A Utopia—for Some—in India

Livia Gershon

JSTOR 

June 24, 2024

In the 1960s, a group of people inspired by anticolonial sentiments and respect for Indian spiritual traditions formed a utopian community called Auroville in southern India. But, as historian Jessica Namakkal writes, they quickly came into conflict with their Tamil neighbors and began replicating some of the same colonial dynamics they opposed.

Namakkal writes that Auroville was the product of a political and spiritual partnership between two people who bridged Indian and European cultures. Sri Aurobindo Ghose was educated in England before returning to India and joining the struggle for independence. Targeted by the British colonial authorities, he fled to French-controlled Pondicherry in southeastern India.

Mira Alfassa was born in Paris to a secular Sephardic Jewish family. She became interested in spiritualism and non-western religions and ended up traveling to India with her husband, an administrator for France’s colonial government. They met Aurobindo in 1914, studied philosophy and religion together, and eventually formed an ashram that attracted both Indians and expats from Europe.

The vision was of a city in the shape of a galaxy with skyscrapers and moving sidewalks.

After Aurobindo’s death in 1950, Alfassa, now known as “the Mother,” began planning a more ambitious community, to be known as Auroville. The vision was of a city in the shape of a galaxy with skyscrapers and moving sidewalks. It would be home to 50,000 “citizens of the world” who would devote themselves to spiritual matters and a future of universal equality. French and US publications covered the plan extensively, and applications streamed in. Once the village was fully established in 1972, its population of 320 ended up including 121 Indians and 190 westerners. Most of the Indian residents were well-educated, financially secure, lighter-skinned north Indians.

For the Tamil residents of the surrounding villages, Namakkal writes, the efforts to build the community, starting in the mid-1960s, were the object of some bemusement. The site began as a stretch of desert where water had to be delivered by jeep. And, while the project leaders stressed the need for all Aurovilians to participate in manual labor, most were unused to such work and unfamiliar with the local climate and crops. In the end, they ended up hiring whole villages of Tamil people to do the work at very low wages. They also used the considerable funds donated by new residents to buy land from local people, leading to growing tensions.

By the time of Alfassa’s death in 1974, it had become clear to most in Auroville that the local villagers would not naturally become an equal part of the project as they had hoped, though efforts to integrate them into it continued for decades. As the community’s population climbed to around 2,000, it hired locals for its handicraft businesses and as cooks and maids for guest houses serving international visitors.

At the time she was writing in 2012, Namakkal wrote, “It is not a stretch to say that… the separation between Aurovilian and Tamilian, and the exploitation of Tamil labor for the operation of Auroville, continue to make Auroville a functioning community.”

https://daily.jstor.org/a-utopia-for-some-in-india

CultNEWS101 Articles: 8/11/2021 (Cult Formation, Gaslighting, Baha'i, Iran, Religious Discrimination, Auroville, India)

Cult Formation, Gaslighting, Baha'i, Iran, Religious Discrimination, Auroville, India

The Harvard Mental Health Letter: Cult Formation (Robert J. Lifton)

" ... Cults represent one aspect of a worldwide epidemic of ideological totalism, or fundamentalism. They tend to be associated with a charismatic leader, thought reform, and exploitation of members. Among the methods of thought reform commonly used by cults are milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, a cult of confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence. The current historical context of dislocation from organizing symbolic structures, decaying belief systems concerning religion, authority, marriage, family, and death, and a "protean style" of continuous psychological experimentation with the self is conducive to the growth of cults. The use of coercion, as in certain forms of "deprogramming," to deal with the restrictions of individual liberty associated with cults is inconsistent with the civil rights tradition. Yet legal intervention may be indicated when specific laws are broken.

Two main concerns should inform our moral and psychological perspective on cults: the dangers of ideological totalism, or what I would also call fundamentalism; and the need to protect civil liberties."

Independent Ireland: Gaslighting: What is it, how to recognise it and how to protect yourself from it

"Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which the perpetrator makes the victim doubt their own memories, perceptions and behaviours. We talk to the experts about the warning signs and how to stand up to a gaslighter.

Calm down. You're so emotional. I never said that. That never happened. It's not a big deal. Stop imagining things. You're always twisting things. I would never have done that. Stop being so dramatic. You're over sensitive. I was just kidding. You're remembering it wrong. What's the matter with you? You're insane. You need help.

This is gaslighting. Mostly it happens in intimate relationships, but really it can happen anywhere — at work, in friendships, in politics. It's not a medical term, but a colloquialism referring to a form of psychological manipulation where over time the manipulated person begins to doubt their own memory, perception, even their reality.

It is a gradual process, which makes it difficult to detect if you're on the receiving end, and even more difficult to extricate yourself from, as it slowly but steadily erodes your sense of self, and of what's real. At its most malevolent, it's crazy making. Like narcissistic rage and coercive control, it is abuse without the black eyes; this is not to say, however, that the violence can progress from psychological to physical."

