7 psychological torture tactics of narcissistic cults

A non-exhaustive take on the protocol of ideological subversion

A narcissistic cult—be it ecclesiastical or secular, interpersonal or collective—has to rely on brainwashing its members by a system of psycho-cognitive tricks that lure the victims into submission to its ideological matrix by engineering their susceptibility to the latter’s unquestionable doctrines.

In order to make someone unreservedly subscribe to a ready-made belief system, the victim’s cognitive faculties have to be subverted, their sense of agency crippled, their reality gaslit, and their moral integrity broken down so as to make space for the only one true system: the cult itself.

The below list is arbitrary and non-exhaustive—I just happened to categorise 7 elements which appear salient in the way I see this. This could as well be 20.

1. Infantalisation

Infantalising the masses by inducing symbiotic dependency on a parental entity: a god-father, a cult leader-father, or a nanny state-motherland, etc. Amongst other techniques, this can be achieved through reward-versus-punishment conditioning protocol. The sooner in the life of the subject this starts, the harder it will be for them to extract themselves from the web of infantile dependency.

Behavioural conditioning automates behaviour through socio-cultural codes of conduct which invisibly can set perverse incentive structures based on leveraging the most basic human needs such as belonging, identity or self-expression against the target individual or population.

These incentives have to be authority-sanctioned so that the target only can realise them on the terms dictated to them by the system imposed by the parent-type authority whose arbitrary power lies beyond reproach or criticism. In the unconscious mind of the subject disobedience must equate with death.

2. Breakdown of intellectual integrity

Subverting critical thinking in a population is key to making its members unquestioningly accept the cult leader’s picture of reality as the only one. The blind god of ideology boasts, “I am the only source of truth and I will destroy everyone who disagrees with me.”

One effective way of breaking systemic integrity of the human mind this through centralised normalisation of double standards in thinking and speaking in public discourse. Accepting as normal when one’s words do not match their actions, or when what is said in private contradicts what is said publicly due to the double-binds inherent in public discourse is detrimental to the faculty of reason itself.

Embedding such double-binds within the systems of religious, political and corporate dogma, and their legal-bureaucratic infrastructures normalises the conditions which in Gregory Bateson’s terms of schismogenesis leads to induction of mental illness. The result is cognitive, psychological and relational systemic crises in individuals and populations. Their integrity breaks down due to “uncorrected positive feedback in the system” (G. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 330).

3. Breakdown of moral integrity

Complementary to the loss of intellectual integrity is the loss of moral integrity. Demoralisation of the target population is absolutely critical for succeeding in rendering the target helpless before the Moloch of the narcissistic cult.

People with strong values will be ready to go to great lengths to defend them. When we value something, when we hold something as sacred—i.e. as something without which our life would not be worth living—we are ready to sacrifice a lot for the sake of protecting it.

A knight will defend his honour; a true scholar, truth; a loving mother, her child—to the death. This is why from the perspective of the narcissistic ideologue, any competing moral system to that of the Party has to be obliterated. The cult demands total submission to the illusion of collective integrity at the cost of the moral integrity of its individual members.

At the same time, a poor man’s substitute of morality is offered where surface short-term opportunities to “be a good person” is served to the masses in the deceitful guise of supporting the current thing. This allows the target to lie to themselves as a means of keeping them from assuming responsibility for the long-term evils unfolding as a result of their self-induced moral bankruptcy.

Under narcissistic dogma, personal integrity has to be thus sacrificed to the Moloch of the fictional integrity of the narcissistic cult. Inducing internal fracture within the individual and the community is critical for making them submit to the big lie of the ideology. Human compassion becomes a weapon in the hands of a self-hating narcissist.

4. Trauma-bonding

All of the above result in generating severe existential pain in any fully alive human individual. Physical, psychological, emotional or cognitive pain is another indispensable tool in the hands of the abuser whose goal is subjugate others to their sadistic will.

The key to successful conditioning of the subject individual or population into a trauma bond is inflicting intermittent shocks of pain with periods of pleasure in between. The less predictable the pattern of these two alternating states, the more addicted to trauma the victim population will get (think of variable reward schedule of gambling machines or social media algorithms which are in this way optimised for inducing addiction).

When we’re in pain, our nervous system defaults to survival mode—fight, flight, freeze or fawn (Pete Walker’s 4Fs)—which makes it impossible for us to access our executive cognitive faculties such as critical discernment of information we receive from the environment, or accurate assessment of our own thinking and perceptions.

