Senate Commission of Inquiry on Cults: the Hearing of Jean-Pierre Jougla
CICNS
Senate Commission of Inquiry on Cults: the Hearing of Jean-Pierre Jougla
By the CICNS (February 2013)
With the hearing of M. Jean-Pierre Jougla of 6 November 2012, we are witnessing the presentation of an ideological discourse which would be dismaying in its poverty in other settings but which, delivered in the Senate by a jurist and university official, takes on in addition a worrying character.
An ideological discourse but also a paradoxical one. The liberticidal message, in many respects disrespectful of opinions, of persons, of groupings and sometimes of the memory of the dead, is with great difficulty veiled by turns of phrase claiming to respect, for pure form’s sake, the freedoms of belief and of therapy.
A paradoxical utterance, flagrantly illustrated in one of his remarks: « Personally, I have no business pronouncing on the validity of these illusory practices.»
Despite his affable air, M. Jougla in fact attacks directly the texts which frame therapeutic freedom[i] and religious freedom[ii], but in a way that is not explicit to the layman.
What is his procedure?
A discourse without clear structure mingling unsubstantiated criticisms of care methods not issuing from Western medicine, denigration, implicit and explicit accusations resting on his interpretation of the facts alone, the techniques of advertising “saturation”, the handling of fear and even of horror through morbid narratives devoid of any direct link with the matter in hand, and proposals of which the most virulent slip discreetly into the discourse.
The presentation is underpinned by what he designates under the appellation “paradigm of the Enlightenment”.
He makes an association between, on the one hand: Enlightenment/rationality/science/free-thought-laïcité/democracy/Western medicine and, on the other, obscurantism/intuition/religious thought/totalitarianism/alternative care methods.
We find here the Manichaean vision of Good and Evil.
Moreover, the whole question of the so-called “cults” and of the hold rests on a notion he avoids questioning. He describes the hold as an inevitability against which the citizen would have to be protected by an arsenal of laws.
Group phenomena have been studied in psychosociology and possibilities of pathological relations exist within families and in every group. There is nothing there that would be specific to gatherings of people on spiritual or therapeutic bases. Fragile personalities developing on a need for support or for control live and inscribe their problematic in every social and family domain. It is absurd to want to confine human problems so common to a specific framework.
To ignore the psychological understanding of these mechanisms in order to describe an absolutely irresistible phenomenon in which legally and criminally responsible persons would decline all responsibility brings us back to disturbing irrational beliefs (“It is not my fault, Your Honour, I was bewitched”) and/or infantile ones (“It is not my fault, daddy, mummy, he is the one who told me to do it”). A curious paradox on the “Enlightenment” side…
The reference to the “Enlightenment” has moreover become a sort of catch-all cliché. Some rely on certain points of the paradigm to defend an exclusive rationalism, a free-thought associated with a rejection of the spiritual/religious. Others to advance a rational thought curious about the mysteries of what is not yet discovered, an open laïcité respectful of spiritual and religious choices…
Following more closely the unfolding of the discourse, the sequence of the argumentation, one finds an anthology of value judgements, necessarily unsubstantiated, another singular paradox for one who claims a flawless scientific methodology. One is also astonished by the unstructured aspect of a discourse which M. Jougla had nevertheless taken the trouble to set down in writing beforehand. This aspect might suggest that it is less a matter of showing and demonstrating from a logical reasoning than of saying and saying again, of impregnating the listeners with platitudes, applying the principle according to which “repetition is as good as demonstration”.
One may for example observe precisely, in this 62-minute performance, the use of the terms:
Méthodes thérapeutiques illusoires (illusory therapeutic methods): 15 times
Méthodes thérapeutiques pchit pchit (whoosh-whoosh therapeutic methods): 1 time
Méthodes thérapeutiques farfelues (harebrained therapeutic methods): 1 time
Méthodes thérapeutiques déviantes (deviant therapeutic methods): 1 time
Méthodes médicales illusoires (illusory medical methods): 1 time
That is, 19 terms disqualifying Non-conventional practices with a therapeutic aim in 62 minutes, or 1 denigrating term roughly every 3 minutes.
22 uses of the qualifier « sectaire » attributed to: group, dimension, hold, form, language, reality, phenomenon… that is, one every 2.8 minutes.
35 uses of the term « secte », that is, one use every 1.7 minutes.
