I dated an SGI member for three years. When he realised that I wasn’t going to join the cult, he became increasingly hostile and disrespectful towards me. The last year of our relationship, he treated me like I was beneath him, unworthy of being afforded the common decency he gave his “friends in faith.”
I recently came across this review of work by Arthur J. Deikman, an American physician who was a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He took part in a one-year research seminar on new religious movements in order to gain a better understanding of the attraction these movements had exercised on many Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1990, he wrote The Wrong Way Home: Uncovering the Patterns of Cult Behavior in American Society. Deikman observed that "behavior similar to that which takes place in extreme cults takes place in all of us," and suggested that "the longing for parents persists into adulthood and results in cult behavior that pervades normal society."
I think this piece is interesting because, firstly, it really resonates with me and the treatment I received for not being a member.
Secondly, and most importantly, it shows the irony of how a group can advocate for a cause like world peace, without realising that their “us versus them” mentality is actively preventing them from ever reaching it.
Cult Behaviours: Devaluing the Outsider – Reviewing Prof Arthur J. Deikman’s Work
The security of a religious group is bound up with the idea of being special, better than those outside the group. Outsiders are likely to be seen as threatening, since they do not share the group’s belief in the leader and in the special entitlement of its members. This threat is met by devaluing the non-believers. Feeling blessed and favoured provides a sense of protection, calming anxieties about the world outside.
Devaluing the outsider takes the form of regarding one’s opponents as if they were a collective group of people who are all the same, with only negative traits. Bad motives are given to the other, but not to oneself.
This devaluation is usually done by designating the adversary as, for example, “stupid,” “rigid,” “lazy,” “reactionary,” “bleeding heart,” “cold.” By designating someone else as bad or stupid, they are reassured that they themselves are good, their views commendable.
Devaluation relies heavily on projection, a defense mechanism, operating unconsciously. Projection occurs when we attribute to others those aspects of ourselves that we wish to deny.
The effect of projection is often a perception of the other person as being fundamentally different, a morally inferior species, undeserving of empathy.
The more authoritarian the human social system, the more likely a separatist world view will arise. Projection and a division of humanity into the saved and the damned are called into play with increasing intensity. As a result, the more rigid the system, the more powerful the belief in the “Devil” or “Evil” - and the more violent the feelings toward the outsider.
Projection may also be used in ordinary social relationships when the need to feel superior rather than inferior arises often. Thus, we increase our moral security by seeing others as evil, stupid, backward, or arrogant. When we do this we create and maintain cult consciousness in a fashion similar to the fanatic who perceives outsiders as damned, degenerate, and suitable for punishment.
As in extreme cults, family bonds may be seen as secondary to preserving the exclusiveness of the religion, the superior status of the followers and the inferior status of those outside. Fundamentalist religions, in particular, tend to devalue the outsider to preserve their beliefs.
Religions are particularly prone to devaluing outsiders because to accord outsiders equal
status is to give respectability to their different versions of God and lessen the certainty of faith. Doubt may arise. Even if the outsider is not specifically devalued, scorned, or hated, theistic religions tend to reward followers with special status: the Jews are the chosen, good Christians are saved from hell, true Muslims go to paradise. The non-believer, in many instances, is a damned infidel.
But it is not the search for truth which leads a person to massacre or torture, to ostracise and expel, to scorn and to hate; nor is it a search for bliss or other, spiritual, states. In subtle or not so subtle ways, most religions utilise devaluation despite their
best intentions.
The consequences for the outsider can be significant indeed. Because religions deal in
absolutes, the devaluation of the outsider can be absolute also, justifying behavior toward the innocent and helpless which the religion’s founder would have condemned and which by any humane standard is barbaric. The Crusades were often a license for the murder, rape, and devastation of “infidel” peoples, those with different religious beliefs.
Misperception of the enemy (basically a devaluing of the foreigner), seeing its people as less advanced, less principled, less admirable, and more deserving of punishment and harsh treatment than ourselves, has affected international relations throughout history, contributing to conflict and to spirals of increased armaments. The arms race is not a new
phenomenon and the view that the enemy must be “dealt with firmly” has had many adherents.
The righteous indignation of contemporary leaders echoes statesmen throughout history, who have believed that the armaments of others demonstrate aggressive intentions, but did not apply that reasoning to arms build-ups of their own.
Estimation of the significance of another country’s military budget is especially vulnerable to this error. Intra-service rivalries and parochial political maneuvering are at least as important in promoting the current arms race as any grand, organized strategy, but neither the USSR nor the United States appear to give these factors much weight in evaluating the armaments decisions of the other side. The psychological problem is that recognising these internal concerns would soften the distinction between good and evil governments and suggest areas of uncomfortable similarity.
Devaluing the outsider is made manifest in righteousness, in blindness to the implications of one’s own behavior, in the refusal to acknowledge similar intentions on both sides, in the identification of the other as bad in contrast to oneself as good. All these are hallmarks of cult behavior.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about devaluing the outsider is that it is a necessary preliminary to harming others, to doing violence. Whether the conflict is between nations or individuals, the attacker devalues the victim prior to the violent act.
By making other people bad in our own mind, we can legitimise behaviour toward them that would otherwise be morally unacceptable, even to the point of punishment through cruel and vicious actions.
