Transcriber: Jessica Kloss Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
We love cults, don't we?
The word "cult," it just rolls off the tongue,
it just sounds evil,
though it wasn't always that way.
In the first century, Christianity was called a cult
and then went on to become one of the world's main religions.
But still, the sinister sound of the word just kind of sealed its fate.
Yes, cults are endlessly fascinating
and always something that someone else is in.
I don't think anyone leaves the house in the morning and says,
"Goodbye, honey. I'm off to join a cult today."
So how is it then that cults seem to be everywhere?
Someone is in them.
The fact of the matter is, I can tell you firsthand
that no one who is in a cult ever thinks they're in a cult.
And while some belief systems are more extreme than others,
it is a continuum.
We are all subject to indoctrination of some form,
whether we realize it or not.
We are all born into a family that teaches us certain values and ideals,
and as we grow, we're embedded with ideas about right and wrong
or about how life should look or how the world should be.
Also, human beings, we are wired to go along with the group.
We're tribalistic,
and this is something that makes us tend to other people who are different.
We like to be around people who are similar to us.
We tend to cancel people whose opinions we don't like.
This is most obvious in the religious realm,
but it's also the case in the political realm,
on the internet, in social groups,
really anywhere where people align around a common belief.
Now, some might say that I was in a cult.
I was raised a Jehovah's Witness.
But if you had asked me back then whether I was brainwashed,
when I believed that all of you were going to die at Armageddon
any day now
and I would be saved by God,
I would have said, "No way!"
Or if you had thought that it was crazy
that I would have refused a blood transfusion
rather than save my life if it came to that,
I would have said that you just don't understand.
Now, I didn't think that I was in a cult.
I just thought that I had the true religion.
In fact, I was so sure that I had the truth
that I moved to mainland China to be a missionary.
I wanted to teach other people this truth.
I spent years learning Mandarin
so that I could bring this message to China,
where they hadn't heard the truth before.
My intentions were good,
I thought.
I mean, I wanted to save them from dying at Armageddon like all of you.
(Laughter)
Ironically,
it was in China that I ended up finding a bit of freedom for the first time.
And I realize that this probably should have been the first sign
that something was up,
because most people, when they get to China,
do not feel more free.
(Laughter)
But it was different for me because back home in my community,
my life revolved around my religion.
It was a very insular community,
and we all believed the same things.
We were busy with our preaching work and our meetings.
In China, all of this was different
because my religion was illegal in China,
and that meant it couldn't operate in the same way.
So what this effectively meant was that for the first time in my life,
I had some physical space from my community,
but the byproduct was I also had some mental space
from this constant indoctrination
and the teachings that told me what I believed.
Also, I was speaking Mandarin,
this language,
which if anyone here has ever learned Mandarin, I'm not sure,
but for an English speaker,
it almost is like you have to excavate your mind in order to speak it.
As I sat there across from my Chinese Bible students,
teaching them these things that I had held as lifelong truths,
it started to sound like I was -
it was as if I was hearing them for the first time in this new language.
And to be honest, some of them sounded kind of crazy.
Venturing outside my community
caused me to see things in different ways, in a new light.
Things I had believed my whole life were true
suddenly didn't add up.
Truths that I had held dear slowly started to even feel wrong.
I had a crisis of faith, and my life turned upside down.
It wasn't easy to leave the Jehovah's Witnesses.
We were taught that leaving is a worse sin
than even murder or child abuse.
It was the one sin God would not forgive.
Also, it wasn't easy to change my life.
I had only ever been a Jehovah's Witness.
I hadn't done anything else.
My husband was a Jehovah's Witness elder.
I had only ever preached.
I didn't go to college.
I didn't have any kind of career to fall back on.
You don't do these things when you think the world is ending.
And if that wasn't bad enough,
when my friends in my religion got wind of the fact
that I was having these doubts,
I was immediately shunned from the community.
I was considered dangerous for having these beliefs.
Now, what this effectively means for a person who has been trained
to build their life around a community
is that suddenly everything is gone,
even family members that just disappeared.
Friends I had had my whole life vanished.
Now, you might wonder
what kind of person would cut off their best friend,
overnight,
over a difference of belief,
or their own daughter, or their sister or granddaughter.
If you're wondering what kind of person, I can tell you.
Someone like me.
Someone, maybe, like you.
Most of us never get the chance I had
to fully grasp how much it is
the way that we're raised and the community that we live in
affects the way we see everything.
And that's because our own culture,
or to say it another way, cult
reaches to the ends of our day-to-day experience.
My story is the rare tale of someone
who had to question the very foundation of their life
and therefore question everything.
But it's also the bigger, more universal story
of how human beings develop belief within a community,
and how sometimes those beliefs that we take for granted as truths
can blind us to bigger, larger truths.
In the 1960s,
a physicist named Thomas Kuhn was studying the history of science,
and he was looking at the trajectory
of our understanding of the physical world.