Every 50 seconds on average one of the terms or expressions « méthode thérapeutique illusoire », « secte », « sectaire » is uttered. It is clear that we have here an implementation of a technique known in advertising, commonly called “saturation”, which consists in repeating as often as possible a simple slogan.
Moreover, one notes that the two long digressions on the poorly elucidated affair of the Solar Temple, artificially introduced and almost beside the point, cover 5 minutes 36 seconds out of 63 minutes of discourse, that is, nearly 10% of the time. One cannot but think of a deliberate use of a dramatic theme aimed at creating the feeling of an underlying danger.
Significant sentences from the passage (minutes indicated)
Commentary
2’ 08 to 4’ 30
the diagnoses of new therapeutic methods are founded on a non-rational approach.
Development on the theme: what is not rational is necessarily false, ridiculous.
4’ 30 to 6’ 23
The Solar Temple: they attracted people by way of health questions. People of sound mind with enviable social positions were trapped.
Underlying message: “beware, great danger of the irrational”.
The example of the Solar Temple is introduced by a tenuous link: one of the leaders was a homeopath.
This affair is poorly elucidated and controversial.
This passage, added to the passage from minutes 51 to 54’ 50, represents a duration of 5’ 36 on the OTS, that is, nearly 10% of the time of the presentation.
6’ 23 to 12’ 07
The care methods used are ineffective, issuing from ancient practices.
Cultivated people, including doctors, have recourse to them…
And you have today still, no later than last weekend, a guru-ette who holds the rank of goddess at world level who came to Toulon to take thousands of people in her arms as she does more or less everywhere in France and who claims to cure by embrace people afflicted with leprosy. We are in the touching for scrofula, it is nothing else…
M. Jougla’s personal opinion, possibly shared by his interlocutors, dispenses with substantiation.
The beginning of a double game: “I am criticising neither the doctors nor the users, but the wicked gurus”.
Moreover, one finds among Amma’s works a hospital which uses classical medical and surgical methods, a holistic care centre, as well as various medical dispensaries.
12’ 07 to 23’ 30 the “causes” of the success
Criticism of medicine: the void left at the level of preventive medicine, of hygienic medicine, of pedagogical medicine.
Lack of humanity, of listening, of empathy, no more room.
Finding a tool which gives meaning to one’s life.
Healing by oneself / scientific medicine.
For « the patient’s narcissistic need », that need to be taken charge of globally, the …need to be at the centre of a process, sometimes even simply to conform to a fashion. It is not much but I believe that on that point there would be efforts to be made on the medical world’s side.
I introduce this dimension of the feeling of belonging to an elite which creates cohesion around a master thinker, through a doctrine; so each time you have to deal with people who are embarked in that belief, you will no longer have access with them to the dimension of rational scientific explanation, they are totally closed to that aspect of things, each illusory therapeutic method becomes an absolute truth founded this time on individual experience and no longer on scientific experience…
“Don’t go and get treated, it’s no use. On the other hand, I’ll give you an address…”
Financial interest, interest linked to power over the other.
A way of relieving the health system, of lowering costs.
Recognition by the mutual insurers.
RISK: cult confinement: a confinement in the theory he has made his own which will very quickly forbid him any objective perception of the real…
“Explanation” of the term “illusory” associated with the new therapeutic methods: “There are deaths”.
Opposition of other forms of medicine which “attack” by depreciating scientific medicine, by claiming to be superior.
Inclusion of the spiritual, religious dimension (eloquent silence).
I am not a cult hunter, I am above all a jurist, therefore respectful of everyone’s freedoms and of fundamental freedoms.
The products and practices sold by these supports of illusory therapeutic practices cost a great deal and they are bought in place of proven medicines which for their part could be reimbursed.
This opening of a presentation miming an approach of study appears as a false semblance of objectivity.
He evades what could be a direction of real questioning: what becomes of the being in the scientific medical approach?
What is illness? Is it only a question of a material body that has to be repaired?
These questions are perhaps a little more than “not much” and vaster than a “narcissistic need”.
He pushes the pieces a little further: there is now (one does not know why) an equivalence between “elitism/doctrine/master thinker” on the one hand and “absolute truth founded on individual experience” on the other.
It is implied that the virtues of tolerance would be the prerogative of a rational thought called “scientific” and that, on the contrary, relying on individual experience allies itself (curiously) with “doctrine” and “master thinker”… We are bogging down in incoherence.
