Ex-Moonie Diane Benscoter: How cults think - YouTube

My journey to coming here today started in 1974. That's me with the funny gloves. I was 17 and going on a peace walk. What I didn't know though, was most of those people, standing there with me, were Moonies. And within a week I had come to believe that the second coming of Christ had occurred, that it was Sun Myung Moon, and that I had been specially chosen and prepared by God to be his disciple.

Now as cool as that sounds, my family was not that thrilled with this. And they tried everything they could to get me out of there,,,

That is the opening to Diane Benscoter's Tedtalk concerning "How Cults Think," she continues,

And about 20 years went by. There was a burning question though that would not leave me. And that was, "How did this happen to me?" And in fact, what did happen to my brain? Because something did. And so I decided to write a book, a memoir, about this decade of my life.

I think we have all hit that "burning question" phase at some point in our lives. We have all wonder or been confronted by the WTF was I thinking. What I find interesting is that Benscoter is not the only individual who has equated extreme religious bullshitery to a brain virus (Dr Darrell Ray, The God Virus):

And so what is this? How does this work? And how I've come to view what happened to me is a viral memetic infection. For those of you who aren't familiar with memetics, a meme has been defined as an idea that replicates in the human brain and moves from brain to brain like a virus, much like a virus. The way a virus works is - it can infect and do the most damage to someone who has a compromised immune system.

What really caught my attention was Benscoter's use of the "Us vs Them" mentality A dichotomy I have noticed in regards to Nephilim Eschatology and the Ancient Alien Hypothesis: ,,,[a]nd the most dangerous part of this is that is creates "us" and "them," "right" and "wrong," "good" and "evil." And it makes anything possible. Makes anything rationalizable.

In a blog post Benscoter talks further in regards to memeplexes, groups of memes which have been used to understand the phenomenon of religion,

This concept gives us a means to view, from an evolutionary perspective, how and why we have tended to clump together into groups with highly polarized ideologies. We can start to understand the pull to view the world from a “Us” versus “Them” perspective. To fully understand how memeplexes work we must examine the psychological elements present in the most powerful and dangerous memeplexes currently in our existence – as well as in our history.

and cites the work of Robert Lifton and his concept of totalism and by proxy "thought reform."

What I find sobering is that I vaguely remember studying some of Lifton's ideas in college and recently watched his appearance in Cults - Dangerous Devotion, a 2009 History channel presentation.

I have to agree with Benscoter in her conclusion to her post and definitely something more to explore:

As a species, we can no longer afford to be swept up in polarizing memeplexes that convince us, falsely, that there are easy answers to life’s hard questions and that our memeplex’s view is THE ultimate truth. Life’s hard questions must be examined with reason and scientific process. This is not possible in a totalistic memeplex.

We must deconstruct totalistic memeplexes to shed light on the glue that binds them and the fuel that gives them power. Only then can we hope to avoid new memeplexes from being born and evolving into dangerous polarizing monsters.

See also: Q&A with Diane Benscoter: Joining, leaving and ultimately defeating the cult