Iran News Wire: Iran: Bahai Woman Sentenced To 5 Years In Prison

" ... Unofficial sources say that there are more than 300,000 people following the Bahai Faith in Iran. However, the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran only recognizes Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism and does not recognize Bahaism.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Iranian Bahais have been systematically persecuted as a matter of government policy. During the first decade of this persecution, more than 200 of Iran's Bahais were killed or executed. Hundreds more were tortured or imprisoned, and tens of thousands lost jobs, access to education, and other rights – all solely because of their religious belief.

The persecution of Iran's Bahais is still ongoing with dozens of Bahais languishing in prisons throughout Iran."

NY Times: The Promise and Tragedy of a Utopian Community, as Seen by One of Its Own

"Utopia's finest hour, Akash Kapur writes in "Better to Have Gone," is the very beginning, "when the dream remains unsullied." The phrase has the ring of preordainment: From the heights of a vision, there is nowhere to go but down.

As it does — viciously then tragically — in his memoir, which is also a group biography, the investigation of a mystery, a meditation on searching and faith, and an act of love. Kapur's main subject is Auroville, a 53-year-old intentional community in southern India where both he and his wife, Auralice, were raised, and where, in 1986, her mother and adoptive father died. The murky circumstances of their deaths shadow Kapur's marriage, all the more when he and Auralice move back to Auroville in 2004. There her parents' fates have been transmuted into a mix of legend, theory and gossip, even as their bodies lie in unmarked graves. Kapur decides (with his wife's help, though she is not credited as an author) to excavate the past. Knowledge, he hopes, might bring peace.

This is a haunting, heartbreaking story, deeply researched and lucidly told, with an almost painful emotional honesty — the use of present tense weaving a kind of trance. I kept wanting to read "Better to Have Gone" because I found it so gripping; I kept wanting not to read it because I found it so upsetting. The image that came to mind, again and again, was of human lives being dashed against the rocks of rigid belief.

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The Promise and Tragedy of a Utopian Community, as Seen by One of Its Own

Amy Waldman
New York Times
July 22, 2021

BETTER TO HAVE GONE
Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville
By Akash Kapur

Utopia’s finest hour, Akash Kapur writes in “Better to Have Gone,” is the very beginning, “when the dream remains unsullied.” The phrase has the ring of preordainment: From the heights of a vision, there is nowhere to go but down.

As it does — viciously then tragically — in his memoir, which is also a group biography, the investigation of a mystery, a meditation on searching and faith, and an act of love. Kapur’s main subject is Auroville, a 53-year-old intentional community in southern India where both he and his wife, Auralice, were raised, and where, in 1986, her mother and adoptive father died. The murky circumstances of their deaths shadow Kapur’s marriage, all the more when he and Auralice move back to Auroville in 2004. There her parents’ fates have been transmuted into a mix of legend, theory and gossip, even as their bodies lie in unmarked graves. Kapur decides (with his wife’s help, though she is not credited as an author) to excavate the past. Knowledge, he hopes, might bring peace.

This is a haunting, heartbreaking story, deeply researched and lucidly told, with an almost painful emotional honesty — the use of present tense weaving a kind of trance. I kept wanting to read “Better to Have Gone” because I found it so gripping; I kept wanting not to read it because I found it so upsetting. The image that came to mind, again and again, was of human lives being dashed against the rocks of rigid belief.

Like much of reality, the story Kapur tells sounds almost too implausible to be true. A Frenchwoman bonds with a yogi in the southern Indian city of Pondicherry and begins administering his ashram. When he dies, she takes over and in her 80s conceives of an experimental township, to be constructed on a barren plateau nearby. Auroville will belong to no nation, will elevate the spiritual over the material and will be a place of “concord and harmony.” A French architect draws up a master plan, which includes at its center a giant sphere covered with gold disks. Meanwhile a group of mostly Western pioneers move out to the plateau, planting seeds in its dry red earth.

The Mother, as everyone calls the Frenchwoman, dies a few years later. Or does she? Her burial inflicts deep trauma on the Frenchman, who has become her most devoted acolyte. For according to the belief system first developed by her sage, Sri Aurobindo, human beings are capable of willing themselves to a new stage of evolution, transcending the body to become a supramental being. The burial has interrupted Mother’s transformation, or so the Frenchman believes. This certainty will lead him, many years later, to guide the lives of two foreigners living in Auroville — a Belgian woman and an American man — down a dangerous and ultimately fatal path. Diane Maes and John Walker will die, after prolonged agony, within a day of each other, she at 36, he at 44. They leave behind a 14-year-old girl named Auralice, who years later will become Kapur’s wife.

Kapur braids the biographies of Diane, a woman of great beauty and perhaps too-great faith, and John, the privileged, cultured scion of an East Coast family, with that of Bernard Enginger, or Satprem, the Frenchman who takes the Mother’s beliefs to extremes — and exhibits extreme indifference to the suffering that results.

