The Cult Member
But what of the other key ingredient constituting a cult—the followers? P.T. Barnum is supposedly the source of the phrase, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and though the saying is probably not originally his, the notion that there are always plenty of people to fool for profit has been proven true enough. There’s the sucker and the one who fools him, there’s the deceived and the deceiver; the cult is about both.
“While the cult is principally driven by the deceiver who understands how easy it is to fool some people, he is greatly helped by the willingness of the deceived to be `had.’”
A friendly snake-oil salesman.
While the cult is principally driven by the deceiver who understands how easy it is to fool some people, he is greatly helped by the willingness of the deceived to be “had.” The existence of cults depends on the ones being deceived being all-too-ready-and-willing to be taken for a ride. There’s not infrequently in such people—these followers—a hunger for a kind of greatness, or to be near such greatness, or a hunger for a kind of rescue only a supposed “great person” can provide. The cult leader is available to provide and feed this need—and so they encourage him in his imaginings and they wish deeply to believe them. Such desires are not unique to cult members; perhaps they may be found in all of us at one time or another, but the cult leader seeks to take advantage of them and greatly exploit them in those who are within his grasp.
But now just how big a ride will the cult member be taken on? What is the magnitude of the deception? For this, we go back to the P.T. Barnum idea for a moment, and a picture associated with him of the con man and the sucker. The cult might seem to be understood in the idea of the con man who aims for a “sucker,” but it’s actually much more total with the cult than with the con man who’s trying to sell time in a time-share, or a lot in Florida. The cult leader has a bigger vision, a greater goal.
The term “total” points us to the work of the scholar Robert J. Lifton, who popularized use of the word “totalism” in describing the cult. Lifton, one of the founders of the modern discipline of cult studies, studied what the Chinese Communists did to captured U.S. servicemen during the Korean War, including turning some of them against their native land to embrace the ideology of their Communist captors using something called “brainwashing.” In describing how these brainwashers worked, Lifton used the term “totalism.” Lifton found this word a useful way to picture how cult leaders, these would-be masters of men and women, work to submerge those they are working on in a completely sealed, almost water-tight world view—a view that is total. Such a term is related to the word “totalitarian,” only that term is mostly applied to an entire culture and nation being worked upon, and not simply to the more limited work of the smaller kind of group, the cult.
So the cult leader is not just a huckster simply selling you, the would-be cult member, something that’s not what it appears to be, as though he were a used car salesman trying to pawn off a lemon as a really great deal; no, it’s a far deeper sort of thing than that because he’s selling you a whole way of life, a total package. The cult leader, the deceiver who heads up a cult, is someone getting you to “buy in” to something at the cost of your whole soul, of all you are and all you have. He brings the notion, as they say, “to a whole new level.” The cult demands all of you—this is “totalism.”
But now back to the willingness of the cult member to be taken in. The marvel of it is that the cult member wants this. He or she is asked to, and does, embrace the total package gladly and completely, and the member’s desire is not only for the package but for the person who packages it—the cult leader. Then, once someone is “sold,” they’re in, and solidly so, so that it is not at all easy for them to get out again.
