From Mental Manipulation to the Global Cult? Denis Duclos in Le Monde diplomatique

From Mental Manipulation to the Global Cult?

After twenty-five years of controversy about the best way to fight the cults, the French parliamentarians have just adopted a law repressing “mental manipulation” and the exploitation of “psychological or psychic dependence”. For their part, the United States is subjecting Europe to intense diplomatic pressure to defend “freedom of religion”. Two antagonistic and equally reductive visions of free will. At the risk of supporting the great societal cult against the small ones.

By Denis Duclos (Le Monde diplomatique, August 2000)

The trauma provoked by the march towards globalisation is underestimated. One is astonished at the swarming of enlightened, sometimes suicidal groups, as if it were foreign to the religion of money and of technoscience. Now, there is kinship between the cult, demanding intimate consent to a group that sums up the human race, and adherence to the universal market, a society at once global and fragmented into consumerist cells rendered narcissistic.

The “emerging religions” express convivial aspirations contrasting with the coldness of the triumphant system. But, on closer inspection, the cult resembles the great society, allying gentle constraint and propagandist hammering. And, if it is difficult to identify banal voluntary servitude (endemic despite La Boétie), it is scarcely easier to separate the follower’s free choice from the psychic influence of the guru.

Certainly, the citizen respectful of human rights rejects coercive, manipulative, indeed criminal groupings, capturing resources, indoctrinating children, infringing physical integrity or perpetrating psychic rape (1). But what is to be done when the coercion is self-administered, in the manner of ascetic monastic rules? When the “brainwashing” imputed to diabolical gurus proves to be a sharing of fantasies by elites such as the thirty-nine rich Californians of Heaven’s Gate who “abandoned their physical receptacle” in March 1997, or the members (doctors, bankers or ministers) of the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS) (2)? And whom is one to prosecute for “incitement to suicide” when people persist in killing themselves, the guides having long since disappeared?

What is one to denounce, when the bubble-society proposed by the cultic worship groups is only a microscopic copy of the planetary cult summoning everyone to consent to becoming a “nice member of humanity”? What is one to think, conversely, when a community, illuminated by a naive myth, allows depressed unemployed people, close to abandoning their children, to find a useful integration again, at least in their own eyes?

To want to stem cultism by judicial harassment — the resort of a “left” dispossessed of its ideals? — seems pusillanimous, and hazardous when it touches on freedoms of association, dearly acquired. As for psychiatrising “cultic pathologies”, that is to attribute expertise to partisan militants (despite their medical diplomas and their peremptory civic spirit). One risks — in the manner of the Soviet psychiatry of sinister memory — supporting the great societal cult against the small one, and giving people to believe that any resistance to the globalising project is abnormal, under the pretext of “denial of reality” (3). Now, in what way would allegiance to the liberal order be a guarantee of realism? Have the universal ideals not shown — like those of the nation — that they could charge themselves with coercive irrationality, gorge themselves on senseless utopias?

To oppose reason to enlightened cultism implies grasping the latter as a social manifestation: it expresses and anaesthetises, in urgency, cultural ruptures (4). The multiplicity of the cults forms a hospitable market of the malaise in civilisation. Belonging to this or that Church counts less here than a vast cultic milieu where future followers and influential personalities meet, and where mystical themes intersect.

Thus, the members of the OTS (those of Heaven’s Gate, or those of the Isis Holistic Centre, who had programmed their end, in the Canaries, in January 2000) had shown, before their fateful adherence, a vast range of interests going from homeopathy to neo-druidism, from near-death experiences to the rites of the resurrection of Osiris and to spiritism (Kardec), from Arthurian legends to the return of the Templars and to Rosicrucianism, from angels to extraterrestrials (favourites of the Raëlian cult). As Umberto Eco had sensed in his Foucault’s Pendulum, these elements form a contemporary mythology at which many drink their fill of the extraordinary. Some will want to merge the real and the imaginary, but the idea of a “transit” of their “fleshly envelope” will not impose itself under the exorbitant influence of gurus: it will first have come from a diffuse trans-cultic culture, banally shot through with flashes of anxiety about ecological disaster.

