Autistic People Who Join Cults

I was recently listening to a podcast about the Heaven's Gate cult and its members' mass suicide. For anybody living under a rock or who wasn't yet born in 1997 when this was all over the news, Heaven's Gate was an offshoot of Christianity that taught its followers that the cult's leader, Marshall Applewhite, was the second coming of Jesus. They believed that in order to get to "the next level" (heaven, if you will), spaceships would come to Earth and pick up the followers for a trip to celestial paradise. But then when the comet Hale-Bopp was discovered, Marshall Applewhite came to the conclusion that the spaceship that was to escort his followers to paradise was trailing the comet. It would not land, and the only way to board the ship was to "leave one's vehicle"-- one's body. That is, commit suicide, so that one's soul will be sent to the ship.

On March 26, 1997, one of the surviving members anonymously called the police to report the mass suicide (he came forward later about his identity). The next morning, the story was all over the news. The Heaven's Gate website had so much traffic that morning that people often had to keep hitting "refresh" several times before the page would load.

I was sixteen years old when this story was in the news, and I was simply floored by it. How could anybody believe that committing suicide would send their souls to a spaceship trailing a comet? I remember that my dad commented that it's too easy to lead people down a path, that it's how Hitler was successful in getting people to buy into the Nazi ideology. Now that I'm older and have read a bit about evolutionary psychology, I have a better understanding why. There is no limit to what people will believe if a charismatic leader knows which buttons to push. Scientists, such as Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, have hypothesized that this tendency to believe what your parents, tribal elders, or some other authority figure tell you helped our ancestors survive in the African Savannah, a setting that was rife with predators, disease, and rival tribes who would fight with you over resources. People who were skeptical of things like, "Don't swim there. You could be eaten by a crocodile" were less likely to survive and reproduce. And these people's brains didn't differentiate between the aforementioned sound advice and something absurd, such as, "If you don't sacrifice an animal for the gods, there will be a terrible famine."

Evolution, of course, did not account for the fact that by 1997, a huge portion of the world would be living in houses, have plenty of food at their fingertips, and not be in situations where there would be predatory animals that could eat them. In 1997 (and in 2019, of course) the human mind still carried baggage of its evolutionary history. This inexorable drive to believe the absurd claims of a charismatic alpha male and to cave into peer pressure was alive and well. It is one of those things that makes us unique as a social species.

That's why it shocked me when I recently found out that one of the members of Heaven's Gate was autistic (and to clarify, he had left the group itself before the mass suicide, but still maintained the beliefs. When he learned about the suicide, he killed himself so he could join his friends on the ship). Autistic people are less likely to follow leaders, to cave into peer pressure, to do the social dances that most of us take for granted. In fact, many of them will just see these dances as utterly absurd and ridiculous. What, then, would drive an autistic person to join Heaven's Gate?, I wondered. But after thinking about it for about five minutes, I realized that in a way it did make sense that some autistic people might join a cult. They're the exception, not the rule, of course, and they probably join for different reasons than their neurotypical peers. And when I generated my hypothesis as to why, it just saddened me.

I can't speak for the guy who joined Heaven's Gate, and in case his family is reading this, I don't want to upset them by speculating about the guy's environment (and I don't want to name him either, even though it is of course easy enough to Google). But in general I can see what might lead someone on the spectrum down this destructive path. I can see it from examples in my own life.

Think about it: You go through your entire life hearing the same damned mantra from well-meaning but tragically misguided family, teachers, and peers, "You don't know how to interact with people." "You don't get it." "You're inappropriate." "You make people uncomfortable." And so forth. You try hard to figure out the social rules, but they are not written in stone and are subject to change upon context. You deal with unbelievable anxiety. You are unintentionally gaslit by the same people, who tell you that you misinterpret friendly teasing as bullying (even though you know damn well that it's bullying), that someone who said something bitingly personal and nasty was "just frustrated and wasn't trying to be mean" (but you knew damn well that he was), and who even dismiss egregious behavior by friends as normal. Your life consists of internalized psychological warfare, and eventually don't trust your own perception in regard to the most mundane, everyday things. It's when I consider this that I realize that yes, of course, a cult might seem like it makes sense to someone in that position.

In cults-- or even some sects of mainstream religion, for that matter-- the rules of social interaction are highly regulated: Don't use certain words; eat this, not that; eat this meal at this time and say these words before the meal; don't interact in a particular way with the opposite sex until you're married; have children by this age; and so on. Or in the case of Heaven's Gate, sex is evil, so sterilization is recommended. Again, I don't want to speculate about the autistic member of Heaven's Gate in particular. But many of us on the spectrum are asexual on top of all the other crap that makes our lives difficult. Imagine, too, being told that your lack of (or relative lack of) interest in dating, sex, or both is wrong, unhealthy, a mental illness, etc. Even if people don't tell you these things, you might feel left out if everyone you know is running off to get married and have kids. Join this group, and you won't feel left out when you're the only person who isn't passionately screwing somebody. Not only will you not only not be expected to get laid, you'll be expected not to get laid.

