Kalina Noelle Lillethun

About Me

Hi there!

My name is Kalina Noelle Lillethun. I’m a second-year student here at Dawson and I’m here to talk about me.

To begin the monologue of my life story, you should first know that I had a rather odd start in life. To cut to the chase, I was in a cult. I was born into it along with my three sisters just like my father and his siblings. My mother joined at the ripe young age of 17, but I won’t go into detail about that now. I was born in Thailand and we, my family and I, jumped from place to place every few years and lived in group homes in places like Indonesia and Mexico. Now, before you get any ideas about how traumatizing my childhood must have been, I must inform you that it was not. I had a great childhood. I saw more of the world in the first ten years of my life than most people do in their entire life. My love of languages stems from this. All those different cultures I was immersed in moulded this love of mine. My childhood consisted of homeschooling, bible study, humanitarian work and a lot of travelling. It’s only when moving here that I realized how unorthodox it all was. The friends I met in school had known each other since kindergarten (whereas the only friends I’d known for more than three years were my sisters), most of them lived in the same house all their lives and the farthest they’d travelled was to vacation in Cuba. I felt lucky. This was my perception of the world as a wee child.

Now, the cult was in no way as pleasant as my childhood portrays it. When I was in it, it was peaceful to an extent and non-problematic -- to an extent. I was shielded from the bad by my parents. They/we did some really good things: helped impoverished countries, did a lot of disaster relief. It was within the group that it was not so great. There were very strict rules that dictated everything and I mean everything. Rules that went from how often you could see your family (if they weren’t members) to how you had to cut their hair. The rules were the worst of it when I was a member, but the history of another matter completely. The cult was formed in 1969 by a man named David Berg. When I was in it, it was called The Family, but back then it was The Children of God. It was really bad back then. To give you somewhat of a time frame, the adult members belonged to different generations, four in total. I would have belonged to the fifth had we stayed. The time of the first and second generations was horrible, but I won’t go into any detail. You can google it if you want to know.

For my project, I want to focus on how language can be used as a weapon. I want to research the cult leaders and dictators who use language to manipulate people, how we fall prey to those traps, how to use it ourselves, linguistic traits in narcissism, how language sub-consciously influences and controls us, etc.

Here are a couple of sources I’m looking into:

https://www.ted.com/talks/ms_shreya_jakhar_the_power_of_manipulation_tedxyouth_hgs
https://medium.com/@PsychBehind/psychology-behind-the-art-of-manipulation-d9e0bdd6d8d3
Book: Magnant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited by Sam Vaknin

Thesis Statement and Topic Sentences

Thesis: Language is used as a weapon to control others as shown in cults, advertisements and in other contexts manipulation.

Topic sentences:

For the longest time, cult leaders have managed to lure a countless number of victims into their webs by manipulating one's need for acceptance, one's fears and with the promise of power.
The advertisement industry has racked in billions upon billions of dollars with the helpful aid of exploiting our weaknesses through word manipulation.
Manipulation in and of itself isn't dangerous, but it is we who transforms it into a weapon. Subconsciously or not, we have mastered this weapon in social media, in our friend groups, with our body language, etc.
Language itself has managed to control our ways of thinking by creating subconscious biases regarding gender, race, social class, etc.

Does the feeling of loneliness influence choice? by Håvard Lillethun

My Paternal History in a Cult

I didn’t really know where to start this project, so, cliché as it is, I decided to start at the beginning.

My reaction to being in a cult was belated. I didn’t realize it until much later. Or, maybe I just didn’t grasp the concept that it was, in fact, a cult. My experience in it was tame and really very normal - or it was normal to me at the time. My dad however was a member for more than 30 years and his father even longer. They had an altered experience. They confronted the bad and good.

The video attached is a small slice of what my farfar went through. From this conference he did, he decided to write an autobiography that will come out next year. I'm very excited/nervous to read it.

*Farfar means grandfather in Norwegian

Lillethun, Håvard, director. Does the Feeling of Loneliness Influence Choice? TEDx Talks, 7 Jan. 2020, www.ted.com/talks/havard_lillethun_does_the_feeling_of_loneliness_influence_choice.

How Can Cult Leaders Manipulate with such Ease?

In my first endeavour to understand how cult leaders manage to manipulate hundreds or thousands of people, I came across reoccurring themes in different cults and their members. Themes that are used to manipulate the members. There are three in total: loneliness, fear and the promise of power.

For the first, leaders would pray the lonely, those who are insecure with their own identity. The leaders would promise love, family and a community where the lonely would feel accepted. Like with my farfar, they would promise all of this in exchange for total and absolute control.

The second consists of the leaders’ manipulation of their members’ fears by using the idea of salvation. In the same way, as with the first, it gave them utter control of their followers. They say jump, you say how high and if you didn’t then the threat of damnation would be used. It was like that in the Family and in more extreme cases like the People's Temple with JonesTown.

As for the last, what I meant by the promise of power was the false sense of power. The promise of spiritual or sexual enlightenment, the promise of wealth or beauty. Cults like Scientology or NXIVM would use it to get anything they want for the members. They would manipulate them into thinking that they were actually gaining something.

