Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults [Paperback]

Janja A. Lalich (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520240189 | ISBN-13: 978-0520240186 | Publication Date: September 15, 2004 | Edition: 1

Heaven's Gate, a secretive group of celibate "monks" awaiting pickup by a UFO, captured intense public attention in 1997 when its members committed collective suicide. As a way of understanding such perplexing events, many have seen those who join cults as needy, lost souls, unable to think for themselves. This book, a compelling look at the cult phenomenon written for a wide audience, dispels such simple formulations by explaining how normal, intelligent people can give up years of their lives--and sometimes their very lives--to groups and beliefs that appear bizarre and irrational. Looking closely at Heaven's Gate and at the Democratic Workers Party, a radical political group of the 1970s and 1980s, Janja Lalich gives us a rare insider's look at these two cults and advances a new theoretical framework that will reshape our understanding of those who join such groups.
Lalich's fascinating discussion includes her in-depth interviews with cult devotees as well as reflections gained from her own experience as a high-ranking member of the Democratic Workers Party. Incorporating classical sociological concepts such as "charisma" and "commitment" with more recent work on the social psychology of influence and control, she develops a new approach for understanding how charismatic cult leaders are able to dominate their devotees. She shows how members are led into a state of "bounded choice," in which they make seemingly irrational decisions within a context that makes perfect sense to them and is, in fact, consistent with their highest aspirations.
In addition to illuminating the cult phenomenon in the United States and around the world, this important book also addresses our pressing need to know more about the mentality of those true believers who take extreme or violent measures in the name of a cause.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"An impressive and even revolutionary look at cultic groups. Lalich challenges fundamental assumptions on all sides of the debate about cults. She spent years as a member of the Democratic Workers Party and provides her readers with a revealing insider's view. To this, the author adds a much-needed comparative focus with her treatment of the Heaven's Gate suicides. The result is a theoretical breakthrough in the study of high commitment groups. Lalich's theory of 'bounded choice' is likely to reshape scholarly thinking for years to come about the dynamics of cult involvement and how and why people may act against their own self-interest in pursuit of higher causes."--E. Burke Rochford, Jr., author of Hare Krishna in America

"Janja Lalich combines unusual empathy for true believers with broad and balanced scholarship and incisive interpretations of overall cultic behavior. Her work illuminates much that goes on not only in charismatic cults but in larger, destructive movements and extremist governments in our troubled world."--Robert Jay Lifton, author of Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World

"At a time when politicized religion is rocking the world in often violent ways, this arresting study of totalizing ideological movements offers a new perspective. It revives the terms 'cult' and 'brainwashing,' often discarded by social scientists, and gives them new meaning as descriptions of cultures of 'bounded choice.' This intriguing notion is applied to two quite different movements: the suicidal Heaven's Gate group and a radical American organization of young Marxists. This book is timely and certain to be widely discussed. But it cannot be easily dismissed-for its author is not only a sensitive social scientist but also a former member of one of the groups. Hence this book speaks with a voice of both thoughtful reason and gripping experience."--Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence

From the Back Cover

"An impressive and even revolutionary look at cultic groups. Lalich challenges fundamental assumptions on all sides of the debate about cults. She spent years as a member of the Democratic Workers Party and provides her readers with a revealing insider's view. To this, the author adds a much-needed comparative focus with her treatment of the Heaven's Gate suicides. The result is a theoretical break through in the study of high commitment groups. Lalich's theory of 'bounded choice' is likely to reshape scholarly thinking for years to come about the dynamics of cult involvement and how and why people may act against their own self-interest in pursuit of higher causes."-E. Burke Rochford, Jr., author of Hare Krishna in America --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 353 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (September 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520240189
• ISBN-13: 978-0520240186
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #543,279 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and important, February 20, 2006

By 

Joseph Davis (Calgary, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults (Paperback)

