The I'm Not Dumb But Podcast
Welcome to The I'm Not Dumb But Podcast, where we won't claim to have all the answers to life's deepest questions, but we promise you an exciting journey into the realms of knowledge you never knew you needed!
Join friends Cesar, Rob, Chris and Victor as we dive head first into topics that might be mainstream but not common knowledge. No topic is too taboo for us to explore. Let's get curious together!
The I'm Not Dumb But Podcast
What is a Cult?
Dive into a thought-provoking exploration of cults and the mechanisms of control that often keep individuals bound to them. In this engaging episode, we connect with Gavri'el HaCohen, co-host of the Leaving Eden podcast, as we unpack the complexities of cult dynamics through the lens of the BITE model developed by cult expert Dr. Stephen Hassan. Discover what truly defines a cult, the psychological tactics they employ, and learn how even seemingly benign organizations can exert control over their members.
We also delve into personal narratives, illustrating the challenges faced by those who navigate life post-cult and the hurdles of rebuilding their identities. From exploring the critical differences between organized religions and cults to understanding the emotional toll coerced beliefs can have, our conversation highlights the essential takeaway: awareness and critical thinking are paramount. Cult-like influences linger in various aspects of our lives, making it crucial to discern where the line is drawn between supportive community and oppressive control.
Join us on this enlightening journey of curiosity as we unravel the nuances of belief, community, and self-empowerment. Subscribe now for insightful discussions and remember to share this episode with someone who could benefit from it!
Follow these links to check out Leaving Eden podcast:
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Welcome everyone to the I'm Not Dumb but Podcast. I am your host today, victor, joined always by Rob. Hello, and Cesar, thank you for joining us today. Cesar, thank you for having me. It's been a while we haven't seen you on interviews.
Cesar:Always there, I just don't say anything. So you're like Chris, but I have a reason we can't have two guys like that.
Victor:I have a reason we can't have two guys like that On this episode, we will be joined by Gavi Hakohen, co-host of the Leaving Eden podcast, to talk about cults. Do you guys know anything about cults?
Cesar:No.
Rob:Rob didn't you try to start one. I did unsuccessfully, so I'm here to figure out how to do it the right way. I had a couple followers, but they left me.
Victor:Just like everyone else in your life.
Cesar:We're still here. Hey, we have you. You know what's funny? I think, knowing everything that I know about Scientology, that I should probably like it, but I don't. I like science stuff. It's all about science stuff, and it's never grabbed my attention.
Victor:I don't think there's any actual science.
Cesar:No, yeah, it's about Errol Hubbard, and science.
Victor:The science fiction writer.
Cesar:Yeah, I like that stuff too.
Victor:Gavi Ha-Cohen is here to help us answer the question. I'm not dumb, but what's a cult?
Cesar:Welcome to the I'm Not Dumb but podcast, where we won't claim to have the answers to life's deepest questions.
Victor:But we'll give you an exciting journey into the realms of knowledge you never knew you'd either.
Cesar:Might be mainstream, but not common knowledge. From artificial intelligence to conspiracy theories, no topic is too taboo for us to explore. Let's get curious together.
Victor:Gavi, welcome to the show. Glad you can join us.
Gavriel HaCohen:I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Victor:So you are the co-host on the Leaving Eden podcast? Yes, tell us how that came about and tell us what do you guys talk about?
Gavriel HaCohen:So the Leaving Eden podcast is a show I host with my friend Sadie. She was raised as a Christian fundamentalist. She was raised in a very culty version of Christianity and we became friends just because we worked at the same car dealership in 2019. And we both were interested in music. We were both kind of interested in religion and reading about religion and stuff. And this was after she had left that religious environment. And then the pandemic hit and we decided to start a podcast about it.
Victor:Nice Pandemic podcasts.
Gavriel HaCohen:Yeah, and you know, five years later, almost here we still are and here we're still doing it, and now it's like my main job that I do. Is that podcast?
Victor:I can't believe it's been five years.
Gavriel HaCohen:Yeah, it feels like it was yesterday, doesn't it?
Victor:since the hoax.
Cesar:Okay, I've gotten every vaccine, by the way even though they're not even out.
Gavriel HaCohen:Yet so we talk about like cults, we talk about religion, we we talk about a wide variety of topics, but generally centered around cults, religion, christianity, fundamentalism, things like that. And that's what we do on the show and it's a lot of fun and I really get a lot out of it and I've learned so much throughout the time that we've been doing it.
Cesar:It's a pretty good listen. I heard it.
Rob:It's pretty good well, thank you so much and it's long form, but it like you're in it well, I I do a lot of editing to try to cut the dead air out.
Victor:So that's, I try to keep it moving when did you get that first interest in religion? Like what about religion was like interesting to you?
Gavriel HaCohen:To me. So I was raised like Jewish, but not that Jewish.
Victor:Okay.
Gavriel HaCohen:Is how I would explain it, like I was raised very culturally Jewish, but you know, and we went to synagogue sometimes and I went to Hebrew school for a couple of years, but there it never really stuck with me. When I was younger and as I got older it became something that was more interesting to me. So I'm from Portland, oregon, that's where I grew up, and Portland is a very secular city Portland- is a city.
Gavriel HaCohen:It's not a place where you see a church on every street corner and it's not a place where most of the people that you hang out with when you're a kid even go to church or are really religiously involved in general, but religion that has such a massive impact on society. So when I started reading more about religion and reading more about different religions, I sort of approached it almost as an outsider and I know I had some I don't want to say nominal, but a decent amount of knowledge. But the way that I approached it was much more as an outsider rather than somebody who was raised with a very strict tradition, like I know a lot of other people were. So when I met Sadie, she was somebody who, when I talked to her, she told me basically I was raised in a cult.
