On the Edge

Political Cults Right and Left

Dennis Tourish, Tim Wohlforth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317463634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This is the first book to document the extent of political cults on both the right and left and explain their significance for mainstream political organizations. The authors outline the defining characteristics of cults in general, and analyze the degree to which a variety of well-known movements fall within the spectrum of cultic organizations. The book covers such individuals and groups as Lyndon LaRouche, Fred Newman, Ted Grant, Marlene Dixon, the Christian Identity movement, Posse Commitatus, Aryan Nation, militias, and the Freemen. It explores the ideological underpinnings that predispose cult followers to cultic practices, along with the measures cults use to suppress dissent, achieve intense conformity, and extract extraordinary levels of commitment.

Part One
The Nature of Cults

Chapter 1
Cults in Politics

Nothing . . . can disturb the convert's inner peace and serenity—except the occasional fear of losing faith again, losing thereby what alone makes life worth living, and falling back into the outer darkness

—Arthur Koestler, 1950

What are Cults?

Destructive cults have been defined as organizations that remold individuality to conform to the codes and needs of the cult, institute taboos that preclude doubt and criticism, and generate an elitist mentality whereby members see themselves as lone evangelists struggling to bring enlightenment to the hostile forces surrounding them.¹ There is only one truth—that espoused by the cult. Competing explanations are not merely inaccurate but degenerate. Cults do not have opponents. They have enemies and frequently dream about their ultimate destruction.

In political cults, people are encouraged to fantasize about what society will be like when they have seized state power. Members are hailed as inspired founders (sometimes called "cadres"), who will be guaranteed a particularly powerful position in the new world order. Simultaneously, they are denounced in the present day for their weak grasp of the founders' inspired ideals. Their inability to work even harder is blamed for the slow rate at which the cult's dream is being realized. The cult's achievements are credited to the wisdom of the leader. Whatever goes wrong is attributed to the slovenly behavior of the members. Thus, grandiosity of vision is combined with a punitive internal atmosphere, aimed at suppressing all dissent. There is a pathological fear of anything that calls even peripheral aspects of the group's ideology into question.

Cults embrace the fields of psychotherapy, religion, New Age, self-help, business training—and politics.² Michael Langone,³ one of the leading authorities on the subject, has calculated that as many as 4 million Americans may have been involved with cult groups. It has been estimated that there are around 500 cults active in Britain today⁴ and between 3 and 5 thousand in the United States.⁵ These figures are almost certainly an underestimate. Larger cults are full of "wannabe" gurus, who frequently split off to create their own private little empires. Cults can consist of as few as two people, in which one person dominates the other and claims a position of privileged insight for himself or herself.

Political cults form the principal focus of this book. An important reason for the lack of attention they have so far received may be that political life is often characterized by frantic activity and intense feelings of party loyalty. This makes it difficult to differentiate between "normal" political parties and groups that have reached such a point of obsession that they can be regarded as cults. In cults, the passion, enthusiasm, and commitment of members is ruthlessly exploited to achieve ever-higher levels of activity. Members often feel like athletes competing in permanent Olympic games. When they are injured or become too downhearted to carry on, their usefulness is over and they are discarded in favor of the latest enthusiastic recruit.

Broad agreement exists in the research literature on general characteristics that define cult groupings. The American Family Foundation defined cults as

[a] group or movement exhibiting great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing, and employing unethical manipulative or coercive techniques of persuasion and control (e.g. isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgement, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it), designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families or the community.⁶

Such groups strive to achieve extreme conformity, an outcome that Lifton⁷ characterizes as "ideological totalism," and that we discuss in detail later in this chapter. The roller-coaster highs and lows of cult recruitment mean that people are constantly switched between disorientating and mutually opposed emotional states. Feelings and ideas lose subtlety, shade, and color. Paltry insights are sold as having cosmic implications. Ideas that may be held by many people are presented as the sole moral property of the group. This further inflates that group's already magnificent sense of intellectual superiority.

Under these conditions, members develop a sense of splendid isolation. Cherished beliefs that predate cult membership are derided as ancient baggage, to be lightly discarded. A new you is in prospect, in which every waking moment will be imbued with more meaning than you have ever dreamed possible. The potential recruit is hurtled along at a constantly increased speed, and faces the prospect of retreating "into doctrinal and organizational exclusiveness, and into all or nothing emotional patterns more characteristic ... of the child than of the individuated adult."⁸ Paradoxically, they may on journey's end feel endowed with superhuman insight into themselves and the surrounding world, rather as some drunks seem to imagine that they are constantly on the verge of achieving startling new insights into the human condition. The reality of what is on offer is invariably rather different.

