Coercion and control in religious cults

December 24, 2023 1:59 AM

Anke Richter, Cult Trip; Inside the world of coercion and control publishers promotion. Interesting but disturbing book on modern day cults that took 10 years to write. Anke describes herself as a workshop junkie and lover of radical transformation who enjoys the buzz of "quick fix spiritual solutions". Her goal is to decolonize yoga of the frauds and the sex pests who have gravitated to it.
Centrepoint community first section of book.
Agama Yoga second section of book (on Thai island of Koh Phangan)
Glorivale religious community third section of book.

Subtle and damaging ways cults groom people especially children; Cults mould people with love bombing and subtle manipulation through friendship.
Claim authorty to absolute truth, (Agama Yoga claims only its leaders understand the truth).
Steal peoples sense of self, especially children with early indoctrination, for example in Gloriavale people are managed down to the level of what colored clothes people are allowed to wear. Anke makes the comparison with mind control in North Korea.
Recent court cases have ordered the management of Gloriavale to pay "volunteer workers" a living wage but Anke asks the question should the organisation be shut down to prevent further mental and sexual abuse of children ?, maybe the organisation should be dissolved and payouts made to members who have been expelled from the community.
Cults collapse quickly but the trauma for abuse victims goes on for years, many are left financially bereft and are in need of long term counselling.

Interesting back figures in Cult Trip.
Bentinho Massaro claims he can control the weather with his mind, he has a history of extorting money from his followers. Previously on Metafilter

Teal Swan claims to be able to astral travel as an alien and has x-ray vision. The organisation has been implicated in suicides of vulnerable followers.
Metafilter previous commentary

Be Schofield, podcasts and documentaries about contemporary spiritual frauds, she speeded the collapse Agama Yoga by publishing users complaints of sexual abuse on Internet. Her research was the basis for a Netflix series on cults.

Agama Yoga, founded by Gregorian Bivolaru continued by Swammi Narcis Tarcau
MISA (movement for spiritual integration into the absolute) the origin of Agama Yoga movement

Osho International Meditation Resort (OIMR), more $Cashram$ than Ashram ?.
Note I am not self promoting this book I have no relationship to the author or publisher.

posted by Narrative_Historian (11 comments total)

I'll follow the links and read the book. Like many others, I am fascinated by stories about cults, having been in one in the Seventies, which, to my mind, was the Decade of Cults, sucking in people like me whose Sixties dreams seemed to have somehow not come true. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it, even though, objectively, there are more cults in the 21st century than there were back then.

Not only am I fascinated by cults, but I'm fascinated by the tremendous interest in cults these days, an interest that seems curiously adjacent to the public's thirst for True Crime narratives.
posted by kozad at 7:39 AM on December 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

objectively, there are more cults in the 21st century than there were back then.

There’s been an alarming (to me) rise in cult-like thought structures dispersed across the internet, where in some cases none of the participants are physically proximate and yet cult behaviors and control methodologies exist.

Perhaps the most famous example is QAnon (offshoots of which obviously moved into the physical-let’s-all-live-together realm), but also weird tiny niche groups (like the people who still believe they will be rendered multi-billionaires and gods among men because they owned stock in BBBY before it went bankrupt, yes really).

…they have mantras of their own, sacred texts, savior figures, prophets, shibboleths that must be repeated lest they be viewed apostate, the whole nine yards.
posted by aramaic at 8:46 AM on December 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

Seems the Agama video was taken down. Super interesting stuff
posted by yuletide at 8:46 AM on December 24, 2023

I'm one of those people fascinated by cults, though I do sometimes feel guilty about the voyeuristic nature of it and wonder if I'm indulging in less wholesome impulses when I watch every cult documentary I can find.

Recently I've watched two about the Twin Flames Universe (one on Amazon Prime, on on Netflix) and one about the Mother God/Love Has Won cult (on HBO/Max). It does seem like there are more of these small cults now, and in both of these cases they were able to recruit via social media and Zoom sessions and YouTube live streams and the like. In both cases a small number of people did end up living together in the same location but it seems like a larger percentage of their following is/was fully virtual. But that's not to say the virtual victims aren't victims - both cults were also grifts charging people for virtual counseling or healing or whatever, in addition to giving life advice that was absolutely harmful when followed.
posted by misskaz at 9:03 AM on December 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

There's a reason the people in the Osho pictures are wearing red - Osho was more famously known as Bagwan Sri Rajneesh.

Grifters gonna grift.
posted by fiercekitten at 9:05 AM on December 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

METAFILTER: curiously adjacent to the public's thirst for True Crime narratives.
posted by philip-random at 9:18 AM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

The interesting thing about the Mother God/Love cult is that it appears that the leader ended up a victim of her own bullshit. She was very sick and was asking to go to the hospital but, following her word, her little group of live-in followers refused. Now they can continue to make money off the grift without dealing with her tyranny and rage.
posted by LindsayIrene at 9:23 AM on December 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh yeah, it's really tragic. She was drinking herself to death and also consuming enough colloidal silver to turn blue at the end. But any time she showed an inkling of maybe I should go to a "3D" (as they called it) hospital, it didn't happen.

Seeing how they drove around with her corpse wrapped in blankets and Christmas lights for 10+ days, including transporting it across state lines, and ended up not being charged, compared with the poor woman in Ohio who is being charged with desecration of a corpse for miscarrying at home on a toilet made me FURIOUS.
posted by misskaz at 9:36 AM on December 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

I'm fascinated by the tremendous interest in cults these days, an interest that seems curiously adjacent to the public's thirst for True Crime narratives.

I'd say rather it's a Venn diagram overlap.
posted by doctornemo at 5:27 PM on December 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

When our food is unvaried and bland, we may take to fascination with images of culinary delights; much the the same with community, which is not typically lacking in cults, despite whichever flaws they have.
posted by grokus at 9:58 PM on December 24, 2023

I binge watched Shiny Happy People (duggars/gothard), Love Has Won, and The Way Down (shamblin) right before Christmas.

I wasn't expecting to attend church at all, being as how I'm a very lapsed Catholic, but ended up in my childhood Catholic Church on Christmas Eve anyways.

The Nicene Creed hit way different.
posted by Baethan at 6:39 AM on December 26, 2023 [1 favorite]