Like other activities in the world of the commodity, adherence to the cult tends towards opportunistic consumption: numerous Japanese thus frequent, at the same time, Shintoism (more “magical”), Buddhism (more philosophical), indeed Christianity (for marriage). One also appreciates the more “existential” cults, which must, in order to please, vie in originality. Thus the reincarnated Buddha Ryuho Okawa, who relies on… Nostradamus. In the United States, Hollywood sets the example: people talk only of the Lamaist affiliation of this or that star formerly New Age, while another has discovered the Kabbalah. It is the same in Africa or in the Afro-American cultures: not only do many followers pass from one cult to another, but most combine affiliation to a religious denomination with participation in several ritual groupings, not to mention recourse to healers or sorcerers. The representations (the spirits) circulate equally between traditions and inspired creators.

Beneath this heteroclite ferment, the vast field of cultic groups can be described as a triangle whose points symbolise three great reactions to the crisis of culture: accepting it, criticising it, fleeing it (5). One can go one better on the scientific, technical and commercial movement, in order to found it spiritually. One can, on the contrary, condemn the decay of the powers in place. Finally, one can decide that one must “have done with it”, by submitting to a terminal judgement. Expressed by cults, these three positions amplify attitudes widespread in global society, such as the race for progress, the struggle against archaisms, or again the staking of life or fortune — struggles for independence, speculative rushes, etc. There again, they do not separate themselves from society, but rather exaggerate its deep tendencies.

1. The cult of modernity

Thus, numerous cults do not wish to reject progress, but to animate its movement. Does the modern world prove to be linked to education? Here is Christian Science, which, from the beginning of the twentieth century, proposed the rational learning of religion. The Church of Scientology claims to master “the knowledge about knowledge”, and to make up the backwardness of knowledge about man in relation to knowledge about nature. Here are others that build schools and laboratories, finance research programmes, recruit on campuses and among the most brilliant students and researchers, among them Supreme Truth (henceforth Arefu) of Aum Shinrikyo, a Buddhism tinged with apocalypticism but centred on the increase of capacities in modern life.

Do the media appear central in our existence? Here are the American or Brazilian televangelists who surpass the most popular of presenters — and, oh scandal, demand remunerations as considerable as theirs! Is the television or computer screen, evidently, the new domestic altar of the consumerist religion? Behold, the Soka Gakkai (the “value creation society”, two million member families claimed) proposes to set in motion in every home a far more interesting apparatus: the altar of the Mandala, where the Daimoku (the adoration of the Lotus sutra) is recited!

Does the Internet link individuals to millions of others? Behold “cyber-religions”, “technocults” and “technosophies” flourishing: more than 20,000 religious forums counted in 1997 on the Internet. Here is the Institute for Research in Human Happiness (a Japanese syncretic cult), which promotes links between followers by satellite. Here again is Aum manufacturing relays for the transmission of thought between the guru and his disciples…

Certainly, cultic modernism can tip over into violence (as in 1995, when members of this powerful cult spread sarin gas in the Tokyo metro, killing five people), but it adapts over the long term. Thus Aum today possesses dozens of computer shops, as is also the case in Europe or the United States for worship communities fascinated by the Network. They reactualise the affinity between sect and commerce described by Max Weber for certain Protestant communities of past centuries.

Does military technology demonstrate its superiority? Ever since the Salvation Army (long demonised as a cult) donned the uniform to fight misery as if on a battlefield, the theme has served many a purpose: thus the strange Ugandan Church of the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces (1993-1996) organised itself in the midst of the civil war like a modern army on the march, endowed with a high-tech military hierarchy (6). For its part, Aum Shinrikyo, structured in “ministries”, had a “defence agency” to which several dozen members of the Japanese army contributed. Moreover, the metro attack did not arise from an eschatological madness, but rather from a “psychological operation”: it had been clandestinely programmed — before its denunciation by the CIA — to corroborate the guru’s prophecy (he was a great admirer of Hitler’s manoeuvres) of a coming “national disaster”, which could not — it was supposed — be attributed to the cult.

