Psychological Manipulation is a Solvable Problem

0:15Speaker 1:Bushki, this is solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg. For a moment, I thought I heard glass breaking around me. Physically, it was my entire identity crumbled. It was just devastating. Dianne ben Scoter's life changed when she left the Mooneyes. It wasn't easy. The cult provided connection and meaning, and while she was a member, it was hard to imagine a life outside of it. Dianne was a victim of psychological manipulation, a technique practiced by cults of very different kinds, ranging from the People's Temple which ended in the Jonestown tragedy, to Nexium to qan On. Radicalization can happen because not enough people understand how psychological manipulation works. And I don't think there's any other way to solve it than to take a public health approach to it. It's like mole whacking.

1:19Speaker 1:Until we get to that tipping point of enough people understanding it, it's just going to show up in different ways and in different packaging, and we'll just be programming someone from this calt and that calt in one person at a time, and that is just not going to solve the problem. It'll just keep getting worse. Diane Benscoter is the founder of Antidote dot NGO. Her organization provides resources the families looking for support and individuals looking to make a change. I just, you know, I could imagine myself just feeling immense frustration and a failure of empathy because it's their own stupidity. It does seem like that, I know, and I struggle with those feelings myself, even after a lifetime of trying to understand this speaking of it, if you can step over, jump over the belief system, if you can go back to the person that you love and remember that they're a good person, remind them that you love them because they are a good person, and that you want to try to improve the relationship.

2:27Speaker 1:Focus on the relationship and see if you can start building from there. Denscoder is hopeful. I believe we can solve the very dangerous problem of psychological manipulation and how it affects so many people in society. Dan, you are a cult d programmer. You're someone who helps people get out of cults and break out of cult thinking. And I wonder if just to begin, you could tell us a little about your own history in a particular cult, the Unification Church, sometimes known as the Mooneyes. I joined that group when I was seventeen years old. I was really confused about what was going on in the world.

3:17Speaker 1:The Vietnam War was going on, and I was listening to the music of our time that was inspiring me to want to do something about the war and to make the world better. And so I went on what I thought was a walk for world peace, and as it turns out, it was the Mooney's and I was recruited and soon understood that the Messiah was on the earth, and it was sun round moon, and that I was born to be a disciple of Christ. That was my mission in life, and so for the next five years I dedicated myself wholly to that task of serving God in that way. In a lot of ways, you fit the stereotype. You were young, impressionable, teenager adolescent going through change life, feeling alienated. That's how you got in. How did you get out? Did someone? Did someone help you?

4:15Speaker 1:Was there a deep programmer who was involved in helping you get out of that? Called there was? My family hired someone to come and talk to me, and it was kind of a situation where I thought that I would be able to help bring them back into the fold. I thought, here's a former member who's gone astray, and I'll be able to bring them back in. Unfortunately for my belief system at that time, they started making a lot of sense, and I started to understand that what had happened to me was that I had been manipulated and taken advantage of, and that this whole thing was a big lie. It was one of the most painful things I've ever experienced in my life to realize that it took a long time to recover from it. And then after you left, how did you start to become a deep programmer yourself. I had the unique opportunity there was a rehab house for people leaving various cults. This woman had opened up her home and had people from whatever cult they were in come there and stay as a time of transition. And she offered me a job there and saw people coming through from High Christiana and Guruma Haraj He's called There's half a dozen Children of God,

5:33Speaker 1:different groups that people would come and stay there for a while during their recovery. That was a really important time for me and understanding how psychological manipulation works, and that wasn't just that the Mooneyes were this unique situation, but I started getting asked to go out on cases where families needed someone to come and talk to their loved one. They would hold the person against their will. That was kind of the old style to programming back in the eighties. They would the family would say, you're not leaving until you talk to this person. It was an intervention type of situation, and I went on many cases like that until I was eventually arrested for kidnapping.

