After I discovered that I was a prisoner in a religious cult instead of an exalted member of a genuine secret society, Margaret Thaler Singers’ book, Cults in Our Midst, which was written with the help of Janja Lalich, became a seminal part of the magic deprogramming elixir that I concocted and drank to free myself from the bonds within myself that chained me to AMORC.  Margaret Singer was a clinical psychologist who lived from 1921 to 2003. As she and Steven Hassan were the two most influential exit counselors I encountered, I have made a point to extensively comment on their work. In fact, you can consider these discussions a form of homage to Ms. Singer, who I consider one of the major architects of my personal liberty.

            Liberty, for those who live in the United States, particularly those who came here from abroad, is a word that has a very sacred ring to it, a word somewhat challenged by our times. Currently, personal liberty and freedom has challenged many Americans. For various reasons, citizens in this country must guard against cultic-type of groups and claims that would enslave their minds and make them vulnerable to sacrificing their personal identity.  There are many reasons that men and women choose to join cults, reasons amply explained in this book, but also in the books by Robert Jay Lifton, who wrote the Preface.

            In the Preface, Lifton talks about Totalism, forms of authoritarian doctrines that control small and large groups, from cults to countries, “emerge during periods of historical-or psychohistorical- dislocation, in which there is a breakdown of the symbols and structures that guide the human society.” He also mentions the power of the “mass media revolution” which so easily, in these high tech times, can flood the human psyche, at any time, on a global level. He also speaks of the stress of the dangers of mass distinction, undoubtedly targeting the possibility of nuclear annihilation and other forms of mass global self-destruction then conceivable by technology.

            Lifton wrote those words in 1995 before 911- and following that epoch event in America in which the technology of the Internet and Social Media having grown astronomically. This period of time also included the breakdown in global financial structures, auguring a potential global economic collapse and a terrorist threat encouraging governments to subtly and non-subtly alter their concepts of privacy and liberty. The human psyche in America and elsewhere is no doubt more than ever vulnerable to cults as a safety harbor from terrorist incursions into schools, military installations public events and even into cyberspace. Totalism as well as fundamentalism, are two safe havens for the mind in a time when there appears to be no clear light of safety in the world of human society.

            Like Lifton, who was an early student of Communist Thought Reform who worked with prisoners of war returning from the Korean conflict when he was a psychiatrist in the US Air Force from 1951 to 1953, Singer also worked for the government with these types of subjects. This was the time she was employed as a senior psychologist in the laboratory of psychology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and worked along side people studying the prisoners of war from the Korean conflict.  She also interviewed Jesuit priests imprisoned in Mainland China who were all subjected to Thought Reform indoctrination.  So both she and Lifton got into the game rather early, learning first hand the secrets of cult indoctrination from victims of enemies of the United States.
            In his career and writing, Lifton has made the distinction between the authentic self, which he calls the Protean self, and the self-fashioned out of totalistic influences by authoritarians utilizing thought reform or mind control. I have generally used cult personality or cult identity to designate this inauthentic product of self-hood shaped by cult influences.

            In my next discussion, I will comment on the idea of negative utopias, a literary creation which mirrors the structure of cults, as described in the introduction by Margaret Singer.