Patterns in groups tending toward the formation of cults; examples from the secular Buddhist community Part Three

The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place; it shall be released into the wilderness.
~ Leviticus 16:10

In my last two posts, I explored two of the four basic features of cult dynamics: group compliance and dependence on a leader.  In this post, I continue with the third feature: devaluing the outsider.

Devaluing the outsider

Devaluation and idealization are polarized ways of appreciating ourselves and others.  When we devalue others, we project our bad or unwanted parts onto them, discharging ourselves of the negative feelings they arouse in us.  Conversely, when we idealize others, we perceive them through starry eyes, projecting qualities onto them to which we ourselves aspire and that imbue us with a warm, expansive feeling.

At a certain stage of child development, this simplified way of viewing complex beings, sometimes called “splitting”, is helpful to sorting out the world and our place in it but, when it persists into adulthood as a means of dealing with interpersonal conflict or our own conflicting feelings, insofar as it misses their depth and subtlety, becomes fanciful and pernicious.  Yet splitting is common and, according to Deikman, devaluing the outsider is “probably the most common cult-like behaviour in everyday society.”[1]

When dissenters and protesters challenge our views in ways that threaten our personal affiliation with a group, its beliefs and core values, we tend to project onto them qualities that distort their views and personalities so that they look “bad” instead of us.  It is easier to project our bad parts than to integrate them and feel shame or some other equally disturbing feeling which might accompany our considering the possibility of our own imperfection and incompleteness.  The more we see our critics as “bad”, the more “we” become the “good guys” and “they” become foreign or alien, and the easier it is to justify our attempts to expel them from our midst.

This is how devaluing the outsider becomes a precursor to violence.  As Deikman explains, “by making other people bad in our own mind, we can legitimize behavior toward them that would otherwise be morally unacceptable, even to the point of sanctioning cruel and vicious actions.”[2]  But we tend not to see our own actions as violent.  Rather, we see them as necessary to evacuating the evil enemy whom we have “vilified with a zeal that combines righteousness and arrogance.”[3]

As Deikman says, “There is seldom any inquiry into the actual statements and actions of members of the “bad” group, or any serious consideration of the adversary’s point of view and its possible validity, and critical analysis of one’s own “good” view, discriminating between assumptions and facts...”[4] Self-righteousness, being an unnuanced view of ourselves as right (and others wrong), is a sure sign of projection, and is "the dominant attitude of cult members, although it may be masked by false humility and public confessions of unworthiness”.[5]

This certainly has been my experience of the secular Buddhist community.  I have noticed that my public criticism of Ken McLeod is frequently met with the devaluation and rejection of me, the critic, not based on any facts or arguments brought to bear on any exchanges, but on frequently advanced assumptions about the critic's “bad” intentions, i.e., wanting to “smear” Mr. McLeod, spread “gossip” and “slander”, “hijack” threads, or on devaluations of my person as“clueless” or akin to “a church lady who insists the world conform to her standards.”  None of these, of course, addresses the substance of any arguments or criticisms but aim at devaluing the critic instead.

Examples of some form of all of these accusations can be found on the SBA website in this discussion on the subject of the prevention of abuse in secular Buddhist organizations where, for example, I was “invited” to reframe my participation in a way that was more in alignment with the group’s values or, alternately, if I didn’t like their group or what I saw on their site or didn’t want to contribute as per Ted Meissner’s suggestions, to simply go away.

This is a classic cult maneuver against the threat of criticism: it creates insiders and outsiders, distancing itself from critics and infidels in an attempt to stifle rebellion and maintain the status quo.  As Deikman explains, “The more authoritarian the human social system, the more likely a separatist world view will arise because any anger or resentment stimulated in the follower by his or her submission to the leader requires displacement onto other persons- the outsider, the infidel, the non-believer.  Feelings of rebellion toward the leader, which are defined by the group as “evil”, make the cult member anxious…”[6]

This displacement of evil onto the outsider was never more obvious than when Unfettered Mind Board member Robert Conrad (who is also Ken McLeod’s personal attorney) wrote the following in response to the publication of My Story:

My definition of "evil" is intentionally causing harm.  There is no other way to put what you are now and have been doing… There is a very destructive side of you.  (You can read the original quote here)

Perhaps more alarming than the tendency of members of the secular Buddhist community to devalue outsiders is the general blindness to their creating paradigms that further enable this devaluation.  Secular Buddhist teachings proffer an unacknowledged and thus not easily critiqued metaphysics which reduces human persons to “patterns” and “stories”, a metaphysics that rejects the most personal aspect of our lives as “confusion”, or as “obstructions” to “naked awareness” or “buddha nature.”

