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How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

theguardian.com

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Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#61

Post by ljm »

dylan604 wrote: post #46
pjc50 wrote: post #29

Some pull quotes, since people seem to be struggling with page loading: > his client, a woman who had recently finished her master’s at a prestigious university, had been drawn into a scam job. It was essentially a pyramid scheme built around a health regimen. Before you could sell it, you had to try it, so you knew what you were selling. > The regimen? Multiple enemas a day. “It escalated to 40 to 60 enemas a day,”…

40 to 60 enemas a day? Per person? Even for hyperbole, that sounds like a lot.

I knew one person--shared a flat with them--who was heavily into that sort of spiritual-esque alternative health, the sort you'd connect to the so-called Woo-to-Q pipeline these days, who would subject themselves to that kind of thing. It was all about the 'cleanse':

1. Fast on water for a week 2. Drink a cup of olive oil, straight 3. Multiple enemas several times a week 4. Maintain a raw vegan diet in between

Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging). And for good measure dose yourself on some kind of poisonous frog venom for more of the same.

If I didn't know any better I would say there was some cult mentality going on, the gateway to manipulation being past childhood trauma and a borderline eating disorder. None of it seemed particularly healthy.

Although with 40+ enemas a day I don't know how you'd have time to do anything else.

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#62

Post by Tade0 »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #53
derbOac wrote: post #34

Interesting read. Framing things as a "cultic relationship" makes a lot of sense to me. The part about using your experience as a basis of truth determination being flawed and a source of vulnerability also was pretty insightful. I'm a little surprised by mention of pushback and accusations of being cult apologists, only because what they're describing as their method is pretty similar in principle to some widespread…

> The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness. It's kind of hard to articulate but the thing with cult and cult-like movements, and also somewhat cons & scams, is the "vulnerability" they exploit is the raw mater…

> A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.

You're describing a cult leader BTW. I've met one. Scary person underneath that mask he was wearing.

Also I now know what a degree in business management is good for.

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#63

Post by vishkk »

simonw wrote: post #40

The best thing I have ever read on this subject is https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-fr... - it is a truly wild ride, profiling David Sullivan, a private investigator who specialized in helping people get their loved ones out of cults and was based in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.

Thank you for sharing -- that was a great read!

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#64

Post by swiftcoder »

delichon wrote: post #51

cult (noun): A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader -- American Heritage Dictionary Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult. It's mostly used as way to slur a disfavored group. It's an element of a…

> Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult.

The extremism is an integral part of what makes folks regard something a cult. Would anyone have cared that NXIVM was running dodgy self-improvement seminars upstate, if they hadn't also been coercing and branding women?

> I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones

Various sects within the various organised religions certainly qualify as cults. I think a fair case could be made for many of the milder ones as well, on the basis of how they tend to treat women/children/etc (restrictive rules about clothing/education/personal-freedom/etc)

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#65

Post by dboreham »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #48

Fantastic article. And their "light touch" approach seems very correct. Now -- What counts as a cult? One sufficient condition, in my opinion, would be ritualized sexual abuse, especially of children. But this is baked even into several mainstream religions, if you only open your eyes. What is good, at least, is that, like viruses, cults/religions generally evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. (This is…

Religion and Cult are obviously very similar things, if not in some cases just different names for exactly the same thing.

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#66

Post by zen928 »

philipallstar wrote: post #52
JKCalhoun wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate ads as much as everyone, but I think you need to at least take a modicum of steps to block ads before posting to HN that you hate seeing all the ads. (Perhaps your point though is to broadcast to everyone—who presumably are in fact blocking ads—that the site is pure awfulness without any ad-blocking. Of course you're preaching to the choir at that point anyway.)

This is like saying "if you don't like train prices then don't complain until you've tried jumping the turnstile".

Yeah, which is a reasonable statement to make on the website TrainHackersAndPassAvoiders.com. I think its appropriate if you consider yourself in the culture to be reminded of the norms everyone in that culture typically follows.

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#67

Post by rboyd »

wait a minute here..

HN:

- asks you to self-assign a new name upon joining

- has a leader

- has a hierarchy (rating system)

- esteemed texts which promise by adopting a strange method (Lisp) that you can achieve higher levels of wealth and self actualization

should I be worried?

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#68

Post by dylan604 »

ljm wrote: post #61
dylan604 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40 to 60 enemas a day? Per person? Even for hyperbole, that sounds like a lot.

I knew one person--shared a flat with them--who was heavily into that sort of spiritual-esque alternative health, the sort you'd connect to the so-called Woo-to-Q pipeline these days, who would subject themselves to that kind of thing. It was all about the 'cleanse': 1. Fast on water for a week 2. Drink a cup of olive oil, straight 3. Multiple enemas several times a week 4. Maintain a raw vegan diet in between Throw…

> Although with 40+ enemas a day I don't know how you'd have time to do anything else

This is what triggered me to questioning even allowing for hyperbole. At what point does it become kink/fetish/addiction?

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#69

Post by wmeredith »

dylan604 wrote: post #46
pjc50 wrote: post #29

Some pull quotes, since people seem to be struggling with page loading: > his client, a woman who had recently finished her master’s at a prestigious university, had been drawn into a scam job. It was essentially a pyramid scheme built around a health regimen. Before you could sell it, you had to try it, so you knew what you were selling. > The regimen? Multiple enemas a day. “It escalated to 40 to 60 enemas a day,”…

40 to 60 enemas a day? Per person? Even for hyperbole, that sounds like a lot.

Seems like a pure logistics issue to me.

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#70

Post by lynx97 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #59
lynx97 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just recently happened to attend a community meeting which took place in a room of a trans-centric housing project. Several of the houses residents also attended. I was schocked to witness a casual chat escalating to a point where several people agreed that they should forcefully storm the parliament building of the capital, if politicians can not be made to fullfil their wishes. So there you have your Jan6 story,…

I've thought about J6 a lot, and what bothers me isn't so much the violence, but the lies and pathetic worldview that drove it. The idea that violence is necessary if an election is stolen - if political forces actually manipulated the results of the democratic process - is not absurd to me, and is not inherently immoral. What made J6 wrong was not that it was violent, but that it was based on the obvious lies of a n…

If you are willing to support--or at least not be bothered by--violence in a democratic process, I guess we can not find any common ground to talk about.
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