Victor:Like that was the first thing. Hi, my name's Sadie. You were raised in a cult?
Gavriel HaCohen:Well, no, she said she was raised in a cult.
Rob:Oh, okay, she opened with that. Yeah, that's one way.
Gavriel HaCohen:So I mean, that's not how she introduced herself to me, but it came up pretty quickly that she was raised in a cult Like she was raised in a form of Christianity where, you know, women aren't allowed to wear pants, they have to wear skirts or, and you know, if you and very repressive for women very extreme forms of purity culture which is not something that you want. It's very bad for people psychologically. There's a lot of people who I talk to now who are raised in that sort of thing, who do have issues with that. As an adult they're still dealing with.
Gavriel HaCohen:But she was raised in a very extreme form of Christianity and so living in Portland and Oregon most of my life, I mean I knew people who were Christian but I didn't know people who were that crazy level of Christian, because those people tend to kind of insulate themselves from everybody else and they tend to only really like to hang out with each other. So when I meet somebody who was raised like that, I had so many questions, I was so interested and that's kind of where everything got started.
Victor:I was raised Catholic, okay, and I didn't think it was anything. It was like the norm. I mean, I'm from New York State. Everyone that I went to school with the majority were Irish, italian and Spanish, so everyone around me was Catholic. Religion wasn't something that was really talked about. There were the five Jewish kids that were in the school. I remember going to Sunday school right Like CCD and seeing everyone that I went the school. I remember going to Sunday school right Like CCD and seeing everyone that I went to school with. So I was like, oh, okay, this is just an extension of the neighborhood around me. And it was only until, I think I left New York and really started meeting other Christian sects that I was like, oh, okay, it's different. And I remember I accidentally went to the christian service instead of the catholic one. Bro, I was blown away. Like first of all, I was like where's jesus? I'm like I don't see jesus anywhere.
Gavriel HaCohen:This is kind of weird because it's idolatry, right. I don't have the crucifix, they have the cross.
Victor:No crucifix the guy wasn't boring. He was like exciting, he was up there, he was just talking, he started showing us movie clips. But yeah, the music wasn't just like depressing, I was like what is?
Rob:this, yeah, live music.
Gavriel HaCohen:Everyone's dancing so what kind of like? I'm curious what kind of uh christianity was it? Was it like baptist? Was it like just non-denominational, was it?
Victor:I think it was non-denominational. I think it was non-denominational. It was like it resembled almost like mega church type stuff. Oh, so you had like the praise and worship music with the live band and the yeah, yeah, yeah, but it was like more upbeat and honestly I felt kind of weird because I was like this isn't depressing and I'm not being told I'm a sinner. It's a different vibe. I mean, since then I am no longer religious and since then I look back on religious gatherings and I'm like this is weird.
Gavriel HaCohen:I mean, I think for a lot of people, especially when it's like for either Catholicism or Judaism or like Orthodox Christianity, a lot of it is like an ethnic thing. A lot of it is like a cultural or like an ethnic thing just as much as it is a religious thing.
Victor:It's part community building.
Gavriel HaCohen:Yeah, and a lot of you know if you have immigrant communities, they're going to stick together in the churches, the way that they're going to do that.
Victor:Where do you think the line is drawn between a cult or a religion?
Rob:And after that, could you just what is your definition on a cult too?
Gavriel HaCohen:So we actually I'm glad that you asked that question, because there is a very methodical and laid out way to determine whether the difference between cults and religions. So I'm going to refer you to the work of the cult expert, Dr Stephen Hassan. He is somebody who grew up in a Jewish family but he joined the Moonies in the 1970s and then, after sort of getting out of the Moonies and un-brainwashing himself, he has basically devoted his life to trying to identify and build a system in order to identify authoritarian and cult control.
Gavriel HaCohen:And so if you go to his website, which is freedomofmindcom, he has laid out there what he calls the BITE model of authoritarian control authoritarian control, and the BITE model is an acronym. So B-I-T-E B stands for behavior, I stands for information, t stands for thought and E stands for emotion. So there's four aspects of cult control. It is behavior control, information control, thought control and emotion control. And so if you go to his website, he has laid out there a lot of examples of what behavior control, information control, thought control and emotion control can be and how they manifest themselves. Life to a certain degree.
Gavriel HaCohen:For something to be classified as a cult rather than a religion and there are some religions that you could say are culty there are some cult groups that aren't religious at all. You could say and I would personally agree with the argument that an abusive, coercive domestic partnership, like an abusive relationship, functions identically to cult control. So that could even just be a situation where that is a one-on-one cult and there's no religion involved in that at all. But it functions exactly the same way as a cult would if it's like Jonestown, if it's Branch Davidian, something like that, and the methods of control are the same whether it's one person, or whether it's a hundred people or a million people.
Victor:The spiritual aspect isn't always needed. It isn't always needed.
Gavriel HaCohen:But spiritualizing problems and spiritualizing the things that you're going through can be a very effective method for emotion control. So I mean we can start with behavior control if you want to just like go through the bite model.
Victor:Is it like a 20 question quiz that tells me what Game of Thrones character?
Gavriel HaCohen:I am, you could. I'm Gryffindor. That's weird, what we consider to be like the gold standard of how you identify authoritarian control. So for behavior control and information control. Behavior control can be things like telling you how to dress, telling you what food to eat, telling you where to go when, but it can also be something that is much more nefarious than that, like it can determine who you have sex with or who you don't have sex with, who you are aren't allowed to have sex with. It could say, oh, you are required to commit x crime as like a show of devotion to us.