This unacknowledged metaphysics provides the foundation for an equally unacknowledged Buddhist theodicy: because others suffer from their own "stories" and "patterns", and because these are not who they really are, we can dismiss their suffering and even their reactions to cruelty as self-caused stubborn clinging to “stories” and “patterns.” The suffering of the abused is unfortunate, perhaps, but, after all, they bring it on themselves, so we need do nothing for them other than try to encourage them to abandon their stories and remind them of their true nature.

This is a curious and very Buddhist version of Deikman’s devaluation: by insisting on their tathagatagarbha as the true nature of those outsiders we do not like, we can dismiss their actuality as of no consequence, anesthetizing our experience of their pain and promoting a notion of “compassion” that has had the life-blood sucked out of it.

Next: Part Four


[1] Deikman, Arthur; The Wrong Way Home, p. 101
[2] Ibid., p.103
[3] Ibid., p.106
[4] Ibid., p.101
[5] Ibid., p.105
[6] Ibid., p.104

Patterns in groups tending toward the formation of cults; examples from the secular Buddhist community Part Two

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare them for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood. 

(Alexis de Tocqueville; Democracy in America)

In my last post, I began an exploration of four basic features of cult dynamics.  In this post, I continue with the second feature: dependence on a leader.

Dependence on a leader

Groups generally need leaders, but cults need to depend on one.

Reliance on leadership harks back to the infantile yearning for a center around which to gravitate and from which to derive pleasure, meaning and direction in our lives.  It manifests in groups as the desire to shift power and responsibility onto someone else, a “predilection for inequality”[1] that explains the incurable attraction to hierarchical organizations and authoritarian leadership.  

We are drawn to leaders.  They inspire confidence and make us feel safe and secure.  Our trust, in turn, inspires them.  This is a comfortable arrangement, so comfortable that we may end up ignoring niggling doubts, contradictions, hypocrisy and other unpalatable facts in favour of satisfying dependency needs.  This is indeed what tends to happen.  We get caught up in the snowball of mutual encouragement, with leaders feeding our illusions of security and our illusions of security fattening their delusions of grandeur, fantasies of omniscience and omnipotence.  We catalyze their arrogance while they catalyze our infatuation and submissiveness.  In our besotted “agentic” state, as Deikman points out, using Stanley Milgram’s famous post-war experiment as an example, leaders need hardly rely on overt forms of manipulation like coercion to get us to do their bidding.  It suffices for them to ask us in liquid tones to “please continue.”[2]  

Deikman, echoing Faulkner’s sentiment that it is a “happy faculty of the mind” to slough off what contradicts the voice of authority, observes that, when truth and conscience conflict with obedience and hierarchical power, which they often do, “obedience and hierarchical power tend to take precedence.”[3]  

Submission can be insidious.  It is not necessary for a leader to have a domineering character in order for him to be able to dominate a group; it is enough that he presents as a “strong, good parent, to convey an optimistic, sincere self-confidence, and communicate belief in a golden future.”[4]  A reasonable outward presentation can in fact disguise an extraordinary amount of self-importance, such as the kind required by someone whose high-flying agenda may include any or all of:  recruiting and training followers, founding and publicizing local, regional, national or international organizations, and promoting other venues in which to disseminate his wisdom.   

Inspired by his vision and magnetized by charisma, followers can easily capitulate to a leader's contrivances and reinforce their own inferiority, quite blind to his narcissism and superiority complex.  This seems to be the case of secular Buddhists.   Distracted by the secularity of a movement that, on the surface, appears sensible and grounded, followers seem to accept uncritically the grandiosity of Buddhist teachers who live like traveling star performers taking their show from castle to castle along the border between the upper-middle and the lower-upper classes.  

As Deikman points out, anything can be idolized by a group, with the resulting behaviours contradicting appearances and/or the values that are preached as when the form dominates the essence of a religion and it becomes “anti-spiritual”[5] or, as in secular Buddhism, when religiosity is disavowed but the trappings and the modus operandi of a very successful church endure, leaving one with the impression of a holy marriage between meditation and show business.

