Posted on 07/16/2005 3:40:55 AM PDT by AdmSmith
One of the commonest reactions to the revelation of the London bombers' identities has been that they were so ordinary, and in at least some instances so well educated. How could such people have callously bombed dozens of their fellow citizens into oblivion? The surprise, really, is that we can be so easily surprised.
In truth, throughout history ordinary people have believed and done extraordinary things. The key to understanding why is to recall that they do so when driven by two things - intense commitment to a powerful ideology and when they join a high control group environment whose every ritual is designed to reinforce their ideological commitment. Groups of this kind are generally known as cults.
Most people assume that, since what cults do is mad, the members must be mad to join. But in fact researchers have found no correlation between cult membership and psychological disorder.
Counterintuitively, most cult members are of at least average intelligence and have perfectly normal personality profiles. It is this which makes them valuable to the cult's leaders - those who are certifiable would be useless at recruiting others, raising money or successfully engaging in terrorism. Consistent with this, a recent analysis of 500 al-Qaeda members found that the majority of them had been in further education and were from relatively affluent families.
The only difference between a cult member and everyone else is that they tend to join at a moment of heightened vulnerability in their lives, such as after a divorce, losing a job or attending college away from home for the first time.
At such moments we are more likely to crave certainty, and the comfort of belonging to some group that gives our lives a higher purpose than day-to-day survival.
Cults promote a message which claims certainty about issues which are objectively uncertain. Despite this logical flaw, the message is alluring. Most of us want to believe that the world is more orderly than it is, and that some authority figure has compelling answers to all life's problems. An individual who claims to have "The Truth" is more convincing than someone who announces "I don't know".
We should never underestimate the power of ideology. Cult leaders know this. They invest their ideology with extraordinary power by exaggerating the extent to which they are confident in its precepts. Conviction becomes faith.
Since we can't see into their heads, we take their public performance of certainty as more authentic than it probably is. And by virtue of their skill as interpreters and purveyors of the chosen ideology, the leader also becomes a powerful authority figure, whose pronouncements are taken very seriously by his or her followers, however strange they seem to outsiders.
Moreover, most of us are much more willing to do bizarre things on the word of authority figures than we care to realise. This was famously shown by Stanley Milgram, an American psychologist in the 1960s. Milgram convinced his subjects that, by administering potentially lethal shocks to other subjects in the next room, they would be helping him in a learning experiment - a rationale, or ideology, that justified despicable behaviour.
In point of fact, the recipients of the shocks were actors who, on cue, shouted and screamed with great conviction. Threequarters of Milgram's real subjects carried his instructions through to an end, when the fake subjects next door were silent, signifying that they were unconscious - or dead.
The London terrorists had two ultimate authority figures - Osama bin Laden, and, beyond him, God. Cults, whether secular or religious, generally go to great pains to project their leaders in a semi-divine light, blessed with uncommon insight, charisma and dedication to the cause. Convincing messages from such sources, cloaked in the language of ideology, have a powerful effect.
The ideology is therefore critical, and cults are adept at reinforcing its power. Members spend more and more time talking only to each other. They engage in rituals designed to reinforce the dominant belief system. Language degenerates into a series of thought-stifling clichés which encourages other actions that are consistent with the ideology of the cult.
The world becomes divided into the absolutely good and the absolute evil, a black and white universe in which there is only ever the one right way to think, feel and behave. Members are immunised against doubt - a mental state in which any behaviour is possible, providing it is ordained by a leader to whom they have entrusted their now blunted moral sensibilities.
A further factor is what has been described as the principle of "commitment and consistency". It has been found that if people make an initial small commitment to a course of action or belief system they become even more motivated to engage in further acts that are consistent with their initial commitment.
For example, if we persuade people to attend a Tupperware party the chances are that they will buy something, even if they have no particular desire to do so. In a similar vein, if we get someone to buy cult literature, attend a meeting or engage actively in any other activity at its behest, more will follow.
The key is that each new step is but a small advance on what has already been done. A terrorist cult does not order each new recruit to engage in a suicide bombing tomorrow. But they will gradually build to that point, so that the final act of detonation is but a small incremental step from that which was taken the day before. The gulf from where the person started to where they have ended up is not immediately apparent.
Within the cultic environment I am describing, ideological fervour is further strengthened by the absence of dissent. Imagine, if you can, a senior DUP member daring to suggest that Gerry Adams has some redeeming qualities.
