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The person who is responding to who-ever-it-is, is JW, who is Joe, not Jim. Btw, what's your point about this exchange and what makes it interesting to you?
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Because the premie troll is very supportive of Dettmers as a person who really has the inside story because his first posting is apparently somewhat less than forthcoming. He goes on to criticise ex-premies for their slanderous lies about Rawat and claims that "Jim" (x#%*! calls him Jim and so I assumed ... ) will never put Dettmers' posts up on "your site" because they are supportive of Rawat. In retrospect we know that Dettmers told more dirt than anyone else so to me this small bit of premie / ex-premie dialogue is a paradigmatic piece of evidence that shows where the credibility in this dialogue resides and it's funny ...
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Hi Ocker, I thought you might need a little help in your "research" so I'm posting this attachment. Hilltop
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Thanks but my "research" is more about the little quirks and byways in this dangerous cult / New Religious Movement great divide. We Barkerians are like that, barking mad and not all that serious.
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Hi Ocker, It's OK... You can have the little quirks and byways about this dangerous cult. I mean that in a good way, I think. You posted something about Joe, one of my all time favorite posters here that makes me wonder as to Why? I think you have some Ex-plaining! I hope you find the time to learn a little respect. IMHO. Here is but one Ex-ample of Joe's willingness to help me and other's... Make some real sense out of Prem Rawat's words within the quotes (that I once posted a while back). Hilltop
Modified by Hilltop at Sat, Jun 24, 2006, 01:57:02
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It is not in my dictionary, but I think I know, though I guess I am one of the few. Andries
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I veer more to the viewpoint of Eileen Barker than Margaret Singer when it comes to explaining cult / New Religious Movement involvement. Therefore I am in something of a minority on this Forum.
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I veer more to the viewpoint of Eileen Barker than Margaret Singer when it comes to explaining cult / New Religious Movement involvement. Therefore I am in something of a minority on this Forum. Well, that explains a lot about your POV, thanks for mentioning that. Important to note (for those readers who don't know) about Eileen Barker is that she isn't a practicing psychologist, she's a sociologist of new religious movements, and that puts her more in the position of observer, as opposed to Margaret Singer, who practiced a whole different field of study, practiced clinical counseling with at least 300 ex-cult members, in addition to her other work surrounding cults and high-demand groups. They practiced quite different disciplines. Also, as far as I know, Singer never accepted funding from any cults/NRMs for her research, but it's reported that Barker has accepted money, which places a big question mark on her papers/books and the objectivity thereof. She's also known by some in the field of the sociology of NRMs and anti-cult folks as an apologist, but I'm sure you already know that, Ocker. Another main feature of Barker's POV is that she doesn't believe in mind control, a/k/a brainwashing in cults, which places here in total opposition to Margaret Singer's POV. The other very telling difference about the two is that cult members tend to "like" Barker, but they "hated" Singer (now deceased). She kept a shotgun in her house to ward off intruders and she also got a lot of hate mail and personal threats by cult members. She counseled Jonestown survivors. There's no question that Singer was polemic in her views and didn't mince words about her opinions of cults and their leaders. With regard to Dettmers's emergence on the ex-premie forums and his subsequent posts, there were a few people like myself and Joe (can't remember others at the moment) who remained skeptical about what Dettmers had to say, and even I complained that other exes were being too sycophantic with him, due to his former status in Rawat World. The exchange you posted between the premie and Joe sounds more to me like Joe being more annoyed with an anonymous poster, than a denial of Dettmers's statements. By that time, we had had so many disruptive premies on board (some were really obnoxious to say the least), and sometimes a knee-jerk reaction by one of us was to tell them to piss off. In that forum format, registration to post wasn't required so there wasn't any protection from disurpters. The type of pre-screening done here before posting makes for a much safer atmosphere for posting on an ex-premie forum. Cynthia
Modified by Cynthia at Sat, Jun 24, 2006, 06:34:49
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Well, that explains a lot about your POV, thanks for mentioning that.
Yes, it does indeed. I'd say Ocker is in the unique position of believing one thesis whilst having been on the receiving end of treatment which would indicate that the other is likely to be more accurate. I'd like to know at which point up the pyramid which has Rawat as its apex, the 'normal' premie, just minding his business, pruning his roses, morphs into the super paranoid litigious cultoid who frightens ex members into uneccessarily signing incriminating legal documents.
.....I complained that other exes were being too sycophantic with him, due to his former status in Rawat World.
I hurled a few at him too. His revelations appeared shortly after I'd exed, & I was still in outrage mode about the whole thing. Jim did a good job in persuading him to open up the way he did, but it's a pity he couldn't say more due to the confidentiality agreements..........more evidence if any were needed, that Singer had the right angle.