Gavriel HaCohen:that could be almost like a gang, yeah I mean, uh, criminal syndicates and criminal gangs operate pretty much identically to cults as well. Often, and when you talk to people who have left gang culture, they talk about how difficult it is to leave and you can feel like you're betraying the other people that you're in that gang with, or whether or not you can feel like your life might be in danger, because those are all tactics that cult groups will use to try to keep people in. So behavior control could be just something as innocuous as like oh, you wear this special garment around you to show your religious devotion. That's something that just because you do that, that doesn't mean that you're in a cult, but that is an aspect of behavior control.
Gavriel HaCohen:Aspect of behavior control, information control is pretty easy to identify. Information control can be something like you only get information from pre-approved sources. So, using the example of, say, you're in a really fundamentalist church and the church has very specific doctrines about what is and isn't appropriate content for people to watch. So you know, content that has nudity is banned. Content that has swear words is banned. You know, anything that's basically above a PG rating is banned. Then it could be a situation where you can only watch content that isn't that if some religious leader watches it first and says, yes, this is okay for you to watch, so it's restricting outside information.
Victor:Could that just be convincing you that other sources of information are bad? Yes, absolutely.
Gavriel HaCohen:That also goes into thought control as well, and I'll get into that in a little bit. Part of information control can also be creating a culture of people informing on each other if they've done things wrong and that helps to create a culture of mistrust. So people, if they're having doubts about what they're being asked to do or what is required of them, they feel like they can't talk to anybody and it's very isolating if they feel like they might be disciplined for speaking to somebody about an issue that they might be having.
Victor:But when?
Gavriel HaCohen:you talk about authoritarian regimes and you go back to communist Russia. Authoritarian regimes like that absolutely function the same way that cults. Do you know? If you look at countries like North Korea, they function basically with a cult of personality around somebody like Kim Jong-un, who is believed to be basically godlike.
Victor:And there is the reason the sun comes up in the sunsets. Yeah, that's literally what. That's what I heard.
Gavriel HaCohen:That's what I heard yeah, but they have such a tight control over what information gets in and what information gets out right and, and so propaganda and manufacturing propaganda can just as well be a part of that.
Gavriel HaCohen:You know, um for information control. Uh, sadie was raised in a form of Christianity where their educational materials that she was taught, the Christian schooling that she went through, was very substandard and it was really more like indoctrination than it was actual education. So the indoctrination into something like being very anti-evolution, because that was a big issue for them, that she was literally taught in school that the Loch Ness Monster not only is real but is a dinosaur that survived the flood of Noah. And scientists want to cover up the fact that the Loch Ness Monster is real, because the Loch Ness Monster's existence disproves evolution and proves that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time.
Victor:I mean you're breaking my heart. I'm keeping the hope alive, nessie. It's not only the censorship, though, because I'm assuming that, because people in cults aren't completely isolated unless you're in North Korea, you're still getting some evidence information. So the outside information that you're getting you're just being told that's lies.
Gavriel HaCohen:Right, and so that's sort of where thought control can come in.
Victor:Right.
Gavriel HaCohen:That a big part of thought control, which is the third element of the bite model. Behavior control and information control are two things that can be done to you by somebody else. So somebody else can control what you wear, somebody else can control what you eat, somebody else can control what information or what media you consume.
Gavriel HaCohen:But, the latter two elements of the BITE model, which are thought control and emotion control, are things that you can only do to yourself. Oh wow, so the thought control is something that you have to do to yourself. You can be trained to do it, but part of thought control is like thought-stopping cliches. So let's use the evolution thing as an example. So Sady was taught that whenever a scientist came up to you and said something like millions and billions of years and used the phrase millions and billions of years, you were supposed to laugh at that. And they were taught physically laugh at that just to sort of create the Like an emotional anchor like a Pavlovian response.
Gavriel HaCohen:Yeah, exactly.
Gavriel HaCohen:In your brain to say, when somebody says millions of years or billions of years, you laugh at that because that's silly, that's ridiculous, nobody could actually believe that, because we know that the earth is 6000 years old, or just like a turn of phrase that can be used to prevent you from thinking things that are sort of unapproved thoughts.
Gavriel HaCohen:So in her life this is, I guess, a good example is that she was taught to always have joy, and always having joy means joy is an acronym for Jesus, others, yourself, and that's the priority with which you have to address the needs. So the needs of Jesus first, then the needs of others, then the needs of yourself, and you can only really address your own needs once you've addressed the needs of everybody else. There's also Bible verses that you can use, things like the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. So if you have a desire that is not something that is sort of approved, then you have to keep telling yourself no, the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, and that gets you to self-doubt and doubt your own morality, so that you will defer to others judgment rather than being able to think for yourself.
Cesar:This is incredibly damaging to people who are raised like this wow, yeah, breaking down this fortress, right like your, your um co-host, sadie. What triggered her to begin the healing process? Because you have all these forces going against you. There has to be some sort of like, some, some kind of moment in her mind or in anyone's mind, where they're like. There has to be something else.
Gavriel HaCohen:It's a long process and there's a lot of people who have been through the same sort of thing. She was having sort of some theological doubts about what she was being taught, because she's a very smart person and her mother is still alive. Her father sadly died a couple of years ago. It was very sad, and she grew up in an environment where women were not allowed a lot of freedom and women were regarded as very much lesser. But her father really wanted her to have a good understanding of the Bible and a good understanding of religion and what it meant to be a Christian, and so he educated her pretty thoroughly theologically. However, this tends to lead to people having doubts because when you go in and you read things, then the more fundamentalist approach and the deeper you dig, the more fundamentalist approach and more strict approach tends to kind of form some cracks, and so the people that are the most sold out, the people that are the most like dialed in. It tends to be a lot of the people that do tend to deconstruct. So part of it was that she realized that she's bisexual she, and that she was taught that in order for people to be bisexual, it meant it, or people to be gay at all. It meant that they had either like a demon was attacking them or a demon was attached to them, or something had happened to them in their lives that turned them gay. And she knew the second hadn't happened, and she knew that she prayed so much that a demon couldn't have possibly attached itself to her. So she started having questions about whether or not she was being taught. That was true and then after that, she was also having questions about what it meant to be saved and what salvation truly meant.