This is an excellent and important book. The concept of 'bounded choice' is a valuable one and can be applied to many situations outside of cults. The majority of the book is taken up with an examination of two contemporary cults -Heaven's Gate and the Democratic Worker's Party (DWP). The Heaven's Gate members, of course, gained great fame when the majority of the cult committed a mass, ritualistic suicide in 1997 in response to the appearance of the spectacular Hale-Bopp comet. The cult had been in existence since 1975 and had been quietly percolating underground for more than 20 years. I can remember when they were first mentioned in the papers in 1975 and had assumed that they had disbanded after the failure of the predicted spaceships to come and take them away. I had not heard of the DWP but was aware of the cult-like aspects of the Marxist-Leninist belief system. Lalich shows how both of these cults, though different in significant ways, operated within an effective and extremely confining framework consisting of charismatic authority, a transcendent belief system, systems of control and systems of influence. By the end of the book, it is much easier to understand how difficult a member would find it to question participation in such an extreme group and come to the reasonable decision that it would be much better to leave.

The author deserves a lot of credit for having the courage and academic rigor to write compellingly about a phenomenon that affected her personally in so powerful a way. As she clearly states, more needs to be done. This is an area important to the very future of mankind. The argument can be made that the most powerful nation in the history of the world (the United States of America) has re-elected its very worst president for a second term because the electorate was in a situation of bounded choice -bounded choice in the sense that the U.S. mass media were either toxic, pro-Bush-regime cheerleaders (Fox network, Limbaugh, etc.) or nervous, wishy-washy bystanders, who would perish before they would ask a question that might earn an attack from the right. How can a people make a reasoned, informed choice when the boundaries are so circumscribed? (This is much easier to see from up in Canada, because, although our media are far from perfect, they still function for the most part as gatherers and disseminators of information, as opposed to sellers and promoters of propaganda.)

The book does have flaws though. The writing in general is fine, but tends towards sociology-ese in theoretical sections. From the point of view of a story, it would have been interesting to explore what the leaders of the Heaven's Gate cult did on a daily basis. Did they watch soap operas? Did they meditate? Did they read detective novels like Marlene Dixon? They certainly were secretive and so maybe this information is not available. Did they have a sexual relationship? The cult discouraged such 'human' relations, but the leaders were hypocritical in other areas, so they could have been sexually active together. What efforts did family members make to rescue their loved ones from the cult? The book does not really explore this. In the DWP, the power of Marlene Dixon's second in command 'Eleanor' was a big part of Dixon maintaining control over the middle level of leaders. Yet when Dixon is overthrown, Eleanor is not even mentioned. Did she finally gain some insight and take part in the coup, or was she not included in the plotting, which occurred while Dixon was out of the country? Not addressing this is frustrating and puzzling to the reader. Also, what became of Dixon after she was kicked out of her own cult? The author leaves the reader hanging. While this may not be important from the point of view of analyzing the workings of the cult, it would have been very interesting to know what became of such a malignant bully.

