Internatiional Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019 93
The People &the Idiots: Surviving a Cult Childhood
By Daniel Hawes
Reviewed by Joseph Szimhart
Just Write Books: Topsham, ME. 2019. ISBN-
10: 194438622X ISBN-13: 978- 1944386221
(paperback). 202 pages. $21.47 (paperback,
Amazon.com).
Nothing is more telling about an intentional
community than how it treats and teaches
children. In this book, Daniel Hawes describes
in visceral detail his horrifying experience
growing up among the Synergists, led by Johnny
Dolphin Allen. I first started tracking Allen’s
cult in 1975. The People &the Idiots. ..has
given me deeper insight into how pathologically
elitist and inhumane Allen’s teachings were.
We learn from this memoir that verbal and
physical beatings of children (per Hawes, the
“people”) by adults (per Hawes, the “idiots”)
devoted to Allen’s intentional communities,
called Synergias, were so common as to be
expected daily. The model for justifying these
beatings was the leader, John Polk “Johnny
Dolphin” Allen (born in 1929), who used verbal
assault and punching as a useful teaching tool to
bring students into a higher state of awareness.
And that was the goal of Allen’s cult: to create a
“universal human being” (p. 150) by repressing
the lesser ego, or “idiot,” in the body–machine
created by society and evolution.
Allen borrowed and repurposed most of his
ideas from the Fourth Way teachings of G. I.
Gurdjieff (1866–1949), a cult leader of the
Seekers of Truth, which he formed and led early
in the 20th century. Gurdjieff taught that
irrational means, trickery, repetitious bodily
labor, and abuse were necessary to shock the
student into emerging from the “machine” self
into self-remembering. or being acutely self-
aware of action in the moment. The self to be
remembered was a gnostic self, or the divine
spark within—the seed of God, if you will—that
only the elite in society could possibly notice.
To attain this “higher octave” or sustained
gnosis [see
https://www.gurdjieff.org/werbock1.htm], one
needed an already enlightened teacher such as
Gurdjieff. The assumption was that only those
ready for awakening could see the emperor–
guru’s clothes.
If that sounds like crazy circular thinking, it is
and it is exactly how otherwise intelligent and
caring people get caught up in elitist cult circles.
Daniel Hawes had no choice: His misfortune
was to be born to parent–seekers who already
began to submit to Allen’s projects, ideas, and
will. Among other descriptors, the Fourth Way
approach was referred to as the Work and the
way of the Sly Man. The three lesser, slower
ways to enlightenment were the ways of the
mind (yogis), the emotions (monks), and the
body (fakirs). The distinctions between these
ways break down because Fourth Way leaders
seemed to employ all ways. Gurdjieff’s ideas
have had a significant influence throughout
dozens of sects, gurus, and celebrities, including
cult leader Osho/Rajneesh, Zen teacher Alan
Watts, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
This memoir by Daniel Hawes echoes Boyhood
with Gurdjieff, by Fritz Peters (1964), whose
parents were students with Gurdjieff at the cult’s
Prieuré commune in France. Peters was 11 when
he first lived, through his teens, with Gurdjieff
as his cabin boy in France. Gurdjieff devotees
who read Peter’s book may find it revealing
about the master’s foibles, but they also find it
humorous to read how Gurdjieff manipulated
seekers who did not grasp the guru’s intentions.
Gurdjieff believed that tricking the wealthy to
contribute to his cause was ethical because of
the importance of his work. This end-justifies-
the-means tactic tends to run through Fourth
Way cults that use the Way of the Sly Man
terminology, and that includes Allen’s
Synergias.
John Allen was adept at manipulating his
wealthier students, most notably Ed Bass (born
in 1945) who became a Synergist in his twenties.

94 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019
Bass was largely responsible for supplying tens
of millions of dollars to fund the Biosphere 2
project in Arizona, for example, which Allen
cofounded. Hawes mentions his encounters with
Bass while at a Synergia in Australia, where he
saw how Bass cowered around Allen. From
around age 8 through 16, Hawes labored for
meager room and board for the Institute of
Ecotechnics (a ranch) paid for by Ed Bass but
controlled by Allen. Allen was careful not to
overplay his thumb on Bass, who retained most
of the profits from Synergia enterprises. Bass
always dressed and ate well among Synergists
who struggled to live on extremely low wages
($4 a day in the early 1970s, for example). The
impoverishment was by design to help cult
members to better advance themselves and not
be attached to material wealth. Bass was an
exception, no doubt because Allen needed the
Bass money to augment his grandiose schemes.
As for education, Hawes was never taught to
read or do math, but he was forced to learn to
tend to livestock, cook and clean for “idiots”
maintain and drive tractors and ranch equipment.
Influenced by the adults, he began smoking at
age 9 and learned to use foul language. By age
19, despite not being able to read, Hawes, with a
friend, developed a tidy business for a time
reconditioning dysfunctional Land Rovers in
Australia. Hawes was driven to earn money by a
survival instinct and not by cult encouragement.
Allen mimicked Gurdjieff’s style, with a mixture
of social engineering using hypnosis or
influence-communication techniques, acting and
movement classes, theater projects, tedious
lectures, esoteric wisdom, and “necessary” abuse
[e.g., Fritz Peters wrote of Gurdjieff, “It had
been impressive, enlightening and even amusing
to watch him, at close range, when he reduced
people to a pulp, as he had done to Mr. Orage”
(Peters, p. 117)]. Gurdjieff’s tirade against A. R.
Orage most likely occurred because Orage
developed a variant of Fourth Way teaching, not
knowing that this would outrage the master.
Orage (1873–1934) was a promising, talented
literary figure when he encountered Gurdjieff,
who was a young man at the time. The point
here, as we learn in Hawes’s book, was
submission to teachers or elders (“idiots”), no
matter what, and is a feature of the Fourth Way.
When we ask what kind of person is attracted to
a Fourth Way group, Peters, as quoted in The
Harmonious Circle, by James Webb, observed:
They seemed to me to have been
attracted to his teaching for a variety of
not very good reasons—because of
loneliness, or perhaps because they
considered themselves misfits or
outcasts. Most of them had dabbled in
the arts, theosophy, the occult or
something of the sort, and had come to
Gurdjieff as if in search of another
‘cure’ for their life problems. ..(Peters,
as cited in Webb, p. 414)
Hawes’s parents fit that description. His father,
an architect, finally broke with the Synergias
years after his son did. Hawes defected when he
legally could, at age 16, and more so at age 19
after he had returned to a Synergia to work for a
time to try to reconnect with his mother, Lisa.
But she remained detached, having barely any
contact with Hawes, in compliance with Allen’s
teaching that the nuclear family is destructive to
the goal of self-remembering. Lisa to this day is
a true believer.
Despite efforts by Allen in an imploring,
flattering letter asking Hawes to stay, and
warning him that he could lose his soul in a bad
world, the broken teenager remained firm in his
decision made years before he could legally
defect. He was well beyond feeling any
sympathy for Allen and his abusive system.
Devotion had literally been beaten out of him.
Hawes takes us through chores during a typical
week at the Ranch in Australia near Fitzroy
Crossing. It is hard to fathom what he had to
do—a throwback to child labor in the Middle
Ages, perhaps. Cult members would argue that
this was for his spiritual development of
character, and that he learned things he might
never experience at proper schools. The latter
was certainly true. He would be shouted at or hit
for the least lapse in judgement or infraction by
humorless “idiots.” Once he was struck so hard
by his female manager across the side of his
head that he could not hear in that ear for more
than a week. No one took him to see a doctor.