Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991, Page 4
Creating a Pawn
A second characteristic of totalistic environments is mystical manipulation or planned
spontaneity. This is a systematic process through which the leadership can create in cult
members what I call the psychology of the pawn. The process is managed so that it appears
to arise spontaneously to its objects it rarely feels like manipulation. Religious techniques
such as fasting, chanting, and limited sleep are used. Manipulation may take on a special
intense quality in a cult for which a particular “chosen” human being is the only source of
salvation. The person of the leader may attract members to the cult, but can also be a
source of disillusionment. If members of the Unification Church, for example, come to
believe that Sun Myung Moon, its founder, is associated with the Korean Central Intelligence
Agency, they may lose their faith.
Mystical manipulation may also legitimate deception of outsiders, as in the “heavenly
deception” of the Unification Church and analogous practices in other cult environments.
Anyone who has not seen the light and therefore lives in the realm of evil can be justifiably
deceived for a higher purpose. For instance, collectors of funds may be advised to deny
their affiliation with a cult that has a dubious public reputation.
Purity and Confession
Two other features of totalism are a demand for purity and a cult of confession. The demand
for purity is a call for radical separation of good and evil within the environment and within
oneself. Purification is a continuing process, often institutionalized in the cult of confession,
which enforces conformity through guilt and shame evoked by mutual criticism and self-
criticism in small groups.
Confessions contain varying mixtures of revelation and concealment. As Albert Camus
observed, “Authors of confessions write especially to avoid confession, to tell nothing of
what they know.” Young cult members confessing the sins of their pre-cultic lives may leave
out ideas and feelings that they are not aware of or reluctant to discuss, including a
continuing identification with their prior existence. Repetitious confession, especially in
required meetings, often expresses arrogance in the name of humility. As Camus wrote: “I
practice the profession of penitence, to be able to end up as a judge,” and, “The more I
accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.”
Three further aspects of ideological totalism are “sacred science,” “loading of the language,”
and the principle of “doctrine over person.” Sacred science is important because a claim of
being scientific is often needed to gain plausibility and influence in the modern age. The
Unification Church is one example of a contemporary tendency to combine dogmatic
religious principles with a claim to special scientific knowledge of human behavior and
psychology. The term “loading the language” refers to literalism and a tendency to deify
words or images. A simplified, cliché-ridden language can exert enormous psychological
force, reducing every issue in a complicated life to a single set of slogans that are said to
embody the truth as a totality. The principle of “doctrine over person” is invoked when cult
members sense a conflict between what they are experiencing and what dogma says they
should experience. The internalized message of the totalistic environment is that one must
negate that personal experience on behalf of the truth of the dogma. Contradictions become
associated with guilt doubt indicates one‟s own deficiency or evil.
Perhaps the most significant characteristic of totalistic movements is what I call “dispensing
of existence.” Those who have not seen the light and embraced the truth are wedded to
evil, tainted, and therefore in some sense, usually metaphorical, lack the right to exist.
That is one reason why a cult member threatened with being cast into outer darkness may
experience a fear of extinction or collapse. Under particularly malignant conditions, the

Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991, Page 5
dispensing of existence is taken literally in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere,
people were put to death for alleged doctrinal shortcomings. In the People‟s Temple mass
suicide-murder in Guyana, a cult leader presided over the literal dispensing of existence by
means of a suicidal mystique he himself had made a central theme in the group‟s ideology.
The totalistic impulse to draw a sharp line between those who have the right to live and
those who do not is especially dangerous in the nuclear age.
Historical Context
Totalism should always be considered within a specific historical context. A significant
feature of contemporary life is the historical (or psychohistorical) dislocation resulting from
a loss of the symbolic structures that organize ritual transitions in the life cycle, and a decay
of belief systems concerning religion, authority, marriage, family, and death. One function
of cults is to provide a group initiation rite for the transition to early adult life, and the
formation of an adult identity outside the family. Cult members have good reasons for
seeing attempts by the larger culture to make such provisions as hypocritical or confused.
In providing substitute symbols for young people, cults are both radical and reactionary.
They are radical because they suggest rude questions about middle-class family life and
American political and religious values in general. They are reactionary because they revive
pre-modern structures of authority and sometimes establish fascist patterns of internal
organization. Furthermore, in their assault on autonomy and self-definition, some cults
reject a liberating historical process that has evolved with great struggle and pain in the
West since the Renaissance. (Cults must be considered individually in making such
judgments.) Historical dislocation is one source of what I call the “protean style.” This
involves a continuous psychological experimentation with the self, a capacity for endorsing
contradictory ideas at the same time, and a tendency to change one‟s ideas, companions,
and way of life with relative ease. Cults embody a contrary “restricted style,” a flight from
experimentation and the confusion of a protean world. These contraries are related groups
and individuals can embrace a protean and a restricted style in turn. For instance, the so-
called hippie ethos of the 1960s and 1970s has been replaced by the present so-called
Yuppie preoccupation with safe jobs and comfortable incomes. For some people,
experimentation with a cult is part of the protean search.
The imagery of extinction derived from the contemporary threat of nuclear war influences
patterns of totalism and fundamentalism throughout the world. Nuclear war threatens
human continuity itself and impairs the symbols of immortality. Cults seize upon this threat
to provide immortalizing principles of their own. The cult environment supplies a continuous
opportunity for the experience of transcendence --a mode of symbolic immortality generally
suppressed in advanced industrial society.
Role of Psychology
Cults raise serious psychological concerns, and there is a place for psychologists and
psychiatrists in understanding and treating cult members. But our powers as mental health
professionals are limited, so we should exercise restraint. When helping a young person
confused about a cult situation, it is important to maintain a personal therapeutic contract
so that one is not working for the cult or for the parents. Totalism begets totalism. What is
called deprogramming includes a continuum from intense dialogue on the one hand to
physical coercion and kidnapping, with thought-reform-like techniques, on the other. My
own position, which I have repeatedly conveyed to parents and others who consult me, is to
oppose coercion at either end of the cult process. Cults are primarily a social and cultural
rather than a psychiatric or legal problem. But psychological professionals can make
important contributions to the public education crucial for dealing with the problem. With
greater knowledge about them, people are less susceptible to deception, and for that reason
some cults have been finding it more difficult to recruit members.