as chanting, meditating, praying, speaking in tongues, or copying written materials by hand.5

  In her interviews, Janja identified four areas where cults exerted these and other types of control upon their members (including children):

  1.

  Indoctrination (education and resocialization)

  2.

  Family Life (child-rearing, parenting, health care, and the atmosphere in the home)

  3.

  Social and Cultural Life (friends, school life, and relationships)

  4.

  Daily Rules (dress codes, behavioral codes, work rules, and discipline)

  As you read about each of these control tactics (especially if you were never in a cult), you may ask yourself, “Why would anyone put up with any of this?” It’s a valid question, because sometimes a cult’s demands and behaviors are outrageous and inexcusable, especially when they involve children. So it’s important to remember what you learned in Chapters 2 and 3: cult members become psychologically entrapped in the leader’s charismatic belief system and by his or her promise of salvation. Devoted members can become so deeply entangled and indoctrinated that they will truly come to believe that the ends justify the means.

  1.

   The Mind-Numbing Effects of Indoctrination

  The ultimate goal of cultic systems of control is to make members submit to the demands of the cult and obey without question. Members are expected to undergo a rigorous self-transformation process in which they learn to believe in and embody the group’s rules and norms—and this resocialization process is partially achieved through rigorous education and training sessions (i.e., indoctrination). Indoctrination occurs regularly in cultic groups, and is reinforced constantly so that members will internalize all of the rules, ideas, and beliefs the group wants them to have. For those who are born into a cult or brought in at a young age, this indoctrination starts early.

  Two young men who grew up in Scientology recall the beginning of their indoctrination sessions:

  When I was little they had me doing little drills that they do for the communication course—but slanted for kids. You’d stare at clocks, and that’s actually all I remember. I remember staring at a clock (laughs).

  * * *

  I ended up taking Scientology courses. I don’t remember if it was during the summer or if it was during the school semester. I remember that I was going full-time for the duration of a few months at least. Scientology fulltime doesn’t mean, you know, 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.; no, it means 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. Except Sundays, I believe, when it’s only a half-day. And this lasted for a few months. I guess I was around nine … eight or nine.

  For Lily, intense martial arts training started when she was still in kindergarten:

  I started training when I was about six. I introduced myself in front of the class for the first time when I was five—I remember that. And then I started training. I was a curious kid, you know. Everybody else was training and I had to sit out. My mom wouldn’t let me. And then, I think, Grandmaster Kim pressured her to have me start. You know, she wants everybody to train. So I started and then after that, I was told I had to. It wasn’t a choice for me anymore—I had to. They had kids’ class and adult class. And they would make us kids go to both sometimes. Sometimes they would make me teach the kids’ class. I wasn’t qualified. I would always go hide in the back room and try and get out of it. We all did.

  Many cults create their own schools because they don’t want children to learn anything that would contradict or question the cult’s beliefs and practices. The legalization of home-schooling in many areas of the United States has made cult schools easier to start and run, which not only denies cult children a good education, but also keeps them isolated from the outside world. An added problem is that in most states, formal supervision of home-schooling is limited at best. For example, Janja asked Matthew if the home-school or curriculum in the Twelve Tribes was ever evaluated by the state. He replied, “Oh, no,” which was a common answer among our narrators, many of whom felt strongly that they did not receive a worthwhile education. Many of them realized this only after they left the cult and found that they didn’t even know the basics.

  A young woman raised in The Family talked about rambling “Mo Letters” that cult leader David “Moses” Berg would send out to all of his cult compounds around the world. These letters and parts of the Bible were the sole curriculum for children in The Family:

  Of course, we were not given a formal education. We were all home-schooled, so our school basically just consisted of Mo Letters because there wasn’t really that much schooling going on. We learned to read by reading the Mo Letters. We learned how to write by writing a reaction to the Mo Letters. And then arithmetic was something that was just kind of taught on the side.

