Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (37 page)

The Unification Church has perhaps the most sophisticated methods for acquiring potential cult members. The first phase is called “love bombing.” A lonely student is spotted, drawn into friendly conversation, and invited to dinner. The student is soon surrounded by smiling faces and warm hands, and inundated with compliments. An invitation to a weekend retreat is extended. At the retreat, guests are urged to take part in endless exercise, singing, games, and oblique religious discussion. Little time is left for the potential recruit to sleep. Any probing questions by the potential recruit are discouraged. Monitors accompany them everywhere, including the bathroom. When Sunday arrives, potential converts are urged to stay for one last party. If the potential recruit calls family members or an employer to say that they will not be present on Monday, the Moonie recruiters know that the individual will stay for the full 7-day program.

That recruits stay for the entire program is essential, from the recruiters’ point of view, because a basic tenet of most cults’ conversion process is to isolate the recruit from the outside world, especially from family and friends. During the intense phase of conversion, recruits are made to feel guilty about their lives and past deeds. They are exhorted to become reborn and join their already cleansed and omniscient “brothers and sisters” in the cult family.

Many cults give converts new names. The Heaven’s Gate cult added “ody” to its members’ names to distinguish them from ordinary people. Some cults emphasize the new reality for recruits by defining time differently. For example, the day is divided by prescribed tasks and duties but is otherwise timeless. Other cults try to produce a new personality in the recruit through sensory deprivation, special diets, sleep deprivation, and by forcing the recruit to take part in endless, exhausting chants, prayers, and indoctrination sessions that focus on the cult leader’s vision.

Although many cults recruit vulnerable people, the popular sense has been that they are the downtrodden of society—as indeed, they were in Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, in the cult led by ex-convict Charles Manson, and in many others. But the Branch Davidians came from a higher stratum of society. The Heaven’s Gate cultists were so well educated that they had a business designing websites. One might hope that a cult made up of reasonably well-educated, well-off recruits from the middle and upper classes, from intact families, would not fall under the suicidal thrall of a deranged cult leader. Unfortunately, this has happened as a result of the power of cult psychology and of the deviant leader’s dominance.

Location Is Everything

All cults try to maintain established meeting places for their activities. Even when a cult has a number of groups that are distributed far and wide, their meeting places display a remarkably uniform appearance. This phenomenon can also be observed in the uniform appearances of the churches of any more-established denominational religion, even though they are in different cities, and, sometimes, in different countries. Similarly, the Hare Krishna temples and the Divine Light Mission ashrams maintain a comforting uniformity that bespeaks continuity and certainty, and that exists regardless of location. When a cult maintains many branches in a country or throughout the world, it is less likely to deteriorate into a killer cult. What keeps it alive and functioning is contact with other cultures and dispersion of authority, both of which serve to counter the regressive forces within a cult.

However, when a cult goes into physical isolation, watch out. Such isolation allows deviant leaders and their teachings to fester. The Jim Jones group was relatively harmless when it was meeting regularly in a converted auditorium on Geary Street in San Francisco. But it became far more than that when its members retreated to a vastly different compound in the Guyana jungle. Similarly, when the Branch Davidians took up residence near Waco, Texas, where 77 acres had been purchased years earlier, more was changed than just their venue. The Heaven’s Gate group was not dangerous when they first met in a hotel on the Oregon coast, but when they moved to an isolated location in southern California, they were ready for death and transfiguration.

Earthly Treasures

In their locations, whether isolated or not, the cults promulgate rules and regulations that are rigidly applied and observed by cult members. Many of these are calculated to foster fund-raising activities. Money, seemingly so unimportant in the spiritual life of the cult, is really of the essence because it is needed for running day-to-day operations. Members may be exploited for their labor or may have their personal incomes expropriated for the benefit of the cult and of the leader. In several instances, cult leaders—who are generally excused from following the rules to which members must adhere—live in opulence, whereas members learn to do without basic comforts. Followers of the Bhagwan Rajneesh, of the Osho Foundational International, gave him a fleet of more than a hundred Rolls Royce automobiles so he could enjoy daily rides. David Koresh had his own private suite with electronic equipment, television, and air conditioning, whereas the other Davidians lived communally in a compound where toilets and running water were substandard. The cult leader, because of his divine connection, is exempted from the worldly restrictions and travails that are the lot of ordinary cult members. The indulged leader’s excesses are but a worldly metaphor for the spiritual rewards that await aspirants.

