Cult Knowhow

• Handling Leaders Well
• Fascism

Handling Leaders

Organizational relations is a vast topic.

There are many leader styles. Democratic, authoritarian, and laissez-faire leadership are three of the most commonly referred to. A leader and his group form a network. The leader is usually the most influential person in a group.

Participative management. The management theorist Douglas McGregor (1960) discerns between two functions of management - to control and motivate. The form of management where motivation has a relatively greater preponderance, may be termed participative management. In it, it is assumed that members or workers are highly motivated and can be trusted to contribute to the organisation's objectives if given the opportunity to participate in organisational decision making. Participative managers consult with and involve employees at all levels of the organization in organisational problem solving and decision making. One aim is to accommodate the physical and social needs of workers/members. There is still debate over the feasibility, wisdom, and even the legal consequences of involving workers in organisational decision making.

Paternalism does not depend on exploitation of workers/members, and can stimulate cultural and educational programs, even community constructions.

In laissez-faire leadership enlightened self-interest dominates. However, individual members or workers function as isolated individuals.

There is also management through bureaucracy of fixed rules governing the organisation.

A closer look at how SRF (Self-Realization Fellowship) is organised, reveals it has paternalism at its core (maternalism is found too), and there is monastic-bureaucratic managing of members: There is next to no participative magement in what really matters, such as dispensing of kriya yoga, the amount of kriyas to be permitted, and so on. Thus, the core control is paternalistic. SRF has a long way to go before it fulfils all the possibilities of a paternalistic web, though.

Lately SRF has been labeled a cult by some. According to Merriam-Webster, the Latin roots of 'cult' involve "care, adoration, cultivate". A cult deals with:

• formal religious veneration, worship;
• a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also its body of adherents;
• a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also its body of adherents;
• a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator;
• (a) great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as a film or book), and especially such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad. (b) usually a small group of people marked by such devotion.

You don't have to be stupid to link up to a cult unwittingly. It's enough to be hoodwinked, for example by play on belongingness. But you may handle main cult factors by training and getting aware of what is at play in the field of your mind and in the open.

It could pay to check or probe into how much control leaders have, and whether they regularly cheat.

Pompous Leaders Bring Complications

Watch your steps - cults have some hallmarks. Here are some of them:

• Strong leader dominance.
• Bad social network most often.
• Up to notorious isolation from family and relatives, if it serves pompous, arrogant, cliché-ridden or grave leadership with control and many complications for tender hearts and minds and nerves.

You could thrive better and accomplish things on your own, eventually.
      Silly initial networks may breed pompous leaders.

Don't expect a hard-hearted cult to be honest and unbiased about all their central issues, if getting members to profit from, matters. You have to calculate well. So as not to get outsmarted, watch out for:

1. Unsound conformity striving.
2. Persuasion or framing.
3. Great obedience to the leader and following quite arbitrary rules and regulations.
4. Insincere argumentation of recruiting.
5. Emotional manipulation, play on unfulfilled instincts, or neuroses.
6. Consistent efforts to block quitting.
7. High exit costs include phobias of harm, failure, and personal isolation.
8. Cult mind control is often of great intensity, persistence, duration, and scope.
9. Among serious dangers are deception, mindless devotion, and failure to deliver on the recruiting promises.
10. Bad cults create total dependence on the group for self identity, recognition, social reinforcement.

Ebu: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD. London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2009.

Hio: Palmer, R., and Joel Colton. A History of the Modern World. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992.



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