Deikman offers an antidote to the snowball effect of a group’s dependence on leaders: cultivating “eye level” relationships, i.e. relationships that are horizontal as opposed to vertical and that dissolve the superior-inferior barrier blocking a two-way, free-flowing style of communication inclusive of hard questions, criticism and dissent.  

The founder of Buddhism used retreat from society, asceticism and solitary contemplation as a means to personal liberation. He nevertheless founded a vibrant, hierarchical community that mushroomed to feed the “regressive dependency”[6] of his contemporaries, complete with rules, scriptures and obedience to authority, as well as lineages in which the passing of blood from parent to child is imitated by dharma transmission from teacher to student.  

Secular Buddhism debunks the formalism, ritual, supernatural beliefs and hierarchical structures of traditional Buddhist culture by taking an approach to practice that seems more in sync with the liberal democratic values of contemporary society.  One might think that this would enhance the ability of a group to avoid the pitfall of dependence on a leader.  But, insofar as it repeats the pattern of its founder and avoids eye-level communication, it does not.  It fosters dependence.

One wonders how many of the students at Stephen Batchelor’s thirty plus teaching events scheduled this year will cultivate eye-level relationships with him…

Next: Part Three

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[1] Deikman, Arthur; The Wrong Way Home, p.71

[2] Ibid., p.99

[3] Ibid., p.73

[4] Ibid., p.73

[5] Ibid., p.90

[6] Ibid

Patterns in groups tending toward the formation of cults; examples from the secular Buddhist community Part One

Sweet coupled airs we sing.

No lonely seafarer
Holds clear of entering
Our green mirror. 
(Homer; The Odyssey, Book 12, 173-176)

There is a natural urge to seek out others and form bonds to overcome the vertigo of being human and alone. This manifests from birth as sucking, the unresting place of an orgasm that explodes like a star and expands toward the ends of a universe that it cannot assimilate.  

We gravitate to groups and form alliances and, in approaching others, cannot help but relive the urgency to connect, repeating patterns of attachment that hark back to our earliest infancy.  These patterns, so deeply ingrained, exert such a force that they can lead us to bypass critical thinking in favor of seeking comfort, security and belonging.  

This is how cults are formed.

The late Arthur Deikman, psychiatrist and author of two books on cults, believed that the tendency to regress to earlier stages of development is responsible for our forming cult-like associations and that, in a sense, human society itself is just an agglomeration of “informal cults to which everyone belongs.”[1]  Deikman feared that, because of this universal regressive tendency, even in democracies, there is an ever-present danger that “the authoritarian impulse will manifest itself in disguised form.”[2]   

I share this concern.  I am especially concerned about what Deikman calls “invisible cults”, i.e., groups that are blind to the patterns of manipulation and influence governing their behaviour.  I have observed these patterns to be operative in almost every group that I have worked with or belonged to, and have also, at times, been blind to their influence on me.

Spiritual groups are particularly susceptible to the phenomenon of regression, due perhaps to ideals of transcendence that aspire to returning to the pre-nativity scene of undifferentiated oneness.   But dysfunctional group behaviours are not reserved to fundamentalist religious groups and organizations.  They are present in subtler and more insidious ways in secular groups when they are organized around a mission, a philosophy and distinct, though sometimes unspoken, rules of engagement.

Below is a list of the basic features indicating cult dynamics as studied by Deikman, features which I propose to flesh out with examples that I have observed or experienced in my own associations with the secular Buddhist community:

1) Compliance with the group

2) Dependence on a leader

3) Devaluing the outsider

4) Avoiding dissent

In this blog post (part one of four posts), I begin by exploring the first one.

Compliance with the group

This is the tendency of an individual to conform to group expectations.  

Compliance is often shaped by tactics like proselytizing, conversion strategies and “love-bombing”[3] that awaken the need to belong, and then intoxicate the prospective convert with promises of acceptance, truth, love or freedom.  In traditional cults, these tactics have a distinctive whiff, like cheap perfume.  In secular cults, they can be of a more subtle variety, and harder to sniff out.  

