Guilt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Behaviors are shaped subtly at first, then more forcefully. The material that will make up the new identity is doled out gradually, piece by piece, only as fast as the person is deemed ready to assimilate it. The rule of thumb is, “Tell the new member only what they are ready to accept.” When I was a lecturer in the Moonies, I remember discussing this policy with others involved in recruiting. I was taught this analogy: “You wouldn’t feed a baby thick pieces of steak, would you? You have to feed a baby something it can digest, like formula. Well, these people (potential converts) are spiritual babies. Don’t tell them more than they can handle, or they will die.” If a recruit became angry because they were learning too much about the real workings of our organization, the person working on them would back off and let another member move in to spoon-feed them some pablum. The formal indoctrination sessions can be very droning and rhythmic—a way to induce hypnotic states. It is fairly common for people to fall asleep during these programs. When I was a cult lecturer, I was taught to chastise people and made them feel guilty if they fell asleep, but in fact they were merely responding well to hypnosis. Even while lightly dozing, a person is still more or less hearing the material and being affected by it, with their normal intellectual defenses down. Another potent technique for change is the induced “spiritual experience.” This is often contrived in the most artificial manner. Private information about the recruit is collected by the person’s closest buddy in the group and then secretly passed to the leadership. Later, at the right moment, this information can be pulled out suddenly to create an “experience.” Perhaps weeks later, in another state, a leader suddenly confronts a recruit about their brother’s suicide. Knowing that they didn’t tell anyone in this new place about it, the recruit thinks the leader has read their thoughts or is being informed directly by the spirit world. The recruit is overcome and begs forgiveness for not being a better member. Destructive religious cults are not the only ones to engineer “mystical” experiences. One martial artist and self-professed mentalist who formed his own cult secretly paid hoodlums to mug his students on the street, in order to heighten their fear of the outside world and become more dependent on him. Another cult leader, a psychotherapist, manipulated one of his clients by confronting her inability to stay on her diet. She believed that he had special powers. He didn’t tell her that he had seen her earlier that day eating an ice cream sundae. She believed that he had special “powers.”

• From Untrue (2018)

  Tim feels convinced that being open is the right way for him and for Lily. He has little in the way of advice for others, and unlike many people in open marriages I spoke to, he never talks about monogamy as “impossible” or “hypocritical” or even “difficult.” He is beyond that point in the process, and when it came to his marriage, he seems to have very little to prove. He prefers to keep his private life private, to the extent that he can, but he is in no sense embarrassed by it, and he seems to enjoy thinking through what it all might mean and why it works for them. During one of our talks, Tim told me that he himself was emerging from the very sudden and bruising crack-up of a longish relationship with a married woman. I was surprised; I had never heard about her before. Tim explained that he had entered into the affair believing that the woman’s husband knew about it. He did not. And when he found out, he told his wife to end the relationship immediately via text. She did. “This was someone I spoke to daily for nearly three years,” Tim said, shaking his head. He spoke of feeling tremendously guilty and said, “I can only imagine what was happening on the other side of that text. The anger. The fireworks.” He said he felt this breakup had altered him at the cellular level, and that he would never again be involved with a woman if he wasn’t sure her husband knew. I wondered about the logistics of confirming such a thing, how it could be done. With a permission slip? A conversation between The Guys? Tim wasn’t sure. This breakup was fresh, though, and what upset him most, he said, was that he had caused pain, and that his ex-girlfriend’s husband would hold this over her forever as punishment. “This will be how he controls the relationship,” Tim explained, shaking his head again. “And I bear some responsibility for that. It makes me feel ill.” He says he would rather be open. “I have struggled with it sometimes. But it means that something like this—the breakup of a family over a deception, or a long terrible stalemate in a marriage with kids because someone was dishonest—won’t happen.”

