Combatting Cult Mind Control by Steven Hassan (1990, Paperback, Reprint)

Written by a psychologist, based on his own experiences with cults.

Discusses how cults work, why it is hard to even realize you are in a cult, and how it is more difficult to get away from a cult once you realize what you are involved with. It has great tips for talking to someone involved with a cult and how you can approach them.

There is a whole chapter devoted to recovery from cults.

It has an amazing appendix of resources should you need further information or help with a cult issue.

“Combatting Cult Mind Control” by Steven Hassan is a book about a subject that seems to rise and fall in cycles. During the decades of the 1960s through the 1980s, various groups and cults seemed to be particularly prevalent, for a wide variety of social and political reasons, but since then they seem to have fallen off the public radar screen.

That does not necessarily mean that the threat no longer exists. The reason I bring this up, today, in 2009, is to discuss the concept that the old cult forms might have morphed into something new. Hare Krishna is out, myspace is in. The internet has allowed groups to come and go with astonishing speed, and far away from watchful eyes. And while traditional cults usually operated in a “religious” setting (I use the word loosely and put it in quotes, but I have no desire to address this issue in that context in this article), the groups that I see as their modern equivalents are sometimes brazenly and unabashedly sinister.

Old–style cults, generally founded by the leader for his own purposes, usually focused on increasing his wealth and power. Today’s internet groups can exist to enrich the members, in good (multi–level marketing organizations) or nefarious (commercial bot–spreading conspirators) ways, but there are also those malcontents whose sole purpose is destruction or vandalism, in a true evil anarchist sense. These are the hardest for me to understand. Hopefully, they may also be less motivated, since there is really nothing gained by their work beyond “bragging rights” which can’t be very valuable to well–adjusted adults.

One significant difference is that in Hassan’s pre–millennial world, cults almost always revolved around a single charismatic leader (perhaps with deputies), in a unified location (or locations), and that is not usually the case on the internet. Granted, without a unified central leader, there is less opportunity for the intense “mind control” part to take effect, but the “cult” can still thrive and grow. The human race, as a whole, does not yet understand how this meta–communication really operates in this brave new world, and how it will play out in the future.

The good news is that information is out there, and anyone who is connected can get it. Old–style cults usually operated in an insulated environment of ignorance and paranoia, and that is far less of a factor now, since the computer and the web itself is the fabric that binds the group together.

Connecting the entire world with instantaneous communication has a light side and a dark side, just like “the Force” and we are seeing both. It might be informative to study these “old ways” to glean ideas on how new far–flung cults might flourish, in the absence of actual physical contact. You cannot be too careful, in cyberspace or the real world.