Cults : Inside the World's Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them (9781982133566) by Cutler Max; Conley Kevin (CON)

Author:Cutler, Max; Conley, Kevin (CON)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

THE BIRTH OF A SELF-TAUGHT DOCTOR

Thériault stood out at school and his teachers found him intelligent, creative, and diligent—a promising student at the top of his class. He taught himself English, which was useful and also allowed him to show off how much smarter he was than his French-speaking family. But his parents were working-class, and like all his siblings Thériault discontinued formal studies after the seventh grade, the last level offered at the local school. Rather than travel to nearby towns and continue his education, he remained at home, cutting lawns and picking up work to help support the family.

He continued to further himself by reading the Bible, one of the few books on hand, and, based on his adult ability to preach eloquently and at length, he appears to have read his scripture deeply. His family belonged to a Catholic faction, the Pilgrims of Saint Michael, which was popular in Quebec in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The group blended a socially conservative stance with a type of economic populism known as social credit, promoting redistribution of profits to working people. If it had ever been put into practice, it would have been akin to the universal basic income proposal that candidate Andrew Yang promoted in the 2020 Democratic primaries.

The Pilgrims of Saint Michael were also known as the White Berets, because they went door-to-door wearing such headgear, handing out promotional literature and trying to gain followers by selling people on the values of social credit. The highly visible hats made the followers stand out, especially when Monsieur Thériault took his son and the rest of his siblings with him to march around the neighborhood campaigning for les Bérets-blancs and seeking donations.

Thériault’s friends made fun of this public participation, a crushing blow to his precarious sense of self-esteem. Narcissists, despite their inflated sense of self, are obsessed with gaining the approval of others and can’t tolerate being teased. Thériault loathed being forced to make this commitment with his father and, as a result, grew to resent Catholicism in the bargain. He could not separate the faith of his parents from the sense that his friends and neighbors were laughing at the Thériault family as they paraded around town for the White Berets.

But as much as this situation tormented him, he still gained valuable experience finagling the approval of the strangers he faced in a notoriously difficult brand of salesmanship. Later in life, Thériault became remarkably adept at this cold-call style of persuasion, and it’s difficult not to wonder, for all his distaste for les Bérets-blancs, if he still profited from the trying experience.

After leaving school in 1961, Thériault performed odd jobs for pocket money and spent his time at dance halls. Now, instead of demonstrating his superiority by gaining top marks, he found that he was able to exercise another peculiar advantage. As Paul Kaihla and Ross Laver recount in Savage Messiah: The Shocking Story of Cult Leader Rock [sic] Thériault and the Women Who Loved Him,

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