Heaven's Gate Cult Quotes

Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[...]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards “Them” (i.e., anyone who is not one of “Us”) is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview.

When the members of the “Heaven’s Gate” cult failed to spot the spacecraft they knew must be trailing the comet Hale-Bopp, they returned the $4,000 telescope they had bought for this purpose, believing it to be defective.

Unfortunately, there’s a downside to the dopamine system, and that is addiction. Addictive drugs take over the role of reward signals that feed into the dopamine neurons. Gambling, pornography, and drugs such as cocaine cause the brain to flood itself with dopamine in response. So, too, do addictive ideas, most notably addictive bad ideas, such as those propagated by cults that lead to mass suicides (think Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate), or those propagated by religions that lead to suicide bombing (think 9/11 and 7/7).

Society, in fact, often holds it to be a virtue to adhere to certain beliefs in spite of evidence to the contrary. Belief in that which reason denies is associated with steadfastness and courage, while skepticism is often identified with cynicism and weak character. The more persuasive the evidence against a belief, the more virtuous it is deemed to persist in it. We honor faith. Faith can be a positive force, enabling people to persevere in the face of daunting odds, but the line between perseverance and fanaticism is perilously thin. Carried to extremes, faith becomes destructive—the residents of Jonestown for example, or the Heaven’s Gate cult. In both cases, the faith of the believers was tested; in both cases, they passed the test.

Generation after generation, this lack of institutional support paves the way for alternative, supernaturally-minded group to surge. This pattern of American unrest was also responsible for the rise of cultish movements throughout the 1960s and 70s, when the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the Kennedy assassination knocked US citizens unsteady. At the time, spiritual practice was spiking but the overt Traditional Protestantism was declining so new movements rose to quench that cultural thirst. These included everything from Christian offshoots like Jews for Jesus and Children of God; to eastern-derived fellowships like 3H0 and Shambala Buddhism, to pagan groups like the Covenant of the Goddess and the Church of Aphrodite, to sci-fiesque ones like Scientology and Heaven's Gate. Some scholars refer to this as the fourth great awakening.

Year after year, we ask: What makes people join cults like Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate? What makes them stay? What makes them behave in wild, baffling, sometimes gruesome ways? Here’s where the answer starts: Using systematic techniques of conversion, conditioning, and coercion, with language as their ultimate power tool, Jones and Applewhite were able to inflict unforgettable violence on their followers without personally laying a finger on them.

Certainly, several of our most sensational cults—the Charles Man-son Family, Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, and Marshall Herff Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate—take on a different aspect in the wake of Aum. The same is true of the cultic milieu of the present-day extreme right, where fantasies of using weapons of mass destruction to transform and purify the world are powerfully present.

You only hear about the cults that start to go out in a blaze of glory. Charles Manson, the Heaven’s Gate people, Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians. Never about the quiet ones, who keep to themselves and don’t make the news.