-The #1 Bestselling Guide to Protection,
Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults-

The classic work by Steven Hassan as discussed by Pierre S. Freeman

When you fish, you have to first tempt the poor animal with bait. But you can’t reel him in until he has been thoroughly hooked. No use in tugging too prematurely because then you may easily lose him and you won’t have dinner tonight. This is the proper procedure in recruiting cult members, too.

            Be sure they are fastened to the hook, then reel ‘em in.

            But a cult recruit is a human and not a fish- and so there is a danger that they will split before the mind control efforts have settled in and the cult identity has been manufactured and properly set in place.
            So the way to handle this is not to feed them too much information too early. In Combatting Cult Mind Control, Hassan points out that the clever cult recruiter will initially aim at comforting the potential member by focusing in on his personal information, extracting from him information about his school, family and personal life, trying to see his vulnerabilities so he can pitch, directly or indirectly, ways the group could help him. Yes, he is looking for a commitment as soon as he can but he doesn’t want to pull on the fish to quickly. It needs to be on the hook first.          And, even then, the ‘reeling in’ needs to be delicate.

            Because of this type of recruitment, people who are considering joining an organization should look and see if the flow of information is somewhat lopsided.  Generally, Hassan says, the recruiter will not divulge much of his own personal information nor of the groups.  There is plenty in that inventory of cult information that would generally alarm any new member and new members, whose personalities were still unfettered by mind control, still might be motivated to do research.

            There are different stages of mind control and perhaps some time I can talk more about them. But one stage is the successful imposition of a phobic trigger in the member’s mind- that is, the acceptance of the recruit that certain things concerned with his behavior in the cult could lead to unpleasant and even disastrous consequences. The ultimate phobia is generally the consequences of leaving the cult. This could be anything like, in my case, being relieved of the connection to the blessings of the egregor, the group consciousness of AMORC which connects it directly to the celestial hierarchy and to the Cosmic, the ultimate divine connection; in other groups, like Scientology, it means being cut off from the organization and possibly to endure various kind of economic and social punishments since Scientology members are very connected to their organizations; in the Unification Church, at the time of Hassan’s membership,  it meant being cut off from the one living connection to Jesus Christ, the man (Reverend Myung Moon) chosen to fulfill his mission on Earth.

            Even looking at the literature of different groups is a royal road to doubt and therefore becomes a strong prohibition in many cult groups.  The manifestation of this prohibition in the cult identity as a rule- is a sign of the group having achieved a certain depth of programming in the member. The request by an outsider, a friend or family member, that the cult member should look into certain particular claims of the cult could awaken this phobic trigger- and the cult member may come up with a variety of reasons not to explore this claim with outside materials or completely ignore the request or try, but feel usually uncomfortable while doing the research- and ultimately quit before a clear answer could be found. This particular trigger- and the anxiety it produces in the cult member- is a key to complete control.
            When, after 26 years of membership, my authentic self started to pop out its head in undeniable ways, like cursing when I was supposed to be doing ritual work in my inner sanctum, having blackouts and getting very agitated when I started to question things, I finally was able to break the phobic barrier and begin to research.

            The fact is that AMORC had used a relatively slow immersion technique in informing me of their rather great distance from historical and metaphysical reality. The pace of the programming was very largely connected to the monographs. In Hassan’s case, it was faster, but there was a lot of peer pressure and heavy workload demands and continuous, relentless in-your-face indoctrination. Despite the differences, it was still a slow-immersion, stage-by-stage immersion that followed certain reliable signs that the member had taken to the hook and that the temperature could be risen to a place where more unlikely and unbelievable information could be accepted and more demands put on the time and energy of the member.

            This was like the readily used but somewhat unlikely metaphor of boiling a frog. The story goes that if you boil him slowly enough, he will not realize that he is reaching a point of lethal temperature and he will allow himself to be boiled to death without really noticing. In our case, only our authentic personality had to be put to death.

            Unfortunately, in both Hassan and my cases, circumstances proved that our real selves could trump our cult identity, if given half a chance.  So here we are, decades later, writing about how to escape a cult instead of recruiting new members as robotic servants of our former slave masters.