A close college friend lost a child and dear friends to the group's suicide death at the hands of the Rev. Jim Jones at Jonestown, Guyana. As a physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, I made the decision to use my knowledge, training, and skill in individual, group, and family therapy to explore and try to help others and myself understand and stand up to destructive, controlling gurus of all kinds…from destructive, exploitive religious cults to violent terror group cults like that of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. It has been a moving and emotional journey.
I wrote
Malignant Pied Pipers: A Psychological Study of Destructive Cult Leaders from Rev. Jim Jones to Osama bin Laden
Bergen’s exclusive and candid interviews with Osama bin Laden captured the evil terror cult leader\’s quiet charisma. I could picture Osama’s lonely childhood desire to connect with his powerful father.
Osama desperately sought strong father-mentor figures after his father’s death. Imagine young Muslim youths flocking to the powerful radical terror cult leader who struck terror in America, the great satan!
On September 11, 2001, the world in which we live was changed forever. The twin towers of the World Trade Center came crashing down, one side of the Pentagon burst into flame, and more than six thousand men, women, and children lost their lives in the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil. As shocking as it was, it had been long in the making: The assault was the most sophisticated and horrifying in a series of operations masterminded by Osama bin Laden and his Jihad group -- an organization that CNN's terrorism analyst Peter Bergen calls Holy War, Inc.…
Charming or seductive cult leaders and their minions reach out to ordinary folks. Person’s in-between—In-between high school and college or a first job, in-between marriages, in-between jobs, after losses of important relationships. Cult groups barrage the potential new member with attention and love-bombing affection.
They offer lively music, fun and interesting talks, and activities. Forget your old family—here is a new, vibrant family of affection.
Over the past two decades, in the United States alone, an estimated twenty million people have joined cults. Today, 3000 to 5000 cults are working to recruit new members and at any point in time, two-and-a-half to three million Americans are active cult members. Often a cult is disguised as a legitimate business or organization: a restaurant, self-help group, psychotherapy clinic, or leadership training program could be a front for the cult. Anyone - no matter what age or income level - could be susceptible to the covert and seductive nature of a cult. Singer's book reveals what cults are…
Hofer, in simple, direct description, leads me to understand the way the soul of a religious or political fanatic is born. Once captured, the “True Believer” grabs the stunning power to seduce, entrap, and dominate other people to the cause.
Hofer’s knowledge of a fanatic’s power can be a power to resist fanaticism and its gurus.
“Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” —New Yorker
The famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” (Wall Street Journal) by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman.
A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.
I am impressed with Stern’s courage and interview skills. She goes to where radical Islamist killers are born and raised—such as Pakistan. Madrassa schools recruit whole families in their promotion of violent jihad as a way of life and commitment. Youths will dedicate their lives, even die, for what they perceive as worthy causes.
Stern exposes the powerful tools by which ordinary people come to kill in God’s name with a sense of quiet conviction.
For four years, Jessica Stern interviewed extremist members of three religions around the world: Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Traveling extensively-to refugee camps in Lebanon, to religious schools in Pakistan, to prisons in Amman, Asqelon, and Pensacola-she discovered that the Islamic jihadi in the mountains of Pakistan and the Christian fundamentalist bomber in Oklahoma have much in common. Based on her vast research, Stern lucidly explains how terrorist organizations are formed by opportunistic leaders who-using religion as both motivation and justification-recruit the disenfranchised. She depicts how moral fervor is transformed into sophisticated organizations that strive for money, power, and attention. Jessica…
We humans, for all our accomplishments in science, art, engineering, architecture, and literature, are haunted psychologically by the stark awareness of the reality that we all die. The various individual, group, and collective unconscious ways of trying to deny the reality of death are legion.
Becker stunned me with the way he organized a penetrating discussion of how many domains the effort to deny the reality of death enters. In the process of exploring these roads of travel to deny death, I found myself searching my own efforts to get meaning in my own life and try to prepare for my death.
Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life's work,The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker's brilliant and impassioned answer to the "why" of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie -- man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing.
How does a charismatic/messianic person like Jim Jones or Osama bin Laden rise up from relative obscurity to the international media stage as a destructive cult leader? What enables these Malignant Pied Pipers to play the role of idealized, worshipped parental figures for their victimized, coauthoring minions or violent followers?
Destructive cult leaders all experienced painful, life-altering disappointments in their parents that occurred through neglect, abandonment, shame, severe disappointment, or humiliation. Malignant Pied Pipers develop a relentless quest to become strong parents or father/mother figures for themselves. This search, of course, requires a ready supply of child-like admirers who are found in cult followers or terror group members. They give psychological birth to followers through an array of sophisticated and powerful indoctrination and seduction techniques.