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Thought control can effectively block out any feelings that do not correspond with the group doctrine. It can also serve to keep a cult member working as an obedient slave. In any event, when thought is controlled, feelings and behaviors are usually controlled as well. Emotional Control Emotional control, the fourth component of the BITE model, attempts to manipulate and narrow the range of a person’s feelings. All or nothing. Either you feel wonderful as a “chosen” member of the elite, someone really special and loved and part of a wonderful movement; or you are broken, unspiritual, have bad karma, are guilty of overts, are sinful and need to repent, try harder and become a better, more devoted member. Guilt and fear figure mightily. However, most cult members can’t see that guilt and fear are being used to control them. They are both essential tools to keep people under control. Guilt comes in many forms. Historical guilt (for instance, the fact that the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima), identity guilt (a thought such as “I’m not living up to my potential”), guilt over past actions (“I cheated on a test”) and social guilt (“People are dying of starvation”) can all be exploited by destructive cult leaders. Members are conditioned to always take the blame, so that they respond gratefully whenever a leader points out one of their “shortcomings.” Fear is used to bind the group members together in several ways. The first is the creation of an outside enemy, who is persecuting the group and its members. For example, the FBI will jail or kill you; Satan will carry you off to Hell; psychiatrists will give you electroshock therapy; armed members of rival sects will shoot or torture you; and, of course, ex-members and critics will try to persecute you. Second is the terror of discovery and punishment by cult members and leaders. Fear of what can happen to you if you don’t do your job well can be very potent. Some groups claim that nuclear holocaust or other disasters will result if members are lax in their commitment. In order to control someone through their emotions, feelings themselves often have to be redefined. For example, everyone wants happiness. However, if happiness is redefined as being closer to God, and God is unhappy (as He apparently is in many religious cults), then the way to be happy is to be unhappy. Happiness, therefore, consists of suffering so you can grow closer to God. This idea also appears in some non-cult theologies, but in a cult it is a tool for exploitation and control. In some groups, happiness simply means following the leader’s directions, recruiting a lot of new members, or bringing in a lot of money. Or, happiness is defined as the sense of community provided by the cult to those who enjoy high status within it.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I felt genuinely sorry for her and I was perplexed as to what to do for her. Suddenly she threw her arms around my neck and she kissed me passionately. We stood there a long while embracing each other and then I thought to myself no, it’s a crime, and besides maybe the wife didn’t go to the movies at all, maybe she’ll be ducking back any minute. I told the kid to pull herself together, that we’d take a trolley ride somewhere. I saw the child’s bank lying on the mantelpiece and I took it to the toilet and emptied it silently. There was only about seventy-five cents in it. We got on a trolley and went to the beach. Finally we found a deserted spot and we lay down in the sand. She was hysterically passionate and there was nothing to do but to do it. I thought she would reproach me afterwards, but she didn’t. We lay there a while and she began talking about Balzac again. It seems she had ambitions to be a writer herself. I asked her what she was going to do. She said she hadn’t the least idea. When we got up to go she asked me to put her on the highway. Said she thought she would go to Cleveland or some place. It was after midnight when I left her standing in front of a gas station. She had about thirty-five cents in her pocketbook. As I started homeward I began cursing my wife for the mean bitch that she was. I wished to Christ it was she whom I had left standing on the highway with no place to go to. I knew that when I got back she wouldn’t even mention the girl’s name. I got back and she was waiting up for me. I thought she was going to give me hell again. But no, she had waited up because there was an important message from O’Rourke. I was to telephone him soon as I got home. However, I decided not to telephone. I decided to get undressed and go to bed. Just when I had gotten comfortably settled the telephone rang. It was O’Rourke. There was a telegram for me at the office—he wanted to know if he should open it and read it to me. I said of course. The telegram was signed Monica. It was from Buffalo. Said she was arriving at the Grand Central in the morning with her mother’s body. I thanked him and went back to bed. No questions from the wife. I lay there wondering what to do. If I were to comply with the request that would mean starting things all over again. I had just been thanking my stars that I had gotten rid of Monica. And now she was coming back with her mother’s corpse. Tears and reconciliation. No, I didn’t like the prospect at all. Supposing I didn’t show up? What then?

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Tom was taught to believe that the Mormon Church represented everything in life that was good and true—and the only way to eternal happiness. He was also taught that anything contrary to the teachings of the church was false, evil and of the Devil—and, of course, would lead to unhappiness. Tom loved his parents, his family, and his Mormon friends. They were good people, and Tom wanted them to love him, accept him and be proud of him. To Tom, this meant not taking seriously his doubts about the church. He felt stuck—like he had to play the game, believe in extraordinary events and theology and dedicate his life to the church. In his late twenties, one of Tom’s guitar students, a lawyer and former missionary, told him some very disturbing facts about the Mormon Church. Some he’d heard before; some he hadn’t. Some of what Tom was told made sense, rang true and disturbed him more than any other discussion about the church that he’d had previously. That night, after he came home, Tom cried in secret, seriously wondering for the first time in his life if Church doctrine might not be true. But he didn’t want to look into any of the things he’d been told that day. Instead, he