  Matthew’s education in the Twelve Tribes was similarly poor:

  We didn’t really have formal education. It was just whatever they could scrounge together (laughs). I have a very unique view of the commune because I’m deaf and all the other kids, they could hear. I was the only deaf person in the whole commune and we probably had 120 hearing children there. So growing up there, I had no language exposure until I was seven years old. I had no social skills because I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t understand language. I couldn’t communicate at all until I was seven years old, and people would struggle to understand how to educate a special-ed deaf person. They were really struggling with this in the commune, so I went to classes with many kids in school and we would sit around in a circle and they were all talking and the teachers didn’t know how to sign or teach me so they would just give me paperwork and pretty much leave me out. Communication around the commune was very difficult for me as well because people did
n’t know how to communicate with me. They didn’t know how to sign, of course, and that became more and more frustrating for me. I had a lot of anger as I was growing up because I had no method of communication. My parents struggled to understand how to communicate with me and understand my feelings and my needs. The commune really did not have anybody else to support us to provide education for me or for any deaf children. So, the people in the commune were very ignorant about providing special ed for me.

  Whether the children were sent to cult-run schools or were home-schooled, the education they received was closely tied to their cult’s beliefs and their leader’s ideas. And even if they went to public schools, the children were re-educated and re-indoctrinated once they got home. One woman raised in the Fellowship Tabernacle church remembers the re-education she and other Fellowship kids received at home:

  The Fellowship didn’t have its own school. There was talk about that, but there were just never enough kids to justify it. I went to public school and they would ask me what they taught me in school. They would ask what the school taught me, and they would correct the teachers, of course, specifically the science teachers. They actually had a special Sunday School class for high school kids where they could get help with their homework and be taught the correct way instead of what their high school teachers taught. “It wasn’t the teachers’ fault that they were confusing you,” they would say. “They were probably good people, but those evil liberals in the school systems, they’re forcing them to teach you this, even though it’s not true.”

  From birth to childhood and into the teen years, cult children’s lives are taken up with indoctrination, work in cult businesses, childcare for other kids (in many instances), and not much else. The children are trained in how to think, feel, behave, and act—and as Joseph recalled in his Exclusive Brethren childhood, this constant training erased his freedoms:

  As far as the Brethren were concerned, you had no freedom of choice and were always being watched. Loyalty, yes, but no feelings of love. Those feelings were no longer alive.

  A young woman who grew up in The Living Word church experienced a similar loss of her freedoms:

  As far as my intellect: I think when you are controlling what people are thinking and how they think about it, you’re putting a cap on creativity and imagination so that people can’t really guide themselves. But it’s all part of the tactics that keep us all under control, such as literally starting out sentences saying, “Let me tell you how to think about this.”

  This restriction of freedoms becomes even more severe when a child misbehaves. Jessica, for example, was sent to one of The Family’s teen-training programs6 for adolescents who were starting to rebel or needed correction:

  There were some teen-training camps in Hungary, where they brought all the teens in the area together. Maybe fifteen or twenty of us were there. We got together and lived in an apartment for a couple of weeks for what was supposed to be intense training. We would spend half the day having classes and then go out witnessing during the other half of the day. We liked being together, but we didn’t like the control. There were people constantly keeping an eye on us, telling us what we did wrong, laying into us if we did something wrong, and calling us in to be rebuked by the leaders. I was given a long talk because I wasn’t smiling enough or strange things like that. I was told if I didn’t start smiling more, I would have to wear a sign saying, “Please remind me to smile.” So they were definitely doing anything they could to pick on you.

  There were also teens wearing “Silence Restriction” signs. I know one boy who spent his first few months there wearing a Silence Restriction sign and being isolated. He had confessed to thoughts of wanting to be an air force pilot or just disagreeing with the leaders. He was always speaking his mind—he was very intellectual, very smart, compared to anybody else around, including most of the adults. His sign would say something like, “I’m on silence restriction. Please don’t talk to me.” Or “I am on STRICT silence restriction,” and that was underlined. And if he so much as did even nonverbal communications, he would get in trouble. Even motioning to try to get you to pass the salt was considered trying to communicate with you. They always had an adult buddy with us, making sure that we weren’t doing anything wrong or breaking their rules. And we constantly had to confess everything. For example, a boy who had lied about something got spanked for it, and he had to confess to the whole group about it. Any time that people did anything wrong they had to get up in front of everybody and share their lesson and share what they had learned.

