Thank You, Mindy Brudno

As part of a job application today, I was asked to write about one of two topics. The one I chose was, "Describe the most important criticism you've ever benefited from. Describe the event and explain how it changed you."

When I was 16-17 years old I was part of what I now regard as having been a political cult. Perhaps the most critical moment during my membership was when I stood alone in objecting to a proposed change in line on an upcoming ballot measure. All of the other ten members of the chapter were ready to vote for it.

The group was nominally democratic, but didn't really encourage independent thought, and I was already struggling with social anxiety. And so, despite having just argued that the proposed line change was unprincipled, I found myself saying I would abstain on the question. Immediately thereafter, another member leaned over and whispered to me that if I thought the line change was unprincipled, I should vote "no" on it, not abstain. I realized she was right and, fortified, voted no.

Looking back on it, I recognize this as the moment when I was in greatest danger of losing my intellectual and emotional freedom. I thank Mindy Brudno, wherever she is.

New Master's Degree Program in Coercive Control Announced

This news from the International Cultic Studies Association:

Drs. Rod and Linda Dubrow-Marshall, long associated with ICSA, have developed a new master’s degree program in coercive control at the University of Salford in Manchester, United Kingdom.  This is an important development for the cultic studies field.

More information online: http://www.salford.ac.uk/pgt-courses/psychology-of-coercive-control

If you or somebody you know is interested in this program, feel free to contact either of them:

l.dubrow-marshall@salford.ac.uk; r.dubrow-marshall@salford.ac.uk

________________________________________________

ICSA (International Cultic Studies Association)

P.O. Box 2265

Bonita Springs, FL 34133

Phone: 1-239-514-3081

fax:  1-305-393-8193

E-mail: mail@icsamail.com

Web site: www.icsahome.com

Conferences and workshops  http://www.icsahome.com/events

Become a member of ICSA and gain access to an e-Library with over 23,000 items.

http://www.icsahome.com/membership

Manchester and the Problem of Social Homelessness

I get rather aggravated with all the focus in the news on the question of whether Salman Abedi "acted alone" or in coordination with ISIS. I mean, it's pretty obvious that he acted under their social influence, whether or not there was practical coordination.

Okay, I understand there's a short-term concern that there might be more incidents, and understanding whether there was an actual conspiracy in this case could help prevent them. But I feel this is distracting people from the more important question. Someone's practically coordinating with ISIS isn't a prerequisite to their committing highly destructive acts like this; but their being under its social influence is. So, could we please have some discussion of how and why some people come under the influence of a group like this, and how it might be prevented?

For BBC listeners, there was a story this morning about the Prevent program in the UK, which is aimed at preventing Muslim youth from being fanaticized (a term I prefer to "radicalized," since one can be socially and politically radical without being violent). It was claimed that this has been successful in many cases, but also that some think such a program can make people in the targeted community feel stigmatized.

There could be some truth to both of these statements. But, even allowing that it may have done some good, I think focusing only on one community is a mistake, for two reasons. First, acts of mass violence come from people of all backgrounds, for various (stated) ideological motives or none at all. Think Sandy Hook, or abortion clinic bombers. Although they may seem to have little to do with Manchester, there's evidence that people who commit such acts tend to have similar psychological profiles. In many cases, even when an act is committed in the name of Islam, it's done by a convert who appears to have a sketchy knowledge of the religion. This suggests that, rather than being the actual cause of such actions, religious beliefs are often an ad hoc explanation latched onto by someone driven by demons they don't understand themselves. So, if you have a program aimed exclusively at preventing Muslim youth from becoming fanaticized, you're failing to protect non-Muslims who are equally at risk of recruitment by cults (Islamic or otherwise) and, for that matter, probably failing to help Muslim youth resist recruitment by non-Islamic cults as well.

And, of course, the other problem is that such a program may in fact make someone feel stigmatized based on their cultural and religious background and have a boomerang effect.