The reaction of his or her colleagues can be readily imagined. It is even more difficult to imagine a group of terrorists listening patiently while one of their number offers the view that "maybe bombing London is not such a good idea". Rather, any deviation from the official script is met by a combination of silence, ridicule and yet louder assertions of the group's dominant ideology.
Ridicule is a powerful social force. It strengthens people's faith in their belief system. Rather than risk becoming marginalised, most of us wish to affiliate even more closely with those groups that we have come to regard as important.
Secondly, when no one is openly critical we tend to imagine, wrongly, that those around us are more certain of their views than they are. The absence of obvious doubt from anyone else quells any reservations that we ourselves may be harbouring, and tempts us into ever more enthusiastic expressions of agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy.
We reason that, if something was wrong, someone other than ourselves would be drawing attention to it. Psychologists call the process "consensual validation". What seems mad to an outsider becomes the conventional wisdom of the group. All sorts of dismal group decisions, including many made by business and government, can be partly explained by this dynamic.
People have been attempting - and failing - to imagine what must have been going through the minds of the bombers in their last minutes. Surely they must have looked around, and had some glimmer of doubt? It is necessarily speculative, but my guess is that any such feeling would have been muted.
Within cults, the gap between rhetoric and reality is so pronounced that, of course, doubts do occasionally intrude. But cult members are taught a variety of automated responses to quell the demon of dissent. For example, a member of the Unification Church who suddenly doubts that the Rev Moon is the ordained representative of God on earth might chant "Satan get behind me".
It is likely, I think, that the London bombers spent their last moments in a final silent scream, designed to obliterate in their minds the pending screams of their soon-to-be victims. It is a sound we all must now attempt to deal with.
What therefore can be done? It is certainly clear that where cultic groups engage in illegal activities the full force of the law should be deployed against them. It is less clear that outlawing any group deemed cultic is the way forward. Who, ultimately, is to decide on the difference between, say, your legitimate religion and my view of a cult?
We must become suspicious of those who claim certainty, we must challenge all authority figures and we must cherish dissent: it is these responses that diminish the leaders of cults, rather than the society in which we live.
Dennis Tourish is a professor of management and organisational behaviour at Robert Gordon University in Scotland. He is co-author of On the Edge: Political Cults, Right and Left published by ME Sharpe
Nobody, from any and all religion, should blindly allow others to tell them what to think.
"Killer cults tend to be led by charismatic megalomaniacs who pit themselves and their churches against the rest of the world. They are usually apocalyptic visionaries drunk with lust and power that have physical and sexual control over their followers. In most cases their beliefs stem from twisted interpretations of established doctrines. These self-proclaimed divinities usually amass a large arsenal of weapons before bringing forth their personal day of reckoning."
Liberals democrat party is a killer cult by these standards.
The fact is that the only a minority of people are thinkers. Majority are the followers. Even the greatest thinkers have most of their ideas inherited from the past generations (many of them unknowingly). Men are social animals more than they are individuals.
That is why we do not have 6 billion religions or 6 billion political ideologies or 6 billion civilizations.
"Now no man was allowed to enter the Garden save those whom he intended to be his ASHISHIN. There was a fortress at the entrance to the Garden, strong enough to resist all the world, and there was no other way to get in. He kept at his Court a number of the youths of the country, from twelve to twenty years of age, such as had a taste for soldiering... Then he would introduce them into his Garden, some four, or six, or ten at a time, having first made them drink a certain potion which cast them into a deep sleep, and then causing them to be lifted and carried in. So when they awoke they found themselves in the Garden.
"When therefore they awoke, and found themselves in a place so charming, they deemed that it was Paradise in very truth. And the ladies and damsels dallied with them to their hearts' content...
"So when the Old Man would have any prince slain, he would say to such a youth: 'Go thou and slay So and So; and when thou returnest my Angels shall bear thee into Paradise. And shouldst thou die, natheless even so will I send my Angels to carry thee back into Paradise.'"
(from 'The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian', translated by Henry Yule, London, 1875.)
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/assassin.htm
We have these same type of ordinary Putz's living here, working hard in the 7-11 by day fermenting violence by night. Ordinary looking middle -eastern people who pose as Americans, but are really hoping to destroy our America and rebuild it into an Islamic shiitehole. Dont be surprised when these people attack.The ACLU is doing all they can to help.
garpes => grapes
The author's diagnosis of symptoms is right on the money.
Most cults don't turn violent, hence they're usually laughed off and/or ignored.
