March 31, 2021 • 28 mins
Cults and other manipulative groups are an issue of public health and Diane Benscoter has strategies that may help.
Diane Benscoter is the founder of Antidote and the author of Shoes of a Servant: My Unconditional Devotion to a Lie.
Here are some links to additional information about cults and psychological manipulation and how to find support:
Support for Individuals, from Antidote
Support for Families, from Antidote
Cult Deprogramming vs. Strategic Interactive Approach from Steven Hassan
Course: Understand Cults: The Basics, by Steven Hassan
Open Minds Foundation: Resources
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Bushki, this is solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg. For a moment,
I thought I heard glass breaking around me. Physically, it
was my entire identity crumbled. It was just devastating. Dianne
(00:36):
ben Scoter's life changed when she left the Mooneyes. It
wasn't easy. The cult provided connection and meaning, and while
she was a member, it was hard to imagine a
life outside of it. Dianne was a victim of psychological manipulation,
a technique practiced by cults of very different kinds, ranging
from the People's Temple which ended in the Jonestown tragedy,
(00:59):
to Nexium to qan On. Radicalization can happen because not
enough people understand how psychological manipulation works. And I don't
think there's any other way to solve it than to
take a public health approach to it. It's like mole whacking.
(01:19):
Until we get to that tipping point of enough people
understanding it, it's just going to show up in different
ways and in different packaging, and we'll just be programming
someone from this calt and that calt in one person
at a time, and that is just not going to
solve the problem. It'll just keep getting worse. Diane Benscoter
(01:41):
is the founder of Antidote dot NGO. Her organization provides
resources the families looking for support and individuals looking to
make a change. I just, you know, I could imagine
myself just feeling immense frustration and a failure of empathy
because it's their own stupidity. It does seem like that,
(02:02):
I know, and I struggle with those feelings myself, even
after a lifetime of trying to understand this speaking of it,
if you can step over, jump over the belief system,
if you can go back to the person that you
love and remember that they're a good person, remind them
that you love them because they are a good person,
(02:24):
and that you want to try to improve the relationship.
Focus on the relationship and see if you can start
building from there. Denscoder is hopeful. I believe we can
solve the very dangerous problem of psychological manipulation and how
it affects so many people in society. Dan, you are
(02:51):
a cult d programmer. You're someone who helps people get
out of cults and break out of cult thinking. And
I wonder if just to begin, you could tell us
a little about your own history in a particular cult,
the Unification Church, sometimes known as the Mooneyes. I joined
that group when I was seventeen years old. I was
(03:15):
really confused about what was going on in the world.
The Vietnam War was going on, and I was listening
to the music of our time that was inspiring me
to want to do something about the war and to
make the world better. And so I went on what
I thought was a walk for world peace, and as
(03:35):
it turns out, it was the Mooney's and I was
recruited and soon understood that the Messiah was on the earth,
and it was sun round moon, and that I was
born to be a disciple of Christ. That was my
mission in life, and so for the next five years
I dedicated myself wholly to that task of serving God
(03:59):
in that way. In a lot of ways, you fit
the stereotype. You were young, impressionable, teenager adolescent going through
change life, feeling alienated. That's how you got in. How
did you get out? Did someone? Did someone help you?
Was there a deep programmer who was involved in helping
you get out of that? Called there was? My family
(04:23):
hired someone to come and talk to me, and it
was kind of a situation where I thought that I
would be able to help bring them back into the fold.
I thought, here's a former member who's gone astray, and
I'll be able to bring them back in. Unfortunately for
my belief system at that time, they started making a
lot of sense, and I started to understand that what
(04:47):
had happened to me was that I had been manipulated
and taken advantage of, and that this whole thing was
a big lie. It was one of the most painful
things I've ever experienced in my life to realize that
it took a long time to recover from it. And
then after you left, how did you start to become
a deep programmer yourself. I had the unique opportunity there
(05:10):
was a rehab house for people leaving various cults. This
woman had opened up her home and had people from
whatever cult they were in come there and stay as
a time of transition. And she offered me a job
there and saw people coming through from High Christiana and
Guruma Haraj He's called There's half a dozen Children of God,
(05:33):
different groups that people would come and stay there for
a while during their recovery. That was a really important
time for me and understanding how psychological manipulation works, and
that wasn't just that the Mooneyes were this unique situation,
but I started getting asked to go out on cases
where families needed someone to come and talk to their
(05:54):
loved one. They would hold the person against their will.
That was kind of the old style to programming back
in the eighties. They would the family would say, you're
not leaving until you talk to this person. It was
an intervention type of situation, and I went on many
cases like that until I was eventually arrested for kidnapping.