  Living in such an environment of constant correction, often to the point of abuse, can have harmful effects, especially for children and adolescents. Paddy Kutz, Executive Director of Mental Health America in New Jersey, notes that it doesn’t matter if child abuse is verbal or physical, frequent or occasional: “It is painful, and the pain can last a lifetime.”7 This pain is a constant companion for many children in cults who are regularly told that they aren’t living up to the group’s standards. Many come to feel as though they are incompetent at everything, and in order to gain approval, they submit utterly and accept whatever role is thrust upon them.8 The endless indoctrination, expectation of perfection, and harsh punishment create a harmful environment that is very difficult to navigate.

  These harmful effects have been studied in depth by Dr. Bruce Perry, Senior Fellow at Houston’s ChildTrauma Academy, who examines “how children’s brains are molded by the people around them,”9 especially in response to physical, emotional, or psychological trauma. For example, Perry found extremely elevated heart rates in the children who survived the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian cult compound. Typically, the normal heart rate for a child at rest is 70–90 beats per minute. Yet, one child, while asleep, had a heart rate of 160!10 Overwhelming and prolonged stressors, such as restrictions, isolation, and abuse, put children and young people at risk for lasting traumatic damage. Along with that, Perry states that prolonged fear may cause “chronic or near-permanent changes in the brain.”11

  When children are traumatized, their family’s response can help them heal and develop resilience—or it can worsen their symptoms. Tragically, many cult families are not allowed to provide the nurturing, love, or healing that traumatized children require.

  2.

   Restrictions on Family Life

  Families in cults have an unusual mission, which is to devote their loyalty to the leader (instead of to each other) and constantly display that loyalty—often by ignoring their family responsibilities in deference to the leader’s needs. In many cults, parent-child relationships are interfered with, and more often than not, the cult will intentionally disrupt family relationships. Matthew watched this happen throughout his time in the Twelve Tribes:

  They were trying to destroy the family because when one child in a family had a problem and the parents didn’t discipline them well enough, the leaders would take the kid and put him or her in another family with other adults, and that’s another form of abuse. I would say that 80 percent of the kids lived with different adults, and not their actual parents. They made kids live in other communes away from their parents. Some even lived in other states.

  Lily noted that families in the College of Learning were separated intentionally into single-gender homes, and that most marriages, including her parents’, were torn apart:

  I think my parents’ divorce was caused by the group. In my opinion, I think it was because my mom and another student would come and dig up stuff on my dad while he wasn’t home and they would snoop around the house and things—my mom and my dad were pitted against each other. Yes, couples got split up if they joined COL full-time. If you’re full-time, you can’t live as husband and wife, so the man and the woman get split up and then they’re kind of pitted against each other.

  In most cases, child-rearing and discipline were also controlled by the cult, and the discipline was often harsh. These harsh disciplinary measures that children were subjected
to were essentially loyalty tests: would the members follow the rules even if their own children were placed in harm’s way? A young woman who was raised in The Living Word church remembers a community dedicated to regular spankings and public humiliations of children:

  The founder started telling people that they should be spanking their children starting at six months old. And so my parents were really big on spankings. And I think it was just because my parents were so, I don’t know, led by dangling carrots in certain ways because they were so tight with the inner circle, but not enough to have any power. They were just sort of led and persuaded by everyone around them to do these things. For instance, with my younger brother, it was obvious that there was something not quite right. Either he had ADD or just some type of deficit with his attention. But many times instead of directly just having a conversation with us, we were humiliated in front of the group, our small group that we went to church with. They would put my little brother up there and say that he did such-and-such and everyone needs to pray for him. And it was never effective and even I, as a very young child, felt shameful and horrible for him because I knew at that young age that that wasn’t right. He didn’t need to be put up there and shamed in front of all these people.