Life in a cult leaves you bruised and battered. When I left the IMT in March 2020, I knew I had a road both long and thorny to travel before I could recover. I may never recover fully from the experience, but that does not mean that I am not going to try. In recent weeks I have managed to access therapy from the university, which has definitely assisted in building myself back up. I have also been reading voraciously and deprogamming myself of the Marxist nonsense that was insidiously drummed into my brain.
What you have to understand about life in a cult, especially a political cult, is this – that there is no escape from the group or from the reinforcement of the doctrine. It is part of what cult experts call ‘milieu control’. All your spare time and energy is spent on cult activities – in my case, paper sales, branch meetings, contact meetings, Labour Party events, demonstrations, trade union meetings, socials and ‘private’ reading of Trotskyist literature at home, in the form of books published by Wellred, articles on the IMT and Socialist Appeal website, the paper and the quarterly magazine. Even when not engaged in ‘formal’ cult activities, informal, personal conversation with other members of the sect was peppered with Marxist phraseology and banal catechisms, catchphrases (‘Remember dialectics’, ‘The ones and twos’, ‘The class struggle does not move in a straight line’) and Marxist-inflected ‘analysis’ of this or that political event. All this served to reinforce the doctrine and deprived me of the time to think. It also meant that I had to be on my toes for the emotionally taxing business of saying the right thing at all times and demonstrating that I had the ‘correct ideas’. Even when I was in the comfort of my own abode, I still had to monitor myself for ‘wrongthink’, knowing that if I was ever confused about anything, I could find an IMT article that would give me the ‘reassurance’ that I needed.
Of course, no matter how loyal and dedicated you are, it is important to remember that in cults, this is always a one-way affair. The moment I started thinking for myself, a campaign of shunning, ostracism and isolation quickly went underway. When I walked out of that hell, I was emotionally drained. The trauma is something I now have to live with. When I read about the worse experiences of people in groups like ISO and the CWI, I am reassured that at least my unpleasant encounter with cultism was mild in comparison. Just the other night, I had my first nightmare about the organisation. I doubt it will be the last.
One thing that has certainly been a massive help is writing about my experiences. It is a form of taking back control, of wresting from my former tormentors a monopoly over the narrative of departure. Most people who leave these groups have the most disgusting lies and slanders spread about them, and having my own blog at least gives me the ability to put my side of the story out there for any doubting members of the organisation. Tragically, many people react by bottling up their experiences, refusing to reflect or to open up about what they have been through, largely due to a mixture of shame and guilt, anger and fear of retaliation from cultists. Indeed, all of those things are what initially held me back from speaking out. Already I know of at least one former member of my branch (someone who goes by the pseudonym Quantum Hedgehog, but is actually a chap called Jack Shaw) who has seen fit to make slanderous remarks about me on this blog, my YouTube channel and on Reddit, in an apparent attempt to discredit me. What he likely will not mention is that he and some other members of the branch behaved so abominably to me at one point that I was driven to considering suicide. But I would prefer to avoid engaging with his petty slanders, which can be explained by a mixture of a personal vendetta towards me, and his continuing involvement in an organisation which is a cult. He is thus duty-bound to go after anyone who speaks badly of his organisation, in time-honoured, Stalinist fashion, like the good, hired hand of the Central Committee that he is. Personally I just feel sorry for him. I hope that in time he realises what he has been trapped into and leaves. One can only imagine that if the IMT ever seizes power, he will be one of the leading figures in its secret police. He must be sorely disappointed that he does not have the power to kill me or throw me in a gulag.