6:14Speaker 1:Everything went wrong, She went out the bathroom window and went to the police, and we're all arrested. It's a little longer story than them. So it was that point that I stopped doing those kind of interventions and started really thinking about what all this meant and what I really could do to make a difference. You know, even that term deep program suggests that there is a distinction between someone who has been manipulated, as you say, and someone who has legitimate beliefs, and that points to the distinction, you know, between cult and religion, or between cult and political movement. And how do we draw that line? How do we define a cult which is a set of beliefs that will require something like kind of deprogramming that you've become very skilled in doing, as opposed to something that is just someone's religion. It's such an important point you're bringing up, Jacob. It's it's really something that I think most people point in the wrong direction. They're trying to define is this a cult or not? And I think that while that's interesting and it can be done, there's a lot of cult experts that do that. I

7:30Speaker 1:think the important question is psychological manipulation being used to try to influence someone's decision making processes, and that is the solvable thing that radicalization can happen because not enough people understand how psychological manipulation works. It can take the form of a religious called someone in a self helped thing like Nexium, Keith Ornary, that whole thing, or scientology. It can happen in what happened recently. This last year was my biggest fear that a large number of people would be radicalized, and the perfect storm happened. People were isolated, people were scared, wondering what was true, They didn't know what news sources to trust, and it was the perfect opportunity to take advantage of those psychological situations, and it works every time. Yeah, so I think you're maybe referring partly to QAnon, people who reject factual information about how the election was decided. You know, QAnon really interesting example.

8:46Speaker 1:It's not a religion. It's a crazy political conspiracy, sort of not exactly clear how it spreads. It happens to be on the right. You know, what makes that a cult? And what how specifically do we deal with that cult? Which is I think from the perspective of our politics, from the perspective the country is, in a way the most dangerous one we're dealing with right now. Is it a cult? There are people that would say that it is, but I think again what's important is that in order to solve this problem, a large number of people, the majority of people, Much like herd immunity, we really need to have the majority of people understand the trickery of psychological manipulation, because I don't think there's any other way to solve it than to take a public health approach to it. It's like mole whacking. Until we get to that tipping point of enough people understanding it, it's just going to show up in different ways and in different packaging, and we'll just be programming someone from this cult and that cult in one person at a time, and that is just not going to solve the problem. It'll just keep getting worse. So it's interesting to think about the

10:02Speaker 1:public health approach. You know, what you can do to make people less vulnerable to manipulate. What's the first step. What you have to do is educate people about the tactics, build curriculum for educators so that they can teach young people from an early age how this works. We have to use influencers to spread information and we have to do everything we can to try to get to that herd immunity point. Much like with cigarettes as a problem that people didn't understand that they were harmful, there had to be a massive education campaign to educate everyone possible about the danger. And now most people if you would ask them, do you understand that cigarette smoking is dangerous?

10:48Speaker 1:They would say yes. And we have to get to that point with psychological manipulation. Yeah, I mean in the classic called there's a leader Reverend Moon or in the Nexium story that you referred to, who's driving the manipulation of the adherents. But QAnon doesn't seem to quite conform to that. I mean, whether there's some wizard of All figure who's planting the seeds of Q I don't know, but there's no publicly identified leader who's getting people to follow him or her. It's kind of a peer to peer cult in that way. Does a cult have to have a leader? And is that a distinctive thing about q and On that it doesn't. It is an interesting thing about q and On for sure. And I think it could be argued that Donald Trump was the leader in some way, that that was the goal. But what's more important, I think is that there were efforts to create an enemy by creating a US into them. You have to have an enemy because if you want people to just believe one source of information, because that's how you control people. If you want people to do what you want them to do, then you have to convince them that all sources of information outside of that group,

12:04Speaker 1:outside of that source of information are lies and untrust worthy or even evil satan whatever. You know. That's how cults do it, and that's how it was done on this larger political spectrum. And so that's how it works. And the other thing is that with technology like it is, it's not that expensive to create media that looks really believable. And so here's a group of people isolated on Facebook and somebody that they like and respect in their circle says something really radical, and it seems to me it rings true. It might be about it might be a racist statement, it might be something about the left being evil or whatever, and it rings true to you. And then you click and click and click, and pretty soon this is all making sense and you're thinking, this explains everything.

12:57Speaker 1:Now I understand the evil on the left is trying to take over the world, and I have to join forces, and this is war, you know, and it grows like that, it's perpetuating. Well, it's a reaction to the intellectual freedom of modern society, isn't it. I mean, in traditional societies, presumably called there less of an issue because people don't have that search for what to believe in and how the world works. That's given to you, and there's a structure to the society and a prescribed set of beliefs and a cosmology, and the actual belief might be wacky, but they're held by everybody. Whereas in modern society you can believe whatever you want, and all the things you say about the vulnerability to psychological manipulation, people's deep need to understand and have a belief system. That's a void that can be filled. But given that, I mean, I don't know if you agree with that particular explanation, but given that, is psychological manipulation a problem that can be solved?