There is here a wide extrapolation. The great majority of users of different forms of medicine are much more prudent and have recourse to both classical and alternative therapies.
By recognising no value a priori in different medical approaches, one is bound to find other reasons for their existence… So let us draw on the lowest and the most banal….
This is a problem only because these approaches are designated in advance as ineffective or harmful… Otherwise, it is good news.
What is the real?
Does science, which has focused on the study of matter, speak to us of the real or only of the current state of its knowledge about the structure and functioning of matter?
There are deaths too in the care services of scientific medicine.
Where are the studies that would show that the use of complementary medicine harms or improves “the chances of survival”, as one says in medical jargon?
It is a very classic phenomenon to claim to be superior, of which no current has the exclusivity…
In the thread of the discourse, this inclusion is presented as dangerous… and yet… What if it were the exclusion of every spiritual and religious dimension that constituted an impoverishment, a drying-up of the essential of the human being?
One is tempted to hear here a denegation, in the Freudian sense of the term.
It is not because a medicine is financed by the community that it is inexpensive:
The cost of adjuvant chemotherapy is estimated at 22,742 F (3,467 €) per patient and the cost of one year’s treatment of a patient presenting a metastatic breast cancer is 76,457 F (11,655 €).]
23’ 30 – 26’
I have no other examples than that of a trial I followed, of which Mme Picard spoke to you when she was heard by your commission, that of a young child dead of undernourishment when one could not reasonably say that the parents had wanted the child’s death. It should be known that those parents were adherents of a method not cultic in itself, which does not go very far, not cultic in itself, around which they had constituted a group really of a cult nature as teachers, directors of a school which taught this method.
It is very frequent that I meet people of the medical profession who are totally blinded by the force of conviction of a person who is under the hold of illusory therapeutic theories.
It is remarkable that M. Jougla declares that he has not, at the end of 2012, any other example to present than the painful story of the child who died in 2008 in a vegan family, to illustrate a supposed cult confinement.
No media outlet moreover reports the existence of a group constituted around the child’s parents.
France Soir relates: “The autopsy demonstrated that Louise did not withstand a poorly treated bronchitis while she was weakened by vitamin deficiencies, no doubt linked to the parents’ vegan diet.”
What is presented to us here is a case of denial (real or pointed out as such), that is to say a defence mechanism of certain personalities (considered as borderline, even psychotic), which has no relation with the context in which it takes place.
It is sadly probable that the exploitation of this dramatic example has here no other design than to arouse fear.
26’ 27’ 12
That young woman who was a physiotherapist suffering from a cancer and who was treated only by a method which was the Dévi method, that is to say the laying on of hands and collective prayer. She was a physiotherapist, her brother was a doctor, she managed to convince everyone that she was in a process of healing thanks to the method she was following. She died fairly quickly in insane suffering because right to the end she did not want to be treated where cancer specialists could take charge of her. That sincerity, I have always encountered it and I have never been able to succeed in convincing people who were embarked in those practices to take some distance and to see things as they are.
Presentation of a new example assimilated to the previous one and yet very different: that of a choice of care assumed to the end and respected by those close to her, whose outcome in terms of survival is not the determining criterion and whose lived experience is entirely respectable.
27’ 15 to 29’ 30
… I believe above all, because I am profoundly republican and democratic, that the only answer is information, training; we have no other answer.
Personally, I have no business pronouncing on the validity of these illusory practices (…), although the appellation I give them already gives my position.
If I have no business pronouncing personally on the validity of these methods — by what right, if not by the right of common sense — I think that on the side of the scientific structures, provided they are given the means, many things could be done, not only at French level but at European level.
We arrive at the heart of the paradoxical discourse. What is to be understood? Because I am a republican and a democrat, I do not want a coercive law (here, for one will see suggestions in that direction emerge a little further on) to combat what I have judged, according to my opinion, as invalid and dangerous? I shall content myself (for the moment) with training and information in order to promote my scientistic truth to the whole of society…
It is an assumed gem of paradoxical discourse which, it is said, marks the intention to manipulate.
Plainly: I do not quite have the right to say it, but “I am right, we are right”, and it is a matter of thinking about the means of imposing our truth.
29’ 30 to 32’
There exists a LOBBYING OF CULT GROUPS
Scientology at the Council of Europe.