My recovery is multi-faceted. I have my music (60s country for the most part), I have my books (Roger Scruton, Christopher Hitchens, Leszek Kolakowski and others), I have my Master’s degree and I have this blog. Tragically, many people who leave will not have these things to fall back on, such do their lives revolve around the organisation. The life of a Trotskyist full-timer is particularly tragic. The likes of Ben Curry, Adam Booth, Daniel Morley and other leading members of the sect will have a long road ahead of them if and when they finally leave. I wonder how they will rebuild their lives, or if they will even have lives to rebuild. They will not enjoy healthy relationships, they will not have happy families (or families at all), they will live a life of penury and misery, enduring conditions worse than under most normal, ‘bourgeois’ jobs – and all for what? For some glorious, pie-in-the-sky utopia which will never be erected upon this earth. Indeed, if they got the revolution they desired for, how do they know that they will not end up like all revolutionaries have in the past – devouring each other, sending one another to the gulag or to the firing squad – and so cannibalising the entity that they have put so much time, energy and emotion into building? For all they know, they are simply paving the way for another Stalin/Taaffe/Healey – presumably from among their ranks – who will ride over their skulls and spines like a terrible tank, orchestrating hell on earth where the Promised Land should be. And they will have themselves to blame for the catastrophe they have unleashed upon humanity, and they will have to consult their consciences, knowing that the enslaved masses will not forgive those false prophets who promised them paradise and landed them in Hades.
It is unhealthy enough to be heavily involved in an organisation which tells its members that the weight of history is upon their shoulders, and that the very survival of humanity is entirely in their hands. It makes unremarkable people think of themselves in a grandiose manner. It makes fanatics and cultists out of people who are otherwise rational and sane. It is still more unhealthy to be in an organisation in which you have to constantly look over your shoulder for which of your ‘comrades’ is going to knife you in the back for personal advancement, or launch a pile-on to force you out of the sect for wrong-think, or which gives you barely enough to live on and restricts you from having a normal family life. Such an environment can only be described as totalitarian.
Often, people like myself who leave are described by our ex-comrades as ‘cowards’ who gave up on political struggle for a quiet life. Not so. If anyone is guilty of cowardice, it is those who choose to remain in an unhealthy environment in which they are subject to psychological abuse, overwork, intellectual stultification, slander, gossip, ostracism and spiritual degradation at every turn, but who refuse to question the way things are for fear of provoking the violent outrage of the rest of the herd. No one wants to be separated from the comforting embrace of the sect, from the illusory union of minds produced by groupthink, from the false brotherhood and friendship provided by ‘comrades’, to explore the terrifying world outside the cult for themselves. The cult is an emotional crutch, a comfort blanket, a prophylactic protecting them from the germs of ‘bourgeois ideology’, and providing a simplified vision of the universe in which everything fits into place like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The real heroes, those who have real courage, are those who boldly stand up, say ‘I have had enough of this,’ and walk out. They have boundaries and they are determined to defend them when they have been crossed. Often they are people who have been loyal members for years, but at a certain point, something snaps. They get tired of being lied to, ignored, told what to think, ridiculed and bullied for the crime of falling on the wrong side of the Central Committee. They decide that what they think and how they feel is more important than what the herd thinks or feels, and abandon it to its own pathetic fate, to take possession of the dangerous world outside. If this is cowardice, it is a strange kind. There is nothing courageous about maintaining blind faith in a false doctrine, a delusional leadership or a psychologically dysfunctional membership that has been subjected to mind control and spiritual subversion. True bravery lies in admitting that one is in error, casting aside a false gospel and experimenting with new ideas, new thoughts and feelings. Nothing is more cowardly than fleeing from the difficulties of the world into the rickety shelter of the intellectual and psychological prison that is fanaticism. Any free-thinker must be willing to tolerate a measure of doubt and uncertainty. Keats called it ‘negative capability’. Nietzsche described it as being a ‘free spirit’. Kolakowski described it as playing the role of the court jester, who upsets the dogmas and catechisms of the priestly caste (by which he meant the Communists who ruled his native Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe). True valour is rejection of false authority and unrelenting opposition to all forms of totalitarianism.