Finally, does society place the accent on success through work, in vast disciplined organisations? Here is the Association for the Unification of World Christianity (directed by the Reverend Moon), which adapts the principle, soon followed by a number of extremely rich spiritual movements: to the point where one wonders whether the model of the cult does not henceforth inspire management methods in the largest companies.

It is, in a sense, strange that the anti-cult vindictiveness should concentrate on these orientations, so much in symbiosis with the “great society”. With Moon, Christian Science or the Church of Scientology, nothing in fact departs from the “forced consent” that an international company or a civil or military organisation currently obtains from its subordinates. One finds there the same naive belief in manipulative techniques: thus American-based multinationals still have recourse to the lie detector, just like Scientology (7).

Now, this belief seems shared by a crusader of “good” anti-cult science, Mr Jean-Marie Abgrall (8), who accords a scientific value to Milgram’s “incitement experiments” (whereas they are theatrical exploitations of the sadism in every person), in order to oppose to them a “deconditioning” that is just as suspect.

Might the virulence towards the modernist cults not come from a jealous competition on the fruitful market of a science presumed all-powerful? That would explain why, in several countries, certain psychotherapists militant for “true science” attempt to have condemned, in the name of the same pseudo-scientific categories, both the cults and the independent schools of psychoanalysis (loath to enter the mould of standardised Anglo-Saxon psychiatry). It is from then on easy for the cults, practised in litigation, to send back to their censors the accusation of coercive intolerance — while they remain more discreet about practices clearly inadmissible for any sovereign State: intelligence-gathering or plays of influence in the service of foreign powers.

This whole game between enemy brothers evacuates the principal question: that of the recourse to scientism — cultic or pseudo-academic — in matters of mores. The strange use the cult makes of the scientific ideal is not indeed the only thing at issue: all the powers (economic and political, judicial and police) are tempted to have recourse to the “magical” power of science, thereby threatening democracy and liberty in the long run.

2. The cults against power

Since the Protestant reforms (and the Judaic movements of the hassid — piety), the “critical” cults share another modern trait: they attack paternalistic authority. Between evangelisms (testifying to the good news), Methodisms or Baptisms (salvific techniques, rites of conversion) and Pentecostalisms (opening access for each person to the Holy Spirit), there is affirmed a “democratic” individualism, linked to the desire to know. Do holiness and salvation belong to clerics (from the Greek kleros: “inheritance”, “lot drawn by chance”), to deserving persons (the “good men”, as the Cathars said of their elites), or rather to the people of the faithful?

Once broached, the question feeds on itself, because, in repudiating the great Churches for their overly hierarchical mediation, each new group is in its turn confronted with the emergence of a clergy — a guide to reading, custodian of the rituals or example of the common ideal. Affirmations of equality (congregationalisms) do not abolish power. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the dynamic has come here from the Pentecostalisms, including within American and European Catholicism (via the “charismatic renewal”). By accepting the most varied manifestations of the Holy Spirit in anyone (during meetings where the emotion of trance is recognised), these gatherings do indeed liberate more individualism.

Yet the evolution towards the plurality of identities does not stop there: overflowing the unifying reference to Scripture, one returns to the spirits of places, of ways of life, of passions, of saints, of national characters, of the dead, etc. It is thus that, since the 1930s, many layers of history have buried the first Pentecostal incursions into Nigeria, the Salvation Army’s missions in the Belgian Congo or those of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Zambia, often for the same reason: the creativity of African cultures in the face of successive foreign waves — Christian or Islamic — their capacity to translate them into the “idiom” of conflicts between spiritual powers and healing practices.

