The Psychology of Cultism; B. Barker

CULTS are not a new phenomenon: they may be as old as man-or even animal herds. Cults may form around an individual, an object, an animal, or a concept. Invariably, the members of the cult ascribe magical powers to their object of worship powers to manipulate the environ ment to protect the cult members against evil spirits, the devil, natu ral disasters, bankruptcy, illness, or whatever. The core concept in cultism is a followership dependent upon some one or something outside itself to assist it in coping with a threaten ing external environment. The more inadequate and inferior the follower feels himself to be, the more magical and mystical the omnipotence proAlong with years of experience as a hospital emer gency department physician, Dr. Barker recently completed a psychiatric residency at Camarillo State Hospital In California. This article, from a speech prepared for medical staff personnel, bears a wider hearing.

Ben Barker the Psychology of Cultism jected onto the leader. However, it is a mistake to focus on the leader or object of veneration. The leader is usually merely a resourceful indi vidual perceptive enough to recog nize the varied types of helplessness in those about him who offers to take away those feelings. That his offer is frequently overstated and illusory is beside the' point. The point is that the followers willingly take the bait-hook, line and sinker. Many were shocked by the sub missive, dependent, compliant fol lowers of Charles Manson who carved x's in their foreheads and chanted on the Los Angeles County Courthouse steps. They were even more shocked to learn that some men and women had brutally an nihilated other human beings on Manson's satanic command. Then there were the illfated followers of Jim Jones whose beliefs led them to a rotting death in the steamy jungles 203 204 THE FREEMAN April of Guyana. Numerous other exam ples could be cited. Where do they all come from? We shake our heads and wonder, while physicians and other societal leaders continue to reinforce exactly the type of be havior that will produce more cul tists.

The Roots of Dependency What are the roots of dependency in human behavior? The answer should be obvious. Each of us began life as a totally dependent parasite encased in a constant-temperature liquid environment with our nutri tional needs satisfied effortlessly. Through some miracle, the mater nal host does not set up an appropri ate foreign body rejection reaction and the fetus enjoys this total de pendency state for some 40-odd weeks before expulsion.! It is presumptuous to assume that this experience precedes awareness. Single-cell living forms demonstrate avoidance behavior to noxious stimuli. Are they aware? If they are, then is it not reasonable to suppose the fetus to be at least as aware? For me, though, the strongest evidence that the intrauterine life is experi enced as pleasurable is the sus tained effort adults make to recreate a similar experience through envi ronmental manipulation. HTo be lCf. S. Ferenczi, ttStages in the Development of the Sense of Reality," Outline of Psycho analysis, by J. S. Van Tesslar, page 112.

waited on hand and foot" by spouse, servant, child, and others has long been associated with cCall the things money can buy." Once expelled from the uterus, the infant must struggle to meet some of his own needs. The struggle is multi-faceted, beginning with an immature autonomic nervous sys tem which must stabilize his inter nal environment in the face of a shifting external environment. Mother assists in this process by attempting through appropriate nurturing techniques to minimize the fluctuations of heat, cold, air circulation, and the like upon the infant. He remains extremely de pendent upon her even though the biological umbilical cord has been ruptured. A more profound attach ment persists which defies logical analysis. In a slow, incomprehensible, years-long process, mother gradu ally weans the infant from his de pendence on her. One of her tools is to promote his interaction with other adults, sibling and peers. Ob viously, no two parents accomplish this task in exactly the same way nor do any two individuals react identically to the same stimulus.

However, there are cultural similarities in the process which conspire to create more than surface similarities in the same generation of offspring. Herein rests the central point of 1980 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CULTISM 205 my thesis: the cultural factors which have produced so many dependent, submissi ve followers among our youth are also behind the decline and fall of the United States as a force of geopolitical significance. Excessive dependency is endemic in our society and those who are in positions .of power and prestige including many in my profession encourage and perpetuate this de pendency. An Age of Specialization We live in an age of specialization so extreme that most of us are truly helpless outside our specialties. Our ((system" thus has become an incredibly complex web of interact ing specialties which provides great comfort when all is going well but reduces us to extreme helplessness in times of crisis. Examples abound: Supermarkets are very convenient unless trucks stop delivering. Au tomo biles are a nice way to get around unless there is no gasoline.

Washing machines are dandy unless yours breaks down and the repair man has a two-week waiting list. The trade-off in our age of technological marvels is this: We gain convenience and security but may sacrifice self-reliance and inde pendence. For example, antibiotics are available over-the-counter in many countries and individuals are free to take the responsibility for the management of their own illnesses. But here in the United States, we do not have that freedom. In fact, pa tients here have been so pro grammed to depend upon physicians that we must take responsibility for all their bumps, bruises and sniffles-hardly leaving us with adequate time to care for those who truly require our skilled services. Our cult of dependency medicine has been so successful that disen chanted followers are literally suing us out of business. They are impa tient and demanding that all dis eases be cured-and cured now! In turning over the responsibility for their health to us, they gave us an illusory omnipotence. Our fallibility crushes this illusion and their re sponse is vindictive anger. Discred ited cult leaders are adjudged harshly by their disappointed fol lowers.

