Terror, Love, and Brainwashing — Alexandra Stein on Cults and Totalist Systems

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Terror, Love, and Brainwashing — Alexandra Stein on Cults and Totalist Systems

Cults and totalist systems

In her book, Terror, Love and Brainwashing, the social psychologist Alexandra Stein says that people often fail to notice the early murmurings of a cult and the influence they can hold over others. They often begin so innocuously, perhaps at the invitation of a friend or colleague to some seminar or shindig.

Then somehow along the way, we see it unfold in our lives or on the news. Congregations of people, holding strange beliefs and rituals, craze about in complete detachment from our shared reality.

Like the Manson family or NXIVM, some go on to afflict immense harm on society and their own members. At their most extreme, they culminate in totalitarian regimes, with monsters like Adolf Hitler who instigate genocide and crimes against humanity.

Their behaviors are sometimes so grotesque that it is hard to imagine how such malformations can take place. But while cults and totalist systems may vary in ideology, function, and scale, they often share in traits, says Stein. She provides the following definition for such groups:

“A totalist system [or cult] is formed and controlled by a charismatic authoritarian leader. It is a rigidly bounded, dense, hierarchical and isolating social system supported… by a total, exclusive ideology. The leader sets in motion processes of brainwashing or coercive persuasion to isolate and control followers. As a result followers are able to be exploited, and potentially become deployable agents, demonstrating uncritical obedience to the group, regardless of their own survival needs.”

Alexandra Stein. (2016). Terror, Love and Brainwashing.

Dominant dogmas

The key operative here is in the word ‘total’. The belief systems in these organizations are dogmatic and all-consuming. Cults and totalitarian regimes go to great lengths to suppress questions, dissent and alternative views that threaten their stranglehold. 

Stein says we can spot totalist systems by the “levels of control they exert over followers.” She asks us to contrast this with the lives of people in non-totalist systems. Sure, they may subscribe to a strange religion or two, but they will remain free to choose their politics, professions, friends, and interest groups—just as scientists are able to hold multiple theories in their heads until their experiments and evidence demands otherwise. 

For them, any one belief system is just that, a single part or fraction of what makes them whole. So “adherence to [any] odd belief… has an entirely different impact on their life than that experience by someone… whose whole existence becomes bound up within one organization”, writes Stein.

Charismatic authoritarians

Of course, at the core of almost every cult or totalist system is a charismatic authoritarian. His or her charisma is necessary for early momentum to generate idealization, worship, and fervor among followers. We should note, as Stein does, that many leaders like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King are certainly charismatic. But they are not authoritarian. They do not seek to control every aspect of their follower’s beliefs and behavior.

Charismatic authoritarians, Stein observes, are more akin to psychopaths. Their charming exterior may hide their egomania, narcissism, superiority complex, pathological lying and apathy towards others. Stein points, for example, to Mao Zedong’s doctor, who had this to say about the man who instituted the Cultural Revolution that led to the deaths of around two million people: “Mao was a man who had no friends… He saw everybody as a subject, a slave… [He] was an irritable, manipulative egotist incapable of human feeling who surrounded himself with sycophants.”

Front groups and recruitment

It goes without saying that leaders cannot be everywhere at once. Instead, larger cults will rely on ‘front groups’ to identify and recruit new members. What’s frightening about them is how they blend and bleed into society. Group therapies, professional seminars and self-help programs are common channels for their recruitment and fundraising. “The Church of Scientology”, Stein writes, “is noted for its many front organizations, such as the Sterling Management corporate training arm or the Narconon drug rehabilitation program.” 

Like those involved in pyramid schemes or multi-level marketing, these groups excel in the psychology of persuasion. Through the use of reciprocity, similarity, social proof, authority, and related social tactics, they lure unsuspecting participants into their snare. Those in a period of change, isolation, hardship, or trauma, Stein notes, perhaps due to  divorce, relocation, retrenchment, or a death in the family, are especially vulnerable.

Other factors, like “war, natural disasters or social upheavals”, she adds, “can contribute to weakening family and community ties… [and] increased social fragmentation and isolation.” This opens new niches for the cult’s tentacles to reach. Indeed, “simply living in the contemporary developed world, with fewer neighborhood ties and more dispersed families, means most of us live in increasingly vulnerable social networks”, Stein argues. 

