From "The Gates Of Eden" To "Day Of The Locust"

This Post-Movement Groups section of the full paper is the one pertaining to Divine Light Mission and Guru Maharaj Ji. The full paper is available online.

FROM "THE GATES OF EDEN" TO "DAY OF THE LOCUST:"

An Analysis of the Dissident Youth Movement of the 1960s and its Heirs of the Early l97Os - the Post-movement Groups.
DANIEL A. FOSS and RALPH W. LARKIN

Article in Theory and Society, January 1976

Post-Movement Groups

Post-movement groups can be classified according to their historical and cultural relationship to the white middle class youth movement of the 1960s.

Some evolved organically out of the decomposing youth culture at the end of the 1960s or later. In this category we would include the Divine Light Mission of Guru Maharaj Ji, authoritarian communes like the Lyman Family, the Manson Family, and the Metellica Aquarian Foundation of Amherst, Massachusetts, and the Marxist sects that arose from the ashes of SDS (e.g., the October League and the Revolutionary Union). Other groups were formed at least in part to repudiate some or all the characteristic cultural manifestations of the sixties, either during the movement period or afterwards. Such groups include the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation (a fundamentalist Christian sect), the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the Hare Krish- nas). the Progressive Labor Party, and the National Caucus of Labor Commit-

tees. Still other groups antedated the existence of the movement, sometimes by decades. They did not appeal to freak youth during the movement period, but received an influx of former movement participants and younger people after the demise of the movement. Examples of these groups are L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology and the Communist and Socialist Workers' Parties.

Post-movement groups, regardless of whether their manifest goal was to transform the social order through the development of a revolutionary vanguard, as in the case of the Marxist sectarians, or through propagation of the faith as in the case of the religious sects, developed an authoritarian structure, formally articulated with sharp boundary-definition. Most of these groups also developed a cult of personality around a single leader who served as an embodiment of the vision of the membership, and to whom they demonstrated extravagant servility. In the cases of the religious groups, the leader became deified and worshipped. Prabupad (A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami), the spiritual master of the Hare Krishnas, Guru Maharaj Ji of the Divine Light Mission, and Moses David of the Children of God are all examples of such deities. Even in cases where post-movement groups were established on non-religious grounds, such deification occurred. Mel Lyman, the founder of "The Lyman Family," a Boston area freak commune, had proclaimed himself God by 1967. Victor Barranco, the originator of the More Houses in Oakland, California, became the spiritual father of the "marks" (his term) he exploited in a profit-making scheme to rebuild old houses. What makes him so incredible is that he induced young ex-freaks to rebuild houses without compensation and after they finished, charged them S$00 a month to live in them. He also ran the Institute of Human Abilities, which amounted to having his devotees pay up to $65 for an hour in his presence. In the cases of the Marxist sectarians, Lyn Marcus of the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) was supposed to have the ability to foretell the precise development of world capitalism for the next five years; it would eventuate in a world-wide depression culminating in the mass strike process-in the midst of which the Labor Committee, knowing exactly what to do, will seize power.

Each of these groups is pyramidal in structure, with lines of authority highly articulated from the top down. The NCLC, directed by ex-efficiency expert Marcus, operates a tightly knit bureaucracy which measures its progress by the hour! The Divine Light Mission is rampant with titles, and has developed a centralized bureaucratic structure which spends most of its effort printing, filling out, and filing data processing forms that monitor organizational activity. The Guru himself holds the titles of Supreme Director and Supreme Chief Executive of the Mission. Smaller groups and authoritarian communes

manifest patriarchal rather than bureaucratic structures. ln these cases, as in the Lyman Family or the Alamo Foundation, the authority comes directly from the leader.

Each group has appropriated a fragment of the freak vision, often using it as the basis of legitimisation of the authoritarian structure. The servility of the members is used as evidence of spirituality, ego-transcendence, or even manifestations of peace and love. When members allow themselves to be subject to hierarchical authority, such personal subjugation is prima facie evidence of commitment to the propagation of love and peace or the historical necessity of the revolution.

Post-movement groups developed non-conflictual stances toward society-at- large. Like their predecessors, they all believed in the inevitability of radical change; however, unlike dissident youth, they believed that social transformation could not be achieved by immediate action upon and conflict with objective social reality, but must be brought about by the attainment of spiritual perfection by the members and the diffusion of spiritual perfection to broad sectors of the population." Where conflict did occur, it was not with the larger society, but between competing, post-movement groups either for similar constituencies or over minute differences in doctrine. For exam- ple, in mid-1973, the NCLC began "Operation Mop-up," a campaign to destroy the Communist Party by beating up its members. At a Divine Light Mission Festival, 30 Hare Krishnas were arrested protesting Guru Maharaj Ji's claim to Perfect Mastership.