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Well PatD, that's one of the things I'd like to know too. But I'm not likely to find out I'm afraid. But to me it's more complex than the simple divide between Barkerianism and Singerianism. As you're a far more recent ex that I am maybe you can give your personal views on where the divide is on the apex or whether there is a divide like that in a premie such as you were or the premies you knew and liked / loved for 30 years.
I would say that Dettmers bio gives far more credence to a Barkerian viewpoint in at least some ways. Here is the ultimate cultoid, the right hand man to the LOTU himself but he doesn't come across as a brainwashed zombie and he finally leaves Rawatism and eventually comes clean on what the Master is really like up close and personal.
And don't get me wrong, I don't see EV or Rawat as a wonderful, positive influence in peoples' lives. I just don't see it as bad as is sometimes painted by "apostates". I am both cheered by the premie understanding of the personal characteristics required to be a honcho and depressed y their apparent inability to care much for truth.
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As you're a far more recent ex that I am maybe you can give your
personal views on where the divide is on the apex or whether there is a
divide like that in a premie such as you were or the premies you knew
and liked / loved for 30 years.
Actually, that is more difficult to answer than you might expect. I went to live abroad in 1985 & didn't know any premies there, then when we returned to England in 1995 it was to a town where we didn't know anyone either, & I never bothered trying to find out if there were any premies in the area, because of a reluctance to commit myself to a couple of evenings a week at a video show, at a time when our children were very young. I suspected that my non-premie wife might object, although she didn't mind at all if I took off a couple of times a year to see Rawat at events.
However, one time I visited old haunts I bumped into a premie I used to know in the street & we went for a drink. It turned out she had left some years earlier. I listened to her reasons & just felt slightly sorry for her as they were all to do with her personal psychology. Those were pre internet days so she was no more informed about the real Rawat than anyone else outside the inner circle. I certainly didn't dream of shunning her & she seemed to still be friends with other individuals who remained premies, though by no means all. When I mentioned meeting her to the person I was staying with, he told me she had caused severe disruption in the local community whilst in the process of leaving, & that someone had come from London to deal with it. That was Peter Lee, onetime driver to the guru, lifer & EV honcho. He told my friend, apparently, that if people were impeding the master's work & wouldn't stop, in the end the only thing you could do was kill them. I remember being appalled when I heard that, & thinking that the man must be a lunatic.
A few years later when I had left myself & was in the process of deconstructing the whole trip, I brought it up again. My friend, who to my amazement was still a premie despite all the evidence, said he couldn't recall ever having told me any such thing about Peter Lee.....go figure, as the Americans say.
I would say from anecdotal evidence that the Singer type cult mentality is prevalent in those whose social life is almost exclusively amongst other premies, & probably not much now with those who treat it as a private belief. Unfortunately there are not many of those left.
As for the org, there has been a huge shakeout of personnel over the last decade, & I think it would be a fair guess to assume that anyone still involved at whatever level is likely to be intransigent in the face of criticism of the Lotu.
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Hi Cynthia,
That's a very good, clear and concise exposition of the differences in their views, albeit from a diehard Singerian. I wish you had given a little more detail about her "reported acceptance" of money from undefined sources as that's the sort of ad hominem attack we expect from Elan Vital. Anyone reading her work would see that if she has been paid off then they wasted their money.
The exchange I posted was done before Dettmers had blown the lid, while he was still being coy, that was the point.