Diane is in many ways the heart of the story, yet it is John who is more vivid on the page. Perhaps this is because of the extensive correspondence between him and his family, provided by John’s sister, Gillian, who years later still feels “incandescent rage” at how her brother died. Or perhaps it is because of the milieu into which he was born: His father was the first curator of the National Gallery, and he was descended on his mother’s side from both Mary, Queen of Scots, and Thomas More (“the patron saint of utopia,” as Kapur notes). His respites from the grinding conditions of Auroville in its early years find him at the Dakota apartments in Manhattan, attending parties with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, or in the wealthy enclave of Fishers Island. He has been born with everything, Kapur makes clear, except a calling.

It seems unfair to judge Diane and John from this distance. It is hard not to. Her tempests, and her negligence toward a son who drowns, grate, as does her stubborn self-subjugation. John’s anti-materialism, meanwhile, is bankrolled by his family’s material largess. “Have we become a race of accountants?” he chastises his baffled yet generous father when the senior Walker finally balks at the expenses for John’s dream mansion in Auroville. It’s not clear that his “dilettantish trust-funded journey” ever truly came to an end.

But ultimately neither Diane’s faith nor John’s privilege was enough to save them, and they seem most deserving of compassion. As do those they left behind, whose grief one suspects no amount of investigation and explanation will completely dispel. After John’s death, his 80-year-old father scribbles on a letter his questions: “1. Death certificate. 2. Where is he or his ashes. 3. What did he die of. 4. When did he die.” As Kapur writes, “This father is starved for the most basic information.”

Yet it is John’s father, an establishment figure and a searcher himself, who gives the book its title. “I admire you on your pilgrimage,” he writes his son. “May it have a good ending. But no matter, better to have gone on it than to have stayed here quietly.”

Kapur wants to believe that John and Diane’s suffering and care for each other in their last years and, especially, months gave their lives, if not meaning, at least coherence. His wife, their daughter, seems skeptical about this, and it’s easy to see why. They sacrificed themselves, but for what? So much of what happened, so much of what was believed, in the early years of Auroville sounds deeply loopy from a modern, rational perspective. The first child born in Auroville, named Auroson, is meant to herald the arrival of a new race. But then he drowns. The Mother promptly explains that he wasn’t happy in his body, and the parents should make a new one, into which she will reinsert his soul. A second Auroson is soon born. There was a totalizing quality to it all, with whatever happened contorted to fit the Mother’s teachings.

Part of Kapur’s strength as a guide is that he is attached to reason, yet he yearns for faith. He wants to understand, even if he cannot, quite. Kapur, who is also the author of “India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India” (2012), is excellent about the ideas that animated Auroville and nearly destroyed it. (I did sometimes wish for a map of the township, without which I felt lost in a mythological place, its locales given names like Certitude and Aspiration.) He spares no detail in describing the community’s early years — the idealism, tenacity and zealotry; the challenges of building (the concrete sphere most of all); the heated disputes about how people should live (schools? money? At various points both were rejected). The tensions, between the starched planners who did not live on the plateau and the barely clothed pioneers who did, appeared early and became so savage that those who tried to stay neutral were themselves targeted and ostracized. Books were burned. Kapur makes these factional disputes among a few hundred people not just clear but compelling.

His focus, so intense, is sometimes too narrow. More history of the French colony of Pondicherry, from where Auroville emanated, would have been useful, along with more scrutiny of how India’s colonial history, which left a hangover of both excessive deference to white Westerners and whiplash against that, shaped Auroville. In its creation, foreigners leveraged global inequities and India’s poverty. Would Mother and her devotees have been able to claim the same open land or fall back on the same cheap labor (both human and bullock) if they had been in Europe? The rule of Indira Gandhi, meanwhile, is viewed entirely through the lens of whether she is good for Auroville, not through what her Emergency (which suspended democratic freedoms in the face of internal unrest) meant for India at large.

But Auroville, not India, is Kapur’s subject, and the place emerges as awful and beautiful in equal measure. “Better to Have Gone” ends with an unexpected lightness, even transcendence, as Kapur helps us see what Auroville has given him, gives him still, despite the pain. In his descriptions of its landscape, made so lush by those early pioneers, as well as of the sphere at its heart, he conveys the internal concord and harmony, the peace, that he finds there.

The autophagy of utopian experiments seems nearly inevitable, perhaps because communities founded on ideals rely on individuals to sustain them. Purity is in the eye of the beholder. Time and again places like this have become laboratories not just for political or spiritual or economic experimentation but for what people will do to one another in the name of human improvement.

Yet Kapur is rightly moved by Auroville’s ability to survive its darkest hours and endure for half a century. He is moved, too, by what it represents: the rejection of convention, ambition, materialism, individualism and all the other treadmills we mindlessly walk. The questions Auroville tried to answer lurk somewhere deep in all of us: Is this the only kind of life? Are these the only things that matter? Few of us will live in places like Auroville, but perhaps all of us need them.