Let's instead recognize that cultism fundamentally isn't about doctrine, but social psychology. Especially under certain sorts of life circumstances, people become susceptible to psychological manipulation by whichever abusive group they're unlucky enough to come across. This is mainly a matter of situation rather than innate disposition; saying there must be something wrong with someone because they joined a cult is like saying there must be something wrong with someone because they stepped in quicksand. Cults can reference any religious tradition, be theologically orthodox or heterodox, or may reference a non-religious ideology (my own adolescent experience was with a political cult, for instance).

The life circumstances that are conducive to cult recruitment are typically those in which a person has limited social ties, such as because of a life transition. Much as outreach efforts are sometimes made to people who are visibly homeless, it would behoove us similarly to try and identify and reach out to those who are socially homeless, so to speak.

There's the cliche of rural communities' bringing pies to newcomers, but this kind of thing doesn't seem to usually happen any more, at least where I've lived. I learned about my neighborhood association from signs posted in advance of the annual Memorial Day potluck; at the potluck, which always includes a membership meeting, various activities are mentioned, but welcoming new neighbors with a visit hasn't been one of them.

What if every neighborhood or block association regularly visited every resident and tried to engage them in community activities that are meaningful as well as fun? If people who have difficulty making social connections on their own initiative are approached proactively in this way, it might greatly reduce the dange rof their being drawn into a manipulative group that will at best exploit them and keep them isolated, and at worst may lead them to engage in (self-)destructive violence. This is something that government could actively promote and even subsidize where necessary.

An Unfunny Satire on "the MRA" Is Taken Down

After also reading the original written version of the piece, and the post on r/exredpill it was largely based on -- and as someone who has a particular interest owing to my adolescent involvement with a political cult -- I think it's important to make a distinction. People in the cultic studies field say there as many groups as there are people in the group; one member may have a cultic relationship with it while another doesn't at all. And the groups themselves are on a continuum. This is why those in the cult awareness field prefer to speak of cultic processes rather than of "cults" as a discrete category of groups.

The r/exredpill poster in question evidently developed a relationship with r/redpill (which, by the way, has basically nothing to do with actual MRAs or men's rights activists -- a common conflation in the feminist milieu) that had significantly cultic characteristics. But, as Alison and Karen point out here, this wasn't because anyone at r/redpill was using deceptive/manipulative recruitment tactics -- as are characteristic of "cults" in the strong , distinctly negative sense of that term -- but simply because he was desperate to find something that would make him feel like less of a loser. The cultic aspect of the relationship came mostly from him and not from conscious, covert manipulation by the group, as you would find in something more deserving of being called a destructive cult.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFEvB3C-YVA

The Hunger Project Gets Free Ride on The World

PRI's The World had a story today about a family that sold their home and gave half the proceeds to The Hunger Project. THP got a lot of good press without any mention of its controversial nature. I sent The World this letter:

Ironic that in the same program in which you reported in such detail on the cultlike practices of the Pakistani Taliban, you also gave free, unrebutted advertising for another cult-related group, The Hunger Project. THP was founded by Werner Erhard of Erhard Seminars Training (est) and several of his followers, and did not end (formal) ties to that group 'til 1991. It has quite recently been accused of trying to suppress critical information about itself. See, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Project#Public_criticism. I also find it objectionable that those you interviewed, in praising THP's stated emphasis on helping people sustainably overcome hunger, spoke as if it were unique in this respect. Even if it is true that this is really their practice now (and they've been accused of misrepresenting their activities in the past), they are hardly alone in this. To name just one example, Oxfam is also known for emphasizing development aid over handouts.

You can write them at theworld@pri.org.

