Transcription
Thank you. Hi everybody. Um, apologies for this slide. Um, I mean, the projector thing, it's a little, makes my eyes a little crazy, but, um, I always like to propose this question wherever I give any type of talk: How would anyone know if they were under mind control? Because when I was in the Moonies, I was sure I wasn't. So I was sure I wasn't in a cult, and I was sure I wasn't brainwashed. Everybody kept telling me I was brainwashed. Everyone kept telling me I was in the cult, but whenever they did that, I just did thought stopping as I had been trained to do in the cult. "Crush Satan, crush Satan, glory to Heaven, peace on Earth, true parents, true parents" to block out the doubts because satanic, you know, entities were trying to attack me.
But I actually did a TEDx talk: "How Can Anyone Know If They've Been Brainwashed?" So I encourage you to check that out. I have on my freedomofmind.com website, if you look up recent media, I have my four TEDx talks right at the top, as well as links to a hundred or so other interviews I've done over the recent years. And I will answer this, uh, my my recipe for reality testing, and it's a useful thing, uh, because one issue when people are exiting, um, a high-demand group or an authoritarian cult, um, is the issue of trust and commitment and a lot of fear over getting into something else that might not be healthy. So to have a toolbox of techniques and strategies to reality test is really the recipe.
So how many people honestly have heard of the Moonies before? I should ask you the other way: Who hasn't heard of the Moonies before? Me? Yeah. Good. So what I want, I want to say for you, this is a terrible projector, okay? Um, it's the perfectionist that's left over in my. So, um, that, that man, Sun Myung Moon, and I hate when people call him a Reverend because he's not, but he said he was. In fact, I was a Reverend in the Moonies too. He claimed that Jesus Christ came to him when he was 16 and asked him to fulfill his, uh, unfinished mission. And he was looked at as the Lord of the Second Advent, the sinless Messiah, the greatest man in human history. By the way, the Moonies believe Jesus failed by going to the cross. The Moonies teach that he should have gotten married, had sinless children, that John the Baptist should have brought all the Jews, they should have marched on Rome, taken over Rome, and taken over the world. And then God's original plan for creation would be fulfilled. There would be no more satanic lineage because they would all be perfected lineage, blood lineage. Because the teaching is that that Lucifer had sex with Eve, Eve seduced Adam, and that's how the fall came about. So that's why we have satanic blood.
So this is a mass wedding of the Moonies, and Moon is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest number of marriages in one day. And it was 30,000 couples of True Believers. Most of these people never met each other before or even spoke the same language, or Koreans, Japanese, all over the world. And Moon would line up the men and the women, and because he knew everything, he could see your spirit and read your mind. I can go on for a long time. So because John said I have to finish the whole presentation in an hour, I'll speed it up. But the point is, really quickly, say you and you. Oh, go ahead. What I was just going to jump in. We're going to jump. So I was just going to say, I always think it's interesting to draw parallels. It's interesting that that, um, Mr. Moon, as he likes you, like us to refer to him, claimed to have received a visitation from Jesus around age 16 and that he was called to fulfill the work that didn't get completed by Jesus when he was here. I think that's an interesting parallel. And then I think another parallel that you may not be familiar with is that whether it's the Book of Mormon, the discussion about the pure blood of Israel and the Book of Mormon, or the lineages that you're all passed, uh, down that are all declared during your patriarchal blessings, that's all about the blood of Israel and lineage. And these are two very strong parallels. Uh, yeah. And you have the Book of Mormon, and the Moonies have the Divine Principle book, uh, and lots of. And I should say that, so I was recruited in February of 1974. I was 19 years old at Queen's College. My girlfriend dumped me. Three women flirted, flirted with me, and lied to me and seduced me, kind of to believing that they were interested in me, and that led me into this cult. I was not a joiner. I was not looking to change my life. My life was good. But I came to be, uh, uh, connected to Moon directly because I was selected as a leader to represent the American group. So I had 100, at least 100 leadership meetings with Moon, where he described the inner doctrine of the group and our plans to take over America and amend the Constitution and how democracy was satanic and all kinds of other horrible things. But I became a True Believer and recruited a lot of people into the cult. And I wanted to add the slide because one of his sons has a crown of golden bullets. This is the Mooney symbol, and he says that the line in Revelation about the rod of iron is an AR-15, and that you need an AR-15 to worship God. So he has a gun cult, and he has training compounds to kill people for civil war in the United States. Because a lot of people said, the Moonies, you never hear about them anymore. Well, they're still around, and very, very large measure. And that man brought busloads of Moonies to January 6th and spread disinformation, saying it was Antifa. The Moonies' newspaper, The Washington Times, said it was Antifa, just to let you know that my former cult is still a powerhouse.
