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