From then on, the thousands of current cults — sometimes ephemeral — of the Africas (eastern, central and southern), or the Brazilian worship groups laying claim or not to an African source, such as the famous candomblé studied by Roger Bastide (9), do not merely prolong old proselytisms (nor are they moreover incompatible with the traditional Churches). They express a “libertarian” segmentation of the market of ideals in the world consumerist society, resisting the mobilisation of labourist periods. Thus, while a quarter of the Guatemalan population is under the influence of cults of North American origin, one observes among the faithful no significant change towards an “economic performance” supposed to be automatically engendered by the puritan ethic (10)!

The Pentecostalisms are caught out by their very propensity to plural expression (the “speaking in tongues”): a hitherto unthinkable variety of rites, dances and thaumaturgic stagings makes its way back up from the colonised to the ex-coloniser. This, despite anathema and demonisation, as in the United States, where certain South American cults presumed of Yoruba (Nigerian) origin are the object of rumours of human sacrifice and sexual crimes, scarcely different from the accusations against Christians under ancient Rome or against Jews in medieval Europe.

When citizens claim to verify the tolerability of such “free cults”, they resemble the dignitaries deciding on prophetic manifestations or community identities within their Church. They thus precipitate the comparison between the “great society” of which they are militants and the totalising cult they denounce. They incarnate Émile Durkheim’s prediction: society takes the place of God.

But do those who launch into a purely judicial treatment of the cults suspect that they are awaited by the latter, who will attack in return — like Scientology fighting psychiatry, or Tradition, Family, Property, created by the Brazilian Plinio Correa de Oliveira to censor artistic freedoms juridically?

The link between majority intolerance and minority cultism is not new: since the hunt for paganisms, the repression of emotional excesses emanates from the authorities as from the cultic groups, in a dialectic of exclusion. Thus the European regions most marked by politico-religious radicalisations (Switzerland in the making, then the Germanies depopulated by the Thirty Years’ religious war) knew more than half the convictions of “witches” recorded in Europe (11). Today, it is in the regions steeped in fundamentalist cultism (in the United States and Latin America) that a number of incredible trials occur for supposed sexual crimes associated with witchcraft.

3. For the halt of a “mad history”

There exist, finally, people to maintain that amplifying our hold over nature and life is madness, and that it is better to stop this adventure. The imaginary end of a history that escapes us is a banal consolation, but there are three ways of sharing this fantasy: either one decrees that time has stopped, or one waits for the terminal salvific event, or, finally, one provokes it: one rushes into what must indeed be called a collective act of suicide.

Adepts of stopped time, Mennonites (the Amish) in Pennsylvania or Hutterites in Canada (in Alberta) live like nineteenth-century Swiss peasants. Certain monastic models (in several religions) have recourse to the immobile time of contemplation, or aim, as in Buddhism, at the abolition of the cycles of life and death. Renewed attempts are situated in this perspective, sometimes linked to an agrarian community. Although the authorities attack these closed groupings (for their pretension to reconstruct filiations outside official family and educational policies), they are rarely the cause of self-destruction, and the apocalyptic theme there is rather a defensive affirmation (according to the British anthropologist Mary Douglas) than an aim.

Like other Adventist Churches, the famous Watch Tower Society (the Jehovah’s Witnesses) practises the awaiting of an event that will resolve sufferings. The posture is nothing new: the foundation of Christianity was nourished by a desire for the end of the world at a time when the acceptance of civilisational unity — the Empire — was unbearable to many. Among the contemporary Hasidisms, the Lubavitch movement hopes for the return of a rabbi as messiah.

The problem of these groups is the passing of the prescribed date, which imposes reworkings in the collective imaginary. Thus, what will become of the Jehovah’s Witnesses when the last person who lived through the war of 1914-1918 has died? One may suppose that, in order to perpetuate themselves as a stable denomination, they will have to rearrange their eschatological perspective, as they have got past the dates previously chosen for the Last Judgement.

