dealing with cults a few thoughts in the wake of the waco denouement i had email discussions with people from this group in particular we discussed how cults operate why the fbi might be motivated to black out news or behave the way it did and what kinds of problems are involved in dealing with cults and similar organizations i include an edited account of what i wrote the identity of my correspondents have i hope been erased the editing process makes the text choppy sorry about that i ve tried to retain the information content ellipses indicate where text was removed a few of the comments in parentheses are new intended to make it easier for outsiders to understand these notes are preliminary feel free to criticize cheers oded begin included text i took a course called the madness of crowds the course included cults and briefly mentioned analyzed jonestown did some external reading too william adorno edited a series of books on the psychology of evil mass movements starting with the authoritarian personality university of chicago press an attempt to figure out what would motivate people to support fascism or be the bad guys in wwii and by extension in other wars in racial lynchings i don t think the books are perfect and the study of psychopathology has advanced but you can elicit koresh types from even the first volume so i think they re onto something how cult psychology works i m an amateur hope i m not hopelessly naive so long as koresh could own his people he made sure they didn t believe there was any life out there for them away from him otherwise he d koresh be nothing during the siege ex davidians recounted how he convinced the people in the compound they survived only through his intercession with god to spare their worthless souls absolutely classic brainwashing technique as long as they believed him they d ignore batf fbi child protective services or even the red cross asking them to come out after all if they ever left him god would catapult them straight to hell and the combined forces of the us gummint with all the goodwill in the world doubtful couldn t save them for a second if i believed it i d stay and die too like the folks in jonestown for a prosaic analogy replace a cult leader with an estranged wife or husband and notice how many folks show up kill the ex and then themselves that s the consequence of shattered cultism it really does happen all the time by the way the treasured ideal in such cases without which life is meaningless is the relationship no matter how abusive rather than the individual s partner why no news don t the feds owe the world an explanation i agree that official explanations are in order i can also see good reasons for news blackouts the only fact available is that had the fbi not acted yesterday those people would be alive today that no matter what those people would have died because koresh made sure they believed they had no lives outside his influence hence it would make little difference when or how the fbi acted he held them hostage as his trump against going to jail but nothing would really stop him from offing them even if the fbi went away look at history rep leo ryan and some staffers visited jonestown at the request of constituents who had relatives there once jonestown was discovered and even though they killed ryan and his entourage they all killed themselves because jim jones knew he d be busted internal arguments asking to spare the children brought up by some of the women in the cult were shouted down there are tapes the logic of saying that no matter how bad the gummint is it wouldn t kill the kids was shouted down as blasphemy and the people who brought it up were threatened with ostracism by people who by their own avowal would be dead within the hour i suspect it s the same with the branch davidians there s a book on jonestown by james reston jr titled our father who art in hell i don t know whether it s good never read it the only way to prevent such a problem would be never to investigate reports of child abuse or sexual mistreatment or organizations buying full auto conversion kits or shipping hand grenades via ups on the off chance of stumbling across cults that would kill themselves so the only way the batf fbi could save those people and future cults is by ignoring such signs i suppose there s another way outsmarting koresh and tricking him into letting them go or somehow influencing his people to abandon him while he owns most of their means of communication with the world a mighty tough row to hoe i suspect the fbi tried to do that with blackouts noise and other sensory insults however maybe they re not very sophisticated or maybe the job is impossible it s certainly possible the guy running the show was a jerk why the fbi might want to blackout during and coverup after if they were doing a poor job of weaning the bd s from koresh they d want to keep it quiet so they wouldn t be embarrassed if they were trying to wean the bd s from koresh they d want to keep it quiet so he couldn t outflank them or well meaning boneheads from any point of view wouldn t screw it up i hate playing chess when the world screams in my face especially if at checkmate time people really die and i could be blamed i don t think ignoring such incidents is a workable policy unless you deny the fbi batf child protective services of whatever stripe and the rest of the gummint should exist at all the end okay have at it