Entrapment: Government as Mind Manipulator

The latest edition of This American Life told the story of a man who was railroaded for an alleged terrorist conspiracy that was completely a creation of the Federal government. The program unfortunately made it sound as if this kind of tactic had only started after 9/11. I wrote them to correct this false impression, and also point out some implications that are often overlooked: The policy of entrapment-by-informant didn't start after 9/11. Two earlier cases spring to mind. In 1998 Theresa Squillacote and Kurt Stand, who had leftist sympathies and worked with the State Department, were led through an extended process of emotional manipulation to agree to pass classified information to a purported agent of post-apartheid South Africa. In the process, therapist/patient confidentiality was also violated. The very fact that the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit supervised this operation is indicative of how much this "crime" was of their own making. A few years earlier, a man was pressured, cajoled, and ultimately even coerced (by an informant pretending to have Mob connections) to agree to a plan to murder a couple boys for a "snuff" film (which films have never actually existed, by the way). This setup is described in harrowing detail in Laura Kipnis' book Bound and Gagged. This policy looks even darker when you consider its conscious use of psychological science for manipulative purposes. After all, what is the function of government supposed to be? It's supposed to help socialize us -- to condition us to internalize inhibitions against destructive behavior. Here, instead, we find government intentionally desocializing someone, destroying their inhibitions, trying to "unmake" them as a social being. If you respond that the targeted individuals couldn't do these things if they hadn't the predisposition, you're overlooking one of the major findings of social psychology, which is that people can often be induced to do things outside their normal behavioral range by various high-pressure tactics, and then to rationalize them by changing the way they see themselves, altering their moral self-definition. In fact, such covert manipulation of cognitive dissonance is one of the chief techniques of cult brainwashing. And it appears to be just what's being done in some of these entrapment cases, especially where the Behavioral Sciences Unit is involved.

'Objectivism" .NE. Objectivity

I just sent this letter to the editor of Phactum, the newsletter of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking. The latest issue featured a picture of Ayn Rand on the cover and a quote used as filler on one of the interior pages.

While the paragraphs about naval vessels that have adorned recent Phacta lack pertinence to the group's aims, they're innocuous enough. The same cannot be said for the latest issue's apparent endorsement of Ayn Rand. Rand exemplified that peculiar species, still extant, that uses "reason" and "objectivity" (or, in this case, "Objectivism") as code words not for critical thinking but, rather, another brand of dogma. I learned some interesting things about her several years ago when my book group met with Matt Ruff, who used her as a character in his science fiction novel Sewer, Gas & Electric. For one, she refused ever to debate those holding an opposing view. For another, her coterie constituted a cult of personality that actually practiced Maoist-style "criticism and self-criticism." These facts reinforced the impression I'd previously formed from my own reading of her. In some essays she offers the most ridiculous caricature of "primitive" communist societies -- a portrayal devoid of any actual ethnographic knowledge but faithfully reflecting her ideological prejudice that private property is the prerequisite to "civilization." Another telling moment was an internal monologue in her novel Atlas Shrugged, describing wilderness as "without cause or purpose." Now there's an odd conflation. Wilderness generally is without purpose, but that hardly means it's without cause. Things in the wild are just as much "caused," i.e., deterministic, as are things in the human world. The flip side of this confusion is expressed elsewhere in the same passage, where the protagonist reflects on her preference for "the clean, rational world of the [train] tunnels." Taken together, these phrases betray a visceral revulsion toward wilderness, and a rejection of anything not immediately reducible to conscious human purpose as "irrational." If you know something about her personal history, you can guess this all stems from her family's dispossession by the Bolsheviks when she was a child, which appears to have given her an obsession with order and "legality" at any cost. She defined "freedom" not in terms of democracy at all, but as the untrammeled supremacy of private property -- while conveniently ignoring the role of force in that institution's creation. I understand that many skeptics are very individualistic and may find Rand's individualism, as well as her atheism, appealing. But an exemplar of critical thinking, she was not. 

On Being Asked to Be a Spokeperson

Today I was confronted by an issue that I hadn't encountered for several years -- since before I realized that I had belonged to a cult.

A friend I encountered asked me to help her with something important. She said there's going to be a tenants' rights protest Thursday morning, and she asked if I knew anyone who could take part in it, or could refer anyone. This probably concerns her personally, since I know she was in court with a complaint against her landlord recently.

