Brainwashing and Cult like Behaviors

Jarrod Felty

January 10, 2006

Psychology Report

I will be discussing with you the topics of brainwashing and cult-like behaviors. I'll be explaining the effects of brainwashing on the human mind and how it appeals other into it's dark and unknown world of misbeliefs. Brainwashing has played a major role in cult-like behaviors, everything from gang related activities to the KKK. Cults are a system or community of religious worship and rituals that are emtremist or false guidance. Brainwashing is intensive, forcible indoctrination, usually political or religious, aimed at destroying a person's basic convictions and attitudes and replacing them with an alternative set of fixed beliefs.

Modern day cults have new members that join around the age of 18-22, pretty the high school graduates and college students. They are usually

middle to upper class members of their community and have some minor college education. Some of the new members come from communication problems within their family. Most kids that enter cults today are ones that are still looking for an indenity of themselves and that are on a quest for spiritual reality that delivers clear cut answers to their questions. The alternate life styles of children in today's society are being proposed today as options. Most children tend to go in and out of jobs, education, and relationships because of their different patters of living. People that have this great mobilty, especially in the youth, are often unfamiliar therefore become lonely(Fleming, 1980).

Most people in the world today experience and idenity crisis or serious spiritual search for answers is theorectically vulnerable to the seduction of the cults by forms of brainwashing. Even though some are more obivously vulnerable than others, which the cult members seduce first. Any hosts of depressional actions may make and individual feel anxious, uncertain, hurt, lonely, unloved, confused or guilty and is a main target for the cults. These members usually are planted around college guidance counselor's offices ready to pounce on any victim that may have felt disappointed by the action the guidance counselor took. These members "sell" their remedies to the kids "hooking" them into joining their "club. This is all a scheme to emotionally control the person and submit them to their fears and fight for the wrong reasons(Fleming, 1980).

Most of the cults were formed around 1960's to after the 1970's. In the 1970's there were at least 3000 cult-type organizations throughout the United States. They have created havoc in their follower's lives and the lives of the follower's families. This has spread over to friends and family where new members could grow and raise more havoc(Schwartz, 2001).

There are many ways that a recruiter can offer people membership to their cults. They offer friendship for ones that are lonely or outcasted. They strike when the loneliness of people are most obivious to others. Giving out food and lodging among loving, caring people often pull in thoses that are lonely to the indoctrination camps of cults. Those that seek spiritual answers to life's questions, they are persuaded by the recruiter who give them simple passages from the bible. Even though some of those passages are often twisted to their liking. They use this to confuse them and lure them to their camps for "further explaination". These "guides" are trained to use religious phrases to like "Praise God", "Thank You Jesus" repeatedly to show "sincere" devotion to God(Fleming, 1980).

All of these "tatics" to control others is known as brainwashing. Thier first step is remove the victim's idenity and then subject the person to outrageous social and physicall pressure and stress. Often most brainwashing is found in prisons or mental insitutions. Then the person becomes isolated from social support. After that they become questioned to the point of exhaustion and are humiliated or discomforted by being bound at all times, during their meals or elimination. If they survive, the prisoner is then rewarded for their cooperation. Cooperation involves confessing their crimes in their former life(Kasschau, 2003)

The cults have demands for their new members. They must work 14-20 hour days with only 5 hours of sleeping. They must set impossible goals for witnessing or litnessing(selling cult literature) both numerical and monetary. Frequent fasting or intensive severe dieting during the work days. Separation of marriage between men and women, but can be permitted by leader's approval. Removal of all privacy with many restrictions on being alone.