Cults Research

To get a hold of what cults actually are, how they devlop and what makes them so horrorifying I began to look up cult behaviour sites and previous documentaries and films.

Ways of Distinguishing Healthy and Unhealthy Cult Movements:
http://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/Warning_signs_of_dysfunctional_cults.html

"Let's start with a useful and neutral (non-pejorative) definition of “cult”—after all, the word originally comes from the positive Latin term cultus, or “worship.” Thus, a neutral definition of “cult” is any group of persons devoted to a charismatic leader (or leaders) who changes these persons' outlook and behavior by communicating his/her values and views and perhaps a kind of “energy,” spiritual or otherwise. The word “cult” has quite negative connotations in our society, especially among conservative Christians. For this reason, some scholars of religion want to drop the term from our vocabulary and replace it with sect or New Religious Movement/NRM. Yet the majority of religious cults are quite benign. Indeed, some can be profoundly transformative in an entirely positive way, promoting deep God-realization...Unhealthy cult behavior can, for that matter, be found within political parties, business corporations, professional societies (e.g., medicine, psychiatry, academia), and other social groups. Hitler’s Third Reich entailed nightmarish cult behavior on political, social and quasi-religious levels.

I found very useful in finding the dysfunctional signals of a cult to get more ideas of what is so terrifying about them. Here is a condensed list of the many signs put on the site:

• Craving for followers; seductive recruiting strategies or heavy-handed tactics
• Intimidating indoctrination procedures that psychologically break a person down (suppressing old behaviors, attitudes, and relationships)
• Expensive entry fees or initiations. In fact, the less the group has to do with money, the better.
• A hidden agenda that becomes known to a group member only after s/he is heavily invested in the cult membership
• Excessive demands on the time and energy
• Trapping or holding onto members
• Flat affect (zombie-like absence of emotions)
• Proud feeling of being the chosen people
• A chronic need to find and persistently maintain enemies inside or outside the group.
• Turning cult members into watched objects who have no privacy in their solitary behavior or relationships with others.
• Preventing contact with outsiders, ex-members, and even certain fellow members of the dysfunctional cult.
• Abusive, domineering top-dog leadership.
• Double standard of behavior for leader(s) and members
• Reinforcing or excusing unethical behaviors (killing, injuring, lying, stealing, plagiarism, bribing, gossiping, sexual misconduct).
• Irrational thinking or magical thinking
• Intellectual parochialism or isolation from other worldviews
• Excessive fascination with altered states of consciousness
• Beware exploitation of sex in any form.

These signs are also seen on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_checklist made by professors on the subject.