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 THE SECRET OF THE CULTS

    Why do so many thousands of apparently intelligent, seemingly successful people allow themselves to be sucked into myriad cults sprouting today in the widening cracks of the Second Wave system? What accounts for the total control that a Jim Jones was able to exercise over the lives of his followers?"

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     "For lonely people, cults offer, in the beginning, indiscriminate friendship. Says an official of the Unification Church: "If someone's lonely, we talk to them. There are a lot of lonely people walking around." The newcomer is surrounded by people offering friendship and beaming approval. Many of the cults require communal living. So powerfully rewarding is this sudden warmth and attention that cult members are often willing to give up contact with their families and former friends, to donate their life's earnings to the cult, to forego drugs and even sex in return.
     But the cult sells more than community. It also offers much-needed structure. Cults impose tight constraints on behavior. They demand and create enormous discipline through beatings, forced labor, and their own forms of ostracism or imprisonment. Psychiatrist H. A. S. Sukhdeo of the New Jersey School of Medicine, after interviewing survivors of the Jonestown mass suicide and reading the writings or members of the Peoples Temple, concludes: "Our society is so free and permissive, and people have so many options to choose from that they cannot make their own decisions effectively. They want others to make the decision and they will follow."
     A man named Sherwin Harris, whos daughter and ex-wife were among the men and women who followed Jim Jones to death in Guyana, has summed it up in one sentence. "This is an example," Harris said, "of what some Americans will subject themselves to in order to bring some structure into their lives.
     The last vital product marketed by the cults is the "meaning." Each has its own single-minded version of reality - religious, political, or cultural. The cult possesses the sole truth and those living in the outside world who fail to recognize the value of that truth are pictured as either misinformed or Satanic. The message of the cult is drummed into the new member at all-day, all-night sessions. It is preached incessantly, until he or she begins to use its terms of reference, its vocabulary, and - ultimately - its metaphor for existence. The "meaning" delivered by the cult may be absurd to the outsider. But that doesn't matter.
     Indeed, the exact, pinned-down content of the cult message is almost incidental. Its power lies in providing synthesis, in offering an alternative to the fragmented blip culture around us. Once the framework is accepted by the cult recruit, it helps organize much of the chaotic information bombarding him or her from the outside. Whether or not that framework of ideas corresponds to outer reality, it provides a neat set of cubbyholes in which the member can store incoming data. It thereby relives the stress of overload and confusion. It provides not truth, as such, but order, and thus meaning.
     By giving the cult member a sense that reality is meaningful - and that he or she must carry that meaning to outsiders - the cult offers purpose and coherence in a seemingly incoherent world.
     The cult, however, sells community, structure, and meaning at an extremely high price: the mindless surrender of self. For some, no doubt, this is the only alternative to personal disintegration. But for most of us the cult's way our is too costly.
     To make Third Wave civilization both sane and democratic, we need to do more than create new energy supplies or plug in new technology. We need to do more than create community. We need to provide structure and meaning as well. And once again there are simple things we can do to get started."