Steve, if I can just jump in really quickly. I'll be jumping in. Keep. Yeah. So one podcast I want to highly, highly recommend to you, it's from The New York Times, The Daily podcast. If any of you ever watched The Daily podcast, I promise you you will value this. The podcast is called "The Untold Story of Sushi in America." And, um, it's a mind-blowing podcast episode, and it talks about how, um, Mr. Moon decided in the '70s and '80s, if I'm right, to seed and cultivate the sushi industry within the United States. Yeah, in '74. Long story short, something between 60 and 80% of the fish sold to sushi restaurants comes through a company or companies owned by the Moonies, and it's a multi-billion dollar organization. Yep. And so parallels between massive wealth through the accumulation of of tithing and contributions to then grow a massive corporate empire is also a very significant parallel. And I promise you, you'll love that podcast episode. Yeah. And I have, I have a list on my website of 71 pages, single-spaced, of entities associated with the Moonies, 71 pages, single-spaced.
So this slide is from the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic Statistical Manual, version five. There was this version four before, and then version three, but there's a, a category called dissociative disorder 300.15. And I'll just read it: "Identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion. Individuals who have been subjected to intense coercive persuasion." And it's important, I want to add that coercive persuasion was a book written by Edgar Schein in 1961. And when you hear the word coercive, you think of violence, like physical violence, but it does not. It can include physical violence, but it's psychological violence. Okay? So, "subjected to intense coercive persuasion, for example, brainwashing, thought reform, indoctrination while captive, torture, long-term political imprisonment, recruitment by sex or cults, or by terror organizations, may present with prolonged changes in or conscious questioning of their identity." And the slide is part of my foundational course for clinicians because most clinicians have never been trained and don't even know this exists. That it's an actual thing that's been identified for decades.
And another clinical diagnosis that I think is relevant and interesting here, it's a diagnosis that exists, I believe, in the DSM-4, but I believe they might have removed it for the DSM-5. Uh, but I think it's still relevant here. It's called complex PTSD or C-PTSD. Have any of you ever heard of C-PTSD before? Okay. Whether or not it's in the current DSM-5, Steve and I have talked about the fact that what does and doesn't get included in the DSM-5 or the future versions of the DSM is often a political, uh, process. So it's not the one true manual for diagnosis. It's just a guide that psychiatrists and psychologists and mental health professionals use. The point is, is that C-PTSD isn't necessarily about one major traumatic event that happened in your life, like an assault or a natural disaster or seeing someone die or a car wreck. It's sort of chronic trauma that you experience over a prolonged period of time, often occurring at the beginning in your childhood. So these are a few types or flavors of diagnoses that if you're a mental health professional, you might be aware of. If you are seeking an expert to help you with your condition, these are some mental health diagnoses that you should be aware of as you're contemplating mental health care. And most clinicians hate the DSM, but it's really useful for research and for insurance reimbursements. That's really. But back to the dissociative disorder. So for me, uh, there was Steve Hassan, who wrote poetry, played basketball, liked women, you know, wanted to be an English professor. Then I got in the Moonies, and then that other identity was evil. I was cloned in the image of Sun Myung Moon to think the right way, feel the right way, act the right way. Um, and so that cult self-suppressed the real me. It didn't erase the real me, but suppressed the real me. And it was in the context of my deprogramming experience following a near-fatal van crash where I fell asleep. I was sleeping three to four hours a night, every night, seven days a week for years. But when I had that accident, I was up for three days straight and woke up as I was driving into the back of a tractor-trailer truck at about 80 miles an hour and nearly died. But I, I was away from the cult for two weeks in the hospital. I was recovering. I needed surgery on my ankle, and that opened a door to my real self. That called my sister, Thea, that led to an invite, invitation to visit her and my brother-in-law and see my nephew who had been born. I hadn't seen my family or talked with them over a year, and that led to the intervention. But, and