"They live outside the grades and categories which the community regards as acceptable" (Galbraith 225)
             Four issues of concern exist in the contemporary American dilemma of cult activity. These issues follow as recruiting techniques, unorthodox practices, and the causes for joining.
             The techniques used by cult leaders in order to recruit new members can be both manipulative and destructive. Margret Thaler Singer Ph.D. reported in the January 1997 Transactional Analysis Journal article "Therapy, Thought Reform, and Cults" , that "thought reform", which is a "process of planned and systematic psychosocial manipulations"(16), is used in order to gain control over cult followers(15). By using psychological methods as a means of luring in and manipulating followers to conform to the group, cult leaders are given a forum for preaching their specific ideologies. Singer states in the previously cited article that "manipulation of the person's total social environment" is a means in which cult leaders "stabilize and reinforce the modified behavior"(16). John Kifner's November 13 1996 New York Times article describes a police arrest of thirty-five members of a leftist cult for possession of illegal weapons. The original leader of this cult reportedly used techni!
             ques such as "isolation and exhaustion to indoctrinate his followers"(A1). On March 27 1997, The Los Angeles Times, staff writers told of the astounding suicide of thirty-nine members of the Heaven's Gate cult which occurred in a Rancho Santa Fe Mansion in San Diego, California(A1). When describing the cult members, they were reported to have all been "younger men who always dressed alike, in monochromatic uniforms of black and white"(A31). Two days later, March 29 1997, The Los Angeles Times article again on the Heaven's Gate cult, described the lifestyle as one that "dem...