stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

400 STRIPPING THE GURUS
“Avatar” and his reportedly dildo-wielding, corona-seeing “pod people”
are really like?
* * *
Zimbardo again took two dozen completely normal, physically and
mentally healthy college-age individuals. He then confined them,
willingly and voluntarily, to a closed environment; stratified the
community into guards and prisoners; and simply instructed the
higher-ups to exact obedience and respect from the lower ones. He
further introduced no charismatic leadership, weird beliefs or
claims to divinity on his own part. There was even no punishment
for leaving, other than the loss of the money the prisoners were to
be paid for their full-term participation in the study, and their own
subjective feelings of being “bad prisoners” in prematurely exiting.
Yet, in less than six days, and quite unintentionally, he created
behaviors among the various classes of participants which are indistinguishable
from those allegedly found in—as a very reasonable
extrapolation from the known, reported data—every ashram
and every so-called cult.
It is thus not the charisma or “divine” status per se of any
leader which creates problems. Rather, the “problematic” nature is
again inherent in the power structure of every closed hierarchical
community, when that stratification is combined with basic human
psychology. Having an “infallible god-man” rather than a merely
human superintendent at the helm will make it harder for others
to disobey or to leave, but even without that, disobedience and departure
will in no way be easy to enact.
Conversely, each one of us is again susceptible to exhibiting
docile “cult-follower” behavior in the right/wrong circumstances.
Tendencies toward conformity, authoritarianism or blind belief
may make it statistically more likely for any given person to be
thus fooled, but truly, it could happen to any one of us.
People believe that “it can never happen to them” because
they want to believe they are stronger and better than the
millions who have fallen victim to [alleged] cult mind control....
A [so-called] cult will generally target the most educated,
active, and capable people it can find. I hear comments
such as “I never knew there were so many brilliant people in
these types of groups” (Hassan, 1990).