then I snapped out, and then I was totally confused. Like, it was me, then there was this alien being that took over my body and my mind, and now I like, what did I believe? Like, what? Huh? How did I believe that? Uh, and so my first reactions were just trying to understand how my mind had been hacked. And I never imagined I'd be here 47 years later talking to you here, um, and sharing my knowledge, but that's how my life has evolved. Um, I'm going to go quicker, out of time, but I like this slide because it helps people realize that people can be involved with an authoritarian group but have very different experiences. And if you're a clinician, and somebody says they were with the Moonies, were they fringe members? Did they live in a center? Were they married in a mass wedding? You know, were they full-time fundraisers? Like, were they a leader and then they were demoted? Like, you really want to understand what they went through in order to most help them. Most people who have glorious, wonderful things to say are fringe members or trained PR people. To, and I, oh, it was, it was, uh, satanic for a Mooney to say anything negative about the church or the organization publicly, like, period. And to, and if you had a bad experience, to tell someone else in the group was evil, much less to tell an outsider something negative about the group. They called it multiplication of evil, anyway, as part of the information control.
So in the context of my deprogramming, the work of this brilliant man, psychiatrist who became my mentor, Robert J. Lifton, who wrote a book in 1961 on Chinese Communist brainwashing called "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism." He's gone on to write about 16 more books, really important, interesting books. One on the psychological effects of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the atomic bomb dropped on their cities. One on Nazi doctors, doctors who were sworn to uphold life, how could they go to Auschwitz and do those horrible experiments? He wrote a book on psychohistory, many, many interesting books. In any case, that first book was used as a reference point in my deprogramming because I didn't think I was under mind control. I didn't think I was brainwashed. And as a Mooney, I was trained to believe that atheists were Satan. So Chinese Communist brainwashing, satanic, something going on with satanic. So when I was asked by the ex-Moonies who were there to help me reevaluate, would I be interested to learn about Chinese Communist brainwashing? I said, sure. And so we went through these eight criteria together. Number one, Milieu control. He said, if you can control the environment and the control of human communication within that environment, that's one of the major aspects of brainwashing. And he, he didn't understand about the dual identity yet, but he talked about how the groupthink got inside your head so that it would tell you how to think properly. So I thought that was really interesting.
Another criteria he talked about: Mystical manipulation, which is essentially planned experiences that that people mistakenly are made to believe are mystical or spiritual events, like mind reading or, you know, say, prophesying something where you already know how it's going to turn out, but in the minds of the believers. I like that. A couple of examples in the Mormon context that I think are helpful for mystical manipulation: Please, patriarchal blessings where they may interview you or know things about you, but then when they give you the patriarchal blessing, it's as if God is communicating directly to you. And of course, the things that you're told to do in your patriarchal blessing are never, you're going to marry outside the faith and raise your kids outside Mormonism and not go on a mission, but become a successful, you know, career, you know, woman, right? It's going to be, you're going to serve a mission, you're going to get married in the temple, you're going to raise your kids in the faith. But it's given to you in the context of believing that that's God himself who's communicating through the patriarch. EFY is another example. Even testimony meetings, father's blessings. There are a lot of examples of mystical manipulation. And it may feel offensive for people, uh, to hear me describe it or characterize it as manipulation, but even if unintended, I often look at religions as being in the, um, uh, being in the elation business of just generating very positive chemicals in your brain that oftentimes are you're made to associate those positive experiences with divine providence, and that seals your commitment to the organization. And that's kind of how, in a Mormon context, your faith gets developed. And it doesn't even necessarily need to be pernicious. It can just be the way the system is constructed.