The more I thought about the aforementioned as possible factors that would make an autistic person join a cult, the more sense it made. Although a vulnerable autistic person is in a much better situation if they're coming of age in 2019, in 1997 the Heaven's Gate member was living in what I call the Final Decade of the Dark Ages for autistic people, an era in which to most people "autistic" meant you didn't talk, and "Asperger's" was a virtually non-existent word. Not to mention, it was also an era in which an autistic person's eccentricities and difficulties were dismissed as "behavioral problems". I am sure that a lot of people are tempted to say, "Oh, you know what? Autistic people are just more gullible." Yeah, okay. Some of them are, about things like a kid trying to screw with you by sarcastically saying, "You're soooo cool!" (stuff like that never got past me, however; my radar was always finely-tuned to such things). But in terms of believing cult leaders? No. A lot of neurotypical people join cults, and let's not forget that many neurotypical people believe in some of the more absurd claims of mainstream religion, such as that a 600-year-old man built an ark that could fit two of every animal species on the planet. So no, please don't try the "autistic people are more gullible" crap to explain away why they might join a cult.

Thinking about these things made me angry, angry enough to put my fist through a wall. It's only been in the past decade really that mainstream society is starting to see the hurt they've inadvertently caused autistic people even when they meant to help them. It's only now that they're seeing the anxiety they cause when they try to make autistic people adapt to the neurotypical world, but never vice-versa. The story about the autistic Heaven's Gate member is really heartbreaking, but in hindsight it's not surprising.

What I Knew Part II: A Lot More Than You Think!

My previous blog post talked about the perception of people with Asperger's as gullible and how, if anything, I was more vigilant than most people need to be. The thing is, I knew and understood a lot more than many people (including my own parents, of course) gave me credit for, and I don't just mean in the realm of knowing when I was being manipulated.

Looking back, it seems that adults thought of me as so detached from reality, almost as if they saw me as a goldfish swimming aimlessly through a bowl and repeatedly hitting my head on the side. It seemed that they thought that I didn't know that I was hitting my head, let alone know that most goldfish don't do this. But I knew. I knew and understood much more than they realized. And despite what they thought, I was very aware that I was different.

By the time I was eleven, I had some vague idea that I was being looked at, that something was going on behind my back, that adults were talking about me. I was well aware that my parents thought there was something psychologically wrong with me. So around that time when I started seeing a psychologist, Dr. Klein (not his real name), I knew I had a lot to be suspicious of. My mother usually talked with Dr. Klein alone for five minutes before my session started. But one day she was in there for almost the entire hour that was supposed to be mine. After I realized that a long time had passed, I knew that something was going on, that they were talking about me. I did what any suspicious eleven-year-old would do: I sat outside the door and eavesdropped. 

I remember Mom saying in exasperation, "She doesn't tell me what she wants." I knew exactly what she was referring to. One day (maybe the same day; I don't remember) before school I was looking for my bra. I had just started "developing", so needing a bra was a new and embarrassing thing for me. Like any adolescent girl, I didn't want my father to hear me talking about it. I found my mother and whispered, "I need my bra." She couldn't hear me. "What?" she had asked in a very loud voice. "My bra," I whispered again.  She still didn't hear me. She kept talking more and more loudly. Not wanting Dad to overhear, in a normal voice I said something like, "My... you know." Mom didn't figure it out. So there she was that afternoon, telling Dr. Klein that for some reason something was preventing me from communicating a simple request. The fact that it hadn't occurred to Mom or Dr. Klein that I would eavesdrop and the fact that Mom couldn't figure out that I had been trying to tell her without Dad overhearing that I was looking for my bra speaks volumes: It shows just how little adults thought I knew and understood. 

Around the same time, I had started drawing violent Addams Family cartoons. I knew not to draw violent pictures in school. But Mom forbade me from drawing them at all because for some reason she was inordinately convinced that I was indeed drawing them in school. Of course I knew at age eleven that there were certain activities appropriate for different contexts! I may have had trouble with some of these, but not all of them as my parents thought.

When I was turning eighteen, I was friends with a girl, Jenna (not her real name), who was fooling around with Wicca. When Mom found out, she yelled at me to stay away from her. Recently I got back in touch with Jenna (as detailed in "Why Do You Keep Dredging These Things Up"?) and I mentioned the Wicca incident to my parents. Neither of my parents remember the incident or even who Jenna was. Mom said that she was likely scared that I would join a cult (I do remember this being the case; Dad and I had had a conversation shortly after the incident). I recall feeling insulted that Mom would think I would be stupid enough to do something like that. When I brought up the incident a few weeks ago, Mom mentioned that I was a "kid with problems" and that was why she had reacted the way she did. I was a month shy of my eighteenth birthday at the time. Of course I knew that cults were dangerous! The Heaven's Gate suicide had happened a little over a year before, and I remember thinking that it was horrible and that it was amazing how easily people could be indoctrinated. And my parents knew that I had had these thoughts because we'd talked about it at the time (the absurdity of thinking that trying out Wicca is a direct pathway to a cult is another tangent I won't get into here). 

I often missed social cues, but I was also better at reading between the lines than many people gave me credit for. In the summer of 1998, when I was seventeen and in the C. I. T. program at Camp Negev, my counselors told me on the first day that they were not letting me work with kids. When I asked why, they said that they wanted me to do "a special job". Suspicious that there was something else going on, I forced it out of them. "It" was that they were not comfortable letting me work with kids. Did they really think I wasn't going to know that there was something they weren't telling me? Did they really not think I would force it out of them? Throughout the day, I was quite upset and went to one of the head staff about it. When I asked her why I was being kept from the kids, she told me that people "had concerns". But I had had enough experience to know that someone telling me that they "had concerns" was a euphemism for something more serious. I had enough experience to know that it could mean, "You're weird", "We see you as a problem," "We don't want you here", or all of the above and more. Long before that, I knew when people were keeping something from me, or not telling me the entire story. "Forcing it out of them" is something I have long since had down to an art. Why wouldn't I, if experience taught me that a lot went on about me behind closed doors?