Excellent post, Mal, brilliant.

What follows is IMO is one of the best and most well-written, cogent and articulate posts ever made to this JC thread of ours.

It's nearly three years old, is by muppet, and I thought that this post would be worth bringing out again.

Muppet, you really hit the nail on the head with this one. My compliments. I return to it again and again in my ongoing effort to really understand this group.

Have you ever actually MET a present member of a JC face-to-face, Blackhat? The reason I ask, is that if you had, then you would quickly realize that the JCs' modus operandi is NOT "love-bombing." DM and the JCs operate by instilling guilt and fear into their prospective recuits, and then manipulating them accordingly.

I have already taken and passed Cults 101. I am now in the midst of my advanced cult-ed coursework. Oh, and I made an A in Social Psych, too.

It's one things to read some books about cults and then make some generalizations based upon what you learned from the books, and it's quite another to go and interact with members of a cult on thier own territory. By doing so, as I have, you quickly realize that all cults do not "love bomb" potential recruits. No, all cults DO NOT work the same way, in terms of recruitment strategies. The Twelve Tribes, for example, love bomb with warm fuzzies and all that. The JCs, by contrast, "fear bomb" their potentials.

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muppet
DM is particularly concerned that professional 'cult-busters' can impact negatively on their recruitment. He claimed that they have a fairly high record of success in 'brainwashing people against groups if they are able to get the person before they have had deep personal involvement in the group'.

This is one reason for the JC's ruthless recruitment strategies. The object is to get the recruit IN quickly before they have time to assess and question the beliefs and practises of the group with anyone else. Once the recruit is brought in, they are taught that they have already been brainwashed by their families and by society since birth and encouraged to be suspicious of them. Slick. Anyone who is convinced they have been brainwashed becomes very keen to alter that. Decisions made by the group are then slickly presented to the recruit alongside a less attractive option (eg choosing eternal damnation or choosing to die an unbeleiver ). Reminders that no one who puts his / her hand to the plough should look back are added. Questions are sidelined as evidence that the recruit does not have faith. Fear is the only alternative presented by the group who claim that society lives in fear (and not by faith) In this setting when a new recruit 'decides' to stay after the trial week, they are unaware that they have been the victime of coercive persuasion. The group are constantly reminded of how evil 'cultbusters' are and one by one are inducted to recruit in the same way, on the basis that we will all try to justify our own behaviour. Therefore the recruit who attempts to recruit others becomes doubly convinced that thry are doing the right thing. DM's letters on cognitive dissonance explain this. DM constantly reminds members that everything they do is their own decision ( lie) and that 'there are no locks on the doors' (but the only alternative option presented is going to hell ) . Door locks are not necessary when a mind has been chained.
Ex members are very brave people.

[forum.culteducation.com]



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/24/2010 08:55PM by zeuszor.

It is true that not all cults use the same methods. Fear is a very powerful method of mind control. My point was that cults do not look like rattlesnakes, or anything as simple as that, as suggested by your earlier post.

As rrmoderator has said, "People that are controlled in cults don't typically choose to be so involved. It's a gradual process that largely depends upon a slow gradual process of deception."

I read Malcolm's description on page 415 of the bad things he did to his parents, and the illegal things he did regarding fraud, while he CHOSE to be in the Jesus Christians. I take it that he is now saying that he CHOSE to do these things of his own free will, (according to his Nuremberg defence argument with regard to Cherry) and is totally responsible for those decisions....and yet his testimony is full of phrases about "being led to believe...."

Being married to a narcissist is the ultimate cultic relationship, and many women never escape, particularly those of an older generation who were already well enslaved before the Women's Movement began to empower women psychologically, morally and economically.

Mind control is a complex thing, and trying to deprogram and work yourself out after such an experience must take years of painful work, if not a lifetime...

"David McKay, Chris Butler et al....are ultimately just victims of themsleves..."?

No.

Leaders of groups called "cults" are not victims.

A cult leader quite often is a psychopath, e.g. David Koresh.

See [www.culteducation.com]

Or mentally ill like Marshall Applewhite.

See [www.culteducation.com]

At a bare minimum most cult leaders seem to suffer from a personality disorder, such as NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder).

See [www.culteducation.com]

Cult leaders are not brainwashed victims.

Instead, they are the people that perpetrate the brainwashing to victimize others.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/24/2010 10:39PM by rrmoderator.