(06:14):
Everything went wrong, She went out the bathroom window and
went to the police, and we're all arrested. It's a
little longer story than them. So it was that point
that I stopped doing those kind of interventions and started
really thinking about what all this meant and what I
really could do to make a difference. You know, even
(06:34):
that term deep program suggests that there is a distinction
between someone who has been manipulated, as you say, and
someone who has legitimate beliefs, and that points to the distinction,
you know, between cult and religion, or between cult and
political movement. And how do we draw that line? How
(06:56):
do we define a cult which is a set of
beliefs that will require something like kind of deprogramming that
you've become very skilled in doing, as opposed to something
that is just someone's religion. It's such an important point
you're bringing up, Jacob. It's it's really something that I
(07:17):
think most people point in the wrong direction. They're trying
to define is this a cult or not? And I
think that while that's interesting and it can be done,
there's a lot of cult experts that do that. I
think the important question is psychological manipulation being used to
try to influence someone's decision making processes, and that is
(07:43):
the solvable thing that radicalization can happen because not enough
people understand how psychological manipulation works. It can take the
form of a religious called someone in a self helped
thing like Nexium, Keith Ornary, that whole thing, or scientology.
It can happen in what happened recently. This last year
(08:08):
was my biggest fear that a large number of people
would be radicalized, and the perfect storm happened. People were isolated,
people were scared, wondering what was true, They didn't know
what news sources to trust, and it was the perfect
opportunity to take advantage of those psychological situations, and it
(08:30):
works every time. Yeah, so I think you're maybe referring
partly to QAnon, people who reject factual information about how
the election was decided. You know, QAnon really interesting example.
It's not a religion. It's a crazy political conspiracy, sort
(08:53):
of not exactly clear how it spreads. It happens to
be on the right. You know, what makes that a cult?
And what how specifically do we deal with that cult?
Which is I think from the perspective of our politics,
from the perspective the country is, in a way the
most dangerous one we're dealing with right now. Is it
a cult? There are people that would say that it is,
but I think again what's important is that in order
(09:17):
to solve this problem, a large number of people, the
majority of people, Much like herd immunity, we really need
to have the majority of people understand the trickery of
psychological manipulation, because I don't think there's any other way
to solve it than to take a public health approach
(09:38):
to it. It's like mole whacking. Until we get to
that tipping point of enough people understanding it, it's just
going to show up in different ways and in different packaging,
and we'll just be programming someone from this cult and
that cult in one person at a time, and that
is just not going to solve the problem. It'll just
(09:59):
keep getting worse. So it's interesting to think about the
public health approach. You know, what you can do to
make people less vulnerable to manipulate. What's the first step.
What you have to do is educate people about the tactics,
build curriculum for educators so that they can teach young
people from an early age how this works. We have
(10:22):
to use influencers to spread information and we have to
do everything we can to try to get to that
herd immunity point. Much like with cigarettes as a problem
that people didn't understand that they were harmful, there had
to be a massive education campaign to educate everyone possible
(10:42):
about the danger. And now most people if you would
ask them, do you understand that cigarette smoking is dangerous?
They would say yes. And we have to get to
that point with psychological manipulation. Yeah, I mean in the
classic called there's a leader Reverend Moon or in the
Nexium story that you referred to, who's driving the manipulation
of the adherents. But QAnon doesn't seem to quite conform
(11:06):
to that. I mean, whether there's some wizard of All
figure who's planting the seeds of Q I don't know,
but there's no publicly identified leader who's getting people to
follow him or her. It's kind of a peer to
peer cult in that way. Does a cult have to
have a leader? And is that a distinctive thing about
q and On that it doesn't. It is an interesting
thing about q and On for sure. And I think
(11:29):
it could be argued that Donald Trump was the leader
in some way, that that was the goal. But what's
more important, I think is that there were efforts to
create an enemy by creating a US into them. You
have to have an enemy because if you want people
(11:50):
to just believe one source of information, because that's how
you control people. If you want people to do what
you want them to do, then you have to convince
them that all sources of information outside of that group,
outside of that source of information are lies and untrust
worthy or even evil satan whatever. You know. That's how
(12:13):
cults do it, and that's how it was done on
this larger political spectrum. And so that's how it works.
And the other thing is that with technology like it is,
it's not that expensive to create media that looks really believable.
And so here's a group of people isolated on Facebook
(12:34):
and somebody that they like and respect in their circle
says something really radical, and it seems to me it
rings true. It might be about it might be a
racist statement, it might be something about the left being
evil or whatever, and it rings true to you. And
then you click and click and click, and pretty soon
this is all making sense and you're thinking, this explains everything.
(12:57):
Now I understand the evil on the left is trying
to take over the world, and I have to join forces,
and this is war, you know, and it grows like that,
it's perpetuating. Well, it's a reaction to the intellectual freedom
of modern society, isn't it. I mean, in traditional societies,
(13:18):
presumably called there less of an issue because people don't
have that search for what to believe in and how
the world works. That's given to you, and there's a
structure to the society and a prescribed set of beliefs
and a cosmology, and the actual belief might be wacky,
but they're held by everybody. Whereas in modern society you
can believe whatever you want, and all the things you
(13:41):
say about the vulnerability to psychological manipulation, people's deep need
to understand and have a belief system. That's a void
that can be filled. But given that, I mean, I
don't know if you agree with that particular explanation, but
given that, is psychological manipulation a problem that can be solved?
