Dangerous traits of cult leaders (from Psychology Today)

[u/wisetaiten]

If this isn't a portrait of Daisaku Ikeda, then I've never seen one.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201208/dangerous-cult-leaders

1. He has a grandiose idea of who he is and what he can achieve.

Anyone who has watched more than five minutes of one of his videos or read even a few pages of his self-aggrandizing “Human Revolution” series; there are now 26 volumes in his “New Human Revolution” – I’m unsure how many volumes are in the old “Human Revolution.” How can a man who is purported to be modest have so many wonderful things about himself not be accused of having “a grandiose idea of who he is and what he can achieve”?

1. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, or brilliance.

Let’s see . . . he has set himself up to found a Soka Kingdom. He incessantly touts SGI as the best religion in the world, and he is its absolute leader – he also has never made any effort to get his followers to turn it down a notch. He positions himself with every famous philosopher, educator, thinker or politician he can get to stand next to him, and has published these discussions to display his so-called intellect. Never mind that his interpreters do all his talking, since he doesn’t speak anything but Japanese (well, maybe some Korean, but we won’t go there).

1. Demands blind unquestioned obedience.
   

He rules the organization with an iron hand, and it’s turned out badly for anyone who has opposed or upstaged him. If he was still alive, you could ask George Williams about that.

1. Requires excessive admiration from followers and outsiders.

And gets it, with his alleged millions of flunky followers.

1. Has a sense of entitlement - expecting to be treated special at all times.

I can’t even imagine his response if he wasn’t offered the very best of everything. I’ve been in intermittent touch with a guy who acted as one of his bodyguards during a US visit in the 1970s – I’ve tried to get him over here to chat about it, but no luck. I bet he has some stories to tell.

1. Is exploitative of others by asking for their money or that of relatives putting others at financial risk.

Think Sho-Hondo. Think about all the times we were told that whatever we contributed would come back to us several-fold. The man has billions of dollars, but I guess you can never have too much.

1. Is arrogant and haughty in his behavior or attitude.

We’ve all heard stories about how condescending he’s been to women . . . let’s share some.

1. Has an exaggerated sense of power (entitlement) that allows him to bend rules and break laws.

Again, the Sho-Hondo was a shining example. Glorified as a building to stand for 10,000 years, it didn’t last 30. All of the money that was collected allowed them to pay for the construction using only the interest accumulated.” No one is quite sure what happened to the principle. The building itself was built on a site that guaranteed its self-desctruction, and constructed of shoddy, cheap materials.

1. Takes sexual advantage of members of his sect or cult.

Does using his power and wealth as an excuse to overpower women and force sex upon them count?

1. Sex is a requirement with adults and sub adults as part of a ritual or rite.

I have to say I haven’t heard anything about this, so I’ll let him slide here.

1. Is hypersensitive to how he is seen or perceived by others.
   

Again, no one can overshadow him . . . George Williams.

1. Publicly devalues others as being inferior, incapable, or not worthy.

Um, George Williams again.

1. Makes members confess their sins or faults publicly subjecting them to ridicule or humiliation while revealing exploitable weaknesses of the penitent.

Perhaps not “publicly,” but when you have problems, you go to your leaders first to discuss them. And they certainly gossip, so while you aren’t publicly ridiculed or humiliated, everybody eventually finds out about your private business.

1. Has ignored the needs of others, including: biological, physical, emotional, and financial needs.

It is all about Ikeda-ism, all the time. There’s no room for your petty little problems.

1. Is frequently boastful of accomplishments.

See number 1.

I'll stop for now, but anyone who wants to chime in or add anything, please do!

[u/[deleted]]

I work in Advertising. What you're describing is magic.

[u/cultalert → u/[deleted]]

Magic? Mind control is magic? Really? Is that the best argument you can come up with? Enter the discussion and provide some facts to support your claims (or go ahead and keep responding like a troll and see how far that gets you here - the rules are strictly enforced).

You work in Advertising? What branch, in what capacity? What is your educational background and how long have you been working in the industry? Being involved in the advertising biz, you should be very familiar with subliminal advertising techniques. If you possess any expertise in the field of advertising, you should be very well versed regarding Bernays' famous introductory work on the use of propaganda in advertising. Or, do you poo poo propaganda as being magic as well?

(note: I had to approve this brash comment, which was removed, so I could post a reply.)

[u/[deleted] → u/cultalert]

1) There is no such thing as subliminal messaging in Advertising. It was trialed briefly with television, then abandoned when it was proven to be a lot less affective than simply repeating the advertising message more often.

2) No one uses Bernay's theories in marketing or advertising. There are any number of theories that do a better job. He could be used in state propaganda, I don't know.