Throughout, the cult attempts to represent its vision as a series of noble insights capable of transforming the present miserable condition of humanity into something far grander and more noble than anything it has so far been able to achieve. A moral imperative is created, in which the cult members are encouraged to believe that only their actions can redeem the world. The alternative, it is alleged, is some form of barbarism, in which all humanity will most probably perish.

A spin on this idea, common in right-wing cults, is the notion that a sizable proportion of the world's population (blacks, gays, or other allegedly degenerate elements) must be annihilated in any event, to save the rest. There is no apparent sense of contradiction between the glowing future, which the group assures its members is its main objective, and the means (civil war, insurrection, racial genocide, an authoritarian inner-party regime) that are assumed to be necessary for its realization.

Intense activism prevents members from having a personal life outside their role as party members. Rival social networks atrophy through neglect, ensuring that members soon come to devote all their spare time to the cult. The unrelenting pace induces exhaustion and depression, making it harder to "think your way out"—too many commitments have been made, all bridges back to sanity are long dynamited, and too little time is left over from party activity for reflection. In a paradox far from unique to political cults, the more ensnared people become in the perfumed trap of activism, the harder it is to escape. Members tend not to leave as the result of rational reflection and conscious decision, but to drop out in despair, exhaustion, and crisis.

Underlying these practices are the cardinal assumptions that social, economic, and political catastrophe lies on the immediate horizon, that a special organization in the shape of the cult is necessary to avert this, and that the nucleus of such a party is to band in the form of the cult. This assumed specialness encourages illusions of correctness, unanimity, and total political prescience. Armed with such conviction, cult members embark on a frantic quest to save the world by recruiting as many other members as possible. It might be thought that such a quest is doomed to failure. Who in their right mind would join a cult? Yet, as the figures cited above suggest, many of us are in fact vulnerable to the attractions of cult membership.

How Cults Recruit and Hold Members

Two leading social psychologists specializing in persuasion, Pratkanis and Aronson,⁹ summarize the research on this issue by humorously suggesting that anyone can create a cult by following a series of simple guidelines derived from what cults actually do. These are:

1. Create your own social reality. What we think we know about the world is in large part derived from our interactions with others, and from the way in which we contrast and compare perspectives derived from different individuals, groups, and media. Cults short-circuit this process by eliminating all sources of information other than that provided by the cult. Members work so hard that they interact only with other cult members, or with people they are in the process of recruiting. They read mostly cult literature. In time, their vocabulary shifts, so that cult-sanctioned words and expressions predominate. It becomes even harder to communicate with nonmembers, since both sides lack a common vocabulary with which to exchange ideas. This leaves cult followers more disposed than ever to the uncritical acceptance of their organization's propaganda.

2. Create a grandfalloon. The term "grandfalloon" is derived from a Kurt Vonnegut novel (Cat's Cradle, 1963), while the process referred to is known in social psychology as the minimal group paradigm. It reflects the research finding that when people are assigned to spurious groups, on the basis of random or minimal criteria, they still identify strongly with those groups and disparage those outside its ranks.¹⁰ A "grandfalloon" describes an out-group of some kind, which can be regarded as unredeemed. Who constitutes the out-group is immaterial—the point is to have one, thereby enhancing the in-group loyalty of cult members. In the case of left-wing cults, the most obvious out-group is the "bourgeoisie." This is supplemented by an assortment of other equally heinous grandfalloons—liquidationists, revisionists, opportunists, ultraleftists, or running dogs of imperialism. On the right, typically, racial minorities, gays, and other races outside the chosen nation are assumed to be much more different from white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males than they actually are. Differences are stressed, while similarities are ignored. Humanity is divided into the chosen and the not chosen, with only those in the former camp worthy or capable of being saved.

3. Create commitment through dissonance reduction. When a contradiction arises between our behavior, on the one hand, and our feelings and attitudes on the other we feel uneasy. For example, we may possess a strong commitment to the values of democracy. If we engage in some action contrary to such values (such as signing a petition demanding that communists be suppressed), we experience an unease which Festinger¹¹ describes as "dissonance." The only way to resolve this conflict is by changing either our attitudes or our behavior, to bring them more in line with each other. Research suggests that most of us have a desire to feel and appear consistent, both to ourselves and others.¹² Accordingly, once we have embarked on a particular course of action, we are more likely to adopt further behavior in that general direction, to create an impression of consistency. We may even help ourselves along this road, by displaying ever more extreme behaviors at odds with our previous convictions. The outcome of this process is called conversion.