In return for giving up the material and comfort rewards of this world, the cult members are promised salvation and healing. Many members even like the altruistic rewards of a stripped-down existence. Promised rewards in the hereafter, many say that they feel happy, content, and spiritually fulfilled. Focused on the group and its ideals, committed cult members come to believe that their own personal difficulties are insignificant and must be ignored.

The Road to the Apocalypse

Killer cults are not born, they are shaped over time. The leaders of killer cults are generally either psychopathic, psychotic, or both. As they sink into madness, they pull their followers down with them. Deviant leaders take a generally benign group of adherents and gradually transform them into followers of a self-fulfilling fatal vision in which, at least for them, the ultimate apocalypse occurs within the cult members’ lifetimes.

How does a group or cult transform itself into a killing machine? Can cults, like individuals, become sick and die? Is there a way of identifying a cult that is beginning to show the early signs of becoming a killer cult?

For the purposes of discussion, cults can be divided into two categories: nondeviant (“healthy”) and deviant (“sick”). This division is already arbitrary because, by definition, cults deviate from the mainstream of society. Moreover, the idea of anything being divided into baskets of healthy or sick is a fiction. For individuals, psychiatrists are fond of saying that normality does not exist. How, then, could it exist for a group? Nevertheless, using the healthy–sick distinction may help us understand some fundamental differences among cults and possibly identify those that are heading for trouble.

The theoretical healthy cult is less authoritarian and more benevolent in style of leadership than the sick one. In it, humane and charitable practices flourish in harmony with the cult’s espoused ideals. In healthy cults, members feel a stronger allegiance to the ideals of the cult than to the personage of the leader. Such a cult maintains open communication with mainstream society. Honesty, candor, and benevolence mark the relationship of members with one another and with the outside world. The cult is not at war with the outside community or country, and a siege mentality does not exist within it. This cult’s spiritual message is universal, not idiosyncratic. Members seek, and possibly find, spiritual peace and fulfillment. Genuinely happy with their lives, they do not require coercion to remain within the cult. Members are free to leave at any time. Such a cult serves to empower its members personally and to facilitate their own journeys toward spiritual enlightenment. The healthy cult channels the dreams of good men and the acts of bad men into constructive outlets.

Cults become sick when their leaders become deviant or mentally ill. The worst problems often surface because a deviant or mentally troubled cult leader may attract equally dysfunctional cult members. Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple recruited many who were disadvantaged psychologically, socially, and economically. These members’ personal needs were so great that it was relatively easy for them to hand over their lives—and eventually, their deaths—to the deviant whims of a mentally disturbed leader.

It is possible for a cult to be chronically ill without the illness becoming terminal. Some cults remain in this sick condition. The leadership of a sick cult is authoritarian and harsh. The real value system of such a cult, hidden behind an idealistic cover, is guided by the leader’s pursuit of power, money, and sex. Rather than seeking spiritual enrichment of its members through humane, charitable practices, the cult demonstrates to the astute observer that such practices are only superficially espoused and that the leader seeks only self-aggrandizement. In such a cult, the spiritual message is frighteningly apocalyptic and promises unique benefits only to people who are and remain members of the cult. Members are exploited rather than enlightened. They are subject to mind control. Information coming into the cult and going out of it is censored. Sharply drawn boundaries hide the cult’s secrets from the outside world. A siege mentality is induced by the leader’s “sick” mind, and the cult may arm itself for the final battle. In the sick cult, the dreams of good men and the acts of bad men are inflamed, and both are harnessed to the nefarious purposes of the deviant cult leader.