14:02Speaker 1:I mean, if it's something the human beings are just fundamentally looking for and missing in modern society, how do you fill that space in a way that wouldn't leave them vulnerable to the cults in the way so many people clearly are. I mean, what do you do when someone is already in and you want to help them get out? What's the first step? In my organization, what we're doing is setting up off ramps basically for people. And the people that come to us as seeking help are almost always family members. They're the loved ones of people who they've noticed that they've completely changed. They can't talk to them anymore, they don't know how to communicate with them, and they feel like their loved one has joined a cult. What we do is try to work with them to help them understand how this has happened, What the trickery of psychological manipulation is so that they can gain empathy, because you have to have empathy toward the person if you're going to help them at all.

15:03Speaker 1:They have to agree that they are willing to have a conversation about the possibility that maybe they've been taken advantage. Then it's just a matter of kind of unpeeling the onion. But they have to want to talk to you. I mean, as you said, you can't kid and have them anymore. It's voluntary, So you know, there has to be at least some openness to see, whether it's because of pressure from family members who they still care about, or some nagging feeling that something's wrong. They have to be open to changing their tanking. Yeah, and most people's approach is, here are a million facts, can't you just look at them and see? But that doesn't work because it's not about the facts, it's about their psychological situation. They need this to be true. They want it to be true.

15:51Speaker 1:They'll do anything for it to be true because they're getting something from it on a psychological level, and so for them to be willing to let go of that, there has to be something bigger in it. For them, and the bigger is that they have to want their relations ship back with their loved ones, for instance. And so if you can approach them with I know you're a good person. I know you're involved in this because you care so much about the world and because you want America to be a great place or whatever it is, whatever it is that they sincerely do care about, and get them to agree perhaps that we both agree that this isn't working, our relationship isn't working. We have to find a way. Will you at least consider some family therapy or someone that can help us learn to talk with each other again and try to get to the bottom of what happened here, And if there are trained mental health professionals that can help look at the family system and help the person feel safe enough to look at the possibility that maybe they've been taken advantage of and maybe that's what's going on here that allows them

17:05Speaker 1:to still believe that they're a good person. And pretty much anyone that I have talked with and helped exit any kind of an extremist group, there's that point where they get it, where they understand that they've been taken advantage of intentionally. Then it's very devastating. At that moment when I realized that, for a moment, I thought I heard glass breaking around me. Physically, it was my entire identity crumbled. It was just devastating. And I think that you have to be very gentle and empathetic towards someone who has been radicalized, because it often takes over your entire identity, and so what you believe, the music, you like, everything has become part of that identity. Your political views, your world views completely are tied up in that. Your community, who you consider your friends. It's an identity crisis and it takes a long time to recover from that. So they have to trust that you have their best interest in mind and that you're not just wanting to argue about what's right and wrong, because that just does not work.

18:26Speaker 1:It does seem that it might be harder to have empathy for someone who's fallen prey to q Andon beliefs than someone who would you join the Hari Krishna's I mean, you know, in the one case, the with QAnon, the views are so noxious and they're adopted by choice. I mean, yes, there's psychological manipulation, but there are people who come through this, you know, just reading stuff and watching Fox News and absorbing bad sources of information. At one level, I can certainly have sympathy for them, But on the other hand, it I just, you know, I could imagine myself just feeling immense frustration and a failure of empathy because it's their own stupidity. It does seem like that, I know, and I struggle with those feelings myself, even after a lifetime of trying to understand this and speaking of it.

19:19Speaker 1:But you know, I would have said that I completely joined the Moonies out of choice, and all of the you know, Keith Rnary, a lot of the people that were involved in that, the women who got branded with his initials, they all said I did it out a choice until they understood and then there's that devastating moment where you realize you've been taken advantage of. But it choice is a confusing word sometimes when you're talking about this topic, and yeah, it does seem noxious. And I have a lot of friends who are former white supremaists and are now trying to pull people out of that.

