Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein

Author:Alexandra Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-03T04:00:00+00:00

Relationship zero

Every totalist leader has to start somewhere. And unless they do inherit an organization – like David Miscavige, or James Taylor Jr. and Bruce Hales of the Exclusive Brethren – they need a first relationship. I call this “relationship zero.” Some – such as the two-person Washington DC sniper cult led by John Allen Muhammed – never get beyond relationship zero, while others end up in control of entire totalitarian states. But this first two-person, or dyadic, relationship is the beginning of creating the social network – a series of connections of one person to another – that makes up the organization.

Fred Newman’s relationship zero was Hazel Daren. According to an early “official” history of Fred Newman’s totalist group, Newman, then 33, met Hazel Daren in 1968, when she was 18 and a student of his at the City College of New York. They met at an encounter group that Newman ran under the aegis of the Philosophy department. Newman recounts how Hazel Daren later begged him to return from a hiatus in California, in,

a beautiful letter, made all the more profound and touching by Hazel’s child-like handwriting. Most fundamental, however, was her child-like sincerity and reasoning. ‘Don’t leave the struggle’ was the essence of her message. ‘You were made for activism and our people, working people, need you’ was the implication.31

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