pushed them aside, and redoubled his efforts to increase his testimony and his faith. For the next 15 years, he lacked the courage to investigate what his student had told him. Meanwhile, the more perfectly Tom practiced his Mormon faith, the more he lived in a world of guilt and shame, always seeking forgiveness. He became obsessed with trying to be worthy, in order to have “the spirit” with him. The routine of daily prayer, scripture study, church activities, seminary and institute classes, regular temple attendance, weekly sacrament meetings, priesthood meetings, and Sunday school constantly indoctrinated Tom and reaffirmed his faith. When he took the sacrament, or went to the temple, he made covenants to be obedient to the strict commandments of God and Church standards. But he also knew that, even as he made those promises, he—like everyone else—would fall short of perfection, and would need to repent over and over again. This routine often led to shame, hopelessness, two-faced hypocritical behavior and a habit of breaking commitments. This can be the perfect recipe to create addiction. Yet Tom was determined to be a man of integrity. With help, he eventually came to the point where he felt that he would rather lose everything, face public humiliation and die with his integrity intact, than to live without it. Integrity became more important to him than his need to believe in the Mormon Church. Armed with this new courage to be completely honest, and to follow his own convictions no matter what the cost, he was finally willing to deeply investigate his questions and concerns about the Church.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I’m thinking now about the rock fight one summer’s afternoon long long ago when I was staying with my Aunt Caroline up near Hell Gate. My cousin Gene and I had been corralled by a gang of boys while we were playing in the park. We didn’t know which side we were fighting for but we were fighting in dead earnest amidst the rock pile by the river bank. We had to show even more courage than the other boys because we were suspected of being sissies. That’s how it happened that we killed one of the rival gang. Just as they were charging us my cousin Gene let go at the ringleader and caught him in the guts with a handsome-sized rock. I let go almost at the same instant and my rock caught him in the temple and when he went down he lay there for good and not a peep out of him. A few minutes later the cops came and the boy was found dead. He was eight or nine years old, about the same age as us. What they would have done to us if they had caught us I don’t know. Anyway, so as not to arouse any suspicion we hurried home; we had cleaned up a bit on the way and had combed our hair. We walked in looking almost as immaculate as when we had left the house. Aunt Caroline gave us our usual two big slices of sour rye with fresh butter and a little sugar over it and we sat there at the kitchen table listening to her with an angelic smile. It was an extremely hot day and she thought we had better stay in the house, in the big front room where the blinds had been pulled down, and play marbles with our little friend Joey Kasselbaum. Joey had the reputation of being a little backward and ordinarily we would have trimmed him, but that afternoon, by a sort of mute understanding, Gene and I allowed him to win everything we had. Joey was so happy that he took us down to his cellar later and made his sister pull up her dress and show us what was underneath. Weesie, they called her, and I remember that she was stuck on me instantly. I came from another part of the city, so far away it seemed to them, that it was almost like coming from another country. They even seemed to think that I talked differently from them. Whereas the other urchins used to pay to make Weesie lift her dress up, for us it was done with love. After a while we persuaded her not to do it any more for the other boys—we were in love with her and we wanted her to go straight. When I left my cousin the end of the summer I didn’t see him again for twenty years or more.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  “And then,” he said, “we took them up on top of a big sand dune that was a few hundred yards from the village.” “Didn’t anybody see you?” “Yeah,” he said. He could feel himself sort of relaxing now. “I think a couple of people in the village. They were going to get water or something. They saw us and one of them started running back to the village. The others just made believe they hadn’t seen us at all. I knew they had but they made believe and kept walking back to the village. We set up a perimeter on top of the hill. We set it up so we could watch all around us and see if anyone was coming out of the village after the woman.” “What time was this?” said the major. “Well—” he looked carefully at his watch. “I think it was about four. It was starting to get dark and I told all the men to eat their rations. Then it became very dark and there were a few small lights in the village and then the shooting started to the left. It was maybe a hundred meters from the big sand dune and I ran to the woman and the kid. I knew she was a woman now and pregnant. Then men started running toward the ocean, away from the dune. Some of them were very frightened. I kept yelling for them to stay, but everyone sort of scattered. Then they all seemed to be running in a line toward a long trench near the ocean. Most of them got back.” “Most of them?” said the major. “Yeah,” he said, “they all got back in the trench except one.” “Who was that?” “That was corporal, he was the last to come back. And that was when it happened,” he said. “What happened?” said the major. “That was when the corporal was killed.” The bald sergeant who worked for the major walked in just as he told the major the thing that had been rolling around in his head all night. “What happened?” said the major. The bald sergeant was putting some papers on the major’s desk. He did that and walked out. “There were a bunch of shots,” he said carefully. “Everybody was shooting, it was a bad firefight.” He paused. “It was pretty bad and then corporal was shot. He was shot and he fell down in front of us and a couple of the men ran out to get him. They pulled him back in. I think the others were still firing. The corpsman tried to help . . . the corporal was shot in the neck . . . The corpsman tried to help . . .” It was becoming very difficult for him to talk now. “Major,” he said, “I think I might have . . . I think I might have killed the corporal.” “I don’t think so,” said the major quickly. “It was very confusing.