I was made very uncomfortable by her request. I hesitated in responding, and ultimately said I don't know anyone with a special interest in housing issues.

I understand where this is coming from. It's the same issue that arose in 2002, while I was preparing to volunteer with ISM. Another friend (Jewish) asked if I could take some item from her, such as a toy, to give to a Palestinian child while I was over there. I was similarly made uncomfortable by this request, and declined. At the time I couldn't really articulate why I felt this way; I only knew that for some reason it was important that what I was doing be entirely "my own," and that fulfilling my friend's request would compromise that.

More recently I've come to understand what this was about. In the cult, an effort was made to make me entirely into a vehicle for ideas and formulations that came from others, totally eliminating my autonomy. As a result, I'm made uncomfortable when I'm asked to act as someone else's representative, even though the context is no longer cultic. This was perhaps especially true in the 2002 incident, since a major motive for my volunteering to put myself in harm's way was to strengthen my sense of self, and overcome the fear that questioning any of the convictions I then held would just be a cowardly "retreat from revolutionary positions." If anything, my sensitivity to this kind of thing is probably greater now than it was then, as I've become conscious of where it comes from.

Too Much Like Old Times

A situation has arisen that triggered unpleasant memories of my experience in the Socialist Workers Party's youth group as a teenager.

The director of a group I've been involved in the past few years has expelled one of the other board members. This was announced on the group's list a few days ago, but I only learned of it yesterday at the membership meeting. The director said that no explanation would be given because of the "sensitivity" of the situation. Unfortunately the expelled board member wasn't present to help explain things.

I don't make snap decisions, and the person who raised the issue at the meeting didn't have a very pleasant manner, so I didn't react immediately, but it didn't sit well with me. Early this morning I awoke with the certainty that this was not a situation I could tolerate. So I just posted the following message as a reply to the announcement of the expulsion on the list.


For me, this way of handling things is unacceptable.

Once before, I belonged to a group that -- without ever saying so outright -- expected me to accept what the leadership told me on faith. Because I didn't do so, I was driven out, and sustained considerable emotional damage in the process. On top of that, when I agreed under duress to resign (rather than face trumped-up charges) I found that I couldn't inform other members of the reasons for my decision since I was no longer a member and so could not attend meetings. I wrote a letter of resignation, but had no way of telling if it was actually ever read to the members.

I'm afraid the present situation just bears too much resemblance to that previous one for my comfort. To be sure, ----- says we can ask him questions off list, but in the end we'd still be in the position of having to take his word for things, wouldn't we? And that's simply not something I can do, especially where it appears that people's rights are at issue.

I'm not judging what happened, since I don't know what happened. What I do know is that I can't be part of a group that functions in this way. Consequently, I am resigning my membership in ---------.

To be fair, yesterday's meeting was at a public venue, so it wouldn't have been so easy to exclude someone. Still, there are ways of making people unwelcome. And it would be a moot point if the person responsible for the decision had explained it himself.

Update from Friday: Despite considerable anxiety, I did tell Connie Willis about what I'd found offensive in Passage (though I didn't make much eye contact while doing so). Her response was respectful, though I got the impression she didn't get the part about how the characters' stupid approach to advertising for subjects disrespected scientific method. I was also pleased that afterward, another person in attendance told me he agreed with my point about that. And, prior to the meeting, I'd run into someone I met at the cultic studies conference and found him readily agreeing with both points. So I'm glad I did it.

One thing that occurs to me, especially in light of my eye contact trouble, is that I probably need more to develop comfort in confronting people on a more strictly one-on-one basis, than in a group setting. So perhaps the next time I have an issue like this to raise with someone, even if I'll be seeing them in a group context, I should try to bring it up with them privately (e.g., in a case like this, expressing my feelings to Willis after the formal Q&A, when people were lining up to speak with her personally and get her autograph).