THE NEW PSYCHO-SPHERE

Light Mission, the Hare Krishna, and the Way, each of which hastemples or branches in most major cities. One of them alone, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, claims 60,000 to 80,000 members, publishes a daily newspaper in New York, owns a fish-packing plant in Virginia, and has many other money-creating enterprises. Its mechanically cheerful fund raisers are a common sight.

Nor are such groups confined to the United States. A recent sensational lawsuit in Switzerland called international attention to the Divine Light Center in Winterthur. “The cults and sects and communities . . . are most numerous in the United States because America is, in this matter, too, 20 years ahead of the rest of the world,” says the London Economist. “But they are to be found in Europe, west and east, and in many other places.” Just why is it that such groups can command almost total dedication and obedience from their members? Their secret is simple. They understand the need for community, structure, and meaning. For these are what all cults peddle.

For lonely people, cults offer, in the beginning, indiscriminate friendship. Says an official of the Unification Church: “If someone’s lonely, we talk to them. There are a lot of lonely people walking around.” The newcomer is surrounded by people offering friendship and beaming approval. Many of the cults require communal living. So powerfully rewarding is (his sudden warmth and attention that cult members are often willing to give up contact with their families andformer friends, to donate their life’s earnings to the cult, to forego drugs and even sex in return.

But the cult sells more than community. It also offers much-needed structure. Cults impose tight constraints on behavior. They demand and create enormous discipline, some apparently going so far as to impose that discipline through heatings, forced labor, and their own forms of ostracism or Imprisonment. Psychiatrist H. A. S. Sukhdeo of the New Jer-Nt-y School of Medicine, after interviewing survivors of the Jonestown mass suicide and reading the writings of members <»f Hie Peoples Temple, concludes: “Our society is so free and I« u nissive, and people have so many options to choose from they cannot make their own decisions effectively. They others to make the decision and they will follow.” A man named Sherwin Harris, whose daughter and ex-wife among the men and women who followed Jim Jones to «i. .nil in Guyana, has summed it up in a sentence. “This is an

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