Did you have a quick [Music] in my patriarchal blessing, it spoke in all my life thinking God was speaking to me of how I've always struggled with righteousness. So for me, that defined who I was, of not being worthy. But I had to commit very hard to the church and those experiences, everything so that I could get, just kind of knock out that you're not righteous, but I am righteous. I gotta get there. I gotta get there. Um, yeah. And that comes back to the perfectionism thing and what we're about to cover, which is one of Lifton's eight criteria called the demand for purity. A mind control environment expects perfection, but it knows that no one can be. So it creates an experience of shame and guilt where you're never good enough. Um, and, uh, so, so, um, but thank you for sharing that. Um, and I'll just say, we're human beings. We'll do the best that we can. We're going to flub up, but to pay attention and acknowledge if we flub up or we hurt someone's feelings or we say something we don't really mean, or whatever, and apologize and move on. And just get rid of this notion that we're supposed to have this, be perfect beings anyway. Rushing through some, looking at the clock.
The cult of confession, he said, was really critical, and part of that was like, there's no privacy, you know? Like, you have to tell the other people in the cult everything, and then they have that information, they can use it to manipulate you, especially if you ask, you know, if you start to have doubts or whatever. But this notion that you, you, that you're not really allowed to have private thoughts and feelings, etc.
The next one he called Sacred Science. It's basically that the doctrine is perfect with a key truth with a capital T. You can't question it. It's ultimately moral and ultimately scientific. So just accept it, no matter what, which is the opposite of the science, the scientific principle, which says that we're just aspiring to learn more and that we test things experientially and empirically to see whether that hypothesis stands up to scrutiny.
The next one, he said, Loading the Language, which is really a biggie, especially for former members, because Lifton talked about this as thought-terminating clichés, where that that are known only inside of the cult. The outsiders, when they hear it, they're like, "What? What the heck is that?" What's the chapter two problem? Or what's a key enable problem? Those are two loaded language things from the Moonies, but within the group, it, it has a very specific meaning. I would love to take a second for you to shout out this thought, this idea of thought-terminating clichés. Can be new to people who are newly questioning, but some of the ones that are most prominent with me, Mormonism might be: "Doubt your doubts." "What else do you know better?" "The next priesthood authority." "Sing your favorite hymn when you have a doubt or a question or something in your mind." Yes. "Ask God, not Google." That's really good. Yes. "Hold on to the iron rod." "Prophets aren't perfect, the, the church is perfect, but the, but the leaders aren't, right?" "Stay in the boat." "No empty chairs." "You could leave the church, but you can't, what, can't leave it alone, right?" "Lead not unto thy understanding." "The learned what the learned to think they are wise, right?" "Where will you go?" That's a very powerful one, Steve, because it's not only a thought-terminating cliché, but it's instilling the fear and the phobia that you like to talk about, because it implies you can't be healthy and happy outside of the system. Three more: "Pray and read your scriptures, right?" As if that's going to solve all your problems. "What's that?" "Someday you'll understand." "Put it on the shelf, right?" "When does the meat ever come?" "Has the meat come yet?" In the back? "What's that?" "Yes, correct sources, right? Church-approved materials versus like the filthy water that's downstream." Yes. "The covenant path, right? Don't fall off the covenant path." Yeah. "Pray about it, but it, but it, but it's only valid if it's endorsed by the proof of that one." Soon. Yes. "Even the very elect will be deceived if a high-level leader leads the church." That doesn't mean, oh, there might be a problem. It means, see, we prophesied it. "Even the very elect will be deceived." "Worldly happiness versus true joy." Let's do two more. "Is it important to your salvation?" "If it's a tough question, I guarantee you it's not pertinent to your salvation." "We don't have all the answers." "It'll get an unfolding revelation, okay?" One more. One more. "Natural man is an enemy to God." Very good. Giving yourselves applause there. All right, go ahead, Stephen.