Amy Waldman is the author of two novels, “A Door in the Earth” and “The Submission,” and a former South Asia bureau chief for The Times.

BETTER TO HAVE GONE

Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville

By Akash Kapur

Illustrated. 344 pp. Scribner. $27.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 1, 2021, Page 1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Requiem for a Dream

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/books/review/better-to-have-gone-akash-kapur.html

What Makes a Cult a Cult?

The line between delusion and what the rest of us believe may be blurrier than we think.

Zoë Heller
New Yorker
July 5, 2021

July 12 & 19, 2021 Issue

Listen to this Story

Male cult leaders sometimes claim droit du seigneur over female followers or use physical violence to sexually exploit them. But, on the whole, they find it more efficient to dress up the exploitation as some sort of gift or therapy: an opportunity to serve God, an exorcism of "hangups," a fast track to spiritual enlightenment. One stratagem favored by Keith Raniere, the leader of the New York-based self-help cult NXIVM, was to tell the female disciples in his inner circle that they had been high-ranking Nazis in their former lives, and that having yogic sex with him was a way to shift the residual bad energy lurking in their systems.

According to Sarah Berman, whose book "Don't Call It a Cult" (Steerforth) focusses on the experiences of NXIVM's women members, Raniere was especially alert to the manipulative uses of shame and guilt. When he eventually retired his Nazi story—surmising, perhaps, that there were limits to how many reincarnated S.S. officers one group could plausibly contain—he replaced it with another narrative designed to stimulate self-loathing. He told the women that the privileges of their gender had weakened them, turned them into prideful "princesses," and that, in order to be freed from the prison of their mewling femininity, they needed to submit to a program of discipline and suffering. This became the sales spiel for the NXIVM subgroup DOS (Dominus Obsequious Sororium, dog Latin for "Master of the Obedient Sisterhood"), a pyramid scheme of sexual slavery in which members underwrote their vow of obedience to Raniere by having his initials branded on their groins and handing over collateral in the form of compromising personal information and nude photos. At the time of Raniere's arrest, in 2018, on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering, and other crimes, DOS was estimated to have more than a hundred members and it had been acquiring equipment for a B.D.S.M. dungeon. Among the orders: a steel puppy cage, for those members "most committed to growth."

Given that NXIVM has already been the subject of two TV documentary series, a podcast, four memoirs, and a Lifetime movie, it would be unfair to expect Berman's book to present much in the way of new insights about the cult. Berman provides some interesting details about Raniere's background in multilevel-marketing scams and interviews one of Raniere's old schoolmates, who remembers him, unsurprisingly, as an insecure bully. However, to the central question of how "normal" women wound up participating in Raniere's sadistic fantasies, she offers essentially the same answer as everyone else. They were lured in by Raniere's purportedly life-changing self-actualization "tech" (a salad of borrowings from est, Scientology, and Ayn Rand) and then whacked with a raft of brainwashing techniques. They were gaslit, demoralized, sleep-deprived, put on starvation diets, isolated from their friends and families, and subjected to a scientifically dubious form of psychotherapy known as neurolinguistic programming. Raniere was, as the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted the case put it, "a modern-day Svengali" and his followers were mesmerized pawns.

Until very recently, Berman argues, we would not have recognized the victimhood of women who consented to their own abuse: "It has taken the #MeToo movement, and with it a paradigm shift in our understanding of sexual abuse, to even begin to realize that this kind of 'complicity' does not disqualify women . . . from seeking justice." This rather overstates the case, perhaps. Certainly, the F.B.I. had been sluggish in responding to complaints about NXIVM, and prosecutors were keener to pursue the cult in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, but, with or without #MeToo, the legal argument against a man who used the threat of blackmail to keep women as his branded sex slaves would have been clear. In fact, Berman and others, in framing the NXIVM story as a #MeToo morality tale about coerced consent, are prone to exaggerate Raniere's mind-controlling powers. The fact that Raniere collected kompromat from DOS members strongly suggests that his psychological coercion techniques were not, by themselves, sufficient to keep women acquiescent. A great many people were, after all, able to resist his spiral-eyed ministrations: they met him, saw a sinister little twerp with a center part who insisted on being addressed as "Vanguard," and, sooner or later, walked away.

It is also striking that the degree of agency attributed to NXIVM members seems to differ depending on how reprehensible their behavior in the cult was. While brainwashing is seen to have nullified the consent of Raniere's DOS "slaves," it is generally not felt to have diminished the moral or legal responsibility of women who committed crimes at his behest. Lauren Salzman and the former television actor Allison Mack, two of the five NXIVM women who have pleaded guilty to crimes committed while in the cult, were both DOS members, and arguably more deeply in Raniere's thrall than most. Yet the media have consistently portrayed them as wicked "lieutenants" who cast themselves beyond the pale of sympathy by "choosing" to deceive and harm other women.