A major disagreement I have with the book is its exclusive portrayal of cult power as coming from the four lynchpins of bounded choice -charismatic authority, a transcendent belief system, systems of control, and systems of influence. While these mechanisms may explain why some people find they cannot make a reasoned decision to leave a cult and thus become true believers, it doesn't explain the mystery of why they would be attracted to, and make the crucial decision to join and stay in, a cult in the first place. We are not talking about joining the neighbourhood tennis club here. We are talking about supposedly normal, rational people choosing to believe that, in one case, the two strangers talking to them are really from another planet and will be soon calling for spaceships to come and take them, and the rest of the worthy, to a new level of existence, and, in the other case, that the most successful and materialistic nation of all time is ripe for a proletarian revolution based on radical Marxism-Leninism and that this revolution will be led by, as described in this book, a slovenly, obese, alcoholic ex-professor with a poor history in academia. Something is missing here, and that is an analysis of the psychological make-up of those choosing to follow such questionable leaders and causes. I believe critical factors are an individual's ability to question authority, critical thinking skills and the ease with which one can suspend such skills, and fantasy proneness. Lalich would like us to view cult members as 'For the most part...giving and idealistic, hardworking and loyal, trustworthy and loving. They are people who yearn for a better world - here or in the hereafter. Is that so bad?' I can't help thinking that the author is looking to rationalize her own ten wasted years in a bizarre, nasty offshoot of world communism. She goes on to say 'People who try something new, something different, are pioneers.' The DWP pioneers? Hardly. Rabid Marxism-Leninism isn't new. We've been down that road before with the likes of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, mass-murderers all. Flaky UFO cults are also not new, as the author confirms with her mention of the cult studied by Festinger. No, this phenomenon is not new, but people who should know better are still at risk of being absorbed into strange cults. The author again says '..we should not forget or deny the courage, endurance and strength of will it takes to step into the unknown.' How about not forgetting gullibility, masochism, fear of admitting a huge mistake and fear of making the right decision (which would be to leave and start again)? Why are some people more susceptible than others? I suspect cult followers are flawed in specific areas, perhaps through upbringing or circumstance -perhaps through genetics, or some combination of both. Clearly more study is required. But to try to explain cult phenomena by giving all of the credit for their success to their admittedly powerful structures is to be naïve in the extreme. No, everybody is not as vulnerable to being taken in by a cult as the next person. The author is very reticent about revealing her own upbringing, which I found suggestive. Maybe events in her early history would help explain why an obviously intelligent person would get involved in, and stay in, such a negative, joyless little gulag like the DWP for so long. There is some indication that she may have been just lonely.

Some minor quibbles. The Manchurian Candidate may indeed be a Red-bating movie but it wasn't part of the 'Red-scare movies of the 1950s' because it came out in 1962. Also the author should know that schizophrenia has nothing to do with 'split personality' (page 19), whatever that is.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A for effort, July 23, 2006

By 

Daniel H. Bigelow (Cathlamet, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults (Paperback)

Janja Lalich combines academic rigor with her own deeply felt attempts to make sense of her personal experiences in the cultlike Democratic Worker's Party in the book Bounded Choice. The gist of it is that otherwise reasonable people find their options narrowing after they make a commitment to a cult, and soon those options can dwindle to simple obedience. Thus, "bounded choice." She explains the mechanisms behind bounded choice with reference to the DWP and the Heaven's Gate cult and she draws parallels between their command structures.

Lalich's sketches of the cults are interesting but cursory and marred by frequent use of conclusory language to gloss over details (for instance, she refers often to the Heaven's Gate cult's tendency to go on "bizarre diets" without ever describing them, and she accuses DWP head Marlene Dixon of writing increasingly incomprehensible communiques without quoting from them). But there is enough basic information for Lalich to get her thesis across, which is, after all, the point.

I am not sure she convinces me of her thesis, though. It seems awfully general to me in its broadest strokes. Sure, choices narrow once one commits -- that's true of everyone, all the time. And the basic mechanisms she cites -- charismatic leadership, transcendent ideology, and implicit and explicit social controls -- are equally general, especially in her interpretations. "Charisma" has to be defined very broadly to encompass both the magnetic leaders of the Heaven's Gate cult and the drunken and abrasive leader of the DWP, and, eqally, "transcendent ideology" can mean anything if both Heaven's Gate's apocalyptic supernatural beliefs and the DWP's attempt to form a political cadre to hasten Marx's communist revolution count. It's true that anything you put your heart and soul into can be considered transcendent, but that defines the term so generally it's no longer useful, if you ask me. The "social controls" mechanisms are equally general.

Lalich tries to make a virtue of this generality by pointing out that her theory is broad enough to encompass political terrorism and erroneous foreign policy, or, for that matter, anything bad that people do. I even noticed that personal charisma, a demand for total commitment, and social control mechanisms would explain the dynamics of a violent domestic relationship as well as they explain cultic behavior. But Lalich seems unaware that her framework and terminology could also be stretched to fit not just bad, but also good, social situations -- for instance, British steadfastness in World War II.

So what I think happened is that in her attempt to include all cults within her framework, Lalich created one so broad that she accidentally described general human behavior instead of separating out cult behavior. It's an interesting framework and there is a certain value to it, and it is clearly the product of deep thought and study; I'm just not sure it does what Lalich wants it to do.