Demystifying Cults
An insider's thery on why normal, intelligent
people follow charismatic cult leaders
by marion harmon
Thirty-year-old Janja Lalich came to San Francisco in 1975 after
completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin
and a Fulbright fellowship in France. Smart, well educated, and
strong-willed, she was also looking for something important to get
involved in, something greater than herself that she could devote
her talents and her passion to. She found it—or thought she
had—in the Democratic Workers Party.
“I was told that we would not follow the political line of
any other country, but that we would create our own brand of Marxism,
our own proletarian feminist revolution,” recalls Lalich.
“We were going to make the world a better place for all people.”
The reality, however, was that their work had little to do with
working-class ideals or goals, says Lalich. Their days consisted
of 18 hours of busywork and denunciation sessions. “We were
taught to dread and fear the outside world which, we were told,
would shun and punish us,” she says. “In fact, the shunning
and punishment were rampant within, but, blinded by our own belief,
commitment, and fatigue, in conjunction with the group’s behavior-control
techniques, I and the others succumbed to the pressures and quickly
learned to rationalize away any doubts or apprehensions.”
A deep commitment
Lalich remained in that group, which other cult experts and former
members also identify as a cult, for more than 10 years. Now a sociology
professor at CSU, Chico and an expert on cultic behavior and charismatic
leaders, Lalich is often consulted by families, attorneys, educators,
helping professionals, and former (and sometimes current) members
of controversial groups. She also is regularly interviewed for high-profile
cult-related news stories, such as Heaven’s Gate, the San
Diego-based cult that committed collective suicide; David Koresh’s
Branch Davidians; and the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart in Salt
Lake City.
Before coming to CSU, Chico, Lalich was the founder and education
director of Bay Area-based Community Resources on Influence and
Control, a research and resource center providing information and
education to the public. She has co-authored three books, including
Captive Hearts, Captive Minds: Freedom and Recovery from Cults
and Abusive Relationships and Cults in Our Midst: The Hidden
Menace in Our Everyday Lives.
With her latest book, out this fall, Lalich seeks to explain how
normal, intelligent people can give up years of their lives—and
sometimes their very lives—to groups and beliefs that appear
bizarre and irrational. In Bounded Choice: True Believers and
Charismatic Cults (University of California Press, 2004), Lalich
develops a new approach for understanding how charismatic cult leaders
are able to dominate their devotees. Lalich’s definitional
framework includes a charismatic authority, an overarching ideology
with a transformational component, and social-psychological influences
and controls that bind members to the group, engendering a total
commitment on the part of those followers who become “true
believers.”
“Cults appeal to that part of ourselves that wants something
better,” says Lalich. “A better world for others or
a better self—these are the genuine, heartfelt desires of
decent, honest human beings. Cult recruiters are trained in how
to play on those desires, how to make it look as though what the
cult has to offer is exactly what you’re interested in.”
Losing self
While Lalich was in the Democratic Workers Party, she desperately
wanted to believe that she had finally found the answer. “Life
in our society today can be difficult, confusing, and frightening,”
says Lalich. “Someone with a glib tongue and good line can
sometimes appear to offer you a solution. In my case, I was drawn
in by the proposed political solution—to bring about social
change. For someone else, the focus may be on health, diet, the
environment, a spirit being, or even becoming a more successful
businessperson. The crux is that cult leaders are adept at convincing
us that what they have to offer is special, real, and forever—and
that we wouldn’t be able to survive apart from the cult.”
Intrigued by the Democratic Workers Party’s early promise
to bring about meaningful social change, Lalich watched as her original
ideals were subsumed within the increasingly arbitrary demands of
the group’s leader, a Marxist sociologist and one-time university
professor. “In the early years, we were mostly sitting in
endless meetings, doing class histories and self-criticism,”
Lalich explains. “But once we started grassroots organizing,
some of that was very important work. For example, we were the only
group that did any kind of major campaign against Proposition 13,
back in the ’70s, and we put other propositions and candidates
on the ballot in San Francisco. While we were doing political work,
being in the group somehow made more sense.”
But all of that energy began to dissipate, she recalls, when the
leader continually changed the group’s direction. “When
there came to be such a disconnect between what we were supposed
to be standing for and what we were really doing, that started to
take its toll on people,” she says.