Gavriel HaCohen:Because she was raised in a version of fundamentalism and a version of Christianity, and this, I guess, gets into, like salvation doctrine and what your specific church believes, because and different Christians have different beliefs about this Christians have different beliefs about this.
Gavriel HaCohen:But her belief that she was raised with was basically that if you ask Jesus to save you, then you go to heaven, no matter what, but if you don't, then you go to hell.
Gavriel HaCohen:And so she would go and knock on doors when she was a kid and as a teenager and when she was a young adult, trying to get people to pray a prayer with her and ask Jesus to save them so that they could go to heaven, and it didn't matter whether they converted to be her form of Christian or not, because they were also taught that if they truly got saved, then they would want to be her right kind of Christian, because Jesus, the Holy Spirit, would come into their hearts and change their desires to make them want to be Christian. And the more she thought about that, that tended to be a thing that didn't make as much sense, especially when she started to think about all of the people who lived places in the world where Christianity wasn't really an option, and whether or not God was going to condemn those people to an eternity of conscious torment just because nobody had ever come to them and told them about Jesus.
Gavriel HaCohen:And the more she thought about that, the less that made sense.
Gavriel HaCohen:So she'd been thinking about these things sort of under the surface for a while and when she was, I believe, 20 years old and this was in 2012, so she was 19 or 20 years old she was at a Bible college called Hiles Anderson College in Northwest Indiana and the man who was the chaplain of the Bible College was arrested because a scandal that really rocked her church and really rocked her beliefs.
Gavriel HaCohen:At the same time, this man's son was the head of the disciplinary committee of the Bible college and she was being persecuted by the disciplinary council or whatever of this Bible college for something that was pretty innocuous. She got a side hug, basically from her boyfriend at the time, and they threatened to kick her out over that head of this disciplinary committee was having people who were members of this church write letters to this judge asking leniency for his father who had sexually abused a minor, and so there was just this level of hypocrisy that really ended up being a hard reason that helped push her out, and it took years and years and years. You know, in this deconstruction process, if you're raised in this environment, it isn't like there's something, there's like a normal for you to default back to all of the things that people like myself, who was raised very secularly thought, think of as like the default. These are things that those people have to learn for the first time as adults.
Gavriel HaCohen:So, there's no normal for them to default back to. They have to learn all that stuff again, and so this is a process that takes a lot of people years and years and years and years and years.
Victor:Would that cause any animosity, though, towards, let's say, agencies such as police or FBI? Whoever arrested them, how are they to discern the difference between they're being persecuted for their beliefs or no? Whoever arrested them, how are they to discern the difference between they're being persecuted for their beliefs or no? They actually committed a crime.
Gavriel HaCohen:Well, it depends on how bought in you are. I mean, if you're bought in enough that you think that our dear leader can do no wrong, then you would think, oh well, the devil is attacking me. The devil is attacking this church because it's too big and it's too strong and this church has to save America and this church has to save the world.
Rob:This one time I was walking down Times Square with my cousin. She was in California so she wanted to check it out and we were walking around and this guy comes up to us and he gives us a card. He's like why don't you guys come by? We're having a meeting later. So my cousin's like oh, we're not doing anything. So I'm looking at the car. I'm like I don't know what this is. I was like listen, we, you know, there's happy hour. She's like let's, let's stop by this thing. I don't know what this is Like. She's very like go with the universe type deal. So we go to this place. So they come in, they put us all in different rooms with a huge TV screen and we all have to sit down and we watch, like this 15 minute video. And I was like am I going to get?
Rob:killed in here and this video was like hitting every like insecurities problems, everything I got going on.
Victor:It is just attacking every single one of them, so it's telling you how you missed your workout. Yeah, you don't look good, so I walk out of there. Yeah totally.
Rob:They wouldn't even let me leave. They were like you have to fill this form out and the questions it was like 50 questions and it was so personal. What are your failures Like? What do you like Like?
Cesar:like so many, real deep yeah, and I was like where do I begin?
Rob:I'm going to be for hours. So I I I had to fill it out. I was like where do I begin? I'm going to be for hours I need another page here, yeah, so I had to fill it out.
Rob:I was like I'm just going to write whatever I need to get the hell out of here. We get out of there and I go I'm never doing this again. Like what was that? She's like I don't know Whatever. We walk out the back cab, just the engine broke like completely shut down, broke right in front of the church. And we come out and I was like it is not a sign.
Rob:It is not a sign we got to get out of here yeah well, now I'm a level eight silver dragon and uh, whatever they got, but by then I thought it was really weird. But so in like sadie's case where she grew up into it and she was like indoctrinated at an early age, I mean, what are some of the tactics or techniques they're using to kind of get people in? It seemed like a very like that Anderson Renewal by Anderson Windows guy who comes to your house. It felt like that. It was very marketing forward, like very pressure-based. Are they all kind of like that or like I think it depends.
Gavriel HaCohen:Going back to Scientology, just real quick, if you're interested in podcasts and this is a pretty fairly well-known podcast, but there's a podcast that I like that they also talk about, like Colts, weird fringe science stuff like this it's called oh no, ross and Carrie, and they joined the church of Scientology to make content out of.