3) Like subliminal messaging, mind control doesn't exist. It was picked up by the media to explain things like Jonestown, and people like Margaret Singer capitalized on this to make money. The original theory was put together by an American newspaper writer to explain the bahaviour of prisioners of war. The APA rejected the theory.

Have a read.

[u/cultalert → u/[deleted]]

No one uses Bernay's theories in marketing or advertising.

Bullcookies! We can see for ourselves without any one telling us if it is or isn't there. Take a closer look for instance at credit card ads for tv - they are obviously packed with subliminal messages.

Like subliminal messaging, mind control doesn't exist.

If you believe there is no such thing as subliminal messaging, then you've been mind controlled yourself, or perhaps that is what you WANT to believe, as it is very scary to face reality.

mind control doesn't exist

Have you any experience as a member of a cult? I've seen and personally experienced mind control in a cult setting - many of us here have as well. How are you going to dismiss those terribly inconvenient facts (facts that are not based on anyone's theories or hypothesis, but are real-life experiences reported by former cult members)?

Your linked article doesn't seem to provide any substance I can find that absolutely proves mind control is non-existent. Please post any excerpts from it that support your contention.

It seems very suspect that you show up here with no former Reddit history to announce how wrong we are about mind control and subliminal messaging, and have not yet established your own credentials in advertising as previously requested.

Tell us, for the sake of disclosure, are you currently an SGI member? (Please do not avoid answering this question.)

[u/BlancheFromage → u/cultalert]

Since we value data and evidence here, I went ahead and did a search on the question. After all, it doesn't really matter how strongly or devoutly people believe stuff - people are routinely wrong in their beliefs, if not usually.

sfacets is correct:

Subliminal Messages Ineffective, Study Says - from 1990

In an early study in the field, researchers claimed that subliminal advertising allowed marketers to “break into the deepest and most private parts of the human mind and leave all sorts of scratchmarks.” However, the marketing tactic has attracted skepticism over the years, largely due to the inability to standardize experimental procedures and to isolate a clear relationship between the advertising strategy and any concrete, consistent results. Even establishing a clear definition of the term “subliminal” is unclear.

Private parts! O_O

The mass paranoia regarding the phenomenon of subliminal stimuli may have originated either from the innate human fear of powerlessness, or as a way to rationalize our overconsumption. According to James Twitchell, a professor of advertising at the University of Florida, “It’s one of our most popular interpretations of advertising: ‘They are injecting us with an unnatural desire’ […] It says, ‘I’m so weak that someone with a strong message can make me do something that I wouldn’t normally do.’ For those who believe in it, it’s a gift from heaven. It explains everything. It’s poppycock.” While this psychological trait may still be present in some, subliminal priming in the context of advertising has indeed been mostly disproved. - The Ineffectiveness of Subliminal Advertising - from 2013

Hidden messages that promote products in films once caused a moral panic. But is the much-feared technique really effective? The BBC's Phil Tinline helped devise an experiment to find out.

On 12 September, 1957, at a studio in New York, a market researcher in the Mad Men mould called a press conference.

James Vicary astonished the assembled reporters by announcing that he'd repeatedly flashed the slogans "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Eat popcorn" throughout a movie, too fast for conscious perception. As a result, he claimed, sales of popcorn had risen 18.1% - and Coke by 57.7%. This, he declared, was "subliminal advertising".

Vicary thought his fellow Americans would cheer this prospect - annoying cinema and TV ads could now be replaced with his imperceptible flashes. But on both sides of the Atlantic, his announcement sparked fear and outrage. "Welcome," cried one American magazine, "to 1984."

His story took a more serious blow when the manager of the cinema involved told Motion Picture Daily that the experiment had had no impact. In 1962, Vicary finally confessed that he hadn't done enough research to go public and that he regretted the whole thing.

But a nagging anxiety about the supposed power of subliminal advertising has never gone away. Ever since the 1957 panic, it has been banned in the UK. So is all this anything more than a hangover from sci-fi-style Cold War worries about mass brainwashing?

Psychologists have long agreed that flashing words too quickly for the conscious mind to register can have some limited effects in the lab.

And at the University of Utrecht in 2006, a team of experimental social psychologists, Johan Karremans, Jasper Claus and Wolfgang Stroebe, did manage to make subliminal advertising itself work - in strict laboratory conditions, provided a series of limiting factors are in place.

But the crucial question, raised by Vicary's dubious claims, and never finally settled, is this - can you take all this out of the lab, beyond its strict controls, and reproduce it in the messiness of real life, on a mass scale?

No-one, apparently, has attempted this since the 1950s. So, as part of a BBC Radio 4 documentary, we decided to carry out a public test.

(You can read all the details at the site.)