20:06Speaker 1:It's a similar kind of how could you possibly be so hateful? But they were just normal people who bought into the idea. It seems horrible, and it is, but and it's what happened with Hitler youth. They weren't born evil Hitler youth. They were radicalized and terrorists. People who strap bombs on their body, people who fed poison to the children and their children in Jonestown. It's it is. It's horrible when you try to talk to them and they are spouting these horrible things, but no one wants to play the fool. And if we can help people understand this trickery, I really do think we can get to the point where this doesn't work anymore. The people that try to use these tactics won't have the same ability to do so. Yeah, it's it's a moment when, unfortunately, cults are seemed to be thriving in America, and stories about cults seem to be thriving in America. I mean these you know, like the document multiple documentaries about Nexium, and you know, people just people just love these stories. Now, presumably it's not people who are in cults who like the stories about cults so much, But I don't know,

21:25Speaker 1:there's something a little cult like about the absorption in cults. I mean what do you make of the you know, popular cults as sort of an aspect of popular culture. People are fascinated by it, and I think everybody wants to believe that it could never happen to them, and so it's something they can point to and say, Wow, isn't that something that would never happen to me? But boy, it's so fascinating, and it is fascinating how someone can be completely taken into something like that kind of a cult.

22:02Speaker 1:And cults are always more prevalent during times of when there's a sidal unrest, during times when there's confusion about the world. It's uncomfortable to feel confused, and it's uncomfortable to feel afraid. I mean, I was really afraid during the pandemic. I'm sure we all were. And or during the beginning of the pandemic. Appreciate you're talking about it in the past tense, They say, yeah, kidden, but especially in the beginning. I know that I My anxiety was so so very high, and in times of anxiety and confusion, and also because of technology, all the changes, the exponential change, the speed of technology change being so fast that oh, a lot of people feel very scared and confused and like they don't fit in, and so those are the perfect conditions. So, Diane, I think the old model that people have in their heads of deep programming is that ends are trying to get their children out of cults.

23:12Speaker 1:But more and more we hear these stories about children who are losing a parent or their parents to cults, and again about QAnon and Trump and these stories we've been reading. You know, is there anything that's different about it? And there are things you've learned about trying to deal with older people in cults and families, whether you're trying to get parents or grandparents out. My inbox at Antidote is just filled with those kinds of stories. Typically, my work has been trying to help disaffected youth because that is a vulnerability. But now it's young people writing from their college dorm rooms and saying I can't talk to my parents anymore. I don't know what to do, and so it is a different demographic. It's the same on a psychological level, it's just a different demographic. And so what we're doing is creating support groups and webinars and ways for people to learn some tactics to help build bridges with their loved ones and to help diffuse the anger that's going on between the two. It's very vult volatile, and that's been taught. It's part of it. If you want control over someone, it's really helpful to have an enemy.

24:40Speaker 1:You've got to diffuse that intense feeling of anger for the other, hatred toward the other, and it comes from both sides. It's really hard on both sides because you feel so frustrated and it feels so evil on the other side, and so that has to be diffused and broken down so that you can learn to talk with each other again. That's the first step. If first you have to start getting to the place where you can remember that things you love about that person so that you can start meeting them there and reminding them that you want that relationship back. Build from there, Diane, we usually wrap up by asking what listeners can do, and in this case I would bifurcate the question. First, what can listeners do about the problem of cults in general and figuring out how to stop cults before they start, the kind of public health approach you were talking about, But separately, what can people do as individuals dealing with other individuals they may know, and their families who are vulnerable or have succumbed to a cult. I think the answer to both of those questions is the same, and that is to educate yourself about the trickery of psychological manipulation.

25:55Speaker 1:Understand that intersection between just human conditions, those things that cause us pain, psychological pain, not feeling lonely or not fitting in, feeling confused or or angry about the changes in the world, fears, those kind of things, and how someone can take advantage of those things and they do so. If you have someone that has clearly been radicalized in some way, I think the first thing to do is educate yourself. There's lots of ways to do that, and I can point people in that direction. We do webinars and support groups and things. And then also to really reach for that empathy, really try to understand if you can go step over, jump over the belief system, if you can, and go back to the person that you love and remember that they're a good person. Remind them that you love them because they are a good person, and that you want to try to improve the relationship.

26:57Speaker 1:Focus on the relationship and see if you can start building from there. If you're just arguing about doctrine. You're just not going to get anywhere. Diane ben Scoter is the founder of Antidote dot ngo and the author of Shoes of a Servant, My Unconditional Devotion to a Lie. To learn more about psychological manipulation and to find resources, please check out the links in our show notes. Next week on the show, I'll talk with an award winning medical innovator, Deja Taylor. She's a senior in high school.

27:35Speaker 1:I hope you'll join us. Solvable Senior producer is Jocelyn Frank. Research in booking by Lisa Don. Catherine Girardo is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Mia Loebell. Solvable is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review it. It really helps us get the word out. You can find Pushkin Podcasts wherever you listen, including on the iHeartRadio app and Apple Podcasts. I'm Jacob Weisberg five