socialmedian: Cult scene: New Zealand and Africa

Add News Flash

User-submitted headlines for this story

Clips

Cult scene: New Zealand and Africa

Source: Boing Boing

Nov 04, 2009

Summary

"Medication" by Andrew Brandou, from his Jonestown paintings

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Some people use the word "cult" as a pejorative, a catchall for sects whose beliefs and practices fall out of the mainstream of organized religion. I use the word as a social scientist or psychologist would, to denote a coercive or totalizing relationship between a dominating leader nad his or her unhealthily dependent followers. As I wrote in Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, "what makes a cult cultish is not so much what it espouses, but how much authority its leaders grant themselves--and how slavishly devoted to them its followers are."

Robert Lifton, the distinguished psychologist and author of many books, including Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China (1961), defined cults in a 1981 letter in the Harvard Mental

...Read the full article

Comments (0)

Add Your Comment