Rick Ross

you are not recognizing your own vulnerability to the extent that you have made yourself more vulnerable to a cult group or some person that wants to run a scam on you. And we see this with con men, multi-level marketing. I mean, look, there would be no advertising or negative political ads if people were not persuadable.

So what these groups do is they create a kind of synthesis of coercive persuasion, thought reform, understood influence techniques that they knowingly use, and they focus it like a laser on someone, and they break them down, put them in a position where they're in distress, or they believe that there's no way out. And the group then says, we have the answer. And then they change them.

And so what you have are people being changed without their informed consent by these groups and being exploited and taken advantage of, which varies from group to group.

So what you see, and I would say this is the nucleus for the definition of a destructive cult, that all definitions intersect these three core characteristics, which is number one, an absolute totalitarian leader that becomes an object of worship, that is the defining element and driving force of the group.

And two, that leader knowingly uses thought reform and coercive persuasion to gain undue influence over his followers. And then three, that leader uses the undue influence that he possesses to exploit and do harm to his followers. And you take those three things together

and I don't care what the name of the group is and what they say they believe, it could be pseudoscience, it could be politics, it could be self-improvement, it could be some kind of religious belief. But that is simply the window dressing, the facade. Beyond that mask are those three core characteristics. The absolute totalitarian leader,

the use of thought reform and coercive persuasion to gain undue influence, and ultimately that undue influence being used to take advantage of people, to exploit them, to do harm to them. And that may vary by degree from group to group because there are some groups that are much worse than others. That doesn't mean that the group that is doing less harm is somehow benign.

But we can recognize that not all groups are hunkering down for doomsday. Not all groups sexually abuse their members or physically abuse them. There are some that are worse than others. But you take those three core characteristics, the all-powerful leader, the use of thought reform and coercive persuasion, and the harm done. Because if there's no harm done, maybe the group is benign.

But in my experience, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so that leader, that Keith Raniere, that Jim Jones, who has no accountability, will ultimately use that power in a destructive way. Wow.

I think that many cult leaders were themselves at one time either in a group that was cult-like, or they read about cults, or they read about thought reform and coercive persuasion. I mean, the books are available. I mean, you know, they can compile a kind of manual, and what you see is they copy from other cult leaders and incorporate and create a composite, like Keith Ranieri did with NXIVM.

which was a composite of Scientology, Ayn Rand, well-established large group awareness training techniques. So what you see over and over again with cult leaders is they don't reinvent the wheel. They just copy. and then they create a composite, and then they have their own group. The names change, but the techniques are the same.

It's interesting, you can deprogram a cult member, but you cannot deprogram a cult leader. A cult leader is inherently, typically, a psychopath, a sociopath, a malignant narcissist. They were... quite literally, it seems to me, born that way. I mean, Keith Raniere was terrorizing children when he was 10, according to reports and interviews. So it's almost like these people are hardwired.

You cannot deprogram them. And you cannot deprogram someone, Sean, that has sincerely held beliefs. So if we see someone that we don't agree with, maybe we don't agree with their politics, maybe we don't agree with their religious point of view, it's not fair to just say, oh, you're brainwashed. You need to be deprogrammed. Because we need to realize that people have sincerely held beliefs.

and that even though we may not agree with those beliefs, that doesn't mean that they're brainwashed. Instead, we should respect the differences that other people have and recognize how thought reform, coercive persuasion works to the extent that we can say, well, did that person arrive at those beliefs

through a process where that was just their family, that was their life, they truly believed this, or were they in a totalitarian controlling group that used thought reform and coercive persuasion to bend them to the will of the leadership? I mean, these are different things.

So I think a lot of times people use the word cult haphazardly to just denigrate some group or individual that they don't appreciate, saying, oh, you're in a cult, or that's a cult. And there is a range of meaning to the word cult. I mean, there are rock groups that have cult followings. There are products that are cult branded and so on.

But when we use the word cult to describe an organization, typically we're talking about a destructive cult. And for that, they need to have those three core characteristics to be defined as a destructive cult.

Now with the internet, it's so fast. I mean, in the old days when I started in the Stone Age before the internet and social media, groups literally had to press the flesh. They had to show up typically on college campuses or parks and malls and recruit people face to face. Now people are recruited through social media online.

And anybody that has an electronic device that accesses the internet is a potential target. So a group can just metastasize online so fast it can make your head spin. Allegio Bishop, who I testified against in Atlanta, who's now in prison, he had over 30,000 followers on Twitter alone. And there are people that have been called cult leaders that have hundreds of thousands of followers online.

And then they cull from those followers to create a deeper committed group. And you can use social media to do that. There was one couple that I dealt with in the Midwest The wife was an attorney. The husband had an MBA and worked remotely from home for a Fortune 500 company. And he was recruited online, indoctrinated through videos on YouTube, and the wife didn't even know it.