I therefore submitted a memorandum to defend the position of FECRIS, I had a deadline, this memorandum never arrived at the addressee’s (…). This memorandum never arrived. As I had proof of dispatch, I was given a new deadline to resubmit it. I cannot accuse anyone.
Scientology is recognised as a religion more or less everywhere in the world. Its representation is explained on that basis at the Council of Europe.
http://www.scientologie-europe.fr/
It has acquired religious status in the United States, in Canada, Brazil, Portugal, Nepal, Japan, in Spain, Italy, South Africa, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, India, Australia… an associative status in the United Kingdom.
It is considered a “cult” in France, Germany and Belgium.
An anecdote which is a non-event but lets a suspicion hover and places him in the position of a potential victim.
32’ to 39’ returns to the CAUSES OF THE RISE OF THE SO-CALLED “illusory therapeutic methods”
The need to give one’s confidence blindly to the one who presents himself as the holder of an exclusive and elitist knowledge.
… if one accepts as a beginning of a definition — I know very well that everyone will tell you that there is no legal definition of what a cult is — the definition which is given by article 223-15-2 of the penal code, that is to say by the About-Picard Act which describes the adherent as “a person in a state of psychological or physical subjection”, you have there, already, a small piece of that definition. And I read you what the definition may become on the basis of article 223: ” the cult is a movement undermining human rights and fundamental freedoms”, that is not in the article of the penal code, but it is the title of the law; therefore, a movement which abuses the state of ignorance or weakness of a person in a state of psychological or physical subjection. You have the description of the adherent: “a state of subjection created, maintained or exploited resulting from the exercise of serious or repeated pressures or of techniques apt to alter his judgement”. That is the practice of cults. And you have an answer to the question you were asking yourselves: “what is a cult?” Above all a cult in matters of health: it is a group which undermines freedom by way of the establishment of a subjection by means of serious and repeated pressures, or of techniques apt to alter the judgement of the person who is in that state of subjection.
…what the MIVILUDES calls dérives sectaires. Personally, I find that this terminology is dangerous because it implies that there are cults which do not drift, and every cult is a drift — a drift in relation to what, if only in relation to a democratic functioning.
M. Jougla returns to these unargued assertions: here we are with an assimilation of different care methods to an approach which would be founded on a “need to give one’s confidence blindly”. Now, it is because M. Jougla makes the choice of recognising scientific proof as the sole criterion of validity that he reads a “blind gift of confidence” and that he perceives “a holder of an exclusive and elitist knowledge” (for good measure) where people are living the expression of a choice in their “soul and conscience”.
We are approaching the equation: “other therapeutic methods” is equivalent to “cult”.
Which allows him to develop his definition of the “cult” and to propose, without saying so explicitly, the text of a possible legal definition of the term “cult”.
By what sleight of hand can one make people believe that every human group functioning on managerial bases other than democracy must be described as a “cult”? Almost all businesses large or small, companies, traditional religions, administrative services do not have a democratic mode of internal functioning…
On the subject of the question of democratic functioning and religions, one will read with interest another view in the reflection of Yves Ledure, professor emeritus at the Paul Verlaine university of Metz: Religion and democracy
39’ 10--- 51’ 10
THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRATORS in reference to Marilyn Ferguson’s work, “Les Enfants du Verseau” (The Aquarian Conspiracy)
In order to avoid being labelled a conspiracy theorist or of yielding without proof to the theory of a plot, I am going to rely on (…) the writings of Marilyn Ferguson (…), “The Aquarian Conspiracy”, translated into French in a watered-down way as “Les Enfants du Verseau”, as though it might shock that there should be conspirators of that theory. So, she described what she perceived as the New Age emergence of a global cultural paradigm in which humanity would come to realise an important part of its physical, psychic or spiritual potential.
(…) Let us abandon reasoning, the use of newly accessible sources, the potentialities offered by psychotechniques and the interest given to intuition, to human relations, and to inner listening. That is the programme that Ferguson set out in the 80s, realised across the whole west coast of the United States, of which traces were seen in the 60s with the hippy movement and which, today, is little by little, without seeming to, winning over all consciousnesses.
(…) It is by basing myself on the central notion of paradigm change developed by Ferguson that I analyse the progress of the de-secularisation of care, the forceful return of archaic medicine. To take up again the return of the archaic, it must first be underlined that the words used to speak of health and of cults are significant in themselves and, without our knowledge, the New Age paradigm penetrates our own conceptions and one must see in it first and foremost the expression of the cult neo-language of combat (…).
