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How do cult leaders get their initial recruits - without already having any infrastructure of social proof?
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This one baffles me. I was reading "Combating Cult Mind Control", by Steven Hassan, and I found myself thinking, how the heck did Moon actually start the Unification Church? How do any of these things get started? The claim of being a messiah is so obviously laughable that I can't understand how he (or any other cult leader) managed to get followers before being able to use the "all my friends believe it so I guess I'm the crazy one" tactic that these people seem to rely on. And everything I read about the topic of cults only concerns what they do once they have some people to start with - not how those people originally join.

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3 years ago