Love bombs, for example, can be dropped using glances or words that merely hint at acceptance and specialness, or infused with an erotic charge and passed off as “spiritual energy”.  My former teacher exuded this.  Students would leave his retreats on fire and with the impression that something special had been transmitted to them.  When I brought this up to my teacher, he would downplay it by saying things like “I’m just the messenger”, while never disavowing that something special was being transmitted.  He once gave a talk to a group of students on the subject of transmission, using physics and the analogy of two tuning forks to explain it as an energy phenomenon, ending his talk with the entreaty to “pass it on”.  Afterward he told me that he was trying to demystify transmission whereas it seemed to me on the contrary that, by using the language of science, he had actually strengthened the belief in an invisible connection between him and his students.  I am not claiming that my teacher was consciously aware of the love-bombs he dropped on his students.  My point is that charismatic juju can be subtly reinforced in ways that strongly enhance group compliance to where nobody dares to say, “The emperor has no clothes.”

Other ways a secular organization gains the compliance of members is through heavy marketing.  In secular Buddhist associations, instead of proselytizing, I have noticed an aggressive use of online publishing, promotion and advertising to disseminate Buddhist material and enlist virtual followers to buy books, donate, or sign up for private instruction and retreats.  Since using the internet is so commonplace, we tend to be blind to how it might be exploited by spiritual groups as a means of seduction and recruitment.  We might naïvely believe, for example, that, because most Buddhist organizations are registered as “non-profit”, nobody’s making a profit or using a corporate model.  Or perhaps we think that our teachers are poor and that our donations are supporting the free and enlightened dissemination of their practice tips and spiritual guidance, failing to ask ourselves how much funds are being raised and going into whose pockets.  My former teacher once told me that his website alone, relying on a “donate” button that is optional for users of his site, brought in 100,000 dollars a year[4].  In 2011 (the last year that I’ve found on public record), his organization, Unfettered Mind, was worth eight hundred and fifty thousand “non-profit” dollars.  

Aside from donations, Buddhist organizations seem to rely heavily on volunteers, and there seems to be no shortage of Buddhist students ready and willing to give freely of their time and energy.  When I was at the Montreal Zen Center (an arguably secular association, I know, but a similar incident could have occurred in a secular context), I was fascinated by how efficiently the students were deployed to clean and maintain Albert Low’s mansion and zendo.  Twice a year, Spring and Fall, students were called upon to donate an entire Saturday to polishing his windows and floors, not to mention the thorough cleaning his house got every time there was a sesshin.  I am not faulting anybody here, I am just noting how eager students were to clean Albert Low’s house, and wonder how many of them returned home to their own dirty apartments and asked themselves, as I did, what on earth they were doing cleaning his home instead of their own.

Deikman suggests that one of the reasons we comply with requests made on behalf of the group is that they join with our need to fulfill a higher cause, one that makes us feel like we are contributing to something greater than our own insignificant lives.   He explains how certain group activities and decisions, even ones that make unreasonable demands on our resources, are justified and sustained by their appeal to our sense of a “greater good”.  (In Buddhism, this is expressed in the concept of merit which one is regularly requested to return to the community of buddhas and bodhisattvas).  In some cases, this missionary instinct leads to relatively benign drudgery like transcribing podcasts or cleaning someone else’s house, but it can also lead to more consequential choices like leaving your children and family, like Siddartha did and like so many of our own teachers have done.  

Sometimes there is covert or subtle pressure to make personal sacrifices on behalf of the group, using fear or veiled threats of exclusion to minimize the importance of other, more mundane commitments vying for our attention.  Not to pick on Albert, but he once said to me, when I was on the point of exhaustion and questioning the wisdom of attending a seven-day sesshin in a poor state of health, that “it would be a pity” if I did not show up, that I was “stronger than what I gave myself credit for” and that, “if I knew how to suffer, I would have the power not to suffer”.  ‘Nough said.  I went.  

Finally, Deikman points to overwork and humility-inducing experiences as ways of weakening one’s defenses and the ability to rebel, “facilitating submission by a kind of anesthesia produced by exhaustion[5]”.  That is true of meditation in general and of Zen in particular, though it has nothing to do with non-secular beliefs and practices that demand submission to a teacher or guru, or threaten post-mortem consequences in another lifetime. 