Zeusor, you comment; how could anyone be a victim of anything if they choose to stay...That is cult 101. Your quote on bounded choice explains exactly how and why that can happen.
The reason there are strong ethical guidlines for the behaviors of psychologists and other counselors is because there is recognition of a power differential.
You might be interested in asking your sociology professor how that type of power differential also applies to religious groups..
The concept that if you disobey the group leader, you are disobeying God is common in many groups. And certainly effects the idea that someone is making a free "unbounded " choice...
Most people in high demand religious groups, if they were not born into them, were As Mr Ross suggests, slowly recruited into them.
You have in the past described that you experienced ?two ? high demand groups before meeting the JCs ( Ole Anthony and the unnamed group your parents enrolled you in, that sounds as if it was highly abusive and you said is still ongoing; perhaps it is worth its own thread that you could provide information on?)
Given your past experiences of course you were going to have a different reaction than some others to the idea of joining the JCs.
I was sad to see you attacking Cait. You are well aware of who she is and her past history.Calling her a cult apologist would appear to be victim bashing.

Blackhat, well put.

In addition, and this applies to the JCs, there are people that were born into the group.

They made no "choice," either bounded or unbounded.

I have spoken with many of these children over the years.

To say the least, they have often endured very difficult circumstances. And those that have somehow summoned the courage to leave, still go through quite a sorting out process, which can often takes years.

They also may have left family members behind, which makes it even more complicated and difficult.

JC members live under constant fear and are scared to death. Fear is what holds them in the "community." DM instills intense fear in his members. JC day to day life must be difficult and exceedingly stressful because the members live in constant fear. Fear is the glue that holds them together. As soon as I walked in that room all those years ago and met the assembled JCs, I could tell that I was in the presence of a group of people who were all in a lot of fear and who were being tightly controlled. I started feeling fearful myself, and left quickly. They just spooked me.

I never attacked Cait or called her a cult apologist. What I wrote is that her statement sound a lot like the kind of statement that a DM apologist might make. Nice try, but read it again more carefully and please quit twisting my words, yasmin.

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blackhat
Mind control is a complex thing, and trying to deprogram and work yourself out after such an experience must take years of painful work, if not a lifetime...

Tell me about it. Remember, I myself am an ex-member of an abusive group also (actually, more than one...DAYTOP helped to set me up for a lot of the things that I was involved in later on in life.) About three months before arriving at Trinity Foundation, I'd just done eleven months in Iraq, near the Green Zone. I have been in more therapy in the last couple of years than a lot of people would receive in ten, in an effort to even begin to recover from what they did to me. DAYTOP was the name of the abusive Synanon-type program that I was subjected to as a kid. It is essentially a "sobriety cult." Maybe it was my involvement in that group that made me sensitive to the dynamic that I saw at work there in the JCs apartment that day. Once bitten, twice shy as they say.

Look, I lived at MeadowHaven and was in therapy there for a whole year. I left MH about nine months ago. In fact, I spent most of last weekend there. I have met many, many ex-members of all kinds of groups myself; first-generation, second-generation, you name it. Two of my very closest friends in the world are second-gen ex-members of the Family, and their families are still involved with that wicked group. I fully understand the guilt and conflict that they deal with. Still, these second-gen Family kids would love to see the cult go down, regardless of whether they still have relatives who are involved. So you do not have to explain trauma and the process of healing from it to me. Have either of you, Yasmin or Blackhat, ever read Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/25/2010 05:27AM by zeuszor.

Zeuszor,
As a second gen ex member myself ( different group) I don't have to rely on friends' reports of what it might be like. Mr Ross' descriptions of the challenges involved were from my point of view, very accurate and deeply moving.
It is possible to care very deeply about parents, group members and people you love, and also to wish to prevent harm to others..
All the best, yasmin

And (cough) to add something that is more pertinent to this thread than either of our histories, Kevin on the JCs forum, states
"My mother never joined the group that Mal chose to join and he should recall that she tried to leave it in Tallangatta, only to be reeled back in, regrettably with my and my siblings assistance"

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yasmin
Zeuszor,
As a second gen ex member myself ( different group) I don't have to rely on friends' reports of what it might be like. Mr Ross' descriptions of the challenges involved were from my point of view, very accurate and deeply moving.
It is possible to care very deeply about parents, group members and people you love, and also to wish to prevent harm to others..
All the best, yasmin

Yasmin, meaning no disrespect, but I really do wish that you would leave your own baggage out of this forum. You have your own forum/online support group in which you can complain to your heart's content, and it's called XJCs.

This place, however, is called the Cult Education Forum. That's why I am here. I am here to help warn the general public about the JCs and neutralize their ability to recruit anybody new.

This is not a social-networking thing to me and I am not here in order to see how many people I can add to my friends list. For the most part, I do not take personally the insults or flak I receive for doing what I do here.

I have always tried to maintain some kind of communications with the XJCs. I felt if we all engaged in some truly "free discussion" ("free discussion" my foot) and off the record, then we would know where we were all at, and could try to ensure that nobody was stepping on anybody else's toes.

As we all know, that approach was rejected and the rest is history.