• From Untrue (2018)

  This book, then, is a work of interdisciplinary cultural criticism. It distills and synthesizes the research of experts on female infidelity in a range of fields, melding it with my own opinions and interpretations of everything from articles in academic journals to studies by social scientists to pop culture songs and movies. I interviewed thirty experts in fields including primatology, cultural and biological anthropology, psychology, sex research, sociology, medicine, and “lifestyle choice advocacy and activism.” I also wanted to include the perspectives of those who have experienced female infidelity firsthand. To that end there are anecdotes and longer stories from women and men I interviewed, who ranged in age from twenty to ninety-three, as well as insights and observations from those I spoke to more informally about infidelity (see the Author’s Note for details). There was not a single dull conversation. Women who refuse to be sexually exclusive can’t be pigeonholed—mostly they struck me as profoundly normal. But what they all have in common is that they dared to do something we have been told is immoral, antisocial, and a violation of our deepest notions of how women naturally are and “should be.” As the sociologist Alicia Walker has suggested, in being untrue, women violate not just a social script but a cherished gender script as well. The women I spoke to were obviously not a representative sample—that wasn’t and isn’t the point. They were storytellers—sometimes remorseful, often guilty or ambivalent, occasionally defiantly unrepentant and even enthused about what they’d done—who added vibrant color and detail to the realities of female infidelity I read about in academic studies and journals and learned about from experts. They were the flushed faces of statistics and the protagonists of their own narratives, as well as the larger narrative of our culture’s ambivalence about women who cheat. I come honestly to my interest in our culture’s obsession with women who are untrue. In my twenties, I struggled, like a lot of young women, with monogamy and the specter of the adulteress. I moved to New York for the vibrant intellectual culture, the vivid nightlife, the like-minded people—and the large pool of potential romantic and sexual partners. Yes, New York seemed like a great place to find a boyfriend, or a few of them. And I did. I intended to date these guys one at a time, to break it off neatly with one before moving on to another, until I found The One I would marry, in the semi-accepted tradition of serial monogamy. That’s what people did.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  One should not be drowned in the human tidal wave, even for the sake of becoming a Master. One must beat with his own rhythm—at any price. I accumulated thousands of years of experience in a few short years, but the experience was wasted because I had no need of it. I had already been crucified and marked by the cross; I had been born free of the need to suffer—and yet I knew no other way to struggle forward than to repeat the drama. All my intelligence was against it. Suffering is futile, my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily . Suffering has never taught me a thing; for others it may still be necessary, but for me it is nothing more than an algebraic demonstration of spiritual inadaptability. The whole drama which the man of today is acting out through suffering does not exist for me: it never did, actually. All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten. Another thing . . . the mystery which enveloped my behavior grew deeper the nearer I came to the circle of uterine relatives. The mother from whose loins I sprang was a complete stranger to me. To begin with, after giving birth to me she gave birth to my sister, whom I usually refer to as my brother. My sister was a sort of harmless monster, an angel who had been given the body of an idiot. It gave me a strange feeling, as a boy, to be growing up and developing side by side with this being who was doomed to remain all her life a mental dwarf. It was impossible to be a brother to her because it was impossible to regard this atavistic hulk of a body as a “sister.” She would have functioned perfectly, I imagine, among the Australian primitives. She might even have been raised to power and eminence among them, for, as I said, she was the essence of goodness, she knew no evil. But so far as living the civilized life goes she was helpless; she not only had no desire to kill but she had no desire to thrive at the expense of others. She was incapacitated for work, because even if they had been able to train her to make caps for high explosives, for example, she might absent-mindedly throw her wages in the river on the way home or she might give them to a beggar in the street. Often in my presence she was whipped like a dog for having performed some beautiful act of grace in her absent-mindedness, as they called it. Nothing was worse, I learned as a child, than to do a good deed without reason.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  One of my clients, from Germany, flew to the United States against his doctor’s advice to try to see his son in the Moonies. He had a heart attack and died. Imagine the guilt the son might have experienced when he found out. Trying to suppress that guilt might have actually prolonged his cult involvement. Remember that you are in a kind of war with the cult. As part of the preparatory process, identify and address everyone’s concerns and emotional needs. Good individual and family counseling can be enormously helpful. Parents and other family members should try to keep the cult problem in a balanced perspective. Life for them and their family has to go on, particularly if the person has been a member for a long time. Let me repeat: life has to go on. Consolidate Your Resources Following the example of the Johnsons, involve as many family members and friends in your rescue efforts as you feel comfortable with. But also help to educate them. Invite them to attend workshops on cults, undue influence or mind control. Contact knowledgeable clergy, mental health professionals, former cult members, families who have had a cult problem, and anyone else who might be able to offer assistance. When it comes to helping cult members exit their groups, people can be extremely helpful and generous. If a family member is very close to the person in a cult, do everything within your power to involve that person. Countless times, a brother or sister who had a lot of clout with the cult member has turned out to be a key player. But also quite often, that person initially did not want to help with a rescue effort. Either they didn’t