What Keeps People From Helping?  

During the 26 years I was imprisoned in a Mind Control cult, I never experienced what I would call a “real intervention.” In my books, Prisoner of San Jose and AMORC Unmasked, I have tried to unfold the techniques of Mind Control and how a dichotomy formed in my psyche that basically short-circuited an easy passage out of the cult. In fact, if it weren’t for the works of people like Steven Hassan, Margaret Thaler Singer and Robert Jay Lifton, I would never have fully unraveled the deep division in myself.  Because of this “unraveling,” I now have a much clearer internal life, which has led to my commitment to free the world of cults like AMORC.

            As in my case, during the time when I was entrenched in AMORC, I was living quite far away from my family (they were in Haiti and I was in a America). And even if I was around them and they happened to know I was a member, would they really realize what had happened to me?   In Hassan’s analysis of problems with recruiting a team, he brings up the typical skepticism about brainwashing in general. If people don’t believe in brainwashing, they are certainly not going to be concerned if you join a group, unless the group seems to be tangibly hurting you or depriving you of their company. And even if you are concretely hurting yourself in their eyes, do they really understand?

            One of the central problems is that many people believe that, as Hassan cites as an errant belief is “There is no such thing as Mind Control.” Maybe they are thinking of the Manchurian Candidate syndrome, which is a speculates that there is a form of Mind Control so invasive that it can make a person into an assassin without him knowing anything about it or it can, for other purposes, just totally wipe out or erase one’s personality, as Hassan mentions. Since I was a victim of brainwashing myself and have studied the literature, I cannot rule out the possibility of the first- and when you look at cults like the Manson family or Aum Shinrikyo, I think it may have happened, perhaps many times. Still, although one can find discussions about this kind of misuse of Mind Control on the Internet or in scientific literature, very few people have researched what has been attempted by various government agencies or criminal organizations or their reputed success.  So a team member certainly might be skeptical about this kind of extreme behavior.

\           On the other hand, the idea of turning a person into a total zombie, which Hassan talks about, a popular understanding of Mind Control,  does seem to many outlandish and I can see the fact that one does not come upon many people whose personalities seem totally wiped out.

            The reality is that formulating a cult identity is chiefly to make one an agent of a cult and its leaders and the personality is not wiped out but rather suppressed as Hassan points out. Understanding this suppression of the ordinary personality by the cult identity is important to anyone who deals with a cult member and the members of a team need to understand why their friend, family member or associate is acting so differently. In fact, what has happened is that his normal thought processes and beliefs have been replaced by new thought processes and beliefs- often substituting “I believe it because my leader has said it for “I believe it because I have seen evidence” as a thought process with the belief being, “The leader’s statements are my chief authority” for “Only by evaluating it myself can I see it is true.” This transfer of authority from oneself to someone else is the essential ingredient in many types of hypnosis and mind control. If one doesn’t believe this change of identities is possible in a cult member and understand the processes involved, what kind of credibility would there be to be on a Strategic Interactive Approach team?