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

---

[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