The Authoritarianism Series Part 2: How a Cult Took Hold on the Left

Empathy for Ye, Cruelty for Me

There are lots of cults in American history that are well known: The Branch Davidians, NXIVM, the Jonestown settlement, and the Manson family come to mind.

But the most influential cult in American history is not as familiar to most, despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that its practices would go on to be hugely influential in the development of the schools that make up the troubled teen industry and therefore impact the many American families who sent their children to those institutions and rely on their staff for guidance.

In 1958, college dropout and semireformed alcoholic Charles Dederich started the Synanon residential drug rehab program. Eventually Synanon would welcome non-addicts as well and in response to various controversies, declare itself a Church.

Dederich’s central innovation was something called The Game. The Game is a form of group attack therapy where the leader of a therapy group and the group members would verbally and emotionally abuse participants. The premise is that people engaged in bad behaviors needed to be assailed in order to take personal responsibility and make themselves better.

A full history of Synanon goes beyond the scope of this post but suffice it to say that — after later women were forced to shave their heads, men were forced to have vasectomies, couples were commanded to break up, beatings were implemented, and Dederich was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder against a lawyer who was investigating the program and who successfully represented a couple suing them — the organization fell into some disrepute in the mainstream media and, in 1991, shut down.

Dederich was many things but he was not a political conservative. He dismissed them as nutty radicals in an interview: “Well, unfortunately…Santa Monica [where Synanon’s main campus was located] is a conservative town. In fact, it's a town that's way over to the right. But it has a small lunatic fringe, of John Birchers and Minute Men and just professional ding-bats who have made a lot of noise.” He married a black woman and was committed to racial integration. He initially preached nonviolence (albeit after he poured root beer on a participant’s head, perhaps in a fit of rage stemming from what relatives later said was bipolar disorder, he decided beatings and violence were sometimes necessary to maintain order).

A charismatic leader, Dederich managed to charm liberally minded academic legends and leftist organizers. Synanon donated to the United Farm Workers and the Black Panther Party, both which would express appreciation for the cult. The legendary leftist leader Cesar Chavez in 1976, after losing a ballot measure, decided to take Dederich’s advice to purge the United Farm Workers of leaders in a McCarthyite manner and implement The Game, publicly humiliating and verbally abusing other members. Later studies found attack therapy to be ineffective or counterproductive pseudoscience that would cause PTSD among many, but the therapeutic establishment loved it: The famed psychologist Abraham Maslow himself fully endorsed Synanon and, despite having absolutely no credentials, Dederich was unanimously voted into the American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama.

What was the appeal of Dederich’s methods to the likes of Chavez and Maslow? These establishment leaders had found their work to be frustrated by what they perceived as the failures of people, be they labor movement participants or patients. These people were seen as too problematic to be helped by the old establishment’s ways of doing things, by emphasizing love and affection, or conventional scientific/labor actions. Only by forcing individuals to suffer — through screaming at them that their problems were their fault and they were failures who needed to shape up — could success be found. Maslow and Chavez felt love and human decency weren’t doing the work needed to accomplish their goals of making patients better or forming an effective labor organization; only a reactionary cult could do that.

Despite the problems with Synanon’s attack therapy, it has never been to my knowledge addressed in a resolution by the American Psychological Association (like gay conversion therapy has) and lives on today in residential treatment facilities often with credentialed liberals in administrative positions, particularly within the troubled teen industry. Synanon’s methods inspired the CEDU therapeutic boarding schools company and while CEDU shut down in 2005 after numerous lawsuits and regulations got them in hot water over various abuses, it inspired numerous spinoffs and its employees would go on to cofound other schools where they would take the methods and reimplement them (those schools often themselves would later shut down after class action lawsuits and staff would flee to start new institutions). The NIH has declared that “many interventions aimed at reducing violence have not been sufficiently evaluated or proven effective, and a few widely implemented programs have been shown to be ineffective and perhaps harmful; programs that seek to prevent violence through fear and tough treatment appear ineffective.” But no matter, as wealthy liberal parents’ attraction to these schools is similar to that of Maslow and Chavez to Synanon: Seeing their children as failures and disappointments who had been too coddled or spoiled, they figured only a reactionary “tough” approach to their kids could “fix” them. The child may have put his hands around somebody’s neck and they thought he was actually going to kill somebody. He may have made threats which he didn’t act on. He may have been so depressed he wasn’t waking up in the morning and instead spent his time watching TV late at night. And in response, they may have started with consulting professionals but becoming frustrated with what they saw as a lack of progress, begun with making the child walk 5 miles home, taking the lock off his door because he was masturbating, locking up the TV in a cabinet, or shooting him with a super soaker to wake him up in the morning. But ultimately, their methods proved futile and they decided it necessary to send him away to a place where CEDU people (and later, ex-military or military college students who joined these sorts of places) would toughen him up through attack therapy and military style exercises (e.g. hiking miles on end, confronting fear of heights through going up a climbing wall, running buckets of dirt across a soccer field). These wealthy liberal parents may feel societal issues still require a compassionate approach and that mean spiritedness is bad, but for them and their family? Well, they think, that’s different. Our situation requires a tougher approach.

Of course, it isn’t only progressives who may feel like their world is falling apart around them, the establishment isn’t providing sufficient answers, and therefore abuse is the necessary solution: Utah is the home to much of the modern industry and the head of the WWASP company, a now defunct troubled teen industry behemoth, was a major Republican donor and conservative stalwart. And the industry probably got its biggest boost when Nancy Reagan actively promoted Straight Inc., another such program, as her “favorite.” The staff tend to be quite conservative and live in rural conservative areas. Justice Clarence Thomas on Harlan Crow’s dime sent his grandnephew to one of these now shuttered institutions in the most conservative district in Georgia even after the settling of a class action lawsuit that exposed its practices.

In fact, the idea that mainstream approaches which may emphasize love won’t work and therefore abuse is the necessary corrective for people who aren’t doing what authority figures want them to forms the fundamental basis of modern political conservatism. I will explore this further in the next and final post in this series.