Next: Part Two

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[1] Deikman Arthur, The Wrong Way Home, (1990, p.9)

[2] Ibid, p.10

[3] Although his web site, “Enlightened Spirituality” set off my warning bells, I am grateful to the author who compiled this comprehensive list of dysfunctional group dynamics (http://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/Warning_signs_of_dysfunctional_cults.html) for introducing me to the notion of love-bombing. 

[4] In a way it is to his credit that my former teacher, in declaring himself an “executive coach”, is more transparent about his profit-based corporate model of teaching than in his role as Buddhist teacher.  However, I do wonder if he still "transmits".

[5] Ibid., p.66

Beyond Belief

It is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.

~ William Faulkner

I have observed in the Buddhist community an absence of critical thinking and curiosity that I find particularly alarming.  I had expected members of this community-- dedicated as they are to cultivating insight and compassion-- to be more sensitive, open and discerning than other communities.  But I now see that Buddhists can be just as closed-minded as anybody else.  

In my own case, despite a background in critical thinking (philosophy) and years of therapy (on both sides of the couch), I put aside the intellectual reservations I had about “awakening” and suspended any disbelief I had that about my teacher having “it”.  It was thrilling to believe, for the first time in my life, that someone could help me transcend the human condition.   I yielded to this authority.  Even in the wake of actions that ultimately broke my heart, which I have documented here and that demonstrated my teacher’s inability to meet our situation with emotional maturity and compassion, it took me a few years to really disbelieve in him.   

From what I have observed, many Buddhist students are striving like I was toward something they want deeply to believe in, and with the same faith in their practice and teacher that I had.  They may be open-hearted but, when they hear about their teacher doing something wrong, they experience an emotional shock that makes the news hard to assimilate.  Some are open to listening anyway, and willing to form their own opinions. But some are not. They snap shut.

Others see their teacher as a consultant or advisor and remain rather utilitarian in their need of him.  They may have no trouble believing that their teacher tried to seduce a student but, since their own emotional investment is relatively superficial, they are generally unsympathetic when a student complains that she was abused.  They’re the ones that say things like: “That’s just the way the world works.”   “He’s only human.”   “It’s your own damn fault.”  Or “Get over it.”  A surprising number of contemporary Buddhists are like this: emotionally cut-off and psychologically defended against feelings, theirs and others.   

Pragmatic and “Geeky” Buddhism seems to hold a particular draw for Buddhists who prefer to leave emotions out of it, and Secular Buddhism seems to attract the crème de la crème.  Armed with the belief that their brand of Buddhism is founded on “reason” and “naturalism”, or that it is “free of ideology” and “without beliefs”, they pose as more liberal than traditional institutions when, in fact, they are rigidly bound to scientistic beliefs and blind to their own ideological presuppositions.  This lack of self-awareness, combined with intellectual arrogance and moral self-righteousness, makes Secular Buddhism, in my own opinion and experience, the most insidious religion around.  

When I have tried to warn members of the secular Buddhist community about my teacher and his organization, they have met my facts and arguments with a defensive wall of silence and censorship or with the knee-jerk reaction of attacking me or my position.  Some pretended to adopt the “neutral” position of withholding judgment “until more facts are out” or until hearing “the other side of the story” while already being biased against considering, and in some cases outright dismissing, first-hand testimony and evidence documenting the actions of this teacher and his Board of Directors. 

Recently, when I posted on a discussion about how to prevent scandals in the secular Buddhist community, spokespersons for The Secular Buddhist Association were quick to cry “gossip” without submitting any facts or evidence of their own and preferring to align themselves with the more powerful.  (They apparently do not consider it "gossip" when their leaders talk critically behind the backs of their own teachers and traditions but seem to consider them dharma champions for coming out “naked”, “atheist” or situated “outside the path of established institutions”.)

One can understand if, as in the first case, for emotional reasons, a student might not wish to consider unpalatable facts about her Buddhist teacher or, as in the second case, a student doesn’t understand or really care about a teacher’s misuse of power.  It is harder to understand why Buddhist leaders, especially those committed to not repeating the patterns of exploitation that they have criticized in more traditional Buddhist cultures, are inflexibly closed to acknowledging the possibility of abuse happening within their own fellowship.  

Somewhere Stephen Batchelor expresses hope that Buddhism not become a Church.  But what is it when an organization is unwilling to explore, or even be curious about, concerns about one’s secular peers if not institutionalized devotion to this body of teachings and teachers?