He noticed something strange,
and that was that Newton's theories of mechanics
did not seem to match with Aristotle's that had come before.
In fact, by comparison, Aristotle's seemed wrong,
though they had been a breakthrough at the time.
They weren't wrong in and of themselves,
but what Kuhn came to see
was that Newton had opened up an entirely new way of seeing the world.
New patterns emerged that had not been previously available to us.
We couldn't see them.
Up until this time, most people had thought of science
as a continuous march towards finding ultimate truth,
that everything that we discovered built on what came before.
What Kuhn saw was that in fact, this wasn't always the case,
that quite often, the path to finding deeper scientific truth wasn't so orderly.
In fact, it required changing how we saw what we thought we knew,
and that could sometimes be a very messy process,
so messy that scientific communities
sometimes looked like my old religious community
when it came to evolving their thinking.
But this is science.
Surely the most rational among us are not prone to this, right?
And surely she's not equating religion and science, is she?
No, I'm not, but we are all prone to this.
Kuhn observed that two scientists could see the same event occur,
and because they were proponents of radically different theories,
conclude entirely different things.
They tended to discover what they expected to discover.
It was the same for me in my religion.
I saw evidence it was true everywhere I looked.
This is because our interpretation of the world determines what we see.
But that wasn't the only thing.
There's another parallel.
Kuhn saw something in science that I saw in my religion too,
and that was that an accepted theory could answer all of the questions asked of it,
it could add up,
it could seem to have integrity,
and still be fundamentally flawed, wrong,
and therefore the answers it gave were wrong too.
My old religion answered all of my disturbing questions of like.
Really, any question you have that disturbs you,
I think this religion could answer.
Why are we here? Why do we die? What is the purpose of life?
Everything.
But as I had come to learn, the premise was flawed,
and therefore so were those answers.
They were meaningless.
The first time that I came across Kuhn
and read about these steps that took place on the road to scientific discovery,
I was stunned
because point by point, step by step,
they mirrored what had happened in my community, and with me,
when I had changed my thinking,
when I had had this personal revolution of sorts.
You see, this is not just the story of scientists or religious people.
This is the story of human beings.
We are wired to go along with the group.
When we believe something,
it is really difficult for us to see what things we're not seeing.
In the 17th century, Galileo was tried and died under house arrest
for supporting the theory that the earth revolved around the sun.
A little while later, in the 1800s, a Hungarian doctor raised the idea
that if physicians washed their hands in the hospital between seeing patients,
fewer people would die.
He ended up disgraced and in a mental institution.
These people were right.
Nearly everyone around them was wrong.
What understandings do we hold now that could be wrong?
Before a scientific breakthrough occurs,
there's always a crisis in the field.
Experiments give results that don't add up with existing theories,
or internal contradictions are found in those theories.
There's upheaval in the community.
There's pushback.
Proponents of new theories are often ridiculed and ostracized.
My exit from my religion, and the aftermath, was not easy.
It was really hard to be the one to speak up.
It was embarrassing to realize that I had been wrong my whole life.
Questioning truths is not easy for any of us,
and it is also not easy for those around us
who share those same beliefs.
I remember one time, after I left my religion,
I went to a cafe and I ran into my now ex-husband, the elder.
He didn't talk to me because he's not allowed to -
I'm an apostate.
But he did text me.
(Laughter)
And what he said was,
"Your eyes looked like the eyes of a dead person."
(Audience) Oh ...
It wasn't easy to be seen this way
by the people I had loved or I had shared my life with,
but it didn't bother me as much as you might think.
And not only because he was my ex-husband,
(Laughter)
but also because I no longer saw the world as I once had.
Kuhn said that whenever a scientific breakthrough occurred,
and an old way of seeing was replaced by a new way of seeing,
the world itself seemed to change.
We learned that the planets did revolve around the sun.
The world changed.
When I held the beliefs of my old religion,
I saw the terrible world that I had been taught to see.
It was full of terrible people
who would hurt you and didn't care, worldly people.
I saw earthquakes and food shortages,
all signs of the apocalypse.
I saw a God who cared only about a few of us
and was going to kill all the rest.
When my thinking changed, the world changed.
This world I encountered now
was full of really good and kind and loving people.
I saw disasters, yes, earthquakes,
but I also saw people who were going to help others
during these disasters, risking their own lives.
I saw a world that had problems,
but had people using their lives to try to solve these problems.
This new world that I discovered had pain and suffering,
but it was also so full of love and goodness and beauty.
So,
can we trust all of our beliefs about the world?
Our truths feel comfortable.
Could that be making some of them feel more true than they actually are?
If each of us stepped outside of our community,
our peer group,
our age group,
our political party,
our country,
what new beliefs might we hold?
What ways of seeing could we change
that could in turn change the world?
Thank you.
(Applause)