The term "brainwashing" was originally used to describe the thought-reform techniques developed by the Maoist government in China. Its usage in connection with cults began in the early seventies. Stories of young people being transformed into "Manchurian Candidate"-style zombies stoked the paranoia of the era and, for a time, encouraged the practice of kidnapping and "deprogramming" cult members. Yet, despite the lasting hold of brainwashing on the public imagination, the scientific community has always regarded the term with some skepticism. Civil-rights organizations and scholars of religion have strenuously objected to using an unproven—and unprovable—hypothesis to discredit the self-determination of competent adults. Attempts by former cult members to use the "brainwashing defense" to avoid conviction for crimes have repeatedly failed. Methods of coercive persuasion undoubtedly exist, but the notion of a foolproof method for destroying free will and reducing people to robots is now rejected by almost all cult experts. Even the historian and psychiatrist Robert Lifton, whose book "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism" (1961) provided one of the earliest and most influential accounts of coercive persuasion, has been careful to point out that brainwashing is neither "all-powerful" nor "irresistible." In a recent volume of essays, "Losing Reality" (2019), he writes that cultic conversion generally involves an element of "voluntary self-surrender."

If we accept that cult members have some degree of volition, the job of distinguishing cults from other belief-based organizations becomes a good deal more difficult. We may recoil from Keith Raniere's brand of malevolent claptrap, but, if he hadn't physically abused followers and committed crimes, would we be able to explain why NXIVM is inherently more coercive or exploitative than any of the "high demand" religions we tolerate? For this reason, many scholars choose to avoid the term "cult" altogether. Raniere 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." Religion, as the old joke has it, is just "a cult plus time."

Acknowledging that joining a cult requires an element of voluntary self-surrender also obliges us to consider whether the very relinquishment of control isn't a significant part of the appeal. In HBO's NXIVM documentary, "The Vow," a seemingly sadder and wiser former member says, "Nobody joins a cult. Nobody. They join a good thing, and then they realize they were fucked." The force of this statement is somewhat undermined when you discover that the man speaking is a veteran not only of NXIVM but also of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment, a group in the Pacific Northwest led by a woman who claims to channel the wisdom of a "Lemurian warrior" from thirty-five thousand years ago. To join one cult may be considered a misfortune; to join two looks like a predilection for the cult experience.

"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 on the Tokyo subway, in 1995, killed thirteen people. In his book "Underground" (1997), Murakami describes most Aum members as having "deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood" in the "spiritual bank" of the cult's leader, Shoko Asahara. Submitting to a higher authority—to someone else's account of reality—was, he claims, their aim. Robert Lifton suggests that people with certain kinds of personal history are more likely to experience such a longing: those with "an early sense of confusion and dislocation," or, at the opposite extreme, "an early experience of unusually intense family milieu control." But he stresses that the capacity for totalist submission lurks in all of us and is probably rooted in childhood, the prolonged period of dependence during which we have no choice but to attribute to our parents "an exaggerated omnipotence." (This might help to explain why so many cult leaders choose to style themselves as the fathers or mothers of their cult "families.")

Some scholars theorize that levels of religiosity and cultic affiliation tend to rise in proportion to the perceived uncertainty of an environment. The less control we feel we have over our circumstances, the more likely we are to entrust our fates to a higher power. (A classic example of this relationship was provided by the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who found that fishermen in the Trobriand Islands, off the coast of New Guinea, engaged in more magic rituals the farther out to sea they went.) This propensity has been offered as an explanation for why cults proliferated during the social and political tumult of the nineteen-sixties, and why levels of religiosity have remained higher in America than in other industrialized countries. Americans, it is argued, 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.

The problem with any psychiatric or sociological explanation of belief is that it tends to have a slightly patronizing ring. People understandably grow irritated when told that their most deeply held convictions are their "opium." (Witness the outrage that Barack Obama faced when he spoke of jobless Americans in the Rust Belt clinging "to guns or religion.") Lauren Hough, in her collection of autobiographical essays, "Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing," gives a persuasive account of the social and economic forces that may help to make cults alluring, while resisting the notion that cult recruits are merely defeated "surrenderers."

Hough spent the first fifteen years of her life in the Children of God, a Christian cult in which pedophilia was understood to have divine sanction and women members were enjoined to become, as one former member recalled, "God's whores." Despite Hough's enduring contempt for those who abused her, her experiences as a minimum-wage worker in mainstream America have convinced her that what the Children of God preached about the inequity of the American system was actually correct. The miseries and indignities that this country visits on its precariat class are enough, she claims, to make anyone want to join a cult. Yet people who choose to do so are not necessarily hapless creatures, buffeted into delusion by social currents they do not comprehend; they are often idealists seeking to create a better world. Of her own parents' decision to join the Children of God, she writes, "All they saw was the misery wrought by greed—the poverty and war, the loneliness and the fucking cruelty of it all. So they joined a commune, a community where people shared what little they had, where people spoke of love and peace, a world without money, a cause. A family. Picked the wrong goddamn commune. But who didn't."

