Prepared to compliment a lecture
by Troy W. Pierce

"Is it easier to believe that nature has gone out of her course or that a man would tell a lie?"

- Thomas Paine

- Consciousness & Manipulation - Consciousness is the Key - Conscious Discernment

1. Limits of Consciousness are the limits of your world

• What is out of our range of consciousness is "not possible"
  
• What is out of the range of consciousness is your blind spot
  

• Wonder & the Sense of the possible - expanding the sense of self or world
  
• Preparation for a Transcendent Experience - ritual, prayer, meditation, etc.
  

• The use of Deception to misdirect Consciousness, While
  
• Appealing to more Basic Forces in the human psyche by engaging Needs, Desires, and Fears to
  block conscious discernment
  
• Thought Stopping - how our own Needs, Desires, & Fears are used to prevent us from using
  Conscious Discernment
  

• "We are the good people, They are the bad people." - the prison of specialness.
  
• Every group has a fundamental problem - it has people in it.
  
• The Other can carry our Negative Shadow - "Demon," or our Positive Shadow - "Wise Holy Guru."
  

- Warning Signs -

1. "Show me where I'm wrong!" "We all know the truth!" - "Disprove me!"

• Instead of proving any claims, Shifts the burden of proof onto the status quo
  
• However, it is impossible to satisfactorily disprove anything without agreed upon criteria,
  methods, world-view, etc.
  
• Imagine trying to disprove the existence of Santa Claus to a 4 year old
  

• Facts are not Experiences & Experiences do not 'prove' metaphysical facts
  
• If you know where you are going on a spiritual path, it is not a spiritual path, thought it may be
  a spiritual discipline
  

• Degrees are listed with no mention of what they are in or from which institution
  
• Titles you've never heard of - especially from someone supposedly within your tradition
  
• Titles that sound made up, probably are - Real titles have some purpose and meaning
  
• Non-academic titles without lineage of conference info, were probably not conferred at all
  
• MDs, Psy.D.s, Ph.D.s, & MSWs in medicine or clinical psychology without licenses to
  practice - a degree cannot be revoked for malpractice, a license can be.
  

• Relationship with Guru is more important than individual personal relationship with divine
  
• That anyone else can do your spiritual work or that you can do anyone else's for them
  

• Who but a con artist will bother telling you that "it is not a scam" to sell you something?
  

If it quacks like a Duck... - How to Spot a Quack (many sources)

1. Panacea/Pandemic - One Cure or One Cause of Illness
   
2. M. D. Conspiracy against it
   
3. Pseudo-medical jargon - no specific biological mechanisms
   
4. Uses anecdotes and testimonials
   
5. Any NEW BREAKTHROUGHS or SECRET CURES
   
6. Appeals to vanity - think for yourself, you know best
   
7. Appeals to desperation - hope for the hopeless
   
8. Double speak - undercuts medical science while appealing to it for justification
   
9. Any Fad Diagnosis or Treatment - whether alternative or scientific, bandwagon diagnoses have a higher probably of being wrong; and of promoting untried cures, and scam products
   

Check List of Sociopathic Indications (from Masks of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley)
(Currently listed as Antisocial Personality Disorder in the DSM-IV. It is very difficult to diagnose.)

1. Glibness/superficial charm
   
2. Manipulative and conning
   
3. Grandiose sense of self
   
4. Pathological lying
   
5. Lack of remorse, shame, or guilt
   
6. Shallow emotions
   
7. Incapacity for love
   
8. Need for stimulation
   
9. Callousness/lack of empathy
   
10. Poor behavioral controls/impulsive nature
    
11. Early problems/juvenile delinquency
    
12. Irresponsibility/unreliability
    
13. Promiscuous sexual behavior/infidelity
    
14. Lack of realistic life plan/parasitic lifestyle
    
15. Criminal or entrepreneurial versatility
    

Narcissistic Personality Disorder(From DSM-IV) - A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), lack of empathy, and hypersensitivity to the evaluation of others, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by at least five of the following:

1. reacts to criticism with feelings of rage, shame, or humiliation (even if not expressed)
   
2. is interpersonally exploitative: takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
   
3. has grandiose sense of self-importance, e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be noticed as "special" without appropriate achievement
   
4. believes that his or her problems are unique and can be understood only by other special people
   
5. is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
   
6. has a sense of entitlement: unreasonable expectation of especially favorable treatment, e.g., assumes that he or she does not have to wait in line when others must do so
   
7. requires constant attention and admiration, e.g., keeps fishing for compliments.
   
8. lack of empathy: inability to recognize and experience how others feel, e.g., annoyance and surprise when a friend who is seriously ill cancels a date
   
9. is preoccupied with feelings of envy
   

The Advanced Bonewits Cult Danger Evaluation Frame
Copyright c 1987 by P. E. I. Bonewits. Used by permission.
Note: The current version of the ABCDEF may be found here.

