Past experience and values are invalid if they conflict with the new cult morality.The control of human communication through environment control.Potential convert is convinced of the higher purpose within the special group.Experiences are engineered to appear to be spontaneous, when, in fact, they are contrived to have a deliberate effect.The group decides who has a right to exist and who does not.The group uses black-or-white thinking and thought-terminating clichés.Former members are seen as "weak, " "lost," "evil," and "the enemy".Public confessional periods are used to get members to verbalize and discuss their innermost fears and anxieties as well as past imperfections.The cult advances the idea that the cult's laws, rules and regulations are absolute and, therefore, to be followed automatically.The philosophical assumption underlying this demand is that absolute purity is attainable, and that anything done to anyone in the name of this purity is ultimately moral.No alternative viewpoint is allowed.The group's belief is that their dogma is absolutely scientific and morally true.The environment demands that personal boundaries are destroyed and that every thought, feeling, or action that does not conform with the group's rules be confessed.The value of individuals is insignificant when compared to the value of the group.Past historical events are retrospectively altered, wholly rewritten, or ignored to make them consistent with doctrinal logic.The group has an elitist world view a sharp line is drawn by cult between those who have been saved, chosen, etc. They become the arbiters of existential guilt, authorities without limit in dealing with others' limitations. Limited as he is, the infant has no choice but to imbue his first nurturing authorities - his parents - with an exaggerated omnipotence, until the time he is himself capable of some degree of independent action and judgment. One is asked to accept these manipulations on a basis of ultimate trust (or faith): "like a child in the arms of its mother." To be sure, one can usually find areas of experience outside its immediate authority; but during periods of maximum totalist activity (like thought reform) any such areas are cut off, and there is virtually no escape from the milieu's ever-pressing edicts and demands.
For they look upon milieu control as a just and necessary policy, one which need not be kept secret: thought reform participants may be in doubt as to who is telling what to whom, but the fact that extensive information about everyone is being conveyed to the authorities is always known.
Rather than modify the myth in accordance with experience, the will to orthodoxy requires instead that men be modified in order to reaffirm the myth.The inspiriting force of such myths cannot be denied; nor can one ignore their capacity for mischief. This combination of personal closure, self-destructiveness, and hostility toward outsiders leads to the dangerous group excesses so characteristic of ideological totalism in any form. Totalist language then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling's phrase, "the language of nonthought.
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