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Thread: a greater understanding of cult mind control is needed in the context of domestic radicalization. It's important to be aware of the process by which people are stripped of their individuality and conditioned to think and behave in ways they would not otherwise exhibit.
This is especially relevant to white supremacists, jihadists, violent street gangs and even relatively ordinary people with certain vulnerabilities increasingly exhibiting violence or fear and hatred-based thought/behavioral patterns after absorbing too much televised propaganda.
We don’t normally think of these disparate groups and phenomenons as related to cults but they all share certain characteristics of mind control and mental conditioning that should be better understood by people who study these issues and the public in general.
How many times have we heard of a mass murderer: “he seemed like such a nice, normal guy, we don’t know how this happened?”
Well we should try harder to understand what happened and draw these parallels across ideological lines. I’m reporting on this for my new book and it clearly stands out to me that America has a serious problem with homegrown radicalization resulting from mind control techniques.
Mind control can be described as “a system of influences that significantly disrupts an individual at their very core, at the level of their identity (their values, beliefs, preferences, decisions, behaviors, relationships etc.) creating a new pseudo-identity or personality."
This is a useful explainer of that process: decision-making-confidence.com/mind-control.h…
This problem isn't just with fringe groups. If a person in a position of power says the same false things often enough to people circumstantially inclined to believe them, that is a conditioning process. It changes the human brain. On a large scale, it changes the way we govern.
We’re seeing this time and time again with right-wing domestic terrorism and even jihadism. There are so many parallels to be drawn here, it sometimes astonishes me that they aren't discussed more often.
I really believe people don’t want to look at it too closely because it’s frightening to understand that a seemingly ordinary person with certain vulnerabilities can lose control of their mind to someone else’s ideas and do things they perhaps wouldn’t normally do.
As one expert put it, “People are afraid of the whole concept of cults. It's threatening to their sense of reality and the order of things. Fundamental attribution error says those people are crazy or stupid, and if they don't learn about them, they won't have contagion."
But the mind control/mental conditioning process is something we must look at in regards to this radicalization problem if we want to understand it. That’s what I’m hoping to do with my book but I just wanted to share some thoughts here. Thanks for reading!