So it's very important to realize that words are the tools we use to think, and if an environment or a group controls your language, it's going to control your thoughts. In Scientology, they have a dictionary of their own words, and Hubbard, the head of that cult, said if you don't agree with something you're reading about in one of the, the organization's books, or you feel confusion, it's because you missed a word, you didn't understand one of the words. You have to go and look it up in their dictionary. So it's called Study Tech in Scientology. So it's a technique to get people to indoctrinate themselves with an entire linguistic system that takes over their mind. Especially if they're born into the group, they don't know what normal words are. But here's the healing imperative with former members: You have to learn what normal words mean. You have to unpack the loaded terms and either abandon the terminology, like Cain/Abel, like I never use that unless I'm talking to ex-Moonies or a chapter two problem, but what happens with the groups of ex-members? It's inevitable. They start saying something that triggers you back into the cult mindset. But the healing technique is really to catch it, name it as a loaded term, and then change it into a real concept or get rid of it because then you can start controlling your own thoughts, right? It's very important for your healing.
And the last two for Lifton: Doctrine over person. Lifton said a mind control environment says that no matter what your experience is, it doesn't matter, the doctrine is the truth. Like, suppress whatever you're feeling or experiencing or deny it because you have to use the ideology, that sacred science, over your own knowledge and experience. And the perfect example of this in the LDS context is the LGBTQ dilemma, right? Like, nowhere in any Mormon scripture is same-sex sexuality or transgender issues mentioned anywhere because these scriptures were manufactured in the 1830s or the early 1840s. So it was not even in vision, so it's not mentioned. And so now, in, you know, it would have been nice to have a prophet who could have prophesied about the LGBT issues, not that they didn't exist back then, but clearly they've come to a head in the past 20, 30, 40 years. It would have been nice to have a prophet that could have foreseen that and provided scripture to accommodate for that and even provided a sense of doctrine and theology for those who identify as LGBTQ. But instead, we have literal silence about LGBTQ issues in the Book of Mormon. And so what is the, what are the leaders to do? If Joseph Smith didn't think about it, with doctrine over person, it leaves the Mormon Church in this dilemma of having a literal epidemic of LGBTQ death by suicide, with the prophets having nothing to add. Because if any modern-day 2023 prophet says in any way that LGBT, being LGBT, is in any way okay, he's contradicting what Spencer W. Kimball or Boyd K. Packer or one of the previous prophets and apostles have said, thus undermining their own authority. And so what you have is, is a church that's willing to endure a literal epidemic of depression, anxiety, homelessness, and sometimes death by suicide because doctrine has to always take precedence over the person. Yes.
I, I want to go and talk about Judaism, but I don't have the time, but I'll come back to that if you want to know, because Judaism is responsible for a lot of these bad beliefs that then got picked up by Christianity and Islam and other cults. So I'm happy to come back to that. But I want the number eight one, it's probably the biggest, most obvious one. It's called Dispensing of Existence. And Lifton said that in a mind control cult, if you believe and you belong, then you have a right to exist. And if you leave, you have no rights anymore. You don't have a right to exist anymore. They define whether you can be or not. If you're in a mind control cult, of course, the minute you get out and you reject that framing, you're free. But if you're using that framing, there's no freedom to ever leave the group. This is never a legitimate reason to leave from the point of view of an authoritarian cult. And I'm sure all of you can kind of connect the dots, but when we talk about existence, we don't mean literally your existence, but in terms of your status. How many of you have lost significant status with your parents, with your siblings, with your friends, with your family, because you've decided, because you've decided to leave? Right? So when we talk about existence, we can swap for that social status. I like to say that you can win the Nobel Peace Prize and cure cancer, but if you leave the Mormon Church, you're still a disappointment to your parents, and that's just a fact, right? You have no social legitimacy or, you know, currency within the Mormon paradigm. How many of you have been cut out of text threads or no longer invited to family events or in any way shunned, soft or hard, by family members because you've decided that you no longer believe? So, yeah.
