Word: siegelman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...from family and friends, the new member gets repeated infusions of the cult's doctrines. The lonely, depressed, frightened and disoriented recruit often experiences what amounts to a religious conversion. Former members of such cults frequently say that something in them "snaps," report Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, authors of Snapping, a new book on what they call "America's epidemic of sudden personality change...
...hint that maybe people are happier and more attuned to the world as ascetic missionaries than a citizens in Consumer America. And by tacitly equating the mass-therapies and pseudo-Eastern movements with all the deeper social currents flowing towards mystical experience, spiritual integration and consciousness-expansion, Conway and Siegelman do a great disservice to the growing segments of society that are seeking more than our culture...
Authors Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman '73 have undertaken a monumental task, that of investigating dozens of cults and movements to discover just what snapping is, why it occurs, the implications for our society and our theory of the mind, and perhaps most importantly, whether it is a threat to freedom that should be fought or an historical moment of widespread social transcendence that should be welcomed...
Conway and Siegelman thought the dark side of sudden personality change was obscured by reports of the transcendent, cosmic, revelatory and eestatic experiences many people had as a result of meditation. LSD, or whatever. They have set out to illuminate the negative aspects of the phenomenon--and come up with scare stories of brainwashing, mind control, Manson murders, Son of Sam shootings...
Conway and Siegelman stack the cards by only interviewing people who have adopted cults and then been "deprogrammed," including Mansonite Leslie van Houten), as well as professional deprogrammer Ted Patrick, and parents and friends of cult member to show that the movements are using sophisticated psychological techniques to induce a mind-numbing, thought-silencing submission among their subjects...