No cult begins unless lead by a charismatic religious or political entrepreneur and hardly a cult can survive following the death of its charismatic founder unless succeeded by another charismatic successor. A charismatic leader does not appear in a vacuum and is in part the product of a larger social or political trend. To build a hierarchical authority with him atop, a charismatic leader claims divinity or special knowledge and demands unquestioning obedience and devotion from the followers. Doubting or questioning the leader’s authority is not at all tolerated and the leader may be aided by one or more core of leaders.
The guru in a cult plays the key role to lead and influence the followers. In 
fact, the process of brainwashing in a cult can be carried out within a structure of an absolute charismatic authority. Besides, in facing the outsiders, the built courage within the insiders originates out of the charismatic impact of the guru before whom they cringe and bow. Thus, first the recruits have to be convinced to put all trust in the leader before anything else and as Singer analyses:
Legend has it that all cult leaders are charismatic. In reality, charisma is less important than skills of persuasion and the ability to manipulate others. In order to start a group, a leader has to have ways of convincing others to follow him or her, and such leaders tend not to relinquish their control. Cult leadership can be a heady role when the leader comes to see the amount of control he or she holds and how easily he or she can influence followers. 1
Unquestionably, the spirit of self-sacrifice within a cult is fostered by devotion and absolute faith in a leader. As a result, the first step following the entry of a new recruit is to build in him/her a sense of devotion to a specific and exceptional sanctity or exemplary character by whose authority instructions or orders are revealed or ordained:
Day one is usually devoted to demonstrating the leader’s absolute authority. The leader, often called a facilitator or trainer, immediately takes control of the setting with a demeanor that suggests he is a powerful, in-charge person and no one is to challenge what he says.”This program works,”the trainer proclaims.”It’s all up to you to obey and get the maximum benefits.”He remains totally in charge, acts knowledgeable, and is practiced in verbal skills, so that he never loses an encounter. Anyone who challenges the trainer will be humiliated and verbally mashed. 2
The idea is strongly infused into the members and, going through the totalitarian authority of Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization or the cult of Mojahedin’s leadership, one can easily notice the cult-like leadership in its most excessive practice in the group. The complexity of leadership relations within MKO requires a study of its own which comes in the category of a variety of phases. There are also differences in the hegemonic styles in each phase as the members’ impression of the leader changed continually as each phase came to engage the organization in a different enterprise according to circumstances. In any case, it was the hegemonic authority of the leadership that compelled the members to take on ventures that were doomed to failure from the very beginning and no logic advocate them. Explaining the authoritative relationship between the leader and the followers in a cult Hoffer states:
It is somewhat terrifying to realize that the totalitarian leaders of our day, in recognizing this source of desperate courage, made use of it not only to steel the spirit of their followers but also to break the spirit of their opponents. In his purges of the old Bolshevik leaders, Stalin succeeded in turning proud and brave men into cringing cowards by depriving them of any possibility of identification with the party they had served all their lives and with the Russian masses. 3
Notwithstanding the deception and cult manipulation within MKO, Rajavi’s authoritative leadership has played a totally influential role in the nature of converting a political group into a destructive cult of personality. Rajavi’s hegemonic leadership can be discussed in two aspects; a) employing leadership absolutism to subjugate high-ranking members and b) to deploy the relationship between the charismatic authority and followers to establish an organizational leadership hegemony entailing absolute devotion.
References:
1- Thaler Singer, Margaret; Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace, introduction..
2- Ibid, 193.
3. Eric Hoffer; The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, New York: First Perennial Classics 2002, p. 62.
Research Bureau – Mojahedin.ws – May 24, 2008
person or group of people that has near-complete control. Charismatic cult leaders often make extreme claims of divine or “otherworldly” power to exercise influence over their members. Many legitimate religions have had powerful figures who have inspired enormous dedication in people. Being a powerful leader is not inherently wrong , though it carries a high potential for abuse. A group becomes destructive when its leader actively uses such power to deceive members and to rob them of their individuality and free will. For example, I was told to surrender my free will (viewed as Satanic) to God’s representative, Moon, and his subleaders. Marshall Applewhite told followers that an alien entity was speaking through him, and used his message to justify his absolute control over their lives. 
the mullahs in Tehran. But the camp, which the organization established in Saddam’s Iraq, is beset by reports of dissidents escaping the gulag. The Iraqi government wants to get rid of the former fighters, but find this avenue blocked. 