But in my work, it includes authoritarian cults. So if you don't agree with Putin, you go to jail or you get murdered. Chinese communism still has thought reform programs. Course, so there's a continuum. And maybe the LDS isn't as bad as some of the extremists. Did you want to say something? I mean, there is the term "spiritual death." And we have all heard a talk saying, "I would rather have my child lead their mission in a casket or die or whatever, than leave the church." Oh, that's horrible, heinous. Without naming names, would you be comfortable sharing the experience of the woman who came up to you after, uh, after the Thrive session yesterday? In, in, I can, without, without giving any descriptions. Oh, it was heartbreaking. A woman came up to me before I left and said that her son had just left his mission early and came to her and said, "It's all lies, Mom. I can't be in this anymore." And she did the Mormon thing, and he took his life the next day. And she's living with that grief and that trauma. So that happened yesterday. Just horrible.
I'll make an analogy. I've worked with many people who were in the Jehovah's Witnesses. They're programmed to believe that if you have a blood transfusion, it's, it's a violation, you'll lose your relationship to God and the future and everything else. And I've worked with people whose children, like, had a car accident or whatever, needed a blood transfusion, and they prayed over their child, and the child died. And then they came to realize it was a mind control cult, and that whole teaching was taken out of context and mistranslated from the Torah, the Jewish scripture. And they're living with that reality that their beautiful child was dead for no reason other than the doctrine said so. You know? So there are some really horrible, horrible stories about that.
So basically, during the Korean War, after the Korean War, there was great interest by American intelligence to find out what is Chinese Communist brainwashing. So some of the luminary researchers was Robert Lifton, and this woman Margaret Singer, Louis Jolly, and West, another one was Edgar Schein, who became a major name in the world of business consulting and organizational development. But Margaret Singer was one of the first to really do expert witness stuff, really stand up against cults and say, it really is brainwashing and mind control, even before Lifton. He was a little chicken in the early days of '76, etc. So I'm just going to read you her six conditions: One, gain control over a person's time, especially his or her thinking time and physical environment. Two, create a sense of powerlessness, fear, and dependency while providing models that demonstrate the new ideal behavior. Three, manipulate rewards, punishments, and experiences to elicit behavior and attitudes desired by leadership. Four, manipulate rewards, punishments, and experiences to suppress the recruit's former social behavior and attitudes, including the use of altered states of consciousness to manipulate experienced. Market was trained in hypnosis, something that I became an expert in on wanting to understand what is, how does that work? But sidestepping critical thinking and making people suggestible and implanting ideas. Five, create a tightly controlled system with a closed system of logic wherein dissenters feel they're questioning indicates something inherently wrong with them, nothing wrong with the system, something wrong with you. You're just not spiritual enough, or you just had bad karma, or whatever. Six, keep recruits unaware and uninformed that there isn't, oops, is an agenda to control or change them. Thought reform is impossible when a person is functioning at full capacity with informed consent. Memorize that sentence. Thought reform or mind control or brainwashing is impossible when a person is functioning at full capacity with informed consent. Really valuable stuff. She wrote the forward to this, by the way. If for those of you who've read my book, you can re-read her, her forward to the 1988 edition. Excuse me, I got a cold.