(14:02):
I mean, if it's something the human beings are just
fundamentally looking for and missing in modern society, how do
you fill that space in a way that wouldn't leave
them vulnerable to the cults in the way so many
people clearly are. I mean, what do you do when
someone is already in and you want to help them
get out? What's the first step? In my organization, what
(14:22):
we're doing is setting up off ramps basically for people.
And the people that come to us as seeking help
are almost always family members. They're the loved ones of
people who they've noticed that they've completely changed. They can't
talk to them anymore, they don't know how to communicate
with them, and they feel like their loved one has
(14:44):
joined a cult. What we do is try to work
with them to help them understand how this has happened,
What the trickery of psychological manipulation is so that they
can gain empathy, because you have to have empathy toward
the person if you're going to help them at all.
They have to agree that they are willing to have
(15:05):
a conversation about the possibility that maybe they've been taken advantage.
Then it's just a matter of kind of unpeeling the onion.
But they have to want to talk to you. I mean,
as you said, you can't kid and have them anymore.
It's voluntary, So you know, there has to be at
least some openness to see, whether it's because of pressure
(15:27):
from family members who they still care about, or some
nagging feeling that something's wrong. They have to be open
to changing their tanking. Yeah, and most people's approach is,
here are a million facts, can't you just look at
them and see? But that doesn't work because it's not
about the facts, it's about their psychological situation. They need
(15:48):
this to be true. They want it to be true.
They'll do anything for it to be true because they're
getting something from it on a psychological level, and so
for them to be willing to let go of that,
there has to be something bigger in it. For them,
and the bigger is that they have to want their
(16:08):
relations ship back with their loved ones, for instance. And
so if you can approach them with I know you're
a good person. I know you're involved in this because
you care so much about the world and because you
want America to be a great place or whatever it is,
whatever it is that they sincerely do care about, and
(16:31):
get them to agree perhaps that we both agree that
this isn't working, our relationship isn't working. We have to
find a way. Will you at least consider some family
therapy or someone that can help us learn to talk
with each other again and try to get to the
bottom of what happened here, And if there are trained
mental health professionals that can help look at the family
(16:55):
system and help the person feel safe enough to look
at the possibility that maybe they've been taken advantage of
and maybe that's what's going on here that allows them
to still believe that they're a good person. And pretty
much anyone that I have talked with and helped exit
any kind of an extremist group, there's that point where
(17:19):
they get it, where they understand that they've been taken
advantage of intentionally. Then it's very devastating. At that moment
when I realized that, for a moment, I thought I
heard glass breaking around me. Physically, it was my entire
(17:40):
identity crumbled. It was just devastating. And I think that
you have to be very gentle and empathetic towards someone
who has been radicalized, because it often takes over your
entire identity, and so what you believe, the music, you like,
(18:00):
everything has become part of that identity. Your political views,
your world views completely are tied up in that. Your community,
who you consider your friends. It's an identity crisis and
it takes a long time to recover from that. So
they have to trust that you have their best interest
in mind and that you're not just wanting to argue
(18:22):
about what's right and wrong, because that just does not work.
It does seem that it might be harder to have
empathy for someone who's fallen prey to q Andon beliefs
than someone who would you join the Hari Krishna's I mean,
you know, in the one case, the with QAnon, the
views are so noxious and they're adopted by choice. I mean, yes,
(18:46):
there's psychological manipulation, but there are people who come through this,
you know, just reading stuff and watching Fox News and
absorbing bad sources of information. At one level, I can
certainly have sympathy for them, But on the other hand,
it I just, you know, I could imagine myself just
feeling immense frustration and a failure of empathy because it's
(19:08):
their own stupidity. It does seem like that, I know,
and I struggle with those feelings myself, even after a
lifetime of trying to understand this and speaking of it.
But you know, I would have said that I completely
joined the Moonies out of choice, and all of the
(19:29):
you know, Keith Rnary, a lot of the people that
were involved in that, the women who got branded with
his initials, they all said I did it out a
choice until they understood and then there's that devastating moment
where you realize you've been taken advantage of. But it
choice is a confusing word sometimes when you're talking about
(19:51):
this topic, and yeah, it does seem noxious. And I
have a lot of friends who are former white supremaists
and are now trying to pull people out of that.
It's a similar kind of how could you possibly be
so hateful? But they were just normal people who bought
(20:15):
into the idea. It seems horrible, and it is, but
and it's what happened with Hitler youth. They weren't born
evil Hitler youth. They were radicalized and terrorists. People who
strap bombs on their body, people who fed poison to
the children and their children in Jonestown. It's it is.
