DS: Thank you, okay, so let me open it up and I can just go over that a little bit. Sure. So the first one, purification of the ego. Okay. That, I'm using that broadly because there are other cults that are for example pyramid schemes, commercial selling kinds of cults, where people have to sell products. I'm not naming any names here. And what has to get purified there is all of the wrong thinking that makes the person not be more successful. In every kind of group something has to be purified. In religious groups, and especially eastern groups, it's often called the ego which just means in these cultic groups, now maybe something in a legitimate religion that isn't traumatizing or abusive, but in a cultic group what it means is get rid of your personal individual subjective sense of self. Right now you become a collective self that lives only for the purpose of, you know, enslaving the delusional sense of omnipotence of the leader. So purifying the ego is always seen as this goal and it looks attractive because you want to stop being depressed or you want to stop being miserable in your relationships or you want whatever. You want to start being more successful in your business. Whatever it is, and oh, here's what you've got to do, you've got to purify your ego. And then you'll get out of your own way. There's a million slogans you can come up with that are used about all of this. And then, you know, everything will come together. Well that may be true in working under certain conditions and certain contexts. In a cult, it's all double speak. It's all meant, in fact, to be part of the campaign of subjugation. Okay. I'll move on to the second one. I don't know if you have any questions.
Rob: No, go ahead.
DS: Only perfection is good enough. Well that's how the game is rigged. You're supposed to keep trying harder. Try harder. Stop having negative thoughts that impact your sales numbers. Stop having negative thoughts that make your spiritual progress slow down. Etc etc. Well no matter how hard you try, that cult leader doesn't want you to slip away and succeed, then what? Then they don't have you to control. They don't have you to boost their own ego. You've gone off and you know become as good as they are, they're equal? They can't have that. So perfection isn't spoken of but the leader typically presents herself as perfect, whether or not that word is used. And behaves as though she is perfect, the last word on everything. And as a result the followers can never win. They can never do a good enough job. They can never try hard enough. They always have to stay there and keep trying and keep working and keep giving because they're not getting it. Because they're not perfect yet.
Of course nobody's ever going to be perfect and nobody ever has been is the unspoken problem with that whole demand. The next one we mention was incessant urgency. It's characteristic of these groups that there's a crisis that everybody has to stay up all night for months dealing with and working on, whether it's within the group because there is, people been saying this that or the other, or saying that there's been sexual abuse, or whatever it is. And everybody now has to go to their workshops and workshops and confessionals and chants and everything else because within the groups there's these malignant forces. That's one reason for the urgency.
The other reason is that something outside is going on. Somebody is going to write an article for the New Yorker. Do you know what my cult did when they found out she was going to write an expose? They trained dozens of people to be Reiki practitioners and to sit in a temple in India and do long distance Reiki on the writer of this expose so that she wouldn't write it. I mean it just boggles the mind. And you know so there's a crisis from without and there's a crisis from within, but for whatever it is, everybody's got to urgently work and not sleep and not eat and just work work work, that's typical in a cult. The violation of boundaries as a norm is a very important aspect of this. You know because you can't ever do anything that's good enough. And all you're trying to do is get the leader to recognize you as good. You know, you start being willing to do whatever it takes. And if a leader wants to use you to do something cruel or abusive to somebody else, well you'll go violate that person's boundaries just as yours have been violated because, you know, the guru wants it and that's going to be what makes the guru want you. So that becomes a norm in the group.
In my group I was spied on and many people were. There were hidden microphones in rooms and then your conversations would be thrown in your face later. Or people were appointed to be spies and to report on everything you said and did. The fifth, inner deviance must be eradicated. Yeah. You know, inner deviance is going to get you ostracized and shunned, booted out, rejected. You have got to, so either you'll get ganged up on and told to leave the group because you're never going to ever achieve enough for redemption to happen. Or you yourself become incredibly self-critical and self-loathing in an effort to eradicate your own deviance. Finally, defend the leader no matter what. This is important because the leader, the longer you stay around the more you see the leader behaving in ways that are highly questionable, if not outright illegal, immoral and so on. And yet you've got to come up with a way to defend that leader.
When Guru Mayi was involved in her campaign against her brother, she wanted people to go to his programs, public programs, and disrupt them. One of the people in the group took it upon himself to hire a thug to throw skunk oil at the audience of her brother's presentation. People were recruited to chase him around in airports when he was going somewhere and harass him and call him fatso and so on. I mean this is all orchestrated by this guru and her right hand man, and people did it. And I saw it. Now I didn't actually do that stuff but I had to spin it. I was a spokesperson and leader of a group, I had to spin it so that it sounded righteous. So that it sounded, what we had to do because of how awful the enemy was. So you know there's loyalties to the leader no matter what, is crucial. And it becomes very much a part of the, well once you leave a group like this, and you realize what you were willing to do. What you were willing to become. What you were willing to be just for the sake of this guru to pay attention and like you.
And you just feel like the stupidest jerk in the world. You know you feel so much shame and so much guilt and regret and loss. But you know, that's what you get. You left the guru, what you get is you feel like you're the worst person on earth. So you've got to get over that when you come out from under authoritarian rule. You've got to stop being afraid of retribution which is often how people feel. And you've got to stop feeling ashamed of yourself. You made a terrible mistake, you made a bunch of them, everybody does. I never met anybody who hasn't. And you know to one degree or another everybody has something they need to come to terms with. And people who lead cults are no different. So that's kind of what I've tried to ---
Rob: And I want to throw in a couple more things in the book that I think is really interesting. That the follower's rewards are recognition from the leader and the ensuant prestige they gain within their group. But those rewards are bestowed and receded at the leader's whim, keeping the follower in a fear, in a state of instability and fear about displeasing the leader and thereby losing status and favor.
DS: Yes.
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