understand mind control or they felt a misplaced loyalty to their sibling. If necessary, plan a mini-intervention with that person first. Then, with them on your side, it may well be much easier to help the cult member exit the group. Lastly, don’t just consolidate your resources: use them as wisely as possible. Coordination, teamwork and good communication all combine for success. Get Organized and Make a Plan Learn as much as you can. Study the enemy—the specific cult group—as well as similar cults. Learn how they think and how they operate. Become knowledgeable about mind control. The more clearly you understand it, the more easily you will be able to explain it to others—including, when the time comes, the cult member. Start with the Freedom of Mind website, freedomofmind.com, which offers a very wide range of free resources, plus links to other helpful websites. Keep organized files. Make copies of important articles to share with everyone concerned. Make copies of every letter written to the cult member and every letter received from them. These may turn out to be quite important during or after any rescue effort. I have frequently shown cult members letters they had written in which they lied to their families, or made promises that they later broke.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It was hard to tell what was happening.” “Yes I know,” said the major. “Sometimes it gets very hard out there. I was out a couple of weeks ago and sometimes it’s very hard to tell what’s happening.” He stared down at the floor of the bunker until he could make himself say it again. He wasn’t quite sure the major had heard him the first time. “But I just want you to know, major, I think I was the one who killed him. I think it might have been me.” There, he had said it. And now he was walking away. For some reason he was feeling a lot better. He had told the major everything and the major hadn’t believed it. It was like going to confession when he was a kid and the priest saying everything was okay. He walked by the men outside the radio shack. They turned their faces away as he passed. Let them talk, he thought. He was only human, he had made a mistake. The corporal was dead now and no one could bring him back. * * * The chaplain held a memorial service that afternoon for the man he had killed and he sat in the tent with the rest of the men. There was a wife and a kid, someone said. He tried to listen to the words the chaplain was saying, the name he kept repeating over and over again. Who was this man he’d just killed? Who had he been? He wanted to scream right there in the church tent, right there during the ceremony. He kept hearing the name too many times, the name of the dead man, the man with the friends, the man with the wife, the one he didn’t know or care to know, the kid from Georgia who was now being carefully wrapped up in some plastic bag and sent back in a cheap wooden box to be buried in the earth at nineteen. He had panicked with the rest of them that night and murdered his first man, but it wasn’t the enemy, it wasn’t the one they had all been taught and trained to kill, it wasn’t the silhouette at the rifle range he had pumped holes in from five hundred yards, or the German soldiers with plastic machine guns in Sally’s Woods. He’d never figured it would ever happen this way. It never did in the movies. There were always the good guys and the bad guys, the cowboys and the Indians. There was always the enemy and the good guys and each of them killed the other. He went back to his tent after the ceremony was over and sat down. There was some mail but he couldn’t get interested in it. Someone had sent him a Sergeant Rock comicbook. But it wasn’t funny anymore. The good guys weren’t supposed to kill the good guys.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He walked on it like a man on a tightrope, it was so dark and so very hard to see. A couple of times he stumbled on the wooden boxes. It was quiet as he opened the tent flap, as quiet and dark as it had been outside the major’s bunker. He dragged in carrying his rifle in one hand and the map case in the other. They were all asleep, all curled up on their cots, inside their mosquito nets. He walked up to his rack and sat down, his head sinking down to the floor. Panic was still rushing through him like a wild train, his heart still raced through his chest as he saw over and over again the kid from Georgia running toward him and the crack of his rifle killing him dead. I killed him, he kept repeating over and over to himself. He’s dead, he thought. Gripping his rifle, holding the trigger, he went through the whole thing again and again, tapping, touching the trigger lightly each time he saw the corporal from Georgia running toward him just as he had out there in the sand when everything seemed so crazy and frightening. Each time he felt his heart racing as the three cracks went off and the dark figure slumped to the sand in front of him. “He’s dead—go get him!” someone was yelling to his right. “Go get him he’s hit!” Someone was running now, running to the body and they were pulling the guy in. They were bringing him back to the trench where they all lay scared and shivering. “Doc—Doc—where’s the corpsman!” somebody was yelling. “Hey Doc, hurry up!” Then somebody said it. Somebody shouted real loud, “It’s corporal. They got corporal . . .” “He’s dead,” somebody said. “He’s gone.” Slowly he turned the rifle around and pointed the barrel toward his head. Oh Jesus God almighty, he thought. Why ? Why? Why? He began to cry slowly at first. Why ? I’m going to kill myself, he thought. I’m going to pull this trigger. He was going mad. One minute he wanted to pull the trigger and the next he was feeling the strange power of a man who had just killed someone. He laid the weapon down by the side of his rack and crawled in with his clothing still on. I killed him, he kept thinking, and when I wake up tomorrow, he thought, when I wake up tomorrow it will still be the same. He wanted to run and hide. He felt like he was in boot camp again and there was no escape, no way off the island. He would wake up with the rest of them the next day. He would get up and wash outside the tent in his tin dish, he would shave and go to chow. But everything would not be all right, he thought, nothing would be all right at all.