Victor:Yeah, wow, and they joined the church of scientology to make content out of.
Gavriel HaCohen:Yeah, wow, and they're still alive to talk about it. Yeah, they have like a, I think, 10 or 12 episode series about it. They also joined the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints and and made podcast episodes about their experiences doing that. Highly recommend that show interesting. Yeah, that's really good what was your, what was your question again, like, just like techniques or tactics like to recruit new people a lot of it comes from you know.
Gavriel HaCohen:Say you have an adverse life experience, say something awful happens to you or you're just unhappy with yourself. A high control group will do. It's not about going and finding everybody, it's going. It's about going and finding the people who will do it. And those people tend to be people who they're going through something, they're insecure about something. They have something specifically in their life that feels unfulfilling and what the church or what a cult will do is. They will say what the church or what a cult will do is. They will say we have a step-by-step rule book that if you follow this to the T, then you will get desired result. You will get the life that you want.
Gavriel HaCohen:I went to a gym once and they told me the same thing.
Victor:Yeah Well, I mean they use the same tactics mean have you ever done crossfit?
Gavriel HaCohen:and you're telling me that's not a cult, that is a cult yeah, man, like I know of people you know their parents were grew up in a very unstable household. You know they had a parent who was like absent, or a parent who was using drugs, or a parent who was just like not there for them and they didn't want to replicate that same issue for their kids. But they also hadn't seen what does good parenting look like behavior modeled for them. So they're like I don't know what to do. What do I do? Do I raise my kids properly? And you know who will tell you how to raise your kids is religious people will tell you how to raise your kids. They will. They will give you all the information that you'll need. They have their own parenting books. They have the community. They have a support system of other parents who will tell you what they're doing, who will help you out when you need something, and they will basically give you a checklist of if you do X, y, z thing.
Gavriel HaCohen:If you raise your kids in this church, you have them behave to these set of standards, either how you dress. You spend this amount of time in your church. You bring your kids up in youth group. You send them to Christian school. You don't teach them about evolution but you teach them about creation instead, and then you send them to our Bible college, then what you're going to end up with is a kid who is going to get married and they're going to have children, and you're going to be a grandparent and everybody's going to be happy and they're you know, everyone's going to live happily ever after.
Gavriel HaCohen:And they're going to give you like a prescribed list of if you do xyz thing and it will be difficult to do xyz thing, because if it were easy then everyone would do it but if you do xyz thing, then you will get out. You know this result and that is the result that you want and that's what they really prey on. Because if somebody comes and knocks on your door and says, hey, change all of your behaviors in your life or you're going to go to hell, then you're going to say get out of here, go bug somebody else. But if somebody knocks on your door and says, you may be feeling down right now, but Jesus loves you and come to us and we will help you out and we will give you tools that you need to survive, then you would say maybe there's something to this, it's probably worth a shot.
Victor:So people who are vulnerable, lost in sense of belonging, or maybe they are looking for community or just looking just for guidance in life.
Gavriel HaCohen:Or people who are just otherwise vulnerable. There there's one tony and susan alamo were. Have you heard of them are?
Cesar:you familiar.
Gavriel HaCohen:Uh, they ran a fairly large, uh, christian organization throughout the 1970s 1980s and what they would do is and this was was in like Hollywood, california is they would get homeless people and they would say we'll feed you if you come to our church, you can live on our compound and you can eat and we'll feed you. And they would do that and they would get them clean from drugs and they would get them in the church and then they would use that as basically like a marketing tool to say look at all this good that we're doing in the community. But then they would also do things like child labor. They would do things like you know, just taking all of the money from all of the people who were living there. They would start companies and have the church members work at the companies, basically for free, and then donate all of their paycheck back to the church.
Gavriel HaCohen:They were having children manufacture bedazzled jackets that were a very big popular fashion item throughout the 1980s. If you look up a Lamo jackets, it's spelled like Alamo. But if you look up a Lamo jackets, uh, you'll find these bedazzled jackets that are made by child labor. In fact, michael Jackson wore one of these jackets on the cover of his bad album. Wow, it's the same sort of thing that that you, and this is one of the reasons why, uh, people such as myself believe that cults and abusive domestic partnerships basically function the same, because abusers will target people specifically who they think are going to be vulnerable for their tactics I imagine for every like story, like sadie, who found the discernment to figure out okay, there's something wrong here.
Cesar:I got to figure out how to get out. There's countless stories of people who either find themselves in a cult, who grew up in a cult, trying to get out but can't. Has Sadie gone back and spoken to people within that denomination that she was in before that denomination that she was in before?
Gavriel HaCohen:Yeah, and she has, and I don't really want to speak on that because that's you know. I don't really want to speak on the personal relationships that she might have with people who you know she used to know from an earlier part of her life or what they're saying now. But when we think of cults, we think of like people who are living in a compound.
Gavriel HaCohen:Right, you know, we think of like Waco, of like people who are living in a compound, right, you know, we think of waco, waco, branch, davidians, uh, flds, that was one we think of like uh jonestown, like you mentioned earlier yeah, and where we think of like people being cordoned off and specifically limited from interacting with outsiders, when, in reality, most of the people who are in this situation are people that are just like among us and walking around us day to day, but you don't know that they have something that's really controlling them and really taking their agency away. People who want to get out. There's often situations where, well, maybe you're being physically prevented from leaving, but the mental barriers to leaving the guilt, the shame, the fear are, I believe, more powerful than physical barriers.
Victor:And you're also losing your community as well, like if all your friends are part of it.
Gavriel HaCohen:Yeah. And how do you build a community Like if you're in your 20s and you leave a religious group that you've been?