The Drug Cult Perhaps the largest cult of all that our profession has had a hand in is the drug cult. By that, I don't mean the HSuperfly" white El Dorado Cadillac jockey who drives his exotic automobile through Harlem or Watts nor do I refer to the Mafia Godfather, the French Connection mystery men or the Colombian cocaine millionaires. I'm talking about the ttdrugstore cult" -the widespread dependence of American citizens on the soothing syrups and pills available on the shelves of 206 THE FREEMAN April drugstores, supermarkets, news stands and elsewhere. It is the cult that has pushed Valium into the number one all-time best-seller spot. Our undergraduate, professional and post-graduate medical educa tion is drug oriented and drug satu rated, hence our primary weapon against illness is, of course, phar macological. Was it not fitting and symbolic that so many at Jonestown were put out of their misery by an injection from a doctor? They trusted him to do the right thing.

Not only medicine but many other careers and skills have enthroned science and the scientiQc technique. Our educational systems perpetuate the myths of science ad nauseam. How much of the science and math shoved down your throats in high school, college, and medical school were really useful to you either in specialty training or in practice? Admit that much of your schooling is pure ritual and you will see that tteducation" itself has become a cult. College graduates enter the real world with magical expectations, waving their hard-earned degrees in the wind. When their skills are not snapped up, they are disillusioned and angry. Schooling as Religion In attempting to achieve power over the environment, students have literally endowed the schooling process with the status of religious veneration and plugged themselves into it. The teachers and professors are the high priests and the process is supposed to mystically and mys teriously protect the follower from risk or harm if the prescribed rituals are followed. Believe it or not, many who educate themselves into over .crowded fields simply return to school for another degree. Others of the educated cultists simply change cults.

Basically, then, we see that the psychology of cultism is simply the persistence of the parent/child rela tionship beyond an appropriate time. Followers or members feel helpless or overwhelmed by an envi ronment they perceive as threaten ing and respond to this feeling by embracing a concept or leader to whom they ascribe magical power. This is a sign of excessive depen dency; and excessive dependency in a society can come either from in adequate parental directing toward self-reliance, individual rejection of such directing, or programming from external sources which directs towards dependency. Additionally, the environment may become truly so threatening that dependency upon an authority or higher power source may be appropriate, in war, say, or in specific subcultures as depicted in the film, ttThe God father." Modern technology also shares the guilt, for it has contrived to capture a formerly active and 1980 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CULTISM 207 mobile social order and transformed it into a sedentary spectator society.

The principal villain in this trans formation process is television. By and large, it is a dehumanization process which tends to dull the senses and produce emotional zom bies who respond primarily to sub liminal and repetitive advertise ment slogans. What then occurs is much akin to disuse atrophy: the spirit within dwindles like melting wax and the mind dulls. The prod ucts of this process suffer endemic obesity and emotional indifference to their actual environment. What Jim Jones and his ilk have offered to these unfortunates is an antidote to the poisonous, de humanizing processes induced by the age of technology. Few who leap for the bait really care that the anti dote itself is toxic, for what they have been experiencing is a living death and any escape hatch is ac ceptable, even if it leads into an endless maze. The visible result is the phenomena of cults so alive in the land today.

In a society of people programmed almost from birth to follow-the leader, it is inevitable that some will fall into the clutches of mad leaders. That is but one of the many conse quences of the loss of self-reliance and of independent judgment in American citizens. Before joining in an emotional condemnation of ((cults," perhaps it would be best to understand that a cult is but a system of worship or ritual. It is a system of belief gone pathological, to be dis tinguished from religious beliefs which inculcate independence. Freedom of Worship The freedom to worship God after your own manner of belief is as valuable to the spirit of indepen dence as is freedom of speech. These freedoms, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, are about all we have left of the dream of the Founding Fathers and should not be carelessly dismissed. Genuine religious beliefs have the special quality of satisfying intellec tual and emotional needs sim ul taneously. They account for unequal life fates, promise release from ill ness and suffering, and offer hope for a better life. They are, indeed, a special, poorly understood, poten tially adaptive set of ego defense mechanisms. Do we psychiatrists have a socially sanctioned right to intervene in religious beliefs, par ticularly when we know so little about the influence of religion on psychopathology?

If we deprive someone of his reli gion, what substitute do we have for him? And ought we to impose such a substitute? Physicians for years have ignored nutrition, exercise, and relaxation as techniques for combating or preventing illnesses. Indeed, we have ignored preventive 208 THE FREEMAN April medicine itself. We are, for the most part, disease-oriented high priests in a cult of science and technology which is leading us all into a fate which appears particularly unat tractive. Chronic stress-related dis eases plague both us and our pa tients (hypertension, strokes, heart attacks, colitis, ulcers, asthma, and so forth), yet we persist in disregard ing the spiritual element in man and rely solely upon chemical po tions and invasive techniques to combat diseases. Perhaps God does exist. Perhaps He was around before Plato and Aristotle. Perhaps He spoke to Moses and Paul and many others.