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  * * * The next few weeks passed in a slow way, much slower than any time in his whole life. Each day dragged by until the night, the soft soothing night, when he could close himself off from the pain, when he could forget the terrible thing for a few hours. Each night before he slept he prayed to his god, begging for some understanding of why the thing had happened, why he had been made into a murderer with one shot. Why him? he thought over and over again. He first pleaded with God, then he became angry, demanding. Oh God, he thought, why did this happen, for what reason? What kind of god, he thought, would do this to him? What kind of god would give him these terrible feelings and nightmares for what seemed to be the rest of his life? The time passed in big gaps of deadness. Nights when he could sleep and forget and mornings when it all came back and the men stood by the tents looking at him in their peculiar way, whispering on the chow line. He found himself reading a small pocket Bible so he would not have to look at them and writing long letters to his mother and father. He wrote in his diary that he wanted to become a priest, and that was what he told his parents in the letter about the corporal that he finally wrote home. He told them the story he had told the major, the story about the firefight. And the whole thing in the letter took on a new and beautiful meaning. He had seen a man killed and something, something very deep and wonderful, had happened to him. In some wonderful way, he wrote to them, he had become something very different than he had ever been before. And now, he told them, he wanted to be a priest. He wanted to be like the guy up on the altar, the healer and the guy who gave communion. He finished the letter and he sent it. There, he thought, it’s through. And now deep down inside him he still felt the angry pain, but it became a little easier to live now, easier to live—even though the war was going on a little worse than before, artillery and rockets were hitting the camp almost every day, sending the men into the little bunkers they had built. The major was still sitting behind his desk in the big sandbagged battalion bunker, and whenever he walked past him the major would return his sharp salute with a very confident smile on his face. He thought of the major as his friend. He had understood the whole terrible thing. He had said that maybe it didn’t happen, things got confusing out there, and the major said he knew, that he had been out there himself under heavy fire and he knew.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now he felt an irritating combination of guilt and anxiety. He thought of his wife, making breakfast with her delicate, methodical movements, or in the bathroom, painstakingly applying kohl under her huge eyes, flicking away the excess with pretty, birdlike finger gestures, her thin elbows raised, her eyes blank with concentration. He thought of Beth, naked and bound, blindfolded and spread-eagled on the floor of her cluttered apartment. Her cartoon characters grinned as he beat her with a whip. Welts rose on her breasts, thighs, stomach and arms. She screamed and twisted, wrenching her neck from side to side. She was going to be scarred for life. He had another picture of her sitting across from him at a restaurant, very erect, one arm on the table, her face serious and intent. Her large glasses drew her face down, made it look somber and elegant. She was smoking a cigarette with slow, mournful intakes of breath. These images lay on top of one another, forming a hideously confusing grid. How was he going to sort them out? He managed to separate the picture of his wife and the original picture of blindfolded Beth and hold them apart. He imagined himself traveling happily between the two. Perhaps, as time went on, he could bring Beth home and have his wife beat her too. She would do the dishes and serve them dinner. The grid closed up again and his stomach went into a moil. The thing was complicated and potentially exhausting. He looked at the anxious girl on the corner. She had said that she wanted to be hurt, but he suspected that she didn’t understand what that meant. He should probably just stay in the pizza place and watch her until she went away. It might be entertaining to see how long she waited. He felt a certain pity for her. He also felt, from his glassed-in vantage point, as though he were torturing an insect. He gloated as he ate his pizza. At the height of her anxiety she saw him through the glass wall of the pizza stand. She immediately noticed his gloating countenance. She recognized the coldly scornful element in his watching and waiting as opposed to greeting her. She suffered, but only for an instant; she was then smitten by love. She smiled and crossed the street with a senseless confidence in the power of her smile. “I was about to come over,” he said. “I had to eat first. I was starving.” He folded the last of his pizza in half and stuck it in his mouth.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  I felt even more guilt for what I had done as a Moonie. I had lied to people, manipulated them, tricked them, and induced them to abandon their families, education, and relationships to follow a would-be dictator.44 The guilt turned to anger the more I studied mind control. I tracked down Dr. Robert Jay Lifton and arranged a meeting at his apartment in Manhattan. He was curious to know why I was so interested in a book about Chinese brainwashing he had written 15 years earlier, in 1961. He was amazed when I described to him, in detail, what the Moonies do to recruit members and how they run their 3 day workshops, their 7 day workshops, and their 21 day, 40 day, and 120 day workshops. He said, “What you are telling me is so much more sophisticated than what the Chinese did in the ‘50s. It’s like a hybrid mutation of a virulent virus strain!” Lifton shifted my entire perspective on myself when he said, “Steve, you know more about this than I do, because you’ve lived it. You know it instrumentally. I only know it theoretically and second-hand. You must study psychology and take what you know through your experience and tell others about it.” He later asked me to co-author a book with him on mind control (something that was never to be). I was flattered by his offer and intended to take him up on it, but the timing wasn’t right for me. I Decide To Go Public Meeting Lifton transformed my life. Instead of looking at myself and seeing a college dropout, a poet with no poetry (I sorely regretted throwing those four hundred poems away), and a former cult member, I saw that perhaps there was a higher purpose for me. At that time, although I was no longer a Moonie, I was still thinking somewhat in black and white terms: good versus evil, us versus them. The world’s most renowned expert on brainwashing thought that I had an important contribution to make, that what I had experienced could be useful in helping people. By this time I had started attending cult awareness meetings of people affected by the problem and was approached by many parents of people in the Moonies. They asked me if I would talk to their children still trapped in the Moonies. I agreed.