TED Talk: Ex-Moonie Diane Benscoter: How Cults Think

Ex-Moonie Diane Benscoter: How Cults Think (February 2009)

Summary: In her TED talk, Diane Benscoter recounts her experiences while a member of Sun Myeong-moon’s Unification Church (통일교회).

She compares Moon’s cult with other cults and extremist groups including Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and suicide bombers. The focus of her talk is her likening of the cultic mindset to a virus or meme that essentially takes over a person and results in them becoming an agent of the group that then spreads the “virus” to others. The victims of the cult then paradoxically become the people doing the most harm because they are the ones actively spreading the “virus” to others as they believe that by doing so they are literally doing God’s work. (complex sentence IC-DC)

Opinion: I particularly liked her likening of the spread of a cult to the spread of a virus. I’ve often thought of cults in exactly the same way. They grow by spreading from person to person. A person indoctrinated into a cult becomes “infected” and then works to “infect” others. It is a very apt analogy. If I had to offer a couple of criticisms, I would first say that I think the speech is too short. (complex sentence DC,IC) This is a subject that is worthy of a deeper and a more precise presentation. That leads me to my second criticism which is that the following quote (below) is unsupported by any evidence. It well may be true, but Diane did not offer any concrete support for the theory that the brain of an indoctrinated cult member looks different from a non-member. (compound sentence) “I am convinced” sounds “convincing”, but I would have preferred to see some science or some study results to back up her claim.

…if you looked at my brain, or any brain that’s infected with a viral memetic infection like this, and compared it to anyone in this room, or anyone who uses critical thinking on a regular basis, I am convinced it would look very, very different.

Related Link: Meet the Love Child Rev. Sun Myung Moon Desperately Tried to Hide

As the illegitimate son of Reverend Moon, Sammy Park was not recruited into the Unification Church as Diane was; he was born into it. Thus, his story is quite a different and, in my opinion, a much more tragic one. I had the pleasure of meeting him and hearing him talk about his life at a conference about cult in Washington DC in 2014. That speech is now online here. At one point in his speech, he mentioned the Unification’s Church former HQ in Chongpa Dong, which is just a few minutes’ walk from our campus. The church mentioned at the end of the following quote is the Chongpa Dong church:

During this era, Moon preached that sex outside of marriage was the worst possible sin. But Choi and other insiders allege that Moon’s philandering continued long after his own marriage. Choi says she kept having sex with him regularly until 1964, when she moved to the United States to attend Georgetown University, in Washington, DC. Prior to her departure, Choi claims, she and Moon were married in a secret ceremony at his church.

Related Link 2: Diane’s book: Shoes of a Servant. I haven’t had the opportunity to read her book yet; however, I hope to do so in the upcoming winter vacation. (compound sentence)

Vocabulary & Expressions

And after about five long years my family had me deprogrammed. And I then became a deprogrammer.

Deprogram (verb) Deprogrammer (noun): To “deprogram” someone means to undo the effects of brainwashing or indoctrination – to free a convert from the influence of a religious cult, political indoctrination, etc., by intensive persuasion or re-education.

Synonyms: re-educate, dissuade

Antonyms: indoctrinate, radicalise

Personal Sentence: I took part in a deprogramming intervention in my hometown in 2013.

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The way a virus works is — it can infect and do the most damage to someone who has a compromised immune system.

Compromised (adjective): unable to function optimally, especially with regard to immune response, owing to underlying disease, harmful environmental exposure, or the side effects of a course of treatment. A compromised immune system is one that has been weakened due to an infection or disease.

Synonyms: weakened, reduced, incapacitated

Antonyms: strengthen, fortify

Personal Sentence: The D-Day invasion of 1944 compromised and then penetrated Nazi defences.