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Cult Conversion [1]
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Date: 2023-07-16
Leon Salzman (“The Psychology of Religions and Ideological Conversion”) speaks to what he calls regressive or psychopathological conversion. He says,
[I]t is a highly charged, profound, emotional experience which occurs during attempts to solve pressing and serious problems in living, or to deal with extreme, disintegrating conflicts. (p. 179)
Authoritarian movements and cults seek to induce disintegrating conflict or process in the goal of reshaping the recruit’s personality. In this way, it could be said that these groups necessitate a conversion experience, so that the recruit experiences (bodily, in some cases) a sense of rescue.
Therein lies the feeling of relief, as noted by Jerrold Post, the level of which is a predictor or marker of just how far outside the bounds of socialized mores the recruit will now venture. Post, an expert of extremism and terrorism, said this about the psychology of those who find their way to such groups:
[R]esearchers found that the more isolated and unaffiliated the new members, the more likely they were to hold assiduously—and unquestioningly—to their group membership, because it provided the members’ sole definition of themselves, their sole source of support. Moreover—and this is particularly important for the question of the capacity of terrorists to commit antisocial acts—these researchers found that the greater the relief the new cult recruits felt on joining, the greater the likelihood they would engage in acts that violated the mores to which they had been socialized. (“Terrorist psycho-logic: Terrorist behavior as a product of psychological forces,” in Origins of terrorism, p. 35; paragraph space added)
Janja Lalich, sociologist and former cult recruit herself, calls the cult experience a resocialization.
Conversion, because it is so novel, must be very compelling. It must occupy a prominent place in memory. And because these types of conversion (often thunderclap or sudden) are part of the person’s lived experience, it becomes part of the person’s narrative, and so it has an excellent opportunity to influence the trajectory of the recruit’s personality and identity from that point. (And not just from that point forward—such experiences are often read backwards, prompting the convert to apply the conversion’s new meaning to prior events and episodes. It allows for a sweeping reinterpretation.)
Robert Lifton details the Mao-era Chinese interrogation tactic of jailers having the prisoners write confessions.
[C]onfession is as much a part of re-education as re-education is of confession. The officials demanded that their accusations become the prisoner’s self-accusations, and that the confession be made with inner conviction. (Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, p. 81)
In another context, Jim Jones had his followers “confess” to him through letter writing, describing their transgressions. Lalich, too, brings up this practice of writing personal histories & being told it’s not critical or incisive enough, to go back and write it again.
This practice provokes conflict with oneself, with one’s own first-person story, one’s master narrative. This is a prime moment or activity to induce fragmentation or disintegration. If a recruit were not quite to the point of making the leap or commitment, this phase or stage might precipitate movement along that score.
This possibility is especially important because this practice can be externally introduced. And paired with environment control or alteration, the jailer can create pressures both from within (due to the writing of these confessions, creating internal tension) and without (manipulating verbal environments, physical locales, literal pressures on the body by the laying on of hands or physical restraint / corporal punishment, introduction of evocative religious ritual, etc.). This is a dual process of pressure.
This dual process of pressure almost certainly creates a state of heightened suggestibility. It may even precede or precipitate a hypnotic or hypnic state.
The compulsion to confess is not static; it continually gathers momentum, and provokes an increasing sense of submission . . . . (Lifton, Thought Reform, pp. 74-75)
It would seem that forcing or compelling a person to confess or recreate their personal narrative (especially in the form of recasting events along a theme of overarching perspective, such as along class or race) introduces a split in that person’s own narrative, which then might compete against each other. I would guess that, in the presence where cognitive dissonance is present due to mutual exclusivities or something close to that, the conflict drives one or the other narrative to take primacy.
And I would go so far as to say that an attending conversion experience, with its emotional undergirding and reshaping, biases the adoption of one narrative over the other, the one that comports with the valence of that emotional state, so that they blend and do not clash. “Totalism,” Lifton says, is “a tendency toward all-or-nothing emotional alignments” (p. 129). The evoked emotion and the selected narrative must harmonize.
If the multiple narratives differ only slightly from each other, they may complement each other or otherwise may exist without conflict, so neither would require rejection. In personality shaping, one must triumph over the other.
And so the cult crafts a false self, a cult self. Steven Hassan speaks to this in Combatting Cult Mind Control.
Perhaps the biggest problem faced by people who have left destructive cults is the disruption of their own identity. There is a very good reason: they have lived for years inside an “artificial” identity given to them by the cult. While cult mind control can be talked about and defined in many different ways, I believe it is best understood as a system which disrupts an individual’s identity. The identity is made up of elements such as beliefs, behavior, thought processes, and emotions that constitute a definite pattern. Under the influence of mind control, a person’s original identity, as formed by family, education, friendships, and most importantly that person’s own free choices, becomes replaced with another identity, often one that he would not have chosen for himself without tremendous social pressure. (p. 54)
Hassan goes on to say:
Mind control, also called “thought reform,” is more subtle and sophisticated [than brainwashing]. Its perpetrators are regarded as friends or peers, so the person is much less defensive. He unwittingly participates by cooperating with his controllers . . . . The new belief system is internalized into a new identity structure. Mind control involves little or no overt physical abuse. Instead, hypnotic processes are combined with group dynamics to create a potent indoctrination effect. The individual is deceived and manipulated—not directly threatened—into making the prescribed choices. On the whole, he responds positively to what is done to him. (p. 56)
Now, the phrase “mind control” is a little passé, perhaps a bit quaint or hard to swallow. But Lalich provides her own conception of what occurs in cult environments.
Through the indoctrination, we enter this state of mind that I call bounded choice. We’ve been so enclosed in this self-sealing system, we have no reality checks, no other feedback. We’re at the mercy of the leader. We believe our entire life future depends on staying with and obeying this leader, to the point where—yes, we have choices, but our choices are confined and constrained by this system that we’re locked in. So, sure, if it’s something insignificant, like, “Oh, what am I going to have for lunch today?” or whatever, yeah, you have a choice about that. But if it’s something significant, like, “Can I leave?” “Can I challenge the leader?” No. Those are thoughts that you cannot entertain, because you know that if you entertain those thoughts, and God forbid act on them, you will basically die, either a literal or figurative death. Many cults say to you, “If you leave, you’re going to die of some dread disease.” You have to give up everything. Give up your entire identity at that point. And most people, when they’re in that state, cannot do that. And this is why so many people, especially at a higher level of cult, experience what we call … moral injury, which is the effect of not just what happened to you but what you did to others, or that you saw happen to others and that you couldn’t do anything about.
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