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5.0 out of 5 stars
The clown opens his crystal circus to beguiling prospectors., Nov 14 2008
I enjoyed reading this, the original issue of ''Snapping'' by Flo Conway (who has a background in communication) and Jim Siegelman (whose orientation is in philosophy). In their book they explain how cults and mass therapy movements indoctrinate people. Such outfits often promote in their membership: a communal lifestyle, withdrawal from family and traditional schooling, detachment from all possessions and bank savings by giving both away, and demonstrating disorientation through bizarre behaviours and rituals based on delusions.
Major cults/mass therapies/brainwashed persons documented here include: Children of God, Divine Light Mission, Erhard Seminars Training, Hare Krishna, Patty Hearst, Jesus Freaks, The Manson Family, People's Temple, Scientology, Son of Sam, Transcendental Meditation, and the Unification Church.
Conway and Siegelman also show how being ''born again'' has its pitfalls. This phenomenon of Christendom's Evangelical wing features instant and deep conversion, profound ecstasy, miracle cures, ardent recruitment methods, as well as mass-marketing extravaganzas. Like in the cults, many of these followers are socially marginalized, devoting time and financial resources to forms of soliciting, and condemning those who don't share their vision which they describe by merely ''talking in circles.'' (This volume presages Conway and Siegelman's 1982 work, ''Holy Terror,'' which highlights fundamentalism's pernicious influence on modern society.)
The authors define ''snapping'' as: ''...a phenomenon that occurs when an individual stops thinking and feeling for himself, when he breaks the bonds of awareness and social relationship that tie his personality to the outside world and literally loses his mind to some form of external or automatic control.'' Further, Conway and Siegelman state that snapping caused an epidemic of sudden personality change--personality disorders current psychiatry failed to effectively treat because of the absence of an environmental or psychophysiological etiology. Also, with government funding cutbacks to mental health services in the 70s, psychiatrists retreated to the sanctity and safety of their medical abode--prescribing drugs, but never challenging these new, distorted, burgeoning human potential movements, with their pat answers to people's personal dilemmas.
As a model of how snapping conceptually occurs, the authors refer to the controversial ''Catastrophe theory'': the unprecedented jump connected with the very dynamics of the snapping moment, stemming from a loss of stability in one's life due to changing parameters beyond their control, causing a noted shifting in their behaviour. When snapping is transformed into what the authors term ''information disease''--the skewing of an individual's essential capability to digest information, their basic awareness tied to their personality is shaken. They say that there are three of these ''disease'' types: ''sustained altered state''--a reduction of one's focus or awareness, ''delusional phase''--a loss of emotion leading to erratic behaviour, and ''not thinking''--the shutting down of one's psyche leading to personality disintegration.
''Snapping,'' by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, is a book that bespeaks the significance of being masters of our transparent awareness and not being fools to be flummoxed and mentally invaded by cultists and mass pseudotherapies, where the clown opens his crystal circus to beguiling prospectors.
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