Rob:in your whole life.
Gavriel HaCohen:How do you build community out of that? And you don't know how to socialize outside of church? Or you were raised in church and you don't have good social skills, and that really depends on personality type and I know a lot of people who are introverted have a lot of difficulty with that, because going out and just saying hi, I'm, you know, I'm Gabi, you want to be friends with me, that's not something that everybody could do.
Gavriel HaCohen:I mean, I moved to a new city at the age of 29 and didn't know anybody when I moved there, and you know, now I have friends and I live here and I'm doing great and I'm engaged, but not everybody can do that.
Rob:Right. When I hear the word cult, it has a negative connotation to it. So are all cults bad, or are there some that are yeah, where are the good?
Gavriel HaCohen:ones at. Definitionally, in order for something to be a cult, it has to be coercive, and I think that's bad. So yeah, if you look at the bite model and you look at, you know, especially when you get into the the thought control and the emotion control, when you know you get in situations where this emotion is a bad emotion and you shouldn't be feeling it like you're not allowed to feel gratitude in this situation rather than anger. Anger is not allowed. That's not something that somebody should be telling you. That is inherently coercive.
Rob:Do these cult leaders, do they believe in what they're teaching? Or is it like this nefarious thought, like I'm going to do this and I'm going to get all this? Is there always another thought, like another plan to take their money to?
Victor:have a group, does it need to revolve around one person?
Gavriel HaCohen:I don't think that it needs to revolve around one person. I think that a lot of cults can be around. I mean some political ideologies you could even qualify as a cult.
Victor:I would say Sports teams maybe.
Gavriel HaCohen:I mean, look, I live in Philly, I'm an Eagles fan, I won't deny it.
Rob:Link if you're really not an Eagles fan.
Victor:He's too deep. He's too deep.
Rob:It's okay, this is a safe space.
Gavriel HaCohen:I drank Incredible Hulk's during the Super Bowl because they were green. That's my life now. The Super Bowl, and, you know, because they were green, that's my life now. No, but it doesn't necessarily need to revolve around a single. I mean, definitely, having a cult of personality and a leader can be helpful in recruiting people and, you know, keeping people in and creating that sense of information. Well, the leader says this and we, we really have to trust their judgment. That can be a valuable tool, but it isn't always necessary. What was the other question? The other question was-.
Rob:Do the leaders actually believe it?
Gavriel HaCohen:That really depends on the situation, because some of them I think do, and some of them are just straight up scammers, like there. You would be shocked how many of these cult leaders are just people who were low-rent grifters, who just figured out. I mean, if I can pretend to be a religious guy, then these people, then you know, I can keep getting away with running the same scam over and over and over in different cities and then eventually it gets out of hand and they have a whole cult on their hands, um some point delude themselves into believing. Oh well, I'm a religious leader, I'm a good person, because, you know, religious leaders are good people. I did a good thing in my community. I I contributed to this charity but I always thought about that.
Rob:I was like, how do they start a cult like? Like, do you have to be good looking to start a call?
Cesar:because if I see this guy with, like you, ever seen what I am not?
Rob:what david koresh looks like no, david, not a good.
Gavriel HaCohen:A lot of these people not great looking people but they're just I mean, I, I could tell you how many of these people just low rentrent grifters. There's also a subset of people who I would put somebody like Jim Jones into this category. Jim Jones was somebody who was raised very religious and who got sucked into a theological movement called Oneness Pentecostalism and also holiness pentecostalism, which are these sort of niche christian sects? Uh, so if you know, if you know about christianity, there's, uh, you know, catholicism, there's protestantism, and pentecostalism is sort of I would consider it like protestant adjacent, but not exactly, and oneness or that's not the one with the snakes is it?
Rob:I mean some of them do that. That's pescatarian um.
Gavriel HaCohen:Basically, they believe that the holy spirit of jesus came back to earth in an event at the Pentecost or the um, at basically a festival, and caused people to do what we now refer to as speaking in tongues.
Victor:Oh, okay.
Gavriel HaCohen:Okay, and so they put a big emphasis on what they call gifts of the Holy Spirit. So they believe that the Holy Spirit can sort of imbue you with the supernatural abilities. And the Holy Spirit for those of imbue you with supernatural abilities and the Holy Spirit for those that don't know, is the third part of the Christian trinity. So there's God the Father, which is God up in heaven. There's God the Son, which is Jesus, and then there's the Holy Spirit, which is the version of God that comes down and affects your life on earth. And the Holy Spirit came down to earth after Jesus died and then went back up to heaven. And the Holy Spirit came down to earth after Jesus died and then went back up to heaven.
Gavriel HaCohen:Now, oneness Pentecostalism is a doctrine of Christianity that rejects the Trinity, so it believes that there is just one God and not in the Trinitarian doctrine. And then when that is combined with holiness Pentecostalism, holiness Pentecostalism is a religious movement that believes that God, when the Holy Spirit comes and acts in your life, you become a holy being, sort of like Jesus. So Jim Jones was involved in oneness Pentecostalism and holiness Pentecostalism. The thing that he did was he sort of was somebody who I believe had like narcissistic tendencies and a messianic complex. And so if you believe in the holiness Pentecostal movement and you have narcissistic tendencies and a messianic complex, then you can also sort of take that extra theological step and say I am, you know, the holiness comes through me, I am also God.
Victor:Right.
Gavriel HaCohen:So when you go and you look at the things that he was doing in California before he Right California and trying to be very socially progressive because this was supposedly a good thing for him to be doing, even though I think that his motivations for doing that were much more self-centered than altruistic and that was how he was recruiting members. He was recruiting members with a theology that he called apostolic socialism, where basically it's like Christianity but sin equates to capitalism.
