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teejai: With reference to the points 1-4 of 'cult behaviour' i am not sure that one can (1)necessarily equate by itself 'adherence to a specific mindset' with 'compliance' . It may be that rightly or wrongly some are adhering to that mindset because they personally believe in it as opposed to being ' brainwashed' into doing so or indeed have experienced a free willed 'conversion on the road to Damascus'.
Did you read the article I linked teejai? I'm going to assume not so I'm going to drag a few quotes into this discussion.
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As I studied the psychological mechanisms that made the cult experience possible, I began to recognize uncomfortably familiar processes. A little reflection provided many specific instances of my own compliance&#8209;conscious and unconscious&#8209;with the values and preferences of my peers, compliance that I had rationalized or ignored because I preferred to think of myself as very independent. Since no radical change or disruption of my life occurred and I was not acting at the behest of a charismatic leader or occult group, it had not occurred to me that I might be behaving like one who has been captured by a cult. Nevertheless, I now realize that the motivations and manipulations constituting cult behavior are present in varying degrees in my own life and that they play a role in the lives of most of us as they operate in our educational systems, the business world, religion, politics, and international relations. Just as many of the more notorious cults have proven to be costly and destructive, so ordinary cult behavior is damaging and harmful to some degree wherever it occurs, no matter how normal its outward appearance.
When the seminar began I viewed cults as pathological entities alien to my everyday life. By the time it ended, I realized that the dynamics of cult behavior and thinking are so pervasive in normal society that almost all of us might be seen as members of invisible cults. In fact, as I will argue, society can be viewed as an association of informal cults to which everyone belongs. Yet the groups most of us belong to do not appear strange, flamboyant, esoteric, or unnatural, nor do they defy society with lurid and violent behavior. Social infrastructures and behaviors that are similar to those of the People's Temple go unnoticed.
Surely, the reader may ask, while it is true that serious consequences result from membership in extreme cults, how can you say harm comes from the groups that make up normal society? I certainly don't recognize such effects in groups to which I belong. I am indeed talking about normal society, in which the damage resulting from cult&#8209;like behavior is not as obvious as that headlined in the newspapers. Our own cult story is much less pronounced, with no noticeable beginning and no end; our perceptions, beliefs, and critical judgments are affected nonetheless.
We Americans live in a constitutional democracy, priding ourselves on the freedoms we have achieved. We live, travel and work without internal passports; we have free choice of job or profession; we may hold any belief and, within wide limits, do anything, say anything, write anything, and protest anything. We choose our governing officials from a list we have ourselves determined.
Democracy is based on an "eye&#8209;level" world in which we look directly at each other; every citizen is a peer. Political power is delegated, not inherited, not taken, not given by divine right, but bestowed by each of us. However, I believe that a danger exists even in democracies that the omnipresent authoritarian impulse will manifest itself in disguised form, will lead us toward a world in which we are always looking up at those who must be obeyed or down at those who must obey us. This is so because authoritar*ianism draws its strength from the same source that supports cult behavior: dependency on groups and leaders.
I believe that we need to bring into awareness the unconscious motivations and excluded information that influence our behavior and thought at the personal, national, and international levels. This requires that we first understand the dynamics of obvious cults and then address similar processes in ourselves and in ordi*nary society. Such understanding can provide us with tools for detecting cult behavior — our own as well as that of others — and enable us to step outside the cult circle.
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What I always found fascinating about that article was its emphasis on cult behavior as opposed to cults themselves. I think I've done a pretty good job of demonstrating where cult behavior is taking place at schizophrenia.com. That doesn't mean people are being brainwashed, they may well be gathering with their own kind where the prevailing mindset takes precedence.
Meanwhile, in some of the conversation that later took place at schizophrenia.com, I saw the term "medical model" being bandied about quite a bit and a few people insisting that it was the established norm and how dare anyone come in and deliberately upset the status quo.
And then I saw other people, such as lunar_wire who stated that he had no clue what he was walking into. He originally came to share his own thoughts and experiences and was treated very badly which is part of the reason he's back. He already knows how those who are different will be treated.
I wondered why schizophrenia.com doesn't just make it blatantly obvious that they are a site that subscribes solely to the medical model. It would certainly make it a lot less painful for people like lunar_wire. Then I got to wondering if maybe, the folks at schizophrenia.com want to have the opportunity to try and convert as many people to their way of thinking as they can. They think it's the right way of thinking so they certainly don't see any harm in their conversion efforts -- they probably think it's a kind thing to do, maybe even their duty to find people like myself and lunar_wire who just don't know that we have a brain disease that there is no recovery from unless we take medication... forever.
Meantime, I caught a post of lunar_wire's earlier tonight in which he stated that he's off medication and he's doing okay; still pulling A's in school. As for me, I've never had any medication. I've been working for four years. I don't think either of us needs to be converted but I can understand why we're considered a threat to that specific mindset.