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  But I was running Windows 95. Windows 95 took forever to shut down. I was closing windows, shutting down programs. I had one of those fat Seagate drives that damaged easily, and I didn’t want to cut the power and possibly damage the drive. This cop clearly didn’t give a fuck about any of that. “Shut it down! Shut it down!” “I am! I’m shutting it down! I have to close the programs!” The crowd was getting angry, and the cop was getting nervous. He turned his gun away from me and shot the computer. Only he clearly didn’t know anything about computers because he shot the monitor. The monitor exploded but the music kept playing. Now there was chaos—music blaring and everyone running and panicking because of the gunshot. I yanked the power cord out of the tower to shut the thing down. Then the cops started firing tear gas into the crowd. The tear gas had nothing to do with me or the music. Tear gas is just what the police use to shut down parties in black neighborhoods, like the club turning on the lights to tell everyone to go home. I lost the hard drive. Even though the cop shot the monitor the explosion somehow fried the thing. The computer would still boot up, but it couldn’t read the drive. My music library was gone. Even if I’d had the money for a new hard drive, it had taken me years to amass the music collection. There was no way to replace it. The DJ’ing business was over. The CD-selling business was done. All of a sudden our crew lost its main revenue stream. All we had left was the hustle, and we hustled even harder, taking the bit of cash we had on hand and trying to double it, buying this to flip it for that. We started eating into our savings, and in less than a month we were running on dust. Then, one evening after work, our friend from the airport, the black Mr. Burns, came by. “Hey, look what I found,” he said. “What’ve you got?” “A camera.” I’ll never forget that camera. It was a digital camera. We bought it from him, and I took it and turned it on. It was full of pictures of a nice white family on vacation, and I felt like shit. The other things we’d bought had never mattered to me. Nikes, electric toothbrushes, electric razors. Who cares? Yeah, some guy might get fired because of the pallet of Corn Flakes that went missing from the supermarket, but that’s degrees removed. You don’t think about it. But this camera had a face. I went through those pictures, knowing how much my family pictures meant to me, and I thought, I haven’t stolen a camera. I’ve stolen someone’s memories. I’ve stolen part of someone’s life.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  young lieutenant in the major’s bunker. “They were attacking,” he said, looking at the lieutenant’s face, “and we moved backward.” “You retreated,” the lieutenant said. “Yes, we retreated and he got shot. He lived a little while but then he died. He died there in the sand and we called for help. And then we put him in the Amtrac. He must have run away when they started firing. It was dark and I couldn’t tell.” “Okay,” said the young-looking lieutenant. “Come back again in the morning and we can go over it again. Too bad about . . .” he said. “Yeah,” he said. He was almost crying now as he turned and walked out of the big command bunker. There was sand all over the place outside and a cold monsoon wind was blowing. He looked out into the darkness and heard the waves of the China Sea breaking softly far away. There was a path made of wooden ammo casings that led back to his tent. He walked on it like a man on a tightrope, it was so dark and so very hard to see. A couple of times he stumbled on the wooden boxes. It was quiet as he opened the tent flap, as quiet and dark as it had been outside the major’s bunker. He dragged in carrying his rifle in one hand and the map case in the other. They were all asleep, all curled up on their cots, inside their mosquito nets. He walked up to his rack and sat down, his head sinking down to the floor. Panic was still rushing through him like a wild train, his heart still raced through his chest as he saw over and over again the kid from Georgia running toward him and the crack of his rifle killing him dead. I killed him, he kept repeating over and over to himself. He’s dead, he thought. Gripping his rifle, holding the trigger, he went through the whole thing again and again, tapping, touching the trigger lightly each time he saw the corporal from Georgia running toward him just as he had out there in the sand when everything seemed so crazy and frightening. Each time he felt his heart racing as the three cracks went off and the dark figure slumped to the sand in front of him. “He’s dead—go get him!” someone was yelling to his right. “Go get him he’s hit!” Someone was running now, running to the body and they were pulling the guy in. They were bringing him back to the trench where they all lay scared and shivering. “Doc—Doc—where’s the corpsman!” somebody was yelling. “Hey Doc, hurry up!” Then somebody said it. Somebody shouted real loud,

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  If you are concerned, consult with as many of the person’s friends and relatives as possible. Don’t do what the Marlowes did, and try to keep the problem hidden. If you do, you will cut yourself off from very valuable emotional support, as well as possible practical help. When people delay talking with others or getting help, in the hope that the person under mind control will magically snap out of it themselves, the consequences can be disastrous. If someone you care about appears to have become involved with a cult, make sure to contact their family—but ask that they not talk to the person about it yet. Doing so could jeopardize the relationship. However, if the situation is handled mindfully and tactfully, the family and the person you care about will ultimately be grateful for your concern. Classic Ineffective Responses Since most people do not understand mind control and the practices of destructive cults, it is easy for them to act ineffectively, or even counterproductively. The most common problem is that family members typically feel an excessive amount of guilt and shame. People blame themselves because of their loved one’s cult involvement. This can be one of the greatest hindrances to positive, effective action. People need to know that they are not at fault. Cults exist. Mind control exists. A mind control virus can infect anyone, just as anyone can become infected with the flu. Another common problem is that people neglect their own needs. The best way to help someone