TED: Diane Benscoter on How Cults Rewire the Brain
The following video from TED, featuring Diane Benscoter’s retrospective on being a Moonie, is a very interesting anecdote on how the psychology of cults rewires the brain. It’s profound to hear her state that in that worldview, it “would be wrong, when your brain is working like that, not to try to save the world through genocide”. It’s amazing what extremes we will go to in order to maintain the delusion that we are special and one of the chosen ones; maybe acknowledging the fact that we, as a species, are nothing greater than insignificant, meaningless, specks of dust in the vast cosmos offers some protection from that line of delusional thinking.
Diane Benscoter spent five years as a “Moonie.” She shares an insider’s perspective on the mind of a cult member, and proposes a new way to think about today’s most troubling conflicts and extremist movements.