So this slide is on my website. If you go to freedomofmind.com, learn about undue influence, influence continuum, you can download and print it. If you can't see this, but you want to see what he's referencing, literally just go to Google Images, type in "influence continuum" under images, it'll show up, and you can just be looking at it on your handheld while he's talking. Has it in their images? They don't have to go to my website. How dare them. Anyway, so the idea here is influence. Human beings are influenced all the time. We influence each other. We can't not influence each other. But I want to offer to you the schema to understand that there are ethical forms of influence, including informed consent, and the unethical, where there's lying, over-lying, withholding vital information, or distorting information, is on the unethical side of the continuum. And when people exit high-demand groups, authoritarian cults, one of the big questions people always have is, how can I, how can I trust myself, or how can I trust anyone else or any other group, pardon me, ever again? And what I believe is, if you understand this model and understand my model of, of what I call the BITE model, standing for controlling behavior, controlling information, controlling thoughts and emotions, and where am I, where are my plastic thingies? And then I, so on my website, you can download this too, but there's like a laundry list of variables that I've outlined for my 47 years. The more of these an environment has, um, the, did I just step on something? The more of the BITE, the more unethical it is. So if, so if you find out somebody lied to you, know, warning, warning, warning, because you want to deal with honest people who are trustworthy. You don't want to find out there's a, a higher secret doctrine, an inner doctrine of something. You want to ask up front, is this it, or is there secret teaching somewhere? Thank you.
Um, and, and we did this version, and there are many more I could add for individuals, many more I could add for leadership or organization, but just to get that, that sense that someone who's a leader, a good leader to follow, is psychologically healthy. They don't face, they're perfect. They don't say you have to follow blindly. They empower other people. They're trustworthy, accountable. Excuse me. But the number one negative, uh, profile you want to really be alert to avoid are what we call malignant narcissists. These are the people, no empathy, it's all about them, everything's for their promotion. But the malignant piece is the psychopathological piece where they think they're above the law. Their, their pathological liars. They're often sadistic, paranoid. There's a whole, again, go to my website, learn about undue influence. There's an entire list for malignant narcissists. 80 to 90% of every cult leader or predator or bad. There are one-on-one cults, by the way, right? A man can control a woman or vice versa, having no coughing. Very quickly. If, let me give your voice a little bit of a rest. Yes. This, this malignant narcissist thing is kind of, um, nuanced, I think, within a Mormon context. I believe that if you, if, if we had 10 never-Mormon objective mental health professionals sort of read "No Man Knows My History," kind of study the life of Joseph Smith and decide whether he met criteria for narcissism, I think you'd be able to make a pretty solid case that he did, in spades. And so that can be the founder. And I think even Brigham Young might, uh, have met criteria for that as well. If you fast forward to maybe David O. McKay, or Spencer W. Kimball, or I don't, I don't even know Gordon B. Hinckley, you may or may not decide that they would meet those criteria. The, the one thing I would, I would say is, and Stephen, I haven't, um, talked about this to you in advance, but I believe, believe that an organism, an organization can operate like a malignant narcissist. In, in the sense, if you just look at doctrine over over individual, right? A narcissist doesn't care what anybody else thinks or feels. Oftentimes, organizations can operate in that way. In other words, it's always the authority and the strength and the vitality of the organization that trumps the value of any individual. And so, let me just add, so think about it, if you're, you're in a group that says your model of excellence is the cult leader, and they're malignant narcissists, everyone's going to be in their cult identity. A malignant narcissist wants to be on certain levels, and the healthiest people will be further away from the top. Very, very good.
