The following is an excellent interview of the late Margaret Singer by FACTNet.  In this interview, Singer discusses magical thinking, what magical thinking is, and how cults use it to exploit vulnerable people.  While it doesn't say, I'm assuming this interview was conducted after the Heaven's Gate tragedy.

Exclusive FACTNet Interview With Margaret Singer: Part III

(In this final section, Margaret Singer discusses how people become involved in cults, the mechanisms employed by cults to control their followers, and how society and government could assist families in dealing with this problem.)

How does a person become involved in a cult? The answer is, it is a process. It's not a sudden decision. It's a process. And the process of getting as much control over the conduct and decision-making and the thinking starts right at the beginning pick-up by the cult. The process starts by a deceptive luring. Many citizens think cults "argue" you into joining. Far from it. They deceptively lure. Some of the groups even call it "love-bombing."

Most of it consists of someone approaching another person and inviting them to come to a lecture, to come and visit, to -- in some way -- attend something with the person.

Some of the other groups start by telling about some wonderful experience that they've had, and they are to recruit only people that they already know. So the recruitment can be done in different ways, but it almost always starts out with the deceptive lure, and when people join they have no idea what the bottom line is going to be.

Then, as a person makes a certain commitment to go to the group, and they either move in, or they start buying the courses, or they start attending the meetings, then comes this process of socialization in which the newcomer sees that the other people use special words and jargon, and he or she starts imitating the language and the conduct of the group so that they don't feel like an outsider, and the cults then start rewarding them for moving toward what is cult-approved behavior, and they punish them for displaying behavior that the cult disapproves of.

Most of the cults have ways in which they manipulate experiences, to show the people proof that they have something magical to offer. The meditation groups, for example, often have people close their eyes and hyperventilate a little bit before they start to meditate, in order to get what everyone knows is going to happen: a little bit of a tingle around the mouth and in the fingers and toes. If you over breathe for, say, a minute and a half, the normal thing that happens is that you get a little tingling around your mouth and your fingers tingle a little bit.

Well, many people either don't know that or they've forgotten it from high school or college physiology, and then the cult interprets that, saying, "Oh! If you are feeling a little tingling here and there, that means you have an open mind." They use all kinds of flattery.

So, a step at a time you get flattered into obeying, and you get punished socially and psychologically for not obeying. And then there are lots of gimmicks used to move you along the pathway, a step at a time, to becoming more and more obedient and more and more dependent on the person.

The operative notions are three words: create dependency, create fear, create guilt, in order to bind the people to the group.

Dependency is achieved by having lectures about how you must not be around lesser beings, people who are not as far advanced as you are, and they also usually say, "Don't have contact with your family," and so on. "We are the new family, we are the enlightened," whatever.

But they start isolating the person, and getting you dependent on them. Then you either give your money, or you make huge tithings to the group, or you buy expensive courses from them to become more dependent on them. Then there are lectures saying that if you leave, you will -- you know -- drop dead, get cancer, get hit by a bus. And they also make you guilty that if you leave, these same dreadful things will happen to your family. Even though they tell you that your family is terrible, people still, inside, remember all those years when they had family.

So pretty soon, you're very dependent on the group, fearful, and guilty that you even think of criticizing or leaving the group. Then an indoctrination program is put into place one step at a time, and the process is that Do -- of the current Heaven's Gate cult, or Bo Peepers as they used to call themselves -- realizes that he has cancer and decides it is a propitious time since people are hearing on the late-night radio shows that there is a UFO following in the trail of the Hale-Bopp comet, and these things build up a momentum.

There is a kind of magical thinking that you see in so many cults -- magical thinking such as saying that the lunar eclipse, the UFO in the tail of the comet, the fact that the Buddha's birthday is coming, that the Christian resurrection and Easter is coming -- all of these things are the kinds of coincidences that the magical thinking that is present in most cults capitalizes on.

Many people have asked me why people put up with this kind of treatment, even in the beginning of their involvement with these groups, what is it that causes a person to be vulnerable to this kind of control and is it something that is unusual, is there a particular type of person who is vulnerable to it, or is it more a matter of the skill of the manipulation.

My answer is: it is the skill of the manipulation, but the manipulators select malleable people. They want bright, normal people. They don't want mean people, they don't want defiant people. They want people who have enough guilt that they can be made to feel more guilty and fearful.

The manipulators are the ones that realize almost all good human beings feel that they have accomplished less than they should have, that maybe they aren't as deserving as someone else. We all have feelings of inadequacy and ever-present human guilt. Master manipulators really know how to capitalize on that.

There are a probably a number of features that might help to predict who is going to be susceptible to these kinds of things and who isn't. One, the circumstances of the moment, when a person is lonely, depressed, in between things, as I discussed earlier. Secondly, if we could rate the person's gullibility, and how willing he or she is to trust other people. And three, if we could get a measure of people's magical thinking, in which they will easily take up nonsensical things.

In other words, could we measure poor logic, poor reality testing, as part of a gullibility. So we the opportunity of the particular moment, they're too gullible, and too willing to believe irrational things -- a high degree of acceptance and use of magical thinking.

It is wise for a person to have a healthy dose of skepticism, because it helps the person make better decisions for themselves. It helps them become much more aware of their responsibilities as a citizen, as a parent, as a spouse, so that being skeptical causes one to look at one's own human responsibilities to the self and others, and not to keep on fantasizing that a good mama and papa are going to come along to feed and rescue us for the rest of our lives.

