This bemuses me. Often.
Have you questioned why you think it is a cult (if you do)? Have you just heard others refer to it as a cult and accepted that ? Why do you believe it is a cult?
So, let's start with some cult requirements and others can tell me how Objectivism fits them.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.
2. The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
3. The group is preoccupied with making money.
4. Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
5. Mind-numbing techniques (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, debilitating work routines) are used to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
6. The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel (for example: members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married; leaders may prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and so forth).
7. The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and members (for example: the leader is considered the Messiah or an avatar; the group and/or the leader has a special mission to save humanity).
8. The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society.
9. The group's leader is not accountable to any authorities (as are, for example, military commanders and ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream denominations).
10. The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify means that members would have considered unethical before joining the group (for example: collecting money for bogus charities).
11. The leadership induces guilt feelings in members in order to control them.
12. Members' subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group.
13. Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group.
14. Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.
Another checklist:
1. Deception - Group identity and/or true motives are not revealed. The group leaders tell members to withhold truth from outsiders.
2. Emotional Leverage/Love Bombing - Instant friendship, extreme helpfulness, generosity and acceptance...Group recruiters "lovingly" will not take "no" for an answer-invitations impossible to refuse without feeling guilty and/or ungrateful. "Love", "generosity", "encouragement" are used to lower defenses and create an ever increasing sense of obligation, debt and guilt.
3. Exploit Personal Crisis - They use an existing crisis as a means of getting you to participate. They exploit vulnerability arising from:
* Broken relationships
* Death in the family
* Loss of job
* Move to new location
* Loneliness/depression
* Guilt/shame
* Stress/fear
4. Crisis Creation - They employ tactics designed to create or deepen confusion, fear, guilt or doubt. i.e. "you aren't serving God the way He intended." Questions areas of faith never before examined or explored and attack other faiths specifically.
5. All The Answers - Provide simple answers to the confusion they, themselves, create. Support these answers with material produced or "approved" by the group.
Programming
1. Intense Study - Focus is on group doctrine and writings. Bible, if used at all, is referred to one verse at time to "prove" group teachings.
2. Opposer Warnings - Recruiters are told that "Satan" will cause relatives and friend to say bad things about the group to try to "steal them away from God." Recruits soon believes group members, alone, are truthful/trustworthy.
3. Guilt and Fear - Group dwells on members' "sinful nature" (many use public confession). Guilt and fear arising from "failing God" are magnified to manipulate new member.
4. Schedule Control & Fatigue - Study and service become mandatory. New member becomes too busy to question. Family, friends, jobs and hobbies are squeezed out, further isolating the new member.
5. Attack Independent Thought - Critical thinking is discouraged as prideful and sinful, blind acceptance encouraged.
6. Divine Commission - Leader(s) claim new revelation from God, within past 200 years, in which all but their group are rejected by God. They, alone, speak for God.
7. Absolutism - They insist on total, unquestioning obedience and submission to the group, both actions AND thoughts. Group "love" and acceptance becomes dependent upon obedience and submission. Unconditional love...isn't.
8. Totalism - "Us against them" thinking. Strengthens group identity. Everyone outside of group lumped under one label.
Retention
1. Motive Questioning- When sound evidence against the group is presented, members are taught to question the motivation of the presenter. The verifiable (sound documentation) is ignored because of doubts over the unverifiable (presenter's motives). See Opposer Warnings (#2 above).
2. Information Control - Group controls what convert may read or hear. They discourage (forbid) contact with ex-members or anything critical of the group. May say it is the same as pornography making it not only sinful and dangerous but shameful as well. Ex-members become feared and avoidance of them becomes a "survival issue."
3. Isolation, Separation & Alienation - Group becomes substitute family. Members encouraged to drop worldly (non-members) friends. May be told to change jobs, quit school, give up sports, hobbies, etc.
4. Coercion - Disobedience, including even minor disagreement with group doctrine, may result in expulsion and shunning.
5. Phobias - The idea is planted that anyone who leaves goes into a life of depravity and sin, loses their sanity, dies, or will have children die, etc. Constant rumors of bad things happening to people who leave. No one ever leaves for "legitimate reasons."
6. Striving for the Unreachable - Group membership and service are essential for salvation..."Work your way into God's favor." NO matter what you do, it is never enough.
Try this one out:
Cult Information Centre (31 Characteristics)
Every cult can be defined as a group having all of the following five characteristics:
1. It uses psychological coercion to recruit, indoctrinate and retain its members
2. It forms an elitist totalitarian society.
3. Its founder leader is self-appointed, dogmatic, messianic, not accountable and has charisma.
4. It believes 'the end justifies the means' in order to solicit funds recruit people.
5. Its wealth does not benefit its members or society.
Mind Control techniques include:
1. Hypnosis
Inducing a state of high suggestibility by hypnosis, often thinly disguised as relaxation or meditation.
2. Peer Group Pressure
Suppressing doubt and resistance to new ideas by exploiting the need to belong.
3. Love Bombing
Creating a sense of family and belonging through hugging, kissing, touching and flattery.
4. Rejection of Old Values
Accelerating acceptance of new life style by constantly denouncing former values and beliefs.
5. Confusing Doctrine
Encouraging blind acceptance and rejection of logic through complex lectures on an incomprehensible doctrine.
6. Metacommunication
Implanting subliminal messages by stressing certain key words or phrases in long, confusing lectures.
7. Removal of Privacy
Achieving loss of ability to evaluate logically by preventing private contemplation.
8. Time Sense Deprivation
Destroying ability to evaluate information, personal reactions, and body functions in relation to passage of time by removing all clocks and watches.
9. Disinhibition
Encouraging child-like obedience by orchestrating child-like behaviour.
10. Uncompromising Rules
Inducing regression and disorientation by soliciting agreement to seemingly simple rules which regulate mealtimes, bathroom breaks and use of medications.
11. Verbal Abuse
Desensitizing through bombardment with foul and abusive language.
12. Sleep Deprivation and Fatigue
Creating disorientation and vulnerability by prolonging mental an physical activity and withholding adequate rest and sleep.
13. Dress Codes
Removing individuality by demanding conformity to the group dress code.
14. Chanting and Singing
Eliminating non-cult ideas through group repetition of mind-narrowing chants or phrases.
15. Confession
Encouraging the destruction of individual ego through confession of personal weaknesses and innermost feelings of doubt.
16. Financial Commitment
Achieving increased dependence on the group by 'burning bridges' to the past, through the donation of assets.
17. Finger Pointing
Creating a false sense of righteousness by pointing to the shortcomings of the outside world and other cults.
18. Flaunting Hierarch
Promoting acceptance of cult authority by promising advancement, power and salvation.
19. Isolation
Inducing loss of reality by physical separation from family, friends, society and rational references.
20. Controlled Approval
Maintaining vulnerability and confusion by alternately rewarding and punishing similar actions.
21. Change of Diet
Creating disorientation and increased susceptibility to emotional arousal by depriving the nervous system of necessary nutrients through the use of special diets and/or fasting.
22. Games
Inducing dependence on the group by introducing games with obscure rules.
23. No Questions
Accomplishing automatic acceptance of beliefs by discouraging questions.
24. Guilt
Reinforcing the need for 'salvation' by exaggerating the sins of the former lifestyles.
25. Fear
Maintaining loyalty and obedience to the group by threatening soul, life or limb for the slightest 'negative' thought, word or deed.
26. Replacement of Relationships
Destroying pre-cult families by arranging cult marriages and 'families'.
*chanting in black cloak while reading Atlas Shrugged*