41’ A digression on the NUMBER OF CHILDREN IN CULTS:
If one estimates that the Jehovah’s Witnesses belong to a cult group, if one takes at face value the number of members they claim, 250,000 more or less year in year out, if one considers that these are 250,000 adults, if one considers that there is one man and one woman one arrives at 125,000 and if one considers that each has one child, one already explodes the number of children of which M. Vuilque spoke to you in the report of the commission he had chaired, and there are not only the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The associations which work on the ground think, estimate 700 or 800,000 adherents; I think they are well below the reality. It is just a digression I was making in relation to the question you had put to M. Vuilque.
46’ digression: negationists of cult thought
I call negationist theorists of the cult reality those who most certainly have not failed to write to your commission to say that there were people who were undermining fundamental freedoms. It is not new, it is frequent (exchange of smiles).
Despite this new denegation, it is indeed a reading of this work in terms of conspiracy, of a plot theory.
There is in his mind no possibility of openness, either for him or (which is more damaging in the functions attributed to him) for others, but rather a war of values, a conflict of paradigm behind which is outlined a combat from which one must emerge victor and the other vanquished.
One may hear the effects of a fear, the feeling of being destabilised in one’s rationalist conceptions.
On this theme one will refer to the hearings of the ministries’ representatives before the parliamentary commission of inquiry on cults and minors of 2006, in order to evaluate the inanity of the estimate referred to.
A Godwin point? This “law” relies on the hypothesis according to which a discussion that goes on can lead to arguments being replaced by extreme analogies. The most common example consists in comparing the theme of the discussion with a Nazi opinion or in calling one’s interlocutor a Nazi.
51’ 54’ 50 digression: to entertain a little, drawn from what happened in the Solar Temple (…).
…and even entirely drawn from what, he presents, is supposed to have happened during the unelucidated tragedy of the Solar Temple. There follows a trivial description studded with morbid details, testifying to a lack of respect for the dead and for those close to them.
One is struck by the lightness and the thoughtlessness of the tone: “to entertain”…
This passage, added to the passage from 4’ 30 to 6’ 23, represents a duration of 5’ 36 on the OTS, that is, nearly 10% of the time of the presentation.
54’ 40 to 63’
(…) The cult is always and above all a structure for the exercise of power within a closed milieu.
The exercise of powers inside the group which are literally of a state nature, and this whatever the size of the cult; and you have certainly been told on several occasions that today we are dealing with groups of 10, 15 people, no more, but which all function according to the same schema, that is to say the establishment of the exercise of a power and always in the same way: around a legislative power, around an executive power, around a judicial power.
QED, but nothing has been demonstrated…
We are simply and solely informed about the representation of the “cult” in M. Jougla’s mind.
[i] The doctor must respect the person’s will after having informed her of the consequences of her choices. If the person’s will to refuse or to interrupt all treatment endangers her life, the doctor must do everything possible to convince her to accept the indispensable care. He may call on another member of the medical profession. In every case, the patient must reiterate her decision after a reasonable delay. This is entered in her medical file. The doctor safeguards the dignity of the dying person and ensures the quality of her end of life by dispensing the care referred to in article L. 1110-10.
No medical act and no treatment may be carried out without the free and informed consent of the person and this consent may be withdrawn at any moment. http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCode.do?idSectionTA=LEGISCTA000006185255&cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006072665&dateTexte=vig
[ii] 1. Principal texts governing religious freedom and expression
French texts:
Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789: “No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by Law”
Article one of the Act of 9 December 1905 concerning the separation of the Churches and the State: “The Republic ensures freedom of conscience. It guarantees the free exercise of religions under the sole restrictions enacted hereafter in the interest of public order.”
Article 5 of the Preamble to the Constitution of 27 October 1946, a preamble forming an integral part of the Constitution of 4 October 1958: “Everyone has the duty to work and the right to obtain employment. No one may be prejudiced, in his work or his employment, by reason of his origins, his opinions or his beliefs.”
Sources
- Commission d'enquête sénatoriale sur les sectes : audition de Jean-Pierre Jougla (archived copy of http://www.cicns.net/Senat_sectes_Jougla.htm)
English translation of Commission d'enquête sénatoriale sur les sectes : audition de Jean-Pierre Jougla (French), originally by CICNS.