About this time every year I receive reminders that I have only until the end of October to submit a proposal for the 2020 Annual Conference of ICSA. ICSA, the International Cultic Studies Association, has graciously accepted papers on a variety of topics that touch on my interests and which relate to their concerns for the study of cultic groups. I am always pleased to mix with academics who take the issue of cults seriously. Here I do not propose to venture into defining what I mean by ‘cults’. I will content myself for the purpose of this blog with a short description – harmful groups normally organised by a narcissistic leader.
Having spoken at the ICSA conferences about ostracism and various aspects of narcissism that seem to be rampant in the cultic/Christian world, I thought this year I would venture back into an old area of my interests. This is one that seems to be constantly neglected by Christians and cult specialists alike. The area of study is known broadly as ‘crowd psychology’. In the 1840s an English author called Charles Mackay wrote an influential book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I used to have a copy of this important work where he makes the claim that people on their own are normally rational. When, however, they gather in large groups their reasoning powers often go into severe decline. Mackay mentions tulip mania in 17th century Holland and various political movements, including the French Revolution, involving large groups of people. The book can be summarised by the idea that crowds are, if not actually mad, severely rationally compromised.
It would be possible to take Mackay’s ideas alone and see how they chime into modern manifestations of crowd ‘madness’. I leave the reader to speculate about what issues I might be thinking about. But things have moved on since Mackay’s day. It is this tradition of thinking and writing about crowds that excites my interest, not least because it touches the religious sphere. The late 19th century produced several seminal works around the idea of ‘contagion’. If one person has a strong conviction, that same idea can spread quickly among his contemporaries, particularly if backed up with powerful rhetoric. It is not surprising that two well-known, but contrasting, early twentieth century figures, each incorporated the idea of contagion into their thinking and writing. One was Freud and the other was Mussolini. Here my purpose in mentioning these two figures is merely to indicate that there is a lively if largely neglected literature from that period related to the behaviour of crowds.
The paper that I intend to offer will spend only a modest amount of attention on these early pioneers. There is however quite a bit of material emerging much later from Britain about the functioning of groups. A writer and psychiatrist Wilfred Bion made some important discoveries in the war years when working with traumatised groups of soldiers. These therapy groups were his original ‘guinea pigs’. Bion noticed that when groups were left to operate in an unstructured way, various processes emerged in a way that seemed almost inevitable. The groups started to operate with what he called ‘basic assumptions’. Without going into all the detail, I can mention the way that the situation of having no leader created anxiety and stress for the group participants. Rather like the Israelites imploring God to give them a king, the group would ‘crown’ one of its members to fulfil the leader function. If one member did fulfil the role of leader, the rest of the group gave themselves permission to lapse into a dependent passive silence.
There were of course other basic assumptions in Bion’s system. One is called ‘flight-fight’ and the other called ‘pairing’. The first of these involves the eruption of hostility and vindictiveness among members of the group which may be directed at a perceived leader or outside ‘enemy’. The ‘pairing’ assumption is somewhat curious. It involves the group fantasising that two of their number are going to become involved sexually and between them produce offspring to carry on the work of the group in the future. Bion claimed that it was important to make these observations because the emerging of basic assumptions in a group will always interrupt and undermine the possibility of doing proper constructive work. The group, in other words, had a proper function which was being destroyed when these assumptions came into play.
I recall Bion’s ideas, not because I support them or even claim to really understand them, but because they continue an important thread from Mackay’s tradition about the behaviour of crowds. The overall idea can be simply stated thus. Being with people, in groups or crowds, makes significant changes to the way we think and reason. Other people, willingly or not, change us and the way our mental life functions. The truth of this idea has been demonstrated over and over again in the political life of our societies. Sometimes entire nations fall captive to the rhetoric of leaders and in this way every individual becomes the outworking of a group mind. Obviously, it is not difficult to see also this process being worked out in some religious settings. Getting people to ‘think and feel alike’ is not in itself wrong. It just becomes wrong when no one questions the process through which it is happening. My paper for next year’s Conference run by ICSA is hoping to look over just some of these ideas and suggest that they are of considerable importance for cultic (and political) studies. The problem is that few people in Britain are apparently now interested in the notions of crowd psychology. Back in the 1960s large conferences were held in Leicester to explore crowd dynamics with leaders of industry. On the church side the late Wesley Carr took a lively interest and was part of the organising committee. Those conferences were massively expensive to organise and now there is no academic centre that can sponsor them.