for censure, persuasion, distortion, brainwashing and mind-control activities against their insiders and sympathizers. Cults show diverse and double reactions in their dealing with the media that draw substantial public attention to accomplish a variety of objectives. Besides, the media in any form play a key role in the formation of public opinion and thought, life-style, and even the depiction of a nation’s destiny. For sure so important, versatile phenomena of the modernity never escape the attention of the cults. In the same way that the media can give warning against the threat and the evil nature of the cults, they can also be at their service, depending on the amount of revenue and how influentially they can master them, to instil noxious ideas into a society. However, since the media can hardly be an exclusive medium for the cults and in many occasions it is too expensive a means for propagation with the least expected outcome, and sometimes inflicts irreparable damages, the cults prefer not to invest much trust in the media. The case is sometimes different with the political cults. If we consider deliberate isolation tactic as one of the cults’ most common mechanisms of control and enforced dependency, then the social persuasion is the identical definition of the mechanism. The recruits are encouraged to disrupt their common lifestyle and leave whatever they are attached to behind to adapt themselves to the cult’s milieu in isolation. In this process, what is considered to be a threat in neutralizing the effects of the social persuasion will be the media which the cults favour to avoid. That is mostly because cults’ prompt of black-and-white thinking fails to be functional and productive in the media which has to be repelled. However, cults are not so powerful as the governments that can have total control over the media for social persuasion and people’s mind-control if they will. Quoting Orwell reasoning the effectiveness of the media coming under the complete control of the governments, Singer states: Orwell reasoned that if a government could control all media and interpersonal communication while simultaneously forcing citizens to speak in a politically controlled jargon, it could blunt independent thinking. If thought could be controlled, then rebellious actions against a regime could be pre- vented. 1 Milieu control, that is total control of members’ communication in the cults, is a mechanism to keep members from communicating anything other than what the cults approve and often involves discouraging members from contacting relatives or friends outside the cult and from reading, watching and listening to anything unapproved by the cult or the organization. Consequently, the effectiveness of the media in illuminating facts about the cults and active organizations is actually neutralized and the insiders are told not to believe and trust in anything they see or hear reported by the media that has to be accounted as an agent in the enemy’s front. In this way, the cults’ leaders blindfold members about historical facts: Milieu control also often involves discouraging members from contacting relatives or friends outside the group and from reading anything not approved by the organization. They are sometimes told not to believe anything they see or hear reported by the media. One left-wing political cult, for example, maintains that the Berlin Wall is still standing and that the "bourgeois capitalist" press war people to think otherwise in order to discredit communism. 2 As a result, cults’ hostile position against the media decreases the influence of the media on the members to a zero degree. Furthermore, cults exploit a variety of approaches and legal levers in the war against the media. Sometimes they use violent tactics such as threatening, intimidation and harassment to frighten away the critics, reporters, journalists and authors and to compel them cease anti-cult productions and programs: A metropolitan newspaper’s desk editor was harassed after he ran a piece critical of a local cult. He and his family had to move out of their home after receiving seventy-two hours of continuous phone calls from cult members. 3 As mentioned earlier, if possible, cults will set up complex networks of public relations and radio-TV stations to make a direct channel of communication and contact with the sympathizers rather than letting them refer to public media for information. Such a biased medium works as sufficient to hold the followers hooked onto the cult. As Singer explains: Cults have found many ways to restrict and control public information about them. Some groups have brochures, handouts for the press, and written overviews and endorsements of the group, often prepared by sophisticated public relations firms. In essence, these materials imply that "you need go no further. Here is who we are. Here is all you need to know to understand us perfectly. Take this material and use it. Everything is fine." The implication is that the material is objectively represented and relatively comprehensive. 4 As a leftist cult, Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) has adopted various tactics to muzzle and beat the media. It will be discussed in the following article. References: 1. Margaret Thaler Singer; Cults in Our Midst, JOSSEY-BASS, 2003, introduction. 2. Ibid, p. 70. 3. Ibid, p. 224. 4. Ibid, p. 226.
As part of the intense influence and change process in many cults, people take on a new social identity, which may or may not be obvious to an outsider. When groups refer to this new identity, they speak of members who are transformed, reborn, enlightened, empowered, rebirthed, or cleared. The group’ approved behavior is reinforced and reinterpreted as demonstrating the emergence of "the new person." Members are expected to display this new identity. 1 The new personality totally split from the outside world is manipulated for a variety of group tasks based on the objectives of the group and cult that consider the outsiders as the enemies who have to be confronted: The conflicts a mass movement seek and incites serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip its followers of their distinct individuality and render them more soluble in the collective medium. 