While the leader was out of the country in late 1985, the group
voted to dissolve. “The inner circle was sitting in a meeting,
and somebody said, ‘You know what? This is nuts.’ ”
And somebody else said, ‘Yeah, I think we’re in a cult.’
Then the tears started. That was it; it just broke. In a way, we
finally had our revolution,” recounts Lalich.
Finding a way back
Several years passed before Lalich resumed anything like a normal
life, she says. “When I got out of the group, I couldn’t
read the front page of a newspaper in one sitting,” she comments.
“How can I describe it? My brain was worn out. I was exhausted
and completely emotionally stunted. Suddenly you’re out in
the world, you have to make all your own decisions. You have to
figure out whom to trust, what to think, and how to interpret everything.”
For some, the tasks can prove overwhelming. “I think the capacity
to decide to leave a closed group such as a cult and then to recover
from the experience depends so much on personal resources as well
as what resources are available out in the world,” she says.
“The fewer of those you have, the harder it is. And the more
years you’ve invested in a group, the harder it is to imagine
life outside of that context, even though that context may be hideous.
The prospect of what’s out there, or what you’ve been
led to believe is out there, seems even worse.”
One of Lalich’s main concerns is the lack of social support
for those with cult experiences. “The stigma is huge,”
she says, “and there is little understanding from society
in general and a dearth of social services geared toward this very
large social problem that continually gets swept under the rug.”
In Lalich’s case, intellectual curiosity drew her back to
academics, and she eventually enrolled in graduate school, earning
a master’s in human development and a doctorate in human and
organizational systems from the Fielding Graduate Institute in Santa
Barbara. She’s been teaching at CSU, Chico since 2001.
Cracking the code
In her new book, Bounded Choice, Lalich explores the similarities
and differences found in two seemingly disparate groups—the
Democratic Workers Party and the ill-fated Heaven’s Gate,
which claimed 41 lives in 1997. “On the surface, these groups
couldn’t have been more different,” she notes. “A
hardcore political group out to change the world, and a way-out-there,
mystical UFO group ready to leave the world. From an in-depth study
of the two came my bounded choice model, which attempts to explain
what happens to people who reach a point where they’re willing
to commit suicide or, in the case of our group, do things that ran
completely counter to what we believed, in terms of creating a more
just world.”
Lalich’s research culminated in a new theory to explain how
the combination of ideology, social structure, and commitment constrains
the choice of true believers. Her book is based on interviews with
cult devotees, analysis of archival material, as well as reflections
on her own experiences. She explores what she calls the “charismatic
commitment” that can take hold of followers—the point
at which the ideal of personal freedom, promised by the group or
its ideology, fuses with the demand for self-renunciation, dictated
by the rules and norms. At that point, explains Lalich, the believer
becomes a “true believer” serving a charismatic leader
or ideology. The person’s options become severely limited,
putting them into a state of ever-present bounded choice.
E. Burke Rochford Jr., a professor of sociology at Middlebury College
in Vermont, has studied the Hare Krishna Movement for more than
20 years. He calls Lalich’s book “an impressive and
even revolutionary look at cultic groups.” “Lalich’s
theory of ‘bounded choice’ is likely to reshape scholarly
thinking for years to come about the dynamics of cult involvement
and how and why people may act against their own self-interest in
pursuit of higher causes,” says Rochford.
Lalich says that many of today’s cults are so sophisticated
in their recruitment and indoctrination techniques that their methods
go far beyond what anybody imagined in the 1950s, when scholars
and researchers were studying thought-reform programs and systematic
behavior-control processes. Although many cults today are more sophisticated,
Lalich proposes that they have the same basic elements, along with
structural and behavioral patterns that persist.
“What’s interesting to me is to unravel how charisma,
ideology, and social influences and controls come together in each
new group I study,” says Lalich. Her current research focuses
on children who were born or raised in a cult and how they later
adapt to mainstream society.
To learn more, go to
www.csuchico.edu/soci/janjalalich.html
Taran March (B.A., English, ’89), a freelance writer and
editor in Cherokee, California, assisted with the research for this
article.
|