All post-movement groups break sharply with the notion, widely disseminated in the late 1960s among White middle class youth, that removal of limitations on immediate gratification and rediscovery of the body is inextricably combined with the process of the transformation of the entire social order. Instead, they stand for a reversion to an earlier cultural syndrome: they advocate self-discipline, self-sacrifice, hard work, systematic and orderly living, and renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh.

These groups minutely regulated the everyday lives of their membership. Short hair, conventional dress for men and modest dress for women have been the norms in several groups. Most prohibited the use of substances defined by the conventional culture as "drugs," and many have banned alcohol as well. All or nearly all of these groups have discouraged uninhibited sexuality and many have encouraged sexual abstinence. Among the Jesus Freaks and the Eastern sects, renunciation of sexuality tended to be a sign of spiritual perfection and that one was relying on the source of ultimate satisfaction which lies within: The Holy Spirit; Krishna; The Reservoir of Pleasure; Theta (in Scientology); or the universal Energy source (Divine Light

Mission). Among the Marxist sects, sexual restraint seemed to be taken as a sign that one was "serious." A member of the NCLC once boasted, "I've got no time for girls, I'm too busy doing class organizing." Some groups, such as the Children of God and the Hare Krishnas, have not discouraged marriage, but insist that marital sex be intended exclusively for purposes of procreation.

All post-movement groups maintain a fierce exclusivity based on the claims of their doctrines and leaders to embody a monopoly of the truth; however, the similarity of their functions is revealed by the fact that many people pass through several of these groups in turn. The fragmentation of the youth culture is most dramatically demonstrated in such claims of exclusivity.

During the sixties, as the vision developed, it was able to incorporate greater varieties of orientations and, because of its subjectivist-existentialist core, became more-or-less universally accepted, since it raised personal experience as the ultimate criterion of validity. Though post-movement groups gave lip service to the criterion of personal experience, those experiences that were the exclusive domain of the group became the basis for the arbitration of Truth. For example, devotees of Guru Maharaj Ji cannot complete a sentence without including the word "experience." However, to them "experience" means experience in the Knowledge, which mere mortals who have not been initiated into the secret meditative techniques of the Divine Light Mission cannot possibly comprehend unless they too become devotees. Since the sole purpose of the organization is the propagation of the one and only Truth, the organization becomes the embodiment of that Truth, and membership in the organization is the only means by which one can have access to the Truth.

In accordance with the characterization of conventional society as meaningless by freaks, post-movement groups offer themselves as remedies for the meaninglessness endured by average middle class citizens and drug-soaked hedonistic hippies alike (and those which do not make overt promises also attract members who join at least in part because of a craving for a more "meaningful existence"), Whereas freaks had found meaning in maintaining a position of defiance and opposition to the "plastic world," post-movement groups find meaning in escape from the complexities and incongruities of the material world (or the world of the mind) into a more transcendent simplified view of the cosmos independent of material reality. Jesus Freaks recruit among long-hairs by denouncing the pointlessness of conflict or the hedonistic life and by claiming that the true Christian can stay permanently high on Jesus and obtain greater joy than that derived from drugs or sex ("Try Jesus-God's eternal triple"). They promise the end of all earthly mental anguish, which is said to be derived from being caught up in the toils of a society dominated by Satan. The Eastern cults promise the same thing using

different words: the material world is illusion, and a life committed solely to activity in the material world is bound to be meaningless and incapable of sustaining true happiness. The mind, preoccupied with coping with the material world, becomes a trap in which the individual becomes entangled.

The individual is urged to by-pass or squelch the mind and to "look within" to find the only reliable source of pleasure, such as Krishna Consciousness or Satchitananand ("truth-consciousness-bliss"). "Give me your troubles," says Guru Maharaj Ji, "and l will give you peace." Marxist sectarians promise a meaningful life by indicating that the individual can either choose to swim with the inexorable tides of history - or against them.

The post-movement period lasted from about 1970-l973. By 1974, the Divine Light Mission had faded from public view after the disastrous Millennium '73 festival in Houston, and conversions declined to 5,797 in 1974 compared to 30,000 in 1973. The Children of God have apparently become a sex-cult, the NCLC faltered, thanks in part to the mental breakdown of its leader, and Jesus Freaks are becoming Baptists.