Cult Stories

When Patrick Ryan entered the world of deprogramming it was still in its kidnapping and holding cult members against their will stage, which was popularized by Ted Patrick in the ‘70’s. Ryan now sees this as a process that was barbaric, but such were the tools of the time. After adopting a gentler form of exit counseling, Ryan’s work continued with a mix of helping people out of cults and collecting literature on the subject, which continues with his work curating Cult News 101. The man is serious about good information as a gateway to get people out of cults, and he sees intervention as something that doesn’t need to be scary. In fact, he believes scare tactics can cause more harm than good.

“We have to do this thorough assessment because we have to assess the situation to find out what’s real for that person, because you don’t want to talk about them doing these horrible things if that group’s not doing these harmful things or the group might be doing the horrible things but only to some people, so you don’t want to impose it.

There’s a thing when Nancy Reagan, President Reagan’s wife, started her anti-drug campaign called “just say no.” She started a program that began drug education in high schools and wherever they did drug education in high schools, drug usage went up.

And the reason is because they were talking in extremes. So, we all knew people who did acid. We all knew people who smoke pot. We knew people who had mushrooms. If you knew people did that and they didn’t jump off bridges, the person who says, “when you do this, you jump off a bridge,” well, they have no credibility.”

It’s the same thing with cults, Ryan proclaims. The right information, the appropriate information, will help people out more than thinking of every cult as a mini-Jonestown. And Ryan sees what he’s doing today as a means of getting people to see the universal in his message. It’s been a long process. Ryan first started collecting articles as the internet became a consumer technology, when he’d pay a dollar for each article and collect them online. Since then, he’s always spread cult news as it rolled out in newsletters or reached the AP.

“I started sending out news every day and then I started working for the International Cultic Studies Association in the mid-nineties. We sort of rolled it into that and we built a huge database of close to 80,000 articles. And then I stopped working for them maybe eight or nine years ago, and I had that database and I just kept it going.

And that’s how this thing came about. It always was amazing to me, families and people say, “I never hear anything about cults.” I’m like, what you mean? It’s in the newspaper all the time. It’s just a way of disseminating information constantly.”

I finished the interview by asking Patrick Ryan why it’s important to tell cult stories. I pointed out that I felt that these stories illustrate that coercive control has proven to be a feature of humanity, which he agreed with.

“It’s a bug, it’s a feature, and it’s the whole history of mankind. It’s nothing new. You know, the history of humanity is oppression of people, of a certain class with money and wealth or swords and spears oppressing other people, making them slaves either physically or mentally. It’s the history of mankind.”