stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

420 STRIPPING THE GURUS
to those exhibited by powerful and powerless members of recognized
(alleged) destructive groups. Further, in real prisons, the
same behaviors occur in spite of the supposed “checks and balances”
governing the guards and supervisors, with those frequently
having little more effect than the comparable constraints allegedly
placed on guru-figures.
Singer could equally have argued that the American educational
system is not a “cult”—and, indeed, it certainly isn’t one.
Yet, Zimbardo himself again mapped the authority structure and
behaviors of that very system, in many significant though less intense
ways, to the prison (and hence ashram) environment.
So, one may place the “cult”/“non-cult” boundary wherever one
most likes along that continuum, depending on one’s preferred
definition of what a “cult” is, or what coercive “brainwashing” or
subtler “mind control” are. The mere presence or absence of that
label, however, says far less about the safety of any relatively
closed, authoritarian hierarchical environment, than one might
like or imagine it to.
A prison or a high school or a heartless business corporation or
a fundamentalist religious ministry or a frat house during pledging
“Hell Week,” or a bad marriage or an abusive family, is assuredly
not a destructive, sadistic, brainwashing “cult,” by any definition of
the phrase.
But still ... one cannot help but notice that each of those environments
can be highly intolerant of even minor disobedience to its
authority-figures. Likewise, each may well offer no “exit clause”
whereby one can “just leave” without suffering extreme social or
financial penalties, should one be mistreated by one’s peers and/or
superiors.
I saw that the structure of most families, businesses and governments
were as committed to keeping their members in
their places as my [so-called] cult [under Yogi Bhajan] ever
had been (K. Khalsa, 1994).
Even in a free and democratic country under siege one can see
precisely the same psychological dynamics. For, a populace rallying
‘round the flag will treat even the mildest questioning of its
leaders’ abilities or motives as being near-treasonous—worthy of
imprisonment or deportation, if not of literal excommunication. In
doing so, they are behaving exactly like the members of any “cult”
would, when confronted with even the most gentle suggestion that