So, um, avoid people who are elitist, grandiose, power-hungry, secretive, deceptive, and especially people who say they know it all and claim authority. Yes, ma'am. Please. [Music] I'm so sorry. In your opinion, the current leaders of the church, they know more than I do, and I feel like I know a lot. So do you believe that that would be a malignant narcissist? So is your question in this, I believe you're asking the question that I most often ask, which is, do the current prophets and apostles of the Mormon Church know that the church isn't true but still teach it as if it is? Is that your question? In other words, are they perpetrating, knowingly, fraud or deception upon the members? Yeah. In my opinion. Well, let's first, do you, do you have an opinion about just organizations in general, whether it's always necessary? Let's just say David Miscavige, who's the successor. Yeah. So what's your view on to what extent in the cults that you've experienced, it's necessary for them to be knowingly perpetuating fraud versus just a victim of their predecessor or a victim of the organization as converts, potentially themselves? And then I'll share my thoughts as well. Right. So it's a case-by-case basis. But if you met me as a Mooney leader, you would say I was a malignant narcissist. And I, that was not my personality or whatever. But it really, there's a difference between people born into something versus somebody who's like, basically healthy and then gets recruited and indoctrinated. But also keep in mind, because they're social beings, we can be in an information and experiential silo where we're surrounded with people who are reinforcing a point of view or a set of beliefs or whatever, where there's no dissonance because everyone's going along with it, and everybody's saying it's normal and healthy. And so as a human being, I've made the decision to always try to err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt. And I err in the direction of not trying to label people in, in a way of putting them in a box and saying they're bad people. I actually believe malignant narcissists need therapy. They are frightfully insecure beings that have a big hole in their heart or in their soul, and they need love and they need, seriously, I mean it. Um, and so, and, and so, uh, but the bottom line is, I don't know, and it's case by case. [Music] It's a common question I'm asked. I'll just give you a quick couple things to think about. Um, yesterday at the Lehigh event, were any of you there? There was a man who said that he came just off the street, noticed there was a group, came in, started watching. He identifies as a believing Latter-day Saint, and he decided to kind of commandeer the mic and bear his testimony to the entire group of 250 prominently ex-Mormons about why the church is true, why he's super glad that he paid tithing, and then he started lecturing the group about why the church has it right about LGBT issues. And at that point, audience members started standing up and screaming at this man. And I've got the whole exchange on video, actually. But, but it's, you know, when we think about it, once we're kind of moving away or out from a belief system, it's hard to remember that we were once True Believers ourselves. So if you go with Occam's razor of what's the simplest explanation, is why is it hard for you to believe that the leaders are still True Believers if you were just True Believers 10 minutes ago, or three years ago, or 10 years ago? There's, there's a quote from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," and maybe you've heard me mention this on the podcast. It's difficult to get a man to see a point of view when his livelihood depends on not seeing it. And if you look at the tobacco executives who all lined up in front of Congress and said that they did not believe that their product caused cancer, you could say that they were all lying. But we all know that confirmation bias is an extremely powerful psychological influence. And if your entire reputation, your relationships, your family, your pension, your career is all based on upholding the validity and the truthfulness of the, in this case, the Mormon Church, those all those social pressures combined with their genuine beliefs from birth and their 90 years of conditioning leads to the most likely scenario for most of the church leaders, which is that they're sincere. And I can say that my brother, who, who worked at the highest levels of Church headquarters for many, many years, who had, who interacted with the church leaders on a first-name basis for many, many years, said that not only were they, in his opinion, True Believers, but that they were actually pretty nice people. And you've all heard, maybe you've heard me say this quote before, that bad people may act badly, and good people may goodly, sometimes it takes religion to make good people do bad things, right? And so I like to, I like to give the Brethren, as we call them in our church, the benefit of the doubt that they're sincere and that they're not knowingly perpetrating a fraud. What's difficult to believe in 2023 is that at least at a minimum, they absolutely know that the perception that we have that they speak directly to God and Jesus, and the perception that they try to foster and engender, which is a belief in them that they have a direct communication line with God and Jesus, they must know at this point that they don't, uh, have the level of connection and communication that they're trying to get us all to believe that they have. So I do believe that they know that the reality is different than the average member believes. And in that sense, there probably is some, there is some deception going on. But I believe that, I'm sorry, Steve, I'm totally. One last sentence. I believe that they sincerely believe that the ends justify the means. They believe that this church does good, that it helps people, that it makes the world a better place. And if they lie or deceive, it's either, uh, in a way that they can justify in their own minds, or they believe that protecting the good name of the church and its vitality at the end of the day is worth any, uh, sacrifices to truth or integrity that they might be.