Reflections | How powerful ancient Chinese cults threatened the regimes of the day, and even hastened the end of dynasties
- Some cults in ancient China became so powerful they grew into political and military forces, and launched armed rebellions against the state
- The most recent nation-shaker before the 20th century saw its founder, who claimed to be Jesus’ younger brother, lead 10,000 followers against the Qing dynasty
I recently watched a deeply unsettling docuseries, Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence (2023).
The series documented a group of students at New York’s Sarah Lawrence College, and the sisters of one of them, falling under the spell of a classmate’s father in the 2010s, and being psychologically and sexually abused by him for close to a decade.
Recorded video and audio footage of abuse showed Lawrence Ray manipulating his obviously intelligent victims – one of them was a medical doctor who had recently graduated from Harvard and Columbia – to the point that they lost all sense of reality, cut off all ties with their family and friends, and became totally and helplessly dependent on him.
A cult includes some or all of the following characteristics: authoritarian control, extremist beliefs, isolation from society, and the veneration of a person or persons.
Today, the definition of cults has broadened to include groups that are non-religious in nature, such as the one depicted in Stolen Youth, but in the past they typically referred to groups that professed some kind of non-mainstream religious beliefs.
