Male
cult leaders sometimes claim droit du seigneur over female followers or
use physical violence to sexually exploit them. But, on the whole, they
find it more efficient to dress up the exploitation as some sort of gift
or therapy: an opportunity to serve God, an exorcism of “hangups,” a
fast track to spiritual enlightenment. One stratagem favored by Keith
Raniere, the leader of the New York-based self-help cult NXIVM, was to
tell the female disciples in his inner circle that they had been
high-ranking Nazis in their former lives, and that having yogic sex with
him was a way to shift the residual bad energy lurking in their
systems.
According to Sarah Berman, whose book “Don’t Call It a Cult”
(Steerforth) focusses on the experiences of NXIVM’s women members,
Raniere was especially alert to the manipulative uses of shame and
guilt. When he eventually retired his Nazi story—surmising, perhaps,
that there were limits to how many reincarnated S.S. officers one group
could plausibly contain—he replaced it with another narrative designed
to stimulate self-loathing. He told the women that the privileges of
their gender had weakened them, turned them into prideful “princesses,”
and that, in order to be freed from the prison of their mewling
femininity, they needed to submit to a program of discipline and
suffering. This became the sales spiel for the NXIVM subgroup DOS
(Dominus Obsequious Sororium, dog Latin for “Master of the Obedient
Sisterhood”), a pyramid scheme of sexual slavery in which members
underwrote their vow of obedience to Raniere by having his initials
branded on their groins and handing over collateral in the form of
compromising personal information and nude photos. At the time of
Raniere’s arrest, in 2018, on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering,
and other crimes, DOS was estimated to have more than a hundred members
and it had been acquiring equipment for a B.D.S.M. dungeon. Among the
orders: a steel puppy cage, for those members “most committed to
growth.”
Given
that NXIVM has already been the subject of two TV documentary series, a
podcast, four memoirs, and a Lifetime movie, it would be unfair to
expect Berman’s book to present much in the way of new insights about
the cult. Berman provides some interesting details about Raniere’s
background in multilevel-marketing scams and interviews one of Raniere’s
old schoolmates, who remembers him, unsurprisingly, as an insecure
bully. However, to the central question of how “normal” women wound up
participating in Raniere’s sadistic fantasies, she offers essentially
the same answer as everyone else. They were lured in by Raniere’s
purportedly life-changing self-actualization “tech” (a salad of
borrowings from est, Scientology,
and Ayn Rand) and then whacked with a raft of brainwashing techniques.
They were gaslit, demoralized, sleep-deprived, put on starvation diets,
isolated from their friends and families, and subjected to a
scientifically dubious form of psychotherapy known as neurolinguistic
programming. Raniere was, as the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted
the case put it, “a modern-day Svengali” and his followers were
mesmerized pawns.
Until very recently, Berman
argues, we would not have recognized the victimhood of women who
consented to their own abuse: “It has taken the #MeToo
movement, and with it a paradigm shift in our understanding of sexual
abuse, to even begin to realize that this kind of ‘complicity’ does not
disqualify women . . . from seeking justice.” This rather overstates the
case, perhaps. Certainly, the F.B.I. had been sluggish in responding to
complaints about NXIVM, and prosecutors were keener to pursue the cult
in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, but, with or without
#MeToo, the legal argument against a man who used the threat of
blackmail to keep women as his branded sex slaves would have been clear.
In fact, Berman and others, in framing the NXIVM story as a #MeToo
morality tale about coerced consent, are prone to exaggerate Raniere’s
mind-controlling powers. The fact that Raniere collected kompromat
from DOS members strongly suggests that his psychological coercion
techniques were not, by themselves, sufficient to keep women
acquiescent. A great many people were, after all, able to resist his
spiral-eyed ministrations: they met him, saw a sinister little twerp
with a center part who insisted on being addressed as “Vanguard,” and,
sooner or later, walked away.
It is also striking
that the degree of agency attributed to NXIVM members seems to differ
depending on how reprehensible their behavior in the cult was. While
brainwashing is seen to have nullified the consent of Raniere’s DOS
“slaves,” it is generally not felt to have diminished the moral or legal
responsibility of women who committed crimes at his behest. Lauren
Salzman and the former television actor Allison Mack, two of the five
NXIVM women who have pleaded guilty to crimes committed while in the
cult, were both DOS members, and arguably more deeply in Raniere’s
thrall than most. Yet the media have consistently portrayed them as
wicked “lieutenants” who cast themselves beyond the pale of sympathy by
“choosing” to deceive and harm other women.
The
term “brainwashing” was originally used to describe the thought-reform
techniques developed by the Maoist government in China. Its usage in
connection with cults began in the early seventies. Stories of young
people being transformed into “Manchurian Candidate”-style zombies
stoked the paranoia of the era and, for a time, encouraged the practice
of kidnapping and “deprogramming” cult members. Yet, despite the lasting
hold of brainwashing on the public imagination, the scientific
community has always regarded the term with some skepticism.
Civil-rights organizations and scholars of religion have strenuously
objected to using an unproven—and unprovable—hypothesis to discredit the
self-determination of competent adults. Attempts by former cult members
to use the “brainwashing defense” to avoid conviction for crimes have
repeatedly failed. Methods of coercive persuasion undoubtedly exist, but
the notion of a foolproof method for destroying free will and reducing
people to robots is now rejected by almost all cult experts. Even the
historian and psychiatrist Robert Lifton, whose book “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism”
(1961) provided one of the earliest and most influential accounts of
coercive persuasion, has been careful to point out that brainwashing is
neither “all-powerful” nor “irresistible.” In a recent volume of essays,
“Losing Reality” (2019), he writes that cultic conversion generally involves an element of “voluntary self-surrender.”
If
we accept that cult members have some degree of volition, the job of
distinguishing cults from other belief-based organizations becomes a
good deal more difficult. We may recoil from Keith Raniere’s brand of
malevolent claptrap, but, if he hadn’t physically abused followers and
committed crimes, would we be able to explain why NXIVM is inherently
more coercive or exploitative than any of the “high demand” religions we
tolerate? For this reason, many scholars choose to avoid the term
“cult” altogether. Raniere may have set himself up as an unerring source
of wisdom and sought to shut his minions off from outside influence,
but apparently so did Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel of Luke records him
saying, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and
wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life
also, he cannot be my disciple.” Religion, as the old joke has it, is
just “a cult plus time.”
Acknowledging
that joining a cult requires an element of voluntary self-surrender
also obliges us to consider whether the very relinquishment of control
isn’t a significant part of the appeal. In HBO’s NXIVM documentary, “The
Vow,” a seemingly sadder and wiser former member says, “Nobody joins a
cult. Nobody. They join a good thing, and then they realize they were
fucked.” The force of this statement is somewhat undermined when you
discover that the man speaking is a veteran not only of NXIVM but also
of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, a group in the Pacific Northwest
led by a woman who claims to channel the wisdom of a “Lemurian warrior”
from thirty-five thousand years ago. To join one cult may be considered a
misfortune; to join two looks like a predilection for the cult
experience.