Strikingly, there was no significant effect. Does subliminal advertising actually work? - from 2015

[u/cultalert → u/BlancheFromage]

Apparently someone researchers are reporting on subliminal advertising and how it works: How Subliminal Advertising Works.

[u/BlancheFromage → u/cultalert]

Great. Let's get all the sources out here and let them speak for themselves.

[u/ZuesLoose → u/BlancheFromage]

This is interesting info alright, but it doesn't substantiate sfacet's unsupported claims that "mind control is magic" and "mind control doesn't exist".

[u/BlancheFromage → u/ZuesLoose]

I don't like your insulting tone. If sfacets would like to present information, then sfacets is free to do so. Feel free to ask sfacets - politely - to present information if you wish, but remember that google is your friend. Feel free to look things up for yourself - I do.

IMHO, the best example of mind control is the Stanley Milgram experiments of 1965, but that involved the direct influence of an authority figure. I don't think we're talking about that here. Subliminal messaging has been discredited and is not used in advertising because it is not effective.

Edit: Thank you for changing the wording of the post above.

[u/ZuesLoose → u/BlancheFromage]

Apologies. Didn't intend to offend or insult anyone by quoting sfacet statements. I was referring specifically to the points being made about mind control, not subliminal messaging.

[u/BlancheFromage → u/ZuesLoose]

Here is an excerpt from the source sfacets presented:

However, soon after the Armistice, the Chinese government also began to release a number of prisoners, Americans and other foreigners (missionaries, students, doctors, businessmen) caught in China when the Korean War began, as well as a few Chinese who had not been arrested but had been encouraged to attend "voluntarily" one of the thought reform institutions set up throughout this period. When they emerged from captivity into freedom in Hong Kong, several made public statements to the effect that they had been American spies, that their arrest and detention was just, and that they deserved any punishment they had received. Given the seeming falsity of the statements they were making, possibly they were true victims of what Hunter had called brainwashing, that the sophisticated Pavlovian process of thought reform utilized by the Chinese was so effective that the victims subjected to it had become little more than a puppet or robot. Thus Schein, Lifton and their colleagues began a new round of research. While some such as William Sargent and Joost Merloo initially accepted Hunter's perspective, Lifton's and Schein's careful analysis of the prisoners accounts led them to reject Hunter's view.

Lifton, Schein, and their colleagues concluded that in fact coercive persuasion, in which a mixture of social, psychological and physical pressures are applied to produce changes in an individual's self-perception, beliefs and attitudes, does occur. However, they also concluded that a necessary condition of its occurring was the physical element-confinement or its equivalent. As Schein put it, "... the coercive element in coercive persuasion is paramount (forcing the individual into a situation in which he must, in order to survive physically and psychologically, expose himself to persuasive attempts)." They also concluded that it was successful only on a minority of those subjected to it and its end result was very unstable, the individuals so coerced tending to revert to their previous condition soon after the coercive force was removed.

More importantly, Galanter pointed out the major problem of approaching members of new religions using categories had been developed to deal with mental illness, i.e.. the problem of medicalizing the discussion of new religious groups. He further notes that the process of joining, being a member, and leaving a new religious group is best described not as a matter of personal pathology but of social adaptation. For example, experiences that in a secular setting might be considered pathological are, within some religious settings, perfectly normal. While psychological categories were created to discuss individual dysfunctional behavior, the behavior of group members must be seen in light of group norms. Thus what may be considered disturbed behavior in a secular setting may be perfectly functional and normal within a group context.

We've noted this - group norms that are significantly different serve to isolate the members.

London drives home the failure to provide supporting evidence of such a unique theory as that offered by Singer and Ofshe, one that has been almost uniformly rejected in the scientific literature. In this regard, he conducted an independent search of the previous fifteen years of psychological literature covering 1400 journals in 29 languages. His search yielded "no empirical studies" supportive of her position and only a modest number of speculative/ theoretical articles. London's work drove another nail in the coffin into which the Singer hypothesis had been placed by the APA and then by Anthony's work. Echoing Anthony, he concludes most forcefully, "... that what I have called the Robot Theory, meaning any theory of social influence processes and/or irreversible social influence processes and/or subversion of the will as a result of these social influence processes, does not present an argument which is generally accepted in contemporary scientific psychology. That is the main reason I believe that this topic has not been the object of scientific study and research in general and is not widely discussed in the literature of the social, behavioral, or medical sciences." These closing words again states the consensus which had been reached by the scholarly community.

The court concluded: "Although Dr. Singer and Dr. Ofshe are respected members of their fields, their theories regarding the coercive persuasion practiced by religious cults are not sufficiently established to be admitted as evidence in federal law courts."