Hijacking attachment

Cults thrive because humans are malleable, social creatures. Attachment theory tells us, for instance, as Stein writes, that “human attachment behavior has evolved as a survival mechanism.” In fact, we see this sort of thing across the animal kingdom. The zoologist Konrad Lorenz discovered, for example, that baby goslings exhibit a behavior we call imprinting. That is, they are genetically programmed to follow the first moving thing they see shortly after hatching. This is usually a good-enough evolutionary rule because it is typically the mother who first catches their eye. But researchers show that even random objects like a roving yellow rubber glove can work just as well if it is the first thing the poor goslings see.

Thankfully, humans are not nearly as straightforward in their bondmaking. Yet we seem to get attached to an awful lot of things, from family and friends to trading cards and sporting teams to political factions and pop idols. In this way, cults are parasitic in the sense that they achieve total control by hijacking the lives and attachments of their followers. After first contact, as Stein explains, the cult will gradually seek to “detach the [follower] from prior attachments”, “control [his or her] access to and from the outside world”, and present itself as the only “safe haven” to fill one’s emotional, communal, and/or spiritual needs. 

Isolation and engulfment

What follows for members is an intensifying process of “isolation and engulfment”, Stein explains. As their previous life and relationships melt away, the followers are “glued in an anxious dependency” to the cult. The organization uses this power imbalance to disable independent contemplation and critical thinking. Propaganda and directives are often laced in positive language like “personal growth” or “god’s will” to rationalize and normalize their ideology.

Isolating tactics, peer pressure and sleep deprivation are also common methods. Stein describes, for instance, how The Unification Church would bus new recruits to remote retreats for indoctrination, giving participants no opportunity to reflect on their experiences with people beyond their immediate circle. Similarly, cults like the Children of God or Heaven’s Gate would allocate chaperones to new recruits to enforce desired norms, and to mitigate the risk of extended contact with ‘outsiders’.

Recruits are also often given new identities, while the leaders endow themselves with familial titles. For instance, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the founder of the Church Universal and Triumphant, went by the grand moniker of “World Mother” or “Mother of the Flame”. Some organizations will even go as far as to control their follower’s marital status and family planning. Groups like “the Iranian Mojahedin might decree celibacy”, Stein notes, while others like the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints will “enforce polygamy.” All of this to control the attachments inside the group.

“The totalist system must walk a fine line: intensive interpersonal interaction is required in order to keep the followers tied into the system… Yet these relationships must not be so close and trusting that followers can find individual escape hatch safe havens… dissenting minorities, or islands of resistance.”

Alexandra Stein. (2016). Terror, Love and Brainwashing.

The onions of reality

While the jump from first contact to cult worship may appear extreme, we have to remember that brainwashing is a lot like the proverbial frog in warming water. Stein likens the social structures of totalist systems to an onion and its manifold layers: “The deeper you go towards the center… the more distant from reality you become… The life and beliefs of the innermost circle are so extreme that the outer circles must be protected from it until they are… sufficiently conditioned.” It is for this reason, Stein notes, that early Scientologists were careful not to expose fresh recruits to the more radical aspects of their mythology—of spacecrafts and aliens in volcanoes—until they were ready.

Cult of cults

One has to wonder if cults are simply an extreme manifestation of society gone wrong. Indeed, many social structures can exhibit the defects we’ve discussed so far to varying degrees. From domestic violence to totalitarian regimes, much of their behavior revolves around control, isolation, oppression, and the imbalance of power. Even corporations and start-ups can display cult-like fervor. Employees who are engulfed in their work may grow isolated and distorted. They lead their personal relationships to harm as their careers consume their lives. You might go as far to say that some of them are not dissimilar to the deployable, uncritical, obedient agents that Stein describes in her book.

Regardless, there are steps we can take to combat the dangers of cults and totalist systems. Whether it is through education, legislation, support groups, or other means of intervention, “the key to resistance”, Stein writes, “is the ability to maintain [and] develop trusting relationships”; and to have safeguards that disallows any one relationship or ideology from swallowing a person’s identity, livelihood, and attachments whole. It may be the case, however, that this is easier said than done. For we seem to be in an age of isolation, polarization and disinformation, despite all the progress humanity has since made. Still, we must try to reconnect, especially with those who are on the precipice, or we risk losing the wisdom and soberness of the crowd to the dogma and madness of the mob.

Sources and further reading