People's attachment to an initial, idealistic vision of a cult often keeps them in it, long after experience would appear to have exposed the fantasy. 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 the classic study "When Prophecy Fails" (1956), Festinger and his co-authors relate what happened to a small cult in the Midwest when the prophecies of its leader, Dorothy Martin, did not come to pass. Martin claimed to have been informed by various disembodied beings that a cataclysmic flood would consume America on December 21, 1954, and that prior to this apocalypse, on August 1, 1954, she and her followers would be rescued by a fleet of flying saucers. 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 actively proselytize about the imminent arrival of the saucers.

This counterintuitive response to dashed hopes animates Akash Kapur's "Better to Have Gone" (Scribner), an account of Auroville, an "intentional community" founded in southern India in 1968. Auroville was the inspiration of Blanche Alfassa, a Frenchwoman known to her spiritual followers as the Mother. She claimed to have learned from her guru, Sri Aurobindo, a system of "integral yoga," capable of effecting "cellular transformation" and ultimately granting immortality to its practitioners. She intended Auroville (its name alludes both to Sri Aurobindo and to aurore, the French word for dawn) to be the home of integral yoga and the cradle of a future race of immortal, "supramental" men and women.

The Mother does not appear to have had the totalitarian impulses of a true cult leader, but her teachings inspired a cultlike zealotry in her followers. When, five years after Auroville's founding, she failed to achieve the long-promised cellular transformation and died, at the age of ninety-five, the fledgling community went slightly berserk. "She never prepared us for the possibility that she would leave her body," one of the original community members tells Kapur. "I was totally blown away. Actually, I'm still in shock." To preserve the Mother's vision, a militant group of believers, known as the Collective, shut down schools, burned books in the town library, shaved their heads, and tried to drive off those members of the community whom they considered insufficiently devout.

Kapur and his wife both grew up in Auroville, and he interweaves his history of the community with the story of his wife's mother, Diane Maes, and her boyfriend, John Walker, a pair of Aurovillean pioneers who became casualties of what he calls "the search for perfection." In the seventies, Diane suffered a catastrophic fall while helping to build Auroville's architectural centerpiece, the Mother's Temple. In deference to the Mother's teachings, she rejected long-term treatment and focussed on achieving cellular transformation; she never walked again. When John contracted a severe parasitic illness, he refused medical treatment, too, and eventually died. Shortly afterward, Diane committed suicide, hoping to join him and the Mother in eternal life.

Kapur is, by his own account, a person who both mistrusts faith and envies it, who lives closer to "the side of reason" but suspects that his skepticism may represent a failure of the imagination. Although he acknowledges that Diane and John's commitment to their spiritual beliefs killed them, he is not quite prepared to call their faith misplaced. There was, he believes, something "noble, even exalted," about the steadfastness of their conviction. And, while he is appalled by the fanaticism that gripped Auroville, he is grateful for the sacrifices of the pioneers.

Auroville ultimately survived its cultural revolution. The militant frenzy of the Collective subsided, and the community was placed under the administration of the Indian government. Kapur and his wife, after nearly twenty years away, returned there to live. Fifty years after its founding, Auroville may not be the "ideal city" of immortals that the Mother envisaged, but it is still, Kapur believes, a testament to the devotion of its pioneers. "I'm proud that despite our inevitable compromises and appeasements, we've nonetheless managed to create a society—or at least the embers of a society—that is somewhat egalitarian, and that endeavors to move beyond the materialism that engulfs the rest of the planet."

Kapur gives too sketchy a portrait of present-day Auroville for us to confidently judge how much of a triumph the town—population thirty-three hundred—really represents, or whether integral yoga was integral to its success. (Norway has figured out how to be "somewhat egalitarian" without the benefit of a guru's numinous wisdom.) Whether or not one shares Kapur's admiration for the spiritual certainties of his forefathers and mothers, it seems possible that Auroville prospered in spite of, rather than because of, these certainties—that what in the end saved the community from cultic madness and eventual implosion was precisely not faith, not the Mother's totalist vision, but pluralism, tolerance, and the dull "compromises and appeasements" of civic life.

Far from Auroville, it's tempting to take pluralism and tolerance for granted, but both have fared poorly in Internet-age America. 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. According to some observers, the QAnon movement does not qualify as a proper cult, because it lacks a single charismatic leader. Donald Trump is a hero of the movement, but not its controller. "Q," the online presence whose gnomic briefings—"Q drops"—form the basis of the QAnon mythology, is arguably a leader of sorts, but the army of "gurus" and "promoters" who decode, interpret, and embroider Q's utterances have shown themselves perfectly capable of generating doctrine and inciting violence in the absence of Q's directives. (Q has not posted anything since December, but the prophecies and conspiracies have continued to proliferate.) It's possible that our traditional definitions of what constitutes a cult organization will have to adapt to the Internet age and a new model of crowdsourced cult.