Know this is all speculation on my part, but from what I’ve read and from my own experience this is all horribly true.

Cults, Explained | Netflix

This is an episode of the Netflix documentary series, Explained. This episode shows how cults are able to lure people in and exert control. The cults showed in this episode range from the Peoples Temple to the twelve Tribes to the Unification Church to my very own, the Children of God. It targets a general audience and premiered in September 2019. Regarding its reliability, it is seeing as it followed people like Janja Lalich, Ph.D. (who is a sociology researcher, author and professor specializing in cults and extremist groups), Reza Aslan (scholar of religious studies and a convert to evangelical Christianity with first-hand knowledge) along with numerous members from a large variety of cults.

Cults, Explained was disconcerting to watch and hit just a little too close home. Nonetheless, it was insightful and it backed all of my theories mentioned above. It talked about our need for a community, about the exertion of fear and the lure of power. For myself, all those things weren’t very apparent when I was growing up, but, with the extensive research I’ve done out of my own curiosity in the past, the Children of God is the perfect example of these kinds of manipulation.

“Full Episode: Cults, Explained | Netflix.” YouTube, YouTube, 18 Oct. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NWIfiV1_XQ.

A look behind the curtain of cult psychology by Verena Daniel

The State News, which is where I found this article, is a student newspaper of Michigan State University and, although not quick reliable, I backed up the information in the article with some research of my own as see below. This article was published on October 29, 2020, and targets a general audience.

This article focuses on my first explanation as to how cult members are manipulated. “I think that cults kind of look for people who are insecure, and those people are usually more susceptible to manipulation and all these negative psych tactics used to rope them in.” This is exactly what I was trying to portray. She too explains how cult leaders exploit this by offering this sense of home and community.

She also reveals that women are more susceptible to this kind of treatment and, although I don’t like this idea, I can’t escape the truth of the matter which I have backed with my own research. In Cult membership: What factors contribute to joining or leaving? you will see the fact of the matter. Women hold the major spot for cult members.

Daniel, Verena. “A Look Behind the Curtain of Cult Psychology.” The State News, 29 Oct. 2020, https://statenews.com/article/2020/10/a-look-behind-the-curtain-of-cult-psychology?ct=content_open&cv=cbox_latest

Cult Membership: What Factors Contribute to Joining or Leaving? by Rousselet, M., et al.

Science Direct is a reliable peer-reviewed psychiatry research page that is rated highly for factual information. This article, written by M. Rousselet and others, was published in November 2017 and focuses on the vulnerability factors of cult members.

Supporting what I’ve said above, this article talks about a person’s weakened sense of identity being used as a tool for manipulation but focuses more on the members’ vulnerability rather than the leaders’ abuse of power. Through many interviews and years of research, they found that the reasons for joining were most a search for spirituality and personal development and dissatisfaction in the members’ lives. All of which backs my claims that these wants are definitely present in members and in theory can be used to manipulate them by the leaders.

The authors brought forth a very interesting comparison between cult members and addictive disorders. Some similar characteristics that they revealed are “persistence despite damage, initial psychological relief, occupation of an exclusive place in the thoughts of members, high psychiatric comorbidity prevalence, high accessibility, leading to social precariousness and the importance of familial support when leaving” (Rousselet, M., et al.). Regarding the psychiatric comorbidity similarity, this study shows that, in the year prior to joining a cult, 51.6% of members had anxiety disorders and 45.2% had mood disorders which is homogeneous to addictive disorders. Other characteristics for this comparison could be the feeling of being beholden to something larger than yourself or out of your control and, perhaps, a false sense of gratitude for that psychological relief.

Rousselet, M., et al. “Cult Membership: What Factors Contribute to Joining or Leaving?” Psychiatry Research, Elsevier, 10 July 2017, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178116319941.

Mind control and Brainwashing The Psychology of Robert Jay Lifton

In Robert Jay Lifton’s book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, he gives a set of criteria for thought Reform, eight in total, but I’ll only go through a few. To explain them I’ll be using Lifton’s definitions and use the Children of God (COG) as an example.

Milieu control:

The control of any and all information or communication in and around the environment inevitably isolating individuals from the rest of the world.

In the COG and later when it changed to the Family, we had limited access to all things outside of the community. No travelling if it wasn’t within the communities, our friends and family weren’t allowed to visit us (stay in the communes), but we could leave to see them for short periods of time. All TV shows, movies, books, games, etc. were made by the Family or were about the Bible. No social media, no cellphones, we were homeschooled by members (uncertified to teach).

Mystical Manipulation:

The leader represented as a divine figure, as having some special ability or anything that sets him/her above the rest of humanity.

The leader of the COG, David Berg (also known as Moses), was a prophet of the Lord who got visions that dictated the way we lived. He was a sick man who said that we had to spread His love through any possible means. The worst of it was his supporting sex with minors. All these “prophesies” were published in what was called Mo Letters which were like cartoon-type pamphlets featuring nudity and God’s love. This was not the case in the Family when I was there.