(20:35):
It's horrible when you try to talk to them and
they are spouting these horrible things, but no one wants
to play the fool. And if we can help people
understand this trickery, I really do think we can get
to the point where this doesn't work anymore. The people
that try to use these tactics won't have the same
(20:56):
ability to do so. Yeah, it's it's a moment when, unfortunately,
cults are seemed to be thriving in America, and stories
about cults seem to be thriving in America. I mean
these you know, like the document multiple documentaries about Nexium,
and you know, people just people just love these stories. Now,
(21:18):
presumably it's not people who are in cults who like
the stories about cults so much, But I don't know,
there's something a little cult like about the absorption in cults.
I mean what do you make of the you know,
popular cults as sort of an aspect of popular culture.
People are fascinated by it, and I think everybody wants
(21:39):
to believe that it could never happen to them, and
so it's something they can point to and say, Wow,
isn't that something that would never happen to me? But boy,
it's so fascinating, and it is fascinating how someone can
be completely taken into something like that kind of a cult.
(22:02):
And cults are always more prevalent during times of when
there's a sidal unrest, during times when there's confusion about
the world. It's uncomfortable to feel confused, and it's uncomfortable
to feel afraid. I mean, I was really afraid during
(22:24):
the pandemic. I'm sure we all were. And or during
the beginning of the pandemic. Appreciate you're talking about it
in the past tense, They say, yeah, kidden, but especially
in the beginning. I know that I My anxiety was
so so very high, and in times of anxiety and confusion,
(22:46):
and also because of technology, all the changes, the exponential change,
the speed of technology change being so fast that oh,
a lot of people feel very scared and confused and
like they don't fit in, and so those are the
perfect conditions. So, Diane, I think the old model that
people have in their heads of deep programming is that
(23:09):
ends are trying to get their children out of cults.
But more and more we hear these stories about children
who are losing a parent or their parents to cults,
and again about QAnon and Trump and these stories we've
been reading. You know, is there anything that's different about it?
And there are things you've learned about trying to deal
(23:32):
with older people in cults and families, whether you're trying
to get parents or grandparents out. My inbox at Antidote
is just filled with those kinds of stories. Typically, my
work has been trying to help disaffected youth because that
is a vulnerability. But now it's young people writing from
(23:56):
their college dorm rooms and saying I can't talk to
my parents anymore. I don't know what to do, and
so it is a different demographic. It's the same on
a psychological level, it's just a different demographic. And so
what we're doing is creating support groups and webinars and
(24:16):
ways for people to learn some tactics to help build
bridges with their loved ones and to help diffuse the
anger that's going on between the two. It's very vult volatile,
and that's been taught. It's part of it. If you
want control over someone, it's really helpful to have an enemy.
(24:40):
You've got to diffuse that intense feeling of anger for
the other, hatred toward the other, and it comes from
both sides. It's really hard on both sides because you
feel so frustrated and it feels so evil on the
other side, and so that has to be diffused and
broken down so that you can learn to talk with
(25:01):
each other again. That's the first step. If first you
have to start getting to the place where you can
remember that things you love about that person so that
you can start meeting them there and reminding them that
you want that relationship back. Build from there, Diane, we
usually wrap up by asking what listeners can do, and
(25:21):
in this case I would bifurcate the question. First, what
can listeners do about the problem of cults in general
and figuring out how to stop cults before they start,
the kind of public health approach you were talking about,
But separately, what can people do as individuals dealing with
other individuals they may know, and their families who are
(25:42):
vulnerable or have succumbed to a cult. I think the
answer to both of those questions is the same, and
that is to educate yourself about the trickery of psychological manipulation.
Understand that intersection between just human conditions, those things that
cause us pain, psychological pain, not feeling lonely or not
(26:05):
fitting in, feeling confused or or angry about the changes
in the world, fears, those kind of things, and how
someone can take advantage of those things and they do so.
If you have someone that has clearly been radicalized in
some way, I think the first thing to do is
educate yourself. There's lots of ways to do that, and
(26:27):
I can point people in that direction. We do webinars
and support groups and things. And then also to really
reach for that empathy, really try to understand if you
can go step over, jump over the belief system, if
you can, and go back to the person that you
(26:48):
love and remember that they're a good person. Remind them
that you love them because they are a good person,
and that you want to try to improve the relationship.
Focus on the relationship and see if you can start
building from there. If you're just arguing about doctrine. You're
just not going to get anywhere. Diane ben Scoter is
(27:10):
the founder of Antidote dot ngo and the author of
Shoes of a Servant, My Unconditional Devotion to a Lie.
To learn more about psychological manipulation and to find resources,
please check out the links in our show notes. Next
week on the show, I'll talk with an award winning
medical innovator, Deja Taylor. She's a senior in high school.
(27:35):
I hope you'll join us. Solvable Senior producer is Jocelyn Frank.