Rate each of the following from 1(low) to 10(high)...

1. ___ Internal control, amount of internal political power exercised by leader(s) over members.
   
2. ___ Wisdom claimed by leader(s); amount of infallibility declared about decisions.
   
3. ___ Wisdom credited to leader(s) by members; amount of trust in decisions made by leader(s).
   
4. ___ Dogma, rigidity of reality concepts taught; amount of doctrinal inflexibility.
   
5. ___ Recruiting, emphasis on attracting new members; amount of proselytizing.
   
6. ___ Front groups, number of subsidiary groups using different names from that of the main group.
   
7. ___ Wealth, amount of money and/or property desired or obtained; emphasis on members' donations.
   
8. ___ Political power, amount of external political influence desired or obtained.
   
9. ___ Sexual manipulation of members by leader(s); amount of control over sex lives of members.
   
10. ___Censorship, amount of control over members' access to outside opinions on the group, its doctrines,
    and/or its leader(s).
    
11. ___ Dropout control, intensity of efforts directed at preventing or returning dropouts.
    
12. ___ Endorsement of violence when used by or for the group or its leader(s).
    
13. ___ Paranoia, amount of fear concerning real or imagined enemies; perceived power of opponents.
    
14. ___ Grimness, amount of disapproval concerning jokes about the group, its doctrines, or its leader(s).
    

Dr. Michael D. Langone's Definition of cult...

A destructive cult is a highly manipulative group which exploits and sometimes physically and/or psychologically damages members and recruits.

A destructive cult: a) dictates - sometimes in great detail - how members should think, feel, and act; b) claims a special, exalted status (e.g., occult powers; a mission to save humanity) - for itself and/or its leader(s) - that usually sets it in opposition to the mainline society and /or the family; c) exploits its members, psychologically, financially, and /or physically; d) utilizes manipulative, or "mind-control," techniques, especially the denigration of independent critical thinking, to recruit prospects and make members loyal, obedient, and subservient; and e) causes considerable psychological harm to many of its members and to members' families.

Although some people deem a group destructive merely because it is deviant or "heretical," the point of view advanced here reserves the label for groups that tend to be exploitive, manipulative, psychologically damaging, exclusive, and totalist. According to this perspective, a group may be deviant and "heretical" without being destructive.

Dr. Langone is the Director of Research for the American Family Foundation, (AFF) which the main emphasis is researching the medical, legal, psychological, and social issues raised by destructive cultism. (Quoted from AFF's 82-02)

The Lifton model of Thought Reform

Based on his study of victims of the "Cultural Revolution" in China.

1. Milieu Control - "...the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual's communication with the outside, but also ... [in] his communication with himself." (p.420)

2. Mystical Manipulation - "...they create a mystical aura around the manipulating institutions... They are the "chosen" ... to carry out the "mystical imperative," the pursuit of which must supersede all considerations of decency or of immediate human welfare." (p.422)

3. The Demand for Purity - "...the experiential world is sharply divided into the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The good and pure are of course those ideas, feelings, and actions which are consistent with the totalist ideology and policy; anything else is apt to be relegated to the bad and impure. ... All "taints" and "poisons" which contribute to the existing state of impurity must be searched out and eliminated." (p. 423)

4. Cult of Confession - "There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed. Such demands are made possible not only by the ubiquitous human tendencies toward guilt and shame but also by the need to give expression to these tendencies." (p.425)

5. The "Sacred Science" - "...maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. ... While thus transcending ordinary concerns of logic, however, the milieu at the same time makes an exaggerated claim of airtight logic, of absolute "scientific" precision. ... The idea here is not so much that man can be God, but rather that man's ideas can be God: that an absolute science of ideas exists ... that this science can be combined with an equally absolute body of moral principles; and that the resulting doctrine is true for all men at all times." (p.428)

6. Loading the Language - "The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating clich�. The most far reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. ...the jargon expresses the claimed certitudes of the sacred science." (p.429-30)

7. Doctrine over Person - "...the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. This primacy of doctrine over person is evident in the continual shift between experience itself and the highly abstract interpretation of such experience - between genuine feelings and spurious cataloging of feelings. ... The same doctrinal primacy prevails in the totalist approach to changing people: the demand that character and identity be reshaped, not in accordance with one's special nature of potentialities, but rather to fit the rigid contours of the doctrinal mold." (p.430-1)

8. The Dispensing of Existence - "The totalist environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be recognized, and those who possess no such right. ...one underlying assumption makes this arrogance mandatory: the conviction that there is just one path to true existence, just one valid mode of being, and that all others are perforce invalid and false. ... For the individual, the polar emotional conflict is the ultimate existential one of "being versus nothingness." He is likely to be drawn to a conversion experience, which he sees as the only means of attaining a path of existence for the future." (p.433-4)

From Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert J. Lifton Chapel Hill 1961/89

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