Demand for Purity:

The world is in black and white, the ideology of the group is divine truth and there is no discussing or disputing this fact and the use of shame and guilt are used to control this matter.

The Ideology of my cult didn’t change throughout the years, it was an evangelist apocalyptic cult. The book of revelations was so heavily engrained into our heads and was the subject of our teachings. If you don’t know, evangelism is the act of preaching the gospel and search the word of God to as many as possible. So, what we did was go around the world to spread God’s love and saved as many of His “sheep” as possible (God was the shepherd and we were the sheep). The details of that aren’t important in this criterion, but what is important is that this ideology was so forcefully pushed on us that it has stuck to a lot of people even after leaving the cult. Some ex-members believe that this pandemic is the beginning of the end. Seeing signs where there are none, the mark of the beast, the anti-Christ, the false prophet, all of which has or is coming.

Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: a Study of "Brainwashing" in China. Martino Publishing, 2014.

Thought reform and the psychology of totalism

by Robert Jay Lifton

The American psychiatrist and author, Robert Jay Lifton, is widely revered for his studies on war, and political violence psychology along with his conjecture on thought reform and is most definitely credible. As it says in the title, this book studies thought reform and the psychology of totalism. Published in 1961, it targets these matters in China, but Lifton’s definition of totalism can, without doubt, be used in the context of cults.

Differing from totalitarianism, totalism is Lifton’s term for the desire for total and utter control over human behaviour and thought. Similar to this, totalitarianism solely involves political power and dominance whereas totalism applies to any group or person. I find cult leaders to be the perfect expression of totalism. As I’ve said multiple times, they possess the need to control others, to manipulate their will in the search for power. In my eyes, the definition of totalism is exactly that of a cult leader.

"The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis." (Lifton, Thought reform and the psychology of totalism)

What’s Been Done and What’s to Come

I’ve only done a third of the work that I was planning to do. There were originally supposed to be three parts to my project. The first is on manipulation in cults, which I’ve finished and that you can see above. The next part was going to be about language in advertisements and the last is on subconscious biases that are in certain languages. I decided that my research paper will focus solely on the first and I will continue the blog as planned, but I'll only be doing the advertisement industry.

The Language of the Advertisement Industry

Always #LikeAGirl

Pepsi "We Will Rock You"

Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”

Wendy's "Where's the Beef"

These are a few of my favourite commercials. They each have very different messages and are practically opposites in the way they present the product. The first one, #LikeAGirl, is an empowering commercial for women. It's more than just an ad to sell the product, they are also supporting an important message. The Pepsi one, on the other hand, uses celebrities (Pink, Beyonce and Britney Speares) to sell their product. The other two use comedy, but in very different ways.

*The source for all these advertisements is https://www.youtube.com/

Language in Advertising a Psycholinguistic Approach by Richard Jackson Harris et al.

Abstract given: "The theory and methodology of psycholinguistics, from experimental cognitive psychology, has much to offer for the study of the processing of the language used in advertising. This conceptual paper explores several areas where a psycholinguistic approach has been useful already or may have potential for studying advertising language. We argue that such research may benefit both the study of advertising and the basic research on language information processing."

This is an academic article that really dives into the linguistics that is involved in the advertisement industry as well as the psychology that is linked to it.

Harris, Richard Jackson, et al. “Language in Advertising a Psycholinguistic Approach.” Taylor & Francis, 18 May 2012, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01633392.1986.10505389

Color Red: Implications for Applied Psychology and Marketing Research

The advancement of technology has enabled commercials to bombarded our every sense. From sight to sound, advertisements have learned to manipulate every single one. For instance, many studies have shown that certain colours are linked to certain emotions and this is a tool the advertisement industry has exploited. This academic journal focuses on the colour red in particular. Normal the colour red has a negative connotation: anger, blood, warning, etc. However, it's translated differently in marketing. In this context, the colour brings a sense of urgency (for clearance sales), encourages appetite (used by many fast-food chains). It's associated with movement, excitement and passion.

Piotrowski, Chris, and Armstrong, Terry. “Color Red: Implications for Applied Psychology and Marketing Research.” The University of West Florida, Psychology and Education - an Interdisciplinary Journal.

I think that the McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It" campaign is the perfect example of this. The flashy red is the cherry (get it - cherries are red) on top of the great slogan.

Although short, the wording in this slogan was chosen very carefully. First, using “I” makes you feel like you’re a part of the brand. If it were “You’re Lovin’ It”, that would be presumptuous. Then, removing the "g" at the end of "loving" was another strategic move. "Lovin'" roles of the tongue so much better. Seeing as it's slang, it also connects to the target audience (young adults and teenagers).

All you really need to understand to make a great campaign is "stay relevant, be sensitive, innovate build trust."

Light, Larry. “Brand Relevance: The Strategy Behind ‘I'm Lovin' It.’” Branding Strategy Insider, 20 May 2020, www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/brand-relevance-the-strategy-behind-mcdonalds-im-lovin-it/#.YJLK12ZKiqA.

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