Liberals have good reason to worry about the political reach of QAnon. A survey published in May by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fifteen per cent of Americans subscribe to the central QAnon belief that the government is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and that twenty per cent believe that "there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders." Yet anxiety about the movement tends to be undercut by laughter at the presumed imbecility of its members. Some of the attorneys representing QAnon followers who took part in the invasion of the Capitol have even made this their chief line of defense; Albert Watkins, 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."

Mike Rothschild, in his book about the QAnon phenomenon, "The Storm Is Upon Us" (Melville House), 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 its threat. The QAnon stereotype of a "white American conservative driven to joylessness by their sense of persecution by liberal elites" ought not to blind us to the fact that many of Q's followers, like the members of any cult movement, are people seeking meaning and purpose. "For all of the crimes and violent ideation we've seen, many believers truly want to play a role in making the world a better place," Rothschild writes.

It's not just the political foulness of QAnon that makes us disinclined to empathize with its followers. We harbor a general sense of superiority to those who are taken in by cults. Books and documentaries routinely warn that any of us could be ensnared, that it's merely a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that the average cult convert is no stupider than anyone else. (Some cults, including Aum Shinrikyo, have attracted disproportionate numbers of highly educated, accomplished recruits.) Yet our sense that joining a cult requires some unusual degree of credulousness or gullibility persists. Few of us believe in our heart of hearts that Amy Carlson, the recently deceased leader of the Colorado-based Love Has Won cult, who claimed to have birthed the whole of creation and to have been, in a previous life, a daughter of Donald Trump, could put us under her spell.

Perhaps one way to attack our intellectual hubris on this matter is to remind ourselves that we all hold some beliefs for which there is no compelling evidence. The convictions that Jesus was the son of God and that "everything happens for a reason" are older and more widespread than the belief in Amy Carlson's privileged access to the fifth dimension, but neither is, ultimately, more rational. In recent decades, scholars have grown increasingly adamant that none of our beliefs, rational or otherwise, have much to do with logical reasoning. "People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world," William J. Bernstein writes, in "The Delusions of Crowds" (Atlantic Monthly). Instead, they "rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions."

Bernstein's book, a survey of financial and religious manias, is inspired by Charles Mackay's 1841 work, "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds." Mackay saw crowd dynamics as central to phenomena as disparate as the South Sea Bubble, the Crusades, witch hunts, and alchemy. Bernstein uses the lessons of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to elucidate some of Mackay's observations, and argues that our propensity to go nuts en masse is determined in part by a hardwired weakness for stories. "Humans understand the world through narratives," he writes. "However much we flatter ourselves about our individual rationality, a good story, no matter how analytically deficient, lingers in the mind, resonates emotionally, and persuades more than the most dispositive facts or data."

It's important to note that Bernstein is referring not just to the stories told by cults but also to ones that lure people into all manner of cons, including financial ones. Not all delusions are mystical. Bernstein's phrase "a good story" is possibly misleading, since a lot of stories peddled by hucksters and cult leaders are, by any conventional literary standard, rather bad. What makes them work is not their plot but their promise: Here is an answer to the problem of how to live. Or: Here is a way to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. In both cases, the promptings of common sense—Is it a bit odd that aliens have chosen just me and my friends to save from the destruction of America? Is it likely that Bernie Madoff has a foolproof system that can earn all his investors ten per cent a year?—are effectively obscured by the loveliness of the fantasy prospect. And, once you have entered into the delusion, you are among people who have all made the same commitment, who are all similarly intent on maintaining the lie.

The process by which people are eventually freed from their cult delusions rarely seems to be accelerated by the interventions of well-meaning outsiders. Those who embed themselves in a group idea learn very quickly to dismiss the skepticism of others as the foolish cant of the uninitiated. If we accept the premise that our beliefs are rooted in emotional attachments rather than in cool assessments of evidence, there is little reason to imagine that rational debate will break the spell.

The good news is that rational objections to flaws in cult doctrine or to hypocrisies on the part of a cult leader do have a powerful impact if and when they occur to the cult members themselves. The analytical mind may be quietened by cult-think, but it is rarely deadened altogether. Especially if cult life is proving unpleasant, the capacity for critical thought can reassert itself. Rothschild interviews several QAnon followers who became disillusioned after noticing "a dangling thread" that, once pulled, unravelled the whole tapestry of QAnon lore. It may seem unlikely that someone who has bought into the idea of Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of children can be bouleversé by, say, a trifling error in dates, but the human mind is a mysterious thing. Sometimes it is a fact remembered from grade school that unlocks the door to sanity. One of the former Scientologists interviewed in Alex Gibney's documentary "Going Clear" reports that, after a few years in the organization, she experienced her first inklings of doubt when she read L. Ron Hubbard's account of an intergalactic overlord exploding A-bombs in Vesuvius and Etna seventy-five million years ago. The detail that aroused her suspicions wasn't especially outlandish. "Whoa!" she remembers thinking. "I studied geography in school! Those volcanoes didn't exist seventy-five million years ago!"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/what-makes-a-cult-a-cult

Guru-preneurs - Babas are the New Babes in Entrepreneurship

Rasananda Panda and RK Renin Singh
Orissa Diary
April 11, 2016

Sri Sri Ravishankar

There is a new spiritual awakening happening in the business world today. Babas and Gurus who have up till now taught people how to perform yoga and enhance spirituality are now teaching the world a new lesson- how to do business!