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I don't pretend to be objective about this subject, but I wouldn't call myself a "diehard Singerian." Since I left the cult, I'm not much of an diehard anything-arian because I try to keep learning as I go. Strangely, the One Reality website lists what they call "Cynthia's Characteristics of a Cult" but it isn't anything that I wrote. What the idiot-owner of OR has listed there is in fact Singer's work which I fully credited to her, in a post of mine they pulled off the forum long ago. Maybe the premie/webmaster of OR never bothered to read the whole post because they were more interested in libelling me than anything else. They do libel well, I'll give them that. I have done a bit of research on these sociologists, though I haven't visited this subject in several months so I might be rusty working from memory here. I posted a lot about the sociologists of NRMs on F8 and it's probably archived, although I don't have the dates. Having said that, I expect researchers like Barker to be objective, but she's firmly in the "no brainwashing/coercive persuasion" camp (CESNUR crowd) and it simply doesn't ring true for me at all. I disagree with her a lot. As for taking money from NRMs and cults, well Hadden, Barker, Melton, Introvigne, et al, which is a particular faction connected with CESNUR, have been taking NRM funding for years and may even have colluded together with the Moonies (specifically) and other groups to discredit Singer/Ofshe as sort of fringe-type researchers. I think their goal was to knock Singer off of the pedestal as the cult expert and they definitely were spinning the anti-brainwashing thing at the time. Maybe she was too strident for them, I don't know. But, their documents got leaked and they got exposed. Slimey critters. It's a convoluted story and I can't just provide you with one link to explain it all and I not just pulling this shit out of the air here making ad hominem attacks on these so-called academics. It takes considerable reading and piecing together of their antics to make sense of it all. Basically, I think Barker, et al, are on the take and are a bunch of self-serving creeps. They absolutely don't help former cult members, and I realize it's not their job to do thatt, but their particular agenda seems to be pro-NRM/cult and based on what I've read, by them and about them, I just don't trust the lot. Melton is positively shameless when taking money for cults. He went to Tokyo to defend the sarin-gas attack cult "Aum" on their dime, and Barker got a thumbs up from the Moonies who promoted her book. Same for Melton -- the Children of God (the notorious child abusing cult) promoted his writings about them on their website(!), and the Scientologists cherry-picked Melton as a court expert witness in at least one of their litigation cases, and also recommends him as an authority on NRMs through their website "Cult Awareness Network" or CAN, which as you know, prior to the Scientologists buying (litigating) CAN out, was a legitimate, informational cult-awareness website that educated the public about destructive cults. These things are not a good indicator for these so-called scholars. So it's no mystery to me why cults pick the scholars they like (the non-critical ones) and avoid the rest. Of course, cults are going to like the ones they pay for or the others who have a point of view that joining a cult is a legitimate, fully-informed choice. Stands to reason. Unfortunately the people who really lose out are the victims of cults. What else is new?
Modified by Cynthia at Sat, Jun 24, 2006, 22:42:22
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Well I can't disagree about Melton who certainly lost any credibility with his outrageous statements re Aum Shinrikyo but everything I have read by Barker in no way appears to be cult apologetics. Maybe you could point out to me her work you consider to be suspect. I am firmly in the "anti-brainwashing" camp though I can accept the "coercive persuasion" as applying to Elan Vital and DLM. I'll even go so far as to say they lie their heads off with their false claims for the "Knowledge" and the "Master" though I think most premies actually believe their own propaganda so they can hardly be considered part of the deception. My estimates are that more than 90% of people who have ever "Received Knowledge" have left after a short or long term association and if you add the numbers who have come along to a meeting or listened to a broadcast or were told about it by someone they knew then it must be the worst attempt at "brain-washing" or even "coercive persuasion" that there has ever been.
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Maybe you could point out to me her work you consider to be suspect. I'll try to get to that, but not today because I don't feel like reading her today. Also, I'm thinking of a piece by Barker that was particularly suspect, and I disagreed with her a lot, but I can't find it right now. Melton and Barker are big fishes in a small pond. They influence people and I expect them to be academics who have a modicum of integrity. My estimates are that more than 90% of people who have ever "Received Knowledge" have left after a short or long term association and if you add the numbers who have come along to a meeting or listened to a broadcast or were told about it by someone they knew then it must be the worst attempt at "brain-washing" or even "coercive persuasion" that there has ever been. That's an interesting statement and it's true that the majority of people who ever received knowledge have left. I'm not sure what you mean by "left." Lots of premies have walked away, but perhaps have never deconstructed the religious mindf**k. I think that I have a different definition of what "left M" means than you do. Over the years, reading and posting on this forum, and talking to so many ex-premies privately has brought me to the conclusion that indeed, Prem Rawat uses coercive persuasion and mind control. There's no question in my mind about the fact that involvement has hurt many, many people. This is based upon the large number of people who have said themselves, that they felt they had fallen victim/prey to mind control by Rawat, and in our cult, it's particularly easy to see how it was done, and continues to be done, based on the fact that Rawat demonizes the use of one's mind. It's right there in black and white. He preys upon young people -- that's always been his MO. I also don't judge the success or failure of Rawat's cult in numbers. After all, it's not the size of a personality cult that makes it a cult, determines how destructiven it is, or determines the level of mind control and coercive persuasion. Rawat flourished in the 70s with mind control. He built his first wealth upon it. Jim Jones didn't have a huge world-wide following and he was very successful. It was during the time when there was defection happening among the ranks of inner circle people (those who knew how Jones used manipulation and fakery [the fake healings he performed]), along with some real negative press, that brought him to disaster. The people in cult inner circles are complicit with a cult leader, but that doesn't mean there isn't mind control, nor does it mean that those adherents on the upper part of the pyramid aren't themselves brainwashed to a degree. People tend to leave their morals and ethics behind when they get to that state of mind. When one watches the behavior from the top down it's easy to see the mind control and control of information (lying and lying by omission).