Perhaps His Holy Spirit is within each human being and resists the sadness of a mechanized, deper sonalized, technological social order. Media manipulators who sen sationalize the fates of unfortunate cultists cannot destroy the source of all life which beats within each of our breasts and breathes freely of the air that His plants provide. The psychology of cultism is but one indication of an intrinsic desire in each of us to offer veneration to the Creator. This process becomes pathological only if the surrogate leader is mad, as with Jim Jones, or when the path followed leads into a blind maze, as with scientific technology. Almost every day another ((accepted" scientific fact is discredited in yet another laboratory experiment. It appears, then, that science offers no final solutions or ultimate explanations. Is our own worship of the microscope and the wonders of micro biology, neuro chemistry and physiology as mis placed as the blind faith that Jones's followers had in him?

Blind Departures from Basic Principles of Freedom This nation was founded upon principles taken from the Judeo Christian ethic and as long as these prevailed, we grew and prospered. Now, there is no prayer in the schools and unionized, socialist teachers insidiously program our youth. Mindless violence and sense less trivia beam at us from the tele vision, our newspapers are full of lies and scantily clad females posing for underwear ads. Heroin is the opiate of the ghetto, alcohol of the middle class community, and cocaine of the wealthy. VaH urn, which we supply, is abused by all social classes. We correctly perceive the sea as a dangerous, hostile environment for man and few would attempt to navi gate it for any significant distance without the benefits of a buoyant and protective superstructure. W(hat many fail to realize is that man's journey on dry land is at least as hazardous. In neglecting the spiritual aspects of our own exis tences, and of our patients' as well, 1980 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CULTISM 209 we are up a creek without either boat or paddles.

Cults, worthless dollars, gasoline shortages and dependent patients are the long-term consequences of too many of us learning to rely on Big Brother. The processed foods we eat and drink are as suspect as the poisoned potion was in Guyana-it simply takes longer for them to kill us. Erich Fromm tells us that all human beings are religious in one way or another, religion being ((any system of thought and action which ... gives the individual the frame of orientation and object of devotion he needs."2 The psychology of cultism is all around us, as men elect to place their faith and trust in other men, 2Ashok Rao, M.D., and Jennifer A. Katze, M.D., "The Role of Religious Belief in a De pressed Patient's Illness," Psychiatric Opinion, June, 1979, pp. 39-43. their machines or their technologi cal products. As long as we pass on shallow values to our youth and let them see us worshipping at the altar of sci ence, or the government, or the dol lar, or gold-they will do likewise.

As long as we promote depen dency in our patients, we are rein forcing the psychology of cultism. The white coat and the stethoscope are counterproductive when used as talismans in a cult of science. We should learn and teach self-reliance and preventive medicine principles, for when these attitudes and values are mixed with genuine faith in the Creator, we may return to being a nation of healthy and sane individ uals rather than a society of drugged, dependent sheep and we may finally reverse the decline of the United States as a force of geopoliti cal significance. Ii IDEAS ON LIBERTY How State Help Destroys Self-Help IT is time to cut through the underbrush of detail and face up to the basic question in this issue of state help versus self-help. What kind of society do we want? One of independent self-reliant citizens, prepared to take care of themselves and their families, asking from the state only to leave them alone and get off their backs? Or a society of government pensioners, willing to sign away their political and economic liberty in exchange for ever bigger handouts? Which is the more desirable type of citizen-the chronic recipient of relief or the sturdy hardworking Amish farmer who had his horses confiscated and sold by order of some local bureaucrat because he wanted to contract out of both the benefits and the payments involved in the social security system?

WILLIAMHENRY CHAMBERLIN Melvin D. Barger PARENT POWER: Can It Help Public Education? THE SHORTCOMINGS of the public schools have become common news fare. The typical complaints are that the schools don't teach, students' test scores are falling, the schools are overrun with drugs and violence, and too much money is being wasted on administration and ((frills." Moreover, public disenchantment with the schools is causing home owners to vote down ordinary tax measures for school support. Most of the proposed remedies in clude more Federal funds for educa tion, better teacher training, and renewed emphasis on the basic skills of reading and writing. Now a new proposal is being heard. It's a demand for ((parent power" in running the schools. Mr. Barger Is a corporate public relations executive and writer In Toledo, Ohio. 210 ((Parent power" is an idea that sounds logical and reasonable. It means that parents should have a voice in school policy decisions and perhaps should have something to say about curricula, choice of textbooks, and the hiring of teachers and administrators. This supposedly would make the people active partic ipants in the educational process and might help cool the rising anger toward the schools. The parents, in sharing power over the schools, will have only themselves to blame if the schools ((do not work."