These are vital questions. They dig into the heart of an important subject.
The full answer is a vast body of information that you could get a master's degree or PhD and not fully attain.
It is comparable to a question for a physicist like what are the forces of nature and how do they interact? If they are honest and well educated they should admit to not understanding how to reconcile issues regarding gravity and quantum mechanics and the problems with incredibly large scale physics and incredibly small scale physics and so on. There are simply too many unknown things.
Similarly, with cults I think that the people who have researched it the best, in my opinion, include people like Robert Jay Lifton and Margaret Singer, you can add Jon Atack as well.
We have many other superb experts in the field including Steven Hassan, Rick Alan Ross, Janja Lalich, Alexandra Stein, Daniel Shaw and others.
A common belief among many experts is that a cult is a kind of group that has at its core a relationship of deception, exploitation, and abuse. If it lacks these qualities then it is not a destructive cult as most experts define it.
To have such a relationship you need at least two people. Many cults are that size or close, like a family size cult or very small group.
You can have many more people in a cult, even millions or billions potentially. Some aspects of a cult change at different sizes but the cult can remain similar and destructive at every size.
The things that have to be understood are human psychology, the psychology of individuals, as both leader and follower in a relationship and the interaction of members of a group, the interaction with each other, with the leader, with various ranks or stations in the group and with people outside the group.
That's a lot to take on. It includes the psychology of a single person dealing with the cult and their thoughts, feelings, and behavior. It includes the subject of influence and how the group can influence or fail to influence the individual.
You can start probably with some of the most basic and concise descriptions of cults from the top experts.
I think the book Freedom of Mind by Steven Hassan is probably the best first book on cults available. It is great for anyone who has at least a tenth grade education and written in a very easy to understand style.
The next book I recommend is Cults In Our Midst by Margaret Singer. It is also quite easy and digs a bit deeper.
A great fundamental to understand cults is the eight criteria for thought reform by Robert Jay Lifton.
The best two books to understand the relationship of the leader and the followers in a cult, and perhaps to answer your question, are Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein and Traumatic Narcissism by Daniel Shaw. They really take on how the relationship is formed and what the leader and follower each experience in a way that no other books do.
The number one thing in my opinion that helps cults to survive is a general lack of knowledge about them and related subjects for the general public and for people, like lawmakers and law enforcement officers, who have a responsibility to protect the public, including cult members, from cults.
If people knew a tiny fraction of the truth about cults they would not stand for them being allowed in their communities. They would demand that politicians and law enforcement investigate them and prosecute their crimes.
Cults largely use secrecy and deception to operate. They usually don't admit their true goals to members or outsiders. Sometimes they do but have such outlandish goals and unusual ideas that they are not taken seriously. But just because someone wants to take over a country or the world and it seems impossible doesn't mean they are not really going to try or not going to hurt people in the attempt.
They also use deception in recruitment. They misrepresent their methods and goals to recruits and often keep their true beliefs and goals and methods hidden.
Many cults pretend to support values such as equality and fairness on the surface but once you join and reach a certain level of commitment you find that the leaders demand that followers give up their rights to sacrifice for them in an unequal and unfair relationship.
Cults isolate members from outside relationship so that members have no one to turn to when the control becomes high and the freedom becomes low. They get members to break off all relationships with people outside the cult so they are dependent on the cult entirely for social support. You dare not leave when you have nowhere to go, and often no money to survive on.
Cults ultimately survive because of human vulnerabilities to deception and psychological manipulation in members and the tendency to lie and find and exploit those vulnerabilities in human predators.
It's a terrible combination that somehow we have ended up with of ruthless and cruel people in human predators who are ready to be leaders and others, the vast majority of us, who accept these people as leaders or elect them when given a choice.
Many others have written on how we accept the people who are least capable as leaders as leaders most of the time.
The simple fact is the first thing we look for in a leader is confidence and the most confident people are apparently human predators. We need people who will make decisions rapidly and carry through on things as leaders and human predators often make quick decisions and stick with them, even if they make them too quickly, without enough information or stick with something that is clearly not working.
The tendency to want to obey authority and to want to comply with group norms has resulted in our acceptance of bad leaders and bad leadership unfortunately all too often.
This is not a special deficiency or defect in an unusual minority of the population but appears to be the case more often than not.
The entire field of cultic studies exists to address the questions you started with. I have written over five hundred posts at Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology regarding cults and I don't have all the answers and I don't think that anyone else does either, because you would need all the answers regarding why and how people do everything they do for that.
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