Cults manipulate it by establishing a spiral of escalating commitment.¹³ Prospective members adopt what are at first small behaviors in line with the group's belief system, and which do not require the formal endorsement of its ideology. An example would be the act of attending a group meeting. In the first instance, the new behaviors are not perceived as challenging the prospective recruit's preexisting belief systems. However, the new behaviors are slowly escalated. Attendance at a meeting might be followed by a forceful "request" to participate in a weekend conference, followed by voting for the group's proposals at other public forums, leading to asking others to do likewise, resulting in the selling of group literature on the streets and climaxing in a public identification with the group's goals.

The gradual nature of what is involved enables the recruit's belief system to slowly adjust to the new behaviors they have adopted. By the time the full impact of the changes is apparent, they have become for all practical purposes a new and permanent identity.

4. Establish the leader's credibility and attractiveness. Most cults promulgate stories and legends concerning the cult leader. Research into the dynamics of persuasion has long established that the credibility and attractiveness of a message's source are vital ingredients in determining its overall impact.¹⁴ Accordingly, cults credit their leaders with superhuman qualities. Lenin on the left and Hitler on the right are viewed in a semidivine light by their followers. They are regarded as possessing uncommon insight into society's problems, and with personal characteristics such as honesty, genius, and compassion which it is assumed will be attractive to prospective recruits. If such founders are dead then the present leaders, in effect, present themselves as the reincarnation of Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Hitler or whoever. Often, the real problems of the leaders (such as alcoholism and drug dependency) are concealed from both prospective and current members.

5. Send members out to proselytize the unredeemed. This ensures that members engage in what is known as self-generated persuasion. Recruiting others means that they are constantly informing other people of all the positive advantages of being in a cult. This relentless (and inaccurate) focus on the positive means that members wind up reconvincing themselves. A feedback loop is created, which is shorn of all interference from the outside world and in which only the liturgy of the cult has any semblance of reality.

6. Distract members from thinking undesirable thoughts. The easiest way to accomplish this is through overwork. A recurrent theme in the chapters that follow is the enormous levels of activity required of those involved in political cults. In this, they share much common ground with their better-known religious, New Age, and psychotherapy counterparts. For example, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain was a small organization (discussed in chapter 10), never capable of mustering more than 1 per cent of the vote when it stood in elections.¹⁵ Nevertheless, it managed to produce a daily newspaper. This would have been a hugely ambitious project for any organization, let alone one that still wore diapers. However, the effort required to write, produce, and distribute a daily paper meant that people were either too busy or too exhausted to question the political direction they were taking.

7. Fixate members' vision on a phantom. In particular, cults create an ideal image of a future "promised land," which they contrast with the drab reality of today. This might be a socialist paradise or an ethnically cleansed America. The cult leaders sing its praises, invent past golden ages when the phantom previously walked the earth, and insist on its imminent return. The effect is that true believers are terrified to take a day or an hour off, in case their dereliction of duty proves responsible for a missed opportunity to recreate Utopia.

The primary concerns of all cults are the recruitment of new members and the raising of as much money as possible. To do this the members are kept in permanent war mode. The consequent state of arousal binds them ever more tightly to the group's core belief system. However, aspects of the cult mind set are also given a particular sp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One. The Nature of Cults
• 1 Cults in Politics
• 2 Groupthink, Big Brother, and Love Bombing
• Part Two. Cults on the Right
• 3 Christian Identity: A Heritage of Hate
• 4 Soldiers of God
• 5 The Travels of Lyndon LaRouche
• Part Three. Therapy Cults and Politics
• 6 Scientology, Maoism, and the Reevaluations of Harvey Jackins
• 7 Fred Newman: Lenin as Therapist
• 8 Synanon: Utopia as a Game
• Part Four. Cults on the Left
• 9 Marlene Dixon’s Little Army
• 10 Gerry Healy: Guru to a Star
• 11 The Lonely Passion of Ted Grant
• 12 The Many Faces of Gino Perente
• Conclusion. Politics as Religion
• Notes
• Index