Imo, 'deprogramming' is just another name for trying to negate learned (and varying degrees of) submissiveness and instilling a human being with a rational, independent backbone for the first time in their lives.
In most cases, scaling Mt. Everest on one's knees would be an easier task.
Once a cult turns to unprovoked violence toward innocents, the factors of time and the safety of the community will/should exclude any responses 'gentler' than imprisonment or extermination.
If the quote attributed to him is accurate, Einstein was close, but wrong.
The two most common elements in the universe are actually hydrogen and wishful thinking.
Skepticism was deployed in the east in support of theology long before it was used in the west to attack it. Ghazali is a lot older than Hume. The belief that nothing can be known with certainty can promote mysticism (by erasing the line between rationalism and mysticism). Doctrinal Asharite theologians are determined skeptics. Faith is acknowledged to be devoid of certainty, certainty and any desire for it is regarded as a species of pride, attempting to control God. To the point where belief in necessity in any form is regarded as heretical. This is not an obscure theological position held by nobodies, it is one of a handful of dominant theological schools in Islam.
Nor is the willingness to accept death a sign of madness. The article turns bravery into madness, or any hope for an afterlife. All Christianity, all Islam, all Hindus teach the existence of afterlifes, as things taken on faith typically, nothing to do with certainty (a modern philosophy shibboleth, not a religious one). You can think they are reassuring fairy tales, but two thirds of mankind profess them so you can't call them abnormal. Ask an anthropologist how far back it goes and across how many cultures. Nor have peoples who rejected such things as mythical been famously tolerant. The greatest mass murderers of the 20th century professed no such beliefs.
Men accept death because they are mortal, and at some point any reasonable man recognizes that there can be and are things more important. The lay runs "then out spake brave Horatio, the master of the gate, 'to every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late, and how can man die better, than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of their gods?'" There is nothing irrational in self sacrifice even to the point of death, if the object is important enough. No one can permanently avoid death, but men can avoid cowardice, servitude, immoral actions, disgrace. Many a soldier has accepted death in battle to save others, there is no metaphysical mystery involve. A rational acceptance of mortality is quite sufficient.
The thing wrong with terrorists who blow others to bits is not that they aren't philosophical skeptics, or that they believe in an afterlife, or that they accept death. People exist who have any or all of those characteristics that have absolutely nothing wrong with them. It is that they kill innocents, and in doing so they commit a great moral evil. That is quite completely all, and it is not complicated.
But people like the writer of this piece are not really interested in what is wrong with the bombers themselves. They are merely using them as a prop to preach against their ideological bete noirs. Since belief in morality and the existence of real moral claims binding on all men is not something they philosophically accept, they look for anything else. And hurl their denunciations at anyone who seems certain of themselves (when the bombers needn't be, and mathematicians can reasonably be certain of all sorts of things), or believes in an afterlife (Mother Teresa must have been so dangerous then, right?), or accepts mortality (as though they will live forever if they don't, and all soldiers are fools).
"[I]f we persuade people to attend a Tupperware party the chances are that they will buy something, even if they have no particular desire to do so."
I always suspected Tupperware was a cult!
No, seriously, good article. Although I'm not sure the DUP (Democratic Ulster Party?) will appreciate being included.
Link is incorrectly parsed and appears to be no longer existant.
Later link works, thanks.
I agree with your two posts.
This author's point of view is standard American Liberalism, that is, that "believers" are very dangerous, and that anyone who thinks differently than they do should be criminally prosecuted.
That American Liberalism is also a cult escapes him.
A better perspective is to study God's Word to discern between a false god and the Truth.
The evil vice isn't faith, rather faith allows one to discern and avoid such evil consequence.
Bump!
Thank you for the post. The general tenor of this thread revolves around the mechanical and group psychological issues in the cult behavior of the most intelligent of the herd animals on this planet.
While interesting, I would suggest that the 'technology' of cult behavior is not the issue. The problem is profoundly spiritual.
In short: There is a spiritual ruler, an adversary, a deceiver of all mankind - whom the Jews correctly see as the problem at the very beginning of The Book: Ha Satan.
Islam is a demonic religion. Satan has invaded some of the Christian church, but not to the extent of his success with Islam.
This entire historical process is a Greek tragedy in slow motion and will eventuate in much more blood and fire before long, if the Islamonazis are not treated in the same manner as the Bushido cult in Japan in the 1940s.
(Now donning my asbestos undies...)
So then FR is a cult ?
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