Warping Reality: Inside the Psychology of Cults

De: Wind Goodfriend, The Great Courses

Narrado por: Wind Goodfriend

Many of us have a deeply personal drive to seek inner fulfillment. We want to grow as individuals, explore our own potential, and make an important and lasting contribution to the world. It’s easy to run into groups that promise to help us along the way, and some of these groups are sincere. When a group, or even a charismatic individual, promises to help us meet our goals but then corrupts our good intentions for their own gain—when they exploit people in an organized fashion—that’s when you may have become a member of a cult. And it can happen much more easily than you might think.

In the 12 fascinating lectures of Warping Reality: Inside the Psychology of Cults, you will learn about some of the most widely known cults of modern times. But unlike any standard news reporting or documentary about the Peoples Temple, The Manson “Family,” The Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, Children of God, the Unification Church, and NXIVM, your expert, Dr. Wind Goodfriend, will help you explore the psychology of these cults. How could these cult leaders have committed such heinous crimes under the guise of “helping” members in their development?

In this course, you will not only learn about cults, but you will also meet two former cult members who are willing to share their stories. They explain what led them to join these groups, what they had hoped to get from the groups versus the reality, and why they each stayed for over a decade before walking away.

It is not the cult members who were interested in cult membership to abuse and betray others, but it is the cult leader who has lied to, manipulated, and used their members in fraudulent and violent ways. Learning about cults and the psychology of their leaders is the best way to limit their control over our communities, loved ones, and ourselves.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2024 The Great Courses (P)2024 The Teaching Company, LLC

Clear thorough organization and clarity

Excellent, documented, clear explanations. This is one of the best books on the subject. Highly recommended.

A Gentle Introduction

I enjoy Great Courses and I was intrigued by the title. I had recently seen the TV program "Escaping Polygamy" and as far as watching the show at face value, it was interesting to see how people processed life in cults and life outside them. I would say this course and the TV program were fairly consistent with how we generally understand cults as a society.
This program was very gentle, nothing too shocking or definitive about cults. There were two people who shared perspectives from being in cults. I think the most interesting part for me was how this course focused on how people who are looking for meaning in their own lives can wind up in cults.

Cultish-ness as a continuum

I appreciate the care taken to put forward rational, analytical theories and insights. The author did a fine job addressing a topic which is typically treated sensationally.

I find the concept of degree of cultish-ness as on a continuum useful, representative of my observations, and rational. The dissection of the phenomenon to consider characteristics and principles by which one may evaluate degree seems of course also pragmatic and readily applied. I include in the previous comment attributes of leaders, members, circumstance, and etc.

The topic would do well to be informed by more rigorous less anecdotally based research.

Chief critique: the narrator. Better as an author. Each sentence seemed inflected like a dramatic reading. That is to say, every sentence was made to feel like the most important sentence. Could / would be much better to match inflection and emphasis with what the most important points indeed.

Fascinating and Disturbing

Cults are something that seem both far away and dangerous in the sense that a lion in the zoo is dangerous—that is to say, not going to be a problem for most people. Occasionally we hear of tragedy—sometimes great tragedy—involving them. The Manson family murders, the Jonestown and Heaven's Gate suicides, David Koresh and his followers’ mass death in Waco, Texas. The names are infamous but they don't seem particularly threatening to the vast majority of Americans. And yet, Goodfriend starts her series of lectures by showing us that cults are actually more common than we think they are and she personalizes her account by interviewing two survivors of cults at the beginning and end of the series. It's these two individuals’ accounts that lift this series up and make the cult phenomenon feel "real". Listening to them, you can easily believe that these were members of your extended family or neighbors down the street who slowly got into something over their heads and had their sense of self and self-worth stripped away until their understanding of reality—as the title suggests—became so warped that they effectively went crazy.

Most of the lectures are spent defining what a cult is, how you recognize one, and how people are sucked in. There is also a lot of time spent analyzing the characteristics of cult leaders and how they maintain control of their flocks. Unsurprisingly, these are disturbingly manipulative individuals who are capable of truly brutal acts in their exercising of control over their followers. One point I found especially interesting is that doing what the leader instructed didn't protect a person from punishment. The cult leaders could and would always invent something wrong with their followers and humiliate them into trying to make things more right. It reminded me a lot about the tools Mao used to break Chinese society and institute communism. But if you truly want to read something troubling, listen to the parts about the people who join cults. They aren't that different from so many people we know. They are trying to do good, to make the world a better place, and make a positive difference. It's these good intentions that seem to make them most vulnerable to the manipulations of the leaders of the cults.

The final part of the lecture is inspiring as Goodfriend returns to the man and woman she interviewed earlier in the book and begins a discussion of how they came to realize that something was very wrong with their lives and figured out a way to escape. It took unbelievable courage—isolated from everyone they knew before joining the cult, stripped of all personal resources, and psychologically battered to the point that they had no meaningful amount of self-worth, these people still found ways to grasp hold of reality and escape. But freedom is not enough to heal their trauma. That takes years of work with therapists trying to rebuild their sense of self and their lives.

Good, insightful

A pretty good, insightful book.
Informative, engaging, well-structured.
Highly recommend.
I particularly liked interviews with real-life cult members, their experiences, and reflections.

cults through he eyes of a feminist

I find it odd that on the one hand she claims that the scale created makes it hard to identify cults but whenever I apply the scale it actually makes it shockingly easy. Instead rather than backing up her arguments she  simply states it is a fact. In the psychology of cult leaders she focuses solely on men. Which is odd since both one of her guest speakers and a number of cults I could go over had female leaders. She also leaves out black leaders and yes America has had a few. She's clearly using the intersectional lens to make sure that her presentation remains palatable to those who preach intersectionality. The light triad is somewhat interesting because it's simply describes the harm reduction of morality of evolutionary psychology. Chapter 9 not only has a graphic warning annoying on its own but then proceeds to point out how all the literature demonizes men while saying yes this is normal and good. Funny how something that's talking about cult psychology is giving into thoughtless group think. Not only does she downplay the sufering of men but goes on to site the now infamous 1 in 3 women statistic. Patriarchy does come up in this chapter and the author tries to excuse this lie into by claiming that she's just going based on the cults and the literature. The problem with this excuse is that she chose which cults and literature would be followed. While she does acknowledge men can be abused she spends most of this apology focusing on non-binary and the lgbtq alliance. The misandry against men is further excuse by pointing to abused women and saying respect their lived experiences. She also supports the changes that affirmative care would require for the language. The end of the book is basically a support manual for women and talks about at length the strength women have shown in the face of PTSD.

The author does several other interesting things throughout this book. She tries to use a form of gnosticism to get her ideas of interpersonal dysfunction between couples and graft that on to cult psychology. As above so below as below so above. 

The end of this book is actually quite funny unintentionally. When she talks about how cults create a conspiracy theory about how psychologists and doctors are in fact evil and must be resisted while simultaneously touching on multiple times patriarchy theory over the book.