stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

GURUS AND PRISONERS 385
in the animal kingdom. There is neither “patriarchy” nor “too
much linear thinking” in such pre-verbal environments; yet the
hierarchical orderings occur all the same.)
Spiritual paths as diverse as Roman Catholicism, Tibetan
Buddhism and Paramahansa Yogananda’s SRF have been grown
in cultures ranging from the agrarian East to postmodern America.
Yet, they are scarcely distinguishable in their power structures,
the behaviors of their members, the penalties for leaving and the
reported, spirit-crushing cruelties visited upon those who stay.
And given all that, it seems clear by now that not only are the
problems with such communities systemic, but the abuse-creating
structures are basically unavoidable.
The issues we have seen, then, are the product far less of a few
“bad apples,” than of the surroundings in which they are contained.
Prisons [and other authoritarian institutions, e.g., ashrams],
where the balance of power is so unequal, tend to be brutal
and abusive places unless great effort is made to control the
guards’ base impulses, [Zimbardo] said. At Stanford and in
Iraq [e.g., Abu Ghraib], he added: “It’s not that we put bad
apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel.
The barrel corrupts anything that it touches” (J. Schwartz,
2004).
In Abu Ghraib, “guards were allowed to do what they needed
to keep ‘order and justice’ inside the prison”—an instruction which
is obviously wholly comparable to that given to Zimbardo’s guards.
David Clohessy, the national director of S.N.A.P. (the Survivors
Network of those Abused by Priests), gave a similar analysis
of the Catholic Church, in its problems with clergy sexual abuse (in
Bruni and Burkett, 2002):
It’s not bad apples. It’s the structure of the barrel that the
apples are in, and it’s the people who are in charge of the
barrel, and the people who fill up the barrel [i.e., the bishops,
cardinals and pope].
Almost universally, in spiritual communities, there are no
meaningful checks and balances on the behaviors of the leaders, to
restrict their exercise of “divine” power. That is so, not only in
terms of their indulgence in base (e.g., sadistic or sexual) impulses,
but also in failing to prevent the Animal Farm-like rewriting of the