I keep thinking that there must be a place for government assistance in this whole problem of cults. What always comes to mind for me is that somehow, I have this notion that our government -- you know, we have a Federal Drug Administration, an FDA, and we have other consumer groups and so on, and yet we don't have a government program that teaches and encourages skeptical thinking, critical thinking, and helps us be better citizens.

Finally, I don't know how families can have some help from the government when they come to realize that a family member has gotten involved with an individual or a group that looks as if the person no longer has full, free control over what their decisions are.

I don't know how to implement it, but this thirty years that I've been hearing families talk, they say, "There is no way that I can get in the presence of my son (or my daughter)." You know, "The cult keeps moving them around the country. When I call, they don't give him my message, they must tear up the mail..." And I came to learn that yes, they did censor mail. They did censor phone calls and visitors.

So it is a matter of getting access to family members to help them reconsider. Do they want to stay in the condition they're in? So they can decide.

I sure hope there will be some official government attention to this issue as a result of this tragedy, but I hoped with Jonestown that that might happen. Nothing ever came of any of these tragedies: Jonestown, Solar Temple, Waco, now this one.

It is known in solid social psychology circles -- in those areas of psychology and psychiatry that study influence -- it is known that you can influence people until you really take away from them their ability to make their own decisions.

But the cult apologists have such tremendous financial backing, get up and say, "Oh, it's not true, mind control doesn't exist." And it is mostly based on not understanding what it is and having a bias in favor of letting people keep on getting trapped by these cults.

People just don't get it. They simply don't get it. We could show them one street scam after another -- there are any number of scams that the police can tell us about. But people just blame the victim and say, "Oh, it was because they were stupid. That's why." But it could happen to almost anybody.

Then when they hear about cults, they always say, "Well, he must have chosen it."

They don't get it. One time I had a mother come and tell me about how dangerously beaten up her daughter was getting, and there was no way this woman and her husband could get to the daughter because the abusive husband never let the daughter out alone. They'd go to visit and he wouldn't let them in.

One day, the girl called and said, "Please come and get me. Please come and get me. I want to leave. He's going to kill me."

They go there, and this fellow lets the mother and father in the door, and they've brought along a couple of big cousins to help her get her stuff to leave. The abusive boyfriend grabs her by the hand and says, "Come here, sweetie, sit on my lap." He had such a grip on her hand that she was afraid he was going to break her hand or her wrist, so she sat down without any struggle because -- she told me later -- she knew he would just kill her, she knew he had a gun.

And she said the family looked at her so funny, and they didn't get it. They said, "Well dear, we were going to come and invite you home but I guess you don't want to leave," and they got up and left. And she said the beating she got was unbelievable. I don't know how long it was before she was able, when he wasn't around, to run away and get out on the street and wave down a cop car.

But her parents just didn't get it, even though they had seen the bruises.

I'm a little pessimistic at the moment about the future, because the society is so accepting of magical thinking and quackery, so accepting of any idea at all being as good as scientific thinking. So I think it is kind of a gloomy period right now, unless people wake up and see how controlled people can be, how tricked people can be.

We are all so overcommited, so overbooked just keeping up with life, that we're afraid to take on a civic duty like thinking about cults. It seems to me that the current situation grew out of a kind of unthinking rebellion -- straight from the 1960s -- in which people like Timothy Leary and so on said, "Drop acid, tune in, tune out, drop your acid." Anybody over thirty was horrible, and there was a mass attack on the government, on belief in government, and a tremendous attack on the family.

A tremendous amount of the attack on the family has come from psychiatry -- the Freudian part of psychiatry, in which Freud was saying it was all the parents' fault. Then there was a big surge of parent-bashing that started with John Rosen and some other people in the late forties and early fifties here in the U.S. There is a section in my book, Crazy Therapies [published by Jossey-Bass] called "Rebirthing, Reparenting," which discusses the intensity with which these people want to trash the family.

There was a tremendous impact here in the 1960s with Kennedy's death. We all had such hope that he was going to make things better and that we could organize so that America really could be what we had dreamed it could be at the end of World War II. It was OK to be patriotic, and so on. Then patriotism got put down in the Vietnam War, Tim Leary was saying, "Disobey your parents, disobey the government, drop out, use drugs," and the whole society got busier and busier, feeling they can't possibly raise their kids, keep their jobs, keep the house.

There is a high degree of disillusionment, and a person is susceptible to a cult in moments of extreme disillusionment. You just tip over and go with them, and they have destroyed your sense of reality and sense of attachment. It is literally brain washing. They wash out -- just like Mao Tse-tung wanted to do to old past political affiliations. The cults do that, and then we're in that very anxious state, and we tip over and go along with Do to wait for the flying saucer, or with someone else to get your engrams unscrambled.

Anything is better than that sense of nothingness, meaninglessness. That is the worst. And part of the appeal of these cults is that you're going to be a better person, you're going to make the world a better place if you just join this group. It gives that sense of meaning temporarily, until they realize that this is not It, but by that time they're down in a steamy jungle drinking a cyanide-laced soft drink, or lying with a purple shroud over their face.

The most important thing to understand is that ending up swallowing Flavor-Aid in Guyana or Phenobarbital and vodka in Rancho Santa Fe is the end of a process. It is not a kind of instantaneous, simple event. It is simply the end result of a lengthy process of indoctrination.