The battle is not easy, but it has never been. My struggle is both a personal one and a political one. In shaking off the shackles of despotism from myself, I also seek to break the chains that bind others. I know now that I cannot seek solace in a utopian and illusory ‘libertarian Marxism’, but must give critical support to imperfect liberal democracy over all those who seek to destroy it. If Solzhenitsyn was correct in saying that ‘The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being’, then I would like to think that my personal choices in the last several months represent a virtuous pursuit of the good, and a valiant fight against evil. It would have been too easy for me to tell myself ‘I am but one man. It would be so much better for me to keep quiet and not say anything.’ If I had thought along those lines, I might still be in the cult. Realising that I really could walk away from all this was both deeply painful but also exciting. The cult had programmed me to think there was no salvation beyond its boundaries. Desertion was an act of great evil. Staying and remaining loyal to the leadership was the one action worthy of praise. I came to the understanding that the opposite was true.
The sooner you leave the cult, the more successful the process of emotional recovery will be. As part of this recovery, it is important to tell yourself that your pain is valid. Often people who leave far-left cults and abandon the ideology will be told that the only reason they became renegades was because of despair, bitterness and emotional turmoil. Indeed, Ben Curry levelled precisely this accusation at me when I dared to leave. A popular text that is often trotted out is Isaac Deutscher’s infamous 1950 essay, ‘The Ex-Communist’s Conscience’, in which he charges ex-Communists who are now bitter anti-Communists with being motivated purely by an emotional overreaction to the sullying of the Communist ideal by Stalinism. They cannot bring themselves to accept that there might be legitimate intellectual reasons why people like me become renegades. It cannot be that Marxism is false; it must be that ex-Communists are just out for petty vengeance and have allowed their feelings to cloud their judgement. But it also reveals the lack of empathy of these people, whose hearts bleed for those exploited by capitalism, but have no such feelings for those who have suffered at the hands of communist ideologues. Leftists bang on about ‘lived experience’, but they only care about the lived experience of people who agree with them. The lived experience of conservatives and ex-communists is apparently not worth probing or empathising with. It suggests that we do not have the right to feel the way we do. I contend that we have every right to feel anger, bitterness and hatred in response to the disgusting way we were treated. It is healthy, normal and right to have such feelings towards those who have subjected us to monstrous abuse, and we must not allow them to displace their suppressed feelings of guilt onto us. This does not preclude looking at the situation in an intellectual manner, and making incisive criticisms of the communist ideal. After all, Marxists themselves are motivated by righteous feelings of anger at what they perceive to be injustice, yet this has not prevented Marxists from thinking about capitalism in an intellectual manner (even if much of this is projecting their emotions onto capitalism under the guise of ‘science’).
If there are so many bitter ex-Marxists out there, then it must be that there is something wrong with Marxism. Marxists cannot get away with blaming everyone else for their failures as they endlessly do. If they want to claim that the failure of Marxism up to this point is because of ‘renegades’ like myself throwing in the towel prematurely, then this is a tacit admission that human beings have an emotional limit to how far they can be pushed – in other words, that there is an essential human nature – and that this makes communism impossible. The ideal society Marxists fantasise about cannot be built by fragile human beings who are so easily overwrought by setbacks ranging from civil wars, to famines, to imperialist subversion – all of which are factors to be contended with in the bid to build the socialist utopia. Unfortunately for Marxists, we are emotional beings, living in a capitalist world that is emotionally taxing already – how much more emotional labour will be required to destroy it and build another one in its place? And how likely is it that people who have been so battered psychologically by the twin forces of capitalism on the one hand, and fanatically organising for socialist transformation on the other, will create a better society? This being the case, perhaps Marxists should just give up.
It is possible to move on from cultism, and even become stronger for the experience. It is not possible, however, to forget. I will never forget my own confrontation with the forces of totalitarianism, and it has made me utterly determined to defend the freedoms we have from the maw of these fanatical wolves. This means speaking out at every possible opportunity, and doing all I can to expose the evil inherent in the false ideas I once believed in. This, too, is a part of the emotional recovery – making up for the lies I promoted by championing truth. I won’t allow anyone to tell me that this constitutes cowardice.