Tactics Of Thought Reform
Tactics of reform fall generally into three categories:
- Destabilize a person’s sense of self
- Get the person to drastically reinterpret his or her life’s history and radically alter his or her worldview and accept a new version of reality and causality
- Develop in the person a dependence on the organization, and thereby turn the person into a deployable agent of the organization
Scholars have looked at it in different ways:
| Condition (Singer) |
Themes (Lifton) |
Stages (Schein) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Keep the person unaware of what is going on and the changes taking place. | 1. Unfreezing | |
| 2. Control the person’s time and, if possible, physical environment. 3. Create a sense of powerlessness, covert fear, and dependency. 4. Suppress much of the person’s old behavior and attitudes. |
1. Milieu control. 2. Loading the language. 3. Demand for purity. 4. Confession. |
|
| 5. Instill new behavior and attitudes | 5. Mystical manipulation. 6. Doctrine over person. |
2. Changing |
| 6. Put forth a closed system of logic; allow no real input or criticism. | 7. Sacred science. 8. Dispensing of existence. |
3. Refreezing |
The Control Theory of deviant behavior explains that people deviate from societal norms when their commitments to a deviant group outweigh their commitments to society on the whole. See more at 1 Conversion and Christian Growth.
Cults In Our Midst fragments
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