The path of collective suicide is equally ancient, although the media and anti-cult movements suggest the beginning of a contemporary series: voluntary poisoning, such as that which occurred in Guyana in 1978, of 918 members of the Peoples Temple, a dissident American evangelist parish led by the pastor Jim Jones. The fatal orientation has been linked in the past to the search for martyrdom, as in the beginnings of Christianity, in certain Muslim warrior sects or in nineteenth-century Brazilian millenarian movements offering themselves to the soldiery come to repress them. Far from being the doing of isolated exaltations, the desire to have done with the world (a vale of tears, hell, an unbearable burden, etc.) in a mothering collective euphoria may have been so widespread that recourse was had to the fear of damnation to check it!

Collective suicide has also arisen from resistance (Jewish fighters refusing to surrender to the Romans in the fortress of Masada, Greek peasant women throwing themselves into the void so as not to be taken by the Turks, etc.). In the attack on the Waco farm (1993), the undoubted suicide project orchestrated by the young guru David Koresh turned into martyrdom in combat following the clumsy armed intervention of the American administration. In the carnage suffered in the spring of 2000 in the Ugandan cult of the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, one cannot ignore the proximity of the approach (orders to gather, obligation of silence, fasting, restraint and gymnastics associated with intensive prayer…) to the martyrdom to order demanded by the leaders of other cults (such as the armies of the Holy Spirit of Alice Lakwena, of Severino Lukoya or of Joseph Kony). In these parodies of disciplinary companies there is also played out the “redemption” of former soldiers, themselves guilty of intertribal massacres. Thus it is in the military-religious idiom, more than in that of the guru, that the will to remove oneself by dying from a civil war without frontiers or end, and to give symbolic signification to AIDS, is translated in East Africa.

Self-destruction is rarely experienced as such, and more often as a repudiation of the mortality of the sexed body and as a spiritual journey towards another incarnation. Is one so far here (although one may repress this proximity with indignation) from the militancies for the “right to die” and the “duty of euthanasia” that are developing with the ageing of the best-off populations?

The suicidal cult represents such a scandal for the members of the world-society (of which it seems an absolute disavowal) that it gives rise to an intense “denial of reality”. Thus one can verify, at each new collective suicide, that the media suppose the gurus to have fled after massacring their followers. The discourse changes little when it turns out that these gurus (however villainous they may be) lie among the first victims: Jim Jones, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite, the guru of Heaven’s Gate, the two leaders of the OTS, Luc Jouret and Jo Di Mambro, and very probably also the Ugandan guru Joseph Kibwetere, whose corpse was recognised by a close relative. Mysterious intervening parties are then evoked (the Mafia, the secret services), a war between dignitaries, “financial difficulties”, etc. When the cult carries out its third suicide (as did the OTS), the medium, rather than finally recognising the self-destruction inspired by shared belief…, falls silent. No more is admitted the despair of the Amazonian or Mexican tribes who, by whole families, hang or poison themselves rather than change their way of life.

This denial on the part of the ideological organs of modernity (which answers the denial of reality imputed to the cults, and the denial by the latter of the suicidal character of their “departures”) must be analysed for what it is: a refusal to admit that the members of a society (however microscopic) can freely associate in order to disappear. To accept it would indeed open an agonising question: does there not exist a tragic tendency in the mere pursuit of an absolutised common ideal? Are the desperate militarisation of societies such as Napoleonic France, imperial or Nazi Germanness between 1914 and 1945, or the “club” of the great nuclear antagonists ready to exterminate each other during the cold war, not insistent signs of this tendency? Does one not feel it at work in the idea of a virtualised world, entirely mobilised by the multinational companies and by the stock-market game? Does it really dissolve in the universal market?

When one represses the very concept of collective suicide, preferring to it the reassuring “mental manipulation”, it is fundamentally because it suggests that the planetary collective could be… an ultimate form of the cult. But how is one to recognise that the whole of humanity could play with ruin or seek to suppress itself?