else is to make sure that you first take care of your own needs. You need to get enough sleep, food and down time to stay sane and balanced. You can hurt yourself and your loved one if you don’t take the time to rest, relax and do other things to cope. A loved one’s cult involvement also has to be placed in a manageable perspective. You can do only what is within your capacity to do. Life has to go on. The Marlowes inadvertently punished their other children because they devoted too much time and energy to Henry, all of which they exerted ineffectively. Another mistake is that people often emotionally overreact to the cult involvement. This can be even more dangerous than doing nothing. A person can get driven further into a cult by hysterical tirades and inappropriate uses of words like “cult” and “brainwashing.” Getting emotionally aggressive with a cult member almost always backfires. One other common error is trying to argue the person out of their cult involvement by using a condescending, confrontational approach. This direct approach is doomed to failure. Rational argumentation is simply not effective with someone who has been indoctrinated through mind control. Add condescension or arrogance, and you are playing right into the cult recruiter’s hands.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  “Yes. We believed in a spirit world. In fact, we believed that whenever someone died, like Tom, it was to pay indemnity for some past sin in the person’s lineage. In this way, another member of the family could join the group, serve the man we revered as the living Messiah, and then later intervene to save the person who had passed on to the spirit world. In this way, God could not only restore the whole world back to its original state of goodness, but restore all of the spiritual beings in the spirit world who were unable to advance without earthly ‘vitality elements’ provided by those on earth.” Phil’s jaw hung open a bit. He asked, “You really believed that?” “At the time, absolutely,” I said. “You see, in the Church, members were not allowed to ask critical questions of anything the leader said or did. We were taught to believe that anything that challenged the leader or the group’s beliefs was ‘negative’ and was caused by evil spirits. We were taught to do thought-stopping to shut down our minds. In my group we did this by praying intensely as well as chanting whenever we started to doubt, or whenever we felt homesick.”173 “What was the name of the group again?” he asked. “The Unification Church,” I said. “You probably know it as the Moonies.” “You were in the Moonies? No—I don’t believe it!” Phil exclaimed. “It’s true. In fact, I was a devoted follower of Sun Myung Moon. I would have gladly died on command, if he had told me to,” I replied. “That’s incredible!” Phil said. “Not only that, but we were literally made to feel that if we ever left the group our lives would fall to pieces,” I continued. “We were told that we would be betraying God, the Messiah, ten generations of our ancestors—the whole world, in fact—if we ever left. We were told that all of our relatives now in the spirit world would accuse us throughout eternity for betraying God.174 It was quite a heavy trip. We were told to avoid all former members because they were controlled by evil. If someone we were close to left the group, we were made to feel that he or she was now a Benedict Arnold and was possessed by demonic spirits.175 Can you put yourself in my shoes and imagine what I felt when I was in there?” “Yes.’’ Phil said. “Amazing. How did you get out?” “Well, I was in an automobile accident in which I was almost killed,” I said. “After two weeks in the hospital and an operation on my leg, I was able to get permission to go visit my sister. She had given birth to my nephew over a year earlier, but I had never seen him. I had never been able to get permission from my central figure. Anyway, my parents hired some former Moonies to come talk with me.” “Didn’t you try to resist?’’ asked Phil.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Another important perspective I wanted Phil to have was that of his parents. He needed to connect with their grief and sense of loss. Phil had been so wrapped up in his own pain that he hadn’t realized how deeply everyone else had been affected. Indeed, his parents had kept themselves together in order to help their children. As a result, they had never been able to go through all the stages of mourning properly. Helping Phil remember and process the experience of being recruited into the cult was also important. When I asked him to verbalize what he thought and felt when he first met the devotee, Phil’s long-suppressed guilt feelings about asking Tom to buy him the guitar string came to the surface, for the first time in years. Furthermore, by recalling his recruitment, Phil was able to remember some of the questions and doubts he had at the time. He also remembered that when he first started chanting, it made the pain go away. He remembered thinking at the time, This is a whole lot better than feeling suicidal. In all rescue efforts, it is important to introduce different perspectives. Each time a cult member takes a different perspective, the cult’s hold on them is weakened. In addition to asking a person to remember who they were before joining the group, it can also be quite valuable to ask them to imagine the future. What will they be like in a year, two years, five years, or even ten years? What do they realistically see themselves doing then? Selling flowers on street corners? If not, how would they feel if they were unable to do anything but sell flowers on the street in ten years? Another valuable perspective can also be that of the cult’s leader. In one rescue effort, I asked a Moonie, “If you were the Messiah, would you live the way Sun Myung Moon is living—in a palatial mansion, with two $250,000 personal yachts, limousines and an array of high-end luxuries?” She answered, “Definitely not. I would give all my money to help the poor. I would live very simply.” I was then able to ask her why she thought Moon lived as he did. She told me, “It troubles me. It has always troubled me!” Most cult leaders lead opulent lives, while their followers live relatively poorly. When I told Phil what it felt like to be in the Moonies, I especially tried to convey what it felt like to be around Moon—the excitement, the honor, the awe. I could have asked him to imagine what it feels like to be a Moonie who believes that Moon is ten times greater than Jesus Christ, to feel the incredible honor of living on earth and meeting the Messiah in person. When Phil stepped into the shoes of a Moonie, his experience as a Krishna devotee was altered forever.