A Fascinating Account of Cult Psychology in Mark E. Laxer’s “Take Me For a Ride: Coming of Age in a Destructive Cult”
Two of my recurring fascinations are obscure books and cult psychology, so I was excited to discover Mark E. Laxer’s “Take Me for a Ride: Coming of Age in a Destructive Cult.”
Victims are often and understandably hesitant to talk about their experiences. For that reason, I have a lot of respect for Laxer’s account of his immersion with Fred Lenz, aka Rama, in 1979. In many ways, cultists can be seen as rape victims. Their sense of psychological and spiritual safety is abused and damaged, often leaving their self confidence in shambles. This is the lens through which this story is told, as Laxer recounts his experience with Lenz while undertaking a cross country bike ride in which he is trying to repair his self-hood.
So many people look at cults from the outside and say ‘this could never happen to me. Those people are foolish and flawed in some fundamental way.” But, that assessment is really nothing more than comfortable egotism. Many of those who fall under the sway of cults are intelligent and sensitive people. The Jonestown victims, for instance, were largely driven not by stupidity, but by a deep and overwhelming need to find something more in life than what is offered by society’s materialism. Laxer also falls in this category. He was a bright young man with a lot of potential, so much potential that he didn’t want to squander it on chasing wealth. That desire for spiritual meaningfulness in life drove him in the sway of a charismatic and manipulative professor who eventually took his guru status to malicious and megalomaniacal levels.
The book offers the insights of someone who is examined enough that he knows what happened to him and and can express it. In that way, the book is powerfully educational. What people don’t like to see or admit to, is that the dynamics of cult psychology are not so very different from the psychological dynamics at play in our lives. We all have psychic blinders that drive us to believe in that which is not true, when we want so badly to deny reality’s harshness.
Much has been written and said about Lenz. I choose not to do that here. This is not Lenz’s story. This is Mark E. Laxer’s story, and it’s definitely worth reading for those who want a darkly fascinating story, a view into cult mechanics, or a look inside the dangerous psychological dynamics that are part of us all, on one level or another.
