The Manson Women and Me Quotes

“In The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo, citing decades of research, details all of the ways that ordinary, average individuals—whether they be soldiers in Guatemala, doctors in Nazi Germany, Hutus in Rwanda—can be stripped of their values, their morality, their souls. After elaborating on the variables that contribute to this process—isolation, drug use, denying people identities—he declares that the most important variable, far and away more important than the others, is the fear of being excluded from the in-group. Manipulating this fear, he asserts, is the most effective way people are transformed from ordinary human beings into human beings capable of evil. We tend to associate the desire for acceptance by the in-group with high school, but according to Zimbardo, this need does not stop at adolescence but continues through adulthood. He cites people’s willingness to suffer painful and or humiliating initiation rites in return for acceptance in fraternities, cults, social clubs, or the military. When the desire to be included is coupled with the terror of being excluded, Zimbardo writes that it can cripple initiative, negate personal autonomy, and lead people to do virtually anything to avoid rejection. “Authorities can command total obedience not through punishment or rewards but by means of the double-edged weapon: the lure of acceptance coupled with the threat of rejection.”
― Nikki Meredith, The Manson Women and Me: Monsters, Morality, and Murder

“When the individual is on his own,” he wrote, “conscience is brought into play. But when he functions in an organizational mode, directions that come from the higher level of competence are not assessed against the internal standards of moral judgment.”
― Nikki Meredith, The Manson Women and Me: Monsters, Morality, and Murder

“The point is that religion provides comfort to people. It’s about faith; logic doesn’t matter.”
― Nikki Meredith, The Manson Women and Me: Monsters, Morality, and Murder

“Part of her deprogramming was to read a book by Robert Jay Lifton about idealistic totalistic communities. Point by point, she realized that the Unification Church qualified: the church manipulated people, both personally and spiritually; the church promoted black-and-white thinking; the church forbade criticism of the leader or the principles of the group; the world was divided into good (everyone in the group) and evil (everyone outside the group). The scales fell from her eyes. She was free from the church’s grip.”
― Nikki Meredith, The Manson Women and Me: Monsters, Morality, and Murder

“Given the barbaric acts ISIS displays on TV and the Internet, it’s reasonable to assume that some kind of pathology is what drives people from comfortable lives in the West into the arms of ISIS. Social science researchers, however, take issue with that assumption; the attraction, they say, is far more complicated. “These young people are not psychopaths,” Scott Atran, an anthropologist wrote in the September 4, 2016, issue of the Guardian, “but rather everyday young people in social transition, on the margins of society, or amidst a crisis of identity.” He explained that recruits for ISIS from Western countries are in transitional stages in their lives—between jobs, schools, relationships, countries—and are looking for new families.”
― Nikki Meredith, The Manson Women and Me: Monsters, Morality, and Murder

“When you grow up poor with an eccentric single anarchist mother and a mystery surrounding your paternity, you’re lacking in the entitled department”
― Nikki Meredith, The Manson Women and Me: Monsters, Morality, and Murder