The victim who is in the midst of pain is thus more susceptible to suggestion. If the pain is severe enough, the subject will likely internalise any ideological narrative as a means to reconcile their cognitive dissonance. After priming the victim with a certain kind of information presented as reality during their period of suffering, the abuser will continue to condition the victim’s reactions by reiterative progression of lesser stimuli which will reduce the victim to infantile addiction to being abused, often associated with warm feelings towards the abuser (the toxic triangle, Stockholm Syndrome).

5. Induced fear, shame, and guilt

It’s critical that the victim’s sense of self is deeply associated with the emotions of fear, shame and guilt. These are the most effective weapons to pre-empt any possibility of them developing a healthy sense of self-worth that would make the false security of the ideological cult redundant.

For this reason, the more conscientious the victim, the better. If they have already been primed for feeling guilty, it will be easy to prey on that vulnerability for the malignant narcissist who by definition lacks conscience.

Fear, shame and guilt are chief psychological weapons of the narcissistic cult—think the cruel priming of individuals into the fear of eternal fire of hell, the shame associated with confessing your darkest secrets to a priest (or Google), or reporting your neighbour/colleague to a state/boss (backstabbing). A real classic is the primal guilt of being born with the original sin… Such nasty narcissistic behaviours can then be scaled up through deployment of rituals, sacraments and stories to keep the target population’s spiritual development permanently crippled throughout their lifetimes, generation after generation, century after century, millenium after millenium.

Once the indoctrination of multiple generations is done through mass religion, the species is ripen for a secular versions of the same protocol adapted in service of political and corporate dogmas—the blueprint for reacting to fear, shame and guilt is ready to be weaponised.

6. Humiliation

Once the subject has been thoroughly conditioned by the arch-sorcery of mind-altering psychotechnologies, they are ready for the final stages of brainwashing.

The repressed awareness of the dissonance between being at the same time a biological adult and an infantilised subject to the corrupted authority induces tremendous humiliation which, like a paralysing venom injected into the victim who is bound by their own decision to submit, precludes their will to fight back.

Once the target has been thoroughly self-deceived into blind compliance, once their sense of reality is totally gaslit by the big lie of the ideology, the humiliation they self-inflict by being enslaved to what destroys them will break their will, thus ensuring their permanent submission to the cult.

7. Learned helplessness

After numerous failed trials, attempting to extract oneself from the vicious cycle of narcissistic abuse, each resulting in punishment, the victim gives in to the idea that escape is impossible, thus signing a suicidal pact with their own blood for it is true that one cannot comply one’s way out of tyranny.

As the subject becomes more and more submissive, weak and self-deluded, the abuse becomes more severe as the abuser learns to despise the victim in proportion to the target’s degree of helplessness. Like a predatory animal, the narcissist gets sadistically high on the victim’s helplessnessness. The target population has now been reduced to being totally dependent on the parasitic mental-behavioural matrix designed for their doom.

The target’s sovereignty has been destroyed as they become toys in the blind pursuit of narcissistic delusions that are spinning out of control. The self-terminating system of narcissistic control can only be starved by the target’s, almost impossible at this stage, deliberate withdrawal of their narcissistic supply.

Breaking out

Breaking the spell of narcissistic abuse requires of the victim to willingly, deliberately accept the immense suffering resulting from the withdrawal symptoms, as the false self imposed by the cult breaks down along with every delusional dream it was fabricated by.

This is a trial of fire and few manage to make it alive as the protocol of indoctrination is so pernicious, so inhumanely effective as to make the escape almost impossible. The target must therefore learn to believe in the impossible to increase the likelihood of their liberation from the Moloch of ideological infection. In addition to understanding the protocol of ideological brainwashing, the escapee must muster courage, develop a strong moral philosophy and become fearless to be formidable in their quest of slaying the Moloch of their own illusions.

Narcissistic ideology is a drug which, like alcohol, destroys slowly and imperceptibly. It is designed to make any direct resistance impossible as it surreptitiously pervades the bodies and minds of its targets. Because the cult has no reality of its own, it has to rely on illusion. Sustaining this illusion requires consistency of the lie upon which it is based.

But in an increasingly networked world it is harder and harder to hide the truth while the hunger for signal is increasing in proportion to the overwhelming flood of idological noise. This is why I believe that the age of information neurtralises the threat of illusions for those who choose to pay the price.