My task between now and the end of the month is to put these ideas into a proposal of 300 words. After that, I will have the task of reviewing, from the small crowd psychology section among my books, the ideas that should be better understood by those who claim to be experts in cults and the religious movements that focus on large group power. Perhaps all I will be able to do is to say simply one thing. The energy of cultic movements and charismatic religion seems to root itself in the powerful dynamics of crowd behaviour. There is a literature on this going back almost two hundred years. Let us be aware of it and be prepared to evaluate it afresh. Our future political life on both sides of the Atlantic as well as our religious bodies depend on our institutions looking at this material with clear eyes.
Douglas Murray’s recent book, also on The Madness of Crowds, is also worth reading on this topic.
Almost nobody in a cult thinks that they are in one.
I recall working for a firm (The Firm) and considering what it took to be promoted to partner. Only if you reached a certain level would you even be party to such information.
One of the criteria for promotion was “loyalty to the Firm”. I could never quite get my head round this, for example what exactly was the Firm? Was it the staff, the buildings? Or did they mean the Firm’s partners, the people themselves?
As an aside, what would disloyalty look like? Would any questioning of their decision making be considered disloyal and disqualify me?
And about the partners: all partners were equal, but clearly some were more equal than others. Junior partners had no vote and I figured about one tenth to one eighth of the income of the top man (mostly men obviously).
Loyalty did not appear to be a two way street. Some people devoted much of their lives in the service and belief of the firm, with very little payback, and certainly no equity.
Ejection, on the other hand, could easily be achieved through redundancy (“times are tough”) or sideways moves (translation: demotion).
For me, the crux of it was the Firm’s mission statement, affixed to the wall of the general office. “We exist to provide the best possible customer service”. My silent variation of this was “to make as much profit for the senior partners as possible”.
Loyalty and blind acquiescence are driven by fear. Fear is often unconscious.
Sometimes the fantasy of eventual preferment allows us to set aside our ethics, turning a blind eye to the abuses right in front of us. Greed or just brownie points.
Many, perhaps the majority even, don’t have the hope of promotion, just not losing their place is all. They can’t afford to think of challenging the status quo. They have no advocate, no union, no hope outside.
It’s perhaps no surprise then that inspirational ideas like Bion’s have gained so little traction. Powerful vested interests have no intention of changing.
That said, the clear message of those early group analysers and their many unheard successors, is that all this dysfunctional behaviour is so inefficient. If we could get back to the task of what we started with, our values, we could achieve a great deal more.
No one likes to be analysed, or thought to be irrational. Analysis is for other people.
No elite group can easily challenge its own raison d’ètre. Inertia is set in its own construction over the ages.
Oh well said! Thank you. Loyalty all one way, yesss.
I have been interested in crowd psychology ever since my days in the Wimber wonderland. Wimber projected a casual, ‘just let the Holy Spirit work’ air, but in fact had made a study of how to manage and manipulate people. And the healing techniques he taught had a a hefty dose of what is medically termed hypnosis in them.
I was in one meeting, in Scotland, where mass hysteria swept the crowd of 2,000 and nearly everyone fainted. It was frightening.
My experiences in that church sparked an interest in the relation between the spiritual, emotional, and psychological which endures to this day. It was quite handy when, as a university chaplain, I was investigating cults operating in Manchester and targeting our students. And it led to my researching an MPhil on ‘Charismatic Healing Ministries and the Sexual Abuse Survivor’.
Fascinating Janet!
Did you find a reluctance amongst the other “delegates” to question the leadership, or the authenticity of the experience in Scotland?
Yes. I counted 20 seats in my row, and only 1 other person was still standing – an NHS manager. He and I exchanged quizzical looks across the sea of bodies. But most people thought ‘the Spirit has been there’. I didn’t sense the Holy Spirit at work, but I was very much aware that the auditorium was overcrowded and airless; we had been there for some hours; we had just spent 45 minutes standing with our heads tilted back, singing words off an overhead screen; the songs were very emotion-centred and played at rock band noise level; and the one which triggered the fainting featured a chorus which was endlessly repeated, a little faster and louder each time.
A small group of us from the church met secretly for a while to discuss the Wimber and Kansas City Prophets techniques and phenomena. The group included a consultant neurologist, an academic specialising in social and religious history, and two professional musicians. It was both interesting and very useful, but the fact we had to meet secretly tells you a lot about the church.
Perhaps a litmus test for such phenomena, would be to see if there were any lasting good in the recipients: “n years on what changes in your life have you experienced?” Might be a suitable question.
An observation: the leaders themselves often seem to be exempt from the “slaying”.