Gavriel HaCohen:So, that was his theological movement. So he was recruiting people in California in the 70s with very socialist ideals and very uh, socially progressive ideals and at the same time he was also using a lot of drugs and also that'll do.
Victor:Oh, he was. Well, it was.
Gavriel HaCohen:You know, it was the time he was I mean he was sauced up like you know, like nobody crazy times and he, he was, you know, deeply paranoid, as will happen.
Gavriel HaCohen:So when you look at a person like him and you look at how things ended with all of those people dying, you end up with somebody who of the himself at the beginning that he's doing the right thing because he has all of these very altruistic good works that he's trying to do in the community, but then you know he he's being very coercive at the same time and ends up killing a lot of people is there a cult religious or non-religious, or spiritual and non-spiritual that you see in like everyday society that kind kind of raises your suspicion or makes you get kind of worried about?
Victor:Let's talk about Apple.
Cesar:Apple users.
Victor:I will not have you talk shit about Tim Cook in this podcast.
Gavriel HaCohen:I mean you want to talk about failure of succession? Yeah, yeah, I mean I remember Apple was like, hey, we made a iphone, iphone's cool. And I was like wow. And that was in like 2007. It was amazing. They made the ipod. I had the ipod. It was amazing they made the you know, they made logic, they made a final cut. That's them right, or is that anything? I don't know yeah, they're like we made all the software that you want, we made all the, and now they're like.
Cesar:We have a better battery.
Victor:We changed the shape of our AirPods.
Cesar:We got rid of the jack, but now we brought it back. Yeah.
Gavriel HaCohen:A cult that I see in society today. I mean, I could talk about MAGA and talk about who you know view him as basically somebody who can do no wrong, and that's something that I I see is very harmful.
Rob:But I think that there's also the issue of the crisis of succession there as well well, don't talk too bad, in case we sell out on this podcast and go full right.
Victor:That's what we're trying to. We got to get their attention first. I'll tell you.
Gavriel HaCohen:It's a good. It's a good way to make money. Nothing sells like outrage. You see these people on the internet, on YouTube, and they're just like. This is why the latest Marvel movie sucks. It went woke and I'm just like I don't even like it has like three million views or something and you're just like who is watching this shit?
Rob:There was one movie that came out and I could never understand, but it was like the golden compass. Why was that so controversial?
Gavriel HaCohen:it's the golden cup that the golden compass backing, like you mean, based on the philip pullman book okay, so it was after a book that I didn't read.
Rob:That's fine back in.
Gavriel HaCohen:I would highly recommend that book.
Victor:That book's fantastic for the rest of the audience here, what do you?
Gavriel HaCohen:is that animated talking about no, no, so, actually no, here's. Here's the thing. I love those books and you want to talk about like books about religion and books about like religious control over society. Those are great books. Uh, the his dark material series by philip pullman fantastic. They did a movie backing like the 2000s with nicole kidman and daniel craig. The movie was not good. Uh, I don't think it was a good adaptation of the story at all, but then in I want to say like 2019, hbo did a series of it and I thought the series was oh, really okay um, but I mean those books are quite subversive when it comes to the power of religion in society and what it means and what sin means and what the soul is and what innocence is.
Gavriel HaCohen:And fantastic book series. Highly recommend those book series. That is like one of my favorite book series ever. Great like young adult fiction. Fantastic About like teenagers trying to save the world.
Rob:Yeah, because I remember when it came out there was some sort of religious. I mean, I didn't watch the movie, but I didn't realize that there was a whole book series behind it. But everyone online was like, oh, the books are better. And I was like, yeah, well, how do we read that?
Gavriel HaCohen:I mean, I would definitely agree with that, but it but like it's just you know, these days. I think that especially one of the issues that I actually do think is a huge issue as far as indoctrination into extremist ideologies is social media algorithms. Once you understand that social media is a platform for selling advertising, and the more amount of time that they can get your eyes on that thing, the more money that they'll make. So, rather than prioritizing what is good quality content, they're prioritizing engagement above anything else else, and so the thing that drives engagement is either you know, if you want to watch, like am I, the assholes with an ai voice over a subway surfers video or like rage bait, so you can have people making videos of things that they're angry about, or making videos that are designed to make you angry so that you'll leave a comment, so it will drive it up in the algorithm.
Gavriel HaCohen:So, like I was saying there, it is very grifty, it is extremely grifty and as somebody who, you know, makes content for a living, I'm frequently annoyed with the low standards by which other people have to. You know, I mean, I guess if you're in an economy where everybody has to be a grifter, then I can't be too mad at it, but still, I wish people would be better.
Victor:I remember when we were younger in school there was a whole thing about cite your sources, and now we're just in the whole. I read it on Reddit source. Trust me, bro.
Gavriel HaCohen:Yeah.
Victor:Yeah, it's very much like that and people just go with it. They just believe it. Same thing with YouTubers. I heard a guy talking about this on YouTube. He must be telling me the truth.
Rob:Yeah, it's like my dad sends me a bunch of links.
Gavriel HaCohen:I mean, I've been guests on some shows where they wanted to talk to me about conspiracy theories or something, something. And they're like oh, what do you think of this conspiracy cult thing that's going on here? And I'm like, and you just kind of have to like, huh that's I don't know.
Victor:I don't know if conspiracy theories would fit under the the bite model oh, a lot of them do oh do they?
Gavriel HaCohen:yeah, so actually I can go back and I can talk about this, uh, back. So I I want to go back to the book of revelation. Have you, are you guys familiar?
Victor:it's been some time I know of it, it's dusted off.