Research in booking by Lisa Don. Catherine Girardo is our
managing producer, and our executive producer is Mia Loebell. Solvable
is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate, and review it. It really
(27:56):
helps us get the word out. You can find Pushkin
Podcasts wherever you listen, including on the iHeartRadio app and
Apple Podcasts. I'm Jacob Weisberg five
Bushki, this is solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg. For a moment,
I thought I heard glass breaking around me. Physically, it
was my entire identity crumbled. It was just devastating. Dianne
(00:36):
ben Scoter's life changed when she left the Mooneyes. It
wasn't easy. The cult provided connection and meaning, and while
she was a member, it was hard to imagine a
life outside of it. Dianne was a victim of psychological manipulation,
a technique practiced by cults of very different kinds, ranging
from the People's Temple which ended in the Jonestown tragedy,
(00:59):
to Nexium to qan On. Radicalization can happen because not
enough people understand how psychological manipulation works. And I don't
think there's any other way to solve it than to
take a public health approach to it. It's like mole whacking.
(01:19):
Until we get to that tipping point of enough people
understanding it, it's just going to show up in different
ways and in different packaging, and we'll just be programming
someone from this calt and that calt in one person
at a time, and that is just not going to
solve the problem. It'll just keep getting worse. Diane Benscoter
(01:41):
is the founder of Antidote dot NGO. Her organization provides
resources the families looking for support and individuals looking to
make a change. I just, you know, I could imagine
myself just feeling immense frustration and a failure of empathy
because it's their own stupidity. It does seem like that,
(02:02):
I know, and I struggle with those feelings myself, even
after a lifetime of trying to understand this speaking of it,
if you can step over, jump over the belief system,
if you can go back to the person that you
love and remember that they're a good person, remind them
that you love them because they are a good person,
(02:24):
and that you want to try to improve the relationship.
Focus on the relationship and see if you can start
building from there. Denscoder is hopeful. I believe we can
solve the very dangerous problem of psychological manipulation and how
it affects so many people in society. Dan, you are
(02:51):
a cult d programmer. You're someone who helps people get
out of cults and break out of cult thinking. And
I wonder if just to begin, you could tell us
a little about your own history in a particular cult,
the Unification Church, sometimes known as the Mooneyes. I joined
that group when I was seventeen years old. I was
(03:15):
really confused about what was going on in the world.
The Vietnam War was going on, and I was listening
to the music of our time that was inspiring me
to want to do something about the war and to
make the world better. And so I went on what
I thought was a walk for world peace, and as
(03:35):
it turns out, it was the Mooney's and I was
recruited and soon understood that the Messiah was on the earth,
and it was sun round moon, and that I was
born to be a disciple of Christ. That was my
mission in life, and so for the next five years
I dedicated myself wholly to that task of serving God
(03:59):
in that way. In a lot of ways, you fit
the stereotype. You were young, impressionable, teenager adolescent going through
change life, feeling alienated. That's how you got in. How
did you get out? Did someone? Did someone help you?
Was there a deep programmer who was involved in helping
you get out of that? Called there was? My family
(04:23):
hired someone to come and talk to me, and it
was kind of a situation where I thought that I
would be able to help bring them back into the fold.
I thought, here's a former member who's gone astray, and
I'll be able to bring them back in. Unfortunately for
my belief system at that time, they started making a
lot of sense, and I started to understand that what
(04:47):
had happened to me was that I had been manipulated
and taken advantage of, and that this whole thing was
a big lie. It was one of the most painful
things I've ever experienced in my life to realize that
it took a long time to recover from it. And
then after you left, how did you start to become
a deep programmer yourself. I had the unique opportunity there
(05:10):
was a rehab house for people leaving various cults. This
woman had opened up her home and had people from
whatever cult they were in come there and stay as
a time of transition. And she offered me a job
there and saw people coming through from High Christiana and
Guruma Haraj He's called There's half a dozen Children of God,
(05:33):
different groups that people would come and stay there for
a while during their recovery. That was a really important
time for me and understanding how psychological manipulation works, and
that wasn't just that the Mooneyes were this unique situation,
but I started getting asked to go out on cases
where families needed someone to come and talk to their
(05:54):
loved one. They would hold the person against their will.
That was kind of the old style to programming back
in the eighties. They would the family would say, you're
not leaving until you talk to this person. It was
an intervention type of situation, and I went on many
cases like that until I was eventually arrested for kidnapping.