Yes, that is a useful test. It’s characteristic of healings accomplished by hypnosis (i.e. the power of suggestion) that they only last a few months.
There is some very useful stuff abut dealing with spiritual phenomena in classic spirituality; especially in St. Teresa of Avila’s writings. The ‘consolations’, as she called them, are nice to have but they don’t really mean much, and focussing on them can lead us astray.
I found with some people in the charismatic movement the ‘signs and wonders’ had some features of addiction – it took more and more extreme phenomena to achieve the same high. Hence Wimber led to the Kansas City Prophets, which gave way to the Toronto Blessing, then to gold fillings, and so on.
God is sometimes found in the fire and thunder, but more often in the still small voice.
Very wise as ever Janet!
The relentless drive for “healings”, and the crowd acquiescing in these suggestions is not a risk free venture. For me, proper treatment for serious conditions can be put off, and the temporary relief you infer leads to despair when symptoms reappear.
Offering false hope from quick cures seems to be charlatanism.
The addiction you refer to serves to promote and “affirm” the ministry being offered. I’d like to think Its proponents do so largely unwittingly, but am less sure of this in recent years.
Narcissism has often been a theme. Usually narcissistic individuals are the focus, but the group or organisation can itself be narcissistic.
Recent comments here illustrate the features of narcissistic organisations, basking in the reflected glory of a flawed image, with sycophantic acolytes doing their PR.
In the corporate world, firms with 2, 3 or 4 letter initials as names, become super brands. They are powerful aspirational networks of “golden boys” (GB). I had the dubious experience of working in one of these. The contrast between a GB firm and a non GB firm, is marked. Hordes of people want to work for one, with the CV kudos of working there.
Crowd behaviour in GBs is quite distinctive. Individual autonomy is often sacrificed for the right to stay and enjoy the perceived luxury Of being associated with the Name of the brand. By autonomy, I mean enjoying things like going home, eating with non brand fiends, personal relationships etc.
I recall many intelligent and interesting colleagues there. A couple of them on one of my teams, had confessed to working on my assignment at 2 o’clock in the morning. They were ‘fly-ins” workers from overseas employed by the GB at lower pay because they had slightly different qualifications. They were working so late because they wanted to make and retain a good impression. I’ve often wondered on whom.
Little attention is paid to whether the experience is actually pleasant or not. I liken it to the intelligent person’s version of self harm.
Beatings, in the form of ridiculous hours are administered on a daily and as I’ve said, often nightly basis. They are usually self-administered. You don’t want a GB beating. The fear is ejection from the divine fold. One of my allocated trainees, with a first class degree and a near-completed pHD thesis, was “let go” for failing one paper of her exams.
The inner core hierarchy is an essential construct of the elite mystique. No one joins a GB firm to work (although they do work hard and long obviously), they join for what the brand will give them, they hope. The carrot and future untold wealth of partnership, is usually recognised as being too far off for most. The majority settle for an exit to a job outside with (they hope) a better salary than without GB on the CV. Few, despite their high IQ seem to compute that success in the outside world consists of a range of other qualities that could be earned or nurtured at a much lower price.
No one critiques the inner core. To do so would lead to a swifter exit. Subsequently it would make no sense to rubbish the brand value we spent so much effort saying to ourselves was worth it.
It you’re wondering whether, despite what I’ve said, GB names are in fact justly superior, take a look at the results. Weekly frauds at huge companies, undetected by GB X or Y. Massive profits from consulting at the same companies.
Continued…
… continued: 2/2
Another distinctive feature of narcissistic groups is that it’s hard to spot the leader. They are fluid and interchangeable. One can easily be “exited” or scapegoated if the Firm gets caught, but it rarely comes to this. The brand continues. Silence booms out.
The appearance of gold is but an illusion. But because the GBs effectively control access to the biggest most prestigious church appointments, sorry I meant companies, the golden brand is not going anywhere soon.
I remember being in a United Church Gathering at Pentecost a year or two ago when the theme was the Fire of the Spirit. At the end the leader was inviting people to come forward to the front whilst music and praise was continuing. “Send the fire, send the fire” he was acclaiming over and over again. I couldn’t avoid as I sat there thinking I’ve seen this all before – it was on Mount Carmel; and it didn’t work then.
“Maybe your god is on the toilet”! Yes. Good point. Like Janet, I sense only bad when people are becoming hysterical.
Yes it does seem a tad unlikely that God would be so simple to manipulate as to require a formulaic set of yelled incantations to produce results for us.
And when asking for fire, not actual fire in case we get burnt.