2 As Hoffer asserts, a cultist personality is formed to be submissive to the inner-cultic relations that have priority to outwardly demonstrated ambitions and goals. The members undergoing overall identity change easily consent to any means of changing behaviour and conduct. Thus, cults can successfully accomplish their goal of binding new members to the group. Considering the stages people will go through as their attitudes are changed by the group environment and the thought reform processes, Singer points to psychologist Edgar Schein’s second stages of three: During this second stage, you sense that the solutions offered by the group provide a path to follow. You feel that anxiety, uncertainty, and self-doubt can be reduced by adopting the concepts put forth by the group or leader. Additionally, you observe the behavior of the longer, term members, and you begin to emulate their ways. As social psychology experiments and observations have found for decades, once a person makes an open commitment before others to an idea, his or her subsequent behavior generally supports and reinforces the stated commitment. That is, if you say in front of others that you are making a commitment to be "pure," then you will feel pressured to follow what others define as the path of purity. 3 There are also the eight psychological themes that psychiatrist Robert Lifton has identified as central to totalistic environments and cults invoke these themes for the purpose of promoting behavioral and attitudinal changes in the members. The third theme, demand for purity, depicts two opposite world of black and white; the cult being an absolutely white and clean world versus the black and evil world of outside. Of course, the members with a new personality have no other choice but to think and act according to cult’s ideology and drawn strategy: An us-versus-them orientation is promoted by the all-or-nothing belief system of the group: we are right; they (outsiders, nonmembers) are wrong, evil, unenlightened, and so forth. Each idea or act is good or bad, pure or evil. Recruits gradually take in, or internalize, the critical, shaming essence of the cult environment, which builds up lots of guilt and shame. Most groups put forth that there is only one way to think, respond, or act in any given situation. There is no in between, and members are expected to judge themselves and others by this all-or-nothing standard. 4 The process of producing identity within MKO follows the same mechanism in the cults and its orientation began with the start of the internal ideological revolution. All the members undergoing the revolution process admitted their identity change, that there does exist a long distance between their organizational and personal identities. It was instilled into them that their identity would be prompted based on the extent of adherence to the ideological system of the group and denial of any personal identity. In a text written by a member of MKO in self-denial we read: Personality, egocentrism, self-reliance and individualism are all souvenirs of the bourgeoisie’s worthless humanism that distanced me from the organization as far as its degree of its impact on me. It was like a chaff that barred me to drink the pure, life-giving instructions of the organization and was leaving me alone in a desolate waste-land with no way out. I was enslaved by dominant ambiguities within me. When I failed to overcome the ongoing struggle inside me, I was even more vulnerable to the outside misfortunes and could not even face them. 5 The member’s confession well depicts his identity destabilization and what psychologists call an identity crisis. He looks back at his own world and values to find out that he has been wrong in the past. This process makes him uncertain about what is right, what to do, and which choices to make and of course, as he admits, only the cult-like instructions of the organization can lead him to what is inspired to be the right path. Consequently, he takes on a new organizational identity which he considers a change for the better. In the process, he, as the member of a cult, detaches from his most dear ideas and attachments which he discovers to have been nothing beyond a barren waste-land for the identity reborn, a utopia in the horizon he fails to dismiss easily. Masoud Banisadr, another separated member of MKO, in his memoir relates of the time when sat tearing whatever attached him to the past under the commands of the organization: This time I attacked my old photographs from my own childhood till marriage and up to then, my parents photographs as I wanted to deny all of them, my father who was perhaps responsible for my bourgeois tendencies and my mother who was responsible of my own ‘mild’ and ‘gentle’ behaviour known as liberal ones. Anna seeing me taking all those photographs and albums, with anger, was quietly crying, then when I attacked our marriage Album she start crying louder, and asked me to stop it. She said those are not just yours . . . but I was not listening to her and took everything and put them in a rubbish bag. 6 Quoting Lifton’s forth theme, through a cult’s instructions, members are told whatever connects them to their former lives is wrong and has to be avoided, a fact well affirmed by MKO’s ex-members: Through the confession process and by instruction in the group’s teachings, members learn that everything about their former lives, including friends, family, and nonmembers, is wrong and to be avoided. Outsiders will put you at risk of not attaining the purported goal: they will lessen your psychological awareness, hinder the group’s political advancement, obstruct your path toward ultimate knowledge, or allow you to become stuck in your past life and incorrect thinking. 7 That is why MKO refer to members’ solubility in the organizational identity as a “reborn” or “identity salvation”. The organization, being transformed into a cult, pursues the same cult mechanism of altering the members’ personal identity to produce a new identity. References: 1. Margaret Thaler Singer; Cults in Our Midst, JOSSEY-BASS, 2003, p. 78. 2. Eric Hoffer; The true believer, Harper &. Row, Publishers, New York, 1966, p. 112. 3. Margaret Thaler Singer; Cults in Our Midst, JOSSEY-BASS, 2003, p. 76. 4. Ibid, 71. 5. Mojahed, no. 252; Abdol-ali Maasoumi’s letter to the ideological revolution. 6. Masoud Banisadr; Memoirs of an Iranian Rebel. 7. Margaret Thaler Singer; Cults in Our Midst, JOSSEY-BASS, 2003, p. 72.
of the major issues in internal cultist relations. The reasons why a person submits to be subjected to mental, physical , psychological, and financial misuse to the extent that he/she gives up job, family, and the individual freedom are very important issues for those interested in investigating cultist mechanisms and levers. In simple words, those outside cults, out of curiosity, strive for public awareness and preventing people’s deviation as well as discovering how in an age of scientific development and communication there people who easily fall in the cults’ trap and are are hoodwinked by their tricks. In order to understand such an issue we must look at the social and psychological techniques used by cults and cultic groups. This process of planned, convert coordinated influence-popularly called brainwashing or mind control or, more technically, thought reform-is the means by which the cult leader subjugates the followers.