All things considered, the “artistic” groups — extropians, ravers, new age travellers and zippies — who navigate between ecological libertarianism, cyberpunk, utopia and science fiction, and who deride the desire for disaster and disincarnation (deflesh: to replace flesh with an artefact) by imagining humanity cryogenised, “downloaded” onto virtual networks or reincarnated on another planet, seem to us more realistic than the censors who deny the nonsense engendered by the computerised ultra-liberal society (12). They suggest indeed that it is not so much the dream of “leaving the body and the world” that is abnormal, as the extreme seriousness leading some to realise their fantasy, where others act it out without leaving life, or the better to find it again.

In Holy Smoke, a beautiful and disturbing film, the New Zealander Jane Campion shows that this same seriousness makes the “unbewitcher” — hired by a possessive family seeking to get its daughter out of the supposed hold of a guru — even more inhuman than the gentle illusion of the ashram. Happily, life and love are there, stronger than all the spiritual technologies and their repressive ripostes combined.

The more we force people to modernise, to “contract” in order to fit the ideal of a humanity regulated by universal commercial law and its technological substratum (ignoring the fundamentally coercive character of this pure management), the more we will expose ourselves to opening wounds that the cult will come to exploit, in complicit opposition with its great global sister.

Denis Duclos is director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Author of Société-Monde, le temps des ruptures, La Découverte, coll. “Recherches-Mauss”, Paris 2002; and of Entre esprit et corps. La culture contre le suicide collectif, Anthropos, Paris 2002

(1) To take up terms from the report of the parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults (called the “Jacques Guyard report”), submitted in 1996. And not to mention “mental manipulation”, which seems to have been retained as a criterion in the law on the cults voted by the French deputies on 22 June 2000.

(2) This group was the setting of a collective suicide committed in three stages, over four years: in 1994, fifty-three deaths in Switzerland and Quebec; in 1995, sixteen in the Vercors; in 1997, five in Montreal. These suicides were presented by their authors as a “transit” towards the vehicle of superior entities, passing close to the Earth on privileged dates (such as the Hale-Bopp comet).

(3) Read Frédéric Lenoir, “Controverses passionnées à propos des sectes”, Le Monde diplomatique, May 1999.

(4) This urgency opposes the sect to religion, posited in the long term, and validates the “couple in tension” religion-sect that Ernst Troeltsch theorised in 1931 in The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Macmillan, New York.

(5) For a typological reflection, read Bryan Wilson’s classic, Religious Sects: A Sociological Study, World University Library, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1970. One may also read the contributions of Françoise Champion and Martine Cohen, who attempt to exercise their trade as sociologists on the cult phenomenon in a strongly impassioned context, in Françoise Champion and Martine Cohen (eds.), Sectes et démocratie, Seuil, Paris, 1999.

(6) Heike Behrend, La Guerre des Esprits en Ouganda, 1985-1996. Le Mouvement du Saint-Esprit d’Alice Lakwena, L’Harmattan, Paris, 1997.

(7) Read Paul Ariès, “La Scientologie contre la République”, Le Monde diplomatique, May 1999.

(8) Member of the Interministerial Observatory on the cults set up in 1996 by the Juppé government. Author of La Mécanique des sectes, Payot-Rivages, Paris, 1996.

(9) Roger Bastide, Le Candomblé de Bahia, coll. “Terre humaine”, Plon, repr. 2000. A work on these popular ceremonies of “possession” that avoids the romanticism of the “return to Africa” by showing the universal reality of the religious market and of the opportunities it offers among poor populations: Stefania Capone, La Quête de l’Afrique dans le candomblé. Pouvoir et tradition au Brésil, Karthala, Paris, 1999.

(10) Contrary to what the American economist Any Sherman supposed, Preferential Option: a christian and neo-liberal strategy for Latin America’s poor, W.B. Eerdmand, Grand Rapids, 1992.

(11) Brian P. Levack, La Grande Chasse aux sorcières en Europe au début des temps modernes, Champ Vallon, 1991.

(12) Read “Le nouvel ordre informatique”, Le Monde diplomatique, January 1999.