Diane Benscoter on Religious Cults' Use of Memes

Diane Benscoter
Diane Benscoter
Interviewer: 
Guest(s): 
07.29.2012

Diane Benscoter talks to Jim Fleming about how the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church used memes to rewire her brain.

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Comments

I very much enjoyed this fascinating interview. Maybe this could shed some light on our political and religious pitfalls in general. Thanks for an excellent program.

I lived in the time of the Moonies - I was not drawn in but I was also from a family culture that believed in questioning. Our current popular culture is like herd mentality - politics, religious extremes. We need more education re memes - what role do schools play in encouraging the idea of questioning and other such processes?

Instead of teaching mainly useless subjects like algebra in schools, we should be teaching critical thinking!!!!

Excellent interview on an extreme version of indoctrination and deprogramming. Yes to calls for critical thinking as curricula in schools. But the entire system is soooo top-down. From efforts to deneuter Sir Darwin to teaching to tests, to the design of books. Teachers have very little leeway. Many simply su*k at critical thinking themselves. Are true believers. They get goosebumps for the likes of Palin or the redneck song God Bless the USA. We don't have a lot of Moonies, but we sure had a lot of people making the logical pretzel reverse inverse back gainer associating 911 to Saddam. Sometimes it's deadly. More often it's the lack of imagination that has God supporting "our" troops and not saying hi when they walk by someone different.

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