With a decrease in volume growth and value, the FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) sector has been facing a crisis since quite some time. Hindustan Unilever Limited, one of the biggest FMCG players in India has its revenue growth in negative since the past seven quarters. From 13.2 per cent in June 2014 to 3.2 per cent in February 2016, there is a huge fall in the MNC’s revenue. Other competitors like ITC’s FMCG business has also fallen from 11-12 per cent to seven per cent in the same duration. The situation is same for other major FMCG players in India. Companies have been trying to cope up with the slow down using various strategies such as increasing ad spending, launching new products and starting various promotional schemes, but to no avail.

As against that, take for instance the case of Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Ayurved. With an estimated turnover of Rs 5000 crores for FY 2016, Patanjali Ayurved on the other hand is growing rapidly day in and day out and the path ahead looks even brighter. Indian consumers have always looked for affordability as well as quality in every purchase they make. Patanjali products provide exactly this to the Indian customers. With 500 products in its product portfolio such as biscuits, juices, supplements, toiletries etc., Patanjali products are placed across as herbal and Ayurvedic products and are considered purer than similar products available in the market. Also, the products are priced quite low comparatively. Add to it the recent trend towards Ayurveda and health is acting as a catalyst in the process. It is hence a no brainer that the demand for Patanjali products has skyrocketed in just a few years after its launch.

Another fact to be noted here is the huge number of followers of these Guru-preneurs. With an estimated number of 70 million + followers, Patanjali products have an already established consumer base that believes in what Baba Ramdev suggests to them. Also, the gurus themselves act as the brand ambassador of these companies and the image of the gurus significantly helps in placing the products. Patanjali Ayurved also advertises aggressively on television with an earmarked Rs 300 Crore as advertisement expenditure thus far. With the tie up with Kishore Biyani owned Future group, Patanjali Ayurved has a well established and far reaching distribution channel. Should we not say strategic alliance?

Interestingly Ramdev baba is not the only one or even the first one to make a cocktail of religion with business. Sri Sri Ravishankar with its Sri Sri Ayurveda- an FMCG arm of Sri Sri’s Art of Living Foundation has also made quite inroads in Indian FMCG sector. Further, Sri Sri released Ojasvita- a malt based health drink targeting the market leaders- Horlicks (a product by GlaxoSmithKline) and Bournvita (a product by Mondelez International) who command 51 percent and 16 percent of the health drink market respectively.

With an even larger follower base of 370 million, the Art of Living Foundation is slowly inching on to the business of wellness and comfort to an otherwise irresistible Indian middle class. Unlike Patanjali Ayurved, Sri Sri Ayurveda products are sold only at POS (Point of Sale) and have just started to use the mass media. Other religious groups like BAPS (Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha), Aurobindo Ashram, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudeva and ISKCON have also established themselves as reliable brands in the FMCG sector. BAPS produces and sells FMCG products under the BAPS Amrut brand name. Similarly Aurobindo Ashram and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudeva (Isha foundation) produce and sell food, wellness and personal care items for its followers and own consumption.

The entry of Babas in business is not limited only to the FMCG sector but there are many other places the Guru-preneurs have started to show their mark.

Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh has entered the media and entertainment sector by releasing two movies - MSG: The Messenger and MSG-2: The Messenger. In both the films, Singh has acted as the main protagonist, directed, produced as well as gave music to both the films. Both the movies were heavily advertised along television and other digital platforms with considerable amount of budget spent towards it. The rock star image of Guru Ram Rahim and a significant number of followers in states of Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan has made sure that there will be many takers for both the films and any film that is due to release. MSG: The Messenger had grossed Rs 216 crore in the box office collection and the second part is claimed to have entered the Rs 50 crore leagues by one of the Dera’s spokesperson. Going by the figures, it is easily seen that Guru Ram Rahim’s strategy is working and working quite good. Also it is believed that three more movies from the same production house are in the pipeline. Besides the movies, the Dera sells spiritual discourses, speeches and music composed by the Dera chief to the various followers. It is also expected that the Dera will also join the FMCG path as it has already taken the MSG franchise.

This trend is however not limited to India. It can also be seen globally as various religious organizations have capitalized on tourism as a source of revenue. Also Televangelism from where it all started is quite prominent in many parts of the world where the tele-evangelists sell their merchandizes.

The Indian economy, it seems is going to depend on these Gurus and Babas who are surely going to become the drivers of Indian economy in the near future. Other companies however will have to fight not only against the marketing strategies of these Guru led companies but also have to deal with the faith of their followers who are loyal to these guru-brands and thus constitutes a sizable market of their products.

http://orissadiary.com/ShowOriyaColumn.asp?id=66299