Cesar:Yeah, I read the back the end is near and these are the signs right yeah, that that.
Gavriel HaCohen:So in the early 20th century the Russian Tsar was running into some problems in Russia. There was this growing socialist movement, this Bolshevik movement within Russia Also. They had basically lost a war with Japan in the early 1900s and the popular sentiment was very much against the czar and against the regime. And in order to try to counteract this, the czar of Russia decided to have a document created to basically blame all of the problems of the people on the Jews.
Victor:It's a common thing in history.
Gavriel HaCohen:Yeah, so you know, I mean it's Russia in the early 1900s. They hate the Jews anyway. So what they did was they created a fabricated document called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and this document it's based heavily on the Book of Revelation, basically based heavily on the signs of the Antichrist that the Jewish people would. And it was basically a forged document pretending to be written by an organization of Jews who were trying to start the one world government that would usher in the Antichrist in the end of days. And this document was called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and part of it was also that they were trying to cast the socialist, the Bolshevik movement as a Jewish movement so that people would be against it ultimately unsuccessful and the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian government.
Gavriel HaCohen:However, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion lived a life of its own beyond just Russia, and it ended up making its way to the United States, where Henry Ford got a hold of it. Henry Ford had it published in the newspaper that he owned called the Dearborn Independent. He also had it translated into German, and that's how Hitler got a hold of it. So Hitler got a hold of this document called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and it was one of the foundational texts that he wrote that inspired him for his attempted extermination of all the Jews. So, after the war was over, the United States was shifting our focus towards basically being very anti-communist, and so this document served as not the text itself but the ideas behind the document served as the inspiration for what became McCarthyism Then.
Gavriel HaCohen:That, after McCarthyism sort of died out, throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, became the satanic panic, where there was this belief that there was a cabal of Satanist people that were conducting satanic rituals and satanic ritual abuse against innocent people, especially children, and this became, it really took on a life of its own. Within the United States in the 1970s and the 1980s, there was this one guy named Mike Warnke who wrote a book called the Satan Seller where he claimed that within about like six weeks of when he was like 20, that he joined the Satanist organization in the United States and basically became chief Satanist, and then he realized that Satan was a bad guy and he became a Christian.
Victor:And this is all people just interpreting these writings different ways.
Gavriel HaCohen:Yes, but because this original conspiracy theory was based so heavily on the book of Revelation, conspiracies that spawned from that original conspiracy theory struck a chord with people who are Christian in the United States, and the Christians were the people who were so heavily anti-communist I mean, everyone was anti-communist, but Christians more than others or willing to believe conspiracy theories about satanic ritual abuse. This conspiracy eventually died out, but then it came back in a big way and that's what turned into QAnon. So this same conspiracy theory about QAnon is the same conspiracy theory that was the one that inspired Hitler in the 1920s and the one that basically was fabricated by the czar of Russia because he was afraid of the Bolsheviks taking over.
Rob:And now everyone has a copy of that in their driver's manual of their brand new Ford Escape. It's in there in their driver's manual of their brand new Ford Escape. It's in there I start to think a little bit about free will. Are people who get into these cults? Are they victims? Is there an element of personal responsibility, or they're just being brainwashed?
Gavriel HaCohen:I mean, there's definitely elements of both. I like to say that there's no such thing as a perfect victim, and no human being is perfect. No one is not susceptible to brainwashing tactics, and as soon as you think that you're immune to these tactics, and that's when they'll get you.
Rob:Meanwhile, Victor got a timeshare.
Victor:It'll pay for itself. Okay, it'll pay for itself. He went for a freehare. It'll pay for itself. Okay, it'll pay for itself he went for a free breakfast.
Gavriel HaCohen:I've seen the South Park episode.
Victor:Yeah, gavi, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate the time you took to speak to us. If anyone wants to check out your content, where can they find it?
Gavriel HaCohen:Yeah, you can go. Uh, look up the leaving eden podcast. Uh, we are on anywhere that you get your podcasts. You can follow us on social media. We're on instagram and I'm on blue sky now hey, now that's good.
Rob:Thank you so much, man. That's awesome. Thank you again.
Gavriel HaCohen:Thank you, yeah you guys have like I'm. I'm. Thank you guys for having me on. I had a great time all right, right guys.
Victor:So final thoughts Cesar.
Cesar:You know it's crazy because I see some of the same parallels with, like in politics sometimes, or like that bite model that he originally talked about, coercion. You know the mind.
Rob:Whatever, I see some of that stuff in politics and it's kind of crazy, as to say, like man, it's kind of nuts rob, yeah, I think, coming into this, one of my biggest uh, one of the things I was looking for for was try to see red flags, like if he could help me to discern red flags if I ever see culty behavior or something of that sense. And and him bringing out this fight model and then now me thinking back to what I know about cults and doing a little bit of research and talking to him. It makes a lot of sense. And another question that I really had for him was when he broke down the difference between cults and religions and how cults always have this negative connotation and it's because of this playbook that they have. It is has a nefarious uh tone to it. It can and does harm those individuals. I got a lot out of that. Are you gonna start one tomorrow, or I might? I mean now that I know how to do it you took a lot of copious notes yeah, do you like wheatgrass?
Victor:take this shotgun once again, we want to thank Gavi Hakohen for joining us and don't forget to check out Leaving Eden podcast. Wherever you get your podcast, you will find so much interesting cult related episodes. We highly recommend it. But since you're here, we want to thank you for listening to us, but we still need your help. If you enjoyed this episode, I want you to find that share button and send this podcast to a friend, family member or just someone that you don't like, and if you could hit subscribe to stay updated on new episodes. Until next time, stay curious Later.
