Selected quotes from "Beyond Belief," an article on cults by Zoe Heller, The New Yorker, July 12 & 19, 2021

[All text inside brackets is Flyingsaucesir's]

"... brainwashing is neither all powerful nor irresistible."

"...cultic conversion usually involves an element of voluntary surrender."

"Attempts to use the "brainwashing defense" to avoid conviction for crimes have repeatedly failed."

[Or, as Warren Zevon put it, "Patty Hearst heard the burst of Rolands Thompson gun"]

[X cult leader] "...may have set himself up as an unerring source of wisdom and sought to shut his minions off from outside influence, but apparently so did Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel of Luke records him saying, "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.""

"Acknowledging that joining a cult requires an element of surrender also obliges us to consider whether the very relinquishment of control isn't a significant part of the appeal."

""Not passive victims, they themselves actively sought to be controlled," Haruki Murakami wrote of the members of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult whose sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, in 1995, killed thirteen people."

"Robert Lifton suggests... that the capacity for totalist submission lurks in all of us and is probably rooted in childhood...during which...we attribute to our parents "an exaggerated omnipotence.""

"Some scholars theorize that...the less control we feel we have in our circumstances, the more likely we are to entrust our fates to a higher power."

[This may explain] "why levels of religiosity have remained higher in America than in other industrialized countries. Americans... experience significantly more economic precarity than people in nations with stronger social safety nets and consequently are more inclined to seek alternative sources of comfort."

[This may also explain America's high rates of drug and alcohol abuse, and the proliferation of guns in the society.]

"The psychologist Leon Festinger proposed the theory of "cognitive dissonance" to describe the unpleasant feeling that arises when an established belief is confronted by clearly contradictory evidence."

[In 1954, Dorothy Martin prophecied that a fleet of alien flying saucers would rescue her followers from an impending apocalypse.]

"When the aliens did not appear, some members of the group became disillusioned and immediately departed, but others dealt with their discomfiture by doubling down on their conviction. They not only stuck with Martin, but began, for the first time, to proselytize about the imminent arrival of the saucers."

"The silos of political groupthink created by social media have turned out to be ideal settings for the germination and dissemination of extremist ideas and alternative realities. To date, the most significant and frightening cultic phenomenon to arise from social media is QAnon."

"A survey published in May by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fifteen percent of Americans subscribe to the central QAnon belief that the government is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles..."

"Albert Watkins, [the attorney] who represents Jacob Chansley, the bare-chested "Q Shaman," recently told a reporter that his client and other defendants were "people with brain damage; they're fucking retarded.""

[Author] "Mike Rothschild...argues that contempt and mockery for QAnon beliefs have led people to radically underestimate the movement, and, even now, keep us from engaging seriously with the threat."

""People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world," William Bernstein writes"...."Instead, they rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived perceptions.""

"Those who embed themselves in a group idea learn very quickly to dismiss the skepticism of others as the foolish can't of the uninitiated."

"The good news is that rational objections to flaws in cult doctrine or to hypocrisies on the part if the cult leader do have a powerful impact if and when they occur to the cult members themselves."

[The big question then, is how do we facilitate that process in members of the Trump cult?]