Getting Inbetween Us

1 Comment » // February 14th, 2010

*This post is excerpted from the book, Cult, A Love Story.

A guru’s followers are everything to her. Without them she is nothing, simply another attention-loving fruitcake with charisma and circular logic. The guru’s followers provide material wealth in the form of tithed wages and other monetary gifts. Cult members also provide free labor to the guru, and are willing to perform the most menial, backbreaking tasks in the name of service to the cause. And perhaps most importantly, a guru’s disciples provide her with the power and control she so desperately needs. The cult leader controls every move her followers make: where they live, how they live, what they eat, where they work, what they work at, how much (or, more accurately, how little) contact they have with their families of origin and/or children and, more to the point of this chapter, who they sleep with.

For the guru, so much of her life, status and power rely on the strength of a vertical relationship, from each follower up to her. The stronger the relationship each follower has to her, the more they are willing to do for her and the longer she can expect them to stay devoted to her cause. Therefore, it is essential that the guru constantly strengthens the vertical tie she has to each person. One of the most effective ways to do this is to continually undermine the horizontal relationships between the members; if horizontal ties are weak, then a disciple has nowhere to look but up, for guidance, comfort and love.

Our guru weakened the horizontal relationships between group members in a number of ways, including ones I’ve described in earlier chapters, such as shunning certain members at certain times and creating an atmosphere of fear and suspicion between the members of the group. But the very best and most effective way by far to undermine the relationships between group members (the horizontal relationships), and thus strengthen the vertical relationship of each person to the guru, is to ensure there is an absence of personal intimacy between members. If deep intimacy existed between a group member and his or her spouse outside the group, or if it began to exist between two group members, this threatened the connection between each disciple and the cult leader. She had to continually make sure that our loyalty and any deep feelings of connection were to her alone. If we became too attached to one another, we would weaken the significant role she played in our lives and she would therefore have less control over us. A person can’t serve two masters; our cult leader knew she had to be the ultimate authority in each of our lives and the person we each trusted the most. A guru creates an atmosphere of “us versus them” (”us” being those in the group and “them” being everyone else on the planet) so that the group is cohesively tied together, while simultaneously ensuring that each member’s loyalty is primarily to her and not the others in the group. (How’s that for a parlour trick?)

One of the best ways to weaken the horizontal relationships and inhibit intimacy within a group is to have a group culture that encourages either celibacy or promiscuity. Both states, although they are polar opposites of each other, achieve the same end because they both inhibit intimacy. Our guru chose the promiscuity curriculum and played an ongoing game of musical beds with those who were closest to her. She was able to do this by proclaiming that relationships, like everything else in her version of how the world worked, were not matters of choice or feeling, but were vehicles to be used for higher learning, getting over ego positions and serving God.

…for the rest of this chapter and more on the topic of cults and the strategic ways cult leaders manipulate their followers please see Chapter 7 of Cult, A Love Story.