(06:14):
Everything went wrong, She went out the bathroom window and
went to the police, and we're all arrested. It's a
little longer story than them. So it was that point
that I stopped doing those kind of interventions and started
really thinking about what all this meant and what I
really could do to make a difference. You know, even
(06:34):
that term deep program suggests that there is a distinction
between someone who has been manipulated, as you say, and
someone who has legitimate beliefs, and that points to the distinction,
you know, between cult and religion, or between cult and
political movement. And how do we draw that line? How
(06:56):
do we define a cult which is a set of
beliefs that will require something like kind of deprogramming that
you've become very skilled in doing, as opposed to something
that is just someone's religion. It's such an important point
you're bringing up, Jacob. It's it's really something that I
(07:17):
think most people point in the wrong direction. They're trying
to define is this a cult or not? And I
think that while that's interesting and it can be done,
there's a lot of cult experts that do that. I
think the important question is psychological manipulation being used to
try to influence someone's decision making processes, and that is
(07:43):
the solvable thing that radicalization can happen because not enough
people understand how psychological manipulation works. It can take the
form of a religious called someone in a self helped
thing like Nexium, Keith Ornary, that whole thing, or scientology.
It can happen in what happened recently. This last year
(08:08):
was my biggest fear that a large number of people
would be radicalized, and the perfect storm happened. People were isolated,
people were scared, wondering what was true, They didn't know
what news sources to trust, and it was the perfect
opportunity to take advantage of those psychological situations, and it
(08:30):
works every time. Yeah, so I think you're maybe referring
partly to QAnon, people who reject factual information about how
the election was decided. You know, QAnon really interesting example.
It's not a religion. It's a crazy political conspiracy, sort
(08:53):
of not exactly clear how it spreads. It happens to
be on the right. You know, what makes that a cult?
And what how specifically do we deal with that cult?
Which is I think from the perspective of our politics,
from the perspective the country is, in a way the
most dangerous one we're dealing with right now. Is it
a cult? There are people that would say that it is,
but I think again what's important is that in order
(09:17):
to solve this problem, a large number of people, the
majority of people, Much like herd immunity, we really need
to have the majority of people understand the trickery of
psychological manipulation, because I don't think there's any other way
to solve it than to take a public health approach
(09:38):
to it. It's like mole whacking. Until we get to
that tipping point of enough people understanding it, it's just
going to show up in different ways and in different packaging,
and we'll just be programming someone from this cult and
that cult in one person at a time, and that
is just not going to solve the problem. It'll just
(09:59):
keep getting worse. So it's interesting to think about the
public health approach. You know, what you can do to
make people less vulnerable to manipulate. What's the first step.
What you have to do is educate people about the tactics,
build curriculum for educators so that they can teach young
people from an early age how this works. We have
(10:22):
to use influencers to spread information and we have to
do everything we can to try to get to that
herd immunity point. Much like with cigarettes as a problem
that people didn't understand that they were harmful, there had
to be a massive education campaign to educate everyone possible
(10:42):
about the danger. And now most people if you would
ask them, do you understand that cigarette smoking is dangerous?
They would say yes. And we have to get to
that point with psychological manipulation. Yeah, I mean in the
classic called there's a leader Reverend Moon or in the
Nexium story that you referred to, who's driving the manipulation
of the adherents. But QAnon doesn't seem to quite conform
(11:06):
to that. I mean, whether there's some wizard of All
figure who's planting the seeds of Q I don't know,
but there's no publicly identified leader who's getting people to
follow him or her. It's kind of a peer to
peer cult in that way. Does a cult have to
have a leader? And is that a distinctive thing about
q and On that it doesn't. It is an interesting
thing about q and On for sure. And I think
(11:29):
it could be argued that Donald Trump was the leader
in some way, that that was the goal. But what's
more important, I think is that there were efforts to
create an enemy by creating a US into them. You
have to have an enemy because if you want people
(11:50):
to just believe one source of information, because that's how
you control people. If you want people to do what
you want them to do, then you have to convince
them that all sources of information outside of that group,
outside of that source of information are lies and untrust
worthy or even evil satan whatever. You know. That's how
(12:13):
cults do it, and that's how it was done on
this larger political spectrum. And so that's how it works.
And the other thing is that with technology like it is,
it's not that expensive to create media that looks really believable.
And so here's a group of people isolated on Facebook
(12:34):
and somebody that they like and respect in their circle
says something really radical, and it seems to me it
rings true. It might be about it might be a
racist statement, it might be something about the left being
evil or whatever, and it rings true to you. And
then you click and click and click, and pretty soon
this is all making sense and you're thinking, this explains everything.
(12:57):
Now I understand the evil on the left is trying
to take over the world, and I have to join forces,
and this is war, you know, and it grows like that,
it's perpetuating. Well, it's a reaction to the intellectual freedom
of modern society, isn't it. I mean, in traditional societies,
(13:18):
presumably called there less of an issue because people don't
have that search for what to believe in and how
the world works. That's given to you, and there's a
structure to the society and a prescribed set of beliefs
and a cosmology, and the actual belief might be wacky,
but they're held by everybody. Whereas in modern society you
can believe whatever you want, and all the things you
(13:41):
say about the vulnerability to psychological manipulation, people's deep need
to understand and have a belief system. That's a void
that can be filled. But given that, I mean, I
don't know if you agree with that particular explanation, but
given that, is psychological manipulation a problem that can be solved?
