Interview with Sylvie Simon on the Theme of "Cults"

Sylvie Simon was a French journalist and novelist with a long-standing interest in spirituality, who devoted the later part of her career to books on health scandals, vaccination policy and what she saw as the suppression of alternative medicine in France. Her argument was that the label “cult” was being used to discredit practitioners and users of non-conventional therapies. In this 2006 interview with CICNS she describes the campaign to ban Bach flower remedies and the disparagement of homeopathy, families accused of cult membership over refused medical treatments, and her support for a citizens’ commission of inquiry into the French anti-cult apparatus.

CICNS interview. (English translation of the interview published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 4 November 2006. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: What is religion?

[inaudible] in the ostracising of alternative health practices. She also testifies as an observer of society and expresses her revolt at the blindness of a liberty-destroying State policy.

[Simon]: I was formerly a journalist and writer — I dealt a great deal with spirituality, precisely — and now I write novels. And I have friends who are scientists or doctors who were terribly troubled because they had practices that were not the usual ones, because they dared to treat cancer or to treat other illnesses differently, or because they dared to say that GMOs were dangerous, or that nuclear power was dangerous. They were immediately ostracised by society, dismissed from their association, from their group, from the CNRS — from Pasteur, for that matter. So all those people said to me one day: you should write about this. So it began like that, and then once you stick your nose into it, it is Pandora’s box. Each time, you want to write a new book about new scandals, about the way we are prevented from expressing ourselves, from speaking, the way all the current discoveries are hidden. And that is why I began this fight, and why I continue it, and why it is very difficult to stop.

That is to say, I do not concern myself with the fight people call anti-cult or not anti-cult; that is not my problem at all. It is obvious that when I see it written in a newspaper that there was such-and-such a “cult” — always in quotation marks — that was led by a homosexual, and that it was obvious, and the emphasis is put on this homeopath, or on an acupuncturist, or on someone who practised alternative medicine — it is obvious that there, that is my fight.

I do not know whether you are familiar with the Bach flower remedies, which are flower essences invented by an English doctor — a biologist, moreover — who is not at all a cult guru, or anything of that kind. And this gentleman invented the Bach flower remedies, which help people to be in a good atmosphere, and so on. And the Ordre des médecins wanted absolutely to ban these Bach flowers, saying that they had no AMM — you know, the AMM is the marketing authorisation — and that this could be dangerous, because they were being co-opted: these flowers were used by cults. Homeopathy too is a… I believe it is Doctor Abgrall who always said that it is a medieval gris-gris, used by cults.

I know of one family like that which was accused of belonging to a cult because it did not want to give growth hormone to its granddaughter: the granddaughter was taken from the family, and the growth hormone was administered to her by force. You are told: if you are against vaccinations, it means you are part of a cult — on the pretext that there are indeed certain communities that refuse vaccination or blood transfusion and the like. But it is a bit as if you said that these communities eat cauliflower or watch a football match, and that would become something stigmatised, because it would be practised by people said to be cultish. This kind of madness really ought to stop.

One could cite any number of cases. As soon as you are in medicine that is not classical, chemical medicine, they try to demonise people. So, to demonise them, they say they belong to a cult. It is easy: that way they are rejected wholesale, and there is no more discussion. From the moment you frighten people, you are sure to govern them far more easily. So, since there is no reason to frighten them other than by demonising certain things, cults were demonised, and thanks to that, people are kept in fear, and they are told: there you are — if you gather in a group, if you eat, if you are vegetarian, it means you belong to a cult — which is completely ridiculous. When we know that Einstein was a vegetarian — did he belong to a cult? When we know that there are any number of professors of medicine who are against vaccinations — they do not belong to a cult; it means nothing.

And it is obvious that abroad, people do not have this sort of mania. I, who have travelled a great deal abroad — people laugh at us outright, telling us: in France, you really have a sectomania that is pathological.

Everyone has the spirituality they want. It is obvious that I am not at all a materialist; it is obvious that I think spirit takes precedence over matter. Above all I am for spiritual freedom: let everyone believe in what they want; everyone has their own way of believing, and I find it must absolutely be respected. Me, I belong to no church; I am against dogmas, because there — all fundamentalists are dangerous people; you know that in the name of God people have killed, have massacred millions of people on Earth, and that I will always be against. But from the moment everyone has their own faith and respects that of the other, let everyone do as they wish. I will even fight all my life, as Voltaire and many others did, so that others, even if they do not agree with me, may express their opinion. And the more we fight, the less we are allowed to express our opinions. We really must stop all these dogmatic excesses that exist in all religions, and that are not found in a much more general spirituality.

Me, I have never spoken of spirituality with the ministries. For now, I have spoken of rights: of citizens’ rights, of the right to freedom of action, of the right to therapeutic freedom. But I have never spoken of spirituality, because that really is the higher level for now. The human being is a consumer, and all that interests them is that people keep consuming as much as possible, that is all. They do not have a broad culture, all those people. You know, each of them has been taught one little piece of truth, and they apply it without seeing that there is something else alongside. So I believe that speaking of spirituality with governments is not worth the trouble, because you are told that in France we are in a republic that is, how shall I put it, totally independent of religious ideologies; but in truth, at one and the same time it is independent, and at the same time it wages war on a certain freedom of thought. And that will not do: the two are totally incompatible with each other. So it is individuals who must take charge of themselves, who must say: let us stop the stupidity, let us stop the brainwashing, let us stop — let us try to think for ourselves. And me, I always say to everyone who listens to me: eradicate fear.

A citizens’ commission of inquiry — I think that is very good, if precisely you can carry out a very serious inquiry with people who are psychologists, jurists and others, to demonstrate clearly that current criminality has nothing to do with cults, has nothing to do with all those things. Current criminality comes rather from the consumer society that we have raised to the skies; and all those young people from the banlieues and elsewhere who have no money, and who are told: to exist on the ground you must have money, be the best-looking, the richest, the one who consumes the most — it is obvious that we are going to manufacture delinquents. So if this commission can be set up, I am entirely for a very serious inquiry to demonstrate that all this is not true, since for the moment we have inquiries in the other direction: only the anti-cult movements giving their opinion. In any case, I will always rise up against the fact that a part of our taxes pays a band of hysterics who brand as cults [inaudible ?] all the people who do not treat their health like everyone else, who do not think like everyone else, and so on. It is completely ridiculous in the end.