"High Control Groups"
Doug Hamilton
Conversation with a scholar visiting to Fairfield, Iowa.
Someone who is with the graduate school in urban planning and development at Rutgers observes:
"..In the Western human experience forever people have joined cults to gain sense of meaning. Our ancestral traditions of rites and rituals set us adrift as a product of colonialism and patriarchy and colonization etc,. Which leaves us disposed to join cults, repeatedly; repeatedly to gain sense of meaning in rites and practices.
There is the concern with the whole thing of 'high control' communities but there is a spectrum of what high control is. The exceptions are like the David Coresh, or some Mormon folks, or Move. Those are violent high control.
The TM movement is high control in expelling people but so is patriarchy, hetero normative, and the nuclear family; these are all forms of high control groups where if you don't behave, don't get along with that, then effectively "we'll expel you". Cultism is a way of orientation towards gaining belonging and being in relationships.
How much of TM is reformable? I would look at it through the lens of 'mutual aid', this is where the idea of "mutual aid" becomes relevant. In TM here is an org that is outdated, has lost its ability to do one-on-one, there is not way to onboard people in to the organization, it is too expensive, there is no real world application inviting people wanting to join in the group.
None of that is being done. That is the rigidity of a group that is not retaining people, your membership numbers suck. These are all things in an organization that is basically irrelevant.
But then, now you have all these people who are outside of that, and people who know how to organize and are good at doing that, where the cool parts of the movement are now doing their own thing.
Around organizing, in the study of 'organizational development'
if the organization is not willing to do X, Y, and Z then there is no reforming it.
Seeing where the TM group has gone astray and recognizing where the cool growth part is, it is in the offshoot part of the community that is doing these mutual aids, who actually are building their own organizations outside of it, that are supportive of care, supportive of community, supportive of spiritual growth in ways that the old organization is not.
Urban planning scholars are not researching spiritual communities in particular, (different from religious studies scholars or communal studies) urban planners look at organizations. Organizations like unions, cooperatives, and their 'organizational development' component. They will look at organizational relational dynamics in communities. Like, looking at times where organizations do come to need to 'disorganize'. Where they need to commit to a cycle of dis-organizing and reorganizing as a strategic planning process.
The offshoots are actually doing the mutual aid."