(14:02):
I mean, if it's something the human beings are just
fundamentally looking for and missing in modern society, how do
you fill that space in a way that wouldn't leave
them vulnerable to the cults in the way so many
people clearly are. I mean, what do you do when
someone is already in and you want to help them
get out? What's the first step? In my organization, what
(14:22):
we're doing is setting up off ramps basically for people.
And the people that come to us as seeking help
are almost always family members. They're the loved ones of
people who they've noticed that they've completely changed. They can't
talk to them anymore, they don't know how to communicate
with them, and they feel like their loved one has
(14:44):
joined a cult. What we do is try to work
with them to help them understand how this has happened,
What the trickery of psychological manipulation is so that they
can gain empathy, because you have to have empathy toward
the person if you're going to help them at all.
They have to agree that they are willing to have
(15:05):
a conversation about the possibility that maybe they've been taken advantage.
Then it's just a matter of kind of unpeeling the onion.
But they have to want to talk to you. I mean,
as you said, you can't kid and have them anymore.
It's voluntary, So you know, there has to be at
least some openness to see, whether it's because of pressure
(15:27):
from family members who they still care about, or some
nagging feeling that something's wrong. They have to be open
to changing their tanking. Yeah, and most people's approach is,
here are a million facts, can't you just look at
them and see? But that doesn't work because it's not
about the facts, it's about their psychological situation. They need
(15:48):
this to be true. They want it to be true.
They'll do anything for it to be true because they're
getting something from it on a psychological level, and so
for them to be willing to let go of that,
there has to be something bigger in it. For them,
and the bigger is that they have to want their
(16:08):
relations ship back with their loved ones, for instance. And
so if you can approach them with I know you're
a good person. I know you're involved in this because
you care so much about the world and because you
want America to be a great place or whatever it is,
whatever it is that they sincerely do care about, and
(16:31):
get them to agree perhaps that we both agree that
this isn't working, our relationship isn't working. We have to
find a way. Will you at least consider some family
therapy or someone that can help us learn to talk
with each other again and try to get to the
bottom of what happened here, And if there are trained
mental health professionals that can help look at the family
(16:55):
system and help the person feel safe enough to look
at the possibility that maybe they've been taken advantage of
and maybe that's what's going on here that allows them
to still believe that they're a good person. And pretty
much anyone that I have talked with and helped exit
any kind of an extremist group, there's that point where
(17:19):
they get it, where they understand that they've been taken
advantage of intentionally. Then it's very devastating. At that moment
when I realized that, for a moment, I thought I
heard glass breaking around me. Physically, it was my entire
(17:40):
identity crumbled. It was just devastating. And I think that
you have to be very gentle and empathetic towards someone
who has been radicalized, because it often takes over your
entire identity, and so what you believe, the music, you like,
(18:00):
everything has become part of that identity. Your political views,
your world views completely are tied up in that. Your community,
who you consider your friends. It's an identity crisis and
it takes a long time to recover from that. So
they have to trust that you have their best interest
in mind and that you're not just wanting to argue
(18:22):
about what's right and wrong, because that just does not work.
It does seem that it might be harder to have
empathy for someone who's fallen prey to q Andon beliefs
than someone who would you join the Hari Krishna's I mean,
you know, in the one case, the with QAnon, the
views are so noxious and they're adopted by choice. I mean, yes,
(18:46):
there's psychological manipulation, but there are people who come through this,
you know, just reading stuff and watching Fox News and
absorbing bad sources of information. At one level, I can
certainly have sympathy for them, But on the other hand,
it I just, you know, I could imagine myself just
feeling immense frustration and a failure of empathy because it's
(19:08):
their own stupidity. It does seem like that, I know,
and I struggle with those feelings myself, even after a
lifetime of trying to understand this and speaking of it.
But you know, I would have said that I completely
joined the Moonies out of choice, and all of the
(19:29):
you know, Keith Rnary, a lot of the people that
were involved in that, the women who got branded with
his initials, they all said I did it out a
choice until they understood and then there's that devastating moment
where you realize you've been taken advantage of. But it
choice is a confusing word sometimes when you're talking about
(19:51):
this topic, and yeah, it does seem noxious. And I
have a lot of friends who are former white supremaists
and are now trying to pull people out of that.
It's a similar kind of how could you possibly be
so hateful? But they were just normal people who bought
(20:15):
into the idea. It seems horrible, and it is, but
and it's what happened with Hitler youth. They weren't born
evil Hitler youth. They were radicalized and terrorists. People who
strap bombs on their body, people who fed poison to
the children and their children in Jonestown. It's it is.