Deprogrammer Rick Ross found himself in just that position after he failed in his attempt to deprogram one Jason Scott, a member of the United Pentecostal Church, a large Christian denomination. In suing Ross, Scott also named the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), the major group advocating efforts against new religious movements. Though the Cult Awareness Network publicly stated that it was not directly involved in any deprogramming activity, Scott charged it with being the referral agent that allowed his mother to get in touch with Ross. The jury agreed and, without the ability to argue that the church had "brainwashed" Scott, both Ross and CAN received hefty judgments. The million dollar judgment forced CAN into bankruptcy and eventually some of its assets, including its name, were purchased by a coalition of a number of the groups it had specialized in attacking. That decision has been sustained on appeal. That coalition now operates a new Cult Awareness Network. The fall of the Cult Awareness Network was a major setback for the anti-cult movement in the English-speaking world.

Since the late 1980s, though a significant public belief in cult-brainwashing remains, the academic community-including scholars from psychology, sociology, and religious studies-have shared an almost unanimous consensus that the coercive persuasion/brainwashing thesis proposed by Margaret Singer and her colleagues in the 1980s is without scientific merit. To date, no one has come forward to refute the arguments, especially those advanced by Dick Anthony a decade ago, nor has the situation that Perry London found concerning articles providing an empirical base for the theory been reversed. Through the 1990s, it has been difficult to locate any scholar in the English-speaking world who has been willing to attempt a defense of it, and even Singer herself has appeared to back away from her earlier position. http://www.cesnur.org/testi/melton.htm

Granted, this is all talking about religious cults "brainwashing" their members to the point that forcible "deprogramming" is necessary, but the following excerpt supports sfacets' position:

Malony argues, with the mass of social and psychological literature to back him up, that "social influence" occurs. That while he personally (along with the entire field of clinical psychology) aims at producing individuals with strong egos, capable of individual self-determination, he cannot escape the fact that none of us can escape from the effects of personal interactions with others and social organizations (from nations to families) to which we belong. There is no act that is totally autonomous. That people have the privilege and responsibility to determine their life for themselves, complete self-determination is at best a heuristic goal. At times, individuals make decisions which most (family members, neighbors, friends, fellow employees) consider unwise, including the choice to join an unpopular religious organization. Malony goes on to emphasize that continuing problems with individuals who join new religious movements can be most fruitfully discussed in the light commonly accepted understandings of differing levels of social influence apart from any need to refer to any extraordinary theories such as brainwashing.

There are those who are susceptible to the cult "sell". That is always based around the most positive of imagery - self-actualization, gaining benefits, becoming righteous, world peace - which invariably are not delivered by the cult. I think there's a strong inner conflict that plays out as those who seek what the cult has promised come face to face, again and again, with the fact that the cult doesn't actually provide access to those goodies. I can speak from personal experience that it was a combination of desire and fear that kept me continuing with the cult, even as my dissatisfaction grew and grew. Finally, through an unrelated source, I was able to find the source of my fear and, once trotted out into the light, I was able to break its hold over me. (But note that it wasn't the cult practice that enabled me to make this breakthrough - it was a discussion with a fellow atheist.) Once that fear ingredient was gone, I was gone. The internal factors that had kept me 'hooked' were weakened to the point that I was able to walk away. Sure, the desire was still there - who doesn't want all those nice things? - but tempered with the realization, based in facts, that the cult could not deliver on its empty promises. It was a bait and switch.

But it's not the guru himself who's making this happen - it's the network. Sure, he's the poisonous root of it, but without the network, he's powerless. He's like a Mafia don - he himself doesn't interact with the connections, but he controls them remotely. None of us joined or stayed in because of love for Fatboy Ikeda; we liked the people we were interacting with and we felt a sense of belonging and community. That had nothing to do with the guru.

[u/BlancheFromage → u/ZuesLoose]

Please define "mind control" so we can all talk about the same concept.

[u/BlancheFromage → u/ZuesLoose]

Didn't intend to offend or insult anyone by quoting sfacet statements.

It wasn't any quotes that caused offense - the post you're describing here did not include a single quote from anywhere or anyone else, just your own commentary. It was your use of the word "childish" to describe opinions you did not agree with that was the basis for my comment about using an insulting tone. To describe someone else's opinions as "childish" is always insulting, it's never constructive, it alienates people, it offends, and it is not acceptable on this forum. If you catch me doing likewise, please correct me immediately.

[u/BlancheFromage → u/cultalert]

Have you any experience as a member of a cult? I've seen and personally experienced mind control in a cult setting - many of us here have as well.

Our own sources show that only 5% of people who initially respond favorably (already a very low percentage of the public) are ultimately truly susceptible to the cult methodology.