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Ocker and Cynthia, Barker has repeatedly expressed her admiration for Melton's work. (Barker 2004) I can also see the merit of Melton's encyclopedic work, though I disagree with his often too sympathetic views on cults, and especially his sweeping generalizations about apostates. (Melton 1998) How can he make such negative sweeping generalizations when at the same time he empasizes the diversity of NRMs? This is a contradictory set of opinions: if NRMs are diverse then naturally their apostates must be diverse too. Look for example at the diversity of the opinions expressed on this forum. Melton should retract and publicly apologize for these statements. I think and hope that Melton learnt a lesson from his blunder regarding Aum Shinrikyo. This blunder was, I believe, symptomatic for his flawed generalizations about cults, persecution of minority religions, and the credibility of apostates. I am firmly in the Barkerian camp too. When assessing claims of brainwashing one should take into account that people quite often mean different things with the term. For example, some people mean with brainwashing that one is strongly influenced by a religious group and not open for evidence of being wrong. In contrast, Singer refers to process of acquiring beliefs and faith in cults, more or less involuntarily and different from what happens in older respected religions e.g. the catholic church. If we use Singer's meaning of brainwashing then I fully agree with Barker's rejection of brainwashing. (Barker 1984, Barker 1988) The case of Sathya Sai Baba confirms some of the worst accusations and generalizations by Singer and others affiliated with the anti-cult movement. In addition, I think that Barker (Barker 1990) unlike Singer (Singer 1979), underestimated the negative effects of leaving cults. I wrote to Barker that the negative effects of leaving are not confined to people who were deprogrammed, though I realize that it is important not to generalize too much from personal experience. However I could provide strong indications that my case is not very exceptional in the case of Sathya Sai Baba. I also have some other (mostly minor) disagreements with her writings. I do not know any other author than Barker whose writings about cults are more balanced. Cynthia, I also want to compliment you with your expressed attitude of not clinging to a certain belief. This is one of the postive, though unintended learning experience I had through the cult. What is learned is the importance of always to stay open for evidence for being wrong and always try to actively understand why other people disagree with you. References - Barker, Eileen The_Making_of_a_Moonie: Choice or brainwashing (1984)
- Barker, Eileen Defection from the Unification Church: Some Statistics and Distinctions, article in the book edited by David G. Bromley Falling from the Faith: The Causes and Consequences of Religious Apostasy. Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, (1988) ISBN 0803931883
- Barker, Eileen New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction (Paperback) Bernan Press (October, 1990) ISBN 0113409273
- Barker, Eileen. What Are We Studying? A Sociological Case for Keeping the 'Nova' , Nova Religio 8 no. 3 (2004) pp. 88-102
- Melton, J. Gordon Finding Enlightenment: Ramtha's School of Ancient Wisdom', Beyond Words Publishing, Inc. Hillsboro Oregon, ISBN 1-885223-61-7 (1998).
- Singer, Margaret Ph. D. Coming Out of the Cults in Psychology Today, January 1979
Modified by Andries at Sun, Jun 25, 2006, 10:42:51
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Melton has written an awful lot and I agree with much of his work. However he is either wilfully ignorant or an astonishingly optimistic in some of his testimony about ISKCON, Aum Shinrikyo and Scientology to the point where it is difficult to believe in his integrity.
Barker may have underestimated the possible negative effects of leaving a cult but this is a very difficult area to study as only the people complaining are the ones that can ordinarily be studied and they do appear to be a minority.
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Barker studied nearly all the members of the Unification Church in the UK. I read some of her data in an article and it is true that the ones who complain were a minority. She found that the ones who were deprogrammed (this was in the 1980s) were more hostile to the Unification Church than those who left outside pressure. I have the impression that the percentage of hostile ex-members of SSB now is higher than those in the UC in the 1980s. I had a discussion with a friend yesterday why it took some people, like us, years to recover and why others left without serious problems. He told me that this was due to three reasons - the intensity of involvement SSB clearly said radical thing, (like saying the name of God 24x7) but only a minority took the radical exhortations of SSB seriously and only a minority had all of their friends in the SSB movement.
- the lack of readily available alternatives upon leaving. This is closely related to nr. 1. I think for example that it helped a lot when people had hobbies, were married etc.
- unsolved intellectual contradictions. Some people experienced miracles for which they cannot find a rational explanation. How on earth can one reconcile this with the allegations of sexual abuse? And if you have the urge to understand then this is really a problem.
Andries
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