(20:35):
It's horrible when you try to talk to them and
they are spouting these horrible things, but no one wants
to play the fool. And if we can help people
understand this trickery, I really do think we can get
to the point where this doesn't work anymore. The people
that try to use these tactics won't have the same
(20:56):
ability to do so. Yeah, it's it's a moment when, unfortunately,
cults are seemed to be thriving in America, and stories
about cults seem to be thriving in America. I mean
these you know, like the document multiple documentaries about Nexium,
and you know, people just people just love these stories. Now,
(21:18):
presumably it's not people who are in cults who like
the stories about cults so much, But I don't know,
there's something a little cult like about the absorption in cults.
I mean what do you make of the you know,
popular cults as sort of an aspect of popular culture.
People are fascinated by it, and I think everybody wants
(21:39):
to believe that it could never happen to them, and
so it's something they can point to and say, Wow,
isn't that something that would never happen to me? But boy,
it's so fascinating, and it is fascinating how someone can
be completely taken into something like that kind of a cult.
(22:02):
And cults are always more prevalent during times of when
there's a sidal unrest, during times when there's confusion about
the world. It's uncomfortable to feel confused, and it's uncomfortable
to feel afraid. I mean, I was really afraid during
(22:24):
the pandemic. I'm sure we all were. And or during
the beginning of the pandemic. Appreciate you're talking about it
in the past tense, They say, yeah, kidden, but especially
in the beginning. I know that I My anxiety was
so so very high, and in times of anxiety and confusion,
(22:46):
and also because of technology, all the changes, the exponential change,
the speed of technology change being so fast that oh,
a lot of people feel very scared and confused and
like they don't fit in, and so those are the
perfect conditions. So, Diane, I think the old model that
people have in their heads of deep programming is that
(23:09):
ends are trying to get their children out of cults.
But more and more we hear these stories about children
who are losing a parent or their parents to cults,
and again about QAnon and Trump and these stories we've
been reading. You know, is there anything that's different about it?
And there are things you've learned about trying to deal
(23:32):
with older people in cults and families, whether you're trying
to get parents or grandparents out. My inbox at Antidote
is just filled with those kinds of stories. Typically, my
work has been trying to help disaffected youth because that
is a vulnerability. But now it's young people writing from
(23:56):
their college dorm rooms and saying I can't talk to
my parents anymore. I don't know what to do, and
so it is a different demographic. It's the same on
a psychological level, it's just a different demographic. And so
what we're doing is creating support groups and webinars and
(24:16):
ways for people to learn some tactics to help build
bridges with their loved ones and to help diffuse the
anger that's going on between the two. It's very vult volatile,
and that's been taught. It's part of it. If you
want control over someone, it's really helpful to have an enemy.
(24:40):
You've got to diffuse that intense feeling of anger for
the other, hatred toward the other, and it comes from
both sides. It's really hard on both sides because you
feel so frustrated and it feels so evil on the
other side, and so that has to be diffused and
broken down so that you can learn to talk with
(25:01):
each other again. That's the first step. If first you
have to start getting to the place where you can
remember that things you love about that person so that
you can start meeting them there and reminding them that
you want that relationship back. Build from there, Diane, we
usually wrap up by asking what listeners can do, and
(25:21):
in this case I would bifurcate the question. First, what
can listeners do about the problem of cults in general
and figuring out how to stop cults before they start,
the kind of public health approach you were talking about,
But separately, what can people do as individuals dealing with
other individuals they may know, and their families who are
(25:42):
vulnerable or have succumbed to a cult. I think the
answer to both of those questions is the same, and
that is to educate yourself about the trickery of psychological manipulation.
Understand that intersection between just human conditions, those things that
cause us pain, psychological pain, not feeling lonely or not
(26:05):
fitting in, feeling confused or or angry about the changes
in the world, fears, those kind of things, and how
someone can take advantage of those things and they do so.
If you have someone that has clearly been radicalized in
some way, I think the first thing to do is
educate yourself. There's lots of ways to do that, and
(26:27):
I can point people in that direction. We do webinars
and support groups and things. And then also to really
reach for that empathy, really try to understand if you
can go step over, jump over the belief system, if
you can, and go back to the person that you
(26:48):
love and remember that they're a good person. Remind them
that you love them because they are a good person,
and that you want to try to improve the relationship.
Focus on the relationship and see if you can start
building from there. If you're just arguing about doctrine. You're
just not going to get anywhere. Diane ben Scoter is
(27:10):
the founder of Antidote dot ngo and the author of
Shoes of a Servant, My Unconditional Devotion to a Lie.
To learn more about psychological manipulation and to find resources,
please check out the links in our show notes. Next
week on the show, I'll talk with an award winning
medical innovator, Deja Taylor. She's a senior in high school.
(27:35):
I hope you'll join us. Solvable Senior producer is Jocelyn Frank.
Research in booking by Lisa Don. Catherine Girardo is our
managing producer, and our executive producer is Mia Loebell. Solvable
is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate, and review it. It really
(27:56):
helps us get the word out. You can find Pushkin
Podcasts wherever you listen, including on the iHeartRadio app and
Apple Podcasts. I'm Jacob Weisberg five
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