Making Sense with Sam Harris - #7 — Through the Eyes of a Cult

Episode Date: March 25, 2015

Sam Harris discusses the Heaven's Gate suicide cult and argues that we all have something important to learn from them about the power of belief. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm going to talk about cults, mostly. I've been in a cultish frame of mind in the last week, getting over bronchitis, so my apologies for my voice being even raspier than it usually is.

But I've been paying attention to cults for some reason, and I've focused on two cults that have been around for a while, Heaven's Gate and Scientology. I recently saw the film Going Clear, based on Lawrence Wright's book by that name, and the book is well worth reading. The film is really a devastating takedown of Scientology. I can't imagine it won't do the organization lasting harm if enough people see it. It just exposes how goofy L. Ron Hubbard was and how sinister his organization soon became under him and his successors. So I do see that film. It's playing on HBO and had some theatrical release as well. But I've mostly been thinking about the Heaven's Gate cult, which, as you might recall, about 18 years ago, came to the world's attention because 39 members, including the chief member, a man named Marshall Applewhite,

who was known as Doe to his devotees, all took their lives in a mansion near San Diego. all took their lives in a mansion near San Diego. They all donned identical pairs of Nikes and drank a cocktail of phenobarbital and vodka, I believe, and then got in their bunk beds and covered themselves with purple shrouds and departed, they imagined, for a spaceship that was following in the tail of the comet Hale-Bopp. So this was a

rather horrifying and peculiar news item. I think it remains the largest mass suicide in U.S. history, although I recall my reaction to it at the time was a little bit less than reverential. I remember sitting on my couch watching this first footage that came out of this house of everyone in their bunk beds with their Nikes and hearing the voiceover announcer say, and in their freezer they had nothing but quart after quart of Starbucks java chip ice cream. And I remember sitting on my couch alone and saying out loud to myself, wait a minute, Starbucks makes ice cream? And then I leapt to my feet and drove straight to the supermarket and bought some Starbucks java chip ice cream. So I guess we all draw from certain tragedies the lessons we need at the time

obviously I've become more sympathetic with the plight of these people in the intervening years and more interested in the phenomenon of cults and have drawn other lessons from this one in any case the most fascinating thing about Heaven's Gate is that the members of this class, as they called it, left final video testimonies as to why they were doing what they were doing and how satisfied they were to be doing it. And this is, of course, analogous to the video

testimonies one often gets from jihadist suicide bombers. But these were people who were really aware of how inscrutable their behavior was going to seem to their loved ones and to the rest of the society in which they were living and they really made their best effort to defend their actions if not explain them and to to simply bear witness or demand that the world bear witness to the psychological fact that they were absolutely unconflicted in doing what they were doing. They just felt immense gratitude for the experience of living for decades with their other cult members with whom they had formed an obvious bond, and for the guidance of Doe and T, the woman who had been his partner, who had died a decade earlier. And these were people who, for the most part, were clearly happy and approaching their deaths with genuine enthusiasm.

They were gleeful about the prospect of departing this world and arriving elsewhere in the galaxy. So these videos are really an amazing document, and I was tempted to put some audio in this podcast, but there really is no substitute for seeing the videos themselves, so I will embed those on my blog. And there's about two hours of video. There's additional hours of Doe himself giving his final testimony and that's also fascinating to watch. But the videos of the cult members

are really profoundly strange and unnerving when you see just how sanguine they are about their whole project, which is, you know, on its face, really the most profligate misuse of human life imaginable. These are people who lived in total isolation for decades under the sway of obviously crazy ideas, depriving themselves of most of life's experience. And these are people who had abandoned children, they had abandoned the rest of their families, and abandoned every other human project that we might deem worthy of a person's attention and energy, and then killed themselves in the most carefree state of mind. And it was entirely the result of what they believed about the nature of the soul,

about the nature of the kingdom of heaven, about the hideous condition of the world, and about the coming apocalypse that Doe assured them was imminent and that this represented their last chance to migrate to the kingdom of heaven. They didn't seize it now, everything would be lost. So these videos really are quite unique, and above all, they offer an insight into just what it's like to be totally convinced of paradise.

The most shocking thing about this, well, there are a few things. The most shocking thing about this, well, there are a few things. One is the undeniable fact that most of these people were clearly happy in some basic sense. You struggle to detect in their faces and in their deliveries some clue to their deeper psychopathology. And in many cases, I think you will come up entirely empty. Now, these people bear all the signs of having spent, as most of them had, 20-plus years living in total isolation from the world. Most of these people had been part of this cult since the mid-'70s, and this was in 1997 that they killed themselves. They all wore identical terrible haircuts and all had androgynous clothing that they buttoned up to the neck.

in common, including underwear. So they had a dogma of non-attachment that was operating here that led to a kind of self-effacement at the level of their presentation. They all wore equally terrible eyeglasses, those who needed them, like they all wandered into a lens crafters and just asked for the worst pair of glasses that could possibly be pulled out of the box. So there's something about these people. They are misfits of a sort, and it's tempting to imagine that they were socially marginalized to a degree that somehow explains how they were recruited into this circumstance

and therefore how they met their end. But that's not to say that these aren't happy, intelligent, relatively high-functioning people who could have succeeded in other contexts in life. And I think that's, to some degree, obviously true of some of them. One thing is clear that many of these people were parents who entirely abandoned their children to join Doe and Tee and submit their lives to this experiment, which, when you look at the details, is rather shocking to consider.

It's shocking especially because when you listen to the teachings of Doe, you can also watch hours of video where he describes all that he knows about the workings of the universe. Some of this video, at least an hour of it, is his final testament given with the full knowledge that they're going to commit suicide in the coming days. And in watching Doe's performance here, I think you'll also look in vain for an obvious reason why people would give their lives over to this man. A few things are conspicuous. One is the total absence of compelling intellectual content. This is not a brilliant person. He's not bowling you over with his ability to connect ideas or to turn phrases. The only clue to his powers of mesmerism is his quality of eye contact, which, as I discuss at one point in my book,

Waking Up, is a feature you find in gurus in general and in people who are making heroic efforts to persuade. And in Doe, this is conspicuous, the man rarely blinks. He's looking at a camera lens for this video, but one can well imagine that this is the style of eye contact he used when talking to people directly. Maybe I'll offer a brief digression on this topic. There's actually a section in my book, Waking Up, where I talk about eye contact, and I'll just read it to you. A person's eyes convey a powerful illusion of inner life. The illusion is true, but it is an illusion all the same. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.

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