When a cult gets you, it’s gotcha. You’re hooked. Your life is changed, paradigms shift, and you are no longer the person you were. In that clichéd term, you’re brainwashed, as if cerebral soap has bubbled between your ears. But what has really happened?
I think it’s all to do with a form of hysteria. We don’t like that word. It implies insanity. But in reality hysteria is vital to life and relationships. And it is all to do with the ability of something from ‘outside’ yourself to infect your mind.
Typical is love. Fall in love with someone and your actions can become strange and erratic. Your person has literally been ‘snatched’ by an outside entity. This form of mild hysteria is not properly understood, but existent all the same.
It can become social, thus becoming a form of mass hysteria. Typical is laughter, which is an uncontrolled spasm – a hysterical symptom. Good comedians invoke mass hysteria among thousands every time they tell a good joke.
Extend this process to a relationship between a charismatic guru and a young, intelligent person who is seeking an answer, and the outside ‘entity’ can infect you in no time at all. For the point about love and laughter – cited above – is that they hit a pleasure centre, and you soon feel euphoric and you’re his.
© Anthony North, April 2007
A LITTLE EXTRA
I’ve often wished Oppenheimer, when discussing the Atom Bomb, had said: ‘You can have it any colour as long as it’s black.’ That would have left Ford to say: ‘I am Death; destroyer of worlds.’
(c) Anthony North, Apr 07 – find more Little Extras on the pages of North’s Review.
THE BORING BIT
This is a post from Anthony North’s ‘alternative network.’ Current affairs posts almost daily on North’s Review and Eye on the World (this includes politics and links). North’s Review also has fiction, writers’ resources and TV reviews. For deeper issues, including paranormal, crime, environment and much more, Beyond the Blog is for you.
BEYOND THE BLOG 