MOVE was a cult in Philadelphia that preached a poorly defined mix of primitivism and anarchy. Armed and dangerous, MOVE had bad relations with its inner-city neighbors and city authorities for years in the early 1980s. In a final, tragic confrontation in 1985, the city decided to try and dislodge cult members from their barricaded row houses. The police used several hundred thousand gallons of water, shot through high pressure hoses, and 7,000 rounds of ammunition in the attempt, which failed. It was then decided that the police ought to “neutralize” the bunker on top of the building. A helicopter dropped a bomb containing an incendiary blasting substance. The fire that erupted destroyed 61 adjoining homes and left 250 families homeless. In the conflagration, 11 MOVE members, including 4 children, died.

A Tale of Two Killer Cults

For a cult to become a killer of its own members, as with the Peoples Temple and the Branch Davidians, the leader must become deviant and deranged in the extreme. Jim Jones constantly preached an apocalyptic end for his followers at the hands of the FB I, CIA, Ku Klux Klan, and through nuclear war. Toward that end, he had the members practice the “white night” ritual of mass suicide by poisoning. Nearing the time when that end actually came about, Jones could not separate reality from fantasy. He believed that he was the reincarnation of Christ, Lenin, and other historical figures. David Koresh also spoke repeatedly of an apocalyptic finale to his ministry. He referred specifically to the seven seals of God’s prophecy for the unfolding of the Apocalypse. There was eyewitness testimony at the trial of the Branch Davidians that this cult, too, had rehearsed and prepared for mass suicide.

A misunderstanding of several important factors about the mentality of killer cults contributed to the terrible ends of both the followers of Jim Jones and of David Koresh. The power of apocalyptic prophecy was not properly weighed. Nor was the fact that the more a group perceives itself to be under the threat of persecution, the stronger the group bonds become. Cult cohesion under conflict ought to be expected, as well as the paranoia that accompanies and is part of a siege mentality. Then, too, the suspiciousness, isolation, and “us-versusthem” perception of reality further create a self-fulfilling prophecy of inevitable destruction. It waits only for the trigger event.

Reports filtered out of Guyana about secretive activities of the Peoples Temple—extensive firearms acquisitions, abuse of members, keeping members in virtual captivity. Such reports brought U.S. House of Representatives member Leo Ryan and a group of reporters to Guyana to investigate. Jim Jones viewed the appearance of Representative Ryan and his group as a confirmation of his own belief that the Peoples Temple was about to be attacked by U.S. government forces. Cult members killed Ryan and two reporters and wounded 16 others at the Jonestown airstrip. When news of this reached Jones, he activated the mass suicide procedure.

The accumulation of sophisticated weaponry began at Ranch Apocalypse long before ATF agents approached its gate. Driven by paranoid expectations of an apocalyptic ending, Koresh decreed military-type drills and construction of bunkers. When the ATF agents tried to force their way into Ranch Apocalypse to confiscate the weapons, the event triggered Koresh’s self-fulfilling prophecy of apocalyptic destruction.

Both Koresh and Jones had declared that they were God. When a cult leader makes such a statement, it is evidence of a serious mental disorder. Gods do not have to abide by the rules of mere mortals. Thus, Koresh and Jones had numerous sexual partners among the cult members. Koresh was alleged to have had sex with many girls in his sect, some as young as 12 years old. He is also alleged to have sired most of the young children in the compound—12 of the 17 who died, by one account. Jones reportedly had sex with both males and females in his cult. Both men had sex with the wives of cult members. They broke up existing families so there would be no other groups competing within the cult. Jones ordered some marriages ended and arranged new ones. All the while, Jones ordered cult members to abstain from sex, which was considered evil except when he engaged in it. It was reported about Ranch Apocalypse that Koresh freely took whichever woman caught his fancy, whereas the other men of the cult lived in “anguished celibacy.” In other words, in both cults, sex was used along with many other matters as a way of controlling cult members.